Crucible of Gold

the faintest suggestion of a smile.

“Well, I hope they can be persuaded to remain, most of them, now that you have arranged handsome estates for them all to live on,” Harcourt said, surveying Rio from the heights: the city had grown a little cramped with another five heavy-weight Tswana dragons trying to clear themselves room in the center, and a scattering of middle-weight beasts debating over the other corners. “If we do have to send them by the Potentate, we will be sitting on our haunches here ourselves for another year; or likely three: one trip won’t be enough to get the half of them back over.”

“They can’t much like the idea of going back crammed aboard the hold very like in the way they came, and so they would be,” Warren said, “for if dragons go along, it will be no end of work fitting enough provisions for them all. If it can even be done: I would not wager on getting more than five hundred passengers aboard at a time, myself. Look sharp, there!”

This exclamation was provoked by the approach of one of the larger Tswana dragons, who abandoning her attempt to make herself comfortable in the ruin of the city had gone aloft, and now came towards the mountain. She had not sighted them, however, or at least paid them no attention if she had; she landed clutching onto the cliff face and began to scratch at the wall experimentally, as though to work out its composition.

Evidently satisfied, she turned her head down and roaring called to her fellows, a few of whom left off their own efforts and joined her in examining the stone. One of the smaller beasts made a thoughtful chirruping noise and darted away, returning shortly thereafter with one of the stolen cannon. From this they stripped away the wheels, leaving only a portion of the wooden housing, on which they seized; the barrel was set against the wall, and the larger beasts began to take it in turn to hammer the length into the rock. The smaller ones held it in place, and when it had been sunk halfway in began to twist and rock it; shortly they had burst out a small pattering avalanche of rock. It bore a strong resemblance to the work Laurence had seen once at the Tswana city of Mosi Oa Tunye, where the dragons carved immense living caverns out of the walls of the waterfall gorge.

By the next morning, the space was large enough for one of the smaller beasts to climb inside and sweep out debris; by that night, two of the larger dragons settled down therein to sleep. “Well, at least some of them are making themselves at home,” Sutton said, as they checked upon the progress, but when Laurence returned to the negotiations and spoke with Lethabo, she shook her head.

“Kefentse will stay, and so will I and my daughters, for we have no other kinsmen remaining back home: but that is not true of many of the dragons,” she said.

Fortunately Lethabo had been more generous to those beasts whose kindred had been wholly decimated, those same being more willing to accept refugees of doubtful lineage; and those dragons were willing to remain rather than risk the dangers of the crossing. But a dozen of the beasts still had villages and kin waiting for them in Africa, and insisted on returning at once, with almost two thousand men meant to accompany them: a company the size of a small army, and if anything more difficult to provision.

“Whatever fine language the Portuguese choose to write down in those papers, Captain, does not very much matter to dragons,” Lethabo had said to Laurence, as they had left the negotiations. “You know it, and so do I. No agreement will hold which does not satisfy them. But this truly is our price: all the slaves freed and reunited with their ancestors, and transport back for those who wish to go. If you cannot do it, we must yet treat with the French, and then, if the Portuguese will not free their slaves—”

She spread her hands eloquently, and Laurence nodded.

“We could send the men by other boats, smaller ones—frigates, or a good-sized merchantman?” Warren proposed now—Laurence flinched a little at hearing him call a frigate a boat—but this suggestion Lethabo rejected out of hand: the dragons would not again be parted from their descendants.

“Well,” Granby said, looking down past the harbor, where the two French transports rode at anchor, their colors bright from the masthead in the sun, “there is nothing else for it, but how can it be done?”

Chapter 18

“IT SHOULD BE EASY AS WINKING, if we wanted to sink them,” Captain Warren observed: and a mere bombardment with boulders, carried one after another from the shore and dropped from on high, would indeed have sent the transports to the bottom of the ocean in no short order— where, of course, they would be of no use whatsoever in getting the Tswana home.

To take the great vessels, preserving them in a useful condition, was by far a more difficult problem, and not least because the French had been alive to the danger of just such an impulse on the part of their uncertain allies. The transports themselves were heavily armed, and bags of caltrops hung from the yard-arms above the dragondecks in such a way that they might instantly be spilt across the planking, their iron teeth being large enough to prevent any dragon from landing easily upon the ship while offering only a little difficulty to the sailors aboard.

Meanwhile the frigates in their company were too small for any but Nitidus or Dulcia to land upon: fast and maneuverable and armed for the most part with a few heavy snub-nosed cannonades which would certainly be turned at once upon any dragon who tried to descend upon the transports: they were close enough to make a directed attack practicable. Laurence could spy among their complement as many as four gun-boats apiece, each armed with the long, narrow-barreled guns which threw the small barbed cannonballs.

“The gun-boats will be in the water five minutes after the alarm is sounded,” Laurence said, peering at them through his glass, “if the crews know their work; in ten minutes, otherwise, and we shall hear from the guns directly after; and the cannonades. We cannot keep the dragons on the decks under that degree of fire.”

“And even if we do manage to hold the deck, the French will have hulled the ships so wretchedly we may as well sit in harbor the next three years, for all the good they will do us: they will never make the long crossing,” Sutton said.

“Yes; we must do something about those gun-boats, first,” Harcourt said, rolling out a sheet of smudged parchment, and taking a scrap of charred wood from the fire to sketch upon it the outline of the harbor. “If we can keep them pinned down, somehow; then take the transports quick as quick can be, if they aren’t to spike the decks against us—if we can only give those frigates a proper fait accompli, they shan’t hull us, unless they mean to sink all their own crews.”

“There’s another difficulty for you,” Warren said cheerfully. “Who’s to sail them? We shan’t; and the Potentate can scarcely let us have enough men to sail two transports more across the ocean and to home. Your bag of sailors will do some good, Laurence, but—”

“They are much improved,” Laurence said, “but I would not trust them to sail a dinghy rigged fore-and-aft across ten miles of calmest sea without trained officers.”

“Pray let us worry about one thing at a time!” Harcourt said. “If we do manage to cut them out, we ought to be grateful enough to have any other difficulties to work out.”

“I do not quite see how it is to be done myself, Laurence,” Temeraire said over his shoulder as the blue- black ocean streamed away beneath them. The weather was all that it should be for flying, clear and not too hot, and he could not help but spiral in mid-air for sheer delight: the difficulties of taking the transports should surely, he thought, be overcome; one could not let that worry one on a day like this.

“I am still on the shipping lanes, I hope,” he added, peering down: he did not understand how Laurence managed to be so certain without an elaborate consultation of his compass and the stars where in the ocean they might be; they had left behind land some two hours ago.

“You are,” Laurence said, “and if you will bear two points to starboard, that is a whaler, I think, and we may hope one of ours; or an American—at present I would be glad to take a dozen sailors out of an American, and damn the provocation.”

Temeraire would have been equally glad, so long as Laurence was satisfied that the act could be justified, and he put on as much speed as he could: but when they came nearer, she hung out Dutch colors to meet their own Union Jack. Laurence swung down by a rope to the rigging, and climbing to the deck met with her captain while