Blood of Tyrants (10 page)

He uncurled himself and rose onto four feet, shaking himself out almost as might have a wet dog. He was long and as narrow in the chest as at the base of his tail, with feet widely spaced; his wings were short and peculiarly stubby, folded against his back. He ambled with a swaying stride through the gate itself, stopping briefly to knock his head against one of the posts three times, and went onwards up the rising slope beyond, where now Laurence saw the underbrush was lower, and trampled in places.

He glanced at Junichiro—he was not sure if they ought to take the chance and try to flee. But Junichiro was trailing wide-eyed after the dragon, and the promise of food was a powerful one. The beast at least did not seem to be immediately hostile.

The trail led a winding way through increasingly difficult undergrowth, where at last the dragon paused and looked back and said, “Why, you are falling quite behind. Up you get,” and reached out a taloned hand to deposit them each in turn upon his back. Junichiro made a small sound almost of protest, and Laurence would have liked to question him—what was the beast, and why did it seem to have no fear of the same law which bound all others against a foreigner—but he could not find it politic to do so when aboard the very beast’s back.

They continued on to a final steeper slope, where at the summit at last a small temple made of wood was found—a tall structure, enough that the dragon could comfortably walk inside, though not very large in plan; and in two great silver bowls at the center stood
a pool of clear liquid, smelling very strongly of plums and spirits; and in the other a great heap of rice and meat, still steaming.

“Take cups! Help yourselves!” the dragon said, sprawling himself across the floor—or
herself
, Laurence belatedly corrected, when some portions of anatomy were thereby more exposed to view; he had been mistaken by a series of low finned spines which curved out from the dragon’s body along its length. “We will drink to the good fortune of this meeting, and then you will recite some poetry for me. You do
know
some poetry?” the dragon asked, anxiously.

“Ma’am,” Laurence said doubtfully, wondering where the attendants were, who had prepared this repast, and how he might hope to make a further escape, “I can give you a little Shakespeare, if that will suit you, but I do not know how it will do in Chinese.”

“No, no,” the dragon said, coiling back with an air of relief. “I do not want it in Chinese. I already know Li Bai and Wang Wei, and many more besides. I want English poetry.”

“But—you cannot speak the tongue?” Laurence asked.

“You will translate it for me afterwards,” she said, and nudged across to him with one talon a small empty cup, perhaps a little larger than a thimble, and another for Junichiro.

The excuses a rather shamefaced Granby provided Temeraire for their decampment were threadbare indeed. His health, the lurking unknown danger of the sea-dragon, the uncertainty of their position, the ship’s need of further repair, the safety of the egg—

At the thought of the egg, he could not forbear putting his head over the side carefully and peering in, with a single eye, at the porthole which looked into the egg’s chamber. This was below the galleys, carefully kept warm, and the egg itself was not visible for being swaddled in a great many velvet and silken dressings, and then hay, and then packed into a crate. But they had shown it to him, when he had first awoken: a splendid smooth pale-cream shell
speckled with a very attractive pattern of red and violet spots, and one notable larger marking shaped roughly like a number eight.

“You must see it, surely.” Temeraire had pointed it out to Lily, though she had looked at it doubtfully.

“It looks more like a cloud to me,” she said, which was absurd; any shape might be a cloud. Temeraire pressed his other friends for their opinion, and finally Kulingile and Dulcia were brought to agree, when he had drawn them the shape of an eight, that it was not unlike; with this he was satisfied to consider his opinion confirmed, and nothing more propitious could be imagined.

Sipho had knocked him up quite a respectable watercolor on a large piece of discarded sailcloth, which was now draped over the crate and might be looked at in lieu of unpacking the egg again—a risk Temeraire quite agreed could not be taken under ordinary circumstances, although he was of course determined Laurence should see the egg as soon as he was found.

“And that,” he said stormily, “will be as soon as I can fly back and manage it: I am very sorry indeed, Granby, to have found you so false as to allow the ship to leave Laurence behind; what he must be thinking of me, at present! You may be sure I will not be silent on the subject, when I have seen him again; he will know of this
treachery
.”

“Oh! That is quite enough,” Iskierka said, cracking an eye. “For Granby did
not
wish to go, at all. He said you would be very upset, and it could do you no good, but Captain Blaise would not stay and the ship is his; and Hammond egged him on, naturally.”

“Pray be quiet, wretched creature, you are not making matters any better,” Granby said, reproving, and called up, “Temeraire, old fellow, listen to me: you mustn’t be so angry. You were very ill, and still are; you couldn’t have gone searching for Laurence any road. And Hammond is at this very moment speaking to the local authorities of the port to have them bring us any news of Laurence, I promise you. He must have made a figure of himself, you know—he is a tall fellow, and they haven’t yellow hair here; he will stand out
a mile. Someone is sure to have taken him up, if—if he has come to shore.”

“If Hammond should come back with any news of Laurence at all, it will be a good deal more than I look for,” Temeraire said, his resentment unabated, and all the greater for his indeed feeling very ill—very wretched. He did not like the thought of a long flight at present, and disliked still more feeling himself in so weak a condition. “And I
will
go back, if I must fly overland to get there,” he added, in defiance of that consciousness.

Wen Shen, the physician, who had been hired to assist in his care, shrugged equably from the deck. “You will drop dead somewhere over the middle of the country, then,” he said, and ate an enormous heaping spoon of the rice porridge, flavored with tunny from Kulingile’s spare catch, which he had commanded to be worked up supposedly for Temeraire’s benefit.

Temeraire did not think much of him, despite his physician’s knot. He had insisted on Temeraire’s drinking a great vat of some bitter and foul-tasting infusion, and on his flying a full circuit around the ship, though he did not feel at all like flying and his wing-joints ached fiercely afterwards. Wen Shen had also made a great many disparaging remarks on Temeraire’s diet and general habits, some of them quite untrue: he did
not
eat an entire roast cow every day. Even if he had liked to, which he did not, they did not have enough cattle aboard for that.

Gong Su had dug up this physician, having rowed over to each one of the Chinese ships in the harbor on their arrival, where he had met with the greatest deference. Since he had openly avowed himself a servant of the Imperial court, he had exchanged his clothing for the formal robes of a scholar; he had shaved his head and put his hair into a severe topknot, with a blue button upon his hat, and now openly carried the pouch with the great red-sealed letter of his authority around his neck.

Temeraire knew Laurence had regarded this alteration of his costume coldly, as a reminder of injury—that Gong Su had deceived
them all for so long, and spied, and passed on information. But in his own opinion, any injury could only be mitigated now by Gong Su’s making amends and doing his best to make a good showing of himself; he was still, Temeraire considered, a member of his crew. And after all, why should Crown Prince Mianning not wish to send a messenger, a trusted servant, to accompany his brother? But Laurence had remained unconvinced by this argument, receiving it only with a snort.

In addition to digging up Wen Shen, Gong Su had spoken with the captains of the Chinese ships; all the vessels had subsequently weighed anchor and maneuvered, awkwardly, into places around the
Potentate
, evidently with the design of providing her some protection. Temeraire had heard this with some skepticism: the Chinese ships were so very much smaller, but Captain Blaise was very well pleased.

“At least it may give us some notice, if a monster like the one you knocked heads with decides to come up from under us,” he said to Captain Berkley. “How we will come off in such an encounter, I am damned if I know, but we will give him a taste of hot iron down his gullet if only he gives us a chance, and see what he thinks of that,” and he gave orders that men should be at some of the guns all hours of day and night.

Temeraire could not really disapprove of any measures for the egg’s security; the sea-dragon had been so very unfriendly, even when there did not seem to Temeraire to be any excuse for such a cold reception. But he was not in the least pleased that Gong Su had also inflicted Wen Shen upon him, whatever any of them liked to say about the improvement in his condition since they had begun dosing him with the physician’s recipe.

“For I am not well enough to go, yet,” Temeraire said miserably to Lily, putting his head down again—somehow he had eaten up all the rice porridge, after all. “If I must be drinking medicine, at least it ought to work.”

“Well, you are better already than you were,” Lily said, consoling.
“It was a great deal of time before I felt properly myself again, you know, after that nasty cough we all had a few years ago.”

“You had better eat something more, and here: if you cannot go, in a few days, I will have a word with Berkley and we will go and have a look around for you, I dare say,” Maximus said, which was very kind, but Temeraire did not believe it in the least: Berkley was like all the rest of them, quite insistent that Laurence was dead, and Temeraire was sure he would not be rigorous in any search.

“I only wish I knew where he was now,” Temeraire said, low, and shut his eyes again.

“Kanpai!” the dragon cried, when Laurence had finished muddling through another passage, and dipped her own head into the silver bowl. Laurence was forced to at least moisten his lips in a show of accompaniment, and hope that he had indeed buried Caesar and not praised him, or for that matter raised him from the dead one act too soon; he was not perfectly sure. He did not think he had been this appallingly drunk since he had been a boy of twelve, trying to make good on every toast at his captain’s table.

Junichiro had fallen asleep perhaps an hour ago, overcome with the liquor and the exertion of their night. He had by slow degrees eased to the floor, until his head had fallen onto Laurence’s bundle and his eyes had closed, almost at the same time.

“I am delighted with it,” the dragon continued, and hiccoughed. “
Neither wit, nor words, nor worth
,” this repeated unslurred and with a startlingly good accent, despite the truly remarkable quantity of liquor which the beast had consumed, “—that has a very pleasing rhythm. This is part of your funerary rites?”

“In the theater, when they have killed him,” Laurence said, confusedly, trying to explain; he was beginning to find it difficult to make his tongue work in Chinese. “There is a dragon when he gives the speech,” he added, with some vague sense that this might be of interest to another beast, trying with movements of his hands
to convey some sense of the usual staging, which he had seen once as a boy of thirteen.

“I would be glad to see it,” the dragon said. “I have lately seen a splendid performance by a troupe, who came by upon the road. I will give you a little of it.”

She began to recite in a low melodious voice, rising and falling in the unfamiliar language. Laurence was not proof against so much inducement added to his own weariness, and before she had completed the third line he had fallen to sleep beside Junichiro. When he woke, the dragon was gone; Junichiro was stirring beside him, and the sun was going down. His head ached like the very devil.

“The guardian must have gone to the water,” Junichiro said. “We should go onwards.”

“Yes,” Laurence said, wearily, “but we had better wait until the sun has gone, and eat,” the bowl holding still a handsome share of leftovers, “and in the meanwhile, I will have a few answers: I am not ungrateful, but I would know what you are about. Did you—seek to escape Kaneko’s service, yourself?” He spoke dubiously; he could scarcely imagine that to be Junichiro’s motive. The boy’s affection for his master had been too visible and sincere for that, and yet it seemed equally unlikely he had been motivated by any sense of injustice done to Laurence himself; there was certainly no personal attachment between them.

“Of course not,” Junichiro said, bitterly; he was brushing his own garments clean as best he could. “I heard my master tell Lady Arikawa you were too much of a coward to take an honorable death. There was no course of honor left for him. If he gave you up for torture to the magistrate, he would have failed in his vow; and he could not disobey the bakufu to protect you. What else was there to do?”

“What
was
this vow?” Laurence demanded. “Why would he have sworn an oath to aid a perfect stranger?”

“He made the vow to Jizo,” Junichiro said shortly, “who guards travelers, to ask him to look after his wife and son.”

His manner did not invite further inquiry. But Laurence recalled the silence of the house, the absence of a chatelaine, Kaneko’s black clothing, and thought he might understand: a wife lost in childbirth, and the child with her. Enough cause, surely, for a man to seek the consolation of religion, and to hold the oath he had made for their sake more dear than a mere promise to be put aside when inconvenient.

“So I will keep you alive, and get you away,” Junichiro went on. “My master will not have disobeyed the law; he will not have brought shame on Lady Arikawa and his own family: the guilt will be on my own head.”

Laurence shook his head in dismay: it was a solution which he felt could only have appealed to the excessive optimism of a young man, a wish to be the hero of the piece. “Unless that magistrate is a fool, he will hold your master accountable for your actions, and you will have only gained a crime to your account and his,” he said.