Blood of Tyrants (15 page)

“Are you sure he isn’t only dead?” Wampanoag said, greatly diminishing Temeraire’s opinion of his intelligence. “They usually are, if they get washed overboard.”

Temeraire with an effort restrained himself from mantling. “I am
quite
sure,” he said, repressively. “And I intend to remain so until I am offered
proof
otherwise.”

Wampanoag had a trick of tilting his head a little to one side, as though he were looking you over from another angle to see if you seemed different, which Temeraire now found had the effect of making him feel under a too-sharp observation. But Wampanoag only said, “So you are only lingering to find him, this fellow you lost?”

“Yes,” Temeraire said, eagerly. “And we should be
very
glad of any assistance in recovering him.”

“But I beg your pardon,” Wampanoag said, “aren’t you here over the
Phaeton
?”

“No, for we hadn’t any notion what had happened to her,” Temeraire said. “We were only on our way to China: we have been invited to the court, you see.”

Wampanoag was quite gratifyingly surprised to hear of their destination; he expressed himself very prettily on the matter indeed, calling it a remarkable honor. “And I will not scruple to say, that puts a very different shade on things here, it seems to me,” he added, “if you are
not
here to quarrel.”

“We are not, in the least,” Temeraire said, although a stab of guilt, when he thought of what Laurence should say when he heard of the
Phaeton
, forced him to add, “although I do say we think it very hard that the
Phaeton
should have been sunk, so far from home with all her hands, and all because, we suppose, of some misunderstanding.”

“Let us certainly call it that, for the moment,” Wampanoag said. “That is a very good name for it, I must say.”

He declared himself delighted to be of service in any way he could, promised to speak with the chief of the Dutch, a gentleman called Doeff, to forward the search, and even with the Japanese directly. “I have a bit of Dutch myself, you know,” he said, “from the shell: my tribe adopted a good many of them back during the quarreling over New Amsterdam that was. So I can have a jaw with their translators, myself: that is why I hired us on here.”

He was so ready to be obliging that Temeraire could not even be too angry with him for adding, “but pray do understand that it is more than I undertake, to return you your sailor. I don’t mean to distress you, but my firm have lost a few ships entire ourselves, all hands, too. It is a dreadful sad wrench, I can tell you, to hear that a neat clipper with her hold packed full and three dozen men aboard has gone to the bottom of the ocean, to be gnawed by serpents, and a clear loss of twenty thousand pounds sterling.”

Temeraire shuddered in real horror, his ruff flattening involuntarily down against his neck, and Churki exclaimed in passionate dismay; but Wampanoag made a prosaic flip of his wing in the air. “I don’t complain: it is a hard business,” he said, “and a necessary risk to run, if you mean to make your fortune at it. But what I mean to say is, not a scrap of sail or bit of timber do we have to show for any ship we have lost: we only know they are lost because they left the one port and never came in at any other, and after we had sat hoping after them a couple of years it was time to leave off saying, ‘She will come in tomorrow.’ So I cannot promise you we will find a trace to say, one way or another, what has happened to your sailor. But whatever I
can
do, I will, sure enough.”

“I cannot hope for more than that,” Temeraire said as politely as he could manage, rather wishing that Wampanoag would leave now before sharing any other ghoulish stories, and seeing before him a long empty stretch of days, waiting and waiting, while Laurence did not come.

The party about to ford the river was evidently the train of a lord on his way home from the capital, amongst them several armed retainers wearing two swords and more serviceable armor as well. Laurence kept his head bent down and rowed industriously but not, he hoped, too fast; Junichiro was silent in the boat’s belly. Laurence thought for a moment they would manage it. The ferrymen and the porters lost interest when they saw that Laurence showed no intention to compete with their business, of which in any case there bade fair to be as much as they could manage with the sheer size of the lord’s retinue, and the confusion and noise of the welcoming inns might have overwhelmed any interest in Laurence and Junichiro’s quiet passage.

But luck turned against them: one of the lord’s servants on the far bank, evidently in charge of getting the entire assembly across the river and looking exasperated and hot, with a few strands of hair straggled loose from his neatly swept-back arrangement,
caught sight of the boat. He called out to them peremptorily, beckoning—
you there, you, the boat
—plainly wishing them to come and assist in the ferrying, despite the scowls of the ferrymen.

Laurence pretended not to hear, not to see; he rowed onwards with more vigor, trying to evade the clumsy-handled ferries, crammed too full of men. But an eddy pushed one of the waddling boats towards their little fishing-boat and bumped her, and a disapproving older woman in the prow took the opportunity to reach over and swat him reprovingly, gesturing back at the crowded bank as she chided him.

The swat dislodged the rag covering his hair; one of the samurai aboard the ship glanced over, and, after a moment of confusion, a recognition dawned. The samurai leaned over, and sought to grab him; Laurence shipped one oar and seized the other mid-stem, jabbing the handle hard into the man’s belly, and tipped him over the side. Another was standing up in the ferry, trying to draw his sword, which he would have needed to practice a good deal more on the water before trying to accomplish it on a wallowing tub of the sort. Before he could get it out, Laurence swung up the flat of the oar and struck the man a hard and ringing clout across the head, knocking him down to the floor of the ferry.

The two boats were yet entangled. “Ma’am, I beg your pardon,” Laurence said to the old woman, who was still sitting ramrod-straight in the ferry over the side from him and regarding him with a flat expression of utter disapproval and not the least evidence of fear; he put out a boot over the side and shoved the ferry off with a heave, and they were loose.

But the entire retinue were now alive to his presence, swarming out upon the banks, and a couple of the samurai wading out towards them with blades drawn: the ford was shallow enough to make attack practical, the river not waist-high on a man. “Take the oars!” Laurence said to Junichiro, who was hesitating with his hand on the hilt of his blade—he could scarcely have been eager to strike men of rank, of his own nation.

Junichiro looked even more torn; but he seized the oars and
began awkwardly to pull. One of the samurai had reached them, catching at the boat’s side: Laurence gripped the man’s wrist to hold away the blade, and with his other hand closed hard struck him across the face and away from the boat. Another was struggling furiously through the current, almost there, but Junichiro had mastered the boat, and they were moving into deeper water.

Laurence ducked a last wild desperate swing of blade, and then he sat again and took the oars—pulled as urgently as ever he had pulled in his life: no longer the easy strokes he had used to move them along, but deep cupping sweeps, legs and back and shoulders all gone into every stroke. He had put a hundred yards between them and the ford before the first ferry could be emptied of her passengers, and a pursuit began to organize. Then he was further on, around a bend of the river, and they had vanished from sight.

He did not slacken his pace; he thought at first he might hope to escape the pursuit—the boats at the ford had by no means been very serviceable, and any rowers they had were like to be unhandy. But as he pulled them onwards, a blue flare went shooting up, back from the ford, and burst with a great thunderclap noise and a shining light on the water. A signal, and faintly he heard an answering roar—a dragon, alerted.

“They will set the patrols on us now,” Junichiro said. “We will be taken,” with a calm certainty, given almost in a conversational tone. He had straightened up in the boat, and looked as though he were already preparing himself to meet his fate.

“I do not propose to be quite so dull a fox as that,” Laurence said. “Pick up that bundle, and jump for the shore when we are near enough.” He turned them towards the left, where the bank came low to the water, with trees close together but not impassable.

L
AURENCE PUSHED THE FISHING-BOAT
off, water already rising inside from the hole he had stove in her hull, and saw her go away downriver not without a qualm: even if remaining aboard would have been certain doom, she was still the quickest road to the sea, and the only one at all familiar. He had left the remains of his already-tattered old shirt wrapped around a bundle of branches to make a sort of scare-crow, standing up in the prow and fluttering out white; if only the boat evaded capture long enough to get some distance away before she sank, he hoped it might prove some source of confusion, if not long defer the pursuit.

At least it would conceal where they had gone, for a little while. Junichiro was already doing his best to obscure the marks their landing had made in the bank with more dead leaves and branches.

The going was slow among the trees, and slower still for lack of clear destination. Laurence could look up and catch a glimpse of the stars, now and again, which pointed him south-west generally, but besides this his progress was wholly blind. “Do you have any notion what is in the countryside near-by here?” he asked Junichiro, as they struggled onwards through the rough terrain.

“We are in Chikugo Province by now,” Junichiro said. He paused and looked up over his shoulder: a sound of leathery wings, faint but carrying over the water, not far distant.

Laurence caught sight of a large old pine, gnarled and twisted,
roots erupting from the ground in low arches. They squirmed between two of these and pressed themselves back into the meager shelter their intersection offered. The night was not bitterly cold, but enough; they were wet, in thin cotton robes, and it would be a long while for the hollow to have warmed with their bodies. The dragon swept overhead a few times, with no particular direction, merely having a general look, or so it seemed to Laurence; but they huddled beneath the predatory search in silence, hearing the distant noise of search parties.

A clamor was raised somewhere off, in the direction of the river, and the dragon turned away towards it: perhaps the boat. Laurence breathed, but did not yet live and move; too soon for that. The sun was barely up, but had not yet penetrated the trees; he only saw the sky lightened overhead. The voices left off, after a while, and the dragon’s searching resumed, but more distant—it was looking somewhere on the other side of the river, Laurence thought. In any case, this was the best chance which was likely to come; a search would close in upon them soon enough if they merely remained in hiding.

He stood, not very quickly or easily; all his muscles protested the cavalier treatment he had served them, going from hot work to a cold, crouching bed, and he could only ruefully envy Junichiro, who bounded out of the hollow behind him as easily as a deer with the limberness of youth. “Have you any notion of the best direction?” he asked.

“We should continue southward and make for the coast of the Ariake Sea,” Junichiro said, “and follow its shore around to Nagasaki.” Laurence nodded, and followed him into the thicket.

They walked in silence most of the time, speaking only in low voices; the woods were deep and hushed about them, and every word seemed to ring out like a bell, inviting capture. But Laurence asked Junichiro the distance to the sea when they made a brief halt by a spring and they gave their feet a rest; blisters were already raising white upon his skin. The number meant nothing at first, as he
did not know how long a
ri
was, but when they began walking again, Junichiro did his best to tell Laurence when they had crossed the distance, and he made it something near two and a half miles. Ten miles to the coast and sixty around, if they could not find another boat and cut across: three days’ forced march, for an infantry company—a company with boots and supply.

Laurence marched on after him and grimly did not make any close inspection of his feet: they would be worse before they were better.

“They are busy enough over
something
, there,” Granby said, peering through his spyglass, which was rigged out with a loop into which he might slip his hook, and thereby use his hand to steady the front. Temeraire would have liked a spyglass himself; he could not see why one might not be made in dragon-size.

“Why would anyone bother?” Iskierka said, dismissively. “If I want to see what is happening, I will just go fly over and take a look; should you like me to do so, Granby?”

“Stay where you are, if you please,” Granby said, “—or if you don’t please, for that matter,” he added. “The last thing I need is Hammond yowling at me some more; he leapt out at Berkley this morning directly he had put his head out of doors, before he had even swallowed a bite of breakfast: I think the fellow don’t sleep.”