Crucible of Gold (24 page)

“I have, too—” Temeraire began.

“You have not,” Magaya said. “Why, they are all in rags, nearly, and not one of them has anything nice that anyone can see.”

Temeraire flattened his ruff, and looked uncomfortable, and had to be pressed to translate this. “But that is only because we have had a very difficult journey,” he said defensively, “and because I have Laurence’s best things put safely by. Anyway,” he added, “how should you know anything of the sort, if you were not watching and luring people away.”

Magaya puffed up her neck and shoulder feathers and sank her
head back into them in an attitude of embarrassment, giving something of the appearance of a huddled chick.

“So,” Temeraire continued, triumphantly, “it is nonsense to say my men ran away to you: perhaps Handes did, but that is because he does not want to be punished for behaving very badly indeed; but Griggs and Yardley only came because you made them sneaking promises behind my back. It is not to be borne, and I am sure the law does not make provision for
that
.”

“I do not admit doing anything of the sort,” Magaya said, with dignity, “but even if I had, they would not have listened, if they were not dissatisfied. Anyway,” she went on hurriedly, “as you are so upset, I see now that you do value them: but perhaps I might give you some more presents, instead?”

“There can be no question of leaving them behind, especially Yardley,” Temeraire said. “They are the King’s subjects, and members of our crew—”

“Oh, very well: but you might leave Handes, at least,” she said. “You do not want him, after all; you only mean to put him to death. I could give you clothing, so your other men would not have to be so ragged—”

“Well,” Temeraire said, and, Laurence was sorry to see, very enthusiastically entered into what he could tell even without benefit of translation was nothing less than haggling over price.

He eventually sat back on his haunches, satisfied, and Magaya smoothed down her collar of feathers in equal pleasure; she called over her shoulder to the watching workmen, and several of them trooped away to the storehouses: returning momentarily with many more baskets, of clothing and the leather sandals worn locally, of dried maize, and even one smallish one full of salt.

Yardley was brought out of one of the huts, and slunk over with a sullen and guilty air. “Sure I am coming down sick, sir, with that plague as killed all those people,” he said, “so I thought I might as well stay here to die, and for them to give you goods for all the fellows—”

“That is enough, Mr. Yardley,” Laurence said, putting a halt to this flow of excuses. “You are very fortunate indeed that Mr. Ferris found you; do you imagine that you would be permitted to live a life of indolence once we had gone, and the beast no longer needed to keep you seduced to hold you by her? I see no idle hands on this farm.”

“Sure I don’t mind work,” Yardley said, outrageously, then added, “and she is the sweetest thing you ever saw, sir; as friendly as could be,” which amazed Laurence for a moment, looking at Magaya with her eleven tons and viciously serrated teeth, until he saw in the doorway of the hut a young woman standing and waving cheerful farewell, all unclothed save a blanket wrapped around her and under one bare shoulder.

He shook his head. “Temeraire,” he said, “will you find out from Magaya if that young woman has been made promises—if she expects marriage—”

“What do you mean?” Magaya said suspiciously. “You cannot have her!—or do you mean you
will
leave Yardley with us, after all?”

“No, no,” Temeraire said, “I mean—Laurence, what do I mean?” he asked doubtfully.

“If there is a child,” Laurence said, “there must be consideration for its care.”

“Of course we will take care of it,” Magaya said, when this was put to her. “The mother is in our
ayllu
, so the baby will be, too.”

“Yes, but,” Laurence began, “have her chances of marriage been materially harmed, by her—her congress, with—”

“Why would they be?” Magaya said.

“I am sure I do not know,” Temeraire said, and looked at Laurence inquiringly.

“As she is no longer virgin,” Laurence said in despair, forcing himself to bring it out. “And even if that dragon does not care either way, perhaps men will; pray inquire of the young lady, herself.”

“Very well, but it seems silly to me,” Temeraire said, and when he put the question to her the young woman blinked up at him and looked as perplexed as Magaya herself had. Laurence shook his head and gave up: the young woman plainly was neither friendless nor excessively sorry at the desertion; nor could he feel he was doing her any great disservice by taking Yardley away.

Of Handes, he saw nothing all the time, save perhaps a skulking half-crouched shadow the sun threw out from behind one of the storehouses, as though someone had hidden in the space between the wall and where the roof reached down nearly to the ground. Laurence looked irresolutely; he did not intend to make himself a prig, and he felt all the compulsion of their dire need and the mercy of leaving Handes behind, and yet there was everything to dislike in the principles of such an act, if not the practicals.

“I do not think there can be anything really wrong in it,” Temeraire said. “Magaya seems a decent sort now that she has come around to behaving better, and I am sure she will take excellent care of Handes: which is more than he deserves, anyway. Besides, Laurence,” he added, “you have just said yourself that the King’s subjects have the right to do as they wish, so long as it is consistent with their duty: Handes wishes to stay here, and it seems to me even if he did not wish to do so, one might consider it his duty to do so, since we will come by so many useful goods, in consequence.”

“It is no free man’s duty to allow himself to be sold into slavery, in a foreign land, no matter how good the price,” Laurence said.

“It is not
exactly
slavery, though,” Temeraire said. “You would not say that
you
were a slave, after all, only because you are mine.”

It was some time since Laurence had considered himself entitled to
demand
Temeraire’s obedience, which otherwise might have enabled him to explain the contradiction easily; and on the face of it, he realized in some dismay, the relations between captain and beast could with more rationality be given the character of possession by the latter, than the former.

“I dare say,” Granby said, when Laurence had laid this insight
before him that evening, while all around them the camp bustled with activity, as the new harnesses were stitched together under Shipley’s busy and strutting supervision. “At least I am damned sure Iskierka would agree with you on the subject; pray don’t say it so loud. This wretched country cannot be a good influence: we may count ourselves lucky if Temeraire don’t go home thinking dragons ought to have men and not just votes.”

H
OME AND
E
NGLAND
seemed very distant in the morning, when they came into the foothills of the great clawing peaks of the Andes, serrated and blue-shadowed where the long swaths of snow lay on their sides. The river divided into a hundred little tributaries trickling down the mountain-sides as they climbed, and by evening the dragons were landing in a high meadow gasping for breath. They had made scarcely ten miles if their progress were to be measured as a line drawn on a map, Laurence thought, and more than a hundred straight up.

He stumbled himself, climbing down from Temeraire’s back, and they were all of them short of breath and queerly sick with some miasma of the mountain air. A few of the men fell over heaving like bellows, and lay where they fell.

Laurence walked to the edge of the meadow where it ended in cliff to breathe deep of some cleaner air and pull it into his lungs, and found he was looking down at a series of terraced fields: man-made yet lying fallow; maize plants struggled with weeds and tall grasses for dominion, and even a few tools lay half-buried in the greenery, abandoned.

All the rest of that journey had the same quality, as though they walked through a stranger’s unattended house, neither host nor servants there to greet them. They saw once in a while dragons, some
even laboring in the fields and others carrying loads of timber. Only once in the first few days did they see any human life: a couple of young girls sitting in a field with their arms wrapped around their knees, watching over a great herd of grazing llamas in a high valley.

They threw a swift startled glance up at the strange dragons and dived for cover into a nearby cave little more than a crevasse in the rock, too narrow for any dragon to reach into, and rang out a clanging bell for alarm. “Pray let us continue on,” Hammond shouted anxiously in Laurence’s ear, “as quickly as may be; there is nothing served by offering even the appearance of provocation—”

“We might have stayed and had some of those llamas, fresh,” Iskierka said, later that evening; instead they had come to ground in another abandoned field with a storehouse, and she was eating a porridge of dried maize flavored with the smoked llama meat which Gong Su had prepared.

“It is truly wonderful, the quantity of supply which this nation has provided along its roads,” Hammond said, inspecting the storehouse. “I believe we have seen not fewer than six to-day alone; do you agree with me, gentlemen?”

Gong Su also was interested in the construction of the storehouse, and when he saw Laurence looking, showed where his attention had been drawn to its design. “It must work excellently, for draining the rainfall: certainly this food has not been stored recently, but very little is spoilt.”

Easy, also, to build up great stores when so far as they could see there were few to consume them. There was something strange and sad in the dragons tilling the great fields, to raise crops which no-one would eat. The handful of beasts to which Temeraire spoke looked at the two hundred men and more aboard with eyes at once eager and resentful: and many offers were made him.

“There once were more men,” Taruca said, when Laurence questioned him. “Many more: my grandfather told me there were so many that only half the
ayllu
had even one dragon among their
curaca
—” by which word he seemed to mean the chiefs of each
clan. “It was a great honor to persuade a dragon to join one’s
ayllu
: a great warrior might win one for his kin, or a skillful weaver.”

“So you see, Captain,” Hammond said, listening, “I was not at all wrong: it is
not
slavery, in the ordinary sense.”

“It was not, in those times,” Taruca said. “Why does a dragon wish to say how a man shall live his life? The honor of the
ayllu
was the honor of the dragon; its strength her strength; they did not govern. But then the plagues came: and men died, so now nearly all the chiefs of all the
ayllus
are dragons. And they are grown anxious, and do not like us to go anywhere; and rightly when they steal from one another.”

There were people, of course: the country was not deserted. As they came northward into the more populous regions, men might be seen openly upon the roads with llama pack-trains, and dragons in a particular blue fringe flew the route. “She says they are watching the roads to make sure there is no theft,” Temeraire said, when one of these had stopped them in their way and demanded that they land in a deserted valley, and show her their safe-conduct from the governor.

All three dragons were inclined to be offended by her intrusion, as she could not have weighed above two tons: to Laurence’s eye she was smaller than the little courier Volly. She did not seem to care that she was dwarfed by them, however, and when she saw the men were most of them in native dress—courtesy of Magaya’s gifts—she insisted on having every last one paraded before her, so she could assure herself of their indeed being all Europeans. This caused some difficulty, as they were not; and aside from the handful of Malay and Chinese sailors who made her most suspicious, several of the British men were tanned too dark and were forced to disrobe to reveal their natural color; and then Demane and Sipho and the three other black men among the crew, she suspected of being made-up in reverse fashion.

“Demane is
mine
,” Kulingile said, when he felt she had looked too long. She only ruffled her feathers up and back at him in answer,
still peering closely, and he reached the end of his patience. Sitting up, he spread wide his wings and threw out his chest: he had always before been remarkably even-tempered, and not often given to parading himself, but he had despite all their privations continued to grow, and when a dragon of nearly thirty tons chose, he could no more be ignored than an avalanche. The patrol-dragon gave a hop sideways, startled into looking up at him, and he threw up his head and roared.

Kulingile’s voice had remained thready and piping, but his roar shared no such qualities. It did not have the same eerie and particular resonance as the divine wind, but the noise was shocking nonetheless, sourced in so vast a pair of lungs, and at such a near distance. Involuntarily many of the men covered their ears, and when Kulingile leaned forward, the patrol-dragon skipped prudently back still farther, made some hasty remarks about being satisfied, and scurried into the air.