Tongues of Serpents. Naomi Novik

withdraw, particularly when Granby must soon depart and restore his precedence.’

      Laurence could of course not look upon the expedition with anything like pleasure, save the meagre sort involved in escaping a worse outcome. There was nothing attractive in the prospect of shepherding a gang of convicts, and a month in Rankin’s company would have been a most effective punishment in quarters less confined than a small encampment; and for insult to add upon these injuries, he might also expect the hostility of the rest of the aviators.

      ‘I know they have made clods of themselves, but you had better have at least one officer,’ Granby said, scratching out a haphazard list of the aviators on the back of a napkin, in his shipboard cabin, as he chose which men to assign to Temeraire and to Iskierka, as temporary crews. Laurence of course had been stripped of his subordinates with his rank, and Iskierka had left her own back in Britain when she had decamped without permission to follow them, taking only Granby. ‘Will you take Forthing?’

      ‘Temeraire has taken him a little in dislike, I find,’ Laurence said.

      ‘Yes, I know,’ Granby said. ‘I should like to give Forthing a chance to make it up with him; otherwise we will have a job of it to persuade Temeraire to let him make a try for one of the eggs. Not that Forthing is any less a clod than the rest, but at least he is a competent clod. Most of the rest are the flotsam of the Corps as much as the eggs are. That fellow Blincoln is pleased with himself if he manages to round up half a dozen men to put away harness in good order; and I suppose he may as well be, because it don’t happen very often.’

      Laurence nodded. ‘We will take Fellowes and Dorset, of course; and Roland and Demane can manage the rest, I expect,’ he said. ‘We ought not take more men than necessary; there can be no need to burden the dragons.’

      ‘I hope,’ Tharkay said, ‘that I may form one of your party, as well, if it is not inconvenient.’

      They looked at him with surprise. After a moment, Laurence said, ‘Certainly, if you like,’ forcibly repressing his curiosity; Granby said, ‘But Lord above, whyever for? We will end with pickaxing our way through solid rock for a month in the worst heat of summer, and there is not a blessed soul out there to be found: unless we see some of the natives, and with three dragons I am pretty sure we won’t.’

      Tharkay paused, and then said quietly, ‘You will be surveying first, from aloft; if there is a route in use, that will offer the best chance of seeing it.’

      ‘If there were a route in use, we shouldn’t have to build one,’ Granby said.

      ‘I am not expecting to find a road suitable for general use,’ Tharkay said. ‘A mule-track at most, I should think.’

      ‘But,’ Laurence said, and only barely restrained himself; Granby also had stopped, with an open mouth: but it was too plain Tharkay did not choose to volunteer more; he might easily have done so. ‘Oh, if you like, then,’ Granby said awkwardly, after a moment, looking at Laurence.

      ‘We should be glad of your company,’ Laurence said, with a bow, and only later, privately to Temeraire expressed his confusion.

      ‘Maybe he is looking for the smugglers,’ Temeraire said, unconcernedly, nibbling up another portion of sheep stuffed with raisins and grains: MacArthur had sent another present that morning, letting no grass grow. Laurence stared. ‘Well, if someone has a secret road and has not said anything to anyone about it,’ Temeraire offered, having swallowed, ‘it stands to reason they must be hiding it for a reason; and you were just telling me of all these goods from China which are coming in.’

      ‘It would be a very peculiar way to bring goods into a port city,’ Laurence said, doubtfully, but he recalled Tharkay had engaged himself in service to the directors of the East India Company: at Maden’s request, he might well have undertaken such a task, even if it did not seem a likely explanation for his wishing to accompany their party.

      ‘But anyone could think of searching the ships and the dockyards, to catch them,’ Temeraire said, and Laurence after a little more consideration had to acknowledge that if the intention was ultimately to ship the goods on to England, the arrangement was ideal: slip the goods into the markets unsuspected, and then any legitimate captain might openly purchase them and carry them onward.

      ‘They must be landing them in a convenient bay, then, somewhere further up the coast,’ Laurence said, ‘and taking them around by land; but it would be a most circuitous route, through unsettled and dangerous countryside.’

      ‘There is nothing very dangerous when there is nothing but kangaroos about,’ Temeraire said dismissively.

      They decamped in accord with Granby’s fondest wishes, the very next morning, with all the speed and disorder usual to the Aerial Corps and more when travelling so light: the bulk of their baggage was made of simple pickaxes and hammers and shovels, instead of bombshells and gunpowder, and the few tents which would be their shelter. The mountains were richly green despite the summer, even seen from a distance; they might rely on finding sufficient water without trying to carry very much of it as supply, and with a few sacks of biscuit and barrels of salt pork they were ready to depart.

      The work gang had been assembled with equal haste: some dozen convicts, having been promised their liberty in exchange for this one service, were herded with difficulty up to the promontory and thence into Temeraire’s belly-rigging. They were an odd, ill-favoured assortment of men, for the most part thin and leathery, with a peculiar similarity to their faces perhaps born of suffering and their preferred mode of consolation: fine trace works of broken red capillaries about the base of their noses, and eyes shot through with blood.

      There were a few men who looked a little more suited to the work which lay ahead: a Jonas Green, who might himself have been cut none-too-neatly out of rock, with bulk in his shoulders and his arms; he alone of the convicts was not drunk when they came up to the promontory. A Robert Maynard was rather more fat than substantial, and no one could have accused him of abstinence, but he had reportedly a little skill at stonemasonry, and his hands showed the evidence: callused hard as iron and large out of all proportion, thick-fingered.

      ‘You had better not mistake him,’ MacArthur said, handing over the manifest of men. ‘Transported for pickpocketing. He cannot do much harm out in the wilderness, but I would advise you keep your purses close when you are coming back.’

      Though they were nearly one and all a little intoxicated, and the hour early enough to yet be dark when they had been marched up to the promontory, the convicts balked at dragon transport, seeing Temeraire’s head swinging towards them through the foggy dimness, and were inclined to withdraw at once.

      ‘It’s more than you can ask a man,’ one almost fragile, reedy-voiced fellow said: Jack Telly, sad-eyed and disappointed in his face, his stunted person incongruous with the aggression of his protest. ‘I can swing a pick all day and all night, and will too, but I ain’t to be thrown in a dragon’s belly without so much as a by-your-leave.’

      The general agreement with this sentiment resisted all logic and was only overcome with sufficient doses of rum and cajolery to leave the men in a more or less stupefied state — not unlike the methods used for transporting cattle, Laurence noted with some resignation, before they could at last be marched aboard. Green alone refused the bribery, with a shake of his head when offered a glass; he was one of the convicts who had only lately been brought over in the Allegiance, and rather climbed aboard with no confidence but a stoic resignation: as though he did not care very greatly if he were to be fed to a dragon.

      Forthing saw the loading managed efficiently under Temeraire’s darkling gaze and said, ‘I believe we are ready, Mr. Laurence,’ a little stiffly but without open discourtesy: Granby, Laurence thought, had made him a few pointed remarks, on the subject of his prospects and how likely these were to be advanced through behaviour which should irritate the dragon overseeing the remaining eggs that were all his hope of promotion.

      ‘The eggs are quite secure?’ Temeraire said, nosing down at his own belly, where they had been snugged-in: he had utterly refused to leave them behind, even in Riley’s care.