Blood of Tyrants (Temeraire) Page 4

  Indeed, he did not go so far that he did not hear the thundering crash of the first pine, coming down; he did not wish to risk overlooking any sign. The coast was mostly rocky, save for a few other inlets and narrow streams coming down, but not very high. “I do not think it would be excessively difficult to get safely ashore, for a man swimming,” Temeraire said to Ferris.

  Ferris said, “There aren’t cliffs, at least,” in a consoling way. “Shan’t we turn back, now? Those fishermen there are sure to see us if only they look up, and I think that must be a harbor over there—”

  “But there are a few more beaches in this direction,” Temeraire said. “We shall go and have a look at those, from the air: I am sure they are too busy fishing to pay any attention to—”

  He was interrupted in this optimistic speech by a sudden bellowing roar, loud and strangely gargled: he turned back hurriedly. “I do not see anyone in the air,” Temeraire said, uncertainly, peering in every direction: the day was clear, and he could not imagine where the roar had come from. “Perhaps it was only another pine coming down—”

  “That noise was no tree-fall,” Ferris said, urgently, and Temeraire could not disagree however much he wished to do; he turned back towards the bay and crested the trees just in time to find, to his appalled surprise, Maximus and Lily and the others all mantling towards a monstrous sea-serpent rearing itself up out of the bay. The rocks were not rocks at all; they were a part of its body, and it was twice as big as Maximus even only in the parts which Temeraire could see.

  And then Temeraire realized he was wrong: it was not a serpent; it was a dragon, with forelegs out upon the sand: only it was very long, and with stubby wings. It opened its mouth and made another roaring noise, a deep angry growling demand at the formation, which carried over the water clear enough, but in some language which Temeraire did not recognize.

  They stood all amazed a moment, regarding one another, very much like figures upon a war-table from Temeraire’s distant view. When none of them answered, the serpent-dragon reached for the second tree, which had struck partway into the water. Lily sprang forward and put her talons upon it; the great dragon made a dismissive snort in her direction, which needed no translation.

  Temeraire beat urgently towards them as Lily raised her wings and flared them out a little: the brilliant orange and purple would have warned any European beast, and their immense wingspan, but it was no surprise if the Japanese dragon did not recognize her as a Longwing, or did not know what that meant; and she was not a third his size. Temeraire saw Captain Harcourt, a tiny figure, lean forward on Lily’s neck and point to the sand; Lily turned her head and spat a thin demonstrative stream of acid, to make her point.

  The serpentine dragon drew back from the hissing black stench and the thin trails of smoke, its own small wings flattening against its back, and then it plunged its head into the water and opened its jaw wide. The dragon, already so massive but slender, began now to rapidly swell up and out to the sides: Temeraire could not understand in the least how he was managing it, and then the dragon reared itself back out and up, and up, and up, and it blasted Lily and all the others with a torrent of water.

  “Oh!” Temeraire cried, “Oh, it is a Sui-Riu!” that variety of dragon being known to him from Sir Edward Howe’s work on the Oriental breeds, but as he flew towards them as quickly as ever he could, he thought with some strong indignation that Sir Edward might have mentioned the immense—the truly immense—scale; and the book had not in the least conveyed the true impact of the water-spouting.

  Even Maximus had been swept off his feet, and was now tangled and struggling up against the tree-line; Lily was coughing and sputtering, having taken the brunt of the torrent, jerking her head, and Nitidus and Dulcia had been carried into the bay itself and were floundering in the waves. Immortalis and Churki were a tumbled sand-clogged mess flung into the woods, trying to get their footing again; Sutton and Messoria, having stationed themselves back and apart, were a little better off and getting into the air.

  But the Sui-Riu evidently had no intention of letting them get their bearings back: he had plunged his head back into the water and was inhaling again. He might blast them on the far side, and so sweep more of them into the water, where he would certainly have an advantage, since he could breathe through it: unsporting, except that to be fair he was one against eight.

  However, Temeraire could not give him much credit for that: no-one had asked the Sui-Riu to be so unfriendly. Lily had given the most polite warning one could ask for—if she had liked to be similarly nasty, she might have taken the Sui-Riu directly in the eye with her shot. Temeraire worked his lungs as he flew, gathering breath, and even as the Sui-Riu drew himself up out of the water again, Temeraire dived towards him, roaring in full and terrible voice.

  The waters of the bay shuddered from the divine wind, the surface going for a moment bowl-like and concave; the Sui-Riu was bowled over onto his side with an immense splash, and his torrent erupted involuntarily and spilled harmless over the water, merely adding more turbulence. But the distance was too great, or else perhaps the water somehow absorbed some of the impact; the Sui-Riu managed to right himself in the water, and did not look so dreadfully injured as did most dragons who had borne the direct brunt of the divine wind. Only a little blood trickled black from his right ear, over scales that were a deep greenish black the color of dry seaweed, and his eye on that side was bloodshot: otherwise he seemed quite all right, and great sharp fins were rising up angrily all over his back, like blades.

  But Temeraire was hovering off the shore, now, closer; and Maximus and Lily were righting themselves. The others fell into line behind Lily, taking up their formation-positions. Temeraire did not much like formation-fighting, but one could not deny its tactical usefulness, and the Sui-Riu evidently did not have any difficulty recognizing his increasing disadvantage. Shaking away the last of the effects, he looked up at Temeraire, and his eyes—a great slitted pale grey that looked nearly white—drew thin and narrow.

  The Sui-Riu rumbled some remarks in a most angry tone, sounding more like a distant thundercloud than anything else. “I do not have any notion what you are saying,” Temeraire informed him loudly, in Chinese, “but you needn’t complain of us, when you attack people out of nowhere—if you should—”

  But as abruptly as he had emerged before, the Sui-Riu was gone: in one smooth motion he plunged beneath the dark murky waters of the bay, clouded even further now by silt and sand raised in their exchange. One long barnacled curve of tail breached the water, and was gone: though Temeraire held position a long time, he did not break the surface again.

  THE LANTERNS WERE COMING alight, one after another, all through the house. Laurence could trace the servants moving in waves as the glow spread behind the walls. The sentry at the door was waking with a snorting start and jerking to his feet, blinking around. Laurence for a moment considered: the man was paunchy and sleep-dazed, armed only with a short blade—a quick struggle might see him through—

  But the dragon was descending from aloft—the dragons, rather, for there were two immense black shadows against the milky wash of the moonless night, coming into the lamp-light. One, the larger, had wide green eyes that glowed like a cat’s: it was not looking at him presently, but if it could see in the dark, like the Fleur-de-Nuit, nothing could be easier than for the beast to hunt him down while he fumbled over unfamiliar ground in the dark.

  Quickly, Laurence turned instead and thrust his small bundle into the ornamental bushes planted against the side of the house, and then went and stood by the door of the house to wait, as though he had been brought there. The sentry looked at him in confusion, but Laurence looked back at him with unmoving face, brazening it out, and the man was in a moment overwhelmed by a sudden flow of servants hurrying out into the garden. Junichiro appeared by Laurence’s elbow.

  “What are you doing out here?” the young man demanded, but preoccupied himself did not wait for an answer; instead he
seized Laurence by the arm and drew him along with the flow of people. “They have certainly come on your account,” he said, “so you may as well stay here.”

  Kaneko was coming out of the house himself, dressed in formal robes; he wore two blades at his belt and came past his servants, who had arrayed themselves in a square as neat as any infantry troop. Two last men were hurrying around the perimeter of a great flagstoned courtyard, lighting lamps all around it, and then they all knelt together as the dragons came descending into the square, Kaneko out ahead of the rest of the party.

  The dragons settled themselves neatly upon the ground; the larger, grey in body and something the size of a middle-weight, wore curious pale green silken dressings the color of its eyes wound about its neck and wing-tips and forelegs, which coming loose made graceful arcs about its body like sails spilling their wind. It had not a single man aboard. The smaller dragon, a brilliant yellow beast larger than a Winchester though not up to combat-weight, carried four: of these, the lead gentleman was dressed in elaborate and formal robes bearing signs of some sort of office, and the others were evidently servants who carried boxes and one an armful of scrolls, and preceding him down unfolded a set of steps to enable him to make a more ponderous and imposing descent.

  The grey dragon bent its head towards Kaneko while the men dismounted. It spoke to him in the Japanese tongue, and he bowed more deeply and said something back. Laurence caught the name Arikawa out of it, but he saw no women; perhaps these were Lady Arikawa’s emissaries, and he could see nothing to bode well for his future in their cold faces.

  There was a little more formal exchange between them, which Laurence could not follow: he was all the more conscious of his utter isolation, of himself as a prisoner among strangers, unable even to pick out a word or to conceive their intentions. The servants were dismissed; the guests and Kaneko went inside the house; Junichiro took him by the arm and drew him along after them. They turned immediately from the entryway into a chamber on the side, whose entire outer wall was slid back and left wide open to face upon the courtyard where the dragons had settled themselves.

  The servants brought great kettles of steaming sharp-nosed tea out to bowls laid before the beasts. The official and Kaneko were served afterwards; they drank, making what Laurence assumed from their tone was mere small conversation, until abruptly he was drawn in front of them, and without hesitation or change of demeanor the official addressed him in Chinese and said, “What is your purpose in coming to our nation?”

  “Sir,” Laurence said, “I have no purpose but to be restored to my country-men, and my ship if at all possible.”

  It was the opening salvo of an interrogation which proceeded despite the hour of the night, and was as frustrating to Laurence as it was to his interlocutor. He could not but be conscious of the impossibility of avowing himself unable to remember his purpose. Better to be thought a liar than a lunatic, he was sure, but unable to confess this truth, he felt every other word hung upon a knife-edge of honor. He did not know why he was here, and therefore could not say with honest confidence that he meant them no injury. What if the Japanese sheltered some French ship, which he pursued?

  “I am a shipwreck: I did not choose to be thrown on your shore, and my presence here is the merest accident,” he said again, the best he could do. “And as you have received no declaration of war, from Britain, nor any envoy,” he added, hoping as much was true, “then, sir, I hope you will believe I am not here as your enemy. You surely cannot imagine me intended in any way to be a spy, and His Majesty’s Government does not behave in so underhanded a manner as to attack another nation with no warning or quarrel.”

  The official, who had been addressed by the others as Matsudaira, was an older man, with a narrow beard that framed his face in dark lines salted a little with grey; his mouth was thin and hard. “Indeed,” he said, and put down his teacup. “With your gracious permission, Lady Arikawa, we will take the Englishman to Hakata Bay, and consult him upon the evidence there.”

  Laurence looked in confusion for any new arrival; then the grey dragon answered, in Chinese, “Let it be done,” with some reluctance in her tone. Kaneko, frowning slightly, looked at her: the dragon shook her head at him, setting the arcs of green fabric trembling.

  The sun was rising, little by little, as they went. Kaneko alone went with the grey dragon—who, Laurence somewhat doubtfully supposed, was Lady Arikawa. She bent her foreleg and invited Kaneko upon her back: evidently some sign of great condescension on her part, and one of which Matsudaira did not approve, judged from the tightening of his lips. Laurence himself and the rest of the company went aboard the second, smaller beast.

  Junichiro, left behind to watch the house, had watched them go aboard with his eyes darting anxiously from his master to Matsudaira: he, too, saw the magistrate’s frowns. Yet he maintained his composure, or nearly so: when the dragons leapt aloft, his face turned up to follow them, betraying for a moment a boyish note of longing. Laurence recognized it as kin to the feeling which he had worn himself as a boy hanging on the prow of his uncle’s ship, although he had never thought of attaching such a feeling to dragons.

  Laurence was grateful to find both his stomach and his courage easily equal to the journey; he had been able to make his way up the harness without hesitation or awkwardness, and the wind cool and fragrant and crisp in his face was a pleasure despite the great rushing speed. They were near the ocean: dawn broke over the water brilliantly, sunlight a streaming silver path towards them so that Laurence’s eyes teared with the glare. The green fabric on Lady Arikawa’s back, which she had drawn taut about herself for the flight, was bordered with innumerable small gems which blazed in the new light. She averted her eyes from the sun, however, and dropped back so the smaller dragon’s shadow could land upon her head and give her some relief from the light. Laurence noted it with some small gratitude: she would be no very effective searcher during the daylight, perhaps—if he could somehow still manage his escape.

  The tenor of Matsudaira’s interrogation had left Laurence in no doubt of the increasing urgency of flight. He could curse the ill-fortune that had brought the dragons down at so unexpected an hour, but not berate himself for failure. He had planned his attempt at escape as well as he could, and at least he had avoided giving rise to suspicion—he was neither bound nor chained at present, and Kaneko had not even missed the sword yet.

  As soon as another opportunity afforded, even perhaps during this excursion, Laurence meant to try again. He had kept the gold bars tucked into the sash of his garment, so he was not wholly without resources even without his lost bundle. The flight indeed might aid him, for they were aloft more than an hour: Laurence had not realized he had been brought so far from the shore, but Kaneko’s house evidently stood perhaps fifteen or even as much as twenty miles inland.

  “Hakata Bay” was a promising sound, however: at least he should be on the coast again, and if there were any chance of slipping away, he could more easily hunt out some fishing-boat. So, at least, he told himself; he refused to listen to the grim internal voice which would fain have whispered in his ear at length of the impracticalities of any such plan, and the absurdity of escaping alone from a large and well-armed party accompanied by dragons, no less. Hopelessness was a worse defeat than any other; he did not mean to yield to it.

  The countryside below was not unpromising for his purposes. At first the land below was settled; but towards the end of their flight, the dragons turned away from a bustling harbor full of shipping, following the line of an old low stone wall—some sort of coastal defense, perhaps? It resembled nothing so much as some of the defenses thrown up against Napoleon, on Britain’s own shores. It carried them along to a more isolate shore, hidden by the curving of the coastline, where there was only a mere fringe of sand leading up to a thick forest of tree-trunks, which Laurence thought might serve to hide him even from dragons.

  But as they landed, the waters of the bay shuddered and broke open, and
a monstrous creature came rising from the waves. It was something like the sea-serpents of half-legendary repute, but magnified to a size that put to shame the most outrageous and absurd sea-tales Laurence had ever heard passed off for truth by sailors; he had never even conceived its like.

  The smaller dragons landed before it and bowed their heads low to the ground; the men slid to the sand and all knelt deeply before the creature. It climbed a little way out on the shore to meet them, its enormous talons digging great gouges in the sand, so deep that water pooled up in them as it lifted them to claw its way further up the shore. It made a rumbling speech to the party, permitting them to rise, and even inclined its head a very little to Lady Arikawa; but when at last it swung its heavy finned head towards Laurence, a glitter of angry malice shone in its pallid white eyes, one of them shot through with broken black vessels of blood.

  “Pray be reasonable,” Hammond said, leaning greenish over the rail; he was chewing a great lump of coca leaves in his distended cheek, an effort to make up for the wad he had lost when the Sui-Riu had swamped them: he was still in his sodden clothing. “We must go on to Nagasaki, as soon as we may, and there make amends. Only consider: if the beast was not some mere feral creature, and it should report our quarrel, any efforts to find Captain Laurence will certainly be grievously hampered by the opposition of the authorities—”

  “What you mean is,” Temeraire said, “you want us to run away from that big sea-dragon like cowards, only because you are afraid he will come after the ship.”

  He did not bother to be polite about it. Captain Blaise had not been the least reluctant to express his own sentiments, when Temeraire and the others had returned, on the subject of the Sui-Riu as it was described to him—sentiments which did not in Temeraire’s opinion do him the least credit. “We must get out of these waters at once,” Blaise had said, and he had made all the men beat to quarters instantly, though there had not been any sign of the other beast all the long flight back.