Наоми Новик – Blood of Tyrants (страница 15)

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.”