Empire of Ivory (20 page)

flying distance of the Cape, Laurence had packed the

surgeons and the barest handful of men and supplies aboard

Temeraire's back, and taken them on ahead, that they might

begin this desperate business of attempting to find the

cure.

It had not been merely an excuse: their orders

unequivocally stated without the loss of a moment, and

Maximus's ragged, gurgling cough was a constant spur to

their sides. But in all honesty, neither had Laurence been

sorry in the least to go. The quarrel had not been made up,

at all.

Laurence had made attempts: once, three weeks into the

journey, he paused, belowdecks, as they passed one another

by chance, and removed his hat; but Riley only just touched

his own brim and shouldered by, a quick surge of red color

mounting in his cheeks. This had stiffened Laurence another

week, long enough to make him refuse an offer of a share in

one of the ship's milch goats, when the one which he had

provided himself ran dry and was sacrificed instead to the

dragons.

Then regret won out again, and he said to Catherine,

"Perhaps we ought to invite the captain and the ship's

officers to dinner?" on deck and perfectly audible to

anyone who might be curious, so when the invitation was

sent it could not be mistaken as anything but a peace

offering. But though Riley came, and his officers, he was

utterly withdrawn all the meal, scarcely answering except

when Catherine spoke to him and never lifting his head from

his plate. His officers, of course, would not speak without

he or another captain addressing them, so it was a strange

and silent affair with even the younger aviators stifled by

the uneasy sense that their manners did not suit the

formality of the occasion.

With such a standing quarrel among the officers, the men,

who at no time made any great secret of their dislike of

the dragons and their aviators, now made still less of one.

Their hostility was leashed tightly by their fear, of

course, even among those who had sailed with Laurence and

Temeraire on the previous voyage to China. Seven dragons

made a great difference from one, and the sudden violent

fits of coughing or sneezing which wracked the poor

creatures and ate at their strength only made them all the

more fearsomely unpredictable to the common sailors, who

could scarcely be made to ascend the foremast for its being

too close to the beasts.

What was worse, their officers corrected them none too

sharply for their hesitation, with predictable results: off

the coast of the Horn she missed stays, and had to be

hurriedly box-hauled, because the men were slow moving on

the dragondeck to shift over the jib and foretop-mast

staysail sheets. The maneuver jarred the dragons sadly

about, setting them to coughing, and then nuisance in a

moment nearly became tragedy: Nitidus went tumbling off

Temeraire's back and knocked Lily's head askew.

Her greasy tub of oiled sand slid with ponderous majesty

over the edge of the dragondeck, and plunged immediately

into the ocean. "Over the side, dearest, put your head over

the side," Catherine cried, her crew all of them to a man

rushing to fetch one of the other replacements from the

galley below. Lily had with a tremendous effort lunged

forward and now was clutching precariously at the edge of

the ship, her head thrust out over the water and her

shoulders curled up into great knots as she tried to hold

from coughing; drops spilled from her bone spurs and smoked

thin black hissing streams from the tarry sides of the

ship: the Allegiance was coming up through the wind, which

blew them back against the wood.

"Shall I try and carry you away from the ship?" Temeraire

asked anxiously, wings half-spread. "Will you climb on my

back?"-a dangerous maneuver at the best of times, with a

dragon not dripping poisonous acid from her jaws, if Lily

could even have managed to get upon him.

"Temeraire," Laurence called instead, "will you see if you

can break up the deck, here," and Temeraire turned his

head. Laurence had only meant him to try and wrench the

planks up, but instead Temeraire opened his jaws

experimentally over the place and gave a queer, throttled

version of his usual roar: four planks cracked, one opening

up along the ring-pattern of the wood and dropping a knot

straight down onto the startled heads of the galley cooks,

crouched and covering themselves in terror.

The space was nearly wide enough: with a few frantic

moments of work they had it enlarged, and Temeraire could

reach down and heave up the tub directly. Lily pressed her

jaw down into the sand and coughed and coughed, miserably

and long, the fit worsened by her having repressed it at

first. The oily sand hissed and smoked and stank with the

fumes of the acid, and the deck gaped with the splintered

hole, jagged edges threatening the dragons' bellies and

letting the steam out of the galley which kept them warm.

"A damned disgrace; we might as well be sailing on a

Frenchman," Laurence said, angrily and not low; it had

already been in his mind that tacking into the wind was

incautious for so large and ponderous a vessel, better

suited to old-fashioned wearing about, particularly when

weighted down as she was with so many dragons.

Riley had appeared on the quarterdeck, and across the ship

faintly drifted the sound of his furious voice, calling

Owens, the deck officer, to account, and the men to fresh

order. But Laurence's voice carried, too; there was a

momentary pause in Riley's tirade, and then it finished

more abruptly.

Riley made his stiff and formal apologies for the incident

only to Catherine, catching her as she came off the

dragondeck to go below, at the end of the day, in what

Laurence could only imagine a design to avoid going up to

speak to all of the aviators together. Her hair had come

loose from its plait, her face was smudged with smoke and

charred soot, and she had taken off her coat to pad under

Lily's jaw, where the bare edge of the tub had chafed. When

he stopped her, she straightened and put her hand through

her hair, loosening it entirely about her face, and his

speech, undoubtedly prepared with care, quite fell apart.

He only said, "I beg your pardon-deeply regret-"

incoherently, and looked all confusion, until she

interrupted tiredly, "Yes, of course, only pray not again,

and do let us have the carpenters make the repairs at once

tomorrow. Good-night," and brushed past him and went below.

She meant nothing by it but that she was tired, and wished

to go to sleep; but it looked cutting to one who did not

know her well enough to know her not in the least likely to

resort to social stratagem to express offense; and perhaps

Riley was ashamed. In any case, by morning all the ship's

carpenters were at work on the dragondeck before even the

aviators arose, with not a word of grumbling or fear even

if a great deal of sweating, particularly when the dragons

roused and began watching with close interest. By the end

of the day they had not only repaired the injury, but also

put in a smooth hatch, which could be opened up into the

galley if the operation required repeating.

"Well, I call that handsome," Catherine said, though

Laurence felt it small amends for the earlier neglect; and

when she added, "we ought to thank him for it," glancing at

him, he said nothing and made no shifts to take her place.

When she did go and ask Riley to dine again, this time

Laurence was careful to absent himself for the meal.

It was an end to any hope of resolution. The rest of the

journey passed in a cold distance between them, barely an

exchange of greetings and only the briefest gesture when

passing on deck or below: made rarer still, as the Navy

officers were quartered to the stern. There could be

nothing comfortable in traveling aboard a ship while at

unconcealed and bitter odds with her captain; the officers

likewise cold, if they were men who had never served with

Laurence himself, or stiff with discomfort otherwise. These

constant chafing indignities of cold treatment from the

ship's complement daily refreshed not only of the pain of

the quarrel but his resentment of Riley's anger.

There was one saving grace; thus isolated from the life of

the ship, and naturally brought into the closest contact

with his fellow captains of the Corps and their habits,

Laurence had sailed this time not merely in theory but in

practice as an aviator: a very different experience, and he

startled himself by preferring it. They had little

practical work to do; by noon the daily slaughter was over,

the dragondeck had been holystoned as best as could be

managed without shifting the dragons too much, the younger

officers examined on their schoolwork, and they were all at

liberty: as much liberty as could be had within the space

of a fully occupied dragondeck, and their half-a-dozen

small cabins below.

"Do you mind if we knock down the bulkhead, Laurence?"

Chenery had said, putting in his head scarcely three days

into the journey, as Laurence was writing letters in his

cabin: a habit he had much neglected on shore of late. "We

want to set up a card-table, but it is too wretchedly

cramped," an odd request, but he gave his assent; it was

pleasant to have the larger space restored, and to write

his letters with the companionable noise of their game and

conversation. It became so settled a practice among them

that the crewmen would have the bulkheads down without

asking, no sooner had they finished dressing; and restored

only for sleeping.

They took their meals almost always thus in common: a

convivial and noisy atmosphere, with Catherine presiding

and all talking across the table heedless of etiquette, the

junior officers squeezed in at the lower half in order of

their promptness in arrival rather than their rank; and

afterwards they gave the loyal toast standing on deck,

followed with coffee and cigars in the company of their

dragons, who were dosed with a posset against coughing, for

what little relief it gave them, in the cooler hours of the

evening. And after supper, he would read to Temeraire,

occasionally from the Latin or the French, with Temeraire

translating for the other dragons.

Laurence assumed Temeraire particularly unusual, among

dragons, for his scholarship; to better suit the rest, he

kept, at first, to their small store of literature, and

only then gave way to those mathematical and scientific

treatises which Temeraire doted upon and he himself found

hard going. Many of these interested the company as little

as Laurence had expected, but he was surprised in reading a

sadly wearing treatise upon geometry to be interrupted by

Messoria, who said sleepily, "Pray skip ahead a little; we

do not need it proven, anyone can tell it is perfectly

correct," referring to great circles. They had no

difficulty at all with the notion that a curved course

rather than a straight was the shortest distance for

sailing, which had confused Laurence himself for a good

week when he had been obliged to learn it for the

lieutenant's examination, in the Navy. The next evening he

was further interrupted in his reading by Nitidus and

Dulcia taking up an argument with Temeraire about Euclid's

postulates, one of which, referring to the principle of

parallel lines, they felt quite unreasonable.

"I am not saying it is correct," Temeraire protested, "but

you must accept it and go on: everything else in the

science is built upon it."

"But what use is it, then!" Nitidus said, getting agitated

enough to flutter his wings and bat his tail against

Maximus's side; Maximus murmured a small reproof without

quite waking. "Everything must be quite wrong if he begins

so."

"It is not that it is wrong," Temeraire said, "only it is

not so plain as the others-"

"It is wrong, it is perfectly wrong," Nitidus cried

decidedly, while Dulcia pointed out more calmly, "Only

consider a moment: if you should begin in Dover, and I a

little south of London, on the same latitude, and we should

then both fly straight northward, we should certainly meet

at the Pole if we did not mistake our course, so what on

earth is the sense of arguing that straight lines will

never meet?"

"Well," Temeraire said, scratching at his forehead, "that

is certainly true, but I promise you the postulate makes

good sense when you consider all the useful calculations

and mathematics which may be arrived at, starting with the

assumption. Why, all of the ship's design, which we are

upon, is at base worked out from it, I imagine," a piece of

intelligence which made nervous Nitidus give the Allegiance