Tongues of Serpents - Naomi Novik

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himself well: he had come over from the Beatrice with not only his two chests of personal baggage, but a pile of leather harness, some chain-mail netting, and a sort of heavy leather hood.

      ‘You throw it over the hatchling’s head as it comes out of the shell, if you are out-of-doors,’ Granby said, when Laurence now inquired, ‘and then it cannot fly away; when you take it off, the light dazzles their eyes, and then if you lay some meat in front of them, they are pretty sure to let you put the harness on, if you will only let them eat. And some fellows like it, because they say it makes them easier to handle; if you ask me,’ he added, bitterly, ‘all it makes them is shy: they are never certain of their ground, after.’

      ‘I wonder if you might be able to put me in the way of some cattle merchant,’ Rankin was saying, to Riley and Lord Purbeck. ‘I intend to provide for the hatchling’s first meal from my personal funds.’

      ‘Surely he can be restrained in some way,’ Laurence said, low. He was not yet beyond the heat of righteous anger kindled all those years before, when they had been unwilling witness to the cruelty of Rankin’s treatment of his first dragon. Rankin was the sort of aviator beloved of the Navy Board: in his estimation as in theirs, dragons were merely a resource and a dangerous one, to be managed and restrained and used to their limits; it was the same philosophy which had rendered it not only tolerable but desirable to contemplate destroying ten thousand of them through the underhanded sneaking method of infection.

      Where Rankin might have been kind to Levitas, he had been indifferent; where indifferent, deliberately cruel, all in the name of keeping his poor beast so downtrodden as to have no spirit to object to any demands made upon it. When Levitas had with desperate courage brought them back the warning of Napoleon’s first attempt to cross the Channel, in the year five, and been mortally wounded in that effort, Rankin had left his dragon alone and slowly dying in a small and miserable clearing, while he sought comfort for his own lesser injuries.

      It was a mode of service which had gone thoroughly out of fashion in the last century among most aviators, who increasingly preferred to better preserve the spirit of their partners; the Government did not always agree, however, and Rankin was of an ancient dragon-keeping family, who had preserved their own habits and methods and passed these along to the scions sent into the Corps, at an age sufficiently delayed for these to be impressed upon them firmly, along with a conviction of their own superiority to the general run of aviators.

      ‘He cannot be permitted to ruin the creature,’ Laurence said. ‘We might at least bar him from use of the hood—’

      ‘Interfere with a hatching?’ Granby cried, looking at Laurence sidelong and dismayed. ‘No: he has a right to make the best go of it he can, however he likes. Though if he can’t manage it in fifteen minutes, someone else can have a try,’ he added, an attempt at consolation, ‘and you may be sure fifteen minutes is all the time he will have; that is all I can do.’

      ‘That is not all that I can do,’ Temeraire said, mantling, ‘and I am not going to sit about letting him throw nets and chains and hoods on the hatchling: I do not care if it is not in the shell anymore. In my opinion, it is still quite near being an egg.’

      He realized this was an irregular way of looking at the matter, but after all, if the hatchling had not yet eaten anything, and if perhaps a bit of egg were still stuck to its hide, one could not be sure that it was ready to manage on its own, and so it was still one’s responsibility. ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘I do not like him at all, and I don’t see that he has any right to be a captain again; just let him try and come here, and I will knock him down for it.’

      ‘You are not doing anything which Granby would not like!’ Iskierka said, jetting out a bit of steam.

      ‘As though you had anything to say to it,’ Temeraire said, coolly. ‘Anyway, you do things which Granby does not like every day.’

      ‘Only,’ Iskierka said, ‘when it is particularly important,’ a monstrous lie, ‘and anyway, that is quite different. You might think of Granby, since you are always on about how I do not take proper care of him: I am not having him made not a captain, like you have done with Laurence, only because you are being absurd again and worrying about hatched dragons,’ she added, which thrust hit home quite successfully; Temeraire flinched involuntarily, and put back his ruff.

      ‘Why,’ Iskierka continued, ‘I have seen this Rankin person: he is smaller than a pony, even. I could have burnt him up to a cinder as soon as I cracked the shell.’

      ‘If he wanted you,’ Temeraire said, ‘he might have you, and welcome,’ but this was only a feeble bit of quarrelling, and not really a just argument; he put his head down and stared at the eggs unhappily.

      ‘And,’ he said to Laurence, a little later, ‘if the egg does not take him, I suppose he will want to try the second, and then the third; I am sure he will not just go, when he has come all this way where no-one wants him, only to be difficult.’

      ‘Only to have another dragon; but so far as that goes, I am afraid you may be right,’ Laurence said, low. ‘But there is not much we can do about it, my dear, if we do not care to put Granby in a very awkward position; and make our own the worse. The eggs are not formally in our care at all, but his.’

      ‘But Arkady charged me with his,’ Temeraire said, ‘and I gave my word; surely that makes me interested.’

      Laurence paused and agreed sombrely, ‘That does put another complexion on the matter,’ but it did not offer any other solution, except squashing Rankin, which would have been quite unfair, as a matter of relative size, and which Laurence insisted was not to be contemplated, despite Admiral Roland’s letter.

      Laurence did not dissuade Temeraire with much enthusiasm; he would not have greatly minded Rankin’s being squashed under other circumstances, and the present situation would have rendered the event not only painless but highly desirable. His sentiments in the matter were only the more exacerbated the following morning, when Riley called upon them: Laurence had preferred to pass another irregular night up on the promontory in his small tent, still more comfortable a berth than remaining aboard ship, when he now must be careful only to visit the quarterdeck, and not go forward.

      For Rankin was of course perfectly correct in the point of etiquette, and they were both barred from the field of honour, which was the only other suitable redress Rankin could have demanded for Laurence’s actions, in their last meeting. Laurence could not be sorry in the least for having handled Rankin so violently, but neither could he force himself into Rankin’s presence, nor pursue the quarrel to which Rankin could not make answer, and retain any pretensions to the character of a gentleman.

      ‘And I cannot blame you for it, either,’ Riley said, ‘but it left me in an awkward position. I had to have him to dinner, and Bligh, too, or look rather shabby; and I am wretchedly sorry, Laurence: is this egg likely to be something out of the common way? Because what must the cawker do but ten minutes after we are at table declare Bligh has been monstrous used by a pack of mutinous dogs, and it ought not be borne.’

      ‘Oh, damn him,’ Laurence said, unguarded in savage exasperation. ‘No, Tom, so far as the egg goes; not if you mean of an order to pick a quarrel with Temeraire; but that has nothing to do with the case. We cannot set upon a British dragon, if it is as small as a Winchester. Are we to have a pitched battle in the harbour? I cannot conceive what he is thinking.’

      ‘Oh, I will tell you that,’ Riley said. ‘He is thinking he means to have the beast, will-you, nill-you. I beg you to imagine how our passenger took it: Bligh at once informed me he considers it my duty to ensure the Admiralty’s orders as regards the egg are carried out; and that he will be sure to write their Lordships to express his opinion, and convey that he has made me so aware.’

      And the very last thing desirable to Riley at the present date was any suggestion of disobedience or recalcitrance, and all the more so if there were any sign it should be provoked by Laurence or even amenable to him. Their connection had already injured Riley’s credit with their Lordships to a severe extent, and he served now, as did all

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