The Savagers Revolution

Chapter 68

Chapter 68

"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 a very doubtful eye.

"But I suppose," Temeraire continued, "that we might try beginning without the assumption, or the contrary one - " and they put their heads together over Temeraire's sand-table, and began to work out their own geometry, discarding those principles which seemed to them incorrect, and made a game of developing the theory; which entertained them a good deal more than most amusements Laurence had ever seen dragons engage in, with those listening applauding particularly inventive notions as if they were performances.

Shortly it became quite an all-encompassing project, engaging the attention of the officers as well as the dragons; the scant handful of aviators with good penmanship Laurence was soon forced to press into service, for the dragons began to expand upon their cherished theory quicker than he alone could take their dictation, partly out of an intellectual curiosity, and partly because they very much liked the physical representation of their work, which they insisted on having separately copied out one for each of them, and treated in much the same way that Temeraire treated his much-beloved jewels.

"I will make you a handsome edition of it, bound up like that nice book which you see Laurence reads from," Laurence found Catherine saying to Lily, shortly, "if only you will eat something more every day: here, a few more bites of this tunny," a bribery which succeeded where almost all else had failed.

"Well, perhaps a little more," Lily said, with a heroic air, adding, "and may it have gold hinges, too, like that one?"

All this society Laurence might have enjoyed, though a little ashamed to find himself preferring what he could not in justice call anything but a very ramshackle way of going on. But for all their courage and good humor, improved by the interest of the sea-voyage, the dragons still coughed their lungs away little by little. What would have otherwise seemed a pleasure-cruise carried on under a ceaseless pall, where each morning the aviators came on the deck and put their crews to work washing away the bloodstained relics of the night's misery, and each night lay in their cabins trying to sleep to the rattling wet accompaniment of the slow, weary hacking above. All their noise and gaiety had a forced and hectic edge, defiance of fear as much as real pleasure: fiddling as Rome burned.

The sentiment was not confined to the aviators, either. Riley might have had other excuses besides the political for preferring not to have Reverend Erasmus aboard, for the ship was already loaded besides him with a large number of passengers, most of them forced upon Riley by influence with the Admiralty, and well-found in the article of luggage. Some number departed at Madeira, to take other ship for the West Indies or Halifax from there, but others were bound for the Cape as settlers, and still others going on to India: an uneasy migration driven, Laurence was forced to suspect, little though he liked to think so ill of perfect strangers, by a dread of invasion.

He had some evidence for his suspicion; the passengers, when he chanced to overhear them speaking as they took the air on the windward side of the quarterdeck, spoke wistfully amongst themselves of the airy chances of peace, and pronounced Bonaparte's name with fear. There was little direct communication, separated as the dragondeck was, nor did the passengers make much effort to become friendly, but on a few occasions, Reverend Erasmus joined Laurence for dinner. Erasmus did not carry tales, of course, but asked, "Captain, is it your opinion that invasion is a settled certainty?" with a curiosity which to Laurence spoke of its being a topic much discussed among the passengers with whom they ordinarily dined.

"I must call it settled that Bonaparte would like to try," Laurence said, "and being a tyrant he may do as he likes with his own army. But if he is so outrageously bold as to make a second attempt where the first failed so thoroughly, I have every confidence he will be pushed off once again," a patriotic exaggeration; but he had no notion of disparaging their chances publicly.

"I am glad to hear you say so," Erasmus said, and added after a moment thoughtfully, "It must be a confirmation of the doctrine of original sin, I think, that all the noble promise of liberty and brotherhood which the revolution in France first brought up to light should have so quickly been drowned by blood and treasure. Man begins in corruption, and cannot achieve grace striving only for victory over the injustices of the world, without striving also for God, and obeying His commandments."

Laurence a little awkwardly offered Erasmus the dish of stewed plums, in lieu of an agreement which should have felt dishonest; he was uneasily aware that he had not heard services for the better part of a year; barring the Sunday services on board, where Mr. Britten, the ship's official chaplain, droned through his sermon with a notable lack of either inspiration or sobriety: and for those, Laurence had often to sit beside Temeraire, to keep him from interrupting.

"Do you suppose, sir," Laurence ventured instead to ask, "that dragons are subject to original sin?" This question had from time to time preyed upon him; he had quite failed to interest Temeraire in the Bible. Scripture rather induced the dragon to pursue such thoroughly blasphemous lines of questioning that Laurence had very soon given it up entirely, from a superstitious feeling that this would only invite greater disaster.

Erasmus considered, and gave it as his opinion that they were not, "For surely the Bible would mention it, if any had eaten of the fruit besides Adam and Eve; and though resembling the serpent in some particulars, the Lord said unto the serpent that upon its belly it should go, whereas dragons are as creatures of the air, and cannot be considered under the same interdiction," he added convincingly, so it was with a heart lightened that Laurence could return to the deck that evening, to once again try and persuade Temeraire to take a little more to eat.

Though Temeraire had not taken sick, he grew limp and faded in sympathy with the other dragons' illness, and, ashamed of his appetite when his companions could not share in it, began to disdain his food. Laurence coaxed and cajoled with little effect, until Gong Su came up to him on deck and in flowery Chinese of which Laurence understood one word in six, but Temeraire certainly followed entire, offered his resignation in shame that his cooking was no longer acceptable. He dwelt at elaborate length upon the stain on his honor and that of his teacher and his family, which he would never be able to repair, and declared his intentions to somehow return home at the nearest opportunity, so that he might remove himself from the scene of failure.

"But it is very good, I promise, only I am not hungry just now," Temeraire protested, which Gong Su refused to credit as anything but a polite excuse, and added, "Good cooking ought to make you hungry, even if you are not!"

"But I am, only - " Temeraire finally admitted, and looked sadly at his sleeping companions, and sighed when Laurence gently said, "My dear, you do them no good by starving yourself, and indeed some harm; you must be at your full strength and healthy when we reach the Cape ."

"Yes, but it feels quite wrong, to be eating and eating when everyone else has stopped and gone to sleep; it feels as though I am sneaking food, behind their backs, which they do not know about," Temeraire said, a perplexing way of viewing the situation, as he had never shown the least compunction about out-eating his companions while they were awake, or jealously guarding his own meals from the attention of other dragons. But after this admission, they gave him his food in smaller portions throughout the day, while the other dragons were wakeful; and Temeraire exhibited no more very extreme reluctance, even though the others still refused any more food themselves.

But he was not happy with their situation, any more than was Laurence; and grew still less so as they traveled southward, Riley's caution keeping them near the shore. They did not put in at Cape Coast, or at Louanda or Benguela; and from a distance these ports looked gaily enough, full of white sails clustering together. But there was reminder enough at hand of their grim commerce, the ocean being full of sharks that came eagerly leaping to the ship's wake, trained like dogs by the common passage of slave-ships to and from those harbors.

"What city is that?" Mrs. Erasmus asked him abruptly. She had come to take the air with her daughters, who were parading themselves decorously back and forth under a shared parasol, for once unattended by their mother.

"Benguela," Laurence said, surprised to be addressed; in nearly two months of sailing she had never spoken to him direct before. She was never forward on any occasion, but rather in the habit of keeping her head bowed and her voice low; her English still heavily accented with Portuguese when she used it at all. He knew from Erasmus that she had gained her manumission only a little while before her marriage; not through the indulgence of her master but by his ill-fortune. That gentleman, a landowner from Brazil, had gone on business to France, passenger on a merchant ship taken in the Atlantic; she and his other slaves had been made free, when the prize had been brought in to Portsmouth.

She was drawn up very tall and straight, both her hands gripping the rail, though she had excellent sea-legs and scarcely needed the support; and she stood a long time looking there, even after the little girls had grown tired of their promenade and abandoned both parasol and decorum to go scrambling over the ropes with Emily and Dyer.

A great many slave-ships went to Brazil from Benguela, Laurence recalled; he did not ask her, but offered her instead his arm to go below again, when at last she turned away, and some refreshment. She refused both, with only a shake of her head, and called her children back to order with a quick low word; they left off their game, abashed, and she took them down below.

Past Benguela there were no more slave ports, at least; both from the hostility of the natives to the trade, and the inhospitable coastline, but the oppressive atmosphere on board was no less. Together Laurence and Temeraire often went aloft to escape, flying in closer to shore than Riley would risk the Allegiance and pacing her from there, so they might watch the African coastline wear away: here impenetrably forested, here spilling yellow rock and yellow sand into the ocean, here the shore crammed with lazy seals; then the long stretch of endless orange desert, bound regularly in thick banks of fog, which made the sailors wary. Almost hourly the officer of the watch called for them to take soundings of the ocean floor, voices muffled and oddly far-away in the mist. Very occasionally a few black men might be glimpsed on shore, observing them in turn with wary attention; but for the most part there was only silence, watchful silence, except for the shrieking of birds.

"Laurence, surely we can reach Capetown from here, quicker than the ship can go," Temeraire said at last, grown weary of the oppressive atmosphere. They were still nearly a month's sailing from that port, however, and the country too dangerous to risk a long overland passage. The interior of the continent was notoriously impenetrable and savage, and had without a trace swallowed whole parties of men; more than one courier-dragon tempted off the coastal route had likewise vanished. But the suggestion appealed, with its prospects of quitting sooner the unhappy conditions of the voyage, and advancing more quickly the crucial research which was their purpose.