Blood of Tyrants

Page 3

Chapter 3
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.
“And,” Temeraire added, “this after we blacked his eye for him quite thoroughly, to boot; it seems to me you might have a little confidence in us.”
They were waiting now only for high tide to finish coming in: the great tree-trunks had been with enormous effort wedged slowly and painfully between the ship and the reef; the anchor-cables were woven in and around Messoria’s harness and Immortalis’s. Maximus would take one lever, Kulingile the other, and Temeraire the middle. Iskierka would lie about on the rocks doing nothing but criticizing—Temeraire snorted—and Lily would look on, and perhaps strike the shoals with acid, as they tried to get the ship off them, if that should seem useful.
“And if he does show himself, while you are working,” Iskierka put in, yawning, “I am perfectly able to breathe flame, even if I do not mean to be exerting myself a great deal presently. He will certainly think better of attacking us, then.”
“Dear God,” Captain Blaise said, and seized Granby by the arm to object violently to any such proceeding: the sailors were really unreasonable on the subject of fire, Temeraire felt; it was not as though Iskierka had proposed setting the sails alight.
He withdrew along the line of the shoals to wait alone until the tide should rise, and simmered quietly beneath the steady cold wash of the waves. He would not go on to Nagasaki. He did not know where precisely Nagasaki was, but it was not near-by; he did not mean to abandon the search for Laurence an instant longer than the ship’s rescue required. The egg would be quite safe, once they were afloat again.
The emptiness of the coast he had flown over with Ferris lingered in the back of his mind like an unpleasant aftertaste. It had been three days and nights since Laurence had been swept away—already any visible signs upon the shore might have been lost. Laurence would have gone inland for water, perhaps; or perhaps he had even been lying under some tree for shelter, or calling up to Temeraire from a distance, unheard. Temeraire still had not the least doubt of Laurence’s survival, but that alone would be of little use if he could not find Laurence.
“Temeraire!” Dulcia landed on his back and knocked him on the shoulder with her head. “We have been calling and calling: it is time to get the ship off the rocks.”
“Oh!” Temeraire said, rousing, and found himself very cold and stiff indeed coming out of the great dark circling of his thoughts; the water was almost halfway up his hindquarters, and the short harness about his shoulders was sodden and heavy and dragging as he went into the air, a reminder of his empty back.
Messoria and Immortalis launched themselves with the cables; Dulcia and Nitidus each took another cable, for what help they could give, and Captain Blaise gave the word to throw the sea-anchor over the side beyond them, to help if it might. The tree-tops had been wedged in carefully under the hull, and their long trunks were jutting up from the ocean, froth churning up around them.
“Are you quite ready?” Temeraire asked Maximus and Kulingile.
“I still say there is something strange about this,” Demane said, from the dragondeck, gripping the railing hard; he had been reluctant to see Kulingile lent to the attempt at all. “Kulingile, you are sure you will do this? I don’t see how it can work—”
“I’ve told you!” his brother Sipho hissed at him.
Temeraire flattened his ruff: he understood a little Demane’s anxiety—there was every reason to believe the Admiralty would be delighted to push him and his brother off if Kulingile were lost: he had still not been confirmed in his rank, and Laurence had been his only patron. But it seemed to Temeraire that this was all the more reason to help him find Laurence and bring him back.
“Oh, I don’t mind trying,” Kulingile said easily, however. “If it don’t work, we will only sit on those logs for a while, and nothing much will happen.”
Temeraire drew breath to explain, yet again, why it would work, after all; then he forced himself not to argue. “If you are quite ready,” he said, and together they flung themselves down upon the levers, and as one exhaled as deeply as they could, from all their air-sacs.
Temeraire had worked it all out on paper, or rather, Sipho had worked it out to his direction, with help from a still-doubtful Ness; but paper made nothing to the experience of plunging deep into the icy cold water, feeling his body pulling at him as though an anchor. He had to scrabble desperately to keep himself upon the lever; his own weight would have dragged him instantly deep beneath the surface of the water.
“Hold on, there, you damned lummox!” Berkley was bellowing, over the railing. “Breathe in again!” Maximus was struggling beside him, and Kulingile was sinking so deep the water was nearly to his fore shoulders.
“Oh, but it is working!” Lily cried, on the far side of the ship, and then with alarm, “Look out—” as the ship came up and off the rocks with almost startling ease, and began to slide down the levers towards them.
Laurence had made one of the party which had taken the Tonnant, at the Nile, after the Longwing formation above had made its pass. He remembered the great pitted smoking holes, which had gone through the decks, and the screams of the wretched seaman who had incautiously put his bare foot upon one small spatter, not the size of a shilling. One of his mess-mates had chopped his foot off at once, there upon the deck, and so saved the fellow’s life; although the wound had mortified and killed him three days later.
He recognized, therefore, the characteristic spattering of the Longwing acid upon the tree-stumps which they showed him, and the earth surrounding them, and although the stolen trees had provoked such hostility in his captors, Laurence could not help but rejoice that at last he could begin to understand; he could make sense of the intelligence these signs offered him. There was a Longwing near-by, and it had come and taken away three prime pieces of timber.
“Taken for masts, most likely,” Laurence said, drawing a picture of a sailing ship in the wet sand to translate the word for them. Three masts on such a scale: a dragon transport for sure, which in any event should have been required to carry a Longwing and its usual formation; and that, surely, explained Laurence’s own presence. The Reliant must have been traveling in company with the larger ship, to serve her as a more agile defender: no-one could call transports easy to handle, for all the massive weight of iron they could bring to bear.
The coat—the green coat—must have come off some aviator’s back. Perhaps it had been thrown up on the shore beside him by the same storm that had wrecked the ship’s masts, and in the first early moments of cold and delirium Laurence had put it on. He wondered now if the sword, too, had come from another man’s hand; but he put that doubt aside. If it had, he could more easily restore it himself than could the Japanese—if he were permitted to go home.
And home was now a real possibility. There was a British ship here, in these very waters. She was not sunk; she was injured, but afloat, and her crew hoped to repair her. The Allegiance? Laurence wondered. Or perhaps the Dominion; although that ship was ordinarily on the run to Halifax. He still did not know what they had been doing with a transport so near Japan, but those questions were as nothing to the sheer inexpressible relief of knowing himself not, as he had begun to feel, wholly adrift, unmoored from any connection to his own life.
Laurence looked up from the sand, and addressed Matsudaira again. “Sir, I will say on behalf of my country-men that I am sure they intended no offense. They came ashore meaning only to take some necessary material for their ship’s repair, from what they must have supposed to be a stand of unused timber.”
“And where is this ship, now?” Matsudaira said.
His expression betrayed nothing but the same mild interest he had displayed throughout all the conversation, but the question came very quick. Laurence paused. He had just been thinking he might ask for a map of the coastline, or for a local fisherman to question. A transport had a draught near fifty feet: she could not anchor in shallow waters, and would not risk coming very near the coast. Some haphazard anchorage sheltered from the worst of the ocean by shoals was the most likely; near in straight line flight from this bay. He thought he might be able to guess a likely place, and even direct a boat thence, given some sense of the nearby waters.
He looked at the great serpentine creature looming overhead: the gleam of intelligence in its eye was plain, despite its monstrous size, and it was following their conversation with a keen, cold interest. It had come up from the bay with no warning—evidently it could breathe underwater. Laurence could easily imagine what such a sea-dragon could do to a ship, even one the size of a transport. Come up from below, throw her on her beam-ends, heave a loop of its body over the stern and drag her down—he could envision no easy defense. Perhaps the Longwing might be able to strike the beast, but in time to save the ship?
Its eye was fixed upon him, badly bloodshot. Was that merely some accident, or something else? Laurence glanced around the clearing. The ground was trampled into mud, as though after heavy rains; and when he looked he saw more damage to the trees around, smaller saplings crushed, branches fallen. There had been more than a mere dispute here—there had been fighting.
Laurence rose slowly to his feet. “I cannot hazard a guess,” he said grimly, and watched Matsudaira’s expression harden.
Temeraire was very cold. He did not know anything else, at first, and then his head was out in the air, and Iskierka was hissing at him ferociously, her talons sharp and clawing into his shoulders, saying, “Quick, quick, breathe in!”
The water held him like a vise, dragging. Temeraire tried to breathe and could not: his chest clenched and he vomited instead, gouts of water erupting painfully, dribbling away down his neck in long streams. Then at last Temeraire could draw in a thin, struggling stream of air. Lily was swimming beside him, trying to get her head under his foreleg. He clung to her, and scrabbled with his other foreleg at the great side of the ship, rising up before him; he managed to catch at a porthole, but the ship listed towards him alarmingly, and cries of warning came down.
“Oh! Why will you not listen to me?” Iskierka was saying impatiently. “You must get more air in, I cannot lift you if you will be so heavy!” She lowered her head and butted him.
“But I am trying,” Temeraire said, only he could not speak for coughing; every breath was a battle. His sides were filling a little more, but the blood was running down his shoulders and he felt so very heavy. His head was ringing in a very peculiar way, and everything seemed colored with a faint greenish light.
Kulingile came up in the water beside him, bulling in under Temeraire’s foreleg, so Temeraire could lean upon him and get out of the water a little more, though Kulingile grunted with the effort. “Get under his hindquarters, if you can,” Berkley was calling down.
“Come on, Temeraire, scramble up, there’s a good chap,” Maximus said. Temeraire did not quite see his way clear to doing as much. He coughed again, and let his head sink against Kulingile’s back; he was sliding back into the water, but he could not mind that so much. It did not feel so cold anymore, after all—
“Temeraire!” Roland said, leaning over the side, “if you drown, we shall all sail away and leave Laurence behind! You know no-one else thinks he is alive. You must get up, or else Hammond will make us all go.”
Temeraire struggled his head up to protest: he was not going to drown, at all; he could swim excellently well. And as for leaving Laurence behind—
“You will, too, drown, and then we shall leave him, see if we don’t!” Iskierka said, and bit him sharply. “Get out of the water. What else do you suppose you are doing?”
He tried to hiss at her, but he had to get another breath in to do it, and when he had that one, he got another. By slow measures, she and the others managed to help him heave up onto the line of the shoals, though the rocks crumbled as he clawed at them, and the waves tried to drag him back down. He crouched huddled on the rocks at last and breathed again in slow delicious sips of sea-air, splendid even though his throat ached badly, getting them in. His wings rattled against his back with cold.
“Well done, my dear one; let him have a rest,” he heard Granby saying, faintly, to Iskierka. “We’ll get him aboard as soon as he has filled his air out again.” The Potentate was moving: Temeraire could see it out of one eye, a few sails rigged out on the mizzen, maneuvering away from the rocks. She was listing a little to one side, but not badly. He closed his eyes.
“Idiocy,” he heard Gaiters saying, some indeterminate time after. The sun was beating on his back, now, but it did not seem to warm him. “Emptying your air—what made the lot of you take such a notion into your heads? I should have liked to come back to England with three heavy-weights having drowned themselves not fifty miles from shore; I suppose they would have hanged me and every other surgeon of the party for incompetence. Well, make yourselves of use, now: get him onto the deck at once. We must pack his sides with hot rocks, and fire up the galleys below. D’you think because he’s a dragon he can’t die of pleurisy?”
“I don’t see why you fellows must always be complaining about something new,” Maximus said. “We did get the ship back into the water, didn’t we? And of course Temeraire will not die of a trifling little cold. But you ain’t comfortable where you are,” he added in Temeraire’s ear, “so do let us get you aboard.” His big blunt head came nosing at Temeraire’s shoulder.
Temeraire would have preferred not to move very much, at present; his whole body seemed to ache from tail-tip to nose, and his side and his right foreleg felt especially tender and bruised. He did not quite recall what had happened: the ship had come sliding, and he had not been able to get out of the way—diving was quite impossible, and the rocks were too far away to grab a hold of, for he had been on the lever amidships. But nothing after that, except the water, and the cold, and the green glaze that still seemed to hang faintly over all the world.
“Come on, then,” Iskierka said crossly, above. “I do not see why you must be making such a fuss at a time like this.” She nipped at his hindquarters.
“I am not making a fuss,” Temeraire wanted to say, but his throat ached so. He let them prod him up onto his haunches, and then Maximus and Kulingile put their shoulders beneath his forelegs.
“Just hop aloft, when you are ready,” Maximus said, “and we will go with you, to take some of the weight off: we will see you over to the deck in a trice, see if we do not.”
Temeraire did not feel ready, but Iskierka would keep complaining at him, and nipping, and making cutting remarks; and finally he gathered himself and jumped as best he could. “Oh!” he cried, “Oh,” for he had not been ready, in the least; the pain flaring along his side was like being burnt with a hot poker, to sear a wound after cleaning, but it ran the whole length of his body. His wings snapped tight, and if Kulingile and Maximus had not been beneath him, he should have fallen into the ocean again.
“Ouhff,” Kulingile said with a grunt, and wobbled beneath him as they flew. “No, I am all right,” he said; Temeraire heard it only distantly: everything had gone greenish and hazy again, and he felt very queer and ill indeed. He clung on blindly only, until they sank all three of them to the deck together and Maximus and Kulingile eased him gently down.
The planks were warm beneath him; the ship rocked with the familiar ocean swell. Temeraire put his head slowly beneath his wing, and shut his eyes, and knew no more.
“Enough!” Matsudaira struck the table before him with the flat of his hand.
They had taken Laurence back to Kaneko’s house, and resumed his questioning in the open room off the courtyard, with Lady Arikawa listening in as she devoured the contents of an entire cauldron which had been brought to her smoking-hot and filled with rice, great bowls of beaten egg and fresh fish flung in to cook against the heated sides. The smell was fantastically appealing, enough to make Laurence a little light-headed; the servants had provided a similar meal, on a smaller scale, to Kaneko and Matsudaira, but he had been given nothing.
There had been no chance yet of escape or evasion, but Laurence told himself that at least now he had his bearings, a little. They were on the western coast of Japan—a pity, that; with Nagasaki on the west—and some seven miles as the crow flew from the nearest shore. Laurence worked the map in his mind while they questioned him; it was a refuge from the awareness that they were not likely to give him much future opportunity to put it to use, with a dragon at the door and increased suspicion.
“You persist in telling evident falsehoods,” Matsudaira said. “I will be plain with you: Lord Jinai has told us of the true size of your force. He was attacked by eight dragons of war-like style and of great size. These did not come from England on a boat, and neither did a Celestial. Such a dragon has not been seen across the sea for five centuries, since the servants of the Yuan emperor stole the last egg of the Divine Wind line from Hakozaki Shrine as he withdrew in ignominy from his attempt at conquest, his murderous beasts having slain the rest of that noble line.”
The foreign names slid over Laurence’s mind without purchase, unfamiliar. “A dragon transport is certainly equal to the task of bearing eight beasts; they are designed for twelve,” he said. “As for the particular breed, I am no authority on dragons, and can offer you no explanation but to think your identification mistaken. Dragon-husbandry was not undertaken in my nation before the Norman Conquest, scarce eight hundred years ago; we certainly were not responsible for that theft.”
He spoke dryly; he was beginning to think it not much beyond them to accuse him of such. The magistrate abruptly snapped shut his fan and pointed it at him. “Speak the truth! You are in league with the Chinese!”
Laurence opened his mouth to answer with heated denial, and then halted. The very tongue in his mouth seemed to give him the lie. He could speak Chinese—why? And Japan was not so far off the course for Guangzhou. Perhaps he had come here in league with the Chinese. It was not inconceivable that Britain should have sought an alliance with the mandarins—they were a byword for dragon-breeders, of course; Laurence was sure the Admiralty should have been delighted to purchase some of their beasts as breeding stock.
“Ha,” Matsudaira said, in answer to Laurence’s silence. “Now, Kaneko-san, let us see this Chinese sword, which you have described to me.”
Laurence ruefully watched Junichiro leave the room at Kaneko’s nod, knowing he would soon return with fresh provocation for his interrogators. “Sir,” he said, “perhaps my information is out of date, but so far as I know, you are not at war with China?” Matsudaira looked at him coldly and said nothing, which Laurence took, perhaps with excessive optimism, for confirmation. “Then any friendship between my nation and China can be no concern of yours, if no offense is given you by either.”
“No offense!” Matsudaira said. “Indeed, your brazenness knows no bounds. Permit me to inform you, if you imagine us to be so easily deceived, that I have the honor to be related to the governor at Nagasaki, where three years ago your vessel Phaeton by deceit took hostages and issued threats against the ships of the harbor, and fired upon the city.”
That, Laurence could not conceal, was a blow; he had heard of no such action. The Phaeton—he could only vaguely recall the ship to mind. A frigate? Yes, Minerva-class, and he thought Captain Wood had her, but—
Matsudaira added coldly, watching his face, “That vessel’s dishonorable captain and all his crew repaid their crimes with their lives.” Laurence could not but envision with horror a ruin that might well have been achieved by that monstrous sea-dragon, or another such beast: like a kraken rising from beneath the waves, all unsuspected, to drag the ship down and down, shattered, and spilling the men into the waves to be devoured at its leisure, or by the ocean itself.
He shuddered for it, and for their fate; and more that he knew nothing of it. Three years ago? Could he have lost such a span of memory, and not be wholly mad? Certainly no such event could have escaped his notice—even if the events had gone unreported, he must have heard of the loss of the Phaeton.
“I cannot account for such an assault, sir, save by some grave misunderstanding, or if intended as an action against Dutch shipping in your harbor,” he said, troubled. “They are French allies—”
“More excuses,” Matsudaira said, cutting him off with a slash of the hand, and then Junichiro returned in haste, nearly running, to report the sword missing and launch a new uproar, which Laurence almost welcomed as distraction from the questions he was unable to answer even to himself.
“If I have taken it,” Laurence said, when they demanded its hiding place, “in doing so I have only been taking my own again, and I do not consider I owe you either apology or explanation in such circumstances. Nor could you rationally expect me to hand it back; yet if I should deny having it, you would call it a lie. I must beg to be excused: I have nothing to say upon the subject.”
He had already decided to say as much, if he were questioned. He thought only a thorough and systematic search of the grounds would uncover his bundle: the ground outside had been trampled by too many feet, since his abortive escape the previous night, to show any trace of his actions.
Matsudaira was by no means conciliated by this reply. “We will see what you have to say when you have been more rigorously questioned,” he said angrily. “I will send for a torturer at once—”
Laurence did not flinch, but regarded him with the flat disdain that any such threat merited. “You may question me as you wish,” he said. “I have not lied; and I hope I can answer you and die like an Englishman.”
To his surprise, however, Lady Arikawa raised her head and rumbled, low, making an objection. “I do not think that necessary yet,” she said, a thin translucent ruff around her neck frilling out.
Matsudaira sat up a little further, with rigid shoulders, and said grimly, “I must with the utmost respect disagree, Lady Arikawa.”
Laurence could not argue with the man’s courage, at least, to so incite a dragon to anger; Lady Arikawa might easily have seized and broken him like a toy without even rising to her feet, and by the swift slitting of her eyes seemed tempted to do so.
“You are charged to carry out a full investigation,” Lady Arikawa said. “We have yet no word from Nagasaki regarding any English vessel in the harbor, nor have the Kirin returned from their survey of the coastal waters, near-by. Surely we can wait for this intelligence to reach us before proceeding.”
“The foreigner is certainly condemned by the law, regardless,” Matsudaira said, after a moment. The grey dragon’s wings flared from her back, unsettled, and folded again; the clawed tips shifted back and forth, restlessly.
Sitting beside Matsudaira and sipping tea, Kaneko had shown no expression but level calm all the while; now he said quietly, “My lady, I most deeply regret my error, and—”
“That is enough,” she said, interrupting crisply. “What error can there be in the will of the heavens? Certainly it is only a great service to the bakufu that this barbarian is available to be questioned about these matters; it may be that much benefit to the nation may derive from his rescue. It would be a great impiety upon our part to disregard the means by which the gods have delivered him into our hands, through this vow which caused your eyes to light upon him where he lay in the road. If they did not intend him to be well-treated, they would not have arranged matters so. I cannot agree to a course which despises so clear a sign from the spirit world.”
She delivered these arguments with an air almost of triumph. Laurence thought he detected in them rather more sophistry than true religious fervor. He remained unable to follow all the undercurrents, but he gathered at the least that she wished to spare her vassal Kaneko whatever embarrassment he might suffer at being forced to renege on his vow of assistance. Laurence could only suppose that embarrassment to have consequences more extreme than he imagined.
Matsudaira did not seem persuaded, but at least her vehemence gave him pause; he said more cautiously, trying to answer her in the same lines, “And yet as a magistrate, I must pursue my duty to the law by every means: the gods would not have delivered him in ignorance of so commonplace a fact.”
“The gods would certainly not have expected you to disregard their wishes,” Lady Arikawa returned, with scorn. “Which indeed, they may have meant as a warning. Consider: it is well-known that men of other races are weak. The torture which brings truth from a Japanese may perhaps even slay a Western barbarian, and deprive us of further information.”
Laurence derived some black humor from the burst of indignation he instinctively felt at the nonsense of being any less fitted to endure pain: a fine and absurd thing it would be, to make a case for his own torture. However, the argument was ill-chosen on Lady Arikawa’s part; Matsudaira and Kaneko could not forbear a doubtful glance in his direction. Laurence was a head taller than any other man in the room, and he could have given any of them thirty pounds or more.
Of course, from Lady Arikawa’s perspective—near enough to twelve tons, Laurence would have guessed—the distinction was all muchwhatlike. In any event, Laurence closed his mouth on any retort he might have made, and stood wooden beneath their gaze; the weaker and more helpless they chose to think him the better, if they should set a commensurate guard upon him.
“It perhaps would be wise to employ a truly skilled practitioner,” Matsudaira said, after a moment, in a conciliatory manner. “I will send to Edo for a specialist in questioning the sick and the elderly. That will necessitate a certain delay, of course. Perhaps in the intervening time, further intelligence will render the questioning unnecessary, or the foreigner may think better of his lies and confess freely.”
Lady Arikawa inclined her head. “It will be convenient for you to keep charge of him here at Kaneko’s house, in the meantime,” she said—a rather strong hinting, there, and Matsudaira did not attempt to argue with her, but bowed his head in agreement.
Two guards were called in: Matsudaira’s men, Laurence thought; they wore signs of authority matching his own. They escorted him, but only back to his original chamber; and there was a tray of food set on a low table in the middle of the floor. Laurence did not hesitate to devour it, and then lay himself down on the straw mat to consider and to rest.
He roused from a half-sleep a little while later; there were voices, coming faint but audible through the walls, and speaking Chinese: Lady Arikawa, and Kaneko with her. “There can be no more honorable fate than to die in the service of Japan, even for a barbarian,” she was saying, in an anxious tone, low: Laurence could only surmise she preferred not to be overheard by the servants of the house. “Surely in delivering him to such an end, you will have assisted him?”
Kaneko did not immediately answer her, but then said, gently, “Most honorable lady, I regret to disappoint you. I vowed that whomever I found upon the road requiring assistance, whether a beggar or a digger of graves, I would serve him as I would my own grandfather, with honor. To see him dispatched as a low criminal—” He trailed off, and said no more.
“Oh!” Lady Arikawa said eagerly, “but that need not be so! I will speak with the magistrate. Why should he not be permitted seppuku instead? And then indeed you will have served him.”
Laurence heard no more of the conversation: the heavy crunching tread of the dragon faded, as though they had wandered away through the gardens. The guards were sitting together at the far end of the chamber speaking in low voices over cards: some sort of game of chance. They were armed with short but serviceable blades, and wore a kind of light, handsome armor, crafted of small plates of wood which overlapped one another neatly.
They rose to attention when Kaneko ducked into the chamber, a short while later, and bowing deeply left the room when he dismissed them. Laurence had been engaged in exercising his right arm, which was yet bruised all along its length with markings as of chain links pressed hard against the flesh. He had the movement of it back, however, and he thought he had worked it limber. Laurence did not rise; he had already managed to crack his head on the ceiling several times, and if the King did not require his officers to rise for the loyal salute on board ship, in similar conditions, Laurence was damned if he would do it for his jailor, here.
Kaneko settled himself on the ground with easy grace and regarded Laurence somberly. “I have come to speak plainly with you, Englishman,” he said.
“That, sir, cannot be anything but welcome,” Laurence said, without much enthusiasm; he had heard enough of the conversation in the garden to guess at Kaneko’s intentions: the man was looking for some means of eeling out of his vow, Laurence supposed, and meant to offer him some mean and cowardly alternative to death—imprisonment for life, perhaps, or a kind of indentured servitude.
Kaneko said, “Even if the bakufu had not decreed the death of all foreigners entering the nation without permission, the circumstances of your arrival would be dark. The shameful offense of your country-men in Nagasaki suggests a false character, and a league between your nation and China has been suspected for several years, now. Your ships have been reported in the northern waters near Peking, where no Westerners formerly were welcome—”
The existence of this traffic came as news to Laurence; so far as he knew, only the port of Guangzhou was open at all. “—and now, this appearance of a Celestial, in conjunction with yourself, and this British dragon you have mentioned,” Kaneko continued, “more than confirms our most extreme suspicions: the Celestials travel only with the Imperial family.”
Laurence could not disagree that such commerce indicated a more intimate connection formed between Britain and China than he recalled; this, however, pressed the bounds of credence. “I should be astonished beyond belief to learn that a member of the Imperial family of China were traveling with my ship. I must continue to believe it more likely that your witness, faced with unfamiliar beasts, mistook some rare British breed for the one you name.”
“There is no mistake,” Kaneko said. “Lord Jinai is the guardian of the West: he is four hundred years old, and he has seen Celestials before. He was not mistaken.”
He spoke flatly, and Laurence did not propose that advanced years might render Lord Jinai’s judgment questionable: he remembered too vividly the sharp, deadly look of the sea-dragon’s eyes; no signs of creeping age there.
Kaneko added, “And your party have not only stolen timber from our shores, but attacked him: so pronounced an insult cannot be anything but deliberate.” He paused, and after a moment said, “You seem a rational man, and though your conduct is not correct, I imagine you are an honorable man, in your own country. Will you offer no explanation?”
Laurence would have liked to pace. He would have given a great deal to be on his quarterdeck, with the sails belled out overhead and wind in his hair, even just long enough to think his way through all the tangled evidence. Failing that, he would have been glad of a pot of strong coffee and a day of quiet—a chance perhaps to write out a letter to Edith Galman; he had often found the exercise to resolve his own thinking, when he had no trusted confidant to hand, as a sea-captain rarely might. Edith—he had a start for a moment; he had not thought of her. He looked at his hand, as yet without a ring.
He pushed that from his mind. He could not allow himself to dwell on such matters now. “I may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb,” he said aloud, in English, to himself, and steeling himself for incredulity, gave Kaneko to understand his loss of memory, in as succinct and unadorned a manner as he could.
Kaneko listened to his brief narrative with mingled bewilderment and suspicion; he asked a few questions only, in tones of extreme politeness, which Laurence ruefully feared covered equally extreme skepticism. “You do not recall why you are here,” Kaneko said at last, “nor anything of an alliance between your nation and China.”
“Whatever injury I have taken has robbed me of more than that,” Laurence said. “I have lost years—how many, I cannot be sure, but certainly two or three. I do not suppose, sir, you can tell me what year it is, in the European reckoning?”
“By the latest report of the Dutch, they make the year 1812, if my recollection is not imperfect,” Kaneko said, and Laurence stared at him, taken aback in real horror: eight years gone?
He looked away at once, but his distress, which he could not easily master, had at least some small beneficial effect: Kaneko was frowning at him, puzzled but a little more convinced, when Laurence managed to overcome his immediate feelings.
“If I may further trespass,” Laurence said, “can you tell me anything of the war? Has Napoleon been defeated?”
Laurence tried as best he could to keep his spirits from sinking entirely, as Kaneko sketched for him the Japanese understanding of circumstances in Europe. Their news was certainly old, and as it came entirely from the Dutch also certainly colored by that nation’s self-interest; it had been translated at least twice, and surely much was lost, in the way of nuance.
So he told himself, and Britain at least was free. Laurence clung to that, for what consolation it might be while hearing of Austria fallen, Prussia—Prussia!—fallen, Spain fallen, Russia half-allied with France—the shadow of the tricolor over all of them. Kaneko did not seem to know what had happened in the Netherlands, but Laurence could hardly imagine they had escaped, no matter what the Dutch representatives here might have said. Napoleon was the master of all Europe.
“I can well believe, sir, that you find my explanation difficult to swallow,” Laurence said, when he could speak again, “for I can scarcely believe it myself; I have withheld it so far for that very reason, having no desire to figure either as an honest lunatic or a witless liar. But I have told you the truth, and you have served me a very heavy blow; I beg your pardon, but you could scarcely have given me worse news.”
His voice failed him, broke, and he did not speak again. Kaneko also said nothing, so they sat together in silence, caught in their own private and separate distress, though by chance entwined. The sun was lowering. A branch outside cast a dappled silhouette upon the rice-paper wall, which lengthened little by little as it traveled over the wall. Soft footsteps moved through the hall outside now and again, the shush-shush of sandaled feet; the guards in their creaking armor shifted their weight on the other side of the panel.
At last Kaneko said, “Perhaps I am being foolish, and yet I do believe you. However, I cannot expect the magistrate to do so: indeed, it could scarcely be in keeping with his duty to do so. Nor would this explanation excuse you. A man who, out of his senses, commits a crime, is still guilty: and lacking memory of your own intentions, you cannot even defend them.”
“Sir, you have taken it by the horns,” Laurence said grimly. “And no, I do not expect him to believe my explanation in the least.”
Kaneko nodded, and then said, quietly, “It may be I can do nothing. The magistrate may insist upon putting you to questioning. But—Lady Arikawa is generous, and her voice is not the least in the councils of the bakufu. She has offered to speak on your behalf, and to request for you the right to commit seppuku, if you should desire it—honorable suicide,” he added, seeing Laurence’s incomprehension. “I would stand for you as your second, if—”
“Good God, no,” Laurence said, recoiling, and cut him off. “I will not pretend I have the least desire to be a martyr, sir, but I am a Christian: I will do my best to endure whatever torment God sees fit to try me by, and not turn to self-slaughter like—”
He paused; he had meant to say, like a heathen, but the remark seemed impolite, in addressing one who by his own expression found Laurence’s own avowed preference as nearly unthinkable. Laurence abruptly wondered, then, if this same fate lay before Kaneko himself—
“If I cannot fulfill my vow,” Kaneko answered, regarding him with somber surprise, “I hope that Lady Arikawa will be generous enough to grant me permission: I am her servant, and she may deny me the right.”
“And if she refuses?”
Kaneko looked bleak. “I will be dishonored, and my family as well.”
Laurence wished to press him further, to understand more, but refrained; a man’s honor could only be in his own keeping, and Laurence could understand, a little. He himself would gladly have accepted death as the price of escaping some dishonorable act, certainly before treason; and he would have preferred death to shameful torment, which would seek to break him. But to endure death was not the same as to seek it by his own hand.
“Sir,” he said, “I know of no reason why you should consider yourself so. You have been of material assistance to me: without your aid, I should likely have died upon the road, sick and alone, without even what understanding has returned to me. I beg you not to commit such an act on my account. Indeed, if you wished to serve me, you would do better to grant me the satisfaction of knowing you stayed your hand, from what my own faith considers mortal sin.”
“My vow was not to you,” Kaneko said, cool and a little censorious, rising to his feet. He inclined his head a little and took his leave without another word; the guards came back in.
An evening meal was brought them all—Laurence noticed belatedly that his own meal, as sparse as he would have ordinarily thought it, was considerably more substantial than the simple bowl of soup and noodles offered the guards; he now understood a little better why he was confined in a hospitable and large chamber, waited upon with consideration. Nevertheless he was still a prisoner, and a condemned man. He looked at the guards: both wore short blades on their belts, and though he had reach and weight on them, they were by no means insubstantial fellows. But Laurence was determined, regardless, to hazard again an escape. His circumstances could hardly be the worse for it.
One of the guards lay himself down to rest; the other sat in the corner and yawned. Laurence lay down and closed his eyes to sleep a little while, until it was thoroughly dark.
He roused a few hours later and turned his head to look. The first guard yet snored; the other was idly humming to himself, tuneless, and rolling the dice.
Laurence turned back his head towards the ceiling, gathering himself. He closed his eyes and let his lips form soundlessly a prayer to the Almighty. Almost certainly he would be slain. He meant to try and overcome the first guard before the second awoke, get away the man’s blade if he could, and then to somehow get out of the house—perhaps the window of the chamber across the hallway. Then he would fly for the woods. It was a reckless plan at best, given two men at his back and dragons in the courtyard, but better a clean death than to sit quietly in a room and await torture.
Laurence sat up from his bedding. The guard looked up, narrowly, but then turned away from him; Laurence halted as the door slid open. Junichiro stood outside, swords at his belt, and spoke coldly, gesturing at the sleeping guard. The second guard roused up, abashed; the two men muttered excuses, which Junichiro evidently cut short; he motioned them out of the room, and climbing in made to stand sentry in their place, his face hard and watchful. The men hang-dog went; the door slid shut. Their small light went bobbing away down the corridor, and vanished deeper into the house.
Laurence ought to have been glad of it: shorter odds by far, against one youth not yet at his full growth. But it left an evil taste in his mouth. He had not given his parole to his captors; he felt himself not in the wrong to make the attempt, and if necessary, he could have stomached killing a guard set upon him, in such circumstances. But not an over-eager young man, scarcely more than a boy, one who had done him not the least evil except to love his own master. Half-gathered to spring, Laurence hesitated. Perhaps if he waited, Junichiro might fall asleep himself, later in the night—
Junichiro said quietly, barely more than a whisper, “Get up. Once we are outside, we must go down the slope to the west, quickly, keeping near the stables—the dragons will not be there. Do you understand?”
“What?” Laurence said, taken aback.
Junichiro did not answer; he had taken a bound scroll out of his robes, and set it down precisely in the center of the floor. He went to the outer wall and began to work latches there: abruptly a large section of the lower half of the wall came loose, and the night air breathed in.
Laurence still did not understand in the least; but understanding might wait. He sprang to Junichiro’s side and caught the heavy panel, lifting it aside; together they slid through the opening and into the gardens, small pebbles rolling underfoot and a fragrant smell of crushed leaves as they forced their way past a few small pines. Junichiro caught him by the arm. “Quickly, now!” he breathed.
Laurence had no idea what had possessed Junichiro to undertake his rescue, but he could still less easily imagine it some sort of deep-laid strategem. He turned aside for a moment, however, to hunt through the bushes, ignoring Junichiro’s attempts to draw him onwards. Then he had the bundle out of the undergrowth where he had left it, and turning said, “Go!”
He followed Junichiro through the gardens, and past a low building smelling of cattle and horse piss; a gentle slope eased away into the woods. Junichiro unerring led them along paths he knew into the trees, jumping fallen logs and streams almost unconscious of their presence. Laurence fixed the bundle over his shoulder, and kept his attention for the forest floor: he had put himself into Junichiro’s hands, and he would have certainly done no better evading pursuit alone.
They had been running for nearly half-an-hour when first a dragon roared, behind them and aloft somewhere. Laurence did not turn to look. If Lady Arikawa marked them out for pursuit, they were surely lost, even if she could not come down upon them herself while they remained within the trees. The snap of wings above, so like a sail belling in the wind, seemed strangely loud in his ears. They ran onwards.