Empire of Ivory (22 page)

officially informed, without looking Laurence in the face;

and bent his head down again over his maps to pretend to be

making calculations: a pretense which succeeded not at all,

Laurence being perfectly aware that Riley could not do so

much as a sum in his head without scratching it out on

paper.

"I will not take all the crew," Laurence told Ferris, who

looked dismal, but even he did not protest over-much.

Keynes and Dorset would come, of course, and Gong Su: the

cooks in the employ of Prince Yongxing, on their previous

visit, had experimented with great enthusiasm on the local

produce, which thus formed one of the surgeons' foremost

hopes of reproducing the cure.

"Do you suppose you can prepare these ingredients in the

same way as they might have used?" Laurence asked Gong Su.

"I am not an Imperial chef!" Gong Su protested, and to

Laurence's dismay explained that the style of cooking in

the south of China, whence he hailed, was entirely

different. "I will try my poor best, but it is not to be

compared; although northern cooking is not very good

usually," he added, in a burst of parochialism.

Roland and Dyer came to be assistants to him, and run and

fetch in the markets, their slight weight a negligible

burden; for the rest, Laurence packed aboard a chest of

gold, and took little more baggage than his sword and

pistols and a pair of clean shirts and stockings. "I do not

feel the weight at all; I am sure I could fly for days,"

Temeraire said, grown still more urgent: Laurence had

forced himself to let caution keep them back a full week,

so they were now less than two hundred miles distant: still

a desperately long single day's flight, but not an

impossible one.

"If the weather holds until morning," Laurence said.

One final invitation he made, which he did not think would

be accepted, to Reverend Erasmus. "Captain Berkley begs me

inform you he would be happy if you continued aboard as his

guests," Laurence said, rather more elegantly than

Berkley's, "Yes, of course. Damned formal nonsense; we are

not going to put them overboard, are we?" could be said to

have deserved. "But of course you are my personal guests,

and welcome to join me, if you would prefer it."

"Hannah, perhaps you would rather not?" Erasmus said,

looking to his wife.

She lifted her head from her small text on the native

language, whose phrases she was forming silently with her

mouth. "I do not mind," she said; and indeed climbed up to

Temeraire's back without any sign of alarm, settling the

girls around her and chiding them firmly for their own

anxiety.

"We will see you in Capetown," Laurence told Ferris, and

saluted Harcourt; with one grateful leap they were gone,

flying and flying over clean ocean, with a good fresh wind

at their heels.

A day and a night of flying had seen them coming in over

the bay at dawn: the flat-topped fortress wall of Table

Mount standing dusty and golden behind the city, light

spilling onto the striated rock face and the smaller jagged

sentinel peaks to either side. The bustling town crammed

full the crescent slice of level ground at the base of the

slope, with the Castle of Good Hope at its heart upon the

shore, its outer walls forming a star-shape from above with

the butter-yellow pentagon of the fort nested within,

gleaming in the early morning as her cannon fired the

welcoming salute to leeward.

The parade grounds where Temeraire was lodged were beside

the castle, only a few dragon-lengths from where the ocean

came grumbling onto the sandy beach: a distance

inconvenient when the wind was blowing too strongly at high

tide, but which otherwise made a pleasant relief against

the summer heat. Although the courtyard enclosed within the

fort itself was large enough to house a few dragons in

times of emergency, it would not have made a comfortable

situation, either for the soldiers stationed in the castle

barracks, or for Temeraire; and happily, the grounds had

been much improved since their last visit breaking their

journey to China. While the couriers no longer flew routes

this far south, too remote for their failing strength, a

fast frigate had been sent on ahead of the Allegiance with

dispatches to warn the acting-governor, Lieutenant-General

Grey, both of their arrival and, secretly, of their urgent

purpose. He had widened the grounds to house all the

formation, and put up a low fence around.

"I am not afraid you will be pestered; but it may keep away

prying eyes, and stifle some of this damned noise," he said

to Laurence, referring to the protests of the colonists at

their arrival. "It is just as well that you have come on

ahead: it will give them some time to get over the notion,

before we have seven dragons all in a lump. The way they

wail, you would think they had never heard of a formation

at all."

Grey had himself reached the Cape only in January; he was

the lieutenant-governor, and would soon be superceded by

the arrival of the Earl of Caledon, so that his position,

with all the awkwardness of a temporary situation, lacked a

certain degree of authority; and he was much beset by cares

not a little increased by their arrival. The townspeople

disliked the British occupation, and the settlers, who had

established their farms and estates farther out into the

countryside and down the coast, despised it and indeed

anything in the shape of government that would have

interfered with their independence, which they considered

dearly and sufficiently paid for by the risk which they

ran, in pressing the frontier into the wild interior of the

continent.

The advent of a formation of dragons was viewed by them all

with the deepest suspicion, especially as they were not to

be permitted to know the real purpose. Thanks to much slave

labor cheaply acquired, in the earlier years of the colony,

the settlers had come to disdain manual labor for

themselves and their families; and their farms and

vineyards and herds had expanded to take advantage of the

many hands which they could forcibly put to the work.

Slaves were not exported from the Cape; they wanted rather

more slaves than they could get: Malay by preference, or

purchased from West Africa, but not disdaining, either, the

unhappy servitude of the native Khoi tribesmen, who if they

were not precisely slaves were very little less

constrained, and their wages unworthy of the term.

Having thus arranged to be outnumbered, the colonists now

exerted themselves to maintain the serenity of their

establishments by harsh restrictions and an absolutely free

hand with punishment. A resentment yet lingered that under

the previous British government, the torture of slaves had

been forbidden; on the further outskirts of the town might

yet be observed the barbaric custom of leaving the corpse

of a hanged slave upon his gibbet, as an illustrative

example to his fellows of the cost of disobedience. The

colonists were well informed, also, of the campaign against

the trade, which they viewed with indignation as likely to

cut them off from additional supply; and Lord Allendale's

name was not unknown to them as a mover of the cause.

"And if that were not enough," Grey said tiredly, when they

had been in residence a few days, "you brought this damned

missionary with you. Now half the town thinks the slave

trade has been abolished, the other half that their slaves

are all to be set free at once and given license to murder

them in their beds; and all are certain you are here to

enforce it. I must ask you to present me to the fellow; he

must be warned to keep more quiet. It is a miracle he has

not been already stabbed in the street."

Erasmus and his wife had taken over a small establishment

of the London Missionary Society, lately abandoned by the

death of its previous tenant, a victim of malarial fevers,

and in far from an ordered state. There was neither a

school nor a church building, yet, only a mortally plain

little house, graced by a few depressed and straggling

trees, and a bare plot of land around it meant for a

vegetable-garden, where Mrs. Erasmus was presently laboring

in the company of her daughters and several of the young

native women, who were being shown how to stake tomato

plants.

She stood up when Laurence and Grey came into view, and

with a quiet word left the girls at work while she led the

two of them inside the house: built in the Dutch style, the

walls made of thick clay, with broad wooden beams exposed

above supporting the thatched roof. The windows and door

all stood open to let air the smell of fresh whitewash;

inside the house was only a single long room, divided into

three, and Erasmus was seated in the midst of a dozen

native boys scattered around on the floor, showing them the

letters of the alphabet upon a slate.

He rose to greet them and sent the boys outside to play, an

eruption of gleeful yelling drifting in directly they had

gone spilling out into the street, and Mrs. Erasmus

disappeared into the kitchen, with a clatter of kettle and

pot.

"You are very advanced, sir, for three-days' residence,"

Grey said, looking after the horde of boys in some dismay.

"There is a great thirst for learning, and for the Gospel,

too," Erasmus said, with pardonable satisfaction. "Their

parents come at night, after they have finished working in

the fields, and we have already had our first service."

He invited them to sit: but as there were only two chairs,

it would have made an awkward division, and they remained

standing. "I will come at once to the point," Grey said.

"There have been, I am afraid, certain complaints made." He

paused, and repeated, "Certain complaints" uneasily, though

Erasmus had said nothing. "You understand, sir, we have but

lately taken the colony, and the settlers here are a

difficult lot. They have made their own farms, and estates,

and with some justice consider themselves entitled to be

masters of their own fate. There is some sentiment-in

short," he said abruptly, "you would do very well to

moderate your activity. You need not perhaps have so many

students-take three or four, most promising; let the rest

return to work. I am informed the labor of the students is

by no means easily spared," he added weakly.

Erasmus listened, saying nothing, until Grey had done; then

he said, "Sir, I appreciate your position: it is a

difficult one. I am very sorry I cannot oblige you."

Grey waited, but Erasmus said nothing more whatsoever,

offering no ground for negotiation. Grey looked at

Laurence, a little helplessly, then turning back said,

"Sir, I will be frank; I am by no means confident of your

continued safety, if you persist. I cannot assure it."

"I did not come to be safe, but to bring the word of God,"

Erasmus said, smiling and immovable, and his wife brought

in the tea-tray.

"Madam," Grey said to her, as she poured the cups at the

table, "I entreat you to use your influence; I beg you to

consider the safety of your children." She raised her head

abruptly; the kerchief which she had been wearing outside

to work had slipped, and by pulling her hair back away from

her face revealed a dull scarred brand upon her forehead,

the initials of a former owner blurred but legible still,

and superimposed on an older tattooed marking, of abstract

pattern.

She looked at her husband; he said gently, "We will trust

in God, Hannah, and in His will." She nodded and made Grey

no direct answer, but went silently back outside to the

garden.

There was of course nothing more to be said; Grey sighed,

when they had taken their leave, and said dismally, "I

suppose I must put a guard upon the house."

A heavy moist wind was blowing from the south-east, draping

the Table Mount in a blanket of clouds; but it abated that

evening, and the Allegiance was sighted the next afternoon

by the castle lookout, heralded by the fire of the signalguns. The atmosphere of suspicion and hostility was a

settled thing by then, throughout the town; although

sentiments less bitter would have sufficed to make her

arrival unsettling for the inhabitants.

Laurence watched her come in, by Grey's invitation, from a

pleasant cool antechamber set atop the castle, and seeing

her from this unfamiliar and reversed direction was struck

by the overwhelming impression of terrible force: not only

the sheer vastness of her size, but the hollow eyes of her

brute armament of thirty-two-pounders, glaring angrily out

of portholes, and what seemed at this distance a veritable

horde of dragons coiled upon her deck, uncountable for

their lying so intertwined that their heads and tails could