Empire of Ivory (44 page)

the wind, and some eight hours later returned again,

finding the Allegiance in the dark by the beacons lit in

the tops.

"Burnt to the ground, the whole place," Chenery said,

tipping back the cup of grog which had been given him,

thirstily. "Not a soul to be seen, and all the wells full

of dragonshit; beg your pardon."

The magnitude of the disaster began gradually to dawn upon

them all: not only Capetown lost, but two of the largest

ports in Africa besides. If the enemy's purpose had been to

seize control of the ports, all the intervening territory

must have first been conquered; but if simple destruction

were all their desire, no such long, drawn-out labor was

required. Without aerial forces to oppose them, the dragons

could overfly with ease any defenses or mustered force, and

go directly to their target, carrying their light infantry

with them; and then expend all their energy upon the

hapless town which had incurred their wrath.

"The guns were all gone," Warren said quietly. "And the

shot; we found the empty caissons where they had been

stored. I would imagine they took the powder also;

certainly we did not see any left behind."

All the long homeward journey along the coast was attended

by the clouds of smoke and ruin, and preceded by their

harbingers the scorched and tattered ships, full of

survivors, making their limping way back to safe harbor.

The Allegiance did not attempt again to put in, relying

instead on the dragons' short flights to the coast to bring

them fresh water, until two weeks more brought them to Cape

Coast: Riley felt it their duty to at least make an

accounting of the dead, at the British port, and they hoped

that the fortifications, older and more extensive than

those in the other ports, might have preserved some

survivors.

The castle which served as headquarters for the port, built

in stone, remained largely intact but for the gaping and

scorched roof; the guns, which had been useless to defend

her, fixed as they were outward to sea, were all gone, as

were the heaped piles of round-shot from the courtyard. The

Allegiance, being subject to the vicissitudes of the wind

and current, could not keep the regular pace of dragons,

and had moved more slowly than the wave of attacks; three

weeks at least had passed since the assault.

While Riley organized the ship's crew in the sad work of

exhuming and making a count of the dead from their mass

grave, Laurence and his fellow captains divided amongst

themselves the richly forested slopes north and surrounding

the wreckage of the town, in hopes of ensuring enough game

for them all: fresh meat was badly needed, the ship's

supplies of salt pork growing rapidly thin, and the dragons

always hungry. Temeraire alone among them was really

satisfied with fish, and even he had wistfully expressed

the desire for "a few tender antelope, for variety's sake;

or an elephant would be beyond anything: they are so very

rich."

In the event, he was able to satisfy his own hunger with a

couple of smallish, red-furred buffalo, while the riflemen

shot another half-a-dozen, as many as he could conveniently

carry back to the ship in his foreclaws. "A little gamy,

but not at all unpleasant; perhaps Gong Su can try stewing

one with a little dried fruit," Temeraire said

thoughtfully, rattling the horns in his mouth in a horrible

fashion to pick his teeth, before he fastidiously deposited

them upon the ground. Then he pricked up his ruff. "Someone

is coming, I think."

"For God's sake are you white men?" the cry came a little

faintly, from the forest, and shortly a handful of dirty,

exhausted men staggered into their clearing, and received

with many pitiful expressions of gratitude their canteens

of grog and brandy. "We scarcely dared to hope, when we

heard your rifles," said their chief, a Mr. George Case of

Liverpool, who with his partner David Miles, and their

handful of assistants, had not been able to escape the

disaster in time.

"We have been hiding in the forest ever since the monsters

descended," Miles said. "They took up all the ships that

had not fled quick enough, and broke or burnt them, before

they left again; and us out here with scarcely any bullets

left. We have been ready to despair: I suppose they would

all have starved, in another week."

Laurence did not understand, until Miles brought them to

the makeshift pen, concealed in the woods, where their last

string of some two hundred slaves remained. "Bought and

paid for, and in another day we should have had them loaded

aboard," Miles said, and spat with philosophical disgust

upon the ground, while one of the gaunt and starving

slaves, his lips badly cracked, turned his head inside the

enclosure and made a pleading motion with his hand for

water.

The smell of filth was dreadful. The slaves had made some

attempt, before weakness had overcome them, to dig small

necessary-pits within their enclosure, but they were

shackled ankle-to-ankle, and unable to move far from one

another. There was a running stream which emptied into the

sea, some quarter-of-a-mile distant; Case and his men did

not look thirsty, or very hungry themselves; there was the

remnant of an antelope over a spit, not twenty feet from

the enclosure.

Case added, "If you will take credit for our passage, we

will make it good in Madeira; or," with an air of great

generosity, "you are welcome to buy them outright if you

prefer: we will give you a good price, you may be sure."

Laurence struggled to answer; he would have liked to knock

the man down. Temeraire did not suffer any similar pangs;

he simply seized the gate in his foreclaws and without a

word tore it entirely from its setting, and threw it down

on the ground, panting over it in anger.

"Mr. Blythe," Laurence said, grimly, "strike these men's

irons, if you please."

"Yes, sir," Blythe said, and fetched his tools; the slavers

gaped. "My God, what are you about?" Miles said, and Case

cried out that they should sue, they should certainly sue;

until Laurence turning on them said low and coldly, "Shall

I leave you here, to discuss the matter with these

gentlemen?" which shut their mouths at once. It was a long

and unhappy process: the men were shackled one to another,

with iron fetters, and in groups of four were fastened

about the necks with rope; a handful with their ankles

cuffed to thick billets of wood, which had rendered it

nearly impossible for them to even stand.

Temeraire tried to speak to the slaves as Blythe freed

them, but they spoke a wholly different language, and

shrank from his lowered head in fear; they were not men of

the Tswana, but of some local tribe, which did not have

similar relations with dragons. "Give them the meat,"

Laurence said quietly, to Fellowes; this gesture required

no translation, and at once the stronger among the former

captives began to arrange cooking-fires, and prop up the

weaker to gnaw upon the biscuit which Emily and Dyer

distributed among them, with the help of Sipho. Many of the

slaves preferred to flee at once, despite their obvious

weakness; before the meat was on the spit, nearly half of

them had vanished into the forest, to make their way home

as best they could, Laurence supposed; there was no way of

knowing how far they had been brought, or from what

direction.

Temeraire sat stiff with disgust as the slavers were put

aboard him; and when they continued to murmur turned his

head to snap his teeth towards them, and say in dangerous

tones, "Speak of Laurence so again, and I will leave you

here myself; you should be ashamed of yourselves, and if

you have not enough sense to be, then you may at least be

quiet." The crew also regarded them with great disapproval.

"Ungrateful sods" was the muttered opinion of Bell, as he

rigged out makeshift straps for them.

Laurence was glad to unload them again, on deck, and see

them disappear among the rest of the Allegiance's

passengers. The other dragons had returned with better luck

from their hunting, and Maximus triumphantly deposited on

the deck a pair of smallish elephants, of which he had

already eaten three; he pronounced them very good eating,

and Temeraire sighed a little, but they were earmarked at

once for the celebration; which though necessarily muted by

their larger circumstances, could not be much longer

delayed and yet leave the bride in a state convenient to

walking the deck of a rolling ship.

It was a rather muddled occasion, although Chenery, with

his usual fine disdain of any notion of polite manners, had

ensured the sobriety of the officiant, by taking Britten by

the ear and dragging him up onto the dragondeck, the night

before, and instructing Dulcia not to let him stir an inch.

The minister was thoroughly sober and petrified by morning,

and Harcourt's runners brought him his clean shirt and his

breakfast on the dragondeck, and brushed his coat for him

on the spot, so he could not slip away and fortify himself

back into insensibility.

But Catherine had not thought at all of providing herself

with a dress, and Riley had not thought at all that she

would not have done so, with the result that she had to be

married in her trousers and coat; giving the ceremony a

very strange appearance, and putting poor Mrs. Grey to the

blush, and several other of the respectable Capetown

matrons who had attended. Britten himself looked very

confused, without the comforting haze of liquor, and

stuttered rather more than less over his phrases. To crown

the event, when he invited onlookers to express any

objections, Lily, despite Harcourt's many reassuring

conversations on the subject, put her head over the lip of

the dragondeck to the alarm of the assembled guests and

said, "Mayn't I?"

"No, you may not!" Catherine said, and Lily heaved a

disgruntled sigh, and turning her lurid orange eye on Riley

said, "Very well, then; but if you are unpleasant to

Catherine, I will throw you in the ocean."

It was perhaps not a very propitious entry to the state of

matrimony, but the elephant meat was indeed delicious.

The lookout saw the light off Lizard Point the tenth of

August as they came at last into the Channel, the dark mass

of England off their port bow, and he caught sight also of

a few lights running past them to the east: not ships of

the blockade. Riley ordered their own lights doused, and

put her on a south-east heading, with careful attention to

his maps, and when morning came, they had the mingled pain

and pleasure of bringing up directly behind a convoy of

some eight ships bound unmistakably for Le Havre: six

merchantmen, and a couple of frigates escorting them, all

lawful prizes, any of which would certainly have struck at

once if only they had been in range. But they were a good

sixty miles away, and catching sight of the Allegiance they

hurriedly pressed on more sail and immediately began to run

clear away.

Laurence leaned on the rail beside Riley watching them go,

wistfully. The Allegiance had not been scraped properly

clean since leaving England, and her bottom was unspeakably

foul; in any event, at her best point of sailing she did

not make eight knots, and even the frigate at the rear of

the convoy was certainly running at eleven. Temeraire's

ruff was quivering as he sat up to watch them. "I am sure

we could catch them," he said. "We could certainly catch

them; at least by afternoon."

"There are her studdingsails," Riley said, watching through

the glass. The sluggish frigate leapt forward, evidently

having only waited until her charges had pulled ahead.

"Not with this wind," Laurence said. "Or you might; but not

the others, and we have no armor. In any case, we could not

take them: the Allegiance would be quite out of sight until

after dark, and without prize-crews they would all run away

from us in the night."

Temeraire sighed and put his head down again on his

forelegs. Riley shut up his glass. "Mr. Wells, let us have

a heading north-northeast, if you please."

"Yes, sir," Wells said sadly, and turned to make the

arrangements; but abruptly, the frigate in the lead checked

her way, and bent her course sharply southward, with much

frantic activity in the rigging visible through the glass.

The convoy all were turning, as if they meant to make now

for Granville, past the Jersey Islands; rather a poorer

risk, and Laurence could not imagine what they meant by it,

unless perhaps they had caught sight of some ship of the

blockade. Indeed, Laurence wondered that they should not

have seen any such ship before now, unless all the blockade