Tongues of Serpents Read Free Page B

no-one would tell me where he was,” Iskierka said, “I am quitesure that if I set something on fire and told them I would set the rest on fire, too, they would come about: so there.”
    “Yes,” Temeraire said, “and in the meanwhile, very likely he would be in whatever house you had set on fire, and be hurt: and if not, the fire would jump along to the nearby buildings whether you liked it to or not, and he would be in one of those. Whereas I will just take the roof off a building, and then I can look inside and lift them out, if they are in there, and people will tell me anyway.”
    “I can take a roof off a building, too!” Iskierka said. “You are only jealous, because someone is more likely to want to take Granby, because he has more gold on him and is much more fine.”
    Temeraire swelled with indignation and breath, and would have expelled them both in a rush, but Roland interrupted urgently, saying, “Oh, don’t quarrel! Look, here they are all coming back, right as rain: that is them on the road, I am sure.”
    Temeraire whipped his head around: three small figures had just emerged from the small cluster of buildings which made the town, and were on the narrow cattle-track which came towards the promontory.
    Temeraire’s and Iskierka’s heads were raised high, looking down towards them; Laurence raised a hand and waved vigorously, despite the twinge in his ribs, which a bath and a little rough bandaging had not gone very far to alleviate; that injury, however, could be concealed. “There; at least we will not have them down here in the streets,” Granby said, lowering his own arm, and wincing a little; he probed gingerly at his shoulder.
    It was still a near-run thing when they had got up to the promontory—a slow progress, and Laurence’s legs wished to quiver on occasion, before they had reached the top and could sit on the makeshift benches. Temeraire sniffed, and then lowered his head abruptly and said, “You are hurt; you are bleeding,” with urgent anxiety.
    “It is nothing to concern you; I am afraid we only had a little accident in the town,” Laurence said, guiltily preferring a certain degree of deceit to the inevitable complications of Temeraire’s indignation.
    “So, dearest, you see it is just as well I wore my old coat,” Granby said to Iskierka, in a stroke of inspiration, “as it has got dirty and torn, which you would have minded if I had on something nicer.”
    Iskierka was thus diverted to a contemplation of his clothing, instead of his bruises, and promptly pronounced it a natural consequence of the surroundings. “If you will go into a low, wretched place like that town, one cannot expect anything better,” she said, “and I do not see why we are staying here, at all; I think we had better go straight back to England.”

Chapter 2
     

     
    “I AM NOT SURPRISED in the least,” Bligh said later that evening, when they had left Riley’s table and gone to the quarterdeck for coffee and cigars, “not in the least; you see exactly how it is now, Captain Laurence, with these whoreson dogs and Merinos.”
    His language was not much better than that of the aforementioned dogs, and neither could Laurence much prefer his company. He did not like to think so of the King’s governor and a Navy officer, and particularly not one so much a notable seaman: his feat of navigating three thousand miles of open ocean in only a ship’s launch, when left adrift by the
Bounty
, was still a prodigy.
    Laurence had looked at least to respect, if not to like; but the
Allegiance
had stopped to take on water in Van Diemen’s Land, and there found the governor they had confidently expected to meet in Sydney, deposed by the Rum Corps and living in a resentful exile. He had a thin, soured mouth, perhaps the consequence of his difficulties; a broad forehead exposed by his receding hair; and delicate, anxious features beneath it, which did not very well correspond with the intemperate language