Tongues of Serpents. Naomi Novik

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СКАЧАТЬ felt Temeraire might find it a heavier penalty to be exacted than he yet knew. Yet the prospect of these miseries, which had heretofore on their journey greatly occupied his concerns, seemed petty in comparison with the disaster of the situation that now awaited them: trapped in the roles of convict and kingmaker both, and without any means of escape, save if they chose to sacrifice all intercourse with society and take themselves off into the wilderness.

      ‘Pray do not worry, Laurence,’ Temeraire said stoutly. ‘I am sure we will find it a very interesting place, and anyway,’ he added, ‘at least there will be something nicer to eat.’

      Their reception, however, had if anything only given more credence to Bligh’s representations, and Laurence’s anxiety. The Allegiance could not be said to have crept up on the colony: she had entered the mouth of the harbour at eleven in the morning on a brilliantly clear day, with only the barest breath of wind to bring her along. After eight months at sea, all of them might have been pardoned for impatience, but no one could be immune to the almost shocking loveliness of the immense harbour: one bay after another curving off the main channel, and the thickly forested slopes running down to the water, interspersed with stretches of golden sand.

      So Riley did not order out the boats for rowing, or even try to spread a little more sail; he let the men mostly hang along the rail, looking at the new country before them while the Allegiance stately glided among the smaller shipping like a great finwhale among clouds of baitfish. Nearly three hours of slow, clear sailing before they lowered the anchor, then, but still there was no welcome come to meet them.

      ‘I will fire a salute, I suppose,’ Riley said, doubtfully; and the guns roared out. Many of the colonists in their dusty streets turned to look, but still no answer came, until after another two hours at last Riley put a boat over the side, and sent Lord Purbeck, his first lieutenant, ashore.

      Purbeck returned shortly to report he had spoken with Major Johnston, the present chief of the New South Wales Corps, but that gentleman refused to come aboard so long as Bligh was present: the intelligence of Bligh’s return had evidently reached Sydney in advance, likely by some smaller, quicker ship making the same passage from Van Diemen’s Land.

      ‘We had better go see him ourselves, then,’ Granby said, quite unconscious of the appalled looks Laurence and Riley directed at him, at the proposal that a Navy captain should lower himself to call upon an Army major, who had behaved so outrageously and ungentlemanly, and unfortunately added, ‘It don’t excuse him, but I would not have put it past that fellow Bligh to send word ahead himself that we were here to put him back in his place,’ sadly plausible; and to make matters worse, there was little alternative. Their stores were running low, and that was no small matter with the hold crammed full of convicts, and the deck weighted down with dragons.

      Riley went stiffly, with a full complement of Marines, and invited Laurence and Granby both to accompany him. ‘It may not be regular, but neither is anything else about this damned mess,’ he said to Laurence, ‘and I am afraid you will need to get the measure of the fellow, more than any of us.’

      It was not long in coming: ‘If you mean to try and put that cowering snake over us again, I hope you are ready to stay, and swallow his brass with us,’ Johnston said, ‘for an you go away, we’ll have him out again in a trice; for my part, I will answer to anyone who has a right to ask it for what I have done, which isn’t any of you.’

      These were the first words uttered, preceding even introduction, as soon as they had been shown into his presence: not into an office, but only the antechamber in the single long building which served for barracks and headquarters both.

      ‘What that has to do with hailing a King’s ship properly when it comes into harbour, I would like to know,’ Granby said heatedly, responding in kind, ‘and I don’t care two pence for Bligh or you, either, until I have provision for my dragon; which you had better care about, too, unless you like her to help herself.’

      This exchange had not made the welcome grow particularly warmer: even apart from the suspicion of their assisting Bligh, Johnston was evidently uneasy for all his bluster, as well might he and his fellows be with their present arrangements, at once illegal and unsettled, with so long a silence from England. Laurence might have felt some sympathy for that unease, under other circumstances: the Allegiance and her dragon passengers came into the colony as an unknown factor, and with the power of disrupting all the established order.

      But the first sight of the colony had already shocked him very much: in this beautiful and lush country, to find such a general sense of malaise and disorder, women and men staggering-drunk in the streets even before the sun had set, and for most of the inhabitants thin ramshackle huts and tents the only shelters. Even these were occupied irregularly: as they walked towards their unsatisfactory meeting, and passed one such establishment with no door whatsoever, Laurence glanced and was very shocked to see within a man and a woman copulating energetically, he still half in military uniform, while another man snored sodden upon the floor and a child sat dirty and snuffling in the corner.

      More distressing still was the bloody human wreckage on display at the military headquarters, where an enthusiastic flogger seemed to scarcely pause between his customers, a line of men shackled and sullen, waiting for fifty lashes or a hundred – evidently their idea of light punishment.

      ‘If I would not soon have a mutiny of my own,’ Riley said, half under his breath, as they returned to the Allegiance, ‘I would not let my men come ashore here for anything; Sodom and Gomorrah are nothing to it.’

      Three subsequent weeks in the colony had done very little to improve Laurence’s opinion of its present or its former management. There was nothing in Bligh himself which could be found sympathetic: in language and manner he was abrupt and abrasive, and where his attempts to assert authority were balked, he turned instead to a campaign of ill-managed cajolery, equal parts insincere flattery and irritated outbursts, which did little to conceal his private conviction of his absolute righteousness.

      But this was worse than any ordinary mutiny: he had been the royal governor, and the very soldiers responsible for carrying out his orders had betrayed him. Riley and Granby continuing obdurate, and likely soon to be gone, Bligh had fixed upon Laurence as his most promising avenue of appeal, and refused to be deterred; daily now he would harangue Laurence on the ill-management of the colony, the certain evils flowing from permitting such an illegitimate arrangement to continue.

      ‘Have Temeraire throw him overboard,’ Tharkay had suggested laconically, when Laurence had escaped to his quarters for a little relief and piquet, despite the nearly stifling heat belowdecks: the open window let in only a still-hotter breeze. ‘He can fish him out again after,’ he added, as an afterthought.

      ‘I very much doubt if anything so mild as ocean water would prove effective at dousing that gentleman’s ardour for any prolonged time,’ Laurence said, indulging from temper in a little sarcasm: Bligh had gone so far today as to overtly speak of his right, if restored, to grant full pardon, and Laurence had been forced to quit him mid-sentence to avoid taking insult at this species of attempted bribery. ‘It might nearly be easier,’ he added more tiredly, the moment of heat past, ‘if I did not find some justice in his accusations.’

      For the evils of the colony’s arrangements were very great, even witnessed at the remove of their shipboard life. Laurence had understood that the convicts were generally given sentences of labour, which being accomplished without further instance of disorder yielded their emancipation and the right to a grant of land: a thoughtful design envisioned by the first governor, intended to render them and the country both settled. But over the course of the subsequent two decades, this had remained little more than a design, and in practice nearly all the men of property were the officers of the New South Wales Corps or their former fellows.

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