Black Powder War

Chapter Three

They left the green oasis of Dunhuang at dawn, the camel bells in a querulous jangle as the beasts reluctantly trudged away over the dune-crests, their shaggy flat feet muddling the sharp lines of the ridges which cut the sunlight into parts: the dunes like ocean waves captured in pen and ink, on one side perfectly white and on the other pure shadow, printed on the pale caramel colour of the sand. The caravan trails unknotted themselves one at a time and broke away to north and south, joinings marked by heaps of bones with staring camel-skulls piled atop. Tharkay turned the lead camel’s head southwards, the long train following: the camels knew their work even if their still-awkward riders did not. Temeraire padded after like a disproportionate herd-dog, at a distance far enough to comfort them, near enough to keep any of them from trying to bolt the way they had come.

Laurence had expected the terrible sun, but so far north, the desert did not hold its heat: by mid-day a man was soaked through with sweat; an hour after nightfall he was chilled to the bone, and a white frost crept over the water-casks during the night. The eagle kept itself fed on brown-spotted lizards and small mice, seen otherwise only as shadows darting uneasily beneath rocks; Temeraire daily reduced the camel train by one; the rest of them ate thin tough strips of dried meat, chewed for hours, and coarse tea mixed into a vile but nourishing slurry with oat flour and roasted wheat berries. The casks were reserved for Temeraire; their own supply came from the water-bags each man carried for himself, filled every other day or so from small decaying wells, mostly tainted with salt, or shallow pools overgrown with tamarisk trees, their roots rotting in the mud: the water yellow and bitter and thick, scarcely drinkable even when boiled.

Each morning Laurence and Temeraire took Tharkay aloft and scouted some little distance ahead of the camel-train for the best path, though always a shimmering haze distorted the horizon, limiting their view; the Tianshan range to the south seemed to float above the blurred mirage, as though the blue jutting mountains were divided from the earth, upon another plane entirely.

‘How lonely it is,’ Temeraire said, though he liked the flying: the heat of the sun seemed to make him especially buoyant, perhaps acting in some peculiar way upon the air-sacs which enabled dragons to fly, and he needed little effort to keep aloft.

He and Laurence would often pause during the day together: Laurence would read to him, or Temeraire recite him attempts at poetry, which he had acquired a taste for in Peking, it being there considered a more appropriate occupation for Celestials than warfare; when the sun dipped lower they would take to the air to catch up the rest of the convoy, following the plaintive sound of the camel bells through the dusk.

‘Sir,’ Granby said, jogging to meet Laurence as they descended, ‘one of those fellows is missing, the cook.’

They went aloft again at once, searching, but there was no sign of the poor devil; the wind was a busy house-keeper, sweeping up the camel-tracks almost as quickly as they had been made, and to be lost for ten minutes was as good as for eternity. Temeraire flew low, listening for the jingle of camel-bells, fruitlessly; night was coming on quickly, and the lengthening shadows of the dunes blurred together into a uniform darkness. ‘I cannot see anything more, Laurence,’ Temeraire said sadly: the stars were coming out, and there was only a thin sliver of moon.

‘We will look again tomorrow,’ Laurence said to comfort him, but with little real hope; they set down again by the tents, and Laurence shook his head silently as he climbed down into the waiting circle of the camp; he gladly took a cup of the thick tea and warmed his chilled hands and feet at the low wavering campfire.

‘The camel is a worse loss,’ Tharkay said, turning away with a shrug, brutal but truthful: Jing Chao had endeared himself to no one. Even Gong Su, his countryman and longest acquaintance, heaved only one sigh; and then led Temeraire around to the waiting roast camel, today cooked in a fire pit with tea-leaves, an attempt at changing the flavour.

The few oasis towns they passed through were narrow places in spirit, less unfriendly than perplexed by strangers: the marketplaces lazy and slow, men in black skull-caps smoking and drinking spiced tea in the shade and watching them curiously; Tharkay exchanged a few words now and again, in Chinese and in other tongues. The streets were not in good repair, mostly drifted over with sand and cut by deep channels pitted with the ancient marks of nail-studded wagon wheels. They bought bags of almonds and dried fruit, sweet pressed apricots and grapes, filled their water-bags at the clean deep wells, and continued on their way.

The camels began moaning early in the night, the first sign of warning; when the watch came to fetch Laurence, the constellations were already being swallowed up by the low oncoming cloud.

‘Let Temeraire drink and eat; this may last some time,’ Tharkay said: a couple of the ground crewmen pried off the cover from two of the flat-sided wooden butts and brushed the damp, cooling sawdust away from the swollen leather bags inside, then Temeraire lowered his head so they might pour out the mixture of water and ice into his mouth: having had nearly a week’s practice, he did not spill a drop, but closed his jaws tight before raising his head up again to swallow. The unburdened camel rolled its eyes and fought at being separated from its fellows, to no avail; Pratt and his mate, both of them big men, dragged it around behind the tents; Gong Su drew a knife across its neck, deftly catching the spurting blood in a bowl; and Temeraire unenthusiastically fell-to: he was getting tired of camel.

There were still some fifteen left to get under cover, and Granby marshalled the midwingmen and the ensigns while the ground crewmen anchored the tents more securely; already the layer of loose fine sand was whipping across the surface of the dunes and stinging their hands and faces, though they put up their collars and wrapped their neckcloths over their mouths and noses. The thick fur-lined tents, which they had been so glad to have during the cold nights, now grew stifling hot as they struggled and pushed and crowded in the camels, and even the thinner leather pavilion which they got up to shield Temeraire and themselves was smotheringly close.

And then the sandstorm was upon them: a hissing furious assault, nothing like the sound of rain, falling without surcease against the leather tent wall. It could not be ignored; the noise rose and fell in unpredictable bursts, from shrieks to whispers and back again, so they could only take brief unrestful snatches of sleep; and faces grew bruised with fatigue around them. They did not risk many lanterns inside the tent; when the sun set Laurence sat by Temeraire’s head in a darkness almost complete, listening to the wind howl.

‘Some call the karaburan the work of evil spirits,’ Tharkay said out of the dark; he was cutting some leather for fresh jesses for the eagle, presently subdued in its cage, head hunched invisibly into its shoulders. ‘You can hear their voices, if you listen,’ and indeed one could make out low and plaintive cries on the wind, like murmurs in a foreign tongue.

‘I cannot understand them,’ Temeraire said, listening with interest rather than dread; evil spirits did not alarm him. ‘What language is that?’

‘No tongue of men or dragons,’ Tharkay said seriously: the ensigns were listening, the older men only pretending not to, and Roland and Dyer had crept close, eyes stretched wide. ‘Those who listen too long grow confused and lose their way: they are never found again, except as bones scoured clean to warn other travellers away.’

‘Hm,’ Temeraire said sceptically. ‘I would like to see the demon that could eat me,’ which would certainly have required a prodigious kind of devil.

Tharkay’s mouth twitched. ‘That is why they have not dared to bother us; dragons of your size are not often seen in the desert.’ The men huddled rather closer to Temeraire, and no one spoke of going outside.

‘Have you heard of dragons having their own languages?’ Temeraire asked Tharkay a little later, softly; most of the men were drifting, half-asleep. ‘I have always thought we learnt them from men only.’

‘The Durzagh tongue is a language of dragons,’ Tharkay said. ‘There are sounds in it men cannot make: your voices more easily mimic ours than the reverse.’

‘Oh! Will you teach me?’ Temeraire asked, eagerly; Celestials, unlike most dragons, kept the ability to easily acquire new tongues past their hatching and infancy.

‘It is of little use,’ Tharkay said. ‘It is only spoken in the mountains: in the Pamirs, and the Karakoram.’

‘I do not mind that,’ Temeraire said. ‘It will be so very useful when we are back in England. Laurence, the Government cannot say we are just animals if we have invented our own language,’ he added, looking to him for confirmation.

‘No one with any sense would say it regardless,’ Laurence began, to be interrupted by Tharkay’s short snorting laugh.

‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘They are more likely to think you an animal for speaking a tongue other than English; or at least a creature unworthy of notice: you would do better to cultivate an elevated tone,’ and his voice changed quite on the final words, taking on the drawling style favoured by the too-fashionable set for a moment.

‘That is a very strange way of speaking,’ Temeraire said dubiously, after he had tried it, repeating over the phrase a few times. ‘It seems very peculiar to me that it should make any difference how one says the words, and it must be a great deal of trouble to learn how to say them all over again. Can one hire a translator to say things properly?’

‘Yes; they are called lawyers,’ Tharkay said, and laughed softly to himself.

‘I would certainly not recommend you to imitate this particular style,’ Laurence said dryly, while Tharkay recovered from his amusement. ‘At best you might only impress some fellow on Bond Street, if he did not run away to begin with.’

‘Very true; you had much better take Captain Laurence as your model,’ Tharkay said, inclining his head. ‘Just how a gentleman ought to speak; I am sure any official would agree.’

His expression was not visible in the shadows, but Laurence felt as though he were being obscurely mocked, perhaps without malice, but irritating to him nonetheless. ‘I see you have made a study of the subject, Mr. Tharkay,’ he said a little coldly. Tharkay shrugged.

‘Necessity was a thorough teacher, if a hard one,’ he said. ‘I found men eager enough to deny me my rights, without providing them so convenient an excuse to dismiss me. You may find it slow going,’ he added to Temeraire, ‘if you mean to assert your own: men with powers and privileges rarely like to share them.’

This was no more than Laurence had said, on many an occasion, but a vein of cynicism ran true and deep beneath Tharkay’s words which perhaps made them the more convincing: ‘I am sure I do not see why they should not wish to be just,’ Temeraire said, but uncertainly, troubled, and so Laurence found he did not after all like to see Temeraire take his own advice to heart.

‘Justice is expensive,’ Tharkay said. ‘That is why there is so little of it, and that it’s reserved for those few with enough money and influence to afford it.’

‘In some corners of the world, perhaps,’ Laurence said, unable to tolerate this, ‘but thank God, we have a rule of law in Britain, and those checks upon the power of men which prevent any from becoming tyrannical.’

‘Or which spread the tyranny over more hands, piecemeal,’ Tharkay said. ‘I do not know that the Chinese system is any worse; there is a limit to the evil one despot alone can do, and if he is truly vicious he can be overthrown; a hundred corrupt members of Parliament may together do as much injustice or more, and be the less easy to uproot.’

‘And where on the scale would you rank Bonaparte?’ Laurence demanded, growing too indignant to be polite: it was one thing to complain of corruption, or propose judicious reforms; quite another to lump the British system in with absolute despotism.

‘As a man, a monarch, or a system of government?’ Tharkay asked. ‘If there is more injustice in France than elsewhere, on the whole, I have not heard of it. It is quixotic of them to have chosen to be unjust to the noble and the rich, in favour of the common; but it does not seem to me naturally worse; or, for that matter, likely to last long. As for the rest, I will defer to your judgement, sir; who would you take on the battlefield: good King George or the second lieutenant of artillery from Corsica?’

‘I would take Lord Nelson,’ Laurence said. ‘I do not believe anyone has ever suggested he likes glory less than Bonaparte, but he has put his genius in service to his country and his King, and graciously accepted what rewards they chose to give him, instead of setting himself up as a tyrant.’

‘So shining an example must vanquish any argument, and indeed I should be ashamed to be the cause of any disillusionment.’ Tharkay’s faint half-smile was visible now: it was growing lighter outside. ‘We have a little break in the storm, I think; I will go and look in on the camels.’ He wrapped a veil of cotton several times around his face, pulling his hat firmly down over all, and drew on his gloves and cloak before ducking out through the flaps.

‘Laurence, but the government must listen in our case, because there are so many dragons,’ Temeraire said, interrogatively, when Tharkay had gone out, returning to the point of real concern to him.

‘They shall listen,’ Laurence said, still smouldering and indignant, without thinking; and regretted it the next instant: Temeraire, only too willing to be relieved of doubt, brightened at once and said, ‘I was sure it must be so,’ and whatever good the conversation might have done, in lowering his expectations, was lost.

The storm lingered another day, fierce enough to wear holes, after a while, in the leather of their pavilion; they patched it as best they could from inside, but dust crept in through all the cracks, into their garments and their food, gritty and unpleasant when they chewed the cold dried meat. Temeraire sighed and shivered his hide now and again, little cascades of sand running off his shoulders and wings onto the floor: they had already a layer of desert inside the tent with them.

Laurence did not know just when the storm ended: as the blessed silence began to fall, they all drifted into their first real sleep in days, and he woke to the sound of the eagle outside giving a red cry of satisfaction. Stumbling out of the tent, he found it tearing raw flesh from the corpse of a camel lying across the remains of the campfire pit, neck broken and white ribcage already half stripped clean by the sands.

‘One of the tents did not hold,’ Tharkay said, behind him. Laurence did not at once take his meaning: he turned and saw eight of the camels, tethered loosely near a heap of piled forage, swaying a little on legs grown stiff from their long confinement; the tent which had sheltered them was still up, leaning somewhat askew with a sand-drift piled up against one side. Of the second tent there was no sign except two of the iron stakes still planted deeply in the ground, and a few scraps of brown leather pinned down, fluttering with the breeze.

‘Where are the rest of the camels?’ Laurence said, in growing horror. He took Temeraire aloft at once, while the men spread out, calling, in every direction, in vain: the scouring wind had left no tracks, no signs, not so much as a scrap of bloody hide.

By midday they had given it up, and began in desolate spirits to pack up the camp; seven camels lost, and their water-casks with them, which they had left on to keep them weighted down and quiet. ‘Will we be able to buy more in Cherchen?’ Laurence asked Tharkay, wearily, wiping a hand across his brow; he did not recall seeing many animals in the streets of the town, which they had left nearly three days before.

‘Only with difficulty,’ Tharkay said. ‘Camels are very dear here, and men prize them highly; some may object to selling healthy beasts to be eaten. We ought not turn back, in my opinion.’ At Laurence’s doubtful look, he added, ‘I set the number at thirty deliberately high, in case of accidents: this is worse than I had planned for, but we can yet manage until we reach the Keriya River. We will have to ration the camels, and refill Temeraire’s water casks as best we can at the oases, forgoing as much as we can ourselves; it will not be pleasant, but I promise you it can be done.’