At length, Laurence stretched himself on the ground, rather out of duty than a real desire to sleep. The leaves were thick blotches overhead: for backdrop, the moon had sunk deeper into cloudbank, imbuing the sky with a general pallor instead of the pitch-black of a clear night. The silence, the heat, remained. Laurence thought perhaps he slept a little; but he had no sense of time passing when he opened his eyes. There was a strange low moaning, but it was not Jonas Green, as he first thought: it was a song, somewhere in the distance.
Laurence remained prone a moment, then abruptly sat up as the noise broke fully into his mind. Several other of the men were sitting up already, tense and listening, their eyes showing white in the corners. They could not make words out, but the rise and fall and rise of the drumming came clearly, over and over: and over it an unnatural and repetitive rattle like dried leaves shaking in wind. It died away even while they listened; then began once more afresh.
“That is a very strange sound,” Temeraire said, drowsily, without opening his eyes. “Whoever can be making it? It sounds as though they did not feel very well; or perhaps were angry.”
This interpretation plainly did not recommend itself to the listening convicts. “Pray do not disturb yourself,” Laurence said, loud enough to carry over the noise, and reach their ears. “It cannot be of concern to us in your company, and you had much better get as much rest as you can.”
Temeraire did not answer, except to sigh a little breath and sleep again. Laurence put a hand on his muzzle, and turned back to his pallet; beside it Tharkay’s lay empty, and his small pack gone with him.
Laurence lay down again, mostly to give an example to the men which should reassure; he did not feel very much like sleep, with that strange inhuman music still lingering. It felt of a piece with all the rest, the alien cry of an alien land.
There were more low whispers, inarticulate yet uneasy, until abruptly Rankin’s voice rang out in its drawling, ironic vowels, “I am sorry to have to ask you gentlemen to be so good as to reserve your presentiments of disaster for morning: I am not competent to endure the hysterics without the fortification of a night’s rest and strong coffee.”
The cold contempt did what sympathy, perhaps, would not have: it silenced them. The strange moaning song died away once more, fading into the dry air. Laurence watched the leaves stirring overhead, and again time slid away from him; he opened his eyes this time to a touch upon his shoulder, and pushed himself up to look at Tharkay, who silently handed him a canteen, full and dripping wet.
“Thank Heaven,” Laurence said, low; and looked a question at Tharkay, why he had not roused all the camp for the discovery.
“I did not find our singers,” Tharkay said, “but their tracks, I believe: there is a way over the ridge to another river, and its banks are not impassable. I have found only the fewest signs of passage, but the trail is not unused. I think it may answer your search—and perhaps mine, also.”
“The—smugglers?” Laurence said, slowly, relying on Temeraire’s intuition.
Tharkay paused and said, “I imagine you find I have been very close; although perhaps not so close as I might have prided myself upon.”
“You may congratulate yourself as much as you like,” Laurence said ruefully, “—my intelligence is borrowed: Temeraire worked out the whole, not myself, and that only by guessing. But I cannot see I have the least right to demand candor from you on the subject of your private affairs. I am sufficiently in your debt,” he added, “that I hope you know I would be glad of an opportunity to make some return; and you need not make me explanations.”
Tharkay smiled, glinting a little even in the dark. “You are kind to make me such an offer; I can well imagine how little you would like in practice to lend yourself so blindly to another man’s course.”
Very true, Laurence was forced to admit, “but despite that, I will not withdraw,” he said, “and if you prefer to keep your silence, I beg you to believe I will not press you.”
“I do not propose to entertain myself unnecessarily,” Tharkay said, “though I will ask you to come aside with me: I have been silent all this while shipboard only because I am not content with the genteel fiction of privacy when separated by only a plank of wood from a hundred idle ears, and I am no more so here in an open forest, surrounded by men who may only pretend to sleep.”
Chapter 6
“YES,” Tharkay said, “I am looking for the smugglers.”
They had walked a short distance into the trees, pressing down the undergrowth; pebbles shifting underfoot and the creak of branches pushed aside assured them no one should be following without their hearing it.
“The East India Company,” Tharkay continued, “is losing some fifty thousand pounds per annum to their work, and they fear worse to come; much worse. So far the illegal trade is only a trickle, but it is a steady trickle they cannot close up, and widening.”
Laurence nodded. “And the goods are not coming in by sea?”
“More to the point,” Tharkay said, “the goods are not leaving by Canton.” Laurence stared. “You begin to understand the degree of their concern, I think.”
“How can they be certain?” Laurence said. “The port is fantastically busy; some shipments must be able to evade their monopoly.”
Tharkay said, “When the smuggling first began to be noticed, a little more than a year ago, word was sent to the offices in Canton to make a note of all ships coming through the port, with the intention of tracing the source: similar efforts have been made before, of course, although they were puzzled by a method so indirect as funneling the goods through Sydney—”
“The operation must eat nearly all the profit of it,” Laurence said.
“So they imagined,” Tharkay said, “and did not at first take it very seriously; they expected to find at the bottom of it only some enthusiast, who was willing to spend a pound to save sixpence: there is very little which inspires creativity so much as government tariffs and licenses. But the ships and their cargo are accounted for, nearly every one. There are a handful of cases—” He shrugged a little, dismissing these. “Nothing which could account for the steady flow of goods; which is only increasing.”
“They fear, then, that the Chinese have opened another port,” Laurence said, “to some other nation.”
“Perhaps not officially,” Tharkay said. “But if the officials of some port city should choose to turn a blind eye to the occasional foreign vessel; for instance, if they should be persuaded by one with sympathy for some foreign nation—”
“Lien,” Laurence said immediately, “and Napoleon would care nothing for the profit; not so long as he could undermine our trade.”
Tharkay nodded. “It all fits together very nicely,” he said. “The French funnel cheap goods to our markets, undercutting the East India Company—”
Trade was Britain’s lifeblood: it bore the cost of the merchant marine which trained her seamen and her shipbuilders; it brought in the gold and silver which funded her allies, and put armies on the Continent to stand in the way of Bonaparte’s dominion. “If prices fell badly enough, they might cause a panic in the Exchange,” Laurence said. “But would anyone in China risk so obliging Lien?”
She had been disgraced in China with the death of her former companion, Prince Yongxing: he had been chief of that conservative faction which had preferred to have nothing to do with the nations of the West, either in commerce or in politics. They had schemed to supplant Crown Prince Mianning, himself privately a sympathizer with the more liberal slant of his court; their design having been uncovered and thwarted, and Yongxing himself slain, Lien had chosen exile in France, divorcing herself from her former home in hopes of finding Napoleon an effective instrument of revenge.