“There was no real hope, of course,” Laurence said, low and bleak, when they had ended the fruitless audience.
“If it is any comfort,” Tharkay said, “I doubt whatever concessions you might have wrung from them would satisfy Willoughby. He is here to take the port; nothing less will content him, and he does not strike me as that political sort of creature who might be persuaded by an appeal to his caution.”
“But he is wholly unreasonable,” Temeraire protested. “It is not as though Britain had built a port here, and the Chinese were taking it away; we had months to travel only to reach here at all.”
That the port was strategically placed so as to easily wreck all of Britain’s shipping, and her mastery of the Indian Ocean, did not appease him. “I do not see how one small country can complain if it does not rule all the oceans of the world, even those which are quite upon the other side,” he said, “and after all, have we not heard that Java is only on the other side of the water here, and the Dutch are there, and our friends? Why does Willoughby not go there and say, Those are yours, and hand them over.”
“He would,” Tharkay said, “but they are defended with modern guns and modern navies, which can raise the price of making such a demand.”
Granby was kind enough to make one final attempt: they flew over with Caesar once more, and he remonstrated with Willoughby, who if he heard, did not show any particular interest in listening. When Granby had finished, he nodded, and then said, “Well, I have heard you out, and now, Captain Granby, and Captain Rankin, I am giving you a damned order: you will get your beasts and all these others out of the port. We scarcely need your help to secure the place, so you need not involve yourself, if you do not choose to—I will be happy,” he added coldly, “to forward your reasoning to Whitehall. All I require is that you do not interfere with my orders, and we will manage the thing ourselves.”
“So he means to smash up all the port,” Temeraire said, “and maybe kill Jia Zhen, who has been so kind to us, or the Larrakia: when I think of the tremendous, the extraordinary generosity which has been shown us—oh! what a wretched little worm this Willoughby fellow must be; it is no wonder he should like Rankin so.”
Laurence said somberly, “I am afraid the fault was ours in accepting that hospitality when we had so little information on the position which our nation had taken, or might choose to; there was reason enough to know the Government would dislike it, if not to guess they should risk a war over the matter. They may,” he added, “suppose that a sharp rebuke here will warn China off from any similar attempts.”
He looked up at Temeraire and said, “I do not say I like it, my dear; I do not, in the least, and Willoughby is the last man I would wish to see entrusted with the power to offer so great an insult to any foreign power not already our enemy. But he has been entrusted with that power, and this is an open and honest act of warfare. The enemy has been offered terms, and however little I think of Willoughby, I know of no reason to suspect he will refuse quarter when surrender has been given. I hope a warning shot will be sufficient to persuade Jia Zhen not to prolong the engagement.
“If it is any comfort to you, I ask you to consider that we ought have left before now, in any case, and we might already be on the track back to Sydney, wholly unaware of anything which occurred in our absence.”
“But we have not left,” Temeraire said, “so we are not unaware, and that is not comforting at all.”
He brooded after, when Laurence had gone to pack his things; he did not mean to make things still more awkward for Laurence, or for Granby, but it seemed very wrong to allow this Willoughby person to destroy the pavilion only because the Government wished to quarrel; after all, the Government had sent Temeraire away here, and did not want him in the service anymore, so he did not see that he owed the Government anything; meanwhile Jia Zhen had been perfectly splendid.
Temeraire was not quite sure what he might do, but while everyone else made ready to depart, a little surreptitiously he went behind the pavilion, and experimented with clearing his throat and trying to take the deep breaths which were required for the divine wind. Dorset paused going by with his instruments, frowning, and when Temeraire in a roundabout way inquired he said disapprovingly, “I cannot recommend the exertion of the throat yet in any way. The strain has been very great, and you have not kept quiet as you ought to have.”
Temeraire thought this was hard, when he had been so silent on their journey—he had not talked above half-a-dozen times a day, except on special occasions, or if he needed to explain something, or if he had seen something of interest which he wished to mention to Laurence or one of his other crew, or had needed to consult on their direction. His throat did not feel so unpleasant anymore, either: it did not hurt when he spoke, and at dinner he had eaten a couple of tunny spines, roasted deliciously, without suffering the least difficulty or soreness.
And he certainly must have the divine wind, to do anything very useful: if he were only to claw away at the ships, he could not do much to both at once. Of course, he did not mean to do anything excessively unpleasant to the ships, either, or at least not to the sailors; but he thought perhaps he might wash them some distance out to sea, so they were too far away to do any shelling; or he might make the seas high enough beneath them that they should be forced to stop working the guns.
Temeraire had tried a little, on their long sea-voyage, to work out how Lien had built up the tremendous wave which she had used to drown the British squadron at the battle of Shoeburyness, but it had to be admitted he had not had very much success. He understood vaguely how she had done it—she had built many little waves, and sent them sculling on, and then had built one last and sent it sweeping along to gather up all the smaller. He had mastered the trick enough to manage perhaps four or five little waves, compounded into one great, and this one he had certainly made more substantial than the ordinary waves all around, but by this Temeraire meant he could achieve a crest of ten feet, perhaps, above the swell; scarcely enough to do more than rock a frigate for a minute or two.
He had thought of his former trick upon the Valérie, where he had struck her with the divine wind directly, but the ships in the harbor had their sails furled: they were riding at anchor, and built solidly of oak; the divine wind had nothing to grip upon. It would not do, so that night he determinedly shook out his wings and flew from their new camp—out on the sand across the bay, exposed to all the weather, with meanwhile the pavilion standing empty but for little Tharunka—and he flew out to the ocean and began doggedly to practice once more, trying to work out how quickly each wave should go.
“For that is the difficulty,” he said to Kulingile, while he scratched calculations in the dirt—he quite missed Perscitia, who would have done the mathematics in her head for him—to try and work out how many breaths he should take between raising another swell. “They do not keep apart the same distance, and some are further apart, and so when the large one goes, it reaches a larger gap, and then by the time it reaches the next wave it is already breaking, and it only falls upon the rest of the waves and does no good to anyone.”
Kulingile ate another bite of his raw cassowary, which he had managed to catch for himself that morning—they were now obliged to fend for their own meals again, without the very material assistance of the Larrakia hunters, who even if they had not brought something pleasant back would at least reliably be able to tell where one might find game—and piped, “But if it takes so long to make, and you do not sink the ships, won’t they only wait until it is gone and then shoot afterwards?”