The dragon looked puzzled over at his own handiwork. “Do you mean, those ships? But they are only made of wood; they are not treasure.”
“I do not suppose that the smallest ship wrecked on your shore was floated for less than three thousand of those gold coins you have piled there so untidily,” Laurence said flatly.
“What?” the dragon cried, and reeled back so aghast it seemed Laurence might as well have ordered the guns fired upon him; he seemed truly overcome, and flew at once to the nearest heap of wrecked ships and from there in an arrowing line to the second graveyard at the other end of the beach, and back again twice; at each halt he went circling round and round over them as though completely out of his head, and at last came darting back to the Reliant to demand, “Can they be fixed? Surely they are not wholly ruined.
Oh! If only those men had said anything! I would never have done it, never, never.”
Laurence had to be glad to have made so profound an impression, although he would have preferred a different foundation for the dragon’s regrets. Even the smaller beasts, when the black dragon had explained matters to them, grew astonishingly distraught; after they too had proceeded to visit the wrecks, they flung themselves upon the bobbing hulls very much as might a man upon the ruined stones of his house, brought low by fire, or sat upon the sand of the beach gazing at them with dull blank eyes and wings drooping limp, a picture of despair.
“We will never hurt another ship,” the black dragon desolately promised, and while Laurence would scarcely have trusted the word of any other pirate, he found himself inclined to believe it despite the prompting of his better judgement. He consulted privately with himself that evening as the Reliant rode at anchor out from the bay, waiting for the morning’s tide; he feared that he rather wished to believe, than did so on sensible grounds. But at length he made himself satisfied: the black dragon had given no proofs of dishonesty, in any of his actions, and indeed any rational consideration should have made lying quite unnecessary to so dreadful a beast, who might far more easily disregard any complaint than thus seek to evade it.
“I do not, however,” he told his lieutenants the next morning, “mean to set up my judgement over that of Their Lordships. We will return first to Bermuda, and from there I shall send them my report; until we have word that they are satisfied, we shall remain near and continue to patrol the seas, and escort any British ships through the dragons’ flying-range.”
His officers were disappointed, he knew; they had naturally hoped to find some French privateer loaded down with treasure, a lawful prize, and at worst to return home and be set loose upon enemy shipping again. The Reliant was a splendid sailor, fast and graceful and well-armed, and fought well could reasonably hope to take most enemies in her class, and outdistance any beyond it. Fortunately, as a counterbalance to these regrets, no sensible officer could have looked upon the black dragon and wished very much to engage it with no aerial support. But Laurence steeled himself to be instructed to do just that, when dispatches came: the Admiralty had not sent him to preach, but to punish.
The Reliant passed three months sailing the Caribbean without serious incident: his log held in it a dozen meetings with merchantmen, none of them molested by the dragons, who were their only other encounter, and frequent enough to make amends for the absence of any other. He was at first wary, when a wing appeared off the ship’s bow in a clear morning, but it was only the black dragon, alone, and he halted well off and called, “Pray may I come in closer? I do not mean to frighten you, at all.”
“You may,” Laurence said, after a brief hesitation; the guns were loaded, and the danger to the beast greater than their own, if he were trusting foolishly.
But the dragon indeed offered no attack. He only winged in quite near—his enormous scale all the more dismaying when he came so close to the Reliant, and it was evident that he was longer, nose to tail, than the entire ship. Then hovering there he put out his head and anxiously peered at the mainmast, tilting his head one way and another, much to the frozen alarm of the boy in the crow’s nest, until Laurence asked, “What are you doing?”
“I am trying to see how it ought to be arranged,” the dragon answered. “We mean to fix the ships, of course, only it is quite difficult when one does not know how it is to be done. Pray will you tell me, what are all these ropes for?”
Laurence did not in the least object to the dragons occupying themselves in such a project, however unlikely to succeed, nor to furthering that end, but he was puzzled to explain a ship’s rigging in French. He was forced to make his apologies after a halting attempt, and then the dragon astonished him by saying,
“You may as well teach me your language, then; I suppose it cannot be much harder than the one Mikli and the others speak.”
Laurence supposed otherwise, but that struck him as a still better method of occupying the beast’s time; he therefore arranged over the objections of his officers to go ashore in a boat once a day, when the Reliant was near enough some islet, and give the dragon lessons. He privately liked the arrangement for entailing a risk only to himself, commensurate he felt with the degree to which he was willfully indulging his own judgement. But before a month had passed, he was forced to confess, astonished by the progress and the wit of his student, that he liked it for its own sake, and indeed had begun to forget that there was any risk at all in the company of a dragon nearly eighteen tons. Céleste was too innocent of malice and fear alike to be a true object of dread when one knew him, Laurence felt; he suffered a daily increasing dismay over the prospect that the Admiralty might order him to make an attempt to bring the dragon down.
Even his crew had begun to grow fond of what they now called “the captain’s dragon” with a hilarity that Laurence deliberately did not notice; he preferred them to be amused at his expense rather than frightened. If Céleste should come before he was on deck, some of the men would even speak with him, and the dragon was very ready to answer as his English improved; he was especially fond of poetry and recitations, when he could persuade any of the men to favor him, and the crew were at the same time engaged in putting on a performance of Macbeth, which aroused his interest so greatly that he began to come whenever he hoped a rehearsal might be in train, and listen raptly.
An anxious merchantman having demanded their escort some distance into the Atlantic, Laurence had not seen Céleste for three days; they were sailing west once more when a sloop hailing them in the distance proved to be just out of Nassau, and her captain informed him they had left his long-awaited dispatches with the governor. “I thank you,” Laurence said heavily, and found it a great effort to maintain the conversation at his table, having invited the captain to join him and his officers for dinner.
“Have you had any luck chasing down those Frenchmen with their dragons?” Captain Archbold asked, innocently heaping coals upon Laurence’s conscience. “I tell you, I do not suppose I am more of a coward than any man, and I have never met a storm yet to frighten me, but I saw a sea-serpent in the Pacific once, gliding past my ship, and if I never see another it will be too soon. It makes a man’s blood run cold to think of going down the gullet of one of those beasts. I shall be very glad to know they are no more.”
“We have found them,” Laurence said, “and there are no Frenchmen: it was a pack of dragons, alone; a French shipwreck left the egg of a large fighting-dragon upon the shore, and his presence emboldened them.”
“Good God!” Archbold cried. “A heavy-weight? —How did you manage it, with no cover yourselves? I should not have supposed a ship could come away so unscathed as you are.”
“We have not found it necessary yet to figh
t the beast,” Laurence said, and one of his younger mids piped up, with a giggle—he had drunk two glasses of wine—“The captain has tamed him instead!”
He was at once frowned into silence by the company and shushed by his neighbors, but Archbold looked quite astonished, as well he might. Laurence saw him off and stood on the quarterdeck alone for some time in the night air, silent and distressed; he felt abruptly how wrong he had been, to make a pet of the dragon he had been ordered to slay—and yet even this was false; it was impossible to describe Céleste so, as though he were a dog or a favorite horse. The dragon was his friend. Nor could Laurence merely reproach himself with self-indulgence, and feel that his pain was his own fault. Céleste had repented of his crimes, and ceased to commit them, as soon as he had known better. There was no justice in putting him to death, and less honor than that in betraying him and taking him by surprise, which was certainly the only way in which an attack could succeed.
Laurence realized to his increasing horror that indeed, he could not stomach the act at all. He envisioned Céleste winging over the ocean to join them at midmorning, as was his wont, fearless and unwary—imagined his own voice giving the order to fire—the dragon falling broken to the waves—
It was impossible. He could not do it. He would have to return to England having failed in his duty, and submit to court-martial; some other man would be sent to destroy the dragon instead. And he would succeed, surely, for Céleste no longer thought to fear a British ship—unless Laurence warned him. His stomach clenched on the thought, still more a dereliction. But he could not persuade himself it was wrong.
He would have to tell Céleste to hide forever, from all men of war, and never approach them again; and then he would have to submit himself to the justice of the Navy.
He could hardly claim to be indifferent to the prospect of ruin and disgrace, but a grateful calm descended, as soon as he had reached this conclusion, which assured him he had found the most honorable course amidst the shoals. He straightened his shoulders and went into his cabin, and at last was able to sleep; until just before morning a tremendous lurch heaved him out of his cot and onto the floor of his cabin with the lamp rolling by. He automatically put out a hand and caught it, blowing out the flame, and in the dim grey light heard the cries of his men mingled with a more hideous groaning of wood.
He waited only long enough to put on his boots; he thrust open his door only to find it partly barred by some heavy weight, as though a mass of cable had been flung across the threshold. He seized his sword and hacked at it, meeting only the resistance of flesh, and abruptly the shadowy mass moved away. He was able to push the door open far enough to emerge onto the deck, to find more long lumpy shadows strewn across his deck, and the lookout above crying out, “Kraken, sir! Kraken!”
The sun was coming up behind an overcast sky, lightening at great speed, and the dreadful beast’s head was rising to meet it on the other side of the ship, vast nacreous eyes taller than the ship’s anchor bulging from either side of a gaping, toothed maw. Laurence hacked grimly away at the massive tentacles as they swarmed among them, men tripping. The kraken certainly had mistaken them for a whale; the creature was so large nothing else could have made the bulk of its diet. It pressed its enormous mouth against the side of the ship repeatedly, evidently trying to bite. Finding nothing to satisfy, it pulled away and an enormous mass of smaller tentacles burst lashing from beneath the row of teeth and began groping over the deck and into the gun ports, curling around men and dragging them down into the monstrous gullet.
“To the guns!” Laurence roared again to any man who might hear him, carving away as he did a slab of another tentacle, trying to make his way towards the nearest gun. The kraken’s shorter limbs were a writhing thicket in his way, and he had now to regret the guns he had moved to the upper deck; the guns on the lower deck might have more easily been fired against the beast. But he could not reach the ladderway, either; one enormous tentacle almost the height of his waist lay athwart the cover, the translucent greenish-black flesh pulsating with the blood vessels within.
A shadow moved across the deck, drawing Laurence’s eyes upwards, as another monstrous limb rose from the depths and was flung over the ship. It landed with a terrible shuddering thump that nearly threw him off his feet, bearing away two of the spars. The Reliant groaned pitiably beneath the weight as the kraken heaved itself still further from the depths and up the side of the vessel, bearing her over. Under such a pressure the ballast would soon begin to shift, and the vessel be dragged beneath the waves as much by her own weight as by the monster.
Laurence snatched a second blade, slicked with blood and the monster’s fluid, from the deck, and threw himself at the nest of tentacles, hacking away furiously. If no one could reach one of the guns, in moments more they would have tipped too far, and the guns would be firing against their own weight.
Three crewmen fell in beside him, and they carved a path towards one of the guns half buried beneath investigating tentacles. He crushed smaller ones beneath his feet as they chopped away the larger, and reached the gun: he dropped his swords, and lashed himself to the carriage with one of the ropes wound half a dozen times around his body and passed it to the next man.
One of the younger ship’s boys, a nimble creature named Flynn, came squirming up through a gun-
port with a sack of powder held in his hand; Laurence seized it and thrust it into the cannon’s mouth without benefit of sponging, and heaved the wadding and the ball behind it at once, and rammed them all down together recklessly. Together he and the men put their shoulders to the gun and ran her out with a groaning effort. Laurence ignored grimly the looming eye that rolled like a dreadful moon towards them, and the tentacles that wrapped round his arms and legs: the kraken became their assistant almost, dragging at the gun as well as them, and at last she was out and aimed towards the monstrous body of the beast.
Laurence began to try and strike the match. The rope round his body drew tight, as on the other side of the gun the gunner’s mate Groghan was seized and lifted aloft, his hands grasping vainly for the carriage—he screamed as the tentacles tugged on him, digging the rope into the flesh of his thigh and waist. Boyle seized the rope and pulled back, braced upon the gun, and behind him, O’Dea had the quill into the touch hole, and the match began to smoulder; Laurence waved the other men back and stood himself with the linstock until they had cut themselves loose. The rope cut, Groghan was lifted away into the air crying out with the end dangling; Laurence set the match to the touch-hole. A moment went by, another—had the powder got wet?—and with a roar the gun fired, jerking Laurence entirely off his feet.
The kraken made no cry itself; the Reliant cried out for it, all the great tentacles convulsing and tightening upon her. Loosed, Groghan fell and landed upon the ship’s rail and scrambled frantically over it and over the deck, slipping and scuttling hands-and-feet away from the wild thrashing of the kraken’s smaller limbs. Laurence hauled himself up, ears ringing, through the cloud of smoke. The ball had struck the kraken’s body and gone in, a puckered mark on its side scorched black at the edges, but it looked dreadfully small against the mass of the creature, and if the wound were mortal, it would not be immediately so.
The kraken heaved three more tentacles onto the ship, exerting itself to finish off its recalcitrant prey, and pulled itself still further up: the great maw gaped over the rail, and the deck began to tilt so steeply Laurence was hanging from the gun ropes more than standing. Half a dozen of the tentacles were
coming for him, and the swords had slid away; he had a smaller knife in his boot, which he stabbed at them as best he could, and beat them off.
“Laurence!” a loud ringing voice called, over the screams and groaning of the wood, and Laurence looked in some confusion only to realize it was Céleste calling as the dragon plunged from the sky and struck at the head of the kraken. Even he was smaller than the leviathan, but he clawed it dreadfully, and with a darting strike of his head seized one of the tentacles in his jaws and bit it through with a violent snapping shake of his head.
“The one abaft the mainmast!” Laurence shouted, through cupped hands, sacrificing himself to the grasping tentacles to make the sound carry. “Strike there!”
Céleste twisted his head round and saw the tentacle, one of the largest, and the one which Laurence judged holding the kraken most securely to the ship; he struck at it with both forelegs, and tore it with his jaws. The kraken flailed at him, but he persisted, and worried his way through the entire limb. The kraken slid partway down as the loose end of the tentacle slithered off the far side of the ship, and the Reliant straightened a little in the waves, but the kraken’s weight dragged down two of the topsails, gripped by its longer limbs, and caught Céleste’s left wing in sailcloth and rope. He tipped over himself, and came nearly down upon the Reliant and the kraken, his flapping attempts to get loose only tangling him further, and the whole entwined mass of ship and dragon and monster rocked violently, threatening to doom all of them together.
And then Céleste spread wide the ruff round his neck and roared down directly at the kraken: a noise so violent the whole sea round the creature hollowed out to a deep concavity that bared its lower body and the seething mass of tentacles yet beneath the surface. The force of the roar traveled with visible rippling through the kraken’s flesh, bulging it out, until with a shocking eruption the entire head of the beast burst entirely.