Tongues of Serpents Page 0,9

clouds of bait-fish. 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 Riley, a Navy captain, should lower himself to call upon an Army major, who had behaved so outrageously and ungentle-manlike. Granby did not notice, but 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 for what I have done to anyone who has a right to ask, 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 harbor, I would like to know," Granby said heatedly, responding in kind, "and I don't care twopence 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 here 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