Crucible of Gold

Chapter 1

“I AM AFRAID HIS ATTENTION is much given to material things,” Shen Li observed in a mild way, while Temeraire strove in the distance lifting up the great carved-out slab of stone which should form the central part of the floor of the pavilion: a curious opinion to hear from a dragon, who were nearly all of them inclined to extreme attachment to material things; but perhaps her long stretches in the air, over the barren distances of the Australian deserts and the southern Pacific, had inclined the great-winged Chinese courier to adopt a philosophy more suited to her lot.

“It is of course an admirable work,” she added, “but such attachments inevitably must lead to suffering.”

Laurence answered her with only a small part of his attention: Temeraire had managed to get the slab aloft, and Laurence now waved the team of men forward to raise the skids which should guide it into its final resting place; but even this immediate work did not hold his thoughts. Those were bent upon the low hut some ten yards distant, under a stand of trees and the coolest place in their ragged encampment, where Hammond lay recovering: and with him all the world, come back to knock at Laurence’s threshold when he had thought it done with.

The slab swayed uncertainly in mid-air, then steadied as it reached the long wooden braces; Temeraire sighed out his breath and lowered slowly away, and the stone scraped bark and shreds of wood down onto the workers as the slab eased gently down and settled in, the men backing away with their staves as it slid.

“Well, and a miracle it is no-one was crushed, or lost a hand,” Mr. O’Dea said with something of an air of disappointment, as he paid off the men with their tots of rum and a few coins of silver; he had made a great many predictions of disaster over Temeraire’s obstinate determination to have the single enormous slab of beautifully marbled stone preserved at the heart of his pavilion.

“It would have been quite criminal to cut it up smaller,” Temeraire said, “and spoil the pattern; not that I do not admire mosaics very much, particularly if they are made of gems, but this is quite out of the common way, even though some might say it is just ordinary rock.”

He had finished inspecting all the supports, sniffing at the fresh mortar anxiously, and now sank down with some relief beside Laurence and Shen Li for a drink of water from the flowing stream. “Do you not agree?”

“It is very handsome,” Shen Li said, “although I can see no evil in admiring it in the valley where it was formed.”

“I do not mean to be rude, Laurence,” Temeraire said quietly aside, when she had turned her attention elsewhere, “but Shen Li can be rather dampening to one’s spirits; although I must be grateful to her for being so obliging as to come and bring us letters and visitors: how kind of Mr. Hammond to travel so long a way to see us.”

“Yes,” Laurence said soberly, as he undid the wrappings on the mail: a large and heavy scroll wrapped on rollers of jade, for Temeraire from his mother, Qian, which accompanied a book of poetry; and a thick sealed packet which Laurence turned over several times and at last had to remove the outer layer of covering to find it addressed to Gong Su with no more direction than his name.

“Thank you, Captain,” Gong Su said, and taking it went into his own small lean-to; shortly Laurence could see him performing the Chinese ritual of obeisance to it, and supposed it must be a communication from his father.

There was also, more incongruously, a heavily crossed note for a Mr. Richard Shipley: “Can this be for you, Mr. Shipley?” Laurence asked, doubtfully, wondering how a former convict should have come by a correspondent in China.

“Aye, sir,” the young man said, taking it, “my brother’s in the Willow-Tree as runs the Canton route, and much obliged to you.”

Shen Li had brought also a small mailbag to be passed along to Sydney, but these were all the letters directed to the members of their own small company of laborers. Laurence closed up the bag: O’Dea would take it to Port Jackson tomorrow, and perhaps Hammond would go along with it. His business might well be there, with Captain Rankin, who after all was the senior officer of the Corps in this country.

Laurence could not persuade himself to believe it, however. While the cows roasted on spits, for the dragons’ dinner, he walked out over the newly laid floor of the pavilion to its edge and looked down upon the broad valley, already sprouting with the first seed crops, and the browsing herd of sheep and cattle lowing soft to one another in the late afternoon. The war was only a distant storm passing on the other side of the mountains, a faint, far-away noise; here there was peace, and honest labor, without the clinging stink of murder and treachery which seemed to have by slow octopoid measures attached itself to his life. Laurence had found himself content to forget the world, and to be forgotten by it.

“Thank you, I will,” he heard Hammond saying, and turned: Hammond had at last emerged from the hut and was by the fireside accepting a glass of rum from Mr. O’Dea and sinking into an offered camp-chair. Laurence rubbed a hand over his jaw, over the hard prickle of the beard, grown familiar. No: Hammond had not come from Peking to bring a few letters and some conversation.

“Pray allow me to renew my gratitude,” Hammond said, struggling back to his feet, when Laurence had joined him. “I have slept all the day!—and I am astonished to see you so far advanced.” He nodded towards the pavilion.

“Yes, indeed,” Temeraire said, swinging his head around at the compliment, “everything is coming along splendidly, and we have thought up several small improvements to the ordinary design. You must walk through it; when you are feeling more the thing, of course: you cannot have had a comfortable journey.”

“No,” Hammond said, very decidedly, “—but I ought not be complaining; Laurence, will you think of it, three weeks!—this time three Sundays ago I was taking tea in Peking; it is scarcely to be believed. Although I am not certain I have survived the experience; yes, thank you, I will take another.”

Hammond was not a bulky man, and not given much to drink; three tots of strong unwatered rum worked upon his caution, or perhaps he would not have spoken so readily when Laurence said, “Sir, while your company must always be welcome, I must confess myself at a loss to answer for your presence here; you cannot have made such a journey for some trivial purpose.”

“Oh!” Hammond said, and looking round in vain for a table at last set down his glass upon the ground, and straightened up beaming, “but I must tell you at once: I am here to restore you to the list, Captain; you are reinstated, and—” Laurence was staring, while Hammond turned to rummaging in the inner pockets of his coat. “I even have them here, with me,” and brought out the two narrow gold bars which marked a captain of the Aerial Corps.

Laurence held himself very still a moment, against the involuntary betraying jerk of movement which nearly escaped: if the bars had not been lying across Hammond’s palm Laurence would have imagined it a sort of wretched joke, a twist of the mind inspired by exhaustion and liquor, but so much premeditation made it true: true, and no less absurd for that. He was a traitor. If he had done anything of note in the invasion of Britain to merit a lessening of the natural penalty for his crime, he had already been granted the clemency of transportation instead of hanging for services rendered, and since had done nothing which should merit the favorable attention of Whitehall: had indeed refused the orders of a Navy officer point-blank.

“Oh! Oh, Mr. Hammond, how could you not say so at once? But I must not reproach you, when you have brought such splendid news,” Temeraire was saying, head bent low and turned so that one enormous eye could survey the bars. “Laurence, you must have your green coat, at once; Mr. Shipley! Mr. Shipley, pray fetch Laurence’s chest here—”

“No,” Laurence said, “—no, I thank you. Sir,” he said to Hammond, with more courtesy than he could feel under the circumstances, “I am very sensible of the kindness you mean to do me by coming all this way with the news, but I must decline.”

He had said it: the only possible answer he could make, and bitter to give. The bars still hung upon Hammond’s palm before him: small and unadorned to represent as they did the lifting of a blot upon his name and his family, whose shame he had with so much effort learned not to think of, as he could do nothing to repair it.

Hammond stared, his hand still outstretched, and Temeraire said, “But Laurence, surely you cannot mean it,” looking at the gold bars.

“There can be only one purpose for ordering my reinstatement in such a manner, in our present circumstances,” Laurence said flatly, “and that is to charge me with oversetting the rebellion here in Sydney: no. I am sorry, sir, but I will not be the Government’s butcher again. I have no great sympathy for Mr. MacArthur and his grab for independence, but he has not acted without cause or without sense, and I will not slaughter British soldiers to march him to a scaffold.”

“Oh—but—” Hammond said, stuttering, “no; no, Captain—I mean, of course, Mr. Laurence; I ought not presume, but—sir, you have mistaken me. I do have business with Governor MacArthur; of course this notion of independence is all nonsense and cannot be allowed to stand, but that is not—while certainly your assistance would be convenient if—”

He paused, collecting himself, while Laurence steeled himself against the hope which demanded its long-abandoned place, and which he ought to have known better than to indulge: if Hammond had brought a mission which any honorable officer of the Corps might be asked to undertake, such an officer would have been asked. But Hammond had drawn himself up more formally: whatever he might now offer would certainly be cloaked in more tempting accents, and all the more difficult to resist.

“First,” Hammond said, “allow me to say I entirely understand your sentiments, sir; I beg your pardon for not expressing myself in a more sensible mode. I will also add for your ears that in many quarters, Mr. MacArthur’s other actions have been seen in nothing less than a prudential light. I hope you can imagine that cooler minds have regarded the prospect of outright war with China, which Captain Willoughby’s—out of courtesy, I will not say folly—which Captain Willoughby’s intentions would have induced, as sheer madness, and not in any accord with the spirit of his orders.”

Laurence only nodded, austerely; he had expressed much the same sentiments in his report on the matter to Jane Roland, which if it had not been officially taken notice of had certainly been seen: Hammond did not have to study far to know his feelings on that subject.

“Insofar as Mr. MacArthur has shown better judgment in rebelling than in acceding to so disastrous a course, he may well be pardoned for the extremity to which he has gone,” Hammond went on, “provided he should acknowledge his mistake and recant. You of course, having direct knowledge of the gentleman, can better say if he can be swayed by reason, but I assuredly have not come with the intention to work upon him by violence, or merely to treat him as a felon.”

“I am very sure Mr. MacArthur will be sensible,” Temeraire put in anxiously: his wings were pinned back flat and the expressive ruff also. Laurence knew Temeraire valued his lost captaincy all the more for blaming himself for its loss and that of the better part of Laurence’s fortune. Though Laurence was unable to value either so high as the honor which he had sacrificed, Temeraire had proven unable to accept his assurances on that score: perhaps for the greater chance which the former had, of ever being recovered.

But however Laurence thought of MacArthur—a second-rate Napoleon, whose talents were not more outsize than his ambitions—he could do him this much credit, or perhaps calumny: if Hammond indeed bore such an offer, Laurence thought it would indeed be accepted. Certainly MacArthur had proclaimed often enough that he had not rebelled on his own account, or for selfish reasons, but only to protect the colony. If that were not entirely the truth, at least MacArthur had deliberately kept open a line of defense less likely to lead him to the gallows; and if he were not inclined to be as sensible as Temeraire hoped, his wife, a wiser woman, likely would be on his behalf.

“Then for what purpose do you require me a captain, instead of a farmer?” Laurence said.

“Nothing at all to do with the rebellion,” Hammond said, and then qualified himself, “at least, perhaps—I do not wish to be accused of deceiving you, sir; it may have been considered as an adjunct to the main thrust of our deliberations, that your reinstatement should perhaps give my discussions with Mr. MacArthur a certain—a degree of—let us say, potency—”

“Yes,” Laurence said, dryly.

Hammond cleared his throat. “But that is not at all our central purpose: any dragon, any first-rate, might be deployed here for such an action, should it prove necessary, and certainly if you have any objection I would consider myself empowered to—that is, you should not have to undertake the mission yourself; after all there is nothing very urgent in correcting the situation, so long as Mr. MacArthur continues to accept the convict ships, as he has. No: it is the situation in Brazilia; perhaps you have heard something of it?”

Laurence paused; he had heard only the most wild hearsay, borne by an American sea-captain. “That Napoleon had shipped some number of the Tswana dragons there, to attack the colony; to Rio, I understand, if it is not only rumor.” They heard only a little news in their isolate valley, and he had not pursued more than what came of its own accord.

“No—no, not rumor,” Hammond said. “Bonaparte has conveyed, at last report, more than a dozen beasts of the most fearsome description, who have wholly laid waste Rio; and there is every expectation of his shipping still more as soon as his transports should return to Africa for them.”

Laurence began to understand, now, what might have brought Hammond here, and his anxious look. “Yet I was only a prisoner among them, sir,” Laurence said slowly, remembering that sudden and dreadful captivity: borne over a thousand miles into the heart of a continent and separated from Temeraire without warning and, at the time, no understanding of the purpose behind his abduction.

“That is more familiarity than nearly any other person can claim,” Hammond said, “and in particular with their language—their customs—”

He stammered over it, and Laurence listened with skepticism: what he had learned over the course of those months of captivity, most of it spent in a prison-cave, he had conveyed in his reports, and he found it difficult to believe that his small experience of the Tswana should have rendered him an acceptable ambassador in the eyes of their Lordships.

To this Hammond said, “I believe—that is to say, I have heard—that his Grace of Wellington thought it not inadvisable—”

“If Wellington maintains any sentiments towards myself or Temeraire past the liveliest impatience, I should be astonished to hear it,” Laurence said.

“Well,” Hammond said, “rather, as I understand it—a certain suggestion—”

Hammond tried for a little longer to dress it up: but when at last he came out with a description which Laurence could swallow, it seemed Wellington had expressed the opinion that if anyone might be hoped to have success at talking sense into a band of uncontrollable dragons, it should be the two of them; as long as someone was sent along to be sure they did not in the process give away three-quarters of the colony.

“I am sure we should be splendid ambassadors,” Temeraire put in, peering down at Laurence hopefully, “however uncomplimentary Wellington may have been about it. Not that I was not quite angry with the Tswana at the time, for after all they had no right to take you, but one must make allowances for their people being taken for slaves, and I am sure the Tswana can be reasonable. Indeed, I do not see why we might not satisfy them at once, by returning those who were stolen.”

“Ah,” Hammond said awkwardly, “yes, well—of course, the interests of our allies must be considered—the difficulty of tracing particular individuals—and naturally the position of the Government vis-à-vis the, the property rights of—”

“Oh! Property rights! That is perfectly absurd to say,” Temeraire said. “If I should take a cow to eat, even if no-one was watching it, you should call it stealing; and if I should give it away to Kulingile for some opals, you would not say that he had any property rights, I am sure, particularly if he knew perfectly well that it was not my own cow at the time.”

Hammond began to take on again the harried look familiar from several occasions of their first mission together, to China, and Laurence was unable to resist, with a certain dour amusement, some speculation whether Hammond would not quickly regret having allowed time to soften his impressions of those past difficulties—and to add a roseate glow to the final triumph—and having volunteered himself as the man intended to keep a leash upon them in this proposed endeavor.

For his own part, Laurence was entirely sure that the number of slaves who would be returned in such a programme as Temeraire proposed would not satisfy the Tswana. Even if the Portuguese were willing to hand over their slaves honestly, they could not raise up the dead devoured by the cruel labor of their mines and plantations, and by the hopelessness of their captivity. Nor could he conceive of making himself in any way the agent of slave-owners, which Hammond had ought to have known, if not from acquaintance with Laurence himself, then from the reputation of his father: Lord Allendale had long been a passionate advocate for abolition.

“But nothing of the sort is conceived, I assure you,” Hammond protested. “Indeed, I will go so far as to say that the Portuguese are quite prepared—under the circumstances, a certain readiness to compromise—” He halted, before making any outright promises, and added, “but in any case, you should not at all be their agent, but ours.”

“And our interest in the matter?” Laurence said.

“The establishment of peace,” Hammond said, “which surely you cannot dispute to be desirable.”

“Peace is not unpleasant, or nearly so boring as one might expect,” Temeraire said, with a faintly wistful note that gave him the lie, “but I do not see why you should be particularly interested in peace in Brazil; if you thought it so splendid you might make peace with Napoleon, in Europe, first: not that I at all wish to promote such a thing,” he added hastily, “at least, not while Lien is lording it over in France: I hope we shall never be at peace with her.”

“Ah,” Hammond said, fumbling, and then stopped, visibly irresolute before saying, “Sir, if I may rely upon your discretion—the utmost secrecy—”

“I am sure you may,” Temeraire said with interest, pricking forward his ruff as he leaned in; Hammond looked still more uncertain, as a large dragon’s notion of confidential whispering might be heard a good ten yards away.

“So far as it is in our power, you may,” Laurence said, “and for what we cannot control, you may rely, sir, on your news being of only scant interest locally, and unlikely of being carried on in any manner which should render it worth relying upon, to any hostile agent.”

That, at least, was very true: there was commerce to and from Port Jackson, but there was not a man laboring in the valley who might reasonably expect to leave this country again; where poverty and perpetual inebriation did not bar them, the law would, and they were as trapped here as Laurence had thought himself and Temeraire to be. Britain was another world; the war a distant fairy-story; none of them would care, if they overheard.

“Then I will be so bold as to reveal to you,” Hammond said, “Napoleon has overreached, with the failure of his invasion, and now the jaws of a trap are laid open for him at last: we will shortly be landing our own troops in Portugal. We mean to bleed him from the south, while the Russians and the Prussians come at him from the east; and Wellington is confident of our eventual victory.”

Audacious in its very extremity: Laurence could only imagine the slog of this proposed war, their troops clawing one inch at a time slowly up the Peninsula through Portugal, through Spain, through the Pyrenees at last to France. Napoleon had indeed suffered dreadful losses in Britain, and left behind an army of prisoners in making his own escape, but whether those losses had been sufficient to leave him vulnerable to final defeat in a grinding campaign, Laurence was not nearly so certain.

“But there can be no hope of victory at all, without a foothold established,” he said.

“Yes,” Hammond said. “We must have Portugal. And if the Prince Regent should have to flee Brazil and return, with Napoleon already occupying Spain—”

“You doubt their continued willingness to permit our passage,” Laurence said.

Hammond nodded. “We must have Portugal,” he repeated.

Temeraire had scarcely understood at first what Hammond was about; it did not seem reasonable to him that anything so momentous should be attended with so little ceremony or notice, but he recalled that just so had it happened to begin with that Laurence had lost his rank. Temeraire had known nothing of it, until one afternoon someone was calling him Mr. Laurence, and the golden bars had gone; and now here they appeared again as swiftly, a lovely gleam in Hammond’s palm.

Laurence was silent, when Hammond had finished expounding on the mission; Temeraire looked at him anxiously. “It does not seem to me there is anything very unpleasant in what Hammond is asking,” he ventured. He could not—naturally he did not wish Laurence to accept his commission back, if it only meant being ordered to do something dreadful, which they should have to refuse, and then have the same unpleasantness of being called traitors all over again; but it was very hard to have such a chance extended and then snatched away.

“You must be tired, sir, after your journey,” Laurence said to Hammond. “If you would care to refresh yourself, my hut is at your disposal, and there is clean water to hand here above the falls; Mr. Shipley will, I hope, be so good as to show you the way,” beckoning to that fellow.

“Oh—oh, certainly,” Hammond said, and went away, though he looked over his shoulder more than once, despite the rough ground, as if to read Laurence’s thoughts off his face.

“Of course you shall not do anything you would dislike, Laurence,” Temeraire said, when Hammond had gone away, and left them in privacy, “only, it does not seem to me there is anything to object to in going to Brazil, and you should have your title back, and your rank.”

“That, my dear, can be nothing more than a polite fiction,” Laurence said. “I cannot pretend that I am in any real sense an officer of any corps when I am determined never again to submit to orders which my own judgment should find immoral.”

A fiction which brought with it bars of gold, and changed entirely the mode in which persons addressed you, seemed to Temeraire real enough for anyone’s taste. “And after all, it is not as though they must give you dreadful orders: perhaps they will have learned their lesson, and think better of it, from now on,” he said hopefully. He did not have any great reliance on the wisdom of the Government, but anyone might be expected to learn, after so many proofs, that he and Laurence were not to be cowed into doing anything which was not just.

“I am sure they will not rely upon either of us to any extent further than they must,” Laurence said.

He was silent again: standing, with his hands clasped behind his back, and looking out over the great expanse of the valley; even in his rough clothes his shoulders were as straight as though they still bore the golden epaulets in which Temeraire had first seen him, and only a little imagination was required to restore to him his uniform, his green coat and the leather harness, and the golden bars. Laurence paused and after a moment longer asked, “Do you wish to go, then?”

It only then occurred to Temeraire that of course, the mission would require leaving their valley. He turned and looked at the pavilion, and the herd of cattle milling below among the grass; the prospect of tree-furred gorges stretched out before them, carved through the yellow and ochre rock of the mountains. He curled his tail in, the tip wanting to switch uneasily through the air; it seemed as though they had only just come and begun the work.

Perhaps it was not so exciting as battles—Temeraire could not argue that—but there was something splendid even in seeing plants grow, when one had helped to sow the fields, and the pavilion half-finished seemed already lonely and abandoned when he thought of going away.

“I suppose—we have been happy here?” Temeraire said, half-questioning. “And I would not like to leave things undone, but—” He looked at Laurence. “Would you rather stay?”

Temeraire drowsed off a few hours later; the handful of small fires near the campsite died away to embers yellow as cream, and the great swath of southern stars came out overhead. From the far side of the valley Laurence heard faintly a song, rising and falling, too distantly for words: the Wiradjuri in their summer camp along the river.

Tomorrow was Tuesday: he should ordinarily have gone down to meet with them and exchange goods, and present for their approval Temeraire’s next intended step in the pavilion’s construction, the acquisition of timber from a stand of large old trees to the north, for the wall-paneling and to build out the rooms which Laurence himself should occupy, and any of their human guests.

O’Dea would go to Sydney with the mail, and return in a week’s time perhaps with some new book. In the meantime, there was the rest of the floor to be laid down, and two of the men had already been set to working upon the shingles for the eventual roof. In a few days the cattle would be moved to fresh pasture; in the evenings Laurence would puzzle out the new volume of Chinese poetry under Temeraire’s guidance: the ordinary daily course of their new life.

Or instead they might be aloft for Port Jackson and Brazil: a couple of pebbles briefly cast up and allowed to rest on the shore, carried away again into the ocean by the retreating tide.

Laurence knew his decision already made; perhaps had been made even before Hammond had spoken. He wished he could be certain his choice was not driven by pride, by the lingering grip of shame: he had done his best to make his peace with his own treason, since it had been a necessary evil, but he could not deny Hammond had laid out a potent bribe. Easy enough to hope, to plan, that they should do more good than evil in the grander orbits of the world, if they should re-enter that sphere; easier still for those hopes to prove false.

Easier than that, to allow those fears to imprison them more securely even than the miles of ocean. Laurence laid a hand on the warm scaled hide of Temeraire’s foreleg. If nothing else, Temeraire was not made to lie idle, in a peaceful valley at the far ends of the earth.

Temeraire slitted open one blue eye and made an interrogative noise, not quite awake.

“No; go back to sleep, all is well,” Laurence said, and when the heavy lid had slid closed again, he stood up; and went down to the river to shave.

Chapter 2

“I CANNOT SAY MUCH FOR A PAVILION without a roof,” Iskierka said, with quite unbearable superiority, “and anyway you cannot bring it along, so even if it were finished, it would not be of any use. I do not think anyone can disagree I have used my time better.”

Temeraire could disagree, very vehemently, but when Iskierka had chivvied a few of her crew—newly brought on in Madras—into bringing up the sea-chests from below, and throwing open the lids to let the sunlight in upon the heaped golden vessels, and even one small casket of beautifully cut gemstones, he found his arguments did ring a little hollow. It seemed the Allegiance had in her lumbering way still managed to get into flying distance of not one but three lawful prizes, on the way to Madras, and another one on the way back, when Hammond’s urgent need of a transport to carry Temeraire to Rio had necessitated her abrupt about-face and return.

“It does not seem very fair,” Temeraire said to Laurence, “when one considers how much sea-journeying we have done, without even one French merchantman coming anywhere in reach; and I do not find that Riley expects we should meet others on the way to Brazil, either.”

“No, but we may meet a whaler or two, if you like,” Laurence said absently. Temeraire was not mollified; whales were perfectly tolerable creatures, very good eating when not excessively large, but no-one could compare them to cartloads of gems and gold; and as for ambergris, he did not care for the scent.

Laurence was presently interviewing the aviators at the covert to form their new crew—a small and undistinguished group to choose from, even though swelled by other men whom Granby had brought back from Madras, the coverts there having been half-emptied of dragons by the plague. But it seemed Iskierka had already taken her pick of the available men for her own crew. Temeraire and Laurence were only to have the leavings, even though, Temeraire thought, they had the greater seniority and also the greater need, as one could not conveniently get very many men on Iskierka’s back to begin with thanks to her endlessly steaming spikes.

Temeraire could only console himself that at least he now had Fellowes back as his very own ground-crew master, and Emily Roland was once more officially Laurence’s ensign; but apart from this he had been stripped almost entirely. At least Gong Su had remained with them all along, so Temeraire had one properly loyal crew member—but Dorset for no very good reason had decided not to rejoin them. There had been some suggestion that it was his duty to stay with the covert, which had no other surgeon; but why Dorset might not come along, and Iskierka’s new surgeon remain behind instead, Temeraire did not understand at all.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Blincoln said, standing rather awkwardly outside the clearing where Laurence was sitting with his writing-table, “sir, I hoped I might have a word.”

Laurence looked up from his notes, and Blincoln began to stumble over an apology—very sorry if he should ever have failed in proper respect; hoped he had done his duty as best he could, always; begged leave to recommend himself to Captain Laurence’s attention—

“Mr. Blincoln,” Laurence said, interrupting him, “I have no complaint to make of your manner towards me under the previous circumstances; if any apology on that score is merited, you may consider it accepted if you wish. I should by far be more inclined to hire a man who had abused me to my face, for a just conviction, than one who has to my own certain knowledge and further credible report behaved in an outrageous and underhanded fashion towards a young officer, friendless and without that defense which he ought have had from your superiors, and knowingly and with selfish intent interfered with the rearing of a beast not his own.”

Laurence meant Demane: evidently the aviators in Sydney had continued their attempts to sway Kulingile away from him, and it was no surprise to Temeraire that Rankin should have done nothing to prevent it. Although, Temeraire did not think it should have been anything so very dreadful if one of the other aviators had succeeded. After all, Demane should have been very welcome back in his own crew, and been much better off, if his dragon had proven so very faithless. Not, of course, that Temeraire wished for any such thing to happen; only, if it had—well, it had not; he sighed, peering over at the sadly abbreviated list of officers that Laurence had jotted down.

Blincoln meanwhile would have protested, but Laurence cut him short. “No,” he said, “I have no interest in hearing whatever explanations you can dredge up, and that your casting of lures was condoned by your senior officer and imitated by many of your fellows as little excuses you as it does credit to any of them. It was wrong in you, and you knew it so; I must ask you and any other man who has acted in similar fashion to expect nothing from me but the strongest possible censure.”

Blincoln hastily retreated; and Laurence put down his pen. “I find I am more given to haste, these days; I have grown too used to a more select company,” he said to Temeraire ruefully.

“It was certainly no more than he deserved,” Temeraire said, “for imagining we should take him for my crew; I certainly have not forgotten how rude he was to you.”

“I can make allowances for any man who might object to treason,” Laurence said, with far more tolerance than Temeraire thought merited, since they had not properly been traitors after all, and now even the Government had admitted it. “But not of this selfish and underhanded leech-work; and now I think on it, we cannot leave Kulingile and Demane here under Rankin’s command. I must speak with Hammond: between us and Granby, I think we have enough authority to make off with a heavyweight, particularly as he has never been formally issued orders since the hatching. Otherwise those men will never let them alone; and if they should think my reinstatement means my ill-report of them will have more credence, they will only grow all the more vicious, for having less to lose by it.”

“Of course Demane should come with us,” Temeraire said, brightening, “and if Kulingile chooses, I do not see any objection. He might come instead of Iskierka?” he suggested hopefully. Unfortunately, it seemed that Hammond quite insisted on her accompanying them: more of this unreasonable favoritism towards fire-breathers.

But at least Kulingile’s coming meant that Temeraire should not be parted from Demane and from Sipho—whom Temeraire was also not prepared to cede from his own crew, even though as Demane’s brother his proper posting might be contested. “But I have an egg-mate back in China, and it is not as though we are always together; so it does not necessarily follow,” Temeraire said to himself, arguing it out.

“Mr. O’Dea will come with us, also, I think,” Laurence said. “He has grown steady, these last few months; and at least that will mean one decent hand in the log-book; and Mr. Shipley. Yes, Roland?”

Emily Roland had come into the clearing, and said in a low tone, “Sir, I beg your pardon; they won’t let him come up, but I thought—I was sure you would wish—”

Temeraire looked down the hill, where the all but unnecessary gate to the covert was manned rather to occupy the aviators than to prevent any incursions from the town: a man in ordinary clothing was being barred. “Why,” Temeraire said with pleasure, after squinting to be sure, although the shock of reddish brown hair was immediately familiar, “I think that is Lieutenant Ferris; whyever should they not let him come up?”

Laurence looked very pale, and said quietly, “Roland, if you please, run and tell those men to stand aside, and that Mr. Ferris is my guest.”

She nodded and dashed away, and shortly Ferris came into the clearing: quite altered, Temeraire found on closer inspection. He had grown heavier-set, especially in the shoulders, and perhaps he had been sunburnt so often that the color had finally stuck, for he was florid in the cheeks, and seemed older than he must be. Temeraire was delighted nevertheless: Ferris had perhaps not been so good a first lieutenant as Granby, but he had been very young at the time, and in any case he should certainly be an improvement over any of the officers here, and of Iskierka’s crew, also.

Poor Ferris looked very ill, Laurence thought as he stood to meet him: untimely aged beyond his twenty and three, and, Laurence was sorry to see, the marks of strong drink beginning to be visible in his face.

“I am very happy to see you again, Mr. Ferris,” Temeraire was saying, inclining his head, “however you have come here; are you lately arrived?”

Ferris a little stumblingly said he had come on a recent colony ship—he had heard—and there trailed off; Laurence said, “Temeraire, if you will excuse us; Mr. Ferris, perhaps you will walk with me a moment.”

Ferris came with him to the small tent which Laurence was using for shelter: set apart from the other aviators, to avoid grating too often against Rankin; Laurence was doubly grateful for the privacy now. He waved Ferris to one of the small camp-chairs, and sitting said quietly, “I am also very glad indeed to see you again, and to have the opportunity to make my apologies, if you can indeed have the grace to accept them: I know of no man I have wronged more deeply.”

Ferris darkened a little in the cheeks, and took Laurence’s offered hand with a low and half-muttered word, not intelligible.

Laurence paused, but Ferris did not speak further, his eyes still downcast. Laurence hardly knew how to proceed—to offer amends at once impossible and insulting. He had thought to protect Ferris, and his other officers, by concealing from them his treason and Temeraire’s; but the court-martial had struck wherever a target might be found, and for the sin of ignorance, Ferris had been dismissed from the service. A promising career blighted, a family heritage disgraced, and the only thing Laurence could not reproach himself for was that by some small grace they had not hanged him.

“We looked for word of you,” Laurence said finally, “but—I could not presume to write your family—”

“No, of course,” Ferris said, low. “I know you were in prison, when—” and they were silent once again.

“I can hardly offer you any recompense which should be adequate,” Laurence said at last: as futile as the offer might be, still it must be made. “But whatever remedy should be in my power to make you—if you have come here intending to establish an estate, I would—” Laurence swallowed his distaste. “I can presume on some acquaintance with the governor, MacArthur; if you should—”

“No, sir, I don’t, that—I heard you had gone, and Temeraire, to start the breeding grounds here,” Ferris said. “I thought, if you were not an officer yourself, anymore, then perhaps you might—that I might be of use, if I came. And in any case—” He stopped, and indeed did not need to go on to make abundantly clear the other motives which should have made such a flimsy hope sufficient to induce him to take ship around the world, for a tiny and ill-run prison colony: the worst sort of disgrace and mortification, and the life of an outcast. “But I hear you are restored to the list, sir.”

Laurence scarcely repressed a flinch: he, the actual traitor, had been reinstated, and guiltless Ferris had not. And that very injustice now barred Laurence from giving him a real place: as a captain of the Aerial Corps, he could appoint only aviators to Temeraire’s crew. He might contrive to offer Ferris some unofficial position, as a hanger-on of sorts; but such a situation could only be deeply painful, putting Ferris in daily company with aviators less gifted and likely to offer him the same disdain which Laurence with more justice had met.

He made the offer nevertheless. “If you should care for such employment as should offer itself,” he said, the details of necessity remaining vague, “and would not object to the journey, I would be glad of your—” There he stopped, and finished awkwardly with, “—company,” as the best of inadequate choices.

“I would be glad of—of the opportunity,” Ferris said, also awkward; that he perceived all the same disadvantages as did Laurence was plain, and equally plain that he was resigned to them. Laurence could not help but recognize he had no other alternative that was preferable: a miserable situation in which to offer a man work, knowing him unable to refuse.

“I will send word to the Allegiance; if you will be so good as to transfer your things there,” Laurence said. “We leave at the earliest opportunity.”

“I am very sorry not to be able to oblige you, Captain,” Hammond said, “but of course, you understand that only Royal dispensation can make any remedy—I would be happy to write a letter, in this regard—”

Laurence had written before now, more than once, and knew that Jane would have gladly seen Ferris reinstated as well if she could; he was not in the least sanguine. “Sir,” he said, “I beg you will forgive me; I have made no demands, nor have I any for myself or for Temeraire, but I must make this my price, as little as I like to have one. You must see there is no just cause why I should have my rank restored, and Mr. Ferris not.”

“He does not have a dragon,” Hammond said, brutally. “No,” he added, “I do understand your sentiments, Captain, and without exceeding myself I will venture so far as to say, the successful accomplishment of our mission should certainly have a material and beneficial effect on his suit; particularly if the young man in question—I understand he will be accompanying us?—should manage to be of service during the expedition.”

With such scant assurances, insufficient even to mention to Ferris, Laurence was forced to content himself; and he regretted the lack even more when he had completed his interviews: the crew he had managed to assemble was not one such as to inspire great confidence. He had taken on Lieutenant Forthing, who had shown himself a competent officer if not a brilliant one, during their crossing of the continent; and for midshipmen three of the younger men: Cavendish, Bellew, and Avery. These were distinguished from the others mainly for their having had less time in their careers to demonstrate a lack of initiative or skill, so he could have some small hope of uncovering some previously hidden talent.

The farewell dinner, given by Mrs. MacArthur, was an event of considerable magnificence despite the limitations of the colony; her husband had been reasonable, or at least sufficiently so to persuade Hammond to endorse the occasion. “You know, Ambassador, I don’t care if I shall call myself First Minister or Governor or Grand High Master of Kangaroos, in the least,” MacArthur had said to him, and repeated at nearly every opportunity, with small variations, wherever witnesses would listen to him, “so long as it is understood we must be allowed to know our business better than anyone else, and let to settle it ourselves, instead of this sitting fire waiting eight months for word from Westminster, or worse, having some Navy officer with more will than mother-wit come blundering in to set us at logger-heads with our nearer neighbors, and they only looking for good trading partners, as we would anyhow care to be.”

The distinction between this position and real independence seemed to Laurence a vague semantical thing, but at least for the moment Hammond professed himself satisfied to indeed call MacArthur Governor, and to see the British colors on the flagpole above the Government House, and to attend his dinner there.

The table was lopsided, almost inevitably, but Mrs. MacArthur had managed to find enough women to intersperse between any men of the rank of lieutenant or higher, so at least the upper half of her table preserved the appearance of even numbers. There was still very little in the way of society in the colony, and Laurence found himself seated beside the particularly beautiful wife of a captain in the New South Wales Corps, one of MacArthur’s subordinates, whom a very little conversation sufficed to discover had come over on a convict ship, for pickpocketing.

Mrs. Gerald could not be called respectable except in the article of her marriage, which she did not scruple to avow, over her third glass, “the best joke, because Timothy would always go on as he was hanging out for a rich woman, when he should go back to England; and nothing more tiresome for a girl to hear. So I wrote out a long letter to myself, and put on it the name of an old beau of mine back home, saying as how he was coming out and meant to have me, with a ring if you please, and I left it about where Timothy should see it: meaning only to keep him from going on as though I was beneath thinking of for anybody. But he went into a rage, and stormed about so, that I lost my temper quite and said he might marry me himself, or else go about his business; and so here I am! And I swear he is none the worse by it, for I am sure no rich woman would know the first thing about how to get on in a country like this.”

She was, despite lacking any shade of sensibility, an amiable dinner companion, more so than the wretched creature on Laurence’s other side, whom he would have been astonished to find a day above fifteen years of age, evidently released from the schoolroom just in time for the event. Despite a better share of the virtues of birth and education than Mrs. Gerald, Miss Hershelm was stricken with so much shyness that all Laurence’s efforts could barely win a syllable from her lips; she did not raise her eyes from her plate even once.

He could not think the occasion ideal for such a child, particularly when the younger men lower down the table began to show signs of forgetting their company, and growing boisterous. Laurence saw Mrs. MacArthur glance down the table, and a quick word to her butler followed; an assemblage of cheeses and sweets came to the table accompanying the pudding, in a rather incoherent combination. Laurence rather suspected another two courses had been intended and forgone, though no-one could have complained of the menu so far: fresh-caught roughy in a sauce of lemons and oranges, with fresh peas; an exceedingly handsome crown roast of lamb ornamented with preserved cherries; new potatoes in their skins presented alongside veal chops dressed with brown butter; a whole tunny baked in salt crust, occupying half the table.

But when the pudding had been cleared, Mrs. MacArthur rose; with equal prudence, MacArthur did not let the port go round very long after dinner was cleared, and proposed their rejoining the ladies almost at once.

When they had come into the drawing rooms, several of the women had vanished, Miss Hershelm among them, Laurence was glad to see; Mrs. Gerald, on the other hand, coming up took him by the arm and declared her intention of presenting him to all the eligible young ladies of the company.

“For it is a great shame you should not be doing some girl any good,” she said, “and it is really too bad of you; I am sure you could use some good company, and you needn’t worry I will present you to anyone so poor-spirited as to mind a dragon. Miss Oakley, may I introduce to you Captain Laurence?”

Laurence managed eventually to demur, on the grounds of ineligibility and imminent departure both, and joined Hammond by the balcony, where he was speaking with another of the ladies: a Mrs. Pemberton, widowed on the very journey which had brought her to the colony, and only lately out of black gloves.

“I do not suppose we would have thought of it, save that Elizabeth—Mrs. MacArthur—is a friend of mine, from our schoolroom days,” she said, Hammond having exclaimed over her having made so long a journey. “But having made your own home in so distant a country as China, can you be so surprised that others might wish to see more of the world than encompassed by a single parish in Devonshire, and six weeks in London? I was glad of the notion when she proposed our coming and taking up a grant of land; her husband would have had work for mine. But there is nothing for a woman alone to do here.”

Except to marry again, she did not say, and her speaking look at the company—grown coarser by the moment, and more loud—made clear she did not see much to admire in the local prospects.

“You might return to England,” Hammond said.

“And go back to Devonshire, and tat lace with my mother-in-law, while her pug snores at our feet,” she said, dryly: it did not seem the sort of portrait which would appeal to a woman who had willingly followed her husband across the world to a half-established colony. “I understand you are gone away again shortly, yourselves?”

“As soon as we have our tide, and the wind is in the west,” Hammond said, poetic but quite inaccurate, as making sail with a westerly wind from her present anchorage would serve better to drive the Allegiance onto the harbor rocks than to the open ocean. “But I do hope to return to England, ma’am, someday. I do not grudge my country any service, but I am not so peripatetic as that; and surely the delights of home must call still more to a woman’s heart.”

“And you, Captain Laurence?” she asked. “Does your heart yearn for a quiet retirement at the end of your service, and a house in the country?”

There was something a little mocking in her tone. “Only if there were room enough for a dragon,” Laurence said, and excused himself to step outside and take the air: in the dark, with the lights of the house shining and the garden full of palm-trees and fruit bats obscured, he might have been at exactly that sort of manor, which he might indeed have imagined for himself, six years and a lifetime ago. He had given the future scarcely a thought since then, occupied excessively by an unexpected present; he was surprised to find he would now gladly prefer his isolate valley, with all its toil and inconveniences.

But the valley had been left behind: the cattle sold, or loaded aboard the Allegiance to feed the dragons; the pavilion roofless under the stars with its pillars sentinel over the half-grown sheaves of wheat. No caretaker could be found for so lonely a place; if ever they returned, there would be vines twining the pillars, and weeds and saplings thick in the fields they had so laboriously cleared.

If ever they returned. He turned and went back into the house.

The governor’s mansion stood opposite the promontory housing the covert, around the bay, so the aviators and the soldiers had a sobering course of night air on the way back to their quarters. Some of the younger officers found the lights of the dockside taverns along the way a stronger lure than the quiet of their barracks, however, and eeled away in twos and threes; until Laurence was very nearly walking alone but for Granby. Rankin was on ahead, with Lieutenant Blincoln and Lieutenant Drewmore, and without need for discussion Laurence and Granby slowed their steps and turned off onto a more circuitous route, to stretch out the walk.

“No-one can say it wasn’t a handsome way to see us off,” Granby said, “although MacArthur might have been less festive about it: I am sure he would have wrung my hand with just as much pleasure if I had told him I was going to the devil; not to say we aren’t.”

“I think we must have a little more faith in Mr. Hammond than that,” Laurence said.

“I’ve more in the Tswana,” Granby said. “I can’t imagine what he supposes we are going to say that will turn them up sweet, and they have some damned dangerous beasts: fire-breathers, and four heavy-weight breeds that we know of, and we know precious little. I would just as soon try farther north, and see if the colonials would hire out some of their beasts for fighting, if they have so many they are using them for freight these days.”

He spoke with a vague disgruntlement shared, Laurence knew, by every aviator who had learned that the Americans had begun to raise dragons in so much earnest that they were bidding fair to rival British numbers, with a scant fraction of the number of men looking to fly them: it was deeply dissatisfying to those who had spent their lives in service, hoping for a rare chance to one day captain their own dragon.

“But much smaller creatures,” Laurence said, “and without military training; there can be no comparison. You may be certain Napoleon will have shipped the most deadly of the Tswana, and as many of them as he could cram aboard his transports.”

“Well, I will hope the three of us may make them take enough notice to bother listening, instead of just having at us straight off,” Granby said, but pessimistically.

“I know Hammond is claiming there will be reinforcements sent to meet us from Halifax, or the Channel, but I will rely on that when they land before us yelling for cattle, and not an instant before.

“Anyway, I oughtn’t complain about the Foreign Office’s latest notion, when I am damned grateful for the consequences: it was enough to drive a fellow wild thinking of you and Temeraire thrown away in this wretched little port with that fellow Rankin yapping at your heels, and a crowd of useless layabouts besides. I don’t blame you for chucking the lot of them and going into the wilds. Whatever are they about, now?” They had come at last in sight of the covert gates, and there was a commotion up on the hillside.

They found something of an uproar, overseen by four interested dragons whose heads loomed above the knot of men; Demane at the heart of it, Laurence rather despairingly saw, and an officer of the New South Wales Corps on his knees in the dirt before him with a bloody lip and wild-eyed alarm at Kulingile peering down.

“—outrage,” Rankin was saying in great heat, “—will have his commander here in the morning, demanding an explanation—”

“I don’t care!” Demane said. “And the only one who has been outrageous is him; I know you don’t care a jot, so he is here and will stay here, until Captain Laurence comes back; and if he wants to get up and leave before then, he may try, and I will have Kulingile hold him upside-down over the cliff.”

“But Roland, I am sure if Demane is angry with him, he has done something to deserve it,” Temeraire was saying meanwhile to Emily Roland, with what Laurence could only call misplaced loyalty, “so there is no reason not to wait for Laurence to come back: he will certainly know whatever is the best thing to do. But perhaps you had better not hold that fellow over the cliff,” he added to Kulingile, the first thing of sense in the conversation, “for you might very easily drop him, if he squirmed. If he should try and run away, you can just pin him down instead: only being careful not to squash him.”

“You are all a pack of damned fools,” Roland said, as furious as Laurence had ever heard her, “and if he weren’t a coward, he would run, and none of you should do anything; there ain’t any reason the captain ought hear anything about it.”

Iskierka said, “Well, I would like to hear about it, as I am not asleep anymore; is there some fighting?”

“Oh, lord,” Granby said, under his breath.

“I am here; what the devil is going on?” Laurence said grimly. “Demane, we spoke this afternoon, I thought, on the subject of brawling.”

“I haven’t!” Demane said; then realizing the bloody mess of his captive’s face gave him every appearance of a lie, added, “Roland did that; only she would have let him off—”

“Because I didn’t care to make a stupid great fuss of knocking down some drunken looby is no reason for you to put your oar into it; what bloody right do you suppose you have, pushing into my affairs?” Roland said. “Sir, pray don’t give him any mind—”

“How was I to know, anyway?” the soldier blurted, from the ground, “—with her hanging about in trousers; I thought it was a get-up, for a joke.”

“If it was, that wouldn’t mean I wanted any of your grabbing, anyway,” Roland said contemptuously, “and if you didn’t know that, you ought have asked, first, if you mean to complain of me.”

Rankin snorted. “Ah; I might have known it would be something on the order of this sordid mess. You may relieve yourself of your prisoner, Demane: no-one expects that the women of the Corps protect their virtue as if they were gentlewomen, and I can only imagine the ridicule with which any suit for breach should meet in such a case; or did you expect to be permitted to hang him for jealousy?”

“That is enough, sir; more than enough,” Laurence said to Rankin, sharply. “And you: your name, sir, and your commander’s,” he said to the soldier, who a little belligerently gave it as Lieutenant Paster. “He will hear from me in the morning; I trust he will share my opinion of a man who cannot show decent respect either to a woman, or to a fellow officer.”

Lieutenant Paster did not stay to argue, when Laurence had waved him off, but escaped down the hill at speed; Demane scowled, and the crowd began to disperse with the focus of interest lost.

“Sir, I don’t need a fuss made,” Roland said, coming up to him. “There wasn’t anything to the matter—”

“If you please,” Laurence said, forestalling her with a hand, and turning to lead her back to his tent, Demane following and trying to speak to her; Roland kept a determined shoulder to his face and ignored him coldly, while he protested that he had only done as he ought—

“That is more than I can say,” Laurence said sharply, sitting at his desk. “Your first concern, Demane, ought have been for the reputation and satisfaction of the lady in question, neither of which can have been served by enacting a public scene in a temper—”

“Thank you, sir,” Roland said, and glared at Demane with satisfaction.

“—I excuse it in the circumstances,” Laurence added, “only as having proceeded from my own failing: the insult could not have been offered in the first place, had I done my duty and arranged for proper chaperonage. No, Roland,” he said, when she began to splutter, “your duties must of course come first, but you are nevertheless a gentlewoman and the daughter of a gentlewoman—”

“I am not!” she said, indignantly. “I am an officer and Mother is—”

“If a man may be asked to be both officer and gentleman, so, too, may you, as far as duty permits,” Laurence said implacably, “—The one does not preclude you from the responsibilities of the other; nor me from mine as your guardian, until you are of age. I will see to the matter in the morning.”

“Now see what you have done,” Roland hissed at Demane, and stormed out of the tent.

“Sir,” Demane said in protest, “I didn’t mean anything of the sort; it is not as though I would let anyone bother Roland—”

“That, sir, is not your privilege,” Laurence said, “nor will be, unless Roland should choose to make it yours, with the consent of her family; until then, I will see to it you comport yourself as a gentleman, also. There will be no more of this running wild, and so far as you choose to press your suit, you will do so within bounds.”

“But that is not—Roland and I—” Demane said.

“Has she made you any commitments, or given you license to consider her promised to you?” Laurence said.

“—No,” Demane said, surly, “but—”

“Then let me hear nothing more of this,” Laurence said with finality.

Demane stalked from the tent in as great a temper as Roland herself, and left Laurence with the very meager satisfaction of knowing he had faced up to an inconvenient duty, without the slightest idea of how to accomplish it. Hiring a satisfactory chaperone at all in the unsettled state of the colony would have been a remarkable task, much less finding one in the span of three days who would not balk at coming on a long sea-voyage and a dangerous mission.

And he could not leave Roland in Sydney; that would be to neglect his still-greater duty to see her formed into an officer fit to command a priceless dragon, the which could not be done without useful experience, even if accompanied by danger. She should have no opportunity to acquire any in a sluggish port, and still less under Rankin’s command. In any event, that gentleman had made it perfectly plain he could not be relied upon to have any consideration for either Roland’s training or her protection.

Laurence wondered doubtfully if perhaps he might find and hire some retired soldier, of advanced years, for the duty: the arrangement could not be called proper, and such a person could offer Roland none of that advice which Laurence vaguely felt was also the purview of a chaperone, unless perhaps the man had raised daughters? But it might do, in lieu of any better solution; and in the meantime, he realized, he should have to row out to the Allegiance and speak to Riley about Roland’s quarters.

“Nothing particularly out of the ordinary,” Laurence said, “but there must be a separate berth, and one for the chaperone.”

“A lady?” Riley said, doubtfully. “Not that I don’t see the need, of course,” he added, “but Laurence, you cannot mean us to go carting a gentlewoman about to Brazil, with a war going? I don’t suppose we have above three women on board, if you count Old Molly in the galley, and the gunner’s wife, and her baby, which I don’t think should count.” And he looked even more doubtful at Laurence’s proposed substitution of a retired gentleman.

Laurence was particularly grateful, now, that Riley had learned of the existence of female officers among the aviators; at least Riley did not need a long explanation. It was true Roland could not expect to enjoy the usual satisfactions of marriage and family, either, and perhaps nothing might truly apply, of the ordinary course of rearing a young woman; but Laurence knew very well what he would have thought of a sea-captain who let his young midshipmen run themselves into gaming debts or overindulgence in either drink or whoring; or otherwise render themselves wholly ineligible to a woman of sense and character. He did not intend to be guilty of the same, nor to allow a situation to persist which had already exposed Roland to insult.

“Even if I can only hire a maid, that would at least be something,” he said.

“You had better consult Mrs. MacArthur,” Riley said. “At least she can tell you how to go on, and perhaps put you in the way of some steady creature; if there is one to be had at such short notice: I think we will have our wind tomorrow, and the tide is at noon.”

They went out on the deck, presently noisy with holystoning and stinking with fresh paint, the hands hard at labor under the watchful eye of Lord Purbeck, the first lieutenant; and Laurence thought Riley was right: a certain unsteadiness in the air, which spoke to old instincts.

“And if you do find someone, I can manage the berths, of course,” Riley added. “You haven’t much crew among the three of you, and there is plenty of room in the bow cabins,” these normally being intended for the use of aviators, aboard a dragon transport, and for a much greater number than the Allegiance would be shipping in this case. “I suppose my own mids may cut up a fuss if your ensign has a berth, if they aren’t to know why; but they must lump it.”

“That one source of difficulty, at least, I may remove,” Laurence said, and shook Riley’s hand before he went down to the ship’s launch, to be taken back to shore.

He found Roland working, with short angry strokes, on oiling some of Temeraire’s harness which had been neglected for lack of ground crew; she sprang up when she saw him. “No,” Laurence said, “I have not reconsidered; however, I have also another duty, to which I trust you will not object: you have seen more than enough service to make midwingman.”

The announcement mollified her a little, but she did say with hopeful cunning, “As midwingman I surely cannot need a chaperone, sir; and anyway, ought you hire one without consulting Mother?”

This reminder was as unnecessary as it was unwelcome: Laurence was awkwardly aware that he was by no means certain of Jane’s approving the hiring of a chaperone. Certainly she herself had never had the benefit of one, and would likely abuse the notion as absurd. But neither did he think Jane would have approved of Emily’s being subject to any unwanted attentions which she could no longer avoid through camouflage; and still less approve of Emily’s engaging herself in any permanent attachment at so young an age.

“When we should again be in England, in her purview, naturally you shall not want for any other guidance,” he said. “Until then, I cannot consider myself alone adequate supervision; have you never felt the want,” he added desperately, by way of persuasion, “of some companion, to whom you might turn for—for advice?”

“Mother has told me all about that,” Emily said with impatience, “and I don’t mean to do anything stupid and put myself out of service for a year; whatever else should I have to talk about with some stuffy old woman who will sniff because I don’t wear skirts?”

Laurence gave up the hope of argument, and contented himself with ordering her to see to the requisition of more gunpowder, for their incendiaries.

Chapter 3

TEMERAIRE COULD NOT PARTICULARLY REGRET seeing the small mean buildings of Sydney dropping away behind them, although Laurence and Riley spoke together so approvingly of the qualities of the harbor; that was very well, but it did not make up for the untidy appearance of the unpaved streets, which were too narrow besides, and the mud which was everywhere. And while he certainly appreciated all the goods which the sea-serpents brought, from China, he did not appreciate the extraordinary stench of the mash of half-rotten fish which they liked to eat; and he did not see why it needed to be kept in open barrels by the dockside. The wind was very nearly directly at their back, carrying the smell along to haunt them as the Allegiance traveled onward.

“I suppose they would not eat any of us?” Mrs. Pemberton inquired of Roland, hesitating at the base of the stairs up to the dragondeck.

“Oh, they certainly would, if ever you gave them any opportunity,” Temeraire said, peering down at her, “—They have no discrimination at all, I am afraid; but you see, they do not seem to be able to speak, so one cannot very easily explain to them that one ought not to eat people. If you should care to go swimming, you had better wait until we are at least a few days out.”

The lady stared up at him dumbly. Temeraire had not precisely followed why Laurence had felt her presence necessary, and when he had asked Roland, she had said, “It is not, at all,” in venomous tones; she now answered Mrs. Pemberton with faint contempt. “Of course none of them will eat you: she means you, Temeraire, and Iskierka and Kulingile, not the serpents.”

“So I am afraid she cannot be very clever,” Temeraire said to Laurence in an undertone, later that day, when they had come out into open ocean and Laurence had come up to the dragondeck again. “And you know, Laurence, I must say that I would consider myself equal to providing any protection which Roland should need, if only you had mentioned it to me; even if she were not of my own crew, I should consider it only my duty to Excidium, since he cannot be with us.”

He could not quite suppress a hint of injury: in the interim Lieutenant Ferris—or Mr. Ferris, as he evidently was to be called—had explained Mrs. Pemberton’s position to him, and Temeraire found himself in perfect agreement with Roland on the subject.

“In body I have no doubt of it,” Laurence said dryly, “—in reputation, I am afraid you might have more difficulty: your opinion would not be solicited in the matter.” He sighed and added, “She is a sensible woman, and not a coward, to have agreed to the position in the first place; I am sure she will soon understand you are no danger to her.”

Several of the serpents had followed them out of the harbor, either for a frolic or in hopes of a meal, and played in the froth spilling out from the Allegiance’s bow, their sides gleaming in spray. No-one liked their company; aside from the smell, which anyone might have objected to, the sailors were very anxious over them and worrying they might at any moment attack. Which the serpents would not, of course, because they were too fat and well-fed; they had only to go back to the harbor if they were hungry. But the sailors were unconvinced and viewed the dragons as their only defense, so that if ever Temeraire tried to take a nap, the sailors were sure to make a great noise in the sails overhead, or send a cannonball rolling across the deck, or drop a coil of rope down upon him from aloft.

“I might be a danger to them, after all,” Temeraire said, disgruntled, when a pailful of slurry had by supposed accident been allowed to pour down onto his neck after one of the serpents still following along in their wake had breached the water in a great curving iridescent leap, evidently to make sure he was paying attention.

Roland was now apparently too senior to wash him: instead Sipho was put to the task, along with a little creature called Gerry: the relic of a New South Wales officer and his wife who had both been carried off by some sort of fever, leaving behind the boy, not quite eight, with no family in the world within two thousand miles. Laurence had acquired him as a runner from Mrs. MacArthur, along with Mrs. Pemberton. “The price of her advice,” Laurence said ruefully, but as far as Temeraire was concerned, Gerry was far more useful: his small fingers were much better able to clean underneath the scales, where some of the slurry had leaked unpleasantly.

He cried when brought up on the dragondeck, to be sure, but Roland abused him for stupidity. “I would have given a great deal to be taken on as a runner two years early, instead of only being put into school; what business do you have to be blubbing like an infant? No-one will ever think you worthy of having a dragon yourself, if you cannot properly appreciate the chance,” she said.

Gerry sniffed wetly and said, “I do not want a dragon myself,” which Temeraire could only approve: perhaps at last he might have another person in his crew who did not mean to go scurrying off to some other dragon, just when he and Laurence had got them trained properly.

“Then you are a great looby,” Roland said. “Who would not like a dragon of their own, and be able to go flying and do their duty to England; and you the son of a soldier: you ought to be ashamed.”

As Gerry’s father had been an eager participant in MacArthur’s rebellion, that late gentleman’s commitment to country and duty was perhaps in question, but the argument at least distracted the boy from his tears. “I am not a looby,” he said sullenly, and followed Sipho up on Temeraire’s back, and by the time they had finished washing him was already reconciled to his new situation enough to go sliding down Temeraire’s flank after.

No-one went pouring slurry on Iskierka, who slept in hissing, steaming state coiled along the front of the dragondeck; Temeraire regarded her with deep disfavor. At least Kulingile was being useful, and fishing: even if he did eat most of what he caught himself, that at least kept him from eating everything in sight at dinner-time, and looking wistfully over at other people’s portions if one did not eat quickly enough.

“You needn’t rock the boat so hard when you land,” Iskierka even complained, when Kulingile had dropped back down licking his chops.

“You needn’t make a noise about anyone else who is not lazing about quite uselessly,” Temeraire said, “and that is very kind of you, Kulingile; thank you,” he added graciously, taking the remnants of the small whale which Kulingile had brought back to offer around, though the edges were ragged and somewhat gnawed, and even these leftovers were more than Temeraire really wanted. He did not quite like to admit that he could not eat so much as Kulingile; it did not seem fair that anyone who had started quite so small and deflated should now be larger than himself, and very soon might even outstrip Maximus.

“I am not hungry,” Iskierka said. “If there were any prizes in sight, that would be different, but there is no sense in flying around only for fish one does not want. Anyway you are not hunting yourself, either.”

“I am guarding the ship from the serpents,” Temeraire said, dignified.

The last of the serpents fell back to Sydney by mid-morning the next day, and left the Allegiance alone and driving towards the roaring forties: the water cold, dark iron-grey, and mazed with greenish froth. Laurence joined Riley at the stern to watch them go, through the glass: spined backs breaching the surface in glittering curves up and down as they swam, until they reached the end of the water stirred up in the Allegiance’s wake, and then plunged deep and vanished.

From there on, monotony, of the sort a sailor loved best: a steady knife-edged wind at their back, and the sun small and cold white on the horizon for all but a few hours of the day. Laurence woke each day to the holystoning of the deck, the round of the ship’s bells; sometimes in the first confusion of rising he wondered why he had not been called for the morning’s watch, and looked in vain for a blue coat.

He could have wished only for a little more occupation: he had grown used in the valley to have every day as much to do as could be done, and found himself now unequal to the task of filling the hours aboard a ship where he had no duty but to be a passenger. Even his self-imposed duties as schoolmaster were usurped by Roland’s chaperone, whom he could not deny was better suited to the task than himself, having before her marriage served as a governess.

He had Granby for company; and might have had Riley, but their relations had never quite recovered from the tensions which had arisen on their journey to Africa. Riley’s father was a slave-owner in the West Indies; Laurence’s own, Lord Allendale, devoted to the cause of abolition: the voyage which led them past all the wretched slave-port cities of that continent had left them constantly rubbed against one another, and without room for apology. Laurence could not open his real feelings on the subject of their mission to Riley; Riley could scarcely avoid knowing what those feelings were; they walked around each other with scrupulous courtesy, and spoke only of sailing, and the weather, and the life of the ship.

Laurence had the pleasure, at least, of going out flying with Temeraire: cold air brisk in their faces, clouds stinging with snow if they ventured south, and beneath them now and again great silvery schools of fish, or pods of whales or porpoises; occasionally the shadow of a handful of sharks. “I do wonder why they are not at all good eating when what they eat themselves is nice; it seems a waste,” Temeraire said, as an aside, before continuing, “And I do not see why we should not do exactly as you propose, Laurence: after all, if the Tswana will take away the slaves anyway, the Portuguese may as well let them all go instead and not have all their cities destroyed, too.”

“The Tswana cannot hope to raid all of Brazil,” Laurence said, “not in time to rescue any of their people yet alive; if that is their only preoccupation.”

He spoke cautiously but hoped otherwise: the Tswana had bent their wrath against even slave ports which had never shipped a single one of their own people, at great distances from their empire; that augured for a chance of persuading them to accept the offer which Laurence privately wished to make: a general liberation throughout the country, in lieu of having all their particular kindred returned.

This hope he did not intend to unfold as yet to anyone but Temeraire; Laurence could easily imagine Hammond’s reaction. Wholesale abolition would scarcely recommend itself to the Portuguese, and might not satisfy the Tswana, either; but the mere possibility of engineering such a stroke demanded any effort in its pursuit.

“At least we must make the attempt; and if we had no other cause to come away, it must have been enough,” he added.

“Certainly we must; and I am sure that the Portuguese will think better of refusing, if they do, when the Tswana have burned up a few more of their cities,” Temeraire said blithely. “And I do not see that Hammond will have any reason to complain, if we should make peace as he wishes. Then we will go back to Britain and defeat Napoleon at last. Do you suppose that is a prize, Laurence?”

It was not: a whaler in the distance, almost certainly a neutral; too small to support Temeraire’s weight, and undoubtedly only to be alarmed by such a visit even if they had been worth bespeaking for news. Temeraire looked around inquiringly; Laurence shook his head in answer; they wheeled away and flew onward without descending even to be seen.

The ocean was otherwise deserted and had been for weeks now; a few islands along their way, mostly rocky outcroppings of deserted volcanic rock half-eaten by lichen. The isolation, for lack of work, was more to be felt than in their valley; Laurence chose to feel it more. It was what he must expect, if he did not mean to subject himself to authority or ask Temeraire to do the same; if they meant to follow their own judgment. Laurence could not but look down half-rueful and half-amazed at the ship below, when they returned to her, and he saw in her the orderly decided pattern of his former life: an ordinary life, a comprehensible one.

He wondered suddenly at Bonaparte: at a man who would discard such a life deliberately, not under an inexorable press of duty or honor but only a flashing reckless hunger; at a man who could put himself outside the society of his fellows for such a motive. “I do not suppose anything will ever content him,” he said to Temeraire. “What victory, what glory, could satisfy such a man? Although perhaps age may do what the mere turning of the world will not, and wear away the worst of his ambition.”

“You may be sure that even if he were to grow tired of conquering and glory, that Lien would not; after all she will not be old for a very long time,” Temeraire said darkly. “And anyway it does not seem to me we ought to only wait and hope: we had much better stop him ourselves, and be quite sure he cannot do any more harm.”

“If Napoleon can seek to ascend all the thrones of Europe, I suppose we may go dragging them out from under him,” Laurence said, although with some humor: descending alone from Temeraire’s back to a ship on the far side of the world in the midst of a cold ocean, and setting his sights on the acknowledged sovereign of a great nation and the conqueror of half of Europe.

The table he returned to, that evening, was a slightly peculiar one, for Laurence and Granby had privately agreed they should treat Demane as if he possessed the rank to which his dragon entitled him, although neither his conversation nor his manners were suited to a seat near the head. But that was an evil often found in the service, in men without the excuse of tender years, and at least Demane might yet be worked on by admonishment and the embarrassment of finding himself under more observation than he had been used to, either as a runner or while deliberately ignored in Sydney.

But Hammond was an uncritical guest, and did not notice if Demane ate through four removes in a row in perfect silence or had to be nudged to make a toast; and his own conversation was more than adequate to fill anything lacking among the rest of the company. Four years as the chief British representative at the Chinese court had brought him some two stone in weight and settled his former driven confidence into assurance, but he was as pell-mell and passionate as ever when enlarging upon a subject close to his heart.

“By report, they have shipped two transports already, which remain in the harbor at present,” he said, laying down biscuit crumbs to make the outline of Rio, and picking out the weevils. “The Tswana have evidently encamped within the ruins of the city.”

“They cannot be much fonder of Bonaparte than of us,” Granby said. “He hasn’t outlawed slavery, either; are they really his allies?”

“I suppose one cannot call it an alliance, not in the real sense of the word,” Hammond said. “You might better say they have given him a truce, in exchange for reparations: but as his reparations involve shipping them across the sea to attack their enemies, which are also his, there is very little to choose between the two. They have not ceased their attacks upon the Spanish coast and the Portuguese, either,” he added with a significant look at Laurence: such attacks should certainly pose a danger to any troops which Britain should land, as well.

“I don’t suppose we might give them something more to think about at the Cape?” Granby said. “Or closer to their home, anyway; the Med is a long way from the south of Africa, and I don’t suppose they can have an easy time of supply.”

“The prospects of a new front in wholly unknown territory, for uncertain gain, can have but little appeal,” Laurence said. “We knew nothing of the existence of the Tswana and their empire, and the present evils of our situation are in no small order due to that ignorance; how much more cautious ought we to be about venturing yet again past the coast of that continent, when we have already certain proofs of their ability to maintain a significant force over so great a distance.”

He spoke absently, listening: above their heads, a change in the rhythm of footsteps and voices on deck had intruded gradually upon his awareness. There was no alarm, no beating to quarters; he had no excuse for leaving the table, and had perforce to restrain his curiosity until the meal had been cleared away, when he could propose coffee on the dragondeck.

Laurence put his head out of the ladderway and saw the sky: curiosity was at once satisfied. Riley had been due to dine with the gunroom that evening; he was already on the quarterdeck, directing the men: no frantic hurry, but a steady progress; the sails were all being reefed. “We are in for a blow, I think; nothing to alarm anyone, of course,” he said out loud, cheerfully, before he added to Laurence in an undertone, “The mercury would have run out of the bottom of the glass, if it could; the dragons had better be chained down sooner than late.”

Laurence nodded silent acknowledgment and went to tell Temeraire he must endure the storm-chains which he so hated. “There is time for a short flight beforehand, if you should like,” he added by way of apology, when Temeraire had flattened down his ruff in protest.

“I do not see why it must always be storming, when we are at sea,” Temeraire said disconsolately, when they had gone aloft and seen in the distance the great billowings of red-violet and purple climbing the sky; the ocean had flattened to black.

He landed reluctantly prepared to submit; and then Iskierka said, “Well, I do not mean to be chained at all: whyever should I not just hold on to the ship, or if it is very bad, we may as well stay aloft,” and Laurence realized in dismay she had never yet experienced a true three-days’ gale, which should outstrip the endurance of any dragon even if the winds alone did not prove fatal.

“I suppose it is likely to blow too long,” Granby said, looking inquiry up at Laurence, who slid from Temeraire’s back and hastened to assure him of the necessity, as quietly as he could manage. Even so the sailors standing ready with the great tarpaulins and the storm-chains cast reproaching looks at him for inviting ill-fortune, which grew still more mournful as Granby began to argue with Iskierka, at a volume which could not help but carry across the ship.

Apart from a general deprecation of superstition, Laurence could not think that the storm building ahead of them required any additional invitation to be as thoroughly bad as could be imagined. Certainly the worse consequence would come from leaving Iskierka unconvinced and unprepared to endure the length of the confinement which the weather bode fair to demand. She argued the matter with Granby for the better part of an hour, while the shadow crept steadily nearer and Riley began to look anxious for the men being kept idle, and the dragons still unsecured. At last in desperation Granby said, “Dear one, we must have done: I will wear the coat if only you will do this for me; pray lie down and let them secure you.”

This coat was a monstrosity of cloth-of-gold crusted with gemstone beads which would not have looked out of place in the last century at Versailles; Iskierka had managed to arrange for its commission in India through Mr. Richers, Granby’s new first lieutenant—subsequently much chastened by his captain—and Granby’s flat refusal to be displayed in so much magnificence had since been a source of great and running dissatisfaction to her.

She pounced at once on the offer. “Whenever I wish it?” she demanded.

“So long as it isn’t all wrong for the occasion,” Granby said, hurriedly qualifying.

“Only if I may decide whether it is wrong or not,” Iskierka said, and Granby submitted to his doom with resignation if not precisely with grace; in turn at last she yielded and stretched herself upon the deck, and allowed them to drag the netting over the massive red-and-black coils of her body, with the chains laced atop it.

Granby avoided Laurence’s eye and went to stand in the bow while the process went forward. Laurence knew it ashamed him deeply to be forced to resort to bribery and stratagem to subdue Iskierka’s temper to the needs of the service, and he could not have been comforted when Kulingile, who was of a very different and amiable temperament, said, “Oh, if you like, but how am I to go hunting?” when Demane asked him to lie down under the tarpaulins also, and required only the assurance that he would be fed if he grew hungry to reconcile him to the experience.

“It will not be at all comfortable,” Temeraire said unhappily as he stretched himself out also, with more accuracy than pessimism: he and Kulingile would spend the storm lying to either side of Iskierka, whose inconvenient spikes made her more difficult to secure, as additional anchors for her bulk: subject as a result not only to the worse brunt of the storm but also to the perpetual emissions of steam from her body.

“We had better feed them up now,” Granby said, returning, while the chains were made fast to the deck, and ropes thrown after them for reinforcement. The debate had consumed nearly all the time which remained to them of the unearthly calm, and now the swell began to slap rhythmic warning against the ship’s sides. Even the hands who normally shied from any contact with the dragons were clambering urgently over the talons and scales to draw the bonds tight: the weight of the beasts could easily overset the ship, if they were not well-secured. “It can only help if they sleep away the first day or so, and there may be difficulties getting the cattle up on deck later on.”

Temeraire was determined not to be difficult; he had seen Granby’s crimson cheek, and Laurence should certainly have no such cause to blush for him, even if Temeraire disliked the chains extremely, more than Iskierka did, and therefore had far better right to ask some return.

“But I am not going to kick up a fuss, and make difficulties for everyone and the poor sailors, who will be working all the storm,” Temeraire said, although he was sorry a moment later to have silenced himself a little too early: he would very much have preferred to have a proper meal, cooked through, but instead he could see a cow being hoisted out from the fore hatch, and the ordinary slaughtering-tubs were out on deck, even as the first spatters of rain came down and rattled in them tinnily.

“And for that matter,” he added sulkily, as the meat was served out, “Laurence has more right than Granby to wear finery; after all he is a prince and a captain, both, and Granby even has less seniority. So if Laurence does not choose to always be going about in his best robes,” which Temeraire could understand: one did not wish to risk damage to anything so handsome unnecessarily, “I do not see that Granby is at all right to do otherwise.”

Kulingile raised his head and put in, “Demane is a prince also,” which Temeraire did not think was quite true, although he did recall Admiral Roland saying something of the sort to some fellow from the Admiralty who had objected to Demane and Sipho being his runners; but certainly it was not as true as for Laurence, who had been adopted with a great deal of formal ceremony. “And he does not wear anything particularly fine.”

Iskierka bristled and hissed steam from her spikes. “Granby has more seniority, if one counts years as an aviator, and I am sure I cannot see any reason he should not be a prince, too, someday very soon.” With this feeble rejoinder she put her head beneath her wing.

The rain had begun falling in earnest, an hour later; Iskierka, sheltered from the wind between them, was securely asleep and jetting out small puffs of steam regularly so that the drops collected upon the tarpaulin and set it sticking clammily to Temeraire’s back. The raw cow sat unpleasantly in his stomach, and he was just contemplating whether it was worth sending Gerry for Gong Su, to perhaps brew him a bowl of tea, when Kulingile put his head over Iskierka’s back and whispered, “Temeraire?”

“Yes?” Temeraire said, rather unhappily concluding that the wind and rain would spoil the tea before he could enjoy it, and then he should have wasted a bowl of their small supply: it was too dear for Laurence to buy in the quantities which Temeraire would have liked to drink.

“Ought Demane wear something more fine?” Kulingile asked, with an anxious note.

“Oh—” Temeraire said, and struggled with warring impulses, but justice decided him: he could not be reconciled to losing Demane and would have been very glad to have him back, but it would have been the meanest sort of trick to mislead Kulingile if he intended to look after Demane properly.

“Certainly one might expect the captain of a dragon of note to present a particularly handsome appearance, when the occasion demands,” Temeraire said, therefore. “I will venture to say, he would do well with a better coat, at least, and he ought to have gold bars as Laurence and Granby do; you see that no-one thinks him a proper captain, without them.”

“But where am I to get such things?” Kulingile said, and with a great rush of generosity Temeraire said, “Well, I will ask Laurence for you, as I am not quite certain; but if we were to take a prize,” he could not help a wistful note in his voice, “and had shares, you would be in funds and could purchase anything you liked with them.”

“Iskierka has many prizes, but we haven’t?” Kulingile said, interrogatively.

“That,” Temeraire said, “is only because she has been put in the way of them, by luck; you may be sure if ever a prize offered, I should certainly be equal to taking it, and I dare say,” he added in fairness, “when you have been in a few actions, you should be sure of doing so as well; as long as you do not let yourself be shot.”

“I don’t think I should care for being shot,” Kulingile said, and shook his head as a wave came rousing over the bow and went sheeting over them, cold straight through. “I don’t care for this, either,” he added.

“No,” Temeraire agreed, hunching water off his shoulders, and huddled back down as the ship went bounding into a trench, a glassy wall of ocean rising sharply ahead.

The Allegiance was by no means the vessel one would choose for riding out a typhoon. “A wallowing bow-heavy tub with more sail than sea-sense; I would as soon cut my throat as try and make her mind,” Laurence remembered hearing Riley himself say of her several years before, when the two of them had watched from the rail of the dear old Reliant as the transport attempted awkwardly to maneuver her way into Portsmouth: neither of them dreaming, at the time, they should ever be upon her in their present circumstances. Laurence had then six years of seniority on the post-list,and with an influential and political family and a record of distinction was marching steadily towards his admiral’s flag, destined only for the most plum assignments; Riley his protégé and second lieutenant, with reason to hope for his own ship in the course of another five years with Laurence’s own influence behind him.

That influence eradicated, Riley had been glad enough to take the Allegiance when she had been offered him. Now, of course, no more such criticism was to be heard from him or even tolerated in his presence, but it was not to be denied that her only virtue was in being almost too large to sink, which in the present circumstances felt more a gauntlet thrown to the elements, a challenge they looked all too determined to meet. Laurence recalled with no fondness their last experience of a serious blow: three days endlessly laboring their way up the crowded swells, doubting every moment whether the ship should reach the crest in time.

And though Riley had knocked some seamanship into all but the worst of the landsmen and gaol-birds, during the passage to New South Wales, there were a great many of the worst: dragon transports were not prized assignments, and Riley had not sufficient influence to preserve his best men from being pillaged away by senior captains. Laurence could not observe the workings of the resultant crew with anything like satisfaction; and yet he could do nothing to amend it but keep himself to the dragondeck or his cabin, containing any impulse to interfere.

“They have matters well in hand, I assure you,” he said to Mrs. Pemberton that afternoon, remarks addressed half to himself, and regarded his cold dinner without enthusiasm by the dimmed light which filtered in through the windows: it was deeply foreign to sit to his meat while the ship’s existence rose and fell without him.

But the storm did not run three days: it lingered for five, following them across the ocean as if by malice, without a single break in the weather long enough to sleep, and with a great many long enough to give them false hope that here, at last, had come an end. As the thicker darkness came to mark the night of the fourth day, and a fresh icy howling of wind swept over them from the south, Laurence went to Riley, who stood haggard and bloodshot by the wheel, and shouted in his ear, “Tom, do you let me send Lord Purbeck to sleep, and I will second you; when he is rested he may spell you in turn.”

Riley nodded after a moment, dully; when Laurence went to him, Purbeck did not say a word to argue but only stumbled away half-asleep already. Laurence did not know the men very well: there was more separation than one might imagine possible aboard a single vessel between the aviators and the sailors, none of whom liked very well to share their ship with dragons. But he knew the Allegiance well enough by now to direct them, and pantomime served better than shouts, with the wind yelling in all their ears at once.

“Surely it must almost be over, now,” Temeraire said, when Laurence came to speak to him briefly: the rain had lightened for a short while. “We might be let up, and stay aloft until the last of it has blown itself out—”

But he spoke low and hopelessly, enervated with fatigue and cold, and his eyes lidded down to slits; when Laurence said, “Not yet, my dear; pray have patience,” Temeraire subsided without further complaint and ate the raw sheep, which was put into his gullet by hand: the galley fires were still out, for safety.

Iskierka, sheltered from the worst of the weather, was in high temper at the length of their confinement, and more difficult to restrain; if Kulingile and Temeraire had not effectively formed part of her prison by the weight of their bodies, anchoring the restraints, Laurence did not doubt she would have flung off the chains and likely cast the entire ship ahoo despite all Granby could do to persuade her to calm.

“Oh! Not yet? It will never end, and I will not stay here, I will not,” she said, furiously, and began to try and throw herself back against the tarpaulin.

“Why are you making such a fuss?” Kulingile said drowsily, and Laurence saw Demane say something in his dragon’s ear; Kulingile yawned, and then heaved his head and one massive foreleg over Iskierka’s shoulders and sighed out, pinning her to the deck with his weight.

Iskierka whipped her head around and snapped at his nose, hissing, but there was no satisfaction to be had: Kulingile was already gone back to sleep, his tongue licking the fresh sheep’s blood from his muzzle in small darting unconscious strokes. “I will not,” she repeated, angrily, but ceased to fight the chains; instead she flung herself flat upon the deck and glared fury at the clouds.

But by the next morning, even her spirits had been defeated by the ceaseless storm. She only gummed at the goat that was offered her, and left half of it in the tub; Temeraire ate nothing at all, and barely opened his eyes to acknowledge when Laurence came to speak to him. “They can’t go on like this,” Granby said to Laurence, meeting him below: Purbeck had slept a little, and was gone on deck again. “Perhaps we had better let them aloft for the rest? It can’t keep storming forever, I suppose.”

He did not sound very convinced, and indeed in the moment it seemed entirely believable that the storm would continue without end, that they sailed under judgment and deluge.

“I would not give anything for the chances of their keeping in company aloft in this cover, and we cannot arrange any sort of rendezvous; we have not the least notion where we are, nor will until we see the stars again,” Laurence said.

“Then maybe Riley would let us put up a fire, and give them something hot to eat, if we were careful about it,” Granby said. “It is bad when they are refusing their meat, Laurence; in cold like this, they ought to be eating more than their usual, even if they are not flying.”

Laurence could not regard this suggestion with anything but dismay, but Gong Su, putting his head in—the aviators would never learn the polite fiction of failing to hear what was said on the other side of a bulkhead, aboard ship—made the suggestion that coals laid in the bottom of one of his great cauldrons would do to make some sort of hot soup, without the risk of open flame.

But Riley was asleep, and Purbeck would not countenance anything of the sort. “You might as well set the ship on fire to begin with,” he said flatly, without even the little courtesy he ordinarily offered Laurence, “and save us wondering how long it will take; and you damned well shan’t unchain them, either: we would be brought by the lee in moments if they went jumping around the deck. They must wait like all of us.”

“If I were sure Iskierka would wait, I shouldn’t ask,” Granby said, with some heat.

“If she is run so mad she would sink us only to have a chance of drowning herself, you may say so, and I will run one of the bow-chasers up to her and we will put a ball in her head before she sends us to the bottom,” Purbeck returned coldly; Laurence had to seize Granby’s arm and draw him away.

Even when Riley returned to the deck, however, he was little more favorable to the notion. “I cannot see taking such a risk, in the least,” he said, “and I wonder at your asking,” he added, even his more generous temper worn away with weariness and the endless grating struggle to keep the ship afloat.

“I am tempted to tell Gong Su to go forward,” Granby said angrily, as Laurence towed him back to the dragondeck, “and be damned to them all, talking as though we were asking for our own pleasure. The ship is meant for carrying dragons about to begin with; what else are they here for? Put a ball in her head, indeed; I would shoot him, first.”

He did not even try to speak quietly, and besides the storm had altered their sense of volume, like deaf men raising their voices to compensate for their own lack; his words fell into another brief lull in the roaring tempest, to be carried precisely where they had no business to go. Riley stiffened; Purbeck looked disdainfully; and where the continuing storm might have shortly erased the memory under the pressure of necessity, in that moment abruptly the clouds broke, and the first sunlight in five days spilled down upon the deck.

“I do not see why anyone would ever choose to be going this way, when there are no prizes and such storms,” Temeraire said, gulping toothfish while hovering mid-air; he was in no hurry to return to the ship, at all. He was sure he would not feel dry and warm again for weeks: the thin spare sun was not up to the task, for all it made a swath of bright colors hanging low among the horizon clouds, and he felt waterlogged to the bone.

Iskierka was farther aloft and flying in wild circles, breathing out flames and looping through the heated air to dry herself off. Temeraire would have been tempted to ask her to do as much for him, if it were not beneath him to be asking favors of her; and anyway, she was quite puffed-off enough for being a fire-breather without still more recognition.

“Are there any more of those?” Kulingile asked, swinging down to circle Temeraire, regarding the toothfish with interest. He had already eaten that afternoon a cow, two seals, and an entire pot of rice porridge which Gong Su had meant for all three of them and the leftovers for their crews.

Temeraire pointed him at the meager school of fish, although they were hardly large enough to be worth the effort even for himself. Kulingile swung back aloft to study the school from farther, however, and then made an efficient bite of them by diving and lowering his jaw directly into the water: dozens of startled fish went flopping wildly out of his mouth as he pulled back aloft, but enough remained for him to crunch in satisfaction, seaweed trailing out the sides of his jaws.

To lie upon the deck afterwards full and contented and unchained, with the galley fires going below for warmth, was in every way satisfactory, even though the swell remained high and at regular intervals waves crested up and flung cold spray upon them. Temeraire propped a wing to shield himself from the worst, and curled his forelegs to make a space where Laurence might sit and read to him.

“I am sure it does not stop there?” Temeraire said, when Laurence had paused rather too long in the midst of a poem; Laurence did not continue, though, and when Temeraire peered down he found Laurence with his head tipped back limply in sleep against a talon, the book neglected and open upon his lap.

Temeraire sighed a little and looked, but Sipho was also asleep, huddled up against Kulingile’s side under a scrap of tarpaulin, Demane beside him; even Roland, who might have been able to puzzle out enough of the characters to read to him, was drooping over her mathematics.

Kulingile sighed also. “I do not want to sleep anymore.”

“I am not going to, either,” Iskierka said; not even this declaration stirred Granby, lying in front of her in his splendid cloth-of-gold coat with his head pillowed upon a coil of rope. “I am sure there are no prizes worth taking near-by, but we might as well go look for some.”

Temeraire could not find fault with this project; even Iskierka might have good notions now and again. “Only we must arrange a rendezvous first,” he said, looking for the sailing master, Mr. Smythe, who might tell him the ship’s heading, and other such things, which Laurence always asked for when he and Temeraire flew away from the ship for any great distance. Temeraire was not entirely sure how this information should guide them in returning, but perhaps Mr. Smythe could explain that as well, so he should not need to wake Laurence; there was no need to wake Laurence at all. Not that Temeraire thought Laurence would in any way object; only Laurence often did not think much of seeking after prizes, even when there was plainly nothing better to do, or at least nothing much better.

But Smythe was also not on the deck; only Lord Purbeck was on deck, and Lieutenant George standing at the helm with his head tipped aslant upon his neck, before he suddenly jerked straight again and blinked his watery blue eyes many times.

“I do not mean to wait; we can find the ship again without any of this,” Iskierka said. “It stands to reason we only need to fly back the way we go, and then follow the ship’s course from there; I can remember that without doing figures.”

“I do not see how you can,” Temeraire said, “when we will be over the open ocean, and you cannot mark your place by a tree or a building or anything of that sort; it would be very stupid of us to get lost, and likely have to spend hours flying about trying to find the ship.”

“Maybe we had better not go,” Kulingile said. “They are cooking something else for us, I think: that is a nice smell.”

It was a nice smell—a roasting smell—beef searing over an open flame, somewhere belowdecks, and Temeraire inhaled with pleasure. He was not hungry at present, and he would not have pressed Laurence for more, when he knew all the cattle must be rationed against possible ill-luck fishing, but no-one would have said no to a treat like roast beef; if only Gong Su did not mean merely to turn it into a stew.

“I want the head!” Iskierka said, snaking her head over the rail to peer down into the forward hatch. “I have not had a roasted cow’s head in ages: and you have both been on land forever and ever.”

“It is not as though there were so many cows in the colony that we might have eaten them whenever we liked,” Temeraire said, “and anyway we have all been at sea already for weeks; I do not see why you should have the head all to yourself. I would not at all mind a taste of beef brains-and-tripe.”

“I will have a haunch,” Kulingile said, “if they don’t overcook it,” anxiously; the smoke was growing a little thick.

Laurence jerked awake abruptly and came standing, the book tumbling from his lap heedless of Temeraire’s protest. “What are they about, below there?” he said, and cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed across the deck, “Fire!”

Laurence seized Granby’s shoulder and roused him; together they plunged down the fore ladderway and into the ship’s belly. More smoke was rising around them and wisping up between the deck seams, grey and bitter; men struggling past them to climb up out of the haze, red-eyed and red-faced and not merely stinking of rum but grinning with it, giggling, despite the dreadful danger of their situation. Laurence realized grimly they had certainly broken open the spirit-room: enough unwatered liquor to make the day’s grog for seven hundred men over the course of six months, and every idler and waster of the ship’s company like as not afloat with it, while the officers and able seamen slept off their exhaustion.

The galley floor was blood-slick with drunken butchery—two cows dead and spitted in their parts over open flame, flesh blackening; the fire had escaped to the tables, and was crawling along ropes. “Get to your pumping stations,” Laurence roared, and caught a man out of the press: Yarrow, one of the able seamen and from Cheltenham, not ordinarily an unreliable man, but he had evidently also yielded to the temptation of drink: his face was soot-bruised and his eyes staring like damnation with the fire’s ruddy glow cast upon them.

“To your station!” Laurence shouted at him, but there was no answering comprehension in that face; Yarrow only wrenched himself from Laurence’s grip and back into the general mass of men, all of them maddened with liquor and fear.

Granby had pulled on his leather gauntlets and was tipping over the great cauldrons of seething salt pork to douse the cooking-fires: men screaming as the boiling water and fat ran down the smoking boards and over their bare feet. The fires were quenched, but a man howling in pain knocked over a burning table, and then he was struggling among the others and spreading fire from his clothing to theirs in the close quarters.

“Captain, Captain—” Darcy yelling—one of Riley’s mids and only a boy, his voice still high and shrill, standing bare-legged in a white nightshirt with his yellow hair loose, visible in the light from the fore hatch. Past him Laurence glimpsed Riley, with no neckcloth and his coat barely on, his mouth open but his shouts impossible to hear over the crowd and the fire, and behind him several of his officers in a wedge trying to force a path through the men to the galley.

Laurence had his sword on his belt: no use here. Granby stooping wrenched loose a plank from one of the tables and handed Laurence another; together they began to clout the drunken, maddened men to either side, and Riley at last won through with half-a-dozen officers. The cook’s mate Urquhart, who had been induced to the butchery of the cattle, was cowering behind the stoves with his guilty knives; five of the ship’s boys more enthusiastic over the meat than the grog had secreted themselves in a corner with a joint and were even in the midst of confusion still tearing away half-raw bites; two men who had been knocked down were now dazed enough to be compliant and not so drunk as to be useless.

With this undistinguished crew they set about mastering the worst of the fire: the men dragging over the bags of sand and the boys snatched from their dinner and set to pouring it in cupfuls onto anything which offered the least flicker; Urquhart cringing put out all the galley fires which were left.

He then lost himself slinking into the crowd and made his escape, perhaps hoping to have his sins forgotten if he could only get out of sight for a time; meanwhile hydra-like the little fires still crept along the deck, and the smoke clotted Laurence’s nose and his breath; they stopped and wiped their eyes, steam of the cooking pots damp on their faces. “Laurence, Laurence,” he heard Temeraire calling from above, the deep sonorous voice penetrating through the boards.

“We had better get back up where they can see us,” Granby said hoarsely—no need to articulate for anyone the consequence of leaving the dragons to grow too anxious for their safety.

“Darcy, go along there and tell that tar-eating cawker Powton to beat to quarters, if he damned well cannot hear me shouting it; and if he has deserted his post, find a drum and beat it your own self,” Riley said. “If I cannot have them pumping water, I would rather have the men at their guns than running wild all through the ship; we must get a little order here.”

The boy scrambled up the ladderway even ahead of Laurence; he and Granby had barely gained the deck before the relentless drum-beat was pounding away and the officers all set up a shout, “To quarters, to quarters!” The effort did some good: sailors were not unused to smoke and disorder, in battle or in drill, and the familiar roll sent many of them, even confused with drink, running below to their battle-stations on the gundecks. But too many of the men less trained or less sensible were left shoving to and fro on the upper deck, to no end, and spoiling what progress could be made.

Laurence pulled himself out of the ladderway wreathed in smoke that curled and clung to his arms, and thrust away a pair of sailors wrestling with each other over an uncorked jug that spilled all its contents even as they fought. They reeled away from him, and then Kulingile reached down over the dragondeck railing and snatched them up in one great taloned forehand: Laurence looked up and saw him dropping the pair into an open sack made of his own belly-netting, pulled down loose.

“I thought it would help, sir,” Roland called down: all three of the dragons were taking it in turn to pick off the worst of the drunkards, clearing the deck.

“Well done,” Laurence called back, before he fell to coughing; he took one quick swallow from the rain-barrel to rinse his mouth, then with Granby joined the rest of the aviators in herding the worst of the drunkards forward to their doom, to be piled in on one another in the netting, a mass of arms and thrashing legs.

“Only be careful!” Temeraire called, not without cause: shot was rolling loose over the deck, knocking men off their feet and going overboard with gulping splashes, or tumbling into the hatches. The sailors had the advantage of liquored stupidity, which made them thoroughly unpredictable: careened into one another and pulled on the ropes, knocked over water-casks, slapped and shoved and yelled. The men on duty in the rigging, not drunk themselves and sorry for it, were jeering and throwing down handfuls of greasy slush scraped off the sails with indiscriminate aim.

The swell was not high—that was to say, not high for the Southern Ocean; only twenty feet—and the Allegiance rolled and pitched wildly from her crew’s neglect. “Look out there!” Purbeck shouted, from the helm: one of the cannon had burst loose from its tackle, and as the ship heaved majestically over the next crest, the snub-nosed iron monster eased out of her traces and began trundling towards them at deceptive pace, wheels of the gun-carriage a hollow grumble over the deck.

Granby was trying to guide some men towards the reaching dragons: the carpenter and three of his mates, amiable drunks swaying deeply and keeping their feet only with the practiced balance of long-time sailors, arm in arm with one another and hiccoughing with laughter. The cannon slid into them sideways at the waist and knocked them over the barrel: expressions more of surprise than alarm as it swept onward with them.

Laurence had only time to seize Granby by the arm, and be dragged alongside with him by the inexorable weight: a corner of his coat was hooked over and pierced by the broken iron ring that had set the gun-carriage loose. Sliding over the deck behind the gun, Laurence managed to set his boot-heels to the railing and stop himself with a jolt as the gun crashed with ease through the oak. The cannon went over; the carpenters went, too, at the last yelling in fear as they fell. Granby screamed once, a shocked cry wrenched out of him, and his arm came queerly loose in Laurence’s grip.

The fine silk slid through Laurence’s fingers, embroidery snarling upon his rough calluses; the sun was in his eyes and dazzling on the cloth-of-gold. Granby had clenched shut his jaw, but his hand did not grip back, and he was sliding over the edge. Abruptly Ferris was beside them, dropping to his knees with a knife in his hands. He put it to the back of Granby’s coat and thrust it through, ripping up, and the cloth sheared away.

Laurence tumbled backwards with Granby, who gasped only, very pale under his sunburnt color; the arm still hung limp when Laurence and Ferris had set him on his feet.

“Granby, Granby!” Iskierka was shrilling, leaning deeply over the dragondeck railing and reaching for the mainmast to support herself, trying to get to them: in a moment she would have clawed through the rigging.

Ferris called back, “I’ll bring him to you, Iskierka; don’t snatch at him or you’ll jar his arm worse,” so she subsided back in hissing anxiety; Laurence nodded to Ferris, who ducked under Granby’s other arm and helped him across the deck.

There was no sign of the other men over the side; the ocean was beaten into a froth all around the ship. No more jeering came from the rigging. All the ship’s officers and her Marines were now awake and on the deck, Riley calling orders from the stern and his servant Carver hovering behind him with a neckcloth flapping in the wind like a white banner, attempting now and again to dart in and tie it for him, over Riley’s impatient jerked hand.

“Laurence, are you well?” Temeraire was calling, with not much less anxiety than Iskierka. Laurence wiped his streaming eyes. Smoke still seeped up from the creeping fire below, and Riley was sending the more coherent of the men down in groups under an officer, to go at it with buckets and pails; he needed hands now, and badly.

“I am very well,” Laurence said, “and pray take those men in your belly-netting and go dunk them half-a-dozen times in the ocean; we will see if they can be sobered enough for work.”

Then he was suddenly looking at the Allegiance as through a window of old mazed glass, green and rippled, with a sunset behind her: fascinated he watched her growing darker and more distant, red and gold color swallowed up by murk; he felt curiously light and free, like flying but without wind.

His head was dragged abruptly up through the water, the clear sun overhead a painful dazzle in his eyes and salt water choking his mouth; he vomited more onto the waves, and blindly clung where Demane put his hands, on a piece of driftwood—on a piece of deck planking, hot to the touch and still smoking from one corner—

There was no sunset. The Allegiance was shattered open along her stern: from the gundeck to the waterline a gaping mouth full of splinters and flames, and all her sails were ablaze.

“My God,” Laurence said involuntarily; his voice was a raw croak.

“What happened?” Demane said, gasping for breath beside him, also holding fast to the plank as it bobbed in the waves.

A sudden roar and shudder shook the Allegiance again, and another eruption of incandescent fire burst from her side; Laurence pulled Demane’s head down and ducked his own: in a moment a rain of splinters and ash came pattering over them, stinging on the skin.

The cloud passed. “But—” Demane said. “But—” He stopped.

Laurence looked up again. The flames inside the ship were dying as the waters rushed in over the broken planking. She was tipping backwards and up, the great fan-shaped dragondeck rising into the air. The dragons were circling overhead like ravens watching some great beast die, as she began slowly to sink down beneath the waves.

Chapter 4

TEMERAIRE DID NOT PRECISELY understand what had happened, at first—he had been skimming low over the water, soaking the drunken sailors despite their loud protestations, and then suddenly a great roaring and fire everywhere, a hundred times louder than Iskierka might have been. Burning scraps of sailcloth and wood were flung upon him, and when he pulled up into the air to look, he saw the flames rising from the deck.

“Is it a battle?” Kulingile demanded in high excitement, dashing over and dripping water onto Temeraire from the men crammed into his own belly-rigging. “Will we have a prize?”

“Well, I suppose we must have been attacked, but I do not see any other ship at all,” Temeraire had said, deeply confused himself, and winged around the Allegiance, only then seeing the enormous gaping hole into the ship—and so very strange to see her cut open in such a way and look in at all the decks in cross-section, the lumpy white hammocks swinging from the rafters like the drawing he had seen once of silkworms in their cocoons, and the guns sliding out into the ocean with tremendous plashes. Casks and bales were floating everywhere, and the sheep had escaped their pen and were swimming away, bleating: many of them had fire caught in their wool.

“Oh,” Kulingile said with interest.

“I am sure we oughtn’t eat them now,” Temeraire said, “this is not a time to be eating. And where is Laurence?” he added, and looked higher. The deck was littered with rigging and broken yards, the ladderways seething with fire and smoke, and bodies lay limp and strewn carelessly everywhere, bloody. Temeraire did not see Laurence anywhere, or any of his crew, and no-one answered when he called. “Laurence!” he cried again.

He flew around the ship again in perfect distraction—there were men in the water, but it was very hard to make them out, only little heads bobbing very much like casks, and they did not call out to him—why, why had Temeraire ever left the ship without Laurence? He had only meant to be gone a few moments—there had been no enemy in sight—what business did the ship have, bursting open in this way—

He jerked his head as something bright flashed in his eyes, and looking over saw Roland—Roland, waving at him wildly from the edge of the dragondeck. She had out one of his talon-sheaths and was reflecting the sunlight at him off the polished gold; she had been ducked underneath one of the tarpaulins. He stooped and snatched her up at once, and seized little Gerry and Sipho also while he was at it—he ought not have left any of them out of his reach at all, ever.

“Laurence?” he demanded. “Yes, yes, I see you,” he added with impatience, taking up Cavendish, who was waving his arms frantically to be picked off the deck also: a midwingman of sixteen, whom Laurence had taken on for some inconceivable reason; who cared anything for him?

“I don’t see the captain,” Roland said, hooking her carabiners onto his harness, and reaching to help Gerry with his. “Leave off yammering, you damned drunken sots,” she added, to the men clamoring from the belly-netting, as she climbed up past them, “or I will tell Temeraire to cut you all loose, and good riddance.” Temeraire had quite forgotten they were even there. “Do you circle about, Temeraire, and go slowly; we’ll all look, for him and—and for Demane.” Kulingile was already flying in wide anxious rings around the ship, calling for Demane.

Iskierka came winging back to help look—she had Granby, latched on to her back; she had not lost her captain. And she had Ferris also aboard, even though Ferris was Temeraire’s—but Temeraire could not be properly annoyed by that; there was no room in him for anything so small at the moment.

Gerry piped faintly from his back, “I see him! I see Demane, and the captain, too,” and Temeraire plunged at once to snatch them both from the water, with the scrap of wood that seemed quite shockingly, painfully small to have been their only support.

“Give him here!” Kulingile demanded at once, hard on his heels and circling anxiously. “Demane, are you well?”

“He is too chilled to speak,” Laurence said—at least, it seemed he said it; his voice did not sound at all like himself, very hoarse and grating, and he stuttered a little. “You must wait until he has warmed again.”

“I’ve a tarpaulin, sir, if you will wrap up in that,” Roland said, reaching up to help him and Demane step down from Temeraire’s claw onto his shoulders. “And we might get some of our gear off the dragondeck, I expect, before she goes under: most of it was tied down.”

Temeraire at first wondered what Roland meant; then he looked back at the ship. Water was pouring into the open hole, and the Allegiance was sliding slowly and gracefully beneath the surface.

“Oh!” he said, “but how are we to save her?”

“There is no hope of that,” Laurence said, locking himself onto the harness with slow, precise movements; his hands were shaking. “Temeraire, I cannot shout; tell Iskierka and Kulingile to take up whatever survivors they can, and we will go after the supply: only you can hover over the ship.”

Laurence was very urgent they should work quickly, but it did not speed matters at all that most of the sailors, quite stupidly, tried to swim away when Iskierka or Kulingile reached to pick them up out of the water. And they were able to get a few things only off the dragondeck—some harness and another tarpaulin, fetched by Roland hanging down on a strap from Temeraire’s belly, with a hoist rigged up to get the things into his netting.

Gong Su had managed somehow to climb out of the belly of the ship, his boots tied together by their laces slung around his neck, with a thin oilskin pouch. He stood helping a still-drink-addled O’Dea balance on the ship’s figurehead—a woman with flowing robes and also great feathered wings, which Temeraire had never seen before due to its ordinarily being hidden beneath the dragondeck; she presently pointed almost directly into the air.

Gong Su pulled himself up Temeraire’s side, when put onto the harness. “No, sir,” Temeraire heard him say, when Laurence asked him about Fellowes, “I am sorry, but I did not see him; all the lower decks are full of smoke, and there are many men dead.”

“It is only to be expected, sure,” O’Dea said, and hiccoughed. “The judgment of the ocean—”

“Enough,” Laurence said: that was all he said, but O’Dea subsided, abashed, and muffled his further hiccoughs into his hand.

“Should I try for some of those water-casks, sir?” Roland called up.

“Tell her no,” Laurence said to Temeraire, “but you ought to drink whichever of them you can reach, yourself, and let Iskierka and Kulingile do the same; and you had better eat those sheep.”

“Those fellows in the belly-netting will be thirsty very soon,” Temeraire pointed out, “and so will you, Laurence.”

“Let Roland light along a couple of canteens, and as for those bastards, they may go hang,” Laurence said, and it was not only his altered voice which made him sound grim. “You must travel as light as may be, my dear: we will want land sooner than water.”

An hour passed, dragging up supplies and a few more survivors from the ship, and then Iskierka was winging by. “We aren’t pulling anyone else up,” Granby called over wearily; his arm and his shoulder were bound up tightly against his body. “Not alive, anyway: the water is too cold. We had better go.”

“Set your course northeast,” Laurence said, “and keep as far apart from the others as you can and still be in sight of one another, so we may best watch for land; make sure Iskierka and Kulingile have lanterns for the night.”

It was very strange and lonely to fly away from the remains of the Allegiance for good, out across the open ocean with no destination. She was nearly all beneath the water now and sinking more rapidly; only the dragondeck yet jutted out into the sky. The ship’s boats were pulling away, crammed with sailors. They could not keep in company with them, of course; there had only been a brief shouting back and forth. Lieutenant Burrough was in command of the launch, and Lieutenant Paris, a boy of fifteen, in charge of the one cutter which had survived, with Midshipman Darcy to assist him.

“You do not see Riley anywhere, do you?” Laurence asked quietly, after they had spoken with the boats.

“No—” Temeraire said, after a moment. Riley had fed him that enormous red-fleshed tunny, three days after his hatching. Temeraire had never been quite so hungry ever in his life as those first few days, and Laurence had been asleep at the time—Riley had come down to the cabin with the fish himself because most of the sailors were too afraid—

“No,” Temeraire said. “No, Laurence, I do not see him.”

Laurence said nothing; when Temeraire glanced back, his face was set and grim, his eyes looking over the smoking wreckage distant; he only nodded, and turned to ask Mrs. Pemberton, “Ma’am, would you prefer to go in the boats?” She had been retrieved along with Mr. Hammond from the bow cabins: they had pushed out a window and waved her spare petticoat to attract notice, and been pulled up by a rope. “We can lower you down to them, and take off one or two of the men, if they are crowded.”

“Thank you, sir; I should rather stay aboard,” she said.

“You must realize,” Laurence said, “dragons can stay aloft at most two days—perhaps three—”

“As I understand it, there is very little chance of a boat making landfall, either, from these latitudes,” she said. “If it were done, t’were well it were done quickly, I think.”

“Of course you are much better remaining with me than going in one of those boats,” Temeraire said, swallowing a last morsel of raw mutton. After all, Lung Shen Li flew all the long way from China to the coast of Australia, scarcely landing along the way. Laurence might be pessimistic, but Temeraire was quite certain he was not going to sink in an ignominious fashion, without even a battle for excuse; he would certainly not drop before they found land.

“I still think we ought to pull her up,” Iskierka grumbled, circling the tip of the Allegiance once more: all her prize-goods had been in the hold, and Granby’s coat was entirely spoilt. That did not cheer Temeraire precisely, because one could not be happy that anything so very nice was ruined, or going to the bottom of the ocean for no-one but sea-serpents to enjoy, but it was something that Iskierka could not show away anymore, and meanwhile Laurence’s own formal robes were safely aboard in their oilskin bag, with Temeraire’s talon-sheaths for company; he could congratulate himself on having detailed Roland to keep them safe, and on the deck.

“We have already tried, when she did not have so much water in her, so there is no sense in imagining we will do any better a second time,” Temeraire said. “We had much better go.”

He put the sun behind him and flew.

Laurence looked around only once while the Allegiance dwindled away behind them, wreckage and flotsam spreading wide around her like the skirts of a court dress; the sharks were already busy in the water. It was a sorry, bitter end for so many good men: the worst saved and even now making moan in Temeraire’s belly-netting, the best sent down to a silent grave trying to repair their folly, without even hope of glory for reward. Riley would be remembered as the man who had lost a transport on a cloudless day; if any of them lived to carry the report back to the Admiralty.

The weak sun, shrunken down and pale this far south, did little to warm skin and clothes waterlogged with salt, but Laurence was sorry to see it sinking, and still more sorry that the dragons had spent so much of the morning aloft in hunting and play.

They spread out as they flew; by dusk, Kulingile and Iskierka were specks to either side like distant sea-birds, growing faint to see as night fell: then there was only the small struggling glow of the lanterns keeping pace with them through the dark. They made not much noise besides the complaining from below, and even that died over time. The wind cut sharp and icy through the oilskins and tarpaulins on their backs, whistling, and the ocean muttered in low voices, patient.

“I am sorry we did not bring along some of the sheep with us,” Temeraire said, yawning tremendously into the wind as the sun came up after only a brief night. “I would not mind another one now; it cannot be convenient to fish when I have so many people dangling off me.”

He put his head down and flew onward. Laurence could not help but think how much lighter Temeraire would go without the men crammed into his belly-netting; it might mean as much as another day aloft. A thought rooted in darker sentiment, in angry resentment: They have killed us.

There were a few rocky atolls scattered across the Pacific at these latitudes; the chances of finding them with neither map nor compass were not to be counted, and if found, little hope of finding another within flying distance from there. These waters were not so hospitable they would sustain three large dragons for long, fishing in the same narrow space.

There was some better chance they would find instead a ship, which might be spied at even great distance by her lights—some lonely whaler plying her lines, or a clipper making for Cape Horn. But such a ship would offer no refuge for any of the dragons; they could only let off their burden, then drown having spent their last strength to rescue the men responsible for the disaster, who deserved better to end their journey at the end of a rope.

Laurence wrote a report as they flew, ten minutes at a time before he had to pause and warm his hands again, tucked inside his coat beneath the tarpaulin. If they did find any such refuge, the Admiralty should at least receive a full accounting, and know Riley had been neither a fool nor an incompetent.

He was betrayed, rather, by the Folly of foolish men, and the Evil of Liquor: when he and his Officers, who had put forth every most heroic effort and preserved the Ship throughout a Gale of terrific force and danger, over the course of five Days and Nights, were overcome for a little while by Fatigue; a great many of the less-skilled Hands, who were used more gently during the Crisis, in Shifts, than the Officers used themselves, seized upon this Opportunity to bring Ruin on all alike in their mad greed for spirits.

I deeply grieve to communicate such a Loss to you, which must be felt all the Worse for its inutility, and the unwarranted Harm it must do to the Reputation of one of the most deserving Officers of my Acquaintance; and hope only that this letter, reaching you, may offer to you and to his son the Consolation of knowing any Ill-Report of him which may be bruited around shall be without Merit.

He enclosed this more personal letter to Catherine Harcourt along with his report, folded within a square of oilcloth sawed away from the one wrapped around himself, and tied with a few scraps of fraying rope. He at least had little likelihood of having to face her in person with such evil news; which event would have been all the more painful for his doubts of her reaction. He hoped Riley would be mourned; Riley deserved to be mourned; Laurence was not at all certain that he would be. Harcourt had married him reluctantly and only for the sake of her coming child, who indeed had proved to be a boy, and she had shown only the greatest impatience since with Riley’s every attempt to fulfill his duty to her.

“Roland, you will keep that by you, if you please,” he said, and she roused from drooping half-slumber to take the packet and put it into her clothing, for safe-keeping. “I hope you will see the letter reaches Captain Harcourt, if you have the chance.”

“I will, sir,” she said, calm as though there had been any real hope of that; it was already afternoon, on the second day. The dragons had been aloft steadily for nearly thirty hours.

“I think there are some dolphins there,” Gerry said, peering over Temeraire’s shoulder. “Look, they are jumping.”

Temeraire roused and abruptly dived, throwing all their stomachs into their throats and raising a yowling of alarm from below, which was silenced by the spray as Temeraire plunged into the pod and came away with three of the dolphins in his talons; he ate them with the efficiency of real hunger and without pausing in his flight, blood spattering back against his breast.

“That is very heartening, I must say,” Temeraire said, licking his talons clean, when he had finished. “And I am sorry, but it is no use complaining; if you had not all run wild, you would not have had to be put into the netting, anyway,” he added, to the unhappy sailors. “I suppose we have not had any sight of land?”

“Not yet,” Laurence said.

Gerry’s sharp young eyes caught a patch of foamy ocean, the next morning: only a scrap of reef some dozen feet from the surface, but that was something. Laurence signaled to Granby and Demane, and the dragons had an hour’s rest, sitting perched on their hind legs with the waves washing over them; the sailors in the netting all pulled themselves up to the top and hung there to keep out of the water as best they could: they had by now given over complaining.

The dragons drooped half-sleeping. At last, Iskierka roused and said crabbily, “We may as well go on; there is no sense sitting here getting colder and colder,” and shook the spray off her wings before leaping back into the air.

“Are you ready?” Laurence asked Temeraire.

“Oh, certainly,” Temeraire said, although it came out mostly in a murmur; he stretched out his neck very far, crackling, and then one mighty heave propelled him aloft again.

The day crept away slowly, measured out in wing-beats; Temeraire did not bother to open his eyes very often, but only altered his course if Laurence touched him gently and spoke to correct their path. He startled awake once with cold water and yells, and jerked himself farther aloft: he had drifted so low a rising swell had struck him full in the face and run along his belly.

He would have liked to reassure Laurence that this had only been an accident—the result of a moment’s inattention—not in any way a sign. He was tired, of course, but not nearly that tired; there was nothing for Laurence to fear. But somehow it was a very great effort to draw breath, and when he had drawn it, he preferred to use it for flying, instead; the air was so very cold.

Iskierka and Kulingile were also flying very low to the water—they were keeping in closer company now. Temeraire saw a spray rise up around Iskierka’s tail for a moment; Kulingile was a little higher in the air, but gradually sinking also. Temeraire heaved breath again and roared—a paltry sort of roar, with nothing of the real force which he could put behind it; only a gesture of defiance, but it rang across the water, and Iskierka’s head jerked up: she looked over and blew out a thin ragged stream of flame, in answer, and together all three of them beat back up determinedly.

Darkness crept up from the rim of the world, a long blue curving unbroken by anything which might have meant rest—no land, no sails, not even another reef. Temeraire did not really notice the night coming on; all the world had narrowed to the next wingbeat, and the next after that, cupping the air with each stroke and pushing it away, trying only to get enough room for a breath; trying only to draw enough breath for the next stroke. He could hear the swells breaking beneath him from his passage.

“Temeraire,” Laurence said, and, “Temeraire,” as though he had said it more than once already. “There away, two points to starboard, my dear.” Temeraire turned and flew on; he was vaguely conscious that there was some movement upon his back, signals of lantern-light, and a few answering lights ahead, bobbing; then a blue light went hissing up from his back.

The painfully bright light flung out over the ocean for a moment, an island amid the dark, and with a final desperate effort Temeraire came over the deck and dropped down onto it—barrels and casks were hastily being cleared in every direction, and warm—oh, warm!—bodies coiling away to make room for him, and Iskierka, and Kulingile landing half on top of them both—Temeraire did not mind that in the least.

The men in the belly-netting were yelling protests and pleas. Temeraire caught Iskierka by the base of the neck and kept her from lying down upon her own load of passengers; there were knives and hatchets already at work, and the netting was coming loose, spilling men everywhere. They crawled feebly away, and Temeraire sank down gratefully; Laurence was climbing down from his back, Laurence was safe, and dimly as he fell asleep Temeraire heard him say, “We surrender.”

Chapter 5

THERE WAS AN OPEN RAIN-BARREL directly before Temeraire when he awoke; he had not quite opened his eyes when he knew it was there—smell, a glimmer of light on water—and rearing up to throw off two of Iskierka’s heavy coils he seized upon it and drank the whole off in one desperate gulping rush. Then he was awake—and very hungry, with his shoulders and wing-joints aching dreadfully, but awake, and he looked round and discovered he was being stared at in what could only be called contemptuous disapproval.

“I do not see what business you have, glaring so,” Temeraire said, putting back his ruff and sitting up. “At least I am not all over feathers, or whatever those are,” for the very peculiarly looking dragon was covered both body and wings in bright, elongated scales—or Temeraire thought they must be scales, but they had irregular edges, and were much larger and did not fit so neatly with one another as did his own. Anyway, Temeraire was larger, too, so there was no excuse; although he was unhappily conscious that it had been rather bad manners to snatch up all the water, without being sure there was enough for everyone else.

The strange dragon snorted, and said something back in a language Temeraire had never heard; then someone else said sleepily, “He says no-one who surrenders without even fighting, from only a little flying, should make much of himself.”

Temeraire looked over at the young Fleur-de-Nuit lying on the other end of the deck, who had her large pale eyes half-lidded and shaded by her wing against the sun. “I am Genevieve,” she added, “and that is Maila Yupanqui; he is an ambassador.”

“Ambassadors, I have always understood, are meant to be especially gracious and polite,” Temeraire said, eyeing Maila darkly. “What language is that?”

“Quechua,” she said. “The Inca speak it.”

The ship was the French transport Triomphe, fresh from the docks in Toulon and having just come around the Horn; she was sailing north, en route to the Incan empire, evidently with a project of alliance.

“I am sure it must be some mischief of Lien’s,” Temeraire said to a very disheartened Arthur Hammond—in Chinese, the only language in which they might have some privacy—when that gentleman had come up on deck. “But at least she is not here herself, and if we should explain all the circumstances to the Inca, I am sure they will think better of allying themselves with her and Napoleon: they cannot be pleased with him when he has been delivering strange dragons from over the ocean into their territory, or near it, anyway. Where is Laurence?”

“The French are not likely to give us an opportunity of making them any such explanations,” Hammond said, seating himself on a coil of rope, “and Captain Laurence is belowdecks with Captain Granby and Demane: they are in good health. I am to inform you that they will each be allowed an airing once a day, in your sight, on the quarterdeck; so long as there is no gesture—no attempt—which might suggest a violation of parole.” He spoke disconsolately.

“What is he saying about Granby?” Iskierka said, picking up her head, and when Hammond had repeated the intelligence for her in English, she hissed in displeasure. “I do not see we have given our parole at all; I did not surrender, and I am sure the three of us can take this ship, if we like: what is this nonsense of keeping my captain away from me?” she demanded.

“We needn’t have let you land last night,” Genevieve said, with some heat—she had been taught English, as well, it seemed—“and then you and your captains would be drowned. It is all very well to say now that you can take the ship: you ought have done it then, if you liked to try.”

Iskierka snorted a curl of smoky flame from her lip—much to the alarm of the crew, whose urgent shouting she ignored—but there was no answering Genevieve’s argument, however much one might have liked to do so.

It was hard to find oneself aboard a perfectly splendid prize, a French transport only just built, and not be allowed to take it when they could have. Besides Genevieve, who was not even fully grown, there was only a Chanson-de-Guerre named Ardenteuse, and a Grand Chevalier absurdly named Piccolo, both of them presently aloft overhead to make room on the deck for the visitors. Piccolo was flying back and forth over the ship and peering downwards narrowly, trying to see just how big Kulingile was—somewhat difficult as Temeraire and Iskierka were coiled up over him.

So that was three against three, or three against four if one counted Maila on the French side—he was disagreeable enough that Temeraire was perfectly willing to do so—and none of them able to breathe fire, or anything like. Oh! They would certainly have been victorious, in a fair fight; only it would not have been fair when they had just come from three days’ flying.

Maila, watching Iskierka, said something to Genevieve without turning his head; she ruffled up her wings and answered him shortly, then after a second exchange she turned and said to Iskierka, “He asks if that is as much fire as you can breathe, at a time.”

“Of course not,” Iskierka said, and put her head to the leeward side and blew out a rippling streamer of flame which reached nearly the full length of the ship and shimmered all the air about it. “And more than that, if I care to,” she added, with a flip of her wings.

This was too much for the sailors: a few minutes later the ship’s captain, a M. Thibaux, mounted the dragondeck with lips grimly set and his hand upon the hilt of his sword, to express his objections to open flame aboard his ship. That was quite understandable, Temeraire felt, but the captain carried it too far, saying to Hammond, “I must beg you to convey to the beast, in whatever terms you think best, that her captain must suffer the consequences of her behavior—I would be sorry to have to execute such a threat, but monsieur, it cannot be tolerated; the next time, I will have him flogged.”

“You will do nothing of the sort to Granby,” Temeraire said indignantly, in French, “and if you should try, Iskierka would set the ship on fire; and I would not stop her, either.”

“What is he saying?” Iskierka demanded, coiling up onto Kulingile’s shoulders to peer down at the captain, jetting steam from her spikes. “Oh! Why do you all not speak so anyone can understand; what is it about Granby?”

“He says he would flog him,” Temeraire said, still angry, “and I am telling him he mayn’t at all: it is not Granby’s fault,” he added to the captain, “when your guest all but asks her to show away, and anyway she was perfectly careful.” Not that Iskierka needed to be breathing fire all over the place, and ordinarily Temeraire would have been all too pleased to issue her a reproof himself, but he did not mean to yield any ground on this point.

Iskierka hissed in a dozen voices at once, from throat and spikes together; and woke Kulingile: he cracked a sleepy eye and rolled it upwards to peer at her as she jounced on his shoulders in fury, and asked, “Is there anything to eat?”

It was maddening to hear the rising uproar on deck, some two feet directly overhead, while powerless to have anything to do with it. “I suppose we may call it a blessing if this ship isn’t sunk, when we are done,” Granby said from the hanging cot where he lay, without opening his eyes; his face was drawn and deeply lined with pain.

Captain Thibaux had been everything gracious—had brought his surgeon to see to Granby’s arm, and his servant to give them an excellent dinner, though their hunger would have made it easy to do justice to one far inferior. But there was still a guard upon the door, four men well-armed and with a look of sturdy competence, and Laurence had no illusions as to their orders: the soldiers looked anxiously at one another, and above, as the noise of quarreling dragons grew all the louder.

That noise soon subsided, however, and shortly thereafter a tapping came on the cabin door.

“Captain Laurence, I regret we are fated always to be meeting in the most uncomfortable circumstances,” M. De Guignes said. “Do you permit?” He poured: an excellent Madeira. “When this endless war is over, I insist that you shall visit me, and I may give you better hospitality, if God wills we should both be spared.”

“You are very kind, sir; it would give me great pleasure,” Laurence said, taking the glass with more politeness than enthusiasm; at present he could hope only that he would not be spending the interval in a French prison, with very little reason to encourage that hope. “I am afraid you might find Temeraire less convenient to host.”

De Guignes smiled. “He should pose no more difficulties than my Genevieve,” he said, touching with pride a small decoration upon his sleeve: the Legion de l’Aile, a singular honor lately created by Napoleon which came accompanied by a dragon egg and an endowment for the beast’s future maintenance, together. Laurence heard this explanation in some astonishment, and later, when De Guignes had gone again, Granby coughed out a laugh from his cot and said, “Lord, trust Bonaparte to bring having a dragon into fashion: I suppose every one of his new aristos will want one, now.”

“Mme. Lien has condescended to offer her advice on the most profitable of crosses to attempt,” De Guignes now added. “Genevieve has now five tongues to her credit, and the last acquired after she was already out of the shell.”

It had not before occurred to Laurence that Lien might improve the French breeding lines through such a mechanism: the Admiralty had rather congratulated themselves that Lien, being female, could only produce a handful of offspring for Napoleon’s benefit. Laurence himself had strongly doubted she could be induced to do even so much, given her pride in her own lineage and disdain for Western breeds. Certainly the Chinese were acknowledged supreme in dragon-breeding techniques, but Laurence had imagined that these must be the province of some band of expert gentlemen very like those who served in the role in Britain and in France. But that was absurd, he belatedly realized: who better to direct the breeding of dragons than the dragons themselves, and if Lien had made any study of the matter, her knowledge would benefit the breeders of France far more than any individual contribution she might have made.

“The captain grants you should have the liberty of the quarterdeck from two to four bells of the afternoon watch, one of you at a time,” De Guignes said, “and you will of course wish to see to the comfort of your men; I am desolate to inform you they must remain in the ship’s gaol, in consequence of their numbers, but every effort will be made—”

“I understand entirely, and your assurances must satisfy me,” Laurence said, interrupting: he did not much object if the rescued sailors were kept in chains and sustained on weeviled biscuit and bilgewater. “If I might solicit some better housing for our officers and crew, I would be grateful: I will stand surety for their parole, if they are willing to give it.”

De Guignes bowed acquiescence.

He had managed to quiet the earlier uproar among the dragons—“Nothing to concern you, gentlemen,” he said, “only the least of misunderstandings, owing to Captain Thibaux’s unfamiliarity with the nature of dragons: he is new to his command, you see. But all has now been made clear: although I cannot greatly envy you, Captain Granby,” he added in a touch of raillery, which Granby’s set mouth did not appreciate.

“But sir,” Laurence said, “I must ask you to confide in me: will we not overmatch your resources? Three dragons of heavy-weight class added to your complement—”

“We are perhaps a little incommoded,” De Guignes said, “but I beg you not to fear: I have discussed the matter with the captain and our aviators, and I am assured we have no cause for alarm. The dragons shall take it in turns to spend some hours aloft, and by rationing and attention to fishing we will arrange to feed them all, if not quite so well as they might like.”

“Everything is quite all right,” Temeraire said the next afternoon, calling down to the quarterdeck—in English; De Guignes had very gently hinted that efforts at concealing the captains’ conversation with their respective dragons might be taken amiss. “Iskierka is complaining of the seaweed—”

“As anyone would,” she put in, without opening her eyes or raising her head, “—it is perfectly foul, and it is all great nonsense to say it is a delicacy in China: we are not in China, and I would much rather have a cow.”

“Well, there isn’t a cow for you to have,” Temeraire said, “and I must call it the worst sort of manners to complain when we are guests.”

“Seaweed?” Laurence said, puzzled.

“Ardenteuse has the net, you can see her there aloft,” Temeraire said, pointing with his snout at the Chanson-de-Guerre flying alongside the vessel with a long rope dangling: shortly she pulled up a fishing net of fine line, full of dark green seaweed and wriggling silver bodies.

“They might pick the fish out for us, at least,” Iskierka said, grumbling, “instead of giving it to us all mashed together. Besides, we are not guests; we are prisoners, since we have surrendered”—very sullenly—“so I will complain as much as I like.”

“And it is not at all unpleasant to keep aloft for half the day,” Temeraire went on, lordly ignoring her, “so long as one may come down and sleep later.”

He made light of the difficulties, but there was an undertone of weariness in his voice which all the effort at cheer did not mask, and he put his head down and fell back to sleep even before Laurence had been gently ushered from the deck at the conclusion of his brief airing.

“It’s not that they can’t fly half the day,” Granby said at dinner, having returned from his own outing equally anxious for Iskierka, “but not when they are to be half-fed, day-in and day-out; and this cold weather don’t make it easier on them, either. I suppose it is still a long way to landfall?”

“Four weeks perhaps, if they are aiming for Matarani,” Laurence said, an educated guess only: he barely knew anything of the Inca ports. They were notoriously unfriendly to sailors putting in at their ports in anything larger than a ship’s launch, so any merchantman determined to trade was forced to anchor miles off the coast out of sight and ferry goods in by boat; and these on return often reported half their crews missing, lost to a fate whose horrors were only magnified for being unknown. Those boats nearly as often carried back chests loaded with gold and silver, in exchange for their goods, which caused the adventurers to persevere; but the Inca were not to be considered hospitable.

In any case, even if Laurence had known the coast as well as that of England, the French had not shown him their charts, and looking out the porthole at what stars he could see did not tell him precisely where they were. “We are out of the forties, at least I can say for certain, so will make worse time the rest of the way.”

“Would you know when we are in range of land, Captain?” Hammond asked, dropping his voice confidentially, in a way Laurence could not like. “In flying range, I mean—and if we should be straining the ship’s capacity—”

“We would nevertheless be bound by our parole to remain, unless the French should give us leave to go,” Laurence said with enough finality, he hoped, to forestall any untenable suggestion: Hammond was a remarkable man in many respects, and Laurence had cause to be grateful for his gifts, but on occasion one might not be sure of him.

“Yes, of course,” Hammond said, and sank back into his chair with a face like a sail with the wind spilling out of it, all gloom; in a moment he burst out, “They must have sent spies through Brazil—it is the only explanation; but how they should have persuaded the Inca—” and subsided; a moment later he was repeating, “I cannot conceive how they should have persuaded the Inca to open relations—”

De Guignes certainly did not mean to volunteer any information; however smiling his courtesies, it was plain he disliked extremely having encountered them, and meant so far as he could to isolate them from the life of the ship and in particular from his Inca passengers, if there were any: Laurence had so far seen none, saving the feathered dragon upon the deck. Captain Thibaux was more really welcoming, but as he could count on the captain’s share of the head-price for three heavy-weight dragons and their officers, as well as for nearly three hundred sailors, he had greater compensation for his pain.

“No, Mr. Hammond, I have met none of the Inca aboard,” Mrs. Pemberton said, when she was permitted to visit them, “although I have been made very welcome: Mme. Récamier has kindly lent me this dress, as I came away without baggage.”

“Récamier?” Hammond said, puzzled. “Not of the salon, in Paris?”

“I believe she lives in Paris,” Mrs. Pemberton said, confirming, “and several of her companions also.”

“But,” Hammond said, and fell into muttering confusion; Laurence could not deny he was as perplexed to find De Guignes carrying along half-a-dozen Frenchwomen of noble birth on a mission to a dangerous and isolate nation.

“I don’t see why he must be so unfriendly,” Kulingile said, meaning Piccolo, who was presently taking his turn to sleep, with his head buried beneath his wing so he would not see Kulingile flying overhead. It had proven necessary to the maintenance of harmony to have only one of the two of them on the deck at any time, once Piccolo had determined that Kulingile was indeed the larger. “It is not as though I were doing it on purpose.”

“That scarcely makes a difference; it is not as though you would choose to be smaller if you could,” Temeraire said. In all honesty he did not himself see why Kulingile needed to be quite so large, and still growing, when he had started out so small and from a stunted egg; it was a little difficult to adjust one’s thinking.

But to be fair, Kulingile was not at all inclined to make a fuss: even though there was not enough to eat, he did not try to demand more than a proportional share, or filch some of the catch for himself the way Piccolo would if one did not make sure he was watched.

“I am not a prisoner of war,” Piccolo had said over-loudly, when Iskierka had caught him at it the other day. “My captain did not surrender himself; this is our ship.”

“It is all very well to make remarks of that sort,” Temeraire had said coldly, “if you were prepared to defend them, but you know very well we cannot be having it out in the middle of the ocean. You may be sure there is not another transport about if we should lose this one, and if there were, there would be even less food to go around.”

Temeraire did not like to remember those last desperate hours of the flight, drawing in a mist of salt with every too-short breath, his whole body growing steadily more heavy around him; it felt too like defeat. But there was no denying that he could not have flown much farther, with all the will in the world to do so. Nor could have Iskierka and Kulingile, of course; so it was not at all a weakness of his own, but nevertheless he had been forced to acknowledge what must indeed be a practical limitation upon almost any dragon.

He would have liked to question Lung Shen Li about her technique—perhaps there was some trick to a long flight—but after all, she did not have the divine wind, so he could not begrudge her a particular gift all her own. In any case, he now properly appreciated the absolute necessity of the ship to all of them, and so they must not quarrel; however much one would have liked to push Maila’s nose in for him, with his constant airs and the shameless way he made up to Iskierka.

“Perhaps when we have made land?” he said to Laurence wistfully. “Not, of course, to violate parole,” Temeraire added hurriedly, seeing Laurence’s expression, “we would not really take the ship away; but only to make quite clear that if they hadn’t our parole—”

But evidently this was not acceptable, either; although Iskierka snorted her opinion of that. “It is all stuff,” she said. “Do you know that they mean to send us back to some breeding grounds in France, and put Granby and Laurence and Demane in prison, for all the war? We should not have any battles, or prizes, ever again; it is perfectly ridiculous to expect us to go along with it when we can roust them in ten minutes.”

Temeraire could not disagree. He had already had more than enough of breeding grounds to satisfy him.

“And they know it, too,” Iskierka added: which was perfectly true. Temeraire had made a point the other morning of exercising the divine wind against the ocean, to raise up a great wave. Of course he had raised it behind the ship and going away, but the bulk of it had been perfectly visible even from the dragondeck, Kulingile had assured him, and the roaring audible. Temeraire did not feel that had been excessive: he had not done it to show away, only to make clear how matters stood; and he had only made the effort once, while Iskierka shot off flames three times a day for no reason at all.

So he did think the French dragons could hardly help but see they were overmatched all around. “I suppose that is why,” Temeraire said to Kulingile, referring to Piccolo’s rudeness. “It cannot be a comfortable situation for them.”

Ardenteuse and Genevieve had both been entirely respectful towards himself from almost the beginning, although Temeraire was a little displeased that they had assumed that attitude only when they had learned he was a Celestial. “Oh! Like Mme. Lien,” Ardenteuse had said eagerly. “Only she is all white, like snow, and has the most splendid jewels, different ones for every day of the week—”

So it could not be called a satisfying state of affairs, in total; not by any means. “If only we had come across them sailing, when we had the Allegiance ourselves,” Temeraire said.

“And we would still have had all the cattle,” Kulingile agreed regretfully.

“But we are not at all planning anything,” Temeraire protested, a few days later, when Laurence reproached him. “Indeed, Laurence, I would not do anything to dishonor you, I promise,” except of course to preserve Laurence’s safety, Temeraire privately amended.

He had learned his lesson in that regard when Laurence had been imprisoned for treason: the British had put Laurence into prison on the Goliath, supposedly safe; Temeraire had gone into the breeding grounds believing it; and then Napoleon had invaded and the ship had been sunk. And Temeraire could not find that anyone had given a single thought to Laurence’s safety at the time—he had only escaped on the ship’s boats because he had been helping them fight.

So Temeraire did not mean to trust any future promises of that sort from anyone; if the French should try and take Laurence away from him, he had already privately conceived of several stratagems which he might use to extract Laurence from their grasp. But there was no need to go into all of that, Temeraire felt, so long as the French did not do anything unreasonable.

“No,” Laurence said. “No, you cannot be accused of anything like planning; there is nothing secretive or conniving in Iskierka’s announcing daily in full voice that she does not mean to be immured in a breeding ground, or in your roaring up waves for your own entertainment fit to sink the ship—” The wave had not been nearly so large as all that, Temeraire wanted to argue, but it did not seem the appropriate moment. “But neither are these gestures calculated to leave our hosts with any confidence in our respect for the rules of civilized warfare, the which they have themselves so generously embraced in offering us harbor from a disaster of our own making.”

Temeraire did not think it was fair to call it their own making: it was not his fault, or Laurence’s, that the Allegiance had sunk. But he did not argue: Laurence spoke too bleakly of the loss, and Temeraire knew it had wounded him very deeply. Indeed he felt it himself—it did not seem right that the Allegiance should be gone forever, and Riley with her. The haze of the long, desperate flight had left the sinking strangely uncertain in Temeraire’s memory—surely they would one day look out from a port, and see her coming in again.

“Of course no-one would ever dream of asking Captain Laurence to violate his parole,” Mr. Hammond said, after Laurence had been taken below again. “But as I think of it, there is no reason you might not speak with the Incan beast—I cannot call myself a proper scholar in the tongue, but I have made some little study of Quechua—I should be happy to instruct you in what little I know—”

“I see no reason why anyone would like to speak with Maila in the least,” Temeraire said, flattening his ruff as he looked up to see the Incan dragon flying alongside Iskierka: the very stupid feathery scales spread out wide when he flew, and shone gaudily iridescent in the sun.

“If we could only form a notion of where their negotiations stand,” Hammond said, in a low voice, “it would be of the greatest use—”

“What use will it be if we are only to be taken to prison?” Temeraire said.

“But by necessity we are first being taken to the Inca,” Hammond said, even more quietly, “who might care to speak with us before they make any decision, so long as they know we are close at hand and empowered to make them offers.”

That was a heartening thought: not all the Inca could be as rude as Maila, Temeraire supposed. “I suppose you may as well teach me the language,” he said. “You can come up along with me when it is my turn to go flying next, and begin.”

“Oh,” Hammond said, and swallowed.

Quechua was not a very difficult language—very nicely regular, Temeraire noted with approval, so that once one had learned the rules, one could make further progress at a steady pace. “There are records of a great many more dialects, from the earlier colonial days,” Hammond shouted through the speaking-trumpet—it was not really necessary to speak so loudly aloft, Temeraire could hear him quite clearly even if he did not yell, but Hammond could not be convinced of that—“but the Inca have imposed their own preferred dialect as a kind of lingua franca.”

As for pronunciation, that was rather more difficult; Temeraire could not always be listening in on Maila’s conversations with Genevieve, but he heard enough to know Hammond’s left something to be desired. “You might bespeak him now,” Hammond suggested, looking over at Maila, who was making a habit lately of flying close by whenever Temeraire went aloft—likely trying to show away, Temeraire thought. Not that Maila looked to advantage beside him, unless one was more fond of a flashy and vulgar coloration, ostentatious purples and greens rather than sleek and elegant black.

“I see no call for that,” Temeraire said coolly. “We are sure to meet some other Incan dragons sometime, whom I am sure will be much better company.”

“It is not as though you should have to translate between him and Iskierka,” Hammond said.

“I do not see what that has to do with anything,” Temeraire said. “I certainly do not care in the least if he does wish to speak with Iskierka; although he can scarcely have anything very intelligent to say, anyway.”

“He gave me his share of the tunny, yesterday,” Iskierka said on deck, later that afternoon, “and if he likes to talk to me, he may; I think he is perfectly polite.”

She nodded to Maila, a gesture Temeraire felt was quite uncalled-for, and rather like fraternizing with the enemy; and to his indignation Maila puffed himself up and nodded back and said, “Madam—charming,” slowly and carefully.

“Oh! So you can speak properly,” Iskierka said. “Why haven’t you, before?”

“Only a little, now,” Maila said.

“He has been eavesdropping on my lessons,” Temeraire said to Hammond, “in the most rude fashion, without showing the least consciousness after; I cannot think much of his manners at all.”

“So he is learning English?” Hammond said, now whispering excessively low: nearly inaudible here on deck, where there were people shouting in the rigging everywhere to make it difficult to hear, when he would yell so frantically aloft. Temeraire flattened his ruff in annoyance. “I had thought older dragons could not, save your breed—how splendid that he can as well! Would he perhaps consent to speak with me, do you think—”

Temeraire did not see anything splendid in it, and in any case Maila steadfastly continued to ignore Hammond’s overtures. One might have expected Hammond to have enough self-respect, Temeraire thought, to leave off his attempts, but instead Hammond insisted on shouting all the louder in his next lesson for Temeraire; and even though Temeraire tried to fly at a farther distance, Maila kept close after him, still listening in shamelessly where no-one wanted him at all.

“I think the day will be fine,” M. De Guignes said to Temeraire the next morning, coming up to the dragondeck to breakfast with Genevieve.

Temeraire had just cracked his eye after a sleep not really long enough to satisfy. “Yes; it is growing warmer,” he said drowsily, and then roused enough to realize that De Guignes had spoken to him in Quechua, rather than in French: rather a mean trick, he thought reproachfully.

“That is a pity,” Hammond said, when Temeraire reported the exchange, “but I suppose we could not conceal it forever. Do you think you might be able to keep on, if they should keep me from going aloft with you? I might give Roland some notes on the language, to read to you—”

“You had much better give them to Sipho,” Temeraire said: Roland was no great hand at studying. “But perhaps we had better stop, if the French do not like it; anyway I am sure I have learned enough—anyone really skilled at languages does not need to be always having lessons, to learn a new one,” he added, looking coldly across the deck at where Maila was sunning himself.

But De Guignes did not make any objection, and after a few wary hours Hammond even set himself up on the dragondeck and began reciting aloud to Temeraire there, as loudly as ever he might, and enunciating his English words far more slowly and clearly than was at all necessary.

“I cannot make out the sense of their heading at all,” Laurence said to Granby at their small table that evening: he could see enough of the stars to be nearly sure they were sailing northwesterly, for no reason he could imagine; as good as adding another week to the journey, at least, and worse if the ship should get herself becalmed—no joke to risk with seven heavy-weights aboard.

By Thibaux’s courtesy, they had none of them been pillaged, so Laurence still had his glass; three days later, during his airing, it showed him a small atoll rising in the distance.

“Perhaps there will be some good fishing there,” Granby suggested. “It would be worth giving up a week, to lay in some stores.”

But the island, as it drew nearer, gave no evidence of particular fecundity: some green jungle carpeting a central peak, which could not be convenient to dig through; and the visible shore mostly black rock and sand through the spyglass lens: a scattering of palm-trees and scrub, sea-birds diving. There were some seals, but they cleared out with great speed after the dragons first set upon them, and did not leave behind enough numbers to make any landfall worth the while, Laurence thought. In any case he could not understand the French making so great a delay, when they might as easily have put the British dragons on shorter commons if they feared at all for their own beasts’ health.

De Guignes joined him on the deck the next day, at the railing. “Ah, Captain Laurence, you see we have come upon this island,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back and studying it meditatively: a black slash upon the ocean, with the dragons rising and falling over it in their hunting.

“Sir, I do,” Laurence said, polite and baffled.

De Guignes nodded. “I am desolate,” he said, “but here we must part, for a little while; I am assured,” he added to Laurence’s stare, “that there is fresh water—assured of it; M. Vercieux, the ship’s master, has once before made landfall here—”

Chapter 6

THE SHORE WAS NOT MORE HOSPITABLE seen close up: the sand barely a crusting over a heart of hard, salt-pitted rock, and no animals to be seen but birds and small scurrying crabs that fled from the boats. De Guignes intended nothing heartless: the French landed for their provision several rain-barrels, in case the small stream should not be sufficient, and enough salt pork and biscuit to sustain the men at least for months; even a tub of preserved lemons.

“I hope you will not be excessively uncomfortable,” he said. “I trust you will not, indeed; the climate, I think, is most tolerable.”

He said it smiling, full of courtesy; but there was steel beneath, and Laurence did not imagine there was any use in Hammond’s stammering, astonished protests. “Monsieur, we of course will return, in due course,” De Guignes said, “on our way back to France: I beg you do not doubt it for a moment,” and Laurence did not doubt it. De Guignes would be only too pleased to come back and retrieve a party of thin and demoralized men and beasts to be carried off to France as prize—however many of them had survived.

“But this must end our parole?” Temeraire said hopefully to Laurence, while they stood upon the shore watching the Triomphe haul her boats back aboard. “Surely we cannot be considered their prisoners anymore: they have let us go.”

“I should not consider us as obliged to them further, no,” Laurence said, dryly, “for what good that may do us.”

A series of attempts, never flying more than a day out from the island, might hope to discover some other land in reach; and repeating the method even in time bring them to the continent—in theory. But the dragons had been stripped of harness and all gear; not a tarpaulin was left them. Even if they had wished to try such a blue-water crossing, there would be no way for the dragons to take more than a few men with them, carried in their talons.

“They have abnegated all their duty,” Hammond said bitterly, watching the ship go. “Outrageous—without decency—”

Laurence could not so easily castigate the French, when the act might have been excused merely for the sake of their own beasts without the further provocation which had been offered them; and in a more cynical vein he could scarcely be surprised, either, that De Guignes had chosen not to convey them to the Inca. Maila even now looked wistfully back towards Iskierka from the dragondeck, as the Triomphe made sail and began to draw away.

They had been left a few dull-edged hatchets, which would serve to fashion some kind of shelter from the meager supply of wood; the salt pork might be eked out further with fishing, and perhaps some supply from the interior of the island, though Laurence doubted whether there would be much in the way of edible vegetation. He surveyed without pleasure the crowd of sailors, who, having made a muddy wreck of the basin where the stream emptied itself, had now disposed of themselves across the beach in sullen idleness, casting sidelong looks at the barrels and casks: Laurence did not doubt that but for the dragons there should instantly have been mutiny and folly along with it.

“Mr. Ferris,” he said grimly, “let us have a little industry here, if you please.”

He spoke preoccupied, from instinct; and then it was too late. Lieutenant Forthing was a competent officer and a sensible man; he had gone to New South Wales not, as had many of the other aviators sent with the mission, because he could get no other desirable post, but because as a foundling lacking all influence, he had little other chance of his own beast.

But this was little enough to put to his credit; and Ferris, meanwhile, had not by mere nepotism come by his original position with Temeraire. He had been made third lieutenant of a heavyweight stationed at the Channel as a boy of sixteen years, and since then had shown his worth across three continents and two oceans.

But that was not adequate excuse, Laurence knew. Forthing was not brilliant, but he was not short of courage or of sense, and he was first lieutenant; Laurence had made him so. That Laurence would rather have had Ferris in that place made no more excuse: officers not to his liking had been forced upon him before, and some of them the very dregs of the service, which Forthing was not; Laurence had never permitted his own disappointment to undercut the authority of one of his officers, and thus the chain on which all authority depended.

Never before: but now he had spoken; he had said, “Mr. Ferris,” and given the direction to him; and Ferris could not be blamed—Ferris had likely thought as little as Laurence himself, before answering, “Yes, sir,” and going at once to work which he did not need laid out for him: the sailors must be rousted from their beds of ease and set to clearing brush, the handful of surviving aviators—the only officers left among them—organized to supervise; small parties of the younger officers sent up into the interior to investigate what supply might be found.

All the work of command—work Ferris knew and had been formed for since his earliest years; work in which he would have been engaged but for a miscarriage of justice. But it was not his work, and Laurence ought not have given it to him. And no way now to easily recant—even more destructive if he had; as much as to say plainly that his first impulse was all for Ferris, and Forthing a poor second in his mind.

Instead Laurence said, “Mr. Forthing, you will oblige me greatly if you will go with Temeraire and look over our prison.”

“Very well, sir,” Forthing said, mingled relief and surprise in his looks superseding the first flash of dismay which Laurence’s first command had produced; he was off to Temeraire’s side at once, speaking loudly, “Temeraire, the captain wishes us to survey the island, if you please,” before Ferris had even begun his own tasks.

“Yes, I heard; but Laurence, will you not come?” Temeraire said, looking over with a rather puzzled expression.

It was indeed a task Laurence would have preferred to undertake himself—aviators had no experience of surveying coastlines, and Forthing could not be expected to recognize a natural harbor or pick out dangerous shoals, beyond the most obvious. But to send Forthing aloft with Temeraire, Laurence himself remaining behind, was the one mark of trust he could offer which, in the eyes of the aviators, would outrank having put Ferris in charge of arranging the camp.

And to be just, this intelligence was unlikely to be of use. Laurence could not envision any way in which they could proceed, with their crew of disappointed drunkards, to form any boat more sophisticated than a raft; to set them to a little spear-fishing would be the apex of his ambitions.

“You will do very well with Forthing, my dear,” Laurence said, “and I had best remain at camp at present; you may wish to delay if you see some chance of good fishing on the other side of the island, as well.”

Temeraire did not quite understand why Laurence should have remained behind, when Granby was here also; and if he should have to go without Laurence, he would rather have had Ferris or Roland. Temeraire had not forgotten Forthing’s behavior towards Laurence, when they had first been sent to New South Wales. Laurence might like to be generous; Temeraire was not so easily to be won over, and if he must grudgingly allow that Forthing had not been quite so useless as most of the aviators at the new colony, that did not mean Temeraire was enthusiastic to have him form one of his own crew.

Or, Temeraire thought, he might as easily have gone alone—more easily, in fact; he had to carry Forthing cupped in his talons, and it was not at all convenient to always be looking to make sure he had not dropped out; Temeraire was not aware of him in quite the same way as of Laurence.

“I suppose you may make notes,” Temeraire said to Forthing, rather doubtfully, as they made ready to go; “but no; you cannot; we haven’t any paper,” so he had even less notion what use Forthing would be.

“I can sketch the outline when we have returned,” Forthing said, a little doubtfully himself, but with an air of determination, “in wet sand.”

He did also make a fuss of what ought to have been a simple circuit of the island, which was not very large—he asked Temeraire to set him down more than once, only so he could collect bits of one plant or another which to Temeraire’s eye did not look any different from the ones on the original shore; and once in a sandy cove to collect up a truly enormous nest of turtle eggs. These he laboriously piled into his shirt one after another, wrapping each in leaves, while Temeraire had to sit three-quarters in the water being battened on by waves and mouthed at by the little sharks that lived in the cove; at least they were cleaning off the bits of seal meat which had clung to him.

“They are very good eating,” Forthing said by way of apology for the wait, as he packed up the eggs, perhaps aware that Temeraire was regarding him with ill-concealed disfavor. That had nothing to do with it, however: it was a great deal more to the point that Forthing’s coat had begun as a cheap and shabby garment, and was now both threadbare and faded from bottle-green to a drab greyish shade by sea-water and sun. His shirt, which it had formerly hidden from view, was worse—stained yellow at the neck and underarms with sweat and imperfect laundering, and the back mostly a mess of untidy darns done with thread of various colors.

He could certainly not have been considered a credit to any dragon at all, and Temeraire felt it keenly. One might excuse any number of temporary irregularities brought on by their trials, but Forthing might have had a better coat, or a decent shirt, to begin with; and he certainly might have trimmed his untidy hair or shaven his beard, which was inclined to grow in four or five different colors, off his very broad square jaw.

“We will want more of this sort of thing than we can get, I expect, before they come back,” Forthing added, to Temeraire’s censorious look.

“We are not going to just sit here and wait for the French to come back and take us off again,” Temeraire said with some heat.

“Well—I don’t see what else we can do,” Forthing said. “We haven’t any rope to tie ourselves on with, if you could even get anywhere from here flying.”

“I am sure Laurence will think of something,” Temeraire said; he had not himself, so far, but of course they had only just arrived. “This is just the sort of thing a Navy captain must deal with, you know, so Laurence is most fitted to work out precisely where we are, and what we shall do next; you see he knew at once what he wished us all to be doing.”

Forthing had the gall to look unconvinced. “I don’t see as being a Navy man will help him to get us off a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific a thousand miles from anywhere,” he said. “If he were Merlin, it might be some use.”

“Who is Merlin?” Temeraire asked, flaring his ruff. “I am sure he would not be any more use than Laurence, to anyone.”

“I was only having a joke,” Forthing said. “He’s a wizard, but not really; it is only stories. There was a fellow would tell them to us, at the foundling house, to keep us quiet,” he added. “About King Arthur, and all.”

“You may tell them to me, then, as we go,” Temeraire said, thinking Forthing might be a little useful after all: but Forthing looked awkward.

“Er, well, it is all early on,” he said. “So they weren’t very keen on dragons, at the time—” and it came out that this King Arthur and his knights had done nothing of real note but to kill innocent dragons all around Britain: almost certainly a pack of lies, as Forthing admitted they had not possessed even any guns at the time, and unpleasant lies at that.

“What are we going to do next, Laurence?” Temeraire asked, in a low voice, later that evening. Forthing had sketched out the lines of the island from memory, and not very badly; Temeraire had helped him. They thought the island was perhaps a mile wide at the extreme, mostly brush and scrub on the western side where the French had landed them, and a jungle-like growth over most of the eastern half; there were a great many little coves and inlets which they had not had time to investigate thoroughly.

“That rain-forest is promising,” Laurence had said tiredly, wiping his brow; there had been a great deal of activity in their absence—lean-tos had gone up to shelter a supply of dry wood, and a cellar dug for the barrels of salt pork; the one cauldron which had been left them was boiling away ceaselessly to make their dinner—which had become breakfast when Forthing unloaded the turtle eggs. No-one else seemed to mind that Forthing’s shirt was so wretched, although Temeraire inwardly writhed with embarrassment, and tried to keep himself between the scene and Iskierka’s view, at least.

“There might be some fruit, at least; and better timber than what we have here,” Laurence said now, yawning; he was leaning against Temeraire’s arm, and his eyes were already closed. “We will send parties as we can; it is damnable not to have men one can trust.”

“Oh, yes, but I meant, what are we going to do about getting to land?” Temeraire said. “We must find some way to get to Brazil, still; we cannot only wait here until the French come back and sail us off to prison.”

“I will count myself delighted if we manage even so much,” Laurence said; and then he was asleep, and Temeraire could not press him further.

It was an endless struggle to keep the men to their small ration, and could not have succeeded if salt pork were any more edible without its hours of boiling; in the third week, inspection discovered that the store of biscuits, weevil-eaten as it was, had been raided.

“It’s a sorry mess, Captain, and it’s certain we’ll soon feel hunger claw at all our bellies,” O’Dea said, reporting the destruction with an air of gloomy satisfaction, which Laurence would have been glad to think unwarranted but instead understated the case. Barrels smashed, one gone entirely, and nearly as much biscuit left to rot in the open air as had been stolen. That was worse than the mere theft: the rank stupidity which even an instinct of self-preservation alone ought to have prohibited.

“Enough left to live on, if we cut the ration in half,” Laurence said, tossing aside a sprung board from one of the ruined barrels. “And if there is not another such incident of pillaging.”

“We can’t live on salt pork and crabmeat alone,” Granby said, standing with him, pale and holding the injured arm clasped hard against his side. “There’s no help for it: we’ll have to keep a watch on it ourselves.”

Laurence nodded. But there were already not enough aviators for all the tasks which a community of several hundred men required for its survival: too many of Granby’s officers and Laurence’s had been engaged belowdecks in fighting the fire, when the Allegiance had gone up. Besides Forthing, there was only Granby’s second lieutenant Bardesley, a silent and sunburnt man brought on in Madras who had been fished from the wreckage; a few of their young midwingmen and ensigns, of whom Cavendish was the oldest; and Granby’s harness-man Pohl: his ankle had been twisted a few days before the fire, and he had as a consequence remained on the dragondeck during the confusion, to the preservation of his life.

“Pohl will do it, and I’ll take a turn myself,” Granby added. “At least I can do that, if I am of precious little other use.” He jerked his chin towards his shoulder.

They had no guns, of course, and no rope; nothing convenient to make a lash with, even if there had been a culprit or a dozen to single out. But any number of men had been on guard over the course of the week, and had opportunity to commit the crime themselves or allow others to do so. “And we cannot easily put a man on shorter commons than we already are,” Laurence said.

There was only one other potential avenue of punishment—but Laurence would not ask that of the dragons for such a cause. Even if he had been willing to set them upon an unarmed man, fragile as a naked child before them regardless of guilt, and if they had been willing to be so set, the example would have been more maddening than salutary, he feared. The sailors already muttered among themselves that they should be fed to the beasts when the hunting had run out: the dragons were forced to spend nearly all the day flying out and back, to keep from stripping their fishing grounds.

“Soon I suppose we will have to eat sharks,” Temeraire had said, dismally. “And it is all very well to say they can be excellent eating,” he added to Gong Su, “I am sure of it, when they have been prepared properly; but we cannot carry any quantity of them back for you to cook for us, and eaten raw they are dreadfully gristly. But we cannot be flying much farther out, and still catch enough to make the flight worth the while.”

This sort of conversation, overheard, did not reassure those same minds which thought to plunder the stores necessary for their own survival. Laurence supposed they would not have hesitated for a moment to throw their own fellows to the dragons, if thereby they might save their own skins, or for that matter obtain a cup of grog: which was the main subject of the daily reveries which occupied all their time besides the bare minim of tasks they could be chivvied into by the aviators.

There was not much necessary to keep the camp in good order: not much necessary, but what was necessary still was not done. Each morning saw the shore strewn afresh with driftwood and seaweed, palm fronds blown down upon them, the splatted excrement of the crying gulls objecting to the intrusion of so noisy a party into their domain. Laurence had given over trying to have the filth cleared away more than once every three or four days: instead they all kicked aside the refuse as they walked here and there, or slipped on it.

“If you will not work, you will not eat,” he had told the men—the one threat which made for any work at all, and which could not be used without limit. A slight, stoop-shouldered midwingman of sixteen like Cavendish could not clout Richard Handes, a man of thirty and four with fists the size of melons and a mouth full of teeth broken in dockside brawls.

Demane managed to impose, when he needed to; which Laurence was certain must have been due to some ferocious quarrel carried on out of his sight, and Emily Roland might have managed a few at once on the strength of personality alone: might have, if Laurence had any intention of trying so dangerous an experiment; instead he took every opportunity to order her away from camp before sunrise, and watched closely that none of the sailors drifted in the same direction.

Laurence would have given a great deal for even one man among the lot whom he could have made bo’sun, but if there were any trustworthy men to be found, they had not put themselves forward. O’Dea and Shipley were not properly of the sailors: they were Laurence’s followers, and O’Dea had enjoyed too well, during their stay about the Triomphe, making somber pronouncements on the demonic effect of liquor—a subject he was most qualified to speak upon, certainly—with imputations on the character of the sailors who had succumbed to its influence. His own culpability in that respect he protested vigorously: he had not been on duty, he was heard to say virtuously.

Shipley, meanwhile, had gown ambitious: he had begun to recognize, with so few hands among the aviators, that a man a little handy and willing might advance past his ordinary expectations. He had been a tailor, before some misfortune had led to his conviction and transportation, and with the loss of Fellowes had evidently formed the aim of making ground-crew master: they did not have harness for him to work on, now, but he made himself busy nonetheless, holding himself apart and lofty from the sailors. They were neither of them to be of use in bridging the gap.

The best candidate, if one were to be had, would have been Mayhew: an older man and one of their small handful of able sailors, who had at one time even advanced to the rank of master’s mate before being rated for drunkenness, and might have been of some use. But he had breathed a great deal of smoke in his own escape from the wreck of the Allegiance, and yet coughed in a near-consumptive fashion; and in any case, he had made no push to fix himself in authority among his fellows.

So instead Urquhart and Handes were the most popular—had even been delegated to speak to Laurence, after the first week, with the sailors’ grievances. “It is hard to be kept so short, Captain,” Urquhart said, with a shifty and a sidelong look that said he did not like so well to be actually addressing Laurence, instead of merely muttering with his fellows. “—dreadful hard, after the troubles we have had; we hope you will think better of it—”

Laurence listened with a mouth pressed thin by wrath, until Urquhart trailed off sidling back and away as his words dried up. Handes, less perceptive, added with brazen insolence, “It is no good going on here as if we were all still on board, and high and mighty. The stores must be opened and shared out proper. We had better have mess twice a day instead of one, and the beasts might bring us a little fish, too, instead of eating it all the day by themselves.”

The words alone were pure disrespect, if they had not also been foolish to an extreme; and to round them out with insult, Handes spoke while clapping one great fist into his other hand softly but in meaningful rhythm, as if he meant to imply some sort of threat: Temeraire was away hunting, at present.

But Laurence was neither slight nor stoop-shouldered, and he had once been a lieutenant—briefly and unhappily—under a hard-horse captain; he had never in his own command found it necessary to resort to similar tactics, but that did not mean he was shy of them. He bent down and seized a brand out of the fire and struck Handes in the belly to fold him over, and then again across the shoulders to flatten him to the ground.

“Stay there,” Laurence said, savagely, standing over him, “stay there, Handes; I will not answer for it, if you should get up. By God, you may hope I will not think better of wasting the very air upon the lungs of a pack of misbegotten whelps of sea-dogs; I had as lief tell Temeraire to chase the lot of you out into the ocean for the sharks, and send you to join the better men who are gone before you. Get you both out of my sight.”

There had been no repetition of this envoy from the sailors, and their industry had already been so bare that it could not be said to have slackened, but Laurence had no illusion that their feelings had altered. Shared out proper was euphemism: the men imagined, or at least dreamed, that there was some liquor hidden among the stores. There might have been: De Guignes had meant to leave them a supply of rum, but Laurence had without hesitation refused this particular generosity. He could scarcely have convinced the sailors of as much, however; to tell them that the offer had been made and rejected would be as much as to tell them it had been made and the results secreted somewhere for the private enjoyment of the aviators.

“That, as much as hunger, was behind this adventure, I do not doubt,” Laurence said, making a tally of the damage. There were now fewer than two biscuits a day for each man, if rationed over four months: futile to hope the French would return any sooner.

“Well, don’t look so glum, Laurence: perhaps there will be a plague, or some tropic fever, and kill off half of us,” Granby said. “You don’t suppose some ship will put in here? Some other ship, I mean.”

“I cannot think it likely; we are too close to the continent and the island too poor,” Laurence said. “A captain would likely seek a more certain harbor if desperate for resupply, and not waste the time otherwise. Nothing to count upon, at least. The dragons may sight one, more likely.”

“And probably frighten them straight off, too,” Granby said. “What are they doing now, do you suppose?”

He meant the sailors: farther down the beach they for once had stirred themselves to build up a bonfire and gathered around it; cocoanut shells were being passed around, and a burst of riotous laughter carried over the sand. “Oh, damn them all,” Laurence said. “They have made a still somewhere, I suppose; that is why one of the barrels was taken. I ought have known.”

“Can you brew liquor out of cocoanuts?” Granby said dubiously.

“That or they have found some other fruit which would serve them,” Laurence said, “unless they are busy poisoning themselves; we will know in the morning. Yes, Mr. Ferris, we know,” he added, as Ferris joined them gesturing over at the bonfire.

“One of the ship’s boys told Gerry, inviting him to come along,” Ferris said, “but only just now.” And Gerry had evidently reported not to Forthing but to Ferris; Laurence privately shook his head.

“I don’t suppose we can stop them,” Granby said, looking over at their small band of aviators. “Not until the dragons come back, at least.”

“And not then,” Laurence said. “They will be all the more unmanageable with liquor in their bellies; we must let them drink themselves insensate if they will, and I only hope they will do so before they achieve some worse devilry.”

“We had better get the rest of the biscuit and meat under some better cover instead,” Granby said, and added, “See to it, if you please, Ferris—” to Laurence’s dismay.

They worked all together the next few hours in the worst of the day’s heat, digging a fresh cellar for the foodstuffs and lining it with palm bark and leaves, and carrying over what remained of the biscuit and pork. All the while the distant noise and celebration grew louder and more riotous: songs drifting over with the smoke, and also the smell of roasting cockles; the sailors had at least shown some industry in arranging their entertainment.

Meanwhile the aviators settled wearily on the sand, and Gong Su shared out their meager dinner: salt pork over long noodles made of pounded biscuit and seaweed, in a thin broth of pork and fish bones; this they were forced to slurp out of cocoanut-shell bowls, using sticks to maneuver the lumps of salt pork to their mouths. “Where is your brother?” Laurence asked Sipho, who was putting aside a bowl—was putting aside two bowls, Laurence noticed, and he added more sternly, “And where is Roland?”

“Demane has gone hunting,” Sipho said evasively. “You know he is very good at it.”

This was perfectly true, and did not satisfy Laurence any the better. Mrs. Pemberton had remained aboard the Triomphe as De Guignes’s guest. Laurence had entreated the privilege for her, and could not have wished to subject a gentlewoman to the experience of marooning, but he felt it frustratingly inconvenient that the chaperone should be gone at precisely the moment her services would have proven of any use.

Demane and Roland did not reappear for hours, while the sailors’ rout grew steadily louder and more turbulent, a quarreling noise: they did not have enough food nor liquor to content them. Scuffles broke out of the crowd, a few yells encouraging the brawlers as for entertainment; but in a darker spirit: a spray of blood bright on the sand, and ugly laughter. “Next pull is mine, lads,” Handes shouted, grinning, as he pushed back towards the still; blood was on his fingers.

Laurence turned away, disliking even to look; and it was no fit sight for the young officers. “Gentlemen, I think we will send you into the interior for an hour or two—”

“No, sir,” Ferris said abruptly, interrupting. “Look sharp, fellows,” and he was standing up—a party of the sailors was coming towards them, dividing off the main body with a line of men trailing after, as though some rough beast reached out a paw; Handes was in the lead.

Laurence rose also, and found himself and Granby barred from the advancing men: Cavendish had planted himself directly before Laurence; Granby’s ensign Thorne, only thirteen, was beside him; Bardesley and Forthing and Ferris had put themselves out front, and all in unison were herding them away towards a stand of scrub and thornbrake, with only Gerry and Sipho inside that protective circle with them: to be sheltered from harm as though he and Granby were children, Laurence thought, repulsed in every instinct.

The sailors closed in, loosely half-a-ring around them, eyes stained red and skin glazed with excessive sweat: their brew was not a wholesome one, and more than one man had vomit already in the corners of his overgrowth of beard. Their breath was so thick with spirits Laurence could smell it, even at the distance. Handes was smiling at him over Ferris’s shoulder with a baring of teeth, gleeful and bloody. “Now, there’s no call for arguing, boys,” Handes said. “We don’t mean any harm, only the captains will come along of us; and then I fancy we’ll hear a different song from the beasts, when they are back.”

“They’ll disembowel the lot of you for the crabs, you ass,” Granby said, “and like as not all the fellows who hadn’t anything to do with it just the same; where do you even suppose you are going to put us?”

“Keep off, there,” Bardesley said, sharp, and shoved away one of the sailors who was pressing in on him too closely.

The man crowded back in directly, and his fellows with him—a smothering weight drawing around them, and Laurence was pressed back against the crackling brush even as the young aviators fought to hold off the encroaching bodies. It was a queer wrestling struggle, an irregular pushing and pulling—when the sailors did try to strike blows, these as often landed only slightly and glancing, gone drunkenly amiss. It was nonetheless deadly serious for all that, and hideous. Disembodied hands came pushing through the human wall to clutch at Laurence’s arm, drag upon his clothing, his belt: broken nails and hard-callused fingers caked with sand, which he could not join to any particular face or sentient will; he felt himself the subject of a blind and hungry urgency, groping after destruction with as much eagerness as if for life.

And over shoulders and heads he looked into eyes squinting and inhuman with that same mad urge; but it was there accompanied, Laurence thought, by fear: a fear he had seen sometimes in the faces of enemy soldiers in a desperate and impossible action; men who went to fight because they were in a mass of other men, forced to it, and knowing it a futile act; knowing they courted death for no reason. Only a few eager faces—Handes’s eyes fixed on him full of delight and snarling—and the rest only men frightened enough they must act somehow, their wits loosened by drink.

The aviators had linked arms; they kicked and butted their heads at the uncoordinated assault, an ignominious defense, but the sun was dropping low, and soon the dragons would be—“Temeraire!” little Gerry cried: he crawled out from under their legs and ran out onto the sand, waving his arms, “Temeraire!”

There were three specks on the horizon, coming in: coming in swiftly, and half-a-dozen men broke away from the attack and fled, back towards the bonfire and the restless, watching mass of men. Another two followed, and soon the aviators would scarce be outnumbered by their assailants; Handes looked baffled. He struck abruptly at Cavendish—clubbed the boy’s head aside and clawed, his fingers scraping over Laurence’s cheek and tearing at the corner of his lip; he brought them away with bloodied nails, but he could not get purchase, even if Laurence could not strike back.

Handes fell back suffused with choleric red; his fellows were dropping back with him; and then they turned towards the brush at a crackle of branches: Roland and Demane were spilling out onto the beach, panting and in haste. They pulled up in dismay, looking at the sailors: and then Handes said, “He’s captain for that big yellow one; we’ll have him, anyway, boys—”

Roland shoved Demane back at the brush. “Run; run now, damn you!” she said, and stooping snatched up two handfuls of sand and flung them into the sailors’ eyes as they came at her.

Sipho pulled his arms loose from the human chain and ran towards them; Ferris sprang after him. Handes had grabbed Roland by the arm and thrown her to the ground, and Demane was leaping on him: nearly a foot shorter and still slim as wire, but for once Laurence had cause to be grateful for his lack of gentlemanly restraint. Demane struck a clenched fist into Handes’s belly, and an elbow at his throat; the fingers of his other hand went at Handes’s eyes, and the big sailor went down choking, his breath suddenly a rattling wheeze, and blood was running down his face.

“I said to run!” Roland said, rolling up to her feet. “Get away from them, you ass; the dragons are coming.” But the rest of the sailors were on them: some twenty men, and three of them seized Demane at once, heaving him up and off the ground. Roland dived at their legs, and managed to trip them; but one man booted her in the face and knocked her aside bloodied.

Ferris was there, trying to pull Demane free; Sipho had snatched up a dry branch and was beating one of the sailors holding him about the head. “Go, hurry!” Granby shouted at the other aviators; he had Laurence’s arm. “We’ll get into the brush—”

“What?” Laurence said.

“Go!” Granby said to them again, dragging Laurence with him, over-riding protest: “No, damn your stiff neck; haven’t you been an aviator long enough?”

Forthing had reached the sailors also, running hard across the sand; but he and Ferris were out in the open, and there were too many: another man seized Demane’s arm and hauled him from under the pile of men; others were helping him, and the larger crowd gathered around the bonfire began to move as a body towards them.

“O God,” Granby said, slowing to watch. The sailors were yelling in mad triumph as they began to drag a struggling Demane towards the bonfire with them. Sipho was trying to go after, but Roland grabbed him with one hand, holding him back; the other she had pressed up to her nose to keep the running blood from her mouth. Handes got up off the sand and stumbled after the rest, calling hoarsely with a hand clapped over his eye, “Wait for me, fellows—now we’ll make the beast mind—”

Then he was falling to the sand and throwing his arms over his head: Kulingile was roaring, coming in over the water at full speed; roaring so it shook the trees, and his shadow poured over the bonfire like a flood.

It was over very quickly. Then Kulingile had Demane clutched in one talon, and lifting him padded away over the sand, saying, “Demane, you are quite well? You are not hurt?” He put Demane down for a moment only, and shook off a last dismembered arm before picking him up again and proceeding onward away; behind his lashing angry tail the fire had been scattered and crushed into ash, and bodies were strewn upon the sand; some still crawling, and moans carried over the sound of the surf.

The dead departed on a pyre built from the corpse of the bonfire and the palm-trees fringing the beach which had been laid waste. Most of the surviving sailors labored silently alongside the aviators to raise it, and the wounded were laid on makeshift pallets of grass, and bandaged with scraps. They had no surgeon among them, of any kind: Granby’s new dragon-surgeon Mallow had been lost with the Allegiance, and Dorset had remained at the covert in New South Wales. Dewey, the former barber, only could do a little. There was for medicine only the dregs of the liquor.

“The biscuit won’t run short, anyway,” Granby said to Laurence, in a morbid humor. They were seated in state upon a few logs of driftwood, looking over the work going forward at a significant distance: the dragons were in no mood to let them go among the sailors, and the sailors were still less inclined to have the dragons anywhere near.

Temeraire had argued for keeping every last one of the aviators by his side: he could not see anything disproportionate, or for that matter out of the ordinary, in the scale of Kulingile’s fury and the damage it had wreaked. “But Laurence, no-one could expect anything different,” Temeraire had said. “I have never seen anything so brazen: even Prince Yongxing did not try and drag you away from me while I was looking on, as though I had nothing to say to it at all. I cannot reproach Kulingile in the least. Are you sure you had better not sit on the other side of me, where they cannot see you?”

Laurence was quite sure, despite the wells which Temeraire’s restless clawing talons dug into the dry sand to be markers of his anxiety. But that was as much concession as Laurence could win: he and Granby remained a quarter-of-a-mile distant from the camp, with nothing to do but sit and be jealously guarded from a band of ragged and hopeless castaways by dragons the size of frigates.

Kulingile had gone still further: he had flown out to a rocky outcropping some distance out from the shore and sat there perched on his haunches with Demane held in his cupped talons; an occasional protesting noise might be heard from him, and he waved at the shore urgently once in a while, but Temeraire had firmly rejected the notion of going to fetch him.

“You could not wish me to be so very rude, Laurence,” he said, “and anyway I am sure nothing could be more provoking at present; not that I could not fight Kulingile, but I do not in the least wish to do so.” Meanwhile he had laid himself in a protective arc, and Iskierka had thrown several of her coils over his hindquarters, and so entwined the two had made a wall of themselves around Laurence and Granby.

“Lord, Ferris, you needn’t look so sour,” Granby added now, as Ferris trudged down the beach to report again. “I am sorry for the poor damned fools, but it’s no worse to be dragon-clawed than hung at the end of the day, and they are man and all of them mutineers. Nothing much worse can have happened, I suppose, while we have been sitting here watching.”

“Oh, can’t it,” Ferris said, losing in impatience the formal manner which was not so thoroughly seated in aviators under any circumstances. “There isn’t any biscuit to run out: a couple of those big palms came down in the stream, and a corner of it has been trickling into the new cellar for the last four hours.”

The cellar was two inches in mud stinking of spoilt salt pork: all the barrels on the bottom level mired deep. Ferris had already put some of the men to prying open the ruined barrels and shifting what biscuit was not soaked into new containers roughly formed out of palm leaves. Nearly half the already-inadequate supply gone: “We would starve, if Kulingile hadn’t thinned us out,” Granby said, dropping himself wearily back to the sand after he had peered down. “Or will we starve anyway?” he added, to Gong Su.

“I am afraid we may be a little hungry in two months,” Gong Su said: by which he diplomatically meant, Laurence supposed, that by then they would likely be drawing lots for rations, day-to-day.

But not all of them: he would not starve, and not Granby, and not Demane; they could not be allowed to starve, or even go hungry enough to alarm their beasts. Laurence looked away, his fingers hooked into his belt and drumming on the dangling ring where the harness ought to have been attached; the French had taken that, too.

“Perhaps the dragons might take a whale,” Granby said. “I suppose one whale would set us up for another month, even if we will get tired of nothing but meat pretty soon.”

“They are not likely to find anything but finwhales,” Laurence said. “And not even a heavy-weight is going to bring one of those to shore: it can always dive away.”

“Captain,” Gerry said, running up to them, “Roland wants you: she is awake again.”

Poor Roland was on a pallet set aside from the other wounded, and Laurence steeled himself to show no dismay: her face was swollen into purple grotesquerie, the lines unrecognizable, and her nose badly broken and imperfectly set. The sailor’s boot had left her cheek torn open and the corner of her mouth; he was afraid it would surely scar. “Well, Roland, not too badly, I hope,” he said.

“No, Captain,” she said, the words coming slow and laborious through the slurring, “but Demane—Gerry says Demane is all right, but everyone is here—”

“Kulingile has gone broody and hauled him out on a bit of rock,” Granby said. “Never fear, Roland, he’ll do; when you are better you can walk out and hear him yelling if you like.”

“I mean everyone else is still here, in camp,” she said. “Did he tell you about the ship?”

“A ship?” Laurence said, at once eager and yet dismayed: by now any ship Roland and Demane might have sighted in the morning would be well away, in who knew what direction. “Where away?” he asked, already calculating in his mind—if he and Granby should set out at once, with Temeraire and Iskierka, what course would cover the best distance—

“The other side of the island, the long cove,” Roland said, meaning a narrow twisting inlet which Forthing had reported from the aerial survey, which penetrated deeply into the interior: too impassable for dragons to follow very far inside the island.

“Well, that’s a piece of luck,” Granby said. “A ship really at anchor?”

“No, no,” Roland said. “Wrecked.”

There was no sense in beginning until the next morning, when Roland insisted she was well enough to show them the way, though Laurence would have spared her another day to recover. “Better sooner than late, sir,” she said, and indeed if there were one point of agreement among all their party it was the desire to escape the macabre ruin of their shore encampment, with the ashes and smoke of the dead being carried ceaselessly upon them by the sea-wind.

If they had not had so many wounded, even the many practical difficulties of moving their remaining supply to some other beach would not have been permitted to stand in the way. During the night three more had died, others were beginning feverish, and they were all of them hungry and all badly parched: the stream now only sluggishly worked to refill the small basin which they had originally dug, where the dragons could drink.

Kulingile had come back to shore only once and during the night, as secretively as a dragon approaching twenty-six tons might be expected to manage, to let Demane get a canteen from Sipho.

“He won’t listen to me at all,” Demane said, gulping hurriedly in Kulingile’s looming shadow: the dragon’s body was swaying back and forth from the energetic lashing of his tail, and the spikes upon his shoulders were bunched and bristling. “He wouldn’t bring me in until I started coughing I was so dry, and keeps too close a watch for me to swim to shore. Sir, we found a ship—”

“Roland told us,” Granby said, “so don’t fret him trying to get away. It’s bad enough already: why the devil didn’t you run for the forest when Roland told you? You and Laurence,” he added, in some exasperation. “But at least it’s not too late for you to learn better.”

“Is she—” Demane said.

“Midwingman Roland will be perfectly well,” Laurence said, flatly, “and we will discuss your excursion when circumstances better permit.”

Demane darted a guilty look, and then Granby called, “All right, Kulingile, he’s done; and we’ll have a guard set when he needs to come for water next, only give us a shout.”

Kulingile answered by snatching Demane away, but he settled back onto his rock more easily, and in an hour he had let Demane sit upon his back instead of clutched in his talons. Demane looked not much better pleased but sat watching them forlornly with his shoulders hunched against the cold water, which sprayed with regularity up Kulingile’s haunches.

“I cannot quite like the notion of going away and leaving only Kulingile to watch over things here; he is too preoccupied,” Temeraire said. “Not that I blame him in the least; only he might not think to keep a watch on my crew, at present.”

“You cannot think me in any danger now,” Laurence said: a more demoralized assemblage than the remaining sailors could not be imagined.

“I did not think you in any danger before,” Temeraire said, “and plainly I was mistaken. It does not seem to me anything is so very different: Kulingile did not kill above thirty of those sailors, and they might as easily make another still, if you wish to blame it all on liquor; which I am by no means ready to do,” he added. “After all, I have seen sailors quite drunk before, and they never set a ship on fire, or tried to snatch you; I am sure there must be something wrong with this particular lot.”

Yes; but if there was, Laurence felt now he had encouraged it by his very despair of them: he had not wished to make anything of them, if anything might be made.

“Yet someone must go hunting,” he said. “You and Iskierka and Kulingile have not been feeding so well you can go two days without anything to eat; and Kulingile will not.”

“Then Iskierka may go,” Temeraire said.

“I shan’t, either,” Iskierka said, raising her head bristling, but after some squabbling the matter was settled by lot: Granby drew a line in the sand and Temeraire dropped onto it a handful of pebbles—pebbles by his standards; each of them a boulder dredged from the ocean floor and roughly the size of a man’s head—and then the results counted off: there were two more on Iskierka’s side of the line than on Temeraire’s.

“I am sure it might come out differently if only I tried again,” Temeraire said, dissatisfied.

“Oh, I will not let anyone do anything to Laurence,” Iskierka said impatiently, “and I will set them on fire if they should try, so you may as well go; you know they are more frightened of me anyway.”

“I am sure I do not know why that should be so,” Temeraire said to Laurence unhappily, before setting out, “but it is; what ought I do?”

“Nothing in the least,” Laurence said, “when you consider—” and halted; he did not like to say, where Granby might overhear and be wounded by the justice of it, that any man of sense would be terrified of so ungovernable a temper as Iskierka’s in command of so great a power of doing harm. “You must consider it as a compliment; true respect is to be preferred above fear, and to induce it a greater achievement than one which can be as easily credited to mere brutality.”

Temeraire was persuaded to go; and meanwhile Laurence was forced to acknowledge the same criticism might be applied as well elsewhere. Where real mutiny was found—and while he would not give that name to the initial sin of running mad after liquor, scarcely so very unusual among sailors, he could give none other to the deliberate attempt to seize himself and Granby and Demane—where mutiny was found, there were sure to be bad officers at the root of it, he had always privately thought.

“It is not as though there had been anything to be done with the men, though, Laurence,” Granby said, too easily dismissing the charge. “After all, what else have we to do but lie about?—and men who are working hard need more food and water than we could spare.”

“Even so,” Laurence said. “We ought to have imposed some discipline upon them, however high the cost; we might have known that men at once excessive idle and half-mad with fear could be relied on for the worst sort of starts: these are pressed men, not volunteers.”

Only fifteen men, he felt, must be called mutineers: fifteen, that is, who were yet left alive. Handes, who in a more just world ought to have been first among the corpses and instead had taken scarcely any harm, could not escape the charge; nor had Laurence any desire to spare him, or the others who had been in the forefront. But the body of men might be spared: Laurence could choose to ignore that last general movement towards the struggle with the aviators.

“Mr. Forthing,” he said, beckoning him aside quietly, “you will choose ten men from the sailors: steadier men, older men, who were not near the struggle; we will take them with us into the interior.”

“Sir,” Forthing said doubtfully, but Laurence was in no wise prepared to welcome discussion of the order, and his looks must have shown it; Forthing went.

In the same ruthless spirit Laurence left Ferris behind, and went into the island interior with less than three men he could have gladly relied on: Roland jarred painfully by every step, Sipho not yet eleven years of age and brought along to run back with tidings of distress if any should arise, and Bardesley, whom Granby had insisted on his taking—“If you mean for me to have Ferris here, you had better have some help.”

Mayhew would come with them; he had held himself back from the worst excesses of the celebration, merely taken a cocoanut shell of the homemade grog and stood off in the shade of the palms with several fellows talking, which had spared him both a charge of mutiny and Kulingile’s wrath. Laurence had no great reliance upon him, but something, he thought, might yet be made of him.

Forthing had dredged up also some men evidently chosen more for advanced age or a placid stupidity than any good qualities, and also Baggy: one of the ship’s boys and so called because as a child of six, he had thought the ship was being boarded when Badger-Bag had climbed up the side in the ceremony of the crossing of the equator, and had leapt down from the rigging upon him, much to the distress of the ship’s cook who had been playing the role, and the general delight of the rest of the crew. Baggy was now fourteen, and in the space of the past seven weeks had abruptly gone from a plump and nimbly scampering child to a gaunt-cheeked pole given to toppling over his own feet. He also blushed every time he looked at Roland, despite the bandage covering half her face—he had not much attention to give to her face—and blushed again when he met by accident Laurence’s censorious eye.

“If I might be of use—” Hammond offered, tentatively; and remembering from five years gone a long grim night in a pavilion under siege, Laurence took him along.

The cove could not be approached from the air without doing such damage to the undergrowth, to clear a space for landing, as might easily send what was left of the wreck to the ocean floor. They were forced instead to go overland, hacking open the path which Demane and Roland had taken the day before: a meandering and mostly theoretical path, as they had not known their own destination at the time.

“We only meant to see if we could find anything to make rope with,” Roland offered as they went, peering at Laurence out of her swollen-squinted eye to see how this was received.

“If you mean to compromise yourself sufficiently to impose upon me the necessity of requiring Demane to fulfill the obligation which his side of those actions imply on the part of a gentleman,” Laurence said grimly, “you may continue in just such a fashion, Mr.—Miss—Roland.”

“What obligation?” she said, in sincere confusion, and when he had clarified his meaning an offer of marriage said impatiently, “There’s nothing to require: he already has, a dozen times. But it is no good anymore; you must see that, sir. I had thought—”

She stopped while they came to a particularly vicious stand of thornbrake, which she and Demane had merely squirmed beneath the previous day; while the men hacked away at it, she leaned against a tree and said softly, unhappy, “But now he has his own dragon. He can’t be an officer of mine, when Mother retires and I get my step, and I can’t ask Excidium to push off Candeoris after all these years,”—the Regal Copper who was the back center of the Longwing’s formation, and his main defender—“even if the Admiralty wouldn’t want Kulingile elsewhere.

“And it’s not like you and Mother, you know,” she added, unconsciously heaping coals of fire onto Laurence’s already-burdened conscience. “The service is everything with her, and Excidium is next, so she doesn’t mind; she doesn’t want more than—” She shrugged in lieu of specification, with enough eloquence to make Laurence inwardly writhe. “But I don’t want someone I want, if I can’t be sure of seeing him one week in the year. What’s the use of only having the right to be jealous?”

Laurence was left not knowing how to answer her; despite the separation that was the common lot of Navy officers and their families he could not persuade himself the circumstances were the same. There, one might have the assurance that only one party was gone abroad; the other remained and gave the home its character. Correspondence might be more or less reliably managed, and a wife could reasonably hope to see her husband for long stretches on shore, even if he were absent years at a time.

Aviators could take no such leave, even if they wished; dragons did not go into dry-dock. And Roland had the right of it: Kulingile would not be used merely defensively, if Laurence was any judge. He had besides the advantage of his immense weight the particularly vicious talons inherited from his Parnassian progenitor, and the spiked tail of the Chequered Nettle from the other side. He would surely in time be given his own formation, when the Admiralty had swallowed Demane as his captain, and the odds that formation would be assigned to the Channel were, Laurence thought, slim.

“None,” Roland said despondently. “They’ll want him at Gibraltar: I hear Laetificat’s never gained back her weight, since the consumption, and she is sure to go to the breeding grounds soon. She’s only been hanging on until the breeders got another Regal Copper over twenty tons.”

The path had been cleared: she pushed herself up and went over to show where they might continue, through a curtain of hanging vines; her shoulders were stooped.

They came soon to a clearing with a fat gopher-like rodent hanging suspended in a rope-trap: Demane’s work of the previous day, forgotten in the urgency of the discovery. No-one would have disdained a bite; it was cut down and taken along. The sound of the surf, which had been muffled away by the thickness of the jungle, became again audible as they continued; and then they came out onto an unpromising rocky beach, which curving plunged back behind a massive tangle of strangler vines that concealed anything behind them so thoroughly, Laurence could not envision how Roland and Demane had even thought to explore.

“There,” Roland said, pointing where the sun gleamed on the picked-clean white of bone lying in a small pocket of sand; they clambered across the rocks and stood over the jumbled skeleton, in rags, disordered by the birds and lacking nearly all fingers and toes. The skull and one thigh-bone rested against a rock shallowly inscribed: HERE LAYS BASSEY AND GEORGE, GODE SHIPMATES, GOD HAV MERCEY.

“You can’t say fairer than that,” old Jergens muttered, one of the men Forthing had chosen; the low grumbling of complaint which had emanated from the sailors died as they climbed past the grave and lifted the vines to expose the rotting hull, and the jagged rock-torn hole.

She had certainly been a pirate: when they had cut away the growth and let some light into the hold, Laurence made his way ankle-deep in water and the remnants of assorted plunder: great gobs of whale oil floating around old barrels, burst chests of silk taken from some hapless East Indiaman. He ignored the furtive poking of the sailors behind him, as they followed him cautiously inside.

“Sir, if you would wait outside—” Forthing tried, looking at the beams phosphorescently green with rot. Laurence did not answer, but in the well-remembered crouch necessary to so cramped a vessel made his way towards the back of the hold, where the stores should have been, and stopping reached up to pull a corner of oilcloth wrapping away.

“Ah,” he said: a coil of twice-laid hawser rope, the thickness of a man’s wrist, lay dry and clean beneath.

It was no easy task to get the goods out: impossible to rig any kind of hoist or pulley from the rotten wood above, and the tide coming and going pulled at their legs even if they only stood in one place. More than one man fell, and came up pierced and bloody with splinters: when they at last emerged from the hold with the first bundles carried straining by four men apiece, some dozen sharks had come to look in on their efforts and were circling in the deeper water.

“Well, as long as they are here anyway,” Temeraire said, and snaking his head out seized two in his jaws at once and lifted his head, swallowing down the thrashing grey tails: Sipho had run back to camp, and directed him. They could not risk his touching the fragile wreck, and the scrap of shore was not large enough for him to land, but he might cling to the shoals out in the water, and wait for them to finish bringing out the newfound treasure: rope and sailcloth and even some knives not entirely eaten by rust.

The sun was sinking low when they had carried out enough to merit loading him up: the men unwound one coil of rope, and set to sawing off a length to use to net up their takings for Temeraire to carry back to camp. It was a long and laborious task; while the men took the knife in turns, Laurence looked up where the stumps of the masts could barely be seen from between the vines, and below them the reflection of the sunset upon a pane of glass yet unbroken.

The vines offered no challenge to a man who had been used to go into the rigging since the age of twelve. Beneath a carpeting of moss and his cautious step, the ship’s deck creaked but did not break, and he made his way to the small cabin behind the ship’s wheel: odd to look through the stern window onto a garden view, with birdsong and tiny pale green curlers of vines coming in through the missing panes.

Whatever storm had driven the ship from anchor and onto the rocks had not left her captain time to knock down his things into the hold. The rotted remnants of a hanging cot were fallen to the floor, and a writing desk still locked lay in a corner alongside a guilty copy of Fanny Hill, which his experience of the midshipmen’s berth permitted Laurence to identify by the much-faded cover. And beside them, still wrapped in oilskins, a sheaf of charts annotated in an old-fashioned hand. Whatever words there had once been were mere smudges now, but Laurence required none: only the scattered misshapen atolls drawn in. Each had surely been a refuge of pirates; they dotted the ocean like the broad-spaced paving-stones of an overgrown garden path, all the way to the continent; the last was marked not a hundred miles from the coast: the coast of the Incan empire.