Crucible of Gold

Chapter 14

THE WATERFALL WAS NOT WIDE but very high, crashing noisily down over its long and broken cliff wall, and so muted the labored panting of the dragons as they slept a little; the high canopy of jungle trees provided them cover. Kulingile’s golden scales they had slathered over with mud, and Temeraire and Iskierka were not in much better case: branches thrust through their harness-straps all over their backs, and vines strewn liberally atop, the better to camouflage them against the relentless pursuit.

A host of small dragons, lightning-quick, had chased and harried them near three hundred miles already in little more than a day and a night and a day, although they had not traveled anywhere near that distance in a straight line: their course had been desperately zig-zagging and convoluted. If they paused, or tried to engage, the small beasts fled before them: to carry the news of their position back to the larger dragons who hung back, waiting and reserving their strength to come directly upon them.

Already they had just barely evaded several close engagements with various Incan aerial battalions: six dragons of heavy-weight size and thirteen of middle-weight, who skillfully attempted to surround and bring them down. Only Kulingile’s massive size had enabled them to escape the first: he had put his head down and bulled through the hemming line of dragons, not one of them less than twenty tons. Temeraire and Iskierka had darted out after him, then turned with their greater maneuverability to claw and lash the enemy long enough for Kulingile to get away into the cloud cover, where they followed shortly after.

The Incan dragons pressed the pursuit without excessive risk, cautiously: all the advantage of time was on their side, and knowledge of the territory. With every moment of flight, Temeraire and Iskierka and Kulingile grew weary, and their strength waned.

There had been no time either for provisions or sensible assembly. The two llamas which Temeraire had brought back from his hunting had gone down Kulingile’s gullet, while the men were hurried into belly-netting without even the opportunity of putting on harness; at least four had been left behind, Laurence thought, having evidently sneaked off on night excursions. He was only consoled that their fate would not be as unkind as it might: they should certainly be welcomed into some dragon’s ayllu in their persons, despite any political differences with their nation, rather than flung into a prison from which there would be little hope of extrication.

The force which had been assembled to seize them—with, he could not help but believe, the aim of securing the dragons as prisoners and perhaps for breeding, as well as delaying any report back to Europe—had come on them even as the sun rose. The few minutes of warning which Temeraire and Iskierka had brought proved, just barely, enough; they went aloft pursued by the first roars of challenge, and flung themselves into a mist-shrouded gorge, flying desperately east into the mountain fastness.

The day had worn away; night brought no relief, for a handsome half-full moon shone on the ice-sheathed mountain-slopes, and there were dragons among the pursuit who seemed able to see them in the dark. But at last Temeraire, flying in the lead, had broken out onto the eastern side of the Andes, and they fled down the slopes into the seeming endless jungle which rose impenetrable and green at their base.

Here they had found enough concealment for a few breaths, a little sleep; a few swallows of water might be cupped from the steady rivulets which trickled down the smooth bark of the trees. Already a light misting rain had fallen twice, in the half-day which they had spent in hiding. But they could not hide for very long with three such beasts among them; Laurence watched the sun creep over the sky, through the dappling leaves, and hoped only that their shelter would serve them until the night.

Hammond, shaky and green from the speed and unsteadiness of their flight, was folding together with trembling hands a few of the coca leaves, which he had stuffed into his pocket as they fled: he put the leaves into his mouth to chew, as they could not boil water for tea. “It is an outrage—a betrayal of all common principles regarding the sanctity of ambassadors—” he was saying, a variation on a theme which he had not ceased to develop since their pell-mell departure.

“If they take their notion of principles from the example which the Spanish made them, there is not much to wonder at,” Laurence said, controlling irritation; he would have been glad of a cup of tea himself, and more grateful yet for one of strong black coffee; instead he cupped water in one of the broad, dinner-plate-sized leaves which hung vinelike off the tree, and poured off the trickle into his mouth.

“We must rather consider our course of escape, and our direction,” he said, and bent to sketch out the shape of the continent roughly in the dirt.

“To Rio, of course?” Hammond said, as though it were merely a matter of choosing their destination. “Now there can be nothing worth delaying for; we ought make all speed possible.”

“Well, we can’t: it is asking for disaster to go haring off through the jungle with no water to speak of,” Granby said. “Laurence, I don’t think we have much choice in the matter: this tree-bark dribble will do for us, but not for the dragons. There might be a hundred streams flowing under the leaves, but they won’t do us any good if we can’t see them from the air. At least if we hold by the mountains, we are pretty sure of seeing some run-off every day.”

“And more likely to be seen in turn,” Laurence said, “by our pursuit. But I do take your point: if we should keep to the trees by day, and put our heads north by night, towards Venezuela—”

“No, no,” Hammond cried. “Gentlemen, we must go to Rio. You have not considered, perhaps, the increased urgency of our mission. With the Sapa Inca having decided to throw her lot in with Napoleon, Brazil is now beset on all sides. You must recall the Prince Regent of Portugal is there, and all the royal family. They must be warned—warned, perhaps rescued; they do not as yet know anything of their danger. I must insist upon it, in my authority as ambassador: I hope you will agree I do not exceed it, in such a cause.”

“If he can’t marry us off, he will murder us, I suppose,” Granby said to Laurence under his breath. “Had we better make for Venezuela, and then circle back to Rio along the coast?”

“We should lose six thousand miles on such a journey,” Laurence said, “and no guaranty of supply along the way, in any case.”

They bent their heads over the dirt, trying without much hope to plot a course more direct across the jungle: they scarcely knew where they were, so even to begin was difficult, and at Granby’s insistence had to allot full half each day’s flying for finding water. “And that I would call ambitious,” he said. “In any case, we mustn’t go so far that we could not fly back to some decent water within a day.”

“Well, it will have to do,” Laurence said finally, when they had at last agreed, and they made their uncomfortable damp beds on the ground to take a little more rest before nightfall; but twilight had only just begun to descend when Demane was shaking Laurence awake.

“The monkeys have gone quiet,” he said softly. Laurence sat up listening, but the waterfall covered any sound of wings. They sat together a moment, squinting upwards: then a groan of rustling branches, and a great orange-feathered dragon’s head thrust down and whispered in Quechua, “Hammond? Are you there?”

“What?” Hammond said, staring up, and Churki landed among them, ruffling up her plumage to cast out the leaves and twigs which had been caught betwixt the feathers.

“We must leave at once,” she said. “The tumi patrols are out after you, and beating the jungle near-by: I have bribed a lieutenant to let me rescue you, but he cannot keep them off for very long.”

When they demanded explanation for her having gone to treasonous lengths in their interest, “How can you call it so?” she protested. “It is my duty. After all, I did not know the Sapa Inca was going to choose to marry your enemy when I asked Hammond to join my ayllu. What sort of creature would I be if I did not do all in my power to protect him, only because it has become inconvenient?”

Of course, her preferred notion of that protection was that Hammond should return with her, to her mother’s territory. “For the Sapa Inca will not mind at all, I promise you,” she added persuasively, “and my mother will give me more people to join the ayllu: you may have three wives all your own, if you would like.”

“I call that justice,” Granby said to Laurence, with a great deal of enjoyment in Hammond’s discomfiture, even as they directed the urgent retreat: all were piling aboard the dragons in great haste, men scrambling to tie themselves to the harness while Forthing and Ferris pushed the clumsier among them back into the belly-netting.

Hammond struggled meanwhile to dissuade Churki, edging close to Temeraire as he spoke: a certain frowning gleam in her eye suggested temptation to snatch him away in disregard of his wishes, when they were so plainly misguided. Until at last he hit in desperation upon the notion of adding, “And you know, I cannot desert my family: why, I have eight brothers and sisters, with any number of children themselves—there must be three dozen by now—”

“Oh!” Churki said. “Why did you not say so, at once? Dozens, and in that uncivilized country of yours, with no dragon to look after them. Of course we must go back to them.” She ruffled her feathers high. “I do not like getting in the way of the tumi patrol, of course; I am sure it will make trouble for my mother if it is known. But she will understand, when I can send her word.”

They were aloft scarce twenty minutes after Churki’s warning. Full dark had fallen, and even as they rose they were attacked by a patrol: five dragons, striking out of the dark, all with small spear-shaped heads and dark green feathers cropped short. They were middle-weights at most, each not a quarter of Temeraire’s size, but they made up for that in numbers and in night-vision; their coloration made them nearly invisible against the night, and plainly the hazy moonlight which came through the clouds was sufficient to enable them to see.

The green dragons were making low calls to one another, in almost chirping voices. “Do not roar,” Laurence called urgently, as yet another of the dragons came darting into the fray from up ahead, slashing at Temeraire’s flank in passing as it winged to join the other five in harrying their flanks. “Temeraire, do you hear me? The jungle must be alive with these beasts; if you should roar, you will draw them upon us in a cloud: we must get ahead of their line before you roar.”

Temeraire flicked his ruff in acknowledgment; he was flying and fighting at once, and Laurence had all the pain of feeling himself and his crew useless in their present circumstances: they had neither guns, nor incendiaries, nor even flash-powder, which might have allowed them to be of assistance against enemy beasts, and could only cling on and hope they did not obstruct Temeraire’s own efforts.

“Mr. Ferris,” Laurence called, leaning over, “do we have that netting—the rope and sailcloth netting, have you any of it left, below? Light it along, if you please—”

“Aye, sir,” Ferris called, and came clambering up Temeraire’s side with a rope lashed around his waist, a tether to the heavy entangled bundle; Forthing and Roland and even Hammond joined their hands to the cable, and they drew it up, brine-stinking cloth and half-rotten rope. Laurence hacked apart a portion with his sword, Roland setting her knife to the sailcloth: she and Ferris and Forthing, aviators all since childhood, managed to take and keep their feet long enough to heave it out as one of the green-feathered dragons swung close to Temeraire’s hindquarters, and the mess billowed open, descending, and settled on the dragon’s head.

The beast squalled, muffled and surprised, and fell away clawing blindly at the unexpected attack; it ran into a second beast and fouled her flight for a moment, but this one squirmed loose and plucked away the ragged cloth, throwing it out over the trees. It sank, a momentary flash of pale cloth, and vanished away amid the trees behind them.

The effort won Temeraire only the briefest respite, but at least it was something. Laurence sawed grimly away at the rope with the dulled edge of his blade, and they managed to try a second time, and a third, but by then the green dragons had grown wiser. Three more of them had joined the pursuit by now; Laurence looked again where the moon made a glowing patch of haze in the sky: they were being herded back westward, and the dragons’ chirping calls were growing more energetic.

Iskierka also had not loosed her flame: as much as lighting a beacon of invitation to the enemy; but the enemy dragons evidently already knew to fear it, anyway. She bore the brunt of their sweeping attacks, one pass after another which only her maneuvering enabled her to avoid; and even so she was clawed and bleeding from a dozen small wounds. She hissed in fury as another pass caught her along one shoulder, and turned to lash out reprisal at the smaller beast: the green dragon fled and was caught only a glancing blow, feathers bursting loose, but the effort left an opening which the enemy were too numerous to miss.

Two of the dragons flew at Iskierka’s head, one from either side, beating their wings furiously to obscure her vision; a third, the largest of the enemy, lunged at the side which Iskierka’s strike had bent into a wide and open curve, unprotected by the chainmail which was her usual battle-gear, and savaged her with tooth and claw both, opening the flesh to the air.

Iskierka roared in agony, and turning blasted flame at the dragon who had already lifted away, too late. Her head was wagging back and forth in pain; and Laurence could see a line of steam in the air where her blood ran freely away. Then he heard Granby crying out, “Sear the wound! If you go down, it doesn’t matter, Iskierka; sear the damned wound, or I swear to you on my honor I will jump anyway—sear it at once—”

He was standing on her back, harness-straps hanging loose save one that he gripped in his hand. Iskierka cried out in protest, and then bent her head back and breathed fire upon her own side: flames coruscating up and over her hide, washing down her length as she flew. Laurence saw Granby and Bardesley silhouetted black against the yellow-red banner of fire for a moment, then the night was pitch-black, darker for the moment of light, and he did not know what had happened to them.

He blinked away the dazzle of the light: Kulingile had ranged himself alongside Iskierka, trying to shield her wounded side with his bulk, and Temeraire was racing to her other side: but behind them, the enemy were gathering together for another run at her, one which should surely bring her down. Their light chirping voices rang clear, incongruous and dreadful as they arranged themselves for the strike and came, arrow-shape formation, towards them.

Laurence felt Temeraire gathering himself, drawing in the great breaths one after another which expanded out his lungs, and yet something different: when Laurence put down his bare hand, he felt nearly a drumming tension to the hide. The enemy dragons were coming, swiftly; then Temeraire turned and roared: but not once only; he roared, low, and roared again, and a third time, and only with the fourth rose to that shattering, terrible sound that was the divine wind.

The very air seemed to shake and howl, rushing away from them; the rain-mist boiling into tight spindled clouds. The first dragons of the formation were pulling up, beginning to pull up, as the ripple struck, and Laurence saw blood come bursting from their noses and their ears.

The three dragons foremost in the formation fell from the sky without a sound, stone-dead; Laurence heard their bodies crashing through the branches below. Others, too, were falling, thrashing in mid-air, choking on blood; and only the hindmost beasts survived, sheltered by the bodies of their fellows: survived, reeled back, and fled away into the night, shrilling out their horror.

Chapter 15

THEY WERE PURSUED NO LONGER. That night they lay exhausted amid trees that towered away from a strangely dim and barren jungle floor populated by ferns and the decomposing bodies of fallen giants, suffering the yelling resentment of the monkeys and of astonishing birds plumed in colors Laurence had scarcely seen in artifice much less nature.

The next morning they buried Lieutenant Bardesley there, in a grave as deep as Temeraire’s claws could open. There was no avoiding the funeral, as the ordinary course of putrefaction seemed accelerated by the damp heat and luscious verdure all around: though Mrs. Pemberton had sacrificed her petticoat and Emily’s to make a shroud, by first light the corpse was crawling with ants the size of grasshoppers, whose jaws left angry bites as they were beaten away. They did not open the shroud to look on his face before they laid him to rest.

Iskierka’s wounds had not mortified, cauterized as they had been by her flame, but a strange feverishness set in by the following evening: the steam which ordinarily issued from her spikes dried to a bare trickle, and her eyes were glassy and bloodshot nearly to black. The heat of her body was become intolerable for close quarters.

“She must have water, and soon,” Churki said, after a sniffed inspection of the injuries, and with a decided air. Laurence had known dragons of more years—Messoria, of their formation, and Excidium—but these had been raised in the British fashion, to obey rather than to command, where Churki seemed to take a certain precedence as a matter of course: she was of course eldest of the dragons by far. “Where do your family live, Hammond? We must determine the best course to reach them.”

When Hammond had, with a certain degree of duplicity, explained their desire to reach Rio and thence to take ship for Britain, she looked at Laurence’s sketch of their proposed route and shook her head, ruffling. “This will not do very well: guessing at water is not sensible. We must go to the Ucayali and follow it to the sea.”

They were no longer pursued, though they did little to conceal their passage. Three more days of flying under Churki’s lead brought them to the river she had described: sluggish-brown, enormous, swollen with all the ice-melt of the Andes.

“If it is not the Amazon, it must yet come out at the ocean,” Laurence said, shading his hand to look down along its length while Iskierka crawled into the river and submerged herself; crocodilian animals with long snouts swam away resentfully, and she rested her head upon the bank and closed her eyes as steam curled up and away from her back where the water lapped against the scales.

The river swelled ever further as they followed its course northward and it met new tributaries until at last the whole mass of it turned east, away from the mountains, and they began the long and grindingly slow journey to the coast. The country was not unpopulated: native tribesmen looked in on them now and again, mostly from the other side of the river, but these vanished as quickly as they came if ever Laurence tried to hail them, or even if Temeraire called out a few words in Quechua. Of dragons they saw only a few small feral beasts, and those by accident: Iskierka was in the river again, preferring to half-paddle herself along than to fly, and so Temeraire and Kulingile had gone off to hunt meanwhile; Iskierka came around a curve and startled three little dragons the size of Winchesters, sharing a meal of a peculiar long-snouted piggish creature on the shore.

She was barely a head in the water at the time, and the dragons stared in curiosity; then she reared up partway on the bank and demanded, “Where did you find that, and is it any good?”

Yet three-quarters and more submerged, she nevertheless outweighed all three of them together; the dragons went into the air as though fired from a cannon and fled, leaving behind their dinner; this proved their only encounter, save for glimpses at a great distance of small beasts flying away. “Oh, well,” Iskierka said callously, and devoured the remnants without a pause, gulping them down with swallows of river water.

“What have you been eating?” Kulingile inquired, on returning: their hunting efforts had so far yielded only some smallish red deer, which did not answer very well to satisfying the hunger of three large dragons, one of them convalescent, though Gong Su did what he could to stretch them.

“I don’t know; they wouldn’t stay and tell me,” Iskierka said drowsily, already half-asleep on the shore and resisting persuasion to continue any farther that day.

In the middle of the night, Laurence woke to her groaning and an acrid stench: she was vomiting heavily into the river, and sank miserably back on the shore afterwards gone limp. They went nowhere that day, and when Temeraire managed to return with a couple more deer, Gong Su insisted on their being boiled nearly to inedibility. Iskierka’s misery carried the day for him, but the dragons were not enthusiastic about the resultant meal, and neither were the sailors, although by then they were glad enough for anything to eat.

The jungle miasma lay heavily upon all of them. Hammond was also queerly feverish and short-tempered, and so, too, several other men, including Ferris; Laurence feared the beginning of some tropical fever setting in among them. He himself was almost perpetually in a sweat, the woolen clothes suited to the high mountain fastnesses of the Inca were become a prison for all of them, but the viciousness and size of the insects prohibited all but the most insensible from exposing any unnecessary part to the air.

“Well, and it is an evil part of the world we have come to, Captain,” O’Dea said, expressing a general sentiment, after a few more days: Temeraire had woken them all with a shattering roar of protest, and shaken off three bats which had latched on to him, in the dark.

“They bit me,” he said; as improbable as the accusation was, investigation turned up small leaking wounds upon his flank where the bats had clung and fed, so it seemed, upon the blood; and several more of them were discovered on all the dragons.

There was something especially horrid in feeding this species of hunger, but the bats were no more to be escaped than the mosquitoes, though Granby slept on Iskierka’s back and woke several times throughout the night to chase them off with his one good arm; and their bites offered a similar kind of discomfort, growing hard and swollen and hot to the touch after a day.

The half-healed injury which Granby had taken to his arm, in the sinking of the Allegiance, had been aggravated and all earlier progress lost in his being flung from Iskierka’s back to the limits of his harness-straps, leaping to escape the flames. Laurence looked at it grimly, in the light: the elbow grossly swollen and bruised purple-black, and the hand dangling useless. They had no surgeon; only the former barber Dewey, who had been pressed into the Allegiance out of a dockside carouse, and his only contribution was to offer, “Why, I can have it off easy as you please, sir, if the little miss will lend me her knife; and someone can find me a bit of drink to steady my hand,” which made Roland glare.

“Wrap it up tight for me, Laurence, if you please,” Granby said hastily, “and let us see what a few weeks will do: it does not pain me over-much—” this last delivered while he was clammy-cold and pale with agony; but Laurence was in too much doubt of the wisdom of the arm’s removal to argue for its being endured: the shoulder which seemed the real seat of the injury could not itself be taken off.

Four days later, the arm looked yet worse: a bluish darkening beneath the skin from elbow to fingers, and Granby could not close his hand. The shoulder at least seemed a little recovered, and when palpated the flesh of the upper arm yet felt warm; but in the morning there was a feverish heat growing above the elbow, and the engorgement of the blood vessels creeping upwards.

“Had it better come off?” Granby said, looking at Laurence’s face.

“I think it must,” Laurence said grimly, and Dewey, coming to inspect his field of work, patted Granby’s shoulder.

“Never you fear, Captain; why, I have had off the arm of a fellow twice your size in under three minutes; although I do not have my saw.” He took the knife which Roland silently proffered him, her irritation at being called miss now subsumed in anxiety, and carried it down to the riverside to sharpen against the stones of the bank.

“Laurence,” Temeraire said, peering over, “whatever are you about? Surely you do not mean him to take off Granby’s arm, for good? Iskierka is asleep: I am sure she ought to be consulted on the subject.”

“That is all I need, at present,” Granby said, under his breath. “Let her sleep, if you please, and Laurence, I would be glad of something to bite on.”

Laurence nodded, and rose to call Forthing and Mayhew to assist him with holding Granby down; abruptly from the bank came a shriek, and he turned to see Dewey being dragged into the river headfirst, a pair of massively wide crocodilian jaws clamped about his skull. They all stared, horrified; three more of the creatures erupted from the water, seizing on flailing arms, legs, and wrestling over the body with terrible strength: before even Temeraire could act, the water was running red, and his lunge pulled out only a headless corpse, lacking also a leg, with a crocodile dangling still clenched upon the other.

“Oh!” Temeraire said, furious, “oh, what do they mean, eating him!” and plunged his head savagely into the midst of the still-frothing waters: he came up with three thrashing beasts, each perhaps a ton in weight, and holding them in his jaws cracked them with a sound not much less dreadful than Dewey’s own death-cry.

He flung them down, and went again into the water, and again, until he had piled up a dozen carcasses; by then the rest had slunk beneath the surface and glided prudently away.

“There,” Temeraire said, panting, “they will think better of it, next time,” and Laurence had not the heart nor the stomach to argue with his estimation of the animals’ intelligence: in any case the men would certainly think better of going anywhere near the riverbanks without great care.

Iskierka had been roused by Temeraire’s frenzy; she sat up and yawned and said, “Whatever did you do that for? They are not good eating; but I will have a couple, if there is nothing better,” and several of the men crept away into the trees to be noisily and emphatically ill.

The crocodiles were abandoned uneaten; but the slaughter forced their immediate departure, as the scavengers of the jungle were too enraptured by the immense feasting prepared for them to delay: the monkeys were not afraid of dragons, and neither were the beetles. Granby said uneasily, “I will have to make the best of it,” and wrapped his arm up against his waist once more before he pulled himself one-handed aboard Iskierka’s back.

Laurence had grown used to the tremendous speed at which dragons consumed the miles: fifteen in an hour at a steady enduring pace, and as many as two hundred in a day, with no obstacles to be surmounted or roads to clear and no dependence upon the wind; but their passage through the jungle was more akin to the slow creep of a ship through the doldrums, being towed by her boats: Iskierka could not fly for long. She leaned heavily on Kulingile and Temeraire, who took it in turn to brace her up, but even they could not support her massive weight very well or for any real length of time. Granby drooped upon her back; she drooped in mid-air, and often came down to rest in the body of the river and moved along like some vast steaming river snake, paddling herself along.

The heat was tremendous, and the air of the jungle close and thick around them when they flew low, or crept after Iskierka in the river. Hammond urged speed, and looked piteous for it: he mopped his brow with shaking hands nearly every minute, and slept fitful and feverish; the other men had by now most of them recovered, but Hammond had never given the impression of particular resilience, and their journey had strained stronger men to the limits. But there was no speed to be had: all energy, it seemed, had been wrung out of them.

Mrs. Pemberton, in her long black dress, was an improbable and lone figure of civilization amid their increasingly ragged number: she managed by dint of quiet but firm requests of a few well-chosen men—those not so tired as to refuse to move but disinclined to argument or quarrel—to every evening arrange a small separate campsite and fire for herself and Roland, and even hot wash-water.

They dragged themselves slowly through the jungle, until Laurence dreamed one night of gulls crying, and woke to hear their voices: when Temeraire went aloft there was a cloud of them wheeling and circling in the distance over the great mouth of the river where it met the open endless ocean blue: they had come to the shore of the Atlantic.

Iskierka lay down in a tidal pool and shut her eyes; Granby was lifted down from her back and carried into the shade of palm-trees. Temeraire and Kulingile went out into the ocean, and did not come back for a full day and night; Laurence had begun to fear in earnest when looking out over the waves, under his shading hand, he saw the strange apparition approaching: a vast misshapen creature with four wings and no limbs.

“Clear the shore, there,” he called, when they came closer; and in exhaustion the two dragons set down their prize: a true monster of the deep, a blue whale not perhaps fully grown, but even so nearly larger than them both together.

“ ’Twould bring twenty thousand pounds rendered down, I expect,” one of the sailors, an old whaler, said in hushed tones, as they sank a sharpened spear into the blubber and cut away to find it nearly a foot deep. Every man had a slice, and Iskierka ate a good two tons of the stuff; Temeraire and Kulingile had already eaten.

“I killed it with my roaring, when it came up for breath, and then we took it in turns to keep the whole above water while the other ate,” Temeraire said, drowsily, while Laurence stroked his muzzle, “for we thought that should make it easier to carry back: but I do not mind admitting to you, Laurence, that I rather worried it was too large even so. Oh! I am very tired.”

In the morning, Iskierka finished another meal of whale meat and blubber, and roused enough from her torpor to say peevishly, “Where is Granby? Why is he not with me?” and then she saw him.

“If none of you are going, I am,” she said fiercely, when she had overcome her first confusion, after Granby did not answer her: his eyes were heavy-lidded and far-away, lost in fever and in pain. “He must have a surgeon: he shall have a surgeon; you will put him on my back at once.”

There were seven other men burning with fevers and the mortification of small wounds, mere scratches acquired in passing which had at first gone unnoticed, until they had gone quickly to rot; two had already been buried. Laurence had not yet decided to press forward, undecided as to the greater evil: he had seen enough men die, at the surgeons’ hands, not to easily take on the risk of moving Granby only to deliver him into those hands, even if any skilled man might be found near-by.

But Iskierka’s determination followed on the bleak acknowledgment there was scarcely any risk to be run, anymore. Gently they bundled Granby onto a stretcher made of branches and woven vines, and covered him with tented leaves against the sun. “I will go and hang on to him, sir,” Roland said, and not even Temeraire protested her climbing aboard Iskierka’s back to help keep Granby shielded and in place.

They turned southward, and came within a day to Belém: the small city huddled down behind its walls, and bells ringing out wildly in alarm as the dragons came into view. “Pull up!” Laurence shouted, realizing too late: the inhabitants saw only four dragons of enormous size, with no uniformed troops and no flags, and of no easily recognizable European breeds: Temeraire was Chinese, Iskierka Turkish, Churki Incan, and Kulingile a fresh cross and wholly unfamiliar. “Temeraire, pull up, and make Iskierka do the same: they will fire on us in a moment.”

Iskierka thought only of Granby, at present, and was diving for the city square: Temeraire plunged beneath her, and bodily heaved her up and out of range even as pepper-guns spoke by the dozen; the thin black clouds spread like a pall over the city’s walls, and then the narrow, long-throated cannon roared out at them and the small barbed balls flew.

But the town was better armed than generaled: the first spurt of firing died away, and a second did not come for nearly ten minutes, and was flung in their direction despite all the dragons having withdrawn beyond the range; when this had finished, Laurence touched Temeraire, and they dived forward into the square, where a regiment was trying to form up with what looked to be half the soldiers missing.

“Stop that,” Temeraire said angrily, in French, “we are not here to attack you, at all: we are British, not the Tswana, and we are here to help.”

“I ought to be more grateful,” Granby said, “seeing how I have had one close-run thing of it after another, and I amn’t in the ground yet; and I don’t mean to complain, but what a nuisance it will be,” answering Laurence, who had complimented him on the progress of the healing stump. The relief of their proving friend rather than foe had spurred a spirit of generosity on the part of the city, improved by Hammond’s presenting them to the local governor in the light of saviors who had come to assist against the invasion; Laurence suspected he had not yet mentioned the altered circumstances in the Incan empire. An excellent surgeon had been provided, along with enough strong spirits to render Granby still more insensible than his fever; and several religious were now nursing him day and night.

“I know fellows go up and down well enough regardless,” Granby added, “and I suppose I can get a hook, so pray don’t listen to me; meanwhile, we had better be going, hadn’t we? I can’t make out all of what they are saying, here, though I made my Spanish tolerably good when I was stationed in Gibraltar, but it seems pretty clear we are needed in Rio yesterday if we are to have any hope of finding the Regent there, anyway.”

“We will not go for a few days more,” Laurence said quietly; Granby was still pale and fever-hectic. “Temeraire is working with their local priest, and several of the traders, to plot us a route: we will save the time twice over, in not having to hunt after water as we fly.”

“All right, then; and tell Iskierka to behave herself, and I will creep out onto the balcony again to-night,” Granby said, and let himself sink back against the pillows, his eyes already closing; Laurence pressed his good shoulder, and went out to be pounced on for information by an anxious and fretting dragon.

“I am glad you killed so many of those dragons,” Iskierka said to Temeraire, when Laurence had given her his report, and gone to speak with the surgeon about some point of the surgery, “very glad; only I wish I had done it, and perhaps I will go back and do it now. If Granby should not get well, I shall, too.”

“That would not be in the least sensible,” Temeraire said, “for we were fighting them in the dark: you will never recognize the particular dragons in question, and it is not as though all of them had an equal share in the assault upon us: I dare say there are a great many of that sort of dragon who never heard of us at all. If you would like to blame someone, you had better blame the Inca; or even Napoleon, for I suppose the Inca set the dragons on us for his sake. Anyway you are still not well, either: have some more of this cow.”

Iskierka ate, if sullenly, and Temeraire bent his head over the map which Sipho was drawing up, according to his instructions and what Temeraire had gleaned from the various traders who had been marched unwillingly up to him for questions.

Iskierka swallowed the haunch and said, “That whale.”

“Yes?” Temeraire said, absently.

“May I have it?” she said, and leaned over to nudge Kulingile. “And your half, also.”

“Can I have the head of your last cow?” Kulingile asked, opening an eye.

“Yes, all right,” Iskierka said, and pushed over the cauldron in which it had been stewed.

“If you like; but what do you mean to do with it?” Temeraire said. “It is nearly half-a-day’s flight away from here, now; and I suppose the meat cannot be good anymore, as we did not preserve it.”

“I don’t want the meat; I want the blubber,” Iskierka said, and insisted she did not care that the blubber would surely have taken on all the flavor of the spoiled meat; which Temeraire did not understand in the least, until she came back again at the end of the next day, stinking and sooty and triumphant, and fell upon her share of the provisions which the town now daily made them.

“Granby has asked for you twice,” Temeraire said, reproachfully, and flattened back his ruff, “and you might sit downwind; what have you been doing?”

“I have been rendering down the whale,” Iskierka said, tearing at her sheep, “for some of those traders: one of the sailors showed me how to go about it, and now I am rich again; and I am going to buy Granby a golden hook.”

“One might think she would be above trickery,” Temeraire said to Laurence, “not, of course, that I begrudge Granby anything at all; but it was my whale: mine and Kulingile’s, and she might have said so if she knew we might get gold for it.”

He could not stifle resentment when he saw the result, and had to watch as Granby came down from his sickbed at last several days later, to be presented by Shipley—whom Iskierka had recruited as her deputy in the matter and was all smiles in a fine suit of black cloth, bowing as he held out the box—with the truly splendid hook: shining gold on black velvet.

“It will be too soft for use, you know,” Granby said, when he could speak again, “so we will have to put it by for special occasions—”

“Not at all,” Iskierka said, “for I thought of that; and so they have made it out of steel, really: it is only gold on the outside; the rest of the funds went for the diamonds.”

“Yes; I see,” Granby said, staring at the shining faceted gems which gleamed all around the base of the hook in even rows.

“Put it on, at once,” Iskierka said, audibly hissing steam in her excitement, and then Granby put down the lid of the box and said, “No.”

Temeraire raised his sullen head, blinking, to watch as Granby said, “No. I am done with this, Iskierka, do you hear me? I am done with being dragged about, and made into what a lunatic might call a fashion-plate, and married off—”

“But you are not married, at all—” Iskierka protested.

“No fault of yours if I am not,” Granby said, which was very true, “and I dare say if I let you go on as you have been, you will try again, soon enough as you have found some princess or duchess or other lying about—” Iskierka twitched in what Temeraire could only call a guilty fashion. “—and I shan’t put up with it anymore: you aren’t fresh out of the shell any longer, and we are going to have a little more sense. Or you may take your leave of me, and find a captain who will swallow all your starts, and let you do just as you like—”

“Never, never!” Iskierka said, bristling wildly. “Oh! How can you be so cruel, when you must see very well that I am only thinking of you.”

“What you mean is, thinking of how you can show me off to your best advantage,” Granby said bluntly, “which isn’t the same thing, at all.”

Iskierka coiled on herself uneasily. Temeraire felt a smart of anxiety for his own part: but, he told himself, it was not at all the same thing, to wish Laurence to be recognized for his own abundant merits; and after all he did not insist on Laurence’s wearing his robes, but only proposed it, now and again, when it seemed to him most appropriate, and when Laurence’s natural modesty should from time to time require a push to overcome.

“Well, I mean to think only of you,” Iskierka said in her defense, “and surely you must like to have splendid things, and have everyone see how particularly important you are—”

“The most splendid thing I am ever like to have,” Granby said, “is a Kazilik dragon, dear one. All I have ever wanted is to call myself a captain, in His Majesty’s Corps, and if you should manage to make me into a lord or an emperor or a rajah, I shouldn’t know in the least what to do with myself.”

Iskierka grumbled deep in her throat, but said grudgingly, “Well, if you very much dislike the idea of being a prince, I suppose I will give it up; but you do want a hook—”

“I should be very glad of a serviceable hook, of good steel, with no gewgaws to catch a blade upon in battle,” Granby said firmly, “and as for the rest of the money, we will put it to provisioning, as the whale was caught for all our benefit,” which Temeraire brightened at, as repairing the injustice of Iskierka’s selfishness. “And if you should ever take another prize in future,” Granby concluded, “we will put it into the Funds.”

“What are those?” Iskierka said.

“Oh—stocks and so forth,” Granby said vaguely, “investments; I dare say when we have come to England I can find a man of business to manage them. I should much rather have the money in the five per cents than wear it in my sleeve.”

So when they left, two days later, they left at last decently equipped again: trousers for all the aviators, and boots—if these did not fit exactly right, they were still closer to proper uniform than before—and at least a shirt for every man. Temeraire rejoiced in four rifles, acquired triumphantly by Roland through an intense bout of haggling, and still more that he had proper riflemen again: Laurence had plucked up Baggy to take one, swearing the boy in as an ensign, and Ferris had one as well. And by Laurence’s order, the spare gunpowder was poured out and stored in small powder-horns, which might even be used as incendiaries in need.

The harness was repaired also; when at last it was buckled on again, and the men had climbed aboard in an orderly fashion almost like a proper ground crew, Temeraire breathed deep in satisfaction. “All lies well; and how wonderful to feel myself properly rigged out again, Laurence,” he said, looking over his shoulder as Laurence settled himself into place.

“Yes; I will be glad not to feel so wretchedly useless, when next we are in battle,” Laurence answered, with satisfaction of his own; and Temeraire noted with pleasure that he and all the crew had carabiners again, which should be far more reliable in keeping them safely aboard.

“I ought to ride with Temeraire,” Hammond said, trying to sidle past Churki, who was insisting on his riding on her back, alone; she had nothing but a light neck-strap for harness that he might use to secure himself. “If we should encounter any of the Tswana, in the air, I ought to be on hand—”

“We will all keep in company,” Churki said, “and Temeraire is a fighting-dragon: you are not a soldier, and therefore should not be aboard a beast who must go into battle if it offers. I can much better keep you safe as an ambassador ought to be.”

He yielded without much grace, but consoled himself with a handful of coca leaves: he had found a fresh supply, and they had quite restored him to health. “Pray do keep in mind,” he called to Temeraire, “that if we should meet the Tswana, you must wait for me to bespeak them: we cannot have any more of this excess of independence.”

“I call that unfair,” Temeraire said to Laurence as they went aloft, “when it is not my fault that our negotiations in Pusantinsuyo did not work; I did not try and marry Granby to the Empress.”

Mrs. Pemberton joined Hammond on Churki: offered the opportunity to stay and await a ship for England, she had refused. “No, Captain, although I thank you for the offer,” she said. “But I should consider myself poor-spirited indeed not to see my charge through to the end: it is only now, after all, that we have arrived at our original destination.”

They made their approach to Rio directly from the north, cutting across a great swath of jungle; and as they drew near they began to be flying over broad cleared estates, green and full of peacefully grazing cattle. “I think perhaps we cannot have heard truthfully, about the destruction,” Temeraire said, swallowing another bite of delicious beef, when they had stopped short of the city to eat well and restore themselves. “Everything seems in order to me here, and we are very close to the sea again.”

But “There is no-one tending the herds,” Laurence said quietly, and asked him to circle around south, so they might approach the city unnoticed, sheltered from view by the Corcovado hill. That next afternoon they came at last into sight of the beautiful harbor of which Laurence had spoken so often, and all the city laid out below.

“Good God,” Hammond said; they were all silent. In the harbor, a great dragon transport even larger than the lost Allegiance was riding at anchor, and a host of smaller vessels around her: six light frigates, bristling with guns. The tricolor snapped gaily from their masts.

All the rest of the city was a ruin of shattered houses and deserted streets, blackened by fire, with perhaps a dozen dragons of varied size nesting in the rubble or perched on some of the wreckage like crows. Some of them were eating cattle, and others lay watchful and huddled around a sort of encampment of tents and sheds which had been erected in one cleared section of the city near the docks.

“They are not all heavy-weights, anyway,” Temeraire said, although privately—he did not wish at all to convey alarm—but privately, he did think it would be rather difficult for even the four of them to manage so many, in a single fight, even if Churki should decide to fight with them; there were at least five heavy-weights among the enemy; and Iskierka was not yet quite well. “Although that red-brown one looks as though he might come up to my weight—”

“Kefentse,” Laurence said. “His name is Kefentse.”

Chapter 16

“I AM GLAD TO SEE YOU WELL, Captain Laurence,” Mrs. Erasmus said—or rather Lethabo, as she informed him she had resumed her childhood name, from before her abduction. Indeed there seemed nothing left of the subdued, silent woman Laurence had first met on the way to Capetown. She now wore the elaborate Tswana dress of patterned cloth, and much gold jewelry bright against her skin, but these were mere externals: the true distinction lay rather in the stern carriage of her neck, the severely pulled-back hair which disdained to hide the scarring upon her forehead, and her direct look.

“But I hope you are not come as an enemy,” she added, bluntly.

She had returned hence with Kefentse to direct the search for more Tswana survivors among the slaves on the estates. Brazil had been the destination of nearly all those slavers who had preyed upon the villages of the Tswana before the Tswana’s armies, being roused, had struck against the slave ports of Africa and stifled the trade. She herself had been brought here as a mere slip of a girl, abducted from her home and sold into bondage; only great good fortune had preserved her to obtain her freedom and eventually return to her homeland. Yet there could not be any great number of similar survivors: apart from the hideous toll of the ocean crossing in the foulness of a slave-ship’s hold, those who lived to reach Brazil would for the most part have been set to hard labor clearing the deadly jungle or harvesting cane.

“You must know you are being used, by Napoleon,” Laurence said, “to an end which would see more and not less of the world reduced to a subjugated state; indeed he has reinstated slavery, rather than forbidden it, in the territories of France. Can you have found so many survivors of your own particular tribe, with this assault, as to justify the toll in life among the innocent?”

“There has been no slaughter,” she said. “We did not burn the city: the Portuguese did that themselves, in their panic, while we stayed upon the mountains and made our demands for the return of the stolen. We took the city only after they had fled it. As for the survivors, you may come and see for yourself.”

With a word to Kefentse, she guided Laurence and Granby and Hammond down to the encampment and through its cramped and narrow lanes, which housed to his surprise many thousands: men, women, children, dazed with both destruction and liberation. “Some are the descendants of those stolen,” she said, “and do not remember their home in Africa.”

“And others,” Granby said to Laurence in an undertone, “haven’t anything to do with the Tswana at all, I imagine: those dragons don’t seem likely to me to be so very particular about who they have found, so long as they have found someone.” He started guiltily, seeing Lethabo’s eye upon him overhearing.

“But he cannot be wrong,” Laurence said to her, when they had gone back into the dockside house which, being one of the remaining standing buildings, served presently as her headquarters. Supplies of foodstuffs and clothing salvaged from the wreckage filled the rooms, and they sat among barrels of salt beef. “I can scarcely believe that so many would have been taken before provoking that answer, which your dragon country-men have made, of smashing the slave ports; and you yourself have told me that not one in ten could have survived this far. The greater share of those you have rescued cannot be of the Tswana.”

“If it were so,” Lethabo said, “and yet they claimed ancestry or some distant memory, would that be less true than the rebirth of our ancestors as the dragons who guard us?”

He did not know how to answer her: she had been the wife of a missionary and, he thought, too good a Christian to believe in that superstition; she saw his confusion and shook her head. “I do not call that a lie,” she said, “which when believed is true; and I think God loves justice better than the letter of the law. You will forgive me a moment.”

She rose, for another four survivors had that moment come rushing into the house: a man and a woman with a child in arms and an older one clinging to her hand. They looked with fear over their shoulders at the middle-weight dragon who had deposited them before the door; in contrast the beast stood outside hunched down and peering in after them, with a hopeful air.

Lethabo spoke to them in Portuguese; Laurence could not follow the conversation, but saw them grow gradually calmer, and then uncertain, looking back at the dragon with doubt writ on their faces. At last Lethabo went to the table before the windows and opened a great ledger in which names were written in two columns: she paged through it and found the name Boitumelo solitary on the left, and read it aloud to them.

The man repeated it slowly, and looked a question at the woman; she looked at the children, and in a moment repeated the name also. Lethabo nodded, and wrote in the right-hand column; then took them outside to the waiting dragon, and spoke with the creature in the language of the Tswana. Laurence went to stand by the doorway, and heard her tell the dragon that the man was likely the grandson of Boitumelo, and this his family. The dragon bugled joy and answered that he had thought so: there was a decided likeness, in the little boy; and he put his nose down to the older child, who after a moment tentatively reached out and gave it a pat.

In a little more than a quarter-of-an-hour, Lethabo came back inside: the new arrivals had been seen off to shelter in the settlement by one of the women assisting her. She raised an eyebrow at Laurence, who stood looking over the ledger. “Do you have any other quarrel with my work?”

“No,” Laurence said quietly, as she shut the book again, “none; save to wonder how you will take so many home.”

“The French have promised to sail us back,” she said, “and then return for more: we were brought from Africa in smaller ships; on these great transports near one thousand can sail, and in better comfort, with the peace of knowing they go to freedom and not to slavery.” She nodded at his look. “And on their return the ships will bring back still more dragons, yes. Of course they are using us: and we them; this is no true alliance, and our King knows better than to trust Napoleon, but we have had not much opportunity to choose our allies in this cause.”

“Would you prefer others?” Laurence asked outright, ignoring Granby’s startled look, and Hammond’s barely restrained flinch of protest.

“Perhaps, Captain,” Lethabo said, “and I think we must have others, if we are all not soon to witness the very slaughter of which you first accused us.”

“Captain,” Hammond said at once, as they left the headquarters and began the walk back to the city’s edge, where Temeraire waited to carry them up to their encampment on the hill, “of course our engaging in a direct action on behalf of the colony is presently somewhat impractical—”

Laurence exchanged a look with Granby, whose face showed what he thought of this as a description of a confrontation between three dragons and near two dozen.

“—but I feel I must remind you that the Portuguese are our allies, and invaluably so—even this very moment British soldiers may be landing on their soil—and I cannot countenance any arrangement which should damage our relations with that nation.”

“I hope to do no such thing,” Laurence said.

“Sir, you will forgive me,” Hammond said, “but as a point of law, these men and women you see thronging these alleys are escaped slaves—the legal property of landowners subject to the Portuguese Crown: in the—the tacit encouragement, the, I must say, near endorsement—sir, you did not at any moment take pains to establish the rights of the—of the owners—”

Laurence stopped in the lane and took Hammond by the arm and turned him forcibly to look: children played in the street building toy forts from shattered bricks, women sat together with their washing; a scene which might have belonged to any village, despite the framing ruins. “Mr. Hammond,” Laurence said, “if you came here with the purpose to render thousands of human souls into bondage, for the mere worldly profit either of landowners or of nations, then you brought the wrong man to assist you; and I think, sir, you well knew as much, when you solicited that I should come.”

“Oh—” Hammond tried to draw away, uncomfortable and without much success. “Captain, I speak here of sovereignty—the necessity of balancing—I must assert that we will not secure the liberty of these men and women, if you begin by giving offense to the Portuguese Crown: in breaching the subject of negotiations with the Tswana first, without reference of any sort to the wishes of the prince regent, you have usurped his authority—”

“If you can envision a solution to the present difficulties faced here by the Crown which does not entail coming to terms with the Tswana,” Laurence said, “then I beg you to enlighten me; and likewise if you imagine any circumstances where the Tswana should agree to affirm the rights of slave-owners. But otherwise, you have heard Lethabo’s account of the circumstances, and unless you doubt her veracity on no grounds whatsoever, in my opinion there is not a moment to lose.”

Lethabo had explained that in the wake of the burning of Rio, their demands having gone unanswered, the Tswana dragons had swarmed out over the nearby countryside and among the nearest estates, snatching up slaves and carrying them back to the city. Rumor had soon outrun their work, and many more slaves as well had begun to flee their masters, and to make their way to the city in hopes of liberation.

There had been no direct battle offered, no extensive engagement: the Tswana were too anxious to avoid any injury coming to the slaves, and the few confrontations with local militia had quickly been resolved in their favor, their having early on seized or ruined nearly all the available artillery. At first the Tswana had carried on their rescue with impunity, but some of the colonists, fearing both the loss of their property and the direct attacks which had not yet come, had hit upon a dreadful solution to forestall them. The slave-owners had made some number of their slaves hostage and penned them into barns or small buildings on their property, which they now threatened to set alight if ever the dragons approached.

This tactic had, in the near term, established a stalemate: the Tswana had confined themselves to snatching only slaves they saw in the open. But their anxiety to protect their kindred warred with their impatience, and the stalemate would not survive for long.

“Yes,” Temeraire confirmed, as they flew back to the camp. “I have been speaking to Kefentse, and he is firmly of the opinion that they must attack regardless. They have been quite at a standstill for two months now, and the hunting is getting thin if they avoid the estates where slaves are held. They do not all agree with him, of course. Dikeledi—she is that middling pinkish dragon with the horns, whom you have seen, flying—Dikeledi has not yet found any survivors of her own tribe, and so she refuses to countenance the risk.”

She was less willing to be deceived than many of her fellow-dragons; having lost her village only a few years before, one of the last struck, she insisted on recognizing the survivors in their persons, rather than accepting others as their descendants to renew her lineage. She was not one of the larger beasts, but had nevertheless enormous consequence among the Tswana for her skill and maneuverability in the air, and, Laurence gathered, was held to be the reincarnation of a priestess of great renown.

But Temeraire reported the general opinion had begun to turn against her: the other beasts were grown angry and brooding over the hostage slaves, whose treatment they feared; particularly after the attempt at starving out one of the plantation owners had ended in horrified failure when he began to starve his slaves in turn.

“A bloodbath on all sides is certain to ensue,” Laurence said, “if we cannot forestall it; therefore, Mr. Hammond, you will oblige me with rather less concern for the injured sentiments of our allies, and more for the swift advancement of a truce which should preserve their very lives.”

The Portuguese government had retreated to a fortification in the city of Paraty, near the limits of the day’s flying range of a dragon. Temeraire flew in under a somewhat ragged British flag which had been dug out from the rubble of the city and provided by Lethabo, despite which their approach met shouts and ringing bells of alarm and assembling troops. Temeraire pulled up and hovered out of range of the guns, while Gerry vigorously hung out the colors and made the handful of appropriate Portuguese signals which had been cobbled out of the collective memory of the aviators, none of whom had ever served very long as signal-ensign.

These were received doubtfully below, plainly occasioning a great deal of discussion, until reply came some quarter-of-an-hour later, and they were bidden to land in the face of a bristling defense: all the guns which the Portuguese yet held, and their crews sweating at the touch holes with the match smoldering.

“You will go aloft again when you have let us off, Temeraire, if you please,” Laurence said, with an eye on those nervous hands. “We can have no reliance on the judgment of those men: keep out of range until they have recognized our party.”

“Well, I will: but only just out of range,” Temeraire said uneasily, “and if there is any difficulty, I am certain if I should come at them from the flank, and roar at the proper angle, I could roll up all those guns at once.”

Laurence shook his head, privately: he had not yet thought over all the consequence of the amplification of the divine wind, which Temeraire had achieved on Lien’s example. Though she had formerly disdained direct action in battle according to the Chinese tradition, her reluctance had not survived the immediacy of threat to Napoleon’s person; and Laurence had no doubt that Napoleon would bend his every wile towards persuading her to unleash so astonishing a weapon in his service in future. That it might be put to use so devastatingly on land, and not merely at sea, made her even more dreadful a danger.

But now he slid from Temeraire’s back into the courtyard, and helped Hammond to climb down before Temeraire lifted away; he turned to meet the dubious eyes of a sweating Portuguese officer in the uniform of an infantry captain, who brightened as he saw Laurence’s green coat and gold bars. He nodded with enthusiasm, and said in broken French, “Ah, you join us! We are overjoyed, pardon—” and turning waved back the guns, and the soldiers fell with expressions of relief out of their ragged square.

Messengers went running into the main building of the fort, which showed recent signs of repair: fresh masonry and paint unmarked by weather. They were kept standing, and Laurence used the time to study the walls: not much use, he thought, against the Tswana; not up to standing against even a middle-weight.

At last Hammond elbowed him and bowed, as from the fortification issued a party of men, with one corpulent man uniformed and beribboned in the front, and Hammond greeted him in his native tongue and then continued in French to say, “And I beg Your Royal Highness will forgive our delay in arriving, occasioned as it has been by difficulties beyond our control; and permit me to introduce to you Captain William Laurence of His Majesty’s Aerial Corps,” before he whispered urgently and unnecessarily to Laurence, “Pray make your bows, sir: this is the prince regent of Portugal.”

“We will certainly take back Rio, very shortly,” Prince João said, “when our forces are well-gathered: from Mexico we have already a dozen beasts, whom even now you can see at maneuvers—”

He waved a hand at the window of his office which looked out upon a valley below, meaning by this a handful of small feral-looking dragons. “One generation at most out of the wild, if that, sir,” Ferris said to Laurence in an undertone, as he peered out the window. The beasts were none of them bigger than a Greyling, and certainly to be rolled up by any one of the Tswana dragons, who were the product of dragon-husbandry at least equal to that of the West and raised on a diet of elephants.

“And we await any day the advent of more beasts: it is not Napoleon alone who has transports, after all. Your dragons shall be of great assistance, but as for truce: no! We will never yield—”

“Then, sir, you have not attended to our report,” Laurence said bluntly, while Hammond blanched. “As we speak Napoleon is securing not merely alliance but direct allegiance from the Inca, whose empire now abuts your own realm so nearly as to intrude upon its claimed boundaries; shortly he will be there upon your flank, not with a handful of dragons imported from overseas, but with the vast and organized aerial legions of that nation.”

“Captain Laurence,” Hammond said desperately, “I think you forget yourself—Your Highness, I hope you will forgive—”

“Mr. Hammond, I forget nothing,” Laurence said, “but I will not stand by and serve as audience for a venture so ill-advised as to wreck all hopes of the preservation of this colony: if that, Your Highness,” he added, turning back to the prince, “and not some temporary victory is your desire, you have only one real avenue which I can see: not merely to make peace with the Tswana and send them hence, but to persuade them to settle here among you.”

Laurence chose abruptly to make the proposal, fully expecting the astonished silence which it won him: he could not deny it sounded even more mad when said aloud than when it had first occurred to him, looking upon the French transports in their harbor, the ten thousand refugees and more in the city. The calculation of voyages and time which should be required to send so many back to their home in Africa had struck him with great force. If the Portuguese were persuaded to yield up their remaining slaves, the numbers would swell into impossibility; add to that the hazards of the crossing, and the Tswana could not so easily return home as they had come. Which likely had been Napoleon’s design: he meant Brazil to be besieged a long while.

“Sir,” Laurence added to the staring expressions, “you must recognize you have no other prospects of a defense against the Inca; not in time. If you should acquire a handful of dragons from overseas, those beasts are stolen only for a little while from the war in Europe. Even if victorious here, which can by no means be relied upon, they must return in short order. In the Tswana, you have at hand a small army of dragons already skilled in aerial battle, attached by the bonds of natural sentiment to a portion of your citizenry, and able to remain and at once begin to breed up beasts of battle-weight.”

He went to the window, and flinging it open called out, “Temeraire! Will you be so good as to join those dragons, there?”

“Oh, if you like, of course I will,” Temeraire said, raising his head from the ground, and peering in the window: his great gleaming blue slitted eye filled the glass, and sent half the men in the room startling out of their chairs and back. “Only I thought I should spoil their maneuvering.”

He lifted away from the courtyard where he had been napping, with a leap that rattled the curtain-rings, and in a moment was among the little dragons. They left off their practice and swarmed around him clamoring in excited voices, which carried even up to the window: in their relative proportions not far short of sparrows circling some great beast, a lion or a bear, to which they could pose no threat. Laurence turned from the window to the prince.

“Your Highness, you can see your recruits will never make a dragon who can stand against a heavy-weight,” Laurence said. “The most skillful breeding program should require decades to achieve such an end. Even if by some method we should drive the Tswana out of your country, do you imagine Napoleon will give you that length of time, before he falls upon you from the west?”

Poor Hammond was much to be pitied, Laurence thought ruefully while he spoke, as being a very unwilling accessory to perhaps the most outrageous speech which likely an ordinary serving-officer had ever made to a ruling sovereign; he looked increasingly more dazed with horror even than distressed.

“Where I am mistaken, or my arguments ill-founded, I am ready to be persuaded,” Laurence added, “and I hope I offer no willful defiance: but neither I nor Temeraire nor any dragon of our party will lend ourselves, in the present circumstances, to a project of attacking the Tswana: an endeavor as sure to lead to disaster in its success as in its failure.”

When he had issued this flat ultimatum, there was not much other discussion to be had: dismissed with some abruptness, Laurence made his courtesies and departed. Hammond remained, at the prince’s command, and Laurence did not try to persuade him otherwise. He could well imagine that conversation: the prince should certainly inquire as to the extent of Laurence’s influence upon the other aviators of their party, and Temeraire’s upon the other dragons, information which Laurence rather wished Hammond to convey than to conceal.

“I will not urge you to act in any way contrary to your conscience; I would reject any such suasion on my own part,” Laurence said to Granby, when he had returned to camp; and with a look he extended the scope of his words to Demane, who raised his head from where Roland was sketching for him on paper the outlines of a maneuver for a heavy-weight beast: he had suddenly of late grown surprisingly intent on furthering his education as an aviator, and now in every open moment was to be found harassing the senior officers for any scrap of knowledge.

“I am not going to attack the Tswana to help these slave-takers,” Demane said flatly, recalling to Laurence that Demane’s own people had suffered similar insult at the hands of the Dutch settlers of Capetown, if not abduction from their native country. “I would as soon fight with them, instead; why shouldn’t we?” he demanded, to Roland’s sitting back on her heels outraged. “Kulingile and I aren’t going to fight Temeraire or Iskierka, but I don’t mind attacking the Portuguese, if they should start the fighting.”

“Oh! As far as that goes, I will say that I shouldn’t mind it, either,” Temeraire said, overhearing. “While I do see that it would be quite inconvenient that the Portuguese should be beat, since they are helping us against Napoleon otherwise, perhaps the Tswana would agree to help us against him instead: and I should just as soon fight with Kefentse. Even if he did snatch you, that time,” he added to Laurence, “he has very handsomely apologized for that, and explained the misunderstanding. And one cannot really blame the Tswana for being so upset; they have the far better cause, it seems to me.”

“I suppose that is a call for me to ask Iskierka,” Granby said, “but I know very well that she will be perfectly willing to fight anyone whosomever. Well, if it helps you make them see sense, I will go as far as saying I plan to be sitting on my heels; but Laurence, I can’t give you my word: there are those reinforcements to think of, which Hammond claimed would be sent us from the Channel. I didn’t believe that they would ever arrive, when I thought we needed them to make any sort of go of things here; but now that they would be inconvenient, I think we must expect them at any moment. And if they do arrive before you have talked all these fellows round to this scheme of yours, and there are British dragons going into battle, I am not going to watch them square off against the Tswana while I sit here and twiddle my thumbs. Thumb,” he added, rueful.

Laurence nodded silently: he wondered, himself, if he could under such circumstances remain a mere observer, without doing whatever he could to persuade Temeraire to join the battle; it could scarcely be borne.

Hammond returned later that afternoon and began a determined pursuit of private inquiry with Granby; who eeled away from him energetically as far as he was able, until finally cornered just before the dinner-hour: Hammond went away from the conversation dissatisfied and anxious, to be taken back to Paraty by one of the Mexican couriers.

“Well, he has made me commit myself,” Granby said, sighing as he swung a leg over the planed log which made one of their benches and dropped himself unceremoniously into his seat: they ate in the open air, their handful of tarpaulins gone for shelter from the sun, and very little cover otherwise. They had established their camp in the hills a little distance from the coast, to avoid the eyes of the French sailors and also their guns, and without relief of wind coming off the water or any shade from trees which had long since been felled to put up the city, the tropical sun was punishing.

“I only hope you shan’t get me dismissed the service, Laurence,” Granby added, reaching across the table, and then winced for the indelicacy: poor Ferris had flinched, and now sat staring down at his trencher of flat wood.

Laurence looked at him, soberly: he could not see another course, but impossible not to recognize that he could scarcely have prejudiced Ferris’s chances of reinstatement more effectively. There would be no triumphant return from this mission; at best they might preserve the colony against immediate destruction. Hammond’s offer of his good offices, such as they were, would not likely survive Laurence’s recalcitrance; and this entire action, working as it must to remind their Lordships of Laurence and Temeraire’s general incorrigibility, would not incline them to mercy for his former first lieutenant.

“Of course, we would have the devil of a time going after them in there, to begin with,” Granby said that evening: they had climbed up to the summit of Corcovado together under the cover of darkness, to spy upon the Tswana in their nightly conclave: the dragons huddled in a circle with the Tswana warriors and councilors forming an inner ring around a low fire: their shadows stretched away long like the spokes of a wheel. Out in the harbor the lanterns of the French ships were glowing out a misplaced constellation on the water, and the light here and there shone on the iron of their guns.

“But I don’t know what we will do if they do go after those plantations,” Granby added: while the deliberations were at too great a distance to be followed, Dikeledi’s head flung back in loudly hissing distress boded ill for their direction. “Do you think there is any chance the regent will go along with you?”

“I hardly hope so far,” Laurence said, tiredly. “At best, he may think on his danger from the Inca a little more, and seek out some truce; but he has a thousand slave-holders clamoring against any arrangement to which the Tswana would consent. And very likely he only thinks me a peculiar sort of lunatic.”

“Well, at least Hammond will have given them a better notion of you—or a worse notion, I should say,” Granby said, lowering his glass. “They haven’t a prayer against the Tswana without us, if they only have a short one with.”

“Granby!” Iskierka hissed up the slope at them, stones rattling away as she clawed partway up. “We must go at once: there are dragons coming towards our camp, from the south, at least five of them.”

“I oughtn’t have opened my mouth,” Granby said; Laurence gripped his arm at the elbow, over the thick straps which bound on the hook, and together they scrambled down into Iskierka’s reach to be put up onto her back. She leapt into the air with a mighty heave, and Laurence felt the rumble of her ceaseless inward workings beneath his legs like the grinding of a millstone as she drew up her flame, preparatory.

“Hi,” Granby said, thumping her in the shoulder with his fist, “that’s enough: those are our fellows, most likely, and you shan’t go flaming them only because they will make matters difficult. I don’t suppose their captains would love us for it,” he added over his shoulder, “but do you suppose Temeraire could talk the beasts round?”

“I think there is every likelihood of it,” Laurence said, as they closed in: Temeraire was on his haunches roaring out in greeting, and there was scarcely any mistaking the silhouettes of the approaching dragons: Lily’s wide-stretched wingspan, and the vast and impenetrable shadow which was Maximus’s bulk.

Chapter 17

MAXIMUS WAS BEING PERFECTLY UNREASONABLE about Kulingile, Temeraire was sorry to be forced to admit. Not that Temeraire did not understand his point of view, but after all, Kulingile had not chosen to grow so large; there was no sense in putting one’s back up. “And if I have grown used to it, after having been there when he hatched as quite the scrawniest thing imaginable, you cannot very well complain,” he added.

Maximus grumbled, deep in his belly, and said, “Oh, well, if he is a friend of yours,” and Kulingile rather uncertainly said, “Would any of you like some beef? Gong Su has just stewed a few of them—” which thawed him further.

“I am glad he is not mean, at any rate; not to be swallowed, if he were,” Maximus added to Temeraire, swallowing instead an entire cow. “And,” he added afterwards, cheered, “I rather think I have an edge on him in wingspan; I am almost sure of it.”

Temeraire was sure of no such thing, but prudently did not say so; everything went off reasonably and in the end they all settled into camp together with no outright quarreling. So there was really no reason for Berkley to be so distressed.

“Those damned blighters back at the fortress wouldn’t mention there was a beast of thirty tons sitting here at your back, would they,” Berkley said to Laurence, as he sat down at last: flushed through and downing a mug of grog which he now accepted, still breathing heavily. “No, it is all, ‘Laurence and Temeraire are up to their usual starts, go and talk sense into them.’ What have you done this time? That young whelp of an ambassador back at Paraty looked like to have an apoplexy when we told him we didn’t undertake to do any such mad thing; as if there were a chance of success, either. I suppose being dismissed the service once is not enough for anyone, ha ha.”

“The Admiral told us you had been reinstated,” Lily said to Temeraire, “but why are we not fighting: I thought that was what we were all sent here for?”

“I shall explain it all to you,” Temeraire told her and Maximus, “when we have all eaten, and slept: perhaps we ought to go and get another whale, so as not to have the bother of hunting for a few days.”

“No,” Maximus said decidedly, crunching the cow’s skull between his jaws, “no whales! If I don’t eat fish for a month it will not be too long: they did not have any meat on that ship. No fresh meat, I mean; it was all dried and mixed in with that porridgey stuff you gave them a notion of, and if we wanted anything better, we could go roust it out ourselves.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Messoria said, as she ate her portion more sedately, “there were half-a-dozen cows aboard only for him; but he would eat them all, nearly right away, and then it was complain, complain, complain, all three months of sailing.”

“I don’t see what is the use of saving them to get thin and tough, at sea,” Maximus said, injured.

Temeraire said, “Well, tomorrow I dare say we will find some more cattle, and I do not mind letting you eat my share to-night: how happy I am to see you all!”

There was something so very comfortable about having Maximus and Lily back, and all their formation also: Messoria and Immortalis, Dulcia and Nitidus, so that around the fire there were a great many voices, all friendly; and together they could certainly have stood against nearly anyone. There were of course still more of the Tswana, and anyway Temeraire did not want to fight them, but it was much pleasanter to think that they could fight, if they wished to, or if anyone offered them an unacceptable insult.

“Anyway it was still better than staying at home in England. It has been all watching the Channel, day and night,” Lily said to Temeraire, tipping her head back daintily to swallow the last haunch of her cow, “and not a single engagement; the French dragons have nearly all gone away, to Spain or to the east, and it is only a few unharnessed beasts who fly patrol along their coast now and never come across. So tiresome, but when we thought we might as well help Perscitia, with the pavilions she is building, everyone grew stupidly upset.”

“Dug out half the best quarry in Hertfordshire,” Berkley said to Laurence, “and tore up four dozen oaks in the Midlands.”

“So they sent us here,” Lily went on, “and we did not mind going; but now we have eaten, and I want to know what we shall be doing here? And why are you shy of fighting those other dragons, if they are the enemy?”

“I am not shy of fighting them,” Temeraire said. “Whoever said so? Only, they are not the enemy, in my opinion; they are those dragons we saw in Africa, and they are only here because they are trying to find their crews again: or what they call their descendants, who were taken for slaves.”

“Those dragons who took Catherine from me, that time?” Lily said, with a cold yellow gleam in her eye.

“You will meet Kefentse tomorrow,” Temeraire said hastily, “and I am sure he will apologize, just as he has apologized to me. Anyway, the real enemy are the Inca, and Laurence is sure that they will overrun this colony if we do not persuade the Tswana to stay and protect it.”

“So that part is true?” Captain Harcourt said to Laurence, her face baffled. “Hammond began to say you intended something of the sort, before he understood we weren’t going to oblige him, but I thought he must have muddled things up: not that I am in a hurry to go roaring in when we are outnumbered three to one, but where do the Inca come into it, at all?”

Laurence briefly acquainted them with the disastrous success which the French had found in the Incan empire, and Temeraire added, “We did try to stop it, of course: but she would marry Napoleon, for all we tried to warn her against him.”

“Small wonder,” Berkley said. “I’m only surprised you didn’t have to flee the country with a horde of dragons on your tails.”

“Well, we did,” Temeraire said. “—It was not in the least amusing; so I don’t see why you should be laughing,” he added, rather nettled.

“I would beg pardon if you deserved it, you great lunatic of a beast,” Berkley said, still snorting in what Temeraire felt was a most undignified way.

Harcourt and the rest of the formation of course had come direct from England, with all their crews, which overran the previously orderly camp in the usual haphazard manner of aviators; but they had also brought supply: guns, and powder, and chainmail armor to spare; and to the endless satisfaction of the sailors several casks of dark rum. Grog was served out with haste, and exchanged for fresh meat and fruit, while a comfortable bonfire was arranged for the captains, and the dragons laid down split logs around it.

While the preparations were under way, Laurence and Granby together described more fully the course of their unfortunate negotiations. “We cannot be certain,” Laurence concluded as they seated themselves, “but the Empress would scarcely have committed herself so fully as to order an attack upon us if she had not resolved upon the marriage: we must assume if it is not yet accomplished, it soon will be.”

“I suppose there is not much chance we could catch them this side of the Horn, if we set sail at once?” Little asked, sitting down beside Granby and handing him a mug of grog. “If he has lingered over the wedding-ceremonies, perhaps.” Laurence exerted an effort of will not to permit himself a look at Granby’s face: he would not have known of the liaison, save for Iskierka’s indiscretion, and so he would not know of it.

“If we did manage to find them in the middle of the ocean, I don’t know what we’d do with him,” Granby said. “Two transports at least, if not another ship, and trust the Incas to cram every dragon aboard that they can.”

“Well, so far we’re even,” Sutton said. “Captain Blaise has the Potentate waiting off the coast, and I presume the Allegiance is hereabouts somewhere?”

Granby stopped and looked at Laurence, who also was halted by surprise: but of course his report to the Admiralty was still in his writing-case—and his letter to Harcourt very likely still in the courier-bag aboard the Triomphe, De Guignes having in courtesy accepted the duty of posting it. Even if that had been handed on to some French courier or frigate by now, Harcourt had been at sea for months now: she could not have received it. The evil news must come to her now, fresh and with no warning.

“Gentlemen, you will excuse me a moment; Captain Harcourt, may I ask the favor of a word?” Laurence said, at least hoping to give her a moment of privacy, but she stood up and looked him in the face and said, “Laurence, Tom is not dead?”

He looked at her helplessly; there was no help to be had or given. “Forgive me,” he said. “I ought to have realized I had outrun my news: the Allegiance was lost in the forties, after a five days’ storm.”

“And he wouldn’t come away?” she said.

“I beg you not to assign to him any such willful act of self-destruction,” Laurence said. “He was to my last sight of him engaged in the most vigorous efforts to rescue the ship from disaster, which until those final moments not the most cautious observer would have considered without hope.”

She nodded silently, and stood there a moment austerely pale and still; her long face had lost its youthful flesh in the crucible of the service and of childbirth, and her hair was pulled back into a severe plait. “You will pardon me, gentlemen,” she said, and walked away from the firelight alone.

Her slim silhouette remained dark on the edge of the camp a long while, with only Lily’s head bent down to her side, offering comfort. Laurence sat up by the fire, waiting, when the others had withdrawn to their tents; thinking she might wish to question him further as to the circumstances: if he could give her little satisfaction, there was no-one to offer more. But when she returned at last with reddened eyes and her skin blotted in places, and sitting down picked up her cup, she did not ask him anything; she only said, “What a dreadful waste; and oh! whyever did I let you persuade me to marry him? His brother is dead, too, and now that harridan will be after me day and night to let her keep little Tom.”

Laurence gathered that by this she meant Riley’s sister-in-law, who was surely anxious not only for her nephew’s education but for the fate of her three daughters, left with only meager portions. After the baby, the estate would devolve upon a distant cousin who could scarcely be expected to have much consideration for their future, or for the comfort of the widow.

“And he is welcome to the whole kit, as far as I care; do you know little Tom can already climb the harness from belly-netting to the captain’s seat, all by himself?” Harcourt said, with a pride which Laurence could not wholeheartedly approve in the case of a three-year-old child. “I have begun to take him up with me: I am sure he will get a dragon even if I cannot persuade Lily to consider him, after all; how I should like not to have to bother with another.”

The advent of the formation, killing Hammond’s last hopes of bringing pressure to bear which should force Laurence into a nearer compliance with his wishes, at last broke the hanging stalemate. The regent yet refused to meet with the Tswana directly, an attempt at preserving his royal dignities, and delegated the conference to several of his noblemen headed by one Dom Soares da Câmara, a gentleman who spoke proudly of holding some thousand men, women, and children as chattel; and meanwhile the Tswana general Mogotsi who had charge of their forces bore rather a contemptuous look when he came into the main fortification at Paraty, which was too small to have allowed the entrance of dragons.

Laurence could understand only some words of what the general said aside to Lethabo, but gathered the meaning: a sneering at someone who had not a single ancestor worthy of rebirth. Mogotsi’s dismissive flip of a hand at the feral dragons outside, hanging well back from Kefentse, required no translation whatsoever. The subsequent negotiations were carried on with a degree of hostility better merited by open warfare: which several of the Portuguese negotiators, slave-owners themselves, seemed if anything to be making an attempt to provoke.

“It must be their only hope of preserving their estates, of course,” Hammond said distractedly as he paced the small anteroom to which they had retired for a brief respite, “their only hope—at least if there is a war, there is some chance of victory—indeed I am most impressed with the forbearance of that general; one would not expect it of a military man—”

Laurence, who had listened to Lethabo translating and picked out whatever he could, did not think that Mogotsi had needed to exercise so much restraint as Hammond would have given him credit for; and suspected that some remarks on the other side which might have given the Portuguese noblemen some excuse for ending the discussion had similarly been left out.

The chief Portuguese negotiator only snorted, and returned to his own occupation of glaring at Laurence; under his urgent whispers, Hammond had thrice renewed his attempts at remonstration, since Lily and her formation had arrived and put a period to his hopes of obviating any need for Laurence’s assistance. These attempts—cajolery, threats, insults, appeals—had not been crowned with success, and at last Hammond had given over and turned his efforts to persuasion of the regent, instead, to make some at least temporary peace.

That it should be temporary was certainly the second hope of the Portuguese negotiators. But in the night, one of the little dragons came darting into the courtyard; his courier-rider dropped off panting, and ran in to convey the news that another French transport approached the harbor: with another nine Tswana dragons who had already left the deck and come to join their fellows on the shore.

The negotiators, roused in the early hours by the news, huddled murmuring and grim together until dawn brought Kefentse back, and the discussions resumed. Having given over the notion of preserving their slave-holdings for the moment, the Portuguese now began to argue for the manumitted slaves remaining on their estates—plainly, Laurence thought, with an eye to reversing that manumission as soon as circumstances might permit it, if not rendering it a mere fiction to begin with.

Lethabo listened, spoke with Mogotsi, and then turning back said, “You have torn kinsmen from one another; this cannot be allowed. Where they do not desire to return to their homeland, however, they may be reunited with their ancestors upon the estates.”

Laurence doubted extremely that the Portuguese negotiators, wearing self-satisfaction in every line of their faces, understood that by ancestors the Tswana meant the dragons; nor did he enlighten them when afterwards Soares da Câmara bragged to his fellows in the next recess.

“You see how they swallow the least gesture,” he said. “We ought to have met them across the table before: these savages have no understanding, no sophistication; they can easily be led if only one should satisfy their primitive impulses. They have learned that to be a slave is undesirable; very well, we will let them call themselves free; what does it matter, if they do not refuse to live in service to their betters, as some instinct of wisdom must lead them to accept? Even if a few thousand of them decide to brave the passage again and go back to Africa, we will scarcely be the losers when one considers the rate at which presently they flee their appointed places, knowing they may escape to the beasts.”

Hammond looked uneasily at Laurence, perhaps wondering how much he understood and whether he would object; Laurence said nothing, and only glanced across the room at Lethabo, who looked back and met his eye with the faintest suggestion of a smile.

“Well, I hope they can be persuaded to remain, most of them, now that you have arranged handsome estates for them all to live on,” Harcourt said, surveying Rio from the heights: the city had grown a little cramped with another five heavy-weight Tswana dragons trying to clear themselves room in the center, and a scattering of middle-weight beasts debating over the other corners. “If we do have to send them by the Potentate, we will be sitting on our haunches here ourselves for another year; or likely three: one trip won’t be enough to get the half of them back over.”

“They can’t much like the idea of going back crammed aboard the hold very like in the way they came, and so they would be,” Warren said, “for if dragons go along, it will be no end of work fitting enough provisions for them all. If it can even be done: I would not wager on getting more than five hundred passengers aboard at a time, myself. Look sharp, there!”

This exclamation was provoked by the approach of one of the larger Tswana dragons, who abandoning her attempt to make herself comfortable in the ruin of the city had gone aloft, and now came towards the mountain. She had not sighted them, however, or at least paid them no attention if she had; she landed clutching onto the cliff face and began to scratch at the wall experimentally, as though to work out its composition.

Evidently satisfied, she turned her head down and roaring called to her fellows, a few of whom left off their own efforts and joined her in examining the stone. One of the smaller beasts made a thoughtful chirruping noise and darted away, returning shortly thereafter with one of the stolen cannon. From this they stripped away the wheels, leaving only a portion of the wooden housing, on which they seized; the barrel was set against the wall, and the larger beasts began to take it in turn to hammer the length into the rock. The smaller ones held it in place, and when it had been sunk halfway in began to twist and rock it; shortly they had burst out a small pattering avalanche of rock. It bore a strong resemblance to the work Laurence had seen once at the Tswana city of Mosi Oa Tunye, where the dragons carved immense living caverns out of the walls of the waterfall gorge.

By the next morning, the space was large enough for one of the smaller beasts to climb inside and sweep out debris; by that night, two of the larger dragons settled down therein to sleep. “Well, at least some of them are making themselves at home,” Sutton said, as they checked upon the progress, but when Laurence returned to the negotiations and spoke with Lethabo, she shook her head.

“Kefentse will stay, and so will I and my daughters, for we have no other kinsmen remaining back home: but that is not true of many of the dragons,” she said.

Fortunately Lethabo had been more generous to those beasts whose kindred had been wholly decimated, those same being more willing to accept refugees of doubtful lineage; and those dragons were willing to remain rather than risk the dangers of the crossing. But a dozen of the beasts still had villages and kin waiting for them in Africa, and insisted on returning at once, with almost two thousand men meant to accompany them: a company the size of a small army, and if anything more difficult to provision.

“Whatever fine language the Portuguese choose to write down in those papers, Captain, does not very much matter to dragons,” Lethabo had said to Laurence, as they had left the negotiations. “You know it, and so do I. No agreement will hold which does not satisfy them. But this truly is our price: all the slaves freed and reunited with their ancestors, and transport back for those who wish to go. If you cannot do it, we must yet treat with the French, and then, if the Portuguese will not free their slaves—”

She spread her hands eloquently, and Laurence nodded.

“We could send the men by other boats, smaller ones—frigates, or a good-sized merchantman?” Warren proposed now—Laurence flinched a little at hearing him call a frigate a boat—but this suggestion Lethabo rejected out of hand: the dragons would not again be parted from their descendants.

“Well,” Granby said, looking down past the harbor, where the two French transports rode at anchor, their colors bright from the masthead in the sun, “there is nothing else for it, but how can it be done?”

Chapter 18

“IT SHOULD BE EASY AS WINKING, if we wanted to sink them,” Captain Warren observed: and a mere bombardment with boulders, carried one after another from the shore and dropped from on high, would indeed have sent the transports to the bottom of the ocean in no short order—where, of course, they would be of no use whatsoever in getting the Tswana home.

To take the great vessels, preserving them in a useful condition, was by far a more difficult problem, and not least because the French had been alive to the danger of just such an impulse on the part of their uncertain allies. The transports themselves were heavily armed, and bags of caltrops hung from the yard-arms above the dragondecks in such a way that they might instantly be spilt across the planking, their iron teeth being large enough to prevent any dragon from landing easily upon the ship while offering only a little difficulty to the sailors aboard.

Meanwhile the frigates in their company were too small for any but Nitidus or Dulcia to land upon: fast and maneuverable and armed for the most part with a few heavy snub-nosed cannonades which would certainly be turned at once upon any dragon who tried to descend upon the transports: they were close enough to make a directed attack practicable. Laurence could spy among their complement as many as four gun-boats apiece, each armed with the long, narrow-barreled guns which threw the small barbed cannonballs.

“The gun-boats will be in the water five minutes after the alarm is sounded,” Laurence said, peering at them through his glass, “if the crews know their work; in ten minutes, otherwise, and we shall hear from the guns directly after; and the cannonades. We cannot keep the dragons on the decks under that degree of fire.”

“And even if we do manage to hold the deck, the French will have hulled the ships so wretchedly we may as well sit in harbor the next three years, for all the good they will do us: they will never make the long crossing,” Sutton said.

“Yes; we must do something about those gun-boats, first,” Harcourt said, rolling out a sheet of smudged parchment, and taking a scrap of charred wood from the fire to sketch upon it the outline of the harbor. “If we can keep them pinned down, somehow; then take the transports quick as quick can be, if they aren’t to spike the decks against us—if we can only give those frigates a proper fait accompli, they shan’t hull us, unless they mean to sink all their own crews.”

“There’s another difficulty for you,” Warren said cheerfully. “Who’s to sail them? We shan’t; and the Potentate can scarcely let us have enough men to sail two transports more across the ocean and to home. Your bag of sailors will do some good, Laurence, but—”

“They are much improved,” Laurence said, “but I would not trust them to sail a dinghy rigged fore-and-aft across ten miles of calmest sea without trained officers.”

“Pray let us worry about one thing at a time!” Harcourt said. “If we do manage to cut them out, we ought to be grateful enough to have any other difficulties to work out.”

“I do not quite see how it is to be done myself, Laurence,” Temeraire said over his shoulder as the blue-black ocean streamed away beneath them. The weather was all that it should be for flying, clear and not too hot, and he could not help but spiral in mid-air for sheer delight: the difficulties of taking the transports should surely, he thought, be overcome; one could not let that worry one on a day like this.

“I am still on the shipping lanes, I hope,” he added, peering down: he did not understand how Laurence managed to be so certain without an elaborate consultation of his compass and the stars where in the ocean they might be; they had left behind land some two hours ago.

“You are,” Laurence said, “and if you will bear two points to starboard, that is a whaler, I think, and we may hope one of ours; or an American—at present I would be glad to take a dozen sailors out of an American, and damn the provocation.”

Temeraire would have been equally glad, so long as Laurence was satisfied that the act could be justified, and he put on as much speed as he could: but when they came nearer, she hung out Dutch colors to meet their own Union Jack. Laurence swung down by a rope to the rigging, and climbing to the deck met with her captain while Temeraire hovered above her.

He climbed back up alone, without taking any men out of her, so it was not a mere ruse; Temeraire sighed, but when Laurence had reached his back and clasped the carabiners on again he said, “South-south-west, my dear, there is not a moment to lose. Captain Hoerug tells me they spoke the Dapple this morning: a forty-eight and a crack frigate, and if we can catch her before she goes beyond our range, we will have our men.”

Laurence scoured the ocean with his glass, and put every one of his small crew to the same task in all directions: a flash of light off a window, the gleam of a lantern when twilight came on, anything would do; and finally near the limits of the range he had privately defined to himself, Baggy called down uncertainly, “Captain? Is that her, there-away; I think I see a flash, maybe.”

Dapple sent up a blue light as they neared, and seeing their flag hung out her colors, an unsuspecting welcome: her captain would not expect to be pillaged from aloft, of course. Laurence did not recall who had Dapple presently; there had been a vast and somber reshuffling in the wake of the disaster at Shoeburyness, and he climbed down preoccupied with working out how many officers she might be able to give him. Only when he was on the deck, amid the familiar life of a Navy ship, and found himself asked for his name, was he recalled abruptly to the awkwardness of his position. To most officers of Britain, he was yet a condemned criminal and a traitor: his reinstatement would surely not yet have made official news.

“Captain William Laurence,” he said, “of Temeraire,” and saw the starts of confusion in the younger officers, the whispers traveling hastily to enlighten those unfortunate enough not to recognize their names; and the looks thrown skyward into the dark, where Temeraire’s black hide was only a shadow against the sky.

The ship’s third lieutenant, a young man scarce twenty years by his looks, had been directing the men into throwing out the pontoon-decks by which they could have offered a dragon a landing place. “Hold there, if you please, Mr. Rightley,” he said, and looked at his captain.

“Captain Adair Galloway,” that gentleman, of an age with Laurence, said slowly without offering a hand, “and sir, I believe I require some explanation.”

“You shall have it, sir,” Laurence said, “but it must be brief: I am sorry to come to you with such demands, but I must have every man you can spare; and if possible some you would find it hard to part with.” He saw his words travel the deck with even more astonishment than his name; and Galloway looked still more bewildered. Laurence knew him by name and a little by reputation: a stickler, and his ship looked it; fresh from the Atlantic crossing and on the verge of a run at the Horn, her paint gleamed new-bright and her brass shone warmly beneath the lanterns; her officers were every man of them in uniforms that would have done justice to a dinner-party, and there was a sense of quiet order in all the lines of the ship.

She was, in short, run along the methods he would once have preferred himself, Laurence realized, rueful and aware of his marked trousers, his dull and unblacked boots, his yellowing linen. However, there was this absurdity in his favor: he had four years on Galloway on the post-list; he had seniority. “Shall we go inside, sir?” he said. “Temeraire would be glad of a short rest, if you can give it to him; but we must be aloft again as quickly as we may: there is not a moment to lose.”

With few alternatives, Galloway showed him into the stern cabin, and shut the door on his interested crew; Laurence knew, of course, that if not every ear on the ship would be pressed directly to the door, they would still hear the conversation repeated soon enough. “Sir,” he said, “I hope you will pardon my forthrightness, but I would address your hesitation at once: I am restored to the list as of 11 November in the last year. But my personal circumstances are of little importance. There are two French transports in Rio: we mean to cut them out, and we have ten dragons to do it with; but I have only two hundred men for prize-crew, and not an officer among them.”

Temeraire hovered impatiently, until the pontoon-deck had been tied down at last: it was not very large, and he had to let himself down very cautiously with his belly quite full of air to keep from swamping it entirely. “There; that will do,” he said, swinging his head round to the ship’s railing: a line of staring sailors backed hurriedly away, except for one young officer who blanched but kept his place.

“Thank you: although pray secure that third line a bit better; that knot is very ugly and is sure to slip in a moment: it would not be in the least pleasant to have this come apart beneath me, and I suppose I should have to pull on the ship to get out of the water again. How many of you do you suppose will come with us?” he asked, unable to resist inquiry.

He did not receive any answer but stammers until Laurence came out with the captain, who looked very displeased, but nevertheless gave orders for forty men to embark, and four of his officers. For the officers, Laurence had Gerry sling over some carabiners and spare harness, and Temeraire put them one after another onto his back, beginning with the third lieutenant, Creed, and ending with a midshipman of fifteen named Wren. The men reluctantly climbed into a makeshift sack upon the deck, which Temeraire himself drew up and stuffed into his belly-netting, where the sailors might climb out of it with some awkwardness but reasonable security.

Forty men more! Temeraire thought triumphantly as he lifted away. Though of course these new recruits should soon go into service aboard the transports, and would thus pass from his purview, the sheer number seemed quite an achievement however transitory; and anyway perhaps they would not be able to take the transports, in which case they might remain with the other sailors as a part of his extended crew, after all.

So he was perfectly satisfied, when he came to camp and let them off; and having eaten an excellent meal of roasted cattle stuffed with the sweet ripe banana fruit he fell asleep until roused unceremoniously several hours later by a shove. “Ow,” he said, opening one eye, “whatever is that for?”

“This is no time to be sleeping,” Iskierka said. “Get up and help me stop this nonsense: they mean to go take those ships without us.”

“I am sure you have just misunderstood,” Temeraire said, sitting up yawning. “Lily and Maximus would not—”

“Not them,” Iskierka said impatiently. “Granby and Laurence!”

Midshipman Wren sat in the front of the boat softly mouthing the time; the sound did not reach the stern where Laurence sat, and the oars dipped silent into the water and rose out again smooth, scattering only a few drops over the waves in their swift arcs before they dived again. Lieutenant Creed sat in the stern of the boat immediately to port, his thin face just visible by its pallor of excitement. He could not fail of being made post for this, of course, if they succeeded: a boy of twenty, to take into charge a transport; the sort of leap of fortune men dreamed of in the Navy.

Or, as O’Dea had gloomily observed on their embarkation, “As like we will end by feeding all the monstrous serpents of the deep, Captain.” Laurence glanced to starboard: Granby’s boat there, rather a tub, which had been acquired from a fisherman down the coast and laden with a heap of chainmail; past him Harcourt’s boat. Laurence had made a vague gesture at trying to dissuade her coming; but they were cramming aboard every last man down to those who could only dubiously lay claim to the name—even young Sipho, clutching the signal-rocket intently—and she scornfully disdained the attempt. When he turned away subsequently, Roland’s eye had met his with a martial light; so there he had not even tried, but contented himself with assigning her to take charge of the second of the boats assigned to lay on the chainmail: at least she would not be on deck until the end.

Their flotilla in miniature crept mouse-softly across the harbor towards the towering bulk of the transports: the Polonaise and the Maréchal. For illumination they had only the moonlight above and the bonfire in the city behind them where the Tswana had gathered for their usual nightly conclave: its noise carried louder over the water than the noise of the other boats, and the glare, Laurence hoped, would dazzle the eyes of the look-outs.

As they drew nearer, Lieutenant Creed looked over at Laurence and nodded, and his boat split away towards the Maréchal, drawing half-a-dozen of the others along in its train. They had drawn alongside the Polonaise, and Laurence opened up his glass and looked: the officer of the watch was down near the stern beside the wheel, the hands on deck made sleeping humps amid the cannon on the quarterdeck, and the lookout in the near crow’s nest yawned against his arm: a ship in harbor, at peace.

Laurence nodded to Seaman Ewyll, waiting in the prow: a sturdy if stolid young man, who flung up the rope with its grappling-hook. It clanged against the rail as it seized on, and they all held still, waiting; not a breath misted the air.

The alarm was not called. Ewyll swarmed up the knotted rope, another five tied at his waist, and he flung them down quickly to the other boats: by the time Laurence made the deck, there were two dozen men already aboard the empty dragondeck, crouching low beside bales and casks, and the seven Frenchmen who had been sleeping on the deck were trussed like roasts with rags stuffed into their mouths. Ewyll and Wren were climbing into the foremast rigging after the suspended bags of the caltrops, with Captain Little and Captain Chenery gone directly after them, easy in the rigging from long mid-air experience aboard their dragons.

Laurence leaned over the side: Granby waved up from his boat, which having sent off half her men now rowed away around the other side of the Polonaise, where she faced the Maréchal, and began the critical work: they flung up ropes to men on deck to be looped over the railing, and began to draw up the chainmail netting, pillaged from the dragons’ equipage, to lie over the portholes of her guns. Laurence turned away, and leading the assembled men soft across the dragondeck halted near the stairs leading to the main deck: a man lay snoring wet and thickly beneath them, mouth hanging slackly open.

Mayhew looked at him; Laurence nodded; Mayhew and another sailor, Todd, slipped barefoot down to the main deck and around back of the stairs, and Mayhew stopped the snoring man’s mouth, pinning him down by the throat with his other hand. Laurence, looking through the steps, could see the Frenchman’s wide starting eyes ringed with white as he struggled against Mayhew’s broad hand; Todd lashed his arms to his body with rope and tied him at ankles and knees, swiftly, and they shoved him behind a stanchion and cleared the way.

Laurence crept down to the main deck, nearly on his toes, glad of the thin battered wreck of his boots. He counted off eight of the men for the fore ladderway, now almost directly before them and unattended. They seized one of the water-barrels and wrestled it on top to block the way, and hovered by it with their pistols and their knives and their cutlasses, whatever weapons they had contrived to conceal about their bodies.

The open deck now stretched away, and the watch-officer, an unlucky young lieutenant, was turning from his desultory conversation with the helmsman and coming towards the prow along the leeward side. Laurence waited, and waited; he wished to give the men in Granby’s boat as long as he could, and the men in the rigging: even half-a-minute might have invaluable worth in the present circumstances. The watch-officer paused mid-decks and looked over the rail—he was inspecting the hull, which Laurence had noted in climbing up was indeed badly barnacled: she would have benefited from a thorough scraping.

The French officer straightened again and came on, humming with an occasional stifled slide towards whistling. He stopped again, squinting out to sea—he was looking at the Maréchal, which stood between them and the shore, so that the bonfire in the city illuminated the crouching shadows of the line of men stealing across her deck.

“Britain!” Laurence bellowed out, at the top of his lungs; the young French officer jumped undignified, turning, drawing his sword, but three of the sailors were on him; he went down at once. Laurence could not look to see any more: he was running towards the aft ladderway with another eight men behind him, and they clapped another barrel over the opening just as faces appeared below, staring up alarmed.

“Alarme! Alarme!” the boy in the crow’s nest was yelling, and the hands on deck were starting up out of their sleep: starting up and meeting swords and knives, many of them. But one man heaved himself up enormously tall, overtopping six and a half feet with arms like a bear’s: he shouldered aside the waving cutlass of the Allegiance sailor who stood in his way, snatched up with both hands a cannonball from one of the caissons on deck, and turning smashed the British sailor down with it. The cannonball rolled away, leaving a trail of blood and brains, and the Frenchman had the cutlass in his hand: he threw himself over the barrel of the neighboring cannon and cut down another man.

Laurence had the water-barrel at his back, which shivered with the rhythmic thumping from below as the men tried to come up; and French sailors were rushing at him across the deck. He fired both his pistols: one man down, another winged along the arm; then it was sword-work and awkward in close quarters: he planted his boot-heel in one man’s belly and thrust him away, jerked free and slashed down at another who was grappling at his sword-arm. Blood spurted hot from the man’s cheek onto his coat sleeve, and Laurence smashed him across the face with his fist, clenched around the blade-hilt.

The man clutched at Laurence’s sword-arm, dragging it down with him as he slid to the deck, and the enormous Frenchman was charging. Laurence struggled to wrench loose his arm, to meet the swinging overhand stroke of the cutlass descending. The blade came on a mere shadow in the dark, a smattering of rust like black pits on the surface, and Laurence put up his arm to meet it sacrificially to keep it off his skull; then the Frenchman was crumpling onto him a heavy dead weight.

Laurence heaved off the corpse and looked past him in surprise: Gong Su was drawing a long knife from the Frenchman’s side, so sharp barely any blood clung to the blade. There was blue light shining cold off the metal and casting a strange grey color over his face, and a hissing streak overhead: the signal-rocket had gone.

That meant they were fighting aboard the Maréchal also: they had been made, and now the next ten minutes, perhaps not even so many, would determine the fate of their venture. If the deck could not be held, on either ship; if the frigates were already awake and launching their boats—

And then Temeraire was roaring: impossible to mistake, as though the world itself were shattering, and Laurence felt even the great mass of the Polonaise go rocking as the ocean unsettled around her. Away across the water he could hear cries of alarm, and rattling thumps as of a hailstorm, if hail were made of solid rock and the size of a man’s head: the dragons were dropping bushels of rock upon the frigates, going after the gun-boats where they were lashed to their trestles.

Laurence could not spare time to try and see, through the dark, whether the stroke had gone home; behind him, the water-barrel which held down the ladderway hatch was growing suddenly light: the men below had sprung out one of its slats, evidently, to drain it empty and allow them to push their way to the deck. “Hold it down, Wesket,” Laurence shouted at one of the sailors, and moved to protect the man’s back from the French as they came on.

Then the Polonaise rocked again as Temeraire landed on her deck: rearing up he tore the French colors from the mast, and roared again: even most of the British sailors flung themselves flat on the deck in horror at that noise, and Dulcia came darting in amidships and managed to plant herself somewhat precarious along the larboard rail, from whence she began to pluck one Frenchman after another off the deck, and hurl them out into the ocean.

“Laurence!” Temeraire called anxiously, and caught sight of him then: all the way at the far end of the ship, near the stern ladderway, and quite surrounded by Frenchmen—even if most of those were presently lying prone upon the deck for no reason which Temeraire could see. Temeraire snorted reproachfully: so much for promises of caution or of hanging back. “Dulcia!” he called to her. “Pray will you look after Laurence: I must go aloft again, for there are another four frigates to manage.”

“I will; is Chenery there?” she called back, while obligingly lunging out across the deck and seizing a couple of men in her jaws, to throw them overboard, who had risen to their feet and approached Laurence.

“He is, here in the rigging,” Temeraire said, after a quick glance, “and shall I bring him to you, now?”

“Here now, I can get myself across the deck of a ship, I hope!” Chenery said, looking up and wiping sweat off his brow. “Just you take these caltrops, will you, and heave them over.”

“Oh; I will use them instead, I think,” Temeraire said, seizing the makeshift sacks which Chenery and Little had made, tying up the corners of the caltrop-sheets. He carried them away into the air, and flying over to the nearest frigate, which was bringing her guns to bear on the deck of the Polonaise, he called, “Iskierka!”

“I am busy!” she called back, from the frigate which she was circling: she was breathing flame past the rigging, to the leeward side, and yelling at them to strike their colors.

“You are not, you are only trying to show away and take another prize,” Temeraire said, “when you know perfectly well we are only trying to take the transports, and all we have to do with the frigates is to keep them off until the transports have struck: now pray fire these for me, as I drop them.”

“Oh, very well; if you will come back to this one, after, and tell them in French to strike; I do not think they can understand me,” she said, flying over to him: he shook the caltrop-sacks open, and she blazed away at them mid-air, so the iron tips of the things were half-melted as they fell down upon the deck of the frigate, and all the gun-boats, and so became stuck on to the wood. Temeraire hovered, watching in satisfaction: the crews had dived away to avoid the rain of smoking-hot iron spikes, and now could not easily manage their boats.

He looked up sharp, however: there was a fresh roaring, around the other side of the second transport, but this time of guns and not of dragons: and Maximus was bellowing in pain.

Temeraire leapt into the air: one of the frigates which he had thought disabled by the rocks had managed to turn broadside to the Maréchal’s dragondeck, and had all-too-cleverly reserved her fire until the moment when Maximus had landed to take off the caltrops: all her guns had gone at once, and poor Maximus had been exposed quite: a gaping rent showed in one of his wings, where the membrane hung loose as a piece of cut sailcloth, and he was bleeding black from shoulder and haunch and side. The Maréchal’s foremast also had been badly shattered, and splinters stuck porcupine-like from his head and neck: he swung his head back and forth with his eyes shut tight, bellowing, and meanwhile the frigate was surely reloading all her guns.

But even as Temeraire flew towards them, Lily was already at work: she dived low and spat a long running stream of acid along the deck, directly above the sides which faced the Maréchal, and cries rose up with the hissing steam as the droplets ate their way down into the gundeck and spattered the crews. Temeraire came following in a rush, and roared up the ocean furiously: the frigate reeled away on a great twenty-foot swell, and the second broadside erupted only stuttering, to hurl the cannonballs into the ocean some ten yards ahead of the Maréchal’s keel.

“There!” Temeraire said, triumphantly, and then cried out himself, shuddering, and nearly dropped into the sea: there was a dreadful burning pain just beneath his wing-joint, so that to stay aloft was agony with each stroke; he cried out gasping again, and abruptly Kulingile was there beside him, to take his weight, and saw him down to the deck of the Maréchal beside Maximus.

“But Laurence,” Temeraire said, gulping a breath, “Laurence—”

“He has not got himself shot,” said Gaiters, Maximus’s surgeon, who was laboring away urgently and with his arms bloodied to the shoulder, “so just you hold still there, until one of us can come and look at you; for God’s sake,” he roared up at the young ensign who was temporarily his assistant, and attempting to assist him in stanching the wounds, “pack that sailcloth in harder; stand on it, if you have to.”

“I am not going to sit on deck while we are still fighting,” Temeraire protested, and craned his head around to look at the injury—perhaps it was not quite so severe as all that, and he might—“Ow!” He stopped: even turning so far was dreadfully unpleasant; he could feel the hooks of the ball tearing at his flesh. “Maximus, are you very badly hurt?”

“I am sure I will be perfectly stout when they have patched me together,” Maximus said, with a grunt. “I should not have roared at all, only it took me by surprise.”

“You will be stone-dead in an hour if we do not stop this blood, so you will shut your eyes and keep quiet, damn you,” Gaiters said furiously. “Where is that fire-breather? Why don’t she make herself useful: I will need this cauterized, as soon as I have dug out this ball—”

“Ough,” Maximus said—not really a complaint, Temeraire thought loyally; it was only a startled noise—as Gaiters very nearly put his head into Maximus’s side, and came out dragging the great iron cannonball with him in both hands, hissing himself in pain: it was still hot, and he dropped it on the deck and rolled it away over the side with his foot.

Iskierka landed, in answer to their signal, and heated the iron bar which Gaiters held out to her with tongs; Maximus reared up his head and yelled—not even the most loyal interpretation could call it anything else, sadly—as it was clapped to the wound, sewn up already with catgut.

But even as the wound was seared, the ship shuddered beneath them with the rolling thunder of the guns, and Temeraire looked anxiously out towards the Polonaise, where Laurence was still fighting. Although Lieutenant Creed and his party had so far also managed to keep the French penned belowdecks, there were still nearly six hundred men aboard, and those had gone to the gundeck, instead, and now were taking aim at the other transport’s deck to save her from their own fate.

But Granby’s men and Roland’s had done their work: the chainmail netting hung over the sides of the ship, and if it did not stop the balls it dragged them down so they went splashing one and all into the sea; only a couple from the end reached the other ship, and splintered away a portion of her dragondeck.

Berkley stood up from Maximus’s head, and climbing down heavily to the deck banged his big gauntleted fist down on the planking beside the fore ladderway. “Is your captain down there? We have the deck; you can see your fellows are all ahoo; now say you strike, or I will let you up, and the dragons can start knocking you overboard like ninepins: but I will damned well have an end of it.”

Chapter 19

“I DO NOT WISH IN THE LEAST to diminish your very just sense of accomplishment, Captain,” Hammond said to Laurence, looking out from the promontory at the two transports, flying British colors and supporting at present three and four dragons respectively: the rest being engaged in shepherding anxiously the boats which were ferrying over their recovered kindred, or bringing themselves the sacks of grain and dried salt beef which should sustain them over the six-week journey to the coast of Africa: in a species of justice, perhaps, they would disembark at the ruins of Lunda, that same port which had seen so many of them first pressed into bondage.

“Not in the least,” Hammond repeated, in dismal tones. The Potentate could also be glimpsed, at a fair distance but coming in: she would be at anchor before sunset, Laurence judged, and they would begin their own process of provisioning her for the journey back to Portsmouth: one which Hammond certainly could not anticipate with any sense of pleasure.

No good would come him from the report which the Portuguese ambassador should make of him: at best, Hammond would figure as an ineffectual nonentity; at worst, as deliberately conniving at Laurence’s insubordinate maneuvering, and the latter was more likely: to do him credit, with the transports acquired, Hammond had devoted his energies to winning over sufficient support at the Portuguese court for the negotiations to see them grudgingly accepted.

And Hammond could not rely on any leavening of success to gloss his supposed misdeeds. The Admiralty would make hay of the cutting-out of the transports, but the Foreign Office would not care much for that in the face of the devastating news regarding the Inca, and to hear that yet another great power had aligned itself, willingly, with Bonaparte: to hear that Britain stood now alone.

“And whatever am I to do about the beast? It is very well and good to say she is not mine; if she persists in following me, she may as well be mine, and I cannot find that any of the dragons have the least sympathy, or inclination to chase her away,” he added, in some exasperation. Indeed Churki’s attachment showed every sign of tenacity, and Hammond’s attempts to dismiss her were met with the amusement of a parent retrieving a wayward child.

“She can’t very well follow you over-sea,” Chenery said.

“Can she not?” Hammond said bitterly. “I have already overheard her discussing arrangements with Temeraire: she means to provide so many bullocks, in exchange for her passage; and how is she to be got off the ship once she has landed on it?”

“But Laurence,” Temeraire said, when Laurence had at Hammond’s plea spoken with him, “I cannot see any reason why Churki should not come back to England with us: you have said very often that the Admiralty is always quite desperate for new dragons who will fight. She was an officer in the Inca army, you know: no-one could argue she does not know how to go about it, and she has promised she will, if she is given her own crew.”

“My dear, she is a subject of an empire which must now be inimical to our own,” Laurence said. “If she aids us, she is a traitor; if she does not, she is our enemy.”

“It does not seem to me treasonous,” Temeraire protested. “After all, it is not as though she were going to fight Incan dragons, her friends perhaps; she will be fighting the French, and she says the Sapa Inca marrying does not make Napoleon her Emperor. Anyway,” he added, “I cannot see myself being so dreadfully rude as to shove her off: she is not so big that she will make things uncomfortable, and she is so much older than any of us except Messoria.”

“So I am afraid I can offer you not much hope of escape,” Laurence told Hammond on shore, supervising the packing of his sea-chest: Gerry was not particularly handy, and Laurence was having to refold every item before it entered the flimsy wooden crate which should have to serve him for the purpose, “unless you should persuade some other person to inveigle her away from you; I may assure you that given your blessing there are several officers among our company who would gladly take your place in her affections.”

“I give it with all my heart,” Hammond said, “and have not the least hope of its answering. If she meant to be fickle, she might have remained in her own country; and I dare say she will be perfectly ready, in the Incan style, to accept any number of suitors, and consider them all her own without letting me off: I will count myself fortunate if I can only persuade her to remain in covert, instead of romping down the Strand behind me, as I suppose she would be glad to do. Unless you could contrive to poison her?” he inquired in a bitter spirit of Gong Su, who had ducked into the tent.

“Did you require me about the provisions?” Laurence asked.

“No, Captain,” Gong Su said, “and Mr. Hammond, I cannot satisfy you; but if I may propose an alternative, you would find Churki no source of difficulty if she should accompany you to China.”

“Ha; I shall not be posted back to China,” Hammond said. “I will be pushed off into the countryside with vague promises of some other occasions in future, which will never come—unless Dom da Câmara decides to try and induce their Lordships to bring me under charges, which I cannot discount—”

“Pardon me,” Gong Su said, gently breaking into this morose ramble, which trailed away low but showed no sign of immediately concluding, “but you need not return to England first: the ship may carry you to China, instead.”

“What?” Hammond said, staring.

“And you, of course, Captain,” Gong Su said, bowing, “and Lung Tien Xiang; that is what I wish to humbly suggest.”

Laurence was rather taken aback himself at what could only be called the effrontery of the suggestion they might virtually commandeer the Potentate, particularly when that suggestion came from a source so ordinarily self-effacing: although that Gong Su might desire to return to his own country was no surprise if one considered it; Laurence made it five years since they had left China. “We are very likely to stop a merchantman on its way to Canton, at Madeira if not before,” Laurence said, “and I would of course book your passage if you wished—” But Gong Su was shaking his head.

“My own insignificant presence cannot make a difference in these matters,” Gong Su said. “But I am of the opinion that my master would, when the fullness of events in this distant part of the world have been laid before him, welcome the chance to consult with you more intimately: and that noble lord, your most honored elder brother and the heir of the dread lord who commands the Celestial Throne, has lately granted me the honor to invite you to visit him, if circumstances should seem to make that desirable: such is his foresight and wisdom.”

He concluded this by bringing out a packet of oilcloth, which he unrolled to reveal a narrow and folded letter—the same letter, Laurence realized after a moment, which Lung Shen Li had brought him in Australia, before their departure, and which Laurence had assumed a message from his family: sealed magnificently with red and enclosed in a wrapper labeled all over with Chinese characters. Gong Su placed it across both hands and presented it to Laurence.

“My elder—my what?” Laurence said, baffled, and then said, “Do you mean Prince Mianning? Your master? What—” He stopped, and pressed his lips shut against betraying himself into an undignified yammer: having been under the impression, until the present moment, that Gong Su had been his cook, he could only regard with outrage both the shockingly brazen mode and the act itself, the self-acknowledgment of a—

“He is not a spy,” Hammond hissed at him urgently, having dragged Laurence nearly bodily to the far corner of the tent, “not a spy, at all, Captain; you must not consider him so. He is—” Hammond groped for some excuse. “He has been delegated to your service—”

“Delegated to my service?” Laurence glared at Hammond. “Mr. Hammond, if you will instruct me what else, but a spy, I am to consider a man who has assuredly reported every minute detail of my affairs—he was a guest in my father’s house!—and those of the service to a foreign power—”

“To your relations, who surely had some right to an interest,” Hammond said, as brazen as Gong Su himself, but hastily altered his course, seeing that Laurence was by no means to be persuaded along these lines, “—to his own government, to whom he surely offers his first allegiance; and in any case,” he dashed on, “in any case, you must see the utmost significance—if Prince Mianning invites us to China officially—”

“Prince Mianning has issued no invitation but one hypothetical,” Laurence said, “and left the power of making it in the hands of this—”

“—servant of the throne,” Hammond said loudly, overriding, “and plainly one of trusted probity and judgment to have been given such license, for, Captain, there can only be one purpose in asking us to make such a journey: they wish to discuss an alliance.”

“How you should arrive at a conclusion so wholly unsupported by any past evidence offered by their behavior—” Laurence began.

“I have been laboring these last five years myself, Captain,” Hammond said, “and not, I trust, to no purpose: China may not have opened her ports to us, but there has certainly been a softening of—”

“From a softening to alliance?” Laurence said.

“If I may,” Gong Su said, apologetically: their voices had risen past even a fiction of private conversation, though Laurence was not much inclined to forgive the reminder that virtually all his conversation, save those conducted under rare circumstances of real privacy, had been exposed to an interest beyond ordinary gossiping curiosity. “I do not presume to speculate as to the motives of my lord, or as to the purpose of his invitation! But I have been impelled to speak as I have by those late events, which one must fear as altering for evil the very balance and the order of the world: and it is with that consideration that I do urge you to hasten without delay to answer the invitation of the crown prince, as is your filial duty.”

“Oh! Laurence, it is beyond anything wonderful!” Temeraire said, in delight. “Of course we must go: I should like nothing better than that Maximus and Lily should see China, and all our formation, too. And to think that Gong Su has arranged it all: I should never have imagined it.”

“No,” Laurence said, stifling the smart of renewed indignation. The first infuriated heat of betrayal past, he had not been able to stand his ground against Hammond’s persuasion very long. Gong Su had made his meaning too plain, even if a notion of courtly decorum forbade him outright speaking on behalf of the Emperor’s son. Laurence could not despite a certain irritated desire to do so believe him a liar or untrustworthy: indeed it was impossible to fault for loyalty a man who in the service of his throne had left home and family to accept a menial position and keep it across a war, five continents, and so many weary years.

Temeraire peered at him a little anxiously. “I hope,” he said tentatively, “that you do not mind we should not go back to England straightaway? But I do understand from Lily that everything there at present is quite at a standstill: and Napoleon will surely have a long time sailing back. And I am sure that this Captain Blaise in charge of the Potentate will see the very real importance of our going to China under these circumstances.”

Of that, Laurence had less certainty. “Particularly as we have only the crown prince’s invitation, and not the Emperor’s; and no certainty of success when we have arrived,” Laurence added soberly, “but I am persuaded we must make the attempt. If we should indeed find it possible to engage China in alliance, that may be our only hope now of standing for long against Napoleon. But we may have to make the passage overland and far to the north, at the Bering strait. I have no confidence in Blaise’s diverting the Potentate at our request: he is not Riley.”

He stopped and said again, low, “He is not Riley,” and swallowed regret once more: the loss not only of a friend, but of that still more priceless treasure, a man on whom he could rely.

“No,” Temeraire said, and bent his head to nose gently at Laurence’s back in comfort.