Tongues of Serpents

Chapter 1

THERE WERE FEW STREETS in the main port of Sydney which deserved the name, besides the one main thoroughfare, and even that bare packed dirt, lined only with a handful of small and wretched buildings that formed all the permanence of the colony. Tharkay turned off from this and led the way down a cramped, irregularly arranged alley-way between two wooden-slat buildings to a courtyard full of men drinking, in surly attitudes, under no roof but a tarpaulin.

Along one side of the courtyard, the further from the kitchens, the convicts sat in their drab and faded duck trousers, dusty from the fields and quarries and weighted down with fatigue; along the other, small parties of men from the New South Wales Corps watched with candidly unfriendly faces as Laurence and his companions seated themselves at a small table near the edge of the establishment.

Besides their being strangers, Granby’s coat drew the eye: bottle-green was not in the common way, and though he had put off the worst excesses of gold braid and buttons with which Iskierka insisted upon adorning him, the embroidery at cuffs and collar could not be so easily detached. Laurence wore plain brown, himself: to make a pretense of standing in the Aerial Corps now was wholly out of the question, of course, and if his dress raised questions concerning his situation, that was certainly no less than honest, as neither he nor anyone else had yet managed to work out what that ought in any practical sense to be.

“I suppose this fellow will be here soon enough,” Granby said, unhappily; he had insisted on coming, but not from any approval of the scheme.

“I fixed the hour at six,” Tharkay answered, and then turned his head: one of the younger officers had risen from the tables and was coming towards them.

Eight months aboard ship with no duties of his own and shipmates nearly united in their determination to show disdain had prepared Laurence for the scene which, with almost tiresome similarity, unfolded yet again. The insult itself was irritating for demanding some answer, more than anything else; it had not the power to wound in the mouth of a coarse young boor, stinking of rum and visibly unworthy to stand among even the shabby ranks of a military force alternately called the Rum Corps. Laurence regarded Lieutenant Agreuth only with distaste, and said briefly, “Sir, you are drunk; go back to your table, and leave us at ours.”

There the similarity ended, however: “I don’t see why I,” Agreuth said, his tongue tangling awkwardly, so he had to stop and repeat himself, speaking with excessive care, “why I should listen to anything out of a piss-pot whoreson traitor’s fucking mouth—”

Laurence stared, and heard the tirade with mounting incredulity; he would have expected the gutter language out of a dockyard pickpocket in a temper, and hardly knew how to hear it from an officer. Granby had evidently less difficulty, and sprang to his feet saying, “By God, you will apologize, or for halfpence I will have you flogged through the streets.”

“I would like to see you try it,” Agreuth said, and leaning over spat into Granby’s glass; Laurence stood too late to catch Granby’s arm from throwing it into Agreuth’s face.

That was of course an end to even the barest hope or pretense of civility; Laurence instead pulled Granby back by his arm, out of the way of Agreuth’s wildly swinging fist, and letting go struck back with the same hand, clenched, as it came again at his face.

He did not hold back; if brawling was outrageous, it looked inevitable, and he would as soon have it over with quickly. So the blow was armed with all the strength built up from childhood on rope-lines and harness, and Laurence knocked Agreuth directly upon the jaw: the lieutenant lifted half-an-inch from the ground, his head tipping back and leading the rest of his frame. Stumbling a few steps as he came down, he pitched face-front onto the floor straight through the neighboring table, to the accompaniment of several shattering glasses and the stink of cheap rum.

That might have been enough, but Agreuth’s companions, though officers and some of them older and more sober than he, showed no reluctance in flinging themselves at once into the fray thus begun. The men at the overturned table, sailors on an East India merchantman, were as quick to take offense at the disruption of their drinking; and a mingled crowd of sailors and laborers and soldiers, all better than three-quarters of the way drunk, and a great scarcity of women, as compared to what would have been found in nearly every other dockyard house of the world which Laurence knew, was a powder-keg ready for the slow-match in any case. The rum had not finished sinking between the paving-stones before men were rising from their chairs all around them.

Another officer of the New South Wales Corps threw himself on Laurence: a bigger man than Agreuth, sodden and heavy with liquor. Laurence twisted himself loose and heaved him down onto the floor, shoving him as well as could be managed under the table. Tharkay was already with a practical air seizing the bottle of rum by the neck, and when another man lunged—this one wholly unconnected with Agreuth, and by all appearances simply pleased to fight anyone at all—Tharkay clubbed him upon the temple swiftly.

Granby had been seized upon by three men at once: two of them, Agreuth’s fellows, for spite, and one who was trying his best only to get at the jeweled sword and belt around Granby’s waist. Laurence struck the pickpocket on the wrist, and seizing him by the scruff of the collar flung him stumbling across the courtyard; Granby exclaimed, then, and turning back Laurence found him ducking from a knife, dirty and rust-speckled, being stabbed at his eyes.

“By God, have you taken all leave of your senses?” Laurence said, and seized upon the knife-wielder’s hand with both his own, twisting the blade away, while Granby efficiently knocked down the third man and turned back to help him. The melee was spreading rapidly now, helped along by Tharkay, who was coolly throwing the toppled chairs across the room, knocking over still more of the tables, and flinging glasses of rum into the faces of the custom as they rose indignantly.

Laurence and Granby and Tharkay were only three together, and thanks to the advance of the New South Wales officers well-surrounded, leaving the irritated men no other target but those same officers; a target on which the convicts in particular seemed not loath to vent their spleen. This was not a very coherently directed fury, however, and when the officer before Laurence had been clubbed down with a heavy stool, the choleric assailant behind him swung it with equal fervor at Laurence himself.

Laurence slipped upon the wet floorboards, catching the stool away from his face, and went to one knee in a puddle. He shoved the man’s leg out from under him, and was rewarded with the full weight of man and stool landing upon his shoulder, so they went sprawling together upon the floor.

Splinters drove into Laurence’s side, where his shirt had ridden up from his breeches and come wholly loose, and the big convict, swearing at him, struck him on the side of his face with a clenched fist. Laurence tasted blood as his lip tore upon his tooth, a dizzying haze over his sight. They were rolling across the floor, and Laurence had no very clear recollection of the next few moments; he was pounding at the other man savagely, a blow with every turn, knocking his head against the boards over and over. It was a vicious, animal struggle, insensible of both feeling and thought; he knew only distantly as he was kicked, by accident, or struck against the wall or some overturned piece of furniture.

The limp unconsciousness of his opponent freed him at last from the frenzy, and Laurence with an effort opened his clenched hand and let go the man’s hair, and pushed himself up from the floor, staggering. They had fetched up against the wooden counter before the kitchen. Laurence reaching up clutched at the edge and pulled himself to his feet, aware more than he wished to be, all at once, of a deep stabbing pain in his side, and stinging cuts in his cheek and his hands. He fumbled at his face and pulled free a long sliver of broken glass, tossing it upon the counter.

The fighting had begun already to die down, oddly quick to Laurence’s instinctive sense of an action; the participants lacked the appetite of a real engagement, where there was anything of worth to be gained. Laurence limping across the room made it to Granby’s side: Agreuth and one of his fellow officers had clawed their way back up onto their feet and were yet grappling weakly with him in a corner, vicious but half-exhausted, so they were swaying back and forth more than wrestling.

Coming in, Laurence heaved Granby free, and leaning on each other they stumbled out of the courtyard and into the narrow, stinking alley-way outside, which yet seemed fresh out from under the makeshift tarpaulin; a fine misting rain was falling. Laurence leaned gratefully against the far wall made cool and light by the coating of dew, ignoring with a practiced stomach the man a few steps away who was heaving the contents of his belly into the gutters. A couple of women coming down the alley-way lifted their skirts over the trickle of muck and continued past them all without hesitation, not even looking in at the disturbance of the tavern courtyard.

“My God, you look a fright,” Granby said, dismally.

“I have no doubt,” Laurence said, gingerly touching at his face. “And I have two ribs cracked, I dare say. I am sorry to say, John, you are not in much better case.”

“No, I am sure not,” Granby said. “We will have to take a room somewhere, if anyplace will let us through the door, to wash up; what Iskierka would do seeing me in such a state, I have no notion.”

Laurence had a very good notion what Iskierka would do, and also Temeraire, and between them there would not be much left of the colony to speak of afterwards.

“Well,” Tharkay said, joining them as he wrapped his neckcloth around his own bloodied hand, “I believe I saw our man look into the establishment, a little while ago, but I am afraid he thought better of coming in under the circumstances. I will have to inquire after him to arrange another meeting.”

“No,” Laurence said, blotting his lip and cheek with his handkerchief. “No, I thank you; I think we can dispense with his information. I have seen all I need to, in order to form an opinion of the discipline of the colony, and its military force.”

Temeraire sighed and toyed with the last bites of kangaroo stew—the meat had a pleasantly gamy sort of flavor, not unlike deer, and he had found it at first a very satisfying change from fish, after the long sea-voyage. But he could only really call it palatable when cooked rare, which did not offer much variety; in stew it became quite stringy and tiresome, especially as the supply of spice left even more to be desired.

There were some very nice cattle in a pen which he could see, from his vantage upon the harbor promontory, but evidently they were much too dear here for the Corps to provide. And Temeraire of course could not propose such an expense to Laurence, not when he had been responsible for the loss of Laurence’s fortune; instead Temeraire had silenced all his mild complaints about the lack of variety: but sadly Gong Su had taken this as encouragement, and it had been nothing but kangaroo morning and night, four days running—not even a bit of tunny.

“I do not see why we mayn’t at least go hunting further along,” Iskierka said, even while licking out her own bowl indecorously—she quite refused to learn anything resembling polite manners. “This is a large country, and it stands to reason there ought to be something more worth eating if we looked. Perhaps there are some of those elephants which you have been on and on about; I should like to try one of those.”

Temeraire would have given a great deal for a delicious elephant, seasoned with a generous amount of pepper and perhaps some sage, but Iskierka was never to be encouraged in anything whatsoever. “You are very welcome to go flying away anywhere you like,” he said, “and to surely get quite lost. No one has any notion of what this countryside is like, past the mountains, and there is no one in it, either, to ask for directions: not people or dragons.”

“That is very silly,” Iskierka said. “I do not say these kangaroos are very good eating, because they are not, and there are not enough of them, either; but they are certainly no worse than what we had in Scotland during the last campaign, so it is stuff to say there is no one living here; why wouldn’t there be? I dare say there are plenty of dragons here, only they are somewhere else, eating much better than we are.”

This struck Temeraire as not an unlikely possibility, and he made a note to discuss it privately with Laurence, later; which recalled him to Laurence’s absence, and thence to the advancing hour. “Roland,” he called, with a little anxiety—of course Laurence did not need nurse-maiding, but he had promised to return before the supper hour, and read a little more of the novel which he had acquired in town the day before—“Roland, is it not past five?”

“Lord, yes, it must be almost six,” Emily Roland answered, putting down her sword; she and Demane were fencing a little, in the yard. She patted her face down with a tugged-free tail of her shirt, and ran to the promontory edge to call down to the sailors below, and came back to say, “No, I am wrong: it is a quarter past seven: how strange the day is so long, when it is almost Christmas!”

“It is not strange at all,” Demane said. “It is only strange that you keep insisting it must be winter here only because it is in England.”

“But where is Granby, if it is so late?” Iskierka said, prickling up at once, overhearing. “He did not mean to go anywhere particularly nice, he assured me, or I should never have let him go looking so shabby.”

Temeraire flared his ruff a little, taking this to heart; he felt it keenly that Laurence should go about in nothing but a plain gentleman’s coat, without even a little bit of braid or golden buttons. He would gladly have improved Laurence’s appearance if he had any chance of doing so; but Laurence still had refused to sell Temeraire’s talon-sheaths for him, and even if he had, Temeraire had not yet seen anything in this part of the world which would have suited him as appropriate.

“Perhaps I had better go and look for Laurence,” Temeraire said. “I am sure he cannot have meant to stay away so long.”

“I am going to go and look for Granby, too,” Iskierka announced.

“Well, we cannot both go,” Temeraire said irritably. “Someone must stay with the eggs.” He cast a quick, judgmental eye over the three eggs in their protective nests of swaddling blankets, and the small canopy set over them, made of sailcloth. He was a little dissatisfied by their situation: a nice coal brazier, he thought, would not have gone amiss even in this warm weather, and perhaps some softer cloth to go directly against the shell; and it did not suit him that the canopy was so low he could not put his head underneath it, to sniff at the eggs and see how hard their shells had become.

There had been a little difficulty over them, after disembarking: some of the officers of the Corps who had been sent along had tried to object to Temeraire’s keeping the eggs by him, as though they would be better able to protect them, which was stuff; and they had made some sort of noise about Laurence trying to kidnap the eggs, which Temeraire had snorted off.

“Laurence does not want any other dragon, as he has me,” Temeraire had said, “and as for kidnapping, I would like to know whose notion it was to take the eggs halfway across the world on the ocean, with storms and sea-serpents everywhere, and to this odd place that is not even a proper country, with no dragons; it was certainly not mine.”

“Mr. Laurence is going directly to hard labor, like all the rest of the prisoners,” Lieutenant Forthing had said, quite stupidly, as though Temeraire were allowing any such thing to happen.

“That is quite enough, Mr. Forthing,” Granby had said, overhearing, and coming upon them. “I wonder that you would make any such ill-advised remark; I pray you take no notice of it at all, Temeraire, none at all.”

“Oh! I do not in the least,” Temeraire answered, “or any of these other complaints; it is all nonsense, when what you mean is,” he added to Forthing and his associates, “you would like to keep the eggs by you, so that they should not know any better when they hatch, but think they must go at once into harness, and that they must take whichever of you wins them by chance: I heard you talk of drawing lots last night in the gunroom, so you needn’t try and deny it. I will certainly have none of it, and I expect neither will the eggs, of any of you.”

He had of course carried his point, and the eggs, away to their present relative safety and comfort, but Temeraire had no illusions as to the trustworthiness of people who could make such spitefully false remarks; he did not doubt that they would creep up and snatch the eggs away if he gave them even the least chance. He slept curled about the tent, therefore, and Laurence had put Roland and Demane and Sipho on watch, also.

The responsibility was proving sadly confining, however, particularly as Iskierka was not to be trusted with the eggs for any length of time. Fortunately the town was very small, and the promontory visible from nearly any point within it if one only stretched out one’s neck to look, so Temeraire felt he might risk it, only long enough to find Laurence and bring him back. Of course Temeraire was sure no one would be absurd enough to try and treat Laurence with any disrespect, but it could not be denied that men were inclined to do unaccountable things from time to time, and Forthing’s remark stirred uneasily in the back of his head.

It was true, if one wished to be very particular about such things, that Laurence was a convicted felon: convicted of treason, and his sentence commuted to transportation only at the behest of Lord Wellington, after the last campaign in England. But that sentence had been fulfilled, in Temeraire’s opinion: no-one could deny that Laurence had now been transported, and the experience had been quite as much punishment as anyone could have wished.

The unhappy Allegiance had been packed to the portholes with still-more-unhappy convicts, who had been kept chained wrist-and-ankle all the day, and stank quite dreadfully whenever they were brought out for exercise in their clanking lines, some of them hanging limp in the restraints. It seemed quite like slavery, to Temeraire; he did not see why it should make so vast a difference as Laurence said, only because a law-court had said the poor convicts had stolen something: after all, anyone might take a sheep or a cow, if it were neglected by its owner and not kept under watch.

Certainly it made the ship as bad as any slaving vessel: the smell rose up through the planking of the deck, and the wind brought it forward to the dragondeck almost without surcease; even the aroma of boiling salt pork, from the galley below, could not erase it. And Temeraire had learned by accident, perhaps a month out on their journey, that Laurence was quartered directly by the gaol, where it must have been far worse.

Laurence had dismissed the notion of making any complaint, however. “I do very well, my dear,” he had said, “as I have the whole liberty of the dragondeck for my days and the pleasanter nights, which not even the ship’s officers have. It would be unfair in the extreme, when I have not their labor, for me to be demanding some better situation: someone else would have to shift places to give me another.”

So it had been a very unpleasant transportation indeed, and now they were here, which no-one could enjoy, either. Aside from the question of kangaroos, there were not very many people at all, and nothing like a proper town. Temeraire was used to seeing wretched quarters for dragons, in England, but here people did not sleep much better than the clearings in any covert, many of them in tents or makeshift little buildings which did not stay up when one flew over them, not even very low, and instead toppled over and spilled out the squalling inhabitants to make a great fuss.

And there was no fighting to be had at all, either. Several letters and newspapers had reached them along the way, when quicker frigates passed the laboring bulk of the Allegiance. It was very disheartening to Temeraire to have Laurence read to him how Napoleon was reported to be fighting again, in Spain this time, and sacking cities all along the coast, and Lien surely with him: and meanwhile here they were on the other side of the world, uselessly. It was not in the least fair, Temeraire thought disgruntledly, that Lien, who did not think Celestials ought to fight ever, should have all the war to herself while he sat here nursing eggs.

There had not even been a small engagement at sea, for consolation: they had once seen a French privateer, off at a distance, but the small vessel had set every scrap of sail and vanished away at a heeling pace. Iskierka had given chase anyway—alone, as Laurence pointed out to Temeraire he could not leave the eggs for such a fruitless adventure—and to Temeraire’s satisfaction, after a few hours she had been forced to return empty-handed.

The French would certainly not attack Sydney, either: not when there was nothing to be won but kangaroos and hovels. Temeraire did not see what they were to do here, at all; the eggs were to be seen to their hatching, but that could not be far off, he felt sure, and then there would be nothing to do but sit about and stare out to sea, as far as he could tell.

The people were all either engaged in farming, which was not very interesting, or were convicts, who it seemed to Temeraire marched out for no reason in the morning and then marched back at night. He had flown after a party of them one day, just to see, and they were only going to a quarry to cut out bits of stone, and then bringing the bits of stone back to town in waggon-carts, which seemed quite absurd and inefficient to him: he could have carried five cartloads in a single flight of perhaps ten minutes, but when he had landed to offer his assistance, the convicts had all run away, and the soldiers had come to complain to Laurence stiffly afterwards.

They certainly did not like Laurence; one of them had been very rude, and said, “For fivepence I would have you down at the quarries, too,” at which Temeraire put his head down and said, “For twopence I will have you in the ocean; what have you done, I should like to know, when Laurence has won a great many battles with me, and we drove Napoleon off; and you have only been sitting here. You have not even managed to raise a respectable number of cows.”

Temeraire now felt perhaps that jibe had been a little injudicious; or perhaps he ought not have let Laurence go into town, after all, when there were people who wished to put him into quarries. “I will go and look for Laurence and Granby,” he said to Iskierka, “and you will stay here: if you go, you will likely set something on fire, anyway.”

“I will not set anything on fire!” Iskierka said. “Unless it needs setting on fire, to get Granby out.”

“That is just what I mean,” Temeraire said. “How, pray tell, would setting something on fire do any good at all?”

“If no-one would tell me where he was,” Iskierka said, “I am quite sure that if I set something on fire and told them I would set the rest on fire, too, they would come about: so there.”

“Yes,” Temeraire said, “and in the meanwhile, very likely he would be in whatever house you had set on fire, and be hurt: and if not, the fire would jump along to the nearby buildings whether you liked it to or not, and he would be in one of those. Whereas I will just take the roof off a building, and then I can look inside and lift them out, if they are in there, and people will tell me anyway.”

“I can take a roof off a building, too!” Iskierka said. “You are only jealous, because someone is more likely to want to take Granby, because he has more gold on him and is much more fine.”

Temeraire swelled with indignation and breath, and would have expelled them both in a rush, but Roland interrupted urgently, saying, “Oh, don’t quarrel! Look, here they are all coming back, right as rain: that is them on the road, I am sure.”

Temeraire whipped his head around: three small figures had just emerged from the small cluster of buildings which made the town, and were on the narrow cattle-track which came towards the promontory.

Temeraire’s and Iskierka’s heads were raised high, looking down towards them; Laurence raised a hand and waved vigorously, despite the twinge in his ribs, which a bath and a little rough bandaging had not gone very far to alleviate; that injury, however, could be concealed. “There; at least we will not have them down here in the streets,” Granby said, lowering his own arm, and wincing a little; he probed gingerly at his shoulder.

It was still a near-run thing when they had got up to the promontory—a slow progress, and Laurence’s legs wished to quiver on occasion, before they had reached the top and could sit on the makeshift benches. Temeraire sniffed, and then lowered his head abruptly and said, “You are hurt; you are bleeding,” with urgent anxiety.

“It is nothing to concern you; I am afraid we only had a little accident in the town,” Laurence said, guiltily preferring a certain degree of deceit to the inevitable complications of Temeraire’s indignation.

“So, dearest, you see it is just as well I wore my old coat,” Granby said to Iskierka, in a stroke of inspiration, “as it has got dirty and torn, which you would have minded if I had on something nicer.”

Iskierka was thus diverted to a contemplation of his clothing, instead of his bruises, and promptly pronounced it a natural consequence of the surroundings. “If you will go into a low, wretched place like that town, one cannot expect anything better,” she said, “and I do not see why we are staying here, at all; I think we had better go straight back to England.”

Chapter 2

“I AM NOT SURPRISED in the least,” Bligh said later that evening, when they had left Riley’s table and gone to the quarterdeck for coffee and cigars, “not in the least; you see exactly how it is now, Captain Laurence, with these whoreson dogs and Merinos.”

His language was not much better than that of the aforementioned dogs, and neither could Laurence much prefer his company. He did not like to think so of the King’s governor and a Navy officer, and particularly not one so much a notable seaman: his feat of navigating three thousand miles of open ocean in only a ship’s launch, when left adrift by the Bounty, was still a prodigy.

Laurence had looked at least to respect, if not to like; but the Allegiance had stopped to take on water in Van Diemen’s Land, and there found the governor they had confidently expected to meet in Sydney, deposed by the Rum Corps and living in a resentful exile. He had a thin, soured mouth, perhaps the consequence of his difficulties; a broad forehead exposed by his receding hair; and delicate, anxious features beneath it, which did not very well correspond with the intemperate language he was given to unleash on those not uncommon occasions when he felt himself thwarted.

He had no recourse but to harangue passing Navy officers with demands to restore him to his post, but all of those prudent gentlemen, to date, had chosen to stay well out of the affair while the news took the long sea-road back to England for an official response. This, Laurence supposed, had been neglected in the upheaval of Napoleon’s invasion and its aftermath; nothing else could account for so great a delay. But no fresh orders had come, nor a replacement governor, and meanwhile in Sydney the New South Wales Corps, and those men of property who had promoted their coup, grew all the more entrenched.

The very night the Allegiance put into the harbor, Bligh had himself rowed out to consult with Captain Riley; he had very nearly asked himself to dinner, and directed the conversation with perfect disregard for Riley’s privilege; though as a Navy man himself he could not be ignorant of the custom.

“A year now, and no answer,” Bligh had said in a cloud of spittle and fury, waving his hand to Riley’s steward to send the bottle round to him again. “A full year gone, Captain, and meanwhile in Sydney these scurrilous worms yet inculcate all the populace with licentiousness and sedition: it is nothing to them, nothing, if every child born to woman on these shores should be a bastard and a bugger and a drunken leech, so long as they do a little work upon their farms, and lie quiet under the yoke: Let the rum flow is their only maxim, the liquor their only coin and god.” He did not, however, stint himself of the wine, near-vinegared though it was, nor the last dregs of Riley’s port; ate well, also, as might a man living mostly on hardtack and a little occasional game.

Laurence, silent, rolling the stem of his glass between his fingers, had been unable to feel some sympathy: a little less self-restraint, and he might have railed with as much fervor against the cowardice and stupidity which had united to send Temeraire into exile. He, too, wished to be restored, if not to rank or to society at least to a place where they might be useful; and not to merely sit here on the far side of the world upon a barren rock, and complain unto Heaven.

But now Bligh’s downfall might as easily be his own: his one hope of return had been a pardon from the colony’s governor, for himself and Temeraire; or at least enough of a good report to reassure those in England whose fears and narrow interest had seen them sent away.

It had always been a scant hope, threadbare; but Jane Roland certainly wished for the return of Britain’s one Celestial, when she had Lien to contend with on the enemy’s side. Laurence might have some hope that the nearly superstitious fear of the breed which had sprung up, after the dreadful carnage of Lien’s attack upon the Navy at the battle of Shoeburyness, was beginning to subside, and cooler minds to regret the impulse which had sent away so valuable a weapon.

At least, so she had written, encouragingly; and had advised him, I may have a prayer of sending the Viceroy to fetch you home, when she has been refit; only for God’s sake be obliging to the Governor, if you please; and I will thank you not to make any more great noise of yourself: it would be just as well if there is not a word to be said of you in the next reports from the colony, good or evil, but that you have been meek as milk.

Of that, however, there was certainly no hope, from the moment when Bligh had blotted his lips and thrown down his napkin and said, “I will not mince words, Captain Riley: I hope you see your duty clear under the present circumstances, and you as well, Captain Granby,” he added.

This was, of course, to carry Bligh back to Sydney, there to threaten the colony with bombardment or pillage, at which the ringleaders MacArthur and Johnston would be handed over for judgment. “And to be summarily hanged like the mutinous scoundrels they are, I trust,” Bligh said. “It is the only possible repair for the harm which they have done: by God, I should like to see their worm-eaten corpses on display a year and more, for the edification of their fellows; then we may have a little discipline again.”

“Well, I shan’t,” Granby had answered, incautiously blunt after the free-flowing wine, “and,” he added to Laurence and Riley privately, afterwards, “I don’t see as we have any business telling the colony they shall have him back: it seems to me after a fellow has been mutinied against three or four times, there is something to it besides bad luck.”

“Then you shall take me aboard,” Bligh said, scowling, when Riley had also made his—more polite—refusal. “I will return with you to England, and there present the case directly; so far, I trust, you cannot deny me,” he asserted, with some truth: such a refusal would have been most dangerous politically to Riley, whose position was less assured than Granby’s, and unprotected by any significant interest. But Bligh’s real intention, certainly, was to return not to England but to the colony, in their company and under Riley’s protection, with the power meanwhile of continuing his attempts at persuasion however long they should remain there in port.

It was not to be supposed that Laurence could put himself at Bligh’s service, in that gentleman’s present mood, without at once being ordered to restore him to his office and to turn Temeraire upon the rebels. If such a course might have served Laurence’s self-interest, it was wholly inimical to his every feeling. He had allowed himself and Temeraire to be so used once, in the war—by Wellington, against the French invaders, in Britain’s greatest extremity; it had still left the blackest taste in his mouth, and he would never again so submit.

Yet equally, if Laurence put himself at the service of the New South Wales Corps, he became nearly an assistant to mutiny. It required no great political gifts to know this was of all accusations the one which he could least afford to sustain, and the one which would be most readily believed and seized upon by his enemies and Temeraire’s, to deny them any hope of return.

“I do not see the difficulty; there is no reason why you should surrender to anyone,” Temeraire said obstinately, when Laurence had in some anxiety raised the subject with him aboard ship as they made the trip from Van Diemen’s Land to Sydney: the last leg of their long voyage, which Laurence formerly would have advanced with pleasure, and now with far more pleasure would have delayed. “We have done perfectly well all this time at sea, and we will do perfectly well now, even if a few tiresome people have been rude.”

“Legally, I have been in Captain Riley’s charge, and may remain so a little longer,” Laurence answered. “But that cannot answer for very long: ordinarily he ought to discharge me to the authorities with the rest of the prisoners.”

“Whyever must he? Riley is a sensible person,” Temeraire said, “and if you must surrender to someone, he is certainly better than Bligh. I cannot like anyone who will insist on interrupting us at our reading, four times, only because he wishes to tell you yet again how wicked the colonists are and how much rum they drink: why that should be of any interest to anyone I am sure I do not know.”

“My dear, Riley will not long remain with us,” Laurence said. “A dragon transport cannot simply sit in harbor; this is the first time one has been spared to this part of the world, and that only to deliver us. When she has been scraped, and the mizzen topmast replaced, from that blow we had near the Cape, they will go; I am sure Riley expects fresh orders very nearly from the next ship into harbor behind us.”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, a little downcast, “and we will stay, I suppose.”

“Yes,” Laurence said, quietly. “—I am sorry.”

And without transport, Temeraire would be quite truly a prisoner of their new situation: there were few ships, and none of merchant class, which could carry a dragon of Temeraire’s size, and no flying route which could safely see him to any other part of the world. A light courier, built for endurance, perhaps might manage it in extremis with a well-informed navigator, clear weather, and luck, setting down on some deserted and rocky atolls for a rest; but the Aerial Corps did not risk even them on any regular mission to the colony, and Temeraire could never follow such a course without the utmost danger.

And Granby and Iskierka would go as well, when Riley did, to avoid a similar entrapment; leaving Temeraire quite isolated from his own kind, save for the three prospective hatchlings who were as yet an unknown quantity.

“Well, that is nothing to be sorry for,” Temeraire said, rather darkly eyeing Iskierka, who at present was asleep and exhaling quantities of steam from her spikes upon his flank, which gathered into fat droplets and rolled off to soak the deck beneath him. “Not,” he added, “that I would object to company; it would be pleasant to see Maximus again, and Lily, and I would like to know how Perscitia is getting on with her pavilion; but I am sure they will write to me when we are settled, and as for her, she may go away anytime she likes.”

Laurence felt Temeraire might find it a heavier penalty than he yet knew. Yet the prospect of these miseries, which had heretofore on their journey greatly occupied his concerns, seemed petty in comparison to the disaster of the situation that now awaited them: trapped in the roles of convict and kingmaker both, and without any means of escape, save if they chose to sacrifice all intercourse with society and take themselves off into the wilderness.

“Pray do not worry, Laurence,” Temeraire said stoutly. “I am sure we will find it a very interesting place, and anyway,” he added, “at least there will be something nicer to eat.”

Their reception, however, had if anything only given more credence to Bligh’s representations, and Laurence’s anxiety. The Allegiance could not be said to have crept up on the colony: she had entered the mouth of the harbor at eleven in the morning on a brilliantly clear day, with only the barest breath of wind to bring her along. After eight months at sea, all of them might have been pardoned for impatience, but no one could be immune to the almost shocking loveliness of the immense harbor: one bay after another curving off the main channel, and the thickly forested slopes running down to the water, interspersed with stretches of golden sand.

So Riley did not order out the boats for rowing, or even try to spread a little more sail; he let the men mostly hang along the rail, looking at the new country before them while the Allegiance stately glided among the smaller shipping like a great finwhale among clouds of bait-fish. Nearly three hours of slow, clear sailing before they lowered the anchor, then, but still there was no welcome come to meet them.

“I will fire a salute, I suppose,” Riley said, doubtfully; and the guns roared out. Many of the colonists in their dusty streets turned to look, but still no answer came, until after another two hours at last Riley put a boat over the side, and sent Lord Purbeck, his first lieutenant, ashore.

Purbeck returned shortly to report he had spoken with Major Johnston, the present chief of the New South Wales Corps, but that gentleman refused to come aboard so long as Bligh was present: the intelligence of Bligh’s return had evidently reached Sydney in advance, likely by some smaller, quicker ship making the same passage from Van Diemen’s Land.

“We had better go see him ourselves, then,” Granby said, quite unconscious of the appalled looks Laurence and Riley directed at him, at the proposal that Riley, a Navy captain, should lower himself to call upon an Army major, who had behaved so outrageously and ungentle-manlike. Granby did not notice, but added, “It don’t excuse him, but I would not have put it past that fellow Bligh to send word ahead himself that we were here to put him back in his place,” sadly plausible; and to make matters worse, there was little alternative. Their stores were running low, and that was no small matter with the hold crammed full of convicts, and the deck weighted down with dragons.

Riley went stiffly, with a full complement of Marines, and invited Laurence and Granby both to accompany him. “It may not be regular, but neither is anything else about this damned mess,” he said to Laurence, “and I am afraid you will need to get the measure of the fellow, more than any of us.”

It was not long in coming: “If you mean to try and put that cowering snake over us again, I hope you are ready to stay, and swallow his brass with us,” Johnston said, “for an you go away, we’ll have him out again in a trice; for my part, I will answer for what I have done to anyone who has a right to ask, which isn’t any of you.”

These were the first words uttered, preceding even introduction, as soon as they had been shown into his presence: not into an office, but only the antechamber in the single long building which served for barracks and headquarters both.

“What that has to do with hailing a King’s ship properly when it comes into harbor, I would like to know,” Granby said heatedly, responding in kind, “and I don’t care twopence for Bligh or you, either, until I have provision for my dragon; which you had better care about, too, unless you like her to help herself.”

This exchange had not made the welcome grow particularly warmer: even apart from the suspicion of their assisting Bligh, Johnston was evidently uneasy for all his bluster, as well might he and his fellows be with their present arrangements, at once illegal and unsettled, with so long a silence from England. Laurence might have felt some sympathy for that unease, under other circumstances: the Allegiance and her dragon passengers came into the colony as an unknown factor, and with the power of disrupting all the established order.

But the first sight of the colony had already shocked him very much: in this beautiful and lush country, to find such a general sense of malaise and disorder, women and men staggering-drunk in the streets even before the sun had set, and for most of the inhabitants thin ramshackle huts and tents the only shelters. Even these were occupied irregularly: as they walked towards their unsatisfactory meeting, and passed one such establishment with no door whatsoever, Laurence glanced and was very shocked to see within a man and a woman copulating energetically, he still half in military uniform, while another man snored sodden upon the floor and a child sat dirty and snuffling in the corner.

More distressing still was the bloody human wreckage on display at the military headquarters, where an enthusiastic flogger seemed to scarcely pause between his customers, a line of men shackled and sullen, waiting for fifty lashes or a hundred—evidently their idea here of light punishment.

“If I would not soon have a mutiny of my own,” Riley said, half under his breath, as they returned to the Allegiance, “I would not let my men come ashore here for anything; Sodom and Gomorrah are nothing to it.”

Three subsequent weeks in the colony had done very little to improve Laurence’s opinion of its present or its former management. There was nothing in Bligh himself which could be found sympathetic: in language and manner he was abrupt and abrasive, and where his attempts to assert authority were balked, he turned instead to a campaign of ill-managed cajolery, equal parts insincere flattery and irritated outbursts, which did little to conceal his private conviction of his absolute righteousness.

But this was worse than any ordinary mutiny: he had been the royal governor, and the very soldiers responsible for carrying out his orders had betrayed him. Riley and Granby continuing obdurate, and likely soon to be gone, Bligh had fixed upon Laurence as his most promising avenue of appeal, and refused to be deterred; daily now he would harangue Laurence on the ill-management of the colony, the certain evils flowing from permitting such an illegitimate arrangement to continue.

“Have Temeraire throw him overboard,” Tharkay had suggested laconically, when Laurence had escaped to his quarters for a little relief and piquet, despite the nearly stifling heat belowdecks: the open window let in only a still-hotter breeze. “He can fish him out again after,” he added, as an afterthought.

“I very much doubt if anything so mild as ocean water would prove effective at dousing that gentleman’s ardor for any prolonged time,” Laurence said, indulging from temper in a little sarcasm: Bligh had gone so far today as to overtly speak of his right, if restored, to grant full pardon, and Laurence had been forced to quit him mid-sentence to avoid taking insult at this species of attempted bribery. “It might nearly be easier,” he added more tiredly, the moment of heat past, “if I did not find some justice in his accusations.”

For the evils of the colony’s arrangements were very great, even witnessed at the remove of their shipboard life. Laurence had understood that the convicts were generally given sentences of labor, which being accomplished without further instance of disorder yielded their emancipation and the right to a grant of land: a thoughtful design envisioned by the first governor, intended to render them and the country both settled. But over the course of the subsequent two decades, this had remained little more than a design, and in practice nearly all the men of property were the officers of the New South Wales Corps or their former fellows.

The convicts at best they used as cheap labor; at worst, as chattel. Without prospects or connections to make them either interested in their future or ashamed of their behavior, and trapped in a country that was a prison which needed no walls, the convicts were easily bribed to both labor and their own pacification with cheap rum, brought in at a handsome profit by the soldiers, and in such a way those who ought to have enforced order instead contributed to its decay, with no care for the disorder and self-destruction they thus engendered.

“Or at least, so Bligh has argued, incessantly, and everything which I have seen bears him out,” Laurence said. “But Tenzing, I cannot trust myself; I fear that I wish the complaints to be just, rather than know they are so. I am sorry to say it would be convenient to have an excuse to restore him.”

“There is capot, I am afraid,” Tharkay said, putting down his last card. “If you insist on achieving justice and not only convenience, you would learn more from speaking with some local citizen, a settled man, with nothing to complain of in his treatment on either side.”

“If such a man is to be found, I can see no reason he would willingly confide his opinion, in so delicate a matter,” Laurence said, throwing in, and gathering the cards up to sort out afresh.

“I have letters of introduction to some few of the local factors,” Tharkay said, a piece of news to Laurence, who wondered; so far as he knew, Tharkay had come to New South Wales merely to indulge an inveterate wanderlust; but of course he could not intrude upon Tharkay’s privacy with a direct question.

“If you like,” Tharkay had continued, “I can make inquiries; and as for reason, if there is discontent enough to form the grounds for your decision, I would imagine that same discontent sufficient motive to speak.”

The attempt to pursue this excellent advice now having ended in public ignominy, however, Bligh was only too eager to take advantage and press Laurence further for action. “Dogs, Captain Laurence, dogs and cowardly sheep, all of them,” Bligh said, ignoring yet again Laurence’s attempt to correct his address to Mr. Laurence; it would suit Bligh better, Laurence in exasperation supposed, to be restored by a military officer, and not a private citizen.

Bligh continued, “I imagine you can hardly disagree with me now. It is impossible you should disagree with me. It is the direct consequence of their outrageous usurpation of the King’s authority. What respect, what discipline, can possibly be maintained under a leadership so wholly devoid of just and legal foundation, so utterly lost to loyalty and—”

Here Bligh paused, perhaps reconsidering an appeal to the virtues of obedience, in the light of Laurence’s reputation; throwing his tiller over, however, Bligh without losing much time said instead, “—and to decency; allow me to assure you this infamous kind of behavior is general throughout the military ranks of the colony, indulged and indeed encouraged by their leaders.”

Fatigue and a soreness at once physical and of the spirit had by now cut Laurence’s temper short: he had endured dinner in increasing discomfort, his ribs grown swollen and very tender beneath the makeshift bandage; his hands ached a great deal, and what was worse, to no purpose: nothing gained but a sense of disgust. He was very willing to think ill of the colony’s leadership, of Johnston and MacArthur, but Bligh had not recommended himself, and his nearly gleeful satisfaction was too crassly, too visibly opportunistic.

Laurence put down his coffee-cup with some force on the steward’s tray. “I must wonder, sir,” he said, “how you would expect to govern, when you should be forced to rely upon those same soldiers whom you presently so disdain; having removed their ringleaders, who have preferred them to an extreme and given them so much license, how would you conciliate their loyalty, having been restored at the hands of one whom they already see as an outlaw?”

“Oh! You give too much credit,” Bligh said, dismissively, “to their loyalty, and too little to their sense; they must know, of course, that MacArthur and Johnston are doomed. The length of the sea-voyage, the troubles in England, these alone have preserved them; but the hangman’s noose waits for them both, and as the time draws near, the advantages of their preferment lose their luster. Some reassurances—some concessions—of course they may keep their land grants, and those appointments not made too ill may remain—”

He made a few more general remarks of this sort, with no better course of action envisioned on Bligh’s part, so far as Laurence could see, than to levy a series of new but only cosmetic restrictions, which should certainly only inflame men irritated by the overthrow, by an outsider and an enemy, of their tolerated if not necessarily chosen leadership.

“Then I hardly see,” Laurence said, not very politely, “precisely how you would repair these evils you condemn, which I cannot see were amended during your first administration; nor is Temeraire, as you seem to imagine, some sort of magical cannon which may be turned on anyone you like.”

“If with this collection of mealy-mouthed objections you will excuse yourself from obliging me, Mr. Laurence,” Bligh answered, deep color spotting in the hollows of his cheeks, “I must count it another disappointment, and mark it against your character, such as that is,” this with an acrid and unpleasant edge; and he left the quarterdeck with his lips pressed tight and angry.

If Bligh followed in his usual mode, however, he would soon repent of his hasty words and seek another interview; Laurence knew it very well, and his feelings were sufficiently lacerated already that he did not care to be forced to endure the pretense of an apology, undoubtedly to be followed by a fresh renewal of those same arguments he had already heard and rejected.

He had meant to sleep aboard the ship, whose atmosphere had been greatly improved: the convicts having been delivered to the dubious embrace of the colony, Riley had set every one of his men to pumping the lower decks clean, sluicing out the filth and miasm left by several hundred men and women who had been afforded only the barest minimum of exercise and liberty essential to health. Smudges of smoke had been arranged throughout, and then a fresh round of pumping undertaken.

With the physical contamination and the hovering and perpetual aura of misery thus erased, Laurence’s small quarters now made a comfortable if not luxurious residence by his standards, formed in his youth by the dimensions of a midshipman’s cot. Meanwhile the small shelter on the dragons’ promontory remained unroofed and as yet lacked its final wall, but Laurence felt bruised more in spirit than in body, and the weather held dry; he went below only to collect a few articles, and quitted the ship to seek refuge in Temeraire’s company.

In this mood, he was by no means prepared to be accosted on the track back up to the promontory by a gentleman on horseback, of aquiline face and by the standards of the colony elegantly dressed, who leaned from his horse and demanded, “Am I speaking with Mr. Laurence?”

“You have the advantage of me,” Laurence said, a little rudely in his own turn; but he was not inclined to regret his curtness when the man said, “I am John MacArthur; I should like a word.”

There was little question he was the architect of the entire rebellion; and though he had arranged to be appointed Colonial Secretary, he had so far not even given Riley the courtesy of a call. “You choose odd circumstances for your request, sir,” Laurence said, “and I do not propose to stand speaking in the dust of the street. You are welcome to accompany me to the covert, if you like; although I would advise you to leave your horse.”

He was a little surprised to find MacArthur willing to hand his reins to the groom, and dismount to walk with him. “I hear you had a little difficulty in the town to-day,” MacArthur said. “—I am very sorry it should have happened.

“You must know, Mr. Laurence, we have had a light hand on the rein here; a light hand, and it has answered beautifully, beyond all reasonable hopes. Our colony does not show to advantage, you may perhaps think, coming from London; but I wonder what you would think if you had been here in our first few years. I came in the year ’ninety; will you credit it, that there were not a thousand acres under cultivation, and no supply? We nearly starved, one and all, three times.”

He stopped and held out a hand, which trembled a little. “They have been so, since that first winter,” he said, and resumed walking.

“Your perseverance is to be admired,” Laurence said, “and that of your fellows.”

“If nothing else, that for certain sure,” MacArthur said. “But it has not been by chance, or any easy road, that we have found success; only through the foresight of wise leadership and the strength of determined men. This is a country for a determined man, Mr. Laurence. I came here a lieutenant, with not a lick of property to my name; now I have ten thousand acres. I do not brag,” he added. “Any man can do here what I have done. This is a fine country.”

There was an emphasis on any man, which Laurence found distasteful in the extreme; he read the slinking bribery in MacArthur’s pretty speech as easily as he had in Bligh’s whispers of pardon, and he pressed his lips together and stretched his pace.

MacArthur perceived his mistake, perhaps; he increased his own to match and said, to shift the subject, “But what does Government send us? You have been a Navy officer yourself, Mr. Laurence; you have had the dregs of the prison-hulks pressed into service; you know what I am speaking of. Such men are not formed for respectability. They can only be used, and managed, and to do it requires rum and the lash—it is the very understanding of the service. I am afraid it has made us all a little coarse here, however; we are ill-served by the proportion of our numbers. I wonder how you would have liked a crew of a hundred, five and ninety of them gaol-birds, and not five able seamen to your name.”

“Sir, you are correct in this much: I have had a little difficulty, earlier in the day,” Laurence said, pausing in the road; his ribs ached sharply in his side, “so I will be frank; you might have had conversation of myself, or of Captain Riley or Captain Granby, as it pleased you, these last three weeks, for the courtesy of a request. May I ask you to be a little more brief?”

“Your reproach is a just one,” MacArthur said, “and I will not tire you further to-night; if you will do me the kindness of returning my visit in the morning at the barracks?”

“Forgive me,” Laurence said dryly, “but I find I am not presently inclined to pay calls in this society; as yet I find the courtesies beyond my grasp.”

“Then perhaps I may pay you another call,” MacArthur suggested, if with slightly pressed lips, and to this Laurence could only incline his head.

“I cannot look forward to the visit with any pleasure,” Laurence said, “but if he comes, we ought to receive him.”

“So long as he is not insulting, and does not try to put you in a quarry, he may come, if he likes,” Temeraire said, making a concession, while privately determining he would keep a very close eye upon this MacArthur person; for his own part, he saw no reason to offer any courtesy at all to someone who was master of a place so wretchedly organized, and acquainted with so many ill-mannered people. Governor Bligh was not a very pleasant person, perhaps, but at least he did not seem to think it in the ordinary course of things for gentlemen to be knocked down in the street in mysterious accidents.

MacArthur did come, shortly after they had breakfasted. He drew up rather abruptly, reaching the top of the hill; Laurence had not yet seen him, but Temeraire had been looking over at the town—sixteen sheep were being driven into a pen, very handsome sheep—and he saw MacArthur pause, and halt, and look as though he might go away again.

Temeraire might have let him do so, and had a quiet morning of reading, but he had not enjoyed his meal and in a peevish humor said, “In my opinion it is quite rude to come into someone’s residence only to stare at them, and turn pale, and go, as if there were something peculiar in them, and not in such absurd behavior. I do not know why you bothered to climb the hill at all, if you are such a great coward; it is not as though you did not know that I was here.”

“Why, in my opinion, you are a great rascal,” MacArthur said, purpling up his neck. “What do you mean by calling me a coward, because I need to catch my breath.”

“Stuff,” Temeraire said roundly, “you were frightened.”

“I do not say that a man hasn’t a right to be taken aback a moment, when he sees a beast the size of a frigate waiting to eat him,” MacArthur said, “but I am damned if I will swallow this; you do not see me running away, do you?”

“I would not eat a person,” Temeraire said, revolted, “and you needn’t be disgusting, even if you do have no manners,” to which Laurence coming around said, “So spake the pot,” rather dryly.

He added, “Will you come and sit down, Mr. MacArthur? I regret I cannot offer you anything better than coffee or chocolate, and I must advise against the coffee,” and Temeraire rather regretfully saw he had missed the opportunity to be rid of this unpleasant visitor.

MacArthur kept turning his head, to look at Temeraire, and remarked, “They don’t look so big, from below,” as he stirred his chocolate so many times it must have grown quite cold. Temeraire was quite fond of chocolate, but he could not have that, either; not properly, without enough milk, and the expense so dear; it was not worth only having the tiniest taste, which only made one want more. He sighed.

“Quite prodigious,” MacArthur repeated, looking at Temeraire again. “He must take a great deal of feeding.”

“We are managing,” Laurence said politely. “The game is conveniently plentiful, and they do not seem to be used to being hunted from aloft.”

Temeraire considered that if MacArthur was here, he might at least be of some use. “Is there anything else to hunt, nearby?” he inquired. “Not of course,” he added untruthfully, “that anyone could complain of kangaroo.”

“I am surprised if you have found any of those in twenty miles as the crow goes,” MacArthur said. “We pretty near et up the lot, in the first few years.”

“Well, we have been getting them around the Nepean River, and in the mountains,” Temeraire said, and MacArthur’s head jerked up from his cup so abruptly that the spoon he had left inside it tipped over and spattered his white breeches with chocolate.

He did not seem to notice that he had made a sad mull of his clothing, but said thoughtfully, “The Blue Mountains? Why, I suppose you can fly all over them, can’t you?”

“We have flown all over them,” Temeraire said, rather despondently, “and there is nothing but kangaroo, and those rabbits that have no ears, which are too small to be worth eating.”

“I would have been glad of a wombat or a dozen often enough, myself,” MacArthur said, “but it is true we do not have proper game in this country, I am sorry to say I know from experience: too lean by half; you cannot keep up to fighting-weight on it, and there is not enough grazing yet for cattle. We have not found a way through the mountains, you know,” he added. “We are quite hemmed in.”

“It is a pity no-one has tried keeping elephants,” Temeraire said.

“Ha ha, keeping elephants, very good,” MacArthur said, as if this were some sort of a joke. “Do elephants make good eating?”

“Excellently good,” Temeraire said. “I have not had an elephant since we were in Africa: I do not think I have tasted anything quite so good as a properly cooked elephant; outside of China, that is,” he added loyally, “where I do not think they can raise them. But it seems as though this would be perfectly good country for them: it is certainly as hot as ever it was in Africa, where they raised them. Anyway we will need more food for the hatchlings, soon.”

“Well, I have brought sheep, but I did not much think of bringing over elephants,” MacArthur said, looking at the three eggs with an altered expression. “How much would a dragon eat, do you suppose, in the way of cattle?”

“Maximus will eat two cows when he can get them, in a day,” Temeraire said, “but I do not think that is very healthy; I would not eat more than one, unless of course I have been fighting, or flying far; or if I were very particularly hungry.”

“Two cows a day, and soon to be five of you?” MacArthur said. “The Lord safe preserve us.”

“If this has brought you to a better understanding of the necessity of addressing the situation, sir,” Laurence said, rather pointedly Temeraire thought, “I must be grateful for your visit; we have had very little cooperation heretofore in making our arrangements from Major Johnston.”

MacArthur put down his chocolate-cup. “I was speaking last night, I think,” he said, “of what a man can make of himself, in this country; it is a subject dear to my heart, and I hope I did not ramble on it too long. It is a hard thing, you will understand, Mr. Laurence, to see a country like this: begging for hands, for the plowshare and the till, and no-one to work it but an army of the worst slackabouts born of woman lying about, complaining if they are given less than their day’s half-gallon of rum, and they would take it at ten in the morning, if they could get it.

“In the Corps, we may not be very pretty, but we know how to work; I believe the Aerial Corps, too, might be given such a character by some,” MacArthur went on. “And we know how to make men work. Whatever has been built in this country, we ha’e built it, and to have a—perhaps I had better hold my tongue; I think you have been shipmates with Governor Bligh?”

“I would not say we were shipmates,” Temeraire put in; he did not care to be saddled with such a relationship. “He came aboard our ship, but no-one much wanted him; only one must be polite.”

Laurence looked a bit rueful, and MacArthur, smiling, said, “Well, I won’t say anything against the gentleman, only perhaps he was no too fond of our ways. The which,” he added, “certainly can be improved upon, Mr. Laurence, I do not deny it; but no man likes to be corrected by come-lately.”

“When come-lately is sent by the King,” Laurence said, “one may dislike, and yet endure.”

“Very good sense; but good sense has limits, sir, limits,” MacArthur said, “where it comes up hard against honor: some things a man of courage cannot bear, and damn the consequences.”

Laurence did not say anything; Laurence was quite silent. After a moment, MacArthur added, “I do not mean to make you excuses: I have sent my eldest on to England, though I could spare him ill, and he must make my case to their Lordships. But I will tell you, I do not tremble, sir, for fear of the answer; I sleep the night through.”

Temeraire became conscious gradually, while he spoke, of being poked; Emily was at his side, tugging energetically on his wing-tip. “Temeraire!” she hissed up to him. “I oughtn’t go right up with that fellow there, he is sure to see I am a girl; but we must tell the captain, there is a ship come from England—”

“I see her!” Temeraire answered, looking over into the harbor: a trim, handsome little frigate of perhaps twenty-four guns: she was drawn up not far from the Allegiance, riding easily at anchor. “Laurence,” he said, leaning over, “there is a ship come from England, Roland says: it is the Beatrice, I think.”

MacArthur stopped speaking, abruptly.

Emily tugged again. “That is not the news,” she said, impatient. “Captain Rankin is on it.”

“Oh! whyever should he have come?” Temeraire said, his ruff pricking up. “Is he a convict?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned his head to the other side. “And Roland says that Rankin is here, on the ship: that dreadful fellow from Loch Laggan. You may certainly put him in a quarry,” he added to MacArthur. “I cannot think of anyone who deserves it more, the way he treated poor Levitas.”

“Oh, why won’t you listen,” Roland cried. “He ain’t a convict at all; he has come for one of the eggs.”

Chapter 3

“OWING TO THE MODE of our last communication, it is quite impossible Mr. Laurence and I should have any intercourse. —I hope I may not be thought difficult,” Rankin said, his crisp and aristocratic vowels carrying quite clearly, over the deck of the Allegiance; his transport the Beatrice had already gone away again, with no more news for the colony: she had left only two months after the Allegiance herself, and the news of the rebellion had not yet reached Government. “But it is generally accepted, I believe, that the dragondeck is reserved for officers of the Corps; and if the gentleman is quartered towards the stern, I see no reason why any inconvenient scenes should arise.”

“I see no reason why I shouldn’t push his nose in for him,” Granby said, under his breath, joining Laurence on the leeward side of the quarterdeck, where passengers were ordinarily allowed liberty. “The worst of it,” he added, “is I can’t see any way clear to refusing him: the orders are plain black on white, he is to be put to Wringe’s egg. What a damned waste.”

Laurence nodded a little; he, too, had had a letter, if not in an official capacity.… though nothing would I like better than if he should get himself sunk in the Ocean on his way to you, Jane had written.

… but his damnd Family have been squalling at their Lordships for nigh on Five Years now, and he had the infernal Bad Luck—mine, that is—of finding himself in Scotland, lately, when we were so overset: went up with one of the Ferals out of Arkady’s pack, saw a little fighting, and mannaged to get himself wounded again.

So I must give him a Beast, or at least a Chance of one, and Someone must put up with him thereafter; as I am about to have twenty-six hatchlings to feed and likely enough a War in Spain, I don’t scruple to say, Better You Than Me.

This last was emphatically full of capitals, and underlined.

I have made the Excuse, that this is the first Egg we have had out of the Ferals, and his having Experience of them in the field, should be an Advantage in its Training.

I was tolrably transparent, I think, but a Title does wonderful things, Laurence: I should have contrivved one much sooner if I had known its Use. Gentlemen who swore at me like fishwives sixmonth ago are become sweet as milk, all because the Regent has signed some scrap of paper for me, and nod their Heads and say Yes, Very Good, when before they would have argued to Doomsday if I should say, It is coming on to rain. Also it is a great benefit they none of them know whether to say Milady or Sir, and as soon as they have arrived at a Decision, they change it again. I only hope they may not make me a Duchess to make themselves easy by saying Your Grace; it would not suit half so well.

I am very obligd to your Mother, by the bye: she wrote, when she saw my name had come out in Debrett’s—as J. Roland, very discreet—and had me to a nice, sociable little Dinner, with every Cabinet Minister she could contrive to lay hands on, I gather: all very shocked, as they had brought their Wives, but they could not say so much as Boo with Her Ladyship at the foot of the Table as if Butter would not Melt in her mouth, and the Ladies did not mind inn the Least, when they understood I was an Officer, and not some Vauxhall Comedienne. I found them sensible Creatures all of them, and I think perhaps I have got quite the wrong Notion about them, as a Class; I expect I ought to be cultivating them. I don’t mind Society half so much if I may wear Trousers, and they were very kind, and left me their Cards.

We are trundling along well enough otherwise and getting back into some Order: feeding dragons on Mash and Mutton Stew is a damn’d site cheaper, Thank God, if the older ones do complain; Excidium is all Sighs and loud Reminiscences of fresh Cattle, and Temeraire’s name is not much lov’d among them, for having given us the Technique.

I will say a word in your Ear for him: I am uneasy about this Business in Spain. Bonaparte ain’t a Fool, and why he should wreck a dozen cities, on the southern Coast, fresh from the ruin of his Invasion, I cannot understand. Mulgrave thinks he means to take Spain and to stop us from supplying them from the Sea, but for that, he ought to be burning them in Portugal, instead.

If Temeraire should think it some Stratagem of Lien’s, I would be glad to know of it, even late as the Intelligence must come: it is very strange to think, Laurence, that I cannot hope for an Answer in under ten Months and a year and a half the more likely. Now we have lost the Capetown port to those African fellows, the couriers cannot even go to India, and meet your letter halfway.

For Consolation, if you should find yourself overcome with Passion and happen to accidentally drop Rankin down a Cliff, or by some Mischance run him through, at least I will not hear of it for as long, and anyway you are already transportd, which I must call a great Convenience for Murder. But I do not mean to Hint, although it is a great Pity to waste an Egg upon him, even one of our poor unwanted Stepchildren.

I hope Emily has not got into too many Scrapes; tho she cannot officially be your Ensign, I am sure you will oblige me by keeping her from any really reckless Behaviour, and do not let Rankin come the Scrub over her, if he have the Gall: I have seen enough to know he is just the sort of Rotter who would try off Airs of False Pity for her Sacrifice and other non Sense.

The three eggs which had been sent with them to begin the experiment were not, by the lights of Britain’s breeders, any great prizes: one a dirt-common Yellow Reaper, sent over because there were seventeen such eggs in the breeding grounds waiting; the second a disappointing and extremely stunted little thing which had unaccountably been produced out of a Parnassian and a Chequered Nettle, both heavy-weights. The last and most promising of the three, large and handsomely mottled and striated, was the offspring of Arkady, the feral leader, and Wringe, the best fighter of his pack.

There was no great enthusiasm for this egg in Britain, where the breeders for the most part viewed the newly recruited ferals as demons sent to wreak havoc and destruction upon their carefully designed lines; so it had been sent away. But it had quickly become the settled thing among the aviators who had been sent along as candidates for the new hatchlings to anticipate great things of the egg. “It stands to reason,” Laurence had overheard more than one officer say to another, “if that Wringe one should have got so big out in the wild, this one should do a good deal better with proper feeding, and training; and no one could complain of the ferals’ fighting spirit.”

Those young officers were now in something of a quandary, which Laurence was not above grimly enjoying, a little: they had been firm and united in their disdain, both for his personal treason and for what they saw as his failure to manage Temeraire properly. But now Rankin had come to supplant one of them, and claim the best egg for himself; he was their most bitter enemy, and Temeraire’s recalcitrance their best hope of denying him.

“He mayn’t have it at all,” Temeraire had said at once, when he had been informed of the proposed arrangement, “and if he likes, he can come up here and try and take it; I should be very pleased to discuss it with him,” darkly, in a way which bade fair to answer all of Jane’s hopes.

“My dear,” Laurence said, having lowered his letter, “I like the prospect as little as you; but if he should be denied even the chance, and return to England thwarted, we have only deferred the evil: he will certainly be put to another egg, there, where you may be certain the poor hatchling will have less opportunity to refuse. And the blame will certainly devolve upon Granby: the orders are for him, and the responsibility to carry them out.”

“I am certainly not having Granby take the blame for anything,” Iskierka said, raising her head, “and I do not see what the problem is, anyway; the egg will be hatched, by then, and why should it be any business of ours what it does after that? It can take him or not, as it pleases.”

Iskierka herself had hatched already breathing fire, and with all the disobliging and determined character anyone could have imagined; she would certainly have had no difficulty in rejecting any unworthy candidate. Most hatchlings did not come from the shell with quite the same mettle, however, and the Aerial Corps had developed many a technique and lure to ensure the successful harnessing of the beasts. Rankin had certainly prepared himself well: he had come over from the Beatrice with not only his two chests of personal baggage, but a pile of leather harness, some chainmail netting, and a sort of heavy leather hood.

“You throw it over the hatchling’s head as it comes out of the shell, if you are out of doors,” Granby said, when Laurence now inquired, “and then it cannot fly away; when you take it off, the light dazzles their eyes, and then if you lay some meat in front of them, they are pretty sure to let you put the harness on, if you will only let them eat. And some fellows like it, because they say it makes them easier to handle; if you ask me,” he added, bitterly, “all it makes them is shy: they are never certain of their ground, after.”

“I wonder if you might be able to put me in the way of some cattle-merchant,” Rankin was saying, to Riley and Lord Purbeck. “I intend to provide for the hatchling’s first meal from my personal funds.”

“Surely he can be restrained in some way,” Laurence said, low. He was not yet beyond the heat of righteous anger kindled all those years before, when they had been unwilling witness to the cruelty of Rankin’s treatment of his first dragon. Rankin was the sort of aviator beloved of the Navy Board: in his estimation as in theirs, dragons were merely a resource and a dangerous one, to be managed and restrained and used to their limits; it was the same philosophy which had rendered it not only tolerable but desirable to contemplate destroying ten thousand of the French beasts through the underhanded sneaking method of infection.

Where Rankin might have been kind to Levitas, he had been indifferent; where indifferent, deliberately cruel, all in the name of keeping his poor beast so downtrodden as to have no spirit to object to any demands made upon him. When Levitas had with desperate courage brought them back the warning of Napoleon’s first attempt to cross the Channel, in the year ’five, and been mortally wounded in that effort, Rankin had left his dragon alone and slowly dying in a small and miserable clearing, while he sought comfort for his own lesser injuries.

It was a mode of service which had gone thoroughly out of fashion in the last century among most aviators, who increasingly preferred to better preserve the spirit of their partners; the Government did not always agree, however, and Rankin was of an ancient dragon-keeping family, who had preserved their own habits and methods and passed these along to the scions sent into the Corps, at an age sufficiently delayed for these to be impressed upon them firmly, along with a conviction of their own superiority to the general run of aviators.

“He cannot be permitted to ruin the creature,” Laurence said. “We might at least bar him from use of the hood—”

“Interfere with a hatching?” Granby cried, looking at Laurence sidelong and dismayed. “No: he has a right to make the best go of it he can, however he likes. Though if he can’t manage it in fifteen minutes, someone else can have a try,” he added, an attempt at consolation, “and you may be sure fifteen minutes is all the time he will have; that is all I can do.”

“That is not all that I can do,” Temeraire said, mantling, “and I am not going to sit about letting him throw nets and chains and hoods on the hatchling: I do not care if it is not in the shell anymore. In my opinion, it is still quite near being an egg.”

He realized this was an irregular way of looking at the matter, but after all, if the hatchling had not yet eaten anything, and if perhaps a bit of egg were still stuck to its hide, one could not be sure that it was ready to manage on its own, and so it was still one’s responsibility. “Anyway,” he added, “I do not like him at all, and I don’t see that he has any right to be a captain again; just let him try and come here, and I will knock him down for it.”

“You are not doing anything which Granby would not like!” Iskierka said, jetting out a bit of steam.

“As though you had anything to say to it,” Temeraire said, coolly. “Anyway, you do things which Granby does not like every day.”

“Only,” Iskierka said, “when it is particularly important,” a monstrous lie, “and anyway, that is quite different. You might think of Granby, since you are always on about how I do not take proper care of him: I am not having him made not a captain, like you have done with Laurence, only because you are being absurd again and worrying about hatched dragons,” she added, which thrust hit home quite successfully; Temeraire flinched involuntarily, and put back his ruff.

“Why,” Iskierka continued, “I have seen this Rankin person: he is smaller than a pony, even. I could have burnt him up to a cinder as soon as I cracked the shell.”

“If he wanted you,” Temeraire said, “he might have you, and welcome,” but this was only a feeble bit of quarreling, and not really a just argument; he put his head down and stared at the eggs unhappily.

“And,” he said to Laurence, a little later, “if the egg does not take him, I suppose he will want to try the second, and then the third; I am sure he will not just go, when he has come all this way where no-one wants him, only to be difficult.”

“Only to have another dragon; but so far as that goes, I am afraid you may be right,” Laurence said, low. “But there is not much we can do about it, my dear, if we do not care to put Granby in a very awkward position; and make our own the worse. The eggs are not formally in our care at all, but his.”

“But Arkady charged me with his,” Temeraire said, “and I gave my word; surely that makes me interested.”

Laurence paused and agreed somberly, “That does put another complexion on the matter,” but it did not offer any other solution, except squashing Rankin, which would have been quite unfair, as a matter of relative size, and which Laurence insisted was not to be contemplated, despite Admiral Roland’s letter.

Laurence did not dissuade Temeraire with much enthusiasm; he would not have greatly minded Rankin’s being squashed under other circumstances, and the present situation would have rendered the event not only painless but highly desirable. His sentiments in the matter were only the more exacerbated the following morning, when Riley called upon them: Laurence had preferred to pass another irregular night up on the promontory in his small tent, still more comfortable a berth than remaining aboard ship, when he now must be careful only to visit the quarterdeck, and not go forward.

For Rankin was of course perfectly correct in the point of etiquette, and they were both barred from the field of honor, which was the only other suitable redress Rankin could have demanded for Laurence’s actions in their last meeting. Laurence could not be sorry in the least for having handled Rankin so violently, but neither could he force himself into Rankin’s presence, nor pursue the quarrel to which Rankin could not make answer, and retain any pretensions to the character of a gentleman.

“And I cannot blame you for it, either,” Riley said, “but it left me in an awkward position. I had to have him to dinner, and Bligh, too, or look rather shabby; and I am wretchedly sorry, Laurence: is this egg likely to be something out of the common way? Because what must the cawker do ten minutes after we are at table but declare Bligh has been monstrous used by a pack of mutinous dogs, and it ought not be borne.”

“Oh, damn him,” Laurence said, unguarded in savage exasperation. “No, Tom, so far as the egg goes; not if you mean of an order to pick a quarrel with Temeraire; but that has nothing to do with the case. We cannot set upon a British dragon, if it is as small as a Winchester. Are we to have a pitched battle in the harbor? I cannot conceive what he is thinking.”

“Oh, I will tell you that,” Riley said. “He is thinking he means to have the beast, will-you, nill-you. I beg you to imagine how our passenger took it: Bligh at once informed me he considers it my duty to ensure the Admiralty’s orders as regards the egg are carried out; and that he will be sure to write their Lordships to express his opinion, and convey that he has made me so aware.”

And the very last thing desirable to Riley at the present date was any suggestion of disobedience or recalcitrance, and all the more so if there were any sign it should be provoked by Laurence or even amenable to him. Their connection had already injured Riley’s credit with their Lordships to a severe extent, and he served now, as did all Laurence’s former associates, under a veil of suspicion. Bligh might not carry his point so far as his re-establishment in the colony, and his ill-management might invite the scorn rather than the sympathy of the Admiralty; that did not mean the Navy Board would not accept with the other hand any charges Bligh laid at Riley’s door.

All the more so, Laurence knew, that they had been given fresh cause to regard Temeraire, and any personage even remotely associated with him, with suspicion: Temeraire had received a letter also, in the post carried by the Beatrice; from Perscitia, who had evidently somehow acquired a scribe.

We have finished the Pavilion already—

“Oh!” Temeraire said sadly, “and I am not there to see it.”

—and begun on a second; we were puzzled where we should get the funds, as it is amazing how quickly Money goes. The Government tried to persuade us all to go back to the Breeding Grounds and leave off building: when we were almost quite finished, if you can imagine it. So the promised Supply has been very late and slow, and when they do send us any Cattle they are thin and not tasty, so we have had to buy Food of our own, and it is very dear at present; also Requiescat will eat like A Glutton, of course.

But we contrived: Majestatis suggested we should send Lloyd to Dover, to inquire after carting work, and we have worked out that men will pay a great deal just for us to carry things to London, and other Towns, as we can do it much more quickly than Horses; and I have worked out a very nice Method by which one can calculate the most efficient Way to go among all of them, taking on some goods and leaving off others; only it grows quite tiresome to calculate if one wishes to go to more than five or six Places.

There was a little noise about our coming and going—nobody much minded when it was just the Winchesters, or even the Reapers; but of course, Requiescat can carry so very much more—even if he is too lazy to go further than Dover to London and back—and Ballista and Majestatis and the other Heavy-weights, and after all, it is not as though we do not fit into the Coverts, so we really saw no reason they should not go, too. But then Government grew upset—when they might have given us proper Food, to begin with, and we should never have needed to trouble ourselves!—and they tried to make a Quarrel, and set some harnessed dragons in the Covert and told them to keep us out of it.

They were out of Scotland, I think; we did not know them, particularly, but Ballista said to them it was no sense squabbling over something so silly: for look, the Government had just put them in the Covert, because they did not want us in the Covert, even though they were just as big; and anyway there was plenty of Room, and we were only passing through. They all thought that was quite sensible, once she gave them a few of our Cows to be friendly; it seems Cows are very dear in the coverts, too, and nobody gets them very often anymore, even the harnessed beasts.

There was besides this communiqué a good deal of gossip about the relations among the dragons, which Laurence read to Temeraire only half-attending; between Perscitia’s lines he could easily read the frantic reports racing through Whitehall: unharnessed heavy-weights descending as they wished into every great city of Britain, terrifying the populace and wrecking the business of ordinary carters to boot; and bribing their harnessed fellows with the greatest of ease, despite all the certain persuasions and efforts of those dragons’ captains.

“That is a great pity about Gladius and Cantarella having a falling-out,” Temeraire said, “for I was sure they would have made a splendid egg; also I do not like Queritoris very much, for he was always making a fuss about carrying soldiers, when we all had to do it; so very tiresome, for everyone, but complaining did not make it any better. Laurence, do you suppose we might carry things for people, here, and so be paid? Only, no,” he interrupted his own thought, rather downcast, “for there is only this one town, and no other to carry things to; how I wish we were home!”

Laurence had wished it, too, but silently folded away the letter which killed his hopes of return aborning; it yet crackled in his coat pocket now, as he answered Riley, “I am sorry you should have had the unpleasantness of his threats; we will of course not ask you to interfere, Tom; nor, I hope, put you in any awkward position.”

“Well, I hope I am not so much a scrub as to come here and ask you out of the side of my mouth to have a care, for my own sake,” Riley said. “I am pretty well found in prize-money, after all, and if I am set ashore, at least I can take my little fellow home, and not worry my life away wondering what absurd thing Catherine is doing with him.” This, a little bitterly: he had not received a letter from Captain Harcourt.

“But this could easily grow to be a more serious matter than a mere quarrel,” Laurence said soberly to Temeraire, after Riley had left, “if Bligh chooses to make it a charge of disobedience, and their Lordships pleased to have an excuse for a court-martial; I can easily imagine it.”

“I can, too,” Temeraire said, “and I am sure we oughtn’t let him hurt Riley, or Granby, either; but we cannot let Rankin hurt the egg, either. Laurence, I have made Roland and Demane bring the egg out, just long enough so I might look at it, and I think it is going to hatch very soon; can we not take it away?”

“Away?” Laurence said; there was nowhere to go.

“Oh, into the countryside,” Temeraire said, “only until it has hatched, I mean; and then we can come back again, and it may choose among the officers if it likes. Or if you thought better,” he added, “we might take one or two of the best of them, instead, so it might choose among them directly: but no-one who would mean to try and use a hood, or a net.”

It was a scheme which Laurence ought at once have rejected, but he surprised himself by thinking soberly that so blatant a maneuver would, at least, be a stroke bold enough to ensure blame could be set only to their own much-overdrawn account. Granby and Riley, left behind and unable to trace their whereabouts, could not so easily be complained of as Granby and Riley standing idly by, in the face of some interference carried out immediately before them.

It was scarcely calculated to win him approval from their Lordships; certainly none from Bligh, but there was, Laurence with a little dark humor acknowledged, something liberating in having nothing whatsoever of which he might be robbed by the law: not even hope. He looked at the egg, himself: he did not hold himself up as an expert, but the shell was certainly harder than it had been, aboard ship, and with that same brittle, slightly thinning quality which he remembered a little from Temeraire’s hatching, and Iskierka’s.

“We could take no one else with us,” Laurence said, “at least, not consenting; and there would be something curious in abducting an aviator to make him a captain: the fellow could not help but be doubted, afterwards.”

“Well, to be perfectly honest I think it just as well not to take any of them,” Temeraire said. “I do not think much of the lot: they were all quite unpleasant, on the ship, and they will think they have a right to the eggs, even though they had nothing to do with making them, and I have been taking care of them all this while. They have nothing to recommend them, any more than Rankin does: I don’t suppose the hatchling will want any of them.”

“We are in too much disgrace, my dear, to expect to see any of them display to advantage,” Laurence said, “but Lieutenant Forthing at least is held a good officer, Granby tells me, and fought with courage at the battle of Shoeburyness.”

“Oh, he is the worst of them!” Temeraire said, immediately censorious, though Laurence did not quite know what had provoked such a degree of heat, “and I don’t care if we are in disgrace; that is no excuse for behaving like a scrub. Besides,” Temeraire added, “he is wretchedly untidy: strings coming out of his coat, and his trousers patched; even Rankin does not look ragged.”

“Rankin,” Laurence said, “is the third son of an earl, and can afford to be nice in his clothing; I am afraid Mr. Forthing was a foundling in the dockyards at Dover, and taken on for creeping into the coverts as a child to sleep next to the dragons: he has no kin in the world.”

“He might still brush his coat,” Temeraire said, obstinately. “No: I should quite prefer no-one at all, to him; I am sure Arkady would be quite disgusted with me if I should allow it.” He leaned over to look at the egg, and put out his thin forked tongue to touch the shell.

“I cannot quarrel with you on this point, if he has left the egg in your charge,” Laurence said. “The judgment must be yours. In any case, it would be difficult to manage. We must also contrive some covering, for the egg; and—”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, “oh, no, whatever are you doing?”

Laurence paused in confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

“No, Laurence; I am speaking to the egg,” Temeraire said, raising his head with an expression of consternation, his ruff flattened against his neck. “It is hatching; however are we to get it away, now?”

“Only remember, you must put up with him for a little while,” Temeraire informed the egg, as it rocked a little more, “as otherwise he can make no end of trouble for everyone, but it will only be a few minutes, and then you may choose someone else, or to have no one at all. And if he puts anything on you which you do not like, only wait a moment, and I will take it away directly. You might,” he added a little exasperated, “have waited in the shell a little longer, until we had gone away and you were quite safe: anyone would think you were not listening to me at all.”

“Captain Granby, if you would be so good as to remove the egg from the prospect of any more interference,” Rankin said, as he and the party of officers came up the track and onto the promontory, “I would be grateful; if it would suit you, I should like to arrange the hatching here,” indicating the place where he stood, quite near the track and a distance from the promontory’s edge.

Temeraire flared out his ruff: Rankin indeed had the leather hood which Laurence had spoken of, and a heavy net with chains, such as Temeraire had once been held down with, shipboard during a typhoon; he had not liked it at all. “Remember, only a moment,” he hissed at the egg, and then reluctantly let the aviators take it away: at least they were very careful, carrying it.

When it was in place, Rankin detailed a couple of the younger officers, midshipmen, to stand on the other side of the egg with the mesh netting, as though they would entangle the poor hatchling if it should try and fly away. To add insult to injury, a boy was leading a handsome sheep on a string behind him, and as soon as the first crack had appeared, Rankin nodded, and two men butchered it into a tub—a lovely hot smell of fresh blood—and brought it over. Temeraire thought it quite unfair—one was so hungry, breaking the shell; it would be so very difficult to resist—and wondered if perhaps he ought take the meat away.

“Granby,” Iskierka said, pricking up her spikes as she also observed, “I do not see why we should not have bought a sheep or two, ourselves; or a cow. I am sure we have enough money.”

“It wouldn’t be polite, dear one,” Granby said.

“I don’t see why,” Iskierka said. “Temeraire might have money, too, if he were as clever at taking prizes as I am; it is not my fault he shouldn’t have arranged things better, and I needn’t eat kangaroo to make up for it.”

“Pray let’s discuss it later,” Granby said, hastily. “The egg is hatching, anyway.”

The shell did not crack neatly, Temeraire noted with a critical eye; instead it fractured off in bits and pieces, and then the hatchling finally smashed its way out in a very messy burst, shaking itself loose. It was not very pretty, either, in his opinion: it was grey all over like Wringe, save for two very broad red streaks of color sweeping from the breastbone and under the wing-joints to trail out in spots along the backbone into its long, skinny tail.

“Good conformation,” Granby said to Laurence, under his breath, “—blast it! Shoulders as strong as you could like.”

The hatchling was quite heavily built forward, Temeraire supposed; and it had very clever snatching front claws, which it used almost at once: Rankin stepped forward with two quick steps, holding the hood; but to Temeraire’s delight, the hatchling snapped out its wrists and seizing hold dragged it away from him and said, “No, I won’t have any of that,” and setting its teeth in the other end tore it quite apart with a slash of its talons.

It flung the pieces down on the ground, with an air of satisfaction. “There; now take it away, and give me the meat.”

Rankin recovered, despite this setback, and said, “You may have it as soon as you have put on the harness.”

“You needn’t, at all,” Temeraire put in, ignoring the looks of disapprobation which the aviators flung at him. “You can take yourself a perfectly tasty kangaroo, anytime you like.”

“Well, I don’t like; what I like is the smell of that meat over there,” the hatchling said, and put its head over on its side consideringly. “As for you: you are an earl’s son, is it?” it inquired of Rankin intently. “An especially good earl?”

Rankin looked a little taken aback, and said after a pause, “My father’s creation dates from the twelfth century.”

“Yes, but, is he rich?” the hatchling said.

“I hope,” Rankin said, “that I may not be so impolite as to speak crassly of my family’s circumstances.”

“Well, that may be pretty-spoken, but it don’t tell me anything useful,” the hatchling said. “Does he have any cows?”

Rankin hesitated, visibly torn, and then said, “I believe there are some dairy farms on his estates—several hundred head among them, I imagine.”

“Good, good,” the dragonet said, approvingly. “Well, let us have a look at this harness, and as long as you are busy being polite, you might give me a taste while I am thinking it over; I do like your hair,” it added; Temeraire did have to admit Rankin’s was of a particularly appealing shade of yellow which looked a little like gold in the sunlight, “and your coat, although that fellow has nicer buttons,” meaning Granby, “but I suppose you can have some like that put on?”

“But you do not want him, at all!” Temeraire said. “He is an extremely unpleasant person, and neglected Levitas dreadfully, although Levitas was forever trying to please him, and then Levitas died, and it was all his doing.”

“Yes, so you have said, over and over, while I was getting ready to come out; and all I have to say is, this Levitas fellow sounds a right bore,” the dragonet said, “and I shall like to have a captain who is the son of an earl, and rich, too; I don’t aim to be eating kangaroo day-in and day-out, thank you; or hurrying about catching prizes for myself, either. But that,” he added, looking at the harness which Rankin was with a slightly uncertain air proferring, “is not nice enough by half: those buckles are dirty, it looks to me.”

“They are certainly dirty,” Temeraire put in urgently, “and so was Levitas’s harness, all the while: quite covered with dirt, and Rankin would not even let him bathe.”

“This is only a temporary harness,” Rankin said, adding tentatively, “and I shall have a nicer made for you, chased with gold,” in what Temeraire felt was a quite shameful bargaining sort of manner.

“Ah, now that sounds more like,” the dragonet said.

“And I shall give you a name, straightaway,” Rankin added, with more firmness. “We shall call you Serenitus—”

“I have been thinking Conquistador, myself,” the dragonet interrupted him, “or perhaps Caesar; only as I understand it, the conquistadores came out of it with a good deal more gold.”

“No-one is going to call you Caesar,” Temeraire said, revolted. “You are only going to be a middle-weight, anyway, if you are that big: Wringe is not even as big as a Reaper.”

“You never know,” the dragonet said, unphazed. “It is better to be prepared. I think Caesar will suit me very well, now I think about it a little more.”

“Well, I wash my hands of it all,” Temeraire said to Laurence, afterwards, in more than a little aggravation, watching Caesar—oh! how ridiculous—eating a second sheep; Rankin had sent out for it, after Caesar had eaten all the first one, down to the scraps, and suggested with a very transparent air that perhaps eating quite a lot while he was fresh-hatched would help him to grow bigger. “And I do not believe that at all,” he added.

“Well, my dear, they seem to me admirably suited,” Laurence said dryly. “Only I am damned if I know what we are to do now.”

Chapter 4

“LAURENCE, I HOPE you will forgive me,” Granby said, low, while across the way Caesar continued his depredations upon the livestock which Rankin had evidently intended for his first week of feedings. “I didn’t mean to say a word, unless he should manage to harness the beast; but he has, and there is no way around it—you must let me go-between, and make up the quarrel.”

“I beg your pardon?” Laurence said, doubtfully, certain he had misunderstood; but Granby shook his head and said, “I know it’s not what you are used to; but pray don’t be stiff-necked about it: there can’t be two captains in a covert at dagger-ends forever and anon, and you can’t fight him; so it must be made up, whatever you think of the blighted wretch,” he added, rather failing at conciliation.

It was by no means what Laurence was used to; the thought of offering Rankin anything so like apology, for an act which had been richly merited by his behavior, and which Laurence would gladly have drawn swords to justify, appalled more than he could easily bear.

“You needn’t think of it that way,” Granby said, “for it’s only that you have the heavier beast, you know: that is the rule. It’s for you to make the first gesture; he can’t, without looking shy. And it don’t signify you aren’t a captain anymore in the official way, because that doesn’t make Temeraire vanish into the air.”

Laurence could not be so easily reconciled, despite all the obvious sense in this policy, to a gesture which to him partook of the worst part of both withdrawal and deceit. “For I do not withdraw, John; I cannot withdraw in the least. It would be rankest falsehood for me to pretend in any way to regret my actions, or any offense which was given by them; and under the circumstances, such a withdrawal must bear a character of self-interest which I must despise.”

“Lord, I am not saying you must truckle to the fellow!” Granby said, with a look half affection and half exasperation. “Nothing of the sort; you only need to let me go forward, and have a word with him, and then you shan’t speak of it again, either of you: that is all. No-one will think any less of you: the contrary, for it would be rotten for the dragonet, you know. If you are giving his captain the go-by, it must make a quarrel between him and Temeraire, too, and you can’t say that is fair.”

This argument had too much justice for Laurence to ignore; he managed barely to make himself nod, once, by way of granting permission, and looked the other way when Rankin joined Granby’s table that night, in a small hostelry, for the dinner which should honor his promotion. Granby cast a worried look at him, sidelong, and said to Rankin, in tones of slightly excessive heartiness, “I am afraid Caesar means to lead you something of a merry chase, sir; a most determined beast.”

Granby, who had more knowledge of the management of a determined if not obstreperous beast than any ten men, might have been pardoned for some degree of private satisfaction in this remark. “If it is any consolation,” he had said to Laurence, earlier, rather more frankly, “the little beast is his just deserts, anyway: how I will laugh to see him dragged hither and yon, protesting all he likes that Caesar must obey. That creature won’t take being shot off in a corner and left to rot.”

Laurence could not wholly take amusement in any part of the circumstances which forced him to endure Rankin’s company; but he did not deny a certain grim satisfaction, which became incredulous when Rankin answered, coolly, “You are very mistaken, Captain Granby; I anticipate nothing of the sort.

“That there has been some mismanagement of the egg, I cannot dispute,” Rankin added, “nor that his hatching did not give cause for concerns such as you have described: but I have been most heartened since those first moments to find Caesar a most complaisant creature by nature. Indeed, it is not too far to say I think him a most remarkable beast, quite out of the common way in intelligence and in tractability.”

Laurence forgot his feelings in bemusement and Granby looked equally at a loss for response, when so far as they had seen, Caesar had spent the afternoon demonstrating only an insistent gluttony. Perhaps Rankin chose to deceive himself, rather than think himself overmatched, Laurence wondered; but Rankin added, with a self-satisfaction that seemed past mere wishful thinking, “I have already begun instructing him on better principles, and I have every hope of shaping him into the attentive and obedient beast which must be the ambition of every aviator. Already he begins to partake of my sentiments and understanding as he ought, and to value my opinion over all others.”

“Well,” Granby said doubtfully, then, “Mr. Forthing, the bottle stands by you,” and the conversation limped away into a fresh direction; but in the morning Laurence was astonished to find Rankin at the promontory, with a book, to attend Caesar’s breakfast. He seated himself at Caesar’s side and began to read to the dragonet as the beast ate: an aviation manual of some sort, Laurence collected from what he overheard, although the language was very peculiar.

“Oh, he has never dug up that antique thing,” Granby said, with disgust, and added, “It is from the Tudor age, I think; all about how to manage a dragon. We read it in school, but I cannot think of anyone who gives it a thought anymore.”

Caesar listened very attentively, however, while he gnawed on a bone, and said earnestly, “My dear captain, I cannot disagree at all, it seems very sensible indeed; pray do you think I ought to try and manage another sheep? I take it quite to heart, what the book says about the importance of early feeding. If it accords with your judgment, of course: I am wholly willing to be guided by your superior experience; but I must say I find I am so much better able to attend when I am quite full.”

“This,” Iskierka said, “is what comes of worrying about hatchlings.”

Temeraire did not think that was very just: he had not worried about Caesar for very long, certainly, and at the present moment he would not have given one scrap of liver for all Caesar’s health and happiness; not, of course, that Caesar seemed to be in any short supply of either. In one week he had eaten nine sheep, an entire cow, a tunny, and even three kangaroos, after Rankin had been forced to reconsider the speed at which he was depleting his funds.

That would have been quite enough to make the dragonet intolerable, particularly the smacking, gloating way in which he took his gluttonous meals, but apart from these offensive habits, he would strut, and wake one up out of a pleasant drowse in the midday heat by singing out loudly, “Oh, my captain is coming to see me,” and he would with very great satisfaction inform Rankin that he was looking very fine, that day, and make a pointed note of every bit of gold or decoration which he wore.

The one consolation which Temeraire had promised himself, Rankin’s certain neglect, which should also ensure his absence, did not materialize: instead Rankin was forever coming, and so Temeraire had to endure not only Caesar, but Rankin also, and hear his irritating voice all the day, reading out from this absurd book full of nonsense about how one ought to never ask questions of one’s captain, and spend all one’s time practicing formation-maneuvers.

“I cannot understand in the least,” Temeraire complained, “why when he had the very nicest of dragons, he was never to be seen; and now one cannot be rid of him. I have even hinted a little that he might take himself off, in the afternoons when it is so very hot and one wishes only to sleep, but he will never go.”

“I imagine he had a better chance of society more to his liking, in Britain,” Laurence said. “He was a courier-captain on light duty, and might easily visit friends of his social order; he has never been a particular favorite, among other aviators.”

“No, I am sure he has not,” Temeraire said, disgustedly.

Meanwhile there was no end of trouble to be seen, because the company Rankin did keep, aside from Caesar, was Governor Bligh, whom Temeraire had now classed a thoroughly unpleasant sort of person: not surprising when one considered he was part of Government. Bligh certainly had some notion that when Caesar was a little more grown, Rankin would help put him back in his post; Temeraire had even overheard Rankin discussing the matter with Caesar.

“Oh, certainly,” Caesar said, “I will always be happy to oblige you, my dear captain; and Governor Bligh. It is of the first importance that our colony—” Our colony, Temeraire fumed silently. “—that our colony should have the finest leadership. I understand,” he added, “that governors have quite a great deal of power, isn’t it? They may give grants of land?”

Rankin paused and said, “—yes; unclaimed land is in the governor’s gift.”

“Just so, just so,” Caesar said. “I understand it takes a great deal of land to raise cattle, and sheep; I am sure Governor Bligh must be well aware of it.”

“A clever beast,” Laurence said dryly, when Temeraire with indignation had repeated this exchange to him. “I am afraid, my dear, we may find ourselves quite at a stand.”

“Laurence,” Temeraire said, shocked, “Laurence, surely you do not imagine he could beat me. If ever he tried to cause us any difficulty—”

“If you were ever to come on to blows,” Laurence said, “we should already be well in the soup; such a conflict must at all costs be avoided. Even in defeat, he might easily do you a terrible injury, and to run such a risk, for the reward only of making yourself more an outlaw and terrifying to the local populace, cannot be a rational choice. Consider that every week now brings us closer to word from England, and I trust the establishment of a new order.”

“Which,” Temeraire said, “is likely to be just as bad as Bligh, I expect.”

“So long as we are not responsible for either its establishment or its destruction,” Laurence said, grimly, “and neither its hated enemy nor its cosseted ally, our situation can only be improved.”

“I do not see very well how,” Temeraire said, brooding over the matter; he was not quite certain he saw it the same way. “Laurence, if we must stay here for some time—?” He paused, interrogatively.

Laurence did not immediately answer. “I am afraid so,” he said, at last, quietly. “The waste of your abilities is very nearly criminal, my dear, and Jane will do her best by us, of course; but with matters as they are amongst the unharnessed beasts in England, and such reports as Bligh is already likely to make of us, I must not counsel you to hope for a quick recall.”

Temeraire could not fail to see that Laurence was quite downcast by his own words. “Why, I am sure it will be perfectly pleasant to remain awhile,” Temeraire said, stoutly, making sure to tuck his wings to his sides in a complaisant sort of way. “Only if we are to remain,” he did not allow any disappointment to color his words, “then it seems to me that Caesar is right on this one point: we ought have better leadership, who can arrange it so we can have proper food, and everything nice—perhaps even a pavilion, with some shade and water, against all this heat. We might even build some roads as wide as in China, and put the pavilions directly in the town; just like a properly civilized country.”

“We cannot hope to promote such a project, however desirable, without the support of civil authority; you cannot force the change wholesale,” Laurence said; he paused and added, low, “We might make such a bargain with Bligh, I expect; he cannot be insensible of your much greater strength, and he knows he requires at least our complaisance, even if he has Rankin’s aid.”

“But Laurence, I do not like Bligh at all,” Temeraire said. “I have quite settled it that he is a bounder: he will say anything, and do anything, and be friendly to anyone, only to be back as governor; but I do not think it is because he wishes so much to do anything pleasant or nice for anyone.”

“No, he wishes only to be vindicated, I believe,” Laurence answered, “—and revenged. Not without cause,” he added, “but—” He stopped and shook his head. “There would be a species of tyranny in it, when they have ruled so long and without argument from the citizenry.”

Temeraire brooded on further afterwards, that afternoon, while Caesar discussed enthusiastically with Rankin plans for an elaborate cattle farm, quite exploding Temeraire’s hopes of napping. He was beginning to understand strongly the sentiment that beggars could not be choosers. No one would ever have chosen to be trapped here; but now he must make the best of it, for himself and for Laurence. Temeraire dismally recognized that he had solaced himself, by thinking that Iskierka was only a wretched pirate, really, and her excesses for Granby in poor taste, which Laurence would not have liked, anyway. But now here was Rankin, too, also wearing gold buttons, and he was a captain still, as Laurence ought have been. There was no thinking two ways about it: Temeraire had not taken proper care of him; he had quite mismanaged the situation.

“Demane,” Temeraire said, lifting his head, and speaking in the Xhosa language, so Rankin could not sneak and overhear, nor Caesar; Demane looked up from where he was figuring sums with Roland—or rather, giving his sums to Sipho to figure for him, while he instead cleaned yet another old flintlock; he had acquired another four in the town, lately. “Demane, do you remember that fellow who was here the other day, MacArthur? Will you go into town and find out where he lives; and take him a message?”

“I cannot but feel I have—I am—mismanaging the situation,” Laurence said somberly, tapping his hand restlessly upon the table until he noticed his own fidgeting, which even then required an effort to cease.

From wishing only to have the decision taken out of his own hands, Laurence now found he did not think he could be easy in his mind to watch the colony’s leaders deposed and, as he increasingly thought Bligh’s intention, executed without even awaiting word from England. “But if Rankin should move in his support, I cannot avoid the decision: either we must stand by or intervene. I hope,” he added ruefully, “that I am not so petty as to have more sympathy for Johnston and MacArthur, and the less for Bligh, only because Rankin has ranged himself alongside him.”

“You might have a worse reason,” Tharkay said. “At least you cannot call the decision self-interested; his restoration would be more to your advantage.”

“Not unless it is by my own doing,” Laurence said, “which I cannot reconcile with a sense of justice; and I doubt even that would serve,” he added, pessimism sharp in his mouth. “Even to act must rouse fresh suspicions; we are damned in either direction, when all they want of us is quiet obedience.”

“If you will pardon my saying so,” Tharkay said, “you will never satisfy them on that point: the last thing you or Temeraire will ever give anyone is quiet obedience. Have you considered it might be better not to try?”

Laurence would have liked to protest this remark: he believed in the discipline of the service, and still felt himself at heart a serving-officer; if he had been forced beyond the bounds of proper submission to authority, it had been most unwillingly. But denial froze in his throat; that excuse was worth precisely the value that their Lordships would have put upon it, which was none.

Tharkay left him to wrestle with it a moment, then added, “There are alternatives, if you wished to consider them.”

“To sit here on the far side of the world, seeing Temeraire wholly wasted on the business of breeding, and condemned to tedium and the absence of all society?” Laurence said, tiredly. “We might, I suppose, do some work for the colony: ferry goods, and assist with the construction of roads—”

“You might go to sea,” Tharkay said, and Laurence looked at him in surprise. “No, I am not speaking fancifully. You remember, perhaps, Avram Maden?”

Laurence nodded, a little surprised: he had not heard the merchant’s name from Tharkay since they had left Istanbul, nor that of Maden’s daughter; and Laurence had himself avoided any mention of either for fear of giving pain. “I must consider myself yet in his debt; I hope he does well—he did not come under any suspicion, after our escape?”

“No; I believe we made a sufficiently dramatic exit to satisfy the Turks without their seeking for conspirators.” Tharkay paused, and then his mouth twisted a little. “He has been lately presented with his first grandson,” he added.

“Ah,” Laurence said, and reached over to fill Tharkay’s glass.

Tharkay raised it to him silently and drank. A minute passed, then leaving the subject with nothing more said, he abruptly added, “I am engaged to perform a service for the directors of the East India Company, at his request; and as I understand it, several of those gentlemen are interested in outfitting privateers, to strike at the French trade in the Pacific.”

“Yes?” Laurence said politely, wondering how this should apply to his situation. What service those merchant lords might require, in this still-small port, Laurence could not understand, though it explained at least why Tharkay had come—and then he realized, startling back a little in his chair, that Tharkay meant this as a suggestion.

“I could scarcely fit Temeraire on a privateer,” he said, wondering a little that Tharkay could imagine it done: it was not as though he had not seen Temeraire.

“Without having broached the subject with the gentlemen in question,” Tharkay said, “I will nevertheless go so far as to assure you that the practicalities would be managed, if you were willing. Ships can be built to carry dragons, where interest exists; and a dragon who can sink any vessel afloat must command interest.”

He spoke with certainty; and Laurence could take his point. A dragon could never ordinarily be obtained for such a purpose; as yet they were the exclusive province of the state. They and the first-rates and transports which could bear a dragon were devoted to blockade-duty, and to naval warfare, not to the quick and stinging pursuit of the enemy’s shipping. Temeraire would be unopposed, and a privateer so armed would be virtually at liberty to take any ship which it encountered.

Laurence did not know how to answer. There was nothing dishonorable in privateering—nothing dishonorable in the least. He had known several men formerly of the Navy to embark on the enterprise, and he had not diminished in respect for them at all.

“I doubt the Government would deny you a letter of marque,” Tharkay said.

“No,” Laurence said. It would surely suit their Lordships admirably. Temeraire wreaking a wholesale destruction among French shipping would be a great improvement over Temeraire sitting idly in New South Wales, with none of the risks attendant on bringing him back to the front and once again into the company of other impressionable beasts, which he might lure into sedition.

“I will not urge it on you,” Tharkay said. “If you should care for the introduction, however, I would be at your service.”

“But that sounds quite splendid,” Temeraire said, with real enthusiasm, when Laurence had laid the proposal before him in only the barest terms. “I am sure we should take any number of prizes; Iskierka should have nothing on it. How long do you suppose it would be, for them to build us a ship?”

Laurence only with difficulty persuaded him to consider it as anything other than a settled thing; Temeraire was already inclined to be making plans for the use of his future wealth. “You could not wish to remain here, instead?” Temeraire said. “Not, of course, that I mean to suggest there is anything wrong here,” he added unconvincingly.

The mornings and late evenings were now the only and scarcely bearable times of day, and they had begun to stretch them with early rising and late nights; the sun was only just up, spilling a broad swath of light across the water running into all the bays of the harbor, making them glow out brilliantly white against the dark curve of the land rising away, blackish green and silent. Temeraire had not eaten in two days: the stretch was not markedly unhealthy, given his inaction, but Laurence feared it was due largely to a secret disdain for his food, the regrettable consequence of Temeraire’s having grown nice in his tastes, a grave danger for a military man—and there Laurence was forced again to the recollection that they were neither of them military, any longer.

Even so, there was an advantage to a stronger stomach: he himself, subject to shipboard provisions during the most ravenous years of his life, could subsist on weeviled biscuit and salt pork indefinitely; even though he had not often had to endure those conditions. Temeraire had too early in his life developed a finicky palate; Gong Su had done what was in his power, but he had made quite clear one could not turn a lean, scrub-fed game animal, half bone and sinew and anatomical oddities, into a fat and nicely marbled piece of beef; Laurence was considering if his finances could stretch to the provision of some cattle, at least for a treat.

“There is Caesar’s breakfast,” Temeraire said, with a sigh, as the mournful lowing of a cow came towards them from the bottom of the hill; but when it was brought up, by an only slightly less reluctant youth, he delivered it not to Caesar but to them, stammering compliments of Mr. MacArthur, and for Laurence there was an invitation card, asking him to supper.

“I wonder he should make such a gesture,” Laurence said, rather taken aback; one thing for MacArthur to bring himself to the covert—however irregularly organized, still in the nature of an official outpost—and quite another to invite Laurence to his home, in mixed company likely overseen by his wife. “I wonder at it indeed; unless,” he added, low, “he has had some intelligence of Rankin’s interest in Bligh’s case: that might make sufficient motive even for this.”

“Umm,” Temeraire said indistinctly, nibbling around a substantial thigh-bone; his attention was fixed notably on Gong Su’s enthusiastic preparations: the cow had been butchered, and was going into the earth with what greenstuffs had passed muster, and some cracked wheat; even Caesar had peeled open an eye and was looking over with covert interest.

The hour was fixed sufficiently late they could wait until the heat of the day had passed and travel at the beginning of twilight; Temeraire, having made a splendid meal, carried Laurence aloft into the softening but yet unbroken blue: no clouds, yet again, all the day. What would have made an hour’s journey on horse, across rough country, was an easy ten minutes’ flight dragon-back, and there was a wide fallow field open near the house, where Temeraire could set down.

“Pray thank him for my cow,” Temeraire said, contentedly settling himself to nap. “It was very handsome of him, and I do not think he is a coward anymore, after all.”

Laurence crossed the field to the house, and paused to knock the dirt from his boots before he stepped into the lane: he had worn trousers, and Hessians, more suitable to flying; but in concession to the invitation, he had made an effort with his cravat, and put on his better coat. A groom came out, and looked about confused for Laurence’s horse before pointing him to the door: the house was comfortable but not especially grand, built practically and made for work, but there was an elegance and taste in the arrangements.

He was shown into the salon, and a company heavily slanted: only four women to seven men, most of those in officers’ uniforms; one of the women rose, as Mr. MacArthur came to join him, and he presented her to Laurence as his wife, Elizabeth.

“I hope you will forgive the informality of our society, Mr. Laurence,” she said, when he had bowed over her hand. “We are grown sadly careless in this wild country, and the heat crushes all aspirations to stiffness. I hope you did not have a very tiring ride.”

“Not at all; Temeraire brought me,” Laurence said. “He is in your southwest field; I trust it no inconvenience.”

“Why, none,” she said, though her eyes had widened, and one of the officers said, “Do you mean you have that monster sitting out in the yard?”

“That monster’s sharpest weapon is his tongue,” MacArthur said. “I am pretty well cut to ribbons yet: did the cow sweeten him at all?”

“As much as you might like, sir,” Laurence said, dryly. “—you have quite hit on the point of weakness.”

The supper was, for all the ulterior motives likely to have been its inspiration, a comfortable and civilized affair: Laurence had not quite known what to expect, from the colonial society, but Mrs. MacArthur was plainly a woman of some character, and though indeed never striving for a formality which both the climate and the situation of the colony would have rendered tiresome and a little absurd, she directed the style of their gathering nevertheless. She could not have a balanced table, so she served the meal in two courses, inviting her guests to refresh themselves in between with a little walking in the gardens, illuminated with lamps, and rearranging the seating on their return to partner the ladies afresh.

The meal was thoughtfully suited to the weather as well: a cool soup of fresh cucumber and mint, meat served in jellied aspic, beef very thinly carved from the joint, lightly boiled chicken; and instead of pudding an array of cakes, with pots of jam, and excellent, fragrant tea; all served on porcelain of the very highest quality, the one real extravagance Laurence remarked: dishes of white and that particularly delicate shade of blue which could not be achieved by any European art, and the strength of real quality.

He noticed it to his hostess with compliments; to his surprise she looked a little crestfallen, and said, “Oh, you have found out my weakness, Mr. Laurence; I could not resist them, although I know very well I oughtn’t: they must be smuggled, of course.”

“Do not say it aloud!” MacArthur cried. “So long as you do not know it for certain, you may ha’e your dishes, and we our tea; and long may the rascals thrive.”

One of the many charges Bligh had laid at the rebels’ door had been the practice of smuggling: the back alleys and trading houses of Sydney were flooded with goods from China, which from the price alone one could tell had evaded the East India Company’s monopoly on such trade. “And I expect he would blame us for the drought, too, if he heard me say I thought the weather would hold clear another month,” MacArthur said, offering a glass of port, when the ladies had left them.

“I don’t say we have never brought in some goods which a governor might not approve of,” he continued, “but I am speaking of rum, which we must have; you cannot get a man to work here, except you fill his glass, and with more than you can pour at five shillings the bottle. A damned folly, too: a pickled liver cannot tell good dark West Indian rum from the Bengali stuff. But we cannot even bring in that, now: there is not a smell of any kind of goods, from Africa, since the Cape was lost.

“As for the China goods, by God! If I could make a profit selling China ware at two pounds a box in Sydney, with all the cost and risk of freight, I would be packing it on ships for England, instead, and die rich as Croesus. There are fellows making a pretty penny selling it on, I believe, even when they can only buy it one box at a time.”

There was a general murmur of agreement, and some anecdotes of trading agreements followed: it seemed to Laurence the officers all were tradesmen also, in some measure, and the tradesmen all former officers, and many of them landed as well: they made no distinction amongst themselves, and perhaps could not have, if there were not men of business enough established in the colony to provide opportunities for investment, or their rough-and-tumble fortunes not yet sufficiently realized in coin to take advantage of them.

MacArthur drew him aside, as the cigars were offered around and lit, and to the open doors looking into the gardens: squeaking small bats were flying now in clouds around the trees where earlier they had slept, hanging. “I am grateful to you for coming,” he said. “We gave you little enough reason to do so.”

“You are a good host, sir,” Laurence said, “and it is a welcome I had not looked for.”

“Governor Bligh would call me a traitor, so far as that goes: has done oft enough, I imagine,” MacArthur said, “and would hang me for it, too. I will not pretend, sir, to be anything less than deeply interested, under the circumstances. I said to you, I believe, that I am ready to stand judgment for my acts; and so I am, but I don’t care to be marched to the scaffold before it is handed down.”

Laurence looked out at the gardens a little grimly—wilting in the heat and yet still restful to look upon, neatly arranged, and beyond them the wide spreading fields. He was conscious that MacArthur’s establishment made a powerful argument in support of his claim to have made something of himself, and in an isolate and difficult country to have carried forward the banner of civilization: uniting all the taste and respectability which was absent from the sad and rackety condition of the town. So long from England and longer yet from any respectability, Laurence could feel the force of that argument all the more strongly.

“Sir,” he answered, “I can well understand your desire; but forgive me, I will not commit myself, and moreover Temeraire, to any course of action in advance. I have a reputation which may make me seem more a friend to rebellion than I am by any willing choice; and for that part, my assistance might not be an unmitigated boon to you, if you had it.”

“And, if you will allow me to be blunt,” MacArthur said, “for your part, you would be in a pretty position, standing in the way of seeing Governor Bligh restored, if a frigate should come in a couple of weeks, declare us the worst unhanged scoundrels south of the line, and the governor to be put back into place at gun-point. No, sir; I do not ask any man, so unconnected to me as you are, to put his neck on the chopping-block with mine; but if you are amenable enough to listen, I had rather propose to you a means of evading the issue entirely.”

He drew Laurence into his study, and on the desk drew out the maps of the colony, and the penning mountain range about it, a great labyrinthine mass of gorges and peaks, only vaguely sketched. “All our purposes can march together,” MacArthur said. “You wish to be well out of the affair; just so: I wish you out of it also, and every other dragon in the place with you, at least long enough for our doom to arrive. It cannot be long now, when the last frigate brought the post only a month behind our news.”

His proposal was an expedition whose purpose should be to find a crossing over the Blue Mountains, and establish a cattle-drive road from the colony to the open territory beyond, “where,” he continued, “you may set up this covert your beasts will require, and take yourselves all the land you might like: I cannot see how anyone can complain, when you have opened the passage yourselves.

“Captain Granby is senior, I think,” he added, “and can I suppose order this Captain Rankin on such a mission: if this new creature means to go on eating as he has begun, it seems to me you had all better be thinking of how to feed him, particularly as you have two more hatchlings to come.”

“I am afraid it must keep you here a little longer,” Laurence said, rather diffident in making the suggestion: he could not like asking Granby to enter into such a stratagem, however practical.

He felt himself caught between shoals and a lee-shore, in an unfamiliar channel: MacArthur’s machinations were no more noble than Bligh’s in their ends, and likely less; even if in their forthrightness more appealing, and with the benefit of MacArthur’s greater charm of person. And they were neither of them looking beyond the parochial boundaries of their quarrel, to the titanic struggle creeping ever more widely over the world. If either of them gave a thought to the war, Laurence could not discover it, and though they might gladly make him any promises which would make of him the useful ally they desired, they neither of them recognized in any real way the colossal folly of wasting Temeraire in this isolate part of the world.

It was enough to make him look again at Tharkay’s suggestion: Laurence could easily long for the sea-wind in his face and the open ocean, and at least the comfort of doing some rather than no good, even if that small and diversionary. Something in his heart curled away from the mercenary life; but he was not certain he ought let that stand in his way, and Temeraire’s. If there was no honor in it, neither could he see any here, at best errand-runners for an indifferent overseer, and at worst pawns in a selfish squabbling.

MacArthur’s proposal offered, however, at least a temporary escape from all these alternatives; if it could not answer for long, Laurence was at present in the mood to be satisfied with small blessings. “But I would not in the least press it upon you,” he added, “and I hope you will not act in any way contrary to your judgment, nor—”

Nor, he meant to add, in excessive haste, but Granby broke in on him before he could. “For God’s sake let us go first thing in the morning,” Granby said, passionately. “I have been living in mortal terror every day I should wake up and find myself a hundred miles into the interior: she keeps talking of going to look for elephants. What I am to do if Rankin will not come, though, I cannot tell you. No one can argue Iskierka isn’t in a different class, but I have no official orders to be here, where he does; and seniority is a sad puzzle: he was a captain first, even if he hasn’t had a dragon for years.”

“I suggest you do not concern yourselves until the event,” Tharkay said, “if it should arise,” and shrugged when Rankin, to Laurence’s private surprise, made no objections either to the project or to Granby’s assertion of rank. “Bligh’s support was desirable to him when he thought you might try to deny him the egg,” Tharkay said. “Now he can only gain very little and risk much by committing himself; I imagine he is perfectly satisfied to have you provide him a convenient excuse to withdraw, particularly when Granby must soon depart and restore his precedence.”

Laurence could of course not look upon the expedition with anything like pleasure, save the meager sort involved in escaping a worse outcome. There was nothing attractive in the prospect of shepherding a gang of convicts, and a month in Rankin’s company would have been a most effective punishment in quarters less confined than a small encampment; for insult to add upon these injuries, he might also expect the hostility of the rest of the aviators.

“I know they have made clods of themselves, but you had better have at least one officer,” Granby said, scratching out a haphazard list of the aviators on the back of a napkin, in his shipboard cabin, as he chose which men to assign to Temeraire and to Iskierka, as temporary crews. Laurence of course had been stripped of his subordinates with his rank, and Iskierka had left her own back in Britain when she had decamped without permission to follow them, taking only Granby. “Will you take Forthing?”

“Temeraire has taken him a little in dislike, I find,” Laurence said.

“Yes, I know,” Granby said. “I should like to give Forthing a chance to make it up with him; otherwise we will have a job of it to persuade Temeraire to let him make a try for one of the eggs. Not that Forthing is any less a clod than the rest, but at least he is a competent clod. Most of the rest are the flotsam of the Corps as much as the eggs are. That fellow Blincoln is pleased with himself if he manages to round up half-a-dozen men to put away harness in good order; and I suppose he may as well be, because it don’t happen very often.”

Laurence nodded. “We will take Fellowes and Dorset, of course; and Roland and Demane can manage the rest, I expect,” he said. “We ought not take more men than necessary; there can be no need to burden the dragons.”

“I hope,” Tharkay said, “that I may form one of your party, as well, if it is not inconvenient.”

They looked at him with surprise. After a moment, Laurence said, “Certainly, if you like,” forcibly repressing his curiosity; Granby said, “But Lord above, whyever for? We will end with pickaxing our way through solid rock for a month in the worst heat of summer, and there is not a blessed soul out there to be found: unless we see some of the natives, and with three dragons I am pretty sure we won’t.”

Tharkay paused, and then said quietly, “You will be surveying first, from aloft; if there is a route in use, that will offer the best chance of seeing it.”

“If there were a route in use, we shouldn’t have to build one,” Granby said.

“I am not expecting to find a road suitable for general use,” Tharkay said. “A mule-track at most, I should think.”

“But—” Laurence said, and only barely restrained himself; Granby also had stopped, with an open mouth: but it was too plain Tharkay did not choose to volunteer more; he might easily have done so. “Oh, if you like, then,” Granby said awkwardly, after a moment, looking at Laurence.

“We should be glad of your company,” Laurence said, with a bow, and only later, privately to Temeraire, expressed his confusion.

“Maybe he is looking for the smugglers,” Temeraire said, unconcernedly, nibbling up another portion of sheep stuffed with raisins and grains: MacArthur had sent another present that morning, letting no grass grow. Laurence stared. “Well, if someone has a secret road and has not said anything to anyone about it,” Temeraire offered, having swallowed, “it stands to reason they must be hiding it for cause; and you were just telling me of all these goods from China which are coming in.”

“It would be a very peculiar way to bring goods into a port city,” Laurence said, doubtfully, but he recalled Tharkay had engaged himself in service to the directors of the East India Company: at Maden’s request, he might well have undertaken such a task, even if it did not seem a likely explanation for his wishing to accompany their party.

“But anyone could think of searching the ships and the dockyards, to catch them,” Temeraire said, and Laurence after a little more consideration had to acknowledge that if the intention was ultimately to ship the goods on to England, the arrangement was ideal: slip the goods into the markets unsuspected, and then any legitimate captain might openly purchase them and carry them onward.

“They must be landing them in a convenient bay, then, somewhere further up the coast,” Laurence said, “and taking them around by land; but it would be a most circuitous route, through unsettled and dangerous countryside.”

“There is nothing very dangerous when there is nothing but kangaroos about,” Temeraire said dismissively.

They decamped in accord with Granby’s fondest wishes, the very next morning, with all the speed and disorder usual to the Aerial Corps and more when traveling so light: the bulk of their baggage was made of simple pickaxes and hammers and shovels, instead of bombshells and gunpowder, and the few tents which would be their shelter. The mountains were richly green despite the summer, even seen from a distance; they might rely on finding sufficient water without trying to carry very much of it as supply, and with a few sacks of biscuit and barrels of salt pork they were ready to depart.

The work gang had been assembled with equal haste: some dozen convicts, having been promised their liberty in exchange for this one service, were herded with difficulty up to the promontory and thence into Temeraire’s belly-rigging. They were an odd, ill-favored assortment of men, for the most part thin and leathery, with a peculiar similarity to their faces perhaps born of suffering and their preferred mode of consolation: fine traceworks of broken red capillaries about the base of their noses, and eyes shot through with blood.

There were a few men who looked a little more suited to the work which lay ahead: a Jonas Green, who might himself have been cut none-too-neatly out of rock, with bulk in his shoulders and his arms; he alone of the convicts was not drunk when they came up to the promontory. A Robert Maynard was rather more fat than substantial, and no one could have accused him of abstinence, but he had reportedly a little skill at stonemasonry, and his hands showed the evidence: callused hard as iron and large out of all proportion, thick-fingered.

“You had better not mistake him,” MacArthur said, handing over the manifest of men. “Transported for pickpocketing. He cannot do much harm out in the wilderness, but I would advise you keep your purses close when you are coming back.”

Though they were nearly one and all a little intoxicated, and the hour early enough to yet be dark when they had been marched up to the promontory, the convicts balked at dragon transport, seeing Temeraire’s head swinging towards them through the foggy dimness, and were inclined to withdraw at once.

“It’s more than you can ask a man,” one almost fragile, reedy-voiced fellow said: Jack Telly, sad-eyed and disappointed in his face, his stunted person incongruous with the aggression of his protest. “I can swing a pick all day and all night, and will, too, but I ain’t to be thrown in a dragon’s belly without so much as a by-your-leave.”

The general agreement with this sentiment resisted all logic and was only overcome with sufficient doses of rum and cajolery to leave the men in a more or less stupefied state—not unlike the methods used for transporting cattle, Laurence with some resignation noted—before they could at last be marched aboard. Green alone refused the bribery, with a shake of his head when offered a glass; he was one of the convicts who had only lately been brought over in the Allegiance, and climbed aboard rather with no confidence but a stoic resignation: as though he did not care very greatly if he were to be fed to a dragon.

Forthing saw the loading managed efficiently under Temeraire’s darkling gaze and said, “I believe we are ready, Mr. Laurence,” a little stiffly but without open discourtesy: Granby, Laurence thought, had made him a few pointed remarks, on the subject of his prospects and how likely these were to be advanced through behavior which should irritate the dragon overseeing the remaining eggs that were all his hope of promotion.

“The eggs are quite secure?” Temeraire said, nosing down at his own belly, where they had been snugged in: he had utterly refused to leave them behind, even in Riley’s care.

“No: for Bligh is still aboard the ship,” Temeraire had said, “and apart from any other mischief he might do them, if one should hatch, I should not be at all surprised if Bligh should try and take it for himself, since Rankin is not going to oblige him after all. I would not worry ordinarily, but plainly the sea-voyage has affected the eggs badly: that is the only explanation for Caesar, in my opinion,” with great disapproval.

“Pray be sure that the little one is in properly,” Temeraire added now. “It would be quite dreadful if it were to slip out.”

“The netting is tight, and the padding will not shift,” Laurence said, pulling against the thick hawsers of the belly-netting with his hand, and leaning his weight against it, without much yielding. “And we cannot have any fear of the temperature falling too far. Try away, if you will.”

Temeraire reared himself up on his hindquarters and shook; not with quite the usual vigor, as he had too much care for the eggs, but enough to be sure nothing was ready to tumble free or break loose. “All lies well,” he said.

“If you are quite ready,” Iskierka said, “perhaps we might leave in reasonable time, instead of sitting about for hours.”

“Some of us,” Temeraire returned smartly, “are carrying things, instead of being quite useless; and if you would not mind being careless with the eggs, I would.”

Iskierka could not easily be used for transport: her spikes, which jetted steam almost perpetually, rendered her hazardous to all but trained men and packages securely wrapped in oilcloth; so she was a good deal more unburdened, carrying only Granby and her makeshift skeleton crew.

“I don’t see why we must be in such a hurry,” Caesar said, disconsolately, to take the opposing position; he was not inclined to do much of anything yet but sleep and eat, in the way of new hatchlings, and did not seem much affected by the boredom which had rendered Iskierka an imminent danger. “We might leave tomorrow; or when it is less hot.”

“That,” Temeraire said, “will not be for three months; now stop complaining, and let us be off.”

For all the apprehension of difficulty and tedium, Laurence could not yet repress a sensation of pleasure in climbing aboard Temeraire’s back, the familiar and solid snap of the metal carabiners locking in his hands, securely fixed on to the harness-rings; the sense of a crew, however small, moving about behind him; other beasts in company. And then the great coiling leap upwards: Temeraire’s wings snapping outstretched to cup the rushing hot air, endless blue above welcoming and glitter on the water below.

The Allegiance and all Sydney herself were reduced to charming picturesque, the dusty roads become gold ribbons from the air, and beyond the city’s bounds the neat squares of cultivated fields and orchards unrolling before them like a spreading carpet; and the dragons’ shadows fell upon them like cut-out silhouettes, rising over the hills, with the mountains rising in their blue haze in the distance.

Chapter 5

THE SENSATION GREW only gradually: the settled fields yielding to unbroken wilderness, stands of ancient timber, eucalypts with their oddly sharp fragrance rising if they landed, and the last hunting tracks fading away beneath the leaf cover. They crossed the Nepean and followed a small nameless tributary winding slow and westward into the mountains, hoping to find somewhere at its end a pass through: but there was none. Instead they came one day after another to another high, rising cliff wall: ragged sandstone, fresh yellow and old stained grey, climbing in heaps of pebbles and cracked boulders to where at last the face rose away sheer.

There was the quality of a hedge-maze to the gorges. The sun appeared only late and vanished early, hidden behind the rearing walls of rock. At first they had been glad of the deep lingering shadows, the cooler air about the river, but with the passing days Laurence was conscious of a building unease as they retreated once more along their course and tried yet another branching of the stream, with only the same fruitless result. They had not yet made forty miles from Sydney, as the dragon flew, and yet they had traversed ten times that distance, it seemed, going back and forth.

It was not merely the lack of civilization; it was the absence of all human life. The country felt wholly untenanted, not empty but abandoned. They had once at night seen a distant fire; in the morning, they had gone on foot nearer to investigate, hoping to meet some native who might perhaps be solicited as a guide; but in the deep crowding thicket they did not find even enough remains of a camp to be sure of what they had seen, or to learn if there were another living soul anywhere within a day’s flight; even Tharkay’s skill could uncover no certain sign. Upon the stone, from time to time, they found markings: handprints in white ochre, or in red; but these were old and weatherworn, for years perhaps, and spoke only of some distant occupation.

“Dead, of the plague and of the pox,” O’Dea said, when Laurence had observed as much to Tharkay, wondering why the country should have been abandoned: O’Dea was an older convict, and a man grown grizzled and sodden through hard years, though not uneducated. “It came upon them hard, the early years after we came, and we saw them die in Sydney town: their bodies came floating into the harbor, spotted sepulchrous white, and their fires burned low and went out; now they are gone, and only their curses linger.”

He was an Irishman and a former lawyer, taken up in the troubles in ’ninety-eight, and under life-sentence; this expedition had offered his first and perhaps his only chance of liberty since he had been fetched to the colony fifteen years before, and while he had solaced himself liberally with rum in the intervening span, he had not wholly lost either his spirit, or a gift for inconvenient poetry.

With too much matter here for it to work upon: Laurence did not doubt his explanation, though it might be exaggerated; he had glimpsed in Sydney some of the natives, walking through the town or plying their canoes in the harbor, seeming unconcerned with the colony’s life rather than either party or inimical to it. But few in number, and here stood the markings for evidence that this country had once been peopled, enough to bring men to this isolate place—not only once but often, for the most recent marks were layered upon older—and now was deserted. There was something bleak and lonely in the fading handprints upon the walls, which vanished into the twilight as they retreated away down the gorge: a claim and a memorial all at once, which seemed a symbol of the land itself denying them passage.

From there on, the disquiet grew among them; the stillness itself made a mute reproach. Temeraire was not immune, either. “I do not understand why we have not yet found a way,” he said. “Whenever we have flown up over the mountaintops, it looks as though this gorge and that one should meet, beneath the trees, and then we come down again and suddenly we have gone the wrong way, or else the gorges do not meet at all, and there is a great heap of rock waiting; and everything looks the same. I do not like it in the least, and it seems to me quite uncanny we should mistake our way so often.”

Large game was not plentiful, and what they found the dragons had to eat; Caesar complained of his much-reduced menu, incessantly, until the general oppression began to make itself felt to him as well, and then he wished only to be gone. “There is nothing good in this place, and I am sure no cows would like to come here, either,” he said. “We had much better get a grant of land nearer the city, where it was so sunny and pleasant; not here where one cannot even see past the trees.”

They were obliged to spend some time each day finding water, although from their lack of success in finding a route, they were often able to fall back to their former camp by the river. The fifth day of their surveying attempt, however, ended in more confusion. From the air, they thought two valleys had conjoined, if only by a narrow passage, which could barely have admitted men on foot to pass, single-file. “I will settle for that, gladly,” Granby said. “It can be widened, and perhaps once we have found one route, we can find another, if we look in the other direction.”

“And more to the point, while we look, we can in the meantime put the men to work, which should hardly be delayed another hour,” Rankin said, with a cold look over his shoulder at the string of convicts who had not yet roused themselves from around their rough and makeshift camp, though the morning was well advanced. “So far they have nothing to occupy them but idleness and rum, and I am sure we may expect trouble from leaving such men prey to restlessness and wild fancies.”

Those wild fancies were rampant not only amongst the convicts, by now. “I hope, sir,” Fellowes, his staid and hard-headed ground-crew master, and ordinarily a sensible fellow, said to Laurence under his breath, “I hope you will have a care, walking that pass; I am sure we have not had so much bad luck for no reason.”

“I do not like it, either,” Temeraire said. “Perhaps I might try and break it open wider, myself, before you should go; I have found the divine wind answers quite well for breaking rock.”

“And for bringing half the cliff wall down upon our heads, certainly,” Rankin interjected.

“It may come down upon your head, and no-one mind in the least,” Temeraire flared, but this criticism was unfortunately sound, and barred the experiment: the soft sandstone walls would crumble a little even from a leather-gloved hand rubbed vigorously across their face, and everywhere the rock rose above the tree-line stood the scars of small landslides and collapses.

The ground of the pass was uneven and shifted easily beneath their feet, gravel and rock slipping where new grass and undergrowth had yet to take secure hold, though there was also enough greenery risen calf-high to hide the canyon floor and make their passage more difficult. They could only go single-file, and the rock thrust up on either side crowding near, so that looking up, squinting, one saw only a narrow strip of sky stark against the dark walls; Laurence had the sensation that the cliffs leaned in towards them.

The wind also was crammed in narrowly, and whistled a little where it passed over sharp edges or crevasses in the rock; a loose slope challenged them awhile in climbing, and Laurence slipped badly on the other side, sliding with a tumble of loose pebbles, sand creeping into all his clothing; falling backwards he caught himself awkwardly on his hands, which sank wrist-deep into the gravel as he slid a little further.

He managed to halt his skidding progress, and lying a little dazed in the spill of stones around him saw directly in front of him another overhang in the cliff, the height of several men from the ground, marked with the ochre signs: handprints and a faded painting. A very narrow and steep ledge protruded from the cliff face which might have served as a track to reach it, for an exceptionally skilled climber.

Laurence struggled up to his feet, and only then saw there was no way forward: they had yet again come to the end of a gorge, without breaking through. There was only a small grassy clearing within almost curved walls of rock, spiky-leaved plants like ivy and a few sapling trees protruding almost horizontal from cracks, and the overhang standing above with the quality of an empty sentinel post.

Granby came in a more controlled slide down the gravel slope beside him, saw at once the dead end, and did not say anything. A few pebbles rolled a little further along from his feet, rattling, and then stopped. There was a palpable silence, all sound muffled and deadened by the encircling rock and the high slope of loose stones.

“Another false start, then?” Rankin said irritably, from the summit of the slope, breaking the silence and yet not the queer power of the place, cathedral in quality. Even he was not insensible to it: his words fell into the space and died without echoing, and he did not speak again.

It was not so easy to get out of the clearing as to get in; Granby managed it, at the price of scraped palms, but Rankin had in the end to brace against the wall and reach down a hand for Laurence to scramble up the slope and out again. Rankin himself balanced easily despite the unsteady ground: he was, Laurence could not deny, an aviator born to the life; his training had started nearer to the cradle than even the age of seven, when most boys were taken into the service.

They returned somberly along the narrow passage, quiet with failure and discomfort; it was a longer and hotter walk retracing their steps, the sun having climbed overhead, and Laurence was weary and damp with sweat before they had returned to the waiting dragons. “No,” Laurence said briefly, to Temeraire’s raised head, “there is no passage. We must return to the river.”

“It’s cursed country,” Jack Telly announced loud and sourly, over the disheartened groans and objections of the other convicts as Lieutenant Blincoln made a desultory effort to marshal them for loading, “and I don’t see why there is any call for a road into it; if we ain’t all to be found like dried-up husks ten years hence we had better be going back to town. And I ha’nt a drink all morning.”

“That is quite enough, Mr. Telly; you will have one when we have made camp by the river, if you are not having strokes for malingering,” Forthing said, and with a clout of a stick roused Maynard and Hob Wessex, who had not even taken their hats off their faces.

He went to prod Jonas Green also, lying curled in the shade of a tree, but Green, who had so far been the most reliable of the men, did not stir but only moaned; and after prodding again, Forthing turned to Laurence and said, low, “Sir, if you would—”

Across the clearing, Rankin looked away from Caesar’s side, where he had been adjusting a strap, and said frowning, “What are you about, there? Get that man up.”

Forthing hesitated, and by then the men were looking over; Green yet had not moved. “He’s not drunk, sir,” he said.

Laurence stepped over and looked down: Green was curled around himself with sweat sprung out all over his body, soaked through his shirt in great dark stains; when they turned him over, his hand was swollen large and reddened around two small black punctures.

Dorset made an inspection—though a dragon-surgeon, he was the nearest thing to a physician among them; he shook his head. “A snake perhaps, or a spider: it is quite impossible to tell.”

“What ought be done?” Laurence asked.

“I will take most detailed notes on the progression,” Dorset said. “I understand there are several highly venomous species recognized already in this part of the world; it will be of great interest to the Royal Society.”

“Yes, but what are we to do for the poor blighter in the meantime?” Granby exclaimed.

“Oh; I can bind up the arm, but I imagine the venom has already spread,” Dorset said absently, his fingers on the man’s pulse. “He may not die; it is entirely dependent upon the degree of venom, and his natural resistance.”

“Water, I imagine,” Tharkay said, a more practical compassion; but Green moaned wordless and incoherently when touched, and vomited up all he was given before they had managed to lift him into the belly-rigging. His condition silenced the noisiest complaints, from respect, but a low muttering grew as they went back aboard: it seemed fresh proof of the hostility of the country which surrounded them.

Perhaps through this distraction, or only from fatigue, they turned at some point wrongly; or so Laurence supposed, when after an hour they had not yet found again their former camp or the river. The sound of running water could be heard, but the canyons brought distant echoes near, now and again, and even from high aloft they could only see impenetrable green, and the alternating pattern of flat clifftops rising and the tree-choked valleys between.

It was very hot. Abruptly and without warning, Caesar set down, tiring all at once. He fit himself into a little shade at the edge of a clearing and curled small, for once without any noise or complaint; he only shut his eyes and lay breathing heavily. Rankin dismounted and stood by his head frowning while Dorset, the surgeon, climbed down from Temeraire’s back to make his inspections. Dorset looked into Caesar’s mouth and nostrils, then pushed his spectacles up into place again as he rose. “There is as yet no serious condition, in my judgment, but he is overheated; and has not had enough water: at this stage of his growth he does not yet possess those reserves which should make him able to bear more privation.”

“Well, we haven’t any water here, so there is no use his lying down now,” Iskierka said, callously, nudging at Caesar’s flank with her nose; he did not stir, except to flick the long narrow end of his tail. “I am thirsty, too; and not getting less so while we sit here.”

Rankin snapped, “Captain Granby, you will restrain your beast, if you please. I will not take Caesar flying about wildly in this heat again; we will have to wait until after dark.”

“Except my beast, if you like, has it aright: we haven’t water here, and we aren’t going to find some more easily in the dark,” Granby said. “Precious soon he will need that more than rest. Could we get him up on Temeraire’s back?”

Temeraire put back his ruff, but reluctantly said to Laurence, “Oh; I suppose I can carry him, if I must; but I think we had much better let everyone down, and go and find water first. Once we know where it is, we may come back and fetch them all, when it is cooler and not so unpleasant to be loaded down.”

Laurence shook his head. “I had rather not part company,” he said, “when we have already seen we can so easily mistake our way; we have grown too complacent, in thinking that we need only go aloft to find our path again. I feel as though we have turned around three times in the last quarter-of-an-hour, for all the sun has not shifted.”

“It seems to me,” Iskierka said, “that the trouble is all these trees, everywhere; I might burn off some of them, and then we could see where the river is, perhaps.”

“After four days of a firestorm, we would not very much care, however,” Rankin said cuttingly.

The trees were not of a sort which would be easily amenable to burning, either, nor to being knocked down: these were not small scrubby creatures, despite their queerly peeling trunks, but old giants, prime timber; Laurence had seen half-a-dozen which could have made the Allegiance a new mainmast. Even Temeraire’s strength could not have quickly uprooted one, and a single tree falling would scarcely have made any notable diminishment in the cover.

They determined at last to wait a little while: the sun was climbing to its zenith, white-hot and hammering directly down upon them. The day grew yet more still; the faint breath of wind brought no relief, only a dry, papery feeling to one’s skin, lips cracking and white.

They unloaded the dragons and Rankin, turning to the convicts, ordered them to break off young tree-branches, and rip up some of the undergrowth, to lay over Caesar’s hide to deepen the shade and give a little vegetal coolness from what water remained within the limbs. The men only resentfully obliged him, then with more attention treated Jonas Green in the same manner: he had been lowered to lie in the darkest shade, and Dorset was dosing him with a small cup of water.

The rest of the convicts returned to their own torpor beneath the trees. Rankin paced for a short time, as if considering whether to try and stir them back to work; but the heat presently defeated him, and he went to sit against one of the tall eucalypts, across from his dragon, his eyes closed. Green moaned occasionally, and stirred; he was yet sweating copiously, and when he roused he could not speak, but only mumbled a few words thickly and crumpled back to sleep.

Temeraire sighed a little, without much noise: he and Iskierka were awkwardly situated in the smallish clearing, having wound themselves into place among the towering spires of the oldest trees, and he could not be wholly shaded from the intensity of the sun; nor could he spread out his wings as he was often wont to do when excessively hot. He did what he could to shade his head, his neck nearly doubled back upon itself, curling partly around a tree, and then he, too, closed his eyes. Sitting not against him but near-by, Laurence also slept; or something like sleep, not half so restful: a sensation not of peace but of drifting, unmoored, the world turning away from beneath them and the sun piercing the leaf cover now and again to stab.

At length it fell beyond the other rim of the gorge, and they had a little more shade: but the lassitude was not easily shaken off, and instead deepened for a little while, so when Laurence had at last roused himself, with an effort, the day was wearing away and late: it was past six, he thought, at the very least, and perhaps later. There was a smell of roasting meat, which had brought him out of that well of uneasy sleep: Demane had half-a-dozen wombats on skewers, over a small, neat fire, and had already given a small cup of the blood to his brother to drink.

“I am not hungry,” Temeraire said, opening his eyes, “but I would not in the least mind a drink of water: pray let us go find the river now; and then I do not suppose I would mind a bite of wombat, even though they are not really worth eating.”

“Then get your own,” Demane said, rather indignantly. “They are very worth eating, to me. Finish that,” he added, to Sipho, who was showing no marked enthusiasm for his treat.

“It is hot, and it tastes very ill,” Sipho said, but quelled by a look accepted his unhappy fate and tipped back the rest of the cup; several of the convicts, also woken by the smell of the cooking meat, watched with more envy than sympathy; every man’s mouth was dry as sand.

“Might send the boy to fetch some more,” Telly said, eyeing Demane, who glared in offense and turned his back.

“We had better make a go of finding the stream again, I suppose,” Granby said, “—we won’t have more light than we do now.”

They already had little, and that quickly diminishing. Though fortunately they had not unloaded wholly, but only shifted the baggage so Temeraire might lie down, it must all be resecured, particularly the eggs; and then Caesar had to be persuaded to climb up onto Temeraire’s back.

“I do not see why I must ride on him; it is very hot and unpleasant,” Caesar grumbled; he had roused enough with the coolness to be difficult. “I think I had much better stay here, and you may go and fetch some water and bring it back; and then I will feel like flying again.”

“It will be a good deal more hot and unpleasant for me,” Temeraire said, “so you may cease caterwauling: it will be no treat to carry you, and I think it is a great pity you should have been allowed to be such a glutton that you are grown fat with no good purpose; I am sure that is why you have tired so quickly.”

This was unjust, coming from a beast who himself had grown to perhaps five times his hatching weight in the space of a week, and Caesar was inclined to resent it; but Iskierka’s temper was at once shorter and more violent. Having reached its ends, she did not bother with recrimination, and only jetted a thin stream of flame directly at Caesar’s hindquarters; which as a form of persuasion worked to admirable effect, as he scrambled forward promptly.

“Ow!” Temeraire said, jerking his own singed tail away, and hunching his wings away from Caesar’s claws. “That is not at all helpful, in the least; and will you stop catching at me? I am not to be climbed like a hill.”

Their departure so delayed, the light was very nearly gone before they were aloft again: only the gorge walls holding a little reflected brightness, the trees a solid dark mass beneath, blanketing the ground. Lacking any certainty of their way, they continued along the line of the gorge, eastward away from the vanishing sun, hoping in such a way to retrace part of their course; the sound of water tormented them, once in a while, coming so clear that Temeraire would raise his head and prick forward his ruff.

From time to time, Iskierka would set down, where there was a little opening, and thrust her head beneath the cover: but there was no sign of water. The stars had slowly begun to come out, and Laurence looking up realized in dismay from the Southern Cross that they had somehow turned again: they were traveling north-west, instead. “Temeraire,” he said, “set down: there, in the space at the base of that cliff.”

“What the devil are you doing?” Rankin demanded; sharp with anxiety.

“We have lost our way, again,” Laurence said. “We cannot keep flying in circles and exhaust them: better we should rest until the stars come more clear.”

Temeraire was indeed very hot and fatigued; where Laurence touched the hide with his bare hand, after they had landed, it felt nearly feverish: blood pumped vigorously along the great swollen vein curving down from the wing-joint. “I do not feel ill; only so thirsty,” Temeraire said.

Caesar was also worse: somnolent again and still, barely twitching when Rankin touched his head. They had only a few cans of water left among them; Temeraire held up the dragonet’s head carefully with a talon, and they tipped what little they had inside. They could not do more than moisten his tongue and mouth, but it at least perhaps gave a sensation of relief; he seemed to lie easier, afterwards.

“Let’s have a little rum, then,” Jack Telly said, whining; and with some reluctance Laurence approved Blincoln’s doling it out to the men in small cups: the worst possible medicine for their present condition, considered as a matter of health, and yet as a matter of discipline the most necessary; they were grown restive in direct proportion to the increasing torpor of the dragons, and the folly of discomfort might easily drive them to desertion and flight into the wilds of the forest, however more unlikely they were to find relief or water on their own.

“I suppose we might dig to a little water,” Granby said. “We aren’t in a desert, at least.”

They had the shovels, and Iskierka was persuaded to oblige as well; but the ground was too porous: they managed to sink a hole some ten feet down, and a few inches of water filled in, but it ran quickly away, and the sides collapsed too easily to hold. Every man had a handful of water, soaked up in handkerchiefs and wrung out into the mouth; they soaked a few more again and laid them over poor Jonas Green’s face, to give him a little relief; and then they were forced to give it up: they could not even fill a cup or a can.

The sky was yet obscured by clouds, which only infrequently broke long enough to show the stars. “We ought to have listened to Temeraire from the first,” Laurence said quietly. “In the morning, I think we must unload him and separate; we cannot hope for more than another day of searching from him or Iskierka, without we find them water.”

“And when you have found any water, how do you propose to find your way back?” Rankin said. “If you do, of course; that certainly would simplify the problem.”

“Oh, honestly,” Granby said, a more measured if less formal response than Laurence would have liked to make, when Temeraire had spent so much of his strength already in carting Caesar about. Rankin compressed his mouth, and did not apologize, but neither did he attempt to continue this line of inquiry; he looked over at Caesar instead, with real anxiety: he could not, Laurence supposed, ever hope to have another beast, if he lost this one as well; and perhaps he had learnt to value the privilege more, after finding himself out of harness.

“In the morning, we’ll have Iskierka set a fire going, a little way up the gorge,” Granby said. “If we break up one of these old monsters, we can make a bonfire they will see in Sydney, I dare say: then we can find our way back. For my part,” he added, “I mean to try crossing some of these ridges, instead of going along the gorges: I don’t know if we have gone back anywhere near the way we came, and I think skipping along sideways we are more like to find some kind of water, even if it isn’t that same blasted stream.”

“I have very little say in the matter, I find,” Rankin said, coldly. “I trust the rest of us will not have been murdered by our company before you return; I suppose at least I can let them at the rum, if it comes to that.” He rose and went to Caesar’s head, and cast himself alongside to sleep.

“I don’t like to be coarse,” Granby said to Laurence, “but if I did, I would be,” a sentiment Laurence shared: he could not help but contemplate with some unhappiness the prospect of long years immured in the colony, with Rankin the senior captain, and with the support of both military rank and family influence, back in England: it could not make for a comfortable or a quiet future.

That, however, whatever vicious phantasies Rankin might entertain, had not the least bearing on their present circumstances. In the morning they must find water, or the dragons would perish: another stretch beneath the sun’s height, in heat this implacable, with no relief, would leave them too wrung-out to fly even a little distance. “If we cannot find anything before noon,” Laurence said, “we must try and sink a proper well; if we line the sides with tree-bark, perhaps, and widen the whole, enough that we can get inside and dig.”

Granby nodded a little; they did not need to speak of the alternative.

They separated, to sleep beside their own dragons; but Laurence found sleep did not come; he was not tired enough, after their long half-involuntary rest during the heat of the day. He sat instead beside Temeraire’s jaw, where the heat radiating from his body did not come too strongly; the night air was still close and thick and hot. The moon rose, at length, and shone from behind a thin veil of clouds, haloed brilliantly in shades of pale pearl-grey and white.

It was very queer to be amid this verdant and standing forest, the ground soft and rich beneath their hands, and still so desperately thirsty when plainly there was plentiful water somewhere near; something almost like deliberate torment in it. Laurence did not care for superstition; he did not yield to it now, but he felt it not unreasonable to be conscious of how ill-fitted they were to be in this country, a lack of understanding and of place.

“They say,” he heard Jack Telly telling the others, low, “that you can fetch up all the way to China, on the other side of the mountains: and get work on a merchantman, and back to England if you like. I spoke to a fellow got up there and back, a year ago.”

“A charming notion, do you not think?” Tharkay said to Laurence; he had come to sit beside him.

“Have you heard it before?” Laurence asked.

Tharkay nodded. “It is rather popular in the port, and made all the more so for these goods coming in; although I think they imagine something more in the line of Xanadu than Canton.”

The convicts were taking it in turns to give Green a few drops of water from the handkerchief-squeezings and to fan him, despite their almost satisfied airs of pessimism. “He is sure to die, and he will not be the last man of us to go, either, you may be sure of it,” O’Dea said, tenderly wiping his brow.

At length, Laurence stretched himself on the ground, rather out of duty than a real desire to sleep. The leaves were thick blotches overhead: for backdrop, the moon had sunk deeper into cloudbank, imbuing the sky with a general pallor instead of the pitch-black of a clear night. The silence, the heat, remained. Laurence thought perhaps he slept a little; but he had no sense of time passing when he opened his eyes. There was a strange low moaning, but it was not Jonas Green, as he first thought: it was a song, somewhere in the distance.

Laurence remained prone a moment, then abruptly sat up as the noise broke fully into his mind. Several other of the men were sitting up already, tense and listening, their eyes showing white in the corners. They could not make words out, but the rise and fall and rise of the drumming came clearly, over and over: and over it an unnatural and repetitive rattle like dried leaves shaking in wind. It died away even while they listened; then began once more afresh.

“That is a very strange sound,” Temeraire said, drowsily, without opening his eyes. “Whoever can be making it? It sounds as though they did not feel very well; or perhaps were angry.”

This interpretation plainly did not recommend itself to the listening convicts. “Pray do not disturb yourself,” Laurence said, loud enough to carry over the noise, and reach their ears. “It cannot be of concern to us in your company, and you had much better get as much rest as you can.”

Temeraire did not answer, except to sigh a little breath and sleep again. Laurence put a hand on his muzzle, and turned back to his pallet; beside it Tharkay’s lay empty, and his small pack gone with him.

Laurence lay down again, mostly to give an example to the men which should reassure; he did not feel very much like sleep, with that strange inhuman music still lingering. It felt of a piece with all the rest, the alien cry of an alien land.

There were more low whispers, inarticulate yet uneasy, until abruptly Rankin’s voice rang out in its drawling, ironic vowels, “I am sorry to have to ask you gentlemen to be so good as to reserve your presentiments of disaster for morning: I am not competent to endure the hysterics without the fortification of a night’s rest and strong coffee.”

The cold contempt did what sympathy, perhaps, would not have: it silenced them. The strange moaning song died away once more, fading into the dry air. Laurence watched the leaves stirring overhead, and again time slid away from him; he opened his eyes this time to a touch upon his shoulder, and pushed himself up to look at Tharkay, who silently handed him a canteen, full and dripping wet.

“Thank Heaven,” Laurence said, low; and looked a question at Tharkay, why he had not roused all the camp for the discovery.

“I did not find our singers,” Tharkay said, “but their tracks, I believe: there is a way over the ridge to another river, and its banks are not impassable. I have found only the fewest signs of passage, but the trail is not unused. I think it may answer your search—and perhaps mine, also.”

“The—smugglers?” Laurence said, slowly, relying on Temeraire’s intuition.

Tharkay paused and said, “I imagine you find I have been very close; although perhaps not so close as I might have prided myself upon.”

“You may congratulate yourself as much as you like,” Laurence said ruefully, “—my intelligence is borrowed: Temeraire worked out the whole, not myself, and that only by guessing. But I cannot see I have the least right to demand candor from you on the subject of your private affairs. I am sufficiently in your debt,” he added, “that I hope you know I would be glad of an opportunity to make some return; and you need not make me explanations.”

Tharkay smiled, glinting a little even in the dark. “You are kind to make me such an offer; I can well imagine how little you would like in practice to lend yourself so blindly to another man’s course.”

Very true, Laurence was forced to admit, “but despite that, I will not withdraw,” he said, “and if you prefer to keep your silence, I beg you to believe I will not press you.”

“I do not propose to entertain myself unnecessarily,” Tharkay said, “though I will ask you to come aside with me: I have been silent all this while shipboard only because I am not content with the genteel fiction of privacy when separated by only a plank of wood from a hundred idle ears, and I am no more so here in an open forest, surrounded by men who may only pretend to sleep.”

Chapter 6

“YES,” Tharkay said, “I am looking for the smugglers.”

They had walked a short distance into the trees, pressing down the undergrowth; pebbles shifting underfoot and the creak of branches pushed aside assured them no one should be following without their hearing it.

“The East India Company,” Tharkay continued, “is losing some fifty thousand pounds per annum to their work, and they fear worse to come; much worse. So far the illegal trade is only a trickle, but it is a steady trickle they cannot close up, and widening.”

Laurence nodded. “And the goods are not coming in by sea?”

“More to the point,” Tharkay said, “the goods are not leaving by Canton.” Laurence stared. “You begin to understand the degree of their concern, I think.”

“How can they be certain?” Laurence said. “The port is fantastically busy; some shipments must be able to evade their monopoly.”

Tharkay said, “When the smuggling first began to be noticed, a little more than a year ago, word was sent to the offices in Canton to make a note of all ships coming through the port, with the intention of tracing the source: similar efforts have been made before, of course, although they were puzzled by a method so indirect as funneling the goods through Sydney—”

“The operation must eat nearly all the profit of it,” Laurence said.

“So they imagined,” Tharkay said, “and did not at first take it very seriously; they expected to find at the bottom of it only some enthusiast, who was willing to spend a pound to save sixpence: there is very little which inspires creativity so much as government tariffs and licenses. But the ships and their cargo are accounted for, nearly every one. There are a handful of cases—” He shrugged a little, dismissing these. “Nothing which could account for the steady flow of goods; which is only increasing.”

“They fear, then, that the Chinese have opened another port,” Laurence said, “to some other nation.”

“Perhaps not officially,” Tharkay said. “But if the officials of some port city should choose to turn a blind eye to the occasional foreign vessel; for instance, if they should be persuaded by one with sympathy for some foreign nation—”

“Lien,” Laurence said immediately, “and Napoleon would care nothing for the profit; not so long as he could undermine our trade.”

Tharkay nodded. “It all fits together very nicely,” he said. “The French funnel cheap goods to our markets, undercutting the East India Company—”

Trade was Britain’s lifeblood: it bore the cost of the merchant marine which trained her seamen and her shipbuilders; it brought in the gold and silver which funded her allies, and put armies on the Continent to stand in the way of Bonaparte’s dominion. “If prices fell badly enough, they might cause a panic in the Exchange,” Laurence said. “But would anyone in China risk so obliging Lien?”

She had been disgraced in China with the death of her former companion, Prince Yongxing: he had been chief of that conservative faction which had preferred to have nothing to do with the nations of the West, either in commerce or in politics. They had schemed to supplant Crown Prince Mianning, himself privately a sympathizer with the more liberal slant of his court; their design having been uncovered and thwarted, and Yongxing himself slain, Lien had chosen exile in France, divorcing herself from her former home in hopes of finding Napoleon an effective instrument of revenge.

Tharkay shrugged. “You know as well as do I the reverence with which Celestials are viewed, and Yongxing’s political allies were only defeated, not eradicated. In the intervening years, they may have regrouped.”

“It seems just the sort of thing Lien would do,” Temeraire said, shaking his tendrils free of water, having drunk his fill, and enjoying the sentiment of righteous disdain. “She and Yongxing were so angry that China should have any trade with the West, and tried to do so many wicked things all in the name of preventing it; and now she has changed her notion and is looking for more.”

Laurence paused, and doubtfully said, “I had not considered that her philosophy was so opposed to opening the borders of China, in its principles; it is incongruous, a little,” then fell silent.

“That is just what I mean,” Temeraire said. “She is perfectly happy to throw all of that over, if only it will hurt us: just her sort of unpleasantness. Laurence, I do not mean to complain,” he added, “for this water is very nice—so fresh and crisp!—but I am hungry.”

Tharkay’s little creek had led them, with only half-an-hour’s flight, to the river into which it merged: wide and clear, and lined along both banks with tall, tall pines. The river flowed in the wrong direction for their needs, south towards Sydney instead of away, and anyway it was full of rocks and very shallow in places; but there was room to walk along its banks, and Tharkay was of the opinion that if they should follow it upstream, they might well find it beginning somewhere in a pass, on the other side of the mountains.

Temeraire thought it an excellent idea to stay close to the river, in any case; one grew so very parched, much more quickly than one might have expected, and then of course there was Caesar—

He cast a disgusted look over: Caesar had needed to be carried to the river, even after they had given him two canteens full of water, and told him there was more to be had, even more cool and refreshing; it had not stirred him to make any effort. He had only said, “I don’t care to fly, just yet; Temeraire may take me,” in the most casual way, and sighed even when asked to climb up onto Temeraire’s back. And when they had finally brought him to the river, he had climbed down and, before anyone could stop him, walked straight on off the bank to immerse himself, so everyone else who wished to drink or to fill a canteen had to use a less convenient place further upstream.

Even the poor sick convict Jonas Green had done better: he had roused up quite heroically when given a full cup, and said, “Damn me if I will die, after all: let me have some more!” and although he trembled dreadfully when he tried to stand, he hobbled over with two men helping him, and sat by the bank until he had managed to wash himself all over, and his wretchedly stinking clothing also, all of which he spread beside him on some flat stones, in the sunlight, to dry.

Caesar, on the other hand, had to be reminded to drink; and then not allowed to drink too much; and then prodded sharply to get out of the water, so others might bathe; even though he was so small yet that a little while lying in the river had sufficed to see him clean. He had sighed and hinted that he wanted scrubbing, when all he needed to do was flatten himself a little to have the water rush over his back with no help. Rankin had at once ordered several of the convicts to oblige him, which meant they were all tired and disinclined to help when Temeraire wished to be bathed a little, too, and needed someone to carry buckets up to his back to pour the water over.

Temeraire sighed and made the best of what Demane and Roland could do, meanwhile dabbling his nose in the deepest part of the river, and tipping his head up so the water would run down his neck. “You might wash down the eggs, too,” he added, “with a soft rag, if you please, and not very hard, only to be sure the shells are clean.”

Lieutenant Forthing was very quick to join in this work, Temeraire noted disapprovingly, and made sure to keep close watch upon him and ensure Forthing did not try and speak to the eggs, to make them any inappropriate promises or brag of himself. “That is enough; it is clean, so you may have done,” Temeraire said, when Forthing had wiped away the dust on the larger egg, the Yellow Reaper; he was not so eager to linger while working on the very little one, at least.

“Temeraire,” Tharkay said to him, when they had all drunk their fill, and settled for a comfortable rest in the shade, while the sun worked past its height, “do you see any signs of fire, along the river, more distantly?”

Temeraire did not mind leaping aloft for a little while, now there was water, and hovering looked as closely as he could in either direction, so far as he could see before the river twisted out of sight around a curve, and plunged away into a canyon the other way, but there was no sign of any person at all, “and also,” he said, coming back down, “I am sorry to say, no sign of any game. I hope I have not been too ungrateful, about the kangaroos.”

“That may make us a little uncomfortable, but it is some encouragement to me if the game has been frightened off,” Tharkay said, and turned towards the camp.

“So you propose to erect a road alongside the river,” Rankin was saying to Laurence, “which will meander in every direction, to the certain unnecessary expense of twenty miles out of fifty, no doubt, and having been built in the midst of summer and drought will be flooded at the first rains; and this, before we have even traced it to its conclusion.”

“Captain Rankin,” Laurence said, in that very level and restrained way which meant he was particularly angry, “if you have uncovered a more certain passage, overnight, I would be glad to hear of it. In the meantime, we are charged to build a road—”

“We are not charged to waste our days wandering in an uncomfortable wilderness to no good purpose, sitting idly by and shepherding these men along, to we know not what end,” Rankin said. “And I have made use of a night’s reflection to better comprehend what anyone of sense,” he stressed, pointedly, “might have observed, from our flights yesterday: there is no reason why these gorges should make a passage at all, and as they evidently choose to collapse at very little provocation, even if we should find one, we could not rely on its perpetuity. We are wandering in a maze that has no exit. We had far better go up on the heights, and find a crossing along the ridges.”

“So that every cow can be marched a thousand feet into the air, and a thousand feet down again, before they come to market,” Granby said. “Precious clever sort of route that would make.”

The day was just as stifling and unpleasant, and they were all hungry, and inclined to argue; as they did not mean to walk any further at present, there was nothing else to do, and it was too hot even to sleep.

“Seems to me we might stay by the water and be comfortable,” Jack Telly said, never shy of putting in his own opinion.

“Much to no one’s surprise,” Rankin snapped. “I imagine we would see two hours’ work in a day, and the rest spent in idling and drunken stupors.”

Temeraire, for his part, privately thought that at least the ridges, being so much higher, would be cooler and more pleasant; one might have a chance of some wind, and at least one would not be staring into these rock walls on every side: so confining. But of course, he would not say anything which might support Rankin, who did not deserve such a mark of distinction; as he had made the suggestion, it could be of no use whatsoever.

“May I propose,” Tharkay said, “that when the sun has eased, we instead follow the course of the river to its culmination and see what advantage this route affords; we need not immediately begin construction.”

This seemed quite sensible; but Rankin did not answer Tharkay, and indeed he turned his back, without a word, and walked away to sit with Caesar: not even the slightest inclination of his head, to acknowledge he had been spoken to, and Tharkay had not been the least bit impolite. “I do not understand what business Rankin has, behaving so rudely,” Temeraire said to Laurence afterwards, while they began to collect the baggage once again.

“None; although I imagine he takes Tharkay’s descent for his excuse,” Laurence said, looking up the course of the river. “You are quite sure you saw no-one on the banks?” he asked. “If you should see anyone—we would be glad to speak the natives, if they were the singers last night; they might well be able to tell us if we have taken a reasonable route.”

“No, there was no-one, but I will certainly look again when we are up,” Temeraire said, remembering belatedly the odd music; he had been so very drowsy and uncomfortable last night that it had all seemed very nearly a dream, or at least far away. “That was a very interesting kind of song; I have never heard anything like, or that language, at all. But whatever about Tharkay’s descent can Rankin object to? After all, it is not as though he were not hatched yet, and no one knows what he might turn out be.”

“His mother was Nepalese,” Laurence said, “and there was some irregularity about the marriage, I understand; I find Rankin is given to think a great deal of birth, and not enough of character.”

He did not try to keep quiet: he and Granby were inclined to resent Rankin’s insult, and Temeraire did not mind joining them in the sentiment; so everyone was very stiff and formal as they packed everything up. Caesar sighed heavily, and made many reluctant noises about flying, and let his head and tail and wings drag limp towards the ground as he pushed himself up; and then Dorset went over and examined him and said, “He may fly, but he should carry no weight; you may not ride, Captain Rankin.”

Caesar sat back on his haunches and said, “I can carry him! He is my captain,” indignantly, all signs of limp torpor gone in a flash, but Dorset was implacable, so Temeraire would have to endure carrying Rankin again, and Laurence did not look at all pleased, either.

To add insult to injury, when Laurence quietly inquired further, Dorset said, “No, no; he is capable of carrying, perfectly capable; but he is bidding fair to develop into a malingerer, and an early lesson such as this is like to have a good effect.”

For his part, Temeraire thought that correcting Caesar’s bad habits was so thoroughly lost a cause that it could not justify any such efforts, when they led to situations so unpleasant to other innocent parties; but Laurence did not like to contradict a surgeon. So up Rankin came again, boarding with Laurence at the very end because of his rank, and as a guest; and instead Tharkay went to fly with Iskierka, which did not suit anyone except her. Though Tharkay was not his, precisely, Temeraire had grown used enough to his company to feel a sense of some responsibility, a degree of justified interest; and Tharkay could not in the least prefer to ride upon Iskierka, who was exceedingly hot and damp in her person, and so unreliable.

They had been working in the hot sun, so that when it dropped again below the gorge walls they were ready to take advantage of the chance, and to fly onward at once. It was not pleasant flying, despite the lack of direct sun: they had to keep close within the narrow canyon walls, uninteresting and covered with scrubby dried-out grass and shrubs gone pale as wheat.

The river running over the rocks had a strange, steady noise; not loud enough to be called a roar, it seemed more a part of the same queer silence which seemed to envelop the gorges. It was not a sound one could listen to; it rather wished to swallow up all other noises, so Temeraire could scarcely even hear his own wings beating.

Caesar kept insisting on flying too close, where he could keep an eye on Rankin, even though it was his own fault he was not allowed to carry his own captain, and as though anyone else would have wanted Rankin, anyway, Temeraire thought. Caesar would clip him, coming too close to the wings, and once he even fouled Temeraire’s wing-joint with the tip of one claw.

Temeraire had been drifting a little, almost sleeping as he flew; the scratch startled him unpleasantly aware again, and conscious of his surroundings. “Ow!” he said, sharply. “That is quite enough; you will keep further off, if you cannot mind where you are putting your claws,” he added, and snapped at Caesar’s tail for warning; Caesar tipped his wings back and dodged hastily, but took the lesson and made a little more of a safe distance between them.

Temeraire settled himself back into the tedium of long flying, but in so doing, noticed a flash of color below. “Laurence,” he said, looking over his shoulder as he paused, hovering, “I think that is a bit of broken plate, there, if I am not mistaken.”

“Whatever is of interest in some flotsam?” Rankin said; Laurence asked Temeraire to set them down, and when Iskierka had come down also, he and Tharkay considered the fragments: it was certainly a very lovely example of Qingbai ware, broken up; a sad waste, Temeraire thought, and the smugglers had ought to have been more careful.

They went aloft again afterwards, flying quite low, where they might be shaded from the sun. The river curved away from them upstream, into a series of gorges, and Temeraire had settled it in his own head they would be flying until nightfall, when he made the last turn and stopping abruptly nearly made Iskierka and Caesar both pile into him; they could not hover as he did.

“What are you doing?” Iskierka demanded, and then beating up over him said, “Oh, there,” with immense satisfaction, as though she had done anything useful to bring them to this point. The river plunged on through the trees below them, but up ahead the timber petered out, and a broad field of rich green growth, very small, spread out across the floor of a wide green valley, framed but not cramped by rising mountains.

There was a murmur of pleasure and satisfaction among all the men—“I have rarely seen such splendid farming country,” Laurence said to Temeraire, “or at least so it looks.”

Temeraire himself was far more preoccupied with the startling evidence they had not been the first to make the crossing, after all; before him, in the field, stood a small and placid herd of cattle, their coats gone shaggy and ragged, munching upon the grass.

“Oh! I cannot think of anything I like better than stewed beef,” Temeraire said, leaning over the cooking meat to inhale its vapours, “or at least, when it is so particularly good.” Gong Su had contrived with his assistance to cut out a little hollow of water from the river, into which a fine, fat specimen of the herd had gone along with many stones Iskierka had heated, for the dragons’ dinner; and the soup was doled out in bowlfuls to the men, to eat with their salt pork and biscuit.

Laurence took a cup of the broth and some biscuit himself, and walked out a little distance into the valley: the earth was soft and springy beneath his feet, unmarred by rocks or stumps, and the leathery smell of the cattle as familiar to him as breathing. He might almost have been on his father’s estates again in Nottinghamshire, but for the glorious rearing escarpments of sandstone, yellow and grey and red, which framed the wide comfortable bowl of the valley floor.

When Temeraire had eaten, they went aloft together to the heights and cleared away a little space amid the vegetation. The long, thickly forested slopes curved downward to the valley floor like wide-spread green skirts, then thinning out into grassy plains: timber and grazing land as well, and the valley stretched a considerable length, ample to any use. The river’s banks needed only to be widened a little, and the mouth of the valley cut, to allow for a most convenient road with easy supply of fresh water for driving cattle.

“If one should put up a pavilion here,” Temeraire said, a little wistfully, “I do not think anyone could ask for a finer prospect: look at those falls over there; and all the cattle would be in view.”

If a great deal of labor would be required to realize such a project, dragon strength could make light work of that. Temeraire might fell the timber they required, and manage the stone as they quarried it, even while the men were set to cutting the road back to Sydney, Laurence thought. And when they had finished, there would be no great difficulty to bring back more cattle along it: the valley could certainly sustain a herd of thrice the size, at least—enough to support even four dragons, if the beasts should supplement their diet with game.

Laurence put down his glass, half-amused to discover in himself so much inclination towards this peculiar sort of domesticity, when he thought how eagerly he had fled from any such work as a boy and spurned with contempt the management of estates, or anything so quiet and unadventurous as a comfortable living; in the face of his father’s impatience and punishment both. He had never seen any honor to be won on fields such as these; now it seemed to him the cleanest place which he had seen in life.

“The trail continues westward,” Tharkay told him, when they had returned to the valley floor, “and I am left none the wiser as to its source. It must meet the coast, somewhere, to be taking on goods from the ships; but I expected to find the path curving, or doubling back upon itself, sooner than this.”

“Now that you are certain the goods have come this way,” Laurence said, “might your search not be more fruitful if you sailed along the coast to examine what nearby harbors, not so distant from the trailhead, should suffice to host a merchant vessel? Or,” he added, “you might leave a sentinel over the trail, and see who will appear.”

“No-one will appear,” Tharkay said, “now that we have come to occupy the valley with three dragons; we might as well be knights on errantry, blowing horns as we go. I expect you will be staying,” he added, half a question.

Laurence paused. “It is certainly an ideal situation for a covert,” he said slowly, and looked at Temeraire. “Could you be happy with such a home?” he asked. “I know it can offer none of the advantages of a more improved location.”

“Oh! as for improvements, we may make our own,” Temeraire said, “and I dare say, once the eggs are hatched, we will make a great deal of progress; particularly as these trees and stones are not anyone’s property, and we do not need to buy them before we make use of them. I must say,” he added, “while it is strange there are no dragons here, it is very convenient not to always be wondering if something you happen to look at is already someone else’s territory, and they will be upset that you have taken one of their cows.”

He seemed as delighted with the prospect as ever he had with privateering; and later, as the sun dipped below the escarpments, and they settled to sleep, Temeraire expounded drowsily on his thoughts, adding, “We will certainly put up a splendid pavilion out of this fragrant wood, and some of this yellow rock; and Laurence, when we have done so, and increased the herd, why, I would put this territory against any in the world.

“And perhaps Maximus or Lily might yet come and visit, or we might have an artist come and work up a painting of it, which we might send to them to look at; and another to send to my mother, also. I am sure she would be curious to see it, and it cannot fail to please. I do not think we have seen a valley like this in China: there are very many interesting places there, of course; and the city cannot be compared, but one might be very well content here, I think.”

Laurence could not encourage him to hope for dragon visitors, but he was glad nevertheless to see Temeraire so contented. The men had built a small fire for the comfort of its light; the temperature had fallen in the dark to a milder degree, and, settled on Temeraire’s forearm, Laurence was conscious himself of a great weight lifted from his shoulders: if politics should deny them the chance to be of use in any material way in the war, there was at least work here to be done which he could not disdain, and the hope of building something rather than tearing away, to no purpose.

The steady rush of Temeraire’s measured breathing made a constant like the ocean lapping the side of a ship; the wind breathed through the trees. Laurence slept, as solidly as he ever had in life, and roused to Temeraire snorting with displeasure and raising his head: Iskierka had nipped him on the back of the neck.

“Whatever is the matter?” Temeraire said irritably. “I was having a very pleasant dream; you need not have interrupted me.”

“There is no time to be sleeping!” Iskierka said. “—The egg is gone.”