Tongues of Serpents

Chapter 13

THEY GAVE CHASE ANYWAY: Kulingile and Caesar left to trail behind, the men packed into the belly-netting with haste; Temeraire and Iskierka stretched themselves lean and straight and flew and flew, at the limits of their speed. They made progress; little by little the dragon grew larger in Laurence’s glass as he watched, the immense wings protruding past the edges of the lens. Onward through the panting heat of the sun, always keeping the dragon in their sight; then the dusk a welcome relief, but there still might be no respite: their quarry did not stop to rest, so neither could they.

The night came on, and the moon spilling silver: Laurence had to struggle to keep his eyes on the dragon now, a moving inkblot crossing the stars, and still it did not pause. The wings scarcely moved; one beat or two now and again to catch a draft of wind, and otherwise nothing, like one of the great sea-birds, an osprey or an albatross, hanging peacefully aloft and more at rest in the sky than on the ground.

It was drawing away. Temeraire’s breath labored more gratingly than before, and Iskierka’s speed was dying. They had flown already a long day, and without halt for anything but a little game snatched on the wing, a few gulped swallows of water at a creek. “There’s another,” Granby said at last, his voice faint but clear across the gulf of the empty air, and Temeraire and Iskierka landed by the gleam of water to drink, their legs trembling and wings drooped nearly to the ground.

Granby leapt down. “Mr. Forthing,” Laurence said quietly, “let us disembark, and see about a camp; by those rocks, if you please, clear away from the water.”

“Yes, sir,” was all Forthing said; failure lay heavy upon them all.

Temeraire and Iskierka did not speak a word; they drank heavily and thirstily, and fell upon the sand asleep as soon as they had been unburdened. Forthing marshaled the aviators and they formed a phalanx of pistols and knives bristling while in that shelter the convicts hastily filled canteens and jugs, and they all drew back to the security of the rocks to eat their dry biscuit and a little hot tea.

“Do you know, the worst of it is, I don’t think they were even trying; I don’t know that they ever saw us,” Granby said tiredly, stretching his legs one after the other out and then in again, working out the stiffness of nearly twenty hours aloft. Laurence did not yet trust himself to sit at all; he thought once he had gone down he would not come up again very easily.

“No,” Laurence said. “The crew all kept below and out of the sun, and so far as I saw them they were sleeping. The dragon did not look around once.” He shook his head. “She might have been sleeping on the wing, herself; I have known Temeraire to do it, on a long flight.”

“Half-sleeping, anyway,” Granby agreed. “Did you see those wings? I suppose she could go around the world on them twice if she wanted to. I have never seen the like. That is no feral beast; that’s breeding, if you please, and I should like to know what they have bred her out of, when we haven’t seen a single other dragon anywhere in this country.”

“Their own lack of concern argues there may be none to be seen,” Tharkay said quietly. “They did not see us because they did not look; they did not imagine any pursuit.”

“You think they have her from somewhere else?” Granby said. “I suppose there might be something like her in Java, with all those islands to fly amongst; but how we have missed ever seeing one of them, I would like to know. I suppose I wouldn’t value an egg of hers much over half-a-million pounds.”

“I should value more,” Laurence said, looking over at Temeraire, so exhausted his head had lolled to one side, and he had not stayed awake even to have his muzzle cleaned of the red dust of their travel, “some way to catch her up.”

The quarry already lost, they waited the next day until Caesar caught them up, himself exhausted and deeply disgruntled: “Well,” he said, “and you haven’t got the egg back, with all this mad peltering, and meanwhile I have had to slog on all day with this lump hanging on to me; and he has eaten everything.”

Kulingile ignored him in favor of swallowing yet another kangaroo nearly whole. Caesar’s complaint was not without some justice: Kulingile had grown visibly in the short span of their absence, and would have made an increasingly heavy burden. Caesar had made by now some eight tons in weight, but Kulingile bid fair to make near enough a ton in weight himself by the end of the day.

“I will not have Caesar carry him again,” Rankin said. “We are not going to stunt his development to carry a spoiled beast along.”

“I have said I am sorry,” Kulingile said, piping, “but I cannot help it I am so very hungry. I think I might fly to-day, though, and then I need not slow anyone down.”

“I don’t see why you should fly to-day, when you did not fly yesterday, or the day before,” Iskierka said dismissively, “so it is no use saying anything like that; but I will carry you, since I am not a complainer.”

Kulingile looked at Iskierka’s bristling sides a little sadly, and it did prove something of an awkward puzzle to fit him aboard, as his own armament of spikes was by no means insubstantial, and were beginning to harden into solid horn, so that as he squirmed into position they clacked noisily against Iskierka’s own. “That will have to do,” Iskierka said, “now strap him down; and you had better not squirm.”

Dorset climbed out of Temeraire’s throat after a final inspection. “I can hardly overstate the damage. There are burst blood vessels throughout, and what blisters were half-healed are now raw. It was wholly inadvisable.”

Laurence nodded but only briefly; there was no sense in dwelling on what was done. “What would you recommend?”

“Rest,” Dorset said, “rest, and a soft diet of fat salt pork; but under the present conditions I must settle for absolutely no exertion of the throat. I will not answer for the consequences should he attempt to roar again until he is quite healed; and if it can be helped, he ought not speak at all.”

Temeraire did not much like not being able to speak: it was very irritating to always be thinking of something, and then unable to tell anyone. And if he should turn his head round to say something, as he flew, Dorset would pick up his head and glare from behind his red-dust-coated round spectacles, quite like a gimlet—Temeraire did not know what a gimlet was but had the impression it was a disapproving, narrow-faced creature that was sour and unpleasant—and anything Temeraire might have been about to say died away.

His throat did not hurt so very much more when he spoke as to make him feel the necessity of the restriction, although he very much did wish the condition to improve—apart from the endless soup and gruel which was now his portion, he had been very distressed to find himself unable to roar. It was not so bad as being unable to fly, of course, so he could not really complain around Kulingile, who could do neither, but Temeraire did feel instinctively that roaring was of particular significance to one’s existence as a dragon, even apart from the divine wind, which of course marked him as a Celestial.

He wondered a little dismally if it were perhaps some sort of retribution, although he did not have a very good idea whence this might have originated; the men spoke of a vengeful deity quite often but Laurence had thoroughly refuted the notion of God dealing out either reward or punishment in life, even if Temeraire did not see the point of passing judgment on people when they were dead and could no longer either enjoy or dislike the consequences.

Only, it did seem to Temeraire that it was somehow fair in a dreadful and unpleasant way that having lost Laurence his title and his fortune, he should now lose the divine wind, himself. It made him anxious, and he formed the habit, in the evenings, of asking Roland quietly to bring out his talon-sheaths, so he might inspect their condition, and watch her polish them over; and he would glance several times down at his breastplate during the day, as they flew.

There was one small saving grace to lighten the unpleasant restriction: there was nothing very much to talk about. The wide-winged dragon had flown quite away; they did not even find a camp, although occasionally there would be a few bones or a scrap of bloody fur left on the ground, or gouged lines in the sand where a dragon had stooped from above with claws outstretched, and once at one of the water-holes there were a few claw-marks where she had stopped to drink, and footprints showed where the men had come down, too. Tharkay looked at them and said, “Four days old; or five,” and that was when they had flown only a week: she had already got so far ahead of them.

She was flying in a straight line nearly directly north, only a few degrees off to the west; Laurence had plotted the course on his maps and it appeared—they were not wholly certain of their present location in the great empty space of the map, which made it a little difficult to conclude—but it seemed as though the course might end in a convenient bay upon the farther coast of the continent, which had been lately surveyed. “It has been marked out, I believe,” Laurence said, “for further investigation; the proximity to Java should make it of great value for shipping among the archipelagoes, and thence to China and to India.”

So they knew their destination, very likely, and there was nothing to be done but to fly towards it, far-away and tedious as it was. Laurence did suggest a little tentatively that the egg might well have hatched, by now, or would do so any day; and that it was in the keeping of another dragon.

“But we cannot turn away now,” Temeraire said. “After all this time we have seen the egg with our own eyes; we cannot let some strange dragon steal it unchallenged, as though it did not matter.”

“That is enough talking,” Dorset said sharply, so Temeraire could not go on to explain further: she was a strange dragon, after all; they did not know her, or whether she had managed eggs successfully.

And Temeraire did not quite understand this business of only staying in the air, endlessly; it did not seem very interesting or practical, although when he looked at the maps, he did think—privately, without spending his voice upon it—that if one could stay aloft so long, then it was not after all such a long way to the next land over. It looked to him only two hundred miles perhaps to Java, or to Indonesia. Even without particularly wide wings, one might make such a flight, if one really wished to, and after that everything else seemed to be closer; one might fly from Java to Siam without going out of sight of land, and then one was really very close to China, if one had wanted to pay a visit.

That afternoon—they flew now only during the evenings and the cool, dark nights, navigating mostly by the stars; occasionally Laurence would touch his shoulder and murmur some small correction, working with his compass by the light of a hooded lantern. They slept instead during the sunlit heat of the day, and that afternoon as they looked over the maps, Laurence said to him quietly, “I am sorry; I beg you to put the thought of such a flight out of your mind.”

“But, Cape York,” Temeraire protested in brief, referring to the northernmost spar of the continent: on the map, there was scarcely a gap between it and the southern coast of the large island marked NEW GUINEA; the distance could not have been more than a hundred miles.

“By what few reports we have, Cape York is surrounded by nearly impenetrable jungle,” Laurence said, “and even having reached it, New Guinea would not offer much improvement in our position: it is nearly two hundred miles across open ocean to any sizable island, and that much again to reach Java, a journey which must be attended by the greatest danger. Any small error could so easily be magnified into disaster—the day clouding over, missing the passage of time, a stronger headwind—and all estimates, all planning, might be for nothing, and leave you without a glimpse of land. Only imagine the desperate quality of losing any sense of place, and knowing that in that very moment, you may be flying further from your only hope of landfall, and yet unable to turn away from the plotted course.”

Temeraire sighed a little; he had not said anything at all, but Laurence had known anyway. Laurence put his hand on Temeraire’s muzzle, and stroked him gently; Temeraire puffed out a little breath against him, and he did try and put it out of his mind, although he still did not think it could be quite so dangerous as Laurence suggested, if one waited for a clear day. He had flown two hundred miles in a day before; though over land.

They did not cover so much ground here, however: it was too hot to fly so far, and they were all carrying quite a lot of weight. Iskierka did complain about Kulingile, despite her fine, boastful remarks of before; and not without some justice. He was still eating tremendously and growing on and on, whatever one might say to him, or however one would prod him warningly away from the food which one was still eating oneself, even if a bit slowly because one’s throat ached.

Temeraire was weighted down with all the men and their things, although at least they had put a few of the aviators off onto Caesar: Rankin had taken some of them for his crew, now that Caesar was getting big enough to manage it, and he had even after some consideration—and discussion with Caesar—taken a few of the more steady convicts for ground crew.

Temeraire had expected more complaining, but quite to the contrary, Caesar instead made himself unbearably smug about it, when Mr. Fellowes had rigged him out with more harness straps, and he made a point of learning the names of all his crew and saying such things as, “Mr. Derrow, my third lieutenant, has done good work today: very handy managing the distribution of weight across the hindquarters,” whenever they landed, or, “It is a fine thing to have a proper ground crew, instead of only one or two unofficial attendants, I will say that much: a great advantage, if one would like perhaps to be scrubbed a little, or to have a harness-buckle adjusted just a touch.”

Caesar did complain about Kulingile, endlessly: every bite of food which Kulingile took might have been snatched from his own mouth, and he would have it that they were robbing him, even though he had a perfectly fair share himself, and really, Temeraire felt, more than quite justified by his size and prospects. Caesar had begun to slow down growing, it seemed, Dorset thought: he was now three months out of the shell, which startled Temeraire to think; had they really been traveling so long?

“Longer than that,” Laurence said, tiredly, dragging a sleeve over his forehead, “and a fortnight more to reach the coast, at this pace.”

“Laurence,” Granby said quietly, “we had better think about how we mean to get back, too. I don’t like to ill-wish, but—Kulingile is nearer to being a real difficulty every day. I know he is the size of a rabbit, as dragons go, but without the air-sacs doing their share, he is getting to be as heavy as though he were carved out of gold. I think Iskierka could take Caesar on her back more easily than him. If it keeps up in this way, I don’t see how we can manage him on the way back.”

Demane overheard enough of this to look rather desperate, and Temeraire saw him saying to Kulingile, “You cannot eat so much: you cannot. Promise me you will only eat half-a-kangaroo today.”

Kulingile said sadly, “I will try not to; only it is very difficult to stop after half of anything, as the other half is right there,” which Temeraire had to agree as an argument possessed a great deal of justice.

At least Kulingile would eat almost anything, without pausing; if they took some more of the cassowaries, he would have them with the feathers on, so they did not need to spend the effort to butcher them. Temeraire tried a small wing just to have a taste—of something, anything, other than soup—and found it very awkward getting a proper bite: the feathers would cushion his teeth, and they tasted wrong in his mouth, as though he were trying to eat something like rope or sailcloth.

He gave up and set it down for Gong Su to put into his vat of soup after all, and shook his head. Kulingile shrugged and said, “I only swallow it anyway,” and tipped his head back and sent down all the rest of the bird, squirming a little to work it down into his belly.

“I suppose it does make it easier to take it all for yourself,” Caesar said, “before anyone else can get in a taste; but what use you are going to make of it, I would like to know.”

Temeraire snorted, wordlessly disapproving, as Caesar had eaten two himself, and did not need any more; but it was true he did not see how Kulingile could enjoy his food at all, taking it so quickly.

Temeraire found that his thoughts drifted easily as he flew, with the stars unchangeable slowly turning above their heads, and through the afternoons; when he could not speak there was not even conversation to break the stillness. The days crept onward and blurred, one very much like another; and with a quality of strangeness. The country rolled away beneath them, and dust whispered against Temeraire’s wings when he tucked his head beneath them to rest in the hot wind.

He found he did not really mind the soft haze of one day to the next: it was a relief of sorts from the weight of anxiety, and he certainly preferred to fly at night and to lie down afterwards in the middle of the day, when the heat of the sun might be a pleasure, as one did not have to work. Each morning a little before noon, when they found water, they landed and encamped. Temeraire would make sure that Laurence and all his crew were safely established upon the rocks, and that there was someone patrolling the sand, just in case the treacherous bunyips decided to make some other attempt, and then he would stretch himself comfortably and sleep for several hours in the steady, baking heat.

To-day he yawned after some time, raising his head, and squinted at the shadows: it was a little while past noon, and still very hot; he was glad not to be flying. He pushed up and went over to the hole for a little drink of water, and returning frowned at Kulingile, who looked very strange: his sides had swelled out again, and he was sleeping in an improbable posture, crouching low to the ground with his head and limbs dangling. Temeraire put his head down and nudged him, and Kulingile did not tip over or lie down properly, but bobbed away over the ground.

He raised his head and blinked reproachfully. “I am sleeping,” he said.

“What are you doing?” Temeraire said, unable to resist asking. “Are you trying to fly?”

Dorset was roused from his own nap, and irritable and vague with drowsiness said, “It was not wholly unexpected, given the growth rate. Tether him,” and would have gone back to sleep without further explanations.

“What do you mean, not unexpected?” Rankin said. “I believe we have had enough of this evasion, Mr. Dorset: what is his prognosis? I do not recall that I have heard of any dragon floating away without its own accord. If he is to become still more of a burden, I will hear of it now.”

“The phenomenon is seen occasionally,” Dorset said in his most biting tones—he did not like the heat, and most days came out unevenly red and speckled in the afternoons, if he did not stay always in the shade—“in Regal Copper hatchlings: it is an indicator he will make twenty-four tons, at the least, when he achieves his growth.”

The response silenced Rankin entirely. Temeraire did not mind that, but everyone else was gone quiet, too, and he could not help but eye Kulingile dubiously: the dragonet was certainly growing very quickly, but that was not saying very much, when he had begun scarcely the size of one of Temeraire’s talons, and now was perhaps a quarter the length of his tail.

“Dorset,” Granby said after a moment, equally doubtful, “I don’t suppose you are quite sure of it?”

“That he will make a heavy-weight, yes, now that the sacs have inflated permanently,” Dorset said. “As for the particular weight, I will not swear to it; but the extreme disproportion of the air-sacs to the rest of the frame exceeds any other recorded to my knowledge, and any hatchling which has exhibited a negative total weight at any point in their development has achieved that size or more.”

No one said anything much afterwards; except Roland gave a sort of squeaking noise and pounded Demane on the shoulder—he looked wary and dazed at once, and said, “He is not going to die, then?”

Temeraire was a little torn over the whole matter: so he would be losing Demane, after all, but on the other hand, there was the very great, very real satisfaction of being proven right, or rather seeing Laurence proven right; but Temeraire might have the credit of trusting Laurence, as anyone else ought to have, and also of having been charitable, with so pleasant a result for once. To further add to the glory of the coup, Rankin was not at all pleased, and now Caesar might not make any more noise about it, either, as Kulingile would outgrow him.

“I will believe it when I see it,” Caesar said, loftily, and then would have tried to sneak another of the cassowaries which Gong Su was cooking for Temeraire to eat, later, if Temeraire had not warned him off with a snap near his hindquarters.

Kulingile took the news more equably. “I did not mean to die, anyway,” he piped—the inflation did not seem to have altered his voice—“but I am glad, if it means I may eat more, and no one will poke at me for it.” He put out his wings and flapped a little, which sent him going up alarmingly quick; Temeraire had to reach out and catch him by the tail-tip, and even then he stayed in mid-air, floating. “Look, Demane, look at me,” Kulingile said, and flapping only one wing managed to spin himself about in a circle.

“It is certainly better than being a great solid lump upon the ground,” Iskierka said, “and I do not mind if I do not have to carry you anymore, but that is a ridiculous thing for a dragon to do; you ought to come down or fly properly,” but Kulingile’s spirits were not depressed by this criticism, and Demane did indeed have to tether him with a rope, which Temeraire allowed to be secured to his harness, as the only rocks about were flat and inconvenient for the purpose.

The only other person displeased by the situation was Sipho, but as he had retreated into the solace of his studies, Temeraire selfishly did not mind that: it was a great satisfaction to him at last to have someone who might read the Analects to him aloud, correctly; if Sipho happened to find a character which he did not yet know, he would scratch it out large and Temeraire could give it to him, which served very well. It went a good deal quicker, and also Temeraire did not need to feel quite so guilty as if he had forced Roland or Laurence to write out a stretch of it for him large enough to see.

“You are getting hunchbacked,” Demane said, disapprovingly, and poked Sipho between his shoulders; Sipho flailed an arm resentfully at his brother and spat, “At least I am not only spending all my time stuffing a fat dragon’s belly, who can’t bother to hunt for himself, even if he can fly, now.”

It was not quite fair to call what Kulingile did at present flying: he had grown so used to dragging about on the ground that Dorset said he had failed to properly develop his instincts, so that now he had it all to learn from the beginning. Quite to the contrary of any natural assumption, it seemed that being so light did not help him at all. He might get off the ground very easily, but he would then float off in quite the opposite direction to the one he desired, and if he flapped too vigorously he would go caroming off anything around, and wrecked several trees in the process. Certainly he was not yet ready to hunt, although no-one could possibly have doubted his enthusiasm for that eventual day; he could not dive effectively at all.

Demane fetched his brother a clout across the ear. “You ought to be helping me, instead of sitting here wearing out your eyes,” he said severely. “You are being very stupid: now we have a dragon, of our own, don’t you understand? When he is grown a little bigger, he will be able to hunt, too, and fight; and then they cannot do anything to us we don’t like.”

“Who?” Sipho said; Temeraire wondered if perhaps Demane meant the bunyips.

“Anyone!” Demane said impatiently.

“Why would anyone do anything to us we don’t like, unless we are going to war, and fighting them,” Sipho said, “and if that is what you mean, then having a great huge big dragon will only mean you have to fight more, and the enemy will try and hurt you anyway, so that doesn’t seem very safe to me at all.”

Demane said, “I don’t mean the enemy. The law has made the captain a prisoner, and taken all his property; what if they would try to take us, too? That is what I mean.”

“Then we would run away,” Sipho said, “except now we have a dragon following us around it would not be hard to catch us. And anyway,” he added, spiteful and contradictory, “I expect they will not let you keep him, now he is going to live and be very big; they will want to give him to somebody else. And I don’t care if they do.”

Demane clouted him again, and stalked away, but later that afternoon he said to Roland quietly, “You don’t suppose they would; take him away from me?”

“In half-a-second,” Roland said absently, without looking up from the pistol which she had taken apart to clean, “if they had any chance of it; I think I heard that scrub Widdlow going on to Flowers about trying something of the sort.” Demane did not say anything, and she looked up. “Don’t be an ass,” she added, “it don’t work that way; ask Temeraire if he would have swapped Laurence, himself.”

“Certainly not,” Temeraire said, “although,” he could not resist adding very quietly, so Dorset should not hear him, “I suppose Kulingile might be more fickle, but if he were, you might find anyway you prefer to remain among my crew; and you would certainly be welcome.”

“That is quite enough murmuring; and inappropriate besides,” Dorset said, without looking up, although Temeraire’s throat felt much better by now, except when it was particularly dry, or they had not found very much water in a day or so. “I would hope that a grown dragon might have a little more restraint than to so resent a hatchling, I might add; I must consider it particularly shameful.”

“What have you been saying to my captain?” Kulingile said suspiciously, picking up his head from his nap, which movement brought him back up off the ground, and trying to swim himself over to Demane managed to accidentally knock him and Roland both over into the sand.

“Nothing,” Temeraire said, because he could not talk any more: Dorset had said so; and anyway he had only been trying to console Demane in case Kulingile should have proven false. If Kulingile remained steadfast, certainly no one would ever interfere, although Temeraire did think it was not quite so bad as Dorset painted it, when one considered that Demane had been his, first.

Laurence found that the resentment towards Demane, which had already been pronounced, easily transmuted itself in form: where the aviators had formerly criticized his daring to preserve a useless beast and thereby slow and threaten the recovery of the final egg, they now without any difficulty objected to his possession of that same beast as undeserved and unsuitable. There was a particularly strong understanding amongst aviators which held in contempt any sort of intrusion into the relationship between captain and beast, but as Laurence himself had known, this understanding might become flexible when the captain was not considered properly an aviator himself.

He remembered with distaste the coarse effort which had been made to separate him from Temeraire early in their relationship and prefer a proven lieutenant into his place, wholly disregarding all that the aviators had known of Temeraire’s likely feelings on the subject, and even resorting to outright falsehood. Laurence himself had been too uninformed to object, at the time; he was now not so, but had no standing to speak even when he heard men muttering enviously and, past convincing themselves that it might be permissible to interfere, well on the way to embracing the idea as a duty.

Demane’s temper was not one which would lightly brook such an insult, either, and he had also the means by which to resent it: though Laurence thought he was not yet fifteen, and a little short perhaps from the inadequacy of his childhood diet, he was filling out rapidly; and he had taken to sword and pistol and rifle with bloodthirsty appetite.

“I will not tell you to swallow it,” Laurence said, “but I do tell you that any gesture, any act, which should demonstrate an uncontrolled temper, or a disdain for the rules of the Corps, can only create a worse prejudice against you, and make all the more unlikely that an official recognition will come; it will not come quickly, that much is certain.”

“They none of them wanted him before,” Demane said, glittering-eyed and angry. “They would have knocked his brains out, and left him to rot, or taken his food—”

“That is quite enough, Demane; they did their duty as they saw it,” Laurence said; while perfectly accurate, Demane’s resentment needed none of the encouragement of approval. “They misjudged, and you did not; that satisfaction ought to hold you against the natural murmurs of regret which any man might feel on seeing a boy advanced so greatly ahead of his years, and with so few opportunities as remain to them.”

“They would not mind so if it were Widener,” Demane muttered, meaning Rankin’s hapless young signal-ensign, but subsided when Laurence regarded him sternly.

“Widener is a lump, so of course they would,” Roland added to Demane scornfully, after he had slumped back sitting next to her in the shade. “Stop being so ungodly prickly. Of course they are all jealous now; they will get over it when you have been in a proper action.”

“It is easy for you to say,” he flared. “No one would ever say you are not an aviator, and talk of sending you back to Africa.”

“And I suppose you have had to knock a lieutenant over for putting his hand in your shirt, then,” Roland said, which brought Laurence’s head up sharply, appalled. “No, I don’t mean to say who,” she added to Demane’s immediate demand, before Laurence had even made an attempt, “he was drunk, and sorry after: really sorry, I mean, not just being a weasel. A weasel would have been afraid to try, I expect, now Mother is a lord admiral. Anyway,” she went on, too candidly, “I don’t know if I should have minded, if he had not been so drunk.”

Much to Laurence’s dismay, however, Demane showed as alarming and visible a predisposition to resent this, as the other; the whole business of which gave Laurence fresh cause for concern: he had been neglectful of his duty by Roland. She might not officially be under his command any longer, but certainly she was still his responsibility, and he had left her without sufficient evidence of protection. He had allowed her to run wild with the other ensigns and runners, though they were plainly reaching an age to make that inadvisable; it suggested a lack of care which could only encourage improper advances.

As there was not a single other female in their company, however, he would be hard-pressed to manage a chaperone at present; and he rather dismally felt Roland would not take with much kindness to supervision, in any case.

“What for?” Granby said, with that perfect disregard for reputation which Laurence could no longer be surprised by, and yet sigh for. “If she does decide to fancy Demane, or anybody else, it would be just as well if she got it out of the way early. Lord knows we would like to keep Excidium in harness at least two more generations, if he will have it; by now he knows our formations better than any ten officers put together. And you can see with Harcourt, there is no telling what may happen; it might take half-a-dozen tries to get a girl.

“No, but I will tell you,” Granby went on, “I am a little worried about this business with Demane: I’ll put a word in where I can, when I have got back to England, and I don’t expect Admiral Roland will have any truck with this business of saying he isn’t in the Corps. But that still leaves you with a good year and a half to manage, and I think Rankin means to encourage it, the rotter.”

“So far as that goes, if need be we will remove to the valley, or find another,” Laurence said, “and have done.”

With Rankin’s encouragement or no, Blincoln—evidently feeling that, as he had originally been offered the egg, he had some right now to try again—did make an attempt; he was a former rifleman, and while they were encamped took one of the guns and went out, in a surreptitious manner, to return with a fresh-killed cassowary, which he brought back and offered to Kulingile while nearly all the rest of the camp were sleeping. Laurence roused only in time to see Kulingile fall upon the carcass at once with evident pleasure, while Demane rolled up to his feet, his hands clenched by his sides, rigidly angry.

Blincoln did not look over, but in a low voice suggested, as he put out a hand to stroke Kulingile’s side, that perhaps the dragonet would like another captain, with a proper rank and standing in the Corps, who might provide for him not only raw meat but the chance at real service.

“No,” Kulingile said, eating unconcernedly, “I have Demane.”

Blincoln paused and said, “Surely this is a very nice cassowary; I am glad you are enjoying it,” beginning on another tack; but Kulingile said, “Yes, although the one which Temeraire gave me yesterday was a bit more fat; and the one Lieutenant Drewmore shot the day before had a better flavor,” and indeed he had been used to be fed by so many, lacking the ability to hunt for himself, that it was not surprising he did not attach much significance to the gift.

The first attempt having failed, Blincoln would have withdrawn, but Demane confronted him: a head shorter than the lieutenant and some fifty pounds at least lighter, a slim dark figure trembling with rage, and he said, “You are a coward, and if you try and steal Kulingile again—”

He stumbled to a halt, not so much reluctant to threaten as unsure precisely to what degree, and Blincoln said, “I hope,” with an air of stuffy superciliousness, “Mr. Demane, that you have better sense than to indulge in histrionics and unreasonable expectations: no heavy-weight can be managed by a young boy. Your passion is understandable, however, and I am sure if you should demonstrate perhaps some more sense—some cooperation—that you will find it a good foundation for future expectations, and a more steady and rational advancement in the Corps—”

Demane spat, comprehensively. “That for steady advancement, as though I would trust any of you cheats,” he said, “and if you think I will ever help you take Kulingile from me, you are a great fool; as if he would have a lying sneak like you anyway, after you wanted to let his brains be knocked out with a sledge. As for being a boy, at least I am not a useless old scrub sent away because he did not deserve his old post—”

Blincoln slapped him across the face, which Laurence, on the point of intervening, could not call entirely unmerited, even if there were no shortage of blame to be credited to Blincoln’s account in the situation; but the noise was crisp and loud in the dry air, and Kulingile’s head snapped up from his repast to see Demane stumbling back under the blow.

Kulingile did not precisely spring: the motion was more peculiar, as he launched himself and landed against Blincoln still floating, but then he exhaled in a sharp, hissing way, and the swelled air-sacs began to deflate, so his real bodily weight at once began to tell, and Blincoln stumbled and went down beneath him. “You have hurt him!” Kulingile said, shrill and furious. “You have hurt him; Demane!” and opened wide his jaws to push out still more air, and Blincoln coughed and struggled to push himself free, gradually being crushed.

“Demane!” Laurence said sharply, turning to rouse Temeraire, who had just cracked open a sleepy eye; but Demane was already there at Kulingile’s head, seizing the tethering-rope and tugging.

“No, come away, you mustn’t kill him,” Demane said urgently, “or there will be trouble: look, I am all right, you can’t even see a mark.”

“That is only because you are dark,” Kulingile said, “and not squashy and red like him,” but with some reluctance he allowed the sacs to inflate once more, and himself to be pulled away, leaving Blincoln gasping and wretched upon the ground, curling around what proved on inspection to be several broken ribs. Dorset bound these up without great gentleness. There were no further attempts; at least, none where Demane might see and object to them, and as he made a determined sentinel, this ruled out nearly any such slinking efforts.

The end of the endless journey came abruptly and unexpected: though Laurence had marked off each day their progress, and written estimates of distance and position in his log. This was for some time their only account, as neither Granby nor Rankin nor any aviator had any notion of keeping records which Laurence could even call barely adequate to serve as a proper second to his own, and Dorset kept voluminous and wholly useless notes on individual leaves, or berries, or the paw of one animal, and could not tell which way was west if the sun were going down at the time.

Laurence put O’Dea to the work experimentally, as the man at least could write a decent hand now that the rum had been sweated out of him; which did produce somewhat more successful accounts, if Laurence would have preferred to do without such descriptions as the Blighted Crimson of the earth here, which surely has drunk the Blood of the Heathen and unwary Traveler, and yearns to taste still more, and the wholly unnecessary dramatization of—

… the loathesome Creature gazed upon us long and meditatively, as if considering which to single out as its lawful Prey, tho the Carcase of the Offering lay before it limp and bloodstain’d from the Slaughter, ere it chuse the easier Course and withdrew beneath the Sands to devour the Flesh of the Kanga-roo and only dream instead of the Satisfaction to be found in a Repast accompanied by the piteous Cries of a more sensible Victim.

They had come now more than five hundred miles from the strange monolith through the endless desert landscape, shifting only a little to be yet more parched; they were drawing nearer the equator, and the heat scarcely to be believed: strange clouds racing overhead, and the sunsets vast and spectacular. They saw once in the distance two more plumes of fire, and endured half-a-dozen thunderstorms which sent water sheeting in violent cascades over the hard-baked ground, so the dragons had to leap aloft out of the torrents.

They could not be sure of their position: one single survey could not necessarily be relied upon; there were no landmarks known, or any way to be sure of their approach. Their progress upon the map showed them steadily nearing the coast, however, and one morning they came upon a broad band of verdant green, stretching away in either direction along the banks of a riverbed, flowing vigorously.

They cut its course again, some two days later, and after this each day the countryside grew less dry: the red earth slowly vanishing from sight as the trees grew closer to one another, and water now more plentiful. They were flying through the night, the cool wind rushing in their faces familiar and pleasant against Laurence’s eyes, half-closing, and then Temeraire was descending, suddenly, to land upon the top of a low hill.

Laurence roused: the air was salt, and below them the moonlight was running silver across the water, a thin shimmering road stretched out vanishing to the dark horizon, far away. The sound of the ocean came lapping clear and liquid up the slope towards them. There were some lights down below—an encampment perhaps, but there were many of them; and Laurence thought perhaps even one or two out on the water, from the bobbing motion—night fishermen in canoes, most likely.

“We had better camp over here, and have a look in the morning, before we go blundering in,” Granby said, his voice kept low not to carry, and Laurence nodded; there was not much chance of hiding Temeraire or Iskierka, but they found a heap of rock which the dragons might curl themselves around, and so have at least a little camouflage against a quick glance in the dark. They put up the small tents around them.

“It is something to think we have crossed the whole continent,” Granby said thoughtfully, while they drank their tea, “but Lord! What a waste of time it will have been, if the egg has already hatched.”

“If it has not hatched,” Rankin said, “I wonder what you propose to do to find it and extract it; you seem to imagine that only because we have found some native village, we have found the end of our search.” He stalked away to Caesar’s side.

“Whether we have found the egg or not,” Laurence said, “I think we have found the end of our road: it must be hatched, or very soon, and when we have reached so clear a terminus I hope they will not demand further pursuit, so vainly.” He looked where Temeraire lay sleeping, silent but for the rasp of his breathing.

He slept by Temeraire’s side; in the morning roused and said tiredly, “Yes?” before he realized he was being looked over by a native man: tall, with a curly beard gone a little to grey; he was otherwise built like a much younger man than his face would have had him, sinewy and muscled, with a spear held casually in hand; he wore a braided belt, from which was slung a loincloth, and nothing else. Two younger men, rather more wary, hung back a little way behind him.

“Laurence, perhaps he has seen the egg, or the other dragon?” Temeraire said, peering interestedly down, which despite the proximity of his teeth did not seem to disconcert their visitor. “Have you?” he asked, and began to repeat his question over in French and in Chinese.

“We will have to try and manage it with pantomime, and whatever O’Dea and Shipley can work out of their language, if anything,” Laurence said, pulling himself up to Temeraire’s back to see where the men had got to. “Mr. O’Dea,” he called, and that gentleman turned and came down from the ridge, where he had been standing with several other of the convicts, looking down at the sea.

“Sir,” O’Dea said as he scrambled down, “we should like to know if we have got to China properly at last.”

“Certainly not; we have only reached the coast,” Laurence said. “I had not thought to find you turned credulous, O’Dea; you can read a map.”

“Well, Captain,” O’Dea said, “I can; but I have seen Chinamen, too, and there are four of them down the hill there.”

“What?” Laurence said, as the native man answered Temeraire, in fragmentary but recognizable Chinese.

“Galandoo says there are two dragons here,” Temeraire said, turning his head around.

Laurence caught hold of the harness and scrambled down from Temeraire’s back, and went to the top of the hill. Below in the harbor, a small, narrow-hulled junk was floating at anchor with lanterns at her stern and bow, still lit in the early-morning light. A small open pavilion of wood and stone stood some distance up the shore, all the corners of the roof upturning towards the sky, with small dragons carved and crouching on every one.

Chapter 14

LAURENCE COULD NOT HAVE IMAGINED any more awkward and inconvenient period to their journey than to be kowtowed to in his plain and travel-stained gear by a dozen men better dressed, on the damp sand of the shore, when Temeraire had said, “I am Lung Tien Xiang, and this is the Emperor’s adopted son, William Laurence,” in Chinese, before Laurence could forestall any such introduction.

The adoption had made a useful and face-saving diplomatic fiction at the time of its promotion, on both British and Chinese sides; to use it for personal gain in the present circumstances felt to Laurence at once dishonest and wretchedly embarrassing. Now these men could not fail to perform any of the formal obeisance which their court etiquette demanded—however visibly, however plainly inappropriate when directed at Laurence—without showing disrespect to their own Emperor, a crime punishable by death.

The ritual had for audience Galandoo and several other of the native men, who looked on with interest. What structures of a permanent sort stood upon the shore all looked to be of the Chinese style, amongst which however the peripatetic natives seemed to be entirely comfortable: there were several younger men, hunters, bringing in game to cooking-pits; and women could be seen working in the enormous courtyard of the pavilion, and also peering down with interest at the ceremony.

If the Chinese gentlemen found the act objectionable, they concealed their feelings, and having risen from the sand invited them into the pavilion, where Laurence halted on the threshold, dismayed: a Yellow Reaper, perhaps a week old, was sleeping comfortably on the stone beside a small fountain, and there were several native women sitting beside it and working with some rocks.

“Oh, here you are,” the dragonet said, lifting its head, and turning said something to one of the women in what sounded like their tongue. “I am Tharunka,” the dragonet added, and a little critically, “you have been quite a long time coming after me.”

“So long as you are hatched, I do not see you have anything to complain of,” Temeraire said, having put his head inside the pavilion. “Who are these people, and what did they mean by taking you, I would like to know?”

“These are the Larrakia,” the dragonet said, “who had me from the Pitjantjatjara, who had me from the Wiradjuri; and pray do not be angry, for they needed me quite badly. You see, we are sending goods so far that all the directions are in different languages for all the different tribes, and of course all of you in Sydney, and there is no one who can speak to all of them; but now I can, as I have heard them all in the shell,” she finished, with some complacency, “and I am learning Chinese, too, as much as I can; and they have given me a great many jewels.”

“Where?” Iskierka instantly demanded, and Tharunka nosed over a large basket, filled near to the brim with glowing, burnished opals, and the women working around her were polishing still more.

“I do not see much use in just a basket of jewels,” Temeraire said later, in private, drinking a bowl of light fragrant tea prescribed for its cooling properties. “If one had them strung, on gold wire perhaps, there might be something to admire; one cannot wear a basket. At least, not without looking silly.”

“Well, I want some,” Iskierka said. “I like the way they shine, the dark ones. Granby, I am sorry we did not bring more gold with us; do you think there are any prizes we might take, hereabouts?”

Granby very emphatically did not.

The chief of the outpost was Jia Zhen, a gentleman of perhaps thirty years of age, young for so isolated a position of responsibility, and full of energy; he had presented to them with earnest satisfaction all the details of the pavilion, established for the comfort of dragon visitors, and beside it across the courtyard stood a large and comfortable house in the Chinese style, offering an excellent prospect upon the harbor.

Laurence disliked extremely feeling inadequate to his social occasions, and all the more so that the Chinese might have expected him, by the grace of his rank, to be more versed than he was; but the courtesies had baffled him in his short stay at the Imperial court, and he had not improved in the intervening time. He did not know how to tactfully inquire after their purpose in being here, nor how far that purpose went: did they think to establish a colony of their own? It did not seem very probable—the Chinese did not have anything like a merchant marine; the little junk in the harbor looked to him a wallowing death-trap, and he was astonished they should have survived the journey: a matter of sheerest luck.

“I suppose you could not have been very comfortable: it must be two thousand miles of ocean and more,” Laurence said to Jia, doubtfully.

“The journey was tiresome, of course,” Jia agreed, “two weeks nearly without land! But one must endure,” which became comprehensible to them that afternoon, watching as the great-winged dragon came in landing before the pavilion, and yawned hugely before dipping her head to the courtyard’s fountain to drink.

“They cannot colonize very well by dragon, at least,” Laurence said, after a dismayed silence: two weeks to China! He did not suppose one could make it in under two months by sea, even if the monsoon were cooperating.

“No,” Granby said judiciously, peering down at the beast, “she’s prodigious, but it is all in the wings now I see her closer; I don’t think she could carry more than a ton and go anywhere.”

“Which I am afraid begs the question,” Tharkay said, “where several tons a week of smuggled goods are coming from into Sydney, unless they have an army of these beasts,” but this theory Temeraire was able to discount, though scarcely with less disquieting news: the dragon, Lung Shen Li, was one of barely four beasts extant, of a wholly new breed.

“The crown prince gave orders they should be bred,” Temeraire explained, “to travel long distances: she says it took them almost three years to manage, and she is still the only one who can conveniently fly so far: her year-mates cannot stay in the air longer than two or three days at a time.”

“In three years?” Granby said, watching covetously: the dragon was stretching herself out in the sun, the massive wings glowing amber with a fine branching tracework of darker veins and tendons. “It can’t have been done; it is twenty, at the least, to work out a halfway sort of new breed, if you don’t mind it being half-blind when you are done.”

“Oh; it is not that they did not know how,” Temeraire said. “She says that her kind were bred by the Ming, before, and there is a record of the matings.”

“Then why the devil shouldn’t they have done it before?” Granby said.

“Because,” Laurence said slowly, realizing, “they did not wish to; or more to the point, the conservative faction would not allow it. —This is the consequence of Prince Yongxing’s death.”

They were silent, considering the implications for Britain’s empire—China choosing to reach beyond, and with the means to do so. “Do you suppose we will have to quarrel with them, over the place?” Granby said dubiously. “I don’t know how much of the country we have claimed; or where we are, for that matter.”

Laurence laid out the maps on the floor of their chamber, but they were uncertain enough of their position to make the determination more than a little troublesome. “I think we are somewhere near One Hundred Thirty East,” he said finally, “which would put us outside the border: Cook’s claim begins at One Thirty-five. The Dutch might have something, of course; although I cannot recall.”

“Well, the politics of it all are past me,” Granby said, “but someone in Whitehall will want to know this; and I dare say they would like to know it quicker than eleven months from now, too.”

There was more they would like to know, also: Tharkay slipped out, that evening, and returning could report that the dockyards were not so simple as they appeared: there were pulley wheels upon the jetty, and along the shore paving-stones had been laid down in clean lines marking out a road, very broad, in the Chinese style, to accommodate dragons. “With two foundations marked along it,” he said, “I imagine for warehouses; or barracks if you care to be pessimistic.”

Laurence could not but be grateful for their presence, whatever the larger political questions: there was a physician of some skill among them for the benefit of Lung Shen Li, out of caution for any possible complication which might threaten the health of a new breed, and he had with great courtesy discussed Temeraire’s condition with Dorset, and suggested a course of treatment which their supply had further made possible; and besides this, Jia had with great generosity flung wide their stores, and Gong Su had applied himself with great energy: Temeraire had eaten better in one week than in the past two months, and already seemed to Laurence much improved.

There was food enough to meet even Kulingile’s appetite, which they saw properly satisfied for the first time at last when he had eaten a heap of fresh-caught fish nearly the full size of his body; and in a smaller and more personal vein, there was something near paradise in finding after so long and grinding a journey, so civilized and gracious a welcome, familiar even if foreign.

But this same gratitude could not but make Laurence all the more sensible of the very real danger of conflict which this outpost represented. It was not merely the presence of the Chinese, or their cooperation with the native Larrakia: two days after their arrival, several Macassan praus appeared in the harbor, come to harvest trepang. Shortly their small flotilla of canoes were plying the coast, Malay divers plunging from their sides over and over, and in the evening bringing in their haul to be counted up and prepared: enormous vats of boiling sea-water stood on bonfires, and after boiling the trepang were hauled out and laid upon frames in huge dark ranks for drying in the intense heat of the sun.

Apart from this freshly gathered haul, the divers brought up also from time to time pearls; to these the native tribesmen had the supply of opals and heaps of dried spices, to exchange for Chinese goods. The market which was forming among them might be small only for being so new, and for the limitations of the harbor, but it was taking shape with remarkable speed.

Jia had set aside all the southern wing of the building for their use and comfort; it was not adequate to the full size of their party, but the lower officers and the convicts put up light tents upon the ground behind the building, as yet undeveloped, and so filled out their shelter. The building was in a light, unfamiliar style well suited to the humid and tropical climate, allowing the winds to bring coolness through the thin walls.

The men were certainly in no great hurry to leave: four had fallen sick, and Laurence felt himself strangely enervated, the natural urgency of so extraordinary a discovery deadened by fatigue and by the peculiar and isolated circumstances: their return journey would devour another two months almost certainly, and then whatever intelligence they might send would require six more at the least to reach any authority who might act. A full day’s idleness seemed without meaning, when matched against such stretches of dead time, and almost difficult to avoid when so abruptly they had been relieved of the necessity or even the opportunity to fend for their own care; one after another unspooled into a week, and when they had only begun to settle it, that they must shortly depart, Jia interrupted their plans by visiting to invite them formally to a banquet, to be held at the night of the new moon, a week hence.

The invitation could not be refused, after so much generosity on the part of their hosts, and so much slothfulness on their own: to suddenly find it necessary to leave at once could only be, it seemed to Laurence, the height of rudeness. “I scarcely see how it can be more suitable to attend some barbaric feast,” Rankin said, “given by encroaching agents of a foreign power likely soon to be at odds with our Government, and undermining our trade; but certainly we will wait if you insist upon it,” he finished, with cool sarcasm, “and a pretty figure I am sure you will cut on the occasion.”

“We are pretty ragged,” Granby said, “but I suppose that is better than behaving like a rudesby; I don’t see you saying no when they are offering you dinner, and bringing a tunny for your beast.”

“At the least,” Laurence said to Temeraire afterwards, privately, “the intimacy of such an occasion may prove an opportunity to broach the subject of their position here—the awkwardness such a situation must produce between our nations—”

“I do not at all see why,” Temeraire said. “We have come so dreadfully far, Laurence; whatever can it matter to anyone in Sydney that the Chinese are here? And it must be very pleasant for us,” he added, “to at least have the opportunity of visiting, if we like to make the journey; and Mr. Jia has already very kindly informed me that if I should like to send letters, he feels it quite his office to send them express. He sees no reason that Lung Shen Li should not visit us even in Sydney to deliver them, when that should be convenient. I have shown her our valley, on the map; she does not think it would be more than a week out of her way, flying from Uluru, so she can manage it now and again.”

“Uluru?” Laurence asked.

“The great rock,” Temeraire said, “where we saw her: that is where they deliver goods to the Pitjantjatjara, who have been sending them onwards to the other tribes; it is easy to make out from aloft. I suppose she might also bring some goods to Sydney herself,” he added, quite the opposite sort of encouragement which the British Government should have liked.

Laurence was determined to make some attempt, however: this outpost was new enough, and the market yet so small, that it might not be an entrenched enterprise; some agreement might be found, some compromise, if he could understand better the purpose of the settlement, and it occurred to him in a dawning hope, that if Jia would forward letters, he might send one also to Arthur Hammond, the envoy established in Peking, who had negotiated the treaty which had left Temeraire in British hands and secured them certain advantages in the single open port of Canton.

“If we could not rely on the letter’s remaining secure and unread,” Laurence said, “at least it would not take the better part of a year to arrive; and I suppose I would trust Hammond’s sense of the situation better than ours.”

“Better than Whitehall’s, also,” Granby said, and looked at Tharkay, “unless you know more of that than we do?”

Tharkay shrugged noncommittally.

Laurence struggled to form some plan of attack, some approach not hideously clumsy in execution, and to further complicate the matter, he would have to rely on Temeraire to translate as his own Chinese was a limited mess and half-forgotten. The occasion could only be uncomfortable; it must seem in some sense almost a threat, or at least interference. Laurence thought it nearly certain he should give offense, and to gentlemen who could not resent it, very nearly the worst solecism he could imagine for his own part; but he had in some sense an obligation to both parties, which demanded the effort of reconciliation: however inadequate he might be to the task, he and Temeraire at least were present, and there was no better interlocutor to be had.

Certainly the Government would likely wish to challenge the encroachment on Britain’s trade, if not the mere existence of what might be termed a colony, although the Chinese seemed less particularly interested in peopling the territory than in forming relations with the native tribesmen, and profiting by the extension of their trade. China’s strength was in her aerial forces, but one light-weight dragon, or even four, if all the other of Lung Shen Li’s breed were brought hence, could not withstand the full force of a British naval expedition, nor modern weaponry, if brought to bear against them.

But all concerns Laurence might have had and all his planning were by the next morning overturned: on the tide, a small fleet of vessels began to come into the harbor: more of the Macassan praus armed with their narrow sleek canoes, but these bringing in great heaps of ripe tropical fruit and carved wooden vessels to be carefully unloaded onto the shore and added to the other stores already under shelter. Several seeming officers of this company were met with some ceremony upon the shore, and invited into the other quarters of the house: and Laurence realized belatedly that the dinner would not be a private event, as Gong Su came and asked if he might offer his assistance with the burgeoning preparations.

Jia was now quite unavailable for any private conference, either, consumed with attentions to his rapidly increasing number of guests: the next morning, Laurence woke and saw in the harbor a launch rowing to the jetty, from a neat little merchant sloop of six guns, an American; and a Dutch vessel came in on the next tide, in the evening.

“The flow of goods to Sydney begins to look incidental,” Tharkay observed: by the evening of the dinner, a Portuguese barque had joined the increasing throng, and without wishing to play the spy, Laurence had seen some dozen small and heavy chests brought onto shore, carefully, and set into the dragon pavilion under guard: almost certainly coinage, and in enough quantity judging by the size to pay for holds full of silk and porcelain and tea; where these goods were to come from, however, Laurence did not see.

“I cannot see why they should not be delivering them by air,” Temeraire said, a little absently; he felt anyone might have been distracted, with chests quite full of gold and silver only sitting there in the corner of the building, and such splendid smells as were rising from the cooking vats upon the shore. Oh! the smell of roasted sesame; and the women were hulling exquisitely ripe longan fruits directly inside the pavilion, and heaping them into enormous bowls: the greatest self-restraint was called for, and Temeraire was not sure if he could have managed it, but for the coming occasion.

“But I will ask Shen Li,” he added, “when she comes back again, although Laurence, I will tell you privately, I was quite right: there is something very peculiar about her, and I am sure it is all these long stretches aloft. She is perfectly pleasant, no-one could ever complain of her; but unless one speaks to her she will only sit quite still without saying a word, for hours and hours, and if one should ask what she is thinking, she says she is trying to stop thinking.”

The magnificence of the coming dinner did make Temeraire feel a little awkward and anxious. He was privately conscious he did not look his best himself, as he had grown a little thin over their journey, and all the sea-bathing in the world had not yet sufficed to clear all the red dust from his hide; his scales were not quite so glossy as he might have liked, and he was sadly conscious that the edges of his wings were ragged. His breastplate had collected several scratches and dents, which Mr. Fellowes with all the will in the world had not quite been able to correct—Temeraire sadly missed having a proper blacksmith.

But at least he did have his talon-sheaths, and Tharunka had offered him some of the oil which she was using upon her own hide, against the dry, hot climate; the effect, Temeraire thought, would be particularly elegant on his black scales.

“I don’t mind sharing at all; I am sorry you had to come all this way,” she said, in what he felt was a handsomely apologetic manner, “especially as no, I don’t suppose I will come back. It is no reflection on the Corps, I am sure, as your captain seems a fine lot; but I can’t be fond of any of these officers you have brought along. They are all too pushy by half, and there is no really good fellow-feeling, as anyone might like to have around. Maybe I don’t have a particular captain of my own, but I am pretty sure of good company any time of day or night if I want it, here with the Larrakia or anywhere in the country; and I don’t have to sleep in a covert, or on a ship, or in some lonesome valley.”

Temeraire could see the sense of her decision, if one cared to have quite a large circle, as most Reapers did seem to. Although he himself could be perfectly content with no other society so long as he had Laurence, certainly none of the other aviators was nearly as good, as Tharunka showed good judgment in recognizing; and the aviators might stop going around muttering and complaining of waste, if they did not choose to be better.

However, in one respect Temeraire did have to blush for Laurence, and for himself: there was no possible consolation for the appearance which Laurence would have to present at the coming dinner, the most particular and notable occasion they had met in this whole country since arriving. Temeraire struggled with his pride, and then yielded: when next Jia Zhen came by the pavilion, Temeraire dropped his head and deeply conscious of embarrassment began to try and explain—the length of the journey—the unsettled state of England after the invasion—the minor technical irregularity of their situation—

Before he had gone very far, however, Jia Zhen forestalled him and said, in the most delicate way imaginable, “I have been meaning to ask you if it would be considered excessively bold to offer a gift of robes on behalf of our small and unworthy outpost, when we have only the most limited of skill and our materials are scarcely suitable.”

“Oh, how happy I should be,” Temeraire cried, deeply grateful, “and I am sure Laurence could not but be honored by the gesture—” which proved even more splendid than Temeraire had ever hoped it might be: there was still some deep blue silk held in the stores, and green, and yellow thread to sew it with which looked almost golden; and it proved that Mr. Shipley had formerly been a tailor. Given the pattern of Jia Zhen’s own formal robes and offered a small sum of golden coins, Shipley worked with great speed and energy, and even went so far as to try a little embroidery, at Temeraire’s suggestion.

To cap his satisfaction and his feelings of deepest good-will, Tharunka said, when it was nearly ready, “Temeraire, the Larrakia have considered the circumstances, and believe that according to the law, it was not quite proper for the Wiradjuri to take my egg from you, even though you were in their country, as I am not anything which one would hunt. As they cannot give me back now, of course, they would like to know if you would accept instead some of these opals? That bit,” she added aside, “was my own notion: I thought they might be very fine on those robes: how lovely they do look!”

“Now that,” Temeraire said, feeling as though he must be aglow, “is what I must call civilized; and I am very glad, Tharunka, that you should have hatched with people of such consideration; if they have not any other dragons amongst them, that is not their fault, after all; certainly no-one could say they do not deserve to have them.”

So the opals were sewn tightly onto the sleeves and the borders of the robe with fine thin thread, and Tharunka was quite right, they shone beautifully upon the dark silk; and when the whole was held up for inspection, no-one could have found any fault in it at all. “I will say it is something like,” even Caesar grudgingly admitted, when he had nosed his head around it, and Iskierka jealously jetted some steam and said, “It is very unreasonable that Granby will not let me take any of these ships; if only I had any more of my treasure here!”

Laurence was stricken perfectly silent by their magnificence, when Jia Zhen presented them—at Temeraire’s request, in the pavilion, so that he might observe. “Pray put them on at once, Laurence,” Temeraire could not help but urge, as Laurence held their luxurious weight across both his arms and looked upon them, “for perhaps they might not fit perfectly; there is still time to alter the size, I think, before this evening.”

Temeraire need not have worried; the robes fit without any alteration, and Laurence said, “My dear, I am very sensible of the effort—the consideration which should have gone into—” and stopped.

Temeraire said delightedly, “It is nothing, Laurence; nothing but what you ought to have had always, and how happy I am! I have not been easy about it, since I knew that I had lost your fortune; but I suppose anyone would rather have these than only some money in a bank. I do not think anyone could buy anything nicer anywhere.”

“And—” Laurence said, “—and you are certain that this should be appropriate for the occasion—not, perhaps, excessive—”

“No; how could it be?” Temeraire said. “When Jia Zhen himself proposed them; and after all, Laurence, you are the Emperor’s son: it is only suitable that you should have the grandest appearance.”

“Oh Lord,” Granby said. “Well, Laurence, you may call me a scrub, but I will be an honest scrub: I will swallow my gold buttons and silk coats and count my blessings. But at least you don’t look a fool,” he added, trying to be comforting, perhaps. “You look as though you might say Off with their heads! at any moment; but not a fool.”

“Thank you,” Laurence said, rather austerely: he felt a fool enough, and furthermore an outrageously false one, counterfeiting the appearance of an Oriental monarch and making, as it must seem, the most absurd pretensions to a station at once far beyond his own and utterly foreign to it.

And he could say nothing: if Temeraire’s plain joy had not forbidden it, simple courtesy towards his hosts would have done as much, when so much effort and expense had been spent in the creation of the garments, and when they had been so ceremoniously presented. But Laurence was perfectly certain he had not put them on correctly, and also unable to persuade himself he would not look ridiculous both to his fellow Britons, and more surely to his hosts, who knew better; he was reduced to only the meager hope that they might not fall down while he ate; which event if it occurred should certainly draw the attention of the entire assembly, as he realized with dismay he was to be seated at the head, beside Temeraire.

The tables had been put out in the large and sprawling courtyard of the house: it was a little crowded for the servants to maneuver in around the five dragons who were all welcome guests, but if a few of the Dutch and Portuguese sailors did look anxiously at the large and well-toothed neighbors, no one protested aloud. Rankin had in the end condescended to make one of the party, at Caesar’s earnest persuasion—“When there are so many foreign visitors,” he had said, “it must look very strange for the senior, the most official representative of His Majesty’s Government to absent himself, and perhaps convey a misleading impression of the relative authority of such representatives as will be present.”

Laurence would gladly have sacrificed all false impression of the authority that he wholly lacked. Instead he was obliged to seat himself upon a large and elevated bench, which he suspected of being the Chinese notion of a throne, while beside him Temeraire gleamed as though he had been lacquered in paint, and displayed what fraction of his jewels he had not seen fit to load onto Laurence instead. He was seated on the other side beside one of the Larrakia chiefs, the oldest of their company, who regarded Laurence’s attire with the unconcealed pleasure of a man enjoying an excellent joke.

The other aviators were a ragged and untidy crowd after their long journey and wore whichever garments they possessed that offered the least embarrassment; saving only Rankin, who had somehow kept with him untouched across an entire continent his formal evening rig. He cut the only elegant figure among them, down to his spotless stockings and the high polish upon his buckled shoes, with no decoration but his small buttonhole medal for valor and a simple, discreet stickpin of gold in his cravat.

“Only look how plain Rankin is,” Temeraire whispered, with satisfaction, and Laurence sighed.

Jia Zhen began the event with a toast delivered in Chinese, of which Laurence understood only enough to blush still more for his own audacity, and which Temeraire unfortunately saw fit to comment upon in perfectly audible whispers, such as “—the generosity of Heaven in bestowing upon our humble outpost the presence of the most noble Celestial Lung Tien Xiang and the emperor’s son Lao-ren-tze—that is a particularly nice turn of phrase, Laurence, the generosity of Heaven in bestowing, do you not think?”

At least after this, the worst of Laurence’s mortification was at an end: the wine came around, the food was carried in, and a gathering of men more likely to be sticklers would have been hard-pressed to care anything for social niceties before the largesse of the hospitality. One might have anticipated some awkwardness from the motley company: the Larrakia elders, the Macassan fishermen, merchant captains from three countries and their first mates, all in their respective best; their hosts in their formal robes.

But these very extremes of appearance and manners in some wise made less difficult their meeting; if only through pantomime might most of the guests communicate with those not of their party, smiles and nods seemed to serve universally, and a raised glass required no explanation. The perhaps natural consequence was overindulgence, so that by the second course, the volume of laughter and conversation was rising steadily, and what formal etiquette any of the participants had preserved began to vanish quite.

With the increased potential for disaster. Demane, unfortunately, had been seated next to a younger Larrakia man, with Emily Roland on the stranger’s other side; the young man was interested in her dress-sword, a fine blade with an elaborately engraved hilt, a gift from her mother. He managed through his scattering of Chinese and her own to make his admiration evident, and as she was no more proud of the sword than a cardinal might be of his office, she was by no means reluctant to show it away; and having displayed it, she tapped her chest and informed the young man, “Emily,” to which he returned, “Lamoorar.” From this the acquaintance proceeded swimmingly through several courses and eventually to the offer, on his part, of a braided wristlet; on which Demane, whose feelings had followed the progression with a visible increase of surliness, gave vent to a hissed demand that Roland reject the gift, on the grounds of impropriety.

“Stuff,” she said. “I don’t see why I ought to be rude; and you needn’t be unpleasant, just because this fellow likes to be friendly,” and when he would have remonstrated further, she turned her back, and offered Lamoorar a trinket of her own: a few glass beads she had acquired in Istanbul, strung upon a cord, which he accepted with a glance at Demane that a jealous spirit might sadly have interpreted as triumph.

Laurence observed the resulting spark in Demane’s expression with alarm, and tried to think how he might intervene without disrupting his own awkward position. But the event was saved: at that moment, Kulingile managed to overset his emptied dish with the wreckage of the fish carcass upon all three of them. Forthing, sitting on Roland’s other side, prudently changed places with her while the damage was repaired, and shifted Demane with Sipho, who with an air of smug and deliberate maturity offered Lamoorar a few words in the Larrakia tongue, which he had troubled himself earlier to acquire, while Demane tried to glare from Kulingile’s other side.

For the convenience of all, it had been decided that Iskierka should take the second position of honor, at the leeward end of the table, so that her occasional jets of steam should not be blown upon everyone else. Granby was seated beside her, of course, and while she sighed in satisfaction over the elaborately layered dish of cassowary and crab and fruit, the American sea-captain leaned over from his own place, three seats down, and said to Granby, “I don’t suppose you ever go wanting a tea-kettle. She’s a big one and no mistake: what sort is she?”

“A Kazilik,” Granby said, perfectly glad to brag, “a Turkish breed; fire-breather, of course,” he added, proudly.

The American introduced himself as a Mr. Jacob Chukwah, of New York; his peculiar name was evidently of Indian extraction. He added, “My brother has one; but more along these lines,” jerking a thumb at the smaller Kulingile, who was stretching out his neck yearningly to the whole tunny being set before him, stuffed to spilling-over with some sort of roast native root, and fried.

“I hadn’t heard you had your own Aerial Corps, yet,” Granby said.

“He is signed on with the militia, and they go in when they are called up, of course,” Chukwah said, “but no, they are on the run from New York to the Ojibwe: dry goods out, mostly, and furs in.”

None of the merchantment officers, with whom he might have shared a tongue, similarly made bold to speak across the table to Laurence: the dreadful state in which he sat precluded such familiarity even from his increasingly free neighbors, and when it occurred to him on the next pass of the wine that shortly the conversation would be past any real exchange of information, Laurence with some little struggle jettisoned his own sense of propriety, and leaning over asked the Portuguese captain, some few seats down, “You have French perhaps, monsieur?” in that language.

A little exchange sufficed to determine that Laurence shared with Senhor Robaldo, a native of Lisbon, a familiarity with a particular inn, which was enough to promote further conversation, leading as soon as Laurence could manage it to a discussion of the state of the war; he was anxious to know more of the attacks upon the cities in Spain, and Robaldo, he hoped, might know if the British had entered the field.

“Oh, the dog, the dog,” Robaldo said, meaning Bonaparte. “Do you know, Mr. Laurence, what he has done? He has made allies of them, and ten thousand corpses still unburied in Spain and in France both.”

“Sir,” Laurence said, blankly, “your news runs too far ahead of me; I am lost. He has made allies of—?”

“The moors!” Robaldo said with fervent, furious energy, not unaffected by the glass of wine he was gulping to wet his throat. “Dogs, dogs all of them; and he is shipping them to Brazilia.”

“Are you talking of Brazil?” the younger American sailor asked across the table in English, Mr. Chukwah’s first mate. “They have burnt Rio to the ground. We spoke to a whaler out of Chile a couple of weeks ago who had heard it in Santiago.”

Robaldo groaned, when Laurence had translated this, and covered his face: he evidently had significant interests in the colony, lending his wrath a very personal intensity. “You would think his heart could not allow it! He was anointed by the Pope; but he is a heathen in his heart, a demon, a demon,” and slid into his own language.

Rather less intimately concerned and better able to command himself in the face of the wine, being some six feet and more in height and solidly built, the American sailor, a Mr. David Wright, could offer Laurence more intelligence. “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about what your redcoats might be up to in Portugal,” he said, “but as I hear it, these fellows came out of Africa, the ones as burnt up the slave ports, and started in on some cities on the Med. They had a run at Gibraltar, too, but that went badly for them, so there’s that for you.”

Laurence was not much comforted to hear it. That the Tswana had intended some more thorough pursuit of their stolen tribesmen, the victims of the slave trade, he had learnt during his brief captivity among them; that they should have with such speed already realized their goal so far as to reach the coast of Europe was more than he would have dreaded. “Then it was not the French who sacked the cities?”

“No,” Wright said. “The Africans went for Toulon, too, after they had done with Spain, and I guess that is where Boney got hold of them, somehow—caught some of them, or bribed ’em; but in any case he worked out some bargain with them, and he has been shipping them across the Atlantic since, on transports—by the dozen, I hear, and they are happy to go.”

“He is setting them on our colonies,” Robaldo said bitterly. “—the inhumanity is beyond words. No civilized nation could abide it.”

“Well,” Wright said, when Laurence had conveyed the sense of this remark, “I am sorry for them, but it puts pretty well paid to this stuff I have heard fellows say about the business, that the black fellows don’t mind it. I would; I don’t reckon I would sit at home quiet if I heard someone had taken my Jenny over the ocean and put her on a block, so I don’t see anyone has a right to complain if they don’t, either.”

“I do not, either,” Temeraire said, putting in, “and it seems to me that if anyone in Brazil did not like to be attacked, they would only need to give back the slaves, and then no one would wish to hurt them, either.”

“I am afraid,” Laurence said grimly, “that the better part of the kidnapped are gone beyond anyone’s reach and are now in the grave; that news is not likely to appease the Tswana when they have crossed the ocean to hear it.”

“I wonder how this gentleman will like it,” Robaldo said, having gathered that Wright did not perhaps feel the full degree of sympathy which he felt appropriate, “when these African monsters have worked their way up the coast, and begun to pillage his cities: there is no shortage of slaves in his country.”

“I don’t mean to make light of the gentleman’s trouble,” Wright said, conciliatory, when he had understood. “There aren’t any in my state, and we haven’t missed them, either, so perhaps I don’t see why folks can’t do without. But I guess it would be hard if you have gotten used to it, years and years, and suddenly there is someone knocking down the door.”

Chukwah leaned over the table and said, “Davey, you can tell that fellow, if you like, the Iroquois hatched thirty-two in New York alone this last year, so if these African fellows come to us looking for a fight, they can have one; and so can anyone else who likes, I expect.

“I’ve surprised you, I guess,” he said with some perhaps pardonable complacency, looking at Granby, who had nearly choked upon the prawn which he was eating; all the other aviators at the table had brought their heads up from the profound attraction of their plates and cups. “Yes, the chiefs have come around to proper cattle farming, and it is working pretty well. I am thinking of jumping ship for it myself: they have more dragons than men to work them these days. A steady man, who doesn’t get the jitters or lose his head aloft, can have a beast of his own in three years.”

To punctuate this remark, Ensign Widener dropped his chopsticks entirely into his bowl, splattering himself shamefully.

“My brother says it is the course of the future,” Chukwah continued. “What does it matter if you can’t ship more than a ton, when you can get it from Boston to Charlotte in a week, hail, sleet, or storm? I am taking this load straight to Californiay, myself, to see if the Chumash riders will carry it over the Rockies for a share: and if they will, no bother with the Horn for us.”

As deeply interesting as the development of the American aerial shipping should naturally be to himself and to every other aviator, Laurence was preoccupied and yet again baffled where Chukwah meant to get sufficient cargo to justify his making so obscure a voyage, and not only him but every other captain present.

He was on the point of speaking to inquire, when Temeraire leaned over and whispered, “Laurence, as we are nearly at the end, it would be very courteous if you were now to offer a toast yourself, and I have thought of a few remarks, if you should wish to make them.” These Laurence had to parrot without comprehension; what little he might have understood, the liquor haze had by now consumed. They were received with utmost politeness and applause, but as he was mortally certain the same would have been true if he had inadvertently insulted the families of all the attendees, he took no great comfort here.

The toast completed, and the wreckage of the meal beginning to be removed, Jia Zhen rose—himself not a little wavery—and invited them to recline in more comfort upon makeshift couches which had been arranged along the wall of the courtyard; the tables were pulled apart and lifted and carried out, to open more room within the court, and the lights were put out. In the absence of the moon, the night was very dark, and the jetty was lined with red lanterns that glowed brilliantly both in their own right and as reflections upon the water.

A peculiar sound began: down upon the sand, one of the Larrakia men was sitting with some sort of an instrument, an enormously long pipe it seemed, which produced a deep, low, droning noise that resounded ceaselessly; he somehow did not pause even for breath. Two of the younger Chinese attendants were now standing at the jetty’s end, holding long poles with lanterns at the ends, which they dangled over the water; a crowd of the younger Larrakia men were waiting upon it.

The company had grown quiet, muffled by the steady droning of the instrument and a sense of anticipation; no longer restricted to their seats, the guests gravitated towards the society of those with whom they could converse, but voices remained low. The tide was lapping in swiftly, high upon the shore, and the waves slapped at the jetty audibly.

“I suppose they might be showing a path to land,” Temeraire said, peering up vainly into the night sky, but then the instrument ceased; in the sudden stillness, a low churning gurgle might be heard, traveling up the slope towards them from the bay, and the illuminated waters about the jetty shivered suddenly with many colors: gold and crimson and blue, rising up, and the great lamp-eyed head of a sea-serpent broke the surface and rose up and up, water streaming from its fins and in rivulets from the knotted brown seaweed which throttled its neck, like heaped strings of pearls.

There was a smattering of applause from the guests, a murmur of appreciation; although one of the Dutchmen said to one of the Macassan captains, in French, “I don’t care; it makes any sailor’s blood run cold to see one, or he is a liar.”

The men on the jetty were heaving a tunny into the serpent’s waiting, opened jaws; it closed its mouth and swallowed with evident pleasure, and they reached for its sides: beneath the seaweed lay chains, running through a network of golden rings piercing the serpent’s fins and sides, and forming a mesh. The ends of these strands were now being drawn up onto the jetty, a heap of untarnished net, and being wound upon the capstan which Laurence had seen before.

Twenty men put hands to the capstan bars, and heaving together were bringing up a chest: carved of wood in a stretched egg-shape and banded with more of the gold, the size perhaps of the water-tank of a first rate; when it had breached the surface, another party of men set pulley hooks in it, and with a great effort it was swung up and onto the shore. The sea-serpent, watching, was fed another tunny; a second chest was drawn up, and then a third, of equal size, with the same maneuver.

The netting was flung back off into the water. Trailing it behind like a skirt of gauze, the serpent turned away and plunging into the water swam to the far side of the bay: a pair of yellow lights gleamed and a bell was ringing from another distant jetty which Laurence had not formerly noticed. As the serpent cleared away, the great head vanishing into ripples and froth, the red lanterns were lowered again to dangle above the water; all fell silent once more, and yet another serpent broke out of the water, blinking slow, garlanded with gold and gleaming kelp.

Chapter 15

THE SERPENTS WERE HAVING a frolic in the sunlight, out past the edge of the harbor and where the water was dark and deeper; one could see them even from the shore as their shining curves breached the waves and plunged again, glittering with scales and their golden nets. There were a great many of them, thirty perhaps, although they were difficult to count and would not stop to even try and talk, when Temeraire had flown over to speak with them.

“They do not seem to care for anything but fish and swimming,” he said, landing again discouraged at the pavilion.

“I don’t see what else you expected,” Caesar said. “My captain says they are a menace to shipping, and they will get themselves caught in fishing nets and break them, which oughtn’t be hard to miss if they were not very dull fellows.”

The pavilion was now the scene of many and intense negotiations, among the various captains and Jia Zhen as well as his lesser officials, who it seemed were responsible for working out the various arrangements, and then presenting them for his final approval. The rows and rows of containers upon the shore had been opened up for inspection, very like, Temeraire thought wistfully, heaps of splendid gifts arrayed for one’s delight. It was a little saddening to think they should all very shortly be going away, and one might not keep any of them, although he was well aware this could only be classed as rampant greed when he had already come out of their visit with so much good fortune. No-one, he felt, could deny that Laurence had been by far the most gorgeously arrayed of anyone present, the evening before, and the exquisite robes, at Temeraire’s suggestion—he did not find that Laurence was quite so careful of his clothing anymore as one might really wish—had now been packed away in oilcloth and in some scraps of silk, and were in a box among Temeraire’s own things, safe and protected.

He would have even been very happy to possess one of the sea-boxes quite empty, and had sniffed them over several times to make a note of their design. They were so very ingeniously crafted that they had scarcely leaked, all the long way from China: on both top and bottom, a sequence of long wooden lips and trenches interlocked with one another, and these had been lined with pale creamy beeswax. It was indeed quite a struggle to open them at all: Temeraire had been only too pleased to oblige with a little assistance, and even he had found it hard going to work his talon-tips into the notches and lever the two halves apart.

Some few seals had failed, but only perhaps three of the lot, and two of these contained porcelain which was only dampened and not spoilt. Although it made for tedious work to take out each piece and inspect it and dry it again, Temeraire could not be sorry in the least, as he and Iskierka and Caesar and Kulingile and Tharunka might all sit at the edge of the pavilion and watch each lovely glowing piece come out, to be wiped and set out upon cloths upon the mowed grassy verge, in the sunlight, and there were hundreds and hundreds of the pieces to be seen.

They were crowded, though, and at first they were distracted by a little squabbling among the little dragons: Caesar was still the largest of those three, but Kulingile had eaten nearly four times as much last night, with all that Caesar had been able to do, and was not so very far off; and Tharunka, who of course was still very small, had the very reasonable contention that as this was in her country, the pavilion was more nearly hers than anyone else’s, and so she ought have the best place.

“I do not see why you must all make such a fuss,” Iskierka said impatiently, “and look, they are bringing out some platters: that one could hold an entire cow.”

“Oh, oh; how marvelous,” Temeraire cried: it was painted with a great phoenix, in yellow and green; of course it would have been the very pity of the world if it had been hurt in any way, but Temeraire did wonder if, perhaps, the salt water had faded the color a little, whether they might decide it could not be sold after all, and they might as well put it aside. “That is enough,” he added to the squabbling, turning his head, “Tharunka, you shall come and sit between Iskierka and me, up on the steps, and Kulingile, you may sit upon me: if you are not floating anymore—”

“—which I am very glad to see,” Iskierka put in, “as it is not reasonable, and looks very strange.”

“—even if you are not floating, anyway you are still very light; one would hardly know you were there,” Temeraire finished. “And there is no reason, Caesar, why you cannot fit on Iskierka’s other side, if I should turn myself a little so Kulingile can see, and then Iskierka sit straight back; but I must say it is time you gave over pretending Kulingile is not going to be bigger.”

Harmony thus re-established, they might all enjoy the remainder of the spectacle as it unfolded before them: there were even some plates which had gold upon their rims, so they flashed in the sunlight, and Temeraire did not even mind Iskierka sighing damply; it was impossible to blame her.

“I should like a whole set,” she said, “and I should eat off them every day.”

“It doesn’t seem to me that it is proper to get anything like that dirty,” Tharunka said, and Temeraire was of her mind, but Iskierka pointed out that the plate would be clean at first, and when one had finished eating one’s food it would be cleaned again, so one would have all the pleasure of seeing it cleaned fresh every day, and also of having it uncovered little by little as you ate.

This seemed almost excessively sybaritic, Temeraire thought, but after all, it was true the plates were intended for the purpose, and one ought to use them so, if one were careful not to let them be broken.

At last the plates were all dry, and packed away again, this time in an ordinary crate: they were going to Holland, it seemed, or at least the Dutch captain was taking them away after some intense conversation with one of the officials, who consulted his records and shook his head a few times, and then at last reached a bargain: one of the chests which had been kept under lock and key in the pavilion was opened up, and oh, it was full to the brim of bars of gold, of which ten were carefully counted out, and then each separately wrapped by the officials in paper; another, with an ink-pot and a brush, wrote upon them in large characters.

“What does that say?” Iskierka said, craning, quite to no purpose, as she could not read a word even of English.

“It is a name,” Temeraire said, squinting a little. “It says, the house of Jing Du, who I suppose is a merchant, and that this is the third of ten bars, in payment for the shipment of five hundred pieces of porcelain,” and the bars were carefully wrapped again in oilcloth, over and over, and set back into one of the other containers: he supposed those would be returned to China.

Mostly the remaining porcelain was not unwrapped, to all their disappointment; each piece was taken out wrapped in paper and shaken a little, and if no pieces came out they were put away into the new crates; a few did drop some shards, and were opened up, and whichever piece had broken was put aside and marked down upon the accounts; but it was more melancholy than satisfying to only see the ones which were smashed.

One of the flawed containers, alas, had contained great bolts of silk; the leak had penetrated also into the oilcloth wrappings and stained several of these wholly beyond repair, and Temeraire bowed his neck in wincing sorrow when they were lifted out and unrolled in the sunlight: great sprawling white-crusted splotches all over the pale-spring green and deep crimson bolts. But the officials only shrugged, philosophically, and put them aside in a heap with the rest of the ruined goods; a note was written and wrapped in oilcloth, to be set with the rest of the payments.

As the morning advanced, the speed of the exchanges began to increase; the rest of the goods came out swiftly, were repacked, and one after another rowed out to the waiting vessels, where the crews loaded them aboard as more and more payments went into the waiting container. Before the sun had reached its zenith, the smaller of the ships were leaving: the Macassan fishermen singing as they put their backs into their rowing and loading the dugout canoes back onto the praus. Their small white sails went up as they drove past the sea-serpents and vanished into clouds upon the ocean, sculling away.

As the other containers were emptied of their deliveries, many of the goods which had been left and unloaded over the past week were now transferred within, in their place: the heaps of trepang now dried and smoked; the sweetly fragrant ripe fruit, each bundled separate into a little wrapping of paper—

“They mean to ship fruit?” Laurence said, doubtfully; he had come to watch.

Temeraire inquired of one of the officials, who had come hurrying inside for a fresh pot of ink. “Yes,” the young man said, “the deep water keeps it cold, and only half of it will spoil. Of course it is all for the Imperial court. Six silver,” he added, when Temeraire asked the cost of a piece.

“Good God,” Laurence said, comprehensively, and Temeraire had to feel that for his own part, he should have rather had six silver coins than one piece of fruit, which might as easily be spoilt as not, and in any case would not even make a bite. “But,” he said wistfully, thinking of the great treasure-chambers at the Emperor’s court, which his mother had shown him on their visit, “perhaps if one has so very many silver coins that one cannot look at them all and enjoy them, one might rather have a piece of fruit; and then one might eat it and think, that is the taste of six silver coins.”

One entire container, one of the newest judging by the color of the outer wood not yet as stained by the ocean waters, was thoroughly lined with oilcloth, and into this were laid bundles upon bundles of furs from the American ship: they were not gold, or brilliantly colored, so Temeraire found it a little peculiar that so much care should be taken with them, but when one of the bundles was spread out, it did glow very richly in the sunlight, a sort of warm red-brown color, and Laurence evidently thought them very fine: beaver, he said, and seal, and mink, which would go to make winter coats of particular warmth.

“Perhaps I ought to have one made for Granby,” Iskierka said—showing away, Temeraire thought with some superiority, out of jealousy over Laurence’s robes; it certainly could not compare in beauty, although as a practical matter, it might not be a bad notion; but it did not seem as though it was ever cold in this country.

Not all the furs were laid into the container, either: Mr. Chukwah and Senhor Robaldo were not allowing anything on the order of a philosophical difference to stand in the way of their making a separate arrangement, and a crate of furs was exchanged for a casket of gold and silver, to the satisfaction of both parties.

At the very last, a final few containers were opened: and within them inside oilskin wrappings a second nested container, and within that another layer of oilskin, which folded back revealed at last rows upon rows of sealed wooden casks marked with characters upon the top: Silver Needle, White Dragon, Yellow Flower, and when one of these was breached, the lovely fragrant smell of tea wafted nearly to the pavilion.

“How many tons would you say this delivery has made?” Laurence said to Tharkay, as the tea was bargained out among the captains, for really astonishing amounts of gold, Temeraire wistfully noticed.

“Twenty at the least,” Tharkay said, and flicked a hand at the smaller pile of goods set aside at the end of the beach, those which had not been taken by anyone; Temeraire had been wondering with increasing interest what should be the fate of those neglected goods, as he could not see anything wrong with any of them. “I imagine the leavings are all they send to Sydney.”

“It is ours: it is part of the payment for using Larrakia country,” Tharunka explained, looking up. “Whatever they cannot sell, we keep, and whatever we don’t want we trade to the Pitjantjatjara, and the Yolngu, and I think the Pitjantjatjara trade it to the Barkindji and the Wiradjuri, who take it to Sydney, and trade it to you. So everyone may have something they like, and no one has to travel anywhere they don’t want, and by the end of it, no one gets left with anything they don’t care for,” which seemed to Temeraire an eminently sensible arrangement through and through.

Laurence did not seem quite so sanguine. “How often do the serpents come, with such a load?” he asked.

Tharunka consulted with Binmuck, the chief of her companions: a woman with a soft and peculiarly deep voice. With the women’s habit of silent labor, this had encouraged the aviators to think her shy: but she had quite established her authority after Maynard had attempted, with an offering of rum which he had somehow once again filched out of the stores, to wheedle one of the younger women out behind the pavilion.

This conversation, which had been carried out in a combination of coaxing whispers and covert pantomime—to evade Laurence’s attention, as he had made quite clear his opinion of such behavior—went forward for some ten minutes, with the woman’s attitude passing from initially a half-flirtatious fascination to withdrawal, as Maynard tried to put his hand upon her arm and draw her out.

Temeraire had just been wondering if he ought perhaps say something to Laurence, even though the young women were Tharunka’s and not his; but Binmuck had silently risen up, taken one of the logs from the fire, and coming over to Maynard clouted him solidly across the back, with so much force that he was knocked flat to the ground on his face, the rum spilling beneath him. He sprang up red-faced and wet, which Temeraire felt served him right; the women all laughed with great enjoyment, pointing at the spreading dark stain upon his shirt—they none of them wore much in the way of clothing—and Maynard slunk hurriedly away in the face of Binmuck’s unsmiling and censorious expression, and her substantial cudgel.

Now she listened thoughtfully to Tharunka’s translation of their question, then answered at length: “This one was particularly good,” Tharunka said, “but Binmuck says that they have been bringing more and more, as they get more of the serpents trained: the Chinese don’t like to put goods on any one of them until it has swum the route back and forth three times without, you see, because it is such a long way; sometimes a new serpent will change its mind and just go another way, and then all your goods are lost. They come once a month,” she added, “because there are two schools now trained to come here and return to Guangzhou; when one leaves here, another leaves there, and they go in opposite directions.”

“And they may add more, I expect,” Laurence said grimly, “and with no great delay,” which Temeraire supposed was true; after all, if all one wanted was fish, and one did not mind where one swam, why ought they not swim here where they should be given so many: the Larrakia had been feeding them all day, whenever they swam up to the bell.

“They won’t like it above half in Whitehall, I suppose,” Granby said. “How soon do you think they will hear of it? It can’t be long.”

“No,” Laurence said. “These gentlemen,” indicating the ships yet riding at anchor, “are adventurers, following nothing much better than a rumor in hopes of finding a profitable run; but each one of them will make that rumor into news, wherever they put into port, and I cannot imagine no British captain has yet heard those same stories: we have any number of Indiamen running all over these waters, and going on to China as well.”

Temeraire did not see how it should be anything to the British, even so; but Laurence and Granby and Tharkay all seemed not even to doubt that it should be provoking in the extreme, and that there was only a question when an angry answer should come about it.

“The absence of those tariffs which drive up the price of Chinese goods must wreck the trade in and out of Canton, as soon as it reaches a sufficient quantity,” Laurence said, “as also must the lower risk: a serpent cannot be sunk, and if they will from time to time wander afield, or lose a container, each single one is not on the scale of a full merchantman.

“But that must now be scarcely the worst of the situation,” Laurence added. “This is no smugglers’ cove; this is a port city and a growing one, under the auspices of a nation which if it is not our enemy, is not our ally; a port here upon the very rim of the Indian Ocean must represent a very real strategic threat to the security of our shipping and to British mastery of the seas.”

Temeraire privately felt that it seemed a little unreasonable for a country as small as Britain to want to rule an ocean halfway around the world, and to complain if China, which was much larger and nearer anyway, wished to only have some sea-serpents coming by, with splendid things which people wanted to buy. “I am sure they would not mind if British merchants should come also,” Temeraire suggested.

“They have never objected to taking our silver before,” Laurence said, “but that will only lead to the same complications as before which our government have already been protesting, and the deficit between our nations will only be increased by a greater flow of goods: they are not likely to take finished goods, or anything else which it profits Britain to trade.”

“Except opium,” Tharkay said, a little sardonic, “which manages its own popularity. The public inspection of the goods might offer some difficulties, but I think one must have faith in the ingenuity of man.”

Laurence was silent; he did not approve of opium, although it was so very useful for managing cattle and sheep when one wished to carry them along and eat better than whatever one could hunt; Temeraire was rather sorry they had not had some of it with them upon their journey, as they might have taken along some of the cows, from their valley.

“Even that trade is not likely to be sufficient consolation in Whitehall,” Laurence said finally, “for the establishment of a port which, at the discretion of the Emperor, might give safe harbor to the French to prey upon our shipping, or at his will lock out British traders and none others from the profits of the trade, whatever those may be.”

Rankin was particularly insistent, but Granby and even Laurence were also firm in agreeing they must return to Sydney at once with the intelligence they had acquired; although Temeraire did point out that if as they assumed, Government would shortly learn of the port without their doing anything, the news would no longer be news by the time they had brought it. Nevertheless, it was their duty, it seemed; and so Temeraire sighed, and supervised Roland and Sipho in packing up the robes along with his other treasures. He felt wistfully how long it would be, before they might once again enjoy such hospitality, and such comfort.

Of course, he did not say so; that was he felt a very poor-spirited reason for not wishing to go, if duty were involved. Only, it was a little hard to know there would be so long a journey, through the uncomfortable desert, hungry and too-hot all the long way—and the hunger would be all the more difficult to manage this way, now that Kulingile was eating more and more—and nothing at the end to hope for but the very awkwardness which had caused them to leave in the first place.

“By now some answer must have been received from Government,” Laurence said.

“But what if they have sent to put Bligh back in?” Temeraire said. “That would not suit us at all, and I am sure he would be unpleasant about it.”

“If they have,” Laurence said, “we must endure him early or late,” which Temeraire thought an excellent argument for late.

But he consoled himself with the prospect of visitors: Shen Li might come, and Tharunka had already promised she should do so as well, one day. “And even if we don’t wish to go so far very often, it is a cheering thought,” she said, “that we can go visiting, if we only can manage the trouble of finding food and water. My people tell me you have been lucky, and it has been a very wet year; ordinarily it is not nearly so green, and the water-holes nearly all run dry by this time of the year.”

Temeraire sighed to hear it; while he would be happy to see Shen Li, too, who could more easily make the journey, one could not look for much in the way of conversation from her.

She returned to the port one last time shortly before they were to depart, and there was something of a stir, for when she landed outside the pavilion, she said, without even having folded her wings, “Jia Zhen, pray ask everyone together at once; I have a letter from the Emperor, for Lao-ren-tze,” so of course everyone had to put down whatever they were doing, and assemble in the courtyard, which a brief discussion established as the most appropriate place, and kowtow to the letter.

“To the letter?” Laurence said, in dismay, when Temeraire explained.

“It has the Imperial seal,” Temeraire said, “so it is as though the Emperor himself is here in part, or at least, I gather that is the notion. Perhaps you would wish to put on your robes again, for the occasion?”

“No, I thank you,” Laurence said. “If I am going to be bowing and scraping to a letter, at least I may do it without fearing to trip and fall by accident.”

“My captain says he would not do it for anything,” Caesar observed, and Temeraire snorted.

“Of course not; there is no reason whatsoever why the Emperor should ever be writing to your captain,” Temeraire returned smartly, “who is of no particular account.”

With this splendid rejoinder he went with Laurence to the ceremony, and afterwards the letter with its magnificent red seal was handed to Laurence, who broke it and looked without comprehension: Temeraire was sorry to admit it, but Laurence had not mastered an adequate number of characters to read very much of anything; and the letter was too small for he himself to quite make it out very well.

“Sipho may read it, however,” Temeraire said, “and inquire of me if he cannot make anything in particular out, by drawing it large.”

It was not a very long letter, but full of great kindness: the Emperor sent wishes for the health of Laurence’s family, and inquired if Laurence had yet married—Sipho paused and added, “and he says if not, there is a young noblewoman of the fourth banner come of age who has not yet been married, which would be very suitable,” which made Temeraire put back his ruff, and Laurence said, “What?”

“I would of course not quarrel with the Emperor,” Temeraire said, “but it does not seem to me that Laurence must marry anyone if he does not like to. Pray what else does it say?”

“We have learned that you were responsible for widely conveying the remedy for—coughing fever, I think it says,” Sipho said, reading on, “when certain unenlightened and disordered individuals within the government of the nation of England would have guarded this blessing for themselves, at the cost of many lives. We commend your behavior: as all know, loyalty to the state is founded upon filial loyalty, and upon the proper observance of the will of Heaven: faced with a difficult situation you have acted in accordance with right principles, and we are pleased.”

Laurence did not seem quite so flattered as Temeraire thought he might have been; certainly the young official who had been appointed to guard the letter and carry it upon its golden tray looked deeply impressed by this mark of favor, reading the letter upside-down even as Sipho worked through it. “Any praise and reward for the act are rightly yours,” Laurence said, “and in any case I cannot take any satisfaction in being thanked by anyone whose feelings did not enter into my consideration at all, whether that should be Bonaparte or the Emperor of China. Does he say anything else?”

“Only that he hopes you will call upon Jia Zhen for anything which you might require,” Sipho said, and Laurence paused and said, “Do you mean to tell me this letter has come from him direct?—he knew that we were here, in this outpost?”

Temeraire looked at Shen Li; she said, “Having delivered the news of your arrival, I awaited the reply and then came, so there should be no unwonted delay: this answer came to Guangzhou in two days by Jade Dragon, and so did your letter.”

For Temeraire had also a reply to his own letter, written much larger upon a scroll of parchment, from Lung Tien Qian, his mother, and she wrote to hope that he was well.

It is a great comfort to me that you are so much nearer: although the distance is very great still, at least one need not endure such inconveniently long delays for correspondence. Your letter of last August had only just reached me, which cannot be considered satisfactory. I am all the more happy to hear of your safe arrival in this part of the world, as I have suffered great consternation upon hearing of the recent upheaval in the country of England, from your friend Mr. Hammond.

I am charmed by the description of your valley, and await with pleasure a view of the landscape. Will you be settled here a long time? You would make me very happy to hear that it is so. I have enclosed a copy of the Songs of Chu, also, which you may enjoy if your studies have advanced.

“And you may read it with me as well, Sipho,” Temeraire said, very pleased. “How kind my mother is! Perhaps we will save the poems and read them out only one a day, as we make our way back, and that will make the journey go more quickly.”

Laurence seemed silent and rather thunderstruck by the letters’ having come so quickly; although Temeraire thought that it was more peculiar and embarrassing that they should take quite so long to come from England.

“They might at least bring letters by courier to somewhere that does not need so much flying across the open ocean—perhaps from Macassar, where those fishermen were from,” Temeraire said, “and then they might row it across, and Shen Li bring them to us in Sydney; that would not be quite so fast, but it would not take eight months! What good is a letter eight months late, when everything must be changed? One might as well write stories that were quite made up—one might say, oh, I have just received a bag of lovely pearls, and if ever a reply came asking to see, one might say, why that was a year ago: they are all gone, now.”

Laurence began to write a letter himself, to Arthur Hammond, the envoy in Peking; Temeraire did not remember him very fondly, as it had been very clear that Hammond would have been perfectly delighted to trade him away for any advantage he might get in the way of ports, or of shipping, and Temeraire had felt this was not merely a great misjudgment of his value to England, but also more than a little rude.

But in the end, Hammond had proven very useful, and had worked out the very many confusing details of the adoption, and Temeraire had grown quite reconciled to him; so he was telling Laurence to send Hammond his best wishes, when Mr. Chukwah came into the pavilion, in search of Jia Zhen.

“I am sorry to run out before dinner, more for myself than for you, to tell the truth,” he said, “but I had better: a frigate has just heaved up over the horizon, and she isn’t flying any colors, but I think I know British handling when I see it; and I don’t care to have half my best men pressed. No offense to you, sir,” he added, giving Laurence a small bow, “but the Navy has been getting a little unreasonable about it: we objected in ’seventy-six, and we’ll object again if we have to.”

“Why,” Temeraire said to Laurence, “surely that means we do not have to hurry away at all; now they must know for certain.”

“Yes,” Laurence said, grimly. “Now they know.”

Chapter 16

THE FRIGATE MIGHT BE SEEN from shore before dusk fell, and a little after a sloop-of-war, sailing in company. “That is the Nereide, I think,” Laurence said, looking through his glass for what he could glimpse of the bow. “She was sent with the expeditionary force to Île de France, by my last Gazette; under Corbet.” He did not share what he had heard of that officer: a hard-knocks captain, court-martialed for brutality; anything might have changed in half-a-year, and rumor might be mistaken.

“I suppose—” Granby said, reluctantly.

“Caesar is the only one who can go,” Laurence said. “Neither Iskierka nor Temeraire could land upon the ship; and I have no confidence they would listen to Demane—or for that matter to me; the captain can scarcely have failed to hear of my case.”

“I don’t know I wouldn’t rather wait until he was close enough to row out to,” Granby muttered, but there was no help for it; they could not with any conscience at all allow a British company to approach without speaking them, so Rankin must go with them; in any case, he was scarcely waiting for their opinion on the matter, and had already gone to dress. Caesar was arranged upon the shore waiting, preening with self-importance.

“Well, we are glad enough to find you,” Willoughby said—Nesbit Willoughby, captain of the Nereide, having supplanted Corbet in that position after, he said, the successful taking of Réunion, which had been undertaken, under Commodore Rowley, to secure a port in place of the lost Capetown; but Laurence could not take any great comfort in the substitution: Willoughby had himself been charged with cruelty before a court-martial, in his previous command, and the ship did not have a happy air; there was a lowering stiffness everywhere, and Caesar was looked upon with a wariness more intimate than mere reflexive anxiety: these were men who feared punishment, and feared it might grow worse.

“Not,” Willoughby continued, “that I imagine we will have any great difficulty. I wonder at them, indeed: planting themselves here cool as you please, not a single possession nearer than four thousand miles and only that one floundering mess of a junk to defend it; other than the dragons, of course, and I am relieved to hear they have only the one they stole. I believe we cannot expect to recapture her?” he inquired.

“Sadly,” Rankin said, “I am afraid the beast has been too thoroughly suborned to permit us to entertain any such hope: several of my officers,” some effrontery in that, which Laurence controlled himself from remarking upon, “have attempted to entice her back, but she has rejected wholly all the lures: her egg was in their possession too long.”

Willoughby nodded. “Well, it is a shame,” he said, “but at least we cannot be too worried about her, new-hatched and untrained. I suppose they will strike their colors at once when we have made clear the situation, in any case.”

“And what is that situation?” Laurence said, a little sharply, and Willoughby looked at him with disfavor.

“I do not much care for your presence at this conference in any case, Mr. Laurence,” he said, “and I will thank you to keep silent. I do not propose to answer to the inquisition of a convicted traitor.”

“Captain Willoughby,” Laurence said, too impatient to tolerate this, “I must beg you to imagine my own interest in either your feelings or your opinion of myself, when I have allowed no similar consideration for those who had greater claims by far to alter my course; and if you dislike my company, you may be shot of it all the sooner if you will not stand upon some notion of preserving ceremony, in circumstances so wholly irregular and unexpected: unless you imagine that a twenty-ton Celestial will have any more patience for it than do I.”

Rankin looked away, as though to express silently his mortification at Laurence’s crudeness; Captain Tomkinson of the Otter covered his mouth and issued a cough, soft and uncomfortable. Granby only did not see anything awkward in the speech, and added, “And speaking of whom, if you do mean to make some noise, you oughtn’t be glad to have found us; Temeraire won’t in the least sit still for your having at these fellows, and I don’t suppose any of the other beasts would care to disoblige him. I don’t know what Captain Rankin may have said about seniority, which is a right-enough mess between us presently, but he knows very well that it don’t make a lick of difference to them. What are your orders?”

Willoughby frowned: he was a narrow-faced man, whose hair had already crept back along the curve of his skull, and he was not particularly well-dressed: his clothes were those of a man who had been at sea for eight months, and lodging in irregular shelters. But Granby had given him an excuse, and it was to Granby he answered: “Our orders,” with emphasis, “are to take the port. And if it will not be surrendered, gentlemen, I will take it; I will take it if I have to shell it to the very earth.”

Willoughby’s authority was quite real: the orders, which he allowed Granby to read, were from Commodore Rowley and indeed specific: the port, if it existed, could not be tolerated, and must be taken before it were fortified; the grounds for doing so a mere bagatelle of a technicality: the Regent had ordered the remainder of the continent claimed on the basis of Fleming’s circumnavigation, which might as easily have given France a claim by the journeys of La Pérouse.

“There’s no sense arguing it with him, anyway,” Granby said, when they had flown back to shore. “He has the bit in his teeth, and the orders are clear enough, to be just.”

“If we must choose between starting a war with China now,” Willoughby had said, “and starting it a year from now, when they have cannon here and are letting the French romp merrily through our trade, we will start it now. And I say it has been too long in coming, myself, when they have been giving Bonaparte one plum of a dragon after another. One despot likes another, I suppose.”

This was a wholesale misunderstanding of the original intention of the Chinese in sending Temeraire’s egg to Napoleon, which had been done for purely interior purposes and merely to avert a question of succession; and even more so Lien’s presence amongst the French: she had fled the country an exile, suspected in treachery against the crown prince, and had gone to Napoleon seeking only revenge.

But this was not Willoughby’s deepest objection; he had added, more vehemently, “And when I think of the way they snatched our East Indiamen, and all of us forced to be meek as milk to them after, I avow it must make any man worthy of the name want to put his hands to his gun. It is time and more we blacked their eye for them.”

Laurence remembered well his own feelings on learning that the Chinese had confiscated four British ships: confiscated them, and forced the sailors to sail their envoy to England, with neither cargo nor payment and only peremptory demands. It had been a gross violation of sovereignty, and he had felt, with every other sailor who had heard it, the most violent fury, not lessened in the least by the cringing behavior of Government—more anxious then to prevent the entry of China into the war, or at least more sanguine that it was to be prevented.

Jia Zhen might of course have felt a similar sense of outrage when Rankin presented to him the demands for surrender, through Temeraire’s dubious translation, to which Temeraire added as commentary, “I do not see how this is reasonable: after all, it is stuff for the Regent to say we have claimed the country, when the Larrakia are right here and have been for ages and ages. Why, what if I were to land in London and say, Very well, because I am the first Chinese dragon to land in London, now I will claim it for the Emperor—that has as much sense as this does.”

Rankin snapped, “That is enough: these are our orders. You may question them if you must in private, not in front of the agent of a foreign nation.”

“That is a very handsome way to talk,” Temeraire said scathingly, “after you have been sleeping in his house, and came to his dinner; it all seems to me like the sort of thing that Requiescat would do, when he was behaving like a scrub. And anyway,” he added, “if Jia Zhen could understand whatever I was saying in English, I would not have to translate, so I do not see why I ought to be any quieter about it in front of him.”

Whitehall claimed a violation of the treaty of Peking, the agreement negotiated by Hammond, wherein China had granted to Britain an equal access to any of her opened ports under the same terms as any other Western nation. Jia Zhen with great courtesy pointed out that this agreement said nothing whatsoever about China’s granting her own merchants other and more favorable terms for export, as should be natural to any nation, and further that the port was not after all a Chinese port, but the possession of the Larrakia, if they had been so kind as to grant the Chinese the use of much of the land.

“And certainly British merchants must always be welcome, in any case. The Pomfrey, I believe,” he said, “was here in the spring: her captain a pleasure to deal with, and most reasonable. I hope that Captain Willoughby will reconsider his position. Any disagreement or quarrel between our nations must be a most painful circumstance, and I fear could scarcely help but grieve the Emperor.”

Laurence ignored Rankin’s black looks to say, “Mr. Jia, I hope that you might agree that the terms of the treaty are somewhat unclear, and the possession of this port itself open to dispute: certainly left to their own devices, the Larrakia had not opened such a trade. Perhaps if the trade were suspended for a time, while our respective governments should discuss such amendments to the treaty as would satisfy them both—”

But Jia Zhen was not to be persuaded, not without reason; he did not refuse outright, but spoke in a calm and roundabout fashion of the difficulty of managing the sea-serpents, the impossibility of interrupting their peregrinations without causing their training to founder, and the expense of providing their food, which must be supported by the trade; he also, to Laurence’s dismay, spoke of the warehouses which were to be constructed, and added, “By the order of the Emperor, several craftsmen have already been commanded to prepare themselves and their families to make the journey: Lung Shen Li will bring them hence on her next journey.” This of course was very like throwing tinder onto a fire, and likely only to stir further enthusiasm on Willoughby’s part for immediate action.

“There was no real hope, of course,” Laurence said, low and bleak, when they had ended the fruitless audience.

“If it is any comfort,” Tharkay said, “I doubt whatever concessions you might have wrung from them would satisfy Willoughby. He is here to take the port; nothing less will content him, and he does not strike me as that political sort of creature who might be persuaded by an appeal to his caution.”

“But he is wholly unreasonable,” Temeraire protested. “It is not as though Britain had built a port here, and the Chinese were taking it away; we had months to travel only to reach here at all.”

That the port was strategically placed so as to easily wreck all of Britain’s shipping, and her mastery of the Indian Ocean, did not appease him. “I do not see how one small country can complain if it does not rule all the oceans of the world, even those which are quite upon the other side,” he said, “and after all, have we not heard that Java is only on the other side of the water here, and the Dutch are there, and our friends? Why does Willoughby not go there and say, Those are yours, and hand them over.”

“He would,” Tharkay said, “but they are defended with modern guns and modern navies, which can raise the price of making such a demand.”

Granby was kind enough to make one final attempt: they flew over with Caesar once more, and he remonstrated with Willoughby, who if he heard, did not show any particular interest in listening. When Granby had finished, he nodded, and then said, “Well, I have heard you out, and now, Captain Granby, and Captain Rankin, I am giving you a damned order: you will get your beasts and all these others out of the port. We scarcely need your help to secure the place, so you need not involve yourself, if you do not choose to—I will be happy,” he added coldly, “to forward your reasoning to Whitehall. All I require is that you do not interfere with my orders, and we will manage the thing ourselves.”

“So he means to smash up all the port,” Temeraire said, “and maybe kill Jia Zhen, who has been so kind to us, or the Larrakia: when I think of the tremendous, the extraordinary generosity which has been shown us—oh! what a wretched little worm this Willoughby fellow must be; it is no wonder he should like Rankin so.”

Laurence said somberly, “I am afraid the fault was ours in accepting that hospitality when we had so little information on the position which our nation had taken, or might choose to; there was reason enough to know the Government would dislike it, if not to guess they should risk a war over the matter. They may,” he added, “suppose that a sharp rebuke here will warn China off from any similar attempts.”

He looked up at Temeraire and said, “I do not say I like it, my dear; I do not, in the least, and Willoughby is the last man I would wish to see entrusted with the power to offer so great an insult to any foreign power not already our enemy. But he has been entrusted with that power, and this is an open and honest act of warfare. The enemy has been offered terms, and however little I think of Willoughby, I know of no reason to suspect he will refuse quarter when surrender has been given. I hope a warning shot will be sufficient to persuade Jia Zhen not to prolong the engagement.

“If it is any comfort to you, I ask you to consider that we ought have left before now, in any case, and we might already be on the track back to Sydney, wholly unaware of anything which occurred in our absence.”

“But we have not left,” Temeraire said, “so we are not unaware, and that is not comforting at all.”

He brooded after, when Laurence had gone to pack his things; he did not mean to make things still more awkward for Laurence, or for Granby, but it seemed very wrong to allow this Willoughby person to destroy the pavilion only because the Government wished to quarrel; after all, the Government had sent Temeraire away here, and did not want him in the service anymore, so he did not see that he owed the Government anything; meanwhile Jia Zhen had been perfectly splendid.

Temeraire was not quite sure what he might do, but while everyone else made ready to depart, a little surreptitiously he went behind the pavilion, and experimented with clearing his throat and trying to take the deep breaths which were required for the divine wind. Dorset paused going by with his instruments, frowning, and when Temeraire in a roundabout way inquired he said disapprovingly, “I cannot recommend the exertion of the throat yet in any way. The strain has been very great, and you have not kept quiet as you ought to have.”

Temeraire thought this was hard, when he had been so silent on their journey—he had not talked above half-a-dozen times a day, except on special occasions, or if he needed to explain something, or if he had seen something of interest which he wished to mention to Laurence or one of his other crew, or had needed to consult on their direction. His throat did not feel so unpleasant anymore, either: it did not hurt when he spoke, and at dinner he had eaten a couple of tunny spines, roasted deliciously, without suffering the least difficulty or soreness.

And he certainly must have the divine wind, to do anything very useful: if he were only to claw away at the ships, he could not do much to both at once. Of course, he did not mean to do anything excessively unpleasant to the ships, either, or at least not to the sailors; but he thought perhaps he might wash them some distance out to sea, so they were too far away to do any shelling; or he might make the seas high enough beneath them that they should be forced to stop working the guns.

Temeraire had tried a little, on their long sea-voyage, to work out how Lien had built up the tremendous wave which she had used to drown the British squadron at the battle of Shoeburyness, but it had to be admitted he had not had very much success. He understood vaguely how she had done it—she had built many little waves, and sent them sculling on, and then had built one last and sent it sweeping along to gather up all the smaller. He had mastered the trick enough to manage perhaps four or five little waves, compounded into one great, and this one he had certainly made more substantial than the ordinary waves all around, but by this Temeraire meant he could achieve a crest of ten feet, perhaps, above the swell; scarcely enough to do more than rock a frigate for a minute or two.

He had thought of his former trick upon the Valérie, where he had struck her with the divine wind directly, but the ships in the harbor had their sails furled: they were riding at anchor, and built solidly of oak; the divine wind had nothing to grip upon. It would not do, so that night he determinedly shook out his wings and flew from their new camp—out on the sand across the bay, exposed to all the weather, with meanwhile the pavilion standing empty but for little Tharunka—and he flew out to the ocean and began doggedly to practice once more, trying to work out how quickly each wave should go.

“For that is the difficulty,” he said to Kulingile, while he scratched calculations in the dirt—he quite missed Perscitia, who would have done the mathematics in her head for him—to try and work out how many breaths he should take between raising another swell. “They do not keep apart the same distance, and some are further apart, and so when the large one goes, it reaches a larger gap, and then by the time it reaches the next wave it is already breaking, and it only falls upon the rest of the waves and does no good to anyone.”

Kulingile ate another bite of his raw cassowary, which he had managed to catch for himself that morning—they were now obliged to fend for their own meals again, without the very material assistance of the Larrakia hunters, who even if they had not brought something pleasant back would at least reliably be able to tell where one might find game—and piped, “But if it takes so long to make, and you do not sink the ships, won’t they only wait until it is gone and then shoot afterwards?”

“Well,” Temeraire said—but it would at the very least disrupt any immediate attack, and very likely make them confused. “And anyway they will have a time beating back up into position; if only the wind should not be in the right quarter, that is, but I do not see why it should be.”

“What are you working on?” Iskierka said suspiciously as she came landing with her own dinner, and looked over the figures; of course she did not understand a thing of mathematics, but only to be safe, Temeraire swept his tail-tip over the diagramme.

“It is none of your affair,” he said loftily; he did not intend to confide in Iskierka, of whom he felt a little wary; one could not rely on her to have the right sort of opinions in such circumstances as these; Granby was still in the service, of course, and so their interests might not be perfectly aligned.

He felt rather more uncomfortable over having so far also avoided the subject with Laurence; but he thought they might better discuss the matter a little later, once Temeraire had already worked out how to make the great waves—after all, so long as he could not do it, then there was nothing really to be spoken of; and when he had, he might then demonstrate the technique to Laurence, which would certainly be a source of great relief and pleasure to him. Laurence had not said anything on the subject directly, but he had encouraged the experiments, and asked Temeraire to consider how one might defeat a similar effort, another time. And if Temeraire should happen to demonstrate it somewhere the ships could also see, perhaps this Willoughby person would be afraid, and Temeraire would never even need to use it directly upon them at all.

He did not just yet think over what he would do otherwise—what else Laurence might say. It seemed after all a great waste of time—one might even consider such ruminations to be an attempt to shirk the certainly very difficult work of learning how to make the wave. And there was no time to be wasted: the ships were almost surely only waiting for the tide to come in that night, so they might come further into the harbor, and do their worst.

“I am going to go find something more to eat,” Temeraire announced, therefore, and flew out to make another attempt. It was not after all false: if there were any fish about when he worked the divine wind upon the water, they often came directly up, dead already or at least so confused that one might just collect them without any difficulty. He had already made a handsome meal of them on his first pass, and the sea-serpents had been pleased enough to take the leavings; he could see their heads breaking the water in the distance, peering at him in anticipation of more, even if they did stay properly and respectfully clear.

He had more success this time in regulating the interval between the waves, and having sent out a series of them pursued with one large final roar: which did make his throat ache dully, and he was forced to stop and cough a little, but oh! what was any of that, for abruptly a great glassy hill was rising up out of the water. The swell went rushing away from him, eating every one of the little waves—climbing higher and higher, until it would certainly have gone to the topmasts at the least, thirty feet and shining pale green, and Temeraire was compelled to fly around in several circles to express his delight as the whole struck upon the hidden reef half-a-mile further out and crashed in a thundering, foaming roar very like an entire broadside firing off.

There was no time to be lost: the boiling white seafoam was tinged pink with sunset, and Temeraire flew flat-out to the shore and landed by the tents, calling, “Laurence—Laurence, pray come and see—”

Laurence looked up from the letter which he was writing—to be carried back to England by the ships, about Demane, although privately Temeraire thought there was no reason why anyone should wish to be a captain in the Corps anymore. If the Corps did not want Laurence, their judgment was plainly unreliable, when even the Emperor had approved of him so highly, and Qian; Temeraire had not mentioned to Laurence, for fear of seeming an excessive brag, but her letter had mentioned him as well, and informed Temeraire that she felt he had made a most auspicious choice of companion.

“If you please, Laurence, would you come and fly out with me?” Temeraire said, “I should like to show you something,” and Laurence looked at the water lapping high upon the shore and said, “I will have my harness in a moment,” and spoke to Granby briefly as he shrugged into the leather straps.

“My dear, I know the situation must give you great pain,” Laurence said, as Temeraire beat out—not so very far this time, still in eyeshot of the harbor. “I cannot like asking you to bear an insult to the nation of—not precisely your birth, but your origin, and certainly of intimate concern to you: I beg you to believe I do it with the utmost reluctance.”

“Laurence, you do not like it yourself at all, though, do you?” Temeraire said. “You do not think that Willoughby should behave so badly to our hosts—you do not approve.”

“No,” Laurence said, “—but I find there is very little to approve of, particularly, in war or in the relations amongst nations. There is no secret of our colony in New South Wales, my dear; China certainly has known of it, and of our interests in the Indian Ocean trade. They cannot even pretend ignorance when they have been sending goods to Sydney herself, and there is certainly a degree of provocation in seizing upon a location so strategic, and so very near the boundary of Cook’s claim to establish their own holding.”

“But that does not excuse destroying the port,” Temeraire said, “and perhaps killing our friends. I do not see that Cook had any business claiming anything anyway, but even if one should make allowances for that, he has not claimed this, so it is not as though one could call it a real challenge.

“But,” he added, stopping to hover, “I do not mean to argue, Laurence; I have something splendid to show you.”

Laurence paused and said, “We might fly further out.”

“Well,” Temeraire said, “I particularly thought it might be useful if Willoughby might see it, also, from where he is—”

He turned and looked, and the ships were making sail: the great billows of white spreading to catch the wind, and come about into the harbor; and the guns had rolled out of the portholes, black tongues. “The tide is not wholly in yet,” Temeraire cried in protest.

Laurence laid a hand upon Temeraire’s side. “My dear, pray let us go further; there is no reason you should be witness here.”

“But you do not understand,” Temeraire said. “I have done it: I have worked out how to make Lien’s wave—” and on his back he felt Laurence go very still.

“No—no, Laurence. I did not mean—of course I did not mean that,” Temeraire said, into that awful silence. “But if only they should see it, I thought—I thought they might not persist.”

Laurence paused, very long, and then he said, “A threat rarely suffices which you do not mean to carry out. And regardless—no. I can have, I will have, no part of even issuing such a threat against the Navy. To prevent an officer of the King from performing his duty and from the commission of his orders would be equally grievous a crime whether committed by violence or mere intimidation. No. I have committed treason once, but in the service of a higher cause than nations, not the lower one of mere personal sentiment; I must beg you to excuse me.”

He spoke with hard, bleak finality, and Temeraire shuddered with distress. He had not seen it so, at all; he had not thought—“It need not be treason, surely,” Temeraire said, “not just to let them see?” but as he spoke, the protest shriveled small upon his tongue: he had known, of course; he had not spoken to Laurence.

He coiled around himself in distress, mid-air, and said, “Oh—I am so very sorry; Laurence, I beg you will forgive me. You cannot think I would ever mean to ask anything like of you again, after everything so dreadful which has occurred—not just to defend a pavilion,” and he was very relieved to feel Laurence’s hand upon his neck, and added, to try and explain himself, “Only I cannot see how it can be right to only watch, as friends are hurt, who have been so generous—and when the Government, after all, has taken so much away.”

“By this argument you should soon reduce all loyalty to a mere competition of bribery,” Laurence said. “If I had thought for one instant that those robes should so secure your affections as to make you wink at treason, I should have thrown them on the fire directly, regardless of what distress you might feel; and,” he added, with a degree of heat, “I am growing inclined to think Jia Zhen knew precisely what he did when he made you so extravagant a gift.”

“I do not mean only the robes,” Temeraire protested weakly, but he was very much shocked that Laurence should even consider so hideous an act, and added, “and I hope you would never really do anything so dreadful. Of course I cannot help but feel kindly towards them, and the Government is always behaving like a scrub; that is not any of their fault, and certainly it is no fault of the robes.”

He looked back at the pavilion in much distress: the Otter, small and quick, had already turned broadside to the harbor, and as he watched, and flinched, the roar of the cannon echoed across the water. The ball went sailing high—they had the cannon elevated—and came down upon one graceful high-pointed corner of the pavilion’s roof, in an instant carrying away the elaborately carved dragon and smashing through the tiles. A distant shriek of wood breaking, which sounded queerly as though it came from somewhere to the east, and a cloud of splinters bursting away; a clatter of more red tiles went sliding down into the gap, and the dark hole stood dreadfully jagged against the elegant line.

“Oh!” Temeraire cried in distress, “Laurence, only look; and if anyone should have been below—”

He darted a little closer—of course he would not do anything, not now he did see it must be still more wrong; but he could not help it—

“Temeraire,” Laurence said.

“No, of course I will not,” Temeraire said, despairingly. “I suppose I might not even knock down the cannonballs, as they flew?” He did not know if the divine wind would allow it, but—

Laurence’s answer, whatever it might have been, was entirely lost to Temeraire; instead all the world went spinning round and full of noise, roaring, and he was driven in a tumbling rush down into the ocean swell, green foaming light everywhere, choking into his nose and into his throat. Temeraire struggled wildly to right himself, belling out his sides, and he burst back up through the surface, coughing and coughing. “Laurence,” he managed, choking, twisting his neck around in panic—but Laurence had not been snatched: he was there, streaming wet and short one of his boots, but dangling safely from his harness and pulling himself back into position.

“There,” Iskierka said, beating back up and away, looking down at him, “so much for your scheming; as though you were so very clever, and no-one had any business making out that you meant to do something to the ships, behaving like a sneak.”

“I did not, at all!” Temeraire said, calling up at her wrathfully, because that was a wicked lie; he had never meant to hurt the ships, “and I think you have been a great deal more of a sneak than I might have been in ages, jumping down upon me like that with no warning.”

“You may complain all you like,” Iskierka said, “but it is no more than you deserved; I will not let you hurt Granby in the service any more than you already have. He is going to be an admiral, and a lord, too; like Roland’s mother.”

“Pray be quiet, you wretched selfish creature,” Granby said, calling through his speaking-horn. “Laurence, are you all right? She would have it he meant to do something—”

Laurence was occupied with a wracking cough, but he managed reassuringly to say, “I have had a ducking before now—perfectly well.”

“Temeraire did mean to do something,” Iskierka said, “whatever he may say; and I have stopped him, which I hope you will tell that captain when he goes back to England; I am sure they will be glad to hear of it,” she added, in a very self-satisfied manner.

“Oh!” Temeraire said. “If I did mean to do something, you should never stop me,” and he took a deep breath and flung out his wings and beat them wildly, swelling out his sides as much as he might; with a lashing of his tail and hindquarters, as though he were trying to lunge back onto the Allegiance after a swim, he managed to get back into the air.

He meant to teach Iskierka a sharp lesson, despite Laurence’s protest, but gunfire called his attention back to the ships, the spattering of rifles going, and not the great guns. Tharunka had come flying out from the pavilion with a couple of men in belly-netting, who were holding great dripping sacks. Temeraire could smell the stuff even at the distance, as they upended it over the Otter and then the Nereide in turn: a clotted, dribbling mess of half-spoiled fish and rotting seaweed, black as tar. As Tharunka stayed quite high to be clear of the rifle-fire, it splattered all over the sails and the poor sailors high up in the crow’s nest, whatever did not miss the ships entirely and land in the water. It was not less than the ships deserved, for their attack, but it seemed quite useless to Temeraire; the bow-chasers were perhaps splashed a little, and the carronades on the quarterdeck, but the gun-deck of course was not touched at all.

The harbor bell was ringing, as Tharunka flew hurriedly away to the shore, and then the waters of the harbor began to churn as one and then another, the sea-serpents breached the stained water and began to claw their way up the sides of the ships and onto the decks, stretching their long necks up towards the slurried sails.

The speed with which the serpents moved was appalling—the massive beasts were struggling one against another to get a purchase on the ships, pushing and shoving to get at what was evidently pure delectation, and meanwhile beneath them the deck pitched and heaved as their weight threw the ship all ahoo. The unfortunates in the rigging, coated in the slime, were immediate victims, snatched like particular tidbits even as the men tried in desperation to flee down the ropes. Wide jaws tore at the cables, and the spars yawed wildly and went tumbling down, throwing more of the slush upon the men on the deck, to draw the serpents’ attention.

A smaller of the serpents had managed to wriggle itself onto the deck of the Nereide entirely almost, only its long tail dangling back over the side, and it began to pursue the sailors with such enthusiasm that it thrust its entire head into the fore ladderway. The axes were coming out now, however; axes and the great guns firing, and as Temeraire and Iskierka flew to the ships, beating urgently, Laurence saw a tall man leap forward and swing down upon the small serpent’s neck, directly behind the head which had been thrust below.

In two strokes he had cleaved the spine, and the body went into furious convulsions that tore the head the rest of the way from the body, spurting dark blood in torrents across the deck. It ran orange-red over the ship’s white-painted rail and down its side, and the smell of dragon blood mingled with the fish-rot and kelp.

Temeraire dived and seized hold of one serpent by the shoulders, dragging it away from the ship as it lashed and flung back its open maw to try and snap at him, the coils and coils of its great length twisting and the small forelegs clawing at the air. Laurence could see directly down into its jaws and throat, looking over Temeraire’s neck, and a pallid hand within desperately clinging to the tissue of the gullet, a face bloodied but not yet senseless gazing up at him in utter horror before the serpent’s thrashing shook the man loose and he vanished still whole deeper into the creature’s belly.

The serpent was unmanageable with its enormous mass drawn out of the water and so violently clawing—“I cannot keep hold of it,” Temeraire panted, struggling to drag it still further; but then Iskierka called, “Only a moment, keep clear!” and dived in. She blasted its dangling length with flame, the skin and scales crisping up and roasting with a dreadful stink; the serpent made a high thin shrieking noise and curled around itself like a beetle as Temeraire dropped it at last back into the water.

“That does for that one,” Iskierka said, satisfied, but Tharunka had just darted in and flung yet another sack of the fish-refuse all upon the disordered deck of the Nereide, closer now that the riflemen were all in disarray, and still more of the serpents came boiling out of the water in a frenzy.

There were dozens of them, ripping, tearing—nothing coordinated, only a maddened and savage fury which did not know even their own kind: as the axes and cutlasses bit into their flesh, they began to snap and tear at their injured fellows, at the rigging, even at the guns slick with fish-scraps—a cannon breaking free of its moorings and running riot across the deck to smash through the railing, taking half-a-dozen men and a serpent with it. The deck was slick with their blood, and the guns roared: cannon tore into their flesh and flung them back into the water.

But more came, and the injured, only still more frenzied, clawed in blind, mad rage at the source of their hurt; and one of the greater monsters, perhaps now recognizing the ship itself as prey and danger, pulled its huge forequarters to the far side and plunging down over into the water began to loop the whole vessel.

Laurence had seen the maneuver attempted once before, on the Allegiance—a vessel nearly twice the draught of the poor Nereide—and only the greatest effort had kept it from succeeding. “We must stop her, that one,” Laurence shouted to Temeraire, who dived and set his claws into the traveling length, the spine itself too protected by a vast and razored network of hard spiny fins.

He strained back, beating; but as they began to drag the serpent clear, above them one of the spars tumbled loose and tipped towards them, and Laurence was half-blinded with the muck as it splattered from the sail upon Temeraire’s back and wings. He wiped the stuff from his eyes only to see a great pink saw-toothed maw coming lamprey-wide towards him, unblinking orange eyes fixed on him with intent greed.

Laurence jerked his sword loose—pistols useless after the dousing—and managed to bring it down into the approaching lower jaw, opening a deep purplish gash into the creature’s lip, which made it recoil; only a little, but Temeraire noticed, and snapped at the beast. It snapped back, and then turning its head bit at his wings, seizing the pin-joint in its mouth and wrestling back and forth while it tried to pierce the tough, resilient membrane. Temeraire roared at it, the great startling thunder of the divine wind resonating painfully in the bones of Laurence’s ears, and it let go and fell away with that high shrilling cry.

But more were lunging at them, and the great serpent beneath them was all the while marching on; the noose was drawing tight, and abruptly the port rail snapped like matchsticks beneath it, and the starboard gone an instant later. The bulk of it slipped Temeraire’s claws and fell to the deck heavily as the support was taken away; he darted down again to seize a fresh hold, and four serpent heads reared up feeding from the deck, one tipping back to swallow the better part of another victim.

Temeraire twisted away from their stretching mouths, and Laurence had managed to pack his powder fresh; he pistoled one of the creatures directly in the eye, and saw the sclera cloud with dark blood as it recoiled shrieking. But Temeraire had to beat away again: they were biting at him from all sides, and he had not won a fresh grip; he had only brought away one sailor, snatched from the deck, and now twisted to hand him up to Laurence: a midshipman, perhaps fourteen, hair and face thick with slime.

“God save you, sir, and him,” the boy said, glazed with horror and polite by reflex; with shaking hands he laced his belt through a harness-ring when Laurence showed him, and wound his arms through the straps to hold on; then Temeraire was making another plunging attempt.

He attacked lower down on the side this time, and between the squirming press of the serpents’ bodies managed to set his claws again into the great one. But he was fighting now against the ocean, too: the swell slapped at his tail and the lower edges of his wings as he sought to hover and pull, and then he was windmilling back, his grip lost: another great serpent, surging suddenly up from the depths, had seized hold of the deck and pulled all the ship groaning askew.

The Nereide was tipping, and the serpents scrabbling up her far side, still trying to reach over to the deck, tipped her further yet; there were cries audible within, and the cannon trying to roar, and then abruptly the loop was drawing tight and tight: the decking began to crack and splinter, and the water pouring over the rail was rushing into the gaps.

She was sinking. Laurence looked out in desperation: Iskierka had seized on to the Otter’s anchor and dragged it deliberately aground, into the shallow water on the shore, where the serpents might not follow: men were leaping from the sides to escape those which yet clung on, while Caesar and Kulingile worked to tear them away: even Tharunka was now helping them, picking men out of the water to carry one after another to shore, and the Larrakia had come down to help pull out the staggering survivors.

There was nothing better to be done. “Temeraire,” Laurence called, “can you drag her onto the shoals, or push her?” and the looped serpent proved an unlikely and bleak hand-hold for Temeraire to use. Kulingile diving came to join him, setting his own long claws deep into the flesh, and they together dragged the hulk even as she splintered and cracked still further.

The deck was nearly empty now of men, pillaged clean, and waves slapping flat against the tipped deck washed clean the muck with sea-water. She was settling lower in the water every moment, but they were moving steadily in towards shore as well, and as the water grew more shallow the less-maddened serpents dropped away. The second enormous serpent looked up at them with what Laurence in an unpleasant fancy thought for a moment was cool deliberation, and then it, too, let go and slipped away into the clouded water.

They pulled the Nereide at last onto a small reef, near the Otter; and there with Temeraire’s claws and the tearing of the coral managed at last to carve away the looped serpent, already dead and slick with blood; Demane was already rescuing men from the hatchway, standing in his straps to help them crawl out onto Kulingile’s back while the dragon clung on to the railing, his sides belled out hugely to support him.

There was no hope of setting her to rights: the keel itself had cracked, and great seams opened all along the hull. Already it was growing dark; Laurence sent Demane back to shore, and Temeraire hovered to receive what other men could be saved: Willoughby was handed up with his eye bandaged over and one leg gone below the knee, the surgeon climbing up after him; the gun-crews crawling out grimed with smoke. They could only hold on to whatever harness they could reach, and though Temeraire flew slowly and carefully to shore to set them down, some lost their grip and plunged down into the surf, only slowly to drag themselves out, crawling the last few feet upon the sand.

They made another journey, and then a third, picking men out of the water. The sun was sliding away behind the pavilion, glowing red upon the lacquered roof; in the water, the corpses of sea-serpents rose and fell with the lapping tide. Temeraire sank upon the sand, heaving breath and his neck bowed deeply with fatigue.

The Larrakia were watching; the young men who had been helping to carry the half-drowned survivors had drawn back and taken up their spears again, standing loosely ringed along the shore: many of them, quiet and watchful, and others joining them; several of the younger Chinese men also, with swords which looked awkward in uncertain grips: they were none of them soldiers. “Mr. Blincoln,” Rankin said, from Caesar’s neck, “if you please, let us have a little order here; Caesar, if you would,” and Caesar reared up onto his hindquarters, making himself however more imposing could be managed, and thrusting out his breast with the bright-blazoned red stripe.

The aviators began loosely to form an opposing line. Laurence slid down from Temeraire’s neck and laid a hand on the soft muzzle, feeling Temeraire’s breath going in labored rasps: aggravated again, no doubt, by the excessive use of the divine wind. Whatever they had in the way of supply remained back in the camp, further along the curve of the bay and out of reach. “Roland,” Laurence said, low, “go and tell Demane; if it comes to fighting, you are to go back to the camp and fetch out powder and shot, and whatever guns might have been left.”

She nodded and ran to join Demane on Kulingile, who despite fatigue was perhaps among all the beasts the nearest to wide-awake, his eyes bright with hunger. Some of the Larrakia had come fresh from their hunting: a brace of small kangaroos were roasting on a spit behind their line, and this had all of Kulingile’s attention.

The sailors lay inert upon the sand, spent more even than the dragons and worn past exhaustion by the wreckage and the horror of what Laurence hardly knew how to call a battle: a struggle against some elemental force, invoked too unwarily, and as swiftly gone when its bloodthirst had been appeased. Out past the edge of the harbor, many of the serpents were at play again, heedless like children who had already forgotten a reproof.

The Larrakia men were speaking amongst themselves, spears held low and ready; the elders in convocation with and the younger men interjecting occasionally. There was a hesitation on both sides: no one was unshaken by the violence of the eruption.

Galandoo came forward out of the men, and beckoned to Tharunka to translate; and to Laurence he said simply, “It is time for you to go.”

Chapter 17

THEY AT NO TIME saw any of the natives during the long tedium of the return voyage, which even on dragon wing consumed half the autumn: the desert creeping by slow, and their passage wary and hunted. They found tracks and signs enough, in the mornings, to know that they were watched; at the water-holes they drank swiftly, and left what small offerings they could spare for the bunyips from their hunting with the country grown still more spare and ungenerous in the waning of the year, and four dragons, one of rapacious appetite, to be fed.

The beasts were all four of them thinner than Dorset liked before they reached at last the marker, the great monolith standing up out of the red desert with all its vegetation now burnt yellow by the sun; and began their turn for the coast. “At least there will be the lake, soon,” Temeraire said wearily lapping at another water-hole, too shallow to put his muzzle in to drink properly.

It was all their hope that long fortnight’s flying: though they were yet only halfway home, they were now moving at a pace wholly different than during their first journey, flying straight instead of in pursuit of an unknown foe, and the prospect of the lake’s refuge invited them onwards. When at last they sighted it in the distance as a faint brilliant gleam stretching over the curve of the horizon, catching the sunset, Temeraire’s wings quickened; all the dragons’ pace increased, and they came landing by the shore not an hour later: to the stench of rotting fish, and a shore crusted with a rim of pink-stained salt; the lake had receded to a long narrow stretch of water.

The water of the shrunken lake could not be drunk: it was become more salty than sea-water, pinkish in hue, and the dead fish floated half-eaten in clumped masses on its surface. The birds had deserted the shore.

They managed to find a small water-hole, sufficient to give the dragons a few swallows, although the requisite bribe drew down too much of their stores; in anticipation of the game at the lake, they had not paused so often for hunting. What little they had left, they ate in silence, huddled close around their small fires. It was not merely inconvenience; the disappointment felt something of a parting slap, contemptuous, from the wild back-country: a reminder they were not welcome.

And yet Laurence felt little more so as they limped finally back into Sydney, a ragged and thinner band, and set down upon the promontory already once more overgrown in their long absence: grass and weeds and small prickly shrubs beginning to re-establish a hold. They arrived late, the Allegiance riding at anchor in the harbor, a small flotilla of merchant ships clustered nearer-in to the shore; the sun hung low in the sky, throwing orange flame across the water, and at the mouth of the harbor, where it emptied out into the ocean, the light glittered on the hides of a dozen sea-serpents, rising and plunging from the water at their play.

“The question only remains how it is to be done, not whether,” Governor Macquarie said: Bligh’s replacement, finally arrived a little while after Granby’s second departure. In the intervening months of their journey, an elegant house had been raised on the spur of land overlooking the harbor, with a clear prospect from the office stretching all the way to the open ocean. Even a small rug lay upon the floor, and the furniture neatly joined; Laurence and Granby stood raggedly out of place, and Rankin for all his efforts was not much better arrayed.

They had not been afforded any opportunity to acquire new clothing; the summons had come last night before they had even sent a runner to formally announce their arrival, and called them at first light to the governor’s mansion, to find the new governor waiting urgently, pacing across the floor of his study.

“I can see no reason to have them here,” Bligh was saying scarcely under his breath, meaning MacArthur and Johnston, on the point of being shown in; MacArthur came across the room to shake Laurence’s hand.

“I find you have been a prodigiously long way, Captain,” he said, throwing a look at the dust-stained and faded maps which had been laid out across the broad desk. “I am glad to see you returned safely,” although there was perhaps some enthusiasm lacking: he and Johnston were ordered to England with Bligh, to stand trial for the rebellion; Granby’s return meant the Allegiance would sail at last, and she would make their natural transport.

“We must first however resolve what is to be done with these serpents: their presence was ominous enough before the report we have had from you, gentlemen,” Macquarie said, interrupting the private greetings, and waving a hand to the chairs at his table.

The serpents had not appeared alone: another of the wide-winged dragons, not Shen Li, had been sighted lately off the eastern coast, on one occasion not thirty miles distant; the serpents shortly thereafter had begun to make their sporadic appearances, evidently being trained upon some new harbor, near enough that in their frolics they from time to time came past Sydney. Shipping went still to and fro without incident; the serpents had not been incited against them, and seemed sufficiently well-fed that any natural inclination which might have led to attacks was suppressed; but this was scarcely much comfort to those who had seen the devastation they might easily wreak.

“They must be eradicated, at once,” Captain Willoughby said harshly, his wooden-leg stump stretched out awkwardly before his chair; he had insisted on accompanying them, though his injuries yet left his face grey and drawn with pain. “We must trace them to their harbor and put them to the sword; them and their masters.”

“Sir,” Laurence said, “we have already suffered a repulse from one attempt at taking a harbor so guarded, without sufficient preparation and, Captain Willoughby must pardon me, without sufficient provocation for the consequence we court. Surely there can be no justification for spurring on a war with China which, we now know, they have the means to carry against all our shipping. Even without the direction of intelligence, the serpents have been a constant peril to sailors before now; they need neither wind nor current in their favor to maneuver, and may strike wholly unexpected from below.”

“Yes,” Bligh said belligerently, “and there are a dozen of them outside our harbor this very moment. If the Chinese meant to teach us to respect their power, they have succeeded; if they meant to teach us fear, sir, they have failed and will always do so.”

“Hear, hear,” Willoughby said, glaring at Laurence, who compressed his lips at this ludicrous enthusiasm; he could scarcely fault Willoughby’s courage, having already lost both an eye and a leg to the serpents, but his sense offered more to criticize.

“The Navy gentlemen must forgive me,” MacArthur said, “but I cannot help but wonder if we could not manage to think of something better to do with these fellows who can, I gather, bring in twenty tons of goods from China to our shores in a month.”

Bligh might have purpled himself into an apoplexy in response; Macquarie raised a hand. “If you please,” he said: he was quiet-spoken, and his face drawn in craggy but warm lines, with deep-set dark eyes. But he would not allow the possibility of negotiation. “Our last orders, by Commander Willoughby’s report,” he nodded to that gentleman, “are plain enough: we are not to tolerate any foreign encroachment on this continent. If efforts to dislodge them from this northern port have failed, that is only more cause to repulse them before they can establish another, nearer.”

He was bent upon the eradication of the serpents; it was left only to discuss how it was to be done. “Bombs must be our surest method for disposing of the creatures,” Rankin said, “delivered from aloft: if they have been trained to come to fish-slops, we can easily bait them to their doom.”

His suggestion was adopted with enthusiasm, despite the obvious difficulties of delivering bombs upon creatures which could plunge to the ocean depths, and whose size alone would make them difficult to kill; Willoughby applauded regardless, and Macquarie approved. Granby, who had more experience of aerial warfare than Rankin, whose former experience had been in the courier service, looked doubtful, and said, “We had better try it on one, first, and at a good distance: if you drive them mad and it don’t work, they might do for all the shipping in the port.”

“Perhaps we ought to clear out some of the most valuable ships,” MacArthur suggested. “If we will be dropping on them from above, I cannot see there is any need to keep the Allegiance in port for them to gnaw on her anchor-cables.”

There was something disingenuous in this proposal: he had already offered his services and Johnston’s to arrange the manufacture of the bombs, which should give them excuse to postpone returning to England. But Riley had already once seen his ship nearly brought down by a sea-serpent, and could not be said to be eager to repeat the experience: he was only too pleased to second the notion, and Governor Macquarie did not disagree.

The plan of attack was agreed upon; the conference dismissed, not before Laurence was given his long-delayed post: three letters bundled together from Jane, and another two for Temeraire; and one to be passed on to Tharkay. He put them in his pocket as they departed; MacArthur caught him at the door of the governor’s office.

“I suppose they aren’t to be reasoned with,” MacArthur inquired, “—these Chinamen, I mean. Do they wish to have us all thrown into the harbor and fed to the things?”

“I will beg you, sir, not to entertain the sort of absurd fancies which I have grown used to hear from raw hands,” Laurence said, too exasperated to be courteous. “They are men, like any others, and like any others possess full measure of folly and vice; but I cannot say their portion is greater than our own.”

“Ah, well,” MacArthur said, “then we may all go to the Devil together.”

He touched his hat and they parted, Laurence to join Temeraire upon the promontory, to share their letters. The correspondence did not go any length to reconciling him to the imminent attack, devastating almost equally in success or failure: Bonaparte had indeed made alliance with the Tswana, according to Jane.

Put them on every Transport he has in his Pockets and shipped them straight across the sea: twenty-six Beasts delivered direct to Rio, nine of them heavy-weight, and two fire-breathers; you may guess what it was like, and I will spare You the Particulars: they don’t make Comfortable Reading, I will tell you.

The Portuguese are howling for Help, and we must do our Best, before they swallow their Pride and bend the Knee to France, but I have no Notion how we will keep these fellows from tearing all the Colony to Rubble if we cannot persuade the Inca to take an Interest. We must have Iskierka back at Any Price, and I would give an Arm for one of those Japanese fellows, the waterspout-makers.

Ten million pounds lost they say so far in Property; ludicrous, ain’t it? So far the Tswana only seem to care about the Plantations and the Slaves, but if they get a taste for War, as Dragons will if you give them half a Minute, and want More, you may be sure Boney will find some to offer them.

Laurence laid the letters down, bleakly: in such circumstances, to be opening another front against an enemy far better equipped than the Tswana to wage war upon their shipping, seemed still nearer to madness. He sent Sipho for pen and paper, and began to add to his own letter, however late and useless it should be, to advise Jane of these new circumstances, and of his fears.

“At least they have made some progress here,” Temeraire said, meaning on the quantity of cattle, and Governor Macquarie was proven very reasonable, he felt, having allowed them each two cows after the ordeal of the journey, despite the expense to the colony. With the shortage, it seemed hard to see so many cattle and sheep loaded aboard the Allegiance for her provisions: Iskierka would at least be at sea, and might eat fish if she chose, in all their variety; there was no reason she ought not take instead some kangaroos, and perhaps some of the grey cassowaries, and there would be seals at New Amsterdam.

She was unswayed by this argument. “And I do not see that I owe you anything,” she added, with a flip of her tail, “when I consider how long the journey, and how many pains I have taken over it. You might at least have given me an egg, for all my trouble.”

“You have caused a good deal of trouble, yourself, and no one wished for you to come from the beginning,” Temeraire retorted, but guilt smote him painfully when he had said it: Iskierka had been of material service, he could not quite deny it in the privacy of his own conscience. He squirmed with discomfort, but he thought rather despairing that Laurence should never approve if he permitted selfish interest to outweigh justice, so Temeraire drew a deep breath and heroically said, “You might stay, I suppose, if you wished to.”

Iskierka snorted, disdainful, “As if anyone would wish to stay in this wretched country, where there is nothing fine to eat, and the only battles one can get, one is covered in stinking fish. No; and if you ask me, you are a great gaby to stay,” she added. “Granby says we will likely go from Madras to Rio, instead of home, and have a splendid battle against those African dragons who ran you off before. I am sure we will do better.”

Temeraire flattened his ruff, from equal parts annoyance and envy; Madras—he had never seen Madras, or any part of India, although many pleasant things were always coming from there; and he understood all of Brazil to be thoroughly littered with gold, from what sailors said. Nor could Temeraire have any enthusiasm for the coming battle: as he understood they would only be dropping bombs, from aloft; and while he would be perfectly happy to clear away the serpents, who had proven to be so wretchedly difficult and stupid besides, Laurence thought it should certainly mean war with China.

But there was no choice: when the Allegiance had gone, and the latest frigate, and those of the merchant ships whose draught was too deep to bring them into the safety of the shallows, they would attack. Laurence also was making his farewells. “Pray give my best to Harcourt,” Laurence said, and then belatedly added, “—I mean to Mrs. Riley, of course; I hope you will find her much recovered, and the child well.”

“I suppose he will be talking by now,” Riley said, “if he hasn’t been dropped from dragon-back mid-air; I shan’t be surprised to hear it if he has.” He took the letters which Laurence had prepared, and those which Sipho had taken down for Temeraire.

“Captain Riley,” Temeraire said, “I know you are not very fond of each other, but if you please, I hope you will tell Lily that I send my regards, also; and she is very welcome to visit, she and Maximus, if they should ever choose to.”

“Oh,” Riley said, a little dismally; Temeraire did have to allow that Lily had been a little unreasonable towards him, but then, in a way one might say it was Riley’s fault that poor Harcourt had suffered so much, with her egg. “Yes; certainly I will convey your wishes.”

“I call it damned stupid and a waste besides,” Granby was saying to Laurence meanwhile, low, but not very low. “To leave you here, and with Rankin to command the covert; if one can even call it a covert when there are three dragons in it, and two as likely to throw him in the ocean as obey him.”

“I wish him very great joy of the command,” Laurence said dryly. “It is not likely to demand much initiative, and he may as well be here as anywhere; he cannot do very much harm in the position, and he is welcome to the politicking. In all honesty, we would be at more of a standstill if Demane were confirmed in rank; from what we have seen of Governor Macquarie, I cannot imagine he would be in the least inclined to listen to a stripling, quite apart from his birth.”

“As far as that goes, Demane is as much an officer as he is a fish; so I don’t know you are worse off with Rankin, either,” Granby said. “No; but it is still a crime to leave you here to rot along with him, and I expect he will make a nuisance of himself; I don’t think he knows how to otherwise. And a prime heavy-weight,” he added, with still more frustration, “with not a prayer of getting him off the continent when the Allegiance has gone.”

Kulingile had outgrown Caesar a short way into their journey, to Temeraire’s private satisfaction, but it seemed to him Kulingile did not need to continue growing at such a pace now, when it plainly consumed so much of the available stores. Even if Iskierka was going away, that still did not leave them with so very many cows, and the hunting grew a good deal more tedious when anyone was taking half-a-dozen kangaroos at a time; soon they should have to fly several hours afield to find herds which could be culled.

“And you have surely heard several of the officers say that there is no use for a really big heavy-weight here in this colony,” Temeraire had said to him, when they had at last returned to the valley, and Kulingile had insisted on a portion of cattle just as large as those which Temeraire and Iskierka had commanded.

But Kulingile remained unimpressed by the hints which Temeraire dropped, and continued both to eat and to grow. “Of course he will not outgrow Maximus,” Temeraire murmured to Dorset interrogatively, when the second cow had vanished, and Kulingile was eyeing the rest of the herd with a sad, speculative gaze; Temeraire did not really see why Kulingile should outgrow him, either, but one did not wish to sound self-centered, or as though one would mind any such thing: it did not signify, of course, if one were a Celestial, even if Kulingile was also coming into a quite handsome pattern of golden scales, as he grew.

“Very likely he will,” Dorset said, writing in his log-book; he had been making a record of everything which Kulingile ate, and doing a great deal of measuring with his knotted string, at least until Kulingile had grown so large that only his talons might so be measured in any reasonable amount of time.

Dorset added, “We will know he has begun to reach his growth when he ceases to be quite so rounded: that is when the body will have overtaken the air-sacs, and so begin to approach the limit.” But it was now more than a week later, and Kulingile still had a tendency to roly-poly, and if he was not quite as long as Temeraire, it would have been a little difficult to say he was decidedly smaller, if one should compare their shadows on the ground.

MacArthur was certainly very impressed by his appearance when he came up to the promontory that afternoon, presumably to speak with Laurence; but Laurence had gone down to the Allegiance to dine with Riley and Granby one final time before their departure, and so there was no one else to meet him. MacArthur paused at the edge of the hill, and asked Temeraire, “So this is the new one, I gather? Something prodigious, I see, for a few months out of the shell; he will have your measure if he goes on a little longer this way.”

“I suppose, if one is only concerned with weight,” Temeraire said, a little repressively.

“Ha ha,” MacArthur said, although Temeraire saw nothing very funny in it. “And does he have a captain?”

“He is mine,” Demane said, belligerently, having already raised his head to listen from where he and Roland were sketching out the proposed plan of attack upon the serpents, and arguing over its merits; Demane was inclined to dislike it only because Rankin had proposed it, and so was finding fault, where Roland had said impatiently, “Yes, he is a scrub, what has that got to do with fighting? If Laurence said to jump in the water and fight them, would you like to do it?”

MacArthur eyed Demane more than a little doubtfully, and then said something to him which did not make any sense: it was a little like the aboriginal languages which Temeraire had now heard bits of, mixed together with a great deal of English peculiarly pronounced. “What?” Demane said, justly baffled.

“He thinks you’re one of their natives!” Sipho said, without looking up from his book. “We are from Africa, and we aren’t stupid, either; you needn’t talk like you are babbling to a child.”

“Well, that is handy,” MacArthur said. “It is a shame more of you black fellows cannot speak better English.”

“It is a shame you can’t speak better Chinese, too,” Sipho said, not quite under his breath, to which MacArthur said, “Why, I cannot say I would mind it these days,” and laughed again, ha ha, and said to Demane, “Now then, how did that come about: you are never an officer?”

“I am, too,” Demane said defiantly, “whatever Captain Rankin may have said; he wanted to have Kulingile killed, when he was hatched, so,” he spat, “that, for him, and anyone else who likes to deny me, I am happy to meet them anytime they like.”

“Well, for my part you may keep your sword in its sheath,” MacArthur said, “and I am happy enough to call you captain if the dragon does; there’s the real sticking-point of the business, after all. I suppose the other fellows are being sticklers over it?” he added shrewdly, and Demane looked mulish.

“You will be sticking here with this big fellow, I gather: what do you mean to do, stick here in this covert?” MacArthur went on. “A little uncomfortable, with a grousing pack of envious fellows about; you might do better to go it your own way, after all—with your own piece of land, and raise cattle of your own.”

Demane took a low startled breath; there was nothing more highly valued in his childhood society than cattle, at once survival and currency: orphan and impoverished, he had risked his life willingly to become the possessor of a cow, which yet remained in some corner of his spirit a standard of wealth. MacArthur might as well have said, that Demane ought to dig up a chest all full of treasure, and pointed him in its direction. “I might,” he said, attempting to be a little cool about the matter, and sounding merely wary.

“Well, keep it in mind,” MacArthur said. “There is no need to make any hasty decisions; only you might think it over, whether it would suit you.”

He asked after Laurence, then, and hearing he was at dinner touched his hat and went away, not without promising another pair of cattle, “With a yearling beef for the littler fellow,” he said, meaning Caesar, “and that way you don’t need to squabble it with this—Kulingheelay, did you say?” as though Temeraire would have squabbled anyway, in some undignified manner. “Give your captain my regards,” he concluded, and so departed, leaving Demane to say to Roland in an undertone, “It would suit me better than scraping to Rankin.”

“As though you would, anyway,” Roland said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t be an ass; he probably wants to see if you can be persuaded to fetch and carry for him, or something like, at a bargain price.”

“Do you suppose he might like something carried at not a bargain price, if he could not get better?” Temeraire inquired; though Roland abjured the idea scornfully, as beneath the dignity of an aviator to consider, Demane was of very like mind when Temeraire said to him privately, afterwards, “But if he or some other person were prepared to pay in cows, no one could object, I find, to doing him some service.”

There would be time yet to consider; at present, the question and MacArthur’s visit both were driven quite from his mind, for the wind had shifted: not very strong, but enough to rattle the spars a little, and in the ideal quarter. There was a consultation going forward on the deck of the ship, which Temeraire could see in the fading light: the young officers on duty peering up and calling questions to the crow’s nest. They were a little while at it and resolved not too soon: below in the street, the doors to the inn opened, where the men had gone to dine, just as the ship fired away a blue light and the small blue pennant rose up on the mast to summon all her officers aboard.

Laurence came up the hill slowly and rested his hand on Temeraire’s side as the ship’s launch rowed back out, the guests from dinner crawling up the side one after another; the men were already at the two massive capstans, marching around, as the sails billowed out in sheets of rolling white.

“Good-bye!” Iskierka called from the dragondeck, her voice carrying over the water. “Good-bye! I will tell Granby to write you whenever anything interesting should happen.”

Temeraire sighed a little, and put his head down upon his forelegs as the Allegiance began her slow and stately progress: the evanescing light orange-pink and steam wreathing her foremast from Iskierka’s spikes, spilling up the belled sails and trailing away; shouts, calls, the bell rung at the quarter-hour came distantly. The ship was moving towards night, away, and the curve of the land gradually concealed the hull so that one saw only the sails gliding; a little longer, and then only the lantern-gleam high up, if Temeraire sat upon his haunches and stretched his neck. Then even that faded to just the gleam of the stars coming out, and between one blink and another, Temeraire lost the track, and she was gone. The Allegiance was gone: the first he had ever sat upon the shore and watched her leave.

The harbor looked strangely empty and smaller with her out of it, as though one could not quite imagine that any ship so large had been in that place, and all the other ships which had looked so small beside her now seemed ordinary in size and respectable. “There is no reason she should not come back someday,” Temeraire said to Laurence, “of course; after all, a ship may go anywhere it likes, and she was sent here once. They might like to send some other dragons. And oh! it would be so very tedious to be sailing another eight months, as Iskierka is likely to do—if she is not sent to Brazil, that is,” he finished rather despondently. He was sure Iskierka would be sent to Brazil, it would be just the sort of thing which happened to Iskierka; it did not seem very fair that anyone so careless should have acquired heaps of treasure, and all the ship’s stores of cattle to herself, and also have a great deal more fighting, and everything pleasant.

But he was determined not to be dismal: he would not be a weight upon Laurence, who had also been left behind to manage with Rankin, and this new governor; Temeraire had been forced sadly to reconsider his feelings towards Macquarie. Laurence certainly thought better of him than of Bligh, and Temeraire would not quarrel on that point, but it seemed Macquarie was rather given to consulting Rankin, and not Laurence, and Laurence had not been invited to several of the conferences to further discuss the plan of attack.

Instead Rankin would return to the covert after these were held, and present the plan to the aviators in a very officious manner; and if Laurence had a point to make, or some question, Rankin would address him very pointedly as Mr. Laurence, and the others as Lieutenant, such as Lieutenant Blincoln; he only ever addressed the midwingmen so, as Mr. Peabody, or Mr. Dawes, so it was all the ever more sharp.

“That scarcely concerns me,” Laurence said, when Temeraire had expressed his very great irritation. “He might as easily refuse to share with me any intelligence from the conferences at all, and try and put another man aboard with us to govern the course of events during the battle; he would be within his rights.”

“As though I should allow any such thing,” Temeraire said, “and I am sure he knows it; he might fight the battle without me, then, and I expect without Kulingile, too.”

Kulingile cracked open an eye at his name and asked drowsily, “Is it time to eat again yet?”

“No, but I imagine you have not long to wait; I passed a butchering on my way,” Tharkay said, coming up the hill.

He shook Laurence’s hand; to Temeraire’s dismay, he had come to also take his leave. “The master of the Miniver informs me he means to make port at Bombay,” Tharkay said, “and I know the road from there to Istanbul.” He smiled a little, twistedly. “Much of my intelligence may be a little old by the time I have got there, but I have promised to deliver it.”

Temeraire did not see why Tharkay should have to go so far, only to deliver news; and particularly when he did not seem as though he wished to go, very much. “But if you must, you might come back,” Temeraire said, “and if you see Bezaid and Sherazde, pray tell them that their egg hatched quite safely; I have often thought that I ought to send them word. It is not their fault, of course, that Iskierka is so very irritating.”

“I think we must expect to regret you a longer time,” Laurence said. “—there can be very little to call you back to this part of the world anytime soon.”

Tharkay paused, then said, “We spoke some time ago of endeavors which might call you away from it, however. I would have opportunity to make inquiries, if you have decided.”

Laurence did not answer immediately; then he said, “No; thank you, Tenzing. I cannot see my way to it. I am very grateful—”

Tharkay waved this away. “Then I will hope some other occupation finds you; you do not seem likely to me to lie idle.” He drew out a handsomely embossed card from a case in his pocket. “My direction is likely to be, as always, uncertain; but you may write me care of my lawyers: if they cannot find me, they will hold the letters until I have called for them.” He gave Laurence the card; they clasped hands once more and agreed on dinner, the following day, before Tharkay went down the slope away.

“I certainly hope that he is right,” Temeraire said, with a little sigh; privateering did seem to him a splendid occupation, and it was a great pity Laurence felt it was not quite the thing. It did not seem to him that anything of interest should ever happen here, nor fair that everyone but himself and Laurence should go.

Tharkay and Laurence were away at dinner the next afternoon when the gunfire erupted, late in the evening. Temeraire had just woken to enjoy the cooler hours, and had been contemplating whether he might call it worth the effort to fly a little distance to the more shaded water-hole and have a cold drink; as the crack and whistle of musketry went off, Kulingile opened his eyes and sat up.

“Is it time to fight the serpents?” he inquired hopefully: his voice had not grown lower, but a great deal more resonant in an odd, echoing manner, so that when he spoke it seemed as though several people were talking at once, saying the very same thing.

“Of course it is not time to fight the serpents,” Caesar said, peering down the slope, “my captain would have come for me, and my crew. There are men fighting one another: perhaps it is duels.”

“It is not duels,” Temeraire said, “no one fights duels at night, and with dozens of people against one another; one fights them at dawn. I do not see why there should be so much disorder in this town, and why Laurence must always be in the midst of it, somewhere I cannot see him; oh! they are firing again.”

There were a great many men in uniforms in the street, struggling now against one another with bayonets and wrestling, their rifles held like staves and battering away. Temeraire rose and peered down the hill anxiously, looking to see if he could make Laurence out anywhere at all in the melee, but his brown coat would have been difficult to see in better light than they had, so that Temeraire did not see him was no comfort; if he had seen Laurence, he might at least have had the opportunity of snatching him away to safety.

“I am going to go down there,” Temeraire said, decisively, “—no, Roland, I cannot wait; plainly Laurence might be anywhere, and perhaps they will stop if I should land among them—I will only knock over that low building, which is very rickety-looking anyway, and perhaps the one beside it.”

“You are not to go anywhere,” Rankin said, panting up the hill, in his heartlessly plain evening clothes and great disarray, with Blincoln and his second lieutenant behind him. “Mr. Fellowes! You will rig Caesar out at once; it is a rebellion. You are to remain here,” he added to Temeraire. “Laurence is in no danger whatsoever: they are advancing on the governor’s mansion, and nowhere near the inn where he was dining.”

“As though I were likely to take your word for it,” Temeraire said scornfully, “or listen to you; I am not under your command, and if someone is rebelling, who is it, and why?”

“That,” Rankin snapped, “is none of your concern; if you do mean to go blundering in, and likely crush Laurence yourself in reckless abandon, by all means do so, but you will keep out of our way. Caesar, does all lie well? That breast-band does not look secure to me, Mr. Fellowes, you will see to it.”

“It is a little loose there over the shoulder, as well,” Caesar reported, puffing out his chest tremendously, and then Demane said, “I don’t see why we should—ow!”

Roland had kicked him soundly in the shin, and as he bent towards it caught him by the ear, twisting it painfully. “Don’t be an ass,” she said, “and don’t you yowl at me, either,” she added, when Kulingile had reared up his head in bristling protest. “It is for his good, and yours.”

“Let go!” Demane hissed back at her, but she was managing to dance around him and keep hold, so he could not easily wrench loose without hurting himself worse. “Why should we let him decide, who is ruling the colony and everyone in it—”

“We shouldn’t,” she hissed, “but you aren’t the son of an earl with twenty thousand a year and half the Lords in his pocket; if you look a rebel, someone will just shoot you, you ass, and not bother with trial about it, either; you haven’t a scrap of influence. And anyway,” she added, “if he hasn’t any business deciding, you have less; you don’t even know who it is rebelling, or why: and I dare say they are all just drunk.”

“They are certainly not drunk,” Temeraire said, “for they have got off three volleys: and it is no joke to reload a gun even when one is sober; it was the greatest difficulty for our artillery company to manage it, with seven men to a cannon, so it must be even more trouble for one person with a musket, it seems to me; and I do wish I knew who they were—”

“It is the New South Wales Corps,” Lieutenant Forthing said, panting; he had dashed up the hill. “Mr. Laurence is coming, Temeraire; he says to tell you he is quite well, and you are not to come in search of him.”

“Where is he, pray?” Temeraire said, still a little wary; Laurence, he knew, thought a little better of Forthing after their journey, but Temeraire did not see that he had done anything of particular value; he would much rather have had Ferris back, or perhaps his midwingman Martin; except of course Martin had given them the cut direct, after the trial.

It was grown too dark to see, but there was a lantern coming up the hill, and then Caesar said, “All lies well, Captain Rankin,” very satisfied with himself, and stood waiting while the company of officers began to go aboard with their rifles and their pistols, and as they mounted, he added aside to Temeraire and Kulingile, in a tone of unpardonable condescension, “Well, fellows, we will settle this in a trice, and be back; pray don’t trouble yourselves over it.”

“I do not see why we do not get any fighting, and you do?” Kulingile said queryingly, which Temeraire felt was a remarkably appropriate question. “I have been very sleepy, but no one can sleep when there are guns going. And if it is the New South Wales Corps, have they not been giving us those sheep? and the cows?”

“Well,” Temeraire said judiciously, “so far as that goes, Governor Macquarie did provide us with some cattle.” One ought, he felt, be scrupulously fair in such circumstances. “But he does mean to start a war with China, which no one would like; Laurence,” he said, swinging his head around, “I am so very relieved to see you: I had meant to go down, but Forthing came sooner. We are discussing whether we ought help Governor Macquarie, or the Corps, who are rebelling again.”

“Yes,” Laurence said, grimly, “—Roland, my glass.”

The battle, if one might call it that, had gone all the distance to the governor’s mansion now, and seemed so far as Temeraire could see it to be quite reduced in scope; there was very little fighting, and the soldiers who had stood in the way now seemed to be walking with the rest, except for the small company of Marines, who had fled. There was singing going on, and a great many of the townspeople had come out with lanterns and also flagons and bottles: one could see the light shining on the glass as they drank and cheered, and pistols were shot off into the air.

Laurence closed the glass and gave it to Roland. “Caesar,” Rankin said, “put me up.”

“Temeraire,” Laurence said, “you will not permit him to go aloft, if you please. Sir,” he said to Rankin, “the event has run past you: you will not turn your beast against a crowd of civilians. God knows there has been enough of that in this war: I will not see it done again.”

Rankin’s face went very pale with anger, and his hand clenched upon the straps of his carabiners, which he held ready. “Mr. Laurence, if you should dare interfere—”

“I do,” Laurence said flatly, and whatever Rankin might have said foundered: there was no threat he could offer.

“If you had the least ambition of pardon,” he said after a stifled, furious struggle briefly contorted his narrow, aristocratic mouth, “you may leave it aside forever; if you think the account I shall give of you will not suffice, Governor Macquarie will surely damn you as thoroughly.”

“I have no doubt of it,” Laurence said, and turned away; he did not care to give Rankin his face.