Empire of Ivory

Chapter 6

OH,” TEMERAIRE SAID, in a very strange tone, and he pitched forward and vomited tremendously all over the open ground before him, heaving up an acrid stinking mess in which the traces of banana leaves, goat horns, cocoanut shells, and long green ropes of braided seaweed might be distinguished among the generalized yellowish mulch, scattered through with unrecognizable scraps of cracked bones and shreds of hide.

“Keynes!” Laurence bellowed, having leapt out of the way just in time, and to the two hapless medicine-men who had offered the latest remedy, savagely said, “Get you gone, and take that worthless draught with you.”

“No, let us have it, if you please, and the receipt,” Keynes said, approaching a little gingerly, and bending to sniff at the pot which they had presented. “A purgative may be of some use on future occasions, if this is not simply a case of excess; were you feeling ill before?” Keynes demanded of Temeraire, who only moaned a little and closed his eyes; he was lying limp and wretched, having crept a little way off from the former contents of his stomach, which steamed unpleasantly even in the overheated late-summer air. Laurence covered his mouth and nostrils with a handkerchief and beckoned to the deeply reluctant groundsmen to bring the midden-shovels, and bury the refuse at once.

“I wonder if it is not the effects of the protea,” Dorset said absently, poking through the pot with a stick and fishing out the remnants of the spiny blossom. “I do not believe we have seen it used as an ingredient before: the Cape vegetation has quite a unique construction, among the plant kingdom. I must send the children for some specimens.”

“As glad as we must be to have delivered you a curiosity, it is certainly nothing which he ever ate before; perhaps you might consider how we are to proceed, instead, without making him ill again,” Laurence snapped, and went to Temeraire’s side before he could make a further display of his ill-temper and frustration. He laid a hand on the slowly heaving muzzle, and Temeraire twitched his ruff in an attempt at bravery.

“Roland, go you and Dyer and fetch some sea-water, from beneath the dock,” Laurence said, and taking a cloth used the cool water to wipe down Temeraire’s muzzle and his jaws.

They had been in Capetown now two days, experimenting lavishly: Temeraire perfectly willing to sniff or swallow anything which anyone should give him, if only it might by some chance be a cure, and exercise his memory; so far without any notable success, and Laurence was prepared to consider this latest episode a notable failure, whatever the surgeons might say. He did not know how to refuse them; but it seemed to him they were trying a great deal of local quackery, without any real grounds for hope, and making a reckless trial of Temeraire’s health.

“I already feel a good deal better,” Temeraire said, but his eyes were closing in exhaustion as he said it, and he did not want to eat anything the next day; but said wistfully, “I would be glad of some tea, if it would not be much trouble,” so Gong Su made a great kettle of it, using a week’s supply, and then to his disgust they put in an entire brick of sugar. Temeraire drank it with great pleasure when it had cooled, and afterwards stoutly declared himself perfectly recovered; but he still looked rather dismally when Emily and Dyer came huffing back from the markets, hung all over with the day’s new acquisitions in net-bags and parcels, and stinking from ten-yards’ distance.

“Well, let us see,” Keynes said, and went poking through the materials with Gong Su: a great many local vegetables, including a long pendulous fruit like an oversized yam, which Gong Su dubiously picked up and thumped against the ground: not even the skin so much as split, until he at last took it into the castle, to the smith, and had it smashed open upon the forge.

“That is from a sausage-tree,” Emily said. “Maybe it is not quite ripe, though; and also we did find some of the hua jiao today, from a Malay stall-keeper,” she added, showing Laurence a small basket of the red peppery seeds, for which Temeraire had acquired a great liking.

“Not the mushroom?” Laurence asked: this being a hideously pungent specimen they all recalled vividly from their first visit, which in its cooking had rendered the entire castle nearly uninhabitable from its noxious fumes. Laurence had his share of the seaman’s instinctive faith in unpleasant medicine, and secretly the best part of his own hopes lay on the thing. But it was surely a wild growth, uncultivated: no person in their senses would ever deliberately eat the thing, and so far it was not to be found, for any price.

“We found a boy who had a little English and told him that we would pay gold for it, if they would bring some,” Dyer piped up; a group of native children had brought them the first example mostly as a curiosity.

“Perhaps the seed husks in combination with another of the native fruits,” Dorset suggested, examining the hua jiao and stirring them with a finger. “They might have been used on any number of dishes.”

Keynes snorted, and, dusting his hands as he straightened from the survey, he shook his head at Gong Su. “No, let his innards have another day’s rest, and leave off all this unwholesome stuff. I am increasingly of the opinion that the climate alone must cook it out of them, if there is to be any benefit to this enterprise at all.”

He prodded the ground with the stick he had been using to turn over the vegetables: dry and hard several inches down, with only the stubborn frizz of short yellow grass to hold it together, the roots long and thin and spidery. A few days into March, they were deep in the local summer, and the steady hot weather made the hard-packed bare ground a baking stone, which fairly shimmered with heat during the peak of the day.

Temeraire cracked an eye from his restorative drowse. “It is pleasant, but it is not so much warmer than the courtyard at Loch Laggan,” he said doubtfully, and in any case the suggestion was not a very satisfying one, as this cure could not be tried until the other dragons arrived.

And for the moment they were alone, although the Allegiance was expected now daily. As soon as the ship had come in flying distance of the Cape, Laurence had packed the surgeons and the barest handful of men and supplies aboard Temeraire’s back, and taken them on ahead, that they might begin this desperate business of attempting to find the cure.

It had not been merely an excuse: their orders unequivocally stated without the loss of a moment, and Maximus’s ragged, gurgling cough was a constant spur to their sides. But in all honesty, neither had Laurence been sorry in the least to go. The quarrel had not been made up, at all.

Laurence had made attempts: once, three weeks into the journey, he paused, belowdecks, as they passed one another by chance, and removed his hat; but Riley only just touched his own brim and shouldered by, a quick surge of red color mounting in his cheeks. This had stiffened Laurence another week, long enough to make him refuse an offer of a share in one of the ship’s milch goats, when the one which he had provided himself ran dry and was sacrificed instead to the dragons.

Then regret won out again, and he said to Catherine, “Perhaps we ought to invite the captain and the ship’s officers to dinner?” on deck and perfectly audible to anyone who might be curious, so when the invitation was sent it could not be mistaken as anything but a peace offering. But though Riley came, and his officers, he was utterly withdrawn all the meal, scarcely answering except when Catherine spoke to him and never lifting his head from his plate. His officers, of course, would not speak without he or another captain addressing them, so it was a strange and silent affair with even the younger aviators stifled by the uneasy sense that their manners did not suit the formality of the occasion.

With such a standing quarrel among the officers, the men, who at no time made any great secret of their dislike of the dragons and their aviators, now made still less of one. Their hostility was leashed tightly by their fear, of course, even among those who had sailed with Laurence and Temeraire on the previous voyage to China. Seven dragons made a great difference from one, and the sudden violent fits of coughing or sneezing which wracked the poor creatures and ate at their strength only made them all the more fearsomely unpredictable to the common sailors, who could scarcely be made to ascend the foremast for its being too close to the beasts.

What was worse, their officers corrected them none too sharply for their hesitation, with predictable results: off the coast of the Horn she missed stays, and had to be hurriedly box-hauled, because the men were slow moving on the dragondeck to shift over the jib and foretop-mast staysail sheets. The maneuver jarred the dragons sadly about, setting them to coughing, and then nuisance in a moment nearly became tragedy: Nitidus went tumbling off Temeraire’s back and knocked Lily’s head askew.

Her greasy tub of oiled sand slid with ponderous majesty over the edge of the dragondeck, and plunged immediately into the ocean. “Over the side, dearest, put your head over the side,” Catherine cried, her crew all of them to a man rushing to fetch one of the other replacements from the galley below. Lily had with a tremendous effort lunged forward and now was clutching precariously at the edge of the ship, her head thrust out over the water and her shoulders curled up into great knots as she tried to hold from coughing; drops spilled from her bone spurs and smoked thin black hissing streams from the tarry sides of the ship: the Allegiance was coming up through the wind, which blew them back against the wood.

“Shall I try and carry you away from the ship?” Temeraire asked anxiously, wings half-spread. “Will you climb on my back?”—a dangerous maneuver at the best of times, with a dragon not dripping poisonous acid from her jaws, if Lily could even have managed to get upon him.

“Temeraire,” Laurence called instead, “will you see if you can break up the deck, here,” and Temeraire turned his head. Laurence had only meant him to try and wrench the planks up, but instead Temeraire opened his jaws experimentally over the place and gave a queer, throttled version of his usual roar: four planks cracked, one opening up along the ring-pattern of the wood and dropping a knot straight down onto the startled heads of the galley cooks, crouched and covering themselves in terror.

The space was nearly wide enough: with a few frantic moments of work they had it enlarged, and Temeraire could reach down and heave up the tub directly. Lily pressed her jaw down into the sand and coughed and coughed, miserably and long, the fit worsened by her having repressed it at first. The oily sand hissed and smoked and stank with the fumes of the acid, and the deck gaped with the splintered hole, jagged edges threatening the dragons’ bellies and letting the steam out of the galley which kept them warm.

“A damned disgrace; we might as well be sailing on a Frenchman,” Laurence said, angrily and not low; it had already been in his mind that tacking into the wind was incautious for so large and ponderous a vessel, better suited to old-fashioned wearing about, particularly when weighted down as she was with so many dragons.

Riley had appeared on the quarterdeck, and across the ship faintly drifted the sound of his furious voice, calling Owens, the deck officer, to account, and the men to fresh order. But Laurence’s voice carried, too; there was a momentary pause in Riley’s tirade, and then it finished more abruptly.

Riley made his stiff and formal apologies for the incident only to Catherine, catching her as she came off the dragondeck to go below, at the end of the day, in what Laurence could only imagine a design to avoid going up to speak to all of the aviators together. Her hair had come loose from its plait, her face was smudged with smoke and charred soot, and she had taken off her coat to pad under Lily’s jaw, where the bare edge of the tub had chafed. When he stopped her, she straightened and put her hand through her hair, loosening it entirely about her face, and his speech, undoubtedly prepared with care, quite fell apart. He only said, “I beg your pardon—deeply regret—” incoherently, and looked all confusion, until she interrupted tiredly, “Yes, of course, only pray not again, and do let us have the carpenters make the repairs at once tomorrow. Good-night,” and brushed past him and went below.

She meant nothing by it but that she was tired, and wished to go to sleep; but it looked cutting to one who did not know her well enough to know her not in the least likely to resort to social stratagem to express offense; and perhaps Riley was ashamed. In any case, by morning all the ship’s carpenters were at work on the dragondeck before even the aviators arose, with not a word of grumbling or fear even if a great deal of sweating, particularly when the dragons roused and began watching with close interest. By the end of the day they had not only repaired the injury, but also put in a smooth hatch, which could be opened up into the galley if the operation required repeating.

“Well, I call that handsome,” Catherine said, though Laurence felt it small amends for the earlier neglect; and when she added, “we ought to thank him for it,” glancing at him, he said nothing and made no shifts to take her place. When she did go and ask Riley to dine again, this time Laurence was careful to absent himself for the meal.

It was an end to any hope of resolution. The rest of the journey passed in a cold distance between them, barely an exchange of greetings and only the briefest gesture when passing on deck or below: made rarer still, as the Navy officers were quartered to the stern. There could be nothing comfortable in traveling aboard a ship while at unconcealed and bitter odds with her captain; the officers likewise cold, if they were men who had never served with Laurence himself, or stiff with discomfort otherwise. These constant chafing indignities of cold treatment from the ship’s complement daily refreshed not only of the pain of the quarrel but his resentment of Riley’s anger.

There was one saving grace; thus isolated from the life of the ship, and naturally brought into the closest contact with his fellow captains of the Corps and their habits, Laurence had sailed this time not merely in theory but in practice as an aviator: a very different experience, and he startled himself by preferring it. They had little practical work to do; by noon the daily slaughter was over, the dragondeck had been holystoned as best as could be managed without shifting the dragons too much, the younger officers examined on their schoolwork, and they were all at liberty: as much liberty as could be had within the space of a fully occupied dragondeck, and their half-a-dozen small cabins below.

“Do you mind if we knock down the bulkhead, Laurence?” Chenery had said, putting in his head scarcely three days into the journey, as Laurence was writing letters in his cabin: a habit he had much neglected on shore of late. “We want to set up a card-table, but it is too wretchedly cramped,” an odd request, but he gave his assent; it was pleasant to have the larger space restored, and to write his letters with the companionable noise of their game and conversation. It became so settled a practice among them that the crewmen would have the bulkheads down without asking, no sooner had they finished dressing; and restored only for sleeping.

They took their meals almost always thus in common: a convivial and noisy atmosphere, with Catherine presiding and all talking across the table heedless of etiquette, the junior officers squeezed in at the lower half in order of their promptness in arrival rather than their rank; and afterwards they gave the loyal toast standing on deck, followed with coffee and cigars in the company of their dragons, who were dosed with a posset against coughing, for what little relief it gave them, in the cooler hours of the evening. And after supper, he would read to Temeraire, occasionally from the Latin or the French, with Temeraire translating for the other dragons.

Laurence assumed Temeraire particularly unusual, among dragons, for his scholarship; to better suit the rest, he kept, at first, to their small store of literature, and only then gave way to those mathematical and scientific treatises which Temeraire doted upon and he himself found hard going. Many of these interested the company as little as Laurence had expected, but he was surprised in reading a sadly wearing treatise upon geometry to be interrupted by Messoria, who said sleepily, “Pray skip ahead a little; we do not need it proven, anyone can tell it is perfectly correct,” referring to great circles. They had no difficulty at all with the notion that a curved course rather than a straight was the shortest distance for sailing, which had confused Laurence himself for a good week when he had been obliged to learn it for the lieutenant’s examination, in the Navy. The next evening he was further interrupted in his reading by Nitidus and Dulcia taking up an argument with Temeraire about Euclid’s postulates, one of which, referring to the principle of parallel lines, they felt quite unreasonable.

“I am not saying it is correct,” Temeraire protested, “but you must accept it and go on: everything else in the science is built upon it.”

“But what use is it, then!” Nitidus said, getting agitated enough to flutter his wings and bat his tail against Maximus’s side; Maximus murmured a small reproof without quite waking. “Everything must be quite wrong if he begins so.”

“It is not that it is wrong,” Temeraire said, “only it is not so plain as the others—”

“It is wrong, it is perfectly wrong,” Nitidus cried decidedly, while Dulcia pointed out more calmly, “Only consider a moment: if you should begin in Dover, and I a little south of London, on the same latitude, and we should then both fly straight northward, we should certainly meet at the Pole if we did not mistake our course, so what on earth is the sense of arguing that straight lines will never meet?”

“Well,” Temeraire said, scratching at his forehead, “that is certainly true, but I promise you the postulate makes good sense when you consider all the useful calculations and mathematics which may be arrived at, starting with the assumption. Why, all of the ship’s design, which we are upon, is at base worked out from it, I imagine,” a piece of intelligence which made nervous Nitidus give the Allegiance a very doubtful eye.

“But I suppose,” Temeraire continued, “that we might try beginning without the assumption, or the contrary one—” and they put their heads together over Temeraire’s sand-table, and began to work out their own geometry, discarding those principles which seemed to them incorrect, and made a game of developing the theory; which entertained them a good deal more than most amusements Laurence had ever seen dragons engage in, with those listening applauding particularly inventive notions as if they were performances.

Shortly it became quite an all-encompassing project, engaging the attention of the officers as well as the dragons; the scant handful of aviators with good penmanship Laurence was soon forced to press into service, for the dragons began to expand upon their cherished theory quicker than he alone could take their dictation, partly out of an intellectual curiosity, and partly because they very much liked the physical representation of their work, which they insisted on having separately copied out one for each of them, and treated in much the same way that Temeraire treated his much-beloved jewels.

“I will make you a handsome edition of it, bound up like that nice book which you see Laurence reads from,” Laurence found Catherine saying to Lily, shortly, “if only you will eat something more every day: here, a few more bites of this tunny,” a bribery which succeeded where almost all else had failed.

“Well, perhaps a little more,” Lily said, with a heroic air, adding, “and may it have gold hinges, too, like that one?”

All this society Laurence might have enjoyed, though a little ashamed to find himself preferring what he could not in justice call anything but a very ramshackle way of going on. But for all their courage and good humor, improved by the interest of the sea-voyage, the dragons still coughed their lungs away little by little. What would have otherwise seemed a pleasure-cruise carried on under a ceaseless pall, where each morning the aviators came on the deck and put their crews to work washing away the bloodstained relics of the night’s misery, and each night lay in their cabins trying to sleep to the rattling wet accompaniment of the slow, weary hacking above. All their noise and gaiety had a forced and hectic edge, defiance of fear as much as real pleasure: fiddling as Rome burned.

The sentiment was not confined to the aviators, either. Riley might have had other excuses besides the political for preferring not to have Reverend Erasmus aboard, for the ship was already loaded besides him with a large number of passengers, most of them forced upon Riley by influence with the Admiralty, and well-found in the article of luggage. Some number departed at Madeira, to take other ship for the West Indies or Halifax from there, but others were bound for the Cape as settlers, and still others going on to India: an uneasy migration driven, Laurence was forced to suspect, little though he liked to think so ill of perfect strangers, by a dread of invasion.

He had some evidence for his suspicion; the passengers, when he chanced to overhear them speaking as they took the air on the windward side of the quarterdeck, spoke wistfully amongst themselves of the airy chances of peace, and pronounced Bonaparte’s name with fear. There was little direct communication, separated as the dragondeck was, nor did the passengers make much effort to become friendly, but on a few occasions, Reverend Erasmus joined Laurence for dinner. Erasmus did not carry tales, of course, but asked, “Captain, is it your opinion that invasion is a settled certainty?” with a curiosity which to Laurence spoke of its being a topic much discussed among the passengers with whom they ordinarily dined.

“I must call it settled that Bonaparte would like to try,” Laurence said, “and being a tyrant he may do as he likes with his own army. But if he is so outrageously bold as to make a second attempt where the first failed so thoroughly, I have every confidence he will be pushed off once again,” a patriotic exaggeration; but he had no notion of disparaging their chances publicly.

“I am glad to hear you say so,” Erasmus said, and added after a moment thoughtfully, “It must be a confirmation of the doctrine of original sin, I think, that all the noble promise of liberty and brotherhood which the revolution in France first brought up to light should have so quickly been drowned by blood and treasure. Man begins in corruption, and cannot achieve grace striving only for victory over the injustices of the world, without striving also for God, and obeying His commandments.”

Laurence a little awkwardly offered Erasmus the dish of stewed plums, in lieu of an agreement which should have felt dishonest; he was uneasily aware that he had not heard services for the better part of a year; barring the Sunday services on board, where Mr. Britten, the ship’s official chaplain, droned through his sermon with a notable lack of either inspiration or sobriety: and for those, Laurence had often to sit beside Temeraire, to keep him from interrupting.

“Do you suppose, sir,” Laurence ventured instead to ask, “that dragons are subject to original sin?” This question had from time to time preyed upon him; he had quite failed to interest Temeraire in the Bible. Scripture rather induced the dragon to pursue such thoroughly blasphemous lines of questioning that Laurence had very soon given it up entirely, from a superstitious feeling that this would only invite greater disaster.

Erasmus considered, and gave it as his opinion that they were not, “For surely the Bible would mention it, if any had eaten of the fruit besides Adam and Eve; and though resembling the serpent in some particulars, the Lord said unto the serpent that upon its belly it should go, whereas dragons are as creatures of the air, and cannot be considered under the same interdiction,” he added convincingly, so it was with a heart lightened that Laurence could return to the deck that evening, to once again try and persuade Temeraire to take a little more to eat.

Though Temeraire had not taken sick, he grew limp and faded in sympathy with the other dragons’ illness, and, ashamed of his appetite when his companions could not share in it, began to disdain his food. Laurence coaxed and cajoled with little effect, until Gong Su came up to him on deck and in flowery Chinese of which Laurence understood one word in six, but Temeraire certainly followed entire, offered his resignation in shame that his cooking was no longer acceptable. He dwelt at elaborate length upon the stain on his honor and that of his teacher and his family, which he would never be able to repair, and declared his intentions to somehow return home at the nearest opportunity, so that he might remove himself from the scene of failure.

“But it is very good, I promise, only I am not hungry just now,” Temeraire protested, which Gong Su refused to credit as anything but a polite excuse, and added, “Good cooking ought to make you hungry, even if you are not!”

“But I am, only—” Temeraire finally admitted, and looked sadly at his sleeping companions, and sighed when Laurence gently said, “My dear, you do them no good by starving yourself, and indeed some harm; you must be at your full strength and healthy when we reach the Cape.”

“Yes, but it feels quite wrong, to be eating and eating when everyone else has stopped and gone to sleep; it feels as though I am sneaking food, behind their backs, which they do not know about,” Temeraire said, a perplexing way of viewing the situation, as he had never shown the least compunction about out-eating his companions while they were awake, or jealously guarding his own meals from the attention of other dragons. But after this admission, they gave him his food in smaller portions throughout the day, while the other dragons were wakeful; and Temeraire exhibited no more very extreme reluctance, even though the others still refused any more food themselves.

But he was not happy with their situation, any more than was Laurence; and grew still less so as they traveled southward, Riley’s caution keeping them near the shore. They did not put in at Cape Coast, or at Louanda or Benguela; and from a distance these ports looked gaily enough, full of white sails clustering together. But there was reminder enough at hand of their grim commerce, the ocean being full of sharks that came eagerly leaping to the ship’s wake, trained like dogs by the common passage of slave-ships to and from those harbors.

“What city is that?” Mrs. Erasmus asked him abruptly. She had come to take the air with her daughters, who were parading themselves decorously back and forth under a shared parasol, for once unattended by their mother.

“Benguela,” Laurence said, surprised to be addressed; in nearly two months of sailing she had never spoken to him direct before. She was never forward on any occasion, but rather in the habit of keeping her head bowed and her voice low; her English still heavily accented with Portuguese when she used it at all. He knew from Erasmus that she had gained her manumission only a little while before her marriage; not through the indulgence of her master but by his ill-fortune. That gentleman, a landowner from Brazil, had gone on business to France, passenger on a merchant ship taken in the Atlantic; she and his other slaves had been made free, when the prize had been brought in to Portsmouth.

She was drawn up very tall and straight, both her hands gripping the rail, though she had excellent sea-legs and scarcely needed the support; and she stood a long time looking there, even after the little girls had grown tired of their promenade and abandoned both parasol and decorum to go scrambling over the ropes with Emily and Dyer.

A great many slave-ships went to Brazil from Benguela, Laurence recalled; he did not ask her, but offered her instead his arm to go below again, when at last she turned away, and some refreshment. She refused both, with only a shake of her head, and called her children back to order with a quick low word; they left off their game, abashed, and she took them down below.

Past Benguela there were no more slave ports, at least; both from the hostility of the natives to the trade, and the inhospitable coastline, but the oppressive atmosphere on board was no less. Together Laurence and Temeraire often went aloft to escape, flying in closer to shore than Riley would risk the Allegiance and pacing her from there, so they might watch the African coastline wear away: here impenetrably forested, here spilling yellow rock and yellow sand into the ocean, here the shore crammed with lazy seals; then the long stretch of endless orange desert, bound regularly in thick banks of fog, which made the sailors wary. Almost hourly the officer of the watch called for them to take soundings of the ocean floor, voices muffled and oddly far-away in the mist. Very occasionally a few black men might be glimpsed on shore, observing them in turn with wary attention; but for the most part there was only silence, watchful silence, except for the shrieking of birds.

“Laurence, surely we can reach Capetown from here, quicker than the ship can go,” Temeraire said at last, grown weary of the oppressive atmosphere. They were still nearly a month’s sailing from that port, however, and the country too dangerous to risk a long overland passage. The interior of the continent was notoriously impenetrable and savage, and had without a trace swallowed whole parties of men; more than one courier-dragon tempted off the coastal route had likewise vanished. But the suggestion appealed, with its prospects of quitting sooner the unhappy conditions of the voyage, and advancing more quickly the crucial research which was their purpose.

Laurence persuaded himself that he should not be derelict in going on early, once they should be near enough to make the flight one which might be accomplished in a day, if a strenuous one. With this incentive, Temeraire was easily induced to eat properly and go for long and uninteresting circular flights around the ship, to build up his strength; and no one else raised objection to their departure. “If you are quite sure you will reach in safety,” Catherine said, with only the most obligatory reluctance; none of the aviators could help but share the urgent desire to have the work begun, now they were so close.

“You shall of course do as you please,” Riley said, when officially informed, without looking Laurence in the face; and bent his head down again over his maps to pretend to be making calculations: a pretense which succeeded not at all, Laurence being perfectly aware that Riley could not do so much as a sum in his head without scratching it out on paper.

“I will not take all the crew,” Laurence told Ferris, who looked dismal, but even he did not protest over-much. Keynes and Dorset would come, of course, and Gong Su: the cooks in the employ of Prince Yongxing, on their previous visit, had experimented with great enthusiasm on the local produce, which thus formed one of the surgeons’ foremost hopes of reproducing the cure.

“Do you suppose you can prepare these ingredients in the same way as they might have used?” Laurence asked Gong Su.

“I am not an Imperial chef!” Gong Su protested, and to Laurence’s dismay explained that the style of cooking in the south of China, whence he hailed, was entirely different. “I will try my poor best, but it is not to be compared; although northern cooking is not very good usually,” he added, in a burst of parochialism.

Roland and Dyer came to be assistants to him, and run and fetch in the markets, their slight weight a negligible burden; for the rest, Laurence packed aboard a chest of gold, and took little more baggage than his sword and pistols and a pair of clean shirts and stockings. “I do not feel the weight at all; I am sure I could fly for days,” Temeraire said, grown still more urgent: Laurence had forced himself to let caution keep them back a full week, so they were now less than two hundred miles distant: still a desperately long single day’s flight, but not an impossible one.

“If the weather holds until morning,” Laurence said.

One final invitation he made, which he did not think would be accepted, to Reverend Erasmus. “Captain Berkley begs me inform you he would be happy if you continued aboard as his guests,” Laurence said, rather more elegantly than Berkley’s, “Yes, of course. Damned formal nonsense; we are not going to put them overboard, are we?” could be said to have deserved. “But of course you are my personal guests, and welcome to join me, if you would prefer it.”

“Hannah, perhaps you would rather not?” Erasmus said, looking to his wife.

She lifted her head from her small text on the native language, whose phrases she was forming silently with her mouth. “I do not mind,” she said; and indeed climbed up to Temeraire’s back without any sign of alarm, settling the girls around her and chiding them firmly for their own anxiety.

“We will see you in Capetown,” Laurence told Ferris, and saluted Harcourt; with one grateful leap they were gone, flying and flying over clean ocean, with a good fresh wind at their heels.

A day and a night of flying had seen them coming in over the bay at dawn: the flat-topped fortress wall of Table Mount standing dusty and golden behind the city, light spilling onto the striated rock face and the smaller jagged sentinel peaks to either side. The bustling town crammed full the crescent slice of level ground at the base of the slope, with the Castle of Good Hope at its heart upon the shore, its outer walls forming a star-shape from above with the butter-yellow pentagon of the fort nested within, gleaming in the early morning as her cannon fired the welcoming salute to leeward.

The parade grounds where Temeraire was lodged were beside the castle, only a few dragon-lengths from where the ocean came grumbling onto the sandy beach: a distance inconvenient when the wind was blowing too strongly at high tide, but which otherwise made a pleasant relief against the summer heat. Although the courtyard enclosed within the fort itself was large enough to house a few dragons in times of emergency, it would not have made a comfortable situation, either for the soldiers stationed in the castle barracks, or for Temeraire; and happily, the grounds had been much improved since their last visit breaking their journey to China. While the couriers no longer flew routes this far south, too remote for their failing strength, a fast frigate had been sent on ahead of the Allegiance with dispatches to warn the acting-governor, Lieutenant-General Grey, both of their arrival and, secretly, of their urgent purpose. He had widened the grounds to house all the formation, and put up a low fence around.

“I am not afraid you will be pestered; but it may keep away prying eyes, and stifle some of this damned noise,” he said to Laurence, referring to the protests of the colonists at their arrival. “It is just as well that you have come on ahead: it will give them some time to get over the notion, before we have seven dragons all in a lump. The way they wail, you would think they had never heard of a formation at all.”

Grey had himself reached the Cape only in January; he was the lieutenant-governor, and would soon be superceded by the arrival of the Earl of Caledon, so that his position, with all the awkwardness of a temporary situation, lacked a certain degree of authority; and he was much beset by cares not a little increased by their arrival. The townspeople disliked the British occupation, and the settlers, who had established their farms and estates farther out into the countryside and down the coast, despised it and indeed anything in the shape of government that would have interfered with their independence, which they considered dearly and sufficiently paid for by the risk which they ran, in pressing the frontier into the wild interior of the continent.

The advent of a formation of dragons was viewed by them all with the deepest suspicion, especially as they were not to be permitted to know the real purpose. Thanks to much slave labor cheaply acquired, in the earlier years of the colony, the settlers had come to disdain manual labor for themselves and their families; and their farms and vineyards and herds had expanded to take advantage of the many hands which they could forcibly put to the work. Slaves were not exported from the Cape; they wanted rather more slaves than they could get: Malay by preference, or purchased from West Africa, but not disdaining, either, the unhappy servitude of the native Khoi tribesmen, who if they were not precisely slaves were very little less constrained, and their wages unworthy of the term.

Having thus arranged to be outnumbered, the colonists now exerted themselves to maintain the serenity of their establishments by harsh restrictions and an absolutely free hand with punishment. A resentment yet lingered that under the previous British government, the torture of slaves had been forbidden; on the further outskirts of the town might yet be observed the barbaric custom of leaving the corpse of a hanged slave upon his gibbet, as an illustrative example to his fellows of the cost of disobedience. The colonists were well informed, also, of the campaign against the trade, which they viewed with indignation as likely to cut them off from additional supply; and Lord Allendale’s name was not unknown to them as a mover of the cause.

“And if that were not enough,” Grey said tiredly, when they had been in residence a few days, “you brought this damned missionary with you. Now half the town thinks the slave trade has been abolished, the other half that their slaves are all to be set free at once and given license to murder them in their beds; and all are certain you are here to enforce it. I must ask you to present me to the fellow; he must be warned to keep more quiet. It is a miracle he has not been already stabbed in the street.”

Erasmus and his wife had taken over a small establishment of the London Missionary Society, lately abandoned by the death of its previous tenant, a victim of malarial fevers, and in far from an ordered state. There was neither a school nor a church building, yet, only a mortally plain little house, graced by a few depressed and straggling trees, and a bare plot of land around it meant for a vegetable-garden, where Mrs. Erasmus was presently laboring in the company of her daughters and several of the young native women, who were being shown how to stake tomato plants.

She stood up when Laurence and Grey came into view, and with a quiet word left the girls at work while she led the two of them inside the house: built in the Dutch style, the walls made of thick clay, with broad wooden beams exposed above supporting the thatched roof. The windows and door all stood open to let air the smell of fresh whitewash; inside the house was only a single long room, divided into three, and Erasmus was seated in the midst of a dozen native boys scattered around on the floor, showing them the letters of the alphabet upon a slate.

He rose to greet them and sent the boys outside to play, an eruption of gleeful yelling drifting in directly they had gone spilling out into the street, and Mrs. Erasmus disappeared into the kitchen, with a clatter of kettle and pot.

“You are very advanced, sir, for three-days’ residence,” Grey said, looking after the horde of boys in some dismay.

“There is a great thirst for learning, and for the Gospel, too,” Erasmus said, with pardonable satisfaction. “Their parents come at night, after they have finished working in the fields, and we have already had our first service.”

He invited them to sit: but as there were only two chairs, it would have made an awkward division, and they remained standing. “I will come at once to the point,” Grey said. “There have been, I am afraid, certain complaints made.” He paused, and repeated, “Certain complaints” uneasily, though Erasmus had said nothing. “You understand, sir, we have but lately taken the colony, and the settlers here are a difficult lot. They have made their own farms, and estates, and with some justice consider themselves entitled to be masters of their own fate. There is some sentiment—in short,” he said abruptly, “you would do very well to moderate your activity. You need not perhaps have so many students—take three or four, most promising; let the rest return to work. I am informed the labor of the students is by no means easily spared,” he added weakly.

Erasmus listened, saying nothing, until Grey had done; then he said, “Sir, I appreciate your position: it is a difficult one. I am very sorry I cannot oblige you.”

Grey waited, but Erasmus said nothing more whatsoever, offering no ground for negotiation. Grey looked at Laurence, a little helplessly, then turning back said, “Sir, I will be frank; I am by no means confident of your continued safety, if you persist. I cannot assure it.”

“I did not come to be safe, but to bring the word of God,” Erasmus said, smiling and immovable, and his wife brought in the tea-tray.

“Madam,” Grey said to her, as she poured the cups at the table, “I entreat you to use your influence; I beg you to consider the safety of your children.” She raised her head abruptly; the kerchief which she had been wearing outside to work had slipped, and by pulling her hair back away from her face revealed a dull scarred brand upon her forehead, the initials of a former owner blurred but legible still, and superimposed on an older tattooed marking, of abstract pattern.

She looked at her husband; he said gently, “We will trust in God, Hannah, and in His will.” She nodded and made Grey no direct answer, but went silently back outside to the garden.

There was of course nothing more to be said; Grey sighed, when they had taken their leave, and said dismally, “I suppose I must put a guard upon the house.”

A heavy moist wind was blowing from the south-east, draping the Table Mount in a blanket of clouds; but it abated that evening, and the Allegiance was sighted the next afternoon by the castle lookout, heralded by the fire of the signal-guns. The atmosphere of suspicion and hostility was a settled thing by then, throughout the town; although sentiments less bitter would have sufficed to make her arrival unsettling for the inhabitants.

Laurence watched her come in, by Grey’s invitation, from a pleasant cool antechamber set atop the castle, and seeing her from this unfamiliar and reversed direction was struck by the overwhelming impression of terrible force: not only the sheer vastness of her size, but the hollow eyes of her brute armament of thirty-two-pounders, glaring angrily out of portholes, and what seemed at this distance a veritable horde of dragons coiled upon her deck, uncountable for their lying so intertwined that their heads and tails could not quite be separated one from another.

She advanced slowly into harbor, dwarfing all the shipping in the port into insignificance, and a kind of grim silence descended upon the town as she fired her salute to the fort: a rolling thunder of guns that echoed back from the face of the mountain, and settled gently upon the town like a fog. Laurence could taste the powder-smoke at the back of his mouth. The women and children had vanished from the streets by the time her anchors were let plunging down.

It was dreadful to see how little they had truly to fear, when Laurence went down to the shore and had himself rowed across to aid with the maneuvers under way to get the dragons transferred off the deck. The long cramped journey had stiffened them all badly, and though the Allegiance had made good time, still every day of the two months and more had eaten steadily away at their strength. The castle was established only steps from the sandy beach, the parade grounds beside it, but even this short flight wearied them now.

Nitidus and Dulcia, the smallest, came across first, to give the others more room; they drew deep breaths and lunged valiantly off the deck, their short wings beating sluggish and slow, and giving them very little lift, so that their bellies nearly scraped the top of the low fence around the parade grounds; they landed heavily and sank down into a heap on the warm ground without even folding their wings back. Messoria and Immortalis then dragged themselves up so wearily to their feet that Temeraire, who was watching anxiously from the grounds, called out, “Pray wait, and I will come and carry you in,” and ferried them one after another upon his back, heedless of the small scrapes and scratches which he took from their claws, as they clutched at him for balance.

Lily nosed Maximus gently, on the deck. “Yes, go on, I will be there in a moment,” he said sleepily, without opening his eyes; she gave a dissatisfied rumble of concern.

“We will get him across, never fear,” Harcourt said coaxingly; and at last Lily was persuaded to submit to their precautionary arrangements for her own transfer: a muzzle had to be fitted over her head, from which a large metal platter was suspended beneath her jaws, and this covered with more of the oiled sand.

Riley had come to see them off; Harcourt turned to him and held out her hand, saying, “Thank you, Tom; I hope we will be coming back across soon, and you will visit us on land.” He took her hand in an awkward sideways grip and bowed over it, somewhere between saluting her and shaking her hand, and backed away stiffly; he still avoided looking at Laurence at all.

Harcourt put her boot on the railing and jumped up to Lily’s back; she took hold of the harness to steady it, and Lily unfurled her great wings, the feature from which the breed took its name: rippled along the edges in narrow bands of black and white with the dark blue of her body shading across their length to a brilliant deep orange the color of old marmalade; they shone iridescent in the sun. Fully extended, they made double the length of her entire body, and once she had fairly launched herself aloft, she scarcely needed to beat them, but glided stately along without great exertion.

They managed the flight across without spilling too much of the sand, or dripping acid upon the castle battlements or the dock; and then there was only Maximus left upon the deck. Berkley spoke to him quietly, and with a great heaving sigh the enormous Regal Copper pushed himself up to his feet, the Allegiance herself rocking a little in the water. He took two slow gouty steps to the edge of the dragondeck and sighed again; his shoulder-muscles creaked as he tried his wings, and then let them sink against his back again; his head drooped.

“I could try,” Temeraire offered, calling from shore; quite impractically: Maximus still made almost two of him by weight.

“I am sure I can manage it,” Maximus said hoarsely, then bent his head and coughed a while, and spat more greenish phlegm out over the side. He did not move.

Temeraire’s tail was lashing at the air, and then with an air of decision he plunged into the surf and came swimming out to them instead. He reared up with his forelegs on the edge of the ship and thrust his head up over the railing to say, “It is not very far: pray come in the water. I am sure together we can swim to the shore.”

Berkley looked at Keynes, who said, “A little sea-bathing can do no harm, I expect; and perhaps even some good. It is warm enough in all conscience, and we will have sun another four hours at this time of year, to dry him off.”

“Well, then, into the water with you,” Berkley said, gruffly, patting Maximus’s side, and stepping back. Crouching down awkwardly, Maximus plunged forequarters-first into the ocean; the massive anchor-cables complained with deep voices as the Allegiance recoiled from the force of his leap, and ten-foot ripples swelled up and went shuddering away from him to nearly overturn some of the unsuspecting slighter vessels riding at anchor in the bay.

Maximus shook water from his head, bobbing up and down, and paddled a few strokes along before stopping, sagging in the water; the buoyancy of the air-sacs kept him afloat, but he listed alarmingly.

“Lean against me, and we shall go together,” Temeraire said, swimming up to his side to brace him up; and little by little they progressed towards the shore until the ocean floor came up abruptly to meet them, clouds of white sand stirring up like smoke, and Maximus could stop to rest, half-submerged yet, with the waves lapping against his sides.

“It is pleasant in the water,” he said, despite another fit of coughing. “I do not feel so tired here,” but he had still to be got out and onto the shore: no little task, and he managed it only in slow easy stages, with all the assistance which Temeraire and the oncoming tide could offer, crawling the final dozen yards nearly on his belly.

Here they let him rest, and brought him the choicest cuts from the dinner which Gong Su had spent the day preparing to tempt the dragons’ appetites after their exertion: local cattle, fat and tender, spit-roasted with a crust of pepper and salt pressed into their flesh, as a flavoring strong enough to overcome the dulling effect of the illness on the dragons’ senses, and stuffed with their own stewed tripes.

Maximus ate a little, drank a few swallows of the water which they carried out to him in a large tub, and afterwards fell back into sluggish torpor, coughing, and slept the night through on shore, with the ocean still coming in and his tail riding up on the waves like a tethered boat. Only in the cool early hours of the morning did they get him the rest of the way to the parade grounds, and there settled him in the best place at its edge beneath the young stand of camphor trees, where he might have a little shade as well as sun, and very near the well which had been sunk to easily bring them water.

Berkley saw him established, and then took off his hat and went to the water trough, to duck his head and bring a couple of cupped handfuls to his mouth to drink, and wipe his red and sweating face. “It is a good place,” he said, his head bent, “a good place; he will be comfortable here—” and ending abruptly went inside the castle, where they breakfasted together in silence. They did not discuss the matter, but no discussion was required; they all knew Maximus would not leave again, without a cure, and they had brought him otherwise to his grave.

Chapter 7

ABOARD, THEY HAD counted every day; they had hurried, they had fretted; now they were arrived and could only sit and wait, while the surgeons went through their fastidious experiments, and refused to give any opinion whatsoever. More outrageous local supplies were brought to them in succession, presented to Temeraire, occasionally tried on one of the sick dragons, and discarded again. This proceeded without any sign of useful effect, and on one unfortunate occasion again distressed Temeraire’s digestive system, so that the shared dragon-midden took on a very unpleasant quality, and had at once to be filled in and a new one dug. The old one promptly sprang up a thick carpet of grass and a bright pink weedy flower, which to their great exasperation could not be rooted out, and attracted a species of wasps viciously jealous of their territory.

Laurence did not say so, but it was his private opinion that all this experimentation was only half-hearted, and meant to occupy their attention while Keynes waited for the climate to do its work; though Dorset made careful notes of each trial in his regular hand, going from one dragon to the next in rounds thrice daily, and inquiring with heartless indifference how much the patient had coughed since the last inquiry, what pains he suffered, how he ate; this last was never much.

At the close of the first week, Dorset finished his latest interrogation of Captain Warren, on the condition of Nitidus, and shut his book and went and spoke quietly with Keynes and the other surgeons. “I suppose they are all prodigious clever, but if they keep on with these secret councils, and telling us nothing, I will begin to want to push their noses in for them,” Warren said, coming to join the rest of them at the card-table, which had been set up under a pavilion in the middle of the grounds. The game was mostly a polite fiction to occupy the days: they did not have much attention to the cards at any time, and now had none, all of them instead watching the surgeons as they huddled together in deep discussion.

Keynes evaded them skillfully for two more days, and finally cornered into giving some report said crabbily, “It is too soon to tell,” but admitted that they had seen some improvement, so far as they could determine merely from the climate: the dragons had shown some resurrection of appetite and energy, and they coughed less.

“It will be no joke, ferrying all the Corps down here,” Little said quietly, after their first early jubilation. “How many transports have we, in all?”

“Seven, I think, if the Lyonesse is out of dry-dock,” Laurence said.

There was a pause; then he added strongly, “But consider, we scarcely need a ship of a hundred guns only to move dragons; transports are meant foremost to deliver them to the front,” this being not entirely a misrepresentation, but only because there was little cause other than war to go to the difficulty and expense of shifting dragons about. “We can put them on barges at Gibraltar instead, and send them along the coast, with an escort of frigates to keep the French off them.”

It sounded well enough, but they all knew that even if not inherently impractical, still such an operation was wholly unlikely to be carried out on the scale of the entire Corps. They might return with the dragons of their own formation preserved, but such a cure was likely to be denied half their comrades or more. “It is better than nothing,” Chenery said a little defiantly, “and more than we had; there is not a man of the Corps who would not have taken such odds, if offered him,” but the odds would be unequal ones.

Longwings and Regal Coppers, heavy-combat dragons and the rarer breeds, no expense or difficulty would be spared to preserve; but for the rest—common Yellow Reapers or quick-breeding Winchesters; older dragons likely to be difficult when their captains died; the weaker or less-skilled flyers; these, a brutal political calculus would not count worth the saving, and leave to die in neglect and misery, isolated undoubtedly in the most distant quarantines which could be arranged. Their cautious satisfaction was dimmed by this shadow, and Sutton and Little took it worst; their dragons were both Yellow Reapers, and Messoria was forty. But even guilt could not extinguish all their eager hope; they slept very little that night, counting coughs instead, tallies to go into Dorset’s book; and in the morning, with only a little coaxing, Nitidus was persuaded to try his wings. Laurence and Temeraire went with him and Warren, for company and in case the little Pascal’s Blue should exhaust his strength; Nitidus was panting hoarsely from his mouth and coughing, now and again, as they flew.

They did not go far. The local hunger for grazing land and timber had scraped the fields and hillsides down to scrubby low grass, all the way to the base of Table Mountain and its satellite peaks, where the slopes grew prohibitive: loose conglomerations of grey and yellow rock in stepped terraces like old rotting stone walls held together by grass and green moss, and clayey dirt for mortar. They halted there and rested on the loose scrubby ground in the shadow of the sheer cliff wall. An extensive scurrying went on in the underbrush as the small game fled from their presence, small furry creatures like brown badgers.

“It is a very strange sort of mountain,” Temeraire observed, craning his head to look back and forth along the long ridge of the peak above them, sheared smooth and flat as if by a leveling knife.

“Yes; oh, very; and how hot it is,” Nitidus said, meaninglessly and half-asleep, and tucked his head beneath his wing to nap. They let him sleep in the sun, and Temeraire yawned, too, and followed his example; Laurence and Warren stood together looking back down into the deep bowl of the harbor where it ran down into the ocean, the Allegiance a toy ship among ants at this distance. The neat geometric pentagon of the castle was drawn in yellow upon the dark earth, with the dragons small, still lumps upon the parade grounds beside it.

Warren took off his glove and rubbed the back of his hand across his brow to wipe the sweat off; he left a careless smudge. “I suppose you would go back to the Navy, if it were you?” he asked.

“If they would have me,” Laurence said.

“A fellow might buy a cavalry commission, I suppose,” Warren said. “There will be no shortage of soldiers needed if Bonaparte continues to have things his way; but it could hardly compare.”

They were silent a while, considering the unpleasant options which would be the portion of so many men cast effectively on shore, by the death of the dragons on which they served.

“Laurence,” Warren went on, after a moment, “this fellow Riley, what sort of a man is he? Ordinarily, I mean; I know you were lately both standing on your honor.”

Laurence was astonished to be appealed to in such a way, but answered, “A gentleman and one of the finest officers of my acquaintance; I cannot say a word against him, personally.”

He wondered very much what should have spurred the inquiry. With the Allegiance confined by her orders to harbor, until the dragons should once again be ready to depart, Riley had of course come to the castle and dined with General Grey on more than one occasion. Laurence had absented himself, but Catherine and the other captains had gone more often than not. Perhaps some quarrel had taken place to give rise to such a question, and Laurence hoped that perhaps Warren would elaborate. But he only nodded, and changed the subject to the likelihood that the wind would change, before their return, so Laurence’s curiosity remained unsatisfied, and the question had only the effect of making him sorry afresh for the quarrel, which he now supposed should never be made up, and the termination of their friendship.

“Nitidus does seem better, does he not?” Temeraire murmured to Laurence, in confidential tones audible only to anyone within twenty feet, while they made ready to return; Laurence could answer wholeheartedly that he thought so as well, and when they returned to the parade grounds, the light-weight ate almost to his healthy standard, putting a period to two goats before he again fell asleep.

On the morrow Nitidus did not want to repeat the exercise, and Dulcia would only go half so far before dropping down to rest. “But she did for a whole one of those oxen, a yearling calf,” Chenery said, doing for a substantial glass of whiskey and water himself, “and a damned good sign I call it; she has not eaten so much in a sixmonth.”

The next day neither of them would go, but sat down again, almost as soon as they had been persuaded to get up on their feet, and begged to be excused. “It is too hot,” Nitidus complained, and asked for more water; Dulcia said more plaintively, “I would rather sleep some more, if you please.”

Keynes put a cup to her chest to listen, and straightening up shook his head. None of the others could be stirred much beyond their sleeping places. When the tallies over which the aviators had labored were examined closely together, the dragons did indeed cough less, but it was not much less; and this benefit had been exchanged, their anxious observers soon perceived, for listlessness and lethargy. The intense heat made the dragons sleepy and disinclined to move, the interest of their new surroundings having now palled, and the brief resurgence in their appetites had evidently been spurred only by the better eating available on shore, as compared to the late stages of the sea-journey.

“I would not have regretted it, not at all,” Sutton muttered, hunched over the table and speaking to himself, but so violently that it could not but be overheard. “How could there be any regret, in such circumstances; there could be none,” in anguish as great as though his guilt over the prospect of a cure for his own Messoria, when so many others might be left to die, had been the very cause of failure; and Little was so white and stricken that Chenery took him into his tent, and plied him with rum until he slept.

“The rate of progress of the disease has been slowed,” Keynes said, at the close of their second week. “It is not an inconsequential benefit,” he added, little consolation for their better hopes.

Laurence took Temeraire away flying, and kept him on the shore all the night, to spare his fellow captains at least briefly the contrast between Temeraire’s health and that of their own dragons. He felt keenly his own portion of guilt and shame, the confused mirror of Sutton’s unhappiness and Little’s: he would not have contemplated trading Temeraire’s health for all the rest, and though he knew his fellow-captains would understand perfectly and feel each of them the same for their own partner, in as irrational a way he felt the failure a punishment for this private selfishness.

In the morning, new sails stood in the harbor: the Fiona, a quick-sailing frigate, had come in during the night, with dispatches. Catherine opened them slowly, at the breakfast-table, and read off the names: Auctoritas, Prolixus, Laudabilis, Repugnatis; gone since the new year.

Laurence, too, had a letter, from his mother:

All is desolation; we are done, for at least another year, and likely more, if the Government should fall again. The Motion was carried in the Commons; the Lords again defeated it, despite everything which could be done, and a most extraordinary Speech, by Mr. Wilberforce, which should have moved the Possessor of any Soul deserving of the name. The Newspapers at least are with us, and speak with all the Outrage merited by so disgusting an Event: the Times writes, “Those Nay-sayers who give no Thought to the Future may sleep easy this Night; the others must try if they can to find Rest, in the sure Knowledge that they have laid up a Store of Misery and Sorrow, which they shall be asked to repay, if not in this World, then in that To Come,” only a just Reproach…

He folded it and put it aside in his coat pocket; he had no heart to read further, and they left the dining room a silent party.

The castle barracks were large enough to house a larger party than they made, but with the disease marching implacable along, the captains by silent agreement preferred to stay closer by their sick beasts. The other officers and men not wishing to be outdone, a small battalion of tents and pavilions sprang up about the grounds, where they most of them spent their days and nights, barring the infrequent rain. All the better to discourage the occasional invasion of the local children, who remembered Temeraire’s last visit of a year ago enough to have lost some of their fear; they had now formed the game of working one another up, until one, challenged past the point of endurance, would make a mad flurrying dash through the parade grounds among the sleeping dragons, before fleeing back out again to receive the congratulations of his peers.

These escalating adventures Sutton quelled for good one afternoon, when a boy dashing in slapped his hand against Messoria’s side, and startled her out of a rare sound sleep. She reared up her head into snorting wakefulness, and the guilty culprit fell over into the dust, scuttling crab-like backwards on hands and feet and rump in his alarm, much greater than hers.

Sutton rose from the card-table and went over to take the boy by the arm, heaving him up to his feet. “Bring me a switch, Alden,” he said to his runner, and leading the intruder stumbling out of the grounds, applied himself with vigor, while the other children scattered and ran a little distance away, peeking out from behind the bushes. At length the unlucky boy’s howls faded to whimpering sobs, and Sutton returned to the table. “I beg your pardon, gentlemen,” he said, and they resumed their desultory play; there were no more incursions that day.

But Laurence woke shortly after dawn, the subsequent morning, and went out of his own tent to find a loud squabbling at their gates, two knots of older children wrestling and kicking at each other with a polyglot confusion of yelling: a handful of Malay and scruffy Dutch boys together, and against them a smaller band of the black natives of the Cape, the Khoi, although previously the two groups had all been equal offenders together. Unhappily their quarrel had roused the dragons, who thus began an hour early their morning bouts of coughing; Maximus, who had suffered badly during the night, gave a heavy sighing groan. Sutton came rushing out of his tent in a mottled rage, and Berkley would have set among the lot of them with the flat of his sword, if Lieutenant Ferris had not thrown himself in the way, his arms outspread, as Emily and Dyer scrambled out from the dusty melee.

“We did not mean to”, she said, muffled by the hand with which she tried to stanch her bloodied nose, “only they both brought some” by some evil genius, the two parties had at the same time after weeks of searching finally uncovered some of the mushroom. Now the rival bands were squabbling over their claim to be the first to present the enormous mushroom caps, two feet and more across, and stinking even in their natural state to high Heaven.

“Lieutenant Ferris, let us have a little order, if you please,” Laurence said, raising his voice, “and let them know they will all of them be paid: there is not the least need for this fuss.”

Despite attempts to convey this reassurance, it took some time to drag apart the angry combatants, who if they did not speak one another’s language certainly understood the salient phrases which were being exchanged, at least well enough to keep their tempers fired up, and who kicked and swung their arms at each other even when hauled apart by main force. They stopped abruptly, however: Temeraire, having woken up also, put his head over the low fence to snuffle with appreciation at the caps, left abandoned by both sides in the grass while they attempted to settle their quarrel by might at arms.

“Ah, mm,” said Temeraire, and licked his chops; in spite of their earlier bravado, the boys did not quite dare to run at him and snatch them away from his jaws, but they all joined into a general cry of protest, seeing themselves on the verge of being robbed, and as a consequence were at last convinced to settle down and accept their payment, counted out in gold coins with precisely equal amounts on both sides.

The Dutch-and-Malay contingent were inclined to grumble, as theirs had been the larger specimen, with three separate caps arranged upon a single stem, as compared to the two upon the mushroom brought by the Khoi, but a speaking glare from Sutton silenced them all. “Bring us some more, and you shall be paid again,” Laurence said, but this produced discouraged looks rather than hope, and they looked at his closed-up purse a little resentfully before they scattered away, to quarrel now amongst themselves over the division of spoils.

“They cannot be edible?” Catherine said doubtfully, in a stifled voice, her handkerchief pressed over her mouth as she examined the things: growths more than proper mushrooms, lopsided and bulging oddly, a pallid fish-belly white irregularly spotted with brown.

But Temeraire said, “Certainly I remember these; they were very tasty,” and only regretfully let Gong Su carry the mushrooms away, which he did by holding them at arm’s-length, gingerly, with two very long sticks.

Having learnt from their earlier experience, they set up the cauldron out of doors instead of within the castle kitchens, Gong Su directing the crews to lay a substantial bonfire underneath the big iron pot, suspended from stakes, with a ladder beside it so he might stir from afar with a long-handled wooden ladle. “Perhaps the red pepper-corns,” Temeraire offered, “or maybe the green; I do not quite remember,” he said apologetically, as Gong Su consulted his spice-box at length in attempts to reproduce the former recipe.

Keynes shrugged and said, “Stew the thing and have done; if we must rely on your reproducing some trick of spicing invented a year ago by five cooks, we may as well go back to England now.”

They stewed it all the morning, Temeraire bending over the pot, sniffing at the bouquet as critically as any drinker of wine and making further suggestions: until at last he licked up a taste from the rim of the cauldron and pronounced it a success, “Or at least, it seems to me familiar; and it is very good,” he added, to an audience of none: they had all been driven away to the edge of the clearing, choking, and barely heard him. Poor Catherine had been taken violently ill, and was still retching behind a bush.

They covered their noses and carried Maximus the posset, which he seemed to enjoy, even stirring himself so far as to put a talon inside the cauldron to tip it over, so he might lick out the last scrapings. After an initial somnolence, it put him in a thoroughly good mood, so that he roused up and even ate all of the tender young kid which Berkley had acquired for his dinner more in hope than in expectation, and asked for more; though he fell asleep again before this could be arranged.

Berkley would have woken him to feed him another goat, and his own surgeon Gaiters agreed; but Dorset took the strongest exception and would have denied him even the first, on the grounds that the digestive processes might interfere with the effect of the posset. This shortly devolved into an argument, as violent as hissing whispers could make it, until, Keynes said finally, “Let him sleep,” overruling both, “but henceforth we will feed him as much as he can eat, after each dose; the importance of restoring his weight cannot be overstated, to the cause of his general preservation. Dulcia is better-fleshed: we will try her on the posset tomorrow as well, without food.”

“I ate it with some oxen; or perhaps some antelope,” Temeraire said reminiscently, nosing a little sadly at the empty pot. “There was some very nice fat, I remember that particularly, the fat with the mushroom sauce; so perhaps it was the oxen after all,” the local breed possessing a queer fatty shoulder-hump over the forequarters.

This single meal had been all Temeraire’s prior experience, but Keynes had divided their meager sample, and beginning with the following morning, Maximus and Dulcia were fed upon it three days in succession, until all the supply was gone. As Laurence remembered it, the concoction had made Temeraire mostly drowsy, and so Maximus became, but on the third day Dulcia alarmed them all by turning unexpectedly manic with excitement on the repeated dose, and nearly insisting on going for a long hectic flight, quite likely beyond her strength, and at the least sure not to be beneficial to her health.

“I can, I am well, I am well!” she cried, her wings fanning at the air; and she went hopping about the parade grounds evasively on her back legs with the surgeons chasing after in attempts to calm her. Chenery was of no use: he had spent the intervening days since the failure of their first hopes keeping himself and Captain Little half-drunk at all times, and in defiance of all the pessimism which Keynes could inflict would happily have thrown himself aboard and gone.

Dulcia was finally persuaded not to go flying off, with the temptation of a couple of lambs dressed hastily by Gong Su with some of the peppery local seed-pods which Temeraire liked; no one suggested she should not be allowed to eat, this time, and she devoured them so readily as to spray bits of meat around the feeding grounds, though ordinarily a rather delicate eater.

Temeraire watched her enviously; not only was he not allowed more than a taste of the posset itself, which he so enjoyed, but his belly was still inclined to be delicate after his excessive adventuring; so that Keynes had placed him on a strict and uninteresting diet of plain-roasted meat which his palate now disdained. “Well, at least we have found the cure, then, surely?”

Dulcia, having finished her repast, fell down asleep and began at once snoring loudly, with a thin wheezing whine on the exhale: nevertheless an improvement, as she had only lately been perfectly unable to breathe save through her mouth. Keynes came over and sat down heavily on the log beside Laurence, mopping his sweating red face with a kerchief, and said disgruntled, “Enough, enough of this casting ourselves into alt; have none of you learnt your lesson? The lungs are by no means clear.”

A heavy bank of clouds blew in during the night, so they all woke to a steady dripping grey rain and clammy wet ground, the air still unpleasantly hot and clinging damply to the skin like sweat. Dulcia was worse again, drooping and tired after her previous day’s cavorting, and the dragons were all of them more inclined to sneeze than ever; even Temeraire sighed and shivered, trying to get more of the rain off his hide and out of the hollows of bone and muscle where it collected. “I do miss China,” he said, picking unhappily at his wet dinner; Gong Su had been unable to sear the antelope carcass properly.

“It must be something else; we will find it, Laurence,” Catherine said, giving him his coffee-cup at the breakfast table inside the castle. Laurence accepted it mechanically and sat down among the rest of them; they ate silently, only the clatter of forks and plates; no one even offered around the salt-cellar, or asked for it. Chenery, ordinarily their life and gaiety, had bruised hollows under his eyes as if he had been beaten about the face, and Berkley had not come in to breakfast at all.

Keynes came in stamping his feet clear of mud, his coat sodden with rain and traces of whitish mucus, and said heavily, “Very well: we must have more of the thing.” They looked at him, made uncomprehending by his tone, and he glared back ferociously before he admitted with reluctance, “Maximus can breathe again,” and sent them all running for the door.

Keynes disliked greatly giving them even this much hope, and resisted all their demands for more; but they could stand by Maximus’s head and hear for themselves the slow wheeze of air through his nostrils, and the same for Dulcia also. The two of them yet coughed and coughed and coughed, but the aviators all agreed amongst themselves that the tenor of the sound was entirely altered: a salutary and productive cough, and not the wet terrible lung-rattle which did not end; or so they contrived to persuade one another.

Dorset still made his daily implacable notations, however, and the surgeons continued with the other experiments: a sort of custard made out of green bananas and cocoanut meat was offered to Lily, who tasted one swallow and refused any more point-blank. Messoria was persuaded to lie curled on one side and a battery of candles were melted onto her skin, lit and cupped, to attempt and heat the lungs, with no apparent effect except to leave great streaks of wax upon her hide. A tiny white-haired Khoi matron appeared at their gates dragging behind her a laundry tub nearly her own size, packed to the brim with a preparation made of monkey livers; with only her broken bits of pidgin Dutch she managed to convey the impression she had brought them a sovereign remedy for any illness whatsoever. When tried on Immortalis, he ate one unenthusiastic bite and left the rest; but they had still to pay, as the remainder was quickly raided by Dulcia, who cleaned out the tub and looked for more.

Her appetite increased by leaps and bounds as the sensation of taste returned, and she coughed less daily; by the end of the fifth day almost not at all, except for an occasional hacking. Maximus coughed a while longer, but in the middle of the night towards the end of the week, they were all woken by a terrible squealing, distant shrieks of terror and fire; in a panic they burst out from the tents to discover Maximus attempting guiltily to sneak unnoticed back into the parade grounds, with as much success as was to be expected in this endeavor, and carrying in his already-bloodied jaws a spare ox. This he hurriedly swallowed down almost entire, on finding himself observed, and then pretended not to know what they were talking about, insisting he had only got up to stretch his legs and settle himself more comfortably. The track of his dragging tail, followed through dust spotted liberally with blood, led them to a nearby stable now half-collapsed, the paddock circled by the wreckage of a fence, and the owners apoplectic with rage and terror at the loss of their valuable team of oxen.

“It is just that the wind turned, and they smelled so very good,” Maximus confessed finally, when confronted with the evidence, “and it has been so long since I have had a nice fresh cow, with no cooking or spices.”

“Why you ridiculous lummox, as though we would not feed you whatever you liked,” Berkley said, without any heat whatsoever, petting him extravagantly. “You will have two of them tomorrow.”

“And let us have no more damned excuses out of you for not eating, during the day, when you will go wandering about at night like a rampaging lion to stuff your belly,” Keynes added more peevishly, scruffy with his night’s growth of beard and disgruntled; he had for once sought his bed at a reasonable hour, after having sat up nearly every night the week observing the dragons. “Why you did not think to tell anyone, I can scarcely understand.”

“I did not like to wake Berkley: he has not been eating properly,” Maximus said earnestly, at which accusation Berkley, who had indeed shed another two stone of weight since their arrival, nearly spluttered himself into a fit.

Afterwards they fed Maximus on the ordinary British diet of fresh-slaughtered cattle, occasionally sprinkled with a little salt, and he began to eat through the local herds—and their own purses—at a truly remarkable rate, until Temeraire was recruited to hunt for him northward of the Cape among the vast herds of wild buffalo; although these were not as tasty in Maximus’s mournful opinion.

By then even Keynes had ceased to affect displeasure, and they were wholly engaged on a fresh, a desperate, search, for more of the wretched fungus. The local children had given up the hunt as too unlikely of return: despite every promise which Laurence and his fellow captains could make of their open and waiting purses, none seemed inclined to hazard their time on the pursuit.

“We can do it ourselves, I suppose,” Catherine said doubtfully, and in the morning Laurence and Chenery took a party of men out to seek hunting grounds less picked-over, Dorset along to confirm the identity of the mushroom; the other captains would not willingly leave their sick dragons, and Berkley was plainly not up to a long traipse through wilderness, although he offered to go.

“No need, old fellow,” Chenery said cheerfully, very cheerfully: since Dulcia’s recovery he was little short of getting on a table to sing for joy, given the least encouragement. “We will manage all right, and you had better stay here and eat with your dragon; he is right, you need fattening up again.”

He proceeded to put himself together in the most outlandish manner imaginable, leaving off his coat and tying his neckcloth around his forehead to keep sweat off his face, and arming himself with a heavy old cavalry saber from the castle armory. The resulting appearance would not have shamed a disreputable pirate, but emerging into the clearing, Chenery looked at Laurence, who was waiting for him in coat and neckcloth and hat, with an expression as dubious as the one which Laurence himself, with more tact, was repressing.

The dragons struck out north, over the bay with Table Mountain at their backs, the Allegiance flashing by below; crossed the glass-green shallows and scalloped curve of pale gold-sand beach at the farther shore, and curved their course north-east and inland, towards a long solitary ridge, the Kasteelberg, which jutted out alone from the rich heartland, an outlier of the mountain ranges farther inland.

Chenery and Dulcia took the lead, signal-flags exuberantly waving, and carried them past the settlements and over a swath of thickening wilderness, setting a brisk and challenging pace that stretched Temeraire’s wings and kept her ahead and out of hailing-distance until very nearly the dinner-hour; only reluctantly did she finally set down, upon a riverbank some ten miles beyond the mountain where they had meant to stop.

Laurence did not have the heart to say anything; he doubted the wisdom of going so far afield, when the mushrooms were perhaps native to the Cape, and they knew nothing of the territory into which they were flying, but Dulcia was stretching her wings out to the sun, drinking deep from the running river, great gulps traveling down her throat visibly. She cast her neck back in an ecstatic spray, and Chenery laughed like a boy and pressed his cheek against her foreleg.

“Are those lions?” Temeraire asked with interest as he folded his wings, his head cocked to listen: there was a deal of angry roaring off in the bush, not the drum-and-bassoon thunder-roll of dragons, but a deep huffed breathy noise, perhaps in protest at the invasion of their territory. “I have never seen a lion,” Temeraire added, nor was likely to, so long as the lions had anything to do with the matter: however annoyed they might be, they would surely not venture anywhere in range.

“Are they very large?” Dulcia said anxiously; neither she nor Temeraire were very enthusiastic about letting the crew continue on foot into the ground cover, despite the party of riflemen which had been brought for their protection. “Perhaps you ought to stay with us.”

“Pray, how are we to see any mushrooms from mid-air?” Chenery said. “You shall have a nice rest, and maybe eat something, and we will be back in a trice. We will manage quite well if we meet any lions; we have six guns with us, my dear.”

“But what if there are seven lions,” Dulcia said.

“Then we shall have to use our pistols,” Chenery said to her cheerfully, showing her his own as he reloaded them fresh to give her comfort.

“I promise you, no lion will come to us to be shot,” Laurence said to Temeraire. “They will run as soon as they hear the first gun, and we will fire away a flare if we need you.”

“Well; so long as you are careful,” Temeraire said, and settled his head on his forelegs, disconsolate.

Chenery’s old saber served well to hack their way into the forest, where Dorset thought the mushroom most likely to be found in the cool and damp soil, and all the game they saw, slim antelope and birds, was at a distance and bounding away quickly: frightened away by the noise of their passage, which was incredible. The undergrowth was ferociously impenetrable, full of immense silver thornbushes, their teeth nearly three inches long and sharp as needles at the tip, treacherously buried in a wealth of green leaves. They were at all times beating down clinging vines and tearing branches, except occasionally where they broke across the trail where some large animals had trampled a path, leaving behind them trees scraped free of bark with red weeping sores like blood. But these offered only brief respite; Dorset would not let them follow the paths for long, from anxiety at meeting their creators, most likely elephants; he was in any case doubtful that they would find any of the mushroom in the open.

They were very hot and tired indeed by dinner-time, no man of them having escaped bloody scratches, and would have been wholly lost but for their compasses, when at last Dyer, who had suffered less, being still a small boy and thin, gave a cry of triumph. Throwing himself flat on his belly, he wriggled beneath another thornbush and emerged again backwards holding a specimen which had been growing against the base of a dead tree.

It was small and clotted with dirt, with two caps only, but this success at once renewed all their energy, and after giving Dyer a huzzah and sharing a glass of grog, they threw themselves again into the task and into the brush.

“How long,” Chenery said, panting as he hacked away, “do you suppose it would take, for every dragon in England; if we must find them all like this—”

There was a low crackling of brush like water droplets sizzling in a skillet of hot fat, and a low coughing sound, dyspeptic, came from the other side of the choked-off shrub. “Be cautious—cautious,” Dorset said, repeating the stammered word as Riggs went closer. Chenery’s first lieutenant Libbley held out his hand, and Chenery gave him the sword. “There may be—”

He stopped. Libbley had worked the sword into the brush to cut away the entangling moss, and Riggs had with his hands pulled apart the branches; a massive head was regarding them thoughtfully through the empty space. It was a pebbled leathery grey, with two enormous horns in a line at the end of its snout and piggishly small black eyes, hard and shiny, its odd hatchet-shaped lip moving ruminatively as it chewed. It was not large compared to a dragon; compared to an ox or even the local buffalo it was very, and so massively built and armored that it took on an inexorable quality.

“Is it an elephant?” Riggs asked in a hushed voice, turning his head, and abruptly the thing snorted and came at them: smashing all the thicket into splinters, astonishing fast for so heavy a creature, with its head bowed forward so the horns thrust out before it as it came. There was a confused ringing clamor of yells and shouts, and Laurence had barely the presence of mind to take hold of Dyer’s and Emily’s collars and pull them back against the trees; groping only afterwards for his pistol, his sword. Too late: the thing had already gone crashing away madly on its set course, and not one of them had got off a shot.

“A rhinoceros,” Dorset was saying calmly. “They are near-sighted, and prone to ill-temper, or so I understand from my reading. Captain Laurence, will you give me your neckcloth?”—and Laurence looked up to see Dorset working busily on Chenery’s leg, a copious flow of blood pumping freely from the thigh where a thick jagged branch jutted out.

Dorset sliced open the breeches with a large catling, intended for use on the delicate layered membranes of dragon wings, maneuvering the tip deftly, and performed a skillful ligature of the pumping vein; afterwards he wrapped the neckcloth several times around the thigh. Meanwhile Laurence had directed the others in making a litter of tree-branches and their coats. “It is only the merest scratch,” Chenery said vaguely, “pray do not disturb the dragons,” but at the quick negative shake of Dorset’s head, Laurence paid Chenery’s protests no attention and fired away the blue gun, sending up the flare.

“Only lie easy,” he said to Chenery, “they will come in a moment, I am sure,” and almost instantly the great shadow of dragon wings came spilling over them, Temeraire’s backlit form solidly black against the sun, the outline too bright to look at him directly. The trees and branches crackled and shattered under his weight, and then he thrust his head in close among them, sniffing, a great reddish head with ten curving ivory tusks set in its upper lip: it was not Temeraire at all.

“Christ preserve us,” Laurence said involuntarily, reaching for his pistol. The beast was not very much smaller than Temeraire, larger than he had imagined ever seeing a feral dragon, built heavy in the shoulders with a double ridge of spikes, the color of red-brown mud, patterned liberally with yellow and grey. “Another gun, Riggs, another gun—”

Riggs fired away, and the feral dragon hissed in irritation, batting, too late, at the streaking flare that burst blue light overhead. His head snaked back towards them, the pupils of his virulent yellow-green eyes narrowing, and he bared his jaws; then Dulcia came darting through the canopy of the trees, crying, “Chenery, Chenery,” and flung herself clawing madly at the much larger feral’s head.

Taken aback by the ferocity of her reckless attack, the red-brown dragon recoiled at first, but snapped back at her with astonishing speed, caught the leading edge of her wing in his mouth, and shook her up and down by it. She shrilled in pain, but when he let her go, apparently satisfied that she had learnt her lesson, she dived back at him again, her teeth bared, despite blood spider-webbing blackly over the membrane of her wing.

He backed away a few paces as best as he could in the close press of the forest, crushing over a few more trees with his rump, with rather a bewildered air, and hissed at her again. She had put herself between them and the feral, and, spreading her wings wide and sheltering, reared up as large as she could make herself, foreclaws raised. Still she looked rather toy-like next to his massive bulk, and instead of attacking, he sat back on his haunches and scratched his nose against his foreleg, in an attitude almost of embarrassed confusion. Laurence had seen Temeraire often express a certain reluctance at fighting a smaller beast, conscious of the difference in their weight-class; but in turn, smaller dragons would not offer battle to one so much larger, ordinarily, without supporting allies to make the contest a more equal one; only the incentive of her captain’s safety was inducing Dulcia to do so now.

Temeraire’s shadow fell over them, and the feral jerked his head up, shoulders bristling, and launched himself aloft to meet the new threat, more his match. Laurence could not see very well what was going forward, though he craned desperately: they had Dulcia to contend with, who in her anxiety to see Chenery and gauge his injuries was bending close and interfering. “Enough, let us get him aboard,” Dorset said, rapping her smartly upon the breast until she backed away. “In the belly-rigging; he must be strapped down properly,” and they hurriedly secured the makeshift litter to the harness.

Meanwhile above the feral darted back and forth about Temeraire in short half-arcs, hissing and clicking at him like a kettle on the boil. Temeraire paused in mid-air, his wings beating the hovering stroke which only Chinese dragons could manage, and his ruff came up and spread wide as his chest expanded deeply. The feral promptly beat away a few more wing-spans, widening the distance between them, and kept his position until Temeraire gave his terrible thundering roar: the trees shaking with the force of it so that a hail of old leaves and twigs, trapped in the canopy, came shedding down upon them, and also some of the ugly lumpen sausage-shaped fruits, whose impact thumped deep aggressive dents in the ground around them; Chenery’s midwingman Hyatt uttered a startled oath as one glanced off his shoulder. Laurence rubbed dust and pollen from his face, squinting up: the feral looked rather impressed, as well he might be, and after a moment’s more hesitation peeled away and flew out of their sight.

Chenery was got aboard with no less haste, and they flew at once back to Capetown, Dulcia constantly craning her head down towards her own belly to see how he did. They unloaded him sadly in the courtyard, and he was carried into the castle, already become feverish and excited, to be examined by the governor’s physician, while Laurence took in the one poor sample that was all the day’s work had won them.

Keynes regarded it somberly, and finally said, “Nitidus. If we must worry about ferals in the forests, even so near, you must have a small dragon to carry you into the woods; and Dulcia will not go away when Chenery is so ill.”

“The thing grows hidden, under bushes,” Laurence said. “We cannot be hunting from dragon-back.”

“You cannot be getting yourselves knocked about by rhinoceri and eaten by ferals, either,” Keynes snapped. “We are not served, Captain, by a cure which consists in losing more dragons than are made healthy, in the process of acquiring it,” and turning, stamped away with the sample to Gong Su, to have it prepared.

Warren swallowed when he heard Keynes’s decision, and said in a voice which did not rise very high, “Lily ought to have it,” but Catherine said strongly, “We will not quarrel with the surgeons, Micah; Mr. Keynes must make all such determinations.”

“When we have enough,” Keynes said quietly, “we may experiment to see how far the dose may be stretched: at present we must have some strength in dragons to get more, and I am by no means confident that this quantity would do for Lily’s size. Maximus will be in no condition to do more than a little easy flying for weeks yet.”

“I understand perfectly, Mr. Keynes, let us say not another word on the subject,” she said, so Nitidus was fed upon the posset, and Lily continued to cough miserably; Catherine sat by her head all the night, stroking her muzzle, heedless of the real danger to herself from the spatters of acid.

Chapter 8

WHOLLY UNLIKELY—WHOLLY unlikely,” Dorset said severely, when Catherine in despair suggested, two weeks later, that they had already acquired all the specimens which there were in the world.

Nitidus had suffered less than most of the dragons, although complained somewhat more, and he recovered with greater speed even than Dulcia, despite a nervous inclination to cough even after the physical necessity had gone. “I am sure I feel a little thickness in my head again this morning,” he said fretfully, or his throat was a little sensitive, or his shoulders ached.

“It is only to be expected,” Keynes said of the last, scarcely a week since he had been dosed, “when you have been lying about for months with no proper exercise. You had better take him out tomorrow, and enough of this caterwauling,” he added to Warren, and stamped away.

With this encouraging permission, they had promptly renewed the search which had been curtailed by Chenery’s injury, confining the sphere a little closer to the immediate environs of the Cape; but after two more weeks had gone by, they had met with no more feral dragons and also with no more success. They had brought back in desperation several other varieties of mushroom, not entirely dissimilar in appearance, two of which proved instantly poisonous to the furry local rodents which Dorset made their first recipients.

Keynes prodded the small curled dead bodies and shook his head. “It is not to be risked. You are damned fortunate not to have poisoned Temeraire with the thing in the first place.”

“What the devil are we to do, then?” Catherine demanded. “If there is no more to be had—”

“There will be more,” Dorset said with assurance, and for his part, he continued to perform daily rounds of the marketplace, forcing the merchants and stall-keepers there to look at his detailed sketch of the mushroom, rendered in pencil and ink. His steady perseverance was rewarded by the merchants growing so exasperated that one of the Khoi, whose Dutch and English encompassed only the numbers one through ten, all he ordinarily required to sell his wares, finally appeared at their gates with Reverend Erasmus in tow, having sought his assistance to put a stop to the constant harassment.

“He wishes you to know that the mushroom does not grow here in the Cape, if I have understood correctly,” Erasmus explained, “but that the Xhosa—” He was here interrupted by the Khoi merchant, who impatiently repeated the name quite differently, incorporating an odd sort of clicking noise at the beginning which reminded Laurence of nothing more than some sounds of the Durzagh language, difficult for a human tongue to render.

“In any case,” Erasmus said, after another unsuccessful attempt to repeat the name properly, “he means a tribe which lives farther along the coast and, having more dealings inland, may know where more is to be found.”

Pursuing this intelligence, however, Laurence soon discovered that to make any contact would be difficult in the extreme: the tribesmen who dwelt nearest the Cape had withdrawn farther and farther from the Dutch settlements, after their last wave of assaults—not unprovoked—had been flung back, some eight years before. They were now settled into an uneasy and often-broken truce with the colonists, and only at the very frontiers was any intercourse still to be had with them.

“And that,” Mr. Rietz informed Laurence, the two of them communicating by means of equally halting German on both sides, “the pleasure of having our cattle stolen: twice a month we lose a cow or more, for all they have signed one truce after another.”

He was one of the chief men of Swellendam, one of the oldest villages of the Cape, and still nearly as far inland as any of the settlers had successfully established themselves: nestled at the foot of a sheltering ridge of mountains, which deterred incursions by the ferals. The vineyards and farmland were close-huddled around the neat and compact white-washed homes, only a handful of heavily fortified farmhouses more widely flung. The settlers were wary of the feral dragons who often came raiding from over the mountains, against whom they had built a small central fort bolstered with two six-pounders, and resentful of their black neighbors, of whom Rietz further added, “The kaffirs are all rascals, whatever heathenish name you like to call them; and I advise you against any dealings with them. They are savages to a man, and more likely will murder you while you sleep than be of any use.”

Having said so much mostly under the unspoken but no less potent duress of Temeraire’s presence on the outskirts of his village, he considered this final and was by no means willing to be of further assistance, but sat mutely until Laurence gave it up and let him go back to his accounts.

“Those certainly are very handsome cows,” Temeraire said, with a healthy admiration of his own, when Laurence rejoined him. “You cannot blame the ferals for taking them, when they do not know any better, and the cows are just sitting there in the pen, doing no-one any good. But how are we to find any of these Xhosa, if the settlers will not help? I suppose we might fly about looking for them?”—a suggestion which would certainly ensure they did not catch the least sight of a people who surely had to be deeply wary of dragons, as likely as the settlers to be victims of the feral beasts.

General Grey snorted, when Laurence had returned to Capetown seeking an alternative, and reported Rietz’s reaction. “Yes; and I imagine if you find one of the Xhosa, he will make you the very same complaint in reverse. They are all forever stealing cattle from one another, and the only thing they would agree on, I suppose, is to complain of the ferals worse. It is a bad business,” he added, “these settlers want more grazing land, badly, and they cannot get it; so they have nothing to do but quarrel with the tribesmen over what land the ferals do not mind leaving to them.”

“Can the ferals not be deterred?” Laurence asked. He did not know how ferals were managed, precisely; in Britain he knew they were largely induced to confine themselves to the breeding grounds, by the regular provision of easy meals.

“No; there must be too much wild game,” Grey said. “They are not tempted enough, at any rate, to leave the settlements alone, and there have been trials made enough to prove it. Every year a few young hotheads make a push inland; for what good it does them, which is none.” He shrugged. “Most of our adventurers are not heard from again, and of course the inaction of the government is blamed. But they will not understand the expense and difficulty involved. I tell you I should not undertake to carve out any more sizable territory here without at the least a six-dragon formation, and two companies of field artillery.”

Laurence nodded; there was certainly no likelihood of the Admiralty sending such assistance at present, or for that matter in the foreseeable future; even apart from the disease, which had so wracked their aerial strength, any significant force would naturally be committed to the war against France.

“We will just have to make shift as best we can,” Catherine said, when he had grimly reported his lack of success that night. “Surely Reverend Erasmus can help us; he can speak with the natives, and perhaps that merchant will know where we can find them.”

Laurence and Berkley went to apply to him the next morning at the mission, already much altered since the last visit which Laurence had made: the plot of land was now a handsome vegetable-garden, full of tomato and pepper plants; a few Khoi girls in modest black shifts were tending the rows, tying up the tomato plants to stakes, and another group beneath a broad mimosa tree were sewing diligently, while Mrs. Erasmus and another missionary lady, a white woman, took it in turn to read to them out of a Bible translated into their tongue.

Inside, the house was almost wholly given over to students scratching laboriously away at writing on scraps of slate, paper too valuable to be used for such an exercise. Erasmus came walking outside with them, for lack of room to talk, and said, “I have not forgotten to be grateful to you for our passage here, Captain, and I would gladly be of service to you. But there is likely as much kinship between the Khoi tongue and that of the Xhosa as there is between French and German, and I am by no means yet fluent even in the first. Hannah does better, and we do remember a little of our own native tongues; but those will be of even less use: we were both taken from tribes much farther north.”

“You still have a damned better chance to jaw with them than any of us do,” Berkley said bluntly. “It cannot be that bloody difficult to make them understand: we have a scrap of the thing left, and we can wave it in their faces to show them what we want.”

“Surely having lived neighbor to the Khoi themselves,” Laurence said, “there may be those among them who speak a little of that tongue, which would allow you to open some communication? We can ask only,” he added, “that you try: a failure would leave us no worse than we stand.”

Erasmus stopped before the garden gate, watching where his wife was reading to the girls, then said low and thoughtfully, “I have not heard of it, if anyone has brought the Gospel to the Xhosa yet.”

Though barred from much expansion inland, the settlers had been creeping steadily out along the coast eastward from Capetown. The Tsitsikamma River, some two long days’ flight away, was now a theoretical sort of border between the Dutch and the Xhosa territories: there were no settlements nearer than Plettenberg Bay, and if the Xhosa were lurking in the brush five steps beyond the boundaries of the outermost villages, as many of the settlers imagined they were, no-one would have been any the wiser. But they had been pushed across the river in the last fighting, it was a convenient line upon a map, and so it had been named in the treaties.

Temeraire kept to the coastline in their flight: a strange and beautiful series of low curved cliffsides, thickly crusted with green vegetation and in some places lichen of bright red, cream and brown rocks spilling from their feet; and beaches of golden sand, some littered with squat penguins too small to be alarmed by their passage overhead: they were not prey for dragons. Late in their second day of flying they passed the lagoon of Knysna sheltered behind its narrow mouth to the ocean, and arrived late in the evening on the banks of the Tsitsikamma, the river driving its way inland, deep in its green-lined channel.

In the morning, before crossing the river, they tied onto two stakes large white sheets, as flags of parley, to avoid giving provocation; and set these streaming out to either side of Temeraire’s wings. They flew cautiously onwards into Xhosa territory, until they came to an open clearing, large enough to permit them to settle Temeraire some distance back, and divided by a narrow, swift-running stream: no obstacle, but perhaps enough of a boundary to provide comfort to someone standing on the other side.

Laurence had brought with him, besides a small but substantial heap of gold guineas, a wide assortment of those things which were commonly used in the local barter, in hopes of tempting out the natives: foremost among them several great chains of cowrie shells, strung on silk thread; in some parts of the continent these were used as currency, and the sense of value persisted more widely; locally they were highly prized as jewellery. Temeraire was for once unimpressed: the shells were not brightly colored enough nor glittery nor iridescent, and did not awaken his magpie nature; he eyed the narrow chain of pearls which Catherine had contributed to the cause with much more interest.

The whole collection the crew laid out upon a large blanket, near enough the edge of the stream to be visible plainly to an observer on the other bank, and with these hoped to coax out some response. Temeraire crouched down as best he could, and then they waited. They had made enough noise, to be sure, but the region was vast: they had flown two days to reach the river, and Laurence was not sanguine.

They slept that night on the bank with no response; and the second day also passed without event, except that Temeraire went hunting and brought back four antelope, which they roasted on a spit for dinner. Not very successfully: Gong Su had remained back at the camp, to feed the other dragons who yet continued ill, and young Allen, detailed to turn the spit, grew distracted and forgot, so that they were scorched black on one side and unappetizingly raw on the other. Temeraire put back his ruff in disapproval; he was, Laurence sadly noted, becoming excessive nice in his tastes, an unfortunate habit in a soldier.

The third day crept onward, hot and clinging from the first, and the men wilted gradually into silence; Emily and Dyer scratched unenthusiastically at their slates, and Laurence forced himself to rise at intervals to pace back and forth, that he would not fall asleep. Temeraire gave a tremendous yawn and put down his head to snore. At an hour past noon they had their dinner: only bread and butter and a little grog, but no one wanted more in the heat, even after the debacle of the previous evening’s meal. The sun dipped only reluctantly back towards the horizon; the day stretched.

“Are you comfortable, ma’am?” Laurence asked, bringing Mrs. Erasmus another cup of grog; they had set her up a little pavilion with the traveling-tents, so she might keep in the shade: the little girls had been left back at the castle, in the charge of a maid. She inclined her head and accepted the cup, seeming as always quite careless of her own comfort. A necessary quality, to be sure, for a missionary’s wife being dragged the length of the globe, yet it felt uncivilized to be subjecting her to the violence of the day’s heat for so little evident use; she did not complain, but she could not have enjoyed being packed aboard a dragon, however well she concealed her fears, and she wore a high-necked gown with sleeves to the wrist, of dark fabric, while the sun beat so ferociously that it glowed even through the leather of the tent.

“I am sorry we have imposed upon you,” he said. “If we hear nothing tomorrow, I think we must consider our attempt a failure.”

“I will pray for a happier outcome,” she said, in her deep steady voice, briefly, and kept her head bowed down.

Mosquitoes sang happily as dusk drew on, though they did not come very close to Temeraire; the flies were less judicious. The shapes of the trees were growing vague when Temeraire woke with a start and said, “Laurence, there is someone coming, there,” and the grass rustled on the opposite bank.

A very slight man emerged in the half-light on the far bank: bare-headed, and naked but for a small blanket which was draped rather too casually around his body to preserve modesty. He was carrying a long, slim-hafted assegai, the blade narrow and spade-shaped, and over his other shoulder was slung a rather skinny antelope. He did not come across the stream, keeping a wary eye on Temeraire; he craned his neck a little to look over their blanket of goods, but plainly he would come no farther.

“Reverend, perhaps if you would accompany me,” Laurence said softly and set out, Ferris following along doggedly behind them without having been asked. Laurence paused at the blanket and lifted up the most elaborate of the cowrie chains, a neck-collar in six or seven bands of alternating dark and light shells, interspersed with gold beads.

They forded the river, shallow here and not coming over the tops of their boots; Laurence surreptitiously touched the butt of his pistol, looking at the javelin: they would be vulnerable, coming up the bank. But the hunter only backed away towards the woods as they emerged from the water, so in the dim light he was very nearly invisible against the underbrush, and could easily have dived back into the obscurity which this afforded: Laurence supposed he had more right than they to be alarmed, alone to their large party, with Temeraire behind them sitting cat-like on his haunches and regarding the situation with anxiety.

“Sir, pray let me,” Ferris said, so plaintively Laurence surrendered the neck-chain to him. He edged cautiously out across the distance, the necklace offered across his palms. The hunter hesitated, very obviously tempted, and then he tentatively held out the antelope towards them, with a slightly abashed air, as if he did not think it a very fair exchange.

Ferris shook his head, and then he stiffened: the bushes behind the hunter had rustled. But it was only a small boy, no more than six or seven, his hands parting the leaves so he could peek out at them with large, curious eyes. The hunter turned and said something to him sharply, in a voice which lost some of its severity by cracking halfway through the reprimand. He was not stunted at all, but only a boy himself, Laurence realized; only a handful of years between him and the one hiding.

The small boy vanished again instantly, the branches closing over his head, and the older one turned back to Ferris with a defiant wary look; his hand was clenched sufficiently on the assegai to show pale pink at the knuckles.

“Pray tell him, if you can, that we mean them no harm,” Laurence said quietly to Erasmus. He did not wonder very much what might have lured them here to take a risk perhaps others of his clan had preferred not to run; the hunter was painfully thin, and the younger boy’s face had none of the soft-cheeked look of childhood.

Erasmus nodded, and approaching tried his few words of dialect, without success. Retreating to more simplistic communication, he tapped his chest and said his name. The boy gave his as Demane; this exchange at least served to make him grow a little easier: he did not seem quite so ready to bolt, and he suffered Ferris to approach him closer, to show him the small sample of the mushroom.

Demane exclaimed, and recoiled in disgust; with no little cause: its confinement in the leather bag during the day’s heat had not improved its aroma. He laughed at his own reaction, though, and came back; but though they pointed to the mushroom, and the string of shells in turn, he continued to look perfectly blank; although he kept reaching out to touch the cowries with rather a wistful expression, rubbing them between thumb and forefinger.

“I suppose he cannot conceive anyone should want to trade for it,” Ferris said, not very much under his breath, his face averted as much as he could.

“Hannah,” Erasmus said, startling Laurence: he had not noticed Mrs. Erasmus come to join them, her skirts dripping over her bare feet. Demane stood a little straighter and dropped his hand from the shells, very like he had been caught at something by a schoolteacher, and edged back from her. She spoke to him a little while in her low voice, slowly and clearly; taking the mushroom from Ferris, she held it out, imperiously gesturing when Demane made a face. Once he had gingerly taken it from her, she grasped him by the wrist and showed him holding it out to Ferris. Ferris held out the shells in return, miming the transfer, and comprehension finally dawned.

A small voice piped up from the bushes; Demane answered it quellingly, then began to talk volubly at Mrs. Erasmus, a speech full of the odd clicking, which Laurence could not imagine how he produced, at such speed; she listened, frowning intently as she tried to follow. He took the mushroom and knelt down to put it on the ground, next to the base of a tree, then mimed pulling it up and throwing it on the ground. “No, no!” Ferris sprang only just in time to rescue the precious sample from being stamped upon by his bare heel.

Demane observed his behavior with a baffled expression. “He says it makes cows sick,” Mrs. Erasmus said, and the gesture was plain enough: the thing was considered a nuisance, and torn up where it was found; which might explain its scarcity. It was no wonder, the local tribesmen being cattle-herders by livelihood, but Laurence was dismayed, and wondered where they should look for the enormous quantities necessary to their cause if it had been the settled practice of generations, perhaps, to eradicate what to them was nothing more than an unpleasant weed.

Mrs. Erasmus continued to speak to the boy, taking the mushroom, and miming a gesture of stroking it, gently, to show him they valued it. “Captain, will you have the crew bring me a pot?” she asked, and when she had put the mushroom into it, and made stirring motions, Demane looked at Laurence and Ferris with a very dubious expression, but then shrugged expressively and pointed upwards, drawing his hand from horizon to horizon in a sweeping arc. “Tomorrow,” she translated, and the boy pointed at the ground where they stood.

“Does he think he can find us some?” Laurence asked intently, but either the question or the response she was unable to convey, and only shook her head after a moment. “Well, we must hope for the best; tell him if you can that we will return,” and the next day, at the same hour near dusk, the boys came out of the brush again, the younger now trotting at Demane’s heels, perfectly naked, and with them a small raggedy dog, its mongrel fur mottled yellow and brown.

It planted itself on the bank and yapped piercingly and continuously at Temeraire while the older boy attempted to negotiate for its services over the noise. Laurence eyed it dubiously; but Demane took the mushroom piece again and held it out to the dog’s nose, then kneeling down covered the dog’s eyes with his hands. The younger boy ran and hid the mushroom deep in the grass, and came back again; then Demane let the dog go again, with a sharp word of command. It promptly returned to barking madly at Temeraire, ignoring all his instructions, until, looking painfully embarrassed, Demane snatched up a stick and hit it on the rump, hissing at it, and made it smell the leather satchel where the mushroom had been kept. At last reluctantly it left off and went bounding across the field, came trotting back with the mushroom held in its mouth, and dropped it at Laurence’s feet, wagging its tail with enthusiasm.

Having decided, very likely, that they were fools, or at least very rich, Demane now turned up his nose at the cowries, wishing rather to be paid in cattle, evidently the main source of wealth among the Xhosa: he opened the negotiations at a dozen head. “Tell him we will give them one cow, for a week of service,” Laurence said. “If he leads us to a good supply of the mushroom, we will consider extending the bargain, otherwise we will return the two of them here with their payment.” Demane inclined his head and accepted the diminished offer with a tolerable attempt at calm gravity; but the wide eyes of the younger boy, whose name was Sipho, and his rather excited tugging at Demane’s hand, made Laurence suspect he had even so made a poor bargain by local standards.

Temeraire put his ruff back when the dog was carried squirming towards him. “It is very noisy,” he said disapprovingly, to which the dog barked an answer equally impolite, by the tone of it, and tried to jump out of its master’s arms and run away; Demane was no less anxious. Mrs. Erasmus sought to coax him a little closer, and reached out to pat Temeraire’s forehand to show there was no danger: perhaps not the best encouragement, since it drew his attention to the very substantial talons: Demane pushed a more interested than alarmed Sipho behind him, the wriggling dog clutched against him with his other arm, and shaking his head vocally refused to come nearer.

Temeraire cocked his head. “That is a very interesting sound,” he said, and repeated one of the words, mimicking the clicking noise with more success than any of them but still not quite correctly. Sipho laughed from behind Demane’s shoulder and said the word to him again; after a few repetitions Temeraire said, “Oh, I have it,” although the clicking issued a little oddly, from somewhere deeper in his throat than the boys produced it; and they were gradually reconciled by the exchange to being loaded aboard.

Laurence had learnt the art of carrying livestock aboard a dragon from Tharkay, in the East, by drugging the beasts with opium before they were loaded on, but they had none of the drug with them at present, so with a dubious spirit of experimentation they put the whining dog aboard by main force instead, and strapped it down. It was inclined to squirm and struggle against the makeshift harness, making several abortive attempts to leap off into the air, until Temeraire lifted away; then after a few yelps of excitement, it sat down on its haunches with its mouth open and tongue lolling out, thrashing its tail furiously with delight, better pleased than its unhappy master, who clung anxiously to the harness and to Sipho, although they were both well hooked on with carabiners.

“Proper circus you make,” Berkley said, with a snort of laughter Laurence considered unnecessary, when they landed in the clearing and set the dog down; it promptly went tearing around the parade grounds, yelling at the dragons. For their part they were only interested and curious until the dog bit a too-inquisitive Dulcia on the tender tip of her muzzle, at which she hissed in anger; the dog yelped and fled back to the dubious shelter of Temeraire’s side; he looked down at it in irritation, and tried unsuccessfully to nudge it away.

“Pray be careful of the creature; I have no idea how we should get or train another,” Laurence said, and Temeraire at last grumbling allowed it to curl up beside him.

Chenery limped out to eat with them that evening in the parade grounds to reassure Dulcia of his improvement, professing himself too tired for any more bed-rest, so they made a merry meal of optimism and roast beef, and passed around the bottle freely; perhaps too freely, for shortly after the cigars were passed, Catherine said, “Oh, damnation,” and getting up went to the side of the clearing to vomit.

It was not the first time she had been ill lately, but the bout was an enthusiastic one. They politely averted their faces, and in a little while she rejoined them at the fire, with a dismal expression. Warren offered her a little more wine, but she shook her head and only rinsed her mouth with water and spat on the ground, and then looking around them all said heavily, “Well, gentlemen, I am sorry to be indelicate, but if I am going to be sickly like this all the way through, you had better know now. I am afraid I have made a mull of it.—I am increasing.”

Laurence only gradually realized that he was staring, with an intolerably rude gaping expression. He closed his mouth at once and held himself rigidly still, fighting the inclination to look at his fellow captains, the five of them sitting around the fire, and study them in the light of candidates.

Berkley and Sutton, both senior to him by ten years, he thought stood more in the relation of uncle to Catherine than anything else. Warren also was older, and had been matched to his rather nervous beast Nitidus for the very steadiness of his nature, which made it difficult to easily imagine him in the light of a lover, under their present circumstances. Chenery was a younger man of high and cheerful spirits, thoroughly innocent of any sense of decorum, and made more handsome by his smiles and a rough careless charm than his looks deserved, being a little thin in the chest and face, with an unfortunately sallow complexion and hair generally blown straight as straw. He was perhaps in personality the most likely, although Immortalis’s captain Little, of a similar age, was the better-looking, despite a nose which was inclined to be beaky, with china-blue eyes and wavy dark hair kept a little long in a poetic style; but this, Laurence suspected, was due more to a lack of attention than any deliberate vanity, and Little was rather abstemious in his habits than luxurious.

There was of course Catherine’s first lieutenant, Hobbes, an intense young man only a year her junior, but Laurence could scarcely believe she would engage herself with a subordinate, and risk all the resentment and difficulties which he had known similar practices, albeit of a more illegal nature, to produce aboard ship. No; it must be one of them; and Laurence could not help but see, from the corner of his eye, that Sutton and Little at least bore expressions more or less of surprise, and that he was being looked at with the same spirit of speculation he himself had been unable to repress, exhibited more openly.

Laurence was unhappily conscious that he could not object. He had committed an equal indiscretion, without ever considering what he should say, or do, if he and Jane were to similarly be taken aback. He could hardly imagine his father’s reaction and even his mother’s, on being presented with such a match: a woman some years his senior, with a natural-born child, of no particular family wholly aside from her complete sacrifice of respectability to her duty. But marriage it would have to be; anything else should be as good as offering insult, to one who deserved from him the confusion of respect of a gentlewoman and a comrade-in-arms, and exposing her and the child to the censure of all society.

Therefore to just such a dreadful situation he had willingly hazarded himself, and he could hardly complain if he were now to suffer a share of that pain on another party’s behalf. Only the one who knew himself guilty could know the truth, of course; and so long as he remained unconfessed, Laurence and his fellow captains should all jointly have to endure the curiosity of the world, however unpleasant, without remedy.

“Well, it is damned bad luck,” Berkley said, setting down his fork. “Whose is it?”

Harcourt said easily, “Oh, it is Tom’s, I mean Captain Riley; thank you, Tooke,” and held out her hand for the cup of tea which her young runner had brought her, while Laurence blushed for all of them.

He passed an uncomfortable and wakeful night, suffering the incessant shrill barking of the dog outside, and, within, all the confusion which could be imagined: whether to speak to Riley, and on what grounds, Laurence scarcely knew.

He felt a certain responsibility for Catherine’s honor and the child’s; irrational under the circumstances, perhaps, when she herself seemed wholly unconcerned. But though she might not care for the good opinion of society or feel herself dishonored, nor her fellow aviators, Laurence was well aware that Riley could claim no such disdain for the eyes of the world. All Riley’s odd constraint, towards the end of the voyage, now bespoke a guilty conscience; certainly he had not approved the notion of women officers, and Laurence did not for a moment imagine that his opinion had altered in consequence of this affair. Riley had only taken personal advantage where it became available to him, and with full knowledge had entered into what for him must be seen as the ruin of a gentlewoman, an act selfish if not vicious, and deserving of the strongest reproof. But Laurence had no standing whatsoever in the world to pursue it; any attempt would only make a thorough scandal of the whole, and as an aviator he was forbidden to enter into personal challenges in any case.

To complicate matters still further, he had a wholly separate motive for speaking, and that to give Riley intelligence of the child’s existence, of which he might well be ignorant. Jane Roland, at least, thought nothing of her daughter Emily’s illegitimacy; by her own admission she had not so much as seen the father since the event of conception, nor seemed to think he had anything to do with the child in the least. This perfect lack of sensibility Catherine evidently shared. Laurence had not dwelt long on this pragmatic ruthlessness before the event; but now he put himself in Riley’s place, and felt that Riley at once deserved all the difficulties of the situation, and the opportunity of rising to meet them.

Laurence rose undecided and unrested, and without much enthusiasm entered into their first attempt to take out the dog. Seeing them make ready, the cur did not wait to be carried aboard, but leapt onto Temeraire’s back and settled itself in pride of place at the base of his neck, just where Laurence ordinarily sat, and barked officiously to hurry the rest of their preparations. “Cannot it ride with Nitidus?” Temeraire said, disgruntled, craning his neck to give it a repressive hiss. Familiarity had already bred contempt; the dog only wagged its tail back at him.

“No, no; I do not want it,” Nitidus said, mantling his wings in resistance. “You are bigger, it does not weigh on you at all.” Temeraire flattened his ruff against his neck and muttered.

They crossed over the mountains again and settled themselves just past the leading edge where the settlements petered out, on a slope lately somewhat bared by a rockslide, which offered the dragons the best opportunity to land deep in the undergrowth. Nitidus managed to wedge himself into a gap left among the trees, where a larger had fallen, but Temeraire was forced to try and make himself a landing place by trampling down the smaller but more stubborn shrubs which had invaded the space. The acacia thorns were long and slender enough to probe between his scales, and catch the flesh beneath, so he flinched to one side or another several times before at last he had something like sure footing and could let them clamber down off his back, to hack themselves out some room and pitch the tents once again.

The dog made itself a nuisance while they made camp, inclined to frolic and startle up the fat brown-and-white pheasants, which ran away from it unhappily, their heads bobbing; until all at once it went very quiet, and its lean rangy body stiffened with excitement. Lieutenant Riggs raised his rifle to his ear, and they all froze, remembering the rhinoceros; but in a moment a troop of baboons came out from among the trees. The largest, a grizzled fellow with a long sour face and a shining rump of bright scarlet protruding from his fur, impossible to ignore, sat back on his haunches and gave them a jaundiced eye; then the band ambled off, the smallest clinging to their mothers’ fur and turning their heads around to stare with curiosity as they were carried away.

There were few large trees; the thickness was made rather of yellow grass everywhere, higher than a man’s head, which filled in every gap the green thornbrake allowed. Above, the thin trees threw up little cloud-like clusters of branches, which gave no relief from the sun. The air was close and hot and full of dust, crumbled grass and dried leaves, and clouds of small birds twitting each other in the brush. The dog led them on an aimless straggling path through the ferocious underbrush; it more easily than they could work through the tangled shrubs and deadwood.

Demane gave the dog occasional encouragement by lectures and yelling, but for the most part gave the cur its head. He and his brother followed on its heels closely and quicker than the rest of them could manage, occasionally disappearing up ahead. Their young clear voices came calling back impatiently to guide them, now and then, and at last, in the mid-afternoon, Laurence came stumbling out of the brush and caught them up to find Sipho proudly holding out one of the mushrooms for their inspection.

“Better by far, but we will still need a week at this rate to get enough for the rest of the formation alone,” Warren said that evening, offering Laurence a glass of port in front of his small tent, with an old stump and a smooth rock serving them as formal seating. The dog had found three more mushrooms on the way back to camp, all of them small ones which would have escaped attention otherwise. They were of course happily collected; but they would not make much of the posset, or the draught.

“Yes, at least,” Laurence said tiredly; his legs ached from their unaccustomed labor. He unfolded them with an effort towards the heat of the small twiggy fire, smoky from the green wood but pleasantly hypnotic.

Temeraire and Nitidus had made good use of their idleness to improve upon the camp, trampling down the earth of the slope to make it more level and tearing up several trees and bushes to clear more ground. Temeraire had rather vengefully hurled the bristling acacia far down the slope, where it could now be seen, incongruously, sitting caught upon two tree-tops with a great clump of dirt around its roots in mid-air.

They had provided also a couple of antelope for the party’s dinner, or had meant to; but the hours had dragged, and with nothing better to do they had eventually eaten most of the kill themselves, and were found licking their chops and empty-handed at the end of the day. “I am sorry, but you were so very long,” Temeraire said apologetically. Happily, Demane showed them the trick of catching the plentiful local pheasants, by driving them towards a waiting collaborator with a net, and these, roasted quickly on a spit and rounded out with ship’s biscuit, made the company a dinner pleasant enough: the birds not the least gamy, having fed evidently only on the local grass-seeds and berries.

Now the dragons had curled around the borders of their camp; protection enough to ward off any nightly dangers; the crews had arranged themselves for sleep on beds of crumpled brush, coats used haphazardly for pillows, or were playing at dice and cards in distant corners, murmuring their wagers and occasionally a cry of victory or despair. The boys, who had been eating like wolves, and already looked rather better fleshed, were stretched upon the ground at Mrs. Erasmus’s feet. She had persuaded them to put on some loose duck trousers, sewn by girls from the mission; her husband was methodically laying out for them on the ground, one at a time, stiff picture-cards showing objects to be identified in their language, and rewarding them with doled-out sweetmeats while she noted down the answers in her log-book.

Warren prodded the fire with a long branch, idly, and Laurence felt at last that they were near enough alone to satisfy discretion; that he might speak, however awkwardly.

“No; I did not know about the child,” Warren said, with not the least discomfiture at the inquiry, but gloomily. “It is a bad business: God forbid she should come to a bad pass here; that little runner of yours is the only girl we have, and she is no wise ready to make a captain, even if Lily would have her. And what the devil we should do for Excidium if she did, I would like to know; the admiral cannot be running about having another child now, with Bonaparte on the other side of the Channel, ready to toss his glove across at any minute.

“I damned well hope you have been taking precautions? But I am sure Roland knows her business,” Warren added, without waiting for reply; just as well, as Laurence had never been asked a question he would have less liked to answer; all the more as it had abruptly and appallingly illuminated certain curious habits of Jane’s, which he had never brought himself to inquire into, and her regular consultations of the calendar.

“Oh, pray don’t take me wrong,” Warren said, misunderstanding Laurence’s fixed expression. “I don’t mean to carp in the least; accidents will happen, and Harcourt has had every excuse for distraction. Bad enough for us, these last months, but what the devil was ever to become of her? Half-pay would keep body and soul together, but money don’t make a woman respectable. That is why I asked you, before, about the fellow; I thought, if Lily died, they might make a match of it.”

“She has no family?” Laurence asked.

“None left, none to speak of. She is old Jack Harcourt’s daughter—he was a lieutenant on Fluitare. He cut straps in the year two, damned shame; but at least he knew she’d been tapped for Lily, by then,” Warren said. “Her mother was a girl down Plymouth way, near the covert there. She went off in a fever when Catherine was scarce old enough to crawl, and no relations to take her in: that is how she was thrown on the Corps.”

Laurence said, “Then, under the present circumstances—I know it is damned officious, but if she has no one else, ought one not speak to him? Of the child, I mean,” he added awkwardly.

“Why, what is there for him to do?” Warren said. “If it is a girl, God willing, the Corps needs her with both hands; and if it is a boy, he could go to sea instead, I suppose; but whatever for? It can only hurt him there, to be a by-blow, and meanwhile a captain’s son in the Corps is pretty sure to get a dragon, if he has any merit of his own.”

“But that is what I mean,” Laurence said, puzzled to find himself so misunderstood. “There is no reason the child must be illegitimate; they might easily be married at once.”

“Oh, oh,” Warren said, dawning wonder, confusion. “Why, Laurence, no; there’s no sense in it, you must see that. If she had been grounded, it might have answered; but thank God, no need to think of that anymore, or anything like,” and he jerked his chin gladly at the tightly lidded box which held the fruits of their day’s labors, to be carried back to Capetown in the morning: Lily would certainly be the next recipient. “A comfortable wife she would make him, with orders to follow and a dragon to look after; I dare say they would not see one another one year in six, him posted to one side of the world and she to the other, ha!”

Laurence was little satisfied to find his sentiments so unaffectedly laughed at, but more so for the uncomfortable sensation that there was some rational cause for so dismissive an answer; and he was forced to go to sleep with his resolution yet unformed.

Chapter 9

MR. KEYNES,” CATHERINE said, cutting through the raised voices, “perhaps you will be so good as to explain to us what alternative you prefer, to Mr. Dorset’s suggestion.”

Experience had improved on their rate of return, a little, and Nitidus had carried their spoils back to Capetown daily; so they returned, after a tired and dusty week, to find Lily dosed, Messoria and Immortalis also, and a small and putrid heap of mushrooms yet remaining. Of these, two had been preserved in oil, two in spirits of wine, two only wrapped in paper and oilcloth, and the lot boxed neatly up with the receipt for the cure. They would be sent back to England by the Fiona, which had been held back this long for their report: she would go with the tide.

But there was no sentiment of triumph at their dinner back, only muted satisfaction; at best the results of all their hunting would not do for more than three dragons; six if the surgeons back in Dover took the risk of halving the dose, or used it on smaller beasts, and that only if all three methods preserved whatever virtue the mushrooms held; Dorset would have liked to dry some, also, but there were not enough of them for this final experiment.

“Well, we are not going to do any better, not unless we hire an army of men and hounds; and where to get them, you may tell me and much obliged,” Warren said, holding the bottle in one hand as he drained his glass in the other, so he might refill the tumbler straight away. “Nemachaen is a clever little beast,” meaning the dog, who had acquired this grandiose name after the lion, courtesy of some of the younger ensigns presently being subjected to a haphazard education in the classics, “but there is only so much blasted forest we can hack through in a day, to find one mushroom or two at a time when we need scores of the things.”

“We must have more hunters,” Laurence said, but they were rather in danger of losing those they had; the agreed-on week having passed, Demane gave signs of wishing for himself and Sipho to be returned to their home village with their reward. Laurence with many unpleasant pangs of conscience had refused to immediately understand his signs, and instead had taken him to see the pen near the castle, where the cow had been set aside: a large, handsome milch cow, placid, with her six-months’ calf browsing the grass beside her; the boy ducked through the fence slats and slipped in to touch her soft brown side with cautious, almost wary delight. He looked at the calf, and back at Laurence, a question in his face; Laurence nodded to say they would give him the other, too. Demane came out, protests silenced by this species of bribery, and Laurence went away feeling that he had behaved himself like a desperate scrub; he hoped very much the boys did not have family to be made anxious for them, although he had rather gained the impression they were orphaned, and at the very least neglected.

“Too slow,” Dorset said, very decidedly despite his stammer. “Too slow, by half. All the searching in the world—we will only help to stamp it out. It has been the target of systematic eradication; we cannot hope to find much nearby. Who knows how long, how many years, the herdsmen have been digging it up. We must go away, farther away, where it may yet grow in quantity—”

“Perfect speculation,” Keynes snapped, “on which to recommend the pursuit of wild chances. How much distance will satisfy you? I dare say all the continent has been used for herding, at some time or another. To risk the formation, dragons scarcely risen from their sickbeds, and go deep into feral territory, on such a hope? The height of folly—”

The argument rose, grew warm, surged across the table; Dorset’s stammer grew more violent so he was scarcely comprehensible, and Gaiters and Waley, Maximus’s and Lily’s surgeons, were ranged with Keynes against him; until at last Catherine had silenced all of them, standing up to make her demand with her hands planted on the cloth.

“I do not quarrel with your concern,” she added, more quietly, “but we did not come here to find a cure only for ourselves. You have heard the latest dispatches; nine more dead since March, and by now more gone, when we could not spare any of them in the least.” She looked at Keynes steadily. “Is there any hope?”

He was silent, displeased, and only with a surly lowering look allowed there to be some chance of a better harvest, farther away; she nodded and said, “Then we will endure the risk, and be glad that our own dragons are well enough to do so.”

There was no question, yet, of sending Maximus, who had only lately begun to try at flying again: with a deal of flapping and kicking up dust, often ending only in an exhausted collapse; he could not quite manage the launching spring, which was necessary to get him aloft, although once in the air could remain for some time. Keynes shook his head and felt at his paunchy sides.

“The weight is coming back unevenly. You are doing your exercises?” he demanded; Maximus protested that he was. “Well, if we cannot get you in the air, we must find you room to walk,” Keynes said, and so Maximus had been set to making a circuit of the town, back and forth several times daily: the only stretch of cleared ground large enough for him, as he could not go far up the mountain-slopes without pulling them down in small avalanches.

No-one was very happy with this solution: ridiculous to have a dragon the size of a frigate ambling about like a lap-dog on an airing, and Maximus complained of the hard ground, and the pebbles which introduced themselves into his talons. “I do not notice them at first,” he said unhappily, while Berkley’s runners struggled with hoof-picks and knives and tongs to pry them out from under the hard, callused hide around the base of the claws, “not until they are quite far down, and then I cannot easily say how very unpleasant it becomes.”

“Why do you not swim, instead?” Temeraire said. “The water is very pleasant here, and perhaps you might catch a whale,” which suggestion brightened Maximus remarkably, and infuriated the fishermen, particularly the owners of the larger boats; they came in a body to protest.

“I am damned sorry to put you out,” Berkley said to them. “You may come with me, and tell him yourselves you do not like it.”

Maximus continued his outings, in peace, and might be seen daily paddling about the harbor. Sadly the whales and dolphins and seals, too clever by half, stayed well-clear of him, much to his disappointment: he did not much like tunny or sharks, the latter of which occasionally beat themselves against his limbs in confused fits perhaps provoked by some traces of blood or flesh from his latest repast: on one occasion he brought back one of these to show, a monster some nineteen feet in length, weighing close on two tons, with its angry snoutish face full of teeth. He had lifted the shark straight out of the water whole, and when he laid it down on the parade grounds before them, it abruptly went into a paroxysm of thrashing: knocking over Dyer, two ensigns, and one of the Marines, snapping and gnashing furiously at the air, before Dulcia managed to pin it to the ground with her foretalons.

Messoria and Immortalis, both older beasts, were perfectly happy to lie in the parade grounds and sleep in the sun, after their short daily flights for exercise; but Lily, having stopped coughing, shortly displayed that same restless energy which had overcome Dulcia, and began to insist on activity. But if she were to go flying anywhere, she must go far abroad, where a stray lingering sneeze or cough would not spray anyone below; Keynes, quite ignoring the covert gestures, the attempts at signaling, of nearly every senior officer, examined her and declared that she was perfectly fit to fly, “had better fly, I should say; this agitation is unnatural, and must be worked off.”

“But perhaps,” Laurence said, voicing the reluctance which the captains all privately shared, and they as a body began to suggest flights out over the ocean, along the scenic and settled coastline and back; gentle exercise.

“I hope,” Catherine said, going pink clear up to her forehead in a wave of color, “I hope that no-one is going to fuss; I would dislike fuss extremely,” and insisted on joining the hunting party, with Dulcia and Chenery, who likewise declared himself perfectly well, although Dulcia would only agree if he was bundled aboard in a heavy cloak, with a warming brick at his feet.

“After all, it cannot hurt to have more of us: we can make several parties and cover more ground; we do not need the dog so badly if the notion is we are looking for larger patches of the stuff,” Chenery said. “Just as well to have more of the dragons in hailing-distance, if any of us should run into a larger band of ferals, and your natives can keep us out of trouble with the animals.”

Laurence applied to Erasmus and his wife for their persuasive assistance, and pressed the cowrie necklace on Demane to open the conversation, as a preliminary bit of bribery. He objected vehemently nonetheless, his voice rising in high complaint, and Mrs. Erasmus said, “He does not like to go so far, Captain: he says that country belongs to the dragons, who will come and eat us.”

“Pray tell him there is no reason why the feral dragons should be angry with us; we will only stay a very little while, to get more of the mushrooms, and our own will protect us if there is any difficulty,” Laurence said, waving at the fine display the dragons made now. Since their recovery, even the older beasts who had not acquired the habit of bathing had been stripped of their harnesses and scrubbed in the warm ocean until their scales shone, and all the leather worked and polished until it, too, gleamed, warm and supple, the buckles glittering bright in the sun.

The parade grounds themselves had been plowed clean, and the refuse-pits filled in, now there was only occasional coughing to manage; the whole fit to welcome an admiral for inspection, aside from the wreckage of a couple of goats, whose bones Dulcia and Nitidus were presently meditatively gnawing. Maximus alone still had a fragile air, but he was bobbing in the ocean a little way off, his hollow sides buoyed up by the water and the somewhat faded orange and red of his hide refreshed by the lingering sunset pouring in over the wide ripples of the water. The rest of the dragons were rather bright-eyed and tigerish, having been worn lean over the course of the sickness; their reawakened appetites were savage.

“And that is another reason it will be just as well for us all to go,” Chenery said, when Demane had at last been brought around to reluctant agreement, or at least worn out from trying to convey his objections through translation. “Grey is a good fellow, and he has not said as much outright, yet; but the townsfolk are kicking up a real dust. It is not just having the dragons about; we are eating them out of hearth and home. The game is getting shy; as for cattle, no one can afford to eat beef anymore at all, and the prices are only getting higher. We had much better get out into wild country and shift for ourselves, where we needn’t annoy anyone.”

It was settled: Maximus would stay to continue his recovery, and Messoria and Immortalis, to sleep and hunt for him; Temeraire and Lily would go abroad as far as a strong day’s flight could take them, with little Nitidus and Dulcia to ferry back their acquisitions, perhaps every other day, and bring back messages.

They were packed and gone with the sun, in the morning, in the usual pell-mell way of aviators; the Fiona in the harbor rising up and falling with the swell, a great deal of activity on her deck in preparation for the morrow. The Allegiance was riding farther out to sea; the watch would be changing in a moment, but for now all was quiet aboard her. Riley had not come ashore; Laurence had not written. He turned his face away from the ship and towards the mountains, dismissing the matter for the present with a vague sense of leaving the question up to fate: by the time they returned with mushrooms in any quantity, perhaps there would be no need to speak; they would have to go home by way of the Allegiance, and it could not be hidden forever; he wondered if Catherine did not already look a little plumper.

Lily set a fine, fast pace; the wind poured over Temeraire’s back as Table Bay rolled away behind them. Barring a few banks of clouds, penned up against the slopes, the weather held clear and not windy, good flying, and there was an extraordinary relief in being once again in company: Lily on point, with Temeraire bringing up the rear and Nitidus and Dulcia flying in wing positions, so their shadows falling on the ground below made the points of a diamond, skimming over the vineyard rows below in neat perforated lines of red and brown, past their first autumnal splendor.

Thirty miles on the wing north-west from the bay took them past the swelling outcroppings of grey granite at Paarl, the last settlement in this direction; they did not stop, but continued on into the rising mountains. A few isolated and intrepid farmsteads could be glimpsed as they wound through the passes, clinging to sheltered folds of the mountain-slopes: the fields browning, the houses nearly impossible to see without a glass, buried as they were in stands of trees and their roofs disguised with brown and green paint.

They stopped to water after mid-day, having come to another valley between the mountain lines, and to discuss their course; they had not seen a cultivated field for some half-an-hour now.

“Let us go on another hour or two, and then we shall stop at the first likely place to make a search,” Harcourt said. “I do not suppose that there is any chance of the dog scenting them from aloft? The smell of the things is so very strong.”

“The best-trained foxhound in the world cannot pick up a vixen’s trail from horseback, much less from mid-air,” Laurence said, but they had been aloft again only a turn of the glass when the dog began barking in furious excitement, and trying to wriggle free of its harness in the most heedless way. Fellowes had gradually taken the handling of the dog into his own hands, disapproving of Demane’s haphazard discipline; his father had been a master of hounds, in Scotland. He had been giving the thin creature a gobbet of fresh meat every time it discovered them a mushroom; by now it would tear away after the least trail of scent with the greatest enthusiasm.

Temeraire had scarcely landed when it escaped its straps and went skidding down his side and abruptly vanished into the high grasses at a place where the slope rose up sharply. They had come into a wide valley, very warm, cupped in a bowl of mountains and still richly green despite the advancing season: fruit-trees everywhere in curiously even rows.

“Oh; I can smell it, too,” Temeraire said, unexpectedly, and when Laurence had slid down from his shoulder, he was no longer surprised at the dog’s frenzy: the smell was pronounced, hanging like a miasma in the air.

“Sir,” Ferris said, calling: the dog was still invisible, but its barking was coming to them with a hollow echoing ring, and Ferris was bending down to the slope; Laurence came up to him and saw half-hidden by a thicket there was an opening, a fissure in the dirt and limestone rock. The dog went silent; in another moment it came scrambling out of the hole and back up to them, an enormous, an absurdly enormous mushroom in its mouth, so large its third cap was dragging upon the ground between the dog’s legs and making it stumble.

It flung the mushroom down, wagging. The opening was near five feet high, and a gentle slope led downwards. The stench was astonishing. Laurence pushed up the clot of vines and moss which hung over the fissure like a curtain, and stepped inside and down, eyes watering from the smoky torch which Ferris had improvised out of rags and a tree-branch. There was surely a draught somewhere at the far end of the cavern; it drew like a chimney. Ferris was looking at him with a half-disbelieving, half-joyful expression, and as his eyes adjusted to the dimness, Laurence made out the strange hillocky appearance of the cavern floor, and knelt to touch: the floor was covered, covered in mushrooms.

“There is not a moment to lose,” Laurence said. “If you hurry, the Fiona may not yet have gone; if she has, you must go and recall her—she will not have gone far; she will not have rounded Paternoster Bay.”

All the crews were busy, breathless; the grass of the field had been trampled flat, and Temeraire’s belly-netting and Lily’s was spread out on the ground, every bag and chest emptied out to be filled with mushrooms, heaps and heaps. A small pale cream-colored breed shared the cavern with the great double-and triple-capped monsters, and also a large black fungus which grew in slabs, but the harvesters were making no attempt to discriminate: sorting could wait. Nitidus and Dulcia were already vanishing into the distance, sacks and sacks slung across their backs giving them a curiously lumpy appearance in silhouette against the sky.

Laurence had the map of the coastline dug out of Temeraire’s bags, and was showing him the likely course the Fiona would have followed. “Go as quickly as you can, and bring back more men. Messoria and Immortalis, too, if they can manage the flight; and tell Sutton to ask the governor for everyone who can be spared from the castle, all the soldiers, and no damned noise about flying, either.”

“He can always get them drunk if need be,” Chenery said, without lifting his head; he was sitting by the netting and keeping a tally as the mushrooms were thrown in, his lips moving in the count along with his fingers. “So long as they can stumble back and forth by the time you have got them here, they may be soused to their skulls.”

“Oh, and barrels, also,” Harcourt added, looking up from the stump where she was sitting, with a cool cloth soaked in water upon her forehead: she had attempted to help with the harvest, but the stink had overwhelmed her, and after a second round of vomiting, painful to all of them to hear, Laurence had at last persuaded her to go and sit outside instead. “That is, if Keynes thinks the mushrooms had better be preserved here; and oil and spirits.”

“But I do not like our all leaving you here,” Temeraire said a little mulishly. “What if that big feral should come back again, or another one? Or lions: I am sure I hear lions, not very far away.” There was not the least sound of anything but monkeys, howling in the tree-tops at a fair distance, and birds clamoring.

“We will be perfectly safe: from dragons, or lions, too,” Laurence said. “We have a dozen guns and more, and we need only step into the cave to hold them off forever: that mouth would not let in an elephant, much less a dragon, and they will not be able to fetch us out.”

“But Laurence,” Temeraire said quietly, putting his head down to speak confidentially; at least, as he fancied. “Lily tells me that Harcourt is carrying an egg; surely at least she ought to come, and I am sure she will not, if you refuse.”

“Why, damn you for a back-alley lawyer; I suppose you have cooked this up between the two of you,” Laurence said, outraged at the deliberate calculation of this appeal, and Temeraire had the grace to look ashamed of himself, but only a little. Lily did not even do as much, but abandoning subterfuge only said to Harcourt, wheedling, “Pray, pray, do come.”

“For Heaven’s sake, enough cosseting,” Catherine said. “In any case, I will do much better sitting here in the cool shade than tearing back and forth, weighing you down to no purpose when you might be carrying another pair of hands instead. No, not a man will you take; only make all the speed in the world, and the sooner you have gone, the sooner you will come back again,” she added.

The belly-netting was as full as it could be without cramming, and Temeraire and Lily were got off at last, still making wistful complaints. “Near enough five hundred, already,” Chenery said triumphantly, looking up from his tally, “and most of them fat, handsome things; enough to dose half the Corps, if only they will last the journey.”

“We will give them their damned herd of cows,” Laurence said to Ferris, meaning Demane and Sipho, who were now taking their ease stretched out upon the ground before the cavern mouth, making grass whistle and refusing to pay much attention to Reverend Erasmus’s attempts to read them an instructive tract for children, his first attempt at translation into their tongue; his wife was helping with the harvest.

Ferris blotted his forehead against his sleeve and said, in stifled, choked tones, “Yes, sir.”

“We will need larger quantities than required of the fresh,” Dorset said, joining them. “Should some potency be lost in the journey, a concentrated dose will compensate for the preservation. Pray stop the harvesting for now: at this rate no one will be left to carry.” The frantic pace had already slackened, with the wearing away of the first flush of excitement and the urgency of getting the dragons loaded, and many of the men looked sick and wan; several were being noisily sick into the grass.

The tents had all gone to make sacks of mushrooms, and there would certainly be no sleeping in the cavern, so they cleared instead the ground before it, chopping through the thornbushes with swords and axes. The remnants they used to build a low encircling break about the edge of the clearing, thorny and obdurate enough to give pause to smaller beasts, and a few parties were set to collecting dry wood for a fire. “Mr. Ferris, let us establish a watch,” Laurence said, “and now that we have all been rested, we will go to work in shifts: I should like to see a more efficient job of it.”

A quarter-of-an-hour seemed long enough, inside that damp, dark space beneath, with only the narrow crack of white light at one end. Besides the mushrooms themselves, there was a grassy stink very like damp manure throughout, and the sour smell of fresh vomit which they had themselves added to the atmosphere. Where they had already cleared the mushrooms, the earth was strangely springy underfoot, almost matted, not like dirt at all.

Laurence staggered out again into the fresh air, gratefully, with his arms full. “Captain,” Dorset said, following him out: he was not carrying a mushroom, and when Laurence had deposited his armload before the newly organized sorters, Dorset showed him a torn-edged square of matted grass and muck, the flooring of the cave. Laurence gazed at it uncomprehendingly. “It is elephant dung,” Dorset said, breaking apart the chunk, “and dragon also.”

“Wing, two points west of north.” Emily Roland’s treble voice rang out high and sharp, before Laurence had fully understood; at once all was a confused hurrying into the shelter of the cave. He looked for Reverend Erasmus, and the children; but before he could be herded inside the cave, Demane with one quick look at the oncoming dragon snatched his brother up bodily from the ground, and ran instead away into the underbrush, the dog dashing off after them; its barking came back twice, at increasing distances, and then cut off into a muzzled whine.

“Leave the mushrooms, take the guns,” Laurence cupped his hands over his mouth to roar over the commotion; he snatched up his own sword and pistols, put aside to help with the carrying, and gave Mrs. Erasmus his hand to descend into the cavern, past the riflemen already crouched down by the door; shortly the rest of them were crammed in also, all of them jostling involuntarily to keep as near the entrance and its fresh air as they could, until the dragon landed with an earth-trembling heavy thud, and thrust his muzzle directly up against the opening.

It was the self-same feral: dark red-brown, with the queer ivory tusks in his muzzle. The hot queasy kerosene smell of dragon-breath came in upon them as he roared furiously, and the faint undertaste of rot from old meals. “Hold fast, men,” Riggs was yelling, by the entrance, “hold fast, wait for it—” until the dragon shifted his position, his open jaws before them, and the volley went off into the soft flesh of its mouth.

The dragon squalled in fury and jerked back. His talons came scrabbling in at the edges of the hole, too large to come all the way inside, and began to pull and claw at the rock. Small pebbles and stones worked loose; dirt rained down upon them from the ceiling. Laurence looked around for Mrs. Erasmus: she was silent, and only bracing herself against the wall of the cavern for steadiness, her shoulders rigid. The riflemen were coughing as they reloaded urgently; but the dragon had already learnt, and did not present them another target. Its claws came curling in on both sides of the fissure, and then it began to throw its weight back, until all the chamber trembled and groaned.

Laurence drew his sword and leaped forward to hack at the talons, then to stab, the hard scaly flesh resisting the edge but not the point; Warren was beside him, and Ferris, in the dark. The dragon roared again outside and flexed its talons, blindly knocking them down as easily as gnats might be swatted. The hard polished bony curve of one claw slid across Laurence’s coat in a line over the belly, thrusting him hard against the matted cavern floor, and the tip caught and pulled a long green thread from the seam as the talons withdrew again from the fissure.

Warren caught Laurence by the arm and together they staggered back from the entry. The gunpowder smoke was bitter and acrid, overlaid on the rotting-sweet stink of the mushrooms; already Laurence could scarcely breathe for the slaughterhouse thickness of the place, and he heard to all sides men heaving, like the lower decks of a ship in a roaring gale.

The feral did not immediately renew the attack. They cautiously crept forward again to peer out: he had settled himself in the clearing outside; by bad luck, far back enough to be out of firing-range of their rifles, and his pale yellow-green eyes were fixed malevolently upon the fissure. He was licking at his hacked-about talons, and making grimaces with his mouth, pulling his lips back from his serrated teeth and forward again, spitting occasionally a little bit of blood upon the ground, but plainly he had taken no great harm. As they watched, he raised his head up and roared again thunderously in anger.

“Sir, we might put gunpowder in a bottle,” his gunner Calloway said, crawling over to Laurence, “or the flash-powder, maybe, would give him a start; I have the sack here—”

“We are not going to frighten that beauty away with a little flash and bang, not for long,” Chenery said, craning his head back and forth to study their enemy. “My God. Fifteen tons at least, or I miss my guess: fifteen tons in a feral!”

“I would call it closer to twenty, and damned unfortunate, too,” Warren said.

“We had better save what you have, Mr. Calloway,” Laurence said to the gunner. “It will do us no good only to startle him away briefly; we must wait until the dragons return, and reserve our fire to give them support.”

“Oh, Christ; if Nitidus or Dulcia are the first back,” Warren said, and did not need to continue: the little dragons would certainly be frantic, and wholly overmatched.

“No; they will all be loaded down, remember?” Harcourt said. “The weight will tell on the light-weights more, and keep them back; but however are they to fight when they get here—”

“Lord, let us not be borrowing trouble, if you please,” Chenery interrupted. “That big fellow is no trained flyer; a nice thing if four dragons of the Corps couldn’t black his eye in a trice, even if Messoria and Immortalis don’t come along. We have only to keep quiet in here until they come.”

“Captain,” Dorset said, stumbling back towards them, “I am—I beg to recall your attention—the floor of the cavern—”

“Yes,” Laurence said, recalling the earlier sample which Dorset had shown him, of the dung upon the floor of the cave, elephant and dragon, where neither animal could have managed entry. “Do you mean there is another way into this cavern somewhere, where it could come in upon us?”

“No, no,” Dorset said. “The dung has been spread. Deliberately,” he added, seeing their confusion. “These are cultivated.”

“What, do you mean men, farming the things?” Chenery said. “What the devil would a person want with the nasty stuff?”

“Did you say there was dragon dung?” Laurence said, and a shadow falling over the mouth of the cave drew their attention outside: two more dragons landing, smaller creatures but sleek, wearing harness made of ropes, and a dozen men armed with assegai, leaping down off their sides.

The new arrivals all stayed well out of rifle-range, conferring. After a little while, one of them came towards the entry cautiously and shouted something in at them. Laurence looked at Erasmus, who shook his head uncomprehending and turned to his wife; she was staring out the door. She had her handkerchief pressed over her mouth and nostrils to hold out the smell, but she lowered it and edging a little closer called back, haltingly. “They say to come out, I think.”

“Oh, certainly.” Chenery was rubbing his face against his sleeve; some grit had entered his eyes. “I am sure they would like it of all things; you may tell them to—”

“Gentlemen,” Laurence said, breaking in hastily, since Chenery had evidently forgotten his audience, “these are no ferals after all, plainly, but under harness; and if we have trespassed upon the cultivated grounds of these men, we are in the wrong: we ought make amends if we can.”

“What a wretched mischance,” Harcourt said, agreeing. “We should have been perfectly happy to pay for the damned things, after all. Ma’am, will you come out and speak to them with us? We should of course understand if you do not wish it,” she added, to Mrs. Erasmus.

“A moment,” Warren said, low and cautiously, catching at Harcourt’s sleeve. “Let us remember that we have never heard of anyone coming through the interior; couriers have been lost, and expeditions, and how many settlements have we heard tell of, destroyed, in just this region north of the Cape? If the dragons are not feral, then these men have been responsible, viciously responsible; we are not to rely on their character.”

Mrs. Erasmus looked at her husband. He said, “If we do not conciliate them, there will surely be battle when your dragons come back, for they will attack in fear for your safety. It is our Christian duty to make peace, if it can be done,” and she nodded and said softly, “I will go.”

“I believe I am senior, gentlemen,” Warren said, “as our dragons are not here,” a specious claim, as precedence in the Corps went by dragon-rank regardless, with no such qualifier involved, outside flag-rank. Coming from the Navy, with its rigid adherence to seniority, Laurence had often found the system confusing if not outright maddening, but it was a pragmatic concession to reality: dragons had their own native hierarchies, and in nature the twenty-year-old handler of a Regal Copper had more authority, on the battlefield, over the instinctive obedience of other dragons, than did a thirty-year veteran on the back of a Winchester.

“Pray let us have no nonsense—” Harcourt began impatiently, when her first lieutenant Hobbes broke in to say, “It is all a hum; you shan’t go at all, none of you, and you ought know better,” a little reproachfully. “Myself and Lieutenant Ferris shall escort the parson and his lady, with their permission, and if all goes well, we will try and bring one of the fellows back here, to speak with you.”

Laurence could not like the arrangement in the least, but for its keeping Catherine out of harm’s way, but the other captains looked guilty and did not argue. They cleared back from the entrance, the riflemen covering the open ground from either side. Mrs. Erasmus cupped her hands over her mouth and called a warning, then Hobbes and Ferris stepped out, one after another, cautiously, each with a pistol held muzzle-down and ready, swords loosened on their belts.

The strangers had stood back again, spears held lightly, the tips pointing towards the ground, but gripped ready to pull back and let fly. They were tall men, all of them, with close-cropped heads and very dark coloring, skin so deep black it had almost a bluish cast in the sunlight. They were dressed very scantily, in loincloths of a remarkable deep purple, decorated in a running fringe with what looked like gold beads, and wore thin laced leather sandals which left the tops of their feet bare, and rose to mid-thigh.

They did not move to attack, and when Hobbes turned and beckoned, Reverend Erasmus climbed out of the cave, and gave his wife his hand to assist her. They joined the lieutenants, and Mrs. Erasmus began speaking, slowly and clearly: she had taken a mushroom from the cave, and held it out to them to show. The red-brown dragon stooped suddenly, its head bending towards her, and spoke; she looked directly up at him, startled but not visibly afraid, and it jerked its head back with an ugly, squawking cry: not a roar or a growl, wholly unlike any sound Laurence had ever heard from a dragon’s throat.

One of the men reached out and catching her by the arm drew her towards him. His other hand pressed her forehead backwards, bending her neck in an awkward exposed curve, and his hand pushed her hair away from her face, where the scar and the tattoo marred her forehead.

Erasmus sprang forward, and Hobbes on his other side, to pull her free. The man let her go, without resistance, and took a step towards Erasmus, speaking low and rapidly, pointing at her. Ferris caught her in his arms as she fell back shaking, supporting her.

Erasmus spread his hands, placating, continuing to speak even while he carefully sought to interpose himself before her. He was plainly not understood; he shook his head and tried again, in the Khoi language. This was not understood, either; at last he tried another, haltingly, and tapping his own chest said, “Lunda.” The dragon snarled, and with no other warning, the man took up his spear and drove it directly through Erasmus’s body, in one unbroken and terrible motion.

Hobbes fired; the man fell; Erasmus also went toppling to his knees. He had an expression of only mild surprise on his face; his hand was on the spear-haft, protruding from just above his breastbone. Mrs. Erasmus gave a single hoarse cry of horror; he turned his head a little in her direction, tried to lift his hand towards her; it fell, limply, and he dropped to the ground.

Ferris half-carried, half-dragged Mrs. Erasmus back towards the cave, the red-brown dragon lunging after them; Hobbes went down in spraying blood under that raking claw. Then Ferris was pushing Mrs. Erasmus into the cavern, backing her into their waiting arms just as the dragon flung itself at the entrance again: roaring at a wild, shrieking pitch, its talons scrabbling madly at the opening and shaking all the hollow hill.

Laurence caught Ferris by the arm as he fell stumbling backwards from the impact, blood in a thin streak crossing his shirt and face. Harcourt and Warren had Mrs. Erasmus. “Mr. Riggs,” Laurence shouted, over the rattling din outside, “a little fire; and Mr. Calloway, let us have those flares, if you please.”

They gave the dragon another volley and a blue light, straight into the face, which at least made it recoil momentarily; the two smaller dragons leapt into the breach and made an effort to herd the larger one back from the cavern, speaking to it in shrill voices, and at last it drew away again, its sides heaving, and dropped back into its crouch at the far end of the clearing.

“Mr. Turner, do you have the time?” Laurence asked his signal-officer, coughing: the clouds from the flare were not dying away.

“I’m sorry, sir, I forgot to turn the glass for a while,” the ensign said unhappily “but it is past four in the afternoon watch.”

Temeraire and Lily had not left until past one: a four-hours’ flight in either direction, and a great deal of labor and packing to be done in Capetown, before they would even begin the return journey. “We must try and get a little sleep by watches,” Laurence said quietly to Harcourt and Warren; Dorset had taken charge of Mrs. Erasmus and guided her deeper into the cave. “We can hold them at the fissure, I think, but we must stay vigilant—”

“Sir,” Emily Roland said, “beg pardon, sir, but Mr. Dorset says to tell you, there is smoke coming into the cave, from the back.”

A narrow vent, at the back, higher up than they could reach: propped up on Mr. Pratt’s broad shoulder, Laurence could see, through the thin stream of black smoke, the orange glow of the fire which the men had set to smoke them out. He dropped back to his own feet and cleared out of the way: Fellowes and Larring, Harcourt’s ground-crew master, were trying together with their men to block the vent with scraps of harness and leather, using their own coats and shirts besides. They were having little success, and time worked against them; already the cavern was nearly unbreathable, and the rising heat only worsened the natural stench.

“We cannot last long this way,” Catherine said, hoarse but steady, when Laurence had come back to the front of the cave. “I think we had better make a dash for it, while we still can, and try and lose them in the forest.”

Outside the entrance, the thorny brush which they had torn up to make their camp was now being heaped up closer by the dragons, forming stacks higher than a man’s head all around the cavern-mouth, and the dragons had arranged themselves carefully behind this barrier: screened from rifle-fire, and blocking their avenues of escape. There would be precious little hope of breaking through; but no better alternative would offer itself.

“My crew is the largest,” Laurence said, “and we have eight rifles. I hope you will all agree we should make the first attempt, and the rest of you come upon our heels: Mr. Dorset, perhaps you will be so kind as to wait with Mrs. Erasmus until we have cleared a little way, and I am sure Mr. Pratt will assist you,” he added.

The order of emergence was settled upon, in haste; they agreed upon a rendezvous point in the woods, consulting their compasses. Laurence felt his neckcloth, to be sure it was tied, and shrugged back into his coat in the dark, adjusting the gold bars upon his shoulders; his hat was gone. “Warren, Chenery; your servant, Harcourt,” he said, shaking their hands. Ferris and Riggs were crouched by the opening, ready; his own pistols were loaded. “Gentlemen,” he said, and drawing his sword went through the cavern exit, a roar of God and King George behind him.

Chapter 10

LAURENCE STUMBLED AS the rough hands dragged him up; his legs would not answer, and when he was flung forward they crumpled at once, casting him full-length on the ground, beside the other prisoners. They were being flung roughly into a rig much like their own belly-netting, but of coarser rope and designed less for passengers than for baggage. In a few sharp jerks, they were hauled up and slung below the red-brown dragon’s belly, their arms and legs left to dangle through the large haphazardly knotted gaps, and their bodies crammed in one atop another. The netting was loose, and swung in great sickening curves with every shift in the wind or direction, every sudden diving movement.

There was no guard set to watch them, nor any personal restraint, but they were thoroughly immobilized regardless, and had no opportunity to shift their positions or converse. He was low in the netting, with his face pressed directly into the raw cords, which scraped him now and again; but he was grateful for the air despite the thin ribbons of blood which came dripping past him, and the wider arc of swinging. Dyer was pushed up against his side; Laurence had his arm around the boy, to keep him in: the netting was uneven, and the cords moving might have easily let him slip through to plunge to his death.

The wounded had been thrown in with the whole. A young midwingman from Chenery’s crew, badly clawed, lay with his jaw pressed against Laurence’s arm, blood seeping slowly from the corner of his mouth and soaking through the cloth. Some time during the night he died, and his corpse stiffened slowly as they flew on. Laurence could distinguish no-one else around him, only the anonymous pressure of a boot in the small of his back, a knee jammed up against his own, so that his leg was bent back upon itself.

He had glimpsed Mrs. Erasmus only briefly, in the dreadful confusion of their taking, as the nets were flung down upon them from the trees; she had certainly been dragged away alive. He did not wish to think on it; he could do little else, and Catherine’s fate weighed on him heavily.

They did not stop. He slept, or at least passed into a state more distant from the world than wakefulness, the wind passing over his face in gusts, the rocking of the netting not wholly unlike the querulous motion of a ship riding at anchor in a choppy cross-sea. A little while after dawn, the dragon brought up sharp, cupping the wind in its wings as it descended, bird-like, and came to the ground jarringly, skipping a few steps along the earth before dropping onto its forelegs.

The netting was cut loose, roughly, and they were picked over quickly and efficiently, the men prodding them with the butt ends of their spears and heaving away the corpses. Laurence could not have risen to his legs with all the liberty in the world to do so, his knee afire with returning blood, but he raised his head, and saw Catherine lying a little way distant: flat upon her back, pale and her eyes shut, with blood on the side of her face. There were two bloody rents in her coat also, near the arm, but she had kept it, and buttoned; her hair was still tightly plaited, and there was no sign she had been distinguished.

No time for anything more: a little water was splashed in their faces, and the netting folded back over their heads; the dragon stepped over them and they were hoisted back up with quick, jerking pulls. Away again. The motion was worse in daylight, and they were a lighter load now, swaying more easily with the wind and every slight change of direction; the Corps was a service that hardened the stomach, but even so filth trickled down now through the press of bodies, the sour smell of bile. Laurence breathed through his mouth so far as he could, and turned his face to the ropes when he himself had to vomit.

There was no more sleep, until at last with the sun they descended again, and this time at last they were taken out from the netting one and two at a time, weak and ill, and lashed together at wrists, upper arms, and ankles, into a human chain. They were fixed to a pair of trees at either end, and their captors came around with water in dripping leather bags, fresh and delicious, the spout dragged too soon away from their seeking mouths; Laurence held the last swallow on his parched tongue as long as he could.

He leaned forward and glanced down the line: he did not see Warren at all, but Harcourt looked up at him, a quick nod; Ferris and Riggs looked as well as could be expected, and Roland was tied on at the very end, her head drooping against the tree to which she was fastened. Chenery was tied the other side of Dyer from him; his head was tipped awkwardly onto his own shoulder, his mouth hung open in exhaustion; he had a great purpling bruise all across his face, and he had his hand clenched upon his thigh, as though the older wound pained him.

They were near the banks of a river, Laurence gradually became aware, hearing the slow soft gurgling of the water behind him though he could not turn about to look, a torment when they were all still thirsty. They were in a matted grassy clearing; sending his eyes to the side he could see a border of large stones encircling the flattened grounds, and a fire-pit blackened with use: a hunting camp, perhaps, used regularly; the men were walking around the boundary, tearing up the greenery which had sent encroaching tendrils into the clearing.

The great red-brown beast settled itself at the far side of the fire-pit, and closing its eyes down to slits went to sleep; the other two took wing again: a mottled green, and a dark brown creature, both with pale grey underbellies gilded with a kind of iridescence, which quickly made them melt into the deepening sky above on their leap.

A long-legged plover wandered through the clearing, picking at the ground for seeds and chirping, a high metallic sound like a small bell struck with a hammer. In a little while the smaller dragons returned, carrying the limp bodies of several antelope; two of these were respectfully deposited before the red-brown dragon, who tore into them with appetite; another they shared amongst themselves; and the last was given to the men, butchered quickly, and put into a large cauldron already steaming.

Their captors were quiet over their dinner, clustering to one side of the fire and eating from bowls with their fingers; when one of them rose to go to the boiling-pot again, and the flames leapt with the sizzle of water, Laurence glimpsed briefly Mrs. Erasmus on the other side of the fire beside the dragon, sitting bent over a bowl in her hands and eating, steadily and calmly. Her hair had come loose from its ruthless restraints, and curved out around her face in a stiff bell-shape; she had no expression at all, and her dress was torn.

After their own meal, the men came over and in a handful of bowls fed them all off the remnants, a kind of grain-porridge cooked in meat broth. There was not a great deal for any of them, and humiliating to have to eat with their faces bent forward into the bowl held for them, like rooting in a trough, the remnants left dripping from their chins. Laurence closed his eyes and ate, and when Dyer would have left some broth in the bowl said, “You will oblige me by eating everything you can; there is no telling when they will feed us again.”

“Yes, sir,” Dyer said, “only they will put us back aboard, and I am sure I will have it all up again.”

“Even so,” Laurence said, and thankfully it seemed that their captors did not mean to set out again immediately. They instead spread out woven blankets upon the ground, and carried out a long bundle from among their things; they set it down upon the blankets and undid the wrappings, and Laurence recognized the corpse: the man whom Hobbes had shot, the one who had murdered Erasmus. They laid him out with ceremony, and washed him down with water carried from the spring, then wrapped him again in the skins of the antelope lately caught. The bloody spear they set beside him, as a trophy perhaps. One of them brought out a drum; others took up dry sticks from the ground, or began simply clapping or stamping their feet, and with their hands and voices made a chant like a single unending cry, one taking up the thread when another paused for breath.

It was grown wholly dark; they were still singing. Chenery opened his eyes and looked over at Laurence. “How far do you suppose we have come?”

“A night and day, flying straight, at a good pace; making steadily north by north-east, I think,” Laurence said, low. “I cannot tell more; what speed do you think he would make, the big one?”

Chenery studied the red-brown dragon and shook his head. “Wingspan equal to his length, not too thickset; thirteen knots at a guess, if he didn’t want to throw the light-weights off his pace. Call it fourteen.”

“More than three hundred miles, then,” Laurence said, his heart sinking; three hundred miles, and not a track left behind them to show the way. If Temeraire and the others could have caught them, he would have had no fear, not of this small rag-tag band; but in the vastness of the continent, they could disappear as easily as if they had all been killed and buried, and waste the rest of their lives imprisoned.

Already they had scarcely any hope of making their way back to the Cape overland, even setting aside the great likelihood of pursuit. If they made directly westward for the coast, avoiding all native perils and managing to find food and water enough to sustain them over a more reasonable month’s march, they might at last reach the ocean; then what? A raft, perhaps, might be contrived; or a pirogue of a sort; Laurence did not set himself up as a Cook or a Bligh, but he supposed he could navigate them to a port, if they escaped gale and dangerous currents, and bring back aid for the survivors. A great many ifs, all of them unlikely in the extreme, and sure to only grow more so the farther they were carried; and meanwhile Temeraire would certainly have come into the interior after them, searching in a panic, and exposing himself to the worst sort of danger.

Laurence twisted his wrists against the ropes: they were good stuff, strong and tightly woven, and there was little yield. “Sir,” Dyer said, “I think I have my pocket-knife.”

Their captors were winding down their ceremony; the two small dragons were digging a hole, for the burial. The pocket-knife was not very sharp, and the ropes were tough; Laurence had to saw for a long time to free one arm, the thin wooden hilt slippery in his sweating hand, and his fingers cramping around it as he tried to bend the knife against the bindings around his wrist. At last he succeeded, and passed it along to Chenery; with one arm free he could work on the knots between him and Dyer.

“Quietly, Mr. Allen,” Laurence said, on his other side; the ensign was tugging clumsily at the knots holding him to one of Catherine’s midwingmen.

The mound was raised, and their captors were asleep, before they had more than half disentangled themselves. There was a noisy groaning of hippopotami in the darkness; it sounded very near-by at times, and occasionally one of the dragons would raise a sleepy head, listening, and make a quelling growl, which silenced all the night around them.

They worked more urgently now, and those of them already freed risked creeping from their places to help the others; Laurence worked with Catherine, whose slim fingers made quick work of the worst knots, and then he whispered softly, when they had loosed her man Peck, the last, “Pray take the others into the woods and do not wait for me; I must try and free Mrs. Erasmus.”

She nodded, and pressed the pocket-knife on him: dulled to uselessness, but at least a moral support; and then they quietly one by one crept into the forest, away from the camp, except for Ferris, who crawled over to Laurence’s side. “The guns?” he asked softly.

Laurence shook his head: the rifles had unhappily been bundled away, by their captors, into the rest of their baggage, which lay tucked beside the head of one of the snoring dragons: there was no way to get at them. It was dreadful enough to have to creep past the sleeping men, lying exhausted and sprawled upon the ground after the catharsis of their wake: every ordinary snuffled noise of sleep magnified a hundredfold, and the occasional low crackles of the fire, burning down, like thunderclaps. His knees were inclined to be weak, and some of his steps sagged, involuntarily, almost so they brushed the ground; he had to steady himself with a hand against the dirt.

Mrs. Erasmus was lying apart from the men, to one side of the fire, very near the head of the great red-brown dragon; his forelegs were curled shallowly to either side of her. She was huddled very small, with her hands tucked beneath her head; but Laurence was glad to see she did not seem to have been injured. She jerked almost loose when Laurence’s hand came over her mouth, the whites of her eyes showing all around, but her trembling quieted at once when she saw him; she nodded, and he lifted his hand away again, to help her to her feet.

They crept as softly away, and slowly, around the great taloned claw, the black horny edges serrated and gleaming with the red firelight, the dragon’s breath coming deep and evenly; his nostrils flared in their regular pace, showing a little pink within. They were ten paces away, eleven; the dark eyelid cracked, and the yellow eye slid open upon them.

He was up and roaring at once. “Go!” Laurence shouted, pushing Mrs. Erasmus onward with Ferris; his own legs would not answer quickly, and one of the men waking leapt upon him, taking him by the knees and to the ground. They fell wrestling in the dust and dirt, near the fire; Laurence grimly hoping for nothing more, now, than to cover the escape. It was a clumsy, drunken struggle, like the last rounds of a mill with both parties weaving and bloodied; both of them exhausted, and Laurence’s weakness matched by his opponent’s confusion of having been woken from sound sleep. Rolling upon his back, Laurence managed to lock an arm around the man’s throat, and pulled with all his might upon his own wrist to hold it; he lashed out with his booted foot to trip another who was snatching for his spear.

Ferris had pushed Mrs. Erasmus towards the forest; a dozen of the aviators were running out, to come to her aid, and to Laurence. “Lethabo!” the dragon cried—whatever the threat or meaning, it brought her to a distracted halt, looking around; the dragon was lunging for Ferris.

She called out in protest herself and, running back where Ferris had dived to the ground to evade in desperation, threw herself between, holding up a hand; the claw, descending, stopped, and the dragon put it down again before her.

This time the men set a watch, learning from their mistake, and tied them up closer by the fire: there would be no second attempt. The two small dragons had herded them back to the camp with contemptuous ease, and an air of practice; if in the process they had also stampeded a small herd of antelope, they did not mind that, and made a late supper to console themselves for the effort. They missed only Kettering, one of Harcourt’s riflemen, and Peck and Bailes, both harness-men; but the latter two stumbled demoralized back into camp and surrendered, early in the morning, with the intelligence that Kettering had been killed, trying to ford the river, by a hippo; their pale and nauseated expressions precluded any wish of knowing more.

“It was my name,” Mrs. Erasmus said, her hands tight around her cup of dark red tea. “Lethabo. It was my name when I was a girl.”

She had not been permitted to come and speak to them, but at her pleading they had at length consented to bring Laurence over, hobbled at the ankles with his wrists tied together before him, and one of the spearmen standing watch lest he try to reach towards her. The red-brown dragon himself was bent over their conversation alertly, with a malevolent eye on Laurence at every moment.

“Are these men of your native tribe, then?” he asked.

“The men, no. They are of a tribe, I think, cousins to my own, or allied. I am not very sure, but they can understand me when I speak. But—” She paused, and said, “I do not understand it properly myself, but Kefentse,” she nodded towards the great hovering beast, “says he is my great-grandfather.”

Laurence was baffled, and supposed she had misunderstood; or translated wrong. “No,” she said, “no; there are many words I do not remember well, but I was taken with many others, and some of us were sold together also. We called all the older men Grandfather, for respect. I am sure that is all it means.”

“Have you enough of the tongue to explain to him we meant no harm?” Laurence asked. “That we only sought the mushrooms—”

She made the halting attempt, but the dragon snorted in a disdainful manner before she had even finished. He at once insinuated his great taloned forehand between them, glaring as if Laurence had offered her an insult, and spoke to the men: they at once pulled Laurence to his feet and dragged him back to the line of prisoners.

“Well,” Chenery said, when Laurence had been tied up with them again, “it sounds a little promising: I dare say when she has had a chance to talk to him, she will be able to bring him round. And in the meantime, at least they do not mean to kill us, or I expect they would have done so already and saved themselves the trouble of our keep.”

For what motive they had been preserved, however, was quite unclear; there was no attempt made to question them, and Laurence was growing bewildered as their journey extended further and further, past what could ever have been the reasonable extent of the territory of a small tribe, even one in the possession of dragons. He might have thought they were circling about, to lose pursuit, but the sun during the day and the Southern Cross at night gave it the lie: their course was steady and purposeful, always north by north-east, veering only to bring them to a more comfortable situation for the night, or to running water.

Early the next day they stopped by a wide river, looking almost orange from its muddy bottom, and populated by more of the noisy hippopotami, which darted away through the water with surprising speed from the pouncing dragons, submerging through wide ripples to evade. At last one of them was served out, by the two small dragons cornering it from both sides, and laid down to be butchered in the clearing. Their captors had grown confident enough to untie a few of them to assist with the tedious labor, Dyer and Catherine’s young runner Tooke set to carrying water back and forth in a bowl, fetching it uneasily from the water’s edge: there was a substantial crocodile sleeping on the farther bank, whose green eye was wide open and fixed upon them; its flesh was evidently not a temptation to the dragons, for it showed not the least sign of fear.

The dragons lay drowsing in the sun, their tails flicking idly at the enormous clouds of flies which gathered round them, their heads pillowed on their forelegs. Mrs. Erasmus was speaking into Kefentse’s ear; mid-sentence, he reared abruptly up and began to make questions of her, demandingly; she flinched back, and only shook her head, refusing. At last he left off, and cast his eyes southward, sitting up on his haunches like a coat of arms: a dragon sejant erect, gules; then slowly he settled himself back down; he spoke to her once more, and pointedly shut his eyes.

“Well, I don’t suppose we need ask what he thinks of letting you go,” Chenery said, when she had crept around to them.

“No,” she said, speaking low to keep from rousing the dragons up again, “and matters are only worse: I spoke of my daughters, and now Kefentse wants nothing more than to go back for them also.”

Laurence was ashamed to feel an eager leap of hope, at a situation which naturally could cause her only the greatest anxiety; but such an attempt would at least reveal to the rest of the formation the identity of their captors. “And I assure you, ma’am,” he said, “that any such demand would be received with the utmost scorn: I am confident that our fellow officers and General Grey will consider your children their own charge.”

“Captain, you do not understand,” she said. “I think he would be ready to attack all the colony to get at them. He thinks there may be more of their stolen kindred there, too, among the slaves.”

“I am sure I wish them much luck, if they like to try it,” Chenery said. “Pray don’t be worried for the girls: even if these fellows have another few beauties like this grandfather of yours at home, it would take a little more than that to crack a nut like the castle. There are twenty-four-pounders there; not to speak of pepper guns, and a full formation. I don’t suppose he would like to come back with us, instead; to England, I mean?” he added, with a flash of cheerful optimism. “If he has taken to you so strong, you ought to be able to persuade him.”

But it was very soon clear that Kefentse, whatever else he meant by calling himself her great-grandfather, certainly considered himself in the light of her elder; even though she thought now, that she vaguely recalled his hatching. “Not well, but I am almost sure of it,” she said. “I was very young, but there were many days of feasting, and presents; and I remember him often in the village, after,” which Laurence supposed answered for her lack of fear of dragons; she had been taken as a girl of some nine-years’ age, old enough to have lost the instinctive terror.

Remembering her only as a child, Kefentse, far from being inclined to obey, had instead concluded from her efforts to secure their freedom that she was their dupe, either frightened or tricked into lying for their sake, and he was grown all the angrier for it. “I beg you do not risk any further attempts at persuasion,” Laurence said. “We must be grateful for his protection of you; I would have you make no more fruitless attempts, which might cause him to reconsider his sentiments.”

“He would do nothing to hurt me,” she said, a strange certainty; perhaps the restoration of some childhood confidence.

Having breakfasted on roasted hippo, they flew on some hours more and landed again only a little while before dark, beside what seemed to be a small farming village. The clearing where they descended was full of children at play, who shrieked with delight at their arrival, and ran eagerly around the dragons, chattering away at them without the slightest evidence of fear; although they peered very nervously at the prisoners. A broad spreading mimosa tree stood at the far end of the clearing, giving pleasant shade, and beneath it stood an odd little shed with no front, raised several feet from the ground and housing within it a dragon egg of substantial size. Around it a circle of women sat with mortar and pestle, pounding grain; they put aside their tools and patted the dragon egg, as if speaking to it, and rose to greet the visitors as they leapt down from the smaller dragons’ backs, and to stare with curiosity.

Several men came in from the village, to clasp arms with the handlers and greet the dragons. An elaborately carved elephant’s tooth hung from a tree, the narrow end cut open to make a horn, and one of the villagers took this down and blew on it, several long hollow ringing blasts. Shortly another dragon landed in the clearing, a middle-weight of perhaps ten tons, a delicate dusty shade of green with yellow markings and sprays of red spots upon his breast and shoulders, and two sets of long foreteeth which protruded over his jaw above and below. The children were even less shy of this newcomer, clustering close about his forelegs, even climbing upon his tail and pulling on his wings, a treatment which he bore with perfect patience while he talked with the visiting dragons.

The four of them settled around the enshrined dragon egg, in company with their handlers and the men of the village; and one older woman also sat with them, her dress marking her apart: a skirt of animal-skins and strings of long beads like reed-joints, and many heaped necklaces of animal claws and colored beads also. The rest of the women brought a large steaming pot of porridge, the grain boiled up in milk rather than broth, for their dinner; with fresh greens cooked with garlic, and dried meat preserved in salt: a little tough, but flavorful, vinegary and spiced.

Bowls were brought for the prisoners, and their hands were untied to allow them to eat for themselves for once, their captors less wary with so large a company around them; and in the celebratory bustle, Mrs. Erasmus was able to slip away from Kefentse to join them once again: he had been given pride of place beside the dragon egg, and presented a large cow to eat; and they seemed to hold the evening’s entertainment until he had finished. At least when the remnants of the carcass on which he feasted had been carried away, and fresh dirt scattered over the ground before him to soak up the blood, only then did the old woman stand up, the one oddly dressed, and coming to stand before the dragon egg began to sing and clap.

The audience took up the rhythm, with clapping and with drums, and their voices joined with her on the refrains; each verse was different, without rhyme or pattern that Laurence could see. “She is saying, she is telling the egg,” Mrs. Erasmus said, staring at the ground, unseeing; intent upon following the words. “She is telling him of his life. She is saying, he was a founder of the village; he brought them to a good safe country, past the desert, where the kidnappers do not come. He was a great hunter, and killed the lion with his own hands, when it would have raided among the cattle; they miss his wisdom, in the council, and he must hurry up and come back to them: it is his duty—”

Laurence stared, entirely baffled. The old priestess had finished her own verses, and began to lead one after another some of the men of the village to stand in front of the egg and recite, with a little prompting assistance from her. “They say they are his sons,” Mrs. Erasmus said, “telling him they long to hear his voice again; that is his grandson, born since his death,” when one of them carried an infant in swaddling to the egg, to pat its small hand against the shell. “It is only some heathen superstition, of course,” Mrs. Erasmus added, but uneasily.

The dragons joined their own voices to the ceremony: the local beast addressing the egg as his old friend, whose return was eagerly awaited; the smaller dragons of the distant border spoke of the general pleasures of the hunt, of taking wing, of seeing their descendants prosper. Kefentse was silent, until the priestess chided him, and coaxed; then at last in his deep voice he gave warning rather than encouragement, and spoke of grief at failing in his duty: of coming back to the deserted village, the smoke of dying fires, all the houses empty; his children lying in the dust, still and not answering his calls, and the hyena slinking through the herds. “He searched, and searched, until he came to the shore, and at the ocean he knew—he knew he would not find us,” Mrs. Erasmus said, and Kefentse put his head down and moaned, very low; abruptly she rose and crossed the clearing to him, and put her hands upon his lowered muzzle.

There was a certain sluggishness to the next morning’s preparations for departure, the dragons and men both having indulged in some brewed liquor, late in the evening’s festivities, which now rendered them all dragging; the small green dragon yawned and yawned, as if he would unhinge his jaw.

Woven baskets were being brought out to the clearing, so large they required two men each to carry, and full of foodstuffs: small pale yellow kidney beans spotted black, hard and dried; red-brown grains of sorghum; small onions of yellow and purple-red; more strips of the pungent dried meat. The men of their party nodded over the tribute, and the baskets were covered with woven lids, tied securely on with strips of tough thin rope braided of bark. The baskets in pairs were slung over the necks of the smaller dragons, who bent their heads to receive them.

There was at all times a watchful guard upon them, however; and also upon the perimeters of the village: younger boys, with a large cow-bell sort of contraption, which they could have rung out in an instant. It was a shameful consequence of the rapacity of the slave trade, that having exhausted the natural supply of prisoners of war among the kingdoms of the coast, the native suppliers of the trade had turned to kidnapping and raiding, without even the thin excuse of a quarrel over territory, solely to acquire more human chattel. These efforts were extending further into the interior with every year, and had evidently made the villagers begin to be wary.

It was not a condition of long standing, for the village was not designed upon defensible lines, being only a collection of handsome but small, low houses made of clay and stones and roofed in straw. These were circular, with nearly a quarter of the circumference open to the elements to let the smoke of their cooking-fires out, and would have offered little shelter against a marauding band intent on capture or slaughter. Indeed there was no great wealth here, which they should have studied to protect: only a small herd of cattle and goats, browsing idly beyond the village boundaries under the attention of a few older children; respectable fields, adequate for subsistence and a little more; a few of the women and older men wore handsome trinkets of ivory and gold and brightly woven cloth. But nothing which would have tempted the rapacity of an ordinary robber, save the inhabitants themselves, for their being peaceful, healthy, and well-fleshed; and the caution sat new and uneasily upon their shoulders.

“They have had no-one stolen here, yet,” Mrs. Erasmus said. “But three children were snatched from a village a day’s flight from here. One was hiding near-by, and slipped away to give the warning; so the ancestors—the dragons—caught them.” She paused and said, oddly calm, “That is why the slave-takers killed all my family, I think; the ones too old or too young to sell. So they could not tell Kefentse where we had gone.”

She stood up and went to go stand watching the village, while the packing went forward: the smallest children at play before their grandmothers, the other women working together, pounding flour out of sorghum, and singing. Her dark, high-collared dress was dusty and torn, incongruous among their bright if immodest garments, and Kefentse lifted his head to watch her with anxious, jealous attention.

“He must have gone half-mad,” Chenery said to Laurence in an undertone, “as though his captain and all his crew were gone in an instant.” He shook his head. “This is a kettle and no mistake: he will never let her go.”

“Perhaps she may find an opportunity to slip away,” Laurence said grimly; he reproached himself bitterly that they had ever involved her and Erasmus at all.

For another day and night they did not stop again, except very briefly for water, and Laurence’s heart sank at the vast expanse of hard, dry desert which rolled away below them, a succession of red-brown sands and arid scrubland, and great white salt pans barren of all life. Their course continued north-east, bearing them still farther inland and away from the coast; their thin hopes of escape or rescue wasting away entirely.

At last they left behind the wastelands, and the desert yielded to milder scenery of green trees and yellow ground overgrown with thick grasses; late in the morning, the belly of the dragon rumbled loud above them with his roar of greeting: answered momentarily with several voices from up ahead, and they came abruptly into view of an astonishing prospect: a vast moving herd of elephants, creeping slowly across the savannah as they tore at the shrubs and low-hanging branches in their path, and enduring with perfect docility the supervision of two dragons and some thirty men, who ambled along comfortably behind, only a few lengths short of the rear of the herd.

The herdsmen carried long sticks with dangling rattles, by which means they kept the herd from turning back; a little farther along, perhaps a quarter-of-a-mile into the wreckage the herd had left behind, women worked busily, spreading great bushels of red-stained manure and planting young shrubs: they sang as they worked, rhythmically.

The prisoners were let down. Laurence almost was distracted from the water-bag for staring at the fat, sluggish creatures, larger than any he had ever heard bragged of. He had visited India twice, as a naval officer, and once seen an impressive old creature carrying a native potentate and his retinue upon its head, some six tons in weight. The most impressive here would have he guessed outweighed that one by half again, and rivaled Nitidus or Dulcia in size, with great ivory tusks jutting out like spears some three feet beyond its head. Another of the behemoths put its head down against a young tree, of no mean size, and with a groaning implacable push brought it crashing to the ground; pleased with its success, the elephant ambled lazily down its length, to devour at leisure the tender shoots from the crown.

After some little conversation with their captors, the herd-dragons went aloft and chivvied away a few of the beasts from the main body of the herd: older animals, by the length of their tusks, without young. These having been coaxed downwind and behind the line of herdsmen, Kefentse and the two other dragons fell upon them skillfully: a single piercing of talons slew the creatures, before they could make any outcry which might have distressed the rest. The dragons made their repast greedily, murmuring with satisfaction, as might a contented gentleman over his pleasing dinner; when they were done, the hyenas crept out of the grass to deal with the bloody remains, and cackled all through the night.

Throughout the next two days, they were scarcely an hour aloft without sight of some other dragons, calling greetings from afar; more villages flashed past beneath them, and occasionally some small fortification with walls of clay and rock, until in the distance they glimpsed a tremendous plume of smoke rising, like a great grass-fire, and a thin silvery line winding away over the earth.

“Mosi oa Tunya,” Mrs. Erasmus had told them, was the name of their destination, meaning smoke that thunders; and a low and continuous roaring built higher around them as Kefentse angled directly towards the plume.

The narrow shining line upon the earth resolved itself swiftly into a river of great immensity: slow and very broad, fractured into many smaller streams, all winding together past rocks and small grassy islets towards a narrow crack in the earth like an eggshell broken down the middle, where the river suddenly boiled up and plunged into the thunder of a waterfall more vast than anything Laurence might have conceived, the gorges of its descent so full of white-plumed spray that its base could not be seen.

Into these narrow gorges, which seemed barely wide enough for him to go abreast, Kefentse dived at speed, pocket rainbows gleaming in puddles collected upon his hide through the first clouds of steam. Pressed hard up against the netting, Laurence wiped water from his face and one-week’s beard, and palmed it away from the hollows of his eyes, squinting as they broke through into a widening canyon.

The lower slopes were thickly forested, a jewel-green tangle of tropical growth reaching some halfway up the walls, where abruptly the vegetation ended and the cliff faces rose sheer and smooth to the plain above, gleaming like polished marble and pockmarked only by the gaping holes of caverns. And then Laurence realized he was not looking at caverns, but at great carved archways, mouths for vaulted halls which penetrated deep within the mountain-side. The cliff walls did not gleam like polished marble; they were polished marble, or as good as: a smooth speckled stone, with quantities of ivory and gold inlaid directly into the rock in fantastical pattern.

Façades were carved and sculpted around the openings, ornamented gorgeously in vivid color and odd abstract patterns, and towering more vast than Westminster or St. Paul’s, the only and inadequate measures of comparison which Laurence possessed. Narrow stairs, their railings carved of stone and smoothed by the water-spray, climbed between the archways to give the perspective: five ordinary town-houses, laid foundation-to-roof atop one another, might have approximated the heights of the largest.

Kefentse was going at a lazy speed now, the better to avoid collision: the gorge was full of dragons. Dragons flew back and forth busily among the halls, some carrying baskets or bundles, some carrying men on their backs; dragons lay sleeping upon the carved ledges, tails drooping downward from the mouths. Upon the stairways and in the halls, men and women stood talking or at labor, dressed in animal-skins or wrapped cloth garments of dazzling-bright colors, indigo and red and yellow ochre against their dark brown skin, many with elaborate chains of gold; and softly running above the sounds of all their mingled speech came the unending voice of the water.

Chapter 11

KEFENTSE DEPOSITED THEM rudely within one of the smaller caverns dug into the face of the rock: he could not fit inside himself, but only balanced upon the lip of the cave while the netting was undone. They were shaken out onto the floor in a heap, still tied up, and he flew at once away, taking poor Mrs. Erasmus with him, and abandoning them to work themselves loose. There was no sharp edge to help them; the cavern walls were smoothed. Dyer and Roland and Tooke managed eventually to squirm their smaller hands out of their bindings, and began to help untie the others.

Thirty of them left all together, from four crews. They were not crowded, nor could their circumstances be called cruel; the floor was strewn liberally with dry straw to soften the hard rock, and despite the lingering day’s heat outside, the chamber remained cool and pleasant. A necessary-pit was carved out of the stone at the back of the chamber; it must surely have connected with a drainage channel somewhere beneath, but the opening was small, and drilled through solid rock: there was no way to get to it. There was a small pool also, in the back, refreshed continuously from a trickling channel and waist-deep on a man, large enough to swim across a few strokes: they would by no means die of thirst.

It was a strange prison, with neither guard nor bars upon the door, but as impregnable as any fortress; there were none of the carved steps leading to their cavern, and nothing but the yawning gorge beneath. The scale of the whole, the carved and gothic ceiling vaulting overhead, would have made a comfortable stall for a small dragon; it ought to have seemed an airy and spacious environment, but had the effect of making them feel rather Lilliputian than comfortable, children wandering in a giant’s house, with their numbers so painfully small and dwindled.

Dorset was alive, with a terrible bruising down along the side of his face, and he pressed his hand now and again to his side, as if his ribs or his breathing pained him. “Mr. Pratt is dead, Captain,” he said. “I am very sorry to be sure: he tried to stand before Mrs. Erasmus, and the beast carved him to the hip,” a grievous loss, the smith’s quiet capability no less than his immense strength.

There was no way to be certain of the full extent of their losses: Hobbes killed before their eyes, and Laurence had seen Chenery’s midwingman Hyatt dead; Chenery’s lieutenant Libbley remembered the surgeon Waley fallen also; but another dozen at least had been heaved out after that first night, the rest of them too sick and dazed to recognize in dim lighting, and more had been left dead upon the field; others still, they hoped, had slipped away in the general confusion, to leave at least some faint direction behind. There was no-one who had seen Warren.

“But I hope to God that Sutton will have the sense to turn back straightaway for the Cape,” Harcourt said. “No-one could ever conceive we had been brought so far; they will wear themselves to rags with fretting, and never find a trace: we must find some way to get them word, at least. Those men knew something about guns, did you notice? There must be some trade, some merchants must be tempted to come: more ivory than they know what to do with, when they build their walls out of the stuff.”

They ventured cautiously to the edge of the cavern-mouth to look out again into the gorges. The first impression of immensity and splendor was not to be undone, but the degree perhaps fell off a little here, farther from the falls and near the end of the inhabited portion of the gorges; the façade of their own prison was plain rock, although the native cliff wall had been polished to a smoothness that would have defied a monkey to climb.

Chenery bent down over the ledge and rubbed his hand over the wall, as far down as he could reach, and came up discouraged. “Not a finger-hold to be had: we are not going anywhere, until we manage to sprout wings of our own.”

“Then we had better rest, while we may,” Harcourt said, in practical tones, “and if you gentlemen will be so good as to give me your backs, I am going to bathe.”

They were roused up early not by any attentions paid to them, for there were none, but by a dreadful noise which could most easily be compared to a swarm of horse-flies in continuous agitation. The sun had not yet penetrated into the twisting canyons, though the sky above was the thorough-going blue of mid-morning, and a faint glaze of mist yet clung to the smooth rock near the cavern mouth.

Across the gorge, a pair of dragons were engaged in a peculiar exercise, flying back and forth hauling alternately upon what looked to be a thick grey hawser coiled about and passed through the end of a tremendous iron shaft, spinning it steadily. The other end of the shaft was plunged into the depths of a cavern only partially hollowed-out, and from here issued the malevolent buzzing. Dust and chalky powder blew out in great gusts, speckling the dragons’ hides so they were coated thickly ochre; occasionally one or the other would turn his head and sneeze powerfully, without ever losing the rhythm.

A great cracking noise heralded a leap forward: loose pebbles and great stones came spilling from the mouth of the hall into a large sack stretched out upon a frame to catch them. The dragons paused in their labor, and withdrew the enormous drill; one clung on to the rough, unpolished cliff, holding the mechanism suspended, while the other perched upon the ledge and scraped out the boulders and loose rock which had shattered. A third dragon, smaller, came winging down the gorge when the operation was complete; he carried away the laden sack, to let the pair resume.

While this work proceeded, almost directly above them another cavern, already sunk deep within the hillside, crawled with human masons finishing the rough work, the distant musical plink-plink of tapping hammers on the rock drifting across the divide; each man bringing his own discards to the cave-mouth as they smoothed down the walls.

They were very industrious all the morning; then mid-day arriving they quitted their work. Their tools were heaped inside the cavern, the vast drill also; and the dragons flying up collected the men, who without any harness leapt with casual fearlessness onto the dragon’s backs, wings, limbs, and clapped on to the handful of woven straps, or merely clung, and were borne away along the gorge, back to the more settled area.

Still no-one had come. They had among their pockets some biscuit, a little dried fruit, which would not have made a meal for even one man; it was pressed on Catherine, who at first disdained it scornfully, until Dorset insisted upon it as a medical matter.

The workmen did not return, but several dragons appeared in a party upon the plain on the far side of the gorge, each carrying a goodly sized bundle of wood, and laid down a large bonfire; then one among them bent its head and breathed out a flame, igniting the whole. It was not perhaps a great stream of fire; but then none was called for by the circumstances. “Oh, that is a pity,” Chenery said, rather low; understating the case.

They grew only sorrier when another pair arrived, carrying what looked to be the component parts of three or four elephants among them, butchered and neatly skewered on long iron stakes, to roast over the bonfire. The wind was in their quarter, carrying towards the caves. Laurence had to wipe his mouth with his handkerchief, twice; even the very back of the cavern offered no shelter from the torment of the delicious smell. It was very disheartening to observe the dragons cast away the scorched and cracked bones, when they had done, into the massive thicket of jungle which lined the floor of the gorge below; still more regrettable were the satisfied growls and yelping which presently rose up in reply, lions, perhaps, or wild dogs: a fresh obstacle to any escape.

Two hours more passed, or nearly, by the cracked glass which Turner had managed to salvage from the wreck of their capture; it began to grow dark. Dragons came flying to many of the plain cave-mouths near-by, carrying netting full of men, whom they let down inside the caves just as the aviators had been deposited: the dragons had a sort of trick of setting their hind legs upon the lip of each cavern, and setting their foreclaws into some ridges carved above the mouth, while their riders unhooked the netting, so they did not have to squeeze into some of these smaller caverns. It bore some resemblance to the passenger-dragons, which Laurence had seen in China, save for the perfect disregard for the comfort of the passengers in the nets.

When these deliveries had finished, a small dragon flew down the gorge towards them, with many baskets slung over its shoulders. It halted in sequence at the cave-mouths, leaving behind a few of the bundles every time, until at last it reached their own. There was a single man upon its back, who looked their number over with a critical eye, then untied some three of the baskets before taking wing again.

Each held a cold and thickened mass of sorghum-porridge cooked in milk: filling if not savory, and the portions not quite so large as desirable. “One basket for every ten men,” Harcourt said, counting cave-mouths, “so as many as fifty men, in that large one: they must have near a thousand prisoners here, spread out.”

“A regular Newgate,” Chenery said, “but less damp, for which be thanked; do you suppose they mean to sell us? A charming solution, if we could get ourselves shipped to Cape Coast and not a French port; and if they were not unpleasant about it.”

“Maybe they will eat us,” Dyer said thoughtfully, his piping voice quite clear; all the other men were engaged deeply with their dinners.

There was a general pause. “A thoroughly morbid suggestion, Mr. Dyer; let me hear no more of this sort of speculation,” Laurence said, taken aback.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Dyer said, surprised, and went directly back to his dinner, with no particular sign of dismay; some of the younger ensigns looked greenly, and it required perhaps a full minute before hunger once again overcame their temporary qualms.

The line of sunlight crept up the far wall and slid away over the edge; dusk came early into the narrow gorge. For lack of anything else to do, they slept, while the sky above was still a daylit blue, and the next morning roused from an uneasy night into darkness, with the dreadful buzzing of the drill suddenly muffled; Dyer’s breathless, “Sir, sir—” in Laurence’s ear.

Kefentse was there; he had thrust as much of his head as would fit into the opening of their cavern, blocking both light and noise from outside. Mrs. Erasmus was with him, difficult to recognize in the native dress which she had been given, and weighted down as if she were in danger of floating away: earrings, armbands like coiled snakes on upper arms and lower, a great neck-collar of gold pieces strung on wire, interspersed with pieces of ivory, dark green jade, and ruby, certainly worth fifty thousand pounds at least, and a great emerald like an egg, set in gold, pinning a turban of silk upon her head.

Most of the native women which they had seen, from their vantage point, had been carrying water, or hanging washing to dry upon the steps, and wore only a kind of leather skirt, reaching to the knees but leaving their breasts quite bare: much to the covert interest of the younger officers. Perhaps formal garments were of different style, or she had prevailed upon them to give her others; she wore instead a long skirt of plain white cotton, and over it another length of cotton cloth woven of bright colors, wrapped and folded elaborately about her shoulders.

She required the assistance of a hand on her elbow to climb down from Kefentse’s back. “They would have me wear more if it would not make it impossible for me to walk: it is the tribal property,” she said. It was evasion; her expression was uneasy, and after a moment’s pause she said, low, “I am sorry: Kefentse is here to take our leader, to go and speak with the king.”

Harcourt was pale but composed. “I am senior, ma’am; he may take me.”

“He may sooner go to the Devil,” Chenery said. “Laurence, shall we have lots for it?” Taking up a small twig from the rushes he snapped it in two and held them out with the top ends even, the lower concealed.

It was at least a good deal more comfortable to be carried in Kefentse’s talons, than in the former netting; and Laurence did not feel his appearance wholly disgraceful: the idleness and heat of the day had left them nothing but time, and thanks to the convenience of the water-pool, he had sponged his coat as best he could, and thoroughly washed his breeches and his linen. He had not shaved, but that could not be helped.

The roar of the falls increased steadily, and the tangle of jungle below, until they were brought at last to a curve of the gorge very near the falls; here a great hall stood open, three times the width of the other archways, the entryway pillared for support. Kefentse dived low and swiftly within, and coming to a stop rolled him unceremoniously out of his talons onto the damp floor, before more carefully setting Mrs. Erasmus onto her feet.

Laurence had already come to expect these indignities, and picked himself up without more than irritation, an emotion promptly vanquished in favor of concern. A makeshift workshop had been established recently, it seemed, along the right side of the chamber, and besides the rifles which the aviators themselves had lost, some sixty or seventy muskets more were laid out upon the floor on woven mats, in various states of disassembly and repair; and worse, far worse: a six-pound gun, its housing cracked but not gone, and a barrel of gunpowder besides. A small group of men were working upon the collection, taking apart a musket and pressing low harsh questions on a man sitting dejectedly on a stool before them; his back, turned to Laurence, was marked with half-a-dozen bloody weals, and flies crawled upon it.

A young man was overseeing their work with great attention; he left off, as Kefentse landed, and came over towards them: tall, with a long face infused with a certain quality of sorrow, not by emotion but only the angle of his cheekbones, like a hound; the nose sculpted and a narrow black beard around the full mouth. He had a small escort of warriors, all of them bare-chested and armed with short spears, leather-skirted; he was distinguished from the rest of them by a thick neck-collar of gold with a fringe of what looked to be the claws of some great cat, and a leopard-skin cape draped over the shoulders: physically powerful, and his eyes were shrewd.

Laurence bowed; the young man ignored him, looking to the other side of the great hall, and from a chamber within came a great creature of golden-bronze hide, the underside of her wings lined in purple like royalty. She was in battle-array formidable as a Crusader, great heavy plates of iron slung across the vulnerable expanse of her breast, with a fine mesh of chain beneath to protect the belly, and the spikes bristling down her spine were sheathed in caps of iron, as were her talons, and these were yet discolored a little with blood; Mrs. Erasmus gave him to understand that this was the king, Mokhachane, and his eldest son Moshueshue.

She—or he?—Laurence was at a loss; he was standing scarcely half-a-length away, and the king was quite certainly, quite visibly a female dragon—seated herself sphinx-like on the floor, her tail curling along her flanks, and regarded Laurence with a cold and amber eye. The young man, Moshueshue, seated himself on a wooden throne, which was brought to him and set by her side, and several older women trailing after settled themselves on wooden stools behind him: these identified as the king’s wives.

Kefentse lowered his head respectfully, and began to speak, evidently giving his account of their capture and journey, which Mrs. Erasmus with great courage dared to dispute, at several points, on their behalf; while trying to help Laurence understand the accusations which had been made. That they had stolen medicines, cultivated for the use of the king’s own subjects, was only the least offense; the foremost, that they had offered a territorial challenge, by invading in the company of their own ancestors, as Kefentse considered the dragons of the formation to be; and in league with enemy tribes had been stealing their children, for which he offered as one portion of evidence that they had been traveling with a man of the Lunda, notorious kidnappers—

Mrs. Erasmus paused and said unevenly, “—he means my husband.”

She did not continue her translation at once, but pressed a fold of her gown briefly to her face, while Kefentse bent low and anxiously over her, crooning, and snapping at Laurence with a hiss, when he would have offered his arm for her support.

“The medicine we took only for necessity, because our own dragons were ill; and without knowing the mushroom cultivated,” Laurence said, but he did not know how else to defend himself. He could not very well deny they had brought dragons; they had, and in any case, this seemed rather to stand in for making a territorial claim, which he could certainly not as a serving-officer deny. The British and the Dutch would alike have been surprised to know their colony had been thought unworthy of notice, and casually to be violated, until the arrival of the formation.

And he was in no fair way armed to justify the practice of slavery, or to deny that it was carried on at the behest of white men, if he might refute some few of the particulars which were leveled against them—“No, good God, of course we do not eat them,” he said, but beyond this could make very little more argument. The dreadful incident of the Zong, where more than a hundred slaves had been deliberately flung overboard, for the sake of insurance-money, chose the moment to come uncomfortably to his mind, with a blush for the guilt and shame of his nation; made him look a liar, if they had not already thought him so.

He could only repeat, that he was not himself a slaver, and was not surprised to find this excuse hold no water with them, nor even when Mrs. Erasmus had explained to them her husband’s perfect innocence; the objection plainly was wider than such personal acts. There was no sympathy offered, for the illness which had driven them to seek the medicine; Laurence rather received the impression that they thought it little more than just deserts, drawing as they did no particular distinction between the British and their dragons, and their temper grew rather more fixed, than less, for all Laurence’s attempts to explain.

The king turned, and, in response to a beckoning flick of her tail, Laurence was led farther back into the chamber, where stood a low table of enormous size, no higher than his knee but some twelve feet long and across. The women folded away the wooden covers, and a hollow space perhaps a foot deep was revealed, like a sort of display-case; inside lay a strange sculpture in the shape of the African continent. It was a map, an enormous map in thick relief to show elevation, gold-dust for sand and mountains of bronze, jewel-chip forests and rivers of silver; and with great dismay Laurence perceived the puff of white featherdown used to stand for the falls. It stood almost halfway between the tip of the continent, where Capetown lay, and the sharp jutting prominence of the African Horn: in his worst fears, he had not thought they had been brought so far into the interior.

They did not let him look at it long; instead they drew him to the other end, where the table had been lately extended: the wood was darker, and the sections of the map laid down only in soft painted wax. He did not at first know what to make of it, until by relative position he understood the blue oval stretch of water at the top of the continent must be the Mediterranean, and realized it was meant to figure as Europe: the outlines of Spain and Portugal and Italy misshapen and the whole continent shrunk; Britain itself nothing but a scattering of small whitish lumps in the upper corner. The Alps and the Pyrenees stood in pinched-up relief, approximately correct, but the Rhine and Volga were strangely meandering, and smaller than he was used to see them marked.

“They wish you to draw it properly,” Mrs. Erasmus said, and one of the prince’s men handed him a stylus; Laurence gave it back. The man repeated the instructions in his own tongue, exaggeratedly, as if Laurence were a slow child; and attempted to press the stylus on him once more.

“I beg your pardon; I will not,” Laurence said, shaking off his hand; the man spoke loudly and struck him abruptly across the face. Laurence pressed his lips together and said nothing, his heart pounding in a furious temper. Mrs. Erasmus had turned to speak urgently to Kefentse; the dragon was shaking his head.

“Having been taken prisoner, in what I must consider an act of war, I must refuse under these conditions to answer any questions whatsoever,” Laurence said.

Moshueshue shook his head, while the dragon-king lowered her head and fixed him with a glittering and furious eye, her head so close that he could see that what he had taken for tusks in Kefentse were a kind of jewelry: ivory rings banded with gold, set in the flesh of her upper lip like ear-rings. She snorted hot breath across his face, and bared serrated teeth; but he had too much use of being so close to Temeraire to be frightened thus, and her eyes slitted down angrily as she drew her head back.

The king said coldly, “You were taken as a thief, and a kidnapper, in our country; you will answer, or—” and Mrs. Erasmus paused and said, “Captain, you will be flogged.”

“Brutality and further ill-usage will in no wise alter my determination,” Laurence said, “and I beg your pardon, ma’am, if you are forced to witness it.”

His answer provoked her only further; Moshueshue laying a hand on the king’s foreleg spoke in low tones, but she shivered her skin impatiently, and threw him off. She spoke in a low angry continuous rumble, which Mrs. Erasmus could only manage piecemeal to convey: “You speak of ill-usage to us, kidnapper, invader—you will answer—we will hunt you all, we will break your ancestors’ eggs.”

She finished and violently cracked her tail above her back, issuing orders. Kefentse held his forehand out to Mrs. Erasmus; she threw Laurence one look of deep concern before she was carried briskly away, which he would have been glad to think unmerited, and then his arms were seized, on either side; his coat cut away down the middle of the back, also his shirt, and he was forced to his knees with the rags still hanging from his shoulders.

He fixed his gaze out through the archway, which opened upon the loveliest prospect he had ever beheld: the sun still low in the sky beyond the falls, newly risen, and glowing small and molten through the gusting clouds of mist. The torrents of water churned to pure white were roaring steadily over the verge, the tangled branches of trees yearning out towards the water, from the canyon-walls where they had taken root; the gauzy insubstantial suggestion of a rainbow, which refused to be seen head-on, but clung to the edge of his vision. His shoulders ached as they drew him taut.

He had seen men take a dozen lashes without a sound; foremast hands, under his very own orders, he reminded himself after every stroke: by the tenth, however, the argument lost its potency, and he was only trying raggedly to endure, in an animal sort of way, the pain which no longer ceased between the strokes but only ebbed and flowed. The whip struck awry once; the man holding his right arm cursed, the edge of his hand having been caught by the lash, by the sound of it, and yelled a complaint at the flogger, good-natured. The whip did not cut the skin, but the weals broke, after some time; blood ran down over his ribs.

Laurence was not precisely insensible when another dragon returned him to the cave, only very far away, his throat raw and stretched to ruin. He was grateful for it, or would have been; otherwise he would have screamed again when they put hands on him, to lift him face-downwards onto the ground, even though they did not touch his torn back: every nerve had been woken to pain. Sleep did not come, only a kind of murky absence of thought, which darkened by degrees into unconsciousness.

Water was put to his lips. With sharp authority Dorset ordered him to drink; the habit of obedience carried Laurence through the effort. He faded again, and for a long time a grey heat stifled him. He thought perhaps he drank a little more, and another time dreamt his mouth was welling up with salty blood, and choking half-woke to Dorset squeezing cold broth into his mouth from a rag, before again he slept and wandered in fever-dreams.

“Laurence, Laurence,” Temeraire said, through the haze, in a strange hollow voice, and Ferris was hissing in his ear, saying, “Captain, you must wake up, you must, he thinks you’re dead—” His voice was full of so much fear that Laurence tried to speak to comfort him, although his mouth would not quite form words properly, then the dream fell away again into a terrible roaring; he felt as though the earth shook; then all gone, into a comfortable darkness.

Chapter 12

THE NEXT HE knew of the world was a cup of clean water held for him by Emily Roland. Dorset was kneeling on the floor beside him, and bracing him up by the waist. Laurence managed to put a hand around the cup and guide it to his mouth, spilling a little; he was palsied as an old man and trembling. He was lying on his stomach on a thin pallet of gathered straw covered with shirts, bare to the chest himself; and he was desperately hungry.

“A little at a time,” Dorset said, giving him small round balls of cooled porridge, one after another. They had eased him onto his side to eat.

“Temeraire?” Laurence said, around an involuntary and desperate gluttony, wondering if he had only dreamed. He could not move his arms freely: his back had scabbed over, but if he reached too far forward the edges split, fresh blood trickling down the skin.

Dorset did not at once answer. “Was he here?” Laurence said sharply.

“Laurence,” Harcourt said, kneeling down by him, “Laurence, pray do not get distressed; you have been ill a week. He was here, but I am afraid they ran him off; I am sure he is quite well.”

“Enough; you must sleep,” Dorset said, and for all the will in the world, Laurence could not resist the command; he was already fading again.

When he woke it was daylight outside, and the cavern nearly empty, except for Roland and Dyer and Tooke. “They take the others to work, sir, in the fields,” she said. They gave him a little water, and reluctantly at his insistence the support of their shoulders, so he might stagger to the edge of the cave and look outside.

The cliff face, opposite, was cracked, and the dark stains of dragon blood looked deep burnt orange-red on the striated walls. “It is not his, sir, or not much,” Emily said anxiously, looking up at him.

She could tell him nothing more: not how Temeraire had found them, nor if he had been quite alone, nor his condition; there had been no time for conversation. With the number of dragons flying at all hours through the gorges, Temeraire had passed for a few moments as one in the throng, but he was too large and remarkably colored to escape notice, and when he had put his head into the cave to see them, he had at once raised an alarm.

Temeraire had penetrated so far only because their captors evidently did not anticipate an incursion of dragons, so deep into their stronghold; but there was a guard now, newly stationed above their cell: Laurence could see its tail, hanging down from the top of the cliff, if he painfully turned his neck, as far as he could, to look directly upwards. “And I expect that means he got clear away from them,” Chenery said comfortingly, when the others had been returned, late in the afternoon. “He can fly rings around half the Corps, Laurence; I am sure he gave them the slip.”

Laurence would have liked to believe it, more than he did; three days had gone by since that delirious state had broken, and if Temeraire had been able, Laurence knew very well he would have made another attempt in the teeth of any opposition; perhaps had, and out of their sight had been injured again, or worse.

Laurence was not taken, the next morning, with the others: they had been set along with the other prisoners of war to working in the elephant-fields, spreading the manure, much to the satisfaction of the young women to whom the work ordinarily fell. “Nonsense; I would be perfectly ashamed if I could not manage it,” Catherine said, “when all those girls do: a good many of them are further along than I am, and it is not as though I have not been brought up to work. Besides, I am perfectly stout; indeed I am much better than I was. But you have been very sick, Laurence, and you are to listen to Dr. Dorset and stay lying down, when they come.”

She was very firm, and Dorset also; but they had been gone a little more than an hour when another dragon came for Laurence: the rider issuing peremptory commands, and beckoning. Roland and Dyer were ready to back him into the depths of the cave, but the dragon was a smallish creature, not much bigger than a courier, and could easily have put himself inside. Laurence struggled to his feet, and for decency’s sake took one of the sweat-and blood-stained shirts which had helped make up his pallet to cover himself, if he was not truly fit to be seen.

He was carried back to the great hall: the king was not there, but the iron-works were in full swing under the supervision of Prince Moshueshue; the smiths were engaged in pouring bullets, with the help of another dragon, who nursed their forge regularly with narrow breathed tongues of flame, rousing the coals within to a fever-pitch of heat. They had somehow acquired several bullet-molds, and there were still more muskets stacked upon the floor, if marked here and there with bloody fingerprints. The room was sweltering, even with a couple of smaller dragons fanning away vigorously to make the air move; but the prince looked satisfied.

He took Laurence back towards the map again; it had been already a little improved, and an entirely new addition made to the west: a vague distance allowed for the Atlantic, and then the approximate shapes of the American continents drawn out: the great harbor of Rio most prominently marked, and the islands of the West Indies placed a little tentatively somewhere to the north. There was none of the exactness needed to make it of practical use for navigation, Laurence was glad to see; he was far from that earlier complacency, during their abduction, which had dismissed their captors as a threat against the colony itself: there were too many dragons here.

Mrs. Erasmus had also been brought, and Laurence braced himself for a further interrogation, to which he would not allow himself to feel unequal, but Moshueshue did not repeat the king’s demands or his violence; his servants instead gave Laurence a drink, oddly sweet, of pressed fruits and water and cocoanut milk, and his questions were of generalities and trade, wide-ranging. He had a bolt of cloth to show Laurence, calico-patterned and certainly from the mills of England; some bottles of whiskey, unpleasantly harsh and cheap by the smell, also of foreign manufacture. “You sell these things to the Lunda,” Moshueshue said, “and those also?” indicating the muskets.

“They have lately fought a war against them,” Mrs. Erasmus said, quickly adding her own explanation, at the tail of the translation: there had been a battle won, two-days’ flight from the falls. “North-west, I think,” she said, and asked Moshueshue permission to show him the territory, on the great map of the continent: north-west, and still deep inland, but in a few days’ striking-distance of the ports of Louanda and Benguela.

“Sir,” Laurence said, “I have never heard of the Lunda before two weeks ago; I believe they must have these goods from perhaps the Portuguese traders, upon the coast.”

“And do you only want captives, or will you take other things in trade? The medicines you stole, or—” and one of the women carried over at Moshueshue’s beckoning a box of jewels, absurdly magnificent, which would have made the Nizam stare: polished emeralds tumbled like marbles with diamonds, and the box itself of gold and silver. Another carried over carefully a tall curious vase, made of woven wire strung occasionally with beads, in an elaborate pattern without figures, and another an enormous mask, nearly tall as she herself was, carved of dark wood inlaid with ivory and jewels.

Laurence wondered a little if this were meant for another sort of inducement. “A trader would oblige you, sir, I am sure. I am not a merchant myself. We would be glad—would have been glad—to pay you for the medicines, in what barter you desired.”

Moshueshue nodded, and the treasure was taken away. “And the—cannon?” He used the English word, himself, with tolerable pronunciation. “Or your boats which cross the ocean?”

There were enough jewels in the box to have tolerably purchased and outfitted a fleet of merchantmen, Laurence would have guessed, but he did not think the Government would be very pleased to see such a project go forward; he answered cautiously, “These are dearer, sir, for the difficulty in their construction; and would do you very little good without the men who understand their operation. But some men might be found, willing to take service with you, and such an arrangement made possible; if there were peace between our countries.”

Laurence thought this was not further than he could in justice go, and as much attempt at diplomacy as he knew how to make; he hoped as a hint, it would not be badly received. Moshueshue’s intentions were not disguised; it was not wonderful that he, more than the king, should have taken to heart the advantages of modern weaponry, more easily grasped at musket-scale by men than by dragons, and should have cared to establish access to them.

Moshueshue put his hand on the map-table and gazed thoughtfully down upon it. At last he said, “You are not engaged in this trade, you say, but others of your tribe are. Can you tell me who they are, and where they may be found?”

“Sir, I am sorry to say, that there are too many engaged in the trade for me to know their names, or particulars,” Laurence said awkwardly, and wished bitterly that he might have been able to say with honesty it had been lately banned. Instead he could only add, that he believed it soon would be; which was received with as much satisfaction as he had expected.

“We will ban it ourselves,” the prince said, the more ominously for the lack of any deliberately threatening tone. “But that will not satisfy our ancestors.” He paused. “You are Kefentse’s captives. He wants to trade you for more of his tribe. Can you arrange such an exchange? Lethabo says you cannot.”

“I have told them that most of the others cannot be found,” Mrs. Erasmus added quietly. “—it was nearly twenty years ago.”

“Perhaps some investigation could locate the survivors,” Laurence said to her doubtfully. “There would be bills of sale, and I suppose some of them must yet be on the same estates, where they first were sold—you do not think it so?”

She said after a moment, “I was taken into the house when I was sold. Those in the fields did not live long, most of them. A few years; maybe ten. There were not many old slaves.”

Laurence did not quarrel with her finality, and he thought she did not translate her own words, either; likely to shield him from the rage which they could provoke. She said enough to convince Moshueshue of the impossibility, however, and he shook his head. “However,” Laurence said, trying, “we would be glad to ransom ourselves, if you would arrange a communication with our fellows at the Cape, and to carry an envoy with us, to England, to establish peaceful relations. I would give my own word, to do whatever could be done to restore his kin—”

“No,” Moshueshue said. “There is nothing I can do with this, not now. The ancestors are too roused up; it is not Kefentse only who has been bereft, and even those who have not lost children of their own are angry. My father’s temper was not long when he was a man, and it is shorter since his change of life. Perhaps after.” He did not say, after what, but issued orders to the attending dragons: without a chance to speak, Laurence was snatched up, and carried out at once.

The dragon did not turn back for the prison-cave, however, but turned instead for the falls, rising up out of the gorge and to the level of the plateau across which the great river flowed. Laurence clung to the basketing talons as they flew along its banks and over another of the great elephant-herds, too quickly for him to recognize if any of his compatriots were among the followers tending the ground; and to a distance at which the sound of the falls was muted, although the fine cloud of smoke yet remained visible, hovering perpetual in place to mark their location. There were no roads below at all, but at regular intervals Laurence began to notice cairns of stones, in circles of cleared ground, which might have served as signposts; and they had flown ten minutes when there came rearing up before them a vast amphitheater.

It was near to nothing, in his own experience, but the Colosseum in Rome; built entirely of blocks of stone fitted so snugly that no mortar, visibly, held them together, the outer enclosure was built in an oval shape, with no entrances but a few, at the base, formed with great overlapping slabs of stone laid one against another like the old stone circles in England. It stood in the middle of a grassy field, undisturbed, as he would have expected from some ancient unused ruin; only a few faintly worn tracks showed where men had come into the entries on foot, mostly from the river, where stakes had been driven in the ground, and a few simple boats were tied up.

But they flew in directly over the walls, and there were no signs of disuse within. The same drymortar method of construction had raised a series of terraces, topped and leveled out with more stone slabs, laid flat, and irregularly arranged; instead of even tiers, narrow stairways divided the theater into sections, each a haphazard arrangement of boxes intended for human use and filled with wooden benches and stools, some beautifully carved, and large stalls surrounding them for dragons. The higher levels simplified further, into wide-open stands with sections marked off only with rope; at the center of it all, a large grassy oval stood bare, broken up with three large stone platforms, and on the last of these, a prisoner with drooping head, was Temeraire.

Laurence was set down a few lengths away, with the usual carelessness, jarring his back sorely; at his repressed gasp, Temeraire growled, a deep and queerly stifled noise. He had been muzzled, with a piece of dreadful iron basketry, secured upon his head with many thick leather straps, which allowed his jaws a scant range of motion: not enough to roar. A thick iron collar around his throat, at the top of his neck, was leashed with three of the massive grey hawsers, which Laurence could now see were made of braided wire, rather than rope; these were fixed to iron rings set in the ground, equidistant from one another, and preventing Temeraire from throwing his weight against any one of them more than the others.

“Laurence, Laurence,” Temeraire said, straining his head towards him with all the inches the cables would yield; Laurence would have gone to him at once, but the dragon which had brought him set its foreleg down between them: he was not permitted.

“Pray do not hurt yourself, my dear; I am perfectly well,” Laurence called, forcing himself to straighten; he was anxious lest Temeraire should have done himself some mischief, flinging himself against the collar: it looked to be digging into the flesh. “You are not very uncomfortable, I hope?”

“Oh, it is nothing,” Temeraire said, panting with a distress which belied his words, “nothing, now I see you again; only I could not move very much, and no-one comes to talk to me, so I did not know anything: if you were well or hurt; and you were so strange, when I saw you last.”

He backed slowly and cautiously one pace and let himself down again, still breathing heavily, and gave his head a little shake, as much as the chains would allow, so they rang around him; like a horse in traces. “And it makes eating a little difficult,” he added bravely, “and water taste of rust, but it does not signify: are you sure you are well? You do not look well.”

“I am, and very glad to see you,” Laurence said, business-like, though in truth he was at some pains to keep his feet, “if beyond words with surprise; we were mortally certain we should never be found.”

“Sutton said we would never find you, by roaming wild about the continent,” Temeraire said, low and angry, “and that we ought to go back to Capetown. But I told him that was a very great piece of nonsense, for however unlikely we should find you looking in the interior, it was very much less likely we should find you back at the Cape. So we asked directions—”

“Directions?” Laurence said, baffled.

He had consulted with some of the local dragons, who, living farther to the south, had not been subject yet to the slave-raiding, and were not so disposed to be hostile. “At least, not once we had made them a few presents of some particularly nice cows—which, I am sorry, Laurence, we took quite without permission, from some of the settlers, so I suppose we must pay them when we have got back to Capetown,” Temeraire added, as confidently as if nothing stood in the way of their return. “It was a little difficult to make them understand what we wanted, at first, but some of them understood the Xhosa language, which I had got a little of from Demane and Sipho, and I have learnt a little of theirs as we came closer: it is not very difficult, and there are many bits which are like Durzagh.”

“But, forgive me; I do not mean to be ungrateful,” Laurence said, “—the mushrooms? What of the cure? Were there any left?”

“We had already given all those we collected to the Fiona,” Temeraire said, “and if those were not enough, then Messoria and Immortalis could do very well taking back the rest, without us,” he finished defiantly, “so Sutton had no right to complain, if we liked to go; and hang orders anyway.”

Laurence did not argue with him; he had no wish of giving any further distress, and in any case, Temeraire’s insubordination having been answered by a success so improbable, he would certainly not be inclined to listen to any criticism on the subject: the sort of break-neck reckless venture crowned inevitably, Laurence supposed, by either triumph or disaster; speed and impudence having their own virtue. “Where are Lily and Dulcia, then?”

“They are hiding, out upon the plains,” Temeraire said. “We agreed that first I should try, as I am big enough to carry you all; and then if anything should go wrong, they would still be loose.” He switched his tail with something halfway between irritation and unease. “It made very good sense at the time, but I did not quite realize, that anything would go wrong, and then I would not be able to help them plan,” he added plaintively, “and now I do not know what they mean to do; although I am sure they will think of something”—but he sounded a little dubious.

As well he might; while they had been speaking, dragons had been coming in a steady stream, carrying in large woven baskets or upon their backs men and women and even children, and settling all down within the stands: a vast company, larger than Laurence had yet suspected. The people arranged themselves in a hierarchy of wealth, those sitting on the lowest levels dressed in the most elaborate finery, panoply of furs and jewellery in a splendid vulgar display. There was a great variety among the beasts, in size and shape, and no sign of recognizable breeds, save perhaps a tendency towards similar coloring, in those who sat near-by one another, or in their pattern of markings. There was one constant, or nearly, however: the hostile looks which were bent upon Laurence and Temeraire, from all sides. Temeraire flared his ruff, as best he could with the constricting straps, and muttered, “They needn’t all stare so; and I think they are great cowards for keeping me chained.”

Soldiers were being brought in, now, by dragons more armored than ornamented, and many of them in bloodstained gear: no mark of slovenly habits but deliberate, worn proudly; many of the stains were fresh as though they had come straight from the recent battle which Mrs. Erasmus had mentioned. These took up places around the floor of the great stadium, in even ranks, while servants began to cover the large central stage with furs, lion-skins and leopard, and similarly draped a wooden throne; drums had been carried in, and Laurence was thankful when they set up a great thunder, and drew all eyes away: the king and the prince had arrived.

The soldiers beat their short-hafted spears against the shields, and the dragons roaring their own salute set up a wave of rattling noise, on and on, while the royalty seated themselves upon the central dais. When they were settled, a small dragon, wearing an odd sort of necklace of fur tails around his neck, leapt up on his haunches, beside the dais, and clearing his throat hushed the crowd with startling speed; his next deep breath was audible in the sudden silence. And then he launched himself into something between story and song: chanted, and without rhyme, to the beat of only one soft drum which kept time for him.

Temeraire tilted his head, to try and make it out; but when he looked at Laurence, and would have spoken, the dragon guarding them gave him a shocked glare even before a word had issued, which quelled him in embarrassment; until with sunset, the chant finished, and the raucous applause burst out again as torches were lit all around the dais. It had evidently been, from what Temeraire could gather, a kind of history of the deeds of the king and his ancestors, and more generally of the many assembled tribes, delivered entirely from memory, and covering some seven generations.

Laurence could not help but feel the liveliest anxiety for the purpose of the convocation; the opening ceremonies thus completed, it proceeded swiftly to angry speeches, greeted with roaring approval and again that thunder of spears against shields. “That is not true at all,” Temeraire said indignantly, during one of these, having picked out a few of the words. One highly decorated dragon, a grey-black fellow of middle-weight size, wearing a thick neck-collar of tiger furs banded with gold, had come and ranged himself opposite Temeraire, and was gesturing at him pointedly. “I would not want your crew anyway; I have my own.” He and Laurence were evidently figuring, in most of these exhortations, as material evidence, to prove the existence of the threat and of its magnitude.

Another dragon, very old, whose wing-spurs dragged upon the ground, and whose eyes were milky with cataracts, was led out into the field by a small escort of hard-faced men whose box, upon the lowest level, was left empty by their departure: they had no family with them. No-one spoke as the dragon crept to the dais, and heaved himself upon it; he raised his trembling head, his speech a thin and fragile lament which silenced all the crowd, and made the women draw to them their children, the dragons curl anxious tails around the clustered knots of their nearest tribesmen; one of the escort wept silently, with his hand over his face, his fellows giving him the courtesy of pretending they did not see.

When he had done, and returned slowly to his place, several of the soldiers began to stand forward to make their remarks: one general, a heavy barrel-chested gentleman, discarded his leopard-skin drape impatiently as he paced, with so much energy his skin gleamed in the torchlight with sweat, arguing vehemently in a voice projected to reach the highest tiers, gesturing at them at regular intervals, striking his fist into his hand, and pointing occasionally at Temeraire. His speech roused them all not only to cheering, but to agreement, grim nodding; he was warning them, that many more such dragons would come, if they did not take action now.

The night dragged on, grim and long; when the children had all fallen into exhausted sleep, some of the dragons and the women carried them away; those left kept speaking, climbing lower down in the stands as room opened, and voices grew more hoarse. Fatigue at last freed Laurence from dread; they had not been stoned yet, nor offered any other violence but words, and his back throbbed and itched and burned, sapping the energy even to be afraid. It was still not easy to stand and be pilloried, even if Laurence thankfully could escape the understanding of the better part of the accusations leveled against them; he solaced himself by keeping as straight as he could make himself, and fixing his gaze beyond the top ranks of the audience. But he was looking not to see, unfocused, so he did not immediately notice, until a vigorous waving made him realize, with a start, that Dulcia was perched on the top rank of seats, now empty.

She was small enough, and her green-and-mottled coloring sufficiently common, to pass for one of the company, whose attention was in any case fixed upon the speakers; when she saw she had Laurence’s eyes, she sat up and held up in her forehands a ragged grey sheet. Laurence had no notion what it was, at first; and then realized it was an elephant-hide, with three holes painstakingly sawed out of it, in the shape of signal-flags: tomorrow, was all the message, and when he had seen it, and nodded to her, she as quickly vanished away again into the dark.

“Oh; I hope they will come and let me loose, first,” Temeraire murmured, fretful at the prospect of a rescue in which he had no say. “There are so many dragons; I hope they will not do anything rash.”

“Oh! I do too,” Harcourt said anxiously, when Laurence had been returned to them, well-roasted and spat-upon, after the conclusion of the ceremonies; she went to the mouth of the cave at once to peer up at their sentinel. The dragon was slumped rather unhappily upon his ledge, with his head drooping down; in the distance the drums were still going, in a celebration which bid fair to continue deep into the night.

They could not prepare, save in the most general way, by drinking as much as they could hold, and washing up; but they all applied themselves to these tasks with more energy than they deserved. “Bother; it is moving again,” Harcourt said, as she squeezed out her wet hair, and she put her hand to the small of her back and rubbed. Inconveniently she had just begun to show; her breeches were now obliged to be left open, and the sides held together over her middle with a bit of bark-string left from their bindings; her shirt was loose, to cover the arrangement. “Oh, if only it is a girl! I will never, never be so careless again.”

By grace they slept well: the masons did not return to their work, perhaps given holiday, and so for once they were not woken with the dawn. No dragon came to carry any of them to the fields; although for an unpleasant balance, no dragon came to bring them any porridge, either, so they would have to make their attempt empty-stomached. There were still a good many dragons flying back and forth through the gorges, all day, but as evening fell their activity reduced, and the women went back early to their cavern-halls, singing, with the baskets full of washing balanced upon their heads.

Of course they had all expected the rescue to be made at night, rationally; but without certain knowledge, the day was full of tension and constant anxiety, and the urge to be always looking out of the cavern-mouth, in a way which could only have roused suspicion. Sunset roused them all to feverish attention; no-one spoke, all of them straining, until a little while after dark the heavy sailcloth-flapping of Lily’s enormous wings could be heard, distantly, on the quiet air.

They all waited for the sound to approach more closely, to see her head in the cavern-entrance; but it did not come. There was only a sneeze, and then another, and a third; concluded shortly with a sort of grumbling cough, and then the retreat of her wings. Laurence looked at Catherine, perplexed, but she was edging towards the cave-mouth, beckoning him and Chenery over; a faint sizzling noise, like bacon on a too-hot frying-pan, a pinched sharp vinegared stink: there were a few pockmarks bubbling on the floor near the cavern-mouth.

“Look,” Catherine said softly, “she has made us handholds,” and she pointed where thin smoky trails rose, barely visible, from the cliff face.

“Well, I dare say we can manage the climb, but what do we do when we are down?” Chenery said, with more optimism than Laurence felt. He had been made to go rock-climbing at Loch Laggan, by the training master Celeritas, some twenty years past the time most aviators began the habit, and had learned thereby to manage upon a dragon’s back without too much discredit to himself; but he remembered the experience, cramped beetle-like creeping one hand or foot at a time, without anything like pleasure, and there he had been wearing carabiners.

“If we walk along the line of the gorge, away from the falls, we are sure to get past the borders of their territory,” Catherine said. “The dragons will have to find us, from there, I suppose.”

The waiting now graduated into sheer agony: they could not begin to climb down, until the acid had eaten itself away into the rock. The salvaged quarter-glass alone kept them on any real sense of time, and the wheeling Southern Cross in the sky above. Twice Laurence looked, to be sure Turner had not missed the glass running out, only to find it nearly full; then by an exercise of will he forced himself not to watch, but rather to close his eyes, and press his hands against his sides, beneath his arms, for warmth. It was the first week of June, and the night was grown sharply and unexpectedly chill.

“Sir, that’s nine,” Turner said softly, at last, and the hissing of the acid had faded. They poked a twig into one of the pitted depressions by the entrance: a good two inches deep, and the stick came out unmarked, except for the very end, which smoked a little.

“And his tail hasn’t moved, sir,” Dyer reported in a whisper, meaning the guard-dragon, up above, after he had put his head out to peer quickly.

“Well, I think it may do,” Catherine said, when she had cautiously felt around with a rag. “Mr. Ferris, you may begin. Gentlemen: no more conversation; no calls, no whispers.”

Ferris had tied his boots together by their laces and slung them backwards around his neck, to keep them out of his way. He tucked a few twists of straw from the floor of the cavern into his waist, then put his head over the side, first, and reached down to feel cautiously around. He looked up and nodded, then swung his leg over; in a moment he vanished, and when Laurence risked a quick look over the edge, he was already only a darker blot on the surface of the wall, fifteen feet down, moving with the limber quickness of youth.

There was no waving, no calling from below; but their ears were stretched, and Turner had the glass still before him: fifteen minutes went, then twenty, and no sound of disaster. Chenery’s first, Libbley, went to the edge and let himself over, in similar array; and after him the ensigns and midwingmen began to go, quicker: two and three at a time; Lily had sprayed the wall thoroughly, and there were hand-holds broadly scattered.

Chenery went, and a little after him, Catherine with her midwingman Drew. Most of the younger aviators had already gone. “I’ll go below you, sir, and guide your feet,” Martin said very softly, his yellow hair darkened with rubbed-in dirt and water. “Let me have your boots.” Laurence nodded silently, and handed them over, and Martin tied them up with his own.

Martin’s hand on his ankle guided his foot to one of the narrow holds: a rough shallow scrape in the face of the rock, which just admitted the grip of his toes; another, to the right. Laurence eased himself over the edge, groping for hand-holds beneath the lip; he could not see the face of the cliff beneath him, his own body blocking what little glimmer the stars gave, and could only rely on the sense of touch: the stone cold, beneath his cheek, and his breathing very loud in his own ears, with the strange amplified quality of being underwater; blind, deaf, he pressed his body flat as he could against the rock.

There was a dreadful moment when Martin touched his ankle again, and waited for him to lift it from the cliff; Laurence thought he would not be able to make himself yield the support. He willed the movement; nothing happened, then he took another breath and at last his foot moved; Martin drawing him gently downward, toes brushing lightly over the rock, to another hold.

The second foot, then one hand, then the next, mindlessly. It was easier to continue, once he had gone into motion, so long as he did not again allow himself to settle into a fixed position. A slow deep bruising ache began between his shoulders, and in his thighs. The tips of his fingers burned a little, as he went; he did not wonder if it was some trace of the acidic fluids left, or tried not to; he did not trust his grip well enough to wipe them against the rag hanging uselessly from his waistband.

Bailes, Dulcia’s harness-man, was near beside him, a little way farther down; a heavy-set man, going cautiously; ground crewmen did not ordinarily go into combat, and had less practice of climbing. He gave suddenly a queer, deep grunt, and jerked his hand; Laurence looked down and saw his face pressed open-mouthed into the rock, making a horrible, low, stifled sound, his hand clawing madly at the stone: clawing, and coming to shreds, there was white bone gleaming at the fingertips, and abruptly Bailes flung out his arm and fell away, his bared teeth clenched and visible, for a brief moment.

Branches cracked, below. Martin’s hand was on his ankle, but not moving, a faint tremor. Laurence did not try to look up, only held to the rock face and breathed, softly, softly; if they were lost, there was nothing to be done: one sweep of a dragon’s foreleg would scrape them off the wall.

At last they resumed. Down again; and to the side, Laurence caught the gleam of translucent rock at the surface: a vein of quartz, perhaps, on which the venom might have pooled, unabsorbed.

Some time later, some ages later, a dragon flew by, going quickly through the night. It was well overhead: Laurence felt its passing only as wind and the sound of wings. His hands were numb with cold and raw. There were pockets of grass beneath his seeking fingers; in a few more steps a slope, scarcely less than vertical; then a tree-root beneath his heel, and they were nearly down: their feet were in dirt, and the bushes were catching at them. Martin tapped his ankle, and they turned and slithered down on their rumps, until they could stand up to put back on their boots. The water could be heard somewhere below, rushing; the jungle a tangle of palm leaves and tough-skinned vines hanging across their path. A clean, damp smell of moving water, fresh earth, and dew trembling and thick upon the leaves; their shirts were soon wet through and chill against their skin. A different world entirely than the dusty brown and ochre of the cliffs above.

They had all agreed none should wait for long, but go on ahead in small parties, hoping if they were discovered at this stage, at least some might yet escape. Winston, one of his harness-men, was waiting a little way on, squatting and rising to stretch out his legs; also young Allen, nervous and gnawing on the side of his thumb, and his fellow ensign Harley. The five of them went on together, following the course of the cliff wall: the earth was soft, and the vegetation full of juice, compliant; easier by far to work through than the dry underbrush, if the vines reached up to trip them from time to time. Allen stumbling almost continuously, his latest growth making him gangly and awkward, all long coltish limbs. They could not avoid some degree of noise; they could not cut their way through, but from time to time were forced to haul upon the vines to make enough slack to get through them, with corresponding groans of protest from the branches on which they hung.

“Oh,” Harley breathed out very softly, frozen; they looked, and eyes looked back: cat-pupiled, bright green. They regarded the leopard; it regarded them; no one moved. Then it turned its head and melted away, solitary and unconcerned.

They went on a little faster, still following the channel of the gorge, until at last the jungle thinned out and dredged up to a point where the river’s course had divided, and two channels followed separate paths: and he could see through the last stretch of jungle Lily and Temeraire waiting there anxiously, astride the narrow banks, and squabbling a little.

“But what if you had missed?” Temeraire was muttering, a little disconsolate and critical, while he stretched his neck to try and peer into the jungle. “You might have hit the cave-mouth, or some of our crew.”

Lily mantled at this suggestion, her eyes very orange. “I hope I do not need to be near-by to hit a wall,” she replied quellingly, and then leaned eagerly forward, as Harcourt came stumbling down the wet slope towards her. “Catherine, Catherine; oh, are you well? Is the egg all right?”

“Hang the egg,” Catherine said, putting her head against Lily’s muzzle. “No, there, dearest; it has only been a nuisance, but I am so very glad to see you. How clever you were!”

“Yes,” Lily said complacently, “and indeed it was much easier than I thought it would be; there was no-one about to pay any mind, except that fellow on the hill, and he was asleep.”

Temeraire nuzzled Laurence gratefully, too, all his quibbling silenced: he still wore the thick iron collar, much to his disgust, and a few clubbed lengths of cable dangling off it, blackened and brittle at the ends where Lily’s acid had weakened the metal enough for the two of them to break it. “But we cannot leave without Mrs. Erasmus,” Laurence said to him, low; but Dulcia was landing among them, and Mrs. Erasmus was clutching to the harness on her back.

They fled cautiously but quickly homeward, the rich husbanded countryside providing: Temeraire savage and quick, cutting out elephants from a herd, while the smaller herd-dragons yelled angry imprecations but did not dare give pursuit when he had roared them down; Lily doubling back sharp on herself, when a heavy-weight roused up in a village on their course and bellowed challenge, to spit with unerring precision at a branch of the great sprawling bao-bab tree beside him. Her acid sent it crashing down upon his shoulders: he jumped and thought better of giving chase; looking back he might be seen gingerly nosing the thick branch, large as an entire tree, away from the clearing.

The aviators wove grasses into makeshift cords, to tie themselves on with, and pinned their limbs under straps of harness so that whenever they paused for water, they all went down in staggering heaps, pounding on their thighs to drown out the prickling of returning blood. The desert they flew across almost without a pause, pale rock and yellow dust, the curious heads of small animals popping up from holes in the ground in hopes of rain as the dragon-shadows passed by like racing clouds. Temeraire had taken all of Dulcia’s crew but Chenery himself; and also some of Lily’s; the three of them made all the haste which could be imagined, and they broke over the mountains into the narrow coastal province of the settlements in the hour before dawn on the sixth day of flight, and saw the tongues of flame, where the cannon at the Cape were speaking.

Narrow pillars of smoke were lying back against the face of Table Mountain as they came across the bay driving into the city, drifting before a hard wind blowing into the bay, and fires all through the city: ships beating desperately out of the harbor into the wind, close-hauled as they could go. The cannon of the castle were speaking without cease, thunder-roll of broadsides from the Allegiance in the harbor also, her deck swathed deeply in grey powder-gusts spilling down her sides and rolling away on the water.

Maximus was fighting in mid-air, above the ship: his sides still gaunt, but the enemy dragons gave him still a wide and respectful berth, and fled from his charges; Messoria and Immortalis flanked him, and Nitidus was darting beneath their cover to harry the enemy in their retreat. So far they had preserved the ship, but the position was untenable; they were only trying to hold long enough to carry away those who could be saved: the harbor full of boats, crammed and wallowing boats, trying to get to her shelter.

Berkley signaled, from Maximus’s back, as they came on: holding well, retrieve company; so they flashed on past and towards the shore, where the castle lay under full siege: a vast body of spearmen, crouched beneath great shields of oxhide and iron. Many of their fellows lay dead in the fields just before the walls, cut dreadfully apart by canister shot, and musketry; other corpses floated in the moat. They had failed to carry the walls by climbing, but the survivors had withdrawn past the substantial rubble that had been made of the nearby houses by the cannon-fire, and now sheltered there from the guns, waiting with terrible patience for a breach in the walls.

Another corpse lay dreadfully stretched, upon the parade grounds: a yellow-and-brown dragon, its eyes cloudy and its body half-burst upon the ground by impact, a gaping hole torn into its side by the round-shot which had brought it down; scraps of bloody hide stood on the grass even a hundred yards distant. Some thirty dragons more were in the air, now making their passes from very high, dropping not bombs but sacks of narrow iron blades, flat and triangular and sharpened along every edge, which drove even into stone: as Temeraire dropped into the courtyard, Laurence could see them bristling from the earth as if it had been sowed with teeth; there were many dead soldiers upon the heights.

King Mokhachane was standing on the lower slopes of Table Mountain clear of cannon-shot, observing grimly, and occasionally mantling her wings in yearning when one of the men or dragons were struck; of course she was a dragon of no great age, and all instinct would have driven her to the battlefield. There were men hovering around her flanks, and others running back and forth to the company gathered before the fortress walls, with orders. Laurence could not see if the prince was by her side.

The city itself had been left untouched: the castle alone bore the attack, although the streets had nevertheless been deserted. Some large boulders lay also strewn in the corners, bloodstained, and others trailing behind them a line of smashed bricks, red under their yellow paint. The soldiers were mostly on the walls, sweating as they worked the guns, and a great crowd of settlers, men and women and children together, huddled in the shelter of the barracks waiting for the boats to return.

Mrs. Erasmus sprang almost at once from Temeraire’s back when they had landed, scarcely a hand to the harness; General Grey, hurrying to greet them, looked with astonishment as she went past him without a word.

“She has gone for her children,” Laurence said, sliding down himself. “Sir, we must bring you off, at once; the Allegiance cannot hold the harbor long.”

“But who the devil is she?” Grey said, and Laurence realized she must have been quite unrecognizable to him, still in her native dress. “And damn the bloody savages, yes; we cannot hit a one of those beasts, as high as they are keeping, even with pepper-shot; they will have the walls down soon if the place does not catch, first. This has not been built to hold against three companies of dragons. Where have they all come from?”

He was already turning, giving orders, his aides running to organize the withdrawal: an orderly, formal retreat, the men spiking their own guns before abandoning them, only a few gun-crews at a time, and hurling into the moat the barrels of powder. Mr. Fellowes had already gone, with the ground crew, for the dragons’ battle-gear: still where it had been stowed, fortunately, in the smithy. They came running with the belly-netting, and all the spare carabiner straps which they had. “The armor, sir, we can’t manage, without he come and lift it himself,” he said, panting, as they began in haste to rig Temeraire’s belly-netting again, and Lily’s; Dulcia had gone aloft again, her riflemen armed now with pepper-shot, to keep the enemy off their heads at least a little while.

“Leave it,” Laurence said; this would be no prolonged struggle, but a quick dash for safety, and back again for more of the men; they needed speed more than the protection of the armor, when the enemy had no guns.

Temeraire crouched for the first group of soldiers to climb into the netting: the men stumbling, some pale and sweating with fear, driven by their officers, and others dazed with the noise and smoke. Laurence now bitterly regretted he had not asked Fellowes, back in England, to rig up some of the Chinese silk carrying-harnesses which would now have allowed them to take many more than the normally allotted number for retreat; thirty for a heavy-weight, when by weight Temeraire could have managed two hundred or more at a run.

They crammed some fifty men in, regardless, and hoped the netting would hold for the short flight. “We will—” Laurence began, meaning to say they would return; he was cut short by a shrieked warning from Dulcia, and Temeraire sprang aloft only in time: three of the enemy, using a netting made of the metal hawsers, had brought overhead an enormous boulder roughly the size of an elephant and let fly. It smashed the delicate cup of the bell-tower with a sour, ringing clang, and came down through the short passage of the entryway, brick and mortared stone crumbling everywhere, and the portcullis moaned and sagged open to the ground.

Temeraire sped to the Allegiance, to let the men down onto the dragondeck, and as quick hastened back to the shore. The spearmen were coming in through the rubble of the narrow passageway, charging with yells into the teeth of the musket-fire Grey had mustered, flooding by and up towards the guns. In parties they were encircling the emplacements yet manned and stabbing the gun-crews to death with quick, short, jerking motions, their spearheads wet and red with blood; one after another the cannon-roars silenced, and the dragons overhead began circling like ominous crows, waiting for the last to be stifled so they might descend.

Temeraire reared up onto the roof and knocked flat a dozen of the attackers with a swipe of his foreleg, snarling. “Temeraire, the guns,” Laurence called. “Smash the guns they have taken—”

The attackers had seized now three cannon not yet spiked, and were trying to turn the first to bring it to bear on the courtyard, where they could fire at Temeraire and Lily. Temeraire simply put his forehand on the housing and thrust the cannon and the six men clinging onto it through the notched brick battlements; it plunged down and into the moat with a terrific splash, the men undaunted letting go and swimming up through the water.

Lily, landing behind them to take on more of the retreat, spat: the second cannon began to hiss and smoke, the barrel thumping to the ground as the wooden housing dissolved quicker than the metal, and went rolling free like a deadly ninepin, knocking men down and spreading the acid everywhere, so splatters hissed upon the brick and dirt.

The earth beneath them shook so violently Temeraire stumbled and dropped back to all four legs in the courtyard: another massive boulder had dropped, and smashed a section of the outer walls, at the far and undefended end of the courtyard. A fresh wave of men came surging through, quicker than Grey’s men could turn to meet them, and charged those still defending the ruined entryway of the castle. The riflemen ranged across Temeraire’s back set up a quick irregular fire into the onrushing mass; then the spearmen were in and grappling furiously with the soldiers and their bayonets, and a strange quiet descended. The guns were scarcely firing anymore, and only a scattering of occasional musket-and pistol-shot broke the soft grunting noise of panting, struggling men, the groans of the wounded and the dying.

All the yard was a great confusion; with no clear avenue of retreat or line of battle, men ran in all directions, now trying to evade, now trying to seek combat, crowded by frightened and bellowing livestock, horses and cows and sheep. These had been brought into the castle, against a siege expected to last longer, and penned in the smaller second courtyard: maddened by the noise of battle and the dragons wild overhead, they had got loose and now went careening indiscriminately through the grounds, a flock of hens crying around their feet, until they broke their legs or necks in flight, or found their way by chance outside the castle grounds.

In the crowd, Laurence caught sight to his surprise of Demane, clinging with grim desperation to the collar of the heifer he had been promised, which plunged and bellowed madly against his slight weight; she was dragging him out into the melee, while the calf tried to follow moaning. Sipho hung back in the archway which allowed communication between the two courtyards of the castle, gnawing upon his small bunched fist, his face wrenched with terror, and then with sudden decision dashed out after his brother, his hand reaching for the lead-rope which straggled out behind the cow.

A pair of soldiers were bayoneting one of the enemy to death savagely, as the cow went dragging by; one straightened and wiped blood across his mouth, panting, and shouted, “Fucking little thief, couldn’t wait till we’re cold—”

Demane saw, let go the cow and lunged; Sipho went down beneath his protective weight; the bayonet flashed down towards them. There was not even time to call out a protest: the tide of the battle drew the soldiers away in another moment, and left the two small bodies huddled on the ground, bloody. The cow stumbled away over the rubble, picking her way out of the courtyard through the open gap in the walls, the calf trotting after her.

“Mr. Martin,” Laurence said, very low. Martin nodded, and tapped Harley on the shoulder; they let themselves down the harness and dashed out across the field. They carried the boys back to be lifted into the netting; Demane limp, Sipho weeping softly against Harley’s shoulder, sticky with his brother’s blood.

A handful of the spearmen had got in among the settlers congregated in the barracks, and a terrible confused slaughter was under way: the women and children were pushed aside, the attackers sometimes bodily setting them against the walls to put them out of the way, but with no compunction went on laying the men out at their feet, while the settlers fired their muskets and rifles wildly, striking friend and foe alike. The emptied boats were coming back for more passengers, but the sailors at the oars hesitated to pull in, despite the furious swearing of the coxs’n, his profanities carrying across the water.

“Mr. Ferris,” Laurence shouted, “Mr. Riggs, clear them some space there, if you please,” and himself slid down, to take charge of the loading of the retreating soldiers in Ferris’s place. Someone handed him a pistol and a cartridge box, still sticky with the blood of the corpse from which they had come; Laurence slung it quickly over his shoulder, and tore open the paper cartridge with his teeth. He had the pistol loaded, and drew out his sword; a spearman came running at him, but he had no opportunity to shoot. Temeraire, catching sight of the threat, cried out his name and lunged to slash the man violently down, dislodging as he did so three of the wavering soldiers trying to get into his netting.

Laurence clenched his jaw, and permitted himself to be concealed behind the closed ranks of his ground crew; he handed the pistol forward to Mr. Fellowes, and instead went to speed aboard the now-desperate men, harried on all sides, into the stretching leather of the netting.

Lily, who could not take as many, had been loaded already; she lifted away and spat at the flood of men coming in through the ruined wall, filling the empty space with smoking, hideously twisted corpses. But she had to go towards the ship, and the survivors behind at once began to knock down more of the rubble from the walls to bury the remnants of acid.

“Sir,” Ferris said, panting as he came back; his hand was tucked into his belt, and a gash brilliant cerise through his shirt, running the length of his arm, “we have embarked them all, I think; the settlers, I mean, those left.”

They had cleared the courtyard, and Temeraire with more savage work had killed those manning the guns; although only a few gun-crews still labored, their irregular fire all that still kept off the dragons. The ship’s boats were dashing away over the sea, the sailors pulling on the oars with frantic back-straining haste; the barracks were awash with blood, bodies of black men and white rising and lowering together in the pink-stained froth where the waves were coming in upon the strand.

“Get the general aboard,” Laurence said, “and signal all retreat, if you please, Mr. Turner.” Turning he offered Mrs. Erasmus his hand to climb aboard; Ferris had escorted her back, and her daughters in their pinafores, dirty and marked with soot, were clinging to her skirts.

“No, Captain, thank you,” she said. He did not understand, at first, and wondered if she were injured; if she did not realize the boats had left. She shook her head. “Kefentse is coming. I told him that I would find my daughters, and wait for him here in the castle: that is why he let me go.”

He stared, bewildered. “Ma’am,” he said, “he cannot pursue us, not long, not from shore; if you fear his capturing you again—”

“No,” she said again, simply. “We are staying. Do not be afraid for us,” she added. “The men will not hurt us. It is dishonor to stain their spears with a woman’s blood, and anyway I am sure Kefentse will be here soon.”

The Allegiance was already weighing anchor, her guns roaring in fresh vigor to clear her skies to make sail. On the battlements, the last working gun-crews had abandoned their posts, and were running madly for escape: to Temeraire, to the last boats waiting.

“Laurence, we must go,” Temeraire said, very low and resonant, his head craning from side to side: his ruff was stretched to its full extent, and even on the ground he was instinctively breathing in long, deep draughts, his chest expanding. “Lily cannot hold so many of them, all alone; I must go help her.” She was all their shelter from the enemy beasts, who were cautious of her acid having seen its effects now at close range, but they would encircle her and have her down in a moment; or draw her too far aloft, so that some of their number could plunge down upon Temeraire while he remained vulnerable upon the ground.

More of the men had come pouring into the courtyard through the yielded ground; they were keeping beyond Temeraire’s reach, but spreading out along the far wall in a half-circle. Individually they could do no great harm, but by rushing together with their spears might drive Temeraire aloft; and above Laurence could see some of the dragons skillfully maneuvering around Lily and into lower positions, ready to receive him onto their claws. There was no time to persuade her; in any case Laurence did not think, looking at her face, that she would be easily persuaded. “Ma’am,” he said, “your husband—”

“My husband is dead,” she said, with finality, “and my daughters will be raised proud children of the Tswana here, not as beggars in England.”

He could not answer: she was a widow, and beholden to no one but herself; he had not the right to compel her. He looked at the children holding on to her, their faces gaunt and hollow, too exhausted by extremity even to be afraid any longer. “Sir, that’s everyone,” Ferris said at his shoulder, looking anxiously between them.

She nodded her farewell to Laurence’s silence, and then bending lifted up the little girl onto her hip; with a hand on the older girl’s shoulder, she guided them towards the shelter of the raised covered porch of the governor’s residence, oddly decorous where it rose out of the bloody wreckage of the battle scattered all around it, and picked her way over the corpses sprawled upon the curving steps.

Laurence said, “Very well,” and turning pulled himself aboard; there was no more time. Temeraire reared up onto his haunches, and roaring sprang aloft: the dragons scattered in alarm before the divine wind, the nearest crying out shrilly in pain as they fell away, and Lily and Dulcia fell in with him as together they bent away towards the Allegiance, a broad spread of sail white against the ocean, already carrying out of the harbor into the Atlantic.

In the courtyard, the dragons began to land in the ruins to pillage among the cattle running free; Mrs. Erasmus was standing straight-backed at the top of the steps, the little girl clasped in her arms, their faces turned up, and Kefentse was arrowing already across the water towards them, calling loud in a joyful voice.