Tongues of Serpents (26 page)

“Oh!” Temeraire said, coughing, “I should like to know why he has deserved to be fed, ever, in that case; and I certainly would not like any of his catch: they look very skinny and tasteless to me. If I wished a kangaroo of
that
sort, I am sure I might have taken two myself.”

“I would not mind one like that,” Kulingile said indistinctly, swallowing.

“What are you feeding him?” Laurence said, looking over.

“Snake,” Demane said, despairingly, “and also two rats, but I could not find any more.”

Temeraire gathered himself and leapt aloft once again, going after the small herd of kangaroos which were yet fleeing, and this time he did not try to snatch one or another as they hopped: instead he flung himself down among them and returned with eight: more than their appetite could require, and the herd likely smashed beyond recovery by so brutal a culling; he was plainly embarrassed by the clumsiness of the maneuver, and looked away when Caesar sniffed.

“Pray eat as much as you can now,” Laurence said, “and when we have reached water, Gong Su can stew the rest for us to carry: it will save us similar pains should we have enough to feed him tomorrow.”

Kulingile dispatched an entire kangaroo alone, by no means the smallest of the catch; Temeraire could scarcely manage as much, despite all his exertions, before the pain of his throat once again overcame his appetite. They loaded the remaining carcasses, cleaned a little, into a sack to hang below the belly-netting.

“Only,” Temeraire said, a little low, “it is quite unaccountable why I should be so tired when we have not been flying very long; it feels as though I cannot properly get my breath, and if I should try and breathe deeply, it aches.” He stretched his wings, and rolled them through their range of movement, a few times, and refused Laurence’s suggestion they should rest a little longer. “No; we have already lost too much time,” he said, “pray let everyone come back aboard.”

Temeraire flew now with the sun climbing over his shoulder and his neck, so that he felt uncomfortably warm upon the one half, and lopsided; a grinding flight which seemed very long. “I suppose it is not mid-day yet,” he said eventually—he did not ask for himself, really; only Laurence had urged a break from the heat of the day, for all their sakes. But it was only eleven.

He put his head down and flew doggedly onward, thinking of nothing but the next wingbeat, until Laurence said, “I think we will stop a little while here, my dear, if you will agree,” and Temeraire
raised his head to see the shining blue-white stretch of water, rolling out before them and stretching northward, covering all the ground.

The lake’s shore was peculiarly crusted, seen from aloft: blue and shallow water, and very white sand, which when they had landed proved instead to be salt: a thin crust over the earth, and the lake full of fish; too small to be worth catching for dragons, Temeraire noted with regret, but the men made a hearty meal of them, and it was pleasant to dip into the deepest part, some distance away, and come out wet.

There were not very many trees or shrubs, although fresh grasses grew in abundance; but despite the lack of shade, Temeraire found it a great refreshment to sit upon the half-green shore and look away from the red sand and rock everywhere; and there were no bushes to hide lurking bunyips. It only lacked, to make the respite complete, Tharkay’s returning in a little while with a tiny scrap of blue silk he had uncovered, half-buried, near some rocks a distance down the shore.

“It has been here some time,” Tharkay said, spreading out the ragged strip to show them: one corner exposed to the sun had gone quite white, where the rest which had been buried was yet a dark blue when it had been brushed free of sand. “There is no reason to expect their latest visit was recent, but we are on some track which they have used.”

“And which should lead us back to their home,” Temeraire said, jubilantly, “and there we may wait for them to come out of the desert with the egg, or perhaps if there is someone there, they will tell us which way to go to find them.”

So he might rest easy in his conscience: he flew out for another swim and drank deeply, gratefully, from the cool water; he did not mind at all that it had a faint little taste of salt, and it was pleasant running down his throat.

He was sorry to leave again; the lake seemed a true oasis at last, the first they had found in so very long. When they had built the cairn of stones, for Iskierka to follow back, and Laurence had tucked a note for Granby beneath it, Temeraire looked over the gleaming expanse with a little sigh.

But Caesar said, half under his breath, “We might stay a little longer,” so Temeraire might even feel virtuous in saying sternly, “No; the egg is still somewhere ahead, and we must keep going,” and he flung himself aloft over the silver water with a leap.

They made good time, after the rest, and Temeraire thought that his breathing was not quite so embarrassingly noisy as before; certainly he could get his breath a little easier, and if he did cough a little, it was nothing so unpleasant as before, he told himself, and managed not to be overcome.

Tharkay counseled against crossing the lake directly: instead they skirted its limits, ragged and imperfect, with long spurs of land protruding deep into the lake, miles wide, which they crossed, landing briefly to scrape together a few more cairns. Long hours and not a sight of the smugglers, or their trail; at least there was game, and Temeraire took more than one kangaroo from the air, neatly, to his satisfaction.

They landed for the night at another stand of trees and shrubs around a watering-hole of fresher water, a little distance onward from the lake, although the ground was still pale with salt. Temeraire put down the kangaroos to be cleaned properly: Gong Su meant to salt down a great quantity of the meat, to sustain them through the desert. The men began to rake together a heap of the salt under his direction; meanwhile Temeraire set upon the vegetation with a will, happy to clear away the bunyips’ concealment.

He had an additional cause to be satisfied with this labor, too, for many little rodents fled from the wreckage, and also some birds, and Kulingile sat by as he worked and snatched them up as they tried to dash.

“You see,” Temeraire said to Caesar, quite pleased, “he can hunt, even if he cannot fly; so there is no call for you to always be sneering.”

“I don’t call it hunting,” Caesar returned, tugging up a shrub beside him, “when we are running them out towards him, and he is only sitting there picking them up. Why, you might as well call it hunting to take a drink of water from a hole that is right before you.”

Temeraire snorted, dismissively; water did not try to run away, so it was not at all like. “Perhaps you might care to try flying, again,” he suggested to Kulingile, as he threw down another heap of bushes.

Kulingile shook out his wings and drew a deep breath and reared up on his hindquarters; he flapped a little; his sides quivered, jelly-like, and then he tipped back down panting thinly and said, “Maybe I will manage it tomorrow.”

Temeraire sighed.

Demane was plainly glad for the respite, also; he had gone out hunting at mid-day again, to take advantage of the bounty of game at
the lake, and as soon as they had disembarked to the security of the rocks, he collapsed almost enervated in what shade they offered. Temeraire thought he might say a private word to Kulingile: he was not taking very good care of Demane, and one might be hungry and still think of these things.

Temeraire, and Caesar, had cleared away the brush and once again filled in all the wretched tunnels—there were so very many of them; Temeraire did not see why they should be necessary. If the bunyips were as quick as Laurence said, it seemed to him they did not need to be hiding underground and leaping out on some unsuspecting person, only to eat; they might hunt respectably. There was something unnatural and unpleasant in it, he felt—and when they had cleared all away, and made safe the camp, the rest of the men shifted over: but Demane lay where he was, asleep.

“If he does not want anything to eat, he can stay there,” Sipho said, rather coldly. “I am surprised he has not gone out hunting again; won’t Kulingile be hungry?”

“You are saying it wrong,” Temeraire said, “it is Kulingile, and you know better, so there is no excuse.”

“I don’t see why it should matter to anyone,” Sipho said, and stared down at his book mulishly.

But Roland pushed herself up, after she had drunk and rested a little, and trudged over to Demane with her canteen. He struggled up and hanging limply over his crossed legs drank and drank, and then drooping followed her to the camp and fell asleep once more, as far as he could be from the little fire which the aviators had put up, for comfort and cooking. Kulingile crept over to him and nosed at his shoulder anxiously until Demane blindly reached out and patted him; then slumped back.

Kulingile sighed, reassured; then looked up at Temeraire and said, in his thin voice, “May I have another kangaroo?”

“After all those rats you ate, anyone would think you had put away enough,” Caesar said, but as Caesar had taken two kangaroos earlier and not shared a bite, Temeraire was quite out of temper with him, and it pleased him to say, in what he felt was a particularly gracious way, “Certainly you may;
I
do not believe in being stingy,” and Kulingile fell with so much gratitude upon the meal that it gave Temeraire a glow of lordly satisfaction.

“If he is going to smother himself with his own weight,” Caesar
said, “it seems to me you can’t call it friendly to help him do it quicker,” but this was only spiteful meanness, Temeraire felt; although Kulingile would eat too quickly, and then stop and gasp to catch his breath, and then begin again; and when he was done and had collapsed in slumber beside Demane, his breathing
was
a little worse.

“Another ten feet,” Dorset remarked, winding up his knotted cord again as he stood from Kulingile’s side. “The rate of growth is exceptional. I will have to make a note of it for the breeding journal, and perhaps for the Royal Society.”

“But when will he be able to fly?” Temeraire asked, and Dorset had no satisfactory answer to give.

But this was only a small and vanishing shadow on his general complacency of spirit: his throat did not hurt quite so much, and Gong Su was now making another pot of soup, which Temeraire expected to enjoy a great deal in the morning—flavored this time with the small yellow fruits of one of the bushes which Temeraire had torn up; Tharkay had pointed it out as having been harvested a little by the aborigines, he thought, and an experimental taste had not caused any discomfort: a little sweetness, and a strong flavor rather like tomatoes, although they looked more nearly like raisins.

“Will you try and eat a little now, before you sleep?” Laurence said. “We can cut some kangaroo small, if that would ease the passage; you cannot heal quickly or well when you are straining to your limits, and not eating.”

“I think I can,” Temeraire said, feeling optimistic, and if he only managed perhaps one kangaroo, and none of the bones, those went directly into the soup and so would not be wasted, and he did not feel quite such vivid pangs when he at last settled upon the sand.

To cap his evening, Laurence read to him a little; when their patience for going over the by-now-familiar material had faded, he put the book down, and Temeraire said, “I have been thinking, Laurence, of the valley: perhaps we might take some of this red stone out of the desert with us, as we return, and use it in building a pavilion: would it not make an interesting pattern, with the yellow stone there?”

“I cannot quarrel with your taste,” Laurence said, looking at the red earth, “although the labor in bringing back so much stone must be great. But we will have the time, I imagine.”

He was silent a little while: night had come on fully now, clear, and with the moon out and shining, cool and pleasant after the sun’s heat.
The desert beneath was endless shadows of clumped grass and the thin scrubby trees, dunes rising and falling away into the distance, and the water a silvered reflection gleaming out at them from the ground. Temeraire thought perhaps Laurence had fallen asleep, but then he said, softly, “I had not quite felt the vastness of this country, until we had come into it all this way, nor its strangeness.”

“Laurence,” Temeraire ventured, holding his breath for the answer, “are you very sad to not return to England?”

“I must be anxious for the sake of our country,” Laurence said, “and our friends left behind; it is difficult to know them in dire straits, and feel we might be of more use elsewhere, and yet remain helpless to assist. But in a personal sense, I have left very little behind, my dear. I have long been used to rely upon correspondence to sustain the intimacy of friendships: it is a necessity for a sailor.”

He paused, then, and said low, “You must be more constrained than I am, by our remaining; I have not forgotten Tharkay’s proposal, only—” He stopped.

“Well, I must say that privateering seems quite splendid, to me,” Temeraire said, unable to conceal a touch of wistfulness, “but I do see, Laurence, that you do not quite like to think of it; and I should not at all wish to do it if you did not feel perfectly satisfied, also; only I thought perhaps you might miss the war.”

“The war? No,” Laurence said. “To be of use, yes; but there is no sense in thinking of it. I am very sorry, my dear, but I hold out no hope for a pardon.”

“But I am sure we need not be useless here,” Temeraire said. “We have found our valley, after all.”

“It would be something, indeed,” Laurence said, “to build for once, instead of tear away; yes.”

So Temeraire might lay his head down with some degree of relief, and the pleasant occupation, before he slept, of working out in his head a design for a pavilion of adequate magnificence to console Laurence for any remaining regrets, patterned in stone of red and gold.

He woke gradually, very cool and comfortable, except for a little smacking of sand at the corner of his jaw; he raised his head and spat it out, and startled: he was overbalancing, and his hindquarters went tipping away underneath him as though he were on the deck of a ship
plunging unexpectedly down into a trough. “What has happened to the ground?” he said, and tried to stand, and could not: there was nothing solid for his feet to grasp, and his limbs dragged very strangely if he moved them—everything seemed very low—“Laurence?” he said: the moon had set, and the sun was not yet risen, and he could not make out much of anything but the small glow of the fire’s embers, down within the camp, and the rearing outcrop of rock some distance away.