Tongues of Serpents (30 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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