Tongues of Serpents (31 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Anyone!” Demane said impatiently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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