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.