Page 22 of League of Dragons (Temeraire)
Laurence did not immediately answer, and then gently said, “There is a small camp in the valley directly behind us, with the remains of a dragon’s meal, I think.”
“But that is splendid!” Temeraire cried, and meant to call to Iskierka with the news; but the tone of Laurence’s voice held him. “Surely we are on their trail?” he added uncertainly.
“The fire is cold, my dear,” Laurence said. “The Fleur-de-Nuit would have spent her day there; she will have been on the wing since nightfall.”
They were a full night’s flying behind her, then. Temeraire’s heart sank, but then Iskierka gave a sudden roar, and even jetted a gout of flame: he jerked his head forward and saw in the distance a small dark figure against the sky, sunlight breaking over the crest of the mountains and catching its wings, and the dragon ducked its head away from the light, as if it disliked the brilliance, and dived back into shadow.
“Oh!” Temeraire cried aloud, and flung himself after Iskierka, all worry, all fear forgot; he beat desperately on even as she stretched herself out her full length, coils unraveling into a single red-and-green banner and steam hissing furiously from every spike. “How far, Laurence? How far?”
Laurence was standing in his carabiners and peering through his glass. “Not five miles distant. Surely they must have gone further in a full night’s flying.”
“It might not have been their camp,” Tharkay said.
“It ought to have been, unless they made remarkably bad time the night before last,” Laurence said, “and they had good reason to make haste.” And then sharply he said, “Temeraire, wait—Temeraire! Listen to me,” but waiting, listening, no; Temeraire could not bear to listen to anything which should make him wait. He roared out instead, a challenge that split the air, and saw the Fleur-de-Nuit—itwasa Fleur-de-Nuit, it was!—pop up again from the valley, looking their way. And wrapped against her breast—impossible to be certain, for it was thickly swaddled in netting, in layers of white padding stark against the dragon’s grey-black hide—oh! Impossible todoubt;it was the egg, the egg—
Laurence was shouting through his speaking-trumpet now, but Temeraire did not hear what he said; fury dimmed all his senses, and drove him in a surging rush forward. He and Iskierka were ranged alongside each other, their minds for once as one; he felt the churning steam of her fires jetting against his side and welcomed it even as the bitter air froze it to his scales. He was breathing in vast expanding gulps, the divine wind thrumming beneath his breast, rattling in his throat. The Fleur-de-Nuit had dived into the valley again, and as they came blazing into it they saw her cowering back against the cliff wall—too ashamed of herself to fly or fight—as well she should have been, Temeraire thought hotly, and he flung himself to the ground and roared well above her head.
She cringed down before him. “How dare you take my egg!” Iskierka hissed, landing beside him and pouncing forward; the Fleur-de-Nuit cried out as she raked her back, and the harness came loose—
“Be careful!” Temeraire leapt forward and caught at the forward edge of the netting as the whole mass of it came loose and the egg—
The egg fell out, unraveling into nothing more than a mass of cotton wadding and rags, empty. The netting hung on Temeraire’s claws. His breath caught: the egg, where was the egg? He could not think, could not understand.
“Temeraire, it is a trap!” Laurence was shouting, hoarse as though he had been shouting it a long time. “Temeraire!”
“A trap,” Temeraire repeated, numbly, as four heavy-weight dragons came down around them: all of them under full harness, loaded with men and guns, and a cloud of middle-weight beasts circled in the air aloft.
LAURENCE SURFACED IN THEpleasant manner where sleep by imperceptible degrees became wakefulness, and the world only slowly intruded upon his consciousness. In the final stages of the process he at last opened his eyes, sunlight illuminating the woolen bedcurtains of deep blue, snugly drawn against draughts. A vast and cheerful noise was rising outside, roughly what might have been expected of a herd of elephants engaged in a melee. He rose and went to the window of his chamber—a window barred with iron, but set in a spacious and comfortable room elevated by the presence of a truly handsome wooden desk he would not have disdained to own himself, and a chamberpot of porcelain painted in flowers.
A species of chaos was under way in the large courtyard: dragons in harness descending, their crews spilling off their backs, and one and all making their way to tables. Even the dragons ate out of large clay bowls they carried for themselves, taken from heaped stacks at one side of the grounds to be filled in the cooking-pits at the other: Laurence could see the clouds of steam rising. The men were doing likewise, on a smaller scale, and the companies then gathered together again to devour their meal. The operation was not a novel one to Laurence, but it was the first time he had seen it executed in so expert a fashion by any Western army; he might again have been with the Chinese legions, save that there was a greater and motley variety to the dragons.
Laurence did not think he saw a single breed to recognize, but the characteristics of many scattered and shared out among many beasts. To his surprise, the light-weight Pou-de-Ciel was perhaps the best represented, mixed it seemed with larger and more notable sorts; one beast, with the conformation and size of the smaller breed almost exactly, had the brilliant yellow-striped black coloration of the Flamme-de-Gloire, a cross he would never have expected. Many others bore in varied patterns the long feathery scales of the Incan breeds.
He had been standing by the window for perhaps a quarter of an hour, watching, when the bell rang half-past noon and all quitted the field, the dragons and the men alike carrying their bowls to an enormous washing-trough, with large bundles of stiff straw tied above to serve as scrubbing-brushes, so they could scrape clean their dishes before depositing them back onto the stacks.
Then they lifted away, and exposed the large and sun-drenched field beyond them. Now Laurence could see the cooking-pits in their neat rows, still emitting a steady cloud of warm steam—which wafted tenderly, moistly, over the just-exposed shells of what seemed a thousand dragon eggs and more.
Laurence stood staring in appalled horror for some half an hour, trying to make an accurate count. It was not an easy task: the eggs were all half-buried in heaps of sand and surrounded by small fires, which a busy crowd of workmen tended out of wheelbarrows laden with wood, moving constantly up and down the rows. He was interrupted finally by a chambermaid knocking tentatively with his coat, cleaned and pressed, along with fresh linen; she asked him timidly if he would come to dinner. He washed and dressed; he would have liked to shave, but they had not left him his razor. The maid led him downstairs—trailed by two guards—into a small room, also barred and well-guarded, where Laurence found a disheartened Granby before him, attempting to make pantomime conversation with a handful of glum, grey Prussian officers.
“Well, Laurence, we are in the soup properly,” Granby said, when they had sat down to table. “He is going to drown us in dragons if we give him another year. How he means to feed them all is a large question, but I dare say he has worked out some cleverness forthat,too.”
Their own dinner was brought out then, and Tharkay still had not come. Laurence turned and spoke to one of the guards: “Our companion, is he ill?Il est malade?”
The young man—very young, his mustache still a weak and struggling thing—stared at him so blankly that Laurence wondered too late if Tharkay might have contrived to pass himself off as a servant, or a ground crewman, and if he were in danger of undermining the ruse. Then the youth said suddenly, “Oh, you mean the spy? They are sending him to Paris to be shot.”
—
“I hope they do not mean to try to putmein a cave, for I will not have it,” Iskierka said loudly, with a snort of flame for the benefit of the two large dragons presently guarding them, who eyed her nervously. The training grounds stood at the foot of a steep cliff wall pockmarked with wide cave-mouths, and many dragons were peering out of them interestedly at the prisoners. Temeraire for his part had lived in a cave before, and in any case had no heart to defend his prerogatives against any kind of insult at the moment. He felt his spirits would have been ideally matched to a tenancy in a dismal swamp, or perhaps upon some comfortless lichen-covered rock.
But they were not taken to a cave. A small dragon, something between a Pou-de-Ciel and a Pascal’s Blue, landed before them and announced in an incongruously deep voice, “Follow me, if you please,” in French; he brought them over the wide martial fields to a spacious building, constructed of stone, with a small but elegant fountain in front. Plainly it had drawn upon the dragon pavilions of China for inspiration, but in style Temeraire had not seen anything like it: the roof was raised up on tall smooth round pillars, and there was something very pleasingly mathematical about the proportions of the rectangular floor, made of white marble and marvelously warmed through from beneath. Iskierka immediately sprawled herself to her full length upon it with a sigh. “Well, I call that something like,” but Temeraire sat on his haunches and curled his tail about himself, resentful of this reminder of the perversity of the world.
“I wonder that you can make yourself comfortable under these circumstances,” he said bitterly. It seemed to him almost heartless.
“I do not see that the circumstances are so very bad,” Iskierka said maddeningly. “I was quite tired and hungry, andyoucould not even keep up with me, flying. Now we will have a rest, and eat something, and then we will find out where the egg and Granby are, and we will go and take them back.”
“You are being unutterably stupid,” Temeraire said. “They will not keep them in the same place. If we should try and get Granby and Laurence, the French will order us to put them back or else they will hurt the egg; if we should try and get the egg, they will order us to leave it or else they will hurt our captains. We are prisoners twice over, and there is nothing we can do about it. I dare say Lien is congratulating herself all this time,” and he added, low, “on how well her plans have come about.”
“I thinkyouare the one being stupid,” Iskierka said, mantling in some heat. “It is quite the other way round. If they should hurt Granby, even a little, or the egg, even a little, I will certainly burn up all of them, and they must know it. They will not dare harm them, I am sure: you see how respectful they are being.”
