Temeraire added, “this after we blacked his eye for him quite thoroughly, to boot; it seems to me you might have a little confidence in us.”
They were waiting now only for high tide to finish coming in: the great tree-trunks had been with enormous effort wedged slowly and painfully between the ship and the reef; the anchor-cables were woven in and around Messoria’s harness and Immortalis’s. Maximus would take one lever, Kulingile the other, and Temeraire the middle. Iskierka would lie about on the rocks doing nothing but criticizing—Temeraire snorted—and Lily would look on, and perhaps strike the shoals with acid, as they tried to get the ship off them, if that should seem useful.
“And if he does show himself, while you are working,” Iskierka put in, yawning, “I am perfectly able to breathe flame, even if I do not mean to be exerting myself a great deal presently. He will certainly think better of attacking us, then.”
“Dear God,” Captain Blaise said, and seized Granby by the arm to object violently to any such proceeding: the sailors were really unreasonable on the subject of fire, Temeraire felt; it was not as though Iskierka had proposed setting the sails alight.
He withdrew along the line of the shoals to wait alone until the tide should rise, and simmered quietly beneath the steady cold wash of the waves. He would not go on to Nagasaki. He did not know where precisely Nagasaki was, but it was not near-by; he did not mean to abandon the search for Laurence an instant longer than the ship’s rescue required. The egg would be quite safe, once they were afloat again.
The emptiness of the coast he had flown over with Ferris lingered in the back of his mind like an unpleasant aftertaste. It had been three days and nights since Laurence had been swept away—already any visible signs upon the shore might have been lost. Laurence would have gone inland for water, perhaps; or perhaps he had even been lying under some tree for shelter, or calling up to Temeraire from a distance, unheard. Temeraire still had not the least doubt of Laurence’s survival, but that alone would be of little use if he could not find Laurence.
“Temeraire!” Dulcia landed on his back and knocked him on the shoulder with her head. “We have been calling and calling: it is time to get the ship off the rocks.”
“Oh!” Temeraire said, rousing, and found himself very cold and stiff indeed coming out of the great dark circling of his thoughts; the water was almost halfway up his hindquarters, and the short harness about his shoulders was sodden and heavy and dragging as he went into the air, a reminder of his empty back.
Messoria and Immortalis launched themselves with the cables; Dulcia and Nitidus each took another cable, for what help they could give, and Captain Blaise gave the word to throw the sea-anchor over the side beyond them, to help if it might. The tree-tops had been wedged in carefully under the hull, and their long trunks were jutting up from the ocean, froth churning up around them.
“Are you quite ready?” Temeraire asked Maximus and Kulingile.
“I still say there is something strange about this,” Demane said, from the dragondeck, gripping the railing hard; he had been reluctant to see Kulingile lent to the attempt at all. “Kulingile, you are sure you will do this? I don’t see how it can work—”
“I’ve told you!” his brother Sipho hissed at him.
Temeraire flattened his ruff: he understood a little Demane’s anxiety—there was every reason to believe the Admiralty would be delighted to push him and his brother off if Kulingile were lost: he had still not been confirmed in his rank, and Laurence had been his only patron. But it seemed to Temeraire that this was all the more reason to help him find Laurence and bring him back.
“Oh, I don’t mind trying,” Kulingile said easily, however. “If it don’t work, we will only sit on those logs for a while, and nothing much will happen.”
Temeraire drew breath to explain, yet again, why it would work, after all; then he forced himself not to argue. “If you are quite ready,” he said, and together they flung themselves down upon the levers, and as one exhaled as deeply as they could, from all their air-sacs.
Temeraire had worked it all out on paper, or rather, Sipho had worked it out to his direction, with help from a still-doubtful Ness; but paper made nothing to the experience of plunging deep into the icy cold water, feeling his body pulling at him as though an anchor. He had to scrabble desperately to keep himself upon the lever; his own weight would have dragged him instantly deep beneath the surface of the water.
“Hold on, there, you damned lummox!” Berkley was bellowing, over the railing. “Breathe in again!” Maximus was struggling beside him, and Kulingile was sinking so deep the water was nearly to his fore shoulders.
“Oh, but it is working!” Lily cried, on the far side of the ship, and then with alarm, “Look out—” as the ship came up and off the rocks with almost startling ease, and began to slide down the levers towards them.
Laurence had made one of the party which had taken the Tonnant, at the Nile, after the Longwing formation above had made its pass. He remembered the great pitted smoking holes, which had gone through the decks, and the screams of the wretched seaman who had incautiously put his bare foot upon one small spatter, not the size of a shilling. One of his mess-mates had chopped his foot off at once, there upon the deck, and so saved the fellow’s life; although the wound had mortified and killed him three days later.
He recognized, therefore, the characteristic spattering of the Longwing acid upon the tree-stumps which they showed him, and the earth surrounding them, and although the stolen trees had provoked such hostility in his captors, Laurence could not help but rejoice that at last he could begin to understand; he could make sense of the intelligence these signs offered him. There was a Longwing near-by, and it had come and taken away three prime pieces of timber.
“Taken for masts, most likely,” Laurence said, drawing a picture of a sailing ship in the wet sand to translate the word for them. Three masts on such a scale: a dragon transport for sure, which in any event should have been required to carry a Longwing and its usual formation; and that, surely, explained Laurence’s own presence. The Reliant must have been traveling in company with the larger ship, to serve her as a more agile defender: no-one could call transports easy to handle, for all the massive weight of iron they could bring to bear.
The coat—the green coat—must have come off some aviator’s back. Perhaps it had been thrown up on the shore beside him by the same storm that had wrecked the ship’s masts, and in the first early moments of cold and delirium Laurence had put it on. He wondered now if the sword, too, had come from another man’s hand; but he put that doubt aside. If it had, he could more easily restore it himself than could the Japanese—if he were permitted to go home.
And home was now a real possibility. There was a British ship here, in these very waters. She was not sunk; she was injured, but afloat, and her crew hoped to repair her. The Allegiance? Laurence wondered. Or perhaps the Dominion; although that ship was ordinarily on the run to Halifax. He still did not know what they had been doing with a transport so near Japan, but those questions were as nothing to the sheer inexpressible relief of knowing himself not, as he had begun to feel, wholly adrift, unmoored from any connection to his own life.
Laurence looked up from the sand, and addressed Matsudaira again. “Sir, I will say on behalf of my country-men that I am sure they intended no offense. They came ashore meaning only to take some necessary material for their ship’s repair, from what they must have supposed to be a stand of unused timber.”
“And where is this ship, now?” Matsudaira said.
His
