the question came very quick. Laurence paused. He had just been thinking he might ask for a map of the coastline, or for a local fisherman to question. A transport had a draught near fifty feet: she could not anchor in shallow waters, and would not risk coming very near the coast. Some haphazard anchorage sheltered from the worst of the ocean by shoals was the most likely; near in straight line flight from this bay. He thought he might be able to guess a likely place, and even direct a boat thence, given some sense of the nearby waters.
He looked at the great serpentine creature looming overhead: the gleam of intelligence in its eye was plain, despite its monstrous size, and it was following their conversation with a keen, cold interest. It had come up from the bay with no warning—evidently it could breathe underwater. Laurence could easily imagine what such a sea-dragon could do to a ship, even one the size of a transport. Come up from below, throw her on her beam-ends, heave a loop of its body over the stern and drag her down—he could envision no easy defense. Perhaps the Longwing might be able to strike the beast, but in time to save the ship?
Its eye was fixed upon him, badly bloodshot. Was that merely some accident, or something else? Laurence glanced around the clearing. The ground was trampled into mud, as though after heavy rains; and when he looked he saw more damage to the trees around, smaller saplings crushed, branches fallen. There had been more than a mere dispute here—there had been fighting.
Laurence rose slowly to his feet. “I cannot hazard a guess,” he said grimly, and watched Matsudaira’s expression harden.
Temeraire was very cold. He did not know anything else, at first, and then his head was out in the air, and Iskierka was hissing at him ferociously, her talons sharp and clawing into his shoulders, saying, “Quick, quick, breathe in!”
The water held him like a vise, dragging. Temeraire tried to breathe and could not: his chest clenched and he vomited instead, gouts of water erupting painfully, dribbling away down his neck in long streams. Then at last Temeraire could draw in a thin, struggling stream of air. Lily was swimming beside him, trying to get her head under his foreleg. He clung to her, and scrabbled with his other foreleg at the great side of the ship, rising up before him; he managed to catch at a porthole, but the ship listed towards him alarmingly, and cries of warning came down.
“Oh! Why will you not listen to me?” Iskierka was saying impatiently. “You must get more air in, I cannot lift you if you will be so heavy!” She lowered her head and butted him.
“But I am trying,” Temeraire said, only he could not speak for coughing; every breath was a battle. His sides were filling a little more, but the blood was running down his shoulders and he felt so very heavy. His head was ringing in a very peculiar way, and everything seemed colored with a faint greenish light.
Kulingile came up in the water beside him, bulling in under Temeraire’s foreleg, so Temeraire could lean upon him and get out of the water a little more, though Kulingile grunted with the effort. “Get under his hindquarters, if you can,” Berkley was calling down.
“Come on, Temeraire, scramble up, there’s a good chap,” Maximus said. Temeraire did not quite see his way clear to doing as much. He coughed again, and let his head sink against Kulingile’s back; he was sliding back into the water, but he could not mind that so much. It did not feel so cold anymore, after all—
“Temeraire!” Roland said, leaning over the side, “if you drown, we shall all sail away and leave Laurence behind! You know no-one else thinks he is alive. You must get up, or else Hammond will make us all go.”
Temeraire struggled his head up to protest: he was not going to drown, at all; he could swim excellently well. And as for leaving Laurence behind—
“You will, too, drown, and then we shall leave him, see if we don’t!” Iskierka said, and bit him sharply. “Get out of the water. What else do you suppose you are doing?”
He tried to hiss at her, but he had to get another breath in to do it, and when he had that one, he got another. By slow measures, she and the others managed to help him heave up onto the line of the shoals, though the rocks crumbled as he clawed at them, and the waves tried to drag him back down. He crouched huddled on the rocks at last and breathed again in slow delicious sips of sea-air, splendid even though his throat ached badly, getting them in. His wings rattled against his back with cold.
“Well done, my dear one; let him have a rest,” he heard Granby saying, faintly, to Iskierka. “We’ll get him aboard as soon as he has filled his air out again.” The Potentate was moving: Temeraire could see it out of one eye, a few sails rigged out on the mizzen, maneuvering away from the rocks. She was listing a little to one side, but not badly. He closed his eyes.
“Idiocy,” he heard Gaiters saying, some indeterminate time after. The sun was beating on his back, now, but it did not seem to warm him. “Emptying your air—what made the lot of you take such a notion into your heads? I should have liked to come back to England with three heavy-weights having drowned themselves not fifty miles from shore; I suppose they would have hanged me and every other surgeon of the party for incompetence. Well, make yourselves of use, now: get him onto the deck at once. We must pack his sides with hot rocks, and fire up the galleys below. D’you think because he’s a dragon he can’t die of pleurisy?”
“I don’t see why you fellows must always be complaining about something new,” Maximus said. “We did get the ship back into the water, didn’t we? And of course Temeraire will not die of a trifling little cold. But you ain’t comfortable where you are,” he added in Temeraire’s ear, “so do let us get you aboard.” His big blunt head came nosing at Temeraire’s shoulder.
Temeraire would have preferred not to move very much, at present; his whole body seemed to ache from tail-tip to nose, and his side and his right foreleg felt especially tender and bruised. He did not quite recall what had happened: the ship had come sliding, and he had not been able to get out of the way—diving was quite impossible, and the rocks were too far away to grab a hold of, for he had been on the lever amidships. But nothing after that, except the water, and the cold, and the green glaze that still seemed to hang faintly over all the world.
“Come on, then,” Iskierka said crossly, above. “I do not see why you must be making such a fuss at a time like this.” She nipped at his hindquarters.
“I am not making a fuss,” Temeraire wanted to say, but his throat ached so. He let them prod him up onto his haunches, and then Maximus and Kulingile put their shoulders beneath his forelegs.
“Just hop aloft, when you are ready,” Maximus said, “and we will go with you, to take some of the weight off: we will see you over to the deck in a trice, see if we do not.”
Temeraire did not feel ready, but Iskierka would keep complaining at him, and nipping, and making cutting remarks; and finally he gathered himself and jumped as best he could. “Oh!” he cried, “Oh,” for he had not been ready, in the least; the pain flaring along his side was like being burnt with a hot poker, to sear a wound after cleaning, but it ran the whole length of his body. His wings snapped tight, and if Kulingile and Maximus had not been beneath him, he should have fallen into the ocean again.
“Ouhff,” Kulingile said with a grunt, and wobbled beneath him as they flew. “No, I am all right,” he said; Temeraire heard it only distantly: everything had gone greenish and hazy again, and he felt very queer and ill indeed. He clung on blindly only, until they sank all three of them to the deck together and Maximus and Kulingile eased him gently down.
The planks were warm beneath him; the ship rocked with the familiar ocean swell. Temeraire put his head slowly beneath his wing, and shut his eyes, and knew no more.
