backing away towards Laurence. “What is it asking?” Laurence asked him, low, but the dragon overheard.
“Ah! So you can speak!” the dragon said triumphantly, in Chinese. “Are you,” it leaned towards him with almost a longing air, “a Dutchman?”
“No, sir,” Laurence said. “I am an Englishman.”
“An Englishman?” The dragon rolled the sound around slowly, tongue flicking out to touch the air. It was only the size of a Yellow Reaper, perhaps, with a wide ruff and long dangling tendrils that hung down about its mouth: something of its appearance seemed strangely familiar, though Laurence had certainly never seen a beast anything like. “I have never heard any English poetry,” the dragon announced, after some consideration. “You must tell me some! Come, let us go up to the temple and have something to eat and drink.”
He uncurled himself and rose onto four feet, shaking himself out almost as might have a wet dog. He was long and as narrow in the chest as at the base of his tail, with feet widely spaced; his wings were short and peculiarly stubby, folded against his back. He ambled with a swaying stride through the gate itself, stopping briefly to knock his head against one of the posts three times, and went onwards up the rising slope beyond, where now Laurence saw the underbrush was lower, and trampled in places.
He glanced at Junichiro—he was not sure if they ought to take the chance and try to flee. But Junichiro was trailing wide-eyed after the dragon, and the promise of food was a powerful one. The beast at least did not seem to be immediately hostile.
The trail led a winding way through increasingly difficult undergrowth, where at last the dragon paused and looked back and said, “Why, you are falling quite behind. Up you get,” and reached out a taloned hand to deposit them each in turn upon his back. Junichiro made a small sound almost of protest, and Laurence would have liked to question him—what was the beast, and why did it seem to have no fear of the same law which bound all others against a foreigner—but he could not find it politic to do so when aboard the very beast’s back.
They continued on to a final steeper slope, where at the summit at last a small temple made of wood was found—a tall structure, enough that the dragon could comfortably walk inside, though not very large in plan; and in two great silver bowls at the center stood a pool of clear liquid, smelling very strongly of plums and spirits; and in the other a great heap of rice and meat, still steaming.
“Take cups! Help yourselves!” the dragon said, sprawling himself across the floor—or herself, Laurence belatedly corrected, when some portions of anatomy were thereby more exposed to view; he had been mistaken by a series of low finned spines which curved out from the dragon’s body along its length. “We will drink to the good fortune of this meeting, and then you will recite some poetry for me. You do know some poetry?” the dragon asked, anxiously.
“Ma’am,” Laurence said doubtfully, wondering where the attendants were, who had prepared this repast, and how he might hope to make a further escape, “I can give you a little Shakespeare, if that will suit you, but I do not know how it will do in Chinese.”
“No, no,” the dragon said, coiling back with an air of relief. “I do not want it in Chinese. I already know Li Bai and Wang Wei, and many more besides. I want English poetry.”
“But—you cannot speak the tongue?” Laurence asked.
“You will translate it for me afterwards,” she said, and nudged across to him with one talon a small empty cup, perhaps a little larger than a thimble, and another for Junichiro.
The excuses a rather shamefaced Granby provided Temeraire for their decampment were threadbare indeed. His health, the lurking unknown danger of the sea-dragon, the uncertainty of their position, the ship’s need of further repair, the safety of the egg—
At the thought of the egg, he could not forbear putting his head over the side carefully and peering in, with a single eye, at the porthole which looked into the egg’s chamber. This was below the galleys, carefully kept warm, and the egg itself was not visible for being swaddled in a great many velvet and silken dressings, and then hay, and then packed into a crate. But they had shown it to him, when he had first awoken: a splendid smooth pale-cream shell speckled with a very attractive pattern of red and violet spots, and one notable larger marking shaped roughly like a number eight.
“You must see it, surely.” Temeraire had pointed it out to Lily, though she had looked at it doubtfully.
“It looks more like a cloud to me,” she said, which was absurd; any shape might be a cloud. Temeraire pressed his other friends for their opinion, and finally Kulingile and Dulcia were brought to agree, when he had drawn them the shape of an eight, that it was not unlike; with this he was satisfied to consider his opinion confirmed, and nothing more propitious could be imagined.
Sipho had knocked him up quite a respectable watercolor on a large piece of discarded sailcloth, which was now draped over the crate and might be looked at in lieu of unpacking the egg again—a risk Temeraire quite agreed could not be taken under ordinary circumstances, although he was of course determined Laurence should see the egg as soon as he was found.
“And that,” he said stormily, “will be as soon as I can fly back and manage it: I am very sorry indeed, Granby, to have found you so false as to allow the ship to leave Laurence behind; what he must be thinking of me, at present! You may be sure I will not be silent on the subject, when I have seen him again; he will know of this treachery.”
“Oh! That is quite enough,” Iskierka said, cracking an eye. “For Granby did not wish to go, at all. He said you would be very upset, and it could do you no good, but Captain Blaise would not stay and the ship is his; and Hammond egged him on, naturally.”
“Pray be quiet, wretched creature, you are not making matters any better,” Granby said, reproving, and called up, “Temeraire, old fellow, listen to me: you mustn’t be so angry. You were very ill, and still are; you couldn’t have gone searching for Laurence any road. And Hammond is at this very moment speaking to the local authorities of the port to have them bring us any news of Laurence, I promise you. He must have made a figure of himself, you know—he is a tall fellow, and they haven’t yellow hair here; he will stand out a mile. Someone is sure to have taken him up, if—if he has come to shore.”
“If Hammond should come back with any news of Laurence at all, it will be a good deal more than I look for,” Temeraire said, his resentment unabated, and all the greater for his indeed feeling very ill—very wretched. He did not like the thought of a long flight at present, and disliked still more feeling himself in so weak a condition. “And I will go back, if I must fly overland to get there,” he added, in defiance of that consciousness.
Wen Shen, the physician, who had been hired to assist in his care, shrugged equably from the deck. “You will drop dead somewhere over the middle of the country, then,” he said, and ate an enormous heaping spoon of the rice porridge, flavored with tunny from Kulingile’s spare catch, which he had commanded to be worked up supposedly for Temeraire’s benefit.
Temeraire did not think much of him, despite his physician’s knot. He had insisted on Temeraire’s drinking a great vat of some bitter and foul-tasting infusion, and on his flying a full circuit around the ship, though he did not feel at all like flying and his wing-joints ached fiercely afterwards. Wen Shen had also made a great many disparaging remarks on Temeraire’s diet and general habits, some of them quite untrue: he did not eat an entire roast cow every day. Even if he had liked to, which he did not, they did not have enough cattle aboard for that.
Gong Su had dug up this physician,
