very presence imply a certain lack of urgency? I dare say it has taken three months for the letter to come this far. A few months more, then, can hardly make a difference; otherwise the Corps would have sent someone nearer.’
‘If anyone nearer could be sent,’ Laurence said, grimly. England was hard-up enough for dragons that even one or two could not easily be spared in any sort of a crisis, certainly not for a month going and coming back, and certainly not a heavy-weight in Temeraire’s class. Bonaparte might once again be threatening invasion across the Channel, or launching attacks against the Mediterranean Fleet, leaving only Temeraire, and the handful of dragons stationed in Bombay and Madras, at any sort of liberty.
‘No,’ Laurence concluded, having contemplated these unpleasant possibilities, ‘I do not think we can make any such assumption, and in any case there are not two ways to read without the loss of a moment, not when Temeraire is certainly able to go. I know what I would think of a captain with such orders who lingered in port when tide and wind were with him.’
Seeing him thus beginning to lean towards a decision, Staunton at once began, ‘Captain, I beg you will not seriously consider taking so great a risk,’ while Riley, more blunt with nine years’ acquaintance behind him, said, ‘For God’s sake, Laurence, you cannot mean to do any such crazy thing.’
He added, ‘And I do not call it lingering in port, to wait for the Allegiance to be ready; if you like, taking the overland route should rather be like setting off headlong into a gale, when a week in port will bring clear skies.’
‘You make it sound as though we might as well slit our own throats as go,’ Granby exclaimed. ‘I don’t deny it would be awkward and dangerous with a caravan, lugging goods all across Creation, but with Temeraire, no one will give us any trouble, and we only need a place to drop for the night.’
‘And enough food for a dragon the size of a first-rate,’ Riley fired back.
Staunton, nodding, seized on this avenue at once. ‘I think you cannot understand the extreme desolation of the regions you would cross, nor their vastness.’ He hunted through his books and papers to find Laurence several maps of the region: an inhospitable place even on parchment, with only a few lonely small towns breaking up the stretches of nameless wasteland, great expanses of desert entrenched behind mountains, and on one dusty and crumbling chart a spidery old-fashioned hand had written heere ys no water 3 wekes in the empty yellow bowl of the desert. ‘Forgive me for speaking so strongly, but it is a reckless course, and I am convinced not one which the Admiralty can have meant you to follow.’
‘And I am convinced Lenton should never have conceived of our whistling six months down the wind,’ Granby said. ‘People do come and go overland; what about that fellow Marco Polo, and that nearly two centuries ago?’
‘Yes, and what about the Fitch and Newbery expedition, after him,’ Riley said. ‘Three dragons all lost in the mountains, in a five-day blizzard, through just such reckless behaviour—’
‘This man Tharkay, who brought the letter,’ Laurence said to Staunton, interrupting an exchange which bade fair to end in hot words, Riley’s tone growing rather sharp and Granby’s pale skin flushing up with tell-tale colour. ‘He came overland, did he not?’
‘I hope you do not mean to take him for your model,’ Staunton said. ‘One man can go where a group cannot, and manage on very little, particularly a rough adventurer such as he. More to the point, he risks only himself when he goes: you must consider that in your charge is an inexpressibly valuable dragon, whose loss must be of greater importance than even this mission.’
‘Oh, pray let us be gone at once,’ said the inexpressibly valuable dragon, when Laurence had carried the question, still unresolved, back to him. ‘It sounds very exciting to me.’ Temeraire was wide awake now in the relative cool of the evening, and his tail was twitching back and forth with enthusiasm, producing moderate walls of sand to either side upon the beach, not much above the height of a man. ‘What kind of dragons will the eggs be? Will they breathe fire?’
‘Lord, if they would only give us a Kazilik,’ Granby said. ‘But I expect it will be ordinary middle-weights: these kinds of bargains are made to bring a little fresh blood into the lines.’
‘How much more quickly would we be at home?’ Temeraire asked, cocking his head sideways so he could focus one eye upon the maps, which Laurence had laid out over the sand. ‘Why, only see how far out of our way the sailing takes us, Laurence, and it is not as though I must have wind always, as the ship does: we will be home again before the end of summer,’ an estimate as optimistic as it was unlikely, Temeraire not being able to judge the scale of the map so very well; but at least they would likely be in England again by late September, and that was an incentive almost powerful enough to overrule all caution.
‘And yet I cannot get past it,’ Laurence said. ‘We were assigned to the Allegiance, and Lenton must have assumed we would come home by her. To go haring off along the old silk roads has an impetuous flavour; and you need not try and tell me,’ he added repressively to Temeraire, ‘that there is nothing to worry about.’
‘But it cannot be so very dangerous,’ Temeraire said, undaunted. ‘It is not as though I were going to let you go off all alone, and get hurt.’
‘That you should face down an army to protect us I have no doubt,’ Laurence said, ‘but a gale in the mountains even you cannot defeat.’ Riley’s reminder of the ill-fated expedition lost in the Karakorum Pass had resonated unpleasantly. Laurence could envision all too clearly the consequences should they run into a deadly storm: Temeraire borne down by the frozen wind, wet snow and ice forming crusts upon the edges of his wings, beyond where any man of the crew could reach to break them loose; the whirling snow blinding them to the hazards of the cliff walls around them and turning them in circles; the dropping chill rendering him by insensible degrees heavier and more sluggish, and worse prey to the ice, with no shelter to be found. In such circumstances, Laurence would be forced to choose between ordering him to land, condemning him to a quicker death in hopes of sparing the lives of his men, or letting them all continue on the slow grinding road to destruction together: a horror beside which Laurence could contemplate death in battle with perfect equanimity.
‘So then the sooner we go the better, for having an easy crossing of it,’ Granby argued. ‘August will be better than October for avoiding blizzards.’
‘And for being roasted alive in the desert instead,’ Riley said.
Granby rounded on him. ‘I don’t mean to say,’ he said, with a smoldering look in his eye that belied his words, ‘that there is anything old-womanish in all these objections—’
‘For there is not, indeed,’ Laurence broke in sharply. ‘You are quite right, Tom; the danger is not a question of blizzards in particular, but that we have not the first understanding of the difficulties particular to the journey. And that we must remedy, first, before we engage either to go or to wait.’
‘If you offer the fellow money to guide you, of course he will say the road is safe,’ Riley said. ‘And then just as likely leave you halfway to nowhere, with no recourse.’
Staunton also tried again to dissuade Laurence, when he came seeking Tharkay’s direction the next morning. ‘He occasionally brings us letters, and sometimes will do errands for the Company in India,’ Staunton said. ‘His father was a gentleman, I believe a senior officer, and took some pains with his education; but still the man cannot be called reliable, for all the polish of his manners. His mother was a native woman, Thibetan or Nepalese, or something like; and he has spent the better
