NAOMI NOVIK

Temeraire: Black Powder War

Dedication

for my mother

in small return for many bajki cudowne

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Part I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Part II

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part III

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Even looking into the gardens at night, Laurence could not imagine himself home; too many bright lanterns looking out from the trees, red and gold under the upturned roof-corners; the sound of laughter behind him like a foreign country. The musician had only one string to his instrument, and he called from it a wavering, fragile song, a thread woven through the conversation which itself had become nothing more than music: Laurence had acquired very little of the language, and the words soon lost their meaning for him when so many voices joined in. He could only smile at whomever addressed him and hide his incomprehension behind the cup of tea of palest green, and at the first chance he stole quietly away around the corner of the terrace. Out of sight, he put his cup down on the window-sill half-drunk; it tasted to him like perfumed water, and he thought longingly of strong black tea full of milk, or better yet of coffee; he had not tasted coffee in two months.

The moon-viewing pavilion was set on a small promontory of rock jutting from the mountain-side, high enough to give an odd betwixt-and-between view of the vast imperial gardens laid out beneath: neither as near the ground as an ordinary balcony nor so high above as Temeraire’s back, where trees changed into matchsticks and the great pavilions into children’s toys. He stepped out from under the eaves and went to the railing: there was a pleasant coolness to the air after the rain, and Laurence did not mind the damp, the mist on his face welcome and more familiar than all the rest of his surroundings, from years at sea. The wind had obligingly cleared away the last of the lingering storm-bank; now steam curled languidly upon the old, soft, rounded stones of the pathways, slick and grey and bright under a moon nearly three-quarters full, and the breeze was full of the smell of over-ripe apricots, which had fallen from the trees to smash upon the cobbles.

Another light was flickering among the stooped ancient trees, a thin white gleam passing behind the branches, now obscured, now seen, moving steadily towards the shore of the nearby ornamental lake, and with it the sound of muffled footfalls. Laurence could not see very much at first, but shortly a queer little procession came out into the open: a scant handful of servants bowed down under the weight of a plain wooden bier and the shrouded body lying atop; and behind them trotted a couple of young boys, carrying shovels and throwing anxious looks over their shoulders.

Laurence stared, wondering; and then the tree-tops all gave a great shudder and yielded to Lien, pushing through into the wide clearing behind the servants, her broad-ruffed head bowed down low and her wings pinned tight to her sides. The slim trees bowed out of her way or broke, leaving long strands of willow-leaves draped across her shoulders. These were her only adornment: all her elaborate rubies and gold had been stripped away, and she looked pale and queerly vulnerable with no jewels to relieve the white translucence of her colour-leached skin; in the darkness, her scarlet eyes looked black and hollow.

The servants set down their burden to dig a hole at the base of one old majestic willow-tree, blowing out great sighs here and again as they flung the soft dirt up, and leaving black streaks upon their pale broad faces as they laboured and sweated. Lien paced slowly around the circumference of the clearing, bending to tear up some small saplings that had taken root at the edges, throwing the straight young trees into a heap. There were no other mourners present, save one man in dark blue robes trailing after Lien; there was a suggestion of familiarity about him, his walk, but Laurence could not see his face. The man took up a post at the side of the grave, watching silently as the servants dug; there were no flowers, nor the sort of long funerary procession Laurence had before witnessed in the streets of Peking: family tearing at their clothes, shaven-headed monks carrying censers and spreading clouds of incense. This curious night-time affair might almost have been the scene of a pauper’s burial, save for the gold-roofed imperial pavilions half-hidden among the trees, and Lien standing over the proceedings like a milk-white ghost, vast and terrible.

The servants did not unwrap the body before setting it in the ground; but then it had been more than a week since Yongxing’s death. This seemed a strange arrangement for the burial of an imperial prince, even one who had conspired at murder and meant to usurp his brother’s throne; Laurence wondered if his burial had earlier been forbidden, or perhaps was even now clandestine. The small shrouded body slipped out of view, a soft thump following; Lien keened once, almost inaudibly, the sound creeping unpleasantly along the back of Laurence’s neck and vanishing in the rustling of the trees. He felt abruptly an intruder, though likely they could not see him amid the general blaze of the lanterns behind him; and to go away again now would cause the greater disturbance.

The servants had already begun to fill in the grave, scraping the heaped earth back into the hole in broad sweeps, work that went quickly; soon the ground was patted level once again under their shovels, nothing to mark the grave-site but the raw denuded patch of ground and the low-hanging willow tree, its long trailing branches sheltering the grave. The two boys went back into the trees to gather armfuls of forest-cover, old rotted leaves and needles, which they spread all over the surface until the grave could not be told from the undisturbed ground, vanishing entirely from view. This labour accomplished, they stood uncertainly back: without an officiate to give the affair some decent ceremony, there was nothing to guide them. Lien gave them no sign; she had huddled low to the ground, drawn in upon herself. At last the men shouldered their spades and drifted away into the trees, leaving the white dragon as wide a berth as they could manage.

The man in blue robes stepped to the graveside and made the sign of the cross over his chest: turning away his face came full into the moonlight, and abruptly Laurence knew him: De Guignes, the French ambassador, and almost the most unlikely mourner imaginable. Yongxing’s violent antipathy towards the influence of the West had known no favourites, nor made distinctions between French, British, and Portuguese, and De Guignes would never have been admitted to the prince’s confidence in life, nor his company tolerated by Lien. But there were the long aristocratic features, wholly French; his presence was at once unmistakable and unaccountable. De Guignes lingered yet a moment in the clearing and spoke to Lien: inaudible at the distance, but a question by his manner. She gave him no answer, made no sound at all, crouched low with her gaze fixed only upon the hidden grave, as if she would imprint the place upon her memory. After a moment he bowed himself away gracefully and left her.

She stayed unmoving by the grave, striped by scudding clouds and the lengthening shadows of the trees. Laurence could not regret the prince’s death, yet pity stirred; he did not suppose anyone else would have her as companion now. He stood watching her for a long time, leaning against the rail, until the moon travelled at last too low and she was hidden from view. A fresh burst of laughter and applause came around the terrace corner: the music had wound to a close.

I

Chapter One

The hot wind blowing into Macau was sluggish and unrefreshing, only stirring up the rotting salt smell of the harbour, the fish corpses and great knots of black-red seaweed, the effluvia of human and dragon wastes. Even so the sailors were sitting crowded along the rails of the Allegiance for a breath of the moving air, leaning against one another to get a little room. A little scuffling broke out among them from time to time, a dull exchange of shoving back and forth, but these quarrels died almost at once in the punishing heat.

Temeraire lay disconsolately upon the dragondeck, gazing towards the white haze of the open ocean, the aviators on duty lying half-asleep in his great shadow. Laurence himself had sacrificed dignity so far as to take off his coat, as he was sitting in the crook of Temeraire’s foreleg and so concealed from view.

‘I am sure I could pull the ship out of the harbour,’ Temeraire said, not for the first time in the past week; and sighed when this amiable plan was again refused: in a calm he might indeed have been able to tow even the enormous dragon transport, but against a direct headwind he could only exhaust himself to no purpose.

‘Even in a calm you could scarcely pull her any great distance,’ Laurence added consolingly. ‘A few miles may be of some use out in the open ocean, but at present we may as well stay in harbour, and be a little more comfortable; we would make very little speed even if we could get her out.’

‘It seems a great pity to me that we must always be waiting on the wind, when everything else is ready and we are also,’ Temeraire said. ‘I would so like to be home soon: there is so very much to be done.’ His tail thumped hollowly upon the boards, for emphasis.

‘I beg you will not raise your hopes too high,’ Laurence said, himself a little hopelessly: urging Temeraire to restraint had so far not produced any effect, and he did not expect a different event now. ‘You must be prepared to endure some delays; at home as much as here.’

‘Oh! I promise I will be patient,’ Temeraire said, and immediately dispelled any small notion Laurence might have had of relying upon this promise by adding, unconscious of any contradiction, ‘but I am quite sure the Admiralty will see the justice of our case very quickly. Certainly it is only fair that dragons should be paid, if our crews are.’

Having been at sea from the age of twelve onwards, before the accident of chance which had made him the captain of a dragon rather than a ship, Laurence enjoyed an extensive familiarity with the gentlemen of the Admiralty Board who oversaw the Navy and the Aerial Corps both, and a keen sense of justice was hardly their salient feature. The offices seemed rather to strip their occupants of all ordinary human decency and real qualities: creeping, nip-farthing political creatures, very nearly to a man. The very superior conditions for dragons here in China had forced open Laurence’s unwilling eyes to the evils of their treatment in the West, but as for the Admiralty’s sharing that view, at least so far as it would cost the country tuppence, he was not sanguine.

In any case, he could not help privately entertaining the hope that once at home, back at their post on the Channel and engaged in the honest business of defending their country, Temeraire might, if not give over his goals, then at least moderate them. Laurence could make no real quarrel with the aims, which were natural and just; but England was at war, after all, and he was conscious, as Temeraire was not, of the impudence in demanding concessions from their own Government under such circumstances: very like mutiny. Yet he had promised his support and would not withdraw it. Temeraire might have stayed here in China, enjoying all the luxuries and freedoms which were his birthright, as a Celestial. He was coming back to England largely for Laurence’s sake, and in hopes of improving the lot of his comrades-in-arms; despite all Laurence’s misgivings, he could hardly raise a direct objection, though it at times felt almost dishonest not to speak.

‘It is very clever of you to suggest we should begin with pay,’ Temeraire continued, heaping more coals of fire onto Laurence’s conscience; he had proposed it mainly for its being less radical a suggestion than many of the others which Temeraire had advanced, such as the wholesale demolition of quarters of London to make room for thoroughfares wide enough to accommodate dragons, and the sending of draconic representatives to address Parliament, which aside from the difficulty of their getting into the building would certainly have resulted in the immediate flight of all the human members. ‘Once we have pay, I am sure everything else will be easier. Then we can always offer people money, which they like so much, for all the rest; like those cooks which you have hired for me. That is a very pleasant smell,’ he added, not a non sequitur: the rich smoky smell of well-charred meat was growing so strong as to rise over the stench of the harbour.

Laurence frowned and looked down: the galley was situated directly below the dragondeck, and wispy ribbons of smoke, flat and wide, were seeping up from between the boards of the deck. ‘Dyer,’ he said, beckoning to one of his runners, ‘go and see what they are about, down there.’

Temeraire had acquired a taste for the Chinese style of dragon cookery which the British quartermaster, expected only to provide freshly butchered cattle, was quite unable to satisfy, so Laurence had found two Chinese cooks willing to leave their country for the promise of substantial wages. The new cooks spoke no English, but they lacked nothing in self-assertion; already professional jealousy had nearly brought the ship’s cook and his assistants to pitched battle with them over the galley stoves, and produced a certain atmosphere of competition.

Dyer trotted down the stairs to the quarterdeck and opened the door to the galley: a great rolling cloud of smoke came billowing out, and at once there was a shout and halloa of ‘Fire!’ from the lookouts up in the rigging. The watch-officer rang the bell frantically, the clapper scraping and clanging; Laurence was already shouting, ‘To stations!’ and sending his men to their fire crews.

All lethargy vanished at once, the sailors running for buckets, pails; a couple of daring fellows darted into the galley and came out dragging limp bodies: the cook’s mates, the two Chinese, and one of the ship’s boys, but no sign of the ship’s cook himself. Already the dripping buckets were coming in a steady flow, the bosun roaring and thumping his stick against the foremast to give the men the rhythm, and one after another the buckets were emptied through the galley doors. But still the smoke came billowing out, thicker now, through every crack and seam of the deck, and the bitts of the dragon-deck were scorching hot to the touch: the rope coiled over two of the iron posts was beginning to smoke.

Young Digby, quick-thinking, had organized the other ensigns: the boys were hurrying together to unwind the cable, swallowing hisses of pain when their fingers brushed against the hot iron. The rest of the aviators were ranged along the rail, hauling up water in buckets flung over the side and dousing the dragondeck: steam rose in white clouds and left a grey crust of salt upon the already warping planks, the deck creaking and moaning like a crowd of old men. The tar between the seams was liquefying, running in long black streaks along the deck with a sweet, acrid smell as it scorched and smoked. Temeraire was standing on all four legs now, mincing from one place to another for relief from the heat, though Laurence had seen him lie with pleasure on stones baked by the full strength of the midday sun.

Captain Riley was in and among the sweating, labouring men, shouting encouragement as the buckets swung back and forth, but there was an edge of despair in his voice. The fire was too hot, the wood seasoned by the long stay in harbour under the baking heat; and the vast holds were filled with goods for the journey home: delicate china wrapped in dry straw and packed in wooden crates, bales of silks, new-laid sailcloth for repairs. The fire had only to make its way four decks down, and the stores would go up in quick hot flames running all the way back to the powder magazine, and carry her all away.

The morning watch, who had been sleeping below, were now fighting to come up from the lower decks, open-mouthed and gasping with the smoke chasing them out, breaking the lines of water-carriers in their panic: though the Allegiance was a behemoth, her forecastle and quarterdeck could not hold her entire crew, not with the dragondeck nearly in flames. Laurence seized one of the stays and pulled himself up on the railing of the deck, looking for his crew among the milling crowd: most had already been out upon the dragondeck, but a handful remained unaccounted for: Therrows, his leg still in splints after the battle in Peking; Keynes, the surgeon, likely at his books in the privacy of his cabin; and he could see no sign of Emily Roland, his other runner: she was scarcely turned eleven, and could not easily have pushed her way out past the heaving, struggling men.

A thin, shrill kettle-whistle erupted from the galley chimneys, the metal cowls beginning to droop towards the deck, slowly, like flowers gone to seed. Temeraire hissed back in instinctive displeasure, drawing his head back up to all the full length of his neck, his ruff flattening against his neck. His great haunches had already tensed to spring, one foreleg resting on the railing. ‘Laurence, is it quite safe for you there?’ he called anxiously.

‘Yes, we will be perfectly well, go aloft at once,’ Laurence said, even as he waved the rest of his men down to the forecastle, concerned for Temeraire’s safety with the planking beginning to give way. ‘We may better be able to come at the fire once it has come up through the deck,’ he added, principally for the encouragement of those hearing him; in truth, once the dragondeck fell in, he could hardly imagine they would be able to put out the blaze.

‘Very well, then I will go and help,’ Temeraire said, and took to the air.

A handful of men less concerned with preserving the ship than their own lives had already lowered the jolly-boat into the water off the stern, hoping to make their escape unheeded by the officers engaged in the desperate struggle against the fire; they dived off in panic as Temeraire unexpectedly darted around the ship and descended upon them. He paid no attention to the men, but seized the boat in his talons, ducked it underwater like a ladle, and heaved it up into the air, dripping water and oars. Carefully keeping it balanced, he flew back and poured it out over the dragondeck: the sudden deluge went hissing and spitting over the planks, and tumbled in a brief waterfall over the stairs and down.

‘Fetch axes!’ Laurence called urgently. It was desperately hot, sweating work, hacking at the planks with steam rising and their axe blades skidding on the wet and tar-soaked wood, smoke pouring out through every cut they made. All struggled to keep their footing each time Temeraire deluged them once again; but the constant flow of water was the only thing that let them keep at their task, the smoke otherwise too thick. As they laboured, a few of the men staggered and fell unmoving upon the deck: no time even to heave them down to the quarterdeck, the minutes too precious to sacrifice. Laurence worked side by side with his armourer, Pratt, long thin trails of black-stained sweat marking their shirts as they swung the axes in uneven turns, until abruptly the planking cracked with gunshot sounds, a great section of the dragondeck all giving way at once and collapsing into the eager hungry roar of the flames below.

For a moment Laurence wavered on the verge, then his first lieutenant, Granby, was pulling him away. They staggered back together, Laurence half-blind and nearly falling into Granby’s arms; his breath would not quite come, rapid and shallow, and his eyes were burning. Granby dragged him partway down the steps, and then another torrent of water carried them in a rush the rest of the way, to fetch up against one of the forty-two-pounder carronades on the forecastle. Laurence managed to pull himself up the railing in time to vomit over the side, the bitter taste in his mouth still less strong than the acrid stink of his hair and clothes.

The rest of the men were abandoning the dragondeck, and now the enormous torrents of water could go straight down at the flames. Temeraire had found a steady rhythm, and the clouds of smoke were already less: black sooty water was running out of the galley doors onto the quarterdeck. Laurence felt queerly shaken and ill, heaving deep breaths that did not seem to fill his lungs. Riley was rasping out hoarse orders through the speaking trumpet, barely loud enough to be heard over the hiss of smoke; the bosun’s voice was gone entirely: he was pushing the men into rows with his bare hands, pointing them at the hatchways; soon there was a line organized, handing up the men who had been overcome or trampled below: Laurence was glad to see Therrows being lifted out. Temeraire poured another torrent upon the last smouldering embers; then Riley’s coxswain Basson poked his head out of the main hatch, panting, and shouted, ‘No more smoke coming through, sir, and the planks above the berth-deck ain’t worse than warm: I think she’s out.’

A heartfelt ragged cheer went up. Laurence was beginning to feel he could get his wind back again, though he still spat black with every coughing breath; with Granby’s hand he was able to climb to his feet. A haze of smoke like the aftermath of cannon-fire lay thickly upon the deck, and when he climbed up the stairs he found a gaping charcoal fire-pit in place of the dragondeck, the edges of the remaining planking crisped like burnt paper. The body of the poor ship’s cook lay like a twisted cinder among the wreckage, skull charred black and his wooden legs burnt to ash, leaving only the sad stumps to the knee.

Having let down the jolly-boat, Temeraire hovered above uncertainly a little longer and then let himself drop into the water beside the ship: there was nowhere left for him to land upon her. Swimming over and grasping at the rail with his claws, he craned up his great head to peer anxiously over the side. ‘You are well, Laurence? Are all my crew all right?’

‘Yes; I have made everyone,’ Granby said, nodding to Laurence. Emily, her cap of sandy hair speckled grey with soot, came to them dragging a jug of water from the scuttlebutt: stale and tainted with the smell of the harbour, and more delicious than wine.

Riley climbed up to join them. ‘What a ruin,’ he said, looking over the wreckage. ‘Well, at least we have saved her, and thank Heaven for that; but how long it will take before we can sail now, I do not like to think.’ He gladly accepted the jug from Laurence and drank deep before handing it on to Granby. ‘And I am damned sorry; I suppose all your things must be spoiled,’ he added, wiping his mouth: senior aviators had their quarters towards the bow, one level below the galley.

‘Good God,’ Laurence said, blankly, ‘and I have not the least notion what has happened to my coat.’

‘Four; four days,’ the tailor said in his limited English, holding up fingers to be sure he had not been misunderstood; Laurence sighed and said, ‘Yes, very well.’ It was small consolation to think that there was no shortage of time: two months or more would be required to repair the ship, and until then he and all his men would be cooling his heels on shore. ‘Can you repair the other?’

They looked together down at the coat which Laurence had brought him as a pattern: more black than bottle-green now, with a peculiar white residue upon the buttons and smelling strongly of smoke and salt water both. The tailor did not say no outright, but his expression spoke volumes. ‘You take this,’ he said instead, and going into the back of his workshop brought out another garment: not a coat, precisely, but one of the quilted jackets such as the Chinese soldiers wore, like a tunic opening down the front, with a short upturned collar.

‘Oh, well—’ Laurence eyed it uneasily; it was made of silk, in a considerably brighter shade of green, and handsomely embroidered along the seams with scarlet and gold: the most he could say was that it was not as ornate as the formal robes to which he had been subjected on prior occasions.

But he and Granby were to dine with the commissioners of the East India Company that evening; he could not present himself half-dressed, or keep himself swathed in the heavy cloak which he had put on to come to the shop. He was glad enough to have the Chinese garment when, returning to his new quarters on shore, Dyer and Roland told him there was no proper coat to be had in town for any money whatsoever: not very surprising, as respectable gentlemen did not choose to look like aviators, and the dark green of their broadcloth was not a popular colour in the Western enclave.

‘Perhaps you will set a new fashion,’ Granby said, somewhere between mirth and consolation; a lanky fellow, he was himself wearing a coat seized from one of the hapless midwingmen, who having been quartered on the lower decks had not suffered the ruin of their own clothes. With an inch of wrist showing past his coat sleeves and his pale cheeks as usual flushed with sunburn, he looked at the moment rather younger than his twenty years and six, but at least no one would look askance. Laurence, being a good deal more broad-shouldered, could not rob any of the younger officers in the same manner, and though Riley had handsomely offered, Laurence did not mean to present himself in a blue coat, as if he were ashamed of being an aviator and wished to pass himself off as still a naval captain.

He and his crew were now quartered in a spacious house set directly upon the waterfront, the property of a local Dutch merchant more than happy to let it to them and remove his household to apartments farther into the town, where he would not have a dragon on his doorstep. Temeraire had been forced by the destruction of his dragondeck to sleep on the beach, much to the dismay of the Western inhabitants; to his own disgust as well, the shore being inhabited by small and irritating crabs which persisted in treating him like the rocks in which they made their homes and attempting to conceal themselves upon him while he slept.

Laurence and Granby paused to bid him farewell on their way to the dinner. Temeraire, at least, approved Laurence’s new costume; he thought the shade a pretty one, and admired the gold buttons and thread particularly. ‘And it looks handsome with the sword,’ he added, having nosed Laurence around in a circle the better to inspect him: the sword in question was his very own gift, and therefore in his estimation the most important part of the ensemble. It was also the one piece for which Laurence felt he need not blush: his shirt, thankfully hidden beneath the coat, not all the scrubbing in the world could save from disgrace; his breeches did not bear close examination; and as for his stockings, he had resorted to his tall Hessian boots.

They left Temeraire settling down to his own dinner under the protective eyes of a couple of midwingmen and a troop of soldiers under the arms of the East India Company, part of their private forces; Sir Thomas Staunton had loaned them to help guard Temeraire not from danger but overenthusiastic well-wishers. Unlike the Westerners who had fled their homes near the shore, the Chinese were not alarmed by dragons, living from childhood in their midst, and the tiny handful of Celestials so rarely left the Imperial precincts that to see one, and better yet to touch, was counted an honour and an assurance of good fortune.

Staunton had also arranged this dinner by way of offering the officers some entertainment and relief from their anxieties over the disaster, unaware that he would be putting the aviators to such desperate shifts in the article of clothing. Laurence had not liked to refuse the generous invitation for so trivial a reason, and had hoped to the last that he might find something more respectable to wear; now he came ruefully prepared to share his travails over the dinner table, and bear the amusement of the company.

His entrance was met with a polite if astonished silence, at first; but he had scarcely paid his respects to Sir Thomas and accepted a glass of wine before murmurs began. One of the older commissioners, a gentleman who liked to be deaf when he chose, said quite clearly, ‘Aviators and their starts; who knows what they will take into their heads next,’ which made Granby’s eyes glitter with suppressed anger; and a trick of the room made some less consciously indiscreet remarks audible also.

‘What do you suppose he means by it?’ inquired Mr. Chatham, a gentleman newly arrived from India, while eyeing Laurence with interest from the next window over; he was speaking in low voices with Mr. Grothing-Pyle, a portly man whose own interest was centred upon the clock, and in judging how soon they should go in to dinner.

‘Hm? Oh; he has a right to style himself an Oriental prince now if he likes,’ Grothing-Pyle said, shrugging, after an incurious glance over his shoulder. ‘And just as well for us too. Do you smell venison? I have not tasted venison in a year.’

Laurence turned his own face to the open window, appalled and offended in equal measure. Such an interpretation had never even occurred to him; his adoption by the Emperor had been purely and strictly pro forma, a matter of saving face for the Chinese, who had insisted that a Celestial might not be companion to any but a direct connection of the Imperial family; while on the British side it had been eagerly accepted as a painless means of resolving the dispute over the capture of Temeraire’s egg. Painless, at least, to everyone but Laurence, already in possession of one proud and imperious father, whose wrathful reaction to the adoption he anticipated with no small dismay. True, that consideration had not stopped him: he would have willingly accepted anything short of treason to avoid being parted from Temeraire. But he had certainly never sought or desired so signal and queer an honour, and to have men think him a ludicrous kind of social climber, who should value Oriental titles above his own birth, was deeply mortifying.

The embarrassment closed his mouth. He would have gladly shared the story behind his unusual clothing as an anecdote; as an excuse, never. He spoke shortly in reply to the few remarks offered him; anger made him pale and, if he had only known it, gave his face a cold, forbidding look, almost dangerous, which made conversation near him die down. He was ordinarily good-humoured in his expression, and though he was not darkly tanned, the many years labouring in the sun had given his looks a warm bronzed cast; the lines upon his face were mostly smiling: all the more contrast now. These men owed if not their lives, at least their fortunes to the success of the diplomatic mission to Peking, whose failure would have meant open warfare and an end to the China trade, and whose success had cost Laurence a blood-letting and the life of one of his men; he had not expected any sort of effusive thanks and would have spurned them if offered, but to meet with derision and incivility was something entirely different.

‘Shall we go in?’ Sir Thomas said, sooner than usual, and at the table he made every effort to break the uneasy atmosphere which had settled over the company: the butler was sent back to the cellar a half-dozen times, the wines growing more extravagant with each visit, and the food was excellent despite the limited resources accessible to Staunton’s cook: among the dishes was a very handsome fried carp, laid upon a ragout of the small crabs, now victims in their turn, and for centrepiece a pair of fat haunches of venison roasted, accompanied by a dish full of glowing jewel-red currant jelly.

The conversation flowed again; Laurence could not be insensible to Staunton’s real and sincere desire to see him and all the company comfortable, and he was not of an implacable temper to begin with; still less when encouraged with the best part of a glorious burgundy just come into its prime. No one had made any further remarks about coats or imperial relations, and after several courses, Laurence had thawed enough to apply himself with a will to a charming trifle assembled out of Naples biscuits and sponge-cake, with a rich brandied custard flavoured with orange, when a commotion outside the dining room began to intrude, and finally a single piercing shriek, like a woman’s cry, interrupted the increasingly loud and slurred conversation.

Silence fell, glasses stopped in mid-air, some chairs were pushed back; Staunton rose, a little wavering, and begged their pardon. Before he could go to investigate, the door was thrust abruptly open, Staunton’s anxious servant stumbling back into the room still protesting volubly in Chinese. He was gently but with complete firmness being pressed aside by another Oriental man, dressed in a padded jacket and a round, domed hat rising above a thick roll of dark wool; the stranger’s clothing was dusty and stained yellow in places, and not much like the usual native dress, and on his gauntleted hand perched an angry-looking eagle, brown and golden feathers ruffled up and a yellow eye glaring; it clacked its beak and shifted its perch uneasily, great talons puncturing the heavy block of padding.

When they had stared at him and he at them in turn, the stranger further astonished the room by saying, in pure drawing-room accents, ‘I beg your pardon, gentlemen, for interrupting your dinner; my errand cannot wait. Is Captain William Laurence here?’

Laurence was at first too bemused with wine and surprise to react; then he rose and stepped away from the table, to accept a sealed oilskin packet under the eagle’s unfriendly stare. ‘I thank you, sir,’ he said. At a second glance, the lean and angular face was not entirely Chinese: the eyes, though dark and faintly slanting, were rather more Western in shape, and the colour of his skin, much like polished teak wood, owed less to nature than to the sun.

The stranger inclined his head politely. ‘I am glad to have been of service.’ He did not smile, but there was a glint in his eye suggestive of amusement at the reaction of the room, which he was surely accustomed to provoking; he threw the company all a final glance, gave Staunton a small bow, and left as abruptly as he had come, going directly past a couple more of the servants who had come hurrying to the room in response to the noise.

‘Pray go and give Mr. Tharkay some refreshment,’ Staunton said to the servants in an undertone and sent them after him; meanwhile Laurence turned to his packet. The wax had been softened by the summer heat, the impression mostly lost, and the seal would not easily come away or break, pulling like soft candy and trailing sticky threads over his fingers. A single sheet within only, written from Dover in Admiral Lenton’s own hand, and in the abrupt style of formal orders: a single look was enough to take it in

… and you are hereby required without the loss of a Moment to proceed to Istanbul, there to receive by the Offices of Avraam Maden, in the service of H. M. Selim III, three Eggs now through agreement the Property of His Majesty’s Corps, to be secured against the Elements with all due care for their brooding and thence delivered straightaway to the charge of those Officers appointed to them, who shall await you at the covert at Dunbar …

The usual grim epilogues followed, herein neither you nor any of you shall fail, or answer the contrary at your peril; Laurence handed the letter to Granby, then nodded to him to pass the letter to Riley and to Staunton, who had joined them in the privacy of the library.

‘Laurence,’ Granby said, after handing it on, ‘we cannot sit here waiting for repairs with a months-long sea journey after that; we must get going at once.’

‘Well, how else do you mean to go?’ Riley said, looking up from the letter, which he was reading over Staunton’s shoulder. ‘There’s not another ship in port that could hold Temeraire’s weight for even a few hours; you can’t fly straight across the ocean without a place to rest.’

‘It’s not as though we were going to Nova Scotia, and could only go by sea,’ Granby said. ‘We must take the overland route instead.’

‘Oh, come now,’ Riley said impatiently.

‘Well, and why not?’ Granby demanded. ‘Even aside from the repairs, it’s going by sea that is out of the way, we lose ages having to circle around India. Instead we can make a straight shot across Tartary—’

‘Yes, and you can jump in the water and try to swim all the way to England, too,’ Riley said. ‘Sooner is better than late, but late is better than never; the Allegiance will get you home quicker than that.’

Laurence listened to their conversation with half an ear, reading the letter again with fresh attention. It was difficult to separate the true degree of urgency from the general tenor of a set of orders; but though dragon eggs might take a long time indeed to hatch, they were unpredictable and could not be left sitting indefinitely. ‘And we must consider, Tom,’ he said to Riley, ‘that it might easily be as much as five months’ sailing to Basra if we are unlucky in the way of weather, and from there we should have a flight overland to Istanbul in any case.’

‘And as likely to find three dragonets as three eggs at the end of it, no use at all,’ Granby said; when Laurence asked him, he gave as his firm opinion that the eggs could not be far from hatching; or at least not so far as to set their minds at ease. ‘There aren’t many breeds who go for longer than a couple of years in the shell,’ he explained, ‘and the Admiralty won’t have bought eggs less than halfway through their brooding: any younger than that, and you cannot be sure they will come off. We cannot lose the time; why they are sending us to get them instead of a crew from Gibraltar I don’t in the least understand.’

Laurence, less familiar with the various duty stations of the Corps, had not yet considered this possibility, and now it struck him also as odd that the task had been delegated to them, being so much further distant. ‘How long ought it take them to get to Istanbul from there?’ he asked, disquieted; even if much of the coast along the way were under French control, patrols could not be everywhere, and a single dragon flying should have been able to find places to rest.

‘Two weeks, perhaps a little less flying hard all the way,’ Granby said. ‘While I don’t suppose we can make it in less than a couple of months, ourselves, even going overland.’

Staunton, who had been listening anxiously to their deliberations, now interjected, ‘Then must not these orders by their 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 part of his life in the wild places of the earth.’

‘For my part, I should rather have a guide half-British than one who can scarcely make himself understood,’ Granby said afterwards, as he and Laurence together picked their way along the back streets of Macau; the late rains were still puddled in the gutters, a thin slick of green overlaid on the stagnating waste. ‘And if Tharkay were not so much a gypsy he wouldn’t be of any use to us; it is no good complaining about that.’

At length they found Tharkay’s temporary quarters: a wretched little two-story house in the Chinese quarter with a drooping roof, held up mostly by its neighbours to either side, all of them leaning against one another like drunken old men, with a landlord who scowled before leading them within, muttering.

Tharkay was sitting in the central court of the house, feeding the eagle gobbets of raw flesh from a dish; the fingers of his left hand were marked with white scars where the savage beak had cut him on previous feedings, and a few small scratches bled freely now, unheeded. ‘Yes, I came overland,’ he said, to Laurence’s inquiry, ‘but I would not recommend you the same road, Captain; it is not a comfortable journey, when compared against sea travel.’ He did not interrupt his task, but held up another strip of meat for the eagle, which snatched it out of his fingers, glaring at them furiously with the dangling bloody ends hanging from its beak as it swallowed.

It was difficult to know how to address him: neither a superior servant, nor a gentleman, nor a native, all his refinements of speech curiously placed against the scruff and tumble of his clothing and his disreputable surroundings; though perhaps he could have gotten no better accommodations, curious as his appearance was, and with the hostile eagle as his companion. He made no concessions, either, to his odd, in-between station; a certain degree of presumption almost in his manner, less formal than Laurence would himself have used to so new an acquaintance, almost in active defiance against being held at a servant’s distance.

But Tharkay answered their many questions readily enough, and having fed his eagle and set it aside, hooded, to sleep, he even opened up the kit which had carried him there so that they might inspect the vital equipment: a special sort of desert tent, fur-lined and with leather-reinforced holes spaced evenly along the edges, which he explained could be lashed quickly together with similar tents to form a single larger sheet to shield a camel, or in larger numbers a dragon, against sandstorm or hail or snow. There was also a snug leather-wrapped canteen, well-waxed to keep the water in, and a small tin cup tied on with string, marks engraved into it halfway and near the rim; a neat small compass, in a wooden case, and a thick journal full of little hand-sketched maps, and directions taken down in a small, neat hand.

All of it showed signs of use and good upkeep; plainly he knew what he was about, and he did not show himself overeager, as Riley had feared, for their custom. ‘I had not thought of returning to Istanbul,’ Tharkay said instead, when Laurence at last came around to inquiring if he would be their guide. ‘I have no real business there.’

‘But have you any elsewhere?’ Granby said. ‘We will have the devil of a time getting there without you, and you should be doing your country a service.’

‘And you will be handsomely paid for your trouble,’ Laurence added.

‘Ah, well, in that case,’ Tharkay said, a wry twist to his smile.

‘Well, I only wish you may all not have your throats slit by Uygurs,’ Riley said in deep pessimism, giving up, after he had tried once more at dinner to persuade them to remain. ‘You will dine with me on board tomorrow, Laurence?’ he asked, stepping into his barge. ‘Very good. I will send over the raw leather, and the ship’s forge,’ he called, his voice drifting back over the sound of the oars dipping into the water.

‘I will not let anyone slit your throats at all,’ Temeraire said, a little indignantly. ‘Although I would like to see an Uygur; is that a kind of dragon?’

‘A kind of bird, I think,’ Granby said; Laurence was doubtful, but he did not like to contradict when he was not sure himself.

‘Tribesmen,’ Tharkay said, the next morning.

‘Oh.’ Temeraire was a little disappointed; he had seen people before. ‘That is not very exciting, but perhaps they are very fierce?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Have you enough money to buy thirty camels?’ Tharkay asked Laurence, after he had finally escaped a lengthy interrogation as to the many other prospective delights of their journey, such as violent sandstorms and frozen mountain passes.

‘We are going by air,’ Laurence said, confused. ‘Temeraire will carry us,’ he added, wondering if Tharkay had perhaps misunderstood.

‘As far as Dunhuang,’ Tharkay said equably. ‘Then we will need to buy camels. A single camel can carry enough water for a day, for a dragon of his size; and then of course he can eat the camel.’

‘Are such measures truly necessary?’ Laurence said, in dismay at losing so much time: he had counted on crossing the desert quickly, on the wing. ‘Temeraire can cover better than a hundred miles in a day at need; surely we can find water over such an expanse.’

‘Not in the Taklamakan,’ Tharkay said. ‘The caravan routes are dying, and the cities die with them; the oases have mostly failed. We ought to be able to find enough for us and the camels, but even that will be brackish. Unless you are prepared to risk his dying of thirst, we carry our own water.’

This naturally putting a period to any further debate, Laurence was forced to apply to Sir Thomas for some assistance in the matter, having had no expectation, on his departure from England, that his ready funds should need to stretch to accommodate thirty camels and supplies for an overland journey. ‘Nonsense, it is a trifle,’ Staunton said, refusing his offered note of hand. ‘I dare say I will have cleared fifty thousand pounds in consequence of your mission, when all is said and done. I only wish I did not think I was speeding you on the way to your destruction. Laurence, forgive me for making so unpleasant a suggestion; I would not like to plant false suspicions in your head, but the possibility has been preying on me since you decided upon going. Could the letter by any chance have been forged?’

Laurence looked at him in surprise, and Staunton went on, ‘Recall that the orders, if honest, must have been written before news of your success here in China reached England— if indeed that news has reached them yet. Only consider the effect upon the negotiations so lately completed if you and Temeraire had unceremoniously gone away in the midst of them: you would have had to sneak out of the country like thieves to begin with, and an insult of such magnitude would surely have meant war. I am hard-pressed to imagine any reason the Ministry should have sent such orders.’

Laurence sent for the letter and for Granby; together they studied it fresh in the strong sunlight from the east-facing windows. ‘I am damned if I am any judge of such things, but it seems Lenton’s hand to me,’ Granby said doubtfully, handing it back.

To Laurence also; the letters were slant and wavering, but this kind of affliction, he did not say to Staunton, was not uncommon; aviators were taken into service at the age of seven, and the most promising among them often became runners by ten, with studies neglected sadly in favour of practical training: his own young cadets were inclined to grumble at his insistence that they should learn to write a graceful hand and practice their trigonometry.

‘Who would bother with it, any road?’ Granby said. ‘That French ambassador hanging about Peking, De Guignes— he left even before we did, and by now I expect he is halfway to France. Besides, he knows well enough that the negotiations are over.’

‘There might be French agents less well-informed behind it,’ Staunton said, ‘or worse, with knowledge of your recent success, trying to lure you into a trap. Brigands in the desert would hardly be above taking a bribe to attack you, and there is something too convenient in the arrival of this message, just when the Allegiance has been damaged, and you are sure to be chafing at your enforced delay.’

‘Well, I make no secret I had as lief go myself, for all this nay-saying and gloom,’ Granby said, as they walked back to their residence: the crew had already begun the mad scramble of preparation, and haphazard bundles were beginning to be piled upon the beach. ‘So it may be dangerous; we are not nursemaids to a colicky baby, after all. Dragons are made to fly, and another nine months of this sitting about on deck and on shore will be the ruin of his fighting-edge.’

‘And of half the boys, if they have not been spoilt already,’ Laurence said grimly, observing the antics of the younger officers, who were not entirely reconciled to being so abruptly put back to work, and engaging in more boisterous behaviour than he liked to see from men on duty.

‘Allen,’ Granby called sharply, ‘mind your damned harness-straps, unless you want to be started with them.’ The hapless young ensign had not properly buckled on his flying-harness, and the long carabiner straps were dragging on the ground behind him, bidding fair to trip him and any other crewman who crossed his path.

The ground-crew master Fellowes and his harness-men were still labouring over the flying rig, not yet repaired after the fire: a good many straps stiff and hard with salt, or rotted or burnt through, which needed replacing; too, several buckles had twisted and curled from the heat, and the armourer Pratt panted over his makeshift forge on shore as he pounded them straight and flat once more.

‘A moment, and I will see,’ Temeraire said, when they had put it on him to try, and leapt aloft in a stinging cloud of sand. He flew a small circuit and landed, directing the crew, ‘Pray tighten the left shoulder-strap a little, and lengthen the crupper,’ but after some dozen small adjustments he pronounced himself satisfied with the whole.

They laid it aside while he had his dinner: an enormous horned cow spit-roasted and dressed with heaps of green and scarlet peppers with blackened skins, and also a great mound of mushrooms, which he had acquired a taste for in Capetown; meanwhile Laurence sent his men to dinner and rowed over to the Allegiance to have a final meal with Riley, convivial though quiet; they did not drink very much, and afterwards Laurence gave him a last few letters for his mother and for Jane Roland, the official post having already been exchanged.

‘Godspeed,’ Riley said, seeing him down the side; the sun was low and nearly hidden behind the buildings of the town as Laurence was rowed back to shore. Temeraire had nibbled the last of the bones clean, and the men were coming out of the house. ‘All lies well,’ Temeraire said, when they had rigged him out once more, and then the crew climbed aboard, latching their individual harnesses onto Temeraire’s with their locking carabiners.

Tharkay, his hat buttoned on with a strap under the chin, climbed easily up and tucked himself away near Laurence, close to the base of Temeraire’s neck; the eagle, hooded, was in a small cage strapped against his chest. Abruptly from the Allegiance came the sudden thunder of cannon-fire: a formal salute, and Temeraire roared out gladly in answer while the flag-signal broke out from the mainmast: fair wind. With a quick bunching of muscle and sinew, a deep hollow rushing intake of breath beneath the skin, all the chambers of air swelling out wide, Temeraire was aloft, and the port and the city went rolling away beneath him.

Chapter Two

They went quickly, very quickly; Temeraire delighting in the chance to stretch his wings for once with no slower companions to hold him back. Though Laurence was at first a little cautious, Temeraire showed no sign of overexertion, no heat in the muscles of his shoulders, and after the first few days Laurence let him choose the pace as he wished. Baffled and curious officials came hurrying out to meet them whenever they came down for some food near a town of sufficient size, and Laurence was forced on more than one occasion to put on the heavy golden dragon-robes, the Emperor’s gift, to make their questions and demands for paperwork subside into a great deal of formal bowing and scraping: though at least he did not need to feel improperly dressed, as in his makeshift green coat. Where possible they began to avoid settlements, instead buying Temeraire’s meals directly from the herdsmen out in the fields, and sleeping nightly in isolated temples, wayside pavilions, and once an abandoned military outpost with the roof long fallen in but the walls still half-standing: they stretched a canopy made of their lashed-together tents over the remnants, and built their fire with the old shattered beams for tinder.

‘North, along the Wudang range, to Luoyang,’ Tharkay said. He had proven a quiet and uncommunicative companion, directing their course most often with a silent pointing finger, tapping on the compass mounted upon Temeraire’s harness, and leaving it to Laurence to pass the directions on to Temeraire. But that night he sketched at Laurence’s request a path in the dirt as they sat outside by the fire, while Temeraire peered down interestedly ‘And then we turn west, towards the old capital, towards Xian.’ The foreign names meant nothing to Laurence, every city spelled seven different ways on his seven different maps, which Tharkay had eyed sidelong and disdained to consult. But Laurence could follow their progress by the sun and the stars, rising daily in their changed places as Temeraire’s flight ate up the miles.

Towns and villages one after another, the children running along the ground underneath Temeraire’s racing shadow, waving and calling in high indistinct voices until they fell behind; rivers snaking below them and the old sullen mountains rising on their left, stained green with moss and girt with reluctant clouds unable to break free from the peaks. Dragons passing by avoided them, respectfully descending to lower ranks of the air to give way to Temeraire, except once one of the greyhound-sleek Jade Dragons, the imperial couriers who flew at heights too cold and thin for other breeds, dived down with a cheerful greeting, flitting around Temeraire’s head like a hummingbird, and as quickly darted up and away again.

As they continued north, the nights ceased to be so stiflingly hot and became instead pleasantly warm and domestic; hunting plentiful and easy even when they did not come across one of the vast nomadic herds, and good forage for the rest of them. With less than a day’s flight left to Xian, they broke their travelling early and encamped by a small lake: three handsome deer were set to roasting for their dinner and Temeraire’s, the men meanwhile nibbling on biscuit and some fresh fruit brought them by a local farmer. Granby sat Roland and Dyer down to practice their penmanship by the firelight while Laurence attempted to make out their attempts at trigonometry. These, having been carried out mid-air and with the slates subject to all the force of the wind, posed quite a serious challenge, but he was glad to see at least their calculations no longer produced hypotenuses shorter than the other sides of their triangles.

Temeraire, relieved of his harness, plunged at once into the lake: mountain streams rolled down to feed it from all sides, and its floor was lined with smooth tumbled stones; it was a little shallow now on the cusp of August, but he managed to throw water over his back, and he frolicked and squirmed over the pebbles with great enthusiasm. ‘That is very refreshing; but surely it must be time to eat now?’ he said as he climbed out, and looked meaningfully at the roasting deer; but the cooks waved their enormous spit-hooks at him threateningly, not yet satisfied with their work.

He sighed a little and shook out his wings, spattering them all with a brief shower that made the fire hiss, and settled himself down upon the shore next to Laurence. ‘I am very glad we did not wait and go by sea; how lovely it is to fly straight, as quickly as one likes, for miles and miles,’ he said, yawning.

Laurence looked down; certainly there was no such flying in England: a week such as the last would have seen them from one end of the isles to the other and back. ‘Did you have a pleasant bathe?’ he asked, changing the subject.

‘Oh, yes; those rocks were very nice,’ Temeraire said, wistfully, ‘although it was not quite as agreeable as being with Mei.’

Lung Qin Mei, a charming Imperial dragon, had been Temeraire’s intimate companion in Peking; Laurence had feared since their departure that Temeraire might privately be pining for her. But this sudden mention seemed a non sequitur, nor did Temeraire seem very love-lorn in his tone. Then Granby said, ‘Oh, dear,’ and stood up to call across the camp, ‘Mr. Ferris! Mr. Ferris, tell those boys to pour out that water, and go and fetch some from the stream instead, if you please.’

‘Temeraire!’ Laurence said, scarlet with comprehension.

‘Yes?’ Temeraire looked at him, puzzled. ‘Well, do you not find it more pleasant to be with Jane, than to—’

Laurence stood up hastily, saying, ‘Mr. Granby, pray call the men to dinner now,’ and pretended not to hear the unsteady stifled mirth in Granby’s voice as he said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and dashed away.

Xian was an ancient city, the former capital of the nation and full of the memory of glory, the thin scattering of carts and travellers lonely on the wide and weed-choked roads leading in to the city; they flew over high moated walls of grey brick, pagoda towers standing dark and empty, only a few guards in their uniforms and a couple of lazy scarlet dragons yawning. From above, the streets quartered the city into chessboard squares, marked with temples of a dozen descriptions, incongruous minarets cheek by jowl with the sharp-pointed pagoda roofs. Narrow poplars and old, old pines with fragile wisps of green needles lined the avenues, and they were received in a marble square before the main pagoda by the magistrate of the city, officials assembled and bowing in their robes: news of their approach was outrunning them, likely on the wings of the Jade Dragon courier. They were feasted on the banks of the Wei river in an old pavilion overlooking rustling wheat fields, on hot milky soup and skewers of mutton, three sheep roasted together on a spit for Temeraire, and the magistrate ceremonially broke sprigs of willow in farewell as they left: wishes for a safe return.

Two days later they slept near Tianshui in caves hollowed from red rock, full of silent unsmiling Buddhas, hands and faces reaching out from the walls, garments draped in eternal folds of stone, and rain falling outside beyond the grotto openings. Monumental figures peered after them through the continuing mist as they flew onward, tracking the river or its tributaries now into the heart of the mountain range, narrow winding passes not much wider than Temeraire’s wingspan. He delighted in flying through these at great speed, stretching himself to the limit, his wing-tips nearly brushing at the awkward saplings that jutted out sideways from the slopes, until one morning a freakish start of wind came suddenly whistling through the narrow pass, catching Temeraire’s wings on the upswing, and nearly flung him against the rock face.

He squawked ungracefully, and managed with a desperate snaking twist to turn round in mid-air and catch himself on his legs against the nearly vertical slope. The loose shale and rock at once gave way, the little scrubby growth of green saplings and grass inadequate to stabilize the ground beneath his weight; ‘Get your wings in!’ Granby yelled, through his speaking-trumpet: Temeraire by instinct was trying to beat away into the air again, and only hastening the collapse. Pulling his wings tight, he managed a clawing and flailing scramble down the loose slope, and landed awkwardly athwart the stream bed, his sides heaving.

‘Order the men to make camp,’ Laurence said quickly to Granby, unhooking his carabiner rings, and scrambled down in a series of half-controlled drops, barely grasping the harness with his fingers before letting himself down another twenty feet, hurrying to Temeraire’s head. He was drooping, the tendrils and ruff all quivering with his too-quick panting, and his legs were trembling, but he held himself up while the poor bell-men and the ground crew let themselves off staggering, all of them half-choking and caked with the grey dirt thrown up in the frantic descent.

Though they had scarcely gone an hour, everyone was glad to stop and rest, the men throwing themselves down upon the dusty yellow grass-banks even as Temeraire himself did. ‘You are sure it does not pain you anywhere?’ Laurence asked anxiously, while Keynes clambered muttering over Temeraire’s shoulders, inspecting the wing-joints.

‘No, I am well,’ Temeraire said, looking more embarrassed than injured, though he was glad to bathe his feet in the stream, and hold them out to be scrubbed clean, some of the dirt and pebbles having crept under the hard ridge of skin around the talons. Afterwards he closed his eyes and put his head down for a nap, and showed no inclination to go anywhere at all; ‘I ate well yesterday; I am not very hungry,’ he answered, when Laurence suggested they might go hunting, saying he preferred to sleep. But a few hours later Tharkay reappeared – if it could be called reappearing, when his initial absence had gone quite unnoticed – and offered him a dozen fat rabbits which he had taken with the eagle. Ordinarily they would hardly have made a few bites for him, but the Chinese cooks stretched them out by stewing them with salt pork fat, turnips, and some fresh greens, and Temeraire made a sufficiently enthusiastic meal out of them, bones and all, to give the lie to his supposed lack of hunger.

He was a little shy even the next morning, rearing up on his haunches and tasting the air with his tongue as high up as he could stretch his head, trying to get a sense of the wind. Then there was a little something wrong with the harness, somehow not easy for him to describe, which required several lengthy adjustments; then he was thirsty, and the water had become overnight too muddy to drink, so they had to pile up stones for a makeshift dam to form a deeper pool. Laurence began to wonder if perhaps he had done badly not to insist they go aloft again directly after the accident; but abruptly Temeraire said, ‘Very well, let us go,’ and launched himself the moment everyone was aboard.

The tension across his shoulders, quite palpable from where Laurence sat, faded after a little while in the air, but still Temeraire went with more caution now, flying slowly while they remained in the mountains. Three days passed before they met and crossed over the Yellow River, so choked with silt it seemed less a waterway than a channel of moving earth, ochre and brown, with thick clods of grass growing out onto the surface of the water from the verdant banks. They had to purchase a bundle of raw silk from a passing river barge to strain the water through before it could be drunk, and their tea had a harsh and clayey taste even so.

‘I never thought I would be so glad to see a desert, but I could kiss the sand,’ Granby said, a few days later: the river was long behind them and the mountains had abruptly yielded that afternoon to foothills and scrubby plateau. The brown desert was visible from their camp on the outskirts of Wuwei. ‘I suppose you could drop all of Europe into this country and never find it again.’

‘These maps are thoroughly wrong,’ Laurence agreed, as he noted down in his log once more the date, and his guess as to miles traversed, which according to the charts would have put them nearly in Moscow. ‘Mr. Tharkay,’ he said, as the guide joined them at the fire, ‘I hope you will accompany me tomorrow to buy the camels?’

‘We are not yet at the Taklamakan,’ Tharkay said. ‘This is the Gobi; we do not need the camels yet. We will only be skirting its edges; there will be water enough. I suppose it would be as well to buy some meat for the next few days, however,’ he added, unconscious of the dismay he was giving them.

‘One desert ought to be enough for any journey,’ Granby said. ‘At this rate we will be in Istanbul for Christmas; if then.’

Tharkay raised an eyebrow. ‘We have covered better than a thousand miles in two weeks of travelling; surely you cannot be dissatisfied with the pace.’ He ducked into the supply-tent, to look over their stores.

‘Fast enough, to be sure, but little good that does everyone waiting for us at home,’ Granby said, bitterly; he flushed a little at Laurence’s surprised look and said, ‘I am sorry to be such a bear; it is only, my mother lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, and my brothers.’

The town was nearly midway between the covert at Edinburgh and the smaller at Middlesbrough, and provided the best part of Britain’s supply of coal: a natural target, if Bonaparte had chosen to set up a bombardment of the coast, and one which would be difficult to defend with the Aerial Corps spread thin. Laurence nodded silently.

‘Do you have many brothers?’ Temeraire inquired, unrestrained by the etiquette which had kept Laurence from similarly indulging his own curiosity: Granby had never spoken of his family before. ‘What dragons do they serve with?’

‘They are not aviators,’ Granby said, adding a little defiantly. ‘My father was a coal-merchant; my two older brothers now are in my uncle’s business.’

‘Well, I am sure that is interesting work too,’ Temeraire said with earnest sympathy, not understanding, as Laurence at once had: with a widowed mother, and an uncle who surely had sons of his own to provide for, Granby had likely been sent to the Corps because his family could not afford to keep him. A boy of seven years might be sponsored for a small sum and thus assured of a profession, if not a wholly respectable one, while his family saved his room and board. Unlike the Navy, no influence or family connections would be required to get him such a berth: the Corps was more likely to be short of applicants.

‘I am sure they will have gun-boats stationed there,’ Laurence said, tactfully changing the subject. ‘And there has been some talk of trying Congreve’s rockets for defence against aerial bombardment.’

‘I suppose that might do to chase off the French: if we set the city on fire ourselves, no reason they would go to the trouble of attacking,’ Granby said, with an attempt at his usual good humour; but soon he excused himself, and took his small bedroll into a corner of their pavilion to sleep.

* * *

Another five days of flying saw them to the Jiayu Gate, a desolate fortress in a desolate land, built of hard yellow brick that might have been fired from the very sands that surrounded it, outer walls thrice Temeraire’s height and nearly two foot thick: the last outpost standing between the heart of China and the western regions, her more recent conquests. The guards were sullen and resentful at their posts, but even so more like real soldiers to Laurence’s eye than the happier conscripts he had seen idling through most of the outposts in the rest of the country; though they had but a scattering of badly neglected muskets, their leather-wrapped sword hilts had the hard shine of long use. They eyed Temeraire’s ruff very closely as if suspecting him of an imposture, until he put it up and snorted at one of them for going so far as to tug on the spines; then they grew a little more circumspect but still insisted on searching all the party’s packs, and they made something of a fuss over the one piece Laurence had decided to bring along instead of leaving on board the Allegiance: a red porcelain vase of extraordinary beauty which he had acquired in Peking.

They brought out an enormous text, part of the legal code which governed exports from the country, studied articles, argued amongst themselves and with Tharkay, and demanded a bill of sale which Laurence had never obtained in the first place; in annoyance he exclaimed, ‘For Heaven’s sake, it is a gift for my father, not an article of trade,’ and this being translated seemed at last to mollify them. Laurence narrowly watched them wrap it back up: he did not mean to lose the thing now, after it had come through vandalism and fire and three thousand miles intact; he thought it his best chance for conciliating Lord Allendale, a notable collector, to the adoption, which would certainly inflame a proud temper already none too pleased with Laurence’s having become an aviator.

The inspection dragged on until mid-morning, but they none of them had any desire to remain another night in the unhappy place: once the scene of joyous arrivals, caravans reaching their safe destination and others setting forth on their return journeys, it was now only the last stopping-place of exiles forced to leave the country; a miasma of bitterness lingered.

‘We can reach Yumen before the worst heat of the day,’ Tharkay said, and Temeraire drank deeply from the fortress cistern. They left by the only exit, a single enormous tunnel passing from the inner courtyard and through the whole length of the front battlements, dim sputtering lanterns at infrequent intervals flickering over walls almost covered with ink and in places etched by dragon claws, the last sad messages before departure, prayers for mercy and to one day come home again. Not all were old; fresh broad cuts at the tunnel’s edge crossed over other, faded letters, and Temeraire stopped and read them quietly to Laurence:

Ten thousand li between me and your grave,

Ten thousand li more I have yet to travel.

I shake out my wings and step into the merciless sun.

Past the shade of the deep tunnel, the sun was indeed merciless and the ground dry and cracked, drifted over with sand and small pebbles. As they loaded up again outside, the two Chinese cooks, who had grown quiet and unhappy overnight despite not the least signs of homesickness over the whole course of their journey thus far, walked a little way off and each picked up a pebble and flung it at the wall, in what seemed to Laurence an odd hostility: Jing Chao’s pebble bounced off, but the other, thrown by Gong Su, skittered and rolled down the sloping wall to the ground. At this he made a short gasp and came at once to Laurence with a torrent of apology, of which even Laurence with his very scant supply of Chinese could make out the meaning: he did not mean to come any further.

‘He says that the pebble did not come back, and that means he will never return to China,’ Temeraire translated; meanwhile Jing Chao was already handing up his chest of spices and cooking tools to be bundled in with the rest of the gear, evidently as reassured as Gong Su was distressed.

‘Come now, this is unreasonable superstition,’ Laurence said to Gong Su. ‘You assured me particularly you did not mind leaving China; and I have given you six months’ wages in advance. You cannot expect me to pay you still more for your journey now, when you have been at work less than a month’s time, and are already reneging upon our contract.’

Gong Su made still further apologies: he had left all the money at home with his mother, whom he made out to be thoroughly destitute and friendless otherwise, though Laurence had met the stout and rather formidable lady in question along with her eleven other sons when they had all come to see Gong Su off from Macau. ‘Well,’ Laurence said finally, ‘I will give you a little more to start you on the way, but still you had much better come with us. It will take you a wretchedly long time to get home going by land, apart from the expense, and I am sure you would soon feel very foolish at having indulged your fancy in such a manner.’ Truthfully, of the two Laurence would much rather have spared Jing Chao, who was proving generally quarrelsome and given to berating the ground crew in Chinese if they did not treat his supplies with what he considered appropriate care. Laurence knew some of the men were beginning to inquire quietly of Temeraire about the meaning of some words to understand what was being said to them; Laurence suspected himself that many of Jing Chao’s remarks were impolite, and if so the situation would certainly become difficult.

Gong Su wavered, uncertainly; Laurence added, ‘Perhaps it only means you will like England so very well you will choose to settle there, but in any case I am sure nothing good can come of taking fright at such an omen, and trying to avoid whatever your fate may be.’ This made an impression, and after a little more consideration Gong Su did climb aboard; Laurence shook his head at the silliness of it all, and turned to say to Temeraire, ‘It is a great deal of nonsense.’

‘Oh; yes,’ said Temeraire with a guilty start, pretending he had not been eyeing a convenient boulder, roughly half the size of a man, which if flung against the wall would likely have brought the guards boiling out in alarm and convinced they were under bombardment by siege weaponry. ‘We will come back someday, Laurence, will we not?’ he asked, a little wistfully: he was leaving behind not only the handful of other Celestial dragons who were all his kin in the world, and the luxury of the Imperial court, but the ordinary and unconscious liberties which the Chinese system showed to all dragons as a matter of course, in treating them very little different from men at all.

Laurence had no such powerful reasons for wanting to return: to him China had been the scene only of deep anxiety and danger, a morass of foreign politics, and if he were honest even a degree of jealousy; he did not himself feel any desire ever to come back. ‘When the war is over, whenever you would like,’ he said however, quietly, and put a hand on Temeraire’s leg, comforting, while the crew finished getting him rigged out for the flight.

Chapter Three

They left the green oasis of Dunhuang at dawn, the camel bells in a querulous jangle as the beasts reluctantly trudged away over the dune-crests, their shaggy flat feet muddling the sharp lines of the ridges which cut the sunlight into parts: the dunes like ocean waves captured in pen and ink, on one side perfectly white and on the other pure shadow, printed on the pale caramel colour of the sand. The caravan trails unknotted themselves one at a time and broke away to north and south, joinings marked by heaps of bones with staring camel-skulls piled atop. Tharkay turned the lead camel’s head southwards, the long train following: the camels knew their work even if their still-awkward riders did not. Temeraire padded after like a disproportionate herd-dog, at a distance far enough to comfort them, near enough to keep any of them from trying to bolt the way they had come.

Laurence had expected the terrible sun, but so far north, the desert did not hold its heat: by mid-day a man was soaked through with sweat; an hour after nightfall he was chilled to the bone, and a white frost crept over the water-casks during the night. The eagle kept itself fed on brown-spotted lizards and small mice, seen otherwise only as shadows darting uneasily beneath rocks; Temeraire daily reduced the camel train by one; the rest of them ate thin tough strips of dried meat, chewed for hours, and coarse tea mixed into a vile but nourishing slurry with oat flour and roasted wheat berries. The casks were reserved for Temeraire; their own supply came from the water-bags each man carried for himself, filled every other day or so from small decaying wells, mostly tainted with salt, or shallow pools overgrown with tamarisk trees, their roots rotting in the mud: the water yellow and bitter and thick, scarcely drinkable even when boiled.

Each morning Laurence and Temeraire took Tharkay aloft and scouted some little distance ahead of the camel-train for the best path, though always a shimmering haze distorted the horizon, limiting their view; the Tianshan range to the south seemed to float above the blurred mirage, as though the blue jutting mountains were divided from the earth, upon another plane entirely.

‘How lonely it is,’ Temeraire said, though he liked the flying: the heat of the sun seemed to make him especially buoyant, perhaps acting in some peculiar way upon the air-sacs which enabled dragons to fly, and he needed little effort to keep aloft.

He and Laurence would often pause during the day together: Laurence would read to him, or Temeraire recite him attempts at poetry, which he had acquired a taste for in Peking, it being there considered a more appropriate occupation for Celestials than warfare; when the sun dipped lower they would take to the air to catch up the rest of the convoy, following the plaintive sound of the camel bells through the dusk.

‘Sir,’ Granby said, jogging to meet Laurence as they descended, ‘one of those fellows is missing, the cook.’

They went aloft again at once, searching, but there was no sign of the poor devil; the wind was a busy house-keeper, sweeping up the camel-tracks almost as quickly as they had been made, and to be lost for ten minutes was as good as for eternity. Temeraire flew low, listening for the jingle of camel-bells, fruitlessly; night was coming on quickly, and the lengthening shadows of the dunes blurred together into a uniform darkness. ‘I cannot see anything more, Laurence,’ Temeraire said sadly: the stars were coming out, and there was only a thin sliver of moon.

‘We will look again tomorrow,’ Laurence said to comfort him, but with little real hope; they set down again by the tents, and Laurence shook his head silently as he climbed down into the waiting circle of the camp; he gladly took a cup of the thick tea and warmed his chilled hands and feet at the low wavering campfire.

‘The camel is a worse loss,’ Tharkay said, turning away with a shrug, brutal but truthful: Jing Chao had endeared himself to no one. Even Gong Su, his countryman and longest acquaintance, heaved only one sigh; and then led Temeraire around to the waiting roast camel, today cooked in a fire pit with tea-leaves, an attempt at changing the flavour.

The few oasis towns they passed through were narrow places in spirit, less unfriendly than perplexed by strangers: the marketplaces lazy and slow, men in black skull-caps smoking and drinking spiced tea in the shade and watching them curiously; Tharkay exchanged a few words now and again, in Chinese and in other tongues. The streets were not in good repair, mostly drifted over with sand and cut by deep channels pitted with the ancient marks of nail-studded wagon wheels. They bought bags of almonds and dried fruit, sweet pressed apricots and grapes, filled their water-bags at the clean deep wells, and continued on their way.

The camels began moaning early in the night, the first sign of warning; when the watch came to fetch Laurence, the constellations were already being swallowed up by the low oncoming cloud.

‘Let Temeraire drink and eat; this may last some time,’ Tharkay said: a couple of the ground crewmen pried off the cover from two of the flat-sided wooden butts and brushed the damp, cooling sawdust away from the swollen leather bags inside, then Temeraire lowered his head so they might pour out the mixture of water and ice into his mouth: having had nearly a week’s practice, he did not spill a drop, but closed his jaws tight before raising his head up again to swallow. The unburdened camel rolled its eyes and fought at being separated from its fellows, to no avail; Pratt and his mate, both of them big men, dragged it around behind the tents; Gong Su drew a knife across its neck, deftly catching the spurting blood in a bowl; and Temeraire unenthusiastically fell-to: he was getting tired of camel.

There were still some fifteen left to get under cover, and Granby marshalled the midwingmen and the ensigns while the ground crewmen anchored the tents more securely; already the layer of loose fine sand was whipping across the surface of the dunes and stinging their hands and faces, though they put up their collars and wrapped their neckcloths over their mouths and noses. The thick fur-lined tents, which they had been so glad to have during the cold nights, now grew stifling hot as they struggled and pushed and crowded in the camels, and even the thinner leather pavilion which they got up to shield Temeraire and themselves was smotheringly close.

And then the sandstorm was upon them: a hissing furious assault, nothing like the sound of rain, falling without surcease against the leather tent wall. It could not be ignored; the noise rose and fell in unpredictable bursts, from shrieks to whispers and back again, so they could only take brief unrestful snatches of sleep; and faces grew bruised with fatigue around them. They did not risk many lanterns inside the tent; when the sun set Laurence sat by Temeraire’s head in a darkness almost complete, listening to the wind howl.

‘Some call the karaburan the work of evil spirits,’ Tharkay said out of the dark; he was cutting some leather for fresh jesses for the eagle, presently subdued in its cage, head hunched invisibly into its shoulders. ‘You can hear their voices, if you listen,’ and indeed one could make out low and plaintive cries on the wind, like murmurs in a foreign tongue.

‘I cannot understand them,’ Temeraire said, listening with interest rather than dread; evil spirits did not alarm him. ‘What language is that?’

‘No tongue of men or dragons,’ Tharkay said seriously: the ensigns were listening, the older men only pretending not to, and Roland and Dyer had crept close, eyes stretched wide. ‘Those who listen too long grow confused and lose their way: they are never found again, except as bones scoured clean to warn other travellers away.’

‘Hm,’ Temeraire said sceptically. ‘I would like to see the demon that could eat me,’ which would certainly have required a prodigious kind of devil.

Tharkay’s mouth twitched. ‘That is why they have not dared to bother us; dragons of your size are not often seen in the desert.’ The men huddled rather closer to Temeraire, and no one spoke of going outside.

‘Have you heard of dragons having their own languages?’ Temeraire asked Tharkay a little later, softly; most of the men were drifting, half-asleep. ‘I have always thought we learnt them from men only.’

‘The Durzagh tongue is a language of dragons,’ Tharkay said. ‘There are sounds in it men cannot make: your voices more easily mimic ours than the reverse.’

‘Oh! Will you teach me?’ Temeraire asked, eagerly; Celestials, unlike most dragons, kept the ability to easily acquire new tongues past their hatching and infancy.

‘It is of little use,’ Tharkay said. ‘It is only spoken in the mountains: in the Pamirs, and the Karakoram.’

‘I do not mind that,’ Temeraire said. ‘It will be so very useful when we are back in England. Laurence, the Government cannot say we are just animals if we have invented our own language,’ he added, looking to him for confirmation.

‘No one with any sense would say it regardless,’ Laurence began, to be interrupted by Tharkay’s short snorting laugh.

‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘They are more likely to think you an animal for speaking a tongue other than English; or at least a creature unworthy of notice: you would do better to cultivate an elevated tone,’ and his voice changed quite on the final words, taking on the drawling style favoured by the too-fashionable set for a moment.

‘That is a very strange way of speaking,’ Temeraire said dubiously, after he had tried it, repeating over the phrase a few times. ‘It seems very peculiar to me that it should make any difference how one says the words, and it must be a great deal of trouble to learn how to say them all over again. Can one hire a translator to say things properly?’

‘Yes; they are called lawyers,’ Tharkay said, and laughed softly to himself.

‘I would certainly not recommend you to imitate this particular style,’ Laurence said dryly, while Tharkay recovered from his amusement. ‘At best you might only impress some fellow on Bond Street, if he did not run away to begin with.’

‘Very true; you had much better take Captain Laurence as your model,’ Tharkay said, inclining his head. ‘Just how a gentleman ought to speak; I am sure any official would agree.’

His expression was not visible in the shadows, but Laurence felt as though he were being obscurely mocked, perhaps without malice, but irritating to him nonetheless. ‘I see you have made a study of the subject, Mr. Tharkay,’ he said a little coldly. Tharkay shrugged.

‘Necessity was a thorough teacher, if a hard one,’ he said. ‘I found men eager enough to deny me my rights, without providing them so convenient an excuse to dismiss me. You may find it slow going,’ he added to Temeraire, ‘if you mean to assert your own: men with powers and privileges rarely like to share them.’

This was no more than Laurence had said, on many an occasion, but a vein of cynicism ran true and deep beneath Tharkay’s words which perhaps made them the more convincing: ‘I am sure I do not see why they should not wish to be just,’ Temeraire said, but uncertainly, troubled, and so Laurence found he did not after all like to see Temeraire take his own advice to heart.

‘Justice is expensive,’ Tharkay said. ‘That is why there is so little of it, and that it’s reserved for those few with enough money and influence to afford it.’

‘In some corners of the world, perhaps,’ Laurence said, unable to tolerate this, ‘but thank God, we have a rule of law in Britain, and those checks upon the power of men which prevent any from becoming tyrannical.’

‘Or which spread the tyranny over more hands, piecemeal,’ Tharkay said. ‘I do not know that the Chinese system is any worse; there is a limit to the evil one despot alone can do, and if he is truly vicious he can be overthrown; a hundred corrupt members of Parliament may together do as much injustice or more, and be the less easy to uproot.’

‘And where on the scale would you rank Bonaparte?’ Laurence demanded, growing too indignant to be polite: it was one thing to complain of corruption, or propose judicious reforms; quite another to lump the British system in with absolute despotism.

‘As a man, a monarch, or a system of government?’ Tharkay asked. ‘If there is more injustice in France than elsewhere, on the whole, I have not heard of it. It is quixotic of them to have chosen to be unjust to the noble and the rich, in favour of the common; but it does not seem to me naturally worse; or, for that matter, likely to last long. As for the rest, I will defer to your judgement, sir; who would you take on the battlefield: good King George or the second lieutenant of artillery from Corsica?’

‘I would take Lord Nelson,’ Laurence said. ‘I do not believe anyone has ever suggested he likes glory less than Bonaparte, but he has put his genius in service to his country and his King, and graciously accepted what rewards they chose to give him, instead of setting himself up as a tyrant.’

‘So shining an example must vanquish any argument, and indeed I should be ashamed to be the cause of any disillusionment.’ Tharkay’s faint half-smile was visible now: it was growing lighter outside. ‘We have a little break in the storm, I think; I will go and look in on the camels.’ He wrapped a veil of cotton several times around his face, pulling his hat firmly down over all, and drew on his gloves and cloak before ducking out through the flaps.

‘Laurence, but the government must listen in our case, because there are so many dragons,’ Temeraire said, interrogatively, when Tharkay had gone out, returning to the point of real concern to him.

‘They shall listen,’ Laurence said, still smouldering and indignant, without thinking; and regretted it the next instant: Temeraire, only too willing to be relieved of doubt, brightened at once and said, ‘I was sure it must be so,’ and whatever good the conversation might have done, in lowering his expectations, was lost.

The storm lingered another day, fierce enough to wear holes, after a while, in the leather of their pavilion; they patched it as best they could from inside, but dust crept in through all the cracks, into their garments and their food, gritty and unpleasant when they chewed the cold dried meat. Temeraire sighed and shivered his hide now and again, little cascades of sand running off his shoulders and wings onto the floor: they had already a layer of desert inside the tent with them.

Laurence did not know just when the storm ended: as the blessed silence began to fall, they all drifted into their first real sleep in days, and he woke to the sound of the eagle outside giving a red cry of satisfaction. Stumbling out of the tent, he found it tearing raw flesh from the corpse of a camel lying across the remains of the campfire pit, neck broken and white ribcage already half stripped clean by the sands.

‘One of the tents did not hold,’ Tharkay said, behind him. Laurence did not at once take his meaning: he turned and saw eight of the camels, tethered loosely near a heap of piled forage, swaying a little on legs grown stiff from their long confinement; the tent which had sheltered them was still up, leaning somewhat askew with a sand-drift piled up against one side. Of the second tent there was no sign except two of the iron stakes still planted deeply in the ground, and a few scraps of brown leather pinned down, fluttering with the breeze.

‘Where are the rest of the camels?’ Laurence said, in growing horror. He took Temeraire aloft at once, while the men spread out, calling, in every direction, in vain: the scouring wind had left no tracks, no signs, not so much as a scrap of bloody hide.

By midday they had given it up, and began in desolate spirits to pack up the camp; seven camels lost, and their water-casks with them, which they had left on to keep them weighted down and quiet. ‘Will we be able to buy more in Cherchen?’ Laurence asked Tharkay, wearily, wiping a hand across his brow; he did not recall seeing many animals in the streets of the town, which they had left nearly three days before.

‘Only with difficulty,’ Tharkay said. ‘Camels are very dear here, and men prize them highly; some may object to selling healthy beasts to be eaten. We ought not turn back, in my opinion.’ At Laurence’s doubtful look, he added, ‘I set the number at thirty deliberately high, in case of accidents: this is worse than I had planned for, but we can yet manage until we reach the Keriya River. We will have to ration the camels, and refill Temeraire’s water casks as best we can at the oases, forgoing as much as we can ourselves; it will not be pleasant, but I promise you it can be done.’

The temptation was very great: Laurence bitterly grudged the loss of more time. Three days back to Cherchen, and likely a long delay there acquiring new pack animals, all the while having to manage food and water for Temeraire in a town unaccustomed to supporting any dragons at all, much less one of his size; a clear loss of more than a week, certainly. Tharkay seemed confident, and yet— and yet—

Laurence drew Granby behind the tents, to consult in privacy: considering it best to keep their mission secret, so far as possible, and not to spread any useless anxiety over the state of affairs in Europe, Laurence had not yet shared their purpose with the rest of the crew, and left them to believe they were returning overland only to avoid the long delay in port.

‘A week is enough time to get the eggs to a covert somewhere,’ Granby said, urgently. ‘Gibraltar— the outpost on Malta— it might be the difference between success and failure. I swear to you there is not a man among us who would not go hungry and thirsty twice as long for the chance, and Tharkay is not saying there is a real risk we shall run dry.’

Abruptly Laurence said, ‘And you are easy in your mind, trusting his judgement on the matter?’

‘More than any of ours, surely,’ Granby said. ‘What do you mean?’

Laurence did not know quite how to put his unease into words; indeed he hardly knew what he feared. ‘I suppose I only do not like putting our lives so completely into his hands,’ he said. ‘Another few days of travel will put us out of reach of Cherchen, with our present supplies, and if he is mistaken—’

‘Well, his advice has been good so far,’ Granby said, a little more doubtfully, ‘though I won’t deny he has a damned queer way of going on, sometimes.’

‘He left the tent once, during the storm, for a long while,’ Laurence said quietly. ‘That was after the first day, halfway through— he said he went to look in on the camels.’

They stood silently together. ‘I don’t suppose we could tell by looking how long that camel has been dead?’ Granby suggested. They went to try an inspection, but too late: Gong Su already had what was left of the dead beast jointed and spitted over a fire, browning to a turn, and offering no answers whatsoever.

When consulted, Temeraire said, ‘It seems a very great pity to turn around to me also. I do not mind eating every other day,’ and added under his breath, ‘especially if it must be camel.’

‘Very well; we continue on,’ Laurence said, despite his misgivings, and when Temeraire had eaten, they trudged onward through a landscape rendered even more drear by the storm, scrub and vegetation torn away, even the scattering of colourful pebbles blown away, leaving no relief to the eye. They would have gladly welcomed even one of the grisly trail-markers, but there was nothing to guide their steps but the compass and Tharkay’s instincts.

The rest of the long dry day passed by, as terrible and monotonous in its turn as the storm, miles of desert grinding slowly away under their feet; there was no sign of life, nor even one of the old crumbling wells. Most of the crew were riding on Temeraire now, trailing the sad little string of camels remaining; as the day wore on, even Temeraire’s head drooped: he too had only had half his usual ration of water.

‘Sir,’ Digby said through cracked lips, pointing, ‘I see something dark over there, though it’s not very big.’

Laurence saw nothing; it was late in the day, with the sun beginning to make queer long shadows out of the small twisted rocks and stumps of the desert landscape, but Digby had the sharp eyes of youth and was the most reliable of his lookouts, not given to exaggeration. So they went on towards it: soon they could all see the round dark patch, but it was too small to be the mouth of a well. Tharkay stopped the camels beside it, looking down, and Laurence slid down from Temeraire’s neck to walk over: it was the lid of one of the lost water-casks, lying incongruously all alone atop the sand, thirty miles of empty desert away from the morning’s camp.

* * *

‘Eat your ration,’ Laurence said sternly, when he saw Roland and Dyer putting down their strips of meat half-eaten: they were all hungry, but the long chewing was painful in a dry mouth, and every sip of water now had to be stolen from Temeraire’s casks; another long day had gone, and still they had found no well. Temeraire had eaten his camel raw, so as not to lose any of the moisture in cooking: only seven left, now.

Two days later they stumbled across a dry, cracked irrigation channel, and on Tharkay’s advice turned northwards to follow its path, hoping to find some water still at its source. The wizened and twisted remains of dead fruit trees still overhung the sides, their small gnarled branches dry as paper to the touch, and as light, reaching for the vanished water. The city took shape out of the desert haze as they rode onwards: shattered timbers jutting out of the sand, sharpened by years of wind into pointed stakes; broken pieces of mud-and-wattle bricks; the last remnants of buildings swallowed by the desert. The bed of the river that had once given life to the city was filled with fine dust; there was nothing living in sight but some brown desert grass clinging to the tops of dunes, which the camels hungrily devoured.

Another day’s journey would put them beyond the hope of turning back. ‘I am afraid this is a bad part of the desert, but we will find water soon,’ Tharkay said, bringing an armful of old broken timbers to the campfire. ‘It is just as well we have found the city; we must be on an old caravan route now.’

Their fire leapt and crackled brightly, the dry seasoned wood going up hot and quick; the warmth and light was comforting in the midst of the ashes and broken relics of the city, but Laurence walked away brooding. His maps were useless, there were no marked roads, nothing to be seen in any direction for miles; and his patience was badly frayed at seeing Temeraire go hungry and thirsty: ‘Pray do not worry, Laurence, I am very well,’ Temeraire had assured him; but he had not been able to keep his eyes from lingering on the remaining camels, and it hurt Laurence to see how quickly he tired, each day, with his tail now often dragging upon the sand: he did not wish to fly, but plodded along in the wake of the camels, and lay down often to rest.

If they turned back in the morning, Temeraire could eat and drink his fill; they might even load two of the water-casks upon him, slaughter an additional camel for him to carry, and try to make Cherchen by air. Laurence thought two days’ flight would see them there, if Temeraire went lightly burdened and had food and water enough. He would take the youngest of the crew: Roland and Dyer and the ensigns, who would slow the others down on the ground and need less water and food for Temeraire to carry; though he would not like leaving the rest of the men, by his calculation the water carried by the last four camels would be just sufficient to see them back to Cherchen by land, if they could manage twenty miles in a day.

Money would then present difficulties: he did not have so much silver he could afford to purchase another great string of camels even if the beasts could be found, but perhaps someone might be found who would take the risk of accepting a note on the strength of his word, offered at an exorbitant rate; or they might exchange some labour: there did not seem to be dragons living in the desert towns, and Temeraire’s strength could accomplish many tasks quickly. In the worst case, he might pry the gold and gems off the hilt of his sword, to be later replaced, and sell the porcelain vase if he could find a taker. God only knew how much delay it would all mean: weeks if not a month, and many fresh risks taken; Laurence took his turn at watch and went to sleep still undecided, unhappy, and woke with Granby shaking him in the early morning, before dawn: ‘Temeraire hears something: horses, he thinks.’

The light crept along the crests of the low dunes just outside the town: a knot of men on shaggy, short-legged ponies, keeping a good distance; even as Laurence and Granby watched, another five or six rode up onto the top of the dune to join them: carrying short curved sabres, and some others with bows. ‘Strike the tents, and get the camels hobbled,’ Laurence said grimly. ‘Digby, take Roland and Dyer and the other ensigns and stay by them: you must not let them run off. Have the men form up around the supplies; backs to that wall, over there, the broken one,’ he added to Granby.

Temeraire was sitting up on his haunches. ‘Are we going to have a battle?’ he asked, with less alarm than eager anticipation. ‘Those horses look tasty.’

‘I mean to be ready, and let them see it, but we are not going to strike first,’ Laurence said. ‘They have not threatened us yet; and in any case, we had much better buy their help than fight them. We will send to them under a flag of truce. Where is Tharkay?’

Tharkay was gone: the eagle also, and one of the camels, and no one remembered seeing him go. Laurence was conscious at first of only shock, more profound than he ought to have felt, having been suspicious. The sensation yielded to a cold savage anger, and dread: they had been drawn just far enough that the camel stolen meant they could not turn back to Cherchen; and the bright beacon of the fire, last night, perhaps had drawn down this hostile attention.

With an effort he said, ‘Very well; Mr. Granby, if any of the men know a little Chinese, let them come with me under the flag; we will see if we can manage to make ourselves understood.’

‘You cannot go yourself,’ Granby said, instantly protective; but events obviated any need for debate on the matter: abruptly the horsemen wheeled around as one and rode away, vanishing into the dunes, the ponies whinnying with relief.

‘Oh,’ Temeraire said, disappointed, and drooped back down onto all fours; the rest of them stood uncertainly a while, still alert, but the horsemen did not reappear. ‘Laurence,’ Granby said quietly, ‘they know this ground, I expect, and we do not; if they mean to have at us and they have any sense, they will go away and wait for tonight. Once we have encamped, they can be on us before we know they are there, and maybe even do Temeraire some mischief. We oughtn’t let them just slip away.’

‘And more to the point,’ Laurence said, ‘those horses were not carrying any great deal of water.’

The soft dented hoofprints led them a wary trail west and southwards, climbing over a series of hills; a little hot wind came into their faces as they walked, and the camels made low eager moaning noises and quickened their pace unasked: over the next rise the narrow green tops of poplar trees came unexpectedly into view, waving, beckoning them on over the rise.

The oasis, hidden in a sheltered cleft, looked only another small brackish pool, mostly mud, but desperately welcome for all that. The horsemen were there gathering on the far edge, their ponies milling around nervously and rolling their eyes as Temeraire approached, and among them was Tharkay, with the missing camel. He rode up to them as if unconscious of any wrong, and said to Laurence, ‘They told me of having seen you; I am glad you thought to follow.’

‘Are you?’ Laurence said.

That stopped him a moment; he looked at Laurence, and the corner of his mouth twisted upwards a little; then he said, ‘Follow me,’ and led them, their hands still full of pistols and swords, around the edges of the meandering pond: clinging to the side of one grassy dune was a great domed structure built of long narrow mud bricks, the same pale straw colour as the yellowed grass, with a single arched opening looking in, and a small window in the opposite wall which presently let in a shaft of sunlight to play upon the dark and shining pool of water that filled the interior. ‘You can widen the sardoba opening for him to drink, only be careful you do not bring down the roof,’ Tharkay said.

Laurence kept a guard facing the horsemen across the oasis, with Temeraire at their backs, and set the armourer Pratt to work with a couple of the taller midwingmen to help. With his heavy mallet and some pry-bars they shortly had tapped away more bricks from the sides of the ragged opening: it was only just large enough before Temeraire had gratefully plunged in his snout to drink, great swallows going down his throat; he lifted his muzzle out dripping wet and licked even the drops away with his long narrow forking tongue. ‘Oh, how very nice and cool it is,’ he said, with much relief.

‘They are packed with snow during the winter,’ Tharkay said. ‘Most have fallen into disuse and are now left empty, but I hoped we might find one here. These men are from Yutien: we are on the Khotan road, and in four more days we will reach the city: Temeraire can eat as he likes, there is no more need to ration.’

‘Thank you; I prefer to yet exercise a little caution,’ Laurence said. ‘Pray ask those men if they will sell us some of their animals: I am sure Temeraire would enjoy a change from camel.’

One of the ponies had gone lame, and the owner professed himself willing to accept in exchange five Chinese taels of silver. ‘It is an absurd amount,’ Tharkay commented, ‘when he cannot easily get the animal home again,’ but Laurence counted the money well-spent as Temeraire tore into the meal with a savage delight. The seller looked equally pleased with his end of the bargain, if less violently demonstrative, and climbed up behind one of the other riders; they and some four or five others at once left the oasis, riding away southwards in a cloud of rising dust. The rest of the horsemen stayed on, boiling water for tea over small grass fires and sending sideways, covert looks across the pond at Temeraire, who now lay drowsy and limp in the shade of the poplars, snorting occasionally in his sleep and otherwise inert. They might only have been nervous for the sake of their mounts, but Laurence began to fear he had by his free-spending given the horsemen cause to think them rich and tempting prey, and he kept the men on close watch, letting them go to the sardoba only by twos.

To his relief, in the waning light the horsemen broke camp and left; their passage away could be followed by the dust which they kicked up, lingering like a mist against the deepening twilight. At last Laurence went himself to the sardoba and knelt by the edge to cup the cold water directly to his mouth: fresh and more pure than any he had tasted in the desert, only a faint earthen taste from lying sheltered inside the clay brick. He put his wet hands to his face and the back of his neck, coming away stained yellow and brown with the dust which had collected upon his skin, and drank another few handfuls, glad of every drop, before he rose again to oversee their making camp.

The water-casks were brimming again and heavy, which displeased only the camels, and even they were not unhappy; they did not spit and kick while being unloaded, as was their usual practice, but submitted quietly to the handling and to their tethers, and eagerly bent their heads to the tender green shrubs around the water-hole. The men’s spirits all were high, the younger boys even playing a little in the cool evening at a makeshift bit of sport with a dead branch as bat and a rolled-up pair of stockings for a ball. Laurence felt certain that some of the flasks being passed from hand to hand held something considerably stronger than water, though he had ordered all liquor poured out and replaced with water before they entered the desert; and they made a merry dinner, the dried meat far more palatable for having being stewed with grain and some wild onions growing near the water’s edge, which Gong Su had pointed out to them as fit for human consumption.

Tharkay took his portion and planted his small tent a little way off, speaking in low voice only to the eagle, resting hooded and silent on his hand after its own meal of a couple of plump and unwary rats. The isolation was not wholly self-imposed: Laurence had not spoken of his suspicions to the men, but his anger that morning at Tharkay’s disappearance had transmitted itself without words, and in any case no-one thought much of his having gone off in such a manner. At worst he might have meant to strand them deliberately: certainly none of them would have been able to find the oasis alone, without the trail accidentally provided by the horsemen; or only a little less bad, he might instead have chosen to abandon them to an uncertain fate, and to secure his own safety by taking a camel and water enough to last him a long time alone. He might have returned to them, having discovered the oasis, but that he had left them only to scout ahead, Laurence could not credit: without a word? With no companion? If not entirely disprovable, still unsatisfying.

What was to be done about him an equal puzzle: they could not manage without a guide, though Laurence could not see continuing with one untrustworthy; yet how another was to be found, he could not well conceive. At least any decision by necessity would be deferred to Yutien: he would not abandon the man alone in the desert, even if Tharkay had meant to do as much to them; at least not with so little proof. So Tharkay was left to sit alone untroubled for the moment, but as the men began to seek their beds, Laurence quietly arranged with Granby a doubled guard on the camels, and let the men think it was only for fear of the horsemen returning.

The mosquitoes sang loudly, all around them, after the sun had gone down; even hands pressed over the ears could not drown out their thin whining voices. The first sudden howling was at first almost a relief, a clear reasonable human noise; then the camels were bellowing and plunging as the horses came stampeding through the middle of the camp, their riders yelling loud enough to drown out any orders Laurence might shout, and scattering the embers of the campfire with long raking branches dragged along the ground.

Temeraire sat up from behind the tents and roared: the camels began struggling all the more wildly against their hobbles, and many of the ponies whinnying in terror bolted away; Laurence heard pistols going off in all directions, and the white muzzle-flashes painfully bright in the dark. ‘Damn you; don’t waste your shot,’ he bellowed, and seized young Allen, pale and frightened, as he stumbled backwards out of a tent with a pistol shaking in his hand. ‘Put that down, if you cannot—’ Laurence said, and caught the pistol as it fell; the boy was sliding limp to the ground, blood spurting from a neat pistol-hole in his shoulder.

‘Keynes!’ Laurence shouted, and thrust the fainting boy into the dragon-surgeon’s arms; he drew his own sword and dashed towards the camels, the guards all staggering uselessly up to their feet, with the thick confused look of men woken from drunken slumber, a couple of hip-flasks rattling empty on the ground beside them. Digby was clinging to the animals’ tethers, nearly dangling by them to keep the camels from rearing: the only one being of any use, even though his gangly young frame was hardly enough weight to keep their heads down, and he was nearly bouncing at the ends of the reins with his fair hair, grown long and unkempt, flopping wildly.

One of the raiders, thrown from his fear-maddened horse, gained his feet; if he could get at the tethers and cut them, the unleashed camels would do half the work, for they would surely bolt directly out of the camp in their present state of confusion and terror; on horseback the raiders could then herd them together and away, and vanish among the hills and valleys of the surrounding dunes.

Salyer, one of the midshipmen on watch, was fumbling his pistol one-handed, trying to cock the hammer and rub at his gummy eyes with the other, while the man bore down on him with sabre raised; suddenly Tharkay was there, snatching the pistol from Salyer’s slack grip. He fired into the raider’s chest, dropping him to the ground, and drew in his other hand a long knife; another of the raiders swung at his head, from on horseback, and Tharkay ducking underneath coolly slit open the animal’s belly. It fell screaming and thrashing, the man pinned underneath and howling almost as loudly, and Laurence’s naked sword swept down once, twice, and silenced them both.

‘Laurence, Laurence, here!’ Temeraire called, and lunged in the dark towards one of the supply tents, the red scattered remnants of the fire giving off a little light, enough to see shadows moving around the edges, and the silhouettes of rearing, snorting horses. Temeraire struck with his talons, fabric ripping as the tent collapsed around the body of a man, and all the other horsemen were suddenly going, drumming hooves going quiet and muffled as they fled from the hard-packed campground onto loose sand, leaving only the mosquitoes behind to raise up their song again.

They had accounted for five men and two horses all told; their losses one of the midwingmen, Macdonaugh, who had taken a sabre-thrust to the belly and now lay gasping quietly upon a makeshift cot; and young Allen: his tent-mate Harley, who had fired off the shot in panic as the horses went thundering by, wept quietly in a corner, until Keynes in his brusque way told the boy, ‘Cease to behave like a watering-pot, if you please; you had better practice your aim: a shot like that would not kill anyone,’ and set him to cutting up bandages for his fellow ensign.

‘Macdonaugh is a strong fellow,’ Keynes said to Laurence quietly, ‘but I will not give you false hope,’ and a few hours before morning, he gave a choked rattling sigh and died. Temeraire dug him a grave in the dry earth some little distance from the watering pool, in the shade of the poplars; very deep, so that sandstorms would not expose the body. The bodies of the other men they buried more shallowly, in a mass grave. The raiders had carried off very little in exchange for their blood: a few cooking pots, a bag of grain, some blankets; and one of the tents had been ruined by Temeraire’s attack.

‘I doubt they will make another attempt, but we had better move on as quickly as we can,’ Tharkay said. ‘If they choose to carry a false report of us back to Khotan, we might find an unpleasant welcome there.’

Laurence did not know what to make of Tharkay: if he were the most brazen traitor alive, or the most inconsistent; or his own suspicions wholly unjust. That had been no coward standing up beside him during the fight, with the panicked animals on every side and the attackers intent only on gain: easy enough for Tharkay to duck away quietly, or even to let the bandits have their way and snatch a camel for himself in the confusion. Still, a man might be brave enough with swords drawn and that say nothing for his character otherwise; though Laurence felt awkward and ungrateful for entertaining the thought.

He would not take further chances, however, at least none unnecessary: if four days’ time brought them safely to Yutien, as Tharkay had promised, well and good; but Laurence would not put them in a position to starve if the promise did not hold true. Fortunately, having gorged himself on the two dead horses, Temeraire was able now without pain to leave the remaining camels unmolested for a couple of days: and at evening on the third he took Laurence aloft, and in the distance they saw the narrow ribbon of the Keriya River shining silver-white in the sunset, interrupting the desert and garlanded with a swath of thick and verdant green.

Temeraire ate his camel that night with pleasure, and they all drank their fill; the next morning they soon came to farmland, bordered on all sides by tall swaying stands of cannabis plants growing higher than a man’s head, planted in perfectly squared rows to anchor the dunes; and vast groves of mulberry trees, leaves rustling against one another in the whisper of breeze, on the approach to the great desert city.

The marketplace was divided into separate quarters, one full of gaily painted wagons that were both transport and shop, drawn by mules or the small shaggy ponies, many of them adorned also with waving collared plumes; in the other, tents of breezy cotton were set up on frameworks of poplar branches to provide a kind of storefront, and smallish dragons in bright spangly jewellery curled around them in company with the traders, raising their heads curiously to watch Temeraire go by; he eyed them with equal interest, and some covetous gleam. ‘It is only tin and glass,’ Laurence said hurriedly, hoping to forestall any desire Temeraire might have to deck himself out in similar wise. ‘It is not worth anything.’

‘Oh; it is very pretty, though,’ Temeraire said regretfully, lingering on a dramatic ensemble rather like a tiara of purple and crimson and brass, with long swooping chains of glass beads draped down the neck.

Like the horsemen they had met, the faces were more Turkish than Oriental, nut-brown in the desert sun, but for the heavily veiled Mahommedan women of whom only their hands and feet could be seen; other women did not cover their faces, but wore only the same four-cornered caps as the men, embroidered lavishly in dyed silks, and watched them with open curious dark eyes: interest returned in at least full measure by the men. Laurence turned to give Dunne and Hackley, the rather exuberant young riflemen, a hard look: they started guiltily and dropped their hands, which they had raised to kiss to a pair of young women across the road.

Trade goods were laid out in every corner of the bazaar: sturdy sacks of cotton canvas standing upon the ground full of grains and rare spices and dried fruit; bolts of silks in queer many-collared patterns of no meaning, neither flowers nor any other image; gleaming treasure-vault walls of stacked chests, with strips of brass hammered on like gilding; bright copper jugs hanging and white conical jars half-buried in the ground, for keeping water cool; and notably many wooden stands displaying an impressive array of knives, their hilts cunningly worked, some inlaid and jewelled, and the blades long and curving and wicked.

They went at first warily through the streets of the bazaar, keeping their eyes on the shadows, but their fears of another ambush proved unfounded: the natives only smiled and beckoned from the stalls, even the dragons themselves calling out invitations to come and buy, some in lovely clear fluting song which Temeraire paused now and again to try and answer with snatches of the dragon language that Tharkay had begun to teach him. Here and there a merchant of Chinese ancestry came out of his stall and bowed low to the ground as Temeraire went by, in respect, and stared in puzzlement at the rest of them.

Tharkay led them unerringly through the dragon quarter and skirting a mosque beautifully painted, the square before it presently full of men and even a handful of dragons prostrating themselves on soft woven prayer-rugs; on the outskirts of the market they came to a comfortable pavilion large enough to accommodate even Temeraire, tall slim wooden columns holding up a roof of canvas, with poplar trees shading the square all around. A little of Laurence’s dwindling supply of silver bought them sheep for Temeraire’s dinner, and a rich pilaf of mutton and onion and moist sweet sultanas for their own, with flat rounds of roasted bread and juicy water-melons to eat in thick slices down to the pale green rind.

‘Tomorrow we can sell the rest of the camels,’ Tharkay said, after the scant leavings had been carried away and the men had disposed themselves around the pavilion, to drowse upon comfortable rugs and cushions; he was feeding the eagle on scraps of sheep’s liver, discarded by Gong Su from the preparations for Temeraire’s meal. ‘From here to Kashgar the oases are not so far apart, and we need only carry enough water for a day.’

No news could have been more welcome; comfortable again in body and spirit, and greatly relieved by their safe crossing, Laurence was inclined to make allowances. To find another guide would take time, and the poplar trees murmuring together around the clearing said that time was short: their leaves had begun to turn gold, early heralds of autumn. ‘Walk with me a moment,’ he said to Tharkay, when the guide had settled the eagle back into its cage and draped it for the night; together they went a little distance back into the lanes of the marketplace, the tradesmen beginning to pack their things away, rolling up the lips of the sacks to cover their dry goods.

The street was busy and crowded, but English was enough privacy; Laurence stopped in the nearest shade and turned to Tharkay, whose face was all polite untroubled inquiry. ‘I hope you have some notion already what I wish to say to you,’ Laurence began.

‘I am sorry it is not so, Captain, and I must put you to the trouble of explication,’ Tharkay said. ‘But perhaps that is best: misunderstandings shall be thus avoided; and I am sure I know of no reason why you should scruple to be frank with me.’

Laurence paused; this sounded to him again more sly half-mockery, for Tharkay was no fool, and he had not spent four days nearly shunned by all their company without noticing. ‘Then I will oblige you,’ Laurence said, more sharply. ‘You have brought us so far successfully, and I am not ungrateful for your efforts; but I am very heartily displeased with your conduct in having abandoned us unannounced in the midst of the desert.

‘I do not want excuses,’ he added, seeing Tharkay’s brow lift. ‘I count them useless, when I cannot know whether to believe them. But I will have your promise that you will not again leave our camp without permission: I want no more of these unannounced departures.’

‘Well, I am sorry not to have given satisfaction,’ Tharkay said thoughtfully, after a moment. ‘And I would never wish to keep you to what now seems to you a bad bargain, out of some sense of obligation. I am perfectly willing we should part ways here if you like. You will be able to find a local guide, in a week or two, perhaps three; but I am sure that cannot mean very much: you will certainly still arrive home in Britain quicker than the Allegiance should have brought you there.’

This answer neatly evaded the required promise, and brought Laurence up directly: they could not easily give up three weeks or one; if that were not an optimistic estimate to begin with, as they knew neither the local language, which seemed closer to Turkish than Chinese, nor the customs: Laurence was not even sure they were still in territory claimed by China, or in some smaller principality.

He swallowed anger, renewed suspicion, and a hasty reply, though all three stuck unpleasantly in his throat. ‘No,’ he said, grimly. ‘We have no time to waste; as I think you know very well,’ he added: Tharkay’s tone had been bland, unreadable, but a little too much so; and there was something knowing in his look, as though he understood their special urgency. Laurence still had the letter from Admiral Lenton secure in his baggage, but now he recalled the smudged softness of the red wax seal, when the letter had first been given him: easy enough, bringing the letter across all these miles, to have pried it open and then sealed it up again.

But Tharkay’s expression did not change at the hint of accusation; he only bowed and said mildly, ‘As you wish,’ and turning went back to the pavilion.

Chapter Four

The red dry mountains looked as though they had been folded directly up out of the desert plain, cliffs painted with broad stripes of white and ochre, without any softening foothills at their base. They remained stubbornly distant: for a whole day Temeraire flew at a steady pace and seemed to come no closer, the mountains drawing themselves ever upwards and out of reach, until suddenly canyon walls were rising to either side. In the space of ten minutes’ flight the sky and desert vanished away behind them, and abruptly Laurence understood the red mountains themselves were the foothills for the towering white-clad peaks beyond.

They camped in wide meadowlands high in the mountains, fortressed by the peaks and sparsely furred with sea-green grass, small yellow flowers standing up like flags from the dusty ground. Horned black cattle with bright red tassels dangling over their foreheads eyed them warily as Tharkay negotiated their price with the herdsmen in their round and conical-roofed huts. At night a few white flakes came silently drifting down, glittering against the night; they melted snow in a great leather pot for Temeraire to drink.

Occasionally, they heard a faint, far-off call of dragons that made Temeraire prick up his ruff; and once in the distance saw a feral pair go spiralling up chasing each other’s tails, crying out in shrill joyful voices before they vanished around the other side of a mountain. Tharkay made them put veils over their eyes, to shield against the brilliant glare; even Temeraire had to submit to this treatment, and very odd he looked with the thin white silk wrapped around his head like a blindfold. Even with such precautions, their faces grew pink and sunburnt for the first few days.

‘We will need to take food with us, past Irkeshtam,’ Tharkay said, and when they had made camp outside the old rundown fortress, he went away and returned nearly an hour later with three locals herding along a small band of fat, short-legged pigs.

‘You mean to take them up alive?’ Granby cried, staring. ‘They will squeal themselves hoarse and then die of terror.’

But the pigs seemed curiously somnolent and indifferent to Temeraire’s presence, much to his puzzlement: he even leaned over and nudged at one with his nose, and it only yawned and sat down thump on its hindquarters in the snow. One of the others kept attempting to walk into the brick wall of the fortress, and had to be hauled repeatedly back by its minders. ‘I put opium in their feed,’ Tharkay said, in answer to Laurence’s confusion. ‘We will let the drug wear off when we make camp, and he will eat after we have rested; then the rest we dose again.’

Laurence was wary of this notion, and not inclined to trust Tharkay’s offhand assurance; he watched closely after Temeraire ate the first pig. It went to its death perfectly sober and kicking all the way, and Temeraire showed no inclination afterwards to begin flying in mad circles; although he did fall into rather a deeper sleep than usual, and snored loud enough to rattle.

The pass itself climbed so high they left the clouds below them, and all the rest of the earth; only the nearby mountain peaks kept them company. Temeraire panted for breath, now and again, and had to let himself down to rest wherever the ground permitted, leaving his body outlined in the snow as he lifted away. There was a queer sense of watchfulness, all the day long; Temeraire kept looking around as he flew, and pausing to hover in mid-air, with a low uneasy rumbling.

Having cleared the pass, they set down for the evening in a small valley sheltered from the wind between two great peaks with the ground clear of snow, and anchored their tents at the bottom of the cliff face; the pigs they penned up with a fence of kindling and rope, and let them range freely. Temeraire paced his side of the valley a few times, and then settled himself down with his tail still twitching; Laurence came to sit beside him with his tea. ‘It is not that I hear anything,’ Temeraire said, uncertainly, ‘but I feel as though I ought to be hearing something.’

‘We have a good position here: we cannot be come upon by surprise, at least,’ Laurence said. ‘Do not let it keep you from sleeping: we have posted a watch.’

‘We are very high in the mountains,’ Tharkay said unexpectedly, startling Laurence: he had not heard the guide come towards them. ‘You may only be feeling the change, and the difficulty of breathing: the air has less body.’

‘Is that why it is so hard to breathe?’ Temeraire said, and abruptly sat up on his haunches; the pigs began to squeal and run as nearly a dozen dragons, motley in colours and size, came winging down towards them. Most of them landed skilfully clinging to the cliff face, peering down towards the tents, faces sleek and clever and hungry looking; the largest three dropped down between Temeraire and the makeshift pen, and sat up on their haunches, challengingly.

They were none of them large: the lead fellow something smaller than a Yellow Reaper, pale grey with brown markings and a single crimson patch across half his face and down his neck, with a great many spiny horns around his head; he bared his teeth and hissed, the horns bristling. His two companions were of slightly larger size, one a collection of bright blues and the other dark grey; and all three heavily scarred with the relics of a great many battles, the marks of tooth and claw.

Temeraire outweighed nearly all three of them together: he sat up very straight and his ruff opened wide, stretching like a frill around his head, and gave a small growling roar in answer: a warning. The ferals, so isolated from all the world, likely would not know to fear Celestials as anything other than large dragons, for their size and strength; but the strange ability of the divine wind was by far their most dangerous weapon, and without visible means could shatter stone and wood and bone. Temeraire did not now raise the divine wind against them, but there was an edge of it in his roaring, enough to rattle Laurence’s bones; and before it, the ferals quailed, the red-patched leader’s horns flattening against his neck, and like a flock of alarmed birds they all flung themselves up and out of the valley.

‘Oh; but I did not do anything, yet,’ Temeraire said, puzzled and a little disappointed. Above them the mountains were still grumbling with the echoes of his roar, piling them one on another into a continuous roll of thunder, a sound almost magnified beyond the original. The white face of the peak stirred at the noise, sighed, and let go its hold upon the stone, the entire slab of snow and ice sliding free almost gently; for a moment yet it kept its shape, moving with slow and stately grace, then cracks like spiderwebs spread across its surface, and the whole collapsed into a great billowing cloud and came galloping down the slope towards the camp.

Laurence felt like the captain of a ship on her beam-ends, seeing the wave that would make her broach-to: in perfect consciousness of disaster and powerless to avert it; there was no time to do anything at all but watch. So quickly did the avalanche come that a couple of the luckless ferals, though they had all tried at once to flee, were swept up in its path. Tharkay was shouting, ‘Get away! Get away from the cliff!’ to the men standing around the tents, pitched directly in the path; but even as he cried out, the vast eruption spilled off the slope, swept over the camp, and then the boiling mass came seething and roaring across the green valley floor.

First there came a shock of cold air, almost physical in its force; Laurence was flung back against Temeraire’s great bulk, reaching out to catch Tharkay’s arm as the guide too stumbled back, and then the cloud itself struck and tore away the world: like being thrust abruptly face-forward into deep snow and held down, a cool muffling eerie blue all around him, a hollow rushing sound in his ears. Laurence opened his mouth for air that was not there, flakes and slivers of ice like knives scraping his face, his lungs heaving against the pressure on his chest, on his limbs, his arms spread-eagled and pressed back so that his shoulders ached.

And then as quickly as it had come, the terrible weight was gone. He was buried standing-up in snow, solidly to the knees and thinning to a solid icy crust over his face and shoulders; with a great desperate heave he broke his arms free, and scraped at his mouth and nostrils with clumsy, benumbed hands, lungs burning until he could drag in the first raw, painful breaths; next to him Temeraire was looking more white than black, like a pane of glass after a frost, and sputtering as he shook himself off.

Tharkay, who had managed to turn his back to the cloud, was in a little better case, already dragging his feet out of the snow. ‘Quickly, quickly, there is not a moment to lose,’ he said, hoarsely, and began to flounder across the valley towards the tents: or where the tents had been; now a sloping heap of snow, piled ten feet deep or more.

Laurence dragged himself free and went after him, pausing to pull up Martin when he saw the midshipman’s straw-yellow hair breaking the snow: he had been only a short way off, but having been knocked flat, he was more deeply buried beneath the snow. Together they struggled through the great drifts: thankfully nearly all soft wet snow, not ice or rock, but dreadfully heavy nonetheless.

Temeraire followed anxiously after and heaved great mounds of snow this way and that at their direction, but he was forced to be careful with his talons. They soon uncovered one of the ferals, struggling like mad to get herself free: a little blue-and-white creature not much bigger than a Greyling; Temeraire seized her by the scruff of her neck and dragged her loose, shaking her free, and in the pocket underneath her body they found one of the tents half-crushed, a handful of the men gasping and bruised.

The feral tried to fly away as soon as Temeraire set her down, but he caught her again and hissed at her, some broken words of the dragon-tongue mingling with ordinary anger; she startled and fluted something back, and then, after he hissed again, she turned abashed and began to help them dig; her smaller claws were better for the more delicate work of getting out the men. The other feral, slightly larger, in motley of orange and yellow and pink, they found pinned at the very bottom of the slope, in much worse case: one wing hanging torn and wildly askew, he made low terrible keening noises and only crouched, shivering and huddled against the ground, when they had freed him.

‘Well, it took you damned long enough,’ Keynes said, when they had dug him out: he had been sitting placidly in the sick-tent, waiting, while the terrified Allen hid his face in his cot. ‘Come along; you can be of some use for once,’ he said, and at once loaded the boy down with bandages and knives and dragged him over to the poor injured creature, who warily hissed them away until Temeraire turned his head and snapped at him; then, cowed, he hunched down and let Keynes do as he liked, only whimpering a little as the surgeon moved the broken spines back into their places.

Granby they found unconscious and blue-lipped, buried nearly upside down, and Laurence and Martin together carried him carefully to cleared ground, covering him with the folds of the one tent they had managed to extract, lying beside the riflemen, who had been standing together very near the slope: Dunne, Hackley, and Lieutenant Riggs, all of them pale and still. Emily Roland managed to dig her own head out, nearly swimming up through the snow, after Temeraire had swept away most of the top layers, and called until they came and got her and Dyer free, the two clutching at each other’s hands.

‘Mr. Ferris, I make all accounted for?’ Laurence asked, near half an hour later; his hand came away bloody from his eyelids, rubbed raw with snow.

‘Yes, sir,’ Ferris said, low: Lieutenant Baylesworth had just been dug out, dead of a broken neck, the last man missing.

Laurence nodded, stiffly. ‘We must get the wounded under cover, and manage some shelter,’ he said, and looked around for Tharkay: the guide was standing a little distance away, head bent, holding the small, still body of the eagle in his hands.

Under Temeraire’s narrow gaze, the ferals led them to a cold, encrusted cave in the mountain wall; as they went in deeper, the passage grew warmer, until it opened up without warning into a great hollowed-out cavern, with a pool of steaming sulphurous water in the middle, and a crudely carved channel for fresh snow-melt running into it. Several more ferals were disposed around the cavern, napping; the leader with the red patch was curled up on an elevated perch, atop a levelled-off rise, chewing meditatively upon the leg-bone of a sheep.

They all startled and made small hissing noises as Temeraire ducked into the chamber, with the injured feral clinging onto his back and the rest of them following behind; but the little blue-and-white dragon sang out some reassurances, and after a moment a few more of the dragons came forward to help the injured one climb down.

Tharkay stepped forward and spoke to them in their language, approximating several sounds of it with whistles and cupping his hands around his mouth, gesturing towards the cave passage. ‘But those are my pigs,’ Temeraire said, indignantly.

‘They are all certainly dead by now from the avalanche, and will only rot,’ Tharkay said, looking up surprised, ‘and there are too many for you to eat alone.’

‘I do not see what that has to do with anything,’ Temeraire said; his ruff was still bristling wide, and he looked over the other dragons, particularly the red-patch one, with a martial eye. They in turn uneasily shuffled and stirred, wings half rising from their backs and folding in again, and watched Temeraire sidelong.

‘My dear,’ Laurence said quietly, laying a hand on Temeraire’s leg, ‘only look at their condition; I dare say they are all very hungry, and would never else have tried to encroach upon you. It would be unkind in the extreme, were you to chase them away from their home that we might shelter here, and if we mean to ask their hospitality, it is only right we should share with them.’

‘Oh,’ Temeraire said, considering, and the ruff began slightly to curl back down against his neck: the ferals truly did look hungry, all whipcord muscle and taut leathery hide, narrow faces and bright eyes watching, and many of them showed signs of old illness or injury. ‘Well, I would not like to be unkind, even if they did try to quarrel, first,’ he at last agreed, and addressed them himself; their first expressions of surprise gave way to a wary half-suppressed excitement, and then the red-patch one gave a quick short call and led a handful of the others out in a flurry.

They came presently back, carrying the bodies of the pigs, and watched with fixed and staring interest as Gong Su began to butcher them. Tharkay having managed to convey a request for wood, a couple of the smaller flew out and returned dragging some small dead pine trees, grey and weathered, which they inquiringly offered; shortly Gong Su had a crackling fire going, smoke drawing up a crevice into the high recesses of the cave, and the pigs were roasting deliciously. Granby stirred and said vaguely, ‘Would there be spareribs?’ much to Laurence’s relief; he was soon roused and drinking tea, hands shaking so he needed help to hold the cup, though they seated him as near the fire as they could.

The crew were all of them inclined to cough and sneeze, the boys particularly, and Keynes said, ‘We ought put them all in the water: to keep the chest warm must be the foremost concern.’

Laurence agreed without thinking and was shortly appalled by the sight of Emily bathing with the rest of the young officers, innocent of both clothing and modesty. ‘You must not bathe with the others,’ Laurence said to her urgently, having bundled her out and into a blanket.

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