Crucible of Gold

and hopeless castaways by dragons the size of frigates.

Kulingile had gone still further: he had flown out to a rocky outcropping some distance out from the shore and sat there perched on his haunches with Demane held in his cupped talons; an occasional protesting noise might be heard from him, and he waved at the shore urgently once in a while, but Temeraire had firmly rejected the notion of going to fetch him.

“You could not wish me to be so very rude, Laurence,” he said, “and anyway I am sure nothing could be more provoking at present; not that I could not fight Kulingile, but I do not in the least wish to do so.” Meanwhile he had laid himself in a protective arc, and Iskierka had thrown several of her coils over his hindquarters, and so entwined the two had made a wall of themselves around Laurence and Granby.

“Lord, Ferris, you needn’t look so sour,” Granby added now, as Ferris trudged down the beach to report again. “I am sorry for the poor damned fools, but it’s no worse to be dragon-clawed than hung at the end of the day, and they are man and all of them mutineers. Nothing much worse can have happened, I suppose, while we have been sitting here watching.”

“Oh, can’t it,” Ferris said, losing in impatience the formal manner which was not so thoroughly seated in aviators under any circumstances. “There isn’t any biscuit to run out: a couple of those big palms came down in the stream, and a corner of it has been trickling into the new cellar for the last four hours.”

The cellar was two inches in mud stinking of spoilt salt pork: all the barrels on the bottom level mired deep. Ferris had already put some of the men to prying open the ruined barrels and shifting what biscuit was not soaked into new containers roughly formed out of palm leaves. Nearly half the already-inadequate supply gone: “We would starve, if Kulingile hadn’t thinned us out,” Granby said, dropping himself wearily back to the sand after he had peered down. “Or will we starve anyway?” he added, to Gong Su.

“I am afraid we may be a little hungry in two months,” Gong Su said: by which he diplomatically meant, Laurence supposed, that by then they would likely be drawing lots for rations, day-to-day.

But not all of them: he would not starve, and not Granby, and not Demane; they could not be allowed to starve, or even go hungry enough to alarm their beasts. Laurence looked away, his fingers hooked into his belt and drumming on the dangling ring where the harness ought to have been attached; the French had taken that, too.

“Perhaps the dragons might take a whale,” Granby said. “I suppose one whale would set us up for another month, even if we will get tired of nothing but meat pretty soon.”

“They are not likely to find anything but finwhales,” Laurence said. “And not even a heavy-weight is going to bring one of those to shore: it can always dive away.”

“Captain,” Gerry said, running up to them, “Roland wants you: she is awake again.”

Poor Roland was on a pallet set aside from the other wounded, and Laurence steeled himself to show no dismay: her face was swollen into purple grotesquerie, the lines unrecognizable, and her nose badly broken and imperfectly set. The sailor’s boot had left her cheek torn open and the corner of her mouth; he was afraid it would surely scar. “Well, Roland, not too badly, I hope,” he said.

“No, Captain,” she said, the words coming slow and laborious through the slurring, “but Demane—Gerry says Demane is all right, but everyone is here—”

“Kulingile has gone broody and hauled him out on a bit of rock,” Granby said. “Never fear, Roland, he’ll do; when you are better you can walk out and hear him yelling if you like.”

“I mean everyone else is still here, in camp,” she said. “Did he tell you about the ship?”

“A ship?” Laurence said, at once eager and yet dismayed: by now any ship Roland and Demane might have sighted in the morning would be well away, in who knew what direction. “Where away?” he asked, already calculating in his mind—if he and Granby should set out at once, with Temeraire and Iskierka, what course would cover the best distance—

“The other side of the island, the long cove,” Roland said, meaning a narrow twisting inlet which Forthing had reported from the aerial survey, which penetrated deeply into the interior: too impassable for dragons to follow very far inside the island.

“Well, that’s a piece of luck,” Granby said. “A ship really at anchor?”

“No, no,” Roland said. “Wrecked.”

* * *

There was no sense in beginning until the next morning, when Roland insisted she was well enough to show them the way, though Laurence would have spared her another day to recover. “Better sooner than late, sir,” she said, and indeed if there were one point of agreement among all their party it was the desire to escape the macabre ruin of their shore encampment, with the ashes and smoke of the dead being carried ceaselessly upon them by the sea-wind.

If they had not had so many wounded, even the many practical difficulties of moving their remaining supply to some other beach would not have been permitted to stand in the way. During the night three more had died, others were beginning feverish, and they were all of them hungry and all badly parched: the stream now only sluggishly worked to refill the small basin which they had originally dug, where the dragons could drink.

Kulingile had come back to shore only once and during the night, as secretively as a dragon approaching twenty-six tons might be expected to manage, to let Demane get a canteen from Sipho.

“He won’t listen to me at all,” Demane said, gulping hurriedly in Kulingile’s looming shadow: the dragon’s body was swaying back and forth from the energetic lashing of his tail, and the spikes upon his shoulders were bunched and bristling. “He wouldn’t bring me in until I started coughing I was so dry, and keeps too close a watch for me to swim to shore. Sir, we found a ship—”

“Roland told us,” Granby said, “so don’t fret him trying to get away. It’s bad enough already: why the devil didn’t you run for the forest when Roland told you? You and Laurence,” he added, in some exasperation. “But at least it’s not too late for you to learn better.”

“Is she—” Demane said.

“Midwingman Roland will be perfectly well,” Laurence said, flatly, “and we will discuss your excursion when circumstances better permit.”

Demane darted a guilty look, and then Granby called, “All right, Kulingile, he’s done; and we’ll have a guard set when he needs to come for water next, only give us a shout.”

Kulingile answered by snatching Demane away, but he settled back onto his rock more easily, and in an hour he had let Demane sit upon his back instead of clutched in his talons. Demane looked not much better pleased but sat watching them forlornly with his shoulders hunched against the cold water, which sprayed with regularity up Kulingile’s haunches.

“I cannot quite like the notion of going away and leaving only Kulingile to watch over things here; he is too preoccupied,” Temeraire said. “Not that I blame him in the least; only he might not think to keep a watch on my crew, at present.”

“You cannot think me in any danger now,” Laurence said: a more demoralized assemblage than the remaining sailors could not be imagined.

“I did not think you in any danger before,” Temeraire said, “and plainly I was mistaken. It does not seem to me anything is so very different: Kulingile did not kill above thirty of those sailors, and they might as easily make another still, if you wish to blame it all on liquor; which I am by no means ready to do,” he added. “After all, I have seen sailors quite drunk before, and they never set a ship on fire, or tried to snatch you; I am sure there must be something wrong with this particular lot.”

Yes; but if there was, Laurence felt now he had encouraged it by his very despair of them: he had not wished to make anything of them, if anything might be made.

“Yet someone must go hunting,” he said. “You and Iskierka and Kulingile have not been feeding so well you can go two days without anything to eat; and Kulingile will not.”

“Then Iskierka may go,” Temeraire said.

“I shan’t, either,” Iskierka said, raising her head bristling, but after some squabbling the matter was settled by lot: Granby drew a line in the sand and Temeraire dropped onto it a handful of pebbles—pebbles by his standards; each of them a boulder dredged from the ocean floor and roughly the size of a man’s head—and then the results counted off: there were two more on Iskierka’s side of the line than on Temeraire’s.

“I am sure it might come out differently if only I tried again,” Temeraire said, dissatisfied.