Crucible of Gold

wings closed, afterwards, for letting it happen; after he had killed them all, of course.”

Temeraire hunched his shoulders up in horror. He had seen a hanging once, at the Channel: the traitor Choiseul, who had nearly abducted Captain Harcourt and passed secrets to Napoleon; and it had been carried out in front of his beast Praecursoris, also. But at least he had done something to invite his fate: they had not given heaps of treasure, and then been murdered out of hand.

“I do not see how Pahuac could have expected any such thing to happen: no-one could,” he said. “Those men must have been quite mad: certainly Laurence would never do anything of the sort.”

“Yes, but it is not every dragon who has the responsibility of protecting the Sapa Inca,” Curicuillor said. “Pahuac ought to have considered their being mad, and intervened sooner: but he was too afraid. That was not long after the pestilences first came, and so many were dead; he was ready to give over everything only to protect Atahualpa.

“To be fair,” she added, “those men had no dragons with them, so plainly even in your own country they were not worthy of being taken into any dragon’s ayllu: low peasants, or even thieves or murderers, I suppose.”

“Well, most men in Europe are not in any dragon’s keeping,” Temeraire said. “They are afraid of us; and also there are too many of them, and not enough of us, I think. In Britain there are ten million people, Laurence says: there was a census, in the year one.”

She had been lying at her ease, until then, her eyes half-lidded and drowsy even while she spoke; but at this she raised up her head quite wide-awake; and even the women hard at work interrupted their own conversations to stare. “Ten million men,” Curicuillor repeated. “Ten million? Is Britain a very large country?” When they had worked out the relative sizes as best they could from Temeraire’s memory, she sat back on her haunches. “Ten million, and in so small a place: there are scarcely three million in all Pusantinsuyo, these days.”

She bent her head low and was silent for several moments, desolately; her plumage flattened to her neck. Then she said to Temeraire, “You may tell them that, when you have come to Cusco: I am sure it will make them more likely to let you speak with the Sapa Inca. Ten million men! If only we had so many!”

Laurence could not be sorry to leave again, despite the unquestioned generosity of Curicuillor’s hospitality; he could not think her influence on Temeraire and the other dragons an unqualified good, in further encouraging them to embrace the local mode of thinking; and apart from this consideration a stay of any duration would surely have resulted in the rapid diminishment of their force. During the night three men had tried to creep away, and when the dragons were at last loaded for departure, Laurence was forced to ignore that another two had managed to desert despite all of Forthing’s best efforts, or there would have been no departure: in the time spent finding them, others would have run.

“Laurence,” Temeraire said frowning, when they put down for water a few hours later, “there is something wrong: we are short two men.”

So Temeraire had noticed two missing, out of nearly two hundred, when he had never before been so particular about passengers; there had of course been his favorites, among his crew, but until very lately he had rather disdained the sailors than valued them.

“Well, I do not much mind,” Temeraire said, when Laurence had persuaded him that they could not return and hunt for the deserters, “as they are not properly my crew, and I suppose we should have to give them up anyway when we come back to Britain.” He made this a question, and looked at Laurence; when Laurence had affirmed it, he sighed. “Do you think, Laurence, we shall receive a full crew again, when we have got back? It would be nice to be properly scrubbed, as a regular matter; and to have my harness better arranged, and looked-after.”

He was reconciled to the loss further when he considered that Curicuillor had provided them with an abundance of supply, and even made him a present of a pair of silver hoops, which Laurence with difficulty dissuaded him from having pierced through his wing-edges. “They would likely catch, in battle,” Laurence said.

“I am sure I could avoid that,” Temeraire said, “but it is quite true that only one pair would not be very impressive. When we should take a prize next, perhaps we may get a few dozen, and then it will be something like.”

“Something like a Covent Garden dancer,” Laurence said to Granby, with a sigh.

“You shan’t complain to me,” Granby said, with some justice.

The spring was cold and delicious, and they flew the rest of that day over a rolling grassland peopled with roving herds of wild vicuña and a handful of villages: Churki led them on, and the patrol-dragons made no attempt to check them. She had the same orange-and-violet plumage as her mother, and if not quite as large, still more than a respectable match for any Regal Copper: a beast of some twenty years’ age, she had informed Hammond. “I was with the army, until last year,” she said, with her gaze fixed on him in what could only be called an unsettling way, “and I won many honors: then I came home to learn good management from my mother before she goes to the other world. I am ready for an ayllu of my own, now. Very soon I shall begin my establishment.”

She paused and then added, “Do I understand correctly that you are not properly of Temeraire’s ayllu, yourself? And not Iskierka or Kulingile’s, either?”

“I must be flattered,” Hammond said to Laurence, “but I hope it may not be considered neglect of any possible service to our country that I do not pursue the offer; I doubt very much she would be willing to come back with me, if I did.”

“I might put it to her,” Temeraire offered. “Curicuillor was very impressed that we should have so many people in Britain, so perhaps Churki would consider it after all.”

“Oh, ah,” Hammond said, in some alarm: he had still a faintly green cast from the day’s flying, and no desire whatsoever to belong to a dragon.

The next day at morning, Churki suggested he should accompany her, flying; and when he feebly demurred she nosed at a tall stand of green-leaved shrub and said, “Brew those leaves fresh, instead of those strange dried ones you carry with you, and you will feel better; or take a handful and chew them.”

“I trust she would know if it would poison me,” Hammond said doubtfully, and carried a sample to Gong Su for his opinion; Gong Su nibbled and spat and shrugged.

“It is always safer to boil, first,” he said, and when brewed the tea had a peculiar but not unpleasant flavor; by the end of the day Hammond had drunk seven cups, and would certainly have been dead if it had possessed even the most mildly toxic character.

“It is quite miraculous,” he said that night. “Do you know, Captain, I have not been ill even once all the day: I feel myself as I have not since we left New South Wales, and I have been shipboard or dragon-back every day. I feel wonderfully clear-headed, indeed; I am willing to declare that it outstrips tea in flavor and in healthful effect, both.”

Their flight the next day brought them to a deep river valley that Churki called Urubamba, and from there they followed the river upstream through deep gorges. They were descending now, the highest mountains behind them, and more roads and villages scattered beneath their passage, until coming around a narrow pass within the river gorge they saw an immense bridge of rope, stretched from one peak to another.

It was heavily laden: three horsemen leading their beasts, and a train of some dozen llamas behind them, and a large party of men walking—or rather clinging to the sides. The bridge was swaying not only with ordinary use, but towards its destruction: the thick ropes were fraying, and even as they approached a piece of matting fell away towards the river, decomposing into its component sticks.

The horses were blindfold, to be led across more calmly, but they were already uneasy with danger; as they scented the dragons on the wind, they went mad with terror and began to rear and struggle against all handling. If there had earlier been any hope of the party’s clearing the span before all the structure came down, there was none now, and scarce moments to disaster.

Temeraire dived at once; the men on the bridge pointed at him and cried out, shouting, but he passed them and hovering bore up underneath the main portion of the bridge as best he could. “A little farther to port,” Laurence called to him, already unfastening his own harness-straps, “and if you will shift backwards, the weight will lie across your hindquarters. Roland, light along that spare harness, from below; we must get those horses hobbled before