clear and no dependence upon the wind; but their passage through the jungle was more akin to the slow creep of a ship through the doldrums, being towed by her boats: Iskierka could not fly for long. She leaned heavily on Kulingile and Temeraire, who took it in turn to brace her up, but even they could not support her massive weight very well or for any real length of time. Granby drooped upon her back; she drooped in mid-air, and often came down to rest in the body of the river and moved along like some vast steaming river snake, paddling herself along.
The heat was tremendous, and the air of the jungle close and thick around them when they flew low, or crept after Iskierka in the river. Hammond urged speed, and looked piteous for it: he mopped his brow with shaking hands nearly every minute, and slept fitful and feverish; the other men had by now most of them recovered, but Hammond had never given the impression of particular resilience, and their journey had strained stronger men to the limits. But there was no speed to be had: all energy, it seemed, had been wrung out of them.
Mrs. Pemberton, in her long black dress, was an improbable and lone figure of civilization amid their increasingly ragged number: she managed by dint of quiet but firm requests of a few well-chosen men—those not so tired as to refuse to move but disinclined to argument or quarrel—to every evening arrange a small separate campsite and fire for herself and Roland, and even hot wash-water.
They dragged themselves slowly through the jungle, until Laurence dreamed one night of gulls crying, and woke to hear their voices: when Temeraire went aloft there was a cloud of them wheeling and circling in the distance over the great mouth of the river where it met the open endless ocean blue: they had come to the shore of the Atlantic.
Iskierka lay down in a tidal pool and shut her eyes; Granby was lifted down from her back and carried into the shade of palm-trees. Temeraire and Kulingile went out into the ocean, and did not come back for a full day and night; Laurence had begun to fear in earnest when looking out over the waves, under his shading hand, he saw the strange apparition approaching: a vast misshapen creature with four wings and no limbs.
“Clear the shore, there,” he called, when they came closer; and in exhaustion the two dragons set down their prize: a true monster of the deep, a blue whale not perhaps fully grown, but even so nearly larger than them both together.
“ ’Twould bring twenty thousand pounds rendered down, I expect,” one of the sailors, an old whaler, said in hushed tones, as they sank a sharpened spear into the blubber and cut away to find it nearly a foot deep. Every man had a slice, and Iskierka ate a good two tons of the stuff; Temeraire and Kulingile had already eaten.
“I killed it with my roaring, when it came up for breath, and then we took it in turns to keep the whole above water while the other ate,” Temeraire said, drowsily, while Laurence stroked his muzzle, “for we thought that should make it easier to carry back: but I do not mind admitting to you, Laurence, that I rather worried it was too large even so. Oh! I am very tired.”
In the morning, Iskierka finished another meal of whale meat and blubber, and roused enough from her torpor to say peevishly, “Where is Granby? Why is he not with me?” and then she saw him.
“If none of you are going, I am,” she said fiercely, when she had overcome her first confusion, after Granby did not answer her: his eyes were heavy-lidded and far-away, lost in fever and in pain. “He must have a surgeon: he
There were seven other men burning with fevers and the mortification of small wounds, mere scratches acquired in passing which had at first gone unnoticed, until they had gone quickly to rot; two had already been buried. Laurence had not yet decided to press forward, undecided as to the greater evil: he had seen enough men die, at the surgeons’ hands, not to easily take on the risk of moving Granby only to deliver him into those hands, even if any skilled man might be found near-by.
But Iskierka’s determination followed on the bleak acknowledgment there was scarcely any risk to be run, anymore. Gently they bundled Granby onto a stretcher made of branches and woven vines, and covered him with tented leaves against the sun. “I will go and hang on to him, sir,” Roland said, and not even Temeraire protested her climbing aboard Iskierka’s back to help keep Granby shielded and in place.
They turned southward, and came within a day to Belém: the small city huddled down behind its walls, and bells ringing out wildly in alarm as the dragons came into view. “Pull up!” Laurence shouted, realizing too late: the inhabitants saw only four dragons of enormous size, with no uniformed troops and no flags, and of no easily recognizable European breeds: Temeraire was Chinese, Iskierka Turkish, Churki Incan, and Kulingile a fresh cross and wholly unfamiliar. “Temeraire, pull up, and make Iskierka do the same: they will fire on us in a moment.”
Iskierka thought only of Granby, at present, and was diving for the city square: Temeraire plunged beneath her, and bodily heaved her up and out of range even as pepper-guns spoke by the dozen; the thin black clouds spread like a pall over the city’s walls, and then the narrow, long-throated cannon roared out at them and the small barbed balls flew.
But the town was better armed than generaled: the first spurt of firing died away, and a second did not come for nearly ten minutes, and was flung in their direction despite all the dragons having withdrawn beyond the range; when this had finished, Laurence touched Temeraire, and they dived forward into the square, where a regiment was trying to form up with what looked to be half the soldiers missing.
“Stop that,” Temeraire said angrily, in French, “we are not here to attack you, at all: we are British, not the Tswana, and we are here to help.”
“I ought to be more grateful,” Granby said, “seeing how I have had one close-run thing of it after another, and I amn’t in the ground yet; and I don’t mean to complain, but what a nuisance it will be,” answering Laurence, who had complimented him on the progress of the healing stump. The relief of their proving friend rather than foe had spurred a spirit of generosity on the part of the city, improved by Hammond’s presenting them to the local governor in the light of saviors who had come to assist against the invasion; Laurence suspected he had not yet mentioned the altered circumstances in the Incan empire. An excellent surgeon had been provided, along with enough strong spirits to render Granby still more insensible than his fever; and several religious were now nursing him day and night.
“I know fellows go up and down well enough regardless,” Granby added, “and I suppose I can get a hook, so pray don’t listen to me; meanwhile, we had better be going, hadn’t we? I can’t make out all of what they are saying, here, though I made my Spanish tolerably good when I was stationed in Gibraltar, but it seems pretty clear we are needed in Rio yesterday if we are to have any hope of finding the Regent there, anyway.”
“We will not go for a few days more,” Laurence said quietly; Granby was still pale and fever-hectic. “Temeraire is working with their local priest, and several of the traders, to plot us a route: we will save the time twice over, in not having to hunt after water as we fly.”
“All right, then; and tell Iskierka to behave herself, and I will creep out onto the balcony again to-night,” Granby said, and let himself sink back against the pillows, his eyes already closing; Laurence pressed his good shoulder, and went out to be pounced on for information by an anxious and fretting dragon.
“I am glad you killed so many of those dragons,” Iskierka said to Temeraire, when Laurence had given her his report, and gone to speak with the surgeon about some point of the surgery, “very glad; only I wish I had done it, and perhaps I will go back and do it now. If Granby should not get well, I shall, too.”
“That would not be in the least sensible,” Temeraire said, “for we were fighting them in the dark: you will never recognize the particular dragons in question, and it is not as though all of them had an equal share in the assault upon us: I dare say there are a great many of that sort of dragon who never heard of us at all. If you would like to blame someone, you had better blame the Inca; or even Napoleon, for I suppose the Inca set the dragons on us for his sake. Anyway you are still not well, either: have some more of this cow.”
Iskierka ate, if sullenly, and Temeraire bent his head over the map which Sipho was drawing up, according to his instructions and what Temeraire had gleaned from the various traders who had been marched unwillingly up to him for questions.
Iskierka swallowed the haunch and said, “That whale.”
“Yes?” Temeraire said, absently.
“May I have it?” she said, and leaned over to nudge Kulingile. “And your half, also.”
“Can I have the head of your last cow?” Kulingile asked, opening an eye.
“Yes, all right,” Iskierka said, and pushed over the cauldron in which it had been stewed.
“If you like; but what do you mean to do with it?” Temeraire said. “It is nearly half-a-day’s flight away from
