Watching anxiously from outside with Granby, Laurence could see that Temeraire’s narrow forked tongue, ordinarily pale pink, was presently coated thickly with white, mottled with virulent red spots.
“I expect that is why he cannot taste anything; there is nothing out of the ordinary in the condition of his passages,” Keynes said, shrugging as he climbed out of Temeraire’s jaws, to applause: a crowd of children, both settlers and natives, had gathered around the clearing’s fence to watch, fascinated as if at a circus. “And they use their tongues for scent also, which must be contributing to the difficulties.”
“Surely this is not a usual symptom?” Laurence asked.
“I don’t recall ever seeing a dragon lose his appetite over a cold,” Granby put in, worriedly. “In the ordinary line of things, they get hungrier.”
“He is only pickier than most about his food,” Keynes said. “You will just have to force yourself to eat until the illness has run its course,” he added, to Temeraire, sternly. “Come, here is some fresh beef; let us see you finish the whole.”
“I will try,” Temeraire said, heaving a sigh that came rather like a whine through his stuffed nose. “But it is very tiresome chewing on and on when it does not taste like anything.” He obediently if unenthusiastically downed several large hunks, but only mauled a few more pieces about without swallowing much of them, and then went back to blowing his nose into the small pit which had been dug for this purpose, wiping it against a heap of broad palm leaves.
Laurence watched silently, then took the narrow pathway winding from the landing grounds back to the castle: he found Yongxing resting in the formal guest quarters with Sun Kai and Liu Bao. Thin curtains had been pinned up to dim the sunlight instead of the heavy velvet drapes, and two servants were making a breeze by standing at the full-open windows and waving great fans of folded paper; another stood by unobtrusively, refilling the envoys’ cups with tea. Laurence felt untidy and hot in contrast, his collar wet and limp against his neck after the day’s exertions, and dust thick on his boots, spattered also with blood from Temeraire’s unfinished dinner.
After the translator was summoned and some pleasantries exchanged, he explained the situation and said, as gracefully as he could manage, “I would be grateful if you would lend me your cooks to make some dish for Temeraire, in your style, which might have some stronger flavor than fresh meat alone.”
He had scarcely finished asking before Yongxing was giving orders in their language; the cooks were dispatched to the kitchens at once. “Sit and wait with us,” Yongxing said, unexpectedly, and had a chair brought for him, draped over with a long narrow silk cloth.
“No, thank you, sir; I am all over dirt,” Laurence said, eyeing the beautiful drapery, pale orange and patterned with flowers. “I do very well.”
But Yongxing only repeated the invitation; yielding, Laurence gingerly sat down upon the very edge of the chair, and accepted the cup of tea which he was offered. Sun Kai nodded at him, in an odd approving fashion. “Have you heard anything from your family, Captain?” he inquired through the translator. “I hope all is well with them.”
“I have had no fresh news, sir, though I thank you for the concern,” Laurence said, and passed another quarter of an hour in further small talk of the weather and the prospects for their departure, wondering a little at this sudden change in his reception.
Shortly a couple of lamb carcasses, on a bed of pastry and dressed with a gelatinous red-orange sauce, emerged from the kitchens and were trundled along the path to the clearing on great wooden trays. Temeraire brightened at once, the intensity of the spice penetrating even his dulled senses, and made a proper meal. “I was hungry after all,” he said, licking sauce from his chops and putting his head down to be cleaned off more thoroughly. Laurence hoped he was not doing Temeraire some harm by the measure: some traces of the sauce got on his hand as he wiped Temeraire clean, and it literally burnt upon the skin, leaving marks. But Temeraire seemed comfortable enough, not even asking more water than usual, and Keynes opined that keeping him eating was of the greater importance.
Laurence scarcely needed to ask for the extended loan of the cooks; Yongxing not only agreed but made it a point to supervise and press them to do more elaborate work, and his own physician was called for and recommended the introduction of various herbs into the dishes. The poor servants were sent out into the markets—silver the only language they shared with the local merchants—to collect whatever ingredients they could find, the more exotic and expensive the better.
Keynes was skeptical but unworried, and Laurence, being more conscious of owing gratitude than truly grateful, and guilty over his lack of sincerity, did not try to interfere with the menus, even as the servants daily trooped back from the markets with a succession of increasingly bizarre ingredients: penguins, served stuffed with grain and berries and their own eggs; smoked elephant meat brought in by hunters willing to risk the dangerous journey inland; shaggy, fat-tailed sheep with hair instead of wool; and the still-stranger spices and vegetables. The Chinese insisted on these last, swearing they were healthy for dragons, though the English custom had always been to feed them a steady diet of meat alone. Temeraire, for his part, ate the complicated dishes one after another with no ill-effects other than a tendency to belch foully afterwards.
The local children had become regular visitors, emboldened by seeing Dyer and Roland so frequently climbing on and about Temeraire; they began to view the search for ingredients as a game, cheering every new dish, or occasionally hissing those they felt insufficiently imaginative. The native children were members of the various tribes which lived about the region. Most lived by herding, but others by foraging in the mountains and the forests beyond, and these in particular joined in the fun, daily bringing items which their older relations had found too bizarre for their own consumption.
The crowning triumph was a misshapen and overgrown fungus brought back to the clearing by a group of five children with an air of triumph, its roots still covered with wet black dirt: mushroom-like, but with three brown-spotted caps instead of one, arranged one atop the other along the stem, the largest nearly two feet across, and so fetid they carried it with faces averted, passing it among one another with much shrieking laughter.
The Chinese servants took it back to the castle kitchens with great enthusiasm, paying the children with handfuls of colored ribbons and shells. Only shortly thereafter, General Baird appeared in the clearing, to complain: Laurence followed him back to the castle and understood the objections before he had fairly entered the complex. There was no visible smoke, but the air was suffused with the cooking smell, something like a mixture of stewed cabbage and the wet green mold which grew on the deck beams in humid weather; sour, cloying, and lingering upon the tongue. The street on the other side of the wall from the kitchens, ordinarily thronged with local merchants, was deserted; and the halls of the castle were nearly uninhabitable from the miasma. The envoys were quartered in a different building, well away from the kitchens, and so had not been personally affected, but the soldiers were quartered directly by and could not possibly be asked to eat in the repulsive atmosphere.
The laboring cooks, whose sense of smell, Laurence could only think, had been dulled by the week of producing successively more pungent dishes, protested through the interpreter that the sauce was not done, and all the persuasion Laurence and Baird together could muster was required to make them surrender the great stew-pot. Baird shamelessly ordered a couple of unlucky privates to carry it over to the clearing, the pot suspended between them on a broad tree branch. Laurence followed after them, trying to breathe shallowly.