“Is that—” he began, and Iskierka dived at once: there was a knot of trees and low, coarse shrubbery, where he thought he had seen a glimmer of movement. She blasted the stand with fire, a quick hot roaring which did not properly catch in the greenery, but would have stunned any enemy within, and then tore into the trees: saplings and bushes cast aside into a singed heap, while she thrust her head within and searched, reaching in her talons to claw and snatch at the ground.
And withdrew: she had a few small rodents collected in a handful of dirt, asphyxiated dead and barely each of them a bite. They ate them anyway, raw and uncleaned. It was of a piece with the sensation Temeraire recognized, of being removed from a place of conscious thought: but then, at present thought was not necessary, nor desirable; and neither was anything like sensibility. They needed only fly, and seek, and hunt so far as was needed to sustain life: he could not be very sorry to be reduced to an animal state, at present, when he must suffer otherwise a fresh dose of self-recrimination.
Iskierka, he had to admit, had not accused him. She might have said, What were you about, to let the egg be left unguarded? Or she might have reproached him for sleeping, or sleeping so soundly, that someone had managed to spirit it away. She had not. Of course, Temeraire might have answered back with the same charge; but he had kept charge of the eggs all the long way from Britain: Iskierka had not had a full share in looking after them. He had not let her have it; and if he had, he was miserably forced to consider, perhaps she would have been more wary, or more alert; perhaps she would not have let the egg be taken.
He had much rather not think at all, than think along such lines. He tore into his little wombats for what virtue they had: they were thin and lean, but each one a small hot bite of juice, revitalizing.
“Are you hungry, Laurence?” Temeraire asked, surfacing only so far from his intent preoccupation.
“No; we do well enough with biscuit, have no fear on that score,” Laurence said, “but my dear, we cannot keep searching for very much longer tonight. The light is failing.”
“We can make torches,” Iskierka said, and turning set her claws into one of the larger eucalypts, shaking it back and forth until at last its roots came loose; a torrent of fire ignited the tree-top and made an oily flame, pungent and queerly medicinal in smell.
But it was not quite so easy as it might have sounded to throw the light properly onto the ground, and when Iskierka had made a torch for Temeraire, he found that holding it was awkward, particularly as he had to be careful of the last little egg hanging forward on his breast, and the convicts slung below in his netting, whenever the wind pushed the fire towards his belly.
He saw the torchlight flicker in reflection, on something on the ground, and turned quite by instinct; cries warned him, and he jerked the torch abruptly aside, but in so doing singed his talons painfully, and dropped it. He half-reached for the falling torch, but then he reconsidered: and went instead for that small reflection, while he yet could place where it had come from.
But he only landed upon stone, and clawing away found only more. Iskierka brought her light over, and it shone abruptly in red and green and pearlescent fire, on a narrow vein his scraping had exposed in the rock.
“Opal,” Tharkay said. The stone was beautiful, and under any other circumstance Temeraire would have greeted the discovery with the utmost pleasure: he could feel nothing for it now, nothing in the least, but only the sharp and bitter disappointment of failure and regret.
“I am very sorry; I beg you will not press on again. You cannot help but miss more than you find, with this method,” Laurence said quietly. “The nights are grown short, in this part of the world; dawn will come soon, and you must have some rest in any case. Better to sleep a little while, and rise at the earliest traces of light.”
The fallen torch was burning down to embers, a little distance off, the only gleam of light anywhere around; all the night seemed very black but for the spray of stars above, and that last orange glow. Iskierka with a low hiss of frustration and wrath flung her own torch aside, and cast herself down in a restless, coiling tumble to sleep.
Temeraire stayed only long enough to be unloaded, although he said, “No; you may leave it there, and the harness; I find I can sleep quite well with it on after all,” when they would have taken off the little egg. He felt very weary suddenly, although he would not have stopped, not for anything, if only there had been any way of continuing the search. He arranged himself carefully on the ground, propped up a little and with the last egg bracketed within his arms, where no one could have come at it without disturbing him.
It did not quite answer, though; uneasily he realized he was used to people clambering over him; so small and light as they were, he might never notice. He decided he should only rest. But sleep stole treacherously over him: his head drooped, his eyelids sank shut, and then the wind shifted, or a branch rubbed along his wing, and he managed to jerk awake again; he nosed anxiously at the egg and made sure all was well, and then the enemy sleep was creeping up again.
He was so tired; and then Laurence, dear Laurence, put a hand on his forearm and climbed over, to sit beside the egg. “Pray get as much rest as you can,” he said. “I can sleep tomorrow when you must be flying.”
“Thank you, Laurence; it should be the greatest comfort to me,” Temeraire said gratefully, and sleep might be allowed to come at last; he closed his eyes on the deeply reassuring sight of the gleam of Laurence’s drawn sword, lying across his knees to be sharpened, and fell at once into slumber.
In the morning, however, the sustaining wrath had fled. All that remained was a grey, grinding misery, the sensation of failure mingled with the certainty that however futile, the search must continue, until the egg’s final fate—dreadful though it was likely to be—should be known. Temeraire nosed at the last, littlest egg to comfort himself: it had begun to harden, he thought, and would soon cease to be in danger; the event could not come quickly enough to suit him.
“You might hurry, if you liked,” he told the egg quietly, “although certainly not so you do yourself any harm; only if you felt hungry, perhaps, or ready to try a little flying, you might come out sooner rather than late.”
Iskierka was pacing, meanwhile: a restless abbreviated movement back and forth, so her long and coiling tail lagged behind when she made her turns, and continued in her original direction for a while, until she lashed it up behind her again. “Well?” she said. “Let us be going; it is light again.”
It was not yet quite light; there was just enough of a paler quality to the sky to see her shape silhouetted black against the horizon, and the faint white clouds of steam issuing from her spikes. But the men had still to be got aboard: the sun was near the horizon as they finally leapt back aloft, and in their climb they broke into the sunlight before it had struck the land.
They had a little while searching before they found the trail itself again, and were obliged to land several times that Tharkay might look for signs. The repeated delays were extremely wearing to the spirit, but Temeraire held back the complaints which he might have wanted to make; he could see that their insistence on continuing to search, into the night, had made it quite impossible for Tharkay to keep any sight of the trail. He could not be unreasonable, he told himself, and added to Iskierka at the fourth such pause, “And the chances of finding the egg must be so much smaller if we should lose the trail entirely; it is only sensible, and we are not wasting time, really, but gaining it.”