He sighed and closed his eyes for a little rest, while the men made their own small smoky fire, and cooked a little salt pork to eat with their biscuit, and they all disposed of themselves to sleep; the pleasant coolness of the night crept on, and Temeraire found himself half-drowsing, listening just in case the kangaroos should come back; the hopping ought to make a noise, he felt, and abruptly a short high shriek startled him up, wide-eyed and looking.
Dawn had not quite broken, but the sky was paling; the men were all sitting up around him, blurred grey shadows against the ground, not moving.
The yell had cut off as abruptly as it had begun. Laurence stood, walking amongst the men to count heads as the light crept nearer, and there was a spare hollow in the ground with empty shoes set beside it, where someone had been sleeping.
“It’s them,” O’Dea said, “—waiting out in the dark and picking us off one by one, taking us in the night. The egg is only bait to lure us on deeper into their country, so they can kill us all. We never ought to be able to follow them otherwise—”
“There’s witchery in it, I say,” another man muttered, not low.
The men were for leaving at once, at once; no-one proposed staying this time to search any longer for the luckless Jonas Green. “The ground at the creek has been disturbed a little,” Tharkay said to Laurence quietly, while the hasty packing commenced, and the men warily filled their cans of water afresh, “but I see nothing one might expect, of a grown healthy man being dragged away, alive or dead; they cannot have swept the ground clean behind them.”
“This is a strange country,” Laurence said, low and puzzled, and came to swing himself aboard.
Temeraire was as pleased to be gone, quickly, not only so they might keep looking for the egg: it worried him a little that this mysterious snatching agency might seize on one of his crew. It seemed just as well to have Laurence and all of them safely away. But then in the air he paused, before he had even properly made any height, and stooped swiftly to the lee side of the rock outcropping.
“Oh, not again,” Caesar complained, “and we have not even had breakfast,” but Temeraire paid no attention, none whatsoever, as he thrust his nose into the low, half-hidden hollow in the stone, tearing away the covering of brush: and in the dirt lay a small heap of fragments of bright, red-glazed porcelain, the lemon-curd-yellow pattern of birds smashed apart.
Chapter 9
“I WISH YOU FELLOWS would make up your minds,” Caesar said, “are we looking for smugglers, or natives, or the egg; and can’t we go find something to eat, instead?”
“Pray don’t be so thick,” Temeraire said, “we are looking for all three, of course, and all three of them are one; and we will go get something to eat when Tharkay has worked out their trail and which way we ought to go.”
This conclusion seemed quite self-evident to him, so he was puzzled to find Rankin utterly dismissive of the notion, and even Laurence saying to Tharkay, “Can the natives be responsible for the smuggling of the goods? I suppose the French might be supplying them, at some distant port—”
“It would certainly save them a great deal of labor,” Tharkay said, “if I do not see how the natives could profit from the effort of carrying large quantities of goods across the width of an entire continent, only to the Sydney market.”
“Why should they not like the goods for themselves?” Temeraire said, “—the porcelain is very nice; although they have been careless again.” Anyone would have liked the piece, he thought, when it had been whole. “While I cannot really wish anything so nice broken, if they meant to break them anyway, it would be very useful if they should drop some others, as they go; and perhaps they may. Which way have they gone?” he asked, which after all was the real, the crucial point.
It was a little disheartening that Tharkay would have it that the pieces were older—had been here since the last rainfall, which certainly had not been in the last week, and of course that was far too long; but he insisted. Temeraire sighed a little, but after all, this was still a trail: if they had come this way before, then likely they had come this way again, or at least should end in the same place.
“And that would suit very well,” Temeraire said to Laurence, tearing hungrily into his meat; they had gone on, and taken a few kangaroos to breakfast upon, “if we might fly on, and then wait for them to come to us, now that we know they will not be carrying the egg onto a ship somewhere, and over the ocean where we can never get at it again.”
He looked for more shards or broken bits as they flew onward, now: if the ground had not been such an inconveniently bright color, it might have been easier; and also there were quite distinct sections, flying over, some of which were much more troublesome to examine. Temeraire preferred those where the trees and shrubs were scant and fire-blackened, and the grass very low to the ground, but in the afternoon when they had flown past a dry creek bed lined with the dark green shrubs, the vegetation flourished up again, huge straw-yellow mop-heads of grasses and pale green tender shrubs everywhere, trees spiking up.
Caesar did not help, either; he would have it that one could not hunt very well here, and they had very likely lost the trail, and the aborigines had gone quite another way, and so forth. And all the while the hot, dusty wind blew and blew into Temeraire’s nostrils, and his eyes, and the red sand gritted upon his hide and collected in small pockets as his wings rolled through each stroke, and itched; and the men in the belly-netting muttered low and sullenly of home, and called out now and again to try and wheedle a halt for “a little grog, sir; it is downright inhuman, in this heat.”
Caesar murmured and complained also, muffled by the heat and wind, until after an hour he said suddenly, “Hi, what is that there,” and Temeraire halted mid-air and whipped his head around, hovering.
“I saw something there, I thought,” Caesar said, but Temeraire flew back and forth and saw not the faintest gleam of foreign color among all the bushes and trees, not a track or even much of a clearing which could have been a camp, and Tharkay shook his head when he looked an inquiry back.
“Well, it wasn’t color, so much,” Caesar said thoughtfully, on being interrogated; he was flying in lazy circles while Temeraire searched. “Just I thought I saw something moving, but when I sang out it stopped. No, I can’t tell you exactly where; this country all looks the same to me. I think it is pretty wonderful I should have spotted it at all.”
“Very wonderful,” Temeraire said, “when you cannot even say what you saw, and no-one else can see it.”
“I am sure I don’t need to bother, another time,” Caesar said, bristling up his shoulders, and throwing out his red-blazoned chest, “if my effort is so unappreciated; just how I suspected it should be, and my fault, of course, that you can’t hunt it out. If you want my opinion, if there were a hundred aborigines hiding about in this grass, you wouldn’t know it, at all. We ought to fly somewhere else entirely; and at least we might set down and have a rest.”
“I am not so lazy that I must have a rest before mid-day,” Temeraire said. “We have already wasted enough time on whatever it is you saw.”
Rankin was standing in his harness, on Caesar’s back, looking behind them. “We will have to set down,” he said, “in at best an hour: there is a thunderstorm coming on.”
“Whyever should he think so?” Temeraire said to Laurence as he banked away, onto his course; the sky was clear, except for a little bank of blue clouds one might see if one looked around behind, but those were not coming on swiftly.