“I have been flying courier duty since I was twelve years old; I can damned well smell a storm,” Rankin said flatly as Caesar came up with them, and twenty minutes later Temeraire was forced to concede, as the wind coming towards them began to die away in odd fits and starts, a suggestion of heaviness in the air, and as they flew on, the cloudbank behind grew long and turned a dark, essential blue striped a little with luminous grey and seaweed-greenish bands of color. The trees stood pale and white-limbed beneath it, lit from before by the sun.
“And it will surely erase all signs of passing,” Temeraire said to Laurence unhappily. “Whatever can be done? I suppose we might fly on anyway, and try to keep ahead?”
“I am not flying on through that,” Caesar said, looking behind apprehensively, as for emphasis the clouds put down abruptly a silent forked line of lightning directly to the earth, spidery and branching and flaring a moment in the dark. The roll of thunder came a long, dragging moment later; and a thin, wispy grey curtain of rain trailed down at one end of the cloud.
“We had better not,” Laurence said, grimly, “and we ought not set down on higher ground, either; you are too large.”
There was a little open space, of bare red earth and yellow grass, among some larger dunes and sheltered from the worst of the rising wind; the clouds were near upon them by then, and spattering gusts of rain which did not fill the eagerly outstretched canteens and cups, but only dimpled the softer loose dirt and left spots upon their clothing, and rattled the dry blades of grass. It was still hot and oppressive. The dark cloud came rolling up across the sky, suddenly quick after its long creeping approach, and the sun vanished.
More great long forks of lightning were tonguing down to the earth against the wide-open horizon, all around, and the voices of the thunder roared and groaned to one another from one side of the clouds to the other, so that one almost imagined meaning into it. Temeraire could not stop himself trying to make sense of it—he felt on the verge, over and over, as when he had learned only a little of some different sort of language, and thought he had just picked out a familiar word or two amid the sea of new sounds.
The wind shifted, coming hard into their faces: another thin spatter of unrefreshing rain thrown into his eyes and nostrils and flinging the dust upon him, so he had to blink and shake his head, snorting; a smell of distant smoke quite clear upon his tongue. Violet and orange haze spread across the sky, and Temeraire put out his wing a little further to shield the egg a little better from the wind.
“Peculiar sort of color there,” Caesar said uneasily, sitting up on his hindquarters: he had grown a great deal, and when he stretched, now, his head might clear Temeraire’s shoulder. It was a strange color: a vivid glow of red as though someone had painted a line across the horizon, and it was altering the color of the sky, casting that umber light on the clouds, so they were at once blue and muddied with orange-red, and still the lightning flashing against it, although now difficult to see.
“May I beg you to put me up,” Laurence said, and Temeraire lifted him so he might see; Laurence opened up his glass and stood looking on Temeraire’s shoulder, and then said, “Thank you; Captain Rankin, Mr. Forthing, I believe we had better get all aboard again.”
The fire came upon them with shocking speed, a low hissing beneath the continuing crash of the thunder and dry wind, whispering with great malice and hunger, and Laurence shouting over the noise, “Leave that, damn your eyes,” while one of the convicts came reluctantly out from behind some bushes and through the grey wisps of drifting smoke, dragging a cask of rum which he had somehow stolen away after their landing, meaning to privately enjoy. The other men jeered and called, yelling at him, “Bring it on quick, Bob, and we’ll be merry as grigs all this fucking flight for once; you won’t have it all to yourself, you old sodden bitch, no you won’t.”
Maynard halting stooped to heave the cask up to his shoulder. The fire was in the distance yet, a broad and smoke-shrouded wall of glowing orange seen through the veil, but already the yellow tips of grass were igniting like red embers upon the crest of the dune behind him as he bent, and a wave of heat came shimmering almost palpable into Temeraire’s face and stole his breath.
Maynard was staggering towards them, and the cask was dripping; small sparks of blue fire going up as the droplets struck the ground to meet the catching tinder of dry grass, and then the thickets were going up ahead of his feet, smoke rising in one thin column after another blown into spreading curtains. Temeraire could not see the fire at all anymore as a separate thing: all the world beyond the dunes was flame, and the smoke climbing into thick and stinging pillars around him.
The man let the cask fall, and began to run shambling and coughing towards them. Temeraire felt very strange; his head was thick and confused and his wings felt leaden. He breathed in deeply, and coughed and coughed also; his throat and chest were closing as though someone had wrapped chains around him, and was trying to draw them taut. “Aloft,” Laurence was roaring, “Temeraire, go aloft,” and Temeraire thought, but I must wait, and he felt quite tired; and then a sharp stab of pain caught his hindquarters, startling his eyes open: when had he closed them?
“Get that egg out of the fire, you damned beast,” Rankin shouted, from behind him, and the egg, the egg: Temeraire with a great bunching effort launched himself up; as his wings spread a great shuddering gust of hot, hot, hot wind blew up from beneath him, catching him aback; Maynard was dangling from the belly-netting, being pulled in, and the cask below was a brief torch burning blue-white out of the smoke for a moment. His hindquarters yet ached: there was a little blood dripping, where Caesar had pricked him hard with his claws, which ran down Temeraire’s legs as he beat upwards. His wings still did not wish to answer very well.
Caesar was ahead, stretched out long and flying all-out in a straight line, beating and beating: Temeraire fixed upon his grey body and flew as best he could. The smoke still climbed after them, in rising tendrils mingling into columns mingling into sheets, thickening along the ground as all the heaped growth was consumed. His breath whistled painfully in his throat, a particular effort every time, and the thunder roared abruptly very near, out of the huge building clouds overhead; he twisted away on instinct, quite uselessly: the lightning had already struck the ground, perhaps a quarter-of-a-mile distant, and another tree was burning like a torch on its hill of red and gold.
The cold air felt better on his hide, in his throat; but the wind struck him from one side and then the next. One great buffeting gust came rushing at them from above, wet and shockingly cold after the heat, and Caesar was tumbled over: his left wing and shoulder blown hard down, and turning his other directly into the gust, so he was blown every which way, and Temeraire with a laboring burst of speed came under him only just in time to right him; sharp painful sting as Caesar’s claws scrabbled on his hide.
Caesar steadied a little, and then they were taken apart again by the wind, another dragging gust which pulled Temeraire suddenly fifty feet straight upwards, only barely managing to keep his wings from snapping against his back.
“Laurence, Laurence,” Temeraire called, to be sure that Laurence had not been hurt, by Caesar’s claws, nor any of his crew; or he tried to call, but nothing came from his throat, so far as he could hear. The thunder was going off again, like cannon or worse, beside him and ahead, all at once: the sky above blazing with great gunpowder-flashes of lightning which showed the clouds going up and up and up like mountains full of cavernous hollows, false promises of shelter, and the edges billowing and crawling out and in, like living things brooding.