This, however, they did not seem to think meaningful; they touched the paper between their fingers appreciatively, and traced the colored lines of ink, but turned it upside-down and back without sign of recognition, even the territory lately traversed which Laurence pointed out to them, the newly marked creek beds and salt pans and hills which must have been familiar landmarks; but perhaps the aborigines did not have the habit of mapmaking.
Instead, Shipley pointed at the necklace and asked “Where?” in the version of the language which he knew, then pointing in each direction of the compass; the aborigines answered with “Pitjantjatjara” and “Larrakia,” and pointed north and west, with almost a throwing gesture and another word—“Far, far,” Shipley said. “I think that’s what it means, anyway.”
“And then what about the men they have been snatching?” O’Dea said, and drew in the sand several figures in stick form, and by them the water-hole and the rock outcropping where Jonas Green had vanished. He then crossed out one of his figures; the aborigines nodded without surprise and said, “Bunyip,” and shook their heads vigorously.
“Bunyip,” they repeated, and crossed the man out more thoroughly, and said a great deal more, which might have been excellent advice if they could have understood a word of it. But then, perceiving they were not understood, the youngest of their company proceeded to hold up his hands like claws by his mouth and made a hissing snatching gesture, with a growl, rather looking like a children’s bogey; and Laurence grew doubtful of the proffered explanation: there had certainly been no monsters wandering about the camp.
But O’Dea proved more willing to accept this excuse, and, somewhat mollified, trying more of his limited supply found a few more common words: he drew the egg larger and showed a dragon coming out of it, wings outspread. The aborigines repeated their gesture towards the north-west, and then the oldest tapped the youth on the shoulder, demanding attention, and opening his mouth sang, in a low and gravelly if resonant voice; the other men clapping softly along, to add rhythm to the chant.
“No use to trying to work that out,” O’Dea said, looking around. “They go off so from time to time, when you ask them directions, but it is only these stories of theirs: monsters and gods and the making of the world. It don’t mean anything.”
The song finishing, and the small smudgy fire also, the men bent to take up their strings of game and to move on to another patch of the grasslands; the youth stepped into the newly burnt section and took himself a branch still burning quietly at one end. Laurence would have liked to try and get a little more intelligence out of them, perhaps recruiting Dorset, who was a good hand at draftsmanship, and trying to with better illustrations convey more precise questions; but the hunters had evidently tired of a conversation of so little profit to themselves, and to restrain them could only provoke the quarrel which the men had formerly imagined.
“Bunyips,” O’Dea repeated to Shipley with ghoulish satisfaction, as they walked back towards the camp. “So it is bunyips: and they must be man-eaters, did you see how those black fellows shook at the word? God rest their souls, Jack Telly and poor Jonas; in a bunyip’s belly, it is a cruel way to end. Like tigers, they must be.”
The story would certainly be all across the camp in moments, when they had returned, and the men undoubtedly as pleased to transfer all their fears to man-eating monsters, as to native tribesmen; or more pleased, for the greater hideousness of the threat. Laurence sighed, and climbed wearily up the dune ahead to wave a reassuring hand to Temeraire, who should be worrying; but when he came in sight, Temeraire was looking down instead at the egg, which Fellowes was hastily taking out of its wrappings.
Chapter 10
“I WILL THANK YOU for an end to this wholly inappropriate interference, Mr. Laurence,” Rankin said, icily. “You have neither rank nor office, nor even proper training to recommend your opinion on the matter. Mr. Drewmore, I trust you are ready to stand the duty? Mr. Blincoln, I believe you are next in seniority, should Mr. Drewmore fail to secure the hatchling; you will prepare yourself as well.”
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Drewmore said after a moment, not displeased but only slow to grasp the offered advantage: a man of forty, heavy of body and of mind at once; he had shown not an iota of initiative, which Laurence had seen, and set himself apart only by a certain amiable willingness and basic competence. He had reached the rank of first lieutenant aboard a middle-weight, for no greater accomplishment than being the son of a distinguished and well-liked captain; but he had been grounded by the death of his beast, during the plague, and no equal post had been offered him.
And Blincoln, only a little second to him in both years and seniority, was similarly a nonentity; neither of them in any way worthy of the one, the last egg. Meanwhile Forthing, who alone among the aviators had distinguished himself in service, however meager his connections, was evidently to be set aside.
Laurence had grown up in a service where influence was very nearly all, in the way of promotion, but he had grown used to the very different mode in the Corps: if a man had much in the way of influence, he was not an aviator, as a rule. Rankin himself was an exception, and Laurence’s former lieutenant Ferris: the only two such cases Laurence had so far met, in the service. Merit, and the lucky opportunity of demonstrating it, had in practice by far the greater reach. Personal loyalties might have their impact, but Rankin did not know these men; they had not been affectionate towards him. He had met them one and all, not a month ago.
Laurence had known the gesture was a futile one; but he had spoken anyway. “Sir, you may not be aware that Captain Granby had other intentions,” he had said, quietly.
Rankin had rebuffed him in as offensive a way as possible, and without bothering to lower his voice; adding now, “I do not intend this covert should be conducted on the irregular and unsound lines of your own model of behavior.”
“By which I can only suppose you mean that Mr. Forthing is not of a line of aviators,” Laurence said.
“Your own example must be all that any man requires to appreciate the value of a trained, a trusted lineage: of men who understand what dragons are, and what their own duty is,” Rankin said.
Temeraire, who had been anxiously watching the egg so far, lifted his head here and said, “Well, if the egg should prefer Mr. Forthing, it may have him; and I will tell it so whether you like me to or not: I do not care whether he has a trusted lineage.”
Rankin wheeled to confront him, but meanwhile the egg was rocking; it cracked abruptly across its equator, or near enough, and all their attention was drawn over to it at once. Tipping over, it did not quite separate; with an evident effort, the broken upper half was slowly pushed forward over the sand, furrowing up the burnt patches, and the hatchling beast crawled laboriously out.
There was a brief, dismayed silence as it raised its head. It was a strange, misshapen creature, with none of the lithe, deadly grace that every other dragonet whom Laurence had ever seen had possessed instantly on cracking the shell. It was a long almost skeletal thing, uniformly mottled brown-grey, and bristling along all its shoulders and in patches over its back with spikes very like the barbs on the tails of the Chequered Nettle, one of which had produced the egg; it had, also, inherited the claws of its Parnassian sire, so long they bid fair to snag upon its own flesh.
Its wings were a little stubby and badly cramped together, draped loosely over the hatchling’s sides, but as it tried to stretch them out, those sides were revealed—distended into swollen folds which bulged out over the dragonet’s shoulder and hip-joints, as if its rib cage were shrunken in too small, and the hide too large for it.