“I beg your pardon; he is an officer,” Laurence was saying to Rankin, “and not merely a personal servant: Demane has been rated nearly two years, and served as acting-captain on Arkady—”
“A feral beast, which could not be controlled in any case,” Rankin said, dismissively. “No; if you imagine I will submit this to the Admiralty, you are thoroughly mistaken. Your servant has made a pet of the creature, and so far as I am concerned, they neither of them have anything to do with the Corps at all; he is welcome to ship back to England if you imagine he will fare better with recognition there. Not that the beast will survive long enough to make that necessary.”
“Only long enough to eat up the best of everything,” Caesar said, disapprovingly; and Temeraire did think the hatchling was being excessive. Kulingile did not eat very quickly, but he had not stopped eating since he had begun, and was now nearly inside the carcass.
“The kangaroo is bigger than you are,” he said, “and you seem to be eating all of it; you might leave some for tomorrow.”
Kulingile pulled his head out of the kangaroo, having torn free another fresh gobbet of meat, and tipped back to swallow down the lump, which traveled as a visible knot down his skinny throat. He panted a few times afterwards, his very peculiar-looking sides heaving out and in, and then said thin and piping, “But I am still hungry now, and my captain fetched it for me, so it is mine, and I will eat it; I will,” and he pushed his head back inside.
Temeraire sighed, and supposed he could not be mean enough to grudge the hatchling its meal; it must, he thought, be very distressing not to be able to fly. He looked at it critically: it was those sides, so queerly bulging and heaped on one another, he thought, which were likely the problem. “I do not suppose you might cut a bit of them out, and sew it up again,” he suggested to Dorset, who was sitting cross-legged by the hatchling’s side and listening to the chest with his ear-trumpet.
“A little quiet if you please,” Dorset said absently, “and it would be of the greatest use imaginable if he would stop eating,” he added to Demane, “—the digestive processes are drowning out the action of the pneumotic system.”
“He will sleep when he isn’t hungry anymore,” Demane said, a possessive hand still on the dragonet’s neck, stroking. He looked over at Roland with a rather triumphant expression, which faded when she turned her back and with a set face went to the other side of the camp, to busy herself with packing away the gear for their departure.
“I didn’t think you would be so jealous,” he said to her, when the dragonet had gone to sleep a little later.
“Yes, very jealous,” Roland said without turning, “you ass: I will be taking Excidium in seven years or so, when Mother is ready to be grounded.” Temeraire silently swelled with indignation, overhearing this.
“Then—” Demane said, and she rounded on him, and said, “What business have you, dragging it out for the poor thing and everyone, only to make a show of yourself? Half these fellows are grounded because their beasts died, d’you think anyone likes it, watching it fight just to get its breath? It’ll outgrow its lungs in a week—”
“You don’t know!” Demane snapped. “The captain doesn’t think it’s going to die.”
“Of course he does,” Roland said, “we all do; listen!” The dragonet, breathing, was quite audible from across the camp; long effortful hissing breaths, which distended its sides. “And the captain wasn’t looking to save it for himself, was he? Only he’ll go through fire if he thinks he ought to; he’s churchy. You aren’t; so I think you are a perfect selfish beast,” she added, and stalked away.
“I am not!” Demane said, and looked up at Temeraire. “He might not die,” he demanded.
“Well, I do not see any reason he should die,” Temeraire said; he was not at all inclined to see the hatchling die, it would be very distressing, “except I do not quite know what he is to do for food, if he should ever have to hunt for himself.”
“I can hunt for him,” Demane said.
“And he is so very small, that perhaps he will not take a great deal of feeding,” Temeraire agreed, and added encouragingly, with a burst of inspiration, “and perhaps he will turn out to be a scholar, and not need to fly at all—or a poet.”
Demane did not look very happy at this suggestion; it was always a little difficult to persuade him to sit to his books, and he was already grown deeply disappointed in his brother, who could hardly be got away from them. Temeraire felt however that he had hit upon an ideal solution, “and after all,” he said to Laurence, “I do not find that anyone asks a fresh-hatched egg to hunt, when it is a person; Harcourt’s egg could only lie about and flap its arms and wail, and at least Kulingile can speak, and eat without someone else putting food into his mouth a bit at a time.”
On this philosophy, he tried to begin teaching Kulingile his characters, when he had woken up, but Kulingile only pulled in his wheezing breath and said, “But I am hungry.”
“It is only two hours since you ate,” Temeraire said, “you cannot be hungry again.”
“I am hungry,” Kulingile repeated sadly.
“Well, at least learn these first five,” Temeraire said, with a sigh, “and then you may have some lizard.”
Kulingile looked at the scratched characters, then looked up and said, “I have learned them.”
“You have not,” Temeraire said, and swept the marks clean from the dirt with the smooth curve of his talon. “Draw them over,” but he was forced to yield in the end, for the long claws would not allow Kulingile to write.
So Kulingile was permitted to devour two—three—of the large lizards, which had been cut up and preserved, earlier. Caesar watched disapprovingly, and Temeraire himself could not be exceedingly happy to see them go. He liked the flavor extremely, but he could not at present enjoy very much of it: his throat ached unpleasantly if he tried to eat anything that was not very soft, and the water tasted still ashy and bitter, even where it had been filtered into the small hollow. Anything which Gong Su had tried to stew for him was tainted with the flavor. He ate as much as he could bear, until the worst demands of hunger were satisfied, but sadly that left a great deal of room in his belly afterwards; he would have been glad to look forward to something better, when he could eat again, but at this rate Kulingile would have eaten up all the salted meat before anyone else could have more than a bite.
“I am very ready to go,” Temeraire said, however, when Laurence asked: Temeraire could not help but feel that the egg must be found very soon, or not at all, and now that there was no other to worry about, his duty was clear; and oh, he so wished to redeem himself—he had almost thought, for an instant, when Laurence had talked of feeding the hatchling—
Well, it did not bear thinking of; Laurence had said everything which could be reassuring, and he had not after all done it—his explanations were entirely sensible, and after all, Temeraire could not really think that anyone would prefer Kulingile to himself, no matter what; Kulingile was very small, even if he did not mean to die. But, Temeraire could not help but be conscious—he had already lost Laurence his fortune, and his rank, and his home; to conclude that sequence by losing, also, an egg—
“I do feel almost perfectly recovered, Laurence,” he said, strongly. “I know I do not quite sound like myself, but that is only a bit of smoke still in my throat; let us go at once.”
Temeraire indeed did not sound like himself, and the pace he set was considerably lowered from the extremes to which he had formerly tried to press: Laurence had been obliged to ask him to rein in, a dozen times in an hour, to keep to a speed which Caesar could match; now not at all. Kulingile clung on to Temeraire’s back flattened low and strapped on, Demane sitting beside him, the recipient of cold disapproval from every aviator who looked over at him; the boy’s head was held up proudly in defiance, and Laurence said, “Mr. Blincoln, we will have a little of the dried meat brought up for the hatchling, if you please,” by way of reproof to the others.