“You see,” Temeraire said to Caesar, quite pleased, “he can hunt, even if he cannot fly; so there is no call for you to always be sneering.”
“I don’t call it hunting,” Caesar returned, tugging up a shrub beside him, “when we are running them out towards him, and he is only sitting there picking them up. Why, you might as well call it hunting to take a drink of water from a hole that is right before you.”
Temeraire snorted, dismissively; water did not try to run away, so it was not at all like. “Perhaps you might care to try flying, again,” he suggested to Kulingile, as he threw down another heap of bushes.
Kulingile shook out his wings and drew a deep breath and reared up on his hindquarters; he flapped a little; his sides quivered, jelly-like, and then he tipped back down panting thinly and said, “Maybe I will manage it tomorrow.”
Temeraire sighed.
Demane was plainly glad for the respite, also; he had gone out hunting at mid-day again, to take advantage of the bounty of game at the lake, and as soon as they had disembarked to the security of the rocks, he collapsed almost enervated in what shade they offered. Temeraire thought he might say a private word to Kulingile: he was not taking very good care of Demane, and one might be hungry and still think of these things.
Temeraire, and Caesar, had cleared away the brush and once again filled in all the wretched tunnels—there were so very many of them; Temeraire did not see why they should be necessary. If the bunyips were as quick as Laurence said, it seemed to him they did not need to be hiding underground and leaping out on some unsuspecting person, only to eat; they might hunt respectably. There was something unnatural and unpleasant in it, he felt—and when they had cleared all away, and made safe the camp, the rest of the men shifted over: but Demane lay where he was, asleep.
“If he does not want anything to eat, he can stay there,” Sipho said, rather coldly. “I am surprised he has not gone out hunting again; won’t Kulingile be hungry?”
“You are saying it wrong,” Temeraire said, “it is Kulingile, and you know better, so there is no excuse.”
“I don’t see why it should matter to anyone,” Sipho said, and stared down at his book mulishly.
But Roland pushed herself up, after she had drunk and rested a little, and trudged over to Demane with her canteen. He struggled up and hanging limply over his crossed legs drank and drank, and then drooping followed her to the camp and fell asleep once more, as far as he could be from the little fire which the aviators had put up, for comfort and cooking. Kulingile crept over to him and nosed at his shoulder anxiously until Demane blindly reached out and patted him; then slumped back.
Kulingile sighed, reassured; then looked up at Temeraire and said, in his thin voice, “May I have another kangaroo?”
“After all those rats you ate, anyone would think you had put away enough,” Caesar said, but as Caesar had taken two kangaroos earlier and not shared a bite, Temeraire was quite out of temper with him, and it pleased him to say, in what he felt was a particularly gracious way, “Certainly you may; I do not believe in being stingy,” and Kulingile fell with so much gratitude upon the meal that it gave Temeraire a glow of lordly satisfaction.
“If he is going to smother himself with his own weight,” Caesar said, “it seems to me you can’t call it friendly to help him do it quicker,” but this was only spiteful meanness, Temeraire felt; although Kulingile would eat too quickly, and then stop and gasp to catch his breath, and then begin again; and when he was done and had collapsed in slumber beside Demane, his breathing was a little worse.
“Another ten feet,” Dorset remarked, winding up his knotted cord again as he stood from Kulingile’s side. “The rate of growth is exceptional. I will have to make a note of it for the breeding journal, and perhaps for the Royal Society.”
“But when will he be able to fly?” Temeraire asked, and Dorset had no satisfactory answer to give.
But this was only a small and vanishing shadow on his general complacency of spirit: his throat did not hurt quite so much, and Gong Su was now making another pot of soup, which Temeraire expected to enjoy a great deal in the morning—flavored this time with the small yellow fruits of one of the bushes which Temeraire had torn up; Tharkay had pointed it out as having been harvested a little by the aborigines, he thought, and an experimental taste had not caused any discomfort: a little sweetness, and a strong flavor rather like tomatoes, although they looked more nearly like raisins.
“Will you try and eat a little now, before you sleep?” Laurence said. “We can cut some kangaroo small, if that would ease the passage; you cannot heal quickly or well when you are straining to your limits, and not eating.”
“I think I can,” Temeraire said, feeling optimistic, and if he only managed perhaps one kangaroo, and none of the bones, those went directly into the soup and so would not be wasted, and he did not feel quite such vivid pangs when he at last settled upon the sand.
To cap his evening, Laurence read to him a little; when their patience for going over the by-now-familiar material had faded, he put the book down, and Temeraire said, “I have been thinking, Laurence, of the valley: perhaps we might take some of this red stone out of the desert with us, as we return, and use it in building a pavilion: would it not make an interesting pattern, with the yellow stone there?”
“I cannot quarrel with your taste,” Laurence said, looking at the red earth, “although the labor in bringing back so much stone must be great. But we will have the time, I imagine.”
He was silent a little while: night had come on fully now, clear, and with the moon out and shining, cool and pleasant after the sun’s heat. The desert beneath was endless shadows of clumped grass and the thin scrubby trees, dunes rising and falling away into the distance, and the water a silvered reflection gleaming out at them from the ground. Temeraire thought perhaps Laurence had fallen asleep, but then he said, softly, “I had not quite felt the vastness of this country, until we had come into it all this way, nor its strangeness.”
“Laurence,” Temeraire ventured, holding his breath for the answer, “are you very sad to not return to England?”
“I must be anxious for the sake of our country,” Laurence said, “and our friends left behind; it is difficult to know them in dire straits, and feel we might be of more use elsewhere, and yet remain helpless to assist. But in a personal sense, I have left very little behind, my dear. I have long been used to rely upon correspondence to sustain the intimacy of friendships: it is a necessity for a sailor.”
He paused, then, and said low, “You must be more constrained than I am, by our remaining; I have not forgotten Tharkay’s proposal, only—” He stopped.
“Well, I must say that privateering seems quite splendid, to me,” Temeraire said, unable to conceal a touch of wistfulness, “but I do see, Laurence, that you do not quite like to think of it; and I should not at all wish to do it if you did not feel perfectly satisfied, also; only I thought perhaps you might miss the war.”
“The war? No,” Laurence said. “To be of use, yes; but there is no sense in thinking of it. I am very sorry, my dear, but I hold out no hope for a pardon.”
“But I am sure we need not be useless here,” Temeraire said. “We have found our valley, after all.”
“It would be something, indeed,” Laurence said, “to build for once, instead of tear away; yes.”
So Temeraire might lay his head down with some degree of relief, and the pleasant occupation, before he slept, of working out in his head a design for a pavilion of adequate magnificence to console Laurence for any remaining regrets, patterned in stone of red and gold.