He woke gradually, very cool and comfortable, except for a little smacking of sand at the corner of his jaw; he raised his head and spat it out, and startled: he was overbalancing, and his hindquarters went tipping away underneath him as though he were on the deck of a ship plunging unexpectedly down into a trough. “What has happened to the ground?” he said, and tried to stand, and could not: there was nothing solid for his feet to grasp, and his limbs dragged very strangely if he moved them—everything seemed very low—“Laurence?” he said: the moon had set, and the sun was not yet risen, and he could not make out much of anything but the small glow of the fire’s embers, down within the camp, and the rearing outcrop of rock some distance away.
“Yes, my dear?” Laurence said drowsily, from his back, and then looking over raised his voice and called, strongly, “Mr. Forthing! A light there, if you please—”
The aviators came with torches, and then abruptly stopped, scrambling back with exclamations: their boots sinking in the sand, thick sludgy noises like the bubbles of a porridge slowly boiling as they pulled them free. In the light, Temeraire saw he had sunk into the earth, nearly up to his breastbone; the folded edges of his wings were plunged deep and his tail was half-submerged, his legs wholly so—
“But I was only sleeping,” he protested, and tried to rear out, but he could not pull his forelegs free, though he exerted all his strength: one would come a little way out, rising, wet sand dribbling from his hide as he pulled, but the effort required grew, and grew, until he could not continue, and sank forward again.
He panted and found this raised him perhaps half-a-foot, not unlike bobbing in the water, but he could not get out: he could not move. He tried again, more vigorously thrashing his limbs—he might move them a little side to side, he found, if he did not try to pull free—until Laurence sharply said, “Temeraire, stop! You are sinking further—”
The sand had crept up higher on his chest, and was lapping at the edges of his back. “Laurence, perhaps you had better climb off,” Temeraire said, turning his neck around to inspect Laurence’s position with some concern. “I am sure I can reach to the others, if I stretch my neck.”
“No, I thank you,” Laurence said.
“I would advise against moving, or lowering your neck to where it may be entrapped,” Tharkay said; he was crouched down inspecting the pit, and setting broken-off twigs into the sand to mark its border. “I am surprised the quicksand should go deep enough for you to have sunk this far.”
“We cannot have overlooked this last night,” Laurence said. “Temeraire and I were sitting here an hour before we slept; the earth was perfectly solid.”
“I only do not understand why it will not let me out,” Temeraire said, unable to resist trying again to draw his foreleg free, very slowly and carefully, only a little way at a time, but it dragged and dragged and dragged, and at last halted: he could draw it no further, and it sank gradually back away as soon as he stopped his efforts.
He was not uncomfortable, precisely: it was quite pleasantly cool, and when Laurence asked, Temeraire said stoutly, “Oh, I do not mind it of itself, only I would like to get out of it, now,” but that did not address the clinging, sticky quality of the stuff: sand was squirming everywhere under the edges of his hide, and there was something dreadful in not being able to get out: it was not at all like swimming in water, which did not try and drag you back down, like chains which you were not allowed to take off.
“Well, I don’t see why you didn’t get out of it when you first noticed,” Caesar said, having roused up, and yawning tremendously against the early morning: he was not yet done with a hatchling’s usual tendency to sleep endlessly.
“I was asleep,” Temeraire bit out, annoyed, “and so I did not notice, until I had woken; and I do not think it is at all wonderful I should not have, as no-one would expect perfectly ordinary sand to turn into something like this. How are we to turn it back?”
“The sun’s heat may burn off enough of the moisture to allow you to dig free, when it rises,” Tharkay said, after a moment. “Perhaps some underground spring feeds this place.”
“If we can remove some quantity of the sand, you may be able to free yourself more quickly,” Laurence said. “Mr. Forthing, shovels, if you please—”
“What’s over there, then,” one of the convicts said, pointing, and Temeraire looked: on the ridge of the dune rising above his precarious position, a narrow angular head was up and visible as a black silhouette against the lightening sky, watching.
Another rose up beside it, and then another: until there was a line of them, long muzzles with rounded snouts, and small black eyes which caught the reflections of the torches and gleamed yellow back at them. They had queer tufted heads. “Steady, there,” Forthing said; the aviators had out their pistols.
The light was increasing: the bunyips were shades of red and brown, the very color of the earth, with pebbled hides, and the tufts were yellow as the grass; if they were not poking up from the hill, they would have been very difficult to see at all. “Oh,” Temeraire said, indignant, “I see now how it is: they are even more cowardly than I thought. This must certainly be their doing; they did not care to fight me properly, or defend their territory, but instead they have made this wretched sneaking trap.”
Rankin snorted. “How a gaggle of lizards are to have produced anything of the sort, I should care to know,” he said. “More likely they have come like vultures, to wait.”
Laurence would rather have liked to knock Rankin into the quicksand. “Mr. Forthing,” he said, tightly, “let us begin digging: I doubt the beasts will make any direct attempt while we have Caesar here, nor come near enough for Temeraire to reach them with his jaws.”
The row of spectators was nevertheless unpleasant to endure: those gleaming pupil-less eyes, malevolent even in their immobility, while they worked and dug heaps of wet sand out from around Temeraire’s body to pile up dark and wet into piles like the misshapen sand castles of small children, towers crumbling as they dried in the rising sun.
“Laurence,” Temeraire said, as the sun grew higher, “I would not mind a drink of water, if it were at all convenient,” which it could not be, given his size, but Forthing sent men down to fetch back all the largest jugs of water, under a pistol-wielding guard.
They returned empty-handed. “There isn’t any,” O’Dea said, “—any water, it has all run away in the night.”
“We drank it nearly dry last night, but it ought to have refilled by now, surely,” Forthing said.
Tharkay had slipped silently away at their announcement, drawing his own pistol; he returned shortly and said, “The spring is no longer flowing to the water-hole. It has been diverted; underground, so far as I can tell.”
Laurence paused, looking up at the row of sentinel bunyips, and said, “Tenzing, do you mean they have done it? Deliberately?”
“Certainly they have done it deliberately,” Temeraire interjected. “You cannot imagine they have done it to be friendly; oh! How I should serve them out, if they were not such cowards, and hiding all the way over there where I cannot get at them, thanks to all this sand.”
Tharkay said, “I see no reason to doubt it. They would find it still more convenient to their hunting to make the water-holes, rather than merely take advantage of whatever natural ones the countryside should offer. If they can divert a natural spring to suit one purpose, why not this one?”
“Why did they not make the pit deeper then, and sink him entire?” Laurence said.
Tharkay shrugged. “It is no great difficulty to avoid drowning in quicksand,” he said. “He is too buoyant to sink so far. The difficulty is in getting out.”