Iskierka roused up looking, and Caesar said, “Well, what else would it be?”—to be glimpsed at this distance, standing beside the monolith and casting a shadow against the smooth red wall, of wings outspread. Huge wings, even half-furled: and there were tiny dark figures of men to be glimpsed, moving around the dragon; there were bundles upon the ground, bales tied up with string, boxes, which they were taking off the beast: and still others, smaller bags, were going up to be stowed in replacement upon the dragon’s back.
Iskierka said, “Whyever are we only sitting here? Let’s go and have a look, and see if it has seen—”
“Oh!” Temeraire cried, “the egg, the egg!” and indeed, a round swaddled bundle was being handed carefully up to the men aboard the dragon, easing into a sling across its breast.
Laurence had barely a moment to seize upon the chain of Temeraire’s breastplate, and get himself latched on, as Temeraire lunged aloft in a burst of speed, Iskierka with him. They had not been seen, Laurence thought, by the company on the ground near the other monument: there was no visible hurry, no move to self-defense. Instead the strange dragon rose and leisurely unfurled its wings the rest of the way—going on and on and on, twice the length of its body and more—and with a tremendous spring of its hindquarters was aloft; one wing-stroke, two, three, and then it spread those wings and was swinging away to the north, gliding on the air.
“Come back!” Temeraire called, flying quicker. “Stop!” and he paused, hovering mid-air, and began to draw in his breath, his chest expanding with the divine wind, that shattering roar which should reach even across that distance.
“Temeraire,” Laurence said sharply, “Temeraire! You ought not, your throat is not—”
“Hurry, hurry,” Iskierka said, circling impatiently; she could not get into its path. “She is getting further away, and with the egg!”
Temeraire flung back his shoulders and pulled in one more heaved breath, and then he opened his jaws, and roared—and broke, the thunder barely begun and the resonance dying in his chest, so Laurence felt the tremors come rippling through the flesh. Temeraire’s voice cracked like strings upon some instrument breaking, and he clenched upon himself coughing—coughing—wracked and gasping, and he sank abruptly to the sand, his head bowed forward over his breast.
Part III
Chapter 13
THEY GAVE CHASE ANYWAY: Kulingile and Caesar left to trail behind, the men packed into the belly-netting with haste; Temeraire and Iskierka stretched themselves lean and straight and flew and flew, at the limits of their speed. They made progress; little by little the dragon grew larger in Laurence’s glass as he watched, the immense wings protruding past the edges of the lens. Onward through the panting heat of the sun, always keeping the dragon in their sight; then the dusk a welcome relief, but there still might be no respite: their quarry did not stop to rest, so neither could they.
The night came on, and the moon spilling silver: Laurence had to struggle to keep his eyes on the dragon now, a moving inkblot crossing the stars, and still it did not pause. The wings scarcely moved; one beat or two now and again to catch a draft of wind, and otherwise nothing, like one of the great sea-birds, an osprey or an albatross, hanging peacefully aloft and more at rest in the sky than on the ground.
It was drawing away. Temeraire’s breath labored more gratingly than before, and Iskierka’s speed was dying. They had flown already a long day, and without halt for anything but a little game snatched on the wing, a few gulped swallows of water at a creek. “There’s another,” Granby said at last, his voice faint but clear across the gulf of the empty air, and Temeraire and Iskierka landed by the gleam of water to drink, their legs trembling and wings drooped nearly to the ground.
Granby leapt down. “Mr. Forthing,” Laurence said quietly, “let us disembark, and see about a camp; by those rocks, if you please, clear away from the water.”
“Yes, sir,” was all Forthing said; failure lay heavy upon them all.
Temeraire and Iskierka did not speak a word; they drank heavily and thirstily, and fell upon the sand asleep as soon as they had been unburdened. Forthing marshaled the aviators and they formed a phalanx of pistols and knives bristling while in that shelter the convicts hastily filled canteens and jugs, and they all drew back to the security of the rocks to eat their dry biscuit and a little hot tea.
“Do you know, the worst of it is, I don’t think they were even trying; I don’t know that they ever saw us,” Granby said tiredly, stretching his legs one after the other out and then in again, working out the stiffness of nearly twenty hours aloft. Laurence did not yet trust himself to sit at all; he thought once he had gone down he would not come up again very easily.
“No,” Laurence said. “The crew all kept below and out of the sun, and so far as I saw them they were sleeping. The dragon did not look around once.” He shook his head. “She might have been sleeping on the wing, herself; I have known Temeraire to do it, on a long flight.”
“Half-sleeping, anyway,” Granby agreed. “Did you see those wings? I suppose she could go around the world on them twice if she wanted to. I have never seen the like. That is no feral beast; that’s breeding, if you please, and I should like to know what they have bred her out of, when we haven’t seen a single other dragon anywhere in this country.”
“Their own lack of concern argues there may be none to be seen,” Tharkay said quietly. “They did not see us because they did not look; they did not imagine any pursuit.”
“You think they have her from somewhere else?” Granby said. “I suppose there might be something like her in Java, with all those islands to fly amongst; but how we have missed ever seeing one of them, I would like to know. I suppose I wouldn’t value an egg of hers much over half-a-million pounds.”
“I should value more,” Laurence said, looking over at Temeraire, so exhausted his head had lolled to one side, and he had not stayed awake even to have his muzzle cleaned of the red dust of their travel, “some way to catch her up.”
The quarry already lost, they waited the next day until Caesar caught them up, himself exhausted and deeply disgruntled: “Well,” he said, “and you haven’t got the egg back, with all this mad peltering, and meanwhile I have had to slog on all day with this lump hanging on to me; and he has eaten everything.”
Kulingile ignored him in favor of swallowing yet another kangaroo nearly whole. Caesar’s complaint was not without some justice: Kulingile had grown visibly in the short span of their absence, and would have made an increasingly heavy burden. Caesar had made by now some eight tons in weight, but Kulingile bid fair to make near enough a ton in weight himself by the end of the day.
“I will not have Caesar carry him again,” Rankin said. “We are not going to stunt his development to carry a spoiled beast along.”
“I have said I am sorry,” Kulingile said, piping, “but I cannot help it I am so very hungry. I think I might fly to-day, though, and then I need not slow anyone down.”
“I don’t see why you should fly to-day, when you did not fly yesterday, or the day before,” Iskierka said dismissively, “so it is no use saying anything like that; but I will carry you, since I am not a complainer.”
Kulingile looked at Iskierka’s bristling sides a little sadly, and it did prove something of an awkward puzzle to fit him aboard, as his own armament of spikes was by no means insubstantial, and were beginning to harden into solid horn, so that as he squirmed into position they clacked noisily against Iskierka’s own. “That will have to do,” Iskierka said, “now strap him down; and you had better not squirm.”