“Sir,” Laurence said, blankly, “your news runs too far ahead of me; I am lost. He has made allies of—?”

“The moors!” Robaldo said with fervent, furious energy, not unaffected by the glass of wine he was gulping to wet his throat. “Dogs, dogs all of them; and he is shipping them to Brazilia.”

“Are you talking of Brazil?” the younger American sailor asked across the table in English, Mr. Chukwah’s first mate. “They have burnt Rio to the ground. We spoke to a whaler out of Chile a couple of weeks ago who had heard it in Santiago.”

Robaldo groaned, when Laurence had translated this, and covered his face: he evidently had significant interests in the colony, lending his wrath a very personal intensity. “You would think his heart could not allow it! He was anointed by the Pope; but he is a heathen in his heart, a demon, a demon,” and slid into his own language.

Rather less intimately concerned and better able to command himself in the face of the wine, being some six feet and more in height and solidly built, the American sailor, a Mr. David Wright, could offer Laurence more intelligence. “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about what your redcoats might be up to in Portugal,” he said, “but as I hear it, these fellows came out of Africa, the ones as burnt up the slave ports, and started in on some cities on the Med. They had a run at Gibraltar, too, but that went badly for them, so there’s that for you.”

Laurence was not much comforted to hear it. That the Tswana had intended some more thorough pursuit of their stolen tribesmen, the victims of the slave trade, he had learnt during his brief captivity among them; that they should have with such speed already realized their goal so far as to reach the coast of Europe was more than he would have dreaded. “Then it was not the French who sacked the cities?”

“No,” Wright said. “The Africans went for Toulon, too, after they had done with Spain, and I guess that is where Boney got hold of them, somehow—caught some of them, or bribed ’em; but in any case he worked out some bargain with them, and he has been shipping them across the Atlantic since, on transports—by the dozen, I hear, and they are happy to go.”

“He is setting them on our colonies,” Robaldo said bitterly. “—the inhumanity is beyond words. No civilized nation could abide it.”

“Well,” Wright said, when Laurence had conveyed the sense of this remark, “I am sorry for them, but it puts pretty well paid to this stuff I have heard fellows say about the business, that the black fellows don’t mind it. I would; I don’t reckon I would sit at home quiet if I heard someone had taken my Jenny over the ocean and put her on a block, so I don’t see anyone has a right to complain if they don’t, either.”

“I do not, either,” Temeraire said, putting in, “and it seems to me that if anyone in Brazil did not like to be attacked, they would only need to give back the slaves, and then no one would wish to hurt them, either.”

“I am afraid,” Laurence said grimly, “that the better part of the kidnapped are gone beyond anyone’s reach and are now in the grave; that news is not likely to appease the Tswana when they have crossed the ocean to hear it.”

“I wonder how this gentleman will like it,” Robaldo said, having gathered that Wright did not perhaps feel the full degree of sympathy which he felt appropriate, “when these African monsters have worked their way up the coast, and begun to pillage his cities: there is no shortage of slaves in his country.”

“I don’t mean to make light of the gentleman’s trouble,” Wright said, conciliatory, when he had understood. “There aren’t any in my state, and we haven’t missed them, either, so perhaps I don’t see why folks can’t do without. But I guess it would be hard if you have gotten used to it, years and years, and suddenly there is someone knocking down the door.”

Chukwah leaned over the table and said, “Davey, you can tell that fellow, if you like, the Iroquois hatched thirty-two in New York alone this last year, so if these African fellows come to us looking for a fight, they can have one; and so can anyone else who likes, I expect.

“I’ve surprised you, I guess,” he said with some perhaps pardonable complacency, looking at Granby, who had nearly choked upon the prawn which he was eating; all the other aviators at the table had brought their heads up from the profound attraction of their plates and cups. “Yes, the chiefs have come around to proper cattle farming, and it is working pretty well. I am thinking of jumping ship for it myself: they have more dragons than men to work them these days. A steady man, who doesn’t get the jitters or lose his head aloft, can have a beast of his own in three years.”

To punctuate this remark, Ensign Widener dropped his chopsticks entirely into his bowl, splattering himself shamefully.

“My brother says it is the course of the future,” Chukwah continued. “What does it matter if you can’t ship more than a ton, when you can get it from Boston to Charlotte in a week, hail, sleet, or storm? I am taking this load straight to Californiay, myself, to see if the Chumash riders will carry it over the Rockies for a share: and if they will, no bother with the Horn for us.”

As deeply interesting as the development of the American aerial shipping should naturally be to himself and to every other aviator, Laurence was preoccupied and yet again baffled where Chukwah meant to get sufficient cargo to justify his making so obscure a voyage, and not only him but every other captain present.

He was on the point of speaking to inquire, when Temeraire leaned over and whispered, “Laurence, as we are nearly at the end, it would be very courteous if you were now to offer a toast yourself, and I have thought of a few remarks, if you should wish to make them.” These Laurence had to parrot without comprehension; what little he might have understood, the liquor haze had by now consumed. They were received with utmost politeness and applause, but as he was mortally certain the same would have been true if he had inadvertently insulted the families of all the attendees, he took no great comfort here.

The toast completed, and the wreckage of the meal beginning to be removed, Jia Zhen rose—himself not a little wavery—and invited them to recline in more comfort upon makeshift couches which had been arranged along the wall of the courtyard; the tables were pulled apart and lifted and carried out, to open more room within the court, and the lights were put out. In the absence of the moon, the night was very dark, and the jetty was lined with red lanterns that glowed brilliantly both in their own right and as reflections upon the water.

A peculiar sound began: down upon the sand, one of the Larrakia men was sitting with some sort of an instrument, an enormously long pipe it seemed, which produced a deep, low, droning noise that resounded ceaselessly; he somehow did not pause even for breath. Two of the younger Chinese attendants were now standing at the jetty’s end, holding long poles with lanterns at the ends, which they dangled over the water; a crowd of the younger Larrakia men were waiting upon it.

The company had grown quiet, muffled by the steady droning of the instrument and a sense of anticipation; no longer restricted to their seats, the guests gravitated towards the society of those with whom they could converse, but voices remained low. The tide was lapping in swiftly, high upon the shore, and the waves slapped at the jetty audibly.

“I suppose they might be showing a path to land,” Temeraire said, peering up vainly into the night sky, but then the instrument ceased; in the sudden stillness, a low churning gurgle might be heard, traveling up the slope towards them from the bay, and the illuminated waters about the jetty shivered suddenly with many colors: gold and crimson and blue, rising up, and the great lamp-eyed head of a sea-serpent broke the surface and rose up and up, water streaming from its fins and in rivulets from the knotted brown seaweed which throttled its neck, like heaped strings of pearls.