“What does that say?” Iskierka said, craning, quite to no purpose, as she could not read a word even of English.

“It is a name,” Temeraire said, squinting a little. “It says, the house of Jing Du, who I suppose is a merchant, and that this is the third of ten bars, in payment for the shipment of five hundred pieces of porcelain,” and the bars were carefully wrapped again in oilcloth, over and over, and set back into one of the other containers: he supposed those would be returned to China.

Mostly the remaining porcelain was not unwrapped, to all their disappointment; each piece was taken out wrapped in paper and shaken a little, and if no pieces came out they were put away into the new crates; a few did drop some shards, and were opened up, and whichever piece had broken was put aside and marked down upon the accounts; but it was more melancholy than satisfying to only see the ones which were smashed.

One of the flawed containers, alas, had contained great bolts of silk; the leak had penetrated also into the oilcloth wrappings and stained several of these wholly beyond repair, and Temeraire bowed his neck in wincing sorrow when they were lifted out and unrolled in the sunlight: great sprawling white-crusted splotches all over the pale-spring green and deep crimson bolts. But the officials only shrugged, philosophically, and put them aside in a heap with the rest of the ruined goods; a note was written and wrapped in oilcloth, to be set with the rest of the payments.

As the morning advanced, the speed of the exchanges began to increase; the rest of the goods came out swiftly, were repacked, and one after another rowed out to the waiting vessels, where the crews loaded them aboard as more and more payments went into the waiting container. Before the sun had reached its zenith, the smaller of the ships were leaving: the Macassan fishermen singing as they put their backs into their rowing and loading the dugout canoes back onto the praus. Their small white sails went up as they drove past the sea-serpents and vanished into clouds upon the ocean, sculling away.

As the other containers were emptied of their deliveries, many of the goods which had been left and unloaded over the past week were now transferred within, in their place: the heaps of trepang now dried and smoked; the sweetly fragrant ripe fruit, each bundled separate into a little wrapping of paper—

“They mean to ship fruit?” Laurence said, doubtfully; he had come to watch.

Temeraire inquired of one of the officials, who had come hurrying inside for a fresh pot of ink. “Yes,” the young man said, “the deep water keeps it cold, and only half of it will spoil. Of course it is all for the Imperial court. Six silver,” he added, when Temeraire asked the cost of a piece.

“Good God,” Laurence said, comprehensively, and Temeraire had to feel that for his own part, he should have rather had six silver coins than one piece of fruit, which might as easily be spoilt as not, and in any case would not even make a bite. “But,” he said wistfully, thinking of the great treasure-chambers at the Emperor’s court, which his mother had shown him on their visit, “perhaps if one has so very many silver coins that one cannot look at them all and enjoy them, one might rather have a piece of fruit; and then one might eat it and think, that is the taste of six silver coins.”

One entire container, one of the newest judging by the color of the outer wood not yet as stained by the ocean waters, was thoroughly lined with oilcloth, and into this were laid bundles upon bundles of furs from the American ship: they were not gold, or brilliantly colored, so Temeraire found it a little peculiar that so much care should be taken with them, but when one of the bundles was spread out, it did glow very richly in the sunlight, a sort of warm red-brown color, and Laurence evidently thought them very fine: beaver, he said, and seal, and mink, which would go to make winter coats of particular warmth.

“Perhaps I ought to have one made for Granby,” Iskierka said—showing away, Temeraire thought with some superiority, out of jealousy over Laurence’s robes; it certainly could not compare in beauty, although as a practical matter, it might not be a bad notion; but it did not seem as though it was ever cold in this country.

Not all the furs were laid into the container, either: Mr. Chukwah and Senhor Robaldo were not allowing anything on the order of a philosophical difference to stand in the way of their making a separate arrangement, and a crate of furs was exchanged for a casket of gold and silver, to the satisfaction of both parties.

At the very last, a final few containers were opened: and within them inside oilskin wrappings a second nested container, and within that another layer of oilskin, which folded back revealed at last rows upon rows of sealed wooden casks marked with characters upon the top: Silver Needle, White Dragon, Yellow Flower, and when one of these was breached, the lovely fragrant smell of tea wafted nearly to the pavilion.

“How many tons would you say this delivery has made?” Laurence said to Tharkay, as the tea was bargained out among the captains, for really astonishing amounts of gold, Temeraire wistfully noticed.

“Twenty at the least,” Tharkay said, and flicked a hand at the smaller pile of goods set aside at the end of the beach, those which had not been taken by anyone; Temeraire had been wondering with increasing interest what should be the fate of those neglected goods, as he could not see anything wrong with any of them. “I imagine the leavings are all they send to Sydney.”

“It is ours: it is part of the payment for using Larrakia country,” Tharunka explained, looking up. “Whatever they cannot sell, we keep, and whatever we don’t want we trade to the Pitjantjatjara, and the Yolngu, and I think the Pitjantjatjara trade it to the Barkindji and the Wiradjuri, who take it to Sydney, and trade it to you. So everyone may have something they like, and no one has to travel anywhere they don’t want, and by the end of it, no one gets left with anything they don’t care for,” which seemed to Temeraire an eminently sensible arrangement through and through.

Laurence did not seem quite so sanguine. “How often do the serpents come, with such a load?” he asked.

Tharunka consulted with Binmuck, the chief of her companions: a woman with a soft and peculiarly deep voice. With the women’s habit of silent labor, this had encouraged the aviators to think her shy: but she had quite established her authority after Maynard had attempted, with an offering of rum which he had somehow once again filched out of the stores, to wheedle one of the younger women out behind the pavilion.

This conversation, which had been carried out in a combination of coaxing whispers and covert pantomime—to evade Laurence’s attention, as he had made quite clear his opinion of such behavior—went forward for some ten minutes, with the woman’s attitude passing from initially a half-flirtatious fascination to withdrawal, as Maynard tried to put his hand upon her arm and draw her out.

Temeraire had just been wondering if he ought perhaps say something to Laurence, even though the young women were Tharunka’s and not his; but Binmuck had silently risen up, taken one of the logs from the fire, and coming over to Maynard clouted him solidly across the back, with so much force that he was knocked flat to the ground on his face, the rum spilling beneath him. He sprang up red-faced and wet, which Temeraire felt served him right; the women all laughed with great enjoyment, pointing at the spreading dark stain upon his shirt—they none of them wore much in the way of clothing—and Maynard slunk hurriedly away in the face of Binmuck’s unsmiling and censorious expression, and her substantial cudgel.

Now she listened thoughtfully to Tharunka’s translation of their question, then answered at length: “This one was particularly good,” Tharunka said, “but Binmuck says that they have been bringing more and more, as they get more of the serpents trained: the Chinese don’t like to put goods on any one of them until it has swum the route back and forth three times without, you see, because it is such a long way; sometimes a new serpent will change its mind and just go another way, and then all your goods are lost. They come once a month,” she added, “because there are two schools now trained to come here and return to Guangzhou; when one leaves here, another leaves there, and they go in opposite directions.”