“Your egg!” Temeraire said, with a guilty start of remembering.
Arkady was rousing up despite his miserable state, and he blazed on reproachfully. “I left it in your charge, on that great ship, to take to New South Wales; then I hear you are in Brazil instead, and going on to China. Why are you not there, keeping watch upon it?”
“Oh,” Temeraire said, writhing a little in shame and discomfort; he did not know how to tell Arkady what had happened. His egg had been treated with the greatest of care; but that had not availed anything: it had hatched out Caesar, a most disagreeable dragon, who had taken as captain none other than the paltry Jeremy Rankin. “I did assure Caesar,” Temeraire offered desperately in his own defense, “that he needn’t take on anyone he didn’t like; that I should not have permitted Rankin to force harness on him—only Caesar would have it, because he learnt that Rankin is the son of an earl, and, I believe, very rich—”
“Ah! Why did you not say so at once?” Arkady closed his eyes in relief. “Then all is well. I am sorry I doubted you,” he said handsomely. And by way of heaping coals of fire on Temeraire’s conscience went on, “Only some very strange stories came to us, that you had lost an egg—that someone had stolen it from under your nose—”
Temeraire squirmed even more wretchedly. He had indeed lost an egg to thieves, though not Arkady’s, and it was not much excuse that he had found it safely hatched in the end; the egg had not hatched in British hands, and anything might have happened to it during the long dreadful chase across the desert. He seized upon the quickest excuse to change the subject. “Well, I did not lose your egg, at all,” he said hastily, “and I am very happy to have been able to reassure you on the subject. So that is why you came from England?”
“Yes,” Arkady said, “for Wringe is brooding again,” triumphantly, “and you may be sure we were not going to let go another egg, when the first had not been properly looked after. But now that it seems there was right care taken, I suppose we will let the officers have it, after all.”
“Well, I am sure they will look after it properly,” Temeraire said, relieved to have escaped with so little of the scolding he guiltily felt he deserved, “but now pray tell me, how did you come here? I suppose you took transport to Guangzhou?”
He had already worked out the picture: surely General Fela’s men had seen Arkady being taken prisoner by the rebels, and had misunderstood; they had thought he was bringing the opium, when instead he had been their helpless prisoner.
But Arkady said, “No, of course not! It is eight months at sea; there was no time for that! I suppose you would have gone somewhere else by the time we came, the way you have been running all over the world. We came by the Pamirs, and to Xian, because we thought this would be a quicker way to Peking. Instead here I am all chained up, and you have gone on somewhere else.”
“I do not see that you have any business complaining about my having gone on,” Temeraire said, a bit indignantly, “as I have gone on here, and otherwise I dare say the rebels would have kept you chained up here forever.”
“Rebels?” Arkady said. “What rebels?”
“The White Lotus,” Temeraire said, “who took you prisoner. But it will all be all right now,” he added, “for this proves you were not bringing them opium: if you were, they would certainly not have chained you up.”
“I was not bringing opium to anyone, but I do not know anything about this White Lotus, or any rebels,” Arkady said. “I was chained up by some great red dragons, a dozen at least. I fought them very bravely, but there were too many of them: they held me down for the men to put those chains on me, though we were only flying through and asking them the way to Peking.”
“Red dragons?” Temeraire said, puzzling. “Like the dragons in the army?”
“Yes,” Arkady said, “in jeweled collars, and their men shouted at us a long time, but I do not understand how they talk, nor do I want to.”
“What is he saying?” Forthing said, looking up from his search of the camp, as Sipho came scrambling out of one of the tents with an odd blade in his hand, wide at the end and narrow at the hilt, and brought it over to them.
“Look what I found,” Sipho said. “There are more of them, inside.”
“That might do, to pry these open,” Ferris said, reaching for it.
“That is not what I mean!” Sipho said. “These are the same kind of swords those fellows used when they tried to murder the captain.”