He descended through a brush of low straggly trees and scrub and nudged his way to the hollow nearest the border of the covert, and then he halted short, staggered, as the morning sun crept through behind him and broke like a stream upon the mass of a mighty and glittering hoard.
Gold—jewels—silver—Temeraire did not know where to look. Heaps of brass pieces, long chains of thick links of bright metal, dazzling great chunks of polished stone and glass, long carved sticks of polished ivory and mahogany and ebon, great cups and plates—dented and scratched from lying in a heap, but what did that matter when there were so many of them! so large!—and swords, and helms, and even huge bolts of cloth—velvet and silk, stained perhaps and torn, but still luxurious—enormous carved chests of wood heaped high with glinting shards of glass in colors, huge blocks of marble carved—
“Temeraire!” Laurence said, and Temeraire shook himself all over and jerked up his head. A low rumbling hiss of warning reached his ears, and he saw only then the huge dragon sprawled over the ground—she was lying upon the very heap itself, as though she had so much treasure she might make a bed of it.
She had a peculiar appearance: her body was sheathed in great plates of bony armor overlapping one another, not unlike the Prussian dragons Temeraire had met before, but to a far greater extent, and she seemed to bulge strangely underneath them: thick rolls swelled over her shoulders, and a large hump upon her back. Steel spikes and great steel rings had been bolted to her natural armor, silver over the natural green coloration of her hide, and were bristling all over her body; she was enormous, larger than himself and nearly as great as Maximus.
She reared herself up with a great heave; several other dragons scrambled away from between them. Temeraire had not noticed them before, either: small frightened-looking creatures, light-weights, mostly grey and white; they did not have the same armor plates, but the steel rings were planted in their bodies as well.
“Temeraire,” Laurence said again, “she must fear you are here to quarrel over that treasure; we must reassure her at once.”
“Oh,” Temeraire said, “oh—yes. Of course. Of course I am not here to challenge her. Pray tell her so, Dyhern,” a little wistfully: only look how much treasure there was! And he could surely have made a successful challenge, and perhaps won some of it for Laurence—“But we are allies,” he said, mastering himself with an effort, “and we must think of our duty first. I am not at all going to challenge her, no matter how much treasure she has.”
“We had better go away at once,” Dyhern said to Laurence, low, in French. “The beast will pay no mind to us: why should she? We are not her captain, nor her officers; you will do your cause no good if you provoke a quarrel.”
“Sir,” Laurence said, “dragons cannot be blamed for not speaking to us, if we do not address ourselves to them. Pray translate for Temeraire, if you can, and let us make the attempt; we will certainly not engage. If she attacks, we must withdraw at once, Temeraire, without offering a blow in return.”
Temeraire did not at all like the notion that if she should strike him, he should be obligated to run away; she would think him a terrific coward, and all those other dragons who were watching as well. “I do not see any reason she should attack me,” Temeraire said. “I have done nothing to her, and I do not mean to; nothing at all.”
Dyhern spoke to the dragon in Russian; Temeraire pricked his ears forward to listen to it: quite different from any tongue he had ever learned. But the enormous dragon did not pay him any attention, nor even look at him: instead she bared her teeth at Temeraire and hissed again, taking a step towards him that required no translation at all. He swelled up his chest, his ruff flaring: “I am not to be hissed at, if you please,” he said coldly in French, “as I am perfectly able to manage you, if you do want to be quarrelsome.”
“Temeraire—” Laurence began, but one of the small dragons, who had ducked behind the great one, put out his narrow white head, arrow-shaped, and said something timidly in a queerly accented French, “What do you want, please, if you are not here to fight?”
“Oh, you speak French, do you?” Temeraire said. “Well, we are here to find out where the French Army is: Napoleon, I mean. We are your allies,” he added, “and might have expected a more polite welcome than this, I must say; I do not know what you are about, when someone cannot even land to pay a visit, without being hissed at and treated like a thief. And you may tell her so, anytime you like.” There was a great deal of righteous satisfaction in making this speech, which a little consoled Temeraire for not being able to fight.