Temeraire did not see why Blaise needed parrot what he had said, as though he had thought of it himself, but he did not very much care; Hammond’s protests, swift to come, were not in the least heeded, and Temeraire had the pleasure, only a little while later, of hearing the drumroll as the ship beat to quarters, and every hand went to his rope or gun.
The eruption of flame and smoke and thunder was everything which he could have desired: the great dreadful roar of the broadside, the gouts of red and blue flame, the thick clouds of black powder smoke rolling away over the water before the wind, carrying towards the harbor. And then Captain Harcourt said, “Do you know, fellows, I think we will go up and have a bit of exercise, ourselves,” and to compound Temeraire’s satisfaction he could watch Lily and all her formation aloft, weaving through the intricate patterns of battle-maneuver. Even Iskierka took an interest, and capped the entire production by going aloft at the very end, and blazing a great circle of fire like a wreath around the ship. Ordinarily Temeraire by no means approved her rampant showing away, but in this case he forgave it. “That has shown them,” he said with real joy.
“Yes,” Hammond said, low and grim: he had not left the dragondeck all the while, but yet stood by Churki’s side, his thin narrow hands clenched upon each other as though he wished to wring them out. “And now we must wait for what they will choose to show us.”
? ? ?
A host of fiddler crabs, too small to be worth the attention of fishermen, scuttled away rapidly along the empty seashore at Laurence’s approach: numerous enough that he and Junichiro were able to rake together a pile of them, with branches, onto a rock and away from their escape into the mud. They ate them raw, cracking the shells and sucking the large claw indecorously clean, without the least hesitation.
They went a little way towards easing the bite of hunger, and a small rivulet emptying into the sea near-by, running quickly over rocks, was fresh enough to drink. Laurence soaked his feet again in the salt water without removing the sandals, if he could even have done so without a knife at this point: the cords had sunk into his swollen flesh. He looked across the sea. The sun was setting at the far end, throwing an orange beam across a flat and level plain of water placid as glass, with scarcely a wave to be seen: broad gentle ripples only coming in to shore, nearly silent.
“I would undertake to cross it on a log, paddling with my hands,” Laurence said to Junichiro. “It is not twenty miles across, here?”
Junichiro thought as much, when they had made some more calculations, and refreshed by their crab supper they plunged back into the forest and hunted out a few sturdy fallen branches, to be latticed together with saplings and the interstices stuffed with leaves. Three hours of work, by the fading light, gave them a raft serviceable enough for the distance—or so Laurence hoped.
“Can you swim?” he belatedly thought to ask, and was glad for Junichiro’s nod; if she came apart beneath them, halfway across, the distance would not be insurmountable, if they could only hold on to a few of the larger limbs.
The moon had risen, brilliant full. “I will try her,” Junichiro said, and carried the raft out upon the water and lay himself upon it flat, cautiously. She did not come apart at once; Laurence looked up from shore at his shout of triumph, and was very satisfied. The wind was in the west, gentle, a mere breath; he finished the last of the work, two branches crossed and tied with some strips of fabric cut, with a sharp rock, from the robe he wore; the rest of it he rigged on her as a sail, and striding out into the water he pushed the foot of the makeshift mast through the raft while Junichiro steadied her, and secured it beneath with another knotted length of fabric, filled with sand and pebbles.
He cautiously got himself upon her, braced his hip against the mast with Junichiro doing the same on the other side, slipped his finger into the loop of the cord he had tied around the end of the cross-yard, and drew her into the wind. The irregular sail stirred, and belled, and lifted; she began to move slowly but surely out upon the water.
“Well,” Laurence said, after they had glided a dozen yards, and not yet sunk, “I would not like to meet even a strong breeze with this rig, but if we can contrive not to move very much, I suppose we may make it into sight of the opposite shore.”
The sea was peculiarly still beneath them, broken more by the eddy of their passage than any waves. Laurence slept in fits and starts, rousing at the tug of the cord upon his finger to adjust the sail. Occasionally he glanced over the side and even saw fish moving, moonlight on dark scales through clear water, and watching them felt a curious sense of familiarity, something just out of reach.