“Laurence is only here because he was lost overboard, saving our ship,” the dragon said, answering her in that tongue, “and if you knew he was here, all along, it is a perfect outrage for you to call us thieves. We have taken but a few trees, and if you want us to pay you for them, we shall: that is nothing in the least to Laurence, whom you have tried to keep from me. I dare say we ought to have gone to war with you. If I had known of it, I should have, and I dare say the Emperor of China would have, too: it is too much to be borne!”
Lady Arikawa looked at Laurence with some doubt in her expression, which Laurence was inclined to share, at this particular piece of hyperbole. “And you need not look like that,” the black dragon added, very coldly, “only because Laurence has been shipwrecked, and does not look his best at present. The Emperor adopted him, five years ago, and we are on our way to make a filial visit. He is a prince of China, and my captain.”
“The devil I am,” said Laurence.
“I BEG YOUR PARDON,” LAURENCE said, interrupting, “but if you please, Captain, I would be grateful if you would begin earlier: the last—” He paused, not liking to give it voice, and then forced his way onwards. “The last I recall very clearly is in the year four.”
“Oh, Lord,” Captain Granby said. He was the captain of the fire-breather, an officer of twenty-and-nine years; tall and somewhat battered, short one arm, and a pleasant, likable fellow, if almost shockingly informal in his manners and his dress of peculiar ostentation: Laurence had not seen so much gold on an admiral of the fleet. “Well, I know you took the Amitié, and Temeraire’s egg was on it—that news was all over the Corps; but as for the rest of that year, or how you came to be there, I haven’t the faintest notion. I suppose Riley could have told us—”
“Riley?” Laurence said, with relief for a name he recognized: his second lieutenant. “Tom Riley? Do you know his direction? I might write him—” and then Granby’s look of startled regret halted him, even before Granby spoke.
So Riley was dead—his ship the Allegiance lost. Laurence rose and went to stand by the stern windows, to breathe in the sea-air in great gulps. Granby was silent where he sat at the table, but Laurence felt his eyes upon his back.
There was a dreadful strangeness to sit across from a man who called him Will, a man who had been his first lieutenant, and yet have his face mean nothing; it was worse, somehow, than having been all alone and adrift. Granby had been all that was kind—they had all been so, and visibly gladdened by his return. Deposited on the deck, Laurence had been embraced with enthusiasm by a dozen strangers before he had been able to make his confusion known; since then, there had been nothing but the most generous anxiety for his health—an anxiety, however, which reminded him at every turn that he was ill, wounded, and in such a manner that he might never recover from it.
Outside the window, near the harbor mouth, he could see the curves of the sea-dragon’s body where it dozed nearly hidden beneath the waves, its presence a warning. Their own dragons were on the deck, and on a few pontoon-rafts floating about the ship; he did not, at the moment, see the black dragon—his dragon. Temeraire. Granby was speaking in low voices with the ship’s surgeon, a Mr. Pettiforth, behind his back. “I must insist we halt this interview, Captain Granby,” Pettiforth said. “You can see for yourself the inimical effects of only this one shock. There can be no question that any further strain on an already-weakened mind must be dangerous. You must withdraw. I must insist; I do insist.”
The surgeon had vociferously argued from the beginning against any attempt to repair the omissions in Laurence’s memory by recounting the events of the intervening years, as more likely to do harm than good. “I consider it a most unique species of brain-fever,” Pettiforth had said. “I have heard of only a few similar instances described; indeed, I am sure the Royal Society will be deeply interested, should I have an opportunity to set down the facts of the case—”
But Laurence had dismissed his advice: he longed for every scrap of intelligence, of knowledge. His feet had been bathed and bandaged; a night’s rest had seen him back on them; he could scarcely imagine delaying any further. He turned back. “Sir, I cannot deny this news is an unpleasant shock, but I am by no means prepared to halt. Captain Granby, if you please—”
“I beg your pardon,” Mr. Hammond broke in, anxiously. “I beg your pardon most extremely, Captain, but I think we must abide by Mr. Pettiforth’s advice for the moment, and ask you to consider—I hope you will forgive my saying so—consider it the course most consistent with your duty.”
“I can scarcely perform the least duty,” Laurence said, “when I do not know what that duty is, sir: so far as I knew before yesterday evening, I was a sea-captain, not an aviator.”