“Gerry, sir,” the little boy said, giving him a peculiar look; Laurence sighed inwardly and made a note he should have to get all the names given him, at least. He thought he would read it over, and learn the daily routine thereby; perhaps he might thus advise himself.
“What a splendid notion,” Temeraire said, unexpectedly, raising his head; his eyes had brightened. “Of course that must help your memory return more swiftly. Although I must tell you,” the dragon added, “the log-book has not been very interesting at all. It has been nothing but fish and wind, these six months, before we ran into that storm. We have not seen a battle anywhere, since we had to run from the Inca, and that was ages ago.”
He was regretful. Laurence’s own thought: the Inca? And hard on that, it belatedly dawned upon him that the dragon himself, unlike a horse, or even a recalcitrant landsman pressed into service, might be relied upon to tell him of their work. “Temeraire,” he said, “do you know the names of the rest of your crew?”
“Of course,” Temeraire said. “You have always told me it is the duty of any good officer to know all the names of his officers and his crew.”
“So it is,” Laurence said grimly. “Pray will you tell me them, one after another?”
“He is already much better,” Temeraire said to Maximus, anxiously, hoping for confirmation. “I know it is quite odd, when he does not remember someone’s name, or a thing which happened in front of him, and quite lately; but you cannot say he is not better.”
“Of course he is better,” Maximus said reassuringly, lifting his dripping jaws from his share of the cod stew. “I dare say he will remember all the rest of it in a week or so, Temeraire; no need to fuss.”
But Laurence was so very strange—so very stiff and awkward; it was not only that he had lost a great deal of his memory, which was bad enough and very inconvenient, but he did not seem to know Temeraire, either, or any of the other aviators, for that matter. He had spent nearly all the last two days closeted with Hammond, and had said very little to anyone. “But I am sure he will improve, once he has had a rest, and we are under way,” Temeraire said to himself, uncertainly.
There was some little difficulty over their departure: Temeraire did not understand, himself; he saw no reason why they should not have sailed out directly they had Laurence again, and he would have liked to: what if the Japanese should have taken it into their heads to snatch Laurence back? And it was no use Hammond’s trying to tell him they had no reason to do such a thing; they had kept him back in the first place, after all. And as for Lord Jinai—that was the name of the particularly rude sea-dragon—if he liked to stop them, he was very welcome to try. Temeraire felt himself quite equal to answering him, with Iskierka, and Kulingile, and all the formation at his backs; not to mention the guns of the Potentate.
But Hammond had objected to that, also; and so a great deal of communication had gone back and forth, passed through the Dutch commissioner, who evidently did not like Napoleon at all and persisted in considering himself a neutral party to the war. “And through us,” said Wampanoag, having come over to share a bite, “which, I don’t mind saying, has done some good: they have decided to give you a proper dinner, to say farewell politely, and see you on your way.”
“That,” said Temeraire somewhat baffled, “is quite absurd: they would have been perfectly welcome to give us dinner, anytime they liked.”
“They might give us more than one, too,” Maximus put in somewhat wistfully: the cod had vanished.
“Why, it’s not the dinner that matters, of course,” Wampanoag said. “It is the timing of the thing: if you sail out before they have given you permission, then they will have lost face; if they should give permission and you shouldn’t go, they will have lost face. And you shouldn’t like it any better if they should try and stop you, or try and chase you, either way. This way, everything will be quite clear.”
Temeraire still did not see very much sense in this: if all parties wished them gone, it seemed to him they might simply go: no-one was asking Lord Jinai to sit there in the harbor mouth, in their way. But Wampanoag seemed to think it entirely sensible.
“And I will say, I am pretty grateful to you,” he said, “for opening the door, as it were. I like them very much, now they have decided to talk to me: very polite fellows, perfectly honest: easy to do business with. They don’t like to say no, so you have to keep a sharp lookout to notice when they mean no, but that isn’t so difficult: the older fellows of the tribe are like that.”