“Gerry,” Laurence said, catching that young boy where he leaned over the rail into the rising wind of their passage, his tow hair blown up into a cloud, “light along to Mr. Junichiro, there, and invite him to the dragondeck, if you please; and be sure you bring him back along the port side.”
The sea-dragon was vanished beneath the waves, a handful of fishing-boats on the water receding, the low mountains of the coast rapidly diminishing. Junichiro lingered for one final uncertain and lonely look back at his native shore before he turned and followed. His steps dragged. In the morning, Laurence intended to find some work for him—surely there could be no shortage of it, on a ship so heavily burdened with dragons—and see him worked to exhaustion for a few weeks. It would strengthen his appetite and dull his capacity for imagination: both ends much to be desired, at present, where his health was concerned. A ship’s ration did not suit the palate of most landsmen, even ones not so gently reared; thankfully Junichiro was still young enough to adapt. And of an age with some few of the aviators, including one young sandy-haired fellow whom Temeraire had named Roland, in Laurence’s own crew, who according to Hammond spoke the Chinese tongue: Laurence would have his young gentlemen to dinner, to-night, and introduce Junichiro around.
He turned his face back to the prow, and tried to persuade himself to be content. A transport was no graceful sailor, but the Potentate was answering beautifully to the wind so directly at her back, nearly her one good point of sailing. Surely no heart could fail to rise beneath so vast and brilliant a spread of sailcloth: four great masts rigged out from mainsail to topgallants. They might well be going twelve knots, a glorious rushing of wind upon his face and everything calculated to delight.
The dragons were still chattering amongst themselves behind him, speaking with pleasure of the entertainment they had lately seen, and their dinner: the equal of any party of drunken officers after a revelry, with two bottles of port in their bellies. Laurence was hard-put not to laugh. It ought have occurred to him, he supposed, that creatures gifted with speech would of a certainty proceed to gossip. He was an old hand at not eavesdropping upon shipboard conversations, but the flow of their strange, resonating voices, which seemed somehow to issue from the base of their throats and not their lips, was a comfortable rumble in the back of his mind, until gradually he became aware that there was an absence. Temeraire was scarcely speaking, and when he did answer some inquiry put to him directly, his voice was quiet and subdued; he lay facing the prow, looking ahead, and apart from the others.
Laurence slowly went to him; he felt uncertain—what could one say, to a dragon? He had no orders to give. But Temeraire’s head lifted and turned to meet him, something half-hopeful and wary in his looks; Laurence said, “If you are not otherwise occupied, may I bear you company?”
“Oh!” Temeraire said, “as though you had to ask, Laurence. Would you—perhaps would you care to have out the dear old Principia Mathematica, and have a look into that? If you have forgotten it, you may at least have the pleasure of reading it afresh.”
Laurence was taken aback: it had not occurred to him a dragon might be a great reader, although belatedly he recalled Kiyo’s fascination with poetry. Gerry was sent for the book, and returned quickly; Temeraire dragged a foreleg forward, out from beneath the heap of dragons, and held it forth. He plainly meant it as a couch, and when Laurence put his hands to it, he found he knew how to climb up, and his body remembered the seat in the elbow’s crook as though he were going blindfold up into the rigging. Laurence sat still a moment with the book open upon his lap, struggling with a kind of horror between bone-deep familiarity and endless strangeness.
“Laurence?” the dragon asked, anxiously. “Are you well? Shall I send for the ship’s surgeon?”
“I am well,” Laurence said, drawing his breath deep; for what alternative was there? “Where should you like me to begin?”
DESPITE A DISQUIETING LACK of any shipboard duties, Laurence had very little leisure on their journey: every hour was consumed by Hammond urgently cramming a thousand details of a foreign court into his head, with the assistance of the Chinese nobleman who was the envoy of the crown prince, Gong Su. Laurence felt himself dragged unwilling back to schoolboy days, with two tutors far more zealous than his own had been—and he had fled the schoolroom for the sea.