“I suppose that is a call for me to ask Iskierka,” Granby said, “but I know very well that she will be perfectly willing to fight anyone whosomever. Well, if it helps you make them see sense, I will go as far as saying I plan to be sitting on my heels; but Laurence, I can’t give you my word: there are those reinforcements to think of, which Hammond claimed would be sent us from the Channel. I didn’t believe that they would ever arrive, when I thought we needed them to make any sort of go of things here; but now that they would be inconvenient, I think we must expect them at any moment. And if they do arrive before you have talked all these fellows round to this scheme of yours, and there are British dragons going into battle, I am not going to watch them square off against the Tswana while I sit here and twiddle my thumbs. Thumb,” he added, rueful.
Laurence nodded silently: he wondered, himself, if he could under such circumstances remain a mere observer, without doing whatever he could to persuade Temeraire to join the battle; it could scarcely be borne.
Hammond returned later that afternoon and began a determined pursuit of private inquiry with Granby; who eeled away from him energetically as far as he was able, until finally cornered just before the dinner-hour: Hammond went away from the conversation dissatisfied and anxious, to be taken back to Paraty by one of the Mexican couriers.
“Well, he has made me commit myself,” Granby said, sighing as he swung a leg over the planed log which made one of their benches and dropped himself unceremoniously into his seat: they ate in the open air, their handful of tarpaulins gone for shelter from the sun, and very little cover otherwise. They had established their camp in the hills a little distance from the coast, to avoid the eyes of the French sailors and also their guns, and without relief of wind coming off the water or any shade from trees which had long since been felled to put up the city, the tropical sun was punishing.
“I only hope you shan’t get me dismissed the service, Laurence,” Granby added, reaching across the table, and then winced for the indelicacy: poor Ferris had flinched, and now sat staring down at his trencher of flat wood.
Laurence looked at him, soberly: he could not see another course, but impossible not to recognize that he could scarcely have prejudiced Ferris’s chances of reinstatement more effectively. There would be no triumphant return from this mission; at best they might preserve the colony against immediate destruction. Hammond’s offer of his good offices, such as they were, would not likely survive Laurence’s recalcitrance; and this entire action, working as it must to remind their Lordships of Laurence and Temeraire’s general incorrigibility, would not incline them to mercy for his former first lieutenant.
“Of course, we would have the devil of a time going after them in there, to begin with,” Granby said that evening: they had climbed up to the summit of Corcovado together under the cover of darkness, to spy upon the Tswana in their nightly conclave: the dragons huddled in a circle with the Tswana warriors and councilors forming an inner ring around a low fire: their shadows stretched away long like the spokes of a wheel. Out in the harbor the lanterns of the French ships were glowing out a misplaced constellation on the water, and the light here and there shone on the iron of their guns.
“But I don’t know what we will do if they do go after those plantations,” Granby added: while the deliberations were at too great a distance to be followed, Dikeledi’s head flung back in loudly hissing distress boded ill for their direction. “Do you think there is any chance the regent will go along with you?”
“I hardly hope so far,” Laurence said, tiredly. “At best, he may think on his danger from the Inca a little more, and seek out some truce; but he has a thousand slave-holders clamoring against any arrangement to which the Tswana would consent. And very likely he only thinks me a peculiar sort of lunatic.”
“Well, at least Hammond will have given them a better notion of you—or a worse notion, I should say,” Granby said, lowering his glass. “They haven’t a prayer against the Tswana without us, if they only have a short one with.”
“Granby!” Iskierka hissed up the slope at them, stones rattling away as she clawed partway up. “We must go at once: there are dragons coming towards our camp, from the south, at least five of them.”
“I oughtn’t have opened my mouth,” Granby said; Laurence gripped his arm at the elbow, over the thick straps which bound on the hook, and together they scrambled down into Iskierka’s reach to be put up onto her back. She leapt into the air with a mighty heave, and Laurence felt the rumble of her ceaseless inward workings beneath his legs like the grinding of a millstone as she drew up her flame, preparatory.
“Hi,” Granby said, thumping her in the shoulder with his fist, “that’s enough: those are our fellows, most likely, and you shan’t go flaming them only because they will make matters difficult. I don’t suppose their captains would love us for it,” he added over his shoulder, “but do you suppose Temeraire could talk the beasts round?”
“I think there is every likelihood of it,” Laurence said, as they closed in: Temeraire was on his haunches roaring out in greeting, and there was scarcely any mistaking the silhouettes of the approaching dragons: Lily’s wide-stretched wingspan, and the vast and impenetrable shadow which was Maximus’s bulk.