“That rain-forest is promising,” Laurence had said tiredly, wiping his brow; there had been a great deal of activity in their absence—lean-tos had gone up to shelter a supply of dry wood, and a cellar dug for the barrels of salt pork; the one cauldron which had been left them was boiling away ceaselessly to make their dinner—which had become breakfast when Forthing unloaded the turtle eggs. No-one else seemed to mind that Forthing’s shirt was so wretched, although Temeraire inwardly writhed with embarrassment, and tried to keep himself between the scene and Iskierka’s view, at least.
“There might be some fruit, at least; and better timber than what we have here,” Laurence said now, yawning; he was leaning against Temeraire’s arm, and his eyes were already closed. “We will send parties as we can; it is damnable not to have men one can trust.”
“Oh, yes, but I meant, what are we going to do about getting to land?” Temeraire said. “We must find some way to get to Brazil, still; we cannot only wait here until the French come back and sail us off to prison.”
“I will count myself delighted if we manage even so much,” Laurence said; and then he was asleep, and Temeraire could not press him further.
It was an endless struggle to keep the men to their small ration, and could not have succeeded if salt pork were any more edible without its hours of boiling; in the third week, inspection discovered that the store of biscuits, weevil-eaten as it was, had been raided.
“It’s a sorry mess, Captain, and it’s certain we’ll soon feel hunger claw at all our bellies,” O’Dea said, reporting the destruction with an air of gloomy satisfaction, which Laurence would have been glad to think unwarranted but instead understated the case. Barrels smashed, one gone entirely, and nearly as much biscuit left to rot in the open air as had been stolen. That was worse than the mere theft: the rank stupidity which even an instinct of self-preservation alone ought to have prohibited.
“Enough left to live on, if we cut the ration in half,” Laurence said, tossing aside a sprung board from one of the ruined barrels. “And if there is not another such incident of pillaging.”
“We can’t live on salt pork and crabmeat alone,” Granby said, standing with him, pale and holding the injured arm clasped hard against his side. “There’s no help for it: we’ll have to keep a watch on it ourselves.”
Laurence nodded. But there were already not enough aviators for all the tasks which a community of several hundred men required for its survival: too many of Granby’s officers and Laurence’s had been engaged belowdecks in fighting the fire, when the Allegiance had gone up. Besides Forthing, there was only Granby’s second lieutenant Bardesley, a silent and sunburnt man brought on in Madras who had been fished from the wreckage; a few of their young midwingmen and ensigns, of whom Cavendish was the oldest; and Granby’s harness-man Pohl: his ankle had been twisted a few days before the fire, and he had as a consequence remained on the dragondeck during the confusion, to the preservation of his life.
“Pohl will do it, and I’ll take a turn myself,” Granby added. “At least I can do that, if I am of precious little other use.” He jerked his chin towards his shoulder.
They had no guns, of course, and no rope; nothing convenient to make a lash with, even if there had been a culprit or a dozen to single out. But any number of men had been on guard over the course of the week, and had opportunity to commit the crime themselves or allow others to do so. “And we cannot easily put a man on shorter commons than we already are,” Laurence said.
There was only one other potential avenue of punishment—but Laurence would not ask that of the dragons for such a cause. Even if he had been willing to set them upon an unarmed man, fragile as a naked child before them regardless of guilt, and if they had been willing to be so set, the example would have been more maddening than salutary, he feared. The sailors already muttered among themselves that they should be fed to the beasts when the hunting had run out: the dragons were forced to spend nearly all the day flying out and back, to keep from stripping their fishing grounds.
“Soon I suppose we will have to eat sharks,” Temeraire had said, dismally. “And it is all very well to say they can be excellent eating,” he added to Gong Su, “I am sure of it, when they have been prepared properly; but we cannot carry any quantity of them back for you to cook for us, and eaten raw they are dreadfully gristly. But we cannot be flying much farther out, and still catch enough to make the flight worth the while.”