There was no sense in beginning until the next morning, when Roland insisted she was well enough to show them the way, though Laurence would have spared her another day to recover. “Better sooner than late, sir,” she said, and indeed if there were one point of agreement among all their party it was the desire to escape the macabre ruin of their shore encampment, with the ashes and smoke of the dead being carried ceaselessly upon them by the sea-wind.
If they had not had so many wounded, even the many practical difficulties of moving their remaining supply to some other beach would not have been permitted to stand in the way. During the night three more had died, others were beginning feverish, and they were all of them hungry and all badly parched: the stream now only sluggishly worked to refill the small basin which they had originally dug, where the dragons could drink.
Kulingile had come back to shore only once and during the night, as secretively as a dragon approaching twenty-six tons might be expected to manage, to let Demane get a canteen from Sipho.
“He won’t listen to me at all,” Demane said, gulping hurriedly in Kulingile’s looming shadow: the dragon’s body was swaying back and forth from the energetic lashing of his tail, and the spikes upon his shoulders were bunched and bristling. “He wouldn’t bring me in until I started coughing I was so dry, and keeps too close a watch for me to swim to shore. Sir, we found a ship—”
“Roland told us,” Granby said, “so don’t fret him trying to get away. It’s bad enough already: why the devil didn’t you run for the forest when Roland told you? You and Laurence,” he added, in some exasperation. “But at least it’s not too late for you to learn better.”
“Is she—” Demane said.
“Midwingman Roland will be perfectly well,” Laurence said, flatly, “and we will discuss your excursion when circumstances better permit.”
Demane darted a guilty look, and then Granby called, “All right, Kulingile, he’s done; and we’ll have a guard set when he needs to come for water next, only give us a shout.”
Kulingile answered by snatching Demane away, but he settled back onto his rock more easily, and in an hour he had let Demane sit upon his back instead of clutched in his talons. Demane looked not much better pleased but sat watching them forlornly with his shoulders hunched against the cold water, which sprayed with regularity up Kulingile’s haunches.
“I cannot quite like the notion of going away and leaving only Kulingile to watch over things here; he is too preoccupied,” Temeraire said. “Not that I blame him in the least; only he might not think to keep a watch on my crew, at present.”
“You cannot think me in any danger now,” Laurence said: a more demoralized assemblage than the remaining sailors could not be imagined.
“I did not think you in any danger before,” Temeraire said, “and plainly I was mistaken. It does not seem to me anything is so very different: Kulingile did not kill above thirty of those sailors, and they might as easily make another still, if you wish to blame it all on liquor; which I am by no means ready to do,” he added. “After all, I have seen sailors quite drunk before, and they never set a ship on fire, or tried to snatch you; I am sure there must be something wrong with this particular lot.”
Yes; but if there was, Laurence felt now he had encouraged it by his very despair of them: he had not wished to make anything of them, if anything might be made.
“Yet someone must go hunting,” he said. “You and Iskierka and Kulingile have not been feeding so well you can go two days without anything to eat; and Kulingile will not.”
“Then Iskierka may go,” Temeraire said.
“I shan’t, either,” Iskierka said, raising her head bristling, but after some squabbling the matter was settled by lot: Granby drew a line in the sand and Temeraire dropped onto it a handful of pebbles—pebbles by his standards; each of them a boulder dredged from the ocean floor and roughly the size of a man’s head—and then the results counted off: there were two more on Iskierka’s side of the line than on Temeraire’s.
“I am sure it might come out differently if only I tried again,” Temeraire said, dissatisfied.
“Oh, I will not let anyone do anything to Laurence,” Iskierka said impatiently, “and I will set them on fire if they should try, so you may as well go; you know they are more frightened of me anyway.”