“Well,” Temeraire said, sorry, “we had better divide up and go separately, to cover more ground; then we can find something and all go back together, quickly.” Kulingile brightened, and Iskierka was nothing loath, either; they agreed to find one another in an hour, and parted.
The hour was nearly spent before Temeraire gave up and turned back towards the river, for their rendezvous, and then stumbled quite by accident upon a sort of construction—an aqueduct carrying water northward, away from the river, and while he did not know its purpose it was plainly built deliberately, so he turned to follow its course and came with only a few minutes’ flying out upon a broad field. In it a small dragon in green and yellow plumes was hard at work, dragging an odd contraption behind himself through the dirt.
The device, Temeraire thought, was made of six of the strange bronze implements they had seen, which had been somewhat clumsily yoked together; they were slung with ropes over the dragon’s shoulders. A few men and women followed the dragon through the field, turning over the dirt that the blades had cut apart.
Temeraire paused hovering over the trees, but they did not look up, all of them too fixed and intent upon the earth beneath them instead, so he landed to introduce himself; and as he came down the small green dragon looked up, saw him, shrilled in tones of horror, and flung the entire bronze plow at his head.
“Ow!” Temeraire said, wincing away as the clanging mess struck against his breast and head. “You are not an eighth my size; whatever do you mean by—” but the dragon was not even waiting; it had seized up the handful of people in its talons and was tearing away into the air.
“Oh!” Temeraire said, outraged, and roared after him; the strange dragon only put on yet more speed, until he pulled up short mid-air just as suddenly, as Kulingile, lit golden by the sun, came flying over the tree-tops.
“I thought you were maybe Supay, or one of his servants,” the small dragon, whose name was Palta, said absently, his impressed gaze still fixed upon Kulingile. But who Supay was, Temeraire did not know, and by Supay the dragon seemed to mean some sort of creature from under ground.
“I do not see how you can have thought any such thing,” Temeraire said. “It sounds as though you had mistaken me for a bunyip or something like it, instead of a dragon, which is perfectly ridiculous.”
“I do not mean to be rude,” the little dragon said, ruffling his feathers up so that he looked nearly twice his size, “but you are all black and shriveled, as though you had been burned up, so I do not think it is as ridiculous as that.”
That was rude, in Temeraire’s opinion, and he was about to say so when Iskierka landed. “What are you all sitting about here for? Have you found another town yet?” she said, and peered critically at Palta. “Is there anything more to eat near-by?” she demanded.
He did not understand her, of course, but Palta shrank back anyway from her outthrust head, wreathed in steam. “My fishermen have just had a very good catch of—” Palta began timidly when Temeraire asked.
“Whatever good is he, then?” Iskierka said impatiently. “Come along back to the camp, and we will find out more from this fellow instead.”
“What fellow?” Temeraire said, and then discovered that Iskierka was carrying a man, whom she had evidently snatched up from somewhere: an old man, with very white hair and his skin deeply furrowed and brown with sun, and marks all over his face; and she had not even asked him if he minded.
“How could I have asked him when I do not speak the language?” she said, dismissing Temeraire’s protests. He was quite sure that she had ought to have asked, and better still not taken him at all. “It is not as though I meant him any harm. We will ask him where we can find some better food, and then I will take him back where I found him—oh, somewhere back that way.”
“I am sure she doesn’t know in the least where she found him,” Temeraire said under his breath, and then asked Palta. “I don’t suppose you know him?”
“No, he is not mine; and you mayn’t have any of mine, either,” Palta said, putting himself anxiously between them and his small group of wide-eyed people. “If you try—”