“You shan’t complain to me,” Granby said, with some justice.
The spring was cold and delicious, and they flew the rest of that day over a rolling grassland peopled with roving herds of wild vicu?a and a handful of villages: Churki led them on, and the patrol-dragons made no attempt to check them. She had the same orange-and-violet plumage as her mother, and if not quite as large, still more than a respectable match for any Regal Copper: a beast of some twenty years’ age, she had informed Hammond. “I was with the army, until last year,” she said, with her gaze fixed on him in what could only be called an unsettling way, “and I won many honors: then I came home to learn good management from my mother before she goes to the other world. I am ready for an ayllu of my own, now. Very soon I shall begin my establishment.”
She paused and then added, “Do I understand correctly that you are not properly of Temeraire’s ayllu, yourself? And not Iskierka or Kulingile’s, either?”
“I must be flattered,” Hammond said to Laurence, “but I hope it may not be considered neglect of any possible service to our country that I do not pursue the offer; I doubt very much she would be willing to come back with me, if I did.”
“I might put it to her,” Temeraire offered. “Curicuillor was very impressed that we should have so many people in Britain, so perhaps Churki would consider it after all.”
“Oh, ah,” Hammond said, in some alarm: he had still a faintly green cast from the day’s flying, and no desire whatsoever to belong to a dragon.
The next day at morning, Churki suggested he should accompany her, flying; and when he feebly demurred she nosed at a tall stand of green-leaved shrub and said, “Brew those leaves fresh, instead of those strange dried ones you carry with you, and you will feel better; or take a handful and chew them.”
“I trust she would know if it would poison me,” Hammond said doubtfully, and carried a sample to Gong Su for his opinion; Gong Su nibbled and spat and shrugged.
“It is always safer to boil, first,” he said, and when brewed the tea had a peculiar but not unpleasant flavor; by the end of the day Hammond had drunk seven cups, and would certainly have been dead if it had possessed even the most mildly toxic character.
“It is quite miraculous,” he said that night. “Do you know, Captain, I have not been ill even once all the day: I feel myself as I have not since we left New South Wales, and I have been shipboard or dragon-back every day. I feel wonderfully clear-headed, indeed; I am willing to declare that it outstrips tea in flavor and in healthful effect, both.”
Their flight the next day brought them to a deep river valley that Churki called Urubamba, and from there they followed the river upstream through deep gorges. They were descending now, the highest mountains behind them, and more roads and villages scattered beneath their passage, until coming around a narrow pass within the river gorge they saw an immense bridge of rope, stretched from one peak to another.
It was heavily laden: three horsemen leading their beasts, and a train of some dozen llamas behind them, and a large party of men walking—or rather clinging to the sides. The bridge was swaying not only with ordinary use, but towards its destruction: the thick ropes were fraying, and even as they approached a piece of matting fell away towards the river, decomposing into its component sticks.
The horses were blindfold, to be led across more calmly, but they were already uneasy with danger; as they scented the dragons on the wind, they went mad with terror and began to rear and struggle against all handling. If there had earlier been any hope of the party’s clearing the span before all the structure came down, there was none now, and scarce moments to disaster.
Temeraire dived at once; the men on the bridge pointed at him and cried out, shouting, but he passed them and hovering bore up underneath the main portion of the bridge as best he could. “A little farther to port,” Laurence called to him, already unfastening his own harness-straps, “and if you will shift backwards, the weight will lie across your hindquarters. Roland, light along that spare harness, from below; we must get those horses hobbled before they fling themselves over.”