Empire of Ivory (25 page)

the cauldron out of doors instead of within the castle

kitchens, Gong Su directing the crews to lay a substantial

bonfire underneath the big iron pot, suspended from stakes,

with a ladder beside it so he might stir from afar with a

long-handled wooden ladle. "Perhaps the red pepper-corns,"

Temeraire offered, "or maybe the green; I do not quite

remember," he said apologetically, as Gong Su consulted his

spice-box at length in attempts to reproduce the former

recipe.

Keynes shrugged and said, "Stew the thing and have done; if

we must rely on your reproducing some trick of spicing

invented a year ago by five cooks, we may as well go back

to England now."

They stewed it all the morning, Temeraire bending over the

pot, sniffing at the bouquet as critically as any drinker

of wine and making further suggestions: until at last he

licked up a taste from the rim of the cauldron and

pronounced it a success, "Or at least, it seems to me

familiar; and it is very good," he added, to an audience of

none: they had all been driven away to the edge of the

clearing, choking, and barely heard him. Poor Catherine had

been taken violently ill, and was still retching behind a

bush.

They covered their noses and carried Maximus the posset,

which he seemed to enjoy, even stirring himself so far as

to put a talon inside the cauldron to tip it over, so he

might lick out the last scrapings. After an initial

somnolence, it put him in a thoroughly good mood, so that

he roused up and even ate all of the tender young kid which

Berkley had acquired for his dinner more in hope than in

expectation, and asked for more; though he fell asleep

again before this could be arranged.

Berkley would have woken him to feed him another goat, and

his own surgeon Gaiters agreed; but Dorset took the

strongest exception and would have denied him even the

first, on the grounds that the digestive processes might

interfere with the effect of the posset. This shortly

devolved into an argument, as violent as hissing whispers

could make it, until, Keynes said finally, "Let him sleep,"

overruling both, "but henceforth we will feed him as much

as he can eat, after each dose; the importance of restoring

his weight cannot be overstated, to the cause of his

general preservation. Dulcia is better-fleshed: we will try

her on the posset tomorrow as well, without food."

"I ate it with some oxen; or perhaps some antelope,"

Temeraire said reminiscently, nosing a little sadly at the

empty pot. "There was some very nice fat, I remember that

particularly, the fat with the mushroom sauce; so perhaps

it was the oxen after all," the local breed possessing a

queer fatty shoulder-hump over the forequarters.

This single meal had been all Temeraire's prior experience,

but Keynes had divided their meager sample, and beginning

with the following morning, Maximus and Dulcia were fed

upon it three days in succession, until all the supply was

gone. As Laurence remembered it, the concoction had made

Temeraire mostly drowsy, and so Maximus became, but on the

third day Dulcia alarmed them all by turning unexpectedly

manic with excitement on the repeated dose, and nearly

insisting on going for a long hectic flight, quite likely

beyond her strength, and at the least sure not to be

beneficial to her health.

"I can, I am well, I am well!" she cried, her wings fanning

at the air; and she went hopping about the parade grounds

evasively on her back legs with the surgeons chasing after

in attempts to calm her. Chenery was of no use: he had

spent the intervening days since the failure of their first

hopes keeping himself and Captain Little half-drunk at all

times, and in defiance of all the pessimism which Keynes

could inflict would happily have thrown himself aboard and

gone.

Dulcia was finally persuaded not to go flying off, with the

temptation of a couple of lambs dressed hastily by Gong Su

with some of the peppery local seed-pods which Temeraire

liked; no one suggested she should not be allowed to eat,

this time, and she devoured them so readily as to spray

bits of meat around the feeding grounds, though ordinarily

a rather delicate eater.

Temeraire watched her enviously; not only was he not

allowed more than a taste of the posset itself, which he so

enjoyed, but his belly was still inclined to be delicate

after his excessive adventuring; so that Keynes had placed

him on a strict and uninteresting diet of plain-roasted

meat which his palate now disdained. "Well, at least we

have found the cure, then, surely?"

Dulcia, having finished her repast, fell down asleep and

began at once snoring loudly, with a thin wheezing whine on

the exhale: nevertheless an improvement, as she had only

lately been perfectly unable to breathe save through her

mouth. Keynes came over and sat down heavily on the log

beside Laurence, mopping his sweating red face with a

kerchief, and said disgruntled, "Enough, enough of this

casting ourselves into alt; have none of you learnt your

lesson? The lungs are by no means clear."

A heavy bank of clouds blew in during the night, so they

all woke to a steady dripping grey rain and clammy wet

ground, the air still unpleasantly hot and clinging damply

to the skin like sweat. Dulcia was worse again, drooping

and tired after her previous day's cavorting, and the

dragons were all of them more inclined to sneeze than ever;

even Temeraire sighed and shivered, trying to get more of

the rain off his hide and out of the hollows of bone and

muscle where it collected. "I do miss China," he said,

picking unhappily at his wet dinner; Gong Su had been

unable to sear the antelope carcass properly.

"It must be something else; we will find it, Laurence,"

Catherine said, giving him his coffee-cup at the breakfast

table inside the castle. Laurence accepted it mechanically

and sat down among the rest of them; they ate silently,

only the clatter of forks and plates; no one even offered

around the salt-cellar, or asked for it. Chenery,

ordinarily their life and gaiety, had bruised hollows under

his eyes as if he had been beaten about the face, and

Berkley had not come in to breakfast at all.

Keynes came in stamping his feet clear of mud, his coat

sodden with rain and traces of whitish mucus, and said

heavily, "Very well: we must have more of the thing." They

looked at him, made uncomprehending by his tone, and he

glared back ferociously before he admitted with reluctance,

"Maximus can breathe again," and sent them all running for

the door.

Keynes disliked greatly giving them even this much hope,

and resisted all their demands for more; but they could

stand by Maximus's head and hear for themselves the slow

wheeze of air through his nostrils, and the same for Dulcia

also. The two of them yet coughed and coughed and coughed,

but the aviators all agreed amongst themselves that the

tenor of the sound was entirely altered: a salutary and

productive cough, and not the wet terrible lung-rattle

which did not end; or so they contrived to persuade one

another.

Dorset still made his daily implacable notations, however,

and the surgeons continued with the other experiments: a

sort of custard made out of green bananas and cocoanut meat

was offered to Lily, who tasted one swallow and refused any

more point-blank. Messoria was persuaded to lie curled on

one side and a battery of candles were melted onto her

skin, lit and cupped, to attempt and heat the lungs, with

no apparent effect except to leave great streaks of wax

upon her hide. A tiny white-haired Khoi matron appeared at

their gates dragging behind her a laundry tub nearly her

own size, packed to the brim with a preparation made of

monkey livers; with only her broken bits of pidgin Dutch

she managed to convey the impression she had brought them a

sovereign remedy for any illness whatsoever. When tried on

Immortalis, he ate one unenthusiastic bite and left the

rest; but they had still to pay, as the remainder was

quickly raided by Dulcia, who cleaned out the tub and

looked for more.

Her appetite increased by leaps and bounds as the sensation

of taste returned, and she coughed less daily; by the end

of the fifth day almost not at all, except for an

occasional hacking. Maximus coughed a while longer, but in

the middle of the night towards the end of the week, they

were all woken by a terrible squealing, distant shrieks of

terror and fire; in a panic they burst out from the tents

to discover Maximus attempting guiltily to sneak unnoticed

back into the parade grounds, with as much success as was

to be expected in this endeavor, and carrying in his

already-bloodied jaws a spare ox. This he hurriedly

swallowed down almost entire, on finding himself observed,

and then pretended not to know what they were talking

about, insisting he had only got up to stretch his legs and

settle himself more comfortably. The track of his dragging

tail, followed through dust spotted liberally with blood,

led them to a nearby stable now half-collapsed, the paddock

circled by the wreckage of a fence, and the owners

apoplectic with rage and terror at the loss of their

valuable team of oxen.

"It is just that the wind turned, and they smelled so very

good," Maximus confessed finally, when confronted with the

evidence, "and it has been so long since I have had a nice

fresh cow, with no cooking or spices."

"Why you ridiculous lummox, as though we would not feed you

whatever you liked," Berkley said, without any heat

whatsoever, petting him extravagantly. "You will have two

of them tomorrow."

"And let us have no more damned excuses out of you for not

eating, during the day, when you will go wandering about at

night like a rampaging lion to stuff your belly," Keynes

added more peevishly, scruffy with his night's growth of

beard and disgruntled; he had for once sought his bed at a

reasonable hour, after having sat up nearly every night the

week observing the dragons. "Why you did not think to tell

anyone, I can scarcely understand."

"I did not like to wake Berkley: he has not been eating

properly," Maximus said earnestly, at which accusation

Berkley, who had indeed shed another two stone of weight

since their arrival, nearly spluttered himself into a fit.

Afterwards they fed Maximus on the ordinary British diet of

fresh-slaughtered cattle, occasionally sprinkled with a

little salt, and he began to eat through the local herdsand their own purses-at a truly remarkable rate, until

Temeraire was recruited to hunt for him northward of the

Cape among the vast herds of wild buffalo; although these

were not as tasty in Maximus's mournful opinion.

By then even Keynes had ceased to affect displeasure, and

they were wholly engaged on a fresh, a desperate, search,

for more of the wretched fungus. The local children had

given up the hunt as too unlikely of return: despite every

promise which Laurence and his fellow captains could make

of their open and waiting purses, none seemed inclined to

hazard their time on the pursuit.

"We can do it ourselves, I suppose," Catherine said

doubtfully, and in the morning Laurence and Chenery took a

party of men out to seek hunting grounds less picked-over,

Dorset along to confirm the identity of the mushroom; the

other captains would not willingly leave their sick

dragons, and Berkley was plainly not up to a long traipse

through wilderness, although he offered to go.

"No need, old fellow," Chenery said cheerfully, very

cheerfully: since Dulcia's recovery he was little short of

getting on a table to sing for joy, given the least

encouragement. "We will manage all right, and you had

better stay here and eat with your dragon; he is right, you

need fattening up again."

He proceeded to put himself together in the most outlandish

manner imaginable, leaving off his coat and tying his

neckcloth around his forehead to keep sweat off his face,

and arming himself with a heavy old cavalry saber from the

castle armory. The resulting appearance would not have

shamed a disreputable pirate, but emerging into the

clearing, Chenery looked at Laurence, who was waiting for

him in coat and neckcloth and hat, with an expression as

dubious as the one which Laurence himself, with more tact,

was repressing.

The dragons struck out north, over the bay with Table

Mountain at their backs, the Allegiance flashing by below;

crossed the glass-green shallows and scalloped curve of

pale gold-sand beach at the farther shore, and curved their

course north-east and inland, towards a long solitary

ridge, the Kasteelberg, which jutted out alone from the