Empire of Ivory (34 page)

one side of the fire and eating from bowls with their

fingers; when one of them rose to go to the boiling-pot

again, and the flames leapt with the sizzle of water,

Laurence glimpsed briefly Mrs. Erasmus on the other side of

the fire beside the dragon, sitting bent over a bowl in her

hands and eating, steadily and calmly. Her hair had come

loose from its ruthless restraints, and curved out around

her face in a stiff bell-shape; she had no expression at

all, and her dress was torn.

After their own meal, the men came over and in a handful of

bowls fed them all off the remnants, a kind of grain-porridge cooked in meat broth. There was not a great deal

for any of them, and humiliating to have to eat with their

faces bent forward into the bowl held for them, like

rooting in a trough, the remnants left dripping from their

chins. Laurence closed his eyes and ate, and when Dyer

would have left some broth in the bowl said, "You will

oblige me by eating everything you can; there is no telling

when they will feed us again."

"Yes, sir," Dyer said, "only they will put us back aboard,

and I am sure I will have it all up again."

"Even so," Laurence said, and thankfully it seemed that

their captors did not mean to set out again immediately.

They instead spread out woven blankets upon the ground, and

carried out a long bundle from among their things; they set

it down upon the blankets and undid the wrappings, and

Laurence recognized the corpse: the man whom Hobbes had

shot, the one who had murdered Erasmus. They laid him out

with ceremony, and washed him down with water carried from

the spring, then wrapped him again in the skins of the

antelope lately caught. The bloody spear they set beside

him, as a trophy perhaps. One of them brought out a drum;

others took up dry sticks from the ground, or began simply

clapping or stamping their feet, and with their hands and

voices made a chant like a single unending cry, one taking

up the thread when another paused for breath.

It was grown wholly dark; they were still singing. Chenery

opened his eyes and looked over at Laurence. "How far do

you suppose we have come?"

"A night and day, flying straight, at a good pace; making

steadily north by north-east, I think," Laurence said, low.

"I cannot tell more; what speed do you think he would make,

the big one?"

Chenery studied the red-brown dragon and shook his head.

"Wingspan equal to his length, not too thickset; thirteen

knots at a guess, if he didn't want to throw the lightweights off his pace. Call it fourteen."

"More than three hundred miles, then," Laurence said, his

heart sinking; three hundred miles, and not a track left

behind them to show the way. If Temeraire and the others

could have caught them, he would have had no fear, not of

this small rag-tag band; but in the vastness of the

continent, they could disappear as easily as if they had

all been killed and buried, and waste the rest of their

lives imprisoned.

Already they had scarcely any hope of making their way back

to the Cape overland, even setting aside the great

likelihood of pursuit. If they made directly westward for

the coast, avoiding all native perils and managing to find

food and water enough to sustain them over a more

reasonable month's march, they might at last reach the

ocean; then what? A raft, perhaps, might be contrived; or a

pirogue of a sort; Laurence did not set himself up as a

Cook or a Bligh, but he supposed he could navigate them to

a port, if they escaped gale and dangerous currents, and

bring back aid for the survivors. A great many ifs, all of

them unlikely in the extreme, and sure to only grow more so

the farther they were carried; and meanwhile Temeraire

would certainly have come into the interior after them,

searching in a panic, and exposing himself to the worst

sort of danger.

Laurence twisted his wrists against the ropes: they were

good stuff, strong and tightly woven, and there was little

yield. "Sir," Dyer said, "I think I have my pocket-knife."

Their captors were winding down their ceremony; the two

small dragons were digging a hole, for the burial. The

pocket-knife was not very sharp, and the ropes were tough;

Laurence had to saw for a long time to free one arm, the

thin wooden hilt slippery in his sweating hand, and his

fingers cramping around it as he tried to bend the knife

against the bindings around his wrist. At last he

succeeded, and passed it along to Chenery; with one arm

free he could work on the knots between him and Dyer.

"Quietly, Mr. Allen," Laurence said, on his other side; the

ensign was tugging clumsily at the knots holding him to one

of Catherine's midwingmen.

The mound was raised, and their captors were asleep, before

they had more than half disentangled themselves. There was

a noisy groaning of hippopotami in the darkness; it sounded

very near-by at times, and occasionally one of the dragons

would raise a sleepy head, listening, and make a quelling

growl, which silenced all the night around them.

They worked more urgently now, and those of them already

freed risked creeping from their places to help the others;

Laurence worked with Catherine, whose slim fingers made

quick work of the worst knots, and then he whispered

softly, when they had loosed her man Peck, the last, "Pray

take the others into the woods and do not wait for me; I

must try and free Mrs. Erasmus."

She nodded, and pressed the pocket-knife on him: dulled to

uselessness, but at least a moral support; and then they

quietly one by one crept into the forest, away from the

camp, except for Ferris, who crawled over to Laurence's

side. "The guns?" he asked softly.

Laurence shook his head: the rifles had unhappily been

bundled away, by their captors, into the rest of their

baggage, which lay tucked beside the head of one of the

snoring dragons: there was no way to get at them. It was

dreadful enough to have to creep past the sleeping men,

lying exhausted and sprawled upon the ground after the

catharsis of their wake: every ordinary snuffled noise of

sleep magnified a hundredfold, and the occasional low

crackles of the fire, burning down, like thunderclaps. His

knees were inclined to be weak, and some of his steps

sagged, involuntarily, almost so they brushed the ground;

he had to steady himself with a hand against the dirt.

Mrs. Erasmus was lying apart from the men, to one side of

the fire, very near the head of the great red-brown dragon;

his forelegs were curled shallowly to either side of her.

She was huddled very small, with her hands tucked beneath

her head; but Laurence was glad to see she did not seem to

have been injured. She jerked almost loose when Laurence's

hand came over her mouth, the whites of her eyes showing

all around, but her trembling quieted at once when she saw

him; she nodded, and he lifted his hand away again, to help

her to her feet.

They crept as softly away, and slowly, around the great

taloned claw, the black horny edges serrated and gleaming

with the red firelight, the dragon's breath coming deep and

evenly; his nostrils flared in their regular pace, showing

a little pink within. They were ten paces away, eleven; the

dark eyelid cracked, and the yellow eye slid open upon

them.

He was up and roaring at once. "Go!" Laurence shouted,

pushing Mrs. Erasmus onward with Ferris; his own legs would

not answer quickly, and one of the men waking leapt upon

him, taking him by the knees and to the ground. They fell

wrestling in the dust and dirt, near the fire; Laurence

grimly hoping for nothing more, now, than to cover the

escape. It was a clumsy, drunken struggle, like the last

rounds of a mill with both parties weaving and bloodied;

both of them exhausted, and Laurence's weakness matched by

his opponent's confusion of having been woken from sound

sleep. Rolling upon his back, Laurence managed to lock an

arm around the man's throat, and pulled with all his might

upon his own wrist to hold it; he lashed out with his

booted foot to trip another who was snatching for his

spear.

Ferris had pushed Mrs. Erasmus towards the forest; a dozen

of the aviators were running out, to come to her aid, and

to Laurence. "Lethabo!" the dragon cried-whatever the

threat or meaning, it brought her to a distracted halt,

looking around; the dragon was lunging for Ferris.

She called out in protest herself and, running back where

Ferris had dived to the ground to evade in desperation,

threw herself between, holding up a hand; the claw,

descending, stopped, and the dragon put it down again

before her.

This time the men set a watch, learning from their mistake,

and tied them up closer by the fire: there would be no

second attempt. The two small dragons had herded them back

to the camp with contemptuous ease, and an air of practice;

if in the process they had also stampeded a small herd of

antelope, they did not mind that, and made a late supper to

console themselves for the effort. They missed only

Kettering, one of Harcourt's riflemen, and Peck and Bailes,

both harness-men; but the latter two stumbled demoralized

back into camp and surrendered, early in the morning, with

the intelligence that Kettering had been killed, trying to

ford the river, by a hippo; their pale and nauseated

expressions precluded any wish of knowing more.

"It was my name," Mrs. Erasmus said, her hands tight around

her cup of dark red tea. "Lethabo. It was my name when I

was a girl."

She had not been permitted to come and speak to them, but

at her pleading they had at length consented to bring

Laurence over, hobbled at the ankles with his wrists tied

together before him, and one of the spearmen standing watch

lest he try to reach towards her. The red-brown dragon

himself was bent over their conversation alertly, with a

malevolent eye on Laurence at every moment.

"Are these men of your native tribe, then?" he asked.

"The men, no. They are of a tribe, I think, cousins to my

own, or allied. I am not very sure, but they can understand

me when I speak. But-" She paused, and said, "I do not

understand it properly myself, but Kefentse," she nodded

towards the great hovering beast, "says he is my greatgrandfather."

Laurence was baffled, and supposed she had misunderstood;

or translated wrong. "No," she said, "no; there are many

words I do not remember well, but I was taken with many

others, and some of us were sold together also. We called

all the older men Grandfather, for respect. I am sure that

is all it means."

"Have you enough of the tongue to explain to him we meant

no harm?" Laurence asked. "That we only sought the

mushrooms-"

She made the halting attempt, but the dragon snorted in a

disdainful manner before she had even finished. He at once

insinuated his great taloned forehand between them, glaring

as if Laurence had offered her an insult, and spoke to the

men: they at once pulled Laurence to his feet and dragged

him back to the line of prisoners.

"Well," Chenery said, when Laurence had been tied up with

them again, "it sounds a little promising: I dare say when

she has had a chance to talk to him, she will be able to

bring him round. And in the meantime, at least they do not

mean to kill us, or I expect they would have done so

already and saved themselves the trouble of our keep."

For what motive they had been preserved, however, was quite

unclear; there was no attempt made to question them, and

Laurence was growing bewildered as their journey extended

further and further, past what could ever have been the

reasonable extent of the territory of a small tribe, even

one in the possession of dragons. He might have thought

they were circling about, to lose pursuit, but the sun

during the day and the Southern Cross at night gave it the

lie: their course was steady and purposeful, always north

by north-east, veering only to bring them to a more

comfortable situation for the night, or to running water.

Early the next day they stopped by a wide river, looking

almost orange from its muddy bottom, and populated by more

of the noisy hippopotami, which darted away through the

water with surprising speed from the pouncing dragons,

submerging through wide ripples to evade. At last one of

them was served out, by the two small dragons cornering it

from both sides, and laid down to be butchered in the

clearing. Their captors had grown confident enough to untie

a few of them to assist with the tedious labor, Dyer and

Catherine's young runner Tooke set to carrying water back

and forth in a bowl, fetching it uneasily from the water's

edge: there was a substantial crocodile sleeping on the