Empire of Ivory (38 page)

where stood a low table of enormous size, no higher than

his knee but some twelve feet long and across. The women

folded away the wooden covers, and a hollow space perhaps a

foot deep was revealed, like a sort of display-case; inside

lay a strange sculpture in the shape of the African

continent. It was a map, an enormous map in thick relief to

show elevation, gold-dust for sand and mountains of bronze,

jewel-chip forests and rivers of silver; and with great

dismay Laurence perceived the puff of white featherdown

used to stand for the falls. It stood almost halfway

between the tip of the continent, where Capetown lay, and

the sharp jutting prominence of the African Horn: in his

worst fears, he had not thought they had been brought so

far into the interior.

They did not let him look at it long; instead they drew him

to the other end, where the table had been lately extended:

the wood was darker, and the sections of the map laid down

only in soft painted wax. He did not at first know what to

make of it, until by relative position he understood the

blue oval stretch of water at the top of the continent must

be the Mediterranean, and realized it was meant to figure

as Europe: the outlines of Spain and Portugal and Italy

misshapen and the whole continent shrunk; Britain itself

nothing but a scattering of small whitish lumps in the

upper corner. The Alps and the Pyrenees stood in pinched-up

relief, approximately correct, but the Rhine and Volga were

strangely meandering, and smaller than he was used to see

them marked.

"They wish you to draw it properly," Mrs. Erasmus said, and

one of the prince's men handed him a stylus; Laurence gave

it back. The man repeated the instructions in his own

tongue, exaggeratedly, as if Laurence were a slow child;

and attempted to press the stylus on him once more.

"I beg your pardon; I will not," Laurence said, shaking off

his hand; the man spoke loudly and struck him abruptly

across the face. Laurence pressed his lips together and

said nothing, his heart pounding in a furious temper. Mrs.

Erasmus had turned to speak urgently to Kefentse; the

dragon was shaking his head.

"Having been taken prisoner, in what I must consider an act

of war, I must refuse under these conditions to answer any

questions whatsoever," Laurence said.

Moshueshue shook his head, while the dragon-king lowered

her head and fixed him with a glittering and furious eye,

her head so close that he could see that what he had taken

for tusks in Kefentse were a kind of jewelry: ivory rings

banded with gold, set in the flesh of her upper lip like

ear-rings. She snorted hot breath across his face, and

bared serrated teeth; but he had too much use of being so

close to Temeraire to be frightened thus, and her eyes

slitted down angrily as she drew her head back.

The king said coldly, "You were taken as a thief, and a

kidnapper, in our country; you will answer, or-" and Mrs.

Erasmus paused and said, "Captain, you will be flogged."

"Brutality and further ill-usage will in no wise alter my

determination," Laurence said, "and I beg your pardon,

ma'am, if you are forced to witness it."

His answer provoked her only further; Moshueshue laying a

hand on the king's foreleg spoke in low tones, but she

shivered her skin impatiently, and threw him off. She spoke

in a low angry continuous rumble, which Mrs. Erasmus could

only manage piecemeal to convey: "You speak of ill-usage to

us, kidnapper, invader-you will answer-we will hunt you

all, we will break your ancestors' eggs."

She finished and violently cracked her tail above her back,

issuing orders. Kefentse held his forehand out to Mrs.

Erasmus; she threw Laurence one look of deep concern before

she was carried briskly away, which he would have been glad

to think unmerited, and then his arms were seized, on

either side; his coat cut away down the middle of the back,

also his shirt, and he was forced to his knees with the

rags still hanging from his shoulders.

He fixed his gaze out through the archway, which opened

upon the loveliest prospect he had ever beheld: the sun

still low in the sky beyond the falls, newly risen, and

glowing small and molten through the gusting clouds of

mist. The torrents of water churned to pure white were

roaring steadily over the verge, the tangled branches of

trees yearning out towards the water, from the canyon-walls

where they had taken root; the gauzy insubstantial

suggestion of a rainbow, which refused to be seen head-on,

but clung to the edge of his vision. His shoulders ached as

they drew him taut.

He had seen men take a dozen lashes without a sound;

foremast hands, under his very own orders, he reminded

himself after every stroke: by the tenth, however, the

argument lost its potency, and he was only trying raggedly

to endure, in an animal sort of way, the pain which no

longer ceased between the strokes but only ebbed and

flowed. The whip struck awry once; the man holding his

right arm cursed, the edge of his hand having been caught

by the lash, by the sound of it, and yelled a complaint at

the flogger, good-natured. The whip did not cut the skin,

but the weals broke, after some time; blood ran down over

his ribs.

Laurence was not precisely insensible when another dragon

returned him to the cave, only very far away, his throat

raw and stretched to ruin. He was grateful for it, or would

have been; otherwise he would have screamed again when they

put hands on him, to lift him face-downwards onto the

ground, even though they did not touch his torn back: every

nerve had been woken to pain. Sleep did not come, only a

kind of murky absence of thought, which darkened by degrees

into unconsciousness.

Water was put to his lips. With sharp authority Dorset

ordered him to drink; the habit of obedience carried

Laurence through the effort. He faded again, and for a long

time a grey heat stifled him. He thought perhaps he drank a

little more, and another time dreamt his mouth was welling

up with salty blood, and choking half-woke to Dorset

squeezing cold broth into his mouth from a rag, before

again he slept and wandered in fever-dreams.

"Laurence, Laurence," Temeraire said, through the haze, in

a strange hollow voice, and Ferris was hissing in his ear,

saying, "Captain, you must wake up, you must, he thinks

you're dead-" His voice was full of so much fear that

Laurence tried to speak to comfort him, although his mouth

would not quite form words properly, then the dream fell

away again into a terrible roaring; he felt as though the

earth shook; then all gone, into a comfortable darkness.

Chapter 12

THE NEXT HE knew of the world was a cup of clean water held

for him by Emily Roland. Dorset was kneeling on the floor

beside him, and bracing him up by the waist. Laurence

managed to put a hand around the cup and guide it to his

mouth, spilling a little; he was palsied as an old man and

trembling. He was lying on his stomach on a thin pallet of

gathered straw covered with shirts, bare to the chest

himself; and he was desperately hungry.

"A little at a time," Dorset said, giving him small round

balls of cooled porridge, one after another. They had eased

him onto his side to eat.

"Temeraire?" Laurence said, around an involuntary and

desperate gluttony, wondering if he had only dreamed. He

could not move his arms freely: his back had scabbed over,

but if he reached too far forward the edges split, fresh

blood trickling down the skin.

Dorset did not at once answer. "Was he here?" Laurence said

sharply.

"Laurence," Harcourt said, kneeling down by him, "Laurence,

pray do not get distressed; you have been ill a week. He

was here, but I am afraid they ran him off; I am sure he is

quite well."

"Enough; you must sleep," Dorset said, and for all the will

in the world, Laurence could not resist the command; he was

already fading again.

When he woke it was daylight outside, and the cavern nearly

empty, except for Roland and Dyer and Tooke. "They take the

others to work, sir, in the fields," she said. They gave

him a little water, and reluctantly at his insistence the

support of their shoulders, so he might stagger to the edge

of the cave and look outside.

The cliff face, opposite, was cracked, and the dark stains

of dragon blood looked deep burnt orange-red on the

striated walls. "It is not his, sir, or not much," Emily

said anxiously, looking up at him.

She could tell him nothing more: not how Temeraire had

found them, nor if he had been quite alone, nor his

condition; there had been no time for conversation. With

the number of dragons flying at all hours through the

gorges, Temeraire had passed for a few moments as one in

the throng, but he was too large and remarkably colored to

escape notice, and when he had put his head into the cave

to see them, he had at once raised an alarm.

Temeraire had penetrated so far only because their captors

evidently did not anticipate an incursion of dragons, so

deep into their stronghold; but there was a guard now,

newly stationed above their cell: Laurence could see its

tail, hanging down from the top of the cliff, if he

painfully turned his neck, as far as he could, to look

directly upwards. "And I expect that means he got clear

away from them," Chenery said comfortingly, when the others

had been returned, late in the afternoon. "He can fly rings

around half the Corps, Laurence; I am sure he gave them the

slip."

Laurence would have liked to believe it, more than he did;

three days had gone by since that delirious state had

broken, and if Temeraire had been able, Laurence knew very

well he would have made another attempt in the teeth of any

opposition; perhaps had, and out of their sight had been

injured again, or worse.

Laurence was not taken, the next morning, with the others:

they had been set along with the other prisoners of war to

working in the elephant-fields, spreading the manure, much

to the satisfaction of the young women to whom the work

ordinarily fell. "Nonsense; I would be perfectly ashamed if

I could not manage it," Catherine said, "when all those

girls do: a good many of them are further along than I am,

and it is not as though I have not been brought up to work.

Besides, I am perfectly stout; indeed I am much better than

I was. But you have been very sick, Laurence, and you are

to listen to Dr. Dorset and stay lying down, when they

come."

She was very firm, and Dorset also; but they had been gone

a little more than an hour when another dragon came for

Laurence: the rider issuing peremptory commands, and

beckoning. Roland and Dyer were ready to back him into the

depths of the cave, but the dragon was a smallish creature,

not much bigger than a courier, and could easily have put

himself inside. Laurence struggled to his feet, and for

decency's sake took one of the sweat-and blood-stained

shirts which had helped make up his pallet to cover

himself, if he was not truly fit to be seen.

He was carried back to the great hall: the king was not

there, but the iron-works were in full swing under the

supervision of Prince Moshueshue; the smiths were engaged

in pouring bullets, with the help of another dragon, who

nursed their forge regularly with narrow breathed tongues

of flame, rousing the coals within to a fever-pitch of

heat. They had somehow acquired several bullet-molds, and

there were still more muskets stacked upon the floor, if

marked here and there with bloody fingerprints. The room

was sweltering, even with a couple of smaller dragons

fanning away vigorously to make the air move; but the

prince looked satisfied.

He took Laurence back towards the map again; it had been

already a little improved, and an entirely new addition

made to the west: a vague distance allowed for the

Atlantic, and then the approximate shapes of the American

continents drawn out: the great harbor of Rio most

prominently marked, and the islands of the West Indies

placed a little tentatively somewhere to the north. There

was none of the exactness needed to make it of practical

use for navigation, Laurence was glad to see; he was far

from that earlier complacency, during their abduction,

which had dismissed their captors as a threat against the

colony itself: there were too many dragons here.

Mrs. Erasmus had also been brought, and Laurence braced

himself for a further interrogation, to which he would not

allow himself to feel unequal, but Moshueshue did not

repeat the king's demands or his violence; his servants

instead gave Laurence a drink, oddly sweet, of pressed