Empire of Ivory Page 0,106

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,