Empire of Ivory Page 0,107

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