Empire of Ivory Page 0,43

"but we must expect it to come on him any day now, and mostly they are disinclined once they get sick; and who can blame them."

Her courage reproached him; she suffered as much herself with no outward show, and he could not yield to his own feelings before her. In any case there was no shading of the truth to be had; he could not lie, and was forced to confess that Temeraire had "grown very fond of a female Imperial, in the retinue of the Emperor, while we were in Peking."

"Well, I am glad to hear it: I must ask if he would oblige us with a mating, to begin as soon as tonight, now he has been without question exposed," Jane said. "Felicita is not very poorly, and informed her captain two days ago that she thinks she has another egg in her; she has already given us two, good creature, before she fell sick. She is only a Yellow Reaper, a middle-weight; it is not the sort of cross any breeder of sense would choose to make, but I think any Celestial blood must be better than none, and we have few enough who are in any state to bear."

"But I have never seen her in my life," Temeraire said puzzledly, when the question was put to him. "Why should I wish to mate with her?"

"It is akin to an arranged marriage of state, I suppose," Laurence said, uncertain how to answer; it seemed to him belatedly a coarse sort of proposal, as though Temeraire were a prize stallion to be set on to a mare, neither of their preferences consulted, and not even a prior meeting. "You need do nothing you do not like," he added abruptly; he would not see this forced on Temeraire, in the least, any more than he should have lent himself to such an enterprise.

"Well, it is not as though I expect I would mind," Temeraire said, "if she would like it so very much, and I am rather bored only sitting about all day," he added, with rather less modesty than candor, "only I do not understand at all why she should."

Jane laughed, when Laurence had brought her this answer, and went out to the clearing and explained, "She would like to have an egg from you, Temeraire."

"Oh." Temeraire immediately puffed out his chest deeply in gratification, his ruff coming up, and with a gracious air bowed his head. "Then certainly I will oblige her," he declared, and as soon as Jane had gone demanded that he be washed and his Chinese talon-sheaths, stored away as impractical for regular use, be brought out and put on him.

"She is so damned happy to be of use, I could weep," said Felicita's captain Brodin, a dark-haired Welshman not many years older than Laurence, with a craggy face which looked made for the grim and brooding lines into which it had presently settled. They had left the two dragons outside in Felicita's clearing to arrange the matter to their own liking, which by the sound they were doing with great enthusiasm, despite the difficulties which ought to have been inherent in managing relations between two dragons of such disparate size. "And I know I have nothing to complain of," he added bitterly, "she does better than nine-tenths of the Corps, and the surgeons think she will last ten years, at this rate of progress."

He poured out an ample measure of wine, and left the bottle on the table between them, with a second and third waiting. They did not speak much, but sat drinking together into the night, drooping gradually lower over their cups until the dragons fell quiet, and the shuddering aspen trees went still. Laurence was not quite sleeping, but he could not think of moving or even to lift his head, weighted with a thick smothering stupor like a blanket; all the world and time dulled away.

Brodin stirred him awake in his chair in the small hours of the morning. "We will see you again tonight?" he asked tiredly, as Laurence stood and bent back his shoulders to crack the angry muscles loose.

"Best so, as I understand it," Laurence said, looking at his hands in vague surprise: they trembled.

He went out to collect Temeraire, whose profoundly smug and indecorous satisfaction might have put him to the blush, were he disposed to be in any way critical of what pleasures Temeraire might enjoy under the present circumstances. "She has already had