Empire of Ivory Page 0,44
two, Laurence," Temeraire said, laying himself back down to sleep in his own clearing, drowsy but jubilant, "and she is quite sure she will have another; she said she could not tell at all that it was the first time I had sired."
"But is it?" Laurence asked, feeling slow and stupid, "Did not you and Mei...?" Belatedly the nature of the question stopped him.
"That had nothing to do with eggs," Temeraire said dismissively, "it is quite different," and coiling his tail neatly around himself went to sleep, leaving Laurence all the more confused, as he could not dream of prying further.
They repeated the visit the following evening. Laurence looked at the bottle and did not take it up again, but with an effort engaged Brodin upon other things: the customs of the Chinese and the Turks, and their sea-journey to China; the campaign in Prussia and the great battle of Jena, which he could re-create in considerable detail, having observed the whole cataclysm from Temeraire's back.
This was not, perhaps, the best means for relieving anxiety; when he had laid out all that whirling offensive, and the solid massed ranks of the Prussian army, in the form of walnut shells, were swept clean from the table, he and Brodin sat back and looked at one another, and then Brodin stood restlessly up and paced his small cabin. "I would as soon he came across while some of us still can fight, if only I could give more than ninepence for our chances if he did."
It was a dreadful thing to hope for an invasion, with unspoken the suggestion of a desire to be killed in one: perilously close, Laurence felt uneasily, to mortal sin, an extreme of selfishness even if it did not mean that England would be laid bare after, and he was troubled to find a sympathetic instinct in himself. "We must not speak so. They do not fear their own deaths, and God forbid that we should teach them to do so, or show less courage than they themselves do."
"Do you think they do not learn fear by the end?" Brodin laughed unpleasantly and short. "Obversaria scarcely knew Lenton, by the end, and he took her out of the shell with his own hands. She could only cry for water, and for rest, and he could give her none. You may think me a heathen dog if you like: I would thank God or Bonaparte or the black Devil himself for giving her a clean death in battle."
He poured the bottle, and when he was finished Laurence reached for it across the table.
"The breeders prefer two weeks," Jane said, "but we will be glad for as long as he feels himself up to the task," so Laurence dragged himself from his bed the next day, his sleep gone all to pieces, taken half in wine at Brodin's table and half during the early hours of the morning, and crept through his day, supervising the useless harness-work and lessons for Emily and Dyer, until it was time to go again. They repeated the engagement twice more, and then on the fifth day, while he sat lumpen and considering the chessboard dully, Brodin raised his head and said to Laurence abruptly, "Has he not yet begun to cough?"
"Perhaps my throat is a little sore," Temeraire said judiciously. Laurence was sitting, his head bent nearly to his knees, scarcely able to support the weight of hope resting so unexpectedly upon his shoulders, while Keynes and Dorset clambered over Temeraire like monkeys: they had listened to his lungs with a great paper cone placed against the chest, to which they put their ears, and stuck their heads in his jaws to examine his tongue, which remained a healthy and unspotted red.
"We must cup him, I think," Keynes said at last, turning to his medical satchel.
"But I am perfectly well," Temeraire objected, sidling away from the approach of the wicked curved blade of the catling. "It does not seem to me that one ought to be forced to take medicine when one is not sick; anyone would think you had no other work to do," he said, aggrieved, and the operation was only achieved by persuading him of the noble service which it should be, to the sick dragons.
It yet required a dozen attempts: he kept withdrawing his leg at the last moment, until Laurence convinced him not to look, but to keep his eyes turned in quite the opposite direction until the