Empire of Ivory Page 0,52

without us." He laid his hand on Temeraire's side, looking away from the labor in which they could have no part, to the open ocean ahead.

Chapter 6

II

Chapter 6

OH," TEMERAIRE SAID, in a very strange tone, and he pitched forward and vomited tremendously all over the open ground before him, heaving up an acrid stinking mess in which the traces of banana leaves, goat horns, cocoanut shells, and long green ropes of braided seaweed might be distinguished among the generalized yellowish mulch, scattered through with unrecognizable scraps of cracked bones and shreds of hide.

"Keynes!" Laurence bellowed, having leapt out of the way just in time, and to the two hapless medicine-men who had offered the latest remedy, savagely said, "Get you gone, and take that worthless draught with you."

"No, let us have it, if you please, and the receipt," Keynes said, approaching a little gingerly, and bending to sniff at the pot which they had presented. "A purgative may be of some use on future occasions, if this is not simply a case of excess; were you feeling ill before?" Keynes demanded of Temeraire, who only moaned a little and closed his eyes; he was lying limp and wretched, having crept a little way off from the former contents of his stomach, which steamed unpleasantly even in the overheated late-summer air. Laurence covered his mouth and nostrils with a handkerchief and beckoned to the deeply reluctant groundsmen to bring the midden-shovels, and bury the refuse at once.

"I wonder if it is not the effects of the protea," Dorset said absently, poking through the pot with a stick and fishing out the remnants of the spiny blossom. "I do not believe we have seen it used as an ingredient before: the Cape vegetation has quite a unique construction, among the plant kingdom. I must send the children for some specimens."

"As glad as we must be to have delivered you a curiosity, it is certainly nothing which he ever ate before; perhaps you might consider how we are to proceed, instead, without making him ill again," Laurence snapped, and went to Temeraire's side before he could make a further display of his ill-temper and frustration. He laid a hand on the slowly heaving muzzle, and Temeraire twitched his ruff in an attempt at bravery.

"Roland, go you and Dyer and fetch some sea-water, from beneath the dock," Laurence said, and taking a cloth used the cool water to wipe down Temeraire's muzzle and his jaws.

They had been in Capetown now two days, experimenting lavishly: Temeraire perfectly willing to sniff or swallow anything which anyone should give him, if only it might by some chance be a cure, and exercise his memory; so far without any notable success, and Laurence was prepared to consider this latest episode a notable failure, whatever the surgeons might say. He did not know how to refuse them; but it seemed to him they were trying a great deal of local quackery, without any real grounds for hope, and making a reckless trial of Temeraire's health.

"I already feel a good deal better," Temeraire said, but his eyes were closing in exhaustion as he said it, and he did not want to eat anything the next day; but said wistfully, "I would be glad of some tea, if it would not be much trouble," so Gong Su made a great kettle of it, using a week's supply, and then to his disgust they put in an entire brick of sugar. Temeraire drank it with great pleasure when it had cooled, and afterwards stoutly declared himself perfectly recovered; but he still looked rather dismally when Emily and Dyer came huffing back from the markets, hung all over with the day's new acquisitions in net-bags and parcels, and stinking from ten-yards' distance.

"Well, let us see," Keynes said, and went poking through the materials with Gong Su: a great many local vegetables, including a long pendulous fruit like an oversized yam, which Gong Su dubiously picked up and thumped against the ground: not even the skin so much as split, until he at last took it into the castle, to the smith, and had it smashed open upon the forge.

"That is from a sausage-tree," Emily said. "Maybe it is not quite ripe, though; and also we did find some of the hua jiao today, from a Malay stall-keeper," she added, showing Laurence a small basket of the red peppery seeds, for which Temeraire had acquired a great liking.

"Not the mushroom?" Laurence asked: this