Empire of Ivory Page 0,59
route had likewise vanished. But the suggestion appealed, with its prospects of quitting sooner the unhappy conditions of the voyage, and advancing more quickly the crucial research which was their purpose.
Laurence persuaded himself that he should not be derelict in going on early, once they should be near enough to make the flight one which might be accomplished in a day, if a strenuous one. With this incentive, Temeraire was easily induced to eat properly and go for long and uninteresting circular flights around the ship, to build up his strength; and no one else raised objection to their departure. "If you are quite sure you will reach in safety," Catherine said, with only the most obligatory reluctance; none of the aviators could help but share the urgent desire to have the work begun, now they were so close.
"You shall of course do as you please," Riley said, when officially informed, without looking Laurence in the face; and bent his head down again over his maps to pretend to be making calculations: a pretense which succeeded not at all, Laurence being perfectly aware that Riley could not do so much as a sum in his head without scratching it out on paper.
"I will not take all the crew," Laurence told Ferris, who looked dismal, but even he did not protest over-much. Keynes and Dorset would come, of course, and Gong Su: the cooks in the employ of Prince Yongxing, on their previous visit, had experimented with great enthusiasm on the local produce, which thus formed one of the surgeons' foremost hopes of reproducing the cure.
"Do you suppose you can prepare these ingredients in the same way as they might have used?" Laurence asked Gong Su.
"I am not an Imperial chef!" Gong Su protested, and to Laurence's dismay explained that the style of cooking in the south of China, whence he hailed, was entirely different. "I will try my poor best, but it is not to be compared; although northern cooking is not very good usually," he added, in a burst of parochialism.
Roland and Dyer came to be assistants to him, and run and fetch in the markets, their slight weight a negligible burden; for the rest, Laurence packed aboard a chest of gold, and took little more baggage than his sword and pistols and a pair of clean shirts and stockings. "I do not feel the weight at all; I am sure I could fly for days," Temeraire said, grown still more urgent: Laurence had forced himself to let caution keep them back a full week, so they were now less than two hundred miles distant: still a desperately long single day's flight, but not an impossible one.
"If the weather holds until morning," Laurence said.
One final invitation he made, which he did not think would be accepted, to Reverend Erasmus. "Captain Berkley begs me inform you he would be happy if you continued aboard as his guests," Laurence said, rather more elegantly than Berkley's, "Yes, of course. Damned formal nonsense; we are not going to put them overboard, are we?" could be said to have deserved. "But of course you are my personal guests, and welcome to join me, if you would prefer it."
"Hannah, perhaps you would rather not?" Erasmus said, looking to his wife.
She lifted her head from her small text on the native language, whose phrases she was forming silently with her mouth. "I do not mind," she said; and indeed climbed up to Temeraire's back without any sign of alarm, settling the girls around her and chiding them firmly for their own anxiety.
"We will see you in Capetown," Laurence told Ferris, and saluted Harcourt; with one grateful leap they were gone, flying and flying over clean ocean, with a good fresh wind at their heels.
A day and a night of flying had seen them coming in over the bay at dawn: the flat-topped fortress wall of Table Mount standing dusty and golden behind the city, light spilling onto the striated rock face and the smaller jagged sentinel peaks to either side. The bustling town crammed full the crescent slice of level ground at the base of the slope, with the Castle of Good Hope at its heart upon the shore, its outer walls forming a star-shape from above with the butter-yellow pentagon of the fort nested within, gleaming in the early morning as her cannon fired the welcoming salute to leeward.
The parade grounds where Temeraire was lodged were beside the castle, only a few dragon-lengths from where