Empire of Ivory Page 0,67
the bushes. At length the unlucky boy's howls faded to whimpering sobs, and Sutton returned to the table. "I beg your pardon, gentlemen," he said, and they resumed their desultory play; there were no more incursions that day.
But Laurence woke shortly after dawn, the subsequent morning, and went out of his own tent to find a loud squabbling at their gates, two knots of older children wrestling and kicking at each other with a polyglot confusion of yelling: a handful of Malay and scruffy Dutch boys together, and against them a smaller band of the black natives of the Cape, the Khoi, although previously the two groups had all been equal offenders together. Unhappily their quarrel had roused the dragons, who thus began an hour early their morning bouts of coughing; Maximus, who had suffered badly during the night, gave a heavy sighing groan. Sutton came rushing out of his tent in a mottled rage, and Berkley would have set among the lot of them with the flat of his sword, if Lieutenant Ferris had not thrown himself in the way, his arms outspread, as Emily and Dyer scrambled out from the dusty melee.
"We did not mean to", she said, muffled by the hand with which she tried to stanch her bloodied nose, "only they both brought some" by some evil genius, the two parties had at the same time after weeks of searching finally uncovered some of the mushroom. Now the rival bands were squabbling over their claim to be the first to present the enormous mushroom caps, two feet and more across, and stinking even in their natural state to high Heaven.
"Lieutenant Ferris, let us have a little order, if you please," Laurence said, raising his voice, "and let them know they will all of them be paid: there is not the least need for this fuss."
Despite attempts to convey this reassurance, it took some time to drag apart the angry combatants, who if they did not speak one another's language certainly understood the salient phrases which were being exchanged, at least well enough to keep their tempers fired up, and who kicked and swung their arms at each other even when hauled apart by main force. They stopped abruptly, however: Temeraire, having woken up also, put his head over the low fence to snuffle with appreciation at the caps, left abandoned by both sides in the grass while they attempted to settle their quarrel by might at arms.
"Ah, mm," said Temeraire, and licked his chops; in spite of their earlier bravado, the boys did not quite dare to run at him and snatch them away from his jaws, but they all joined into a general cry of protest, seeing themselves on the verge of being robbed, and as a consequence were at last convinced to settle down and accept their payment, counted out in gold coins with precisely equal amounts on both sides.
The Dutch-and-Malay contingent were inclined to grumble, as theirs had been the larger specimen, with three separate caps arranged upon a single stem, as compared to the two upon the mushroom brought by the Khoi, but a speaking glare from Sutton silenced them all. "Bring us some more, and you shall be paid again," Laurence said, but this produced discouraged looks rather than hope, and they looked at his closed-up purse a little resentfully before they scattered away, to quarrel now amongst themselves over the division of spoils.
"They cannot be edible?" Catherine said doubtfully, in a stifled voice, her handkerchief pressed over her mouth as she examined the things: growths more than proper mushrooms, lopsided and bulging oddly, a pallid fish-belly white irregularly spotted with brown.
But Temeraire said, "Certainly I remember these; they were very tasty," and only regretfully let Gong Su carry the mushrooms away, which he did by holding them at arm's-length, gingerly, with two very long sticks.
Having learnt from their earlier experience, they set up the cauldron out of doors instead of within the castle kitchens, Gong Su directing the crews to lay a substantial bonfire underneath the big iron pot, suspended from stakes, with a ladder beside it so he might stir from afar with a long-handled wooden ladle. "Perhaps the red pepper-corns," Temeraire offered, "or maybe the green; I do not quite remember," he said apologetically, as Gong Su consulted his spice-box at length in attempts to reproduce the former recipe.
Keynes shrugged and said, "Stew the thing and have done; if we must rely on your reproducing some trick of