Empire of Ivory Page 0,74

bodies and shook his head. "It is not to be risked. You are damned fortunate not to have poisoned Temeraire with the thing in the first place."

"What the devil are we to do, then?" Catherine demanded. "If there is no more to be had - "

"There will be more," Dorset said with assurance, and for his part, he continued to perform daily rounds of the marketplace, forcing the merchants and stall-keepers there to look at his detailed sketch of the mushroom, rendered in pencil and ink. His steady perseverance was rewarded by the merchants growing so exasperated that one of the Khoi, whose Dutch and English encompassed only the numbers one through ten, all he ordinarily required to sell his wares, finally appeared at their gates with Reverend Erasmus in tow, having sought his assistance to put a stop to the constant harassment.

"He wishes you to know that the mushroom does not grow here in the Cape, if I have understood correctly," Erasmus explained, "but that the Xhosa - " He was here interrupted by the Khoi merchant, who impatiently repeated the name quite differently, incorporating an odd sort of clicking noise at the beginning which reminded Laurence of nothing more than some sounds of the Durzagh language, difficult for a human tongue to render.

"In any case," Erasmus said, after another unsuccessful attempt to repeat the name properly, "he means a tribe which lives farther along the coast and, having more dealings inland, may know where more is to be found."

Pursuing this intelligence, however, Laurence soon discovered that to make any contact would be difficult in the extreme: the tribesmen who dwelt nearest the Cape had withdrawn farther and farther from the Dutch settlements, after their last wave of assaults - not unprovoked - had been flung back, some eight years before. They were now settled into an uneasy and often-broken truce with the colonists, and only at the very frontiers was any intercourse still to be had with them.

"And that," Mr. Rietz informed Laurence, the two of them communicating by means of equally halting German on both sides, "the pleasure of having our cattle stolen: twice a month we lose a cow or more, for all they have signed one truce after another."

He was one of the chief men of Swellendam, one of the oldest villages of the Cape, and still nearly as far inland as any of the settlers had successfully established themselves: nestled at the foot of a sheltering ridge of mountains, which deterred incursions by the ferals. The vineyards and farmland were close-huddled around the neat and compact white-washed homes, only a handful of heavily fortified farmhouses more widely flung. The settlers were wary of the feral dragons who often came raiding from over the mountains, against whom they had built a small central fort bolstered with two six-pounders, and resentful of their black neighbors, of whom Rietz further added, "The kaffirs are all rascals, whatever heathenish name you like to call them; and I advise you against any dealings with them. They are savages to a man, and more likely will murder you while you sleep than be of any use."

Having said so much mostly under the unspoken but no less potent duress of Temeraire's presence on the outskirts of his village, he considered this final and was by no means willing to be of further assistance, but sat mutely until Laurence gave it up and let him go back to his accounts.

"Those certainly are very handsome cows," Temeraire said, with a healthy admiration of his own, when Laurence rejoined him. "You cannot blame the ferals for taking them, when they do not know any better, and the cows are just sitting there in the pen, doing no-one any good. But how are we to find any of these Xhosa, if the settlers will not help? I suppose we might fly about looking for them?" - a suggestion which would certainly ensure they did not catch the least sight of a people who surely had to be deeply wary of dragons, as likely as the settlers to be victims of the feral beasts.

General Grey snorted, when Laurence had returned to Capetown seeking an alternative, and reported Rietz's reaction. "Yes; and I imagine if you find one of the Xhosa, he will make you the very same complaint in reverse. They are all forever stealing cattle from one another, and the only thing they would agree on, I suppose, is to complain of the ferals worse.