Tongues of Serpents Page 0,58

not like to alarm the men," Temeraire added, "and I am afraid we may have got into the underworld, somehow: I cannot account for it otherwise."

" - I beg your pardon?" Laurence said, opening his eyes, and standing; and then he was silent.

"I am sorry we should have pressed on during the night," Temeraire said, "but perhaps it was Jack Telly's spirit - "

"We are not in the underworld!" Laurence said, but the men when they woke were more of Temeraire's mind; until the meager breakfast of biscuit had been shared out, and then one very stupid person said, "I reckon there wouldn't be biscuit, in the hot place; we'm in China, I expect, and whoever would want to come here, I don't know."

At once the convicts all agreed: they had certainly reached China. They were not moved from this ridiculous opinion, either, even when Temeraire exasperated said, "But this is not China at all; China is across the ocean from here, and it is a very splendid place, not like this at all; there are thousands and thousands of dragons there, all over."

"There you have it," O'Dea said to the others with ghoulish relish, "a godforsaken place: we will see a horde of them fly out of the west, any morning now, coming to devour us; and then we will go down to Old Nick's country in the end." Temeraire put back his ruff in irritation.

"Some mineral in the soil gives it the color, I imagine," Dorset said, scraping at the earth with the end of a stick and peering inquisitively at the still-brighter dirt revealed below.

"We must backtrack in any case," Tharkay said, shading his eyes with a hand. "We must have overshot the turning of their trail."

"I can't see they would come into this countryside," Granby agreed, absently rubbing his arms as he looked around him yet again, as though he could not help it; Temeraire could see many of the other men doing so as well, and it made him look again also: it was indeed very odd to find oneself in the middle of this queer red landscape. "It is a godforsaken country; I don't suppose anyone can live here comfortably. Shall we go back to that water-hole we saw, last night? And we had better see the men all have a drink, before they come over ugly on us."

But when they had flown on three miles - still the endless sweeping in either direction, and all the while their eyes on the ground, so the tiny distance took the better part of two hours - Tharkay suddenly leaned forward on Iskierka's back, and Temeraire followed her to the ground: Tharkay leaped down in three bounds from her back to the sands, and he stooped at a mounded heap of red sand, exactly hollowed to that same eggshell curve, and beside it, stark and brilliantly reflecting in the sunlight, a white ochre handprint was marked freshly upon a jutting monolith of dark red stone.

Iskierka left them an hour later, winging her way back to Sydney, though not without a great deal of quarreling and dissension: she had not wished to leave, nor Granby; but there was no help for it. A smugglers' trail, which should by necessity come to a definite conclusion in some fixed harbor, was one thing; but the natives might go anywhere at all in their own country, and in circles if they wished.

"All right, maybe it isn't the smugglers; but what would the natives want with a dragon?" Granby had said. "I don't say they have any reason to love us, but they can't ever have seen a dragon before we landed in this country, and if you should tell me that a first glimpse of Temeraire, or Iskierka, or even Caesar, should make a man want to hatch a beast out for himself, I call it mad."

They were all at something of a loss from the new discovery: but besides the handprint the heavy red sand had taken all around the imprint of bare feet, and Tharkay had uncovered, too, some remnants of their meal: emptied seed-pods, roasted, and the stems of berries from a bush near-by; native, and certainly no smugglers would have made such a meal at the risk of poisoning themselves.

Tharkay shrugged a little. "I do not pretend to an understanding of their motives," he said, "but their tracks are reasonably clear, and I am afraid it answers a great many questions: I have already found it