dine with him virtually every night. This practice had been interrupted by the gale, but that having blown itself out the night before, they meant to resume this evening.
It was a good meal and a merry one, particularly once the bottle had gone round a few times and the younger midshipmen had drunk enough to lose their wooden manners. Laurence had the happy gift of easy conversation, and his table had always been a cheerful place for his officers; to help matters along further, he and Riley were fast approaching a true friendship now that the barrier of rank had been removed.
The gathering thus had an almost informal flavor to it, so that when Carver found himself the only one at liberty, having devoured his pudding a little more quickly than his elders, he dared to address Laurence directly, and tentatively said, “Sir, if I may be so bold as to ask, is it true that dragons can breathe fire?”
Laurence, pleasantly full of plum duff topped by several glasses of a fine Riesling, received the question tolerantly. “That depends upon the breed, Mr. Carver,” he answered, putting down his glass. “However, I think the ability extremely rare. I have only ever seen it once myself: in a Turkish dragon at the battle of the Nile, and I was damned glad the Turks had taken our part when I saw it work, I can tell you.”
The other officers shuddered all around and nodded; few things were as deadly to a ship as uncontrolled fire upon her deck. “I was on the Goliath myself,” Laurence went on. “We were not half a mile distant from the Orient when she went up, like a torch; we had shot out her deck-guns and mostly cleared her sharpshooters from the tops, so the dragon could strafe her at will.” He fell silent, remembering: the sails all ablaze and trailing thick plumes of black smoke; the great orange-and-black beast diving down and pouring still more fire from its jaws upon them, its wings fanning the flames; the terrible roaring which was only drowned out at last by the explosion, and the way all sound had been muted for nearly a day thereafter. He had been in Rome once as a boy, and there seen in the Vatican a painting of Hell by Michelangelo, with dragons roasting the damned souls with fire; it had been very like.
There was a general moment of silence, imagination drawing the scene for those who had not been present. Mr. Pollitt cleared his throat and said, “Fortunately, I believe that the ability to spit poison is more common among them, or acid; not that those are not formidable weapons in their own right.”
“Lord, yes,” Wells said, to this. “I have seen dragon-spray eat away an entire mainsail in under a minute. But still, it will not set fire to a magazine and make your ship burst into flinders under you.”
“Will Temeraire be able to do that?” Battersea asked, a little round-eyed at these stories, and Laurence started; he was sitting at Riley’s right hand, just as if he had been invited to the gunroom for dinner, and for a moment he had almost forgotten that instead he was a guest in his former cabin, and upon his former ship.
Fortunately, Mr. Pollitt answered, so Laurence could take a moment to cover his confusion. “As his breed is not one of those described in my books, we must wait for the answer until we reach land and can have him properly identified; even if he is of the appropriate kind, most likely there would be no manifestation of such an ability until he has his full growth, which will not be for some months to come.”
“Thank heavens,” Riley said, to a general round of laughing agreement, and Laurence managed to smile and raise a glass in Temeraire’s honor with the rest of the table.
Afterwards, having said his good nights in the cabin, Laurence walked a little unsteadily back towards the stern, where Temeraire lay in solitary splendor, the crew having mostly abandoned that part of the deck to him as he had grown. He opened a gleaming eye as Laurence approached and lifted a wing in invitation. Laurence was a little surprised at the gesture, but he took up his pallet and ducked under into the comfortable warmth. He unrolled the pallet and sat down upon it, leaning back against the dragon’s side, and Temeraire lowered the wing again, making a warm sheltered space