Throne of Jade Page 0,128

I woke up and he told me smug as a deacon that he had packed you off alone with some Chinaman; not that Temeraire would let any harm come to you, but anything could happen in a crowd, after all."

"No, nothing of the kind was attempted at all; our guide was a little rude to begin, but perfectly civil by the end." Laurence glanced over at the bundles stacked in the corner, where Zhao Wei's men had left them. "I begin to think Hammond was right, John; and it was all old-maid flutters and imagination," he said, unhappily; it seemed to him, after the long day's tour, that the prince hardly needed to stoop to murder, with the many advantages of his country to serve as gentler and no less persuasive arguments.

"More likely Yongxing gave up trying aboard ship, and has just been waiting to get you settled in under his eyes," Granby said pessimistically. "This is a nice enough cottage, I suppose, but there are a damned lot of guards skulking about."

"All the more reason not to fear," Laurence said. "If they meant to kill me, they could have done so by now, a dozen times over."

"Temeraire would hardly stay here if the Emperor's own guards killed you, and him already suspicious," Granby said. "Most like he would do his best to kill the lot of them, and then I hope find the ship again and go back home; though it takes them very hard, losing a captain, and he might just as easily go and run into the wild."

"We can argue ourselves in circles this way forever." Laurence lifted his hands impatiently and let them drop again. "At least today, the only wish which I saw put in action was to make a desirable impression upon Temeraire." He did not say that this goal had been thoroughly accomplished and with little effort; he did not know how to draw a contrast against the treatment of dragons in the West without sounding at best a complainer and at worst nearly disloyal: he was conscious afresh that he had not been raised an aviator, and he was unwilling to say anything that might wound Granby's feelings.

"You are a damned sight too quiet," Granby said, unexpectedly, and Laurence gave a guilty start: he had been sitting and brooding in silence. "I am not surprised he took a liking to the city, he is always on fire for anything new; but is it that bad?"

"It is not only the city," Laurence said finally. "It is the respect which is given to dragons; and not only to himself: they all of them have a great deal of liberty, as a matter of course. I think I saw a hundred dragons at least today, wandering through the streets, and no one took any notice of them."

"And God forbid we should take a flight over Regent's Park but we have shrieks of murder and fire and flood all at once, and ten memoranda sent us from the Admiralty," Granby agreed, with a quick flash of resentment. "Not that we could set down in London if we wanted to: the streets are too narrow for anything bigger than a Winchester. From what we have seen even just from the air, this place is laid out with a good deal more sense. It is no wonder they have ten beasts to our one, if not more."

Laurence was deeply relieved to find Granby taking no offense against him, and so willing to discuss the subject. "John, do you know, here they do not assign handlers until the dragon is fifteen months of age; until then they are raised by other dragons."

"Well, that seems a rotten waste to me, letting dragons sit around nursemaiding," Granby said. "But I suppose they can afford it. Laurence, when I think what we could do with a round dozen of those big scarlet fellows that they have sitting around getting fat everywhere; it makes you weep."

"Yes; but what I meant to say was, they seem not to have any ferals at all," Laurence said. "Is it not one in ten that we lose?"

"Oh, not nearly so many, not in modern times," Granby said. "We used to lose Longwings by the dozen, until Queen Elizabeth had the bright idea of setting her serving-maid to one and we found they would take to girls like lambs, and then it turned out the Xenicas would, too. And Winchesters often used to nip off like lightning before