not a settled thing amongst the men.
"Jack made a fuss, didn't he," Bob Maynard said, slurred with rum and not so quietly that he could not be heard, and rolling a significant glance towards Rankin where he stood speaking with Caesar. "Some as are high-in-the-instep didn't much like him saying what was what, when we are being hauled into the back of beyond; some here were mighty quick to hurry us off, and not a tear to shed for old Jack."
Though Maynard was given to persuading the other men to game away their rum to him, and while being nearly twice as large as most of the other poor thin convicts scarcely managed half the work of anyone else, he was endlessly ready to oblige with a song, in a fine deep baritone, or an entertaining story; not at all wont to complain, ordinarily, so the accusation struck with more than ordinary force, from him. Temeraire could not easily repress a start of guilt; he had himself thought - for just a moment, though, and not spoken aloud, he excused himself - that it would not be so dreadful not to have Jack Telly along always complaining.
"Still, it was not on purpose; no one asked him to go away and jump into a pit," Temeraire said, "and we did look, for quite some time," but he could not quite convince himself that Jack Telly would have accepted these arguments, and as it should be his decision whether to haunt them or not, Temeraire could not find any relief; he could only lie down curled very close about the last remaining egg, to make sure no malevolent spirits could creep in at it.
Chapter 8
BUT IT SEEMED to Temeraire that Jack Telly had indeed cursed them, for all their luck had run away. They searched and searched, and were always it seemed a little too late, or had gone a little too far; meanwhile the trail crept onward beneath them at the snail's pace of foot speed, offering only the most tantalizing bits of encouragement - today a scrap of porcelain; tomorrow another nest for the egg.
Temeraire passed an uneasy night, and woke even more uneasy; he raised his head in the first moments before dawn, while everyone else yet slept, and watched the line of the horizon growing sharper where it met the sky. It seemed very far away. The forest had broken up at some time during their last night's flight, and there was nothing to conceal the hard edge of the world but a handful of brushy trees looking a little like broomsticks stuck into the earth upside down, and low hillocks.
At first the dawn grey lingered, cast over all the ground, pale knotted clumps of grass and darker shrubs standing out against the dark earth. Then by degrees the blue washed over the vast bowl of sky in advance of the sun, and color began to come back into the world - but color terrible and strange. The sandy earth all beneath them was red as the exposed side of a freshly broken brick, as though someone had painted it. The grasses were hay-yellow, as if dead, but all of them; there was not a single green blade anywhere.
The stand of bushes along one side of their camp looked a little less unnatural: full of shining, dark green leaves; but they alone looked verdant, and the stand of trees which Temeraire had been looking at, between them and the horizon, were blackened as if by fire. The smoke-stains were dark up and down the bark, but equally strange, they had fresh green leaves put out at their ends, despite the curled-up, charred scraps of the old ones clinging still to the lower branches.
There were no clouds in the sky, no water on the ground; not a living thing stirred anywhere around. It was the queerest place Temeraire had ever seen: even the Taklamakan, which had been empty and barren and cold and of no use to anyone, had not looked so very wrong - at the oases, there had been poplar-trees, and proper grass; and where there was no water, there were no plants growing; and the ground had not looked so peculiar at all.
"Laurence," Temeraire said urgently, nudging him; Laurence was drowsing lightly against his forearm, sitting near the egg. "Laurence, perhaps you might wake up."
"Yes?" Laurence said, still asleep, and rubbed his hand over his face.
"I am not afraid myself, of course; but I should