He recognized, therefore, the characteristic spattering of the Longwing acid upon the tree-stumps which they showed him, and the earth surrounding them, and although the stolen trees had provoked such hostility in his captors, Laurence could not help but rejoice that at last he could begin to understand; he could make sense of the intelligence these signs offered him. There was a Longwing near-by, and it had come and taken away three prime pieces of timber.
“Taken for masts, most likely,” Laurence said, drawing a picture of a sailing ship in the wet sand to translate the word for them. Three masts on such a scale: a dragon transport for sure, which in any event should have been required to carry a Longwing and its usual formation; and that, surely, explained Laurence’s own presence. The Reliant must have been traveling in company with the larger ship, to serve her as a more agile defender: no-one could call transports easy to handle, for all the massive weight of iron they could bring to bear.
The coat—the green coat—must have come off some aviator’s back. Perhaps it had been thrown up on the shore beside him by the same storm that had wrecked the ship’s masts, and in the first early moments of cold and delirium Laurence had put it on. He wondered now if the sword, too, had come from another man’s hand; but he put that doubt aside. If it had, he could more easily restore it himself than could the Japanese—if he were permitted to go home.
And home was now a real possibility. There was a British ship here, in these very waters. She was not sunk; she was injured, but afloat, and her crew hoped to repair her. The Allegiance? Laurence wondered. Or perhaps the Dominion; although that ship was ordinarily on the run to Halifax. He still did not know what they had been doing with a transport so near Japan, but those questions were as nothing to the sheer inexpressible relief of knowing himself not, as he had begun to feel, wholly adrift, unmoored from any connection to his own life.
Laurence looked up from the sand, and addressed Matsudaira again. “Sir, I will say on behalf of my country-men that I am sure they intended no offense. They came ashore meaning only to take some necessary material for their ship’s repair, from what they must have supposed to be a stand of unused timber.”
“And where is this ship, now?” Matsudaira said.
His expression betrayed nothing but the same mild interest he had displayed throughout all the conversation, but the question came very quick. Laurence paused. He had just been thinking he might ask for a map of the coastline, or for a local fisherman to question. A transport had a draught near fifty feet: she could not anchor in shallow waters, and would not risk coming very near the coast. Some haphazard anchorage sheltered from the worst of the ocean by shoals was the most likely; near in straight line flight from this bay. He thought he might be able to guess a likely place, and even direct a boat thence, given some sense of the nearby waters.
He looked at the great serpentine creature looming overhead: the gleam of intelligence in its eye was plain, despite its monstrous size, and it was following their conversation with a keen, cold interest. It had come up from the bay with no warning—evidently it could breathe underwater. Laurence could easily imagine what such a sea-dragon could do to a ship, even one the size of a transport. Come up from below, throw her on her beam-ends, heave a loop of its body over the stern and drag her down—he could envision no easy defense. Perhaps the Longwing might be able to strike the beast, but in time to save the ship?
Its eye was fixed upon him, badly bloodshot. Was that merely some accident, or something else? Laurence glanced around the clearing. The ground was trampled into mud, as though after heavy rains; and when he looked he saw more damage to the trees around, smaller saplings crushed, branches fallen. There had been more than a mere dispute here—there had been fighting.
Laurence rose slowly to his feet. “I cannot hazard a guess,” he said grimly, and watched Matsudaira’s expression harden.
Temeraire was very cold. He did not know anything else, at first, and then his head was out in the air, and Iskierka was hissing at him ferociously, her talons sharp and clawing into his shoulders, saying, “Quick, quick, breathe in!”
The water held him like a vise, dragging. Temeraire tried to breathe and could not: his chest clenched and he vomited instead, gouts of water erupting painfully, dribbling away down his neck in long streams. Then at last Temeraire could draw in a thin, struggling stream of air. Lily was swimming beside him, trying to get her head under his foreleg. He clung to her, and scrabbled with his other foreleg at the great side of the ship, rising up before him; he managed to catch at a porthole, but the ship listed towards him alarmingly, and cries of warning came down.
“Oh! Why will you not listen to me?” Iskierka was saying impatiently. “You must get more air in, I cannot lift you if you will be so heavy!” She lowered her head and butted him.
“But I am trying,” Temeraire said, only he could not speak for coughing; every breath was a battle. His sides were filling a little more, but the blood was running down his shoulders and he felt so very heavy. His head was ringing in a very peculiar way, and everything seemed colored with a faint greenish light.
Kulingile came up in the water beside him, bulling in under Temeraire’s foreleg, so Temeraire could lean upon him and get out of the water a little more, though Kulingile grunted with the effort. “Get under his hindquarters, if you can,” Berkley was calling down.
“Come on, Temeraire, scramble up, there’s a good chap,” Maximus said. Temeraire did not quite see his way clear to doing as much. He coughed again, and let his head sink against Kulingile’s back; he was sliding back into the water, but he could not mind that so much. It did not feel so cold anymore, after all—
“Temeraire!” Roland said, leaning over the side, “if you drown, we shall all sail away and leave Laurence behind! You know no-one else thinks he is alive. You must get up, or else Hammond will make us all go.”
Temeraire struggled his head up to protest: he was not going to drown, at all; he could swim excellently well. And as for leaving Laurence behind—
“You will, too, drown, and then we shall leave him, see if we don’t!” Iskierka said, and bit him sharply. “Get out of the water. What else do you suppose you are doing?”
He tried to hiss at her, but he had to get another breath in to do it, and when he had that one, he got another. By slow measures, she and the others managed to help him heave up onto the line of the shoals, though the rocks crumbled as he clawed at them, and the waves tried to drag him back down. He crouched huddled on the rocks at last and breathed again in slow delicious sips of sea-air, splendid even though his throat ached badly, getting them in. His wings rattled against his back with cold.
“Well done, my dear one; let him have a rest,” he heard Granby saying, faintly, to Iskierka. “We’ll get him aboard as soon as he has filled his air out again.” The Potentate was moving: Temeraire could see it out of one eye, a few sails rigged out on the mizzen, maneuvering away from the rocks. She was listing a little to one side, but not badly. He closed his eyes.
“Idiocy,” he heard Gaiters saying, some indeterminate time after. The sun was beating on his back, now, but it did not seem to warm him. “Emptying your air—what made the lot of you take such a notion into your heads? I should have liked to come back to England with three heavy-weights having drowned themselves not fifty miles from shore; I suppose they would have hanged me and every other surgeon of the party for incompetence. Well, make yourselves of use, now: get him onto the deck at once. We must pack his sides with hot rocks, and fire up the galleys below. D’you think because he’s a dragon he can’t die of pleurisy?”
“I don’t see why you fellows must always be complaining about something new,” Maximus said. “We did get the ship back into the water, didn’t we?