“The eggs are quite secure?” Temeraire said, nosing down at his own belly, where they had been snugged in: he had utterly refused to leave them behind, even in Riley’s care.

“No: for Bligh is still aboard the ship,” Temeraire had said, “and apart from any other mischief he might do them, if one should hatch, I should not be at all surprised if Bligh should try and take it for himself, since Rankin is not going to oblige him after all. I would not worry ordinarily, but plainly the sea-voyage has affected the eggs badly: that is the only explanation for Caesar, in my opinion,” with great disapproval.

“Pray be sure that the little one is in properly,” Temeraire added now. “It would be quite dreadful if it were to slip out.”

“The netting is tight, and the padding will not shift,” Laurence said, pulling against the thick hawsers of the belly-netting with his hand, and leaning his weight against it, without much yielding. “And we cannot have any fear of the temperature falling too far. Try away, if you will.”

Temeraire reared himself up on his hindquarters and shook; not with quite the usual vigor, as he had too much care for the eggs, but enough to be sure nothing was ready to tumble free or break loose. “All lies well,” he said.

“If you are quite ready,” Iskierka said, “perhaps we might leave in reasonable time, instead of sitting about for hours.”

“Some of us,” Temeraire returned smartly, “are carrying things, instead of being quite useless; and if you would not mind being careless with the eggs, I would.”

Iskierka could not easily be used for transport: her spikes, which jetted steam almost perpetually, rendered her hazardous to all but trained men and packages securely wrapped in oilcloth; so she was a good deal more unburdened, carrying only Granby and her makeshift skeleton crew.

“I don’t see why we must be in such a hurry,” Caesar said, disconsolately, to take the opposing position; he was not inclined to do much of anything yet but sleep and eat, in the way of new hatchlings, and did not seem much affected by the boredom which had rendered Iskierka an imminent danger. “We might leave tomorrow; or when it is less hot.”

“That,” Temeraire said, “will not be for three months; now stop complaining, and let us be off.”

For all the apprehension of difficulty and tedium, Laurence could not yet repress a sensation of pleasure in climbing aboard Temeraire’s back, the familiar and solid snap of the metal carabiners locking in his hands, securely fixed on to the harness-rings; the sense of a crew, however small, moving about behind him; other beasts in company. And then the great coiling leap upwards: Temeraire’s wings snapping outstretched to cup the rushing hot air, endless blue above welcoming and glitter on the water below.

The Allegiance and all Sydney herself were reduced to charming picturesque, the dusty roads become gold ribbons from the air, and beyond the city’s bounds the neat squares of cultivated fields and orchards unrolling before them like a spreading carpet; and the dragons’ shadows fell upon them like cut-out silhouettes, rising over the hills, with the mountains rising in their blue haze in the distance.

THE SENSATION GREW only gradually: the settled fields yielding to unbroken wilderness, stands of ancient timber, eucalypts with their oddly sharp fragrance rising if they landed, and the last hunting tracks fading away beneath the leaf cover. They crossed the Nepean and followed a small nameless tributary winding slow and westward into the mountains, hoping to find somewhere at its end a pass through: but there was none. Instead they came one day after another to another high, rising cliff wall: ragged sandstone, fresh yellow and old stained grey, climbing in heaps of pebbles and cracked boulders to where at last the face rose away sheer.

There was the quality of a hedge-maze to the gorges. The sun appeared only late and vanished early, hidden behind the rearing walls of rock. At first they had been glad of the deep lingering shadows, the cooler air about the river, but with the passing days Laurence was conscious of a building unease as they retreated once more along their course and tried yet another branching of the stream, with only the same fruitless result. They had not yet made forty miles from Sydney, as the dragon flew, and yet they had traversed ten times that distance, it seemed, going back and forth.

It was not merely the lack of civilization; it was the absence of all human life. The country felt wholly untenanted, not empty but abandoned. They had once at night seen a distant fire; in the morning, they had gone on foot nearer to investigate, hoping to meet some native who might perhaps be solicited as a guide; but in the deep crowding thicket they did not find even enough remains of a camp to be sure of what they had seen, or to learn if there were another living soul anywhere within a day’s flight; even Tharkay’s skill could uncover no certain sign. Upon the stone, from time to time, they found markings: handprints in white ochre, or in red; but these were old and weatherworn, for years perhaps, and spoke only of some distant occupation.

“Dead, of the plague and of the pox,” O’Dea said, when Laurence had observed as much to Tharkay, wondering why the country should have been abandoned: O’Dea was an older convict, and a man grown grizzled and sodden through hard years, though not uneducated. “It came upon them hard, the early years after we came, and we saw them die in Sydney town: their bodies came floating into the harbor, spotted sepulchrous white, and their fires burned low and went out; now they are gone, and only their curses linger.”

He was an Irishman and a former lawyer, taken up in the troubles in ’ninety-eight, and under life-sentence; this expedition had offered his first and perhaps his only chance of liberty since he had been fetched to the colony fifteen years before, and while he had solaced himself liberally with rum in the intervening span, he had not wholly lost either his spirit, or a gift for inconvenient poetry.

With too much matter here for it to work upon: Laurence did not doubt his explanation, though it might be exaggerated; he had glimpsed in Sydney some of the natives, walking through the town or plying their canoes in the harbor, seeming unconcerned with the colony’s life rather than either party or inimical to it. But few in number, and here stood the markings for evidence that this country had once been peopled, enough to bring men to this isolate place—not only once but often, for the most recent marks were layered upon older—and now was deserted. There was something bleak and lonely in the fading handprints upon the walls, which vanished into the twilight as they retreated away down the gorge: a claim and a memorial all at once, which seemed a symbol of the land itself denying them passage.

From there on, the disquiet grew among them; the stillness itself made a mute reproach. Temeraire was not immune, either. “I do not understand why we have not yet found a way,” he said. “Whenever we have flown up over the mountaintops, it looks as though this gorge and that one should meet, beneath the trees, and then we come down again and suddenly we have gone the wrong way, or else the gorges do not meet at all, and there is a great heap of rock waiting; and everything looks the same. I do not like it in the least, and it seems to me quite uncanny we should mistake our way so often.”

Large game was not plentiful, and what they found the dragons had to eat; Caesar complained of his much-reduced menu, incessantly, until the general oppression began to make itself felt to him as well, and then he wished only to be gone. “There is nothing good in this place, and I am sure no cows would like to come here, either,” he said. “We had much better get a grant of land nearer the city, where it was so sunny and pleasant; not here where one cannot even see past the trees.”