Laurence assumed Temeraire particularly unusual, among dragons, for his scholarship; to better suit the rest, he kept, at first, to their small store of literature, and only then gave way to those mathematical and scientific treatises which Temeraire doted upon and he himself found hard going. Many of these interested the company as little as Laurence had expected, but he was surprised in reading a sadly wearing treatise upon geometry to be interrupted by Messoria, who said sleepily, “Pray skip ahead a little; we do not need it proven, anyone can tell it is perfectly correct,” referring to great circles. They had no difficulty at all with the notion that a curved course rather than a straight was the shortest distance for sailing, which had confused Laurence himself for a good week when he had been obliged to learn it for the lieutenant’s examination, in the Navy. The next evening he was further interrupted in his reading by Nitidus and Dulcia taking up an argument with Temeraire about Euclid’s postulates, one of which, referring to the principle of parallel lines, they felt quite unreasonable.

“I am not saying it is correct,” Temeraire protested, “but you must accept it and go on: everything else in the science is built upon it.”

“But what use is it, then!” Nitidus said, getting agitated enough to flutter his wings and bat his tail against Maximus’s side; Maximus murmured a small reproof without quite waking. “Everything must be quite wrong if he begins so.”

“It is not that it is wrong,” Temeraire said, “only it is not so plain as the others—”

“It is wrong, it is perfectly wrong,” Nitidus cried decidedly, while Dulcia pointed out more calmly, “Only consider a moment: if you should begin in Dover, and I a little south of London, on the same latitude, and we should then both fly straight northward, we should certainly meet at the Pole if we did not mistake our course, so what on earth is the sense of arguing that straight lines will never meet?”

“Well,” Temeraire said, scratching at his forehead, “that is certainly true, but I promise you the postulate makes good sense when you consider all the useful calculations and mathematics which may be arrived at, starting with the assumption. Why, all of the ship’s design, which we are upon, is at base worked out from it, I imagine,” a piece of intelligence which made nervous Nitidus give the Allegiance a very doubtful eye.

“But I suppose,” Temeraire continued, “that we might try beginning without the assumption, or the contrary one—” and they put their heads together over Temeraire’s sand-table, and began to work out their own geometry, discarding those principles which seemed to them incorrect, and made a game of developing the theory; which entertained them a good deal more than most amusements Laurence had ever seen dragons engage in, with those listening applauding particularly inventive notions as if they were performances.

Shortly it became quite an all-encompassing project, engaging the attention of the officers as well as the dragons; the scant handful of aviators with good penmanship Laurence was soon forced to press into service, for the dragons began to expand upon their cherished theory quicker than he alone could take their dictation, partly out of an intellectual curiosity, and partly because they very much liked the physical representation of their work, which they insisted on having separately copied out one for each of them, and treated in much the same way that Temeraire treated his much-beloved jewels.

“I will make you a handsome edition of it, bound up like that nice book which you see Laurence reads from,” Laurence found Catherine saying to Lily, shortly, “if only you will eat something more every day: here, a few more bites of this tunny,” a bribery which succeeded where almost all else had failed.

“Well, perhaps a little more,” Lily said, with a heroic air, adding, “and may it have gold hinges, too, like that one?”

All this society Laurence might have enjoyed, though a little ashamed to find himself preferring what he could not in justice call anything but a very ramshackle way of going on. But for all their courage and good humor, improved by the interest of the sea-voyage, the dragons still coughed their lungs away little by little. What would have otherwise seemed a pleasure-cruise carried on under a ceaseless pall, where each morning the aviators came on the deck and put their crews to work washing away the bloodstained relics of the night’s misery, and each night lay in their cabins trying to sleep to the rattling wet accompaniment of the slow, weary hacking above. All their noise and gaiety had a forced and hectic edge, defiance of fear as much as real pleasure: fiddling as Rome burned.

The sentiment was not confined to the aviators, either. Riley might have had other excuses besides the political for preferring not to have Reverend Erasmus aboard, for the ship was already loaded besides him with a large number of passengers, most of them forced upon Riley by influence with the Admiralty, and well-found in the article of luggage. Some number departed at Madeira, to take other ship for the West Indies or Halifax from there, but others were bound for the Cape as settlers, and still others going on to India: an uneasy migration driven, Laurence was forced to suspect, little though he liked to think so ill of perfect strangers, by a dread of invasion.

He had some evidence for his suspicion; the passengers, when he chanced to overhear them speaking as they took the air on the windward side of the quarterdeck, spoke wistfully amongst themselves of the airy chances of peace, and pronounced Bonaparte’s name with fear. There was little direct communication, separated as the dragondeck was, nor did the passengers make much effort to become friendly, but on a few occasions, Reverend Erasmus joined Laurence for dinner. Erasmus did not carry tales, of course, but asked, “Captain, is it your opinion that invasion is a settled certainty?” with a curiosity which to Laurence spoke of its being a topic much discussed among the passengers with whom they ordinarily dined.

“I must call it settled that Bonaparte would like to try,” Laurence said, “and being a tyrant he may do as he likes with his own army. But if he is so outrageously bold as to make a second attempt where the first failed so thoroughly, I have every confidence he will be pushed off once again,” a patriotic exaggeration; but he had no notion of disparaging their chances publicly.

“I am glad to hear you say so,” Erasmus said, and added after a moment thoughtfully, “It must be a confirmation of the doctrine of original sin, I think, that all the noble promise of liberty and brotherhood which the revolution in France first brought up to light should have so quickly been drowned by blood and treasure. Man begins in corruption, and cannot achieve grace striving only for victory over the injustices of the world, without striving also for God, and obeying His commandments.”

Laurence a little awkwardly offered Erasmus the dish of stewed plums, in lieu of an agreement which should have felt dishonest; he was uneasily aware that he had not heard services for the better part of a year; barring the Sunday services on board, where Mr. Britten, the ship’s official chaplain, droned through his sermon with a notable lack of either inspiration or sobriety: and for those, Laurence had often to sit beside Temeraire, to keep him from interrupting.

“Do you suppose, sir,” Laurence ventured instead to ask, “that dragons are subject to original sin?” This question had from time to time preyed upon him; he had quite failed to interest Temeraire in the Bible. Scripture rather induced the dragon to pursue such thoroughly blasphemous lines of questioning that Laurence had very soon given it up entirely, from a superstitious feeling that this would only invite greater disaster.