Berkley looked at Keynes, who said, “A little sea-bathing can do no harm, I expect; and perhaps even some good. It is warm enough in all conscience, and we will have sun another four hours at this time of year, to dry him off.”

“Well, then, into the water with you,” Berkley said, gruffly, patting Maximus’s side, and stepping back. Crouching down awkwardly, Maximus plunged forequarters-first into the ocean; the massive anchor-cables complained with deep voices as the Allegiance recoiled from the force of his leap, and ten-foot ripples swelled up and went shuddering away from him to nearly overturn some of the unsuspecting slighter vessels riding at anchor in the bay.

Maximus shook water from his head, bobbing up and down, and paddled a few strokes along before stopping, sagging in the water; the buoyancy of the air-sacs kept him afloat, but he listed alarmingly.

“Lean against me, and we shall go together,” Temeraire said, swimming up to his side to brace him up; and little by little they progressed towards the shore until the ocean floor came up abruptly to meet them, clouds of white sand stirring up like smoke, and Maximus could stop to rest, half-submerged yet, with the waves lapping against his sides.

“It is pleasant in the water,” he said, despite another fit of coughing. “I do not feel so tired here,” but he had still to be got out and onto the shore: no little task, and he managed it only in slow easy stages, with all the assistance which Temeraire and the oncoming tide could offer, crawling the final dozen yards nearly on his belly.

Here they let him rest, and brought him the choicest cuts from the dinner which Gong Su had spent the day preparing to tempt the dragons’ appetites after their exertion: local cattle, fat and tender, spit-roasted with a crust of pepper and salt pressed into their flesh, as a flavoring strong enough to overcome the dulling effect of the illness on the dragons’ senses, and stuffed with their own stewed tripes.

Maximus ate a little, drank a few swallows of the water which they carried out to him in a large tub, and afterwards fell back into sluggish torpor, coughing, and slept the night through on shore, with the ocean still coming in and his tail riding up on the waves like a tethered boat. Only in the cool early hours of the morning did they get him the rest of the way to the parade grounds, and there settled him in the best place at its edge beneath the young stand of camphor trees, where he might have a little shade as well as sun, and very near the well which had been sunk to easily bring them water.

Berkley saw him established, and then took off his hat and went to the water trough, to duck his head and bring a couple of cupped handfuls to his mouth to drink, and wipe his red and sweating face. “It is a good place,” he said, his head bent, “a good place; he will be comfortable here—” and ending abruptly went inside the castle, where they breakfasted together in silence. They did not discuss the matter, but no discussion was required; they all knew Maximus would not leave again, without a cure, and they had brought him otherwise to his grave.

ABOARD, THEY HAD counted every day; they had hurried, they had fretted; now they were arrived and could only sit and wait, while the surgeons went through their fastidious experiments, and refused to give any opinion whatsoever. More outrageous local supplies were brought to them in succession, presented to Temeraire, occasionally tried on one of the sick dragons, and discarded again. This proceeded without any sign of useful effect, and on one unfortunate occasion again distressed Temeraire’s digestive system, so that the shared dragon-midden took on a very unpleasant quality, and had at once to be filled in and a new one dug. The old one promptly sprang up a thick carpet of grass and a bright pink weedy flower, which to their great exasperation could not be rooted out, and attracted a species of wasps viciously jealous of their territory.

Laurence did not say so, but it was his private opinion that all this experimentation was only half-hearted, and meant to occupy their attention while Keynes waited for the climate to do its work; though Dorset made careful notes of each trial in his regular hand, going from one dragon to the next in rounds thrice daily, and inquiring with heartless indifference how much the patient had coughed since the last inquiry, what pains he suffered, how he ate; this last was never much.

At the close of the first week, Dorset finished his latest interrogation of Captain Warren, on the condition of Nitidus, and shut his book and went and spoke quietly with Keynes and the other surgeons. “I suppose they are all prodigious clever, but if they keep on with these secret councils, and telling us nothing, I will begin to want to push their noses in for them,” Warren said, coming to join the rest of them at the card-table, which had been set up under a pavilion in the middle of the grounds. The game was mostly a polite fiction to occupy the days: they did not have much attention to the cards at any time, and now had none, all of them instead watching the surgeons as they huddled together in deep discussion.

Keynes evaded them skillfully for two more days, and finally cornered into giving some report said crabbily, “It is too soon to tell,” but admitted that they had seen some improvement, so far as they could determine merely from the climate: the dragons had shown some resurrection of appetite and energy, and they coughed less.

“It will be no joke, ferrying all the Corps down here,” Little said quietly, after their first early jubilation. “How many transports have we, in all?”

“Seven, I think, if the Lyonesse is out of dry-dock,” Laurence said.

There was a pause; then he added strongly, “But consider, we scarcely need a ship of a hundred guns only to move dragons; transports are meant foremost to deliver them to the front,” this being not entirely a misrepresentation, but only because there was little cause other than war to go to the difficulty and expense of shifting dragons about. “We can put them on barges at Gibraltar instead, and send them along the coast, with an escort of frigates to keep the French off them.”

It sounded well enough, but they all knew that even if not inherently impractical, still such an operation was wholly unlikely to be carried out on the scale of the entire Corps. They might return with the dragons of their own formation preserved, but such a cure was likely to be denied half their comrades or more. “It is better than nothing,” Chenery said a little defiantly, “and more than we had; there is not a man of the Corps who would not have taken such odds, if offered him,” but the odds would be unequal ones.

Longwings and Regal Coppers, heavy-combat dragons and the rarer breeds, no expense or difficulty would be spared to preserve; but for the rest—common Yellow Reapers or quick-breeding Winchesters; older dragons likely to be difficult when their captains died; the weaker or less-skilled flyers; these, a brutal political calculus would not count worth the saving, and leave to die in neglect and misery, isolated undoubtedly in the most distant quarantines which could be arranged. Their cautious satisfaction was dimmed by this shadow, and Sutton and Little took it worst; their dragons were both Yellow Reapers, and Messoria was forty. But even guilt could not extinguish all their eager hope; they slept very little that night, counting coughs instead, tallies to go into Dorset’s book; and in the morning, with only a little coaxing, Nitidus was persuaded to try his wings. Laurence and Temeraire went with him and Warren, for company and in case the little Pascal’s Blue should exhaust his strength; Nitidus was panting hoarsely from his mouth and coughing, now and again, as they flew.