A young man was overseeing their work with great attention; he left off, as Kefentse landed, and came over towards them: tall, with a long face infused with a certain quality of sorrow, not by emotion but only the angle of his cheekbones, like a hound; the nose sculpted and a narrow black beard around the full mouth. He had a small escort of warriors, all of them bare-chested and armed with short spears, leather-skirted; he was distinguished from the rest of them by a thick neck-collar of gold with a fringe of what looked to be the claws of some great cat, and a leopard-skin cape draped over the shoulders: physically powerful, and his eyes were shrewd.

Laurence bowed; the young man ignored him, looking to the other side of the great hall, and from a chamber within came a great creature of golden-bronze hide, the underside of her wings lined in purple like royalty. She was in battle-array formidable as a Crusader, great heavy plates of iron slung across the vulnerable expanse of her breast, with a fine mesh of chain beneath to protect the belly, and the spikes bristling down her spine were sheathed in caps of iron, as were her talons, and these were yet discolored a little with blood; Mrs. Erasmus gave him to understand that this was the king, Mokhachane, and his eldest son Moshueshue.

She—or he?—Laurence was at a loss; he was standing scarcely half-a-length away, and the king was quite certainly, quite visibly a female dragon—seated herself sphinx-like on the floor, her tail curling along her flanks, and regarded Laurence with a cold and amber eye. The young man, Moshueshue, seated himself on a wooden throne, which was brought to him and set by her side, and several older women trailing after settled themselves on wooden stools behind him: these identified as the king’s wives.

Kefentse lowered his head respectfully, and began to speak, evidently giving his account of their capture and journey, which Mrs. Erasmus with great courage dared to dispute, at several points, on their behalf; while trying to help Laurence understand the accusations which had been made. That they had stolen medicines, cultivated for the use of the king’s own subjects, was only the least offense; the foremost, that they had offered a territorial challenge, by invading in the company of their own ancestors, as Kefentse considered the dragons of the formation to be; and in league with enemy tribes had been stealing their children, for which he offered as one portion of evidence that they had been traveling with a man of the Lunda, notorious kidnappers—

Mrs. Erasmus paused and said unevenly, “—he means my husband.”

She did not continue her translation at once, but pressed a fold of her gown briefly to her face, while Kefentse bent low and anxiously over her, crooning, and snapping at Laurence with a hiss, when he would have offered his arm for her support.

“The medicine we took only for necessity, because our own dragons were ill; and without knowing the mushroom cultivated,” Laurence said, but he did not know how else to defend himself. He could not very well deny they had brought dragons; they had, and in any case, this seemed rather to stand in for making a territorial claim, which he could certainly not as a serving-officer deny. The British and the Dutch would alike have been surprised to know their colony had been thought unworthy of notice, and casually to be violated, until the arrival of the formation.

And he was in no fair way armed to justify the practice of slavery, or to deny that it was carried on at the behest of white men, if he might refute some few of the particulars which were leveled against them—“No, good God, of course we do not eat them,” he said, but beyond this could make very little more argument. The dreadful incident of the Zong, where more than a hundred slaves had been deliberately flung overboard, for the sake of insurance-money, chose the moment to come uncomfortably to his mind, with a blush for the guilt and shame of his nation; made him look a liar, if they had not already thought him so.

He could only repeat, that he was not himself a slaver, and was not surprised to find this excuse hold no water with them, nor even when Mrs. Erasmus had explained to them her husband’s perfect innocence; the objection plainly was wider than such personal acts. There was no sympathy offered, for the illness which had driven them to seek the medicine; Laurence rather received the impression that they thought it little more than just deserts, drawing as they did no particular distinction between the British and their dragons, and their temper grew rather more fixed, than less, for all Laurence’s attempts to explain.

The king turned, and, in response to a beckoning flick of her tail, Laurence was led farther back into the chamber, where stood a low table of enormous size, no higher than his knee but some twelve feet long and across. The women folded away the wooden covers, and a hollow space perhaps a foot deep was revealed, like a sort of display-case; inside lay a strange sculpture in the shape of the African continent. It was a map, an enormous map in thick relief to show elevation, gold-dust for sand and mountains of bronze, jewel-chip forests and rivers of silver; and with great dismay Laurence perceived the puff of white featherdown used to stand for the falls. It stood almost halfway between the tip of the continent, where Capetown lay, and the sharp jutting prominence of the African Horn: in his worst fears, he had not thought they had been brought so far into the interior.

They did not let him look at it long; instead they drew him to the other end, where the table had been lately extended: the wood was darker, and the sections of the map laid down only in soft painted wax. He did not at first know what to make of it, until by relative position he understood the blue oval stretch of water at the top of the continent must be the Mediterranean, and realized it was meant to figure as Europe: the outlines of Spain and Portugal and Italy misshapen and the whole continent shrunk; Britain itself nothing but a scattering of small whitish lumps in the upper corner. The Alps and the Pyrenees stood in pinched-up relief, approximately correct, but the Rhine and Volga were strangely meandering, and smaller than he was used to see them marked.

“They wish you to draw it properly,” Mrs. Erasmus said, and one of the prince’s men handed him a stylus; Laurence gave it back. The man repeated the instructions in his own tongue, exaggeratedly, as if Laurence were a slow child; and attempted to press the stylus on him once more.

“I beg your pardon; I will not,” Laurence said, shaking off his hand; the man spoke loudly and struck him abruptly across the face. Laurence pressed his lips together and said nothing, his heart pounding in a furious temper. Mrs. Erasmus had turned to speak urgently to Kefentse; the dragon was shaking his head.

“Having been taken prisoner, in what I must consider an act of war, I must refuse under these conditions to answer any questions whatsoever,” Laurence said.

Moshueshue shook his head, while the dragon-king lowered her head and fixed him with a glittering and furious eye, her head so close that he could see that what he had taken for tusks in Kefentse were a kind of jewelry: ivory rings banded with gold, set in the flesh of her upper lip like ear-rings. She snorted hot breath across his face, and bared serrated teeth; but he had too much use of being so close to Temeraire to be frightened thus, and her eyes slitted down angrily as she drew her head back.

The king said coldly, “You were taken as a thief, and a kidnapper, in our country; you will answer, or—” and Mrs. Erasmus paused and said, “Captain, you will be flogged.”

“Brutality and further ill-usage will in no wise alter my determination,” Laurence said, “and I beg your pardon, ma’am, if you are forced to witness it.”