His answer provoked her only further; Moshueshue laying a hand on the king’s foreleg spoke in low tones, but she shivered her skin impatiently, and threw him off. She spoke in a low angry continuous rumble, which Mrs. Erasmus could only manage piecemeal to convey: “You speak of ill-usage to us, kidnapper, invader—you will answer—we will hunt you all, we will break your ancestors’ eggs.”

She finished and violently cracked her tail above her back, issuing orders. Kefentse held his forehand out to Mrs. Erasmus; she threw Laurence one look of deep concern before she was carried briskly away, which he would have been glad to think unmerited, and then his arms were seized, on either side; his coat cut away down the middle of the back, also his shirt, and he was forced to his knees with the rags still hanging from his shoulders.

He fixed his gaze out through the archway, which opened upon the loveliest prospect he had ever beheld: the sun still low in the sky beyond the falls, newly risen, and glowing small and molten through the gusting clouds of mist. The torrents of water churned to pure white were roaring steadily over the verge, the tangled branches of trees yearning out towards the water, from the canyon-walls where they had taken root; the gauzy insubstantial suggestion of a rainbow, which refused to be seen head-on, but clung to the edge of his vision. His shoulders ached as they drew him taut.

He had seen men take a dozen lashes without a sound; foremast hands, under his very own orders, he reminded himself after every stroke: by the tenth, however, the argument lost its potency, and he was only trying raggedly to endure, in an animal sort of way, the pain which no longer ceased between the strokes but only ebbed and flowed. The whip struck awry once; the man holding his right arm cursed, the edge of his hand having been caught by the lash, by the sound of it, and yelled a complaint at the flogger, good-natured. The whip did not cut the skin, but the weals broke, after some time; blood ran down over his ribs.

Laurence was not precisely insensible when another dragon returned him to the cave, only very far away, his throat raw and stretched to ruin. He was grateful for it, or would have been; otherwise he would have screamed again when they put hands on him, to lift him face-downwards onto the ground, even though they did not touch his torn back: every nerve had been woken to pain. Sleep did not come, only a kind of murky absence of thought, which darkened by degrees into unconsciousness.

Water was put to his lips. With sharp authority Dorset ordered him to drink; the habit of obedience carried Laurence through the effort. He faded again, and for a long time a grey heat stifled him. He thought perhaps he drank a little more, and another time dreamt his mouth was welling up with salty blood, and choking half-woke to Dorset squeezing cold broth into his mouth from a rag, before again he slept and wandered in fever-dreams.

“Laurence, Laurence,” Temeraire said, through the haze, in a strange hollow voice, and Ferris was hissing in his ear, saying, “Captain, you must wake up, you must, he thinks you’re dead—” His voice was full of so much fear that Laurence tried to speak to comfort him, although his mouth would not quite form words properly, then the dream fell away again into a terrible roaring; he felt as though the earth shook; then all gone, into a comfortable darkness.

THE NEXT HE knew of the world was a cup of clean water held for him by Emily Roland. Dorset was kneeling on the floor beside him, and bracing him up by the waist. Laurence managed to put a hand around the cup and guide it to his mouth, spilling a little; he was palsied as an old man and trembling. He was lying on his stomach on a thin pallet of gathered straw covered with shirts, bare to the chest himself; and he was desperately hungry.

“A little at a time,” Dorset said, giving him small round balls of cooled porridge, one after another. They had eased him onto his side to eat.

“Temeraire?” Laurence said, around an involuntary and desperate gluttony, wondering if he had only dreamed. He could not move his arms freely: his back had scabbed over, but if he reached too far forward the edges split, fresh blood trickling down the skin.

Dorset did not at once answer. “Was he here?” Laurence said sharply.

“Laurence,” Harcourt said, kneeling down by him, “Laurence, pray do not get distressed; you have been ill a week. He was here, but I am afraid they ran him off; I am sure he is quite well.”

“Enough; you must sleep,” Dorset said, and for all the will in the world, Laurence could not resist the command; he was already fading again.

When he woke it was daylight outside, and the cavern nearly empty, except for Roland and Dyer and Tooke. “They take the others to work, sir, in the fields,” she said. They gave him a little water, and reluctantly at his insistence the support of their shoulders, so he might stagger to the edge of the cave and look outside.

The cliff face, opposite, was cracked, and the dark stains of dragon blood looked deep burnt orange-red on the striated walls. “It is not his, sir, or not much,” Emily said anxiously, looking up at him.

She could tell him nothing more: not how Temeraire had found them, nor if he had been quite alone, nor his condition; there had been no time for conversation. With the number of dragons flying at all hours through the gorges, Temeraire had passed for a few moments as one in the throng, but he was too large and remarkably colored to escape notice, and when he had put his head into the cave to see them, he had at once raised an alarm.

Temeraire had penetrated so far only because their captors evidently did not anticipate an incursion of dragons, so deep into their stronghold; but there was a guard now, newly stationed above their cell: Laurence could see its tail, hanging down from the top of the cliff, if he painfully turned his neck, as far as he could, to look directly upwards. “And I expect that means he got clear away from them,” Chenery said comfortingly, when the others had been returned, late in the afternoon. “He can fly rings around half the Corps, Laurence; I am sure he gave them the slip.”

Laurence would have liked to believe it, more than he did; three days had gone by since that delirious state had broken, and if Temeraire had been able, Laurence knew very well he would have made another attempt in the teeth of any opposition; perhaps had, and out of their sight had been injured again, or worse.

Laurence was not taken, the next morning, with the others: they had been set along with the other prisoners of war to working in the elephant-fields, spreading the manure, much to the satisfaction of the young women to whom the work ordinarily fell. “Nonsense; I would be perfectly ashamed if I could not manage it,” Catherine said, “when all those girls do: a good many of them are further along than I am, and it is not as though I have not been brought up to work. Besides, I am perfectly stout; indeed I am much better than I was. But you have been very sick, Laurence, and you are to listen to Dr. Dorset and stay lying down, when they come.”

She was very firm, and Dorset also; but they had been gone a little more than an hour when another dragon came for Laurence: the rider issuing peremptory commands, and beckoning. Roland and Dyer were ready to back him into the depths of the cave, but the dragon was a smallish creature, not much bigger than a courier, and could easily have put himself inside. Laurence struggled to his feet, and for decency’s sake took one of the sweat-and blood-stained shirts which had helped make up his pallet to cover himself, if he was not truly fit to be seen.

He was carried back to the great hall: the king was not there, but the iron-works were in full swing under the supervision of Prince Moshueshue; the smiths were engaged in pouring bullets, with the help of another dragon, who nursed their forge regularly with narrow breathed tongues of flame, rousing the coals within to a fever-pitch of heat. They had somehow acquired several bullet-molds, and there were still more muskets stacked upon the floor, if marked here and there with bloody fingerprints. The room was sweltering, even with a couple of smaller dragons fanning away vigorously to make the air move; but the prince looked satisfied.