Empire of Ivory (27 page)

for Lily's size. Maximus will be in no condition to do more

than a little easy flying for weeks yet."

"I understand perfectly, Mr. Keynes, let us say not another

word on the subject," she said, so Nitidus was fed upon the

posset, and Lily continued to cough miserably; Catherine

sat by her head all the night, stroking her muzzle,

heedless of the real danger to herself from the spatters of

acid.

Chapter 8

WHOLLY UNLIKELY-WHOLLY unlikely," Dorset said severely,

when Catherine in despair suggested, two weeks later, that

they had already acquired all the specimens which there

were in the world.

Nitidus had suffered less than most of the dragons,

although complained somewhat more, and he recovered with

greater speed even than Dulcia, despite a nervous

inclination to cough even after the physical necessity had

gone. "I am sure I feel a little thickness in my head again

this morning," he said fretfully, or his throat was a

little sensitive, or his shoulders ached.

"It is only to be expected," Keynes said of the last,

scarcely a week since he had been dosed, "when you have

been lying about for months with no proper exercise. You

had better take him out tomorrow, and enough of this

caterwauling," he added to Warren, and stamped away.

With this encouraging permission, they had promptly renewed

the search which had been curtailed by Chenery's injury,

confining the sphere a little closer to the immediate

environs of the Cape; but after two more weeks had gone by,

they had met with no more feral dragons and also with no

more success. They had brought back in desperation several

other varieties of mushroom, not entirely dissimilar in

appearance, two of which proved instantly poisonous to the

furry local rodents which Dorset made their first

recipients.

Keynes prodded the small curled dead bodies and shook his

head. "It is not to be risked. You are damned fortunate not

to have poisoned Temeraire with the thing in the first

place."

"What the devil are we to do, then?" Catherine demanded.

"If there is no more to be had-"

"There will be more," Dorset said with assurance, and for

his part, he continued to perform daily rounds of the

marketplace, forcing the merchants and stall-keepers there

to look at his detailed sketch of the mushroom, rendered in

pencil and ink. His steady perseverance was rewarded by the

merchants growing so exasperated that one of the Khoi,

whose Dutch and English encompassed only the numbers one

through ten, all he ordinarily required to sell his wares,

finally appeared at their gates with Reverend Erasmus in

tow, having sought his assistance to put a stop to the

constant harassment.

"He wishes you to know that the mushroom does not grow here

in the Cape, if I have understood correctly," Erasmus

explained, "but that the Xhosa-" He was here interrupted by

the Khoi merchant, who impatiently repeated the name quite

differently, incorporating an odd sort of clicking noise at

the beginning which reminded Laurence of nothing more than

some sounds of the Durzagh language, difficult for a human

tongue to render.

"In any case," Erasmus said, after another unsuccessful

attempt to repeat the name properly, "he means a tribe

which lives farther along the coast and, having more

dealings inland, may know where more is to be found."

Pursuing this intelligence, however, Laurence soon

discovered that to make any contact would be difficult in

the extreme: the tribesmen who dwelt nearest the Cape had

withdrawn farther and farther from the Dutch settlements,

after their last wave of assaults-not unprovoked-had been

flung back, some eight years before. They were now settled

into an uneasy and often-broken truce with the colonists,

and only at the very frontiers was any intercourse still to

be had with them.

"And that," Mr. Rietz informed Laurence, the two of them

communicating by means of equally halting German on both

sides, "the pleasure of having our cattle stolen: twice a

month we lose a cow or more, for all they have signed one

truce after another."

He was one of the chief men of Swellendam, one of the

oldest villages of the Cape, and still nearly as far inland

as any of the settlers had successfully established

themselves: nestled at the foot of a sheltering ridge of

mountains, which deterred incursions by the ferals. The

vineyards and farmland were close-huddled around the neat

and compact white-washed homes, only a handful of heavily

fortified farmhouses more widely flung. The settlers were

wary of the feral dragons who often came raiding from over

the mountains, against whom they had built a small central

fort bolstered with two six-pounders, and resentful of

their black neighbors, of whom Rietz further added, "The

kaffirs are all rascals, whatever heathenish name you like

to call them; and I advise you against any dealings with

them. They are savages to a man, and more likely will

murder you while you sleep than be of any use."

Having said so much mostly under the unspoken but no less

potent duress of Temeraire's presence on the outskirts of

his village, he considered this final and was by no means

willing to be of further assistance, but sat mutely until

Laurence gave it up and let him go back to his accounts.

"Those certainly are very handsome cows," Temeraire said,

with a healthy admiration of his own, when Laurence

rejoined him. "You cannot blame the ferals for taking them,

when they do not know any better, and the cows are just

sitting there in the pen, doing no-one any good. But how

are we to find any of these Xhosa, if the settlers will not

help? I suppose we might fly about looking for them?"-a

suggestion which would certainly ensure they did not catch

the least sight of a people who surely had to be deeply

wary of dragons, as likely as the settlers to be victims of

the feral beasts.

General Grey snorted, when Laurence had returned to

Capetown seeking an alternative, and reported Rietz's

reaction. "Yes; and I imagine if you find one of the Xhosa,

he will make you the very same complaint in reverse. They

are all forever stealing cattle from one another, and the

only thing they would agree on, I suppose, is to complain

of the ferals worse. It is a bad business," he added,

"these settlers want more grazing land, badly, and they

cannot get it; so they have nothing to do but quarrel with

the tribesmen over what land the ferals do not mind leaving

to them."

"Can the ferals not be deterred?" Laurence asked. He did

not know how ferals were managed, precisely; in Britain he

knew they were largely induced to confine themselves to the

breeding grounds, by the regular provision of easy meals.

"No; there must be too much wild game," Grey said. "They

are not tempted enough, at any rate, to leave the

settlements alone, and there have been trials made enough

to prove it. Every year a few young hotheads make a push

inland; for what good it does them, which is none." He

shrugged. "Most of our adventurers are not heard from

again, and of course the inaction of the government is

blamed. But they will not understand the expense and

difficulty involved. I tell you I should not undertake to

carve out any more sizable territory here without at the

least a six-dragon formation, and two companies of field

artillery."

Laurence nodded; there was certainly no likelihood of the

Admiralty sending such assistance at present, or for that

matter in the foreseeable future; even apart from the

disease, which had so wracked their aerial strength, any

significant force would naturally be committed to the war

against France.

"We will just have to make shift as best we can," Catherine

said, when he had grimly reported his lack of success that

night. "Surely Reverend Erasmus can help us; he can speak

with the natives, and perhaps that merchant will know where

we can find them."

Laurence and Berkley went to apply to him the next morning

at the mission, already much altered since the last visit

which Laurence had made: the plot of land was now a

handsome vegetable-garden, full of tomato and pepper

plants; a few Khoi girls in modest black shifts were

tending the rows, tying up the tomato plants to stakes, and

another group beneath a broad mimosa tree were sewing

diligently, while Mrs. Erasmus and another missionary lady,

a white woman, took it in turn to read to them out of a

Bible translated into their tongue.

Inside, the house was almost wholly given over to students

scratching laboriously away at writing on scraps of slate,

paper too valuable to be used for such an exercise. Erasmus

came walking outside with them, for lack of room to talk,

and said, "I have not forgotten to be grateful to you for

our passage here, Captain, and I would gladly be of service

to you. But there is likely as much kinship between the

Khoi tongue and that of the Xhosa as there is between

French and German, and I am by no means yet fluent even in

the first. Hannah does better, and we do remember a little

of our own native tongues; but those will be of even less

use: we were both taken from tribes much farther north."

"You still have a damned better chance to jaw with them

than any of us do," Berkley said bluntly. "It cannot be

that bloody difficult to make them understand: we have a

scrap of the thing left, and we can wave it in their faces

to show them what we want."

"Surely having lived neighbor to the Khoi themselves,"

Laurence said, "there may be those among them who speak a

little of that tongue, which would allow you to open some

communication? We can ask only," he added, "that you try: a

failure would leave us no worse than we stand."

Erasmus stopped before the garden gate, watching where his

wife was reading to the girls, then said low and

thoughtfully, "I have not heard of it, if anyone has

brought the Gospel to the Xhosa yet."

Though barred from much expansion inland, the settlers had

been creeping steadily out along the coast eastward from

Capetown. The Tsitsikamma River, some two long days' flight

away, was now a theoretical sort of border between the

Dutch and the Xhosa territories: there were no settlements

nearer than Plettenberg Bay, and if the Xhosa were lurking

in the brush five steps beyond the boundaries of the

outermost villages, as many of the settlers imagined they

were, no-one would have been any the wiser. But they had

been pushed across the river in the last fighting, it was a

convenient line upon a map, and so it had been named in the

treaties.

Temeraire kept to the coastline in their flight: a strange

and beautiful series of low curved cliffsides, thickly

crusted with green vegetation and in some places lichen of

bright red, cream and brown rocks spilling from their feet;

and beaches of golden sand, some littered with squat

penguins too small to be alarmed by their passage overhead:

they were not prey for dragons. Late in their second day of

flying they passed the lagoon of Knysna sheltered behind

its narrow mouth to the ocean, and arrived late in the

evening on the banks of the Tsitsikamma, the river driving

its way inland, deep in its green-lined channel.

In the morning, before crossing the river, they tied onto

two stakes large white sheets, as flags of parley, to avoid

giving provocation; and set these streaming out to either

side of Temeraire's wings. They flew cautiously onwards

into Xhosa territory, until they came to an open clearing,

large enough to permit them to settle Temeraire some

distance back, and divided by a narrow, swift-running

stream: no obstacle, but perhaps enough of a boundary to

provide comfort to someone standing on the other side.

Laurence had brought with him, besides a small but

substantial heap of gold guineas, a wide assortment of

those things which were commonly used in the local barter,

in hopes of tempting out the natives: foremost among them

several great chains of cowrie shells, strung on silk

thread; in some parts of the continent these were used as

currency, and the sense of value persisted more widely;

locally they were highly prized as jewellery. Temeraire was

for once unimpressed: the shells were not brightly colored

enough nor glittery nor iridescent, and did not awaken his

magpie nature; he eyed the narrow chain of pearls which

Catherine had contributed to the cause with much more

interest.

The whole collection the crew laid out upon a large

blanket, near enough the edge of the stream to be visible

plainly to an observer on the other bank, and with these

hoped to coax out some response. Temeraire crouched down as