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not—”
    Temeraire was still quite puzzled a moment; then he understood, and indignation swelled his breast. “I should not take that slovenly third-rate
—piker
for my captain if he were the last person to be had on the earth,” he said, heatedly. “Oh!
Him
, to succeed Laurence: I should like to see it! If the Admiralty should dare to propose it, I should go to Whitehall and bring the Navy Offices down about their ears.
    “Anyway,” he added, in the teeth of his own anxiety, “I am sure Laurence will look after himself very well, until we can come get him: oh! Why are they taking so very long about getting aloft?”
    The flight was not a long one, the coast rising ahead of them as they flew, the waters still depthless blue-black beneath. Dulcia and Nitidus sped on ahead in spite of Hammond’s cries of protest, but they circled back to meet the rest of them shortly before they all came over the coast: they had seen a few small fishing-boats, they reported,and a great many large half-drowned rice fields, with the beginnings of green shoots.
    “But nothing very nice to eat,” Nitidus said sadly. “Why, I did not even see a sheep, or a goat.”
    “Thank Heaven,” Temeraire could overhear Hammond say, foolishly: it would have been nice to know sheep might be had, even if they could not easily be got.
    Captain Warren fetched Nitidus a buffet to the shoulder, and raised his speaking-trumpet to call over from his back, as they fell back into formation, “More to the point, there’s a bay straightaway three points to the north, with pine-trees as handsome as you could like.”
    The bay was isolate, the glossy black water’s surface broken with a great many lumpy protruding rocks which likely made it inconvenient for fishing-boats, and showed no signs of use except a low stone wall which did not seem to have any purpose at all; it only ran along the shore in either direction. Hammond let himself down from Churki’s back clumsily but with haste the instant they had landed, and hurried to inspect: it was overgrown with a carpet of pale short green grass. “I see no sign of any other sort of traffic,” he said, with great relief, when he had straightened up, “so now pray let us get the trees and be away: at once, at once. I shall account all arrears of Fortune paid off, if only we should escape without notice.”
    Lily cocked her head, considering, and said, “I suppose we should like them to fall inwards: stand back, all of you, if you please.”
    “And to the north,” Captain Harcourt added, from her back, looking at the narrow wind-socks which stood up from Lily’s harness at various points. “Sing out when you are all safe away.”
    Temeraire waited until Hammond with the rest of the company was moving, hastily, out of any chance of Lily’s acid spattering, and then announced, “I will go aloft, and see if I can make out anything more of the countryside: I should not like to disappoint Iskierka.”
    In point of fact, he was quite willing to disappoint Iskierka if there were no cows to be had; but so long as they were here on land, Temeraire did not see any reason not to have a look around for Laurence. “Of course we are not
likely
to see him,” he added to Ferris, over his shoulder, as he flew quickly away before he might have to hear Hammond shouting protests after him, “but if only we should happen to, how convenient that would be: even Hammond could not complain, then. And even if we do not, we will have saved some time, later; we will not have to search here again. We will not go far, we will only go along the coast—”
    Indeed, he did not go so far that he did not hear the thundering crash of the first pine, coming down; he did not wish to risk overlooking any sign. The coast was mostly rocky, save for a few other inlets and narrow streams coming down, but not very high. “I do not think it would be
excessively
difficult to get safely ashore, for a man swimming,” Temeraire said to