At the third day, six hours after they saw the last sign of civilization, Temeraire said: "I think we have finally left Pusantinsuyo behind us."
Neither of them had eaten nor slept properly in the past seventy-two hours. They were too distressed for either. The days were simple: waking up from their nightly torments with sunrise, a brief discussion about whether it rose in the east or in the west, flying until sunset, and then lying down thinking about their captains. They did not talk about it, as their feelings were mostly mutual. Still, Iskierka focussed more on her revenge on Napoleon and Lien, and kept asking for the approximate time it would take to reach the coast, and from there to Rio, to which Temeraire could not reply with much accuracy.
"What's that?" Iskierka asked softly.
"You spent days persuading the Sapa Inca to take Granby as her husband, and weeks making friends with that flimsy Yupanqui, yet you have already forgotten the local name for… why are you descending?"
Iskierka dove, and came back up a minute later, holding two small deer. She threw one at Temeraire, much like she would do on their journey through Terra Australis. He caught it in his mouth, was about to say he wasn't hungry but realised he was and swallowed the animal without chewing.
"Thank you." he managed. And then it was silent for another six hours.
When night fell, Temeraire roared enough trees down so they could land. As they were dragging the plants away he found that the Divine Wind had accidentally killed a cougar mother and three cubs. He ate the little ones and tossed the mother to Iskierka, who devoured it in one bite.
When he lied down, he found that Iskierka wasn't just dragging the fallen wood away, but was purposely dropping it on a large cone-shaped heap. When she was done, she fetched two pieces of wood and threw one at Temeraire, who accepted it hesitantly. At closer inspection it turned out to be approximately the size of a human, and broken off at that length on purpose.
Iskierka placed her log carefully in the middle of the heap, and looked at it for a little while. She then closed her eyes, and spew flames at the log, then went aloft and kept firing the heap while flying around it. The wood was moist and it would not burn properly, but she kept at it for the better part of the night.
Temeraire looked at his own log. He thought of Laurence. This was the third time he had lost him. First in Africa, where he had vanished without a trace. It had taken him weeks, studying every blade of grass for clues and asking even the fiercest ferals for directions, but he had found him and brought him back.
The second time he lost him was in England, where the report of his death reached him in the breeding grounds. It had depressed him for days, until Perscitia snapped him out of it and he somehow organised sixty lazy, quarrelling dragons into an army and achieved victories on the French army, before finding out Laurence was alive after all.
This time there was nothing to be done. He knew were his captain was, and had no way to fight his murderers.
He closed his eyes, and pushed the log that was Laurence in the little stream they had just drunk from. He counted to a hundred before opening his eyes, and when he did Laurence was gone.
Iskierka's bonfire was still ablaze when she and Temeraire finally went to sleep, at a little distance from each other. They tried to sleep, but the fire drew hundreds of little creatures who looked about as much as squirrels as monkeys. They uttered caws, bawls and shrieks, and a while a roar yielded twenty dead monkeys it attracted even more, and fire did much the same. Sleeping was impossible.
"Why can't we fly now? " complained Iskierka, to which Temeraire replied negatively, although the thought had crossed his mind more than once.
"How would we know where to go? I know where the sun rises and sets, but haven't learned all the thousands of stars by name."
"Granby did. He could tell where to go even at a cloudy night."
"That's because he had a compass. And it is common knowledge that you can't travel in a straight line without any points of reference, like the sun."
"Can we then at least go to some place that has no monkeys?"
In a jungle, a place without monkeys was hard to find, as they couldn't simply land between the trees, and roaring them down woke the pests up.
When the sun finally rose, Temeraire saw that they had been going in the wrong direction all night. He couldn't care less. They hunted for some more deer, which were very sparse in the rainforest. At the end of the sixth day they were very hungry and very tired, when they stumbled upon a mighty river.
"We can sleep on the beach without you having to roar." Although there were still a few hours of daylight left, Temeraire agreed and they lied down in the mud, which would have been very uncomfortable had they not been so dreadfully tired.
They slept until sometime after midnight Iskierka suddenly roared and swung her tail in all directions. It was too dark to see, and only after she blew some flames in frustration did Temeraire see that a dark-coloured caiman had bitten himself stuck on the end of Iskierka's tail. Chasing your own tail was hard enough to do in broad daylight, and in the middle of the night it took them half an hour before the now long-dead animal was decapitated, leaving its head stuck in her flesh.
Of course their fight with the caiman had drawn more monkeys, and they had to fly quite some distance downstream before another suitable location was found. Sadly, this place had bats, which stung them like mosquitoes did to humans, waking them up several more times during the night.
"Maybe we should try sleeping in the day and flying through the night?" Temeraire asked hopefully, as yet another unsatisfying night had gone by.
It was attempted but still left them still tired, as sleeping in the bright sunlight was not much easier than sleeping through monkey noises.
"Now, that part of the new plan works somewhat, now let's try flying in the night."
"But how will we navigate? I told you I don't know the stars."
"That's easy. We start at sunset and fly away from it, and keep that course throughout the night, and when the sun rises we will see it ahead of us!"
Temeraire's sleep-deprived brain could see nothing wrong with that plan, and paid no attention to his earlier protests.