Victory of Eagles

Chapter 13

TEMERAIRE PULLED CLOSE around himself, his tail coiled snugly against his body, and tried without much success to sleep; there were a great many things he did not want to think about, but so long as he continued awake, they clamored for his attention.

They had landed in Edinburgh covert only after dark, and found it wet and bleak and muddy, and the water of the pond not fit to drink: there were too many dragons buried there, too recently. So they had to take turns putting their heads below a thin run-off from the castle walls, which tasted unpleasantly green, and settle themselves uncomfortably between the two burial-mounds most widely separated. They were crowded, and there was plenty of room for one or another of them to go and sleep among the other mounds, but no-one at all proposed to go off alone; they rather huddled more closely. Laurence had left almost at once to go and speak with Wellesley, and he was gone a long time; enough that they had finished their dinner long before his return—a couple of old tough cows and three sheep, hacked up and pit-roasted with a great heap of potatoes, which Gong Su had organized the crews to procure: happily these took on some of the flavor of the meat and were not unappetizing at all, once they had cooked long enough.

“I don’t hold with this cookery much,” Maximus had said, licking his chops, having slowly and thoughtfully wrecked seventeen bushels of potatoes roasted in their skins, “but these are not half bad, if one cannot have a nice fresh cow, that is.”

Temeraire took a long time over his own meal, but at last he had stretched it as far as it could go, and Maximus was eyeing the last pile of sheep-intestines hopefully, so Temeraire had to finish it off; and then he had nothing to do but lie uncomfortably in the mud, curled up small to stay warmer, and worry about Laurence.

“Of course he ain’t happy,” Gentius said sleepily. “The country overrun by all these Frogs, who would be happy? I would not think much of his sense if he were dancing a jig.”

“But that is not the same as unhappy,” Temeraire said, “when we are going to fight to make the French leave, and will have some battles soon.”

Gentius cocked his head ruminatively. “Men like to be unhappy sometimes,” he offered. “My second captain would come sit under my wing with a book and weep over it, most evenings. I thought at first she must be wounded, but she told me not to fret at all, she liked to do it; and the next morning she would be right as rain again.” Temeraire was doubtful; he had never noticed Laurence weeping over a book, although sometimes he did not enjoy them very much.

But he did not quite like to press the conversation very far. To be perfectly honest, Temeraire was a little concerned—he was perhaps anxious—very well, he was afraid, that he might learn that Laurence was not so much upset as angry—He was afraid that Laurence was angry with him.

Temeraire had not quite understood what it would mean, for Laurence to be called a traitor. Of course, the Government meant to execute him or imprison them away from one another, but Temeraire had thought, with those two fates averted, that otherwise all would be much the same; and at first it seemed so: they flew together, and were given orders, and everything nearly like. But it was not the same at all. Of course there had been no other alternative but to take over the cure; only, Temeraire had not quite understood, before they went, that treason meant Laurence should be losing his life, and his crew, and his rank.

“At least,” he said, “at least, you are still my captain; and after all, while there are many captains who have some sort of dragon, I am the only dragon who is a commodore—” But when he had tried this argument out privately to himself, it did not sound really consoling after all: puffing himself off, as though Laurence ought to be satisfied with Temeraire’s consequence and none of his own—insult to injury, and Laurence had lost his gold bars, too.

Temeraire raised his head out of the mud and said, “Roland, do you know Captain Fenter’s neck-chain, the gold one, with the emerald? It is not official, is it? Anyone might wear something of the sort?” It was a handsome piece which he and all the others at Loch Laggan had remarked, on the captain of a smug Anglewing named Orchestia; and, Temeraire thought, something very suitable to the captain of a dragon of elevated rank, however neglectful of him the Corps might be. “Do you suppose that Laurence might buy something like it, here in town?”

“I expect he could not afford it; the law-suit, you know,” she said wisely, looking up from her boots, which she was blacking.

“What law-suit?” Temeraire said, puzzled.

“Over those slaves,” she said, “which we let loose in Africa. Those slave-owners we carried back sued the captain, and I suppose he could not fight the suit very well, as he was in prison, so they have taken all his capital.”

“Taken it?” Temeraire with difficulty kept his tail from quivering and thumping upon the ground. “Surely not all his capital,” he said, in a struggling voice.

“I heard it was ten thousand pounds, or something like,” Emily said.

“Ten thousand pounds!” Gentius exclaimed, horror-struck, his head jerking from the ground, the mud squelching dreadfully. “Ten thousand pounds! You did not say anything about ten thousand pounds gone. Why, that is ten of those eagles, or more,” and everyone murmured shocked; even Maximus and Lily flinched, and could not quite look at Temeraire.

Temeraire felt quite staggered, and nearly ill. Laurence had not said anything beforehand; he had not said that all his treasure should be taken away; or so Temeraire tried to argue to himself. But it felt a very flimsy and weak excuse, and when he opened his mouth to make it to the others, he stopped without giving it voice. He had not troubled to find out, and now here he was, himself a commodore, showing away with jewels and two epaulettes, while Laurence had nothing but a plain coat growing every day more shabby.

“Ten thousand pounds,” Gentius said again, censoriously, wagging his head from side to side. “You have certainly made a good mull of it,” and Temeraire huddled himself down, feeling all the justice of the condemnation.

“But, if we had not taken over the cure,” he said, rather small, “a great many dragons should have died, even who had nothing at all to do with the war, or France. It cannot have been wrong.”

“If you ask me,” Perscitia said, after a moment, “the French ought to have given you some treasure to make up for it, as you went on their account; at least, not precisely on their account,” she amended, “but they did well out of it, so I don’t think much of them letting you come out the worser, when you needn’t have done it at all.”

“Well,” Temeraire said, and was forced to admit that such an offer had been made, and a most handsome one. “Only Laurence said no, because that would have been more treasonous,” he finished.

“I don’t see myself how getting treasure, after you had already done treason, could make it any worse,” Chalcedony said. “After all, they are the enemy, and if they gave you treasure, they would have less, and that would be worse for them; so if you ask me, it would really have been making up for the treason, to take it,” which struck Temeraire as a very just point, and one he rather wished he had thought of at the time.

“Only, I did not realize Laurence would lose his capital,” Temeraire said unhappily, “so I did not think it would be so important.”

“Well, well, you are a young fellow yet,” Gentius said, relenting a little, “and you have time to make it up. Win battles, take some prizes while you are at it, and it will all come right in the end—Government will do you up right, if you are only heroic enough.”

“But I have been very heroic,” Temeraire protested, “and they have not been fair at all; they have even tried to take Laurence away from me.”

“You ain’t been the right sort of heroic,” Gentius said. “You must win battles, that is the road. That is how my first captain was made, you know; they did not use to let Longwing captains be captain, properly. They called her only Miss, and there was a fellow aboard she was supposed to listen to, only he was a lummox and managed to be drunk out of his wits just when we had a battle to go to, and all our formation waiting.” He snorted. “So she said to the crew—‘Gentlemen’—” and here he paused, rubbing his forelegs restlessly against one another, with a frowning expression.

They waited, and waited, and waited; although Temeraire was almost quivering with impatience: if Gentius’s captain had gone from Miss to Captain, surely Laurence might have his rank repaired, in the same fashion—

“It is difficult to remember, the way she said it, exact,” Gentius said defensively. “They don’t talk as they used to, but I think I have it: she said, ‘Gentlemen, seeing that our duty consisteth in going to war, I should judge this a sad excuse to fail in it, insofar as we expect to contrive without Captain—without Captain—’ Bother,” Gentius muttered, interrupting himself, “I have forgot his name. But she said it,” he went on, “and she said, ‘insofar as we expect to contrive without his company, no worser an outcome upon the field than our absence will ensure, the which I will stand surety for: therefore will I still go, and any man who wisheth not to venture himself, under my command, may remain behind.’”

He rolled triumphantly through to the end of his recitation, but then had to wait for applause while his audience worked out just what had been said. “But I don’t understand, did you win the battle or not?” Messoria said finally, puzzled.

“Of course we won the battle,” Gentius said irritably. “And we did a sight better without Captain Haulding—hah, I have remembered his name after all—aboard, I can tell you that. I was writ up in the newspapers, even, and Government gave over and made her captain properly: because we had done well,” he finished, with a meaningful nudge to Temeraire’s shoulder. “That is the road: win battles for them, and they will come about, see if they don’t.”

“That is all very well,” Iskierka remarked, “as soon as they let us have some battles. There he comes now, ask him when we shall be fighting,” and she nudged Temeraire: Laurence was coming down the path from the castle.

Temeraire hardly knew how to look Laurence in the face; bitterly conscious now of his guilt, he half-expected Laurence to upbraid him at once. But Laurence said only, to Roland and to Demane and Sipho, “Go and rouse up the other captains; at once, if you please,” and stood waiting and silent until the others had been drawn from their uncomfortable bivouacs. “Gentlemen, I have been commissioned temporarily, and given command of this expedition; you will find your written orders there, and I trust they allow of no ambiguity.”

Laurence had a sheaf of papers in his hands, packets each sealed separately and inscribed with the other captains’ names; he handed the orders to Sipho to carry around.

“Damned paperwork, with Bonaparte in our parlor,” Berkley muttered. “Trust the Army for this sort of thing—”

“You will oblige me greatly, Berkley, by putting those orders by safe, somewhere they cannot come to harm,” Laurence said, when Berkley would have crumpled the parchment. “I would be glad to know the chain of command quite clear, to anyone who should inquire, in future.” All the other captains paused and looked at him, and Temeraire wondered puzzled why it should matter; the red wax seals affixed to the parchment were attractive, but they might be made anytime one wished; and Laurence had not kept one himself.

But Laurence did not explain further. Instead he went on, “The French are harassing our farmers with raiding bands, and so supplying the wants of their army. Our duty is to stop this predation, and so far as is practicable without undue risk to the dragons, to reduce the forces available to Napoleon.”

There was a pause, and then Granby said, “—you mean—his irregulars?”

“I do,” Laurence said.

“What does he expect us to do with the prisoners, cart them about with us in the belly-rigging?” Berkley said.

“There will be no quarter given,” Laurence said. There was a heavy finality to his tone, which somehow warned off any other questions; the captains did not say anything even to one another. “We will begin in Northumberland, tomorrow, and work our way south. We leave at dawn, gentlemen; that is all.”

They stood a moment longer looking at their orders and at Laurence, with oddly uncertain expressions; in the end they all drifted away back to their tents without another word said. Temeraire himself was at a standstill. He could not understand why Laurence should have taken the command. He was already in command, and it was important, was it not, for a dragon to have the post—Laurence himself had said as much. Temeraire did not mean to be selfish anymore, at all, now that he knew he had been selfish; if Laurence wished the command, of course he should have it, and yet, if it mattered for politics—for all the dragons—

He struggled over it; ventured at last timidly to ask, and added hurriedly, “I do not mind at all, for myself, personally, I am very happy that you are restored, and a captain now again. Only, if it is important—”

He was yet mostly coiled up with the others, but everyone else was asleep; the other men were gone into their tents. Laurence had told Roland and Demane and Sipho to go and sleep in his tent, and had stayed out, wrapped in his coat and cloak and looking over maps, which he had laid out on a small camp-table; he was marking them with a small wax pencil, here and there.

“In the present case, it is the more important you should not be in command, or anyone but myself,” Laurence said.

There was something odd in his voice: queerly flat, as if he did not much care what he was saying, and he did not look up from his work. Temeraire wished very much it were not so dark, and he could see Laurence’s face. “In any case,” Laurence added, “whether the courts will believe you truly the commander is a proposition yet untried; and I hope you would not risk the lives and the careers of the other captains, unconsenting, for the sake of your precedence.”

“But,” Temeraire said, “are they not risking their lives anyway?”

“In battle,” Laurence said, “not afterwards.”

Temeraire did not much want to pursue; however dreadful to think Laurence was angry with him, it would be all the worse to know, to hear it from Laurence himself. “Laurence,” Temeraire said anyway, bravely, “pray explain to me; I know—I know I have let you be hurt, because I did not try to understand well enough, and I do not mean to let it happen again, only I cannot help it, if I do not know.”

Laurence did look up at that, his eyes briefly catching a reflection from the castle upon the hill. “There is nothing to help; I am in no danger.”

“If they should be, so should you,” Temeraire said.

“I cannot be condemned twice,” Laurence said. “Pray get some rest: we have a hundred miles to fly in the morning.”

“I WANT HIM BLED,” Wellesley had said, in the tower room of Edinburgh Castle, standing over the map of England swarming with blue markers, with the icy rain lashing at the windows. Distantly, down the hall, the muffled sound of the King’s voice was rising in some complaint; to Laurence it seemed very loud. “Every man to him is worth five to us. He must bring them across at great expense, and he must spend his dragons’ strength to do it. And his men live off the land—he relies upon them raiding the countryside, feeding themselves and driving in cattle for the dragons, and keeping his supply lines meager and short.”

“You mean you wish us to attack his irregulars,” Laurence broke in, tired of evasions.

“His supply-lines, his foragers, his scouts.” Wellesley thumped the map. “He has hundreds of small raiding parties scattered throughout the country north of London; he cannot survive long without them, and they are exposed. You will destroy every one of them you can find.

“You will not engage,” he added, “any substantial party, with other dragons in number, or artillery: I do not mean to lose any of the beasts.”

Laurence had expected something of the sort, from the tenor of Wellesley’s summons; he was not surprised, and heard it with dull acceptance. The strategy was sound, coldly speaking: if Bonaparte began to lose men quicker than he could replace them, and found his supply growing short, he would have to accept a battle on whatever terms it was offered him, or withdraw entirely.

But dragons were not put to such a use in civilized warfare; Wellesley knew it, and so did he. Pragmatism alone held them too valuable to risk and too expensive to supply, save against a more substantial target, of strategic importance, than a small party of light foot armed only with muskets. But it was not pragmatism but sentiment which with a single voice called inhuman the exceptions made from time to time. There was little that aroused more horror and more condemnation from ordinary men than the prospect of dragons set loose against them; men had been court-martialed and hanged for it, even by their own side.

“Pillaging,” Wellesley added after a moment, “of course, cannot be tolerated—”

“There will be none,” Laurence said, “save what must be requisitioned to feed the dragons. Is there anything else?”

Wellesley looked at him narrowly. “Will you do it?”

There was little enough Laurence could now do, to repair what he had done; he could not restore the lives of the slain, or raise up ships from the Channel floor that had been sunk, or make recompense to all the ordinary countrymen whose livelihood and possessions had been raided away by an invading army. He could not repair his father’s health, or the King’s, or Edith’s happiness. But he had already stained himself irrevocably with dishonor, for the sake of an enemy nation and a tyrant’s greed; he could stain himself a little more for the sake of his own, and shield with his own ruined reputation those who yet had one to protect.

“I do not need written orders for myself,” he had answered Wellesley. “But I require them for those other officers of the Corps involved: you may say merely that they must follow my orders.”

Wellesley had understood very well, what Laurence offered him, and he had not refused it. The orders were written, and given him, and he had left Wellesley in his tower, and gone down and down, to the waiting covert.

It was a silent, grim camp in the morning, as they harnessed the dragons and the crews went aboard; twice or more, Laurence thought Harcourt almost meant to speak to him. But in the end they all mounted up and flew with no words exchanged. The cold wind in Laurence’s face was welcome, and the steady beat of Temeraire’s wings, and the silence; his small crew did not address him, and sitting forward on Temeraire’s neck, they might have been alone in a wide-open sky; the rolling unmarred moors beneath them knew nothing of war or boundaries.

Wellesley’s spies had reported already a dozen raiding bands or more, moving through the North Country, stealing from farms and seizing cattle; Laurence had marked them on his map, as best the reports could place them. But the enemy provided them instead a convenient beacon of smoke, easily visible ten miles off. It was a thin black coil turning lazily upwards from the roof of a great farmhouse, the fire mostly extinguished by the time they arrived: the rest of the village stood empty, when the dragons came down, but for two men in homespun: villagers, not soldiers, laid out in the road dead, with stab wounds flower-red upon their bellies; they had been bayoneted.

“The villagers shan’t come out while we have the dragons here,” Harcourt said. “If we leave them outside—”

“No,” Laurence said; he did not mean to waste time on such things. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “We are officers of the King. You will come out at once, or we will have the dragons tear down the houses until you do.”

There was no reply, no stirring. “Temeraire,” Laurence said, and indicated a small neat cottage near the end of the village lane. “Bring it down, if you please.”

Temeraire looked at it, and said uncertainly, “Shall I roar?”

“However you choose,” Laurence said.

“Ought I bring it all down at once?” Temeraire asked, turning his head to inspect the cottage; he darted a look back at Laurence, as if trying to gauge his real intent. “Perhaps, if I just took off this chimney—”

“Oh, you are taking too long,” Iskierka said, and promptly blasted it with fire, the dry thatched roof going alight in a merrily crackling instant.

It burned fiercely, putting out sharp smoke; the flames licking out eagerly towards its neighbors; Laurence sat waiting, and after a moment a cellar door creaked open and a few men came forth, “Put it out, for God’s sake put it out,” one of them begged gasping. “All the village will catch—”

“Berkley, if you will be so good,” Laurence said; Maximus took off the burning roof, and laying it on the ground scraped some dirt over it with a clumsy swipe, leaving it half-buried. Laurence looked back at the villagers, who stared up at him pale and sweating. “Which way did the French go?”

“Towards Scarrow Hill,” the older man said after a moment, his voice still trembling. “With all our cattle, every last one—” The faint lowing of a cow from the woods made him a liar on that point, but Laurence did not care. “They left not an hour—”

“Very good; to quarters, gentlemen, and let the riflemen make ready,” Laurence said over his shoulder, to the other captains. “Aloft, Temeraire, along the road.”

They caught the French fifteen minutes later, and heard them first: singing a bawdy snatch of “Auprès de ma blonde, qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon” as they marched through a forested section: then they emerged out onto the road again, cattle in a string bellowing and throwing their heads, uneasy as they scented the dragons aloft. The men pulled irritably on the cows’ heads and tried to drag them along. They did not look up.

Temeraire craned his head back and looked at Laurence. Ten dragons came on behind them. “Mr. Allen,” Laurence said, “signal the attack.”

Chapter 14

I DO NOT SEE what is wrong with it,” Iskierka said, still nibbling upon the charred beef bones of her dinner. “They are stealing the cows for their dragons, it is not our fault if their dragons are too lazy to come and get the cows themselves.”

“It is not wrong,” Temeraire said, dissatisfied, “precisely.”

“Not very sporting, though,” Gentius said. “They did not even have a gun.”

“The village did not have a gun, either, or even muskets,” Lily said, “so it was not very sporting of those soldiers, in the first place.”

“Anyway,” Iskierka added, with an air of smug virtue, “we must obey our orders.”

Temeraire did not argue further. It was not that he minded for himself, anyway, very much, although it had not been a very interesting battle: they had dived, the soldiers had fired a few shots, and then they had all run away into the woods, if they were not dead; it had lasted scarcely five minutes, and nothing to show for it. Except of course the cows, but those they mostly had to give back.

He was not going to say so, of course, but he rather felt Iskierka was right. If the soldiers had not wanted to be attacked, they ought not have been going about in other people’s territory, taking their food and much more than they could eat themselves. Only, he was a little worried, because it seemed the sort of thing that Laurence might have minded, and he felt instinctively there was something strange, that Laurence did not seem to care.

The villagers certainly had been very grateful. “Two months to spring. We would have starved, or near enow; thank ye, sir,” the village headman said, the half-burned cottage quite forgiven, as the others came nervously out to look over their cattle and their goods, and make their own anxious courtesies.

A few young men from Maximus’s ground crew had driven back those cows which had not been killed or panicked to death in the fighting; Gladius and Chalcedony had carried back the two large carts of grain, also, and the villagers had sent word back along the road, to those others pillaged, to come and share what there was left to have.

But Laurence did not seem pleased by their many thanks, either; he only nodded, and said, “Send word also that if you should see or hear of any French movements, you are to light a beacon: smoke, or a bonfire at night, and we will come for it if we see.”

Gong Su had taken those cows which had been killed; enough for all the dragons to have a little fresh roast beef, and then a share of soup and bones and meat mixed with vegetables and grain, for all the crew and everyone in the village besides. The atmosphere was celebratory, and all the more when the villagers brought out a concealed store of honey wine. Temeraire had even enjoyed a cupful poured into his mouth, so he might close his jaws on it and keep the crisp fragrant smell on his tongue.

Laurence had not eaten very much, and now he came away from the village and the celebration, back to Temeraire’s side; but only to get out his maps again and study the roads.

Temeraire drew a deep breath, watching him, and said valiantly, “Laurence—Laurence, I have been thinking. Perhaps you might sell my talon-sheaths. I do not mean just now,” he added, hurriedly, “but, when the war is over—”

“Why?” Laurence said, a good deal more absently than Temeraire felt such an offer merited. “Are you tired of them?”

“No, of course not, who could become tired of them?” Temeraire said, and then paused; he was not sure how he might explain, without betraying his knowledge of the loss which Laurence had concealed, surely because it wounded him greatly. “I only thought,” he tried, “that perhaps you might like to have some more capital, as you have given me so much of it yourself.”

“I have no need of capital,” Laurence said, “and you had better keep them, against future need. I thank you for the offer; it was handsomely made,” he added, which ought to have been a tremendous relief, but Temeraire found that instead he was only unhappier, for having tried his most desperate notion and found it of no use. Laurence had not seemed even a little moved by the prospect of having so splendid a treasure for his own; the gratitude had been only formal.

He put his head down upon his forelegs and watched Laurence a little longer; Laurence had a lamp, and in the light, he looked a little odd—he was not quite clean-shaven, Temeraire realized, and there was some dried blood upon his jaw, which he had not taken off. His hair was tied roughly back, and grown long. But he did not seem to care for any of it; all his attention was for the map, and the figures he was studying.

“May I not help you, Laurence?” Temeraire asked at last, rather hopelessly, for lack of any other idea.

Laurence paused over the papers, then put one sheet out with the lamp upon it. “Is it large enough for you to see?—it is the tax roll for the last year. I expect the French will first plunder the wealthier estates and villages, so we will look for them there.”

“Yes, I can read it,” Temeraire said; it was only a little difficult, if he squinted. “Shall I tell you all the richest ones, in order?”

AS THEY PUSHED GRADUALLY SOUTHWARD, the raiding parties grew steadily larger and more desperate: no longer small bands, out to forage for themselves as much as for the beasts, but urgent support for dragons headquartered now at small outposts and encampments throughout the heart of England, to distribute the burden of their feeding. If the cattle did not arrive daily, the dragons would soon go hungry; and some number of them would have to be transferred elsewhere, southwards, even perhaps back to France.

Already the disruption of the foraging was having an effect. Without the smaller parties bringing in regular provender, the soldiers had more effort to keep themselves fed, as well as the dragons, and this made them all the more ruthless. Villages and farms and estates were now stripped to the bone and often torn apart in the search for hidden stores; or even to no end but wanton destruction: some vicious urge in the soldiers, brought on by too much license to ruin what they found. If any villagers sought to protect their homes and livelihoods, they were as often murdered or abused, or at best left to starve with a house burning behind them.

These brutalities soon roused the countryside from a sullen, small resistance, which would gladly have thrashed French soldiers making boastful remarks in a pub or passed news of them to British parties, while concealing food from them all alike, to open hatred. No-one fled from the dragons now when they landed, but marched out their cattle to feed them, and daily the plumes of beacon-fires rose. The little feral dragons of the Pennines, who lived wild and ordinarily raided farms for their meals, had been recruited by hunger and Temeraire’s persuasion to collect the far-flung intelligence: they darted from one beacon to another, where the townspeople provided them with a sheep or goat, and in return they carried the information back to Laurence’s encampment, daily edging farther south. Laurence thought it likely he knew more of the movements of the French than their own generals did, and he daily sent long letters back to Jane and to Wellesley.

A little blue feral came darting into camp, an evening in Cumbria, while they sat mostly dull and quiet, sharpening bayonets or drinking watered whiskey at their small fires, and in an incongruously deep voice announced, “The French are coming this way, with guns, and twelve dragons.”

“Leave the camp,” Laurence said, standing, and put back on his sword. “No, everything; we need the time more than the supply. Leave the fires burning. All aloft, gentlemen, at once,” he said sharply, while everyone yet hesitated a moment, and spurred them into action.

“But, Laurence,” Temeraire murmured, as he climbed aboard, “why do we not stay and fight them? It is our first chance of a real battle, and perhaps they will even have eagles—”

“There is no honor to be won in a battle between thieves,” Laurence said flatly, taking the maps which Demane held out to him, and skimmed them over. “Divide into parties of no more than three, and take separate routes, all of you; we rendezvous at Cross Fell,” he called, and they lifted one and all away.

They were too agile a band to be easily tracked or caught, with a thousand eyes in every direction looking out danger for them, and three more such attempts failed as thoroughly to find anything more than their abandoned fires and cooking pits. Rewards, offered in vast sums, were scornfully ignored, and in frustration the French grew savage and turned instead to reprisals against any they suspected of providing intelligence or comfort, which made nearly all the citizenry. At Howick Hall, perhaps two weeks into their raiding, they caught a large company, busy pillaging not only the cattle and the food, but carrying out also paintings, and china plate, and great silver candelabra, while the house burned slowly down around them, and their officers laughed and drank wine from the cellars in the courtyard.

The dragon-shadows falling over them silenced their merriment, and hurriedly two dozen muskets were raised up. Temeraire hovering over them roared out at the house, and nearly the whole front wall, flickering with flame, slid down in a heap and buried half the soldiers with it, leaving the building for a moment like a child’s doll-house, opened for viewing, with more of the looters staring out at them.

Then the roof, groaning in complaint, gave way, and the great house folded in upon itself, walls crumbling into brick, slates clattering and spilling down upon the lawn still smoking. The horses and cows stampeded madly away, and the remaining soldiers fled in the other direction, leaving a great pirate-heap of goods in an oxcart, pitiful next to the smoldering ruins.

The village, in the shelter of the house, had also been struck; the men having tried to resist had been slaughtered nearly one and all. The women and children had taken shelter in the church, which had not given them much protection: the soldiers had come in and outraged some of the young women, and murdered the vicar, a man of eighty, when he had feebly tried to intercede.

“We ought to hunt down the rest of them,” one young midshipman said, “every last one,” and there was no disagreement. Laurence felt only weary.

“Berkley,” he said, “have your men clear the village, and let the dragons bury the dead. Sutton, Little, take the other Reapers, and bring over what you can from the house: they will need more supply, here. Or we can take you to Craster,” he offered, to the matron who had got the survivors into some order.

“They won’t have better houses for us there,” she said. “Whatever you can bring us, we’ll thank you for, Captain, and we will manage; they didn’t find all there was to find.” She did not say, aloud, that they had now fewer mouths to feed.

The Yellow Reapers were a while in returning, and came back with an air of grim satisfaction, bloodstained, carrying also some dead cattle and deer.

“I will venture a little farther,” Laurence said. “We will not encamp yet, but we will raid farther south, as far as we can fly in and out again in a day.”

“Just as well,” Little said, low. “Let them look over their shoulders, everywhere in England,” to a murmur of agreement. The French had thus reconciled them all to their mission; few of the captains anymore looked askance at their attacks, or urged quarter. Laurence heard it without satisfaction.

“I am sure I can fly a little quicker, if I try,” Maximus put in; they held their conferences out in the air, so the dragons might listen in.

Some four days later, summoned by another column of smoke, they found and destroyed another raiding party at Wollaton. Flying back from the battlefield, with the corpses left behind dark and crimson on the snow, Laurence saw one after another the blackened husks of houses he knew, familiar. Great houses were burning everywhere, ideal targets: their cellars full of wine and brandy, their pantries laden for winter. The Galman estate yet stood, but deserted, with a ragpicker’s wares strewn all over the courtyard: curtains and carpets, torn and trodden into mud, and more hanging out of the shattered windows. The stables were burnt to the ground, and the old lily-pond, where he had used to walk with Edith, choked upon the bloated corpse of a horse, torn at the haunches where dogs had got to it.

He knew he must expect to find Wollaton Hall itself burnt, and only hope his family had managed to flee in time. He was steeled for it, he thought; at least he could contemplate the possibility without a feeling of anything more than a calm and distant regret. Then they came over the lake, and Wollaton Hall stood upon the crest of its hill, untouched, with light in the windows and neat thin trails of smoke only from the chimneys; gilt and golden, and deer bounding away urgently.

They landed in the park; the dragons went to hunt. Laurence climbed a ridge and stood looking at the house with a sense almost of unreality: twilight was deepening as he watched, and in the muted light the edges of the house blurred. “Well, it is good luck,” Harcourt said to him, uncertainly.

“You will pardon me,” he said. “I will not be long,” and he walked across the lawn towards the house. The hedge-rows were trimmed, and the walks had been swept of snow; there was a murmur of noise and life, louder as he came to the house, until standing in the formal gardens he might look in through the glass at the candle-lit ballroom, full of people, standing and sitting and lying, on pallets and on camp-beds: cottagers he recognized, others from the village.

“Here now, what are you about? You may come to the front, if you’re wanting something,” someone said to Laurence, making him start: a young gardener, scowling and holding a rake as though he would do something with it.

“I am William Laurence,” he said. “Is Lady Allendale here?”

She came out to him, wrapped in a cloak against the chill: wool only, and not her furs. “Will, my dear,” she said, “are you well? Have you come alone—”

“We are encamped in the park, to hunt only,” Laurence said. “We leave again as soon as the dragons are fed: are you well? And my father?”

“As well as anyone could expect, with all this upheaval,” she said. “He knows a little of what has happened: he knows you are with the Corps again,” she added, anxiously.

He said nothing; there was nothing to be proud of, in the service he was giving. “I am glad to find you unmolested,” he said after a moment; strangely reluctant. “We came over the village—I hope Lord and Lady Galman are well.”

Lady Allendale, too, hesitated. “Yes, they stay with us.”

He paused again, and reaching into his coat brought out the ring, in the small envelope of paper he had folded around it. “I wish that I had not—I am sorry to bear ill-tidings,” he said. “Mr. Woolvey was killed, in London—I have kept it to send to Edith, when that might be possible. If her parents might—”

“Yes, we had word,” she said, low and unhappy, and took it from him; she curled her hand around the envelope, and her face looked drawn.

“He died well,” Laurence said, “if that can be said; he died bravely, at least, in service to the Crown.”

She nodded, and they stood silently; a little snow yet was falling, white flecks upon her dark cloak. “Tell me,” he said, finally.

“An officer came, and gave us the Emperor’s compliments, and assurances that we would never be harmed,” she said. “None of the raiding parties have come here; even lately, when they are pillaging everywhere—”

“Yes,” Laurence said, stopping her. “I understand,” and understood also his own dread; of course. Bonaparte had managed to pay him for his treason, after all.

“We can shelter a great many more,” she said quietly, after a moment. “Our stores, also, are untouched, if there are any you would like to send to us.”

“If you can send a cart to Wollaton,” he said, “they were struck this morning, and have wounded.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “Can you not stay the night?”

With an effort, he kept himself from recoiling, and only touched his hat. “I must beg your pardon; we have some hours yet to fly tonight,” he said, and bowed, and turned; the lights of the house glittered on the snow as he walked away.

TEMERAIRE HAD GOT THREE DEER, despite their springiness, and felt rather pleased with the world until Laurence came back from the house, pale, and refused his share of dinner. “I am very happy the house is not burnt up,” Temeraire said to him anxiously, as they made ready to get under way, wondering if something else perhaps had happened, if there were some damage which he could not see.

Laurence paused, and looked over his shoulder. Temeraire looked, too, and thought the house looked very like a jewel itself; the pale yellow stone glowed with light, warm and inviting, coming out of so many windows in so interesting a variety of shapes; all the dozens of intricate towers and ornaments in perfect order.

“I will never come here again,” Laurence said, and pulled himself up the harness. “Let us be away.”

It was all of a piece; Laurence was not himself at all, and Temeraire was increasingly certain they would never make matters right this way. They had taken no prizes whatsoever all their long weeks of raiding: the French soldiers had nothing but the food they had stolen, not even a cannon or a flag to be proud of, and if ever any more suitable battle offered, Laurence would insist on their flying away at once, to hide.

What battles they did have were over very quickly. Perscitia had devised a method of tearing up tall yew-trees, with bushy tops and smooth long trunks, and dragging their crowns along the ground during a diving rush. It was most convenient: the soldiers could simply be swept away by the dozens, and the branches sheltered one from the musket-fire; so there was no risk at all. The chief difficulty was to keep the men from scattering, and it felt rather unpleasant and odd to be chasing anyone so very small who would just as soon have run away; even if, as Messoria explained, they would only regroup and go stealing again. It was not the sort of fighting Temeraire had looked for, even though everyone else seemed to approve.

“Where is the rest of the army, I should damn well like to know! But at least you fellows are showing the Frogs what-for,” one stout elderly gentleman said, thumping his stick on the floor for emphasis. They had stopped a raiding party outside a village in Derbyshire, and the children were brought out to see them all. A few of the older boys, very bold, came running up to touch them; one put his hand on Temeraire’s foreleg, and then stared up large-eyed when Temeraire peered down at him in interest and said, “Hello.”

The child ran away very quickly. “Chinese children are braver,” Temeraire said to Laurence, “but I am glad that these are getting a little better, and coming to see us. I suppose it is because we are being heroic?” he added, interrogatively; he was hopeful that if this was not very interesting fighting, at least it was the sort which Government would like.

“Their parents had done better to keep them locked away,” Laurence said, without much emotion. “Will you look over the maps with me?”

So it certainly made Laurence no happier, although Temeraire did not perfectly understand why Laurence should insist on their fighting so, if he did not approve it himself. Since they had seen Wollaton Hall, however, he seemed all the more fixed upon his course.

“I fear it is the unhealthy climate and the diet of this country,” Gong Su said. “No-one could be well, eating in such an unbalanced way.”

“But we do not have much choice what we eat, while we are at war, and I cannot do anything about the climate,” Temeraire said.

“Too bad,” Demane said, rather indistinctly; he was not enjoying his first British winter, and snuffling almost continuously into his sleeve. Sipho was not suffering, or rather not in the same manner: he was regularly bundled into every spare piece of clothing which Demane could find, and now wearing three shirts, a knitted waist, two coats, a boat-cloak, a hood, and a hat crammed down upon it all, could scarcely move from where he had been put down near the fire.

Roland was sitting with her arms curled about her knees. “It is not right,” she said. “I don’t mean, we oughtn’t to be stopping them, but we ought to be letting them surrender when they see us, and taking them prisoner; although, I don’t know what we should do with them. I wish Mother were here,” she added, desolately.

Many of the other captains were also dissatisfied; the very next day Temeraire overheard Granby speaking with Laurence, in low voices, and then Laurence said, “Captain Granby, I hope you know that you may transfer to another station, at any time you wish: I would not keep anyone at this task against his will.”

“Why, damn you, Laurence,” Granby said, and walked away.

“Of course Granby is not happy,” Iskierka said, yawning, when Temeraire went so far as to ask her. “I am not happy either, this is all very boring, and we have no treasure. But it is still better than just carrying soldiers about, or patrolling. At least we are doing something. And it is orders, anyway, which you ought not question,” she added; Temeraire put back his ruff.

FARMERS NOW SLAUGHTERED their own cattle, if they heard the French approaching, and poisoned their grain; villagers in makeshift armed bands ambushed soldiers while they slept; and one foraging mission after another returned to their encampments empty-handed, when they returned at all. An unwise outpost commander, sorely pressed, at last made the mistake for which Laurence had been waiting, and sent out his dragons to hunt for themselves; the farms immediately around their encampment had already been depleted, and the beasts separated to look farther afield.

“There are nine, two of those big grey ones, and the rest are all smaller, with three only a little bigger than I am,” one of their small spies informed them. “The big ones went alone, south, and the others went towards a town north-northeast, with a red steeple, and parted there.”

Laurence nodded, and Gong Su led the feral to his reward, a portion of mutton stewed with rabbit, which the little dragon tore into ravenously: the supply of meat was growing increasingly thin throughout the countryside.

“I am sure we can beat seven dragons,” Temeraire said, his ruff already excited, and his tail switching.

“We are not going to fight seven,” Laurence said. “We are going after the Chevaliers.” He laid out his map quickly and showed them all: a large estate lay some three miles south of the outpost, with a dairy.

They kept high, over the cloud cover, and emerged only just above the estate: the Petit Chevaliers were yet on the ground, eating. It had likely been a few days since their last meal, and they were trying urgently to make up for it. Two carcasses already each lay stripped down to bones, and they had moved to thirds; their crew had dismounted and were with similar energy ransacking the dairy-house.

“Those are milch cows,” Demane said indignantly, peering down at the dragons and their repast; his own people were great herdsmen, and valued their proper husbandry high.

“Signal the attack,” Laurence said, and Temeraire roaring plummeted with the rest; the Chevaliers panicked and flung themselves aloft, instinctively. One leapt only to meet Maximus’s full weight upon her back, and bellowing dreadfully was driven down, straight down, into the ground again, and with a snapping crack went silent. Maximus staggered off and shook himself, dazed by the impact; she did not move, and her captain crying her name flung himself heedless across the field towards her.

The other Chevalier managed to beat a little farther aloft, and shouldered past Chalcedony’s eager but over-optimistic attempt to repeat Maximus’s feat, bowling the Yellow Reaper over; but Iskierka was lunging with ferocious glee, and a torrent of flame engulfed the Chevalier’s wing and neck.

“Ow!” Chalcedony said, barely dodging the edge of the flames himself. “You needn’t hit me!”

“Well, get out of the way, then!” Iskierka called over her shoulder, already pursuing the crying Petit Chevalier, whose hide and tender membrane showed the blackened and scorched marks of her flame. The dragon was trying to come back around: his captain was yet upon the ground, and despite the wounds, the dragon would not abandon him.

“Je me rends!” the captain cried, from the ground, through a speaking-trumpet; he was waving a white handkerchief furiously. “Je me rends!”

It was the only hope for his dragon. Lily was winging in from the other direction, and Temeraire hovered aloft; the Reapers in a group had barred every point on the rose. In a moment they would bring the Petit Chevalier down.

For a moment, Laurence did not move. A heavy-weight was difficult to manage—their orders—Then he said, “Mr. Allen, signal Captain Berkley: take charge of prisoner. Temeraire, tell that dragon to land, there by those trees, and keep away from his captain.”

The rest of the French aviators backed away as the dragons came down, and fled into the dairy-house and the woods behind; the dead dragon’s crew dragged their captain away, the man weeping openly like a child; Laurence looked down at the misery and hatred in their faces, turned briefly up towards him.

The French captain submitted to being bound, and while his dragon called to him anxiously, was put aboard Maximus. “Is he fit to fly, Berkley?” Laurence asked.

“I am only a little jarred,” Maximus said, trying to nose at his own chest. Berkley’s surgeon Gaiters was already palpating the massive ribs with his hands, carefully, in either direction.

“I do not believe there is a crack,” he said, “but a few days’ rest—”

Berkley snorted. “After this? Not unless we were in Scotland. They will be out in force after us.”

“No,” Laurence said, still cold, “they will not. They cannot afford it.”

In the morning the first reports came from their little spies: the French heavy-weights were retreating south, towards London, forced back into territory under more thorough French control, where their hunger could be satisfied. Slowly after them the rest of the combat-weight beasts also melted away, more every day as the stores depleted, until nothing remained but the small couriers. Now the infantry were exposed, unless they kept in their encampments and did not stir out; in which case they would starve. A few large bands went out with artillery, but could not find enough for all, and in desperation soon broke into smaller parties for foraging; these were at their mercy.

Blue pins for the small French companies daily marched across his maps, back and forth from their encampments; one by one they were plucked out and laid back into their tin, and Laurence rinsed blood mechanically off his hands at the wash-basin. Very little thought now was required, and he was glad of it, distantly. Their own supply gave them no difficulty; if they landed near a town or a village, meat would somehow be managed for them and the dragons, cows or pigs or mutton, even if the villagers themselves went hungry as a consequence. Occasionally the French tried again a pursuit, orchestrated from farther south, but so much early warning reached them they had merely to draw back a little, and let the dragons sleep, while a flock of little ferals kept watch.

They had been raiding then nearly two months, when Arkady arrived the first week of March in a great flurry of noise, carrying Tharkay and with three of his ferals for escort, and at once began to parade before Temeraire and the others to tell them of his adventures since their last meeting. He had only been patrolling with the others, but by his account he had fought hordes of French dragons, and captured many prizes, and he bragged that they would do well, now he had come to join them; at which news Temeraire laid back his ruff in irritation.

“I have a message for you, from Wellesley,” Tharkay said to Laurence, and came inside with him. The implacable maps were laid out upon a makeshift table, a door laid over two old trestles, inside the small cottage where he had sheltered overnight; Tharkay stood in the doorway looking out while Laurence opened the letter. Their camp was a strange, silent place: no prisoners but the one solitary French officer, the captain, desolately sitting outside a hut with his hands loosely tied and bound to a stake in the ground, under guard by a couple of Granby’s bellmen. The massacred trees, which the dragons used for their sweeping, were in a great heap at the edge of camp and the dark bare branches darker still with dried blood, a forest’s graveyard. Every man went about his work silently, and without either fuss or satisfaction; they had killed fifty men that morning.

Wellesley’s new orders were not very different: he only directed their efforts more particularly towards the eastern coast, and carefully avoided any word to suggest what those efforts should be; all was left unstated, and Wellesley closed by saying, and you are welcome to this jabbering creature and his fellows, if you can make better use of them.

“Very good,” Laurence said, setting it aside. He drew out the map of the North Sea coast, to consider it: there had been some raiding near Stickney, last week, and an outpost near Cromer, one of the places the Fleur-de-Nuits would likely be landing with fresh troops, when they could get across. “They must send out foragers there twice a week,” Laurence said to Tharkay. “I will send you there with Berkley, and free the rest of us to go after them at Stickney; if you begin near the outpost and circle outwards, you are likely to find the foragers soon enough; there ought not be more than fifty men. They have stopped sending out larger bands. Berkley will approach from their forward direction, and you will cut off their avenue of retreat—”

“I beg your pardon,” Tharkay said. “I prefer not.”

Laurence paused, his hand arrested mid-air above the map.

“Arkady, I am sure, will oblige,” Tharkay said, “but someone else must captain him. I regret,” he added, with a lash of irony, “I have not the luxury of setting aside, for a time, the veneer of civilization; I must be a little more careful. A temporary viciousness may be pardonable in a gentleman, even admirable; but it must brand me forever a savage. Laurence, what are you doing?”

The question was simple enough, and ought to have afforded any of a dozen answers; one after another presented themselves for his consideration. “Killing soldiers,” Laurence said, at last, “most of whom are starving; and making them vicious, so they give us still-better excuse.”

It had the poor advantage of being true; giving it voice, Laurence tasted all its ugliness on his tongue. He sat down and put a hand over his mouth, and found his face was wet. He could not speak again for a little while, struggling to master himself and his voice; at last he said to Tharkay, hoarsely, “If you will not, what will you do?”

He did not mean the question in the immediate sense, and Tharkay did not take it so. He shrugged in his restrained way, the movement of a hand only. “There is work enough in the world,” he answered, “and little enough time.”

“And no-one to decide, but yourself,” Laurence said. “No authority but your own conscience.”

“There are authorities to choose from,” Tharkay said, “to suit any action, if you like; I prefer to keep the choice a little closer.”

It seemed to Laurence the most miserably solitary existence imaginable; isolated by more than distance or even disdain. “How do you bear it? The choice, and all the consequences thereof, alone—”

“Perhaps use has reconciled me; or,” Tharkay said dryly, “perhaps I simply have less natural inclination to hold myself responsible for the sins of the world, rather than for my own.”

Laurence covered his face with his hands a moment, and shut his eyes against the filtered reddish light. The hayloft smell of straw and the vanished horses, warm and familiar, and the sulfur bite of the dragons outside; wood-smoke and Arkady’s smug prattle, broken occasionally by Temeraire’s more resonant protests.

“Very well,” he said, and went out, leaving the orders upon the table.

Chapter 15

FORGIVE ME,” LAURENCE SAID. Temeraire had settled himself for the night, curled up comfortably in an old, well-plowed field behind the barn, fallow now and full of soft dry grass underneath the snow. They were alone, or nearly so. Demane and Sipho and Roland and Allen were all tucked into the curve of Temeraire’s haunch, under a little lean-to which Demane and Roland had worked out of a tent and a few sticks, and rigged to Temeraire’s side, as it was warmer to sleep against him so than in the tent alone. But all four were fast asleep. Arkady at last had stopped telling stories, and was now busily making up to Iskierka, to sleep near in the heat she gave off. Temeraire had sniffed a little in disdain, and curled his own tail about the lean-to, just to be sure his crew would sleep warm, and dry besides.

He did not at once understand, what Laurence was apologizing for, until Laurence had explained a little. “Forgive me,” Laurence repeated. “Bad enough that I used myself so; to have used you likewise, is unpardonable—”

“But Laurence,” Temeraire said, at once glad and baffled, “it was my fault, surely: it was my notion we should go to France in the first place. Only, I did not know that they should take your capital, and your rank; and I am sorry—”

“I am not,” Laurence said. “I should give more than that, and count it cheap, to preserve my conscience; I am ashamed to have submitted to despair so far as to ever have thought differently.”

Temeraire did not wish to argue in the least: Laurence sounded like himself again, if still drawn and perhaps unhappy, and that was worth anything; but privately he could not help a certain resentment that a conscience seemed to be so very expensive, and yet had no substantial form which one might admire, and display to one’s company.

“But,” he said, heroically, “I did mean what I said, dear Laurence, about the talon-sheaths, and I do wish you may sell them, and buy some new things for yourself: I would like my conscience to be just as clear.”

Laurence said, with even a touch of amusement, “I am sorry to have neglected my coat, if it has given you so wretched a notion of my finances, but I am not so wholly impoverished.” More gently he added, “There will be no more pavilions, I am afraid, but I hope I need not be an embarrassment to you.”

“You should never be,” Temeraire said, and nudged Laurence with his nose.

Laurence stroked his muzzle. “I do not know what our course will hereafter be,” he said. “I owe apologies, more than this, and must make them; and then I must write to Wellesley—I know not how, but I must tell him we will not continue in this manner. There will be no more of this slaughter without quarter. We will manage our prisoners somehow; and we will rather seek out than flee any force which has a gun, or a few dragons.”

Temeraire had not known how worried he had been, until the source of the distress had lifted; but his spirits rose almost effervescently at Laurence’s words. “How happy I am to hear it,” he said, adding, “and I am sure we will take a great many prizes.” However brave a face Laurence wished to put on it, Temeraire felt this could not but be reassuring.

“More likely,” Laurence said, “Wellesley will order me to come back and be hanged at once.”

“If he does, you shall not go,” Temeraire said indignantly, flaring his ruff.

“No,” Laurence said, after a moment. “I shall not.”

Along these lines the letter was written, with difficulty, and by Gherni it was sent. They established their new camp between North Seaton and Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, and began to put up a stockade manned with volunteers from the countryside. “We are making a nice honey-pot for them to rescue,” Sutton commented, as the dragons cheerfully tore up trees: they had no guns to defend the walls.

“Then at least they will have spent the time and effort to come for them, which they would otherwise have used to bring fresh troops over from France,” Laurence said. In any case, no-one objected; it shamed him again to see how greatly the other officers and dragons both were relieved by the alteration in their practice. He expected daily however an answer from Wellesley, relieving him of the command, and wondered what he should say to the other captains when it came; if Wellesley should have found some other officer to carry on the work.

But no letter came: three days later a great noise arose in the morning around their camp: many ferals bursting in upon them eagerly with news, and before their combined chatter could be worked out, the great dragons of the Corps were already landing everywhere, laden with men. One company after another were put off onto the ground, supplies, artillery, and the dragons leapt away again with scarcely more than a call of greeting. Above them more dragons were flying past, all the British Army on the move.

Wellesley arrived a little past noon, and commandeered the old half-derelict barn, where the crews had been sleeping, for his headquarters. “Out, the rest of you,” he said, jerking his head at the crew and even the aides sweeping out the floor, fixing Laurence in place with a cold look. “Cleverly done, Laurence,” Wellesley said, when they were alone. “Not so simple after all, are you?”

Laurence was silent, uncertain, until Wellesley added, “I will not waste my breath asking who on my staff passed you the news, but you will understand me: if you have the infernal gall to waste my time now, with some damned attempt at extortion, I will shoot you myself.”

And then Laurence understood: Wellesley thought his letter had been timed deliberately, on the very eve of his southward advance, to establish Wellesley’s own responsibility for the slaughter of the French irregulars.

“I will not hear a damned word about pardon from you,” Wellesley said, “not a one. In three days’ time we will meet Bonaparte, and if I win, no-one will give a damn whatever accusations you like to make. And of course,” he added, icily, “you will be well-looked-after in the event we lose. Rowley!” he bellowed. “Get my desk in here, and call in the general staff.”

Officers began to pour in, struggling under tables and maps and chairs. Laurence was almost at once pressed away from Wellesley as they thronged around him, and any reply Laurence might have made was lost in the crowd.

He felt the urgent wish to push through, to seize Wellesley and to argue; but he forced himself to be still. It did not matter. He could make no denial Wellesley would believe. In any case, that Wellesley thought him a blackguard for refusing to continue, rather than for having begun at all, made little difference; Laurence had earned the condemnation, and he might as well bear it for the wrong cause.

“Emily,” he said, turning instead, and beckoned her back into the building; she was peering in at the door cautiously, to one side of the stampede. “Take Demane and go up and get those hayloft doors open,” he told her, “so Temeraire and the other dragons can hear.”

He went outside himself: it was already becoming impossibly cramped upon the ground, though more trees had been uprooted, and a broad avenue opened up to the road: every dragon who had landed, dropping off men, was soon jostling for space at the hayloft.

“We shan’t manage like this,” Jane said, Excidium having landed after a warning hiss had cleared him a place. “Dragons over the rank of lieutenant only may stay: the rest of you must go on with the rest of the Army, and get the news from your officers or your captains. We have had to give them all ranks, thanks to your Temeraire’s splendid scheme,” she added dryly to Laurence. “The rest of them turned miserably sulky and wanted epaulettes of their own; frivolous creatures.” She patted Excidium, who looked rather smug with two epaulettes of deep fire orange, to match the edges of his massive wings.

They had scarcely made a little order, and themselves crammed back into the barn, before Wellesley began: his aides put up a map of Chatham roads, the mouth of the Thames where it spilled into the Channel, with all the small towns and villages thereabout. Their positions were marked, and a low murmur went about: their backs would be to the sea.

“Well, gentlemen, I see you like our position as well as I hope our friend Bonaparte will do,” Wellesley said. “The Navy and the Corps have all but cut off his connection to the Continent, and the countryside has risen. He loses now each day a hundred men, and each week two dragons, for lack of supply. He can ill afford to refuse us a pitched battle, if we offer it to him on what I trust he will think reasonable terms.”

The terms seemed indeed reasonable—from the French perspective. Laurence wondered if Wellesley meant by such an arrangement to stiffen the backs of the soldiers, by denying them any avenue of retreat save through the French troops before them.

“Colonels Featherstone and Bree, you will take the center. Your position is the most essential: you must hold, until you are signaled,” Wellesley said. “Yield before the moment is ripe, and he will split our forces, and destroy us at his leisure. You are not to advance, under any circumstances: you are only to form square and hold. Colonel Rethlow, you will back them with the artillery.

“The cavalry will take position on either flank, with the rest of our infantry positioned here, and here,” he indicated, “and the Corps will hold off any French attempt to charge our center from aloft. All our design, gentlemen, as I hope you gather,” he went on, “is to hold fast, while they spend the best part of their strength, and divert their attacks from our center, until the signal is given.

“The order of march then being sounded, we will gradually withdraw along either flank—” Two of the aides heaved up a fresh map, with new positions marked, yielding to the French the very center position which had been so vigorously defended. “—and cut him off from his aerial support and whatever reserves he may have yet kept back, and launch our attack against his rear. General Paget, it will be your task to ensure that Bonaparte himself remains within our circle. General Ollen, your artillery will be directed towards Bonaparte’s reserves, rather than the main body of his force, to keep them from rejoining him.

“Our aim, gentlemen, is the capture of this tyrant, and an end to his perpetual war. I will be satisfied with nothing less, and I assure you their Lordships have agreed with my judgment.”

With only this brief and unsettling plan of battle, he concluded and dismissed them all, adding, “Colonel Featherstone, a word with you.” He drew that officer aside privately, thus preventing many other officers of the general staff, who themselves plainly wanted a word, and more than one.

Laurence went out to Temeraire, who was rather regretfully submitting to being rigged out in carrying-harness. “We are taking this company,” he said, as Laurence came, “or so he tells me—” The infantry officer nodded to Laurence, a little stiffly, and touched his hat.

“Very good,” Laurence answered, and stifled his doubts. To risk dividing their forces so, yielding the center to Napoleon and then directing all their force deliberately between him and his reserve, to be pounded upon from either side, seemed a terrible risk to run; if it made more likely Napoleon’s capture, it made also more likely that the French should simply overrun them. But Wellesley was not a fool, and if he meant to tolerate all the weaknesses and dangers of his planned course, he had some cause. He had certainly taken pains to evade any questions, and any protests which might have been made against him to the ministers, by delaying the conference until the deployment already had begun. There was nothing for it now, but to trust him.

THE DEGREE OF EXCITEMENT which Temeraire felt, expressed itself nearly as pain: his ruff expanded, whenever a few minutes passed where he did not make an effort to smooth it out, and drew a pounding tightness all along the line of his neck. He tried now and again to curl himself for a little rest, but it was impossible: no more of wretched raids, no more hiding, no more carrying anyone about; a real battle at last.

Their coverts were established also on the coast, but well to the flanks of the battle, to north and south. Temeraire could see the dotted lines of fishing huts scattered away around them, a few distant yellow candle-gleams, and the rocky coastline a dark mass against the faintly lighter sky, the steady ongoing roar of the surf behind them. It was yet dark; the voices of the Fleur-de-Nuits, scouting their positions, echoed overhead. Occasionally a flare was shot off to blind them, or a few dragons chosen by lot went up to chase a few of them away.

Laurence rose a little before dawn, and climbed down from Temeraire’s back, to look out towards the battlefield.

“Is Napoleon there?” Temeraire asked Laurence, eagerly. “Have they come?”

“Yes,” Laurence said. “They are in pickets; put your head down and you will see them.”

Temeraire lowered his head and tipped it so he had one eye aimed along the ground: against the deep grey of the sky as it lightened, he could see atop a hill the tiny narrow lines of the pickets: narrow posts, little more than sticks, each leaning a little in one direction or another, and the lumpy dark shapes at their base: the sleeping soldiers, thus kept in their columns. Overhead, the stars were dimming and going out: a thick grey fog rolling in from the water, as the sky grew paler.

“It is time,” Laurence said. Fellowes stirred, behind Temeraire’s leg, and yawning rose to see to the harness.

Temeraire rumbled softly, deep in his throat, and called, “Majestatis, Ballista—it is time to get everyone up.”

“I still do not like this plan at all,” Perscitia said, fretfully, as they all ate: fresh cattle, saved for this morning, and nearly everyone had all they wanted. “I do not see what the use is, in fighting so hard to keep them from the center, and then letting them have it after all; why not give it to them at once, to begin? And are you quite sure they are there?”

The question was not as odd as it seemed; the fog had grown so thick they could see nothing from the ground but the trees just about the clearing: the presence of their own army had to be taken on faith, much less the enemy.

“Yes, I am quite sure,” Temeraire said. “Laurence pointed them out to me, just before morning. We will see them better once we are aloft, I am sure.”

Rain fell in a thin icy drizzle as they went up: they had all drawn lots to see who should have which shift, as Admiral Roland had insisted they might not all fight at once, and Temeraire did see the sense in keeping some back, when the battle should be very long. He was very relieved to be leading up the first rank, however, and hoped privately that the fog might last; and perhaps Laurence would not notice when it was mid-day and time for their own rest.

He could not, after all, see much better from above. Pockets of mist like seething cauldrons stood in every low valley, and still more great towering clouds were rolling majestically in from the sea, so high they stretched up to engulf him as much as the ground below, with gusts of sharp rain that pattered noisily on his wings. As they flew on towards the battlefield, he began to catch glimpses of the soldiers in their companies on the march, all arranged a little differently, like patches of cloth in odd sizes, some long as ribbons and only five men across, others great massed bodies upon the field.

All rippled smoothly over the ground, columns of white and black and blue and red, on either side, gliding up over the hills, down again into the valleys to be swallowed up in the fog. Even then, he could still hear the strange noise they made marching: less a thumping, which he might have expected, than a regular hissing, as their clothing or their boots brushed against one another with each stride. The wet ground muffled their steps. The trumpets sounded, a joyful encouraging noise no matter who had blown them; and the cannon spoke in orange flame to announce the battle had been joined, somewhere.

The French dragons were somewhere farther back, Temeraire supposed, peering uselessly; trees lashed with fog-banks barred his view of the French rear. “There,” Laurence called, and Temeraire followed the line of his arm to see their own center established.

Temeraire was pleased that, to his eye, their own force was much the handsomer. A great many of the Frenchmen he could spy wore long drab coats, with scarcely a touch of color, and otherwise were largely in white breeches and white shirts—none too clean, Temeraire noted—with very ordinary dark blue coats. He much preferred the vivid red coats which dominated their own army. They had also several companies of soldiers in the center in colorful and patterned skirts, instead of plain breeches; and of course their flag was by far the more interesting.

“And if they do have eagles,” Temeraire said to Laurence, “all the better for us to take them away. Laurence, do you not like those skirts they are wearing, over there?”

“Those are the Scots Greys cavalry,” Laurence said, looking through his glass, “and those are the Coldstream Guard, beside them. If anyone can hold the center, they will; but good God: Bonaparte will pound them without mercy.”

“We will keep the dragons off,” Temeraire said. “I am only a little worried, that at the end we are meant to encircle Bonaparte, and not his aerial support—what if Lien should escape?” Privately, Temeraire felt it was rather peculiar to take so many pains to capture Napoleon and not so Lien, who was a good deal larger, and possessed also the divine wind.

“Let us hope to have such success as will make that a matter for concern,” Laurence said. “But if Bonaparte is taken, she will surrender, I expect; although she may realize he cannot be held hostage for her behavior in the usual manner.”

“Here they come,” Majestatis called, wheeling around. Through the sheen of rain, Temeraire could see the dark shadows of the French dragons coming. Below them the front lines of the British infantry began to form into their large bristling squares to receive the charge. Soldiers stood shoulder-to-shoulder, facing outwards, about an open center. The front rank knelt with bayonets outward, the second aiming over their heads in parallel, and the third pointing upwards. Long pole-arms were thrust deeply into the ground just behind them, steadied by their bearers: the gleaming broad fan-shaped blades straight up, and the narrower pikes angled backwards, to catch any dragon attempting to strike at the line of the square from behind.

The French dragons were coming with bombs and nets, however, to try and overcome such measures; they had also stolen Perscitia’s trick of uprooting trees, which they plainly meant to use broom-like to sweep gaps into the squares at a distance.

“Now, Temeraire,” Laurence called urgently, and Temeraire dashed ahead to meet the French skirmishers, roaring with delight. There, there was a Roi-de-Vitesse coming out of the fog. He was armed with a tall if slender birch-tree, white and bare-branched, clutched a little awkwardly in his talons. He dived to avoid Temeraire’s charge, making determinedly for the front lines of the first square; his crew fired a spray of rifle-fire up at Temeraire’s belly as they passed. A quick hot sting of pain—he had been hit, but Temeraire sniffed when Laurence asked; it was nothing, nothing at all.

He threw himself over with an elegant, corkscrewing twist, and plunged low in pursuit of the smaller French dragon. Dimly he was aware of the bayonets looming ahead, gleaming and silver as the fog swirled away from them, and Laurence saying something to Demane about the bombs, but the French dragon filled all his view. Oh, it was very quick—but Temeraire stretched his wings, cupped all the air he could, and flung himself after. He would not let it at the square; he would not be outrun—and with a lunge, he had got near enough to put his claws into the other dragon’s tail.

The Roi-de-Vitesse squalled, and tried to jerk away. Temeraire set his talons and beat backwards furiously, while over his shoulder, a couple of small bombs were lobbed at the French dragon’s crew as they tried to bring their rifle-fire to bear again. “Tenez bon,” the dragon cried to his crew, at once squirming to throw off the bombs and flailing away with his tree, as best he could manage with Temeraire’s grip upon him.

Temeraire only just stifled an undignified yelp as the tree-top fetched him a sharp slap across the neck and belly: the branches were springy, and stung painfully. But he kept his head, despite the very unpleasant sensation, and managed to seize hold of the tree in his jaws and wrest it away. Disarmed, the French beast gave over his attempt at last and flew away hurriedly for the safety of his own covert, his bleeding tail dripping behind him.

“Ha,” Temeraire called after the vanquished, curling his talons about the trunk, and he lashed the air with the tree experimentally a few times. “Laurence, perhaps we might go at their ranks, with this?” he proposed, over his shoulder: he could see a company of French soldiers advancing slowly from the mist, and he was quite sure the tree would answer nicely in reverse.

“We must stay near the squares,” Laurence answered, “and not advance. Pray call those Reapers back, on your left: they have already let themselves be lured too far.”

Temeraire sighed a little, but he threw the birch-tree into the sea, and turned to corral Chalcedony and the others. They were all darting at a Grand Chevalier, lunging in at her head and nipping at her flanks, but the big dragon, rather than turning on them in earnest or fleeing properly, was slyly retreating little by little, luring them back towards the French lines so the smaller dragons could slip past and make their attempts against the squares.

“You are meant to be an officer, it is your duty to keep everyone else from flying off,” Temeraire said sternly, when he had rounded them and they were all flying back towards the squares.

“Well, Cantarella has the epaulette,” Chalcedony said, a rather craven defense.

“Oh!” Cantarella said, and nipped at the edge of his wing; he yelped and twisted away. “Very well, then I am in command now, you have all heard him say so,” she declared, and hitched her epaulette forward—it was a bit sodden with rain, but still notable against her pale yellow and white. “You may be sure I will not let us go afield again.”

They did not have to go afield, anyway, to have all the fighting they might want: the French were coming steadily after them, and Temeraire wheeled to meet them with a will.

BY MID-DAY, they were driven farther aloft: the French had established an artillery emplacement at the center, despite all the British artillery could do against them, with a shield of pepper guns and several of the cannon elevated to strike at any dragon dipping low.

The air was colder and cleaner as they rose out of range, and more clouds streamed past to divorce them from the noise and fury of the battlefield below. Their own struggle was quieter, the whistling air and the muffling clouds stealing all but fragments of roaring, and the occasional pop-pop of rifle-fire. The French had abandoned their trees and netting, proven to encumber them too greatly against a determined aerial defense. Laurence felt rather discouraged than pleased, however, by the speed with which the experiment had been adopted, tried, and cast off.

He could feel Temeraire’s energy flagging: they had been fighting now six hours, and there was little chance to pause and rest. Many of the soldiers below were lying upon the ground, out of the way of cannon-fire; Wellesley had ordered they might do so, when not themselves engaged. There was nowhere similar for the dragons to land, except the coverts where they had slept, a mile away. Behind the British lines there was only the roar of the sea, invisible beneath the blanketing fog, and on either flank the cavalry horses stood nervously shifting, pawing at the dirt.

The French had abandoned cavalry entirely. It ought to have given away an advantage; dragons could not be risked on charges in the face of artillery, as the cold calculation of warfare would allow an individual horse to be, and the British horses were all hooded now, blinders cupping their eyes, so they could only see straight ahead, with sachets of fragrance over their nostrils so they could not smell the dragons. A little past noon, Laurence heard the drumming of the first charge below.

The heavy cavalry were splendid in their rush, all of them shouting furiously and waving scimitars, the standard flying out behind them. They were sent at a battalion of the French infantry, a maneuver to gain some breathing room—nearly every French company now was pressing steady fire against the Coldstream Guards, which Napoleon had surely identified as the linchpins of the British center. The French battalion did not break; instead they formed square themselves—but a peculiar square, double-size, with a great empty gap in the center.

The cavalry committed to their charge: they were flying across the gap, in the face of the steady musketry—horses falling with terrible human shrieks, men flung off and crushed beneath the hooves of their own mounts. “Laurence, where is that Pou-de-Ciel going?” Temeraire said urgently, pointing—one of the small drab French dragons had broken away from the skirmishing and was diving quickly towards its own lines.

The Pou-de-Ciel landed, directly within the French square—and doing so, brought to vivid life the relative nature of size. The Pou-de-Ciel were a light-weight breed just barely combat-weight, and this one perhaps six or seven tons only. It yet loomed hugely over the ranks of soldiers, great taloned claws flexing behind the silver rows of bayonets, roaring with its red mouth full of teeth.

Even hooded and with their noses full of perfume, the horses would not run directly at a dragon: the cavalry-charge wavered, and broke. The horses’ necks were bowed deeply, or pulling frantically away to either side, as they fell to a stumbling gait fighting the reins. One, out in front and recoiling too late, slid off its hind legs as it came too close. The Pou-de-Ciel leaned over and snatched the horse bodily off the ground with one clawed forehand, shook the rider unceremoniously off onto the ground, and with much enthusiasm opened its jaws wide and took off the flailing horse’s head with one bite; the French dragons had likely been on short commons a while now.

The effect upon the remaining cavalry of the pitiful sight was pronounced; the horses were given their way, wheeling away back to the British lines, never having come within ten yards of the infantry square at all. The Pou-de-Ciel leapt away again as soon as the cavalry had fled, before British artillery could be brought to bear against it, having had a little rest and a little supper besides.

Farther to the rear of the French army, Laurence saw, more of their dragons were dropping down for a similar rest, out of artillery-range and amidst the infantry companies, who did not flinch.

“Well, I do not need a rest,” Temeraire said bravely, “and if I did, there are Ballista and Requiescat coming now, with the fresh shift. I suppose I would not mind setting down for just a minute, perhaps,” he added, “and a little something to eat.”

“I think we cannot,” Laurence said, grimly. “He is sending in his reserves.” The fog was thinning now a little, blowing away from the land, and far to the rear of the French lines, dragons were leaping into the air, one after another. And now the advantage would tell: none of the French dragons, with their short and frequent rests, were withdrawing. There would be no rest for Temeraire, or any of the British dragons who had been aloft and fighting since first light.

Temeraire pulled up very short, abruptly, so Laurence was flung against his leather straps. A determined crowd of six little Garde-de-Lyons pouring fresh into the field had charged him in a body, and now began shrieking in exaggerated voices and belaboring his head and neck wildly, batting with wings and claws.

Temeraire backwinged with two mighty strokes and roared to scatter them, the tremor of the divine wind knocking them back, but in those few moments, the enormous Grand Chevalier they had seen earlier came crashing past, and threw herself down at the square of the Coldstream Guards.

The pikes and bayonets were stiffened, but she did not come down upon them directly. Instead she struck the ground directly before the front ranks, so heavily many of the men were flung off their feet, and turning round roared full in all their faces. It was a moral assault only, but a dragon the size of a large barn roaring less than ten paces away might make the bravest man blanch. Bayonets wavered and dipped, and then twenty riflemen stood up on her back and fired a terrible and concentrated volley into the stunned ranks.

A knot of men fell all together, opening a vulnerable gap in the wall of the square, and she thrust her massive foreleg into that open space and swept it along the line, all the way to the corner of the square, crushing and knocking down men and pikes like so many blades of grass. Temeraire roared furiously and dived towards her, but one of the Garde-de-Lyons flung itself into his path.

“That,” Temeraire said furiously, “is quite enough, and anyway the soldiers are smaller still than you.” He seized the little dragon’s neck in his jaws, and with a jerk of his head broke it, a single dreadful snap. He let the beast go falling out of the sky, a little scrap of scarlet and blue, the small handful of crewmen scattering like falling leaves through the air behind.

The Garde-de-Lyon had bought the necessary time with its life, however. Below, the Grand Chevalier had gotten herself off the ground again, and with an escort of joyfully roaring Pêcheurs and Pou-de-Ciels was ponderously flying back to the shelter of her lines—“The coward,” Temeraire said bitterly, watching her escape into the range of the French artillery. The square was trying desperately to re-form, some soldiers crawling back to their places on hands and knees, too dazed yet even to stand, dragging their muskets along behind them.

Laurence heard the horns blowing, a thin and thready sound, and everywhere the French were suddenly advancing. The knot of fishing huts on the left flank, so long hotly contested, now came suddenly under a savage bombardment. The fresh dragons coming in flung themselves over it, casting down loads of munitions, until at last a rush of infantry poured over the low encircling fences and charged into the huts, one after another, and black smoke came out the windows as the British colors came down.

If they meant to give the center up, it must be soon. But Wellesley gave no order: he was observing the battle from a ridge on the right flank, where a few tents had been erected for the headquarters. At the moment he was looking out to sea, gauging perhaps the weather, which had begun at last sluggishly to clear, before sweeping his glass back towards the French rear. Laurence followed his line of sight with his own glass, and saw in the thinning mist Napoleon’s standard, and the Emperor himself in his plain grey coat and black hat, mounted on a white horse and backed by the gleaming and polished ranks of his Guard.

Even as he watched, Napoleon raised a hand, and with a single economical gesture sent ten thousand men in motion. The word ran along the French lines, and one after another of those marshaled companies began their steady march forward, into the British center. The Emperor himself turned towards the fishing huts, just taken, and the Guard followed in steady ranks as his command shifted forward.

On either flank, the dragons of the Corps were fighting fiercely to hold off the advance, but they too were tired. On the right Accendare, the great Flamme-de-Gloire, loosed a torrent of flame against Lily’s formation, and Laurence to his horror saw Messoria recoil, her wing blackened and smoking. She did not fall out of the sky, but reeled heavily against little Nitidus, fouling his flight, and a few men, specks of black, went tumbling down through the sky.

Two of Accendare’s wingmen darted in to press the advantage, boarders leaping across to Lily’s back. She twisted and plunged, trying to shake them loose, and in the opening a spectacular Honneurd’ Or, gold and blue and red, went through the shield, diving towards the massed ranks of British cavalry with a great roar, his crew firing off flares from his shoulders as he went, spreading his wings wide.

The horses shrilled and bucked in terror, and stampeded madly straight ahead, pouring in a mass into the open field, and providing the French with their bodies a shield against the British artillery. The advancing ranks of the French infantry broke now into a steady jog, their bayonets fixed low as they came; and back over the French camp, dragons formed into line: heavy-weights and middle-weights, with a screen of light-weights and courier-beasts before them, and all together began a slow, measured advance, one wingbeat after another, inexorably.

“LAURENCE, IF WE DO NOT GIVE THEM the center now, I think they will take it themselves,” Temeraire said, doubtfully. Still Wellesley did not give the order; the signal-flags on the hill, when Temeraire could get a glimpse of them through the fog, showed still hold fast.

“I know,” Laurence said. “We must keep off the advance, as long as may be. If you will break their line at scattered points, and engage the heavy-weights—”

“Wait, wait,” Perscitia cried shrilly from a distance, and Temeraire looked over surprised to see her flapping madly towards them. She looked very odd: all her artillery-crew of militia were upon her back, tied on with ropes, and they in turn were helping to hold on her back enormous bundles, of the carrying-harnesses which had been used to bring the Army hence. The harnesses had been made hastily of silk and linen, any which could be obtained: dresses and curtains and table-cloths all sacrificed to the cause, many in bright colors, so she looked as though she were wearing an enormous fringed skirt dangling over her sides and legs, just barely shy of fouling her wings.

“We are not going to retreat!” Temeraire said, indignantly. “We have not lost the battle; and we shan’t, either,” he added determinedly.

“No, no,” she said, panting, as she came up to them: and Temeraire saw the harnesses were really so hopelessly tangled up that no-one could have picked them apart in less than an hour. “Take—” she said, gulping for breath, and waggled some of it at him.

Dubiously he took a bundle of it in his claws, and discovered it was wet; and it did not smell very nice, either, like the smell when grog was passed out, aboard a ship. “What have you done with them?” he said, and, “Ow,” jerking his head back; there was something sharp and bitter, which stung his nose.

“Liquor,” Perscitia said, getting back her breath, as other dragons came and took more of the bundles from her, “and also some tar, I think; and there is some pepper on them, too, so do not sniff them. Where is Iskierka? She must—oh, there you are, no,” she said, resisting as Iskierka reached for one herself, “you shan’t take one, you must set them all alight, as we drop them—”

“Oh, that is easy,” Iskierka said. The Anglewings each snatched a bundle, and the Grey Coppers, and a good many of the ferals: all the quicker dragons, the little ones.

“Hurry, hurry,” Temeraire called: the French dragons were coming slow, but they were coming, and down below their infantry was already engaged in a dreadful struggle, bayonet-to-bayonet, which was spilling blood over the field and weakening the massed British squares: the French design plainly meant to leave them vulnerable to aerial attack.

He led them all aloft, high aloft, and spreading out along in parallel to the French line they let the bundles go: Iskierka shot after them eagerly, flames licking from her jaws in one burst after another, and the unraveling bundles caught with bright blue and yellow flames as they fell through the air.

The French dragons recoiled from the fireballs dropping into their faces, fouling their smooth line. “Now, at once,” Laurence said urgently, pointing at the weaknesses in their line. “That Chanson-de-Guerre, and that Defendeur-Brave—”

“Ballista, do you see?” Temeraire called, and she waved her tail like a flag to show she had heard: a swarm of Yellow Reapers dashed after her as she charged the marbled yellow-brown Chanson-de-Guerre. “Quickly, with me,” Temeraire said, to the lightweights, “and do you want to come with us?” he asked Perscitia.

“No, I do not,” she said, hastily circling away, “and anyway,” she called back over her shoulder, “I will go see if I can make more of those bundles; although I think I have used all the spirits that were in the supply-waggons—”

Temeraire did not have time to listen to any more: they were hurrying down straight for the Defendeur, who had swerved to avoid a particularly large one of the fireballs, that had left a thick trail of smoke behind. His flank was open now and unprotected for a moment by the line, and the Grey Copper Rictus darted in and opened a great slash along the line of his shoulder, nearly severing one strap of his harness.

The Defendeur bellowed in pain and hunched himself towards the wound: a wide gaping slice stark red against the golden brown and green of his hide. “Hah!” Rictus called, and then squalled as the Defendeur snapped out his hook-ended tail and caught him full in the belly: a more dreadful and dangerous wound, on so much smaller a beast, and Rictus was borne crying away by one of the Anglewings.

But he had opened an avenue for attack, and Velocitas flung himself to the Defendeur’s rear, baiting the slashes of his tail and swerving this way and that, so the other Anglewings and the Grey Coppers could make darting attempts on the Defendeur’s head; and when the riflemen had all been flung off their feet, Minnow threw herself into the melee, landed upon the big dragon’s back, and snatched away one of the men in her talons.

“There, that’s your captain,” she called, waving the poor man, and the French dragon roared furiously and went after her in a rush, bowling over one of the Anglewings and breaking the French line completely, as Minnow raced away towards the British clearings with her prisoner.

“That is a little hard,” Temeraire said, feeling rather sorry for the poor dragon, and making a note Minnow should never again ride upon his own back, while Laurence was there; he had not thought she was quite so unscrupulous as to steal in the middle of a fight. But he could not deny it had been very handy, at getting the big dragon away, and now he himself might clear away great swaths of middle-weights, just by roaring to either side of the gap the heavy-weight had left.

Requiescat was engaged with the Grand Chevalier in the next section of the line, and though he might have had a little edge in weight, her advantage in having a crew was telling against him: a steady rifle-fire was peppering his massive sides, and had left a great many small holes visible in his wings, and she cleverly took every opportunity to position herself higher aloft, where he was forced to dodge one bomb after another which her bellmen flung against him. Temeraire saw that on their flank, too, the harnessed dragons of the Corps were only just barely holding off the vast right wing of l’Armée de l’Air, also advancing, and they would soon all be forced into a tangled mess together.

“There are ships coming,” Majestatis said, looping nearby.

“What?” Temeraire said.

“Ships,” Majestatis said laconically. “Out to sea. You can see them if you go over that cloud.”

And then the trumpets were at last, at last sounding the order to yield the center, with a shrill note, and there was no time to look; the squares below were falling back into column and marching away, and Temeraire had at once to be sure everyone was flying away properly, to either flank as they were meant to do. “Remember, we are to meet again behind their lines!” he called urgently, nipping an over-excited Anglewing who had started to fly the wrong way.

The French soldiers were charging forward more quickly now, and their dragons were stooping. “Surely we ought not just fly away—they will have our men in a moment,” Temeraire said urgently over his shoulder to Laurence.

“Go!” Laurence said; he was looking through his glass at the sea. “Go at once! You must get clear of the center, and aloft—”

Temeraire pulled away, with a last anxious look over his shoulder; but as he did, he was startled to see the last of the Coldstream Guards throwing themselves flat upon the ground instead of marching away farther, and then a roar of thunder erupted from the fogbank, smoke and orange flame.

He broke over the top of the cloud-bank and saw them in that moment: sixteen ships-of-the-line, and the enormous gold-blazoned Victory at their head, with Nelson’s admiral’s flag flying from the mast. All of them together were unleashing their full broadsides directly into the front rank of the French dragons and men, clouds of black smoke enveloping them even as the fog at last spilled off their sails and prows.

The French dragons came down in shocking numbers. The heavy-weights, one target after another, were struck with cannonballs: wings shattering and bones cracked, they came down into their own infantry below them. A few only managed with faltering beats to carry themselves out over the remaining laggard lines of British infantry and smash them. The great Grand Chevalier crashed through the lines and dragged so far along the ground that she ended at last in the surf, shattered and still, her head rising and falling limply with the choppy waves as they crashed upon her shoulders.

Temeraire felt a queer, confused shudder of sympathy, his wings wanting to come forward, as if to protect his own breast. The trumpets were blowing again, and the British artillery on the flanks, whose force had all this while been blunted, opened a deadly hail of canister-shot against the rear and flanks of the French infantry, chasing them forward into the endless rain of cannon-fire from the ships.

“Temeraire!” Laurence called, and he started: Excidium was roaring out the signal, distantly, and he was not yet in place! He flung himself hastily back—he no longer felt tired at all, the urgency of the moment trembling along his wings. He gathered up the others who also had been distracted by the dreadful spectacle, all of them flying to join the dragons of the Corps in a great single body, nearly a hundred of them all together, and as one they roared and charged the French reserves.

The French soldiers were already reeling from so visible a disaster—the falling dragons could be seen for a good mile, and the wind was blowing harder now, clearing at last the clouds and fog. Nelson’s flagship was plainly visible off the shore, the admiral’s flag streaming out brilliant white and crossed with red, and the ships in line-of-battle ranged alongside Victory—the Minotaur and the Prince of Wales, and all the rest of the fleet returned from Copenhagen, and some six prizes beside them, each one pounding away now at the shore.

The French broke, at the attack from their rear, and fled; but there was nowhere to run but into the waiting maw, a withering cross-fire of Navy and Army guns at the ready to receive them. The British infantry marched at a steady trot into the emptied space, and Temeraire heard Lien at last—she was calling frantically as the infantry divided her and the last French aerial reserves from Napoleon and his Guard.

Napoleon had seen the trap, of course, and the retreat was sounding furiously from every French trumpet; but too late. The order of the French ranks had dissolved into one mass of terrified men, and the dragons carried by their momentum all came falling into the hail of cannon-fire. Wellesley had committed all his reserves now, companies which had been held off to either flank, and emerging from the trees and fog with their artillery set up a wall of hot iron, to prevent the French forces from retreating or regrouping.

The tightening noose closed upon Bonaparte. “Temeraire, the Corps will help the infantry hold the line,” Laurence called. “We must keep off any who break through.”

Temeraire could see Lien now clearly—she was yet on the ground, calling to direct the French dragons to try one thing after another, intent now only on breaking someone through, to rescue Napoleon and what other survivors could be rescued from the wrack and ruin.

“Of course she would not come herself,” Temeraire said, contemptuously, as a great cloud of little dragons—she had even sent in the couriers—came racing forward. “Velocitas, you and all the other Anglewings, fall back to meet them, and you too, Moncey. Cantarella, when they have got them confused, you all harry them forward, into the range of the ships.”

The little dragons managed to dart through and past the heavy-weights, but came quickly up against the pack of Anglewings, too agile to easily be passed. Velocitas and the others slashed and snapped at the little dragons, chivvying them along, breaking up the knot and dividing the dragons from one another, leaving them easy prey for the pouncing Yellow Reapers. Recoiling from so many larger dragons, they were herded into the cross-fire. “Temeraire, you must call Chalcedony back,” Laurence said, sharply.

“Where?” Temeraire said, looking round too late. Chalcedony had pursued one little Pou-de-Ciel too far, and with a dreadful hollow thump one of the indiscriminate cannonballs took him directly in the chest.

He seemed to fold up around the blow, and fell without a sound. The little Pou-de-Ciel fluttered raggedly on, managed to thread the rain of iron, and broke out again into the open sky. It did not turn back for another attempt, but flew on across the Channel, towards France.

A handful more had managed to get through—a few even had collected some handful of desperate soldiers from the ground—and were straggling away over the water. But none had got near Napoleon himself; and the British infantry were advancing on his position. The Guard had pulled into square around him, a mortal shield.

Lien had seen the failure, and his peril; she gave suddenly a loud shrilling call, and took to the air herself.

“Oh!” Temeraire cried, eagerly, but she did not come: she turned instead away and fled, over the fields, with the scattered handful of French dragons behind her: her honor-guard of Petit Chevaliers, and a few half-blind Fleur-de-Nuits, with eyeshades. “Oh, oh!” Temeraire said, jouncing in the air with indignation, “oh, how cowardly, she is leaving him behind—”

“She will be going after the ships,” Laurence said. “Temeraire, quickly, turn so they can see you. Allen, the signal-flags, warning to ships, wing to northeast—spell out for them, Celestial, Nelson will understand—”

“Shall we go and help them?” Temeraire said, hopefully, hovering while Allen waved the flags urgently. It still looked to him as though Lien had run away, and he was sure if she did mean to try anything at the ships, it would just be an excuse: what she really wanted was to be out of the fighting, and he was sure she would flee for good as soon as she had made some small gesture. “If she does mean to run away, we ought to stop her; I was worried all along she should escape.”

“If we should engage, the British ships will not be able to fire upon her,” Laurence said. “There, they have been warned, do you see: he is directing some of their fire against her. Can you come about the other side? If she tries to flee towards France, we may then intercept her course.”

It was a fine and elegant sight to watch the flank of the British line-of-battle weaving gracefully, one after another, to present their broadsides to the dragons coming around. Lien went nowhere near the ships’ range, however; she had stopped far distant, a small white figure against the grey sky, and now was hovering over the waves while the remnants of the French aerial forces wheeled and wheeled above her in tight circles. She was roaring: the echoes of the divine wind came carrying over the water, even at such a distance, with a fine mist of wave spray steaming away from her in clouds of white.

“Have you any notion what she is doing?” Laurence asked; he was looking out at her through his glass.

“Perhaps she has gone mad, over losing another companion,” Temeraire offered. He did not really think so, but he did not see what good it could possibly do her, to be roaring at the water. “It is not as though water holds shape; even if she breaks it, it will just come back together, so—” He flicked his tail, uncertainly. “She is going nearer the ships, though,” he added, “so they will be able to shoot her, soon, in any case.”

Lien was indeed gradually approaching the ships, still roaring madly at the waves. She was so low now the waves were nearly lapping at her belly, rearing up to reach for her after every roar.

“Those waves are ten foot above the rest of the swell,” Laurence said. “Mr. Allen, a signal for the ships: storm anchors, not in our code, in the Navy’s—yes, the red and white, and then the green, and then the red circle. Temeraire, I do not know what she is about, but I think we cannot hazard letting her try it—go after her, and quickly.”

Temeraire scarcely waited for the word and threw himself joyously forward. The waves did not seem so very high; they would not have reached over the sides of the tall ships, and he had been to sea enough to know they might manage much higher. But if they should be struck by so many waves, one after another, perhaps they could not fire their guns, and then Lien might come near enough to use the divine wind upon them.

In any case, he privately cared only that he should at last have a chance at Lien; who had done nothing, only sat about watching while everyone else was hurt and killed. But even as he came, Lien abruptly stopped chasing the waves she had raised. Instead she wheeled back from them, some dozen wingbeats. Temeraire was close enough he could see the trembling of her breast, and the way her wings wavered. She was very tired; and Temeraire pressed on with new urgency. He would have her now, she could not fly away quickly enough—

Lien hovered a moment, drawing breaths, and then she charged after the waves once more. She swept low and level across the water, roaring so loud that the cannon, still speaking behind Temeraire, were drowned out. A fresh swell rose ahead of her in response, not so high as the others, but low and smooth, and moving very fast away. Spent by the effort, she fell silent and hung there in the air trembling. Her head was almost limp, but the swell ran on without her, to outpace and catch the elevated waves. As it met them, the waves seemed almost to stutter and collapse into it, one after another melting into the whole—

Temeraire heeled back, startled: with scarcely any warning the wave had reared high enough to block Lien out, thrusting itself directly in his way, and his wing-tip cut a line of spray in its face as he wheeled away just in time to keep from being caught by its rising crest. He thought, at first, he would just climb higher aloft and go over the wave; but he had no time. Behind him the swell was rising, rising, a dark green-glossy wall of water so vast that now small curlers of foam were breaking upon its face as well as its crest, and he was racing it towards the ships.

“Temeraire!” Laurence was crying out, “Temeraire, can you break it—”

Temeraire darted a look over his shoulder: the wave was still growing. He had never seen anything so vast, and a shudder trembled along the tip of his tail. They had weathered a typhoon once, in the Indian Ocean; a swirling wrath of clouds overhead, so he could not fly, and the Allegiance climbing and climbing each terrible rising wave, only to go rushing down the far side at shattering speed. But this was another thing entirely; almost not of the world in its monstrous size. But Lien had made it; she had raised it, with the divine wind, and so surely he might break it.

The wave came on after them, swift and dreadfully silent for all its great size, the choppy surf smoothing out before it as minor courtiers yielding way to a passing monarch. With frantic wingbeats he pulled away, trying to get a little more room to turn around. The ships were so very near now that he could read their names off their prows, and see men in the rigging, and darting about on the deck, little specks scurrying. Temeraire was dripping with the spray, his wings streaming as he flew and flew. He could not gain elevation, he had not time to draw much breath; but he had gained all the ground there was to be gained, and he turned himself around, and roared out, with all his very might.

“DEAR GOD HAVE MERCY,” Laurence said, or thought he said, when he had wiped the salt from his eyes and looked back.

Temeraire had broken them a hole in the wave: a great ragged patch standing open like a window, for an instant, wherethrough they could still see a glimpse of the line: Victory with her pennants, all the line-of-battle and their white sails gleaming like pearl against the thunderstorm color of the ocean. And then doom was upon them.

The great Neptune, broadside to the wave, fired her guns in a flaming golden roar before she was struck, a last shout of defiance; then she was gone. The ships facing into the wave rose up the shining face, their prows driving seafoam-pale gouges into the monster, mere pinpricks, climbing bravely until one after another they were overturned in cataracts of white foam and swallowed into the green mass.

The wave slouched onward down the Channel, subsiding gradually as it ran: the shoulders of a giant irritated, shrugging away. One solitary ship-of-the-line, the Superb, bobbed at anchor, all her masts snapped away and water pouring from her sides; two frigates, which had dropped their anchors in time, were on their beam-ends and struggling to right themselves before they, too, sank. A few human specks in the water were clinging to wreckage. Of fourteen ships-of-the-line, nothing else remained, like castles built in sand, swept away by the tide.

No cannon spoke, nor guns; even the personal knots of fighting stilled. In the silence now the last of the French dragons came flying, massed in a desperate arrow-head lunge into the sudden gap in the cross-fire, and the Guard ran forward, packed around Napoleon, to meet them.

“Temeraire!” Laurence called—a frantic trumpet-signal was blowing the alarm. Temeraire struggled wearily to turn, calling out to the other dragons. Already a small, lithe Chasseur-Vocifère was leaping away from the ground, and Napoleon was on her back.

Temeraire made for the party, but four of the French dragons wheeled to meet them, smaller Pêcheur-Rayés but valiant, clawing and shrieking heedless of how they themselves were cut about. Ballista dived into the fray, lashing a couple of them across the heads with her tail, and Requiescat was charging in to join them, roaring in fury, but the Chasseur was away, fleeing across the Channel, and after her went five others burdened with dozens of Guardsmen, a cloud of musketry trailing. They were clear. Across the water, Lien, crumpled, was being supported away over the Channel by her escort, a couple of Petit Chevaliers, laboring mightily to keep her in the air.

The last of the French dragons broke away and fled. The men yet on the field threw down their guns, and sank most of them to their knees or to all fours, broken with exhaustion. Nineteen eagle standards lay trampled and mired in the blood-churned mud, amid twenty thousand corpses.

The day was won.

Chapter 16

LAURENCE, I WILL DO you credit; I have never in my life met any man more desirable to hang, and less convenient,” Wellesley said.

“Oh, and after everything we have done,” Temeraire said, indignantly.

“No more than you ought, and less than some,” Wellesley fired back. “It is a damned pity you could not get yourself decently killed on the field: better than you managed it.”

Laurence put his hand on Temeraire’s forearm, to restrain. “Yes, sir; and the same could be said of many another.”

Wellesley—or rather Wellington, now; he had taken the new name with the ducal coronet that was his reward—snorted. They sat on the portico of Temeraire’s own pavilion—his first opportunity to take up residence, though Laurence had built it for him months before; their journey to Africa and imprisonment had intervened, and in the interim it had become a general residence. Even now a few other dragons napped in corners, and nearby Perscitia was very audibly lecturing her former militia—she had brought the men along with her after the battle, those who would be bribed by a share of her treasure—in their mixing of mortar: they were putting up another pavilion.

A tremendous crash heralded the arrival of another load of bricks; Requiescat, assisting with the construction and fired with enthusiasm, had carried alone what looked to be nearly five tons.

Wellington looked broodingly at the heap, and the foundations for the next pavilion over, which were busily being excavated by Minnow and half-a-dozen of her fellows: dirt flew at a prodigious rate. “Where are you getting that brick?”

“We have bought it,” Perscitia said, overhearing this question, “so you needn’t try and complain we are stealing; we have sold our eagles, and have capital.”

“And God help us all,” Wellington said, tapping his fingers against his thigh. “You ought to be made to pay damages, out of it; do you know I had nearly a mutiny on my hands, the next day? Not one drop of beer or rum to be had, among a hundred thousand men, and a good ten thousand casualties.”

“If you did not like it,” Perscitia said, “you ought to have managed the battle more neatly, and then I shouldn’t have needed to find a way to stop those French dragons for so long.”

This was not a little outrageous, considering that Wellington had managed to stage a battle of two hundred thousand men, three hundred dragons, and two dozen ships-of-the-line, nearly to his exact specifications; and to hold worse ground against an army better-trained and better-equipped than his own, for nearly three hours longer than planned, until the fog had loosened its grip enough for the ships to make their way in close enough to shore to begin the bombardment. “Damn your impudence,” he growled; but Perscitia only flipped her wings at him a little, and loftily went back to her pavilion.

It was mid-morning, the seventeenth of March. Some two weeks had passed since the battle and its immediate aftermath: lassitude and dull confusion over so great a triumph and disaster mingled. The survivors had man and beast sunk to the ground and slept where they stood, uneasily, listening to the chorus of the low sighs of the dying yet upon the field, men starting up with cries whenever a greater wave came crashing upon the rocky shore.

The next day, without direction, they had begun the immense effort of clearing away the dead. Temeraire and his cohort had attended to the dragons. Not all were dead; many lingered, broken and slowly bleeding out their lives, dull-eyed and surrounded by the shattered bodies of their crew. Some were coaxed with much nudging and support back onto their feet, to limp away over the ground to the surgeons’ clearing; others, worse injured, could only be given a merciful end. Some of the aviators also had survived, shielded from the worst of the impact by their dragon’s body, and had to be taken away to join the other prisoners.

Chalcedony’s body lay stretched upon a green hill, a slash of white and yellow; whole, it seemed, until they turned him over and saw the shattered red ruin of his chest. The Yellow Reapers nudged their shoulders beneath him, and in a knot carefully lifted him up to carry off the field.

“But where will we take him?” Gladius said, much subdued.

“We will take him to the old quarantine-grounds,” Temeraire said, “near Dover, where the sick dragons were buried.”

They had laid Chalcedony and their other dead to rest in another of the great barrow-mounds rising in the valley of the quarantine: early green shoots were climbing valiantly out from the softening cover of snow, and the earth smelt richly moist as the dragons turned it over to raise the mound.

More from habit than any conscious thought, they had flown on to Dover looking for food; but habit served well enough: many dragons of the Corps had returned also to their own clearings, and the ground crews and herdsmen were bringing in what cattle could be rounded up and shared out. A week later, a grounds-keeper from the old Wales breeding ground, Lloyd, appeared at Temeraire’s pavilion—bedraggled but plodding on, too stubbornly fixed in his course to alter it—with the beginning of a string of cattle.

“Why, Lloyd,” Temeraire said, “where have you got these cows from?” He did not wait for an answer to begin eating.

“The pens in London,” Lloyd said, accepting with gratitude a cup of tea, though he looked around first for spirits. “Well, and they were ours first, weren’t they,” he added with a self-righteous air, so perhaps their provenance was best not inquired after very far.

The dragons from Dover came every so often, and looked wistfully at the work going forward. “I do not see why we cannot have one at the covert, too,” Maximus said, rumbling in dissatisfaction. “Iskierka does.”

“Do I have a few thousand pounds to spare on erecting you a temple?” Berkley said. “Nonsense, all this complaining; you have slept outside all your life and never taken an ounce of harm from it,” but shortly a collection had quietly been taken up, among the officers, and a friendly rivalry begun among the dragons to see whose should be completed first.

Through such visitors, Laurence had some word from London, what news anyone could scarcely avoid hearing: the King retired to Kensington, and the Prince of Wales made regent for him; Bonaparte successfully escaped to Paris, though with his tail between his legs. The newspapers were full of patriotic fervor and mourning for Nelson and the lost seamen, spoken of as martyrs for their nation.

All the while, no-one had sought to prevent their coming and going, nor paid them any official notice, but Laurence had known the situation an ephemeral one. The wheels of government might yet be some time restoring their course, after so great a disruption, but inevitably they would fall into the cart-tracks: treason could not be simply ignored.

Wellington’s arrival had surprised him only that it was Wellington and not Jane sent to demand his surrender, or some lesser officer; but it did not encourage him. “Sir,” Laurence said, “I trust you have sufficient demands upon your time you did not come for the purpose of inquiring after our work. If you want something of me, I hope you will speak freely.”

“But Laurence is not going to prison, or to be hanged,” Temeraire put in, “and if that is what you came for, you may go away again: come with an army and take him, and try if you can.”

“We are not going to start a pitched battle against you and your pack of rogues, if that is what you mean,” Wellington said. “I know damned well about your little pact—that Longwing and that Regal Copper, who are going about Dover telling everyone that if we should come against you, they will fight with you, and so should every other dragon, or their captains will be taken away next?”

Laurence looked at Temeraire, who had the grace to look abashed, but not very, and retorted, “You haven’t any right to complain if I do not trust you; you have tried to take Laurence before, and now where is our pay, that we ought to have received? And the coverts, which you promised to open to us.”

“That is enough,” Wellington said. “You had my word, and my word is good; you will have your coverts and your pay, and no later than any other scoundrel who stood up under fire. It will be half a year before the Government can pay off all its arrears, and you will have to lump it until then. You are not starving, at least, which is more than many an Englishman can say.”

“Well, then,” Temeraire said, a little mollified, “I am sorry if I was rude, if you will keep your promises, and you do not mean to try and put Laurence in prison; then what do you want, after all?”

“What I want,” Wellington said, “—or rather what His Majesty’s Government wants, is to be shot of you. Submit to the King’s justice, and your sentence will be commuted, to transportation and labor.”

Temeraire snorted, at justice, and with much suspicion had to have the sentence explained to him, that the Government meant Laurence should be sent abroad to the colony of New South Wales. “But that is on the other side of the world; that is as bad as putting you in prison again,” Temeraire protested. “I will certainly not let them send you so far away from me.”

“No,” Laurence said, watching Wellington’s face. “That, I imagine, is not the intention. Sir, it cannot be wise to send Temeraire away, not when the French yet have Lien. Whatever you may think of me, it is too high a price.”

“You are a little dull to-day, Laurence,” Wellington said. “The price is giving you your life, and their Lordships think it cheap, as a way to be rid of a dragon who, if he takes it into his head, can sink half the shipping in Dover harbor.”

Temeraire flared out his ruff. “That is very rude,” he said. “I would never do anything so cruel to the fishermen, and the merchants; whyever would I?”

The story of Lien’s feat had crossed the country entire at wild-fire speed, carried across the country with news of victory and Nelson’s death by the victorious soldiers marching back to London and their homes. It had not gained much in the telling: there was not much to gain, either in horror or in amazement. But Laurence was dismayed to find the fear which it had whipped up, thus transferred to such irrational action, and said so. “If this is a dreadful weapon, the French possess it also; merely to ignore it ourselves does no good, any more than you would melt down your own cannon because the French had fired one upon you.”

“When they have built a cannon which chooses, now and again, to turn around and fire into their faces instead, and means to persuade all their other cannon to do the same, I will gladly leave it to them,” Wellington said. “No, Laurence, you see before you a convert: you have entirely convinced me that the beasts are sapient, and now I am damned if I will let you make them political. We can better support a defense against one solitary beast than your Whiggish rabblerousing among ten thousand of them.”

“But if you agree we are intelligent, not that it is not perfectly obvious, then you cannot deny we have every right to be political,” Temeraire said.

“I can and will deny you or any man or beast the right to tear apart the foundations of the state,” Wellington said. “Rights be damned; we will never hear an end of anyone crying for their rights.”

When he had gone, Temeraire looked sidelong at Laurence. “I am sure no-one can make us go, if we do not like,” he said, “and I do not care what Wellesley thinks, or Wellington, even if he is a duke now.”

Laurence put a hand on Temeraire’s foreleg and looked out over the valley; it was a view improved over the last summer, with the verdant growth coming up over the undulating hills of the barrow-mounds, and the sheep and cattle Lloyd had gathered dotting the green hills as they browsed. It was all England and home laid out before him, creeping out from under the shadow; and now he must leave it, forever, for a distant, dry country. “We must go,” he said.

“I AM SENDING a few eggs on your transport,” Jane said. “They need some beasts in New South Wales, to forward the settlement.” She sat down upon the edge of a boulder; they had walked a little way from the pavilion, to have some privacy, and up a hillside where they might have a view all the way to the sea: grey mist hanging over the water, and at its edges a little glitter of sunlight, a few white sails.

“Can they be spared?” Laurence asked.

“More easily than they can be kept,” Jane said. “Before you brought us your cure, we thought we should have to replace the entire population of the Isles; now there are more eggs keeping warm than we will be able to feed in a year, after all this plundering and bad management. As for our friend across the way,” she added, tossing a pebble over the side of the cliff, vaguely in the direction of France, “Bonaparte lost forty beasts in his adventures here. He will not come over again shortly, and we will be ready for him if he does.”

He nodded and sat down beside her. Jane absently rubbed her hands together and blew upon them: there was still a chill in the air. Below, Excidium was inspecting the foundations with interest, Perscitia cajoling him to spray a channel for her in some of the stones, with his acid, so it should allow water to run off more easily.

“I am afraid, Laurence, you will officially be a prisoner; it is understood you shan’t be put in irons, or anything which should distress Temeraire, but so far as formality—”

“I could expect nothing else.”

She sighed. “At any rate, I have had some work to persuade their Lordships to do anything but the ungracious, but there will be crews for the new hatchlings going along, of course; so I have managed that you will have your handful also, among them.”

“You will not send Emily, surely,” Laurence said.

“I would not send anyone else, if I was not ready to send her,” Jane said. “No; she is a sturdy creature, and any road I would rather risk her health than her spirit. She will do better to be as far away from my station as she can. I suppose you have not heard yet, they have named me Admiral of the Air,” and she laughed. “Wellesley—Wellington, I must say now—is a damned hard-headed bastard, but do you know, he insisted on it; and that they create me a peer or some such nonsense, only they are still arguing over how to manage it, without they let me sit in the Lords.”

“I congratulate you most heartily,” Laurence said, and shook her hand. “But Jane, we will be halfway across the world—I do not even know what we will do, there—”

“They will find out some work for you, I have no doubt,” Jane said. “They mean to find a way into the interior; dragons will make easy work of that, and if nothing else, you may help them clear land. It is a waste, of course,” she added, “and I hope we do not have cause to regret it, but I will tell you honestly, Laurence, I am glad you will go. I have not liked to think what should happen if you did not.”

“I would not raise civil war,” he said.

“You would not; I am not so sanguine about him,” Jane said, looking down at Temeraire, presently settling some sort of squabble arisen between Cantarella and Perscitia; of course half the Yellow Reapers had dived into the quarrel on Cantarella’s side at once. “But as for Emily: I do not mean to give anyone opportunity to whisper of special treatment, or try to work on me through her, either for good or ill. With three or four beasts established, there will be enough scope for her to advance a while, and ships come and go often enough. I am only worried for Catherine.”

Riley and the Allegiance would be their transport, as so often before; and Catherine of course could not be spared even if she had wished to go. “Only I do not know whatever to do about the boy,” Catherine said. “I do not quite like to let him go—”

“I do not see why,” Lily muttered, not very quietly.

“—but if he is to go to sea, I suppose he had better begin as he will go on; and if he should prefer the Corps someday, there will be dragons enough, and perhaps he ought to be with his father,” Catherine finished, at dinner that evening; she and Berkley had come out to see him off, as of course Laurence could not come to the covert to dine while legally a prisoner. They sat together in the pavilion around a small convenient card-table, eating roast mutton and bread, sheltered from the wind by the dragons dozing comfortably around them.

Laurence with some reluctance said, “Harcourt, under ordinary circumstances, I would not presume to offer advice on such a point; but you must recall, she will be a prison-ship for the journey; she will be carrying prisoners.” The ordinary transports ran twice a year; the Allegiance would go out of turn, but she was so vast that a great many convicts could be crammed into her between decks.

“I suppose they will not be let to wander the ship,” she said, surprised, and he had to convey some sense of the natural order of a prison-ship: the dreadful frequency of scurvy and fever and dysentery, the misery and regular danger of rebellion.

He was sorry to find his descriptions borne out when they came to the Allegiance the next morning, at Sheerness Dockyard: it was not pleasant to see their familiar and faithful transport all at loose ends, her crew a sad and surly crowd of pressed landsmen, some of them not far removed from the poor wretches who could be heard—and smelled—down beneath, clanking restlessly in the irons which must restrain them, so close to shore. Nearly every able seaman had been plundered away by ships with nobler duties and captains with more influence than Riley, having perhaps been tainted by too much association with Laurence, could muster to keep them for such a mission. A grating was already rigged, and fresh bloodstains beneath showed it had lately seen use; the bo’sun and his mates were bodily shoving the men to their work.

Across the harbor, another vessel was making ready to go down the Thames, on the same wind which would keep the Allegiance in port a while longer. She made a stark contrast: a sailing barge, flat-bottomed and small next to the behemoth of the dragon transport, and manned to precision by a tiny handful of sailors all in black; even her sails were dyed black, and her sides had been freshly painted, so there was no waterline to mar her side. A great casket, black-and-gold-painted, was gently and respectfully being conveyed onto her, while her officers stood at attention.

“That is Nelson’s coffin,” Laurence said, when Temeraire quietly inquired; a hush had fallen over all the ship, and even the most bitter of the impressed landsmen had been silenced, by the fists of their fellows if not by a sense of decorum, while the casket was in view. Tears showed on hardened faces, and Laurence could hear one man sobbing like a child, somewhere up in the rigging. A confused prickling of tears stood in his own eyes.

Nelson had given Britain mastery of the sea at Trafalgar; from Copenhagen he had brought back eighteen prizes and secured the passages of the Baltic Sea. All the month before the battle at Shoe-buryness had been joined, he had with his fleet swept the Channel clean of French shipping and beaten away at the regular French flights, so Napoleon should have no reinforcements. The ships had concealed their flags and painted over their names, so no-one should realize he had returned, and for love of him not a man out of five thousand sailors and more had deserted, even while the ships hid in home ports.

His personal sins might have been excused, though Nelson had selfishly exposed his wife to the misery of his flagrant unfaithfulness, and his friend Lord Hamilton to the astonished censure of the world. If Lady Hamilton had rescued her reputation, by her heroic spy-work in the occupation, it did not redeem Nelson’s choice; but if, for so much victory and sacrifice, all these venial matters should have been passed over, there were worse evils to Nelson’s account. He had defended slavery, and without a qualm advocated the hideous murder of those thousands of dragons, allies and neutrals as well as their enemies, by the spreading of the plague: evils Laurence could never forgive, and whose consequence he would personally bear the rest of his life.

Yet for a moment, Laurence could feel nothing but the deepest wrenching misery, watching the barge heave off the dock and those black sails filling; a grief unburdened by judgment; a grief he might have felt wholeheartedly, in another life. Guns were firing as the barge passed away down the river: an impromptu thunder of salutes. A hurried struggle went forward on the deck behind them, and the Allegiance’s ragged crew managed by simple weight of her massive thirty-twos to contribute a meaningful roar or two to the procession, though they could not yet fire a broadside in unison.

The barge vanished swiftly over the horizon, carried inland by wind and tide. Distantly the salutes went on, like a receding storm, and at last faded entirely. The Allegiance groaned softly at her anchors, and the unhappy life of the ship resumed behind him. Laurence breathed again. He had not wept, in the end.

Temeraire had watched the procession with interest; now he stretched his wings—cautiously, to keep them in line with the wind and not abreast of it—and asked, “Will we leave soon?”

“When the captain and the passengers are come aboard,” Laurence said. “In a few days, perhaps, if the wind turns fair.”

They, of course, had been required aboard earlier, as they were not passengers but prisoners; and if Laurence were disposed to forget their official status, the first lieutenant, Lord Purbeck, was not. A guard—a wholly useless guard, two Marines armed with muskets, whom Temeraire might accidentally have knocked over without noticing—had been placed on the steps to the dragondeck, and when Laurence looked for his things, they had been stowed in a small, dark cabin beside the stern ladderway, two decks down: as near to the gaol-deck as practical, without being right in it, and full of the stench. To this he was followed by the guard, and they looked as though they would have liked to keep him in it; until he said, “You may go up, then, and explain to Temeraire I am not allowed to come to him.”

The aviators began to come aboard irregularly: they were not an assembled crew, of course, with their own dragon, but rather were drifting over from Dover covert, by twos and threes, including two of the captains Jane had sent: both of them older men lately dropped to earth by the death of their former dragons, in the dreadful epidemic, long before anyone had looked for such an event; experienced men, who might have looked for long careers ahead of them. Another man they would take aboard in Gibraltar; three eggs were to be sent with them.

These were delivered, with great care and attention, by a party of three dragons. The eggs, swaddled in cotton wadding and lowered down into a nest built for them over the galley, were not what anyone would call a real prize: one Yellow Reaper, and one unfortunate cross between a Chequered Nettle and a Parnassian, who had somehow produced a shockingly small egg that looked more likely to produce a Winchester than a heavy-weight. The third, delivered by Arkady himself, was his own: or so he smugly informed them, and had been lately produced by Wringe. He was not at all sorry to see the egg go, convinced it was an especial honor to have it sent to a wide-open and unclaimed territory; although he stayed a long time lecturing Temeraire sternly on his duty of oversight and care, and extracting promises Temeraire should be sure the egg was not touched by anyone at all, and that only someone very rich should be permitted to become the captain.

“I am glad to see you again, before we go,” Laurence said, to Tharkay, awkwardly; they had not spoken, since that day in the camp, when Tharkay had so easily and so wrenchingly cut him to the bone; Laurence scarcely knew whether to apologize or to express gratitude.

“You need not bid me farewell, just yet; I am coming,” Tharkay said. “Captain Riley has been good enough to invite me as his guest.”

“I did not know you knew him,” Laurence said, as near as he could come to questioning.

“I did not,” Tharkay said, “but Captain Harcourt was good enough to introduce me. I am tolerably well in pocket, at present, thanks to your admiral’s generosity,” he added, seeing that Laurence was surprised, “and I have never been to Terra Australis; the journey tempts me.”

Wanderlust might drive a man across the ocean or to the farther side of the world; it would not drive him aboard a ship with one he despised, when funds would have allowed him to choose his passage. “Then I am glad we shall be shipmates,” Laurence said: as far as he could trust himself to express his feelings, without giving mortification to himself or any other.

Riley came aboard late, and grim, and alone, with the tide already making a noise against her sides; he did not come to greet Laurence, of course, but neither did he say anything to the two captains, or to Tharkay, technically at least his guest. He went instead directly to his cabin, and came out only to weigh anchor and make sail; before sequestering himself again. Purbeck knew his work, and managed despite the very awkward crew to get them out of the harbor, with only the least direction; and then the black waters of the Channel were slipping away behind them.

TEMERAIRE PUT HIS HEAD over the side and studied the waves, as they went, and said to Laurence, “I only wish I knew how she did it; I might practice, to work it out?” But Laurence with some energy dissuaded him, although Temeraire protested he would only make the waves go away from the ship; even so, Laurence did not think Riley or the sailors would like it.

Temeraire sighed, and settled himself again; it was bad enough to be facing so long a sea-journey again, when all his friends were building pavilions, and soon to have pay: it was worse yet to be sent to such a strange and unfriendly country, which had no dragons at all. He was sure if it were at all nice, some dragons would have gone there before; so it must be wholly dreadful, and he was particularly anxious for the eggs. Not that he would let anything happen to them, of course, but it was a heavy responsibility, and none of them even his own. It did not seem very fair.

“Will it be very long?” he asked Laurence, the next morning, already feeling rather discouraged by the monotony of the horizon; he was gloomily unsurprised to hear they should be sailing for seven months, or longer.

“We must put in at Gibraltar and then at St. Helena,” Laurence said, “as we cannot put in at the Cape anymore; and then likely again at New Amsterdam.”

“And you are sure we might not just as well go to China?” Temeraire asked. “We might fly there overland—” But Laurence did not wish to do it.

“I do not mean to be a martyr,” he said, “but the law must be the law for everyone; and it has bent for me a great deal already, and for you; however grudgingly. Though our actions were just, I cannot easily forget that others, who had a claim on our loyalty and our service, have suffered by them, and that our enemies thereby have profited. We have left behind England safer than she was, and free, thank God; I need not reproach myself for that. But I would yet gladly do what honorable work I might find, in her service, to repay the debt I owe, even if I may only do it indirect.”

Temeraire would have objected strongly if anyone else had suggested that Laurence owed any more than he had given; but he could not very well quarrel with Laurence himself on the subject, if he had liked to, when he owed Laurence a debt, too. Only, he wished they were not going so very far. Already the days had begun to drag intolerably.

“Wing, two points off the larboard stern,” the lookout cried, and Temeraire roused hopefully: perhaps it would be a battle; or perhaps Volly, coming to call them back to England; or Maximus and Lily, come to bear him company, so they should all go together.

“But it is none of them; it is Iskierka,” he said, disgruntledly, when she had come close enough he could see the thin cloud of steam trailing her; she was flying a little sluggishly and tired, and she thumped down upon the dragondeck in much disarray: she did not have even her full harness on, and none of her crew, only Granby latched on to her neck-strap.

“What are you doing here?” Temeraire demanded, while she thirstily drank up two barrels of his water.

She settled herself more comfortably, looping her massive coils in a very inconvenient way, half-sprawling over the deck and some of them dangling over the sides, so that Temeraire could not help but notice that in reaching her full length she had grown longer than he was, himself. “I am coming with you.”

“No, you are not,” Temeraire said. “We are transported, you are not; you had better go back at once.”

“Well, I cannot,” she said. “I am too tired to fly back now, and by tomorrow morning it will be too far; so we may as well go on.”

“I do not see what you want to come for, anyway,” Temeraire said.

“I told you that you might give me an egg, when we had won,” Iskierka said, “so I have come to keep my promise.”

“But I do not want to give you an egg, at all!” Temeraire said. “I do not want you aboard the ship, either: you take too much room, and you are damp.”

“I do not take any more room than you; at least, not much more,” Iskierka said, to add insult to injury, “and I am warmer; so you needn’t quarrel.”

“And,” Temeraire said, “you are disobeying orders again, I am sure of it: Granby would never let you come.”

“Oh, well,” she said, “one cannot always be obeying orders. When will we be there?”

“IT IS THIS DRATTED EGG,” Granby said to Laurence. “She is set on it having fire, and the divine wind; I have tried and tried to tell her it don’t work so, but she will not listen, and now here we are.”

“You may take her off at Gibraltar,” Laurence suggested.

“Oh, yes, if she will choose to go,” Granby said, and sat down upon an emptied cask of water, limp with defeat.

Iskierka, having been given a pig to eat, had already in satisfied complacence gone to sleep; her steadily issuing cloud of vapor went spilling over the bow and trailing away along either side of the ship, as though to illustrate their steady pace, farther away from England. Temeraire had pushed her mostly to one half the dragondeck, as best he could, and now sat coiled up and disgruntled, with his ruff flattened against his neck.

“You may be glad of the company, before we have crossed the line,” Laurence said, by way of comfort.

“I will not, even if I am very bored; any more than I would be glad of a typhoon,” Temeraire said, broodingly. “And I am sure she will be a bad influence upon the eggs.”

Laurence looked at Iskierka, and at Granby, who was presently drowning his sorrow in a glass of rum; Tharkay had come on deck and prudently caught one of the runners, to send for a bottle. “At least you need not fear for their safety,” he suggested.

“Unless she should set the ship on fire,” Temeraire said; a good deal too loudly for the comfort of any sailor in ear-shot, which might have omitted those two decks below, or in the stern.

“Then I am afraid you must study philosophy,” Laurence said, “and learn to bear the misfortune. I hope the arrangement is at least preferable to the breeding grounds.”

“Oh! Anything might be better than that, and still be dreadful,” Temeraire said, and with a sigh settled his head down forward. “Pray, Laurence; let us have the Principia Mathematica, as there is nothing better?”

“Again?” Laurence said, but sent Emily down for the book. She returned scowling, at the state of his quarters, but with a shake of his head he dissuaded her from any word to Temeraire. “Where shall I begin?” he asked, but he did not immediately hear the answer, as he looked down and put his hands on the book: his fingers caught on the delicate pages, and traced the embossed lines of the heavy cover, leather stamped with gilt. The same book under his hands, the salt wind in his face, Temeraire at his side; nothing changed outwardly, and yet in his essentials he felt as wholly altered as if he had been reborn, since the last time he had set foot upon the deck of a ship: a tide coming in, high and fast, which had swept clean the sand.

“Laurence?” Temeraire said. “Would you prefer another?”

“No, my dear,” Laurence said. “I do very well.”