Black Powder War

Chapter 11

PRINCE HOHENLOHE LISTENED to Laurence’s attempted explanations without very much expression: some sixty years of age, with a jovial face rendered dignified rather than unpleasantly formal by his white-powdered wig, he looked nonetheless determined. “Little enough did Britain offer, to the defeat of the tyrant you so profess to hate,” he said finally, when Laurence had done. “No army has come across from your shores to join the battle. Others, Captain, might have complained that the British prefer to spend gold than blood; but Prussia is not unwilling to bear the brunt of war. Yet twenty dragons we were assured, and promised, and guaranteed; and now we stand on the eve of war, and none are here. Does Britain mean to dishonor her agreement?”

“Sir, not a thought of it, I swear to you,” Thorndyke said, glaring daggers at Laurence.

“There can be no such intention,” Laurence said. “What has delayed them, sir, I cannot guess; but that can only increase my anxiety to be home. We are a little more than a week’s flying away; if you will give me safe-passage I can be gone and back before the end of the month, and I trust with the full company which you have been promised.”

“We may not have so long, and I am not inclined to accept more hollow assurances,” Hohenlohe said. “If the promised company appears, you may have your safe-passage. Until then, you will be our guest; or if you like, you may do what you can to fulfill the promises which were made: that I leave to your conscience.”

He nodded to his guard, who opened the tent-door, signifying plainly the interview was at an end; and despite the courtliness of his manners, there was iron underlying his words.

“I hope you are not so damned foolish you will sit about watching and give them still more disgust of us,” Thorndyke said, when they had left the tent.

Laurence wheeled on him, very angry. “As I might have hoped that you would have taken our part, rather than encourage the Prussians in treating us more as prisoners than allies, and insulting the Corps; a pretty performance from a British officer, when you know damned well our circumstances.”

“What a couple of eggs can matter next to this campaign, you have leave to try and convince me,” Thorndyke said. “For God’s sake, do you not understand what this could mean? If Bonaparte rolls them up, where the devil do you suppose he will look next but across the Channel? If we do not stop him here, we will be stopping him in London this time next year; or trying to, and half the country in flames. You aviators would rather do anything than risk these beasts you are hooked to, I know that well enough, but surely you can see—”

“That is enough; that is damned well enough,” Laurence said. “By God, you go too far.” He gave the man his back and stalked away in a simmering rage; he was not by nature a quarrelsome man, and he had rarely so wanted satisfaction; to have his courage questioned, and his commitment to duty, and withal an insult to his service, was very hard to bear, and he thought if their circumstances had been anything other than desperate, he could not have restrained himself.

But the prohibition forbidding Corps officers to duel was not an ordinary regulation, to be circumvented; here of all places, in the middle of a war, he could not risk some injury, even short of death, that might not only leave him out of the battle but would cast Temeraire wholly down. But he felt the stain to his honor, deeply, “and I suppose that damned hussar is off thinking to himself I have not the courage of a dog,” he said, bitterly.

“You did just as you ought, thank Heaven,” Granby said, pale with relief. “There’s no denying it’s a wrench, but the risk isn’t to be borne. You needn’t see the fellow again; Ferris and I can go-between with him, if there’s anything we must deal with him for.”

“I thank you; but I should sooner let him shoot me than let him think I have the least reluctance to face him,” Laurence said.

Granby had met him at the entrance to the covert; now together they reached the small, bare clearing which had been assigned them; Temeraire was curled up in what comfort he could find and listening intently to the conversation of the Prussian dragons near him, ears and ruff pricked up with attention, while the men busied themselves at cooking-fires, snatching a hasty meal.

“Are we leaving now?” he asked, when Laurence arrived.

“No, I am afraid not,” Laurence said, calling over his other senior officers, Ferris and Riggs, to join them. “Well, gentlemen, we are in the thick of it,” he told them grimly. “They have refused us the safe-conduct.”

When Laurence had finished giving them the whole of the situation, Ferris burst out, “But sir, we will fight, won’t—I mean, will we fight with them?” hastily correcting himself.

“We are not children or cowards, to sulk in a corner when there is a battle to hand, and of such vital importance,” Laurence said. “Offensive they have been, but I will grant they have been sorely tried, and they might be as outrageous as they liked before I would let pride keep us from doing our duty, and there can scarcely be any question of that; only I wish to God I knew why the Corps has not sent the promised aid.”

“There’s only one thing it can be; they must be needed more somewhere else,” Granby said, “and likely enough it’s the same reason they sent us for the eggs in the first place; only if the Channel is not under bombardment, the trouble must be somewhere overseas—some great upset in India, or trouble in Halifax—”

“Oh! Maybe we are taking back the American colonies?” Ferris offered; Riggs opined that it was more likely the colonials had invaded Nova Scotia, ungrateful rebellious sods; and they wrangled it back and forth a moment before Granby interrupted their fruitless speculation.

“Well, it don’t matter where, exactly; the Admiralty will never strip the Channel bare no matter how busy Bonaparte is elsewhere, and if all the spare dragons are coming home by transport, any sort of mess at sea could have held them up. But if they are already two months overdue, surely they must arrive any moment.”

“For my part, Captain, I hope you’ll forgive my saying, I’d as soon stay and fight if they get here tomorrow,” Riggs said, in his bluff forthright way. “We could always pass the eggs to some middle-weight to take home; it would be a damned shame to miss a chance to help give Boney a drubbing.”

“Of course we must stay and fight,” Temeraire put in, dismissing the entire question with a flick of his tail; and indeed there would have been no restraining him, if the battle were anywhere in his vicinity: young male dragons were not notably reluctant to jump into an affray. “It is a great pity that Maximus and Lily are not here, and the rest of our friends; but I am very glad at last we will get to fight the French again. I am sure we can beat them this time, too, and then maybe,” he added suddenly, sitting up; his eyes widened and his ruff mounted up with a visible rush of enthusiasm, “the war will be over, and we can go home and see to the liberty of dragons, after all.”

Laurence was startled by the intensity of his own sensation of relief; though uneasy, he had not properly realized how very low Temeraire had sunk, that this burst of excitement should provide so sharply defined a contrast. It wholly overcame any inclination he might have had to voice discouraging cautions; though a victory here, he was well aware, was necessary but not sufficient to Bonaparte’s final defeat. It was entirely possible, he privately argued with his conscience, that Bonaparte might be forced to make terms, if thoroughly checked in this campaign; and thus give Britain real peace for at least a little while.

So he merely said, “I am glad that you are all of like mind with me, gentlemen, so far as engaging to fight; but we must now consider our other charge: we have bought these eggs too dear in blood and gold to lose them now. We cannot assume the Corps will arrive in time to take them safely home, and if this campaign lasts us more than a month or two, as is entirely likely, we will have the Kazilik egg hatching in the midst of a battlefield.”

They none of them spoke for a moment; Granby with his fair skin flushed up red to his roots, and then went pale; he dropped his eyes and said nothing.

“We have them properly bundled up, sir, in a tent with a good brazier, and a couple of the ensigns watching it every minute,” Ferris said, after a moment, glancing at Granby. “Keynes says they will do nicely, and if it comes to real fighting, we’d best set the ground crew down somewhere well behind the lines, and leave Keynes behind to look after the eggs; if we have to fall back, we can stop and catch them all up quick enough.”

“If you are worried,” Temeraire put in unexpectedly, “I will ask it to wait as long as it can, once the shell is a little harder, and it can understand me.”

They all looked blankly at him. “Ask it to wait?” Laurence said, confused. “Do you mean—the hatchling? Surely it is not a matter of choice?”

“Well, one does begin to be very hungry, but it does not feel so pressing until one is out of the shell,” Temeraire said, as if this were a matter of common knowledge, “and everything outside seems very interesting, once one understands what is being said. But I am sure the hatchling can wait a little while.”

“Lord, the Admiralty will stare,” Riggs said, after they had all chewed over this startling piece of intelligence. “Though perhaps it is only Celestials who are like that; I am sure I never heard a dragon talk of remembering anything from inside the shell at all.”

“Well, there is nothing to talk about,” Temeraire said prosaically. “It is quite uninteresting; that is why one comes out.”

Laurence dismissed them to go and begin to make some sort of camp, with their limited supplies. Granby hurried away with only a nod; the other lieutenants exchanged a look and followed him. Laurence supposed it was less common with aviators, than with Navy men, that a man got his step only for being in the right place at the right moment, hatchings being under more regular control than captured ships. In the early days of their acquaintance, Granby had himself been one of those officers resentful of Laurence’s acquiring Temeraire. Laurence understood his constraint, and his reluctance to speak; Granby could neither speak in favor of a course which would almost certainly result in his being the most senior candidate available when the egg should hatch; nor protest against one which would require him to make the attempt to harness a hatchling under the most dire circumstances, in the midst of a battlefield, the egg barely in their hands for a few weeks, of a rare breed almost unknown to them, and almost certainly no future chance of promotion if he failed.

Laurence spent the evening writing letters in his small tent: all he had in the way of quarters, and that having been put up by his own crew; there had been no offer made to quarter him or his men more formally, though there were barracks for the Prussian aviators erected all around the covert. In the morning he meant to go into Dresden, and see if he could arrange to draw funds on his bank; the last of his money would be gone in a day, provisioning his men and Temeraire at war-time prices, and he had no inclination to go begging to the Prussians under the present circumstances.

A little while after dark, Tharkay tapped one of the tent-poles and came in; the ugly wound at least had not mortified, but he was still limping a little and would bear the deep gouge upon his thigh the rest of his days, a furrow of flesh all seared away. Laurence got up and waved him to the cushion-heaped box which was all he had as a chair. “No, sit; I will do perfectly well here,” he said, and himself lay down Turkish-style upon the other cushions on the ground.

“I have only come for a moment,” Tharkay said. “Lieutenant Granby tells me we are not to leave; I understand Temeraire has been taken in lieu of twenty dragons.”

“Flattering, I suppose, if considered that way,” Laurence said wryly. “Yes; we are established here, if against our design, and whether we can fill that tally or no, we mean to do what we can.”

Tharkay nodded. “Then I will keep my word to you,” he said, “and tell you, this time, that I mean to depart. I doubt an untrained man would be anything other than a dangerous nuisance aboard Temeraire’s back in an aerial battle, and you hardly need a guide when you cannot stir out of the camp: I cannot be of any further use to you.”

“No,” Laurence said slowly, reluctant but unable to argue the point, “and I will not press you to stay, in our present circumstances, though I am sorry to lose you against a future need; and I cannot at the moment reward you as your pains have deserved.”

“Let us defer it,” Tharkay said. “Who knows? We may meet again; the world is not after all so very large a place.”

He spoke with that faint smile, and stood to give Laurence his hand. “I hope we shall,” Laurence said, gripping it, “and that I may be of use to you in turn, someday.”

Tharkay refused an offer to try and get him a more personal safe-conduct; and indeed Laurence did not have much fear he would need one, despite his game leg. With no further ado, Tharkay put up the hood of his cloak and picking up his small bundle was gone into the bustle and noise of the covert; there were few guards posted around the dragons, and he vanished quickly among the scattered campfires and bivouacs.

Laurence had sent Colonel Thorndyke a stiff, short word that they meant to offer their services to the Prussians; in the morning the colonel came again to the covert, bringing with him a Prussian officer: rather younger than other of the senior commanders, with a truly impressive mustache whose tips hung below his chin, and a fierce, hawk-like expression.

“Your Highness, may I present Captain William Laurence, of His Majesty’s Aerial Corps,” Thorndyke said. “Captain, this is Prince Louis Ferdinand, commander of the advance guard; you have been assigned to his command.”

They were forced for direct communication to resort to French. Laurence ruefully thought that at least his mastery of that language was improving, with as much use as he was being forced to make of it; indeed he was for once not the worse speaker, as Prince Louis spoke with a thick and almost impenetrable accent. “Let us see his range, his skill,” Prince Louis said, gesturing to Temeraire.

He called over a Prussian officer, Captain Dyhern, from one of the neighboring coverts, and gave him instructions to lead his own heavy-weight, Eroica, and their formation in a drill to give them the example. Laurence stood by Temeraire’s head watching, with private dismay. He had wholly neglected formation-drill practice over the long months since their departure from England, and even at the height of their form they could not have matched the skill on display. Eroica was nearly the size of Maximus, Temeraire’s year-mate and a Regal Copper, the very largest breed of dragon known; and he was not a fast flier, but when he moved in square his corners nearly had points, and the distance separating him from the other dragons scarcely varied, to the naked eye.

“I do not at all understand, why are they flying that way?” Temeraire said, head cocked to one side. “Those turns look very awkward, and when they reversed there was enough room for anyone to go between them.”

“It is only a drill, not a battle-formation,” Laurence said. “But you can be sure they will do all the better in combat for the discipline and the precision required to perform such maneuvers.”

Temeraire snorted. “It seems to me that they would do better to practice things that would actually be of use. But I see the pattern; I can do it now,” he added.

“Are you sure you would not like to observe a little longer?” Laurence asked, anxiously; the Prussian dragons had only gone through one full repetition, and he for his own part would not at all have minded a little time to practice the maneuver in privacy.

“No; it is very silly, but it is not at all difficult,” Temeraire said.

This was perhaps not the best spirit in which to enter into the practice, and Temeraire had never much liked formation-flying at all, even the less-rigorous British style. For all Laurence could do to restrain him, he dashed through the maneuver at high speed, a good deal quicker than the Prussian formation had managed it, not to mention than any other dragon over a light-weight in size could have kept up with, spiraling himself about in a flourishy way to boot.

“I put in the turning over, so that I would always be looking out of the formation body,” Temeraire added, coiling himself down to the ground rather pleased with himself. “That way I could not be surprised by an attack.”

This cleverness plainly did not much impress Prince Louis, nor Eroica, who gave a short coughing snort, as dismissive as a sniff. Temeraire pricked up his ruff at it and sat up on his haunches narrow-eyed. “Sir,” Laurence said hurriedly, to forestall any quarreling, “perhaps you are not aware that Temeraire is a Celestial; they have a particular skill—” Here he stopped, abruptly aware that divine wind might sound poetical and exaggerated if directly translated.

“Demonstrate, if you please,” Prince Louis said, gesturing. There was no appropriate target nearby, however, but a small stand of trees. Temeraire obligingly smashed them down with one deep-chested violent roar, by no means the full range of his strength, in the process rousing the whole covert of dragons into loud calls and inquiries and sparking a terrified distant whinnying from the cavalry on the opposite side of the encampment.

Prince Louis inspected the shattered trunks with some interest. “Well, when we have pushed them back onto their own fortifications, that will be useful,” he said. “At what distance is it effective?”

“Against seasoned wood, sir, not very great,” Laurence said. “He would have to come too near exposed to their guns; however, against troops or cavalry, the range is greater, and I am sure would have excellent effect—”

“Ah! But too dear a cost,” Prince Louis said, waving a hand expressively towards the perfectly audible sound of the shrilling horses. “The army which exchanges its cavalry for dragon-corps will be defeated in the field, if their opponent’s infantry hold; this the work of Frederick the Great conclusively has proven. Have you before fought in a ground engagement?”

“No, sir,” Laurence was forced to admit; Temeraire had only a few actions at all to his credit, all purely aerial engagements, and despite many years’ service Laurence could not claim any experience himself, for while most aviators come up through the ranks would have had some practice at least working in support of infantry, he had spent those years afloat, and by whatever chance had never been at a land battle of any kind.

“Hm.” Prince Louis shook his head and straightened up. “We will not try and train you up now,” he said. “Better to make of you the best use we can. You will sweep with Eroica’s formation, in early battle, then hold the enemy off their flanks; keep with them and you will not spook the cavalry.”

Having inquired into Temeraire’s complement, Prince Louis insisted also on providing them with a few Prussian officers and another half-a-dozen ground hands to fill out their numbers; Laurence could not deny the extra hands were of use, after the unhappy losses which he had suffered, without replacement, since their departure from England: Digby and Baylesworth only lately, Macdonaugh killed in the desert, and poor little Morgan slain along with half his harness-men in the French night assault near Madeira so long ago, when they had scarcely weighed anchor. The new men seemed to know their work, but they spoke almost no English and very indifferent French, and he could not like having such perfect strangers aboard; he was anxious a little for the eggs.

The Prussians were plainly not much appeased by his willingness to assist; they had softened a little towards Temeraire and his crew, but the Aerial Corps were still being spoken of as treacherous. Aside from the pain which this could not help but give Laurence, as this justification had been sufficient to make the Prussians comfortable in keeping him against his will, he would not have been wholly astonished if they took the opportunity to commandeer the Kazilik egg, should they become aware of the imminent hatching.

He had made mention of his urgency, without telling them precisely that the egg was so near its time, and he had not said it was a Kazilik, which should certainly provide a great increase of temptation: the Prussians did not have a fire-breather either. But with the Prussian officers about, the secret was in some jeopardy, and they were all unknowing teaching the eggs German by their conversation, which should make a seizure all the easier.

He had not discussed the matter with his own officers, but that had not been necessary to make them share his concerns; Granby was a popular first officer, well-liked, and even if he had been roundly loathed none of the crew could have been happy to see the fruit of all their desperate labors snatched away. Without any instructions, they were standoffish to the Prussian officers and cautious to keep them away from the eggs, which were left in their swaddling-clothes and kept at the heart of their camp under a now-tripled volunteer guard, posted by Ferris, whenever Temeraire was engaged in maneuvers or exercise.

This did not occur very often; the Prussians did not believe in exerting dragons very much, outside of battle. The formations daily drilled and went on reconnaissance missions, probing out a little way into the countryside, but they did not go very far, being constrained by the range of their slowest members. Laurence’s suggestion that he should take Temeraire farther afield had been denied, on the grounds that if they were to encounter any French party they should be taken, or lead them back towards the Prussian encampment, providing too much intelligence in exchange for small gain: yet another of Frederick the Great’s maxims, which he was growing tired of hearing.

Only Temeraire was perfectly happy: he was rapidly acquiring German from the Prussian crewmen, and he was just as pleased not to have to be constantly performing formation exercises. “I do not need to fly around in squares to do well in a battle,” he said. “It is a pity not to see more of the countryside, but it does not matter; once we have beaten Napoleon, we can always come back for a visit.”

He regarded the coming battle in the light of an assured victory, as indeed did nearly the whole of the army around them, except for the grumbling Saxons, mostly reluctant conscripts. There was much to give foundation to such hopes: the level of discipline throughout the camp was wonderful to behold, and the infantry drill beyond anything Laurence had ever seen. If Hohenlohe was not a genius of Napoleon’s caliber, he certainly seemed a soldierly kind of general, and his swelling army, large as it was, comprised less than half of the Prussian forces; and that not even counting the Russians, who were massing in the Polish territories to the east and would soon march in support.

The French would be badly outnumbered, operating far from their home territory with supply lines stretched thin; they would not be able to bring many dragons with them, and the lingering threat of Austria on their flank and Britain across the Channel would force Napoleon to leave a good portion of his troops behind to guard against a surprise late entry into the war on the part of either power.

“Who has he fought, anyway: the Austrians and the Italians, and some heathens in Egypt?” Captain Dyhern said; Laurence had out of courtesy been admitted to the captains’ mess of the Prussian aviators, and they were happy on the occasion of his visits to shift their conversation to French, for the pleasure of describing to him the inevitable defeat of that nation. “The French have no real fighting quality, no morale; a few good beatings and we will see his whole army melt away.”

The other officers all nodded and seconded him, and Laurence was as willing as any of them to raise a glass to Bonaparte’s defeat, if less inclined to think his victories quite so hollow; Laurence had fought enough Frenchmen at sea to know they were no slouches in battle, if not much in the way of sailors.

Still, he did not think they were soldiers of the Prussian caliber, and it was heartening to be among a company of men so determined on victory; nothing like shyness known among them, or even uncertainty. They were worthy allies; he knew without question he should not hesitate to range himself in line with them, on the day of battle, and trust his own life to their courage; as near the highest encomium he could give, and which made all the more unpleasant his sensations when Dyhern drew him aside, as they left the mess together one evening.

“I hope you will allow me to speak, without offense,” Dyhern said. “Never would I instruct a man how his dragon is to be managed, but you have been out in the East so long; now he has some strange ideas in his head, I think?”

Dyhern was a plain-spoken soldier, but he did not speak unkindly, and his words were intended in the nature of a gentle hint; mortifying enough to receive for all that, with his suggestion that “perhaps he has not been exercised enough, or he has been kept from battle too often; it is good not to let them grow preoccupied.”

His own dragon, Eroica, was certainly an exemplar of Prussian dragon-discipline: he even looked the role, with the heavy overlapping plates of bone which ringed his neck and traveled up the ridges of his shoulders and wings, giving him an armored appearance. Despite his vast size, he showed no inclination to indolence, instead being rather quick to chide the other dragons if they should flag, and was always ready to answer a call to drill. The other Prussian dragons were much in awe of him, and willingly stood aside to let him take first fruits when they had their meals.

Laurence had been invited to let Temeraire feed from the pen, once they had committed to joining the battle; and Temeraire, inclined to be jealous of his own precedence, would not hang back in Eroica’s favor. Nor would Laurence have liked to see him do so, for that matter. If the Prussians did not choose to make more use of Temeraire’s gifts, that was their lookout; he could even appreciate the reasoning that kept them from disrupting their beautifully precise formations by introducing at so late a date a new participant. But he would not have stood for a moment any disparagement of Temeraire’s qualities, nor tolerated a suggestion Temeraire was in any way not the equal—and to his own mind, the superior—of Eroica.

Eroica did not object to sharing his dinner himself, but the other Prussian dragons looked a little sourly at Temeraire’s daring, and they all of them stared when Temeraire did not immediately eat, but took his kill over to Gong Su to be cooked first. “It always tastes just the same, if you only eat it plain,” Temeraire said to their very dubious expressions. “It is much nicer to have it cooked; try a little and you will see.”

Eroica made no answer to this but a snort, and deliberately tore into his own cows quite raw, devouring them down to the hooves; the other Prussian dragons at once followed his example.

“It is better not to give in to their whims,” Dyhern added to Laurence now. “It seems a small thing, I know—why not let them have all the pleasure they can, when they are not fighting? But it is just as with men. There must be discipline, order, and they are the happier for it.”

Guessing that Temeraire had once again broached the subject of his reforms with the Prussian dragons, Laurence answered him a little shortly, and went back to Temeraire’s clearing, to find him curled up unhappily and silent. What little inclination Laurence had to reproach him vanished in the face of his disappointed droop, and Laurence went to him at once to stroke his soft muzzle.

“They say I am soft, for wishing to eat cooked food, and for reading,” Temeraire said, low, “and they think I am silly for saying dragons ought not to have to fight; they none of them wanted to listen.”

“Well,” Laurence said gently, “my dear, if you wish dragons to be free to choose their own way, you must be prepared that some of them will wish to make no alteration; it is what they are used to, after all.”

“Yes, but surely anyone can see that it is nicer to be able to choose,” Temeraire said. “It is not as though I do not want to fight, whatever that booby Eroica says,” he added, with abrupt and mounting indignation, his head coming up off the ground and the ruff spreading, “and what he has to say to anything, when he does not think of anything but counting the number of wingbeats between one turn and the next, I should like to know; at least I am not stupid enough to practice ten times a day just how best to show my belly to anyone who likes to come at me from the flank.”

Laurence received this stroke of temper with dismay, and tried to apply himself to soothing Temeraire’s jangled nerves, but to little success.

“He said that I ought to practice my formations instead of complaining,” Temeraire continued heatedly, “when I could roll them up in two passes, the way they fly; he ought to stay at home and eat cows all day long, for the good they will do in a battle.”

At last he allowed himself to be calmed, and Laurence thought nothing more of it; but in the morning, sitting and reading with Temeraire—now puzzling laboriously, for his benefit, through a famous novel by the writer Goethe, a piece of somewhat dubious morality called Die Leiden des jungen Werther—Laurence saw the formations go up for their battle-drills, and Temeraire, still smarting, took the opportunity to make a great many critical remarks upon their form, which seemed to Laurence accurate so far as he could follow them.

“Do you suppose he is only in a savage mood, or mistaken?” Laurence privately asked Granby, afterwards. “Surely such flaws cannot have escaped them, all this time?”

“Well, I don’t say I have a perfectly clear picture of what he is talking about,” Granby said, “but he isn’t wrong in any of it so far as I can tell, and you recall how handy he was at thinking up those new formations, back during our training. It’s a pity we’ve never yet had a chance of putting them to work.”

“I hope I do not seem to be critical,” Laurence said to Dyhern that evening. “But though his ideas are at times unusual, Temeraire is remarkably clever at such things, and I would consider myself amiss not to raise the question to you.”

Dyhern eyed Laurence’s makeshift and hasty diagrams, and then shook his head smiling faintly. “No, no; I take no offense; how could I, when you so politely bore my own interference?” he said. “Your point is well-taken: what’s right for one, is not always fair for the other. Strange how very different the tempers of dragons can be. He would be unhappy and resentful, if you were always correcting or denying him, I expect.”

“Oh, no,” Laurence said, dismayed. “Dyhern, I meant to make no such implication; I beg you believe me quite sincere in wishing to draw to your attention a possible weakness in our defense, and nothing more.”

Dyhern did not seem convinced, but he did look over the diagrams a little longer, and then stood up and clapped Laurence on the shoulder. “Come, do not worry,” he said. “Of course there are some openings you here have found; there is no maneuver without its points of weakness. But it is not so easy to exploit a little weakness in the air, as it might seem upon paper. Frederick the Great himself approved these drills; with them we beat the French at Rossbach; we will beat them again here.”

With this reply Laurence had to be content, but he went away dissatisfied; a dragon properly trained ought be a better judge of aerial maneuvers than any man, it seemed to him, and Dyhern’s answer more willful blindness than sound military judgment.

Chapter 12

THE INNER COUNCILS of the army were wholly opaque to Laurence; the barrier of language and their establishment in the covert, far from most other divisions of the army, distanced him twice over even from the usual rumors that went floating through the camp. What little he heard was contradictory and vague: they would be concentrating at Erfurt, they would be concentrating at Hof; they would catch the French at the River Saale, or at the Main; and meanwhile the weather was turning to autumnal chill and the leaves to yellow around their edges, without any movement.

Nearly two weeks had crept by in camp, and then at last the word came: Prince Louis summoned the captains to a nearby farmhouse for dinner, fed them handsomely out of his own purse, and to their even greater satisfaction enlightened them a little.

“We mean to make a push south, through the Thuringian forest passes,” he said. “General Hohenlohe will advance through Hof towards Bamberg, while General Brunswick and the main army go through Erfurt towards Würzburg,” he went on, pointing out the locations on a great map spread out over the dinner table, the destination towns near the known positions where the French Army had been established over the summer. “We have still not heard that Bonaparte has left Paris. If they choose to sit in their cantonments and wait for us, all the better. We will strike them before they know what has happened.”

Their own destination, as part of the advance guard, would be the town of Hof, on the borders of the great forest. The march would not be quick; so many men were not easily supplied, and there were some seventy miles to cover. Meanwhile along their route supply-depots had to be established, particularly with herds for the dragons, and the lines of communication secured. But with all these caveats, still Laurence went back to the clearing with much satisfaction: at last, to know something and to be moving was a thousand times better, no matter how slow it would seem to abruptly be bounded by the speed of infantry and cavalry, dragging their guns along in waggons.

“But why do we not go farther out ahead?” Temeraire said, when an easy two hours’ flight had brought them, the next morning, to their new covert. “It is not as though we are doing anything of use here but making ourselves some clearings; even those slow dragons can manage flying a little longer, surely.”

“They don’t want us getting too far off from the infantry,” Granby said. “For our sake as much as theirs; if we went off on our own and ran into a troop of French dragons with a regiment of their own infantry and a couple of guns to back them up, we shouldn’t enjoy it above half.”

In such a case, the enemy dragons would have a clear advantage, the field guns giving them a space of safety in which to regroup and rest, and providing a zone of danger against which the dragons without infantry support could be pinned. But despite this explanation, Temeraire still sighed, and only grumblingly reconciled himself to knocking down some more trees, for firewood and to clear space for himself and the Prussian dragons, while they waited for the marching infantry to catch up.

In this creeping manner they had covered barely twenty-five miles in two days, when abruptly their orders were changed. “We will be massing first at Jena,” Prince Louis said, shrugging ruefully at the vagaries of the senior officers, who continued to meet daily, ferried back and forth by dragon-couriers. “General Brunswick wishes to move all the army together through Erfurt instead.”

“First we move not at all, and now we change directions,” Laurence said to Granby, with some irritation; they had already gone farther south than Jena and now would have to travel some distance northward as well as west; with the slow pace of the infantry it might mean half-a-day lost. “They would do better to have fewer of these conferences, and to more point.”

The army was not assembled around Jena until early October; by then Temeraire was hardly the only one irritated with the pace. Even the most stolid of the Prussian dragons were restless at being held on so short a rein, and strained their necks out westward daily, as if they might win a few more miles by wishing for them. The town was upon the banks of the great Saale River, broad and unfordable, which would serve well as a barrier to defend. Their original destination of Hof lay only twenty miles farther south along its course, and Laurence, studying the maps laid out in the impromptu captains’ mess organized in a large pavilion, shook his head; the change of position seemed to him a retreat without cause.

“No, you see, some of the cavalry and infantry have been sent ahead to Hof anyway,” Dyhern said. “A little bit of bait, to make them think we are coming that way, and then we pour down on them through Erfurt and Würzburg, and catch them still in parts.”

It sounded well enough, but there was a small obstacle to the plan, shortly discovered: the French were already in Würzburg. The news traveled round the camp like wildfire, scarcely moments after the panting courier had ducked into the commander’s tent, reaching even the aviators with scarcely any delay.

“They say Napoleon himself is there,” one of the other captains said, “the Imperial Guard is at Mainz, and his Marshals are all over Bavaria: the whole Grande Armée is mobilized.”

“Well, and so much the better,” Dyhern opined. “At least no more of this damned marching, thank God! Let them come to us for their thrashing.”

Into this sentiment they were all prepared to enter, and a sudden energy gripped the camp; all sensed that battle was close at hand, as the senior officers again closeted themselves for intense discussions. There was no shortage of news and rumors now: every hour, it seemed, some fresh piece of intelligence reached them, though still the Prussians were sending out scarcely any reconnaissance missions, for fear of their capture.

“You will enjoy this, gentlemen,” Prince Louis said, coming into their mess. “Napoleon has made a dragon an officer: it has been seen giving orders to the captains of his aerial corps.”

“Its captain, surely,” one of the Prussian officers protested.

“No, it has none at all, nor any kind of crew,” Prince Louis said, laughing; Laurence, however, found nothing amusing in the news, particularly when confirmed in his suspicion that the dragon in question was entirely white.

“We will see to it you have a chance at her on the field, never fear,” Dyhern said only, when Laurence had briefly acquainted them all with Lien and her history. “Ha ha! Maybe the French will not have been practicing their formations, if she is in charge? Making a dragon an officer; next he will promote his horse to general.”

“It does not seem at all silly to me,” Temeraire said, with a sniff, when this had been passed along; he was disgruntled at the news of Lien’s preferment among the French, when contrasted with his own treatment by the Prussians.

“But she can’t know a thing about battles, Temeraire, not like you,” Granby said. “Yongxing kicked up such a fuss about Celestials not fighting; she shan’t ever have been in one herself.”

“My mother said that Lien was a very great scholar,” Temeraire said, “and there are many Chinese books about aerial tactics; there is one by the Yellow Emperor himself, though I did not have a chance to read it,” he finished regretfully.

“Oh, things out of books,” Granby said, waving a hand.

Laurence said grimly, “Bonaparte is no fool. I am sure he has their strategy well in his own hands; and if giving Lien rank were enough excuse to convince her to come into the battle, I am sure he would make her a Marshal of France, and call it cheap at the price; it is the divine wind we must fear now, and what it may do to the Prussian forces, not her generalship.”

“If she tries to hurt our friends, I will stop her,” Temeraire said, adding, under his breath, “but I am sure she is not wasting time on silly formations.”

They moved out of Jena early the next morning, with Prince Louis and the rest of the advance guard, for the town of Saalfeld, a cautious ten miles south of the rest of the army, to await the French advance. All was quiet on their arrival; Laurence took a moment to go into the town before the infantry should come in, hoping through the offices of Lieutenant Badenhaur, one of the young Prussian officers added to his crew, to acquire some decent wine and better provender; having replenished his funds in Dresden, he now meant to give his senior officers a dinner that night, and arrange for some special provision for the rest of his crew. The first battle could come now at any day, and both supplies and the time to prepare them would likely grow short during the ensuing maneuvers.

The Saale River trotted briskly astride their course, energetic though the autumn rains had not yet begun. Laurence paused, halfway across the bridge, and thrust a long branch into the water: down to the limit of his arm, not yet at the bottom, and then as he knelt lower to try and reach a little farther, a surge of the current pulled it roughly from his hand.

“I would not like to try and ford that; and least of all with artillery,” Laurence said, wiping his hands as he came off the bridge; though Badenhaur barely knew any English, he nodded in full agreement: translation was scarcely necessary.

The inhabitants were not well-pleased with the coming invasion of their sleepy little town, but the shopkeepers were ready enough to be mollified with gold, even if the women closed the shutters on the upper stories of their houses with some vehemence as they walked past. They made their arrangements with the keeper of a small inn, who was despondently willing to sell many of his provisions, before the main body of troops should arrive and likely commandeer the rest. He lent them also a couple of his young sons to carry the supplies back. “Pray tell them there is nothing to fear,” Laurence told Badenhaur, as they crossed back over the river and drew near the covert, the excited dragons making an unusually loud noise chattering with one another; the boys’ eyes had grown saucer-wide in their faces.

They were not much comforted by whatever Badenhaur said, and ran off home almost before Laurence managed to give them each a few pennies in thanks. As they left the food, however, delicious smells rising from the baskets, nobody much minded. Gong Su took charge of the meals; he had by now mostly acquired the role of cook for the men as well as Temeraire, that duty ordinarily rotated about the men of the ground crew, and rarely well-performed. They had all gradually grown used to the creeping inclusion of Oriental spices and preparations in their food, until now they would most likely have noticed their absence more.

The cook was left otherwise unoccupied. Eroica said to Temeraire, as the dragons assembled for their own repast, “Come and eat with us! Fresh meat is what you need, on the eve of a battle; hot blood puts fire into the breast,” encouragingly; and Temeraire, who could not conceal he was pleased to be so invited, assented and indeed tore into his cow with great eagerness, if he did lick his chops clean with more fastidiousness than the rest, and wash himself in the river after.

There was nearly a holiday atmosphere by the time the first of the cavalry squadrons began to come across the river, and the sounds and smells of horses reached them through the curtain of trees, the creak and the sharp smell of oil from the gun-carriages: the rest of the men would not arrive until morning. As dusk came on, Laurence took Temeraire for a short solitary flight to let him dissipate some of the nervous energy which had set him to clawing the ground again. They went high up, so as not to alarm the horses, and Temeraire hovered a while squinting through the twilight.

“Laurence, will we not be left very open, on this ground?” Temeraire asked, craning his head around. “We cannot get back across the river very quickly, if there is only that one bridge; and there are all those woods about.”

“We do not mean to cross back over; we are holding the bridge for the rest of the army,” Laurence explained. “If they came up and the French were in possession of this bank, it would be very difficult to cross over in the face of their resistance, so we must hold it if ever we can.”

“But I do not see any more of the army coming,” Temeraire said. “What I mean is, I can see Prince Louis and the rest of the advance guard, but no one else behind us; and there are a great many campfires over there, in front.”

“That damned infantry is creeping along again, I dare say,” Laurence said, squinting northward himself; he could just make out the lights of Prince Louis’s carriage, swaying along the road towards the encampment around the town, and beyond that nothing but darkness, far into the distance; while in the south, small smoky campfires were winking in and out of view, like fireflies, brilliant in the thickening dark: the French were less than a mile away.

Prince Louis was not backwards in his response: by dawn his battalions were moving rapidly over the bridge and taking up their positions. Some eight thousand men with more than forty-four guns to support them, though half of them were the conscripted Saxons, whose mutterings were all the louder now that the French were known to be so near. The first musket-shots began to ring out only a little later: not the real beginning of a battle, only the advance outposts trading a little desultory fire with the French scouts.

By nine in the morning, the French were coming out of the hills, keeping well back in the trees where the dragons could not easily get at them. Eroica led his formation in threatening great sweeps over their heads, with Temeraire following after them, but with little effect; Temeraire had been forbidden to use the divine wind, so near to the cavalry. To their general frustration, they were shortly signaled back, so that the cavalry and infantry might make their way forward and engage.

Eroica threw out a signal-flag; “Down, land,” Badenhaur, sitting close at Laurence’s left, translated, and they all dropped down into the covert again: a panting runner was there with fresh orders for Captain Dyhern.

“Well, my friends, we are in luck,” Dyhern called back to all the formation cheerfully, waving the packet overhead. “That is Marshal Lannes over there, and there is a pile of eagles to be won today! The cavalry will have their turn for a while; we are to try and come around behind them, and see if we can scare up a few French dragons to fight with.”

They went up again, high over the battlefield: with the pressure of the dragon-formation lifted, the French skirmishers had burst out of the woods to engage the front ranks of Prince Louis’s forces, and behind them marched out a single battalion of infantry in line and some squadrons of light cavalry: not yet a great commitment of forces, but the battle was properly joined, and now the guns began to speak in their deep thundering voices. Shadows were moving through the wooded hills; impossible to make out their exact movements, and as Laurence turned his glass upon them, Temeraire let out a ringing roar: a French formation of dragons had lifted into the air, and was coming for them.

The formation was considerably larger than Eroica’s, but made almost wholly of smaller dragons, most of them light-weights and even a few courier-types among them. They had none of the crispness that marked the Prussian maneuvers: they had formed into a sort of pyramid, but a shaky one, and were beating up at such different speeds that they were changing places with one another as they came.

Eroica and his formation came about in perfect order to meet the onrushing French, spreading out into a doubled-line, at two heights. Temeraire was nearly turning himself in circles, trying not to overshoot their left flank, where Laurence had set him to take up position; but the Prussians were in formation before the French reached them, and riflemen aboard each dragon leveled their guns for the devastating volley-fire for which the Prussians were justly feared.

But just as they came into rifle-range, and the guns began to crack, the French formation dissolved into even more complete chaos, dragons darting in every direction; and the Prussian volley made almost no impression. A very neat piece of work, tempting the volley out of them, Laurence was forced to acknowledge; but he did not at once see the point: it would not do them much good, when the little French dragons did not carry the manpower to return fire in kind.

They did not seem to wish to, either; instead, they only circled around in a frantic, buzzing cloud, keeping a safe distance too far for boarding, and their crews firing off shots almost at random, picking off men here and there, dashing in for a moment to claw or snap at the Prussian dragons in any opening they were given. Of those, there were many; Temeraire’s peevish criticisms were proving all too accurate, and nearly every dragon of the Prussian force was soon marked and bleeding, here and there, as bewildered they tried to go about in one direction or another, to face their opponents properly.

Temeraire, moving alone, was able best to avoid the skirmishing smaller dragons and pay them back; with no threat of boarding and gunnery only a waste of ammunition against such small quick targets, Laurence only gave him his head, and waved his men to stay low and keep out of the way. Pursuing fiercely, Temeraire caught one after another of the littler French dragons, giving them each a vigorous shake and clawing that had them squalling in pain and retreating hastily from the field.

But he was only one, and there were a great many more of the small dragons than he alone could catch; Laurence would have liked to try and tell Dyhern to break up the formation, and let the single dragons fight as they would: at least they would not have been rendering themselves so predictably vulnerable, over and over, and their heavier weight ought to have told badly against the smaller dragons. He had no opportunity, but after a few more passes Dyhern reached the same conclusion: another signal-flag went up, and the formation broke apart; the bloodied, pain-maddened dragons threw themselves with renewed energy at the French.

“No, no!” Temeraire cried, startling Laurence; and whipping his head around said, “Laurence, down there, look—”

He leaned over the side of Temeraire’s neck, already pulling out his glass: a great body of French infantry were coming out of the woods to the west, enveloping Prince Louis’s right flank, and the center was being pressed back by hard, determined fighting: men were falling back over the bridge, and the cavalry had no room to charge. Just now would have been the ideal moment for a dragon-sweep, to drive back the flanking attempt, but with the formation broken up it was almost sure to fail.

“Temeraire, go!” Laurence cried, and already drawing in his breath, Temeraire folded his wings and arrowed downwards, towards the encroaching French troops on the west: his sides swelled out, and Laurence pressed his hands over his ears to muffle a little of that terrible roaring force, as Temeraire unleashed the divine wind. His pass complete, he swept up and away; dozens of men lay crumpled and still upon the ground, blood oozing from their nostrils and their ears and their eyes, and the smaller trees lying cast around them like matchsticks.

The Prussian defenders were a little more dazed themselves than heartened, however, and in their shocked pause a Frenchman in an officer’s uniform leapt from the trees and out amongst his own dead, holding up a standard, and shouted, “Vive l’Empereur! Vive la France!” He charged forward, and behind him came all the rest of the French advance guard, nearly two thousand men, and poured down against the Prussians, hacking away with their bayonets and sabers, getting in amongst them so Temeraire could not strike again without killing as many of their own side.

The case was growing desperate: everywhere the infantrymen were being forced into the Saale River and dragged down by the current and the weight of their own boots, the horses’ hooves slipping on the banks. With Temeraire hovering, searching for an opening, Laurence saw Prince Louis rally the rest of the cavalry for a charge at the center. The horses massed around him, and with a roar and thunder they threw themselves gallantly forward, to meet the French hussars with an impact like a ringing bell, swords against sabers. The clash stirred up the thick black clouds of gunpowder smoke around them, to cling to the horses’ legs and go whirling about them like a storm. Laurence hoped, for a moment; and then he saw Prince Louis fall, the sword spilling from his hand, and a terrible cheer rose from the French as the Prussian colors went down beside him.

No rescue came. The Saxon battalions broke first and spilled wildly across the bridge, or flung down their arms in surrender; the Prussians held in small pockets, as Prince Louis’s subordinates tried to hold the men together and withdraw in good order. Most of the guns were being abandoned upon the field, and the French were raking the Prussians with a deadly fire, men toppling to the ground or falling into the river in droves as they tried to flee. Others began to retreat northward along the line of the river.

The bridge fell, scarcely after noon; by then, Temeraire and the other dragons were only engaged in defending the retreat, trying to keep the small darting French dragons from turning the withdrawal into a complete rout. They did not meet with much success; the Saxons were in full flight, and the smaller French dragons were snatching up artillery and horses alike away from the Prussian forces, some with screaming men still aboard, and depositing them back into the hands of the French infantry, now establishing themselves upon the far bank of the Saale, amidst the still-shuttered buildings of the town.

The fighting was all but over; the signal-flags sauve qui peut fluttered sadly from the ruin of the Prussian position, and the clouds of smoke were drifting away. The French dragons fell back at last, as the retreat drew too far away from their infantry support, and all drooping and weary Temeraire and the Prussian dragons came to earth to catch their breath at Dyhern’s signal.

He did not attempt to cheer them; there was no cheer to be had. The littlest dragon of the formation, a light-weight, was carrying carefully in his talons the broken body of Prince Louis, recovered in a desperate lunge from the battlefield. Dyhern only said briefly, “Collect your ground crews, and fall back on Jena; we will rendezvous there.”

Chapter 13

LAURENCE HAD PUT down his ground crew deep in the countryside on the far bank of the Saale, tucked into a well-hidden forested defile, not easily seen from above; they were standing all together, the strongest of the hands in front with axes and sabers and pistols held ready, and Keynes and the runners to the back, the eggs tucked safely in their swaddling and harness near a small screened-off fire.

“We heard the guns going near since you left us, sir,” Fellowes said, anxiously, even as he and his men began looking over Temeraire’s harness for damage.

“Yes,” Laurence said, “they overran our position; we are falling back on Jena.” He felt as though he were speaking from a great distance; an immense weariness had hold of him, which could not be allowed to show. “A ration of rum for all the flight crew; see to it if you please, Mr. Roland, Mr. Dyer,” he said, letting himself down; Emily and Dyer carried the spirit bottles around, with a glass, and the men each drank their tot. Laurence took his own last, with gratitude; the hot liquor was at least an immediate presence.

He went back to speak with Keynes over the eggs. “No harm at all,” the surgeon said. “They could keep like this a month without difficulties.”

“Have you any better sense of when we may expect the hatching?” Laurence asked.

“Nothing whatsoever has changed,” Keynes said, in his peevish way. “We still have anywhere from three weeks to five, or I should have said.”

“Very good,” Laurence said, and sent him to look over Temeraire, in case there should be any sign of injury to his muscles, a result of overextending himself, which in the heat of battle or the present sorrow he might not have noticed.

“It was mostly that they took us by surprise,” Temeraire said miserably, as Keynes clambered over him, “and those wretched formations; oh, Laurence, I ought to have said more, and made them listen.”

“There was scarcely any hope of your doing so under the circumstances,” Laurence said. “Do not reproach yourself; think rather how the formation movements might most easily be amended, without causing them great confusion. I hope we may persuade them to heed your advice, now, and if so, we will have repaired a grave fault in tactics, at no more cost than the loss of one skirmish; as painful a lesson as it has been, we will then count ourselves fortunate it was no worse.”

They arrived at Jena in the small hours of the morning; the army was drawing up close around the town, withdrawing in upon itself. The French had captured a badly needed supply-train at Gera, and the depots in the town were near-empty. There was only a single small sheep for Temeraire to eat; Gong Su stretched it by stewing, with the addition of some aromatics which he had gathered, and Temeraire made a better meal than the men, who had to make do with a sort of hastily cooked porridge, and hard-baked bread.

There was an ugly murmuring all through the camp, as Laurence walked by the fires: Saxon stragglers coming in from the battlefield were murmuring that they had borne the brunt of the attack, sacrificed to try and hold the French; and worse yet, there had been another defeat: General Tauentzein, retreating from Hof in the face of the French advance, had backed out of Marshal Soult’s arms and straight into Marshal Bernadotte’s, from frying-pan to fire, and had lost four hundred men before at last escaping. Enough to disquiet any man, much less those who had been counting on an easy, assured victory; there was little sign of that early supreme confidence anymore.

He found Dyhern and the other Prussian aviators having claimed a small ramshackle cottage, hastily deserted by its peasant tenants when the dragons descended upon their fields, for their meager comfort. “I am not proposing any wholesale alteration,” Laurence said urgently, laying out his diagrams, sketched to Temeraire’s orders, “only what changes can easily be accommodated; whatever risks are entailed in so desperate a change in the final hour can scarcely be measured against the certainty of disaster, if nothing be done.”

“You are kind enough not to say, I told you so,” Dyhern said, “but I hear it nonetheless. Very well; we will let a dragon be our instructor, and see what can be done; at least we will not be sitting in covert licking our wounds, like dogs after a beating.”

He and his fellow captains had been sitting gloomily around the mostly bare table, drinking in silence; now he rallied himself and them both with an immense effort, and by sheer force of personality put fresh heart into them, chiding them for getting into the dumps, and very nearly dragged them bodily outside and back to their dragons. The activity perked up their heads and spirits, Temeraire not least of all; he sat up bright-eyed as they all assembled and gladly threw himself into the exercise, showing them the new flying-patterns which he had devised.

To these Laurence and Granby had contributed little but simplified much; elaborate maneuvers which Temeraire could perform without a thought were simply beyond the physical agility of most Western dragon breeds. Even considerably slowed down, the new patterns gave the Prussians, so long inculcated with their formal drills, some difficulty at first, but the precision which informed their regular practice slowly began to tell, and after a dozen passes or so they were tired but triumphant. Some of the other dragons with the army had crept up to observe, and shortly after their officers came too; when Dyhern and his formation dropped down at last for a rest, they were quickly mobbed with questions, and shortly a couple of other formations were in the air trying their own hand.

Their practice was interrupted that afternoon, however, by a fresh change of plans: the army was concentrating anew about Weimar, with intentions of falling back to protect their lines of communications with Berlin, and once again the dragons would lead the way. An angry grumbling met this news; before now all the marching hither and yon, the changing orders, had been taken in good spirits, viewed as the inevitable shifting course of a war. But to fall back again now pell-mell, as if a couple of small French victories were enough to chase them home, was infuriating to all; and the confusion of orders took on the more unsettling cast of a lack of decision among the commanders.

In this hostile mood, the further news reached them that the ill-fated Prince Louis had taken his position across the Saale in answer to unclear orders by Hohenlohe, which had indeed implied an advance in progress, though this same advance had not been properly authorized by Brunswick or the King; the whole army had never stirred southward in the end, Hohenlohe evidently thinking better of his plans.

“He sent fresh orders to fall back,” Dyhern said, bitterly, having heard the news from one of Prince Louis’s aides-de-camp, who had just struggled back to camp, on foot, his poor horse having foundered crossing the Saale. “But we were already engaged by then, and our prince had not an hour left of life; so has Prussia thrown away one of her finest soldiers.”

They could not be said to be mutinous, but they were very angry all, and worse than that discouraged; the sense of achievement built over the afternoon worn away. They went silently to their several clearings to oversee the work of packing.

The sound of the courier-dragon leaving the covert had begun to be a hateful noise, signifying yet another of the endless futile conferences was under way. Laurence woke to that flurry of wings in the still-black hours of the morning, and rolled out of his tent in bare feet and shirtsleeves to scrub his face at the water-barrel: no frost yet, but more than cold enough to wake a man properly. Temeraire lay sleeping still, breath coming in warm puffs from his nostrils; Salyer looked up alertly when Laurence glanced into the cramped half-sized tent where he and the snoring Allen had kept the night’s watch over the eggs: the warmest place in camp, the fabric doubled over and the brazier coals glowing.

They were in covert now a little ways north of Jena, near the eastern edge of the Prussian Army, almost united: the Duke of Brunswick had moved his own forces closer during the night. The whole countryside seemed alive with campfires, whose smoke mingled sadly with the burning town in the distance: something between a panic and a riot had broken out among Hohenlohe’s forces the previous night over too little food and too much bad news. The French advance guard had been sighted again just to the south, and several anticipated supply-trains had not arrived; too much, particularly for the Saxons, reluctant allies to begin with and now thoroughly disenchanted.

Separated from the rest of the camp as the covert was, Laurence had not seen much of the unhappy events, but before calm could be restored, fires had caught among the buildings, and now the morning air was acrid and bitter with the floating ash and smoke, damp with dense fog. It was early on the thirteenth of October; almost a month now since their arrival in Prussia, and still he had received no word from England, the post slow and uncertain with the countryside full of armed men. Standing alone with his tea at the edge of the clearing, he looked northwards yearning; he deeply felt the want of connection, so tantalizingly close, and he had rarely known so great a desire to be at home, even when a thousand miles more distant.

The sun was beginning to make some forays towards dawn, but the fog held on grimly, a thick grey mist blanketing all the encampment. Sounds traveled only a short way, deadened queerly, or came seemingly out of nowhere, so one saw ghostly silent figures moving without sound and in another direction heard disembodied voices floating. The men rose sluggishly and went about their work without speaking much one to the other: tired and hungry.

The orders came shortly after ten in the morning: the main body of the army would retreat northwards through Auerstadt, while Hohenlohe’s forces kept their position, covering the retreat. Laurence read it silently and handed it back to Dyhern’s runner without comment: he would not speak critically of the Prussian command to a Prussian officer. The Prussians were less reticent amongst themselves, loud in their own tongue as the instructions went around.

“They say we ought to give the French a proper battle here, and I think they are quite right,” Temeraire said. “Why are we here at all, if not to fight? We might have stayed at Dresden, for all this marching we have been doing; it is as though we are running away.”

“It is not our place to say such things,” Laurence said. “There may be intelligence which we lack that makes sense of all these maneuvers.” This was a small sop to comfort; he did not very much believe it himself.

They were not themselves to move at any time soon, and as the dragons had been fed but poorly three days running now, orders were given not to ask them for any exertions, since at any moment they might be called on for a fresh march or a battle, though that at least seemed now less likely. Temeraire settled to drowse and dream of sheep, and Laurence said to Granby, “John, I am going to go and have a look around from higher ground, outside this blasted fog,” leaving him in command.

A flat-topped height, the Landgrafenberg, commanded the plateau and valley of Jena: Laurence took young Badenhaur as his guide again and together they pushed their way up through a narrow winding ravine that led up its wooded slopes, choked in places by wicked-thorned blackberry bushes. Farther up, the track faded out into the tall grasses: no one had mowed the hay here, the hill too steep to bother, though here and there the taller trees had been cut, and level clearings trampled flat by sheep: a couple of them looked up incuriously and trotted off into the bracken.

Sweating, they gained the summit after almost an hour of toil. “So,” Badenhaur said, waving his hand inarticulately at the fine prospect; Laurence nodded. A ring of smoke-blue mountains closed off the view in the far distance, but from their ideal vantage point all the bowl of the valley was spread in a circle around them almost like a living map, its gentler hills furred by yellowing beeches and smaller stands of evergreens, a few white-skinned birches stark among them. The fields were mostly brown-yellow and flat, much of the harvest taken in, muted in the thin autumnal light that made the day seem already far advanced and threw the scattered farmhouses into brilliant relief.

A heavy bank of clouds moving steadily westward presently blocked off the morning sun from their immediate view, the shadow creeping up and over the hills. By contrast a fragment of the Saale River nestled among the hills farther away caught the sunlight full-on and blazed incandescent at them, until Laurence found his eyes almost watering with the brilliance. The wind rose, a low fire-crackling sound of crumpled leaves and dry branches, and under that the deeper hollow roar, rather like a sail first belling out, but going on and on without an end. Otherwise there was an immense silence. The air tasted, smelled, strangely barren: no animal fragrance or rot, the ground already hard with frost.

On the side of the mountain from which they had come, the Prussian Army lay in its serried ranks, mostly obscured under the thick blanket of fog; but here and there the sunlight flickered valiantly on bayonets as Brunswick’s legions started to draw away north towards Auerstadt. Laurence cautiously went to peer over the opposite side, where the town lay; there was no definite sign of the French, but the fires in Jena were going out: the orange glowing remnants, like coals from this height, faded one by one amid indistinct voices shouting; Laurence could just dimly make out the forms of horses with carts going to and from the river, carrying water.

He stood a while contemplating the ground, pantomiming to Badenhaur with occasional recourse to the handful of French they both possessed, and then they both went still at once; a breath of wind blew the thick climbing pillar of smoke away from the town, and revealed a dragon coming into view from the east: it was Lien, flying over the river and the town in a quick, hummingbird progress, stopping to hover here and again. There was one startled moment where Laurence had the illusion of her flying directly towards them: a moment only, and then he realized it was no illusion.

Badenhaur pulled on his arm, and together they threw themselves flat to the ground and crawled underneath the blackberry bushes, the long thorns scratching and pulling. Some twenty feet in they found a refuge hollowed out from the ground and the bramble: the work of sheep. The branches kept rustling after they had settled themselves in the low depression, and after a moment a sheep came struggling and kicking to join them in the little hollow, leaving behind great tufts of its wool strung from the thorns, a welcome screen. It flung itself down shivering beside them, perhaps finding some comfort in human company in its turn, as the white dragon folded her great wings and let herself down gracefully onto the summit.

Laurence tensed, waiting; if she had seen them, if she were hunting them, a stand of blackberry would hardly keep her off for long. But she looked away, interested rather in the prospect which they themselves had been examining. There was something different in her appearance: in China he had seen her wear elaborate ensembles of gold and rubies; in Istanbul she had been wholly bare of jewels; but now she wore a very different piece, something like a diadem set around the base of her ruff and hooked cleverly under the edges and the jaw, made of shining steel rather than gold, and secure in the center one enormous diamond nearly the size of a chicken’s egg, which blazed insolently even in the thin morning light.

A man in a French officer’s uniform let himself down off her back and sprang to the ground. Laurence was deeply surprised to see that she had tolerated a passenger, still less one so undistinguished; the officer was bare-headed, dark hair short and thinning, in only a heavy leather coat flung over a chasseur’s uniform, high black boots over breeches, with a serviceable sword slung at his waist.

“Here is a fine thing, all our hosts assembled to greet us,” he said, his French oddly accented, opening up a glass to survey over the Prussian Army with particular attention to the ranks flowing away onto the road north. “We’ve kept them waiting too long; but that will soon be attended to. Davout and Bernadotte will send those fellows back to us presently. I do not see the banner of the King, do you?”

“No, and we should not wait here to find it, with no outposts established. You are too exposed,” Lien said, in disapproving tones, looking only indifferently over the field: her blood-red eyes were not very strong.

“Come now, surely I am safe in your company!” the officer chided her, laughing, and his smile, which momentarily he turned flashing up to her, gave light to his whole face.

Badenhaur was gripping Laurence’s arm almost with convulsive pressure. “Bonaparte,” the Prussian hissed, when Laurence glanced at him. Shocked, Laurence turned back around, leaning closer to the bramble for a better look: the man was not particularly stunted, as he had always imagined the Corsican to be from the depictions in the British newspapers, but rather compact than short. At present, animated with energy, his large grey eyes brilliant and his face a little flushed from the cold wind, he might even have been called handsome.

“There is no hurry,” Bonaparte added. “We can give them another three-quarters of an hour, I think, and let them send another division onto the road. A little walking to and fro will put them in just the right frame of mind.”

He spent most of this allotted time pacing back and forth along the ridge, gazing thoughtfully out at the plateau below, much of the raptor in his expression, while Laurence and Badenhaur, trapped, were forced to endure an agony of apprehension on the behalf of their fellows. A shudder by his side made Laurence look; Badenhaur’s hand had crept towards his pistol, a look of terrible indecision crossing the lieutenant’s face.

Laurence put his hand on Badenhaur’s arm, restraining, and the young man dropped his eyes at once, pale and ashamed, and let his hand down; Laurence silently gave his shoulder a rough shake for comfort. The temptation he could well understand; impossible not to entertain the wildest thoughts, when scarcely ten yards distant stood the architect of all Europe’s woes. If there had been any hope of making him prisoner, it should certainly have been their duty to attempt it, however likely to end in personal disaster; but no attack out of the brush could possibly have succeeded. Their first movement would alert Lien; and Laurence from personal experience knew well how quickly a Celestial could take action. Their only possible chance was indeed the pistol: an assassin’s shot, from their concealed position, at his unsuspecting back: no.

Their duty was plain; they would have to wait, concealing themselves, and then bear the intelligence back to camp as quickly as they could muster, that Napoleon was closing upon them the jaws of a trap; the biter might yet be bit, and an honorable victory won. But in this task every minute should count, and it was a thorough-going torture to be forced to lie quiet and still, watching the Emperor at his meditations.

“The fog is blowing off,” Lien said, her tail flicking uneasily; she was squinting narrowly down towards the positions of Hohenlohe’s artillery, which had the mountain in their view. “You should not be risking yourself like this; let us go at once. Besides, you have had all the reports you need.”

“Yes, yes, my nursemaid,” Bonaparte said absently, looking again through his glass. “But it is a different thing to see with one’s own eyes. There are at least five errors in the elevations on my maps, even without surveying, and those are not three-pounders but six with that horse artillery on their left.”

“An Emperor cannot also be a scout,” she said severely. “If you cannot trust your subordinates, you ought to replace them, not do their work.”

“Behold me properly lectured!” Bonaparte said, with mock indignation. “Even Berthier does not speak to me like this.”

“He ought to, when you are being foolish,” she said. “Come; you do not want to provoke them into coming up here and trying to hold the summit,” she added, cajolingly.

“Ah, they have missed their chance for that,” he said. “But very well, I will indulge you; it is time we got about the business in any case.” He put away his glass finally and stepped into her waiting cupped talons as though he had been used to be handled by a dragon all his life.

Badenhaur was scrambling heedlessly through the bramble almost before she was away. Laurence burst out into the clearing behind him and stopped to look over the prospect one last time, searching for the French Army. The fog was turning thin and insubstantial, wisping away, and now he could see clearly around Jena the corps of Marshal Lannes busy heaping up depots of ammunition and food, salvaging for their shelter wood and materials from the burnt-out husks of the buildings, putting up empty pens. But though Laurence pulled out his glass and looked in every direction, he could see no sign of any other mass of French troops immediately visible, certainly not this side of the Saale River; where Bonaparte meant to get his men from, to launch any sort of attack, he could not see.

“We may yet be able to seize these heights, before he can get his men established,” Laurence said absently, only half to Badenhaur. A battery of artillery, from this position, would offer a commanding advantage over the plateau; small wonder Bonaparte meant to seize it. But he had been backwards, it seemed, in getting a foothold.

And then the dragons began popping up over the distant woods like jack-in-the-boxes: not the light-weights they had encountered in battle at Saalfeld, but the middle-weights who made up the bulk of any aerial force: Pêcheurs and Papillons, coming at great speed and out of formation. They landed among the French troops securing Jena, something very odd in their appearance. Looking closer through the glass, Laurence realized that they were all of them almost covered over with men: not their own crews only, but whole companies of infantry, clinging on to silk carrying-harnesses, of the same style which he had seen used in China for the ordinary transport of citizens, only far more crowded.

Every man had his own gun and knapsack; the largest of the dragons bore a hundred men or more. And their talons were not empty: they carried, laboring, also whole caissons of ammunition, enormous sacks of food, and, shockingly, nets full of live animals: these, being deposited into the pens and cut free, went wandering about in aimless daze, knocking into the walls and falling over, as visibly drugged as the pigs Temeraire had carried over the mountains, not so very long ago. Laurence sinkingly recognized the damnable cleverness of the scheme: if the French dragons had carried their own rations with them in this manner, there could be any number of them brought along, and not the few dozen which were counted the sum total who could be sustained by an army on the march through hostile territory.

In the course of ten minutes, nearly a thousand men had been assembled on the ground, and the dragons were already turning back for fresh loads; they were coming, Laurence estimated, scarcely a distance of five miles, but five miles with no road, heavily forested and broken by the river. A corps of men would ordinarily have taken a few hours to come across it; instead in minutes they were landing in their new positions.

How Bonaparte had induced his men to consent to attach themselves to dragons and be carried through the air, Laurence could scarcely imagine and had no time to consider; Badenhaur was inarticulately pulling him away. In the distance were rising the heavy-weights of l’Armée de l’Air, the great Chevaliers and Chansons-de-Guerre in all their massive and terrible splendor, on a course for the summit itself, and they were carrying not food nor ammunition but field guns.

Laurence and Badenhaur flung themselves down the hillside and away, both of them skidding and sliding in a cloud of pebbles on the steep trail, clouds of dust and dying leaves stinging their faces as the dragons landed atop the summit. Halfway down the slope, Laurence stopped long enough to risk a final look back: the heavy-weights were discharging battalions by twos and threes, the men running at once to drag the guns into place along the foremost ridge, and the dragons’ belly-rigging was being unhooked to deposit great heaps of round-shot and canister-shot beside them.

There would be no challenging them for the summit, and no chance of retreat. The battle would take place as Napoleon had desired, in the shadow of the French guns.

Chapter 14

THE ARTILLERY BATTERIES were trading hot words before Laurence had even left Hohenlohe’s tent; already the fastest couriers were flying desperately after Brunswick and the King, and westward to call in the reserves from Weimar. There was no option now but to concentrate as quickly as possible and give battle. For his own part, Laurence could be almost thankful for the French catching them, if not for the suddenness of their assault; it seemed to him as it had to Temeraire, that the commanders had labored desperately the last week to avoid the very war which they had provoked and which all their men were prepared to endure; a stupid cowering sort of delay that could only wear down morale, reduce their supply, and leave detachments exposed and vulnerable to being cut down one by one, as poor Prince Louis had been.

The prospect of action had quite swept away the malaise hanging upon the camp, and the iron discipline and drill was telling in their favor: as he walked swiftly through the ranks he heard laughter and joking tones; the order to stand-to was met everywhere with an instant response, and though the men were themselves in sorry case, wet and pinched with hunger, they had kept their arms in good order, and their colors sprang out gaily overhead, the great banners snapping in the wind like musket-shot.

“Laurence, hurry, hurry, they are fighting already without us!” Temeraire called urgently, sitting up high on his back legs with his head craned out of the covert, spotting Laurence before he had even reached the clearing.

“I promise you we will have enough fighting today, however late we enter the fray,” Laurence said, leaping into Temeraire’s waiting claw with a speed that belied his counsel of patience, and swinging himself rapidly into place with the aid of Granby’s outstretched hand; all the crew were already in their places, the Prussian officers no less than the British, and Badenhaur, who was trained as a signal-officer, sat anxiously beside Laurence’s own place.

“Mr. Fellowes, Mr. Keynes, I trust you will make the safety of the eggs your first concern,” Laurence called down, locking his carabiners onto the harness just in time: Temeraire was already launching himself aloft, and the only answer Laurence got was their waving hands, any words inaudible in the rush of wingbeats as they drove towards the front lines of the battlefield, to engage the oncoming French advance guard.

Some hours later, the morning’s first skirmishing done, Eroica led them to ground in a small valley where the dragons might snatch a few swallows of water and catch their breath. Temeraire, Laurence was glad to see, was holding up well and little affected in his spirits, though they might be said to have suffered a repulse. There had been little hope, indeed, of keeping the French from gaining a foothold, not under the guns which had already been established on the heights: at least they had been made to pay for the ground which they had won, and the Prussians had gained enough time to deploy their own regiments.

Far from dismayed, Temeraire and the other dragons were rather more excited at having fought, and full of anticipation of still more battle to come. Too, they had benefited from their work: few were the dragons who had not managed to seize a dead horse or two to eat, so they were better-fed than they had been for many a day, and full of the resultant energy. Waiting their turns to drink, they even engaged in calling across the valley to one another with accounts of their individual bravery, and how they had done for this enemy dragon and that. These Laurence judged to be exaggerated, as the entire plain was not littered with the corpses of their victims, but no scruples on this account arrested their pleasure in boasting. The men stayed aboard, passing around canteens and biscuit, but the captains gathered to consult for a few moments.

“Laurence,” Temeraire said to him, as he climbed down to join the others, “this horse I am eating looks very odd to me; it is wearing a hat.”

The limp and dangling head was covered with an odd sort of hood, attached to the bridle and made of some thin cotton stuff, very light, but with stiff wooden cuffs almost encircling the eye-holes, and some sort of pouches covering the nostrils. Temeraire held it for him, and Laurence cut away one of the pouches with his knife: a sachet of dried flowers and herbs, and though it was soaked through now with blood and the horse’s damp sweating breath, Laurence could still smell the strong perfume beneath.

“Over the nose like that, it must keep them from smelling the dragons and getting spooked,” Granby said, having come down to look at it with him. “I dare say that is how they manage cavalry around dragons in China.”

“That is bad, very bad,” Dyhern said, when Laurence had shared the intelligence with him. “It means they will be able to use their cavalry under dragon-fire, when we cannot use ours. Schleiz, you had better go and tell the generals,” he added, to the captain of one of his light-weights, and the man nodded and dashed back to his dragon.

They had been aground for scarcely fifteen minutes, but they rose up to find the world already changed. The great contest now was unfolding fully beneath them: like nothing Laurence had ever seen. Across full five miles of villages and fields and woods the battalions were forming, ironwork and steel blazing in the sun amid a sea of color, uniforms of green and red and blue in their thousands, in their tens of thousands, all the massed regiments filing into their battle-lines like a monstrous ballet, to the accompaniment of the shrill animal cries of horses, the jar and clatter of the wheels of the supply-carts, the thundercloud-rumble of the field guns.

“Laurence,” Temeraire said, “how many of them there are!” The scale might justly make even dragons feel small, a sensation Temeraire could hardly have been less used to; he halted in place and hovered uncertainly, gazing over the battlefield.

Clouds of white-grey gunpowder smoke were blowing across the fields and tangling into the forests of oak and pine. There was some hard fighting continuing on the Prussian left, around a small village; better than ten thousand men engaged, Laurence guessed, and for all that inconsequential. Elsewhere the French had paused to reinforce their lines, in the space which they had already gained: men and horses were pouring over the bridges of the Saale, the eagles of their standards shining gold, and still more coming on dragon-back. Upon the morning’s first battlefield the bodies of the dead lay abandoned by both sides; only victory or time would see them buried.

Temeraire said, low, “I did not know battles could be so large; where are we to go? Some of those men are far away; we cannot help all of them.”

“We can but play our own part as best we can,” Laurence answered him. “It is not for any one man or dragon to win the day; that is the business of the generals. We must look sharp to our orders and our signals, and achieve what they ask of us.”

Temeraire made an uneasy rumble. “But what if we should not have very good generals?”

The question was unpleasantly apt; at once the involuntary comparison sprang to mind between that lean and glittering-eyed man on the heights, so full of certainty and command, and the old men in their pavilions with their councils and arguments and endlessly changing orders. Below to the back of the field he could see Hohenlohe on his horse, his white-powdered wig in place, with his knot of aides-de-camp and men running back and forth around him; Tauentzein, Holtzendorf, and Blücher were moving among their separate troops; the Duke of Brunswick was not yet upon the field, his army still hurrying back from their aborted retreat. None of them distant strangers to sixty; and they faced on the French side the Marshals who had fought and clawed their way through the Revolutionary wars and the man who held their reins, any one of whom could have given them twenty years.

“Good or bad, our duty remains the same and that of any man,” Laurence said, thrusting aside with an effort such unworthy thoughts. “Discipline on the field may win the day even if the strategy be flawed, and its absence will ensure defeat.”

“I do see,” Temeraire said, resuming his flight: up ahead, the French light-weight dragons were rising again to harry the unfolding ranks of the Prussian battalions, and Eroica and his formation had turned to meet them. “With so many men, all must obey, or there would be no order at all; they cannot even see themselves as we can, and know how they stand in the whole.” He paused and added anxiously and low, “Laurence, if—only if—we were to lose this war, and the French were to try again to come into England, surely we would be able to stop them?”

“Better not to lose,” Laurence said grimly, and then they were back into the thick of it, the tableau of the battlefield dissolving into the hundred private struggles of their own corner of the war.

By the early afternoon they could feel the tide shifting in their direction for the first time. Brunswick’s army was pouring back in double-quick time, long before Bonaparte could have expected them, and Hohenlohe had sent out all his battalions: twenty of them already now deployed in parade-ground form upon the open field and preparing to make an assault against the leading corps of French infantry, who were hunkered down in a small village near the center of the battle.

Still the French heavy-weights had not engaged, and the larger Prussian dragons were growing exasperated. As Temeraire said, “It does not feel right to me, only batting around these little fellows; where are the big dragons from their side? This is not much of a fair fight.” By the sound of Eroica’s loud and grumbling response, he wholly agreed, and his swipes at the little French dragons were beginning to be desultory.

At last one Prussian courier, a high-flying Mauerfuchs, risked a quick overflight of the French camp while the rest of them engaged the light-weights at close quarters. He winged back almost at once in a flurry to say the larger French dragons were no longer bringing in men, and now were all lying about on the ground, eating and some even napping. “Oh!” Temeraire said, outraged, “they must all be great cowards, sleeping when there is a battle going on; what do they mean by it?”

“We can be grateful for it; they must have worn themselves all out lugging about those guns,” Granby said.

“Yet at this rate they will be well-rested enough when they come in,” Laurence said; their own side had been flying hours with only the briefest pauses for water. “Perhaps we ought take turns ourselves; Temeraire, will you not land a while?”

“I am not at all tired,” Temeraire protested, “and look, those dragons are trying some mischief over there,” he added, and dashed away without waiting for an answer, so they all had to cling to his harness to keep from being flung off their feet as he collided mid-air with a startled and squalling pair of French light-weights, who had only been circling around looking over the battlefield, and who promptly fled his attack.

Before Laurence could renew his suggestion, loud cheering rang out below and their attention was distracted: in the teeth of the continuing terrible artillery-fire, Queen Louise herself had come out and was galloping along the Prussian line, escorted only by a handful of dragoons, the Prussian banner streaming out brilliantly behind their little party. She wore a colonel’s uniform coat over her clothing and the stiff-sided plumed hat also, with her hair caught up snugly beneath it. The soldiers yelled her name wildly: she was perhaps the heart of the Prussian War Party and had long urged a resistance to Napoleon and his predations of Europe. Her bravery could not fail to put heart into the men; the King also was on the field, his banner showing farther on the Prussian left, and all throughout the ranks the senior officers had exposed themselves with their men to the fire.

She had no sooner cleared the field than the order was given; in another sort of encouragement, bottles were going down across the front ranks, men pouring the liquor straight into their mouths. The drums beat out the signal, and the infantry charged straight out from their lines with bayonets leveled, men screaming with raw voices, and stormed into the narrow lanes of the village.

The death-toll was hideous: from behind every garden wall and window the French sharp-shooters arose and put forth a ceaseless fire, and near enough every bullet found a mark; while down the straight-aways of the main tracks of the village the artillery pounded away, canister-shot breaking apart into deadly shrapnel as it flew from the mouths of the guns. But the Prussians came onward with irresistible force, and one after another the guns were silenced as they poured into the farmhouses, the barns, the gardens, the pigsties, and hacked down the French soldiers at their places.

The village was lost, and the French battalions were pouring out its back, retreating in good order but retreating nonetheless, for nearly the first time that day. The Prussians roared and kept coming onwards: behind the village they drew back together into line again under the shouts of their sergeants and threw the terrible volley-fire upon the retreating French again.

“That is a great success, Laurence, is it not?” Temeraire said jubilantly. “And now surely we will push them back still further?”

“Yes,” Laurence said, full of inexpressible relief, leaning over to shake hands with Badenhaur in congratulation, “now we will see some proper work done.”

But they had no further opportunity to watch the ground-battle unfold; Badenhaur’s hand abruptly tightened on Laurence’s with surprise, and the young Prussian officer pointed him around: from the summit of the Landgrafenberg the massed forces of the French aerial corps were rising, the heavy-weights coming to the battle at last.

The Prussian dragons gave almost as one a loud roar of delight, and full of renewed energy began to shout out taunting remarks on the subject of the French dragons’ late entry to the field as they waited for the others to move into formation and close. The French light-weights, who had so valiantly held the field all day, made now one heroic final effort and kept up a sort of screen before the oncoming dragons, darting back and forth around the Prussians’ heads to obscure their view, wings flapping distractingly in their faces. The bigger dragons impatiently snorted and lashed out here and there, but without much attention, rather craning their heads to see. Only at the last moments did the light-weights pull away, and Laurence saw the French were not coming in formation at all.

Or almost—there was one formation, the plainest imaginable, only a wedge, but made entirely of heavy-weights: in the lead one Grand Chevalier, leaner but with broader shoulders than Eroica, and behind him three Petit Chevaliers, each one bigger than Temeraire, and behind them a row of six Chansons-de-Guerre only a little smaller, incongruously cheerful in appearance with their orange and yellow markings. They might all have been formation-leaders in their own right; instead they made one enormous if lumbering group, surrounded by a vast unformed crowd of middle-weights.

“Well, that’s never a Chinese strategy?” Granby said, staring. “—what the devil are they trying now?” Laurence shook his head perplexed; they had seen a few military reviews amongst the Chinese dragons, who operated aloft more nearly as men did upon the ground, drilling in lines and columns, and never in so confused a manner.

Eroica and his formation anchored the center of the Prussian line, and now with bared teeth he threw himself forward to meet the Grand Chevalier, crying out in a ringing challenge. The Prussian colors were streaming out from his shoulders like another pair of wings. The two formations increased their speed as they drew nearer one another; the miles turned into yards and then feet and then vanished all together. The collision was at hand—and then the moment was past, and Eroica turned round bewildered and indignant in mid-air: the big French dragons had one and all swerved to go past him and gone straight for the wings of his formation, the ranks of smaller middle-weights.

“Feiglings!” Eroica bellowed after them at the top of his lungs as they clawed and scattered his wing dragons. He had been left flying almost alone, and even as he came around to the attack again, three of the French middle-weights seized the opening and drew up alongside him. They were too small to do him any direct harm, and did not even try, but their backs were crammed full of men. No less than three boarding parties leapt over, almost twenty men, swords and pistols in their hands, grabbing at his harness.

Eroica’s crew burst into activity to hold off the new threat, all the riflemen bringing up their guns, and a sudden spatter of musket-shot rang out, making the raised sword-blades sing in high, clear notes as the bullets struck them. Thick streams of gunpowder smoke boiled away as Eroica thrashed in the air frantically, head going this way and that as he tried to see what was going toward and protect his captain.

His efforts threw off many of the hapless boarders, who went flailing through the air, but others had already latched themselves on securely; and Eroica was throwing his own crew off their feet as well as the boarders. The confusion served the French with a lucky stroke: two lieutenants clinging to one another for support kept their feet after one of these mid-air convulsions, when all the crew had been flung down, and in the momentary gap they sprang forward and hacked off the carabiner straps of some eight men, sending them tumbling free to their deaths.

The rest of the struggle was sharp but brief, as the boarding parties advanced in force upon the dragon’s neck. Dyhern shot two men and killed another with a saber-thrust, but then his blade lodged in the man’s chest and would not come out again; and the falling body ripped it from his hands. The French seized his arms and put a blade to his throat, calling to Eroica, “Geben Sie oben,” while they pulled down the Prussian flags and put the tricolor in its place.

It was a terrible loss, and one which they could not avert: Temeraire himself was being hotly pursued by five middle-weights, similarly overburdened with men, and all his speed and ingenuity were required to avoid them. Now and again a few men would take the desperate risk and leap across onto his back even though they were not very close; but few enough that Temeraire flung them off at once, with a quick writhing turn, or the topmen cut them down with sword or pistol.

But an Honneur-d’Or, greatly daring, flung herself directly at Temeraire’s head; he ducked instinctively, and as she whisked by overhead a couple of her bellmen let go and dropped aboard directly onto Temeraire’s shoulders, flattening young Allen and knocking Laurence and Badenhaur into a tangled sprawl of straps and limbs. Laurence grabbed blindly for some purchase; Badenhaur was with an excess of courage trying to throw himself atop Laurence protectively, and getting in the way of his putting himself back on his feet.

But the act was justified: he sank back gasping into Laurence’s arms, blood spreading dark from a stab-wound through his shoulder; the Frenchman who had dealt the blow was drawing back the sword for another attempt. Granby with a shout threw himself against the handful of attackers and heaved them back three paces. Laurence at last righted himself and cried out—Granby had thrown off his straps to make the attack, and the pair of French officers seizing him by the arms flung him over the side.

“Temeraire!” Laurence shouted. “Temeraire!”

The earth dropped out from beneath his feet: Temeraire doubled on himself and plunged after Granby’s falling body, wings driving. Laurence could not breathe for the sickening, dizzying speed of it, the blurred ground hurtling towards them and a humming like the sound of bees all around them from the flight of bullets through the air as they came low over the battlefield. And then Temeraire corkscrewed up and away, his tail smashing to flinders a slim young oak-tree. Laurence clawed himself hand-over-hand up the straps and looked over Temeraire’s shoulder: Granby lay in Temeraire’s talons gasping, trying to staunch the blood streaming from his nostrils.

Laurence rolled to his feet and went for his sword. The Frenchmen were leaping to the attack again; he smashed the pommel into the first one’s face, savagely, and felt the bone crush beneath his gloved fist; then he ripped the blade free from the sheath and swung at the second. It was the first time he had struck a flesh-blow with the Chinese sword: it bowled the man’s head off with scarcely any resistance.

From startlement and reaction, Laurence stood gawking at the headless body, its hand still clinging to its sword. Then belatedly Allen jumped to his duty and cut the Frenchmen’s straps, so their bodies fell away, and Laurence was recalled to himself. He wiped his sword hurriedly and put it back away; hauling himself gratefully back into his place on Temeraire’s neck.

The French had turned their successful maneuver against the other formations one at a time: the heavy-weights throwing themselves en masse against the wings, isolating the leaders so the middle-weights could pounce. Eroica was flying away wretchedly with hang-dog head, and not alone; three more Prussian heavy-weight dragons followed him in short order, all of them beating so slowly they were descending towards the ground between each wing-stroke and the next. The other members of their formations were milling uncertainly without them, slow to comprehend the abrupt losses: ordinarily the members of a formation so stripped of its leader would have at once gone to support a different formation, but having been all stricken at once, they were now mostly flying into each other’s way, at the mercy of their enemies. The French heavy-weights massed again and brutally scattered them over and over, riflemen firing terrible barrages into their crews. Men were falling like hailstones, and the loss was so dreadful that many of the dragons cried out and yielded themselves in desperation, unboarded, to save their captains and the remnants of their crews.

The last three Prussian formations, forewarned by their comrades’ fate, had drawn up in tight close ranks, protecting their leaders; but though they were successfully fending off the attempts at breaking in, they were paying with distance and position, drifting farther and farther afield under the steady pressure. Temeraire’s own situation was growing increasingly desperate; he twisted and turned this way and that, constantly under fire with his own riflemen returning their own shot in bursts: Lieutenant Riggs bawling out the firing drill to keep them steady, though they were all of them reloading as fast as they could go.

Temeraire’s scales and the chainmail with which he was girt turned aside most of those balls which came towards him by accident, though here and again one tore through the more delicate membrane of his wings, or lodged shallowly in his flesh. He did not flinch, too full of battle-fever to even feel the small wounds, but concentrated all his powers on the evasion. Even so Laurence thought in anguish that they too would soon be forced to flee the field or be taken; the long day’s labors were telling on Temeraire, and his turns were slowing.

To quit the field, to desert under fire without an order to retreat, he could hardly imagine; yet the Prussians themselves were giving way, and if he did not withdraw, aside from the very great evil of their own capture, the eggs were almost sure to fall into enemy hands as well. Laurence had no desire to so recompense the French for having taken Temeraire’s egg from them; he was on the point of calling Temeraire away, at least for a breath, when his conscience was spared: a clarion roar sounded, musical and terrible at once, and with breathtaking suddenness their enemies vanished away. Temeraire whirled around three times before he was satisfied he had indeed been left in peace, and only then risked hovering long enough for Laurence to see what was going forward.

The ringing call was Lien’s voice: she had not herself taken part in the battle, but she was hovering now in mid-air, behind the lines of the French dragons. She had no harness nor crew, but the great diamond upon her forehead was glowing fiery orange with the reflected sunset, almost to match the virulence of her red eyes. She cried out again, and Laurence heard another drumming below: signals flying from the French ranks, and at the crest of the hill on a grey charger Bonaparte himself watching over the field, the breastplates of the feared Imperial Guard behind him molten gold in the light.

The Prussian formations dispersed or driven off, the French dragons had acquired a clear dominance over the aerial arena. Now in answer to Lien’s call, they all moved together into a straight-line formation. Below, the French cavalry all as one wheeled and broke away to either side of the battlefield, all the horses spurred as quick as they could go, and the infantry fell back from the front lines, though keeping up a steady musket- and artillery-fire as they went.

Lien rose higher into the air and drew a great breath, her ruff under its steel diadem spreading wide around her head, her sides belling out like sails overpressed with wind, and then from her jaws burst the terrible fury of the divine wind. She directed it against no target; she struck down no enemy and dealt not a single blow; but the hideous force of it left the ears ringing as though all the cannon in the world had gone off at once. Lien was some thirty years of age to Temeraire’s two, a little larger and more experienced by far, and there was not only the power of her greater size behind it but a sort of resonance, a rise and fall in her voice, which carried on the roaring a seemingly endless time. Men reeled back from it, all along the battlefield; the Prussian dragons huddled themselves away; even Laurence and his crew, familiar with the divine wind, jerked instinctively away so that their carabiner straps drew taut.

A complete silence followed, broken only by small shocked cries, the moans of the wounded on the field below; but before the echoes had stopped ringing away, all the line of French dragons lifted up their own heads and, roaring in full voice, plunged earthwards. They pulled up their dive just short of collision with the ground; some few, indeed, were unable to do so, and tumbled out of the sky to crush great swaths of the Prussian ranks beneath their bodies, though crying out in agony as they rolled over their own wings. But the rest did not even pause: dragging their claws and tails as they skimmed just above the ground, they went tearing through the stunned and unprepared ranks of the Prussian infantry, and they left great bloody ranks of the dead behind them as they lifted away again into the air.

The men broke. Before even the dragons struck the front ranks, the lines to the rear were dissolving into utter confusion, a wild panicked attempt at flight, men struggling with one another and trying to flee in different directions. King Frederick was standing in his stirrups, three men holding his frantic and heaving charger to keep it from throwing him off; he was shouting through a speaking-trumpet while signal-flags waved. “Retreat,” Badenhaur said, gripping Laurence’s arm: his voice sounded utterly matter-of-fact, but his face was streaked and dirty with tears, which he did not seem even to notice he was shedding; down on the field below, the Duke of Brunswick’s limp and blood-spattered body was being carried back towards the tents.

But the men were in no frame to listen or to obey; some few battalions managed indeed to form into square for defense, the men standing shoulder to shoulder with their bayonets bristling outwards, but others went running half-mad back through the village, through the woods, which they had only just won with so much labor; and as the French dragons dropped to the earth to rest, their blood-spattered sides heaving, the French cavalry and infantry poured all down off the hill and streamed past them, roaring in human voices, to complete the ruin and defeat.

Chapter 15

“NO, I AM all right,” Granby said, hoarsely, when they laid him out in the covert. “For God’s sake don’t hold up on my account; I am only damned tired of always getting knocked about the head.” He was shaken and ill, for all he said, and when he tried to drink a little portable soup he vomited it up again at once; so his crewmates contented themselves with giving him enough liquor to knock him over yet again, of which he drank only a swallow or two before falling asleep.

Laurence meant to take aboard as many of the ground crews as he could, of the dragons taken prisoner. Many of the men almost refused to come, in disbelief; the covert was well to the south of the battlefield, and they had not seen the day’s events. Badenhaur argued with them a long time, all of them growing increasingly loud and tense. “Keep your damned voices down,” Keynes snapped, while the crew carefully bundled the eggs back aboard into the belly-rigging. “That Kazilik is mature enough by now to understand,” he said to Laurence in an undertone. “The last thing we need is for the blessed creature to be frightened in the shell; it often makes a timid beast.”

Laurence nodded grimly, and then Temeraire lifted his weary head up from the ground and looked into the darkening sky above. “There is a Fleur-de-Nuit up there, I hear its wings.”

“Tell those men they may stay and be damned, or get aboard now,” Laurence said to Badenhaur, waving his own crew aboard, and they landed outside Apolda cold and tired and cramped.

The town was nearly a ruin: windows smashed, wine and beer running in the gutters, stables and barns and pens all emptied; no one in the streets but drunken soldiers, bloody and ragged and belligerent. On the stoop of the largest inn Laurence had to step past one man weeping like a child into the palm of his right hand; his left was missing, the stump tied up in a rag.

Inside there were only a handful of lower officers, all of them wounded or half-dead of exhaustion; one had enough French to tell him, “You must go; the French will be here by morning if not sooner. The King has gone to Sömmerda.”

In the back cellars Laurence found a rack of wine bottles unbroken, and a cask of beer; Pratt heaved the last onto his shoulder and carried it, while Porter and Winston took armfuls of bottles, and they went back to the clearing. Temeraire had smashed up an old dead oak, lightning-blasted, and the men had managed to kindle a fire; he lay curved round it while the men huddled against his sides.

They shared the bottles and breached the cask for Temeraire to drink; little enough comfort, when they had at once to get aloft again. Laurence hesitated; Temeraire was so exhausted he was swallowing with his eyes almost shut. But that fatigue was itself a danger; if a French dragon-patrol came on them now, he doubted Temeraire could rouse quickly enough to escape. “We must be away, my dear,” he said gently. “Can you manage?”

“Yes, Laurence; I am perfectly well,” Temeraire said, struggling up onto his feet again, though he added, low, “Must we go very far?”

The fifteen-mile flight seemed longer. The town bloomed out of the dark suddenly, with a bonfire on the outskirts; a handful of Prussian dragons looked up anxiously as Temeraire landed heavily beside it, in the trampled field which was their bivouac: light-weights and a few couriers, a couple of middle-weights; not a single formation entire, and not another heavy-weight among them. They crowded gladly around him for reassurance, and nudged towards him a share of the horse-carcasses that were their dinner, but he tore off only a little of the flesh before he sank down quite asleep, and Laurence left him dead to the world, many of the smaller dragons tucking themselves against his sides.

He sent the men to find what cheer they could to make their camp more comfortable and walked across the fields to the town alone. The night was quiet and beautiful: an early frost made all the stars shine bright, and his breath only briefly hung white in the air. He had not done very much fighting, but he was aching in all his parts, a clenching hot pain around his neck and shoulders, legs stiff and cramped; he stretched them gratefully. Tired cavalry-horses crowded into a paddock raised their heads and whickered anxiously as he went past the fence: they smelled Temeraire upon him, he supposed.

Little enough of the army had yet reached Sömmerda: most fugitives had escaped on foot, and would be walking through the night, if they even knew to come. The town had not been looted, and some measure of order was kept; the groans of the wounded marked the field-hospital in a small church, and the King’s hussar guards were drawn up still in ranks outside the largest building: not quite a fortress, only a solid and respectable manor.

He could find no other aviators at all, nor any senior officer to make his report to, with poor Dyhern captured; he had spent some of the day in support of General Tauentzein’s command, and another part under Marshal Blücher; but so far as anyone could tell him, neither was in the town. At last he went to Hohenlohe directly, but the prince was engaged in conference, and a young aide, with an officious brusqueness hardly excusable even by the weight under which they all were laboring, took him to the room and told him to wait in the hallway outside. After half-an-hour cooling his heels outside the door without so much as a chair, hearing only the occasional muffled sound of voices, Laurence sat down on the floor and put out his legs, and fell asleep leaning against the wall.

Someone was speaking to him in German. “No, thank you,” he said, still asleep, and then opened his eyes. A woman was looking down at him, with a kind expression but half-amused; abruptly he recognized the Queen, and a couple of guards were standing with her. “Oh, good Lord,” Laurence said, and sprang to his feet with much embarrassment, begging her pardon in French.

“Oh, what a nothing,” she said, and looked at him curiously, “but what are you doing here?” She opened the door, when he had explained, and put her head in, to Laurence’s discomfort: he had much rather have waited a longer time than seem a complainer.

Hohenlohe’s voice answered her in German, and she beckoned Laurence in with her. A good fire was laid on in the room, and heavy tapestries on the walls kept the cold stone from leaching away all the heat. The heat was very welcome; Laurence had stiffened up even further from sitting in the hall. King Frederick stood leaning against the wall near the fireplace: a tired man, not as handsome or vital as his wife, with a long pale face and hair set high up on his broad white forehead; his mouth was thin, and he wore a narrow mustache.

Hohenlohe stood at a large table covered over with maps; Generals Rüchel and Kalkreuth were with him; also several other staff-officers. Hohenlohe stared at Laurence unblinkingly a long moment, then with an effort said, “Good God, are you still here?”

Laurence did not immediately understand how to take this, as Hohenlohe had not even known he was in the town; then he was abruptly wide-awake and furiously angry. “I am sorry that I should have troubled you,” he bit out. “As you have been expecting my desertion, I am perfectly happy to be gone.”

“No, nothing of the kind,” Hohenlohe said, somewhat incoherently adding, “and God in Heaven, who could blame you.” He ran his hand over his face; his wig was disordered and dingy grey, and Laurence was sorry; plainly Hohenlohe did not have full command of himself.

“I have only come to make my report, sir,” Laurence said, with more moderation. “Temeraire has taken no serious injury; my losses are three wounded, none dead, and I have brought in some three dozen ground crewmen from Jena, and their equipment.”

“Harness and forges?” Kalkreuth asked quickly, looking up.

“Yes, sir, though only two of the latter, besides our own,” Laurence said. “They were too heavy to bring more.”

“That is something, thank God,” Kalkreuth said. “Half our harnesses are coming apart at the seams.”

After this no one else spoke for a long time. Hohenlohe was gazing fixedly at the maps, but with an expression which suggested he was not properly seeing them; General Rüchel had slipped into a chair, his face grey and tired, and the Queen was at her husband’s side, murmuring to him in a low private voice in German. Laurence wondered if he ought to ask to be excused, though he did not think they were keeping silent from any scruple at his presence: there was a very miasma of fatigue thickening the atmosphere of the room. Abruptly the King shook his head and turned back to face the room. “Do we know where he is?”

There was no need to ask who he was. “Anywhere south of the Elbe,” one young staff-officer muttered, and flushed as it came out over-loud in the dull room, earning him glares.

“Jena tonight, Sire, surely,” Rüchel said, still scowling at the young man.

The King was perhaps the only one who took no notice of the slip of the tongue. “Will he give us an armistice?”

“That man? Not a moment to breathe,” Queen Louise said, with scorn, “nor any kind of honorable terms. I would rather throw myself completely into the arms of the Russians than grovel for the pleasure of that parvenu.” She turned to Hohenlohe. “What can be done? Surely something can be done?”

He roused himself a little and went through his maps, pointing at different garrisons and detachments, speaking half in French and half in German of rallying the troops, falling back on the reserves. “Bonaparte’s men have been marching for weeks and fighting all day,” he said. “We will have a few days, I hope, before they can organize a pursuit. Perhaps a large share of the army has escaped; they will come this way and towards Erfurt: we must gather them and fall back—”

Heavy boots rang on the stones in the hallway, and a heavy hand on the door. The newcomer, Marshal Blücher, did not wait to be asked in, but came in with no more warning. “The French are in Erfurt,” he said, without ceremony, in plain blunt German even Laurence could understand. “Murat landed with five dragons and five hundred men and they surrendered, the fuckers—” He cut off in great confusion, blushing fiery red under his mustaches: he had just seen the Queen.

The others were more preoccupied with his intelligence than his language; a confused babble of voices arose, and a scramble among the staff-officers through the disordered papers and maps. Laurence could not follow the conversation, mostly in German, but that they were brangling was noisily clear. “Enough,” said the King, suddenly and loud, and the quarreling faltered and stilled. “How many men do we have?” he asked Hohenlohe.

The papers were shuffled through again, more quietly; at last the descriptions of the various detachments were all collected. “Ten thousand under Saxe-Weimar, somewhere on the roads south of Erfurt,” Hohenlohe said, reading the papers. “Another seventeen in Halle, under Württemburg’s command, our reserves; and so far we have another eight thousand here from the battle: more will surely come in.”

“If the French do not overtake them,” another man said quietly; Scharnhorst, the late Duke of Brunswick’s chief of staff. “They are moving too quickly. We cannot wait. Sire, we must get every man we have left across the Elbe and burn the bridges at once, or we will lose Berlin. We should send couriers to begin even now.”

This provoked another furious explosion, nearly every man in the room shouting him down and in their disagreement finding a vent for all the raw violence of their feelings, which were all that one might expect from proud men, seeing their honor and that of their country rolled in the dust, and forced to learn humility and fear at the hand of a deadly and implacable enemy, whom even now they all could feel drawing close upon their heels.

Laurence too felt an instinctive revulsion for so ignominious a withdrawal, and the sacrifice of so much territory; madness, it seemed to him, to give so much ground without forcing the French to do battle for any of it. Bonaparte was not the sort of man who would be satisfied even with a large bite when he could devour the whole, and with as many dragons as he had in his train, the destruction of the bridges seemed at once an insufficient obstacle, and an admission of weakness.

In the tumult, the King beckoned to Hohenlohe and drew him aside before the windows to speak with him; when the rest had spent themselves in shouting, they came back to the tables. “Prince Hohenlohe will take command of the army,” the King said, quietly but with finality. “We will fall back on Magdeburg to gather our forces together, and there consider how best to organize the defense of the line of the Elbe.”

A low murmuring of obedience and agreement answered him, and with the Queen he quitted the room. Hohenlohe began to issue orders, sending men out with dispatches, the senior officers one by one slipping away to organize their commands. Laurence was by now almost desperate for sleep, and tired of being left waiting; when all but a handful of staff-officers remained and he still had been given no orders nor dismissed, and Hohenlohe showed every sign of once again burying himself in the maps, Laurence finally lost patience and put himself forward.

“Sir,” he said, interrupting Hohenlohe’s study, “may I ask to whom I am to report; or failing that, your orders for me?”

Hohenlohe looked up and stared at him again with that hollow expression. “Dyhern and Schliemann are made prisoner,” he said after a moment. “Abend also; who is left?” he asked, looking around. His aides seemed uncertain how to answer him; then finally one ventured, “Do we know what has become of George?”

Some more discussion, and several men sent to make inquiries, all returned answers in the negative; Hohenlohe said finally, “Do you mean to say there is not a single damned heavy-weight left, out of fourteen?”

Lacking either acid-spitters or fire-breathers, the Prussians organized their formations to maximize strength rather than, like the British, to protect a dragon with such critical offensive capabilities; the heavy-weights were nearly all formation-leaders, and as such had come in for particular attention in the French attack. Too, they had been peculiarly vulnerable to the French tactics, being slower and more ponderous than the middle-weights who had spearheaded the boarding attempts, and much of their strength and limited agility already worn down from a day of hard flying. Laurence had seen five taken on the battlefield; he did not find it wonderful that the rest should have been snapped up afterwards, or at best driven far away, in the chaotic aftermath.

“Pray God some will come in overnight,” Hohenlohe said. “We will have to reorganize the entire command.”

He paused heavily and looked at Laurence, both of them silenced by the awareness that Temeraire was the only heavy-weight left at hand; at one stroke thus become critical to their defenses, and impossible to restrain: Hohenlohe could not force them to stay. Laurence could not help being torn; in some wise his first duty was to protect the eggs, and given the disaster, that surely meant to see them straightaway to England; yet to desert the Prussians now would be as good as giving the war up for lost, and pretending they could do no more to help.

“Your instructions, then, sir?” he said abruptly; he could not bring himself to do it.

Hohenlohe did not make any expressions of gratitude, but his face relaxed a little, a few of the lines easing out. “Tomorrow morning I will ask you to go to Halle. All our reserves are there: tell them to fall back, and if you can carry some guns for them, so much the better. We will find some work for you then; God knows there will be no shortage.”

“Ow!” Temeraire said, loudly. Laurence opened his eyes already sitting up, his back- and leg-muscles protesting loudly, and his head thick and clouded besides from so little sleep: there was only a little dim light filtering in. He crawled out of his tent and discovered that this was rather the fault of the fog than the hour: the covert was already alive, and even as he stood up he saw Roland coming to wake him as she had been told to do.

Keynes was scrambling over Temeraire, digging out the bullets; their precipitous departure from the battlefield after the fighting had kept him from attending to the wounds then. Though Temeraire had borne them up to now without even noticing, and far worse wounds without complaint, he flinched from their extraction, stifling small cries as Keynes drew each one out; though not very thoroughly.

“It is always the same,” Keynes said sourly; “you will get yourselves hacked to pieces and call it entertainment, but only try and stitch you back together and you will moan without end.”

“Well, it hurts a great deal more,” Temeraire said. “I do not see why you must take them out; they do not bother me as they are.”

“They would damned well bother you when you got blood-poisoning from them. Hold still, and stop whimpering.”

“I am not whimpering, at all,” Temeraire muttered, and added, “ow!”

There was a rich, pleasant smell in the air. Three meager horse-carcasses were all that had been delivered to the covert that morning to feed more than ten hungry dragons; before the inevitable jostling could begin, Gong Su had appropriated the lot. The bones he roasted in a fire-pit and then stewed with the flesh in some makeshift cauldrons, the dragons’ breastplates temporarily put to this new use and all the youngest crewmen set to stirring. The ground crews he peremptorily sent out to scavenge by means best not closely examined whatever else they could find, which varied ingredients he picked over for inclusion.

The Prussian officers looked on anxiously as their dragons’ provisions all went into the vats, but the dragons caught a sort of excitement at the process of choosing which items would go in, and offered their own opinions by here nudging forward a heap of knotted yellow onions, there surreptitiously pushing away some undesirable sacks of rice. These last, Gong Su did not let go to waste; he reserved some quantity of the liquid when the dragons had been served their portions, and cooked the rice separately in the rich broth swimming with scraps, so the aviators breakfasted rather better than much of the camp; a circumstance which went far to reconciling them to the strange practice.

The harnesses of the dragons were all in sorry shape, clawed and frayed, some down to the wires threaded through the leather for strength, some straps entirely severed; and Temeraire’s was in particularly wretched case. They had neither the time nor the supplies to make proper repairs, but some patchwork at least had to be done before their departure for Halle.

“I’m sorry sir, with all we can do it’ll be rising noon before we can get him under leather again,” Fellowes came to say apologetically, having made a first survey of the damage and set the harness-men to work. “It’s the way he twists about, I expect: widens the tears.”

“Do what you can,” Laurence said briefly; no need to press them: every man was working to his limits, and there were as many as could be asked for, volunteers from the ground crews they had rescued. In the meantime, he coaxed Temeraire to sleep and conserve his energy.

Temeraire was not unwilling, and laid himself out around the still-warm ashes of the cooking fires. “Laurence,” he said after a moment, softly, “Laurence, have we lost?”

“Only a battle, my dear; not the war,” Laurence said, though honesty compelled him to add, “but a damnably important battle, yes; I suppose he has taken half the army prisoner, and scattered the rest.” He leaned against Temeraire’s foreleg, feeling very low; he had so far staved off with activity any serious contemplation of their circumstances.

“We must not yield to despair,” he said, as much for himself as for Temeraire. “There is yet hope, and if there were none at all, still sitting on our hands bewailing our fate would do no good.”

Temeraire sighed deeply. “What will happen to Eroica? They will not hurt him?”

“No, never,” Laurence answered. “He will be sent along to some breeding-grounds, I am sure; he may even be released, if they settle upon terms. Until then they will only keep Dyhern under lock and key; what the poor devil must feel.” He could well imagine all the horrors of the Prussian captain’s situation; to be not only himself prevented from doing any good for his country, but the instrument of his inexpressibly valuable dragon’s imprisonment. Temeraire evidently shared some very similar train of thought, with respect to Eroica; he curled his foreleg in to draw Laurence nearer, and nudged him a little anxiously for petting; this reassurance only let him drop off at last.

The harness-men managed the repairs quicker than promised, and before eleven o’clock were beginning the laborious process of getting aboard all the enormous weight of straps and buckles and rings, with much assistance from Temeraire himself: he was the only one who could possibly have raised up the massive shoulder-strap, some three feet wide and full of chain-mesh within, which anchored the whole.

They were in the midst of their labors when several of the dragons looked up together, at some sound which only they could hear; in another minute they could all see a little courier coming in towards them, his flight oddly unsteady. He dropped into the center of the field and sank down off his legs at once, deep bloody gashes along his sides, crying urgently and twisting his head around to see his captain: a boy some fifteen years of age if so many, drooping in his straps, whose legs had been slashed badly by the same strokes which marked his dragon.

They cut off the bloody harness and got the boy down; Keynes had put an iron bar in the hot ashes the moment both came down, and now clapped the searing surface to the open and oozing wounds, producing a terrible roasting smell. “No arteries or veins cut; he’ll do,” was his brusque remark after he had inspected his handiwork, and he set to giving the same treatment to the dragon.

The boy revived with a little brandy splashed into his mouth and smelling-salts under his nose; and he got out his message in German, gasping long stuttering breaths between the words to keep from breaking into sobs.

“Laurence, we were to go to Halle, were we not?” Temeraire said, listening. “He says the French have taken the town; they attacked this morning.”

“We cannot hold Berlin,” Hohenlohe said.

The King did not protest; he only nodded. “How long until the French reach the city?” the Queen asked; she was very pale, but composed, with her hands lying in her lap folded over lightly. “The children are there.”

“There is no time to waste,” Hohenlohe said; enough of an answer. He paused and said, his voice almost breaking, “Majesty—I beg you will forgive—”

The Queen sprang up and took his shoulders in her hands, kissing him on the cheek. “We will prevail against him,” she said fiercely. “Have courage; we will see you in the east.”

Regaining some measure of self-control, Hohenlohe rambled on a little longer, plans, intentions: he would rally more of the stragglers, send the artillery trains west, organize the middle-weights into formations; they would fall back to the fortress of Stettin, they would defend the line of the Oder. He did not sound as though he believed any of it.

Laurence stood uncomfortably in the corner of the room, as far away as he could manage. “Will you take their Majesties?” Hohenlohe had asked, heavily, when Laurence had first told him the news.

“Surely you will need us here, sir,” Laurence had said. “A fast courier—” but Hohenlohe had shaken his head.

“After what happened to this one, bringing the news? No; we cannot take such a risk. Their patrols will be out in force all around us.”

The King now raised the same objection and was answered the same way. “You cannot be taken,” Hohenlohe said. “It would be the end, Sire, he could dictate whatever terms he desired; or God forbid, if you should be killed, and the crown prince still in Berlin when they come there—”

“O God! My children in that monster’s power,” the Queen said. “We cannot stand here talking; let us go at once.” She went to the door and called her maid, waiting outside, to go and fetch a coat.

“Will you be all right?” the King asked her quietly.

“What, am I a child, to be afraid?” she said scornfully. “I have been flying on couriers; it cannot be very different,” but a courier twice the size of a horse was not to be compared with a heavy-weight bigger than the whole barn. “Is that your dragon, on the hill over there?” she asked Laurence, as they came into view of the covert; Laurence saw no hill, and then realized she was pointing at the middling-sized Berghexe sleeping on Temeraire’s back.

Before Laurence could correct her, Temeraire himself lifted up his head and looked in their direction. “Oh,” she said, a little faintly.

Laurence, who remembered when Temeraire had been small enough to fit into a hammock aboard the Reliant, still in some part did not think of him being quite so large as he really was. “He is perfectly gentle,” he said, in an awkward attempt at reassurance; also a brazen lie, since Temeraire had just enthusiastically spent the previous day in the most violent pursuits imaginable; but it seemed the thing to say.

All the dragon-crews sprang up startled to their feet as the royal couple entered the makeshift covert, and remained at stiff and awkward attention; aviators were not used to being so graced, as the little couriers who ordinarily bore important passengers went to their lodgings to carry them to and fro. Neither monarch looked very easy, particularly when all the dragons, catching their crews’ excitement, began craning their heads to peer at them; but with true grace the King took the Queen’s arm in his and went around to speak to the captains and give each a few words of approval.

Laurence seized the moment and beckoned hurriedly to Granby and Fellowes. “Can we get a tent put up for them aboard?” he asked urgently.

“I don’t know we can, sir; we left all behind what we could spare, running from the battlefield, and that lummox Bell had out the tents to make room for his kit, as though we couldn’t work him up a tanning-barrel anywhere we went,” Fellowes said, rubbing at the back of his neck nervously. “But we’ll manage something, if you can give me a turn of the glass; maybe some of these other fellows can lend us a bit of scrap.”

The tent was indeed managed out of two pieces of spare leather sewn together; personal harnesses were cobbled together; a half-respectable cold supper was hastily assembled and packed into a basket with even a bottle of wine, though how this should be opened mid-flight without disaster, Laurence had not the least idea. “If you are ready, Your Majesty,” he said tentatively, and offered the Queen his arm when she nodded. “Temeraire, will you put us up? Very carefully, if you please.”

Temeraire obligingly put down his claw for them to step into. She looked at it a little palely; the nails of his talons were roughly the length of her forearm and of polished black horn, sharp along the edges and coming to a wicked point. “Shall I go first?” the King said to her quietly; she threw her head back and said, “No, of course not,” and stepped in, though she could not help but throw an anxious look at the talons curving above her head.

Temeraire was regarding her with great interest, and having let her step off again onto his shoulder, he whispered, “Laurence, I always thought queens would have a great many jewels, but she has none at all; have they been stolen?”

Fortunately he spoke in English, as otherwise this remark would not have been much of a secret, issuing as it did from jaws large enough to swallow a horse. Laurence hurried the Queen into the tent before Temeraire could shift to German or French and take to questioning her on the state of her array; she very sensibly wore a plain heavy overcoat of wool over her gown, adorned with nothing more elaborate than silver buttons, and a fur pelisse and hat, practical enough on a flight.

The King had the benefit at least of a military officer’s experience of dragons, and showed no hesitation, if he felt any; but the retinue of guards and servants looked more deeply anxious even at coming near. Looking at their pale faces, the King said something briefly in German; Laurence guessed from the looks of shamefacedness and relief that he was giving them permission to stay behind.

Temeraire took this opportunity to put in his own remarks in that language, provoking startled looks all around; and he then stretched out his foreleg towards the group. This did not quite have the effect that Laurence imagined Temeraire had intended, and a few moments later there were left only four of the royal guard, and one old woman servant, who snorted profoundly and climbed without ceremony into Temeraire’s hand to be put aboard.

“What did you say to them?” Laurence asked, half-amused and half-despairing.

“I only told them they were being very silly,” Temeraire said in injured tones, “and that if I meant to do them any harm, it would be much easier for me to reach them where they were standing, anyway, than if they were on my back.”

Berlin was in a ferment; the townspeople looked without love on soldiers in uniform, and Laurence, going through the town in haste, trying to get what supplies he could, heard muttering about the “damned War Party” in every shop and corner. News of the terrible loss had already reached them, along with news of the French drive on the city, but there was no spirit of resistance or revolt, or even any great unhappiness; indeed the general impression was a kind of sullen satisfaction at being proven right.

“They drove the poor King to it, you know, the Queen and all those other young hotheads,” the banker told Laurence. “They would prove that they could beat Bonaparte, and they could not, and who is it that pays for their pride but us, I ask you! So many poor young men killed, and what our taxes will be after this I do not want to think.”

Having delivered himself of these criticisms, however, he was quite willing to advance Laurence a good sum in gold. “I had rather have my money in an account at Drummonds’ than here in Berlin with a hungry army marching in,” he said candidly, while his two sons lugged up a small but substantial chest.

The British embassy was in turmoil; the ambassador already gone, by courier, and scarcely anyone left could give him good information, or would; his green coat commanded not the least attention, beyond queries if he were a courier, bringing dispatches.

“There has been no trouble in India these three years, whyever should you ask such a thing?” a harried secretary said, impatiently, when Laurence at last resorted to halting him in the corridor by main force. “I have not the least understanding why the Corps should have failed in our obligations, but it is just as well we had not more committed to this rout.”

This political view Laurence could not easily subscribe to, still more angry and ashamed to hear the Corps described in such a way. He closed his mouth on the reply which first sprang to mind and said only, very cold, “Have you all safe route of escape?”

“Yes, of course,” the secretary said. “We will embark at Stralsund. You had best get back to England straightaway yourself. The Navy is in the Baltic and in the North Sea, to assist with operations in support of Danzig and Königsberg, for whatever good that will do; but at least you will have a clear route home once you are over the sea.”

If a craven piece of advice, this at least was reassuring news. But there were no letters of his own waiting, which might have given him an explanation less painful to consider, and of course none would find them now. “I cannot even send a new direction home with them,” Laurence said to Granby as they walked back towards the palace. “God only knows where we shall be in two days, much less a week. Anyone would have to address it to William Laurence, East Prussia; and throw it into the ocean in a bottle, too, for all the likelihood it should find me.”

“Laurence,” Granby said abruptly, “I hope to God you will not think me chickenhearted; but oughtn’t we be getting home, as he said?” He gazed straight ahead down the street and avoided Laurence’s eyes as he spoke; there was alternating color and pallid white in his cheeks.

It abruptly occurred to Laurence, to be compounded with his other cares, that his decision to stay might look to the Admiralty as though he were keeping the egg out in the field intentionally, delaying until Granby might have his chance. “The Prussians are too badly short of heavy-weights now to let us go,” he said finally, not really an answer.

Granby did not answer again, until later, when they had come to Laurence’s quarters and might shut the door behind them; in that privacy he bluntly said, “Then they can’t stop us going, either.”

Laurence was silent over the brandy-glasses; he could not deny it, nor even criticize, having entertained much the same thought himself.

Granby added, “They’ve lost, Laurence: half their army, and half the country too; surely there’s no sense in staying now.”

“I will not allow their final loss to be certain,” Laurence said strongly at this discouraged remark, turning around at once. “The most terrible sequence of defeats may yet be reversed, so long as men are to be had and they do not despair, and it is the duty of an officer to keep them from doing so; I trust I need not insist upon your confining such sentiments to your breast.”

Granby flushed up crimson and answered with some heat, “I am not proposing to go running around crying that the sky is falling. But they’ll need us at home more than ever; Bonaparte is sure to already be looking across the Channel with one eye.”

“We did not stay only to avoid pursuit or challenge,” Laurence said, “but because it is better to fight Bonaparte farther from home; that reason yet remains. If there were no real hope, or if our efforts could make no material difference, then I would say yes; but to desert in this situation, when our assistance may be of the most vital importance, I cannot countenance.”

“Do you honestly think they will manage any better than they have so far? He’s overmatched them, start to finish, and they are in worse case now than they were to start.”

This there was no denying, but Laurence said, “Painful as the lesson has been, we have surely learnt much of his mind, of his strategy, from this meeting; the Prussian commanders cannot fail to now revise their strategy, which I fear before this first contest of arms had too much to do with overconfidence.”

“As far as that goes, too much is better than too little,” Granby said, “and I see precious little reason for any confidence at all.”

“I hope I will never be so rash as to say I am confident of dealing Bonaparte a reversal,” Laurence said, “but there remains good and practical reason to hope. Recall that even now the Prussian reserves in the east, together with the Russian Army, will outmatch Bonaparte’s numbers by half again. And the French cannot venture forward until they have secured their lines of communication: there are a dozen fortresses of vital strategic importance, fended by strong garrisons, which they will first have to besiege and then leave troops to secure.”

But this was only parroting; he knew perfectly well numbers alone did not tell the course of battle. Bonaparte had been outnumbered at Jena.

He paced the room for another hour when Granby had at last gone. It was his duty to show himself more certain than he was, and besides that to not permit himself to be downhearted, sentiments which should surely convey themselves to the men. But he was not wholly sure of the course he was following, and he knew that his decision was in some part formed by his disgust for the notion; desertion, even from a situation into which he had effectively been pressed, had too much an ugly and dishonorable ring to it, and he had not the happy turn of character which might have allowed him to call it by another name, and lose the odium thereby.

“I do not want to give up, either, though I would like to be at home,” Temeraire said, with a sigh. “It is not so nice, losing battles, and seeing our friends taken prisoner. I hope it is not upsetting the eggs,” he added, anxious despite all of Keynes’s reassurances, and bent over to nudge them gently and carefully with his nose where they lay in their nests, presently tucked between two warming braziers under a ledge in the main courtyard of the palace, waiting to be loaded aboard.

The King and Queen were saying their farewells: they were sending the royal children away by courier to the well-protected fortress of Königsberg, deep in East Prussia. “You ought to go with them,” the King said softly, but the Queen shook her head and kissed her children goodbye swiftly. “I do not want to go away, either, Mother; let me come, too,” said the second prince, a sturdy boy of nine, and he was only packed off with difficulty and in the face of loud protests.

They stood together watching until the little courier-dragons dwindled to bird-specks and vanished, before at last they climbed back aboard Temeraire for the journey eastward with the handful of their retinue brave enough to venture it: a small and sad party.

Overnight a steady stream of bad news had flowed into the city, though at least these pieces of intelligence had been largely expected, if not so soon: Saxe-Weimar’s detachment caught by Marshal Davout, every last man of ten thousand killed or taken prisoner; Bernadotte already at Magdeburg, cutting Hohenlohe off; the Elbe crossings falling into French hands, not a single bridge destroyed; Bonaparte himself already on the road to Berlin, and when Temeraire rose up into the air, they could see, not very distant, the smoke and dust of the oncoming army: marching, marching, with a cloud of dragons overhead.

They spent the night at a fortress on the Oder River; the commander and his men had not even heard rumors, and were bitterly shocked by news of the defeat. Laurence suffered through the dinner which the commander felt it necessary to give, a black and silent meal, quenched by the officers’ depression and the natural embarrassment attendant on dining in the presence of royalty. The small walled covert attached to the fortress was barren and dusty and uncomfortable; and Laurence escaped to it and his meager bivouac of straw with great relief.

He woke to a soft rolling patter like fingertips on a drum: a steady grey rain falling against Temeraire’s wings, which he had spread over them protectively; there would be no fire that morning. Laurence had a cup of coffee inside, looking over the maps and working out the compass-directions for the day’s flight; they were trying to find the eastern reserves of the army, under command of General Lestocq, somewhere in the Polish territories which Prussia had lately acquired.

“We will make for Posen,” the King said tiredly; he did not look as though he had slept very well. “There will be at least a detachment in the city, if Lestocq is not there yet himself.”

The rain did not slacken all the day, and sluggish bands of fog drifted through the valleys below them; they flew through a grey formlessness, following the compass and the turns of the hourglass, counting Temeraire’s wingbeats and marking his speed. Darkness was almost welcome; the cross-wind that blew the rain in their faces slackened, and they could huddle a little warmer in their leather coats. Villagers in the fields disappeared as they flew overhead; they saw no other signs of life until, crossing a deep river valley, they flew over five dragons, ferals, sleeping upon a sheltered ledge, who lifted up their heads at Temeraire’s passage.

They leapt off the ledge and came flying towards Temeraire; Laurence grew anxious, lest they either provoke a quarrel or try and follow them, like Arkady and the mountain ferals; but they were small gregarious creatures and only flew alongside Temeraire a while, jeering wordlessly and making demonstrations of their flying abilities, backwing swoops and steep dives. Half-an-hour’s flight brought them to the edge of the valley, and there the ferals with piercing cries broke off and circled back away into their territory. “I could not understand them,” Temeraire said, looking over his shoulder after them. “I wonder what that language is, that they are speaking; it sounds a little bit like Durzagh in places, but it was too different to make out, at least when they spoke so quickly.”

They did not reach the city that night after all: some twenty miles short they came upon the small and sodden campfires of the army, settling into miserable wet bivouacs for the night. General Lestocq came to the covert himself to greet the King and Queen, with sedan-chairs drawn up as close as he could persuade the bearers to come; he had evidently been warned to expect them, likely by a courier.

Laurence was naturally not invited to accompany them, but neither was he offered the simple courtesy of a billet, and the staff-officer who stayed to see to their supply was offensively short in his hurry to be gone. “No,” Laurence said with mounting impatience, “no, half a sheep will not do; he has had a ninety-miles’ flight today in bad weather, and he damned well will be fed accordingly. You do not look to me as though this army were on short commons.” The officer was at length compelled to provide a cow, but the rest of them had a wet and hungry night, receiving only some thin oat porridge and biscuit, and no meat ration at all; perhaps a spiteful revenge.

Lestocq had with him only a small corps: two formations of smallish heavy-weights, nowhere near Temeraire’s size, with four middle-weight wing dragons apiece, and a few courier-dragons for leaven. Their comfort had been equally neglected: the men were sleeping mostly distributed upon the backs of their dragons, only a few smallish tents posted for officers.

After they had unloaded him, Temeraire nosed around here and there, trying to find some drier place to rest, without success: the bare ground of the covert was nothing but mud two full inches down.

“You had better just lie down,” Keynes said. “The mud will keep you warm enough, once you are in it properly.”

“Surely it cannot be healthy,” Laurence said dubiously.

“Nonsense,” Keynes said. “What do you think a mustard-plaster is but mud? So long as he does not lie in it for a week, he will do perfectly well.”

“Wait, wait,” Gong Su said, unexpectedly; he had been gradually acquiring English, being isolated otherwise, but he was still shy of speaking out, save where his business of cookery was concerned. He went through his jars and spice-bags hurriedly and brought out a jar of ground red pepper, a few pinches of which Laurence had seen him use to flavor an entire cow. He put on a glove and ran beneath Temeraire’s belly, scattering a double handful of it upon the ground, while Temeraire peered at him curiously from between his legs.

“There, now will be warm,” Gong Su said, stepping out and sealing tight the jar again.

Temeraire gingerly let himself down into the muck, which made rude noises as it squelched up around his sides. “Ugh,” he said. “How I miss the pavilions in China! This is not at all pleasant.” He squirmed a little. “It is warm, but it feels quite odd.”

Laurence could not like having Temeraire thus marinated, but there was little hope of doing better by him tonight at least. Indeed, he recalled that even while with the larger corps, under Hohenlohe’s command, they had received little better accommodations; only the milder weather had rendered their circumstances more comfortable.

Granby and his men did not seem to take it as he did, shrugging. “I suppose it’s what we’re used to,” Granby said. “When I was with Laetificat in India, once they put us on the day’s battlefield, with the wounded moaning away all night and bits of swords and bayonets everywhere, because they didn’t want to be put to the trouble of clearing some brush away for us to sleep elsewhere; Captain Portland had to threaten to desert to get them to move it the next morning.”

Laurence had spent his career as an aviator so far entirely in the highly comfortable training-covert at Loch Laggan and in the long-established one at Dover, which—if nothing like what the Chinese considered adequate—at least offered well-drained clearings, shaded by trees, with barracks for the men and junior officers, and rooms at the headquarters for the captains and senior lieutenants. He supposed perhaps he was unrealistic, to expect good conditions in the field, with an army on the march, but surely something better might have been arranged: there were hills visible not very distant, certainly within an easy quarter-of-an-hour’s flight, where the ground would not have been so thoroughly soaked.

“What can we do for the eggs?” he asked Keynes; at present the two large bundles were standing upon a handful of chests, draped over with an oilskin. “Will they take any harm from the cold?”

“I am trying to think,” Keynes said irritably; he was pacing around Temeraire. “Will you be sure not to roll onto them in the night?” he demanded of the dragon.

“Of course I am not going to roll onto the eggs!” Temeraire said, outraged.

“Then we had better wrap them in oilskins and bury them up against his side in the mud,” Keynes said to Laurence, ignoring Temeraire’s muttered indignations. “There’s no hope of starting a fire that will keep in this rain.”

The men were already all as wet as they could be; by the time they had finished digging a hole they were also all over mud, but at least they had warmed up by the exercise; Laurence himself had stood out the whole while being drenched, feeling it his place to share the discomfort. “Share out the rest of the oilskins, and let everyone sleep aboard,” he said, once the eggs were safely tucked into their nest, and gratefully climbed up to his own shelter for the night: the tent, now vacant, had been left up on Temeraire’s back for him.

Having covered nearly two hundred miles in two days of flying, it was an unwelcome reversion to find themselves once again leashed by the infantry and, worse, by the endless trail of supply-waggons, which it seemed were stuck as often they were moving. The roads were terrible, unpaved sand and dirt that churned and squelched under every step, and littered with fallen leaves, wet and slippery. The army was moving eastward in hopes of a rendezvous with the Russians; even in the wretched conditions, laboring under the news of defeat, the discipline did not fail, and the column marched along in steady order.

Laurence found he had been unjust to the supply-officer: they were indeed on short rations. Though the harvest had just been brought in, there seemed to be nothing available anywhere in the countryside; at least not to them. The Poles showed empty hands when asked to sell, no matter what money they were offered. The crops had been bad, the herds had been sick, they said if pressed, and showed empty granaries and pens; though the black shiny eyes of pigs and cattle might occasionally be glimpsed peeking out from the dark woods behind their fields, and occasionally some enterprising officer unearthed a cache of grain or potatoes hidden in a cellar or beneath a trap-door. There were no exceptions, not even for Laurence’s offers of gold, not even in houses where the children were too thin and scantily dressed against the coming winter; and once, in a small cottage little better than a hovel, when in exasperation he doubled the gold in his palm and held it out again with a pointed look at the baby lying scarcely covered in its cradle, the young matron of the house looked at him with mute reproach, and pushed his fingers closed over it before she pointed at the door.

Laurence went out again rather ashamed of himself; he was anxious for Temeraire, who was not getting enough to eat, but he could hardly blame the Poles for resenting the partition and occupation of their country; it had been a shameful business, much deplored in his father’s political circles, and Laurence thought perhaps the Government had made some sort of formal protest, though he did not properly remember. It would hardly have made a difference; hungry for land, Russia and Austria and Prussia would not have listened. They had all pushed their borders out piece by piece, ignoring the cries for justice from their weaker neighbor, until at last they had met in the middle and there was no more country left in between; small wonder that the soldiers of one of those nations should meet a cool reception now.

They took two days to cross the twenty miles to Posen and found an even colder welcome there; and a more dangerous one. Rumors had already reached the town: with the arrival of the army, the disaster at Jena could hardly be a secret, and more news came pouring in. Hohenlohe had finally surrendered with the tattered remnants of his infantry; and with that all of Prussia west of the Oder was falling like a house of cards.

The French Marshal Murat was repeating all over the country the same trick that had worked so nicely for him at Erfurt, seizing fortresses one after another with no weapon but brass cheek. His simple method was to present himself at their stoop, announce that he had come to receive their surrender, and wait until the doors were opened and the governor let him in. But when the governor at Stettin, several hundred miles from the battlefield and as yet wholly ignorant of what had occurred, indignantly refused this charming request, the iron beneath the brass plating was revealed: two days later there were thirty dragons and thirty guns and five thousand men outside the walls, busily digging trenches and piling up bombs in very noticeable heaps for a full assault, and the governor meekly handed over the keys and his garrison.

Laurence overheard this story told some five times in one walk around the town’s marketplace square; he did not understand the language, but the same names would keep ringing out together, in tones not merely amused but exultant. Men sitting together murmuring in alehouses were raising their vodka-glasses to Vive l’Empereur when there was no Prussian in hearing distance, and sometimes even when there was, depending on how low the level in the bottle had gone; there was an atmosphere of belligerence and hope mingled.

He put his head in at every market-stall he could find; here at least the merchants could not refuse to sell what was plainly in sight, but supplies in the town were not much more plentiful and had for the most part already been appropriated. After much searching, Laurence was able only to find one poor small pig; he paid some five times its value and at once had it knocked smartly over the head with a cudgel to stun it and trundled to its doom in a wheelbarrow by one of his harness-men. Temeraire took it and ate it raw, too hungry to wait for cooking, and painstakingly licked clean his talons afterwards.

“Sir,” Laurence said, restraining his temper, “you have not the proper supply for a heavy-weight, and the daily distance you cross is a tenth of what he can do.”

“What difference does that make?” General Lestocq said, bristling. “I do not know what kind of discipline you run in England, but if you are with this army, you march with it! Good God, your dragon is hungry; so are all my men hungry. A fine form we should be in, if I began letting them run fifty miles afield to feed themselves.”

“We would be at every evening’s camp—” Laurence said.

“Yes, you will be,” Lestocq said, “and you will be at the morning camp, and at the noon camp, and with the rest of the dragon-corps at every moment, or I will have you down as a deserter; now get out of my tent.”

“I take it things went well,” Granby said, looking at his face when Laurence came back into the small abandoned shepherd’s hut which was their day’s shelter, the first time they had slept dry in the week of slow and miserable marching since Posen; Laurence threw his gloves down on the cot with violence, and sat down to pull off his boots, ankle-deep in mud.

“I have half a mind to take Temeraire and be gone after all,” Laurence said furiously. “Let that old fool put us down as deserters if he likes, and be damned to him.”

“Here,” Granby said, and picked up some of the straw from the floor to take hold of the boot-heel, so Laurence could get his foot out. “We could always go hunting, and join up again if we see a fight coming,” he said, wiping off his hands and sitting back down on his own cot. “They’ll hardly turn us away.”

Laurence almost gave it consideration, but he shook his head. “No; but if this continues as it is—”

It did not; instead their pace slowed even further, and the only thing in shorter supply than food was good news. Rumors had gone around the camp for several days that a peace settlement had been offered by the French; an almost general sigh of relief had issued from the weary troops, but as the days passed and no announcement came, hope failed. Then fresh rumors followed about the shocking terms: the whole vast swath of Prussian territory east of the Elbe to be surrendered, and Hanover, too; huge indemnities to be paid; and, outrageously, the crown prince to be sent to Paris, “under the care of the Emperor, to the improvement of understanding and friendship between our nations, desirable to all,” as the sinister phrasing had it.

“Good Lord, he does begin to think himself a proper Oriental despot, doesn’t he,” Granby said, hearing this news. “What would he do if they broke the treaty, send the boy to the guillotine?”

“He had D’Enghien murdered for less cause,” Laurence said, thinking with sorrow of the Queen, so charming and courageous, and how this fresh and personal threat should act upon her spirits. She and the King had gone on ahead to meet with the Tsar; that, at least, was a piece of encouragement: Alexander had pledged himself wholly to continue the war, and the Russian Army was already on its way to rendezvous with them in Warsaw.

“Laurence,” Temeraire said, and Laurence shuddered up out of an old familiar night-terror: finding himself utterly alone on the deck of the Belize, his first command, in a gale; all the ocean lit up by lightning-flashes and not a human face anywhere in sight; with the unpleasant new addition of a dragon egg rolling ponderously towards the open forward hatch, too far for him to reach in time: not the green-speckled red of the Kazilik egg, but the pale porcelain of Temeraire’s.

He wiped the dream from his face and listened to the distant sounds: too regular for thunder. “When did it begin?” he asked, reaching for his boots; the sky was only just growing lighter.

“A few minutes ago,” Temeraire said.

They were three days from Warsaw, on the fourth of November. All through that day’s march they heard the guns to the east, and during the night a red glow of fire shone in the distance. The guns were fainter the next day and silent by the afternoon. The wind had not changed. The army did not break from its mid-day camp; the men scarcely stirred, as if they all collectively held their breath, waiting.

The couriers, sent off that morning, came back hurrying a few hours later, but though the captains went directly to the general’s quarters, before they even came out again the news was somehow already spreading: the French had beaten them to Warsaw. The Russians had been defeated.

Chapter 16

THE SMALL CASTLE had been built of red brick, a long time ago: wars had battered it; peasants looking for building materials had dismantled it; rain and snow had melted down its edges. It was little more than a gutted shell now, one wall held up between half-crumbled towers, windows that faced onto open fields on both sides.

They were grateful for the shelter nonetheless, Temeraire huddling for concealment into the square made by the ruined walls, the rest of them sheltering in the single narrow gallery, full of red brick dust and crumbled white mortar.

“We will stay another day,” Laurence said in the morning; more an observation than a decision: Temeraire was grey and limp with exhaustion, and the rest of them hardly in better state. He asked for volunteers to go hunting and sent Martin and Dunne.

The countryside was alive with French patrols, and

Polish also, formed of dragons released from the Prussian breeding-grounds where they had been pent up since the final partition ten years before. During the intervening years, many of their captains had died in Prussian captivity or from age or sickness; the bereft dragons were full of bitterness, which had easily enough been turned to

Napoleon’s use. They might not answer to discipline well enough to serve in battle, without captain or crew, but they could profitably be set to scouting; and no harm done if they should take it on themselves to attack some hapless group of Prussian stragglers.

And the army was nothing but stragglers now, all of them making only loosely for the last Prussian strongholds in the north. There was no more hope of victory; the generals had spoken only of securing some position that might strengthen their hands at the bargaining table a little. It seemed to Laurence folly; he doubted himself whether there would be any table at all.

Napoleon had sent his armies speeding across the sodden roads of Poland with not a single waggon to hold them back, dragons carrying all the supply: gambling that he could catch and beat the Russians before his food ran out and his men and beasts began to starve. He had risked all on one throw of the dice, and won; the Tsar’s armies had been strung out along the road to Warsaw, wholly unsuspecting, and in three days and three battles he had smashed them in their separate parts. The Prussian army he had carefully skirted on the road; they had served him, they understood only too late, as bait to draw the Russians more quickly from their borders.

Now the jaws of the Grande Armée were closing in on them for the final bite. The army had spilled northward in desperation, whole battalions deserting at a time; Laurence had seen artillery and ammunition abandoned on the road, supply-waggons surrounded by clouds of birds feasting on grain spilled in struggles among the starving men. Lestocq had sent orders to the covert to send the dragon-corps to their next post, a small village ten miles away; Laurence had crumpled the dispatch in his hand and let it fall to the ground to be trampled into the mud, and then he had put his men aboard, with all the supplies they could find, and flown north as long as Temeraire’s strength would allow.

What so complete a defeat should mean for Britain, he would not now consider. He had one goal only: to get Temeraire and his men home, and the two dragon eggs. They seemed now pitifully inadequate, when they should have to help be a wall around Britain, to defend her against an Emperor of Europe in search of more worlds to conquer. If he had been once again on that hill, in the brush, with Napoleon standing so close to hand, Laurence did not know what he would do; he wondered occasionally, in the sleepless hours of the night, if Badenhaur blamed him for staying his hand.

He did not feel any kind of black mood or anger, such as had occasionally fallen upon him after a defeat; only a great distance. He spoke calmly to his men, and to Temeraire; he had managed to get his hands on a map, at least, of their route to the Baltic Sea, and spent most of his hours studying how to skirt the towns, or how to get back on course after a patrol had forced them to flee out of their way, to a temporary safety. Though Temeraire could cover ground by far more quickly than infantry, he was by far more visible as well, and their progress northward did not much outstrip the rest of the army after all their dodging and evasions. There was little left in the countryside to forage, and they were all going hungry, giving whatever could be spared to Temeraire.

Now, in the ruins of the castle, the men slept, or lay listless and open-eyed against the walls, not moving. Martin and Dunne came back after nearly an hour with one small sheep, shot neatly through the head. “I’m sorry for having to use the rifle, sir, but I was afraid it would get away,” Dunne said.

“We didn’t catch sight of anyone,” Martin added anxiously. “It was off alone; I expect it had wandered away from its herd.”

“You did as you ought, gentlemen,” Laurence said, without attending very much; if they had done anything badly, it would still hardly have been worth reproaching them.

“I take it first,” Gong Su said urgently, catching his arm, when Laurence would have given it straight to Temeraire. “Let me, it will go further. I make soup for everyone; there is water.”

“We haven’t much biscuit left,” Granby ventured to him very quiet and tentatively, at this suggestion. “It would put heart into the fellows, to have a taste of some meat.”

“We cannot risk an open flame,” Laurence said with finality.

“No, not open fire.” Gong Su pointed to the tower. “I build inside, smoke comes out slow, from this,” and he tapped the crevices between the bricks in the wall beside them. “Like smokehouse.”

The men had to come out of the closed gallery, and Gong Su could only go in to stir for a few minutes at a time, coming out coughing and with his face covered with black, but the smoke seeped out only in thin, flat bands which clung to the brick and did not send up any great column.

Laurence turned back to his maps, laid out on top of a broken table-sized block of wall; he thought a few more days would see them to the coastline, and then he would have to decide: west for Danzig, where the French might be, or east to Königsberg, almost surely still in Prussian hands, but farther from home. He was all the more grateful, now, to his meeting with the embassy secretary in Berlin who had given him the now-priceless information that the Navy was out in the Baltic in force—Temeraire had only to reach the ships, and they would be safe; pursuit could not follow them into the teeth of the ships’ guns.

He was working out the distances for the third time when he lifted his head, frowning; men were stirring a little across the camp. The wind was shifting into their faces and carrying a snatch of song, not very tuneful but sung with great enthusiasm in a girl’s clear voice, and in a moment she came into view around the wall. She was just a peasant girl, bright-cheeked with exercise, with her hair neatly braided back beneath a kerchief and carrying a basket full of walnuts and red berries and branches laden with yellow and amber leaves. She turned the corner and saw them: the song stopped mid-phrase, and she stared at them with wide startled eyes, still open-mouthed.

Laurence straightened up; his pistols were lying in front of him, weighting down the corners of his maps; Dunne and Hackley and Riggs all had their rifles right in their hands, being that moment engaged in reloading; Pratt, the big armorer, was leaning against the wall in arm’s reach of the girl; a word and she would be caught, silenced. He put his hand out and touched the pistol; the cold metal was like a shock to his skin, and abruptly he wondered what the devil he was doing.

A shudder seized him, shoulders to waist and back; and suddenly he was himself again, fully present in his own skin and astonished by the change of sensation: he was at once painfully, desperately hungry, and the girl was running away wildly down the hill, her basket flung away in a hail of golden leaves.

He continued the movement and put the pistols back into his belt, letting the maps roll up. “Well, she will have everyone in ten miles roused in a moment,” he said briskly. “Gong Su, bring the stew out; we can have a swallow at least before we must get about it, and Temeraire can eat while we pack. And Roland, Dyer, do you two go and collect those walnuts and crack the shells.”

The two runners hopped over the wall and began to gather up the spilled contents of the peasant girl’s basket, while Pratt and his mate Blythe went in to help carry out the big soup-pot. Laurence said, “Mr. Granby, let us see a little activity here, if you please; I want a lookout up on that tower.”

“Yes, sir,” Granby said, jumping at once to his feet, and with Ferris began rousing the men from their own separate lethargies to begin pushing the broken stone and brick into something like steps up the side of the tower. The work did not go quickly, with the men all tired and shaky, but it gave them more life, and the tower was not so very high; soon enough they had a rope thrown over one of the crenellations of the parapet, and Martin was scrambling up to keep watch, calling, “And don’t you fellows eat my share, either!” to more laughter than this feeble sally deserved. The men turned eagerly to get out their tin cups and bowls as the cauldron came very carefully out, not a drop spilling.

“I am sorry we must go so quickly,” Laurence said to Temeraire, stroking his nose.

“I do not mind,” Temeraire said, nuzzling him with particular energy. “Laurence, you are well?”

Laurence was ashamed that his queer mood should have been so noticeable. “I am; forgive me for having been so out of sorts,” he answered. “You have had the worst of it all along; I ought never have committed us to this enterprise.”

“But we did not know that we were going to lose,” Temeraire said. “I am not sorry to have tried to help; I would have felt a great coward running away.”

Gong Su ladled out the still-thin soup in small sparing portions, half-a-cupful to each man, and Ferris doled out the biscuit; at least there was as much tea as anyone could want to drink, situated as the castle was between two lakes. They all ate involuntarily slowly, trying to make each bite count for two, and then Roland and Dyer went around with the odd unexpected treat of fresh walnuts, a little young and bitter, but delicious; the purplish sloes, too tart for their palates, Temeraire licked up out of the basket as a single swallow. When all had eaten their share, Laurence sent Salyer up in Martin’s place, and had the midshipman down for his own meal; and then Gong Su began heaving the dismembered joints of the sheep’s carcass out of the cauldron one at a time directly into Temeraire’s waiting jaws, so the hot juice would not run out of them and go to waste.

Temeraire too lingered over each swallow, and he had scarcely consumed the head and one leg before Salyer was leaning over and shouting, and scrambling down the rope. “Air patrol, sir, five middle-weights coming,” he panted; a worse threat than Laurence had feared: the patrol must have been sheltering just at the nearby village, and the girl must have run straight to them. “Five miles distant, I should think—”

The meal behind them and the immediate danger before gave them all a burst of fresh energy; in moments the equipment was back aboard, the light mesh armor laid out: they had left behind the armor plates, several escapes ago. Then Keynes said, “For the love of Heaven, don’t eat the rest of the meat,” sharply to Temeraire, who was just opening his mouth for Gong Su to tip in the last mouthfuls.

“Why not?” Temeraire demanded. “I am still hungry.”

“The blasted egg is hatching,” Keynes said. He was already tearing and heaving at the silken swaddling, throwing off great shining panels of green and red and amber. “Don’t stand there gawking, come and help me!” he snapped.

Granby and the other lieutenants sprang to his assistance at once while Laurence hurriedly organized the men to get the second egg, still wrapped up, back into Temeraire’s belly-rigging; it was the last of the baggage.

“Not now!” Temeraire said to the egg, which was now rocking back and forth so energetically that they were having to hold it in place with their hands; it would otherwise have gone rolling end-over-end across the ground.

“Go and get the harness arranged,” Laurence told Granby, and took his place bracing the egg; the shell was hard and glossy and queerly hot to the touch under his hands, so he even took a moment to pull on his gloves; Ferris and Riggs, on the other side, were wincing their hands away alternately.

“We must leave at this moment, you cannot hatch now; and anyway there is almost no food,” Temeraire added, to no apparent effect but a furious rapping noise from inside against the shell. “It is not paying me any mind,” he said, aggrieved, sitting back on his haunches, and looked rather unhappily at the remnants in the cauldron.

Fellowes had long since put together a dragonet’s rig out of the softest scraps of harness, just in case, but it had been rolled up snugly with the rest of the leather deep in their baggage. They finally got it out, and Granby turned it over with almost shaking hands, opening some buckles and adjusting others. “Nothing to it, sir,” Fellowes said softly; the other officers clapped him on the back with encouraging murmurs.

“Laurence,” Keynes said in an undertone, “I ought to have thought of this before; but you had better draw Temeraire away at once, as far as you can; he won’t like it.”

“What?” Laurence said, just as Temeraire said, with a flare of belligerence, “What are you doing? Why is Granby holding that harness?”

Laurence thought at first, in deep alarm, that Temeraire was speaking out against the harnessing of the dragon in principle. “No, but Granby is in my crew,” Temeraire said, obstinately, an objection which disqualified every man in sight, unless perhaps he had not yet formed an attachment to Badenhaur or the handful of other Prussian officers. “I do not see why I must give it my food, and Granby.”

The shell was beginning to crack, now; none too soon. The patrol had slowed their approach out of caution, perhaps imagining that the British meant to make a stand from behind the shelter of the walls, since evidently they were not fleeing. But caution would only keep them off so long; soon one of them would make a quick dart overhead, see what was going on, and then they would instantly attack in force.

“Temeraire,” Laurence said, backing away a distance and trying to distract Temeraire’s attention from the hatching egg, “only consider, the little dragon will be quite alone, and you have a large crew all for yourself. You must see it is not fair; there is no one else for the dragonet, and,” he added with sudden inspiration, “it will have no jewels at all, such as you have; it must surely feel very unhappy.”

“Oh,” Temeraire said. He put his head down very close to Laurence. “Perhaps it could have Allen?” he suggested quietly, with a darting look over his shoulder to make sure he was not overheard by that awkward young ensign, who was presently engaged in surreptitiously running his finger around the rim of the pot, and licking it clean of a few more drops of soup.

“Come, that is unworthy of you,” Laurence said reprovingly. “Besides, this is Granby’s chance of promotion; surely you would not deny him the right to advance himself.”

Temeraire made a low grumbling noise. “Well, if he must,” he said, ungraciously, and curled up to sulk, taking up his sapphire breastplate in his foreclaws to nose over and rub to a higher shine with the side of his cheek.

His agreement was only just in time; the shell did not so much break open as burst with a cloud of steam, speckling them all with tiny fragments of shell and egg-slime. “I did not make such a mess,” Temeraire said, disapprovingly, brushing at the bits stuck to his hide.

The dragonet itself spat bits of shell in every direction; it was hissing below its breath in a strangled sort of way. It was almost a miniature in form of the adult Kaziliks, with the same bristling thorny spines all over, scarlet with shining purplish armor plates over its belly; even the impressive horns were there, smaller in scale; only the green leopard-spots were missing. The baby dragon looked up at them with glaring yellow eyes, hot and indignant, coughed once, twice, and then drew in and held a deep breath that made its sides puff out like a balloon. Abruptly thin jets of steam issued out of its spines, hissing, and it opened its mouth and jetted out a little stream of flame some five feet long, sending the nearest men jumping back in surprise.

“Oh, there,” she said, pleased, sitting up on her haunches. “That is much better; now let me have the meat.”

Granby had been looking perfectly white beneath his sunburn, but he managed a steady voice as he stepped nearer her. He was holding the harness draped across his right arm, where she could see it plainly, without thrusting it at her. “My name is John Granby,” he said. “We will be happy to—”

“Yes, yes, the harnessing,” she interrupted, “Temeraire has told me about that.”

Laurence turned and eyed Temeraire, who looked vaguely guilty and pretended to be very occupied polishing away a scratch on his breastplate; Laurence began to wonder what else he might have instructed the eggs in, as he had been nursemaiding them now nearly two months.

Meanwhile the dragonet put her head out to sniff at Granby; she tilted her head first to one side and then the other, looking him up and down. “And you have been Temeraire’s first officer?” she said interrogatively, with the air of one asking for references.

“I have,” Granby said, rather flustered, “and should you like a name of your own? It is a very nice thing to have; I would be happy to give you one.”

“Oh, I have already decided that,” she said, much to Granby’s further consternation and that of the other aviators. “I want to be Iskierka, like that girl was singing about.”

Laurence had harnessed Temeraire more by accident than design, and since then had never seen another hatching; he did not have any very clear idea of how it was supposed to go, but judging by the expressions of his men this was not characteristic. However, the baby Kazilik added, “But I should like to have you as my captain anyway, and I do not mind being harnessed and fighting to help protect England; but hurry, because I am very hungry.”

Poor Granby, who had likely been dreaming of this day since he had been a seven-year-old cadet, every moment planned out with full ceremony and the name long-since chosen, looked tolerably blank for a moment; then abruptly he laughed out loud. “All right, Iskierka it is,” he said, recovering handsomely, and held up the neck-loop of the harness. “Will you put your head in here?”

She cooperated quite willingly, except for stretching her head impatiently out towards the pot while he hurried to fasten the last few buckles, and when finally loosed, she thrust her entire head and forelegs into the still-hot cauldron to devour the remains of Temeraire’s dinner. She did not need any encouragement to eat quickly; the contents vanished with blazing speed, the pot rocking back and forth as she finished licking it clean. “That was very good,” she said, lifting her head out again, her little horns dripping with soup, “but I would like some more; let us go hunting.” She experimentally fluttered out her wings, still soft and crumpled against her back.

“Well, we can’t now, we must get out of here,” Granby said, keeping a prudent hold of her harness; and a sudden storm of wings came above, as one of the patrol-dragons finally came and put its head over the wall to see what they were doing. Temeraire sat up and roared, and it backwinged hastily away, but the damage was done; it was already calling to its fellows.

“All aboard, no ceremony!” Laurence shouted, and the crew hastily flung themselves onto the harness. “Temeraire, you must carry Iskierka, will you put her aboard?”

“I can fly myself,” she said. “Is there going to be a battle? Now? Where is it!” She did indeed lift off into the air a little ways, but Granby managed to keep his grip on her harness, and she ended by bouncing back and forth.

“No, we are not going to have a battle,” Temeraire said, “and anyway you are too little to fight just yet.” He bent down his head and closed his jaws around her body: the gap between his sharp front teeth and those to the rear held her neatly, and though she squalled in angry protest, he picked her up and laid her down across his shoulders. Laurence gave Granby a leg up to the harness, so he could scramble to her straightaway, and followed himself. All the crew were aboard, and Temeraire launched himself with a leap even as the patrol came charging over the wall: roaring he threw himself straight up into their midst, and knocked them all away like ninepins.

“Oh! Oh! They are attacking us! Quick, let us kill them!” Iskierka said with appalling bloodthirstiness, trying to leap off into the air.

“No; for Heaven’s sake, stop that!” Granby said, clinging to her desperately while with his other hand he struggled to get carabiner straps on her, to latch her harness securely to Temeraire’s. “We’re going a dashed sight faster right now than you could manage; be patient! We’ll go flying as much as you like, only give it a little while.”

“But there is a battle now!” she said, squirming around to try and see the enemy dragons; she was hard to get a proper hold of, with all her spiky thorn-like protrusions, and she was scrabbling at Temeraire’s neck and harness with her claws; still soft, but evidently ticklish from the way Temeraire snorted and tossed his head.

“Hold still!” Temeraire said, looking around; he had taken advantage of the temporary disarray of the enemy dragons to put on a burst of speed, and was flying fast for a thick cloudbank to the north, which might conceal them. “You are making it very difficult for me to fly.”

“I don’t want to be still!” she said shrilly. “Go back, go back! The fighting is that way!” For emphasis she fired off another jet of flame, which only narrowly escaped singeing off Laurence’s hair, and danced with impatience from one foot to the other, with all Granby could do to hold her.

The patrol came on rapidly after them, and they did not give up after the cloud cover hid Temeraire from their sight, but kept on, calling out to one another in the mist to make sure of their positions, and advancing more slowly. The cold damp was unpleasant to the little Kazilik, who coiled herself around Granby’s chest and shoulders in loops for warmth, narrowly avoiding strangling him or jabbing him with spikes, and kept up a muttering complaint about their running away.

“Do hush, there’s a dear creature,” Granby said, stroking her. “You’ll give away our place; it is like hide-and-seek, we must be quiet.”

“We would not need to be quiet or stay in this nasty cold cloud if only we went and thrashed them,” she said, but finally subsided.

At length the sound of the searchers died away, and they dared to slip out again; but now a fresh difficulty presented itself: Iskierka had to be fed. “We will have to risk it,” Laurence said, and they flew cautiously away from the thick woods and lakes, and closer to farmland territory, while they searched the ground with spyglasses.

“How nice those cows would be,” Temeraire said wistfully after a little while; Laurence hurriedly turned his glass to the far distance and saw them, a herd of fine cattle grazing placidly upon a slope.

“Thank Heaven,” Laurence said. “Temeraire, go to ground if you please; that hollow there will do, I think,” he added, pointing. “We will wait until after dark and take them then.”

“What, the cows?” Temeraire said, looking around with some confusion as he descended. “But Laurence, are those not property?”

“Well, yes, I suppose they are,” Laurence said, in embarrassment, “but under the circumstances, we must make an exception.”

“But how are the circumstances any different than when Arkady and the others took the cows in Istanbul?” Temeraire demanded. “They were hungry then, and we are hungry now; it is just the same.”

“There we were arriving as guests,” Laurence said, “and we thought the Turks our allies.”

“So it is not theft if you do not like the person who owns the property?” Temeraire said. “But then—”

“No, no,” Laurence said hastily, foreseeing many future difficulties. “But at present—the exigencies of war—” He fumbled through some explanation, trailing off lamely. Of course it would seem rather like theft; although this was, at least on the maps, Prussian territory, so it might reasonably be called requisition. But the distinction between requisition and theft seemed difficult to explain, and Laurence did not at all mean to tell Temeraire that so had all their food the past week been stolen, and likely near enough all the supply from the army, too.

In any case, call it bald-faced theft or some more pleasant word, it was still necessary; the little dragon was too young to understand having to go hungry, and was in more desperate need: Laurence well remembered the way Temeraire had gone through food in his early weeks of rapid growth. And they were in great need too, of her silence: if thoroughly fed she would probably sleep away all the time between meals for her first week of life.

“Lord, she’s a proper terror, isn’t she,” Granby said, lovingly, stroking her glossy hide; despite her impatient hunger, she had fallen into a nap while they waited for the night to come. “Breathing fire straight from the shell; it will be a fright to manage her.” He did not sound as though he objected.

“Well, I hope she will soon become more sensible,” Temeraire said. He had not quite recovered from his earlier disgruntlement, and his temper had not been improved by her accusations of cowardice and demands to go back and fight: certainly his own instinctive inclination, if an impractical one. More generally it seemed his devotion to the eggs had curiously not translated to immediate affection for the dragonet; though perhaps he was merely still annoyed at being robbed to feed her.

“She is precious young,” Laurence said, stroking Temeraire’s nose.

“I am sure I was never so silly, even when I was first hatched,” Temeraire said, to which remark Laurence prudently made no answer.

An hour after sunset they crept up the slope from downwind and made their stealthy attack; or so it might have been, save in a frenzy of excitement Iskierka clawed through the carabiner straps holding her on, and flung herself over the fence and onto the back of one of the sleeping, unsuspecting cows. It bellowed in terror and bolted away with all the rest of the herd, with the dragonet clinging aboard and shooting off flames in every direction but the right one, so the affair took on the character more of a circus than a robbery. The house lit up, and the farmhands dashed out with torches and old muskets, expecting perhaps foxes or wolves; they halted at the fence staring, as well they might; the cow had taken to frantic bucking, but Iskierka had her claws deeply embedded in the roll of fat around its neck, and was squealing half in excitement, half in frustration, ineffectually biting at it with her still-small jaws.

“Only now look what she has done,” Temeraire said self-righteously, and jumped aloft to snatch the dragonet and her cow in one claw, a second cow in the other. “I am sorry we have woken you up, we are taking your cows, but it is not stealing, because we are at war,” he said, hovering, to the white and frozen little group of men now staring up at his vast and terrible form, whose incomprehension came even more from terror than from language.

Feeling pangs of guilt, Laurence hastily fumbled at his purse and threw some gold coins down. “Temeraire, do you have her? For Heaven’s sake let us be gone at once; they will have the whole country after us.”

Temeraire did have her, as was proven once in the air by her muffled but audible yelling from below, “It is my cow! It is mine! I had it first!” which did not greatly improve their chances of hiding. Laurence looked back and saw the whole village shining like a great beacon out of the dark, one house after another illuminating; it would certainly be seen for miles.

“We had better have taken them in broad daylight, blowing a fanfare on trumpets,” Laurence said with a groan, feeling that it was a judgment on him for stealing.

They put down only a little way off out of desperation, hoping to feed Iskierka and make her quiet. At first she refused to let go of her cow, now quite dead, having been pierced through by Temeraire’s claws, though she could not quite get through its hide and begin eating. “It is mine,” she kept muttering, until at last Temeraire said, “Be quiet! They only want to cut it open for you, now let go. Anyway, if I wanted your cow I would take it away.”

“I should like to see you try!” she said, and he whipped his head down and growled at her, which made her squeak and jump straight for Granby, who was knocked sprawling by her landing unexpectedly in his arms. “Oh, that was not nice!” she said indignantly, coiling around Granby’s shoulders. “Only because I am still small!”

Temeraire had the grace to look a little ashamed of himself, and he said a little more placatingly, “Well, I am not going to take your cow anyway, I have one of my own, but you should be polite while you are still so little.”

“I want to be big now,” she said sulkily.

“You shan’t get bigger unless you let us feed you properly,” Granby said, which drew her quick attention. “Come and you shall watch us make it ready for you; how will that do?”

“I suppose,” she said, reluctantly, and he carried her back over to the carcass. Gong Su slit open the belly and cut out first the heart and the liver, which he held out to her with a ceremonial air, saying, “Best first meal, for little dragons to get big,” and she said, “Oh, is it?” and snatched them in both claws to eat with great gusto, blood pouring out the sides of her jaws as she tore and swallowed one bite and another from each one in turn.

One of the leg joints was all the rest which she could manage, despite her best efforts, and then she collapsed into a stupor to their general and profound gratitude; Temeraire devoured the rest of his own cow while Gong Su crudely and quickly butchered the remnants of the second and packed it away in his pots; and they were back aloft in some twenty minutes, with the dragonet now lying heavy and asleep in Granby’s arms, quite dead to all the world.

But there were dragons circling over the illuminated village in the distance now, and as they rose up one of them turned to look at them, its luminous white eyes shining: a Fleur-de-Nuit, one of the few nocturnal breeds. “North,” Laurence said, grimly, “straight north as quick as you can, Temeraire; to the sea.”

They fled all the rest of the night, the queer low voice of the Fleur-de-Nuit sounding always behind them, like a deep brass note, and the answering higher voices of the middle-weights following its lead. Temeraire was burdened more heavily than their pursuers, carrying all his ground crew and supplies and Iskierka to boot; it seemed to Laurence she had already visibly grown. Still Temeraire managed to keep ahead, but only just, and there was no hope of losing them; the night was cold and clear, the moon barely short of full.

The miles spilled away, the Vistula River beneath them unwinding towards the sea, black and glistening occasionally with ripples; they loaded all their guns fresh, readied the flash-powder charge, and Fellowes and his harness-men struggled all the way up Temeraire’s side notch by notch with a square of spare chain-mesh to lay over Iskierka for protection. She murmured without waking and snuggled closer to Granby as they draped it over her body, hooking it to the rings of her little harness.

Laurence thought at first that the enemy had started shooting at them from too far away; then the guns sounded again and he recognized the sound: not rifles but artillery, in the distance. Temeraire turned towards it at once, to the west; out before them was opening the vast unbroken blackness of the Baltic, and the guns were Prussian guns, defending the walls of Danzig.

Chapter 17

“I AM SORRY you should have shut yourself into this box with us,” General Kalkreuth said, passing to him the bottle of truly excellent port, which Laurence could appreciate sufficiently to tell it was being wasted on his palate after the past month of drinking weak tea and watered rum.

It followed on several hours full of sleep and dinner, and the still-better comfort of seeing Temeraire eat as much as he wished. There was no rationing, at least not yet: the city’s warehouses were full, the walls fortified, and the garrison strong and well-trained; they would not easily be starved out or demoralized into surrender. The siege might last a long time; indeed the French seemed in no hurry to begin it properly.

“You see we are a convenient mousetrap,” Kalkreuth said, and took Laurence to the southern-facing windows. In the waning daylight, Laurence could see the French encampments arranged in a loose circle around the city, out of artillery-fire range, astride the river and the roads. “Daily I see our men coming in from the south, the remnants of Lestocq’s division, and falling into their hands as neatly as you please. They must have taken five thousand prisoners already at least. From the men, they only take their muskets and their parole and send them home, so as not to have the feeding of them; the officers they keep.”

“How many men do they have?” Laurence asked, trying to count tents.

“You are thinking of a sortie, and so have I been,” Kalkreuth said. “But they are too far away; they would be able to cut the force off from the city. When they decide to start besieging us in earnest and come a little closer, we may have some action; for what good it will do us, now that the Russians have made peace.

“Oh yes,” he added, seeing Laurence’s surprise, “the Tsar decided he would not throw a good army after bad, in the end, and perhaps that he did not want to spend the rest of his life as a French prisoner; there is an armistice, and they are negotiating a treaty in Warsaw, the two Emperors, as the best of friends.” He gave a bark of laughter. “So you see, they may not bother getting us out; by the end of this month I may be a citoyen myself.”

He had only just escaped the final destruction of Prince Hohenlohe’s corps, having been ordered to Danzig by courier to secure the fortress against just such a siege. “They first appeared on my doorstep less than a week later, without warning,” he said, “but since then I have had all the news I could want: that damned Marshal keeps sending me copies of his own dispatches, of all the impudence, and I cannot even throw them in his face because my own couriers cannot get through.”

Temeraire himself had barely made it over the walls; most of the French dragons enforcing the blockade were presently on the opposite side of the city, barring it from the sea, and surprise had saved them from the artillery below. However, they were now properly in the soup: several more pepper-guns had made their appearance amid the French guns since that morning, and long-range mortars were being dug into place all around.

The walled citadel itself was some five miles distant from the ocean harbor. From Kalkreuth’s windows Laurence could see the last shining curve of the Vistula River, its mouth broadening as it spilled into the sea, and the cold dark blue of the Baltic was dotted over with the white sails of the British Navy. Laurence could even count them through the glass: two sixty-fours, a seventy-four with a broad pennant, a couple of smaller frigates as escort, all of them standing only a little way off the shore; in the harbor itself, protected by the guns of the warships, lay the big lumbering transport hulks which had been waiting to go and fetch Russian reinforcements to the city: reinforcements that now would never come. Five miles distant and as good as a thousand, with the French artillery and aerial corps standing in between.

“And now they must know that we are here and cannot reach them,” Laurence said, lowering the glass. “They could hardly have avoided seeing us come in, yesterday, with the fuss the French made.”

“It’s that Fleur-de-Nuit who chased us here that is the worst trouble,” Granby said. “Otherwise I should say let us just wait until the dark of the moon and make a dash for it; but you may be sure that fellow will be waiting for us to try just such a thing; he’d have all the rest of them on us before we clear the walls.” Indeed that night they could see the big dark blue dragon as a shadow against the moonlit ocean, sitting up alertly on his haunches in the French covert, his enormous pallid eyes almost unblinking and fixed on the city walls.

“You are a good host,” Marshal Lefèbvre said cheerfully, accepting without demur another tender pigeon upon his plate, and attacking it and the heap of boiled potatoes with gusto and manners perhaps more suited to a guard-sergeant than a Marshal of France: not surprising, as he had begun his military career as such, and life as the son of a miller. “We’ve been eating boiled grass and crows with our biscuit these two weeks.”

He wore his curly hair grey and unpowdered over a round peasant’s face. He had sent emissaries to try and open negotiations, and had accepted sincerely and without hesitation Kalkreuth’s caustic reply: an invitation to dine in the city itself to discuss the matter of surrender. He had ridden up to the gates with no more escort than a handful of cavalrymen. “I’d take more risk for a dinner like this,” he said with a rolling laugh, when one of the Prussian officers commented ungraciously on his courage. “It’s not as though you’d get anything for long by putting me in a dungeon, after all, except to make my poor wife cry; the Emperor has a lot of swords in his basket.”

After he had demolished every dish and mopped up the last of the juices from his plate with bread, he promptly let himself doze off in his chair while the port went around, and woke up only as the coffee was set before them. “Ah, that gives life to a man,” he said, drinking three cups in quick succession. “Now then,” he went on briskly without a pause, “you seem like a sensible fellow and a good soldier; are you going to insist on dragging this all out?”

The mortified Kalkreuth, who had not meant in the least to suggest he would truly entertain a suggestion of surrender, said coolly, “I hope I will maintain my post with honor until I receive orders to the contrary from His Majesty.”

“Well, you won’t,” Lefèbvre said prosaically, “because he’s shut up in Königsberg just like you are here. I’m sure it’s no shame to you. I won’t pretend I’m a Napoleon, but I hope I can take a city with two-to-one odds and all the siege guns I need. I’d just as soon save the men, yours and mine both.”

“I am not Colonel Ingersleben,” Kalkreuth said, referring to the gentleman who had so quickly handed over the fortress of Stettin, “to surrender my garrison without a shot fired; you may find us a tougher nut to digest than you imagine.”

“We’ll let you out with full honors,” Lefèbvre said, refusing to rise to the bait, “and you and your officers can go free, so long as you give parole not to fight against France for twelve months. Your men too, of course, though we’ll take their muskets. That’s the best I can do, but still it’ll be a damned sight nicer than getting shot or taken prisoner.”

“I thank you for your kind offer,” Kalkreuth said, getting up. “My answer is no.”

“Too bad,” Lefèbvre said without dismay, and got up also, putting on the sword he had casually slung over the back of his chair. “I don’t say it’ll stay open forever, but I hope you’ll keep it in mind as we go on.” He paused on turning, seeing Laurence, who had been seated some distance down the table, and added, “Though I’d better say now it doesn’t apply to any British soldiers you have here. Sorry,” he said to Laurence apologetically, “the Emperor has a fixed notion over you English, and anyway we’ve orders about you in particular, if you’re the one with that big China dragon who came sailing over our heads the other day. Ha! You caught us sitting on the pot and no mistake.”

With this final laugh at his own expense, he tramped out whistling to collect his escort and ride back out of the walls, leaving all of them thoroughly depressed by his good cheer; and Laurence to spend the night imagining all the most lurid sorts of orders which Lien might have persuaded Bonaparte to make concerning Temeraire’s fate.

“I hope I need not tell you, Captain, that I have no thoughts of accepting this offer,” Kalkreuth said to him the next morning, having summoned him to breakfast to receive this reassurance.

“Sir,” Laurence said quietly, “I think I have good reason to fear being made a French prisoner, but I hope I would not ask to have the lives of fifteen thousand men spent to save me from such a fate, with God only knows how many ordinary citizens killed also. If they establish their batteries of siege guns, and I do not see how you can prevent it forever, the city must be surrendered or reduced to rubble; then we would be killed or taken in any case.”

“We have a long road to travel before then,” Kalkreuth said. “They will have slow going on their siege works, with the ground frozen, and a cold unhealthy winter sitting outside our gates; you heard what he said about their supplies. They will not make any headway before March, I promise you, and a great deal can happen in so long a time.”

His estimate seemed good at first: seen through Laurence’s glass, the French soldiers picked and spaded the ground in an unenthusiastic manner, making little headway with their old and rust-bitten tools against the hard-packed earth: saturated through, so near to the river, and frozen hard already in the early winter. The wind brought drifts and flurries of snow off the sea, and frost climbed the window-panes and the sides of his morning washbasin each day before dawn. Lefèbvre himself looked to be in no rush: they could see him, on occasion, wandering up and down the shallow beginnings of the trench, trailed by a handful of aides and his lips puckered in a whistle, not dissatisfied.

Others, however, were not so content with the slow progress: Laurence and Temeraire had been in the city scarcely a fortnight before Lien arrived.

She came in the late afternoon, out of the south: rider-less, trailed only by a small escort of two middle-weights and a courier, beating hard away from the leading edge of a winter gale that struck the city and the encampment scarcely half-an-hour after she had landed. She had been sighted by the city lookouts only, and for all the two long days of the storm, with snow obscuring all their sight of the French camp, Laurence entertained some faint hope that a mistake had been made; then he woke heart thundering the next day to a clear sky and the dying echoes of her terrible roar.

He ran outside in nightshirt and dressing gown, despite the cold and the ankle-deep snow not yet swept from the parapet; the sun was pale yellow, and dazzling on the whitened fields and on Lien’s marble-pale hide. She was standing at the edge of the French lines, inspecting the ground closely: as he and the appalled guards watched, she once again drew her breath deep, launched aloft, and directed her roar against the frozen earth.

The snow erupted in blizzard-clouds, dark clods of dirt flying, but the real damage was not to be recognized until later, when the French soldiers came warily back to work with their pickaxes and shovels. Her efforts had loosened the earth many feet down, to below the frost-line, so that their work now moved at a far more rapid pace. In a week the French works outstripped all their prior progress, the labor greatly encouraged by the presence of the white dragon, who often came and paced back and forth along the lines, watchful for any sign of slackening, while the men dug frantically.

Almost daily the French dragons now tried some sortie against the city’s defenses, mostly to keep the Prussians and their guns occupied while the infantry dug their trenches and set up their batteries. The artillery along the city walls kept the French dragons off, for the most part, but occasionally one of them would try and make a high aerial pass, out of range, to drop a load of bombs upon the city fortifications. Dropped from so great a height, these rarely hit their mark, but more often fell into the streets and houses with much resulting misery; already the townspeople, more Slavic than German and feeling no particular enthusiasm for the war, began to wish them all at Jericho.

Kalkreuth daily served his men a ration of gunnery to return upon the French, though more for their morale than for what effect it would have upon the works, still too far away to reach. Once in a while a lucky shot would hit a gun, or carry away a few of the soldiers digging, and once to their delight struck a posted standard and sent it with its crowning eagle toppling over: that night Kalkreuth ordered an extra ration of spirits sent round to all, and gave the officers dinner.

And when tide and wind permitted, the Navy would creep in closer from their side and try a fusillade against the back of the French encampment; but Lefèbvre was no fool, and none of his pickets were in range. Occasionally Laurence and Temeraire could see a small skirmish go forward over the harbor, a company of French dragons running a bombardment against the transports; but the quick barrage of canister- and pepper-shot from the warships as quickly drove them back in turn: neither side able to win a clear advantage against the other. The French might, with time enough, have built artillery emplacements enough to drive off the British ships, but they were not to be so distracted from their real goal: the capture of the city.

Temeraire did his best to fend off the aerial attacks, but he was the only dragon in the city barring a couple of tiny couriers and the hatchling, and his strength and speed had their limits. The French dragons spent their days flying idly around the city, over and over, taking it in shifts; any flagging of Temeraire’s attention, any slackening of the guard at the artillery, was an opportunity to pounce and do a little damage before dashing away again, and all the while the trenches slowly widened and grew, the soldiers as busy as an army of moles.

Lien took no part in these skirmishes, save to pause and sit watching them, coiled and unblinking of eye; her own labors were all for the siege works going steadily forward. With the divine wind, she could certainly have perpetrated a great slaughter among the men on the ramparts, but she disdained to venture herself directly on the field.

“She is a great coward, if you ask me,” Temeraire said, glad of an excuse to snort in her direction. “I would not let anyone make me hide away like that, when my friends were fighting.”

“I am not a coward!” Iskierka threw in, briefly awake enough to notice what was going on around her. No one could have doubted her claim: increasingly massive chains were required to restrain her from leaping into battle against full-grown dragons as yet twenty times her size, though daily that proportion was decreasing. Her growth was a fresh source of anxiety: though prodigious, it was not yet sufficient to enable her either to fight or to fly effectively, but would soon make her a serious burden upon Temeraire should they attempt to make their escape.

Now she rattled her latest chain furiously. “I want to fight too! Let me loose!”

“You can only fight once you are bigger, like she is,” Temeraire said hurriedly. “Eat your sheep.”

“I am bigger, much,” she said resentfully, but having dismantled the sheep, she fell shortly fast asleep again, and was at least temporarily silenced.

Laurence drew no such sanguine conclusions; he knew Lien was lacking neither in physical courage nor in skill, from the example of her duel with Temeraire in the Forbidden City. Perhaps she might yet be governed, to some extent, by the Chinese proscription against Celestials engaging in combat. But Laurence suspected that in her refusal to engage directly they rather saw the cunning restraint appropriate to a commander: the position of the French troops was thoroughly secure, and she was too valuable to risk for only insignificant gain.

The daily exhibition of her natural authority over the other dragons, and her intuitive understanding of how best they could be put to use, soon confirmed Laurence in his sense of the very material advantage to the French of her taking on what seemed so curious a role. Under her direction, the dragons forwent formation drill in favor of light skirmishing maneuvers; when not so engaged, they lent themselves to the digging, further speeding the progress of the trenches. Certainly the soldiers were uneasy at sharing such close quarters with dragons, but Lefèbvre managed them with displays of his own unconcern, walking among the laboring dragons and slapping them on their flanks, joking loudly with their crews; though Lien gave him a very astonished look on the one occasion when he used her so, as a stately duchess might to a farmer pinching her on the cheek.

The French had the advantage of superior morale, after all their lightning victories, and the excellent motive of getting inside the city walls before the worst of the winter struck. “But the essential point is, it is not only the Chinese, who grow up among them, who can grow accustomed: the French have gotten used to it,” Laurence said to Granby amid hasty bites of his bread-and-butter; Temeraire had come down to the courtyard for a brief rest after another early-morning skirmish.

“Yes, and these good Prussian fellows also, who have Temeraire and Iskierka crammed in amongst them,” Granby said, patting her side, which rose and fell like a bellows beside him; she opened an eye without waking and made a pleased drowsy murmur at him, accompanied with a few jets of steam from her spines, before closing it again.

“Why shouldn’t they?” Temeraire said, crunching several leg bones in his teeth like walnut shells. “They must recognize us by now unless they are very stupid, and know that we are not going to hurt them; except Iskierka might, by mistake,” he added, a little doubtfully; she had developed the inconvenient habit of occasionally scorching her meat before she ate it, without much attention to who if anyone might be in her general vicinity at the time.

Kalkreuth no longer spoke of what might happen, or of long waits; his men were drilling daily to make ready for an attack on the advancing French. “Once they are in range of our guns, we will sortie against them at night,” he said grimly. “Then, if we accomplish nothing more, we can at least make some distraction that may give you a chance at escaping.”

“Thank you, sir; I am deeply obliged to you,” Laurence said; such a desperate attempt, with all the attendant risk of injury or death, nevertheless recommended itself greatly when laid against the choice to quietly hand himself and Temeraire over. Laurence did not doubt for an instant that Lien’s arrival was owed to their presence: the French might be willing to take their time, more concerned with the capture of the citadel; she had other motives. Whatever Napoleon’s plans and hers for the discomfiture of Britain, to witness them as helpless prisoners, under a sure sentence of death for Temeraire, was as terrible a fate as Laurence could conceive, and any end preferable to falling into her power.

But he added, “I hope, sir, that you do not risk more than you ought, helping us so: they may resent it sufficiently to withdraw the offer of honorable surrender, should their victory seem, as I fear it now must, a question merely of time.”

Kalkreuth shook his head, not in denial: a refusal. “And so? If we took Lefèbvre’s offer; even if he let us go, what then?—all the men disarmed and dismissed, my officers bound by parole not to lift a hand for a year. What good will it do us to be released honorably, rather than to make unconditional surrender; either way the corps will be utterly broken up, just like all the rest. They have undone all the Prussian Army. Every battalion dissolved, all the officers swept into the bag—there will be nothing even left to rebuild around.”

He looked up from his maps and despondency and gave Laurence a twisted smile. “So, you see, it is not so great a thing that I should offer to hold fast for your sake; we are already looking total destruction in the face.”

They began their preparations; none of them spoke of the batteries of artillery which would be directed upon them, or the thirty dragons and more who would try and bar their way: there was after all nothing to be done about them. The date of the sortie was fixed for two days hence on the first night of the new moon, when the gloom should hide them from all but the Fleur-de-Nuit; Pratt was hammering silver platters into armor plates; Calloway was packing flash-powder into bombs. Temeraire, to avoid giving any hint of their intentions, was hovering over the city as was his usual wont; and in one stroke all their planning and work was overthrown: he said abruptly, “Laurence, there are some more dragons coming,” and pointed out over the ocean.

Laurence opened up his glass and squinting against the glare of the sun could just make out the approaching forces: a shifting group of perhaps as many as twenty dragons, coming in fast and low over the water. There was nothing more to be said; he took Temeraire down to the courtyard, to alert the garrison to the oncoming attack and to take shelter behind the fortress guns.

Granby was standing anxiously by the sleeping Iskierka in the courtyard, having overheard Laurence’s shout. “Well, that has torn it,” he said, climbing up to the city walls with Laurence and borrowing his glass for a look. “Not a prayer of getting past two dozen more of—”

He stopped. The handful of French dragons in the air were hurriedly taking up defensive positions against the newcomers. Temeraire rose up on his hind legs and propped himself against the city wall for a better view, much to the dismay of the soldiers stationed on the ramparts, who dived out of the way of his great talons. “Laurence, they are fighting!” he said, in great excitement. “Is it our friends? Is it Maximus and Lily?”

“Lord, what timing!” Granby said, joyfully.

“Surely it cannot be,” Laurence said, but he felt a sudden wild hope blazing in his chest, remembering the twenty promised British dragons; though how they should have come now, and here to Danzig of all places—but they had come in from the sea, and they were fighting the French dragons: no formations at all, only a kind of general skirmishing, but they had certainly engaged—

Taken off their guard and surprised, the small guard of French dragons fell back in disarray little by little towards the walls; and before the rest of their force could come to their aid, the newcomers had broken through their line. Hurtling forward, they set up a loud and gleeful yowling as they came tumbling pell-mell into the great courtyard of the fortress, a riot of wings and bright colors, and a preening, smug Arkady landed just before Temeraire and threw his head back full of swagger.

Temeraire exclaimed, “But whatever are you doing here?” before repeating the question to him in the Durzagh tongue. Arkady immediately burst into a long and rambling explanation, interrupted at frequent junctures by the other ferals, all of whom clearly wished to add their own mite to the account. The cacophony was incredible, and the dragons added to it by getting into little squabbles amongst themselves, roaring and hissing and trading knocks, so that even the aviators were quite bewildered with the noise, and the poor Prussian soldiers, who had only just begun to be used to have the well-behaved Temeraire and the sleeping Iskierka in their midst, began to look positively wild around the eyes.

“I hope we are not unwelcome.” The quieter voice drew Laurence around, away from the confusion, and he found Tharkay standing before him: thoroughly wind-blown and disarrayed but with his mild sardonic look unchanged, as though he regularly made such an entrance.

“Tharkay? Most certainly you are welcome; are you responsible for this?” Laurence demanded.

“I am, but I assure you, I have been thoroughly punished for my sins,” Tharkay said dryly, shaking Laurence’s hand and Granby’s. “I thought myself remarkably clever for the notion until I found myself crossing two continents with them; after the journey we have had, I am inclined to think it an act of grace that we have arrived.”

“I can well imagine,” Laurence said. “Is this why you left? You said nothing of it.”

“Nothing is what I thought most likely would come of it,” Tharkay said with a shrug. “But as the Prussians were demanding twenty British dragons, I thought I might as well try and fetch these to suit them.”

“And they came?” Granby said, staring at the ferals. “I never heard of such a thing, grown ferals agreeing to go into harness; how did you persuade them?”

“Vanity and greed,” Tharkay said. “Arkady, I fancy, was not unhappy to engage himself to rescue Temeraire, when I had put it to him in those terms; as for the rest—they found the Sultan’s fat kine much more to their liking than the lean goats and pigs which are all the fare they can get in the mountains; I promised that in your service they should receive one cow a day apiece. I hope I have not committed you too far.”

“For twenty dragons? You might have promised each and every one of them a herd of cows,” Laurence said. “But how have you come to find us here? It seems to me we have been wandering halfway across Creation.”

“It seemed so to me, also,” Tharkay said, “and if I have not lost my sense of hearing in the process it is no fault of my company. We lost your trail around Jena; after a couple of weeks terrorizing the countryside, I found a banker in Berlin who had seen you; he said if you had not been captured yet, you would likely be here or at Königsberg with the remains of the army, and here you behold us.”

He waved a hand over the assembled motley of dragon-kind, now jostling one another for the best positions in the courtyard. Iskierka, who had so far miraculously slept through all the bustle, had the comfortable warm place up against the wall of the barracks’ kitchens; one of Arkady’s lieutenants was bending down to nudge her away. “Oh, no,” Granby said in alarm, and dashed for the stairs down to the courtyard: quite unnecessarily, for Iskierka woke just long enough to hiss out a warning lick of flame across the big grey dragon’s nose, which sent him hopping back with a bellow of surprise. The rest promptly gave her a wide respectful berth, little as she was, and gradually arranged themselves in other more convenient places, such as upon the roofs, the courtyards, and the open terraces of the city, much to the loud shrieking dismay of the inhabitants.

“Twenty of them?” Kalkreuth said, staring at little Gherni, who was sleeping peacefully on his balcony; her long, narrow tail was poking in through the doors and lying across the floor of the room, occasionally twitching and thumping against the floor. “And they will obey?”

“Well; they will mind Temeraire, more or less, and their own leader,” Laurence said doubtfully. “More than that I will not venture to guarantee; in any case they can only understand their own tongue, or a smattering of some Turkish dialect.”

Kalkreuth was silent, toying with a letter opener upon his desk, twisting the point into the polished surface of the wood, heedless of damage. “No,” he said finally, mostly to himself, “it would only stave off the inevitable.”

Laurence nodded quietly; he himself had spent the last few hours contemplating ways and means of assault with their new aerial strength, some kind of attack which might drive the French away from the city. But they were still outnumbered in the air three dragons to two, and the ferals could not be counted on to carry out any sort of strategic maneuver. As individual skirmishers they would do; as disciplined soldiers they were a disaster ready to occur.

Kalkreuth added, “But I hope they will be enough, Captain, to see you and your men safely away: for that alone I am grateful to them. You have done all you could for us; go, and Godspeed.”

“Sir, I only regret we cannot do more, and I thank you,” Laurence said.

He left Kalkreuth still standing beside his desk, head bowed, and went back down to the courtyard. “Let us get the armor on him, Mr. Fellowes,” Laurence said quietly to the ground-crew master, and nodded to Lieutenant Ferris. “We will leave as soon as it is dark.”

The crew set about their work silently; they were none of them pleased to be leaving under such circumstances. It was impossible not to look at the twenty dragons disposed about the fortress as a force worth putting to real use in its defense; and the desperate escape they had planned to risk alone felt now selfish, when they meant to take all those dragons with them.

“Laurence,” Temeraire said abruptly, “wait; why must we leave them like this?”

“I am sorry to do it also, my dear,” Laurence said heavily, “but the position is untenable: the fortress must fall eventually, no matter what we do. It will do them no good in the end for us to stay and be captured with them.”

“That is not what I mean,” Temeraire said. “There are a great many of us, now; why do we not take the soldiers away with us?”

“Can it be done?” Kalkreuth asked; and they worked out the figures of the desperate scheme with feverish speed. There were just enough transports in the harbor to squeeze the men aboard, Laurence judged, though they should have to be crammed into every nook from the hold to the manger.

“We will give those jack tars a proper start, dropping onto them out of nowhere,” Granby said dubiously. “I hope they may not shoot us out of the air.”

“So long as they do not lose their heads, they must realize that an attack would never come so low,” Laurence said, “and I will take Temeraire to the ships first and give them a little warning. He at least can hover overhead, and let the passengers down by ropes; the others will have to land on deck. Thankfully they are none of them so very large.”

Every silk curtain and linen sheet in the elegant patrician homes was being sacrificed to the cause, much against their owners’ wishes, and every seamstress of the city had been pressed into service, thrust into the vast ballroom of the general’s residence to sew the carrying-harnesses under the improvisational direction of Fellowes. “Sirs, begging your pardon, I won’t stand on oath they’ll any of them hold,” he said. “How these things are rigged in China, ordinary, I’m sure I don’t know; and as for what we are doing, it’ll be the queerest stuff dragon ever wore or man ever rode on, I can’t say plainer than that.”

“Do what you can,” General Kalkreuth said crisply, “and any man who prefers may stay and be made prisoner.”

“We cannot take the horses or the guns, of course,” Laurence said.

“Save the men; horses and guns can be replaced,” Kalkreuth said. “How many trips will we need?”

“I am sure I could take at least three hundred men, if I were not wearing armor,” Temeraire said; they were carrying on their discussion in the courtyard, where he could offer his opinions. “The little ones cannot take so many, though.”

The first carrying-harness was brought down to try; Arkady edged back from it a little uneasily until Temeraire made some pointed remarks and turned to adjust a strap of his own harness; at which the feral leader immediately presented himself, chest outthrust, and made no further difficulties: aside from turning himself round several times in an effort to see what was being done, and thus causing a few of the harness-men to fall off. Once rigged out, Arkady promptly began prancing before his comrades; he looked uncommonly silly, as the harness was partly fashioned out of patterned silks that had likely come from a lady’s boudoir, but he plainly found himself splendid, and the rest of the ferals murmured enviously.

There was rather more difficulty getting men to volunteer to board him, until Kalkreuth roundly cursed them all for cowards and climbed on himself; his aides promptly followed him up in a rush, even arguing a little over who should go up first, and with this example before them the reluctant men were so shamed they too began clamoring to board; to which Tharkay, observing the whole, remarked a little dryly that men and dragons were not so very different in some respects.

Arkady, not the largest of the ferals, being leader more from force of personality than size, was able to lift off the ground easily with a hundred men dangling, perhaps a few more. “We can fit nearly two thousand, across all of them,” Laurence said, the trial complete, and handed the slate to Roland and Dyer to make them do the sums over, to be sure he had the numbers correct: much to their disgruntlement; they felt it unfair to be set back to schoolwork in so remarkable a situation. “We cannot risk overloading them,” Laurence added. “They must be able to make their escape if we are caught at it in the middle.”

“If we don’t take care of that Fleur-de-Nuit, we will be,” Granby said. “If we engaged him tonight—?”

Laurence shook his head, not in disagreement but in doubt. “They are taking precious good care he is not exposed. To get anywhere near we would have to come in range of their artillery, and get directly into their midst; I have not seen him stir out of the covert since we arrived. He only watches us from that ridge, and keeps well back.”

“They would hardly need the Fleur-de-Nuit to tell them we were doing something tomorrow, if we made a great point of singling him out tonight,” Tharkay pointed out. “He had much better be dealt with just before we begin.”

No one disagreed, but puzzling out the means left them at sixes-and-sevens a while. They could settle on nothing better than staging a diversion, using the littler dragons to bombard the French front ranks: the glare would interfere with the Fleur-de-Nuit’s vision, and in the meantime the other dragons would slip out to the south, and make a wider circle out to sea.

“Though it won’t do for long,” Granby said, “and then we will have all of them to deal with, and Lien, too: Temeraire can’t fight her with three hundred men hanging off his sides.”

“An attack such as this will rouse up all the camp, and someone will see us going by sooner or late,” Kalkreuth agreed. “Still it will gain us more time than if the alarm were raised at once; I would rather save half the corps than none.”

“But if we must circle about so far out of the way, it will take a good deal more time, and we will never get so many away,” Temeraire objected. “Perhaps if we only went and killed him very quickly and quietly, we might then get away before they know what we are about; or at least thumped him hard enough he could not pay any more attention—”

“What we truly need,” Laurence said abruptly, “is only to put him quietly out of the way; what about drugging him?” In the thoughtful pause, he added, “They have been feeding the dragons livestock dosed with opium all through the campaign; if we slip him one more thoroughly saturated, likely he will not notice any queer taste, at least not until it is too late.”

“His captain will hardly let him eat a cow if it’s still wandering in circles,” Granby said.

“If the soldiers are eating boiled grass, the dragons cannot be eating as much as they like, either,” Laurence said. “I suspect he will prefer to ask forgiveness than permission, if a cow goes by him in the night.”

Tharkay undertook to manage it. “Find me some nan-keen trousers and a loose shirt, and give me a dinner-basket to carry,” he said. “I assure you I will be able to walk through the camp quite openly; if anyone stops me I will speak pidgin to them and repeat the name of some senior officer. And if you give me a few bottles of drugged brandy for them to take from me, so much the better; no reason we cannot let the watch dose themselves with laudanum, too.”

“But will you be able to get back?” Granby asked.

“I do not mean to try,” Tharkay said. “After all, our purpose is to get out; I can certainly walk to the harbor long before you will have finished loading, and find a fisherman to bring me out; they are surely doing a brisk business with those ships.”

Kalkreuth’s aides were crawling around the courtyard on hands and knees, drawing out a map in chalks, large enough for the feral dragons to make out and, by serendipity, colorful and interesting enough to command their attention. The bright blue stripe of the river would be their guide: it passed through the city walls and then curved down to the harbor, passing through the French camp as it went.

“We will go single-file, keeping over the water,” Laurence said, “and pray be sure the other dragons understand,” he added anxiously to Temeraire, “they must go very quietly, as if they were trying to creep up on some wary herd of animals.”

“I will tell them again,” Temeraire promised, and sighed a very little. “It is not that I am not happy to have them here,” he confided quietly, “and really they have been minding me quite well, when one considers that they have never been taught, but it would have been so very nice to have Maximus and Lily here, and perhaps Excidium; he would know just what to do, I am sure.”

“I cannot quarrel with you,” Laurence said; apart from all considerations of management, Maximus alone could likely have taken six hundred men or more, being a particularly large Regal Copper. He paused and asked, tentatively, “Will you tell me now what else has been worrying you? Are you afraid they will lose their heads, in the moment?”

“Oh; no, it is not that,” Temeraire said, and looked down, prodding a little at the remains of his dinner. “We are running away, are we not?” he said abruptly.

“I would be sorry to call it so,” Laurence said, surprised; he had thought Temeraire wholly satisfied with their plan, now that they meant to carry out the Prussian garrison with them, and for his own part thought it a maneuver to applaud: if they could manage it. “There is no shame in retreating to preserve one’s strength for a future battle, with better hope of victory.”

“What I mean is, if we are going away, then Napoleon really has won,” Temeraire said, “and England will be at war for a long time still; because he means to conquer us. So we cannot ask the Government to change anything, for dragons; we must only do as we are told, until he is beaten.” He hunched his shoulders a little and added, “I do understand it, Laurence, and I promise I will do my duty and not always be complaining; I am only sorry.”

It was with some awkwardness in the face of this handsome speech that Laurence recognized, and had then to convey to Temeraire, the change in his own sentiments, an awkwardness increased by the bewildered Temeraire’s dragging out, one after another, all of Laurence’s own earlier protests on the subject.

“I have not, I hope, changed in essentials,” Laurence said, struggling for justification in his own eyes as well as his dragon’s, “but only in my understanding. Napoleon has made manifest for all the world to see the marked advantages to a modern army of closer cooperation between men and dragons; we return to England not only to take up our post again, but bearing this vital intelligence, which makes it not merely our desire but our duty to promote such change in England.”

Temeraire required very little additional persuasion, and all Laurence’s embarrassment, at seeming to be fickle, was mitigated by his dragon’s jubilant reaction, and the immediate necessity of presenting him with many cautions: every earlier objection remained, of course, and Laurence knew very well they would face the most violent opposition.

“I do not care if anyone else minds,” Temeraire said, “or if it takes a long time; Laurence, I am so very happy, I only wish we were at home already.”

All that night and the next day they continued to labor over the harnesses; the cavalry-horses’ tack was soon seized upon and cannibalized, and the tanners’ shops raided. Dusk was falling and Fellowes was still frantically climbing with his men all over the dragons, sewing on more carrying-loops, of anything which was left—leather, rope, braided silk—until they seemed to be festooned with ribbons and bows and flounces. “It is as good as Court dress,” Ferris said, to much muffled hilarity, as a ration of spirits was passed around, “we ought to fly straight to London and present them to the Queen.”

The Fleur-de-Nuit took up his appointed position at the usual hour, settling back on his haunches for the night’s duty; as the night deepened, the edges of his midnight blue hide slowly faded into the general darkness, until all that could be seen of him were his enormous dinner-plate eyes, milky white and illuminated by the reflections of the campfires. Occasionally he stirred, or turned round to have a look towards the ocean, and the eyes would vanish for a moment; but they always came back again.

Tharkay had slipped out a few hours before. They watched, anxiously; for an eternity counting by the heartbeat, for two turns counting by the glass. The dragons were all ranged in lines, the first men aboard and ready to go at once. “If nothing comes of it,” Laurence said softly, but then the palely gleaming eyes blinked once, twice; then for a little longer; then again; and then with the lids drooping gradually to cover them, they drifted slowly and languorously to the ground, and the last narrow slits winked out of sight.

“Mark time,” Laurence called down to the aides-decamp standing anxiously below, holding their hourglasses ready; then Temeraire leapt away, straining a little under the weight. Laurence found it queer to be conscious of so many men aboard, so many strangers crowding near him: the communal nervous quickening of their breath like a rasp, the muffled curses and low cries silenced at once by their neighbors, their bodies and their warmth muting the biting force of the wind.

Temeraire followed the river out through the city walls: staying over the water so that the living sound of the current running down to the sea should mask the sound of his wings. Boats drawn up along the sides of the river creaked their ropes, murmuring, and the great brooding bulk of the harbor crane protruded vulturelike over the water. The river was smooth and black beneath them, spangled a little with reflections, the fires of the French camp throwing small yellow flickers onto the low swells.

To their either side, the French encampment lay sprawling over the banks of the river, lantern glims showing here and there the slope of a dragon’s body, the fold of a wing, the pitted blue iron of a cannon-barrel. Lumps that were soldiers lay sleeping in their rough bivouacs, huddled near one another under blankets of coarse wool, overcoats, or only mats of straw, with their feet poking out towards the fires. If there were any sounds to be heard from the camp, however, Laurence did not know it; his heart was beating too loudly in his ears as they went gliding by, Temeraire’s wingbeats almost languidly slow.

And then they were breathing again as the fires and lights fell behind them; they had come safely past the edges of the encampment with one mile of soft marshy ground to the sea, the sound of the surf rising ahead: Temeraire put on eager speed, and the wind began to whistle past the edges of his wings; somewhere hanging off the rigging below, Laurence heard a man vomiting. They were already over the ocean; the ship-lanterns beckoned them on, almost glaring bright with no moon for competition. As they drew near Laurence could see a candelabrum standing in the stern-windows of one of the ships, a seventy-four, illuminating the golden letters upon her stern: she was the Vanguard, and Laurence leaned forward and pointed Temeraire towards her.

Young Turner crept out onto Temeraire’s shoulder and held up the night-signal lantern where it could be seen, showing the friendly signal out its front, one long blue light, two short red, with thin squares of cloth laid over the lantern-hole to make the colors, and then the three short white lights to request a silent response; and again, as they drew nearer and nearer. There was a delay; had the lookout not seen? was the signal too old? Laurence had not seen a new signal-book in almost a year.

But then the quick blue–red–blue–red of the answer shone back at them, and there were more lights coming out on deck as they descended. “Ahoy the ship,” Laurence called, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“Ahoy the wing,” came the baffled reply, from the officer of the watch, faint and hard to hear, “and who the devil are you?”

Temeraire hovered carefully overhead; they flung down long knotted ropes, the ends thumping hollowly upon the deck of the ship, and the men began to struggle loose from the harness with excessive haste to be off. “Temeraire, tell them to go carefully, there,” Laurence said sharply. “The harness won’t stand hard use, and their fellows will be next aboard.”

Temeraire rumbled at them low, in German, and the descent calmed a little; still further when one man, missing his grasp, slipped and went tumbling down with a too-loud cry that broke only with the wet melon-thump sound of his head striking against the deck. Afterwards the others went more warily, and below, their officers began to force them back against the ship’s rails and out of the way, using hands and sticks to push them into place instead of shouted orders.

“Is everyone down?” Temeraire asked Laurence; only a handful of the crew were left, up on his back, and at Laurence’s nod, Temeraire carefully let himself down and slipped into the water beside the ship, scarcely throwing up a splash. There was a great deal of noise beginning to rise from the deck, the sailors and soldiers talking at one another urgently and uselessly in their different tongues, and the officers having difficulty reaching one another through the crowd of men; the crew were showing lanterns wildly in every direction.

“Hush!” Temeraire said to them all sharply, putting his head over the side, “and put away those lights; can you not see we are trying to keep quiet? And if any of you do not listen to me or begin to scream, like great children, just because I am a dragon, I will pick you up and throw you overboard, see if I do not,” he added.

“Where is the captain?” Laurence called up, into a perfect silence, Temeraire’s threat having been taken most seriously.

“Will? Is that Will Laurence?” A man in a nightshirt and cap leaned over the side, staring. “The devil, man, did you miss the sea so much you had to turn your dragon into a ship? What is his rating?”

“Gerry,” Laurence said, grinning, “you will do me the kindness to send out every last boat you have to carry the message to the other ships; we are bringing out the garrison, and we must get them embarked by morning, or the French will make the country too hot to hold us.”

“What, the whole garrison?” Captain Stuart said. “How many of them are there?”

“Fifteen thousand, more or less,” Laurence said. “Never mind,” he added, as Stuart began to splutter, “you must pack them in somehow, and at least get them over to Sweden; they are damned brave fellows, and we aren’t leaving them behind. I must get back to ferrying; God only knows how long we have until they notice us.”

Going back to the city they passed over Arkady coming with his own load; the feral leader was nipping at the tails of a couple of the younger members of his flock, keeping them from meandering off the course; he waved his tail-tip at Temeraire as they shot by, Temeraire stretched out full-length and going as fast as he might, as quiet as he might. The courtyard was in controlled havoc, the battalions marching out one after another in parade-ground order to their assigned dragons, boarding them with as little noise as could be managed.

They had marked each dragon’s place with paint on the flagstones, already scratched and trampled by claws and boots. Temeraire dropped into his large corner, and the sergeants and officers began herding the men quickly along: each climbed up the side and thrust his head and shoulders through the highest open loop, getting a grip on the harness with his hands or clinging to the man above, trying for footholds on the harness.

Winston, one of the harness-men, flew over gasping, “Anything that needs fixing, sir?” and ran off instantly on hearing a negative, to the next dragon; Fellowes and his handful of other men were dashing about with similar urgency, repairing loose or broken bits of harness.

Temeraire was ready again; “Mark time,” Laurence called.

“An hour and a quarter, sir,” came back Dyer’s treble; worse than Laurence had hoped, and many of the other dragons were only getting away with their second loads alongside them.

“We will get faster as we go along,” Temeraire said stoutly, and Laurence answered, “Yes; quickly as we can, now—” and they were airborne again.

Tharkay found them again as they dropped their second load of men down to one of the transports in the harbor; he had somehow gotten on deck, and now he came swarming hand-over-hand up the knotted ropes, in the opposite direction from the descending soldiers. “The Fleur-de-Nuit took the sheep, but he did not eat the whole thing,” he said quietly, when he had gotten up to Laurence’s side. “He ate only half, and hid the rest; I do not know it will keep him asleep all night.”

Laurence nodded; there was nothing to be done for it; they had only to keep going, as long as they could.

A suggestion of color was showing in the east, now, and too many men still crowded the lanes of the city, waiting to get aboard. Arkady was showing himself not useless in a time of crisis; he chivvied along his ferals to go quicker, and himself had already managed eight circuits. He came sailing in for his next load even as Temeraire finally lifted away with his seventh: his larger loads took more time to get aboard and disembark. The other ferals too were holding up bravely: the little motley-colored one whom Keynes had patched up, after the avalanche, was showing himself particularly devoted, and ferrying his tiny loads of twenty men with great determination and speed.

There were ten dragons on the decks of the ships, unloading, as Temeraire landed, mostly the larger of the ferals; the next pass would see the city close to empty, Laurence thought, and looked at the sun: it would be a close-run race.

And then abruptly from the French covert rose a small, smoking blue light; Laurence looked in horror as the flare burst over the river: the three dragons who were in transit at the moment squawked in alarm, jerking from the sudden flash of light, and a couple of men fell from their carrying-harnesses screaming to plunge into the river.

“Jump off! Jump, damn you,” Laurence bellowed at the men still climbing down from Temeraire’s harness. “Temeraire!”

Temeraire called it out in German, almost unnecessarily; the men were leaping free from all the dragons, many falling into the water where the ships’ crews began frantically to fish them out. A handful were stuck still on the carrying-harnesses, or clinging to the ropes, but Temeraire waited no longer; the other dragons came leaping into the air behind him, and as a pack they stormed back to the city, past the shouts and now-blazing lanterns of the French encampment.

“Ground crew aboard,” Laurence shouted through his speaking-trumpet as Temeraire came down into the courtyard for the last time, and outside the French guns sounded their first tentative coughing roars. Pratt came running with the last dragon egg in his arms, wrapped and bundled around with padding and oilskin, to be thrust into Temeraire’s belly-rigging; and Fellowes and his men abandoned their makeshift harness-repairs. All the ground crew came swarming aboard with the ease of long practice on the ropes, getting quickly latched to the harness proper.

“All accounted for, sir,” Ferris yelled from farther along Temeraire’s back; he had to use his speaking-trumpet to be audible. Above their heads, the artillery was sounding from the walls, the shorter hollow coughs of howitzers, the whistling whine and fall of mortar shells; in the courtyard, shouting now, Kalkreuth and his aides were directing the last battalions aboard.

Temeraire picked Iskierka up in his mouth and slung her around onto his shoulders. She yawned and picked up her head drowsily. “Where is my captain? Oh! Are we fighting now?” Her eyes opened all the way at the rolling thunder of the guns going off one after another over their heads.

“Here I am, don’t fret,” Granby called, clambering up the rest of the way to catch her by the harness, just in time to keep her from leaping off again.

“General!” Laurence shouted; Kalkreuth waved them on, refusing, but his aides snatched him bodily and heaved him up: the men let go their own grips on the harness to take hold of him and hand him up along, until he was deposited next to Laurence, breathing hard and with his thin hair disarrayed: his wig had vanished in the ascent. The drummer was beating the final retreat; men were running down from the walls, abandoning the guns, some even leaping from the turrets and ledges straight onto the dragons’ backs, grabbing blindly for some purchase.

The sun was coming up over the eastern ramparts, the night breaking up into long, narrow ranked clouds like rolled cigars, blue and touched all along their sides with orange fire; there was no more time. “Go aloft,” Laurence shouted, and Temeraire gave a shattering roar and leapt away with a great thrust of his hindquarters, men dangling from his harness; some slipped away grasping vainly at the air, and fell down to the stones of the courtyard below, crying out. All the dragons came rising into the air behind him, roaring with many voices, with many wings.

The French dragons were coming out of their covert and going to the pursuit, their crews still scrambling to get into battle-order; abruptly Temeraire slowed, to let the ferals pass him, and then he put his head around and said, “There, now you may breathe fire at them!” and with a squeak of delight, Iskierka whipped her head around and let loose a great torrent of flame over Temeraire’s back and into their pursuers’ faces, sending them recoiling back.

“Go, now, quickly!” Laurence was shouting; they had won a little space, but Lien was coming: rising from the French camp bellowing orders; the French dragons, milling about in their riders’ confusion, fell instantly in line with her. There was no sign of her earlier self-restraint: seeing them now on the verge of escape, she was beating after them with furious speed, outdistancing all the French dragons but the littlest couriers, who desperately fought to keep pace with her.

Temeraire stretched long and went flat-out, legs gathered close, ruff plastered against his neck, wings scooping the air like oars; they devoured the miles of ground as Lien did the distance between them, the thunder-coughing of the long guns of the warships beckoning them to the safety of their sheltering broadside. The first acrid wisps were in their faces; Lien was stretching out her talons, not yet in reach, and the little couriers were making wild attempts on their sides, snatching away a few men in their talons; Iskierka was gleefully firing off at them in answer.

Abruptly they were blind, plunging into a thick black-powder cloud; Laurence’s eyes were streaming as they came out again, clear and away past the encampment and still going fast. The city and its fading lights was dwindling behind them with every wing-stroke; they shot out low over the harbor, the last of the men being hauled up out of the water and into the transports, and here came the great rolling drum-beat of the cannon: canister-shot whistling by thick as hailstones behind them, to halt the French dragons.

Lien burst through the cloud and tried to come after them, even through the rain of hot iron, but the little French couriers shrilled, protesting; some threw themselves on her back, clinging, to try and drag her out of range. She shook them all off with a great heave, and would have pressed on, but one more, crying out, flung himself before her with desperate courage: his hot black blood was flung spattering upon her breast as the shot which would have struck her tore instead through his shoulder, and she halted at last, her battle-fury broken, to catch him up when he would have fallen from the sky.

She withdrew then with the rest of her anxious escort of couriers; but hovering out of range over the snow-driven shore, she voiced one final longing and savage cry of disappointment, as loud as if she might crack the sky. It chased Temeraire out of the harbor and beyond, leaving a ghost of itself still ringing in their ears, but the sky ahead was opening up to a fierce deep cloudless blue, an endless road of wind and water before them.

A signal was flying from the mast of the Vanguard. “Fair wind, sir,” Turner said, as they passed the ships by. Laurence leaned into the cold sea-wind, bright and biting; it scrubbed into the hollows of Temeraire’s sides to clean away the last of the pooled eddies of smoke, spilling away in grey trailers behind them. Riggs had given the riflemen the order to hold their fire, and Dunne and Hackley were already calling habitual insults to each other as they sponged out their barrels and put their powder-horns away.

It would be a long road still; as much as a week’s flying, with this contrary wind in their faces and so many smaller dragons to keep in company; but to Laurence it seemed he already beheld the rough stone coast of Scotland, heather gone brown and purplish-sere and the mountains mottled with white, past the green hills. A great hunger filled him for those hills, those mountains, thrusting up sharp and imperious, the broad yellowing squares of harvested farmland and the sheep grown fat and woolly for winter; the thickets of pine and ash in the coverts, standing close around Temeraire’s clearing.

Out ahead of them, Arkady began something very like a marching-song, chanting lines answered by the other ferals, their voices ringing out across the sky each to each; Temeraire added his own to the chorus, and little Iskierka began to scrabble at his neck, demanding, “What are they saying? What does it mean?”

“We are flying home,” Temeraire said, translating. “We are all flying home.”