by Naomi Novik
“But we can’t drive the herd all that way by tomorrow,” Lloyd said.
“Then you will have to bring them as close as you can, and we will manage somehow,” Temeraire said; he was done listening to difficulties. “I have seen Napoleon’s army fight, and in a week they will be in London, so we must be, also.”
“We are a hundred fifty miles from London,” Lloyd protested.
“All the more reason to travel fast,” Temeraire said, and flung himself into the air.
Chapter 5
LAURENCE STOOD BEWILDERED in the empty grounds, and called Temeraire’s name a few times. There was no answer but the mumbled echoes that the cliffs gave back, and the momentary attention of a small red squirrel which paused to look at him, before continuing on its way. Elsie landed again, behind him. “Not a wing in the sky, sir,” Hollin said, “But we found—”
Elsie carried them up to a cave, reaching deep into the mountain face. Though the light was failing rapidly, Laurence could trace with his fingers the letters of Temeraire’s name, carved deeply into the rock: so at least he had been here, and well enough to leave this mark. They managed to fashion a torch to inspect it, but the cave was too tidy, inside, to guess when his habitation had ended: no bones or other remnants of food.
It was only two days since the landing, but with as many dragons as lived in the breeding grounds, if the herdsmen had all abandoned their posts, and the regular delivery of cattle had been interrupted, the provisions would quickly have been spent. The dragons must have scattered from hunger, and likely in all the directions of the rose.
“Well, let us not borrow trouble,” Hollin said, consoling. “He is a clever fellow, and it cannot have been so long since they left. There are some fresh bones down by the pen, from this morning by the look of them.”
Laurence shook his head. “I hope he would not have been so foolish, as to stay to the last,” he answered, low. “So many dragons will undoubtedly be eating up all the local supply, as they go, and he must have more food than a smaller beast.”
“I am a smaller beast,” Elsie said, a little anxiously, “but I must have something to eat, too, and there is nothing here.”
They went to Llechrhyd, the nearest settlement they found, and bought her a sheep from a small cottager, who told them the village by some lucky chance had not been raided. “Flew off east, all of them, at once this morning,” the old woman told Laurence, while Elsie discreetly made her dinner out behind the stable, “like a plague of crows: it was dark half-an-hour, all them passing over, and us sure they would fall on us in a moment; more than that I can’t say.”
“Hollin,” Laurence said, when he had turned away, disheartened, “I cannot tell you what your duty is; we have no very good intelligence, I am afraid, and if he is flying to feed himself, we cannot well imagine where he may have gone.”
“Well, sir,” Hollin said, “they said to bring you back with him, and I suppose those are my orders until I hear otherwise. Anyways, I dare say we will find him tomorrow, first thing or good as. It’s not as though he’s so easy to miss.”
But this was not reckoning with the confusion of dozens of beasts all flung out upon the countryside at once. Certainly dragons, in the plural, had been seen everywhere—dreadful marauding beasts, and no one knew what things were coming to when they were just allowed to go flying around loose. But as to one particular dragon, black with a ruff, no-one had anything to say.
One farmer thirty miles on, belligerent enough to be brave, had not hidden in his cellar during the visitation, and swore that a giant dragon had eaten four of his cows, informing him they were being confiscated for the war effort and he should be repaid by the Government. He even showed them where the dragon had scratched a mark in an old oak-tree for his reimbursement, and for a moment Laurence entertained hopes. But it was not a Chinese mark, only an X clumsily carved through the bark, with four scratches below. “Red and yellow, like fire,” the oldest boy said, peering at them from over the window-sill of the house, despite his mother’s restraining hand, and sank them completely.
Ten dragons had stopped to drink at the lake on the grounds of a stately house in Monmouthshire, the housekeeper told them, anxiously, and eaten some of the deer: ten neat X’s were marked in the dirt by the lakeshore. “I am sure I could not tell you if they were black or red or spotted green and yellow, it was all I had to do to keep breathing, with half my maids fainted dead away,” she said. “And then one of the creatures came to the door, and asked us through it if we had any curtains. Red ones,” she added. “We threw outside all the ones from the ballroom, and then they took them and went away.”
Laurence was baffled: curtains? He would have understood better if they had demanded the silver plate. But at least they were moving in a group, and in the earnest excuses for the pillaging, he thought he saw Temeraire’s influence, if not his presence: it was so near a mimic to the Chinese mode, which they had witnessed, where dragons purchased goods by making their mark for the supplier.
The following day, they discovered another farmer with a collection of marks, who rather astonishingly was not unhappy: the dragons had eaten four of his cows yesterday, he agreed, but that very morning some men had come through with a string of cattle, and given him replacements, which he pointed out in their field: four handsome beef cattle, better in all honesty than the scrawnier animals in the farmer’s own herd.
Seven dragons had been seen in Pen-y-Clawdd, four had landed by the river in Llandogo, and perhaps one of them had been black—yes, certainly one had been black. Then a dozen had been seen—no, two dozen—no, a hundred—numbers shouted by the crowd in the common room of an inn, growing steadily more implausible. Laurence gave it no credit at all, but a few miles farther along, Elsie landed them in a torn-up meadow, with a neatly dug necessary-pit on the low side away from the water, filled in but still fragrant, with signs of occupation by at least some number of dragons. “We must be getting right close, then,” Hollin said, encouragingly, but the next day, no one had so much as seen a wing-tip, though Elsie went miles around in widening rings to make inquiries, for hours and hours together. They had one and all vanished into the air.
“WE WILL BE GETTING CLOSE to the French tomorrow, so beginning today we will fly when it is dark,” Temeraire said, “and try and be as quiet as we can; so pass the word to everyone, not to fly somewhere if you see lights; or if you smell cows, because they will bellow and run and make a fuss.”
The others nodded, and Temeraire rose up on his haunches to inspect their own pen of cattle. He missed Gong Su very much. It was not that cooked food was so much pleasanter, he did not care about the taste at all at present. But Gong Su could stretch a single cow amongst five hungry dragons, if only there were rice, or something else like to cook it with.
The farther they got from Wales, the more complicated everything became. Lloyd said that it was expensive to bring the cows so far, because they must be fed along the road, and they could not be brought very quickly, because they would sicken and stop being fat and good to eat. It helped a great deal that Majestatis had suggested the notion of borrowing cows, in advance, and using the later ones to repay; but if they were always flying about snatching cows from the nearby farms, the French were sure to hear about it: Marshal Lefèbvre’s forces were busy snatching cows themselves.
“Maybe we oughtn’t be having the cows driven to us,” Moncey said. “We could always go fetch them for ourselves, and come back.”
“That is no good at all,” Perscitia said severely. “The longer we must fly to get to the supply, the more food we must eat only to reach there and come back, which is a waste, and also it means more time flying back and forth, instead of fighting.”
“Supply-lines,” Gentius said, dolefully, shaking his head. “War is all about supply-lines; my third captain told me.”
He had insisted on coming along, although he could not really see very well to fly anymore, and tired easily; but he was grown light enough that he
could be carried along by any of the heavy-weights, and it was very satisfying to everyone to think they had a Longwing with them.
Aside from the difficulty about the food, Temeraire was pleased with their progress; he and Perscitia had devised several maneuvers, which even Ballista had allowed to be clever; and Moncey and the others had brought them a good deal of news about the French, although they could only sneak so close before it became too likely they should be caught; Temeraire was trying to think how they might better find a way to spy. They had worked out how to organize their camp so it did not take a great deal of room, by letting the smaller dragons sleep atop the big, which was warmer anyway, and after the first awkward day had learned to dig their necessary-pit far away from their water.
That had been very unpleasant, and five of the dragons had got quite sick, from being so thirsty they had drunk anyway, despite the smell. A few others had grown bored and gone off on their own, all of them ferals who had never served, but some of those had come back when they had not been able to find easy food on their own, which brought them straight back to the question of supply.
“We can go and fetch a great many cattle here, if they are drugged with laudanum,” Temeraire said, “but it seems to me, if the French are going about taking cows, we would do better to eat their food first, instead of our own, and let them have the bother of gathering it; and that way we may fight and eat together.”
It made a sensible strategy, they all agreed, and for Temeraire it was nearly more justification than cause: he wanted badly to fight. The urge to violence, not particular but general, hunger for some explosive action, was always stirring in him now, craving release, and Perscitia and Moncey often eyed him anxiously. Sometimes Temeraire would even rouse up, not from sleep but from some halfway condition, and find himself deserted: the others all flown away some distance, crouched down low and watching him.
“It isn’t healthy, how he pens it up,” Gentius said loudly after their meeting, not seeing Temeraire close enough to overhear. “You fellows don’t know what it is like, having a really fine captain and losing her: it is worse than having all your treasure stolen. That is why he goes so queer, now and again. A proper battle, that is what he needs, a bit of blood,” and Temeraire wanted it very much. He did not like the sensation of being a passenger, it seemed to him, in his own life, unable not to feel as he chose, and if a battle would repair it, he was almost tempted to go seek one out at once.
But he had brought everyone else along; he could not abandon them to their own devices now or drag them into a mindless squabble, even if he would have liked one. Instead he brooded on strategy, and when the urge grew more difficult to bear, he went away and curled himself tightly with his head against his flank, beneath the dark huddle of his wing, and murmured to himself from the Principia Mathematica, which Laurence had read to him so often he had it all by heart, and if he spoke low, and flattened his voice, he might almost imagine he heard Laurence instead, reading to him in the rain, safe and sheltered beside him.
But he need not have struggled so hard to keep it in: the very next morning, Minnow and Reedly came into camp flying so quick they had to skip-hop a few paces along the ground to stop, full of news: “Pigs,” Reedly said, panting, “so many of them, a whole pen back of their army, and some of ’em are big as ponies.”
“Pigs,” Gentius said thoughtfully, cracking an eye. “Pigs are good eating, all the way through.”
“Pigs are easy to keep,” Lloyd put in. “We drive ’em into the forest and they will feed themselves, and you go in and take one when you want, or round ’em up to drive them along.”
“And there are only a couple of old Chevaliers to guard them,” Minnow said. “They are big, but lazy, and they were fast asleep when we saw.”
“Very good,” Temeraire said, attempting to sound cool and serene, although his tail wanted to thump the ground in an undignified way. “Lloyd, you and your men will go with Moncey and the Winchesters. You will wait until we have attacked, and drawn everyone off, and then you will go and take the pigs and bring them along here.
“Now,” he said, turning, and swept a patch of dirt smooth with the tip of his tail. “Minnow, show me what the camp looks like—”
They set off a couple of hours before evening: Minnow and Reedly were very sure there was not a Fleur-de-Nuit with the company, and so they would attack at night, when everyone would be asleep and most surprised, and have the most difficulty in chasing after them when the pigs had been seized. The little dragons would come behind, that much was decided; and Temeraire after some thinking put one of their Chequered Nettles, Armatius, in front, carrying Gentius upon his back. Ballista and Majestatis went on either side of him, and Requiescat came behind them, and to either side of him a couple of Yellow Reapers carrying their flags.
These were not very elegant, only some velvet curtains tied up to saplings, but every real army had flags, and red was an auspicious color. Streaming out they made a fine show, especially carried by the Yellow Reapers to either side of Requiescat’s orange and red. Everyone brightened as they billowed out, and the Reapers were especially pleased, and held themselves proudly. Even Requiescat turned his head as they flew and said, “Well, those are something like, anyway,” to Temeraire, who only inclined his head, stiffly; he did not by then trust himself to speak.
They came near the camp with the sun already down behind them, and small cooking-fires lit, all over, among the tents. “Gentius,” Temeraire said, “when I roar, you will go in first—only show them your wings, and spit somewhere near the guns, and then fly back to Armatius and go back to camp. You cannot see well enough to be spitting once we have flown in, but they will not know that, and I dare say it will make them very alarmed.”
“Ha ha!” Gentius said. “Fighting again, at my age; I feel like a hatchling,” and he fluttered out his wings a little, making ready.
Temeraire broke away and flew ahead towards the camp, climbing as he did, and hovered directly above it; the moon had not yet risen, and he did not think they would notice him. It was very peculiar to be so close to the enemy but not fighting yet, to start a battle when he chose; and not wholly comfortable. It had always seemed so very plain to him, and quite natural, when one should dart in and begin; but that was when he only needed to think of himself. Now there were so many others to consider, and the enemy, too. Perhaps, it occurred to him suddenly, there were a great many other French dragons nearby, which they had not seen or heard of, who would appear out of nowhere and turn the tide. Then they should lose, and it would be his fault; he should have lost the day.
The prospect was alarming as no ordinary fighting would have been, and Temeraire almost thought perhaps he would go back, and ask the others what they thought. He looked back northwest: he could just make them out, a great mass of shadows darker than the trees and the fields below. They were coming on as slowly as they could, wingbeats lazy so they drifted low and then swooped back up, describing great arcs instead of flying straight, all of them waiting for his signal. If only he might have a little advice—
But he was quite alone. He trembled, but there was no use being cowardly; there was no-one to help him, and he must decide. Below, the two Chevaliers slept just one hill beyond the low rough earthwork barricade, where the sentries strolled along the line, casually. In the camp, fires were scattered about, and some horses—the wind drifted a little, bringing some eddy with it, and one of the horses raised its head and whickered, uneasily; another pawed at the ground and tossed its head.
“Ce n’est rien, ce n’est rien,” a man said, eating his supper near them.
Temeraire drew his lungs full, thought of Laurence, and roared out his challenge.
He kept roaring a long time. The Chevaliers jerked up in their clearing at once, their wings opening even before their eyes had, and began roaring furious answer, their heads twisting this way and that as they searched the sky for him. Men came racing from the tents about them; Temeraire saw a captain wit
h flashes of gold on his shoulder, being put up. They sprang into the air half-crewed, men leaping for the harness from the ground as they rose.
“Je suis là!” Temeraire called out, propelling himself with great thrusts backwards away from the camp, and roared again. “Me voilà!” They wheeled mid-air and came barreling straight towards him, teeth bared, and he hovered and waited and then dropped himself straight out of the way, his wings folded closed and tight while they shot by, white flashes of rifle-fire sparking along their backs—and behind them, Gentius came soaring gracefully down over the camp on his wide-spread enormous wings, and spat acid over ten cannon in a row.
Bells of alarm were clanging madly now, torches lit, men rushing out to form into rows as the handful of horses screamed and struggled against their handlers. Temeraire could not help a wild surging sensation of excitement almost overpowering, as Requiescat and Ballista and Majestatis came thundering down through the camp, claws and tails dragging through tents and pickets and fires all alike, scattering them, and the red banners glowing in the fires that bloomed at once all over.
He dived down and joined their long straight row, stretching his ruff wide. They tore across the full length of the camp without a pause, and whipped back up aloft trailing canvas and rope and anything else they had snagged upon their claws. Once they had gone high enough again they could not be shot, they pulled it all off and let it drop down upon the camp.
Perscitia had suggested the notion, as they had no bombs, “especially if you can get some tents pulled up, and drop them on the pepper guns,” she had said, and it answered remarkably well—most of the tents bundled up as they dropped, but one luckily unfurled and floated down in a heap atop a company of infantry trying to aim the long-barreled pepper guns, the bayonets poking out of it and making them only worse entangled.
“Oh!” Temeraire said exultantly. “Oh, it is working! Perscitia, look—” but she was nowhere near to be seen, and he could not spend time finding her. The Chevaliers had wheeled about to come back, but they were holding off—the sizzling crisp of Gentius’s acid was sharp in the air for anyone to smell if only they put out their tongue, and though it was dark, the fires leaping up from the camp glowed red against Temeraire’s belly, and Majestatis and Requiescat and Ballista, enough to make it plain that there were four heavy-weights lined up opposite. Quickly Temeraire turned and roared out, “Chalcedony! Go around and at them!”