NAOMI NOVIK

Victory of Eagles

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 2008

Copyright © Naomi Novik 2008

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 2014

Cover illustrations © Dominic Harman

Naomi Novik asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007256761

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007318612

Version: 2019-02-26

For Dr. Sonia Novik

who gave this book a home

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Part II

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Part III

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Keep Reading

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PART I

Chapter One

The breeding grounds were called Pen Y Fan, after the hard, jagged slash of mountain rising like an axe-blade at their heart, rimed with ice along its edge and rising barren over the moorland. It was a cold, wet Welsh autumn already, coming on towards winter, and the other dragons were sleepy and remote, uninterested in anything but meals. A few hundred of them were scattered throughout the grounds, mostly established in caves or on rocky ledges, wherever they could fit themselves. No comfort or even order was provided for them, except for the feedings, and the mowed-bare strip of ground around the borders, where torches were lit at night to mark the lines past which they might not go. The town-lights glimmered in the distance, cheerful and forbidden.

Temeraire had hunted out and cleared a large cavern on his arrival, to sleep in; but it would be damp, no matter what he did in the way of lining it with grass, or flapping his wings to move the air, which in any case did not suit his notions of dignity. Much better to endure every unpleasantness with stoic patience, although that was not very satisfying when no-one would appreciate the effort. The other dragons certainly did not.

He was quite sure he and Laurence had done as they ought, in taking the cure to France, and no one sensible could disagree; but just in case, Temeraire had steeled himself to meet with either disapproval or contempt, and he had worked out several very fine arguments in his defence. Most importantly, of course, it had been a cowardly, sneaking way of fighting: if the Government wished to beat Napoleon, they ought to fight him directly, and not make his dragons sick to make him easy to defeat; as if British dragons could not beat French dragons, without cheating. ‘And not only that,’ he added, ‘but it would not only have been the French dragons who would have died. Our friends from Prussia, who are imprisoned in their breeding grounds, would also have gotten sick. And it might perhaps even have spread so far as China; and that would be like stealing someone else's food, even when you are not hungry; or breaking their eggs.’

He made this impressive speech to the wall of his cave, as practice. They had refused to give him his sand-table, and he had no-one of his crew to jot it down for him. He did not have Laurence, who would have helped him work out just what to say. So he repeated the arguments over to himself quietly, instead, so he would not forget them. And if these arguments did not suffice, he might point out that it was, after all, he who had brought the cure back in the first place – he and Laurence, with Maximus and Lily and the rest of their formation – and if anyone had a right to say where it should be shared out, they did. No one would even have known of it if Temeraire had not happened to be sick in Africa, where the medicinal mushrooms grew.

He might have saved himself the trouble. No one accused him of anything, nor, as he had privately, and a little wistfully thought possible, had they hailed him as a hero. They simply did not care.

The older dragons, not feral but retired, were a little curious about the latest developments in the war, but only distantly. They were more inclined to reminisce about their own battles from earlier wars, and the rest had only provincial indignation over the recent epidemic. They cared that their own fellows had sickened and died; they cared that the cure had taken so long to reach them; but it did not mean anything to them that dragons in France had also been ill, or that the disease would have spread, killing thousands if Temeraire and Laurence had not taken over the cure. They also did not care that the Lords of the Admiralty had called it treason, and sentenced Laurence to die.

They had nothing to care for. They were fed, and there was enough for everyone. If the shelter was not pleasant, it was no worse than what the dragons were used to, from the days of their active service. None of them had heard of pavilions, or ever thought they might be made more comfortable than they were. No-one molested their eggs; the groundskeepers took them away with infinite care in wagons lined with straw, and hot-water bottles and woollen blankets in the wintertime. They would bring back reports until the eggs were hatched and of no more concern; it was safer, even, than keeping them oneself, so even the dragons who had not cared to take a captain at all, would often as not hand over their own eggs.

They could not go flying very far, because they were fed at no set time but randomly, from day to day, so if one went out of ear-shot of the bells, one was likely to come too late, and go hungry. So there was no larger society to enjoy, no intercourse with the other breeding grounds or with the coverts, except when some other dragon came from afar, to mate. But even that was arranged for them. Instead they sat, willing prisoners in their own territory, Temeraire thought bitterly. He would never have endured it if not for Laurence; only for Laurence, who would surely be put to death at once if Temeraire did not obey.

He held himself aloof from their society at first. There was his cave to be arranged: despite its fine prospect it had been left vacant for being inconveniently shallow, and he was rather crammed-in; but there was a much larger chamber beyond it, just visible through holes in the back wall, which he gradually opened up with the slow and cautious use of his roar. Slower, even, than perhaps necessary: he was very willing to have the task consume several days. The cave had then to be cleared of debris, old gnawed bones and inconvenient boulders, which he scraped out painstakingly even from the corners too small for him to lie in, for neatness' sake. He found a few rough boulders in the valley and used them to grind the cave walls a little smoother, by dragging them back and forth, throwing up a great cloud of dust. It made him sneeze, but he kept on; he was not going to live in a raw untidy hole.

He knocked down stalactites from the ceiling, and beat protrusions flat into the floor, and when he was satisfied, he arranged some attractive rocks and dead tree-branches, twisted and bleached white along the sides of his new antechamber, with careful nudges of his talons. He would have liked a pond and a fountain, but he could not see how to bring the water up, or how to make it run when he had got it there, so he settled for picking out a promontory on Llyn y Fan Fawr which jutted into the lake, and considering it also his own.

To finish, he carved the characters of his name into the cliff-face by the entrance, although the letter R gave him some difficulty and came out looking rather like the reversed numeral four. When he was done with that, routine crept up and devoured his days. He would rise, when the sun came in at the cave mouth, take a little exercise, nap, rise again when the herdsmen rang the bell, eat, then nap and exercise again, and then go back sleep; there was nothing more. He hunted for himself, once, and so did not go to the daily feeding; later that day one of the small dragons brought up the grounds-master, Mr. Lloyd, and a surgeon, to be sure that he was not ill. They lectured him on poaching sternly enough to make him uneasy for Laurence's sake.

For all that, Lloyd did not think of him as a traitor, either. He did not think enough of Temeraire to consider him capable. The grounds-master cared only that his charges stay inside the borders, ate, and mated; he recognized neither dignity nor stoicism, and anything Temeraire did out of the ordinary was only a bit of fussing. ‘Come now, we have a fresh lady Anglewing visiting today,’ Lloyd would say, ‘quite a nice little piece; we will have a fine evening, eh? Perhaps we would like a bite of veal, first? Yes, we would, I am sure,’ providing the responses with his questions, so Temeraire had nothing to do but sit and listen. Lloyd was a little hard of hearing, so if Temeraire did try to say, ‘No, I would rather have some venison, and you might roast it first,’ he was sure to be ignored.

It was almost enough to put one off making eggs. Temeraire was growing uncomfortably sure that his mother would not have approved of how often they wished him to try, or how indiscriminately. Lien would certainly have sniffed in the most insulting way. It was not the fault of the female dragons sent to visit him, they were all very pleasant, but most of them had never managed to produce an egg before, and some had never even been in a real battle or done anything interesting at all. They were frequently embarrassed, as they did not have any suitable present that might have made up for their position; but it was not as though he could pretend that he was not a very remarkable dragon, even if he liked to; which he did not, very much. He would have tried to pretend for Bellusa, a poor young Malachite Reaper without a single action to her name, sent by the Admiralty from Edinburgh. She had miserably offered him a small knotted rug, which was all her confused captain would afford: it might have made a blanket for Temeraire's largest talon.

‘It is very handsome,’ Temeraire said awkwardly, ‘and so cleverly done; I admire the colours very much,’ He tried to drape it carefully over a small rock, by the entrance, but the gesture only made her look more wretched, and she burst out, ‘Oh, I do beg your pardon; he wouldn't understand in the least, and thought that I meant I would not like to, and then he said—’ and she stopped abruptly in even worse confusion, so Temeraire was sure that whatever her captain had said, it had not been at all nice. He had not even had the satisfaction of delivering one of his cherished retorts, because it was not as though she herself had said anything rude. So, although he had not much wanted to, he obliged anyway. He was determined to be patient, and quiet; he would not cause any trouble. He would be perfectly good.

Temeraire did not let himself think very much about Laurence; he did not trust himself. It was hard to endure the perpetual sensation of deep unease, almost overpowering when he thought of how he did not know how Laurence was, what his condition might be.

He was sure he knew where his breastplate was at every moment, and his small gold chain, these being in his own possession; his talon-sheaths had been left with Emily, and he was quite certain she could be trusted to keep them safe. Ordinarily he would have trusted Laurence, to keep himself safe; but the circumstances were not what they ought to be, and it had been so very long. The Admiralty had promised that so long as he behaved, Laurence would not be hanged, but they were not to be trusted, not at all. Temeraire resolved twice a week to go to Dover, at once, or to London – only to make inquiries, to see they had not, only to be sure. But unwanted reason always asserted itself, before he had even set out. He must not do anything that might persuade the Government he was unmanageable, and therefore that Laurence was of no use to them. He must be as complaisant and accommodating as ever he might.

It was a resolution already sorely tried by the end of his third week, when Lloyd brought him a visitor, admonishing the gentleman loudly, ‘Remember now, not to upset the dear creature, but to speak nice and slow and gentle, like to a horse,’ which was infuriating enough, even before the gentleman in question was named to him as one Reverend Daniel Salcombe.

‘Oh, you,’ Temeraire said, which made Salcombe look taken aback, ‘Yes, I know perfectly well who you are. I have read your very stupid letter to the Royal Society, and I suppose now you have come to see me behave like a parrot, or a dog.’

Salcombe stammered excuses, but it was plainly the case. He began laboriously to read to Temeraire a prepared list of questions, something quite nonsensical about predestination, but Temeraire would have none of it. ‘Pray be quiet; St. Augustine explained it much better than you, and it did not make any sense even then. Anyway, I am not going to perform for you, like some circus animal. I really cannot be bothered to speak to anyone so uneducated that he has not even read the Analects,’ he added, guiltily omitting Laurence; but then Laurence did not set himself up as a scholar, and write insulting letters about people he did not know, ‘And as for dragons not understanding mathematics, I am sure I know more on the subject than do you.’

He scratched out a triangle into the dust, and labelled the two shorter sides. ‘There; tell me the length of the third side, and then you may talk. Otherwise, go away, and stop pretending you know anything about dragons.’

The simple diagram had already perplexed several gentlemen, when he had put it to them during a party in the London covert, rather disillusioning Temeraire as to the general understanding of mathematics among the human populace. Reverend Salcombe evidently had not paid much attention to that part of his education either, for he stared, and coloured to his mostly bare pate. Then he turned to Lloyd furiously, ‘You have put the creature up to this, I suppose! You prepared the remarks—’ The unlikelihood of this accusation striking him, perhaps, as soon as he met Lloyd's gaping, uncomprehending face. He immediately amended, ‘they must have been given to you, by someone, and you fed them to him, to embarrass me—’

‘I never, sir,’ Lloyd protested, to no avail, and it annoyed Temeraire so much that he nearly indulged himself in a very small roar; but in the last moment he exercised great restraint, and only growled. Salcombe fled hastily all the same, Lloyd running after him, calling anxiously for the loss of his tip. He had been paid, then, to let Salcombe come and gawk at Temeraire, as though he really were a circus animal. Temeraire was only sorry he had not roared, or better yet thrown them both in the lake.

And then his temper faded, and he drooped. He realized too late, that perhaps he ought to have talked to Salcombe, after all. Lloyd would not read to him, or even tell him anything of the world. If Temeraire asked slowly and clearly enough to be understood, he only said, 'Now, let's not be worrying ourselves about such things, no sense in getting worked up. Salcombe, however ignorant, had at least wished to have a conversation; and he might have been prevailed upon to read something from the latest Proceedings, or a newspaper. Oh, what Temeraire would have done for a newspaper!

During this time the heavyweight dragons had been finishing their own dinners. The largest, a big Regal Copper, spat out a well-chewed grey and bloodstained ball of fleece, belched tremendously, and lifted away for his cave. Now the rest came in a rush, middle-weights and light-weights and the smaller courier-weight beasts landing to take their own share of the sheep and cattle, calling to one another noisily. Temeraire did not move, but only hunched himself a little deeper while they squabbled and played around him He did not look up even when one, with narrow blue-green legs, set herself directly before him to eat, crunching loudly upon sheep bones.

‘I have been considering the matter,’ she informed him, after a little while, around a mouthful, ‘and in all cases, where the angle is ninety degrees, as I suppose you meant to draw it, the length of the long side must be a number which, multiplied by itself, is equal to the lengths of the two shorter sides, each multiplied by themselves, added.’ She swallowed noisily, and licked her chops clean. ‘Quite an interesting little observation. How did you come to make it?’

‘I never did,’ Temeraire muttered, ‘it is the Pythagorean theorem; everyone who is educated knows it. Laurence taught it to me,’ he added, making himself even more miserable.

‘Hmh,’ the other dragon said, rather haughtily, and flew away.

But she reappeared at Temeraire's cave the next morning, uninvited, and poked him awake with her nose, saying, ‘Perhaps you would be interested to learn that there is a formula which I have invented, which can invariably calculate the power of any sum? What does Pythagoras have to say to that?’

‘You did not invent it,’ Temeraire said, irritable at having been woken up early, with so empty a day to be faced. ‘That is the binomial theorem, Yang Hui made it a very long time ago,’ and he put his head under his wing and tried to lose himself again in sleep.

He thought that would be the end of it, but four days later, while he lay by his lake, the strange dragon once again landed beside him. She was bristling furiously and her words tumbled over one another as she rushed, ‘There, I have just worked out something quite new: the prime number coming in a particular position, for instance the tenth prime, is always very near the value of that position, multiplied by the exponent one must put on the number p to get that same value – the number p,’ she added, ‘being a very curious number, which I have also discovered, and named after myself.’

‘Certainly not,’ Temeraire said, rousing with smug contempt when he had made sense of what she was talking about. ‘It is not p, it is e; you are talking of the natural logarithm. And as for the rest about prime numbers, it is all nonsense. Consider the prime fifteen—’ and then he paused, working out the value in his head.

‘You see,’ she said, triumphantly, and after working out another two-dozen examples, Temeraire was forced to admit that the irritating stranger might indeed be correct.

‘And you needn't tell me that this Pythagoras invented it first,’ the other dragon added, with her chest puffed out, ‘or Yang Hui, because I have inquired, and no-one has ever heard of either of them. They do not live in any of the coverts or anywhere around breeding grounds, so you may keep your tricks. Who ever heard of a dragon named anything like Yang Hui; such nonsense.’

Temeraire was neither despondent nor tired enough to forget how dreadfully bored he was, and so he was less inclined to take offence. ‘He is not a dragon, neither of them are,’ he said, ‘and they are both dead anyway, for years and years; Pythagoras was a Greek, and Yang Hui was from China.’

‘Then how do you know they invented it?’ she demanded, suspiciously.

‘Laurence read it to me,’ Temeraire said. ‘Where did you learn any of it, if not out of books?’

‘I worked it out myself,’ the dragon said. ‘There is nothing much else to do, here.’

Her name was Perscitia. She was an experimental crossbreed from a Malachite Reaper and a lightweight Pascal's Blue, who had come out rather larger, slower, and more nervous than the breeders had hoped for. Nor was her colouring ideal for any sort of camouflage. Her body and wings were bright blue and streaked with shades of pale green, with widely scattered spines along her back. Perscitia was not very old, either, unlike most of the once-harnessed dragons in the breeding grounds. She had given up her captain. ‘Well,’ Perscitia said, ‘I did not mind him. He showed me how to do equations, but I do not see any use in going to war and getting oneself shot at or clawed up, for no good reason. And, when I would not fight, he did not much want me anymore,’ a statement airily delivered, but Perscitia avoided Temeraire's eyes, making it.

‘Well, if you mean formation fighting, I do not blame you; it is very tiresome, Temeraire said. 'They do not approve of me in China,’ he added, to be sympathetic, ‘because I do fight. Celestials are not supposed to.’

‘China must be a very fine place,’ Perscitia said, wistfully, and Temeraire was by no means inclined to disagree. Sadly he thought, that if only Laurence had been willing, they might now be together in Peking, strolling in the gardens of the Summer Palace again. He had not had the chance to see it during autumn.

And then he paused, raised his head and said, ‘You made inquiries? What do you mean by that? You cannot have gone out?’

‘Of course not,’ Perscitia said. ‘I gave Moncey half my dinner, and he went to Brecon for me and put the question out on the courier circuit. This morning he went again, and received word that no one had ever heard of those names.’

‘Oh—’ Temeraire said, his ruff rising, ‘Pray; who is Moncey? I will give him anything he likes, if he can find out where Laurence is. He may have all my dinner, for a week.’

Moncey was a Winchester, who had slipped the leash at his hatching and eeled right out of the barn door, straight past a candidate he did not care for; and so made his escape from the Corps. Being a gregarious creature, he had been coaxed eventually into the breeding grounds more by the promise of company than anything else. Small and dark purple, he looked like any other Winchester at a distance, and excited no comment if seen abroad, or was absent from the daily feeding. As long as his missed meals were properly compensated for, he was very willing to oblige.

‘Hm, how about you give me one of those cows, the nice fat sort they save for you special, when you are mating,’ Moncey said. ‘I would like to give Laculla a proper treat,’ he added, exultingly.

‘Highway robbery,’ Perscitia said indignantly, but Temeraire did not care at all; he was learning to hate the taste of the cows, particularly when it meant yet another miserably awkward evening session, and he nodded on the bargain.

‘But no promises, mind,’ Moncey cautioned. ‘I'll put it about, have no fear, but it'll take many a week to hear back if you want it sorted out proper to all the coverts, and to Ireland, and even so maybe no-one will have heard anything.’

‘There is sure to have been word,’ Temeraire said quietly, ‘if he is dead.’

* * *

The ball came in down through the ship's bow and crashed recklessly the length of the lower deck, the drum-roll of its passage heralding its progression with castanets of splinters raining against the walls for accompaniment. The young Marine guarding the brig had been trembling since the call to go to quarters had sounded above; a mingling, Laurence thought, of anxiety, the desire to be doing something and the frustration at being kept at so miserable a post. A sentiment he shared from his still more miserable place within the cell. The ball seemed to be rolling at a leisurely pace as it approached the brig. The Marine put out his foot to stop it before Laurence could protest.

He had seen the same impulse have much the same result during other battles. The ball took off the better part of the young man's foot and continued unperturbed into and through the metal grating, skewing the door off its top hinge before finally embedding itself, two inches deep into the solid oak wall of the ship. Laurence pushed the swinging door open and climbed out of the brig, taking off his neckcloth to tie up the Marine's foot. The young man was staring mutely at his bloody stump, and needed a little coaxing to limp along to the orlop. ‘As clean a shot as I have ever seen,’ Laurence said, encouragingly, and left him there for the surgeons. The steady roar of cannon-fire was going on overhead.

He climbed the stern ladder-way and plunged into the roaring confusion of the gun-deck. Daylight shining through jagged gaping holes in the ship's east-pointed bows, made a glittering cloud of the smoke and dust kicked up from the cannon. Roaring Martha had jumped her tackling, and five men were fighting to hold her long enough against the roll of the ship to get her secure again. At any moment, the gun might go running wild across the deck, crushing men and perhaps smashing through the side. ‘There girl, hold fast, hold fast—’ The captain of the gun-crew spoke to the canon as if she were a skittish horse, his hands flinching away from the smoking-hot barrel. One side of his face was bristling with splinters standing out like hedgehog spines.

No one knew Laurence in the smoky red light, he was only another pair of hands. His flight gloves were still in his coat pocket. Wearing them, he clapped on to the metal and pushed her by the mouth of the barrel, his palms stinging even through the thick leather, and with a final thump she heaved over into the channel again. The men tied her down and stood around trembling like well-run horses, panting and sweating.

There was no return fire, no calls passed along from the quarterdeck, no ship in view through the gun port. The ship was griping furiously where he put his hand on the side, a sort of low moaning complaint as if she were trying to go too close to the wind. Water glubbed in a curious way against her sides, a sound wholly unfamiliar, and he knew this ship. He had served on Goliath four years in her midshipman's mess as a boy, as lieutenant for another two and at the Battle of the Nile; he would have said he could recognise every note of her voice.

He put his head out of the porthole and saw the enemy crossing their bows and turning to come about for another pass She was only a frigate: a beautiful trim thirty-six gun ship which could have thrown not half of Goliath's broadside; an absurd combat on the face of it, and he could not understand why they had not turned to rake her across the stern. There was only a little grumbling from the bow-chasers above, not much of a reply to be making, though there was a great deal shouting.

Looking forward along the ship, he saw that she had been pierced by an enormous harpoon through her side, as if she was a whale. The end inside the ship had several curved barbs, which had been jerked back to bite into the wood. And when Laurence put his head out of the port-hole, he caught sight of the cable at the harpoon's other end swinging grandly up and up, into the air, where two enormous heavyweight dragons were holding on to it: a Grand Chevalier, and a Parnassian, middle-aged, likely traded to France during an earlier peacetime.

It was not the only harpoon: three more cable-lines dangled from their grip to the bow, and Laurence could see another two stretched from the stern. The dragons were too far aloft for him to note all of the details, with the ship's motion underneath him, but the cables were somehow laced into their harnesses. By flying together and pulling, they were pivoting the ship's head into the wind. The dragons were too far aloft for round-shot to reach them. One of them sneezed, from the action of the frantic pepper guns, but they had only to beat their wings to get away from the pepper, hauling the ship merrily along while they did it.

‘Axes, axes,’ the lieutenant was shouting; then the clattering of iron as the bosun's mates came spilling weapons across the floor: hand-axes, cutlasses, knives. The men snatched them up and began to reach out of the portholes to hack at the ropes, but the harpoon shafts were two feet long, and the ropes had enough slackness to prevent good purchase. Someone would have to climb out of a porthole to saw at them: open and exposed against the hull of the ship, with the frigate coming around again.

No one moved at first; then Laurence reached out and took a short cutlass, from the heap. The lieutenant looked into his face, and knew him, but said nothing. Turning to the opening Laurence worked his shoulders out, hands quickly beneath his feet to support him, and eeled out as the lieutenant started calling again. Shortly, a rope was flung down to him from the deck above, so he could brace himself against the hull. Many faces peered over anxiously, all strangers; then another man came sliding down over the rail, and another, to work on the other harpoons.

Making a bright target against the ship's paintwork, Laurence began the grim effort of sawing away at the cable, strands fraying one at a time. The rope was cable-laid: three hawsers of three strands, well wormed and thick as a man's wrist, parcelled in canvas.

If he were killed, at least his family would be spared the embarrassment of his hanging. He was only alive now to be a chain round Temeraire's neck, until the Admiralty judged the dragon pacified enough by age and habit that Laurence might be dispensed. That could mean he faced years, long years, mouldering in gaol or in the bowels of a ship.

It was not a purposeful thought, no guilty intention; it only crossed his mind involuntarily, while he worked. He had his back to the ocean and could not see anything of the frigate or the larger battle beyond: his horizon was the splintered paint of Goliath's side, lacquered shine made rough by splinters and salt, and the cold sea was climbing up her hull and spraying his back. Distant roars of cannon-fire spoke, but Goliath had let her guns fall silent, saving her powder and shot for when they should be of some use. The loudest noises in his ears were the grunts and effort of the men hanging near-by, sawing at their own harpoon lines. Then one of them gave a startled yell and let go his rope, falling away into the churning ocean; a small darting courier-beast, a Chasseur-Vocifère, was plunging at the side of the ship with another harpoon.

The beast held it something like a jouster in a medieval tournament, with the butt rigged awkwardly into a cup attached to its harness, for support, and two men on its back bracing the rig. The harpoon thumped dully against the ship's side, near to where Laurence hung, and the dragon's tail slapped a wash of salt water up into his face, heavy stinging thickness in his nostrils and dripping down the back of his throat as he choked it out. The dragon lunged away again even as the Marines fired off a furious volley, trailing the harpoon on its line behind it: the barb had not bitten deep enough to penetrate. The hull was pockmarked with the dents of earlier attempts, a good dozen for each planted harpoon marring her spit-and-polish paintwork.

Laurence wiped salt from his face against his arm and shouted, ‘Keep working, man, damn you,’ at the other seaman still hanging near him. The first strand was going, tough fibres fraying away from the cutlass edge and fanning out like a broom. He began on the second, rapidly, although the blade was going dull.

The roar of the cannon made him jerk, involuntarily, and the ball came whistling across the water, skipping two, three times along the wave-tops, like a stone thrown by a boy. It looked as though it came straight for him, an illusion. The whole ship groaned as the ball punched at the bows, and splinters flew like a sudden blizzard out of the open portholes. They peppered Laurence's legs, stinging like a flock of bees, and his stockings were quickly wet with blood. He clung on to the harpoon arm and kept sawing; the frigate was still firing, her broadside rolling on, and the roundshot hurtled at them again and again. There was a sickening deep sway to Goliath's motion now as she took the pounding.

He had to hand the cutlass back and shout for a fresh one to get through the last strand. Then at last the cable was cut loose and swinging away free, and they pulled him back in. He staggered when he tried to stand, and went to his knees slipping in blood: stockings laddered and soaked through red; his best breeches, the ones he had worn for the trial, were pierced and spotted. He was helped to sit against the wall, and turned the cutlass on his own shirt, for bandages to tie up the worst of the gashes; no-one could be spared to help him to the surgeons. The other harpoons had been cut and they were moving at last, coming around. All the crews were fixed by their guns, savage in the dim red glow, teeth bared and mazed with blood from cracked lips and gums, their faces black with sweat and grime, ready to take vengeance.

Suddenly, a loud pattering like rain or hailstones came down: small bombs with short fuses dropped by the French dragons. Lightning flashes were visible through the boards of the deck. Some rolled down through the ladderways and burst in the gun-deck, hot flash-powder smoke and the burning glare of pyrotechnics, painful to the eyes. Then the cannon were speaking as they hove around in view of the frigate, and the order came down to fire.

There was nothing for a long moment but the mindless fury of the ship's guns going: impossible to think in that roaring din, smoke and hellish fire in her bowels choking away all reason. Laurence reached up for the port-hole when they had paused, and hauled himself up to look. The French frigate was reeling away under the pounding, her foremast down and hulled below the water-line, so each wave slapping away poured into her.

There was no cheering. Past the retreating frigate, the breadth of the Channel spread open before them. All the great ships of the blockade were as entangled and harassed as they had been. Bucephalas and the mighty Gloucester, both 100 guns, were near enough to recognize. They wore cables rising up to three and four dragons; a flock of French heavyweights and middleweights industriously tugging them every which way. The ships were firing steadily but uselessly, clouds of smoke that did not reach the dragons above.

And between them, half a dozen French ships-of-the-line, come out of harbour at last, were stately going by, escort to an enormous flotilla. A hundred and more, barges and fishing boats and even rafts in lateen rig, all of them crammed with soldiers, the wind at their backs and the tide carrying them towards the shore, tricolours streaming proudly from their bows towards England.

With the Navy paralysed, only the dragons of the Corps were left to stop the advance. But the French warships were firing something like pepper into the air above the flotilla, in quantities that could never have been afforded if it were. It burned. Red spark fragments glowed like fireflies against the black smoke-cloud hanging over the boats, shielding them from aerial attack. One of the transport boats was near enough that Laurence saw the men had their faces covered with wet kerchiefs and rags, or huddled under oilcloth sheets. The British dragons made desperate attempts to dive, but recoiled from the clouds, and had instead to fling down bombs from too great a height: ten splashing into the wide ocean for every one which came near enough to make a wave against a ship's hull. The smaller French dragons harried them too, flying back and forth and jeering in shrill voices. There were so many of them, Laurence had never seen so many: wheeling almost like birds, clustering and breaking apart, offering no easy target to the British dragons in their stately formations.

One great Regal Copper, who might have been Maximus: red and orange and yellow against the blue sky, flew at the head of a formation with Yellow Reapers in lines to each wing, but Laurence did not see Lily. The Regal roared, audible faintly even over the distance, and bulled his formation through a dozen French lightweights to come at a great French warship: flames bloomed from her sails as the bombs at last hit, but when the formation rose away again, one of the Reapers was streaming crimson from its belly and another was listing. A handful of British frigates, too, were valiantly trying to dash past the French ships to come at the transports: with some little success, but they were under heavy fire, and if they sank a dozen boats, half the men were pulled aboard others, so close were the little transports to one another.

‘Every man to his gun,’ the lieutenant said sharply. Goliath was turning to go after the transports. She would be passing between Majestueux and Héros, a broadside of nearly three tons between them. Laurence felt it when her sails caught the wind properly again: the ship leaping forward like an eager racehorse held too long. She had made all sail. He touched his leg: the blood had stopped flowing, he thought. He limped back to an empty place at a gun.

Outside, the first transports were already hurtling onward to the shore, lightweight dragons wheeled above to shield them while they ran artillery onto the ground. One soldier rammed the standard into the dirt, the golden eagle atop catching fire with the sunlight: Napoleon had landed in England at last.

Chapter Two

The question sent out, Temeraire found the prospect of an answer almost worse. Before, the world itself had been undecided. If Laurence was still in it he might as easily stay alive as not, and so long as Temeraire continued to believe, Laurence was alive, at least in part. At best, the news would report that he was still imprisoned. As the day crept onward, Temeraire began to feel that certainty was a weak reward for the risk of receiving an answer to the contrary, a possibility Temeraire could not bear to envision. A great blankness engulfed him if he tried, like a grey sky full of clouds above and below, fog all around.

He wanted distraction badly, and there was none, except to talk to Perscitia, who was at least interesting, if infuriating also. Perscitia liked to think herself a great genius, and she was certainly unusually clever, even if she could not quite grasp the notion of writing. Occasionally, to Temeraire's discomfiture, she would leap quite far ahead, and come out with some strange notion, from none of the books Temeraire had read, that could neither be disproved, nor quarrelled with.

But she was so jealous of her discoveries that she flew into a temper when Temeraire informed her that any of them had been made before, and she was resentful of the hierarchy of the breeding grounds, which denied her the just desserts of her brilliance. Because of her middling size, she had to make do with an inconvenient poky clearing down in the moorlands, about which she complained endlessly. It provided little more than an overhang to shelter from the rain.

‘So why do you not take a better place?’ Temeraire said, exasperated. ‘There are several very nice ones directly over there, in the cliff face; you would be much more comfortable there, I am sure.’

‘One does not like to be quarrelsome’ Perscitia said being evasive and entirely false: she liked very well to be quarrelsome, and Temeraire did not understand what that had to do with taking an empty cave, either, but at least it diverted the subject.

The only event of note was that it rained for a week without stopping, with a steady driving wind that came in to all the cave-mouths and permeated the ground, and made everyone perfectly miserable. Temeraire was very glad of his antechamber, where he could shake off the water and dry before retreating to the comfort of his larger chamber. Several of the smallest dragons, courier-weights living in the hollows by the river, were flooded out of their homes entirely. Feeling sorry for their muddy and bedraggled state, Temeraire invited them to stop in his cavern, while the rain continued, so long as they first washed off the mud. They were, at least, loud with appreciation for his arrangements.

A few days later, when he was once again solitary and brooding over Laurence, a shadow crossed over the mouth of his cave. It was the big Regal Copper, Requiescat; he ducked in through the antechamber and came into Temeraire's main chamber, uninvited. He gazed around the room with an impressed air, and nodding said, ‘It is just as nice as they said.’

‘Thank you,’ Temeraire said, thawed a little by the compliment. He did not feel much like company, but remembered he must be polite. ‘Will you sit down? I am sorry I cannot offer you tea.’

‘Tea?’ Requiescat said absently. He was busy poking his nose into the corners of the cave, even putting his tongue out to smell them, as if he were at home; Temeraire's ruff began to bristle.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, stiffly, ‘I am afraid you have found me unprepared for guests,’ which he thought was a clever way of hinting that Requiescat might go away again.

But the Regal Copper did not take the hint; or at any rate he did not choose to go. but instead settled himself comfortably along the back of the cave and said, ‘Well, old fellow, I am afraid we will have to swap.’

‘Swap?’ Temeraire said, puzzled, until he divined that Requiescat meant caves. ‘I do not want your cave,’ adding hastily, ‘I am sure that it is very nice, but I have just got this one arranged to suit me.’

‘This one is much bigger now,’ Requiescat explained, ‘and it is much nicer in the wet. Mine,’ he added regretfully, ‘has been full of puddles all week; wet clear through to the back.’

‘Then I can hardly see why I would change,’ Temeraire said, still more baffled, and then he sat up, outraged and astonished, and let his ruff spread fully. ‘Why, you are a damned scrub,’ he said. ‘How dare you come here, and behave like a visitor, when all the time it is a challenge? I have never seen anything so devious in my life; it is the sort of thing Lien would do,’ he added, cuttingly. ‘You may get out at once. If you want my cave you may try to take it. I will meet you anytime you like: now, or at dawn tomorrow.’

‘Now, now, let us not get excited,’ Requiescat said soothingly. ‘I can see you are a young fellow, right enough. A challenge, really! It is nothing of the sort; I am the most peaceable fellow in the world, and I do not want to fight anyone. I am sorry if I was ham-handed about it. It is not that I want to take your cave, you see—’ Temeraire did not see, in the least, ‘—it is a question of appearances. Here you are a month, with the nicest cave, and you nowhere near the biggest either.’ Requiescat preened his own side, a little. He certainly outweighed any dragon Temeraire had seen, except Maximus and Laetificat. ‘We have our own little ways here, of arranging things to keep everyone comfortable. No one wants any fighting to cut up our peace, not when there is no need. It would be a nasty-tempered sort of fellow who would get to fighting over one cave versus another, both of them large and handsome; but distinctions must be preserved.’

‘Stuff,’ Temeraire said. ‘It sounds to me like you have become so lazy, having all your meals given to you and nothing to do, that you do not even want to put yourself to the trouble of properly bullying other people. Or maybe,’ he added, having made up his mind to be really insulting, ‘you are just a coward, and thought I was the same. Well, I am not, and I am not going to give you my cave, either, no matter what you do.’

Requiescat did not rise to the remarks, but only shook his head dolefully. ‘There, I am not a clever chap, so I have made a mull of explaining, and now your back is put up. I suppose we will have to get the council together, or you will never believe me. It is a bother, but it is your right, after all.’ He heaved himself back to his feet and added, infuriatingly, ‘You may keep the place until then; it will take me a day or so to get word to everyone,’ before he padded out again, leaving Temeraire quivering with rage.

‘His cave is the nicest,’ Perscitia said anxiously, later, ‘at least, we have certainly always thought so. I am sure you would like it, and maybe you could make it even more pleasant than this? Why don't you go and see it before quarrelling?’

‘I do not care if it is Ali Baba's cave, and full of gold and lamps,’ Temeraire said, not even trying to master his temper. It felt better to be angry than miserable, and he was glad of having something else to think about instead of that which he could do nothing to repair. ‘It is a question of principle. I am not going to be bullied, as though I were not up to fighting him. If I made the other cave nice, he would only try and take it back, I am sure. Or some other dragon would try and push me out. Who are this council?’

‘It is all the biggest dragons,’ Perscitia said, ‘and a Longwing, although Gentius does not bother to come out much anymore.’

‘All of them his friends, I suppose,’ Temeraire said.

‘Oh no; no one much likes Requiescat.’ Moncey said, perched on the lip of Temeraire's cave. ‘He eats so much, and will never take less, even if it's short commons all around. But he is the biggest, and there should not be fighting, so the general rule is that caves go by who is strongest if there is any quarrel. No one is allowed to take a place out of his class, or others will get jealous and squabble.’

‘You see, it is just as I told you: all unfairness,’ Perscitia said bitterly, ‘as if the only quality of any importance were one's weight, or how good one is at scratching and biting and kicking up a fuss; never any consideration for really remarkable qualities.’

‘I grant it has some practical sense as a way to choose caves,’ Temeraire said, ‘but it is nonsense that after I have taken one— One that he might have had at any time before I came, and did not want —he should be able to snatch it from me after I have gone to so much trouble to make it nice. And he is not stronger than me, either, if he does weigh more. I should like to know if he has sunk a frigate, alone, with a Fleur-de-Nuit on his back? And as for distinction, my ancestors were scholars in China while his were starving in pits.’

‘Be that as it may, he knows all the council, and you don't,’ Moncey said, practically. ‘You are hardly going to fight a dozen heavyweights at once, and beg pardon, but no one looking at you would say, “right-o, there is a match for old Requiescat.” Not that you are little, but you are a bit skinny-looking.’

‘I am not. Am I?’ Temeraire said, craning his head anxiously to look back at himself. He did not have spines along his back the way Maximus or Requiescat did, but was rather sleek; perhaps a bit long for his weight, by British standards. ‘But anyway, he is not a fire-breather, or an acidspitter.’

‘Are you?’ Moncey inquired.

‘No,’ Temeraire said, ‘but I have the divine wind. Laurence says that is even better.’ However, it belatedly occurred to him that perhaps Laurence might have been speaking partially; certainly Moncey and Perscitia looked blank, and it was difficult to explain just how it operated. ‘I roar, in a particular sort of way—I have to breathe quite deeply, and there is a clenching feeling, along the throat, and then—and then it makes things break—trees, and so on,’ Temeraire finished in an ashamed mutter, conscious that it sounded very dull and useless, when so described. ‘It is very unpleasant to be caught in it,’ he added defensively, ‘at least, so I understand from how others have reacted, if they are before me when I use it.’

‘How interesting,’ Perscitia said, politely, ‘I have often wondered what sound is, exactly; we ought to do some experiments.’

‘Experiments aren't going to help you with the council,’ Moncey said.

Temeraire switched his tail against his side, thinking, before saying with some distaste, ‘No, I see that: it is all politics. It is plain to me: I must work out what Lien would do.’

He cornered Lloyd, the next morning, and said, ‘Lloyd, I am very hungry today; may I have an extra cow, to take up to my cave?’

‘There, that is a little more like it,’ Lloyd said approvingly; not deaf at all to a request so satisfactory to his own ideas of dragon-husbandry. He ordered it directly, and while waiting Temeraire asked, attempting a casual air, ‘I do not suppose you might recall, who Gentius has sired?’

The old Longwing cracked a bleary eye, when Temeraire landed, and peered at him rather incuriously. ‘Yes?’ he said. His cave was not so large, but a comfortable dry hollow tucked well under the mountainside, on ground overlooking a curve of the creek; so positioned that he only had to creep downhill for a drink, and walk a short distance to a large flat rock full in the sun, where he presently lay napping.

‘I beg your pardon for not coming to visit you before, sir,’ Temeraire said, inclining his head, ‘I have served with Excidium these last three years at Dover—Your third hatchling,’ he added, when Gentius looked vague.

‘Yes, Excidium, of course,’ Gentius said, his tongue licking the air experimentally. Temeraire laid the cow down before him, butchered with the help of Moncey's small claws to take out the large bones. ‘A small gift to show my respect,’ Temeraire said, and Gentius brightened. ‘Why, that is trés gentil of you,’ he said, with atrocious pronunciation, which Temeraire remembered just in time not to correct, and took the cow into his mouth to gum at it slowly with the wobbly remainders of his teeth. ‘Most kind, as my first captain liked to say,’ Gentius mumbled reminiscently around it. ‘You might go in there and bring out her picture,’ he added, ‘if you are very careful with it.’

The portrait was rather odd and flat-looking, and the woman in it very plain, even before time and the elements had faded her; but it was in a really splendid golden frame, so large and thick that Temeraire could take it delicately between two talon-tips to lift it, and carry it out into the sun. ‘How beautiful,’ he said sincerely, holding it where Gentius could at least point his head in its direction, although his eyes were so milky with cataracts he could not have seen it as more than a blur in the golden square.

‘Charming woman,’ Gentius said, sadly. ‘She fed me my first bite, fresh liver, when my head was no bigger than her hand. One never quite gets over the first, you know.’

‘Yes,’ Temeraire said, low, and looked away unhappily; at least Gentius had not had her taken from him, and put who knew where.

When he had put the portrait back with equal care, and listened to a long story about one of the wars in which Gentius had fought – something with the Prussians, where pepper guns had been invented: very unpleasant things, especially when one had not been expecting them – then Gentius was quite ready to be sympathetic, and to shake his head censoriously over Requiescat's behaviour. ‘No proper manners, these days, that is what it is.’

‘I am very glad to hear you say so: that is just what I thought, but as I am quite young, I did not feel sure without advice from someone wiser, like yourself,’ Temeraire said, and then with sudden inspiration added, ‘I suppose next he will propose that if any of us have some treasure that he likes, gold or jewels, we must give it to him: it follows quite plainly.’

That was indeed enough to rouse Gentius up, with so handsome a treasure of his own to consider. ‘I do not see that you are wrong at all,’ he said, darkly. ‘Of course, we cannot have Winchesters taking caves fit for Regal Coppers, there would be no end of trouble and quarrelling, and sooner or later the men will involve themselves, and make it all even worse. They somehow think Reapers of less use than Anglewings, because there are more of them and they are clannish, instead of the other way round, and they have many more such odd notions. But that is not the same as taking away a cave perfectly suitable to your weight and standing.’ He paused and said delicately, ‘I do not suppose you had a formation of your own?’

‘No,’ Temeraire said, ‘at least, not officially. Arkady and the others fought under my orders, and I was wing-mates with Maximus: he is Laetificat's hatchling.’

‘Laetificat, yes; fine dragon,’ Gentius said. ‘I served with her, you know, in '76; we had a dust-up with the colonials at Boston. They had artillery above our positions—’

Temeraire came away eventually with Gentius's firm promise to attend the council-meeting, and returned to his cave pleased with the success of his primary efforts. ‘Who else is on the council?’ he asked.

While Perscitia began listing off names, Reedly, a mongrel half-Winchester, courier-weight with yellow streaks, piped up from the corner, ‘You ought to speak to Majestatis.’

Perscitia bristled at once. ‘I see no reason why he ought do any such thing. Majestatis is a very common sort of dragon; and he is not on the council, anyway.’

‘He made sure I got a share of the food, when we were all sick, and things were short,’ Minnow said, on the other side. She was a muddy-coloured feral with touches of Grey Copper and Sharpspitter and even a little Garde-de-Lyon, which had given her vivid orange eyes and blue spots to set off her otherwise drab colouring.

A low murmur of general agreement went around. A crowd had gradually accumulated in Temeraire's cave to offer their advice and remarks. A good many of the smaller dragons had interested themselves in Temeraire's case: those he had sheltered and their acquaintances, and the not-insignificant number, who had some injury, real or imagined, to lay at Requiescat's door. ‘And he is not on the council only because he does not care to be; he is a Parnassian.’ she said to Temeraire.

‘If he were a Flamme de Gloire, it would hardly signify,’ Perscitia said coldly, ‘as he does nothing but sleep all the time.’

Moncey nudged Temeraire with his head and murmured, ‘Corrected her once, six years ago.’

‘It was only an error of arithmetic!’ Perscitia said heatedly. ‘I should have found it out myself in a moment, I was only preoccupied by the much more important question—’

‘Where does he live?’ Temeraire asked, interrupting. He felt that anyone who had no time for politics must be rather sensible.

Majestatis was indeed sleeping when Temeraire came to see him; his cave was out of the way, and not very large. But Temeraire noticed that there was a carefully placed heap of stones, along the back, which blocked one's view into the interior. If he widened his pupils as far as they would go, he thought he could make out a darker space behind them, as if there were a passageway going back deeper into the mountainside.

He coiled himself neatly and waited without fidgeting, as was polite. But at length, when Majestatis showed no signs of waking, Temeraire coughed, then coughed again a little more emphatically. Majestatis sighed and said, without opening his eyes, ‘So you are not leaving, I suppose?’

‘Oh,’ Temeraire said, his ruff prickling, ‘I thought you were only sleeping, not ignoring me deliberately. I will go at once.’

‘Well, you might as well stay now,’ Majestatis said, lifting his head and yawning himself awake. ‘I don't bother to wake up if it isn't important enough to wait for, that's all.’

‘I suppose that is sensible, if you like to sleep better than to have a conversation,’ Temeraire said, dubiously.

‘You'll like it better in a few years yourself,’ Majestatis said.

‘I do not expect so,’ Temeraire said. ‘At least, the Analects say it is not proper for a dragon to sleep more than fourteen hours of the day, so I shan't, unless,’ he added, desolately, ‘I am still shut up in here, where there is nothing worth doing.’

‘If you think so, what are you doing here, instead of in the coverts?’ Majestatis said. He listened to the explanation with the casual sympathy of one listening to a storyteller, and passed no judgment, other than to nod equably and say, ‘A bad lot for you, poor worm.’

‘Why have you come here?’ Temeraire ventured. ‘You are not very old, yourself; do you really like to sleep so much? You might have a captain, and be in battles.’

Majestatis shrugged with one wing-tip, flared and folded down again. ‘Had one, mislaid him.’

‘Mislaid?’ Temeraire said.

‘Well,’ Majestatis said, ‘I left him in a water-trough, but I don't suppose he is still sitting there.’

He was not inclined to be very enthusiastic, even when Temeraire had explained,. He only sighed and said, ‘You are young, to be making such a fuss out of it.’

‘If I am,’ Temeraire retorted, ‘at least I am not complacent, and ready to let this sort of bullying go on, when I can do something about it; and I do not mean to be satisfied,’ he added, with a pointed look at the back of Majestatis's cave, ‘to arrange matters better only for myself.’

Majestatis's eyes narrowed, but he did not stir otherwise. ‘It seems to me you are as likely to make it worse for everyone at least. There's no wrangling now, and no one is getting hurt.’

‘No one is very comfortable, either,’ Temeraire said. ‘We all might have nicer places, but no one will work to improve theirs; they will not if they know it may be taken away from them, at any time, because they have made it nice. Once a cave is yours, it ought to be yours, like property.’

The council looked a little dubious at this argument, when Temeraire repeated it to them the next afternoon. Early that morning, the rain had been broken by a strong westerly wind sweeping the clouds scudding before it. They had gathered in a great clearing among the mountains, full of pleasant broad smooth-topped rocks, warmed by the sun. Majestatis had come after all, and Gentius, although the old dragon was mostly asleep after the effort of making the flight. He was curled up on the blackest rock, murmuring occasionally to himself. Requiescat sprawled inelegantly across half the length of the clearing, making himself look very large. Temeraire disdained the attempt and kept himself neatly coiled, with his ruff spread proudly, although he privately wished he might have had his talon-sheaths, and a headdress such as he had seen in the markets along the old silk caravan roads; he was sure that could not fail to impress.

Ballista, a big Chequered Nettle, thumped her barbed tail on the ground several times to silence the muttering that had arisen among the council, in the middle of Temeraire's remarks. ‘And if we agree that everyone may keep their own cave, when they have got it,’ Temeraire went on, valiantly, in the face of so much scepticism, ‘I would be very happy to share the trick of arranging them better. You all may have nicer caves, if you only take a little trouble to make them so.’

‘Very nice I am sure if you are a yearling’ one peevish older Parnassian said, ‘to be fussing with rocks and twigs.’

There were several snorts of agreement; and Temeraire bristled. ‘If you do not care to, and you are happy with your cave as it is, then you need not. But neither should you be able to take someone else's cave, when they have done all the work. I am certainly not going to be robbed as if I were a lump. I will smash the cave up myself and make it unpleasant before I hand it over meekly.’

‘Now, now.’ Ballista said. ‘There is no call to go yelling about smashing things or making threats; that is quite enough of that. Now we'll hear Requiescat.’

‘Hum, quarrelsome, isn't he,’ Requiescat said. ‘Well, you all know me chums and I don't mean to make a brag of myself, but I expect no one would say I couldn't take any cave I liked if I wanted to. I am not a squabbler, and don't like to hurt anybody; a young fellow like this is excitable enough to bite off a bigger fight than he can swallow—’

‘Oh!’ Temeraire said indignantly. ‘You may not claim any such thing, unless you should like to prove it. I have beaten dragons nearly as big as you.’

Requiescat swung his big head around. ‘Isn't it true you're bred not to fight? Persy was going about saying some such.’

Perscitia gave an angry yelp ‘I never!’ But was quickly stifled by the other small dragons sitting around her at Ballista's censorious glare.

‘Celestials,’ Temeraire said, very coolly, ‘are bred to be the very best sort of dragon. In China, we are not supposed to fight unless the nation is in danger, because China has a good deal more dragons than here and we are too valuable to lose. So we only fight in emergencies, when ordinary fighting dragons are not up to the task.’

‘Oh, China,’ Requiescat said dismissively. 'Anyway chums, there you have it plain as day. I say I am tops, and ought to have the best cave; he says it isn't so, and he won't hand it over. Ordinarily, there'd be no ways to work this out ‘cept with a tussle, and then someone gets hurt and everyone is upset. This is just the sort of thing the council was made up for, and I expect it ought to be pretty clear to all of you which of us is right, without it coming to claws.’

‘I do not say I am tops,’ Temeraire said, ‘although I think it likely. I say that the cave is mine, and that it is unjust for you to take it. That is what the council ought to be for. Justice, not squashing everyone down, just to keep things comfortable for the biggest dragons.’

The council, being composed of the biggest dragons, did not look very enthusiastic. Ballista said, ‘All right, we have heard everyone out. Now look, Teymuhreer,’ she pronounced it quite wrongly, ‘we don't want a lot of fuss and bother—’

‘I do not see why not,’ Temeraire said. ‘What else have we to do?’

Several of the smaller dragons tittered, rustling their wings together. She cleared her throat warningly at them and continued, ‘We don't want a lot of fighting, anyhow. Why don't you just go on and show us a bit of flying, so we know what you can do; then we can settle this.’

‘But that is not at all the point!’ Temeraire said. ‘It ought not make a difference if I were as small as Moncey—’ he looked, but Moncey was not among the little dragons observing, so he amended, ‘or if I were as small as Minnow there. No one was using it, no one wanted the cave before I had it.’

Requiescat gave a flip of his wings. ‘It was not the nicest, before,’ he said, in reasonable tones.

Temeraire snorted angrily. ‘Yes, yes; go on, then; unless you don't like us to see,’ Ballista said impatiently. That was too much to bear. He threw himself aloft, spiralling high and fast as he could, tightening into a spring, and then dived directly into formation manoeuvres, that was what would please them, he thought bitterly. He finished the training pass and backwinged directly, flying the pattern backwards, and then hovered in mid-air before descending sharply. He was showing off, of course, but they had demanded he do so. Landing, he announced, ‘I will show you the divine wind now, but you had better clear away from that rock wall, as I expect a lot of it will come down.’

There was a good deal of grumbling as the big dragons shifted themselves, with dragging tails and annoyed looks. Temeraire ignored them and breathed in deeply several times, stretching his chest wide, as he meant to do as much damage as he could. He noticed in dismay, that the crag was not loose, nor made of the same nice soft white limestone in the caves, which crumbled so conveniently. He scraped a claw down the rockface and merely left white scratches on the hard grey rock.

‘Well?’ Ballista said. ‘We are all waiting.’

There was no helping it. Temeraire backed away from the cliff and drew a preparatory breath. Then there was a hurried rush of wings above and Moncey dropped into the clearing beside him, panting, and said, ‘Call it off; it's all off,’ urgently, to Ballista.

‘Hey, what's this, now?’ Requiescat said, frowning.

‘Quiet, you fat lump,’ Moncey said, narrowing a good many eyes; he was not much bigger than the Regal Copper's head. ‘I'm fresh from Brecon. The Frogs have come over the Channel.’

A great confused babble arose all around, even Gentius roused with a low hiss, and while everyone spoke at once, Moncey turned to Temeraire and said, ‘Listen, your Laurence, word is in they locked him up on a ship called the Goliath—’

‘The Goliath!’ Temeraire said. ‘I know that ship. Laurence has spoken of it to me before. That is very good—That is splendid. I know just where it is, it is on blockade, and I am sure anyone at Dover can tell me exactly where—’

‘Dear fellow, there's no good way to say this,’ Moncey said. ‘The Frogs sank her this morning, coming across. She is at the bottom of the ocean, and not a man got off her before she went down.’

Temeraire did not say anything. A terrible sensation was rising, climbing up his throat. He turned away to let it come. The roar burst out like the roll of thunder overhead, silencing every word around him, and the wall of stone cracked open before him like a pane of mirrored glass.

Chapter Three

They pulled the ship's boats into Dover harbour well past eleven o'clock at night, sweating underneath their wet clothing, hands blistered on the oars. They climbed out shivering onto the docks. Captain Puget was handed up in a litter, almost senseless with blood-loss, and Lieutenant Frye, nineteen, was the only one left to oversee. The rest of the senior officers were dead. Frye looked at Laurence with great uncertainty, then glanced around. The men offered him nothing, they were beaten with rowing and defeat. At last, Laurence quietly offered, ‘The port admiral,’ prompting him. Frye coloured and said to a gangly young midshipman, clearing his throat, ‘Mr. Meed, you had better take the prisoner to the port admiral, and let him decide what is to be done.’

With two Marines for guards, Laurence followed Meed through the dockside streets to the port admiral's office where they found nearly more confusion than had been on the deck of the Goliath in her last moments. After the double broadside had un-masted her, smoke had spread everywhere, fire crawling steadily down through the ship towards the powder magazine, as cannon ran wildly back and forth on her decks.

Here the hallways were suffocating with unchecked speculation. ‘Five hundred thousand men landed,’ one man said in the hallway, a ridiculous number, inflated by panic. ‘Already in London,’ said another, ‘and two millions in shipping seized,’ the very last of these being the only plausible suggestion. If Bonaparte had captured one or two of the ports on the Thames estuary and taken the merchantmen there, he might indeed have reached something like that number. He would have seized an enormous collection of prizes to fuel the invasion, like coal heaped into a burning stove.

‘I do not give a damn if you take him out and lynch him, only get him out of my sight,’ the port admiral said furiously, when Meed finally managed to work his way through the press and ask him for orders. There was a vast roar outside the windows like the wind rising in a storm, even though the night was clear. More petitioners were shoving frantically past them. Laurence had to catch Meed by the arm and hold him up as they fought their way out. The boy could scarcely have been fourteen and was a little underfed.

Set adrift, Meed looked helpless. Laurence wondered if he would have to find his own prison, but then one young lieutenant pushed through towards them, flung him a look of flat contempt, and said, ‘That is the traitor, is it? This way. You dogs take a damned proper hold of him, before he sneaks away in this press.’

He took up an old truncheon in the hallway, and swinging it to clear the way, took them out into the street. Meed trotted after him gratefully. The lieutenant brought them to a run-down sponging house two streets away, with bars upon the windows and a mastiff tied in the barren yard. It howled unhappily, adding to the clamour of the half-rioting crowd. A beating upon the door brought out the master of the house. He whined objections, which the lieutenant overruled one after another, but at last conceded.

‘Better than you deserve,’ he said to Laurence coldly, as he held open the door of a small and squalid attic. He was a slight young man with a struggling moustache. A solid push would have laid him out upon the unkempt floor. Laurence looked at him for a moment, and then stepped inside, stooping under the lintel. The door was shut upon him. Through the wall he heard the lieutenant ordering the two Marines to stand watch, and the owner's complaints trailing him back down the stairs.

It was bitterly cold. The irregular floor of warped and knotted boards felt strange under Laurence's feet, still expecting the listing motion of the ship. There was a handkerchief-square of a window, which at present let in only the thick smell of smoke. Shining rooftops, lit by a reddish glow, were all that he could see.

Laurence sat down on the narrow cot and looked at his hands. There would be fighting all along the coast by now. Men would have landed at Sheerness, and likely along points north, all around the mouth of the Thames. Not five hundred thousand, nothing like that, but enough perhaps. It would not take a very large company of infantry to establish a secure beachhead, then Napoleon could land men as quick as he could get them across the Channel.

This, Laurence would have said, could be not very quickly. Not in the face of the Navy. But that opinion fell before the manoeuvres he had witnessed today. Pitting great numbers of lightweights, easy to feed and quick to manoeuvre, against the British heavyweights, and using their own heavyweights against the British ships flew in the face of all common wisdom. But it bore the same tactical stamp as the whirling attack which he had witnessed at Jena, spearheaded by Lien. Laurence had no doubt her advice had also served Napoleon in this latest adventure.

Laurence had reported on the battle of Jena to the Admiralty. It was a bitter thought to know that his treason had now undermined that intelligence, and likely discredited all his reports. He thought Jane at least would still have kept it under consideration. Even if she had not forgiven him, she knew him well enough to know that his treason had begun and ended with delivering the cure. But from what he had seen of the battle, the British dragons were still locked in the same antiquated habits of aerial war.

The noises outside the window rose and fell like the sea. Somewhere nearby glass was breaking and a woman shrieked. The red glow brightened. He lay down and tried to sleep a little, but his rest was broken repeatedly by ragged eruptions of noise, falling back into the general din by the time he jarred awake, panting and sore. In his dreams, fragmentary images of the burning ship, which became glossy, black scales beneath the flames, curling and crisping at the edges. He rose once. There was a small dirty pitcher of water, but he was not yet thirsty enough to resort to it for a drink. He splashed his face with a cupped handful. His fingers came away streaked with soot and grime. He lay down again, there was more screaming outside, and a stronger smell of smoke.

It did not so much as grow light, as simply less dark. There was a thick sooty pall over the city, and his throat ached sharply. No one came with food, and he received not a word from his guards. Laurence paced his cell restlessly. Four long strides across, three lengthwise from the bed, but he used smaller steps and made it seven. His arms, clasped behind his back, felt as though they were weighted down with roundshot. He had rowed for five hours without a pause.

That at least had been something to do, something besides this useless fretting. The city was burning, and all he could do here was burn with it, or moulder to be taken a prisoner by the French, with Napoleon's army scarcely ten miles distant. And even if he died, Temeraire might never know. He might keep himself a prisoner long for lost cause, and be taken by the French. Laurence could not trust Napoleon with Temeraire's safety, not while Lien was his ally. Her voice, and the self-interest which would prompt him to be the master of the only Celestial outside China's borders, would be more persuasive than his generosity.

The guards might be tempted to let him out by their own desire to be gone, if only Laurence could convince himself he had any right to go. But he had been court-martialled and convicted, and justly so, with all due process of law. Though he would gladly have foregone the dragging out of evidence, he had been condemned already by his own voice. The panel of officers had listened with blank faces, tight with disgust. All were Navy officers, no aviator had been allowed to serve. Too many had been pulled into the vile business, implicated and smeared in any way they could be. Ferris, was singled out because Laurence must have confided in his first lieutenant. ‘And it must present a curious appearance to the court,’ the prosecutor had said, sneering, while Ferris sat drawn and pale and wretched and did not look at Laurence, ‘that he did not raise the alarm for an hour after the accused and his beast were known to be missing, and did not at once open the letter which was left behind—’

Chenery too had been named, and only because he had also been in London covert at the time. Berkley and Little and Sutton, were all brought in to give evidence, and if Harcourt and Jane had not been mentioned, it was only because the Admiralty did not know how to do so without embarrassing themselves more than their targets. ‘I did not know a damned thing about the business, and I am sure nor did anyone else. Anyone who knows Laurence will tell you he would not have breathed a word of it to anyone,’ Chenery had said defiantly. ‘But I do say that sending over the sick beast was a blackguardly thing for the Admiralty to have done, and if you want to hang me for saying so, you are welcome.’

They had not hanged Chenery, thank God, for lack of evidence and for need of his dragon, but Ferris, a lieutenant with no such protection, had been broken out of the service. Every effort Laurence had made to insist that the guilt was his alone had been ignored. A fine officer had been lost to the service, his career and his life spoilt. Laurence had met his mother and his brothers. They were an old family and proud. But Ferris had been away from home from the age of seven, so they did not have that intimate knowledge, which should make them confident of his innocence, and replace the affectionate support from his fellow-officers now denied to him. To witness his misery and know himself culpable hurt Laurence worse than his own conviction had done.

That had never been in any doubt. There had been no defence to make, and no comfort but the arid certainty that he had done as he ought. That he could have done nothing else. It offered scarce comfort, but saved him from the pain of regret. He could not regret what he had done, he could not have let ten thousand dragons, most of them wholly uninvolved in the war, be murdered for his nation's advantage. When he had said as much, and freely confessed that he had disobeyed his orders, assaulted a Marine, stolen the cure, and given aid and comfort to the enemy, there was nothing else to say. The only charge he contested, was that he had stolen Temeraire, too. ‘He is neither the King's possession nor a dumb beast. His choice was his own and it was freely made,’ Laurence had said, but he had been ignored, of course. He had scarcely been taken from the room before he was brought back in again to hear his sentence of death pronounced.

And then it had been quietly postponed. He had been hurried under guard, from the chamber and into a stifling, black-draped carriage. After a long rattling journey ending at Sheerness, he had been put aboard the Lucinda and then transferred to Goliath. He had been confined to the brig, an oubliette meant only to keep him breathing. It was a living death, worse than the hanging he was promised in future.

But that was not his choice to make. He had made one choice, and sacrificed all the others. His life was no longer his own, even if the court chose to leave it to him a little while longer. To flee now would be no more honourable than to have fled straight to China, or to have accepted Napoleon's solicitations. He could not go. He had no other way of believing himself loyal, he could make no other reparation. He might look at the door, but he could not open it.

A brief glaze of rain washed the window and thinned the smoke outside. He went to stand by the glass, though he could not see anything but a grey dimness. The sun, if it had come up, stayed hidden.

The doorknob rattled and the door opened. Laurence turned and stared at the man on the other side. His lean, travel-leathered face and oriental features were familiar but unexpected. ‘I hope I find you in good health,’ Tharkay said. ‘Will you come with me? I believe there is still a danger of fire.’

The guards had vanished. The house was entirely deserted, but for a couple of men who had wandered in drunk off the street and were sleeping in the front hall. Laurence stepped over their legs and out into the morning. A thin pallid haze of smoke and false dawn lay over the docks, drifting out to sea. Glass, broken slate and charred wood littered the street, with other unspeakable trash. Sweepers lugubriously pushed their brooms down the middle of the lane, doing little to help.

Tharkay led Laurence down a side alley where the dead body of a horse, stripped of saddle and bridle, blocked the way. A young kestrel with long trailing jesses was perched on its side, occasionally tearing at the flesh and uttering satisfied cries. Tharkay held out his hand and whistled, and the kestrel came back to him, to be hooded and secured upon his shoulder.

‘I am three weeks back from the Pamirs,’ Tharkay said. ‘I brought another dozen feral beasts for your ranks. In good time, it seems. Roland sent me to bring you in.’

‘But how came you here?’ Laurence said, while they picked their way onward through the unfashionable back streets. The town already looked as though it had been sacked. Windows and doors still intact, were shut tight, some boarded, giving the house-fronts an unfriendly air. ‘How did you know I was in the town—’

‘The town was not the difficulty. The wreckers off the coast knew which way the Goliath's boats had gone,’ Tharkay said. ‘I was here before you were, I imagine. Finding out where you had been stowed was more difficult. I foolishly went to the trouble of obtaining these, first,’ showing Laurence a folded packet of papers, ‘from the port admiral, in the assumption he would know the whereabouts of the prisoner he was assigning to me. But he left me in the hall for over two hours, and quarrelled with me for another. Only when I had his signature did he at last confess to having not the slightest knowledge where you might be.’

They came to a clearing, a courier-covert, where little Gherni waited for them fidgeting anxiously. She hissed at Tharkay urgently. He answered her in the same tangled dragon-language, which Laurence could not understand, and then clambered up her scanty rigging to her back, pointing out the couple of hand-holds Laurence should use to get himself aboard.

‘We may have some difficulty on our journey,’ Tharkay said. ‘Almost all of Bonaparte's men are stationed on the coast, but his dragons are going deep inland. Fifty thousand men, I believe,’ he answered, when Laurence asked how they faced, ‘and as many as two hundred beasts, if one cares to believe the figure. The Corps has fallen back with the rest of the army, to Rainham. I imagine to await Bonaparte's pleasure, as for why they are being so courteous, you would have to ask the generals.’

‘I thank you for coming,’ Laurence said. Tharkay had risked a great deal, with half of Bonaparte's army between him and the coast. ‘You have taken service, then?’ he asked, looking at Tharkay's coat. He wore gold bars: a captain's rank. In the army it was not uncommon for a man to be commissioned only when he was needed, but it was a rare phenomenon in the Corps, where the type of dragon dictated rank. But with Tharkay was one of the few who could speak with the feral dragons of the Pamirs it was no surprise the Corps had wanted him. It was more of one that he had accepted a commission.

‘For now.’ Tharkay shrugged.

‘No one could accuse you of making a self-interested choice,’ Laurence said grimly, with the smell of the burning city in his nostrils.

‘One of its advantages,’ Tharkay said. ‘Any fool could throw in his lot with a victor.’

Laurence did not ask why he had been sent. Fifty thousand men landed was answer enough. Temeraire must be wanted, and Laurence the only, however undesirable, means to obtain his services. It was a pragmatic and temporary choice, nothing to give him hope of forgiveness either personal or legal. Tharkay volunteered no more, Gherni was already springing aloft, and the wind blew all possible words away.

The sky held the peculiar crispness of late autumn, blue, clear and cloudless, beautiful flying weather. They had scarcely been half an hour aloft when Gherni suddenly plunged beneath them, and trembling went to ground in a wooded clearing of pines. Laurence had seen nothing, but he and Tharkay pushed forward to the edge of the woods and peered out from the shade. Two shapes leapt from the ground, and approached. The two big grey-and-brown dragons, glided with lazy assurance, and well they might. Grand Chevaliers were the largest of the French heavyweights, and only a little smaller than Regal Coppers. Each had what looked close to a dozen stupefied cows dangling in their belly-netting, occasionally uttering groggy and perplexed moans, and pawing ineffectually at the air with their hooves.

The pair went by calling to each other cheerfully in French too colloquial and rapid for Laurence to follow, their crews laughing. Their shadows passed like scudding clouds. Gherni held very still beneath the branches. Her eyes were the only part of her which moved, tracking the great dragons' passage overhead.

She could not be persuaded back aloft, afterwards, but curled up as deeply as she could, and proposed that they should bring her something to eat instead. She would not go up again until it was dark. That the French Fleur de Nuits would be out then, was not an argument Laurence wished to attempt, for fear of her refusing to go on at all. Tharkay only shrugged, examined his pistols, and put himself on a track towards the nearby farmhouses. ‘Perhaps the Chevaliers have not eaten all the cattle.’

There were no cows left visible, nor sheep, nor people. Only a scattering of unhappy chickens, upon which Tharkay methodically loosed the kestrel, taking one after another. They would not make much dinner for Gherni, but they were better than nothing. Then they discovered a small pig in the stable, rooting in the straw, oblivious both to the fate it had earlier escaped and the one now descending upon it.

Gherni was neither picky nor patient enough to demand her pork cooked, and they roasted the chickens for themselves over a small, well-banked fire, feeding the kestrel on the sweetbreads, and waving their hands through the smoke to thin it out. Without salt the meat had little flavour, but did well enough to fill their stomachs. They gnawed down to the bones, rubbed their greasy hands clean with grass, and buried the remnants.

And then they had only to wait for the sun to go down. It was scarcely noon, and the ground cold and hard to sit upon, the wind blowing a steady chill into fingers and feet, despite their stamping. But Laurence could stand when he chose, and go to the edge of the copse and feel the wind blowing into his face, and see the placid well-ruled fields in their orderly brown ranks and tall white birch-trees raising their limbs high against the unbroken sky.

Tharkay came and stood beside him. There was no alteration in his looks or manner. If he was silent, he had been silent before. To be able to stand here for a moment, not as a traitor, but only himself, unchanged, in the company of another, was to Laurence as liberating as the absence of locks and barred doors. He had suffered wide disapproval before without intolerable pain, when he knew himself in the right. He had not known it could be so heavy.

Tharkay said, ‘I might never have found you, of course.’

It was an offer, and Laurence was ashamed to be tempted; tempted so strongly that he could not immediately make his refusal, not with freedom open before him and the stench of smoke and the ship's bilges still thick in the back of his throat.

‘My idea of duty is not yours,’ Tharkay said. ‘But I can think of no reason why you should owe a pointless death to any man.’

‘Honour is sufficient purpose,’ Laurence said, low.

‘Very well,’ Tharkay said, ‘if your death would preserve it better than your life. But yet the world is not shared between Britain and Napoleon, and you do not need to die. You and Temeraire would be welcome in other parts of the world. You may recall there is some semblance of civilization,’ he added dryly, ‘in a few places, beyond the borders of England.’

‘I do not—’ Laurence said, struggling, ‘I will not pretend that I do not consider it, for Temeraire's sake if not my own. But to fly would be to make myself truly a traitor.’

‘Laurence,’ Tharkay said, after a pause, ‘you are a traitor.’ It was a blow to hear him say so, in his cool blunt way. The lack of passion in his words only made them seem less accusation than statement of fact. ‘Allowing them to put you to death for it may be your form of apology, but it does not make you less guilty.’

Laurence did not know how to answer. Of course Tharkay was right. It was useless to cry that he loved his country, and had betrayed her only in extremis, as the lesser of two hideous evils. He had betrayed her, and the cause mattered not. So perhaps he now condemned Temeraire to lonely servitude, and himself to life-long imprisonment, for nothing. Perhaps all that could be lost, had been lost. And yet he could not answer.

They stood silently for a long time. At last, Tharkay shook his head and put his hand on Laurence's shoulder. ‘It is getting dark.’

‘Yes, I sent for him,’ Jane said flatly. ‘And you may leave off your coughing and your insinuations, if I wanted a man between my legs that badly, there is a camp full of handsome young fellows outside, and I dare say I could find one out to oblige me without going to such trouble.’

Having momentarily appalled her audience of generals and ministers into silence, she rode on, ‘If the French took him prisoner, they would have two Celestials; and even if the two are too close related to breed direct, they will crossbreed them—perhaps to Grand Chevaliers, if you like to imagine that—and breed the offspring back to fix the traits. In one generation they will have a breed of their own, and we nothing. We haven't a single egg out of Temeraire yet. Put Laurence in a gaol-wagon and bring him along under guard, if you insist, but if you have any sense you will make use of him, and the beast.’

The atmosphere in the tent was not a convivial one. Conversation circled endlessly around the disaster of the landing and Laurence had already gathered enough to realise that Jane had not been in command of the aerial defence, after all. Sanderson had been made admiral at Dover, over her head.

For what reason, Laurence scarcely needed to wonder. They had never liked making her commander, but having been forced to do it by necessity, they would likely have gone on rather than admit a mistake. Had they not wanted vengeance, had they not thought her complicit in Laurence's treason.

As for Sanderson, Laurence knew little about the man. He was handler to a Parnassian and commanded a large independent formation at Dover. They had served together, but not closely. Thoroughly experienced but no brilliant officer, Sanderson's attention was badly divided. Though his Artemisia had been dosed with the cure several times, she still fared poorly from the after-effects of the epidemic. It had nearly killed him too. He was not a year short of sixty, and had scarcely slept or eaten while his dragon ailed.

He now sat in a corner of the tent and dabbing an oozing cut over his eye with a folded bandage. He said nothing while the generals shouted at Jane instead. He looked grey and faded under the bright bloody streak across his forehead.

‘Splendid, so you would put a known traitor and his uncontrollable beast into the middle of our lines,’ one member of the Navy Board said. ‘You may as well rig up a telegraph and signal our plans to Bonaparte at once.’

‘Bonaparte can't damned well have an easier time of it than he has already, unless you run up a white flag,’ Jane snapped. ‘He has a hundred dragons more than he ought to, by any counting. You Admiralty gentlemen swear up and down that we would know he'd stripped Prussia and Italy to the bone, so I suppose he is pulling them out of the trees, and as we can't do the same, we must have every last beast we can scrounge. Six beasts too injured to fight in the next month, four of our newest ferals slunk off, and you want to let a Celestial moulder. It's pure idiocy.’

‘Why precisely are we listening to this haranguing fishwife?’ someone said.

‘To be more precise,’ Jane said, ‘you are not listening to me. But you had better start. Begging your pardon Sanderson, you are a damned fine formation-leader, but you weren't the man for this.’

‘No, not at all, Roland,’ Sanderson said, dully, and patted the cloth to his forehead again.

‘We are listening to her,’ another general from the back, said impatiently; he was a lean sharp-faced man with a decided aquiline nose, and wore the Order of the Bath, ‘because you could not scrape up a competent man for the job. We are not going to beat Bonaparte with yesterday's mess.’

‘Portland—’ another began.

‘Stop bleating the man's name like a talisman,’ the general returned. ‘If it is not Nelson with you, it is Portland. Gibraltar is as bad as Denmark, neither of them can be here in under a month. Until then, get out of her way.’

‘General Wellesley, you cannot seriously support the suggestion—’ another minister said, gesturing to Laurence.

‘I am capable of deciding to what I will support, without consultation. Thank you,’ Wellesley said. He looked Laurence up and down with a cold dismissive eye. ‘He's a sentimentalist, isn't he—surrendered himself? Damned romantic. What difference does it make? Hang him after.’

Jane took him to her tent. ‘No, you had better stay, Frette,’ she said, speaking to her aide-de-camp, who had risen from a camp-table as she ducked inside. ‘I will not make hay for any more rumours.’

She poured herself a glass of wine, and drank it with her back to Laurence. He could not quarrel with her decision, but he wished that they had been alone. He felt it impossible to speak as he wished before anyone else. Then she put down the glass and sat down behind her desk. ‘Tomorrow you will go by courier to Pen Y Fan,’ she said tiredly, without looking at him. ‘That is where they have been keeping Temeraire. Will you bring him back?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Laurence said.

‘They will very likely hang you after, unless you manage to do something heroic,’ Jane said.

‘If I wished to avoid justice, I might have stayed in France,’ Laurence said. ‘Jane—’

‘Admiral Roland, if you please,’ she said, sharply. After a moment's silence, she added, ‘I cannot blame you, Laurence. Christ knows it was ugly. But if I am to do any good here, I cannot be fighting their damned Lordships as well as Napoleon's dragons. Frette will take you to the officers' tent to eat, and then find you somewhere to sleep. You will go tomorrow, and when you come back you will be flying in formation, under Admiral Sanderson. That will be all.’

She gave a jerk of her head, and Frette held open the tent flap clearing his throat. Laurence could only bow, and withdraw slowly, wishing he had not seen her drop her forehead to her clenched fist, and the grimness around her mouth.

He felt a dreadful sense of awkwardness when entered the large mess tent in Frette's company. He saw none of his nearest acquaintance, and was glad to postpone that evil, but several remarks were made by little known captains. He pretended not to hear, the discomfort and downcast faces of those who would not snub him, but still did not choose to meet his eyes, was worse.

He had been braced for this, so was unprepared when his hand was seized, and aggressively pumped by a gentleman he had only seen perhaps twice before, across the officers' common room at Dover. Captain Hesterfield loudly said, ‘May I shake your hand, sir?’ too late for the request to be refused, and then nearly bodily dragged Laurence over to his table in the corner, and presented him to his companions.

There were six officers at the small and huddled table. Two of them were Prussians, one of whom, Von Pfeil, Laurence recognized from the siege of Danzig, and another who introduced himself as cousin to Captain Dyhern, with whom they had fought at the Battle of Jena. They were now refugees, having chosen exile and service in Britain over the parole Napoleon had offered to Prussian officers.

Another stranger, Captain Prewitt, had been recalled to England a few months before, out of desperation. His Winchester had escaped the epidemic, as they were ordinarily assigned to Halifax covert. He had been stationed on a lonely circuit out in Quebec to put him out of the way of anyone hearing his radical political views, as he freely acknowledged.

‘Or perhaps it was my poetry,’ Prewitt said, laughing at himself, ‘but my pride can better stand condemnation of my politics than of my art, so I choose to take it so. And this is Captain Latour,’ a French Royalist turned British officer. Hesterfield and the two others, Reynolds and Gounod, were Prewitt's political sympathizers, if a little quieter than he on the subject, and Laurence gradually realized the little group not supporters of his act, but were divided from the rest of the company precisely because they quarrelled over its morality.

‘Murder, murder most foul, there is no other word,’ Reynolds declared, covering Laurence's hand with his own, pinning it to the table by the wrist, and looking at him with the focused, earnest expression of the profoundly drunk. Laurence did not know what to say. He had agreed, and had laid down his life to prevent it, but he did not care to be congratulated for it, by a stranger.

‘Treason is another word,’ another officer said, at the nearest populated table, making no pretence about eavesdropping. A half-empty bottle of whiskey stood before him.

‘Hear, hear,’ another man said.

There were too many bottles in the room, and too many angry and disappointed men. It was an invitation for a scene. Laurence disengaged his hand. He would have liked to excuse himself and shift tables, but Frette had abandoned him to Prewitt and his willing company, and Laurence could not imagine imposing himself on anyone else in the room. ‘I beg you gentlemen not to speak of it,’ he said quietly, to the table. But to no avail. Reynolds was already arguing with the whiskey-drinker, and their voices were rising.

Laurence set his jaw, and tried not to listen. ‘And I say,’ the whiskey-drinker was saying, ‘that he is a traitor who ought to be drug outside, strung up, and drawn and quartered after, and you with him, if you say otherwise—’

‘Medieval sentiment—’ They were both standing now, Reynolds shaking off Gounod's half-hearted restraining hand to get up. Their voices were loud enough to drown all nearby conversation.

Laurence rose, and catching Reynolds by the shoulder firmly, pressed him back towards his chair. ‘Sir, you do me no kindness by this. Leave off,’ he said, low and sharply.

‘That's right, let him teach you how to be a coward,’ the other man said.

Laurence stiffened. He could not resent insults he had earned, he had sacrificed the right to defend himself against traitor, but coward was a slap he could not gladly swallow. But he could not make the challenge. He had caused enough harm. He could not—would not, do more. He closed his mouth on the bitterness in the back of his throat, and did not turn to look the man in the face, though he now stood so close his liquored breath came hot and strongly over Laurence's shoulder.

‘Call him a coward, when you would've sat and done nothing,’ Reynolds flung back. He shook off Laurence's hand, or tried. ‘I suppose your dragon would enjoy you being happy to see ten thousand of them put down, poisoned or good as, like dogs—’

‘One at least ought to be poisoned,’ the other man said, and Laurence let go of Reynolds, turned, and knocked the officer down.

The man was drunk and unsteady, and as he went down pulled the table and the bottle over with him. Cheap liquor bubbled out over the ground as it rolled away. For a moment no one spoke, and then chairs went back across the tent, as if nothing more had been wanted than a pretext.

The quarrel at once devolved into a confusing melee, with no sides. Laurence even saw two men from the same table wrestling in a corner. But a few men singled him out, one a captain he knew by face from Dover, if not immediately by name. He had fresh streaks of black dragon-blood on his clothing. His name was Geoffrey Windle, Laurence remembered incongruously, as they grappled, just before Windle struck him full on the jaw.

The impact rocked him back on his heels; his teeth snapped together, and he felt the startling pain of a bitten cheek. Gripping a tent-pole for purchase, Laurence managed to seize a chair and pull it around between them as Windle lunged at him again; the man tripped over it and went into the pole with his full weight, which was considerable: he had some three stone over Laurence. The canvas roof above them sagged precipitously.

Two more men came at Laurence, faces ugly with anger. They caught him by the arms and rushed him against the nearest table. They were drunk enough to be belligerent, but not enough to be clumsy. He still wore his buckled shoes and laddered stockings, and lacked good purchase on the ground, and the weight of his boots to kick out with. They pinned him down, and one of them held out a blade, a dull eating-knife, still slick with grease from his dinner. Laurence set his heel down against the surface of the table and heaved, managing to get his shoulders loose for a moment, twisting away from the short furious stabbing, so the blade only tore into his ragged coat.

The tent pole creaked and gave way. Canvas fell upon them in a sudden catastrophic rush. Laurence had freed his arms, only to be imprisoned in the smothering folds. They were heavy, and he had an effort to lift it enough from his face to breathe. He rolled off the table, and then felt hands gripping his arm again, pulling at him. Laurence struck out blindly at the new attacker, and they struggled upon the ground until the other man managed to drag the edge of the canvas off their heads and heave them into the open air. It was Granby.

‘Oh, Lord,’ Granby said. Laurence turned and saw that half the tent had crumpled in on the heaving mass beneath. Those sober enough to have avoided the fighting were carrying out the lanterns from the other side. Others doused the collapsed canvas with water; smoke trickled out from beneath.

‘You'll do a damned sight better out of the way,’ Granby said, when Laurence would have gone to help, and drew him along one of the camp paths, narrow and stumbling-dark, towards the dragon clearings.

They walked in silence over the uneven ground. Laurence tried to slow his short, clenched breathing without success. He felt inexpressibly naïve. He had not even thought to fear such a possibility, until he heard it in the mouth of a drunkard. But when they did hang him, knowing it would lose them Temeraire's use,—what might those men do, those men who had meant to infect all the world's dragons with consumption and condemn them to an agonizing death. They would see Temeraire dead, rather than of use to anyone they were disposed to see as an enemy: France, or China, or any other nation. They would not scruple at any sort of treachery necessary to achieve his destruction. To them Temeraire was only an inconvenient animal.

‘I suppose,’ Granby said, abruptly, out of the dark, ‘that he insisted on it? Your carrying the stuff to France, I mean.’

‘He did,’ Laurence said, after a moment, but he did not mean to hide behind Temeraire's wings. ‘I am ashamed to say, he was forced to, but only at first. I would not have you believe I was taken against my will.’

‘No,’ Granby said, ‘no, I only meant, you shouldn't have thought of it at all, on your own.’

The observation felt true, and uncomfortably so, though Laurence supposed Granby had meant it as consolation. He felt a sharp sudden stab of loneliness. He wanted very badly to see Temeraire. Laurence had slept his last night beneath his sheltering wing nearly four months ago, in the northern mountains. Their treason committed, they had snatched a few hours of freedom before they made the fatal flight across the Channel. Since then there had been only a succession of prisons, more or less brutal, for them both. Temeraire had spent months alone, friendless and unhappy, in breeding grounds full of feral beasts and veterans, with no order or discipline to keep them from fighting.

They passed the clearings one by one, the millhouse rumble of sleeping dragons to either side, their dinners finished and their crews toiling on the harnesses by lantern-light, the faint clanking of hammers tapped away and the acrid smoky stink of harness oil carried on the breeze. They had a long walk out in the dark after the last clearing, up a steep slope to the crown of a hill overlooking all the camp, where Iskierka lay sleeping in a thick spiny coil, steam issuing with her every breath, and the feral dragons scattered around her.

She cracked an eye open as they came in and inquired drowsily, ‘Is it a battle time yet?’

‘No, love, back to sleep,’ Granby said, and she sighed and shut her eye. But she had drawn the attention of the men, they looked from Laurence to Granby, and then they looked back down again, saying nothing.

‘Perhaps I had best not stay,’ Laurence said. He knew some of the faces, men from his own crew, even some of his former officers. He was glad they had found places here.

‘Stuff,’ Granby said. ‘I am not so damned craven, and anyway,’ he added, more despondently, when he had led Laurence into his own tent, pitched in the comfortable current of heat which Iskierka gave off, ‘I cannot be much farther in the soup than I am already, after yesterday. She's spoilt, there is no other word for it. Wouldn't keep in formation, wouldn't obey signals, took the ferals with her—’ He shrugged, and taking a bottle from the floor poured them each a glass, which he drank with an unaccustomed enthusiasm.

‘It's not so bad, on patrol,’ Granby said, after wiping his mouth. ‘She doesn't need any coaxing to look out the enemy, and she'll take directions to make it easier. But in a fleet action—I don't mean she was useless,’ he added, with a defensive note. ‘They did for a first-rate and three frigates, and chased off a dozen French beasts. But she hasn't a shred of discipline. Pretended not to hear me, left the right wing of the Corps wide open, and two beasts badly hurt for it. I would be broken for it, if they could afford to give her up.’

He was pacing the small confines of his tent, still holding the empty glass, and talking swiftly, almost nervously. More to be saying something, to fill the air between them, than to impart these particular words. ‘This is the sort of thing that rots the Corps,’ he said. ‘I never thought I would be a bad officer, someone who ruins his dragon, the kind of fool, kept on only because his beast won't serve otherwise. The Army— the Navy—they sneer at us for that, as much as for anything else we do, but there at least they are right to sneer. So our admirals have to dance to the Navy's tune, and meanwhile the youngsters see it, too, and you can't ask them to be better, when they see a fellow let off anything, anything at all—’

He pulled himself up abruptly, realizing too late that his words were applicable to more of his audience than himself, and looked at Laurence miserably.

‘You are not wrong,’ Laurence said. He had assumed the same himself, in his Navy days. He had thought the Corps full of wild, devil-may-care libertines, who delighted in disregarding law and authority as far as they dared, barely kept in check. To be used for their control over the beasts, but not respected.

‘But if we have more liberty than we ought,’ Laurence said, after a moment, struggling through, ‘it is because our dragons haven't enough. They have no stake in victory other than our happiness. Any nation would give them their daily bread just to have peace and quiet. We are granted our license for as long as we do what we should not. So long as we use their affections to keep them obedient.’

‘How else do you make them care?’ Granby said. ‘If we did not, the French would run right over us, and take our eggs themselves.’

‘They care in China,’ Laurence said, ‘and in Africa. They care that their rational sense is not imposed on, nor their hearts put into opposition with their minds. If they cannot be woken to a natural affection for their country, such as we feel, it is our fault and not theirs.’

Laurence slept the night in Granby's tent, on top of a blanket. He would not take Granby's cot. It was odd to sleep warmly and wake in a sweat, then step out and see the camp below dusted overnight with snow, soiled grey tents for the moment clean white, and the ground already churning into muddy slush.

‘You are back,’ Iskierka said, looking at Laurence. She was wide awake, picking over the charred remnants of her breakfast, and watching the sluggish camp with a disgruntled eye. ‘Where is Temeraire? He has let you get into a wretched state,’ she added, with rather a smug air. Laurence could not argue, he was a pitiful sight indeed. His coat was ragged and his shoes were starting to open at the seams. The less said of his stockings the better. ‘Granby,’ she said, looking over his shoulder, ‘you may lend Laurence your fourth-best coat, and then you may tell Temeraire,’ she added to Laurence, ‘that I am very sorry he cannot give you nicer things.’

However, Granby was wearing his fourth-best coat, as the other three were wholly unsuitable for actual fighting. They were ostentatiously adorned with the fruits of Iskierka's determined prize-hunting. It would not in any case have been a very successful loan, as Laurence had some four inches in the shoulders, which Granby had instead in height. But Granby sent word out, and shortly a young runner returned carrying a folded coat, and a spare pair of boots.

‘Why, Sipho,’ Laurence said. ‘I am glad to find you well; and your brother, also, I hope?’ He had worried what might have become of the two boys, brought from Africa, who had helped them there. He had made them his own runners by way of providing for them, but had then found himself unable to be of further assistance.

‘Yes, sir,’ Sipho said in perfect English, though less than a year before the child had never heard a word of it. ‘He is with Arkady, and Captain Berkley says, you are welcome to these, and to come and say hello to Maximus would you, if you are not too damned stiff-necked. He said to say just that,’ he added earnestly.

‘You aren't the only one who owes them,’ Berkley said, in his blunt way, when Laurence had come and thanked him for assuming responsibility for the boys. ‘You needn't worry about them being cast off anyway, we need them. They can jaw with those damned ferals better than any man jack of us. That older boy talks their jabber quicker than he does English. You'd better worry about them getting knocked on the head instead. I had a fight on my hands to make the Admiralty let me keep this one grounded for now. They would have put him up as an ensign, if you like, not nine years of age. Demane they would have no matter what I said, but that is just as well. He fights,’ he added succinctly, ‘so he may as well do it against the Frogs, where it don't get him in hot water.’

Maximus was much recovered, from the last time Laurence had seen him. Three months of steady feeding on shore had brought him nearly up to his former fighting weight, and he put his head down and said in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘Tell Temeraire that Lily and I have not forgotten our promise, and we are ready to fight with him whenever he should ask. We will not let them hang you, not at all.’

Laurence stared up at the immense Regal Copper. All his crew looked deeply distressed, as well they might, the outlaw remark being perfectly audible several clearings over. Berkley only snorted. ‘There has been plenty of talk like that, and louder,’ he said. ‘I expect that is why you have been kept stuffed between decks in a ship instead of a in a decent prison on land. No, don't beg my pardon. It was sure as sixpence you and that mad beast of yours would make a spectacle of yourselves sooner or later. Bring him back, do for a dozen Frogs, and save us all the bother of the execution.’

With this sanguine if unlikely recommendation, Laurence reported to the courier-clearing with his orders, looking a little less shabby. Berkley was a thickset man, and if the borrowed coat was too large, at least he could get it on. And the borrowed boots were entirely serviceable, with a little padding of straw at the toes. His repaired appearance got him no better treatment, however. There were a dozen beasts waiting for messages and orders, and when Laurence had presented himself, the courier-master said, ‘If you will be so good as to wait,’ and left him outside the clearing. Laurence was near enough to see the master talking with his officers. None of the courier captains looked very inclined to take him up. He was left standing an hour, while four messages came in and were sent out, before another Winchester landed bringing fresh orders from the Admiralty, and at last the courier-master came and said, ‘Very well; we have a man to take you.’

‘Morning, sir,’ the captain said, touching his hat, as Laurence came over. It was Hollin, his former ground-crew master. ‘Elsie, will you give the captain a leg up? There is a strap there, sir, handy for you.’

‘Thank you, Hollin,’ Laurence said, grateful for the steady, matter-of-factness, and climbed up to her back. ‘We are for Pen Y Fan.’

‘Right you are, sir, we know the way,’ Hollin said. ‘Do you need a bite to sup, Elsie, before we go?’

‘No,’ she said, raising her head dripping from the water-trough. ‘They always have lovely cows there, I will wait.’

They did not speak very much during the flight. Winchesters were so small and quick one felt always on the point of flying off from the force of the wind steadily testing the limits of the carabiner straps. Laurence's hands, already blistered, grew bruised where he held on to the leather harness. They raced past blurred fields of brown stalks and snow. The thin cold air chapped at their faces and leaked into the neck of Laurence's coat, and through his threadbare shirt. He did not mind, he wished they might go quicker still. He resented now every mile remaining.

Goodrich Castle swelled up before them, on its hill, and Hollin put out the signal-flags as they flashed by: courier, with orders, and the fort's signal-gun fired in acknowledgment, already falling behind them.

The mountains were growing closer, and closer, and as the sun began to set Elsie came over the final sharp ridge and over the broad blood-stained feeding grounds, and the cliffs full of dragon-holes. She landed. The cattle pen was empty, its wide door standing open. There were no lights and no sound. There was not a dragon anywhere to be seen.

Chapter Four

Overnight, icicles had grown upon the overhang of the cave, a row of glittering teeth, and now as the sun struck they steadily dripped themselves away upon the stone, an uneven pattering without rhythm or sense. Temeraire opened his eyes once in a while, dully to watch them shrink; then he closed his eyes and put his head down. No one had proposed his removal, or disturbed him.

A scrabbling of claws made him look up; a small dragon had landed on the ledge, and Lloyd was sliding down from its back. ‘Come now then,’ Lloyd said, tramping in, his boots ringing and smearing field-muck on the clean stone. ‘Come now, old boy, why such a fuss, today? We have a lovely visitor waiting. A nice fat bullock will set you up—’

Temeraire had never wanted to kill anyone, except of course anyone who tried to hurt Laurence; he liked to fight well enough, as it was exciting, but he had never thought that he would like to kill anyone just for himself. Only, in this moment it seemed to him he would much rather that than have Lloyd before him, speaking so, when Laurence was dead.

‘Be silent,’ he said, and when Lloyd continued without a pause.

‘—the very best put aside for you special, tonight—’

Temeraire stretched out his neck and put his head directly before Lloyd and said, low, ‘My captain is dead.’

That at least meant something to Lloyd: he went white, stopped talking and held himself very still; Temeraire watched him closely. It was almost disappointing. If only Lloyd would say something else dreadful, or do something foul as he always did; if only—but Laurence would not like it— Laurence would not have liked it—Temeraire took a long hissing breath, and drew his head back, curling in upon himself again, and Lloyd sagged in relief.

‘Why there's been some mistake,’ he said, after a moment, his voice only a few shades less hearty. ‘I've heard nothing of the sort, old boy, word would've been sent me—’

His words made Temeraire angry all over again, but differently now: the sharp strange feeling was dulled, and he felt quite tired, wishing only for Lloyd to be gone.

‘I dare say you would tell me he was alive, even if he had been hanged at Tyburn,’ he said, bitterly, ‘as long as it made me eat, and mate, and listen to you. Well, I will not. I have borne it; I would have borne anything, only to keep Laurence alive, but I will bear it no longer. I will eat when I like, and not otherwise, and I will not mate with anyone unless I choose to.’ He looked at the little dragon who had brought Lloyd and said, ‘Now take him away, if you please; and tell the others that I do not want him brought again without asking first.’

The little dragon bobbed his head nervously and picked up the startled and protesting Lloyd to carry him down again. Temeraire closed his eyes and coiled himself again; the drip of the icicles his only company.

A few hours later, Perscitia and Moncey landed on the cave ledge with a studied air of insouciance, carrying two fresh-killed cows. They brought them inside, and laid them in front of him. ‘I am not hungry,’ Temeraire said sharply.

‘Oh, we only told Lloyd they was for you so he would let us have extra,’ Moncey said cheerfully. ‘You don't mind if we eat them here?’ and he tore into the first one. Temeraire's tail twitched, entirely without volition, at the hot juicy smell of the blood, and when Perscitia nudged the second cow towards him, he took it in his jaws without really meaning to. In a few swallows it was gone, and what they had left of the first followed swiftly.

He flew down for another, and even a fourth; he did not have to think or feel while he ate. A small flock of the more diminutive dragons clustered together on the edge of the feeding grounds watching him anxiously, and when he looked for yet another cow, a couple of them rose up to herd one towards him. But none of them spoke to Temeraire. When he had finished, he flew for a long distance along the river and settled down to drink only where he might be quite alone again. He felt sore in all his joints, as if he had flown hard in sleeting weather for a long, long time.

He washed, as well as he could manage alone, and went back to his cave to think. Perscitia came up to see him, to present an interesting mathematical problem, but he only glanced at it and said, ‘No. Help me find Moncey; I want to know what has been happening with the war.’

‘Why, I don't know,’ Moncey said, surprised, when they had tracked him down, lazing in a meadow on the mountainside with some of the other Winchesters and small ferals. They had been playing a bit of a game, where they tossed branches upon the ground and tried to pick up as many as they could without dropping any. ‘It's nothing to do with us, you know, not here. The Frenchy dragons and their captains are all kept over in Scotland, further up. There won't be any fighting round here.’

‘It is to do with us, too,’ Temeraire said. ‘This is our territory, all of ours; and the French are trying to take it away. That has as much to do with us as it would if they were trying to take your cave, and more, because they are trying to take everything else along with your cave.’

The little dragons put down their sticks and came closer to listen, with some interest. ‘But what do you want to do?’ Moncey said.

Numerous official couriers were crossing the countryside in every direction, at all speed, and the afternoon was not entirely spent before Moncey and the other Winchesters were able to return, full of as much news as Temeraire could wish for. If the numbers reported were a little inconsistent, it did not matter very much; Napoleon had landed a great many men, all near London, and there had not yet been any great battle to throw him off.

‘He is all over the coast, and the fellows say there is this Marshal Davout fellow poking about in Kent, to the south of London, and another one Lefèbvre, who is already somewhere along this way,’ Moncey said, pointing out the countryside west of the capital, and nearest Wales.

‘Oh, I know that one, he was at the siege of Danzig,’ Temeraire said. ‘I do not think he was so very clever, he did not make a big push to have us out, not until Lien came and took charge of everything. Where is our army?’

‘All fallen back about London,’ Minnow said. ‘Everyone says there is going to be a big battle there, in a couple of weeks perhaps.’

‘Then there is not a moment to lose,’ Temeraire said.

They passed the word for a council meeting, and everyone came promptly: the other big dragons considerably more respectful now, even if Ballista still was patronizing, ‘You are upset, of course, and no wonder; but I am sure if you tell them you would like another captain—’

‘No,’ Temeraire said, the resonance making his whole body tremble, and looked away, while everyone fell quiet. After a moment he was able to continue. ‘I am not going to take another captain,’ he said, ‘and a stranger; I do not need a handler as if I were one of Lloyd's cows. I can fight on my own, and so can any of you.’

‘But what is there to fight for?’ Requiescat said. ‘If the French win, they aren't going to give us any bother, it will only mean someone else taking eggs; they'll be just as careful.’

There was a murmur of agreement, and Moncey added, a little plaintively, ‘And I thought you were always on about how unfair the Admiralty are, not letting us have any liberty.’

‘I do not mean to speak for the Government,’ Temeraire said. ‘But this country is our territory as much as it is any man's; it belongs to us all together, and if we simply sit here eating cows while Napoleon tries to take it away, we have no right to complain of anything.’

‘Well, what is there to complain of, then?’ Requiescat said. ‘We have everything as we like it.’

‘So you will quarrel over a wet unpleasant cave, but you will not fight to sleep in a pavilion, which is never wet or cold, even in winter?’ Temeraire said, scornfully. ‘You only think you have things as you like them to be, because you have never seen anything better, and that is because you have spent all of your lives penned up here or in coverts.’

When he had described pavilions for them a little more, and the dragon-city in Africa, he added, ‘And in Yutien, there were dragons who were employed as merchants. All of them had heaps of jewels – only tin and glass, Laurence said, but they were very pretty anyway; and in Africa they had gold enough to put it on all of their crew members.’ There were not many dragons present who did not sigh at least a little; those who wore their small treasures looked at them, and many of the unadorned looked at them, wistfully.

‘It all sounds a lot of gimcrackery to me,’ Requiescat said.

‘Then you may stay here and have my cave, which is not a quarter as nice as a pavilion,’ Temeraire said coolly, ‘and when we have beaten Napoleon and taken many prizes, you shan't have a share; Moncey will have more gold than you.’

‘Prizes!’ Gentius said, rousing unexpectedly. ‘I helped in taking a prize once. My captain had a fourteenth share. That is how she bought the picture.’

Everyone knew of Gentius's painting, and an impressed murmur went around: this example proved better than hypothetical jewels in a country which none of them had seen.

‘Now, now, settle down,’ Ballista said, thumping her tail, but with a considerably more lenient air. ‘Look here, I suppose no one much wants the French to beat us, we have all had a go with them before, if we were ever in service. But the corps don't want us unless we take harness and captains, and we cannot just wander into battles: we will get circled and shot up. That is no joke, even for us big ones.’

‘If we fight thoughtlessly and singularly, we will,’ Temeraire said, ‘but there is no reason we must do that, and we cannot be boarded if we have no harness, or—or anyone to capture. We will form our own army, and we will work out tactics for ourselves, not stuff men have invented without bothering to ask us even though they cannot fly themselves. It stands to reason that we can do better than them, if we try.’

‘Hm, well,’ Ballista said to his convincing argument, and the general murmur of agreement found it so too.

‘All right, all right,’ Requiescat said. ‘Very nice storytelling, but it is all a hum. Treasure and battles are well and good, but what d'you mean to do for dinner?’

The next morning, they landed together on the grounds at the feeding time. The cows in their pen were bellowing invitingly, and their delicious grassy scent made Temeraire's tongue want to lick the air. But the other dragons all kept the line with him: no one even turned their nose toward the running cattle. The herdsmen prodded the cows forward with no results, and then looked at each other and back at Lloyd, in confusion.

Lloyd began pacing up and down the line of dragons looking up at them all in bafflement, saying entreatingly to one after another in turn, ‘Go on, then, eat something.’ Temeraire waited until Lloyd came up to him, then bent his head down and said, ‘Lloyd, where do the cows come from?’

Lloyd stared at him. ‘Go on, eat something, old boy,’ he repeated feebly, so it came out as a question more than a command.

‘Stop that; my name is Temeraire, or you may call me sir,’ Temeraire said, ‘since that is how to speak to someone politely.’

‘Oh, ah,’ Lloyd said, not very sensibly.

‘You have heard that the French have invaded?’ Temeraire enquired.

‘Oh!’ Lloyd said, in tones of relief. ‘None of you need worry anything about that. Why, they shan't come anywhere near here, or interfere with your cows. You shall all be fed, the cows will come here every day, there's no call to save them, old boy—’

Temeraire raised his head and gave a small roar, only to quiet him; snow tumbled down the slope on the other side of the feeding grounds, but it was not very much, a foot perhaps, scarcely deep enough to dust his talons. ‘You will say sir,’ he told Lloyd, lowering his head to fix the groundsman securely with one eye.

‘Sir,’ Lloyd said, faintly.

Satisfied, Temeraire sat back on his haunches and explained. ‘We are not staying here,’ he said, ‘so you see, it is no help to tell us that the cows will always be here. We are, all of us, going to fight Napoleon and we need to take the cows with us.’

Lloyd did not seem to understand him at first; it required the better part of an hour to work it into his head, that they were all leaving the grounds and did not mean to come back. When it did, he became desperate, and began to beg and plead with them in a very shocking way, which made Temeraire feel wretchedly embarrassed: Lloyd was so very small, and it felt like bullying to say no to him.

‘That is quite enough,’ Temeraire said at last, forcing himself to be firm. ‘Lloyd, we are not going to hurt you or take away your food or your property, so you have no right to carry on at us in this way, only because we do not like to stay.’

‘How you talk; I'll be dismissed from my post for certain, and that's the least of it,’ Lloyd said, almost in tears. ‘It's as much as my life is worth, if I let you all go out wandering wild, pillaging farmers' livestock every which way—’

‘But we are not going pillaging, at all,’ Temeraire said. ‘That is why I am asking you where the cows come from. If the Government would feed them to us here, they are ours, and there is no reason we cannot take them and eat them somewhere else.’

‘But they come from all over,’ Lloyd said, and gesturing to his herdsmen added, ‘the drovers bring a string every week from a different farm. It is as much as all of Wales can do, to feed you lot; there's not one place.’

‘Oh,’ Temeraire said, and scratched his head; he had envisioned a very large pen, somewhere over the mountains perhaps, full of cows waiting to be taken out and carried along. ‘Well,’ he decided, ‘then you all will have to help: you will go to the farms and fetch the cows and bring them along to us. That way,’ he added, with a burst of fresh inspiration, ‘no one can complain to you, or sack you, because you will not have let us go off at all.’

This solution did not immediately promote itself to the herdsmen, who began to protest: some of them had families, and none of them wished to go to war. ‘No, that is all stuff and nonsense,’ Temeraire said. ‘It is your duty to fight the French as much as it is ours; more, because it is your Government, and it would press you if you were needed. I have been to sea with many pressed men; I know it is not very nice,’ he added, although he did not entirely see why they did not like to go; anywhere was better than this loathsome place, and at least they would be doing something, rather than sitting about, ‘but if Napoleon wins, that also will not be very nice, and anyway, I dare say the Government will stop your wages if they learn that you are sitting here with no dragons about. And if you come, we will give you a share of the prizes we take.’

Prizes proved to be a magical word with men as well as dragons, as did the general conviction, arrived at through a deal of quiet muttering, that if they did not go with the dragons, they should certainly be blamed for the desertion; but no one could complain they had not done their duty if they followed the beasts. Or at least, it would be more difficult to find them.

‘We might be ready soon as next week,’ Lloyd said, with one last gasping attempt. ‘If you'd all just have a bite to eat, and a bit of sleep first—’

‘We are leaving now,’ Temeraire said firmly, and rising up on his haunches called out, ‘Advance guard, aloft; and you may take your breakfast with you.’

Moncey and the small dragons gleefully leapt onto the herd, first for once, and went eating as they flew; it was perhaps a little messy, but much quicker to eat as one went. Minnow swallowed the head of her cow, and waved a wing-tip. ‘We will see you at the rendezvous,’ she called down. ‘Come on then pips, off we go,’ she said to the other courier-weights and they all stormed away rapidly northwards and east, along the planned route.

‘Now can we eat?’ Requiescat said, watching after them plaintively.

‘Yes, you may all eat, but have half now and take the rest to eat along the way, otherwise you will fly slowly, and be hungry again anyway at the end of it,’ Temeraire said. ‘Lloyd, we are going to Abergavenny, or outside it, anyway; do you know where that is?’

‘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 within 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.

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