by Naomi Novik
“Well, I suppose it is a little easier to knock them down,” he admitted to Laurence, “after they have been burnt some; not that I could not have managed it alone.”
“You must also reserve your strength,” Laurence said. “Another pass, and that will have done it, I think; some trees left standing will do no harm. The signal, Mr. Allen,” Laurence added, and when Temeraire had given the field another circle, the middle-weights came in dropping their loads of wet dirt, scooped up easily from the riverbed of the Thames with waggon-carts as shovels, and heaped it onto the remaining flames.
What was left would not have been much use as a real place to rest, the field a wet and smoky mess, covered with heaps of debris and the cracked stumps of trees poking inconveniently out of the ground at odd intervals. No-one could have comfortably stretched out in it without a great deal more work done to clear it out. But there were still a handful of fires crackling left, smaller, which the men dug rings around, to keep from spreading, and after a little shoveling here and there a handful of tents were put up, and from aloft it looked well enough, especially with the stuffed redcoats, coats and breeches filled with straw, which Admiral Roland’s men had arranged about some of the fires.
“I like those,” Perscitia said, eyeing the figures, and paced back a few steps to examine them critically. “One must be quite close to notice, and I dare say if one were moving quickly, it would be quite impossible.”
“I hope it will do for the Fleurs, any road,” Admiral Roland said. “And now, the lot of you, to the herds; and to sleep. Laurence, do you want your officers?”
“I would not have them removed from other posts, if they have been placed,” Laurence said, “but I defer to your judgment, Admiral.” Temeraire tipped his head and put his ear towards Laurence, puzzled a little, to hear better his tone, which seemed to him a little odd.
“Are you not happy?” Temeraire asked anxiously, while he waited for his dinner; the herdsmen at the pen were conferring together, about the rations which they could provide, with occasional anxious glances towards the sixty dragons patiently arranged outside the fence. Laurence had been so very quiet, since the conference. “We are together again, and we will soon beat Napoleon; I am sure the generals cannot help but see, when that is done, that we have done everything correctly. I see now,” he added, “why they were ready to be so wicked: they are so very afraid of losing. And I cannot really blame them for being afraid, because they do not seem to be very clever; but they might at least be clever enough to see that they ought to let us manage things, if they are not very good at it themselves.”
“I would not for the world diminish your spirits,” Laurence said, after a moment. “I am very glad indeed to be with you again, and for the prospect of action; but I will counsel you against that degree of overconfidence, which lends itself only to disappointment. That,” he added, lower, nearly to himself, “was perhaps as much as anything the cause of the Prussian loss.”
“Well, they were very slow,” Temeraire said. “And it seems to me so are these fellows, but at least now it cannot matter any longer, since we are to fight here: we do not need to hurry anywhere. Whyever is it taking so long?” He stretched his head out over the fence. “What is the difficulty?”
They did not have enough, that was the difficulty: less than eighty cows in the pen, and all the harnessed dragons to be fed also. “Then you must make soup, and roast and crack the bones to make it tastier, and so we can eat them more easily; and you might put some grain in it, and some vegetables,” Temeraire added, to the rather perplexed-looking herdsmen. “Laurence, where has Gong Su gone to?”
“I do not know,” Laurence said. “He was privately hired, not an official member of the crew, and my affairs have been in no kind of order. I have not been able to carry on any sort of correspondence, nor meet my obligations. I expect he must have sought other employment: I hope he was successful.”
“I did not think all my crew would be taken away in this fashion,” Temeraire said, feeling rather displeased, “or I would have brought everyone with us to France; except then I suppose they would all have been called traitors, too, and perhaps some of them would not have liked to go.”
“No,” Laurence said. “But I thank you for the reminder; I must make arrangements, while I can; I must make inquiries after Gong Su, and make good my other debts.”
“There will be a great deal of time, after tomorrow,” Temeraire pointed out.
Laurence paused and then said, “Best to clear away such things before a battle, my dear.”
* * *
THE SOUP THE HERDSMEN at length managed was not very good, even though they were all hungry enough to eat it: the meat and vegetables in congealed lumps at the bottom, and not very pleasant, either, but squashy and flavorless. Only Gentius was pleased: he ate twice his usual amount, and pronounced it excellent, really excellent, and he would have another serving if there were any left.
“Not much like proper food,” Requiescat said unenthusiastically.
“Well, tomorrow when we have beaten them, we will go and get our own herd, and perhaps by then, Laurence will have got hold of Gong Su again,” Temeraire said, “and then he will make us a feast to celebrate, something very nice, perhaps, such as what they cook in the Imperial Palace.”
“I will be happy enough with a proper cow, fresh,” Requiescat said, and then sat up abruptly, throwing back his shoulders, as with a great thump Maximus came down in the clearing before them and rattled all the trees nearby.
“Hm,” Maximus said, and drew himself up on his haunches, too.
“You are here!” Temeraire cried, joyfully. “Is Lily with you also? Are you well?”
“Right as rain,” Maximus said absently, without looking away from Requiescat; they were both prickling up their spines and staring at one another directly in the eyes.
“Where is—Maximus?” Temeraire said, puzzled. “What are you doing?”
“Laurence!” a voice yelled faintly, from outside the camp, and Laurence looked up from where he was sitting and writing. “Laurence, get that damned lump of mine out of that camp, you have another Regal there!”
“Oh,” said Temeraire, and roared, loudly, over their heads; Maximus and Requiescat both jerked violently and turned to look at him instead, blinking. “There, now do not start that again, we have a battle tomorrow,” Temeraire said, “and you had better stop Berkley from running so fast, or he will have an apoplexy,” he added.
Maximus turned his head and said, “You do not have to run, what is there to be running for?” as Berkley came nearly staggering into the clearing, and Laurence went to give him his arm to the fallen tree which Temeraire had pulled down for him to sit on.
Berkley stared from Maximus to Requiescat and back, very suspiciously, while he gulped for breath. “Pray do not worry, I will not let them fight,” Temeraire said. “I would have thought you had more sense,” he added to them severely.
“I was not going to fight,” Maximus said, unconvincingly. “Only I have never seen anyone big as me before, except when I was still growing.”
“The girls are bigger,” Requiescat said, with rather a reminiscent tone. “But that is different.”
“I do not see why,” Temeraire said, “and it is not as though a Grand Chevalier were much smaller.” He did not think he was much smaller, either, but that perhaps would be rather puffing himself off to say.
“Don’t much like them, either,” Requiescat said.
Maximus nodded vigorously in agreement. “And we are on short commons,” he added. “I knew you must be back, as soon as they brought us this mess for dinner.” He nudged Temeraire’s shoulder with his head, in a friendly way. Temeraire wobbled, but managed with some effort to keep his balance.
“Tomorrow there will be plenty, and anyway, even if there were not, I dare say you could fly in opposite directions and find something, without having to quarrel over it,” Temeraire said. “But where is Lily?”
“She is
in Scotland,” Maximus said. “Catherine has had the egg, so she cannot be flying to fight.”
“I suppose I did not tell you before: a boy,” Berkley said to Laurence, gloomily, “so no use to us; and ten pounds, damn him. Nearly killed her.”
“The egg is very noisy,” Maximus added.
“I hope they both do well now?” Laurence said.
“She can write and say so, which means she is only half-dead, I expect,” Berkley said, and heaved himself up to his feet. “Have you finished your damned card-call?” he said to Maximus. “If this fine scheme of Roland’s is going to do any good, you cannot be hopping all over the camp now it is getting dark. And you may carry me this time, instead of heaving yourself off without a word.”
“I only wanted to come see Temeraire a moment,” Maximus said, putting out one great curved claw for Berkley to climb into. “And now we have, so we may go.”
“We shall see each other tomorrow in the fighting, anyway,” Temeraire said, with satisfaction, and curled himself up to sleep with a sense of great contentment, only to be jarred rudely awake an hour later, by the queer muffled booming of bombs falling, and the popping voices of the pepper guns answering.
He put his head up and looked: he could not see anything much but the occasional white blooms of powder-flash from the ground, where the artillery-men were firing, and the great yellow bursts of flame as the bombs struck and burst. When there was no firing going on, he could only make out the faintest shadows of the handful of light-weights circling—mostly mongrels with better night-vision than most, Minnow and some other of the ferals, who had been organized into shifts to give some semblance of resistance to enhance the ruse.
“You ought to go back to sleep,” Laurence said, rousing, and Temeraire lowered his head to nose at him carefully: how good it was not to be alone, and to know Laurence was with him, and safe; only it would have been better still if they might have gone fighting together.
“I will, in a moment,” Temeraire said, privately hoping that perhaps the Fleurs might realize the trick, any moment now, and they should have to go and join in. But the French dragons were flying too high aloft, and the fires on the ground and the explosions of their own bombs dazzled their sensitive eyes too badly, particularly with the flash-powder being shot in their faces whenever the fighting detachment could manage: Arkady and some of his ferals, with their small crews, were taking a part.
He sighed and put his head down again, twitching as yet another of the bombs went off.
SILENCE WOKE LAURENCE, a little while before dawn: the bombardment had stopped. He rolled off Temeraire’s arm and went to wash his face, breaking the crust of ice in the bowl and scrubbing as best as he could: there was no soap. Smoke still rose from the decoy field, but the sky above was empty and lightening quickly. The French would be on the move by now: an hour, perhaps would see them—
A bell was ringing, distantly, a frantic note in its voice, and others picking up the alarm, coming nearer and nearer, sounding all over the camp, and Temeraire put his head up and said exultantly, “It is time to fight.”
He put Laurence aboard into an odd arrangement, with only the few straps of harness which Fellowes and Blythe had managed for him and Allen and Roland to latch on to; there would be no one more going up with them. He had considered whether to dismiss Roland back to whatever post she had abandoned, from concern that it might seem a reflection on Jane, a kind of endorsement she surely would not have chosen to make. But he did not know where she had been serving, and when he had inquired, Roland had put out her chin and only said, “I should prefer to stay, sir,” and she shook her head when he asked her if she had been signal-ensign. “Fifth lookout, sir; I shan’t be missed.”
Of course, Emily had no need to worry about her future, which was quite settled: she would inherit Excidium, on her mother’s retirement, a promotion guaranteed; Blythe and Fellowes were ground-crew masters and could always be sure of a place. Allen, however—
“No, sir, well,” Allen said, stumbling over his words, “that is, they hadn’t given me a place again, sir, aloft; I was with the clerks, so, it doesn’t much matter for me.”
It was, Laurence privately and sadly felt, a better place for him: Allen was hopelessly clumsy, and more than once had nearly accomplished his own end; but Laurence would not tell any man to stay behind the lines, who wished to be in them.
They now came stumbling from their small cold shelter, little more than a few branches laid down on the earth, next Temeraire’s side, to keep them from lying in the wet. Laurence reached a hand down, to help them up, where before many dozens would have been.
“I am coming, too,” another voice said, thickly accented; Laurence looked over and saw Demane standing already beside him, having come up the other side. The boy was bristling with arms: two smallswords, two pistols, two knives, all with mismatched hilts, and a sack of small bombs slung over his shoulder, which he strung onto the harness without waiting for permission. “No, you sit there,” he told Allen, pointing farther back along Temeraire’s shoulder to the lookout’s place, and such was the air of decision that Allen meekly obeyed; though he had three years and a foot in height over the younger boy.
“Are you not assigned to Arkady?” Laurence said.
“We are of your crew,” the boy said, meaning himself and Sipho, whom Laurence now spied down in the clearing, helping Fellowes and Blythe to arrange their meager supply of tools, waiting in case Temeraire should need to come back in for repairs. “Both of us, together. You said.”
“That is quite right,” Temeraire said, looking around, “and I am sure Arkady does not need him; he was allowed to fight last night,” with a note of some disgruntlement, “and will be sleeping late, and I dare say we will have won by the time he wakes up.”
So they were four aboard, where thirty were common and hundreds had been managed, all of them latched to the one thick band: it circled Temeraire’s neck, and was joined by securing straps to bands about either of his shoulders, so it would not slide about. When they had all hooked on their carabiners, Temeraire sat up, and now Laurence could see past the trees to where a cloud of French dragons was coming, like bees, back and forth along the road: setting down great numbers of men and guns.
He had seen these maneuvers before, at the Battle of Jena, and he was heartened a little to see that the British Army was not waiting idly by, but guns were being hastily advanced to fire upon the French positions, before they could be secured. The guns moved slow, however, men struggling to drag them forward through the mud, and already the French were answering nearly as vigorously.
“They are beginning without us,” Temeraire said, and his roar roused up all the dragons at once. “The enemy are here; are you all quite ready?” he asked them.
“No, wait, I have had an idea,” the blue-green dragon said, the one called Perscitia, and leapt into the air; in a moment she had returned, with something in her talons which she laid down upon the ground: a heap of the sodden and ragged figures, stuffed with straw, from their decoy clearing; some were still smoking and charred. “Tie them on to us,” she said, to the group of militiamen, rubbing their eyes, who had been sleeping beside her. “Tie them on, with rope—”
“They are quite wet,” Temeraire said, sniffing at the figures. “I do not see the use of that.”
“They will think you are harnessed!” Perscitia said. “Oh, and the paint, where is that black paint? Bring it at once, too, and make straps on them—”
“We have no time,” Temeraire protested.
“Their dragons are not fighting yet,” Perscitia said. “—very well, very well, we will do it only to the heavy-weights! Do you not see,” she snapped, “they will jump over to try and board you, and then there will be nothing for them to latch on to, and you will have them off in a trice.”
“Ha,” Jane said with satisfaction, when she had landed with Excidium, only a little while later, and had the plan explained to her, while the men finished painting
Requiescat with the false harness-stripes. “Yes; very clever. They will smoke it soon enough, but while the trick lasts, they will be jumping over to board you big ones by the dozens. All right, gentlemen,” she looked over at Temeraire, “here are your orders, then: you unharnessed fellows will go in first, then, and go in close quarters at them. If you can draw their boarding parties, they will be undermanned when we come in, and we have the advantage in weight. He has only eight heavy-weight beasts brought up from the coast, as yet; I dare say he has had to send the rest back, for lack of food.”
“And when you have come in?” Temeraire asked.
“Then I cut you loose against the flanks of their infantry,” Jane said. “If we are all fighting aloft together, we will only get ourselves into a tangle, but you cannot do anything but good against them near to the ground, so long as you keep out of the line of fire of our artillery.”
“And keep out of our acid, too,” Excidium added, and leapt into the air.
“We have acid ourselves,” the old Longwing Gentius muttered, from where he was perched aboard a big Chequered Nettle, Armatius.
Temeraire turned his head and asked, “Are you all quite secure?”
Laurence checked his borrowed cutlass and pistols, one last time. “We are,” he answered, and they were aloft, with a great surging rush of wind, and many voices roaring as they rose.
Bonaparte’s Armée de l’Air was seduced easily into trying again the strategy, which had served them so well at Jena, the cloud of smaller dragons rushing the heavy-weights, loaded up with men. Laurence looked away; thirty Frenchmen at once had flung themselves with enthusiasm and courage onto Requiescat’s back, to face the large company they expected, and a shrug of the great Regal Copper’s shoulders threw them off into the air, grasping and futile; and a few of them cried out as they fell, dreadfully, until the noise ended below.
