Victory of Eagles (11 page)

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 drew in 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, old boy, word would’ve been sent me—”

It made Temeraire angry all over again but differently; that sharp strange feeling was dulled, and now he

felt quite tired, and wished only for Lloyd to be gone away.

“I dare say
you
would tell me he were alive, if he had been hanged at Tyburn,” he said, bitterly, “only 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; 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.” He looked at the little dragon who had brought Lloyd

up and said, “Now take him away, if you please; and tell the others 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, with the drip-drip-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, 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 over, he took it in

his jaws without really meaning to. Then somehow in a few swallows it was gone, and what they had left

of the first also.

He went down for another, and even a fourth; he did not have to think or feel anything while he ate. A

small flock of the littler dragons clustered together on the edge of the feeding grounds, watching him

anxiously, and when he looked for another cow, a couple of them rose up to herd one towards him. But

none of them spoke to him. 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

very hard for a long time, in sleeting weather.

He washed, as well as he could manage alone, and went back to his cave to think. Perscitia came up to

see him, with an interesting mathematical problem, but he looked at it and then 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 were playing a bit of a game,

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where they tossed tree-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, farther 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 is as much to do with us as if they were trying to take your cave, and more, because

they will take everything else along with your cave.”

The little dragons put down their sticks and came nearer to listen, with some interest. “But what do you

want to do?” Moncey said.

The official couriers were crossing the countryside in every direction, at all speed, and the afternoon was

not yet gone before Moncey and the other Winchesters were able to return, full of all the news which

Temeraire could wish. If the numbers reported were perhaps a little inconsistent, that did not matter very

much; Napoleon certainly had landed a great many men, all near London, and there had not been any

great battle yet to throw him off.

“He is all over the coast, and then the fellows say there is this Marshal Davout fellow poking about in

Kent, south of London, and another one, Lefèbvre, who is already somewhere along this way,” Moncey

said, pointing out the countryside west of the city, 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 another council-meeting, and everyone came promptly: the other big dragons

considerably more respectful now, if Ballista still was patronizing as she said, “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, “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. “Even if the French win, they ain’t going to give us any

bother, it will only be someone else taking eggs, just as careful.”

There was a murmur of agreement, and Moncey added, a little plaintively, “And I thought you were on

about how unfair the Admiralty are, and not letting us have any liberty.”

“I do not mean to say anything for the Government at all,” 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 only sit here eating cows while

Napoleon is trying to take it away, we have no right to complain of anything.”

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

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“So you would quarrel over one wet unpleasant cave instead of another, but you would not like 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, because you have never seen anything better, and that is because you have spent

all your lives penned up here or in coverts.”

When he had described pavilions for them a little more, and the dragon-city in Africa, and added, “And

in Yutien, there were dragons who were merchants, and 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
their crews,” there were not many dragons who did not sigh at least a little, and those who had some

little bit of treasure on them looked at it, and many of the rest 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 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 Gentius’s painting, and a really impressed murmur went around: this was better than

hypothetical jewels in another 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, anyway; we have all had a go with them

before, if we were ever in service. But the men don’t want us unless we take harness and captains, and

we cannot just go wandering into battles: we will get circled round and shot up. That is no joke, even for

us big ones.”

“If we fight thoughtlessly, just one alone at a time, we will,” Temeraire said, “but there is no reason we

must, and we cannot be boarded if we have no harness, or—or anyone to capture. We will be 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 we can do better than
that,
if we try.”

“Hm, well,” Ballista said; this was a convincing argument, and the general murmur of agreement found it

so.

“All right, all right,” Requiescat said. “Very nice story-telling, but it is all a hum. Treasure and battles are

well and good, but what d’you mean to do for dinner?”

They landed all together on the grounds the next morning at the feeding time, the cows bellowing

invitingly in their pen, and the delicious grassy scent made Temeraire’s tongue want to lick out at the air.

But the other dragons all kept the line with him: no one even put their nose out towards the running cattle.

The herdsmen prodded the cows forward, with no results, and looked at one another and back at Lloyd,

in confusion.

Lloyd began going up and down the line looking up at them all in bafflement, saying to one after another

in turn, “Go on, then, eat something,” entreatingly. Temeraire waited until Lloyd came up to him and then

bent his head down and said, “Lloyd, where do the cows come from?”

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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 say
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 inquired.

“Oh!” Lloyd said, in tones of relief. “None of you need worry anything about that. Why, they shan’t

come anywhere near, or interfere with the 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; a bit of snow came tumbling 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 Lloyd 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 say the cows will be here. We are going to fight Napoleon, all of us; and we need to

take the cows with us.”

Lloyd did not seem at first to understand him; it required the better part of an hour to work it into his

head that they were all leaving the grounds together and did not mean to come back, and then he began

to be desperate, and 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 bullying to say no to him.

“That is quite enough,” Temeraire said at last, forcing himself to firmness. “Lloyd, we are not going to

hurt you or take away your food or your property, so you have no right to go on at us in this way, only

because we do not like to stay.”

“How you talk; I’ll be dismissed my post for sure, 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 another 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 some 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, and that

way,” he added, with a burst of fresh inspiration, “no-one can complain to you, or sack you, because you

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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 liked to go to war. “No, that is all stuff,” 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 certainly better than this