Victory of Eagles (12 page)

loathsome place, and they would be
doing
something, and not only sitting about, “but if Napoleon wins,

that will also not be very nice, and anyway, I dare say the Government will stop your wages if they learn

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 a magical word with men as well as dragons, as did the general conviction arrived at

among the men through a deal of quiet muttering, that if they did
not
go, they should certainly be blamed,

but no-one could complain they had not done their duty, if they followed the beasts when they ran off. Or

at least, it would be more difficult to find them to complain.

“We might be ready soon as next week,” Lloyd said, one last gasping attempt. “If you’d all just have a

bite to eat, and a bit of sleep—”

“We are leaving
now,
” Temeraire said, and rising up on his haunches called out, “Advance guard, aloft;

and you may take your breakfast, too.”

Moncey and the small dragons all gleefully leapt onto the herd, first for once, and went up still 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 went storming away rapidly

northward 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, because otherwise you

will fly slow, 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?”

“But we can’t drive the herd all that way by tomorrow,” Lloyd said.

“Then you will have to bring them as close as you can, and we will manage somehow,” Temeraire said;

he was done listening to difficulties. “I have seen Napoleon’s army fight, and in a week they will be in

London, so we must be, also.”

“We are a hundred fifty miles from London,” Lloyd protested.

“All the more reason to travel fast,” Temeraire said, and flung himself into the air.

Chapter 5

Page 38

L
AURENCE STOOD BEWILDEREDin the empty grounds, and called Temeraire’s name a few times.

There was no answer but the mumbled echoes that the cliffs gave back, and the momentary attention of a

small red squirrel which paused to look at him, before continuing on its way. Elsie landed again, behind

him. “Not a wing in the sky, sir,” Hollin said, “But we found—”

Elsie carried them up to a cave, reaching deep into the mountain face. Though the light was failing

rapidly, Laurence could trace with his fingers the letters of Temeraire’s name, carved deeply into the

rock: so at least he had been here, and well enough to leave this mark. They managed to fashion a torch

to inspect it, but the cave was too tidy, inside, to guess when his habitation had ended: no bones or other

remnants of food.

It was only two days since the landing, but with as many dragons as lived in the breeding grounds, if the

herdsmen had all abandoned their posts, and the regular delivery of cattle had been interrupted, the

provisions would quickly have been spent. The dragons must have scattered from hunger, and likely in all

the directions of the rose.

“Well, let us not borrow trouble,” Hollin said, consoling. “He is a clever fellow, and it cannot have been

so long since they left. There are some fresh bones down by the pen, from this morning by the look of

them.”

Laurence shook his head. “I hope he would not have been so foolish, as to stay to the last,” he

answered, low. “So many dragons will undoubtedly be eating up all the local supply, as they go, and he

must have more food than a smaller beast.”

“I am a smaller beast,” Elsie said, a little anxiously, “but I must have something to eat, too, and there is

nothing here.”

They went to Llechrhyd, the nearest settlement they found, and bought her a sheep from a small

cottager, who told them the village by some lucky chance had not been raided. “Flew off east, all of

them, at once this morning,” the old woman told Laurence, while Elsie discreetly made her dinner out

behind the stable, “like a plague of crows: it was dark half-an-hour, all them passing over, and us sure

they would fall on us in a moment; more than that I can’t say.”

“Hollin,” Laurence said, when he had turned away, disheartened, “I cannot tell you what your duty is;

we have no very good intelligence, I am afraid, and if he is flying to feed himself, we cannot well imagine

where he may have gone.”

“Well, sir,” Hollin said, “they said to bring you back with him, and I suppose those are my orders until I

hear otherwise. Anyways, I dare say we will find him tomorrow, first thing or good as. It’s not as though

he’s so easy to miss.”

But this was not reckoning with the confusion of dozens of beasts all flung out upon the countryside at

once. Certainly dragons, in the plural, had been seen everywhere—dreadful marauding beasts, and no

one knew what things were coming to when they were just allowed to go flying around loose. But as to

one particular dragon, black with a ruff, no-one had anything to say.

One farmer thirty miles on, belligerent enough to be brave, had not hidden in his cellar during the

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visitation, and swore that a giant dragon had eaten four of his cows, informing him they were being

confiscated for the war effort and he should be repaid by the Government. He even showed them where

the dragon had scratched a mark in an old oak-tree for his reimbursement, and for a moment Laurence

entertained hopes. But it was not a Chinese mark, only an
X
clumsily carved through the bark, with four

scratches below. “Red and yellow, like fire,” the oldest boy said, peering at them from over the

window-sill of the house, despite his mother’s restraining hand, and sank them completely.

Ten dragons had stopped to drink at the lake on the grounds of a stately house in Monmouthshire, the

housekeeper told them, anxiously, and eaten some of the deer: ten neat
X
’s were marked in the dirt by

the lakeshore. “I am sure I could not tell you if they were black or red or spotted green and yellow, it

was all I had to do to keep breathing, with half my maids fainted dead away,” she said. “And then one of

the creatures came to the door, and asked us through it if we had any curtains. Red ones,” she added.

“We threw outside all the ones from the ballroom, and then they took them and went away.”

Laurence was baffled: curtains? He would have understood better if they had demanded the silver plate.

But at least they were moving in a group, and in the earnest excuses for the pillaging, he thought he saw

Temeraire’s influence, if not his presence: it was so near a mimic to the Chinese mode, which they had

witnessed, where dragons purchased goods by making their mark for the supplier.

The following day, they discovered another farmer with a collection of marks, who rather astonishingly

was not unhappy: the dragons had eaten four of his cows yesterday, he agreed, but that very morning

some men had come through with a string of cattle, and given him replacements, which he pointed out in

their field: four handsome beef cattle, better in all honesty than the scrawnier animals in the farmer’s own

herd.

Seven dragons had been seen in Pen-y-Clawdd, four had landed by the river in Llandogo, and perhaps

one of them had been black—yes, certainly one had been black. Then a dozen had been seen—no, two

dozen—no, a hundred—numbers shouted by the crowd in the common room of an inn, growing steadily

more implausible. Laurence gave it no credit at all, but a few miles farther along, Elsie landed them in a

torn-up meadow, with a neatly dug necessary-pit on the low side away from the water, filled in but still

fragrant, with signs of occupation by at least some number of dragons. “We must be getting right close,

then,” Hollin said, encouragingly, but the next day, no one had so much as seen a wing-tip, though Elsie

went miles around in widening rings to make inquiries, for hours and hours together. They had one and all

vanished into the air.

“WE WILL BE GETTING CLOSEto the French tomorrow, so beginning today we will fly when it is

dark,” Temeraire said, “and try and be as quiet as we can; so pass the word to everyone, not to fly

somewhere if you see lights; or if you smell cows, because they will bellow and run and make a fuss.”

The others nodded, and Temeraire rose up on his haunches to inspect their own pen of cattle. He missed

Gong Su very much. It was not that cooked food was so much pleasanter, he did not care about the

taste at all at present. But Gong Su could stretch a single cow amongst five hungry dragons, if only there

were rice, or something else like to cook it with.

The farther they got from Wales, the more complicated everything became. Lloyd said that it was

expensive to bring the cows so far, because they must be fed along the road, and they could not be

brought very quickly, because they would sicken and stop being fat and good to eat. It helped a great

deal that Majestatis had suggested the notion of borrowing cows, in advance, and using the later ones to

repay; but if they were always flying about snatching cows from the nearby farms, the French were sure

Page 40

to hear about it: Marshal Lefèbvre’s forces were busy snatching cows themselves.

“Maybe we oughtn’t be having the cows driven to us,” Moncey said. “We could always go fetch them

for ourselves, and come back.”

“That is no good at all,” Perscitia said severely. “The longer we must fly to get to the supply, the more

food we must eat only to reach there and come back, which is a waste, and also it means more time

flying back and forth, instead of fighting.”

“Supply-lines,” Gentius said, dolefully, shaking his head. “War is all about supply-lines; my third captain

told me.”

He had insisted on coming along, although he could not really see very well to fly anymore, and tired

easily; but he was grown light enough that he could be carried along by any of the heavy-weights, and it

was very satisfying to everyone to think they had a Longwing with them.

Aside from the difficulty about the food, Temeraire was pleased with their progress; he and Perscitia had

devised several maneuvers, which even Ballista had allowed to be clever; and Moncey and the others

had brought them a good deal of news about the French, although they could only sneak so close before

it became too likely they should be caught; Temeraire was trying to think how they might better find a

way to spy. They had worked out how to organize their camp so it did not take a great deal of room, by

letting the smaller dragons sleep atop the big, which was warmer anyway, and after the first awkward

day had learned to dig their necessary-pit far away from their water.

That had been very unpleasant, and five of the dragons had got quite sick, from being so thirsty they had

drunk anyway, despite the smell. A few others had grown bored and gone off on their own, all of them

ferals who had never served, but some of those had come back when they had not been able to find easy

food on their own, which brought them straight back to the question of supply.

“We can go and fetch a great many cattle here, if they are drugged with laudanum,” Temeraire said, “but

it seems to me, if the French are going about taking cows, we would do better to eat their food first,

instead of our own, and let them have the bother of gathering it; and that way we may fight and eat

together.”

It made a sensible strategy, they all agreed, and for Temeraire it was nearly more justification than cause:

he wanted badly to fight. The urge to violence, not particular but general, hunger for some explosive

action, was always stirring in him now, craving release, and Perscitia and Moncey often eyed him

anxiously. Sometimes Temeraire would even rouse up, not from sleep but from some halfway condition,

and find himself deserted: the others all flown away some distance, crouched down low and watching

him.

“It isn’t healthy, how he pens it up,” Gentius said loudly after their meeting, not seeing Temeraire close