Victory of Eagles (20 page)

will have a hundred thousand men by Christmas, and come down on him when
we
choose, not

Bonaparte—”

“And let him milk London dry, and wreck the country in the meantime—” one man shouted.

“Send men on to London to warn the tradesmen and the bankers out of the city with whatever they can

manage,” Wellesley said. “Half of them have gone running to Edinburgh already, after the King; let the

rest of them go, too.”

“If they choose to,” someone said, “instead of stay, and shake Bonaparte’s hand as he comes in.”

“If they mean to stay, they’ll stay,” Jane said. “You won’t make ’em less eager by letting Bonaparte beat

you beforehand. Scotland is the first damned thing of sense anyone has said. We needed these sixty

beasts, Maclaine, but you cannot throw sixty dragons like round-shot and hope they land somewhere

useful. In a week I will have worked out a way to use them, and by Christmas I will know how to do it

properly; for tomorrow we can’t do more than cut them loose on his flank and let them do as they like

everywhich-way.”

“But that sounds perfectly agreeable to me,” Temeraire interrupted. “I do not see at all why we ought

not be able to beat Napoleon tomorrow, even if he outnumbers us; it seems quite cowardly to run away

from him.”

Laurence sinkingly heard this speech, which he was sure could have no salutary effect. If he did not

much like the idea of retreat, he had yet heard no plan of battle offered, which gave him any confidence

that the British were prepared to meet Bonaparte; and he was not heartened, to see that those officers

advocating loudest for battle, were by and large those in finer clothes, and fatter than field rations could

keep a man.

“O, you wretched bloodthirsty creature,” Jane said, “as if it were not bad enough dealing with all the

thrusting-out of chests already, now you must needs do it too; we need more sense, not less.”

“I am not thrusting out my chest at all,” Temeraire protested, pulling himself in rather concave instead,

“and I am being very sensible, because if you
did
run away, it would not do any good, at least if you go

by foot as you have been. He will just go after you. He can catch you up in a trice: they go fifty miles in a

day.”

“Nonsense,” someone said.

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“It is not nonsense,” Temeraire said. “Lefèbvre’s company, eight thousand men, were all near Newbury

by Thursday morning, and they had only landed at Deal on Monday; so he
can
do it.”

There was a moment of perfect silence, on all sides: it was one thing to argue over retreat; another

entirely to hear the enemy could not be escaped. After a moment, Jane said, “Well, he can beat us by the

numbers, but we have around two dozen heavy-weights now, and he hasn’t more than ten, aside from his

Fleurs. I will take it on to beat his speed, if you will only let me—”

“—put redcoats on dragons, yes, yes, as you keep saying,” she was interrupted, by another colonel. “I

should like to see it.”

“You can come to our camp if you would,” Temeraire offered. “We have been carrying along a lot of

them, although,” he added severely, “if you wanted us
all
to carry, you ought to have spent a little time

making carrying-harnesses, which I know Laurence told you of; because it would be a good deal more

convenient than rope, and we could manage more, but perhaps if they do not mind being bundled up into

sacks made out of tents, or belly-netting—”

“I should damned well say they will mind,” one general said.

“Are they soldiers or aren’t they?” Wellesley snapped. “Shoot the first insubordinate bastard to refuse

and the rest of them will go quiet enough.”

But it was too far; he and Jane were both shouted down. “Enough of this craven counsel,” General

Dalrymple said. “We stand, and we fight. General Wellesley, you will take the right flank tomorrow, and

hold the line at the barracks. General Burrard, you will take the left, and plan on pinching him, when he

has worn himself out enough, trying to fight uphill against the main body of our force.”

Wellesley stiffened, at the assignment; something of a slap, to be set in the position where less

maneuvering should be required, and less initiative. He made no outward protest, however, but his fingers

on the hilt of his sword drummed.

“And as for you, Roland,” Dalrymple added, “if the damned beasts will not fight the Fleur-de-Nuits—”

“I did not say that at all!” Temeraire said, bristling. “We will fight anyone, I only said, we cannot stop

them, if you send us out of camp to do it. The Fleur-de-Nuits can see at night, and we cannot; it stands

to reason they can go right around us, above or below. We cannot stop them just by lining up

somewhere in their road and hoping.”

“You can hear them, can’t you?” Dalrymple demanded, exasperated enough by repeated interruption to

address Temeraire directly, for once.

“A Fleur-de-Nuit sounds just like a Yellow Reaper to us, flying,” Temeraire said. “They beat at the

same pace.”

Laurence blinked. He had never noticed such a thing, nor considered it as a difficulty, and by the

expressions of the other officers, neither had any of them; even Jane looked surprised by the intelligence,

and she was an aviator of thirty years’ experience and more.

“And anyway,” Temeraire added, “one cannot tell where a sound is coming from closely, not when one

is aloft and moving, and there are a great many other dragons about all beating in circles. If the

Fleur-de-Nuits should go past us one at a time, we would likely never notice them at all, and then we

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would come back and you would complain we had not done anything. If you want us to stop them, you

may say so, and then let
us
work out, how it is to be done.”

Chapter 8

T
EMERAIRE COULD NOTcall it a very satisfactory conversation, although he congratulated himself

on putting an end to the threats against Laurence. But the generals were not very clever, at all, and

whatever Laurence might say about superior officers, it seemed to Temeraire that if they were his

superiors, then they ought to give him
better
orders than he could work out for himself, not worse; and

some of them had wanted to run away, only because they did not have as many people.

“But, at least I have spoken to a fellow from the Ministry, and told him that we require voting, and pay,

and he did not refuse; which I think is encouraging,” he told the others, “and they have been sensible

enough to let us manage the Fleur-de-Nuits how we like: only, now we must work out how.”

“If we fight them here right at the camp,” Perscitia said thoughtfully, the tip of her tail flicking urgently

back and forth, “then they must come right to us, to do any good, and there will be enough light from the

fires to see them at least a little, and we can fight them off straightaway.”

“They need not fight you at all, if you are above the camp,” Laurence said. “They need only dart in and

drop their bombs and fly away again: they are sure to hit something of value, without needing to be

particular about their targets.”

“Perhaps if we should make a ring about the camp,” Temeraire said, “and then if we heavy-weights fly

patterns, back and forth across, then they cannot come in without our noticing them, and we can catch

them and teach them a good lesson; they will not long keep at it.”

“Yes,” Admiral Roland said, “and tomorrow we will have not a one of you fit to fly, which Napoleon will

have bought cheap at the price of sending out ten dragons, who are no good in the day any road. No; we

can’t spend near so much of your strength. Tonight every last heavy-weight of you must eat, and get at

once to sleep; you have already been flying more than you ought, the day before a battle.”

Unfortunately the good sense of this rather dull objection, which Temeraire would have liked to dismiss,

was making itself felt in a palpable way; Requiescat was snoring noisily in his corner, even though he was

supposed to be attending to their conference, and Temeraire could not deny that he himself felt his mind

drifting to his dinner more than seemed fitting, with a battle ahead. He sighed, and acknowledged the

justice of it.

“But the little dragons cannot fight so many big, without any of us,” he said. “And we will need them,

too, tomorrow; otherwise Napoleon will send all of his little ones against us, and even though most of us

have not any crew to be captured, they will still tangle us up.”

Admiral Roland rubbed her cheek with her knuckles and then she said, “Well, we can’t spare the

strength to keep them from the camp, so we had better keep the camp from them.”

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It was a little while before they could begin to put the plan in motion: Admiral Roland had evidently some

arguing to do first, but at last the fires began to be put out, all across the camp, and the men to take down

their tents, grumbling against the cold.

“This is boring,” Iskierka said to him, dissatisfied, as they sat waiting: a large square of forest just beside

the camp was being marked out for them by middle-weights. “It is not at all as good as fighting, and I do

not want to sleep.”

“Well, you must sleep, or else you cannot fight tomorrow,” Temeraire said, although privately he felt

rather much the same. “Now hurry, we do not have a good deal of time; the sun is already going down,

and they will be sure to realize something is wrong, if it gets dark and they can see everything is ablaze.”

“Yesterday you did not want me setting trees on fire at all,” she said still grumbling, but leaping aloft she

strafed across the marked square with her flame, until the trees began to catch; the middle-weights had

pulled up a good broad line of trees all around, and clawed up the dirt, to make a fire-break. It made a

fine blaze, pleasantly warm—“Temeraire,” Laurence said, gently touching his neck, and Temeraire jerked

his head up; it had been very comfortable to doze.

“I am awake. Is it our turn yet?” He leapt aloft, and studied critically the still-blazing trees. He could not

just cry away at them, for if they fell athwart the fire-break, they would catch all the rest of the trees, so

he went in a careful perimeter about them, and roared inward into the square. The fire-weakened trees

crashed and fell in the most satisfying way, sparks flying up in great glowing orange clouds like small

fireworks.

“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

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