Victory of Eagles (33 page)

to breathe, “quite so easy as it looks. It seems to me it ought to be easier to roar just a little, than all-out;

but it is not. I do not understand why. Not,” he added hastily, “that I cannot do it perfectly well: if Lien

can do it, so can I.”

“Since you are having trouble, I will help, too,” Iskierka announced, landing beside them, and before

anyone could stop her, she had put her head down and blasted flame out onto the ice-packed ground.

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A great cloud of hissing steam arose in the center of her strike, but for the most part the flames licked

and billowed away to either side over the hard icy surface. Happily the ditch-diggers were by now

established at a safe distance, watching rather nervously with their officers, and were not singed; but the

fire caught in the heap of fallen trees which Temeraire had knocked down.

“Now see what you have done,” Temeraire said. “Quickly,” he called up, “fetch dirt, and put out the

fires.”

“Wait,” Perscitia said, landing. “If we lay the logs down where you mean to dig the ditches, they will melt

the ground, and the men can get warm while they wait.”

“See, it has all worked out for the best,” Iskierka said to Temeraire, brazenly adding, “I meant it so.”

He flattened his ruff and said, “Then you may help put the logs in place, since you have so very cleverly

set them on fire
before
they were lined up properly.”

Laurence dismounted as they worked, and went to speak to the sergeant and his men and explain the

scheme. “They won’t come this way?” was all the man wanted to know, wiping a nervous dirty hand

over his blond moustaches, and leaving them streaked and muddy.

“If they do, they will do you no harm,” Laurence said, with no more patience, “and they are saving you

an afternoon of hard labor after marching. When the fire in the logs has died down, you will find the

ground easier to dig, and you may chop up the remains for tinder and sleep warmer tonight than you had

any hope of doing.”

Wellesley rode up on his dark horse, wrestling to keep it under control, the animal skittish and shy of

flames and dragons both. “What the devil are you doing, then?” He did not wait for an answer, but threw

an eye over the works and snorted. “Clever as foxes, I see. Well, don’t stand there, man,” he said to the

sergeant. “Go and clear the rest of that brush. Goren, we’ll have the wounded over here, nearest the

fires. At least they can’t get up and run away from the dragons like ninnies: half of ’em haven’t legs

anymore. And as for you and that beast of yours,” he added to Laurence, grimly, “finish here and be at

the clearings in an hour, no more: I have words for you I don’t care to have interrupted.”

The horse and the general wheeled away, aides in train, and Laurence went back to Temeraire, who

was pushing the last few logs into place with a broken-off branch, to save his talons from singeing: the fire

was still very hot. Demane was already off his back and vanished, as he was wont to do given even five

minutes in reach of the ground. “Roland, go and fetch him out,” Laurence said, and waited tapping his

thigh until she came out of the woods some ten minutes later, half-dragging Demane along: he had a string

of rabbits and squirrels already gathered from the wreckage the dragons had made, and looked surly to

have been interrupted.

“Go set up a tent in camp, if you can,” Laurence said, “and then see what you can do in the way of

forage for the dragons. Janus, I am sure you can be of use to Mr. Fellowes, or Mr. Dorset.”

“Aye, sir,” Janus said.

“
You
may keep working here until it is done,” Temeraire said to Iskierka, rather smugly, “since it was all

your notion,” and carried Laurence over to the clearings, where Ballista was already improving their

comfort by smashing up shrubs and thornbrake with her barbed tail. Perscitia had managed to establish a

remarkable bonfire, by setting several of the fallen trees into a tent-pole shape, and using the crushed and

pounded wreckage for tinder, although she was now eyeing the towering blaze a little nervously: it had

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grown a good deal higher than her head.

“A handsome signal,” Wellesley said sarcastically, when he came. “It is kind of you to spare Bonaparte

the trouble of having to find us in the dark.”

“You have a dozen fires lit just over the hill in the other part of camp, so I do not think it makes much

difference that this one is a little bigger,” Perscitia said, in defensive understatement. “And,” she added

with sudden inspiration, “this is so bright the Fleur-de-Nuits cannot come near us: it will hurt their eyes

too much to see anything else around.”

Wellesley only snorted at this justification, and turned to Laurence. “And I suppose you have another

such clever explanation you would like to feed me—”

“Sir,” Granby said, breaking in, “the fault was mine, for letting Iskierka run away with me—”

“I imagine there is no shortage of blame to parcel out among you,” Wellesley said cuttingly.

“It is not Granby’s fault at all!” Iskierka said, overhearing. “He did not like our going, and I am sorry

now to have disobliged him; but I do not see why we ought to flap along after you like chickens, with

no-one to fight all day. If we are supposed to protect you, we would do much better to go find someone

who meant to attack you, and kill them before they did; so what I did was perfectly sensible, and it was

just bad luck we got captured. And even so it has all come right in the end, so you haven’t any cause to

yell.”

“Yes, I begin to see your captain might be wholly innocent,” Wellesley said, eyeing her. “Granby, is it?”

“Yes, sir,” Granby said, miserably.

“The next time this creature disobeys, you will cut her loose,” Wellesley said. “You and your crew will

be reassigned; as for her, I do not care if she goes in the breeding grounds or flies across the sea; if she

won’t follow orders, she is useless, and worse than useless when she induces others to risk good beasts

after bad.”

“Oh!” Iskierka said, jetting a hissing cloud of steam. “Oh, I am
not
useless! I have taken more prizes

than anybody, I can beat anyone who tries to fight me—”

“Brawling does not impress me,” Wellesley said. “We are here to win a war, not a single battle or a

private mill; and any one dragon, like any one man, is expendable. The nation has managed without a

Celestial or a fire-breather this long, and we will manage again without you if we must. If you are spoiling

for a fight, you will have one when we are ready to give it to the French; until then, you are going to

behave, or you can give up your captain and get you gone: we will find other work for him.”

“Granby, you would never,” she appealed, and poor Granby stood white and wretched and looked at

Wellesley, and then he said, low, “Dear one, I am an officer of the King.”

Laurence looked away. He did not know he could have passed a similar test. Temeraire was not willful,

in the same fashion; his disobedience had been more deliberate and more grave than Iskierka’s—but that

was an excuse. If Wellesley, if any superior, ordered him to leave Temeraire, a simple plain order to go

to another duty, and not as a means to abuse—

Iskierka made a low dreadful keening noise in her throat, and hissed out a whistling of steam so thick it

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clouded the ground around her feet; then she leapt away across the clearing and huddled herself into a

heap of coils. Arkady sprang to her side and began speaking to her hurriedly in the dragon-tongue.

“I would not care if she did go away with them,” Temeraire said, listening, “and if you ask me, it serves

her just right. I should be very happy to have you back myself, Granby,” he added.

“I beg your pardon,” Granby said, looking wretched, and ran across the clearing after her.

“You have damned little room to criticize,” Wellesley said to Temeraire.

“I am not always running off to please myself!” Temeraire said. “I have never disobeyed, except when

someone tried to take Laurence from me, or hurt him,
first;
and when the Government tried to murder all

the dragons in the world.”

“So you have only been insubordinate or treasonous a dozen times or so, is that all?” Wellesley said

dryly. “—No, save your breath and the rest of your excuses. Carry on this way again, under my

command, and I will treat the promises I have made you as cavalierly as you do
your
duty: do you

understand me? Both of you,” he added, “as I see I cannot lay the guilt on your handler’s shoulders

alone; but I will be damned if I try and apportion the guilt.”

“Yes, sir,” Laurence said quietly.

“But we have not done anything wrong to-day: that was all because Iskierka ran off,” Temeraire

protested. “It is not my fault, or Laurence’s.”

“It damned well is, if you are her commanding officer,” Wellesley said. “Do not let me hear you blame

one of your subordinates again.”

“Oh,” said Temeraire, quelled, and looked a little ashamed.

“Now,” Wellesley said, “if you have finished with this back-talking: since you have spent half the day

flying hither and yon, I mean to profit by it, at least. Where is Davout bivouacked, and how many soldiers

does he have on the road in reach of us?”

“But I told Hollin to tell you,” Temeraire said. “They have all gone back to London.”

“There were thirty thousand men behind us yesterday morning,” Wellesley said. “I don’t care if

Bonaparte is chasing them with whips from morning to night and using dragons for supply, they cannot all

have got back to the city in a day: you must at least have seen some sign, pickets or fires—”

“Sir,” Laurence said, “there was no sign that any of us saw, either the beasts which flew off earlier, or

when we pursued them; we saw Davout’s regiments making camp around London, and Murat was in the

city also.”

“And I have already told you all,” Temeraire said, “they can go fifty miles in a day, we have seen them

do it, so—”

“It is one thing to move a brigade or two by dragon-back,” Wellesley said impatiently, “another to move

an army: you cannot put much more than two hundred men even on the largest beasts.”

“That is not how they do it,” Perscitia put in, unexpectedly. The other dragons had all been listening in to

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the conversation and the lecture with gossipy interest, though hanging back a little; now she put her head

forward to interject. “They do not just take a hundred men and fly with them straight, all day. They take a

hundred men and carry them as far as they can in an hour, and put them down, and those men start

marching from there. And then the dragons go back and get the next hundred men, who you see have

been marching all this time, so they are not all the way off, and the dragons take
them
forward for—”

“Wait, they fly
back
?” Requiescat said, and with much irritation Perscitia had to interrupt to claw a

picture into the dirt, showing how the companies would each in turn be carried leap-frog over those in

front of them, each receiving two hours of the dragons’ time.

“And so on, until they have carried everyone a
little
way, and given them all a rest,” Perscitia said, “and

so the men can walk thirty miles instead of twenty, and the dragons fly everyone twenty miles on top of

that, so the whole company has moved fifty miles, together.”

She finished triumphantly, and Requiescat said, “Well, it seems like a lot of bother to me, just for an

extra twenty miles; even I can make that in an hour or two,” and she huffed in indignation.

Wellesley had a better appreciation of her explanation, however, and studied the diagram with a fierce,

hawk-like intent. “So this is what Roland has been going on about, then?” He looked at Laurence and

said sharply, “And can your beasts manage the same?”

“If the men would go aboard,” Laurence answered him.

“They will go aboard if I have to shoot them,” Wellesley said.

For all his harsh words, however, the next morning he took the Coldstream Guards apart, and

addressed them personally; the seven Yellow Reapers and three Grey Coppers were lined up some

distance behind him, facing away so their jaws and teeth could not be seen. They had been rigged out

with rope and sackcloth, and his aides were all busily climbing over the dragons—to no purpose but the

dramatic, as the rigging had already been thoroughly tried by the dragons themselves tugging on it.

“Men,” Wellesley said, “this is a damned sorry state of affairs we are in. That Corsican upstart sleeping

in the King’s bed, and his bully-boys stealing cattle and wrecking the harvest: it is more than any

red-blooded Englishman can bear, and we are not going to bear it, either, for much longer.”

“That’s right,” a couple of men called back; a “hear, hear” and scattered mutterings of agreement.

“Every one of you knows they cannot outfight you, and we have learned they are not outwalking you,

either: it is all one of Boney’s tricks. Those damned lazy Frenchmen are being carted around half the day

on dragon-back, that is how they have been getting the jump on us,” Wellesley said, jerking his head

back towards the dragons. “It is time we put a stop to it, and your colonel has solicited the honor for

your regiment to go first.

“It is no treat to go aloft, so I rely on you all to make an example for the rest of the corps to follow.