Victory of Eagles (14 page)

pyramids of round-shot trembled and collapsed, balls rolling everywhere across the ground, crushing

men’s legs, and the dragons all leapt aloft in the fresh confusion.

“Look, look,” cried Fricatio, one of the Grey Coppers, as he climbed up, “look, I caught a horse,”

waving it in his talons.

“This is no time to be eating!” Temeraire said, but it reminded him of their real purpose, and he went up

a little more to see: sure enough there were a great many shadows moving about near the pigs, and the

gate of the pen was swinging wide open. “We have the pigs!” he cried, and everyone cheered noisily,

and Temeraire added, “Now we can go!”

“Why?” Majestatis said.

“What?” Temeraire said.

“Why ought we go?” Majestatis said, and pointed down: all the soldiers were fleeing in a body

eastward, routed, only stopping long enough to heave the wounded upon waggons, and drag them away.

Aloft, the Chevaliers were turning tail and going, too, and the camp in all its flames was left deserted, to

its conquerors.

“Well,” Temeraire said the next morning, peering down the slightly charred barrel, “it is very nice, but I

am not sure what we can do with it.”

“Drop it on their heads, next battle,” Moncey suggested.

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“Listen to you talk; we shan’t waste a real cannon like that,” Gentius said. “What we need is some men

to fire it for us. A proper artillery company. And we need some proper surgeons, too,” he added, “for us

and for ’em,” meaning the prisoners, most of them wounded who had been left behind on the field. There

were not very many of these; by the time the dragons had managed to put out the fires, nearly all the

casualties were dead.

Lloyd and the men had helped the survivors away, and put up a tent for them, but that left all the dead

men lying about. The battle had been very satisfying, if not quite as long or as ordered as one might have

wished, and Temeraire was not sorry to have killed the soldiers: it was just as well, since otherwise they

would have had to fight them again, and after all they had invaded. But he was sorry they were dead, and

it made one rather sad to look at them.

Most of the ferals did not see what the difficulty was, and a couple were for eating them. Temeraire

flattened his ruff in horror, and everyone else hissed disapprovingly, so this suggestion was withdrawn.

“Yes, that is enough of
that
kind of talk,” Gentius said. “But we can’t leave them lying about, either. That

ain’t fitting; they were good enemies.”

So a couple of the Reapers had dug a grave, perhaps a little deep, some twenty foot, and the couriers

had collected up the dead and put them inside, and after they had filled the hole in, Chalcedony had

respectfully stuck one of the least-charred French flags upright into the mound, and they had all bowed

their heads solemnly for a moment, and then they had eaten some pigs.

Now they were beginning the work of picking through the remains of the camp. Most things had been

burnt up, but for metal pots, buckles, cannon-shot, and most excitingly a great solid lump of gold, a heap

of sovereigns melted all together, which had been found in the charred remains of a chest. Reedly had

nosed it out onto the ground in front of all of them, and many heads had craned forward to look at it in

admiration; it shone brilliantly in the morning sun.

“Well, how is it to be shared out?” Requiescat said, eyeing it covetously.

“We must put it aside somewhere safe,” Temeraire said, “and when the war is over, we will take all the

treasure we have gotten, like this, and have some splendid pavilions built all over, which we can all use

whenever we like, which will be better than for us all to have only enough to buy a piece of a pavilion in

only one place. And what is left over, we will use to get medals, for everyone, and everyone will have a

medal to suit their size.”

All approving this arrangement, a few dragons were detailed off—after complicated negotiations,

resulting in Reedly, Chalcedony and another Yellow Reaper, and an Anglewing, all going together, when

Reedly could easily have carried it alone—to escort the gold chunk to a place of safety back in the

breeding grounds. The rest of them had fallen back to searching the camp with even more enthusiasm

than before: then they had uncovered the cannon.

Most of the guns had been ruined; those whose housings were not burnt or acid-eaten had been spiked

by their crews before being abandoned. One, however, under the protective weight of a smothering tent,

had escaped destruction. It was a little pitted, and its wheels were perhaps a bit singed along the edge,

but it was a real great gun, a good twelve-pounder, and they had plenty of balls around for it. There was

even a store of gunpowder left, as the waggon full of powder had been kept some distance away from

the rest of the camp.

“But how are the men to know what is to be done, if they are not already soldiers?” Temeraire said. He

had seen the guns fired many times, aboard ship, but he did not recall perfectly just how it was managed.

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“Perhaps Perscitia can work out—” he looked, and realized she was not poking through the camp with

the others, but was sitting near the water-hole curled up in a lump.

“Are you hurt?” he inquired, having gone over to her.

“Of course I am not hurt,” she said, snappishly.

“Why are you sitting over here then, instead of coming to see; we have found some gold already, and

maybe there is more.”

“Well, it is not as though I will have a share,” she said. “I did not do any fighting.”

“Everyone had a chance,” Temeraire said, injured; he did not feel he had been unfair. Naturally the

heavy-weights ought to go first, if they could do the worst—

Perscitia looked away, and hunched her wings more snugly. “You may go away, if all you mean is to

sneer, and be unpleasant. I am sure it is no business of anyone’s, if I did not care to fight.”

“I am not sneering, at all, and you may stop being so quarrelsome!” Temeraire said. “I did not notice that

you did not fight.”

She fidgeted a little, and muttered by way of apology, “Others did,” glancing towards the other dragons.

“But why did you not, if you mind so much now?” Temeraire asked. “You might have, any time you

liked.”

“I did not like,” she said, defiantly, “—so there, and you may call me a coward if you want; I am sure I

do not care.”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, and sat back on his haunches. He was not quite sure what to say. “I am very

sorry?” he offered, uncertainly. He supposed it must be very unpleasant to be a coward. But he had

always thought cowards were wretched creatures, who would do something unpleasant such as steal

your things, even if they knew they could not win fighting for them, and that was not what Perscitia was

like, at all. “And you are never shy of quarreling with anyone.”

“That is not the same,” she said. “One does not get shot for quarreling, or have a wing torn up, or a

cannonball in the chest—I saw a dragon take a cannonball once, it was dreadful.”

“Of course,” Temeraire said, “but one must just be quick enough, and then you can dodge them.”

“That is nonsense,” she said. “A musket-ball can go much quicker than any dragon, so it is all decided

by chance, before you ever think of evading, or even notice that someone is shooting at you. If you are

very quick, of course, then you are gone before they can have fired very often,” she added, “so your

chances are
better,
but they are best if you do not go anywhere in front of a gun at all.—And I am not

very quick.”

Temeraire rubbed the side of a talon against his forehead, pondering. “In China,” he said, “only some

kinds of dragons fight at all; a great many of them are scholars, and would not know what to do in a

battle at all. No-one thinks any less of them, or calls them cowards; I suppose that is what you are.”

She lifted her head, and Temeraire added, “Anyway, we are all perfectly happy to fight, so there is no

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sense in your doing it, when you dislike it.”

“Well, I think just the same,” she said, brightening, “only I do not like anyone to say I did not do my

part; but there is no part other than fighting.”

“We must work out how to use the gun,” Temeraire said. “That would be very useful, and perhaps you

can think of something we might do with it, to help us fighting, and that is a fair share, as no-one else

knows how to do it.”

This solution so suited her that by the end of the day, she had a dozen men working busily as a

gun-crew. These had come to them along with another thirty, from the local militia, who had rather

nervously come to the battlefield in the morning with their muskets, to see what had happened during the

night. Reassured by the gaily flapping flags, they had come near enough to be pressed into service with

cheerful ruthlessness by Lloyd and his fellows, tired of being hands for near sixty dragons as well as

herdsmen.

The militiamen were abjured not to be such lumps when they cringed from Perscitia in fear, and lectured

with great pomp by Lloyd on the need to stop Bonaparte, and then surrendered to her tender mercies.

They spent the day working through the mechanics of the gun-firing, the swabbing, the wadding—steps

Perscitia had pieced together by interrogating the men, on how their muskets were fired, and then every

dragon who had ever been in service on board a ship or in a fleet action, and seen the great guns go.

It had been a little difficult: everyone remembered the sequence a little differently, and for a moment they

were at a standstill, until she hit upon the notion of making a tally, of which order everyone recalled, and

taking the most popular. By evening they successfully launched their first round-shot across the camp

with a bang, to the great startlement of all the other dragons, napping full of pork and satisfaction.

“If we could only work out a way for it to slide properly, there is no reason you might not take it aloft,”

she said wistfully that evening, coming to join the discussion with all her old sense of assurance restored.

She would happily have kept working, but her men having grown sufficiently used to her, their remnants

of fear had at last been outweighed by their fatigue, and they had rebelled and demanded a chance to

sleep and eat. “At least, maybe Requiescat might, and it could be set off upon his back; but the recoil,

that is the difficulty.”

“What to do next,
that
is the difficulty,” Temeraire said, and bent his head over the information which

Moncey had brought and sketched out into maps, wondering how they might learn what the French

would do next, and how soon he might bring them to another battle.

Chapter 6

S
IR,”HOLLIN SAID,“I don’t like to make you think of it, but with him loose this long, gone this far off

from the grounds, it stands to reason he isn’t flying wild—he has gone to look for you.”

“I know,” Laurence said.

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If Temeraire had gone to Dover, he had flown straight into the arms of Napoleon’s invading army. And

Laurence could not follow—Jane’s very justification for retrieving him from prison at all had been to keep

him out of French hands. Already he was four days overdue in camp, or generously three, and their

absence would reflect on her just when she most needed all forces of persuasion aligned in her favor to

prepare for Napoleon’s inevitable march on London.

He knew what duty demanded: return, and report his failure, and wait until some word at last came in of

Temeraire’s fate. To sit in gaol endlessly, with no notion of what had happened to Temeraire—Laurence

did not know how he would bear it. But there was no other alternative. Already he had likely injured

Hollin’s career, if so much prior association with him had not been tarnish enough; as he had injured Jane,

and Ferris, and so many others—as if he had not already done enough harm.

“We might go another day,” Hollin suggested. “Work our way back towards the Army, sir, asking along

the way, and maybe see what anyone has heard about the French. It stands to reason the generals will

want to know that anyway, sir.”

Laurence knew he ought to refuse it. It was generosity offered from friendship, not Hollin’s real and

considered judgment. “Thank you, Hollin; if you think it justified,” he said at last, the internal struggle lost,

or at least some ground yielded. “But we shall go straight towards the camp,” he added, to win back a