Victory of Eagles

Satisfied, Temeraire sat back on his haunches and explained. ‘We are not staying here,’ he said, ‘so you see, it is no help to tell us that the cows will always be here. We are, all of us, going to fight Napoleon and we need to take the cows with us.’

Lloyd did not seem to understand him at first; it required the better part of an hour to work it into his head, that they were all leaving the grounds and did not mean to come back. When it did, he became desperate, and began 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 like bullying to say no to him.

‘That is quite enough,’ Temeraire said at last, forcing himself to be firm. ‘Lloyd, we are not going to hurt you or take away your food or your property, so you have no right to carry on at us in this way, only because we do not like to stay.’

‘How you talk; I'll be dismissed from my post for certain, 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 a different 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 a 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. That way,’ he added, with a burst of fresh inspiration, ‘no one can complain to you, or sack you, because you 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 wished to go to war. ‘No, that is all stuff and nonsense,’ 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 better than this loathsome place, and at least they would be doing something, rather than sitting about, ‘but if Napoleon wins, that also will not be very nice, and anyway, I dare say the Government will stop your wages if they learn that 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 to be a magical word with men as well as dragons, as did the general conviction, arrived at through a deal of quiet muttering, that if they did not go with the dragons, they should certainly be blamed for the desertion; but no one could complain they had not done their duty if they followed the beasts. Or at least, it would be more difficult to find them.

‘We might be ready soon as next week,’ Lloyd said, with one last gasping attempt. ‘If you'd all just have a bite to eat, and a bit of sleep first—’

‘We are leaving now,’ Temeraire said firmly, and rising up on his haunches called out, ‘Advance guard, aloft; and you may take your breakfast with you.’

Moncey and the small dragons gleefully leapt onto the herd, first for once, and went 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 stormed away rapidly northwards 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, otherwise you will fly slowly, 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?’

‘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 within 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 Five (#ufc6c6828-520a-5394-bfaf-98803e721660)

Bewildered, Laurence stood in 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.

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 he had at least been here, and was 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 had been only two days since the French landing, but many dragons lived in the breeding grounds; if the herdsmen had abandoned their posts and the regular delivery of cattle interrupted, the provisions would quickly have been spent. The dragons must surely have scattered from hunger, and likely in all the directions of the rose.

‘Well, let us not borrow trouble,’ Hollin said, consolingly. ‘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 only 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 foraging dragons will undoubtedly be consuming all of the local supply, 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 could find, and bought her a sheep from a small cottager, who told them that the village, by some lucky chance, had not been raided. ‘Flew off east, all of them, this morning,’ the old woman told Laurence, while Elsie discreetly ate her dinner behind the stable, ‘like a plague of crows. It was dark for half an hour, with all them passing over and us sure they would fall on our heads 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, so I suppose those are my orders until I hear otherwise. Anyways, I dare say we will find him tomorrow, first thing or as good as. It's not as though he's so easy to miss.’

But this course did not reckon with the confusion of dozens of beasts flung out upon the countryside at once. Certainly, dragons 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 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 hope. 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 farmer's oldest boy had said, peering at them from over the windowsill of the house, despite his mother's restraining hand, which sank them completely.

In Monmouthshire, ten dragons had stopped to drink at the lake in the grounds of a stately house, the housekeeper told them, anxiously, and had also eaten some of the deer: ten neat Xs were marked in the ground 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 could do to keep breathing, and with half my staff 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 those 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 offered for the pillaging, he thought he saw Temeraire's influence, if not his presence: it was so near a mimic to the Chinese mode, where dragons purchased goods by making their mark for the supplier.

In the late evening 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 passed 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.

The next day, 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—all numbers shouted by the crowd in the common room of an inn, growing steadily more implausible. Laurence gave them no credit at all.

A few miles further 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. The dragons had, one and all, vanished into the air.

‘We will be getting close to 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. It was not that cooked food was so much more pleasant, he did not care about the taste at all at present, but Gong Su could stretch a single cow among five hungry dragons. If only there were a quantity of rice, or something else like to cook with it.

The further they travelled 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. That Majestatis had suggested the notion of borrowing cows in advance, and using the later ones to repay, had helped a great deal; but if they were always flying about snatching cows from the nearby farms, the French were sure 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 and fetch them for ourselves, and then 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 to reach it 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 well enough to fly anymore, and tired easily; but he had grown light enough that he could be carried along by any of the heavyweights, 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 manoeuvres, 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 over a great deal of room, by letting the smaller dragons sleep on top of the big, which was warmer anyway; and after the first awkward day they had learned to dig their necessary-pit far away from their water. That had been very unpleasant, and five of the dragons had become 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, that if the French are going about taking cows anyway, 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.’

They all agreed it made a sensible strategy, and for Temeraire it was nearly more justification than cause: he wanted badly to fight. The urge to violence, the hunger for some explosive action, was always stirring in him now, craving release, and often Perscitia and Moncey 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 enough to overhear. ‘You fellows don't know what it's like, having a really fine captain and losing her: it is worse than having all your treasure stolen. That is why he goes so queer now and again. A proper battle, that is what he needs, a bit of blood,’ and Temeraire wanted it very much. He did not like the sensation of being a passenger in his own life, unable to feel as he chose; if a battle would repair it, he was almost tempted to go seek one out at once.

But he had brought everyone else along, and he could not abandon them to their own devices now or drag them into a mindless squabble, even if he would have liked one. Instead he brooded on strategy, and when the urge grew too difficult to bear, he went away and curled himself tightly, with his head against his flank beneath the dark huddle of his wing, and murmured to himself from the Principia Mathematica. Laurence had read it to him so often that he had it all by heart, and if he spoke low, and flattened his voice, he might almost imagine he heard Laurence instead, reading to him in the rain, safe and sheltered beside him.

The very next morning, Minnow and Reedly came into camp flying so quick they had to skip-hop a few paces along the ground to stop, full of news: ‘Pigs,’ Reedly said, panting, ‘so many of them, a whole pen, back of their army, and some of 'em are big as ponies!’