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 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
SIR,” 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.
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 little of it, and tried to persuade himself perhaps Temeraire had heard, somehow, of the main body of the Army, and gone there. They might find him in Woolwich waiting—but no, that passed the limits of optimism. Temeraire was not waiting, anywhere, if he knew where Laurence was, and likely even if he had not the slightest idea. He had crossed half of Africa without the least notion and found Laurence in the middle of an unfamiliar continent; he would certainly not be discouraged by the need to search all of Britain if need be, even in the middle of a war; and as like as not get himself hurt thereby.
They flew much-interrupted, stopping at any farm with a herd of moderate size, and at any towns with a clearing large enough for a courier; but they got no news, or at least none they wanted. “Lost twenty of my sheep, but not to any dragons; to the French, damn they eyes,” one angry herdsman informed them.
“They are so close?” Laurence said, in dismay; they were yet west of London, much farther than he would have imagined the French had come even in small parties.
The man spat. “Came through here yesterday, pillaging buggers; begging your pardon sir, but it is enough to make a saint swear. Three of my best ewes going into their bellies, and a stud, all because of that lunkhead boy of mine didn’t get them into the hills in time. But there, who thought they would be here so soon?”