Cries of protest began rising, through the stifled moment, accusations of defeatism and surrender. Wellesley raised his voice and kept going, “Waste munitions and men and beasts to hold a lost position—we all ought to be hanged for traitors if we do it. To Scotland—to Scotland and the mountains, damn you all! He can’t hold the country and keep the Channel open both. Let him have England for a month, let him spend men and dragons trying to hold it, and march for Loch Laggan. We 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.
“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 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
TEMERAIRE COULD NOT call 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.”