The French dragons were coming with bombs and nets, however, to try and overcome such measures; they had also stolen Perscitia’s trick of uprooting trees, which they plainly meant to use broom-like to sweep gaps into the squares at a distance.
“Now, Temeraire,” Laurence called urgently, and Temeraire dashed ahead to meet the French skirmishers, roaring with delight. There, there was a Roi-de-Vitesse coming out of the fog. He was armed with a tall if slender birch-tree, white and bare-branched, clutched a little awkwardly in his talons. He dived to avoid Temeraire’s charge, making determinedly for the front lines of the first square; his crew fired a spray of rifle-fire up at Temeraire’s belly as they passed. A quick hot sting of pain—he had been hit, but Temeraire sniffed when Laurence asked; it was nothing, nothing at all.
He threw himself over with an elegant, corkscrewing twist, and plunged low in pursuit of the smaller French dragon. Dimly he was aware of the bayonets looming ahead, gleaming and silver as the fog swirled away from them, and Laurence saying something to Demane about the bombs, but the French dragon filled all his view. Oh, it was very quick—but Temeraire stretched his wings, cupped all the air he could, and flung himself after. He would not let it at the square; he would not be outrun—and with a lunge, he had got near enough to put his claws into the other dragon’s tail.
The Roi-de-Vitesse squalled, and tried to jerk away. Temeraire set his talons and beat backwards furiously, while over his shoulder, a couple of small bombs were lobbed at the French dragon’s crew as they tried to bring their rifle-fire to bear again. “Tenez bon,” the dragon cried to his crew, at once squirming to throw off the bombs and flailing away with his tree, as best he could manage with Temeraire’s grip upon him.
Temeraire only just stifled an undignified yelp as the tree-top fetched him a sharp slap across the neck and belly: the branches were springy, and stung painfully. But he kept his head, despite the very unpleasant sensation, and managed to seize hold of the tree in his jaws and wrest it away. Disarmed, the French beast gave over his attempt at last and flew away hurriedly for the safety of his own covert, his bleeding tail dripping behind him.
“Ha,” Temeraire called after the vanquished, curling his talons about the trunk, and he lashed the air with the tree experimentally a few times. “Laurence, perhaps we might go at their ranks, with this?” he proposed, over his shoulder: he could see a company of French soldiers advancing slowly from the mist, and he was quite sure the tree would answer nicely in reverse.
“We must stay near the squares,” Laurence answered, “and not advance. Pray call those Reapers back, on your left: they have already let themselves be lured too far.”
Temeraire sighed a little, but he threw the birch-tree into the sea, and turned to corral Chalcedony and the others. They were all darting at a Grand Chevalier, lunging in at her head and nipping at her flanks, but the big dragon, rather than turning on them in earnest or fleeing properly, was slyly retreating little by little, luring them back towards the French lines so the smaller dragons could slip past and make their attempts against the squares.
“You are meant to be an officer, it is your duty to keep everyone else from flying off,” Temeraire said sternly, when he had rounded them and they were all flying back towards the squares.
“Well, Cantarella has the epaulette,” Chalcedony said, a rather craven defense.
“Oh!” Cantarella said, and nipped at the edge of his wing; he yelped and twisted away. “Very well, then I am in command now, you have all heard him say so,” she declared, and hitched her epaulette forward—it was a bit sodden with rain, but still notable against her pale yellow and white. “You may be sure I will not let us go afield again.”
They did not have to go afield, anyway, to have all the fighting they might want: the French were coming steadily after them, and Temeraire wheeled to meet them with a will.
BY MID-DAY, they were driven farther aloft: the French had established an artillery emplacement at the center, despite all the British artillery could do against them, with a shield of pepper guns and several of the cannon elevated to strike at any dragon dipping low.
The air was colder and cleaner as they rose out of range, and more clouds streamed past to divorce them from the noise and fury of the battlefield below. Their own struggle was quieter, the whistling air and the muffling clouds stealing all but fragments of roaring, and the occasional pop-pop of rifle-fire. The French had abandoned their trees and netting, proven to encumber them too greatly against a determined aerial defense. Laurence felt rather discouraged than pleased, however, by the speed with which the experiment had been adopted, tried, and cast off.
He could feel Temeraire’s energy flagging: they had been fighting now six hours, and there was little chance to pause and rest. Many of the soldiers below were lying upon the ground, out of the way of cannon-fire; Wellesley had ordered they might do so, when not themselves engaged. There was nowhere similar for the dragons to land, except the coverts where they had slept, a mile away. Behind the British lines there was only the roar of the sea, invisible beneath the blanketing fog, and on either flank the cavalry horses stood nervously shifting, pawing at the dirt.
The French had abandoned cavalry entirely. It ought to have given away an advantage; dragons could not be risked on charges in the face of artillery, as the cold calculation of warfare would allow an individual horse to be, and the British horses were all hooded now, blinders cupping their eyes, so they could only see straight ahead, with sachets of fragrance over their nostrils so they could not smell the dragons. A little past noon, Laurence heard the drumming of the first charge below.
The heavy cavalry were splendid in their rush, all of them shouting furiously and waving scimitars, the standard flying out behind them. They were sent at a battalion of the French infantry, a maneuver to gain some breathing room—nearly every French company now was pressing steady fire against the Coldstream Guards, which Napoleon had surely identified as the linchpins of the British center. The French battalion did not break; instead they formed square themselves—but a peculiar square, double-size, with a great empty gap in the center.
The cavalry committed to their charge: they were flying across the gap, in the face of the steady musketry—horses falling with terrible human shrieks, men flung off and crushed beneath the hooves of their own mounts. “Laurence, where is that Pou-de-Ciel going?” Temeraire said urgently, pointing—one of the small drab French dragons had broken away from the skirmishing and was diving quickly towards its own lines.
The Pou-de-Ciel landed, directly within the French square—and doing so, brought to vivid life the relative nature of size. The Pou-de-Ciel were a light-weight breed just barely combat-weight, and this one perhaps six or seven tons only. It yet loomed hugely over the ranks of soldiers, great taloned claws flexing behind the silver rows of bayonets, roaring with its red mouth full of teeth.
Even hooded and with their noses full of perfume, the horses would not run directly at a dragon: the cavalry-charge wavered, and broke. The horses’ necks were bowed deeply, or pulling frantically away to either side, as they fell to a stumbling gait fighting the reins. One, out in front and recoiling too late, slid off its hind legs as it came too close. The Pou-de-Ciel leaned over and snatched the horse bodily off the ground with one clawed forehand, shook the rider unceremoniously off onto the ground, and with much enthusiasm opened its jaws wide and took off the flailing horse’s head with one bite; the French dragons had likely been on short commons a while now.