The captains and first lieutenants generally held such discussions of strategy and tactics at dinnertime, or during the late evenings after the dragons had all fallen asleep. Laurence’s opinion was rarely solicited in these conversations, but he did not take that greatly to heart: though he was quickly coming to grasp the principles of aerial warfare, he still considered himself a newcomer to the art, and he could hardly take offense at the aviators doing the same. Save when he could contribute some information about Temeraire’s particular capabilities, he remained quiet and made no attempt to insinuate himself into the conversations, rather listening for the purpose of educating himself.
The conversation did turn, from time to time, to the more general subject of the war; out of the way as they were, their information was several weeks out of date, and speculation irresistible. Laurence joined them one evening to find Sutton saying, “The French fleet could be bloody well anywhere.” Sutton was Messoria’s captain and the senior among them, a veteran of four wars, and somewhat given to both pessimism and colorful language. “Now they have slipped out of Toulon, for all we know the bastards are already on their way across the Channel; I wouldn’t be surprised to find the army of invasion on our doorstep tomorrow.”
Laurence could hardly let this pass. “You are mistaken, I assure you,” he said, taking his seat. “Villeneuve and his fleet have slipped out of Toulon, yes, but he is not engaged in any grand operation, only in flight: Nelson has been in steady pursuit all along.”
“Why, have you heard something, Laurence?” Chenery, Dulcia’s captain, asked, looking up from the desultory game of vingt-et-un that he and Little, Immortalis’s captain, were playing.
“I have had some letters, yes; one from Captain Riley, of the Reliant,” Laurence said. “He is with Nelson’s fleet: they have chased Villeneuve across the Atlantic, and he writes that Lord Nelson has hopes of catching the French in the West Indies.”
“Oh, and here we are without any idea of what is going on!” Chenery said. “For Heaven’s sake, fetch it here and read it to us; you are not very good to be keeping this all to yourself while we are all in the dark.”
He spoke with too much eagerness for Laurence to take offense; as the sentiments were repeated by the other captains, he sent a servant to his room to bring him the scant handful of letters he had received from former colleagues who knew his new direction. He was obliged to omit several passages commiserating with him on his change in situation, but he managed to elide them gracefully enough, and the others listened with great hunger to his bits and pieces of news.
“So Villeneuve has seventeen ships, to Nelson’s twelve?” Sutton said. “I don’t think much of the blighter for running, then. What if he turns about? Racing across the Atlantic like this, Nelson cannot have any aerial force; no transport could keep up the pace, and we do not have any dragons stationed in the West Indies.”
“I dare say the fleet could take him with fewer ships still,” Laurence said, with spirit. “You are to remember the Nile, sir, and before that the battle of Cape St. Vincent: we have often been at some numerical disadvantage and still carried the day; and Lord Nelson himself has never lost a fleet action.” With some difficulty, he restrained himself and stopped here; he did not wish to seem an enthusiast.
The others smiled, but not in any patronizing manner, and Little said in his quiet way, “We must hope he can bring them to account, then. The sad fact of the matter is, while the French fleet remains in any way intact, we are in deadly danger. The Navy cannot always be catching them, and Napoleon only need hold the Channel for two days, perhaps three, to ferry his army across.”
This was a lowering thought, and they all felt its weight. Berkley at last broke the resulting silence with a grunt and took up his glass to drain it. “You can all sit about glooming; I am for bed,” he said. “We have enough to do without borrowing trouble.”
“And I must be up early,” Harcourt said, sitting up. “Celeritas wants Lily to practice spraying upon targets in the morning, before maneuvers.”
“Yes, we all ought to get to sleep,” Sutton said. “We can hardly do better than to get this formation into order, in any case; if any chance of flattening Bonaparte’s fleet offers, you may be sure that one of the Longwing formations will be wanted, either ours or one of the two at Dover.”
The party broke up, and Laurence climbed to his tower room thoughtfully. A Longwing could spit with tremendous accuracy; in their first day of training Laurence had seen Lily destroy targets with a single quick spurt from nearly four hundred feet in the air, and no cannon from the ground could ever fire so far straight up. Pepper guns might hamper her, but her only real danger would come from aloft: she would be the target of every enemy dragon in the air, and the formation as a whole was designed to protect her. The group would be a formidable presence upon any battlefield, Laurence could easily see; he would not have liked to be beneath them in a ship, and the prospect of doing so much good for England gave him fresh interest for the work.
Unfortunately, as the weeks wore on, he saw plainly that Temeraire found it harder going to keep up his own interest. The first requirement of formation flying was precision, and holding one’s position relative to the others. Now that Temeraire was flying with the group, he was limited by the others, and with speed and maneuverability so far beyond the general, he soon began to feel the constraint. One afternoon, Laurence overheard him asking, “Do you ever do more interesting flying?” to Messoria; she was an experienced older dragon of thirty years, with a great many battle-scars to render her an object of admiration.
She snorted indulgently at him. “Interesting is not very good; it is hard to remember interesting in the middle of a battle,” she said. “You will get used to it, never fear.”
Temeraire sighed and went back to work without anything more like a complaint; but though he never failed to answer a request or to put forth an effort, he was not enthusiastic, and Laurence could not help worrying. He did his best to console Temeraire and provide him with other subjects to engage his interest; they continued their practice of reading together, and Temeraire listened with great interest to every mathematical or scientific article that Laurence could find. He followed them all without difficulty, and Laurence found himself in the strange position of having Temeraire explain to him the material which he was reading aloud.
Even more usefully, perhaps a week after they had resumed training a parcel arrived for them in the mail from Sir Edward Howe. It was addressed somewhat whimsically to Temeraire, who was delighted to receive a piece of mail of his very own; Laurence unwrapped it for him and found within a fine volume of dragon stories from the Orient, translated by Sir Edward himself, and just published.
Temeraire dictated a very graceful note of thanks, to which Laurence added his own, and the Oriental tales became the set conclusion to their days: whatever other reading they did, they would finish with one of the stories. Even after they had read them all, Temeraire was perfectly happy to begin over again, or occasionally request a particular favorite, such as the story of the Yellow Emperor of China, the first Celestial dragon, on whose advice the Han dynasty had been founded; or the Japanese dragon Raiden, who had driven the armada of Kublai Khan away from the island nation. He particularly liked the last because of the parallel with Britain, menaced by Napoleon’s Grande Armée across the Channel.
He listened also with a wistful air to the story of Xiao Sheng, the emperor’s minister, who swallowed a pearl from a dragon’s treasury and became a dragon himself; Laurence did not understand his attitude, until Temeraire said, “I do not suppose that is real? There is no way that people can become dragons, or the reverse?”