Temeraire put his head down and puffed up his chest with a deep breath, then flung himself down amongst the shrinking knot of dragons, and barreled through with much the effect of a cat descending upon an unsuspecting flock of pigeons. Friend and foe alike went tumbling wildly; the ferals flung into higher excitement. They flew around with much disorderly shrilling for a few moments, and as they did, the French righted themselves: the formation leader waved a signal-flag, and the Pou-de-Ciels wheeled together and away, escaping.
Arkady and the ferals did not pursue, but came gleefully romping back over to Temeraire, alternating complaints at his having knocked them about, with boastful prancing over their victory and the rout of the enemy, which Arkady implied was in spite of Temeraire’s jealous interference. “That is not true, at all,” Temeraire said, outraged, “you would have been perfectly dished without me,” and turned his back upon them and flew towards land, his ruff stiffened up with indignation.
They found Wringe sitting and licking at her scarred wing in the middle of a field. A few clumps of bloodstained white wool upon the grass, and a certain atmosphere of carnage in the air, suggested she had quietly found herself some consolation; but Laurence chose to be blind. Arkady immediately set up as a hero for her benefit, and paraded back and forth to re-enact the encounter. So far as Laurence could follow, the battle might have raged a fortnight, and engaged some hundreds of enemy beasts, all of them vanquished by Arkady’s solitary efforts. Temeraire snorted and flicked his tail in disdain, but the other ferals proved perfectly happy to applaud the revisionary account, though they occasionally jumped up to interject stories of their own noble exploits.
Laurence meanwhile had dismounted; his new surgeon Dorset, a rather thin and nervous young man, bespectacled and given to stammering, was going over Wringe’s injuries. “Will she be well enough to make the flight back to Dover?” Laurence inquired; the scraped wing looked nasty, what he could see of it; she uneasily kept trying to fold it close and away from the inspection, though fortunately Arkady’s theatrics were keeping her distracted enough that Dorset could make some attempt at handling it.
“No,” Dorset said, with not the shade of a stammer and a quite casual authority. “She needs lie quiet a day or so under a poultice, and those balls must come out of her shoulder presently, although not now. There is a courier-ground outside Weymouth, which has been taken off the routes and will be free from infection; we must find a way to get her there.” He let go the wing and turned back to Laurence blinking his watery eyes.
“Very well,” Laurence said, bemused; at the change in his demeanor more than the certainty alone. “Mr. Ferris, have you the maps?”
“Yes, sir; though it is twelve miles straight flying to Weymouth covert across the water, sir, if you please,” Ferris said, hesitating over the leather wallet of maps.
Laurence nodded and waved them away. “Temeraire can support her so far, I am sure.”
Her weight posed less difficulty than her unease with the proposed arrangement, and, too, Arkady’s sudden fit of jealousy, which caused him to propose himself as a substitute: quite ineligible, as Wringe outweighed him by several tons, and they should not have got a yard off the ground.
“Pray do not be so silly,” Temeraire said, as she dubiously expressed her reservations at being ferried. “I am not going to drop you unless you bite me. You have only to lie quiet, and it is a very short way.”
Chapter 3
BUT THEY REACHED Weymouth covert only a little short of dusk, in much perturbation of spirit, Wringe having expressed the intention, five or six times during the course of their flight, of climbing off mid-air to fly the rest of the way herself. Then she had accidentally scratched Temeraire twice, and thrown a couple of the topmen clean off his back with her uneasy shifting, their lives saved only by their carabiner-locked straps. On landing, they were both handed down bruised and ill from the knocking-about they had taken, and helped away by their fellows to be dosed liberally, with brandy, at the small barracks-house.
Wringe put up a singular fuss to having the bullets extracted, sidling away her hindquarters when Dorset approached knife in hand, insisting she was quite well, but Temeraire was sufficiently exasperated by now to have no patience with her evasions; his low rumbling growl, resonating upon the dry, hard-packed earth, made her meekly flatten to the ground and submit to being picked over with a lantern suspended overhead. “That will do,” Dorset said, having pried out the third and final of the balls. “Now some fresh meat, to be sure, and a night’s quiet rest. This ground is too hard,” he added, with disapproval, as he climbed down from her shoulder with the three balls rattling bloodily in his little basin.
“I do not care if it is the hardest ground in Britain; only pray let me have a cow and I will sleep,” Temeraire said wearily, leaning his head so Laurence could stroke his muzzle while his own shallow cuts were poulticed. He ate the cow in three tremendous tearing gulps, hooves-to-horns, tipping his head backwards to let the last bite of the hindquarters go down his throat. The farmer who had been prevailed upon to bring some of his beasts to the covert stood paralyzed in a macabre sort of fascination, his mouth gaping, and his two sons likewise with their eyes starting from their heads. Laurence pressed a few more guineas into the man’s unresisting hand and hurried them all off; it would do Temeraire’s cause no good to have fresh and lurid tales of draconic savagery spreading.
The ferals disposed of themselves directly around the wounded Wringe, sheltering her from any draft and pillowing themselves one upon the other as comfortably as they could manage, the smaller ones among them crawling upon Temeraire’s back directly he had fallen asleep.
It was too cold to sleep out, and they had not brought tents with them on patrol; Laurence meant to leave the barracks, small enough in all conscience without dividing off a captain’s partition, to his men, and take himself to a hotel, if one might be had; in any case he would have been glad of a chance to send word back to Dover by the stage, that their absence would not occasion distress. He did not trust any of the ferals to go alone yet, with their few officers so unfamiliar.
Ferris approached as Laurence made inquiry of the few tenants of the covert. “Sir, if you please, my family are here in Weymouth; I am sure my mother would be very happy if you chose to stay the night,” he said, adding, with a quick, anxious glance that belied the easy way in which he issued this invitation, “I should only like to send word ahead.”
“That is handsome of you, Mr. Ferris; I would be grateful, if I should not be putting her out,” Laurence said. He did not miss the anxiety. In courtesy, Ferris likely felt compelled to make the invitation, if his family had so much as an attic corner and a crust of bread to spare. Most of his younger gentlemen, indeed most of the Corps, were drawn from the ranks of what could only be called the shabby-genteel, and Laurence knew they were inclined to think him higher than he did himself: his father kept a grand state, certainly, but Laurence had not spent three months together at home since taking to sea, without much sorrow on either side, except perhaps his mother’s, and was better accustomed to a hanging berth than a manor.
Out of sympathy he would have spared Ferris, but for the likely difficulty of finding any other lodgings, and his own weary desire to be settled, even if it were only in an attic corner, with a crust of bread. The noise of the day behind them, he was finding it difficult not to yield to a certain lowness of spirit. The ferals had behaved quite as badly as expected, and he could not help but see how impossible it should be, to guard the Channel with such a company. The contrast could not have been greater, to the fine and ordered ranks of British formations, those ranks now decimated; and he felt their absence all the more keenly for it.