The little dragon turned and spoke to the larger in a tongue that was very much like Durzagh, the dragon language which Arkady and his ferals spoke, in the Pamirs. Temeraire could follow it better than not, and understood quite plainly when the large dragon snorted and said, “That is nonsense. Tell him to go away at once, or I will crush him, and take that breastplate of his for myself.”
Temeraire flattened his ruff and snapped, “I should like to see you try—” But Laurence’s hand upon his neck reminded him, so with a great effort he straightened his neck and with chilly condescension went on. “—but we are not here to pick a quarrel: so if you do want me to go away, you need merely answer my question, and we shall leave; I do not in the least wish to remain in the company of a dragon whose wealth is by no means sufficient to excuse her poor manners.”
“And why would you ask me such a question?” the dragon said coldly.
“Well, I do not mean you must know where the French Army is, I suppose,” Temeraire said, “but you can tell me where the Russian Army is, and that will be where the French are, soon enough; so that will do.”
“What Russian Army?” the enormous dragon said. “What is this to me?”
Temeraire drew back his head upon his neck, in some confusion. “Laurence,” he said, turning his head, speaking in French, “and Captain Dyhern, is there perhaps some mistake? This dragon is not in the army, at all.”
“Of course she is,” Dyhern said. “There is her regiment number, upon her shoulder,” and indeed, Temeraire saw where he pointed to a large 26 painted in bright red that stood out upon one of the armor plates, and beside it the number 8.
“The captain is in a regiment,” the little dragon interjected, a little uncertainly, “—I believe? I have heard him speak of the regiment.”
The enormous dragon shrugged when this had been relayed to her, and said without moving her suspicious eye from Temeraire, “So this is some human matter. I do not care about that. If you want an army, you had better go find some humans and talk to them; and while you do it, you may go far away from me and my treasure.”
She reached out her foreleg and jealously scraped a few spilled coins back into her heap: her talons were sheathed in bright caps of polished steel, which had been nailed on; she certainly looked as though she were a fighting-dragon. But Temeraire felt quite at an impasse: how could she not know if she were in the army, and not care about it in the least? Before he could ask her anything further, however, a man appeared in an officer’s uniform: out of breath and red in the face, with several other younger officers running behind him, and shouted up at Laurence in French, “Who the devil are you? How dare you come stir up my beasts?”
“Sir—” Laurence said, and slid down from Temeraire’s back, to go and speak with the gentleman, who coldly deigned to give his name: Captain Ivan Rozhkov, of the Twenty-Sixth Regiment of the Air. He had a luxuriant mustache and beard, brown shot through a very little with silver, and a narrow face fixed presently in anger; he held in one hand a peculiar sort of short whip, with a heavy silver handle. The little white dragon had sidled over towards him, and was murmuring quietly to him; but he waved the dragon off. “As far as I am concerned,” Rozhkov said, “you are a pack of spies: you will go, or I will set Vosyem upon you.”
“If you mean that dragon there,” Temeraire said, interjecting, “I have fought bigger dragons than her, without the least difficulty,” although privately he did admit to himself that she would present a notable challenge: the armor might, he feared, stand up to the divine wind; and those spikes and her tipped claws would certainly be quite nasty at close quarters. “So you needn’t be threatening. We are only asking so we can go and fight alongside you, after all.”
Rozhkov only looked up at him halfway through this conversation, and then snorted and said to Laurence, “You English, you make your dragons into house-pets and parrots: keep your three hundred fairy tales, and take this trained dog of yours away to them, also! There are ten fighting-beasts in this covert all her size; I will rouse them all up if you are not on your way at once.”
Temeraire reared up on his hind legs, to take a quick look around, and indeed he saw two more of the hollows in sight, and then he realized that in each of them a gleam might be spied out, through the treees—ten dragons! Ten dragons, all of them with so much treasure, it nearly could not be borne. “Oh,” Temeraire said, longingly. “Oh; but how can they all be so rich?”
“If you think you will be pillaging here, you are very wrong,” Rozhkov snapped to Laurence.