“That is enough,” Laurence said shortly. “More than enough, sir; I am sorry to have distressed your beast, and to have disturbed your morning. I hope to God you will have no greater cause to regret the occasion. Temeraire, we will be on our way; there is nothing to be gained here. We must rely on Hammond to procure the intelligence for us.”
“Certainly,” Temeraire said, as haughtily as he could manage, dragging his eyes away; he reached out to put Laurence up. “It seems very peculiar to me, to find dragons so perfectly uninformed about the war they ought to be fighting in; but as their officers do not seem to be much better, one cannot blame them, I suppose.”
He paused, with Laurence in his talons, and raised up on his haunches again: a heavy clanging bell had begun to ring, not far away, and cries were going up across the covert. Vosyem had lifted her own head in fresh suspicion. In the distance, approaching swiftly, a knot of five dragons were flying, unsteadily and on a wavering course. One was a beast on Vosyem’s scale, enormous and armor-plated; the others were smaller, in motley colors, trying to support him as they went. He left a thin spattering trail of blood behind him.
Temeraire swung Laurence to his back and sprang aloft, even as Rozhkov shouted some commands, cracking the whip, and the small white and grey dragons all went up together alongside him. “Why is Vosyem not helping?” Temeraire demanded of the little one who spoke French, as they flew up. It would have been a great deal handier to have a beast or two that size, when there was one so large to manage landing; the poor fellow did not look as though he could come down properly on his own.
“But what if one of the others took her treasure?” the little dragon said, looking at Temeraire dubiously. “There are no guards posted, and it has not been locked up properly.”
While that argument could be said to have a great deal of sense, it was also distinctly selfish, in Temeraire’s opinion. At least there were a great many of the smaller dragons, and together they caught the huge beast from beneath and managed to get him landed safely in a vacant clearing. His head hung forward listlessly, and he seemed as though he only wished to lie down. But an officer aboard his back cracked his whip, and he continued to hold himself up while a rope ladder was flung down, and men scrambled off: he was carrying a crew of nearly thirty, and many of them officers.
They were met by the officers of the covert, running to help; several men in bandages stained badly with blood, some being let down from the belly-netting strapped down to flat cots; they were all carried away. A man in a captain’s uniform staggered off, took a rag from a colleague and mopped his bloody brow, said in French, “Give me a drink, for the love of the Holy Mother,” and took a cup from another and drank it down. He wiped his mouth and said, “I must get back aloft and to the city. Rozhkov, will you get Tri settled and get that belly-wound stitched up? By God! I didn’t think we would make it in the end, even though I swore to General Tutchkov we would manage.”
He took another gulp; his crew were already busily re-harnessing one of the smaller dragons, a white creature stippled with spots of grey and black, for him to ride, while dragon-surgeons scrambled for the beast. “For God’s sake, Vasya,” cried a younger officer, “don’t keep us all holding our breath: what has happened? Has there been fighting?”
“Fighting!” the captain laughed, a harsh noise, hoarse. “If you want to call it that. We have been run out of Smolensk. We are falling back on Valutino, and if not there on Usvyatye, and if not there, on Tsarevo Zaimische—and if not there, God help the Tsar!”
HALF-A-DAY’S FLIGHT, AND A pillar of smoke rising in the distance: another Russian town burning. As Temeraire beat towards it, Laurence saw the Russian Army straggling by, the small dragons flying past scarcely to be made out beneath the infantry soldiers clinging all over their bodies, being borne back with the retreat more swiftly than their feet could carry them. Officers were astride at the neck or in some cases being dangled beneath from a sort of swinging chair.
“Too much for their weight,” Chu said, observing the flocks of smaller beasts, “although they are performing well, but infantry-dragons ought to be one hundred and fifty picul,” this measure being roughly on the order of nine tons; the white dragons were not more than six or seven, to Laurence’s eye: barely light-weights. In the far distance, he could see a melee of courier-weight dragons skirmishing: Cossack troops, he supposed, tangling with the French scouts; the pursuit was not far behind. It was the thirtieth of August.