Temeraire could not help but feel a little dissatisfied the next morning, even though Kutuzov had personally come to see them, accompanied by several of his staff officers: the general inspected them all with an air of suspicion, studying Chu and Temeraire especially with narrowed eyes. He looked over the supply-dragons and the Jade Dragons, and then demanded of Laurence, “The numbers of this force are in these proportions? Two middle-weight to eight light-weight and four of these—”
He gave a wave of his arm up and down, baffled by the Jade Dragons, who regarded him and the Russian officers with doubtful expressions of their own; Lung Yu Li said to Temeraire very quietly, “Surely that man has forgotten to put on all his clothing?” Kutuzov was wearing snug trousers and a waistcoat all of brilliant white, excessively tight upon a figure which was not good and showed to even less advantage as he lowered himself into a field chair put down for him, low to the ground, and stretched forth his legs and reclined back so as to make the mound of his belly protruberant under his folded hands.
“No, sir,” Laurence said to him. “There are only a few more of the couriers, and they are not counted in our numbers; it is three middle-weight fighters to one light-weight for supply.”
“Well, well. You are generous fairies, indeed. All the more so that he has brought almost no heavy-weights, himself,” Kutuzov added, meaning Napoleon. “All right, so where is this Chinese general of yours? As long as I am here, let me talk to him. Why is he hiding?”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Laurence said, “this is General Chu.”
An absurdly long amount of time was required to make Kutuzov believe that Chu was indeed their commander; the Russians looked increasingly disdainful, and several of them began to speak in low voices to Kutuzov, again proposing that the whole force was imaginary, until Temeraire, still smarting at middle-weight—he was by no means middle-weight; no-one could possibly have called twenty tons middle weight even if he were not as enormous and lumpen as the Russian beasts—broke in.
“If we were inventing it all, for what reason I cannot imagine,” he said coldly in French, “you would not be any worse off believing us than you are now, with Napoleon chasing you across your own country, and, it is plain to see, giving your dragons a drubbing. If you did have a dragon general yourselves, I dare say he would have put matters into better train.”
With morning, Temeraire had been able to see a little more of the arrangements of the Russian beasts in the rough coverts they had arranged for themselves: they were all outrageously quarrelsome with one another, at least the heavy-weights were. There did not seem to be very many of them, and all had wounds of some sort, some of which had not yet been treated properly: he had seen at least three with swollen bulging places where a pistol-ball had not been extracted, although he remembered quite well his own surgeons Keynes and Dorset saying that it was of great importance to remove them swiftly.
Vosyem and her regiment had been summoned up overnight, and Temeraire had seen the small dragon from her clearing again, laboring under a heavy tun of water which he was bringing her to drink, though she certainly could have more easily carried it herself, or for that matter gone to the pond to drink.
The little dragon had stopped by their own camp: his was the only friendly greeting they had from any of the Russians. “I am glad you have found us after all,” he said, in his small chirping voice, “and that it is all cleared up: so you are here to fight with us?”
“Yes, of course,” Temeraire said, “but pray tell me, whatever are you doing with that water?”
“Oh, I will bring you some, too, I promise—only pray do let me get a little supper, first,” the little dragon said, misunderstanding. He spoke with his head tilted, peering sidelong up at Temeraire as though he expected to be cuffed, and then glanced with even more anxiety over to where several other of the small dragons were now picking over the remnants of the carcass of a large moose which had just been abandoned by one of the heavy-weights.
“I do not need any water,” Temeraire said; the Shen Lung had jointly chosen a campsite near a small stream, which had taken not the work of half-an-hour to divert into forming a convenient pool, “and if you are hungry, you may have some of our breakfast, if you like; we have plenty. Only I have seen you fly back and forth seven times in the last hour past our camp. I beg your pardon,” he added, “if I seem rude for inquiring, but I cannot make any sense out of it.”
“Oh, I am doing whatever Vosyem would like me to do,” the little dragon said, meanwhile turning to stare at the immense pit full of porridge and meat. “Is that really food? But there is so much of it.”