Shen Lung Chi, who could not understand him, nevertheless could read his hungry expression perfectly well, and dished out a large bowl of the porridge; after having devoured this and licked it bare, and refreshed himself at the pool, the small dragon was induced to reveal that his name was Grig, though he seemed half-alarmed even to confess he had one at all. It seemed that the light-weights were meant to answer to the whims of the bigger dragons, and ordinarily fed only on what leavings they could snatch.
“She wanted some water,” Grig said, “and then she wanted me to fly back to camp and be sure that her treasure was under proper guard; but Captain Rozhkov would not give me leave to do that, so I had to go back and tell her so,” he hunched his shoulders as if in the memory of a blow, as he repeated this, “and then she had me carry him a message, and say that if he did not let me go, she would go herself; so then I had to come back and tell her that if she left, he would call off the guard and let all her treasure be stolen—”
“Well, it seems to me a perfectly wretched arrangement,” Temeraire said, “and I do not see how any of you are going to fight properly, when we have any fighting: you will be too tired.”
“Oh,” Grig said, “but I will not be fighting; I am too small to fight.”
“You aren’t smaller than those Cossack dragons, over there,” Temeraire said.
“No; but they are irregulars, and I am too big to join them; they cannot feed a dragon my size,” Grig said. Temeraire looked over at the Cossack camp: it seemed a far more hospitable place, their dragons tucked around the campfire in amongst the people, and if they did not have enormous heaps of treasure at least had neat harness, and most of them wore handsome woven blankets. But it was certainly true they were considerably smaller: the size of Winchesters, courier-weight beasts by British standards.
Certainly the Russian heavy-weights all looked very imposing—no-one could deny it, and Temeraire had observed that, despite their size, they demonstrated a remarkable speed. Their steel-taloned claws and long necks lashed out very much as though, as Forthing put it, there was gunpowder lit behind them. But as they demonstrated their fighting qualities, for the most part, by quarreling with one another and knocking about the smaller beasts, Temeraire nevertheless felt entirely justified in making his criticisms now, although the Russian officers evidently did not enjoy hearing it, and several of them scowled and spoke again to Kutuzov in their own tongue instead of French, with passion; but the general waved his hand and silenced them.
It seemed that the Russian Army had been retreating all this time, ever since Napoleon had crossed the Niemen—all summer long. Their first plan of battle, which to Temeraire sounded quite sensible, had evidently been to give battle at Vilna and then withdraw a little way into their countryside, luring the French to a final battle at a fortified encampment, where the Russians should have had the advantage. Why they had decided instead to only run away, Temeraire could not in the least understand, when they did have a very substantial army; surely it would have been better to at least try and fight, even if it did seem that Napoleon had a much larger army than anyone had expected.
Evidently many of the Russian officers shared his sentiments, and General Barclay had been superseded as the senior commander for having failed to give battle; but it did not seem to Temeraire that Kutuzov was in a great hurry to fight, either: they were still arguing whether the battle should be given here, or at the nearby town of Tsarevo Zaimische, which evidently offered good ground, or somewhere else entirely.
In any case, though they had been running away as hard as they could, Napoleon’s army had nearly caught them a dozen times. He had refined still further the use of dragons in his operations. From what the Russians described, each regiment now traveled with its own beasts, infantry and artillery alike. Men and light-weights foraged, while the heavier dragons leap-frogged companies down the road, and occasionally bore up the guns and heavy loads. Napoleon had eschewed larger magazines; his supply depots were instead numerous and lightly defended, each of them vulnerable perhaps, but as a whole able to withstand even many losses.