There were many of these: he stood for nearly three hours in the cold, damp morning air, watching others go in and out, all the while the sky lightened; the coming day’s heat was still only a distant promise. At last the tent-flap was raised, and he was admitted; Kutuzov was not yet finished dressing, and sat at the remnants of his breakfast in the company of several Russian officers, nobles all, and most of them to Laurence’s eye useless hangers-on. “Good morning, Captain?” Kutuzov said, very placidly, almost sleepily, but there was a hard note to the words.
“Sir,” Laurence said, without preamble, “we have been made: the French reconnoitering behind us spied the first jalan on the approach. They will have fallen back at once, certainly, unless we move to engage. It may already be too late.”
One man, a colonel named Toll, gave a half-snorted laugh, stifled; a few other men of the company smiled with a kind of gentle condescension, as though to say that Laurence’s little joke had been amusing enough, but wasn’t it stale by now? Kutuzov folded his hands together over his belly, leaning back in his chair, and contemplated Laurence with the careful expression of a scholar at a rare specimen, trying to make it out properly. “Hahm,” he said. “I wonder if Napoleon is so easily to be put off the battle he has been seeking for so long.”
“By all means,” Laurence said grimly, “if his alternative is destruction, and if by doing so he can fall back on better ground, knowing that we will now make ourselves the pursuers, and come to meet him on a position of his choosing.”
“Be that as it may,” Kutuzov began, in mild noncommittal tones, which Laurence might with pleasure have shaken out of him; already the candles in the tent were growing dim and unnecessary. The sun was up outside.
The tent-flap was thrust aside, impatiently; a young captain of hussars pushed inside and said, panting and breathless, “Sir, the Cossacks report the French have left their pickets; they are gone—there is a cloud on the road for ten miles, going west. The French are falling back everywhere.”
Kutuzov paused; the tent was silent. Laurence saw every man of the company staring at him in return, as though they began at last to believe: it was nearly anticlimax when scant moments later a young courier captain stumbled in, pale, and blurted, “There are a thousand dragons coming from the east.”
The weather was choking-hot and the clouds of dust upon the road, stirred up by many marching feet, rose so high that Temeraire coughed and coughed as he flew; he could make out nothing at all of the French Army, and very little even of their own directly below.
It was splendid nevertheless to be flying once more at the head of the assembled jalan, and flying now not to some contrived mission but to a real battle, where he and these dragons should fight properly and win a magnificent victory and defeat Napoleon at last. He would like to see what the Ministry should say to Laurence then, Temeraire thought with an intense private sensation of delight.
Nothing could have been more satisfying than the behavior of the Russians, when at last they had seen the ranks of the jalan. The heavy-weights had been quite abashed into silence, looking overhead as the legions came on, singing their flying-song and the beat of their wings making a great hollow rushing sound like the wind in the tops during a gale. The Russian soldiers had many of them formed, quite without orders, into their defensive squares with bayonets held aloft bristling, until General Kutuzov had sent men around to tell them all that these dragons were their allies, and some old men in very long beards and robes had gone out amongst the troops and made loud speeches.
“Those are priests,” Dyhern said, “and they are telling them that you are sent by God to smite the enemies of Russia.”
“Oh,” Temeraire said in strong indignation, “we are not; why should they suppose God had anything to do with it? We are sent by the Emperor. I do not see why God should get the credit of it, at all.” But in spite of his objections on this score, he could not deny being pleased when slowly the soldiers instead began to cheer lustily, and clash their bayonets together in an unmusical sort of welcome. Kutuzov was even so kind as to order a salute fired, from the great guns; although this startled the dragons nearest those guns a great deal and caused a degree of confusion as they recoiled and tangled with the niru nearest them, and it required half-an-hour to quite smooth out the resulting disarray.
“Of course they had no business not to believe us,” Temeraire said to Laurence, “but I cannot deny they are proving ready to make handsome amends for it, and I do not know it is not more gratifying to have such a change.”
“I should be more ready to enjoy it,” Laurence said, “if not bought at such a cost: Napoleon will make us pay dearly for this mistake.”