TEMERAIRE JOLTED OUT OF sleep the next morning with a start: the thunder-roll and the low terrible whistling of the field guns. It was just dawn. “Twelve-pounders,” Laurence said, listening: not as great a noise as the enormous sixty-eights which could be carried by a dragon transport like the Potentate, or even the thirty-six-pounders which had made up most of the guns of the Reliant, on which Temeraire had hatched, but they were certainly loud enough for all that. When Temeraire put his head out of the pavilion, he saw many of the other dragons sitting up on their haunches, looking a little uneasily to the west where the noise of the guns came steadily.
“How they go on!” Chu said. The guns were firing in nearly a continuous stream; as soon as the reverberation of one shot had died away, here came another. “At least when dragons roar, we have it over with, and then you can hear yourself think again. But I am ready to bear the noise, if that means we can get started. Come, we had better go and have a look.”
They had encamped at the Russian rear, as they could reach the fighting more easily than might the infantry or the cavalry, and this way refresh themselves during the battle and tend to injured dragons without being exposed to the artillery. As Chu issued his orders, the niru began at once to go aloft; Temeraire flew alongside him swiftly the five minutes to the front, and there halted to hover: the battlefield looked quite different than the previous afternoon. The French had thrown up three rows of fences nearly all about the highest ground, constructed as they had seen of heavy logs and piled stones and dirt. And as a final insult, they had even seized and improved upon the very fortifications which the Russians had built and abandoned, not a week before.
The ranks of infantry stood arrayed now behind the heavy fences, deployed into broad lines, and great batteries of artillery stood upon raised ground behind them, with several redoubts piled up; their felling of trees had removed the few obstacles which remained to their clear prospect in every direction, while the Russians had been obliged to take up positions crowded up against a heavy stand of timber to the north and with marshy ground not distant from their rear. But the French dragons were massed towards the center, in a peculiar concentration, which it seemed to Temeraire should make it possible to encircle them entirely.
He ventured to point this out to Chu, who said, “Yes, so why has he done it?”
“You have forgotten the guns,” Laurence said, pointing: many of the great massed batteries of smaller guns stood behind the infantry ranks, aiming skyward. “Those will surely be firing on us: they are elevated too high to fire on the Russian infantry.”
As the Russian dragons made their own first pass, carrying heavy loads of bombs meant for the French infantry positions, the raised artillery began to roar: canister-shot, filling the air with smoke and the flying balls and scraps of metal, and even though these nearly all fell harmlessly into the field between the armies, the hail barred an approach to the French forces from more than half the sky: only the center, where the French dragons were massed, was open air.
“Hah,” Chu said, “so he is making a mountain pass, out of gunfire. Yes, I see; we will have a hard time coming at him.” The Russian heavy-weights were already being stymied, their approach towards the French falling back before the blistering fire, which would have torn their wings apart if they had continued.
But Chu signaled nevertheless, and Temeraire watched with rising joy as six niru flew forward to make the first sortie, and two other wings of four niru apiece broke away to either side of the battlefield, to probe at the French defenses. They were fighting, at last they were fighting, and then Chu said, “Well, let’s go back and sit down and have a morning drink; is there any tea, Shen Lao?”
“What?” Temeraire said, outraged. “But the battle is joined! Everything has begun!”