Nine dragons of the niru at Temeraire’s rear together managed to bring down another five, along with their hapless captives; but by the time they could save the men and go aloft again, there was no hope of catching any more. The ferals were all of them vanishing again, as swiftly as they had come, dispersing to all corners of the countryside.
The battle was dying behind them, in the confusion and horror brought on by the unexpected swarming attack. The day was drawing to a close; the Russians began to fall back to the south, taking up positions across the road to Kaluga, and left the French to possession of the streets, choked with bodies and running with blood.
Their dinner that night was a thin and scanty one. The ferals had not acted with malice: they had not deliberately spoilt the cooking-pits nor the supply they could not themselves carry off, save accidentally, but accident had been more than enough. Their attack had taken or ruined more than half the army’s food, for that night. Reports were yet coming in, from all around the countryside, of further depradations against the farmers and nearby villages: terrified peasants were even coming to the army, with their children and their cattle, begging for protection.
“And there are breeding grounds also on the Ugra River,” one Russian aviator said: a river which ran on past Kaluga itself. “Heavy-weight breeding grounds.”
The Cossacks were laboring valiantly all that evening, despite nightfall, to bring them further intelligence of the movement of both the French Army and the feral beasts. Late in the night, while Kutuzov yet sat looking heavily over his maps, one of their captains came in weary and in his dirt, his mustaches stained with tobacco, and reported to him in Russian. Kutuzov nodded a little.
“The French have put out cooking-pits for them,” Kutuzov said briefly to Laurence.
Despite all the barriers of language, evidently the French had managed to make a simple bargain understood: if the ferals brought them grain, which they could not ordinarily digest, the French added some meat to the stew, and shared it out between them and their own dragons.
“And like as not throwing our prisoners and our slain into the pits, the monsters,” another Russian said, a grotesque fantasy, but one which Laurence heard more than once repeated in the camp.
Kutuzov said heavily, “We fall back towards Kaluga, at once. Captain,” he said to Laurence, “will you go to the Ugra grounds, and secure them?”
Laurence was silent a moment: to make himself a gaoler, for starving and chained beasts, was work he could scarcely bear to contemplate, and yet the faces of the screaming wounded haunted him. “We will, sir,” he said.
Temeraire did not disagree; he and all the Chinese dragons, and their crews, had been very silent and shocked since the battle: what was yet a lurking fear in the heart of most Westerners, who had grown up on tales of maurauding dragons and heroic knights standing forth to slay them, and who thought of aviators as the handlers of savage beasts, was to them so unthinkable and vile as to be unacceptable even as a subject for fiction.
They left at once, despite the late hour; so, too, did the army. They saw a few torches moving upon the road below for guidance, the light reflected here and there off pikes and bayonets that bristled in every direction; in the hospital-waggons, those less grievously wounded rode sitting up, holding weapons aloft. There was no sight of French pursuit or forward motion: they remained ensconced around Maloyaroslavets, or what was left of that town after the ruinous combat.
Three roads now stood open to Napoleon: he might retreat himself towards Moscow and from there retire to Smolensk along the road which had brought him, or he might instead try and take a southern route; or if he had not yet lost the heart for a final adventure, even strike out for Kaluga after all, and throw a gauntlet once more in the teeth of the Russian Army.
“I could scarcely imagine it, even of Bonaparte,” Laurence said to Tharkay, as they flew through the night; he had sent most of the officers below to sleep, as much as they might, in the belly-netting, “after he was halted in his tracks yesterday, except—”
Tharkay nodded minutely. Dragons could not fly long distances day in and out without steady provender, and their assembled host was so large that if their supply were destroyed, even an instant dispersal to all directions with the liberty of pillaging could not feed them all. And their own supply depots, intended as they were for the feeding of great numbers of dragons, would in any case now be appealing targets for the ferals. Shen Shi already looked grave, and after private consultation that night, Zhao Lien had sent away some twenty dragons to be a guard upon their nearest depots—and with instructions that should they be overwhelmed, they were immediately to begin to retreat eastward instead of trying to rejoin the main body of their jalan.