With this rejoinder he put down the reed and stalked outside to make ablutions: a large fountain stood outside gushing from a tall stone pillar, fed somehow from underground; he drank thirstily and deeply from the gush, then thrust his head into the deep pool which it fed, and flinging it back let the water pour off his mane and cascade down his back to the ground. Then he flew some short distance to the nearby midden.
“It don’t make any sense to me; we’ve always stuffed them full as they could hold, when we were going to be doing any long flying, if there was food to be had,” Granby said doubtfully, when Laurence asked him his opinion. “But we can’t drum them up some pigs from thin air, and I don’t see any here, so we must lump it for now whether it’s good advice or no.”
They followed Chu’s example at the fountain, and got themselves aboard again, not without some stifled sighs from the ground crewmen, who could see ahead another day of endless crammed-in flying. “Pray forgive us, Larring,” Harcourt said, to her own ground-crew master. “I don’t mean to use you all so unkind. While we fly to-day, piece out the spare leather into belt-harnesses for you all, and beginning tomorrow we’ll have you take it in turn to latch on to the back harness yourselves. It will be good for the officers to have some exercise climbing about, anyway; it’s been too long since we had maneuvers.”
She added to Laurence and Granby afterwards, before they themselves mounted, “But it will slow us down, if they have to be clambering all over creation while we fly, with only belt-harness. Will there be any more dragons, any time soon, so we could let the fellows ride?”
That question was answered late that afternoon: beneath them the markers changed, and instead of Peking the name of another city was shown, unfamiliar to them all; General Chu glancing down saw it, and said something to one of the Jade Dragons. The green dragon nodded, with three quick efficient jerks rolled up her banner, handed it on to the second, and wheeling shot away into the upper air and south-easterly, vanishing with almost unbelievable speed.
She returned scarcely an hour later, dropping back into place, and took up her banner again. They flew on another two hours, and as the sun descended Laurence saw in the distance four dragons, three red and a blue, gathered at a marker up ahead. Even as their own company approached, the party leapt aloft to meet them and fell into place off their left flank and slightly above, in a simple arrow-head formation, the blue dragon at the rear and center. The leader, who wore a thin flat band of silver about his neck, bobbed his head respectfully to Temeraire and to Chu, but not a word was said: they all flew onwards together.
Laurence could crane about to peer at them more closely, at least at their underbellies, and could see the other aviators doing so all amongst their company. The three red dragons wore a kind of light armoring, thin hammered plates sewn together and bound very near the skin; it was heaviest at the pockets where the legs met the body, padded a little there. They carried not a single man amongst them; Laurence had seen a few upon their backs, but those were not visible from below, and did not at any time come climbing into view.
The blue dragon, on the other hand, wore no armor but bore a silken carrying-harness, some thirty men aboard in rows down its sides, and long nets between those rows bulged with supplies. It flew a little below the red dragons, and Laurence realized after a time observing that where the three red beat their wings in time, the blue beat his at a pace off-set and quicker, three to each stroke of the larger beasts. “I wonder if it improves his speed,” Laurence said.
The next day two more such groups joined them; the day after, another. By the end of the first week, as they crossed the border into the neighboring province, they flew with forty dragons at their back.
CHU CALLED HALTS NOW two hours earlier, and these occurred in staggered fashion: first he landed, and the formation with him, accompanied by one of the four-dragon clusters; the rest of the body flew onwards, and might be observed for some distance ahead landing two groups at a time in sequence, spreading themselves out across a wide territory.
No sooner did these land but the crew were leaping off the blue dragons, bringing with them the packed nets, then the blue dragons all went aloft again and flew off to either side of the course of their flight, returning an hour later with motley supply acquired, Laurence could only guess, at storehouses and villages around them, which all of it went into cooking-vats already prepared by the crew and full of boiling water. Bags of grain formed the largest part of this supply, with only a few oxen or sheep or pigs to leaven the porridge, and there was now no opportunity to pick out the meat: all went into the pot and was cooked an hour, then served out.
“It does not seem right they should all have to work so hard when we only sit and wait,” Temeraire said, observing their labors, but Chu, overhearing him, shook his head.
“We are too big to spend our time on supply,” he said. “We must save our energies for the heat of battle.”