Fortunately Lethabo had been more generous to those beasts whose kindred had been wholly decimated, those same being more willing to accept refugees of doubtful lineage; and those dragons were willing to remain rather than risk the dangers of the crossing. But a dozen of the beasts still had villages and kin waiting for them in Africa, and insisted on returning at once, with almost two thousand men meant to accompany them: a company the size of a small army, and if anything more difficult to provision.
“Whatever fine language the Portuguese choose to write down in those papers, Captain, does not very much matter to dragons,” Lethabo had said to Laurence, as they had left the negotiations. “You know it, and so do I. No agreement will hold which does not satisfy them. But this truly is our price: all the slaves freed and reunited with their ancestors, and transport back for those who wish to go. If you cannot do it, we must yet treat with the French, and then, if the Portuguese will not free their slaves—”
She spread her hands eloquently, and Laurence nodded.
“We could send the men by other boats, smaller ones—frigates, or a good-sized merchantman?” Warren proposed now—Laurence flinched a little at hearing him call a frigate a boat—but this suggestion Lethabo rejected out of hand: the dragons would not again be parted from their descendants.
“Well,” Granby said, looking down past the harbor, where the two French transports rode at anchor, their colors bright from the masthead in the sun, “there is nothing else for it, but how can it be done?”
“IT SHOULD BE EASY AS WINKING, if we wanted to sink them,” Captain Warren observed: and a mere bombardment with boulders, carried one after another from the shore and dropped from on high, would indeed have sent the transports to the bottom of the ocean in no short order—where, of course, they would be of no use whatsoever in getting the Tswana home.
To take the great vessels, preserving them in a useful condition, was by far a more difficult problem, and not least because the French had been alive to the danger of just such an impulse on the part of their uncertain allies. The transports themselves were heavily armed, and bags of caltrops hung from the yard-arms above the dragondecks in such a way that they might instantly be spilt across the planking, their iron teeth being large enough to prevent any dragon from landing easily upon the ship while offering only a little difficulty to the sailors aboard.
Meanwhile the frigates in their company were too small for any but Nitidus or Dulcia to land upon: fast and maneuverable and armed for the most part with a few heavy snub-nosed cannonades which would certainly be turned at once upon any dragon who tried to descend upon the transports: they were close enough to make a directed attack practicable. Laurence could spy among their complement as many as four gun-boats apiece, each armed with the long, narrow-barreled guns which threw the small barbed cannonballs.
“The gun-boats will be in the water five minutes after the alarm is sounded,” Laurence said, peering at them through his glass, “if the crews know their work; in ten minutes, otherwise, and we shall hear from the guns directly after; and the cannonades. We cannot keep the dragons on the decks under that degree of fire.”
“And even if we do manage to hold the deck, the French will have hulled the ships so wretchedly we may as well sit in harbor the next three years, for all the good they will do us: they will never make the long crossing,” Sutton said.
“Yes; we must do something about those gun-boats, first,” Harcourt said, rolling out a sheet of smudged parchment, and taking a scrap of charred wood from the fire to sketch upon it the outline of the harbor. “If we can keep them pinned down, somehow; then take the transports quick as quick can be, if they aren’t to spike the decks against us—if we can only give those frigates a proper fait accompli, they shan’t hull us, unless they mean to sink all their own crews.”
“There’s another difficulty for you,” Warren said cheerfully. “Who’s to sail them? We shan’t; and the Potentate can scarcely let us have enough men to sail two transports more across the ocean and to home. Your bag of sailors will do some good, Laurence, but—”
“They are much improved,” Laurence said, “but I would not trust them to sail a dinghy rigged fore-and-aft across ten miles of calmest sea without trained officers.”
“Pray let us worry about one thing at a time!” Harcourt said. “If we do manage to cut them out, we ought to be grateful enough to have any other difficulties to work out.”
“I do not quite see how it is to be done myself, Laurence,” Temeraire said over his shoulder as the blue-black ocean streamed away beneath them. The weather was all that it should be for flying, clear and not too hot, and he could not help but spiral in mid-air for sheer delight: the difficulties of taking the transports should surely, he thought, be overcome; one could not let that worry one on a day like this.