Empire of Ivory (7 page)

darting in at the French dragons and away, setting up a

raucous caterwauling as they went, without very much actual

fighting to be seen. It would have done nicely to frighten

away a rival gang in the wild, Laurence supposed,

particularly one so outnumbered, but he did not think the

French were to be so easily diverted; indeed as he watched,

the five enemy dragons, all of them only little Pou-deCiels, drew into close formation and promptly bowled

through the cloud of ferals.

The ferals, still putting on a show of bravado, scattered

too late to evade the rifle-fire, and now some of their

shrill cries were for real pain. Temeraire was beating up

furiously, his sides belling out like sails as he heaved

for the breath to get himself so high aloft, but he could

not easily gain their height, and would be at a

disadvantage himself against the smaller French when he

had. "Give them a gun, quickly, and show the signal for

descent," Laurence shouted to Turner, without much hope;

but the ferals came plummeting down in a rush when Turner

put out the flags, none too reluctant to put themselves

around Temeraire.

Arkady was keeping up a low, indignant clamoring under his

breath, nudging anxiously at his second Wringe, the worsthit, her dark grey hide marred with streaks of darker

blood. She had taken several balls to the flesh and one

unlucky hit to the right wing, which had struck her on the

bias and scraped a long, ugly furrow across the tender

webbing and two spines; she was listing in mid-air

awkwardly as she tried to favor it.

"Send her below to shore," Laurence said, scarcely needing

the speaking-trumpet with the dragons crowded so close that

they might have been talking in a clearing, and not the

open sky. "And pray tell them again, they must keep wellclear of the guns; I am sorry they have had so hot a

lesson. Let us keep together and-" but this came too late,

as the French were coming down in arrow-head formation, and

the ferals followed too closely on his first instruction

and spread themselves out across the sky.

The French also at once separated; even together they were

not a match for Temeraire, whom they had surely recognized,

and by way of protection engaged themselves closely with

the ferals. It must have been an odd experience for them;

Pou-de-Ciels were generally the lightest of the French

combat breeds, and now they were finding themselves the

relative heavy-weights in battle against the ferals, who

even where their wingspan and length matched were all of

them lean and concave-bellied creatures, a sharp contrast

against the deep-chested muscle of their opponents.

The ferals were now more wary, but also more savage, hot

with anger at the injury to their fellow and their own

smaller stinging wounds. They used their darting lunges to

better effect, learning quickly how to feint in and provoke

the rifle volleys, then come in again for a real attack.

The smallest of them, Gherni and motley-colored Lester,

were attacking one Pou-de-Ciel together, with the more wily

Hertaz pouncing in every now and again, claws blackened

with blood; the others were engaged singly, and more than

holding their own, but Laurence quickly perceived the

danger, even as Temeraire called, "Arkady! Bnezh's'li

taqom-" and broke off to say, "Laurence, they are not

listening."

"Yes, they will be in the soup in a moment," Laurence

agreed; the French dragons, though they seemed on the face

of it to be fighting as independently as the ferals, were

maneuvering skillfully to put their backs to one another;

indeed they were only allowing the ferals to herd them into

formation, which should allow them to make another

devastating pass. "Can you break them apart, when they have

come together?"

"I do not see how I will be able to do it, without hurting

our friends; they are so close to one another, and some of

them are so little," Temeraire said anxiously, tail lashing

as he hovered.

"Sir," Ferris said, and Laurence looked at him. "I beg your

pardon, sir, but we are always told, as a rule, to take a

bruising before a ball; it don't hurt them long, even if

they are knocked properly silly, and we are close enough to

give any of them a lift to land, if it should go so badly."

"Very good; thank you, Mr. Ferris," Laurence said, putting

strong approval in it; he was still very glad to see Granby

matched off with Iskierka, even more so when dragons would

now be in such short supply, but he felt the loss keenly,

as exposing the weaknesses in his own abbreviated training

as an aviator. Ferris had risen to his occasions with nearheroism, but he had been but a third lieutenant on their

departure from England, scarcely a year ago, and at

nineteen years of age could not be expected to put himself

forward to his captain with the assurance of an experienced

officer.

Temeraire put his head down and puffed up his chest with a

deep breath, then flung himself down amongst the shrinking

knot of dragons, and barreled through with much the effect

of a cat descending upon an unsuspecting flock of pigeons.

Friend and foe alike went tumbling wildly; the ferals flung

into higher excitement. They flew around with much

disorderly shrilling for a few moments, and as they did,

the French righted themselves: the formation leader waved a

signal-flag, and the Pou-de-Ciels wheeled together and

away, escaping.

Arkady and the ferals did not pursue, but came gleefully

romping back over to Temeraire, alternating complaints at

his having knocked them about, with boastful prancing over

their victory and the rout of the enemy, which Arkady

implied was in spite of Temeraire's jealous interference.

"That is not true, at all," Temeraire said, outraged, "you

would have been perfectly dished without me," and turned

his back upon them and flew towards land, his ruff

stiffened up with indignation.

They found Wringe sitting and licking at her scarred wing

in the middle of a field. A few clumps of bloodstained

white wool upon the grass, and a certain atmosphere of

carnage in the air, suggested she had quietly found herself

some consolation; but Laurence chose to be blind. Arkady

immediately set up as a hero for her benefit, and paraded

back and forth to re-enact the encounter. So far as

Laurence could follow, the battle might have raged a

fortnight, and engaged some hundreds of enemy beasts, all

of them vanquished by Arkady's solitary efforts. Temeraire

snorted and flicked his tail in disdain, but the other

ferals proved perfectly happy to applaud the revisionary

account, though they occasionally jumped up to interject

stories of their own noble exploits.

Laurence meanwhile had dismounted; his new surgeon Dorset,

a rather thin and nervous young man, bespectacled and given

to stammering, was going over Wringe's injuries. "Will she

be well enough to make the flight back to Dover?" Laurence

inquired; the scraped wing looked nasty, what he could see

of it; she uneasily kept trying to fold it close and away

from the inspection, though fortunately Arkady's theatrics

were keeping her distracted enough that Dorset could make

some attempt at handling it.

"No," Dorset said, with not the shade of a stammer and a

quite casual authority. "She needs lie quiet a day or so

under a poultice, and those balls must come out of her

shoulder presently, although not now. There is a courierground outside Weymouth, which has been taken off the

routes and will be free from infection; we must find a way

to get her there." He let go the wing and turned back to

Laurence blinking his watery eyes.

"Very well," Laurence said, bemused; at the change in his

demeanor more than the certainty alone. "Mr. Ferris, have

you the maps?"

"Yes, sir; though it is twelve miles straight flying to

Weymouth covert across the water, sir, if you please,"

Ferris said, hesitating over the leather wallet of maps.

Laurence nodded and waved them away. "Temeraire can support

her so far, I am sure."

Her weight posed less difficulty than her unease with the

proposed arrangement, and, too, Arkady's sudden fit of

jealousy, which caused him to propose himself as a

substitute: quite ineligible, as Wringe outweighed him by

several tons, and they should not have got a yard off the

ground.

"Pray do not be so silly," Temeraire said, as she dubiously

expressed her reservations at being ferried. "I am not

going to drop you unless you bite me. You have only to lie

quiet, and it is a very short way."

Chapter 3

BUT THEY REACHED Weymouth covert only a little short of

dusk, in much perturbation of spirit, Wringe having

expressed the intention, five or six times during the

course of their flight, of climbing off mid-air to fly the

rest of the way herself. Then she had accidentally

scratched Temeraire twice, and thrown a couple of the

topmen clean off his back with her uneasy shifting, their

lives saved only by their carabiner-locked straps. On

landing, they were both handed down bruised and ill from

the knocking-about they had taken, and helped away by their

fellows to be dosed liberally, with brandy, at the small

barracks-house.

Wringe put up a singular fuss to having the bullets

extracted, sidling away her hindquarters when Dorset

approached knife in hand, insisting she was quite well, but

Temeraire was sufficiently exasperated by now to have no

patience with her evasions; his low rumbling growl,

resonating upon the dry, hard-packed earth, made her meekly

flatten to the ground and submit to being picked over with

a lantern suspended overhead. "That will do," Dorset said,

having pried out the third and final of the balls. "Now

some fresh meat, to be sure, and a night's quiet rest. This

ground is too hard," he added, with disapproval, as he

climbed down from her shoulder with the three balls

rattling bloodily in his little basin.

"I do not care if it is the hardest ground in Britain; only

pray let me have a cow and I will sleep," Temeraire said

wearily, leaning his head so Laurence could stroke his

muzzle while his own shallow cuts were poulticed. He ate

the cow in three tremendous tearing gulps, hooves-to-horns,

tipping his head backwards to let the last bite of the

hindquarters go down his throat. The farmer who had been

prevailed upon to bring some of his beasts to the covert

stood paralyzed in a macabre sort of fascination, his mouth

gaping, and his two sons likewise with their eyes starting

from their heads. Laurence pressed a few more guineas into

the man's unresisting hand and hurried them all off; it

would do Temeraire's cause no good to have fresh and lurid

tales of draconic savagery spreading.

The ferals disposed of themselves directly around the

wounded Wringe, sheltering her from any draft and pillowing

themselves one upon the other as comfortably as they could

manage, the smaller ones among them crawling upon

Temeraire's back directly he had fallen asleep.

It was too cold to sleep out, and they had not brought

tents with them on patrol; Laurence meant to leave the

barracks, small enough in all conscience without dividing

off a captain's partition, to his men, and take himself to

a hotel, if one might be had; in any case he would have

been glad of a chance to send word back to Dover by the

stage, that their absence would not occasion distress. He

did not trust any of the ferals to go alone yet, with their

few officers so unfamiliar.

Ferris approached as Laurence made inquiry of the few

tenants of the covert. "Sir, if you please, my family are

here in Weymouth; I am sure my mother would be very happy

if you chose to stay the night," he said, adding, with a

quick, anxious glance that belied the easy way in which he

issued this invitation, "I should only like to send word

ahead."

"That is handsome of you, Mr. Ferris; I would be grateful,

if I should not be putting her out," Laurence said. He did

not miss the anxiety. In courtesy, Ferris likely felt

compelled to make the invitation, if his family had so much

as an attic corner and a crust of bread to spare. Most of

his younger gentlemen, indeed most of the Corps, were drawn

from the ranks of what could only be called the shabbygenteel, and Laurence knew they were inclined to think him

higher than he did himself: his father kept a grand state,

certainly, but Laurence had not spent three months together

at home since taking to sea, without much sorrow on either

side, except perhaps his mother's, and was better

accustomed to a hanging berth than a manor.

Out of sympathy he would have spared Ferris, but for the

likely difficulty of finding any other lodgings, and his

own weary desire to be settled, even if it were only in an