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 all manoeuvring skilfully, 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 near-heroism, 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 among the shrinking knot of dragons, and barrelled through with much the effect of a cat descending upon an unsuspecting flock of pigeons. Friend and foe alike went tumbling wildly; and thankfully, the ferals, used to rough play, were none of them much the worse for wear, except for being 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 Poux-de-Ciel 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.
Wringe was 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 revised 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 absently, with not the shade of a stammer and a quite casual authority. ‘She needs to lie quiet a day or so under a poultice; and those balls must come out of her shoulder presently, although not now. There’s a courier-ground 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 of her wing and turned back to Laurence blinking watery eyes.
‘Very well,’ Laurence said, bemused; at the change in his demeanour 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 lifted him 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.’
They reached the Weymouth covert only a little short of dusk, somewhat dispirited. Wringe had expressed her intention seven times during the course of their flight, of climbing off mid-air and flying the rest of the way herself. Then she had accidentally scratched Temeraire twice, in startlement, and had even thrown a couple of the topmen clean off his back with her uneasy shifting. Their lives were saved only by their carabiner-locked straps. On landing, they were both handed down badly bruised and ill from the knocking they had taken, and assisted by their fellows, they limped away to be dosed liberally with brandy at the small barracks-house.
Wringe then put up a fuss upon having the bullets extracted, sidling her hindquarters away when Dorset approached, knife in hand. She insisted that she was quite well, but Temeraire was sufficiently exasperated by now to have lost patience with her evasions, and his low rumbling growl, resonating upon the hard-packed earth, made her flatten to the ground meekly and submit.
‘That will do,’ Dorset said, having pried out the third and final of the balls. ‘Now let’s have some fresh meat for her, just to be sure, and a night’s quiet rest. This dry ground is too hard,’ he added, with disapproval, as he climbed down from her shoulder, the three balls rattling bloodily in his little basin.
‘I do not care if it is the hardest ground in Britain; only let me have a cow and I will sleep,’ Temeraire said wearily, leaning his head so that 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 hindquarters slip down his throat. The farmer who had been prevailed upon to bring some of his beasts to the covert stood paralyzed in macabre fascination, his mouth agape, His two farm-hands stood likewise, 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
