Victory of Eagles

“Pillaging,” Wellesley added after a moment, “of course, ca

“There will be none,” Laurence said, “save what must be requisitioned to feed the dragons. Is there anything else?”

Wellesley looked at him narrowly. “Will you do it?”

There was little enough Laurence could now do, to repair what he had done; he could not restore the lives of the slain, or raise up ships from the Cha

“I do not need written orders for myself,” he had answered Wellesley. “But I require them for those other officers of the Corps involved: you may say merely that they must follow my orders.”

Wellesley had understood very well, what Laurence offered him, and he had not refused it. The orders were written, and given him, and he had left Wellesley in his tower, and gone down and down, to the waiting covert.

It was a silent, grim camp in the morning, as they harnessed the dragons and the crews went aboard; twice or more, Laurence thought Harcourt almost meant to speak to him. But in the end they all mounted up and flew with no words exchanged. The cold wind in Laurence’s face was welcome, and the steady beat of Temeraire’s wings, and the silence; his small crew did not address him, and sitting forward on Temeraire’s neck, they might have been alone in a wide-open sky; the rolling unmarred moors beneath them knew nothing of war or boundaries.

Wellesley’s spies had reported already a dozen raiding bands or more, moving through the North Country, stealing from farms and seizing cattle; Laurence had marked them on his map, as best the reports could place them. But the enemy provided them instead a convenient beacon of smoke, easily visible ten miles off. It was a thin black coil turning lazily upwards from the roof of a great farmhouse, the fire mostly extinguished by the time they arrived: the rest of the village stood empty, when the dragons came down, but for two men in homespun: villagers, not soldiers, laid out in the road dead, with stab wounds flower-red upon their bellies; they had been bayoneted.

“The villagers shan’t come out while we have the dragons here,” Harcourt said. “If we leave them outside—”

“No,” Laurence said; he did not mean to waste time on such things. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “We are officers of the King. You will come out at once, or we will have the dragons tear down the houses until you do.”

There was no reply, no stirring. “Temeraire,” Laurence said, and indicated a small neat cottage near the end of the village lane. “Bring it down, if you please.”

Temeraire looked at it, and said uncertainly, “Shall I roar?”

“However you choose,” Laurence said.

“Ought I bring it all down at once?” Temeraire asked, turning his head to inspect the cottage; he darted a look back at Laurence, as if trying to gauge his real intent. “Perhaps, if I just took off this chimney—”

“Oh, you are taking too long,” Iskierka said, and promptly blasted it with fire, the dry thatched roof going alight in a merrily crackling instant.

It burned fiercely, putting out sharp smoke; the flames licking out eagerly towards its neighbors; Laurence sat waiting, and after a moment a cellar door creaked open and a few men came forth, “Put it out, for God’s sake put it out,” one of them begged gasping. “All the village will catch—”

“Berkley, if you will be so good,” Laurence said; Maximus took off the burning roof, and laying it on the ground scraped some dirt over it with a clumsy swipe, leaving it half-buried. Laurence looked back at the villagers, who stared up at him pale and sweating. “Which way did the French go?”

“Towards Scarrow Hill,” the older man said after a moment, his voice still trembling. “With all our cattle, every last one—” The faint lowing of a cow from the woods made him a liar on that point, but Laurence did not care. “They left not an hour—”

“Very good; to quarters, gentlemen, and let the riflemen make ready,” Laurence said over his shoulder, to the other captains. “Aloft, Temeraire, along the road.”

They caught the French fifteen minutes later, and heard them first: singing a bawdy snatch of “Auprès de ma blonde, qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon” as they marched through a forested section: then they emerged out onto the road again, cattle in a string bellowing and throwing their heads, uneasy as they scented the dragons aloft. The men pulled irritably on the cows’ heads and tried to drag them along. They did not look up.

Temeraire craned his head back and looked at Laurence. Ten dragons came on behind them. “Mr. Allen,” Laurence said, “signal the attack.”

Chapter 14

I DO NOT SEE what is wrong with it,” Iskierka said, still nibbling upon the charred beef bones of her di

“It is not wrong,” Temeraire said, dissatisfied, “precisely.”

“Not very sporting, though,” Gentius said. “They did not even have a gun.”

“The village did not have a gun, either, or even muskets,” Lily said, “so it was not very sporting of those soldiers, in the first place.”

“Anyway,” Iskierka added, with an air of smug virtue, “we must obey our orders.”

Temeraire did not argue further. It was not that he minded for himself, anyway, very much, although it had not been a very interesting battle: they had dived, the soldiers had fired a few shots, and then they had all run away into the woods, if they were not dead; it had lasted scarcely five minutes, and nothing to show for it. Except of course the cows, but those they mostly had to give back.

He was not going to say so, of course, but he rather felt Iskierka was right. If the soldiers had not wanted to be attacked, they ought not have been going about in other people’s territory, taking their food and much more than they could eat themselves. Only, he was a little worried, because it seemed the sort of thing that Laurence might have minded, and he felt instinctively there was something strange, that Laurence did not seem to care.

The villagers certainly had been very grateful. “Two months to spring. We would have starved, or near enow; thank ye, sir,” the village headman said, the half-burned cottage quite forgiven, as the others came nervously out to look over their cattle and their goods, and make their own anxious courtesies.

A few young men from Maximus’s ground crew had driven back those cows which had not been killed or panicked to death in the fighting; Gladius and Chalcedony had carried back the two large carts of grain, also, and the villagers had sent word back along the road, to those others pillaged, to come and share what there was left to have.

But Laurence did not seem pleased by their many thanks, either; he only nodded, and said, “Send word also that if you should see or hear of any French movements, you are to light a beacon: smoke, or a bonfire at night, and we will come for it if we see.”

Gong Su had taken those cows which had been killed; enough for all the dragons to have a little fresh roast beef, and then a share of soup and bones and meat mixed with vegetables and grain, for all the crew and everyone in the village besides. The atmosphere was celebratory, and all the more when the villagers brought out a concealed store of honey wine. Temeraire had even enjoyed a cupful poured into his mouth, so he might close his jaws on it and keep the crisp fragrant smell on his tongue.