IT WAS NOT at all pleasant to wait, and wait, and keep waiting: Temeraire paced, and then went aloft to look in case there should be any sign, and then came back down and paced a little more.
"There is no one coming, is there?" Perscitia asked, a little anxiously, worried in another direction entirely. "No French dragons? Perhaps you should stop going up so much: someone might see you, and," she added quickly, "if we had to move, or had some fuss, it would make it hard for Laurence to find us again, on his way back."
Temeraire tried to settle; he could not help but see the sense in this remark, but he shook his head at her offer of a haunch of cow: the smaller dragons had gone out quietly hunting for all of them, but he did not have much appetite.
"It was not very fair of those dragons," Arkady said, "all coming on at us at once like that. If you ask me, they are all cowards. We should go fly in and get Iskierka out ourselves." He had recovered his spirits and was eating a sheep, which Lester had gone and fetched for him, with great cheer.
"We are not going to do any such thing," Temeraire said. "There are four times as many of them as of us, with guns and soldiers, and they will only have us down. Anyway that would not help us get Granby back: they will shoot him," and maybe Laurence, too, he added silently, anxiously. It was all the more unpleasant to have Arkady making such reckless suggestions, when it was all that Temeraire wished to do himself.
"What are we going to do, then," Arkady returned, "if they do not come back?"
"If they do not come back," Temeraire said, and paused, and lamely finished, "then we will think of something," not liking to imagine the prospect. He had thought Laurence was dead, and it had been just as dreadful in every way as if Laurence really had been dead. It made one unsure of the distinction between the event imagined and real, and therefore, Temeraire felt, any sort of unnecessary speculation perhaps a little bit of a risk. Laurence thought such concerns foolishly superstitious, Temeraire knew, but it seemed to him a danger not worth courting.
"What is he saying, the scalawag?" Gentius asked, scowling at Arkady milkily, in great disapproval: he was not very happy with the extra flying, which he had to endure on Armatius's back, or the uncomfortable state of their camp. "I hope he is properly ashamed of himself."
"No," Temeraire said, "he is not, at all, and he is making foolish suggestions, too."
"Well, pay no attention to him," Gentius said. "Now," and he lowered his voice, "I don't like to make you worry, Temeraire, but have you thought about what we will do, if they don't come back right off?"
Temeraire flattened back his ruff and, unable to repress the desire, went aloft to look again. It was beginning to grow dark, out towards the eastern edge of the sky, when he went high: there was a vague watery sort of moon near the west horizon ready to set, and a few plumes of dust here and there, herds of cattle. Not a sign of Laurence though, or of Iskierka; and then he looked back the other way and saw a Winchester in harness flying towards them.
Elsie landed panting. "Oh, we thought we would never find you: what are you doing here? Scotland is not this way; you are going back towards London."
"We are not lost!" Temeraire said, rather coldly: he did not much like Elsie. Hollin had been a very good ground-crew chief. Fellowes did his best, but he was perhaps not quite as attentive to the way the harness lay against one's hide, or as prompt in getting it off, in the evenings - not that Temeraire had much harness anymore at present, but it was the principle of the thing - and Fellowes was a little dull, if one were alone in the evening, and wanted a little conversation; besides, Hollin had been first - in short, Temeraire had not ceased to regret the loss. "We have not gone the wrong way," he repeated. "We are only waiting here for Laurence and Tharkay to rescue Granby: Iskierka has got herself captured."
"Oh, Lord," Hollin said, sliding down from Elsie's back. He had a satchel over his shoulder. "When did they go?"
"Hours ago," Temeraire said, despondently, "though Laurence said, they should likely need most the day to reach the city, on foot, and then if they could find where Granby was, they would not try and get him out, until it was dark, and nearly everyone asleep. So they are not late, at all; they are in good time," and did not mention that he had so lately been aloft looking for them, despite these facts.
Hollin rubbed a hand over his mouth and said, "I have a dispatch - "
"How large is it?" Temeraire inquired, and Hollin took out a folded snippet of paper from his satchel, handsomely sealed with red wax, and not quite so small that Temeraire could not see it; but as for reading, no. "You will have to read it to me out loud," Temeraire said.
"I am not sure I ought to," Hollin said, apologetically. "It says it is for Captain Laurence, you see here."
"I am sure Laurence would want us to know if it is anything important," Temeraire said. "Anyway, if it is orders for us, then I suppose that is just a mistake in addressing it by someone who does not quite understand that I am colonel of the regiment, myself."
Hollin hesitating looked around the clearing at the other men: none of them in rank higher than lieutenant, and that dubious.
"Stop looking at them," Perscitia said irritably. "It stands to reason that it is orders for us, and we cannot carry them out without knowing what they are; so either you had better tell us, or go back and see what this Wellesley fellow wants you to do: but if you ask me, he would only be annoyed you had wasted so much time going back and forth."
Hollin shrugged helplessly, but this argument carried the day: he broke the seal and read aloud, "'You are requested and required, to proceed without the loss of a moment to Coventry, and resume your duties in guarding the withdrawal, instead of - '" He paused in his reading, and then clearing his throat finished, "' - instead of whatever damned fool start you have gotten into your heads now. If you have forgotten the end of our last conversation, I haven't, and if you want pay for your damned beasts, you will keep them at their work.'"
"I do not see why everyone assumes that we are just dashing off madly, without thinking where we are going," Temeraire said, exasperated. "Of course we would be doing that, if Iskierka had not got herself captured, but she has, so Laurence has had to go rescue her; and we cannot go right away, because they are not back yet."
"Some of us might go back and join them?" Perscitia suggested, rather hopefully.
"No, we are staying all together from now on," Temeraire said, "and Arkady and Iskierka and all of the other ferals will fly out in front where all of us can see them, as they cannot be trusted to behave properly," and he translated this for Arkady's benefit.
"Bah," Arkady said, with a dismissive sniff, "you would have done the same, if you were not trying to play at being a human, and flapping along as slow as if we had to creep on the ground like them. They have nothing to complain of, we did not leave them in any danger. We would have seen if this Napoleon's army were chasing them as we came towards London, and there has not been any sign of them."
"I would not have done any such thing," Temeraire returned smartly, "because I would have had better sense than to go wandering off for no good reason and no particular notion of what to do, just to please myself - "
"We had very good reason," Arkady said, "we went to bring food back for everyone, that the French were stealing - "
"You did no such thing!" Temeraire said outraged. "Wringe told us, you went to get prizes for yourselves, and you did not mean to share with anyone at all."
Arkady had just enough grace to look momentarily uncomfortable, but no more than that. "Well, it was Iskierka's idea," he said, with a flip of his tail, and Temeraire snorted in disdain.
"But anyway," Temeraire said, turning back to Hollin, "that much is true: we have not seen Napoleon's army on any of the roads at all to-day, and we would have, flying back this way, if they were in pursuit. So he needn't worry..." He trailed off; Wellesley might not need to worry, but Temeraire realized he himself had every cause: Napoleon's army must be somewhere, and if it were not on the road to London, most likely it was all in London: where Laurence was, and Granby.
Of course he still could do nothing but fret: even if they had set off right away, there was no chance of getting to London before it was quite dark, and he did not need Perscitia's anxious whispered hints to know that it was mad to go trying to fly into a French camp at night when they had Fleur-de-Nuits about. "But in the morning - " he said, and then put down his head without finishing. There would still be guns, and thousands of men, and who knew how many dragons: it would still be quite useless.
"Perhaps he will be back before morning," Perscitia said in a tone so gloomy it left no doubt of her skepticism on that point.
"Well," Temeraire said to Hollin, "you had better go back and tell Wellesley that we will come as soon as I have got Laurence back, and he should not worry about the men, unless of course Napoleon has flown all his soldiers ahead to attack him," he added, hopefully: perhaps that was what had happened.
"We should have seen them going by, if that is what they were doing," Perscitia pointed out depressingly.
After Hollin left, the hours dragged. Temeraire slept fitfully and uneasily, rousing at every rustle or whisper to peer into the darkness, seeing nothing, and before dawn he was awake for good and uncomfortable, an unpleasant sharp ache in the underside of his jaw and all along his neck to his breastbone, where the knotted scar bothered him. He tried to crane his head down to rub his nose against it, but could not quite manage it: his neck felt very strange when he tried, and crackled as he stretched. He could not make his foreleg bend to it either, inward, and at last he sighed and laid himself back down upon the cold ground, thinking wistfully of the warm stone at Loch Laggan, or the pavilions in China.
There was a faint orange glow of coming sunrise in the distance, to the west; and then he raised his head again realizing that was quite impossible. "Oh, oh!" he cried, "wake up, everyone - " and flung himself aloft as Iskierka came blazing towards them, turning now and again to fire flames off into the face of her pursuit: some seven or eight dragons, trying to get near enough to board her again: there were a handful of men on her back struggling already - "Laurence!" Temeraire cried, straining his eyes to make him out among the dim figures.
She shot by overhead and the French pursuit all of them backwinged as Temeraire rose into their path, scrambling to avoid running into him. Temeraire opened wide his jaws and roared furious thunder on them, a P
37
