“Pray God some will come in overnight,” Hohenlohe said. “We will have to reorganize the entire command.”
He paused heavily and looked at Laurence, both of them silenced by the awareness that Temeraire was the only heavy-weight left at hand; at one stroke thus become critical to their defenses, and impossible to restrain: Hohenlohe could not force them to stay. Laurence could not help being torn; in some wise his first duty was to protect the eggs, and given the disaster, that surely meant to see them straightaway to England; yet to desert the Prussians now would be as good as giving the war up for lost, and pretending they could do no more to help.
“Your instructions, then, sir?” he said abruptly; he could not bring himself to do it.
Hohenlohe did not make any expressions of gratitude, but his face relaxed a little, a few of the lines easing out. “Tomorrow morning I will ask you to go to Halle. All our reserves are there: tell them to fall back, and if you can carry some guns for them, so much the better. We will find some work for you then; God knows there will be no shortage.”
“Ow!” Temeraire said, loudly. Laurence opened his eyes already sitting up, his back- and leg-muscles protesting loudly, and his head thick and clouded besides from so little sleep: there was only a little dim light filtering in. He crawled out of his tent and discovered that this was rather the fault of the fog than the hour: the covert was already alive, and even as he stood up he saw Roland coming to wake him as she had been told to do.
Keynes was scrambling over Temeraire, digging out the bullets; their precipitous departure from the battlefield after the fighting had kept him from attending to the wounds then. Though Temeraire had borne them up to now without even noticing, and far worse wounds without complaint, he flinched from their extraction, stifling small cries as Keynes drew each one out; though not very thoroughly.
“It is always the same,” Keynes said sourly; “you will get yourselves hacked to pieces and call it entertainment, but only try and stitch you back together and you will moan without end.”
“Well, it hurts a great deal more,” Temeraire said. “I do not see why you must take them out; they do not bother me as they are.”
“They would damned well bother you when you got blood-poisoning from them. Hold still, and stop whimpering.”
“I am not whimpering, at all,” Temeraire muttered, and added, “ow!”
There was a rich, pleasant smell in the air. Three meager horse-carcasses were all that had been delivered to the covert that morning to feed more than ten hungry dragons; before the inevitable jostling could begin, Gong Su had appropriated the lot. The bones he roasted in a fire-pit and then stewed with the flesh in some makeshift cauldrons, the dragons’ breastplates temporarily put to this new use and all the youngest crewmen set to stirring. The ground crews he peremptorily sent out to scavenge by means best not closely examined whatever else they could find, which varied ingredients he picked over for inclusion.
The Prussian officers looked on anxiously as their dragons’ provisions all went into the vats, but the dragons caught a sort of excitement at the process of choosing which items would go in, and offered their own opinions by here nudging forward a heap of knotted yellow onions, there surreptitiously pushing away some undesirable sacks of rice. These last, Gong Su did not let go to waste; he reserved some quantity of the liquid when the dragons had been served their portions, and cooked the rice separately in the rich broth swimming with scraps, so the aviators breakfasted rather better than much of the camp; a circumstance which went far to reconciling them to the strange practice.
The harnesses of the dragons were all in sorry shape, clawed and frayed, some down to the wires threaded through the leather for strength, some straps entirely severed; and Temeraire’s was in particularly wretched case. They had neither the time nor the supplies to make proper repairs, but some patchwork at least had to be done before their departure for Halle.
“I’m sorry sir, with all we can do it’ll be rising noon before we can get him under leather again,” Fellowes came to say apologetically, having made a first survey of the damage and set the harness-men to work. “It’s the way he twists about, I expect: widens the tears.”
“Do what you can,” Laurence said briefly; no need to press them: every man was working to his limits, and there were as many as could be asked for, volunteers from the ground crews they had rescued. In the meantime, he coaxed Temeraire to sleep and conserve his energy.
Temeraire was not unwilling, and laid himself out around the still-warm ashes of the cooking fires. “Laurence,” he said after a moment, softly, “Laurence, have we lost?”
“Only a battle, my dear; not the war,” Laurence said, though honesty compelled him to add, “but a damnably important battle, yes; I suppose he has taken half the army prisoner, and scattered the rest.” He leaned against Temeraire’s foreleg, feeling very low; he had so far staved off with activity any serious contemplation of their circumstances.
“We must not yield to despair,” he said, as much for himself as for Temeraire. “There is yet hope, and if there were none at all, still sitting on our hands bewailing our fate would do no good.”
Temeraire sighed deeply. “What will happen to Eroica? They will not hurt him?”
“No, never,” Laurence answered. “He will be sent along to some breeding-grounds, I am sure; he may even be released, if they settle upon terms. Until then they will only keep Dyhern under lock and key; what the poor devil must feel.” He could well imagine all the horrors of the Prussian captain’s situation; to be not only himself prevented from doing any good for his country, but the instrument of his inexpressibly valuable dragon’s imprisonment. Temeraire evidently shared some very similar train of thought, with respect to Eroica; he curled his foreleg in to draw Laurence nearer, and nudged him a little anxiously for petting; this reassurance only let him drop off at last.
The harness-men managed the repairs quicker than promised, and before eleven o’clock were beginning the laborious process of getting aboard all the enormous weight of straps and buckles and rings, with much assistance from Temeraire himself: he was the only one who could possibly have raised up the massive shoulder-strap, some three feet wide and full of chain-mesh within, which anchored the whole.
They were in the midst of their labors when several of the dragons looked up together, at some sound which only they could hear; in another minute they could all see a little courier coming in towards them, his flight oddly unsteady. He dropped into the center of the field and sank down off his legs at once, deep bloody gashes along his sides, crying urgently and twisting his head around to see his captain: a boy some fifteen years of age if so many, drooping in his straps, whose legs had been slashed badly by the same strokes which marked his dragon.
They cut off the bloody harness and got the boy down; Keynes had put an iron bar in the hot ashes the moment both came down, and now clapped the searing surface to the open and oozing wounds, producing a terrible roasting smell. “No arteries or veins cut; he’ll do,” was his brusque remark after he had inspected his handiwork, and he set to giving the same treatment to the dragon.