They spent the night at a fortress on the Oder River; the commander and his men had not even heard rumors, and were bitterly shocked by news of the defeat. Laurence suffered through the dinner which the commander felt it necessary to give, a black and silent meal, quenched by the officers’ depression and the natural embarrassment attendant on dining in the presence of royalty. The small walled covert attached to the fortress was barren and dusty and uncomfortable; and Laurence escaped to it and his meager bivouac of straw with great relief.
He woke to a soft rolling patter like fingertips on a drum: a steady grey rain falling against Temeraire’s wings, which he had spread over them protectively; there would be no fire that morning. Laurence had a cup of coffee inside, looking over the maps and working out the compass-directions for the day’s flight; they were trying to find the eastern reserves of the army, under command of General Lestocq, somewhere in the Polish territories which Prussia had lately acquired.
“We will make for Posen,” the King said tiredly; he did not look as though he had slept very well. “There will be at least a detachment in the city, if Lestocq is not there yet himself.”
The rain did not slacken all the day, and sluggish bands of fog drifted through the valleys below them; they flew through a grey formlessness, following the compass and the turns of the hourglass, counting Temeraire’s wingbeats and marking his speed. Darkness was almost welcome; the cross-wind that blew the rain in their faces slackened, and they could huddle a little warmer in their leather coats. Villagers in the fields disappeared as they flew overhead; they saw no other signs of life until, crossing a deep river valley, they flew over five dragons, ferals, sleeping upon a sheltered ledge, who lifted up their heads at Temeraire’s passage.
They leapt off the ledge and came flying towards Temeraire; Laurence grew anxious, lest they either provoke a quarrel or try and follow them, like Arkady and the mountain ferals; but they were small gregarious creatures and only flew alongside Temeraire a while, jeering wordlessly and making demonstrations of their flying abilities, backwing swoops and steep dives. Half-an-hour’s flight brought them to the edge of the valley, and there the ferals with piercing cries broke off and circled back away into their territory. “I could not understand them,” Temeraire said, looking over his shoulder after them. “I wonder what that language is, that they are speaking; it sounds a little bit like Durzagh in places, but it was too different to make out, at least when they spoke so quickly.”
They did not reach the city that night after alclass="underline" some twenty miles short they came upon the small and sodden campfires of the army, settling into miserable wet bivouacs for the night. General Lestocq came to the covert himself to greet the King and Queen, with sedan-chairs drawn up as close as he could persuade the bearers to come; he had evidently been warned to expect them, likely by a courier.
Laurence was naturally not invited to accompany them, but neither was he offered the simple courtesy of a billet, and the staff-officer who stayed to see to their supply was offensively short in his hurry to be gone. “No,” Laurence said with mounting impatience, “no, half a sheep will not do; he has had a ninety-miles’ flight today in bad weather, and he damned well will be fed accordingly. You do not look to me as though this army were on short commons.” The officer was at length compelled to provide a cow, but the rest of them had a wet and hungry night, receiving only some thin oat porridge and biscuit, and no meat ration at all; perhaps a spiteful revenge.
Lestocq had with him only a small corps: two formations of smallish heavy-weights, nowhere near Temeraire’s size, with four middle-weight wing dragons apiece, and a few courier-dragons for leaven. Their comfort had been equally neglected: the men were sleeping mostly distributed upon the backs of their dragons, only a few smallish tents posted for officers.
After they had unloaded him, Temeraire nosed around here and there, trying to find some drier place to rest, without success: the bare ground of the covert was nothing but mud two full inches down.
“You had better just lie down,” Keynes said. “The mud will keep you warm enough, once you are in it properly.”
“Surely it cannot be healthy,” Laurence said dubiously.
“Nonsense,” Keynes said. “What do you think a mustard-plaster is but mud? So long as he does not lie in it for a week, he will do perfectly well.”
“Wait, wait,” Gong Su said, unexpectedly; he had been gradually acquiring English, being isolated otherwise, but he was still shy of speaking out, save where his business of cookery was concerned. He went through his jars and spice-bags hurriedly and brought out a jar of ground red pepper, a few pinches of which Laurence had seen him use to flavor an entire cow. He put on a glove and ran beneath Temeraire’s belly, scattering a double handful of it upon the ground, while Temeraire peered at him curiously from between his legs.
“There, now will be warm,” Gong Su said, stepping out and sealing tight the jar again.
Temeraire gingerly let himself down into the muck, which made rude noises as it squelched up around his sides. “Ugh,” he said. “How I miss the pavilions in China! This is not at all pleasant.” He squirmed a little. “It is warm, but it feels quite odd.”
Laurence could not like having Temeraire thus marinated, but there was little hope of doing better by him tonight at least. Indeed, he recalled that even while with the larger corps, under Hohenlohe’s command, they had received little better accommodations; only the milder weather had rendered their circumstances more comfortable.
Granby and his men did not seem to take it as he did, shrugging. “I suppose it’s what we’re used to,” Granby said. “When I was with Laetificat in India, once they put us on the day’s battlefield, with the wounded moaning away all night and bits of swords and bayonets everywhere, because they didn’t want to be put to the trouble of clearing some brush away for us to sleep elsewhere; Captain Portland had to threaten to desert to get them to move it the next morning.”
Laurence had spent his career as an aviator so far entirely in the highly comfortable training-covert at Loch Laggan and in the long-established one at Dover, which—if nothing like what the Chinese considered adequate—at least offered well-drained clearings, shaded by trees, with barracks for the men and junior officers, and rooms at the headquarters for the captains and senior lieutenants. He supposed perhaps he was unrealistic, to expect good conditions in the field, with an army on the march, but surely something better might have been arranged: there were hills visible not very distant, certainly within an easy quarter-of-an-hour’s flight, where the ground would not have been so thoroughly soaked.
“What can we do for the eggs?” he asked Keynes; at present the two large bundles were standing upon a handful of chests, draped over with an oilskin. “Will they take any harm from the cold?”
“I am trying to think,” Keynes said irritably; he was pacing around Temeraire. “Will you be sure not to roll onto them in the night?” he demanded of the dragon.
“Of course I am not going to roll onto the eggs!” Temeraire said, outraged.
“Then we had better wrap them in oilskins and bury them up against his side in the mud,” Keynes said to Laurence, ignoring Temeraire’s muttered indignations. “There’s no hope of starting a fire that will keep in this rain.”