One farmer thirty miles on, belligerent enough to be brave, had not hidden in his cellar during the visitation, and swore that a giant dragon had eaten four of his cows, informing him they were being confiscated for the war effort and he should be repaid by the Government. He even showed them where the dragon had scratched a mark in an old oak-tree for his reimbursement, and for a moment Laurence entertained hopes. But it was not a Chinese mark, only an X clumsily carved through the bark, with four scratches below. “Red and yellow, like fire,” the oldest boy said, peering at them from over the window-sill of the house, despite his mother’s restraining hand, and sank them completely.
Ten dragons had stopped to drink at the lake on the grounds of a stately house in Monmouthshire, the housekeeper told them, anxiously, and eaten some of the deer: ten neat X’s were marked in the dirt by the lakeshore. “I am sure I could not tell you if they were black or red or spotted green and yellow, it was all I had to do to keep breathing, with half my maids fainted dead away,” she said. “And then one of the creatures came to the door, and asked us through it if we had any curtains. Red ones,” she added. “We threw outside all the ones from the ballroom, and then they took them and went away.”
Laurence was baffled: curtains? He would have understood better if they had demanded the silver plate. But at least they were moving in a group, and in the earnest excuses for the pillaging, he thought he saw Temeraire’s influence, if not his presence: it was so near a mimic to the Chinese mode, which they had witnessed, where dragons purchased goods by making their mark for the supplier.
The following day, they discovered another farmer with a collection of marks, who rather astonishingly was not unhappy: the dragons had eaten four of his cows yesterday, he agreed, but that very morning some men had come through with a string of cattle, and given him replacements, which he pointed out in their field: four handsome beef cattle, better in all honesty than the scrawnier animals in the farmer’s own herd.
Seven dragons had been seen in Pen-y-Clawdd, four had landed by the river in Llandogo, and perhaps one of them had been black—yes, certainly one had been black. Then a dozen had been seen—no, two dozen—no, a hundred—numbers shouted by the crowd in the common room of an inn, growing steadily more implausible. Laurence gave it no credit at all, but a few miles farther along, Elsie landed them in a torn-up meadow, with a neatly dug necessary-pit on the low side away from the water, filled in but still fragrant, with signs of occupation by at least some number of dragons. “We must be getting right close, then,” Hollin said, encouragingly, but the next day, no one had so much as seen a wing-tip, though Elsie went miles around in widening rings to make inquiries, for hours and hours together. They had one and all vanished into the air.
“WE WILL BE GETTING CLOSE to the French tomorrow, so beginning today we will fly when it is dark,” Temeraire said, “and try and be as quiet as we can; so pass the word to everyone, not to fly somewhere if you see lights; or if you smell cows, because they will bellow and run and make a fuss.”
The others nodded, and Temeraire rose up on his haunches to inspect their own pen of cattle. He missed Gong Su very much. It was not that cooked food was so much pleasanter, he did not care about the taste at all at present. But Gong Su could stretch a single cow amongst five hungry dragons, if only there were rice, or something else like to cook it with.
The farther they got from Wales, the more complicated everything became. Lloyd said that it was expensive to bring the cows so far, because they must be fed along the road, and they could not be brought very quickly, because they would sicken and stop being fat and good to eat. It helped a great deal that Majestatis had suggested the notion of borrowing cows, in advance, and using the later ones to repay; but if they were always flying about snatching cows from the nearby farms, the French were sure to hear about it: Marshal Lefèbvre’s forces were busy snatching cows themselves.
“Maybe we oughtn’t be having the cows driven to us,” Moncey said. “We could always go fetch them for ourselves, and come back.”
“That is no good at all,” Perscitia said severely. “The longer we must fly to get to the supply, the more food we must eat only to reach there and come back, which is a waste, and also it means more time flying back and forth, instead of fighting.”
“Supply-lines,” Gentius said, dolefully, shaking his head. “War is all about supply-lines; my third captain told me.”
He had insisted on coming along, although he could not really see very well to fly anymore, and tired easily; but he was grown light enough that he could be carried along by any of the heavy-weights, and it was very satisfying to everyone to think they had a Longwing with them.
Aside from the difficulty about the food, Temeraire was pleased with their progress; he and Perscitia had devised several maneuvers, which even Ballista had allowed to be clever; and Moncey and the others had brought them a good deal of news about the French, although they could only sneak so close before it became too likely they should be caught; Temeraire was trying to think how they might better find a way to spy. They had worked out how to organize their camp so it did not take a great deal of room, by letting the smaller dragons sleep atop the big, which was warmer anyway, and after the first awkward day had learned to dig their necessary-pit far away from their water.
That had been very unpleasant, and five of the dragons had got quite sick, from being so thirsty they had drunk anyway, despite the smell. A few others had grown bored and gone off on their own, all of them ferals who had never served, but some of those had come back when they had not been able to find easy food on their own, which brought them straight back to the question of supply.
“We can go and fetch a great many cattle here, if they are drugged with laudanum,” Temeraire said, “but it seems to me, if the French are going about taking cows, we would do better to eat their food first, instead of our own, and let them have the bother of gathering it; and that way we may fight and eat together.”
It made a sensible strategy, they all agreed, and for Temeraire it was nearly more justification than cause: he wanted badly to fight. The urge to violence, not particular but general, hunger for some explosive action, was always stirring in him now, craving release, and Perscitia and Moncey often eyed him anxiously. Sometimes Temeraire would even rouse up, not from sleep but from some halfway condition, and find himself deserted: the others all flown away some distance, crouched down low and watching him.
“It isn’t healthy, how he pens it up,” Gentius said loudly after their meeting, not seeing Temeraire close enough to overhear. “You fellows don’t know what it is like, having a really fine captain and losing her: it is worse than having all your treasure stolen. That is why he goes so queer, now and again. A proper battle, that is what he needs, a bit of blood,” and Temeraire wanted it very much. He did not like the sensation of being a passenger, it seemed to him, in his own life, unable not to feel as he chose, and if a battle would repair it, he was almost tempted to go seek one out at once.
But he had brought everyone else along; he could not abandon them to their own devices now or drag them into a mindless squabble, even if he would have liked one. Instead he brooded on strategy, and when the urge grew more difficult to bear, he went away and curled himself tightly with his head against his flank, beneath the dark huddle of his wing, and murmured to himself from the Principia Mathematica, which Laurence had read to him so often he had it all by heart, and if he spoke low, and flattened his voice, he might almost imagine he heard Laurence instead, reading to him in the rain, safe and sheltered beside him.