‘Now,’ said Wellesley, ‘if you have finished with this back-talking: since you have spent half the day flying hither and yon, I mean to at least profit by it. Where is Davout bivouacked, and how many soldiers does he have on the road in reach of us?’

‘But I told Hollin to tell you,’ Temeraire said. ‘They have all gone back to London.’

‘There were thirty thousand men behind us yesterday morning,’ Wellesley said. ‘I don't care if Bonaparte is chasing them with whips from morning to night and using dragons for supply, they cannot have reached the city in a day. You must have seen some sign, pickets or fires—’

‘Sir,’ Laurence said, ‘there was no sign. No sign reported by the beasts which flew off earlier, or from when we pursued them. We saw Davout's regiments making camp around London, and Murat was in the city also.’

‘And I have already told you all,’ Temeraire said, ‘they can go fifty miles in a day, we have seen them do it, so—’

‘It is one thing to move a brigade or two by dragonback,’ Wellesley said impatiently, ‘and quite another to move an army. You cannot put more than two hundred men even on the largest beasts.’

‘That is not how they do it,’ Perscitia put in, unexpectedly. The other dragons had been listening in on the interview with interest. ‘They do not just take a hundred men and fly with them straight, all day. They take a hundred men and carry them as far as they can in an hour, and put them down, and those men start marching from there. And then the dragons go back and get the next hundred men, who you see have been marching all this time, so they are not as far off, and the dragons take them forward for—’

‘Wait, they fly back?’ Requiescat asked, and with much irritation Perscitia had to interrupt her explanation to claw a picture into the soil, to illustrate how the companies would each in turn leapfrog over those in front of them, each receiving two hours of the dragons' time.

‘And so on, until they have carried everyone a little way, and given them all a rest.’ Perscitia said, ‘So the men can walk thirty miles instead of twenty, and the dragons fly everyone twenty miles on top of that, so the whole company can move fifty miles, together.’

She finished triumphantly, and Requiescat said, ‘Well, it seems like a lot of bother to me, just for an extra twenty miles. Even I can make that in an hour or two,’ and Perscitia huffed in indignation.

Wellesley had a better appreciation of her explanation, however, and studied the diagram with fierce intent. ‘So this is what Roland has been going on about, then?’ He looked at Laurence and said sharply, ‘And can your beasts manage the same?’

‘If the men would go aboard,’ Laurence answered him.