The first few days were confusion. It was difficult to match the supply to the men at the end of each day, and more than one set of rations went astray. At first they did not manage to go more than ten miles beyond their usual distance, and the brigades on the road became a wretched muddle, with some regiments on each other's heels, and others separated by miles. The dragons were also not very pleased, either. ‘One of them poked at me with a bayonet,’ Chalcedony complained, indignantly, ‘and when I turned around and told him to stop, he shrieked at me. He is lucky I did not toss him off.’

But a semblance of order was gradually imposed on proceedings, and in the end, the march, which ought to have taken a long slow month, was completed in two weeks. The advantage of air transport was proved all the more as they came through the mountains. The dragons carried the men over the worst stretches, where snow and ice had made the road impassable. Winter was now upon them in earnest, and they flew deeper into it as they went north, until the Cairngorm range became visible one clear morning, and with them Loch Laggan, and its citadel, which looked down upon the frozen black waters.

‘Oh, at last,’ Temeraire said, with relief, peering down at the courtyard with its heated stones dark and bare of snow.

But Laurence was looking at something else. There was a dragon already in the courtyard. A Papillon Noir gorgeously ornamented with iridescent stripes of blue and green, curled comfortably upon the stones with a flag of parley and a tricolour upon its shoulders.

Chapter Twelve

It was a great relief to at last off load his last shipment of men and supply. Temeraire understood the necessity of moving as quickly as Napoleon, and if he had been disposed to doubt it at first, Perscitia's calculations had showed plainly how quickly the difference of thirty miles a day, added up to make significant difference. But it was so very tedious going back and forth on these short hopping flights. An hour in the air, then letting men off, and then flying directly back to have another load put on. It was impossible to fly quickly or freely with men clinging to the makeshift rigging, and then there was all the unpleasantness of their dirt. His own crew were well able to handle such matters without spattering him, even little Roland, and since the passengers were only an hour or two aboard at most, Temeraire felt it was not too much to ask that they show some restraint. But some of them simply could not manage it, and if he dived a little to catch a better air-current, or twisted to keep on an updraft, he was sure to be soiled. It would take a week of bathing before he felt at all clean again.