‘Then you may stay here and have my cave, which is not a quarter as nice as a pavilion,’ Temeraire said coolly, ‘and when we have beaten Napoleon and taken many prizes, you shan't have a share; Moncey will have more gold than you.’

‘Prizes!’ Gentius said, rousing unexpectedly. ‘I helped in taking a prize once. My captain had a fourteenth share. That is how she bought the picture.’

Everyone knew of Gentius's painting, and an impressed murmur went around: this example proved better than hypothetical jewels in a country which none of them had seen.

‘Now, now, settle down,’ Ballista said, thumping her tail, but with a considerably more lenient air. ‘Look here, I suppose no one much wants the French to beat us, we have all had a go with them before, if we were ever in service. But the corps don't want us unless we take harness and captains, and we cannot just wander into battles: we will get circled and shot up. That is no joke, even for us big ones.’

‘If we fight thoughtlessly and singularly, we will,’ Temeraire said, ‘but there is no reason we must do that, and we cannot be boarded if we have no harness, or—or anyone to capture. We will form our own army, and we will work out tactics for ourselves, not stuff men have invented without bothering to ask us even though they cannot fly themselves. It stands to reason that we can do better than them, if we try.’

‘Hm, well,’ Ballista said to his convincing argument, and the general murmur of agreement found it so too.

‘All right, all right,’ Requiescat said. ‘Very nice storytelling, but it is all a hum. Treasure and battles are well and good, but what d'you mean to do for dinner?’

The next morning, they landed together on the grounds at the feeding time. The cows in their pen were bellowing invitingly, and their delicious grassy scent made Temeraire's tongue want to lick the air. But the other dragons all kept the line with him: no one even turned their nose toward the running cattle. The herdsmen prodded the cows forward with no results, and then looked at each other and back at Lloyd, in confusion.

Lloyd began pacing up and down the line of dragons looking up at them all in bafflement, saying entreatingly to one after another in turn, ‘Go on, then, eat something.’ Temeraire waited until Lloyd came up to him, then bent his head down and said, ‘Lloyd, where do the cows come from?’

Lloyd stared at him. ‘Go on, eat something, old boy,’ he repeated feebly, so it came out as a question more than a command.

‘Stop that; my name is Temeraire, or you may call me sir,’ Temeraire said, ‘since that is how to speak to someone politely.’

‘Oh, ah,’ Lloyd said, not very sensibly.

‘You have heard that the French have invaded?’ Temeraire enquired.