‘That is not the same,’ she said. ‘One does not get shot for quarrelling, or have a wing torn up, or a cannonball in the chest—I saw a dragon take a cannonball once, it was dreadful.’

‘Of course,’ Temeraire said, ‘but one must simply be quick enough, and then you can dodge them.’

‘That is nonsense,’ she said. ‘A musket-ball can go much quicker than any dragon, so it is all decided by chance, before you ever think of evasion, or even notice that someone is shooting at you. If you are very quick, of course, then you can very often be gone before they have even fired,’ she added, ‘so your chances are better, but they are best if you do not go anywhere in front of a gun at all—And I am not very quick.’

Temeraire rubbed the side of a talon against his forehead, pondering. ‘In China,’ he said, ‘only some kinds of dragons fight; a great many of them are scholars, and would not know what to do in a battle at all. No-one thinks any less of them, or calls them cowards; I suppose that is what you are.’

She lifted her head, and Temeraire added, ‘Anyway, we are all perfectly happy to fight, so there is no sense in your doing it too, when you dislike it so.’

‘Well, I think just the same,’ she said, brightening, ‘only I do not like anyone to say I did not do my part, and there is no part other than fighting.’

‘We must work out how to use the gun,’ Temeraire said. ‘That would be very useful, and perhaps you can think of something we might do with it, to help us while fighting? That is surely a fair share, as no-one else knows how to do it.’

This solution suited her so well that by the end of the day, Perscitia had a dozen men working busily as a gun-crew. They had come to them, along with another thirty, from the local militia, who had rather nervously come to the battlefield in the morning bearing muskets, to see what had happened during the night. Reassured by the gaily-fluttering flags, they had come near enough to be pressed into service with cheerful ruthlessness by Lloyd and his fellows, tired of being hands for near sixty dragons as well as their herdsmen.

The militiamen were abjured not to be such lumps when they cringed from Perscitia in fear, and were lectured with great pomp by Lloyd on the need to stop Bonaparte, before they surrendered to her tender mercies. They spent the day working through the mechanics of the gun-firing, the swabbing, the wadding—all the steps Perscitia had pieced together by interrogating the men, on how their muskets were fired, and then every dragon who had ever been in service on board a ship or in a fleet action, and might have seen the great guns go.