‘You can come to our camp if you would,’ Temeraire offered. ‘We have been carrying along a lot of them; although,’ he added severely, ‘if you wanted us all to carry, you ought to have spent a little time making carrying-harnesses, which I know Laurence told you of. It would be a good deal more convenient than rope, and we could manage a greater load; but perhaps if they do not mind being bundled up into sacks made out of tents, or belly-netting—’

‘I should damned well say they will mind,’ one general said.

‘Are they soldiers or aren't they?’ Wellesley snapped. ‘Shoot the first insubordinate bastard to refuse and the rest of them will go quietly enough.’

But it was too far; he and Jane were both shouted down. ‘Enough of this craven counsel,’ General Dalrymple said. ‘We stand, and we fight. General Wellesley, you will take the right flank tomorrow and hold the line at the farmhouse. General Burrard, you will take the left, and plan on pinching him just when he has worn himself out trying to fight uphill against the main body of our force.’

Wellesley stiffened at the assignment. It was something of a slap, to be set in the position where less manoeuvring would be required, and less initiative. He made no outward protest, but his fingers on the hilt of his sword drummed.

‘And as for you, Roland,’ Dalrymple added, ‘if the damned beasts will not fight the Fleur-de-Nuits—’

‘I did not say that at all!’ Temeraire said, bristling. ‘We will fight anyone, I only said we cannot stop them if you send us out of camp to do it. The Fleur-de-Nuit can see at night, and we cannot; it stands to reason that they can go right around us, above or below. We cannot stop them just by lining up somewhere in their road and hoping.’

‘You can hear them, can't you?’ Dalrymple demanded, exasperated enough by repeated interruption to address Temeraire directly, for once.

‘A Fleur-de-Nuit sounds just like a Yellow Reaper to us, flying,’ Temeraire said. ‘They beat at the same pace.’

Laurence blinked; he had never noticed such a thing before, nor considered it a difficulty, and by the expressions upon the faces of the other officers, neither had any of them. Even Jane looked surprised by the intelligence, and she was an aviator of thirty years' experience and more.

‘And anyway,’ Temeraire added, ‘one cannot tell where a sound is coming from, not when one is aloft and moving, and there are a great many other dragons about all beating in circles. If the Fleur-de-Nuits should go past us one at a time, we would likely never notice them at all, and then we would come back and you would complain that we had not done anything. If you want us to stop them, you may say so, and then let us work out, how it is to be done.’

Chapter Eight