The ferals were not shy by any means, and gifted skirmishers, from all their play; Laurence thought it safe to leave the smaller dragons entirely to them. ‘Pray make no sustained attack,’ he called, through the speaking-trumpet. ‘Only roust them from the shore, as quickly as you may—’ as the hollow thump-thump of bombs, exploding below, interrupted.
Their own battle was not a long one; without the hope of surprise, the Pêcheur knew himself thoroughly overmatched, Temeraire a more agile flyer and in a wholly different class so far as weight. Having risked and lost a throw of the dice, he and his captain were evidently not inclined to try their luck again; Temeraire had scarcely stooped before the Pêcheur dropped low to the water and beat away quickly over the waves, his riflemen keeping up a steady fusillade to clear his retreat.
Laurence turned his attention above, to the furious howling of the ferals’ voices: they could scarcely be seen, having lured the French high aloft, where their greater ease with the thin air could tell to their advantage. ‘Where the devil is my glass?’ he said, and took it from Allen. The ferals were making a sort of taunting game of the business, darting in at the French dragons and away, setting up a raucous caterwauling as they went, without very much actual fighting to be seen. It would have done nicely to frighten away a rival gang in the wild, Laurence supposed, particularly one so outnumbered, but he did not think the French were to be so easily diverted; indeed as he watched, the five enemy dragons, all of them little Poux-de-Ciels, drew into close formation and promptly bowled through the cloud of ferals.
The ferals, still focused on their show of bravado, scattered too late to evade the rifle-fire, and now some of their shrill cries expressed real pain. Temeraire was beating furiously, his sides belling out like sails as he heaved for the breath to get himself as high, but he could not easily gain such altitude, and would be at a disadvantage to the smaller French beasts when he did. ‘Give them a gun, quickly, and show the signal for descent,’ Laurence shouted to Turner, without much hope; but the ferals came plummeting down in a rush when Turner put out the flags, none too reluctant to position themselves around Temeraire.
Arkady was keeping up a low, indignant clamouring under his breath, nudging anxiously at his second Wringe, the worst-hit, her dark grey hide marred with streaks of darker blood. She had taken several balls to the flesh and one unlucky hit to the right wing, which had struck her on the bias and scraped a long, ugly furrow across the tender webbing and two spines; she was listing in mid-air awkwardly as she tried to favour it.
‘Send her below to shore,’ Laurence said, scarcely needing the speaking-trumpet with the dragons crowded so close that they might have been talking in a clearing and not the open sky. ‘And pray tell them again, they must keep well-clear of the guns; I am sorry they have had so hot a lesson. Let us keep together and—’ but this came too late, as the French were advancing down in arrow-head formation, and the ferals followed his first instruction too closely on and had spread themselves out across the sky.
The French also at once separated; even together they were not a match for Temeraire, who they had surely recognized, and by way of protection engaged themselves closely with the ferals. It must have been an odd experience for them; Poux-de-Ciel were generally the lightest of the French combat breeds, and now they were finding themselves the relative heavy-weights in battle against the ferals, who even where their wingspan and length matched were all of them lean and concave-bellied creatures, a sharp contrast against the deep-chested muscle of their opponents.
The ferals were now more wary, but also more savage, hot with anger at the injury to their fellow and their own smaller stinging wounds. They used their darting lunges to better effect, learning quickly how to feint in and provoke the rifle volleys, then come in again for a real attack. The smallest of them, Gherni and little motley-coloured Lester, were attacking one Pou-de-Ciel together, with the more wily Hertaz pouncing in every now and again, claws blackened with blood; the others were engaged singly, and more than holding their own, but Laurence quickly perceived the danger, even as Temeraire called, ‘Arkady! Bnezh s’li taqom—’ and broke off to say, ‘Laurence, they are not listening to me.’
‘Yes, they will be in the soup in a moment,’ Laurence agreed; the French dragons, though they seemed on the face of it to be fighting as independently as the ferals, were all manoeuvring skilfully, their backs to one another; indeed they were only allowing the ferals to herd them into formation, which should allow them to make another devastating pass. ‘Can you break them apart, when they have come together?’
‘I do not see how I will be able to do it, without hurting our friends; they are so close to one another, and some of them are so little,’ Temeraire said anxiously, tail lashing as he hovered.
‘Sir,’ Ferris said, and Laurence looked at him. ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but we are always told, as a rule, to take a bruising before a ball; it don’t hurt them long, even if they are knocked properly silly, and we are close enough to give any of them a lift to land, if it should go so badly.’
‘Very good; thank you, Mr. Ferris,’ Laurence said, putting strong approval in it; he was still very glad to see Granby matched off with Iskierka, even more so when dragons would now be in such short supply, but he felt the loss keenly, as exposing the weaknesses in his own abbreviated training as an aviator. Ferris had risen to his occasions with near-heroism, but he had been but a third lieutenant on their departure from England, scarcely a year ago, and at nineteen years of age could not be expected to put himself forward to his captain with the assurance of an experienced officer.
Temeraire put his head down and puffed up his chest with a deep breath, then flung himself down among the shrinking knot of dragons, and barrelled through with much the effect of a cat descending upon an unsuspecting flock of pigeons. Friend and foe alike went tumbling wildly; and thankfully, the ferals, used to rough play, were none of them much the worse for wear, except for being flung into higher excitement. They flew around with much disorderly shrilling for a few moments, and as they did, the French righted themselves: the formation leader waved a signal-flag, and the Poux-de-Ciel wheeled together and away, escaping.
Arkady and the ferals did not pursue, but came gleefully romping back over to Temeraire, alternating complaints at his having knocked them about, with boastful prancing over their victory and the rout of the enemy, which Arkady implied was in spite of Temeraire’s jealous interference. ‘That is not true, at all,’ Temeraire said, outraged, ‘you would have been perfectly dished without me,’ and turned his back upon them and flew towards land, his ruff stiffened up with indignation.
Wringe was sitting and licking at her scarred wing in the middle of a field. A few clumps of bloodstained white wool upon the grass, and a certain atmosphere of carnage in the air, suggested she had quietly found herself some consolation; but Laurence chose to be blind. Arkady immediately set up as a hero for her benefit, and paraded back and forth to re-enact the encounter. So far as Laurence could follow, the battle might have raged a fortnight, and engaged some hundreds of enemy beasts, all of them vanquished by Arkady’s solitary efforts. Temeraire snorted and flicked his tail in disdain, but the other ferals proved perfectly happy to applaud the revised account, though they occasionally jumped up to interject stories of their own noble exploits.
Laurence meanwhile had dismounted; his new surgeon Dorset, a rather thin and nervous young man, bespectacled and given to stammering, was going over Wringe’s injuries. ‘Will she be well enough to make the flight back to Dover?’ Laurence inquired; the scraped wing looked nasty, what he could see of it; she uneasily kept trying to fold it close and away from the inspection, though fortunately Arkady’s theatrics were keeping her distracted enough that Dorset could make some attempt at handling it.
‘No,’ Dorset said absently, with not the shade of a stammer and a quite casual authority. ‘She needs to lie quiet a day or so under a poultice; and those balls must come out of her shoulder presently, although not now. There’s a courier-ground outside Weymouth, which has been taken off the routes and will be free from infection. We must find a way to get her there.’ He let go of her wing and turned back to Laurence blinking watery eyes.
‘Very