When everyone had gone, Laurence sat heavily down in a camp chair with rather an explosive sigh and said to one of the new runners, “Brandy-and-water, if you please, Winters.” He drank this off without a pause and said aloud, “Like a very damned merchant,” incomprehensibly, “but we will see if it answers; I think it may.”

—

Laurence was half sorry to find the extent to which his and Temeraire’s stratagem, which he could not help but find a little contemptible, did answer. He was surprised to discover in the circuit he made through their encampment the next day that the dragons had set their signal-ensigns to drilling them in the flags—this, even though older dragons by and large had a great deal of difficulty in learning anything resembling a new language. Laurence could not understand it immediately, until he reviewed the list of awards and discovered that he had mentioned close attention to signals seven times. And when Laurence visited the Scottish ferals’ clearing, he found them all present and accounted for: the first time since their departure from Dover that such a remarkable event had occurred. Not a one had stolen out of camp overnight to try for private pillaging. The handful of Ricarlee’s beasts who had stayed aloft and fought with Requiescat—and who had been rewarded with an extra share apiece—were cock-of-the-walk, and the subject of envious sighs.

He grimly accepted his own victory, and having finished his rounds asked Minnow to take him into the city, where the new headquarters had been established: Major-General von Wittgenstein beaming and delighted with everybody, and despite the surfeit of hangers-on surrounding him and the general chaos produced by too many men without any real work to do, a spirit of energy and confidence suffused the entire establishment, which Laurence could not but witness with a pang of envy.

“Admiral Laurence!” Wittgenstein cried, on seeing him, and came around to shake his hand again. During the terrible struggle of the previous year, he had been forced to abandon St. Petersburg to Oudinot and Saint-Cyr, and his satisfaction at liberating Berlin had been doubled into joy by having now avenged that painful loss. “The Cossacks tell me they have all certainly crossed the river: there is not a French soldier east of the Elbe, God be thanked! They have fallen back on the Saale. I have just sent couriers to the Tsar and to His Majesty King Frederick with a full accounting of the battle, and you may be sure they have both been acquainted with the noble performance of your beasts.”

Laurence could not be encouraged by this generous remark, to him a painful reminder that their commanders had very little expectation of the discipline of dragons; he could only be glad in a sour way, that the report would go far to strengthen his own position. “Is there any word about Napoleon himself?” he asked.

Wittgenstein waved a hand. “Still in Paris, they say!” but added, “Come, step inside,” and took him to a smaller back chamber; here were only a couple of staff-officers, laboring intently over a sheaf of intelligence-reports. “The latest word is he has raised an army of nearly two hundred thousand men and four hundred dragons, at Mainz,” Wittgenstein said quietly, when the door was closed; a piece of intelligence that could not be called heartening, and it was no wonder he preferred to share it in private. “Blücher will cross into Saxony next week, to liberate Dresden and Leipzig, and we hope persuade the King of Saxony to join the alliance. I do not need to tell you, Admiral, how necessary to that end it will be to avoid pillage in his countryside. I understand from Admiral Dyhern that you are supplying your entire force on twenty kine, daily?”

“And twenty tons of wheat, sir,” Laurence said slowly, already anticipating the coming question.

“Admiral Dyhern has been ordered by His Majesty to join General Blücher,” Wittgenstein said—Dyhern having himself also been promoted; most of the senior Prussian officers had been quietly retired in the years since Jena, and every chance taken of pushing forward younger and more competent men. “In my judgment, and that of Field Marshal Kutuzov, you and your dragons are urgently wanted there, and our victory here to-day only makes that more desirable. But we do not demand it, Admiral, if you do not think it possible to supply your force there.”

The question was a difficult one indeed. Laurence could manage it, he thought, but not without putting all the dragons on porridge, even the ones whose captains demanded the official ration of meat, and not without the risk of going hungry for a day now and again. Ordinarily he would have scorned such small concerns under these circumstances: if Napoleon truly had raised four hundred dragons already at Mainz, he could not be held unless the British dragons came. But Laurence could not rely on his captains to reconcile their beasts to short commons, and dragons themselves had little tolerance for going hungry when there was a handsome sheepfold to be seen over the next hill, whether or not the sheep were theirs for the taking.

This last concern at least, Laurence could air to Wittgenstein without feeling that he exposed the Corps to any particular shame; then he had only to swallow his personal pride, at asking for what seemed to him almost the power to bribe his own beasts. “If you will pardon me, sir,” he said unhappily, “I will say what I know must have an unfortunate appearance of self-interest: it would be of inexpressible value to me to have further captures of supply, of the sort you made over to us yesterday, which I might award as prizes among the beasts to encourage them to maintain discipline.”

“Among the beasts?” Wittgenstein said, frowning. “I do not understand. You mean your officers—you think they will keep them in line, if—”

“Sir,” Laurence broke in, preferring to be rude than hear so mortifying a character given to his officers. “Sir, I beg your pardon; no, I mean among the beasts themselves.”

Wittgenstein stared, then gave a small explosive snort of laughter. “What do dragons care for prize-money? We do not have heaps of gold to give them.” But when Laurence assured him that the beasts did indeed care, passionately, he was ready to believe. “But money is in short supply everywhere, Admiral,” he said.

“I am aware of it, sir,” Laurence said. “I do not require funds: if you can only grant us further quantities of charqui, or cattle, or grain, acquired from the enemy, that will do.”

He did not describe how he intended to convert these supplies into funds. Wittgenstein surely knew enough of the wretched graft of commissaries to suspect something of the method. Laurence had indeed made an evil use of Jane’s intelligence about corruption in the Supply-Office: before leaving England, he had called upon those men she labeled as the most rapacious, and had quietly discussed with them the high price of meat on the Continent, and the difficulty in transporting even salt pork, much less cattle, to a force which traveled as the dragon flew.