—

“And still the Austrians are flying back and forth between Vienna and Dresden every day,” Dyhern said, grumbling even as he offered Laurence a cup of remarkably good coffee. “If he gives us one good knock, they will scurry back into his pockets, you may be sure.”

They were encamped outside Leipzig, near the small town of Lützen, waiting for the order to move onwards. The headquarters of the allied forces had been moved forward from the east and established in Dresden: the Tsar himself was there with Field Marshal Kutuzov—whom report had very ill, which was certainly doing nothing to improve the coordination and communications of their army. And then the word had come last night: Napoleon had left Paris. Napoleon was coming to the front. The whisper had traveled around every campfire at a rapid pace, throwing an evil shadow over every man. Laurence had heard the murmurs as he walked through camp that morning, past the stirring fires and the dim wash of dawn, lightening a heavy grey sky.

He was meeting with Dyhern and the Russian Admiral Ilchenko, to review the supply manifests for the week ahead. Laurence had not managed to acquire more than a smattering of Russian in the last campaign, and Ilchenko was entirely innocent of English, while Dyhern’s French left much to be desired; they communicated therefore in a patchwork of languages, often translating the same remark more than once, to be sure they had understood. But this awkwardness was the least of their difficulties.

Further reserves had joined them from the east as the Prussian Army mobilized fully, and more Russian dragons had come from the heartland, now that spring was reducing the need for them to keep the ferals from raiding. In numbers, they now even approached Napoleon’s reported tally of four hundred beasts, although numbers alone were not a sufficient measure.

The Prussians now could field some 130 beasts, many of them having been liberated on the way to Berlin—but half of these were slow-flying heavy-weights. Even their middle-weights stood on the heavier side, and they had very few light-weights at all. Laurence would privately have preferred to keep the large beasts ferrying men and guns—especially guns. He knew it was a general tenet of the Chinese legions that dragons above middle-weight were a waste of muscle, but a middle-weight could not carry a twenty-four-pounder for any distance, and a heavy-weight could. Napoleon had previously made just such a use of his own heavy-weight dragons to bring a far greater weight of metal to bear upon the battlefield than horses over bad roads could arrange. But Laurence could not direct Dyhern, who with his comrades not unnaturally hungered for more avenging victories in the field. And in any case, the Prussian artillery-men were in no hurry to mount dragons.

On the Russian side, they claimed eighty beasts, but in practice only the thirty heavy-weights were under military discipline, and these could be used for nothing but battle. They cared too little for men—indeed barely acknowledged their existence save as the occasional providers of food and treasure, or the brutality of bit and hobble. A week gone, Vosyem had sent three hundred soldiers plummeting to a grisly death, because a knot of the carrying-harness had irritated her under the wing. She had not complained to her officers; she had simply turned her head round mid-air and torn away the silk with a few quick slashes of her serrated teeth, ignoring the cries and pleas of her passengers and the frantic spurring of her officers. The infantry had since refused to go aboard any of the Russian beasts, and Laurence could scarcely blame them.

As for cargo, one could give a Russian dragon almost anything to carry, but one could not rely on getting it back again. Only the day before, Admiral Ilchenko had very grudgingly come to Laurence to ask for Temeraire’s assistance: Jevionty, one of his newly arrived dragons, would not surrender a cannon he had been ordered to carry from Vilna to the waiting artillery company whose charge it was, and he had begun to snarl and hiss at any officer who even attempted to approach him.

“Do not hiss at me,” Temeraire said with great dignity, when he had descended into the clearing. “If I wanted a gun of my own, I should buy one, with my money,” and Jevionty a little abashed had muttered apology: the reputation of Temeraire’s treasure had spread widely among the Russian dragons. “And I cannot see what you want with this cannon. They are not pretty to look at, and they are no use unless you have men to fire them for you.”

“It is mine,” Jevionty said obstinately, “and it is valuable, or else why do they want to steal it from me?” He had lost his own hoard in the devastation of Moscow, and was keen to rebuild it in any manner possible: the Russian beasts counted standing among themselves almost entirely based on their possessions.

“Well, they are an artillery company and they can fire it, so it is worth a great deal to them,” Temeraire said. He scratched a claw thoughtfully along his eye ridge. “It is true that the value of things may depend upon how much someone else wants them. But I cannot call it anything but mean to keep it for yourself when you can get no good from it, and anyway, where are you going to keep it? You had much better let the men fight it for you. Have them paint your name upon the top of the barrel, so you can always see which gun is yours while you are flying above it, and then let them manage it for you.”

After a little more nudging, and the promise of gold paint, Jevionty was persuaded to accept this solution, but the episode did not inspire any confidence in the Russian dragons as porters.

Meanwhile, the large body of Russian light-weights, who would have been by far the more valuable as part of their unified force, were nearly impossible to make use of or even to count: their numbers in camp varied widely from day to day. Barring a handful of beasts like Grig, who had established a stronger relationship with one or another of the officers, they would only perform errands given to them in the moment and with the promise of an immediate reward of food.

“The heavy-weights must eat first,” Ilchenko answered flatly, when Laurence suggested he might establish a regularity of feeding time, to create the beginnings of discipline among the light-weight greys. But the ferocious heavy-weights were the pride of the Russian forces, and Ilchenko refused to care that they often left their feeding pits scraped clean, or spoiled what they did not eat with hot squabbles. So the greys were left to scrounge for scraps, and likely to go stealing from the local farmers. At least the irregular Cossack troops fed themselves: their fly-weight beasts were well practiced in living off the land without excessively offending their neighbors, and ate a cheerfully indiscriminate variety. But they were no use in a pitched battle, or against the French dragons, unless they came across one of them alone and unwary.