“LAURENCE,” TEMERAIRE SAID, A little nervously, “I think we have done it, although perhaps I ought not say so; but surely we have won a battle at last? Really won it, I mean, not only in the dispatches.” He did not quite dare to believe it: after so much tiresome running away, to see the French retreating for once was very unusual, and he worried perhaps it might be a trick of some sort. “Perhaps we ought to send some scouts to our rear,” he added, “to be sure there is no-one coming up behind us. Where is that Davout fellow? I still remember how very unpleasant it was when he nearly surprised us, at the battle of London.”

“Davout is in Hamburg,” Laurence said, which was very comforting, as that city was several hundreds of miles distant, “and we are quite certain that Napoleon has no troops anywhere in our rear; no, I think we have carried the day.”

The poor little village of Reichenbach had not survived its encounter with two quarrelsome armies: there was scarcely a building left standing, and the sad wreck of a big French Papillon Noir lay sprawled in the smashed heap of a barn, fragments of stone and shingles and the corpses of soldiers scattered all around his body. The legions were methodically pressing the French corps back all along the leading edge of battle, exposing ever more of their artillery and infantry, and now at last Temeraire could really see some use in the Russian heavy-weights: it was not that they had begun to listen better, or follow sensible tactics at all, for they had not; but it did not seem necessary. Laurence had set a sizable bounty upon each gun captured, and in their eagerness the Russian beasts flung themselves ferociously and heedless down into the French ranks and began laying about with teeth and claws, and the poor artillery-men were fleeing wildly in every direction at once.

“I think we must add a bonus, the next battle, for guns taken unspiked,” Laurence said: he was observing the same, through his glass. “We will take at least a hundred to-day, I think. Temeraire, pray will you pass the word to the legions to concentrate their attentions upon the French right flank? If we can break that group of middle-weights there, we will open them nicely to the Austrian advance.”

“Certainly,” Temeraire said, and roared a low sequence of three notes, which brought one of the Jade Dragons to his side immediately to relay orders, but before he could issue his commands, Yu Shen backwinged a little distance away in a respectful attitude, and Ning suddenly came up on his right and hovered beside him. Now she appeared, when all the hard work had been done, Temeraire thought resentfully; he had barely landed all day, and had scarcely had time for more than a few gulps of porridge, and that cold.

“Well, what do you want?” Temeraire said.

“I wonder if you might consider sending the legions against the center,” Ning said.

“No, not in the least,” Temeraire said. “The Imperial Guard is anchoring the center, with a hundred Incan beasts, besides their Grand Chevaliers, and you can see the guns for yourself. We should be rolled up straightaway if we pressed the attack, and then our general advance would be broken. The suggestion is quite absurd—whyever would you propose such a thing?” he added, belatedly curious. He could not make out any reason for it, unless perhaps Ning meant to lead them into a trap for some peculiar reason of her own, but even then, she would have had to think them really quite stupid to listen.

“All you have said is perfectly true,” Ning said, “until one considers that there are sixty heavy-weights approaching the French rear. If you should draw the French center forward even by quite a small margin, you should weaken their line, and thus expose their entire retreat.”

“But why should there be sixty heavy-weights in the French rear, and where have they come from?” Temeraire said. As a wish to be granted by some particularly benevolent spirit, perhaps the God that Laurence was so fond of, the notion appealed to him greatly: it would only be justice that they should come up from behind Napoleon for once, although he did not see how they could have managed it. “It cannot be Excidium and Lily, from Spain; they have only just crossed the Pyrenees by now, and they had a great many dragons to manage over there, anyway.”

He finished on an interrogative note, hoping despite himself, but Ning said, “It is not them: it is the dragons from the convocation, the ones you called the Tswana.”

“There is no reason it should be the Tswana,” Temeraire said. “Not that it would not be very handsome of them to help us,” he added, “but I do not think they care a fig whether we should win, or Napoleon.”

“However fruitless it may be to guess at their motives,” Ning said, “one may nevertheless conclude their intentions, from their having taken up a position ideally calculated to fall upon Napoleon’s rear, and having failed to offer him any assistance in his present difficult circumstances. In any case, I can hardly call their motives very obscure: if we should defeat Napoleon, they must prefer to have us in their debt.”

Temeraire noticed, not without a little irritation, that suddenly Ning had decided to include herself in their ranks, with all this we and us. “Yes, but we—Laurence and myself, that is, and our friends,” he pointedly noted, “—will not defeat Napoleon with one battle,” but then he looked at the field again, and imagined sixty heavy-weight dragons added upon it, and slowly said, “Laurence—Laurence, if we should break their center—if we should rout the guard, and the Tswana should block a retreat to the west—”

“Yes,” Laurence said, his voice taut. “Yes: we might have a chance to capture him, if the guard should break.”

“One might have expected,” Ning remarked a little tartly, “that my advice would be well-founded: had you not better get about it?”

Laurence stood up in his carabiner straps and stepped to the side of Temeraire’s neck, looking down at her. “Ning,” he said, in Chinese, “I beg your pardon: I must ask you to give me your word before these witnesses,” and he beckoned to Yu Shen and also Yu Guo, who had come a little closer to listen in, “that the situation is as you have described it.”

Ning said thoughtfully, “Well, I am prepared to give my word that the Tswana are there, and that they number between forty and seventy beasts, the better part of whom are heavy-weight, and that they are ideally placed to strike at the French rear; however, more than this I will not avow. If you disagree with my conclusions, you may draw your own, and proceed as you like. I consider that I have discharged my duty to China, in offering you the fruits of my observation and my own advice, and if you now choose to discard so notable an opportunity, for want of assurances which I cannot provide with perfect certainty, I cannot hold myself responsible.”