Temeraire flared his ruff angrily, and with an enormous heave twisted them bodily over and thumped the Copacati soundly at the base of her neck with the side of his head. The blow made his jaw ache, but it was worth it to check that sort of talk, and it shook all her own scanty crew loose and dangling from their carabiners, so at least they had no advantages over his own boarding party gone over.

“Temeraire, we must fall back,” Laurence called: the French forces were taking the bait, pressing forward everywhere to meet them.

Temeraire reluctantly let go and threw himself away from the Copacati, beating furiously, and managed to roar briefly into her face. He could not build enough resonance to properly roar and knock her back, but she recoiled enough he could open up some room between them. He fell back on the legions, who had split into their three-beast squadrons, and were skillfully fending off the French beasts pressing upon them.

They could not hold their ground long against numbers and weight so much the greater than their own force. They did not really want to hold it, of course: as they fell back, the French dragons pressed forward to keep on them, and in so doing left exposed the infantry and guns of the Old Guard at their rear.

But Temeraire began to feel a little anxious, as their position was becoming undoubtedly awkward. The flanks of the French aerial corps had begun to close in upon their sides, and they were increasingly in danger of finding themselves enveloped. Many of the Chinese dragons were beginning to take real injury: it seemed that in every direction Temeraire looked, he saw one of the red-gold beasts falling out of the ranks to retreat to the surgeons, many of them trailing black blood as they flew. The remaining squadrons pulled together, and re-formed themselves in a disciplined manner: along the line in reverse order from left to right, any dragon who lost a fighting-partner shifted over to fill a gap in the next squadron with an opening. It was elegantly done, without disruption to their maneuvering, but their ranks were steadily compressing as a consequence, exposing the survivors to more of the enemy’s force.

The Chinese commander Zhao Lien winged around from her position at the rear of the force to join Temeraire. “Honored one, may this humble soldier suggest that we make arrangements to withdraw over the shelter of the artillery, if it is not inconvenient,” which was a polite way of saying he had got them thoroughly into the soup, and there was now no way out of it except to simply run away, which would certainly give the French every opportunity to wreak disaster on the allied troops beneath them, and perhaps even turn back the tide of the battle as a whole.

Napoleon, too, had seen their plight; perhaps even before they themselves had marked it. Down on the ground, the ranks of the Old Guard were moving forward, and with that anchor the French withdrawal everywhere was halting. Companies were re-forming and wheeling around, light-weight beasts dropping to pick up cannon and replace them in firing position, the enormous clockwork of Napoleon’s war machinery turning under its master’s hand.

But the movement was accompanied from some distant place over the hills by a steady deep drum-beat, growing louder and louder even above the cannon-roars, a great pounding noise that resonated peculiarly in Temeraire’s skull as it climbed, and climbed still further. The other dragons around him all paused, turning as they looked back towards the French rear. Shadows were forming out of the deep bank of grey clouds to the west, and then the clouds were streaming away as a wide row of dragons was suddenly pouring down over the western slope directly at Napoleon’s rear: dragons in every vivid color, and on every back a drummer sat, pounding furiously to keep the time of their wings.

Their bellies had been covered with pads of thick grey leather. They did not fly separately or even in formations, but in short lines of four and carrying a peculiar device that looked like the front edge of a plow more than anything else Temeraire knew. The teeth were made of curved elephant tusks, bound into a thin frame of wood and metal. The Tswana dragons plunged them down among the troops and swept forward, turning over men and guns and earth all together.

The French dragons wheeled around in alarm to meet their advance, but as they did, a second wave of Tswana dragons came arrowing down from far overhead: they must have climbed very high, to be able to come swooping out of the clouds so, and their plummeting speed was enormous; they struck the body of the French corps with shocking force, and drove dozens of beasts to the ground, smashing them into their own artillery and men before they climbed a little shakily off again, and shook themselves and jumped back into the air.

Temeraire stared, a little. He had never seen the Tswana fight properly, dragon to dragon: he had seen them tear apart the Cape Town settlement, and its fort, but that assault had been carried out in a fury of rage and revenge by dragons maddened at the loss of their tribes, and anyway it had nearly been over, by the time he had arrived. This was a great deal more systematic and impressive, not to say a little alarming; but after a moment he shook himself off, and roared a welcoming challenge before he led the legions forward to help. The French center was collapsing entirely; Iskierka and the Prussian dragons were turning their left flank, forcing the remaining dragons there onto the already-great disorder behind them, and as the dragons cleared the field and began a steady bombardment of the infantry squares below, the Russian and Prussian cavalry charged, sabers raised and shouting, into their disorganized ranks.

The French retreat, half turned around, now fell into complete rout. Men were fleeing the field in masses, companies disintegrating. Temeraire swept back and forth trying to see past the confusion and pick out Lien. On the left flank he could see Marshal Saint-Cyr lifting away on a Petit Chevalier with a clinging mass of staff-officers aboard, making their escape towards the western road still held by the French rear-guard, their guns firing steadily and hot.

The Old Guard had drawn together, above and below, to make themselves a sheltering box with the Emperor inside. Blowing horns were summoning the heavy-weights back into a knot, and Temeraire roared in fury as he saw Lien at last, well-hidden behind a screen of artillery and heavy-weight dragons: Napoleon was being thrust bodily aboard her back by his soldiers. “Laurence, Laurence, she is getting away!” he cried, hovering, half-hoping Laurence would order him to charge, to throw himself through that crowd of dragons.

“I am sorry, my dear,” Laurence said heavily. “There are too many of them—”

But suddenly there were not. The Tswana had gathered their first fruits of surprise, and now re-formed into a large company on the French right flank, spear-shaped, preparing to sweep around and engage the French heavy-weights. There were sixty of them; Temeraire had thirty left of the Chinese legions at his back, and Eroica was leading some forty Prussian beasts, with Iskierka supporting them. The French had nearly a hundred beasts still gathered, and in tight formation could have held for an hour even against all of them pressing in.