The crew set about their work silently; they were none of them pleased to be leaving under such circumstances. It was impossible not to look at the twenty dragons disposed about the fortress as a force worth putting to real use in its defense; and the desperate escape they had planned to risk alone felt now selfish, when they meant to take all those dragons with them.
“Laurence,” Temeraire said abruptly, “wait; why must we leave them like this?”
“I am sorry to do it also, my dear,” Laurence said heavily, “but the position is untenable: the fortress must fall eventually, no matter what we do. It will do them no good in the end for us to stay and be captured with them.”
“That is not what I mean,” Temeraire said. “There are a great many of us, now; why do we not take the soldiers away with us?”
“Can it be done?” Kalkreuth asked; and they worked out the figures of the desperate scheme with feverish speed. There were just enough transports in the harbor to squeeze the men aboard, Laurence judged, though they should have to be crammed into every nook from the hold to the manger.
“We will give those jack tars a proper start, dropping onto them out of nowhere,” Granby said dubiously. “I hope they may not shoot us out of the air.”
“So long as they do not lose their heads, they must realize that an attack would never come so low,” Laurence said, “and I will take Temeraire to the ships first and give them a little warning. He at least can hover overhead, and let the passengers down by ropes; the others will have to land on deck. Thankfully they are none of them so very large.”
Every silk curtain and linen sheet in the elegant patrician homes was being sacrificed to the cause, much against their owners’ wishes, and every seamstress of the city had been pressed into service, thrust into the vast ballroom of the general’s residence to sew the carrying-harnesses under the improvisational direction of Fellowes. “Sirs, begging your pardon, I won’t stand on oath they’ll any of them hold,” he said. “How these things are rigged in China, ordinary, I’m sure I don’t know; and as for what we are doing, it’ll be the queerest stuff dragon ever wore or man ever rode on, I can’t say plainer than that.”
“Do what you can,” General Kalkreuth said crisply, “and any man who prefers may stay and be made prisoner.”
“We cannot take the horses or the guns, of course,” Laurence said.
“Save the men; horses and guns can be replaced,” Kalkreuth said. “How many trips will we need?”
“I am sure I could take at least three hundred men, if I were not wearing armor,” Temeraire said; they were carrying on their discussion in the courtyard, where he could offer his opinions. “The little ones cannot take so many, though.”
The first carrying-harness was brought down to try; Arkady edged back from it a little uneasily until Temeraire made some pointed remarks and turned to adjust a strap of his own harness; at which the feral leader immediately presented himself, chest outthrust, and made no further difficulties: aside from turning himself round several times in an effort to see what was being done, and thus causing a few of the harness-men to fall off. Once rigged out, Arkady promptly began prancing before his comrades; he looked uncommonly silly, as the harness was partly fashioned out of patterned silks that had likely come from a lady’s boudoir, but he plainly found himself splendid, and the rest of the ferals murmured enviously.
There was rather more difficulty getting men to volunteer to board him, until Kalkreuth roundly cursed them all for cowards and climbed on himself; his aides promptly followed him up in a rush, even arguing a little over who should go up first, and with this example before them the reluctant men were so shamed they too began clamoring to board; to which Tharkay, observing the whole, remarked a little dryly that men and dragons were not so very different in some respects.
Arkady, not the largest of the ferals, being leader more from force of personality than size, was able to lift off the ground easily with a hundred men dangling, perhaps a few more. “We can fit nearly two thousand, across all of them,” Laurence said, the trial complete, and handed the slate to Roland and Dyer to make them do the sums over, to be sure he had the numbers correct: much to their disgruntlement; they felt it unfair to be set back to schoolwork in so remarkable a situation. “We cannot risk overloading them,” Laurence added. “They must be able to make their escape if we are caught at it in the middle.”
“If we don’t take care of that Fleur-de-Nuit, we will be,” Granby said. “If we engaged him tonight—?”
Laurence shook his head, not in disagreement but in doubt. “They are taking precious good care he is not exposed. To get anywhere near we would have to come in range of their artillery, and get directly into their midst; I have not seen him stir out of the covert since we arrived. He only watches us from that ridge, and keeps well back.”
“They would hardly need the Fleur-de-Nuit to tell them we were doing something tomorrow, if we made a great point of singling him out tonight,” Tharkay pointed out. “He had much better be dealt with just before we begin.”
No one disagreed, but puzzling out the means left them at sixes-and-sevens a while. They could settle on nothing better than staging a diversion, using the littler dragons to bombard the French front ranks: the glare would interfere with the Fleur-de-Nuit’s vision, and in the meantime the other dragons would slip out to the south, and make a wider circle out to sea.
“Though it won’t do for long,” Granby said, “and then we will have all of them to deal with, and Lien, too: Temeraire can’t fight her with three hundred men hanging off his sides.”
“An attack such as this will rouse up all the camp, and someone will see us going by sooner or late,” Kalkreuth agreed. “Still it will gain us more time than if the alarm were raised at once; I would rather save half the corps than none.”
“But if we must circle about so far out of the way, it will take a good deal more time, and we will never get so many away,” Temeraire objected. “Perhaps if we only went and killed him very quickly and quietly, we might then get away before they know what we are about; or at least thumped him hard enough he could not pay any more attention—”
“What we truly need,” Laurence said abruptly, “is only to put him quietly out of the way; what about drugging him?” In the thoughtful pause, he added, “They have been feeding the dragons livestock dosed with opium all through the campaign; if we slip him one more thoroughly saturated, likely he will not notice any queer taste, at least not until it is too late.”
“His captain will hardly let him eat a cow if it’s still wandering in circles,” Granby said.
“If the soldiers are eating boiled grass, the dragons cannot be eating as much as they like, either,” Laurence said. “I suspect he will prefer to ask forgiveness than permission, if a cow goes by him in the night.”
Tharkay undertook to manage it. “Find me some nan-keen trousers and a loose shirt, and give me a dinner-basket to carry,” he said. “I assure you I will be able to walk through the camp quite openly; if anyone stops me I will speak pidgin to them and repeat the name of some senior officer. And if you give me a few bottles of drugged brandy for them to take from me, so much the better; no reason we cannot let the watch dose themselves with laudanum, too.”
“But will you be able to get back?” Granby asked.
“I do not mean to try,” Tharkay said. “After all, our purpose is to get out; I can certainly walk to the harbor long before you will have finished loading, and find a fisherman to bring me out; they are surely doing a brisk business with those ships.”