She would gladly have torn the creeping vile creature apart with her own bare claws. So far had they lowered her, Lien thought bitterly, in so little time!
And then the emperor looked at Villiers and said, “You have miscounted, monsieur. There are a thousand and two: I must find new generals.”
Lien twitched the very end of her tail, a second self-betrayal in as many moments, although she could be grateful that she did not gape and stammer as did the two officials; and in any case her lapse was not observed. The emperor was already turning to his secretary, saying, “Send for Murat: I must have someone who is not a fool,” and wheeling back to her for a moment said sharply, “He will attend you tomorrow, and you will describe to him how dragons can be fed on grain, and how the cavalry is to be managed. Armand, take a letter to Berthier—” and walked away from them all.
Like all these Frenchmen, Murat had an appearance which veered between unkempt and unseemly, but he was not, to her satisfaction, a fool. She was cautiously pleased. It would take years, of course, to begin to correct the flaws in the division of their army, and the lamentable deficiencies of their husbandry and agriculture would require a generation or more. But she did not need to be quite so patient, she thought. If the emperor obtained the victory of which he was so certain, in the east, and in the meanwhile she persuaded him to adopt a more rational arrangement of his aerial forces, a force sufficient for invasion might be assembled within the decade, she hoped; or two perhaps.
Three days later, Fraternité woke her in the late afternoon roaring; instinct brought her out of the pavilion straightaway, to see what the matter was, but the three of them were only cavorting about like drunkards.
“We are going to war!” Lumière informed her, mad with delight. “We are not to be left behind, after all; only we will have to eat a lot of gruel and carry things, but that is all right.”
She was a little taken aback, and then more when the emperor came to see her that afternoon. “You are coming also,” he said, which she was ashamed to find made her chest wish to expand in an undignified manner, although she controlled the impulse. He wanted her opinions on the new arrangements, he informed her; and she was to tell the officers if there were mistakes.
It had not occurred to her that he would attempt in the span of a week to make changes in the organization of his army, and she kept private her first opinion: that he was a madman. In the morning, escorted by her three young companions, she flew to the place of concentration at Mayence, where the dragons were coming in with their first experimental loads of supply. It was, as anyone could have predicted, perfect chaos. The laborers did not know what they were doing, and were clumsy and slow at unloading the dragons, who had been packed incorrectly to begin with; the soldiers did not know how to manage on the carrying harnesses; the cattle were drugged either too much or too little. One could not simply overturn the habits of centuries, however misguided, by giving orders.
She expressed as much in measured terms to the emperor that evening, when he arrived by courier; he listened to her and then said, “Murat says that applying your methods would provide us with a sixfold increase in weight of metal thrown, and tenfold increase in supply for the dragons.”
“At the very least,” she said, because there was certainly no understating the inefficiency of the present methods. “When done properly.”
“For now, I am prepared to settle for doubling my numbers,” the emperor said dryly, “so we will tolerate some flaws.”
He then dictated a proclamation to his secretary, which was by the hour of the evening meal distributed among the camp and read aloud to the listening soldiers, describing the worst flaws which required correction, and also to her bafflement a lengthy explanation of the reasoning behind the alterations; why he should communicate such information to simple men, likely only to confuse them, she did not understand.
But the next day they did improve a little, and she could not dispute that even fumbling and disorganized, they had bettered the prior state of affairs, although she was still doubtful that it was worth the sacrifice of cohesion and discipline which came when men were following a course in which they had been trained and drilled for years. Of course, the emperor seemed equally willing to sacrifice that discipline in lesser causes. His communications were haphazard at best; while he daily received messages, they came at irregular intervals, and the little couriers cheerfully told her that his army was distributed over hundreds of miles, companies wandering almost independent from one another.
She wondered, and still more at his success, when his couriers were by no means efficient or swift, being bred only for lightness instead of the proper bodily proportions and all far more suitable as skirmishers, and she told him as much that night with even less ceremony. As no one else treated him with the proper degree of awe, she felt it unnecessary to do so herself, and he did not seem to notice any lack of respect. Instead he sent for a chair and sat and asked her questions, endlessly and into the night, while his secretaries and guards drooped around him. His voice at least was pleasant: not so deep as her prince’s nor so well-trained, and with a peculiar accent, but clear and strong and carrying.
In the morning, they left for the front, his small courier in the lead; and in the waning hours of the day Lien crested a bank of hills and paused, hovering and silent, while beneath her a vast ant-army of men crawled like small squares of living carpet over the earth, dotting the countryside in either direction as far as her vision could stretch.
It was of course still not rational to make men rather than dragons the center of any military force; still she could not help a strange and disquieting impression of implacable power in the steady marching, as though they might walk on and on across all the world. And in the dusty tracks behind them came on the rattling caravans of black iron, cannons larger than any she had ever seen.
“These throw only sixteen pounds,” the emperor said that night, while under his brooding eye Fraternité hefted several of the guns. “Can he take more weight than that?”
“Of course I can,” Fraternité said, throwing out his chest.
“No, he cannot,” Lien said. “Do not squawk at me,” she added, with asperity. “You cannot fly straight through the day with your wing-muscles so constrained.”
Fraternité subsided; the emperor however said, “How many hours could he fly with another?”
“No more than two straight,” Lien said, and the emperor nodded. The next day, he summoned her and went to gather men from a town called Coblenz, some sixty miles distant. The cannon were loaded on the heaviest dragons, save Lien herself; they were sent two hours on and unloaded; then, having been rested an hour, sent back for other supplies and to carry forward some companies of the infantry. It was an odd and unintuitive back-and-forth, attended with awkwardness and difficulty, but by nightfall the entire company was all reunited, thirty miles nearer to Mayence and not too wretchedly out of order.
The emperor came to her with a gleam of jubilation in his eye that made him handsomer, although she did not think the progress justified as much satisfaction as he displayed, and said so. He laughed and said, “In three days we will see, madame; I bow to you where dragons are concerned, but not men.”
The next day, they brought the full company into Mayence before noon, and by that evening had set out again on the wing to Cologne for another, with scarcely a pause in between. Before his three days’ time was finished, they had brought in ten thousand men, with their supply, and she had begun to think he was not so much a fool after alclass="underline" there was that same inevitability in their course which she had felt watching the small marching companies, the momentum of so many men combined; and a spirit of joint effort which animated his countless hordes of tiny soldiers.