a wide respectful berth, little as she was, and gradually arranged themselves in other more convenient places, such as upon the roofs, the courtyards, and the open terraces of the city, much to the loud shrieking dismay of the inhabitants.
"Twenty of them?" Kalkreuth said, staring at little Gherni, who was sleeping peacefully on his balcony; her long, narrow tail was poking in through the doors and lying across the floor of the room, occasionally twitching and thumping against the floor. "And they will obey?"
"Well; they will mind Temeraire, more or less, and their own leader," Laurence said doubtfully. "More than that I will not venture to guarantee; in any case they can only understand their own tongue, or a smattering of some Turkish dialect."
Kalkreuth was silent, toying with a letter opener upon his desk, twisting the point into the polished surface of the wood, heedless of damage. "No," he said finally, mostly to himself, "it would only stave off the inevitable."
Laurence nodded quietly; he himself had spent the last few hours contemplating ways and means of assault with their new aerial strength, some kind of attack which might drive the French away from the city. But they were still outnumbered in the air three dragons to two, and the ferals could not be counted on to carry out any sort of strategic maneuver. As individual skirmishers they would do; as disciplined soldiers they were a disaster ready to occur.
Kalkreuth added, "But I hope they will be enough, Captain, to see you and your men safely away: for that alone I am grateful to them. You have done all you could for us; go, and Godspeed."
"Sir, I only regret we cannot do more, and I thank you," Laurence said.
He left Kalkreuth still standing beside his desk, head bowed, and went back down to the courtyard. "Let us get the armor on him, Mr. Fellowes," Laurence said quietly to the ground-crew master, and nodded to Lieutenant Ferris. "We will leave as soon as it is dark."
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