of a great farmhouse, the fire mostly extinguished by the time they arrived: the rest of the village stood empty, when the dragons came down, but for two men in homespun: villagers, not soldiers, laid out in the road dead, with stab wounds flower-red upon their bellies; they had been bayoneted.
"The villagers shan't come out while we have the dragons here," Harcourt said. "If we leave them outside - "
"No," Laurence said; he did not mean to waste time on such things. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, "We are officers of the King. You will come out at once, or we will have the dragons tear down the houses until you do."
There was no reply, no stirring. "Temeraire," Laurence said, and indicated a small neat cottage near the end of the village lane. "Bring it down, if you please."
Temeraire looked at it, and said uncertainly, "Shall I roar?"
"However you choose," Laurence said.
"Ought I bring it all down at once?" Temeraire asked, turning his head to inspect the cottage; he darted a look back at Laurence, as if trying to gauge his real intent. "Perhaps, if I just took off this chimney - "
"Oh, you are taking too long," Iskierka said, and promptly blasted it with fire, the dry thatched roof going alight in a merrily crackling instant.
It burned fiercely, putting out sharp smoke; the flames licking out eagerly towards its neighbors; Laurence sat waiting, and after a moment a cellar door creaked open and a few men came forth, "Put it out, for God's sake put it out," one of them begged gasping. "All the village will catch - "
"Berkley, if you will be so good," Laurence said; Maximus took off the burning roof, and laying it on the ground scraped some dirt over it with a clumsy swipe, leaving it half-buried. Laurence looked back at the villagers, who stared up at him pale and sweating. "Which way did the French go?"
"Towards Scarrow Hill," the older man said after a moment, his voice still trembling. "With all our cattle, every last one - " The faint lowing of a cow from the woods made him a liar on that point, but Laurence did not care. "They left not an hour - "
"Very good; to quarters, gentlemen, and let the riflemen make ready," Laurence said over his shoulder, to the other captains. "Aloft, Temeraire, along the road."
They caught the French fifteen minutes later, and heard them first: singing a bawdy snatch of "Auprē«s de ma blonde, qu'il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon" as they marched through a forested section: then they emerged out onto the road again, cattle in a string bellowing and throwing their heads, uneasy as they scented the dragons aloft. The men pulled irritably on the cows' heads and tried to drag them along. They did not look up.
Temeraire craned his head back and looked at Laurence. Ten dragons came on behind them. "Mr. Allen," Laurence said, "signal the attack."
Chapter 14
I DO NOT SEE what is wrong with it," Iskierka said, still nibbling upon the charred beef bones of her dinner. "They are stealing the cows for their dragons, it is not our fault if their dragons are too lazy to come and get the cows themselves."
"It is not wrong," Temeraire said, dissatisfied, "precisely."
"Not very sporting, though," Gentius said. "They did not even have a gun."
"The village did not have a gun, either, or even muskets," Lily said, "so it was not very sporting of those soldiers, in the first place."
"Anyway," Iskierka added, with an air of smug virtue, "we must obey our orders."
Temeraire did not argue further. It was not that he minded for himself, anyway, very much, although it had not been a very interesting battle: they had dived, the soldiers had fired a few shots, and then they had all run away into the woods, if they were not dead; it had lasted scarcely five minutes, and nothing to show for it. Except of course the cows, but those they mostly had to give back.
He was not going to say so, of course, but he rather felt Iskierka was right. If the soldiers had not wanted to be attacked, they ought not have been going about in other people's territory, taking their food and much more than they could eat themselves. Only, he was a little worried, because it seemed the sort of thing that Laurence might have minded, and he felt instinctively there was something strange, that Laurence