Victory of Eagles Page 0,32

ruff, no-one had anything to say.

One farmer thirty miles on, belligerent enough to be brave, had not hidden in his cellar during the visitation, and swore that a giant dragon had eaten four of his cows, informing him they were being confiscated for the war effort and he should be repaid by the Government. He even showed them where the dragon had scratched a mark in an old oak-tree for his reimbursement, and for a moment Laurence entertained hopes. But it was not a Chinese mark, only an X clumsily carved through the bark, with four scratches below. "Red and yellow, like fire," the oldest boy said, peering at them from over the window-sill of the house, despite his mother's restraining hand, and sank them completely.

Ten dragons had stopped to drink at the lake on the grounds of a stately house in Monmouthshire, the housekeeper told them, anxiously, and eaten some of the deer: ten neat X's were marked in the dirt by the lakeshore. "I am sure I could not tell you if they were black or red or spotted green and yellow, it was all I had to do to keep breathing, with half my maids fainted dead away," she said. "And then one of the creatures came to the door, and asked us through it if we had any curtains. Red ones," she added. "We threw outside all the ones from the ballroom, and then they took them and went away."

Laurence was baffled: curtains? He would have understood better if they had demanded the silver plate. But at least they were moving in a group, and in the earnest excuses for the pillaging, he thought he saw Temeraire's influence, if not his presence: it was so near a mimic to the Chinese mode, which they had witnessed, where dragons purchased goods by making their mark for the supplier.

The following day, they discovered another farmer with a collection of marks, who rather astonishingly was not unhappy: the dragons had eaten four of his cows yesterday, he agreed, but that very morning some men had come through with a string of cattle, and given him replacements, which he pointed out in their field: four handsome beef cattle, better in all honesty than the scrawnier animals in the farmer's own herd.

Seven dragons had been seen in Pen-y-Clawdd, four had landed by the river in Llandogo, and perhaps one of them had been black - yes, certainly one had been black. Then a dozen had been seen - no, two dozen - no, a hundred - numbers shouted by the crowd in the common room of an inn, growing steadily more implausible. Laurence gave it no credit at all, but a few miles farther along, Elsie landed them in a torn-up meadow, with a neatly dug necessary-pit on the low side away from the water, filled in but still fragrant, with signs of occupation by at least some number of dragons. "We must be getting right close, then," Hollin said, encouragingly, but the next day, no one had so much as seen a wing-tip, though Elsie went miles around in widening rings to make inquiries, for hours and hours together. They had one and all vanished into the air.

"WE WILL BE GETTING CLOSE to the French tomorrow, so beginning today we will fly when it is dark," Temeraire said, "and try and be as quiet as we can; so pass the word to everyone, not to fly somewhere if you see lights; or if you smell cows, because they will bellow and run and make a fuss."

The others nodded, and Temeraire rose up on his haunches to inspect their own pen of cattle. He missed Gong Su very much. It was not that cooked food was so much pleasanter, he did not care about the taste at all at present. But Gong Su could stretch a single cow amongst five hungry dragons, if only there were rice, or something else like to cook it with.

The farther they got from Wales, the more complicated everything became. Lloyd said that it was expensive to bring the cows so far, because they must be fed along the road, and they could not be brought very quickly, because they would sicken and stop being fat and good to eat. It helped a great deal that Majestatis had suggested the notion of borrowing cows, in advance, and using the later ones to repay; but if they were always flying about snatching cows from the nearby farms,