Victory of Eagles Page 0,38
others, but was sitting near the water-hole curled up in a lump.
"Are you hurt?" he inquired, having gone over to her.
"Of course I am not hurt," she said, snappishly.
"Why are you sitting over here then, instead of coming to see; we have found some gold already, and maybe there is more."
"Well, it is not as though I will have a share," she said. "I did not do any fighting."
"Everyone had a chance," Temeraire said, injured; he did not feel he had been unfair. Naturally the heavy-weights ought to go first, if they could do the worst -
Perscitia looked away, and hunched her wings more snugly. "You may go away, if all you mean is to sneer, and be unpleasant. I am sure it is no business of anyone's, if I did not care to fight."
"I am not sneering, at all, and you may stop being so quarrelsome!" Temeraire said. "I did not notice that you did not fight."
She fidgeted a little, and muttered by way of apology, "Others did," glancing towards the other dragons.
"But why did you not, if you mind so much now?" Temeraire asked. "You might have, any time you liked."
"I did not like," she said, defiantly, " - so there, and you may call me a coward if you want; I am sure I do not care."
"Oh," Temeraire said, and sat back on his haunches. He was not quite sure what to say. "I am very sorry?" he offered, uncertainly. He supposed it must be very unpleasant to be a coward. But he had always thought cowards were wretched creatures, who would do something unpleasant such as steal your things, even if they knew they could not win fighting for them, and that was not what Perscitia was like, at all. "And you are never shy of quarreling with anyone."
"That is not the same," she said. "One does not get shot for quarreling, or have a wing torn up, or a cannonball in the chest - I saw a dragon take a cannonball once, it was dreadful."
"Of course," Temeraire said, "but one must just be quick enough, and then you can dodge them."
"That is nonsense," she said. "A musket-ball can go much quicker than any dragon, so it is all decided by chance, before you ever think of evading, or even notice that someone is shooting at you. If you are very quick, of course, then you are gone before they can have fired very often," she added, "so your chances are better, but they are best if you do not go anywhere in front of a gun at all. - And I am not very quick."
Temeraire rubbed the side of a talon against his forehead, pondering. "In China," he said, "only some kinds of dragons fight at all; a great many of them are scholars, and would not know what to do in a battle at all. No-one thinks any less of them, or calls them cowards; I suppose that is what you are."
She lifted her head, and Temeraire added, "Anyway, we are all perfectly happy to fight, so there is no sense in your doing it, when you dislike it."
"Well, I think just the same," she said, brightening, "only I do not like anyone to say I did not do my part; but there is no part other than fighting."
"We must work out how to use the gun," Temeraire said. "That would be very useful, and perhaps you can think of something we might do with it, to help us fighting, and that is a fair share, as no-one else knows how to do it."
This solution so suited her that by the end of the day, she had a dozen men working busily as a gun-crew. These had come to them along with another thirty, from the local militia, who had rather nervously come to the battlefield in the morning with their muskets, to see what had happened during the night. Reassured by the gaily flapping flags, they had come near enough to be pressed into service with cheerful ruthlessness by Lloyd and his fellows, tired of being hands for near sixty dragons as well as herdsmen.
The militiamen were abjured not to be such lumps when they cringed from Perscitia in fear, and lectured with great pomp by Lloyd on the need to stop Bonaparte, and then surrendered to her tender mercies. They spent the day working through the mechanics of the gun-firing, the swabbing, the wadding - steps Perscitia had pieced together by