yelled faintly, from outside the camp, and Laurence looked up from where he was sitting and writing. "Laurence, get that damned lump of mine out of that camp, you have another Regal there!"
"Oh," said Temeraire, and roared, loudly, over their heads; Maximus and Requiescat both jerked violently and turned to look at him instead, blinking. "There, now do not start that again, we have a battle tomorrow," Temeraire said, "and you had better stop Berkley from running so fast, or he will have an apoplexy," he added.
Maximus turned his head and said, "You do not have to run, what is there to be running for?" as Berkley came nearly staggering into the clearing, and Laurence went to give him his arm to the fallen tree which Temeraire had pulled down for him to sit on.
Berkley stared from Maximus to Requiescat and back, very suspiciously, while he gulped for breath. "Pray do not worry, I will not let them fight," Temeraire said. "I would have thought you had more sense," he added to them severely.
"I was not going to fight," Maximus said, unconvincingly. "Only I have never seen anyone big as me before, except when I was still growing."
"The girls are bigger," Requiescat said, with rather a reminiscent tone. "But that is different."
"I do not see why," Temeraire said, "and it is not as though a Grand Chevalier were much smaller." He did not think he was much smaller, either, but that perhaps would be rather puffing himself off to say.
"Don't much like them, either," Requiescat said.
Maximus nodded vigorously in agreement. "And we are on short commons," he added. "I knew you must be back, as soon as they brought us this mess for dinner." He nudged Temeraire's shoulder with his head, in a friendly way. Temeraire wobbled, but managed with some effort to keep his balance.
"Tomorrow there will be plenty, and anyway, even if there were not, I dare say you could fly in opposite directions and find something, without having to quarrel over it," Temeraire said. "But where is Lily?"
"She is in Scotland," Maximus said. "Catherine has had the egg, so she cannot be flying to fight."
"I suppose I did not tell you before: a boy," Berkley said to Laurence, gloomily, "so no use to us; and ten pounds, damn him. Nearly killed her."
"The egg is very noisy," Maximus added.
"I hope they both do well now?" Laurence said.
"She can write and say so, which means she is only half-dead, I expect," Berkley said, and heaved himself up to his feet. "Have you finished your damned card-call?" he said to Maximus. "If this fine scheme of Roland's is going to do any good, you cannot be hopping all over the camp now it is getting dark. And you may carry me this time, instead of heaving yourself off without a word."
"I only wanted to come see Temeraire a moment," Maximus said, putting out one great curved claw for Berkley to climb into. "And now we have, so we may go."
"We shall see each other tomorrow in the fighting, anyway," Temeraire said, with satisfaction, and curled himself up to sleep with a sense of great contentment, only to be jarred rudely awake an hour later, by the queer muffled booming of bombs falling, and the popping voices of the pepper guns answering.
He put his head up and looked: he could not see anything much but the occasional white blooms of powder-flash from the ground, where the artillery-men were firing, and the great yellow bursts of flame as the bombs struck and burst. When there was no firing going on, he could only make out the faintest shadows of the handful of light-weights circling - mostly mongrels with better night-vision than most, Minnow and some other of the ferals, who had been organized into shifts to give some semblance of resistance to enhance the ruse.
"You ought to go back to sleep," Laurence said, rousing, and Temeraire lowered his head to nose at him carefully: how good it was not to be alone, and to know Laurence was with him, and safe; only it would have been better still if they might have gone fighting together.
"I will, in a moment," Temeraire said, privately hoping that perhaps the Fleurs might realize the trick, any moment now, and they should have to go and join in. But the French dragons were flying too high aloft, and the fires on the ground and the explosions of their own bombs dazzled their sensitive eyes too badly, particularly