Книга - League of Dragons

League of Dragons
Naomi Novik


With the acclaimed Temeraire novels, New York Times bestselling author Naomi Novik has created a fantasy series like no other. Now, with LEAGUE OF DRAGONS, Novik brings the imaginative tour-de-force that has captivated millions to an unforgettable finish.Napoleon’s invasion of Russia has been roundly thwarted. But even as Capt. William Laurence and the dragon Temeraire pursue the retreating enemy through an unforgiving winter, Napoleon is raising a new force, and he’ll soon have enough men and dragons to resume the offensive. While the emperor regroups, the allies have an opportunity to strike first and defeat him once and for all – if internal struggles and petty squabbles don’t tear them apart.Aware of his weakened position, Napoleon has promised the dragons of every country – and the ferals, loyal only to themselves – vast new rights and powers if they fight under his banner. It is an offer eagerly embraced from Asia to Africa – and even by England, whose dragons have long rankled at their disrespectful treatment.But Laurence and his faithful dragon soon discover that the wily Napoleon has one more gambit at the ready – one that that may win him the war, and the world.























Copyright (#u2c004f13-30c1-5c1a-8410-7b0e03864e9d)


HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2016

Copyright © Naomi Novik 2016

Map copyright © Robert Bull 2016

Naomi Novik asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008121167

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008121150

Version: 2016-05-06




Dedication (#u2c004f13-30c1-5c1a-8410-7b0e03864e9d)


To Charles

sine qua non




Map (#u2c004f13-30c1-5c1a-8410-7b0e03864e9d)








Contents

Cover (#u091c5cac-50f5-528c-b423-749647622e56)

Title Page (#u000c4874-0193-5722-bac0-2b7476e9a444)

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part II

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part III

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Part IV

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

About the Author

The Temeraire Series by Naomi Novik

About the Publisher



Part I (#u2c004f13-30c1-5c1a-8410-7b0e03864e9d)




Chapter 1 (#u2c004f13-30c1-5c1a-8410-7b0e03864e9d)







THE CHEVALIER WAS NOT dead when they found her, but the scavengers had already begun to pick at her body. A cloud of raucous crows lifted when Temeraire’s shadow fell over the clearing, and a stoat slunk away into the underbrush, coat white, muzzle red. As he dismounted, Laurence saw its small hard shining eyes peering patiently out from beneath the bramble. The French dragon’s immense sides were sunken in between her ribs so deeply that each hollow looked like the span of a rope bridge. They swelled out and in with every shallow breath, the movement of her lungs made visible. She did not move her head, but her eye opened a very little. It rolled to look on them, and closed again without any sign of comprehension.

A dead man sat in the snow beside her, leaning against her chest and staring blindly forward, in the ragged remnants of what had once been the proud red uniform of the Old Guard. He wore epaulets and the front of his coat was pockmarked with many punctures where medals had once hung, likely sold to whichever Russian peasants would sell him a pig or a chicken for gold and silver. Flotsam from Napoleon’s disintegrating Grande Armée: the dragon had most likely been driven by hunger to go too far afield, searching for food, and having spent her final strength could not then catch up the remaining body of her corps. She had come down a day ago: the churned ground beneath her was frozen into solid peaks, and her captain’s boots were drifted over with the snow which had fallen yesterday morning.

Laurence looked for the sun, descending and only barely shy of the horizon. Every scant hour of daylight now was precious, even every minute. The last corps of Napoleon’s army were racing west, trying to escape, and Napoleon himself with them. If they did not catch him before the Berezina River, they would not catch him; he had reinforcements and supply on the other side—dragon reinforcements, who would spirit him and his troops safely away. And all this devouring war would have no conclusion, no end. Napoleon would return only a little chastened to the welcoming cradle of France and raise up another army, and in two years there would be another campaign—another slaughter.

Another laboring breath pushed out the Chevalier’s sides; breath steamed out of her nostrils, billowing like cannon-smoke in the frigid air. Temeraire said, “Can we do nothing for her?”

“Let us lay a small fire, Mr. Forthing, if you please,” Laurence said.

But the Chevalier would not take even water, when they melted some snow for her to drink. She was too far gone; if indeed she wished any relief with her captain gone and a living death already upon her.

There was only one kindness left to provide. They could not spare powder, but they still had a few iron tent-poles with sharpened ends. Laurence rested one against the base of the dragon’s skull, and Temeraire set his massive claw upon it and thrust it through with a single stroke. The Chevalier died without a sound. Her sides rose and fell twice more while the final stillness crept slowly along her enormous body, spasms of muscle and sinew visible beneath the skin. A few of the ground crew stamped their boots and blew on their hands. The snow heavy upon the pine-trees standing around them made a muffled silence.

“We had better get along,” Grig said, before the final shudders had left the Chevalier’s tail; a faint note of reproach in his high sparrow-voice. “It is another five miles to the meeting-place for to-night.”

He alone of their company was little affected by the scene, but then the Russian dragons had cause enough to be inured to cruelty and hunger, having lived with both all their days. And there was no real justification for ignoring him; they had done what little good there was to be done. “See the men back aboard, Mr. Forthing,” Laurence said, and walked to Temeraire’s lowered head. The breath had frozen in a rim around Temeraire’s nostrils while they flew. Laurence warmed the ice crust with his hands and broke it carefully away from the scales. He asked, “Are you ready to continue onwards?”

Temeraire did not immediately answer. He had lost more flesh than Laurence liked these last two weeks, from bitter cold, hard flying, and too little food. Together these could waste the frame of a heavy-weight dragon with terrifying speed, and the Chevalier made a grim object lesson to that end. Laurence could not but take it to heart.

He once more bitterly regretted Shen Shi, and the rest of their supply-train. Laurence had already known to value the Chinese legions highly, but never so much as when they were gone, and all the concerns of ensuring their supply had fallen into his own hands. The Russian aviators had only the most outdated notions of supply for their beasts, and Temeraire, with all the will in the world, had too much spirit to believe that he could not fly around the world on three chickens and a sack of groats if doing so would put him in striking distance of Napoleon again.

“I am so very sorry Shen Shi and the others had to go back to China,” Temeraire said finally, in an echo of Laurence’s thoughts. “If we were only traveling in company, perhaps …”

He trailed off. Even the most relentless optimism could not have imagined a rescue for the poor Chevalier: three heavy-weights together would have had difficulty in carrying her. “At least we might have given her some hot porridge,” Temeraire said.

“If it is any consolation to you,” Laurence said, “remember she came into this country as a conqueror, and willingly.”

“Oh! What would the dragons of France not do for Napoleon?” Temeraire said. “When you know how much he has given them, and how he has changed their lot: built them pavilions and roads through all Europe, and given them their rights? You cannot blame her, Laurence; you cannot blame any of them.”

“Then at least you may blame him,” Laurence said, “for trading so far on that loyalty to bring her and her fellows into this country in a vain and unjustified attempt at conquest. It was never in your power to prevent her coming, or to rescue her. Only her master might have done so.”

“I do,” Temeraire said. “I do blame him, and Laurence, it would be beyond everything, if he should escape us now.” He heaved a deep breath, and raised his head again. “I am ready to go.”

The men were already aboard; Temeraire lifted Laurence to his place at the base of his neck, and with a spring not as energetic as Laurence would have liked, they were aloft again. Beneath them, the stoat crept out of its hiding-place and went back to its feasting.

The ferocious wind managed to come as a surprise again, even after so short a break in their flying. The last warmth of autumn had lingered late into November, but the Russian winter had come with a true vengeance now, more than justifying all the dire warnings which Laurence had heard before its advent, and to-day the temperature had fallen further still. He was used to biting cold upon the deck of a racing frigate or aloft upon a dragon’s back in winter, but no experience had prepared him to endure this chill. Leather and wool and fur could not keep it out. Frost gathered thickly on his eyelashes and brows before he could even put his flying-goggles back on; when at last he secured them, the ice melted and ran down the insides of the green glass, leaving trails across his sight like rain.

The ground crew traveling in the belly-netting, shielded better from the wind, might huddle together and make a shared warmth; he had given his scant handful of officers permission to sit together in twos and threes. He could permit himself no such comfort. Tharkay had left them two weeks before, on his way to answer an urgent call to Istanbul; there was no-one else whom Laurence might sit with, without awkwardness—Ferris could not be asked without reflection on Forthing, and equally the reverse; and he could not ask them both, when they might at any moment be attacked. They had to be spread wider than that across Temeraire’s back.

He endured the cold as best he could beneath wrappings of oilcloth and a patchwork fur made of rabbit- and weasel-skins, keeping his fingers tucked beneath his arm-pits and his legs folded. Still the chill crept inexorably throughout his limbs, and when his fingers reached a dangerous numbness and ceased to give him pain, he forced himself to stand up in his straps. He carefully unlatched one carabiner, working slowly with thick gloves and numbed hands, and hooked it to a further ring; he then undid the second, and made his way along the harness hand-over-hand to the limits of the first strap before latching back on.

The natural hazards of such an operation, with half-frozen hands and feet and on a dragon’s back made more slippery than usual with patches of ice, were outweighed by the certain evil of staying still for too long in such cold: he had to stir his blood. At least the instinctive fear of the plummeting ground below was in this case his ally, rather than an enemy; his heart jerked and pounded furiously when his feet slipped and he crashed full on his side, clinging to the harness with one hand and one strap, trees rushing by in a dark-green blur below.

Emily Roland detached herself from a nearby knot of huddled officers, and clambering with far more skill came to his side—she had been dragon-back upon her mother’s beast nearly since her birth and was as much at home aloft as on the ground; she expertly caught his loose strap as the carabiner came banging against Temeraire’s side, and latched it to another ring. Laurence nodded his thanks, and managed to regain his footing; but he was flushed and panting when he regained his place at last.

Temeraire himself kept low to the ground, his eyes slitted almost shut against the glare and the breath from his nostrils that came streaming back along his neck: it made clouds filled with needles of ice that stung Laurence’s face. Grig flew behind, making as much use as he could of the air churned up by Temeraire’s wings. Below them rolled the endless snow and the black bare trees frosted with ice, the fields empty and glittering and hard. If they passed so much as a hut, it remained invisible to them. The peasants had taken to covering their houses in snow up to the eaves, to conceal them from the sight of the marauding feral dragons: they ate their potatoes raw, rather than light a fire whose smoke might betray them.

Only the corpses remained unburied, the trail of dead that Napoleon’s army left behind it. But even these did not linger in the open long: a host of feral dragons pursued them, savage as any murder of crows. If a man fell, they, too, did not wait for the body to grow cold.

Laurence might have called it the hand of justice, that Napoleon’s army should now be hunted and devoured by the very ferals he had unleashed upon the Russian populace. But he could not take any solace in the dissolution of the once-proud Grande Armée. The pillage of Moscow trailed grotesquely behind them: silken cloth and gold chains and delicate inlaid furniture discarded along the sides of the road by starving men who now thought only of bare survival. Their misery was too enormous; they were fallen past being enemies and reduced to human animals.

Temeraire reached the rendezvous an hour later, on the edge of nightfall. He inhaled a grateful deep breath of the cooking-steam from the big porridge-pit as he landed, and immediately fell-to upon his portion. As he ate, Ferris approached Laurence: he was holding several short sticks which he had tied together at the top, making a skeleton for a miniature tent. “I have been thinking, sir, if we propped these over his nostrils, we might drape the oilcloth over them, and have his nose in with us after all. Then his breath shan’t freeze in the night; and we can open a chimney-hole at the top to let it out again. Whatever warmth we might lose thereby, I think the heat of his breath will more than make up.”

Laurence hesitated. The responsibility of their arrangements was the duty of the first lieutenant, and ought to be left in his hands; the interference of the captain on such a level could only undermine that officer’s authority. Ferris would have done better to apply to Forthing rather than to Laurence, allowing the other man to take the credit of the idea, but that was a great deal to ask when Forthing stood in the place that should have been his; that had been his, before he had been dismissed from the service.

“Very good, Mr. Ferris,” Laurence said, finally. “Be so good as to explain your suggestion to Mr. Forthing.”

He could not bring himself to refuse anything which might improve Temeraire’s situation, already so distressed. But guilt gnawed him when he saw Forthing’s cheek color as Ferris spoke to him: the two men standing mirror, the one stocky and squared-off in shoulders and jaw, and the other tall and lean, his features not having yet lost all the delicacy of youth; both of them equally ramrod-straight. Forthing bowed a very little, when Ferris had finished, and turning gave stiff orders to the ground crew.

The oilcloth was rearranged, and Laurence lay down to sleep directly beside Temeraire’s jaws, the regular susurration of his breath not unlike the murmur of ocean waves. The warmth was better than anything they had managed lately, but even so it was not enough to drive out the cold; at the edges of the oilcloth it waited knife-like, and slid inside on any slightest breath of wind. Laurence opened his eyes in the middle of the night to see a strange rippling motion in the cloth overhead. He put a hand out and touched Temeraire’s side: the dragon was shivering violently.

There were faint groans outside, grumbling. Laurence lay a moment longer, and then groggily forced himself up and went outside. The fur he had wrapped over his coat was useless as armor against the cold. The Russian aviators were up already, walking among their dragons and striking them with their iron goads, shouting until the beasts stirred and got up, sluggishly. Laurence went to Temeraire’s head and spoke. “My dear, you must get up.”

“I am up,” Temeraire said, without opening an eye. “In a moment I will be up,” but after a little more coaxing he climbed wearily to his feet and joined the line the Russian dragons had formed: they were all walking in a circuit through the camp, heads sagging.

After they had walked for half an hour, the Russians permitted their dragons to lie down again, this time in a general heap directly beside the porridge-pit. A thick crust of ice had formed over the top; the cooks at regular intervals threw in more hot coals, which broke through the crust and sank. Laurence urged Temeraire to huddle in as well; a great many of the small white dragons curled in around him. The oilcloth was slung again; they all returned to the attempt to sleep. But it seemed to him the cold grew still worse. The ground beneath them radiated chill as a stove might have given off heat, so intense that all the warmth which their bodies could produce was not adequate to push it back.

Temeraire sighed behind his closed teeth. Laurence drifted uneasily, rousing now and again to put his hand on Temeraire’s side and be sure he was not again shivering so dangerously. The night crept on. He roused Temeraire with the other dragons for another circuit. “The banners of the Monarch of Hell draw nigh, Captain,” O’Dea said, he and the other ground crewmen stamping along with Laurence alongside Temeraire’s massive plodding feet. His hands were tucked beneath the arm-pits of his coat. “No wonder if we are o’ertaken, and the dawn find us locked in ice eternal; God save us sinners all!” Then the cold stopped even his limber tongue.

They returned to their place; they slept again, or tried to sleep. Laurence stirred some unmeasured time later and thought morning must be coming near, but when he looked outside the night remained impenetrable: the light was only from torches. A Cossack courier had landed, his small beast already crawling into the general heap. The other beasts made grumbling protests at the cold of her body. Her rider was chattering so badly he could not speak, but waved his hands in frantic haste in the faces of the handful of officers who had gathered around him, the movements throwing wild shadows through the torchlight. Laurence forced himself out into the cold and crossed to join them. “Berezina,” the man was saying. “Berezina.”

A young ensign came running with a cup of hot grog. The man gulped, and they closed in around him to give him some little share of their own warmth. His clothing was coated white, and the ends of his fingers where he gripped the cup were blackened here and there: frostbite.

“Berezina zamerzayet,” he managed; one of the officers muttered a curse even as the courier stammered out a little more around another swallow.

“What did he say?” Laurence asked low, of one of them who had French.

“The Berezina has frozen,” the man answered. “Bonaparte is running for it.”

They were aloft before sunrise, and reached the camp of the Russian advance guard as the dawn crept over the frozen hills. The Berezina was a clouded ghostly lane between high-piled snowbanks. To the north of the Russian camp, a handful of French regiments were streaming across the river in good order, men marching two abreast, with narrower lines to either side of camp-followers and soldiers who had fallen out of the ranks, struggling across alone as best they could: women and children with their heads down, hunched against the cold; wounded men leaving bloody marks upon the ice as they limped along. Bodies lay prostrated beside the lines, and here and there a figure huddled and unmoving. Even with escape open before them, some had reached the limits of their strength.

“That cannot be all of his army?” Temeraire said doubtfully: there were not two thousand men. Upon the hills of the eastern bank, a small party of French dragons huddled together around a pair of guns, established to provide cover for the retreat, but there were only four beasts.

“They are spread out along the river to the north,” Laurence answered, reading the dispatch which Gerry had come running to bring him. The division was a clever stratagem: if the Russians came at any one crossing in strength, Napoleon might sacrifice that portion to save the rest; if the Russians divided themselves to attack more than one, Napoleon could use his advantage in dragons to concentrate several of his companies more quickly than the Russians could do the same. Each group remained large enough to fend off the Cossack harrying bands.

Laurence finished reading and turned to the crew. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we have intelligence that Napoleon has declared to his soldiers that he will not go dragon-back while any man in his army remains this side of the Berezina; if he has not lied, he is somewhere along the river even now.”

A low murmur of excitement went around the men. “If we can only get him, let the rest of them get away!” Dyhern said, pounding his fist into his palm. “Laurence, will we not go at once?”

“We must!” Temeraire said urgently, hunger and cold forgotten. “Oh! Why are the Russians only standing about, waiting?”

This criticism was unjust; the Russian sergeants were already bawling the men into their marching-lines, and even as Laurence ordered his officers to make ready for action, orders were sent running around the rest of the dragons: they were to go and survey the French crossings, and bring back word of any company of unusual strength. “Temeraire,” Laurence said, as he loaded his pistols fresh, “pray have Grig pass the word to look for Incan dragons in particular: there were not many with the French, and those few will surely be devoted to Napoleon’s protection. Ma’am, I hope you will be comfortable in camp,” he added, to Mrs. Pemberton, Emily Roland’s chaperone. “Mr. O’Dea will do his best for you, I trust.”

“Aye, ma’am, whate’er can be done,” O’Dea said, reaching to pull on the brim of a cap he no longer had; his head was swathed instead in a makeshift turban of furs and flayed horsehide, flaps dangling over the ears and the back of the neck. “We’ll strike up a tent and do what we can about some porridge, Captain.”

“Pray have not a thought for me,” Mrs. Pemberton said; she herself was engaged in low conversation with Emily and handing her an extra pistol, one of her own, and a clean pocket-handkerchief.

The French dragons on their hill lifted wary heads when they saw the Russian dragons coming, but did not immediately take to the air themselves; the guns beside them were heaved up, waiting if they should descend into range. Laurence looked across at Vosyem, the Russian heavy-weight nearest him; there was little love lost between himself and Captain Rozhkov, but for the moment they were united in their single goal. Rozhkov looked back, his own flying-goggles blue, and they shook their heads at each other in wordless agreement: Bonaparte would not be with this company, the most exposed to Russian attack; in any case, there were no carriages nor wagons, and very few cavalry.

They flew northward along the line of the river: already a dozen marching ant-lines dotted across the frozen white surface. Behind them, the French company fired up signal-flares in varied colors, surely signaling to their fellows ahead. As the Russian dragons closed in on the next crossing, a volley of musketry fired to greet them, and they had to go higher aloft: painful in the cold weather, and there was not an Incan dragon to be seen; only a few French middle-weights gathered by their guns, who eyed the mass of Russian heavy-weights with some anxiety.

There were, however, a dozen wagons crossing the river under guard by the company, pulled by teams of horses, many of them having lost their hoods: they went frantic and heaving with the dragons overhead. And the wagons were laden not only with wounded but with pillaged treasure, and in alarm Laurence heard Vosyem rumble interest, cocking her head sideways to peer down, as one of the wagons toppled over, and a load of silver plate slid out across the snow, blazing with reflected light.

Laurence heard Rozhkov shout at her, and haul brutally upon the spiked bit she wore, to no avail. The other Russian heavy-weights had seen the treasure as well—they were snarling at one another, snapping, throwing their heads violently to shake their officers off the reins. “Whatever are they hissing for?” Temeraire said, craning his head about. “Anyone can see Napoleon is not there. Napoleon is not there!” he repeated to the Russian dragons, in their tongue.

Vosyem paid no attention. With one last heave of shoulders and neck, she flung Rozhkov and his two lieutenants off their feet, leaving them dangling by their carabiner straps, and her reins were loose. With a roar, she banked sharply, her wings folding, and stooped towards the baggage-train. The other Russian heavy-weights roared also and flung themselves after her, all of them, claws outstretched: worried more about which of them would reach the laden carts first than about the enemy.

“Oh! What are they doing!” Temeraire cried; Laurence looked away, sickened. In their savage eagerness, the Russian beasts were making no effort to avoid the hospital-carts or the camp-followers, and wounded men were spilling out across the ice with cries of agony. The Russian dragons skirmished among them, heedless; others were smashing the rest of the carts, dragging them up onto the bank, mantling at each other with hisses and displays of their claws and teeth.

Temeraire turned wide circles in distress aloft, but there was nothing to be done. He could not force a dozen maddened dragons to come to heel, even if the Russian beasts had not already disdained him. “Temeraire,” Laurence called, “see if you can persuade the smaller beasts to come along with us. If we can only find Napoleon, we can return and perhaps by then marshal the other heavy-weights; we can do nothing with them at present.”

Temeraire called to Grig and the other grey light-weights, who were not unwilling to follow him; none of them could hope for a scrap of treasure with so many heavy-weights engaged. Even as they turned away, two of the Russian dragons went smashing into the frozen surface of the river, clawing at each other, rolling over and over, and the ice broke with a crack like gunfire: three wagons and dozens of screaming men and women sank at once into the dark rushing water beneath.

Temeraire’s head was bowed as he flew northward, leaving the hideous scene behind them. They flew past another four crossing-points: Marshal Davout’s regiments, much diminished yet still in fighting-order. He had few guns and almost no dragons left, most of them forced to flee ahead of the retreat outside Smolensk, but his soldiers had climbed up onto the edges of their hospital-wagons, holding their bayonets aloft to form a bristling forest of discouraging points. “A courier has told him, I suppose,” Temeraire said, “how the Russian dragons were behaving: oh! Laurence, I hardly know how to look at them. That they should think I would do such a thing, go after a hospital-cart, and only for a little silver!”

“Well, it was quite a lot of silver,” Grig said, in a faintly envious tone, then hastily added, “which does not of course mean they were right to do it: Captain Rozhkov will be so very angry! All the officers will, and,” he finished glumly, “I expect they will take away our dinners.”

Temeraire flattened his ruff, not liking this speech very much. He beat away quickly, urgently. The river swung back eastward beneath them, snow blowing in little drifts across the ice. Over the next stand of hills, they found one smaller crossing already completed: tracks through the snow on both sides of the bank, and the ground atop the highest point on the eastern bank trampled and bared of snow, where dragons had lifted away the guns and followed the company. But the soldiers had already vanished into the trees on the western bank.

Laurence swept the countryside and the river ahead with his spyglass, anxiously. As little as he wished Napoleon to escape, he feared crossing the enemy’s lines. The Russian light-weights were not accustomed to any combat beyond their own internal skirmishing; they did not make a strong company, and now there were French dragons on every side, backed with guns and companies in good order. “We must begin to think of turning back,” he said.

“Not yet, surely!” Temeraire cried. “Look, is that not a Cossack party, over there? Perhaps they will know where Napoleon has gone.”

He flung himself ahead, eagerly. It was indeed a Cossack raiding party: seven small beasts, courier-weights perhaps half Grig’s size, each of them carrying a dozen men hanging off their bright hand-woven harnesses. The Cossack men were armed with sabers and pistols; their clothing was stained dark in places with dried blood. Parties such as theirs had been harrying the French rear all the way from Kaluga; they had been largely responsible for the speed of Napoleon’s collapse, but they had neither the arms nor the dragon-weight to meet regular troops. The chief man waved them a greeting, and Dyhern shouted back and forth with him in Russian, through Laurence’s borrowed speaking-trumpet; they landed, and Temeraire came to earth beside them. Dyhern leapt down and went to the Cossacks, carrying Laurence’s best map; after a quick conversation, he came back to say, “The Prince de Beauharnais is crossing over the next two miles with nine thousand men and twelve dragons: none of them are Inca.” Laurence nodded silently, grim with disappointment; but then Dyhern moved his finger further north on the map and said, “But there are two Incan beasts with the Guard company crossing here, where the river forks, with a carriage and seven covered wagons.”

“Only two dragons?” Laurence said sharply.

The Cossack captain nodded and held up two fingers, to confirm, and then moved his hand in a circle and flung it in a gesture westward, conveying flight. “He says all the other Inca dragons flew away west four days ago in a great hurry: they took nothing with them,” Dyhern said.

“They must have run out of food,” Temeraire suggested, but Laurence doubted. For the Incan dragons, all the potent instincts of personal loyalty were bound up in their Empress, now Napoleon’s consort. He was the father of her child, which had secured their devotion to him. That in extremis he should have chosen to send away those beasts who could have been relied upon to protect him, first and foremost, seemed unlikely.

“But we have not seen any other French heavy-weights, either,” Temeraire said. “None, except that poor Chevalier—so perhaps he had to send them all away, and kept only those two.” He was hovering, looking yearningly north, his ruff quivering. “Laurence, surely we must try. Only imagine if we should learn that he escaped us, so near—”

Laurence looked again over the map. Only the merest chance, and between them and the fork lay a force of twelve French dragons, and a strong company of men and guns. If the French should see a danger to Napoleon, and turn back in force—“Very well,” Laurence said. He could not bear it, either. “Dyhern, will you ask them to show you a way to come at the fork from the east? We must go around de Beauharnais, far enough to be out of sight, to have any hope of coming at his chief.”

Temeraire flew low, just brushing the snow from the tree-tops, and flat-out; setting such a pace that the small Russian dragons fell behind, just barely keeping in sight. Laurence did not slow him. Speed was the only chance, if there were any. If the Cossacks’ intelligence were good, then Temeraire alone could halt Napoleon’s party, if he arrived in time to catch them out in the open; then the Russian light-weights might catch them up, and provide a decisive blow. But if the Cossacks had been mistaken, if there were more heavy-weight dragons or more guns, a company too great for Temeraire alone to stop, then the Russian light-weights could not make victory possible. There was no chance, either, of going back to get the Russian heavy-weights—and just when their power might have told significantly, if the French truly had sent away all of their own larger beasts.

Laurence was well aware that if they found a force too large for them, he would have a difficult struggle against Temeraire’s inclination to keep him from an attempt which could only end in disaster. When Temeraire turned at last sharply westward again, going back towards the river, Laurence stood in his straps, despite the still-ferocious wind and cold, and trained his glass ahead of their flight. The trees broke; he could see the two branches of the river flowing, the marshy ground around them, and then his heart leapt. A very large covered wagon was trundling up the far bank onto a narrow road, being pulled not by horses but by one of the Incan dragons; and behind it rolled a carriage, large and ornamented in gold, with a capital N blazoned upon the door. Another Incan dragon waited anxiously beside the guns on the eastern bank, its yellow-and-orange plumage so ruffled up the beast looked three times its size—but even so, not up to Temeraire’s weight. There was not another dragon in sight.

“Laurence!” Temeraire said.

“Yes,” Laurence said, his own much-restrained spirits rising; two dragons and guns, and on the order of three hundred men, to guard only a carriage and a wagon-train? He reached for his sword, and loosened it in its sheath. “At them, my dear, as quickly as you can. Mr. Forthing! Pass the word below, ready incendiaries!”

Temeraire was already drawing in air, his sides swelling; beneath his hide trembled the gathering force of the divine wind. Faint cries of alarm carried to Laurence’s ears as the French sighted them; the Incan dragon in the lead abandoned the wagon and leapt aloft, beating quickly, and the second came up to join it, both going into a wide, darting, back-and-forth flying pattern, making themselves difficult to hit. The men on the ground sent up a volley of flares even as Temeraire swept in.

“Ware the guns,” Laurence shouted to Temeraire; a flick of the ruff told him he had been heard. Twelve-pound field guns, two of them, spoke together, coughing canister-shot and filling their approach with shrapnel; but Temeraire had already beaten up out of their range, skimming the top edge of the powder-smoke cloud, and as he swept over the emplacement, the bellmen let go a dozen incendiaries.

“Ha! Well landed!” Dyhern shouted: fully half of the incendiaries were exploding among the French gun-crews. Others rolled away; one burst on the river and sank into the hole it had blown itself in the crust. And then Temeraire was past; he doubled back on the guns and unleashed the divine wind against their rear—the endless impossible noise, ice-coated trees on the bank shattering like glass bottles, the housing of the guns cracking and coming apart. One still-smoking barrel rolled down the hill and carried away two massive snowbanks; it struck the back wheel of the carriage, shattering it, and the cascade half-buried the entire vehicle in snow.

The Incan dragons dived, ready to make raking passes along Temeraire’s vulnerable sides. But Temeraire twisted sinuously away to one side and traded slashing blows with the heavier beast: blue-and-green plumage with a ring of scarlet around its eyes, which gave it a fierce look. There were nearly two dozen Imperial Guardsmen on its back; rifle-fire cracked from their guns, the whine of a bullet passing not distant from Laurence’s ear, and six of them leapt for Temeraire’s back as the dragons closed.

The sky wheeled around them, a tumult of colors and cold wind; then Temeraire pulled away, leaving the Incan beast bleeding. “Make ready for boarders!” Forthing was shouting. The Guardsmen had leapt across to Temeraire’s back latched one to the other; only two of them had made hand-holds, but that had been enough to hold the rest on.

The Guards made intimidating figures: they were all tall, heavily built men, bulky in leather coats and fur caps drawn tightly around the head, with broad sabers and four pistols each slung into their harness-straps. They steadied one another until they had all latched on; then in a tense, disciplined knot they came forward swiftly along the back, covering one another’s advance with pistols held ready.

Laurence now had cause to regret his threadbare crew. He had but few officers; his choices had been scant, in New South Wales, and of that motley selection only a handful had survived the wreck of the Allegiance: small Gerry, who could not yet hold a full sword, brandishing a long knife instead; for midwingmen, besides Emily Roland, he had only Baggy, still gangly in the midst of getting his growth and only lately advanced from the ground crew; and thin, stoop-shouldered Cavendish: brave enough, but likelier by the look of him to be blown overboard by a strong gust of wind than to cross swords with one of Napoleon’s Grognards.

Laurence had not wanted to take men from his fellow-captains; Harcourt had offered, handsomely, when they had parted ways in China. But Laurence knew he and Temeraire were deep in the black books of the Admiralty; he might have been reinstated, as a matter of form and necessity, but no-one could imagine that those gentlemen would turn a kindly eye on any officer coming from his crew. That consideration might now doom the men he did have, or even Temeraire.

By unconscious agreement, Roland and the boys were thrust back to make a final defense between the oncoming boarders and Laurence—a prospect which he could only find grotesque; and yet the fault was his own, for not taking more pains to fill out his crew. Forthing had no second or third lieutenant behind him, no older midwingmen who might have bolstered their resistance; there were no riflemen aboard.

Ferris and Dyhern drew their swords; they joined Forthing, clambering along the line of Temeraire’s back to meet the Frenchmen. Laurence drew his own sword and his pistol—the metal painfully cold to the touch; he could only hope it would fire.

The world turned over again, a dizzying spiral, and then suddenly they were in a steep climb: the Incan dragons were pursuing Temeraire hotly, trying to prevent him getting his breath back again; they were wary of the divine wind. Laurence had learned the trick of leaning hard into his straps, his boots planted firmly against hide, to keep from falling over during hard flying, but even so he could not avoid a disorientation that blurred all the world into meaningless shapes and colors.

He shook his head and blinked streaming eyes. The Guards had all kept their feet. Forthing climbed into range—he stood up in his straps—he fired his pistol; one of the Guards fired his at the same instant. A cloud of smoke, and the Guardsman fell; Forthing jerked, twisting around in his straps. A spray of blood burst from his cheek and was slapped back onto his skin by the wind, bright red around a torn bleeding hole: the bullet had gone into his mouth and through the side of his face. Another pistol fired off, the grey smoke anonymous; Laurence could not tell whether the shot was on their side or the French.

Dyhern was grappling with one of the Guardsmen; he was a big man himself, but the other, a younger man, was bearing him down. Ferris looked down Temeraire’s back, and then, greatly daring, reached down and unlatched his second strap, and let go the harness: he fell ten feet straight down onto the man overpowering Dyhern, and managed to catch onto one of his straps. Before the Frenchman could recover, Ferris had pistoled him in the face. He thrust the spent pistol into his belt, and bent to latch himself on in the dead man’s place; the corpse went falling away.

All sensation of weight abruptly vanished. Temeraire had opened just enough distance from his pursuers to turn; now he arced over, mid-air. He hung suspended a fraction of a moment, and then he was plummeting, down onto the two Incan dragons so close on his heels. The dragons shrieked, bending their heads away to protect their eyes from Temeraire’s claws and teeth, entangled with one another. The world fractured: Temeraire roared in the dragons’ faces as they all fell, the divine wind drumming beneath his skin again; he roared again, and a third time, his wings beating the air wildly. They were falling, all falling together; Laurence clung to the straps, straining, and saw the other men doing the same. Like being in the tops mid-gale, struggling to reef a sail. And then Temeraire smashed the two dragons together down into the riverbank beneath him, tree-limbs snapping, snow and ice erupting all around like gunpowder smoke.

Laurence shielded his eyes with his sleeve, but the flying snow thickly coated the top of his head, covered over his mouth and ears. They had stopped moving. If Temeraire had been wounded in the fall—

He dropped his arm only to see one of the Guardsmen slash his own straps and come leaping in four quick strides directly towards him. Emily Roland lunged at the man from one side, Baggy from the other; but he had more than a foot in height on either of them, and bulled his way past them. He had a saber ready in his hand; Laurence pulled up his own pistol and fired—with no result; the powder was too wet. He flung the pistol into the Frenchman’s face instead, and met the descending sword on his own: a brutal impact. The Frenchman pounded down on Laurence’s sword with main strength, trying to beat it out of his grip, and seized his arm.

The surface shuddered beneath them, Temeraire shaking himself free of the coating of snow. The Frenchman let go his hold on Laurence’s arm and seized his harness instead, to keep his footing. They were close enough to have embraced; Laurence managed to lean back far enough to club the man across the jaw with the guard of his sword-hilt. The man shook his head, dazed, but struck down again with his saber; the Chinese sword shrieked as the two blades scraped against each other, but held.

They were matched and straining; then the bright crack of a pistol, and hot blood and brains spurted into Laurence’s eyes. He jerked aside. Emily Roland had shot the man in the back of the head. Laurence wiped blood and ice from his face as Temeraire reared up onto his feet and shook himself steady. The two Incan dragons lay still and broken beneath him, shattered by the divine wind more than by the fall; the green-blue-plumed head had fallen back limply across the ice, a blaze of incongruous color.

Laurence looked back. The last two Guardsmen on Temeraire’s back had surrendered: Forthing was taking their guns and swords, and Ferris was binding their arms. All their fellows upon the dragons had been slain: the bodies of men lay scattered around the wreckage of the beasts.

Further up the river, the soldiers around the carriage stood frozen and staring back at them, clutching their rifles, pale. Laurence felt Temeraire draw breath, and then he roared out once more over all their heads, shattering, terrible. The men broke. In a panicked mass they fled, some scrambling and slipping up the river in blind terror; some flying back eastward, undoubtedly into the waiting arms of the Cossacks; most however ran for the western bank, vanishing into the trees.

Temeraire stood panting, and then he threw off the battle-fever; he looked around. “Laurence, are you well? Oh! Have you been hurt? What were those men about, there?” he demanded, narrowly, catching sight of the prisoners.

“No, I am perfectly well,” Laurence said; his shoulders would feel that struggle for a week, but his skin had scarcely been broken. “It is not my blood; do not fear.” He laid his hand upon Temeraire’s neck to soothe him; he well knew what the fate of the prisoners would be, if Temeraire imagined them responsible for having harmed him.

For once, however, Temeraire was willing to be diverted. “Then—” Temeraire’s head swung back towards the gilded carriage, standing now alone upon the bank and still buried deeply beneath the snow. He leapt, and was on the riverbank. He pushed the large wagon away, with a grunt of effort, and scraped the bulk of the drift away from the carriage with his foreleg. Laurence sprang down, with Dyhern following; they went to the door, which had been thrust half an inch open against the snow before it stuck, and dragged it open against the remnants of the drift.

Two women inside were huddled in terror half-fainting against the cushions: a beautiful young lady in a gown cut too low for respectability, and her maid; they clung to each other and screamed when the door was opened. “Good God,” Dyhern said.

“The Emperor,” Laurence asked them sharply in French. “Where is he?”

The women stared at him; the lady said, in a trembling voice, “He is with Oudinot—with Oudinot!” and hid her face against the maid’s shoulder. Laurence stepped back, dismayed, and looked back at the wagon: Temeraire reached for the cover with his talons, seized, tore.

The sun blazed on gold: gold plate and paintings in gilt frames; silver ornaments, brass-banded chests and traveling boxes. They threw back the covers: more gold and silver and copper, sheaves of paper money. They had taken only Napoleon’s baggage: the Emperor was safely away.




Chapter 2 (#u2c004f13-30c1-5c1a-8410-7b0e03864e9d)







“IT DOES NOT SEEM reasonable,” Temeraire said disconsolately, “that when I should have liked nothing more than to have a great fortune, none was to be had; and now here it is, just when I should have preferred to catch Napoleon. Not,” he added, hurriedly, so as not to tempt fate, “that I mean to complain, precisely; I do not at all mind the treasure. But Laurence, it is beyond everything that he should have slipped past us: he has quite certainly got away?”

“Yes,” Hammond answered for Laurence, who was yet bent over the letters which Placet had brought them all from Riga. “Our latest intelligence allows no other possibility. He was seen in Paris three days ago, with the Empress: he must have gone by courier-beast the instant his men had finished crossing. They say he has already ordered another conscription.”

Temeraire sighed and put his head down.

The treasure remained largely in its wagon, which was convenient for carrying. Laurence had insisted on returning those pieces which could be easily identified, such as several particularly fine paintings stolen from the Tsar’s palace, but there were not so many of those; nearly all of it had been chests full of misshapen lumps of gold, which had likely been melted in the burning of Moscow, and which no-one could have recognized.

Temeraire did not deny it was a handsome consolation; but it did not make amends for Napoleon’s escape, and while he was not at all sorry that the Russian heavy-weights now looked on him with considerably more respect and had one and all avowed that in future they would listen to him when he told them not to stop, they would not believe that he had not done it for the gold. “I was doing my duty,” he had said, stiffly, “and trying to capture Napoleon, which is what all of you ought to have done, too.”

“Oh, yes,” they all answered, nodding wisely, “your duty: now tell us again, how much gold is in that middling chest with the four bands around it?” It was not what he called satisfying.

“And now Napoleon is perfectly comfortable at home again,” Temeraire said, “having tea with Lien, no doubt; I am sure she has not spent the winter half-frozen: I dare say she has been sleeping in a dozen different pavilions, and eating feasts. And we are still here.”

“Still here?” Hammond cried. “Good Heavens, we took Vilna not three days ago; you cannot consider our residence here of long duration.”

But Temeraire personally did not make much difference between Vilna and Kaluga; yes, he could see perfectly well that upon the map there were five hundred miles between them, and it was just as well to have crossed them, and anyone might say that they were in Lithuania instead of Russia; but he found little altered, and nothing to be very glad of, in their present surroundings. The coverts, on the very fringes of the city, were unimproved; the ground frozen ever as hard as in Russia proper, and though there was more food to be had, it remained unappetizing: dead horses, only ever dead horses. Laurence had arranged for a bed to be made up for him of straw and rags, which daily the ground crew built up a little more, but this was a very meager sort of comfort when Temeraire might look down the hill at the palace in the city’s heart lit up with celebrations from which dragons were entirely excluded, although the victory could not possibly have been won without them.

“Indeed I am almost glad,” Temeraire said, “that the jalan had to return to China; I should not know what to say to them if they had met with such incivility; not to speak of ill-use. It is one thing to endure any number of discomforts in the field, on campaign; one must expect these things, and I am sure no-one would say we were unwilling to share in the general privation. It is quite another to be left sitting in mud, in frozen mud, and offered half-thawed dead horsemeat, while the Tsar is feasting everyone else who has done anything of note, and yet he never thinks of asking any of us.”

“But he has,” Hammond said earnestly. “Indeed, Captain,” he added, turning towards Laurence, “I am here to request your attendance: it is the Tsar’s birthday to-day, and it is of course of all things desirable that you should attend as a representative not only of His Majesty’s Government—” Temeraire flattened his ruff at the mention of that body of so-called gentlemen, but Hammond threw an anxious look at him and hurried on. “—but of our friendship, indeed our intimate ties, with China; I wondered if perhaps you might be prevailed upon to wear the Imperial robes of state, which the Emperor has been so kind as to bestow upon you—”

Despite a strong sense of indignation at being himself neglected in the invitation, Temeraire could not help but approve this idea, wishing to see Laurence, at least, recognized as he deserved. But Laurence had a horror, a very peculiar horror, of putting himself forward. He would at once refuse, Temeraire was sure; he always required the most inordinate persuasion to display himself even in honors which he had properly earned—

“As you wish,” Laurence said, without lifting his head from his letters; his voice sounded distant and a little strange.

Hammond blinked, as though he himself had not expected to meet with so quick a success, and then he hastily rose to his feet. “Splendid!” he said. “I must do something about my own clothes as well; I will call for you in an hour, then, if that will do. I hope you will pardon me until then.”

“Yes,” Laurence said, still remote, and Hammond bowed deeply and took himself out of the clearing nearly at a trot. Temeraire peered down at Laurence in some surprise, and then in dismay said, “Laurence—Laurence, are you quite well? Are you ill?”

“No,” Laurence said. “No, I am well. I beg your pardon. I am afraid I have received some unhappy news from England.” He paused a long moment still bent over the letter, while Temeraire held himself anxious and stiff, waiting: what had happened? Then Laurence said, “My father is dead.”

Lord Allendale had been a stern and distant parent, not an affectionate one, but Laurence was conscious that he had always had the satisfaction of being able to respect his father. While not always agreeing with his judgment, Laurence had never blushed for his father’s honor, both in private and in public life unstained by any reproach; and in this moment, Laurence was bitterly conscious that his father could not have said the same of his youngest son. His treason had broken his father’s health, had certainly hastened this final event.

Laurence did not know if his father could ever have been brought to understand or to approve the choice which he had made. He had reconciled himself to his own crime only with difficulty, and he had before him every day all the proofs which any man could require, of the sentience and soul of dragons. He had seen those dragons dying hideously, worn away by the slow coughing degrees of the plague; he had with his own eyes witnessed their agony and seen the carrion-mounds of a hundred beasts raised outside Dover. He had known what the Ministry did, in deliberately infecting the dragons of Europe with that disease: a wholesale murder of allies and innocents as much as of their enemies.

All this had been required to turn his hand to the act, to make him bring the cure to France and give it into Napoleon’s hand. And even so, he had recoiled from the act at first. He had dreamt of the moment of crisis again only three nights ago; of Temeraire saying, “I will go alone,” and afterwards in the dream Laurence found himself in an empty covert, going from clearing to clearing, calling Temeraire’s name, with no answer.

With an effort, Laurence recalled himself to his circumstances: Temeraire’s head was lowered to peer at him, full of anxiety. “I am well,” he said again, and put his head on the dragon’s muzzle as reassurance. “I am not overset.”

“Will you not take anything? Gerry,” Temeraire called, raising his head, “pray go and fetch a cup of hot grog for Laurence, if you please; as we have nothing better it must do,” he added, turning back down. “Oh, Laurence; I am so very sorry to hear it: I hope your mother is not hurt? Have the French invaded them again? Ought we go at once?”

“No,” Laurence said. “The letter is a month old, my dear; we are too late for the funeral rites.” He did not say that he should scarcely have been welcome, with or without a twenty-ton dragon. “He died in his bed. My mother is not ill, only much grieved.” His voice, low, faded out without his entirely willing it to do so. The letter was in his mother’s hand, brief, sharp-edged with sorrow. His father had been hale and vigorous five years ago, still in his prime; she might justly have hoped not to be made a widow so soon. When Gerry came running with the hot cup, Laurence drank.

“In his bed?” Temeraire was muttering to himself, as if he did not understand; but he did not press any further for explanation; he only curled himself around Laurence, and offered the comfort of his companionship. Laurence seated himself heavily upon the dragon’s foreleg, grateful, and read the letter over again so he might at least have the pleasure of being unhappy with those whose unhappiness he had caused.

“I am sorry, Laurence; I do not suppose he could have heard that your fortune was restored,” Temeraire said, looking over at the wagon-cart, still piled high.

“He would have known me restored to the list,” Laurence said, but this was only a sop to Temeraire’s feelings. He knew that neither his fortune, nor his pardon and the reinstatement of his rank, which might restore him in the good graces of the world, would have weighed at all with Lord Allendale. That gentlemen could more easily have brooked his son’s public execution, on a charge he knew to be false, than to see his son laureled with gold and praised in every corner, and known to him as a traitor.

He might have told his father that worldly concerns at least had not weighed with him; he had acted only as his conscience had brutally required. But he had not seen his father since his conviction; he had not presumed to write, even after his sentence had been commuted to transportation, nor since his pardon. And they would now never speak again. There would be no opportunity for defense or explanation.

And Laurence could not but regard Temeraire’s extravagant hoard with dismay, although the Russians had been more astonished by his being willing to return any part of the treasure than by his keeping it entirely for himself. Laurence had asked how and where they should surrender the pillaged goods; the other aviators had only stared uncomprehending, and asked how he had managed to persuade Temeraire to surrender even the Tsar’s paintings, which could not have had a plainer provenance. He knew perfectly well what his father would have thought of a fortune obtained with so little character of law to the process.

But there was something too much like bitterness in that thought. Laurence made himself fold up the letter, and put it away in his pocket. He would not dwell upon what he could not repair. They were still at war; the French Emperor might have escaped, but the French army was yet strung out between Vilna and Berlin, what was left of it, and there would surely be more work to do soon enough.

There were other letters; letters from Spain: one from Jane Roland and one from Granby, with an enclosure addressed to Temeraire directly. Laurence meant to open them, but Temeraire said tentatively, “Laurence, I suppose you must begin to dress: Hammond will be calling for you in a quarter of an hour. Roland,” he called, “will you pray bring out Laurence’s robes? Be sure you do not track them in the dirt.”

Too late, Laurence recalled the conversation he had not attended; too late, protest sprang to his lips. Emily Roland was already with great ceremony and satisfaction unfolding the immense and heavily embroidered robes of silk which belonged to the son of the Emperor of China, and not to that of Lord Allendale.

When Laurence had gone, Temeraire brooded, watching the celebrations get under way. Even the magnificent display of fireworks which opened the evening did not please him: a stand of trees blocked a great deal of the covert’s view, which he felt might have been taken into account, and the faint drifting smoke only reminded him that he and every other dragon had eaten nothing but porridge and burnt horse for months.

“And it is not as though they did not know any better, anymore,” Temeraire said resentfully. He had refrained from making any remarks, while Laurence might be distressed by them any further, but after he had left for the celebration, Temeraire could no longer restrain himself. “It is not as though they had not seen, for themselves, that dragons should like to eat well, or live in a more orderly fashion; they have seen the arrangements of the Chinese legions.”

Churki, Hammond’s dragon—or rather, the Incan dragon who had decided, quite unaccountably in Temeraire’s opinion, to lay claim to him; Hammond by no means wished to be an aviator, nor even liked to fly—lifted her head out of her ruffled-up feathers; she had huddled down to await his return. “Why do you keep complaining we have not been invited to that ceremony? Plainly it is a gathering of men: how could any dragon come into that building where they are holding it?”

“They might make buildings large enough for us to come into, as they do in China,” Temeraire said, but she only huffed in a dismissive way.

“It is inconvenient for people to always be in buildings built to our size; it means they have too far to go to get from one thing to another,” Churki said, which had not occurred to Temeraire before. “Naturally they like to have places of their own; there is nothing wrong in that, nor that they should hold their own celebrations. And as far as I can tell, you are the senior dragon here; who else should be offering thanks for victory, and arranging the comforts of your troops, but you?”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, abashed. “But how am I to arrange any comforts, when we are only thrown upon a miserable covert, and have nowhere else to go?”

Churki shrugged. “This does seem a poor city,” she said, “and there are no large plazas of stone where dragons would ordinarily sleep or gather; but something may always be contrived! There is good enough timber in those woods there, and it would not be more than a few days to put down a floor of split logs, if you sent all those Russians to fetch a few dozen. Then you must pay men and women, if you have not enough in your own ayllu to carry out the work, to prepare ornaments and a feast. I do not see that there is any great puzzle about it,” she added, rather severely.

“Well,” Temeraire said, and would have protested that the woods were certainly property belonging to someone or another, but he could not help feeling it would be really complaining, then; the sort of complaining that shirkers did, when they did not want to work. Laurence had a great disgust of shirkers. “Ferris,” he called instead. “Will you be so good as to go into town for me, and make some inquiries? And pray can you see where Grig has got to?”

The crush of the ballroom would have been sufficient to stifle a man wearing something other than heavy silk robes. Laurence endured grimly both the heat and the attentions of the company. The robes were meant for a man presumed by their makers to be the natural center of any gathering he attended, and in this setting they had the happy power of ensuring him that position; he certainly outshone every man present, and most of the women. Hammond was aglow with delight, presenting him without hesitation to men of the highest rank as their social equal, and presuming upon the association to address himself to them. Laurence could not even check him, in public as they were, when Hammond was the King’s representative.

And the solitary one here, even though he was not even properly an envoy to Russia at all, but to China—but no other British diplomat had managed to keep up with the Tsar during the tumult of both retreat and pursuit. Lord Cathcart had been forced to flee St. Petersburg early on when Napoleon’s army had seized it; the ambassador in Moscow had decamped that city shortly before its fall, and Laurence had no idea what had become of the man. Only Hammond, with the benefit of a dragon as traveling-companion, had been able to stay with headquarters all the long dusty way.

“I am entirely reconciled to Churki’s company—entirely; I cannot overstate the benefits of having made myself so familiar, to the Tsar and his staff,” Hammond said, in low voice but with a naked delight that Laurence could not help but regard askance. “And, quite frankly, they think all the better of me, for being as they suppose her master; they value nothing so much as courage, and I assure you, Captain, that whenever we have caught them up, and I have been seen dismounting her back, and instructing her to go to her rest, without benefit of bit or harness, I have been received with a most gratifying amazement. I have arranged to have it happen in sight of the Tsar three times.”

Laurence could not openly say what he felt about such machinations, or about Hammond saying, “My dear Countess Lieven, pray permit me to make you known to His Imperial Highness.” He could only do his best to escape. A storm of cheering offered him an opportunity at last: the Tsar making his entrance to the pomp of a military band, and soldiers strewing the path that cleared for him with prizes: French standards, many torn and bloodstained, symbols of victory. Laurence managed to slip Hammond’s traces and take himself out onto a balcony. The night air, still bitterly cold, was for once welcome. He would have been glad to leave entirely.

“Ha, what a get-up,” General Kutuzov said, coming onto the balcony with him, surveying Laurence’s robes.

“Sir,” Laurence said, with a bow, sorry he could not defend himself against any such remark.

“Well, I hear you can afford them,” Kutuzov said, only heaping up the coals. “I have not heard so much gnashing of teeth in my life as when you brought that wagon-load of gold into camp, and all the rest of those big beasts nursing along scraps of silver, over which they nearly quarreled themselves to pieces. Tell me, do you think we could buy off these ferals with trinkets?”

“Not while they are starving,” Laurence said.

Kutuzov nodded with a small sigh, as if this was no more than he expected. There was a bench set upon the balcony. The old man sat down and brought his pipe out; he tamped down tobacco and lit it, puffing away clouds into the cold. They remained in silence. The revelry behind them was only increasing in volume. Outside on the street, on the other side of the back wall around the governor’s palace, a single shambling figure limped alone through a small pool of yellow lamp-light, leaving a trail dragged through the snow behind him: a French soldier draped in rags, occasionally stopping to emit a dry, hacking cough; dying of typhus. He continued his slow progress and disappeared back into the dark.

“So Napoleon has got away,” Kutuzov said.

“For the moment,” Laurence said. “I believe, sir, that the Tsar is determined on pursuit?”

Kutuzov sighed deeply from his belly, around the stem of the pipe. “Well, we’ll see,” he said. “It’s good to have your own house in order before you start arranging someone else’s. There are a thousand wild dragons on the loose between St. Petersburg and Minsk, and they aren’t going to pen themselves up.”

“I had hoped, sir, that you had thought better of that practice,” Laurence said.

“Half my officers are of the opinion we should bait them with poison and hunt them all down. Well, what do you expect, when they are flying around eating everything in sight, and sometimes people? But cooler heads know we can’t afford it! If it weren’t for you and those Chinese beasts, Napoleon would have had us outside Moscow last summer, and we wouldn’t be here to chat about it.” Kutuzov shook his head. “But one way or another, something must be done about them. We can’t rebuild the army when our supply-lines are being raided every day. You’ll forgive me for being a blunt old man, Captain,” he added, “but while I can see why you British would like us to finish beating Napoleon to pieces, I don’t see much good in it for Mother Russia at present.”

Laurence had already heard this sentiment murmured among some of the Russian soldiers; he was all the more sorry to hear it espoused by Kutuzov himself, the garlanded general of the hour. “You cannot suppose, sir, that Napoleon will be quieted for long, even by this disaster.”

“He may have enough else to occupy him,” Kutuzov said. “There was a coup attempt in Paris, you know.”

“I had not heard it,” Laurence said, taken aback.

“Oh, yes,” Kutuzov said. “Two weeks ago. That is why his Incan beasts went racing off home—back to that Empress of theirs. She seems to have managed everything neatly enough: all the men involved were rounded up and shot before the week was out. But Bonaparte is going to be busy enough at home for some time, I expect. Anyway, as long as he doesn’t come back to Russia, I don’t see that it’s our business to worry about him. If the Prussians and Austrians don’t like their neighbor, let them do something about him.”

At this juncture, Hammond appeared to retrieve Laurence and draw him back into the ballroom; he was worried and yet unsurprised when Laurence related the substance of the conversation to him. “I am afraid far too many of the Russian generals are of like mind,” Hammond said. “But thank Heaven! The Tsar, at least, is not so shortsighted; you may imagine, Captain, how profoundly he has been affected by the misery and suffering which Bonaparte has inflicted upon his nation. Indeed he would like a word with you, Captain, if you will come this way—”

Laurence submitted to his doom, and permitted Hammond to usher him up to the dais where the Tsar now sat in state; but when they had approached the Tsar rose and came down the steps, much to Laurence’s dismay, and kissed him on both cheeks. “Your Highness,” the Tsar said, “I am delighted to see you look so well. Come, let us step outside a moment.”

This was too much; Laurence opened his mouth to protest that he was by no means to be treated as royalty; but Hammond cleared his throat with great vigor to prevent him, and the Tsar was already leading the way into an antechamber, advisors trailing him like satellites after their Jovian master. “Clear the hallway outside, Piotr,” the Tsar said to a tall young equerry, as they came into the smaller room. “Your Highness—”

“Your Majesty,” Laurence broke in, unable to bear it, despite Hammond’s looks, “I beg your pardon. I am foremost a British serving-officer, and a captain of the Aerial Corps; I am far from meriting that address.”

But Alexander did not bend. “You may not desire the burden which it represents, but you must endure it. The Tsar of Russia cannot be so uncouth as to insult the emperor who chose to bestow that honor upon you.” Nor, Laurence unwillingly recognized, be so unwise as to insult an emperor who could send three hundred dragons to Moscow; he bowed in acknowledgment and was silent.

“We will take a little air together,” Alexander said. “You know Count Nesselrode, I think, Mr. Hammond?”

Hammond stammered agreement, even as he cast an anxious sideways glance at that gentleman, who certainly meant to begin issuing demands as soon as his Imperial master was out of ear-shot of haggling: demands for money, which Hammond was far from being authorized to meet on Britain’s behalf. But Laurence could do nothing to relieve his discomfiture. He followed the Tsar out upon the balcony.

A greater contrast with the scene which he had overlooked, from the other side of the palace, could scarcely be envisioned: the streets before the palace gates were thronged with celebrating Russian soldiers, shouting, screams of laughter, a blaze of lanterns, and even the occasional squib of makeshift fireworks contrived from gunpowder. Alexander looked with pardonable satisfaction upon his troops, who had pursued Napoleon across five hundred barren miles in winter, and yet remained in fighting order.

“I trust you were not put to excessive trouble to return the portraits, Your Highness,” the Tsar said. “I was given to understand it quite impossible to extract prizes from the beasts, once taken.”

“By no means, Your Majesty,” Laurence said. “I must assure you that dragons, while having no more natural understanding of property rights than would a wholly uneducated man, may be brought to an equal comprehension; Temeraire was entirely willing,” this a slight exaggeration, “to restore all the stolen property to its rightful owners, if only provenance might be established.” Laurence paused; he disliked very much making use of an advantage he had not earned, but the opportunity of putting a word into so important an ear could not be given up. “It is a question of education and of management, if you will pardon my saying so. If a dragon is taught to value nothing but gold, and to think of its own worth as equal to that of its hoard, it will naturally disdain both discipline and law in the pursuit of treasure.”

But Alexander only nodded abstractly, without paying him much attention. “I believe you were speaking with good Prince Kutuzov, earlier this evening,” he said, surprising Laurence; he wondered how the Tsar should already have intelligence of an idle conversation, held not an hour since, in the midst of his ball. “I am sorry to have dragged him so far from his warm hearth. His old age deserved a better rest than his country—and Bonaparte!—have given him.”

Laurence spoke cautiously, feeling himself on the treacherous grounds of politics; did Alexander mean to criticize the old general’s views? “He has always seemed to me a great deal of a pragmatist, Your Majesty.”

“He is a wise old warrior,” Alexander said. “I have not many such men. And yet sometimes the wiser course requires such pains as may make even a wise man shrink from them. You, I am sure, understand that Bonaparte’s appetite is insatiable. He may lick his wounds awhile; but who that has seen the wreck of Moscow could imagine that the man who went on from that disaster to continue a futile pursuit will long be dismayed?”

The pursuit had not seemed nearly so futile at the time, to one among the prey. If Napoleon had been able to feed the Russian ferals for another week, if the Chinese legions had reached the end of their own supply a week earlier; on so narrow a thread had the outcome turned. But Laurence did not need to be persuaded of Napoleon’s recklessness. “No,” he said. “He will not stop.” Then slowly, he added, “He cannot stop. If his ambition was of a kind which could be checked by any form of caution, he would never have achieved his high seat. He does not know fear, I think; even when he should.”

Alexander turned to him, his face suddenly alight and intent. “Exactly so!” he cried. “You have described him exactly. A man who does not know fear—even of God. Once even I permitted myself to be lost in admiration of his genius; I will not deny it, though I have learned to be ashamed of it. And yet at that time, it seemed to me such courage, such daring, demanded respect. But now we have seen him for what he is; in the ruin of his army he has been revealed: a fiend who gorges on human blood and misery! If only we had captured him!”

“I am very sorry he should have escaped,” Laurence said, low.

He had tried to comfort himself, after the first bitter disappointment, with common sense: Bonaparte would surely not have left himself exposed in any way that might have rendered him vulnerable to capture. He had undoubtedly crossed with a strong company, in good order, and remained always in the very heart of his Old Guard. There had not been any real chance. But common sense was insufficient relief; Laurence feared Alexander was too right, when he said that Napoleon would not be checked for long. He would raise a fresh army, the drum-beat would begin again. The Russian Army and the Russian winter had won them not a year’s reprieve.

“I am determined it will not be so,” Alexander said. “He may have slipped away; but we will not allow him to escape justice forever. God has granted us victory, and more than that, has left our enemy weakened. We must seize this opportunity of destroying his power. It is our duty to liberate not only Russia but all Europe from this scourge of mankind. I will pursue him; I will see him brought down! When my soldiers stand in Paris, as his trampled into Petersburg and Moscow, then I will be satisfied to go home again; not before!”

Alexander’s face was flushed with vehemence. Laurence regarded the Tsar soberly. It was impossible to doubt the sincerity of his inspired wrath. But the Tsar spoke not of forcing Napoleon to sue for peace, or make concessions of territory; he spoke of driving Napoleon from his throne. To take Paris—the very idea was fantastical. All of Prussia yet lay under the yoke of France; Austria was docile and shrinking before him; and Napoleon would surely defend the heartland of France desperately, with every resource in his power—which, Laurence well knew, included a vast and devoted army of dragons. And behind them, the greatest cities of Russia lay in rubble and in ruin; feral dragons roamed the countryside pillaging at will. Kutuzov’s might be the loudest voice, but it would not be the only one advising Alexander to go home and put his own house in order.

“Well,” Hammond said, as they left the palace together, a little while after, “I suppose I will either be knighted, or sent to prison; I have left the Government very few alternatives.”

Laurence regarded him with concern. “What have you promised the Russians?”

“A million pounds,” Hammond said.

“Good God!” Laurence said, appalled. “Hammond, what authority have you to offer a tenth such a sum?”

“Oh—” Hammond gestured impatiently. “I am overstepping my orders, but the plain truth is, it cannot be done with less; likely it must be twice as much. Their finances are in the most monstrous wreck imaginable.”

“That, I can well believe,” Laurence said. “Can it be done at all?”

“I am not going to tempt fate by making any such prediction,” Hammond said. “Bonaparte has overturned too many thrones and armies. But I will say—if it is ever to be done, it must be done now. He has been pushed over the Niemen already; Wellington is ready to strike in Spain. We will not get a better chance. But if we are to get anywhere at all, we must bring the Prussians over; and to do that, we must empower the Russians to make a real showing. I will call it cheap at the price, if a million pounds should have that effect.”

Hammond concluded almost defiantly, as if he were making an argument before the king’s ministers, rather than in a half-deserted street in Vilna, before a man nowhere in their good graces. Laurence shook his head.

“Sir,” he said, “I think you have forgotten one critical point. Can you conceive that the King of Prussia should ever agree to join us in opposing Bonaparte while his son and heir remains hostage in Paris?”

Hammond said, “His officers will force him to it. All of East Prussia longs to throw off Bonaparte’s yoke. A few Russian victories, and his own generals will be ready to mutiny to our side if he does not embrace the effort—”

“And then what do you imagine will happen to the prince?” Laurence snapped; Hammond paused, as if so minor a consideration had not occurred to him.

“Bonaparte cannot mean to offer any harm to the boy,” Hammond said, uneasily.

“His father may be less willing to rely upon such a conviction,” Laurence said.




Chapter 3 (#u2c004f13-30c1-5c1a-8410-7b0e03864e9d)







TEMERAIRE COULD NOT HELP but enjoy Laurence and Hammond’s surprise, when they came back into the covert and found the work quite advanced: a central plaza already laid out, full of squares framed with logs. The Russian light-weights were filling these with stones and sand, which they were gathering from the riverbed and the hills near-by, using the water-troughs for shovel-scoops.

“Yes,” Temeraire said, with what he felt was a deserved complacency, “we are further along than I should have expected. I did not imagine that the heavy-weights would make themselves any help at all, but once they understood that I meant to feast them, many of them became quite interested.”

“But what have you done!” cried Hammond. “You must have torn up an entire stand of timber—”

“We have,” Temeraire said, “but that is all right: I paid for it, and the owner told Ferris he did not mind at all, as long as we would not eat his cattle; and then I bought those, too, so he was perfectly satisfied.”

The cows were already roasting upon spits over a roaring fire, under the interested supervision of Baggy. “Only, I thought it would be a shame to see such good beef go to waste, sir,” he said, looking at Laurence sidelong. “And Temeraire said he thought there wouldn’t be any harm this once—”

“Yes, very well,” Laurence said, not entirely with approbation.

Temeraire privately did not understand why Laurence considered cooking strictly the province of the ground crew, as it seemed to him quite one of the most important functions of his crew as a whole, but he knew that Laurence was strict with Baggy: the boy had been promoted from the ground crew, to try and fill the dearth of officers, and there seemed to be some need to keep him only at an officer’s tasks. “I hope you do not mind, Laurence,” Temeraire said apologetically, “as it is for the party, and not just ordinary eating: so it needs a close eye upon it. Yardley will let the meat overcook, and say that it is healthy, when it is only quite inedible.”

“I am sorry that he has not learned better; I will contrive to hire a proper cook, if I can,” Laurence said.

“That,” Temeraire said, “would be splendid. Oh! How lovely it is, Laurence, to be in funds again—although of course,” he added hastily, “ten thousand pounds’ worth of the treasure is properly yours, not mine: I have not forgotten my debt, in the least.”

“I know of no debt whatsoever you owe me,” Laurence said, very nobly, although Temeraire knew that Laurence had lost all his money in a law-suit, which had been settled against him because everyone had thought him a traitor at the time. That hideous memory had long preyed on Temeraire’s spirits, and he could not help but rejoice that he had the power to restore Laurence’s fortunes at last; he did not at all mean to let Laurence refuse, out of generosity. But Temeraire was puzzled, a moment, to think how he might induce Laurence to take the gold; Laurence certainly could not have carried it himself, if Temeraire pressed it upon him.

Inspiration struck. “Perhaps you would prefer if I should arrange repayment in some nicer form,” Temeraire said. “—I suppose there are jewelers, somewhere near?”

“I do not suppose it,” Laurence said, very quickly. “Let us by all means put it into the Funds; I will see if I can find a banker, instead.”

“That will suit me perfectly, if you prefer,” Temeraire said triumphantly, and then belatedly wondered if there had been something unpleasantly smacking of artifice, in this maneuver; if it were the sort of thing that Lien might have done. He almost asked Laurence, but realized that he could not do so without undermining the good effects, so instead he excused himself privately that no-one could really complain of being given ten thousand pounds.

“And,” he added thoughtfully, “I do not suppose, Laurence, that you might put us in the way of some fireworks of our own? I should like to have them set off from that mountain-ridge, up there, so we can see them very clearly from this plaza; and also, if it might be arranged, some musicians.”

Laurence by no means begrudged Temeraire or the dragons a share in the feasting; and indeed he could scarcely wish Temeraire to spend the pillaged treasure of Russia better, than to feed her army’s dragons. He only chafed to be arranging entertainments rather than engagements; but the latter could not be had merely for the asking. There was no supply for heavy-weights ahead of them, nor likely to be, unless Hammond’s outrageous promise were fulfilled.

In the meantime, they should have to sit in Vilna and watch Napoleon’s army fleeing westward, knowing that the disordered companies and solitary officers who this day escaped would be marching back to meet them in springtime: their ranks fleshed out, their equipment restored, once again the instruments of their master’s limitless ambition. Laurence thought again of the Grand Chevalier, panting out her life in slow gasps on the frozen ground; the corpses in their dotted lines running all the way from Moscow. Pale faces stared from the corners of his mind, and he could not help seeing among them his own father’s face, equally pale and still, lying blind in the chapel at Wollaton Hall. A sense of futility dragged upon his spirits as he walked from the covert the next morning, to be thrown off only with an effort; Laurence thought perhaps he ought be glad for any employment.

He presented himself to the colonel of the foot artillery regiment stationed nearest the covert: the soldiers had been among those who had been borne dragon-back during the escape from Moscow, and had lost some of their fear of dragons. “Your Highness,” the colonel said, bowing deeply, when Laurence had been shown in; Laurence sighed inwardly, and accepted the greeting as well as the far more welcome offer of a cup of tea—strong and flavorful, although the Russians did not know anything of introducing the beverage to milk.

“I should be grateful for the loan of your regimental band,” Laurence said, after the niceties were observed, “if they should not object to coming into the covert this evening. The men should not need to remain the night,” he added, “—only until we have drunk the Tsar’s health: in vodka, of course.” He was well aware of the power of this inducement to obtain the cooperation of many a reluctant soldier.

The colonel looked rather relieved than otherwise, and far from objecting, expressed his gratitude at their having been singled out for such an honor. He could not have meant this with any sincerity; likely the man had been expecting some far more egregious demand, presented on the grounds of his supposed rank.

Whatever the cause, however, Laurence could only be pleased by the extraordinarily stirring marches that evening, which accompanied the fireworks from the heights. Any remaining hesitation he might have felt at what seemed frivolity was overcome by the fixed and rapt expressions upon the faces of all the Russian dragons, while they stared skywards and their tails beat upon the ground in an unconscious accompaniment to the martial music.

This was succeeded by dinner: roast cattle, each stuffed and laid upon a bed of boiled potatoes and turnips, sufficient to sate even the hungriest beast. It had proven impossible to find even one dragon-sized vessel of brass, much less anything like an elegant service, but Temeraire’s ingenuity had contrived a solution: the bed of a wagon had been taken off its frame, painted gaily and festooned with tinsel, and this was loaded up and ceremonially presented to each dragon in turn, while Grig, at Temeraire’s side, described the military achievements of that beast in glowing terms. The dragons swelled visibly with both dinner and pride, and those still anticipating their turn were loudest in applause.

Not all the dragons had come, at first; some were restrained by their own disdain, and some by their officers. But the noise and the aroma drew the laggards in by degrees, and not only them; some of the Cossack dragons looked in, and after this even some wholly unharnessed dragons whom Laurence supposed must be the local ferals. These were not the half-starved Russian beasts escaped from their breeding grounds, but small wild dragons, green and sparrow-brown, with narrow heads and large bony crests atop them in stripes of oranges and yellows.

They were wary, but full of yearning, and Temeraire was quick to welcome them: he nudged the other beasts to make room and called them in; they were invited to gnaw upon the roasted carcasses. By way of making thanks for this hospitality, the ferals made a great deal of approving noise after every speech Temeraire made describing the work of the fighting-dragons; so there were no objections to their presence.

When at last every beast of three dozen had been fed, and they lay sprawled out and nearly somnolent upon the floor, Temeraire straightened up and cleared his throat, and made them all a long speech in the Russian dialect of the dragon-language. Laurence could not follow this very well, but it was certainly well-received; the dragons snorting approval, and sometimes even rousing up enough to roar. And then, at its conclusion, Emily Roland and Baggy came solemnly forward and presented each military beast with a chain of polished brass, upon which hung a placard carved—a little crudely, but legibly—with the dragon’s name.

A more thunderstruck company, Laurence had never seen. The Russian heavy-weights had been used to spend their many hours of leisure squabbling ferociously, and even skirmishing with one another; the light-weight beasts had to devote their energies to stealing scraps for their dinners. They had never been taught anything of generosity or of fellowship, and before now they had been too resentful of being pushed aside to learn anything from the practices of the Chinese legions, except to envy them their more regular supplies of food. But even the most disdainful beast was overcome by this display; they presented their heads low in orderly turn to receive their decorations, and as they departed to their several clearings, each almost humbly thanked Temeraire for his hospitality, while their officers stared in amazement. The success of the evening was complete.

“I do think it came off well, Laurence, do you not agree?” Temeraire said, in a victorious mood. He was settling at last to sleep upon the floor, with the pleasant company of four or five small ferals huddled around him, their bodies warming him. The remnants of the feast were being cleared away: the bones, picked clean, had been heaped up onto the wagon and driven away to be put into the porridge-pot for tomorrow. “Even if it cannot compare to the dinners which we have enjoyed in China,” he added.

“Your company was entirely satisfied, which must be the aim of any host,” Laurence said. “I cannot think they found anything wanting.”

“That is true,” Temeraire said, “even if it is because they do not know any better; but I am too pleased to be unhappy tonight, Laurence, and that dinner has set me up entirely. Do you suppose we will be sent forward to rejoin the pursuit tomorrow? Surely Napoleon is getting even further away while we are waiting here.”

But Laurence said, “My dear, I am afraid there can be no question of that.”

Temeraire had been drifting to sleep even as he spoke, but this unwelcome news woke him quite. He listened in dismay as Laurence explained: more supply was needed, and more money, and the Prussians should have to throw in with them, and it seemed the Austrians were wanted, too, and any number of conditions.

“But Napoleon and his army are running away now,” Temeraire said in protest. “You and Hammond were saying only yesterday that we cannot afford to let them escape, if we are to defeat him in the spring.”

“It will certainly make the task more difficult,” Laurence said. “But we cannot defeat him in the spring in any case, unless we have the Prussians; if they will not join us, the Russians cannot risk pressing on.”

“I do not see why the Prussians should be so necessary to us,” Temeraire said. “Napoleon beat them quite handily at Jena, after all; he rolled up all the country in a month’s time. If they would like another chance to show what they can do, of course they might have it, but as for waiting for them—!”

However, there was nothing to be done without supply. That much, Temeraire understood reluctantly. He had not liked to say so to Laurence, but he had really not felt like himself, those last few weeks of the campaign, when it had been so cold, and with not nearly enough food. There had been no use complaining—one could only keep flying, and hope that sooner or later one came to something to eat. But the gnawing in his belly had been extremely distracting, and he had often felt a strange distance from himself; once to his horror he had even found himself looking at a dead soldier down in the snow thinking that the fellow might go into the porridge, with no harm done anyone.

Temeraire shuddered from the memory. “If the Russians will not send forward the supply, we can do nothing,” he said, “I do see that much: so how are they to be worked upon? When will the Prussians come in?”

But this was evidently to be left to diplomats. As Temeraire had very little confidence in those gentlemen accomplishing this or any task in any reasonable time, he was by no means satisfied, and when Laurence had gone to sleep, he yet lay wakeful and brooding into the night, despite his comfortably full belly and warm sides.

“Pray will you stop shifting?” one of the little ferals said drowsily: they spoke a dialect not far at all from Durzagh, the dragon-tongue, although flavored with a variety of words borrowed from Russian and German and French. “No disrespect,” she added, “only it is hard to get warm if you are always moving.”

Temeraire hastily stilled his claws: he often could not help furrowing the earth when he was distracted, even though he was ashamed to have so fidgety a habit, and this time he was still more annoyed to see he had accidentally torn up some of the handsome new flooring. “I beg your pardon,” he said, and then he asked, “Tell me, do any of you fly over Prussia, now and then? It starts two rivers over from here, I think. Have you seen any Prussian fighting-dragons, in the breeding grounds there? Or perhaps further west? I suppose Napoleon would not have kept them close to their officers.”

The ferals conferred among one another: they had not, as their own territory stopped at the Niemen. “But I am sure we can pass the word, if there is someone you would like to send a message to,” one of them said.

“That,” Temeraire said, “would be very kind of you; I should be very grateful for any news of a dragon named Eroica, in particular.”

“One of the dragons who live near Danzig might know something,” the first feral said. “They take a lot of fish there, so a few of them like to change places now and then with one of their neighbors, and they get the news there. We will have a wander over to their territory in the morning, if,” she added, a bit craftily, “we don’t have to spend too much time looking for breakfast.”

“Not as much as would fill a cup of tea!” the quartermaster said belligerently, when Temeraire would have let the ferals take a share of the porridge, the next morning.

Temeraire flattened down his ruff. That Russian officer had spent all the day before scowling at the preparations for the feast, as though he did not like them doing anything to feed themselves. Temeraire had very little use for him anyway; in his opinion, the man might at least have improved on horsemeat by now if he had only made a push to be useful. The quartermaster added something in Russian, which Temeraire recognized as impolite, and put his boot on top of the large lid.

“I do not see myself why we ought to be sharing with those dragons,” Grig said, peering over Temeraire’s shoulder.

“That is because you are very shortsighted,” Temeraire said, but he knew perfectly well that he could not start a quarrel with the quartermaster over the food: that was a sure road to having all the Russian dragons join in, all of them trying to get more of it for themselves, and then all the food would be spoilt, or nearly; he had seen it happen more than once. “Laurence,” he called instead, and when Laurence came from his tent, he explained the circumstances.

“That the attempt ought to be made is certain, and cheap at the cost of some porridge: I will speak to the quartermaster,” Laurence said soberly. “But pray do not speak of this project before Dyhern: it can only be cruelty to raise hopes whose fulfillment is so uncertain. I very much hope that your efforts will be answered, but you must not expect a positive reply. We are a thousand miles from France, and I would be astonished if Bonaparte had not taken the cream of the Prussian aerial forces straight to his own breeding grounds.”

He went to draw the quartermaster aside. While they conferred, Temeraire considered Laurence’s warning; he could not help but see that it would be very difficult to get word from so far away. The ferals should certainly grow bored, or decide that they did not want the trouble of crossing through someone else’s territory.

When the porridge was finally served out, and the ferals had eaten, Temeraire announced, “And if someone should really bring me word of Eroica, I will even give them—” he drew a deep breath and went on, heroically, “—I will give them this box full of gold plate. Roland, will you unlatch it, if you please?”

Not without a pang, he watched her lift the lid to display the contents: the heaped plates of Napoleon’s own service, stamped with eagles around the letter N, lustrous and beautifully polished. The ferals all sighed out as one, as well they might: Temeraire could almost not bear to really mean it, although he had steeled himself to make the offer.

He drew his eyes away with an effort. “But,” he added sternly, to the wide upturned eyes of the ferals as they looked at him, “I do not mean to be taken in; I must be able to tell that the message really is from Eroica, otherwise I will certainly not give the reward.”

The ferals flew away, fortified and inspired, already making plans with one another gleefully about how they should share the treasure, or a few loudly announcing that they should find Eroica all alone, and not have to share it at all. Temeraire looked dismally at the box. “Pray close it up and put it away, Roland,” he said, feeling it was already lost; he sighed and felt that after this, at least no-one should say he was unwilling to make sacrifices for the war.




Chapter 4 (#u2c004f13-30c1-5c1a-8410-7b0e03864e9d)







What is happening with the egg? You have been very slow in sending me reports these last few weeks, and I cannot see any good reason for it, when the French have just been running away and you have not even had any fighting.

We have been very busy here ourselves. I am sorry to say that Wellesley, or Wellington, or whatever his name is at present, insisted on our retreating back on Ciudad Rodrigo for the winter, only because Soult and Jourdan came up with half a dozen dragons and some few thousand men; and to make matters worse, the food was all sent by the wrong road, so we none of us had anything to eat, not even porridge, for four days. Fortunately, we discovered there were a great many handsome pigs running wild in the forests, which made good eating; and it was not in the least my fault if some of them ran away across the army’s march, nor can I call it unreasonable that the soldiers should have shot a few of them to eat. I cannot see why Wellington should have made such a fuss over it.

But I took it very meekly when he shouted, and I did not even snort a little fire in his direction: I have decided I will not quarrel with him at all. I had a word with him when I came, about making Granby an admiral, and Wellington said he is quite certain Granby deserves all the honors which a grateful nation might possibly bestow, and he has promised will see they are given, if only we should get the French out of Spain.

We will certainly manage it in the spring, even if everyone is lazing in winter quarters at present. I do not suppose you will have got them out of Germany by then, however. It is a great pity you have let Napoleon get away.

ISKIERKA

PS: The Spanish fire-breathers are much smaller than I am.

Temeraire received this piece of provocation with strong indignation. “And this, when I wrote to her only three days ago,” he said, his tail lashing in expression of his sentiments, and threatening to demolish a stand of young ash-trees, “as soon as we had come to Vilna, and after we have had so much trouble: nothing to eat for four days, she says, with pigs running wild everywhere just for the taking! I should have given a great deal for a pig, anytime these last four months.”

“You must make some allowances,” Laurence said absently, reading between the lines, where Granby’s hand had noted the rather more alarming numbers which had actually provoked the retreat: 90,000 men & cavalry. “The courier-route to Portugal is sadly beset by French aerial patrols, and nearly all the post must go by sea. Iskierka will not have received your letter yet.”

This did not much incline Temeraire to forgiveness, however, and worse yet, Iskierka’s complaint only increased his brooding concern over their egg. As this wonder of nature was presently resting within the precincts of the Imperial City in Peking, tended and watched over by a dozen anxious dragon nursemaids and a battalion of servants, he might reasonably have remained free from alarm. But while they had traveled in company with the Chinese legions, Temeraire had enjoyed near-weekly reports about the egg, relayed by Jade Dragon couriers to and from the Imperial City, and had indulged himself in any number of inquiries, suggestions, hints—every form of eager interference by which he might assure himself of the safety and welfare of his future offspring. Now that those lines of communication had been severed, their keenly felt absence made Temeraire more anxious than he might have been if they had never been opened at all.

“You do not think, Laurence,” Temeraire said, fretful, “that one of the Cossacks might go, perhaps? They seem very handy at traveling light; and I am sure it is not above three weeks’ journey, through friendly territory.”

This was a very fanciful way of describing a route across four thousand miles of frozen, half-deserted countryside, lately ravaged by two enormous armies and full of savagely angry feral dragons and equally angry peasants, either of which might offer violence to one of the feather-weight Cossack beasts. These, in any case, were neither especially speedy nor inclined to travel alone: as raiders and scouts they were matchless, but they were not reliable couriers.

“I am afraid not,” Laurence said, and Temeraire sighed.

Hammond had been on the other side of the clearing, giving a final reading to his own dispatches, which would go by the return. As Temeraire’s voice could not be called confidential, and Hammond had no notion of respecting privacy, he now intruded upon their conversation. “You are quite certain it is impossible, Captain?” he asked, which could only encourage Temeraire. “I had thought perhaps Captain Terrance might go—”

“What’s that?” Placet said, cracking open an eye: the aforementioned Terrance was fast asleep upon the slope of his back, hat tipped over his head and snoring, having dosed himself liberally with brandy against the chill of the flight from the Baltic. “Fly to China? I should like to see us do any such mad thing. No, indeed: we have enough to do, flying back and forth to Riga, and going all over the sea trying to find wherever the ships have got to, to-day.”

“Only it is naturally of the greatest importance to re-establish our communications with the Imperial court,” Hammond said to Laurence, as they walked together to the next of the dinner-parties: Laurence’s attendance had become de rigueur, by virtue of the Tsar’s having recognized his rank.

That doing so was of the greatest importance to Hammond’s position, Laurence had no doubt. Hammond could hardly be considered to be fulfilling his duty as Britain’s ambassador to China when he was halfway around the world from any representative of that nation. But what value such a connection should have to the war effort, Laurence doubted extremely.

“We cannot expect that the Emperor will once more consent to loan us any considerable force, when we have been unable to maintain the previous one,” he said.

“I am by no means of your mind, Captain,” Hammond said quickly. “By no means—I think you give insufficient weight to the spirit of amity which has been established between our nations, and the sense of alarm which the extent of Napoleon’s ambitions have raised, in the better-informed members of the Imperial court—”

“An alarm which his defeat in Russia must now greatly allay,” Laurence said.

For this Hammond had no answer. After a brief pause, he resumed by saying, “Perhaps if we were to establish a way-station, as it were? I have consulted some of the Russian maps of the northern coastline, and I thought perhaps I might propose to the Admiralty that a frigate be stationed in the Laptev Sea—”

Laurence stared. Hammond trailed off, uncertainly. “Sir,” Laurence said, “if you are willing to delay until next August, when I believe some portions of that body of water may have melted, I suppose a ship could be navigated along the Siberian coast; she should have to get out of the Arctic before October, however.”

“Oh,” Hammond said, and lapsed into a gloomy silence. He had given Terrance the fatal packet, with its extravagant promise of a million pounds. In three days’ time it would arrive in London; within a week, he would have an answer, and might well be recalled to England in disgrace. And if Hammond were recalled, Laurence knew he would likely be ordered back as well. Once back in Britain, he and Temeraire would undoubtedly be sent to the most unpleasant and useless posting which malice might contrive: some isolated sea-washed rock off the western shores of Scotland, with no chance of any action at all, nor communication with other dragons who might be influenced by Temeraire’s heretical notions of justice.

He might refuse that order, of course, if it came. The Admiralty would court-martial him again, Laurence supposed, with a kind of black humor; he knew he should feel a greater distress at the prospect than he did. But indeed, the event could not cause him much pain. Even under his present circumstances, he could scarcely envision any future where he might resume a place in British society. So be it: he would let them try him in absentia, this time, and ignore the outcome. He would only need to grieve another conviction insofar as it retained the power to distress his mother.

They had reached the steps of the house; the footman was holding the door. Laurence could not but find the contrast absurd, to step from such thoughts onto the threshold of a glittering ball and find generals and archdukes bowing to him; it lent the scene a kind of unreality, as though he sojourned briefly in a fairy-world which would vanish away as soon as he had left it.

“They must see the necessity,” Hammond murmured worried, to himself. “They must, they must. If you please, Captain, I should like to present you to Prince Gorchakov—”

Laurence moved through the room still suffused with that feeling of falsehood, all the world a theater-stage; the men and women he spoke to flat as playing cards, all surface and no substance. Everyone spoke of the same things, repeated the same remarks: Napoleon had been seen in Paris, Napoleon was raising another army. Ferals had destroyed the estate of Count Z—and the summer house of Princess B—. The two threads were often wound together, and Napoleon almost blamed more for having unleashed the starved and chained dragons than for his invasion, it seemed.

“Murat should be hanged like a spy, in my opinion,” one gentleman declared, whom Laurence did not recognize: he wore a uniform free from decorations. “And his master after him, if he had not been permitted to escape! And the beasts slaughtered, one and all. A few porridge-vats full of poison—”

“And when Napoleon returns, with a hundred of his own beasts in the air?” Laurence said, distant and dismissive; he would have turned away.

“Then poison them, too!” the man said, glaring and belligerent. “At least I hope some hero might be found, who would go into a French camp and make the attempt, instead of this rank folly where tenderly we nurse monsters who would devour us all. Now I hear we are to take porridge out of the mouths of our own serfs, over whom God has set us as fathers and mothers, and set it out to feed the beasts—Oriental corruption! Because they are slaves to their own dragons, they would see the rest of us brought low and groveling in the dirt beside them—”

He was drunk, Laurence realized, cheeks suffused with a stain that owed more to wine than heat. It did not matter. “Sir, you are offensive,” Laurence said. The company around them were drawing away, slightly; faces turning aside, hiding behind fans. “You must withdraw the remark.”

“Withdraw!” the man cried. He shook off the hand of another gentleman, who was trying to whisper in his ear. “Withdraw, when murdered children cry out for justice, from the serpents’ bellies? By all the holy saints, when I think that God above sent a plague, which would have cleansed them one and all from the earth—!” Here he was forcibly interrupted, by his friend and another officer, who were both speaking to him in urgent low Russian. But he paused only a moment, and shook their hands off. “No! I will not knock my head to a man who chooses to parade himself around under the supposed dignities bestowed by a barbaric king—”

Hammond’s hand was on his own arm, but Laurence took it away, and struck the man sharply across the face, breaking him off mid-sentence; the man fell stumbling back into the hands of his friends. Laurence turned away before he could get up again and walked for the door, quickly. People made way murmuring, glancing towards his face and looking away again. Laurence did not know what they saw written there. He felt only weary, and disgusted, and angry with himself: if he had been less distant from his company, he must have seen that he was speaking with a man too drunk to be answered. But now there was nothing to be done.

Hammond caught him by the door and trotted down the steps beside him, his face stricken. “I hope you will act for me, Mr. Hammond,” Laurence said.

“Captain,” Hammond said, “I must ask whether—if the gentleman should seek satisfaction, then—as I understand, there is a prohibition against dueling for aviators, strictly enforced—”

Laurence halted in the road and turned to stare at him. “Mr. Hammond, if you can explain to me how, having agreed to call myself the son of the Emperor of China, I am to make amends to a man who has so egregiously insulted him to my face, and call myself a gentleman, much less a prince, in future, I am ready to listen.”

Hammond gnawed on his lip. “No, no,” he said. “No, I quite see; it would entirely undermine the claim,” as though he merely considered the matter in a pragmatic light. “Ah! But wait; I am certain—I am almost certain, the gentleman is neither a prince nor an officer. As an Imperial prince, your rank, your elevated rank, must preclude your meeting anyone of such markedly inferior rank—you cannot distinguish someone so far beneath you. I must find out his name; I must speak to Kolyakin, in the Imperial household—I will call on him in the morning—”

Laurence turned away from Hammond’s mutterings and back to the drudgery of the ice-crusted snow, his head lowered. He could not quarrel with Hammond’s point, and it aligned too well with what he knew to be his duty; and yet all feeling revolted at making such a use of the distinction which the Emperor had bestowed upon him—to deny satisfaction to a gentleman whom he had so deeply and deliberately offended. And yet the severity of the insult had merited the reproof. Laurence had struck the man precisely because he had felt he could not accept anything but an apology so complete as to be abasement. But he had done so with the intention of giving satisfaction if asked for it, as the man surely would.

“You will speak with the gentleman’s friends, first, I hope,” Laurence said heavily, “and make it known to them that I will consider an apology. I should be glad to excuse his behavior on the grounds of drink.” He did not like soliciting an apology for an offense so great, and he did not see how the other man could offer one remotely satisfactory without appearing a coward, after receiving a public blow. But he could not stomach giving the man no recourse at all.

“Oh, yes, naturally,” Hammond said, already looking more relieved with every moment. “I will certainly arrange the matter.”

“And if you cannot,” Laurence said, “I must ask you to inform the gentleman’s friends that they must be ready to get him away instantly, should any mischance befall me.”

Temeraire roused when Laurence came back to the covert, and peered up at the stars. “I did not expect you another two hours, Laurence. Are you taken ill?” he asked, anxiously. He had overhead some of the Russian officers say that more than a thousand men had died yesterday, of some sort of fever, and Temeraire could not but recall that Laurence’s father had died in his bed, where nothing ought to have menaced him.

“No, I am well. I did not care to stay,” Laurence said. “Shall we read something?”

The temporary relief brought by this answer vanished by the next day: Temeraire was quite certain Laurence was not well after all. He was very silent, and spent nearly all the morning in his tent, writing letters and arranging his papers as though before a battle.

“Would there be any chance of some of the French army coming this way, after all?” Temeraire asked, when Laurence came out at last; perhaps Laurence had not said anything, because he did not wish to raise hopes.

But Laurence answered too easily. “I am afraid not,” he said. “I believe they have all crossed the Niemen, by last report.” So it was not that, either. Temeraire did not like to pry; he knew Laurence felt it a great rudeness to ask questions, and solicit information which had not been volunteered. But Laurence remained too-silent and grave all that day, and did not eat much of his dinner, which he took at the covert that evening for the first time since they had come to Vilna.

Temeraire had nothing to occupy him sufficient to distract him from these anxious observations. The Russians had no notion of aerial drill under ordinary circumstances, and on the amount of supply they possessed, all the dragons were inclined to sleep more than fly, anyway. Temeraire had made arrangements, through Grig, for some of the smaller beasts to spend the afternoon in his clearing, where Temeraire recited some poetry to them, and afterwards tried to spur them to discussion. But they mostly yawned, and then he yawned, too, and it was so very easy to drowse, even though Temeraire took very much to heart the instruction, from the Analects, that a dragon ought not spend more than fourteen hours of the day in sleep.

He tried to read alone, or have Roland read to him from the newspapers, when one might be found in a language which she read sufficiently well—Temeraire again felt the injustice that Sipho should have gone away with his brother and Kulingile; Kulingile had gone to the Peninsular Army, where would be no shortage of English newspapers, and perhaps even books, which anybody at all could read to him; and meanwhile Roland could only read in three languages, and not very well in any of them—or he might amuse himself by doing some mathematical problems in his head, only these made him drowsy as well.

So he was very much at leisure to worry, and think up new sideways questions which might approach the question of Laurence’s health. None of these produced a satisfactory answer. Laurence was not tired; Laurence was not too hot, nor too cold; Laurence did not have the head-ache. Laurence did indeed recall vomiting over the side during that typhoon in the year six, but he did not feel the least inclination to be similarly ill at present.

“Laurence,” Temeraire said finally in desperation, “perhaps you have heard of typhus?”

“I have,” Laurence said. “It is going through the hospitals, I am afraid; poor devils.”

“Oh! The hospitals only?” Temeraire said, much relieved. “You would have no thought of typhus, would you?”

“What, of being ill? None whatsoever. Whence has this sudden concern for my health arisen?” Laurence said, raising his head from his pistols, which he was cleaning.

“Only, I do not quite understand,” Temeraire said, “how your father seems to have died in his bed, and you have been so very quiet—”

Laurence said, “My father was seventy-two, and had been ill a long time, my dear; I may hope for another two score years myself, if nothing should—” He stopped very abruptly.

Temeraire was immediately alarmed, and only more so, when Laurence said, “Temeraire, I beg your pardon. I am not ill; but it is true that my thoughts are occupied. I am sorry that I should have let you see it, when I cannot confide their subject to you; honor demands my silence at present. Having said so much, I trust you will not press me further.”

“And I did not, but I very much wished to,” Temeraire said to Churki, unhappily, that afternoon, when Laurence had left with Hammond on yet another social occasion. Laurence’s speech had done nothing to make Temeraire feel less uneasy: entirely the reverse. Laurence’s idea of honor was very peculiar, and nearly all-encompassing; it had led him into dangerous situations before now.

“I should think so,” Churki said. “Why did you not insist on being informed further at once? What if he has got himself into some difficulty, which you ought to manage for him? Men do not always like interference, and by and large,” she added, “I do not hold with unnecessary interference; they ought to be allowed to manage their own affairs. But there are some matters which a respectable dragon ought not allow to go forward among her people; why, I have known men to be lured out of their ayllu to visit a woman in another, and then they are snatched up by some other dragon and never seen again, all because their own dragon did not intervene soon enough.”

“Well, I am sure Laurence has not been visiting some woman,” Temeraire said uneasily; it did occur to him that Laurence had been attending all these parties, at which he understood there were a great many ladies all in very dazzling gowns; and Laurence did have odd notions about what might be due the reputation of a gentlewoman. “Perhaps you are right; perhaps I ought to inform myself. Roland,” he said, turning to break in on her sword-drill with Baggy, “Roland, you would not happen to know which party Laurence has gone to, this afternoon? You might go after him, and just keep an eye upon him.”

Baggy dropped his sword at once and sat down looking grateful for the respite: he was finally filling out his well-stretched frame little by little, but remained still very lanky.

“I mightn’t at all,” Roland said, with feeling, wiping sweat and strands off her brow; she wore her sandy hair braided in a queue, but a great deal of it had escaped during the practice: her enthusiasm for the exercise was considerably greater than Baggy’s. “I should have to put on a dress. You had better ask Forthing to go after him, or Ferris: he can do the pretty when he has to.”

“Ferris, certainly,” Temeraire said, mindful of the wretched condition of Mr. Forthing’s coat, which he could hardly bear to have seen even within the confines of the covert, much less out in the world, as associated with any officer of his; neither was his appearance at all improved by the large wadding of bandages bound up over the wound in his cheek. “—pray ask him to go at once, if you please.”

“I’ll go!” Baggy volunteered, and scrambled up and away with a flailing of thin limbs and an expression of relief.

Ferris went out in a condition of which any dragon might be proud: in a neat grey coat, freshly sponged down and with a golden stick-pin in the lapel, trousers faultlessly white and boots well-polished. “I will find him, never fret, Temeraire,” Ferris said. “I have enough Russian to ask about, and there aren’t so many aviators about that people won’t remember a flying-coat.”

“And perhaps you might find Grig for me,” Temeraire said to Roland, after Ferris had gone, just in case: if any other dragon had been nosing about Laurence, Grig was sure to know of it.

But Grig did not need to be summoned: he was at that very moment darting into the clearing in a rush. “Temeraire, some of those ferals have returned, that you asked to go west for you; but they have come in over Symerka’s clearing, and he thinks they are trying to get at his treasure.”

“Oh! What treasure has he got to speak of, but three silver plates, dented!” Temeraire said, in some exasperation.

But this paucity in no wise deterred Symerka, who was indeed beating aloft furiously, launching himself at the two cowering ferals, who together could have fit under one of his wings. Temeraire had to roar very loudly to get his attention; so that the entire infantry battalion at the foot of the hill burst out of their tents and began milling around, and a few of them fired guns in panic.

“These are my guests, who have come to bring us intelligence, not to take anything,” Temeraire said to Symerka severely, putting himself in front of the ferals. “You cannot be supposing everyone a thief, and jumping on them without so much as a word.”

“Well, as you are vouching for them,” Symerka said, “I suppose they are all right; but I am sure that one looked towards my plates,” he added, stretching his neck as he flew back and forth before them a few more times, before at last subsiding and returning to his clearing.

“I am sorry you should have had so unfriendly a welcome,” Temeraire said to the ferals: it was their chief come back again, and one other with her, a thin pale-grey creature almost as white as Lien, except with grey eyes instead of red. Temeraire was sorrier yet when the feral chief declared herself quite overset, and in need of restoration after their fright: she could not speak a word until they were fed. The quartermaster refused to be of any use, and in any case the dinner porridge would not be ready for another four hours yet. Roland had to be sent down to the city with a gold coin, and Temeraire then had to see this go down the gullets of his visitors in the form of two handsome round-bellied pigs.

“Now then,” Temeraire said pointedly, when at last they had licked the last specks of blood from their muzzles.

“First,” the feral chief said, uncowed, “I should like us to be very clear on terms. I suppose you would agree I have had a share in bringing you the message, even if I don’t bring it myself, so long as I introduce you to someone who does?”

“Certainly,” Temeraire said, “and that is quite enough of terms to discuss, until there is such a message, as I suppose you mean that you don’t have it.”

“Well, no,” she said, “not yet: Bistorta here was not ready to believe me, that there was gold in it, and she says it is getting dangerous to go into France.”

“They are all gone mad for this Napoleon down there,” the pale-grey dragon said, in French, when Temeraire inquired of her. “All of them, whether they are harnessed or no. It has come to be so that they will herd you down for questioning as a spy if they do not know you. But your Prussian friends are there, yes, in the breeding grounds outside Moirans-en-Montaigne: I have seen them. It used to be I would take a sheep off their herders now and then, before the patrols grew so unfriendly. But these days, I would not risk going in except for gold, and as I told Molic here, I will believe in gold when I see it in front of my face; although you have certainly given us a handsome meal,” she added, “and so behold, I am ready to be persuaded.” She folded her wings neatly and tucked her head back in an expectant curve.

Temeraire sighed deeply and resigned himself to salting the wound: Roland and Baggy were told off to display the golden plate service once more, and the appreciative sighs of his guests only made him feel, all the more, what he would be losing. But he cheered himself that Bistorta could not say for certain whether Eroica himself were there, nor recall the names of any particular Prussian dragons; she might be entirely mistaken.

“But I will certainly attempt it,” she said, after one last acquisitive squint at the engraving upon the largest platter. “Oh! Will I not! But tell me now what I must say to this fellow Eroica, when I find him.”

“If you should find him,” Temeraire said, with emphasis, “you shall tell him that Dyhern is quite at liberty, and here with us, and we should like him to rejoin; and also all his comrades. Roland,” he turned his head, “I do not suppose you can learn from Dyhern which other Prussian aviators have been set free? Without telling them why, of course: Laurence is quite right that Dyhern ought not be distressed, when very likely we will not find Eroica after all.”

This list took some time to obtain; the ferals did not object to the delay, nor to eating a substantial share of Temeraire’s dinner when the porridge did at length finally come. “Eating fat, morning and night,” Molic said, with a replete sigh; her belly was noticeably rounded. “It makes you think twice about harness, doesn’t it?”

“No, it does not,” Bistorta said positively. “I mean no offense,” she added, “but it is not for me: following orders from one, who takes orders from another, for the sake of a third. Some of those dragons in France, they have never met this Napoleon at all, yet now they are ready to fight if you so much as hint he is not made of diamonds, all because he has given them a few pavilions and firework-shows. For me, I will stay in the mountains and be free; I would rather sleep in a meadow than beneath a painted roof.”

“Firework-shows,” Temeraire muttered, in fresh irritation: he was quite sure that the French dragons did not have to arrange their own entertainments; Napoleon would certainly see them invited to any general triumph.

At last Roland came with the list, written out in large letters, and Temeraire read it out to Bistorta; she listened carefully and permitted Roland to strap the list onto her foreleg, wrapped in several layers of oilskin and tucked into a map-case. “That will do,” she said, shaking it to be sure it wouldn’t fall off. “As long as I can take it off with my teeth, if I need to.”

“Perhaps we had better stay until morning?” Molic said hopefully, meaning breakfast, but Bistorta had been too much inspired by the display of gold to wait; she nodded a farewell and was aloft, Molic trailing after her with a little more reluctance. Temeraire saw them go, and then noticed the aviators were going to their beds; it had grown late.

“Why, Laurence has been gone a long while,” Temeraire said, “and Ferris is not back, either—I suppose he has found them, and has stayed in their company,” he added, striving not to be anxious, unnecessarily anxious. “I wonder where they are.”




Chapter 5 (#u2c004f13-30c1-5c1a-8410-7b0e03864e9d)







A CARRIAGE HAD BEEN WAITING for them, as close to the covert as the driver and his horses were willing to come. Hammond led Laurence to it with a miserable and anxious look, but in silence. Laurence had nothing he wished to say, and Hammond did not breach the wall of reserve which had risen around him.

The streets were busy with mid-day traffic, and their progress was slow. Laurence sat in the close stuffy box and watched the city move past through the window. “I am sorry for the inconvenient timing,” Hammond at last ventured. “The gentleman’s friends would not agree to meet earlier; they expressed doubts of his being entirely sober, by then.”

Laurence only inclined his head. He could not find any emotion within but a concern for Temeraire’s unhappiness, and this he could only permit himself to feel distantly. Hammond blamed himself that matters had come to such a pass, but wrongly; he had made every effort—he had made too much of an effort. His discreet inquiries to the Russian Imperial household had brought an instant answer: Baron Dobrozhnov was certainly beneath a prince of China, and the Tsar would as certainly order his immediate execution, for having offended an ally of such importance.

“But of course, you need make no official complaint,” Hammond had tried, desperately, after he had very reluctantly conveyed the message to Laurence.

“Have you heard from the gentleman’s friends?” Laurence had said, ignoring him, and to do Hammond credit, he did not pursue the attempt; it was absurd to suppose that the world would not know of it, if Laurence refused to meet Dobrozhnov by standing on the grounds of his Imperial rank.

He was not afraid; some deadening of the natural instinct of self-preservation had grown habitual, from long use, and he did not think he had anything to fear but his own harm or injury. The usual arguments for the prohibition of dueling, by an aviator, did not hold in his own case. Most dragons little felt the significance of their fighting work; they received no encouragement to be attached, themselves, to the causes for which they fought, and when their captains died would not remain in the field. But Temeraire would not abandon the struggle against Napoleon only because he was bereaved, thinking of nothing but his own grief and caring nothing for the larger cause; Temeraire would carry on their work.

Perhaps half an hour past the city walls, the carriage slowed as the wheels turned into a dirt lane and halted. Laurence opened the door: they had halted near a small stand of trees, on a narrow street barely dug out of the snow, ice mingled with pebbles and dust underfoot. A small solitary farmhouse stood atop a nearby hill, dark, with a peculiar weathercock in the shape of a rabbit; a few shaggy dark cows with snow dusted across the tops of their backs were browsing at a pile of hay in a nearby meadow. They were alone as yet: the cattle watched incuriously as Laurence and Hammond walked through the packed snow towards the trees. Beneath the laden branches, the ground was nearly clear, browsed down to the grass beneath.

“Perhaps he will not come,” Hammond said. “Maybe his friends have persuaded him …”

Laurence did not listen; he marked out the clearing and its length with his eye, noted that the wind was high enough to alter a bullet’s course. He was sorry that Dobrozhnov was not a military man; he disliked having so much advantage, where he could not be conciliatory. The wind was cold, and he walked back and forth, swinging his arms, to keep his blood moving. Hammond shivered beneath his heavy fur coat and hat. The time dragged. Laurence was conscious of the slow shift of the shadows of the tree-branches upon the snow.

“You are certain you have not mistaken the place?” he said finally.

“Quite certain,” Hammond said. “Baron Von Karlow mentioned the rabbit; and that is his groom up there with our driver, who gave us the direction. But Captain, if the other gentleman is late, perhaps has chosen not to come—”

“We will wait another quarter of an hour,” Laurence said.

At the very end of this period, they saw in the distance a carriage approaching slowly; in another ten minutes it had drawn up, the horses only lightly exercised. “You have certainly made very poor time,” Hammond said, sharply, when the gentlemen descended; a doctor followed them out of the carriage.

“I am very sorry,” Baron Von Karlow said, heavily, with a strange emphasis. Laurence knew him a little: another Prussian officer who had thrown in with the Russians rather than accept the French yoke, like Dyhern; he had distinguished himself in the battle of Maloyaroslavets. The friendship had likely a pecuniary ground: Dobrozhnov was wealthy, and given to sponsoring Prussian officers who required some support.

Von Karlow bowed to Laurence very stiffly; his look was unhappy and constrained. Laurence belatedly understood: they had not come so late by accident. Dobrozhnov had kept him waiting, in the cold, deliberately.

That gentleman looked better than the last time Laurence had seen him; clear-eyed and his skin no longer flushed with drink, although the bruise across his cheek had purpled. He avoided Laurence’s eyes, and said, “Well, let us get on with it,” and walked away to the other side of the clearing.

“Captain,” Hammond said, low and angry; he, too, had understood. “I will require a delay, and see if we cannot arrange for something hot to drink; the goodwife of the farmhouse, perhaps, would provide—”

“No,” Laurence said. He felt a heavy weariness and dismay, as if Dobrozhnov had gone to his knees and begged for his life. “There is no need. I have killed men in colder weather than this.”

Hammond took the dueling-pistols to the center of the clearing, and met Von Karlow there; they inspected the weapons together. Hammond took some time over the examination, and carried the pistols back with the case tucked under his arm and his ungloved hands wrapped around the guns, warming them. Laurence was grateful, for the sentiment more than the act; the fire of Hammond’s indignation lifted some of the oppression from his own spirits. He took one of the pistols, checked it, and nodded to Hammond; Von Karlow turned from his side and nodded as well. He walked back to the middle of the clearing and held up his handkerchief.

“On a count of three,” he said, “when I have dropped the handkerchief, you may fire.”

Laurence turned his side, to present a narrow target, and took aim; Dobrozhnov also turned, and Laurence was sorry to see the man’s hand trembling, a little. He did not look at the gun, or the man’s face; he looked at his chest, chose his point, and adjusted his pistol for the wind. “One,” Von Karlow said. “Two—”

Dobrozhnov fired. Laurence all in one moment heard the explosion, saw the smoke, and felt the impact in his whole body; a sharp, shocking blow, knocking the air from his lungs. Then he was on the ground, without any consciousness of the fall. “My God!” Von Karlow cried aloud. He sounded far away.

Hammond was kneeling by his side in the snow, bending over him, ashen. “Captain—Captain, can you speak? Here, Doctor, at once!”

Laurence drew a shallow breath, and another. The pain was startling, but general; he could not tell where he had been hit. Hammond’s hands were on him, and the doctor’s, opening his coat and his shirt, and then the doctor was sliding his hand down over Laurence’s back. The doctor was speaking in Russian. “Thank Heaven! He says it has gone cleanly through,” Hammond said. “Captain, do not move.”

That was not, at present, a necessary instruction; Laurence’s arms and legs felt weighted down as though by iron bands. The doctor was already working on him with needle and thread, humming to himself, a strangely cheerful noise. Laurence scarcely felt anything beyond a little pressure; a deep chill was traveling through his body. Hammond spoke to the doctor and then he bent down and took the pistol from Laurence’s hand and stood. Laurence heard him saying, with icy formality, “Sir, I hope you will agree with me that a return of fire is required, under the circumstances of this unhappy accident. I am ready to oblige your party at any time.”

“I agree, unquestionably,” Von Karlow answered, his voice harsh.

“It was an accident,” Dobrozhnov was saying, his voice trembling, “—a perfect accident. Bozhe! My finger slipped—”

He stopped talking; neither of the other two men spoke. After a moment he said, “Of course—of course. But we should see if the gentleman will recover to take his own shot—a hour can do no harm—”

“Such agitation of his wound can in no wise be recommended,” Hammond said. “Nor that he go on lying here, in cold, any longer than he has already been kept in it. I add, sir, that I will be delighted to stand for another exchange of fire, should the completion of the first not achieve a decisive result. We may alternate, and so go on as you have begun.”

“I agree to your proposal on behalf of my party,” Von Karlow said.

Their united coldness was not less palpable than the frozen ground; Dobrozhnov said, “—yes. Yes, of course.”

His footsteps crunched away a small distance, and then halted. Laurence opened his eyes. He had not been conscious of closing them. The doctor was still humming, and putting a thick compress upon the wound. The sky above had that peculiar blue brightness of a very cold day. The sun had already passed its zenith. Laurence heard, a moment later, the explosion of a second pistol, and Dobrozhnov’s exclamation.

“Well, sir?” Hammond said. “Can your party continue?”

“My arm is hit,” Dobrozhnov said.

“A graze to the off-arm,” Von Karlow said. “The wound is not grave.”

“I do not know any reason why I must wish the other gentleman harm,” Dobrozhnov said. “I am very willing to consider the matter closed.”

Von Karlow said, after a moment, heavily, “Do you consider honor satisfied, sir?”

“Under the circumstances, I think I must request a second exchange,” Hammond said. “Your party may fire whenever ready.”

There was a brief pause. Laurence was already a little more aware of himself. He would have tried to sit up; the doctor pressed his shoulders back to the ground with the firmness of a nursemaid to a small child. Laurence shut his eyes again, and heard the pistol-shot, a thick hollow wooden thump; the bullet had hit a tree.

“You may fire when ready,” Von Karlow said, after a moment.

A second shot. Dobrozhnov gasped. The doctor made an impatient grunt, and pushed himself up and left Laurence’s side. Hammond was there in his place, a moment later. “Pray hold still, Captain,” he said. “I will get the driver; we will remove you to the farmhouse in a moment.”

He stood up again. “Sir, is honor satisfied, on your side?”

“My party cannot answer, but I consider the matter closed,” Von Karlow said. “I hope you will permit me to express my regret for any irregularity; I would be glad to shake your hand, sir, if you would take my own.”

“I am very glad to do so, sir; I find no fault in your arrangements,” Hammond said.

A fence stile was brought, and the driver helped Hammond put him on it. Laurence was by then conscious only of cold; the movement caused him some discomfort, but this was brief, and he knew very little of the next passage of time. Bare tree-branches like lacework crossing over his field of vision; the warm stink of cows and pasture; the cry of several anxious chickens; the thump of a fist on a door, and then finally warmth again: they lay him near the fireplace, a roast on the spit turning and a sizzle of fat on the logs. Footsteps came and went around him; voices spoke, but they largely spoke in Lithuanian—a peculiar music not at all like Russian or German to his ear. He drifted, or slept, or dozed; then he opened his eyes and looked at the window. It was dark outside. “Temeraire will have missed me,” he said aloud, and reaching groped for something to help him sit up.

He could not manage it. He fell back gasping to the floor. A woman came to his side—he stared up at her: a girl not twenty years of age, extraordinarily beautiful with clear green eyes and dark-brown hair; she returned the stare with immense interest. A sharp word drew her away; Laurence turned his head and found her mother glaring at him, with the same green eyes. Laurence inclined his head a little, trying to convey his lack of ill-intentions, if that were necessary under the circumstances.

His chest ached. A dressing was wrapped around his body, pressing upon the ribs. Blood had not quite soaked through the topmost level on the front. “Captain,” Hammond said, kneeling beside him. “Are you—do you feel improved?”

“Temeraire,” Laurence said, saving his breath.

“Von Karlow has gone back to town,” Hammond said. “He has promised to send a message to the covert that we have been asked to stay the night at a hunting-lodge, outside the town. Pray try and rest. Are you in a great deal of pain?”

“No.” There was no use in saying anything else. Laurence closed his eyes.

Forthing read out Laurence’s note loudly: it was brief, but quite clear; Laurence would not come back to-day. “Oh,” Temeraire said, disappointed; he had anticipated with pleasure revealing the initial success of his scheme. Laurence would surely approve all his arrangements, and in particular the generosity of his offering so remarkable a reward, and the result which it had already achieved. Indeed, Temeraire had quite counted upon that approval to salve the regrets which could not help but assail him, when he thought too long about the burnished luster of the golden plates, and imagined himself handing them over.

At least he had hoped to enjoy the satisfaction of showing Laurence that he, too, was not a slave to fortune; that he was quite willing to make the most extraordinary sacrifices in a worthy cause. There did not seem to Temeraire to be any need to defer that enjoyment until the final outcome was determined; after all, he had already made the gesture, and even now suffered the pains of anticipation. Even if Bistorta should not find Eroica in the end, Temeraire had still committed himself, and might as well have the credit of so doing.

So he sighed; but he only meant to resign himself to waiting, and thought nothing more of the note, until Churki said, “There is something I don’t care for going on here. Lay that out where I can put an eye on it.”

There was a great deal of sharp authority in her tone; Forthing had automatically spread the letter open on the rock before he recalled she was not properly entitled to give him orders. But by then Churki had already bent her head, and was peering closely at the small note; she said, “I thought so; it did not sound like something Hammond would have written, and that is not his hand. Is it your Laurence’s?”

Temeraire peered at the letter very closely. It was difficult to make out the very small letters, but finally he decided that it was not.

“And the contents are too scanty for my taste. Where is this hunting-lodge, and who is their host?” Churki said. “Hammond is not given to sailing off without good reason, and he dislikes hunting extremely; whyever has he gone to such a place? None of this looks reliable. Whatever peculiar business your Laurence is engaged upon, it looks to me as though he has drawn Hammond into it, too.”

“When Laurence has only been going about town because Hammond has made him go into society!” Temeraire said, but this protest was distracted; if anything had happened, it was surely not Laurence’s fault, at all, but in every other respect he found Churki’s remarks uncomfortably plausible.

“And we will have a bad time of searching,” Churki added. “There isn’t a moon to-night.”

“Searching!” Forthing said. “What do you mean, searching: flying about and roaring and scaring good people in-doors? No talk of that, if you please. You are both working yourself up over nothing. Here’s a note that Captain Laurence and Mr. Hammond very kindly asked someone to send for them, so you shouldn’t worry when they came home a little late even though they are two sensible gentlemen perfectly able to take care of themselves, and instead here you are brewing it up into a proper conspiracy for no reason.”

“I do not think it is no reason, at all,” Temeraire said, with dislike. He did not think Forthing was as devoted to Laurence as he should have been, considering how Laurence had condescended to have him as first officer. Churki might be a little over-fretful on account of how Incan dragons were giving to stealing one another’s people, but certainly there was no harm in being cautious. “Only it would do no good anyway for us to begin flying around without knowing anything of where Laurence and Hammond are: we will never find them without some direction. Who brought the letter, Roland, and where did they get it?”

“Just one of the street boys, the ones who aren’t afraid to come near the covert,” Roland said. “We’ll see if we can catch him; like as not he’ll have gone for one of the bun-sellers down the road.” She tapped Baggy and Gerry, and went running with them for the gate of the covert.

Baggy returned the first, some twenty minutes later and out of breath. “Tisn’t my fault,” he said, when Churki demanded what was taking them all so long. “When we found him, he could only say he brought it from a message-boy who brought it this far but didn’t want to come in the covert; so we had to go after him, and it is only luck I even got that one at all. And then he said it came from an officer, a Prussian officer named Von Karlow, at a public house near the German Gate, and that is all the way on the other side of the town.”

“Ah!” Dyhern said. “Von Karlow: I know the man. I have fought with him: a good man—an honorable man. He would not send you a lie, Temeraire, I am sure.”

“There, you see,” Forthing said.

“I do not see,” Churki said. “I have never heard this man’s name. How does he know Hammond or Laurence at all, and how does he know that they are at this lodge? Why should it be his business to send a letter on their behalf? I am by no means satisfied.”

Forthing was inclined to argue with her, but Temeraire interrupted. “Dyhern,” he said, “if this gentleman is your acquaintance, perhaps you will oblige me by going to call upon him, and asking him the direction of this lodge. After all, it must be outside the city somewhere; there could be no real harm in our going to look in upon them, and if they have only stayed the night because of their horses being tired, we might bring them home.”

He finished decidedly, with a flip of his tail, and felt he had struck a sensible, a reasonable course of compromise, without permitting himself to grow overly alarmed as Churki had. But Forthing, of course, could only bleat objections. “There is no call for your chasing off after Captain Laurence,” he said. “What if he should have left by the time you got there? He would come straight here, and want to know what had become of you; meanwhile you would be flying about half-distracted, supposing the worst, and what if we should get orders to fight?”

“We will not get orders to fight,” Temeraire said. “We have wanted orders to fight for three weeks, and we have not had any; we are not going to get some now.”

He turned his head even as he spoke: at last here was Ferris coming back into the clearing. Forthing said, “Mr. Ferris, I hope you have word from the captain; I am sure you will tell us everything is well, and there is no reason for any sort of alarm.”

“Oh, will I,” Ferris said, and Temeraire, looking closely, saw that his face was set and furious. “He is gone to a meeting; some caper-merchant Russian lag-wit insulted the Emperor of China to his face at a party last night, and he struck the man. I cannot find anyone to tell me where it is, but I have learned for a certainty that one of the man’s friends called on Hammond this morning, some fellow named Karloff or Karlow.”

“Good God!” Forthing cried, and there was a general noise of excitement and babble among the crew, which made it quite impossible at first for Temeraire to understand what exactly had happened, and why they should be so distressed that Laurence had—quite justifiably—chastised a rudesby, and what any of this had to do with meetings or hunting-lodges. “Captain Dyhern, pray will you go at once,” Forthing was saying, and Dyhern was already coming out of his tent, in his coat and his hat, and Baggy said, “I will run ahead and get you a carriage, sir,” and pelted away towards the street again.

“What is the to-do?” Roland said, looking as Baggy flew past her; she was coming back the other way. “Did Baggy have any luck finding the message-boy?”

“Roland,” Temeraire said, putting a forefoot before her, so she could not be swallowed up in the general chaos, “pray tell me at once what it means, that Laurence has gone to a meeting.”

“He wouldn’t,” she said, but at once said, “Oh, but he would, wouldn’t he; has he?”

“Yes,” Temeraire said, gripped with horror. “Roland, what is a meeting?”

“The worst nonsense anyone ever heard of, and he knows perfectly well better; if Mother were here, she would throw him in stocks for it, if he has not got himself shot,” Roland said, stormily.

“Shot?” Temeraire said blankly. “Shot?”

“He has gone to fight a duel,” Roland said.

Nearly the most dreadful hour of Temeraire’s life followed on this intelligence: an hour in which he could do nothing, knowing all the time that somewhere not an hour’s flight away, Laurence might at this very moment be stepping upon a field of honor. This was aptly named, it seemed to Temeraire, as honor was a word which seemed associated with every worst disaster in his life: a hollowness for which Laurence had before now been willing to die in the most unnecessary fashion, and this one more unnecessary than ever. “For no-one could suppose Laurence was a coward,” Temeraire said. “Not even anyone who disliked him extremely: I have heard the Admiralty tell him he had not enough fear.”

“It isn’t the captain that anyone would call a coward, sure,” O’Dea said, “but the other fellow that he struck; and the captain’s too much a gentleman to hit another and not let him have satisfaction, if he ask for it. Ah, the sword and the pistol have made much food for worms ere now out of men of honor, and watered the soil with blood and the tears of their relics. I have known eight men shot dead in duels, on the greens of Clonmel.” He patted Temeraire’s foreleg, in what perhaps was meant to be a comforting gesture; but Temeraire was too stricken to feel any sense of gratitude.

His crew had scattered out into the city, all of them trying to learn where the duel was to be held, and when; Dyhern was engaged in canvassing his acquaintance among the Prussian officers to find some intelligence of Von Karlow. Temeraire had thought of flying passes over the town, but Ferris had dissuaded him. “As likely as not, they are fighting somewhere outside the city, or beneath some trees, and if you terrify everyone into hiding behind closed doors and shutters, we will never find out where in time.”

He spoke of in time, but Laurence had been gone so long already; and every minute dragged onwards. Some of the crew came straggling back, without anything to report, until a pale and sweating Cavendish came back; he said, “Is Mr. Forthing anywhere?”

“He has not come back yet,” Temeraire said. “What have you heard?”

“What about Mr. Ferris?” Cavendish said, and then he wished to wait for Captain Dyhern to return, and then desperately, “Well, perhaps Roland will be back, in a little while,” and Temeraire realized he was trying to put off bad news.

“Tell me at once,” Temeraire said.

“I don’t know anything,” Cavendish said, but a low awful growling was building in Temeraire’s throat, thrumming against the ground, and Cavendish swallowed and said, “I don’t, nothing certain! Only I went along of Captain Dyhern to the public house, where that Karlow fellow is supposed to have rooms; he wasn’t there, so Captain Dyhern went on, but I overheard a couple of fellows in the taproom, from an infantry regiment, talking over a duel—but they didn’t know anything, not really; they didn’t know it was our captain—”

“What did they say?” Temeraire said.

“They said,” Cavendish said, “they said someone had fought a fatal duel, somewhere outside the city,” Temeraire felt the world drag to a halt, suspended, “and they said—they said it was Von Karlow’s own fault, seconding a coward, because—because his man fired ahead of the signal.”

“He is dead, then,” Churki said. “And without even a single child! I am so very sorry, Temeraire.”

“No,” Temeraire said, “no; he is not dead,” blindly, and Dyhern came panting up the hill, shouting, “He is not dead! He is not dead, thank the good God.”

“He is not?” Temeraire said, thrusting his head down low to the ground, the world lurching back into motion.

Dyhern caught Cavendish by the ear and shook him. “What do you mean by repeating nonsense like that, you young sow’s head? Keep your mouth shut, next time. He is not dead,” he repeated, and had to let go the wincing Cavendish to bend himself double, hands braced on his knees, to get back his air: Dyhern was a big man, and though he had lost a great deal of flesh to grief and to winter, his wind was not so remarkable that he could cheerfully run up the steep hillside to the entry gates.

“Then what has happened?” Temeraire cried.

“The other man,” Dyhern said, “is dead.”

“Oh! That is just as well,” Temeraire said, immensely relieved. “If he were not, I should certainly have killed him; but I am glad Laurence has already done so. Why has he not come back?”

“He did not kill his man,” Dyhern said. “Hammond did.”

“What?” Churki said, sitting up sharply. “What has Hammond to do with killing anyone? He is not a soldier!”

Dyhern did not say anything more, waving away the questions as he heaved for breath; then he went to his tent and came out with his harness. “I will tell you all, once we are in the air,” he said. “We are flying west. Von Karlow has given me their direction. Here, be useful now,” he added, to Cavendish, “and get aboard. We may need hands. You there, O’Dea, you will tell the officers where we have gone. Give me your paper, I will write the direction.”

Temeraire did not argue, because he agreed with Dyhern: Laurence was alive, and all further intelligence might be deferred in the interest of going to him at once. He waited impatiently for Dyhern to finish scribbling his note, and then held out his claw for him and for Cavendish, to put them up more quickly on his back. “Well?” he said. “Have you latched on?” and hearing the carabiner-clicks did not wait for an answer, but launched himself into the air.

Laurence woke in the night coughing, a sharp pain in his side, and found Dyhern bending over him and the household in weeping terror. “Take him, take him!” the goodwife was saying in rough German, making pushing gestures at Laurence with her hands. “Give the dragon!”

Dyhern calmed her with a stern speech in that language, too quick for Laurence to follow, and turning back said, “Rest, Captain, I will tell Temeraire you cannot be moved,” and then was gone again. Laurence fell back into fitful and uneasy sleep and woke again with the household in fresh dismay, shrieks rousing him: it was daylight outside, and Temeraire had put his enormous eye up to the window to peer in at him.

“Temeraire,” Laurence tried to say, and then he was dreaming again, of beef: fresh hot roast beef, the juices running red and rare, until these became rivulets of blood dripping from Dobrozhnov, a dead groaning corpse who came close and closer and put out clammy hands to grasp Laurence’s arms; he woke with a jerk in an unpleasant but welcome sweat, too warm: his fever had broken. There was a pot of beef broth cooking over the fire.

He drank nearly all of it, and then realized that the groaning soul in the cot across the room from him was Dobrozhnov: still alive, despite a bullet gone through his chest. “Good God, why is he here?” Laurence said to Hammond.

“I am very sorry for the circumstances, Captain; he could not be moved, and indeed, we hardly foresaw any reason to do so,” Hammond said uneasily, looking towards the cot. “The doctor was quite sure of his being dead before now. But I am very glad to see you so improved: will you eat a little more?”

“With pleasure,” Laurence said, “when I have spoken to Temeraire.”

This required the support of Dyhern’s strong shoulders, and the use of the household’s only bed and its meager supply of pillows; limping across the chamber was even so a remarkably painful process of transfer, and when Laurence at last was lying upon the bed, he was forced to accept another swallow of laudanum from Hammond, and catch his breath for some twenty minutes before he could again speak to let them know they might open the door.

Temeraire put his head up to it, anxious, deeply distressed. “Anyone might have guessed,” he said with immense reproach, “that the sort of person who would insult the Emperor would cheat, and here you are wounded!”

“I assure you I feel very much better,” Laurence said, although he was indeed in severe pain, which the laudanum only served to cloud and not remove. He heard and understood only distantly: his attention was fixed on his own words, struggling to keep in mind that he must say nothing of Dobrozhnov, still lying helpless in the room behind him. Temeraire could not know him still alive.

“I have been speaking with Dyhern a great deal on the subject of dueling,” Temeraire said, “and it seems plain to me that something must be done. You must give me your word, Laurence, that if anyone ever should insult you again, they must be told at once that I will insist on being your second myself. I am very much indebted to Mr. Hammond for having killed that wretched fellow, but in future, if anyone likes to prove they are not a coward by insulting you, they may fight me, and then they cannot complain of not having had satisfaction: I am sure everyone will agree they were brave, once they are dead. Pray promise me, and then you must go have some more beef broth,” he insisted.

Laurence said vaguely, “As you wish,” having become unable to follow the conversation, and was grateful to be carried back to the fire, still in the bed, and to eat a little more broth. This the daughter of the house brought him, and sat by him for a while frowning, and then in a little awkward German spoke to him, asking quite seriously if the dragon obeyed him because he was a devil. This notion she proposed with an air of interest more than horror, and seemed reluctant to accept Laurence’s denial. When he awoke from a long drowse, he did so finding her carefully putting his hand onto the family crucifix, and in some exasperation he took hold of it, showed her he had not the least hesitation in doing so, and kissed it: a Popish gesture, but convincing. She seemed however disappointed, and demanded to know how he did control the dragon.

“Ask Hammond,” Laurence said, too weary to struggle on in German, of which he had very little even under better circumstances. “He has a dragon also.”

Hammond was meeting with very little success in controlling his dragon in any manner, however: Churki was in a mood of great severity, which had been not at all improved by learning the details of Hammond’s behavior in the duel, which she loudly characterized as ridiculous and inappropriately dangerous. The next day Laurence felt improved enough to be carried out of doors for a brief airing; he was glad to escape the cottage briefly despite the cold, as Dobrozhnov persisted in not dying and had begun to moan almost incessantly from pain. By then he found a serious quarrel brewing between the beasts: Churki was inclined to blame him for having dragged Hammond into the affair, and Temeraire was inclined to blame Hammond for the reverse, and an atmosphere of resentment had settled between them.

“A pretty thing to be accusing you of,” Temeraire said, snorting with sufficient force to blow the snow before him into a cloud, “when you are so badly wounded you groan day and night,” and then he paused with a sudden puzzled expression and looked over at the cottage, from which had just issued one of these groaning noises.

“I do not cry out, I assure you,” Laurence said hastily, hoping to divert Temeraire’s attention: Temeraire would certainly kill Dobrozhnov at once if he learned of the man’s survival, and very likely have the house in ruins on all its occupants besides. “—I am not uncomfortable.”

“Still, you are the one who has been shot,” Temeraire said, not mollified, and it was of no use to point out that Hammond had stood the same hazard; indeed Laurence found it best not to discuss the particulars of the duel at all.

The remainder of his crew had arrived the previous day, driving the wagon-load of gold and treasure—much to Temeraire’s relief—and Laurence could not help but be aware that his officers were very shocked; their disapproval was a palpable thing. Of Jane Roland’s reaction he was left in no doubt, from Emily’s furious looks, and he was uncomfortably certain that the absent Granby, too, would have upbraided him in the strongest terms. The ground crew, who did not themselves suffer from the prohibition against dueling, were more tolerant, and indeed rather more pleased than not to have a captain who would fight a duel in the teeth of prohibition; they considered his ferocity as reflecting well upon them. But Laurence did not care to have an act of unpleasant necessity be approved as barbarism, so this was not much consolation.

The officers of course could not express their feelings through any open reproach, but they were worsening the quarrel by ranging with Churki in blaming him. Temeraire was now torn between his own anger with Laurence and his unwillingness to cede ground to Churki, and Laurence was very dismayed to find the quarrel migrate onto the person of Miss Merkelyte. Hammond had introduced this young lady to Churki, by way of answering her questions and, he hoped, reconciling the family to the continuing presence of two large dragons in their acreage. Churki found much to approve in the girl’s youth and beauty—too much to approve; she informed Temeraire, in haughty tones, that she would accept the young lady, on Hammond’s behalf, as a kind of apology.

“Well, I am not going to make her an apology,” Temeraire said, indignant on very wrong grounds. “I do not see why Hammond should have her at all. She is very beautiful, at least all the crew tell me so. She may marry Ferris.”

Laurence would have upbraided both beasts for their scheming, as an insult to the already-unwilling hospitality of their hosts, but when he had marshaled Dyhern and Mrs. Pemberton to make apologies to Mrs. Merkelyte and ask her to keep her daughter in-doors, that lady held a conference with her daughter, and then demanded instead to know the situations of both gentlemen, and the particulars of bride-price and settlements. They were serfs, despite their relative prosperity, and had much to be wary of in seeing their nation absorbed by Russia, where their caste was notoriously oppressed. It was perhaps not surprising that Mrs. Merkelyte was ready to seize an opportunity of lofting her child to the security of a far higher sphere of society, even at the cost of losing her.

The proposed grooms were more hesitant. Ferris, while by no means indifferent to Miss Merkelyte’s charms, had sufficiently disappointed his family, through no fault of his own, to wish to further provoke them by presenting them with a wife of whose birth and education they would have strongly disapproved; meanwhile Hammond had vague but firmly held plans to ally himself with a woman of wealth and influential family, when he should have achieved sufficient success to recommend himself to such a lady. Laurence could not blame them, but the natural consequence of their failing to come up to the mark was to permit every other man of their company, of remotely marriageable age, to imagine himself as the lady’s partner instead.

Forthing, whom Laurence was sorry to learn a widower, hinted himself willing to pay his addresses, while Ferris reddened with indignation; Cavendish quarreled with Baggy though they had not half a beard between them. Even O’Dea made it his business to sit by Laurence’s bedside and recite poetry, casting soulful looks across the room while struggling to contrive rhymes for Gabija.

No young lady who had been so thoroughly sheltered could be blamed for enjoying such attentions; meanwhile her mother kept a hawk’s eye on the proceedings, but did not demur so long as her sense of propriety was not crossed. Temeraire hurled fuel upon the fire by regularly ordering some item of his treasure brought out from under the tarpaulins, to be polished and displayed in the thin wintry sunlight. Churki grew incensed with the competition offered to her own ambitions and began to hold long insistent conversations with Hammond, from which he escaped with an expression so mortified that Laurence could not imagine what had been said.

“What has not been said?” Hammond paced the room, pale with red spots. “I will not forbear to say, Captain, that the morals of dragons are very sadly flexible,” and Laurence realized appalled that Churki was proposing that Hammond take the girl into his keeping, if he did not wish to marry her.

“Well, of course there is no reason for her to go into Hammond’s keeping,” Temeraire said, “but she might go into yours. Indeed, that seems to me an excellent solution: we can pay bride-price now, and she may choose which of my crew she likes when she is ready. Or perhaps she might marry someone else,” he added, struck as though by a remarkable inspiration, “and then they should join my crew also: I have thought, Laurence, that we might do well to have a few more officers.”

After this conversation, Laurence said to Hammond, “For God’s sake, send for that doctor and ask if I am not well enough to be moved before we have more to reproach ourselves with than we already do; I am sure neither of these wretched beasts would scruple to make themselves procurers, only to win their point.”

The doctor came and pronounced Laurence on the mend, but not well enough to be allowed a flight in cold air; after this disappointment he inspected Dobrozhnov, and further complicated the situation by announcing that the gentleman evidently meant to live after all.

Dobrozhnov still moaned incessantly that night, but by the following morning, he began to be well enough to sit up and make an even worse nuisance of himself. Most unfortunately, he spoke Lithuanian. Nor felt, so far as Laurence could tell, any compunction about abusing the hospitality he had received: indeed he was no sooner well enough to speak, than he began to make clear by his behavior that he considered Miss Merkelyte fair game, and himself entitled to enjoy her favors, if only he should conquer her resistance ahead of his competitors. Laurence did not understand the words with which he addressed her, but the tone was so familiar it might have been better suited to a bawdy-house, and covered her with confusion.

Laurence had been determined to say nothing to the man; indeed, to ignore his presence insofar as possible: the situation was impossible otherwise. But he could hardly sit by and watch the progress of the seduction of an innocent girl, whose character was so alarmingly threatened, and not least through the actions of his own crew. “Hammond,” Laurence said, “he must be induced to leave that girl alone. Can you get rid of him?”

“I hardly know how,” Hammond said dubiously. “We can scarcely get him out of the house without the dragons seeing him: they are watching the door every minute to see who is coming in or out to speak with Miss Merkelyte.”

Just when he would have preferred to be ill for longer, Laurence found his own recovery speeding; he was well enough to stand up by himself the next day, and when he went slowly and haltingly outside, on Ferris’s arm, the cold did not bite with more than its usual ferocity. But he could not avoid knowing that their own departure would now leave the girl unprotected. Dobrozhnov had spent an hour in close conversation with the mother that very morning, and Laurence had seen gold change hands—ostensibly in thanks for the house’s hospitality. The coins were a trifle to a man as wealthy as Dobrozhnov, but to the household they meant ten years’ work and good fortune, and Mrs. Merkelyte plainly did not conceive that such a sum had been pressed upon her by a man with anything other than serious intentions; nor did Dobrozhnov have any hesitation letting her imagine he meant to offer her daughter a respectable marriage, rather than an arrangement as dishonorable as it was likely to be of short duration.

“Forthing,” Laurence said at last, grimly settling on the least of the many evils from which he had to make his choice, “will you marry her?”

“If—if she likes,” Forthing said, a little uncertainly; he had not received much encouragement. He was not rich and had never been handsome, even before the fresh scar which marred his face, nor were his manners of a sort that could impress a young woman, and he was besides this a little too practical to be entirely in love himself. “Only, I don’t know what I’m to do with her. I could send her to my sister. I suppose she’d learn English quick enough?”

“Whatever use is that?” Temeraire said, objecting immediately. “Why should she go away? I wish her to remain with us.”

“We cannot be taking her to war,” Laurence said.

“Why not?” Temeraire asked. “Roland comes to war, and so does Mrs. Pemberton. And Laurence,” he lowered his head, if not much his voice, “must it really be Forthing? I am sure she is too beautiful for him: only look at his coat!”

“Pray come and speak with her mother,” Laurence said to Forthing, deferring this argument; he felt not a little guilty at Forthing’s doubtful expression, but under the circumstances he could see no better solution.

However, Mrs. Merkelyte was grown particular: not entirely remarkable, when she had a wealthy Russian baron sleeping on her floor making a pretense of courtship, and two dragons busily trying to offer her the choice of a British diplomat and a younger son of the nobility, however unwilling these latter two might be. Dyhern awkwardly demurred from serving as go-between, for which Laurence could hardly blame the man, so Hammond had to be recruited to the task. He tried to persuade her through the barrier of German, but he was nervous lest he make a remark too easily misconstrued to commit him as the bridegroom, rather than Forthing. The discussion continued for only a little while; mother and daughter exchanged a glance; the girl looked away—the mother shook her head. Meanwhile Dobrozhnov watched all the proceedings sidelong from his own cot, with an amused and half-incredulous expression, as though he thought the offer absurd; Laurence was conscious of a strong desire to knock him down again.

Gabija did not admire Dobrozhnov; her own preference was quite certainly for Ferris, on whom her eyes often lingered: with his sword and pistols and flying-coat, and the military carriage which had never deserted him, he presented the qualities of an officer even though he no longer possessed the rank. He had a smooth high forehead beneath auburn locks, and over the course of the preceding year he had filled out in muscle to match his height; if not a match for her in beauty, he could reasonably have been called handsome even by a judge with more basis for comparison. She was too shy to even attempt to speak to him, but she made excuses to be in his way, and even dared to linger near Temeraire, who might be relied upon to call Ferris over whenever she was by.

But despite these evident signs of calf-love, Laurence feared her susceptible to Dobrozhnov’s persuasion: she plainly did not wish to settle, any longer, for the quiet country life which would have been her natural lot. If no better offer were made her, she might well be persuaded to accept Dobrozhnov’s suit, without understanding what fate she embraced.

And yet Laurence had reached the end of what solutions he might offer: he could not press Ferris to marry under the circumstances. Temeraire however felt no such hesitation, and when the failure of Forthing’s suit had been reported—to Churki’s visible and ruffled-up satisfaction—he urged at once, “Ferris, are you sure you would not like to marry her,” while Laurence, catching his breath upon the camp-chair which had been arranged for him, could not yet object.

“I must beg to be excused,” Ferris said, and dragged his eyes away from Miss Merkelyte’s appealing glance with an effort: she was feeding the chickens in the yard, and made a remarkably charming portrait with her dress hiked up to her knees, and curls of her dark hair escaping from under a kerchief. He swallowed, and added with some bitterness, “It would be too much to prostrate my mother a second time,” and took himself away.

“Temeraire,” Laurence said, “you cannot be tormenting him so: leave off.”

“But if we do not object, I do not see why he ought to imagine his mother will; after all, she has never seen Gabija,” Temeraire began, but he stopped and raised his head, his ruff pricking up.

A small dragon came dropping out of the clouds in the distance: one of the local ferals, green, with a remarkable bony crest atop her head in orange and brown stripes. She sighted them and came on, circled once and descended. “So here you are!” she said, in accusatory tones. “What do you mean by hiding yourself away like this?”

“I beg your pardon?” Temeraire said, glacially. “I have come here to look after Laurence, who was injured in a duel; and I do not propose to let anyone object to it, either.”

“Hm,” the feral said, “well, as long as you aren’t trying to get out of it, at least: I hope you wouldn’t be that sort of dragon.”

“I am not that sort of dragon, at all!” Temeraire said. “And it is quite outrageous that you should come flitting back again to accuse me of any such thing. It is not as though I were going to wait about forever on the very thin chance that you should return. After you have found Eroica, then it will be very well for you to start talking about my trying to get out of it: as though I were a scrub.”

“What?” Dyhern said, standing up; he had been sitting upon a log near-by, occupying himself with whittling while Laurence spoke with Temeraire and Ferris, and to Laurence’s regret, he had heard his dragon’s name mentioned.

“All right,” the feral said, “so go on and bring out the plate, then: we are here, aren’t we?”

“I believe,” Temeraire said in awful tones, “that there was a small matter of proof, and as for we—” Here he stopped, and Laurence heard Dyhern make a short, sharp inhalation, audible even across the farmyard, and then he was running, his arms open wide as a boy as he pelted downhill, shouting: there were half a dozen heavy-weight dragons breaking through the cloud cover, wisps of fog boiling away over their grey and brown bodies, and Eroica was in the lead.




Chapter 6 (#u2c004f13-30c1-5c1a-8410-7b0e03864e9d)







LAURENCE HAD RARELY SEEN a man so overcome: Dyhern could not manage any language but German, and his speech was so choked with tears that it could not have been comprehensible if he had been speaking the most fluent English, but he wrung Laurence’s hand with fervor enough to make words superfluous. Eroica, too, was beyond words, attempting as well as any dragon of twenty-three tons and armored in bone plates might to make himself a lap-dog, nearly knocking Dyhern over with attempts at caressing, while his fellows crowded around with enormous anxiety and peppered Dyhern with questions, asking after their own captains, their own officers. The noise was extraordinary.

“Temeraire,” Laurence said, almost too baffled to share in the delights of so unlikely a reunion, “I suppose you must have engineered this, but I cannot conceive how.”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, in despairing tones; he was regarding the touching scene with his ruff flattened so thoroughly against his neck as to make it nearly impossible to see at all.





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