by Naomi Novik
Feeling pangs of guilt, Laurence hastily fumbled at his purse and threw some gold coins down. “Temeraire, do you have her? For Heaven’s sake let us be gone at once; they will have the whole country after us.”
Temeraire did have her, as was proven once in the air by her muffled but audible yelling from below, “It is my cow! It is mine! I had it first!” which did not greatly improve their chances of hiding. Laurence looked back and saw the whole village shining like a great beacon out of the dark, one house after another illuminating; it would certainly be seen for miles.
“We had better have taken them in broad daylight, blowing a fanfare on trumpets,” Laurence said with a groan, feeling that it was a judgment on him for stealing.
They put down only a little way off out of desperation, hoping to feed Iskierka and make her quiet. At first she refused to let go of her cow, now quite dead, having been pierced through by Temeraire’s claws, though she could not quite get through its hide and begin eating. “It is mine,” she kept muttering, until at last Temeraire said, “Be quiet! They only want to cut it open for you, now let go. Anyway, if I wanted your cow I would take it away.”
“I should like to see you try!” she said, and he whipped his head down and growled at her, which made her squeak and jump straight for Granby, who was knocked sprawling by her landing unexpectedly in his arms. “Oh, that was not nice!” she said indignantly, coiling around Granby’s shoulders. “Only because I am still small!”
Temeraire had the grace to look a little ashamed of himself, and he said a little more placatingly, “Well, I am not going to take your cow anyway, I have one of my own, but you should be polite while you are still so little.”
“I want to be big now,” she said sulkily.
“You shan’t get bigger unless you let us feed you properly,” Granby said, which drew her quick attention. “Come and you shall watch us make it ready for you; how will that do?”
“I suppose,” she said, reluctantly, and he carried her back over to the carcass. Gong Su slit open the belly and cut out first the heart and the liver, which he held out to her with a ceremonial air, saying, “Best first meal, for little dragons to get big,” and she said, “Oh, is it?” and snatched them in both claws to eat with great gusto, blood pouring out the sides of her jaws as she tore and swallowed one bite and another from each one in turn.
One of the leg joints was all the rest which she could manage, despite her best efforts, and then she collapsed into a stupor to their general and profound gratitude; Temeraire devoured the rest of his own cow while Gong Su crudely and quickly butchered the remnants of the second and packed it away in his pots; and they were back aloft in some twenty minutes, with the dragonet now lying heavy and asleep in Granby’s arms, quite dead to all the world.
But there were dragons circling over the illuminated village in the distance now, and as they rose up one of them turned to look at them, its luminous white eyes shining: a Fleur-de-Nuit, one of the few nocturnal breeds. “North,” Laurence said, grimly, “straight north as quick as you can, Temeraire; to the sea.”
They fled all the rest of the night, the queer low voice of the Fleur-de-Nuit sounding always behind them, like a deep brass note, and the answering higher voices of the middle-weights following its lead. Temeraire was burdened more heavily than their pursuers, carrying all his ground crew and supplies and Iskierka to boot; it seemed to Laurence she had already visibly grown. Still Temeraire managed to keep ahead, but only just, and there was no hope of losing them; the night was cold and clear, the moon barely short of full.
The miles spilled away, the Vistula River beneath them unwinding towards the sea, black and glistening occasionally with ripples; they loaded all their guns fresh, readied the flash-powder charge, and Fellowes and his harness-men struggled all the way up Temeraire’s side notch by notch with a square of spare chain-mesh to lay over Iskierka for protection. She murmured without waking and snuggled closer to Granby as they draped it over her body, hooking it to the rings of her little harness.
Laurence thought at first that the enemy had started shooting at them from too far away; then the guns sounded again and he recognized the sound: not rifles but artillery, in the distance. Temeraire turned towards it at once, to the west; out before them was opening the vast unbroken blackness of the Baltic, and the guns were Prussian guns, defending the walls of Danzig.
Chapter 17
“I AM SORRY you should have shut yourself into this box with us,” General Kalkreuth said, passing to him the bottle of truly excellent port, which Laurence could appreciate sufficiently to tell it was being wasted on his palate after the past month of drinking weak tea and watered rum.
It followed on several hours full of sleep and dinner, and the still-better comfort of seeing Temeraire eat as much as he wished. There was no rationing, at least not yet: the city’s warehouses were full, the walls fortified, and the garrison strong and well-trained; they would not easily be starved out or demoralized into surrender. The siege might last a long time; indeed the French seemed in no hurry to begin it properly.
“You see we are a convenient mousetrap,” Kalkreuth said, and took Laurence to the southern-facing windows. In the waning daylight, Laurence could see the French encampments arranged in a loose circle around the city, out of artillery-fire range, astride the river and the roads. “Daily I see our men coming in from the south, the remnants of Lestocq’s division, and falling into their hands as neatly as you please. They must have taken five thousand prisoners already at least. From the men, they only take their muskets and their parole and send them home, so as not to have the feeding of them; the officers they keep.”
“How many men do they have?” Laurence asked, trying to count tents.
“You are thinking of a sortie, and so have I been,” Kalkreuth said. “But they are too far away; they would be able to cut the force off from the city. When they decide to start besieging us in earnest and come a little closer, we may have some action; for what good it will do us, now that the Russians have made peace.
“Oh yes,” he added, seeing Laurence’s surprise, “the Tsar decided he would not throw a good army after bad, in the end, and perhaps that he did not want to spend the rest of his life as a French prisoner; there is an armistice, and they are negotiating a treaty in Warsaw, the two Emperors, as the best of friends.” He gave a bark of laughter. “So you see, they may not bother getting us out; by the end of this month I may be a citoyen myself.”
He had only just escaped the final destruction of Prince Hohenlohe’s corps, having been ordered to Danzig by courier to secure the fortress against just such a siege. “They first appeared on my doorstep less than a week later, without warning,” he said, “but since then I have had all the news I could want: that damned Marshal keeps sending me copies of his own dispatches, of all the impudence, and I cannot even throw them in his face because my own couriers cannot get through.”
Temeraire himself had barely made it over the walls; most of the French dragons enforcing the blockade were presently on the opposite side of the city, barring it from the sea, and surprise had saved them from the artillery below. However, they were now properly in the soup: several more pepper-guns had made their appearance amid the French guns since that morning, and long-range mortars were being dug into place all around.
The walled citadel itself was some five miles distant from the ocean harbor. From Kalkreuth’s windows Laurence could see the last shining curve of the Vistula River, its mouth broadening as it spilled into the sea, and the cold dark blue of the Baltic was dotted over with the white sails of the British Navy. Laurence could even count them through the glass: two sixty-fours, a seventy-four with a broad pennant, a couple of smaller frigates as escort, all of them standing only a little way off the shore; in the harbor itself, protected by the guns of the warships, lay the big lumbering transport hulks which had been waiting to go and fetch Russian reinforcements to the city: reinforcements that now would never come. Five mi
les distant and as good as a thousand, with the French artillery and aerial corps standing in between.
“And now they must know that we are here and cannot reach them,” Laurence said, lowering the glass. “They could hardly have avoided seeing us come in, yesterday, with the fuss the French made.”
“It’s that Fleur-de-Nuit who chased us here that is the worst trouble,” Granby said. “Otherwise I should say let us just wait until the dark of the moon and make a dash for it; but you may be sure that fellow will be waiting for us to try just such a thing; he’d have all the rest of them on us before we clear the walls.” Indeed that night they could see the big dark blue dragon as a shadow against the moonlit ocean, sitting up alertly on his haunches in the French covert, his enormous pallid eyes almost unblinking and fixed on the city walls.
“You are a good host,” Marshal Lefèbvre said cheerfully, accepting without demur another tender pigeon upon his plate, and attacking it and the heap of boiled potatoes with gusto and manners perhaps more suited to a guard-sergeant than a Marshal of France: not surprising, as he had begun his military career as such, and life as the son of a miller. “We’ve been eating boiled grass and crows with our biscuit these two weeks.”
He wore his curly hair grey and unpowdered over a round peasant’s face. He had sent emissaries to try and open negotiations, and had accepted sincerely and without hesitation Kalkreuth’s caustic reply: an invitation to dine in the city itself to discuss the matter of surrender. He had ridden up to the gates with no more escort than a handful of cavalrymen. “I’d take more risk for a dinner like this,” he said with a rolling laugh, when one of the Prussian officers commented ungraciously on his courage. “It’s not as though you’d get anything for long by putting me in a dungeon, after all, except to make my poor wife cry; the Emperor has a lot of swords in his basket.”
After he had demolished every dish and mopped up the last of the juices from his plate with bread, he promptly let himself doze off in his chair while the port went around, and woke up only as the coffee was set before them. “Ah, that gives life to a man,” he said, drinking three cups in quick succession. “Now then,” he went on briskly without a pause, “you seem like a sensible fellow and a good soldier; are you going to insist on dragging this all out?”
The mortified Kalkreuth, who had not meant in the least to suggest he would truly entertain a suggestion of surrender, said coolly, “I hope I will maintain my post with honor until I receive orders to the contrary from His Majesty.”
“Well, you won’t,” Lefèbvre said prosaically, “because he’s shut up in Königsberg just like you are here. I’m sure it’s no shame to you. I won’t pretend I’m a Napoleon, but I hope I can take a city with two-to-one odds and all the siege guns I need. I’d just as soon save the men, yours and mine both.”
“I am not Colonel Ingersleben,” Kalkreuth said, referring to the gentleman who had so quickly handed over the fortress of Stettin, “to surrender my garrison without a shot fired; you may find us a tougher nut to digest than you imagine.”
“We’ll let you out with full honors,” Lefèbvre said, refusing to rise to the bait, “and you and your officers can go free, so long as you give parole not to fight against France for twelve months. Your men too, of course, though we’ll take their muskets. That’s the best I can do, but still it’ll be a damned sight nicer than getting shot or taken prisoner.”
“I thank you for your kind offer,” Kalkreuth said, getting up. “My answer is no.”
“Too bad,” Lefèbvre said without dismay, and got up also, putting on the sword he had casually slung over the back of his chair. “I don’t say it’ll stay open forever, but I hope you’ll keep it in mind as we go on.” He paused on turning, seeing Laurence, who had been seated some distance down the table, and added, “Though I’d better say now it doesn’t apply to any British soldiers you have here. Sorry,” he said to Laurence apologetically, “the Emperor has a fixed notion over you English, and anyway we’ve orders about you in particular, if you’re the one with that big China dragon who came sailing over our heads the other day. Ha! You caught us sitting on the pot and no mistake.”
With this final laugh at his own expense, he tramped out whistling to collect his escort and ride back out of the walls, leaving all of them thoroughly depressed by his good cheer; and Laurence to spend the night imagining all the most lurid sorts of orders which Lien might have persuaded Bonaparte to make concerning Temeraire’s fate.
“I hope I need not tell you, Captain, that I have no thoughts of accepting this offer,” Kalkreuth said to him the next morning, having summoned him to breakfast to receive this reassurance.
“Sir,” Laurence said quietly, “I think I have good reason to fear being made a French prisoner, but I hope I would not ask to have the lives of fifteen thousand men spent to save me from such a fate, with God only knows how many ordinary citizens killed also. If they establish their batteries of siege guns, and I do not see how you can prevent it forever, the city must be surrendered or reduced to rubble; then we would be killed or taken in any case.”
“We have a long road to travel before then,” Kalkreuth said. “They will have slow going on their siege works, with the ground frozen, and a cold unhealthy winter sitting outside our gates; you heard what he said about their supplies. They will not make any headway before March, I promise you, and a great deal can happen in so long a time.”
His estimate seemed good at first: seen through Laurence’s glass, the French soldiers picked and spaded the ground in an unenthusiastic manner, making little headway with their old and rust-bitten tools against the hard-packed earth: saturated through, so near to the river, and frozen hard already in the early winter. The wind brought drifts and flurries of snow off the sea, and frost climbed the window-panes and the sides of his morning washbasin each day before dawn. Lefèbvre himself looked to be in no rush: they could see him, on occasion, wandering up and down the shallow beginnings of the trench, trailed by a handful of aides and his lips puckered in a whistle, not dissatisfied.
Others, however, were not so content with the slow progress: Laurence and Temeraire had been in the city scarcely a fortnight before Lien arrived.
She came in the late afternoon, out of the south: rider-less, trailed only by a small escort of two middle-weights and a courier, beating hard away from the leading edge of a winter gale that struck the city and the encampment scarcely half-an-hour after she had landed. She had been sighted by the city lookouts only, and for all the two long days of the storm, with snow obscuring all their sight of the French camp, Laurence entertained some faint hope that a mistake had been made; then he woke heart thundering the next day to a clear sky and the dying echoes of her terrible roar.
He ran outside in nightshirt and dressing gown, despite the cold and the ankle-deep snow not yet swept from the parapet; the sun was pale yellow, and dazzling on the whitened fields and on Lien’s marble-pale hide. She was standing at the edge of the French lines, inspecting the ground closely: as he and the appalled guards watched, she once again drew her breath deep, launched aloft, and directed her roar against the frozen earth.
The snow erupted in blizzard-clouds, dark clods of dirt flying, but the real damage was not to be recognized until later, when the French soldiers came warily back to work with their pickaxes and shovels. Her efforts had loosened the earth many feet down, to below the frost-line, so that their work now moved at a far more rapid pace. In a week the French works outstripped all their prior progress, the labor greatly encouraged by the presence of the white dragon, who often came and paced back and forth along the lines, watchful for any sign of slackening, while the men dug frantically.
Almost daily the French dragons now tried some sortie against the city’s defenses, mostly to keep the Prussians and their guns occupied while the infantry dug their trenches and set up their batteries. The artillery along the city walls kept the French dragons off, for the most part, but occasionally one of them would try and ma
ke a high aerial pass, out of range, to drop a load of bombs upon the city fortifications. Dropped from so great a height, these rarely hit their mark, but more often fell into the streets and houses with much resulting misery; already the townspeople, more Slavic than German and feeling no particular enthusiasm for the war, began to wish them all at Jericho.
Kalkreuth daily served his men a ration of gunnery to return upon the French, though more for their morale than for what effect it would have upon the works, still too far away to reach. Once in a while a lucky shot would hit a gun, or carry away a few of the soldiers digging, and once to their delight struck a posted standard and sent it with its crowning eagle toppling over: that night Kalkreuth ordered an extra ration of spirits sent round to all, and gave the officers dinner.
And when tide and wind permitted, the Navy would creep in closer from their side and try a fusillade against the back of the French encampment; but Lefèbvre was no fool, and none of his pickets were in range. Occasionally Laurence and Temeraire could see a small skirmish go forward over the harbor, a company of French dragons running a bombardment against the transports; but the quick barrage of canister- and pepper-shot from the warships as quickly drove them back in turn: neither side able to win a clear advantage against the other. The French might, with time enough, have built artillery emplacements enough to drive off the British ships, but they were not to be so distracted from their real goal: the capture of the city.
Temeraire did his best to fend off the aerial attacks, but he was the only dragon in the city barring a couple of tiny couriers and the hatchling, and his strength and speed had their limits. The French dragons spent their days flying idly around the city, over and over, taking it in shifts; any flagging of Temeraire’s attention, any slackening of the guard at the artillery, was an opportunity to pounce and do a little damage before dashing away again, and all the while the trenches slowly widened and grew, the soldiers as busy as an army of moles.
