by Naomi Novik
Lien took no part in these skirmishes, save to pause and sit watching them, coiled and unblinking of eye; her own labors were all for the siege works going steadily forward. With the divine wind, she could certainly have perpetrated a great slaughter among the men on the ramparts, but she disdained to venture herself directly on the field.
“She is a great coward, if you ask me,” Temeraire said, glad of an excuse to snort in her direction. “I would not let anyone make me hide away like that, when my friends were fighting.”
“I am not a coward!” Iskierka threw in, briefly awake enough to notice what was going on around her. No one could have doubted her claim: increasingly massive chains were required to restrain her from leaping into battle against full-grown dragons as yet twenty times her size, though daily that proportion was decreasing. Her growth was a fresh source of anxiety: though prodigious, it was not yet sufficient to enable her either to fight or to fly effectively, but would soon make her a serious burden upon Temeraire should they attempt to make their escape.
Now she rattled her latest chain furiously. “I want to fight too! Let me loose!”
“You can only fight once you are bigger, like she is,” Temeraire said hurriedly. “Eat your sheep.”
“I am bigger, much,” she said resentfully, but having dismantled the sheep, she fell shortly fast asleep again, and was at least temporarily silenced.
Laurence drew no such sanguine conclusions; he knew Lien was lacking neither in physical courage nor in skill, from the example of her duel with Temeraire in the Forbidden City. Perhaps she might yet be governed, to some extent, by the Chinese proscription against Celestials engaging in combat. But Laurence suspected that in her refusal to engage directly they rather saw the cunning restraint appropriate to a commander: the position of the French troops was thoroughly secure, and she was too valuable to risk for only insignificant gain.
The daily exhibition of her natural authority over the other dragons, and her intuitive understanding of how best they could be put to use, soon confirmed Laurence in his sense of the very material advantage to the French of her taking on what seemed so curious a role. Under her direction, the dragons forwent formation drill in favor of light skirmishing maneuvers; when not so engaged, they lent themselves to the digging, further speeding the progress of the trenches. Certainly the soldiers were uneasy at sharing such close quarters with dragons, but Lefèbvre managed them with displays of his own unconcern, walking among the laboring dragons and slapping them on their flanks, joking loudly with their crews; though Lien gave him a very astonished look on the one occasion when he used her so, as a stately duchess might to a farmer pinching her on the cheek.
The French had the advantage of superior morale, after all their lightning victories, and the excellent motive of getting inside the city walls before the worst of the winter struck. “But the essential point is, it is not only the Chinese, who grow up among them, who can grow accustomed: the French have gotten used to it,” Laurence said to Granby amid hasty bites of his bread-and-butter; Temeraire had come down to the courtyard for a brief rest after another early-morning skirmish.
“Yes, and these good Prussian fellows also, who have Temeraire and Iskierka crammed in amongst them,” Granby said, patting her side, which rose and fell like a bellows beside him; she opened an eye without waking and made a pleased drowsy murmur at him, accompanied with a few jets of steam from her spines, before closing it again.
“Why shouldn’t they?” Temeraire said, crunching several leg bones in his teeth like walnut shells. “They must recognize us by now unless they are very stupid, and know that we are not going to hurt them; except Iskierka might, by mistake,” he added, a little doubtfully; she had developed the inconvenient habit of occasionally scorching her meat before she ate it, without much attention to who if anyone might be in her general vicinity at the time.
Kalkreuth no longer spoke of what might happen, or of long waits; his men were drilling daily to make ready for an attack on the advancing French. “Once they are in range of our guns, we will sortie against them at night,” he said grimly. “Then, if we accomplish nothing more, we can at least make some distraction that may give you a chance at escaping.”
“Thank you, sir; I am deeply obliged to you,” Laurence said; such a desperate attempt, with all the attendant risk of injury or death, nevertheless recommended itself greatly when laid against the choice to quietly hand himself and Temeraire over. Laurence did not doubt for an instant that Lien’s arrival was owed to their presence: the French might be willing to take their time, more concerned with the capture of the citadel; she had other motives. Whatever Napoleon’s plans and hers for the discomfiture of Britain, to witness them as helpless prisoners, under a sure sentence of death for Temeraire, was as terrible a fate as Laurence could conceive, and any end preferable to falling into her power.
But he added, “I hope, sir, that you do not risk more than you ought, helping us so: they may resent it sufficiently to withdraw the offer of honorable surrender, should their victory seem, as I fear it now must, a question merely of time.”
Kalkreuth shook his head, not in denial: a refusal. “And so? If we took Lefèbvre’s offer; even if he let us go, what then?—all the men disarmed and dismissed, my officers bound by parole not to lift a hand for a year. What good will it do us to be released honorably, rather than to make unconditional surrender; either way the corps will be utterly broken up, just like all the rest. They have undone all the Prussian Army. Every battalion dissolved, all the officers swept into the bag—there will be nothing even left to rebuild around.”
He looked up from his maps and despondency and gave Laurence a twisted smile. “So, you see, it is not so great a thing that I should offer to hold fast for your sake; we are already looking total destruction in the face.”
They began their preparations; none of them spoke of the batteries of artillery which would be directed upon them, or the thirty dragons and more who would try and bar their way: there was after all nothing to be done about them. The date of the sortie was fixed for two days hence on the first night of the new moon, when the gloom should hide them from all but the Fleur-de-Nuit; Pratt was hammering silver platters into armor plates; Calloway was packing flash-powder into bombs. Temeraire, to avoid giving any hint of their intentions, was hovering over the city as was his usual wont; and in one stroke all their planning and work was overthrown: he said abruptly, “Laurence, there are some more dragons coming,” and pointed out over the ocean.
Laurence opened up his glass and squinting against the glare of the sun could just make out the approaching forces: a shifting group of perhaps as many as twenty dragons, coming in fast and low over the water. There was nothing more to be said; he took Temeraire down to the courtyard, to alert the garrison to the oncoming attack and to take shelter behind the fortress guns.
Granby was standing anxiously by the sleeping Iskierka in the courtyard, having overheard Laurence’s shout. “Well, that has torn it,” he said, climbing up to the city walls with Laurence and borrowing his glass for a look. “Not a prayer of getting past two dozen more of—”
He stopped. The handful of French dragons in the air were hurriedly taking up defensive positions against the newcomers. Temeraire rose up on his hind legs and propped himself against the city wall for a better view, much to the dismay of the soldiers stationed on the ramparts, who dived out of the way of his great talons. “Laurence, they are fighting!” he said, in great excitement. “Is it our friends? Is it Maximus and Lily?”
“Lord, what timing!” Granby said, joyfully.
“Surely it cannot be,” Laurence said, but he felt a sudden wild hope blazing in his chest, remembering the twenty promised British dragons; though how they should have come now, and here to Danzig of all places—but they had come in from the sea, and they were fighting the French dragons: no formations at all, only a kind of general skirmishing, but they had certainly engaged—
Taken off their guard
and surprised, the small guard of French dragons fell back in disarray little by little towards the walls; and before the rest of their force could come to their aid, the newcomers had broken through their line. Hurtling forward, they set up a loud and gleeful yowling as they came tumbling pell-mell into the great courtyard of the fortress, a riot of wings and bright colors, and a preening, smug Arkady landed just before Temeraire and threw his head back full of swagger.
Temeraire exclaimed, “But whatever are you doing here?” before repeating the question to him in the Durzagh tongue. Arkady immediately burst into a long and rambling explanation, interrupted at frequent junctures by the other ferals, all of whom clearly wished to add their own mite to the account. The cacophony was incredible, and the dragons added to it by getting into little squabbles amongst themselves, roaring and hissing and trading knocks, so that even the aviators were quite bewildered with the noise, and the poor Prussian soldiers, who had only just begun to be used to have the well-behaved Temeraire and the sleeping Iskierka in their midst, began to look positively wild around the eyes.
“I hope we are not unwelcome.” The quieter voice drew Laurence around, away from the confusion, and he found Tharkay standing before him: thoroughly wind-blown and disarrayed but with his mild sardonic look unchanged, as though he regularly made such an entrance.
“Tharkay? Most certainly you are welcome; are you responsible for this?” Laurence demanded.
“I am, but I assure you, I have been thoroughly punished for my sins,” Tharkay said dryly, shaking Laurence’s hand and Granby’s. “I thought myself remarkably clever for the notion until I found myself crossing two continents with them; after the journey we have had, I am inclined to think it an act of grace that we have arrived.”
“I can well imagine,” Laurence said. “Is this why you left? You said nothing of it.”
“Nothing is what I thought most likely would come of it,” Tharkay said with a shrug. “But as the Prussians were demanding twenty British dragons, I thought I might as well try and fetch these to suit them.”
“And they came?” Granby said, staring at the ferals. “I never heard of such a thing, grown ferals agreeing to go into harness; how did you persuade them?”
“Vanity and greed,” Tharkay said. “Arkady, I fancy, was not unhappy to engage himself to rescue Temeraire, when I had put it to him in those terms; as for the rest—they found the Sultan’s fat kine much more to their liking than the lean goats and pigs which are all the fare they can get in the mountains; I promised that in your service they should receive one cow a day apiece. I hope I have not committed you too far.”
“For twenty dragons? You might have promised each and every one of them a herd of cows,” Laurence said. “But how have you come to find us here? It seems to me we have been wandering halfway across Creation.”
“It seemed so to me, also,” Tharkay said, “and if I have not lost my sense of hearing in the process it is no fault of my company. We lost your trail around Jena; after a couple of weeks terrorizing the countryside, I found a banker in Berlin who had seen you; he said if you had not been captured yet, you would likely be here or at Königsberg with the remains of the army, and here you behold us.”
He waved a hand over the assembled motley of dragon-kind, now jostling one another for the best positions in the courtyard. Iskierka, who had so far miraculously slept through all the bustle, had the comfortable warm place up against the wall of the barracks’ kitchens; one of Arkady’s lieutenants was bending down to nudge her away. “Oh, no,” Granby said in alarm, and dashed for the stairs down to the courtyard: quite unnecessarily, for Iskierka woke just long enough to hiss out a warning lick of flame across the big grey dragon’s nose, which sent him hopping back with a bellow of surprise. The rest promptly gave her a wide respectful berth, little as she was, and gradually arranged themselves in other more convenient places, such as upon the roofs, the courtyards, and the open terraces of the city, much to the loud shrieking dismay of the inhabitants.
“Twenty of them?” Kalkreuth said, staring at little Gherni, who was sleeping peacefully on his balcony; her long, narrow tail was poking in through the doors and lying across the floor of the room, occasionally twitching and thumping against the floor. “And they will obey?”
“Well; they will mind Temeraire, more or less, and their own leader,” Laurence said doubtfully. “More than that I will not venture to guarantee; in any case they can only understand their own tongue, or a smattering of some Turkish dialect.”
Kalkreuth was silent, toying with a letter opener upon his desk, twisting the point into the polished surface of the wood, heedless of damage. “No,” he said finally, mostly to himself, “it would only stave off the inevitable.”
Laurence nodded quietly; he himself had spent the last few hours contemplating ways and means of assault with their new aerial strength, some kind of attack which might drive the French away from the city. But they were still outnumbered in the air three dragons to two, and the ferals could not be counted on to carry out any sort of strategic maneuver. As individual skirmishers they would do; as disciplined soldiers they were a disaster ready to occur.
Kalkreuth added, “But I hope they will be enough, Captain, to see you and your men safely away: for that alone I am grateful to them. You have done all you could for us; go, and Godspeed.”
“Sir, I only regret we cannot do more, and I thank you,” Laurence said.
He left Kalkreuth still standing beside his desk, head bowed, and went back down to the courtyard. “Let us get the armor on him, Mr. Fellowes,” Laurence said quietly to the ground-crew master, and nodded to Lieutenant Ferris. “We will leave as soon as it is dark.”
The crew set about their work silently; they were none of them pleased to be leaving under such circumstances. It was impossible not to look at the twenty dragons disposed about the fortress as a force worth putting to real use in its defense; and the desperate escape they had planned to risk alone felt now selfish, when they meant to take all those dragons with them.
“Laurence,” Temeraire said abruptly, “wait; why must we leave them like this?”
“I am sorry to do it also, my dear,” Laurence said heavily, “but the position is untenable: the fortress must fall eventually, no matter what we do. It will do them no good in the end for us to stay and be captured with them.”
“That is not what I mean,” Temeraire said. “There are a great many of us, now; why do we not take the soldiers away with us?”
“Can it be done?” Kalkreuth asked; and they worked out the figures of the desperate scheme with feverish speed. There were just enough transports in the harbor to squeeze the men aboard, Laurence judged, though they should have to be crammed into every nook from the hold to the manger.
“We will give those jack tars a proper start, dropping onto them out of nowhere,” Granby said dubiously. “I hope they may not shoot us out of the air.”
“So long as they do not lose their heads, they must realize that an attack would never come so low,” Laurence said, “and I will take Temeraire to the ships first and give them a little warning. He at least can hover overhead, and let the passengers down by ropes; the others will have to land on deck. Thankfully they are none of them so very large.”
Every silk curtain and linen sheet in the elegant patrician homes was being sacrificed to the cause, much against their owners’ wishes, and every seamstress of the city had been pressed into service, thrust into the vast ballroom of the general’s residence to sew the carrying-harnesses under the improvisational direction of Fellowes. “Sirs, begging your pardon, I won’t stand on oath they’ll any of them hold,” he said. “How these things are rigged in China, ordinary, I’m sure I don’t know; and as for what we are doing, it’ll be the queerest stuff dragon ever wore or man ever rode on, I can’t say plainer than that.”
“Do what you can,” General Kalkreuth said crisply, “and any man who prefers may stay and be made prisoner.”
“W
e cannot take the horses or the guns, of course,” Laurence said.
“Save the men; horses and guns can be replaced,” Kalkreuth said. “How many trips will we need?”
“I am sure I could take at least three hundred men, if I were not wearing armor,” Temeraire said; they were carrying on their discussion in the courtyard, where he could offer his opinions. “The little ones cannot take so many, though.”
The first carrying-harness was brought down to try; Arkady edged back from it a little uneasily until Temeraire made some pointed remarks and turned to adjust a strap of his own harness; at which the feral leader immediately presented himself, chest outthrust, and made no further difficulties: aside from turning himself round several times in an effort to see what was being done, and thus causing a few of the harness-men to fall off. Once rigged out, Arkady promptly began prancing before his comrades; he looked uncommonly silly, as the harness was partly fashioned out of patterned silks that had likely come from a lady’s boudoir, but he plainly found himself splendid, and the rest of the ferals murmured enviously.
There was rather more difficulty getting men to volunteer to board him, until Kalkreuth roundly cursed them all for cowards and climbed on himself; his aides promptly followed him up in a rush, even arguing a little over who should go up first, and with this example before them the reluctant men were so shamed they too began clamoring to board; to which Tharkay, observing the whole, remarked a little dryly that men and dragons were not so very different in some respects.
Arkady, not the largest of the ferals, being leader more from force of personality than size, was able to lift off the ground easily with a hundred men dangling, perhaps a few more. “We can fit nearly two thousand, across all of them,” Laurence said, the trial complete, and handed the slate to Roland and Dyer to make them do the sums over, to be sure he had the numbers correct: much to their disgruntlement; they felt it unfair to be set back to schoolwork in so remarkable a situation. “We cannot risk overloading them,” Laurence added. “They must be able to make their escape if we are caught at it in the middle.”
