Blood of Tyrants

by Naomi Novik

Page 16

 

  Part III

  Chapter 16

  THE ROOM WAS ABLAZE with candles, many standing before mirrors of gilt and shining on gold and silver; the guests an equal brilliance of jewels and silks and velvet, their voices rising and falling in steady rhythm over the delicate threads of music. There might be a hectic flush on some cheeks, a nervous edge to laughter too quickly suppressed, but no-one surveying the company would have imagined that four hundred miles away, St. Petersburg was occupied by Napoleon’s army; nor from overhearing their conversation.

  “They say that one could walk across the Seine on the backs of those foreign dragons, so closely were they crammed in upon one another outside Notre Dame,” Countess Andreyevna said, in tones of solemn horror more appropriate to the discussion of a funeral than a baptism. “We see now where all this dreadful revolution leads, and what a monster has taken hold of France! He will not content himself with regicide and self-aggrandizement, but will tear down the Christian faith with everything else: he is a heathen, that is plain to see.

  “And not seven months since the wedding,” she added, with a flavor of spitefulness. “I hope that Bonaparte may be confident of his paternity. ”

  The new Roi de Cusco, as he had been styled, was by now four months old and reportedly thriving: he had been christened Napoleon Joseph Pachacuti Yupanqui—by Cardinal Fesch, and quite in accordance with Catholic rites, despite the complaints of the countess.

  Laurence had not held much hope of some event preventing the marriage. The Incan Empress had shown plainly she had as much quick decision in her nature as ever did Bonaparte, and having made her choice to accept his suit, she had already flung all the resources of her own vast Empire behind that course. Her dragons had driven the British out of the Incan Empire the very same day, and she had taken ship for France with Bonaparte not three months later, from the reports which had reached Laurence in Brazil.

  Evidently, Anahuarque had also chosen to anticipate the rites, and thus had Napoleon so quickly gained the heir required to secure the loyalty of the Incan dragons and the future of his dynasty—the only thing which might have been wanting to further spur his relentless ambition. But however much the child’s birth might be deplored, Laurence had not the least desire to engage in gossip about it. Napoleon’s son could as yet do nothing; his army, everything.

  Laurence quitted, without much ceremony, the company gathered around the countess in some impatience, and went seeking Hammond. He had been raised amid political dinners, gatherings of men either in power or soon to be, and his sense of such things was finely tuned: this was nothing of the sort—merely society, not politics, nor even the mingling of the two. There were a handful of aristocrats with some influence, each of them courted by a subtle band of hangers-on seeking personal advantage; a few staff officers and adjutants, none as high as a general. The rest of the company were merely the wealthy or titled or connected to the same, and of not the least significance.

  “Hammond,” Laurence said, having cut him out of his own conversation with an elderly dandy of a baron with a brusque swiftness of which he would have been ashamed under less dire circumstances, “why the devil are we here?”

  He and Temeraire had arrived the previous evening, with Chu and a couple of niru, and joined Shen Shi at the supply depot outside Moscow: enormous granaries piled high with wheat and cured meat, which she had displayed to them with an attitude of deep embarrassment. “I regret that my preparations have been so inadequate,” she said.

  They could not in justice be so called; but they were not, however, what one might have wished for a force of three hundred dragons: the Russians had been recalcitrant in providing assistance. “I am trying,” Hammond said now, with some asperity, “to catch someone’s ear: they will not listen to me; not even our own ambassador,” he added bitterly, “the wretched old fool! There are a thousand adventurers all over the city, peddling miracles to anyone that will give them an audience; they have decided I am to be classed with these charlatans.

  “My only hope,” Hammond added, “was that your arrival would bring an end to their doubts—that they could scarcely deny the evidence when you had appeared—but I called at the department of state this morning, and a staff-officer told me that if you would fight, you might go westward down the New Smolensk Road and report for duty to whichever colonel you found first; but if I did not leave, he would lay hands on me and kick me all the way to the door. They have not received any report whatsoever, from the east, of any force of dragons approaching. Where are the rest of the beasts?”

  “That is not a new question, to be asked of the British,” a man said, approaching their corner, and Laurence looked at him startled: an extraordinary intrusion, and the note of rancor as palpable as the thick Prussian accent.

  “I beg your pardon,” Laurence said, grimly, wondering if he was on the point of facing a challenge, a wretched trap between honor and duty; and then there was something familiar about the man, the face. Laurence had a brief, vivid memory of gunpowder smoke in his nose amid a clear and brilliantly blue sky: of a vast army pouring over fields, tricolor flags billowing; a great dragon lapped in heavy scales almost like mail, a bellowing laugh; and he found he did know the man, despite his greying hair and his paunch. “Captain Dyhern, I believe?” he said, slowly.

  They had fought together, briefly, in the disastrous campaign of the year six. Dyhern had been taken prisoner at Jena, he and his dragon Eroica, an impressive Prussian heavy-weight, both of them among the many victims of the revolution in aerial tactics which Lien had brought to Bonaparte’s service.

  Dyhern’s face was hard and sour and scarred, thinner than last they had met and aged far more than the intervening years could account for; but they had been allies, once, and had done him no injury of which to be ashamed: Laurence and Temeraire had given what aid they could, even in the midst of that overwhelming rout. The anger was not personal, but general, then; Laurence looked steadily into his face, and Dyhern after a moment looked aside, as one who knows himself in the wrong and does not care to admit it.

  “I am glad to see you at liberty, sir,” Laurence said; he felt no obligation to press for any more satisfaction. “I hope it is not—I hope the cause is not an unhappy one. ” A captain would not ordinarily be paroled or released by the enemy, save if his dragon were slain; although in the legal sense Napoleon and Prussia had made peace, Napoleon had neither withdrawn his occupying troops nor released the dragons, nor his most valuable hostage: the crown prince of Prussia, who lived yet in Paris under his supposed guardianship.

  “I escaped prison a year ago,” Dyhern said, briefly for what could only have been a long and a dreadful tale. “As for Eroica—I know not. I have sought him in the breeding grounds. But they did not know of him. They sequestered many of our beasts deep in France—some we hear they have persuaded to turn coat and join their ranks: you may be sure he will never be seen among those,” he added, with a touch of fierce pride. “But of anything else—” His hand moved a little sideways, limply, as though to convey that the sum of his knowledge was insufficient even to be put into words.

  So he was an aviator without a beast, grounded and unable to be of any use, and burdened by the wretched knowledge that if Eroica did live, he was yet kept a prisoner by his fear for Dyhern’s own safety: a cause for bitterness Laurence had himself tasted, enough to make him sympathetic. But the twenty dragons that Britain had promised to the Prussian war effort, in the campaign of 1806, had only been held back due to the deadly plague which had descended so mercilessly on Britain’s dragons, and would not even when healthy have made any material difference to the disaster.

  “Yes, perhaps it is true,” Dyhern said, with a snort. “But it is no wonder if the Tsar and his generals think very little of British promises now, and little of this story, this fantasy, of three hundred dragons from nowhere, from the hordes of the East. I have heard your story: you bring eight dragons, and call them
three hundred. ”

  Laurence shook his head: he did not himself know where the bulk of the Chinese forces were, nor why they had not yet arrived in Moscow, and in truth he would have felt doubtful himself if he had not already seen once with his own eyes the rapidity of their mustering. Dyhern was not wrong: with a few seeds of doubt sowed already, particularly if many other Prussian officers were also refugee among the Russians, and the British ambassador himself unconvinced, it was no wonder any longer if they could gain no ear.

  “We had best go and speak with Chu,” Laurence said to Hammond. “The remainder of the dragons cannot be far distant now: we might persuade the Russians to send a courier to confirm the approach of at least one cohort, if he can tell us their direction. ”

  There could be no question of their merely departing for the front: the armies might be anywhere in a square five hundred miles across. An aerial force with no ground support, even one of their extraordinary size, would be perilously vulnerable to any encounter with a substantial French force mingling dragons and artillery; three hundred dragons was not so many that they could afford to lose half of them.

  Laurence hesitated, on the point of departing, and then quietly said to Dyhern, “Captain, if you are not otherwise engaged in the war effort, I hope you will permit me to say that Temeraire and I would be glad of your assistance: we are short-handed, and my crew have many of them not seen aerial combat. ” Several of them indeed were former sailors, recruited from the survivors of the wreck of the Allegiance; his officers were a wretchedly scanty bunch, most of those having also perished in that disaster. Forthing was brave and competent enough, but not by any means a star in the firmament; Ferris could not be called a lieutenant, though he deserved the place; besides them Laurence had only a few ragged midwingmen and ensigns.

  Dyhern was silent; the lines of resentment and misery stood out upon his face more strongly for a moment it seemed, in the candlelight of the room; then abruptly he said, “My God! I will not sit by the fire while there is a dragon to fly and fight; yes, I will come with you. Of course I will come. Do you go now?”

  Laurence would have gladly made arrangements for his later joining them, but Dyhern refused: “I have with me my boots, my coat, and my sword. What else do I possess?” He accosted a servant to write a hasty note of apology to his host, begging for his things to be delivered to Hammond’s care at the embassy when it should be convenient. “Baron Sarkovsky will understand: his mother was a Prussian, a cousin of my father,” he said, “and he has been kind enough to give a home to a few of us who have not been able to stomach bending our necks beneath the Corsican’s boot-heel: even those like myself for whom the army has had no use. ” The treaty which the King of Prussia had signed with Napoleon had been humiliating in the extreme.

  The streets of Moscow were silent and humid, heat lingering in the late air of August, thick even at night, and the moon above them shone through an aureole of pale haze. “Napoleon is near Smolensk,” Dyhern said, “or so they say; but he might be outside the gates of Moscow tomorrow, for all that damned coward Barclay has done to slow him down. He has not given a single battle. He flees and flees, like a rat evading—Oh, it is Davout! Run to the east! Ah! Murat is there! Fly to the south! My God, Napoleon himself! And he faints away like a maiden,” with a contemptuous sweep of his hand, his deep voice descending again from high-pitched mimicry. “It is enough to turn one’s stomach. They let St. Petersburg fall without a shot fired; and still he flees. But Barclay must defend Smolensk; he cannot let it fall: so my friends say. ”

  The streets had wound through a narrow and unpleasantly scented warren of crammed-in impoverished buildings, approaching the gates of the small main covert of the city. Hammond had at least gained them the use of the British embassy’s courier Placet, a glum Winchester of middling years whose captain, a man named Terrance, contented himself with his isolate post through a good-humored drunkenness: they could not presently fly their usual routes with the French Army blocking them to east and north. Dragon and man were both snoring in harness, and were roused only with difficulty for the flight out to the encampment: this lying some ten miles and more beyond the city limits.

  “Three of you, now?” Placet said with a sigh at Dyhern’s addition to their party, though he outweighed an elephant handily and could have taken several more passengers without any real trouble. “Well, I suppose you had better lock yourselves on; we won’t get there any sooner. ”

  The encampment was barely respectable, by Chinese standards, though its appearance astonished Dyhern to silence. Shen Shi and her escort, eight of the common blue dragons and their numerous crews, had labored extensively: large cooking-pits were covered with rough-hewn stone lids, and over these enormous mats of wood and metal had been unrolled, on which dragons might sleep warm: more stood yet unused and waiting. Wells had been sunk up on a hill, near-by, and channels dug to bring the water rolling downstream, diverted into distinct pools for drinking and for bathing, and continuing on towards the cattle pens.

  Above all this stood the great gauzy pavilion which had been erected once more for Temeraire, and beside this the one for Chu, where the general was napping; as they approached he raised his head, peering narrowly at Dyhern, and before Hammond could address him on the subject of the missing beasts demanded in tones of irritation, “Well, is this a Russian general, finally? Where are his maps? Will he tell me where the enemy is? My army cannot travel any slower than they already are. ”

  Hammond, mouth half-opened, recalled himself and stammered, “Sir, no, this is Captain Dyhern, a Prussian officer, a friend of Captain Laur—that is, I mean, of His Imperial Highness. But so far as the army goes, we had come to ask you that very—that is to say, to inquire of you, where your army might be. I am afraid the Russians have had no reports, from the countryside, of any substantial forces approaching—”

  He trailed off, in the face of Chu’s stare, and fell silent. “Your remarks are very peculiar,” Chu said. “Are you complaining because we are not spoiling the territory of our allies? My troops are not undisciplined yearlings. ”

  “I beg your pardon,” Hammond said, “but surely by now many of the—of the niru will have joined up, in preparation for the final muster? Even a quarter of a jalan could not escape notice—”

  “No,” Chu said, “nor travel more than twenty miles in a day, through this barren and unsettled countryside, before they had to stop to be sure they could feed themselves; certainly stripping the farmers bare to do so. ”

  Laurence could not but recognize the plain sense of Chu’s remarks: he realized in dismay he had unconsciously gone too far in assigning to the Chinese legions some fantastical power of supplying their wants, by the example he had seen within China itself, where undoubtedly there had been, unseen, supply depots and warehoused goods in the near distance available to the building force. “Sir,” he said, “do you mean they are traveling in their individual niru? Keeping some substantial distance from one another?”

  “Twenty miles, at least,” Chu said, agreeing: indeed a sufficient separation to permit even many groups of dragons, traveling four at a time, to make themselves nearly invisible within the vastness of the Russian countryside. “It will require four days to muster the full force upon the battlefield: but that,” he added in some heat, “must be presently!

  “I have already sent the couriers to delay their pace, having seen the inadequacy of our supply here, but they cannot merely halt where they are, nor slow very much: the countryside is too poor. We must find the enemy, concentrate to defeat him, and disperse again to return. ”

  Hammond cleared his throat and said, “Sir, I am—I entirely take your point, and—and I beg you do not suppose I in the least mean to question your arrangements; but perhaps if—perhaps if some fraction of the force might be assembled, and summoned hence—”

  Chu lowered his head to stare at him. “Why?”

  “The Russians think us liars,” Laurence said bluntly, when Ha
mmond would have continued to evade. “They do not believe that the force is coming. ”

  Chu snorted and shook out his fringed mane with disgust. “They will certainly believe it when they have three hundred dragons eating every last scrap of wheat in twenty miles around this city, but they will not be very happy, and less so when I will have to send all my jalan away again before we have even seen any fighting!”

  “I am very glad to see you, Captain Dyhern,” Temeraire said, “and oh! It is the greatest shame, about Eroica: we must try and find out where he is, and I dare say then we can get word to him that you are at liberty. Perhaps we will take some French dragons prisoner, and I will ask them: I am sure no dragon could fail to be sympathetic to his situation, nor wish him to be denied a reunion with you. ”

  “Temeraire,” Laurence said, “you could not ask them to commit treason against their own nation. ”

  “I do not see why it should be treason,” Temeraire said, “when their nation has no business keeping Dyhern away from Eroica: you might as well say Moncey committed treason, because he told me you were on Goliath,” recalling with a shudder his own dark days in the breeding grounds of Wales; Moncey and his fellow feral Winchesters had been his only hope of himself being reunited with Laurence, then.

  “But if they do not like to talk to me about it,” he added, “I will speak to Moncey himself when we are back in England. I do not see any reason why one of the Winchesters mightn’t nip across and have a word with some of the unharnessed French dragons, from their own breeding grounds. They did as much only to gossip; indeed, Captain, I am sure we will be able to find him for you. ”

  Dyhern flushed red, when Temeraire had finished; he said, “I will thank you, if it can be done,” very shortly, and then stepped away; Laurence said to Temeraire quietly, “My dear, pray do not raise false hopes: a thousand things may arise to prevent our being able to assist him. ”

  “Well, I will not say anything more about it, at present,” Temeraire said, but privately he did not see why it should be at all difficult: after all, Eroica must be somewhere, very likely with other dragons about, and it seemed very poor-spirited to be getting in the dumps without having at least asked properly. So far as Temeraire could see, Dyhern had only ever spoken to other men, and not tried to ask any dragons at all, much less the couriers or better yet the unharnessed dragons of the breeding grounds, and the ferals, who had the most chance of flying about as they liked.

  “I don’t suppose you know any of the unharnessed dragons in this country?” he asked Placet.

  “You suppose rightly,” Placet said. “I haven’t seen hide or wing of a feral, and as for their couriers here, they are rudesbys; they speak some outlandish stuff and don’t care to even nod their heads, in a friendly way, when they see you. They only go and take their pig, and sit in a corner and stare at you, as though they supposed you meant to come and steal it from them. ” He sighed heavily. “Not all of us get to go gallivanting about the world to charming places, with fancy dinners, and gewgaws; but one would think that perhaps the Admiralty might let a fellow come home, once in a while. But I don’t complain, of course,” he added.

  “Well, there must be a breeding ground here, somewhere,” Temeraire said, “and at the very least, they must have a bigger covert near-by for their own beasts: and,” he added in sudden inspiration, “Laurence: surely we ought to go and speak to them in any case. I dare say the dragons will know all that Chu would like, about where the French Army is; they must be hearing of it from their officers every minute. ”

  Dyhern could speak the Russian tongue, and direct them to the main covert of the Russian beasts, some twenty miles from the city, on the opposite side from their own encampment. It seemed a peculiarly inconvenient arrangement, in its relation to the encampment they had been allocated: when he drew it upon a map for them to see, there could hardly have been a greater distance, and yet keep both in an hour’s flight of the city. Temeraire flattened his ruff at this discourtesy.

  “Let us be a little more generous than that,” Laurence said. “We have claimed the approach of three hundred beasts; even doubting us, they may well have wished to give us as much room as possible. I can conceive of no other reason that would place us at opposite ends. They can hardly imagine that we should seek a quarrel with their own dragons, when we are come as their allies. ”

  “No, indeed,” Temeraire said in some irritation, a state which only increased upon their arrival: the Russian covert was far better placed than the ground which they had been allocated, with better drainage, several small ponds and lakes sharing ground with a series of low craggy foothills, into which hollows had been dug and large roofs built out to make neat and comfortable dens, and from aloft many of these looked quite deserted but for small bands of men: Temeraire felt he and Chu might at least have been invited to take up residence, as a gesture of courtesy to the senior officers of their force, even if there were not enough room for all the dragons which were coming.

  He descended through a brush of low straggly trees and scrub and nudged his way to the hollow nearest the border of the covert, and then he halted short, staggered, as the morning sun crept through behind him and broke like a stream upon the mass of a mighty and glittering hoard.

  Gold—jewels—silver—Temeraire did not know where to look. Heaps of brass pieces, long chains of thick links of bright metal, dazzling great chunks of polished stone and glass, long carved sticks of polished ivory and mahogany and ebon, great cups and plates—dented and scratched from lying in a heap, but what did that matter when there were so many of them! so large!—and swords, and helms, and even huge bolts of cloth—velvet and silk, stained perhaps and torn, but still luxurious—enormous carved chests of wood heaped high with glinting shards of glass in colors, huge blocks of marble carved—

  “Temeraire!” Laurence said, and Temeraire shook himself all over and jerked up his head. A low rumbling hiss of warning reached his ears, and he saw only then the huge dragon sprawled over the ground—she was lying upon the very heap itself, as though she had so much treasure she might make a bed of it.

  She had a peculiar appearance: her body was sheathed in great plates of bony armor overlapping one another, not unlike the Prussian dragons Temeraire had met before, but to a far greater extent, and she seemed to bulge strangely underneath them: thick rolls swelled over her shoulders, and a large hump upon her back. Steel spikes and great steel rings had been bolted to her natural armor, silver over the natural green coloration of her hide, and were bristling all over her body; she was enormous, larger than himself and nearly as great as Maximus.

  She reared herself up with a great heave; several other dragons scrambled away from between them. Temeraire had not noticed them before, either: small frightened-looking creatures, light-weights, mostly grey and white; they did not have the same armor plates, but the steel rings were planted in their bodies as well.

  “Temeraire,” Laurence said again, “she must fear you are here to quarrel over that treasure; we must reassure her at once. ”

  “Oh,” Temeraire said, “oh—yes. Of course. Of course I am not here to challenge her. Pray tell her so, Dyhern,” a little wistfully: only look how much treasure there was! And he could surely have made a successful challenge, and perhaps won some of it for Laurence—“But we are allies,” he said, mastering himself with an effort, “and we must think of our duty first. I am not at all going to challenge her, no matter how much treasure she has. ”

  “We had better go away at once,” Dyhern said to Laurence, low, in French. “The beast will pay no mind to us: why should she? We are not her captain, nor her officers; you will do your cause no good if you provoke a quarrel. ”

  “Sir,” Laurence said, “dragons cannot be blamed for not speaking to us, if we do not address ourselves to them. Pray translate for Temeraire, if you can, and let us make the attempt; we will certainly not engage. If she attacks, we must withdraw at once, Temeraire, without offering a blow in re
turn. ”

  Temeraire did not at all like the notion that if she should strike him, he should be obligated to run away; she would think him a terrific coward, and all those other dragons who were watching as well. “I do not see any reason she should attack me,” Temeraire said. “I have done nothing to her, and I do not mean to; nothing at all. ”

  Dyhern spoke to the dragon in Russian; Temeraire pricked his ears forward to listen to it: quite different from any tongue he had ever learned. But the enormous dragon did not pay him any attention, nor even look at him: instead she bared her teeth at Temeraire and hissed again, taking a step towards him that required no translation at all. He swelled up his chest, his ruff flaring: “I am not to be hissed at, if you please,” he said coldly in French, “as I am perfectly able to manage you, if you do want to be quarrelsome. ”

  “Temeraire—” Laurence began, but one of the small dragons, who had ducked behind the great one, put out his narrow white head, arrow-shaped, and said something timidly in a queerly accented French, “What do you want, please, if you are not here to fight?”

  “Oh, you speak French, do you?” Temeraire said. “Well, we are here to find out where the French Army is: Napoleon, I mean. We are your allies,” he added, “and might have expected a more polite welcome than this, I must say; I do not know what you are about, when someone cannot even land to pay a visit, without being hissed at and treated like a thief. And you may tell her so, anytime you like. ” There was a great deal of righteous satisfaction in making this speech, which a little consoled Temeraire for not being able to fight.

  The little dragon turned and spoke to the larger in a tongue that was very much like Durzagh, the dragon language which Arkady and his ferals spoke, in the Pamirs. Temeraire could follow it better than not, and understood quite plainly when the large dragon snorted and said, “That is nonsense. Tell him to go away at once, or I will crush him, and take that breastplate of his for myself. ”

  Temeraire flattened his ruff and snapped, “I should like to see you try—” But Laurence’s hand upon his neck reminded him, so with a great effort he straightened his neck and with chilly condescension went on. “—but we are not here to pick a quarrel: so if you do want me to go away, you need merely answer my question, and we shall leave; I do not in the least wish to remain in the company of a dragon whose wealth is by no means sufficient to excuse her poor manners. ”

  “And why would you ask me such a question?” the dragon said coldly.

  “Well, I do not mean you must know where the French Army is, I suppose,” Temeraire said, “but you can tell me where the Russian Army is, and that will be where the French are, soon enough; so that will do. ”

  “What Russian Army?” the enormous dragon said. “What is this to me?”

  Temeraire drew back his head upon his neck, in some confusion. “Laurence,” he said, turning his head, speaking in French, “and Captain Dyhern, is there perhaps some mistake? This dragon is not in the army, at all. ”

  “Of course she is,” Dyhern said. “There is her regiment number, upon her shoulder,” and indeed, Temeraire saw where he pointed to a large 26 painted in bright red that stood out upon one of the armor plates, and beside it the number 8.

  “The captain is in a regiment,” the little dragon interjected, a little uncertainly, “—I believe? I have heard him speak of the regiment. ”

  The enormous dragon shrugged when this had been relayed to her, and said without moving her suspicious eye from Temeraire, “So this is some human matter. I do not care about that. If you want an army, you had better go find some humans and talk to them; and while you do it, you may go far away from me and my treasure. ”

  She reached out her foreleg and jealously scraped a few spilled coins back into her heap: her talons were sheathed in bright caps of polished steel, which had been nailed on; she certainly looked as though she were a fighting-dragon. But Temeraire felt quite at an impasse: how could she not know if she were in the army, and not care about it in the least? Before he could ask her anything further, however, a man appeared in an officer’s uniform: out of breath and red in the face, with several other younger officers running behind him, and shouted up at Laurence in French, “Who the devil are you? How dare you come stir up my beasts?”

  “Sir—” Laurence said, and slid down from Temeraire’s back, to go and speak with the gentleman, who coldly deigned to give his name: Captain Ivan Rozhkov, of the Twenty-Sixth Regiment of the Air. He had a luxuriant mustache and beard, brown shot through a very little with silver, and a narrow face fixed presently in anger; he held in one hand a peculiar sort of short whip, with a heavy silver handle. The little white dragon had sidled over towards him, and was murmuring quietly to him; but he waved the dragon off. “As far as I am concerned,” Rozhkov said, “you are a pack of spies: you will go, or I will set Vosyem upon you. ”

  “If you mean that dragon there,” Temeraire said, interjecting, “I have fought bigger dragons than her, without the least difficulty,” although privately he did admit to himself that she would present a notable challenge: the armor might, he feared, stand up to the divine wind; and those spikes and her tipped claws would certainly be quite nasty at close quarters. “So you needn’t be threatening. We are only asking so we can go and fight alongside you, after all. ”

  Rozhkov only looked up at him halfway through this conversation, and then snorted and said to Laurence, “You English, you make your dragons into house-pets and parrots: keep your three hundred fairy tales, and take this trained dog of yours away to them, also! There are ten fighting-beasts in this covert all her size; I will rouse them all up if you are not on your way at once. ”

  Temeraire reared up on his hind legs, to take a quick look around, and indeed he saw two more of the hollows in sight, and then he realized that in each of them a gleam might be spied out, through the treees—ten dragons! Ten dragons, all of them with so much treasure, it nearly could not be borne. “Oh,” Temeraire said, longingly. “Oh; but how can they all be so rich?”

  “If you think you will be pillaging here, you are very wrong,” Rozhkov snapped to Laurence.

  “That is enough,” Laurence said shortly. “More than enough, sir; I am sorry to have distressed your beast, and to have disturbed your morning. I hope to God you will have no greater cause to regret the occasion. Temeraire, we will be on our way; there is nothing to be gained here. We must rely on Hammond to procure the intelligence for us. ”

  “Certainly,” Temeraire said, as haughtily as he could manage, dragging his eyes away; he reached out to put Laurence up. “It seems very peculiar to me, to find dragons so perfectly uninformed about the war they ought to be fighting in; but as their officers do not seem to be much better, one cannot blame them, I suppose. ”

  He paused, with Laurence in his talons, and raised up on his haunches again: a heavy clanging bell had begun to ring, not far away, and cries were going up across the covert. Vosyem had lifted her own head in fresh suspicion. In the distance, approaching swiftly, a knot of five dragons were flying, unsteadily and on a wavering course. One was a beast on Vosyem’s scale, enormous and armor-plated; the others were smaller, in motley colors, trying to support him as they went. He left a thin spattering trail of blood behind him.

  Temeraire swung Laurence to his back and sprang aloft, even as Rozhkov shouted some commands, cracking the whip, and the small white and grey dragons all went up together alongside him. “Why is Vosyem not helping?” Temeraire demanded of the little one who spoke French, as they flew up. It would have been a great deal handier to have a beast or two that size, when there was one so large to manage landing; the poor fellow did not look as though he could come down properly on his own.

  “But what if one of the others took her treasure?” the little dragon said, looking at Temeraire dubiously. “There are no guards posted, and it has not been locked up properly. ”

  While that argument could be said to have a great deal of sense, it was also distinctly s
elfish, in Temeraire’s opinion. At least there were a great many of the smaller dragons, and together they caught the huge beast from beneath and managed to get him landed safely in a vacant clearing. His head hung forward listlessly, and he seemed as though he only wished to lie down. But an officer aboard his back cracked his whip, and he continued to hold himself up while a rope ladder was flung down, and men scrambled off: he was carrying a crew of nearly thirty, and many of them officers.

  They were met by the officers of the covert, running to help; several men in bandages stained badly with blood, some being let down from the belly-netting strapped down to flat cots; they were all carried away. A man in a captain’s uniform staggered off, took a rag from a colleague and mopped his bloody brow, said in French, “Give me a drink, for the love of the Holy Mother,” and took a cup from another and drank it down. He wiped his mouth and said, “I must get back aloft and to the city. Rozhkov, will you get Tri settled and get that belly-wound stitched up? By God! I didn’t think we would make it in the end, even though I swore to General Tutchkov we would manage. ”

  He took another gulp; his crew were already busily re-harnessing one of the smaller dragons, a white creature stippled with spots of grey and black, for him to ride, while dragon-surgeons scrambled for the beast. “For God’s sake, Vasya,” cried a younger officer, “don’t keep us all holding our breath: what has happened? Has there been fighting?”

  “Fighting!” the captain laughed, a harsh noise, hoarse. “If you want to call it that. We have been run out of Smolensk. We are falling back on Valutino, and if not there on Usvyatye, and if not there, on Tsarevo Zaimische—and if not there, God help the Tsar!”