Blood of Tyrants
Page 17

Chapter 17
HALF-A-DAY’S FLIGHT, AND A pillar of smoke rising in the distance: another Russian town burning. As Temeraire beat towards it, Laurence saw the Russian Army straggling by, the small dragons flying past scarcely to be made out beneath the infantry soldiers clinging all over their bodies, being borne back with the retreat more swiftly than their feet could carry them. Officers were astride at the neck or in some cases being dangled beneath from a sort of swinging chair.
“Too much for their weight,” Chu said, observing the flocks of smaller beasts, “although they are performing well, but infantry-dragons ought to be one hundred and fifty picul,” this measure being roughly on the order of nine tons; the white dragons were not more than six or seven, to Laurence’s eye: barely light-weights. In the far distance, he could see a melee of courier-weight dragons skirmishing: Cossack troops, he supposed, tangling with the French scouts; the pursuit was not far behind. It was the thirtieth of August.
The army was in disarray; beneath them, Laurence saw the men marching in long columns, bedraggled, dusty; heads bowed with exhaustion, sullen. Endless numbers of men; Chu himself fell increasingly silent and astonished by the numbers, the further they flew; when they had come to rest upon a hill, near a trickling spring, he shook his head and said, “The ant can devour a mountain,” and then plunged his head deep to drink.
Temeraire continued futilely to search for the high command; there was nothing which might have been called a headquarters visible to the eye. They flew over an artillery company rattling sluggish upon the road; Dyhern caught sight of Prussian soldiers and clambered down from Temeraire’s neck, and went to speak with them. He returned to say, “Barclay de Tolly has been replaced: it is General Kutuzov, now, and they say he is in Elnya, to the south.”
Kutuzov was not in Elnya; but much of the army had concentrated north of the town, and spilled into its limits. Laurence and Dyhern and Tharkay went into the streets together, to try and find some senior officer. A deep smoldering atmosphere emanated from the soldiers and officers alike, somewhere between misery and wrath; the burning of Smolensk was on every tongue, a collective mourning, and Laurence heard Kutuzov’s name repeated every few steps with more desperation than hope. They at last found a ferociously busy colonel engaged in directing the fortification of the northern approach to the town. “General Kutuzov is in Vyazma,” he said: another fifty miles, back the way they had come.
“I begin to see,” Chu said in dry irritation, “why you use such heavy couriers; they must carry enough men to hunt down the one you are looking for, who may be under a table, or in a basket.” The Jade Dragons might have flown the distances trivially, at much less cost to their joint energies, but speaking neither Russian nor French could not themselves communicate, even if Russian officers would have deigned to speak with them; they could serve only as couriers among Chu’s own forces.
Temeraire and Chu reached the town as night was falling, weary. Two of Shen Shi’s supply-dragons had accompanied them, carrying sacks of wheat and a dazed pig, for which they had ample cause to be grateful: the few Russian dragons they saw, their encampments merely crushed fields, were snarling and hissing at one another with belligerence over a scanty supply of dead cavalry-horses. They made their own camp upon a low hill not yet tenanted by any other company, and the supply-dragons dug a cooking-pit. “If you will come with me,” Laurence said to Dyhern, “we will try again: I suppose when we have looked in every town between Smolensk and Moscow, we will find him eventually.”
He scarcely hoped for success, but they made Kutuzov at last, his pavilion planted atop a low rise among three companies of artillery, with two courier-dragons, red, drowsing beside it and a great flag waving brilliant white and red. But the way was still barred. Dyhern attempted to persuade the guards to let them through the perimeter without success; Laurence’s French gained them no better result.
“Well,” Chu said, when they had returned to report their failure, “this general can talk to me, and we can settle upon our ground, and I can summon the three jalan to assemble there in four days. If he does not want to talk to me, I can call together ten niru, here, and let them feed themselves off the countryside for three days. And if he does not talk to me then, we will turn around and go home, and I will apologize to the Emperor. I will not spend my soldiers for fools, nor expose them to those guns for no purpose.”
He said this last very flatly: to have failed his orders so thoroughly would certainly condemn him to disgrace and exile from the Imperial court, even if the fault had been none of his own. But Laurence found he could not argue the decision. He had recalled too clearly, as Chu spoke, the dreadful slaughter of the French dragons at Shoeburyness: the smell of sulfur and fresh loam overturned, the rain of dirt flung high into the air as the British guns brought down the Grand Chevalier. He could scarcely fault Chu for not wishing to hazard his soldiers to such a fate without some assurance of support and the achieving of some desirable end.
“Laurence,” Tharkay said abruptly, “do you have those particularly magnificent robes with you somewhere?”
“Oh! Oh, yes! That is a splendid notion,” Temeraire said, lifting his head with as much eagerness as might be needed to supply the want of Laurence’s own. “Of course they will not turn you away, Laurence, when they see you properly dressed. And I have the robes with me; at least, I ought to: Roland, you have made them quite safe, I suppose?”
“Yes, of course; they are wrapped in oilcloth and in the batting chest,” Roland said, before Laurence could begin to protest. “Shall I fetch them out?”
“At once, if you please,” Temeraire said, while Laurence drew breath. However desperate the circumstances, all feeling revolted at the notion he should trick himself out in the panoply of the Imperial court and use it to present himself as a prince of China—and not merely in that court, where all involved knew and perfectly understood the polite and fictional nature of his status, but brazenly to the government of a foreign state, to none other than the commander-in-chief of the Russian Army, appointed by the Tsar himself.
“Besides which, you can scarcely expect the Russians to believe me a prince of China on sight,” Laurence said, “and they are not likely to listen or accept so fantastic a story as my adoption must seem, on first blush.” But Temeraire was inclined to be mulish; Temeraire did not see any reason why anyone should doubt Laurence’s claims.
“I beg that you will forgive my presuming to raise a small difficulty, Lung Tien Xiang,” Gong Su said, coming quite unexpectedly to the rescue, “but there can be no question of His Imperial Highness presenting himself in such a manner.”
Temeraire paused, his ruff flattening, but undeterred Gong Su added gently, “I am sure that if not for the urgency of our situation, and the small amount of time your duties have permitted you to enjoy at the Imperial court, you would recall that the honor of a formal Imperial visit cannot be lightly bestowed, and requires most careful arrangements. The foreign officials should have to be instructed in correct protocol,” meaning of course they should have to agree to prostrate themselves before Laurence, an event unlikely in the extreme, “and appropriate gifts should have to be presented on the Emperor’s behalf and offered in return. Of course such a remarkable mission cannot be sent forward without the Emperor’s will.”
“Certainly not,” Laurence said, with deep relief. “Temeraire, you would not in the least ask me to do such a thing.”
“But when the war depends upon it,” Temeraire said, “I am sure the Emperor would understand if one were to make an exception—and all to carry out his orders,” he added quickly, with the air of one seizing upon an excellent argument.
“I think we must be guided in such matters by Gong Su,” Laurence said hastily, “whose experience of the Imperial court dwarfs our own.”
Temeraire turned to Chu in appeal, but he shook his mane vigorously. “Oh, no,” he said. “You are not going to get me to quarrel with the crown prince’s envoy: I am keeping out of it. You are a Celestial and he is a prince; you can disagree. I am just an old general who wants a quiet life, and to retire to a place in the mountains.”
Temeraire snorted at this. “But how otherwise are we to get in to see Kutuzov?” he said, turning back to Laurence, who was grimly aware he had no answer, other than perhaps bringing Temeraire down over Kutuzov’s pavilion and pulling it up into the air, which should certainly provoke a response of some kind: more likely a cannonball than an invitation, however.
“If I may cut your Gordian knot,” Tharkay said, with a glint in his eye. “Bring down the robes, Roland. You are not going to wear them, Will. You are going to lend them to me.”
“I do not see why anyone other than Laurence should wear them,” Temeraire grumbled, while they unpacked the indeed very thoroughly wrapped garments from their layers and layers of oilcloth and sacking. “They are his robes, and he is the Emperor’s son; it seems to me quite wrong that you should present yourselves in any other manner. Laurence, if you are worried about causing the Emperor any distress, I am sure he should object to your lending out his gift. And is it not in any case quite illegal for Tharkay to wear them?”—half-pleadingly.
“Tharkay can hardly be considered guilty of violating the sumptuary laws of a nation of which he is neither citizen nor servant, and when we are not even within its borders,” Laurence said, “and I will present myself to General Kutuzov, as I am, a British serving-officer, here with our nation’s allies to assist in the war effort; Gong Su will present himself as the Emperor’s envoy. We will not claim any position falsely for Tharkay. Whatever conclusions the Russians might choose to draw, from his looks, and his having borrowed certain garments of mine, will create no obligations of state on either side.”
He spoke to convince himself as much as Temeraire: but his conscience smote him badly for this undeniable piece of sophistry, and still more when Tharkay had been rigged out in the red robes: he did indeed look a very imposing potentate. “You look as wretched as a cat, Will,” Tharkay said. “You need not borrow so much trouble; I dare say we will be run out of camp at bayonet-point before ever we announce ourselves.”
When he ran so dreadful a risk, Laurence could hardly begrudge him the right to extract what black humor might be found in the situation: they were far more likely to be shot, than laughed at, in the prevailing mood of the Russian Army, and Tharkay, in assuming a deceptive rôle, most likely to be held culpable. “Are you certain you wish to go forward with this?” Laurence said to him quietly. “If the Russian command are determined to reject help offered with an open hand, it need not be our concern to deliver it to them in the face of all obstacles which they put before us.”
“And go back to China, with three hundred dragons at our back?” Tharkay said. “No, Laurence; it would be an unconscionable waste, and I find I have committed too much to the enterprise to see it fail now.” He paused, and with less levity added, “You must know, Laurence, that if we cannot stop Napoleon here, likely we can never stop him. If he has time to establish a Kingdom of Poland, and feed it the rest of Prussia little by little; if he can ship over a hundred Incan dragons—” The sentence required no completion; Laurence nodded. With the wealth and power of the Incan Empire merging with his own, and his conquests in Europe secured, Napoleon’s position would grow the more unassailable; his fist would close ever tighter. Russia was the last great counterbalance left in Europe; if it fell, Napoleon would turn all his attention to Spain. And when Spain had been crushed—he would look to Britain once again.
He settled on his own sword, then flanked Tharkay on one hand; Gong Su took the other, with Dyhern, Forthing, and Ferris behind, all of them in the best show they could arrange. They were preceded into the camp by two Jade Dragons: the size of draft-horses and utterly foreign with their lean vulpine heads and dragging wings, bearing suspended between them, on chains slung from their necks, a fence-post on which they had rigged Chu’s banner, framed on either side by lanterns in the Chinese style.
Their procession met with bewildered astonishment as they began it, and collected up a number of strays and camp-followers in their train as they went through the encampment: boys running alongside staring and calling in Russian. One of them, rather daring, darted forward to touch with a finger the wing of Lung Yu Fei, the Jade Dragon nearest the side; she whipped her head on her long narrow neck around and hissed at him for this effrontery. With her jaws of serrated teeth scarce inches from his face, the boy paled and fell backwards in alarm, scuttling away on hands and feet like a beetle while his friends jeered him good-naturedly.
They were very nearly as good as a circus coming up the hill for pageantry, and the very growing noise of their approach removed the necessity of passing some challenge: the inhabitants of Kutuzov’s pavilion came out themselves to see and to stare as they climbed the hill towards them: the field marshal himself a portly and beribboned gentleman in front, white-haired and with a large, high-browed face, the nose and cheeks and jowls bulbous, one eye milky; epaulettes and medals and sash proclaiming his identity. Beside him was a tall lean man with a smooth-pated head: Barclay de Tolly, Laurence thought. Their party came to a halt some several arm’s-lengths away, and the Russian high command regarded them in silent astonishment while not a word was said.
Tharkay carried the event in high aplomb, his face set in the sternest lines as he regarded the assembled Russian company with a searching air, and then said over his shoulder, in Chinese, “I think that will do; you had better be the first to break the silence.”
“Gentlemen,” Laurence said to them in French, “I am Captain William Laurence, of His Royal Majesty’s Aerial Corps. I am here on behalf of our ally, the Emperor of China, in the company of his envoy, and I have the honor to offer you three hundred of the Chinese aerial legions, who can be on the battlefield in four days: if you will use them.”
Temeraire could not help but feel a little dissatisfied the next morning, even though Kutuzov had personally come to see them, accompanied by several of his staff officers: the general inspected them all with an air of suspicion, studying Chu and Temeraire especially with narrowed eyes. He looked over the supply-dragons and the Jade Dragons, and then demanded of Laurence, “The numbers of this force are in these proportions? Two middle-weight to eight light-weight and four of these—”
He gave a wave of his arm up and down, baffled by the Jade Dragons, who regarded him and the Russian officers with doubtful expressions of their own; Lung Yu Li said to Temeraire very quietly, “Surely that man has forgotten to put on all his clothing?” Kutuzov was wearing snug trousers and a waistcoat all of brilliant white, excessively tight upon a figure which was not good and showed to even less advantage as he lowered himself into a field chair put down for him, low to the ground, and stretched forth his legs and reclined back so as to make the mound of his belly protruberant under his folded hands.
“No, sir,” Laurence said to him. “There are only a few more of the couriers, and they are not counted in our numbers; it is three middle-weight fighters to one light-weight for supply.”
“Well, well. You are generous fairies, indeed. All the more so that he has brought almost no heavy-weights, himself,” Kutuzov added, meaning Napoleon. “All right, so where is this Chinese general of yours? As long as I am here, let me talk to him. Why is he hiding?”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Laurence said, “this is General Chu.”
An absurdly long amount of time was required to make Kutuzov believe that Chu was indeed their commander; the Russians looked increasingly disdainful, and several of them began to speak in low voices to Kutuzov, again proposing that the whole force was imaginary, until Temeraire, still smarting at middle-weight—he was by no means middle-weight; no-one could possibly have called twenty tons middle weight even if he were not as enormous and lumpen as the Russian beasts—broke in.
“If we were inventing it all, for what reason I cannot imagine,” he said coldly in French, “you would not be any worse off believing us than you are now, with Napoleon chasing you across your own country, and, it is plain to see, giving your dragons a drubbing. If you did have a dragon general yourselves, I dare say he would have put matters into better train.”
With morning, Temeraire had been able to see a little more of the arrangements of the Russian beasts in the rough coverts they had arranged for themselves: they were all outrageously quarrelsome with one another, at least the heavy-weights were. There did not seem to be very many of them, and all had wounds of some sort, some of which had not yet been treated properly: he had seen at least three with swollen bulging places where a pistol-ball had not been extracted, although he remembered quite well his own surgeons Keynes and Dorset saying that it was of great importance to remove them swiftly.
Vosyem and her regiment had been summoned up overnight, and Temeraire had seen the small dragon from her clearing again, laboring under a heavy tun of water which he was bringing her to drink, though she certainly could have more easily carried it herself, or for that matter gone to the pond to drink.
The little dragon had stopped by their own camp: his was the only friendly greeting they had from any of the Russians. “I am glad you have found us after all,” he said, in his small chirping voice, “and that it is all cleared up: so you are here to fight with us?”
“Yes, of course,” Temeraire said, “but pray tell me, whatever are you doing with that water?”
“Oh, I will bring you some, too, I promise—only pray do let me get a little supper, first,” the little dragon said, misunderstanding. He spoke with his head tilted, peering sidelong up at Temeraire as though he expected to be cuffed, and then glanced with even more anxiety over to where several other of the small dragons were now picking over the remnants of the carcass of a large moose which had just been abandoned by one of the heavy-weights.
“I do not need any water,” Temeraire said; the Shen Lung had jointly chosen a campsite near a small stream, which had taken not the work of half-an-hour to divert into forming a convenient pool, “and if you are hungry, you may have some of our breakfast, if you like; we have plenty. Only I have seen you fly back and forth seven times in the last hour past our camp. I beg your pardon,” he added, “if I seem rude for inquiring, but I cannot make any sense out of it.”
“Oh, I am doing whatever Vosyem would like me to do,” the little dragon said, meanwhile turning to stare at the immense pit full of porridge and meat. “Is that really food? But there is so much of it.”
Shen Lung Chi, who could not understand him, nevertheless could read his hungry expression perfectly well, and dished out a large bowl of the porridge; after having devoured this and licked it bare, and refreshed himself at the pool, the small dragon was induced to reveal that his name was Grig, though he seemed half-alarmed even to confess he had one at all. It seemed that the light-weights were meant to answer to the whims of the bigger dragons, and ordinarily fed only on what leavings they could snatch.
“She wanted some water,” Grig said, “and then she wanted me to fly back to camp and be sure that her treasure was under proper guard; but Captain Rozhkov would not give me leave to do that, so I had to go back and tell her so,” he hunched his shoulders as if in the memory of a blow, as he repeated this, “and then she had me carry him a message, and say that if he did not let me go, she would go herself; so then I had to come back and tell her that if she left, he would call off the guard and let all her treasure be stolen—”
“Well, it seems to me a perfectly wretched arrangement,” Temeraire said, “and I do not see how any of you are going to fight properly, when we have any fighting: you will be too tired.”
“Oh,” Grig said, “but I will not be fighting; I am too small to fight.”
“You aren’t smaller than those Cossack dragons, over there,” Temeraire said.
“No; but they are irregulars, and I am too big to join them; they cannot feed a dragon my size,” Grig said. Temeraire looked over at the Cossack camp: it seemed a far more hospitable place, their dragons tucked around the campfire in amongst the people, and if they did not have enormous heaps of treasure at least had neat harness, and most of them wore handsome woven blankets. But it was certainly true they were considerably smaller: the size of Winchesters, courier-weight beasts by British standards.
Certainly the Russian heavy-weights all looked very imposing—no-one could deny it, and Temeraire had observed that, despite their size, they demonstrated a remarkable speed. Their steel-taloned claws and long necks lashed out very much as though, as Forthing put it, there was gunpowder lit behind them. But as they demonstrated their fighting qualities, for the most part, by quarreling with one another and knocking about the smaller beasts, Temeraire nevertheless felt entirely justified in making his criticisms now, although the Russian officers evidently did not enjoy hearing it, and several of them scowled and spoke again to Kutuzov in their own tongue instead of French, with passion; but the general waved his hand and silenced them.
It seemed that the Russian Army had been retreating all this time, ever since Napoleon had crossed the Niemen—all summer long. Their first plan of battle, which to Temeraire sounded quite sensible, had evidently been to give battle at Vilna and then withdraw a little way into their countryside, luring the French to a final battle at a fortified encampment, where the Russians should have had the advantage. Why they had decided instead to only run away, Temeraire could not in the least understand, when they did have a very substantial army; surely it would have been better to at least try and fight, even if it did seem that Napoleon had a much larger army than anyone had expected.
Evidently many of the Russian officers shared his sentiments, and General Barclay had been superseded as the senior commander for having failed to give battle; but it did not seem to Temeraire that Kutuzov was in a great hurry to fight, either: they were still arguing whether the battle should be given here, or at the nearby town of Tsarevo Zaimische, which evidently offered good ground, or somewhere else entirely.
In any case, though they had been running away as hard as they could, Napoleon’s army had nearly caught them a dozen times. He had refined still further the use of dragons in his operations. From what the Russians described, each regiment now traveled with its own beasts, infantry and artillery alike. Men and light-weights foraged, while the heavier dragons leap-frogged companies down the road, and occasionally bore up the guns and heavy loads. Napoleon had eschewed larger magazines; his supply depots were instead numerous and lightly defended, each of them vulnerable perhaps, but as a whole able to withstand even many losses.
“He builds them in the woods, where there are no roads at all,” General Barclay said. “A heavy-weight knocks down a few trees for them and goes on; the middle-weights come, deposit some goods and cattle, assist in building a little fortification, and go on; a few light-weights strike out across the countryside for whatever of substance they can steal, leave it, and go on; then a company remains with a couple of light guns and a few couriers, enough to carry supply forward. If our Cossacks strike, they defend themselves. If we come in force, they snatch whatever they can carry and flee, dispersing to the nearest other depots and reinforcing these, and call for a heavier beast to strike in return.”
The Russians had only evaded Napoleon through good luck and desperate contortions, and because he and his generals had thrown away several chances by arguing with one another. Napoleon’s own brother Jerome had simply run away from his corps on the eve of battle in a temper and gone back to France; or so the Russians said—they had evidently learned of the incident from their spies, and it was repeated with great enjoyment. Then, too, thanks to heavy rains, the Russian roads had become quite impassable with mud at several points, slowing the French advance and forcing Napoleon’s dragons to carry the guns nearly all the way by air. Temeraire had carried a twelve-pounder himself once, in the retreat from London, and it had been quite exhausting; one could not lug something so heavy and then fight again straightaway, particularly not without a healthy dinner.
It seemed that Napoleon had tried to repair the sluggishness of his advance, as much as he could, by personally flying about to the different parts of his army, when he could, to take command directly; he had been at the battle of Kliastitzy, and smashed the Russian corps there, opening his Marshals’ road to St. Petersburg; and a week later at Smolensk, where by the narrowest of margins the Russian Army had escaped him. And now he was closing in ever more swiftly; he would be on them within a day, perhaps two, and it seemed the Russians had decided at last to fight.
Chu, when Temeraire and Laurence had finished translating the Russian accounts of the campaign so far, hummed deep in his throat, skeptically. “Are they sensible men?” he demanded.
“I know it seems peculiar that they have been running away all this time,” Temeraire began, but Chu snorted.
“Nonsense,” he said. “What is peculiar is that they have been planning to fight an army larger than theirs in every way, with inferior air support. If they did not know we were coming, they had much better have kept running!”
Temeraire was taken aback; Laurence said, “General Chu, Moscow is in some sense the central city of their nation—it is not formally the capital, but the Tsar is crowned here; they cannot let it fall without some resistance.”
“Oh, I see; politics,” Chu said. “Well, at least find out for me why they have organized their aerial forces in such an absurd way, for there must be some reason. I see they do not have any proper system of supply, but they could at least field forty middle-weights, instead of those fifteen hulks and so many of those little fellows.”
The Russians looked irritated to be questioned on this point. “Does this beast of yours not know how long an egg takes to hatch?” General Tutchkov said to Laurence, impatiently. “How does it suppose we should have got fifty middle-weight beasts under harness since they crossed the Niemen?”
“You might have gone to your breeding grounds,” Temeraire said. “I dare say if you had offered even a little of all that immense treasure to your retired beasts, or your ferals, they would have been delighted to fight for you.” This suggestion met only with stares, and a great comprehensive snort from Kutuzov out of his bulbous nose, which was quite rude; but at any rate, it answered Chu’s remaining concern: the Russians had not thought to do so.
“So, they are not sensible men,” Chu said with finality. “How do they expect to properly oppose a nation whose aerial forces so outweigh their own? They may be victorious in this war, thanks to our assistance, and yet find themselves in the gravest difficulty in the next season once again.
“But,” he added, “that is not my business, but theirs! My business is to win now, and if that is the only reason, and these numbers are correct, I am satisfied with our prospects for battle. But I must yet have four days to concentrate upon the battlefield.”
Kutuzov was silent a moment, when this information was conveyed: the great massed corps of Napoleon’s army were hard upon their rear, and even falling back might not gain them sufficient time along the road to Moscow. “Well,” he said finally, “if we cannot win the time from our enemy, we must ask him if he will be so kind as to give it to us.” And he called over one of his pages, and took up a pen and paper, to write swiftly a letter to the Tsar.
A large tent had been erected upon neutral ground outside Vyazma, a field cleared half-a-mile in either direction and policed watchfully by dragons of both parties: for the French part, Laurence saw, nearly all middle-weights of no breed which he recognized, most of them with large broad foreheads. Deep chests and heavy shoulders were common as well, but their hides were of peculiarly motley appearance, muddied greens and yellows and browns.
He thought grimly that he detected Lien’s hand at work there, though there was no sign of her either at present or reported by the Russian scouts; at least one spy report not three weeks old had positively placed her at the Château de Saint-Cloud, outside Paris, in the company of the new Empress and the infant heir. “I can believe nearly anything of her,” Temeraire said, “but she cannot have let Napoleon go to war without her: I am sure she cannot. I dare say she is hiding somewhere, and will find some way to do something dreadful to us before the end. Not,” he added, “that I will not be entirely ready to meet her, Laurence, of course.”
Gong Su had not disagreed with him openly, but quietly told Laurence afterwards, “It is considered the foremost duty of every Celestial to guard the Emperor’s line, a duty which precedes even the ties of companionship: and Napoleon has now but this one child. I think it likely that Lung Tien Lien has indeed remained in Paris, to protect him and to forward his education,” a stroke of great good fortune for which Laurence could not but be grateful.
But Lien had now had charge of Napoleon’s aerial forces and his breeding programme for a full five years, and the fruits of her labor were everywhere to be observed not only in the looks but in the wide intelligence and education of the French dragons. These were frequently to be seen sitting up high on their haunches and peering into the distance, getting the best look they could at the disposition of the Russian troops, and then putting their heads together to murmur and exchange thoughts. They were all of them under harness, but many of them bore no evident captain, and several of them emblems which might have been symbols of rank.
Indeed one of the dragons, a grey-and-green beast not quite a middle-weight, sat quietly and unobtrusively in the corner of the field, unremarked; but Laurence saw with disquiet that besides a very cursory harness, only enough to take up perhaps a few riders, it bore a wide red sash pinned with a large silver star: a Marshal? Napoleon had granted Lien the baton years before, establishing the precedent; a dragon of sufficient military gifts to have merited another such grant would surely make a deadly opponent.
There were also three heavy-weights beside: a Petit Chevalier and a Chanson-de-Guerre, each holding one corner of the French line, and anchoring the center was a dragon as different from every other beast upon the field as could be imagined: an Incan dragon, with its long lapping scales like feathers gleaming a brilliant sky-blue and tipped with scarlet, looking more like some immense sort of brooding phoenix, wearing a kind of golden headdress and its belly armored in a mesh washed with gold and bearing many decorations: surely an officer in the Incan armies, and if not yet wholly familiar with Western warfare, likely to be an able commander in the air.
But there were enough signs of weakness visible to hearten a Russian ally, too: hard use had worn many a harness-strap and tarnished many a buckle; the men aboard the dragons looked thin, and they were fewer in number than they ought have been, for so many beasts. However skillfully they had stretched their supply, however swiftly they had moved, still their ranks had dwindled during their long march, and Napoleon could not easily get more men to swell them out again. Laurence had taken a short flight aloft with Temeraire, earlier, and spied out a little of the enemy’s artillery: nearly all nine-pounders or lighter, although there were many of them, and the number of cavalry astonishingly small; Bonaparte was relying heavily upon his aerial advantage.
And to this encouragement, Hammond had sent a welcome dash of joyful news: Placet had arrived breathless from Moscow the night before, with Captain Terrance, wide-awake sober for once, spilling off his back; he had seized Laurence by both arms. “Wellington has smashed Marmont, at Salamanca,” he said. “On July the twenty-second. Routed him foot and horse and wing: the French lost thirteen thousand men, and they say Marmont is dead, or at least so gravely wounded we will not see him again in the field this year.”
If that news had yet reached Napoleon, or his men, to discourage them, there was no evidence of it to be found in their soldierly demeanor across the field; but it had been inexpressibly heartening to men facing the might of France. Laurence would have been drunk still this morning if he had swallowed every toast offered him the night before, in Wellington’s health and the King’s.
Chu had under cover of darkness taken himself and the rest of his forces to the back of their lines, out of sight of French spies; he now napped comfortably, too old a campaigner to fear the event and satisfied with his arrangements, while Shen Shi and her staff, even further back, had begun the work of organizing cooking-pits and water, and medical stations; the blue dragons were ferrying supplies from the depot near Moscow. The Jade Dragons had gone already to pass the word amongst the jalan to gather.
Temeraire stood anxiously amongst the dragons on the Russian side of the field: incongruous in his smooth black and clean-lined conformation when lined up with the bristling, armored Russian heavy-weights, whose own suspicious attentions were nearly all devoted to him and to one another, rather than the enemy. The Russian beasts were laden with men, grim officers in thick leather coats, who held thick riveted straps of leather which had been chained on to the rings driven into the heavy plates of horn that grew upon the dragons’ shoulders. Others dangled from grotesque bridles, made of chainmail with spiked steel bits, which Laurence no less than Temeraire could only regard with disgust.
Vosyem was of their number; Temeraire had tried to speak with her, and propose helping her remove it. She had snarled at him around the bit, and fiercely said, “You would like it, that I should be shamed, and refused a chance to do battle and win my share; one less to divide the plunder with, is that it?”
“That is a very quarrelsome beast,” Temeraire said in some irritation, withdrawing, “and if anyone could be said to deserve to wear a muzzle, I suppose she does; but no-one can be said to deserve it, Laurence. What are they about?”
“I cannot tell you.” Laurence watched the line of Russian dragons: the snarling, savage twists of head giving them a look of restive cavalry-horses; the crews gripping hard upon the lines with their faces as set as men facing down artillery, as men looking into the maw of death, though they stood upon no battlefield: they were afraid of their own beasts. “I have always heard the Russian aerial corps mentioned as one to fear,” he said, low. “The dragons, it is reputed, will not cease fighting if their captains are taken and cannot be seized by boarding; they have often been seen to fight wholly unmanned.”
He had thought, by that reputation, that they might expect to find some greater degree of enlightenment here in the treatment of dragons, perhaps some influence from the East; instead it was plain the dragons would fight on in such circumstances because they had no affection for their officers, or their crews, at all. They cared nothing for the cause of battle, and only for the reward which might be theirs at its conclusion.
“I cannot deny,” Temeraire said, “that their treasure is magnificent beyond anything; but it is not enough for any sensible dragon to put up with this. No wonder they did not think any of their ferals would fight for them. Laurence, I must say, if only he were not such a tyrant, and always beginning wars, and invading people’s countries—”
“Yes.” It was hard indeed, for anyone who had affection for a dragon, to look upon this field and not feel the keenest sympathy with the French and their emperor’s more enlightened regime, in that regard at least. And yet behind the noble ranks of that army lay a track of near ten thousand miles of wasteland, of death and ruin for man and dragon alike, and if Bonaparte were not stopped, it would march across another ten thousand. There would never be an end to his ambition. “It is time,” Laurence said.
From the northern end of the field, the French dragons had made way for a small company to come out: three courier-weight dragons, bearing the flag of France and the standard of the Imperial Guard; a company of the Imperial Guard on foot watchful behind them, polished and brilliant in their red cloaks. And sitting on the center dragon, a man in a grey coat, with his bicorn hat worn athwart.
“Pray do be careful,” Temeraire said to Laurence. “Even if Lien is not here, I dare say Napoleon will think of something dreadful to do, if only you give him the least chance.”
“Recall that for once, this is our trap, not his,” Laurence said, “and we can only be grateful that he seems to be walking into it.” The grass of the field was yet wet with dew and left streaks upon his Hessian boots as he strode across it towards the gathering Russian party.
Napoleon was altered still further from the last occasion Laurence had seen him, in the Incan capital city of Cusco: older, fatter, and more tired; his voice was thick with a bad cold, and he pressed a handkerchief often to his face, coughing. He showed all the ill-effects of the strain which he had placed upon himself, by flying at such frequency from one part of his army to the next. Standing to greet him, Tsar Alexander was the taller by a head, his face set in stern lines and handsome, though his curling hair drew back a little already from his high brow; young and vital and with an intensity in his looks, romantic in flavor, and a flush on his pale cheeks that stood stark against the high black collar which he wore. The contrast they offered to the eye only increased the impression, looking upon the French Emperor, of fatigue, of a man past the days of his youth, and perhaps his prime.
And yet somehow when Napoleon entered the pavilion he diminished his company, rather than the reverse: a subtle and yet sensible movement traveled around him, a shifting of weight, eyes turning towards him, which made him somehow the center of the stage.
He discarded formality: reached out his arms and embraced the Tsar and kissed him upon both cheeks, though Alexander received the gesture only stiffly, and with a set mouth. “Mon cher,” Napoleon said to him, and keeping a hand upon his arm spoke to him directly of his regret, disregarding quite all other men in the room: all sorrowful familiarity, nearly paternal. “You have desired this war, I think,” he said, “as little as I have. I know the love you have for your people and your country; no less than mine for France, and so dreadfully have both suffered from our disagreements, and to what end? To whose satisfaction?”
He turned and beckoned forward one of his young aides-decamp, who carried a long, thin draped package forward. “I have the honor,” Napoleon said, “to return this to you: a token, if you will take it as such, that we would gladly be not your enemies, trespassers and thieves in your land, but your guests, cherishing your possessions as dearly as those of any well-loved host.”
It was indeed the icon of Smolensk, the frame a little blackened with smoke, carefully laid on a bed of white velvet. “It was saved from the fire by Murat himself,” Napoleon said, “who ran into the cathedral to snatch it from the smoke and amidst the falling timbers: a scene of such destruction I yet am anguished to recall, and had no power to prevent; God forbid another such occasion.”
The threat, standing as they did not a hundred miles from Moscow, could not have been more pointedly delivered nor received, and Alexander, though handling the icon reverently, gave only short thanks; he had it swiftly removed from the tent, when an aide had been sent out to bring a Russian priest to carry it away. “I think you know Mikhail Illarionovich,” the Tsar then said, meaning Marshal Kutuzov, and made punctilious introductions to every other officer of the general staff present, even through the ranks of brigadiers: at once serving to make a greater delay, and to deflect Napoleon’s attentions from himself.
Napoleon addressed Kutuzov with a jovial note, congratulating him on his recent appointment to the command, and a little slyly saying, “It is a long while since we met, you and I, on the field outside Austerlitz,” an unnecessary reminder of that devastating victory, which had first established him as the master of Europe.
He had for nearly every man there a word of recognition, most without any malicious flavor behind them. He knew their battles and their decorations, and when a brigadier general named Tzvilenev was presented to him, he said thoughtfully, “Ah! I hope you will permit me to congratulate you, young man,” and kissing him added, “You have a son. Your wife was in St. Petersburg when it fell to us, for her time came upon her and she could not flee; I am happy to be able to tell you they were both in excellent health, and under the protection of Marshal Oudinot there.”
That poor young man, who had labored under a preoccupied and anxious look which Laurence now could well understand, stood dazed by the intelligence and the low congratulations of his fellows, who looked a little wary at venturing to make them in the present circumstances. But Kutuzov made his own loudly, clapping the young man upon the shoulder, and calling at once for a toast, which necessitated glasses and bottles and camp-tables; so through Russian machinations and Napoleon’s vanity in turn, the introductions alone were so prolonged as to devour nearly two hours of time.
Napoleon paused during the long proceedings, on seeing Laurence standing behind the ranks of the senior officers, and called him forward to be embraced. “My gratitude,” he said solemnly, “does not fail. I have not forgotten what I and perhaps all the world owe to you, Captain Laurence, though I must yet deplore your presence here and the influence of your masters, who sit upon their island fomenting these quarrels amongst nations, and destroying from their fastness the peace and security of Europe. Would that you were now a subject of France! You know well,” he added to Alexander, with a hint of reproach, “how the efforts of England have been bent to divide us from one another, and how I have spent myself and France, to try and remove their power to do so.”
Laurence could hardly receive Napoleon’s sentiments with satisfaction: well might the Emperor regret having failed, in his invasion of Britain; Laurence could only rejoice at it, and the wound which it had inflicted on Napoleon’s dominion. And yet with all the cause in the world to hate the man before him, Laurence could not deny the power of his presence. If there had been any smaller advantage to be won by this conference than a force of three hundred dragons, if they had played for lesser stakes, anything not so sure to bring them victory, he thought this encounter might have been as destructive to the morale of the officers as if Napoleon had brought poison to put into their cups.
Alexander himself was not unaffected; evilly so, while the meeting proceeded through drawn-out paces. Impossible not to see that he felt even now a kind of instinctive yearning towards the conqueror as Napoleon concentrated all his attentions, all his intent focus, towards him, not unlike the direction of batteries of artillery; and yet he was resentful of his own feelings, a resentment silenced but diminished not at all by the necessity of deceit.
He played his rôle thoroughly and well, speaking at length and only of intangibles—of the honor of Russia, of his duty to his patrimony, of philosophy and of religion—so that all the while the conversation was kept carefully inconclusive. Napoleon, it was evident to see, saw himself a seducer; and to oblige him Alexander made himself out a maiden to be courted, and as coy as any skillful courtesan played off his suitor’s ardent attempts to reach a consummation.
He deferred any explicit offers, which should have to be rejected; he made none himself; and yet he conveyed appealingly all the willingness to make peace which Napoleon, at the head of a tired army thousands of miles from their homes, might hope for. His reward was the success of their aim. When the sun began to sink, nothing had been resolved upon, and they agreed to meet again: Napoleon departed, and they had won the first day.
But Alexander afterwards was in a rage of humiliation, so overcome that he sat silently and unmoving, saying not a word, until the word came that Napoleon was well away with all his escort. Then Alexander flung the camp-table with a savage jerk of his hand upwards and over, startled men scattering away before the toppling dishes and the smoking candles, and rose to pace the opened space like a tiger upon a leash.
His ministers hastily made efforts to clear the pavilion, ushering out the aides and junior officers; Laurence half wished to leave himself, but there was no easy way to do so, standing as he was with the senior officers.
“As though,” Alexander said low, “as though Holy Russia were to be bought like a girl, for the price of a few compliments—as though we were to come like the cringing dog to heel, servile beneath him, and allow him to march forward this vile philosophy, this blasphemy, across all Europe—to overthrow all Christianity, and set a—”
The men who remained were all silent before the tirade, their heads nearly bowed; only one of the diplomats, a Greek nobleman named Kapodistrias, at last ventured to step forward and speak to the Tsar quietly, reminding him the goal had been achieved. “Buonaparte’s vanity and contempt will soon receive their just reward,” he said.
But Napoleon was not to be deferred so easily for a second day. As though he felt he had paid sufficient lip service to his courting, the next morning he grew swiftly more insistent, and Alexander’s patience was by no means equal to fending off his approaches. They had not yet made noon when Napoleon cut short the diplomatic dance, thrusting aside with a sweep of his arm the carefully wrought speech which Kapodistrias and several of Alexander’s other diplomats had engineered, outlining without commitment the nearly innumerable small points of conflict and how these might perhaps be resolved—a catalogue which, if permitted to continue, might have consumed another day all on their own.
But Napoleon interrupted with a brusque, “Enough; enough of this,” and leaning forward to Alexander said bluntly, “Come, Your Majesty: these matters are for other men. Oudinot governs in St. Petersburg, and we speak here less than one hundred miles from the great city of the Moskova. Must the very throne of your ancestors fall into the hands of my army before you will cease to listen to warmongers? Shall we not again be friends? Give me only your oath that you will uphold again the Continental System, that you will recognize the Kingdom of Poland, and we will proclaim peace to these brave assembled soldiers. Then let the diplomats argue what they will!”
“In the sight of the Holy Mother,” Alexander said, springing from his chair, “I will chop the throne into kindling with my own hands before you sit upon it, and for the rest, you may take what you can. But before I give you peace while you stand with an army on my soil, I will grow my beard to my belt and go and eat potatoes with my serfs!”
The conference was shattered. The diplomats on both parts made small abortive attempts to bring their monarchs back to the table, for their several causes; but Alexander could scarcely make apology now without becoming a liar, and Napoleon, at first only surprised, grew swiftly choleric when he understood Alexander’s intransigence had not been a mere flourishing of temper but an expression of true feeling, and an outright rejection of the most central terms which should have formed naturally the core of any serious negotiation.
Napoleon’s face colored; he looked as though he would have liked to upbraid the Tsar like a junior officer, and nearly took a step towards him; Berthier put a hand upon his arm, prudently. Still hot with anger and breathing quickly, Napoleon said to Alexander’s back, “When you have thought better of your choice, I will not let this harden my heart against you,” and turning stormed from the pavilion.
The Russian courier-riders outside the pavilion had of course heard all the proceedings; Laurence saw one young enthusiast, as angry as Alexander himself at the indignity offered the Tsar, jerk deliberately upon the chain of his dragon’s bridle, and jab it with a spur, so the dragon snarling lashed its head forward to pull the rein loose, placing its jaws directly in Napoleon’s path scarce half-afoot from his head. Napoleon jerked back from the gnashing teeth, many of them jagged and broken and stained; two of his aides caught him, else he would have fallen, and the French couriers opposite their Russian counterparts all rose snarling on their haunches.
For a moment, the battle might have been joined directly, on the field before the pavilion; Laurence put his own hand on his pistol, and saw many another officer do the same. Then Napoleon said, “No,” sharply, and waved his own couriers down; he gave one look to the brazen young officer, who defiantly raised his chin and made no apology, though he had better have hung his head at so nearly breaking the state of truce; and then another harder to the dragon, who had pulled its head in towards its chest, and was mouthing the bit with sullen irritation and a cold look for its own handler. “No,” he said again, more thoughtfully, and turning went to mount up on his own courier, and departed for his lines.
“More than the heart could bear, Sire,” Kutuzov said to Alexander, out of the silence; they were all of them aware that the hammer of the French Army stood ready to fall upon them. “But the point has not been lost. We have been falling back all this day; they will not catch us to-night or tomorrow. Bagration’s men have been making fortifications at Borodino. We can hold him there—until the dragons arrive.”
He glanced at Laurence as he spoke, a narrow gleam in his one good eye, which Laurence did not wholly know how to interpret. But he and Temeraire carried the report back to Chu, with a borrowed map to show him the location of the little village: scarcely a pinprick on the outskirts of Klin, a little way off the road to Moscow.
“Well, it will have to be good enough,” Chu said philosophically, when he was given the news, and dictated new orders to one of the Jade Dragons, instructing half of the first jalan to concentrate and approach at a quicker pace. “I would rather have the entire force at the outset, and in the meantime a frightful number of these men will die, I imagine, but ah well! There are a great many of them, and we can manage for a day,” he added, a little callously.
“Sir,” Laurence said after a moment, “I must tell you I think the Russians as yet doubt the arrival of our oncoming forces. I fear they may not intend to organize their forces so as to provide that ground support which they have promised.” He spoke half-reluctantly: his duty to bring the Chinese aerial forces to bear warring with his sense of what was owed them.
“I do not see why they should not support us properly,” Temeraire said; he turned to look at Grig, who had become something of a fixture of their encampment, drawn by the regular helpings of porridge. “Grig, surely they do believe us now, they must know we are telling the truth.”
“Oh,” Grig said, doubtfully, looking up from his bowl, “I would not know about that. Are you sure that all these dragons are coming? It does seem very strange that there are so many of them, and we still have not seen them on the way.”
Temeraire flattened his ruff. “Of course I am sure,” he said, “and anyway, Laurence,” he added, “even if they don’t believe us, they may as well prepare: after all, they must give battle somewhere.”
Tharkay had been sitting beside the dragons, reading; he looked up and raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
Temeraire paused, doubtfully. “But they cannot simply keep running away,” he said.
“Why not?” Tharkay said, and Chu gave a snort of laughter; Temeraire put back his ruff.
“Ha ha,” Chu said, to Temeraire, “young fellows like you are the only reason why not, and probably that Tsar of theirs is clamoring for a fight, too. Well, I see that fat old general is not so stupid after all. If we come, why then, he will win a great battle and the war will be over; and if we don’t, we have given him an excellent excuse to run some more without losing face.”
“But if we did not come, and he ran, then Napoleon would win the war!” Temeraire protested.
Chu snorted. “We had to fly over three thousand miles of this country just to get here!” he said. “This Napoleon would have a long way to go to conquer the whole thing, a long and hungry way. No: I begin to think a little better of this Kutuzov fellow, even if these people don’t know anything about dragons.”