Blood of Tyrants
Page 20

Chapter 20
LAURENCE PAUSED A LONG moment in the empty street, caught by the sight of a swinging, blackened lantern and the shape of steps leading up to a gutted doorway, opening onto the rubble of a house. For a moment he thought it another old memory returning, some flash of the destruction of Portsmouth; then he recognized abruptly the home of Countess Andreyevna, where he had dined his first night in Moscow. Of the palatial house there was nothing left but jagged timbers thrust up into the sky, heaps of tumbled brick and cinders, one corner in the back where a narrow servants’ staircase and a corner of the second floor stood alone, a few feet of space.
“Do you see something?” Tharkay asked quietly. His own face was half-covered; only his eyes looked out above the scarf he had wrapped over his nose and mouth: not too incongruous a costume in the city, for there were yet quantities of dust and ash lingering in the air.
“No,” Laurence said. “No, it is nothing; let us go on.” He put his shoulder back to the yoke of the small cart they were dragging behind them, with its few bags of grain: their safe-passage and the only one required; the French had mastered their own maurauding troops and now were offering urgent and enthusiastic welcome to any of the local peasantry who offered to sell them any food—there being very few such offers; those who made them were meeting with savage reprisals from Russian partisans.
The streets of Moscow bore little resemblance to the thronged narrow lanes which Laurence had seen from aloft, only a month before: now half-deserted, frequented more by rats than men and full of rubble, lined with ruined houses and gardens still choked with ash. Some three-quarters of the city had burned, and if that disaster had denied the French its comforts and supply, Laurence found it hard to accept the price. Little better illustration could be wanted of the cost of Napoleon’s pride.
A troop of grenadiers marched past in good order, though their uniforms were an unholy mess: coats in a dozen different colors, most of them threadbare and patched, boots cracked and wrapped about with string; only their muskets still shone brightly. Their eyes drifted to the cart as they passed, with an interest more than academic; when they turned the corner, one man even detached himself from the end of the column and came back, and pointing at the bags said, “Qu’est-ce que c’est là?”
Without answering him, Tharkay silently presented him with a paper which had been prepared for them by one young Russian aide-de-camp, in that alphabet, and embellished with all the official art which his creativity had permitted; the name Louis-Nicholas Davout was the only legible Latin on the sheet. It was a name to conjure with, for Davout’s harshness with indiscipline was legendary, and reports had reached even the Russian camp of the executions he had ordered for pillaging. The soldier thrust the paper back and assumed an officious mien, saying coolly, “Le Maréchal est avec l’Empereur, en la place Rouge,” and pointed them along another street before hurrying to rejoin his vanished troop.
Tharkay raised an eyebrow to Laurence as he put away the paper: should they take the chance? Laurence hesitated a moment, but nodded. They had intended only a general reconnoiter, to gain a sense of the French strength and the imminence of action—a sense which could not presently be gained, not reliably, from their Russian allies.
Morale in the Russian Army had rebounded and even swelled as the French showed no inclination to foray past Moscow, and steady reports of the disintegration of their supply reached the Russian camp every day—often at the same time as their own supply-waggons arrived from the south, loaded with shipments of bread and boots and uniforms. Even the rank and file now had gradually come to share Barclay’s view: that Napoleon had indeed overreached, and delivered himself and his Grande Armée into as neat a trap as was ever devised for an enemy. Each day meant the death of another hundred of his cavalry-horses, and three days before he had sent away fifteen of his dragons, traveling together to defend themselves against Cossack harrying: their departure had been observed, and had occasioned great cheer amongst the Russians.
But even as the soldiers grew more satisfied, their commanders grew less so. The intrigue at the Russian headquarters had risen to a fiery pitch; despite having managed the singularly effective retreat through the city, General Barclay had at last resigned his command entirely, in indignation at the disrespect he had met from both Kutuzov and Bennigsen, and those two men were at logger-heads themselves.
Kutuzov’s position was an unsettled one: he had been nearly forced on Alexander to begin with, and he had sacrificed Moscow to the enemy. With both Moscow and Petersburg lost, the enemy everywhere west of the Volga and north of Moscow, the Russian nobility had been scattered upon the countryside, many of them cut off from their estates and fearing personal ruin. It was his task not merely to plan the Russian counterattack, when time had done its work, but to keep those nobles and even the Tsar himself placated, and fight off all the loud and urgent cries for an immediate battle.
He was resorting to a kind of outrageous propaganda: mere skirmishes between his men and Murat’s advance guard were magnified into great victories—even if his forces came back with but a single prisoner and having lost several men themselves—and he exaggerated even the already-heartening reports of the French decline, filling his dispatches with such numbers as would have shortly ended with Napoleon sitting in Moscow alone but for a single mule and a barrel of beer.
And he was concerned, above all, with ensuring that the Chinese legions remained with the army. If Napoleon were to once again have the advantage in the air, the French position would by no means be so desperate as it was. They had great magazines of their own at Smolensk, and elsewhere through the south. If they did not need to fear being pounced upon by half-a-dozen niru, Napoleon’s dragons might have been put to supply work, or even to swiftly relocate his army to Smolensk, there to winter and regroup for a fresh campaign in the spring.
Laurence did not wish to abandon Kutuzov in the least, but neither could he feel it at all consistent with the duty he owed the Emperor of China, to strand his borrowed legions in the midst of Russia with inadequate supply during the oncoming winter. October had so far been beautiful, warm and mild; but in the last two days the trees had with startling speed begun to shed their leaves. The Russian countryside was taking on a grey and gloomy character, unrelieved by the enormously tall pine trees looming with their cold dark needles, the increasingly barren birches rattling in the wind.
With the full cooperation of the Russians, Shen Shi had now established depots to the east and west both, which she estimated could carry the legions at their full strength for a month. But there was no reason to expect that Kutuzov would have struck even then: the old general was perfectly willing to permit Napoleon to sit in Moscow as long as he wished. And once they had begun the counterattack, the road back to the Niemen was a long one.
“How much longer will we be required?” Zhao Lien had asked Laurence bluntly, two days before. He could not tell her, and he felt too strongly that he could not trust whatever answer Kutuzov might make him.
“Bonaparte is our best hope, for the campaign to begin,” he had said ruefully to Temeraire that evening. “If he has any sense, he must try and fight his way back to Smolensk sooner than late, and westward on from there swiftly. He cannot long suppose that the Russians will make peace with him now.”
Such a peace would have allowed Napoleon to withdraw without humiliation, surely all that he could now hope for; but that peace was as surely to be denied him. Alexander, with his government-in-exile in Tula, was intensely, savagely delighted by the growing evidence of French discomfiture: he had already written out many long ambitious schemes to Kutuzov and his other generals for retaking Moscow, for the pursuit and destruction of the remnant of the French Army, and indeed even the capture of Napoleon himself.
Kutuzov received these directives placidly, and stayed just where he was. He had done his best to assist Napoleon in deceiving himself about the prospects of peace: he had received a French envoy affably, and agreed to a temporary armistice, but the false negotiations of Vyazma had done much to close that door. Alexander refused to receive such an envoy himself, or to write so much as a note, feeling that he had already stretched his own honor to bear as much as he could. Napoleon’s pride alone could keep him in Moscow—but of that, he had an ample supply. When desperation and the growing certainty of disaster would overcome it, was nearly impossible to tell.
“We could hope for no better opportunity to learn his mind,” Laurence said softly to Tharkay now, in the ruined street; together they dragged the cart onto the main street leading towards the Kremlin.
Here the devastation altered in character: the buildings had been more preserved than not, evidently by the labors of the French dragons; great puddles of dirty water yet stood in the gutters. Yet they had still been looted: scraps of silk and shattered porcelain might be seen on the steps, broken furnishings. How the French supposed they should carry away such an immense store of plunder, Laurence could hardly imagine.
The street itself was better tended; looking west towards the bounds of the city, Laurence could see a troop of dragons laboring to clear away the rubble and men behind them repairing the worst of the damage to the cobblestones: perhaps making ready the road for retreat? He and Tharkay went plodding on with their heads down into the vast square around the onion-domed cathedral which, though blackened with smoke, had also been saved: Laurence saw in some disgust that the building was evidently being used for a stable.
The remains of many smaller wooden buildings still lingered at its base, and resting against the high walls of the Kremlin some forty dragons were drowsing together in heaps, while their crews silently prodded at large cauldrons simmering with their poor thin dinner: they were eating dead horses mostly half-starved or sick, stewed with flour. The dragons looked too weary to be called indolent, slumped in the heavy attitudes of exhaustion.
One more-alert beast stood before the cathedral, beside the great city fountain, while some few peasant women, cringing, took their buckets of water before hurrying away: a heavy-weight Papillon Noir in black with iridescent stripes. “That is Liberté,” he murmured to Tharkay. He had seen the beast once before, during the invasion of England: he was the personal beast of Marshal Murat, and beside it stood the man himself.
The pair were standing beside one of the Russian light-weights, white-grey. Laurence thought for a moment it might be a prisoner, but as he and Tharkay drew their cart a little closer, he saw the poor beast had no harness and was nearly skeletal in appearance, deep concavities between its ribs. It had a bowl of thin soup, which it was licking up with slow, painstaking care, one foreleg curled around the bowl and a wary watchful hostile eye turned up towards Liberté. Its wings were drawn up tight to its body, as though it might at any moment flee.
Murat was evidently waiting to see the Emperor, and following the line of his gaze Laurence saw him: Napoleon was near the Kremlin gates, in his dust-grey coat and flanked by the still-glittering ranks of his escort, the Imperial Guard. Davout was a tall thin figure beside him, and his chief of staff Berthier as well.
A French officer then approached the cart, and they were forced to stop: Laurence engaged the man before he could notice Tharkay’s foreign looks, pulling back the cover to show him the ten sacks of grain, pantomiming numbers with his hands to indicate many more than these were on offer. “Cinq cent?” the Frenchman asked. Laurence nodded, and then held out a hand flat and tapped his palm, asking for an offer; the officer said, “Attends,” and went away to confer with another.
Napoleon looked himself as heavy and morose as the dragons of his army; he seemed to only be giving half his attention to an anxious speech which Berthier was making him, full of gestures and intensity; the Emperor glanced away often at the somnolent dragons, at the few companies of soldiers equally dispirited and yawning against the walls. He knew, of course; surely he knew the hopelessness of his position. He was not a fool. He had his hands clasped behind his back, his chin lowered upon his breast; Berthier gestured, down the square, and following his arm, Laurence saw a nearly medieval train of waggon-carts, already loaded and with their covers lashed down.
Bonaparte stood a moment more, and then gave a short nod; Berthier, after a speaking look of relief exchanged with Davout, hurried away back into the Kremlin. Davout seemed as though he wished to say something; Napoleon jerking a hand forestalled him and turned abruptly away, his face hard, and strode out across the square towards Murat, who rose to meet him.
The French quartermasters were still discussing amongst themselves. Laurence looked at Tharkay and, receiving a nod, hazarded the risk. He strode across the square towards the city fountain, as though to have a drink of water, where he could overhear a little.
Napoleon had put his hand on Liberté’s side, patting the dragon with easy familiarity as he spoke with Murat; the beast nosed at him with pleasure. “Well, brother,” he was saying, with a ghost of a smile, “the last die is thrown, we must stand up from the table! We will have to fight our way back to France, and no rest after that.”
“What else is a soldier for?” Murat said, with a wave of his arm: more generosity than Bonaparte deserved, having pressed them all on towards destruction. “We’ll sleep a long time in the end. Will you want us to give them a bite on the flank before we draw back?”
Fortune did not smile on Laurence’s adventure to so great an extent as to permit him to overhear such invaluable intelligence; Bonaparte only raised his hand a little and wagged it to either side, noncommittal, and jerked his head towards the small Russian dragon, asking Liberté in a deliberate tone of levity, “What is this, your prisoner? A fine battle you must have had!”
“I have not fought her at all,” Liberté said, in some indignation, “even though she tried to steal one of our pigs, when we camped near the breeding grounds; and I carried her here myself.”
“I couldn’t stomach leaving her to starve, poor beast,” Murat said to Napoleon, “and it’s not as though she could do us any real harm. I’ve sent for one of the surgeons. Look at what they do to them.”
The surgeon, a man in a long black frock coat carrying the grim instruments of his trade, still stained with the blood of some recent patient, came past the fountain even as he spoke; Laurence averted his face, quickly, until the man had gone around him. The dragon hissed at the surgeon and snapped as he approached, only to subside when Liberté put his foreleg on her neck and pinned it to the ground. The man climbed carefully upon her back, between the wings.
Laurence could not see, at first, what the surgeon was doing there; the dragon bellowed in pain and tried to thrash, but Liberté held her fast. A few minutes passed, perhaps three, and then the man flung down over the dragon’s side a chain, dripping black blood, with two large barbed hooks on either end still marked with gobbets of flesh: a hobble, simpler but not unlike the one which had held Arkady, when they had found him held prisoner in China. The dragon made a low keening noise, shivering still, but her wings gave a small abortive flutter, as if suddenly freed.
Napoleon made an exclamation of disgust, looking down at the hobble. “And she was not the only one?”
“All of them, in the breeding grounds,” Murat said. “And they look as though they do not get enough food to keep alive a cat; I wonder they get any eggs out of them at all.”
Temeraire could not but fret anxiously at Laurence’s absence, though he had for comfort a splendid dispatch newly arrived from Peking, in which Huang Li had not only reported the egg’s continuing perfect condition, but even, to Temeraire’s delight, enclosed a small illustration of the pavilion in which the egg was housed, at the Summer Palace, showing it attended by four ladies-in-waiting and four Imperial dragons, and being fanned by servants against the late summer’s heat.
“Of course I must keep the original,” Temeraire said to Emily, “but perhaps we might make a copy of it, for Iskierka. Surely one of those aides could knock something up?” He was dictating her a letter to pass along the comforting reassurances he had received, and trying as best he could to describe their own success, giving it better terms than he really felt it deserved. “Do you suppose they have reached the Peninsula by now?” he asked wistfully. It was very hard to think that Iskierka might at this very moment already be with the Corps in Spain, which was evidently winning one brilliant battle after another, and he could report nothing for his own part but one battle, from which they had retreated.
“I don’t think so,” Emily said, with sufficient promptness to suggest that she had thought about the subject before. “They left China in July, just as we did. They might have gone by air from Persia, if they stopped there, and have just been able to reach Gibraltar. But if they have gone round Africa, they cannot be in Spain before Christmas.”
Temeraire did not say, but felt, that this was a small relief: perhaps they would have had another battle before Iskierka did finally have a chance for one of her own. But Emily herself sighed and said, “So it isn’t surprising, that we shouldn’t have had word from them yet,” and looked down at the letter she was writing with a discontented expression, fidgeting with her quill in such a way as to scatter ink across the page.
While she was blotting up the spots, Temeraire said a little anxiously, “I hope you are not changing your mind—I hope you have not thought better of refusing Demane. I am sure that marriage cannot be so wonderful.”
“No,” she said, downcast. “No, at least, not marriage; but—I suppose I am sorry, a little; I wish I’d had him, while I had the chance.”
“Emily,” Mrs. Pemberton said, raising her head from where she sat near-by, working on her sewing. “I must beg you not to say such things.”
“Oh, I know it isn’t my duty; and it should have been a monstrously stupid thing to do,” Emily said, “and so I didn’t. But I shan’t see him for years now, I suppose; if we ever serve together again at all.” She sighed. “And one gets curious,” she added.
“I ought to be turned off without a character,” Mrs. Pemberton said to herself, half under her breath, and then to Emily said, “Even if you must think such things, you needn’t say them, at least not where anyone might hear you. The last thing a young gentleman requires is any encouragement in that direction.”
Temeraire was entirely of like mind with her. He had considered briefly whether perhaps it might be just as well to have Emily marry one of the officers of his own crew, but after some cautious inquiries about the etiquette of the matter, he had determined that this could not really serve to keep her with him when Admiral Roland decided to retire, and it was perfectly likely that she would instead take her own husband away to Excidium with her: so it was not at all to be wished under any circumstances.
He raised his head, alertly, catching some movement through the encampment: Laurence and Tharkay had come back, he saw with much relief, although Laurence’s expression was dreadfully grim, and as he came near, already stripping away his peasant cloak, Temeraire asked anxiously, “Napoleon will not retreat?”
Laurence did not answer at once, only shook his head to say he could not immediately answer, and went into the pavilion, and into his tent; Temeraire in surprise went after him and lowered his head anxiously to peer inside: Laurence was putting on his uniform again, his movements short and sharp, angry. He said to Temeraire briefly, savagely, “They are chaining their dragons in the breeding grounds; they are keeping them hobbled.”
Temeraire did not understand, at first, until Laurence had explained; and then he scarcely could believe it, until he had found Grig again and demanded a confirmation. “Well—well, yes,” Grig said, edging back and looking at him sidelong with some anxiety at Temeraire’s anger, though it was not directed at him. “If one won’t go into harness, they don’t let one fly. Whyever would anyone stay in the breeding grounds, otherwise?”
“It is quite beyond anything,” Temeraire said, furious. “Laurence—”
But at that very moment, the courier arrived from headquarters, breathless, with fresh orders: the clamoring demands for action had at last overcome Kutuzov’s inertia. They were ordered to attack.
Laurence regarded the orders silently, Temeraire peering down beside him. He knew his duty; it was not to liberate the miserable and wretched Russian dragons, nor to tell the Russians how they were to manage their own beasts: it was to secure the defeat of Napoleon and his army, and see them reduced beyond the ability to threaten either a renewed invasion of Britain, or further warmongering upon the Continent. That defeat was now within their grasp.
“But afterwards,” he said to Temeraire, “—afterwards—” He stopped, and then sent for Gong Su and asked him, “Sir, would the Emperor consent to receive these dragons into his Empire?” He gestured to Grig, who looked back with an uncertain expression.
Gong Su looked at Grig with a cool, assessing eye. “He speaks more than one tongue?” he asked. “Will you inquire at what age he acquired them?”
“Well, the dragon-tongue, I learnt that in the breeding grounds before I was hatched,” Grig said, doubtfully, “and as for Russian, and French, I cannot rightly say; I suppose I have just picked them up bit by bit the same way that the others have: one does, hearing them every day.”
As this was by no means characteristic of most dragon breeds, particularly not in the West, Gong Su nodded in some appreciation. He said to Laurence, “Of course I cannot speak with any official weight. But these beasts appear to be of respectable qualities, and moderate size. There is a great hunger for village porters in the countryside. If they did not consider laborer’s work in such small settlements beneath their dignity, then there should be no difficulty in finding employment for them.”
“Will you write and inquire if I may extend an offer of such hospitality?” Laurence asked bluntly; Gong Su bowed.
Laurence nodded and said to Temeraire, “Then afterwards, when we have done, we will go to all the breeding grounds which Grig can lead us to—you will explain to them the conditions of their welcome in China, of their employment there—and those who wish to depart, we will free from their hobbles and take with us on our own return to China.
“And if the Russians do not care to lose all their breeding stock,” he added, low with anger, “they may amend their treatment.”
He knew the condition of the Russian peasantry, very little removed from slavery, was nearly as pitiable as that of the dragons; and yet there was something intolerable in the spectacle of hundreds of beasts so hobbled that they might not even fly as was their nature, but instead were confined to scrabbling in pits; save for those beasts who, cowed by the horror of their circumstances, would consent to be slaves for scraps and at least a little freedom of movement. The sensation was much as though, laboring with all his might upon the rigging of a ship and in her upper decks, keeping company with her crew, Laurence had suddenly seen through an open ladderway the faces of captives chained and looking up at him with accusation, and discovered himself in service upon a slaver.
He and Temeraire flew together to the headquarters, where a ferment of activity was going forward: Bennigsen and his staff were in an ill-suppressed condition of delight, Kutuzov more phlegmatic; he had appointed Bennigsen and Colonel Toll to the command of the operation. Their target would be Murat himself and his corps, encamped not far from Tarutino, who had grown incautious after a month-long informal truce, their patrols slack: a heavy forest near-by offered cover for a surprise attack.
“Ah, Captain,” Kutuzov said, and beckoned him out of the tumult, “come and let us discuss your orders.”
“Sir,” Laurence said, following him into a separate chamber, formerly the private library of the master of the house, “I will carry out your orders, if you continue to desire our assistance; but I must beg permission to speak frankly, as the price of that assistance may no longer be one you willingly accept.”
Kutuzov settled himself comfortably in his chair and waved a hand for permission, his face settling into its habitual slack lines; he listened in silence while Laurence laid out both his objections to the abuse of the Russian ferals, and his intentions towards them. “I hope you will understand, sir, if Temeraire and the other dragons should have that fellow-feeling towards their own kind, which absolutely must have prohibited their making themselves allies of a nation which so maltreated them. This project is the only manner in which I can conceive of reconciling that repugnance with our continued service to you.
“But I am by no means willing to provoke a confrontation between nations, wholly undesirable to either; if you should wish us to depart at once, without engaging in what you may call interference in your affairs, we will do so,” Laurence added, “and I hope you will believe me nevertheless entirely desiring your victory over Bonaparte, in such a case.”
He finished slowly, a little surprised to find Kutuzov still listening to him with an attitude almost of complacency. The old general snorted at his look and said, “Grig is a clever little creature, you know: Captain Rozhkov raised him from the egg.”
While Laurence with a sense of strong indignation digested this, Kutuzov continued, “It is not as though we have not heard of you, Captain Laurence. We have all had a great many arguments, whether your aid would not be too expensive, to begin with.”
“Sir,” Laurence said, now baffled, “I beg your pardon; however should you know me from Adam?”
“If the world had not heard of you, after your adventure at Gdansk,” Kutuzov said, meaning Danzig, where they had rescued the garrison from the wreck of the Prussian campaign, “or after the plague, we should certainly have heard of you after Brazil. Where you go, you leave half the world overturned behind you. You are more dangerous than Bonaparte in your own way, you and that beast of yours.
“It is awkward you should have seen that feral just now, in Moscow, but in the end, it seems it will not make so much difference. The Tsar means us to chase the French all the way to Paris, and I cannot do that without four hundred dragons or more. I must get them out of the breeding grounds somehow.
“So! You will show us how to feed dragons on grain, and I will speak to Arakcheyev,” the Tsar’s chief minister, “and we will cut them loose.”
Laurence almost did not at first quite comprehend Kutuzov’s answer; he had long felt—long known—the many practical advantages offered by a more humane and just treatment of dragons; he had recognized the danger to Britain and any other nation in the stark comparison between the increasing consideration offered to French dragons, and the ill-treatment of their own. He had indeed made these practical matters his argument on many occasions, but he had grown so used to failure, to meeting with only a stolid, blind resistance, that to find not only a tolerant ear but agreement left him more nonplussed than rejection; he did not at once know what to say. “Sir,” Laurence said, and halted, overwhelmed by a perfect reversion of feeling, as though he had faced a mortal enemy, and been offered from his hand a priceless gift; he could cheerfully have embraced the old general with Slavic passion.
He with difficulty tried to express his sentiments; Kutuzov waved them away. “Don’t be too quick to rejoice,” he said. “We can’t cut them loose until we can be sure we can feed them. It hasn’t been so long since the Time of Troubles, you know; half the country would rise up if they saw dragons flying all over unharnessed.” He indicated with one thick finger a painting upon the wall, which depicted a band of pikemen heroically massed and their commander pointing aloft at a looming, snarling dragon, which stood with outspread wings over the broken body of a horse and clutched in one taloned hand a screaming maiden, her trailing white gown a banner stained with blood and her arms outflung in supplication as she cast her eyes up to the heavens.
“Sir,” Laurence said dryly, “permit me to assure you that the most vicious beast in all Russia would not prefer to make its dinner out of a lady of six or seven stone over a horse of one hundred.”
Kutuzov shrugged. “There were not always horses,” he said bluntly.
Laurence was nevertheless able to return to Temeraire with a spirit no longer weighed down with guilt, and share with him the satisfaction not only of having carried their point, but having won it in such a manner as founded the victory on the most solid of ground: that the Russians had freely recognized the necessity of reforming their treatment of their native dragons. “Well,” Temeraire said, “I am very glad to see that they have some real sense, Laurence; Kutuzov must be quite a good fellow, particularly as he means us to attack. And now we can do so wholeheartedly.
“Although,” he added, with a lowering frown, “I cannot like hearing that Grig has been carrying tales of us: whatever did he mean by it, and pretending that he was so wretched, if he is really quite the pet of his captain? I do not know what to make of it at all.”
“You must take it as a compliment,” Tharkay said, “that you are of sufficient importance to have spies set upon you.” He had expressed just such a sentiment on first learning that Gong Su had been all the while an agent of Prince Mianning; Laurence could not partake in those feelings, however, and was not in the least sorry to find the little dragon had prudently taken himself off and vanished into the general mass of the Russian forces.
But it was nevertheless with a gladdened heart that Laurence went to his tent, to clean his guns and sharpen his sword before the engagement, and was surprised to find Junichiro there. “I have neglected you, I find,” Laurence said, in apology: it had not escaped his notice that Junichiro had made extraordinary progress in his study of English, and had furthermore devoted himself with great attention to mastering not only aerial tactics, but learning as much as he could of all others as well: he had seen the boy make persistent overtures to the Russian artillery-officers, in particular, and questioning any he found who could speak at least a little French.
He had in short done all that anyone might have wanted, to make him an officer; but Laurence had realized, too late, that he was by no means a valuable mentor: the Aerial Corps would be more likely to scorn Junichiro than embrace him, for having Laurence’s good word.
“But,” he said, “I will write to Admiral Roland, and see if I can solicit her influence on your behalf—”
“Sir,” Junichiro said quietly, “I beg you do not concern yourself further with this matter: I cannot serve in your Corps.”
Laurence paused, startled, and was even more so when Junichiro added, “I have come to ask your permission to depart; and if you refuse it, I must nevertheless end my service to you, even if by a final means.” Laurence realized with appalled astonishment that Junichiro spoke of ending his own life: that he would die, by his hand, rather than continue with them.
“Good God,” he said, “whatever should make you even contemplate so desperate a course of action? I know of no reason why I should refuse you the right to depart; I might counsel you against it, but you are a free man, and you have made no oath of service to the King: indeed, I am rather indebted to you, than the reverse.”
“Captain,” Junichiro said, “you may feel differently when I have explained, but it would be dishonorable of me to conceal my purpose from you: I intend to go to France.”
“You mean to take service with Bonaparte,” Laurence said, half-disbelieving: although he did now see why Junichiro had thought he would object. It sounded like treachery, and yet the confession made it not so; a true traitor would have gone, silently, slinking away. But if Junichiro truly meant to go to Napoleon now, with so much intimate knowledge of their force, their positions—
“No.” Junichiro shook his head. “I mean to ask him to send an envoy to my country.”
Laurence sat down slowly on the camp-chair, disturbed. “Pray explain yourself.”
“I am masterless,” Junichiro said, “—a criminal and an exile. But it is still my duty to serve the Emperor—my Emperor. It is still my duty to serve Japan. And your nation is not the friend of mine.”
He gestured a little, towards the tent entrance. “Your position in this war is now superior,” he said. “It is likely that you will be victorious, and cement your alliance with China. And long have they coveted dominion over Japan. I have seen the might of their dragons. Soon they will have Western ships, and Western guns. And we must have them, too—and if not from you, it seems we must have them from France.”
“We need not be your enemy, only to be China’s friend,” Laurence said, but Junichiro raised his eyes and looked at him straight-on.
“You require alliance with them,” Junichiro said. “You require their dragons. Whatever you might hope to get from us, you do not need, not in the same way. If they demand that you choose, you will choose them.” He made a short cutting gesture with one hand. “My decision is made. I have only waited so long because I did not wish to depart while your situation was yet uncertain, or bleak: I would not leave you in defeat. If you wish to prevent my leaving, you can. I will not attempt to steal away like a thief in the night. But I will no longer serve Britain.”
Laurence was silent. He knew what Hammond would have said, to the prospect of sending so priceless an ambassador as Junichiro would make straight into Napoleon’s hands: a man not merely versed in the language of Japan but intimately familiar with its customs, and of high birth; a man who despite his exile still had friends among the nobility of that nation, and whose opinions might be privately respected, even if he could not officially be pardoned. It could easily be as much as handing Napoleon a new ally, one who could threaten China’s coasts and British shipping.
“You have sacrificed everything,” Laurence said finally, “home, position, friends; and if not for my sake, to my benefit. I have no right to keep you, and I cannot dispute your conclusions. But my first duty is to see this war won. If you will give me your word of honor, not to reveal any information about our forces or those of the Russians, I cannot stand in your way.”
Junichiro said, “I swear it,” very simply.
Laurence nodded a little; he had no doubt of that promise being kept. “Then I will bid you Godspeed,” he said quietly, “and I hope with all my heart that your fears will not come to pass.”
Junichiro bowed to him deeply, and slipped away; Laurence sat silently in the tent with his sword across his knees, and wondered if they would next meet again as enemies, across a battlefield.
Temeraire was all the more relieved, that Kutuzov’s good sense meant that he could properly continue to fight: he was sure now of their ultimate victory. The strike against Murat’s forces proved a great success, although a great many of the Russian infantry got themselves lost in the woods and did not reach the battlefield in time: but that scarcely mattered, when Shao Ri came back with not only four captured dragons, and all their crews, but a golden eagle still with tatters of a tricorn attached and sixteen guns; and the rest of the infantry had done well for themselves also, having taken nearly two thousand prisoners and twenty guns, and three eagles. One could not compare, of course, for there were so many more of the French infantry that Napoleon was obliged to give them more eagles to carry, and the eagle which Shao Ri had captured was nearly three times the size—perhaps a little closer to twice—and in any case truly splendid. Temeraire had rarely felt so much delight as when Shao Ri lay the captured standards before Laurence and himself, with a low bow: he felt his breast quite bursting with pride and satisfaction.
The mood in the Russian camp was also nearly exaltation, and everyone was pleased, except the generals, who were quarreling again: General Raevsky, whom Laurence thought a great deal of, and who had dined with them on several occasions, even told Laurence he avoided headquarters as much as ever he could. “It is a nest of vipers,” he said, “and they have not yet reorganized the command, even though Barclay is gone.”
But however much they quarreled, at least they had won their first real and clear victory, unquestioned, and in the shadow of this defeat, Napoleon had to begin his own retreat from Moscow at last, quite as humiliated as the most ardent Russian patriot might have desired. Of course, they had only defeated his advance guard, but for the moment it seemed as good as if they had routed his entire army, and Temeraire now looked forward with the most eager anticipation to an opportunity to do just that. The question before them now was which way Napoleon would withdraw, along which road; and only a few days later, Temeraire was woken a little way into the evening by a courier coming: there was fighting in Maloyaroslavets, a little town south of their camp along the Kaluga Road, and Napoleon’s whole army was there.
“Nothing could be better,” he said to Laurence jubilantly. “Now we will properly fall upon him; and perhaps he will be there himself, and we can take him prisoner.”
Of course, they had been obliged to disperse the second jalan back to the east, because Shen Shi felt too uncertain of supply. But Temeraire privately felt that was all the better, because it should mean more of an excuse for him to take part in the battle, directly; however little he wished to disregard General Chu’s last advice to him, he could not help but think he would have quite an awkward time of it explaining, when next he saw Iskierka, if he did not have at least a little fighting himself.
“And we cannot be blamed now, Laurence,” he said, “for Kutuzov has got those aides who can speak Chinese, even if their accents are perfectly dreadful; so I do not see that we must sit about behind the lines. Indeed, they are by far the better placed to do it, since they can speak Chinese and Russian, and I have not worked Russian out yet.”
He had been very careful to avoid doing so: he did not in the least want to be able to go-between any more than he already did.
“So long as we can be of material use,” Laurence said, “I will not scruple to say I share your feelings: and God willing, this battle will see Napoleon’s army broken.”
Laurence had a note from General Raevsky, while the jalan were assembling: Will you carry us? was all the message, and he was glad to return an affirmative answer. Raevsky had ten thousand men in his corps, lately denied the opportunity to partake in the attack upon Murat and all of them filled with passion; they flung themselves aboard the Chinese dragons with a will, as enthusiastic seeking battle as they had been miserable in retreat.
The dragons snatched up the guns, and launched aloft: Temeraire nearly trembling with excitement beneath him and only with difficulty keeping to the pace that Zhao Lien watchfully set, to avoid wearing out her forces under their burden; the Russians began to sing as they flew on, deep young joyful voices, and traded off with the Chinese crews, one after another, all the length of their flight.
“He must have meant to march on Kaluga,” Raevsky said to Laurence, as they flew: that city being presently the main supply base of Kutuzov’s army, and the gateway to the munitions factories of the south. “God favors Russia at last: if Dokhturov had not caught him, he could have done us some more mischief yet.”
The distance was only twenty miles: two hours put them in sight of the town, and the plumes of smoke rising; several of the buildings were burning, and the cannon roared ferociously on both sides. Zhao Lien brought them around wide, to the south behind the Russian advance guard which was ferociously holding the small town against Napoleon’s advance. More prepared this time for the hop-skip of the Chinese landing, Raevsky’s corps were disembarked in not half-an-hour; his sergeants were already bawling for order and forming the men into their regiments as the Chinese dragons lifted off again, to form up aloft.
Temeraire hovered longingly beside Zhao Lien as she sent forth the first jalan through the climbing smoke. Dokhturov had only one aerial regiment of six heavy-weights, and with them two dozen light-weights whom, in defiance of tradition, he had flung into battle to give his men a little cover against the French skirmishing attack. The French dragons, some twenty in number and wearing the emblem of the corps of Eugène de Beauharnais, had been handily outfighting them and dropping bombs upon the Russian troops, who were taking a dismal shelter against a handful of buildings now all of them in flames.
The Chinese legions drove in and at once turned the tide in the air: the French infantry fell back and dug themselves grimly into the stone monastery at the center of town behind their guns, and the French dragons turned tail and simply fled, as quickly as they could go. “Look, Laurence, you see they are just running away!” Temeraire said, in rather exultant tones, as they watched the retreat from the southern end of the town.
Five niru set off in pursuit; but the crews of the French middle-weights abruptly swung below and cut loose their belly-netting, dropping their munitions. And thus lightened, the French middle-weights could just barely outdistance the Chinese and began to pull away. One niru did manage to pounce on a lagging beast, however, and skillfully dragged him down to the ground. The remainder escaped: but meanwhile the soldiers below were now exposed, and the Russian supply corps had labored to some purpose in these intervening weeks to provide the Chinese legions with their own bombs, which now their crews began to hurl down on the entrenched Frenchmen.
The French answer came in the form of round-shot. The French used stones and bricks from the shattered walls and streets of the town to elevate their guns until they were pointing nearly directly over their heads, and in so doing managed to inflict a casualty of their own: a ball tore into the belly of one of the Shao Lung and erupted through its back, and the poor creature fell stone-dead from the sky, smashing through a burning building and leaving its wreck sprawled across the streets of the town. Raevsky’s men had now dragged their guns into position, with the aid of horses snatched from Dokhturov’s corps: the battlefield was no place for cavalry, with fire on every side and the narrow streets choked with rubble nearly impassable even for men on foot. Their guns began to thunder in company.
The French—whom Laurence realized, when the smoke cleared well enough to see their uniforms, were not Frenchmen but Italians, recruited from another of Napoleon’s conquests—would surely have retreated in the face of their disadvantages, if any opportunity offered them; but as they were behind the only stone walls in their vicinity, they could get no better shelter than where they were, and by removing themselves from it would have exposed themselves both to the relentless artillery and to the snatching talons of the dragons above.
From necessity they held their position, answering as best they could, and so valiantly that they could only be winnowed down a little at a time, and the fires of the town crept ever closer towards them.
They held for an hour, pushed back slowly, and then Laurence through his glass saw movement through the immense towering clouds of smoke. “Temeraire,” he said, “take us aloft, if you please,” but Zhao Lien’s scouts were already darting back to report to her: Davout’s corps had arrived, with fifty French dragons in support.
For the next four hours, the battle roared back and forward through the town: at first the French fell back, under their newly arrived air cover, and the Russians with a shout charged into its narrow lanes and took possession; then they themselves were forced back by the terrible weight of the French artillery and their advantage in infantry. The town changed hands five more times, that dreadful afternoon: many of the wounded could not be rescued, and a sudden change in the wind drove the spreading flames abruptly further on. As those who could not walk were engulfed by the spreading flames, the shrieks of the dying rose like a noise out of perdition from the smoke.
“Dear God,” Laurence said. “Temeraire—Temeraire, can you interrupt them? For God’s sake, we must have a cease-fire, and get those men out of the way.”
They passed the word to Zhao Lien, and then Temeraire flung himself aloft and roared terribly, shatteringly: so hugely that all those below halted a moment and covered their heads against it. Emily and Baggy flung out a great white trailing sheet and waved it in the wind, and for a moment the guns fell silent; Zhao Lien sent in four of the supply-dragons, to snatch up the wounded of both sides, and bear them limp and half-scorched out.
The pause stretched on for a moment, for a minute, for three. Laurence half-wondered if perhaps it might go on, no-one wishing to continue: if a little space might break through whatever illusion it was permitted men to desire battle and to give it. It seemed as though all the world held its breath; and then a small company of artillery from de Beauharnais’s corps touched off a primed gun, near the center, and the conflict was rejoined even as the wounded—and the many dead which had been taken up from among them—were laid out moaning upon the ground.
“Laurence, when we do not even want this town anyway, particularly,” Temeraire said, looking sadly over the miserable wretches. “There is nothing splendid in it; if there ever were, it is surely quite ruined now, and if we did win this battle, we should have gained nothing but to say that we had won: that cannot be enough.”
“The town may not be of significance in itself,” Laurence said, “but it is immensely so as a gateway to our main sources of supply and beyond that to the Russian munitions-factories; if Napoleon managed to seize a great magazine for himself, and so hamper our own supply, he might well cripple the Russian Army.”
As the battle continued, Zhao Lien directed her dragons steadily and conservatively: their advantage against the French was no longer so overwhelming, for besides the removal of the second jalan, they had been reduced by injuries: the Chinese armor, though excellent against talon and tooth, which it deflected easily, did not withstand rifle-fire as did chainmail. Of the 200 dragons of the remaining jalan, 150 were fighting-beasts, of whom nearly 30 were presently in the care of the surgeons; and their scouts and spies had recorded nearly 80 beasts in fighting trim still to Napoleon’s tally, though not all of those were to be seen. So she was careful not to commit her entire force: 50 beasts presently were napping on the ground below, conserving their strength, leaving them 70 against 50 in the air.
Laurence had kept all this time scanning the town with his glass: even with all the advantages of elevation, he could scarcely make out anything for the smoke, layers upon layers of it, white and grey and smudged black, except when the blaze of cannon-fire briefly illuminated a company. “The French are presently heavily committed to those streets in the north-east,” he said, having made out their positions, “and I do not see any of their guns pointing to their rear. If we should come around for a single pass, and level the buildings behind them with the divine wind, we should likely roll them up: and they are supporting the right flank of their army.”
“I will ask Zhao Lien at once,” Temeraire said, eagerly, and shot to her side; she looked more than a little anxious—small wonder; Laurence could well believe she would not like in the least to return to China with the news she had lost a Celestial, and even a dubious sort of Imperial prince—but there were nearly twenty guns established in the exposed position, and she could not fail to see the advantage of knocking such a hole in the French artillery.
“Very well,” she said, reluctantly, at last, “—only wait a moment: the seventh and the fifteenth niru have performed with particular excellence, and deserve the honor of escorting your pass.” She waved aloft two companies from the resting dragons below, and recalled those two named companies from the battle; surrounded thus by six beasts flying in protective pattern, Laurence almost felt himself back in England, formation-flying, as they swung out around the town.
Sweeping his gaze over the battlefield as they flew, Laurence saw, aboard one of the French middle-weights, a tall captain in flying-leathers looking at them through his own glass who plainly recognized the danger they posed; his ensign began at once putting out urgent signal-flags. The smoke concealed these from the men below, however; and the French were too hard-pressed to send enough relief to overcome Temeraire’s escort. The captain bent forward over his dragon’s neck, and the beast fell back from the fighting and turning flung itself gallantly towards the ground, going to warn the artillery-men in person.
“Quickly,” Laurence said, “quickly, before they can turn round the guns—”
Their course by necessity was taking them wide around the town, as French artillery range covered nearly every inch of it and beyond its limits; Temeraire increased his speed, while his escort struggled to keep pace with him. Below, the middle-weight had managed to perch for a moment upon a collapsed building, hopping from one foot to the other and trying to keep her bell-men from being scorched while the captain shouted down to the artillery company.
The men were frantically dragging round several of the guns, to aim towards their approach, but their horses were stumbling with drooping heads, already weak, and the guns were surely scorching-hot from their work. Temeraire threw himself forward, roaring, and the buildings, weakened already by fire, began to shatter as the divine wind struck: the center of the walls collapsing inwards and the half-burnt roofs falling after them, until the whole went tumbling forward in a sudden crashing wave of burning tinders, a great blinding rush of orange sparks and ash spraying up, very much as from a fire stuck by a poker and stirred, and buried the guns and the men with them.
The French dragon had snatched one gun from the wreck, crying out with pain at the heat; the bell-men stretched their hands out to seize a few of the soldiers as she flung herself aloft. She was laboring away as Temeraire pulled up again, and Laurence alarmed called, “Temeraire! Temeraire, we must pull back!” for Temeraire was plainly unsatisfied with the immense success of his maneuver and half-instinctively had begun beating in pursuit, though this course should bring them too close to another battery of French artillery.
“Oh—” Temeraire said, stifled, and turned away: but a little sluggishly, and the roar of guns came from beneath as they came briefly into range.
Laurence caught Baggy, when he would have ducked, and kept him standing straight; the boy abashed glanced to see if anyone else had noticed his brief lapse. But his nearest neighbor, Roland, was hanging halfway out over Temeraire’s shoulder, her carabiner straps extended to full length, and shouting enemy positions down to Forthing below: he was directing Laurence’s handful of bell-men in flinging bombs down.
A whistling of round-shot came nearly past Laurence’s ear; behind him another struck one of the dragons on Temeraire’s left, scored its side, and as it jerked away, crying, tore a terrible gaping rent through its wing. Temeraire nearly turned back to catch him, but the other dragons of the niru were already closing in to support their wounded comrade. “Onward straight!” Laurence shouted through his speaking-trumpet: the other dragons would try to stay with Temeraire, and if he turned backwards they would find themselves snarled and vulnerable. The guns below had been meant for firing on the enemy infantry, at the other end of the town, but in a moment they would be reloaded with canister-shot, and a second volley would be sure of doing terrible damage among them.
Temeraire put on a burst of speed, and carried them back out of range; they swung back to Zhao Lien, who said nothing, but looked at the wounded dragon as he was helped tenderly to the ground; Temeraire hung his head, and as plainly did not require the lecture. He flew down to stand beside the wounded dragon, asking his name unhappily—“Lung Zhao Yang, Honorable One,” the dragon said, trying despite his injuries to bow his head.
“I am very sorry I should have led you too close to the guns,” Temeraire said, low, and stayed watching anxiously while the surgeons inspected the terrible damage to the wing, shaking their heads with concern.
“Do not wholly reproach yourself,” Laurence said quietly. “We have silenced eighteen guns, and made a material change to the course of the battle; their position has been badly weakened. It must be counted worth the cost.”
Temeraire nodded a little, unhappily, but did not say anything; he went back aloft watching, until abruptly a small panting Russian dragon came flying wildly towards the village from the north-east, and threading their own ranks dropped himself unceremoniously onto Temeraire’s back amidst the crew, sending them all scrambling and himself nearly trembling with his speed and the effort of his flight: it was Grig.
“Oh,” Temeraire said, coldly, having craned his head around in astonishment to be so boarded, “—you.”
“Yes, but pray,” Grig said, between his gulped breaths, “pray don’t be angry, not now: they are all coming. I couldn’t stop them; they won’t listen to me. If only you can persuade them—”
“What has happened?” Laurence said sharply, and looked back the way that Grig had come: a low grey cloud, moving fast, approaching.
“Murat went to the breeding grounds on the Motsha River,” Grig said, “and let them all go. He told them—”
The cloud was resolving into a great mass of dragons, most of them grey-white beasts with also a handful of smaller black dragons like the Russian couriers, flying raggedly and slowly but coming onward for all that: not towards the battlefield, nor towards their army, but heading directly for the supply-train in their rear. Temeraire flung himself towards their path, but even as he tried to intercept their course, they were already flying past like hurtling comets, lean and swollen-bellied and hollow-ribbed, some of them with eyes nearly shut and others dripping a kind of trailing slime from the sides of their mouths.
The Shen Lung, though ordinarily not combatants, were nevertheless well prepared to guard the supply against enemy attack: the twenty of them in the rear rose up swiftly to form a knot of protection over the cooking-pits, but preparation was no match for the number and desperation of the loosed ferals, in a battle whose sole question was, whether the supply should be ruined, or not. Some ferals blindly flung themselves heedless of claws and teeth down, and dragged quartered pigs dripping from the pits, then fled with their prizes away; others avoided the defenders and threw themselves instead further on to fall upon the rearing, terrified carthorses of the supply-train stretched down the road to the south.
These, too, were defended promptly by their drivers, who despite the little warning they had been given with courage unshipped their pikes and began to thrust at the snatching ferals; but there were not dozens of dragons, but a hundred and more, and though maddened with hunger they were not dumb beasts. They quickly began to form impromptu bands: one beast or two would draw the defenders, and the other snatch a horse away in that brief opening; then all three together would dart off bearing their trophy.
In the span of ten minutes, all had been reduced to utter chaos in the Russian baggage: carts unhorsed or overturned, and the rest trying both to defend themselves and keep their frantic horses from destroying themselves with their plunging, desperate attempts to break loose from their traces and escape. The Cossack aviators were trying to do what they might, but even massed, their small beasts could not stand against the grey dragons when the latter were so blindly determined to bull their way through.
The ferals were indiscriminate in their hunger: Laurence saw, looking back, that there was some chaos also in the French rear, where a few knots of starving dragons had hurled themselves against their supply-train; but Murat had evidently aimed the beasts well, and the general course of their flight was leading directly to the Russian rear. A dozen afflicted the French; it seemed near a hundred and more had fallen upon the Russians.
The niru who had been held in reserve had now come aloft. “Pray do not hurt them, if you can help it!” Temeraire called to them, as they joined him and began to swiftly work to envelop the rampaging cloud of ferals. “Let us try and force them to the ground: I am sure if only we can, they will listen to us, once we give them a little food.”
But the ferals had no intention of staying either to listen or be recaptured, as surely they must have feared. Those who had already snatched some food were darting away in every direction, like fish escaping from a closing net; only an especially ragged few, who had not been able to seize a prize and had reached the limits of their strength, were borne down. Others yet unsuccessful began to abandon their attempts, and then, to Laurence’s horror, he saw them turning away from the well-defended supply, and falling upon the rows of the prone and bloody ranks of the wounded soldiers in their hospital.
Temeraire roared in protest, and led the niru in a scattering charge: but a dozen dragons fleeing carried off men screaming for aid and rescue in their talons. “God in Heaven,” Laurence said, sickened, as he saw one wild-eyed creature raise a thrashing man to its jaws even as it flew, and with a snap of teeth and a savage jerk tear him in half.
Temeraire with a surge caught two of the beasts, and seizing them by the necks with his talons dragged them down to the ground. Laurence saw Ferris raise his rifle to his shoulder and take aim at one of the dragons, who was still trying even pinned to the ground to eat its victim. They were perhaps twenty yards distant. The gun spoke, with a burst of grey smoke; the dragon’s head jerked back like a kicking horse, a spurt of blood and ichor coming from its eye, and fell limp. The man it had seized fell to the ground with it, and began to drag himself sobbing away, pulling his leg from between its teeth.
Nine dragons of the niru at Temeraire’s rear together managed to bring down another five, along with their hapless captives; but by the time they could save the men and go aloft again, there was no hope of catching any more. The ferals were all of them vanishing again, as swiftly as they had come, dispersing to all corners of the countryside.
The battle was dying behind them, in the confusion and horror brought on by the unexpected swarming attack. The day was drawing to a close; the Russians began to fall back to the south, taking up positions across the road to Kaluga, and left the French to possession of the streets, choked with bodies and running with blood.
Their dinner that night was a thin and scanty one. The ferals had not acted with malice: they had not deliberately spoilt the cooking-pits nor the supply they could not themselves carry off, save accidentally, but accident had been more than enough. Their attack had taken or ruined more than half the army’s food, for that night. Reports were yet coming in, from all around the countryside, of further depradations against the farmers and nearby villages: terrified peasants were even coming to the army, with their children and their cattle, begging for protection.
“And there are breeding grounds also on the Ugra River,” one Russian aviator said: a river which ran on past Kaluga itself. “Heavy-weight breeding grounds.”
The Cossacks were laboring valiantly all that evening, despite nightfall, to bring them further intelligence of the movement of both the French Army and the feral beasts. Late in the night, while Kutuzov yet sat looking heavily over his maps, one of their captains came in weary and in his dirt, his mustaches stained with tobacco, and reported to him in Russian. Kutuzov nodded a little.
“The French have put out cooking-pits for them,” Kutuzov said briefly to Laurence.
Despite all the barriers of language, evidently the French had managed to make a simple bargain understood: if the ferals brought them grain, which they could not ordinarily digest, the French added some meat to the stew, and shared it out between them and their own dragons.
“And like as not throwing our prisoners and our slain into the pits, the monsters,” another Russian said, a grotesque fantasy, but one which Laurence heard more than once repeated in the camp.
Kutuzov said heavily, “We fall back towards Kaluga, at once. Captain,” he said to Laurence, “will you go to the Ugra grounds, and secure them?”
Laurence was silent a moment: to make himself a gaoler, for starving and chained beasts, was work he could scarcely bear to contemplate, and yet the faces of the screaming wounded haunted him. “We will, sir,” he said.
Temeraire did not disagree; he and all the Chinese dragons, and their crews, had been very silent and shocked since the battle: what was yet a lurking fear in the heart of most Westerners, who had grown up on tales of maurauding dragons and heroic knights standing forth to slay them, and who thought of aviators as the handlers of savage beasts, was to them so unthinkable and vile as to be unacceptable even as a subject for fiction.
They left at once, despite the late hour; so, too, did the army. They saw a few torches moving upon the road below for guidance, the light reflected here and there off pikes and bayonets that bristled in every direction; in the hospital-waggons, those less grievously wounded rode sitting up, holding weapons aloft. There was no sight of French pursuit or forward motion: they remained ensconced around Maloyaroslavets, or what was left of that town after the ruinous combat.
Three roads now stood open to Napoleon: he might retreat himself towards Moscow and from there retire to Smolensk along the road which had brought him, or he might instead try and take a southern route; or if he had not yet lost the heart for a final adventure, even strike out for Kaluga after all, and throw a gauntlet once more in the teeth of the Russian Army.
“I could scarcely imagine it, even of Bonaparte,” Laurence said to Tharkay, as they flew through the night; he had sent most of the officers below to sleep, as much as they might, in the belly-netting, “after he was halted in his tracks yesterday, except—”
Tharkay nodded minutely. Dragons could not fly long distances day in and out without steady provender, and their assembled host was so large that if their supply were destroyed, even an instant dispersal to all directions with the liberty of pillaging could not feed them all. And their own supply depots, intended as they were for the feeding of great numbers of dragons, would in any case now be appealing targets for the ferals. Shen Shi already looked grave, and after private consultation that night, Zhao Lien had sent away some twenty dragons to be a guard upon their nearest depots—and with instructions that should they be overwhelmed, they were immediately to begin to retreat eastward instead of trying to rejoin the main body of their jalan.
So at a stroke, Napoleon had already managed to whittle down their aerial advantage to a thin margin, now composed not very much of numbers but only of the greater experience and skill at maneuvering which the Chinese forces brought to battle, as compared to his young legions.
The night was very clear, and very cold: Temeraire’s breath streamed away behind them in long trailing gusts as he flew on. The first hard frosts had come at last; before they had gone aloft, the ground had been frozen beneath them to a depth of seven inches, and many of the Shao Lung, unused to the cold climate, had been grumbling. It was the twenty-fifth of October. Laurence had to check their course against the stars, several times, until at last they struck the line of the Ugra River and turned to follow it southeast; a gibbous moon hung pale white, shining off the water and more translucently the skin of ice forming over its surface.
“When we arrive,” Laurence had said to Temeraire and Zhao Lien, “we must first give them something to eat; we cannot expect beasts who are starving to hear any reason, but having been fed might listen, when Temeraire and Grig can speak with them in their own tongue.”
Shen Shi had looked even more grave, but had at last agreed to release an additional quarter-day’s ration from her already-strained depots; the grain and drugged cattle were now being carried by the dragons following them along with their own supply. The sixty remaining dragons of the first jalan, under Shao Ri, were coming with them; the rest, and Zhao Lien, had remained with Kutuzov’s army to cover the withdrawal south. A withdrawal which could all too easily end in disaster, if Kaluga’s storehouses were struck.
“Temeraire,” Grig said, laboring to catch them up, “Temeraire, there is someone there on the river, I think.”
“Where away?” Temeraire asked, and stooping they landed to find a Cossack dragon, barely the size of a Winchester, lying smashed and dying upon the bank half in and half out of the water: his side riddled with bullets, and his two riders both broken beneath his body. The dragon was already nearly gone; one man, who had been half in the frigid water, was dead; but the other opened his eyes and turned his head to look Laurence in the face.
“We will have you out in a moment,” Laurence said to him, kneeling to put a hand on his shoulder, the best comfort he could give; ribs were protruding from the man’s flesh, and the dragon lay over his legs. The Cossack only seized him by the collar with a desperate final straining effort and tried to pull him close; Laurence leaned in, and the man whispered, “Murat,” and released him, falling back; a little gush of blood came from his lips, and he was still.
Laurence rising to catch at the harness and climb back aboard said, “Temeraire, we must go at once. Send half the niru along the river, quietly, until they see the other end of the breeding grounds, and then we must close in on all sides: and let us pray the quarry has not yet escaped us. And pass the word: douse all lights.”
Lanterns all extinguished, they flew low and quietly over the tree-tops, until coming over a hill they reached a wide shallow valley of the breeding grounds; a massive Russian heavy-weight nearly the size of a Regal Copper was crouched low, its head hanging to the ground, as four men labored frantically upon its back, working on a massive chain of iron stained with rust. They were not surgeons, but blacksmiths: Laurence realized abruptly that the French had forgone removing the barbs for the practical expedient of merely cutting the chains off them, and leaving the difficult hooks where they were.
A small portable forge glowed orange-red where they hammered on the second link, having already broken the first; the dragon was already moving its right wing, experimentally, and looking over with a craning head at its own back to watch the work: it was nearly quivering. The beast did not look quite so starved as had the grey light-weights: if maddened past fear of maiming by starvation, a heavy-weight might have been able to break even the strongest hobble, and then could have done enormous damage. But it certainly looked lean and hungry enough, and eager for its freedom.
The smiths were working with desperate urgency, and around them all the crew and company of twelve dragons in harness were looking anxiously in all directions, around Liberté himself; but on the ground before him, as nonchalant as if he was in the midst of Paris instead of engaged in a wildly reckless and dangerous enterprise behind his enemy’s lines, Murat walked back and forth whistling unconcerned. Laurence put a restraining hand silently on Temeraire’s neck, and kept his glass stretched out, watching the far side of the breeding ground, for any glint of the other half of their own company; he did not mean to lose this chance through excessive haste.
At last he caught a glitter of moonlight on a bared sword-blade waved at him. The smiths had nearly cut through the second link, below. “Ready arms, and on them,” Laurence said, and with a glad and terrible roar, Temeraire surged forward, while below them the French dragons sprang desperately for escape.
The Russian heavy-weight, jerking up its head, saw them approaching and tried its other wing: the smiths were thrown off their feet as the chain went flying from beneath their hands, and with their smoking, sparking forge went sliding down its back to the ground as the massive dragon reared up. It bent down and snatched them all up together in one claw, four men and forge tumbled together, and with the other caught the loose hanging end of the chain; and then it flung itself into the air.
Laurence signaled to let the beast go—he had not the heart to return the creature to its chains, and they had better prey before them. Liberté had snatched Murat off his feet and flung himself into the air, and all the other dragons of the division were doing their best to make of themselves a screen between him and their attackers.
But the net had been drawn too tight: one niru after another skillfully surrounded and carved away each French dragon, nearly in minutes, with the skill of a surgeon cutting away limbs: until Liberté was all exposed, flying desperately, but not quickly enough. Ten more dragons surrounded him and began to cut off his flight, no matter which way he turned, tiring him and slowing his movement: a great stag, surrounded by wolves. Then one of the Shao Lung, especially large and with a jagged pale white scar running enormous the length of his left flank, made a full-body leap onto Liberté’s back and with a roar knocked his crew off their feet; he sank both foretalons deep into Liberté’s back, behind his wings.
Liberté shrilled with agony, and his wings faltered. Another Chinese dragon made a raking pass at his side, knocking air from his body; a third caught his tail and then they all closed in upon him and above him: he sank down at last helpless from the air, and having fallen to the ground resorted to curling his entire massive body tight around Murat, still held within his talons, with a pitiful hunted desperation.
Temeraire landed before him, nearly quivering with excitement, and murmured, “Laurence, I have never taken anyone so important prisoner: what ought we do?”
“Nothing more nor less than with any other man or beast: we must require Liberté’s surrender,” Laurence said, “and his giving Murat into our hands; and we must have both of their paroles.”
Temeraire straightened, sweeping back his wings, and rather grandly said to Liberté, “We will accept your surrender, if you please; and your parole.”
“Do you swear you will not hurt Murat?” Liberté demanded anxiously, looking at them both, though he could scarcely have prevented it. Murat’s own opinion on the circumstances as yet could not have been obtained, because only a faintly muffled noise was emerging, from the tight coils of Liberté’s body, to confirm that he was still even there.
“I am confident the Russians will treat him with all the consideration due to a prisoner of his rank,” Laurence said, “and I will give you my own word, he will be neither abused nor pillaged.”
A faint voice was heard saying, in French, “Damn you, you silly python, let me out!” and Liberté unwillingly uncoiled himself; Murat pulled himself up and over one great foreleg, and sprang down to the ground in the open. Laurence slid from Temeraire’s back to meet him.
Laurence bowed and said, “Your Majesty—” Napoleon had put him on the throne of Naples, “—I am obliged to require your parole.”
Murat reached out and seized him by the shoulders. “What are you saying,” he said. “Can you truly mean to prevent us?” He turned Laurence almost bodily, and flung out an arm to where Laurence saw a heap of five broken chains scattered on the ground, massive and monstrous links of brutal iron. “Have you a heart to see these magnificent beasts chained and starved like rats, for even another minute? I know you, Captain Laurence—I remember when you brought the cure to France, and saved my own Liberté thereby, and so many others. Once you had the courage to seek justice, more than only obey; will you not find that courage again?
“You and these,” he gestured to the hovering and watchful dragons, “ought to aid us, not stand in our way. Will you truly make common cause with men as would do such things?”
Laurence said, quietly, controlled, “You are right, sir, that this treatment cannot but appall any sense of justice and decency. But what you have done, in merely striking their chains and throwing them upon the army and the innocent peasantry of their own country, is to set them upon a course whose certain event is their destruction at the hands of a furious and determined nation. And you have done this, not for their benefit, but to make them weapons to serve your own unjust ends and thirst for conquest.”
“Oh, villain!” Murat cried. “Where else should they turn, but on the holders of their whips? I told the Emperor I would not walk out of this country, without striking the chains off every beast I could find, if it cost me my life and him my service. March me away, then, and have me shot if you like; I have no regret. Vive la France!”
He flung his saber at Laurence’s feet, delivering this speech in parade-ground tones; it roused an answering cheer from his men and their beasts, despite their captivity. Laurence could not but shake his head: he found he did not question Murat’s sincerity; so wild an impulse seemed all of a piece with the very recklessness which had led him to expose himself and his men so deeply in enemy territory.
Roland with a quick jump leapt forward, and picked up the sword to give to Laurence, so he would not need to bend down and pick it up. “Sir, if you will give me your parole, I should be glad to return it,” Laurence said, mastering his own anger, and when Murat haughtily acquiesced, did so: he could not take insult from a man made prisoner, and Murat’s courage could hardly be denied; he had been at the fore of the French dragons, at Tsarevo Zaimische, time and again.
The niru had been swiftly going over the breeding grounds, in the meantime; and now one of Shen Shi’s lieutenants, a man named Guan Fei, quietly approached Laurence. “I must advise against preparing our cooking-pits here,” he said. “This place is unhealthy: there are many dead, who have not been properly buried. We should go along the river to the south, and find some clean ground.”
“The remaining dragons here will be unable to fly,” Laurence said, “and we ought still to feed them; and then free them ourselves and take them along with us, if they will come. If we can catch any of the rest, perhaps their fellows will be able to induce them to pause and listen, rather than fight.”
But Guan Fei said, “There are only four dragons we have found yet remaining within the grounds: we can arrange to transport them a short distance, but they are in any case ill and close to death. I have arranged for them to be tended.”
“There ought to be fifty dragons here,” Temeraire said in alarm. “Where are all the others?”
Laurence looking at Murat’s face, which showed no small degree of satisfaction, said grimly, “Kaluga. He has set them on Kaluga.”
It was not until the next day that Laurence had the pleasure of delivering his prisoner to Kutuzov in Kaluga: a thin and insubstantial pleasure, in the face of the disaster which had unfolded about them.
The town had been utterly unprepared for the sudden and thunderclap descent of forty heavy-weight beasts: the great magazines had been smashed open and ruined, immense quantities of munitions and grain taken, cattle and horses slaughtered and devoured; and much of the town itself smashed in the frenzy of destruction.
Temeraire and his fellows had driven on the last few miles from the breeding grounds to Kaluga, despite their fatigue and hunger. But even so they had come too late, and found a scene of wreckage only: the heavy-weights had come, the townspeople told Laurence, and plundered swiftly, and as swiftly fled back towards the north—perhaps carrying their stolen goods towards Napoleon’s army.
Temeraire had tried to go aloft again, in pursuit; he and his fellows had gone half-a-mile, heads drooping progressively lower, and then Shao Ri had roused up and shaken his head and turning towards Laurence and Temeraire had said, “We must halt.”
Laurence himself started from a half-doze and realized the folly of their attempt: after a day of hard fighting, little food and less rest, followed by a cold flight in the dark and a battle to end it, the dragons were at the limits of their strength. “Put out the signals, Gerry, if you please,” he said, and to Temeraire’s half-drowsing protest said quietly, “We cannot throw ourselves at nearly our own number of fresh heavy-weights, in this state; we would be destroyed. You must all have some rest, and something to eat, before we can continue on.”
The exhausted dragons slept eight hours, in four watches, with the French dragons always under a wary eye; Laurence had put their captains and crews aboard the swiftest of the dragons of the niru, and kept Murat himself aboard Temeraire, but he was mindful that not all the French dragons might have been harnessed from the shell, and might not feel the intensity of attachment to their captains which ordinarily served to render a captured beast meek. He was well served by his caution: a little while after dawn, he roused to find two of the French dragons being wrestled to the ground again, having made an attempt to creep away.
In the morning, they returned to Kaluga, where the army was slowly marching in, and Laurence delivered their noble prisoner to the headquarters. Murat had been considered by the Russians an honored foe; they saluted him in the air and on the field, when they saw him: a great horseman, a great swordsman, a great soldier, fearless in battle and gallant in his personal manner, he was in most respects the romantic ideal to which young Russian officers aspired.
But now as Laurence escorted him past many of those who had cheered him, not long before, and into the building of the headquarters, silence followed them: a hard, angry silence. In his office, Kutuzov said, very briefly, coldly, “Your Majesty,” and then paused; he then said, “The Tsar has commanded that you be sent to Tobolsk,” a city which Laurence recalled: they had passed it, in the earlier stages of their journey from China, deep in Siberia’s wastes, “there to await the conclusion of the war; you depart in the morning.”
Murat’s courage, to do him credit, flagged not a moment; he only said, cheerfully, “I am sorry to miss the rest of it! May I write a letter to my wife?”
He did not wait for permission, but brazenly reached for pen and paper on Kutuzov’s desk, and scribbled out a careless note:
My darling Caroline! My luck has gone sour; I have been taken prisoner and am being shipped away to some distant corner of beyond, whose name I have already forgotten—
“Tobolsk, was it?” he asked, and scribbled it in.
I am perfectly well; Liberté has not a scratch; tell your brother to win the war as quick as blazes and bring me home before I die of boredom. Ever yours, Joachim.
He folded it once and handed it over. “You are welcome to read it over, but I promise there are no secrets,” he said. “I’ve no head for ciphers. I don’t suppose there are any pretty women in this country?”
Laurence could not but feel some sympathy, seeing him sent away: he knew the bitter pang of being sent away from the field to linger in remote exile in an alien land, and felt an echo of the misery of his own transportation, the heavy bowing weight upon his shoulders, the knowledge that he and Temeraire would be denied the chance to be of any use. And Murat had not even the comfort of his own dragon’s company; Liberté would be kept imprisoned far from him, and very likely in one of the same dreadful breeding grounds they had emptied.
But Laurence felt nothing but coldness for Murat’s acts: the impulse to free the dragons might have been a noble one, but it would not have been carried out, if it had not so neatly aligned with his interests and those of Bonaparte, and if truly motivated by disinterested affection would never have been done in so crude a way, which showed so much disdain for the evil consequences that would fall on those dragons themselves.
“Sir,” Laurence said to Kutuzov, when Murat had been escorted away to await his transport, “will you tell me where we stand?”
Kutuzov shook his head. “Thirty ferals were seen at Maloyaroslavets this afternoon, with cartloads of grain from Kaluga.” Answer enough: that meant the Russian dragons were accepting the lures which the French had thrown out to them. Laurence was silent. He could no more reproach the beasts for pursuing a course of liberation, than the Russians for wishing to defend themselves against Napoleon’s invasion.
He returned to his own encampment and found an unhappy Grig lingering there, having managed to beg Temeraire’s pardon, and wanting company: twenty Russian light-weights had vanished from the muster. “They are leaving,” he said, low. “I think—I think they are going over to Napoleon.”
“How many of them speak French?” Laurence asked, grimly.
“So many of our officers speak it,” Grig said, “I dare say nearly all of us know a little, at least.”
Meaning that by serving as go-betweens, they might permit Napoleon to turn the ferals into more than simply a wild foraging party, scarcely under his control; they might allow him to weld them into a true fighting force, and use them effectively in battle.
The day was drawing on; Laurence spoke long with Shen Shi, and several officers of the Russian general staff, upon the one essential note: supply, supply, supply. The roads from the south were slow and choked with mud, and more attacks had already been reported, against their supply depots. At last he fell asleep for a few hours of rest, on Temeraire’s arm; at eleven in the night, Roland woke him.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, quietly, “but there’s a dispatch,” and handed him the note; he broke it open and read: Napoleon’s army had begun to move south, along the Kaluga Road. He was coming. He had chosen the great gamble. A cold and stinging wind was blowing into Laurence’s face; he rubbed away sleep, and found his hand wet; he looked up. Snow was falling.
Winter had come.