by Naomi Novik
“Why have you come here?” Temeraire ventured. “You are not very old, yourself; do you really like to sleep so much? You might have a captain, and be in battles.”
Majestatis shrugged with one wing-tip, flared and folded down again. “Had one, mislaid him.”
“Mislaid?” Temeraire said.
“Well,” Majestatis said, “I left him in a water-trough, and I don’t suppose he is still sitting there, so I have no notion where he has got to.”
He was not inclined to be very enthusiastic; when Temeraire had explained, he sighed and said, “You are young, to be making such a fuss out of it.”
“If I am,” Temeraire retorted, “at least I am not complacent, and ready to let this sort of bullying go on, when I can do something about it; and I do not mean to be satisfied,” he added, with a pointed look at the back of Majestatis’s cave, “to arrange matters better only for myself.”
Majestatis’s eyes slitted narrow, but he did not stir otherwise. “It seems to me you are as likely to make it worse for everyone. There’s no wrangling now, at least, and no one is getting hurt.”
“No one is very comfortable, either,” Temeraire said. “We all might have nicer places, but no one will work to improve theirs, if they know it may be taken away from them, at any time, because they have made it nice. Once a cave is yours, it ought to be yours, like property.”
The council looked a little dubious at this argument, when Temeraire repeated it to them, the next afternoon: a strong westerly wind had swept the last scattering traces of rain-clouds before it and scraped the sky to a wintry brilliance, and they had gathered in a great clearing among the mountains, full of pleasant broad smooth-topped rocks, warmed by the sun. Majestatis had come after all, and Gentius, although the old dragon was mostly asleep after the effort of making the flight, curled upon the blackest rock and murmuring occasionally to himself. Requiescat sprawled inelegantly across half the length of the clearing, making himself look very large; Temeraire disdained the attempt and kept himself neatly coiled, with his ruff spread proudly; although he privately wished he might have had his talon-sheaths, and even a headdress such as he had seen in some of the markets along the old silk caravan roads; he was sure that could not fail to impress.
Ballista, a big Chequered Nettle, thumped her barbed tail on the ground several times to silence the muttering which had arisen amongst the council, in the middle of Temeraire’s remarks. “And if we agree,” Temeraire went on, valiantly, in the face of so much skepticism, “that everyone may keep their own cave, when they have got it, I would be very happy to show anyone the trick of arranging them better; so you all may have nicer caves, if you only take a little trouble to make them so.”
“Very nice I am sure,” one peevish older Parnassian said, “if you are a yearling, to be fussing with rocks and twigs.”
There were several snorts of agreement; and Temeraire bristled. “If you do not care to, and you are happy with your cave as it is, then you needn’t; but neither ought you go and take someone else’s cave, when they have done all the work. Certainly I am not going to be robbed, as if I were a lump; I will smash the cave up myself and make it not at all nice for anyone, before I hand it over meekly.”
“Now, now, then,” Ballista said. “There is no call to go yelling about smashing things or making threats; that is enough of that. Now we’ll hear Requiescat.”
“Hum, quarrelsome, ain’t he,” Requiescat said. “Well, you all know me, chums, and I don’t mean to make a brag of myself, but I expect no one would say I couldn’t take any cave I liked, if I wanted to. I am not a squabbler, and don’t like to hurt anybody; a young fellow like this is excitable enough to bite off a bigger fight than he can swallow—”
“Oh!” Temeraire said indignantly. “You mayn’t claim any such thing, unless you like to prove it; I have beat dragons nearly as big as you.”
Requiescat swung his big head around. “Ain’t it true you’re bred not to fight? Persy was going about saying some such.”
Perscitia gave an angry yelp of “I never,” stifled quickly by the other small dragons sitting around her at Ballista’s censorious glare.
“Celestials,” Temeraire said, very coolly, “are bred to be the very best sort of dragon. In China, we are not supposed to fight unless the nation is in danger, because China has a good deal many more dragons than here, and we are too valuable to lose; so we only fight in emergencies, when ordinary fighting-dragons are not up to the task.”
“Oh, China,” Requiescat said dismissively. “Anyway, fellows, there you have it plain as day. I say I am tops, and ought to have the best cave; he says it ain’t so, and he won’t hand it over. Ordinary, there’d be no ways to work that out but a tussle, and then someone gets hurt and everyone is upset. This is just the sort of thing the council was made up for, and I expect it ought to be pretty clear to all of you which of us is right, without it coming to claws.”
“I do not say I am ‘tops,’” Temeraire said, “although I think it is just as likely that I am; I say that the cave is mine, and it is unjust for you take it. That is what the council ought to be for: justice, not squashing everyone down, just to keep things comfortable for the biggest dragons.”
The council, being composed of the biggest dragons, did not look very enthusiastic. Ballista said, “All right; we have heard everyone out. Now look, Temeraire—” She pronounced it quite wrongly, Teymuhreer. “—we don’t want a lot of fuss and bother—”
“I do not see why not,” Temeraire said. “What else have we to do?”
Several of the smaller dragons tittered, rustling their wings together; she cleared her throat warningly at them and continued, “We don’t want a lot of fighting, anyhow. Why don’t you just go on and show us a bit of flying, so we know what you can do; then we can settle this clear.”
“But that is not at all the point!” Temeraire said. “If I were as small as Moncey—” He looked, but Moncey was not among the little dragons observing, so he amended, “If I were as small as Minnow there, it oughtn’t make any difference. No one was using it, no one wanted it; not before I had it.”
Requiescat gave a flip of his wings. “It was not the nicest, before,” he said, in reasonable tones.
Temeraire snorted angrily; but Ballista said impatiently, “Yes, yes; go on, then; unless you don’t like us to see,” and that was too much to bear; he threw himself aloft, spiraling high and fast as he could, tightening into a spring, and then dived directly into formation-maneuvers: that was what would please them, he thought bitterly. He finished the training pass and backwinged directly into the reverse, flying the pattern backwards, and then hovered mid-air before descending straight downwards: showing away, of course, but they had demanded he do so; and landing he announced, “I will show you the divine wind, now; but you had all better clear away from that rock wall, as I expect a lot of it will come down.”
There was a good deal of grumbling as the big dragons shifted themselves, with dragging tails and annoyed looks; Temeraire ignored them and breathed in very deeply, several times, stretching his chest wide: he meant to do as much damage as he could. He noticed in belated dismay, though, that the face of the rock wall was not loose, or even the nice soft white limestone in the caves, which crumbled so conveniently. He nosed out to it and scraped a claw down the face: he barely left white scratches on the hard grey rock.
“Well?” Ballista said. “We are all waiting.”
There was no help for it; Temeraire backed away from the cliff, and drew breath, preparatory; and then there was a hurried rush of wings above: Moncey dropped into the clearing beside him, panting, and said, “Call it off; it’s all off,” urgently, to Ballista.
“Hey, what’s this, then?” Requiescat said, frowning.
“Quiet, you fat lump,” Moncey said, slitting a good many eyes; he was not much bigger than the Regal Copper’s head. “I’m fresh from Brecon: the Frogs have come over the Channel.”
A great confused babble aros
e, all around; even Gentius roused, with a low hiss, and while everyone spoke at once, Moncey turned to Temeraire and said, “Listen, your Laurence, word is in they locked him up on a ship called the Goliath—”
“The Goliath!” Temeraire said. “I know that ship; Laurence has spoken of it to me before. That is very good—that is splendid; it is on blockade, I know just where it is, nearly, and I am sure anyone at Dover can tell me exactly where—”
“Old fellow, I wish I needn’t pop it out so; but there’s no good way to say it,” Moncey said. “The Frogs sank her this morning, coming across. She is at the bottom of the ocean, and not a man got off her before she went down.”
Temeraire did not say anything; a terrible sensation was rising, climbing up his throat. He turned blindly away to let it come, the roar bursting out like the roll of thunder overhead, silencing every word around him, and the wall of stone cracked open before him like a pane of mirrored glass.
Chapter 3
THEY PULLED THE ship’s boats into Dover harbor past eleven o’clock at night, sweating underneath their chilled, wet clothing, hands blistered on the oars; they climbed out shivering onto the docks, Captain Puget handed up in a litter almost senseless with blood-loss, and Lieutenant Frye, nineteen, the only one left to oversee; the rest of the senior officers were all dead. Frye looked at Laurence with great uncertainty and glanced around. The men offered him nothing, beaten down with rowing and defeat, silent. At last Laurence said quietly to the young man, “The port admiral,” prompting, and Frye colored and said to a gangly young midshipman, clearing his throat, “You had better take the prisoner to the port admiral, Mr. Meed, and let him decide what is to be done.”
With two Marines for guards, Laurence went with Meed along the dockside streets to the port admiral’s office, where they found nearly more confusion than had been on the deck of the Goliath in her last moments after the double broadside had dismasted her: smoke everywhere, fire crawling steadily down through the ship towards the powder magazine, and cannon running wild back and forth on her decks; here instead the hallways were thick with unchecked speculation. “Five hundred thousand men landed,” one man said in the hallway, a ridiculous number, inflated by panic without common sense; “Already in London,” said another, “and ten millions in shipping seized,” the very last of these the only plausible suggestion. If Bonaparte had captured one or two of the ports on the Thames estuary, and taken the merchantmen there, he might indeed have reached something like that number: an enormous collection of prizes to fuel the invasion already begun, like coal heaped into a burning stove.
“I do not give a damn if you take him out and lynch him, only get him out of my sight,” the port admiral said furiously, when Meed finally managed to work his way through the press and ask him for orders; there was a vast roaring noise outside the windows like the wind rising in a storm, even though the night was clear. More petitioners were shoving frantically past them, so Laurence had to catch Meed by the arm and hold him up as they were carried away: the boy could scarcely have been fourteen and was a little underfed.
Set adrift, Meed looked helplessly. Laurence wondered if he should have to find his own prison and lock himself into it, but then one young lieutenant pushed through towards them, flung him a look of flat contempt, and said, “That is the traitor, is it? This way, and you two damned dogs take a proper hold of him, before he crawls away in this press.”
He took up an old truncheon in the hallway, left from some press-gang perhaps, and swinging it to clear the way took them out into the street, Meed trotting gratefully after. He brought them to an old run-down sponging house two streets away, with bars upon the windows and a mastiff tied in the barren yard, howling unhappily to add to the clamor of the uneasy, half-rioting crowd. Beating upon the door brought out the master of the house, who whined objections which the lieutenant overruled one after another, and at last defeated entirely by pushing in upon him.
“There, and better than you deserve,” he said to Laurence coldly, having taken them up to the small and squalid attic, and held open the door. He was a slight young man with a struggling moustache, and a solid push would have served to lay him out upon the unkempt floor. Laurence looked at him a moment, and then went inside, stooping under the lintel; the door was shut upon him. Through the wall he heard the lieutenant ordering the two Marines to stay and stand watch, and the owner’s complaints trailing him back down the stairs.
It was bitterly cold. The irregular floor of warped and knotted boards felt strange under Laurence’s feet, still expecting the listing motion of the ship. There was a handkerchief-square of a window for air and light, which at present let in only the thick smell of smoke, and a reddish glow shining on the undersides of the rooftops, all that he could see.
Laurence sat down on the narrow cot and looked at his hands. There would be fighting by now all along the coast: men landed at Deal, and likely along points north, all around the mouth of the Thames. Not five hundred thousand, nothing like, but enough, perhaps. It would not take a very large company of infantry to establish a secure beachhead, secure enough, and then Napoleon could land men as quick as he could get them across the Channel.
This, Laurence would have said, could be not very quickly; not in the face of the Navy. But that opinion fell before the maneuvers he had witnessed today: pitting great numbers of light-weights, easy to feed and quick to maneuver, against the British heavy-weights, in the face of all common wisdom; and using the massed power of their own heavy-weights instead against the ships, the British point of strength. It bore the same tactical stamp as the whirling attack which he had seen at the battle of Jena, spearheaded there by Lien, and Laurence had no doubt her advice had served Napoleon in this latest adventure.
Laurence had reported on the Battle of Jena to the Admiralty; it was a bitter thought to consider that his treason must have undermined that intelligence, and likely discredited all his reports. Jane at least, he had thought—had hoped—would still have kept it under consideration, even if she had not forgiven; would have understood him so far, to know that his treason had begun and ended with delivering the cure. But in what he had seen of the battle, the British dragons had been locked in their same formations, all the same antiquated habits of aerial war.
The noise outside the window rose and fell like the sea; somewhere nearby glass was breaking. A woman shrieked. The glow increased. He lay down and tried to sleep a little; his rest was broken by ragged eruptions of noise, already falling back into the general din by the time he jarred awake, panting and sore, from fragmentary images of the burning ship, which in his dreams became black and glossy beneath the flames, scales curling and crisping at the edges. He rose once; there was a small dirty pitcher of water to which he was not yet thirsty enough to resort for drinking, and he splashed his face a little with a cupped handful. His fingers came away streaked black with soot and grime. He lay down again; there was more screaming outside, and a stronger smell of smoke.
It did not grow light so much as less dark; there was a thick sooty pall over the city, and his throat ached sharply. No one came with food; there was not a word from his guards. Laurence paced his cell: four long strides across, three lengthwise from the bed, but he used smaller steps and made it seven, restless; his arms clasped behind his back, feeling as though they were weighted down with round-shot, dragging; he had rowed for five hours without a pause.
That at least had been something to do: something besides this useless fretting away to no purpose. The city burned, and all he could do here was burn with it; or moulder to be taken a prisoner by the French, with Napoleon’s army scarcely ten miles distant. And even if he died, Temeraire might never know—might keep himself a prisoner long after any cause had gone, and stay to be taken by the French. Laurence could not trust Napoleon for Temeraire’s safety: not while Lien was his ally. Her voice, and the self-interest which would see him master of the only Celestial outside China’s borders, would be louder in Napoleon’s ear than
any prompting of generosity.
The guards might be persuaded to let him out by their own desire to be gone, if nothing else; if only Laurence could persuade himself he had any right to go. But he had been court-martialed and convicted, and justly so, with all due process of law, though he would gladly have forgone it all. The endless dragging out of evidence, though he had been condemned already by his own voice; the panel of officers listening, faces blank if not tight with disgust. Navy officers all of them; not an aviator had been allowed to serve. Too many of them had been one after another dragged into the vile business, implicated and smeared any way they could be—Ferris, because Laurence must have confided in his first lieutenant—“And it must present a curious appearance to the court,” the prosecutor had said, sneering, while Ferris sat drawn and pale and wretched and did not look at Laurence, “that he did not raise the alarm for an hour after the accused and his beast were known to be missing, and did not at once open the letter which was left behind—”
Chenery, too, had been named, only because he had also been in London covert at the time, and Berkley and Little and Sutton all brought in to give evidence; and if Harcourt and Jane had not been mentioned, Laurence was sure it was only because the Admiralty did not know how to do it, without embarrassing themselves more than their targets. “I did not know a damned thing about the business, and I am sure neither did anyone else; anyone who knows Laurence will tell you he would not have breathed a word of it to anyone,” Chenery had said defiantly, “but I do say sending over the sick beast was a blackguardly thing for the Admiralty to have done, and if you like to hang me for saying so, you are welcome.”
They had not hanged Chenery, thank God, for lack of evidence and for need of his dragon; but Ferris, a lieutenant with no such protection, had been broken out of the service: every effort Laurence had made to insist that the guilt was his alone had been ignored. A fine officer lost to the service, his career and his life spoilt—Laurence had met his mother, his brothers; they were an old family and a proud, and Ferris had been away from home from the age of seven: they did not have that intimate, personal knowledge which should make them confident of his innocence, and give him the affectionate support now denied him from his fellow-officers. To witness his misery and know himself culpable hurt Laurence worse than his own conviction had done.