by Naomi Novik
“I WANT HIM BLED,” Wellesley had said, in the tower room of Edinburgh Castle, standing over the map of England swarming with blue markers, with the icy rain lashing at the windows. Distantly, down the hall, the muffled sound of the King’s voice was rising in some complaint; to Laurence it seemed very loud. “Every man to him is worth five to us. He must bring them across at great expense, and he must spend his dragons’ strength to do it. And his men live off the land—he relies upon them raiding the countryside, feeding themselves and driving in cattle for the dragons, and keeping his supply lines meager and short.”
“You mean you wish us to attack his irregulars,” Laurence broke in, tired of evasions.
“His supply-lines, his foragers, his scouts.” Wellesley thumped the map. “He has hundreds of small raiding parties scattered throughout the country north of London; he cannot survive long without them, and they are exposed. You will destroy every one of them you can find.
“You will not engage,” he added, “any substantial party, with other dragons in number, or artillery: I do not mean to lose any of the beasts.”
Laurence had expected something of the sort, from the tenor of Wellesley’s summons; he was not surprised, and heard it with dull acceptance. The strategy was sound, coldly speaking: if Bonaparte began to lose men quicker than he could replace them, and found his supply growing short, he would have to accept a battle on whatever terms it was offered him, or withdraw entirely.
But dragons were not put to such a use in civilized warfare; Wellesley knew it, and so did he. Pragmatism alone held them too valuable to risk and too expensive to supply, save against a more substantial target, of strategic importance, than a small party of light foot armed only with muskets. But it was not pragmatism but sentiment which with a single voice called inhuman the exceptions made from time to time. There was little that aroused more horror and more condemnation from ordinary men than the prospect of dragons set loose against them; men had been court-martialed and hanged for it, even by their own side.
“Pillaging,” Wellesley added after a moment, “of course, cannot be tolerated—”
“There will be none,” Laurence said, “save what must be requisitioned to feed the dragons. Is there anything else?”
Wellesley looked at him narrowly. “Will you do it?”
There was little enough Laurence could now do, to repair what he had done; he could not restore the lives of the slain, or raise up ships from the Channel floor that had been sunk, or make recompense to all the ordinary countrymen whose livelihood and possessions had been raided away by an invading army. He could not repair his father’s health, or the King’s, or Edith’s happiness. But he had already stained himself irrevocably with dishonor, for the sake of an enemy nation and a tyrant’s greed; he could stain himself a little more for the sake of his own, and shield with his own ruined reputation those who yet had one to protect.
“I do not need written orders for myself,” he had answered Wellesley. “But I require them for those other officers of the Corps involved: you may say merely that they must follow my orders.”
Wellesley had understood very well, what Laurence offered him, and he had not refused it. The orders were written, and given him, and he had left Wellesley in his tower, and gone down and down, to the waiting covert.
It was a silent, grim camp in the morning, as they harnessed the dragons and the crews went aboard; twice or more, Laurence thought Harcourt almost meant to speak to him. But in the end they all mounted up and flew with no words exchanged. The cold wind in Laurence’s face was welcome, and the steady beat of Temeraire’s wings, and the silence; his small crew did not address him, and sitting forward on Temeraire’s neck, they might have been alone in a wide-open sky; the rolling unmarred moors beneath them knew nothing of war or boundaries.
Wellesley’s spies had reported already a dozen raiding bands or more, moving through the North Country, stealing from farms and seizing cattle; Laurence had marked them on his map, as best the reports could place them. But the enemy provided them instead a convenient beacon of smoke, easily visible ten miles off. It was a thin black coil turning lazily upwards from the roof of a great farmhouse, the fire mostly extinguished by the time they arrived: the rest of the village stood empty, when the dragons came down, but for two men in homespun: villagers, not soldiers, laid out in the road dead, with stab wounds flower-red upon their bellies; they had been bayoneted.
“The villagers shan’t come out while we have the dragons here,” Harcourt said. “If we leave them outside—”
“No,” Laurence said; he did not mean to waste time on such things. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “We are officers of the King. You will come out at once, or we will have the dragons tear down the houses until you do.”
There was no reply, no stirring. “Temeraire,” Laurence said, and indicated a small neat cottage near the end of the village lane. “Bring it down, if you please.”
Temeraire looked at it, and said uncertainly, “Shall I roar?”
“However you choose,” Laurence said.
“Ought I bring it all down at once?” Temeraire asked, turning his head to inspect the cottage; he darted a look back at Laurence, as if trying to gauge his real intent. “Perhaps, if I just took off this chimney—”
“Oh, you are taking too long,” Iskierka said, and promptly blasted it with fire, the dry thatched roof going alight in a merrily crackling instant.
It burned fiercely, putting out sharp smoke; the flames licking out eagerly towards its neighbors; Laurence sat waiting, and after a moment a cellar door creaked open and a few men came forth, “Put it out, for God’s sake put it out,” one of them begged gasping. “All the village will catch—”
“Berkley, if you will be so good,” Laurence said; Maximus took off the burning roof, and laying it on the ground scraped some dirt over it with a clumsy swipe, leaving it half-buried. Laurence looked back at the villagers, who stared up at him pale and sweating. “Which way did the French go?”
“Towards Scarrow Hill,” the older man said after a moment, his voice still trembling. “With all our cattle, every last one—” The faint lowing of a cow from the woods made him a liar on that point, but Laurence did not care. “They left not an hour—”
“Very good; to quarters, gentlemen, and let the riflemen make ready,” Laurence said over his shoulder, to the other captains. “Aloft, Temeraire, along the road.”
They caught the French fifteen minutes later, and heard them first: singing a bawdy snatch of “Auprès de ma blonde, qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon” as they marched through a forested section: then they emerged out onto the road again, cattle in a string bellowing and throwing their heads, uneasy as they scented the dragons aloft. The men pulled irritably on the cows’ heads and tried to drag them along. They did not look up.
Temeraire craned his head back and looked at Laurence. Ten dragons came on behind them. “Mr. Allen,” Laurence said, “signal the attack.”
Chapter 14
I DO NOT SEE what is wrong with it,” Iskierka said, still nibbling upon the charred beef bones of her dinner. “They are stealing the cows for their dragons, it is not our fault if their dragons are too lazy to come and get the cows themselves.”
“It is not wrong,” Temeraire said, dissatisfied, “precisely.”
“Not very sporting, though,” Gentius said. “They did not even have a gun.”
“The village did not have a gun, either, or even muskets,” Lily said, “so it was not very sporting of those soldiers, in the first place.”
“Anyway,” Iskierka added, with an air of smug virtue, “we must obey our orders.”
Temeraire did not argue further. It was not that he minded for himself, anyway, very much, although it had not been a very interesting battle: they had dived, the soldiers had fired a few shots, and then they had all run away into the woods, if they were not dead; it had lasted scarcely five minutes, and nothing to show for it. Except of cou
rse the cows, but those they mostly had to give back.
He was not going to say so, of course, but he rather felt Iskierka was right. If the soldiers had not wanted to be attacked, they ought not have been going about in other people’s territory, taking their food and much more than they could eat themselves. Only, he was a little worried, because it seemed the sort of thing that Laurence might have minded, and he felt instinctively there was something strange, that Laurence did not seem to care.
The villagers certainly had been very grateful. “Two months to spring. We would have starved, or near enow; thank ye, sir,” the village headman said, the half-burned cottage quite forgiven, as the others came nervously out to look over their cattle and their goods, and make their own anxious courtesies.
A few young men from Maximus’s ground crew had driven back those cows which had not been killed or panicked to death in the fighting; Gladius and Chalcedony had carried back the two large carts of grain, also, and the villagers had sent word back along the road, to those others pillaged, to come and share what there was left to have.
But Laurence did not seem pleased by their many thanks, either; he only nodded, and said, “Send word also that if you should see or hear of any French movements, you are to light a beacon: smoke, or a bonfire at night, and we will come for it if we see.”
Gong Su had taken those cows which had been killed; enough for all the dragons to have a little fresh roast beef, and then a share of soup and bones and meat mixed with vegetables and grain, for all the crew and everyone in the village besides. The atmosphere was celebratory, and all the more when the villagers brought out a concealed store of honey wine. Temeraire had even enjoyed a cupful poured into his mouth, so he might close his jaws on it and keep the crisp fragrant smell on his tongue.
Laurence had not eaten very much, and now he came away from the village and the celebration, back to Temeraire’s side; but only to get out his maps again and study the roads.
Temeraire drew a deep breath, watching him, and said valiantly, “Laurence—Laurence, I have been thinking. Perhaps you might sell my talon-sheaths. I do not mean just now,” he added, hurriedly, “but, when the war is over—”
“Why?” Laurence said, a good deal more absently than Temeraire felt such an offer merited. “Are you tired of them?”
“No, of course not, who could become tired of them?” Temeraire said, and then paused; he was not sure how he might explain, without betraying his knowledge of the loss which Laurence had concealed, surely because it wounded him greatly. “I only thought,” he tried, “that perhaps you might like to have some more capital, as you have given me so much of it yourself.”
“I have no need of capital,” Laurence said, “and you had better keep them, against future need. I thank you for the offer; it was handsomely made,” he added, which ought to have been a tremendous relief, but Temeraire found that instead he was only unhappier, for having tried his most desperate notion and found it of no use. Laurence had not seemed even a little moved by the prospect of having so splendid a treasure for his own; the gratitude had been only formal.
He put his head down upon his forelegs and watched Laurence a little longer; Laurence had a lamp, and in the light, he looked a little odd—he was not quite clean-shaven, Temeraire realized, and there was some dried blood upon his jaw, which he had not taken off. His hair was tied roughly back, and grown long. But he did not seem to care for any of it; all his attention was for the map, and the figures he was studying.
“May I not help you, Laurence?” Temeraire asked at last, rather hopelessly, for lack of any other idea.
Laurence paused over the papers, then put one sheet out with the lamp upon it. “Is it large enough for you to see?—it is the tax roll for the last year. I expect the French will first plunder the wealthier estates and villages, so we will look for them there.”
“Yes, I can read it,” Temeraire said; it was only a little difficult, if he squinted. “Shall I tell you all the richest ones, in order?”
AS THEY PUSHED GRADUALLY SOUTHWARD, the raiding parties grew steadily larger and more desperate: no longer small bands, out to forage for themselves as much as for the beasts, but urgent support for dragons headquartered now at small outposts and encampments throughout the heart of England, to distribute the burden of their feeding. If the cattle did not arrive daily, the dragons would soon go hungry; and some number of them would have to be transferred elsewhere, southwards, even perhaps back to France.
Already the disruption of the foraging was having an effect. Without the smaller parties bringing in regular provender, the soldiers had more effort to keep themselves fed, as well as the dragons, and this made them all the more ruthless. Villages and farms and estates were now stripped to the bone and often torn apart in the search for hidden stores; or even to no end but wanton destruction: some vicious urge in the soldiers, brought on by too much license to ruin what they found. If any villagers sought to protect their homes and livelihoods, they were as often murdered or abused, or at best left to starve with a house burning behind them.
These brutalities soon roused the countryside from a sullen, small resistance, which would gladly have thrashed French soldiers making boastful remarks in a pub or passed news of them to British parties, while concealing food from them all alike, to open hatred. No-one fled from the dragons now when they landed, but marched out their cattle to feed them, and daily the plumes of beacon-fires rose. The little feral dragons of the Pennines, who lived wild and ordinarily raided farms for their meals, had been recruited by hunger and Temeraire’s persuasion to collect the far-flung intelligence: they darted from one beacon to another, where the townspeople provided them with a sheep or goat, and in return they carried the information back to Laurence’s encampment, daily edging farther south. Laurence thought it likely he knew more of the movements of the French than their own generals did, and he daily sent long letters back to Jane and to Wellesley.
A little blue feral came darting into camp, an evening in Cumbria, while they sat mostly dull and quiet, sharpening bayonets or drinking watered whiskey at their small fires, and in an incongruously deep voice announced, “The French are coming this way, with guns, and twelve dragons.”
“Leave the camp,” Laurence said, standing, and put back on his sword. “No, everything; we need the time more than the supply. Leave the fires burning. All aloft, gentlemen, at once,” he said sharply, while everyone yet hesitated a moment, and spurred them into action.
“But, Laurence,” Temeraire murmured, as he climbed aboard, “why do we not stay and fight them? It is our first chance of a real battle, and perhaps they will even have eagles—”
“There is no honor to be won in a battle between thieves,” Laurence said flatly, taking the maps which Demane held out to him, and skimmed them over. “Divide into parties of no more than three, and take separate routes, all of you; we rendezvous at Cross Fell,” he called, and they lifted one and all away.
They were too agile a band to be easily tracked or caught, with a thousand eyes in every direction looking out danger for them, and three more such attempts failed as thoroughly to find anything more than their abandoned fires and cooking pits. Rewards, offered in vast sums, were scornfully ignored, and in frustration the French grew savage and turned instead to reprisals against any they suspected of providing intelligence or comfort, which made nearly all the citizenry. At Howick Hall, perhaps two weeks into their raiding, they caught a large company, busy pillaging not only the cattle and the food, but carrying out also paintings, and china plate, and great silver candelabra, while the house burned slowly down around them, and their officers laughed and drank wine from the cellars in the courtyard.
The dragon-shadows falling over them silenced their merriment, and hurriedly two dozen muskets were raised up. Temeraire hovering over them roared out at the house, and nearly the whole front wall, flickering with flame, slid down in a heap and buried half the soldiers with it, leaving the building for a moment lik
e a child’s doll-house, opened for viewing, with more of the looters staring out at them.
Then the roof, groaning in complaint, gave way, and the great house folded in upon itself, walls crumbling into brick, slates clattering and spilling down upon the lawn still smoking. The horses and cows stampeded madly away, and the remaining soldiers fled in the other direction, leaving a great pirate-heap of goods in an oxcart, pitiful next to the smoldering ruins.
The village, in the shelter of the house, had also been struck; the men having tried to resist had been slaughtered nearly one and all. The women and children had taken shelter in the church, which had not given them much protection: the soldiers had come in and outraged some of the young women, and murdered the vicar, a man of eighty, when he had feebly tried to intercede.
“We ought to hunt down the rest of them,” one young midshipman said, “every last one,” and there was no disagreement. Laurence felt only weary.
“Berkley,” he said, “have your men clear the village, and let the dragons bury the dead. Sutton, Little, take the other Reapers, and bring over what you can from the house: they will need more supply, here. Or we can take you to Craster,” he offered, to the matron who had got the survivors into some order.
“They won’t have better houses for us there,” she said. “Whatever you can bring us, we’ll thank you for, Captain, and we will manage; they didn’t find all there was to find.” She did not say, aloud, that they had now fewer mouths to feed.
The Yellow Reapers were a while in returning, and came back with an air of grim satisfaction, bloodstained, carrying also some dead cattle and deer.
“I will venture a little farther,” Laurence said. “We will not encamp yet, but we will raid farther south, as far as we can fly in and out again in a day.”
“Just as well,” Little said, low. “Let them look over their shoulders, everywhere in England,” to a murmur of agreement. The French had thus reconciled them all to their mission; few of the captains anymore looked askance at their attacks, or urged quarter. Laurence heard it without satisfaction.