Black Powder War t-3

by Naomi Novik

  Temeraire was regarding her with great interest, and having let her step off again onto his shoulder, he whispered, “Laurence, I always thought queens would have a great many jewels, but she has none at all; have they been stolen?”

  Fortunately he spoke in English, as otherwise this remark would not have been much of a secret, issuing as it did from jaws large enough to swallow a horse. Laurence hurried the Queen into the tent before Temeraire could shift to German or French and take to questioning her on the state of her array; she very sensibly wore a plain heavy overcoat of wool over her gown, adorned with nothing more elaborate than silver buttons, and a fur pelisse and hat, practical enough on a flight.

  The King had the benefit at least of a military officer’s experience of dragons, and showed no hesitation, if he felt any; but the retinue of guards and servants looked more deeply anxious even at coming near. Looking at their pale faces, the King said something briefly in German; Laurence guessed from the looks of shamefacedness and relief that he was giving them permission to stay behind.

  Temeraire took this opportunity to put in his own remarks in that language, provoking startled looks all around; and he then stretched out his foreleg towards the group. This did not quite have the effect that Laurence imagined Temeraire had intended, and a few moments later there were left only four of the royal guard, and one old woman servant, who snorted profoundly and climbed without ceremony into Temeraire’s hand to be put aboard.

  “What did you say to them?” Laurence asked, half-amused and half-despairing.

  “I only told them they were being very silly,” Temeraire said in injured tones, “and that if I meant to do them any harm, it would be much easier for me to reach them where they were standing, anyway, than if they were on my back.”

  Berlin was in a ferment; the townspeople looked without love on soldiers in uniform, and Laurence, going through the town in haste, trying to get what supplies he could, heard muttering about the “damned War Party” in every shop and corner. News of the terrible loss had already reached them, along with news of the French drive on the city, but there was no spirit of resistance or revolt, or even any great unhappiness; indeed the general impression was a kind of sullen satisfaction at being proven right.

  “They drove the poor King to it, you know, the Queen and all those other young hotheads,” the banker told Laurence. “They would prove that they could beat Bonaparte, and they could not, and who is it that pays for their pride but us, I ask you! So many poor young men killed, and what our taxes will be after this I do not want to think.”

  Having delivered himself of these criticisms, however, he was quite willing to advance Laurence a good sum in gold. “I had rather have my money in an account at Drummonds’ than here in Berlin with a hungry army marching in,” he said candidly, while his two sons lugged up a small but substantial chest.

  The British embassy was in turmoil; the ambassador already gone, by courier, and scarcely anyone left could give him good information, or would; his green coat commanded not the least attention, beyond queries if he were a courier, bringing dispatches.

  “There has been no trouble in India these three years, whyever should you ask such a thing?” a harried secretary said, impatiently, when Laurence at last resorted to halting him in the corridor by main force. “I have not the least understanding why the Corps should have failed in our obligations, but it is just as well we had not more committed to this rout.”

  This political view Laurence could not easily subscribe to, still more angry and ashamed to hear the Corps described in such a way. He closed his mouth on the reply which first sprang to mind and said only, very cold, “Have you all safe route of escape?”

  “Yes, of course,” the secretary said. “We will embark at Stralsund. You had best get back to England straightaway yourself. The Navy is in the Baltic and in the North Sea, to assist with operations in support of Danzig and Königsberg, for whatever good that will do; but at least you will have a clear route home once you are over the sea.”

  If a craven piece of advice, this at least was reassuring news. But there were no letters of his own waiting, which might have given him an explanation less painful to consider, and of course none would find them now. “I cannot even send a new direction home with them,” Laurence said to Granby as they walked back towards the palace. “God only knows where we shall be in two days, much less a week. Anyone would have to address it to William Laurence, East Prussia; and throw it into the ocean in a bottle, too, for all the likelihood it should find me.”

  “Laurence,” Granby said abruptly, “I hope to God you will not think me chickenhearted; but oughtn’t we be getting home, as he said?” He gazed straight ahead down the street and avoided Laurence’s eyes as he spoke; there was alternating color and pallid white in his cheeks.

  It abruptly occurred to Laurence, to be compounded with his other cares, that his decision to stay might look to the Admiralty as though he were keeping the egg out in the field intentionally, delaying until Granby might have his chance. “The Prussians are too badly short of heavy-weights now to let us go,” he said finally, not really an answer.

  Granby did not answer again, until later, when they had come to Laurence’s quarters and might shut the door behind them; in that privacy he bluntly said, “Then they can’t stop us going, either.”

  Laurence was silent over the brandy-glasses; he could not deny it, nor even criticize, having entertained much the same thought himself.

  Granby added, “They’ve lost, Laurence: half their army, and half the country too; surely there’s no sense in staying now.”

  “I will not allow their final loss to be certain,” Laurence said strongly at this discouraged remark, turning around at once. “The most terrible sequence of defeats may yet be reversed, so long as men are to be had and they do not despair, and it is the duty of an officer to keep them from doing so; I trust I need not insist upon your confining such sentiments to your breast.”

  Granby flushed up crimson and answered with some heat, “I am not proposing to go running around crying that the sky is falling. But they’ll need us at home more than ever; Bonaparte is sure to already be looking across the Channel with one eye.”

  “We did not stay only to avoid pursuit or challenge,” Laurence said, “but because it is better to fight Bonaparte farther from home; that reason yet remains. If there were no real hope, or if our efforts could make no material difference, then I would say yes; but to desert in this situation, when our assistance may be of the most vital importance, I cannot countenance.”

  “Do you honestly think they will manage any better than they have so far? He’s overmatched them, start to finish, and they are in worse case now than they were to start.”

  This there was no denying, but Laurence said, “Painful as the lesson has been, we have surely learnt much of his mind, of his strategy, from this meeting; the Prussian commanders cannot fail to now revise their strategy, which I fear before this first contest of arms had too much to do with overconfidence.”

  “As far as that goes, too much is better than too little,” Granby said, “and I see precious little reason for any confidence at all.”

  “I hope I will never be so rash as to say I am confident of dealing Bonaparte a reversal,” Laurence said, “but there remains good and practical reason to hope. Recall that even now the Prussian reserves in the east, together with the Russian Army, will outmatch Bonaparte’s numbers by half again. And the French cannot venture forward until they have secured their lines of communication: there are a dozen fortresses of vital strategic importance, fended by strong garrisons, which they will first have to besiege and then leave troops to secure.”

  But this was only parroting; he knew perfectly well numbers alone did not tell the course of battle. Bonaparte had been outnumbered at Jena.

  He paced the room for another hour when Granby had at last gone. It was his duty to show himself more certain than he was, and besides that to not permit hims
elf to be downhearted, sentiments which should surely convey themselves to the men. But he was not wholly sure of the course he was following, and he knew that his decision was in some part formed by his disgust for the notion; desertion, even from a situation into which he had effectively been pressed, had too much an ugly and dishonorable ring to it, and he had not the happy turn of character which might have allowed him to call it by another name, and lose the odium thereby.

  “I do not want to give up, either, though I would like to be at home,” Temeraire said, with a sigh. “It is not so nice, losing battles, and seeing our friends taken prisoner. I hope it is not upsetting the eggs,” he added, anxious despite all of Keynes’s reassurances, and bent over to nudge them gently and carefully with his nose where they lay in their nests, presently tucked between two warming braziers under a ledge in the main courtyard of the palace, waiting to be loaded aboard.

  The King and Queen were saying their farewells: they were sending the royal children away by courier to the well-protected fortress of Königsberg, deep in East Prussia. “You ought to go with them,” the King said softly, but the Queen shook her head and kissed her children goodbye swiftly. “I do not want to go away, either, Mother; let me come, too,” said the second prince, a sturdy boy of nine, and he was only packed off with difficulty and in the face of loud protests.

  They stood together watching until the little courier-dragons dwindled to bird-specks and vanished, before at last they climbed back aboard Temeraire for the journey eastward with the handful of their retinue brave enough to venture it: a small and sad party.

  Overnight a steady stream of bad news had flowed into the city, though at least these pieces of intelligence had been largely expected, if not so soon: Saxe-Weimar’s detachment caught by Marshal Davout, every last man of ten thousand killed or taken prisoner; Bernadotte already at Magdeburg, cutting Hohenlohe off; the Elbe crossings falling into French hands, not a single bridge destroyed; Bonaparte himself already on the road to Berlin, and when Temeraire rose up into the air, they could see, not very distant, the smoke and dust of the oncoming army: marching, marching, with a cloud of dragons overhead.

  They spent the night at a fortress on the Oder River; the commander and his men had not even heard rumors, and were bitterly shocked by news of the defeat. Laurence suffered through the dinner which the commander felt it necessary to give, a black and silent meal, quenched by the officers’ depression and the natural embarrassment attendant on dining in the presence of royalty. The small walled covert attached to the fortress was barren and dusty and uncomfortable; and Laurence escaped to it and his meager bivouac of straw with great relief.

  He woke to a soft rolling patter like fingertips on a drum: a steady grey rain falling against Temeraire’s wings, which he had spread over them protectively; there would be no fire that morning. Laurence had a cup of coffee inside, looking over the maps and working out the compass-directions for the day’s flight; they were trying to find the eastern reserves of the army, under command of General Lestocq, somewhere in the Polish territories which Prussia had lately acquired.

  “We will make for Posen,” the King said tiredly; he did not look as though he had slept very well. “There will be at least a detachment in the city, if Lestocq is not there yet himself.”

  The rain did not slacken all the day, and sluggish bands of fog drifted through the valleys below them; they flew through a grey formlessness, following the compass and the turns of the hourglass, counting Temeraire’s wingbeats and marking his speed. Darkness was almost welcome; the cross-wind that blew the rain in their faces slackened, and they could huddle a little warmer in their leather coats. Villagers in the fields disappeared as they flew overhead; they saw no other signs of life until, crossing a deep river valley, they flew over five dragons, ferals, sleeping upon a sheltered ledge, who lifted up their heads at Temeraire’s passage.

  They leapt off the ledge and came flying towards Temeraire; Laurence grew anxious, lest they either provoke a quarrel or try and follow them, like Arkady and the mountain ferals; but they were small gregarious creatures and only flew alongside Temeraire a while, jeering wordlessly and making demonstrations of their flying abilities, backwing swoops and steep dives. Half-an-hour’s flight brought them to the edge of the valley, and there the ferals with piercing cries broke off and circled back away into their territory. “I could not understand them,” Temeraire said, looking over his shoulder after them. “I wonder what that language is, that they are speaking; it sounds a little bit like Durzagh in places, but it was too different to make out, at least when they spoke so quickly.”

  They did not reach the city that night after all: some twenty miles short they came upon the small and sodden campfires of the army, settling into miserable wet bivouacs for the night. General Lestocq came to the covert himself to greet the King and Queen, with sedan-chairs drawn up as close as he could persuade the bearers to come; he had evidently been warned to expect them, likely by a courier.

  Laurence was naturally not invited to accompany them, but neither was he offered the simple courtesy of a billet, and the staff-officer who stayed to see to their supply was offensively short in his hurry to be gone. “No,” Laurence said with mounting impatience, “no, half a sheep will not do; he has had a ninety-miles’ flight today in bad weather, and he damned well will be fed accordingly. You do not look to me as though this army were on short commons.” The officer was at length compelled to provide a cow, but the rest of them had a wet and hungry night, receiving only some thin oat porridge and biscuit, and no meat ration at all; perhaps a spiteful revenge.

  Lestocq had with him only a small corps: two formations of smallish heavy-weights, nowhere near Temeraire’s size, with four middle-weight wing dragons apiece, and a few courier-dragons for leaven. Their comfort had been equally neglected: the men were sleeping mostly distributed upon the backs of their dragons, only a few smallish tents posted for officers.

  After they had unloaded him, Temeraire nosed around here and there, trying to find some drier place to rest, without success: the bare ground of the covert was nothing but mud two full inches down.

  “You had better just lie down,” Keynes said. “The mud will keep you warm enough, once you are in it properly.”

  “Surely it cannot be healthy,” Laurence said dubiously.

  “Nonsense,” Keynes said. “What do you think a mustard-plaster is but mud? So long as he does not lie in it for a week, he will do perfectly well.”

  “Wait, wait,” Gong Su said, unexpectedly; he had been gradually acquiring English, being isolated otherwise, but he was still shy of speaking out, save where his business of cookery was concerned. He went through his jars and spice-bags hurriedly and brought out a jar of ground red pepper, a few pinches of which Laurence had seen him use to flavor an entire cow. He put on a glove and ran beneath Temeraire’s belly, scattering a double handful of it upon the ground, while Temeraire peered at him curiously from between his legs.

  “There, now will be warm,” Gong Su said, stepping out and sealing tight the jar again.

  Temeraire gingerly let himself down into the muck, which made rude noises as it squelched up around his sides. “Ugh,” he said. “How I miss the pavilions in China! This is not at all pleasant.” He squirmed a little. “It is warm, but it feels quite odd.”

  Laurence could not like having Temeraire thus marinated, but there was little hope of doing better by him tonight at least. Indeed, he recalled that even while with the larger corps, under Hohenlohe’s command, they had received little better accommodations; only the milder weather had rendered their circumstances more comfortable.

  Granby and his men did not seem to take it as he did, shrugging. “I suppose it’s what we’re used to,” Granby said. “When I was with Laetificat in India, once they put us on the day’s battlefield, with the wounded moaning away all night and bits of swords and bayonets everywhere, because they didn’t want to be put to the trouble of clearing some brush away for u
s to sleep elsewhere; Captain Portland had to threaten to desert to get them to move it the next morning.”

  Laurence had spent his career as an aviator so far entirely in the highly comfortable training-covert at Loch Laggan and in the long-established one at Dover, which—if nothing like what the Chinese considered adequate—at least offered well-drained clearings, shaded by trees, with barracks for the men and junior officers, and rooms at the headquarters for the captains and senior lieutenants. He supposed perhaps he was unrealistic, to expect good conditions in the field, with an army on the march, but surely something better might have been arranged: there were hills visible not very distant, certainly within an easy quarter-of-an-hour’s flight, where the ground would not have been so thoroughly soaked.

  “What can we do for the eggs?” he asked Keynes; at present the two large bundles were standing upon a handful of chests, draped over with an oilskin. “Will they take any harm from the cold?”

  “I am trying to think,” Keynes said irritably; he was pacing around Temeraire. “Will you be sure not to roll onto them in the night?” he demanded of the dragon.

  “Of course I am not going to roll onto the eggs!” Temeraire said, outraged.

  “Then we had better wrap them in oilskins and bury them up against his side in the mud,” Keynes said to Laurence, ignoring Temeraire’s muttered indignations. “There’s no hope of starting a fire that will keep in this rain.”

  The men were already all as wet as they could be; by the time they had finished digging a hole they were also all over mud, but at least they had warmed up by the exercise; Laurence himself had stood out the whole while being drenched, feeling it his place to share the discomfort. “Share out the rest of the oilskins, and let everyone sleep aboard,” he said, once the eggs were safely tucked into their nest, and gratefully climbed up to his own shelter for the night: the tent, now vacant, had been left up on Temeraire’s back for him.