by Naomi Novik
The fighting at the door was a greater strain now with fewer of them to hand, but the opening was sufficiently narrow that they could hold it even so. The bodies of the dead were forming a grisly addition to their barrier, piled now two and even three deep, and some of the attackers were forced to stretch over them to fight. The reloading time seemed queerly long, an illusion; Laurence was very glad of the rest when at last the next volley was ready. He leaned against the wall, drinking again from the vase; his arms and shoulders were aching from the constant pressure, and his knees.
“Is it empty, sir?” Dyer was there, anxious, and Laurence handed him the vase: he trotted away back towards the pond, through the haze of smoke shrouding the middle of the room; it was drifting slowly upwards, into the cavernous emptiness above.
Again the Chinese did not immediately storm the door, with the volley waiting. Laurence stepped a little way back into the pavilion and tried to look out, to see if he could make anything out beyond the front line of the struggle. But the torches dazzled his eyes too much: nothing but an impenetrable darkness beyond the first row of shining faces staring intently towards the entryway, feverish with the strain of battle. The time seemed long; he missed the ship’s glass, and the steady telling of the bell. Surely it had been an hour or two, by now; Temeraire would come soon.
A sudden clamor from outside, and a new rhythm of clapping hands. His hand went without thought to the cutlass hilt; the volley went off with a roar. “For England and the King!” Granby shouted, and led his group into the fray.
But the men at the entry were drawing back to either side, Granby and his fellows left standing uneasily in the opening. Laurence wondered if maybe they had some artillery after all. But instead abruptly a man came running at them down the open aisle, alone, as if intent on throwing himself onto their swords: they stood set, waiting. Not three paces distant he leapt into the air, landed somehow sideways against the column, and sprang off it literally over their heads, diving, and tucked himself neatly into a rolling somersault along the stone floor.
The maneuver defied gravity more thoroughly than any skylarking Laurence had ever seen done; ten feet into the air and down again with no propulsion but his own legs. The man leapt up at once, unbruised, now at Granby’s back with the main wave of attackers charging the entryway again. “Therrows, Willoughby,” Laurence bellowed to the men in his group, unnecessarily: they were already running to hold him back.
The man had no weapon, but his agility was beyond anything; he jumped away from their swinging swords in a manner that made them seem accomplices in a stage play rather than in deadly earnest, trying to kill him; and from his greater distance, Laurence could see he was drawing them steadily back, towards Granby and the others, where their swords could only become dangers to their comrades.
Laurence clapped on to his pistol and drew it out, his hands following the practiced sequence despite the dark and the furor; in his head he listened to the chant of the great-gun exercise, so nearly parallel. Ramrod down the muzzle with a rag, twice, and then he pulled back the hammer to half-cocked, groping after the paper cartridge in his hip pouch.
Therrows suddenly screamed and fell, clutching his knee. Willoughby’s head turned to look; his sword was held defensively, at the level of his chest, but in that one moment of incaution the Chinese man leapt again impossibly high and struck him full on the jaw with both feet. The sound of his neck snapping was grisly; he was lifted an inch straight up off the ground, arms splaying out wide, and then collapsed into a heap, his head lolling side-to-side upon the ground. The Chinese man tumbled to the ground from his leap, landed on his shoulder, rolling lightly back up, and turned to look at Laurence.
Riggs was yelling from behind him, “Make ready! Faster, damn you, make ready!”
Laurence’s hands were still working. Tearing open the cartridge of black powder with his teeth, a few grains like sand bitter on his tongue. Powder straight down the muzzle, then the round lead ball after, the paper in for wadding, rammed down hard; no time to check the primer, and he raised the gun and blew out the man’s brains, barely more than arm’s reach away.
Laurence and Granby dragged Therrows back over to Keynes while the Chinese backed away from the waiting volley. He was sobbing quietly, his leg dangling useless; “I’m sorry, sir,” he kept saying, choked.
“For Heaven’s sake, enough moan,” Keynes said sharply, when they put him down, and slapped Therrows across the face with a distinct lack of sympathy. The young man gulped, but stopped, and hastily scrubbed an arm across his face. “The kneecap is broken,” Keynes said, after a moment. “A clean enough break, but he won’t be standing again for a month.”
“Get over to Riggs when you have been splinted, and reload for them,” Laurence told Therrows, then he and Granby dashed back to the entryway.
“We’ll take rest by turns,” Laurence said, kneeling down by the others. “Hammond, you first; go and tell Riggs to keep one rifle back, loaded, at all times, if they should try and send another fellow over that way.”
Hammond was visibly heaving for breath, his cheeks marked with spots of bright red; he nodded and said hoarsely, “Leave your pistols, I will reload.”
Blythe, gulping water from the vase, abruptly choked, spat out a fountain, and yelled, “Sweet Christ in Heaven!” and made them all jump. Laurence looked around wildly: a bright orange goldfish two fingers long was wriggling on the stones in the puddled water. “Sorry,” Blythe said, panting. “I felt the bugger squirming in my mouth.”
Laurence stared, then Martin started laughing, and for a moment they were all grinning at one another; then the rifles cracked off, and they were back to the door.
The attackers made no attempt at setting the pavilion on fire, which surprised Laurence; they had torches enough, and wood was plentiful around the island. They did try smoke, building small bonfires to either side of the building under the eaves, but through either some trick of the pavilion’s design, or simply the prevailing wind, a drifting air current carried the smoke up and out through the yellow-tiled roof. It was unpleasant enough, but not deadly, and near the pond the air was fresh. Each round the one man resting would go back there, to drink and clear his lungs, and have the handful of scratches they had all by now accumulated smeared with salve and bound up if still bleeding.
The gang tried a battering ram, a fresh-cut tree with the branches and leaves still attached, but Laurence called, “Stand aside as they come, and cut at their legs.” The bearers ran themselves directly onto the blades with great courage, trying to break through, but even the three steps that led up to the pavilion door were enough to break their momentum. Several at the head fell with gashes showing bone, to be clubbed to death with pistol-butts, and then the tree itself toppled forward and halted their progress. The British had a few frantic minutes of hacking off the branches, to clear the view for the riflemen; by then the next volley was more than ready, and the attackers gave up the attempt.
After this the battle settled into a sort of grisly rhythm; each round of fire won them even more time to rest now, the Chinese evidently disheartened by their failure to break in through the small British line, and by the very great slaughter. Every bullet found its mark; Riggs and his men had been trained to make shots from the back of a dragon, flying sometimes at thirty knots in the heat of battle, and with less than thirty yards to the entryway, they could scarcely miss. It was a slow, grinding way to fight, every minute seeming to consume five times its proper length; Laurence began to count the time by volleys.
“We had better go to three shots only a volley, sir,” Riggs said, coughing, when Laurence knelt to speak with him, his next rest spell. “It’ll hold them all the same, now they’ve had a taste, and though I brought all the cartridges we had, we’re not bloody infantry. I have Therrows making us more, but we have enough powder for another thirty rounds at most, I think.”
“That will have to do,” Laurence said. “We will try and hold them longer between vo
lleys. Start resting one man every other round, also.” He emptied his own cartridge box and Granby’s into the general pile: only another seven, but that meant two rounds more at least, and the rifles were of more value than the pistols.
He splashed his face with water at the pond, smiling a little at the darting fish which he could see more clearly now, his eyes perhaps adjusting to the dark. His neckcloth was soaked quite through with sweat; he took it off and wrung it out over the stones, then could not bring himself to put it back on once he had exposed his grateful skin to the air. He rinsed it clean and left it spread out to dry, then hurried back.
Another measureless stretch of time, the faces of the attackers growing blurry and dim in the doorway. Laurence was struggling to hold off a couple of men, shoulder-to-shoulder with Granby, when he heard Dyer’s high treble cry out, “Captain! Captain!” from behind. He could not turn and look; there was no opportunity for pause.
“I have them,” Granby panted, and kicked the man in front in the balls with his heavy Hessian boot; he engaged the other hilt-to-hilt, and Laurence pulled away and turned hurriedly around.
A couple of men were standing dripping on the edge of the pond, and another pulling himself out: they had somehow found whatever reservoir fed the pond, and swum through it underneath the wall. Keynes was sprawled unmoving on the floor, and Riggs and the other riflemen were running over, still reloading frantically as they went. Hammond had been resting: he was swinging furiously at the two other men, pushing them back towards the water, but he did not have much science: they had short knives, and would get under his guard in a moment.
Little Dyer seized one of the great vases and flung it, still full of water, into the man bending over Keynes’s body with his knife; it shattered against his head and knocked him down to the floor, dazed and slipping in the water. Roland, running over, snatched up Keynes’s tenaculum, and dragged the sharp hooked end across the man’s throat before he could arise, blood spurting in a furious jet from the severed vein, through his grasping fingers.
More men were coming out of the pond. “Fire at will,” Riggs shouted, and three went down, one of them shot with only his head protruding from the water, sinking back down below the surface in a spreading cloud of blood. Laurence was up beside Hammond, and together they forced the two he was struggling against back into the water: while Hammond kept swinging, Laurence stabbed one with the point of his cutlass, and clubbed the other with the hilt; he fell unconscious into the water, open-mouthed, and bubbles rose in a profusion from his lips.
“Push them all into the water,” Laurence said. “We must block up the passage.” He climbed into the pond, pushing the bodies against the current; he could feel a greater pressure coming from the other side, more men trying to come through. “Riggs, get your men back to the front and relieve Granby,” he said. “Hammond and I can hold them here.”
“I can help also,” Therrows said, limping over: he was a tall fellow, and could sit down on the edge of the pond and put his good leg against the mass of bodies.
“Roland, Dyer, see if there is anything to be done for Keynes,” Laurence said over his shoulder, and then looked when he did not hear a response immediately: they were both being sick in the corner, quietly.
Roland wiped her mouth and got up, looking rather like an unsteady-legged foal. “Yes, sir,” she said, and she and Dyer tottered over to Keynes. He groaned as they turned him over: there was a great clot of blood on his head, above the eyebrow, but he opened his eyes dazedly as they bound it up.
The pressure on the other side of the mass of bodies weakened, and slowly ceased; behind them the guns spoke again and again with suddenly quickened pace, Riggs and his men firing almost at the rate of redcoats. Laurence, trying to look over his shoulder, could not see anything through the haze of smoke.
“Therrows and I can manage, go!” Hammond gasped out. Laurence nodded and slogged out of the water, his full boots dragging like stones; he had to stop and pour them out before he could run to the front.
Even as he came, the shooting stopped: the smoke so thick and queerly bright they could not see anyone through it, only the broken heap of bodies around the floor at their feet. They stood waiting, Riggs and his men reloading more slowly, their fingers shaking. Then Laurence stepped forward, using a hand on the column for balance: there was nowhere to stand but on the corpses.
They came out blinking through the haze, into the early-morning sunlight, startling up a flock of crows that lifted from the bodies in the courtyard and fled shrieking hoarsely over the water of the lake. There was no one left moving in sight: the rest of the attackers had fled. Martin abruptly fell over onto his knees, his cutlass clanging un-musically on the stones; Granby went to help him up and ended by falling down also. Laurence groped to a small wooden bench before his own legs gave out; not caring very much that he was sharing it with one of the dead, a smooth-faced young man with a trail of red blood drying on his lips and a purpled stain around the ragged bullet wound in his chest.
There was no sign of Temeraire. He had not come.
Chapter 15
SUN KAI FOUND THEM scarcely more than dead themselves, an hour later; he had come warily into the courtyard from the pier with a small group of armed men: perhaps ten or so and formally dressed in guard uniforms, unlike the scruffy and unkempt members of the gang. The smoldering bonfires had gone out of their own accord, for lack of fuel; the British were dragging the corpses into the deepest shade, so they would putrefy less horribly.
They were all of them half-blind and numb with exhaustion, and could offer no resistance; helpless to account for Temeraire’s absence and with no other idea of what to do, Laurence submitted to being led to the boat, and thence to a stuffy, enclosed palanquin, whose curtains were drawn tight around him. He slept instantly upon the embroidered pillows, despite the jostling and shouts of their progress, and knew nothing more until at last the palanquin was set down, and he was shaken back to wakefulness.
“Come inside,” Sun Kai said, and pulled on him until he rose; Hammond and Granby and the other crewmen were emerging in similarly dazed and battered condition from other sedan-chairs behind him. Laurence followed unthinking up the stairs into the blessedly cool interior of a house, fragrant with traces of incense; along a narrow hallway and to a room which faced onto the garden courtyard. There he at once surged forward and leapt over the low balcony railing: Temeraire was lying curled asleep upon the stones.
“Temeraire,” Laurence called, and went towards him; Sun Kai exclaimed in Chinese and ran after him, catching his arm before he could touch Temeraire’s side; then the dragon raised up his head and looked at them, curiously, and Laurence stared: it was not Temeraire at all.
Sun Kai tried to drag Laurence down to the ground, kneeling down himself; Laurence shook him off, managing with difficulty to keep his balance. He noticed only then a young man of perhaps twenty, dressed in elegant silk robes of dark yellow embroidered with dragons, sitting on a bench.
Hammond had followed Laurence and now caught at his sleeve. “For God’s sake, kneel,” he whispered. “This must be Prince Mianning, the crown prince.” He himself went down to both knees, and pressed his forehead to the ground just as Sun Kai was doing.
Laurence stared a little stupidly down at them both, looked at the young man, and hesitated; then he bowed deeply instead, from the waist: he was mortally certain he could not bend a single knee without falling down to both, or more ignominiously upon his face, and he was not yet willing to perform the kowtow to the Emperor, much less the prince.
The prince did not seem offended, but spoke in Chinese to Sun Kai; he rose, and Hammond also, very slowly. “He says we can rest here safely,” Hammond said to Laurence. “I beg you to believe him, sir; he can have no need to deceive us.”
Laurence said, “Will you ask him about Temeraire?” Hammond looked at the other dragon blankly. “That is not him,” Laurence added. “It is some other Celestial, it is not Temeraire.”
“He is well?” Laurence asked, not bothering to try and make sense of this; the most urgent concern was to understand what might have kept Temeraire away.
“There is no reason to think otherwise,” Sun Kai said, which seemed evasive. Laurence did not know how to press him further; he was too thick with fatigue. But Sun Kai took pity on his confusion and added more gently, “He is well. We cannot interrupt his seclusion, but he will come out sometime today, and we will bring him to you then.”
Laurence still did not understand, but he could not think of anything else to do at the moment. “Thank you,” he managed. “Pray thank His Highness for his hospitality, for us; pray convey our very deep thanks. I beg he will excuse any inadequacy in our address.”
The prince nodded and dismissed them with a wave. Sun Kai herded them back over the balcony into their rooms, and stood watching over them until they had collapsed upon the hard wooden bed platforms; perhaps he did not trust them not to leap up and go wandering again. Laurence almost laughed at the improbability of it, and fell asleep mid-thought.
“Laurence, Laurence,” Temeraire said, very anxiously; Laurence opened his eyes and found Temeraire’s head poked in through the balcony doors, and a darkening sky beyond. “Laurence, you are not hurt?”
“Oh!” Hammond had woken, and fallen off his bed in startlement at finding himself cheek-to-jowl with Temeraire’s muzzle. “Good God,” he said, painfully climbing to his feet and sitting back down upon the bed. “I feel like a man of eighty with gout in both legs.”
Laurence sat up with only a little less effort; every muscle had stiffened up during his rest. “No, I am quite well,” he said, reaching out gratefully to put a hand on Temeraire’s muzzle and feel the reassurance of his solid presence. “You have not been ill?”