Blood of Tyrants (Temeraire)

by Naomi Novik

  The mountains grew before them all afternoon. In the foothills, as they drew near at last in the late evening, Temeraire glimpsed below a supply depot prepared for them, surely over weeks: pens holding cattle and swine, and enormous granaries; oh, how he would have delighted in a cow, that very moment. The very thought of the sweet gush of juicy blood upon his tongue made his ruff prick forward for a moment.

  Their force, he abruptly realized, was breaking apart again into smaller parties, three or four groups splitting away from the main body at one time, the blue dragons diving to take up some supplies from the pens below, and each such company then vanishing into the craggy mountains, to some ledge or cavern or hidden valley. They overflew a few of them already busy making camp, and Temeraire was wondering how much further it would be to their own, when at last they came over a ridge and saw outspread below the bowl of a valley full of tents, and in the middle of an open landing ground several men in armor, one of them in the lead with a splendid cloak, and with them a large wooden chest.

  The Jade Dragons with their banners had already landed, and disposed of themselves to either side of the landing grounds; General Chu was stooping towards them. Temeraire came to earth beside him, making a great effort to descend gracefully, easily, as though he were not in the least tired; but he was glad to fold his wings. And then General Chu said sharply, “What is that smoke coming from, there to the west?”

  The man in the cloak bowed low and said, “Honored General Chu, we have this very morning destroyed a stronghold of the rebels: and if those in your company are British, we gladly await their explanation for this.”

  He turned and beckoned: the chest, nearly six feet long, was carried forward; Temeraire saw to his surprise it was a sea-chest, the front painted with a banner reading LYDIA. They flung the lid open, and inside to the very lip was loose sackcloth, and the chest was heaped with large round balls, wrapped in faded brown petals. “What is that?” Temeraire said over his shoulder, to Laurence, who was gazing down upon it with a hard and grim expression.

  “Opium,” Laurence said.

  GENERAL FELA WAS YOUNG for his rank, but his hands and his face were those of a man who had spent his life not in drawing rooms but in the field, hardened and sword-callused and leathery with sun; his mustaches and his queue were trimmed to an efficient length. His pistol-belt and swords all of them showed heavy use.

  He led the way personally up through the silent ruins of the village: a small creeping terraced place, ancient and clinging to the mountain-side, grey stone mortared to make the walls and steps of the narrow lanes that wound between the houses. The door of the largest house stood thrust open, and blood spattered the floor; the bodies had been removed. Laurence followed Fela and his soldiers inside, grimly, and stood looking in the courtyard: two dozen chests and more, stacked upon one another to the height of a man’s head.

  “We followed a British dragon to this place,” Fela said, coldly, “bearing more such chests. The guilty culprits fled before our approaching forces, however, and left their allies to their destruction.”

  Laurence looked at Hammond, who did not answer, but only stood in pallid silence.

  They went back out through the village. The attack had evidently come in the early hours before dawn, and the town had been brutally punished for its support of the rebels: cattle and goods stripped, citizenry put to the sword. The streets echoed emptily beneath their boot-heels, and the doors stood open, ruined.

  A poor mountain village, worth nothing to anyone but its citizens; and now all of those were dead. Laurence could see the marks of talons and jaws, where roofs had been ripped away, walls torn down; and through one gaping hole as he walked along the dusty, smooth-cobblestoned lane he saw a cradle, empty and overturned, blackened with smoke. Laurence was not unused to blood nor to brutality; God knew he had seen more than enough men dead, falling corpses into the ocean or hacked apart with saber and cannon-fire. And yet when he stood looking over the empty and ruined village, his stomach twisted wrenchingly with disgust: a passionate horror.

  “Was there more opium there?” Temeraire asked, from where he stood nearly upon the outskirts of the village, leaning anxiously over the roofs.

  “Yes,” Laurence said shortly. “Twenty thousand pounds’ worth, or near to it; a monstrous amount.”

  “Oh?” Iskierka suddenly raised her head. “Is opium worth so much? I have never heard that, before. What do they mean to do with it, now that they have taken it?”

  “Burn it,” Laurence said.

  “That seems a great waste,” she said, in disgruntled tones.

  “I cannot—I cannot by any means account for it,” Hammond said, in much agitation, when they had returned to the encampment.

  The British party had been directed to establish themselves on the western side of the valley, separated pointedly from the rest of the forces by a wide furrowed line of open dirt, with sentries posted along it and a dozen of the red dragons encamped surrounding them. “To do honor to the prince, and to Lung Tien Xiang, and ensure none should trouble them,” Fela had said, coldly, paying lip service to the fiction of Laurence’s command.

  “I thank you,” Laurence had said, and did not argue; he was himself savagely angry. Across the camp, Chu was directing that his own pavilion be raised up at the farthest point from theirs, beside Fela’s tent.

  Their baggage had been heaped carelessly at the boundary, and the cauldrons of porridge: not a generous allotment of the last, particularly when Maximus and Kulingile dragged at last into the camp; the dragons were snappish and sharp at one another over the pots. Spent from their long and arduous flight, however, they were too weary to quarrel long; the porridge was eaten quickly, and they all collapsed into sleep almost at once.

  Hammond’s tent had been put up near the center of their encampment, surrounded for privacy by the tents and pavilions of their own men; Churki slept now half-circled round it, the steady heaving of her side gently swelling the back panel of the tent.

  “It will be a wretched mess, if we have to fight our way out of this,” Catherine Harcourt said to Laurence, low, as they ducked inside Hammond’s tent together, with the other captains. “If those twelve can hold us long enough for any reinforcements to come up, which I suppose is what they are thinking, we will be sunk. Our only chance will be to bull out through them as quickly as we can—Lily in the middle, Temeraire and Iskierka on her either flank, one pass to clear out anyone before us, and then they give way to Maximus and Kulingile, and we all fall in behind the two of them and make due west. How we are to contrive to win home, with no supply—”

  “Pray keep your voice down!” Hammond said. “There can be no call to begin planning so disastrous a course. I grant you the circumstances are awkward—”

  “Awkward!” Harcourt said. “Hammond, we are landed in the middle of the largest aerial army of which I have ever heard tell, and now they are only waiting for word that they may put us to the sword and claw.”

  “Word that will not come,” Hammond said. “It is preposterous, the idea that we should have provided opium to these rebels—that we should have somehow delivered it here.” He blotted his forehead with the back of his hand and looked around his tent, anxiously. “Where are—ah.” He dug after his pouch of leaves. “I assure you,” he said, folding over a hunk of crumbling leaves with hands that shook, “there must be a misunderstanding. In the morning, I will consult with Lung Qin Mei—we will draft a reply. There are any number of possible explanations. Perhaps these rebels meant to sell opium in order to fund their efforts; it does not follow that we must have been involved in their crimes.”

  “And I suppose,” Laurence said, reaching the end of his temper, “that this ragged band of rebels have somehow contrived in their small and impoverished territory to acquire the funds to purchase so enormous a supply?”

  He rose to his feet; Hammond stepped back from him, warily. “What use do you imagine it will be to defend ourselves against other charges, w
hen we have already been proven so demonstrably false?” Laurence said. “Twenty chests of Indian opium, of the same make, packed together and certainly from a single British ship. This is no private, no individual endeavor; this was not concealed from the eyes of our factors. This is no secret winking. This is deliberate, orchestrated defiance of the law, and our guilt there is undeniable.”

  Laurence was grimly aware that a courier had already flown for the Imperial City with the news of this latest discovery. He would be obliged to follow it with his own; he would have to make excuses, to scrape and connive at justification. He would have to let Hammond put falsehoods into his mouth, or see his men and fellow-officers condemned, his country-men in Guangzhou chased out, all hope of alliance ruined. And he could scarcely see any hope for averting that fate even if he did all this.

  “You have made me a liar, and yourself,” he said, bitterly, and stalked from the tent.

  Outside the last of the tents had gone up, and the night had gone quiet: the quiet of a prison camp. The ground crewmen and the junior officers were sitting wearily at their fires, supping on the remnants of the provided food. Several knots of officers stood looking across the boundary line at the rest of the camp and the twelve red dragons drowsing along it: not with more caution than was deserved.

  Granby ducked out of the tent and joined him, watching them. “Laurence, I don’t mean to tell you not to be angry: this is a rotten hole for us to have been put into, all because some fellows in Guangzhou want to line their pockets,” he said, after a moment. “But there’s a stink to this all around. Fela hasn’t told all the truth, either.”

  Laurence looked at him. Granby said, “Where is this British dragon supposed to have come from, that he says was lugging these chests? It’s the sort of thing he might imagine: I dare say all their merchants ship goods dragon-back, here. We don’t; we haven’t any merchant dragons. Even our courier-beasts don’t come to China: we can scarcely get one to India four times a year.”

  “And yet those chests are from Guangzhou, and from a British ship,” Laurence said slowly. “They were conveyed here somehow.”

  “I suppose so,” Granby said, “but they weren’t brought by a British dragon, and if Fela says they were, he’s a bare-faced liar.”

  “I beg your pardon; I am distracted,” Laurence said, to Mrs. Pemberton: she had spoken to him, and he had not attended, for the lingering turmoil in his mind. “Thank you, tea would be most welcome.”

  He had not slept easily or well. The ruined village lingered in his mind, in his dreams; he saw again and again the cracked stone houses, the mill fallen silent, the walls blackened with smoke and the claw-marks standing pale against them. Again and again he had walked through the street, hearing somewhere distantly the roar of dragons, with a strange and dreadful sense of familiarity: perhaps because it might almost have been an English village, a village of Nottinghamshire on his own father’s estates, pillaged so and broken. He had woken unsettled, cloudy.

  The day stood before him without direction. He had still the charge, in theory, of finding this rebellion and putting it down, but it was hard to imagine how he ought to carry that out. His command had never been more than a nominal fiction, and if Chu’s sympathies had not been with Lord Bayan and the conservative faction from the beginning, they were surely fixed in that direction now.

  He had contemplated crossing the camp to Chu’s pavilion and speaking with him. “I hope you will pardon me, Captain,” Hammond had said, cool and formal with him after the previous day’s reproof, “but I must urge against it. Let us not forget the attempts upon your life. In the present—difficulties—your death would surely be the cap to the efforts to sever relations between our nations. I must ask you to remain within the camp.”

  Hammond had spent the rest of the morning in Temeraire’s pavilion, drafting the letter to the Emperor, with Mei offering him advice on the choice of argument and phrase. Mei had regarded the chests of opium with a stony expression as they were brought out of the ruined village, and afterwards had curled herself to sleep without any word to Temeraire, or any of them; but at least she had remained in his pavilion. She had met Hammond’s request for assistance that morning without pleasure, but with a nod of her head.

  She had as little choice as he did, Laurence supposed: the conservative faction would surely try to use this to topple the crown prince, if they could, and certainly to undermine his plans for modernization. But to her, the British could be now nothing more than a gang of ruffians, smuggling poison into her nation and conniving at treason; she could scarcely have liked any better than Laurence did, to attempt to defend their acts.

  But Hammond had written the letter; she had helped him; Laurence had signed his name to it, and one of the Jade Dragons had borne it away. Then they had all three of them retired, separately: Hammond, with a short bow, to his tent; Mei curled into a corner of the pavilion in pointed silence. Laurence had gone to see Mrs. Pemberton settled: he had ordered that her tent be pitched as near Temeraire’s pavilion and his own as possible, and had begged the most reliable men from the other captains’ crews to stand guard.

  She gave him a cup of tea: to his surprise, with milk. “There are some sheep down there below,” she said, with a ghost of a smile, “and Emily has made several acquaintances amongst the young women. They were kind enough to find us a milch one and liberate her. The ewe is picketed down that crevasse, over there, so she needn’t be troubled by seeing the dragons, poor creature. The flavor is not quite right, but at least it is something.”

  She had also somehow assembled and kept a service, though a small and motley one: her two cups were now the handle-less Chinese sort, and the saucers wide and smooth; the sugar bowl was of Portuguese make, evidently acquired in Brazil; the teapot, plain earthenware, had been given her by the American merchant in Nagasaki. She stirred her cup with a chop-stick inverted, and her hands did not shake, though she looked still drawn: it had been only three days since the attack, and those full of wearisome travel.

  “I find nothing wanting, I assure you,” Laurence said. “I hope you are recovered?”

  “I would be ashamed to be anything else,” she said, “when I was of so little use, and in less danger. I hope I am not so poor-spirited as that.”

  “More than a little, of both danger and use, ma’am, I must protest,” Laurence said. “But I am glad if you are well.”

  She drew a breath and sighed, then looked away across the camp. “May I confess something to you, Captain?” she said. “I hope it will not make you very angry, but I should like to clear the air, on my side—I should like to be quite frank.”

  Laurence paused and set down his cup upon his knee. “By all means; I hope you need never even ask, to speak so,” he said.

  “I was shocked, very shocked, when I first understood Emily’s position,” Mrs. Pemberton said, “when I first knew she was an officer. I thought it the most outrageous thing I had ever heard, to see a mere girl imposed upon in such a manner, from childhood; and I must admit, sir, I thought—I assumed—she was surely imposed upon in the other manner, as well.”

  “I cannot reproach you,” Laurence said grimly. “What else is anyone to imagine, who knows a little of the world?”

  She nodded. “If she had given me the least encouragement, I should have taken her away with me at the first opportunity—the first ship we met—and laid suit in court to see her respectably established,” she said. “I was quite ready to name you a villain, and all the Corps with you.”

  Laurence looked at her in surprise, and some respect; he could not fault her impulse, even if he knew it could hardly have found a less willing object. “That encouragement,” he said, “I know very well you did not receive.”

  “No,” she said. “She quite abused me for an idiot.”

  She laughed and exchanged a rueful glance with Laurence, who could well imagine the nature of Emily’s reaction, and her scornful answer; she had griped to him often enough, in only the last m
onth, about being saddled with a chaperone at all.

  “And now instead I must say I do increasingly see the justice of her complaint,” Mrs. Pemberton said, “though I would be sorry to lose my post; I cannot see that I am of the least use to her.”

  She fell silent, and after a pause quietly added, “I dare say I would not at all like to be an aviator. But there is nothing quite so unpleasant as to find oneself so wholly dependent on another’s protection, in such dreadfully visceral circumstances. I would cheerfully have exchanged a life of hard service to be able in that moment to defend myself.”

  Laurence offered her his handkerchief; she waved it away, and drew out her own to press to her eyes briefly. “I beg your pardon,” she said, “and I am done with being a watering-pot. I will have Emily teach me to fence, if I can learn; and oh! I am sorry now I sold my husband’s guns after he died, for I would be happy indeed to have a pair of pistols of my own.”

  “I should be happy to be of service to you in the matter,” Laurence said, “when we next have the opportunity.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” she said. “I would be grateful.”

  He took his leave of her to return to his own tent, pausing when he saw Temeraire standing watching him, his tail lashing in so uncontrolled a manner as to threaten the supports of his pavilion. “Is there something wrong?” Laurence asked him, in some concern; Granby had given him to understand that the danger he had been under was likely to provoke some long repercussions of watchfulness and anxiety, but Temeraire could hardly suppose him to be in danger from a conversation with Mrs. Pemberton.