by Naomi Novik
There were some soldiers already clambering over the stones towards the two imprisoned dragons; but Temeraire whipped his head around on his long neck and snapped at them, his jaws clashing on empty air: the men were beyond even his reach. “Temeraire!” Laurence called out surprised as he leapt from Immortalis’s back.
“Laurence!” Temeraire cried, catching sight of them, “Laurence, look out! They are assassins, all of them.”
“What?” Little said, himself just slid down from Immortalis’s back.
A shadow was growing on the ground beneath them, and Laurence, seeing it, turned and shouted to Immortalis through cupped hands, “Aloft again, quick!” while he and Little both dived for safety. A great scarlet beast in armor came heavily down where Immortalis had just in time darted away, its claws digging furrows in the rock; the beast roared and swung its head narrow-eyed over them all.
Laurence scrambled away over the loose stones, towards Temeraire and Arkady. The red-patch dragon looked down at him and said in a strange tongue, which Laurence only a little followed, “Make Temeraire move! They will all be squashed anyway, if those men kill him.”
“Laurence, be careful,” Temeraire called anxiously. “Do not get anywhere near these fellows; and that is for you,” he added, snapping again at one of the soldiers, who had lunged at him, a weapon a little like an old-fashioned halberd in his hand, a curved and wicked blade bound to the end of a long staff, which he jabbed at Temeraire’s eyes. “Ow!” Temeraire added, and Laurence saw one of the other soldiers had climbed up onto his back and was stabbing the blade down towards Temeraire’s spine.
Laurence realized then in sudden horror that Temeraire was not merely buried but helpless to free himself; Temeraire could not move, and the soldiers might carve him at their leisure like a side of slaughtered beef. He drew his sword and leapt for the would-be murderers. The ground was perilously uncertain, a loose slide of pebbles beneath his feet. Still, he scrambled for the top of Temeraire’s back and charged the man jabbing at the great column of the spine.
There were several other men drawing close down the unsteady slope, but Laurence thought for the moment of nothing but the enemy immediately before him. He dived under the man’s swing, that already-bloody blade shaving painfully along the back of his head, taking skin and hair with it; but Laurence came up inside the man’s guard and, seizing his shoulder, drove his sword up between the loose plates of armor, through and through the man’s body to his back. The soldier was a young man, only a scruff of beard yet grown; his eyes and open mouth stared and clouded, and the halberd fell away with a clatter to the rocks as Laurence heaved the body off his blade.
Laurence looked down at Temeraire’s wound: the scales had resisted, but the flesh was hacked enough to let grey bone show through, stained with the dark dragon blood that ran away in rivulets down Temeraire’s back. The enormous lump of the backbone, the size of Laurence’s trunk nearly, had defied the halberd’s strokes so far, but five men more were nearly upon him, and if unopposed they could hack away at it, like woodsmen together felling some great monster of the forest.
“Laurence!” Little called, and Laurence reached down to catch the end of the halberd, which Little had taken hold of, and was holding outstretched to him. Little used it to scramble more easily up the slope of rocks to Laurence’s side; he drew a pistol from his belt, and his own sword.
Above them, Laurence saw Immortalis feinting bravely around the Chinese beast, which outweighed him so greatly. But the red dragon was not merely the stronger but the more maneuverable, its long lanky body snapping with great agility back upon itself almost, allowing it to turn sharp in mid-air, and its wings had something in common with the structure of Temeraire’s own, which allowed him to hover. Immortalis could merely hold it off briefly, and not hope to defeat it.
“If Immortalis went back to camp, to raise the alarm?” Laurence said to Little.
Little looked up at Immortalis with a grim expression, and back at Laurence, shaking his head. “That last day of flying, those fellows could manage twenty knots,” he said. “A Yellow Reaper can’t get above sixteen. If he turns tail, he’ll only be brought down by the hindquarters.”
He spoke with a hard flat tone, as though he were not speaking of the death of his beast, but when one of the soldiers came down off the slope, Little leveled his pistol and fired with a look of very savagery, distorting his face which in ordinary repose bore almost a poet’s half-dreamy look. He hurled the pistol into another man’s face, and sprang forward to meet the halberd and cut him down.
Laurence leapt with him, to take advantage of the unsteady footing the men would have as they came off the slope. He felt all the same useless fury he saw in Little’s face: to see Temeraire brought so low, so hideously, and by a pack of cowards and traitors—murderers indeed—burned through him with an intensity that came from no rational font. Laurence had seen his ship sink; he had suffered that—he was sure he had suffered it, though the name slid from his mind. He remembered sea-water pouring in waterfalls through the gunports; he remembered sitting in a boat rowing, rowing, while the masts slid in ragged tatters beneath the waves.
The Goliath, he suddenly thought, as his sword met the halberd-stave with a clanging; and he jerked his head in a shake to send away the false memory—he had not served on Goliath since the Nile; Goliath had not sunk there. But the feeling stayed on his tongue: black powder ash and the smell of burning sails, and the roaring torrent. And yet that pain, that sorrow, was distant and removed by comparison.
He set his teeth and flung his enemy’s weapon wide by sheer brute force, heaving it up and clear, and risked the brief opening, overbalancing himself for an extra inch of reach, so that the tip of his sword tore open the man’s throat. Blood spilled down his neck along a bloody line, but as Laurence completed the stroke and stumbled away, it suddenly spurted red with ferocious energy. The soldier clapped a hand up to the gush and then fell to knees and toppled away over the side.
Laurence caught himself on Temeraire’s back with one hand and tried to twist himself up to his feet; but not quickly enough, and he felt another blade catch his sword-arm and bite into the meat of the muscle. He jerked away from the hot pain, falling, and rolled along Temeraire’s back hearing Temeraire above roaring in fury.
“Laurence!” Temeraire cried, and did manage to heave himself a little despite the weight of stones, tumbling all of them off their feet together, and straining he brought his head around and snatched the soldier with the dripping pole-arm in his jaws.
There was something dreadful in watching a man broken between those enormous jaws; Temeraire cracked his body like walnut shells, and flung the wreck of him to the ground. He roared again, that terrible shattering roar, and the soldiers involuntarily cowered back from it.
But he could roar only to the sky. He could not turn that power upon them, not without breaking apart the unstable slope and burying them one and all in a shared tomb, and aloft, the red dragon was closing in on her tiring adversary. Immortalis darted low beneath her, and tried to claw at her belly, but with striking speed she reversed herself again and caught him, claws tearing into Immortalis’s shoulders, driving him with a powerful thrust of her great body into the ground.
“Immortalis!” Little cried, anguished. The red dragon had seized him with her jaws by the back of the neck, just below his skull, and was shaking him like a rat terrier, a great clawed foot holding his thrashing body pinned. She would break his neck in a moment; then she would be free to do as she wished, and Temeraire and Arkady yet pinned into helplessness.
Then a roaring above, and a monstrous shadow falling: Kulingile came down with Demane and Junichiro and Baggy all three upon his back and his claws outstretched, the scarlet dragon an easy target for him. She gave an undignified squawk of alarm and let Immortalis go, but too late: Kulingile smashed her down into the ground. He closed his jaws midway down along her throat and wrenched her neck away from her body with brute force. Laurence
heard the audible crack, and she collapsed into dead weight.
“Captain,” Demane cried from Kulingile’s back, his voice sharp and high with anxiety, “where is Sipho?”
“I have not the least idea,” Laurence said, grimly anxious himself; there was no sign of the boy, nor of his officers, and the cascade of rock that had buried Temeraire and Arkady would have crushed them like insects.
The would-be assassins were trying to flee, too late. Laurence had heretofore thought Kulingile of a remarkably placid nature, but that was not in evidence now as the great golden beast turned towards them: having been roused to violence and with Demane’s fear driving him, he hissed and swept the soldiers into a broken heap onto the ground with a few swipes of his massive talons, careless of them as a child with its toys; only a few of them groaned and moved a little, and soon they, too, were still. Junichiro leapt down from Kulingile’s back and drawing his own sword stood over the bodies, while Baggy cautiously collected away their blades.
“Sipho is here,” Temeraire said, “underneath me; I will keep him quite safe, only get Laurence back to the camp where he will be safe, at once; hurry!”
“I am certainly not leaving until I see you freed,” Laurence said.
“Are you sure you hadn’t better go, after all?” Little said to him, doubtfully, and Laurence, startled, looked at him. “Your head is all over blood.”
Laurence reached up to wipe the grime from his face, and finding his hand come away red with gore felt back to where his scalp hung open and wet. “Help me fold it up again,” he said. “A head wound is always a bloody nuisance; but unless my brains are out in the air, I suppose it will not kill me.”
Little gave him his neckcloth, to tie it up with; and Laurence settled himself by Temeraire’s side to wait out the slow, cautious labor. Kulingile scraped away the loose crumbling rock only a little at a time, so as to free Temeraire without risking the death of the trapped men below, if they had survived so long, buried alive; meanwhile Junichiro and Baggy wordlessly helped Little to get thick bandages from Immortalis’s belly-netting, to pack into his sluggishly bleeding wounds; the poor dragon lay heavily and breathing in gulps.
Temeraire also was silent, his head resting awkwardly upon a heap of loose-piled rock, breath wheezing a little through his nostrils; the rocks pressed in upon his sides and drove them inwards, forcing him to struggle for his air. Laurence stroked the soft muzzle while he waited. He had longed for the feelings which might have driven him to treason, having only the stark barren knowledge of it; here, seeing Temeraire so vulnerable to murder and treachery, he had instead been roused to sentiments of great violence, unexplained by reason. He groped after the truth of himself like a prisoner in Plato’s cave, watching shadows.
The grey dragon, Arkady, was rather the worse for wear; his eyes were drifting half-shut and groggy, and his breath came noisily: the weight of stone had pressed still more of the breath out of him. Laurence watched him with concern, seeing Temeraire’s fate looming ahead if he was not quickly freed, and only with an effort held himself back from urging Kulingile to work faster. Demane had as much right to fear for his brother, and the dragons were not yet in truly dire straits.
“Laurence,” Temeraire said, hoarsely, breaking the silence suddenly. “Laurence, I must beg your pardon.”
“There is no cause, as far as I know,” Laurence said. “I hope you know I do not hold you responsible for my own actions—where I have allowed myself to be persuaded, the decision must in the end have been my own. And where apologies between us may have been merited, in the past, and there made, I hope you do not imagine me so unreasonable as to expect you to repeat them.”
“Oh! That is very easy to say,” Temeraire said, unhappily, “when you do not know the half of it. You do not know—” He heaved a breath, which rolled a cascade of pebbles from his back. “Laurence, it is not only the treason; it is not only your rank: I lost you all your fortune,” he said. “I lost you—ten thousand pounds. A court took it away from you, because you could not answer the charge.”
Laurence waited, but this seemed the sum total of Temeraire’s great confession. “I hope you do not think me so wretchedly mercenary as to weigh that in any wise with the rest,” he said, more than half outraged.
“I suppose you have forgotten that, as well,” Temeraire said. “But ten thousand pounds is an enormous sum! Why, Gentius said to me it should be worth a dozen eagles, like we took from Napoleon.”
“I am perfectly aware of the size of the sum; and as it might be ten times the greater and still not buy me a thimbleful of honor, I must beg leave to continue to disdain it by comparison,” Laurence said. “I suppose I have been in the way of twice that sum, in prize-money, if I had chosen to ask for a prize-cruise or to chase shipping, instead of harrying the enemy’s forces if ever I could.”
“But that is all the worse,” Temeraire said, with a heaving gasp. “For you got it just so, honorably, and it was all your own. You had won it, by yourself, before ever I was hatched; it was not our fortune, at all; it was yours. I had not the shadow of a right to do such a dreadful thing, and after you had built me a pavilion as well. I did offer you my talon-sheaths,” Temeraire added wretchedly, his voice sinking low, “but oh—you would not take them; as though I could not even repair the injury.”
Laurence struggled to make sense of it. He had seen Temeraire gloating over the prized sheaths, to Laurence’s mind a singularly absurd piece of adornment which made any sort of eating ten times the more awkward and battle impossible; and he thought Temeraire would have seen his wings clipped off his back before surrendering them. “I suppose if you imagine it a kind of theft,” he said slowly, “I can better comprehend your misery; but if I have been plundered by a court, either it was unjustly, which cannot be your fault, or for some act of my own. In any case,” he added, with as much energy as he could, “I do assure you I do not regard it; I am not made in the least wretched by that loss.”
Temeraire was silent, and then said low, “Very well. Not by that, perhaps; but certainly by—” He halted, and then said even more softly, “Surely you would be happier, if you had—if you had never found my egg; if you had not harnessed me at all.”
Laurence hardly knew how to answer; it seemed to him true as well. Temeraire dragged in a breath and added with a strange rasp like the hum of bee-wings beneath it, “If you would prefer—I will stay in China, alone; if you would like. You may go wherever you like. Or, or you may stay here, where no-one would call you a traitor, and I—I will—”
He halted, evidently fumbling for some alternative, but Laurence said, “No.” It came easily to his mouth, as easily as anything: that itself would have to be answer enough. “I would not make the exchange,” he said, “even now; what I have done, what I have chosen, I would not unmake, even if I could.”
ANOTHER HOUR PASSED; NIGHT had come. Enough of the rocks had been drawn away, by now, that Temeraire could breathe freely once more; but he scarcely noticed the relief, by comparison with the rest, although he was very glad when Arkady—who had begun by then to feel well enough to complain incessantly and fidget—was freed from his side and helped away. Immortalis had stolen back to the camp, under cover of dark, to tell the others what had happened; Nitidus had flown back carrying Maximus’s surgeon Gaiters, who now was studying the dreadful chains and considering how they might best be removed.
Temeraire could not quarrel with his situation despite the discomfort. It was worth, oh, everything! to know that Laurence did not wish to leave him. Temeraire was with some difficulty trying to comprehend Laurence’s disgust of his own lost fortune—he could scarcely call it anything else—only because it could not buy him honor. The fortune could have bought him a great many other things, all of them very splendid, so that did not really explain it to Temeraire’s satisfaction. But he was not so determined to be unhappy that he would insist on Laurence’s being so, having been given such assurances.
“Why is he taking so l
ong about it?” Arkady demanded of Temeraire, breaking in on his thoughts. Temeraire jerked his head up, for he had been drifting in a half-doze, dull with fatigue even though he could breathe now more easily. “Tell him to finish and take it off me. I do not see why he is waiting.”
Temeraire looked over. Gaiters had already drawn the hooks which had been driven through Arkady’s wings, by cutting them and pulling them away; his point of concern seemed to be how to cut out the barbs in Arkady’s shoulders so that the flesh would not be torn so badly that he could not fly.
“Well, I will have a go at it, at any rate. Horrocks, get me my knives,” Gaiters said, calling down from Arkady’s back to his assistant, and Kulingile was pressed from the work of digging to hold Arkady still for the operation. Arkady indeed shrilled loudly in protest and shuddered all over while the cruel knives dug around in his flesh; Horrocks pointed, now and again, and Gaiters, without taking his eyes off his work, grunted and nodded in answer, while the blood welled up continually around his hands. Horrocks mopped about them with a rag, and three of the midwingmen stood holding the bar of the barb steady.
Temeraire tried not to watch; it was gruesome, and he did not like surgery at all. But some fascination drew his eyes again and again to the spectacle, until at last Gaiters gave the word. “All right, fellows, lift away,” and he and Horrocks together reached within the wound to guide the barb out as the midwingmen raised up the bar. It emerged little by little—a thing of horror with curling spikes and gobbets of flesh still clinging to them.
The second one was extracted more quickly: not five minutes, and then Horrocks was finishing the sewing while Gaiters washed his hands. “What a vicious piece of work,” Gaiters said, looking it over laid out upon the ground. “I have never seen the like. I suppose they have so many dragons here they don’t mind if they ruin a number of them.”
Temeraire was very glad to have it bundled up and taken away, in any case; Arkady was coaxed limping away to a corner of the encampment, as he had been warned away from any exertion until the wounds had healed, where he collapsed almost at once into slumber, snoring loudly.