Blood of Tyrants (Temeraire)

by Naomi Novik

  “He deserves the chance to show what he can do,” Laurence said, “before the eyes of senior officers whose preferment can assure him the acquiesence of the Ministry. You cannot doubt that they, at least, would be full willing to quarrel with Kulingile’s choice.”

  “Oh! I can believe anything of them, certainly,” Temeraire said, “but I do not see why we must pay them any mind: after all, we have resolved not to do so, haven’t we, when we think they are mistaken.”

  Temeraire was only at long slow length convinced that perhaps such a half-vagabond and uncertain existence as their own should not be the only nor yet the ideal course for a young man only beginning on his career to follow. “And one,” Laurence added quietly, “who has not the advantages of family and name which both you and I possess, even if not in such measure as you might desire. Recollect he is an orphan, alone in the world, divided from the country of his birth and from his very tribe: even if he wished now to return, the port of Capetown is closed to our ships, and he is not of the Tswana; his own people have no dragons among them, and would scarcely welcome him and Kulingile back.”

  All now was nearly in readiness for the moment of parting, come upon them so swiftly and, Laurence only hoped, not too late to bring them to the aid of the Russian armies. The egg was now safely in Mianning’s keeping; at dawn they would make their last farewells, the dragons of the formation taking wing for the harbor, Kulingile and Iskierka with them; and Temeraire and Arkady flying north with General Chu.

  Laurence ducked into Tharkay’s chamber again. The maps had been rolled into their cases and the meager baggage packed; Tharkay was lying in the bed, his eyes closed, dressed but for his sword-belt and his boots as though he meant to sleep in his clothing before waking for the journey. “It will be just as well not to be fumbling to dress in the dark, with these hands of mine,” Tharkay said, dispassionately, working them gently open and shut as Laurence sat in the chair beside him: bruises still darkened the skin, and half the fingers were splinted.

  Granby came into the room to join them and said, “You’re determined you won’t take ship with us?” while perching upon the end of the bed. “It won’t be an easy road. You’ll be flying cold, Laurence, I’m afraid: I dare say the Chinese would have a fit if you tried to put up a tent on Temeraire’s back. Have you got a new flying-coat, yet?”

  “I have, thank you,” Laurence said. Mianning had made him free of his own purse, towards repairing his wardrobe, and Laurence had swallowed his half-remembered irritation and begged Gong Su for assistance in navigating the etiquette of commissioning a garment from one of the local tailors in such a way that would not oblige the poor tradesman to proffer the item as a gift.

  The coat had been delivered with sufficient alacrity to mean that the fellow had however stayed up night and day working upon it. But Laurence was grateful for the speed, which should let him take the coat with him; and more so that the garment did not make a guy of him. The leather was a supple black and the sleeves darted cleverly at shoulder and elbow with padded dark blue silk: a little outré, perhaps, but when Laurence had discovered how the contrivance served to ease the sweep of a sword, he had no objections to make. There were a few more ornate embossed decorations than he might have liked upon the sleeves, but these were subtle and easily to be missed at a distance.

  His memory had begun more steadily to come back to him—flashes of recollection and emotion, conversations and actions: still with blank spaces full of surprise between them, but he felt no longer that strange sense of division from himself. Even that, he now recognized, was not so great a distance from the state of his mind these last several years. He was divided from the man he had once been, and by a gulf he could no longer cross.

  “I fear there is something of cowardice in it,” he admitted, meaning his loss of memory. “A retreat, and weak-minded at that, when I can no longer be what I was even if I wished; there is no pretense, no masquerade that could achieve it. I thought I had faced up to it; I had not thought to be so easily overcome.”

  “I am of the opinion,” Tharkay said, “that you ought not assign to free will something more likely the consequence of a sharp blow to the skull.”

  Granby snorted. “You are the only fellow I can think of, Laurence, whose notion of a weak-minded retreat would be to cast your own head ahoo and slog onwards confused beyond everything, and nearly kill yourself thrice over.”

  He rose and gave Tharkay a bow in lieu of shaking hands: as he was short one, and Tharkay’s still in sorry condition. Together they left him to his rest, closing the courtyard door behind them as they stepped out. The dragons of the formation were engaged in postdinner ablutions—a final enjoyment of that pleasure which they would not so easily find after leaving the Imperial precincts, where enormous dragon’s-head spouts were placed at the eaves of the buildings through which torrents of pleasantly hot water might be pumped over the dragons’ backs.

  “What an ungodly flood: we will be lucky if we are not all carried away,” Captain Little said, as he sprang up onto one of the stone benches to save his boots, after Nitidus had grown too enthusiastic in his pumping: a broad gushing stream developed, running down Immortalis’s back to the drain. “John, we will need Iskierka to toast their rumps before we get them back under harness, or we will all be flying wet,” he said, offering a hand to pull Granby up by his good arm; and then, after a moment’s hesitation, Laurence afterwards.

  Laurence took it in an equally awkward spirit. The return of his memory had belatedly clarified all Little’s avoidance: of course Little knew, for Granby had surely told him, that Laurence had by misfortune and Iskierka’s indiscretion been brought into not only Granby’s guilty secret, but his own.

  And not, as one might learn of such a thing aboard a ship—not by whispered ship’s gossip, and eavesdropping through her wooden walls, and one suspicious circumstance laid upon another like bricks to make a wall of certainty. Laurence could by that sort of testimony have denounced a score of men, in the Navy, and would nevertheless cheerfully and with a sense of perfect honesty have sworn, under oath, that he knew nothing of their predilections and personal habits, and denied any knowledge of a crime, even if Admiral D—had maintained an entire troop of particularly beautiful young men who could not reef a sail or pull upon a line, and Captain K—had so passionately greeted his first lieutenant of ten years, that man returning wounded from a boarding party, as to require all present to avert their eyes.

  No: in this case, Granby had confessed it to him, outright, and thus made him complicit; and Iskierka had as plainly marked out Little’s guilt. Laurence could not argue to himself that he did not know, and that he had no duty to speak.

  The man he had been eight years before, Laurence realized, would have acknowledged that duty; perhaps would even however reluctantly and unhappily have denounced them to a superior, and set in motion all the machinery of the courts-martial to destroy them. That man would have put duty above not merely personal sentiment and attachment, but above the natural sense of justice which revolted at the idea of exposing to ruin and misery any man for such a crime.

  He would have not valued his own feelings, on such a matter, higher than the law and the discipline of the service. If he had kept silent, either from affection or a sense of having received a confidence, or a more practical consideration of the damage the loss of two skilled captains and their beasts would do to the service, he would have felt a painful and bitter guilt at doing so. And so aside from an ordinary mortification at having his intimate concerns so exposed to a man not his close friend, Little had indeed a cause to fear; and especially a partial and stumbling return of Laurence’s memory.

  Laurence ruefully admitted to himself that he had been a great deal happier in this instance not to remember: it was wretchedly awkward to know that which he ought not know, and to know that Little and Granby should both know he knew it, while none of them might utter a word on the subject. But he felt no guilt; he was done with that subtle
species of cowardice which hid behind the judgment of other men. He said to them, “I had better take my leave of you now, gentlemen; you will have a difficult time enough getting away, I think,” and offered Little his hand. “My most sincere regards, and good fortune, to you both,” he said, as close as he could come, he felt, to conveying a reassurance without being so plain as to embarrass them both. Granby he embraced, and added, more lightly, “And for Heaven’s sake, John, have a care for that other arm.”

  “Trust me! Though I can’t very well complain,” Granby said. “I did say that I would have given an arm to have Iskierka a little more biddable, so if I have been taken at my word, that is not the fault of Fortune. So at least this time, you may indeed hope to be shot of me: I have Iskierka’s word she will go quietly to the Potentate, and no more haring off madly.”

  “I am sorry for the pains she has put you to,” Laurence said, “and I will refrain from expressing the sentiment to her, but for my own part, I must be grateful to her: I cannot think what we should have done, these last two years, without you both. Godspeed!”

  He took his leave of them and navigated from one stone bench to another, making his farewells to the other captains as he passed them and their beasts in the flooded courtyard, until at last he was across, and stepped through the house and out to the palace lanes, returning to Temeraire’s courtyard. “What is all that noise, over there?” Temeraire asked, raising his head from his book. The ground crewmen were bundling up their supplies, and the house servants were busily engaged in packing all Laurence’s things under Temeraire’s watchful eye, including the scarlet robes of silk and velvet. Laurence sighed inwardly to see them; he would gladly have left them behind by oversight.

  “They are making something of a lake,” Laurence said. The stones of Temeraire’s court were still a little damp from his own bathing, and his hide still speckled with drops that had not run off him; Laurence took one of the large soft silken rags from their basket in the corner of the courtyard and dried a small pool which had accumulated in the crook of Temeraire’s foreleg. Temeraire nudged him with pleasure and thanks, and Laurence seated himself upon the arm.

  They sat together a little while without a word required, in silent contentment, a peace that would vanish soon enough; and yet would still be there to be found again, Laurence thought. How nearly he had lost it, entirely, without even knowing what he lost.

  “Laurence,” Temeraire said after a little while, “Napoleon will be quite outnumbered in the air, will he not?”

  “So we hope,” Laurence said. “And he will not be able to bring his full infantry and cavalry to bear against us, either. He will have to leave detachments behind to hold his lines open. Numerically, we should have the advantage, and the advantage of fighting on Russian soil.”

  “It does sound so very promising,” Temeraire said. “Surely we shall have him this time. And you need not make that noise, either, O’Dea,” he added. “We will have three hundred dragons with us: I am quite sure even Napoleon and Lien cannot have anything to say to them.”

  O’Dea, sitting on a rock and sewing links of mail back onto Temeraire’s armor, had given a lugubrious snort. “Why, it’s true enough we’ve a great many dragons here; I suppose we can hope that most of them will still be with us when we’re there. We must hope for it, sure, seeing how Boney has sent the Russians scampering more than once before now. ’Tis a cold winter in that country, so I’ve heard: a cold winter to be out on the barren plain, haunted by wild beasts, without a fire to sit beside and all the French Army on our heels.”

  “I do not think you ought to speak so discouragingly,” Temeraire said disapprovingly. “Why, Maximus and Lily and even Iskierka would not be going away if they thought there were any chance of our being beat: you see how sure they are we will win.”

  O’Dea wagged his head. “Ah, indeed; ’tis a pity, all those fellows going away by ship, and like as not to the bottom of the ocean.”

  Temeraire flattened his ruff, and maintained a dignified silence until O’Dea had gone back into the house, as the lanterns were dimmed; then he said to Laurence, “Laurence, what will we do, if Napoleon should defeat us?”

  “Starve,” Laurence said, dryly.

  THE ROOM WAS ABLAZE with candles, many standing before mirrors of gilt and shining on gold and silver; the guests an equal brilliance of jewels and silks and velvet, their voices rising and falling in steady rhythm over the delicate threads of music. There might be a hectic flush on some cheeks, a nervous edge to laughter too quickly suppressed, but no-one surveying the company would have imagined that four hundred miles away, St. Petersburg was occupied by Napoleon’s army; nor from overhearing their conversation.

  “They say that one could walk across the Seine on the backs of those foreign dragons, so closely were they crammed in upon one another outside Notre Dame,” Countess Andreyevna said, in tones of solemn horror more appropriate to the discussion of a funeral than a baptism. “We see now where all this dreadful revolution leads, and what a monster has taken hold of France! He will not content himself with regicide and self-aggrandizement, but will tear down the Christian faith with everything else: he is a heathen, that is plain to see.

  “And not seven months since the wedding,” she added, with a flavor of spitefulness. “I hope that Bonaparte may be confident of his paternity.”

  The new Roi de Cusco, as he had been styled, was by now four months old and reportedly thriving: he had been christened Napoleon Joseph Pachacuti Yupanqui—by Cardinal Fesch, and quite in accordance with Catholic rites, despite the complaints of the countess.

  Laurence had not held much hope of some event preventing the marriage. The Incan Empress had shown plainly she had as much quick decision in her nature as ever did Bonaparte, and having made her choice to accept his suit, she had already flung all the resources of her own vast Empire behind that course. Her dragons had driven the British out of the Incan Empire the very same day, and she had taken ship for France with Bonaparte not three months later, from the reports which had reached Laurence in Brazil.

  Evidently, Anahuarque had also chosen to anticipate the rites, and thus had Napoleon so quickly gained the heir required to secure the loyalty of the Incan dragons and the future of his dynasty—the only thing which might have been wanting to further spur his relentless ambition. But however much the child’s birth might be deplored, Laurence had not the least desire to engage in gossip about it. Napoleon’s son could as yet do nothing; his army, everything.

  Laurence quitted, without much ceremony, the company gathered around the countess in some impatience, and went seeking Hammond. He had been raised amid political dinners, gatherings of men either in power or soon to be, and his sense of such things was finely tuned: this was nothing of the sort—merely society, not politics, nor even the mingling of the two. There were a handful of aristocrats with some influence, each of them courted by a subtle band of hangers-on seeking personal advantage; a few staff officers and adjutants, none as high as a general. The rest of the company were merely the wealthy or titled or connected to the same, and of not the least significance.

  “Hammond,” Laurence said, having cut him out of his own conversation with an elderly dandy of a baron with a brusque swiftness of which he would have been ashamed under less dire circumstances, “why the devil are we here?”

  He and Temeraire had arrived the previous evening, with Chu and a couple of niru, and joined Shen Shi at the supply depot outside Moscow: enormous granaries piled high with wheat and cured meat, which she had displayed to them with an attitude of deep embarrassment. “I regret that my preparations have been so inadequate,” she said.

  They could not in justice be so called; but they were not, however, what one might have wished for a force of three hundred dragons: the Russians had been recalcitrant in providing assistance. “I am trying,” Hammond said now, with some asperity, “to catch someone’s ear: they will not listen to me; not even our own ambassador,” he added bitterl
y, “the wretched old fool! There are a thousand adventurers all over the city, peddling miracles to anyone that will give them an audience; they have decided I am to be classed with these charlatans.

  “My only hope,” Hammond added, “was that your arrival would bring an end to their doubts—that they could scarcely deny the evidence when you had appeared—but I called at the department of state this morning, and a staff-officer told me that if you would fight, you might go westward down the New Smolensk Road and report for duty to whichever colonel you found first; but if I did not leave, he would lay hands on me and kick me all the way to the door. They have not received any report whatsoever, from the east, of any force of dragons approaching. Where are the rest of the beasts?”

  “That is not a new question, to be asked of the British,” a man said, approaching their corner, and Laurence looked at him startled: an extraordinary intrusion, and the note of rancor as palpable as the thick Prussian accent.

  “I beg your pardon,” Laurence said, grimly, wondering if he was on the point of facing a challenge, a wretched trap between honor and duty; and then there was something familiar about the man, the face. Laurence had a brief, vivid memory of gunpowder smoke in his nose amid a clear and brilliantly blue sky: of a vast army pouring over fields, tricolor flags billowing; a great dragon lapped in heavy scales almost like mail, a bellowing laugh; and he found he did know the man, despite his greying hair and his paunch. “Captain Dyhern, I believe?” he said, slowly.

  They had fought together, briefly, in the disastrous campaign of the year six. Dyhern had been taken prisoner at Jena, he and his dragon Eroica, an impressive Prussian heavy-weight, both of them among the many victims of the revolution in aerial tactics which Lien had brought to Bonaparte’s service.