Blood of Tyrants (Temeraire)

by Naomi Novik

  “We had better go away at once,” Dyhern said to Laurence, low, in French. “The beast will pay no mind to us: why should she? We are not her captain, nor her officers; you will do your cause no good if you provoke a quarrel.”

  “Sir,” Laurence said, “dragons cannot be blamed for not speaking to us, if we do not address ourselves to them. Pray translate for Temeraire, if you can, and let us make the attempt; we will certainly not engage. If she attacks, we must withdraw at once, Temeraire, without offering a blow in return.”

  Temeraire did not at all like the notion that if she should strike him, he should be obligated to run away; she would think him a terrific coward, and all those other dragons who were watching as well. “I do not see any reason she should attack me,” Temeraire said. “I have done nothing to her, and I do not mean to; nothing at all.”

  Dyhern spoke to the dragon in Russian; Temeraire pricked his ears forward to listen to it: quite different from any tongue he had ever learned. But the enormous dragon did not pay him any attention, nor even look at him: instead she bared her teeth at Temeraire and hissed again, taking a step towards him that required no translation at all. He swelled up his chest, his ruff flaring: “I am not to be hissed at, if you please,” he said coldly in French, “as I am perfectly able to manage you, if you do want to be quarrelsome.”

  “Temeraire—” Laurence began, but one of the small dragons, who had ducked behind the great one, put out his narrow white head, arrow-shaped, and said something timidly in a queerly accented French, “What do you want, please, if you are not here to fight?”

  “Oh, you speak French, do you?” Temeraire said. “Well, we are here to find out where the French Army is: Napoleon, I mean. We are your allies,” he added, “and might have expected a more polite welcome than this, I must say; I do not know what you are about, when someone cannot even land to pay a visit, without being hissed at and treated like a thief. And you may tell her so, anytime you like.” There was a great deal of righteous satisfaction in making this speech, which a little consoled Temeraire for not being able to fight.

  The little dragon turned and spoke to the larger in a tongue that was very much like Durzagh, the dragon language which Arkady and his ferals spoke, in the Pamirs. Temeraire could follow it better than not, and understood quite plainly when the large dragon snorted and said, “That is nonsense. Tell him to go away at once, or I will crush him, and take that breastplate of his for myself.”

  Temeraire flattened his ruff and snapped, “I should like to see you try—” But Laurence’s hand upon his neck reminded him, so with a great effort he straightened his neck and with chilly condescension went on. “—but we are not here to pick a quarrel: so if you do want me to go away, you need merely answer my question, and we shall leave; I do not in the least wish to remain in the company of a dragon whose wealth is by no means sufficient to excuse her poor manners.”

  “And why would you ask me such a question?” the dragon said coldly.

  “Well, I do not mean you must know where the French Army is, I suppose,” Temeraire said, “but you can tell me where the Russian Army is, and that will be where the French are, soon enough; so that will do.”

  “What Russian Army?” the enormous dragon said. “What is this to me?”

  Temeraire drew back his head upon his neck, in some confusion. “Laurence,” he said, turning his head, speaking in French, “and Captain Dyhern, is there perhaps some mistake? This dragon is not in the army, at all.”

  “Of course she is,” Dyhern said. “There is her regiment number, upon her shoulder,” and indeed, Temeraire saw where he pointed to a large 26 painted in bright red that stood out upon one of the armor plates, and beside it the number 8.

  “The captain is in a regiment,” the little dragon interjected, a little uncertainly, “—I believe? I have heard him speak of the regiment.”

  The enormous dragon shrugged when this had been relayed to her, and said without moving her suspicious eye from Temeraire, “So this is some human matter. I do not care about that. If you want an army, you had better go find some humans and talk to them; and while you do it, you may go far away from me and my treasure.”

  She reached out her foreleg and jealously scraped a few spilled coins back into her heap: her talons were sheathed in bright caps of polished steel, which had been nailed on; she certainly looked as though she were a fighting-dragon. But Temeraire felt quite at an impasse: how could she not know if she were in the army, and not care about it in the least? Before he could ask her anything further, however, a man appeared in an officer’s uniform: out of breath and red in the face, with several other younger officers running behind him, and shouted up at Laurence in French, “Who the devil are you? How dare you come stir up my beasts?”

  “Sir—” Laurence said, and slid down from Temeraire’s back, to go and speak with the gentleman, who coldly deigned to give his name: Captain Ivan Rozhkov, of the Twenty-Sixth Regiment of the Air. He had a luxuriant mustache and beard, brown shot through a very little with silver, and a narrow face fixed presently in anger; he held in one hand a peculiar sort of short whip, with a heavy silver handle. The little white dragon had sidled over towards him, and was murmuring quietly to him; but he waved the dragon off. “As far as I am concerned,” Rozhkov said, “you are a pack of spies: you will go, or I will set Vosyem upon you.”

  “If you mean that dragon there,” Temeraire said, interjecting, “I have fought bigger dragons than her, without the least difficulty,” although privately he did admit to himself that she would present a notable challenge: the armor might, he feared, stand up to the divine wind; and those spikes and her tipped claws would certainly be quite nasty at close quarters. “So you needn’t be threatening. We are only asking so we can go and fight alongside you, after all.”

  Rozhkov only looked up at him halfway through this conversation, and then snorted and said to Laurence, “You English, you make your dragons into house-pets and parrots: keep your three hundred fairy tales, and take this trained dog of yours away to them, also! There are ten fighting-beasts in this covert all her size; I will rouse them all up if you are not on your way at once.”

  Temeraire reared up on his hind legs, to take a quick look around, and indeed he saw two more of the hollows in sight, and then he realized that in each of them a gleam might be spied out, through the treees—ten dragons! Ten dragons, all of them with so much treasure, it nearly could not be borne. “Oh,” Temeraire said, longingly. “Oh; but how can they all be so rich?”

  “If you think you will be pillaging here, you are very wrong,” Rozhkov snapped to Laurence.

  “That is enough,” Laurence said shortly. “More than enough, sir; I am sorry to have distressed your beast, and to have disturbed your morning. I hope to God you will have no greater cause to regret the occasion. Temeraire, we will be on our way; there is nothing to be gained here. We must rely on Hammond to procure the intelligence for us.”

  “Certainly,” Temeraire said, as haughtily as he could manage, dragging his eyes away; he reached out to put Laurence up. “It seems very peculiar to me, to find dragons so perfectly uninformed about the war they ought to be fighting in; but as their officers do not seem to be much better, one cannot blame them, I suppose.”

  He paused, with Laurence in his talons, and raised up on his haunches again: a heavy clanging bell had begun to ring, not far away, and cries were going up across the covert. Vosyem had lifted her own head in fresh suspicion. In the distance, approaching swiftly, a knot of five dragons were flying, unsteadily and on a wavering course. One was a beast on Vosyem’s scale, enormous and armor-plated; the others were smaller, in motley colors, trying to support him as they went. He left a thin spattering trail of blood behind him.

  Temeraire swung Laurence to his back and sprang aloft, even as Rozhkov shouted some commands, cracking the whip, and the small white and grey dragons all went up together alongside him. “Why is Vosyem not helping?” Temeraire demanded of the little
one who spoke French, as they flew up. It would have been a great deal handier to have a beast or two that size, when there was one so large to manage landing; the poor fellow did not look as though he could come down properly on his own.

  “But what if one of the others took her treasure?” the little dragon said, looking at Temeraire dubiously. “There are no guards posted, and it has not been locked up properly.”

  While that argument could be said to have a great deal of sense, it was also distinctly selfish, in Temeraire’s opinion. At least there were a great many of the smaller dragons, and together they caught the huge beast from beneath and managed to get him landed safely in a vacant clearing. His head hung forward listlessly, and he seemed as though he only wished to lie down. But an officer aboard his back cracked his whip, and he continued to hold himself up while a rope ladder was flung down, and men scrambled off: he was carrying a crew of nearly thirty, and many of them officers.

  They were met by the officers of the covert, running to help; several men in bandages stained badly with blood, some being let down from the belly-netting strapped down to flat cots; they were all carried away. A man in a captain’s uniform staggered off, took a rag from a colleague and mopped his bloody brow, said in French, “Give me a drink, for the love of the Holy Mother,” and took a cup from another and drank it down. He wiped his mouth and said, “I must get back aloft and to the city. Rozhkov, will you get Tri settled and get that belly-wound stitched up? By God! I didn’t think we would make it in the end, even though I swore to General Tutchkov we would manage.”

  He took another gulp; his crew were already busily re-harnessing one of the smaller dragons, a white creature stippled with spots of grey and black, for him to ride, while dragon-surgeons scrambled for the beast. “For God’s sake, Vasya,” cried a younger officer, “don’t keep us all holding our breath: what has happened? Has there been fighting?”

  “Fighting!” the captain laughed, a harsh noise, hoarse. “If you want to call it that. We have been run out of Smolensk. We are falling back on Valutino, and if not there on Usvyatye, and if not there, on Tsarevo Zaimische—and if not there, God help the Tsar!”

  HALF-A-DAY’S FLIGHT, AND A pillar of smoke rising in the distance: another Russian town burning. As Temeraire beat towards it, Laurence saw the Russian Army straggling by, the small dragons flying past scarcely to be made out beneath the infantry soldiers clinging all over their bodies, being borne back with the retreat more swiftly than their feet could carry them. Officers were astride at the neck or in some cases being dangled beneath from a sort of swinging chair.

  “Too much for their weight,” Chu said, observing the flocks of smaller beasts, “although they are performing well, but infantry-dragons ought to be one hundred and fifty picul,” this measure being roughly on the order of nine tons; the white dragons were not more than six or seven, to Laurence’s eye: barely light-weights. In the far distance, he could see a melee of courier-weight dragons skirmishing: Cossack troops, he supposed, tangling with the French scouts; the pursuit was not far behind. It was the thirtieth of August.

  The army was in disarray; beneath them, Laurence saw the men marching in long columns, bedraggled, dusty; heads bowed with exhaustion, sullen. Endless numbers of men; Chu himself fell increasingly silent and astonished by the numbers, the further they flew; when they had come to rest upon a hill, near a trickling spring, he shook his head and said, “The ant can devour a mountain,” and then plunged his head deep to drink.

  Temeraire continued futilely to search for the high command; there was nothing which might have been called a headquarters visible to the eye. They flew over an artillery company rattling sluggish upon the road; Dyhern caught sight of Prussian soldiers and clambered down from Temeraire’s neck, and went to speak with them. He returned to say, “Barclay de Tolly has been replaced: it is General Kutuzov, now, and they say he is in Elnya, to the south.”

  Kutuzov was not in Elnya; but much of the army had concentrated north of the town, and spilled into its limits. Laurence and Dyhern and Tharkay went into the streets together, to try and find some senior officer. A deep smoldering atmosphere emanated from the soldiers and officers alike, somewhere between misery and wrath; the burning of Smolensk was on every tongue, a collective mourning, and Laurence heard Kutuzov’s name repeated every few steps with more desperation than hope. They at last found a ferociously busy colonel engaged in directing the fortification of the northern approach to the town. “General Kutuzov is in Vyazma,” he said: another fifty miles, back the way they had come.

  “I begin to see,” Chu said in dry irritation, “why you use such heavy couriers; they must carry enough men to hunt down the one you are looking for, who may be under a table, or in a basket.” The Jade Dragons might have flown the distances trivially, at much less cost to their joint energies, but speaking neither Russian nor French could not themselves communicate, even if Russian officers would have deigned to speak with them; they could serve only as couriers among Chu’s own forces.

  Temeraire and Chu reached the town as night was falling, weary. Two of Shen Shi’s supply-dragons had accompanied them, carrying sacks of wheat and a dazed pig, for which they had ample cause to be grateful: the few Russian dragons they saw, their encampments merely crushed fields, were snarling and hissing at one another with belligerence over a scanty supply of dead cavalry-horses. They made their own camp upon a low hill not yet tenanted by any other company, and the supply-dragons dug a cooking-pit. “If you will come with me,” Laurence said to Dyhern, “we will try again: I suppose when we have looked in every town between Smolensk and Moscow, we will find him eventually.”

  He scarcely hoped for success, but they made Kutuzov at last, his pavilion planted atop a low rise among three companies of artillery, with two courier-dragons, red, drowsing beside it and a great flag waving brilliant white and red. But the way was still barred. Dyhern attempted to persuade the guards to let them through the perimeter without success; Laurence’s French gained them no better result.

  “Well,” Chu said, when they had returned to report their failure, “this general can talk to me, and we can settle upon our ground, and I can summon the three jalan to assemble there in four days. If he does not want to talk to me, I can call together ten niru, here, and let them feed themselves off the countryside for three days. And if he does not talk to me then, we will turn around and go home, and I will apologize to the Emperor. I will not spend my soldiers for fools, nor expose them to those guns for no purpose.”

  He said this last very flatly: to have failed his orders so thoroughly would certainly condemn him to disgrace and exile from the Imperial court, even if the fault had been none of his own. But Laurence found he could not argue the decision. He had recalled too clearly, as Chu spoke, the dreadful slaughter of the French dragons at Shoeburyness: the smell of sulfur and fresh loam overturned, the rain of dirt flung high into the air as the British guns brought down the Grand Chevalier. He could scarcely fault Chu for not wishing to hazard his soldiers to such a fate without some assurance of support and the achieving of some desirable end.

  “Laurence,” Tharkay said abruptly, “do you have those particularly magnificent robes with you somewhere?”

  “Oh! Oh, yes! That is a splendid notion,” Temeraire said, lifting his head with as much eagerness as might be needed to supply the want of Laurence’s own. “Of course they will not turn you away, Laurence, when they see you properly dressed. And I have the robes with me; at least, I ought to: Roland, you have made them quite safe, I suppose?”

  “Yes, of course; they are wrapped in oilcloth and in the batting chest,” Roland said, before Laurence could begin to protest. “Shall I fetch them out?”

  “At once, if you please,” Temeraire said, while Laurence drew breath. However desperate the circumstances, all feeling revolted at the notion he should trick himself out in the panoply of the Imperial court and use it to present himself as a prince of China—and not merely in that court,
where all involved knew and perfectly understood the polite and fictional nature of his status, but brazenly to the government of a foreign state, to none other than the commander-in-chief of the Russian Army, appointed by the Tsar himself.

  “Besides which, you can scarcely expect the Russians to believe me a prince of China on sight,” Laurence said, “and they are not likely to listen or accept so fantastic a story as my adoption must seem, on first blush.” But Temeraire was inclined to be mulish; Temeraire did not see any reason why anyone should doubt Laurence’s claims.

  “I beg that you will forgive my presuming to raise a small difficulty, Lung Tien Xiang,” Gong Su said, coming quite unexpectedly to the rescue, “but there can be no question of His Imperial Highness presenting himself in such a manner.”

  Temeraire paused, his ruff flattening, but undeterred Gong Su added gently, “I am sure that if not for the urgency of our situation, and the small amount of time your duties have permitted you to enjoy at the Imperial court, you would recall that the honor of a formal Imperial visit cannot be lightly bestowed, and requires most careful arrangements. The foreign officials should have to be instructed in correct protocol,” meaning of course they should have to agree to prostrate themselves before Laurence, an event unlikely in the extreme, “and appropriate gifts should have to be presented on the Emperor’s behalf and offered in return. Of course such a remarkable mission cannot be sent forward without the Emperor’s will.”

  “Certainly not,” Laurence said, with deep relief. “Temeraire, you would not in the least ask me to do such a thing.”

  “But when the war depends upon it,” Temeraire said, “I am sure the Emperor would understand if one were to make an exception—and all to carry out his orders,” he added quickly, with the air of one seizing upon an excellent argument.