by Naomi Novik
“I think we must be guided in such matters by Gong Su,” Laurence said hastily, “whose experience of the Imperial court dwarfs our own.”
Temeraire turned to Chu in appeal, but he shook his mane vigorously. “Oh, no,” he said. “You are not going to get me to quarrel with the crown prince’s envoy: I am keeping out of it. You are a Celestial and he is a prince; you can disagree. I am just an old general who wants a quiet life, and to retire to a place in the mountains.”
Temeraire snorted at this. “But how otherwise are we to get in to see Kutuzov?” he said, turning back to Laurence, who was grimly aware he had no answer, other than perhaps bringing Temeraire down over Kutuzov’s pavilion and pulling it up into the air, which should certainly provoke a response of some kind: more likely a cannonball than an invitation, however.
“If I may cut your Gordian knot,” Tharkay said, with a glint in his eye. “Bring down the robes, Roland. You are not going to wear them, Will. You are going to lend them to me.”
“I do not see why anyone other than Laurence should wear them,” Temeraire grumbled, while they unpacked the indeed very thoroughly wrapped garments from their layers and layers of oilcloth and sacking. “They are his robes, and he is the Emperor’s son; it seems to me quite wrong that you should present yourselves in any other manner. Laurence, if you are worried about causing the Emperor any distress, I am sure he should object to your lending out his gift. And is it not in any case quite illegal for Tharkay to wear them?”—half-pleadingly.
“Tharkay can hardly be considered guilty of violating the sumptuary laws of a nation of which he is neither citizen nor servant, and when we are not even within its borders,” Laurence said, “and I will present myself to General Kutuzov, as I am, a British serving-officer, here with our nation’s allies to assist in the war effort; Gong Su will present himself as the Emperor’s envoy. We will not claim any position falsely for Tharkay. Whatever conclusions the Russians might choose to draw, from his looks, and his having borrowed certain garments of mine, will create no obligations of state on either side.”
He spoke to convince himself as much as Temeraire: but his conscience smote him badly for this undeniable piece of sophistry, and still more when Tharkay had been rigged out in the red robes: he did indeed look a very imposing potentate. “You look as wretched as a cat, Will,” Tharkay said. “You need not borrow so much trouble; I dare say we will be run out of camp at bayonet-point before ever we announce ourselves.”
When he ran so dreadful a risk, Laurence could hardly begrudge him the right to extract what black humor might be found in the situation: they were far more likely to be shot, than laughed at, in the prevailing mood of the Russian Army, and Tharkay, in assuming a deceptive rôle, most likely to be held culpable. “Are you certain you wish to go forward with this?” Laurence said to him quietly. “If the Russian command are determined to reject help offered with an open hand, it need not be our concern to deliver it to them in the face of all obstacles which they put before us.”
“And go back to China, with three hundred dragons at our back?” Tharkay said. “No, Laurence; it would be an unconscionable waste, and I find I have committed too much to the enterprise to see it fail now.” He paused, and with less levity added, “You must know, Laurence, that if we cannot stop Napoleon here, likely we can never stop him. If he has time to establish a Kingdom of Poland, and feed it the rest of Prussia little by little; if he can ship over a hundred Incan dragons—” The sentence required no completion; Laurence nodded. With the wealth and power of the Incan Empire merging with his own, and his conquests in Europe secured, Napoleon’s position would grow the more unassailable; his fist would close ever tighter. Russia was the last great counterbalance left in Europe; if it fell, Napoleon would turn all his attention to Spain. And when Spain had been crushed—he would look to Britain once again.
He settled on his own sword, then flanked Tharkay on one hand; Gong Su took the other, with Dyhern, Forthing, and Ferris behind, all of them in the best show they could arrange. They were preceded into the camp by two Jade Dragons: the size of draft-horses and utterly foreign with their lean vulpine heads and dragging wings, bearing suspended between them, on chains slung from their necks, a fence-post on which they had rigged Chu’s banner, framed on either side by lanterns in the Chinese style.
Their procession met with bewildered astonishment as they began it, and collected up a number of strays and camp-followers in their train as they went through the encampment: boys running alongside staring and calling in Russian. One of them, rather daring, darted forward to touch with a finger the wing of Lung Yu Fei, the Jade Dragon nearest the side; she whipped her head on her long narrow neck around and hissed at him for this effrontery. With her jaws of serrated teeth scarce inches from his face, the boy paled and fell backwards in alarm, scuttling away on hands and feet like a beetle while his friends jeered him good-naturedly.
They were very nearly as good as a circus coming up the hill for pageantry, and the very growing noise of their approach removed the necessity of passing some challenge: the inhabitants of Kutuzov’s pavilion came out themselves to see and to stare as they climbed the hill towards them: the field marshal himself a portly and beribboned gentleman in front, white-haired and with a large, high-browed face, the nose and cheeks and jowls bulbous, one eye milky; epaulettes and medals and sash proclaiming his identity. Beside him was a tall lean man with a smooth-pated head: Barclay de Tolly, Laurence thought. Their party came to a halt some several arm’s-lengths away, and the Russian high command regarded them in silent astonishment while not a word was said.
Tharkay carried the event in high aplomb, his face set in the sternest lines as he regarded the assembled Russian company with a searching air, and then said over his shoulder, in Chinese, “I think that will do; you had better be the first to break the silence.”
“Gentlemen,” Laurence said to them in French, “I am Captain William Laurence, of His Royal Majesty’s Aerial Corps. I am here on behalf of our ally, the Emperor of China, in the company of his envoy, and I have the honor to offer you three hundred of the Chinese aerial legions, who can be on the battlefield in four days: if you will use them.”
Temeraire could not help but feel a little dissatisfied the next morning, even though Kutuzov had personally come to see them, accompanied by several of his staff officers: the general inspected them all with an air of suspicion, studying Chu and Temeraire especially with narrowed eyes. He looked over the supply-dragons and the Jade Dragons, and then demanded of Laurence, “The numbers of this force are in these proportions? Two middle-weight to eight light-weight and four of these—”
He gave a wave of his arm up and down, baffled by the Jade Dragons, who regarded him and the Russian officers with doubtful expressions of their own; Lung Yu Li said to Temeraire very quietly, “Surely that man has forgotten to put on all his clothing?” Kutuzov was wearing snug trousers and a waistcoat all of brilliant white, excessively tight upon a figure which was not good and showed to even less advantage as he lowered himself into a field chair put down for him, low to the ground, and stretched forth his legs and reclined back so as to make the mound of his belly protruberant under his folded hands.
“No, sir,” Laurence said to him. “There are only a few more of the couriers, and they are not counted in our numbers; it is three middle-weight fighters to one light-weight for supply.”
“Well, well. You are generous fairies, indeed. All the more so that he has brought almost no heavy-weights, himself,” Kutuzov added, meaning Napoleon. “All right, so where is this Chinese general of yours? As long as I am here, let me talk to him. Why is he hiding?”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Laurence said, “this is General Chu.”
An absurdly long amount of time was required to make Kutuzov believe that Chu was indeed their commander; the Russians looked increasingly disdainful, and several of them began to speak in low voices to Kutuzov, again proposing that the whole force was imagi
nary, until Temeraire, still smarting at middle-weight—he was by no means middle-weight; no-one could possibly have called twenty tons middle weight even if he were not as enormous and lumpen as the Russian beasts—broke in.
“If we were inventing it all, for what reason I cannot imagine,” he said coldly in French, “you would not be any worse off believing us than you are now, with Napoleon chasing you across your own country, and, it is plain to see, giving your dragons a drubbing. If you did have a dragon general yourselves, I dare say he would have put matters into better train.”
With morning, Temeraire had been able to see a little more of the arrangements of the Russian beasts in the rough coverts they had arranged for themselves: they were all outrageously quarrelsome with one another, at least the heavy-weights were. There did not seem to be very many of them, and all had wounds of some sort, some of which had not yet been treated properly: he had seen at least three with swollen bulging places where a pistol-ball had not been extracted, although he remembered quite well his own surgeons Keynes and Dorset saying that it was of great importance to remove them swiftly.
Vosyem and her regiment had been summoned up overnight, and Temeraire had seen the small dragon from her clearing again, laboring under a heavy tun of water which he was bringing her to drink, though she certainly could have more easily carried it herself, or for that matter gone to the pond to drink.
The little dragon had stopped by their own camp: his was the only friendly greeting they had from any of the Russians. “I am glad you have found us after all,” he said, in his small chirping voice, “and that it is all cleared up: so you are here to fight with us?”
“Yes, of course,” Temeraire said, “but pray tell me, whatever are you doing with that water?”
“Oh, I will bring you some, too, I promise—only pray do let me get a little supper, first,” the little dragon said, misunderstanding. He spoke with his head tilted, peering sidelong up at Temeraire as though he expected to be cuffed, and then glanced with even more anxiety over to where several other of the small dragons were now picking over the remnants of the carcass of a large moose which had just been abandoned by one of the heavy-weights.
“I do not need any water,” Temeraire said; the Shen Lung had jointly chosen a campsite near a small stream, which had taken not the work of half-an-hour to divert into forming a convenient pool, “and if you are hungry, you may have some of our breakfast, if you like; we have plenty. Only I have seen you fly back and forth seven times in the last hour past our camp. I beg your pardon,” he added, “if I seem rude for inquiring, but I cannot make any sense out of it.”
“Oh, I am doing whatever Vosyem would like me to do,” the little dragon said, meanwhile turning to stare at the immense pit full of porridge and meat. “Is that really food? But there is so much of it.”
Shen Lung Chi, who could not understand him, nevertheless could read his hungry expression perfectly well, and dished out a large bowl of the porridge; after having devoured this and licked it bare, and refreshed himself at the pool, the small dragon was induced to reveal that his name was Grig, though he seemed half-alarmed even to confess he had one at all. It seemed that the light-weights were meant to answer to the whims of the bigger dragons, and ordinarily fed only on what leavings they could snatch.
“She wanted some water,” Grig said, “and then she wanted me to fly back to camp and be sure that her treasure was under proper guard; but Captain Rozhkov would not give me leave to do that, so I had to go back and tell her so,” he hunched his shoulders as if in the memory of a blow, as he repeated this, “and then she had me carry him a message, and say that if he did not let me go, she would go herself; so then I had to come back and tell her that if she left, he would call off the guard and let all her treasure be stolen—”
“Well, it seems to me a perfectly wretched arrangement,” Temeraire said, “and I do not see how any of you are going to fight properly, when we have any fighting: you will be too tired.”
“Oh,” Grig said, “but I will not be fighting; I am too small to fight.”
“You aren’t smaller than those Cossack dragons, over there,” Temeraire said.
“No; but they are irregulars, and I am too big to join them; they cannot feed a dragon my size,” Grig said. Temeraire looked over at the Cossack camp: it seemed a far more hospitable place, their dragons tucked around the campfire in amongst the people, and if they did not have enormous heaps of treasure at least had neat harness, and most of them wore handsome woven blankets. But it was certainly true they were considerably smaller: the size of Winchesters, courier-weight beasts by British standards.
Certainly the Russian heavy-weights all looked very imposing—no-one could deny it, and Temeraire had observed that, despite their size, they demonstrated a remarkable speed. Their steel-taloned claws and long necks lashed out very much as though, as Forthing put it, there was gunpowder lit behind them. But as they demonstrated their fighting qualities, for the most part, by quarreling with one another and knocking about the smaller beasts, Temeraire nevertheless felt entirely justified in making his criticisms now, although the Russian officers evidently did not enjoy hearing it, and several of them scowled and spoke again to Kutuzov in their own tongue instead of French, with passion; but the general waved his hand and silenced them.
It seemed that the Russian Army had been retreating all this time, ever since Napoleon had crossed the Niemen—all summer long. Their first plan of battle, which to Temeraire sounded quite sensible, had evidently been to give battle at Vilna and then withdraw a little way into their countryside, luring the French to a final battle at a fortified encampment, where the Russians should have had the advantage. Why they had decided instead to only run away, Temeraire could not in the least understand, when they did have a very substantial army; surely it would have been better to at least try and fight, even if it did seem that Napoleon had a much larger army than anyone had expected.
Evidently many of the Russian officers shared his sentiments, and General Barclay had been superseded as the senior commander for having failed to give battle; but it did not seem to Temeraire that Kutuzov was in a great hurry to fight, either: they were still arguing whether the battle should be given here, or at the nearby town of Tsarevo Zaimische, which evidently offered good ground, or somewhere else entirely.
In any case, though they had been running away as hard as they could, Napoleon’s army had nearly caught them a dozen times. He had refined still further the use of dragons in his operations. From what the Russians described, each regiment now traveled with its own beasts, infantry and artillery alike. Men and light-weights foraged, while the heavier dragons leap-frogged companies down the road, and occasionally bore up the guns and heavy loads. Napoleon had eschewed larger magazines; his supply depots were instead numerous and lightly defended, each of them vulnerable perhaps, but as a whole able to withstand even many losses.
“He builds them in the woods, where there are no roads at all,” General Barclay said. “A heavy-weight knocks down a few trees for them and goes on; the middle-weights come, deposit some goods and cattle, assist in building a little fortification, and go on; a few light-weights strike out across the countryside for whatever of substance they can steal, leave it, and go on; then a company remains with a couple of light guns and a few couriers, enough to carry supply forward. If our Cossacks strike, they defend themselves. If we come in force, they snatch whatever they can carry and flee, dispersing to the nearest other depots and reinforcing these, and call for a heavier beast to strike in return.”
The Russians had only evaded Napoleon through good luck and desperate contortions, and because he and his generals had thrown away several chances by arguing with one another. Napoleon’s own brother Jerome had simply run away from his corps on the eve of battle in a temper and gone back to France; or so the Russians said—they had evidently learned of the incident from their spies, and it was repeated with great enjoyment. Then, too, thanks to heavy rains
, the Russian roads had become quite impassable with mud at several points, slowing the French advance and forcing Napoleon’s dragons to carry the guns nearly all the way by air. Temeraire had carried a twelve-pounder himself once, in the retreat from London, and it had been quite exhausting; one could not lug something so heavy and then fight again straightaway, particularly not without a healthy dinner.
It seemed that Napoleon had tried to repair the sluggishness of his advance, as much as he could, by personally flying about to the different parts of his army, when he could, to take command directly; he had been at the battle of Kliastitzy, and smashed the Russian corps there, opening his Marshals’ road to St. Petersburg; and a week later at Smolensk, where by the narrowest of margins the Russian Army had escaped him. And now he was closing in ever more swiftly; he would be on them within a day, perhaps two, and it seemed the Russians had decided at last to fight.
Chu, when Temeraire and Laurence had finished translating the Russian accounts of the campaign so far, hummed deep in his throat, skeptically. “Are they sensible men?” he demanded.
“I know it seems peculiar that they have been running away all this time,” Temeraire began, but Chu snorted.
“Nonsense,” he said. “What is peculiar is that they have been planning to fight an army larger than theirs in every way, with inferior air support. If they did not know we were coming, they had much better have kept running!”
Temeraire was taken aback; Laurence said, “General Chu, Moscow is in some sense the central city of their nation—it is not formally the capital, but the Tsar is crowned here; they cannot let it fall without some resistance.”
“Oh, I see; politics,” Chu said. “Well, at least find out for me why they have organized their aerial forces in such an absurd way, for there must be some reason. I see they do not have any proper system of supply, but they could at least field forty middle-weights, instead of those fifteen hulks and so many of those little fellows.”