by Naomi Novik
The Russians looked irritated to be questioned on this point. “Does this beast of yours not know how long an egg takes to hatch?” General Tutchkov said to Laurence, impatiently. “How does it suppose we should have got fifty middle-weight beasts under harness since they crossed the Niemen?”
“You might have gone to your breeding grounds,” Temeraire said. “I dare say if you had offered even a little of all that immense treasure to your retired beasts, or your ferals, they would have been delighted to fight for you.” This suggestion met only with stares, and a great comprehensive snort from Kutuzov out of his bulbous nose, which was quite rude; but at any rate, it answered Chu’s remaining concern: the Russians had not thought to do so.
“So, they are not sensible men,” Chu said with finality. “How do they expect to properly oppose a nation whose aerial forces so outweigh their own? They may be victorious in this war, thanks to our assistance, and yet find themselves in the gravest difficulty in the next season once again.
“But,” he added, “that is not my business, but theirs! My business is to win now, and if that is the only reason, and these numbers are correct, I am satisfied with our prospects for battle. But I must yet have four days to concentrate upon the battlefield.”
Kutuzov was silent a moment, when this information was conveyed: the great massed corps of Napoleon’s army were hard upon their rear, and even falling back might not gain them sufficient time along the road to Moscow. “Well,” he said finally, “if we cannot win the time from our enemy, we must ask him if he will be so kind as to give it to us.” And he called over one of his pages, and took up a pen and paper, to write swiftly a letter to the Tsar.
A large tent had been erected upon neutral ground outside Vyazma, a field cleared half-a-mile in either direction and policed watchfully by dragons of both parties: for the French part, Laurence saw, nearly all middle-weights of no breed which he recognized, most of them with large broad foreheads. Deep chests and heavy shoulders were common as well, but their hides were of peculiarly motley appearance, muddied greens and yellows and browns.
He thought grimly that he detected Lien’s hand at work there, though there was no sign of her either at present or reported by the Russian scouts; at least one spy report not three weeks old had positively placed her at the Château de Saint-Cloud, outside Paris, in the company of the new Empress and the infant heir. “I can believe nearly anything of her,” Temeraire said, “but she cannot have let Napoleon go to war without her: I am sure she cannot. I dare say she is hiding somewhere, and will find some way to do something dreadful to us before the end. Not,” he added, “that I will not be entirely ready to meet her, Laurence, of course.”
Gong Su had not disagreed with him openly, but quietly told Laurence afterwards, “It is considered the foremost duty of every Celestial to guard the Emperor’s line, a duty which precedes even the ties of companionship: and Napoleon has now but this one child. I think it likely that Lung Tien Lien has indeed remained in Paris, to protect him and to forward his education,” a stroke of great good fortune for which Laurence could not but be grateful.
But Lien had now had charge of Napoleon’s aerial forces and his breeding programme for a full five years, and the fruits of her labor were everywhere to be observed not only in the looks but in the wide intelligence and education of the French dragons. These were frequently to be seen sitting up high on their haunches and peering into the distance, getting the best look they could at the disposition of the Russian troops, and then putting their heads together to murmur and exchange thoughts. They were all of them under harness, but many of them bore no evident captain, and several of them emblems which might have been symbols of rank.
Indeed one of the dragons, a grey-and-green beast not quite a middle-weight, sat quietly and unobtrusively in the corner of the field, unremarked; but Laurence saw with disquiet that besides a very cursory harness, only enough to take up perhaps a few riders, it bore a wide red sash pinned with a large silver star: a Marshal? Napoleon had granted Lien the baton years before, establishing the precedent; a dragon of sufficient military gifts to have merited another such grant would surely make a deadly opponent.
There were also three heavy-weights beside: a Petit Chevalier and a Chanson-de-Guerre, each holding one corner of the French line, and anchoring the center was a dragon as different from every other beast upon the field as could be imagined: an Incan dragon, with its long lapping scales like feathers gleaming a brilliant sky-blue and tipped with scarlet, looking more like some immense sort of brooding phoenix, wearing a kind of golden headdress and its belly armored in a mesh washed with gold and bearing many decorations: surely an officer in the Incan armies, and if not yet wholly familiar with Western warfare, likely to be an able commander in the air.
But there were enough signs of weakness visible to hearten a Russian ally, too: hard use had worn many a harness-strap and tarnished many a buckle; the men aboard the dragons looked thin, and they were fewer in number than they ought have been, for so many beasts. However skillfully they had stretched their supply, however swiftly they had moved, still their ranks had dwindled during their long march, and Napoleon could not easily get more men to swell them out again. Laurence had taken a short flight aloft with Temeraire, earlier, and spied out a little of the enemy’s artillery: nearly all nine-pounders or lighter, although there were many of them, and the number of cavalry astonishingly small; Bonaparte was relying heavily upon his aerial advantage.
And to this encouragement, Hammond had sent a welcome dash of joyful news: Placet had arrived breathless from Moscow the night before, with Captain Terrance, wide-awake sober for once, spilling off his back; he had seized Laurence by both arms. “Wellington has smashed Marmont, at Salamanca,” he said. “On July the twenty-second. Routed him foot and horse and wing: the French lost thirteen thousand men, and they say Marmont is dead, or at least so gravely wounded we will not see him again in the field this year.”
If that news had yet reached Napoleon, or his men, to discourage them, there was no evidence of it to be found in their soldierly demeanor across the field; but it had been inexpressibly heartening to men facing the might of France. Laurence would have been drunk still this morning if he had swallowed every toast offered him the night before, in Wellington’s health and the King’s.
Chu had under cover of darkness taken himself and the rest of his forces to the back of their lines, out of sight of French spies; he now napped comfortably, too old a campaigner to fear the event and satisfied with his arrangements, while Shen Shi and her staff, even further back, had begun the work of organizing cooking-pits and water, and medical stations; the blue dragons were ferrying supplies from the depot near Moscow. The Jade Dragons had gone already to pass the word amongst the jalan to gather.
Temeraire stood anxiously amongst the dragons on the Russian side of the field: incongruous in his smooth black and clean-lined conformation when lined up with the bristling, armored Russian heavy-weights, whose own suspicious attentions were nearly all devoted to him and to one another, rather than the enemy. The Russian beasts were laden with men, grim officers in thick leather coats, who held thick riveted straps of leather which had been chained on to the rings driven into the heavy plates of horn that grew upon the dragons’ shoulders. Others dangled from grotesque bridles, made of chainmail with spiked steel bits, which Laurence no less than Temeraire could only regard with disgust.
Vosyem was of their number; Temeraire had tried to speak with her, and propose helping her remove it. She had snarled at him around the bit, and fiercely said, “You would like it, that I should be shamed, and refused a chance to do battle and win my share; one less to divide the plunder with, is that it?”
“That is a very quarrelsome beast,” Temeraire said in some irritation, withdrawing, “and if anyone could be said to deserve to wear a muzzle, I suppose she does; but no-one can be said to deserve it, Laurence. What are they about?”
“I cannot tell you.” Laur
ence watched the line of Russian dragons: the snarling, savage twists of head giving them a look of restive cavalry-horses; the crews gripping hard upon the lines with their faces as set as men facing down artillery, as men looking into the maw of death, though they stood upon no battlefield: they were afraid of their own beasts. “I have always heard the Russian aerial corps mentioned as one to fear,” he said, low. “The dragons, it is reputed, will not cease fighting if their captains are taken and cannot be seized by boarding; they have often been seen to fight wholly unmanned.”
He had thought, by that reputation, that they might expect to find some greater degree of enlightenment here in the treatment of dragons, perhaps some influence from the East; instead it was plain the dragons would fight on in such circumstances because they had no affection for their officers, or their crews, at all. They cared nothing for the cause of battle, and only for the reward which might be theirs at its conclusion.
“I cannot deny,” Temeraire said, “that their treasure is magnificent beyond anything; but it is not enough for any sensible dragon to put up with this. No wonder they did not think any of their ferals would fight for them. Laurence, I must say, if only he were not such a tyrant, and always beginning wars, and invading people’s countries—”
“Yes.” It was hard indeed, for anyone who had affection for a dragon, to look upon this field and not feel the keenest sympathy with the French and their emperor’s more enlightened regime, in that regard at least. And yet behind the noble ranks of that army lay a track of near ten thousand miles of wasteland, of death and ruin for man and dragon alike, and if Bonaparte were not stopped, it would march across another ten thousand. There would never be an end to his ambition. “It is time,” Laurence said.
From the northern end of the field, the French dragons had made way for a small company to come out: three courier-weight dragons, bearing the flag of France and the standard of the Imperial Guard; a company of the Imperial Guard on foot watchful behind them, polished and brilliant in their red cloaks. And sitting on the center dragon, a man in a grey coat, with his bicorn hat worn athwart.
“Pray do be careful,” Temeraire said to Laurence. “Even if Lien is not here, I dare say Napoleon will think of something dreadful to do, if only you give him the least chance.”
“Recall that for once, this is our trap, not his,” Laurence said, “and we can only be grateful that he seems to be walking into it.” The grass of the field was yet wet with dew and left streaks upon his Hessian boots as he strode across it towards the gathering Russian party.
Napoleon was altered still further from the last occasion Laurence had seen him, in the Incan capital city of Cusco: older, fatter, and more tired; his voice was thick with a bad cold, and he pressed a handkerchief often to his face, coughing. He showed all the ill-effects of the strain which he had placed upon himself, by flying at such frequency from one part of his army to the next. Standing to greet him, Tsar Alexander was the taller by a head, his face set in stern lines and handsome, though his curling hair drew back a little already from his high brow; young and vital and with an intensity in his looks, romantic in flavor, and a flush on his pale cheeks that stood stark against the high black collar which he wore. The contrast they offered to the eye only increased the impression, looking upon the French Emperor, of fatigue, of a man past the days of his youth, and perhaps his prime.
And yet somehow when Napoleon entered the pavilion he diminished his company, rather than the reverse: a subtle and yet sensible movement traveled around him, a shifting of weight, eyes turning towards him, which made him somehow the center of the stage.
He discarded formality: reached out his arms and embraced the Tsar and kissed him upon both cheeks, though Alexander received the gesture only stiffly, and with a set mouth. “Mon cher,” Napoleon said to him, and keeping a hand upon his arm spoke to him directly of his regret, disregarding quite all other men in the room: all sorrowful familiarity, nearly paternal. “You have desired this war, I think,” he said, “as little as I have. I know the love you have for your people and your country; no less than mine for France, and so dreadfully have both suffered from our disagreements, and to what end? To whose satisfaction?”
He turned and beckoned forward one of his young aides-decamp, who carried a long, thin draped package forward. “I have the honor,” Napoleon said, “to return this to you: a token, if you will take it as such, that we would gladly be not your enemies, trespassers and thieves in your land, but your guests, cherishing your possessions as dearly as those of any well-loved host.”
It was indeed the icon of Smolensk, the frame a little blackened with smoke, carefully laid on a bed of white velvet. “It was saved from the fire by Murat himself,” Napoleon said, “who ran into the cathedral to snatch it from the smoke and amidst the falling timbers: a scene of such destruction I yet am anguished to recall, and had no power to prevent; God forbid another such occasion.”
The threat, standing as they did not a hundred miles from Moscow, could not have been more pointedly delivered nor received, and Alexander, though handling the icon reverently, gave only short thanks; he had it swiftly removed from the tent, when an aide had been sent out to bring a Russian priest to carry it away. “I think you know Mikhail Illarionovich,” the Tsar then said, meaning Marshal Kutuzov, and made punctilious introductions to every other officer of the general staff present, even through the ranks of brigadiers: at once serving to make a greater delay, and to deflect Napoleon’s attentions from himself.
Napoleon addressed Kutuzov with a jovial note, congratulating him on his recent appointment to the command, and a little slyly saying, “It is a long while since we met, you and I, on the field outside Austerlitz,” an unnecessary reminder of that devastating victory, which had first established him as the master of Europe.
He had for nearly every man there a word of recognition, most without any malicious flavor behind them. He knew their battles and their decorations, and when a brigadier general named Tzvilenev was presented to him, he said thoughtfully, “Ah! I hope you will permit me to congratulate you, young man,” and kissing him added, “You have a son. Your wife was in St. Petersburg when it fell to us, for her time came upon her and she could not flee; I am happy to be able to tell you they were both in excellent health, and under the protection of Marshal Oudinot there.”
That poor young man, who had labored under a preoccupied and anxious look which Laurence now could well understand, stood dazed by the intelligence and the low congratulations of his fellows, who looked a little wary at venturing to make them in the present circumstances. But Kutuzov made his own loudly, clapping the young man upon the shoulder, and calling at once for a toast, which necessitated glasses and bottles and camp-tables; so through Russian machinations and Napoleon’s vanity in turn, the introductions alone were so prolonged as to devour nearly two hours of time.
Napoleon paused during the long proceedings, on seeing Laurence standing behind the ranks of the senior officers, and called him forward to be embraced. “My gratitude,” he said solemnly, “does not fail. I have not forgotten what I and perhaps all the world owe to you, Captain Laurence, though I must yet deplore your presence here and the influence of your masters, who sit upon their island fomenting these quarrels amongst nations, and destroying from their fastness the peace and security of Europe. Would that you were now a subject of France! You know well,” he added to Alexander, with a hint of reproach, “how the efforts of England have been bent to divide us from one another, and how I have spent myself and France, to try and remove their power to do so.”
Laurence could hardly receive Napoleon’s sentiments with satisfaction: well might the Emperor regret having failed, in his invasion of Britain; Laurence could only rejoice at it, and the wound which it had inflicted on Napoleon’s dominion. And yet with all the cause in the world to hate the man before him, Laurence could not deny the power of his presence. If there had been any smaller advantage to be won by this conference than a forc
e of three hundred dragons, if they had played for lesser stakes, anything not so sure to bring them victory, he thought this encounter might have been as destructive to the morale of the officers as if Napoleon had brought poison to put into their cups.
Alexander himself was not unaffected; evilly so, while the meeting proceeded through drawn-out paces. Impossible not to see that he felt even now a kind of instinctive yearning towards the conqueror as Napoleon concentrated all his attentions, all his intent focus, towards him, not unlike the direction of batteries of artillery; and yet he was resentful of his own feelings, a resentment silenced but diminished not at all by the necessity of deceit.
He played his rôle thoroughly and well, speaking at length and only of intangibles—of the honor of Russia, of his duty to his patrimony, of philosophy and of religion—so that all the while the conversation was kept carefully inconclusive. Napoleon, it was evident to see, saw himself a seducer; and to oblige him Alexander made himself out a maiden to be courted, and as coy as any skillful courtesan played off his suitor’s ardent attempts to reach a consummation.
He deferred any explicit offers, which should have to be rejected; he made none himself; and yet he conveyed appealingly all the willingness to make peace which Napoleon, at the head of a tired army thousands of miles from their homes, might hope for. His reward was the success of their aim. When the sun began to sink, nothing had been resolved upon, and they agreed to meet again: Napoleon departed, and they had won the first day.
But Alexander afterwards was in a rage of humiliation, so overcome that he sat silently and unmoving, saying not a word, until the word came that Napoleon was well away with all his escort. Then Alexander flung the camp-table with a savage jerk of his hand upwards and over, startled men scattering away before the toppling dishes and the smoking candles, and rose to pace the opened space like a tiger upon a leash.