Blood of Tyrants (Temeraire)

by Naomi Novik

His ministers hastily made efforts to clear the pavilion, ushering out the aides and junior officers; Laurence half wished to leave himself, but there was no easy way to do so, standing as he was with the senior officers.

  “As though,” Alexander said low, “as though Holy Russia were to be bought like a girl, for the price of a few compliments—as though we were to come like the cringing dog to heel, servile beneath him, and allow him to march forward this vile philosophy, this blasphemy, across all Europe—to overthrow all Christianity, and set a—”

  The men who remained were all silent before the tirade, their heads nearly bowed; only one of the diplomats, a Greek nobleman named Kapodistrias, at last ventured to step forward and speak to the Tsar quietly, reminding him the goal had been achieved. “Buonaparte’s vanity and contempt will soon receive their just reward,” he said.

  But Napoleon was not to be deferred so easily for a second day. As though he felt he had paid sufficient lip service to his courting, the next morning he grew swiftly more insistent, and Alexander’s patience was by no means equal to fending off his approaches. They had not yet made noon when Napoleon cut short the diplomatic dance, thrusting aside with a sweep of his arm the carefully wrought speech which Kapodistrias and several of Alexander’s other diplomats had engineered, outlining without commitment the nearly innumerable small points of conflict and how these might perhaps be resolved—a catalogue which, if permitted to continue, might have consumed another day all on their own.

  But Napoleon interrupted with a brusque, “Enough; enough of this,” and leaning forward to Alexander said bluntly, “Come, Your Majesty: these matters are for other men. Oudinot governs in St. Petersburg, and we speak here less than one hundred miles from the great city of the Moskova. Must the very throne of your ancestors fall into the hands of my army before you will cease to listen to warmongers? Shall we not again be friends? Give me only your oath that you will uphold again the Continental System, that you will recognize the Kingdom of Poland, and we will proclaim peace to these brave assembled soldiers. Then let the diplomats argue what they will!”

  “In the sight of the Holy Mother,” Alexander said, springing from his chair, “I will chop the throne into kindling with my own hands before you sit upon it, and for the rest, you may take what you can. But before I give you peace while you stand with an army on my soil, I will grow my beard to my belt and go and eat potatoes with my serfs!”

  The conference was shattered. The diplomats on both parts made small abortive attempts to bring their monarchs back to the table, for their several causes; but Alexander could scarcely make apology now without becoming a liar, and Napoleon, at first only surprised, grew swiftly choleric when he understood Alexander’s intransigence had not been a mere flourishing of temper but an expression of true feeling, and an outright rejection of the most central terms which should have formed naturally the core of any serious negotiation.

  Napoleon’s face colored; he looked as though he would have liked to upbraid the Tsar like a junior officer, and nearly took a step towards him; Berthier put a hand upon his arm, prudently. Still hot with anger and breathing quickly, Napoleon said to Alexander’s back, “When you have thought better of your choice, I will not let this harden my heart against you,” and turning stormed from the pavilion.

  The Russian courier-riders outside the pavilion had of course heard all the proceedings; Laurence saw one young enthusiast, as angry as Alexander himself at the indignity offered the Tsar, jerk deliberately upon the chain of his dragon’s bridle, and jab it with a spur, so the dragon snarling lashed its head forward to pull the rein loose, placing its jaws directly in Napoleon’s path scarce half-afoot from his head. Napoleon jerked back from the gnashing teeth, many of them jagged and broken and stained; two of his aides caught him, else he would have fallen, and the French couriers opposite their Russian counterparts all rose snarling on their haunches.

  For a moment, the battle might have been joined directly, on the field before the pavilion; Laurence put his own hand on his pistol, and saw many another officer do the same. Then Napoleon said, “No,” sharply, and waved his own couriers down; he gave one look to the brazen young officer, who defiantly raised his chin and made no apology, though he had better have hung his head at so nearly breaking the state of truce; and then another harder to the dragon, who had pulled its head in towards its chest, and was mouthing the bit with sullen irritation and a cold look for its own handler. “No,” he said again, more thoughtfully, and turning went to mount up on his own courier, and departed for his lines.

  “More than the heart could bear, Sire,” Kutuzov said to Alexander, out of the silence; they were all of them aware that the hammer of the French Army stood ready to fall upon them. “But the point has not been lost. We have been falling back all this day; they will not catch us to-night or tomorrow. Bagration’s men have been making fortifications at Borodino. We can hold him there—until the dragons arrive.”

  He glanced at Laurence as he spoke, a narrow gleam in his one good eye, which Laurence did not wholly know how to interpret. But he and Temeraire carried the report back to Chu, with a borrowed map to show him the location of the little village: scarcely a pinprick on the outskirts of Klin, a little way off the road to Moscow.

  “Well, it will have to be good enough,” Chu said philosophically, when he was given the news, and dictated new orders to one of the Jade Dragons, instructing half of the first jalan to concentrate and approach at a quicker pace. “I would rather have the entire force at the outset, and in the meantime a frightful number of these men will die, I imagine, but ah well! There are a great many of them, and we can manage for a day,” he added, a little callously.

  “Sir,” Laurence said after a moment, “I must tell you I think the Russians as yet doubt the arrival of our oncoming forces. I fear they may not intend to organize their forces so as to provide that ground support which they have promised.” He spoke half-reluctantly: his duty to bring the Chinese aerial forces to bear warring with his sense of what was owed them.

  “I do not see why they should not support us properly,” Temeraire said; he turned to look at Grig, who had become something of a fixture of their encampment, drawn by the regular helpings of porridge. “Grig, surely they do believe us now, they must know we are telling the truth.”

  “Oh,” Grig said, doubtfully, looking up from his bowl, “I would not know about that. Are you sure that all these dragons are coming? It does seem very strange that there are so many of them, and we still have not seen them on the way.”

  Temeraire flattened his ruff. “Of course I am sure,” he said, “and anyway, Laurence,” he added, “even if they don’t believe us, they may as well prepare: after all, they must give battle somewhere.”

  Tharkay had been sitting beside the dragons, reading; he looked up and raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

  Temeraire paused, doubtfully. “But they cannot simply keep running away,” he said.

  “Why not?” Tharkay said, and Chu gave a snort of laughter; Temeraire put back his ruff.

  “Ha ha,” Chu said, to Temeraire, “young fellows like you are the only reason why not, and probably that Tsar of theirs is clamoring for a fight, too. Well, I see that fat old general is not so stupid after all. If we come, why then, he will win a great battle and the war will be over; and if we don’t, we have given him an excellent excuse to run some more without losing face.”

  “But if we did not come, and he ran, then Napoleon would win the war!” Temeraire protested.

  Chu snorted. “We had to fly over three thousand miles of this country just to get here!” he said. “This Napoleon would have a long way to go to conquer the whole thing, a long and hungry way. No: I begin to think a little better of this Kutuzov fellow, even if these people don’t know anything about dragons.”

  LAURENCE SLEPT ONLY ILL, the night of the seventh September; his head was pillowed on his folded coat, where he stretched on Temeraire’s arm, and he raised it at a dozen sounds, a do
zen noises, all his mind alive to the wide road of possibilities opening before them. In the distance there was the occasional sound of musketry, now and again a faintly heard roar: the Cossacks on their dragons and horses were harrying the French lines.

  The Russians had previously established a small redoubt at the town of Shevardino, a meager fortification of only a few logs piled atop one another, which now Kutuzov meant to use as a lure to dangle before the French—another day’s distraction before the great conflict unfolded, and another day which might allow him to slip away if the dragons did not materialize.

  Laurence slept again, woke again, this time to the sound of resonant dragon voices near-by. He roused to see another of the scarlet dragons, wearing the symbols of a jalan commander, speaking low with Chu and bowing deeply. “No, Shao Ri, it is not to be supposed we might travel without attracting any attention,” Chu said. “You have done all that you could. Establish your camp and bring forward your troops.”

  “As you command, General,” Shao Ri said, and with a final bow went aloft again; Laurence sat up as Temeraire lifted his own head, and Chu looked over at them.

  “So you are awake? It’s just as well,” Chu said, “for we have had some bad luck. A patrol of those French dragons came upon the leading edge of Shao Ri’s jalan, late last night, and three of them escaped. He says,” he added, “they are good fliers: too bad! You had better go and tell Kutuzov. The French will be falling back at once, of course, unless they are very stupid; but if he moves quickly enough there may be a chance to strike him on the road.”

  Temeraire flew very quickly indeed. “It would be the outside of enough,” he said as they went, the air tearing with great violence at Laurence’s hair and the skirts of his coat, “for Napoleon to escape, after all the trouble we have gone to, and when he has come all this way.”

  “We will bring him to battle sooner or late,” Laurence answered, but he felt as much urgency as Temeraire did, and sprang down from his back with jarring haste directly they had landed, to push his way into the camp; he waited impatiently while a cold, reluctant aide went to rouse Kutuzov, and counted every dragging minute as a blow.

  There were many of these: he stood for nearly three hours in the cold, damp morning air, watching others go in and out, all the while the sky lightened; the coming day’s heat was still only a distant promise. At last the tent-flap was raised, and he was admitted; Kutuzov was not yet finished dressing, and sat at the remnants of his breakfast in the company of several Russian officers, nobles all, and most of them to Laurence’s eye useless hangers-on. “Good morning, Captain?” Kutuzov said, very placidly, almost sleepily, but there was a hard note to the words.

  “Sir,” Laurence said, without preamble, “we have been made: the French reconnoitering behind us spied the first jalan on the approach. They will have fallen back at once, certainly, unless we move to engage. It may already be too late.”

  One man, a colonel named Toll, gave a half-snorted laugh, stifled; a few other men of the company smiled with a kind of gentle condescension, as though to say that Laurence’s little joke had been amusing enough, but wasn’t it stale by now? Kutuzov folded his hands together over his belly, leaning back in his chair, and contemplated Laurence with the careful expression of a scholar at a rare specimen, trying to make it out properly. “Hahm,” he said. “I wonder if Napoleon is so easily to be put off the battle he has been seeking for so long.”

  “By all means,” Laurence said grimly, “if his alternative is destruction, and if by doing so he can fall back on better ground, knowing that we will now make ourselves the pursuers, and come to meet him on a position of his choosing.”

  “Be that as it may,” Kutuzov began, in mild noncommittal tones, which Laurence might with pleasure have shaken out of him; already the candles in the tent were growing dim and unnecessary. The sun was up outside.

  The tent-flap was thrust aside, impatiently; a young captain of hussars pushed inside and said, panting and breathless, “Sir, the Cossacks report the French have left their pickets; they are gone—there is a cloud on the road for ten miles, going west. The French are falling back everywhere.”

  Kutuzov paused; the tent was silent. Laurence saw every man of the company staring at him in return, as though they began at last to believe: it was nearly anticlimax when scant moments later a young courier captain stumbled in, pale, and blurted, “There are a thousand dragons coming from the east.”

  The weather was choking-hot and the clouds of dust upon the road, stirred up by many marching feet, rose so high that Temeraire coughed and coughed as he flew; he could make out nothing at all of the French Army, and very little even of their own directly below.

  It was splendid nevertheless to be flying once more at the head of the assembled jalan, and flying now not to some contrived mission but to a real battle, where he and these dragons should fight properly and win a magnificent victory and defeat Napoleon at last. He would like to see what the Ministry should say to Laurence then, Temeraire thought with an intense private sensation of delight.

  Nothing could have been more satisfying than the behavior of the Russians, when at last they had seen the ranks of the jalan. The heavy-weights had been quite abashed into silence, looking overhead as the legions came on, singing their flying-song and the beat of their wings making a great hollow rushing sound like the wind in the tops during a gale. The Russian soldiers had many of them formed, quite without orders, into their defensive squares with bayonets held aloft bristling, until General Kutuzov had sent men around to tell them all that these dragons were their allies, and some old men in very long beards and robes had gone out amongst the troops and made loud speeches.

  “Those are priests,” Dyhern said, “and they are telling them that you are sent by God to smite the enemies of Russia.”

  “Oh,” Temeraire said in strong indignation, “we are not; why should they suppose God had anything to do with it? We are sent by the Emperor. I do not see why God should get the credit of it, at all.” But in spite of his objections on this score, he could not deny being pleased when slowly the soldiers instead began to cheer lustily, and clash their bayonets together in an unmusical sort of welcome. Kutuzov was even so kind as to order a salute fired, from the great guns; although this startled the dragons nearest those guns a great deal and caused a degree of confusion as they recoiled and tangled with the niru nearest them, and it required half-an-hour to quite smooth out the resulting disarray.

  “Of course they had no business not to believe us,” Temeraire said to Laurence, “but I cannot deny they are proving ready to make handsome amends for it, and I do not know it is not more gratifying to have such a change.”

  “I should be more ready to enjoy it,” Laurence said, “if not bought at such a cost: Napoleon will make us pay dearly for this mistake.”

  Napoleon had evidently no sooner received the news of his deadly danger than he had at once leapt into action and flung his men back onto the road—an immense gamble on his part: if Kutuzov had only moved more quickly, the French should have been vulnerable to an attack in their rear. But with the crisis upon him, as so often before, Napoleon had disdained the smaller course and seized the one avenue of obtaining some compensatory advantage, which the choice of ground might give him, against the suddenly altered balance of power between himself and his enemies.

  And he had been rewarded, for the moment of great danger had passed. The bulk of the French Army, falling back west by forced marches, had been already well away before the Russians had roused, and as soon as the sky had grown even a little light, the French dragons had begun their quick hop-scotch portage of men and guns, and sped them even further away.

  Temeraire could not but regret the opportunity lost, but after all, they would win in any case, and in some way it seemed more sporting, that Napoleon should know what force would meet him, and have a chance to do his very best, and then be defeated anyway. “Not, of course,” he said hastily, “that I mean we ought not hav
e taken advantage of the opportunity, or that it would have been unfair; this is war, after all, and I do not mean to be romantical—but as it has been lost, anyway, we may console ourselves that the quality of our victory will be the greater, if no-one can say Napoleon did not have a fair chance to win, that he was only taken by surprise.”

  “When we are in battle with the greatest general of this age, and perhaps of any,” Laurence said, “I will be glad enough for victory of any kind; we can ill afford to sacrifice this chance or any other.”

  Temeraire refused to be so pessimistic: Napoleon was not trying to get away entirely, which would have been maddening; he had only fallen back on a nearby town, Tsarevo Zaimische, and soon the battle would be joined properly—although it seemed, not to-day, but tomorrow. Kutuzov was advancing their army, but they would not be in position properly until late, and then there would not be enough time to engage the enemy.

  Chu growled deeply in his throat. “And where are we to get supply, if we do not defeat him the next day?” he demanded, and summoned Shen Shi to join him and Temeraire in proceeding to Kutuzov’s tent; although at least General Kutuzov came out at once to speak to them now, and listened with attention to their difficulties.

  “We have four days’ adequate supply on hand, and of that we require three to reach our nearest resupply point,” Chu said, his tone glacially polite.

  “Which means, sir,” Laurence said, having translated this, to the perplexed pause which received it, “that the legions should have to quit the field by mid-day tomorrow, regardless of the circumstances of the battle.”

  Kutuzov at once sent for his own quartermasters, and an urgent conference was held. “General, we cannot procure three hundred head of cattle overnight!” one of these worthies protested. “Not unless you mean to starve the entire army for three days to feed them.”

  “What do we want with three hundred head of cattle?” Chu said, with a disparaging snort.