Blood of Tyrants (Temeraire)

by Naomi Novik

  A troop of grenadiers marched past in good order, though their uniforms were an unholy mess: coats in a dozen different colors, most of them threadbare and patched, boots cracked and wrapped about with string; only their muskets still shone brightly. Their eyes drifted to the cart as they passed, with an interest more than academic; when they turned the corner, one man even detached himself from the end of the column and came back, and pointing at the bags said, “Qu’est-ce que c’est là?”

  Without answering him, Tharkay silently presented him with a paper which had been prepared for them by one young Russian aide-de-camp, in that alphabet, and embellished with all the official art which his creativity had permitted; the name Louis-Nicholas Davout was the only legible Latin on the sheet. It was a name to conjure with, for Davout’s harshness with indiscipline was legendary, and reports had reached even the Russian camp of the executions he had ordered for pillaging. The soldier thrust the paper back and assumed an officious mien, saying coolly, “Le Maréchal est avec l’Empereur, en la place Rouge,” and pointed them along another street before hurrying to rejoin his vanished troop.

  Tharkay raised an eyebrow to Laurence as he put away the paper: should they take the chance? Laurence hesitated a moment, but nodded. They had intended only a general reconnoiter, to gain a sense of the French strength and the imminence of action—a sense which could not presently be gained, not reliably, from their Russian allies.

  Morale in the Russian Army had rebounded and even swelled as the French showed no inclination to foray past Moscow, and steady reports of the disintegration of their supply reached the Russian camp every day—often at the same time as their own supply-waggons arrived from the south, loaded with shipments of bread and boots and uniforms. Even the rank and file now had gradually come to share Barclay’s view: that Napoleon had indeed overreached, and delivered himself and his Grande Armée into as neat a trap as was ever devised for an enemy. Each day meant the death of another hundred of his cavalry-horses, and three days before he had sent away fifteen of his dragons, traveling together to defend themselves against Cossack harrying: their departure had been observed, and had occasioned great cheer amongst the Russians.

  But even as the soldiers grew more satisfied, their commanders grew less so. The intrigue at the Russian headquarters had risen to a fiery pitch; despite having managed the singularly effective retreat through the city, General Barclay had at last resigned his command entirely, in indignation at the disrespect he had met from both Kutuzov and Bennigsen, and those two men were at logger-heads themselves.

  Kutuzov’s position was an unsettled one: he had been nearly forced on Alexander to begin with, and he had sacrificed Moscow to the enemy. With both Moscow and Petersburg lost, the enemy everywhere west of the Volga and north of Moscow, the Russian nobility had been scattered upon the countryside, many of them cut off from their estates and fearing personal ruin. It was his task not merely to plan the Russian counterattack, when time had done its work, but to keep those nobles and even the Tsar himself placated, and fight off all the loud and urgent cries for an immediate battle.

  He was resorting to a kind of outrageous propaganda: mere skirmishes between his men and Murat’s advance guard were magnified into great victories—even if his forces came back with but a single prisoner and having lost several men themselves—and he exaggerated even the already-heartening reports of the French decline, filling his dispatches with such numbers as would have shortly ended with Napoleon sitting in Moscow alone but for a single mule and a barrel of beer.

  And he was concerned, above all, with ensuring that the Chinese legions remained with the army. If Napoleon were to once again have the advantage in the air, the French position would by no means be so desperate as it was. They had great magazines of their own at Smolensk, and elsewhere through the south. If they did not need to fear being pounced upon by half-a-dozen niru, Napoleon’s dragons might have been put to supply work, or even to swiftly relocate his army to Smolensk, there to winter and regroup for a fresh campaign in the spring.

  Laurence did not wish to abandon Kutuzov in the least, but neither could he feel it at all consistent with the duty he owed the Emperor of China, to strand his borrowed legions in the midst of Russia with inadequate supply during the oncoming winter. October had so far been beautiful, warm and mild; but in the last two days the trees had with startling speed begun to shed their leaves. The Russian countryside was taking on a grey and gloomy character, unrelieved by the enormously tall pine trees looming with their cold dark needles, the increasingly barren birches rattling in the wind.

  With the full cooperation of the Russians, Shen Shi had now established depots to the east and west both, which she estimated could carry the legions at their full strength for a month. But there was no reason to expect that Kutuzov would have struck even then: the old general was perfectly willing to permit Napoleon to sit in Moscow as long as he wished. And once they had begun the counterattack, the road back to the Niemen was a long one.

  “How much longer will we be required?” Zhao Lien had asked Laurence bluntly, two days before. He could not tell her, and he felt too strongly that he could not trust whatever answer Kutuzov might make him.

  “Bonaparte is our best hope, for the campaign to begin,” he had said ruefully to Temeraire that evening. “If he has any sense, he must try and fight his way back to Smolensk sooner than late, and westward on from there swiftly. He cannot long suppose that the Russians will make peace with him now.”

  Such a peace would have allowed Napoleon to withdraw without humiliation, surely all that he could now hope for; but that peace was as surely to be denied him. Alexander, with his government-in-exile in Tula, was intensely, savagely delighted by the growing evidence of French discomfiture: he had already written out many long ambitious schemes to Kutuzov and his other generals for retaking Moscow, for the pursuit and destruction of the remnant of the French Army, and indeed even the capture of Napoleon himself.

  Kutuzov received these directives placidly, and stayed just where he was. He had done his best to assist Napoleon in deceiving himself about the prospects of peace: he had received a French envoy affably, and agreed to a temporary armistice, but the false negotiations of Vyazma had done much to close that door. Alexander refused to receive such an envoy himself, or to write so much as a note, feeling that he had already stretched his own honor to bear as much as he could. Napoleon’s pride alone could keep him in Moscow—but of that, he had an ample supply. When desperation and the growing certainty of disaster would overcome it, was nearly impossible to tell.

  “We could hope for no better opportunity to learn his mind,” Laurence said softly to Tharkay now, in the ruined street; together they dragged the cart onto the main street leading towards the Kremlin.

  Here the devastation altered in character: the buildings had been more preserved than not, evidently by the labors of the French dragons; great puddles of dirty water yet stood in the gutters. Yet they had still been looted: scraps of silk and shattered porcelain might be seen on the steps, broken furnishings. How the French supposed they should carry away such an immense store of plunder, Laurence could hardly imagine.

  The street itself was better tended; looking west towards the bounds of the city, Laurence could see a troop of dragons laboring to clear away the rubble and men behind them repairing the worst of the damage to the cobblestones: perhaps making ready the road for retreat? He and Tharkay went plodding on with their heads down into the vast square around the onion-domed cathedral which, though blackened with smoke, had also been saved: Laurence saw in some disgust that the building was evidently being used for a stable.

  The remains of many smaller wooden buildings still lingered at its base, and resting against the high walls of the Kremlin some forty dragons were drowsing together in heaps, while their crews silently prodded at large cauldrons simmering with their poor thin dinner: they were eating dead horses mostly half-starved or sick, stewed with flour. The dragons loo
ked too weary to be called indolent, slumped in the heavy attitudes of exhaustion.

  One more-alert beast stood before the cathedral, beside the great city fountain, while some few peasant women, cringing, took their buckets of water before hurrying away: a heavy-weight Papillon Noir in black with iridescent stripes. “That is Liberté,” he murmured to Tharkay. He had seen the beast once before, during the invasion of England: he was the personal beast of Marshal Murat, and beside it stood the man himself.

  The pair were standing beside one of the Russian light-weights, white-grey. Laurence thought for a moment it might be a prisoner, but as he and Tharkay drew their cart a little closer, he saw the poor beast had no harness and was nearly skeletal in appearance, deep concavities between its ribs. It had a bowl of thin soup, which it was licking up with slow, painstaking care, one foreleg curled around the bowl and a wary watchful hostile eye turned up towards Liberté. Its wings were drawn up tight to its body, as though it might at any moment flee.

  Murat was evidently waiting to see the Emperor, and following the line of his gaze Laurence saw him: Napoleon was near the Kremlin gates, in his dust-grey coat and flanked by the still-glittering ranks of his escort, the Imperial Guard. Davout was a tall thin figure beside him, and his chief of staff Berthier as well.

  A French officer then approached the cart, and they were forced to stop: Laurence engaged the man before he could notice Tharkay’s foreign looks, pulling back the cover to show him the ten sacks of grain, pantomiming numbers with his hands to indicate many more than these were on offer. “Cinq cent?” the Frenchman asked. Laurence nodded, and then held out a hand flat and tapped his palm, asking for an offer; the officer said, “Attends,” and went away to confer with another.

  Napoleon looked himself as heavy and morose as the dragons of his army; he seemed to only be giving half his attention to an anxious speech which Berthier was making him, full of gestures and intensity; the Emperor glanced away often at the somnolent dragons, at the few companies of soldiers equally dispirited and yawning against the walls. He knew, of course; surely he knew the hopelessness of his position. He was not a fool. He had his hands clasped behind his back, his chin lowered upon his breast; Berthier gestured, down the square, and following his arm, Laurence saw a nearly medieval train of waggon-carts, already loaded and with their covers lashed down.

  Bonaparte stood a moment more, and then gave a short nod; Berthier, after a speaking look of relief exchanged with Davout, hurried away back into the Kremlin. Davout seemed as though he wished to say something; Napoleon jerking a hand forestalled him and turned abruptly away, his face hard, and strode out across the square towards Murat, who rose to meet him.

  The French quartermasters were still discussing amongst themselves. Laurence looked at Tharkay and, receiving a nod, hazarded the risk. He strode across the square towards the city fountain, as though to have a drink of water, where he could overhear a little.

  Napoleon had put his hand on Liberté’s side, patting the dragon with easy familiarity as he spoke with Murat; the beast nosed at him with pleasure. “Well, brother,” he was saying, with a ghost of a smile, “the last die is thrown, we must stand up from the table! We will have to fight our way back to France, and no rest after that.”

  “What else is a soldier for?” Murat said, with a wave of his arm: more generosity than Bonaparte deserved, having pressed them all on towards destruction. “We’ll sleep a long time in the end. Will you want us to give them a bite on the flank before we draw back?”

  Fortune did not smile on Laurence’s adventure to so great an extent as to permit him to overhear such invaluable intelligence; Bonaparte only raised his hand a little and wagged it to either side, noncommittal, and jerked his head towards the small Russian dragon, asking Liberté in a deliberate tone of levity, “What is this, your prisoner? A fine battle you must have had!”

  “I have not fought her at all,” Liberté said, in some indignation, “even though she tried to steal one of our pigs, when we camped near the breeding grounds; and I carried her here myself.”

  “I couldn’t stomach leaving her to starve, poor beast,” Murat said to Napoleon, “and it’s not as though she could do us any real harm. I’ve sent for one of the surgeons. Look at what they do to them.”

  The surgeon, a man in a long black frock coat carrying the grim instruments of his trade, still stained with the blood of some recent patient, came past the fountain even as he spoke; Laurence averted his face, quickly, until the man had gone around him. The dragon hissed at the surgeon and snapped as he approached, only to subside when Liberté put his foreleg on her neck and pinned it to the ground. The man climbed carefully upon her back, between the wings.

  Laurence could not see, at first, what the surgeon was doing there; the dragon bellowed in pain and tried to thrash, but Liberté held her fast. A few minutes passed, perhaps three, and then the man flung down over the dragon’s side a chain, dripping black blood, with two large barbed hooks on either end still marked with gobbets of flesh: a hobble, simpler but not unlike the one which had held Arkady, when they had found him held prisoner in China. The dragon made a low keening noise, shivering still, but her wings gave a small abortive flutter, as if suddenly freed.

  Napoleon made an exclamation of disgust, looking down at the hobble. “And she was not the only one?”

  “All of them, in the breeding grounds,” Murat said. “And they look as though they do not get enough food to keep alive a cat; I wonder they get any eggs out of them at all.”

  Temeraire could not but fret anxiously at Laurence’s absence, though he had for comfort a splendid dispatch newly arrived from Peking, in which Huang Li had not only reported the egg’s continuing perfect condition, but even, to Temeraire’s delight, enclosed a small illustration of the pavilion in which the egg was housed, at the Summer Palace, showing it attended by four ladies-in-waiting and four Imperial dragons, and being fanned by servants against the late summer’s heat.

  “Of course I must keep the original,” Temeraire said to Emily, “but perhaps we might make a copy of it, for Iskierka. Surely one of those aides could knock something up?” He was dictating her a letter to pass along the comforting reassurances he had received, and trying as best he could to describe their own success, giving it better terms than he really felt it deserved. “Do you suppose they have reached the Peninsula by now?” he asked wistfully. It was very hard to think that Iskierka might at this very moment already be with the Corps in Spain, which was evidently winning one brilliant battle after another, and he could report nothing for his own part but one battle, from which they had retreated.

  “I don’t think so,” Emily said, with sufficient promptness to suggest that she had thought about the subject before. “They left China in July, just as we did. They might have gone by air from Persia, if they stopped there, and have just been able to reach Gibraltar. But if they have gone round Africa, they cannot be in Spain before Christmas.”

  Temeraire did not say, but felt, that this was a small relief: perhaps they would have had another battle before Iskierka did finally have a chance for one of her own. But Emily herself sighed and said, “So it isn’t surprising, that we shouldn’t have had word from them yet,” and looked down at the letter she was writing with a discontented expression, fidgeting with her quill in such a way as to scatter ink across the page.

  While she was blotting up the spots, Temeraire said a little anxiously, “I hope you are not changing your mind—I hope you have not thought better of refusing Demane. I am sure that marriage cannot be so wonderful.”

  “No,” she said, downcast. “No, at least, not marriage; but—I suppose I am sorry, a little; I wish I’d had him, while I had the chance.”

  “Emily,” Mrs. Pemberton said, raising her head from where she sat near-by, working on her sewing. “I must beg you not to say such things.”

  “Oh, I know it isn’t my duty; and it should have been a monstrously stupid thing to do,” Emily said, “and
so I didn’t. But I shan’t see him for years now, I suppose; if we ever serve together again at all.” She sighed. “And one gets curious,” she added.

  “I ought to be turned off without a character,” Mrs. Pemberton said to herself, half under her breath, and then to Emily said, “Even if you must think such things, you needn’t say them, at least not where anyone might hear you. The last thing a young gentleman requires is any encouragement in that direction.”

  Temeraire was entirely of like mind with her. He had considered briefly whether perhaps it might be just as well to have Emily marry one of the officers of his own crew, but after some cautious inquiries about the etiquette of the matter, he had determined that this could not really serve to keep her with him when Admiral Roland decided to retire, and it was perfectly likely that she would instead take her own husband away to Excidium with her: so it was not at all to be wished under any circumstances.

  He raised his head, alertly, catching some movement through the encampment: Laurence and Tharkay had come back, he saw with much relief, although Laurence’s expression was dreadfully grim, and as he came near, already stripping away his peasant cloak, Temeraire asked anxiously, “Napoleon will not retreat?”

  Laurence did not answer at once, only shook his head to say he could not immediately answer, and went into the pavilion, and into his tent; Temeraire in surprise went after him and lowered his head anxiously to peer inside: Laurence was putting on his uniform again, his movements short and sharp, angry. He said to Temeraire briefly, savagely, “They are chaining their dragons in the breeding grounds; they are keeping them hobbled.”

  Temeraire did not understand, at first, until Laurence had explained; and then he scarcely could believe it, until he had found Grig again and demanded a confirmation. “Well—well, yes,” Grig said, edging back and looking at him sidelong with some anxiety at Temeraire’s anger, though it was not directed at him. “If one won’t go into harness, they don’t let one fly. Whyever would anyone stay in the breeding grounds, otherwise?”