Empire of Ivory

by Naomi Novik

  The ferals put their heads together and muttered and hissed and whistled amongst themselves, in a cacophony made private only by the obscurity of their language, and finally Arkady turned back and professed himself willing to settle on the trade agreement, except that he insisted goats should be three to a cow, they having some contempt for that animal, more easily obtained in their former homeland and likely there to be scrawny.

  Jane bowed to him to seal the arrangement, and he bobbed his head back, his expression deeply satisfied, and rendered all the more piratical by the red splash of mongrel color which covered one of his eyes and spilled down his neck. “They are a gang of ruffians and make no mistake,” Jane said, as she led them back towards her offices, “but I have no doubt of their flying, at any rate: with that sort of wiry muscle they will go in circles around anything in their weight-class, or over it, and I am happy to stuff their bellies for them.”

  “NO, SIR; THERE’LL be no trouble,” the steward of the headquarters said, rather low, of finding rooms for Laurence and his officers; even arriving as they had out of nowhere and without notice. Most of the captains and officers were encamped out in the quarantine-grounds with their sick dragons, despite the cold and wet, and the building was queerly deserted: hushed and silent, as it had not been even at the low-ebb of the days before Trafalgar, when nearly all the formations had gone south to help bring down the French and Spanish fleets.

  They all drank Granby’s health together, but the party broke up early, and Laurence was not disposed to linger afterwards: a few wretched lieutenants sitting together at a dark table in the corner, not talking; an older captain snoring with his head tipped against the side of his armchair, a bottle of brandy empty by his elbow. Laurence took his dinner alone in his rooms, near the fire; the air was chill, from the rooms to either side being vacant.

  He opened the door at a faint tapping, expecting perhaps Jane, or one of his men with some word from Temeraire, and was startled to find instead Tharkay. “Pray come in,” Laurence said, and belatedly added, “I hope you will forgive my state.” The room was yet disordered, and he had borrowed a dressing-gown from a colleague’s neglected wardrobe; it was considerably too large around the waist, and badly crumpled.

  “I am come to say good-bye,” Tharkay said, and shook his head, when Laurence had made an awkward inquiry. “No, I have nothing to complain of; but I am not of your company. I do not care to stay only to be a translator; it is a rôle which must soon pall.”

  “I would be happy to speak to Admiral Roland—perhaps a commission—” Laurence said, trailing away; he did not know what might be done, or how such matters were arranged in the Corps, except to imagine them a good deal less formally prescribed than in the Army, or the Navy, but he did not wish to promise what might be wholly infeasible.

  “I have already spoken to her,” Tharkay said, “and have been given one, if not the sort you mean; I will go back to Turkestan and bring back more ferals, if any can be persuaded into your service on similar terms.”

  Laurence would have been a good deal happier to have the ferals already in their service remotely manageable; a quality they were not more likely to gain, after Tharkay’s departure. But he could not object; it was hard to imagine Tharkay’s pride should allow him to remain as a supernumerary, even if restlessness alone did not drive him on. “I will pray for your safe return,” Laurence said, and offered him instead a glass of port, and supper.

  “What an odd fellow you have found us, Laurence,” Jane said in her offices, the next morning. “I ought to give him his weight in gold, if the Admiralty would not squawk: twenty dragons talked out of the trees, like Merlin; or was it Saint Patrick? Anyway, I am sorry to rob you of the help, and pray don’t think me ungrateful, if you are in your rights to complain; it is enough of a miracle you should have brought us Iskierka and one egg whole, considering the way Bonaparte has been romping about the Continent, much less our amiable band of brigands. But I cannot spare the chance of more, however mean and scrawny they might be; not with matters as they stand.”

  The map of Europe was laid out topmost on her table, great clots of markers, representing dragons, spread from the western borders of Prussia’s former territory all the way to the footsteps of Russia. “From Jena to Warsaw in three weeks,” she said, as one of her runners poured out wine for them. “I would not have given a bad ha’penny for the news, if you had not brought it yourself, Laurence; and if we hadn’t had it from the Navy, too, I would have sent you to a physician.”

  Laurence nodded. “And I have a great deal to tell you of Bonaparte’s aerial tactics, which are wholly changed from what they were. Formations are of no use against him; at Jena, the Prussians were routed, wholly routed. We must at once begin devising counters to his new methods.”

  But she was already shaking her head. “Do you know, Laurence, I have less than forty dragons fit to fly? and unless he is a lunatic, he will not come across with less than a hundred. He shan’t need any fine tactics to do for us. For our part, there is no one to learn any new.”

  The scope of the disaster silenced him: forty dragons, to try and patrol all the coastline of the Channel, and give cover to the ships of the blockade.

  “What we want at present is time,” Jane continued. “There are a dozen hatchlings in Ireland, preserved from the disease, and twice as many eggs due to hatch in the next six months: we bred a good many of them, early on. If our friend Bonaparte will only be good enough to give us a year, things will look something more like: the rest of these new shore batteries in place, the young dragons brought up, your ferals knocked into shape; not to mention Temeraire and our new fire-breather.”

  “Will he give us a year?” Laurence said, low, looking at the counters: not very many yet, upon the Channel coastline; but he had seen first-hand how swiftly Napoleon’s dragon-borne army could now move.

  “Not a minute, if he hears anything of our pitiable state,” Jane said. “But that aside—well, we hear he has made a very good friend in Warsaw, a Polish countess they say is a raving beauty; and he would like to marry the Tsar’s sister. We will wish him good fortune in his courting, and hope he takes a long leisurely time about it. If he is sensible, he will want a winter night for crossing the Channel, and the days are already growing longer.

  “But you may be sure that if he learns how thin we are on the ground, he will come posting back quick as lightning, and damn the ladies. So our task of the moment is to keep him properly in the dark. A year’s time, then we will have something to work with; but until then, for you all it must be—”

  “OH, PATROLLING,” TEMERAIRE said, in tones of despair, when Laurence had brought their orders.

  “I am sorry, my dear,” Laurence said, “very truly sorry; but if we can serve our friends at all, it will be by taking on those duties which they have had to set aside.” Temeraire was silent and brooding, unconsoled; in an attempt to cheer him, Laurence added, “But we need not abandon your cause, not in the least. I will write my mother, and those of my acquaintance who may have the best advice to give, on how we ought to proceed—”

  “Whatever sense is there in it,” Temeraire said, miserably, “when all our friends are ill, and there is nothing to be done for them? It does not matter if one is not allowed to visit London, if one cannot even fly an hour. And Arkady does not give a fig for liberty, anyway; all he wants are cows. We may as well patrol; or even do formations.”

  This was the mood in which they went aloft, a dozen of the ferals behind them more occupied in squabbling amongst themselves than in paying any attention to the sky; Temeraire was in no way inclined to make them mind, and with Tharkay gone, the few hapless officers set upon their backs had very little hope of exerting any form of control.

  These young men had been chosen—from no shortage of officers, so many men having been grounded by the illness of their assigned beasts—for their skill in language. The ferals were all of them far too old to acquire a new tongue easily; so the officers sh
ould have to learn theirs instead. To hear them trying to whistle and cluck out the awkward syllables of the Durzagh language had quickly palled as entertainment and grown a nuisance to the ear, but it had also to be endured; no-one knew the tongue with any fluency aside from Temeraire, and a few of Laurence’s younger officers who had acquired a smattering in the course of their journey to Istanbul.

  Laurence had indeed lost two of his already-diminished number of officers entirely to the cause: one of the riflemen, Dunne, and Wickley of the bellmen had both of them enough grasp of Durzagh to make the basic signals understood to the ferals, and they were not so young as to make a command absurd. They had been set aboard Arkady in a highly theoretical position of authority; there was none of that natural bond which the first harnessing seemed to produce, of course, and Arkady was far more likely to obey his own whimsical impulse than any orders which they might give. The feral leader had already given it as his opinion that this flying over the ocean was absurd, as a useless territory in which no reasonable dragon would interest itself, and the likelihood he would veer away at any moment in search of better entertainment seemed to Laurence high.

  Jane had set them a course along the coastline, for their first excursion; no risk at all of an action, so near to land, but at least the cliffs interested the ferals, and the bustle of shipping around Portsmouth, which they would gladly have investigated further if not called to order by Temeraire. They flew on past Southampton and westward along towards Weymouth, setting a leisurely pace; the ferals resorting to wild acrobatics to entertain themselves, swooping to such heights as must have rendered them dizzy and ill, save for their former habituation among the most lofty mountains of the earth, and plummeting thence into absurd and dangerous diving maneuvers, so close they threw up spray as they skimmed up again from the waves. It was a sad waste of energy, but well-fed as the ferals now were, by comparison to their previous state, of energy they had a surfeit which Laurence was glad enough to see spent in so restrained a manner, if the officers clinging sickly to their harnesses did not agree.

  “Perhaps we might try a little fishing,” Temeraire suggested, turning his head around, when abruptly Gherni cried out above them, and the world spun and whirled as Temeraire flung himself sidelong; a Pêcheur-Rayé went flying past, and the champagne-popping of rifle-fire spat at them from his back.

  “To stations,” Ferris was shouting, men scrambling wildly; the bellmen were casting off a handful of bombs down on the recovering French dragon below while Temeraire veered away, climbing. Arkady and the ferals were shrilly calling to one another, wheeling excitedly; they flung themselves with eagerness on the French dragons: a light scouting party of six, as best Laurence could make out among the low-lying clouds, the Pêcheur the largest of the lot and the rest all light-weights or couriers; both outnumbered and outweighed, therefore, and reckless to be coming so close to British shores.

  Reckless, or deliberately venturesome; Laurence thought grimly it could not have escaped the notice of the French that their last encounter had brought no answer from the coverts.

  “Laurence, I am going after that Pêcheur; Arkady and the others will take the rest,” Temeraire said, curving his head around even as he dived.

  The ferals were not shy by any means, and gifted skirmishers, from all their play; Laurence thought it safe to leave the smaller dragons entirely to them. “Pray make no sustained attack,” he called, through the speaking-trumpet. “Only roust them from the shore, as quickly as you may—” as the hollow thump-thump of bombs, exploding below, interrupted.

  Without the hope of surprise, the Pêcheur knew himself thoroughly overmatched, Temeraire a more agile flyer and in a wholly different class so far as weight. Having risked and lost a throw of the dice, he and his captain were evidently not inclined to try their luck again; Temeraire had scarcely stooped before the Pêcheur dropped low to the water and beat away quickly over the waves, his riflemen keeping up a steady fusillade to clear his retreat.

  Laurence turned his attention above, to the furious howling of the ferals’ voices: they could scarcely be seen, having lured the French high aloft, where their greater ease with the thin air could tell to their advantage. “Where the devil is my glass?” he said, and took it from Allen. The ferals were making a sort of taunting game of the business, darting in at the French dragons and away, setting up a raucous caterwauling as they went, without very much actual fighting to be seen. It would have done nicely to frighten away a rival gang in the wild, Laurence supposed, particularly one so outnumbered, but he did not think the French were to be so easily diverted; indeed as he watched, the five enemy dragons, all of them only little Pou-de-Ciels, drew into close formation and promptly bowled through the cloud of ferals.

  The ferals, still putting on a show of bravado, scattered too late to evade the rifle-fire, and now some of their shrill cries were for real pain. Temeraire was beating up furiously, his sides belling out like sails as he heaved for the breath to get himself so high aloft, but he could not easily gain their height, and would be at a disadvantage himself against the smaller French when he had. “Give them a gun, quickly, and show the signal for descent,” Laurence shouted to Turner, without much hope; but the ferals came plummeting down in a rush when Turner put out the flags, none too reluctant to put themselves around Temeraire.

  Arkady was keeping up a low, indignant clamoring under his breath, nudging anxiously at his second Wringe, the worst-hit, her dark grey hide marred with streaks of darker blood. She had taken several balls to the flesh and one unlucky hit to the right wing, which had struck her on the bias and scraped a long, ugly furrow across the tender webbing and two spines; she was listing in mid-air awkwardly as she tried to favor it.

  “Send her below to shore,” Laurence said, scarcely needing the speaking-trumpet with the dragons crowded so close that they might have been talking in a clearing, and not the open sky. “And pray tell them again, they must keep well-clear of the guns; I am sorry they have had so hot a lesson. Let us keep together and—” but this came too late, as the French were coming down in arrow-head formation, and the ferals followed too closely on his first instruction and spread themselves out across the sky.

  The French also at once separated; even together they were not a match for Temeraire, whom they had surely recognized, and by way of protection engaged themselves closely with the ferals. It must have been an odd experience for them; Pou-de-Ciels were generally the lightest of the French combat breeds, and now they were finding themselves the relative heavy-weights in battle against the ferals, who even where their wingspan and length matched were all of them lean and concave-bellied creatures, a sharp contrast against the deep-chested muscle of their opponents.

  The ferals were now more wary, but also more savage, hot with anger at the injury to their fellow and their own smaller stinging wounds. They used their darting lunges to better effect, learning quickly how to feint in and provoke the rifle volleys, then come in again for a real attack. The smallest of them, Gherni and motley-colored Lester, were attacking one Pou-de-Ciel together, with the more wily Hertaz pouncing in every now and again, claws blackened with blood; the others were engaged singly, and more than holding their own, but Laurence quickly perceived the danger, even as Temeraire called, “Arkady! Bnezh's’li taqom—” and broke off to say, “Laurence, they are not listening.”

  “Yes, they will be in the soup in a moment,” Laurence agreed; the French dragons, though they seemed on the face of it to be fighting as independently as the ferals, were maneuvering skillfully to put their backs to one another; indeed they were only allowing the ferals to herd them into formation, which should allow them to make another devastating pass. “Can you break them apart, when they have come together?”

  “I do not see how I will be able to do it, without hurting our friends; they are so close to one another, and some of them are so little,” Temeraire said anxiously, tail lashing as he hovered.

  “Sir,” Ferris said, and Laurence
looked at him. “I beg your pardon, sir, but we are always told, as a rule, to take a bruising before a ball; it don’t hurt them long, even if they are knocked properly silly, and we are close enough to give any of them a lift to land, if it should go so badly.”

  “Very good; thank you, Mr. Ferris,” Laurence said, putting strong approval in it; he was still very glad to see Granby matched off with Iskierka, even more so when dragons would now be in such short supply, but he felt the loss keenly, as exposing the weaknesses in his own abbreviated training as an aviator. Ferris had risen to his occasions with near-heroism, but he had been but a third lieutenant on their departure from England, scarcely a year ago, and at nineteen years of age could not be expected to put himself forward to his captain with the assurance of an experienced officer.

  Temeraire put his head down and puffed up his chest with a deep breath, then flung himself down amongst the shrinking knot of dragons, and barreled through with much the effect of a cat descending upon an unsuspecting flock of pigeons. Friend and foe alike went tumbling wildly; the ferals flung into higher excitement. They flew around with much disorderly shrilling for a few moments, and as they did, the French righted themselves: the formation leader waved a signal-flag, and the Pou-de-Ciels wheeled together and away, escaping.

  Arkady and the ferals did not pursue, but came gleefully romping back over to Temeraire, alternating complaints at his having knocked them about, with boastful prancing over their victory and the rout of the enemy, which Arkady implied was in spite of Temeraire’s jealous interference. “That is not true, at all,” Temeraire said, outraged, “you would have been perfectly dished without me,” and turned his back upon them and flew towards land, his ruff stiffened up with indignation.

  They found Wringe sitting and licking at her scarred wing in the middle of a field. A few clumps of bloodstained white wool upon the grass, and a certain atmosphere of carnage in the air, suggested she had quietly found herself some consolation; but Laurence chose to be blind. Arkady immediately set up as a hero for her benefit, and paraded back and forth to re-enact the encounter. So far as Laurence could follow, the battle might have raged a fortnight, and engaged some hundreds of enemy beasts, all of them vanquished by Arkady’s solitary efforts. Temeraire snorted and flicked his tail in disdain, but the other ferals proved perfectly happy to applaud the revisionary account, though they occasionally jumped up to interject stories of their own noble exploits.