Black Powder War (44 page)

The townspeople were more welcoming to the Prussians, most of them young soldiers pale and wretched after the flight. General Kalkreuth himself had been among these final refugees; he had to be let down from Arkady's back in a sling, his face white and sickly under his beard. The local medical man looked doubtful, but cupped a basin full of blood from him and had him carried away to the nearest farmhouse, to be kept warm and dosed with brandy and hot water.

Other men were less fortunate; the harnesses, cut away, came down in filthy and tangled heaps weighted by corpses already turning greenish: some killed by the French attacks, others smothered by their own fellows in the panic, or dead of thirst or plain terror. They buried in all sixty-three men of a thousand that afternoon, some of them nameless, in a long and shallow grave laboriously pick-axed out of the frozen ground; the rest of them were a ragged crew, clothes and uniforms inadequately brushed, faces still dirty, attending silently. Even the ferals, though they did not understand the language, perceived the ceremony, and sat on their haunches respectfully to watch from a distance.

Word had come straight back from Edinburgh only a few hours later, but with orders so queer as to be incomprehensible: the Prussians were to be left behind in Dunbar and quartered on the town, reasonably enough; the dragons, as expected, were summoned to Edinburgh. But there was no invitation to General Kalkreuth or his officers to come along; to the contrary, Laurence was strictly adjured to bring no Prussian officers with him. As for the dragons, they were not permitted to come into the large and comfortable covert itself, not even Temeraire: instead Laurence was ordered to leave them sleeping in the street, and to report to the admiral in command in the morning.

He had stifled his own reaction, and spoken mildly of the arrangements to Major Seiberling, now the senior Prussian; implying as best he could without any outright falsehood that the Admiralty meant to wait until General Kalkreuth was recovered for an official welcome.

"Oh; must we fly again?" Temeraire said when Laurence told him; he heaved himself wearily back onto his feet, and went around the drowsing ferals to nudge them awake: they had all crumpled into somnolence after their dinners.

Their flight was slow and the days were grown short; it lacked only a week to Christmas, Laurence realized abruptly. The sky was fully dark by the time they reached the city, but the castle on its high rocky hill, standing above the shadowed expanse of the covert, shone out for them like a beacon, its windows and walls bright with torches, the narrow buildings of the old medieval part of the city crammed together close around it.

Temeraire hovered doubtfully above the cramped and winding streets; there were many spires and pointed roofs to contend with, and not very much room. "I do not see how I am to land," he said uncertainly. "I am sure to break one of those buildings; why have they built these streets so small? It was much more convenient in Peking."

"If you cannot do it without hurting yourself, we will go away again, and orders be damned," Laurence said; his patience was grown very thin.

But in the end Temeraire managed to let himself down into the cathedral square without bringing down more than a few lumps of ornamental masonry from the spire; the ferals, being all of them considerably smaller, had less difficulty. They were a little anxious at being removed from the fields full of sheep and cattle, however, and suspicious of their new surroundings; Arkady bent low and put his eye to an open window to peer inside at the empty rooms, making skeptical inquiries of Temeraire as he did so.

"That is where people sleep, is it not, Laurence? Like a pavilion," Temeraire said, trying cautiously to arrange his tail into a more comfortable position. "And sometimes where they sell jewels and other pleasant things. But where are all the people?"

Laurence was quite sure all the people had fled; the wealthiest tradesman in the city would be sleeping in a gutter tonight, if it were the only bed he could find in the new part of town, safely far away from the pack of dragons who had invaded his streets.

The dragons had eventually disposed of themselves in some reasonable comfort; the ferals, used to sleeping in rough-hewn caves, were even well pleased with the soft and rounded cobblestones. "I do not mind sleeping in the street, Laurence, truly; it is quite dry, and I am sure it will be very interesting to look at, in the morning," Temeraire had said, drowsily, before falling straight asleep again, his head lodged in one alleyway and his tail in another.

But Laurence minded for him; it was not the sort of welcome which he felt they might justly have looked for, a long year away from home, having been sent halfway round the world and back.

Having left Temeraire and all his officers still sleeping, in whatever comfort they managed to find, Laurence now presented himself to the guards at the castle gate and was shown to the admiral's office at once, escorted by a young red-coated Marine through the dark and quiet courtyards of stone, empty and free from hurry. The doors were opened, and he went in stiffly, straight-shouldered; his face had set into disapproving lines, cold and rigid. "Sir," he said, eyes fixed at a point upon the wall; and only then glanced down, and said, surprised, "Admiral Lenton?"

"Yes, Laurence; sit, sit down." Lenton dismissed the guard, and the door closed upon them and the musty, book-lined room; the Admiral's desk was nearly clear, but for a single small map and a handful of papers. Lenton sat for a moment silently. "It is damned good to see you," he said at last. "Very good to see you indeed. Very good."

Laurence was very much shocked at his appearance. In the year since their last meeting, Lenton seemed to have aged ten: hair gone entirely white, and a vague, rheumy look in his eyes; his jowls hung slack. "I hope I find you well, sir," Laurence said, deeply sorry, no longer wondering why Lenton had been transferred to Edinburgh, the quieter post; he wondered only what illness might have so ravaged him, and who had been made commander at Dover in his place.

"Oh..." Lenton waved his hand, fell silent. "I suppose you have not been told anything," he said, after a moment. "No, that is right; we agreed we could not risk word getting out."

"No, sir," Laurence said, anger kindling afresh. "I have heard nothing, and been told nothing; with our allies asking me daily for word of the Corps, until there was no more use in asking."

He had given his own personal assurances to the Prussian commanders; he had sworn that the Aerial Corps would not fail them, that the promised company of dragons, which might have turned the tide against Napoleon in this last disastrous campaign, would arrive at any moment. He and Temeraire had stayed and fought in their place when the dragons did not arrive, risking their own lives and those of his crew, in an increasingly hopeless cause; but the dragons had never come.

Lenton did not immediately answer, but sat nodding to himself, murmuring, "Yes, that is right, of course." He tapped a hand on the desk, looked at the papers without reading them, a portrait of distraction.

Laurence added more sharply, "Sir, I can hardly believe you would have lent yourself to so treacherous a course, and one so terribly shortsighted; Napoleon's victory was by no means assured, if the twenty promised dragons had been sent."

"What?" Lenton looked up. "Oh, Laurence, there was no question of that. No, none at all. I am sorry for the secrecy, but as for not sending the dragons, that called for no decision. There were no dragons to send."

Victoriatus heaved his sides out and in, a gentle, measured pace. His nostrils were wide and red, a thick flaking crust around the rims, and a dried pink foam lingered about the corners of his mouth. His eyes were closed, but after every few breaths they would open a little, dull and unseeing with exhaustion; he gave a rasping, hollow cough that flecked the ground before him with blood, and subsided once again into the half-slumber that was all he could manage. His captain, Richard Clark, was lying on a cot beside him; unshaven, in filthy linen, an arm flung up to cover his eyes and the other hand resting on the dragon's foreleg; he did not move, even when they approached.

After a few moments, Lenton touched Laurence on the arm. "Come, enough; let's away." He turned slowly aside, leaning heavily upon a cane, and took Laurence back up the green hill to the castle. As they returned to his offices, the corridors seemed no longer peaceful but hushed, sunk in irreparable gloom.

Laurence refused a glass of wine, too numb to think of refreshment. "It is a sort of consumption," Lenton said, looking out the windows that faced onto the covert yard; Victoriatus and twelve other great beasts lay screened from one another by the ancient windbreaks, piled branches, and stones grown over with ivy.

"How widespread-?" Laurence asked.

"Everywhere," Lenton said. "Dover, Portsmouth, Middlesbrough. The breeding-grounds in Wales and Halifax; Gibraltar; everywhere the couriers went on their rounds; everywhere." He turned away from the windows and took his chair again. "We were inexpressibly stupid; we thought it was only a cold, you see."

"But we had word of that before we had even rounded the Cape of Good Hope, on our journey east," Laurence said, appalled. "Has it lasted so long?"

"In Halifax it started in September of the year four," Lenton said. "The surgeons think now it was the American dragon, that big Indian fellow: he was kept there, and then the first dragons to fall sick here were those who had shared the transport with him to Dover; then it began in Wales when he was sent to the breeding-grounds there. He is perfectly hearty, not a cough or a sneeze; very nearly the only dragon left in England who is, except for a handful of hatchlings we have tucked away in Ireland."

"You know we have brought you another twenty," Laurence said, taking a brief refuge in making his report.

"Yes, these fellows from where, Turkestan?" Lenton said: willing to follow. "Did I understand your letter correctly; they were brigands?"

"I would rather say, jealous of their territory," Laurence said. "They are not very pretty, but there is no malice in them, and all of them sound as a bell; though what use twenty dragons can be, to cover all England-" He stopped. "Lenton, surely something can be done-must be done," he said.

Lenton only shook his head briefly. "The usual remedies did some good, at the beginning," he said. "Quieted the coughing, and so forth. They could still fly, and ate ordinarily; colds are usually such trifling things, with them. But it lingered on so long, and after a while the possets seemed to lose their effect-some began to grow worse-"

He stopped, and after a long moment added, with an effort, "Obversaria is dead."

"Good God!" Laurence cried, unable to stifle the exclamation. "Sir, I am shocked to hear it-so deeply grieved." It was a dreadful loss: she had been flying with Lenton some forty years, the flag-dragon at Dover for the last ten, and though relatively young had produced four eggs already; perhaps the finest flyer in all England, with few to even compete with her for the title.

"That was in, let me see; August," Lenton said, as if he had not heard. "After Inlacrimas, but before Minacitus. It takes some of them worse than others. The very young hold up best, and the old ones linger; it is the ones between who have been dying. Dying first, anyway; I suppose they will all go in the end."

"Do you mean to say that they all remain ill-none have recovered?" Laurence said. "None at all?"

"None; none at all." Lenton shook his head. "If they once begin coughing, they do not stop; at least not alive."