Blood of Tyrants (43 page)

Temeraire flattened his ruff, and maintained a dignified silence until O’Dea had gone back into the house, as the lanterns were dimmed; then he said to Laurence, “Laurence, what
will
we do, if Napoleon should defeat us?”

“Starve,” Laurence said, dryly.

T
HE ROOM WAS ABLAZE
with candles, many standing before mirrors of gilt and shining on gold and silver; the guests an equal brilliance of jewels and silks and velvet, their voices rising and falling in steady rhythm over the delicate threads of music. There might be a hectic flush on some cheeks, a nervous edge to laughter too quickly suppressed, but no-one surveying the company would have imagined that four hundred miles away, St. Petersburg was occupied by Napoleon’s army; nor from overhearing their conversation.

“They say that one could walk across the Seine on the backs of those foreign dragons, so closely were they crammed in upon one another outside Notre Dame,” Countess Andreyevna said, in tones of solemn horror more appropriate to the discussion of a funeral than a baptism. “We see now where all this dreadful revolution leads, and what a monster has taken hold of France! He will not content himself with regicide and self-aggrandizement, but will tear down the Christian faith with everything else: he is a heathen, that is plain to see.

“And not seven months since the wedding,” she added, with a flavor of spitefulness. “I hope that Bonaparte may be confident of his paternity.”

The new
Roi de Cusco
, as he had been styled, was by now four months old and reportedly thriving: he had been christened Napoleon Joseph Pachacuti Yupanqui—by Cardinal Fesch, and quite in
accordance with Catholic rites, despite the complaints of the countess.

Laurence had not held much hope of some event preventing the marriage. The Incan Empress had shown plainly she had as much quick decision in her nature as ever did Bonaparte, and having made her choice to accept his suit, she had already flung all the resources of her own vast Empire behind that course. Her dragons had driven the British out of the Incan Empire the very same day, and she had taken ship for France with Bonaparte not three months later, from the reports which had reached Laurence in Brazil.

Evidently, Anahuarque had also chosen to anticipate the rites, and thus had Napoleon so quickly gained the heir required to secure the loyalty of the Incan dragons and the future of his dynasty—the only thing which might have been wanting to further spur his relentless ambition. But however much the child’s birth might be deplored, Laurence had not the least desire to engage in gossip about it. Napoleon’s son could as yet do nothing; his army, everything.

Laurence quitted, without much ceremony, the company gathered around the countess in some impatience, and went seeking Hammond. He had been raised amid political dinners, gatherings of men either in power or soon to be, and his sense of such things was finely tuned: this was nothing of the sort—merely society, not politics, nor even the mingling of the two. There were a handful of aristocrats with some influence, each of them courted by a subtle band of hangers-on seeking personal advantage; a few staff officers and adjutants, none as high as a general. The rest of the company were merely the wealthy or titled or connected to the same, and of not the least significance.

“Hammond,” Laurence said, having cut him out of his own conversation with an elderly dandy of a baron with a brusque swiftness of which he would have been ashamed under less dire circumstances, “why the devil are we here?”

He and Temeraire had arrived the previous evening, with Chu
and a couple of
niru
, and joined Shen Shi at the supply depot outside Moscow: enormous granaries piled high with wheat and cured meat, which she had displayed to them with an attitude of deep embarrassment. “I regret that my preparations have been so inadequate,” she said.

They could not in justice be so called; but they were not, however, what one might have wished for a force of three hundred dragons: the Russians had been recalcitrant in providing assistance. “I am trying,” Hammond said now, with some asperity, “to catch someone’s ear: they will not listen to me; not even our own ambassador,” he added bitterly, “the wretched old fool! There are a thousand adventurers all over the city, peddling miracles to anyone that will give them an audience; they have decided I am to be classed with these charlatans.

“My only hope,” Hammond added, “was that your arrival would bring an end to their doubts—that they could scarcely deny the evidence when you had appeared—but I called at the department of state this morning, and a staff-officer told me that if you would fight, you might go westward down the New Smolensk Road and report for duty to whichever colonel you found first; but if I did not leave, he would lay hands on me and kick me all the way to the door. They have not received any report whatsoever, from the east, of any force of dragons approaching. Where
are
the rest of the beasts?”

“That is not a new question, to be asked of the British,” a man said, approaching their corner, and Laurence looked at him startled: an extraordinary intrusion, and the note of rancor as palpable as the thick Prussian accent.

“I beg your pardon,” Laurence said, grimly, wondering if he was on the point of facing a challenge, a wretched trap between honor and duty; and then there was something familiar about the man, the face. Laurence had a brief, vivid memory of gunpowder smoke in his nose amid a clear and brilliantly blue sky: of a vast army pouring over fields, tricolor flags billowing; a great dragon
lapped in heavy scales almost like mail, a bellowing laugh; and he found he did know the man, despite his greying hair and his paunch. “Captain Dyhern, I believe?” he said, slowly.

They had fought together, briefly, in the disastrous campaign of the year six. Dyhern had been taken prisoner at Jena, he and his dragon Eroica, an impressive Prussian heavy-weight, both of them among the many victims of the revolution in aerial tactics which Lien had brought to Bonaparte’s service.

Dyhern’s face was hard and sour and scarred, thinner than last they had met and aged far more than the intervening years could account for; but they had been allies, once, and had done him no injury of which to be ashamed: Laurence and Temeraire had given what aid they could, even in the midst of that overwhelming rout. The anger was not personal, but general, then; Laurence looked steadily into his face, and Dyhern after a moment looked aside, as one who knows himself in the wrong and does not care to admit it.

“I am glad to see you at liberty, sir,” Laurence said; he felt no obligation to press for any more satisfaction. “I hope it is not—I hope the cause is not an unhappy one.” A captain would not ordinarily be paroled or released by the enemy, save if his dragon were slain; although in the legal sense Napoleon and Prussia had made peace, Napoleon had neither withdrawn his occupying troops nor released the dragons, nor his most valuable hostage: the crown prince of Prussia, who lived yet in Paris under his supposed guardianship.

“I escaped prison a year ago,” Dyhern said, briefly for what could only have been a long and a dreadful tale. “As for Eroica—I know not. I have sought him in the breeding grounds. But they did not know of him. They sequestered many of our beasts deep in France—some we hear they have persuaded to turn coat and join their ranks: you may be sure he will never be seen among
those
,” he added, with a touch of fierce pride. “But of anything else—” His hand moved a little sideways, limply, as though to convey that the sum of his knowledge was insufficient even to be put into words.

So he was an aviator without a beast, grounded and unable to be of any use, and burdened by the wretched knowledge that if Eroica did live, he was yet kept a prisoner by his fear for Dyhern’s own safety: a cause for bitterness Laurence had himself tasted, enough to make him sympathetic. But the twenty dragons that Britain had promised to the Prussian war effort, in the campaign of 1806, had only been held back due to the deadly plague which had descended so mercilessly on Britain’s dragons, and would not even when healthy have made any material difference to the disaster.

“Yes, perhaps it is true,” Dyhern said, with a snort. “But it is no wonder if the Tsar and his generals think very little of British promises now, and little of this story, this fantasy, of three hundred dragons from nowhere, from the hordes of the East. I have heard your story: you bring eight dragons, and call them three hundred.”

Laurence shook his head: he did not himself know where the bulk of the Chinese forces were, nor why they had not yet arrived in Moscow, and in truth he would have felt doubtful himself if he had not already seen once with his own eyes the rapidity of their mustering. Dyhern was not wrong: with a few seeds of doubt sowed already, particularly if many other Prussian officers were also refugee among the Russians, and the British ambassador himself unconvinced, it was no wonder any longer if they could gain no ear.

“We had best go and speak with Chu,” Laurence said to Hammond. “The remainder of the dragons cannot be far distant now: we might persuade the Russians to send a courier to confirm the approach of at least one cohort, if he can tell us their direction.”

There could be no question of their merely departing for the front: the armies might be anywhere in a square five hundred miles across. An aerial force with no ground support, even one of their extraordinary size, would be perilously vulnerable to any encounter with a substantial French force mingling dragons and artillery; three hundred dragons was not so many that they could afford to lose half of them.

Laurence hesitated, on the point of departing, and then quietly
said to Dyhern, “Captain, if you are not otherwise engaged in the war effort, I hope you will permit me to say that Temeraire and I would be glad of your assistance: we are short-handed, and my crew have many of them not seen aerial combat.” Several of them indeed were former sailors, recruited from the survivors of the wreck of the
Allegiance
; his officers were a wretchedly scanty bunch, most of those having also perished in that disaster. Forthing was brave and competent enough, but not by any means a star in the firmament; Ferris could not be called a lieutenant, though he deserved the place; besides them Laurence had only a few ragged midwingmen and ensigns.

Dyhern was silent; the lines of resentment and misery stood out upon his face more strongly for a moment it seemed, in the candlelight of the room; then abruptly he said, “My God! I will not sit by the fire while there is a dragon to fly and fight; yes, I will come with you. Of course I will come. Do you go now?”

Laurence would have gladly made arrangements for his later joining them, but Dyhern refused: “I have with me my boots, my coat, and my sword. What else do I possess?” He accosted a servant to write a hasty note of apology to his host, begging for his things to be delivered to Hammond’s care at the embassy when it should be convenient. “Baron Sarkovsky will understand: his mother was a Prussian, a cousin of my father,” he said, “and he has been kind enough to give a home to a few of us who have not been able to stomach bending our necks beneath the Corsican’s boot-heel: even those like myself for whom the army has had no use.” The treaty which the King of Prussia had signed with Napoleon had been humiliating in the extreme.

The streets of Moscow were silent and humid, heat lingering in the late air of August, thick even at night, and the moon above them shone through an aureole of pale haze. “Napoleon is near Smolensk,” Dyhern said, “or so they say; but he might be outside the gates of Moscow tomorrow, for all that damned coward Barclay has done to slow him down. He has not given a single battle.
He flees and flees, like a rat evading—Oh, it is Davout! Run to the east! Ah! Murat is there! Fly to the south! My God, Napoleon himself! And he faints away like a maiden,” with a contemptuous sweep of his hand, his deep voice descending again from high-pitched mimicry. “It is enough to turn one’s stomach. They let St. Petersburg fall without a shot fired; and still he flees. But Barclay must defend Smolensk; he cannot let it fall: so my friends say.”