Crucible of Gold (33 page)

Temeraire could see Genevieve go up from the hall where the French were quartered, with Piccolo and Ardenteuse on her heels, to join the approaching party: and then all six dragons circled together overhead and descended one after another into the royal court, Piccolo unsubtly crowding against Kulingile’s shoulder to make room for Lien to come down.

She
was looking splendidly, Temeraire could not help but reluctantly acknowledge: besides the immense diamond upon her breast, which caught the light of the lamps, she wore also a sort of gauntlet upon each foreleg—talon-sheaths tipped in rubies, joined by delicate lacy chains of silver to broad cuffs set with diamonds, which were in turn joined to another set of cuffs above her elbow-joint set with sapphires, so that she wore the colors of the tricolor herself. She wore no other harness, and carried but one rider—

The French dragons all bowed their heads low, and the men aboard their backs removed their hats; De Guignes slid from Genevieve’s
back and knelt, as Napoleon dismounted from Lien’s back, stepping easily down onto her proffered foreleg, which she then lowered to the ground.

He took De Guignes by the shoulders and raised him up, kissed him on either cheek, and said in French, “Best of emissaries! You must not be offended that I have come myself, any more than are my Marshals when I come to take the field; some battles a man must win himself. This is the Empress?” And when De Guignes confirmed it, Napoleon said, “Then tell her, my friend, that I myself have come! And hazarded my own person, to show her the honor which I and France mean to do her, if she will come and grace our throne.”

If the Inca’s dragons were inclined to resent the intrusion of the French party into the ceremony, and Napoleon’s disregard of their protocol, his very temerity seemed to carry fortune with it: De Guignes was heard out, and the ruffled dragons gradually subsided on hearing Napoleon identified and his flamboyant message translated. Certainly there was enough courage to impress in the act of delivering himself into the power of a foreign sovereign; although Laurence noted that the two Flammes-de-Gloire bore each of them more than a usual complement of riflemen, all wary-eyed and with their guns ready to their hands.

A murmuring ran among the Incan dragons; even Maila looked uncertain, and abruptly Anahuarque raised a hand, and her court fell silent. “Tell the Emperor we welcome him to our court,” she said. “Such a great journey must have left him fatigued: you shall go and rest, and we will dine all together this evening, to celebrate the opening friendship among all our nations.”

Hammond translated this excessively optimistic speech for Laurence’s benefit, as the Sapa Inca turning spoke low to Maila, with a hand upon his muzzle. She then stepped into the dragon’s grasp; with one final look at Iskierka, he went aloft and carried her
from the hall, while the other dragons swept away the rest of her retinue in similar fashion, and left the courtyard to their foreign guests.

Napoleon did not immediately depart himself, either: he turned smiling to the Frenchwomen who had been serving as De Guignes’s deputies, and kissed their hands; and not content with stopping there came towards them, exclaiming, “Captain Laurence! I hope I find you in the best of health.” He greeted Hammond and Granby on De Guignes’s introduction with a similar warmth, which disregarded all the just cause any Briton had to resent both his general overarching ambition, and most egregiously his late invasion of England, which had been only just thrown off two years before at the dreadful cost of Admiral Nelson’s life and the loss of fourteen ships-of-the-line, and twenty thousand men or more.

Laurence answered his inquiries with all the reserve which he could muster; Napoleon disregarded the latter, and pursued the former with unexpected intensity: before the onslaught of questioning Laurence found that he was saying more than he meant, about the peculiarities of the interior of Australia, and the sea-serpent trade established with China; at the description of which Lien might be seen to flatten her ruff back against her neck disapprovingly.

“I expect she does not think China ought to engage in commerce with foreign nations,” Temeraire said when they had returned to their own quarters, “just as she thinks Celestials ought not engage in battle.”

Hammond had managed to extricate them from the Emperor’s company with excuses barely short of outright rudeness; and when he had been set down fell to anxious pacing in their hall, muttering to himself, and packing coca leaves into his teapot. “Pray have a care not to disarrange your appearance,” he added, raising his head. “We cannot be sure when we will be summoned to dinner, and we must be ready; they are certain to have plans—offers to
make—oh! The wretched timing of it all. Has Maila come to see Iskierka?”

“We have scarce been back here in the hall five minutes, so no, he hasn’t. And it is a sorry state of affairs,” Granby said to Laurence, dropping himself to the floor with a sigh, and no care for the beautiful red cloak which crumpled beneath him, “when I must cheer Napoleon on, and hope that he outdoes us all: but my God, I think I have never been so happy in my life as when he landed.”

Temeraire could not be pleased to see Napoleon, and still less Lien, but that did not mean feeling the least unhappiness at the oversetting of the ceremony. He felt Iskierka had deserved any amount of discomfiture. He flattened back his ruff as Maila came winging down to the courtyard to see her, and threw a scornful look her way. “I
hope
,” he said loudly, “that no self-respecting dragon would abase themselves, by pleading with the representative of a foreign nation, only from disappointment.”

“Oh!” said Iskierka, “I do not
plead
, with anyone,” and Temeraire had to do her justice: she received Maila very coolly, and only grew more so when he began to sidle around talking of Napoleon’s dramatic arrival, and how it must alter their immediate plans—how the Flammes-de-Gloire had been demonstrating the range of their own fire-breath, that afternoon—how Lien was a most unusual beast, and clearly blessed by the gods because of her remarkable coloration—

“You might try your luck with
her
,” Temeraire said, not even bothering to pretend that he was not listening in, “perhaps
she
will have eggs for you; but I should not expect it, myself.”

Maila huffed out his neck-collar feathers and said, “Lien has explained she is not able to have eggs, with a dragon so distant from her own ancestry—that Celestial dragons cannot be crossed with other kinds. She does not wish to waste our time, or else she
would be honored; that is why she has brought the fire-breathers, who are two dragons of her honor-guard. They will remain here, if we wish it, to form closer ties between our people.”

While Temeraire reeled back into silence, appalled, Iskierka snorted. “If you think a couple of ratty French beasts are as good as
me
,” she said, “only because they can breathe a little fire, then you are welcome to their company: I have better things to do with my time than to make a push for anyone, much less anyone so undiscriminating.”

“I do not!” Maila protested. “I do not think them your equal, at all: that is why I am here. I am only warning you. You must come and speak to Anahuarque; you must persuade
her
—she must marry Granby, and send this foreign Emperor away, not marry him and go across the ocean.”

“If you ask me,” Temeraire said, his tail lashing violently—he had been deeply agitated since Maila’s visit, and Laurence had not yet had any opportunity to pursue the cause—“he is not interested in you and your eggs, after all; he wants only to keep the Empress locked up safe here in the mountains, and not let to do anything: and I am sure he will want to do the same with Granby, too.”

“He is, too, interested in my eggs,” Iskierka said, flaring, while Hammond urged their immediate attendance on the Inca: Maila was prepared to arrange a private audience at once, informally, for them to plead their cause.

“There can be not a moment to lose—the dinner this evening may decide everything, and in any case De Guignes may already be making them proposals by some other channel,” Hammond said, very nearly trying to drag Granby out the door, or push him, all while straightening his cloak and ignoring Granby’s half-attempts to thrust him away. “We
must
go, at once, at once.”

The conversation was thoroughly one-sided. Granby retired to
the background with relief, after the first presentation, while Hammond flung himself into the breach wholeheartedly. But Anahuarque only listened impassive while Hammond tried one avenue and then another. He hinted at the dangers of the ocean crossing—spoke of the revolution in France, and the execution of the King and Queen—listed all the many nations which had lined up to oppose Napoleon’s ambition, never acknowledging that of these, Spain had all but fallen, Prussia had been defeated, Austria had accepted truce, Russia only watched from afar—

He ran down at last, and Anahuarque still said nothing, but only watched them with her dark, thoughtful eyes: her silence a deliberate thing, it seemed to Laurence, designed to invite Hammond’s very torrent of words, and all the intelligence which he might thereby deliver even unintentionally.

Laurence rose and said quietly, “Madam, we cannot know what will sway your decision, so I think we will take our leave of you and give you time to consider. I would only say, if you permit, that the Emperor is a prodigiously gifted man”—he ignored Hammond’s sudden frantic twitch of his sleeve—“prodigiously gifted man, who has turned those gifts to the evil service of ambition. There are no bounds to his appetite for the conquest and subjugation of other men, and whatever aid you choose to give him you may be certain will be turned to those ends, regardless of the misery and privation the pursuit will bring upon the world.”

He bowed, and turned to Temeraire, who was waiting to lift him up. “That was splendidly said, Laurence,” Temeraire said, as they flew back to their courtyard in company with Iskierka. “I am sure it must decide her for us: no-one could like to help Napoleon fight still more wars; not that wars are not exciting, but it is unreasonable.”

Laurence shook his head; he did not know, himself, anything more than that he had at least spoken the truth. He looked at Mrs. Pemberton, who had accompanied them; she said after a moment,
“I would be more sanguine, sir, if she had not also seized herself a crown—but on the other hand,” she added, “I think she has not much desire to share it.”

The feast was a deeply peculiar affair: French and British soldiers seated across from one another, mostly unable or unwilling to communicate with one another except by scowling; the Inca’s generals on the upper and lower ends of the square joining in, more universally; the dragons seated behind the men murmuring to one another while they ate their roasted llamas. Even Hammond and De Guignes seemed thrown off their stride by the situation, with its equal shares of high tension and silence, and the only person who gave evidence of being thoroughly comfortable was Napoleon himself.

He had evidently studied Quechua to a little extent, and forged ahead in using his handful of words despite what Temeraire said scornfully to Laurence was a dreadful accent and no grammar whatsoever. He paid a relentless court to the Empress, though seated at several removes from her stool, and took advantage of a rather rude question from one of the warriors seated by her side as an excuse to sweep the cloth before him clear and demonstrate upon it the victory of Austerlitz, with pieces of potato to represent the battalions. Even Laurence could scarcely resist leaning in to hear this narrative; he thought ruefully, in his defense, that with all the just resentment in the world no military man could fail to be enraptured, until one considered the dreadful toll of life, and the consequences to all Europe.

Anahuarque, meanwhile, said very little; she gave Napoleon brief smiles, for encouragement, but as he spoke to the warriors of the battle, Laurence looked to see her eyes intent upon the Emperor, and surprised a look of cold and determined calculation in her face. She glanced back at Maila Yupanqui, who was coiled and brooding with his head laid beside her stool, and laid a hand gently upon his jaw; she bent and murmured to him, some reassurance
perhaps for all the foreign men gathered at her table, and his ruffled feathers smoothed after a moment down against his throat.

“Well,” Granby said, fatalistically, as they left the table, “at least there’s this: she’ll only marry me if she
wants
someone who will not give her any bother; maybe I can even leave, in a few years.”

“If you have already given her a child; two or three, ideally. I hope your family are productive?” Hammond said, as they walked; only as an aside: he was sunk in gloom, and did not even notice the wry looks which his remark provoked.

“I don’t think anyone should say I had an excess of sensibility about the matter,” Granby said, which Laurence thought rather understated the case, “and in any case one could not worry over-much about a child with, as far as I can see, a dozen nursemaids over ten tons in size; beyond the usual line, that is; but it is over-much for Hammond to talk of my qualities as a sire in that way, as though I were a horse.”

“I am sure it was just Lien’s excuse,” Temeraire said, “and not true in the least; I do not believe it for an instant that Celestials cannot breed.”

“If you say so,” Kulingile said equably. “I don’t see it matters much,” which Temeraire could not agree with; but then, Kulingile was rather young, and did not yet think of eggs as desirable things. He did not appreciate properly that Temeraire’s own egg had been so valuable a prize that Laurence’s two-eighths share, as captain of the vessel which had seized it, had bought the splendid breastplate of platinum and sapphire which Temeraire yet wore; and that Iskierka’s egg had commanded a hundred thousand pounds in gold coins—of course, no-one had known at the time what her personality was to be, and Temeraire had been thought only an Imperial rather than a Celestial dragon. But that only went to show how very important eggs were: no-one in Britain would give a hundred
thousand pounds for Iskierka to-day, he was quite sure; except perhaps Hammond at the present moment.