Victory of Eagles (4 page)

dragons were holding on to it: an older Parnassian, likely traded to France during an earlier peacetime,

and a Grand Chevalier.

It was not the only harpoon: three more cable-lines dangled down from their grip to the bow, and

another two from the stern, that Laurence could see. The dragons were too far aloft for him to make out

the details, with the ship’s motion underneath him, but the cables were somehow laced into their

harnesses, and merely by flying together and pulling, they were pivoting the ship’s head into the wind: all

her sails must have been taken aback, and the dragons were too far aloft for round-shot to reach them.

One of them sneezed from the action of the frantically speaking pepper guns, but they had only to beat

their wings a little more to get away from the pepper, hauling the ship along while they did it.

“Axes, axes,” the lieutenant was shouting, with a clattering of iron as the bosun’s mates came spilling

weapons across the floor: hand-axes, cutlasses, knives. The men snatched them up and began to reach

out the portholes to try and hack the ship free, but the harpoons were two foot long from the hook, and

the ropes had enough slackness to give no good purchase to their efforts. Someone would have to climb

out of a porthole to saw at them: open and exposed against the hull of the ship, with the frigate coming

around again.

No-one moved to go, at first; then Laurence reached out and took a short cutlass, sharpened, from the

heap. The lieutenant looked into his face and knew him, but said nothing. Turning to the porthole,

Laurence worked his shoulders through and pulled himself out, many hands quickly coming beneath his

feet to support him and the lieutenant calling again; shortly a rope was flung down to him from the deck

above, so he could brace himself against the hull. Many faces were peering over at him anxiously:

strangers; then another man came sliding down over the rail, and another, to work on the other harpoons.

Laurence began the grim effort of sawing away at the cable, strands going one at a time; the rope was

cable-laid, three hawsers of three strands, well-wormed and thick as a man’s wrist and parceled in

canvas, and meanwhile he made a bright target against the ship’s paintwork for the guns of the frigate. If

he were killed, the embarrassment of his hanging would at least be spared his family. He was only alive

now to be a chain round Temeraire’s neck, until the Admiralty should decide the dragon pacified enough

by age and habit that Laurence might be dispensed with and his sentence carried out; and that might be

years, long years, mouldering in gaol or in the bowels of a ship.

It was not a purposeful thought, no guilty intention; it only crossed his mind involuntarily, while he

worked. He had his back to the ocean and could not see anything of the frigate or the larger battle

beyond: his horizon was the splintered paint of
Goliath
’s side, lacquered shine made rough by splinters

and salt, and the cold sea was climbing up her hull and spraying his back. Distant roars of cannon-fire

spoke, but
Goliath
had let her guns fall silent, saving her powder and shot for when they should be of

some use. The loudest noises in his ears were the grunts and effort of the men hanging nearby, sawing at

their own harpoon-lines. Then one of them gave a startled yell and let go his rope, falling away into the

churning ocean; a small darting courier-beast, a Chasseur-Vocifère, was plunging at the side of the ship

with another harpoon.

The beast held it something like a jouster in a medieval tournament, with the butt rigged awkwardly into

a cup attached to its harness, for support, and two men on its back bracing the rig. The harpoon thumped

dully against the ship’s side, near to where Laurence hung, and the dragon’s tail slapped a wash of salt

water up into his face, heavy stinging thickness in his nostrils and dripping down the back of his throat as

he choked it out. The dragon lunged away again even as the Marines fired off a furious volley, trailing the

harpoon on its line behind it: the barb had not bitten deep enough to penetrate. The hull was pockmarked

with the dents of earlier attempts, a good dozen for each planted harpoon marring her spit-and-polish

paintwork.

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Laurence wiped salt from his face against his arm and shouted, “Keep working, man, damn you,” at the

other seaman still hanging near him. The first rope of his own cable was gone at last, tough fibres fraying

away from the cutlass edge and fanning out like a broom; he began on the second, rapidly, although the

blade was going dull.

The frigate was still there to harass them, and he could not help but look around at the roar of cannon so

nearby. A ball came whistling across the water, skipping two, three times along the wave-tops, like a

stone thrown by a boy. It looked as though it came straight for him, an illusion: the whole ship groaned as

the ball punched in at the bows, and splinters flew like a sudden blizzard out of the open portholes. They

peppered Laurence’s legs, stinging like a flock of bees, and his stockings were quickly wet with blood.

He clung on to the harpoon arm and kept sawing; the frigate was still firing, broadside rolling on, and the

round-shot hurtled at them again and again, a sickening deep sway to
Goliath
’s motion now as she took

the pounding.

He had to hand the cutlass back in and shout for a fresh to get through the last strand; then at last the

cable was cut loose and swinging away free, and they pulled him back in; he staggered when he tried to

stand, and went to his knees slipping in blood: stockings laddered and soaked through red; his best

breeches, still the same ones he had worn for the trial, were pierced and spotted. He was helped to sit

against the wall, and turned the cutlass on his own shirt for bandages to tie up the worst of the gashes;

no-one could be spared to help him to the surgeons. The other harpoons had been cut; they were moving

at last, coming around; and all the crews were fixed by their guns, savage in the dim red glow penetrating,

teeth bared and mazed with blood from cracked lips and gums, faces black with sweat and grime, ready

to take vengeance.

A loud pattering like rain or hailstones came suddenly down: small bombs with short fuses dropped by

the French dragons, flashes like lightning visible through the boards of the deck; some rolled down

through the ladderways and burst in the gundeck, hot flash-powder smoke and the burning glare of

pyrotechnics, painful to the eyes; then they hove around in view of the frigate and the order came down

to fire, fire.

There was nothing for a long moment but the mindless fury of the ship’s guns going: impossible to think in

that roaring din, smoke and hellish fire in her bowels choking away all reason. Laurence reached up for

the porthole when they had paused, and hauled himself up to look. The French frigate was reeling away

under the pounding, her foremast down and hulled below the water-line, so each wave slapping away

poured into her.

There was no cheering. Past the retreating frigate, the breadth of the Channel spread open before them,

and all the great ships of the blockade, entangled and harassed just as they had been. The
Aboukir
and

the mighty
Sultan,
seventy-four guns, were near enough to recognize: cables rising up to three and four

dragons, French heavy-weights and middle-weights industriously tugging every which way. The ships

were firing steadily but uselessly, clouds of smoke that did not reach the dragons above.

And between them, half-a-dozen French ships-of-the-line, come out of harbor at last, were stately going

by, escort to an enormous flotilla. A hundred and more, barges and fishing-boats and even rafts in lateen

rig, all of them crammed with soldiers, the wind at their backs and the tide carrying them towards the

shore, tricolors streaming proudly from their bows towards England.

With the Navy paralyzed, only the dragons of the Corps were left to stop the advance. But the French

warships were firing regularly into the air above the flotilla: something like pepper, in vaster quantities than

could have been afforded of spice, and burning. Red spark fragments glowed like fireflies against the

Page 10

black smoke-cloud which hung over the boats, shielding them from aerial attack. One of the transport

boats was near enough that Laurence saw the men had their faces covered with wet kerchiefs and rags,

or huddled under oilcloth sheets. The British dragons made desperate attempts to dive, but recoiled from

the clouds, and had instead to fling down bombs from too great a height: ten splashing into the wide

ocean for every one which came near enough to make a wave against a ship’s hull. The smaller French

dragons harried them, too, flying back and forth and jeering in shrill voices. There were so many of them,

Laurence had never seen so many: wheeling almost like birds, clustering and breaking apart, offering no

easy target to the British dragons in their stately formations.

One great Regal Copper might have been Maximus: red and orange and yellow against the blue sky, at

the head of a formation with Yellow Reapers in two lines to his either wing, but Laurence did not see

Lily. The Regal roared, audible faintly even over the distance, and bulled his formation through a dozen

French light-weights to come at a great French warship: flames bloomed from her sails as the bombs at

last hit, but when the formation rose away again, one of the Reapers was streaming crimson from its belly

and another was listing. A handful of British frigates, too, were valiantly trying to dash past the French

ships to come at the transports: with some little success, but they were under heavy fire, and if they sank

a dozen boats, half the men were pulled aboard others, so close were the little transports to one another.

“Every man to his gun,” the lieutenant said sharply.
Goliath
was turning to go after the transports. She

would be passing between
Majestueux
and
Héros,
a broadside of nearly three tons between them.

Laurence felt it when her sails caught the wind properly again: the ship leaping forward like an eager

racehorse held too long. She had made all sail. He touched his leg: the blood had stopped flowing, he

thought. He limped back to an empty place at a gun.

Outside, the first transports were already hurtling themselves onward to the shore, light-weight dragons

wheeling above to shield them while they ran artillery onto the ground, and one soldier rammed the

standard into the dirt, the golden eagle atop catching fire with the sunlight: Napoleon had landed in

England at last.

Chapter 2

T
HE QUESTION SENT OUT,Temeraire found it was almost worse to have the prospect of an

answer; to know that there
was
an answer, and that it would reach him soon. Before, the world itself had

been undecided, if Laurence was still in it: he might as easily be alive as not, and so long as Temeraire did

not
know
otherwise, Laurence was alive at least in part, which was almost all which could be hoped for:

the news at best would only be that he was still imprisoned. As the day crept onward, Temeraire began

to feel certainty was a weak reward to repay the risk of receiving the dreadful contrary answer, a

possibility which Temeraire could not bear to envision: a great blankness engulfed him if he tried, like a

grey sky full of clouds above and below, fog all around.

He wanted distraction badly, and there was none, except to talk to Perscitia; which was at least

interesting, if from time to time infuriating also. Perscitia liked to think herself a great genius, and she was

certainly unusually clever even if she could not quite grasp the notion of writing; occasionally, to

Temeraire’s discomfiture, she would leap quite far ahead, and come out with some strange notion, which

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was in none of the books Temeraire had read, but which could not at all be disproved or quarreled with.

But she was so jealous of her discoveries that she flew into a temper when Temeraire could inform her

that any of them had been made before, and she was resentful of the hierarchy of the breeding grounds,

which as she saw it denied her the just deserts of her brilliance. Because of her middling size, she had to

make do with an inconvenient poky clearing down in the moorlands, of which she complained