Empire of Ivory (16 page)

Temeraire shuddered, then with decision drew breath and

roared out: but over the French dragon, not directly at

her. She gave a startled shrill cry of alarum, backwinging

as if she was trying to reverse her course, her pace

dropping off to nothing for a moment. With a convulsive

gathered lunge, Temeraire was above her and folding his

wings, bearing her bodily down towards the earth below:

soft pale yellow sand, heaped in rolling dunes, and the

little French dragon went tumbling pell-mell as they plowed

into the dirt behind her, oceanic waves of dust billowing

up in a cloud around them.

They slid across the ground some hundred yards, Laurence

blind and trying to shield his mouth from the flying sand,

hearing Temeraire hissing in displeasure and the French

dragon squalling. Then "Hah!" Temeraire said triumphantly,

"je vous ai attrapé il ne faut pas pleurer; oh, I beg your

pardon, I am very sorry," and Laurence wiped the grit from

his face and nostrils, coughing violently, and clearing his

stinging vision found himself looking almost directly into

the alarming fiery orange of a Longwing's slit-pupiled eye.

Excidium turned his head to sneeze, acid droplets spraying

involuntarily with the gesture, smoking briefly as the sand

absorbed them. Laurence gazed in horror as the great head

swung wearily back and Excidium said, in a harsh and

rasping voice, "What have you done? You ought not have come

here," while the sand-cloud settled to show him one among a

half-a-dozen Longwings, Lily raising her head out of her

shielding wing beside him, all of them huddled close in the

sand-pit that was their place of quarantine.

Chapter 5

THEY HAD NO companion in their isolated quarantine-meadow

but little Sauvignon, the French courier-beast, who had not

even the solace of her captain's presence. He, poor child,

had been marched away in irons against her good behavior,

while she made piteous cries under the restraint of

Temeraire's reluctant but irresistible hold upon her back,

his great claw nearly pinning her to the ground entirely.

She huddled upon herself after he was gone, and was only

gradually persuaded by Temeraire to eat a little, and then

to talk. "Voici un joli cochon," Temeraire said, nudging

over one of the spit-roasted hogs which Gong Su had

prepared for him, lacquered in dark orange sauce. "Votre

capitaine's'inquiétera's'il apprend que vous ne mangez pas,

vraiment."

She took a few bites, shortly proceeding to greater

enthusiasm once Temeraire had explained to her that the

recipe was à la Chinois: her naïve remark that she was

eating "comme la Reine Blanche" and a little more

conversation confirmed to Laurence that Lung Tien Lien,

their bitter enemy, was now securely established in Paris,

and deep in Napoleon's councils. The little courier, full

of hero-worship for the other Celestial, was not to be led

into exposing any secret plans, if she knew of any, but

Laurence needed no revelations to tell him that Lien's

voice was sure to be loud for invasion, if Napoleon

required any additional persuasion, and that she would

strive to keep his attention firmly fixed upon Britain and

no other part of the world.

"She says Napoleon is having the streets widened, so Lien

may walk through all the city," Temeraire said,

disgruntled, "and he has already built her a pavilion

beside his palace. It does not seem fair that we have such

difficulties here, when she has everything her own way."

Laurence answered only dully; he cared very little anymore

for such larger affairs, when he was to watch Temeraire die

as Victoriatus had died, reduced to that hideous bloody

wreckage; a devastation far more complete than any Lien

might have engineered from the deepest wells of malice.

"You were with them only a few moments; let us hope," Jane

had said, but no more than that, and in her lack of

encouragement Laurence saw Temeraire's death-warrant signed

and sealed. All the sand-pit was surely thick with the

contagion; the Longwings had been penned up there for the

better part of a year, the effluvia buried in the sand

along with their poisonous acid.

He understood, belatedly, why he had seen none of his

former colleagues, why Berkley and Harcourt had not

answered his letters. Granby came to visit him, once: they

could neither of them manage more than half-a-dozen words,

painfully stilted; Granby consciously avoiding the subject

of his own healthy Iskierka, and Laurence not wishing in

the least to speak of Temeraire's chances, especially not

where Temeraire himself might hear, and learn to share his

own despair. At present Temeraire had no concern for

himself, secure in the confidence of his own strength, a

comfort which Laurence had no desire to take from him

before the inevitable course of the disease should manage

the job.

"Je ne me sens pas bien," Sauvignon said, on the morning of

the fourth day, waking herself and them with a violent

burst of sneezing; she was taken away to join the other

sick beasts, leaving them to wait alone for the first

herald of disease.

Jane had come to see him daily, with encouraging words as

long as he wished to hear them, and brandy for when he

could no longer; but she reluctantly said, coming to see

him on the unhappy day, "I am damned sorry to speak of this

so bluntly, Laurence, but you must forgive me. Would

Temeraire have begun to think of breeding yet, do you

know?"

"Breeding," Laurence said bitterly, and looked away; it was

natural, of course, that they should wish to preserve the

bloodline of the rarest of all breeds, acquired with such

difficulty, and now also in the possession of their enemy;

yet to him it could be only a desire to replace what should

be irreplaceable.

"I know," she said gently, "but we must expect it to come

on him any day now, and mostly they are disinclined once

they get sick; and who can blame them."

Her courage reproached him; she suffered as much herself

with no outward show, and he could not yield to his own

feelings before her. In any case there was no shading of

the truth to be had; he could not lie, and was forced to

confess that Temeraire had "grown very fond of a female

Imperial, in the retinue of the Emperor, while we were in

Peking."

"Well, I am glad to hear it: I must ask if he would oblige

us with a mating, to begin as soon as tonight, now he has

been without question exposed," Jane said. "Felicita is not

very poorly, and informed her captain two days ago that she

thinks she has another egg in her; she has already given us

two, good creature, before she fell sick. She is only a

Yellow Reaper, a middle-weight; it is not the sort of cross

any breeder of sense would choose to make, but I think any

Celestial blood must be better than none, and we have few

enough who are in any state to bear."

"But I have never seen her in my life," Temeraire said

puzzledly, when the question was put to him. "Why should I

wish to mate with her?"

"It is akin to an arranged marriage of state, I suppose,"

Laurence said, uncertain how to answer; it seemed to him

belatedly a coarse sort of proposal, as though Temeraire

were a prize stallion to be set on to a mare, neither of

their preferences consulted, and not even a prior meeting.

"You need do nothing you do not like," he added abruptly;

he would not see this forced on Temeraire, in the least,

any more than he should have lent himself to such an

enterprise.

"Well, it is not as though I expect I would mind,"

Temeraire said, "if she would like it so very much, and I

am rather bored only sitting about all day," he added, with

rather less modesty than candor, "only I do not understand

at all why she should."

Jane laughed, when Laurence had brought her this answer,

and went out to the clearing and explained, "She would like

to have an egg from you, Temeraire."

"Oh." Temeraire immediately puffed out his chest deeply in

gratification, his ruff coming up, and with a gracious air

bowed his head. "Then certainly I will oblige her," he

declared, and as soon as Jane had gone demanded that he be

washed and his Chinese talon-sheaths, stored away as

impractical for regular use, be brought out and put on him.

"She is so damned happy to be of use, I could weep," said

Felicita's captain Brodin, a dark-haired Welshman not many

years older than Laurence, with a craggy face which looked

made for the grim and brooding lines into which it had

presently settled. They had left the two dragons outside in

Felicita's clearing to arrange the matter to their own

liking, which by the sound they were doing with great

enthusiasm, despite the difficulties which ought to have

been inherent in managing relations between two dragons of

such disparate size. "And I know I have nothing to complain

of," he added bitterly, "she does better than nine-tenths

of the Corps, and the surgeons think she will last ten

years, at this rate of progress."

He poured out an ample measure of wine, and left the bottle

on the table between them, with a second and third waiting.

They did not speak much, but sat drinking together into the

night, drooping gradually lower over their cups until the

dragons fell quiet, and the shuddering aspen trees went

still. Laurence was not quite sleeping, but he could not

think of moving or even to lift his head, weighted with a

thick smothering stupor like a blanket; all the world and

time dulled away.

Brodin stirred him awake in his chair in the small hours of

the morning. "We will see you again tonight?" he asked

tiredly, as Laurence stood and bent back his shoulders to

crack the angry muscles loose.

"Best so, as I understand it," Laurence said, looking at

his hands in vague surprise: they trembled.

He went out to collect Temeraire, whose profoundly smug and

indecorous satisfaction might have put him to the blush,

were he disposed to be in any way critical of what

pleasures Temeraire might enjoy under the present

circumstances. "She has already had two, Laurence,"

Temeraire said, laying himself back down to sleep in his

own clearing, drowsy but jubilant, "and she is quite sure

she will have another; she said she could not tell at all

that it was the first time I had sired."

"But is it?" Laurence asked, feeling slow and stupid, "Did

not you and Mei...?" Belatedly the nature of the question

stopped him.

"That had nothing to do with eggs," Temeraire said

dismissively, "it is quite different," and coiling his tail

neatly around himself went to sleep, leaving Laurence all

the more confused, as he could not dream of prying further.

They repeated the visit the following evening. Laurence

looked at the bottle and did not take it up again, but with

an effort engaged Brodin upon other things: the customs of

the Chinese and the Turks, and their sea-journey to China;

the campaign in Prussia and the great battle of Jena, which

he could re-create in considerable detail, having observed

the whole cataclysm from Temeraire's back.

This was not, perhaps, the best means for relieving

anxiety; when he had laid out all that whirling offensive,

and the solid massed ranks of the Prussian army, in the

form of walnut shells, were swept clean from the table, he

and Brodin sat back and looked at one another, and then

Brodin stood restlessly up and paced his small cabin. "I

would as soon he came across while some of us still can

fight, if only I could give more than ninepence for our

chances if he did."

It was a dreadful thing to hope for an invasion, with

unspoken the suggestion of a desire to be killed in one:

perilously close, Laurence felt uneasily, to mortal sin, an

extreme of selfishness even if it did not mean that England

would be laid bare after, and he was troubled to find a

sympathetic instinct in himself. "We must not speak so.

They do not fear their own deaths, and God forbid that we

should teach them to do so, or show less courage than they

themselves do."

"Do you think they do not learn fear by the end?" Brodin

laughed unpleasantly and short. "Obversaria scarcely knew

Lenton, by the end, and he took her out of the shell with

his own hands. She could only cry for water, and for rest,

and he could give her none. You may think me a heathen dog

if you like: I would thank God or Bonaparte or the black

Devil himself for giving her a clean death in battle."

He poured the bottle, and when he was finished Laurence

reached for it across the table.

"The breeders prefer two weeks," Jane said, "but we will be

glad for as long as he feels himself up to the task," so

Laurence dragged himself from his bed the next day, his