Empire of Ivory (3 page)

alternately terrified at the descent of a whole company of

dragons onto their quiet hamlet, and elated by the success

of their new shore battery, put into place scarcely two

months ago and never before tried. Half-a-dozen courierbeasts driven off and one Pou-de-Ciel slain, overnight

became a Grand Chevalier and several Flammes-de-Gloire, all

hideously killed; the town could talk of nothing else, and

the local militia strutted through the streets to general

satisfaction.

The townspeople grew less enthusiastic, however, after

Arkady had eaten four of their sheep; the other ferals had

made only slightly less extravagant depredations, and

Temeraire himself had seized upon a couple of cows, shaggy

yellow-haired Highland cattle, sadly reported afterwards to

be prize-winning, and devoured them to the hooves and

horns.

"They were very tasty," Temeraire said apologetically; and

turned his head aside to spit out some of the hair.

Laurence was not inclined to stint the dragons in the

least, after their long and arduous flight, and on this

occasion was perfectly willing to sacrifice his ordinary

respect for property to their comfort. Some of the farmers

made noises about payment, but Laurence did not mean to try

and feed the bottomless appetites of the ferals out of his

own pocket. The Admiralty might reach into theirs, if they

had nothing better to do than sit before the fire and

whistle while a battle was carrying on outside their

windows, and men dying for lack of a little assistance. "We

will not be a charge upon you for long. As soon as we hear

from Edinburgh, I expect we will be called to the covert

there," he said flatly, in reply to the protests. The

horse-courier left at once.

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, 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

sixty-three men out of a thousand that afternoon, some of

them nameless, in a long and shallow grave laboriously

pickaxed out of the frozen ground. The survivors 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 came back from Edinburgh only a few hours later, but

with orders so queer as to be incomprehensible. They began

reasonably enough: the Prussians to be left behind in

Dunbar and quartered in the town; and the dragons, as

expected, summoned to the city. 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 at all, not even Temeraire: instead Laurence was

ordered to leave them sleeping in the streets about the

castle, and to report to the admiral in command in the

morning.

He stifled his first reaction, and spoke 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; 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

Edinburgh; but the castle shone out for them like a beacon

with its windows and walls bright with torches, on its high

rocky hill above the shadowed expanse of the covert, with

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 between them, giving

the city the appearance of a spear-pit. "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 old cathedral square without bringing down more than a

few lumps of ornamental masonry; the ferals, being all of

them considerably smaller, had less difficulty. They were

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 inquires of

Temeraire as he did so.

"That is where people sleep, is it not, Laurence? Like a

pavilion," Temeraire said, trying cautiously to rearrange

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 eventually disposed of themselves in some

reasonable comfort; the ferals, used to sleeping in roughhewn caves, were even 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

said consolingly, even with 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. It was one thing to find themselves in

rough quarters while on campaign, where no man could expect

better, and might be glad for a cow-byre to lay his head

in. To be deposited like baggage on the cold unhealthy

stones, stained years-dark with street refuse, was

something other; the dragons might at least have been

granted use of the open farmland outside the city.

And it was no conscious malice: only the common unthinking

assumption by which men treated dragons as inconvenient if

elevated livestock, to be managed and herded without

consideration for their own sentiments; an assumption so

ingrained that Laurence had recognized it as outrageous

only when forced to do so by the marked contrast with the

conditions he had observed in China, where dragons were

received as full members of society.

"Well," Temeraire said reasonably, while Laurence laid out

his own bedroll inside the house beside his head, with the

windows open so they might continue to speak, "we knew how

matters were here, Laurence, so we cannot be very

surprised. Besides, I did not come to make myself more

comfortable, or I might have stayed in China; we must

improve the circumstances of all our friends. Not," he

added, "that I would not like my own pavilion; but I would

rather have liberty. Dyer, will you pray get that bit of

gristle out from between my teeth? I cannot reach forward

to put my claw upon it."

Dyer startled up from his half-doze upon Temeraire's back

and, fetching a small pick from their baggage, scrambled

obediently into Temeraire's opened jaws to scrape away.

"You would have more luck in achieving the latter, if there

were more men ready to grant you the former," Laurence

said. "I do not mean to counsel you to despair; we must

not, indeed. But I had hoped to find on our arrival more

respect than when we left, not less; which must have been a

material advantage to our cause."

Temeraire waited until Dyer had climbed out again to

answer. "I am sure we must be listened to on the merits,"

he said, a large assumption, which Laurence was not at all

sanguine enough to share, "and all the more, when I have

seen Maximus and Lily, and they are ranged with me. And

perhaps also Excidium, for he has been in so many battles:

no one could help but be impressed with him. I am sure they

will see all the wisdom of my arguments; they will not be

so stupid as Eroica and the others were," Temeraire added,

with shades of resentment. The Prussian dragons had at

first rather disdained his attempts at convincing them of

the merits of greater liberty and education, being as fond

of their tradition of rigorous military order as ever were

their handlers, and preferring instead to ridicule as

effete the habits of thought which Temeraire had acquired

in China.

"I hope you will forgive me for bluntness; but I am afraid

even if you had the hearts and minds of every dragon in

Britain aligned with your own, it would make very little

difference: as a party you have not very much influence in

Parliament," Laurence said.

"Perhaps we do not, but I imagine if we were to go to

Parliament, we would be attended to," Temeraire said, an

image most convincing, if not likely to produce the sort of

attention which Temeraire desired.

Laurence said as much, and added, "We must find some better

means of drawing sympathy to your cause, from those who

have the influence to foster political change. I am only

sorry I cannot apply to my father for advice, as relations

stand between us."

"Well, I am not sorry, at all," Temeraire said, putting

back his ruff. "I am sure he would not have helped us; and

we can do perfectly well without him." Aside from his

loyalty, which would have resented coldness to Laurence on

any grounds, he not unnaturally viewed Lord Allendale's

objections to the Aerial Corps as objections to his own

person; and despite their never having met, he felt

violently as a matter of course towards anyone whose

sentiments would have seen Laurence separated from him.

"My father has been engaged with politics half his life,"

Laurence said: with the effort towards abolition in

particular, a movement met with as much scorn, at its

inception, as Laurence anticipated for Temeraire's own. "I

assure you his advice would be of the greatest value; and I

do mean to effect a repair, if I can, which would allow our

consulting him."

"I would as soon have kept it, myself," Temeraire muttered,

meaning the elegant red vase which Laurence had purchased

in China as a conciliatory gift. It had since traveled with

them five thousand miles and more, and Temeraire had grown

inclined to be as possessive of it as any of his own

treasures; he now sighed to see it finally sent away, with

Laurence's brief and apologetic note.

But Laurence was all too conscious of the difficulties

which faced them; and of his own inadequacy to forward so

vast and complicated a cause. He had been still a boy when

Wilberforce had come to their house, the guest of one of

his father's political friends, newly inspired with fervor

against the slave trade and beginning the parliamentary

campaign to abolish it. Twenty years ago now; and despite

the most heroic efforts by men of ability and wealth and

power greater than his own, in those twenty years surely a

million souls or more had yet been carried away from their

native shores into bondage.

Temeraire had been hatched in the year five; for all his

intelligence, he could not yet truly grasp the weary slow

struggle which should be required to bring men to a

political position, however moral and just, however

necessary, in any way contrary to their immediate selfinterest. Laurence bade him good-night without further

disheartening advice; but as he closed the windows, which

began to rattle gently from the sleeping dragon's breath,

the distance to the covert beyond the castle walls seemed

to him less easily bridged than all the long miles which

had brought them home from China.