Victory of Eagles (39 page)

that would be worse for them; so if you ask me, it would really have been making
up
for the treason, to

take it,” which struck Temeraire as a very just point, and one he rather wished he had thought of at the

time.

“Only, I did not realize Laurence would lose his capital,” Temeraire said unhappily, “so I did not think it

would be so important.”

“Well, well, you are a young fellow yet,” Gentius said, relenting a little, “and you have time to make it up.

Win battles, take some prizes while you are at it, and it will all come right in the end—Government will

do you up right, if you are only heroic enough.”

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“But I have been
very
heroic,” Temeraire protested, “and they have not been fair at all; they have even

tried to take Laurence away from me.”

“You ain’t been the right sort of heroic,” Gentius said. “You must win battles, that is the road. That is

how my first captain was made, you know; they did not use to let Longwing captains be captain,

properly. They called her only Miss, and there was a fellow aboard she was supposed to listen to, only

he was a lummox and managed to be drunk out of his wits just when we had a battle to go to, and all our

formation waiting.” He snorted. “So she said to the crew—‘Gentlemen’—” and here he paused, rubbing

his forelegs restlessly against one another, with a frowning expression.

They waited, and waited, and waited; although Temeraire was almost quivering with impatience: if

Gentius’s captain had gone from
Miss
to
Captain,
surely Laurence might have his rank repaired, in the

same fashion—

“It is difficult to remember, the way she said it, exact,” Gentius said defensively. “They don’t talk as they

used to, but I think I have it: she said, ‘Gentlemen, seeing that our duty consisteth in going to war, I

should judge this a sad excuse to fail in it, insofar as we expect to contrive without Captain—without

Captain—’ Bother,” Gentius muttered, interrupting himself, “I have forgot his name. But she said it,” he

went on, “and she said, ‘insofar as we expect to contrive without his company, no worser an outcome

upon the field than our absence will ensure, the which I will stand surety for: therefore will I still go, and

any man who wisheth not to venture himself, under my command, may remain behind.’”

He rolled triumphantly through to the end of his recitation, but then had to wait for applause while his

audience worked out just what had been said. “But I don’t understand, did you win the battle or not?”

Messoria said finally, puzzled.

“Of course we won the battle,” Gentius said irritably. “And we did a sight better without Captain

Haulding—hah, I have remembered his name after all—aboard, I can tell you that. I was writ up in the

newspapers, even, and Government gave over and made her captain properly: because we had done

well,” he finished, with a meaningful nudge to Temeraire’s shoulder. “That is the road: win battles for

them, and they will come about, see if they don’t.”

“That is all very well,” Iskierka remarked, “as soon as they let us
have
some battles. There he comes

now, ask him when we shall be fighting,” and she nudged Temeraire: Laurence was coming down the

path from the castle.

Temeraire hardly knew how to look Laurence in the face; bitterly conscious now of his guilt, he

half-expected Laurence to upbraid him at once. But Laurence said only, to Roland and to Demane and

Sipho, “Go and rouse up the other captains; at once, if you please,” and stood waiting and silent until the

others had been drawn from their uncomfortable bivouacs. “Gentlemen, I have been commissioned

temporarily, and given command of this expedition; you will find your written orders there, and I trust

they allow of no ambiguity.”

Laurence had a sheaf of papers in his hands, packets each sealed separately and inscribed with the other

captains’ names; he handed the orders to Sipho to carry around.

“Damned paperwork, with Bonaparte in our parlor,” Berkley muttered. “Trust the Army for this sort of

thing—”

“You will oblige me greatly, Berkley, by putting those orders by safe, somewhere they cannot come to

harm,” Laurence said, when Berkley would have crumpled the parchment. “I would be glad to know the

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chain of command quite clear, to anyone who should inquire, in future.” All the other captains paused and

looked at him, and Temeraire wondered puzzled why it should matter; the red wax seals affixed to the

parchment were attractive, but they might be made anytime one wished; and Laurence had not kept one

himself.

But Laurence did not explain further. Instead he went on, “The French are harassing our farmers with

raiding bands, and so supplying the wants of their army. Our duty is to stop this predation, and so far as

is practicable without undue risk to the dragons, to reduce the forces available to Napoleon.”

There was a pause, and then Granby said, “—you mean—his irregulars?”

“I do,” Laurence said.

“What does he expect us to do with the prisoners, cart them about with us in the belly-rigging?” Berkley

said.

“There will be no quarter given,” Laurence said. There was a heavy finality to his tone, which somehow

warned off any other questions; the captains did not say anything even to one another. “We will begin in

Northumberland, tomorrow, and work our way south. We leave at dawn, gentlemen; that is all.”

They stood a moment longer looking at their orders and at Laurence, with oddly uncertain expressions;

in the end they all drifted away back to their tents without another word said. Temeraire himself was at a

standstill. He could not understand why Laurence should have taken the command.
He
was already in

command, and it was important, was it not, for a dragon to have the post—Laurence himself had said as

much. Temeraire did not mean to be selfish anymore, at all, now that he knew he had been selfish; if

Laurence wished the command, of course he should have it, and yet, if it mattered for politics—for all the

dragons—

He struggled over it; ventured at last timidly to ask, and added hurriedly, “I do not mind at all, for

myself,
personally,
I am very happy that you are restored, and a captain now again. Only, if it is

important—”

He was yet mostly coiled up with the others, but everyone else was asleep; the other men were gone

into their tents. Laurence had told Roland and Demane and Sipho to go and sleep in his tent, and had

stayed out, wrapped in his coat and cloak and looking over maps, which he had laid out on a small

camp-table; he was marking them with a small wax pencil, here and there.

“In the present case, it is the more important you should not be in command, or anyone but myself,”

Laurence said.

There was something odd in his voice: queerly flat, as if he did not much care what he was saying, and

he did not look up from his work. Temeraire wished very much it were not so dark, and he could see

Laurence’s face. “In any case,” Laurence added, “whether the courts will believe you truly the

commander is a proposition yet untried; and I hope you would not risk the lives and the careers of the

other captains, unconsenting, for the sake of your precedence.”

“But,” Temeraire said, “are they not risking their lives anyway?”

“In battle,” Laurence said, “not afterwards.”

Temeraire did not much want to pursue; however dreadful to think Laurence was angry with him, it

Page 141

would be all the worse to
know,
to hear it from Laurence himself. “Laurence,” Temeraire said anyway,

bravely, “pray explain to me; I know—I know I have let you be hurt, because I did not try to understand

well enough, and I do not mean to let it happen again, only I cannot help it, if I do not know.”

Laurence did look up at that, his eyes briefly catching a reflection from the castle upon the hill. “There is

nothing to help; I am in no danger.”

“If
they
should be, so should you,” Temeraire said.

“I cannot be condemned twice,” Laurence said. “Pray get some rest: we have a hundred miles to fly in

the morning.”

“I WANT HIM BLED,”Wellesley had said, in the tower room of Edinburgh Castle, standing over the

map of England swarming with blue markers, with the icy rain lashing at the windows. Distantly, down the

hall, the muffled sound of the King’s voice was rising in some complaint; to Laurence it seemed very

loud. “Every man to him is worth five to us. He must bring them across at great expense, and he must

spend his dragons’ strength to do it. And his men live off the land—he relies upon them raiding the

countryside, feeding themselves and driving in cattle for the dragons, and keeping his supply lines meager

and short.”

“You mean you wish us to attack his irregulars,” Laurence broke in, tired of evasions.

“His supply-lines, his foragers, his scouts.” Wellesley thumped the map. “He has hundreds of small

raiding parties scattered throughout the country north of London; he cannot survive long without them,

and they are exposed. You will destroy every one of them you can find.

“You will not engage,” he added, “any substantial party, with other dragons in number, or artillery: I do

not mean to lose any of the beasts.”

Laurence had expected something of the sort, from the tenor of Wellesley’s summons; he was not

surprised, and heard it with dull acceptance. The strategy was sound, coldly speaking: if Bonaparte

began to lose men quicker than he could replace them, and found his supply growing short, he would

have to accept a battle on whatever terms it was offered him, or withdraw entirely.

But dragons were not put to such a use in civilized warfare; Wellesley knew it, and so did he.

Pragmatism alone held them too valuable to risk and too expensive to supply, save against a more

substantial target, of strategic importance, than a small party of light foot armed only with muskets. But it

was not pragmatism but sentiment which with a single voice called inhuman the exceptions made from

time to time. There was little that aroused more horror and more condemnation from ordinary men than

the prospect of dragons set loose against them; men had been court-martialed and hanged for it, even by

their own side.

“Pillaging,” Wellesley added after a moment, “of course, cannot be tolerated—”

“There will be none,” Laurence said, “save what must be requisitioned to feed the dragons. Is there

anything else?”

Wellesley looked at him narrowly. “Will you do it?”

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There was little enough Laurence could now do, to repair what he had done; he could not restore the

lives of the slain, or raise up ships from the Channel floor that had been sunk, or make recompense to all

the ordinary countrymen whose livelihood and possessions had been raided away by an invading army.

He could not repair his father’s health, or the King’s, or Edith’s happiness. But he had already stained

himself irrevocably with dishonor, for the sake of an enemy nation and a tyrant’s greed; he could stain

himself a little more for the sake of his own, and shield with his own ruined reputation those who yet had

one to protect.

“I do not need written orders for myself,” he had answered Wellesley. “But I require them for those

other officers of the Corps involved: you may say merely that they must follow my orders.”

Wellesley had understood very well, what Laurence offered him, and he had not refused it. The orders

were written, and given him, and he had left Wellesley in his tower, and gone down and down, to the

waiting covert.

It was a silent, grim camp in the morning, as they harnessed the dragons and the crews went aboard;

twice or more, Laurence thought Harcourt almost meant to speak to him. But in the end they all mounted

up and flew with no words exchanged. The cold wind in Laurence’s face was welcome, and the steady

beat of Temeraire’s wings, and the silence; his small crew did not address him, and sitting forward on

Temeraire’s neck, they might have been alone in a wide-open sky; the rolling unmarred moors beneath

them knew nothing of war or boundaries.

Wellesley’s spies had reported already a dozen raiding bands or more, moving through the North

Country, stealing from farms and seizing cattle; Laurence had marked them on his map, as best the

reports could place them. But the enemy provided them instead a convenient beacon of smoke, easily

visible ten miles off. It was a thin black coil turning lazily upwards from the roof of a great farmhouse, the

fire mostly extinguished by the time they arrived: the rest of the village stood empty, when the dragons

came down, but for two men in homespun: villagers, not soldiers, laid out in the road dead, with stab

wounds flower-red upon their bellies; they had been bayoneted.

“The villagers shan’t come out while we have the dragons here,” Harcourt said. “If we leave them

outside—”

“No,” Laurence said; he did not mean to waste time on such things. He cupped his hands around his

mouth and shouted, “We are officers of the King. You will come out at once, or we will have the dragons

tear down the houses until you do.”

There was no reply, no stirring. “Temeraire,” Laurence said, and indicated a small neat cottage near the

end of the village lane. “Bring it down, if you please.”