Victory of Eagles (47 page)

Pêcheur-Rayés but valiant, clawing and shrieking heedless of how they themselves were cut about.

Ballista dived into the fray, lashing a couple of them across the heads with her tail, and Requiescat was

charging in to join them, roaring in fury, but the Chasseur was away, fleeing across the Channel, and after

her went five others burdened with dozens of Guardsmen, a cloud of musketry trailing. They were clear.

Across the water, Lien, crumpled, was being supported away over the Channel by her escort, a couple

of Petit Chevaliers, laboring mightily to keep her in the air.

The last of the French dragons broke away and fled. The men yet on the field threw down their guns,

and sank most of them to their knees or to all fours, broken with exhaustion. Nineteen eagle standards

lay trampled and mired in the blood-churned mud, amid twenty thousand corpses.

The day was won.

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Chapter 16

L
AURENCE,IWILL DO you credit; I have never in my life met any man more desirable to hang, and

less convenient,” Wellesley said.

“Oh, and after everything we have done,” Temeraire said, indignantly.

“No more than you ought, and less than some,” Wellesley fired back. “It is a damned pity you could not

get yourself decently killed on the field: better than you managed it.”

Laurence put his hand on Temeraire’s forearm, to restrain. “Yes, sir; and the same could be said of

many another.”

Wellesley—or rather Wellington, now; he had taken the new name with the ducal coronet that was his

reward—snorted. They sat on the portico of Temeraire’s own pavilion—his first opportunity to take up

residence, though Laurence had built it for him months before; their journey to Africa and imprisonment

had intervened, and in the interim it had become a general residence. Even now a few other dragons

napped in corners, and nearby Perscitia was very audibly lecturing her former militia—she had brought

the men along with her after the battle, those who would be bribed by a share of her treasure—in their

mixing of mortar: they were putting up another pavilion.

A tremendous crash heralded the arrival of another load of bricks; Requiescat, assisting with the

construction and fired with enthusiasm, had carried alone what looked to be nearly five tons.

Wellington looked broodingly at the heap, and the foundations for the next pavilion over, which were

busily being excavated by Minnow and half-a-dozen of her fellows: dirt flew at a prodigious rate. “Where

are you getting that brick?”

“We have bought it,” Perscitia said, overhearing this question, “so you needn’t try and complain we are

stealing; we have sold our eagles, and have capital.”

“And God help us all,” Wellington said, tapping his fingers against his thigh. “You ought to be made to

pay damages, out of it; do you know I had nearly a mutiny on my hands, the next day? Not one drop of

beer or rum to be had, among a hundred thousand men, and a good ten thousand casualties.”

“If you did not like it,” Perscitia said, “you ought to have managed the battle more neatly, and then I

shouldn’t have needed to find a way to stop those French dragons for so long.”

This was not a little outrageous, considering that Wellington had managed to stage a battle of two

hundred thousand men, three hundred dragons, and two dozen ships-of-the-line, nearly to his exact

specifications; and to hold worse ground against an army better-trained and better-equipped than his

own, for nearly three hours longer than planned, until the fog had loosened its grip enough for the ships to

make their way in close enough to shore to begin the bombardment. “Damn your impudence,” he

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growled; but Perscitia only flipped her wings at him a little, and loftily went back to her pavilion.

It was mid-morning, the seventeenth of March. Some two weeks had passed since the battle and its

immediate aftermath: lassitude and dull confusion over so great a triumph and disaster mingled. The

survivors had man and beast sunk to the ground and slept where they stood, uneasily, listening to the

chorus of the low sighs of the dying yet upon the field, men starting up with cries whenever a greater

wave came crashing upon the rocky shore.

The next day, without direction, they had begun the immense effort of clearing away the dead. Temeraire

and his cohort had attended to the dragons. Not all were dead; many lingered, broken and slowly

bleeding out their lives, dull-eyed and surrounded by the shattered bodies of their crew. Some were

coaxed with much nudging and support back onto their feet, to limp away over the ground to the

surgeons’ clearing; others, worse injured, could only be given a merciful end. Some of the aviators also

had survived, shielded from the worst of the impact by their dragon’s body, and had to be taken away to

join the other prisoners.

Chalcedony’s body lay stretched upon a green hill, a slash of white and yellow; whole, it seemed, until

they turned him over and saw the shattered red ruin of his chest. The Yellow Reapers nudged their

shoulders beneath him, and in a knot carefully lifted him up to carry off the field.

“But where will we take him?” Gladius said, much subdued.

“We will take him to the old quarantine-grounds,” Temeraire said, “near Dover, where the sick dragons

were buried.”

They had laid Chalcedony and their other dead to rest in another of the great barrow-mounds rising in

the valley of the quarantine: early green shoots were climbing valiantly out from the softening cover of

snow, and the earth smelt richly moist as the dragons turned it over to raise the mound.

More from habit than any conscious thought, they had flown on to Dover looking for food; but habit

served well enough: many dragons of the Corps had returned also to their own clearings, and the ground

crews and herdsmen were bringing in what cattle could be rounded up and shared out. A week later, a

grounds-keeper from the old Wales breeding ground, Lloyd, appeared at Temeraire’s

pavilion—bedraggled but plodding on, too stubbornly fixed in his course to alter it—with the beginning of

a string of cattle.

“Why, Lloyd,” Temeraire said, “where have you got these cows from?” He did not wait for an answer

to begin eating.

“The pens in London,” Lloyd said, accepting with gratitude a cup of tea, though he looked around first

for spirits. “Well, and they were ours first, weren’t they,” he added with a self-righteous air, so perhaps

their provenance was best not inquired after very far.

The dragons from Dover came every so often, and looked wistfully at the work going forward. “I do not

see why we cannot have one at the covert, too,” Maximus said, rumbling in dissatisfaction. “Iskierka

does.”

“Do I have a few thousand pounds to spare on erecting you a temple?” Berkley said. “Nonsense, all this

complaining; you have slept outside all your life and never taken an ounce of harm from it,” but shortly a

collection had quietly been taken up, among the officers, and a friendly rivalry begun among the dragons

to see whose should be completed first.

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Through such visitors, Laurence had some word from London, what news anyone could scarcely avoid

hearing: the King retired to Kensington, and the Prince of Wales made regent for him; Bonaparte

successfully escaped to Paris, though with his tail between his legs. The newspapers were full of patriotic

fervor and mourning for Nelson and the lost seamen, spoken of as martyrs for their nation.

All the while, no-one had sought to prevent their coming and going, nor paid them any official notice, but

Laurence had known the situation an ephemeral one. The wheels of government might yet be some time

restoring their course, after so great a disruption, but inevitably they would fall into the cart-tracks:

treason could not be simply ignored.

Wellington’s arrival had surprised him only that it was Wellington and not Jane sent to demand his

surrender, or some lesser officer; but it did not encourage him. “Sir,” Laurence said, “I trust you have

sufficient demands upon your time you did not come for the purpose of inquiring after our work. If you

want something of me, I hope you will speak freely.”

“But Laurence is not going to prison, or to be hanged,” Temeraire put in, “and if that is what you came

for, you may go away again: come with an army and take him, and try if you can.”

“We are not going to start a pitched battle against you and your pack of rogues, if that is what you

mean,” Wellington said. “I know damned well about your little pact—that Longwing and that Regal

Copper, who are going about Dover telling everyone that if we should come against you, they will fight

with you, and so should every other dragon, or their captains will be taken away next?”

Laurence looked at Temeraire, who had the grace to look abashed, but not very, and retorted, “You

haven’t any right to complain if I do not trust you; you have tried to take Laurence before, and now

where is our pay, that we ought to have received? And the coverts, which you promised to open to us.”

“That is enough,” Wellington said. “You had my word, and my word is good; you will have your coverts

and your pay, and no later than any other scoundrel who stood up under fire. It will be half a year before

the Government can pay off all its arrears, and you will have to lump it until then. You are not starving, at

least, which is more than many an Englishman can say.”

“Well, then,” Temeraire said, a little mollified, “I am sorry if I was rude, if you will keep your promises,

and you do not mean to try and put Laurence in prison; then what do you want, after all?”

“What I want,” Wellington said, “—or rather what His Majesty’s Government wants, is to be shot of

you. Submit to the King’s justice, and your sentence will be commuted, to transportation and labor.”

Temeraire snorted, at
justice,
and with much suspicion had to have the sentence explained to him, that

the Government meant Laurence should be sent abroad to the colony of New South Wales. “But that is

on the other side of the world; that is as bad as putting you in prison again,” Temeraire protested. “I will

certainly not let them send you so far away from me.”

“No,” Laurence said, watching Wellington’s face. “That, I imagine, is not the intention. Sir, it cannot be

wise to send Temeraire away, not when the French yet have Lien. Whatever you may think of me, it is

too high a price.”

“You are a little dull to-day, Laurence,” Wellington said. “The
price
is giving you your life, and their

Lordships think it cheap, as a way to be rid of a dragon who, if he takes it into his head, can sink half the

shipping in Dover harbor.”

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Temeraire flared out his ruff. “That is very rude,” he said. “I would never do anything so cruel to the

fishermen, and the merchants; whyever would I?”

The story of Lien’s feat had crossed the country entire at wild-fire speed, carried across the country with

news of victory and Nelson’s death by the victorious soldiers marching back to London and their homes.

It had not gained much in the telling: there was not much to gain, either in horror or in amazement. But

Laurence was dismayed to find the fear which it had whipped up, thus transferred to such irrational

action, and said so. “If this is a dreadful weapon, the French possess it also; merely to ignore it ourselves

does no good, any more than you would melt down your own cannon because the French had fired one

upon you.”

“When they have built a cannon which chooses, now and again, to turn around and fire into their faces

instead, and means to persuade all their other cannon to do the same, I will gladly leave it to them,”

Wellington said. “No, Laurence, you see before you a convert: you have entirely convinced me that the

beasts are sapient, and now I am damned if I will let you make them political. We can better support a

defense against one solitary beast than your Whiggish rabblerousing among ten thousand of them.”

“But if you agree we are intelligent, not that it is not perfectly obvious, then you cannot deny we have

every right to be political,” Temeraire said.

“I can and will deny you or any man or beast the right to tear apart the foundations of the state,”

Wellington said. “Rights be damned; we will never hear an end of anyone crying for their rights.”

When he had gone, Temeraire looked sidelong at Laurence. “I am sure no-one can make us go, if we