Victory of Eagles (8 page)

He might look at the door, but he could not open it.

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A brief glaze of rain washed the window and thinned the smoke outside. He went to stand by the

window, though he could not see anything but a general grey dimness. The sun, if it had come up, stayed

hidden; he rather felt than knew it was past dawn.

The knob rattled in the door, and the door opened. Laurence turned and stopped, staring, at the man on

the other side: the familiar but unexpected lean face, travel-leathered, and the Oriental features. “I hope I

find you in good health,” Tharkay said. “Will you come with me? I believe there is still a danger of fire.”

The guards had vanished; the house was entirely deserted, but for a couple of men who had wandered in

drunk off the street and were sleeping in the front hall. Laurence stepped over their legs and out into the

morning: a thin pallid haze of smoke and false dawn lying over the docks and drifting out to sea. Glass

and broken slate and charred wood littered the street, and unspeakable trash; a couple of sweepers

lugubriously pushed their brooms down the middle of the lane, doing not very much to help.

Tharkay led Laurence down a side alley, where the dead body of a horse, stripped of saddle and bridle,

lay blocking the way; a young kestrel with long trailing jesses perched on its side, tearing occasionally at

the flesh and uttering a satisfied cry. Tharkay held out his hand and whistled, and the kestrel came back

to him, to be hooded and secured upon his shoulder.

“I am three weeks back from the Pamirs,” Tharkay said. “I brought another dozen feral beasts for your

ranks; in good time, it seems. Roland sent me to bring you in.”

“But how came you here?” Laurence said, while they picked their way onwards through the

unfashionable backstreets. The town looked very much as though it had been already sacked, and those

windows and doors yet intact were all shut tight, some boarded, giving the house-fronts an unfriendly

glowering air. “How you knew I was in the town—”

“The town was not the difficulty; the wreckers off the coast knew which way the
Goliath
’s boats had

gone,” Tharkay said. “I was here before you were, I imagine; finding where you had been stowed was

more difficult. I foolishly went to the trouble to get these, first,” showing Laurence a folded packet of

papers, “from the port admiral, in the assumption he would know the whereabouts of the prisoner he was

assigning to me, but he left me in the hall two hours, and quarreled with me another, and only when I had

his signature did he at last confess to having not the least knowledge where you were, with the harbor on

fire.”

They came to a bare clearing, a courier-covert, where little Gherni waited for them fidgeting anxiously;

she hissed at Tharkay urgently. He answered her in the same tangled dragon-language, which Laurence

could not make much sense of, and then clambered up her scanty rigging to her back, pointing Laurence

at the couple of handholds to get himself aboard.

“We may have some difficulty,” Tharkay said. “Bonaparte’s men are still nearly all on the coast, but his

dragons are going deep inland. Fifty thousand, I believe,” he answered, when Laurence asked how many

men, “and as many as two hundred beasts, if one cares to believe the figure. The Corps has fallen back

with the rest of the army, to Woolwich. I believe to await Bonaparte’s pleasure; why they are being so

courteous, you would have to ask the generals.”

“I thank you for coming,” Laurence said; Tharkay had risked a great deal, with such geography: half

Bonaparte’s army landed somewhere between them and the Army. “You have taken service, then?” he

asked, looking at Tharkay’s coat: he wore gold bars, a captain’s rank. It was not uncommon in the Army

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for a man to be commissioned when he was needed, if a rarer phenomenon in the Corps, where the

dragon made the rank, than in other branches. But with Tharkay one of the few who could speak with

the feral dragons of the Pamirs, it was no surprise the Corps had wanted him; more of one that he had

accepted.

“For now.” Tharkay shrugged.

“No-one could accuse you of an interested choice,” Laurence said, too grim for even black humor, with

the smell of the burning city in his nostrils.

“One of its advantages,” Tharkay said. “Any fool could throw in his lot with a victor.”

Laurence did not ask why he had been sent. Fifty thousand men landed was answer enough: Temeraire

must be wanted, and Laurence himself the only, however undesirable, means to come by his services; it

was a pragmatic and a temporary choice only, nothing to give him hope of forgiveness either personal or

legal. Tharkay himself volunteered no more: Gherni was already springing aloft, and the vigor of the wind

blew all possible words away.

The sky had the peculiar late-autumn crispness, very blue and clear and cloudless, beautiful flying

weather, and they had scarcely been half an hour aloft before Gherni suddenly plunged beneath them,

and trembling went to ground in a wooded clearing of pines. Laurence had seen nothing, except perhaps

a few specks drifting that might have been wandering birds; but he and Tharkay pushed forward to the

edge of the woods and, peering out from the shade, saw at length two shapes leap up from the ground,

and come closer. Two big grey-and-brown dragons, gliding with lazy assurance, and well they might:

Grand Chevaliers, the largest of the French heavy-weights, only a little smaller than Regal Coppers. They

were messy with recent pillaging, and each had what looked like a dozen cows dangling stupefied in their

belly-netting, these occasionally uttering groggy and perplexed moans, and pawing ineffectually at the air

with their hooves.

The pair went by calling to each other cheerfully in French too colloquial and rapid for Laurence to

follow, their crews laughing. Their shadows passed like scudding clouds, a moment’s complete blotting of

the sun, while Gherni held very still beneath the branches. Her eyes were the only part of her which

moved, tracking the great dragons’ passage overhead.

She could not be persuaded back aloft, afterwards, but curled up as deeply as she could wedge herself

into the trees, and proposed instead that they should bring her something to eat. She would not go again

until it was dark. That the French Fleur-de-Nuits would be out then, in their turn, was not an argument

which Laurence wished very much to attempt on her, for fear of her refusing to go on at all. Tharkay only

shrugged, and examined his pistols, and put himself on a track towards the nearby farmhouses. “Perhaps

the Chevaliers will not have eaten all the cattle.”

There were no cows left visible, nor sheep, nor people; only a scattering of unhappy chickens, which

Tharkay methodically loosed the kestrel against, one after another. They would not make much dinner for

Gherni, but a little was better than nothing; and then in the stable a small pig was discovered, rooting

unconcernedly in the straw, oblivious both to the fate which it had earlier escaped and to the one which

now descended upon it.

Gherni was neither picky nor patient enough to demand her pork cooked, and they roasted the chickens

for themselves over a small, well-banked fire, feeding the kestrel on the sweetbreads, and waving their

hands through the smoke to thin it out. Without salt the meat had little flavor, but did well enough to fill

their stomachs. They gnawed it down to the bones, and buried the remnants deep; they rubbed their

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greasy hands clean with grass.

And then only the wait for the sun to go down: a crawling time, when it was scarcely yet noon, and the

ground cold and hard to sit upon: wet rotting leaves in a muck everywhere, the wind blowing a steady

chill into fingers and feet, with all the stamping they could do. But Laurence could stand when he chose,

and go to the edge of the copse and feel the wind blowing freely into his face, and see the placid

well-ruled fields in their orderly brown ranks and tall white birch-trees raising their limbs high against the

unbroken sky.

Tharkay came and stood beside him. There was no alteration in his looks or manner; if he was silent, he

had been silent before. It was to Laurence as much liberation as the absence of locks and barred doors,

to be able to stand here a moment, and be no traitor, but only himself, unchanged, in the company of

another. He had suffered wide disapproval before, without intolerable pain, when he knew himself in the

right; he had not known it could be so heavy.

Tharkay said, “I might never have found you, of course.”

It was an offer, and Laurence was ashamed to be tempted; tempted so strongly he could not

immediately make his refusal, not with all freedom open before him, and the stench of smoke and the

ship’s bilges still thick in the back of his throat, ready to be tasted.

“My idea of duty is not yours,” Tharkay said. “But I know of no reason why you owe it to any man to

die, to no purpose.”

“Honor is sufficient purpose,” Laurence said, low.

“Very well,” Tharkay said, “if your death would preserve it better than your life. But the world is not yet

quite ranged all between Britain and Napoleon, and you do not need to choose between them or die.

You would be welcome, and Temeraire, in other parts of the world. You may recall there is at least a

semblance of civilization,” he added dryly, “in some few places, beyond the borders of England.”

“I do not—” Laurence said, struggling, “I will not pretend that I do not consider it, for Temeraire’s sake

if not my own. But to fly would be to make myself truly a traitor.”

“Laurence,” Tharkay said, after a pause, “you
are
a traitor.” It was a blow to hear him say so, in his

cool blunt way, all the lack of passion in the words serving only to make them seem less accusation than

statement of fact. “Allowing them to put you to death for it may be a form of apology, but it does not

make you less guilty.”

Laurence did not know how to answer; of course Tharkay was right. It was useless to cry, that he loved

his country, and had betrayed her only
in extremis,
as the lesser of two hideous evils. He had betrayed

her, and the cause mattered not at all. So perhaps for nothing, now, he condemned Temeraire to lonely

servitude, himself to life-long imprisonment. Perhaps all that could be lost, had been lost. And yet—and

yet—He could not answer.

They stood a long while, mutely. At last Tharkay shook his head, and put his hand on Laurence’s

shoulder. “It is getting dark.”

“Yes, I sent for him,” Jane said, flatly. “And you may leave off your coughing and your insinuations: if I

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wanted a man between my legs so badly, there is a campful of handsome young fellows outside, and I

dare say I could find one out to oblige me, without going to such trouble.”

Having momentarily appalled her audience of generals and ministers into silence, she rode on, with no

more muttering to contend against, “If the French took him prisoner, they would have two Celestials; and

even if the two are too close related to breed direct, they will cross-breed them—perhaps to Grand

Chevaliers, if you like to imagine that—and breed the offspring back to fix the traits: in a generation they

will have a breed of their own, and we nothing: we haven’t a single egg out of Temeraire yet. Put

Laurence in a gaol-waggon and bring him along under guard, if you insist; but if you have any sense, you

will make use of him, and the beast.”

The atmosphere in the generals’ tent was not a convivial one. All conversation circled endlessly around

the central disaster of the landing, returning to it again and again, and Laurence had already gathered

enough to understand: Jane had not been in command of the aerial defense, after all. Sanderson had been

made Admiral at Dover, over her head.

For what reason, Laurence scarcely needed to wonder: they had never liked making her commander,

but having been forced to do it by necessity, they would likely have gone on as they had begun rather

than admit a mistake; if they had not wanted vengeance, if they had not thought her complicit in

Laurence’s treason.

As for Sanderson, Laurence knew the man a little: he was handler to a Parnassian and commanded a

large independent formation at Dover; they had served together, if not very closely. Thoroughly

experienced but no brilliant officer, Laurence would have said, and Sanderson’s attention was badly

divided. Though his Animosia had been dosed with the cure, several times, she still fared poorly from the

aftereffects of the epidemic, and it had nearly killed him, too: he was not a year short of sixty, and had

scarcely slept or eaten while his dragon ailed.

He sat now in a corner of the tent and wiped occasionally at an oozing cut over his eye with a folded

bandage, saying nothing, while the generals shouted instead at Jane; he looked grey and faded under the

bright bloody streak on his forehead.

“Splendid, so you would put a known traitor and his uncontrollable beast into the middle of our very

lines,” one member of the Navy Board said. “You may as well rig up a telegraph and signal all our plans

to Bonaparte at once.”

“Bonaparte can’t damned well have an easier time of it than he has already, unless you run up a white