Victory of Eagles (9 page)

flag instead,” Jane snapped. “He has a hundred dragons more than he ought to, by any numbers. You

gentlemen at the Admiralty swear up and down we should have heard if he’d stripped Prussia and Italy

to the bone; so I suppose he is pulling them out of the trees; and as we can’t do the same, we must have

every last beast we can scrounge. Six beasts too injured to fight in the next month, four of our newest

ferals slunk off, and you want to let a Celestial rot; pure idiocy.”

“Why precisely are we listening to this haranguing fishwife?” someone said.

“To be precise,” Jane said, “you aren’t listening to me, and you had better start. Begging your pardon,

Sanderson, you are a damned fine formation-leader; but you weren’t the man for this.”

“No, not at all, Roland,” Sanderson said, dully, and patted the cloth to his forehead again.

“We are listening to her,” another general said in back, impatient: a lean sharp-faced man with a decided

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aquiline nose, and the Order of the Bath, “because you could not scrape up a competent man for the job.

We are not going to beat Bonaparte with yesterday’s mess.”

“Portland—” another began.

“Stop bleating the man’s name like a talisman,” the general said. “If it is not Nelson with you, it is

Portland. Gibraltar is as bad as Denmark: neither of them is to be had in under a month. Until then, get

out of her way.”

“General Wellesley, you cannot seriously be lending your voice to the suggestion—” another minister

said, gesturing to Laurence.

“Thank you; I am capable of deciding to what I will lend my voice, without consultation,” Wellesley said.

He raked Laurence up and down with a cold dismissive eye. “He’s a sentimentalist, isn’t

he—surrendered himself? Damned romantic. What difference does it make? Hang him after.”

Jane took him to her tent. “No, you had better stay, Frette,” she said, speaking to her aide-de-camp,

who had risen from a camp-table as she ducked inside. “I can better afford to be frank before a witness

than make hay for any more rumors.”

She poured herself a glass of wine, and drank it with her back to him. Laurence could not quarrel with

her decision, but he wished that they had been alone; he himself felt it impossible to speak as he wished

before anyone else. Then she put down the glass and sat down behind her desk. “Tomorrow you will go

by courier to Pen Y Fan,” she said, tiredly, without looking at him. “That is where they have been

keeping Temeraire. Will you bring him back?”

“Yes, of course,” Laurence said.

“They very likely
will
hang you after, unless you manage to do something heroic,” Jane said.

“If I had wished to avoid justice, I might have stayed in France,” Laurence said. “Jane—”

“Admiral Roland, if you please,” she said, sharply. After a moment’s silence, she added, “I cannot blame

you, Laurence; Christ knows it was ugly. But if I am to do any good, I cannot be fighting their damned

Lordships as well as Napoleon’s dragons. Frette will take you to the officers’ tent to eat, and find you

somewhere to sleep. You will go tomorrow, and when you come back you will be flying in formation,

under Admiral Sanderson. That will be all.”

She gave a jerk of her head, and Frette clearing his throat held open the tent flap; Laurence could only

bow, and withdraw too slowly, wishing he had not seen her drop her forehead to her clenched fist, and

the grimness around her mouth.

There was a dreadful awkwardness when he came into the large mess tent in Frette’s company. He saw

none of his nearest acquaintance, and was glad to postpone that evil, but several remarks were made by

captains little known to him, which he had to pretend not to hear, and worse than that was the discomfort

and downcast faces of those who would not snub him, but still did not choose to meet his eyes.

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He had been prepared for this much; he was not as well braced to have his hand seized, and

aggressively pumped, by a gentleman he had only seen perhaps twice before, across the officers’

common room at Dover. Captain Hesterfield loudly said, “May I shake your hand, sir?” too late for the

request to be refused, and then nearly bodily dragged Laurence over to his table in the corner, and

presented him to his companions.

There were six officers at the small and huddled table: two Prussians, one of whom, Von Pfeil, Laurence

recognized from the siege of Danzig, and another who stood and shook his hand, and introduced himself

as cousin to Captain Dyhern, with whom they had fought at the Battle of Jena. They were refugees from

their own country, having chosen exile and service in Britain over accepting the parole which Napoleon

had offered to Prussian officers.

Another stranger, Captain Prewitt, had been called to England a few months before, out of desperation:

his Winchester had escaped the epidemic, as they were ordinarily assigned to Halifax covert, whence he

had been stationed on a lonely circuit out in Quebec to put him out of the way of anyone hearing his

radical political views, as he freely acknowledged.

“Or perhaps my poetry,” Prewitt said, laughing at himself, “but my pride can better stand condemnation

of my politics than of my art, so I choose to take it so. And this is Captain Latour,” a French Royalist

turned British officer. Hesterfield and the two others, Reynolds and Gounod, were political sympathizers

of Prewitt’s, if a little quieter than he on the subject, and Laurence gradually realized they were not

incidentally supporters of his act, but were divided from the rest of the company precisely by quarreling

over it.

“Murder, murder most foul, there is no other word,” Reynolds declared, covering Laurence’s hand with

his own, pinning it to the table by the wrist, and looking at him with the focused, too-earnest expression

of the profoundly drunk. Laurence did not know what to say; he had agreed, and had laid down his life

to prevent it, but he did not care to be congratulated for it, by a stranger.

“
Treason
is another word, if you like,” another officer said, at the nearest populated table, making no

pretenses about eavesdropping; a bottle of whiskey half-empty stood before him, and he was drinking

alone.

“Hear, hear,” another man said.

There were entirely too many bottles in the room, and too many angry and disappointed men. It was an

invitation for a scene. Laurence disengaged his hand. He would heartily have liked to excuse himself and

shift tables, but Frette had abandoned him to Prewitt and his willing company, and Laurence could not

imagine imposing himself on anyone else in the room. “I beg you gentlemen not to speak of it,” he said

quietly, to the table: to no avail. Reynolds was already arguing with the whiskey-drinker, and their voices

were penetrating.

Laurence set his jaw, and tried not to hear. “And
I
say,” the whiskey-drinker was saying, “that he is a

traitor who ought to be drug outside, strung up, and drawn and quartered after, and you with him, if you

say otherwise—”

“Medieval sentiment—” They were both standing now, Reynolds shaking off Gounod’s half-hearted

restraining hand to get up. Their voices had risen enough to drown all nearby conversation.

Laurence rose, and catching Reynolds by the shoulder firmly, pressed him back towards his chair. “Sir,

you do me no kindness by this; leave off,” he said, low and sharply.

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“That’s right, let him teach you how to be a coward,” the other man said.

Laurence stiffened. He could not resent insults which he had earned, he had sacrificed the right to defend

himself against
traitor
—but
coward
was a slap he could not gladly swallow. Yet even if dueling were

not forbidden aviators,
he
could not make challenge. He had caused enough harm; he could not—would

not—do more. He closed his mouth on the bitterness in the back of his throat, and did not turn to look

the man in the face, though he stood now so offensively close his liquored breath came hot and strongly

over Laurence’s shoulder.

“Call him a coward, when you would’ve sat and done nothing,” Reynolds flung back, resisting the push.

He shook off Laurence’s hand, or tried. “I suppose your dragon would think a lot of your being happy to

see ten thousand of them put down, poisoned or good as, like dogs—”

“At least
one
of ’em ought to be poisoned,” the other man said, and Laurence let go of Reynolds and

turned and knocked him down.

The man was drunk and unsteady, and going down pulled the table and the bottle over with him, cheap

liquor bubbling out over the dirt as it rolled away. For a moment no-one spoke, and then chairs went

back across the tent, eagerly, as if nothing more had been wanted than a pretext.

The quarrel at once devolved into a confused melee, with nothing so organized as sides; Laurence saw

two men from the same table wrestling in a corner. But a few men singled him out, one a captain he knew

by face from Dover, if not immediately by name; he had streaks of black dragon blood fresh on his

clothing. Geoffrey Windle, Laurence remembered incongruously, as they grappled, and then Windle

struck him full on the jaw.

The impact rocked him back on his heels: his teeth snapped together, jarring all up to his skull with the

startling pain of a bitten cheek. Gripping a tent-pole for purchase, Laurence managed to seize a chair and

pull it around between them as Windle lunged at him again; the man tripped over it and went into the pole

with his full weight: considerable, as he had some three stone over Laurence. The canvas roof above

sagged precipitously.

Two more men came at Laurence, faces ugly with anger, and caught him by the arms together to rush

him against the nearest table: drunk enough to be belligerent, not enough to be clumsy. He still had on his

buckled shoes and his laddered stockings, and neither good purchase on the ground, nor the weight of

his boots to kick out with. They pinned him down, and one had out a knife, a dull eating-knife, still slick

with grease from his dinner. Laurence set his heel down against the surface of the table and heaved,

managing to get his shoulders loose a moment, twisting away from the short furious stabbing of the blade,

so it only tore into his ragged coat.

The tent-pole creaked and gave, and the canvas came pouring down upon them in a sudden

catastrophic rush. His arms were free, only to be imprisoned worse in the smothering folds, so heavy he

had an effort to lift it clear enough from his face to breathe. He rolled off the table, and then there were

hands gripping his arm again, pulling at him. Laurence struck out blindly at the new attacker, and they

went falling together, rolling along the dirt floor, until the other man managed to drag the edge of the

canvas off their heads and get them into the open air; and it was Granby.

“Oh, Lord,” Granby said: Laurence turned and saw half the tent crumpled in on a heaving mass beneath.

Those sober enough to have avoided the fighting were carrying out the lanterns from the other side, and

others dousing the collapsed canvas with water; some smoke trickled out from beneath.

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“You’ll do a damned sight more good to come out of the way; here,” Granby said, when Laurence

would have gone to help, and drew him along one of the camp paths, narrow and stumbling-dark,

towards the dragon-clearings.

They walked in silence over the uneven ground. Laurence tried to slow his short, clenched breathing,

without success. He felt inexpressibly naïve. He had not even thought to fear such a possibility, until he

heard it in the mouth of a drunkard. But when they did hang him—knowing it would lose them

Temeraire’s use—what might not those same men do, who had meant to infect all the world’s dragons

with consumption and condemn them to an agonized death. Of course they would gladly see Temeraire

dead, rather than of use to anyone they were disposed to see as an enemy—France or China or any

other nation. They would not scruple at any sort of treachery necessary to achieve his destruction; to

them Temeraire was only an inconvenient animal.

“I suppose,” Granby said, abruptly, out of the dark, “that he insisted on it: your carrying the stuff to

France, I mean.”

“He did,” Laurence said, after a moment, but he did not mean to hide behind Temeraire’s wings. “I am

ashamed to say, he was forced to, at first; I am ashamed of it. I would not have you believe I was taken

against my will.”

“No,” Granby said, “no, I only meant, you shouldn’t have thought of it at all, on your own.”

The observation felt true, and uncomfortably so, though Laurence supposed Granby had meant it as

consolation. A sudden sharp stab of feeling caught his breath: loneliness and something more, an

inarticulate next cousin to homesickness. He wanted very badly to see Temeraire. Laurence had slept his

last night beneath the sheltering wing nearly three months ago, in the northern mountains, treason already

committed and a few hours snatched before they made the fatal flight across the Channel. Since then

there had been only a succession of prisons, more or less brutal, for them both: and what had these

months been for Temeraire, alone and friendless and unhappy, in the breeding grounds full of feral beasts

and veterans, with likely no order or discipline to keep them from fighting.