Empire of Ivory

Chapter 13

PRAY AM I disturbing you?” Riley said awkwardly; he could not knock, because there was no door. There were a great many women aboard, refugee, to the service of whose meager comfort nearly all the cabins and bulkheads had gone, and a little ragged sailcloth was all which presently divided Laurence’s berth from Chenery’s, on one side, and from Berkley’s on the other. “May I ask you to take a turn with me, on the dragondeck?”

They had already spoken, of course, from necessity, in those first distracted hours, all the officers united in the effort to make some sense of seven dragons, wailing children, wounded men, several hundred inconvenient passengers, and all the confusion which might be expected on a ship three times the size of a first-rate, launched with no preparation directly into a brutal headwind, with a lee-shore ready to receive her at any time, and her deck still littered with the large metal-shod stones which had served the enemy for missiles.

In the melee Laurence had nevertheless seen Riley looking anxiously over the newly arrived company; an anxiety visibly relieved by the sight of Harcourt calling orders to her crew. But another few chances of observation altered his looks of relief to puzzlement, and then to suspicion. Riley had at last come up to the dragondeck, on the excuse of requesting the dragons to shift their places to bring the ship a little more by the stern, and so obtained a better view of Catherine’s condition. It was just as well that Laurence had understood what he meant to achieve, for the request as Riley conveyed it to them became a confused scheme of putting Maximus at the head of the deck, with Lily apparently on his back, and Temeraire stretched along the port rail, which would likely have ended with half the dragons in the water, and the ship turning in stately circles.

“Very willing,” Laurence now pronounced himself, and they went above in silence: necessary silence, to some extent, as Laurence had to follow Riley single-file through the narrow lanes that were all that was left of navigable space inside, and up the ladders. The crammed-in passengers having been given the liberty of the quarterdeck, for light and exercise, the dragondeck afforded more privacy than was to be had anywhere else on the ship; so long as one did not mind an interested audience of dragons.

These were in any case for the moment mostly inanimate; Temeraire and Lily and Dulcia worn-out, by their long and desperate flight as well as the excitement at its end, and Maximus making the forestay hum with the resonance of his deep, sonorous snores. It was just as well they were tired enough to sleep without eating, as there was little to be had, nor would be again until the ship could put in at some port for resupply; when they woke they would have to fish for their supper.

“I am afraid,” Riley said diffidently, breaking their silence as they walked along the railing, “that we may have to water at Benguela; I regret it very much, if it should give you any pain. I am considering whether we ought not to try for St. Helena instead.”

St. Helena was not a slave port, and out of their way. Laurence was deeply sensible of the degree of apology embodied in this offer, and immediately said, “I do not think it can be recommended. We could easily find ourselves blown to Rio on the easterlies, and even though both the cure and word of the loss of the Cape must precede us home, our formation must still be needed urgently back in England.”

Riley as gratefully received this gesture in return, and they walked several passes up and down the deck much more comfortably together. “Of course we cannot lose a moment,” Riley said, “and for my own part I have reason enough to wish us home again, as quickly as we might go, or thought I did, until I realized she meant to be obstinate; but, Laurence, I beg you will forgive me for speaking freely: I would be grateful for a headwind all the way, if it meant we should not arrive before she has married me.”

The other aviators had already begun referring, in uncharitable terms, to what they viewed as Riley’s quixotic behavior, Chenery going so far as to say, “If he will not leave off harassing poor Harcourt, one will have to do something; but how is he to be worked on?”

Laurence had rather more sympathy for Riley’s plight; he was a little shocked by Catherine’s refusal to marry rather than burn, when the plain choice was put before her, and he was forcibly reminded to regret Reverend Erasmus, for the lack of what he was sure would have been that gentleman’s warm and forceful counsel in favor of the marriage. Mr. Britten, Riley’s official chaplain, assigned by the Admiralty, could not have brought a moral argument to bear on anyone, even if he were made sober long enough to do so.

“But at least he is ordained,” Riley said, “so there would be no difficulty about the thing whatsoever; everything would be quite legal. But she will not hear of it. And she cannot say, in fairness,” he added half-defiantly, “that it is because I am some sort of scoundrel, because I did not try to speak before; it was not as though—I was not the one who—” then cutting himself off hastily, instead ended more plaintively by saying, “and, I did not know how to begin. Laurence, has she no family, who might prevail on her?”

“No; quite alone in the world,” Laurence said. “And, Tom, you must know that she cannot leave the service: Lily cannot be spared.”

“Well,” Riley said reluctantly, “if no one else can be found to take the beast on,” a notion of which Laurence did not bother to try and disabuse him, “but it does not matter: I am not such an outrageous scrub as to abandon her. And the governor was kind enough to tell me that Mrs. Grey is perfectly willing to receive her: generous beyond what anyone might expect, and it would surely make everything easy for her in England; they have a large acquaintance, in the best circles; but of course not until we are married, and she will not listen to reason.”

“Perhaps she fears the disapproval of your family,” Laurence said, more from a motive of consolation than conviction; he was sure Catherine had not given a thought to the feelings of Riley’s family, nor would have, if she had determined on the marriage.

“I have already promised her that they would do all that is proper, and so they would,” Riley said. “I do not mean to say it is the sort of match they would have looked out for me; but I have my capital, and can marry to please myself without any accusation of imprudence, at least. I dare say that my father at least will not care two pins, if only it is a boy; my brother’s wife has not managed anything but girls, the last four years ago, and everything entailed,” he finished, very nearly flinging up his hands.

“But it is all nonsense, Laurence,” Catherine said, equally exasperated, when he approached her. “He expects me to resign the service.”

“I believe,” Laurence said, “that I have conveyed to him the impossibility of such a thing, and he is reconciled to the necessity, if not pleased by it; and you must see,” he added, “the very material importance of the circumstance of the entailment.”

“I do not see, at all,” she said. “It is something to do with his father’s estate? What has it to do with me, or the child? He has an older brother, has he not, with children?”

Laurence, who had not so much been instructed in the legal structures of inheritance and entailment as absorbed them through the skin, stared; and then he hastily made her understand that the estate would descend in the male line, and her child, if a boy, stood to inherit after his uncle. “If you refuse, you deny him his patrimony,” Laurence said, “which I believe likely to be substantial, and entailed in default on a distant relation who would care nothing for the interest of Riley’s nieces.”

“It is a stupid way of going on,” she said, “but I do see; and I suppose it would be hard luck on the poor creature, if he grew up knowing what might have been. But all I am hoping for is not a boy at all, but a girl; and then what use is she to him, or I?” She sighed, and rubbed the back of her hand across her brow, and finally said, “Oh, bother; I suppose he can always divorce me. Very well: but if it is a girl, she will be a Harcourt,” she added with decision.

The marriage was briefly postponed for want of anything suitable to make a wedding-feast, until they had managed some resupply. Already extremity had driven them to shore on several occasions: there was no safe harbor on their charts, along the southern coastline, where the Allegiance might have safely put in; so instead the empty water-casks were roped together and draped upon the dragons, who daily flew in the twenty miles of open water which Riley’s caution left between them and the coast, and tried to find some nameless river emptying into the sea.

Drawing near Benguela, they passed a pair of tattered ships on the fifteenth of June, with blackened sides and makeshift slovenly sails a pirate would have been ashamed to rig, which they took for fellow refugees from the Cape, choosing to make east for St. Helena. The Allegiance did not offer to heave-to; they had no water or food to spare of their own, and in any case the smaller ships ran away from them, likely fearing to be pressed either for supplies or men, not without cause. “I would give a good deal for ten able seamen,” Riley said soberly, watching them go hull-up over the horizon; he did not speak of what he would give for a proper dole of clean water. The dragons were already licking the sails in the morning, for the dew, all the company having been put on half-rations.

They saw the smoke first, still rising, from a long way off: a steady ongoing smoulder of damp wood piled into massive bonfires, which as they drew nearer the harbor resolved themselves into the overturned hulks of ships, which had been dragged from the ocean onto the beach. Little more than the stout keels and futtocks remained, like the rib cages of beached leviathans who had flung themselves onto the sands to die. The fortifications of the Dutch factory had been reduced to rubble.

There was no sign of life. With all the gunports open, and the dragons roused and alive to the least warning of danger, the ship’s boats went to the shore full of empty water-casks. They came back again, pulling more quickly despite their heavier load; in Riley’s cabin, Lieutenant Wells reported uneasily. “More than a week, sir, I should say,” he said. “There was food rotting, in some of the houses, and all that is left of the fort is perfectly cold. We found a large grave dug in the field behind the port; there must have been at least a hundred dead.”

“It cannot have been the same band who came on us in Capetown,” Riley said, when he had done. “It cannot; could dragons have flown here, so quickly?”

“Fourteen hundred miles, in less than a week’s time? Not if they meant to fight at the end of it, and very likely not at all,” Catherine said, measuring upon the map with her fingers; she had the chair, as Riley had managed to carry the point of giving her the large stern-cabin for the journey home. “They needn’t have, at any rate; there were dragons enough at the falls to make another raiding party of the same size, or another ten, for that matter.”

“Well, and I am sorry to sound like a damned ill-wishing crow,” Chenery said, “but I don’t see a blessed reason why they shouldn’t have gone for Louanda, while they were at it.”

Another day’s sailing brought them in range of the second port; Dulcia and Nitidus set off, beating urgently before the wind, and some eight hours later returned again, finding the Allegiance in the dark by the beacons lit in the tops.

“Burnt to the ground, the whole place,” Chenery said, tipping back the cup of grog which had been given him, thirstily. “Not a soul to be seen, and all the wells full of dragonshit; beg your pardon.”

The magnitude of the disaster began gradually to dawn upon them all: not only Capetown lost, but two of the largest ports in Africa besides. If the enemy’s purpose had been to seize control of the ports, all the intervening territory must have first been conquered; but if simple destruction were all their desire, no such long, drawn-out labor was required. Without aerial forces to oppose them, the dragons could overfly with ease any defenses or mustered force, and go directly to their target, carrying their light infantry with them; and then expend all their energy upon the hapless town which had incurred their wrath.

“The guns were all gone,” Warren said quietly. “And the shot; we found the empty caissons where they had been stored. I would imagine they took the powder also; certainly we did not see any left behind.”

All the long homeward journey along the coast was attended by the clouds of smoke and ruin, and preceded by their harbingers the scorched and tattered ships, full of survivors, making their limping way back to safe harbor. The Allegiance did not attempt again to put in, relying instead on the dragons’ short flights to the coast to bring them fresh water, until two weeks more brought them to Cape Coast: Riley felt it their duty to at least make an accounting of the dead, at the British port, and they hoped that the fortifications, older and more extensive than those in the other ports, might have preserved some survivors.

The castle which served as headquarters for the port, built in stone, remained largely intact but for the gaping and scorched roof; the guns, which had been useless to defend her, fixed as they were outward to sea, were all gone, as were the heaped piles of round-shot from the courtyard. The Allegiance, being subject to the vicissitudes of the wind and current, could not keep the regular pace of dragons, and had moved more slowly than the wave of attacks; three weeks at least had passed since the assault.

While Riley organized the ship’s crew in the sad work of exhuming and making a count of the dead from their mass grave, Laurence and his fellow captains divided amongst themselves the richly forested slopes north and surrounding the wreckage of the town, in hopes of ensuring enough game for them all: fresh meat was badly needed, the ship’s supplies of salt pork growing rapidly thin, and the dragons always hungry. Temeraire alone among them was really satisfied with fish, and even he had wistfully expressed the desire for “a few tender antelope, for variety’s sake; or an elephant would be beyond anything: they are so very rich.”

In the event, he was able to satisfy his own hunger with a couple of smallish, red-furred buffalo, while the riflemen shot another half-a-dozen, as many as he could conveniently carry back to the ship in his foreclaws. “A little gamy, but not at all unpleasant; perhaps Gong Su can try stewing one with a little dried fruit,” Temeraire said thoughtfully, rattling the horns in his mouth in a horrible fashion to pick his teeth, before he fastidiously deposited them upon the ground. Then he pricked up his ruff. “Someone is coming, I think.”

“For God’s sake are you white men?” the cry came a little faintly, from the forest, and shortly a handful of dirty, exhausted men staggered into their clearing, and received with many pitiful expressions of gratitude their canteens of grog and brandy. “We scarcely dared to hope, when we heard your rifles,” said their chief, a Mr. George Case of Liverpool, who with his partner David Miles, and their handful of assistants, had not been able to escape the disaster in time.

“We have been hiding in the forest ever since the monsters descended,” Miles said. “They took up all the ships that had not fled quick enough, and broke or burnt them, before they left again; and us out here with scarcely any bullets left. We have been ready to despair: I suppose they would all have starved, in another week.”

Laurence did not understand, until Miles brought them to the makeshift pen, concealed in the woods, where their last string of some two hundred slaves remained. “Bought and paid for, and in another day we should have had them loaded aboard,” Miles said, and spat with philosophical disgust upon the ground, while one of the gaunt and starving slaves, his lips badly cracked, turned his head inside the enclosure and made a pleading motion with his hand for water.

The smell of filth was dreadful. The slaves had made some attempt, before weakness had overcome them, to dig small necessary-pits within their enclosure, but they were shackled ankle-to-ankle, and unable to move far from one another. There was a running stream which emptied into the sea, some quarter-of-a-mile distant; Case and his men did not look thirsty, or very hungry themselves; there was the remnant of an antelope over a spit, not twenty feet from the enclosure.

Case added, “If you will take credit for our passage, we will make it good in Madeira; or,” with an air of great generosity, “you are welcome to buy them outright if you prefer: we will give you a good price, you may be sure.”

Laurence struggled to answer; he would have liked to knock the man down. Temeraire did not suffer any similar pangs; he simply seized the gate in his foreclaws and without a word tore it entirely from its setting, and threw it down on the ground, panting over it in anger.

“Mr. Blythe,” Laurence said, grimly, “strike these men’s irons, if you please.”

“Yes, sir,” Blythe said, and fetched his tools; the slavers gaped. “My God, what are you about?” Miles said, and Case cried out that they should sue, they should certainly sue; until Laurence turning on them said low and coldly, “Shall I leave you here, to discuss the matter with these gentlemen?” which shut their mouths at once. It was a long and unhappy process: the men were shackled one to another, with iron fetters, and in groups of four were fastened about the necks with rope; a handful with their ankles cuffed to thick billets of wood, which had rendered it nearly impossible for them to even stand.

Temeraire tried to speak to the slaves as Blythe freed them, but they spoke a wholly different language, and shrank from his lowered head in fear; they were not men of the Tswana, but of some local tribe, which did not have similar relations with dragons. “Give them the meat,” Laurence said quietly, to Fellowes; this gesture required no translation, and at once the stronger among the former captives began to arrange cooking-fires, and prop up the weaker to gnaw upon the biscuit which Emily and Dyer distributed among them, with the help of Sipho. Many of the slaves preferred to flee at once, despite their obvious weakness; before the meat was on the spit, nearly half of them had vanished into the forest, to make their way home as best they could, Laurence supposed; there was no way of knowing how far they had been brought, or from what direction.

Temeraire sat stiff with disgust as the slavers were put aboard him; and when they continued to murmur turned his head to snap his teeth towards them, and say in dangerous tones, “Speak of Laurence so again, and I will leave you here myself; you should be ashamed of yourselves, and if you have not enough sense to be, then you may at least be quiet.” The crew also regarded them with great disapproval. “Ungrateful sods” was the muttered opinion of Bell, as he rigged out makeshift straps for them.

Laurence was glad to unload them again, on deck, and see them disappear among the rest of the Allegiance’s passengers. The other dragons had returned with better luck from their hunting, and Maximus triumphantly deposited on the deck a pair of smallish elephants, of which he had already eaten three; he pronounced them very good eating, and Temeraire sighed a little, but they were earmarked at once for the celebration; which though necessarily muted by their larger circumstances, could not be much longer delayed and yet leave the bride in a state convenient to walking the deck of a rolling ship.

It was a rather muddled occasion, although Chenery, with his usual fine disdain of any notion of polite manners, had ensured the sobriety of the officiant, by taking Britten by the ear and dragging him up onto the dragondeck, the night before, and instructing Dulcia not to let him stir an inch. The minister was thoroughly sober and petrified by morning, and Harcourt’s runners brought him his clean shirt and his breakfast on the dragondeck, and brushed his coat for him on the spot, so he could not slip away and fortify himself back into insensibility.

But Catherine had not thought at all of providing herself with a dress, and Riley had not thought at all that she would not have done so, with the result that she had to be married in her trousers and coat; giving the ceremony a very strange appearance, and putting poor Mrs. Grey to the blush, and several other of the respectable Capetown matrons who had attended. Britten himself looked very confused, without the comforting haze of liquor, and stuttered rather more than less over his phrases. To crown the event, when he invited onlookers to express any objections, Lily, despite Harcourt’s many reassuring conversations on the subject, put her head over the lip of the dragondeck to the alarm of the assembled guests and said, “Mayn’t I?”

“No, you may not!” Catherine said, and Lily heaved a disgruntled sigh, and turning her lurid orange eye on Riley said, “Very well, then; but if you are unpleasant to Catherine, I will throw you in the ocean.”

It was perhaps not a very propitious entry to the state of matrimony, but the elephant meat was indeed delicious.

The lookout saw the light off Lizard Point the tenth of August as they came at last into the Channel, the dark mass of England off their port bow, and he caught sight also of a few lights running past them to the east: not ships of the blockade. Riley ordered their own lights doused, and put her on a south-east heading, with careful attention to his maps, and when morning came, they had the mingled pain and pleasure of bringing up directly behind a convoy of some eight ships bound unmistakably for Le Havre: six merchantmen, and a couple of frigates escorting them, all lawful prizes, any of which would certainly have struck at once if only they had been in range. But they were a good sixty miles away, and catching sight of the Allegiance they hurriedly pressed on more sail and immediately began to run clear away.

Laurence leaned on the rail beside Riley watching them go, wistfully. The Allegiance had not been scraped properly clean since leaving England, and her bottom was unspeakably foul; in any event, at her best point of sailing she did not make eight knots, and even the frigate at the rear of the convoy was certainly running at eleven. Temeraire’s ruff was quivering as he sat up to watch them. “I am sure we could catch them,” he said. “We could certainly catch them; at least by afternoon.”

“There are her studdingsails,” Riley said, watching through the glass. The sluggish frigate leapt forward, evidently having only waited until her charges had pulled ahead.

“Not with this wind,” Laurence said. “Or you might; but not the others, and we have no armor. In any case, we could not take them: the Allegiance would be quite out of sight until after dark, and without prize-crews they would all run away from us in the night.”

Temeraire sighed and put his head down again on his forelegs. Riley shut up his glass. “Mr. Wells, let us have a heading north-northeast, if you please.”

“Yes, sir,” Wells said sadly, and turned to make the arrangements; but abruptly, the frigate in the lead checked her way, and bent her course sharply southward, with much frantic activity in the rigging visible through the glass. The convoy all were turning, as if they meant to make now for Granville, past the Jersey Islands; rather a poorer risk, and Laurence could not imagine what they meant by it, unless perhaps they had caught sight of some ship of the blockade. Indeed, Laurence wondered that they should not have seen any such ship before now, unless all the blockade had lately been driven up the Channel by a gale.

The Allegiance had now the advantage of sailing to head them off, rather than directly in their train. Riley said, “We may as well keep on them a little while longer,” with studied calm, and put the ship after them, much to the unspoken but evident satisfaction of the crew: if only the other ship, which as yet they could not see, were fast enough! Even a single frigate might do, imbued by the near and awful presence of the Allegiance with greater force, and so long as the Allegiance was on the horizon at the climax of the chase, she should have a share in any prize taken.

They searched the ocean anxiously, sweeping with their glasses, without success; until Nitidus, who had been jumping aloft at intervals, landed and said breathlessly, “It is not a ship; it is dragons.”

They strained to see, but the oncoming specks were lost among the clouds, nearly all the time. But they were certainly coming fast, and before the hour had closed, the convoy had altered their course yet again: they were now trying only to get under cover of some French gun emplacement along the coast, risking the danger of running for a lee-shore with the wind behind them. The Allegiance had closed the distance to some thirty miles.

“Now may we go?” Temeraire said, looking around; all the dragons were thoroughly roused, and though crouched to keep from checking the ship’s way, they had their heads craned up on their necks, fixed intently upon the chase.

Laurence closed up his glass and turning said, “Mr. Ferris, the fighting crew to go aboard, if you please.” Emily held out her hand for the glass, to carry it away; Laurence looked down at her and said, “When you are finished, Roland, I hope you and Dyer may be of use to Lieutenant Ferris, on the lookouts.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, in almost a breathless squeak, and dashed to stow the glass; Calloway gave her and Dyer each a pistol, and Fellowes their harnesses a tug, before the two of them scrambled aboard.

“I do not see why I must go last,” Maximus said petulantly, while Temeraire and Lily’s crews scrambled aboard; Dulcia and Nitidus already aloft, Messoria and Immortalis to make ready next.

“Because you are a great mumping lummox and there is no damned room to rig you out until the deck is cleared away,” Berkley said. “Sit quiet and they will be off all the sooner.”

“Pray do not finish all the fighting until I am there,” Maximus called after them, his deep bellow receding and growing faint with the thunder of their passage; Temeraire was stretching himself, outdistancing the others, and for once Laurence did not mean to check him. With support so near at hand, there was every reason to take advantage of his speed; they needed only to harry and delay the convoy a little while in order to bring up all the pursuit, which should certainly make the enemy shipping strike.

But Temeraire had only just reached the convoy when the clouds above the leading frigate went abruptly boiling away in a sudden blazing eruption like cannon-fire, and through the unearthly ochre glow, Iskierka came diving down, her spikes dragging ragged shreds of mist and smoke along behind her, and shot a flamboyant billowing arc of flame directly across the ship’s bows. Arkady and the ferals came pouring after her, yowling fit for a nuisance of cats, and went streaking up and down the length of the convoy, hooting and shrilling, quite in range of the ships’ guns; but what looked like recklessness was not so, for they were going by so swiftly that only the very merest chance could have allowed a hit, and the force of their wings set all the sails to shivering.

“Oh,” Temeraire said doubtfully, as they went dashing crazily past him, and paused to hover. Iskierka meanwhile was flying in coiled circles over the frigate, yelling down at them to strike, to strike, or she would burn them all up to a tinder, only see if she would not; and she jetted off another burst of flame for emphasis, directly into the water, which set up a monstrous hissing pillar of steam.

The colors came promptly down, and meekly the rest of the convoy followed suit. Where Laurence would have expected the lack of prize-crews to pose many difficulties, there were none: the ferals at once busily and in a practiced manner set about herding the prizes as skillfully as sheepdogs tending their flock, snapping at the wheelmen, and nudging them by the bows to encourage them to turn their heads for England. The littlest of the ferals, like Gherni and Lester, landed on the ships directly, terrifying the poor sailors almost mortally.

“Oh, it is all her own notion,” Granby said ruefully, shaking Laurence’s hand, on the bow of the Allegiance; when that vessel had met them halfway and traveling now in company they had resumed their course for Dover. “She refused to see why the Navy ought to get all the prizes; and I am afraid she has suborned those damned ferals. I am sure she has them secretly flying the Channel at night looking for prizes, without reporting them, and when they tell her of one, she pretends she has just taken it into her head to go in such and such a direction. They are as good as any prize-crew ever was; the sailors are all as meek as maids, with one of them aboard.”

The remainder of the ferals were aloft, singing lustily together in their foreign tongue, and larking about with satisfaction. Iskierka however had crammed herself in among the formation, and in particular had seized the place along the starboard rail where Temeraire preferred to nap. She was no small addition: having gained her full growth in the intervening months since they had seen her, she was now enormously long and sprawling, the heavy coils of her serpentine body at least as long as Temeraire, and draped over anything which happened to be in her way, most inconveniently.

“There is not enough room for you,” Temeraire said ungraciously, nosing away the coil which she had deposited upon his back, and picking up his foot out of the other which was slithering around it. “I do not see why you cannot fly back to Dover.”

“You may fly to Dover if you like,” Iskierka said, flicking the tip of her tail dismissively. “I have flown all morning, and anyway I am going to stay with my prizes. Look how many of them there are,” she added, exultant.

“They are all our prizes,” Temeraire said.

“As it is the rule, I suppose we must share with you,” she said, with an air of condescension, “but you did nothing except come late, and watch,” a remark which Temeraire rather instinctively felt the justice of, than disputed, and he hunched down to sulk over the situation in silence.

Iskierka nudged him. “Look how fine my captain is,” she added, to heap on coals of fire; and much to poor Granby’s embarrassment: he was indeed a little ridiculously fine, gold-buttoned and-beringed, and the sword at his waist also hilted in gold, with a great absurd diamond at the pommel, which he did his best to conceal with his hand.

“She fusses for days, if I will not, every time she takes another prize,” Granby muttered, crimson to the ears.

“How many has she taken?” Laurence said, rather dubiously.

“Oh—five, since she set about it in earnest, some of them strings like this one,” Granby said. “They strike to her right off, as soon as she gives them a bit of flame; and we have not a great deal of competition for them: I do not suppose you know, we have not been able to hold the blockade.”

They exclaimed over this news with alarm. “It is the French patrols,” Granby said. “I don’t know how, but I would swear they have another hundred dragons more than they ought, on the coast; we cannot account for them. They only wait until we are out of sight, and then they go for the ships on blockade: dropping bombs, and as we haven’t enough dragons well yet to guard at all hours, the Navy must stand ship-and-ship, to fend them off. It is a damned good thing you have come home.”

“Five prizes,” Temeraire said, very low, and his temper was not improved when they reached Dover, where upon a jutting promontory above the cliffs Iskierka now had a large pavilion made of blackened stone, sweating from the exhalations of her spines and surely over-warm in the summer heat. Temeraire nevertheless regarded it with outrage, particularly after she had smugly arranged herself upon the threshold, her coils of vivid red and violet displayed to advantage against the stone, and informed him that he was very welcome to sleep there, if he should feel at all uncomfortable in his clearing.

He swelled up and said very coolly, “No, I thank you,” and retreating to his own clearing did not even resort to the usual consolation, of polishing his breastplate, but only curled his head beneath his wing and sulked.

Chapter 14

LAURENCE FOLDED THE paper, from Bristol, and threw it beside the coffee-pot, with the caricature facing downwards: a bloated and snaggle-toothed creature labeled Africa, evidently meant to be a dragon, and several unclothed natives of grinning black visage prodding with spears a small knot of women and children into its open maw, while the pitiful victims uplifted their hands in prayer and cried O Have You No Pity in a long banner issuing from their mouths.

“I must go see Jane,” he said. “I expect we will be bound for London, this afternoon; if you are not too tired.”

Temeraire was still toying with his last bullock, not quite sure if he wanted it or not; he had taken three, greedy after the short commons of their voyage. “I do not mind going,” he said, “and perhaps we may go a little early, and see our pavilion; there can be no reason not to go near the quarantine-grounds now, surely.”

If they did not bring the first intelligence of the wholesale disaster in Africa, having been preceded in their flight by many a swifter vessel, certainly they carried the best: before their arrival, no-one in England had any notion of the identity of the mysterious and implacable foe who had so comprehensively swept clean the African coast. Laurence and Harcourt and Chenery had of course written dispatches, describing their experiences, and handed them on to a frigate which had passed them off Sierra Leone, and to another in Madeira; but in the end, these had only anticipated their arrival by a few days. In any case, formal dispatches, even the lengthy ones produced over the leisure of a month at sea, were by no means calculated to satisfy the clamoring demands of Government for information on so comprehensive a disaster.

Jane at least did not waste their time with a recounting of the facts. “I am sure you will have enough of that before their Lordships,” she said. “You will both have to come, and Chenery also; although perhaps I can beg you off, Harcourt, if you like: under the circumstances.”

“No, sir, thank you,” Catherine said, flushing. “I should prefer no special treatment.”

“Oh, I will take all the special treatment we can get, with both hands,” Jane said. “At least it will make them give us chairs, I expect; you look wretched.”

Jane herself was much improved, from when Laurence had left her; her hair was shot more thoroughly with silver, but her face, better fleshed, showed all the effects of cares lightened and a return to flying: a healthier wind-burnt color in the cheek, and lips a little chapped. She frowned at Catherine, who despite a perpetual lobsterish color from the sun managed still to look faintly bluish under the eyes, and pallid. “Are you still being taken ill?”

“Not very often,” Catherine said, without perfect candor; Laurence—indeed, all the ship’s company—had been witness to her regular visits to the rail, aboard ship. “And I am sure that I will be better now we are not at sea.”

Jane shook her head disapprovingly. “At seven months I was as well as ever I have been in my life. You have not put on nearly enough weight. It is an engagement like any other, Harcourt, and we must be sure you are up to the mark.”

“Tom wishes me to see a physician, in London,” Catherine said.

“Nonsense,” Jane said. “A sensible midwife is what you need; I think my own is still in harness, here in Dover. I will find her direction for you. I was damned glad of her, I will tell you. Twenty-nine hours’ labor,” she added, with the same dreadful reminiscent satisfaction as a veteran of the wars.

“Oh,” Catherine said.

“Tell me, do you find—” Jane began, and shortly Laurence sprang up, and went to interest himself in the map of the Channel which was laid out on Jane’s desk, striving rather desperately not to hear the rest of their conversation.

The map was not as distressing in the visceral sense, although this was perhaps rather a sign of improper sensibility on his part, as the circumstances it depicted were as unfortunate as could be imagined. All the French coastline of the Channel was now littered with markers, blue representing companies of men, white for the individual dragons: clustered around Brest there were fifty thousand men at least, and another fifty at Cherbourg; at Calais a force half that number again; and scattered among these positions some two hundred dragons.

“Are these figures certain?” Laurence asked, when they had finished their exchange, and joined him at the table.

“No, more’s the pity,” Jane said. “He has more; dragons, at any rate. Those are only the official estimates. Powys insists he cannot be feeding so many beasts, so close together, when we have the ports blockaded; but I know they are there, damn them. I get too many reports from the scouts, more dragons than they ought to be seeing at a time; and the Navy tell me they cannot get a smell of fish but they catch it themselves, the price of meat has gone so dear across the way. Our own fishermen are rowing over to sell their catches.

“But let us be grateful,” she added. “If the situation were not so damned dire, I am sure they would keep you in Whitehall a month, answering questions about this business in Africa; as it is, I will be able to extract you without much more than a day or two of agony.”

Laurence lingered, when Catherine had left; Jane filled his glass again. “And you would do as well with a month at the seashore yourself, to look at you,” she said. “You have had rather a dreadful time of it, I find, Laurence. Will you stay to dinner?”

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Temeraire wishes to go up to London while it is still light out.” He thought perhaps he ought to excuse himself; he rather felt that he wished to talk to her, more than knew what he wanted to say, and he could not be standing there stupidly.

She rescued him, though, saying, “I am very grateful to you, by the bye, for the compliment to Emily. I have sent on to Powys at Aerial Command to confirm her and Dyer in rank as ensign, just so there should be nothing havey-cavey about the business; but there shan’t be any trouble about that. I don’t suppose you have any likely boys in mind for their places?”

“I do,” he said, steeling himself, “if you please: the ones I brought from Africa.”

Demane had passed the weeks after their escape from Capetown deep in delirium, with his side, where the bayonet had gone in, swelled out beneath the small scabbed cut as if an inflated bladder had sat beneath the skin; and Sipho, too distressed even to speak, refusing to leave the sickbed except to creep away and fetch water or gruel, which he patiently fed his brother spoon by spoon. The southern coast had slipped rapidly away to starboard, taking with it any hope of kin to whom they might have been returned, long before the ship’s surgeon had informed Laurence that the boy would make a recovery. “It is to your credit, sir,” Laurence had said, even while wondering whatever was to be done with the boys now; by then the Allegiance had seen Benguela, and there could be no question of turning back.

“It is no such thing,” Mr. Raclef had retorted, “a wound in the vitals of this sort is invariably fatal, or ought to be; there was nothing to be done but make him comfortable,” and he went away again muttering, vaguely offended at having so obvious a diagnosis defied.

The patient persisted in his defiance, making good proofs of the resilience of youth, and very shortly had reacquired the two stone of weight lost in his illness, and another for good measure. Demane was dismissed the sick-bay before they had crossed the equator, and the two were installed in the passenger quarters together, in a tiny curtained-off compartment scarcely large enough to sling their one small hammock: the older boy’s wariness would not permit them to sleep at the same time, and he insisted alternating watches.

He was not without justification nervous of the general crowd of refugees from the Cape, who regarded the boys with simmering anger as representatives of the “kaffirs” they blamed for the destruction of their homes. It was useless to try and explain to the settlers that Demane and Sipho were of a wholly different nation than the one which had attacked them, and there was great indignation that the boys should be housed among them, particularly from the elderly shopkeeper and the farmhand whose respective nooks had each been shortened by the width of seven inches for their sake.

A few quiet belowdecks scuffles with the settler boys predictably followed. These ceased quickly, it becoming rapidly evident that a boy, even lately ill, who had been for several years entirely dependent for his survival upon his own hunting skills, and by necessity forced to contend against lions and hyenas for his supper, was not an advisable opponent for boys whose experience ended at schoolyard squabbling. They resorted instead to the petty torments of smaller children, covert pinching and prodding, small malicious traps of slush or filth left just beside the hammock, and the ingenious use of weevils. The third time Laurence found the boys sleeping on the dragondeck, tucked up against Temeraire’s side, he did not send them back to their small compartment below.

Temeraire, being nearly their solitary point of familiarity and the only one left among the company who had any grasp of their language whatsoever, quickly lost whatever lingering horrors he had possessed for them; the more so, as they were sure, in his company, to avoid their tormentors. The boys were soon as apt to be clambering over his back, in their games, as any of the younger officers, and through his tutelage acquiring a reasonable command of English, so that a little while after they had left Cape Coast, Demane might come to Laurence and ask, in a steady voice betrayed only by his hand clutching tightly at the railing, “Are we your slaves now?”

Laurence stared, shocked, and the boy added, “I will not let you sell Sipho away from me,” defiantly, but with a note of such desperation as showed his understanding that he had not much power, to defend himself or his brother from such a fate.

“No,” Laurence said, at once; it was a dreadful blow, to find himself regarded as a kidnapper. “Certainly not; you are—” but he was here stopped by the uncomfortable lack of any position to name, and forced to conclude, lamely, “you are by no means slaves. You have my word you shall not be parted,” he added; Demane did not look much comforted.

“Of course you are not slaves,” Temeraire said, in dismissive tones, to rather better effect, “you are of my crew,” an assumption springing from his native possessiveness, which serenely made them his own in spite of all the obvious impracticality of such an arrangement, and forced Laurence to recognize he could see no other solution, which should give them the respectability they might have earned, among their own tribe, for the services which they had performed.

No one could have called them gentleman-like, in birth or in education, and Laurence was dismally aware that while Sipho was a biddable, good-natured child, Demane was too independent, and more likely to be obstinate as a pig, if not belligerent, towards anyone wishing to effect an alteration in his manners. But difficulty alone could not be permitted to stand in the way: he had taken them from home, from all the relations which they might have, and robbed them of all standing in the world. If, at the end, there had been no practical way to restore them, he could not escape responsibility for the situation having arisen; he had willfully contributed to it, to the material benefit of the Corps and his mission.

“Captains can choose whom they like; that has always been the way of it,” Jane said, “but I will not say there shan’t be a noise about it: you may be sure that as soon as the promotions are posted in the Gazette, I will be hearing from a dozen families. At present we have more likely boys trained up than places for them, and you have got yourself the reputation of a proper schoolmaster, even if they did not like to see their sprouts on a heavy-weight: it is a pretty sure road to making lieutenant, if they do not cut straps before then.”

“I must surely give the greater weight,” he said, “to those who have given so much in our service; and Temeraire already counts them as his own crew.”

“Yes; but the carpers will say you ought to take them as personal servants, or at best ground crew,” she said. “But damn them all; you shall have the boys, and if anyone complains of their birth, you may always declare them princes in their native country, without any fear of being proven false. Anyway,” she added, “I will put them on the books, quietly, and we will hope they slip past. Will you let me give you a third? Temeraire’s complement allows for it.”

He assented, of course; and she nodded. “Good: I will send you Admiral Gordon’s youngest grandson, and that will make him your best advocate, instead of your loudest critic: no one has as much time for writing letters and making noise as a retired admiral, I assure you.”

Sipho was very willing to be pleased, when informed of their elevation; Demane said a little suspiciously, “We take messages? And ride the dragon?”

“And other errands,” Laurence said, and was then puzzled how to explain errands, until Temeraire said, “Those are small boring things, which no one very much likes to do,” which did not reduce the suspicion.

“When will I have time to hunt?” the boy demanded.

“I do not suppose you will,” Laurence said, taken aback, and only after a little more exchange gathered the boy did not realize that they would be fed and clothed: at Laurence’s expense, of course, as they had no family sponsoring them; cadets drew no pay. “You cannot think we would let you starve; what have you been eating so far?”

“Rats,” Demane said succinctly, explaining belatedly to Laurence’s satisfaction the unusual lack of those delights more civilly referred to as millers, which had been much lamented among the midshipmen whose traditional prey they were, “but now we are on land again, I took two of those small things last night,” and gestured to make long ears.

“Not from the grounds of Dover Castle?” Laurence said; certainly there would not have been many of them nearer-by, with the smell of so many dragons about. “You must not, again; you will be taken up for poaching.”

He was not perfectly sure Demane was convinced, but at last Laurence declared a private victory and detailed the two of them to Roland and Dyer’s supervision, to be led through their tasks a while.

It was a short flight only to the quarantine-grounds, and the pavilion established to good effect in a sheltered valley, sacrificing prospect for a windbreak. It was not empty: two rather thin and exhausted Yellow Reapers were sleeping inside, still coughing occasionally, and a limp little Greyling: not Volly, but Celoxia, and her captain Meeks. “On the Gibraltar route, I think,” Meeks said, to their inquiry, “if he has not been broken-down again,” rather bitterly. “I don’t mean to carp at you, Laurence; God knows you have done all you might, and more. But they seem to think at the Admiralty that it is like putting the wheel back on a cart, and they want us flying all the old routes again at once. Halifax and back, by way of Greenland and a transport, anchored in the middle of the north fifties, with ice-water coming over the bow with every wave; of course she is coughing again.” He stroked the little dragon’s muzzle; she sneezed plaintively.

The floor was very comfortably warm, at least, and if the wood-fire was a little smoky, worming up through the square stone slabs of the floor, the open plan blew the fumes away. It was a simple, practical building, not at all elegant or ornate, and Temeraire might have slept in it, but it could not have been called spacious, on his scale. He regarded it with brooding disappointment, and was not disposed to linger; the crew did not even have the opportunity to dismount before he wished to be off again, putting the pavilion at his back, and flying with rather a drooping ruff.

Laurence tried to console him by remarking on the sick dragons yet sheltering there, even in the summer’s heat. “Jane tells me that they would pile them in ten at a time,” he said, “during the winter, so wet and cold; and the surgeons are quite certain it saved a dozen lives.”

Temeraire only muttered, “Well, I am glad it has been useful,” ungraciously; such distant triumphs, achieved out of his sight and several months before, were not quite satisfactory. “That is an ugly hill,” he added, “and that one, also; I do not like them,” inclined to be displeased even with the landscape, when ordinarily he was mad for anything out of the common way, and would point out anything of the most meager interest to Laurence’s attention, with delight.

The hills were odd; irregular and richly covered with grass, they drew the eye queerly as they went overhead. “Oh,” said Emily suddenly, on the forward lookout, craning her head over Temeraire’s shoulder to look down at them, and shut her mouth hurriedly in embarrassment at the solecism of having spoken without a warning to give. Temeraire’s wingbeats slowed. “Oh,” he said.

The valley was full of them: not hills but barrow-mounds, raised over the dragon-corpses where they had breathed their last. Here and there an outthrust horn or spike came jutting from the sod; or a little fall of dirt had bared the white curve of a jaw-bone. No one spoke; Laurence saw Allen reach down and close his hands around the jingle of his carabiners, where they hooked on to the harness. They flew on silently, above the verdant deserted green, Temeraire’s shadow flowing and rippling over the spines and hollows of the dead.

They were still quiet when Temeraire came in to the London covert, and the little unpacking necessary carried on subdued: the men carried the bundles to be stacked at the side of the clearing, and went back for others; the harness-men had none of their usual cheerful squabbling over who was to manage the belly-netting, but in silence Winston and Porter went to it together. “Mr. Ferris,” Laurence said, voice deliberately raised, “when we are in reasonable order, you may give a general leave, through tomorrow dinner; barring any pressing duties.”

“Yes, sir; thank you,” Ferris said, trying to match his tone; it did not quite take, but the work went a little more briskly, and Laurence was confident a night’s revelry would soon finish the work of rousing the men out of the sense of oppression.

He went and stood at Temeraire’s head, putting his hand comfortingly on his muzzle. “I am glad it was useful,” Temeraire said, low, and slumped more deeply to the ground.

“Come; I would have you eat something,” Laurence said. “A little dinner; and then I will read to you, if you like.”

Temeraire did not find much consolation in philosophy, or even mathematics; and he picked at his food until, pricking up his ruff, he raised his head and put a protective forehand over his cow, and Volly came tumbling into the clearing, kicking up a furious hovering cloud of dust behind him.

“Temrer,” Volly said happily, and butted him in the shoulder, then immediately cast a wistful eye on the cow.

“Don’t be taken in,” James said, sliding down from his back. “Fed not a quarter-of-an-hour ago, while I was waiting for the mails in Hyde Park, and a perfectly handsome sheep, too. How are you, Laurence? Tolerably brown, I find. Here’s for you, if you please.”

Laurence gladly accepted the parcel of letters for his crew, with one on top, to his personal direction. “Mr. Ferris,” he said, handing the packet over, to be distributed. “Thank you, James; I hope we find you well?”

Volly did not look so bad as Meeks’s report might have made Laurence fear, if with a degree of rough scarring around the nostrils, and a slightly raspy voice. It did not inhibit him from rambling happily on to Temeraire, with an enumeration of the sheep and goats which he had lately eaten, and a recounting of his triumph at having sired, early in the recent disaster, an egg, himself. “Why, that is very good,” Temeraire said. “When will it hatch?”

“Novembrer,” Volly said delightedly.

“He will say so,” James said, “although the surgeons have no notion; it hasn’t hardened a tick yet, and it would be early. But the blessed creatures do seem to know, sometimes, so they are looking out a likely boy for the thing.”

They were bound for India, “Tomorrow, or the day after, maybe; if the weather keeps fair,” James said airily.

Temeraire cocked his head. “Captain James, do you suppose that you might carry a letter for me? To China,” he added.

James scratched his head to receive such a request; Temeraire was unique among British dragons, so far as Laurence knew, in writing letters; indeed, not many aviators managed the habit themselves. “I can take it to Bombay,” he said, “and I suppose some merchantman is bound to be going on; but they’ll only go to Canton.”

“I am sure if they give it to the Chinese governor there, he will see it delivered,” Temeraire said with justifiable confidence; the governor was likely to consider it an Imperial charge.

“But surely we ought not delay you, for personal correspondence,” Laurence said a little guiltily; if James did seem a little careless of his schedule.

“Oh, don’t trouble yourself,” James said. “I don’t quite like the sound of his chest yet, and the surgeons don’t, either; as their Lordships ain’t disposed to worry about it, so neither am I, about being quite on time. I’m happy enough to linger in port a few days, and let him fatten himself up and sleep a while.” He slapped Volly on his flank, and led him away to another clearing, the small Greyling following on his heels almost like an eager hound, if a hound were imagined the size of a moderate elephant.

The letter was from his mother, but it had been franked: a small but valuable sign of his father’s approval, of its having been sent, with replies to his last letter:

We are very shocked by the News you send us from Africa, which in many respects exceeds that appearing in the Papers, and pray for the Solace of those Christian souls caught in the Wrack, but we do not repudiate some Sentiment, which the Abhorrence of such dreadful Violence cannot wholly silence, that the Wages of Sin are not always held in Arrears to be paid off on the Day of Reckoning, but Malefactors by God’s Will may be held to account even in this earthly life; Lord Allendale considers it a Judgment upon the failure of the Vote. He is much satisfied by your Account, that the Tswana (if I have it correctly) might perhaps have been appeased, by the Ban; and we have hopes that this necessary Period, to that evil trade, may soon lead to a better and more humane Condition for those poor Wretches who yet suffer under the Yoke.

She concluded more unfortunately by saying,

…and I have taken the Liberty of enclosing a small Trinket, which amused me to buy, but for which I have no Use, as your Father has mentioned to me that you have taken an Interest in the Education of a Young Lady, who I hope may find it suitable.

It was a fine string of garnets, set in gold; his mother had only one granddaughter, a child of five, out of three sons and now five grandsons, and there was a wistful note to be read between the closely written lines. “That is very nice,” Temeraire said, peering over at it with an appraising and covetous eye, although it would not have gone once around one of his talons.

“Yes,” Laurence said sadly, and called Emily over to deliver the necklace to her. “My mother sends it you.”

“That is very kind of her,” Emily said, pleased, and if a little perplexed, quite happy to forgo that sentiment in favor of enjoyment of her present. She admired it, over her hands, and then thought a moment, and a little tentatively inquired, “Ought I write to her?”

“Perhaps I will just express your thanks, in my reply,” Laurence said; his mother might not dislike receiving the letter, but it would only have encouraged the misunderstanding, and his father would certainly look with disfavor on any such gesture as suggesting expectations of a formal acknowledgment, no part of his sense of the responsibilities towards an illegitimate child; and there was no easy way to explain to him the perfect lack of foundation for such a concern.

Laurence was sadly puzzled how to write, even in his own letter, to avoid adding to the confusion, as he could not in civility omit the barest facts: that he had delivered the gift, seen it received, and heard thanks; all of which alone revealed that he had seen Emily very lately and, by the speed of his reply, it would seem regularly. He wondered how he might explain the situation to Jane: he had the vague and slightly lowering thought that she would find it highly amusing, nothing to be taken seriously; that she would not at all mind being taken for—and here his pen stuttered and halted, with his thoughts, because of course, she was the mother of a child, out of wedlock; she was not a respectable woman, and it was not only the secret of the Corps which would have prevented him ever making her known to his mother.

Chapter 15

JANE,” LAURENCE SAID, “will you marry me?”

“Why, no, dear fellow,” she said, looking up in surprise from the chair where she was drawing on her boots. “It would be a puzzle to give you orders, you know, if I had vowed to obey; it could hardly be comfortable. But it is very handsome of you to have offered,” she added, and standing up kissed him heartily, before she put on her coat.

A timid knock at the door prevented anything more he might have said: one of Jane’s runners, come to tell her the carriage was ready at the gates of the covert, and they had perforce to go. “I will be glad when we are back in Dover; what a miserable swamp,” Jane said, already blotting her forehead on her sleeve as she left the small barracks-house: the London setting added, to the attractions of stifling heat and the heavy moisture-laden air, all the city’s unrivaled stench, and the mingling of barnyard scents with the acrid stink of the small covert’s presently overburdened dragon-middens.

Laurence said something or other about the heat, and offered her his handkerchief mechanically. He did not know how to feel. The offer had come from some deeper impulse than conscious decision; he had not meant to speak, and certainly not yet, not in such a manner. An absurd moment to raise the question, almost as if he wished to be refused; but he was not relieved, he was by no means relieved.

“I suppose they will keep us past dinner-time,” Jane said, meaning their Lordships, an opinion which seemed to Laurence rather optimistic; he thought it very likely they should be kept for days, if Bonaparte were not so obliging as to invade, with no warning. “So I must look in on Excidium before we go: he ate nothing at all, last night; nothing, and I must try and rouse him up to do better today.”

“I do not need to be scolded,” Excidium murmured, without opening his eyes, “I am very hungry,” but he was scarcely able to rouse himself from his somnolence even to nudge briefly at her hand. Though naturally one of those earliest dosed with the supply of mushroom sent on by frigate from Capetown, he was by no means yet fully recovered from his ordeal; the disease had been well advanced in his case by the time the cure had arrived, and only in the last few weeks had it been judged safe for him to leave the uncomfortable sand-pits which had made his home for more than a year. Nevertheless he had insisted on managing the flight to London, instead of letting Temeraire carry Jane with Laurence, and was now paying for his pride with near-prostration; he had done nothing but sleep since their arrival, the afternoon before.

“Then try and take a little while I am here, for my comfort,” Jane said, and stepped back to the clearing’s edge to keep her best coat and trousers from being spattered by the fresh-butchered sheep carried hurriedly over by the covert herdsmen, and hacked apart directly in front of Excidium’s jaws, which ground methodically away at the joints of meat as they were put in his mouth.

Laurence took the opportunity of escaping her company for a moment, and went to the neighboring clearing where Temeraire was busily engaged, despite the early hour, with his two sand-tables, upon the letter. He was working upon an account of the disease, and its treatment, which he meant to send to his mother in China, with Mr. Hammond as his proxy, against the danger that a similar outbreak might one day there occur. “You have made that Lung look more like Chi,” he said severely, casting an eye over the work of his coterie of secretaries: Emily and Dyer, who had been disgruntled to learn that their promotion to the exalted rank of ensign had not relieved them of all responsibility of schoolwork, and with them Demane and Sipho, who were at least at no greater disadvantage learning Chinese script than anyone else would have been.

Laurence thought, abruptly, he might have asked her the other day, after they had disposed of the fate of the boys. They had been closeted alone together, without interruption, nearly an hour; that, at any rate, would have been a more opportune moment to speak, barring any scruple at introducing a subject so intimate in the precincts of her office. Or he might have spoken yesterday night, when they had left the dragons sleeping and retired together to the barracks-house; or, better still, he ought to have waited some weeks, until the settling of this first furious bustle of activity after their arrival: hindsight serving powerfully to show him how he might better have forwarded the suit he had not wholly intended to make.

Her rejection had been too practical, too quick, to give him much encouragement to renew his addresses, under any future circumstances. In the ordinary way, he should have considered it as forming a necessary end to their relations, but the mode of her refusal made it seem mere petulance to be wounded, or to insist on some sort of moralizing line. Yet he was conscious of a lowering unhappiness; perhaps in turning Catherine’s advocate towards the state of matrimony, he had become his own, and without quite knowing had set his heart upon it, or at any rate his convictions.

Temeraire finished his present line upon the sand-table, and lifting his foreleg away to let Emily carefully exchange it with the second, caught sight of Laurence. “Are you going?” he inquired. “Will you be very late?”

“Yes,” he said, and Temeraire lowered his head and peered at him searchingly. “Never mind,” Laurence said, putting his hand on Temeraire’s muzzle. “It is nothing; I will tell you later.”

“Perhaps you had better not go,” Temeraire suggested.

“There can be no question of that,” Laurence said. “Mr. Roland, perhaps you will go and sit with Excidium this afternoon, and see if you can convince him to take a little more food, if you please.”

“Yes, sir. May I take the children?” Emily said, from the advanced age of twelve, meaning Demane and Sipho, the older of whom lifted his head indignantly at the name. “I have been teaching them how to read and write in English, in the afternoons,” she added importantly, which filled Laurence with anticipatory horror at the results of this endeavor, as Emily’s penmanship most often resembled nothing more than snarled thread.

“Very good,” he said, consigning them to their fate, “if Temeraire does not need them.”

“No; we are almost finished, and then Dyer may read to me,” Temeraire said. “Laurence, do you suppose we have enough mushroom to spare, that we may send a sample with my letter?”

“I hope so; Dorset tells me that they have managed to find a way to cultivate the thing, in some caves in Scotland, so what remains need not all be preserved against future need,” Laurence said.

The carriage was old and not very comfortable, close and hot and rattling horribly over the streets, which were in any case none to the good this close to the covert. Chenery, so ordinarily irrepressible, was sweating and silent; Harcourt very pale, although this had a more prosaic cause than anxiety, and halfway along she was obliged in a choked voice to request they stop, so she might vomit into the street.

“There, I feel better,” she said, leaning back in, and looked only a little shaky when she stepped down from the carriage and refused Laurence’s arm for the short walk through the courtyard into the offices.

“A glass of wine, perhaps, before we go in?” Laurence said to her softly, but she shook her head. “No; I will just take a touch of brandy,” she said, and moistened her lips from the flask which she carried.

They were received in the boardroom, by the new First Lord and the other commissioners: the Government had changed again in their absence, over the question of Catholic emancipation, Laurence gathered; and the Tories were in once more: Lord Mulgrave sat now at the head of the table, a little heavy by the jowls, with a serious expression and pulling a little at the end of his nose; the Tories did not think much of the Corps, under any circumstances.

But Nelson was there, also; and quite in defiance of the general atmosphere he rose as soon as they had entered, and remained standing, until in some embarrassment the other gentlemen at the table struggled to their feet; then coming forward he shook Laurence’s hand, in the handsomest manner, and asked to be presented.

“I am filled with admiration,” he declared, on being named to Catherine, and making her a noble leg, “and indeed humbled, Captain Harcourt, on having read your account; I have been accustomed,” he added, smiling, “to think a little well of myself, and to like a little praise: I will be the first to admit it! but your courage stands above any example which I can easily recollect, in a lifetime of service. Now, we are keeping you standing; and you must have something to drink.”

“Oh—no, nothing,” Catherine said, so mortally crimson her freckles stood out as pale spots. “Nothing, thank you, sir; and it was nothing, I assure you, nothing which anyone else would not have done; which my fellow-officers did not do,” she added, confusing her refusals of both refreshment and praise.

Lord Mulgrave did not look entirely satisfied to have his precedence thus usurped. A chair had of course to be offered her, and perforce them all; some shuffling ensued so they were ranged together in a close row along the farther side of the table, with the naval lords facing them along the other, but still it did not quite have the court-martial quality of standing for interrogation.

They went first through a tedious summation of events, and a reconcilement of the accounts: Chenery had set down ten days, for the flight which had carried them prisoner to the falls; Laurence had made it twelve, Catherine eleven; which difference consumed nearly an hour, and required several maps to be dug out by the secretaries, none of which precisely agreed with one another on the scale of the interior. “Sir, we would do better to apply to the dragons, for our facts,” Laurence said finally, raising his head from the fourth of these, when they had only been able to agree conclusively that there had been a desert somewhere in the middle, and it had not been less than nine-days’ flying. “I will vouch that Temeraire is well able to judge distances, in flight, and while they did not follow directly in our course, I am certain at least he can tell us where the borders of the desert are, which we crossed, and the larger of the rivers.”

“Hm,” Mulgrave said, not encouragingly, stirring the report before him with a forefinger. “Well, put it aside; let us move to the matter of insubordination. I understand correctly, I believe, that all three beasts disregarded Captain Sutton’s orders, to return to Capetown.”

“Why, if you like to call it insubordination,” Jane said. “It is a good deal more to the point, that all three of them listened at all; and that they did not go haring off wild into the interior at once, when they knew their captains stolen: remarkable discipline, I assure you, and more than I would have looked for under the circumstances.”

“Then I should like to know what else it is to be called,” Lord Palmerston said, from his seat further down. “A direct order disobeyed—”

“Oh—” Jane made half an impatient gesture with her hand, aborted. “A dragon of twenty tons is not to be called to account by any means other than persuasion, that I know of, and if they did not value their captains enough to disobey for them, they would not ever obey at all; so it is no use complaining. We might as well say that a ship is insubordinate, because it will not go forward when there is no wind: you can command the first as easily as the latter.”

Laurence looked down at the table. He had seen dragons enough in China, who without any captain or handler whatsoever behaved with perfect discipline, to know her defense was flawed. He did not know a better name for it than insubordination, himself, and was not inclined to dismiss it so lightly; it in some wise seemed to him more insulting than otherwise, to suggest that the dragons did not know better. That Temeraire had known where his duty lay, Laurence was quite certain; that Temeraire had disobeyed Sutton’s orders willfully, only because he did not like to follow them, was also certain. He as surely had considered that disobedience justified and natural, not even requiring of explanation, and would have been surprised to find anything else truly expected of him; but he would never have denied the responsibility.

To draw such a fine point, however, before a hostile audience, perhaps inducing them to demand an irrational punishment, Laurence did not deem prudent; even if he had been inclined to contradict Jane in such a setting. He was silent, while a brief wrestling over the question ensued; finished unresolved, when Jane had said, “I am quite willing to lecture them on the subject, if you should like it, my Lords; or put them to a court-martial, if that seems to you sensible; and the best use of our time at present.”

“For my part, gentlemen,” Nelson said, “I think it cannot come as a surprise to those here, when I say that victory is the best of all justifications, and to answer it with reproaches looks to me very ill. The success of the expedition proves its merit.”

“A very fine success,” Admiral Gambier said sourly, “which has left a crucial colony not merely lost but in ruins, and seen the destruction of every port along the coast of Africa; most notably meritorious.”

“No-one could have expected a company of seven dragons to hold the African continent against a plague of hundreds, under any circumstances,” Jane said, “and we had better be grateful to have, instead, what intelligence we have gained from the successful recovery of our officers.”

Gambier did not contradict her directly, but snorted and went on to inquire about another small discrepancy, in the reports; but as the session dragged on, it became gradually clear through his line of questioning, and Lord Palmerston’s, that they meant to suspect that the prisoners had provoked the invasion deliberately, and subsequently had colluded to conceal the act. How they had gone about it, was not to be specified; nor their motives, until at last Gambier added, in an ironical tone, “And of course, it is the slave trade to which they objected so violently; although as everyone knows, the natives of the continent have made a practice of it from time immemorial, long preceding the arrival of Europeans on their shore; or perhaps I should say, of course it is they, who objected to the trade. I believe, Captain Laurence, that you have strong views on the subject; I cannot be speaking out of turn to say so.”

Laurence said only, “No, sir; you are not.” He offered no further remark; he would not dignify the insinuation with a defense.

“Have we nothing more pressing,” Jane said, “that we must spend our time on the possibility, that a large company of officers arranged to have themselves abducted, and a dozen good men killed, so they could go and be offensive enough, among a foreign nation where they did not speak a word, to provoke them into assembling a dozen wings for immediate assault? Which, I suppose, should have been accomplished overnight, for Heaven knows there are no difficulties in providing support, to a hundred dragons.”

The questioning, with its grinding focus on minutiae, was sullenly given up in another hour, when it had not provoked confession. There were no official grounds for court-martial, as no dragon had been lost, and if their Lordships meant to seek a trial for the loss of the Cape, it would have to be General Grey who faced it, and there was certainly no public sympathy for such an inquest. There was nothing left for them but to be deeply dissatisfied; and nothing left for Laurence and his fellow-captains but to sit and listen to their complaints.

Several measures of recapturing the ports were proposed which had not the least chance of success, Jane forced to recall to their Lordships, with poorly concealed exasperation, the parade of failures which had been occasioned by all the attempts to establish colonies in the face of organized aerial hostilities: by Spain, in the New World; the total destruction of Roanoke; the disasters in Mysore. “You should need enough ships to throw twenty tons of metal, and six formations, to take the Cape long enough to secure the fort again, if they have not ripped it all down,” she said, “and when you were done, you should have to leave two of those formations behind with a first-rate’s worth of guns, and I hardly like to think how many soldiers; and somehow supply them monthly, if the enemy did not have the bright notion of attacking the supply-ships farther north.”

The proposals subsided. “My Lords, you are already aware, that I see no grounds to quarrel with Admiral Roland’s figures,” Nelson said, “if I am perhaps, not so pessimistic of our chances to succeed, where the attempts of a previous century had failed. But even half such a force cannot be easily mustered, and certainly not unobserved; nor could it be transported from any civilized port, to any province of Africa, without the knowledge of the Navy, and indeed without its complaisance in the matter: I will stand surety for it.

“If we cannot retake the Cape, therefore, or reestablish a foothold upon the continent, we may nevertheless satisfy ourselves that no other nation may do so. France, certainly, cannot aspire to it. I will not say that Napoleon may not conquer anyplace in the world from Calais to Peking, so long as he can walk to it; but if he must put to sea, he is at our mercy.

“Indeed,” he added, “I will go further. Without in any way ceasing to lament the dreadful loss we have suffered, in property and lives, from the savagery of this unprovoked assault, I will as a question of strategy declare myself heartily content to exchange all the convenience of our possession of the Cape, for the lack of any need to defend that position, henceforth. We have spoken before, gentlemen, in these halls, of all the expense and difficulty of improving the fortifications and patrolling the vast coastline against French incursion: an expense and difficulty which will now be borne instead by our erstwhile enemies.”

Laurence was by no means disposed to argue with him, but he could not comprehend at first, why the Admiralty should have feared such an incursion at all. The French had never shown the least ambition to seize the Cape, which if a valuable port in general was unnecessary to them, holding as they did the Île de France, off the eastern coast of Africa, and certainly a difficult nut to crack; they had enough to do to hold what maritime possessions they already had.

Mulgrave pulled at his nose a little, without comment. “Admiral Roland,” he said at last reluctantly, as if he did not like to pronounce her title, “what is our present strength at the Channel, if you please?”

“From Falmouth to Middlesbrough, eighty-three I put at fighting strength,” she said, “and another twenty who could rise to the occasion. Seventeen of those heavy-weight, and three Longwings, besides the Kazilik and the Celestial. At Loch Laggan we have another fourteen, hatchlings, in training but old enough to bring up; and more, of course, along the North Sea coast. We would be hard-put to feed them, for an action of more than a day, but they would make a good relief.”

“What is your estimation of our chances, should he make another attempt to invade by means of airships, such as he used at the battle of Dover?” Nelson asked.

“If he don’t mind leaving half of them on the ocean floor, he might be able to land the rest, but I shouldn’t recommend it him,” Jane said. “The militia will set them on fire as quick as they can come in past us. No; I asked for a year, and it has not been so long, but the cure makes up for all that, and having back Lily and Temeraire in fighting trim: the French cannot come by air.”

“Yes, the cure,” Nelson said. “It is I trust secured? There is no chance it might be stolen? I believe I heard of an incident—”

“Why, I beg you will not blame the poor fellow,” Jane said. “He is a lad of fourteen, and his Winchester was in a bad way. There were some sorry rumors, I am afraid to say, that there was not enough of the cure to go about, because we began a little slowly, to see how small the dose might be kept before we ran around pouring it down their gullets. There was no harm done, and he confessed it all himself, quite rightly, when I put it to all the captains. We put a guard on the supply, afterwards, to keep anyone else from temptation, and no one has gone poking about.”

“But if another attempt should be made?” Nelson said. “Might the guard be easily increased, and perhaps some fortification arranged?”

“After feeding every blessed dragon in Britain and the colonies on the stuff, there is precious little of it left to steal, if anyone should want to,” Jane said, “except what the gentlemen of the Royal Society have managed to persuade to take root up at Loch Laggan; and as for that, if anyone likes to try and take it from the middle of a covert, they are welcome.”

“Very good; so, gentlemen,” Nelson said, turning to the other commissioners, “you see that as a result of these events, deplorable as they may be in themselves, we may now be quite certain in our control of the cure: at least as certain as our own efforts could have made us.”

“I beg your pardon,” Laurence said, making sense at last he thought of the preoccupation, and with dismay, “is there reason to believe the disease has been communicated to the Continent? Are the French dragons taken ill?”

“We hope so,” Nelson said, “although we yet lack confirmation upon the point; but the spy-courier, the Plein-Vite whom we captured, was sent over to them two days ago, and we hope any day to receive word that they have been inoculated with the disease.”

“The only damned silver lining to the bloody mess,” Gambier said, to a general murmur of agreement. “It will be some reparation to see the Corsican’s face, when his own beasts are all coughing blood.”

“Sir,” Laurence managed; beside him Catherine was sickly-wan with horror, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth. “Sir, I must protest against—” He felt as though he were choking. He remembered little Sauvignon, who had kept Temeraire company that long dreadful week when they thought all hope was lost; when Laurence had expected to see his dragon coughing blood, at any moment.

“I should damned well hope so,” Jane said, standing up. “This is why you had her sent to Eastbourne, I suppose, and none of closing the quarantine-grounds at all; a splendid creeping business. Will we be driving a plague-ship into their harbor, next, pray tell me, or poisoning their convoys of grain? Like a parcel of damned scrubs—”

Musgrave, straightening outraged in his chair, snapped, “Ma’am, you are out of order,” and Admiral Gambier said, “This is what comes of—”

“Why damn you, Gambier, come around here and say so,” she said, putting her hand to her sword, and the room devolved very quickly to shouting and scorn, so even the Marines outside the door put in their heads timidly.

“You cannot mean to do this,” Laurence said. “Your Grace, you have met Temeraire, spoken to him; you cannot imagine they are not thinking creatures, beasts to be put to the slaughter—”

Palmerston said, “Tenderhearted womanish folly—” seconded by Gambier, and Ward; “—the enemy,” Nelson said, over the noise, trying to reply, “and we must seize the opportunity which has been offered us, to level the distinction between our aerial forces and theirs—”

The sly, underhanded way it had all been managed, proved well enough that the commissioners had expected opposition, and chosen to avoid it; they were not more ready to be harangued after the fact, and when Jane had shortly grown a little louder, they had reached the limits of their tolerance. “—and this,” Jane was shouting, “is how I am told, days past the event; when the stupidest scuttling crab might conceive that, as soon as Bonaparte knows what has happened, as soon as he sees his beasts growing sick, he will come across at once; at once, if he is not a gawping fool—and you drag me here to Dover, with two Longwings and our Celestial, and the damned Channel hanging open like Rotten Row—” when Musgrave rising beckoned to the guards, to stand open the door.

“Then we must not keep you,” he said, rather icily, and added, when Jane would have gone on, “You are dismissed, madam,” holding out the formal orders for the defense of the Channel, the papers crumpling savagely in Jane’s fist as she stormed out from the room.

Catherine leaned heavily on Chenery’s arm as they left, pale with her lip bitten to dark red. Nelson, following, stopped Laurence in the hall before he could go far after them, with a hand to his arm; and spoke to him at length: about what, Laurence did not entirely follow; a cutting-out expedition which he proposed to make, to Copenhagen, the Danish fleet to be seized there. “I would be glad to have you, Captain,” he finished, “and Temeraire, if you can be spared from the defense of the Channel, at least for a week’s time.”

Laurence stared at him, feeling heavy and stupid, baffled at Nelson’s easy manner: he had met Temeraire, had spoken with him; he could not plead ignorance. He might not have been the prime mover of this experiment; but he was no opponent of it, whose opposition might have been everything, would have been everything, surely.

The silence grew strained, then oppressive. Nelson paused, said, with a little more hauteur, “You are fresh from a long voyage, and I am sure tired from all this questioning; I have considered it an unnecessary waste, from the first. We will speak again tomorrow; I will come to the covert in the morning, before you must return.”

Laurence touched his hat; there was nothing he could say.

Out of the building and into the street, sick to his heart and wretched, seeing nothing; the touch on his elbow made him startle, and he stared at the small, shabby man standing next to him. The expression Laurence wore must have shown some sign of what he felt; the small man bared a mouthful of wooden teeth in an attempt at a placating smile, thrust into Laurence’s hand a packet of papers, and touching his own forelock dashed away, without a word spoken.

Mechanically Laurence unfolded it: a suit for damages in the amount of ten thousand three hundred pounds, two hundred six slaves valued at fifty pounds a head.

Temeraire was asleep in the lingering, slanted light; dappled. Laurence did not wake him, but sat down on the rough-hewn log bench beneath the shelter of the pine-trees, facing him, and silently bent his head: in his hands he turned over the neat roll of crisp rice paper, the seal in red ink already affixed, which Dyer had handed him. The letter could not be allowed to go, he supposed; too much chance of interception, or that the intelligence might find its way back somehow to Lien, if she yet retained any allies in the Chinese court.

The clearing was empty: the men still out on their leave. From the small forge, past the trees, Blythe’s hammer steadily rang on the harness-buckles, a thin metallic sound exactly like the odd voice of the African bird, calling along the river, and Laurence found the dust of the clearing suddenly thick in his nostrils, the new-copper smell of blood and dirt vividly recalled, of sour vomit. He had the strong sensation of rope, pressing into the skin of his face, and he rubbed his hand uneasily over his cheek as if he might find a mark there, though they had all faded; there was nothing more than a little roughness, perhaps, an impression of the corded rope left upon the skin.

Jane joined him after a little while, her fine coat discarded and her neckcloth also; there were bloodstains on her shirt. She sat down on the bench and leaned forward mannish with her elbows braced against her knees, her hair still plaited back but the finer strands about the face wisping free.

“May I beg a day’s leave of you?” Laurence asked, eventually. “I must see my solicitors, in the City. I know it cannot be long.”

“A day,” she said. She chafed her hands together absently, though it was not cold in the least, even with the sun making its last farewells behind the barracks-house. “Not longer.”

“Surely they will keep her quarantined?” Laurence said, low. “Her captain saw our own quarantine-grounds; he must have realized she was taken ill, as soon as he saw her. He would never expose the other dragons.”

“Oh, they thought it out with both hands; never fear,” Jane said. “I have had the account of it, now. He was sent home by boat; she was let to see him off, from a distance, and told that he had been sent to the covert outside of Paris, where the mail-couriers nest. I dare say she flung herself directly into their ranks. O, what a filthy business. By now it has been well-spread, I am sure: the couriers go every quarter-of-an-hour, and new come in, as often.”

“Jane,” Laurence said, “Napoleon’s couriers go to Vienna. They go to Russia and to Spain, and all through Prussia—the Prussian dragons themselves are penned in French breeding grounds; our allies whom we deserted, in their hour of need—they go even to Istanbul, and from there, where will the disease not be carried?”

“Yes, it is very clever,” she said, smiling, with a parchment thinness to the corners of her mouth. “The strategy is very sound; no one could argue with it. At a stroke we go from very nearly the weakest aerial force, in Europe, to the strongest.”

“By murder,” Laurence said. “It can be called nothing else; wholesale murder.” Nor was there any reason why the devastation should end in Europe. All the maps over which he had labored, through their half-year’s journey home from China, unfolded again for him without any need for their physical presence; the wavering course of their journey now made a track for slow creeping death to run along in reverse. Strategy, strategy, would call it a victory to see the Chinese aerial legions decimated: without them, the Chinese infantry and cavalry could hardly stand against British artillery. The distant corners of India brought under control, Japan humbled; perhaps a sick beast might be delivered to the Inca, and the fabled cities of gold flung open at last.

“I am sure they will find a prettier name for it, in the history books,” Jane said. “It is only dragons, you know; we ought think nothing more of it, than if we were to set fire to a few dozen ships in their harbor, which we would gladly enough do.”

He bowed his head. “And this is how wars should be fought.”

“No,” she said tiredly. “This is how they are won.” She put her hands on her knees, and pushed herself standing. “I cannot stay, I must take the courier for Dover at once; I have persuaded Excidium to let me go. I will need you by tomorrow night.” She rested her hand on his shoulder a moment, and left him.

He did not move, a long while, and when he at last raised his head, Temeraire was awake and watching him, the slit-pupiled eyes a faint gleam in the dark. “What has happened?” Temeraire asked quietly, and quietly Laurence told him.

Temeraire was not angry, precisely; he listened, and grew rather intent than savage, crouched low; when Laurence had done, he said, simply, “What are we to do?”

Laurence wavered uncertainly—he did not understand; he had expected some other response, something more than this—and said at last, “We are to go to Dover—” He stopped.

Temeraire had drawn back his head. “No,” he said, after a moment’s strange stillness. “No; that is not what I meant, at all.”

Silence. “There is nothing to—no protest which—She is already sent,” Laurence said, finally; he felt thick-tongued, helpless. “The invasion is to be expected at any moment, we are to stand guard at the Channel—”

“No,” Temeraire said loudly. There was a terrible resonance in his voice; the trees murmured back with it, shivering. “No,” he repeated. “We must take them the cure. How can we come at it? We can go back to Africa, if we must—”

“You are speaking treason,” Laurence said, without feeling, oddly calm; the words only a recitation of fact, distant.

“Very well,” Temeraire said, “if I am an animal, and may be poisoned off like an inconvenient rat, I cannot be expected to care; and I do not. You cannot tell me I should obey; you cannot tell me I should stand idle—”

“It is treason!” Laurence said.

Temeraire stopped, and looked at him only. Laurence said, low and exhausted, “It is treason. Not disobedience, not insubordination; it cannot—there is no other name which it can bear. This Government is not of my party; my King is ill and mad; but still I am his subject. You have sworn no oath, but I have.” He paused. “I have given my word.”

They were silent again. There was a clamor back in the trees; some of the ground-crew men returning from their day’s leave, noisy with liquor; a snatch of raised song—that saucy little trim-rigged doxy—and roar of laughter, as they went into the barracks-house, their lanterns vanishing.

“Then I must go alone,” Temeraire said wretchedly, so softly that for once there was real difficulty in making out the words. “I will go alone.”

Laurence breathed once more; hearing it, said aloud, made everything quite clear. He was grateful, it occurred to him, that Jane had refused; that he had not that pain to give. “No,” he said, and stepped forward, to put his hand on Temeraire’s side.

Chapter 16

LAURENCE WROTE TO Jane, the merest word; no apology could suffice, and he would not insult her, by asking her to sympathize, adding only:

He folded it over twice, sealed it with especial care, and laid it flat upon his neatly made cot, the address faced upwards; and left his small quarters, walking between the narrow rows of snoring men to go outside again. “You may be dismissed, Mr. Portis,” he said to the officer of the watch, who was nodding at the edge of the clearing. “I will take Temeraire up for a turn; we will not have a quiet flight again in some time.”

“Very good, sir,” Portis said, barely concealing a bloodshot yawn, and did not stay to be persuaded further: not quite drunk, but his gait a little shambling as he went back to the barracks-house.

It was not nine. In an hour, at most two, Laurence supposed, they should be missed; he relied on scruple to forbid Ferris’s opening the letter, addressed to Jane, until he began to suffer a greater degree of anxiety, which might save another hour; but then the pursuit would be furious. There were some five couriers in the covert sleeping now; more by Parliament; some of the fastest flyers in all Britain. They had not only to outrun them to Loch Laggan, but after to the coast: every covert, every shore battery from Dover to Edinburgh would be roused to bar their passage.

Temeraire was waiting, ruff pricked, agitated and crouched small to conceal it. He put Laurence upon his neck, and launched quickly; London falling away, a collection of lamps and lanterns and the bitter smoke of ten thousand chimneys, ships’ lights moving gently down the Thames, and only the rushing hollow sound of wind. Laurence shut his eyes, until they had grown accustomed, then looked at his compass to give Temeraire the direction: four hundred miles, north by north-west, into the dark.

It was strange to be all alone on Temeraire’s back again, not merely for a pleasure-flight; the ordinary round of duty did not often allow it. Unburdened but by the triviality of Laurence’s weight and the barest harness, Temeraire stretched himself and drove high aloft, to the margins where the air grew thin; pale clouds passing beneath them over the dark ground, fellow sailors in the air. His ruff was flattened down, and the wind came whistling hard over his back, cold at these heights even in the midst of August; Laurence drew his leather coat more snugly close, and put his hands beneath his arms. Temeraire was going very fast; his wings beating a full, cupped stroke, and the world beneath blurred when Laurence looked over his shoulder.

Close towards dawn, Laurence saw to the distant west faintly an eerie glow which illuminated the curve of the earth, as if the sun meant to rise the wrong way round; a color broken, now and again, by belching smoke: Manchester, and its mills, he guessed, so they had gone some hundred and sixty miles, in less than seven hours. Twenty knots, twenty-five.

A little after dawn, Temeraire stooped, without a word, and came to ground at the shores of a small lake to drink deeply, his head thrust partway beneath the water, with the gulps traveling convulsively down his throat; he stopped, and panted, and drank some more. “Oh, no; I am not tired; not very tired, only I was so thirsty,” he said a little thickly, turning his head back: despite his brave words he shook himself all over, and blinked away a dazed expression before he asked, in a more normal tone, “Shall I set you down a moment?”

“No; I am very well,” Laurence said; he had his grog-flask with him, and in his pocket a little biscuit, which he had not touched. He wanted nothing; his stomach was closed. “You are making a good time, my dear.”

“Yes, I know,” Temeraire said complacently. “Oh! It is more pleasant than anything, to go so quickly, in pleasant weather, only the two of us; I should like it above all, if only,” he added, looking round sorrowfully, “I did not fear that you were unhappy, dear Laurence.”

Laurence would have liked to reassure him; he could not. They had passed over Nottinghamshire during the night; they might have passed over his home, his father’s house. He rubbed his hand upon the neck-scales, and said quietly, “We had better be off; we are more visible, in the day.”

Temeraire drooped, and did not answer, but launched himself aloft again.

They came in over Loch Laggan after seven hours more, at the dinner-hour; Temeraire without even the pretense of courtesy or warning dived directly into the feeding grounds, and not waiting for the herdsmen seized two surprised cows out of the pen: his descent too swift even for them to bellow. Alighting with them on the ledge which overlooked the training flights, he crammed them one after another down his throat, not pausing even to swallow all the first before he began upon the second. He gave a relieved sigh, afterwards, and belched replete; then daintily began to lick clean his talons before he made a guilty start: they were observed.

Celeritas was lying in the waning sun, upon the ledge, his eyes half-lidded. He looked aged, as he had not during their training, so long ago and yet scarcely three years gone; the luster of his pale jade-colored markings had faded, as cloth washed in too-hot water, and the yellow darkened to a bronzey tone. He coughed a little hoarsely. “You have put on some length, I see.”

“Yes, I am as long as Maximus,” Temeraire said, “or anyway, not much shorter; and also I am a Celestial,” he added smugly: they had left off their training under the pressure of the last threat of invasion, in the year four, at the time unaware of Temeraire’s real breed or his particular curious ability of the divine wind and thinking him instead an Imperial: still a most valuable breed, but not as vanishingly rare.

“So I had heard,” Celeritas said. “Why are you here?”

“Oh,” Temeraire said. “Well—”

Laurence let himself down and stepped forward. “I beg your pardon, sir; we are here from London, for some of the mushrooms: may I ask where they are kept?” They had resolved on this brazen frontal assault, as offering the best chance of success; even if Temeraire might look daunted now.

Celeritas snorted. “They are nursing the things like eggs: downstairs, in the baths,” he said. “You will find Captain Wexler at table, I believe; he is commander of the fort now,” and turned to Temeraire inquisitively, while Temeraire went hunching steadily down. Laurence did not like to leave him alone, to face all the pain of lying in the face of the friendly, unwary curiosity of his old training master, but there was no time: Celeritas would soon begin to wonder, at the absence of their crew, and the most hardened liar could scarcely have concealed this treachery for long.

It was strange to walk the corridors again, now familiar instead of alien; the cheerful roar of the communal dining-tables, which he could hear around the corners, like the blurred continuous noise of a distant cataract: welcoming, and yet closed to him utterly; he felt himself already set apart. There were no servants in the halls, likely all of them busy with the dinner service, but for one small lad running by with a stack of clean napkins, who did not give him a second glance.

Laurence did not go to Captain Wexler: his excuse could not withstand the absence of orders, of any real explanation; instead he went directly to the narrow, humid stairway which led down to the baths, and in the dressing room put off swiftly his boots, his coat, flung down upon the shelves with his sword laid down beside them; his trousers and shirt he left on, and taking with him a towel went into the great tiled steam room. He could see dimly a few somnolent forms drowsing, but in the clouds no faces could be easily made out, and he moved on with quick purpose; no one spoke to him, until he had nearly reached the far door, then a fellow lying with a towel over his face lifted it off. Laurence did not know him: an older lieutenant perhaps, or a younger captain, with a thick bristling mustache dripping water off its corners. “Beg pardon,” he said.

“Yes?” Laurence said, stiffening.

“Be a good fellow and shut the door quick, if you mean to go through,” the man said, and putting himself down covered his face again.

Laurence did not understand, until he had opened the door to the large bathing-room beyond and the thick miasmic stench of the mushrooms assaulted him, mingled with the pungent smell of a dragon-midden. He pulled the door to behind him quickly, and put his hand over his face, breathing deep through his mouth. The room was deserted, nearly; the dragon eggs sat gleaming wetly in their niches, safe behind the wrought-iron fence along the back of the room, and beneath them on the floor great tubs of black fertile soil, speckled reddish brown with dragon waste for fertilizer, and mushrooms like round buttons poking from the dirt.

There were two young Marines, undoubtedly without much seniority, standing guard: very unhappy, and nearly red enough in the face to match their coats from the room’s intense heat; their white trousers were stained with lines of running dye. They looked at Laurence rather hopefully as, if nothing else, a distraction; he nodded to them and said, “I am come from Dover, for more of the mushrooms; pray bring out one of those tubs.”

They looked dubious, and hesitated; the older ventured, “Sir, we aren’t supposed to, unless the commander says so, himself.”

“Then I beg your pardon for the irregularity; my orders said nothing of the sort,” Laurence said. “Be so kind as to send and confirm them, with him, if you please; I will wait here,” he said to the younger soldier, who did not stay to be invited again, much to the poorly stifled outrage of the older man: but he had the key, hanging from the chain on his belt, so he could not be allowed to go.

Laurence waited as the metal door swung to again; waited; the ship turning slowly through the wind, her broadside coming to bear, the enemy’s stern in sight; the clang sounded, as a bell, and he struck the Marine a heavy blow, just below the ear, as the man gazed scowling after his fellow.

The man fell staggering to one knee, his face turning up in surprise, his mouth opening; Laurence struck him again, hard, his knuckles bursting and leaving smears of blood along the Marine’s cheekbone and jaw; the soldier fell heavily and was still. Laurence found that he was breathing raggedly. He had to steady his hands before he could unlatch the key.

The tubs were of varied sizes, half-barrels of wood filled with dirt, most of them large and unwieldy; Laurence seized the smallest, and threw over it the towel he had brought, hot and damp already only from the moist air of the baths. He went out by the far door, walking quickly through the rest of the circuit, back to the dressing rooms: still deserted, but dinner would by now be far advanced, and men left the tables as they pleased. He could expect interruption at any moment; sooner if the Marine were more inclined to be dutiful than dawdling, and reached the commander. Laurence flung on his boots and coat haphazardly over his wet things, and went up the stairs with the tub balanced on his shoulder, his other hand gripping tight to the rail: not recklessly; he did not mean to do this much, and fail. He burst out into the hall, and went hurriedly around a corner to straighten his clothes: if he were not so plainly disordered, he would not make a spectacle enough to draw conscious attention, he hoped, despite the odd burden of the tub. The stench was not wholly muffled by the covering linen, but it wafted behind him rather than before.

The noise of the dining hall was indeed already less; he heard voices, nearer, in the corridors; and passed a pair of servants laden down with dirty dishes. Looking down another corridor which crossed his own, he saw a couple of young midwingmen go racing across from one door to the next, shouting like boys, gleefully; in another moment he heard more running footsteps, boots falling heavily, fresh shouting: but the tone was very different.

He abandoned circumspection and ran, clumsy with the tub and shifting it every moment, until he burst out onto the ledge. Celeritas looked over at him with his dark green eyes perplexed and doubtful; Temeraire said in a sudden rush, “Pray forgive me, it is all a hum, we are taking them to France so all the dragons there do not die, and tell them Laurence did not like to do it, at all, only I insisted upon it,” not a pause for breath or punctuation, and snatching Laurence with the tub up in his talons, he flung himself away into the air.

They went rushing away bare moments before five men charged out after them; bells were ringing madly, and Temeraire had not settled Laurence back upon his neck before the beacon-fire went alight and dragons came pouring out of the castle grounds like smoke.

“Are you safe?” Temeraire cried.

“Go, go at once,” Laurence shouted for an answer, lashing harness-straps around the tub to hold it down before him, and Temeraire whipped himself straight and flew, flew; the pursuit was hot upon them. Not dragons whom Laurence knew: there was one gangly-looking Anglewing, nearly in the lead, and a few Winchesters gaining on them: not to much purpose, but perhaps able to interfere a little with their flight, and delay them for the others. Temeraire said, “Laurence, I must go higher; are you warm enough?”

He was soaked through, and chilled to the skin already by their flight, despite the overhanging sun. “Yes,” he said, and pulled his coat closer about him. A bank of clouds pressed down upon the crowns of the mountains, and Temeraire pushed into them, the clinging mist springing up in fat droplets on the buckles, the waxed and oiled leather of the harness, Temeraire’s glossy scales. The dragons chasing called to one another, roaring, and plunged in after them, distant obscure shadows in the fog, their voices echoing and muffled at odd alternate turns, so he was scaling upwards through a strange and formless landscape without direction, haunted by their ghostly images.

He burst clear just short of a towering white mountain-face, stark against the open blue, and Temeraire roared as he came: a hammer-blow against the solid-packed ice and snow; Laurence clung to the harness, shivering involuntarily, as Temeraire pulled up nearly vertical, climbing along the face of the mountain, and the pursuit came chasing out of the clouds only to recoil from the thundering, rolling, steady roar of avalanche, coming down upon them like a week’s snowstorm compressed into a heartbeat: the Winchesters all squalling alarmed, and scattering away from it like a flock of sparrows.

“South, due south,” Laurence said, calling forward to Temeraire, pointing him the way as they came over the peak and broke away, losing the more distant followers. But Laurence could see the beacons going up already down the long line to the coast: the beacons which ordinarily would have warned of invasion, instead now carrying the warning in the other direction and ahead of them. Every covert, every dragon would be alert, even without knowing what was the matter precisely, and would try to stop them in their flight. They could not fly in any direction which would bring them upon a covert, and see them headed off and caught between two forces; their only hope for an escape lay along the more sparsely guarded North Sea coast, short of Edinburgh. Yet they had also to be near enough to make it across to the Continent; with Temeraire already tired.

Night would come, soon; three hours more would give them the safety of dark. Three hours; Laurence wiped his face against his sleeve, and huddled down.

Temeraire came at last exhausted to ground, in darkness, six hours later; his pace had slackened, little by little, the slow measured flap of his wings like a timepiece winding down, until Laurence looking over had seen not a single flickering light; not a shepherd’s bonfire, not a torch, as far as his sight could reach, and said at last, “Down, my dear; you must have some rest.”

He thought they were in Scotland still, or perhaps Northumberland; he was not certain. They were well south of Edinburgh and Glasgow, somewhere in a shallow valley; he could hear water trickling nearby, but they were too tired to go find it. He ate all his biscuit, ravenous suddenly, and took the last of his grog, huddled up against the curve of Temeraire’s neck: it sprawled out untidily from his body, his draggled wings; he slept as he had landed.

Laurence stripped to the skin, and laid his wet things out on Temeraire’s side, to let the native heat of the dragon’s body do what it might to dry them; then rolled himself in his coat to sleep. The wind was cool enough, among the mountains, to keep the chill upon his skin. Temeraire gave a low rumbling murmur, somewhere in his belly, and twitched; there was distantly a hurried rustling, a clatter of frightened small hooves; but Temeraire did not wake.

The next he knew it was morning, and Temeraire was feasting red-mouthed upon a deer, with another lying dead beside it; he swallowed down his meal and looked at Laurence anxiously. “It is quite nice raw, too, and I can tear it up for you small; or perhaps you can use your sword?” he suggested.

“No; I pray you eat it all. I have not been at hard labor as have you: I can stand to be parted from my dinner a little longer,” Laurence said, getting up to scrub his face in the small trickling creek, some ten paces only from where they had collapsed, and to put back on his clothes. Temeraire had attempted to spread them out upon a warm sunny rock, with his claws: they were not very damp anymore, but a little mauled about; at least the tears did not show much, under the long coat.

After Temeraire had finished his breakfast, Laurence sketched out the line of the North Sea coastline, and the Continent. “We cannot risk going much south of York,” Laurence said. “Once past the mountains the country is too settled; we will be seen at once by day and perhaps by night also. We must make for the mountains on the coast near Scarborough, pass there the night, and make Holland our final mark across the sea: the country there is unsettled enough I hope we need not fear immediate challenge. Then along the coastline to France; and we shall hope they do not shoot us down without a word.”

He put his tattered shirt upon a stick, in the end, to make a ragged flag of parley; and waved it mightily against the side of Temeraire’s neck, while they came in over Dunkirk. Beneath them in the harbor, nevertheless, a frantic alarum set up aboard the French ships, when they saw Temeraire coming, to show that the fame of his sinking of the Valérie had spread this far, and many useless attempts were made, at firing cannon at him, although he was considerably too high aloft to be in range.

The French dragons came charging in a determined cloud: already some of them were coughing, and they were none of them in a mood to converse, until Temeraire roared out like thunder in their faces, and took them all aback, then loudly said, “Ârret! Je ne vous ai pas attaqué il faut que vous m’écouter: nous sommes venus pour vous apporter du médicament.”

As the first handful were mulling this over, flying circles around them, another party came flying fresh from the covert roaring their own defiance; the two groups grew rapidly more confused, captains shouting at one another over their speaking-trumpets, until at last signals were issued, and they were escorted to the ground by a wary honor-guard, six dragons on either side and more preceding them and behind. When they had been brought down, in a wide and pleasant meadow, there was a good deal of shuffling and edging back, not frightened but wary, and anxious murmurs from the dragons as their officers descended.

Laurence unstrapped the tub, and unlatched his own carabiners: men were already swarming up the sides of Temeraire’s harness, and there were pistols leveled at him before he stood. “You will surrender,” a young lieutenant said, narrow-eyed and thickly accented.

“We already have,” Laurence said tiredly, and held out to him the wooden tub; the young man looked at it, perplexed, wincing away from the stench. “They are to cure the cough,” Laurence said, “la grippe, des dragonnes,” and pointed to one of the coughing dragons.

It was taken from him with much suspicion, but passed down, if not as the priceless treasure it was, at least with some degree of care. The tub vanished from his sight, at any rate, and so beyond his concern; a great sinking weariness was spreading through him, and he fumbled with more awkwardness even than usual at the harness-straps, climbing down, until he slipped and fell the last five feet to the ground.

“Laurence,” Temeraire cried urgently, leaning towards him; another French officer sprang forward and seizing Laurence by the arm dragged him up and put the muzzle of a pistol, cold and gritty with powder-grains, to his neck.

“I am well,” Laurence said, restraining with an effort a cough; he did not wish to jar the pistol. “I am well, Temeraire, you do not need to—”

He was permitted to say no more; there were many hands upon him, and the officers gathering tight around him like a knot; he was half-carried across the meadow towards the tense and waiting line of French dragons, a prisoner, and Temeraire made a low wordless cry of protest as he was dragged away.

Chapter 17

LAURENCE SPENT THE night in a solitary uncomfortable cell, in the bowels of the covert headquarters: clammy and hot, without a breath of air; the narrow barred window at the top of wall looked out on a barren parade-ground, and let in only dust. They gave him a little thin porridge and a little water; a little straw on the floor for a bed; but there was none of that humane self-interest which would have let him buy greater comfort, though he had a little money in his pockets.

They did not rob him, but his hints were ignored: a cold resentful suspicion in their looks, and some muttered colloquial remarks that he thought he was meant to understand better than his limited French would allow. He supposed the news had spread, by now, amongst them: the nature of the disease, the virulence; and he would have been as little forgiving as they were. The guards were all old aviators, former ground crewmen with wooden legs, or missing arms: a sinecure, like the post of cook aboard a ship; although no cook he had ever known would have refused a neat bribe for a cup of his slush, not from the Devil himself.

It did not touch him in a personal way, however; there was no room for that. He only gave up the attempt, and threw himself down on the dirty pallet with his coat wrapped around him, and slept dreamless and long; when he roused with the gaol-keepers’ clanging delivery of the morning’s porridge, he looked down at the floor, where the window square of sunlight lay divided neatly into its barred sections, and shut his eyes again, without bothering to rise and eat.

He had to be woken in the afternoon by rough shaking, and he was brought afterwards to another room with a handful of grim-faced senior officers arranged before him, along the long side of a table. They interrogated him with some harshness as to the nature of the mushrooms, the disease, his purpose in bringing the cure, if a cure it was. He was forced to repeat himself, and exhorted to speak more quickly when he went slowly in his stumbling French; when he tried for a little more speed, and misspoke, the errors were seized upon, and shaken like a rat-killing dog might, to squeeze all the life there was out of them.

Having been served such a black turn to begin with, they had some right to suspect him the instrument of some further underhanded trick, instead of one acting to prevent it; nevertheless he found it hard to bear up; and when they began to ask him other questions, of the position of ships in the Channel, the strength in the Dover covert, he nearly answered at first, only from fatigue and the habit of replying, before he caught himself up.

“You do know we may hang you as a spy,” one of the officers said coldly, when Laurence had flatly refused to speak. “You came in without colors, without uniform—”

“If you wish to object, because I had made my shirt a parley-flag, it would be kind of you at least to arrange for me to have another,” Laurence said, wondering with black humor if next they would offer to flog him. “As for the rest, I had rather hang for a British spy, than be a French.”

He ate the cold waiting porridge when they had put him back into his cell, mechanically, and went to look out of the window at what nothing there was to see. He was not afraid, only still very tired.

The interrogations went on a week, but eased gradually from suspicion to a wary and bewildered sort of gratitude, in step with the progress of the trial they had made, of one of the mushrooms. Even when they had been convinced the cure was as real as the disease, the officers did not know what to make of Laurence’s actions; they came at him with the question in one way and then another, and when he repeated that he had only come to bring the cure, to save the dragons’ lives, they said, “Yes, but why?”

As he could give them no better answer, they settled for thinking him quixotic, with which he could not argue, and his keepers grew sufficiently mellow to let him buy some bread and the occasional stewed fowl. At the end of the week, they put a fetter on his leg, and took him out to see Temeraire, established in respectful state in the covert, and under guard only by one unhappy Petit Chevalier, not much smaller than he, whose nose dripped continuously upon the ground. One small tub of course would not do, to cure all those infected, and although it had evidently been delivered successfully to the charge of several expert Brêton mushroom-farmers, many of the sick dragons would have to suffer for several months more before there was enough of the cure to go around. Where the disease might spread further, Laurence could only hope that with the cure established in England and France, the quarrel of the two powers must deliver it to their respective allies also, and cupidity amongst such a widened number of keepers lead to its eventual dispersal.

“I am very well,” Temeraire said. “I like their beef here, and they have been obliging enough to cook it for me, do you know? The dragons here at least are perfectly willing to try cooked food, and Validius here,” he nodded to the Petit Chevalier, who sneezed to acknowledge it, “had a notion, that they might stew it for us with wine; I have never understood what was so nice about it, that you were always drinking it, but now I do; it has a very nice flavor.”

Laurence wondered how many bottles had been sacrificed, to sate the hunger of two very large dragons; perhaps not a very good year, he thought, and hoped they had not yet formed the notion of drinking spirits unadulterated by cooking. “I am glad you are so comfortably situated,” he said, and made no complaint of his own accommodations.

“Yes, and,” Temeraire added, with not a little smugness, “they would like me to give them five eggs, all to very large dragons, and one of them a fire-breather; although I have told them I cannot,” he finished wistfully, “because of course they would teach the eggs French, and make them attack our friends, in England; they were surprised that I should mind.”

This was of a piece with the questions Laurence had faced: all the worse grief, that he could so naturally be taken for a wholehearted turncoat, judged by his own acts; it was the greater curiosity to all when he did not offer to be a traitor. He was glad to see Temeraire contented, and sincerely so; but he returned to his cell lower in his spirits, conscious that Temeraire would be as happy here, as he was in England; happier, perhaps.

“I would be grateful for a shirt, and trousers,” Laurence said, “if my purse can stand it; I want for nothing else.”

“The clothing I insist you will permit me to arrange from my own part,” De Guignes said, “and we will see you at once in better accommodations; I am ashamed,” he added, with a cold look over his shoulder that made the gaolers edge away from where they were listening and peeping in at the door, “that you should have met with such indignity, monsieur.”

Laurence bowed his head. “You are very kind, sir; I have no complaint to make of my treatment, and I am very sensible of the honor which you do in coming so far to see me,” he said quietly.

They had last met under very different circumstances: at a banquet in China, De Guignes there at the head of Napoleon’s envoy, and Laurence with the King’s. Although their political enemy, he had been impossible to dislike; and Laurence without knowing it had already endeared himself to the gentleman, some time before, by taking some pains to preserve the life of his nephew, taken prisoner in a failed boarding attempt; so the encounter had been, so far as personal matters went, a friendly one.

That he had come all this way was, however, a marked kindness; Laurence knew himself a prisoner of no great importance or rank, except as surety for Temeraire’s good behavior, and De Guignes must have been thoroughly occupied. While his embassy had failed in its original designs, De Guignes had succeeded in one marked particular: seducing Lien to Napoleon’s cause, and bringing her back with him to France. He had been promoted for it, Laurence vaguely thought, to some higher office in the foreign service; he had heard something of it, interested more in the name than in the rank; certainly De Guignes now showed all the signs of prosperity and position, in his handsome rings and in the elegance of his silk-and-linen coat.

“It is little enough amends for what you have suffered,” De Guignes said, “and I am here not only in my own person, but to bear you all the assurances of His Majesty that you will soon better feel the gratitude of France, which you have so richly earned.”

Laurence said nothing; he would have preferred to remain in his cell, starved, stripped naked, and fettered with iron, than be rewarded for his actions. But Temeraire’s fate stopped his mouth: there was one at least in France, who far from feeling any sentiments of gratitude had all cause in the world to hate and wish them ill: Lien herself, who at least in rumor had Napoleon’s confidence, and would gladly have seen Temeraire suffering the torments of the damned. Laurence would not disdain what protection from her malice the public avowals of imperial gratitude might provide.

It had certainly a more immediate effect: De Guignes had scarcely left the room before Laurence was shifted to a handsome chamber upstairs, appointed plainly but with some eye to comfort; a pleasant view of the open harbor, gaily stocked with sails, outside his window. The shirt and trousers materialized by morning: of very fine linen and wool, with silk thread, and with them clean stockings and linen; in the afternoon arrived a notable coat to replace his own much-battered and-stained article: cut of black leather, with skirts lower than the tops of his boots, and buttons in gold so pure they were already no longer quite circular.

Temeraire admired the results, very much, when in the morning they were reunited to be transferred to Paris; and barring an inclination to complain that Laurence was not permitted to ride upon him, for the journey, was perfectly satisfied with their change of venue. He did glare ferociously at the small and quailing Pou-de-Ciel who would serve as transport, as if he suspected her of planning to carry Laurence off for some nefarious ends. But the precaution would have been wise even if Laurence had given their parole, as without it he would have set a pace impossible for his escort to match; even as it was, they were hard-pressed. Temeraire outdistanced them, except in fits and starts, when he doubled back to come alongside the Pou-de-Ciel and call out remarks to Laurence; so the other dragons, most of them showing early signs of the illness, were rather exhausted when they came in sight of the Seine.

Laurence had not been to Paris since the year one, in the last peace, and had never before seen it from the dragon-heights; but even with so little familiarity, he could scarcely have failed to notice transformation on such a scale. A broad avenue, still more than half raw dirt, had been driven straight through the heart of the city, smashing through all the old medieval alley-ways. Extending from the Tuileries towards the Bastille, it continued the line of the Champs-Élysées, but dwarfed that into a pleasant country lane: the new avenue perhaps half as wide as that massive square of Peking, which stood before the Forbidden City, and much longer; with dragons hovering over and lowering great stacks of paving-stones into the street.

A triumphal arch of monumental scale was going up, in the Place de l’Étoile, half still presently mocked up in wood, and new embankments upon the Seine; more prosaically, in other places the ground had been opened up to a great depth, and new sewers were being laid in mortared cobblestones. On the city’s border an enormous bank of slaughterhouses stood behind a newly raised wall, with a plaza open beside them, and a handful of cows on spits roasting; a dragon was sitting there eating one, holding it on the spit like an ear of corn.

Below them directly, the gardens of the Tuileries had been widened, out from the banks of the Seine nearly an additional quarter-of-a-mile in the opposite direction, swallowing up the Place Vendôme into their boundaries; and overlooking the riverbank, at right corners to the palace, a great pavilion in stone and marble was going up: an edifice in the Roman style, but on a different scale. In the grassy courtyard already laid down beside it, Lien lay drowsily coiled in the shade, a thin white garden-snake seen from so far aloft, easy to make out among the other dragons who were scattered at decorous distance around her.

They were brought down in those gardens: not where Lien slept, but in another plaza before the palace, with a makeshift pavilion of wood and sailcloth hastily erected in their honor. Laurence had scarcely time to see Temeraire established, before De Guignes took his arm and smiling invited him inside; smiling, but with a firm grip, and the guards gripped their muskets tightly: still honored guest and prisoner both.

The apartments where they conducted him would have befitted a prince; he might have wandered blindfold through the room for five minutes together without knocking into a wall. Used as he was to cramped quarters, Laurence found their scale irritating rather than luxurious: the walk from the chamberpot to the dressing-table a nuisance, and the bed too soft and overburdened with hangings for the hot weather; standing alone under the high and muraled ceiling, he felt an actor in a bad play, with eyes and mockery upon him.

He sat down at the writing-table in the corner, to have somewhere to put himself, and pushed up the cover: paper aplenty, and good pens, and ink, fresh and liquid when he opened the jar; he closed it slowly again. He owed six letters; they would never be written.

Outside it grew dark; from his window he could see the pavilion on the riverbank, illuminated with many colorful lanterns. The workers had gone away; Lien was now lying across the top of the stairway, her wings folded to her back, watching the light on the water: a silhouette more than a shape. She turned her head, and Laurence saw a man come walking down the broad path towards her, and ascend into the pavilion: lanterns shone red on the uniforms of his guard, which he had left at the foot of the stair.

De Guignes came the next morning after breakfast, all renewals of kindness and generous sentiments, and took him walking down to see Temeraire, with only a moderate guard. Temeraire was awake and by the lashing of his tail in a state of near-agitation; “She has sent me an invitation,” he said plaintively, as soon as Laurence had sat down. “I do not know what she means by it; I am not going to go and talk to her, at all.”

The invitation was a handsomely calligraphed scroll, in Chinese characters, tied with a tassel of red and gold; it was not long, and merely requested the pleasure of the company of Lung Tien Xiang at the Pavilion of the Seven Pillars for drinking tea and restful repose, in the heat of the day. “There is nothing evidently insincere in it; perhaps she means it as a gesture of reconciliation,” Laurence said, though he did not think much of the chances.

“No, she does not,” Temeraire said darkly. “I am sure if I go, the tea will be very unpleasant, at least my tea will be, and I will have to drink it or look ill-mannered; or she will make remarks which do not seem offensive, until I have gone away and thought them over; or she will try and have you murdered while I am not there: you are not to go anywhere without a guard, and if anyone tries to murder you, you must call for me very loud,” he added. “I am sure I could knock down a wall of that palace, if I had to, to reach you,” a remark which left De Guignes with a peculiar rigid expression; he could not forbear a glance at the substantial stone wall of the Tuileries, overlooking the pavilion.

“I assure you from my heart,” he said, recovering his aplomb, “that no one could be more sensible of the generosity which you have shown to France; Madame Lien has been among the first, to receive the cure which you have delivered us—”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, disgruntled.

“—and, as all of the nation, welcomes you with open arms,” De Guignes carried on manfully.

“Stuff,” Temeraire said. “I do not believe it at all; and I do not like her anyway, even if she does mean it, so she may keep her invitations and her tea; and her pavilion, too,” he added, low, with an envious twitch of his tail.

De Guignes coughed, and did not attempt further to persuade him; instead he said, “I will make your regrets, then; in any event, you may be occupied with preparations, as tomorrow morning His Majesty wishes to meet you, and to convey to you all the thanks of the nation. He wishes you to know it grieves him very much that the formalities of war should attend such a meeting; and that for his part, he welcomes you as brothers, and not as prisoners at all,” he added, with a look at once tactful and significant: a delicate hinting that they need not be prisoners for their part, either, if they chose.

The whole speech, his earnest manner, had a vaguely mercenary quality, which, to do justice to the man’s humanity, he gave with a very faint, dismissive air; so to accept would have needed only a nod. Laurence looked away instead; to hide his expression of distaste; but Temeraire said, “If he does not like us to be prisoners, it seems to me he is the Emperor, and can let us go if he likes. We are not going to fight for you against our own friends back in England, if that is what you mean.”

De Guignes smiled without any sign of offense. “His Majesty would never invite you to any dishonorable act.” A pretty sentiment, and one which Laurence was inclined to trust from Bonaparte as much as from the Lords of the Admiralty: less. De Guignes rose gracefully and said, “I hope you will excuse me now to my other duties: Sergeant Lasalle and his men will escort you to your quarters for dinner, Captain, when you have finished your conversation,” and so quitted them strategically, to let them contemplate his vague suggestions alone.

They did not say anything a while; Temeraire scratched at the ground. “I suppose we cannot stay,” he muttered, half-ashamedly, “even if we did not fight? I thought we would go back to China, but then we have still left everything in Europe as it is. I am sure I can protect you from Lien, and perhaps I might help work upon that road; or I might write books. It seems very nice here,” he added. “One could go walking, here in the gardens, or in the road, and meet people.”

Laurence looked down at his hands, which held no answer. He did not mean to grieve Temeraire, or to distress him, but he had known his own fate since first they had embarked upon this adventure; and at last he said quietly, “My dear, I hope you will stay, and have whatever profession you desire; or that Bonaparte will give you passage back to China if you prefer it. But I must go home to England.”

Temeraire paused, and then he said uncertainly, “But they will hang you—”

“Yes,” Laurence said.

“I will not, I will never let them,” Temeraire said. “Laurence—”

“I have committed treason,” Laurence said. “I will not now add cowardice to that crime, nor let you shield me from its consequences.” He looked away; Temeraire was silent and trembling, and it was painful to look at him. “I do not regret what we have done,” he said quietly. “I would not have undertaken the act, if I were not willing to die for it; but I do not mean to live a traitor.”

Temeraire shuddered, and drew himself back onto his haunches, staring blindly out into the gardens; motionless. “And if we stay,” he said, eventually, “they will say it was all self-interest—that we brought the cure for a reward, so that we should have a pleasant life, here or in China; or perhaps that we were cowards, and thought Napoleon would win the war, and we did not want to fight. They will never admit that they were in the wrong; and that we have sacrificed our own happiness, to repair what never ought have been done, in the first place.”

Laurence had not so articulated his instinctive decision; he did not need to, to know what he must do. For his own part, he did not care what should be thought of it, and said so. “What will be thought of it, I already know, and I do not suppose anything now will alter those sentiments; if that were of any importance, we should not have gone. I am not returning to make a political gesture, but because it must be done; if there is any honor to be preserved after such an act.”

“Well, I would not give a button for honor,” Temeraire said. “But I do care about the lives of our friends, and that those lords should learn to be ashamed of what they have done; which I suppose they will never do, but others might, if they were not given so convenient an excuse to dismiss the whole matter.” He bowed his head. “Very well; we will tell him no, and if he will not set us free, we can escape and return, on our own.”

“No,” Laurence said, recoiling. “My dear, there is no sense in it; you had much better go back to China. They will only throw you in the breeding grounds.”

“Oh! certainly! that I should run away, but not you, when you have done it for me, you never thought of it but for me?” Temeraire heaped scorn upon the notion. “No; if they mean to put you to death, they will have to put me to death also; I am as guilty or more, and I will certainly not let you be killed while I am alive. And if they do not like to execute me, I will go lie down in front of Parliament, until they have changed their minds.”

They were escorted across the gardens to the great pavilion, together; Laurence marched in a company of Imperial Guards, splendid and sweating in their tall black shakos and blue coats. Lien was lying upon the riverbank, observing benevolently the traffic which went up and down the Seine before her, and turned her head when they came, inclining it politely; Temeraire went very stiff, and rumbled, deep in his throat.

She shook her head disapprovingly at his manners. “You needn’t shake your head at me,” Temeraire retorted, “because I do not care to pretend that we are friendly; it is only that I am not deceitful: so there.”

“How is it deceitful, when you know we are not friendly, and so do I,” Lien pointed out, “and all who are in our confidence? There is no-one deceived, who has any right to know, but those who prefer to take no notice of it; except with your boorish behavior, no one about can avoid knowing, and being made to feel awkward.”

Temeraire subsided muttering, and crowded up as close as he could to the nervous guards, trying to hover protectively near Laurence; a dish of tea was brought him, which he sniffed suspiciously and then disdained, and a glass of cold sillery, which Laurence did not; a slight cooling breeze came off the water and the greenery of the park, and the vast marbled space was pleasant, with somewhere hidden a running gurgle of water over stone, but the day was still very hot, even with the morning not yet far advanced.

The soldiers went to attention; and then Bonaparte was coming down the walk, trailing guards and secretaries, one of whom was writing desperately even as they came: taking down a letter. The valedictions were added as they came up the steps, then Bonaparte turned away, came through the two files of guards hastily shuffling out of his way, and seizing Laurence by the shoulders kissed him on both cheeks.

“Your Majesty,” Laurence said, rather faintly. He had seen the emperor once before, briefly and from concealment, while Bonaparte had been overlooking the field of Jena; and had been impressed at that time with the intensity and the nearly cruel anticipation in his expression, the remote eye, the hawk about to stoop. There was no less intensity now, but perhaps some softening; the emperor looked stouter, his face a little more rounded, than on that peak.

“Come, walk with me,” Bonaparte said, and drew him by the arm down to the water, where Laurence was not himself required to walk, but rather to stand and let the emperor pace before him, gesturing, with a restless energy. “What do you think of what I have done with Paris?” he asked, waving his hand towards the sparrow-cloud of dragons visible, working on the new road. “Few men have had the opportunity to see my designs, as you have, from the air.”

“An extraordinary work, Your Majesty,” Laurence said, sorry to be so sincere; it was the kind of work which only tyranny, he supposed unhappily, could achieve, and characteristic of all Napoleon’s works, smashing through tradition with a kind of heedless forward motion; he would have preferred to find it ugly, and ill-reasoned. “It will expand all the character of the city.”

Bonaparte nodded, satisfied with this remark, and said, “It is only a mirror held up to the expansion of the national character, however, that I am going to achieve. I will not allow men to fear dragons: if cowardice, it is dishonorable; if superstition, distasteful; and there are no rational objections. It is only habit, and habit which can and must be broken. Why should Peking be superior to Paris? I will have this the most beautiful city of the world, of men and dragons both.”

“It is a noble ambition,” Laurence said, low.

“But you do not agree with it,” Bonaparte said, pouncing; Laurence twitched before the sudden assault, very nearly of palpable force. “But you will not stay, and see it done, though you have already been given proof of the perfidy, the dishonorable measures to which a government of oligarchs will stoop: it can never be otherwise,” he added; more declaration than an attempt to convince, “when money becomes the driving force of the state: there must be some moral power beneath, some ambition, that is not only for wealth and safety.”

Laurence did not think very much of Bonaparte’s method, which substituted an insatiable hunger for glory and power, at the cost of men’s lives and liberty; but he did not try to argue. It would have been hard indeed, he thought, to marshal any argument in the face of the monologue, which Bonaparte did not mind continuing in the absence of opposition or even response; he ranged widely across philosophy and economics, the useless folly of government by clerks, the differences, which he detailed minutely on philosophical grounds quite beyond Laurence’s comprehension, between the despotism of the Bourbons and his own imperial state: they had been tyrants, parasites, holding power through superstition and for their own personal pleasure, lacking in merit; he was the defender of the Republic, and the servant of the nation.

Laurence only withstood, as a small rock in a deluge; and the gale past said simply, “Your Majesty, I am a soldier, not a statesman; and I have no great philosophy but that I love my country. I came because it was my duty as a Christian and a man; now it is my duty to return.”

Bonaparte regarded him, frowning, displeased, a tyrant’s lowering look; but it flitted quickly away, then he stepped closer, and gripped Laurence by the arm, persuasive. “You mistake your duty. You would throw away your life: all right, you might say, but it is not yours alone. You have a young dragon, who has devoted himself to your interest, and who has given you all his love and confidence. What can a man not accomplish, with such a friend, such a councilor, free from any trace of envy or self-interest? It has made you who you are. Think where would you now be, without the stroke of fortune that put his heart into your keeping?”

At sea, like as not, or at home: a small estate in England perhaps, married, by now his first child here; Edith Woolvey, née Galman, had been delivered of her first four months before. Marching steadily up the post-list towards flag-rank; he would probably have been sitting presently on blockade, beating up and down off Brest or Calais, a tedious but necessary routine. A prosperous and an honest life, and if no great chance of glory, as far from treason as from the moon; he had never asked for anything else, or expected it.

The vision stood at a distance almost bewildering, now; mythical, softened by a comfortable blind innocence. He might have regretted it; he did regret it, now, except there was no room in the gardens of that house for a dragon to be sleeping in the sun.

Bonaparte said, “You do not suffer from the disease of ambition—so much the better. Let me give you an honorable retirement. I won’t insult you by offering you a fortune, only his keep and yours. A house in the country, a cattle-herd. Nothing will be asked of you that you do not want to give.” His hand tightened, when Laurence would have drawn away. “Will your conscience be more clear when you have delivered him into captivity? Into a long captivity,” he added sharply. “—they will not tell him when they put you to death.”

Laurence flinched; and through the grip Bonaparte felt it and pursued, as a breach in his lines. “Do you think they would hesitate to forge your name to letters? You know they will not, and in any case the messages will only be read aloud. A few words—you are well, you think of him, you hope that he is obedient—and he will be imprisoned by them better than iron bars. He will wait and linger and hope for many years, starved and cold and neglected, long after you have swung from a gibbet. Can you be satisfied to condemn him to it?”

Laurence knew all this sprang from a selfish concern: if Bonaparte could not have Temeraire’s active complaisance, even in the matter of breeding, he would still have been glad at least to deny him to the British; and he probably had hopes of persuading them, in time, to do more. That knowledge, cold and impersonal, gave Laurence no comfort; it did not matter to him that Bonaparte was interested, when he was very likely also right.

“Sir,” Laurence said unevenly, “I wish you may persuade him to stay.—I must go back.”

The words had to be forced. He spoke past a constriction, as one who has been running a race uphill, for a long time: since that moment in the clearing, since they had left London behind. But now the hill was past; he had reached the summit, and he stood there breathing hard; there was nothing more he had to say or bear; his answer was fixed. He looked over at Temeraire, waiting anxiously inside the open pavilion. He thought he would try and put himself in Temeraire’s hands, at least, rather than be marched back to prison; if he was killed in the attempt, it did not make much difference.

Bonaparte recognized it; he let go Laurence’s arm, and turned away from him to pace frowning up and down; but at last he turned. “God forbid I should alter such a resolve. Your choice is the choice of Regulus, and I honor you for it. You will have your liberty—you must have your liberty,” he said, “and more: a troop of my Old Guard will escort you to Calais; Accendare’s formation see you across the Channel, under flag of truce: and all the world will know that France at least can recognize a man of honor.”

The covert at Calais was busy: fourteen dragons were not easily put in order, and Accendare herself was inclined to snap and be difficult, irritable and weary with coughing. Laurence turned away from the confusion, and wished only, dully, to be gone; to have done with everything, all the hollow ceremony: eagles and flags, polished buckles, the fresh pressed blue of the French uniforms. The wind was fair for England; their party was expected, letters having traveled across and back to arrange the parley. There would be dragons and chains to meet them: perhaps even Jane, or Granby, or strangers who knew nothing more of him than his crime. By now his family surely would know all.

De Guignes was rolling up the map of Africa from the table; Laurence had shown him the valley where they had found the mushroom supply. It was nothing materially more than he had already done; the mushrooms were growing, but Bonaparte did not care to wait, Laurence supposed, or risk a failure of the harvest. They meant at once to send an expedition, which was even now outfitting in the harbor: two sleek frigates, and he believed another three going from La Rochelle, in hopes that at least one would evade the blockade and reach their destination, and by stealth or negotiation acquire an immediately useful supply. Laurence hoped only they should not all be taken prisoner, but even if they were, he supposed it could not matter; the cure was established and would spread; no more dragons would die. It was a small satisfaction, at least, if a dry and tasteless one.

He had feared some last attempt at bribery or seduction, but De Guignes did not even ask him to say anything, with a great sensitivity, but brought out a dusty bottle of brandy, and poured him a generous glass. “To the hope of peace between our people,” he proposed; Laurence moistened his lips, polite, and left the cold collation untouched; and when it had been cleared, he went outside to Temeraire.

Temeraire was not embroiled in the general clamor; he was sitting quietly hunched on one side, looking out to sea over the straits: the white cliffs were plainly visible, from their perch. Laurence leaned against his side and shut his eyes, the steady heartbeat beneath like the rushing tide in a conch shell. “I beg you will stay,” Laurence said. “You serve me not at all, nor your own cause; it will only be thought blind loyalty.”

Temeraire said, after a moment, “If I do, will you tell them that I carried you away, against your will, and made you do it?”

“Never, good God,” Laurence said, straightening, and wounded even to be asked; too late he realized he had been led up to the mark.

“Napoleon said that if I stayed, you might tell them so if you liked,” Temeraire said, “and then they might spare you. But I said you would never say such a thing at all, so it was no use; and so you may stop trying to persuade me. I will never stay here, while they try to hang you.”

Laurence bowed his head, and felt the justice of it; he did not think Temeraire ought to stay, but only wished that he would, and be happy. “You will promise me not to stay forever in the breeding grounds,” he said, low. “Not past the New Year, unless they let me visit you in the flesh.” He was very certain they would execute him by Michaelmas.