Page 60 of League of Dragons (Temeraire)
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And yet they disappeared all too quickly. “I would be glad of another twoweeks,” Temeraire said, yawning extremely wide, exposing all his teeth and a considerable stretch of gullet traveling back into a darkness which had lately enveloped many gallons of porridge and a haunch of venison besides, “but I think we will really do quite well, most of us. There is no teaching the Russian heavy-weights anything; that is the only point on which I cannot call myself satisfied. They are all delighted with the notion of prize-money, but they will not pay attention to signals at all. They will only go straight in and start fighting. Do you suppose there is any chance of armoring them better? I would just as soon load them with spikes and mail, so they cannot be either boarded or brought down, and then we may send them in whenever we should need some very hard fighting. One must do them justice; they are verygoodat fighting, if not at listening.”
“I will see what can be done,” Laurence said. “We may be able to shift something from the Prussians. I am inclined, if you think we can spare them, to place their heavy-weights entirely at the service of the artillery, even on the field. Napoleon will still have us outgunned, but if we can swiftly bring more metal to bear where it is most needed, we may overcome his advantage.”
Temeraire murmured his agreement, but he was already falling asleep. Laurence rested his hand on the breathing muzzle a little longer, and sighed; he would have given much for two more weeks as well. But the armistice was over. No treaty had emerged from Dresden, where Metternich had reportedly spent the entire week closeted with the Emperor. Napoleon would be on the move at first light, and peace would be won only on the battlefield.
Laurence walked back to his cabin by way of the courier-clearing—a route which took him nearly half a mile out of his way and wasted precious sleep; but he could not help making one final visit. By his best estimate, the answer from the legionsmighthave come yesterday,oughtto have come to-day, and could yet come tomorrow without disaster. After that, hope would have failed: they would face Napoleon again before even a small part of the Chinese legions might join their force.
Word would be sent to his quarters at once, if a Jade Dragon landed; Laurence knew it very well. Nevertheless, his feet took him past the courier-clearing, and as he drew near, he heard the leathery flap of wings aloft, a dragon coming down, and saw the two blue flares and one green, which were the safe-passage signal for their camp. His steps quickened to an undignified pace, and he nearly ran up onto Hammond’s heels: that gentleman was standing at the edge of the clearing, his hands clasped anxiously, and staring up into the dark.
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Hammond,” Laurence said, extremely surprised to find him there.
“Oh—! Admiral!” Hammond cried aloud: equally surprised, with less right to be so, and a look of anxiety Laurence could not understand.
The dragon came down. She was an unfamiliar beast, a heavy courier in Austrian colors, wearing a white flag of parley. She was carrying passengers: gentlemen passengers, swathed thickly in furred oilskins for the journey, who climbed down with the awkwardness of men not used to go aloft very often.
One of them had especial difficulty, and required the support of a gold-handled cane when he reached the ground; Laurence appalled realized it was none other than Monsieur de Talleyrand himself, whom report had restored to Napoleon’s service—as though Hammond had chosen to invite a pair of the Emperor’s eyes to come and wander about their covert, and look in on all the latest arrangements of their aerial forces.
That Hammondwasresponsible was plain: he had already gone forward to his guests, greeting the second passenger as Count Metternich. He had surely united the ministers here for some secret final attempt at negotiation. Laurence was sorry to learn of anything so plainly not meant for his own eyes, but any sense of intrusion he might have felt was under the circumstances exploded by Hammond’s indiscretion, which he now evidently meant to crown by leading Napoleon’s minister along the main track which led down into the field-covert and directly past their assembled forces—including all the ferals which had lately been recruited to their cause.
“Mr. Hammond, sir, forgive me, you have been turned around; I think you must mean to takethispath,” Laurence said loudly, and catching Hammond by the arm drew him to the slighter track at the opposite end of the clearing, which swung out wide around the covert to reach the headquarters, and was used by those nervous of coming too near the dragons. “Sir,” he said, low but sharply, “if you have not before considered the material value to Napoleon of any intelligence about the disposition of our aerial forces, I must ask you do so now. Keep Monsieur de Talleyrand from sight of the clearings, and do not bring him back here. I will send the beast on to headquarters to wait for you.”
Hammond colored and stammered an apology at once. “Very sorry—I assure you there was no—all my apologies, Admiral, you are right, of course,” and after a moment’s hesitation added, “We will be on the west slope, at the green farmhouse—I did not like to trouble you for a passage—”
“Then I will have one of our couriers escort the Austrian courier there,” Laurence said, not much appeased; Hammond ought not have put such a peculiar value on asking for the small inconvenience of an escort for his courier at the cost of exposing them all to the bright, curious looks of Talleyrand, who even now observed their whispered conversation placidly, and without any evident qualms at overhearing whatever he might. The only comfort was the lateness of the hour, which should have bleached away the colors of the dragons and sent most of them to sleep; Talleyrand could have got no very exact count from aloft.
By the time Laurence had made the arrangements and seen the ministers off to their negotiations without further harm to secrecy, an hour had been consumed, and the full dark had descended. No other couriers had come.
He knew he ought to seek his own rest. But he lingered a little longer, to the ill-concealed disgust of the watch, who plainly would have liked nothing better than to go to sleep themselves even though they were on duty. He paced away another half an hour, by the glass, before at last he took himself away.
He was at the very door of his cabin when one of the watch-officers came running after him, even more disgusted now and panting, to tell him a Jade Dragon had arrived, and to hand him a scroll, written in Chinese. Laurence turned it right-way up and read it swiftly. “Very good” was all he said, and the watch officer went away even more disgruntled, without even gossip to carry; but Laurence went into his cabin and shut the door, and when he fell upon his cot he slept at once, dreamlessly, and well.
“LAURENCE,”TEMERAIRE SAID, Alittle nervously, “I think we have done it, although perhaps I ought not say so; but surely we have won a battle at last? Really won it, I mean, not only in the dispatches.” He did not quite dare to believe it: after so much tiresome running away, to see the French retreating for once was very unusual, and he worried perhaps it might be a trick of some sort. “Perhaps we ought to send some scouts to our rear,” he added, “to be sure there is no-one coming up behind us. Where is that Davout fellow? I still remember how very unpleasant it was when he nearly surprised us, at the battle of London.”
“Davout is in Hamburg,” Laurence said, which was very comforting, as that city was several hundreds of miles distant, “and we are quite certain that Napoleon has no troops anywhere in our rear; no, I think we have carried the day.”
The poor little village of Reichenbach had not survived its encounter with two quarrelsome armies: there was scarcely a building left standing, and the sad wreck of a big French Papillon Noir lay sprawled in the smashed heap of a barn, fragments of stone and shingles and the corpses of soldiers scattered all around his body. The legions were methodically pressing the French corps back all along the leading edge of battle, exposing ever more of their artillery and infantry, and now at last Temeraire could really see some use in the Russian heavy-weights: it was not that they had begun to listen better, or follow sensible tactics at all, for they had not; but it did not seem necessary. Laurence had set a sizable bounty upon each gun captured, and in their eagerness the Russian beasts flung themselves ferociously and heedless down into the French ranks and began laying about with teeth and claws, and the poor artillery-men were fleeing wildly in every direction at once.
“I think we must add a bonus, the next battle, for guns taken unspiked,” Laurence said: he was observing the same, through his glass. “We will take at least a hundred to-day, I think. Temeraire, pray will you pass the word to the legions to concentrate their attentions upon the French right flank? If we can break that group of middle-weights there, we will open them nicely to the Austrian advance.”
“Certainly,” Temeraire said, and roared a low sequence of three notes, which brought one of the Jade Dragons to his side immediately to relay orders, but before he could issue his commands, Yu Shen backwinged a little distance away in a respectful attitude, and Ning suddenly came up on his right and hovered beside him.Nowshe appeared, when all the hard work had been done, Temeraire thought resentfully; he had barely landed all day, and had scarcely had time for more than a few gulps of porridge, and that cold.
“Well, what do you want?” Temeraire said.
“I wonder if you might consider sending the legions against the center,” Ning said.
“No, not in the least,” Temeraire said. “The Imperial Guard is anchoring the center, with a hundred Incan beasts, besides their Grand Chevaliers, and you can see the guns for yourself. We should be rolled up straightaway if we pressed the attack, and then our general advance would be broken. The suggestion is quite absurd—whyever would you propose such a thing?” he added, belatedly curious. He could not make out any reason for it, unless perhaps Ning meant to lead them into a trap for some peculiar reason of her own, but even then, she would have had to think them really quite stupid to listen.
“All you have said is perfectly true,” Ning said, “until one considers that there are sixty heavy-weights approaching the French rear. If you should draw the French center forward even by quite a small margin, you should weaken their line, and thus expose their entire retreat.”
“But why should there be sixty heavy-weights in the French rear, and where have they come from?” Temeraire said. As a wish to be granted by some particularly benevolent spirit, perhaps the God that Laurence was so fond of, the notion appealed to him greatly: it would only be justice thattheyshould come up from behind Napoleon for once, although he did not see how they could have managed it. “It cannot be Excidium and Lily, from Spain; they have only just crossed the Pyrenees by now, and they had a great many dragons to manage over there, anyway.”
He finished on an interrogative note, hoping despite himself, but Ning said, “It is not them: it is the dragons from the convocation, the ones you called the Tswana.”
“There is no reason it should be the Tswana,” Temeraire said. “Not that it would not be very handsome of them to help us,” he added, “but I do not think they care a fig whether we should win, or Napoleon.”
“However fruitless it may be to guess at theirmotives,” Ning said, “one may nevertheless conclude theirintentions,from their having taken up a position ideally calculated to fall upon Napoleon’s rear, and having failed to offer him any assistance in his present difficult circumstances. In any case, I can hardly call their motives very obscure: if we should defeat Napoleon, they must prefer to have us in their debt.”
