Page 27 of League of Dragons (Temeraire)
“I am glad to see you well,” Laurence said, a little constrained.
“I would be glad if it were so, Captain,” Junichiro said forthrightly, “but I do not presume to expect such consideration from you.”
Laurence’s feelings were indeed divided, and so opposed to one another as to be difficult to reconcile. Junichiro had placed him under such profound personal obligation, in aiding him to escape execution in Japan, that Laurence had given himself no real hope of discharging the debt. That Junichiro had provided that aid not for Laurence’s sake, but to save his own beloved master, in no wise diminished that lingering obligation. The boy had made himself a criminal in his own country, had forfeited all hope of rank and place and home.
And yet—Laurence had done his best to discharge the debt: he had given Junichiro a place among his crew, and sought to establish him as an officer—not impossible in the motley ranks of the Aerial Corps. He had done everything in his power to secure the young man a respectable future, and to make him comfortable if not happy. But Junichiro had spurned all these good offices, in the end, and gone—gone to the French, hoping to promote among them an alliance with Japan, as counterbalance to the threat he saw to his nation from the deepening connection between China and Britain.
It was impossible to see him now and not realize that here was the architect of Temeraire’s distress and his own. Junichiro had been among their party in China; he had known everything of the negotiations which pledged Temeraire and Iskierka’s egg to Crown Prince Mianning, in exchange for the alliance that had sent the Chinese legions to the war in Russia. He had seen with his own eyes the pavilion where the egg had been established in state, and the guard placed upon it. His intelligence had undoubtedly been responsible both for Napoleon’s forming the design of capturing the egg, and for its success.
—And yet Junichiro had not behaved dishonorably. He had openly avowed his intentions before resigning Laurence’s service, despite the personal risk he ran thereby. And it was by no means clear to Laurence that Junichiro understood his duty to his nation wrongly. While desiring nothing but peace with Japan, Hammond had made no secret of valuing higher an alliance with China: Britain would certainly look the other way should that power decide to turn their attention to their smaller neighbor, an event not so unlikely when Prince Mianning ascended his throne: the crown prince had already demonstrated his intentions to broaden China’s reach, and bring his nation more into the world.
Laurence could hardly feelpleasureat finding Junichiro here under these circumstances, and established deep in Napoleon’s councils—but if he meant to be civil to Napoleon, who had waged a relentless war upon Europe for near twenty years now, and invaded his own country—and who, for his part, showed no disposition to be less than gracious to Laurence, who had been instrumental in thwarting his destruction of the Russian Army—he could yet greet Junichiro with courtesy, and he returned the bow the young man made him.
“Captain Laurence,” Napoleon said, turning back again, having commanded an array of refreshments, the addition of several comfortable chairs, a change of drapery, an increase in their firewood, and the assignment of a footman to carry out their errands, “I am remiss. You must permit me to offer you my condolences upon the loss of your father.”
“I thank Your Majesty,” Laurence said quietly.
Napoleon remained with them nearly an hour, talking freely and walking the room as though among intimate friends. Laurence could not but be sensible of the compliment the Emperor paid him with such a degree of attention and time, and perplexed by it; if he had not succumbed to Napoleon’s blandishments five years before, when by so doing he might have saved his own life and Temeraire’s liberty, the Emperor could hardly expect to seduce him now. Or so Laurence hoped, unhappily conscious that he might have given encouragement to such thoughts, in asking a favor, and contemplating with no pleasure the prospect of having to refuse any entreaty which the Emperor might now make him.
But Napoleon asked him nothing, except his opinion on this or that new provision for the dragons of France, which he had under consideration. There were many of these: Napoleon passed freely from schools for hatchlings, to a scheme of using dragons in laying new trails over the Alps—inquiring for Laurence’s opinion on the Alpine ferals as he did so. “They have resisted all our offers most stubbornly,” Napoleon said, shaking his head.
“They have a remarkable bent for independence, I should have said, Your Majesty,” Laurence said.
“Which you admire!” Napoleon said, with a keen glance. “But nothing can be accomplished by one alone and friendless, without support. If I should ride into the field alone, what use would I be? And yet with an army beside me, what can I not accomplish?—They would do much better for themselves to accept the protection of France.”
Laurence refrained from making a remark about the value this protection had been to the Russian ferals Napoleon had loosed and then abandoned. “I think you may find them hard to persuade,” he said only, and Napoleon moved onwards.
His designs ranged almost absurdly wide. He talked of establishing great trade routes by dragon-back even to India and to China; he talked of building pavilions all across the breadth of Europe and Asia. His plans grew ever more ambitious as he spoke, and Laurence wondered. Napoleon spoke not at all of the disastrous reversal he had lately suffered—betrayed no consciousness either by word or look, or even by moderation, of the wreck of a million men, of ruin and defeat. Indeed he spoke of the war only briefly, to complain of his stepson, Eugene de Beauharnais. “He is too openhearted. He has given you quite a generous gift—the Oder!” Napoleon said. “All because a few Cossacks have given him a little trouble, and a handful of Prussian dragons.” Laurence could not but rejoice at the news: so the Tsar had sent his troops forward after all. But the censure in Napoleon’s voice made not the slightest acknowledgment that he had left that army wrecked, in an untenable position.
There was something dreadful in this determined avoidance, as though Napoleon could not bear to recognize his own defeat and had instead to delude himself, even knowing as he must that his audience in this case knew the truth. Laurence was sorry to see it. He had thought in Russia that the Emperor was not himself—sallow, thickened: he had gained another stone in weight and did not carry it well, his face settling into heavy lines. The grey eyes were dulled; he stared into the fire often as he spoke, and did not meet his listeners’ eyes often.
But he remained Napoleon, for all that. Laurence said, wanting only to escape the painful sense of omission, “We were impressed by your training grounds outside Grenoble, Your Majesty.”
“Ha!” Napoleon cried, turning round. “—you mean, by the number of eggs.” Laurence could not deny it; he bowed. “Yes,” Napoleon said, “for seven years now we have attended the wisdom of the Princess of Avignon—Madame Lien as you knew her—and you have seen the fruits of our labors. There are four thousand eggs laid upon the sands of France, and soon they will come to their maturity.
“The old ways of war are done, Captain. You have seen their death-knell,” Napoleon added. “The army which can bring more power to bear upon the battlefield, more quickly, will always be the victor: the weight of metal and of men will carry the day—if their generals are wise. You were at Tsarevo Zaimische?”
“I was,” Laurence said, surprised to hear the Emperor now at last mention anything of the campaign: although in some wise the battle had been his triumph.
“What a morning that was!” Napoleon said. “A little of my own sauce, as they say: to be woken in the first hours of the day to hear of five hundred dragons coming for me. You ought to have had me! But you could not bring your full weight to bear.” His face was illuminated again with vivid satisfaction; he seized upon a scrap of writing paper and a pen, and with a quick hand sketched out the defensive emplacements, his own forces behind their wall of defensive guns and the narrow corridor left; the Russian Army and the Chinese legions spread wide before it. “—You did not do as you ought. If you had committed your forces decisively, you must have overwhelmed us, and secured a complete victory, the destruction of my army. But you permitted caution to rule you,” he finished, flipping the pen from his fingers with a shrug; and Laurence knew well that no one would ever say the same of this man.
Napoleon stood studying his own diagram a moment longer, then abruptly said, “Come, let us go and take the air—you are no delicate courtier; you are a soldier,” and Laurence had no objection to make; indeed agreed heartily, privately hoping for a glimpse of Temeraire somewhere upon the grounds.
The gardens of Fontainebleau had been expanded and transformed into a covert, but not resembling any Western notion of that word. Large and imposing pavilions were made private by stands of young trees and elaborate trellises of vines, fountains playing among them: something from an imagined pastoral landscape, only with dragons instead of sheep. Dragons of every description: smaller feral-looking beasts, heavy-weights in every color and conformation, until Laurence, at first bewildered by the variety, spied down a narrow walk the heavy sinuous curve of a Kazilik dragon, unmistakably marked by the steam-hissing spines.
But the dragon was not Iskierka: the hide considerably more black-green, and Laurence realized only then that these were not all French beasts. These were dragons from every corner of the world: besides the Turkish beast, he caught sight of several not unlike Arkady and his fellow Pamir-dwellers; over there to the north a huddled group of Russian ferals, lean and savage-looking; in a green-marbled pavilion along their way a pair of dragons conversing in broad colonial English. And as they turned back for the house, Laurence saw a dragon he was sure he recognized: Dikeledi, one of the beasts of the Tswana, whom he had last seen sailing for Africa with a transport full of slaves liberated from the Brazilian plantations.
The dragon took notice of him also, peering back curiously, then turned to speak to a man—to Moshueshue, Laurence realized in deepening astonishment; the crown prince of the Tswana, here? Nothing could account for it, but to suppose that Napoleon had somehow gathered all these dragons here, in secret. Questions trembled on Laurence’s lips, although constrained: he was an enemy of France. And yet Napoleon had brought them here of his own volition; he had not needed to promenade Laurence about the grounds, inevitably to notice the presence of so many foreign beasts. Laurence asked, therefore, only a little diffidently.
“What secrecy has been necessary?” Napoleon said. “You,Captain Laurence, know well the willful ignorance cultivated by my enemies of the lives of dragons. I have made no efforts at concealment: what use, when my couriers have gone throughout the world, and spoken with dragons in every part of it? We could not have expected them all to keep it secret, if we wished to. If you have had no intelligence of our convocation, it is no doing of mine: you see there we have even Russian beasts among us.” He gave a disparaging snort. “Your old men and generals will not have it that dragons are thinking creatures, and throw a few coins at them to keep them contented. What do they know of it, when my couriers land even in their own breeding grounds, and speak to the creatures they have penned up and expect to remain quiescent even in the face of their outright destruction? You may be sure that the pitiable condition of the Russian ferals has not been forgottenhere—those monstrous wing-chains! I wonder that you can with complacency range yourself with the architects of such cruelty.”
Laurence could not easily answer this charge. He might have said that Napoleon had been little kinder in leaving them to starve and be hunted down, all so that they might wreak havoc among the Russian supply-lines. He might have said that the Russians had been on the point of freeing the ferals. But he could not bring himself to make these arguments. He would have chosen starvation over slavery, himself, and the Russians had been no less calculating in their decision than Napoleon: they had planned to make their ferals into troop-carriers, and that decision had been made only under the duress of Napoleon’s own lightning-quick advances. In truth, he had nearly resigned his post and gone when he had learned of the brutalities by which the Russian ferals were kept confined to their breeding grounds: only Kutuzov’s assurances that the ferals would be freed, under his and Temeraire’s own supervision, had kept them at their post.
“Not with complacency,” Laurence said finally. “But war makes strange bedfellows, sir.”
“By your decision,” Napoleon said sternly, as though chiding a low subordinate. “You know the masters you serve: you cannot expect otherwise under their rule.” Laurence closed his mouth on a reply: he could make none that would be civil, nor politic, to an emperor and a gaoler. Napoleon presently seemed to think better of his tone; he added, “But I will not wound you with reproaches! I knowyourconscience is not of that soft metal, which bends before a wind.”
True to his word, the Emperor instead returned to enlarging upon those plans he had earlier described—which seemed now less grandiose, if he meant to accomplish them by an alliance with all the dragons of the world, direct: an unlikely but not impossible endeavor, Laurence thought. The evils of the condition of dragons in nearly every nation of the West, and the wholly unimproved situation of most ferals, would offer a fertile ground for Napoleon’s proposals: if he could afford them, which seemed the greatest bar.
