Empire of Ivory (6 page)

rendered all the more piratical by the red splash of

mongrel color which covered one of his eyes and spilled

down his neck. "They are a gang of ruffians and make no

mistake," Jane said, as she led them back towards her

offices, "but I have no doubt of their flying, at any rate:

with that sort of wiry muscle they will go in circles

around anything in their weight-class, or over it, and I am

happy to stuff their bellies for them."

"No, sir; there'll be no trouble," the steward of the

headquarters said, rather low, of finding rooms for

Laurence and his officers; even arriving as they had out of

nowhere and without notice. Most of the captains and

officers were encamped out in the quarantine-grounds with

their sick dragons, despite the cold and wet, and the

building was queerly deserted: hushed and silent, as it had

not been even at the low-ebb of the days before Trafalgar,

when nearly all the formations had gone south to help bring

down the French and Spanish fleets.

They all drank Granby's health together, but the party

broke up early, and Laurence was not disposed to linger

afterwards: a few wretched lieutenants sitting together at

a dark table in the corner, not talking; an older captain

snoring with his head tipped against the side of his

armchair, a bottle of brandy empty by his elbow. Laurence

took his dinner alone in his rooms, near the fire; the air

was chill, from the rooms to either side being vacant.

He opened the door at a faint tapping, expecting perhaps

Jane, or one of his men with some word from Temeraire, and

was startled to find instead Tharkay. "Pray come in,"

Laurence said, and belatedly added, "I hope you will

forgive my state." The room was yet disordered, and he had

borrowed a dressing-gown from a colleague's neglected

wardrobe; it was considerably too large around the waist,

and badly crumpled.

"I am come to say good-bye," Tharkay said, and shook his

head, when Laurence had made an awkward inquiry. "No, I

have nothing to complain of; but I am not of your company.

I do not care to stay only to be a translator; it is a rôle

which must soon pall."

"I would be happy to speak to Admiral Roland-perhaps a

commission-" Laurence said, trailing away; he did not know

what might be done, or how such matters were arranged in

the Corps, except to imagine them a good deal less formally

prescribed than in the Army, or the Navy, but he did not

wish to promise what might be wholly infeasible.

"I have already spoken to her," Tharkay said, "and have

been given one, if not the sort you mean; I will go back to

Turkestan and bring back more ferals, if any can be

persuaded into your service on similar terms."

Laurence would have been a good deal happier to have the

ferals already in their service remotely manageable; a

quality they were not more likely to gain, after Tharkay's

departure. But he could not object; it was hard to imagine

Tharkay's pride should allow him to remain as a

supernumerary, even if restlessness alone did not drive him

on. "I will pray for your safe return," Laurence said, and

offered him instead a glass of port, and supper.

"What an odd fellow you have found us, Laurence," Jane said

in her offices, the next morning. "I ought to give him his

weight in gold, if the Admiralty would not squawk: twenty

dragons talked out of the trees, like Merlin; or was it

Saint Patrick? Anyway, I am sorry to rob you of the help,

and pray don't think me ungrateful, if you are in your

rights to complain; it is enough of a miracle you should

have brought us Iskierka and one egg whole, considering the

way Bonaparte has been romping about the Continent, much

less our amiable band of brigands. But I cannot spare the

chance of more, however mean and scrawny they might be; not

with matters as they stand."

The map of Europe was laid out topmost on her table, great

clots of markers, representing dragons, spread from the

western borders of Prussia's former territory all the way

to the footsteps of Russia. "From Jena to Warsaw in three

weeks," she said, as one of her runners poured out wine for

them. "I would not have given a bad ha'penny for the news,

if you had not brought it yourself, Laurence; and if we

hadn't had it from the Navy, too, I would have sent you to

a physician."

Laurence nodded. "And I have a great deal to tell you of

Bonaparte's aerial tactics, which are wholly changed from

what they were. Formations are of no use against him; at

Jena, the Prussians were routed, wholly routed. We must at

once begin devising counters to his new methods."

But she was already shaking her head. "Do you know,

Laurence, I have less than forty dragons fit to fly? and

unless he is a lunatic, he will not come across with less

than a hundred. He shan't need any fine tactics to do for

us. For our part, there is no one to learn any new."

The scope of the disaster silenced him: forty dragons, to

try and patrol all the coastline of the Channel, and give

cover to the ships of the blockade.

"What we want at present is time," Jane continued. "There

are a dozen hatchlings in Ireland, preserved from the

disease, and twice as many eggs due to hatch in the next

six months: we bred a good many of them, early on. If our

friend Bonaparte will only be good enough to give us a

year, things will look something more like: the rest of

these new shore batteries in place, the young dragons

brought up, your ferals knocked into shape; not to mention

Temeraire and our new fire-breather."

"Will he give us a year?" Laurence said, low, looking at

the counters: not very many yet, upon the Channel

coastline; but he had seen first-hand how swiftly

Napoleon's dragon-borne army could now move.

"Not a minute, if he hears anything of our pitiable state,"

Jane said. "But that aside-well, we hear he has made a very

good friend in Warsaw, a Polish countess they say is a

raving beauty; and he would like to marry the Tsar's

sister. We will wish him good fortune in his courting, and

hope he takes a long leisurely time about it. If he is

sensible, he will want a winter night for crossing the

Channel, and the days are already growing longer.

"But you may be sure that if he learns how thin we are on

the ground, he will come posting back quick as lightning,

and damn the ladies. So our task of the moment is to keep

him properly in the dark. A year's time, then we will have

something to work with; but until then, for you all it must

be-"

"Oh, patrolling," Temeraire said, in tones of despair, when

Laurence had brought their orders.

"I am sorry, my dear," Laurence said, "very truly sorry;

but if we can serve our friends at all, it will be by

taking on those duties which they have had to set aside."

Temeraire was silent and brooding, unconsoled; in an

attempt to cheer him, Laurence added, "But we need not

abandon your cause, not in the least. I will write my

mother, and those of my acquaintance who may have the best

advice to give, on how we ought to proceed-"

"Whatever sense is there in it," Temeraire said, miserably,

"when all our friends are ill, and there is nothing to be

done for them? It does not matter if one is not allowed to

visit London, if one cannot even fly an hour. And Arkady

does not give a fig for liberty, anyway; all he wants are

cows. We may as well patrol; or even do formations."

This was the mood in which they went aloft, a dozen of the

ferals behind them more occupied in squabbling amongst

themselves than in paying any attention to the sky;

Temeraire was in no way inclined to make them mind, and

with Tharkay gone, the few hapless officers set upon their

backs had very little hope of exerting any form of control.

These young men had been chosen-from no shortage of

officers, so many men having been grounded by the illness

of their assigned beasts-for their skill in language. The

ferals were all of them far too old to acquire a new tongue

easily; so the officers should have to learn theirs

instead. To hear them trying to whistle and cluck out the

awkward syllables of the Durzagh language had quickly

palled as entertainment and grown a nuisance to the ear,

but it had also to be endured; no-one knew the tongue with

any fluency aside from Temeraire, and a few of Laurence's

younger officers who had acquired a smattering in the

course of their journey to Istanbul.

Laurence had indeed lost two of his already-diminished

number of officers entirely to the cause: one of the

riflemen, Dunne, and Wickley of the bellmen had both of

them enough grasp of Durzagh to make the basic signals

understood to the ferals, and they were not so young as to

make a command absurd. They had been set aboard Arkady in a

highly theoretical position of authority; there was none of

that natural bond which the first harnessing seemed to

produce, of course, and Arkady was far more likely to obey

his own whimsical impulse than any orders which they might

give. The feral leader had already given it as his opinion

that this flying over the ocean was absurd, as a useless

territory in which no reasonable dragon would interest

itself, and the likelihood he would veer away at any moment

in search of better entertainment seemed to Laurence high.

Jane had set them a course along the coastline, for their

first excursion; no risk at all of an action, so near to

land, but at least the cliffs interested the ferals, and

the bustle of shipping around Portsmouth, which they would

gladly have investigated further if not called to order by

Temeraire. They flew on past Southampton and westward along

towards Weymouth, setting a leisurely pace; the ferals

resorting to wild acrobatics to entertain themselves,

swooping to such heights as must have rendered them dizzy

and ill, save for their former habituation among the most

lofty mountains of the earth, and plummeting thence into

absurd and dangerous diving maneuvers, so close they threw

up spray as they skimmed up again from the waves. It was a

sad waste of energy, but well-fed as the ferals now were,

by comparison to their previous state, of energy they had a

surfeit which Laurence was glad enough to see spent in so

restrained a manner, if the officers clinging sickly to

their harnesses did not agree.

"Perhaps we might try a little fishing," Temeraire

suggested, turning his head around, when abruptly Gherni

cried out above them, and the world spun and whirled as

Temeraire flung himself sidelong; a Pêcheur-Rayé went

flying past, and the champagne-popping of rifle-fire spat

at them from his back.

"To stations," Ferris was shouting, men scrambling wildly;

the bellmen were casting off a handful of bombs down on the

recovering French dragon below while Temeraire veered away,

climbing. Arkady and the ferals were shrilly calling to one

another, wheeling excitedly; they flung themselves with

eagerness on the French dragons: a light scouting party of

six, as best Laurence could make out among the low-lying

clouds, the Pêcheur the largest of the lot and the rest all

light-weights or couriers; both outnumbered and outweighed,

therefore, and reckless to be coming so close to British

shores.

Reckless, or deliberately venturesome; Laurence thought

grimly it could not have escaped the notice of the French

that their last encounter had brought no answer from the

coverts.

"Laurence, I am going after that Pêcheur; Arkady and the

others will take the rest," Temeraire said, curving his

head around even as he dived.

The ferals were not shy by any means, and gifted

skirmishers, from all their play; Laurence thought it safe

to leave the smaller dragons entirely to them. "Pray make

no sustained attack," he called, through the speakingtrumpet. "Only roust them from the shore, as quickly as you

may-" as the hollow thump-thump of bombs, exploding below,

interrupted.

Without the hope of surprise, the Pêcheur knew himself

thoroughly overmatched, Temeraire a more agile flyer and in

a wholly different class so far as weight. Having risked

and lost a throw of the dice, he and his captain were

evidently not inclined to try their luck again; Temeraire

had scarcely stooped before the Pêcheur dropped low to the

water and beat away quickly over the waves, his riflemen

keeping up a steady fusillade to clear his retreat.

Laurence turned his attention above, to the furious howling

of the ferals' voices: they could scarcely be seen, having

lured the French high aloft, where their greater ease with

the thin air could tell to their advantage. "Where the

devil is my glass?" he said, and took it from Allen. The

ferals were making a sort of taunting game of the business,