League of Dragons (27 page)

“If you wanted a prospect less likely than their Lordships' making
you
admiral, giving the command to an Incan dragon will do nicely,” Jane said. “Not that the creatures don't know their business,
I
can tell you: we have had a dozen of them to worry about since last August, and they are worth three times their fighting-weight in other beasts. The only saving grace is they hate to lose even a single crewman, and if we manage to heave over a boarding party of four or five, well-secured, we can bargain them out of the day's fighting just to save a single bellman's life, even if they outnumber us three to one.
Well-secured
being the real difficulty: they are quick as lightning at throwing us off, otherwise. You will have a wretched time with those thieves in the Commissariat, by the bye,” she added. “It has been nothing but bales of rotting leather and rusted buckles, and what they call oilskins I call barley-sacks,” as though he were already in command.

She paused, seeing his look, and added, “You won't refuse it?”

“No,” he said after a moment. “No, I will not refuse.” Whatever his quarrels with the men of the Admiralty, there was in his own understanding of duty a wide gulf between the necessary defiance of an immoral order, and refusing to undertake a task only because it was difficult, or demanded any private discomfort. If he could have proposed a man better fitted for the urgent task, he would feel the matter differently, but from that escape he was barred by the continuing resentment of all the ministers and officers he had offended: they would argue far more vigorously than he for the virtues of any conceivable substitute. If he were offered the command, he might be sure he was the only choice.

“But Jane,” he said abruptly, “I will not—I cannot accept unless they reinstate Ferris, and promise him his chance. I cannot. That I should be reinstated, promoted, appointed to command, and
he
still bear the stain of the crime which I committed, entirely without his knowledge—it is intolerable to every feeling.”

“Oh, I dare say that can be managed,” Jane said. “His is an old family in the Corps, and they have a great deal of influence. The wolves were howling for blood too loudly at the time for them to make any difference, but this will change matters. I will write old Admiral Gloucester, who served with Ferris's great-uncle, and we will set the wheels turning.”

They discussed the command a long time onwards; she gave him names of men to search out and others to avoid, both in the Commissariat and in his officers—as best he could; Laurence knew better than to suppose he would have much power of choice save among Temeraire's own crew, and perhaps not even there. The Admiralty was certain to name all the beasts of his company. But he made note of the men she recommended and spoke against; on the battlefield, the Admiralty would be far away, and the decisions his.

He had written a sheet both sides and crossed it, full of her good advice, and the clock had struck ten; then Jane said, “You may as well stay the night, if you like,” and he was staring at a meaningless scratch of ink, his mouth gone abruptly dry with want. He had not permitted himself the license of hoping—of coming near enough hope even to think of—

“Jane,” he said, all at once vividly aware of her bare hand on the table between them, strong and square, thinned a little by the years but deeply known, familiar, save for the yellow-jeweled signet and the white scar running between the two last fingers down the back, which had not been there before—before the shattering of his life. It had been late summer, an August night hot enough that they had left off the coverlet and lain naked together with the windows open, a devil's bargain between the London stench and the stifling heat. The next night he had betrayed her, and his country, and flown with Temeraire to take the cure to France.

He had not touched her since. Nor any other woman. Not from loyalty—
loyalty
a word he had no right to use with her—but a deadening of some inward vital part, necessary to desire. They had spoken together; he had even been alone with her. But the door had been closed. He had not conceived that it might ever again open. “Jane,” he said again.

She looked at him, with a little surprise, and then said, “Why, Laurence,” and reached to take his hand.

He had been raised on decorum, that it should come as easily as breathing even in the face of death and tragedy. But his hand was twisted into her hair, the neat snug braid coming apart around his fingers, and the other shaking as he pulled open her neckcloth, on the Turkish rug before the sitting-room hearth with the table shoved over, the maps scattered and stirring in the draught.

Her mouth was wide and glad beneath his, laughing a little when he let her get her breath, and her hand bracing up his back. He dragged his cheek across the soft skin of her breast where the shirt hung loose, kissed her throat, luxuriated. He could not remember to be careful. They tangled themselves up, almost wrestling, until she said amused, “You will have us in the cinders: back your wings a moment,” and sat up to push his coat off his shoulders.

His hands slid under the fine linen of her shirt, over the warm generous curving of her back, as she threw a leg over his hip. “Ah, there,” she murmured, pleased. They moved together. The fire was crackling low, dying; she gasped.

He worried distantly that he might bruise her, his grip tight on her as he raised them both, her muscles shifting sweetly beneath his hands. She caught both her hands into his hair and bent forward to lean her forehead against his, smiling in the small, secret dark place between them, and he shuddered suddenly and completely, despite all the will in the world to hold off. He groaned in apology. “Graceless as a boy,” he said, rueful, when he had his breath back again, and he tumbled her over onto her back to better use his hands to bring her. “I hope you will pardon me,” he said, when she had sighed at last.

She laughed and kissed him. “I don't leave for Spain until tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “You can make me a better showing in the morning,” and then, practical, rolled up and went to wash.

They went upstairs carrying their boots, hand-in-hand, and left them in a heap in the corner of her bedroom. She pillowed herself comfortably against the headboard and lit a cigar, and blew a long, satisfied plume of smoke. He refused the one she offered him, lying flat on his back beside her and contemplating the canopy without seeing it, his mind already catching on the hooks and burrs of planning, the immensity of the problem suddenly laid across his shoulders. “How many beasts will they give me, do you think?”

“Not more than twenty, I should think,” Jane said. “If we can even supply that many. Two formations from Dover, and another from Edinburgh, I would expect.”

Laurence was silent. He had learned enough of dragon-supply, he hoped, to make material improvements over the traditional standards of the Corps. He could not be fully confident of success, and he was wary of letting his force outstrip their means, but—twenty dragons would do very little, against the force assembling against them in France, and any legions from China would not arrive before late in the spring. “Would the Admiralty let me have more?” he asked. “If I should take unassigned middle-weights, and light-weights?”

“Light-weights are in short supply,” Jane said. “Unless you can make Temeraire talk some ferals out of the stones for you, which I don't put past him. Of middle-weights, the Yellow Reapers have recovered nicely since the plague, most of them, and we have a good crowd of them
ex formatio.
There's a likely Reaper-Parnassian cross, too, a yearling now at Kinloch Laggan, under Captain Adair—a decent fellow. I expect they'd let you have her, if you ask after they've given you the rest of the beasts. How do you mean to feed them?”

“On corn and salt pork, and not beef,” Laurence said. “Jane, I will undertake to bring them to the battlefield, but I cannot set myself up as a tactician against officers with ten years' more experience in the air.”

“The finest formations ha'nt done anyone in Europe a particle of good against Bonaparte these last six years,” Jane said, “so as far as that goes, you know as much about facing him as anyone in the Corps: more, if you have learnt anything from the Chinese, which you ought have done. Besides, once you are in the air, the beasts will be following Temeraire, you know, and not really you, if that is a comfort.” She snorted. “No-one can say he isn't a fair hand at talking other beasts into line. Although I hear he has met his match at last: tell me about this new terror you have visited upon us. I understand she is the despair of Whitehall, and has been issuing demands to be introduced to
our
prince, poor fellow, in case he should be more useful to her than Napoleon's heir, or the future Emperor of China?”

“And I wish to assure you, Temeraire, that I did mean to give this Prince of Wales of yours a fair trial,” Ning said. “I would not like you to feel that I have acted with disrespect to your companion's nation and your home. But I am afraid it will not do: this business of Parliament must be an excessive inconvenience.”

“That,” Perscitia said, much ruffled beneath her sash and medal of office, which marked her as a member of that body, “is only because you do not properly appreciate the importance of the legislature, and its necessity to the promotion of our interests.”

“I am afraid I cannot allow its advantages over a more direct exercise of power,” Ning said.

“You are describing
Tyranny,
” Perscitia said grandly—Temeraire heard the capital letter quite distinctly—“and a moment's reflection will show you its numerous flaws: only
one
can be a tyrant, and therefore such a political system will rarely be just, or serve the needs of all.”

“That is lamentable, to be sure,” Ning said practically, “—unless one should happen to be the tyrant, whereupon it makes everything very easy.”

“Temeraire,” Perscitia said, when Ning had finished her cow and gone to sleep again, already ten feet longer than she had been that morning; now roughly three times the size of an elephant. “Temeraire, I hope you will forgive me, but that hatchling of yours has some peculiar notions.”

“I am not certain she is
wrong,
however,” Temeraire said doubtfully. Laurence had a very low opinion of tyranny, he knew, and therefore he felt himself obliged to despise it by commutation, but there was no denying that it had its uses. He looked around the London covert with some disfavor, remembering too well the beautiful grounds at Fontainebleau. There was a pavilion for them to sleep in now, which would once have seemed to him the height of luxury; but there was only one, extremely crowded, and not even as nice as the one where he and Iskierka had been housed at the training camps near the Alps.

There was nothing to beautify the arrangements, no fountains or even a pleasant courtyard; the pavilion had only been erected in the midst of the old clearings where they once had slept on bare dirt, and the paths among the trees were too narrow for anyone but a human to walk. The stones were not properly heated, either: there were several braziers going for warmth, but in all, the establishment did not stand up well to comparison with their recent prison.

“But it is entirely unreliable,” Perscitia said. “
Now
Napoleon has decided to be fond of dragons, because he has learned to make us particularly useful in fighting his wars, and for that matter, quelling any of his enemies in France itself—but what of the tyrant who will come after him? What if the next emperor should decide that he does not like dragons? I would rather have the protection of law, and tradition, and know that whatever we have gained cannot be as easily taken away again. Temeraire, we must give real thought to the future. One day they will cast a cannon that can take a Regal out of the sky with one shot fired, and then where will we be?”

“Nonsense,” Temeraire said uneasily. “I have been shot two dozen times myself, and there has been nothing so terrible about it. Of course a cannonball would be very unpleasant, but unless one goes too close to the ground, or flies into their path, they are not so difficult to avoid.”

“There were no guns at all, five hundred years ago,” Perscitia said. “I have been assured of it, by my secretaries.”

“
That
is quite false,” Temeraire said, glad to be able to contradict her. “They were invented during the Song dynasty, a thousand years ago: I have read of them in China.”

“But even so they
were
invented—they did not always exist,” Perscitia said, turning his information around to serve her own argument, which seemed to Temeraire unfair. “And Chinese guns are not as good as ours are now, and therefore guns have
improved,
and they will go on improving. What do you suppose will happen when they do not need us to make war anymore, and we are only very inconvenient and eat a great deal, and frighten most of them? They were quite willing to let a great many of us starve, when we were too sick to fly and hunt for ourselves, and they couldn't get eggs out of us anymore.

“No, it is no good our relying on any one king or emperor, and it is no good letting them only use us for battle. Oh! I am very glad you are come back, Temeraire. Even though I have been elected, there are still any number of dragons who will not listen to me at all, only because I am not large and do not like to fight all the time,” she added peevishly. “But they will certainly mind
you,
and I am sure
you
can understand, if you only make a little push to do so.”

Temeraire was not at all sure he wanted to understand. Perscitia did like to take alarm at things unnecessarily. It was surely nonsense to talk of shooting down heavy-weights as though they were geese—but Perscitia was clever, and he felt uncomfortably she might not be entirely mistaken about the march of progress.