League of Dragons (38 page)

“Smoke off forward wing, one point to starboard,” Belleisle called urgently—one of his lookouts. Laurence immediately turned his glass in that direction. At first he was uncertain: smoke, or only a wisp of cloud in shadow? But the thin grey wisps were rising from the ground: smoke.

“I think we will go to battle-stations, Mr. Forthing,” Laurence said.

“Aye, sir,” Forthing said, turning to pass the word to Challoner, but this was scarcely required: every man was already in motion, their speed a mark of how tightly wound their spirits: like arrows held at the limits of their bow reach, ready to be loosed.

The smoke gathered rapidly ahead of them, not only from their drawing nearer: the city was burning. “Laurence, that is Accendare there on the other side of the city,” Temeraire said, “I am sure of it,” and Laurence scanning the sky managed to pick her out briefly. The Flamme-de-Gloire was nearly the largest dragon to be seen, and stark in her yellow and black as for a moment her wings hung open against the sky in their direction.

“She has never done all that herself,” his midwingman Ashgrove blurted out, aghast. He was a young officer, and had come from a dragon run on rather looser lines of propriety than Laurence liked to see; but the remark was not unprovoked, as their passage brought the city further into view: a city bathed in flames. Easier to have counted those houses which were
not
burning, many of them emitting soldiers forced to flee stumbling through the lanes and alleys of the city. Napoleon had evidently declined to fight through the streets; he was smoking out his enemy—a brutality that bid fair to be as effective as it was callous. But Laurence, too, could not imagine how Accendare, for all her fearsome reputation, had single-handedly fired the entire city, its houses largely built of stone and well-supplied with water.

“Wing to larboard!” cried the fore larboard lookout. Not one wing but a hundred, two hundred, more: a cloud of dragons was rising en masse from a previously hidden valley, where they had evidently been resupplying. In pairs they carried large iron cauldrons suspended from yokes, steam rising from the innards, and as they turned and swept over the city, they tipped them over to pour out long billowing streamers of smoking tar and pitch. Behind them came a second wave, throwing out incendiaries to ignite the hot tar—these sometimes bursting in mid-air.

His glass trained upon the still-distant mass of dragons, Laurence could not escape the feeling there was more variation among them than he would have expected to see—variation not merely in color and size and pattern. There were too many dragons of sharper distinctions—the shape of the skull, or the mounting of the wings. “Roland,” Laurence said, before he remembered she was gone. “Mr. Forthing,” he said instead, “do you mark anything peculiar about those dragons?” He would have liked to consult Granby, but failing that any man who had been an aviator all his life, and more familiar with the variety of dragons.

Forthing peered over, holding determinedly to the straps of his flying-cap, which had lost its buckle in their tearing speed and now threatened to quit the field at any moment; he was trying to tie up the loose straps instead. “A lot of queer sorts, sir, if that is what you mean. Ferals—he has scraped the barrel, I suppose.”

Laurence shook his head, dissatisfied. “Would you call them
French
ferals?”

“One feral's much like another,” Forthing said uncertainly.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Challoner put in, “I have been in the colonies, lately, and while I would not swear to it, those green ones on the left flank there have a look of Naskapi beasts—those are the natives up north of Halifax.”

“What, Indians, here?” Forthing said. “How should they ever get here, and why would they?” But Laurence had already put his glass on the green dragons, who were carrying sacks of incendiaries, and although it was too far to make anything of facial features, the men aboard were certainly not French officers—one only to each dragon, wearing long leather coats embroidered all over in patterns, fur-collared. Their beasts had the same angular, narrow-muzzled heads common among the Incan beasts, although their scales were not of the long feather-like sort.

He shook his head, dissatisfied and puzzled, but he could not spare the matter more thought: in five minutes more they would be upon the battlefield, if they continued on their straight-line course. They could strike directly at the bombing run: the slow pace and coordination required for the operation meant that even a little opposition would be sufficient to disrupt it. But the city was plainly lost already, and the only hope of defeating Napoleon was to save the army, if it could be done.

The breadth of that monstrous force would make any rear-guard defense hopeless without the support of guns. But there ought to have been guns: at least three hundred of them. All lost, in the fires? On that chance all hung: if they could establish artillery positions, a successful retreat might yet be accomplished. “Temeraire,” he said after a moment, “we will come around by the south, and get a better look at what Accendare is doing on the road over there.”

The signals went out, and they swung wide around the burning city: people below streaming into the countryside, carrying the wreckage of their lives—small carts laden, wheelbarrows, mothers with babes in their arms, a parade of misery. Accendare herself was flying over a rise of land near the eastern gates, circling with a crowd of light-weight hangers-on, mostly Pêcheur-Rayés. She had nothing to do with the fires in the city at all: she was instead striking at the efforts of the allied forces to establish a line of defense across the eastern highway, along which a straggling line of Prussian infantry were attempting to retire.

Infantry squares stood in tight formation, locked in defense around the artillery-crews struggling to bring their guns to bear. Their bristling bayonets held off a direct assault, but Accendare's flames scorched and seared them, and the Pêcheurs, having spent their incendiaries, were dropping anything to hand upon them. One dropped a torn-up sapling, and crushed six men in a row—but the soldiers beside them heaved out the sapling and closed ranks, keeping their bayonets up; one of the fallen struggled up again, and another took the fallen rifles, and planted them in the dirt with the bayonets jutting up. Nearly every square was bristling with these unattended spikes, testament to the grinding toll the assault had been taking upon them.

Laurence could not help but admire the courage and steadfastness which had preserved the order of the Russian and the Prussian infantry under an aerial pounding so unopposed; he did not see a single beast in the air working to defend them. But no small force of dragons could have hoped to hold long against such a disparity of numbers.

Nor could his own. Still, he closed up his glass and nodded, not with relief but with certainty; the decision was made, and now there was nothing to do but to fight it out. “Tell Iskierka to take Accendare,” Laurence called to Temeraire, “and we will put a stop to that bombardment, across the eastern side of the city at least: we must give the infantry some chance to get onto the road.”

He gave the word to Quigley to signal the Cossacks to follow Iskierka: the smaller dragons clustering about Accendare were plainly French regulars, and the Cossacks were all veterans who had refined their boarding techniques against those troops over two years now of hard fighting. Granby's signal-officer waved an acknowledging flag, and then Iskierka tilted and peeled away with her following, leaving Temeraire with a sadly diminished band—only thirty dragons, many of them only out of courier-class by a generous assessment—half a dozen of the Scots, two Prussian Mauerfuchs, and then seven Grey Coppers and five Xenicas robbed from the British formations; none of them with real muscle to speak of.

But Laurence signaled them into a diamond-shape, behind Temeraire, and their sheer furious pace made its own impact upon the enormous cloud of French dragons. Temeraire roared out, the divine wind opening a path before them like the sweep of some enormous scythe, and even when the echoes had faded the fear of it kept the dragons spilling away to either side. There was no slackening. All the small dragons packed tightly in a mass behind Temeraire, the
chop chop chop
of their wings beating close and frantic, and they carved a channel directly through and burst out over the eastern gates, leaving the bombing-pass disrupted: cauldrons spilled too soon, incendiaries fallen too late.

They nearly passed Accendare, fleeing back to the safety of the French lines as Iskierka gleefully scorched her escort, and the faint sound of huzzahs reached them from the ground, a few shots fired off by way of greeting or celebration. But for the most part the Russians and the Prussians were making urgent use of every moment that had been won them. The guns sheltered inside the bayonet-bristling squares of infantry were now dragged swiftly into a line on the low hills overlooking the road, and began almost at once to fire steadily, establishing a slender cordon of safety the French dragons could not fly across with impunity. And almost at once, the main body of the corps began to make an orderly retreat—men marching out from the back walls of the city, despite conflagration behind them, and streaming away along the road to the east.

Iskierka and the Cossacks swung back to join Temeraire. They still made only a very small band, against the French numbers. And this retreat they should now have to defend with only that thin support of guns, for an hour. The French were already halting the bombardment, Laurence saw: the dragons were going to ground, in companies, and setting down their burdens. In a moment the full force of that attack would be upon them.

“We can make very little plan of battle, ignorant as we are of all knowledge of the enemy's dispositions, and so outnumbered as we must expect to find ourselves,” Laurence had said before their departure, to his small knot of captains. “If a defensive line can be established, Temeraire and Iskierka will give the lead: let your beasts do their best to support them. We will at all times attempt to remain above boarding-speed, and accept the sacrifice of accuracy. I have full confidence that every man—every officer—and dragon will do his duty,” he finished, a little awkwardly altering his remarks, as among the company stood all five women under his command—whom he should now have to expose to so extraordinary a risk. But the Xenicas were the heaviest of the fast dragons, and could not be spared.

The sacrifice of accuracy was complete indeed at the pace which Temeraire now set, freed from the constraint of slower beasts in his company. He led one furious corkscrewing pass after another, knocking or simply terrifying the French dragons out of his path, which the lighter dragons behind him mauled enthusiastically. Wind and a riot of colors tore at Laurence's eyes: he could not distinguish one dragon from another in the speed of their passage, but even when Temeraire slowed to turn back for another pass, he found it nearly impossible to make any sense of the battlefield, or the enemy's forces.

Laurence and his officers fired their guns blindly as Temeraire swept along, hoping more than certain that they occasionally hit a target: one pistol and another, and then the struggle of reloading mid-air, grains of powder blown scattering from the packet, pistol-balls slipping away from numbed fingers. On his left, Baggy uttered a wordless exclamation and clapped his hand to his forehead: a bright red line drawn across the entire front as though someone had meant to take off the top of his head, blood running freely down his face; he had been grazed by a ball. Half a wingbeat slower, and he would have been killed: a shot impersonal as a bolt of lightning, in a sky full of storms.

It was very like doing battle with locusts—every blow landed, but there seemed no hope of headway. Temeraire savaged this dragon, roared another into recoiling flight—and still more came to take their place, erupting from the smoke-clouds like spirits boiling up from some infernal region. The French came at them endlessly, trying to win past to overturn the roaring guns and destroy the retreating army.

Laurence was conscious of every moment of that hour as he had never felt time in a battle before. There was nothing he could do to aid Temeraire but keep a lookout in every direction and warn him if the enemy approached—but the enemy was always approaching, and there was no respite to be had. If Temeraire slowed for anything but the briefest turn, the French converged on him at once. If he retired for a breath behind the safety of the guns, the French instantly resumed their attacks upon the artillery. It was not an effort that could be sustained for long, not after three hours' brutal flight.

His speed began to falter. Their destruction came on, steady and inevitable; Laurence searched the horizon after every turn. He had lost all sense of time, and the sand-glass had become useless thanks to Temeraire twisting in his evasions, frequently turning himself entirely over. The sun was shrouded in smoke.

Laurence measured minutes in increments of despair, and was nearly at its limits when one of the lookouts set up a cry. The glass nearly slipped from his fingers as he wrenched it from his belt just as Temeraire dived again, but then he climbed, and Laurence did not need the glass: the line of dragons approaching was visible in the distance, Fidelitas in the center of the force.

Their speed was slowing as they made their approach. The French rear-guard were swinging guns around to set up an unwelcoming barrage, and abruptly the air lightened around them as several dozen of the French beasts pulled away to try to bar the reunion of their forces. Poole would have to choose whether to force a way through, at great risk, or sweep wide of the city with the French skirmishing to delay him every step of the way, a safer course which would mean the loss of another half an hour before he could come to their aid.

Half an hour they did not have. There were more than enough dragons remaining to face them, and even as Temeraire's flagging energies were renewed by the sight of their fellows, so was the enemy's determination to bring him down before his relief came. Seven dragons surged at his head from all sides, a sudden penning-up. Captain Gaudey flying alongside sent up a shout, and her Xenica Glorianus made swift merciless work of the exposed side of one red-and-blue Garde-de-Lyon attempting to foul Temeraire's left side, letting him escape—but Temeraire had been checked for a moment; long enough for a dozen boarders to spring over from the gathered enemy dragons, firing pistols and swinging curved swords—Napoleon's famed Mamluk troops, their red trousers brilliant against Temeraire's hide.