Black Powder War (24 page)

Keynes tapped the shells lightly, pressed his ear to the surface and listened, wetted a finger and rubbed them a little and brought it to his mouth. When he was satisfied with his examination, he stepped away again, and Temeraire drew his coils more snugly back around the eggs and looked anxiously to hear his verdict.

"Well, they are in good form, and have taken no harmful chill," Keynes said. "We had better keep them wrapped up in the silk, and," he jerked his thumb at Temeraire, "it will do them no harm to have him playing nursemaid. The middle-weight is in no immediate danger at all; by the sound I should say the dragonet is not yet formed; we might have months to wait there. But for the Kazilik, no more than eight weeks, and no less than six; there is not a moment to lose in getting it home."

"Austria is not safe, nor the German states, with French troops thick on the ground as they are," Laurence said. "I mean to go northward, through Prussia; a week and a half should see us to the coast, and from there a few days' flight to Scotland."

"Whichever way you go, you should go quickly; I will contrive to delay my report to Vienna a little, so you are out of the country before those damned politicians can think of some way they can make use of you to shame Austria a little more," Eigher said, when Laurence spoke to him again, that evening. "I can give you safe-conduct to the border. But should you not go by sea?"

"It would cost us at least another month, going around by Gibraltar, and we would have to find shelter along the Italian coast a good deal of the way," Laurence said. "I know the Prussians have accommodated Bonaparte heretofore, but do you think they will go so far as to surrender us to him?"

"Surrender you? No," Eigher said. "They are going to war."

"Against Napoleon?" Laurence exclaimed; that was a piece of good news he had not expected to hear. The Prussians had long been the finest fighting force in Europe; if only they had joined the earlier coalition in time, surely the outcome would have been very different, and their entry into the struggle now seemed to him a great victory for Napoleon's enemies. But it was plain Eigher saw nothing to be pleased with in this intelligence.

"Yes, and when he has trampled them into the dirt, and the Russians with them, there will be no one left at all in Europe to restrain him," the colonel said.

Laurence kept his opinion of this pessimism to himself. The news made his own heart lift gladly, but an Austrian officer, no matter how passionately he hated Bonaparte, might well not desire to see the Prussian Army succeed where his own had failed. "At least they will have no motive to delay our journey," he said tactfully.

"Go fast and keep ahead of the fighting, or Bonaparte will delay you himself," Eigher said.

The next evening they set out again under cover of dark. Laurence had left several letters with Eigher to be sent on to Vienna and thence to London, though he hoped his own road home would be quicker; but in case of any accident, their progress so far should at least be known, and the situation with the Ottoman Empire.

His report to the Admiralty, laboriously encoded in the year-old ciphers which were all he had to hand, had taken on a more wooden tone than usual. It was not guilt precisely; he was perfectly convinced in his own mind of the justice of his actions, but he was conscious how the whole might appear to a hostile judge: a reckless and imprudent adventure, unsanctioned by any authority higher than himself, entered into on the slightest of evidence. Easy enough to make the change in the sentiments of the Turks the consequence rather than the cause of the theft.

And it could not be defended as a question of duty; no one would ever call it a man's duty to perform so wild and desperate a mission, with profound implications for relations with a foreign power, without orders; it could even be called quite the contrary. Nor was he the sort of sophist who could bald-faced point at Lenton's orders to bring the eggs home and call that justification. There was none, indeed, but urgency; the more sensible reply, in every possible way, would have been an immediate return home, to place the tangled matter into the hands of the Ministry.

He was not sure whether he would have approved his own actions, hearing of them secondhand; just the sort of wild behavior the world expected of aviators, and indeed, perhaps there was something to it; he did not know whether he would have risked so much, knowing himself subject to serve at the pleasure of the Navy. If deliberate, a paltry sort of caution that would be; but no, he had never consciously chosen the politic course; there was only something quite distinct in being captain to a living dragon who entered wholly into his engagements and who was not to be given or taken away by the will of other men. Laurence was uneasily forced to consider whether he might be in danger of beginning to think himself above authority.

"Myself, I do not see what is so wonderful about authority at all," Temeraire said, when Laurence ventured to disclose his anxiety that morning as they settled down for a rest; they had encamped in a clearing high upon the leeward side of a mountain slope, untended but for a handful of former sheep now roasting under Gong Su's careful hand in a fire-pit which did not give off much smoke, the better to avoid notice.

"It seems to me that it is only forcing people to do things which they do not wish to do, and which they cannot be persuaded to do, with threats," he continued. "I am very glad we are above it. I would not at all be pleased if someone could take you away from me and make me have another captain, like a ship."

Laurence could hardly quarrel with this, and while he might have argued the description of authority, he could not, feeling too false in so doing; he plainly did like being free of restraint at least so far, and if he were ashamed of it he might at least not lie about it. "Well; I suppose it is true any man would be a tyrant an he could," he said ruefully. "All the better reason to deny Bonaparte any more power than he already has."

"Laurence," Temeraire said thoughtfully, "why do people do as he says, when he is so unpleasant a person? And dragons too."

"Oh; well, I do not know he is an unpleasant man in his person," Laurence admitted. "His soldiers love him at least, though that is scarcely to be marveled at, when he keeps winning wars for them; and he must have some charm, to have risen so high."

"Then why is it so terrible that he should have authority, if someone must have it?" Temeraire asked. "I have not heard that the King has ever won any battles, after all."

"The King's authority is nothing like," Laurence answered. "He is the head of the State, but he does not have absolute power; no man in Britain does. Bonaparte has no restraint, no check upon his will; and such gifts as he has he uses only to serve himself. The King and his ministers are all in the end the servants of our nation first, before themselves; at any rate, so the best of them are."

Temeraire sighed, and did not pursue the discussion further, but listlessly curled himself up with the eggs again, leaving Laurence to gaze on him with anxiety. It was not only the unhappy loss; the death of any of his crew always left Temeraire distressed, but rather in frustrated anger than this dragging lethargy; and Laurence feared deeply that the true cause was rather their disagreement over the question of dragon liberties; a more profound disappointment, and one which time would not lay to rest.

He might try and describe for Temeraire a little of the slow political work of emancipation, the long years Wilberforce had already spent nudging one partial act and then another forward through Parliament, and how they were still laboring to ban even the trade; but that seemed to him poor consolation to offer, and not much use as a model: so slow and calculated a progress would never recommend itself to Temeraire's eager soul, and they would have little time to pursue politics while engaged in their duties in any case.

But some hope, he increasingly felt, he must somehow discover; for all that he could not put aside his conviction of their duty to put the war effort first, he could not easily bear to see Temeraire so cast-down.

The Austrian countryside was green and golden with the ripening harvest, and the flocks were fat and contented, at least until Temeraire got his claws upon them; they saw no other dragons and faced no challenge. They crossed into Saxony and moved steadily northward another two days, still with no sign of the mobilizing army; until at last they crossed over one of the last swelling foothills of the final ridges of the Erz Gebirge mountains and came abruptly upon the vast encampment swelling out of the town of Dresden: seventy thousand men or more, and nearly two dozen dragons sprawling in the valley beside.

Laurence belatedly gave the order to have the flag hung out, as below the alarm was raised and men went running to their guns, crews to their dragons; the British flag brought them a very different reception, however, and Temeraire was waved down to a hastily cleared place in the makeshift covert.

"Keep the men aboard," Laurence told Granby. "I hope we need not stop long; we could make another hundred miles today." He swung himself down the harness to the ground, mentally composing his explanations and requests in French, and brushed ineffectually at the worst of his dirt.

"Well, it is about damned time," a voice said, in crisp English. "Now where the devil are the rest of you?"

Laurence turned and stared blankly: a British officer was standing before him, scowling, and snapping his crop against his leg. Laurence would hardly have been more astonished to meet a Piccadilly fish-merchant in the same circumstances. "Good God, are we mobilizing also?" he asked. "I beg your pardon," he added, belatedly recollecting himself. "Captain William Laurence, of Temeraire, at your service, sir."

"Oh; Colonel Richard Thorndyke, liaison officer," the colonel said. "And what do you mean; you know damned well we have been waiting for you lot."

"Sir," Laurence said, ever more bewildered, "I think you have mistaken us for another company; you cannot have been expecting us. We are come from China by way of Istanbul; my latest orders are months old."

"What?" Now it was Thorndyke's turn to stare, and with growing dismay. "Do you mean to tell me you are alone?"

"As you see us," Laurence said. "We have only stopped to ask safe-passage; we are on our way to Scotland, on urgent business for the Corps."

"Well, what more urgent business than the bloody war the Corps has, I should damned well like to know!" Thorndyke said.

"For my part, sir," Laurence said angrily, "I should like to know what occasion justifies such a remark about my service."

"Occasion!" Thorndyke exclaimed. "Bonaparte's armies on the horizon, and you ask me what occasion there is! I have been waiting for twenty dragons who ought have been here two months ago; that is the bloody occasion."

Part Three

Chapter 11

PRINCE HOHENLOHE LISTENED to Laurence's attempted explanations without very much expression: some sixty years of age, with a jovial face rendered dignified rather than unpleasantly formal by his white-powdered wig, he looked nonetheless determined. "Little enough did Britain offer, to the defeat of the tyrant you so profess to hate," he said finally, when Laurence had done. "No army has come across from your shores to join the battle. Others, Captain, might have complained that the British prefer to spend gold than blood; but Prussia is not unwilling to bear the brunt of war. Yet twenty dragons we were assured, and promised, and guaranteed; and now we stand on the eve of war, and none are here. Does Britain mean to dishonor her agreement?"

"Sir, not a thought of it, I swear to you," Thorndyke said, glaring daggers at Laurence.

"There can be no such intention," Laurence said. "What has delayed them, sir, I cannot guess; but that can only increase my anxiety to be home. We are a little more than a week's flying away; if you will give me safe-passage I can be gone and back before the end of the month, and I trust with the full company which you have been promised."

"We may not have so long, and I am not inclined to accept more hollow assurances," Hohenlohe said. "If the promised company appears, you may have your safe-passage. Until then, you will be our guest; or if you like, you may do what you can to fulfill the promises which were made: that I leave to your conscience."

He nodded to his guard, who opened the tent-door, signifying plainly the interview was at an end; and despite the courtliness of his manners, there was iron underlying his words.

"I hope you are not so damned foolish you will sit about watching and give them still more disgust of us," Thorndyke said, when they had left the tent.

Laurence wheeled on him, very angry. "As I might have hoped that you would have taken our part, rather than encourage the Prussians in treating us more as prisoners than allies, and insulting the Corps; a pretty performance from a British officer, when you know damned well our circumstances."

"What a couple of eggs can matter next to this campaign, you have leave to try and convince me," Thorndyke said. "For God's sake, do you not understand what this could mean? If Bonaparte rolls them up, where the devil do you suppose he will look next but across the Channel? If we do not stop him here, we will be stopping him in London this time next year; or trying to, and half the country in flames. You aviators would rather do anything than risk these beasts you are hooked to, I know that well enough, but surely you can see-"

"That is enough; that is damned well enough," Laurence said. "By God, you go too far." He gave the man his back and stalked away in a simmering rage; he was not by nature a quarrelsome man, and he had rarely so wanted satisfaction; to have his courage questioned, and his commitment to duty, and withal an insult to his service, was very hard to bear, and he thought if their circumstances had been anything other than desperate, he could not have restrained himself.

But the prohibition forbidding Corps officers to duel was not an ordinary regulation, to be circumvented; here of all places, in the middle of a war, he could not risk some injury, even short of death, that might not only leave him out of the battle but would cast Temeraire wholly down. But he felt the stain to his honor, deeply, "and I suppose that damned hussar is off thinking to himself I have not the courage of a dog," he said, bitterly.