Blood of Tyrants (Temeraire #8) - Page 20

Chapter 20

LAURENCE PAUSED A LONG moment in the empty street, caught by the sight of a swinging, blackened lantern and the shape of steps leading up to a gutted doorway, opening onto the rubble of a house. For a moment he thought it another old memory returning, some flash of the destruction of Portsmouth; then he recognized abruptly the home of Countess Andreyevna, where he had dined his first night in Moscow. Of the palatial house there was nothing left but jagged timbers thrust up into the sky, heaps of tumbled brick and cinders, one corner in the back where a narrow servants’ staircase and a corner of the second floor stood alone, a few feet of space.

“Do you see something?” Tharkay asked quietly. His own face was half-covered; only his eyes looked out above the scarf he had wrapped over his nose and mouth: not too incongruous a costume in the city, for there were yet quantities of dust and ash lingering in the air.

“No,” Laurence said. “No, it is nothing; let us go on.” He put his shoulder back to the yoke of the small cart they were dragging behind them, with its few bags of grain: their safe-passage and the only one required; the French had mastered their own maurauding troops and now were offering urgent and enthusiastic welcome to any of the local peasantry who offered to sell them any food—there being very few such offers; those who made them were meeting with savage reprisals from Russian partisans.

The streets of Moscow bore little resemblance to the thronged narrow lanes which Laurence had seen from aloft, only a month before: now half-deserted, frequented more by rats than men and full of rubble, lined with ruined houses and gardens still choked with ash. Some three-quarters of the city had burned, and if that disaster had denied the French its comforts and supply, Laurence found it hard to accept the price. Little better illustration could be wanted of the cost of Napoleon’s pride.

A troop of grenadiers marched past in good order, though their uniforms were an unholy mess: coats in a dozen different colors, most of them threadbare and patched, boots cracked and wrapped about with string; only their muskets still shone brightly. Their eyes drifted to the cart as they passed, with an interest more than academic; when they turned the corner, one man even detached himself from the end of the column and came back, and pointing at the bags said, “Qu’est-ce que c’est là?”

Without answering him, Tharkay silently presented him with a paper which had been prepared for them by one young Russian aide-de-camp, in that alphabet, and embellished with all the official art which his creativity had permitted; the name Louis-Nicholas Davout was the only legible Latin on the sheet. It was a name to conjure with, for Davout’s harshness with indiscipline was legendary, and reports had reached even the Russian camp of the executions he had ordered for pillaging. The soldier thrust the paper back and assumed an officious mien, saying coolly, “Le Maréchal est avec l’Empereur, en la place Rouge,” and pointed them along another street before hurrying to rejoin his vanished troop.

Tharkay raised an eyebrow to Laurence as he put away the paper: should they take the chance? Laurence hesitated a moment, but nodded. They had intended only a general reconnoiter, to gain a sense of the French strength and the imminence of action—a sense which could not presently be gained, not reliably, from their Russian allies.

Morale in the Russian Army had rebounded and even swelled as the French showed no inclination to foray past Moscow, and steady reports of the disintegration of their supply reached the Russian camp every day—often at the same time as their own supply-waggons arrived from the south, loaded with shipments of bread and boots and uniforms. Even the rank and file now had gradually come to share Barclay’s view: that Napoleon had indeed overreached, and delivered himself and his Grande Armée into as neat a trap as was ever devised for an enemy. Each day meant the death of another hundred of his cavalry-horses, and three days before he had sent away fifteen of his dragons, traveling together to defend themselves against Cossack harrying: their departure had been observed, and had occasioned great cheer amongst the Russians.

But even as the soldiers grew more satisfied, their commanders grew less so. The intrigue at the Russian headquarters had risen to a fiery pitch; despite having managed the singularly effective retreat through the city, General Barclay had at last resigned his command entirely, in indignation at the disrespect he had met from both Kutuzov and Bennigsen, and those two men were at logger-heads themselves.

Kutuzov’s position was an unsettled one: he had been nearly forced on Alexander to begin with, and he had sacrificed Moscow to the enemy. With both Moscow and Petersburg lost, the enemy everywhere west of the Volga and north of Moscow, the Russian nobility had been scattered upon the countryside, many of them cut off from their estates and fearing personal ruin. It was his task not merely to plan the Russian counterattack, when time had done its work, but to keep those nobles and even the Tsar himself placated, and fight off all the loud and urgent cries for an immediate battle.

He was resorting to a kind of outrageous propaganda: mere skirmishes between his men and Murat’s advance guard were magnified into great victories—even if his forces came back with but a single prisoner and having lost several men themselves—and he exaggerated even the already-heartening reports of the French decline, filling his dispatches with such numbers as would have shortly ended with Napoleon sitting in Moscow alone but for a single mule and a barrel of beer.

And he was concerned, above all, with ensuring that the Chinese legions remained with the army. If Napoleon were to once again have the advantage in the air, the French position would by no means be so desperate as it was. They had great magazines of their own at Smolensk, and elsewhere through the south. If they did not need to fear being pounced upon by half-a-dozen niru, Napoleon’s dragons might have been put to supply work, or even to swiftly relocate his army to Smolensk, there to winter and regroup for a fresh campaign in the spring.

Laurence did not wish to abandon Kutuzov in the least, but neither could he feel it at all consistent with the duty he owed the Emperor of China, to strand his borrowed legions in the midst of Russia with inadequate supply during the oncoming winter. October had so far been beautiful, warm and mild; but in the last two days the trees had with startling speed begun to shed their leaves. The Russian countryside was taking on a grey and gloomy character, unrelieved by the enormously tall pine trees looming with their cold dark needles, the increasingly barren birches rattling in the wind.

With the full cooperation of the Russians, Shen Shi had now established depots to the east and west both, which she estimated could carry the legions at their full strength for a month. But there was no reason to expect that Kutuzov would have struck even then: the old general was perfectly willing to permit Napoleon to sit in Moscow as long as he wished. And once they had begun the counterattack, the road back to the Niemen was a long one.

“How much longer will we be required?” Zhao Lien had asked Laurence bluntly, two days before. He could not tell her, and he felt too strongly that he could not trust whatever answer Kutuzov might make him.

“Bonaparte is our best hope, for the campaign to begin,” he had said ruefully to Temeraire that evening. “If he has any sense, he must try and fight his way back to Smolensk sooner than late, and westward on from there swiftly. He cannot long suppose that the Russians will make peace with him now.”

Such a peace would have allowed Napoleon to withdraw without humiliation, surely all that he could now hope for; but that peace was as surely to be denied him. Alexander, with his government-in-exile in Tula, was intensely, savagely delighted by the growing evidence of French discomfiture: he had already written out many long ambitious schemes to Kutuzov and his other generals for retaking Moscow, for the pursuit and destruction of the remnant of the French Army, and indeed even the capture of Napoleon himself.

Kutuzov received these directives placidly, and stayed just where he was. He had done his best to assist Napoleon in deceiving himself about the prospects of peace: he had received a French envoy affably, and agreed to a temporary armistice, but the false negotiations of Vyazma had done much to close that door. Alexander refused to receive such an envoy himself, or to write so much as a note, feeling that he had already stretched his own honor to bear as much as he could. Napoleon’s pride alone could keep him in Moscow—but of that, he had an ample supply. When desperation and the growing certainty of disaster would overcome it, was nearly impossible to tell.

“We could hope for no better opportunity to learn his mind,” Laurence said softly to Tharkay now, in the ruined street; together they dragged the cart onto the main street leading towards the Kremlin.

Here the devastation altered in character: the buildings had been more preserved than not, evidently by the labors of the French dragons; great puddles of dirty water yet stood in the gutters. Yet they had still been looted: scraps of silk and shattered porcelain might be seen on the steps, broken furnishings. How the French supposed they should carry away such an immense store of plunder, Laurence could hardly imagine.

The street itself was better tended; looking west towards the bounds of the city, Laurence could see a troop of dragons laboring to clear away the rubble and men behind them repairing the worst of the damage to the cobblestones: perhaps making ready the road for retreat? He and Tharkay went plodding on with their heads down into the vast square around the onion-domed cathedral which, though blackened with smoke, had also been saved: Laurence saw in some disgust that the building was evidently being used for a stable.

The remains of many smaller wooden buildings still lingered at its base, and resting against the high walls of the Kremlin some forty dragons were drowsing together in heaps, while their crews silently prodded at large cauldrons simmering with their poor thin dinner: they were eating dead horses mostly half-starved or sick, stewed with flour. The dragons looked too weary to be called indolent, slumped in the heavy attitudes of exhaustion.

One more-alert beast stood before the cathedral, beside the great city fountain, while some few peasant women, cringing, took their buckets of water before hurrying away: a heavy-weight Papillon Noir in black with iridescent stripes. “That is Liberté,” he murmured to Tharkay. He had seen the beast once before, during the invasion of England: he was the personal beast of Marshal Murat, and beside it stood the man himself.

The pair were standing beside one of the Russian light-weights, white-grey. Laurence thought for a moment it might be a prisoner, but as he and Tharkay drew their cart a little closer, he saw the poor beast had no harness and was nearly skeletal in appearance, deep concavities between its ribs. It had a bowl of thin soup, which it was licking up with slow, painstaking care, one foreleg curled around the bowl and a wary watchful hostile eye turned up towards Liberté. Its wings were drawn up tight to its body, as though it might at any moment flee.

Murat was evidently waiting to see the Emperor, and following the line of his gaze Laurence saw him: Napoleon was near the Kremlin gates, in his dust-grey coat and flanked by the still-glittering ranks of his escort, the Imperial Guard. Davout was a tall thin figure beside him, and his chief of staff Berthier as well.

A French officer then approached the cart, and they were forced to stop: Laurence engaged the man before he could notice Tharkay’s foreign looks, pulling back the cover to show him the ten sacks of grain, pantomiming numbers with his hands to indicate many more than these were on offer. “Cinq cent?” the Frenchman asked. Laurence nodded, and then held out a hand flat and tapped his palm, asking for an offer; the officer said, “Attends,” and went away to confer with another.

Napoleon looked himself as heavy and morose as the dragons of his army; he seemed to only be giving half his attention to an anxious speech which Berthier was making him, full of gestures and intensity; the Emperor glanced away often at the somnolent dragons, at the few companies of soldiers equally dispirited and yawning against the walls. He knew, of course; surely he knew the hopelessness of his position. He was not a fool. He had his hands clasped behind his back, his chin lowered upon his breast; Berthier gestured, down the square, and following his arm, Laurence saw a nearly medieval train of waggon-carts, already loaded and with their covers lashed down.

Bonaparte stood a moment more, and then gave a short nod; Berthier, after a speaking look of relief exchanged with Davout, hurried away back into the Kremlin. Davout seemed as though he wished to say something; Napoleon jerking a hand forestalled him and turned abruptly away, his face hard, and strode out across the square towards Murat, who rose to meet him.

The French quartermasters were still discussing amongst themselves. Laurence looked at Tharkay and, receiving a nod, hazarded the risk. He strode across the square towards the city fountain, as though to have a drink of water, where he could overhear a little.

Napoleon had put his hand on Liberté’s side, patting the dragon with easy familiarity as he spoke with Murat; the beast nosed at him with pleasure. “Well, brother,” he was saying, with a ghost of a smile, “the last die is thrown, we must stand up from the table! We will have to fight our way back to France, and no rest after that.”

“What else is a soldier for?” Murat said, with a wave of his arm: more generosity than Bonaparte deserved, having pressed them all on towards destruction. “We’ll sleep a long time in the end. Will you want us to give them a bite on the flank before we draw back?”

Fortune did not smile on Laurence’s adventure to so great an extent as to permit him to overhear such invaluable intelligence; Bonaparte only raised his hand a little and wagged it to either side, noncommittal, and jerked his head towards the small Russian dragon, asking Liberté in a deliberate tone of levity, “What is this, your prisoner? A fine battle you must have had!”

“I have not fought her at all,” Liberté said, in some indignation, “even though she tried to steal one of our pigs, when we camped near the breeding grounds; and I carried her here myself.”

“I couldn’t stomach leaving her to starve, poor beast,” Murat said to Napoleon, “and it’s not as though she could do us any real harm. I’ve sent for one of the surgeons. Look at what they do to them.”

The surgeon, a man in a long black frock coat carrying the grim instruments of his trade, still stained with the blood of some recent patient, came past the fountain even as he spoke; Laurence averted his face, quickly, until the man had gone around him. The dragon hissed at the surgeon and snapped as he approached, only to subside when Liberté put his foreleg on her neck and pinned it to the ground. The man climbed carefully upon her back, between the wings.

Laurence could not see, at first, what the surgeon was doing there; the dragon bellowed in pain and tried to thrash, but Liberté held her fast. A few minutes passed, perhaps three, and then the man flung down over the dragon’s side a chain, dripping black blood, with two large barbed hooks on either end still marked with gobbets of flesh: a hobble, simpler but not unlike the one which had held Arkady, when they had found him held prisoner in China. The dragon made a low keening noise, shivering still, but her wings gave a small abortive flutter, as if suddenly freed.

Napoleon made an exclamation of disgust, looking down at the hobble. “And she was not the only one?”

“All of them, in the breeding grounds,” Murat said. “And they look as though they do not get enough food to keep alive a cat; I wonder they get any eggs out of them at all.”

Temeraire could not but fret anxiously at Laurence’s absence, though he had for comfort a splendid dispatch newly arrived from Peking, in which Huang Li had not only reported the egg’s continuing perfect condition, but even, to Temeraire’s delight, enclosed a small illustration of the pavilion in which the egg was housed, at the Summer Palace, showing it attended by four ladies-in-waiting and four Imperial dragons, and being fanned by servants against the late summer’s heat.

“Of course I must keep the original,” Temeraire said to Emily, “but perhaps we might make a copy of it, for Iskierka. Surely one of those aides could knock something up?” He was dictating her a letter to pass along the comforting reassurances he had received, and trying as best he could to describe their own success, giving it better terms than he really felt it deserved. “Do you suppose they have reached the Peninsula by now?” he asked wistfully. It was very hard to think that Iskierka might at this very moment already be with the Corps in Spain, which was evidently winning one brilliant battle after another, and he could report nothing for his own part but one battle, from which they had retreated.

“I don’t think so,” Emily said, with sufficient promptness to suggest that she had thought about the subject before. “They left China in July, just as we did. They might have gone by air from Persia, if they stopped there, and have just been able to reach Gibraltar. But if they have gone round Africa, they cannot be in Spain before Christmas.”

Temeraire did not say, but felt, that this was a small relief: perhaps they would have had another battle before Iskierka did finally have a chance for one of her own. But Emily herself sighed and said, “So it isn’t surprising, that we shouldn’t have had word from them yet,” and looked down at the letter she was writing with a discontented expression, fidgeting with her quill in such a way as to scatter ink across the page.

While she was blotting up the spots, Temeraire said a little anxiously, “I hope you are not changing your mind—I hope you have not thought better of refusing Demane. I am sure that marriage cannot be so wonderful.”

“No,” she said, downcast. “No, at least, not marriage; but—I suppose I am sorry, a little; I wish I’d had him, while I had the chance.”

“Emily,” Mrs. Pemberton said, raising her head from where she sat near-by, working on her sewing. “I must beg you not to say such things.”

“Oh, I know it isn’t my duty; and it should have been a monstrously stupid thing to do,” Emily said, “and so I didn’t. But I shan’t see him for years now, I suppose; if we ever serve together again at all.” She sighed. “And one gets curious,” she added.

“I ought to be turned off without a character,” Mrs. Pemberton said to herself, half under her breath, and then to Emily said, “Even if you must think such things, you needn’t say them, at least not where anyone might hear you. The last thing a young gentleman requires is any encouragement in that direction.”

Temeraire was entirely of like mind with her. He had considered briefly whether perhaps it might be just as well to have Emily marry one of the officers of his own crew, but after some cautious inquiries about the etiquette of the matter, he had determined that this could not really serve to keep her with him when Admiral Roland decided to retire, and it was perfectly likely that she would instead take her own husband away to Excidium with her: so it was not at all to be wished under any circumstances.

He raised his head, alertly, catching some movement through the encampment: Laurence and Tharkay had come back, he saw with much relief, although Laurence’s expression was dreadfully grim, and as he came near, already stripping away his peasant cloak, Temeraire asked anxiously, “Napoleon will not retreat?”

Laurence did not answer at once, only shook his head to say he could not immediately answer, and went into the pavilion, and into his tent; Temeraire in surprise went after him and lowered his head anxiously to peer inside: Laurence was putting on his uniform again, his movements short and sharp, angry. He said to Temeraire briefly, savagely, “They are chaining their dragons in the breeding grounds; they are keeping them hobbled.”

Temeraire did not understand, at first, until Laurence had explained; and then he scarcely could believe it, until he had found Grig again and demanded a confirmation. “Well—well, yes,” Grig said, edging back and looking at him sidelong with some anxiety at Temeraire’s anger, though it was not directed at him. “If one won’t go into harness, they don’t let one fly. Whyever would anyone stay in the breeding grounds, otherwise?”

“It is quite beyond anything,” Temeraire said, furious. “Laurence—”

But at that very moment, the courier arrived from headquarters, breathless, with fresh orders: the clamoring demands for action had at last overcome Kutuzov’s inertia. They were ordered to attack.

Laurence regarded the orders silently, Temeraire peering down beside him. He knew his duty; it was not to liberate the miserable and wretched Russian dragons, nor to tell the Russians how they were to manage their own beasts: it was to secure the defeat of Napoleon and his army, and see them reduced beyond the ability to threaten either a renewed invasion of Britain, or further warmongering upon the Continent. That defeat was now within their grasp.

“But afterwards,” he said to Temeraire, “—afterwards—” He stopped, and then sent for Gong Su and asked him, “Sir, would the Emperor consent to receive these dragons into his Empire?” He gestured to Grig, who looked back with an uncertain expression.

Gong Su looked at Grig with a cool, assessing eye. “He speaks more than one tongue?” he asked. “Will you inquire at what age he acquired them?”

“Well, the dragon-tongue, I learnt that in the breeding grounds before I was hatched,” Grig said, doubtfully, “and as for Russian, and French, I cannot rightly say; I suppose I have just picked them up bit by bit the same way that the others have: one does, hearing them every day.”

As this was by no means characteristic of most dragon breeds, particularly not in the West, Gong Su nodded in some appreciation. He said to Laurence, “Of course I cannot speak with any official weight. But these beasts appear to be of respectable qualities, and moderate size. There is a great hunger for village porters in the countryside. If they did not consider laborer’s work in such small settlements beneath their dignity, then there should be no difficulty in finding employment for them.”

“Will you write and inquire if I may extend an offer of such hospitality?” Laurence asked bluntly; Gong Su bowed.

Laurence nodded and said to Temeraire, “Then afterwards, when we have done, we will go to all the breeding grounds which Grig can lead us to—you will explain to them the conditions of their welcome in China, of their employment there—and those who wish to depart, we will free from their hobbles and take with us on our own return to China.

“And if the Russians do not care to lose all their breeding stock,” he added, low with anger, “they may amend their treatment.”

He knew the condition of the Russian peasantry, very little removed from slavery, was nearly as pitiable as that of the dragons; and yet there was something intolerable in the spectacle of hundreds of beasts so hobbled that they might not even fly as was their nature, but instead were confined to scrabbling in pits; save for those beasts who, cowed by the horror of their circumstances, would consent to be slaves for scraps and at least a little freedom of movement. The sensation was much as though, laboring with all his might upon the rigging of a ship and in her upper decks, keeping company with her crew, Laurence had suddenly seen through an open ladderway the faces of captives chained and looking up at him with accusation, and discovered himself in service upon a slaver.

He and Temeraire flew together to the headquarters, where a ferment of activity was going forward: Bennigsen and his staff were in an ill-suppressed condition of delight, Kutuzov more phlegmatic; he had appointed Bennigsen and Colonel Toll to the command of the operation. Their target would be Murat himself and his corps, encamped not far from Tarutino, who had grown incautious after a month-long informal truce, their patrols slack: a heavy forest near-by offered cover for a surprise attack.

“Ah, Captain,” Kutuzov said, and beckoned him out of the tumult, “come and let us discuss your orders.”

“Sir,” Laurence said, following him into a separate chamber, formerly the private library of the master of the house, “I will carry out your orders, if you continue to desire our assistance; but I must beg permission to speak frankly, as the price of that assistance may no longer be one you willingly accept.”

Kutuzov settled himself comfortably in his chair and waved a hand for permission, his face settling into its habitual slack lines; he listened in silence while Laurence laid out both his objections to the abuse of the Russian ferals, and his intentions towards them. “I hope you will understand, sir, if Temeraire and the other dragons should have that fellow-feeling towards their own kind, which absolutely must have prohibited their making themselves allies of a nation which so maltreated them. This project is the only manner in which I can conceive of reconciling that repugnance with our continued service to you.

“But I am by no means willing to provoke a confrontation between nations, wholly undesirable to either; if you should wish us to depart at once, without engaging in what you may call interference in your affairs, we will do so,” Laurence added, “and I hope you will believe me nevertheless entirely desiring your victory over Bonaparte, in such a case.”

He finished slowly, a little surprised to find Kutuzov still listening to him with an attitude almost of complacency. The old general snorted at his look and said, “Grig is a clever little creature, you know: Captain Rozhkov raised him from the egg.”

While Laurence with a sense of strong indignation digested this, Kutuzov continued, “It is not as though we have not heard of you, Captain Laurence. We have all had a great many arguments, whether your aid would not be too expensive, to begin with.”

“Sir,” Laurence said, now baffled, “I beg your pardon; however should you know me from Adam?”

“If the world had not heard of you, after your adventure at Gdansk,” Kutuzov said, meaning Danzig, where they had rescued the garrison from the wreck of the Prussian campaign, “or after the plague, we should certainly have heard of you after Brazil. Where you go, you leave half the world overturned behind you. You are more dangerous than Bonaparte in your own way, you and that beast of yours.

“It is awkward you should have seen that feral just now, in Moscow, but in the end, it seems it will not make so much difference. The Tsar means us to chase the French all the way to Paris, and I cannot do that without four hundred dragons or more. I must get them out of the breeding grounds somehow.

“So! You will show us how to feed dragons on grain, and I will speak to Arakcheyev,” the Tsar’s chief minister, “and we will cut them loose.”

Laurence almost did not at first quite comprehend Kutuzov’s answer; he had long felt—long known—the many practical advantages offered by a more humane and just treatment of dragons; he had recognized the danger to Britain and any other nation in the stark comparison between the increasing consideration offered to French dragons, and the ill-treatment of their own. He had indeed made these practical matters his argument on many occasions, but he had grown so used to failure, to meeting with only a stolid, blind resistance, that to find not only a tolerant ear but agreement left him more nonplussed than rejection; he did not at once know what to say. “Sir,” Laurence said, and halted, overwhelmed by a perfect reversion of feeling, as though he had faced a mortal enemy, and been offered from his hand a priceless gift; he could cheerfully have embraced the old general with Slavic passion.

He with difficulty tried to express his sentiments; Kutuzov waved them away. “Don’t be too quick to rejoice,” he said. “We can’t cut them loose until we can be sure we can feed them. It hasn’t been so long since the Time of Troubles, you know; half the country would rise up if they saw dragons flying all over unharnessed.” He indicated with one thick finger a painting upon the wall, which depicted a band of pikemen heroically massed and their commander pointing aloft at a looming, snarling dragon, which stood with outspread wings over the broken body of a horse and clutched in one taloned hand a screaming maiden, her trailing white gown a banner stained with blood and her arms outflung in supplication as she cast her eyes up to the heavens.

“Sir,” Laurence said dryly, “permit me to assure you that the most vicious beast in all Russia would not prefer to make its dinner out of a lady of six or seven stone over a horse of one hundred.”

Kutuzov shrugged. “There were not always horses,” he said bluntly.

Laurence was nevertheless able to return to Temeraire with a spirit no longer weighed down with guilt, and share with him the satisfaction not only of having carried their point, but having won it in such a manner as founded the victory on the most solid of ground: that the Russians had freely recognized the necessity of reforming their treatment of their native dragons. “Well,” Temeraire said, “I am very glad to see that they have some real sense, Laurence; Kutuzov must be quite a good fellow, particularly as he means us to attack. And now we can do so wholeheartedly.

“Although,” he added, with a lowering frown, “I cannot like hearing that Grig has been carrying tales of us: whatever did he mean by it, and pretending that he was so wretched, if he is really quite the pet of his captain? I do no