Blood of Tyrants (46 page)

“Laurence,” Tharkay said abruptly, “do you have those particularly magnificent robes with you somewhere?”

“Oh! Oh, yes! That is a splendid notion,” Temeraire said, lifting his head with as much eagerness as might be needed to supply the want of Laurence’s own. “Of course they will not turn you away, Laurence, when they see you properly dressed. And I have
the robes with me; at least, I ought to: Roland, you have made them quite safe, I suppose?”

“Yes, of course; they are wrapped in oilcloth and in the batting chest,” Roland said, before Laurence could begin to protest. “Shall I fetch them out?”

“At once, if you please,” Temeraire said, while Laurence drew breath. However desperate the circumstances, all feeling revolted at the notion he should trick himself out in the panoply of the Imperial court and use it to present himself as a prince of China—and not merely in that court, where all involved knew and perfectly understood the polite and fictional nature of his status, but brazenly to the government of a foreign state, to none other than the commander-in-chief of the Russian Army, appointed by the Tsar himself.

“Besides which, you can scarcely expect the Russians to believe me a prince of China on sight,” Laurence said, “and they are not likely to listen or accept so fantastic a story as my adoption must seem, on first blush.” But Temeraire was inclined to be mulish; Temeraire did not see any reason why anyone should doubt Laurence’s claims.

“I beg that you will forgive my presuming to raise a small difficulty, Lung Tien Xiang,” Gong Su said, coming quite unexpectedly to the rescue, “but there can be no question of His Imperial Highness presenting himself in such a manner.”

Temeraire paused, his ruff flattening, but undeterred Gong Su added gently, “I am sure that if not for the urgency of our situation, and the small amount of time your duties have permitted you to enjoy at the Imperial court, you would recall that the honor of a formal Imperial visit cannot be lightly bestowed, and requires most careful arrangements. The foreign officials should have to be instructed in correct protocol,” meaning of course they should have to agree to prostrate themselves before Laurence, an event unlikely in the extreme, “and appropriate gifts should have to be presented on the Emperor’s behalf and offered in return. Of course such a
remarkable mission cannot be sent forward without the Emperor’s will.”

“Certainly not,” Laurence said, with deep relief. “Temeraire, you would not in the least ask me to do such a thing.”

“But when the war depends upon it,” Temeraire said, “I am sure the Emperor would understand if one were to make an exception—and all to carry out his orders,” he added quickly, with the air of one seizing upon an excellent argument.

“I think we must be guided in such matters by Gong Su,” Laurence said hastily, “whose experience of the Imperial court dwarfs our own.”

Temeraire turned to Chu in appeal, but he shook his mane vigorously. “Oh, no,” he said. “You are not going to get me to quarrel with the crown prince’s envoy: I am keeping out of it. You are a Celestial and he is a prince;
you
can disagree. I am just an old general who wants a quiet life, and to retire to a place in the mountains.”

Temeraire snorted at this. “But how otherwise are we to get in to see Kutuzov?” he said, turning back to Laurence, who was grimly aware he had no answer, other than perhaps bringing Temeraire down over Kutuzov’s pavilion and pulling it up into the air, which should certainly provoke a response of some kind: more likely a cannonball than an invitation, however.

“If I may cut your Gordian knot,” Tharkay said, with a glint in his eye. “Bring down the robes, Roland. You are not going to wear them, Will. You are going to lend them to me.”

“I do not see why anyone other than Laurence should wear them,” Temeraire grumbled, while they unpacked the indeed very thoroughly wrapped garments from their layers and layers of oilcloth and sacking. “They are
his
robes, and
he
is the Emperor’s son; it seems to me quite wrong that you should present yourselves in any other manner. Laurence, if you are worried about causing the Emperor
any distress, I am sure he should object to your lending out his gift. And is it not in any case quite illegal for Tharkay to wear them?”—half-pleadingly.

“Tharkay can hardly be considered guilty of violating the sumptuary laws of a nation of which he is neither citizen nor servant, and when we are not even within its borders,” Laurence said, “and I will present myself to General Kutuzov, as I am, a British serving-officer, here with our nation’s allies to assist in the war effort; Gong Su will present himself as the Emperor’s envoy. We will not
claim
any position falsely for Tharkay. Whatever conclusions the Russians might choose to draw, from his looks, and his having borrowed certain garments of mine, will create no obligations of state on either side.”

He spoke to convince himself as much as Temeraire: but his conscience smote him badly for this undeniable piece of sophistry, and still more when Tharkay had been rigged out in the red robes: he did indeed look a very imposing potentate. “You look as wretched as a cat, Will,” Tharkay said. “You need not borrow so much trouble; I dare say we will be run out of camp at bayonet-point before ever we announce ourselves.”

When he ran so dreadful a risk, Laurence could hardly begrudge him the right to extract what black humor might be found in the situation: they were far more likely to be shot, than laughed at, in the prevailing mood of the Russian Army, and Tharkay, in assuming a deceptive rôle, most likely to be held culpable. “Are you certain you wish to go forward with this?” Laurence said to him quietly. “If the Russian command are determined to reject help offered with an open hand, it need not be our concern to deliver it to them in the face of all obstacles which they put before us.”

“And go back to China, with three hundred dragons at our back?” Tharkay said. “No, Laurence; it would be an unconscionable waste, and I find I have committed too much to the enterprise to see it fail now.” He paused, and with less levity added, “You must know, Laurence, that if we cannot stop Napoleon here, likely we can never stop him. If he has time to establish a Kingdom of
Poland, and feed it the rest of Prussia little by little; if he can ship over a hundred Incan dragons—” The sentence required no completion; Laurence nodded. With the wealth and power of the Incan Empire merging with his own, and his conquests in Europe secured, Napoleon’s position would grow the more unassailable; his fist would close ever tighter. Russia was the last great counterbalance left in Europe; if it fell, Napoleon would turn all his attention to Spain. And when Spain had been crushed—he would look to Britain once again.

He settled on his own sword, then flanked Tharkay on one hand; Gong Su took the other, with Dyhern, Forthing, and Ferris behind, all of them in the best show they could arrange. They were preceded into the camp by two Jade Dragons: the size of draft-horses and utterly foreign with their lean vulpine heads and dragging wings, bearing suspended between them, on chains slung from their necks, a fence-post on which they had rigged Chu’s banner, framed on either side by lanterns in the Chinese style.

Their procession met with bewildered astonishment as they began it, and collected up a number of strays and camp-followers in their train as they went through the encampment: boys running alongside staring and calling in Russian. One of them, rather daring, darted forward to touch with a finger the wing of Lung Yu Fei, the Jade Dragon nearest the side; she whipped her head on her long narrow neck around and hissed at him for this effrontery. With her jaws of serrated teeth scarce inches from his face, the boy paled and fell backwards in alarm, scuttling away on hands and feet like a beetle while his friends jeered him good-naturedly.

They were very nearly as good as a circus coming up the hill for pageantry, and the very growing noise of their approach removed the necessity of passing some challenge: the inhabitants of Kutuzov’s pavilion came out themselves to see and to stare as they climbed the hill towards them: the field marshal himself a portly and beribboned gentleman in front, white-haired and with a large, high-browed face, the nose and cheeks and jowls bulbous, one eye milky; epaulettes and medals and sash proclaiming his identity. Beside
him was a tall lean man with a smooth-pated head: Barclay de Tolly, Laurence thought. Their party came to a halt some several arm’s-lengths away, and the Russian high command regarded them in silent astonishment while not a word was said.

Tharkay carried the event in high aplomb, his face set in the sternest lines as he regarded the assembled Russian company with a searching air, and then said over his shoulder, in Chinese, “I think that will do; you had better be the first to break the silence.”

“Gentlemen,” Laurence said to them in French, “I am Captain William Laurence, of His Royal Majesty’s Aerial Corps. I am here on behalf of our ally, the Emperor of China, in the company of his envoy, and I have the honor to offer you three hundred of the Chinese aerial legions, who can be on the battlefield in four days: if you will use them.”

Temeraire could not help but feel a little dissatisfied the next morning, even though Kutuzov had personally come to see them, accompanied by several of his staff officers: the general inspected them all with an air of suspicion, studying Chu and Temeraire especially with narrowed eyes. He looked over the supply-dragons and the Jade Dragons, and then demanded of Laurence, “The numbers of this force are in these proportions? Two middle-weight to eight light-weight and four of these—”

He gave a wave of his arm up and down, baffled by the Jade Dragons, who regarded him and the Russian officers with doubtful expressions of their own; Lung Yu Li said to Temeraire very quietly, “Surely that man has forgotten to put on all his clothing?” Kutuzov was wearing snug trousers and a waistcoat all of brilliant white, excessively tight upon a figure which was not good and showed to even less advantage as he lowered himself into a field chair put down for him, low to the ground, and stretched forth his legs and reclined back so as to make the mound of his belly protruberant under his folded hands.

“No, sir,” Laurence said to him. “There are only a few more of the couriers, and they are not counted in our numbers; it is three middle-weight fighters to one light-weight for supply.”

“Well, well. You are generous fairies, indeed. All the more so that he has brought almost no heavy-weights, himself,” Kutuzov added, meaning Napoleon. “All right, so where is this Chinese general of yours? As long as I am here, let me talk to him. Why is he hiding?”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” Laurence said, “
this
is General Chu.”

An absurdly long amount of time was required to make Kutuzov believe that Chu was indeed their commander; the Russians looked increasingly disdainful, and several of them began to speak in low voices to Kutuzov, again proposing that the whole force was imaginary, until Temeraire, still smarting at
middle-weight
—he was by no means middle-weight; no-one could possibly have called twenty tons
middle
weight even if he were not as enormous and lumpen as the Russian beasts—broke in.

“If we were inventing it all, for what reason I cannot imagine,” he said coldly in French, “you would not be any worse off believing us than you are now, with Napoleon chasing you across your own country, and, it is plain to see, giving your dragons a drubbing. If you
did
have a dragon general yourselves, I dare say he would have put matters into better train.”

With morning, Temeraire had been able to see a little more of the arrangements of the Russian beasts in the rough coverts they had arranged for themselves: they were all outrageously quarrelsome with one another, at least the heavy-weights were. There did not seem to be very many of them, and all had wounds of some sort, some of which had not yet been treated properly: he had seen at least three with swollen bulging places where a pistol-ball had not been extracted, although he remembered quite well his own surgeons Keynes and Dorset saying that it was of great importance to remove them swiftly.

Vosyem and her regiment had been summoned up overnight,
and Temeraire had seen the small dragon from her clearing again, laboring under a heavy tun of water which he was bringing her to drink, though she certainly could have more easily carried it herself, or for that matter gone to the pond to drink.

The little dragon had stopped by their own camp: his was the only friendly greeting they had from any of the Russians. “I am glad you have found us after all,” he said, in his small chirping voice, “and that it is all cleared up: so you
are
here to fight with us?”

“Yes, of course,” Temeraire said, “but pray tell me, whatever are you doing with that water?”

“Oh, I will bring you some, too, I promise—only pray do let me get a little supper, first,” the little dragon said, misunderstanding. He spoke with his head tilted, peering sidelong up at Temeraire as though he expected to be cuffed, and then glanced with even more anxiety over to where several other of the small dragons were now picking over the remnants of the carcass of a large moose which had just been abandoned by one of the heavy-weights.

“I do not need any water,” Temeraire said; the Shen Lung had jointly chosen a campsite near a small stream, which had taken not the work of half-an-hour to divert into forming a convenient pool, “and if you are hungry, you may have some of our breakfast, if you like; we have plenty. Only I have seen you fly back and forth seven times in the last hour past our camp. I beg your pardon,” he added, “if I seem rude for inquiring, but I cannot make any sense out of it.”

“Oh, I am doing whatever Vosyem would like me to do,” the little dragon said, meanwhile turning to stare at the immense pit full of porridge and meat. “Is that really food? But there is so much of it.”

Shen Lung Chi, who could not understand him, nevertheless could read his hungry expression perfectly well, and dished out a large bowl of the porridge; after having devoured this and licked it bare, and refreshed himself at the pool, the small dragon was induced
to reveal that his name was Grig, though he seemed half-alarmed even to confess he had one at all. It seemed that the light-weights were meant to answer to the whims of the bigger dragons, and ordinarily fed only on what leavings they could snatch.