Victory of Eagles (19 page)

more. A few pieces of jewellery were perhaps not much to notice, Laurence realized, when one had

never seen the whole dragon before; and as an Army officer, Wellesley had likely never been close to a

beast over courier-weight; a seaman might at least have served on a transport.

“I am Colonel Temeraire, at your service,” Temeraire said, peering down interestedly.

“You are, are you?” Wellesley said after another moment, recovering his voice. “You’ll do to stop a few

mouths, anyway. Rowley, go tell those fellows in there to come out, so we can meet with our new

colonel.”

A man came hurriedly out of the tent: no military officer, but a gentleman in a neat sober suit of dark

brown. “General, if you will forgive me—the Ministry feels there is some danger of a precedent—if I

might have a word—” He had not properly, fully, noticed Temeraire yet: while he talked his eyes flicked

a few times to the side and up, caught glimpses of black scales, the smooth horn of the talons,

impressions which over the course of his sentence accumulated until at last he raised his head to look

properly, and fell silent.

Page 64

“No, you mightn’t,” Wellesley said with satisfaction, watching him choke, and pressed him unresistingly

into a folding-chair. “Have a seat, Giles. Rowley, go on and tell the rest of them to come out here.”

“I beg your pardon,” Temeraire said to the poor man, who trembled violently as the dragon’s head

lowered near, “but if you are part of the Ministry, I should like a word, myself. We would like to vote,

please, and also to be paid.”

The professional soldiers were not quite so easily quelled, and Jane dispelled a great deal of the effect,

by coming out and saying to Temeraire, “Did you deck yourself out for Christmas? This is a war, not a

Vauxhall burlesque.”

“I have put on my nicest things, to be respectful,” Temeraire said, injured.

“To show away, you mean,” Jane said, and as this mode of conversation did not result in her being

eaten, or squashed, the others grew more bold. More bold than Wellesley at least would have liked; he

had very evidently hit on the notion of stifling dissent with his own proposals through an intimidation by

proxy, more than he had any real interest in consulting Temeraire’s opinion.

What threat they faced was not any longer the subject of disagreement; scouts and word along the road

had brought enough plain intelligence for that. The Fleur-de-Nuits would come, two formations’ worth of

them, likely near the middle of the night, and would bombard them steadily until morning, when the

massed French lines would fall upon them and try to drive them from their position.

This position was indeed an enviable one: the generals had retreated from the coast very particularly to

reserve for themselves the luxury of choosing the next battlefield. That Napoleon would seek to occupy

London, had never been in doubt. He had occupied Vienna, though that city lacked strategic value, and

marched through Berlin, only for the moral value of these victories, the personal and not the military

satisfaction of standing in his enemies’ palaces and feeling them his own.—And London had a great many

banks. Gold and silver to fuel his invasion, and the chance to split the country south from north, with the

Thames as a useful vein bringing him lifeblood from the coast.

So the British army had arranged itself on the southern bank between Woolwich and Oxleas Wood,

overlooking the Great Dover Road to London, barricades having been established across what alternate

roads might have served the French. If these impediments were not as advanced as one would have

liked, Napoleon having moved too quickly, still they would have markedly delayed the progress of any

great mass of men, and given the British time to fall upon them from behind, and they were well-placed if

Napoleon tried to come at the city down the river. But Napoleon did not mean to scorn the gauntlet

which had been thrown down: he was coming to them, along the main road.

In the present encampment, the British had the advantage of higher ground, with several stout

farmhouses and a few old stone walls and fences, for barricades and fortifications, which should make

them all the harder to dislodge. “We will hold here,” Sir Hew Dalrymple said: he had the command, an

older officer with a stout neck and fair hair creeping back from his temples. “It would be folly to yield so

advantageous a position—”

“And if we are
forced
to yield it?” Wellesley said, dryly; there was marshy ground on their western

flank, sodden with snow; but no-one would discuss this difficulty.

“He has moved quicker than we had expected, but we must not let this throw us into disarray,” General

Dalrymple continued. “That is how the Prussians ran into trouble—letting him cast them into confusion,

Page 65

changing their minds and their ground ten times a day.”

“Sir, I beg your pardon,” Laurence said, unable to restrain himself. “That a lack of decision plagued the

Prussian army, I cannot deny; but they were outfought, sir, on open ground—”

“With this trick of horse-blinders you have gone on about, in your report,” Dalrymple said. “You may

set your mind at ease,” he added, in ironic tones, which said without a word how little he trusted

Laurence’s anxiety, “we have not discounted what of your intelligence could be confirmed; our horses

have their own damned hoods now, and if Bonaparte thinks he will stampede us with a few

dragon-charges, he will soon learn otherwise.”

“And this time, Bonaparte has let his thirst for speed outpace his sense,” another general said. “All the

scouts agree, even the beasts,” he added coldly in Jane’s direction, before she had said a word, “that he

has not brought up all his army yet. He has some thirty thousand men, not fifty; we are not far short of

him even without our levies and reinforcements.”

“You will be a damn sight shorter by morning,” she answered, “if you mean to lie here and be

bombarded. And my scouts have made thirty thousand, but that does not mean there are not more to

come.”

“You have caterwauled without a stop how we must have these sixty more dragons,” another officer, a

colonel, said belligerently, “and swallow treason and unhandled beasts to have them, and now you talk as

though we have nothing to do but sit and bear it while the French drop round-shot on our heads. If they

are of no use here, they are of no use at all.”

“We have seen a great many of the French along our way from Wales,” Temeraire said, putting in his

own oar, “and of course we can stop the Fleur-de-Nuits, if we can only see them, but at night that is

difficult.”

“Difficult? So is winning battles difficult,” General Dalrymple said, scowling, and not looking up. He

beckoned to his aide and thrust out a map to Laurence. “You will take the beasts here, a mile out past

camp,” he said, “and hold the Fleur-de-Nuits there, until morning—”

“
That
is very silly; the Fleur-de-Nuits will go right around us if we are a mile out,” Temeraire said.

“A couple of rounds against Lefèbvre’s rear-guard, and now you try to tell us our business,” Dalrymple

said to Laurence. “By God, I have half-a-mind to—you will obey orders, damn you; you will do as you

are told and be grateful for the chance—”

“If I had done as I was told,” Temeraire said, “you should have sixty less dragons, and Lefèbvre would

have a good deal more food, and tomorrow Napoleon would likely beat all of you for good. So that is a

very stupid thing to say. Whyever ought I do as I am told?”

“If you do not, we will hang—” the belligerent officer began, and Jane said, “Maclaine!” too late, and

Temeraire growled, deep in his throat, and lowered his head with his ruff up sharp.

Briefly, he had perhaps become to them only another voice in their deliberations, if a queer, more

resonant one, speaking from aloft. But what contempt the little familiarity had produced, vanished in the

face of that growl, the great glossy lowered head with the eyes half-a-foot across and glittering

yellow-slitted like lamps, over a jawful of serrated teeth with the smallest the size of a man’s hand. It was

too palpable a reminder that they were in the presence of a creature who could have, with a stroke, killed

Page 66

them all, and with very little effort to himself. To Laurence, Temeraire could never seem viscerally a

threat; but he had handled the dragon from hatchling to maturity, and remembered him a creature

scarcely larger than a dog.

“Laurence has oaths and duty to you, and he would
let
you hang him, although I do not understand

why,” Temeraire said after a moment, low and angrily. “And I cannot make him come away with me,

against his will, because that would also be wrong. But I will not let him be parted from me again, and if

you
do
hang him, then I will take my friends and go; but not back to China. I will go to Napoleon, and I

will tell him he may have my territory, if only he destroys you all, and I will give him any help he wants of

me to do it.
Now
threaten me again, if you like.”

Laurence stood wretchedly, helplessly. He ought to have expected it. Lien had done as much, for the

death of
her
companion, Prince Yongxing; had gone and put herself freely into Bonaparte’s hands, with

nothing at the time but contempt for him and all the West, and even though a Napoleon the master of

Europe might turn his eyes against her own nation, someday. And what sense of loyalty Temeraire might

have begun to acquire to Britain, whatever Laurence might have been able to instill in him, had been

undone thoroughly first by the Admiralty’s plan, to infect and kill all the dragons of the West, reserving

the cure for British use; and by their later imprisonment and the death-sentence on Laurence which had

been used as a bludgeon against him: and now used once too often.

To think his execution would leave Temeraire not free to make his own way back to China, but a

devoted enemy of Britain, was a fresh agony; Laurence had no doubt that such a threat would only make

the generals despise him and the dragon all the more, and see in it his own scheme for preserving his neck

by blackmail. They might choose not to provoke Temeraire again, while Napoleon had men on British

soil, but that, he hoped profoundly, was only a temporary state, and then—

Laurence did not discount, as Dalrymple did, Temeraire’s achievement: without experience or training

for the task, or anything but will, he had persuaded sixty lazy, well-fed dragons to go with him to war;

and had won two victories already, against the French army. That Lefèbvre was not the best of the

Marshals, that he had no great number of dragons with him, that Temeraire had only engaged with small

companies, meant very little next to the greater success that he had managed to keep his force together

and fed. But these men might shortsightedly think themselves happy to be rid of Temeraire and any

dragons recalcitrant enough to follow him; and if they did not, they would only take this as still more

cause to try some low scheme of murder against him.

“Temeraire,” he said, low, trying, into the silence which lingered, “Temeraire, you cannot say such things;

you are a serving-officer now—these are your superiors; you may not make threats, or growl at their

orders—you must withdraw the remarks.”

“I did not growl at the orders,” Temeraire said after a moment, still low and angrily, but drawing away

his head a little, and all around the circle one might see chests rising with postponed breath. “I did not

growl at the
orders,
and will not, no matter how stupid they are; but as for hanging, if anyone should try

to take you from me again, I
shall
growl at them, and worse, and it is no use telling me I ought not.”

“As one might expect—” Maclaine began, a little faintly, only to be interrupted by Wellesley.

“Damn you, Maclaine, stop baiting the damned bear to see it dance.” Wellesley seized the moment, and

addressed the others, still silent and shaken. “This is all nonsense. I do not believe for a minute that

Bonaparte has come up with a man less than all his army, whatever phantasy the scouts have brought

you. We can get forty thousand men at Weedon, with their guns and supply, and if we give Bonaparte

one of his precious pitched battles without every last one of them, we are a pack of fools.”

Page 67

“Then what do you propose we do?” Dalrymple snapped. “Stand aside and wave him on to London?”

“London was lost three days ago,” Wellesley said, “if not two weeks ago, when Nelson was sent to

Copenhagen with twenty ships, and Bonaparte saw his main chance. The sooner we swallow it, the

better. Get the men on the road tonight, at once. They have been lying about with nothing to do but get

drunk and gamble and whore for a week, they can give up a little sleep—”

Cries of protest began rising, through the stifled moment, accusations of defeatism and surrender.

Wellesley raised his voice and kept going, “Waste munitions and men and beasts to hold a lost

position—we
all
ought to be hanged for traitors if we do it. To Scotland—to Scotland and the

mountains, damn you all! He can’t hold the country and keep the Channel open both. Let him have

England for a month, let him spend men and dragons trying to hold it, and march for Loch Laggan. We