Main Victory of Eagles
No image available

Victory of Eagles

Categories: Фэнтези
Language: english
File: FB2 , 685 KB
Download (fb2, 685 KB)

His Majesty's Dragon

Language: english
File: FB2 , 760 KB

Black Powder War

Language: english
File: FB2 , 690 KB

   Victory of Eagles
    The fifth adventure of Captain William Laurence and his extraordinary fighting dragon, Temeraire, as they travel from the shores of Britain to China and Africa.
   doc2fb, FB Editor v2.0
   Victory of Eagles
   The fifth book in the Temeraire series
   Naomi Novik
   For Dr. Sonia Novik,
   who gave this book a home
     Chapter 1
    He was quite sure he and Laurence had done as they ought, in taking the cure to France, and no-one sensible could disagree; but just in case, Temeraire had steeled himself to meet with either disapproval or contempt, and he had worked out several very fine arguments in his defense. Most important, of course, it was just a cowardly, sneaking way of fighting: if the Government wished to beat Napoleon, they ought to fight him directly, and not make his dragons sick to try to make him easy to defeat; as if British dragons could not beat French dragons, without cheating. “And not only that,” he added, “but it would not be only the French dragons who died: our friends from Prussia who are imprisoned in their breeding grounds would also have got sick, and perhaps it might even have gone so far as China; and that would be like stealing someone else’s food, even when you are not hungry; or breaking their eggs.”
    For all that, Lloyd did not think of him as a traitor, either; did not think enough of him to consider him one. The grounds-master only cared about his charges so far as they all stayed inside the borders, and ate, and mated; he recognized neither dignity nor stoicism, and anything which Temeraire did out of the ordinary was only a bit of fussing. “Come now, we have a fresh lady Anglewing visiting to-day,” Lloyd would say, jocularly, “quite a nice little piece; we will have a fine evening, eh? Perhaps we would like a bite of veal, first? Yes, we would, I am sure,” providing the responses with the questions, so Temeraire had nothing to do but sit and listen; and as Lloyd was a little hard of hearing, if Temeraire did try to say, “No, I would rather have some venison, and you might roast it first,” he was sure to be ignored.
    It was almost enough to put one off making eggs, and in any case Temeraire was growing uncomfortably sure that his mother would not have approved in the least, how often they wished him to try, and how indiscriminately. Lien would certainly have sniffed in the most insulting way. It was not the fault of the female dragons sent to visit him, they were all very pleasant, but most of them had never managed an egg before, and some had never even been in a real battle or done anything interesting at all. So then they were embarrassed, as they did not have any suitable present for him which might have made up for it; and it was not as though he could pretend that he was not a very remarkable dragon, even if he liked to. Which he did not, very much, although he would have tried for Bellusa, a poor young Malachite Reaper without a single action to her name, sent by the Admiralty from Edinburgh, who miserably offered him a small knotted rug, which was all her confused captain would afford: it might have made a blanket for Temeraire’s largest talon.
    “It is very handsome,” Temeraire said awkwardly, “and so cleverly done; I admire the colors very much,” and tried to drape it carefully over a small rock, by the entrance, but the gesture only made her look more wretched, and she burst out, “Oh, I do beg your pardon; he wouldn’t understand in the least, and thought I meant I would not like to, and then he said—” and she stopped abruptly in even worse confusion; so Temeraire was sure that whatever her captain had said, it had not been at all nice. It was as painful as could be, and he had not even the satisfaction of delivering one of his cherished retorts, because it was not as though she herself had said anything rude. So he did not much want to, but he obliged anyway. He was determined he would be patient, and quiet, in all things; he would not cause any trouble. He would be perfectly good.
    Temeraire did not let himself think very much about Laurence; he did not trust himself. It was hard to endure the perpetual sensation of deep unease, almost overpowering, when he thought how he did not know how Laurence was, what his condition might be. Temeraire was sure to know every moment where his breastplate was, and his small gold chain, these being in his own possession; his talon-sheaths had been left with Emily, and he was quite certain she was to be trusted to keep them safe. Ordinarily he would have trusted Laurence, too, to keep himself safe; at least, if he were not proposing to do something dangerous for no very good reason, which he was sadly given to, on occasion; but the circumstances were not what they ought to be, and it had been so very long. The Admiralty had promised that so long as he behaved, Laurence would not be hanged, but they were not to be trusted, not at all. Temeraire resolved twice a week that he should go to Dover at once, to London—only to make inquiries, to see they had not, only to be sure—but unwanted reason always asserted itself before he had even set out. He must not do anything which should persuade the Government he was unmanageable, and therefore Laurence of no use to them. He must be as complaisant and accommodating as ever he might.
    It was a resolution already sorely tried by the end of his third week, when Lloyd brought him a visitor, admonishing the gentleman loudly, “Remember now, not to upset the dear creature, but to speak nice and slow and gentle, like to a horse,” infuriating enough, even before the gentleman was named to him as one Reverend Daniel Salcombe.
    “Oh, you,” Temeraire said, which made that gentleman look aback, “yes, I know perfectly well who you are; I have read your very stupid letter to the Royal Society, and I suppose you are come to see me behave like a parrot, or a dog.”
    Salcombe stammered excuses, but it was plainly the case; he began laboriously to read to Temeraire off a prepared list of questions, something quite nonsensical about predestination, but Temeraire would have none of it. “Pray be quiet; Saint Augustine explained it much better than you, and it still did not make any sense even then. Anyway, I am not going to perform for you, like a circus animal. I really cannot be bothered to speak to anyone so uneducated he has not read the Analects,” he added, guiltily excepting Laurence, in the back of his mind; but then Laurence did not set himself up as a scholar, and write insulting letters about people he did not know. “And as for dragons not understanding mathematics, I am sure I know more of it than do you.”
    He scratched out with his claw a triangle, in the dirt, and labeled the two shorter sides. “There; tell me the length of the third, and then you may talk; otherwise, go away, and stop pretending you know anything about dragons.”
    The simple diagramme had perplexed several gentlemen, when Temeraire had put it to them at a party in the London covert, rather disillusioning Temeraire as to the general understanding of mathematics among men. The Reverend Salcombe evidently had not paid much attention to that part of his education, either, for he stared, and colored up to his mostly bare pate, and turned to Lloyd furiously, saying, “You have put the creature up to this, I suppose! You prepared the remarks—” The unlikelihood of this accusation striking him, perhaps, as soon as he had made it to Lloyd’s gaping, uncomprehending face, he immediately amended, “They were given you, by someone, and you fed them to him, to embarrass me—”
    “I never, sir,” Lloyd protested, to no avail, and it annoyed Temeraire so much that he nearly indulged himself in a small, a very small roar; but in the last moment he exercised great restraint, and only growled. Salcombe fled hastily all the same, Lloyd running after him, calling anxiously for the loss of his tip: he had been paid, then, to let Salcombe come and gawk at Temeraire, as though he really were a circus animal; and Temeraire was only sorry he had not roared, or better yet thrown them both in the lake.
    And then his temper faded, and he drooped. He thought, too late, that perhaps he ought to have talked to Salcombe, after all. Lloyd would not read to him, or even tell him anything of the world at all, even if Temeraire asked slowly and clearly enough to be understood, but only said maddeningly, “Now, let’s not be worrying ourselves about such things, no sense in getting worked up.” Salcombe, however ignorant, had wished to have a conversation; and he might yet have been prevailed upon to read him something from the latest Proceedings, or a newspaper—oh, what Temeraire would have done for a newspaper!
    All this time the heavy-weight dragons had been finishing their own dinners; the largest, a big Regal Copper, spat out a well-chewed grey and bloodstained ball of fleece, belched tremendously, and lifted away for his cave. His departure cleared a wide space of the field, and now the rest came in a rush, middle-weights and light-weights and the smaller courier-weight beasts landing in to take their own share of the sheep and cattle, calling to one another noisily. Temeraire did not move, but only hunched himself a little deeper while they squabbled and played around him, and did not look up even when one, a middle-weight with narrow blue-green legs, set herself directly before him to eat, crunching loudly upon sheep bones.
    “I have been considering the matter,” she informed him, after a little while, around a mouthful, “and in all cases, where the angle is ninety degrees, as I suppose you meant to draw it, the length of the longest side must be a number which, multiplied by itself, is equal to the lengths of the two shorter sides, each multiplied by themselves, added.” She swallowed noisily, and licked her chops clean. “Quite an interesting little observation; how did you come to make it?”
    “I never,” Temeraire muttered. “It is the Pythagorean theorem; everyone knows it who is educated. Laurence taught it me,” he added, by way of making himself even more miserable.
    “Hmh,” the other dragon said, rather haughtily, and flew away.
    But she reappeared at Temeraire’s cave the next morning, uninvited, and poked him awake with her nose, saying, “Perhaps you would be interested to learn that there is a formula which I have invented, which can invariably calculate the power of any sum; what does Pythagoras have to say to that.”
    “You never invented it,” Temeraire said, irritable at having been woken up early, with so empty a day to be faced. “That is the binomial theorem, Yang Hui made it a very long time ago,” and he put his head under his wing and tried to lose himself again in sleep.
    He thought that would be all, but four days later, while he lay by his lake, the strange dragon landed beside him bristling and announced in a furious rush, her words nearly tumbling over one another in the attempt to get them out, “There, I have just worked out something quite new: the prime number coming in a particular position, for instance the tenth prime, is always very near the value of that position, multiplied by the exponent one must put on the number p to get that same value—the number p,” she added, “being a very curious number, which I have also discovered, and named after myself—”
    “Certainly not,” Temeraire said, rousing with comfortable contempt, when he had made sense of what she was talking about. “That is e, and you are talking of the natural logarithm, and as for the rest, about prime numbers, it is all nonsense; only consider the prime fifteen—” and then he paused, working out the value in his head.
    “You see,” she said, triumphantly, and after working out another two dozen examples, Temeraire was forced to admit the irritating stranger might indeed be correct.
    “And you needn’t tell me that this Pythagoras invented it first,” the other dragon added, chest puffed out hugely, “or Yang Hui, because I have inquired, and no-one has ever heard of either of them; they do not live in any of the coverts or breeding grounds, so you may keep your tricks. I thought as much; who ever heard of a dragon named anything like Yang Hui; nonsense.”
    Temeraire was neither despondent nor tired enough, in the moment, to forget how dreadfully bored he was, and so he was less inclined to take offense. “He is not a dragon, either of them,” he said, “and they are both dead anyway, for years and years; Pythagoras was a Greek, and Yang Hui was from China.”
    “Then how do you know they invented it?” she demanded, suspiciously.
    “Laurence read it me,” Temeraire said. “Where did you learn any of it, if not out of books?”
    “I worked it out myself,” the dragon said. “There is nothing much else to do, here.”
    Her name was Perscitia. She was an experimental cross-breed of a Malachite Reaper and a light-weight Pascal’s Blue, who had come out rather larger, slower, and more nervous than the breeders had hoped; and her coloring was not ideal for any sort of camouflage: the body and wings mostly bright blue and streaked with shades of pale green, with widely scattered spines along her back. She was not very old, either, unlike most of the once-harnessed dragons in the breeding grounds: she had given up her captain. “Well,” Perscitia said, “I did not mind my captain, he showed me how to do equations, when I was small, but I do not see any use in going to war, and getting oneself shot at or clawed up, for no reason which anyone could explain to me. And, when I would not fight, he did not much want me anymore,” a statement airily delivered, but Perscitia avoided Temeraire’s eyes, making it.
    “If you mean formation-fighting, I do not blame you; it is very tiresome,” Temeraire said. “They do not approve of me in China,” he added, to be sympathetic, “because I do fight: Celestials are not supposed to.”
    “China must be a very fine place,” Perscitia said, wistfully, and Temeraire was by no means inclined to disagree; he thought sadly that if only Laurence had been willing, they might now be together in Peking, perhaps strolling in the gardens of the Summer Palace again; he had not had the chance to see it in autumn.
    And then he paused, and abruptly raising his head he said, “You say you made inquiries: what do you mean by that? You cannot have gone out.”
    “Of course not,” Perscitia said. “I gave Moncey half my dinner, and he went to Brecon for me and put the question out on the courier circuit; this morning he went again, and the word was in no-one had ever heard of anybody by those names.”
    “Oh—” Temeraire said, his ruff rising, “oh, pray; who is Moncey? I will give him anything he likes, if only he can find out where Laurence is; he may have all my dinner, for a week.”
    Moncey was a Winchester, who had slipped the leash and eeled right out the door of the barn where he had hatched, past a candidate he did not care for, and so made his escape from the Corps. He had been coaxed eventually into the breeding grounds, more by the promise of company than anything else, being a gregarious creature. Small and dark purplish, he looked like any other Winchester at a distance, and excited no comment if either seen abroad or absent from the daily feeding; and as long as his missed meals were properly compensated for, he was very willing to oblige.
    “Hm, how about you give me one of those cows, the nice fat sort they save for you special, when you are mating,” Moncey said. “I would like to give Laculla a proper treat,” he added, exultingly.
    “Highway robbery,” Perscitia said indignantly, but Temeraire did not care at all; he was learning in any case to hate the taste of the cows, when it meant yet another miserably awkward evening session, and nodded on the bargain.
    “But no promises, mind,” Moncey cautioned. “I’ll put it about, no fears, but it’ll be as many as a few weeks to hear back, if you want it sorted out proper to all the coverts, and to Ireland, and even so maybe no-one will have heard anything.”
    “There is sure to have been word,” Temeraire said, low, “if he is dead.”
    THE BALL CAME in down through the ship’s bows and crashed recklessly the length of the lower deck, the drumroll of its passage preceding it with castanets of splinters raining against the walls for accompaniment. The young Marine guarding the brig had been trembling since the call to go to quarters had sounded above; a mingling, Laurence thought, of anxiety and the desire to be doing something, and the frustration at being kept at so useless and miserable a post: a sentiment he shared from his still more useless place within the cell. The ball seemed only to be rolling at a leisurely pace by the time it approached the brig, and offered a first opportunity; the Marine had put out his foot to stop it before Laurence could say a word.
    He had seen much the same impulse have much the same result on other battlefields: the ball took off the better part of the foot and continued unperturbed into and through the metal grating, skewing the door off its top hinge and finally embedding itself two inches deep into the solid oak wall of the ship, there remaining. Laurence pushed the crazily swinging door open and climbed out of the brig, taking off his neckcloth to tie the Marine’s foot; the young man was staring amazed at the bloody stump, and needed a little coaxing to limp along to the orlop. “A clean shot; I am sure the rest will come off nicely,” Laurence said for comfort, and left him to the surgeons; the steady roar of cannon-fire was going on overhead.
    He went up the stern ladderway and plunged into the confusion of the gundeck: daylight shining in from her east-pointed bows, through jagged gaping holes, and making a glittering cloud of the smoke and dust kicked up from the cannon. Roaring Martha had jumped her tackling, and five men were fighting to hold her wedged against the roll of the ship long enough to get her secure again; at any moment the gun might go running wild across the deck, crushing men and perhaps smashing through the side. “There girl, hold fast, hold fast—” The captain of the gun-crew was speaking to her like a skittish horse, his hands wincing away from the barrel, smoking-hot; one side of his face was bristling with splinters standing out like hedgehog spines.
    In the smoke, in the red light, no one knew Laurence; he was only another pair of hands. He had his flight gloves still in his coat pocket; he clapped on to the metal with them and pushed her by the mouth of the barrel, his palms stinging even through the thick leather, and with a final thump she heaved over into the grooves again. The men tied her down and then stood around her trembling like well-run horses, panting and sweating.
    There was no return firing, no calls passed along from the quarterdeck, no ship in view through the gunport. The ship was griping furiously where Laurence put his hand on the side, a sort of low moaning complaint as if she were trying to go too close to the wind, and water was glubbing in a curious way against her sides: a sound wholly unfamiliar, and he knew this ship. He had served on Goliath four years in her midshipmen’s mess as a boy, as lieutenant for another two and at the Battle of the Nile; he would have said he could recognize every note of her voice.
    He put his head out the porthole and saw the enemy crossing their bows and turning to come about for another pass: a frigate only, a beautiful trim thirty-six-gun ship which could have thrown not half of Goliath’s broadside; an absurd combat on the face of it, and he could not understand why they had not turned to rake her across the stern. Instead there was only a little grumbling from the bow-chasers above, not much reply to be making. Looking forward along the ship, he saw that she had been pierced by an enormous harpoon sticking through her side, as if she were a whale. The end inside the ship had several ingeniously curved barbs, which had been jerked sharply back to dig into the wood; and the cable at the harpoon’s other end swung grandly up and up and up, into the air, where two enormous heavy-weight dragons were holding on to it: an older Parnassian, likely traded to France during an earlier peacetime, and a Grand Chevalier.
    It was not the only harpoon: three more cable-lines dangled down from their grip to the bow, and another two from the stern, that Laurence could see. The dragons were too far aloft for him to make out the details, with the ship’s motion underneath him, but the cables were somehow laced into their harnesses, and merely by flying together and pulling, they were pivoting the ship’s head into the wind: all her sails must have been taken aback, and the dragons were too far aloft for round-shot to reach them. One of them sneezed from the action of the frantically speaking pepper guns, but they had only to beat their wings a little more to get away from the pepper, hauling the ship along while they did it.
    “Axes, axes,” the lieutenant was shouting, with a clattering of iron as the bosun’s mates came spilling weapons across the floor: hand-axes, cutlasses, knives. The men snatched them up and began to reach out the portholes to try and hack the ship free, but the harpoons were two foot long from the hook, and the ropes had enough slackness to give no good purchase to their efforts. Someone would have to climb out of a porthole to saw at them: open and exposed against the hull of the ship, with the frigate coming around again.
    No-one moved to go, at first; then Laurence reached out and took a short cutlass, sharpened, from the heap. The lieutenant looked into his face and knew him, but said nothing. Turning to the porthole, Laurence worked his shoulders through and pulled himself out, many hands quickly coming beneath his feet to support him and the lieutenant calling again; shortly a rope was flung down to him from the deck above, so he could brace himself against the hull. Many faces were peering over at him anxiously: strangers; then another man came sliding down over the rail, and another, to work on the other harpoons.
    Laurence began the grim effort of sawing away at the cable, strands going one at a time; the rope was cable-laid, three hawsers of three strands, well-wormed and thick as a man’s wrist and parceled in canvas, and meanwhile he made a bright target against the ship’s paintwork for the guns of the frigate. If he were killed, the embarrassment of his hanging would at least be spared his family. He was only alive now to be a chain round Temeraire’s neck, until the Admiralty should decide the dragon pacified enough by age and habit that Laurence might be dispensed with and his sentence carried out; and that might be years, long years, mouldering in gaol or in the bowels of a ship.
    It was not a purposeful thought, no guilty intention; it only crossed his mind involuntarily, while he worked. He had his back to the ocean and could not see anything of the frigate or the larger battle beyond: his horizon was the splintered paint of Goliath’s side, lacquered shine made rough by splinters and salt, and the cold sea was climbing up her hull and spraying his back. Distant roars of cannon-fire spoke, but Goliath had let her guns fall silent, saving her powder and shot for when they should be of some use. The loudest noises in his ears were the grunts and effort of the men hanging nearby, sawing at their own harpoon-lines. Then one of them gave a startled yell and let go his rope, falling away into the churning ocean; a small darting courier-beast, a Chasseur-Vocifère, was plunging at the side of the ship with another harpoon.
    The beast held it something like a jouster in a medieval tournament, with the butt rigged awkwardly into a cup attached to its harness, for support, and two men on its back bracing the rig. The harpoon thumped dully against the ship’s side, near to where Laurence hung, and the dragon’s tail slapped a wash of salt water up into his face, heavy stinging thickness in his nostrils and dripping down the back of his throat as he choked it out. The dragon lunged away again even as the Marines fired off a furious volley, trailing the harpoon on its line behind it: the barb had not bitten deep enough to penetrate. The hull was pockmarked with the dents of earlier attempts, a good dozen for each planted harpoon marring her spit-and-polish paintwork.
    Laurence wiped salt from his face against his arm and shouted, “Keep working, man, damn you,” at the other seaman still hanging near him. The first rope of his own cable was gone at last, tough fibres fraying away from the cutlass edge and fanning out like a broom; he began on the second, rapidly, although the blade was going dull.
    The frigate was still there to harass them, and he could not help but look around at the roar of cannon so nearby. A ball came whistling across the water, skipping two, three times along the wave-tops, like a stone thrown by a boy. It looked as though it came straight for him, an illusion: the whole ship groaned as the ball punched in at the bows, and splinters flew like a sudden blizzard out of the open portholes. They peppered Laurence’s legs, stinging like a flock of bees, and his stockings were quickly wet with blood. He clung on to the harpoon arm and kept sawing; the frigate was still firing, broadside rolling on, and the round-shot hurtled at them again and again, a sickening deep sway to Goliath’s motion now as she took the pounding.
    He had to hand the cutlass back in and shout for a fresh to get through the last strand; then at last the cable was cut loose and swinging away free, and they pulled him back in; he staggered when he tried to stand, and went to his knees slipping in blood: stockings laddered and soaked through red; his best breeches, still the same ones he had worn for the trial, were pierced and spotted. He was helped to sit against the wall, and turned the cutlass on his own shirt for bandages to tie up the worst of the gashes; no-one could be spared to help him to the surgeons. The other harpoons had been cut; they were moving at last, coming around; and all the crews were fixed by their guns, savage in the dim red glow penetrating, teeth bared and mazed with blood from cracked lips and gums, faces black with sweat and grime, ready to take vengeance.
    A loud pattering like rain or hailstones came suddenly down: small bombs with short fuses dropped by the French dragons, flashes like lightning visible through the boards of the deck; some rolled down through the ladderways and burst in the gundeck, hot flash-powder smoke and the burning glare of pyrotechnics, painful to the eyes; then they hove around in view of the frigate and the order came down to fire, fire.
    There was nothing for a long moment but the mindless fury of the ship’s guns going: impossible to think in that roaring din, smoke and hellish fire in her bowels choking away all reason. Laurence reached up for the porthole when they had paused, and hauled himself up to look. The French frigate was reeling away under the pounding, her foremast down and hulled below the water-line, so each wave slapping away poured into her.
    There was no cheering. Past the retreating frigate, the breadth of the Channel spread open before them, and all the great ships of the blockade, entangled and harassed just as they had been. The Aboukir and the mighty Sultan, seventy-four guns, were near enough to recognize: cables rising up to three and four dragons, French heavy-weights and middle-weights industriously tugging every which way. The ships were firing steadily but uselessly, clouds of smoke that did not reach the dragons above.
    And between them, half-a-dozen French ships-of-the-line, come out of harbor at last, were stately going by, escort to an enormous flotilla. A hundred and more, barges and fishing-boats and even rafts in lateen rig, all of them crammed with soldiers, the wind at their backs and the tide carrying them towards the shore, tricolors streaming proudly from their bows towards England.
    With the Navy paralyzed, only the dragons of the Corps were left to stop the advance. But the French warships were firing regularly into the air above the flotilla: something like pepper, in vaster quantities than could have been afforded of spice, and burning. Red spark fragments glowed like fireflies against the black smoke-cloud which hung over the boats, shielding them from aerial attack. One of the transport boats was near enough that Laurence saw the men had their faces covered with wet kerchiefs and rags, or huddled under oilcloth sheets. The British dragons made desperate attempts to dive, but recoiled from the clouds, and had instead to fling down bombs from too great a height: ten splashing into the wide ocean for every one which came near enough to make a wave against a ship’s hull. The smaller French dragons harried them, too, flying back and forth and jeering in shrill voices. There were so many of them, Laurence had never seen so many: wheeling almost like birds, clustering and breaking apart, offering no easy target to the British dragons in their stately formations.
    One great Regal Copper might have been Maximus: red and orange and yellow against the blue sky, at the head of a formation with Yellow Reapers in two lines to his either wing, but Laurence did not see Lily. The Regal roared, audible faintly even over the distance, and bulled his formation through a dozen French light-weights to come at a great French warship: flames bloomed from her sails as the bombs at last hit, but when the formation rose away again, one of the Reapers was streaming crimson from its belly and another was listing. A handful of British frigates, too, were valiantly trying to dash past the French ships to come at the transports: with some little success, but they were under heavy fire, and if they sank a dozen boats, half the men were pulled aboard others, so close were the little transports to one another.
    “Every man to his gun,” the lieutenant said sharply. Goliath was turning to go after the transports. She would be passing between Majestueux and Héros, a broadside of nearly three tons between them. Laurence felt it when her sails caught the wind properly again: the ship leaping forward like an eager racehorse held too long. She had made all sail. He touched his leg: the blood had stopped flowing, he thought. He limped back to an empty place at a gun.
    Outside, the first transports were already hurtling themselves onward to the shore, light-weight dragons wheeling above to shield them while they ran artillery onto the ground, and one soldier rammed the standard into the dirt, the golden eagle atop catching fire with the sunlight: Napoleon had landed in England at last.
     Chapter 2
    THE QUESTION SENT OUT, Temeraire found it was almost worse to have the prospect of an answer; to know that there was an answer, and that it would reach him soon. Before, the world itself had been undecided, if Laurence was still in it: he might as easily be alive as not, and so long as Temeraire did not know otherwise, Laurence was alive at least in part, which was almost all which could be hoped for: the news at best would only be that he was still imprisoned. As the day crept onward, Temeraire began to feel certainty was a weak reward to repay the risk of receiving the dreadful contrary answer, a possibility which Temeraire could not bear to envision: a great blankness engulfed him if he tried, like a grey sky full of clouds above and below, fog all around.
    He wanted distraction badly, and there was none, except to talk to Perscitia; which was at least interesting, if from time to time infuriating also. Perscitia liked to think herself a great genius, and she was certainly unusually clever even if she could not quite grasp the notion of writing; occasionally, to Temeraire’s discomfiture, she would leap quite far ahead, and come out with some strange notion, which was in none of the books Temeraire had read, but which could not at all be disproved or quarreled with.
    But she was so jealous of her discoveries that she flew into a temper when Temeraire could inform her that any of them had been made before, and she was resentful of the hierarchy of the breeding grounds, which as she saw it denied her the just deserts of her brilliance. Because of her middling size, she had to make do with an inconvenient poky clearing down in the moorlands, of which she complained endlessly—no prospect and little more than an overhang to shelter from the rain.
    “So why do you not take a better?” Temeraire said, exasperated. “There are several very nice, directly over there, in the cliff face; you would be much more comfortable there, I am sure.”
    “One does not like to be quarrelsome,” Perscitia said, evasive and entirely false: she liked very well to be quarrelsome, and Temeraire did not understand what that had to do with taking an empty cave, either; but at least it diverted the subject.
    The only event of note was that it rained for a week without stopping, with a steady driving wind behind it which came in to all the cave-mouths and permeated the ground, and made everyone perfectly miserable; Temeraire was very glad of his antechamber, where he could shake off the water and dry before retreating to the comfort of his larger chamber. Several of the smallest dragons, courier-weights living in the hollows by the river, were flooded out of their homes entirely; sorry for their muddy and bedraggled state, Temeraire invited them to stop in his cavern, while the rain continued, so long as they first washed off the mud. They were loud with appreciation for his arrangements, gratifyingly, and a few days later, while he was brooding anxious and solitary once again over Laurence, a shadow crossed over the mouth of his cave.
    It was the big Regal Copper, Requiescat; he ducked in through the antechamber and came into Temeraire’s main chamber, uninvited, and gazed around the room with a pleased air, nodding, and said, “It is just as nice as they said.”
    “Thank you,” Temeraire said, thawed a little by the compliment, although he did not much want company, just then; and then he remembered he must be polite. “Will you sit down? I am sorry I cannot offer you tea.”
    “Tea?” Requiescat said, but absently, not expecting an answer; he was poking his nose into the corners of the cave, even putting his tongue out to smell them, Temeraire saw indignantly, as if he were at home; Temeraire’s ruff began to try to bristle.
    “I beg your pardon,” he said, stiffly, “I am afraid you have found me unprepared for guests,” which he thought was a clever way of hinting that Requiescat might go away again, any time he chose.
    But the Regal Copper did not take the hint; or at any rate he did not choose to go, but instead settled himself comfortably along the back of the cave and said, “Well, old fellow, I am afraid we will have to swap.”
    “Swap?” Temeraire said, puzzled, until he divined that Requiescat meant caves. “I do not want your cave,” adding hastily, “not that it is not very nice, I am sure; but I have just got this one arranged to suit me.”
    “This one is much bigger now,” Requiescat explained, or by his tone thought he was explaining, “and it is much nicer in the wet; mine,” he added regretfully, “has been full of puddles, all this week; wet clear through to the back.”
    “Then I can hardly see why I would change,” Temeraire said, still more baffled, and then he sat up, outraged and astonished, and let his ruff spread fully as it had so wanted to do. “Why, you are a damned scrub,” he said. “How dare you come here, and behave like a visitor, and all the time it is a challenge? I never saw anything so sly in my life; it is the sort of thing Lien would do, I suppose,” he added, cuttingly, “and you may get out at once; if you want my cave you may try and take it; I will meet you anytime you like: now, or at dawn tomorrow.”
    “Now, now, let us not get excited,” Requiescat said pacifyingly. “I can see you are a young fellow, right enough. A challenge, really! It is nothing of the sort; I am the most peaceable fellow in the world, and I do not want to fight anyone. I am sorry if I was ham-handed about it. It is not that I want to take your cave, you see—” Temeraire did not see, in the least. “—it is a question of appearances. Here you are a month, with the nicest cave, and you nowhere the biggest, either.” Requiescat preened his own side, a little; certainly he outweighed any dragon Temeraire had seen but Maximus and Laetificat. “We have our own little ways here, of arranging things to keep everyone comfortable. No-one wants any fighting to cut up our peace, not when there is no need; it would be a nasty-tempered sort of fellow who would get to fighting over one cave versus another, both of them large and handsome enough for anyone; but distinctions must be preserved.”
    “Stuff,” Temeraire said. “It sounds to me like you have got so lazy, having all your meals given you, and nothing to do, that you do not even want to put yourself to the trouble of properly bullying other people; or maybe,” he added, having made up his mind to be really insulting, “you are just a coward, and thought I was the same: well, I am not, and I am not going to give you my cave, either, no matter what you do.”
    Requiescat did not rise to the remarks, but only shook his head dolefully. “There, I am not a clever chap, so I have made a mull of explaining, and now your back is put up. I suppose we will have to get the council together, or you will never believe me. It is a bother, but it is your right, after all.” He heaved himself back up to his feet and added, infuriatingly, “You may keep the place until then; it will take me a day or so to get word to everyone,” before he padded out again, leaving Temeraire quivering with rage.
    “His cave is the nicest,” Perscitia said anxiously, later, “at least, certainly we have always thought so; I am sure you would like it, and maybe you could make it even more pleasant than this. Why don’t you go and see, first, before fighting him?”
    “I do not care if it is Ali Baba’s cave, and full of gold and lamps,” Temeraire said, not trying to master his temper; it was better to be angry than miserable, and he was glad of anything to think about instead of what he could do nothing to repair. “It is a question of principle: I am not going to be bullied, as though I were not up to his weight. If I made the other cave nice, he should only try and take that back, I am sure; or some other dragon would try and push me out: no, thank you. Who are this council?”
    “It is all the biggest dragons,” Perscitia said, “and a Longwing, although Gentius does not bother to come out much anymore.”
    “All of them his friends, I suppose,” Temeraire said.
    “No one much likes Requiescat,” Moncey said, perched on the lip of Temeraire’s cave. “He eats so much, and will never take less, even if it is short commons all around. But he is the biggest, and so there shouldn’t be fighting, the general rule is that caves go by who is strongest, if there is any quarrel; and no-one is allowed to take a place out of his class, or others will get jealous and squabble.”
    “You see it is just as I told you, all unfairness,” Perscitia said bitterly, “as if the only quality of any importance were one’s weight, or how good one is at scratching and biting and kicking up a fuss; never any consideration for really remarkable qualities.”
    “I will allow it to have some practical sense,” Temeraire said, “as a way to choose caves; but it is nonsense that after I have taken one, which he might have had at any moment before I came, and did not want, that he should be able to snatch it from me after I have gone to so much trouble to make it nice. And he is not stronger than me, either, if he does weigh more. I should like to know if he has sunk a frigate, alone, with a Fleur-de-Nuit on his back; and as for distinction, my ancestors were scholars in China while his were starving in pits.”
    “That’s as may be, but he knows all the council, and you don’t,” Moncey said, practically. “You ain’t going to fight a dozen heavy-weights at once, and beg pardon, but no-one looking at you would say, right-o, there is a match for old Requiescat: not that you are little, but you are a bit skinny looking.”
    “I am not; am I?” Temeraire said, craning his head anxiously to look back at himself. He did not have spines along his back, the way Maximus or Requiescat did, but was sleek; he was perhaps a bit long for his weight, by British standards. “But anyway, he is not a fire-breather, or an acid-spitter.”
    “Are you?” Moncey inquired.
    “No,” Temeraire said, “but I have the divine wind; Laurence says it is even better.” However, it belatedly occurred to him that perhaps Laurence might have been speaking partially; certainly Moncey and Perscitia looked blank, and it was difficult to explain just how it operated. “I roar, in a particular sort of way—I have to breathe quite deeply, and there is a clenching feeling, along the throat, and then—and then it makes things break; trees, and so on,” Temeraire finished in an ashamed mutter, conscious that it sounded very dull and useless, when so described. “It is very unpleasant to be caught in it,” he added defensively, “at least, so I understand, from how others have acted, if they are before me when I use it.”
    “How interesting,” Perscitia said, politely. “I have often wondered what sound is, exactly; we ought to do some experiments.”
    “Experiments ain’t going to help you with the council,” Moncey said.
    Temeraire switched his tail against his side, thinking, and then he said with distaste, “No, I see that: it is all politics. It is plain to me: I must work out what Lien would do.”
    He cornered Lloyd, the next morning, and said, “Lloyd, I am very hungry to-day; may I have an extra cow, to take up to my cave?”
    “There, that is a little more like,” Lloyd said approvingly; not deaf at all to a request so satisfactory to his own ideas of dragon-husbandry, he ordered it directly; and while waiting, Temeraire asked, attempting an air casual, as though he were only making conversation, “I do not suppose you might recall, who Gentius has sired?”
    The old Longwing cracked a bleary eye, when Temeraire landed, and peered at him rather incuriously. “Yes?” he said. His cave was not so large, but a comfortable dry hollow tucked well under the mountainside, on higher ground overlooking a curve of the creek, so he might merely creep downhill for a drink without flying, and then back up, to a large flat rock full in the sun, where he presently lay napping.
    “I beg your pardon for not coming by before, sir,” Temeraire said, inclining his head, “to visit you; I have served with Excidium these last three years at Dover—your third hatchling,” he added, when Gentius looked vague.
    “Yes, Excidium, of course,” Gentius said, his tongue licking the air, experimentally, and Temeraire laid down before him the cow, butchered with the help of Moncey’s small claws to take out the large bones. “A small gift to show my respect,” Temeraire said, and Gentius brightened. “Why, that is très gentil of you,” he said, with atrocious pronunciation, which Temeraire just in time remembered not to correct, and took the cow into his mouth to gum at it slowly with the wobbly remainder of his teeth. “Very kind, as my first captain liked to say,” Gentius mumbled reminiscently around it. “You might go in there and bring out her picture,” he added, “if you are very careful with it.”
    The portrait was rather odd and flat-looking, and the woman in it very plain, even before time and the elements had faded her; but it was in a really splendid golden frame, so large and thick that Temeraire could take it delicately between two talon-tips to lift it, and carry it out into the sun. “How beautiful,” he said sincerely, holding it where Gentius could at least point his head in its direction, although his eyes were so milky with cataracts he could not have seen it as more than a blur in the golden square.
    “Charming woman,” Gentius said, sadly. “She fed me my first bite, fresh liver, when my head was no bigger than her hand. One never quite gets over the first, you know.”
    “Yes,” Temeraire said, low, and looked away unhappily; at least Gentius had not had her taken from him, and put who knew where.
    When he had put the portrait back with equal care, and listened to a long story about one of the wars in which Gentius had fought—something with the Prussians, where pepper guns had been invented: very unpleasant things, especially when one had not been expecting them at all—then Gentius was quite ready to be sympathetic, and to shake his head censoriously over Requiescat’s behavior. “No proper manners, these days, that is what it is.”
    “I am very glad to hear you say so: that is just what I thought, but as I am quite young, I did not feel sure of myself, without advice from someone wiser, like yourself,” Temeraire said, and then with sudden inspiration added, “I suppose next, he will propose that if any of us have some treasure, which he likes, gold or jewels, we must give it to him: it follows quite plainly.”
    That was indeed enough to rouse Gentius up, with so handsome a treasure of his own to consider. “I do not see that you are wrong at all,” he said, darkly. “Of course we cannot have Winchesters taking caves fit for Regal Coppers, there would be no end of trouble and quarreling, and then sooner or later the men will involve themselves, and make it all even worse; they think somehow Reapers are less use than Anglewings, because there are more of them and they are clannish, instead of the other way round; and they have many more such odd notions. But that is not the same as taking away a cave perfectly suitable to your weight and standing.” He paused and said delicately, “I do not suppose you had a formation of your own?”
    “No,” Temeraire said, “at least, not officially; although Arkady and the others fought under my orders, and I was wing-mates with Maximus: he is Laetificat’s hatchling.”
    “Laetificat, yes; fine dragon,” Gentius said. “I served with her, you know, in ’seventy-six; we had a dust-up with the colonials at Boston. They got artillery above our positions—”
    Temeraire came away eventually with Gentius’s firm promise to attend the council-meeting, and returned to his cave well-pleased with the success of his first efforts. “Who else is on the council?” he asked.
    While Perscitia began listing off names, Reedly, a mongrel half-Winchester with yellow streaks, piped up from the corner, “You ought to speak to Majestatis.”
    Perscitia bristled at once. “I see no reason why he ought do any such thing. Majestatis is a very common sort of dragon; and he is not on the council, anyway.”
    “He made sure I got a share of the food, when we were all sick, and things were short,” Minnow said, on the other side; she was a muddy-colored feral with touches of Grey Copper and Sharpspitter and even a little Garde-de-Lyon, which had given her vivid orange eyes and blue spots to set off her otherwise drab coloring.
    A low murmur of general agreement went around. A crowd had gradually accumulated in Temeraire’s cave to offer their advice and remarks, a good many of the smaller dragons having interested themselves in Temeraire’s case: those he had sheltered and their acquaintance, and besides them the not-insignificant number who had some injury, real or imagined, to lay at Requiescat’s door. “And he is not on the council only because he does not care to be; he is a Parnassian,” Minnow added, to Temeraire.
    “If he were a Flamme-de-Gloire, it would hardly signify,” Perscitia said coldly, “as he does nothing but sleep all the time.”
    Moncey nudged Temeraire with his head and murmured, “Corrected her once, six years ago.”
    “It was only an error of arithmetic!” Perscitia said heatedly. “I should have found it out myself in a moment, I was only occupied with the much more important question—”
    “Where does he live?” Temeraire asked, interrupting; he felt that anyone who did not have time for politics must be rather sensible.
    Majestatis was indeed sleeping when Temeraire came to see him; his cave was out of the way, and not very large; but Temeraire noticed that there was a carefully placed heap of stones, along the back, which blocked one’s view into the interior; if he widened his pupils as far as they would go, he thought he could make out a darker space behind them, as if there were a passageway going back deeper into the mountainside.
    He coiled himself neatly and waited without fidgeting, as was polite; but at length, when Majestatis showed no signs of waking—after ten minutes, or perhaps five—very nearly five—Temeraire coughed; then he coughed again, a little more emphatically, and Majestatis sighed and said, without opening his eyes, “So you are not leaving, I suppose?”
    “Oh,” Temeraire said, his ruff prickling, “I thought you were only sleeping, not ignoring me deliberately; I will go at once.”
    “Well, you might as well stay, now,” Majestatis said, lifting his head and yawning himself awake. “I don’t bother to wake up if it isn’t important enough to wait for, that’s all.”
    “That is sensible, I suppose; if you like to sleep better than to have a conversation,” Temeraire said, dubiously.
    “You’ll like it better in a few years yourself,” Majestatis said.
    “No, I do not suppose I will,” Temeraire said. “At least, the Analects say the superior dragon does not sleep more than fourteen hours of the day, so I shan’t; unless,” he added, desolately, “I am still shut up in here, where there is nothing worth doing.”
    “If you think so, what are you doing here, instead of in the coverts?” Majestatis said. He listened to the explanation with the same casual sympathy of one hearing a story-teller, which Temeraire was beginning to expect, and passed no judgment, other than to nod equably and say, “A bad lot for you, poor worm.”
    “Why have you come here?” Temeraire ventured. “You are not very old, yourself; do you really like to sleep so much? You might have a captain, and be in battles.”
    Majestatis shrugged with one wing-tip, flared and folded down again. “Had one, mislaid him.”
    “Mislaid?” Temeraire said.
    “Well,” Majestatis said, “I left him in a water-trough, and I don’t suppose he is still sitting there, so I have no notion where he has got to.”
    He was not inclined to be very enthusiastic; when Temeraire had explained, he sighed and said, “You are young, to be making such a fuss out of it.”
    “If I am,” Temeraire retorted, “at least I am not complacent, and ready to let this sort of bullying go on, when I can do something about it; and I do not mean to be satisfied,” he added, with a pointed look at the back of Majestatis’s cave, “to arrange matters better only for myself.”
    Majestatis’s eyes slitted narrow, but he did not stir otherwise. “It seems to me you are as likely to make it worse for everyone. There’s no wrangling now, at least, and no one is getting hurt.”
    “No one is very comfortable, either,” Temeraire said. “We all might have nicer places, but no one will work to improve theirs, if they know it may be taken away from them, at any time, because they have made it nice. Once a cave is yours, it ought to be yours, like property.”
    The council looked a little dubious at this argument, when Temeraire repeated it to them, the next afternoon: a strong westerly wind had swept the last scattering traces of rain-clouds before it and scraped the sky to a wintry brilliance, and they had gathered in a great clearing among the mountains, full of pleasant broad smooth-topped rocks, warmed by the sun. Majestatis had come after all, and Gentius, although the old dragon was mostly asleep after the effort of making the flight, curled upon the blackest rock and murmuring occasionally to himself. Requiescat sprawled inelegantly across half the length of the clearing, making himself look very large; Temeraire disdained the attempt and kept himself neatly coiled, with his ruff spread proudly; although he privately wished he might have had his talon-sheaths, and even a headdress such as he had seen in some of the markets along the old silk caravan roads; he was sure that could not fail to impress.
    Ballista, a big Chequered Nettle, thumped her barbed tail on the ground several times to silence the muttering which had arisen amongst the council, in the middle of Temeraire’s remarks. “And if we agree,” Temeraire went on, valiantly, in the face of so much skepticism, “that everyone may keep their own cave, when they have got it, I would be very happy to show anyone the trick of arranging them better; so you all may have nicer caves, if you only take a little trouble to make them so.”
    “Very nice I am sure,” one peevish older Parnassian said, “if you are a yearling, to be fussing with rocks and twigs.”
    There were several snorts of agreement; and Temeraire bristled. “If you do not care to, and you are happy with your cave as it is, then you needn’t; but neither ought you go and take someone else’s cave, when they have done all the work. Certainly I am not going to be robbed, as if I were a lump; I will smash the cave up myself and make it not at all nice for anyone, before I hand it over meekly.”
    “Now, now, then,” Ballista said. “There is no call to go yelling about smashing things or making threats; that is enough of that. Now we’ll hear Requiescat.”
    “Hum, quarrelsome, ain’t he,” Requiescat said. “Well, you all know me, chums, and I don’t mean to make a brag of myself, but I expect no one would say I couldn’t take any cave I liked, if I wanted to. I am not a squabbler, and don’t like to hurt anybody; a young fellow like this is excitable enough to bite off a bigger fight than he can swallow—”
    “Oh!” Temeraire said indignantly. “You mayn’t claim any such thing, unless you like to prove it; I have beat dragons nearly as big as you.”
    Requiescat swung his big head around. “Ain’t it true you’re bred not to fight? Persy was going about saying some such.”
    Perscitia gave an angry yelp of “I never,” stifled quickly by the other small dragons sitting around her at Ballista’s censorious glare.
    “Celestials,” Temeraire said, very coolly, “are bred to be the very best sort of dragon. In China, we are not supposed to fight unless the nation is in danger, because China has a good deal many more dragons than here, and we are too valuable to lose; so we only fight in emergencies, when ordinary fighting-dragons are not up to the task.”
    “Oh, China,” Requiescat said dismissively. “Anyway, fellows, there you have it plain as day. I say I am tops, and ought to have the best cave; he says it ain’t so, and he won’t hand it over. Ordinary, there’d be no ways to work that out but a tussle, and then someone gets hurt and everyone is upset. This is just the sort of thing the council was made up for, and I expect it ought to be pretty clear to all of you which of us is right, without it coming to claws.”
    “I do not say I am ‘tops,’” Temeraire said, “although I think it is just as likely that I am; I say that the cave is mine, and it is unjust for you take it. That is what the council ought to be for: justice, not squashing everyone down, just to keep things comfortable for the biggest dragons.”
    The council, being composed of the biggest dragons, did not look very enthusiastic. Ballista said, “All right; we have heard everyone out. Now look, Temeraire—” She pronounced it quite wrongly, Teymuhreer. “—we don’t want a lot of fuss and bother—”
    “I do not see why not,” Temeraire said. “What else have we to do?”
    Several of the smaller dragons tittered, rustling their wings together; she cleared her throat warningly at them and continued, “We don’t want a lot of fighting, anyhow. Why don’t you just go on and show us a bit of flying, so we know what you can do; then we can settle this clear.”
    “But that is not at all the point!” Temeraire said. “If I were as small as Moncey—” He looked, but Moncey was not among the little dragons observing, so he amended, “If I were as small as Minnow there, it oughtn’t make any difference. No one was using it, no one wanted it; not before I had it.”
    Requiescat gave a flip of his wings. “It was not the nicest, before,” he said, in reasonable tones.
    Temeraire snorted angrily; but Ballista said impatiently, “Yes, yes; go on, then; unless you don’t like us to see,” and that was too much to bear; he threw himself aloft, spiraling high and fast as he could, tightening into a spring, and then dived directly into formation-maneuvers: that was what would please them, he thought bitterly. He finished the training pass and backwinged directly into the reverse, flying the pattern backwards, and then hovered mid-air before descending straight downwards: showing away, of course, but they had demanded he do so; and landing he announced, “I will show you the divine wind, now; but you had all better clear away from that rock wall, as I expect a lot of it will come down.”
    There was a good deal of grumbling as the big dragons shifted themselves, with dragging tails and annoyed looks; Temeraire ignored them and breathed in very deeply, several times, stretching his chest wide: he meant to do as much damage as he could. He noticed in belated dismay, though, that the face of the rock wall was not loose, or even the nice soft white limestone in the caves, which crumbled so conveniently. He nosed out to it and scraped a claw down the face: he barely left white scratches on the hard grey rock.
    “Well?” Ballista said. “We are all waiting.”
    There was no help for it; Temeraire backed away from the cliff, and drew breath, preparatory; and then there was a hurried rush of wings above: Moncey dropped into the clearing beside him, panting, and said, “Call it off; it’s all off,” urgently, to Ballista.
    “Hey, what’s this, then?” Requiescat said, frowning.
    “Quiet, you fat lump,” Moncey said, slitting a good many eyes; he was not much bigger than the Regal Copper’s head. “I’m fresh from Brecon: the Frogs have come over the Channel.”
    A great confused babble arose, all around; even Gentius roused, with a low hiss, and while everyone spoke at once, Moncey turned to Temeraire and said, “Listen, your Laurence, word is in they locked him up on a ship called the Goliath—”
    “The Goliath!” Temeraire said. “I know that ship; Laurence has spoken of it to me before. That is very good—that is splendid; it is on blockade, I know just where it is, nearly, and I am sure anyone at Dover can tell me exactly where—”
    “Old fellow, I wish I needn’t pop it out so; but there’s no good way to say it,” Moncey said. “The Frogs sank her this morning, coming across. She is at the bottom of the ocean, and not a man got off her before she went down.”
    Temeraire did not say anything; a terrible sensation was rising, climbing up his throat. He turned blindly away to let it come, the roar bursting out like the roll of thunder overhead, silencing every word around him, and the wall of stone cracked open before him like a pane of mirrored glass.
     Chapter 3
    THEY PULLED THE ship’s boats into Dover harbor past eleven o’clock at night, sweating underneath their chilled, wet clothing, hands blistered on the oars; they climbed out shivering onto the docks, Captain Puget handed up in a litter almost senseless with blood-loss, and Lieutenant Frye, nineteen, the only one left to oversee; the rest of the senior officers were all dead. Frye looked at Laurence with great uncertainty and glanced around. The men offered him nothing, beaten down with rowing and defeat, silent. At last Laurence said quietly to the young man, “The port admiral,” prompting, and Frye colored and said to a gangly young midshipman, clearing his throat, “You had better take the prisoner to the port admiral, Mr. Meed, and let him decide what is to be done.”
    With two Marines for guards, Laurence went with Meed along the dockside streets to the port admiral’s office, where they found nearly more confusion than had been on the deck of the Goliath in her last moments after the double broadside had dismasted her: smoke everywhere, fire crawling steadily down through the ship towards the powder magazine, and cannon running wild back and forth on her decks; here instead the hallways were thick with unchecked speculation. “Five hundred thousand men landed,” one man said in the hallway, a ridiculous number, inflated by panic without common sense; “Already in London,” said another, “and ten millions in shipping seized,” the very last of these the only plausible suggestion. If Bonaparte had captured one or two of the ports on the Thames estuary, and taken the merchantmen there, he might indeed have reached something like that number: an enormous collection of prizes to fuel the invasion already begun, like coal heaped into a burning stove.
    “I do not give a damn if you take him out and lynch him, only get him out of my sight,” the port admiral said furiously, when Meed finally managed to work his way through the press and ask him for orders; there was a vast roaring noise outside the windows like the wind rising in a storm, even though the night was clear. More petitioners were shoving frantically past them, so Laurence had to catch Meed by the arm and hold him up as they were carried away: the boy could scarcely have been fourteen and was a little underfed.
    Set adrift, Meed looked helplessly. Laurence wondered if he should have to find his own prison and lock himself into it, but then one young lieutenant pushed through towards them, flung him a look of flat contempt, and said, “That is the traitor, is it? This way, and you two damned dogs take a proper hold of him, before he crawls away in this press.”
    He took up an old truncheon in the hallway, left from some press-gang perhaps, and swinging it to clear the way took them out into the street, Meed trotting gratefully after. He brought them to an old run-down sponging house two streets away, with bars upon the windows and a mastiff tied in the barren yard, howling unhappily to add to the clamor of the uneasy, half-rioting crowd. Beating upon the door brought out the master of the house, who whined objections which the lieutenant overruled one after another, and at last defeated entirely by pushing in upon him.
    “There, and better than you deserve,” he said to Laurence coldly, having taken them up to the small and squalid attic, and held open the door. He was a slight young man with a struggling moustache, and a solid push would have served to lay him out upon the unkempt floor. Laurence looked at him a moment, and then went inside, stooping under the lintel; the door was shut upon him. Through the wall he heard the lieutenant ordering the two Marines to stay and stand watch, and the owner’s complaints trailing him back down the stairs.
    It was bitterly cold. The irregular floor of warped and knotted boards felt strange under Laurence’s feet, still expecting the listing motion of the ship. There was a handkerchief-square of a window for air and light, which at present let in only the thick smell of smoke, and a reddish glow shining on the undersides of the rooftops, all that he could see.
    Laurence sat down on the narrow cot and looked at his hands. There would be fighting by now all along the coast: men landed at Deal, and likely along points north, all around the mouth of the Thames. Not five hundred thousand, nothing like, but enough, perhaps. It would not take a very large company of infantry to establish a secure beachhead, secure enough, and then Napoleon could land men as quick as he could get them across the Channel.
    This, Laurence would have said, could be not very quickly; not in the face of the Navy. But that opinion fell before the maneuvers he had witnessed today: pitting great numbers of light-weights, easy to feed and quick to maneuver, against the British heavy-weights, in the face of all common wisdom; and using the massed power of their own heavy-weights instead against the ships, the British point of strength. It bore the same tactical stamp as the whirling attack which he had seen at the battle of Jena, spearheaded there by Lien, and Laurence had no doubt her advice had served Napoleon in this latest adventure.
    Laurence had reported on the Battle of Jena to the Admiralty; it was a bitter thought to consider that his treason must have undermined that intelligence, and likely discredited all his reports. Jane at least, he had thought—had hoped—would still have kept it under consideration, even if she had not forgiven; would have understood him so far, to know that his treason had begun and ended with delivering the cure. But in what he had seen of the battle, the British dragons had been locked in their same formations, all the same antiquated habits of aerial war.
    The noise outside the window rose and fell like the sea; somewhere nearby glass was breaking. A woman shrieked. The glow increased. He lay down and tried to sleep a little; his rest was broken by ragged eruptions of noise, already falling back into the general din by the time he jarred awake, panting and sore, from fragmentary images of the burning ship, which in his dreams became black and glossy beneath the flames, scales curling and crisping at the edges. He rose once; there was a small dirty pitcher of water to which he was not yet thirsty enough to resort for drinking, and he splashed his face a little with a cupped handful. His fingers came away streaked black with soot and grime. He lay down again; there was more screaming outside, and a stronger smell of smoke.
    It did not grow light so much as less dark; there was a thick sooty pall over the city, and his throat ached sharply. No one came with food; there was not a word from his guards. Laurence paced his cell: four long strides across, three lengthwise from the bed, but he used smaller steps and made it seven, restless; his arms clasped behind his back, feeling as though they were weighted down with round-shot, dragging; he had rowed for five hours without a pause.
    That at least had been something to do: something besides this useless fretting away to no purpose. The city burned, and all he could do here was burn with it; or moulder to be taken a prisoner by the French, with Napoleon’s army scarcely ten miles distant. And even if he died, Temeraire might never know—might keep himself a prisoner long after any cause had gone, and stay to be taken by the French. Laurence could not trust Napoleon for Temeraire’s safety: not while Lien was his ally. Her voice, and the self-interest which would see him master of the only Celestial outside China’s borders, would be louder in Napoleon’s ear than any prompting of generosity.
    The guards might be persuaded to let him out by their own desire to be gone, if nothing else; if only Laurence could persuade himself he had any right to go. But he had been court-martialed and convicted, and justly so, with all due process of law, though he would gladly have forgone it all. The endless dragging out of evidence, though he had been condemned already by his own voice; the panel of officers listening, faces blank if not tight with disgust. Navy officers all of them; not an aviator had been allowed to serve. Too many of them had been one after another dragged into the vile business, implicated and smeared any way they could be—Ferris, because Laurence must have confided in his first lieutenant—“And it must present a curious appearance to the court,” the prosecutor had said, sneering, while Ferris sat drawn and pale and wretched and did not look at Laurence, “that he did not raise the alarm for an hour after the accused and his beast were known to be missing, and did not at once open the letter which was left behind—”
    Chenery, too, had been named, only because he had also been in London covert at the time, and Berkley and Little and Sutton all brought in to give evidence; and if Harcourt and Jane had not been mentioned, Laurence was sure it was only because the Admiralty did not know how to do it, without embarrassing themselves more than their targets. “I did not know a damned thing about the business, and I am sure neither did anyone else; anyone who knows Laurence will tell you he would not have breathed a word of it to anyone,” Chenery had said defiantly, “but I do say sending over the sick beast was a blackguardly thing for the Admiralty to have done, and if you like to hang me for saying so, you are welcome.”
    They had not hanged Chenery, thank God, for lack of evidence and for need of his dragon; but Ferris, a lieutenant with no such protection, had been broken out of the service: every effort Laurence had made to insist that the guilt was his alone had been ignored. A fine officer lost to the service, his career and his life spoilt—Laurence had met his mother, his brothers; they were an old family and a proud, and Ferris had been away from home from the age of seven: they did not have that intimate, personal knowledge which should make them confident of his innocence, and give him the affectionate support now denied him from his fellow-officers. To witness his misery and know himself culpable hurt Laurence worse than his own conviction had done.
    That had never been in any doubt. There had been no defense to make, and no comfort but the arid certainty that he had done as he ought; that he could have done nothing else. That was no comfort at all, but that it saved him from the pain of regret: he could not regret what he had done. He could not have let ten thousand dragons, most of them wholly uninvolved in the war, be murdered for his nation’s advantage. When he had said as much, and freely confessed that he had disobeyed his orders, assaulted a Marine, stolen the cure, and given aid and comfort to the enemy, there was nothing else to say; the only charge which he had contested, was that he had stolen Temeraire, too. “He is neither the King’s possession nor a dumb beast, and his choice was his own and freely made,” Laurence had said, but he had been ignored, of course; and he had scarcely been taken from the room before he was brought back in again to hear his sentence of death pronounced.
    And then at once quietly postponed: he had been hurried from the chamber under guard, and into a stifling, black-draped carriage. A long blind rattling journey ending at Sheerness, where he had been put aboard the Lucinda and then transferred to Goliath, and put into the brig: an oubliette meant only to keep him breathing, and little else. A living death, worse than the hanging he was promised in future, and if he stayed, and was not taken by the French, they would only put him back into an upright coffin. Laurence knew it well.
    But that was not his choice to make; he had made one choice, and sacrificed all the others. His life was no longer his own, even if the court chose to leave it to him a little while longer, and to flee now would be no better than to have fled to China, or to have accepted Napoleon’s offers and solicitations to stay. He could not go. He had no other way of knowing himself not a traitor, no other reparation he could make. He might look at the door, but he could not open it.
    A brief glaze of rain washed the window and thinned the smoke outside. He went to stand by the window, though he could not see anything but a general grey dimness. The sun, if it had come up, stayed hidden; he rather felt than knew it was past dawn.
    The knob rattled in the door, and the door opened. Laurence turned and stopped, staring, at the man on the other side: the familiar but unexpected lean face, travel-leathered, and the Oriental features. “I hope I find you in good health,” Tharkay said. “Will you come with me? I believe there is still a danger of fire.”
    The guards had vanished; the house was entirely deserted, but for a couple of men who had wandered in drunk off the street and were sleeping in the front hall. Laurence stepped over their legs and out into the morning: a thin pallid haze of smoke and false dawn lying over the docks and drifting out to sea. Glass and broken slate and charred wood littered the street, and unspeakable trash; a couple of sweepers lugubriously pushed their brooms down the middle of the lane, doing not very much to help.
    Tharkay led Laurence down a side alley, where the dead body of a horse, stripped of saddle and bridle, lay blocking the way; a young kestrel with long trailing jesses perched on its side, tearing occasionally at the flesh and uttering a satisfied cry. Tharkay held out his hand and whistled, and the kestrel came back to him, to be hooded and secured upon his shoulder.
    “I am three weeks back from the Pamirs,” Tharkay said. “I brought another dozen feral beasts for your ranks; in good time, it seems. Roland sent me to bring you in.”
    “But how came you here?” Laurence said, while they picked their way onwards through the unfashionable backstreets. The town looked very much as though it had been already sacked, and those windows and doors yet intact were all shut tight, some boarded, giving the house-fronts an unfriendly glowering air. “How you knew I was in the town—”
    “The town was not the difficulty; the wreckers off the coast knew which way the Goliath’s boats had gone,” Tharkay said. “I was here before you were, I imagine; finding where you had been stowed was more difficult. I foolishly went to the trouble to get these, first,” showing Laurence a folded packet of papers, “from the port admiral, in the assumption he would know the whereabouts of the prisoner he was assigning to me, but he left me in the hall two hours, and quarreled with me another, and only when I had his signature did he at last confess to having not the least knowledge where you were, with the harbor on fire.”
    They came to a bare clearing, a courier-covert, where little Gherni waited for them fidgeting anxiously; she hissed at Tharkay urgently. He answered her in the same tangled dragon-language, which Laurence could not make much sense of, and then clambered up her scanty rigging to her back, pointing Laurence at the couple of handholds to get himself aboard.
    “We may have some difficulty,” Tharkay said. “Bonaparte’s men are still nearly all on the coast, but his dragons are going deep inland. Fifty thousand, I believe,” he answered, when Laurence asked how many men, “and as many as two hundred beasts, if one cares to believe the figure. The Corps has fallen back with the rest of the army, to Woolwich. I believe to await Bonaparte’s pleasure; why they are being so courteous, you would have to ask the generals.”
    “I thank you for coming,” Laurence said; Tharkay had risked a great deal, with such geography: half Bonaparte’s army landed somewhere between them and the Army. “You have taken service, then?” he asked, looking at Tharkay’s coat: he wore gold bars, a captain’s rank. It was not uncommon in the Army for a man to be commissioned when he was needed, if a rarer phenomenon in the Corps, where the dragon made the rank, than in other branches. But with Tharkay one of the few who could speak with the feral dragons of the Pamirs, it was no surprise the Corps had wanted him; more of one that he had accepted.
    “For now.” Tharkay shrugged.
    “No-one could accuse you of an interested choice,” Laurence said, too grim for even black humor, with the smell of the burning city in his nostrils.
    “One of its advantages,” Tharkay said. “Any fool could throw in his lot with a victor.”
    Laurence did not ask why he had been sent. Fifty thousand men landed was answer enough: Temeraire must be wanted, and Laurence himself the only, however undesirable, means to come by his services; it was a pragmatic and a temporary choice only, nothing to give him hope of forgiveness either personal or legal. Tharkay himself volunteered no more: Gherni was already springing aloft, and the vigor of the wind blew all possible words away.
    The sky had the peculiar late-autumn crispness, very blue and clear and cloudless, beautiful flying weather, and they had scarcely been half an hour aloft before Gherni suddenly plunged beneath them, and trembling went to ground in a wooded clearing of pines. Laurence had seen nothing, except perhaps a few specks drifting that might have been wandering birds; but he and Tharkay pushed forward to the edge of the woods and, peering out from the shade, saw at length two shapes leap up from the ground, and come closer. Two big grey-and-brown dragons, gliding with lazy assurance, and well they might: Grand Chevaliers, the largest of the French heavy-weights, only a little smaller than Regal Coppers. They were messy with recent pillaging, and each had what looked like a dozen cows dangling stupefied in their belly-netting, these occasionally uttering groggy and perplexed moans, and pawing ineffectually at the air with their hooves.
    The pair went by calling to each other cheerfully in French too colloquial and rapid for Laurence to follow, their crews laughing. Their shadows passed like scudding clouds, a moment’s complete blotting of the sun, while Gherni held very still beneath the branches. Her eyes were the only part of her which moved, tracking the great dragons’ passage overhead.
    She could not be persuaded back aloft, afterwards, but curled up as deeply as she could wedge herself into the trees, and proposed instead that they should bring her something to eat. She would not go again until it was dark. That the French Fleur-de-Nuits would be out then, in their turn, was not an argument which Laurence wished very much to attempt on her, for fear of her refusing to go on at all. Tharkay only shrugged, and examined his pistols, and put himself on a track towards the nearby farmhouses. “Perhaps the Chevaliers will not have eaten all the cattle.”
    There were no cows left visible, nor sheep, nor people; only a scattering of unhappy chickens, which Tharkay methodically loosed the kestrel against, one after another. They would not make much dinner for Gherni, but a little was better than nothing; and then in the stable a small pig was discovered, rooting unconcernedly in the straw, oblivious both to the fate which it had earlier escaped and to the one which now descended upon it.
    Gherni was neither picky nor patient enough to demand her pork cooked, and they roasted the chickens for themselves over a small, well-banked fire, feeding the kestrel on the sweetbreads, and waving their hands through the smoke to thin it out. Without salt the meat had little flavor, but did well enough to fill their stomachs. They gnawed it down to the bones, and buried the remnants deep; they rubbed their greasy hands clean with grass.
    And then only the wait for the sun to go down: a crawling time, when it was scarcely yet noon, and the ground cold and hard to sit upon: wet rotting leaves in a muck everywhere, the wind blowing a steady chill into fingers and feet, with all the stamping they could do. But Laurence could stand when he chose, and go to the edge of the copse and feel the wind blowing freely into his face, and see the placid well-ruled fields in their orderly brown ranks and tall white birch-trees raising their limbs high against the unbroken sky.
    Tharkay came and stood beside him. There was no alteration in his looks or manner; if he was silent, he had been silent before. It was to Laurence as much liberation as the absence of locks and barred doors, to be able to stand here a moment, and be no traitor, but only himself, unchanged, in the company of another. He had suffered wide disapproval before, without intolerable pain, when he knew himself in the right; he had not known it could be so heavy.
    Tharkay said, “I might never have found you, of course.”
    It was an offer, and Laurence was ashamed to be tempted; tempted so strongly he could not immediately make his refusal, not with all freedom open before him, and the stench of smoke and the ship’s bilges still thick in the back of his throat, ready to be tasted.
    “My idea of duty is not yours,” Tharkay said. “But I know of no reason why you owe it to any man to die, to no purpose.”
    “Honor is sufficient purpose,” Laurence said, low.
    “Very well,” Tharkay said, “if your death would preserve it better than your life. But the world is not yet quite ranged all between Britain and Napoleon, and you do not need to choose between them or die. You would be welcome, and Temeraire, in other parts of the world. You may recall there is at least a semblance of civilization,” he added dryly, “in some few places, beyond the borders of England.”
    “I do not—” Laurence said, struggling, “I will not pretend that I do not consider it, for Temeraire’s sake if not my own. But to fly would be to make myself truly a traitor.”
    “Laurence,” Tharkay said, after a pause, “you are a traitor.” It was a blow to hear him say so, in his cool blunt way, all the lack of passion in the words serving only to make them seem less accusation than statement of fact. “Allowing them to put you to death for it may be a form of apology, but it does not make you less guilty.”
    Laurence did not know how to answer; of course Tharkay was right. It was useless to cry, that he loved his country, and had betrayed her only in extremis, as the lesser of two hideous evils. He had betrayed her, and the cause mattered not at all. So perhaps for nothing, now, he condemned Temeraire to lonely servitude, himself to life-long imprisonment. Perhaps all that could be lost, had been lost. And yet—and yet—He could not answer.
    They stood a long while, mutely. At last Tharkay shook his head, and put his hand on Laurence’s shoulder. “It is getting dark.”
    “Yes, I sent for him,” Jane said, flatly. “And you may leave off your coughing and your insinuations: if I wanted a man between my legs so badly, there is a campful of handsome young fellows outside, and I dare say I could find one out to oblige me, without going to such trouble.”
    Having momentarily appalled her audience of generals and ministers into silence, she rode on, with no more muttering to contend against, “If the French took him prisoner, they would have two Celestials; and even if the two are too close related to breed direct, they will cross-breed them—perhaps to Grand Chevaliers, if you like to imagine that—and breed the offspring back to fix the traits: in a generation they will have a breed of their own, and we nothing: we haven’t a single egg out of Temeraire yet. Put Laurence in a gaol-waggon and bring him along under guard, if you insist; but if you have any sense, you will make use of him, and the beast.”
    The atmosphere in the generals’ tent was not a convivial one. All conversation circled endlessly around the central disaster of the landing, returning to it again and again, and Laurence had already gathered enough to understand: Jane had not been in command of the aerial defense, after all. Sanderson had been made Admiral at Dover, over her head.
    For what reason, Laurence scarcely needed to wonder: they had never liked making her commander, but having been forced to do it by necessity, they would likely have gone on as they had begun rather than admit a mistake; if they had not wanted vengeance, if they had not thought her complicit in Laurence’s treason.
    As for Sanderson, Laurence knew the man a little: he was handler to a Parnassian and commanded a large independent formation at Dover; they had served together, if not very closely. Thoroughly experienced but no brilliant officer, Laurence would have said, and Sanderson’s attention was badly divided. Though his Animosia had been dosed with the cure, several times, she still fared poorly from the aftereffects of the epidemic, and it had nearly killed him, too: he was not a year short of sixty, and had scarcely slept or eaten while his dragon ailed.
    He sat now in a corner of the tent and wiped occasionally at an oozing cut over his eye with a folded bandage, saying nothing, while the generals shouted instead at Jane; he looked grey and faded under the bright bloody streak on his forehead.
    “Splendid, so you would put a known traitor and his uncontrollable beast into the middle of our very lines,” one member of the Navy Board said. “You may as well rig up a telegraph and signal all our plans to Bonaparte at once.”
    “Bonaparte can’t damned well have an easier time of it than he has already, unless you run up a white flag instead,” Jane snapped. “He has a hundred dragons more than he ought to, by any numbers. You gentlemen at the Admiralty swear up and down we should have heard if he’d stripped Prussia and Italy to the bone; so I suppose he is pulling them out of the trees; and as we can’t do the same, we must have every last beast we can scrounge. Six beasts too injured to fight in the next month, four of our newest ferals slunk off, and you want to let a Celestial rot; pure idiocy.”
    “Why precisely are we listening to this haranguing fishwife?” someone said.
    “To be precise,” Jane said, “you aren’t listening to me, and you had better start. Begging your pardon, Sanderson, you are a damned fine formation-leader; but you weren’t the man for this.”
    “No, not at all, Roland,” Sanderson said, dully, and patted the cloth to his forehead again.
    “We are listening to her,” another general said in back, impatient: a lean sharp-faced man with a decided aquiline nose, and the Order of the Bath, “because you could not scrape up a competent man for the job. We are not going to beat Bonaparte with yesterday’s mess.”
    “Portland—” another began.
    “Stop bleating the man’s name like a talisman,” the general said. “If it is not Nelson with you, it is Portland. Gibraltar is as bad as Denmark: neither of them is to be had in under a month. Until then, get out of her way.”
    “General Wellesley, you cannot seriously be lending your voice to the suggestion—” another minister said, gesturing to Laurence.
    “Thank you; I am capable of deciding to what I will lend my voice, without consultation,” Wellesley said. He raked Laurence up and down with a cold dismissive eye. “He’s a sentimentalist, isn’t he—surrendered himself? Damned romantic. What difference does it make? Hang him after.”
    Jane took him to her tent. “No, you had better stay, Frette,” she said, speaking to her aide-de-camp, who had risen from a camp-table as she ducked inside. “I can better afford to be frank before a witness than make hay for any more rumors.”
    She poured herself a glass of wine, and drank it with her back to him. Laurence could not quarrel with her decision, but he wished that they had been alone; he himself felt it impossible to speak as he wished before anyone else. Then she put down the glass and sat down behind her desk. “Tomorrow you will go by courier to Pen Y Fan,” she said, tiredly, without looking at him. “That is where they have been keeping Temeraire. Will you bring him back?”
    “Yes, of course,” Laurence said.
    “They very likely will hang you after, unless you manage to do something heroic,” Jane said.
    “If I had wished to avoid justice, I might have stayed in France,” Laurence said. “Jane—”
    “Admiral Roland, if you please,” she said, sharply. After a moment’s silence, she added, “I cannot blame you, Laurence; Christ knows it was ugly. But if I am to do any good, I cannot be fighting their damned Lordships as well as Napoleon’s dragons. Frette will take you to the officers’ tent to eat, and find you somewhere to sleep. You will go tomorrow, and when you come back you will be flying in formation, under Admiral Sanderson. That will be all.”
    She gave a jerk of her head, and Frette clearing his throat held open the tent flap; Laurence could only bow, and withdraw too slowly, wishing he had not seen her drop her forehead to her clenched fist, and the grimness around her mouth.
    There was a dreadful awkwardness when he came into the large mess tent in Frette’s company. He saw none of his nearest acquaintance, and was glad to postpone that evil, but several remarks were made by captains little known to him, which he had to pretend not to hear, and worse than that was the discomfort and downcast faces of those who would not snub him, but still did not choose to meet his eyes.
    He had been prepared for this much; he was not as well braced to have his hand seized, and aggressively pumped, by a gentleman he had only seen perhaps twice before, across the officers’ common room at Dover. Captain Hesterfield loudly said, “May I shake your hand, sir?” too late for the request to be refused, and then nearly bodily dragged Laurence over to his table in the corner, and presented him to his companions.
    There were six officers at the small and huddled table: two Prussians, one of whom, Von Pfeil, Laurence recognized from the siege of Danzig, and another who stood and shook his hand, and introduced himself as cousin to Captain Dyhern, with whom they had fought at the Battle of Jena. They were refugees from their own country, having chosen exile and service in Britain over accepting the parole which Napoleon had offered to Prussian officers.
    Another stranger, Captain Prewitt, had been called to England a few months before, out of desperation: his Winchester had escaped the epidemic, as they were ordinarily assigned to Halifax covert, whence he had been stationed on a lonely circuit out in Quebec to put him out of the way of anyone hearing his radical political views, as he freely acknowledged.
    “Or perhaps my poetry,” Prewitt said, laughing at himself, “but my pride can better stand condemnation of my politics than of my art, so I choose to take it so. And this is Captain Latour,” a French Royalist turned British officer. Hesterfield and the two others, Reynolds and Gounod, were political sympathizers of Prewitt’s, if a little quieter than he on the subject, and Laurence gradually realized they were not incidentally supporters of his act, but were divided from the rest of the company precisely by quarreling over it.
    “Murder, murder most foul, there is no other word,” Reynolds declared, covering Laurence’s hand with his own, pinning it to the table by the wrist, and looking at him with the focused, too-earnest expression of the profoundly drunk. Laurence did not know what to say; he had agreed, and had laid down his life to prevent it, but he did not care to be congratulated for it, by a stranger.
    “Treason is another word, if you like,” another officer said, at the nearest populated table, making no pretenses about eavesdropping; a bottle of whiskey half-empty stood before him, and he was drinking alone.
    “Hear, hear,” another man said.
    There were entirely too many bottles in the room, and too many angry and disappointed men. It was an invitation for a scene. Laurence disengaged his hand. He would heartily have liked to excuse himself and shift tables, but Frette had abandoned him to Prewitt and his willing company, and Laurence could not imagine imposing himself on anyone else in the room. “I beg you gentlemen not to speak of it,” he said quietly, to the table: to no avail. Reynolds was already arguing with the whiskey-drinker, and their voices were penetrating.
    Laurence set his jaw, and tried not to hear. “And I say,” the whiskey-drinker was saying, “that he is a traitor who ought to be drug outside, strung up, and drawn and quartered after, and you with him, if you say otherwise—”
    “Medieval sentiment—” They were both standing now, Reynolds shaking off Gounod’s half-hearted restraining hand to get up. Their voices had risen enough to drown all nearby conversation.
    Laurence rose, and catching Reynolds by the shoulder firmly, pressed him back towards his chair. “Sir, you do me no kindness by this; leave off,” he said, low and sharply.
    “That’s right, let him teach you how to be a coward,” the other man said.
    Laurence stiffened. He could not resent insults which he had earned, he had sacrificed the right to defend himself against traitor—but coward was a slap he could not gladly swallow. Yet even if dueling were not forbidden aviators, he could not make challenge. He had caused enough harm; he could not—would not—do more. He closed his mouth on the bitterness in the back of his throat, and did not turn to look the man in the face, though he stood now so offensively close his liquored breath came hot and strongly over Laurence’s shoulder.
    “Call him a coward, when you would’ve sat and done nothing,” Reynolds flung back, resisting the push. He shook off Laurence’s hand, or tried. “I suppose your dragon would think a lot of your being happy to see ten thousand of them put down, poisoned or good as, like dogs—”
    “At least one of ’em ought to be poisoned,” the other man said, and Laurence let go of Reynolds and turned and knocked him down.
    The man was drunk and unsteady, and going down pulled the table and the bottle over with him, cheap liquor bubbling out over the dirt as it rolled away. For a moment no-one spoke, and then chairs went back across the tent, eagerly, as if nothing more had been wanted than a pretext.
    The quarrel at once devolved into a confused melee, with nothing so organized as sides; Laurence saw two men from the same table wrestling in a corner. But a few men singled him out, one a captain he knew by face from Dover, if not immediately by name; he had streaks of black dragon blood fresh on his clothing. Geoffrey Windle, Laurence remembered incongruously, as they grappled, and then Windle struck him full on the jaw.
    The impact rocked him back on his heels: his teeth snapped together, jarring all up to his skull with the startling pain of a bitten cheek. Gripping a tent-pole for purchase, Laurence managed to seize a chair and pull it around between them as Windle lunged at him again; the man tripped over it and went into the pole with his full weight: considerable, as he had some three stone ov