Kitabı oku: «The Temeraire Series», sayfa 3

Chapter Three

They pulled the ship's boats into Dover harbour well past eleven o'clock at night, sweating underneath their wet clothing, hands blistered on the oars. They climbed out shivering onto the docks. Captain Puget was handed up in a litter, almost senseless with blood-loss, and Lieutenant Frye, nineteen, was the only one left to oversee. The rest of the senior officers were dead. Frye looked at Laurence with great uncertainty, then glanced around. The men offered him nothing, they were beaten with rowing and defeat. At last, Laurence quietly offered, ‘The port admiral,’ prompting him. Frye coloured and said to a gangly young midshipman, clearing his throat, ‘Mr. Meed, you had better take the prisoner to the port admiral, and let him decide what is to be done.’

With two Marines for guards, Laurence followed Meed through 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 un-masted her, smoke had spread everywhere, fire crawling steadily down through the ship towards the powder magazine, as cannon ran wildly back and forth on her decks.

Here the hallways were suffocating with unchecked speculation. ‘Five hundred thousand men landed,’ one man said in the hallway, a ridiculous number, inflated by panic. ‘Already in London,’ said another, ‘and two millions in shipping seized,’ the very last of these being 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. He would have seized an enormous collection of prizes to fuel the invasion, 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 roar outside the windows like the wind rising in a storm, even though the night was clear. More petitioners were shoving frantically past them. Laurence had to catch Meed by the arm and hold him up as they fought their way out. The boy could scarcely have been fourteen and was a little underfed.

Set adrift, Meed looked helpless. Laurence wondered if he would have to find his own prison, 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. You dogs take a damned proper hold of him, before he sneaks away in this press.’

He took up an old truncheon in the hallway, and swinging it to clear the way, took them out into the street. Meed trotted after him gratefully. The lieutenant brought them to a run-down sponging house two streets away, with bars upon the windows and a mastiff tied in the barren yard. It howled unhappily, adding to the clamour of the half-rioting crowd. A beating upon the door brought out the master of the house. He whined objections, which the lieutenant overruled one after another, but at last conceded.

‘Better than you deserve,’ he said to Laurence coldly, as he held open the door of a small and squalid attic. He was a slight young man with a struggling moustache. A solid push would have laid him out upon the unkempt floor. Laurence looked at him for a moment, and then stepped inside, stooping under the lintel. The door was shut upon him. Through the wall he heard the lieutenant ordering the two Marines to 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, which at present let in only the thick smell of smoke. Shining rooftops, lit by a reddish glow, were all that he could see.

Laurence sat down on the narrow cot and looked at his hands. There would be fighting all along the coast by now. Men would have landed at Sheerness, and likely along points north, all around the mouth of the Thames. Not five hundred thousand, nothing like that, but enough perhaps. It would not take a very large company of infantry to establish a secure beachhead, 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 manoeuvres he had witnessed today. Pitting great numbers of lightweights, easy to feed and quick to manoeuvre, against the British heavyweights, and using their own heavyweights against the British ships flew in the face of all common wisdom. But it bore the same tactical stamp as the whirling attack which he had witnessed at Jena, spearheaded by Lien. Laurence had no doubt her advice had also served Napoleon in this latest adventure.

Laurence had reported on the battle of Jena to the Admiralty. It was a bitter thought to know that his treason had now undermined that intelligence, and likely discredited all his reports. He thought Jane at least would still have kept it under consideration. Even if she had not forgiven him, she knew him well enough to know that his treason had begun and ended with delivering the cure. But from what he had seen of the battle, the British dragons were still locked in the same antiquated habits of aerial war.

The noises outside the window rose and fell like the sea. Somewhere nearby glass was breaking and a woman shrieked. The red glow brightened. He lay down and tried to sleep a little, but his rest was broken repeatedly by ragged eruptions of noise, falling back into the general din by the time he jarred awake, panting and sore. In his dreams, fragmentary images of the burning ship, which became glossy, black scales beneath the flames, curling and crisping at the edges. He rose once. There was a small dirty pitcher of water, but he was not yet thirsty enough to resort to it for a drink. He splashed his face with a cupped handful. His fingers came away streaked with soot and grime. He lay down again, there was more screaming outside, and a stronger smell of smoke.

It did not so much as grow light, as simply less dark. There was a thick sooty pall over the city, and his throat ached sharply. No one came with food, and he received not a word from his guards. Laurence paced his cell restlessly. Four long strides across, three lengthwise from the bed, but he used smaller steps and made it seven. His arms, clasped behind his back, felt as though they were weighted down with roundshot. He had rowed for five hours without a pause.

That at least had been something to do, something besides this useless fretting. The city was burning, 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. He might keep himself a prisoner long for lost cause, and be taken by the French. Laurence could not trust Napoleon with Temeraire's safety, not while Lien was his ally. Her voice, and the self-interest which would prompt him to be the master of the only Celestial outside China's borders, would be more persuasive than his generosity.

The guards might be tempted to let him out by their own desire to be gone, if only Laurence could convince himself he had any right to go. But he had been court-martialled and convicted, and justly so, with all due process of law. Though he would gladly have foregone the dragging out of evidence, he had been condemned already by his own voice. The panel of officers had listened with blank faces, tight with disgust. All were Navy officers, no aviator had been allowed to serve. Too many had been pulled into the vile business, implicated and smeared in any way they could be. Ferris, was singled out 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, and only because he had also been in London covert at the time. Berkley and Little and Sutton, were all brought in to give evidence, and if Harcourt and Jane had not been mentioned, it was only because the Admiralty did not know how to do so without embarrassing themselves more than their targets. ‘I did not know a damned thing about the business, and I am sure nor 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 that sending over the sick beast was a blackguardly thing for the Admiralty to have done, and if you want 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 had been lost to the service, his career and his life spoilt. Laurence had met his mother and his brothers. They were an old family and proud. But Ferris had been away from home from the age of seven, so they did not have that intimate knowledge, which should make them confident of his innocence, and replace the affectionate support from his fellow-officers now denied to him. 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 defence to make, and no comfort but the arid certainty that he had done as he ought. That he could have done nothing else. It offered scarce comfort, but 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 he contested, was that he had stolen Temeraire, too. ‘He is neither the King's possession nor a dumb beast. His choice was his own and it was freely made,’ Laurence had said, but he had been ignored, of course. He had scarcely been taken from the room before he was brought back in again to hear his sentence of death pronounced.

And then it had been quietly postponed. He had been hurried under guard, from the chamber and into a stifling, black-draped carriage. After a long rattling journey ending at Sheerness, he had been put aboard the Lucinda and then transferred to Goliath. He had been confined to the brig, an oubliette meant only to keep him breathing. It was a living death, worse than the hanging he was promised in future.

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. To flee now would be no more honourable than to have fled straight to China, or to have accepted Napoleon's solicitations. He could not go. He had no other way of believing himself loyal, he could make no other reparation. 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 glass, though he could not see anything but a grey dimness. The sun, if it had come up, stayed hidden.

The doorknob rattled and the door opened. Laurence turned and stared at the man on the other side. His lean, travel-leathered face and oriental features were familiar but unexpected. ‘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 lay over the docks, drifting out to sea. Glass, broken slate and charred wood littered the street, with other unspeakable trash. Sweepers lugubriously pushed their brooms down the middle of the lane, doing little to help.

Tharkay led Laurence down a side alley where the dead body of a horse, stripped of saddle and bridle, blocked the way. A young kestrel with long trailing jesses was perched on its side, occasionally tearing at the flesh and uttering satisfied cries. 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 onward through the unfashionable back streets. The town already looked as though it had been sacked. Windows and doors still intact, were shut tight, some boarded, giving the house-fronts an unfriendly air. ‘How did you know 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 out where you had been stowed was more difficult. I foolishly went to the trouble of obtaining 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 for over two hours, and quarrelled with me for another. Only when I had his signature did he at last confess to having not the slightest knowledge where you might be.’

They came to a 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 understand, and then clambered up her scanty rigging to her back, pointing out the couple of hand-holds Laurence should use to get himself aboard.

‘We may have some difficulty on our journey,’ Tharkay said. ‘Almost all of Bonaparte's men are stationed on the coast, but his dragons are going deep inland. Fifty thousand men, I believe,’ he answered, when Laurence asked how they faced, ‘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 Rainham. I imagine to await Bonaparte's pleasure, as for 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 half of Bonaparte's army between him and the coast. ‘You have taken service, then?’ he asked, looking at Tharkay's coat. He wore gold bars: a captain's rank. In the army it was not uncommon for a man to be commissioned only when he was needed, but it was a rare phenomenon in the Corps, where the type of dragon dictated rank. But with Tharkay was one of the few who could speak with the feral dragons of the Pamirs it was no surprise the Corps had wanted him. It was more of one that he had accepted a commission.

‘For now.’ Tharkay shrugged.

‘No one could accuse you of making a self-interested choice,’ Laurence said grimly, 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 the only, however undesirable, means to obtain his services. It was a pragmatic and temporary choice, nothing to give him hope of forgiveness either personal or legal. Tharkay volunteered no more, Gherni was already springing aloft, and the wind blew all possible words away.

The sky held the peculiar crispness of late autumn, blue, clear and cloudless, beautiful flying weather. They had scarcely been half an hour aloft when Gherni suddenly plunged beneath them, and trembling went to ground in a wooded clearing of pines. Laurence had seen nothing, but he and Tharkay pushed forward to the edge of the woods and peered out from the shade. Two shapes leapt from the ground, and approached. The two big grey-and-brown dragons, glided with lazy assurance, and well they might. Grand Chevaliers were the largest of the French heavyweights, and only a little smaller than Regal Coppers. Each had what looked close to a dozen stupefied cows dangling in their belly-netting, 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. 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, and proposed that they should bring her something to eat instead. She would not go up again until it was dark. That the French Fleur de Nuits would be out then, was not an argument Laurence wished to attempt, for fear of her refusing to go on at all. Tharkay only shrugged, examined his pistols, and put himself on a track towards the nearby farmhouses. ‘Perhaps the Chevaliers have not eaten all the cattle.’

There were no cows left visible, nor sheep, nor people. Only a scattering of unhappy chickens, upon which Tharkay methodically loosed the kestrel, taking one after another. They would not make much dinner for Gherni, but they were better than nothing. Then they discovered a small pig in the stable, rooting in the straw, oblivious both to the fate it had earlier escaped and the one now descending 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 flavour, but did well enough to fill their stomachs. They gnawed down to the bones, rubbed their greasy hands clean with grass, and buried the remnants.

And then they had only to wait for the sun to go down. It was scarcely noon, and the ground cold and hard to sit upon, the wind blowing a steady chill into fingers and feet, despite their stamping. But Laurence could stand when he chose, and go to the edge of the copse and feel the wind blowing 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. To be able to stand here for a moment, not as a traitor, but only himself, unchanged, in the company of another, was to Laurence as liberating as the absence of locks and barred doors. 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 that he could not immediately make his refusal, not with freedom open before him and the stench of smoke and the ship's bilges still thick in the back of his throat.

‘My idea of duty is not yours,’ Tharkay said. ‘But I can think of no reason why you should owe a pointless death to any man.’

‘Honour is sufficient purpose,’ Laurence said, low.

‘Very well,’ Tharkay said, ‘if your death would preserve it better than your life. But yet the world is not shared between Britain and Napoleon, and you do not need to die. You and Temeraire would be welcome in other parts of the world. You may recall there is some semblance of civilization,’ he added dryly, ‘in a 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. The lack of passion in his words only made them seem less accusation than statement of fact. ‘Allowing them to put you to death for it may be your 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. So perhaps he now condemned Temeraire to lonely servitude, and himself to life-long imprisonment, for nothing. Perhaps all that could be lost, had been lost. And yet he could not answer.

They stood silently for a long time. 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 that badly, there is a camp full 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, ‘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 crossbreed them—perhaps to Grand Chevaliers, if you like to imagine that—and breed the offspring back to fix the traits. In one 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-wagon 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 tent was not a convivial one. Conversation circled endlessly around the disaster of the landing and Laurence had already gathered enough to realise that Jane had not been in command of the aerial defence, 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 rather than admit a mistake. Had they not wanted vengeance, had they not thought her complicit in Laurence's treason.

As for Sanderson, Laurence knew little about the man. He was handler to a Parnassian and commanded a large independent formation at Dover. They had served together, but not closely. Thoroughly experienced but no brilliant officer, Sanderson's attention was badly divided. Though his Artemisia had been dosed with the cure several times, she still fared poorly from the after-effects of the epidemic. It had nearly killed him too. He was not a year short of sixty, and had scarcely slept or eaten while his dragon ailed.