A LONG AND desperate flight, then, to the Austrian border; all of them sick at heart and only the urgency of the moment keeping them from an indulgence of their grief. Temeraire flung himself onward through the night without speaking, without answering to Laurence's soft calls except to keen back his misery, and behind them a holocaust of fire raged, the wrath of the Kazilik dragons striped across the sky, trying to find them.
The moon had set; they flew on with no light but the clouded stars, and an occasional risked sliver of lantern-light to see the compass by. Temeraire's midnight hide was nearly invisible in the dark, and his ears pricked sharp for the sound of dragon wings. Three times he veered away to one side or another as faster couriers dashed by, carrying the alarm outwards: all the countryside raised against them. But all the while they surged on, Temeraire stretching to the limits of his speed as he had never before done, the cupped wing-strokes like flashing oars dipping into the night, driving them on.
Laurence did not try to hold him back; there was no exhilaration or battle-fever, now, which on other occasions might have driven Temeraire to exceed the bounds of his own endurance. Impossible, too, to be sure how quickly they were going; beneath them all was darkness but the occasional faint glow of a chimney, flashing by. They huddled all silent and close against Temeraire's body, out of the lashing wind.
The eastern edge of the night, behind them, was beginning to shine a paler blue; the stars were going out. No use in urging Temeraire to greater speed; if they could not reach the border before dawn, they would have to hide, somehow, until the following night; there would be no getting across during the day.
"Sir, I make a light there," Allen said, breaking the silence, his voice stifled and still thick with tears; he pointed away and north. One after another the torchlight glimmers came into view: a thin necklace of lights strung along the border, and the low wrathful roaring of dragons, calling one to the other in frustration. They were flying along the border in small formations, back and forth like wheeling birds, all of them roused and peering into the darkness.
"They haven't any night-flyers; they are only venturing a shot in the dark," Granby said softly into Laurence's ear, cupping his hand around the noise. Laurence nodded.
The agitation of the Turkish dragons had roused the Austrian border as well; on the far bank of the Danube, Laurence could see a fortification not far distant, set on a hill and fully illuminated; he touched Temeraire's side, and when Temeraire looked around, his great eyes shining and liquid in the dark, Laurence pointed him at it silently.
Temeraire nodded; he did not go straight at the border, but flew parallel to the line of fortifications a while, watching the Turkish dragons in their flights; now and again the crews did even go so far as to fire off a rifle into the dark, likely more for the little satisfaction of making a noise than in real hopes of striking a target. They were sending up flares occasionally, but it was hopeless, with miles of border, to illuminate it all.
Temeraire gave them only the warning of muscles suddenly gathered; Laurence pulled down Allen and the other lookout, Harley, and stayed low to Temeraire's neck himself, and then Temeraire was driving himself forward with short rapid-fire strokes, building up a great deal of speed; ten dragon-lengths from the border he ceased to beat his wings at all, leaving them wide-extended, and drew in a great heaving breath that distended out his sides; gliding he went straight across at one of the dark places between the outposts, and the torches to either side did not so much as gutter.
He did not beat up again for as long as he could; they drifted so low to the ground that Laurence smelled fresh pine-needles before at last Temeraire risked a fresh stroke and then another, to lift himself clear of the tree-tops. He went to north of the Austrian fort, better than a mile, before he came around again; the Turkish border now was more clearly visible against the sky growing paler, and there was no sign they had been noticed in their crossing: the dragons were continuing their search-flights.
Still they had to get under cover before light; Temeraire was too large to easily hide in the countryside. "Run up the colors and hang out a white flag with them, Mr. Allen," Laurence said. "Temeraire, get in and land as quick as you can; better to have them make a noise inside the walls than on our approach."
Temeraire's head was hanging low; he had flown harder than perhaps ever before in his life, and after earlier exertion and grief; his wingbeats were slow now not from caution but from exhaustion. But he drew himself up without complaint for one last sprint: he flung himself up towards the fort and over its walls in a desperate heave, and came down heavily in the courtyard, swaying upon his haunches, scattering in terror a troop of cavalry-horses on one side, and a company of infantrymen on the other, all of them yelling wildly as they fled.
"Hold your fire!" Laurence bellowed out of his speaking-trumpet, then repeated it in French, standing up to wave the British flag. He won some hesitation from the Austrians, and in the pause Temeraire sighed and settled back upon his haunches, head drooping forward over his breast, and said, "Oh, I am so very tired."
Colonel Eigher provided them coffee and beds, and for Temeraire one of the horses which had in its frenzy broken a leg; the rest were hurriedly taken outside the walls of the fort and left in a paddock under guard. Laurence slept through until the afternoon, and rose from his cot still half-submerged in the murk of sleep, while outside Temeraire continued to snore in a manner which would certainly have given him away even to the Turks half-a-mile distant across the border, if he had not been curled up securely behind the thick wooden walls of the fort.
"They mean to dance to Bonaparte's fiddle, do they?" Eigher said, when given a fuller account of their adventure than Laurence had been able to muster up the previous night; his own preoccupation, quite naturally, with the state of relations his nation might expect with her neighbors. "Much joy may they get of him."
He gave Laurence a good dinner, and some sympathy; but he had little to spare. "I would send you on to Vienna," he said, pouring yet another glass of wine, "but God in Heaven, I would be serving you an ill turn. It shames me to say, but there are creatures calling themselves men who would serve you to Bonaparte on a platter; and bend both their knees to him while they were at it."
Laurence said quietly, "I am very grateful for the shelter you have given us, sir, and I would not for all the world embarrass you or your country; I know you are at peace with the French."
"At peace," Eigher said, bitterly. "We are cowering at their feet, you may say; and with more truth."
By the end of the meal he had drunk nearly three bottles; and the slowness with which the wine had any effect upon him betrayed that this was no irregular occurrence. He was a gentleman, but of no high estate, which had limited his advancement and his postings beneath, Laurence suspected, what his competence might have deserved; but it was not resentment drove him to drink but a misery which found voice as the evening drew on, and the combination of brandy and company further unbridled his tongue.
Austerlitz was his demon; he had served under General Langeron in the fatal battle. "The devil gave us the Pratzen Heights," he said, "and the town itself; took his men out of the best ground deliberately and played at a retreat, and why? So that we would fight him. He had then fifty thousand men, and we ninety, with the Russians; and he was luring us to battle." Humorlessly he laughed. "And why not give them to us? He took them back easily enough, a few days later." He waved his hand over the map-table, on which he had laid out a tableau of the battle: a task which had taken him scarcely ten minutes, though he was already thoroughly taken in drink.
Laurence, for his part, had not drunk enough to numb his appalled reaction; he had learned of the great disaster at Austerlitz while already at sea, on his way to China, and only in the vaguest terms; the intervening months had given him no better information, and he had by stages allowed himself to believe the victory exaggerated. Eigher's tin soldiers and wooden dragons in their stately array made a deeply unpleasant impression as the colonel moved them about.
"He let us entertain ourselves by beating upon his right a little while, until we had emptied our center," Eigher said, "and then they appeared: fifteen dragons and twenty thousand men. He had brought them up by forced marches, and not a whisper we had of their coming. We limped on another few hours, the Russian Imperial Guard cost them some blood, but that was the end of it."
Reaching out he tipped over a little mounted figure with a commander's baton, and lay back in his chair, his eyes shut. Laurence picked up one of the little dragon-figures, turning it over in his hands; he did not know what to say.
"Emperor Francis went and begged him for peace the next morning," Eigher said after a little while. "The Holy Roman Emperor, bowing to a Corsican who snatched himself a crown." His voice was thick, and he did not speak again but fell slowly into a stupor.
Laurence left Eigher sleeping and went out to Temeraire, now awake and no less unhappy. "Digby would be bad enough," Temeraire said, "but we have killed that dragonet, too, and it did not have anything to do with all of this; it did not choose to be sold to us, or to be kept back by the Turks, and it could not get away."
He had curled himself brooding around the two remaining eggs, keeping them cuddled against his body, perhaps by instinct, and occasionally putting out his long forked tongue to touch the shells. He only with reluctance admitted even Laurence and Keynes to examine them, and kept hovering so close that the dragon-surgeon impatiently said, "Get your bloody head out of the way, will you; I cannot see anything with you blocking all the light."
Keynes tapped the shells lightly, pressed his ear to the surface and listened, wetted a finger and rubbed them a little and brought it to his mouth. When he was satisfied with his examination, he stepped away again, and Temeraire drew his coils more snugly back around the eggs and looked anxiously to hear his verdict.
"Well, they are in good form, and have taken no harmful chill," Keynes said. "We had better keep them wrapped up in the silk, and," he jerked his thumb at Temeraire, "it will do them no harm to have him playing nursemaid. The middle-weight is in no immediate danger at all; by the sound I should say the dragonet is not yet formed; we might have months to wait there. But for the Kazilik, no more than eight weeks, and no less than six; there is not a moment to lose in getting it home."
"Austria is not safe, nor the German states, with French troops thick on the ground as they are," Laurence said. "I mean to go northward, through Prussia; a week and a half should see us to the coast, and from there a few days' flight to Scotland."
"Whichever way you go, you should go quickly; I will contrive to delay my report to Vienna a little, so you are out of the country before those damned politicians can think of some way they can make use of you to shame Austria a little more," Eigher said, when Laurence spoke to him again, that evening. "I can give you safe-conduct to the border. But should you not go by sea?"
"It would cost us at least another month, going around by Gibraltar, and we would have to find shelter along the Italian coast a good deal of the way," Laurence said. "I know the Prussians have accommodated Bonaparte heretofore, but do you think they will go so far as to surrender us to him?"
"Surrender you? No," Eigher said. "They are going to war."
"Against Napoleon?" Laurence exclaimed; that was a piece of good news he had not expected to hear. The Prussians had long been the finest fighting force in Europe; if only they had joined the earlier coalition in time, surely the outcome would have been very different, and their entry into the struggle now seemed to him a great victory for Napoleon's enemies. But it was plain Eigher saw nothing to be pleased with in this intelligence.
"Yes, and when he has trampled them into the dirt, and the Russians with them, there will be no one left at all in Europe to restrain him," the colonel said.
Laurence kept his opinion of this pessimism to himself. The news made his own heart lift gladly, but an Austrian officer, no matter how passionately he hated Bonaparte, might well not desire to see the Prussian Army succeed where his own had failed. "At least they will have no motive to delay our journey," he said tactfully.
"Go fast and keep ahead of the fighting, or Bonaparte will delay you himself," Eigher said.
The next evening they set out again under cover of dark. Laurence had left several letters with Eigher to be sent on to Vienna and thence to London, though he hoped his own road home would be quicker; but in case of any accident, their progress so far should at least be known, and the situation with the Ottoman Empire.
His report to the Admiralty, laboriously encoded in the year-old ciphers which were all he had to hand, had taken on a more wooden tone than usual. It was not guilt precisely; he was perfectly convinced in his own mind of the justice of his actions, but he was conscious how the whole might appear to a hostile judge: a reckless and imprudent adventure, unsanctioned by any authority higher than himself, entered into on the slightest of evidence. Easy enough to make the change in the sentiments of the Turks the consequence rather than the cause of the theft.
And it could not be defended as a question of duty; no one would ever call it a man's duty to perform so wild and desperate a mission, with profound implications for relations with a foreign power, without orders; it could even be called quite the contrary. Nor was he the sort of sophist who could bald-faced point at Lenton's orders to bring the eggs home and call that justification. There was none, indeed, but urgency; the more sensible reply, in every possible way, would have been an immediate return home, to place the tangled matter into the hands of the Ministry.
He was not sure whether he would have approved his own actions, hearing of them secondhand; just the sort of wild behavior the world expected of aviators, and indeed, perhaps there was something to it; he did not know whether he would have risked so much, knowing himself subject to serve at the pleasure of the Navy. If deliberate, a paltry sort of caution that would be; but no, he had never consciously chosen the politic course; there was only something quite distinct in being captain to a living dragon who entered wholly into his engagements and who was not to be given or taken away by the will of other men. Laurence was uneasily forced to consider whether he might be in danger of beginning to think himself above authority.
"Myself, I do not see what is so wonderful about authority at all," Temeraire said, when Laurence ventured to disclose his anxiety that morning as they settled down for a rest; they had encamped in a clearing high upon the leeward side of a mountain slope, untended but for a handful of former sheep now roasting under Gong Su's careful hand in a fire-pit which did not give off much smoke, the better to avoid notice.
"It seems to me that it is only forcing people to do things which they do not wish to do, and which they cannot be persuaded to do, with threats," he continued. "I am very glad we are above it. I would not at all be pleased if someone could take you away from me and make me have another captain, like a ship."
Laurence could hardly quarrel with this, and while he might have argued the description of authority, he could not, feeling too false in so doing; he plainly did like being free of restraint at least so far, and if he were ashamed of it he might at least not lie about it. "Well; I suppose it is true any man would be a tyrant an he could," he said ruefully. "All the better reason to deny Bonaparte any more power than he already has."
"Laurence," Temeraire said thoughtfully, "why do people do as he says, when he is so unpleasant a person? And dragons too."
"Oh; well, I do not know he is an unpleasant man in his person," Laurence admitted. "His soldiers love him at least, though that is scarcely to be marveled at, when he keeps winning wars for them; and he must have some charm, to have risen so high."
"Then why is it so terrible that he should have authority, if someone must have it?" Temeraire asked. "I have not heard that the King has ever won any battles, after all."
"The King's authority is nothing like," Laurence answered. "He is the head of the State, but he does not have absolute power; no man in Britain does. Bonaparte has no restraint, no check upon his will; and such gifts as he has he uses only to serve himself. The King and his ministers are all in the end the servants of our nation first, before themselves; at any rate, so the best of them are."
Temeraire sighed, and did not pursue the discussion further, but listlessly curled himself up with the eggs again, leaving Laurence to gaze on him with anxiety. It was not only the unhappy loss; the death of any of his crew always left Temeraire distressed, but rather in frustrated anger than this dragging lethargy; and Laurence feared deeply that the true cause was rather their disagreement over the question of dragon liberties; a more profound disappointment, and one which time would not lay to rest.
He might try and describe for Temeraire a little of the slow political work of emancipation, the long years Wilberforce had already spent nudging one partial act and then another forward through Parliament, and how they were still laboring to ban even the trade; but that seemed to him poor consolation to offer, and not much use as a model: so slow and calculated a progress would never recommend itself to Temeraire's eager soul, and they would have little time to pursue politics while engaged in their duties in any case.
But some hope, he increasingly felt, he must somehow discover; for all that he could not put aside his conviction of their duty to put the war effort first, he could not easily bear to see Temeraire so cast-down.
The Austrian countryside was green and golden with the ripening harvest, and the flocks were fat and contented, at least until Temeraire got his claws upon them; they saw no other dragons and faced no challenge. They crossed into Saxony and moved steadily northward another two days, still with no sign of the mobilizing army; until at last they crossed over one of the last swelling foothills of the final ridges of the Erz Gebirge mountains and came abruptly upon the vast encampment swelling out of the town of Dresden: seventy thousand men or more, and nearly two dozen dragons sprawling in the valley beside.
Laurence belatedly gave the order to have the flag hung out, as below the alarm was raised and men went running to their guns, crews to their dragons; the British flag brought them a very different reception, however, and Temeraire was waved down to a hastily cleared place in the makeshift covert.
"Keep the men aboard," Laurence told Granby. "I hope we need not stop long; we could make another hundred miles today." He swung himself down the harness to the ground, mentally composing his explanations and requests in French, and brushed ineffectually at the worst of his dirt.
"Well, it is about damned time," a voice said, in crisp English. "Now where the devil are the rest of you?"
Laurence turned and stared blankly: a British officer was standing before him, scowling, and snapping his crop against his leg. Laurence would hardly have been more astonished to meet a Piccadilly fish-merchant in the same circumstances. "Good God, are we mobilizing also?" he asked. "I beg your pardon," he added, belatedly recollecting himself. "Captain William Laurence, of Temeraire, at your service, sir."
"Oh; Colonel Richard Thorndyke, liaison officer," the colonel said. "And what do you mean; you know damned well we have been waiting for you lot."
"Sir," Laurence said, ever more bewildered, "I think you have mistaken us for another company; you cannot have been expecting us. We are come from China by way of Istanbul; my latest orders are months old."
"What?" Now it was Thorndyke's turn to stare, and with growing dismay. "Do you mean to tell me you are alone?"
"As you see us," Laurence said. "We have only stopped to ask safe-passage; we are on our way to Scotland, on urgent business for the Corps."
"Well, what more urgent business than the bloody war the Corps has, I should damned well like to know!" Thorndyke said.
"For my part, sir," Laurence said angrily, "I should like to know what occasion justifies such a remark about my service."
"Occasion!" Thorndyke exclaimed. "Bonaparte's armies on the horizon, and you ask me what occasion there is! I have been waiting for twenty dragons who ought have been here two months ago; that is the bloody occasion."
