Blood of Tyrants (28 page)

“I am surprised to hear that you have so little confidence in General Fela’s ability to put down the White Lotus resurgence,” Mianning said.

“When a hidden hand props the foe from behind, and he is forbidden to strike at the true source of danger, even the greatest general cannot be expected to easily find success,” Bayan said. “Perhaps,” he added, with a false air of having been suddenly struck with a new idea, “the foreigners should be tasked to go to
his aid, under the command of the Emperor’s son and Lung Tien Xiang. If the British are responsible, they may correct their own wrongdoing. If they are not, they may do a singular service to the nation, and thereby properly merit some acknowledgment.”

Laurence heard this proposal with dismay: he could well imagine what Hammond should say to their entire party being sent away from the heart of Imperial power to the hinterlands of China, silenced and expected to clear away a provincial rebellion that might be as much whisper and legend as armed force, and nearly incapable of defeat. Let a man be robbed on the road, and the conservatives might claim rebels had done it. And if the rebellion were real, were some truly dangerous insurgency against the throne, Laurence could scarcely imagine that their own party would be of particular use, stumbling over themselves in a foreign land. They might well merely be in the way, and in so being might make Bayan’s accusations almost true.

He was all the more dismayed, then, to hear Mianning slowly say, “While rising from questionable suppositions, nevertheless Lord Bayan’s proposal has merit.”

Laurence could not help but stare at him, while Mianning serenely continued, “Though the remnants of the White Lotus may not yet have become truly dangerous, the creeping vine is best pruned back early, and with greater zeal than necessary. To send my brother—with a force appropriate to his rank—to see them put down and restore harmony, would be a wise course and a duty befitting his dignities.”

It was little comfort to Laurence to see Bayan as taken aback as himself by Mianning’s unexpected yielding. “What escort could the prince require other than his own company?” Bayan said at once, urgently. “General Fela and the army are there already—”

“And yet have so far been insufficient to halt this insurgency, by your own report,” Mianning said. “Surely you would not propose that such a risk be taken with my brother, nor the honorable Lung Tien Xiang, who have not had the blessings of proper military
training. When I myself first led men into battle, I was arrayed not only in armor, but with the wisdom of the senior officers who advised me.”

Laurence could not like the proposal any better for Bayan’s evident dismay; but neither he nor Bayan had any opportunity to object further: the Emperor had straightened in his seat, and it was plain the audience had reached its conclusion.

“My son Laurence,” the Emperor said, “taking General Lung Shao Chu, and consulting at all times his advice and wisdom, you will gather three
jalan
of dragon bannermen and go south with them, to deal with the rebellion and uncover the source of these strange and evil rumors about your country-men, proving them false if you can. Return swiftly and victorious home.”

He had scarcely finished speaking when one of the half-a-dozen scribes working busily by his side, the one nearest the throne, rose and kneeling before the throne presented him a clean copy of the orders upon a writing-desk. The Emperor took up a brush and signed, swiftly, and taking up the red seal pressed it down; the sheet was folded over thrice by the scribe’s skillful hands even as he turned to offer it to Laurence, who with a sense of numb disaster bowed his head before it.

“H
M
,”
SAID
G
ENERAL
C
HU
, deep in his throat, when he had been presented to the rest of the formation, and to Iskierka and Kulingile. Temeraire eyed him uneasily. His yellow crest had evidently with age sprouted a great golden-colored mane, which framed his broad flat jaws and the curving horns which bent away from his forehead, and the edges of his vermilion scales were tipped with translucence. He was not quite so large as Temeraire himself, smaller considerably than Maximus and Kulingile, and he was not a Celestial, of course; but somehow that did not seem to matter very much.

He had been very polite, of course—very gracious—on their introduction; he had bowed quite formally and correctly to Laurence and to Temeraire himself, with all the respect due to the Imperial connection. No-one could possibly have faulted his manners, only Temeraire could not quite help but feel that the general did not think very much of their company.

“Hm,” General Chu said again, after a moment’s silence in which they all stared at one another. “Well, we will not get to Xian any sooner. Let us be going.”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, a little taken aback. “Do you mean, now?”

Chu peered at him from under the bristling fringe of his mane, with an air of raised eyebrows. “Are you ill?” he said, with a hint of waspishness. “Is the chill of the day too great?” The day was in fact not in the least cold, an early-spring pleasantness in the air.

“No, only,” Temeraire said, “are we not to take a great many soldiers with us?”

“Three
jalan
,” General Chu said, and paused as if waiting for Temeraire to go on; but since Temeraire did not know in the least what to say, after a moment Chu added, “Of course you would not expect them to gather all here and fly along the entire way with us,” in heavy, pointed tones.

Temeraire had expected just that. He had been on fire, in fact, to see a proper Chinese aerial company assembled; and he knew Laurence and the other aviators were as deeply interested as he was himself. “Of course not,” he said, a little abashed, and turning his head down murmured to Laurence, “Can we be ready to leave very quickly, Laurence, do you think?”

“He means us to leave on the moment?” Laurence looked at Hammond, and at the other captains; no-one spoke a moment in their confusion. Laurence had only returned two hours before, and had scarcely even had enough time to explain to everyone the Emperor’s command.

Then Captain Harcourt said, “I suppose there’s no reason to wait, if we
are
going. Have we any better notion of what to do?”

She looked around, and no-one answered her: they had all been debating just that, vigorously, before General Chu’s abrupt arrival; but while disliking the orders, no-one could work out an alternative. Hammond had just been saying, “We
cannot
refuse this direct Imperial command—at least, Captain Laurence cannot, not and maintain any thin fiction of familial connection: and having lost that tenuous connection, they will assuredly not merely refuse our requests for alliance, but order us out of the capital forthwith, and revoke all those particular and unusual trading privileges which have so benefitted our nation, in the last five years—”

Temeraire, for his part, had no objection to taking Laurence away from here, where assassins lurked around every corner and he was not even to be permitted to deal with Lord Bayan as that treacherous coward deseved. Temeraire was sure that they should
certainly be able to quash this rebellion handily, and it seemed to him as good a means as any for ensuring they should gain the alliance they required.

“Well,” Harcourt said, when no-one had anything else to offer, “let us call it settled: I don’t say we shall
stay
, but I don’t suppose it will hurt us to
go
. Mr. Hammond, you would oblige me greatly if you would dash a few words to Captain Blaise in the
Potentate
, so he knows where we have got ourselves off to; and I dare say we can be off in a trice.”

She turned and called to her first lieutenant, “Richards, we must get aloft: and there is not a moment to lose, if you please.”

The aviators went into the tremendous scrambling rush of getting away: gear tumbled pell-mell into chests, the ground crewmen hauling up the belly-netting to the shouts of, “Heave! Heave!” and the officers leaping aboard. Temeraire watched with a little disgruntlement as his own crew went aboard Kulingile. Of course he understood that, according to the Chinese way of thinking, there was a loss of dignity in carrying so many men and going under harness, and for a Celestial to be so burdened was unthinkable; as a consequence, they had devised this arrangement for their journey to the capital from Tien-sing harbor. And while certainly Temeraire did not want to look undignified, he still could not like it in the least; he sighed.

“Will I come with you?” Junichiro was asking Laurence. Temeraire did not quite know what to think of him: he had been very ready to take Junichiro to his heart, when he had learnt everything that young man had done, to see Laurence safely back; but Junichiro had been so very standoffish; he had spurned Temeraire’s thanks, saying, “I did nothing for
his
sake,” and when Temeraire had asked him for lessons in Japanese, shipboard, he had refused with a flat, unfriendly, “Of what use could such instruction be to you? We will never return there again,” and he had walked clear away across the dragondeck. He did nothing all the day but sit and stare across the ocean, or, since they disembarked, at a wall, it
seemed to Temeraire; and though Laurence had asked Emily Roland to teach him English, Junichiro did not seem to be making any progress at all: he scarcely answered when she tried to make him repeat the most basic words.

Even now, he did not ask with any interest, only a cold question, as though he did not care either way, and did not very much
want
to come; but Laurence said only, “We are all going; stay with Midwingman Roland, if you please,” and sent him up to Kulingile’s back after her.

“Have a little patience: he has been a great deal bereft,” Laurence said, as he climbed into Temeraire’s cupped talons to be put up. “And I cannot give him any real work to do, until he has learnt English; we must let time work on him, and isolation. He is a young man: I dare say he will lose his taste for solitude, soon enough, and want some more society than he can get speaking only Chinese.”

Laurence latched his carabiners on: Temeraire did not even need to shake himself and settle his own harness, as he had none but his polished breastplate, which O’Dea had looked over for him. “It is sure to tarnish sooner or late, with all this sea-air and flying,” O’Dea had said, alarmingly, but when pressed had added, “though not yet: the rot lies far off in wait, for another day.”

Leaning over to speak to General Chu, Laurence asked, “Sir, may I inquire, are there arrangements we ought make for our supply?”

“No particular arrangements will be necessary until we are closer to Xian,” Chu answered, without even looking up. He had sighed heavily, watching their preparations, and had shut his eyes and lay his head down upon his forelegs to rest.

Those preparations were accomplished in under half-an-hour; he cracked one enormous green eye and peered out. “Are you ready at last?” he said, and heaved back up to his feet. “Very well, then,” and coiling himself up on his hindquarters launched himself into the air. His wings were short, the veins and ribbing in green, and his body long and sinuous, so he went undulating as he flew.

“I do not see in the least what he has to object to; we went very quickly indeed,” Temeraire said to Laurence, grumbling, and leapt after the general’s dwindling figure.

A quartet of Jade Dragons, the tiny light-weight couriers scarcely much larger than a man, rose from outside the Imperial grounds to join them: the four of them bore long fluttering banners, red emblazoned with golden characters, and preceded General Chu in the air in a straight line. They led the way southward out of the city, the broad avenues and teeming marketplaces falling away to narrower streets thronged with men broken with the occasional great pavilion crammed with dragons sleeping or amusing themselves. Temeraire saw from aloft, as they passed an immense complex upon the outskirts of Peking, a handful of the most common sort of blue dragons playing some sort of game with stones, which he made a note to inquire about when he had anyone more sympathetic to ask than Chu.

The city yielded to settled sparse towns and then all at once to farmland and fields. Temeraire noticed large square markers set at regular intervals beneath them, dark grey stone engraved with white-enameled characters: they all bore the name of Peking, the direction to that city, and the distance. He pointed them out to Laurence. “That is very convenient,” he said, “and I wonder we do not have them in England; it is much less trouble than having to follow a road, only to know where you are; I can see these from quite far away without the least difficulty.”

“It is a clever notion,” Laurence said, peering down over Temeraire’s shoulder with his glass, “although I suppose it is no use at night.”

But that proved not to be the case: as the evening fell, the letters still came onwards, taking on a pallid glow, faint but enough to make them legible for a little while as they swam out of the dark. “I cannot imagine how they are arranging it,” Laurence said, trying to look through his glass. “Perhaps when we land we may have an opportunity to examine them. Temeraire, we must ask him for a
halt in any case, not long from now; those fellows in the belly-netting must be allowed to stretch their legs. We are not flying to a battle.”