Blood of Tyrants (47 page)

“She wanted some water,” Grig said, “and then she wanted me to fly back to camp and be sure that her treasure was under proper guard; but Captain Rozhkov would not give me leave to do that, so I had to go back and tell her so,” he hunched his shoulders as if in the memory of a blow, as he repeated this, “and then she had me carry him a message, and say that if he did not let me go, she would go herself; so then I had to come back and tell her that if she left, he would call off the guard and let
all
her treasure be stolen—”

“Well, it seems to me a perfectly wretched arrangement,” Temeraire said, “and I do not see how any of you are going to fight properly, when we have any fighting: you will be too tired.”

“Oh,” Grig said, “but I will not be
fighting
; I am too small to fight.”

“You aren’t smaller than those Cossack dragons, over there,” Temeraire said.

“No; but they are irregulars, and I am too big to join them; they cannot feed a dragon my size,” Grig said. Temeraire looked over at the Cossack camp: it seemed a far more hospitable place, their dragons tucked around the campfire in amongst the people, and if they did not have enormous heaps of treasure at least had neat harness, and most of them wore handsome woven blankets. But it was certainly true they were considerably smaller: the size of Winchesters, courier-weight beasts by British standards.

Certainly the Russian heavy-weights all looked very imposing—no-one could deny it, and Temeraire had observed that, despite their size, they demonstrated a remarkable speed. Their steel-taloned claws and long necks lashed out very much as though, as Forthing put it, there was gunpowder lit behind them. But as they demonstrated their fighting qualities, for the most part, by quarreling
with one another and knocking about the smaller beasts, Temeraire nevertheless felt entirely justified in making his criticisms now, although the Russian officers evidently did not enjoy hearing it, and several of them scowled and spoke again to Kutuzov in their own tongue instead of French, with passion; but the general waved his hand and silenced them.

It seemed that the Russian Army had been retreating all this time, ever since Napoleon had crossed the Niemen—all summer long. Their first plan of battle, which to Temeraire sounded quite sensible, had evidently been to give battle at Vilna and then withdraw a little way into their countryside, luring the French to a final battle at a fortified encampment, where the Russians should have had the advantage. Why they had decided instead to only run away, Temeraire could not in the least understand, when they did have a very substantial army; surely it would have been better to at least try and fight, even if it did seem that Napoleon had a much larger army than anyone had expected.

Evidently many of the Russian officers shared his sentiments, and General Barclay had been superseded as the senior commander for having failed to give battle; but it did not seem to Temeraire that Kutuzov was in a great hurry to fight, either: they were still arguing whether the battle should be given here, or at the nearby town of Tsarevo Zaimische, which evidently offered good ground, or somewhere else entirely.

In any case, though they had been running away as hard as they could, Napoleon’s army had nearly caught them a dozen times. He had refined still further the use of dragons in his operations. From what the Russians described, each regiment now traveled with its own beasts, infantry and artillery alike. Men and light-weights foraged, while the heavier dragons leap-frogged companies down the road, and occasionally bore up the guns and heavy loads. Napoleon had eschewed larger magazines; his supply depots were instead numerous and lightly defended, each of them vulnerable perhaps, but as a whole able to withstand even many losses.

“He builds them in the woods, where there are no roads at all,” General Barclay said. “A heavy-weight knocks down a few trees for them and goes on; the middle-weights come, deposit some goods and cattle, assist in building a little fortification, and go on; a few light-weights strike out across the countryside for whatever of substance they can steal, leave it, and go on; then a company remains with a couple of light guns and a few couriers, enough to carry supply forward. If our Cossacks strike, they defend themselves. If we come in force, they snatch whatever they can carry and flee, dispersing to the nearest other depots and reinforcing these, and call for a heavier beast to strike in return.”

The Russians had only evaded Napoleon through good luck and desperate contortions, and because he and his generals had thrown away several chances by arguing with one another. Napoleon’s own brother Jerome had simply run away from his corps on the eve of battle in a temper and gone back to France; or so the Russians said—they had evidently learned of the incident from their spies, and it was repeated with great enjoyment. Then, too, thanks to heavy rains, the Russian roads had become quite impassable with mud at several points, slowing the French advance and forcing Napoleon’s dragons to carry the guns nearly all the way by air. Temeraire had carried a twelve-pounder himself once, in the retreat from London, and it had been quite exhausting; one could not lug something so heavy and then fight again straightaway, particularly not without a healthy dinner.

It seemed that Napoleon had tried to repair the sluggishness of his advance, as much as he could, by personally flying about to the different parts of his army, when he could, to take command directly; he had been at the battle of Kliastitzy, and smashed the Russian corps there, opening his Marshals’ road to St. Petersburg; and a week later at Smolensk, where by the narrowest of margins the Russian Army had escaped him. And now he was closing in ever more swiftly; he would be on them within a day, perhaps two, and it seemed the Russians had decided at last to fight.

Chu, when Temeraire and Laurence had finished translating the Russian accounts of the campaign so far, hummed deep in his throat, skeptically. “Are they sensible men?” he demanded.

“I know it seems peculiar that they have been running away all this time,” Temeraire began, but Chu snorted.

“Nonsense,” he said. “What is peculiar is that they have been planning to fight an army larger than theirs in every way, with inferior air support. If they did not know we were coming, they had much better have kept running!”

Temeraire was taken aback; Laurence said, “General Chu, Moscow is in some sense the central city of their nation—it is not formally the capital, but the Tsar is crowned here; they cannot let it fall without some resistance.”

“Oh, I see; politics,” Chu said. “Well, at least find out for me why they have organized their aerial forces in such an absurd way, for there must be
some
reason. I see they do not have any proper system of supply, but they could at least field forty middle-weights, instead of those fifteen hulks and so many of those little fellows.”

The Russians looked irritated to be questioned on this point. “Does this beast of yours not know how long an egg takes to hatch?” General Tutchkov said to Laurence, impatiently. “How does it suppose we should have got fifty middle-weight beasts under harness since they crossed the Niemen?”

“You might have gone to your breeding grounds,” Temeraire said. “I dare say if you had offered even a little of all that immense treasure to your retired beasts, or your ferals, they would have been delighted to fight for you.” This suggestion met only with stares, and a great comprehensive snort from Kutuzov out of his bulbous nose, which was quite rude; but at any rate, it answered Chu’s remaining concern: the Russians had not thought to do so.

“So, they are
not
sensible men,” Chu said with finality. “How do they expect to properly oppose a nation whose aerial forces so outweigh their own? They may be victorious in this war, thanks to our assistance, and yet find themselves in the gravest difficulty in the next season once again.

“But,” he added, “that is not my business, but theirs! My business is to win now, and if that is the only reason, and these numbers are correct, I am satisfied with our prospects for battle. But I must yet have four days to concentrate upon the battlefield.”

Kutuzov was silent a moment, when this information was conveyed: the great massed corps of Napoleon’s army were hard upon their rear, and even falling back might not gain them sufficient time along the road to Moscow. “Well,” he said finally, “if we cannot win the time from our enemy, we must ask him if he will be so kind as to give it to us.” And he called over one of his pages, and took up a pen and paper, to write swiftly a letter to the Tsar.

A large tent had been erected upon neutral ground outside Vyazma, a field cleared half-a-mile in either direction and policed watchfully by dragons of both parties: for the French part, Laurence saw, nearly all middle-weights of no breed which he recognized, most of them with large broad foreheads. Deep chests and heavy shoulders were common as well, but their hides were of peculiarly motley appearance, muddied greens and yellows and browns.

He thought grimly that he detected Lien’s hand at work there, though there was no sign of her either at present or reported by the Russian scouts; at least one spy report not three weeks old had positively placed her at the Château de Saint-Cloud, outside Paris, in the company of the new Empress and the infant heir. “I can believe nearly anything of her,” Temeraire said, “but she cannot have let Napoleon go to war without her: I am sure she cannot. I dare say she is hiding somewhere, and will find some way to do something dreadful to us before the end. Not,” he added, “that I will not be entirely ready to meet her, Laurence, of course.”

Gong Su had not disagreed with him openly, but quietly told Laurence afterwards, “It is considered the foremost duty of every Celestial to guard the Emperor’s line, a duty which precedes even the ties of companionship: and Napoleon has now but this one child. I think it likely that Lung Tien Lien has indeed remained in
Paris, to protect him and to forward his education,” a stroke of great good fortune for which Laurence could not but be grateful.

But Lien had now had charge of Napoleon’s aerial forces and his breeding programme for a full five years, and the fruits of her labor were everywhere to be observed not only in the looks but in the wide intelligence and education of the French dragons. These were frequently to be seen sitting up high on their haunches and peering into the distance, getting the best look they could at the disposition of the Russian troops, and then putting their heads together to murmur and exchange thoughts. They were all of them under harness, but many of them bore no evident captain, and several of them emblems which might have been symbols of rank.

Indeed one of the dragons, a grey-and-green beast not quite a middle-weight, sat quietly and unobtrusively in the corner of the field, unremarked; but Laurence saw with disquiet that besides a very cursory harness, only enough to take up perhaps a few riders, it bore a wide red sash pinned with a large silver star: a Marshal? Napoleon had granted Lien the baton years before, establishing the precedent; a dragon of sufficient military gifts to have merited another such grant would surely make a deadly opponent.

There were also three heavy-weights beside: a Petit Chevalier and a Chanson-de-Guerre, each holding one corner of the French line, and anchoring the center was a dragon as different from every other beast upon the field as could be imagined: an Incan dragon, with its long lapping scales like feathers gleaming a brilliant sky-blue and tipped with scarlet, looking more like some immense sort of brooding phoenix, wearing a kind of golden headdress and its belly armored in a mesh washed with gold and bearing many decorations: surely an officer in the Incan armies, and if not yet wholly familiar with Western warfare, likely to be an able commander in the air.

But there were enough signs of weakness visible to hearten a Russian ally, too: hard use had worn many a harness-strap and tarnished many a buckle; the men aboard the dragons looked thin,
and they were fewer in number than they ought have been, for so many beasts. However skillfully they had stretched their supply, however swiftly they had moved, still their ranks had dwindled during their long march, and Napoleon could not easily get more men to swell them out again. Laurence had taken a short flight aloft with Temeraire, earlier, and spied out a little of the enemy’s artillery: nearly all nine-pounders or lighter, although there were many of them, and the number of cavalry astonishingly small; Bonaparte was relying heavily upon his aerial advantage.

And to this encouragement, Hammond had sent a welcome dash of joyful news: Placet had arrived breathless from Moscow the night before, with Captain Terrance, wide-awake sober for once, spilling off his back; he had seized Laurence by both arms. “Wellington has smashed Marmont, at Salamanca,” he said. “On July the twenty-second. Routed him foot and horse and wing: the French lost thirteen thousand men, and they say Marmont is dead, or at least so gravely wounded we will not see him again in the field this year.”

If that news had yet reached Napoleon, or his men, to discourage them, there was no evidence of it to be found in their soldierly demeanor across the field; but it had been inexpressibly heartening to men facing the might of France. Laurence would have been drunk still this morning if he had swallowed every toast offered him the night before, in Wellington’s health and the King’s.

Chu had under cover of darkness taken himself and the rest of his forces to the back of their lines, out of sight of French spies; he now napped comfortably, too old a campaigner to fear the event and satisfied with his arrangements, while Shen Shi and her staff, even further back, had begun the work of organizing cooking-pits and water, and medical stations; the blue dragons were ferrying supplies from the depot near Moscow. The Jade Dragons had gone already to pass the word amongst the
jalan
to gather.

Temeraire stood anxiously amongst the dragons on the Russian side of the field: incongruous in his smooth black and clean-lined
conformation when lined up with the bristling, armored Russian heavy-weights, whose own suspicious attentions were nearly all devoted to him and to one another, rather than the enemy. The Russian beasts were laden with men, grim officers in thick leather coats, who held thick riveted straps of leather which had been chained on to the rings driven into the heavy plates of horn that grew upon the dragons’ shoulders. Others dangled from grotesque bridles, made of chainmail with spiked steel bits, which Laurence no less than Temeraire could only regard with disgust.