Blood of Tyrants (54 page)

L
AURENCE PAUSED A LONG
moment in the empty street, caught by the sight of a swinging, blackened lantern and the shape of steps leading up to a gutted doorway, opening onto the rubble of a house. For a moment he thought it another old memory returning, some flash of the destruction of Portsmouth; then he recognized abruptly the home of Countess Andreyevna, where he had dined his first night in Moscow. Of the palatial house there was nothing left but jagged timbers thrust up into the sky, heaps of tumbled brick and cinders, one corner in the back where a narrow servants’ staircase and a corner of the second floor stood alone, a few feet of space.

“Do you see something?” Tharkay asked quietly. His own face was half-covered; only his eyes looked out above the scarf he had wrapped over his nose and mouth: not too incongruous a costume in the city, for there were yet quantities of dust and ash lingering in the air.

“No,” Laurence said. “No, it is nothing; let us go on.” He put his shoulder back to the yoke of the small cart they were dragging behind them, with its few bags of grain: their safe-passage and the only one required; the French had mastered their own maurauding troops and now were offering urgent and enthusiastic welcome to any of the local peasantry who offered to sell them any food—there being very few such offers; those who made them were meeting with savage reprisals from Russian partisans.

The streets of Moscow bore little resemblance to the thronged narrow lanes which Laurence had seen from aloft, only a month before: now half-deserted, frequented more by rats than men and full of rubble, lined with ruined houses and gardens still choked with ash. Some three-quarters of the city had burned, and if that disaster had denied the French its comforts and supply, Laurence found it hard to accept the price. Little better illustration could be wanted of the cost of Napoleon’s pride.

A troop of grenadiers marched past in good order, though their uniforms were an unholy mess: coats in a dozen different colors, most of them threadbare and patched, boots cracked and wrapped about with string; only their muskets still shone brightly. Their eyes drifted to the cart as they passed, with an interest more than academic; when they turned the corner, one man even detached himself from the end of the column and came back, and pointing at the bags said,
“Qu’est-ce que c’est là?”

Without answering him, Tharkay silently presented him with a paper which had been prepared for them by one young Russian aide-de-camp, in that alphabet, and embellished with all the official art which his creativity had permitted; the name
Louis-Nicholas Davout
was the only legible Latin on the sheet. It was a name to conjure with, for Davout’s harshness with indiscipline was legendary, and reports had reached even the Russian camp of the executions he had ordered for pillaging. The soldier thrust the paper back and assumed an officious mien, saying coolly, “
Le Maréchal est avec l’Empereur, en la place Rouge
,” and pointed them along another street before hurrying to rejoin his vanished troop.

Tharkay raised an eyebrow to Laurence as he put away the paper: should they take the chance? Laurence hesitated a moment, but nodded. They had intended only a general reconnoiter, to gain a sense of the French strength and the imminence of action—a sense which could not presently be gained, not reliably, from their Russian allies.

Morale in the Russian Army had rebounded and even swelled
as the French showed no inclination to foray past Moscow, and steady reports of the disintegration of their supply reached the Russian camp every day—often at the same time as their own supply-waggons arrived from the south, loaded with shipments of bread and boots and uniforms. Even the rank and file now had gradually come to share Barclay’s view: that Napoleon had indeed overreached, and delivered himself and his Grande Armée into as neat a trap as was ever devised for an enemy. Each day meant the death of another hundred of his cavalry-horses, and three days before he had sent away fifteen of his dragons, traveling together to defend themselves against Cossack harrying: their departure had been observed, and had occasioned great cheer amongst the Russians.

But even as the soldiers grew more satisfied, their commanders grew less so. The intrigue at the Russian headquarters had risen to a fiery pitch; despite having managed the singularly effective retreat through the city, General Barclay had at last resigned his command entirely, in indignation at the disrespect he had met from both Kutuzov and Bennigsen, and those two men were at logger-heads themselves.

Kutuzov’s position was an unsettled one: he had been nearly forced on Alexander to begin with, and he had sacrificed Moscow to the enemy. With both Moscow and Petersburg lost, the enemy everywhere west of the Volga and north of Moscow, the Russian nobility had been scattered upon the countryside, many of them cut off from their estates and fearing personal ruin. It was his task not merely to plan the Russian counterattack, when time had done its work, but to keep those nobles and even the Tsar himself placated, and fight off all the loud and urgent cries for an immediate battle.

He was resorting to a kind of outrageous propaganda: mere skirmishes between his men and Murat’s advance guard were magnified into great victories—even if his forces came back with but a single prisoner and having lost several men themselves—and he exaggerated even the already-heartening reports of the French decline, filling his dispatches with such numbers as would have shortly
ended with Napoleon sitting in Moscow alone but for a single mule and a barrel of beer.

And he was concerned, above all, with ensuring that the Chinese legions remained with the army. If Napoleon were to once again have the advantage in the air, the French position would by no means be so desperate as it was. They had great magazines of their own at Smolensk, and elsewhere through the south. If they did not need to fear being pounced upon by half-a-dozen
niru
, Napoleon’s dragons might have been put to supply work, or even to swiftly relocate his army to Smolensk, there to winter and regroup for a fresh campaign in the spring.

Laurence did not wish to abandon Kutuzov in the least, but neither could he feel it at all consistent with the duty he owed the Emperor of China, to strand his borrowed legions in the midst of Russia with inadequate supply during the oncoming winter. October had so far been beautiful, warm and mild; but in the last two days the trees had with startling speed begun to shed their leaves. The Russian countryside was taking on a grey and gloomy character, unrelieved by the enormously tall pine trees looming with their cold dark needles, the increasingly barren birches rattling in the wind.

With the full cooperation of the Russians, Shen Shi had now established depots to the east and west both, which she estimated could carry the legions at their full strength for a month. But there was no reason to expect that Kutuzov would have struck even then: the old general was perfectly willing to permit Napoleon to sit in Moscow as long as he wished. And once they had begun the counterattack, the road back to the Niemen was a long one.

“How much longer will we be required?” Zhao Lien had asked Laurence bluntly, two days before. He could not tell her, and he felt too strongly that he could not trust whatever answer Kutuzov might make him.

“Bonaparte is our best hope, for the campaign to begin,” he had said ruefully to Temeraire that evening. “If he has any sense, he
must try and fight his way back to Smolensk sooner than late, and westward on from there swiftly. He cannot long suppose that the Russians will make peace with him now.”

Such a peace would have allowed Napoleon to withdraw without humiliation, surely all that he could now hope for; but that peace was as surely to be denied him. Alexander, with his government-in-exile in Tula, was intensely, savagely delighted by the growing evidence of French discomfiture: he had already written out many long ambitious schemes to Kutuzov and his other generals for retaking Moscow, for the pursuit and destruction of the remnant of the French Army, and indeed even the capture of Napoleon himself.

Kutuzov received these directives placidly, and stayed just where he was. He had done his best to assist Napoleon in deceiving himself about the prospects of peace: he had received a French envoy affably, and agreed to a temporary armistice, but the false negotiations of Vyazma had done much to close that door. Alexander refused to receive such an envoy himself, or to write so much as a note, feeling that he had already stretched his own honor to bear as much as he could. Napoleon’s pride alone could keep him in Moscow—but of that, he had an ample supply. When desperation and the growing certainty of disaster would overcome it, was nearly impossible to tell.

“We could hope for no better opportunity to learn his mind,” Laurence said softly to Tharkay now, in the ruined street; together they dragged the cart onto the main street leading towards the Kremlin.

Here the devastation altered in character: the buildings had been more preserved than not, evidently by the labors of the French dragons; great puddles of dirty water yet stood in the gutters. Yet they had still been looted: scraps of silk and shattered porcelain might be seen on the steps, broken furnishings. How the French supposed they should carry away such an immense store of plunder, Laurence could hardly imagine.

The street itself was better tended; looking west towards the bounds of the city, Laurence could see a troop of dragons laboring to clear away the rubble and men behind them repairing the worst of the damage to the cobblestones: perhaps making ready the road for retreat? He and Tharkay went plodding on with their heads down into the vast square around the onion-domed cathedral which, though blackened with smoke, had also been saved: Laurence saw in some disgust that the building was evidently being used for a stable.

The remains of many smaller wooden buildings still lingered at its base, and resting against the high walls of the Kremlin some forty dragons were drowsing together in heaps, while their crews silently prodded at large cauldrons simmering with their poor thin dinner: they were eating dead horses mostly half-starved or sick, stewed with flour. The dragons looked too weary to be called indolent, slumped in the heavy attitudes of exhaustion.

One more-alert beast stood before the cathedral, beside the great city fountain, while some few peasant women, cringing, took their buckets of water before hurrying away: a heavy-weight Papillon Noir in black with iridescent stripes. “That is Liberté,” he murmured to Tharkay. He had seen the beast once before, during the invasion of England: he was the personal beast of Marshal Murat, and beside it stood the man himself.

The pair were standing beside one of the Russian light-weights, white-grey. Laurence thought for a moment it might be a prisoner, but as he and Tharkay drew their cart a little closer, he saw the poor beast had no harness and was nearly skeletal in appearance, deep concavities between its ribs. It had a bowl of thin soup, which it was licking up with slow, painstaking care, one foreleg curled around the bowl and a wary watchful hostile eye turned up towards Liberté. Its wings were drawn up tight to its body, as though it might at any moment flee.

Murat was evidently waiting to see the Emperor, and following the line of his gaze Laurence saw him: Napoleon was near the
Kremlin gates, in his dust-grey coat and flanked by the still-glittering ranks of his escort, the Imperial Guard. Davout was a tall thin figure beside him, and his chief of staff Berthier as well.

A French officer then approached the cart, and they were forced to stop: Laurence engaged the man before he could notice Tharkay’s foreign looks, pulling back the cover to show him the ten sacks of grain, pantomiming numbers with his hands to indicate many more than these were on offer. “
Cinq cent?
” the Frenchman asked. Laurence nodded, and then held out a hand flat and tapped his palm, asking for an offer; the officer said, “
Attends
,” and went away to confer with another.

Napoleon looked himself as heavy and morose as the dragons of his army; he seemed to only be giving half his attention to an anxious speech which Berthier was making him, full of gestures and intensity; the Emperor glanced away often at the somnolent dragons, at the few companies of soldiers equally dispirited and yawning against the walls. He knew, of course; surely he knew the hopelessness of his position. He was not a fool. He had his hands clasped behind his back, his chin lowered upon his breast; Berthier gestured, down the square, and following his arm, Laurence saw a nearly medieval train of waggon-carts, already loaded and with their covers lashed down.

Bonaparte stood a moment more, and then gave a short nod; Berthier, after a speaking look of relief exchanged with Davout, hurried away back into the Kremlin. Davout seemed as though he wished to say something; Napoleon jerking a hand forestalled him and turned abruptly away, his face hard, and strode out across the square towards Murat, who rose to meet him.

The French quartermasters were still discussing amongst themselves. Laurence looked at Tharkay and, receiving a nod, hazarded the risk. He strode across the square towards the city fountain, as though to have a drink of water, where he could overhear a little.

Napoleon had put his hand on Liberté’s side, patting the dragon with easy familiarity as he spoke with Murat; the beast nosed at
him with pleasure. “Well, brother,” he was saying, with a ghost of a smile, “the last die is thrown, we must stand up from the table! We will have to fight our way back to France, and no rest after that.”

“What else is a soldier for?” Murat said, with a wave of his arm: more generosity than Bonaparte deserved, having pressed them all on towards destruction. “We’ll sleep a long time in the end. Will you want us to give them a bite on the flank before we draw back?”

Fortune did not smile on Laurence’s adventure to so great an extent as to permit him to overhear such invaluable intelligence; Bonaparte only raised his hand a little and wagged it to either side, noncommittal, and jerked his head towards the small Russian dragon, asking Liberté in a deliberate tone of levity, “What is this, your prisoner? A fine battle you must have had!”