Blood of Tyrants (58 page)

But the ferals had no intention of staying either to listen or be recaptured, as surely they must have feared. Those who had already snatched some food were darting away in every direction, like fish escaping from a closing net; only an especially ragged few, who had not been able to seize a prize and had reached the limits of their strength, were borne down. Others yet unsuccessful began to abandon their attempts, and then, to Laurence’s horror, he saw them turning away from the well-defended supply, and falling upon the rows of the prone and bloody ranks of the wounded soldiers in their hospital.

Temeraire roared in protest, and led the
niru
in a scattering charge: but a dozen dragons fleeing carried off men screaming for aid and rescue in their talons. “God in Heaven,” Laurence said, sickened, as he saw one wild-eyed creature raise a thrashing man to its jaws even as it flew, and with a snap of teeth and a savage jerk tear him in half.

Temeraire with a surge caught two of the beasts, and seizing them by the necks with his talons dragged them down to the ground. Laurence saw Ferris raise his rifle to his shoulder and take aim at one of the dragons, who was still trying even pinned to the ground to eat its victim. They were perhaps twenty yards distant. The gun spoke, with a burst of grey smoke; the dragon’s head jerked back like a kicking horse, a spurt of blood and ichor coming from its eye, and fell limp. The man it had seized fell to the ground with it, and began to drag himself sobbing away, pulling his leg from between its teeth.

Nine dragons of the
niru
at Temeraire’s rear together managed to bring down another five, along with their hapless captives; but by the time they could save the men and go aloft again, there was no hope of catching any more. The ferals were all of them vanishing again, as swiftly as they had come, dispersing to all corners of the countryside.

The battle was dying behind them, in the confusion and horror brought on by the unexpected swarming attack. The day was drawing to a close; the Russians began to fall back to the south, taking up positions across the road to Kaluga, and left the French to possession of the streets, choked with bodies and running with blood.

Their dinner that night was a thin and scanty one. The ferals had not acted with malice: they had not deliberately spoilt the cooking-pits nor the supply they could not themselves carry off, save accidentally, but accident had been more than enough. Their attack had taken or ruined more than half the army’s food, for that night. Reports were yet coming in, from all around the countryside, of further depradations against the farmers and nearby villages: terrified peasants were even coming to the army, with their children and their cattle, begging for protection.

“And there are breeding grounds also on the Ugra River,” one Russian aviator said: a river which ran on past Kaluga itself. “Heavy-weight breeding grounds.”

The Cossacks were laboring valiantly all that evening, despite nightfall, to bring them further intelligence of the movement of both the French Army and the feral beasts. Late in the night, while Kutuzov yet sat looking heavily over his maps, one of their captains came in weary and in his dirt, his mustaches stained with tobacco, and reported to him in Russian. Kutuzov nodded a little.

“The French have put out cooking-pits for them,” Kutuzov said briefly to Laurence.

Despite all the barriers of language, evidently the French had managed to make a simple bargain understood: if the ferals brought them grain, which they could not ordinarily digest, the French added some meat to the stew, and shared it out between them and their own dragons.

“And like as not throwing our prisoners and our slain into the pits, the monsters,” another Russian said, a grotesque fantasy, but one which Laurence heard more than once repeated in the camp.

Kutuzov said heavily, “We fall back towards Kaluga, at once. Captain,” he said to Laurence, “will you go to the Ugra grounds, and secure them?”

Laurence was silent a moment: to make himself a gaoler, for starving and chained beasts, was work he could scarcely bear to contemplate, and yet the faces of the screaming wounded haunted him. “We will, sir,” he said.

Temeraire did not disagree; he and all the Chinese dragons, and their crews, had been very silent and shocked since the battle: what was yet a lurking fear in the heart of most Westerners, who had grown up on tales of maurauding dragons and heroic knights standing forth to slay them, and who thought of aviators as the handlers of savage beasts, was to them so unthinkable and vile as to be unacceptable even as a subject for fiction.

They left at once, despite the late hour; so, too, did the army. They saw a few torches moving upon the road below for guidance, the light reflected here and there off pikes and bayonets that bristled in every direction; in the hospital-waggons, those less grievously wounded rode sitting up, holding weapons aloft. There was no sight of French pursuit or forward motion: they remained ensconced around Maloyaroslavets, or what was left of that town after the ruinous combat.

Three roads now stood open to Napoleon: he might retreat himself towards Moscow and from there retire to Smolensk along the road which had brought him, or he might instead try and take a southern route; or if he had not yet lost the heart for a final adventure, even strike out for Kaluga after all, and throw a gauntlet once more in the teeth of the Russian Army.

“I could scarcely imagine it, even of Bonaparte,” Laurence said to Tharkay, as they flew through the night; he had sent most of the officers below to sleep, as much as they might, in the belly-netting, “after he was halted in his tracks yesterday, except—”

Tharkay nodded minutely. Dragons could not fly long distances day in and out without steady provender, and their assembled host was so large that if their supply were destroyed, even an instant
dispersal to all directions with the liberty of pillaging could not feed them all. And their own supply depots, intended as they were for the feeding of great numbers of dragons, would in any case now be appealing targets for the ferals. Shen Shi already looked grave, and after private consultation that night, Zhao Lien had sent away some twenty dragons to be a guard upon their nearest depots—and with instructions that should they be overwhelmed, they were immediately to begin to retreat eastward instead of trying to rejoin the main body of their
jalan
.

So at a stroke, Napoleon had already managed to whittle down their aerial advantage to a thin margin, now composed not very much of numbers but only of the greater experience and skill at maneuvering which the Chinese forces brought to battle, as compared to his young legions.

The night was very clear, and very cold: Temeraire’s breath streamed away behind them in long trailing gusts as he flew on. The first hard frosts had come at last; before they had gone aloft, the ground had been frozen beneath them to a depth of seven inches, and many of the Shao Lung, unused to the cold climate, had been grumbling. It was the twenty-fifth of October. Laurence had to check their course against the stars, several times, until at last they struck the line of the Ugra River and turned to follow it southeast; a gibbous moon hung pale white, shining off the water and more translucently the skin of ice forming over its surface.

“When we arrive,” Laurence had said to Temeraire and Zhao Lien, “we must first give them something to eat; we cannot expect beasts who are starving to hear any reason, but having been fed might listen, when Temeraire and Grig can speak with them in their own tongue.”

Shen Shi had looked even more grave, but had at last agreed to release an additional quarter-day’s ration from her already-strained depots; the grain and drugged cattle were now being carried by the dragons following them along with their own supply. The sixty remaining dragons of the first
jalan
, under Shao Ri, were coming
with them; the rest, and Zhao Lien, had remained with Kutuzov’s army to cover the withdrawal south. A withdrawal which could all too easily end in disaster, if Kaluga’s storehouses were struck.

“Temeraire,” Grig said, laboring to catch them up, “Temeraire, there is someone there on the river, I think.”

“Where away?” Temeraire asked, and stooping they landed to find a Cossack dragon, barely the size of a Winchester, lying smashed and dying upon the bank half in and half out of the water: his side riddled with bullets, and his two riders both broken beneath his body. The dragon was already nearly gone; one man, who had been half in the frigid water, was dead; but the other opened his eyes and turned his head to look Laurence in the face.

“We will have you out in a moment,” Laurence said to him, kneeling to put a hand on his shoulder, the best comfort he could give; ribs were protruding from the man’s flesh, and the dragon lay over his legs. The Cossack only seized him by the collar with a desperate final straining effort and tried to pull him close; Laurence leaned in, and the man whispered, “
Murat
,” and released him, falling back; a little gush of blood came from his lips, and he was still.

Laurence rising to catch at the harness and climb back aboard said, “Temeraire, we must go at once. Send half the
niru
along the river, quietly, until they see the other end of the breeding grounds, and then we must close in on all sides: and let us pray the quarry has not yet escaped us. And pass the word: douse all lights.”

Lanterns all extinguished, they flew low and quietly over the tree-tops, until coming over a hill they reached a wide shallow valley of the breeding grounds; a massive Russian heavy-weight nearly the size of a Regal Copper was crouched low, its head hanging to the ground, as four men labored frantically upon its back, working on a massive chain of iron stained with rust. They were not surgeons, but blacksmiths: Laurence realized abruptly that the French had forgone removing the barbs for the practical expedient of merely cutting the chains off them, and leaving the difficult hooks where they were.

A small portable forge glowed orange-red where they hammered on the second link, having already broken the first; the dragon was already moving its right wing, experimentally, and looking over with a craning head at its own back to watch the work: it was nearly quivering. The beast did not look quite so starved as had the grey light-weights: if maddened past fear of maiming by starvation, a heavy-weight might have been able to break even the strongest hobble, and then could have done enormous damage. But it certainly looked lean and hungry enough, and eager for its freedom.

The smiths were working with desperate urgency, and around them all the crew and company of twelve dragons in harness were looking anxiously in all directions, around Liberté himself; but on the ground before him, as nonchalant as if he was in the midst of Paris instead of engaged in a wildly reckless and dangerous enterprise behind his enemy’s lines, Murat walked back and forth whistling unconcerned. Laurence put a restraining hand silently on Temeraire’s neck, and kept his glass stretched out, watching the far side of the breeding ground, for any glint of the other half of their own company; he did not mean to lose this chance through excessive haste.

At last he caught a glitter of moonlight on a bared sword-blade waved at him. The smiths had nearly cut through the second link, below. “Ready arms, and on them,” Laurence said, and with a glad and terrible roar, Temeraire surged forward, while below them the French dragons sprang desperately for escape.

The Russian heavy-weight, jerking up its head, saw them approaching and tried its other wing: the smiths were thrown off their feet as the chain went flying from beneath their hands, and with their smoking, sparking forge went sliding down its back to the ground as the massive dragon reared up. It bent down and snatched them all up together in one claw, four men and forge tumbled together, and with the other caught the loose hanging end of the chain; and then it flung itself into the air.

Laurence signaled to let the beast go—he had not the heart to return the creature to its chains, and they had better prey before them. Liberté had snatched Murat off his feet and flung himself into the air, and all the other dragons of the division were doing their best to make of themselves a screen between him and their attackers.

But the net had been drawn too tight: one
niru
after another skillfully surrounded and carved away each French dragon, nearly in minutes, with the skill of a surgeon cutting away limbs: until Liberté was all exposed, flying desperately, but not quickly enough. Ten more dragons surrounded him and began to cut off his flight, no matter which way he turned, tiring him and slowing his movement: a great stag, surrounded by wolves. Then one of the Shao Lung, especially large and with a jagged pale white scar running enormous the length of his left flank, made a full-body leap onto Liberté’s back and with a roar knocked his crew off their feet; he sank both foretalons deep into Liberté’s back, behind his wings.

Liberté shrilled with agony, and his wings faltered. Another Chinese dragon made a raking pass at his side, knocking air from his body; a third caught his tail and then they all closed in upon him and above him: he sank down at last helpless from the air, and having fallen to the ground resorted to curling his entire massive body tight around Murat, still held within his talons, with a pitiful hunted desperation.

Temeraire landed before him, nearly quivering with excitement, and murmured, “Laurence, I have never taken anyone so important prisoner: what ought we do?”

“Nothing more nor less than with any other man or beast: we must require Liberté’s surrender,” Laurence said, “and his giving Murat into our hands; and we must have both of their paroles.”

Temeraire straightened, sweeping back his wings, and rather grandly said to Liberté, “We will accept your surrender, if you please; and your parole.”

“Do you swear you will not hurt Murat?” Liberté demanded
anxiously, looking at them both, though he could scarcely have prevented it. Murat’s own opinion on the circumstances as yet could not have been obtained, because only a faintly muffled noise was emerging, from the tight coils of Liberté’s body, to confirm that he was still even there.