Blood of Tyrants (59 page)

“I am confident the Russians will treat him with all the consideration due to a prisoner of his rank,” Laurence said, “and I will give you my own word, he will be neither abused nor pillaged.”

A faint voice was heard saying, in French, “Damn you, you silly python, let me out!” and Liberté unwillingly uncoiled himself; Murat pulled himself up and over one great foreleg, and sprang down to the ground in the open. Laurence slid from Temeraire’s back to meet him.

Laurence bowed and said, “Your Majesty—” Napoleon had put him on the throne of Naples, “—I am obliged to require your parole.”

Murat reached out and seized him by the shoulders. “What are you saying,” he said. “Can
you
truly mean to prevent us?” He turned Laurence almost bodily, and flung out an arm to where Laurence saw a heap of five broken chains scattered on the ground, massive and monstrous links of brutal iron. “Have
you
a heart to see these magnificent beasts chained and starved like rats, for even another minute? I know you, Captain Laurence—I remember when you brought the cure to France, and saved my own Liberté thereby, and so many others. Once you had the courage to seek justice, more than only obey; will you not find that courage again?

“You and these,” he gestured to the hovering and watchful dragons, “ought to aid us, not stand in our way. Will you truly make common cause with men as would do such things?”

Laurence said, quietly, controlled, “You are right, sir, that this treatment cannot but appall any sense of justice and decency. But what
you
have done, in merely striking their chains and throwing them upon the army and the innocent peasantry of their own country, is to set them upon a course whose certain event is their destruction at the hands of a furious and determined nation. And you
have done this, not for their benefit, but to make them weapons to serve your own unjust ends and thirst for conquest.”

“Oh, villain!” Murat cried. “Where else should they turn, but on the holders of their whips? I told the Emperor I would not walk out of this country, without striking the chains off every beast I could find, if it cost me my life and him my service. March me away, then, and have me shot if you like;
I
have no regret.
Vive la France!
”

He flung his saber at Laurence’s feet, delivering this speech in parade-ground tones; it roused an answering cheer from his men and their beasts, despite their captivity. Laurence could not but shake his head: he found he did not question Murat’s sincerity; so wild an impulse seemed all of a piece with the very recklessness which had led him to expose himself and his men so deeply in enemy territory.

Roland with a quick jump leapt forward, and picked up the sword to give to Laurence, so he would not need to bend down and pick it up. “Sir, if you will give me your parole, I should be glad to return it,” Laurence said, mastering his own anger, and when Murat haughtily acquiesced, did so: he could not take insult from a man made prisoner, and Murat’s courage could hardly be denied; he had been at the fore of the French dragons, at Tsarevo Zaimische, time and again.

The
niru
had been swiftly going over the breeding grounds, in the meantime; and now one of Shen Shi’s lieutenants, a man named Guan Fei, quietly approached Laurence. “I must advise against preparing our cooking-pits here,” he said. “This place is unhealthy: there are many dead, who have not been properly buried. We should go along the river to the south, and find some clean ground.”

“The remaining dragons here will be unable to fly,” Laurence said, “and we ought still to feed them; and then free them ourselves and take them along with us, if they will come. If we can catch any of the rest, perhaps their fellows will be able to induce them to pause and listen, rather than fight.”

But Guan Fei said, “There are only four dragons we have found
yet remaining within the grounds: we can arrange to transport them a short distance, but they are in any case ill and close to death. I have arranged for them to be tended.”

“There ought to be fifty dragons here,” Temeraire said in alarm. “Where are all the others?”

Laurence looking at Murat’s face, which showed no small degree of satisfaction, said grimly, “Kaluga. He has set them on Kaluga.”

It was not until the next day that Laurence had the pleasure of delivering his prisoner to Kutuzov in Kaluga: a thin and insubstantial pleasure, in the face of the disaster which had unfolded about them.

The town had been utterly unprepared for the sudden and thunderclap descent of forty heavy-weight beasts: the great magazines had been smashed open and ruined, immense quantities of munitions and grain taken, cattle and horses slaughtered and devoured; and much of the town itself smashed in the frenzy of destruction.

Temeraire and his fellows had driven on the last few miles from the breeding grounds to Kaluga, despite their fatigue and hunger. But even so they had come too late, and found a scene of wreckage only: the heavy-weights had come, the townspeople told Laurence, and plundered swiftly, and as swiftly fled back towards the north—perhaps carrying their stolen goods towards Napoleon’s army.

Temeraire had tried to go aloft again, in pursuit; he and his fellows had gone half-a-mile, heads drooping progressively lower, and then Shao Ri had roused up and shaken his head and turning towards Laurence and Temeraire had said, “We must halt.”

Laurence himself started from a half-doze and realized the folly of their attempt: after a day of hard fighting, little food and less rest, followed by a cold flight in the dark and a battle to end it, the dragons were at the limits of their strength. “Put out the signals, Gerry, if you please,” he said, and to Temeraire’s half-drowsing
protest said quietly, “We cannot throw ourselves at nearly our own number of fresh heavy-weights, in this state; we would be destroyed. You must all have some rest, and something to eat, before we can continue on.”

The exhausted dragons slept eight hours, in four watches, with the French dragons always under a wary eye; Laurence had put their captains and crews aboard the swiftest of the dragons of the
niru
, and kept Murat himself aboard Temeraire, but he was mindful that not all the French dragons might have been harnessed from the shell, and might not feel the intensity of attachment to their captains which ordinarily served to render a captured beast meek. He was well served by his caution: a little while after dawn, he roused to find two of the French dragons being wrestled to the ground again, having made an attempt to creep away.

In the morning, they returned to Kaluga, where the army was slowly marching in, and Laurence delivered their noble prisoner to the headquarters. Murat had been considered by the Russians an honored foe; they saluted him in the air and on the field, when they saw him: a great horseman, a great swordsman, a great soldier, fearless in battle and gallant in his personal manner, he was in most respects the romantic ideal to which young Russian officers aspired.

But now as Laurence escorted him past many of those who had cheered him, not long before, and into the building of the headquarters, silence followed them: a hard, angry silence. In his office, Kutuzov said, very briefly, coldly, “Your Majesty,” and then paused; he then said, “The Tsar has commanded that you be sent to Tobolsk,” a city which Laurence recalled: they had passed it, in the earlier stages of their journey from China, deep in Siberia’s wastes, “there to await the conclusion of the war; you depart in the morning.”

Murat’s courage, to do him credit, flagged not a moment; he only said, cheerfully, “I am sorry to miss the rest of it! May I write a letter to my wife?”

He did not wait for permission, but brazenly reached for pen and paper on Kutuzov’s desk, and scribbled out a careless note:

“Tobolsk, was it?” he asked, and scribbled it in.

He folded it once and handed it over. “You are welcome to read it over, but I promise there are no secrets,” he said. “I’ve no head for ciphers. I don’t suppose there are any pretty women in this country?”

Laurence could not but feel some sympathy, seeing him sent away: he knew the bitter pang of being sent away from the field to linger in remote exile in an alien land, and felt an echo of the misery of his own transportation, the heavy bowing weight upon his shoulders, the knowledge that he and Temeraire would be denied the chance to be of any use. And Murat had not even the comfort of his own dragon’s company; Liberté would be kept imprisoned far from him, and very likely in one of the same dreadful breeding grounds they had emptied.

But Laurence felt nothing but coldness for Murat’s acts: the impulse to free the dragons might have been a noble one, but it would not have been carried out, if it had not so neatly aligned with his interests and those of Bonaparte, and if truly motivated by disinterested affection would never have been done in so crude a way, which showed so much disdain for the evil consequences that would fall on those dragons themselves.

“Sir,” Laurence said to Kutuzov, when Murat had been escorted away to await his transport, “will you tell me where we stand?”

Kutuzov shook his head. “Thirty ferals were seen at Maloyaroslavets this afternoon, with cartloads of grain from Kaluga.” Answer enough: that meant the Russian dragons were accepting the lures which the French had thrown out to them. Laurence was silent. He could no more reproach the beasts for pursuing a course of liberation, than the Russians for wishing to defend themselves against Napoleon’s invasion.

He returned to his own encampment and found an unhappy Grig lingering there, having managed to beg Temeraire’s pardon, and wanting company: twenty Russian light-weights had vanished from the muster. “They are leaving,” he said, low. “I think—I think they are going over to Napoleon.”

“How many of them speak French?” Laurence asked, grimly.

“So many of our officers speak it,” Grig said, “I dare say nearly all of us know a little, at least.”

Meaning that by serving as go-betweens, they might permit Napoleon to turn the ferals into more than simply a wild foraging party, scarcely under his control; they might allow him to weld them into a true fighting force, and use them effectively in battle.

The day was drawing on; Laurence spoke long with Shen Shi, and several officers of the Russian general staff, upon the one essential note: supply, supply, supply. The roads from the south were slow and choked with mud, and more attacks had already been reported, against their supply depots. At last he fell asleep for a few hours of rest, on Temeraire’s arm; at eleven in the night, Roland woke him.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, quietly, “but there’s a dispatch,” and handed him the note; he broke it open and read: Napoleon’s army had begun to move south, along the Kaluga Road. He was coming. He had chosen the great gamble. A cold and stinging wind was blowing into Laurence’s face; he rubbed away sleep, and found his hand wet; he looked up. Snow was falling.

Winter had come.

With many, many thanks to beta-readers Georgina Paterson, Vanessa Len, Sally McGrath, and Francesca Coppa, all of whom gave me incredibly helpful feedback and inspiration, and helped me improve this book in so many ways.

Thanks again to my wonderful agent, Cynthia Manson, and to my new editor, Anne Groll, who pounded this book into shape.

And now and always, all my love and thanks to my amazing husband, Charles, and also to Evidence, who doesn’t quite get what mommy does yet, but is already fond of dragons.

His Majesty’s Dragon

Throne of Jade

Black Powder War

Empire of Ivory

Victory of Eagles

Tongues of Serpents

Crucible of Gold

Blood of Tyrants

Naomi Novik was born in New York in 1973, a first-generation American, and raised on Polish fairy tales, Baba Yaga, and Tolkien. Her first novel,
His Majesty’s Dragon
, the opening volume of the Temeraire series, was published in 2006 and has been translated into twenty-three languages and optioned by Peter Jackson, the Academy Award–winning director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

She has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. She is one of the founding board members of the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the fair-use rights of fan creators, and is herself a fanfic writer and fan vidder, as well as one of the architects of the open-source Archive of Our Own.

Novik lives in New York City with her husband, Edgar Award–winning mystery novelist Charles Ardai, their shiny new daughter, Evidence, and a recently and ruthlessly winnowed set of four five computers.

You can find out more at her website (
http://naominovik.com
) and follow her as naominovik on Livejournal, Twitter, and Facebook.