Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novik
The great Neptune, broadside to the wave, fired her guns in a flaming golden roar before she was struck, a last shout of defiance; then she was gone. The ships facing into the wave rose up the shining face, their prows driving seafoam-pale gouges into the monster, mere pinpricks, climbing bravely until one after another they were overturned in cataracts of white foam and swallowed into the green mass.
The wave slouched onward down the Channel, subsiding gradually as it ran: the shoulders of a giant irritated, shrugging away. One solitary ship-of-the-line, the Superb, bobbed at anchor, all her masts snapped away and water pouring from her sides; two frigates, which had dropped their anchors in time, were on their beam-ends and struggling to right themselves before they, too, sank. A few human specks in the water were clinging to wreckage. Of fourteen ships-of-the-line, nothing else remained, like castles built in sand, swept away by the tide.
No cannon spoke, nor guns; even the personal knots of fighting stilled. In the silence now the last of the French dragons came flying, massed in a desperate arrow-head lunge into the sudden gap in the cross-fire, and the Guard ran forward, packed around Napoleon, to meet them.
“Temeraire!” Laurence called—a frantic trumpet-signal was blowing the alarm. Temeraire struggled wearily to turn, calling out to the other dragons. Already a small, lithe Chasseur-Vocifère was leaping away from the ground, and Napoleon was on her back.
Temeraire made for the party, but four of the French dragons wheeled to meet them, smaller Pêcheur-Rayés but valiant, clawing and shrieking heedless of how they themselves were cut about. Ballista dived into the fray, lashing a couple of them across the heads with her tail, and Requiescat was charging in to join them, roaring in fury, but the Chasseur was away, fleeing across the Channel, and after her went five others burdened with dozens of Guardsmen, a cloud of musketry trailing. They were clear. Across the water, Lien, crumpled, was being supported away over the Channel by her escort, a couple of Petit Chevaliers, laboring mightily to keep her in the air.
The last of the French dragons broke away and fled. The men yet on the field threw down their guns, and sank most of them to their knees or to all fours, broken with exhaustion. Nineteen eagle standards lay trampled and mired in the blood-churned mud, amid twenty thousand corpses.
The day was won.
Chapter 16
LAURENCE, I WILL DO you credit; I have never in my life met any man more desirable to hang, and less convenient,” Wellesley said.
“Oh, and after everything we have done,” Temeraire said, indignantly.
“No more than you ought, and less than some,” Wellesley fired back. “It is a damned pity you could not get yourself decently killed on the field: better than you managed it.”
Laurence put his hand on Temeraire’s forearm, to restrain. “Yes, sir; and the same could be said of many another.”
Wellesley—or rather Wellington, now; he had taken the new name with the ducal coronet that was his reward—snorted. They sat on the portico of Temeraire’s own pavilion—his first opportunity to take up residence, though Laurence had built it for him months before; their journey to Africa and imprisonment had intervened, and in the interim it had become a general residence. Even now a few other dragons napped in corners, and nearby Perscitia was very audibly lecturing her former militia—she had brought the men along with her after the battle, those who would be bribed by a share of her treasure—in their mixing of mortar: they were putting up another pavilion.
A tremendous crash heralded the arrival of another load of bricks; Requiescat, assisting with the construction and fired with enthusiasm, had carried alone what looked to be nearly five tons.
Wellington looked broodingly at the heap, and the foundations for the next pavilion over, which were busily being excavated by Minnow and half-a-dozen of her fellows: dirt flew at a prodigious rate. “Where are you getting that brick?”
“We have bought it,” Perscitia said, overhearing this question, “so you needn’t try and complain we are stealing; we have sold our eagles, and have capital.”
“And God help us all,” Wellington said, tapping his fingers against his thigh. “You ought to be made to pay damages, out of it; do you know I had nearly a mutiny on my hands, the next day? Not one drop of beer or rum to be had, among a hundred thousand men, and a good ten thousand casualties.”
“If you did not like it,” Perscitia said, “you ought to have managed the battle more neatly, and then I shouldn’t have needed to find a way to stop those French dragons for so long.”
This was not a little outrageous, considering that Wellington had managed to stage a battle of two hundred thousand men, three hundred dragons, and two dozen ships-of-the-line, nearly to his exact specifications; and to hold worse ground against an army better-trained and better-equipped than his own, for nearly three hours longer than planned, until the fog had loosened its grip enough for the ships to make their way in close enough to shore to begin the bombardment. “Damn your impudence,” he growled; but Perscitia only flipped her wings at him a little, and loftily went back to her pavilion.
It was mid-morning, the seventeenth of March. Some two weeks had passed since the battle and its immediate aftermath: lassitude and dull confusion over so great a triumph and disaster mingled. The survivors had man and beast sunk to the ground and slept where they stood, uneasily, listening to the chorus of the low sighs of the dying yet upon the field, men starting up with cries whenever a greater wave came crashing upon the rocky shore.
The next day, without direction, they had begun the immense effort of clearing away the dead. Temeraire and his cohort had attended to the dragons. Not all were dead; many lingered, broken and slowly bleeding out their lives, dull-eyed and surrounded by the shattered bodies of their crew. Some were coaxed with much nudging and support back onto their feet, to limp away over the ground to the surgeons’ clearing; others, worse injured, could only be given a merciful end. Some of the aviators also had survived, shielded from the worst of the impact by their dragon’s body, and had to be taken away to join the other prisoners.
Chalcedony’s body lay stretched upon a green hill, a slash of white and yellow; whole, it seemed, until they turned him over and saw the shattered red ruin of his chest. The Yellow Reapers nudged their shoulders beneath him, and in a knot carefully lifted him up to carry off the field.
“But where will we take him?” Gladius said, much subdued.
“We will take him to the old quarantine-grounds,” Temeraire said, “near Dover, where the sick dragons were buried.”
They had laid Chalcedony and their other dead to rest in another of the great barrow-mounds rising in the valley of the quarantine: early green shoots were climbing valiantly out from the softening cover of snow, and the earth smelt richly moist as the dragons turned it over to raise the mound.
More from habit than any conscious thought, they had flown on to Dover looking for food; but habit served well enough: many dragons of the Corps had returned also to their own clearings, and the ground crews and herdsmen were bringing in what cattle could be rounded up and shared out. A week later, a grounds-keeper from the old Wales breeding ground, Lloyd, appeared at Temeraire’s pavilion—bedraggled but plodding on, too stubbornly fixed in his course to alter it—with the beginning of a string of cattle.
“Why, Lloyd,” Temeraire said, “where have you got these cows from?” He did not wait for an answer to begin eating.
“The pens in London,” Lloyd said, accepting with gratitude a cup of tea, though he looked around first for spirits. “Well, and they were ours first, weren’t they,” he added with a self-righteous air, so perhaps their provenance was best not inquired after very far.
The dragons from Dover came every so often, and looked wistfully at the work going forward. “I do not see why we cannot have one at the covert, too,” Maximus said, rumbling in dissatisfaction. “Iskierka does.”
“Do I have a few thousand pounds to spare on erecting you a temple?” Berkley said.
Through such visitors, Laurence had some word from London, what news anyone could scarcely avoid hearing: the King retired to Kensington, and the Prince of Wales made regent for him; Bonaparte successfully escaped to Paris, though with his tail between his legs. The newspapers were full of patriotic fervor and mourning for Nelson and the lost seamen, spoken of as martyrs for their nation.
All the while, no-one had sought to prevent their coming and going, nor paid them any official notice, but Laurence had known the situation an ephemeral one. The wheels of government might yet be some time restoring their course, after so great a disruption, but inevitably they would fall into the cart-tracks: treason could not be simply ignored.
Wellington’s arrival had surprised him only that it was Wellington and not Jane sent to demand his surrender, or some lesser officer; but it did not encourage him. “Sir,” Laurence said, “I trust you have sufficient demands upon your time you did not come for the purpose of inquiring after our work. If you want something of me, I hope you will speak freely.”
“But Laurence is not going to prison, or to be hanged,” Temeraire put in, “and if that is what you came for, you may go away again: come with an army and take him, and try if you can.”
“We are not going to start a pitched battle against you and your pack of rogues, if that is what you mean,” Wellington said. “I know damned well about your little pact—that Longwing and that Regal Copper, who are going about Dover telling everyone that if we should come against you, they will fight with you, and so should every other dragon, or their captains will be taken away next?”
Laurence looked at Temeraire, who had the grace to look abashed, but not very, and retorted, “You haven’t any right to complain if I do not trust you; you have tried to take Laurence before, and now where is our pay, that we ought to have received? And the coverts, which you promised to open to us.”
“That is enough,” Wellington said. “You had my word, and my word is good; you will have your coverts and your pay, and no later than any other scoundrel who stood up under fire. It will be half a year before the Government can pay off all its arrears, and you will have to lump it until then. You are not starving, at least, which is more than many an Englishman can say.”
“Well, then,” Temeraire said, a little mollified, “I am sorry if I was rude, if you will keep your promises, and you do not mean to try and put Laurence in prison; then what do you want, after all?”
“What I want,” Wellington said, “—or rather what His Majesty’s Government wants, is to be shot of you. Submit to the King’s justice, and your sentence will be commuted, to transportation and labor.”
Temeraire snorted, at justice, and with much suspicion had to have the sentence explained to him, that the Government meant Laurence should be sent abroad to the colony of New South Wales. “But that is on the other side of the world; that is as bad as putting you in prison again,” Temeraire protested. “I will certainly not let them send you so far away from me.”
“No,” Laurence said, watching Wellington’s face. “That, I imagine, is not the intention. Sir, it cannot be wise to send Temeraire away, not when the French yet have Lien. Whatever you may think of me, it is too high a price.”
“You are a little dull to-day, Laurence,” Wellington said. “The price is giving you your life, and their Lordships think it cheap, as a way to be rid of a dragon who, if he takes it into his head, can sink half the shipping in Dover harbor.”
Temeraire flared out his ruff. “That is very rude,” he said. “I would never do anything so cruel to the fishermen, and the merchants; whyever would I?”
The story of Lien’s feat had crossed the country entire at wild-fire speed, carried across the country with news of victory and Nelson’s death by the victorious soldiers marching back to London and their homes. It had not gained much in the telling: there was not much to gain, either in horror or in amazement. But Laurence was dismayed to find the fear which it had whipped up, thus transferred to such irrational action, and said so. “If this is a dreadful weapon, the French possess it also; merely to ignore it ourselves does no good, any more than you would melt down your own cannon because the French had fired one upon you.”
“When they have built a cannon which chooses, now and again, to turn around and fire into their faces instead, and means to persuade all their other cannon to do the same, I will gladly leave it to them,” Wellington said. “No, Laurence, you see before you a convert: you have entirely convinced me that the beasts are sapient, and now I am damned if I will let you make them political. We can better support a defense against one solitary beast than your Whiggish rabblerousing among ten thousand of them.”
“But if you agree we are intelligent, not that it is not perfectly obvious, then you cannot deny we have every right to be political,” Temeraire said.
“I can and will deny you or any man or beast the right to tear apart the foundations of the state,” Wellington said. “Rights be damned; we will never hear an end of anyone crying for their rights.”
When he had gone, Temeraire looked sidelong at Laurence. “I am sure no-one can make us go, if we do not like,” he said, “and I do not care what Wellesley thinks, or Wellington, even if he is a duke now.”
Laurence put a hand on Temeraire’s foreleg and looked out over the valley; it was a view improved over the last summer, with the verdant growth coming up over the undulating hills of the barrow-mounds, and the sheep and cattle Lloyd had gathered dotting the green hills as they browsed. It was all England and home laid out before him, creeping out from under the shadow; and now he must leave it, forever, for a distant, dry country. “We must go,” he said.
“I AM SENDING a few eggs on your transport,” Jane said. “They need some beasts in New South Wales, to forward the settlement.” She sat down upon the edge of a boulder; they had walked a little way from the pavilion, to have some privacy, and up a hillside where they might have a view all the way to the sea: grey mist hanging over the water, and at its edges a little glitter of sunlight, a few white sails.
“Can they be spared?” Laurence asked.
“More easily than they can be kept,” Jane said. “Before you brought us your cure, we thought we should have to replace the entire population of the Isles; now there are more eggs keeping warm than we will be able to feed in a year, after all this plundering and bad management. As for our friend across the way,” she added, tossing a pebble over the side of the cliff, vaguely in the direction of France, “Bonaparte lost forty beasts in his adventures here. He will not come over again shortly, and we will be ready for him if he does.”
He nodded and sat down beside her. Jane absently rubbed her hands together and blew upon them: there was still a chill in the air. Below, Excidium was inspecting the foundations with interest, Perscitia cajoling him to spray a channel for her in some of the stones, with his acid, so it should allow water to run off more easily.
“I am afraid, Laurence, you will officially be a prisoner; it is understood you shan’t be put in irons, or anything which should distress Temeraire, but so far as formality—”
“I could expect nothing else.”
She sighed. “At any rate, I have had some work to persuade their Lordships to do anything but the ungracious, but there will be crews for the new hatchlings going along, of course; so I have managed that you will have your handful also, among them.”
“You will not send Emily, surely,” Laurence said.
“I would not send anyone else, if I was not ready to send her,” Jane said. “No; she is a sturdy creature, and any road I would rather risk her health than her spirit. She will do better to be as far away from my station as she can. I suppose you have not heard yet, they have named me Admiral of the
“I congratulate you most heartily,” Laurence said, and shook her hand. “But Jane, we will be halfway across the world—I do not even know what we will do, there—”
“They will find out some work for you, I have no doubt,” Jane said. “They mean to find a way into the interior; dragons will make easy work of that, and if nothing else, you may help them clear land. It is a waste, of course,” she added, “and I hope we do not have cause to regret it, but I will tell you honestly, Laurence, I am glad you will go. I have not liked to think what should happen if you did not.”
“I would not raise civil war,” he said.
“You would not; I am not so sanguine about him,” Jane said, looking down at Temeraire, presently settling some sort of squabble arisen between Cantarella and Perscitia; of course half the Yellow Reapers had dived into the quarrel on Cantarella’s side at once. “But as for Emily: I do not mean to give anyone opportunity to whisper of special treatment, or try to work on me through her, either for good or ill. With three or four beasts established, there will be enough scope for her to advance a while, and ships come and go often enough. I am only worried for Catherine.”
Riley and the Allegiance would be their transport, as so often before; and Catherine of course could not be spared even if she had wished to go. “Only I do not know whatever to do about the boy,” Catherine said. “I do not quite like to let him go—”
“I do not see why,” Lily muttered, not very quietly.
“—but if he is to go to sea, I suppose he had better begin as he will go on; and if he should prefer the Corps someday, there will be dragons enough, and perhaps he ought to be with his father,” Catherine finished, at dinner that evening; she and Berkley had come out to see him off, as of course Laurence could not come to the covert to dine while legally a prisoner. They sat together in the pavilion around a small convenient card-table, eating roast mutton and bread, sheltered from the wind by the dragons dozing comfortably around them.