Naomi Novik - Crucible of Gold

“Mr. Hammond, I forget nothing,” Laurence said, “but I will not stand by and serve as audience for a venture so ill-advised as to wreck all hopes of the preservation of this colony: if that, Your Highness,” he added, turning back to the prince, “and not some temporary victory is your desire, you have only one real avenue which I can see: not merely to make peace with the Tswana and send them hence, but to persuade them to settle here among you.”

Laurence chose abruptly to make the proposal, fully expecting the astonished silence which it won him: he could not deny it sounded even more mad when said aloud than when it had first occurred to him, looking upon the French transports in their harbor, the ten thousand refugees and more in the city. The calculation of voyages and time which should be required to send so many back to their home in Africa had struck him with great force. If the Portuguese were persuaded to yield up their remaining slaves, the numbers would swell into impossibility; add to that the hazards of the crossing, and the Tswana could not so easily return home as they had come. Which likely had been Napoleon’s design: he meant Brazil to be besieged a long while.

“Sir,” Laurence added to the staring expressions, “you must recognize you have no other prospects of a defense against the Inca; not in time. If you should acquire a handful of dragons from overseas, those beasts are stolen only for a little while from the war in Europe. Even if victorious here, which can by no means be relied upon, they must return in short order. In the Tswana, you have at hand a small army of dragons already skilled in aerial battle, attached by the bonds of natural sentiment to a portion of your citizenry, and able to remain and at once begin to breed up beasts of battle-weight.”

He went to the window, and flinging it open called out, “Temeraire! Will you be so good as to join those dragons, there?”

“Oh, if you like, of course I will,” Temeraire said, raising his head from the ground, and peering in the window: his great gleaming blue slitted eye filled the glass, and sent half the men in the room startling out of their chairs and back. “Only I thought I should spoil their maneuvering.”

He lifted away from the courtyard where he had been napping, with a leap that rattled the curtain-rings, and in a moment was among the little dragons. They left off their practice and swarmed around him clamoring in excited voices, which carried even up to the window: in their relative proportions not far short of sparrows circling some great beast, a lion or a bear, to which they could pose no threat. Laurence turned from the window to the prince.

“Your Highness, you can see your recruits will never make a dragon who can stand against a heavy-weight,” Laurence said. “The most skillful breeding program should require decades to achieve such an end. Even if by some method we should drive the Tswana out of your country, do you imagine Napoleon will give you that length of time, before he falls upon you from the west?”

Poor Hammond was much to be pitied, Laurence thought ruefully while he spoke, as being a very unwilling accessory to perhaps the most outrageous speech which likely an ordinary serving-officer had ever made to a ruling sovereign; he looked increasingly more dazed with horror even than distressed.

“Where I am mistaken, or my arguments ill-founded, I am ready to be persuaded,” Laurence added, “and I hope I offer no willful defiance: but neither I nor Temeraire nor any dragon of our party will lend ourselves, in the present circumstances, to a project of attacking the Tswana: an endeavor as sure to lead to disaster in its success as in its failure.”

When he had issued this flat ultimatum, there was not much other discussion to be had: dismissed with some abruptness, Laurence made his courtesies and departed. Hammond remained, at the prince’s command, and Laurence did not try to persuade him otherwise. He could well imagine that conversation: the prince should certainly inquire as to the extent of Laurence’s influence upon the other aviators of their party, and Temeraire’s upon the other dragons, information which Laurence rather wished Hammond to convey than to conceal.

“I will not urge you to act in any way contrary to your conscience; I would reject any such suasion on my own part,” Laurence said to Granby, when he had returned to camp; and with a look he extended the scope of his words to Demane, who raised his head from where Roland was sketching for him on paper the outlines of a maneuver for a heavy-weight beast: he had suddenly of late grown surprisingly intent on furthering his education as an aviator, and now in every open moment was to be found harassing the senior officers for any scrap of knowledge.

“I am not going to attack the Tswana to help these slave-takers,” Demane said flatly, recalling to Laurence that Demane’s own people had suffered similar insult at the hands of the Dutch settlers of Capetown, if not abduction from their native country. “I would as soon fight with them, instead; why shouldn’t we?” he demanded, to Roland’s sitting back on her heels outraged. “Kulingile and I aren’t going to fight Temeraire or Iskierka, but I don’t mind attacking the Portuguese, if they should start the fighting.”

“Oh! As far as that goes, I will say that I shouldn’t mind it, either,” Temeraire said, overhearing. “While I do see that it would be quite inconvenient that the Portuguese should be beat, since they are helping us against Napoleon otherwise, perhaps the Tswana would agree to help us against him instead: and I should just as soon fight with Kefentse. Even if he did snatch you, that time,” he added to Laurence, “he has very handsomely apologized for that, and explained the misunderstanding. And one cannot really blame the Tswana for being so upset; they have the far better cause, it seems to me.”

“I suppose that is a call for me to ask Iskierka,” Granby said, “but I know very well that she will be perfectly willing to fight anyone whosomever. Well, if it helps you make them see sense, I will go as far as saying I plan to be sitting on my heels; but Laurence, I can’t give you my word: there are those reinforcements to think of, which Hammond claimed would be sent us from the Channel. I didn’t believe that they would ever arrive, when I thought we needed them to make any sort of go of things here; but now that they would be inconvenient, I think we must expect them at any moment. And if they do arrive before you have talked all these fellows round to this scheme of yours, and there are British dragons going into battle, I am not going to watch them square off against the Tswana while I sit here and twiddle my thumbs. Thumb,” he added, rueful.

Laurence nodded silently: he wondered, himself, if he could under such circumstances remain a mere observer, without doing whatever he could to persuade Temeraire to join the battle; it could scarcely be borne.

Hammond returned later that afternoon and began a determined pursuit of private inquiry with Granby; who eeled away from him energetically as far as he was able, until finally cornered just before the dinner-hour: Hammond went away from the conversation dissatisfied and anxious, to be taken back to Paraty by one of the Mexican couriers.

“Well, he has made me commit myself,” Granby said, sighing as he swung a leg over the planed log which made one of their benches and dropped himself unceremoniously into his seat: they ate in the open air, their handful of tarpaulins gone for shelter from the sun, and very little cover otherwise. They had established their camp in the hills a little distance from the coast, to avoid the eyes of the French sailors and also their guns, and without relief of wind coming off the water or any shade from trees which had long since been felled to put up the city, the tropical sun was punishing.