Naomi Novik - Victory of Eagles

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. “Nonsense, all this complaining; you have slept outside all your life and never taken an ounce of harm from it,” but shortly a collection had quietly been taken up, among the officers, and a friendly rivalry begun among the dragons to see whose should be completed first.

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.”