Naomi Novik - Black Powder War

There was rather more difficulty getting men to volunteer to board him, until Kalkreuth roundly cursed them all for cowards and climbed on himself; his aides promptly followed him up in a rush, even arguing a little over who should go up first, and with this example before them the reluctant men were so shamed they too began clamoring to board; to which Tharkay, observing the whole, remarked a little dryly that men and dragons were not so very different in some respects.

Arkady, not the largest of the ferals, being leader more from force of personality than size, was able to lift off the ground easily with a hundred men dangling, perhaps a few more. “We can fit nearly two thousand, across all of them,” Laurence said, the trial complete, and handed the slate to Roland and Dyer to make them do the sums over, to be sure he had the numbers correct: much to their disgruntlement; they felt it unfair to be set back to schoolwork in so remarkable a situation. “We cannot risk overloading them,” Laurence added. “They must be able to make their escape if we are caught at it in the middle.”

“If we don’t take care of that Fleur-de-Nuit, we will be,” Granby said. “If we engaged him tonight—?”

Laurence shook his head, not in disagreement but in doubt. “They are taking precious good care he is not exposed. To get anywhere near we would have to come in range of their artillery, and get directly into their midst; I have not seen him stir out of the covert since we arrived. He only watches us from that ridge, and keeps well back.”

“They would hardly need the Fleur-de-Nuit to tell them we were doing something tomorrow, if we made a great point of singling him out tonight,” Tharkay pointed out. “He had much better be dealt with just before we begin.”

No one disagreed, but puzzling out the means left them at sixes-and-sevens a while. They could settle on nothing better than staging a diversion, using the littler dragons to bombard the French front ranks: the glare would interfere with the Fleur-de-Nuit’s vision, and in the meantime the other dragons would slip out to the south, and make a wider circle out to sea.

“Though it won’t do for long,” Granby said, “and then we will have all of them to deal with, and Lien, too: Temeraire can’t fight her with three hundred men hanging off his sides.”

“An attack such as this will rouse up all the camp, and someone will see us going by sooner or late,” Kalkreuth agreed. “Still it will gain us more time than if the alarm were raised at once; I would rather save half the corps than none.”

“But if we must circle about so far out of the way, it will take a good deal more time, and we will never get so many away,” Temeraire objected. “Perhaps if we only went and killed him very quickly and quietly, we might then get away before they know what we are about; or at least thumped him hard enough he could not pay any more attention—”

“What we truly need,” Laurence said abruptly, “is only to put him quietly out of the way; what about drugging him?” In the thoughtful pause, he added, “They have been feeding the dragons livestock dosed with opium all through the campaign; if we slip him one more thoroughly saturated, likely he will not notice any queer taste, at least not until it is too late.”

“His captain will hardly let him eat a cow if it’s still wandering in circles,” Granby said.

“If the soldiers are eating boiled grass, the dragons cannot be eating as much as they like, either,” Laurence said. “I suspect he will prefer to ask forgiveness than permission, if a cow goes by him in the night.”

Tharkay undertook to manage it. “Find me some nan-keen trousers and a loose shirt, and give me a dinner-basket to carry,” he said. “I assure you I will be able to walk through the camp quite openly; if anyone stops me I will speak pidgin to them and repeat the name of some senior officer. And if you give me a few bottles of drugged brandy for them to take from me, so much the better; no reason we cannot let the watch dose themselves with laudanum, too.”

“But will you be able to get back?” Granby asked.

“I do not mean to try,” Tharkay said. “After all, our purpose is to get out; I can certainly walk to the harbor long before you will have finished loading, and find a fisherman to bring me out; they are surely doing a brisk business with those ships.”

Kalkreuth’s aides were crawling around the courtyard on hands and knees, drawing out a map in chalks, large enough for the feral dragons to make out and, by serendipity, colorful and interesting enough to command their attention. The bright blue stripe of the river would be their guide: it passed through the city walls and then curved down to the harbor, passing through the French camp as it went.

“We will go single-file, keeping over the water,” Laurence said, “and pray be sure the other dragons understand,” he added anxiously to Temeraire, “they must go very quietly, as if they were trying to creep up on some wary herd of animals.”

“I will tell them again,” Temeraire promised, and sighed a very little. “It is not that I am not happy to have them here,” he confided quietly, “and really they have been minding me quite well, when one considers that they have never been taught, but it would have been so very nice to have Maximus and Lily here, and perhaps Excidium; he would know just what to do, I am sure.”

“I cannot quarrel with you,” Laurence said; apart from all considerations of management, Maximus alone could likely have taken six hundred men or more, being a particularly large Regal Copper. He paused and asked, tentatively, “Will you tell me now what else has been worrying you? Are you afraid they will lose their heads, in the moment?”

“Oh; no, it is not that,” Temeraire said, and looked down, prodding a little at the remains of his dinner. “We are running away, are we not?” he said abruptly.

“I would be sorry to call it so,” Laurence said, surprised; he had thought Temeraire wholly satisfied with their plan, now that they meant to carry out the Prussian garrison with them, and for his own part thought it a maneuver to applaud: if they could manage it. “There is no shame in retreating to preserve one’s strength for a future battle, with better hope of victory.”

“What I mean is, if we are going away, then Napoleon really has won,” Temeraire said, “and England will be at war for a long time still; because he means to conquer us. So we cannot ask the Government to change anything, for dragons; we must only do as we are told, until he is beaten.” He hunched his shoulders a little and added, “I do understand it, Laurence, and I promise I will do my duty and not always be complaining; I am only sorry.”

It was with some awkwardness in the face of this handsome speech that Laurence recognized, and had then to convey to Temeraire, the change in his own sentiments, an awkwardness increased by the bewildered Temeraire’s dragging out, one after another, all of Laurence’s own earlier protests on the subject.

“I have not, I hope, changed in essentials,” Laurence said, struggling for justification in his own eyes as well as his dragon’s, “but only in my understanding. Napoleon has made manifest for all the world to see the marked advantages to a modern army of closer cooperation between men and dragons; we return to England not only to take up our post again, but bearing this vital intelligence, which makes it not merely our desire but our duty to promote such change in England.”

Temeraire required very little additional persuasion, and all Laurence’s embarrassment, at seeming to be fickle, was mitigated by his dragon’s jubilant reaction, and the immediate necessity of presenting him with many cautions: every earlier objection remained, of course, and Laurence knew very well they would face the most violent opposition.