Naomi Novik - League of Dragons

“I am afraid not,” Laurence said, and Temeraire sighed.

Hammond had been on the other side of the clearing, giving a final reading to his own dispatches, which would go by the return. As Temeraire’s voice could not be called confidential, and Hammond had no notion of respecting privacy, he now intruded upon their conversation. “You are quite certain it is impossible, Captain?” he asked, which could only encourage Temeraire. “I had thought perhaps Captain Terrance might go—”

“What’s that?” Placet said, cracking open an eye: the aforementioned Terrance was fast asleep upon the slope of his back, hat tipped over his head and snoring, having dosed himself liberally with brandy against the chill of the flight from the Baltic. “Fly to China? I should like to see us do any such mad thing. No, indeed: we have enough to do, flying back and forth to Riga, and going all over the sea trying to find wherever the ships have got to, to-day.”

“Only it is naturally of the greatest importance to re-establish our communications with the Imperial court,” Hammond said to Laurence, as they walked together to the next of the dinner-parties: Laurence’s attendance had become de rigueur, by virtue of the Tsar’s having recognized his rank.

That doing so was of the greatest importance to Hammond’s position, Laurence had no doubt. Hammond could hardly be considered to be fulfilling his duty as Britain’s ambassador to China when he was halfway around the world from any representative of that nation. But what value such a connection should have to the war effort, Laurence doubted extremely.

“We cannot expect that the Emperor will once more consent to loan us any considerable force, when we have been unable to maintain the previous one,” he said.

“I am by no means of your mind, Captain,” Hammond said quickly. “By no means—I think you give insufficient weight to the spirit of amity which has been established between our nations, and the sense of alarm which the extent of Napoleon’s ambitions have raised, in the better-informed members of the Imperial court—”

“An alarm which his defeat in Russia must now greatly allay,” Laurence said.

For this Hammond had no answer. After a brief pause, he resumed by saying, “Perhaps if we were to establish a way-station, as it were? I have consulted some of the Russian maps of the northern coastline, and I thought perhaps I might propose to the Admiralty that a frigate be stationed in the Laptev Sea—”

Laurence stared. Hammond trailed off, uncertainly. “Sir,” Laurence said, “if you are willing to delay until next August, when I believe some portions of that body of water may have melted, I suppose a ship could be navigated along the Siberian coast; she should have to get out of the Arctic before October, however.”

“Oh,” Hammond said, and lapsed into a gloomy silence. He had given Terrance the fatal packet, with its extravagant promise of a million pounds. In three days’ time it would arrive in London; within a week, he would have an answer, and might well be recalled to England in disgrace. And if Hammond were recalled, Laurence knew he would likely be ordered back as well. Once back in Britain, he and Temeraire would undoubtedly be sent to the most unpleasant and useless posting which malice might contrive: some isolated sea-washed rock off the western shores of Scotland, with no chance of any action at all, nor communication with other dragons who might be influenced by Temeraire’s heretical notions of justice.

He might refuse that order, of course, if it came. The Admiralty would court-martial him again, Laurence supposed, with a kind of black humor; he knew he should feel a greater distress at the prospect than he did. But indeed, the event could not cause him much pain. Even under his present circumstances, he could scarcely envision any future where he might resume a place in British society. So be it: he would let them try him in absentia, this time, and ignore the outcome. He would only need to grieve another conviction insofar as it retained the power to distress his mother.

They had reached the steps of the house; the footman was holding the door. Laurence could not but find the contrast absurd, to step from such thoughts onto the threshold of a glittering ball and find generals and archdukes bowing to him; it lent the scene a kind of unreality, as though he sojourned briefly in a fairy-world which would vanish away as soon as he had left it.

“They must see the necessity,” Hammond murmured worried, to himself. “They must, they must. If you please, Captain, I should like to present you to Prince Gorchakov—”

Laurence moved through the room still suffused with that feeling of falsehood, all the world a theater-stage; the men and women he spoke to flat as playing cards, all surface and no substance. Everyone spoke of the same things, repeated the same remarks: Napoleon had been seen in Paris, Napoleon was raising another army. Ferals had destroyed the estate of Count Z—and the summer house of Princess B—. The two threads were often wound together, and Napoleon almost blamed more for having unleashed the starved and chained dragons than for his invasion, it seemed.

“Murat should be hanged like a spy, in my opinion,” one gentleman declared, whom Laurence did not recognize: he wore a uniform free from decorations. “And his master after him, if he had not been permitted to escape! And the beasts slaughtered, one and all. A few porridge-vats full of poison—”

“And when Napoleon returns, with a hundred of his own beasts in the air?” Laurence said, distant and dismissive; he would have turned away.

“Then poison them, too!” the man said, glaring and belligerent. “At least I hope some hero might be found, who would go into a French camp and make the attempt, instead of this rank folly where tenderly we nurse monsters who would devour us all. Now I hear we are to take porridge out of the mouths of our own serfs, over whom God has set us as fathers and mothers, and set it out to feed the beasts—Oriental corruption! Because they are slaves to their own dragons, they would see the rest of us brought low and groveling in the dirt beside them—”

He was drunk, Laurence realized, cheeks suffused with a stain that owed more to wine than heat. It did not matter. “Sir, you are offensive,” Laurence said. The company around them were drawing away, slightly; faces turning aside, hiding behind fans. “You must withdraw the remark.”

“Withdraw!” the man cried. He shook off the hand of another gentleman, who was trying to whisper in his ear. “Withdraw, when murdered children cry out for justice, from the serpents’ bellies? By all the holy saints, when I think that God above sent a plague, which would have cleansed them one and all from the earth—!” Here he was forcibly interrupted, by his friend and another officer, who were both speaking to him in urgent low Russian. But he paused only a moment, and shook their hands off. “No! I will not knock my head to a man who chooses to parade himself around under the supposed dignities bestowed by a barbaric king—”

Hammond’s hand was on his own arm, but Laurence took it away, and struck the man sharply across the face, breaking him off mid-sentence; the man fell stumbling back into the hands of his friends. Laurence turned away before he could get up again and walked for the door, quickly. People made way murmuring, glancing towards his face and looking away again. Laurence did not know what they saw written there. He felt only weary, and disgusted, and angry with himself: if he had been less distant from his company, he must have seen that he was speaking with a man too drunk to be answered. But now there was nothing to be done.

Hammond caught him by the door and trotted down the steps beside him, his face stricken. “I hope you will act for me, Mr. Hammond,” Laurence said.