Empire of Ivory

‘She is a handful and a half,’ Granby admitted softly, as they considered the coiled serpentine length of Iskierka’s body, faint threads of steam issuing from the many needle-like spikes upon her body, ‘and I didn’t ride herd on her, sir, I am sorry.’

Iskierka had already established herself to her own satisfaction, if no one else’s, by clawing out a deep pit in the clearing next to Temeraire’s where she had been housed, and then filling it with ash acquired from the demise of some two dozen young trees, the largest she could manage at present. She had unceremoniously uprooted and burnt them inside her pit, then added a collection of boulders to the powdery grey mixture, which she fired to a moderate glow before falling asleep in her heated nest. The bonfire and its lingering smoulder were visible for some distance, even from the farmhouses nearest the covert; and after only a few hours, her arrival had produced several complaints and a great deal of alarm.

‘Oh, you have done enough keeping her harnessed out in the countryside, and without a head of cattle to your name,’ Jane said, giving the drowsing Iskierka’s side a pat. ‘They may bleat to me all they like, she’s a fire-breather and you may be sure the Navy will cheer your name when they hear we have our own at last. Well done; well done indeed, and I am happy to confirm you in your rank, Captain Granby. Should you like to do the honours, Laurence?’

Most of Laurence’s crew had already been employed in Iskierka’s clearing, beating out the stray embers which flew from her pit and threatened to ignite all the entire covert if left unchecked. Ash-dusty and tired as they all were, they had stayed, lingering consciously without the need of any announcement. They lined up on one muttered word from young Lieutenant Ferris to watch Laurence pin a second pair of gold bars upon Granby’s shoulders.

‘Gentlemen,’ Jane said, when Laurence had done, and they gave a cheek-flushed Granby three huzzahs, whole-hearted if a little subdued, and Ferris and Riggs stepped over to shake him by the hand.

‘We will see about assigning you a crew, though it is early days with her yet,’ Jane said, after the ceremony had dispersed, and they proceeded on to make her acquainted with the ferals. ‘I have no shortage of men now, more’s the pity. Feed her twice daily, see if we cannot make up for any growth she may have been shorted, and whenever she is awake I will start you on Longwing manoeuvres. I don’t know if she can scorch herself, as they can with their own acid, but we needn’t find out by trial.’

Granby nodded; he seemed not the least nonplussed at answering to her. Neither did Tharkay, who had been persuaded to stay on at least a little longer, as one of the few of them with any influence upon the ferals at all. He rather looked mostly amused, in his secretive way, once past the inquiring glance which he had first cast at Laurence: as Jane had insisted upon being taken to the new-come dragons at once, there had been no chance for Laurence to give Tharkay a private caution in advance of their meeting. He did not reveal any surprise, however, but only made her a polite bow, and performed the introductions calmly.

Arkady and his band had made no little less confusion of their own clearings than Iskierka, preferring to knock down all the trees between them and cluster together in a great heap. The chill of the December air did not trouble them, used as they were to the vastly colder regions of the Pamirs, but they spoke disapprovingly of the dampness, and on discovering the senior officer of the covert before them, at once demanded an accounting of their promised cows, from her: one apiece daily, was the offer by which they had been lured into service.

‘They make the argument that if they do not eat their share of cows upon a given day, that they are still owed the cattle, and may call the credit in at a future time,’ Tharkay explained, igniting Jane’s deep laugh.

‘Tell them they shall have as much as they can eat on any occasion, and if they are too suspicious for that to satisfy them, we shall make them a tally. Each of them may take one of the logs they have knocked over to the feeding pens, and mark it each time they take a cow,’ Jane said, more merry than offended at being met with a negotiation. ‘Pray ask, will they agree to a rate of exchange? Two hogs for a cow, or two sheep, should we bring in some variety of livestock?’

The ferals put their heads together and muttered, hissed and whistled among themselves in a cacophony made private only by the obscurity of their language. Finally Arkady turned back and professed himself willing to settle, on the proviso that the rate for goats would be three to one cow; they had some measure of contempt for the species being the animals most easily obtained in their former homeland, and they also suspected them of being scrawny.

Jane bowed to him to seal the arrangement, and he bobbed his head back. His expression was one of deeply satisfaction and rendered all the more piratical by the red splash of colour covering one of his eyes and spilling down his neck.

‘They are a gang of ruffians and make no mistake,’ Jane said, as she led them back to her offices, ‘but I have no doubt of their flying capabilities, at any rate: with that sort of wiry muscle they will fly circles around anything in their weight-class, or over it, and I am happy to stuff their bellies for them.’

‘No, sir; there’ll be no trouble,’ the steward of the headquarters said, rather quietly, promising to find rooms for Laurence and his officers. Most of the other captains and officers were encamped in the quarantine-grounds with their sick dragons, despite the cold and wet, and so the building was deserted; even more hushed and silent than it had been during the low-ebb before Trafalgar, when nearly all the formations had gone south to help bring down the French and Spanish fleets.

They all drank Granby’s health, but the party broke up early, and Laurence was not disposed to linger. A few wretched lieutenants sat at a dark table in the corner, without talking; an older captain snored, his head tipped against the side of his armchair and a bottle of brandy empty by his elbow. Laurence took his supper alone in his rooms and drank his port near the fire.

He opened the door at a faint tapping, expecting perhaps Jane, or one of his men had come with some word from Temeraire, but was startled to find Tharkay instead. ‘Pray come in,’ Laurence said, and belatedly added, ‘I hope you will forgive my state.’ The room was disordered, and he had borrowed a dressing-gown from a colleague’s neglected wardrobe. It was considerably too large around the waist, and badly crumpled.

‘I am come to say good-bye,’ Tharkay said, and, ‘No, I have nothing to complain of,’ when Laurence had made an awkward inquiry, ‘but I am not of your company. I do not care to stay as only a translator; it is a role which would soon pall.’

‘I would be happy to speak to Admiral Roland – perhaps a commission—’ Laurence said, trailing away; he did not know what might be done, or how such matters were arranged in the Corps, except to imagine them a good deal less formally prescribed than in the Army, or the Navy. Tharkay was an asset of inestimable value to them as a linguist; and Laurence would have argued gladly for any measure that might persuade him to stay.

‘I have already spoken to the Admiral,’ Tharkay said, ‘and have been given one, if not the sort you mean: I will go back to Turkestan and enlist more ferals, if any more can be persuaded into your service on similar terms.’

‘No matter how mean and scrawny they are,’ Jane said, entering the room without ceremony and stripping off her gloves, which were stained by the sour-milk odour of dragon mucus, and acrid smoke. ‘Pray don’t think me ungrateful, Laurence,’ she added, coming to warm her hands at the fire, ‘it is a miracle you should have brought us Iskierka and one egg whole, considering the way Bonaparte has been romping about the Continent, much less our amiable band of brigands with them; but I would be a good deal happier to have another twenty at such a price.’

Laurence would have been a good deal happier to have the first twenty ferals more manageable; a quality they were not more likely to gain after Tharkay’s departure. ‘I will pray for your safe return,’ Laurence said, and offered his hand in farewell. He could not object, it was hard to imagine that Tharkay’s pride might allow him to remain as a supernumerary, even if mere restlessness did not drive him on.

‘What an odd fellow you have found us, Laurence,’ Jane said, when Tharkay had gone. ‘I ought to give him his weight in gold, and would, if the Admiralty would not squawk. Twenty dragons talked out of the trees, like Merlin; or was it St. Patrick? Never mind, come to my rooms, if you please. This place has a cursed draft, and my maps are there.’

The map of Europe was laid out on her table, covered with great clots of markers, representing dragon positions from the western borders of Prussia’s former territory all the way to the footsteps of Russia. ‘From Jena to Warsaw in three weeks,’ she said, as one of her runners poured wine for them. ‘I would not have given a bad ha’penny for the news, if you had not brought it yourself, Laurence; and if we hadn’t had it from the Navy, too, I would have sent you to a physician.’

Laurence nodded. ‘And I have a great deal to tell you of Bonaparte’s aerial tactics too, they have changed entirely. Formations are of no use against him; at Jena, the Prussians were routed, wholly routed. We must begin devising counters to his new methods at once.’

But she was already shaking her head. ‘Do you know, Laurence, I have less than forty dragons fit to fly? Unless Bonaparte is a lunatic, he will not come across with less than a hundred. He shan’t need any fine tactics to do for us. For our part, there is no one to learn any new defence.’

The scope of the disaster silenced him: only forty dragons, to patrol the south coast, and give cover to the ships of the blockade.

‘What we need at present is time,’ Jane continued. ‘There are a dozen hatchlings in Ireland, preserved from contagion, and twice as many eggs due to hatch in the next six months. We bred a good many of them, early on. If our friend Bonaparte is good enough to give us a year, the rest of these new shore-batteries will be in place, the young dragons brought up, and we’ll have your ferals knocked into shape; not to mention Temeraire and our new fire-breather.’

‘Will he give us a year?’ Laurence said, low, looking at the counters. There were not many near the Channel yet; but he had seen first-hand how swiftly Napoleon’s dragon-borne army could move.

‘Not a minute, if he hears anything of our pitiable state,’ Jane said. ‘But our troubles aside, well, we hear he has made a very good friend in Warsaw, a Polish countess. They say she is a raving beauty, and he would like to marry a sister of the Tsar. We will wish him good fortune in his courting, and hope that he takes his long leisurely time about it. If he is sensible, he will want a winter night to make a crossing, and the days are already growing longer.

‘But we can be sure that if he learns how thin we are on the ground, he will come posting back quick as lightning, and damn the ladies. So our task of the moment is to keep him properly in the dark. In a year’s time we will have something to work with; but until then, for you all it must be—’

‘Oh, patrolling,’ Temeraire said, in tones of despair, when Laurence had brought their orders.

‘I am sorry, my dear,’ Laurence said, ‘very truly sorry; but if we can serve our friends at all, it will be by taking on those duties which they have had to set aside.’ Temeraire was silent and brooding. In an attempt to cheer him, Laurence added, ‘But we need not abandon your cause, not in the least. I cannot write my father, as relations between us stand; but I will write my mother, and those of my acquaintance who may have the best advice to give, on how we ought to proceed—’

‘Whatever sense is there in it,’ Temeraire said, miserably, ‘when all our friends are ill, and there is nothing to be done for them? It does not matter if one is not allowed to visit London, if one cannot even fly for an hour. And Arkady does not give a fig for liberty, anyway; all he wants are cows. We may as well patrol; or even do formations.’

This was the mood in which they went aloft, a dozen of the ferals behind them more occupied in squabbling amongst themselves than in paying any attention to the sky; Temeraire was in no way inclined to make them mind, and with Tharkay gone, the few hapless officers set upon their backs had very little hope of exerting any form of control.

These young men had been chosen for their language skills. The ferals all far too old, in draconic terms, to acquire a new tongue easily, so their officers would have to learn theirs instead. To hear them trying to whistle and cluck the awkward syllables of the Durzagh language had quickly palled as entertainment and become a nuisance to the ear. But it had also to be endured; no one aside from Temeraire knew the tongue fluently, and only a few of Laurence’s younger officers had acquired a smattering in the course of their journey to Istanbul.

Laurence had indeed lost two of his already-diminished number of officers to the cause: both Dunne, one of the riflemen, and Wickley of the bellmen had a good enough grasp of Durzagh to translate basic signals, and were not so young as to make command absurd. They had been set aboard Arkady in a highly theoretical position of authority; the natural bond which the first harnessing seemed to produce was absent of course, and Arkady was far more likely to obey his own whimsical impulse than any orders which they might give. The feral leader had already expressed his opinion that flying over the ocean was absurd, he proclaimed it a useless territory for which no reasonable dragon would have interest, and the likelihood that he would veer away at any given moment in search of better entertainment seemed to Laurence precariously high.

Jane had set them a course along the coastline, for their first excursion. There was no risk at all of action, so near to land, but at least the cliffs interested the ferals. The bustle of shipping around Portsmouth had drawn their eye, and they would gladly have investigated further if not called to order by Temeraire. They flew on past Southampton and westward along towards Weymouth, setting a leisurely pace. The ferals resorted to wild acrobatics for entertainment; swooping to heights that should have rendered them dizzy and ill, save for their habituation among the loftiest mountains on the earth. They plummeted into absurd and dangerous diving manoeuvres, skimming the sea so closely that they threw up spray from the waves. It was a sad waste of energy, but the ferals now were well-fed by comparison to their previous state, and they had a surfeit which Laurence was glad enough to see spent in so unrestrained a manner, even if the officers clinging sickly to their harnesses did not agree.

‘Perhaps we might try a little fishing,’ Temeraire suggested, turning his head around, when little Gherni abruptly cried out above them, and then the world spun and whirled as Temeraire flung himself sidelong; a Pêcheur-Rayé went flying past them, and the champagne-popping of rifle-fire spat at them from his back.

‘To stations,’ Ferris was shouting, men scrambling wildly; the bellmen were casting off a handful of bombs down on the recovering French dragon below while Temeraire veered away, climbing. Arkady and the ferals were shrilly calling to one another, wheeling excitedly; they flung themselves with eagerness on the French dragons: a light scouting party of six, as best Laurence could make out among the low-lying clouds, the Pêcheur the largest of the lot and the rest all light-weights or couriers; both outnumbered and outweighed, therefore, and reckless to be coming so close to British shores.

Reckless, or deliberately venturesome; Laurence thought grimly it could not have escaped the notice of the French that their last encounter had brought no answer from the coverts.

‘Laurence, I am going after that Pêcheur; Arkady and the others will take the rest,’ Temeraire said, curving his head around even as he dived.

The ferals were not shy by any means, and gifted skirmishers, from all their play; Laurence thought it safe to leave the smaller dragons entirely to them. ‘Pray make no sustained attack,’ he called, through the speaking-trumpet. ‘Only roust them from the shore, as quickly as you may—’ as the hollow thump-thump of bombs, exploding below, interrupted.

Their own battle was not a long one; without the hope of surprise, the Pêcheur knew himself thoroughly overmatched, Temeraire a more agile flyer and in a wholly different class so far as weight. Having risked and lost a throw of the dice, he and his captain were evidently not inclined to try their luck again; Temeraire had scarcely stooped before the Pêcheur dropped low to the water and beat away quickly over the waves, his riflemen keeping up a steady fusillade to clear his retreat.

Laurence turned his attention above, to the furious howling of the ferals’ voices: they could scarcely be seen, having lured the French high aloft, where their greater ease with the thin air could tell to their advantage. ‘Where the devil is my glass?’ he said, and took it from Allen. The ferals were making a sort of taunting game of the business, darting in at the French dragons and away, setting up a raucous caterwauling as they went, without very much actual fighting to be seen. It would have done nicely to frighten away a rival gang in the wild, Laurence supposed, particularly one so outnumbered, but he did not think the French were to be so easily diverted; indeed as he watched, the five enemy dragons, all of them little Poux-de-Ciels, drew into close formation and promptly bowled through the cloud of ferals.

The ferals, still focused on their show of bravado, scattered too late to evade the rifle-fire, and now some of their shrill cries expressed real pain. Temeraire was beating furiously, his sides belling out like sails as he heaved for the breath to get himself as high, but he could not easily gain such altitude, and would be at a disadvantage to the smaller French beasts when he did. ‘Give them a gun, quickly, and show the signal for descent,’ Laurence shouted to Turner, without much hope; but the ferals came plummeting down in a rush when Turner put out the flags, none too reluctant to position themselves around Temeraire.

Arkady was keeping up a low, indignant clamouring under his breath, nudging anxiously at his second Wringe, the worst-hit, her dark grey hide marred with streaks of darker blood. She had taken several balls to the flesh and one unlucky hit to the right wing, which had struck her on the bias and scraped a long, ugly furrow across the tender webbing and two spines; she was listing in mid-air awkwardly as she tried to favour it.

‘Send her below to shore,’ Laurence said, scarcely needing the speaking-trumpet with the dragons crowded so close that they might have been talking in a clearing and not the open sky. ‘And pray tell them again, they must keep well-clear of the guns; I am sorry they have had so hot a lesson. Let us keep together and—’ but this came too late, as the French were advancing down in arrow-head formation, and the ferals followed his first instruction too closely on and had spread themselves out across the sky.

The French also at once separated; even together they were not a match for Temeraire, who they had surely recognized, and by way of protection engaged themselves closely with the ferals. It must have been an odd experience for them; Poux-de-Ciel were generally the lightest of the French combat breeds, and now they were finding themselves the relative heavy-weights in battle against the ferals, who even where their wingspan and length matched were all of them lean and concave-bellied creatures, a sharp contrast against the deep-chested muscle of their opponents.

The ferals were now more wary, but also more savage, hot with anger at the injury to their fellow and their own smaller stinging wounds. They used their darting lunges to better effect, learning quickly how to feint in and provoke the rifle volleys, then come in again for a real attack. The smallest of them, Gherni and little motley-coloured Lester, were attacking one Pou-de-Ciel together, with the more wily Hertaz pouncing in every now and again, claws blackened with blood; the others were engaged singly, and more than holding their own, but Laurence quickly perceived the danger, even as Temeraire called, ‘Arkady! Bnezh s’li taqom—’ and broke off to say, ‘Laurence, they are not listening to me.’

‘Yes, they will be in the soup in a moment,’ Laurence agreed; the French dragons, though they seemed on the face of it to be fighting as independently as the ferals, were all manoeuvring skilfully, their backs to one another; indeed they were only allowing the ferals to herd them into formation, which should allow them to make another devastating pass. ‘Can you break them apart, when they have come together?’