Empire of Ivory

He stifled his first reaction, and spoke mildly of the arrangements to Major Seiberling, now the senior Prussian; implying as best he could without outright falsehood that the Admiralty meant to wait until General Kalkreuth was recovered before they gave him an official welcome.

‘Oh; must we fly again?’ Temeraire said. He heaved himself wearily back onto his feet, and approached the drowsing ferals to nudge them awake: they had all crumpled into somnolence after their dinners.

Their flight to Edinburgh was slow and the days were growing short. It was only a week to Christmas, Laurence realized abruptly. The sky was fully dark by the time they reached their destination; but the castle shone out for them like a beacon, its windows and walls bright with torches as it stood on its high rocky hill above the shadowed expanse of the covert. The narrow buildings of the medieval part of the city crammed together close around it.

Temeraire hovered doubtfully above the cramped and winding streets; there were many spires and pointed roofs to contend with, and not very much room between them, giving the city the appearance of a spear-pit. ‘I do not see how I am to land here,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I am sure to break one of those buildings; why have they built these streets so small? It was much more convenient in Peking.’

‘If you cannot do it without hurting yourself, we will go away again, and orders be damned,’ Laurence said; his patience was grown very thin.

But in the end Temeraire managed to let himself down into the old cathedral square without bringing down more than a few lumps of ornamental masonry; the ferals, being all of them considerably smaller, had less difficulty. They were a little anxious at being removed from the fields full of sheep and cattle, however, and suspicious of their new surroundings; Arkady bent low and put his eye to an open window to peer inside at the empty rooms, making sceptical inquires of Temeraire as he did so.

‘That is where people sleep, is it not, Laurence? Like a pavilion,’ Temeraire said, trying cautiously to rearrange his tail into a more comfortable position. ‘And sometimes it is where they sell jewels and other pleasant things. But where are all the people?’

Laurence was quite sure that all the people had fled; the wealthiest tradesman in the city would sleep in a gutter tonight, if it were the only bed he could find in the new part of town, safely away from the pack of dragons who had invaded his streets.

The dragons eventually disposed of themselves in some manner of reasonable comfort; the ferals, used to sleeping in rough-hewn caves, were even pleased with the soft, rounded cobblestones. ‘I do not mind sleeping in the street, Laurence, truly; it is quite dry, and I am sure it will all be very interesting to look at, in the morning,’ Temeraire said, consolingly, before falling asleep with his head lodged in one alleyway and his tail in another.

But Laurence minded for him; it was not the sort of welcome which he felt they might justly have looked for, a long year away from home, having been sent halfway round the world and back. It was one thing to find themselves in rough quarters while on campaign, where no man could expect much better and might be grateful for a cow-byre to lay his head upon. But to be deposited like baggage, on cold unsanitary stones stained dark with years of street refuse, was something other; the dragons might at least have been granted use of the open farmland outside the city.

Laurence knew it was unconscious malice: the common unthinking assumption made by men who treated dragons only as inconvenient, if elevated, livestock, to be managed and herded without consideration for their own sentiments. It was an ingrained assumption. Even Laurence had recognized it as outrageous only when forced to do so by witnessing by contrast the conditions he had observed in China, where dragons were received as full members of society.

‘Well,’ Temeraire said reasonably, while Laurence laid out his own bedroll inside the house beside his head, leaving the windows open so they might continue to speak, ‘we knew how matters were here, and so we cannot be very surprised. Besides, I did not come back to make myself more comfortable, or I would have stayed in China. We must improve the circumstances of our friends. Not,’ he added, ‘that I would object to having my own pavilion; but I would rather have liberty. Dyer, pray will you retrieve that bit of gristle from between my teeth? I cannot reach far enough to put my claw upon it.’

Dyer, startled from his half-doze upon Temeraire’s back, ran to fetch the small pick from their luggage, and then scrambled obediently into Temeraire’s open jaws to scrape away.

‘You would have more luck achieving the latter if there were more men ready to grant you the former,’ Laurence said. ‘I do not mean to counsel you to despair; indeed we must not. But I had hoped to find, upon our arrival, more respect for you than when we departed, not less. It would have brought material advantage to our cause.’

Temeraire waited until Dyer had climbed out again to answer. ‘I am sure they will listen to the merits of such reform,’ he said; a large assumption, which Laurence was not at all sanguine enough to share, ‘and all the more, when I have seen Maximus and Lily and they are ranged with me. And perhaps Excidium also, for he has been in the most battles: no one could help but be impressed by him. I am sure they will see the wisdom of my arguments; they will not be as stupid as Eroica and the others were,’ Temeraire added, with obvious shades of resentment. The Prussian dragons had at first rather disdained his attempts to convince them of the merits of greater liberty and education among dragons. They were as fond of their traditional rigorous military order as their handlers, and preferred to ridicule the habits that Temeraire had acquired in China as effete.

‘I hope you will forgive me for my bluntness; but I am afraid that even if you allied the hearts and minds of every dragon in Britain with your own, it would make very little difference. As a political party you have no influence with Parliament,’ Laurence said.

‘Perhaps we do not, but I imagine if we were to go to this Parliament, we would be attended to,’ Temeraire said, an image most convincing, if not likely to produce the sort of attention Temeraire desired.

He said as much, and added, ‘We must find some better means of drawing sympathy to your cause, from those who have the influence to foster political change. I am only sorry I cannot apply to my father for advice, as relations stand between us.’

‘Well, I am not sorry, at all,’ Temeraire said, putting back his ruff. ‘I am sure he would not have helped us; and we can do perfectly well without him.’ Aside from his loyalty, which would have made him resent coldness towards Laurence on any grounds, Temeraire viewed Lord Allendale’s objections to the Aerial Corps as objections to him personally. Despite them never having met, he felt violently towards anyone whose sentiments would have seen Laurence separated from him.

‘My father has been engaged in politics for half of his life,’ Laurence said. Lord Allendale made special effort towards abolition in particular, it was a movement that had been met with as much scorn at its inception, as Laurence anticipated for Temeraire’s own cause. ‘I assure you his advice would be of the greatest value; and I do mean to effect a repair, if I can, which would allow us to consult him.’

‘I would as soon have kept it, myself,’ Temeraire muttered, meaning the elegant red vase that Laurence had purchased in China as a conciliatory gift. It had since travelled with them five thousand miles and more, and Temeraire had grown as possessive of it. He sighed when it was finally sent away, with a brief and apologetic note.

But Laurence was all too conscious of the difficulties that faced them, and of his own inadequacy to progress so vast and complicated a campaign. He had been a boy when Wilberforce had come to their house. He came as the guest of one of Lord Allendale’s political friends, newly inspired with fervour against the slave trade and just beginning the parliamentary campaign to abolish it. That was twenty years ago, and despite the most heroic efforts by men of ability, wealth and power greater than his own, a million souls or more must have been carried away from their native shores since then.

Temeraire had been hatched for only a few years; for all his intelligence, he could not yet grasp the weary struggle which was the required path to a political position, however moral and just it was, however necessary, or contrary to their immediate self-interest it was. Laurence bade him good-night without further disheartening advice; but as he closed the windows, which began to rattle gently from the sleeping dragon’s breath, the distance to the covert beyond the castle walls seemed to him less easily bridged than all the long miles which had brought them home from China.

The Edinburgh streets were quiet in the morning, unnaturally so, and deserted but for the dragons sleeping in stretched ranks over the old grey cobbles. Temeraire’s great bulk was heaped awkwardly before the smoke-stained cathedral and his tail running down into an alleyway scarcely wide enough to hold it. The sky was clear, cold and very blue, only a scattering of terraced clouds ran out to sea, a faint suggestion of pink and orange lighting the stones.

Tharkay was awake, the only soul stirring; he sat crouched against the cold in one of the narrow doorways; an elegant home, the heavy door stood open behind him. He had a cup of tea, steaming in the air. ‘May I offer you one?’ he inquired. ‘I am sure the owners would not begrudge us.’

‘No, thank you; I must go up and see about the dragons,’ Laurence said; he had been woken by a runner from the castle, summoning him to a meeting in the castle, at once. Another piece of discourtesy, when they had arrived so late; and to make matters worse, the boy had been unable to tell him if any provision had been made for the hungry dragons. What the ferals would say when they awoke, Laurence did not like to think.

‘You need not worry; I am sure they can fend for themselves,’ Tharkay said blandly, not a cheering prospect, and offered Laurence his own cup as consolation; Laurence sighed and drained it, grateful for the strong, hot brew.

He was escorted from the castle gates to the admiral’s office by a young red-coated Marine, their path winding around to the headquarters building through the medieval stone courtyards, empty and free from hurry in the early morning dimness. The doors were opened, and he went in stiffly, straight-shouldered; his face had set into disapproving lines, cold and rigid. ‘Sir,’ he said, eyes fixed at a point upon the wall; and only then glanced down, and said, surprised, ‘Admiral Lenton?’

‘Laurence. Yes, sit; sit down.’ Lenton dismissed the guard, and the door closed upon them and the musty, book-lined room; the Admiral’s desk was nearly clear, but for a single small map, a handful of papers. Lenton sat for a moment silently. ‘It is damned good to see you,’ he said at last. ‘Very good to see you indeed. Very good.’

Laurence was very much shocked at his appearance. In the year since their last meeting, Lenton seemed to have aged ten: hair gone entirely white, and a vague, rheumy look in his eyes; his jowls hung slack. ‘I hope I find you well, sir,’ Laurence said, deeply sorry, no longer wondering why Lenton had been transferred north to Edinburgh, a quieter post. He wondered what illness had ravaged him so, and who had been made commander at Dover in his place.

‘Oh…’ Lenton waved his hand, fell silent. ‘I suppose you have not been told anything,’ he said, after a moment. ‘No, that is right; we agreed we could not risk word getting out.’

‘No, sir,’ Laurence said, anger kindling afresh. ‘I have heard nothing, and been told nothing. Our allies asked me daily for word of the Corps, until they knew there was no more use in asking.’

He had given his personal assurances to the Prussian commanders. He had sworn that the Aerial Corps would not fail them; that the promised company of dragons, which might have turned the tide against Napoleon in this last disastrous campaign, would still arrive at any moment. He and Temeraire had stayed and fought in their place when the dragons did not arrive, risking their own lives and those of his crew in an increasingly hopeless cause; but the dragons had never come.

Lenton did not immediately answer, but sat nodding to himself, murmuring. ‘Yes, that is right, of course.’ He tapped a hand on the desk, looked at some papers without reading them, a portrait of distraction.

Laurence added more sharply, ‘Sir, I can hardly believe you would have lent yourself to so treacherous a course, and one so terribly short-sighted; Napoleon’s victory was by no means assured, if the twenty promised dragons had been sent.’

‘What?’ Lenton looked up. ‘Oh, Laurence, there was no question of that. No, none at all. I am sorry for the secrecy, but as for not sending the dragons, that called for no decision. There were no dragons to send.’

Victoriatus heaved his sides out and in, a gentle, measured pace. His nostrils were wide and red, a thick flaking crust edged their rims, and dried pink foam lingered about the corners of his mouth. His eyes were closed, but after every few breaths they would open a little, dull and unseeing with exhaustion; he gave a rasping, hollow cough that flecked the ground before him with blood; and subsided once again into the half-slumber that was all he could manage. His captain, Richard Clark, was lying on a cot beside him: unshaven, in filthy linen, an arm flung up to cover his eyes and the other hand resting on the dragon’s foreleg; he did not move, even when they approached.

After a few moments, Lenton touched Laurence on the arm. ‘Come, enough; let’s away.’ He turned slowly aside, leaning heavily upon a cane, and took Laurence back up the green hill to the castle. The corridors, as they returned to his offices, seemed no longer peaceful but hushed, sunk in irreparable gloom.

Laurence refused a glass of wine, too numb to think of refreshment. ‘It is a sort of consumption,’ Lenton said, looking out the windows that faced onto the covert yard; Victoriatus and twelve other great beasts lay screened from one another by the ancient windbreaks, piled branches and stones grown over with ivy.

‘How widespread?’ Laurence asked.

‘Everywhere,’ Lenton said. ‘Dover, Portsmouth, Middlesbrough. The breeding grounds in Wales and Halifax; Gibraltar; everywhere the couriers went on their rounds; everywhere.’ He turned away from the windows and took his chair again. ‘We were inexpressibly stupid; we thought it was only a cold, you see.’

‘But we had word of that before we had even rounded the Cape of Good Hope, on our journey east,’ Laurence said, appalled. ‘Has it lasted so long?’

‘In Halifax it started in September of the year five,’ Lenton said. ‘The surgeons think now it was the American dragon, that big Indian fellow: he was kept there, and then the first dragons to fall sick here were those who had shared the transport with him to Dover; then it began in Wales when he was sent to the breeding grounds there. He is perfectly hearty, not a cough or a sneeze; very nearly the only dragon left in England who is, except for a handful of hatchlings we have tucked away in Ireland.’

‘You know we have brought you another twenty,’ Laurence said, taking a brief refuge in making his report.

‘Yes, these fellows are from where, Turkestan?’ Lenton said: willing to follow. ‘Did I understand your letter correctly; they were brigands?’

‘I would rather say that they were jealous of their territory,’ Laurence said. ‘They are not very pretty, but there is no malice in them. Though what use twenty dragons can be, to cover all England—’ He stopped. ‘Lenton, surely something can be done? Must be done?’ he said.

Lenton only shook his head briefly. ‘The usual remedies did some good, at the beginning,’ he said. ‘Quieted the coughing, and so forth. They could still fly, if they did not have much appetite; and colds are usually such trifling things with them. But it lingered on so long, and after a while the possets seemed to lose their effect. Some began to grow worse—’

He stopped, and after a long moment he sighed and added with an effort, ‘Obversaria is dead.’

‘Good God!’ Laurence cried. ‘Sir, I am shocked to hear it – so deeply grieved.’ It was a dreadful loss: she had been flying with Lenton some forty years, the flag-dragon at Dover for the last ten, and though relatively young had produced four eggs already; she was perhaps the finest flyer in all England, with few to even compete with her for the title. ‘That was in, let me see, August,’ Lenton said, as if he had not heard. ‘After Inlacrimas, but before Minacitus. It takes some of them worse than others. The very young hold up best, and the old ones linger; it is the ones between who have been dying. Dying first, anyway; I suppose they will all go in the end.’

Chapter Two

‘Captain,’ Keynes said, ‘I am sorry, but any gormless imbecile can bandage up a bullet-wound, and a gormless imbecile is very likely to be assigned in my place. I cannot stay with the healthiest dragon in Britain when the quarantine-coverts are full of the sick.’

‘I perfectly understand, Mr. Keynes, and you need say no more,’ Laurence said. ‘Will you not fly with us as far as Dover?’

‘No; Victoriatus will not last the week; I will wait and attend the dissection with Dr. Harrow,’ Keynes said, with brutal practicality that made Laurence flinch. ‘I hope we may learn something about the characteristics of the disease. Some of the couriers are still flying; one will carry me onwards.’

‘Well,’ Laurence said, and shook the surgeon’s hand. ‘I hope we shall see you with us again soon.’

‘I hope you will not,’ Keynes said, in his usual acerbic manner. ‘If you do, I will otherwise be lacking for patients, which from the course of this disease, will mean they are all dead.’

Laurence could hardly say his spirits were lowered; they had already been reduced so far as to make the doctors loss make little difference. But he was sorry. Dragon-surgeons were not by and large near so incompetent as the naval breed, and despite Keynes’ words Laurence did not fear his eventual successor, but to lose a good man, his courage and sense proven and his eccentricities known, was never pleasant; and Temeraire would not like it.

‘He is not hurt?’ Temeraire pressed. ‘He is not sick?’

‘No, Temeraire; but he is needed elsewhere,’ Laurence said. ‘He is a senior surgeon; I am sure you would not deny his attentions to your comrades suffering from this illness.’

‘Well, if Maximus or Lily should need him,’ Temeraire said, crabbily, and drew furrows in the ground. ‘Shall I see them again soon? I am sure they cannot be so very ill. Maximus is the biggest dragon I have ever seen, even though we have been to China; he is sure to recover quickly.’

‘No, my dear,’ Laurence said, uneasily, and broke the worst of the news. ‘The sick… none of them have recovered, and you must take the very greatest care not to go anywhere near the quarantine-grounds.’

‘But I do not understand,’ Temeraire said. ‘If they do not recover, then—’ He paused.

Laurence only looked away. Temeraire had good excuse for not understanding at once. Dragons were hardy creatures, and many breeds lived a century and more; he might have justly expected to know Maximus and Lily for longer than a man’s lifetime, if the war did not take them from him.

At last, sounding almost bewildered, Temeraire said, ‘But I have so much to tell them – I came for them, so they might learn that dragons may read and write, and have property, and do things other than fight.’

‘I will write a letter for you, which we can send to them with your greetings, and they will be happier to know you are well and safe from contagion than for your company,’ Laurence said. Temeraire did not answer; he was very still, and his head bowed deeply to his chest. ‘We will be nearby,’ Laurence went on, after a moment, ‘and you may write to them every day, if you wish; when we have finished our work.’

‘Patrolling, I suppose,’ Temeraire said, with a very unusual note of bitterness, ‘and more stupid formation-work; while they are all sick, and we can do nothing.’

Laurence looked down, into his lap, where their new orders lay amid the oilcloth packet of all his papers, and had no comfort to offer: brusque instructions for their immediate removal to Dover, where Temeraire’s expectations were likely to be answered in every particular.

He was not encouraged by their arrival at Dover. They reported their presence directly after they had landed, but Laurence was left to cool his heels in the hall outside the new admiral’s office for thirty minutes, listening to voices by no means indistinct despite the heavy oaken door. He recognized Jane Roland shouting; the voices that answered her were unfamiliar too, and Laurence rose to his feet abruptly as the door was flung open. A tall man in a naval coat came rushing out with clothing and expression both disordered, his lower cheeks mottled to a moderate glow under his sideburns; he did not pause, but threw Laurence a furious glare before he left.

‘Come in, Laurence, come in,’ Jane called, and he entered the room. She stood with the admiral, an older man dressed rather astonishingly in a black frockcoat and knee breeches with buckled shoes.

‘You have not met Dr. Wapping, I think,’ Jane said. ‘Sir, this is Captain Laurence, of Temeraire.’

‘Sir,’ Laurence said, and made his leg deep to cover his confusion and dismay. He supposed that if all the dragons were in quarantine, putting the covert in the charge of a physician was the sort of thing that would make sense to landsmen. The notion had once been advanced to him by a family friend seeking his influence on behalf of a less-fortunate relation, to put forward a surgeon – not even a naval surgeon – for the command of a hospital ship.

‘I am honoured to make your acquaintance, Captain,’ Dr. Wapping said. ‘Admiral, I will take my leave; I beg your pardon for having been the cause of so unpleasant a scene.’

‘Nonsense; those rascals at the Victualing Board are a pack of unhanged scoundrels, and I am happy to put them in their place; good day to you. Would you credit it, Laurence,’ Jane said, as Wapping closed the door behind himself, ‘the wretches are not content that the poor creatures eat scarcely enough to feed a bird, but they must send us diseased stock and scrawny too?

‘But this is not any way to welcome you home.’ She caught him by the shoulders and kissed him soundly on both cheeks. ‘You are a damned sight. Whatever has happened to your coat? Will you have a glass of wine?’ She poured for them both without waiting his answer and he took the drink it in a sort of appalled blankness. ‘I have all your letters, so I have a tolerable notion what you have been doing; you must forgive me my silence, Laurence. I found it easier to write nothing than to leave out the only matter of any importance.’

‘No. That is, yes, of course,’ he said, and sat down with her at the fire. Her coat had been thrown over the arm of her chair, and now that he looked, he could see the admiral’s fourth bar on the shoulders; and the front, which was now magnificently frogged with braid. Her face, too, was altered but not for the better: she had lost a stone of weight at least, and her dark hair, cropped short, was shot with grey.

‘Well, I am sorry to be such a ruin,’ she said ruefully, and laughed away his apologies. ‘No, we are all of us decaying, Laurence, there is no denying it. You have seen poor Lenton, I suppose. He held up like a hero for three weeks after she died, but then we found him on the floor of his bedroom in an apoplexy. For a week he could not speak without slurring his words. He came along a good ways afterwards, but he is still only a shade of himself.’

‘I am deeply sorry for it,’ Laurence said, ‘though I drink to your promotion,’ and by a Herculean effort he managed it without a stutter.