NAOMI NOVIK

Throne of Jade

Copyright

HarperVoyager

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006

Copyright © Temeraire LCC 2006

Naomi Novik asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007258727

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780007318575

Version: 2018-11-08

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Part I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Part II

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part III

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PART I

Chapter One

The day was unseasonably warm for November, but in some misguided deference to the Chinese embassy, the fire in the Admiralty boardroom had been heaped excessively high, and Laurence was standing directly before it. He had dressed with especial care, in his best uniform, and all throughout the long and unbearable interview, the lining of his thick bottle-green broadcloth coat had been growing steadily more sodden with sweat.

Over the doorway, behind Lord Barham, the official indicator with its compass arrow showed the direction of the wind over the Channel: in the north-northeast today, fair for France; very likely even now some ships of the Channel fleet were standing in to have a look at Napoleon’s harbours. His shoulders held at attention, Laurence fixed his eyes upon the broad metal disk and tried to keep himself distracted with such speculation; he did not trust himself to meet the cold, unfriendly gaze fixed upon him.

Barham stopped speaking and coughed again into his fist; the elaborate phrases he had prepared sat not at all in his sailor’s mouth, and at the end of every awkward, halting line, he stopped and darted a look over at the Chinese with a nervous agitation that approached obsequiousness. It was not a very creditable performance, but under ordinary circumstances, Laurence would have felt a degree of sympathy for Barham’s position: some sort of formal message had been anticipated, even perhaps an envoy, but no one had ever imagined that the Emperor of China would send his own brother halfway around the world.

Prince Yongxing could, with a word, set their two nations at war; and there was besides something inherently awful in his presence: the impervious silence with which he met Barham’s every remark; the overwhelming splendour of his dark yellow robes, embroidered thickly with dragons; the slow and relentless tapping of his long, jewel-encrusted fingernail against the arm of his chair. He did not even look at Barham: he only stared directly across the table at Laurence, grim and thin-lipped.

His retinue was so large they filled the boardroom to the corners, a dozen guards all sweltering and dazed in their quilted armour and as many servants besides, most with nothing to do, only attendants of one sort or another, all of them standing along the far wall of the room and trying to stir the air with broad-panelled fans. One man, evidently a translator, stood behind the prince, murmuring when Yongxing lifted a hand, generally after one of Barham’s more involved periods.

Two other official envoys sat to Yongxing’s either side. These men had been presented to Laurence only perfunctorily, and they had neither of them said a word, though the younger, called Sun Kai, had been watching all the proceedings, impassively, and following the translator’s words with quiet attention. The elder, a big, round-bellied man with a tufted grey beard, had gradually been overcome by the heat: his head had sunk forward onto his chest, mouth half-open for air, and his hand was barely even moving his fan towards his face. They were robed in dark blue silk, almost as elaborately as the prince himself, and together they made an imposing façade: certainly no such embassy had ever been seen in the West.

A far more practised diplomat than Barham might have been pardoned for succumbing to some degree of servility, but Laurence was scarcely in any mood to be forgiving; though he was nearly more furious with himself, at having hoped for anything better. He had come expecting to plead his case, and privately in his heart he had even imagined a reprieve; instead he had been scolded in terms he would have scrupled to use to a raw lieutenant, and all in front of a foreign prince and his retinue, assembled like a tribunal to hear his crimes. Still he held his tongue as long as he could manage, but when Barham at last came about to saying, with an air of great condescension, ‘Naturally, Captain, we have it in mind that you shall be put to another hatchling, afterwards,’ Laurence had reached his limit.

‘No, sir,’ he said, breaking in. ‘I am sorry, but no: I will not do it, and as for another post, I must beg to be excused.’

Sitting beside Barham, Admiral Powys of the Aerial Corps had remained quite silent through the course of the meeting; now he only shook his head, without any appearance of surprise, and folded his hands together over his ample belly. Barham gave him a furious look and said to Laurence, ‘Perhaps I am not clear, Captain; this is not a request. You have been given your orders, you will carry them out.’

‘I will be hanged first,’ Laurence said flatly, past caring that he was speaking in such terms to the First Lord of the Admiralty: the death of his career if he had still been a naval officer, and it could scarcely do him any good even as an aviator. Yet if they meant to send Temeraire away, back to China, his career as an aviator was finished: he would never accept a position with any other dragon. None other would ever compare, to Laurence’s mind, and he would not subject a hatchling to being second-best when there were men in the Corps lined up six-deep for the chance.

Yongxing did not say anything, but his lips tightened; his attendants shifted and murmured amongst themselves in their own language. Laurence did not think he was imagining the hint of disdain in their tone, directed less at himself than at Barham; and the First Lord evidently shared the impression, his face growing mottled and choleric with the effort of preserving the appearance of calm. ‘By God, Laurence; if you imagine you can stand here in the middle of Whitehall and mutiny, you are wrong; I think perhaps you are forgetting that your first duty is to your country and your King; not to this dragon of yours.’

‘No, sir; it is you who are forgetting. It was for duty I put Temeraire into harness, sacrificing my naval rank, with no knowledge then that he was any breed truly out of the ordinary, much less a Celestial,’ Laurence said. ‘And for duty I took him through a difficult training and into a hard and dangerous service; for duty I have taken him into battle, and asked him to hazard his life and happiness. I will not answer such loyal service with lies and deceit.’

‘Enough noise, there,’ Barham said. ‘Anyone would think you were being asked to hand over your firstborn. I am sorry if you have made such a pet of the creature you cannot bear to lose him—’

‘Temeraire is neither my pet nor my property, sir,’ Laurence snapped. ‘He has served England and the King as much as I have, or you yourself, and now, because he does not choose to go back to China, you stand there and ask me to lie to him. I cannot imagine what claim to honour I should have if I agreed to it. Indeed,’ he added, unable to restrain himself, ‘I wonder that you should even have made the proposal; I wonder at it greatly.’

‘Oh, your soul to the devil, Laurence,’ Barham said, losing his last veneer of formality; he had been a serving sea-officer for years before joining the Government, and he was still very little a politician when his temper was up. ‘He is a Chinese dragon, it stands to reason he will like China better; in any case, he belongs to them, and there is an end to it. The name of thief is a very unpleasant one, and His Majesty’s Government does not propose to invite it.’

‘I know how I am to take that, I suppose.’ If Laurence had not already been half-broiled, he would have flushed. ‘And I utterly reject the accusation, sir. These gentlemen do not deny they had given the egg to France; we seized it from a French man-of-war; the ship and the egg were condemned as lawful prize out of hand in the Admiralty courts, as you very well know. By no possible understanding does Temeraire belong to them; if they were so anxious about letting a Celestial out of their hands, they ought not have given him away in the shell.’

Yongxing snorted and broke into their shouting-match. ‘That is correct,’ he said; his English was thickly-accented, formal and slow, but the measured cadences only lent all the more effect to his words. ‘From the first it was folly to let the second-born egg of Lung Tien Qian pass over sea. That, no one can now dispute.’

It silenced them both, and for a moment no one spoke, save the translator quietly rendering Yongxing’s words for the rest of the Chinese. Then Sun Kai unexpectedly said something in their tongue which made Yongxing look around at him sharply. Sun kept his head inclined deferentially, and did not look up, but still it was the first suggestion Laurence had seen that their embassy might perhaps not speak with a single voice. But Yongxing snapped a reply, in a tone which did not allow of any further comment, and Sun did not venture to make one. Satisfied that he had quelled his subordinate, Yongxing turned back to them and added, ‘Yet regardless of the evil chance that brought him into your hands, Lung Tien Xiang was meant to go to the French Emperor, not to be made beast of burden for a common soldier.’

Laurence stiffened; common soldier rankled, and for the first time he turned to look directly at the prince, meeting that cold, contemptuous gaze with an equally steady one. ‘We are at war with France, sir; if you choose to ally yourself with our enemies and send them material assistance, you can hardly complain when we take it in fair fight.’

‘Nonsense!’ Barham broke in, at once and loudly. ‘China is by no means an ally of France, by no means at all; we certainly do not view China as a French ally. You are not here to speak to His Imperial Highness, Laurence; control yourself,’ he added, in a savage undertone.

But Yongxing ignored the attempt at interruption. ‘And now you make piracy your defence?’ he said, contemptuous. ‘We do not concern ourselves with the customs of barbaric nations. How merchants and thieves agree to pillage one another is not of interest to the Celestial Throne, except when they choose to insult the Emperor as you have.’

‘No, Your Highness, no such thing, not in the least,’ Barham said hurriedly, even while he looked pure venom at Laurence. ‘His Majesty and his Government have nothing but the deepest affection for the Emperor; no insult would ever willingly be offered, I assure you. If we had only known of the extraordinary nature of the egg, of your objections, this situation would never have arisen—’

‘Now, however, you are well aware,’ Yongxing said, ‘and the insult remains: Lung Tien Xiang is still in harness, treated little better than a horse, expected to carry burdens and exposed to all the brutalities of war, and all this, with a mere captain as his companion. Better had his egg sunk to the bottom of the ocean!’

Appalled, Laurence was glad to see this callousness left Barham and Powys as staring and speechless as himself. Even among Yongxing’s own retinue, the translator flinched, shifting uneasily, and for once did not translate the prince’s words back into Chinese.

‘Sir, I assure you, since we learned of your objections, he has not been under harness at all, not a stitch of it,’ Barham said, recovering. ‘We have been at the greatest of pains to see to Temeraire’s – that is, to Lung Tien Xiang’s – comfort, and to make redress for any inadequacy in his treatment. He is no longer assigned to Captain Laurence, that I can assure you: they have not spoken these last two weeks.’

The reminder was a bitter one, and Laurence felt what little remained of his temper fraying away. ‘If either of you had any real concern for his comfort, you would consult his feelings, not your own desires,’ he said, his voice rising, a voice that had been trained to bellow orders through a gale. ‘You complain of having him under harness, and in the same breath ask me to trick him into chains, so you might drag him away against his will. I will not do it; I will never do it, and be damned to you all.’

Judging by his expression, Barham would have been glad to have Laurence himself dragged away in chains: eyes almost bulging, hands flat on the table, on the verge of rising; for the first time, Admiral Powys spoke, breaking in, and forestalled him. ‘Enough, Laurence, hold your tongue. Barham, nothing further can be served by keeping him. Out, Laurence; out at once: you are dismissed.’

The long habit of obedience held: Laurence flung himself out of the room. The intervention likely saved him from an arrest for insubordination, but he went with no sense of gratitude; a thousand things were pent up in his throat, and even as the door swung heavily shut behind him, he turned back. But the Marines stationed to either side were gazing at him with thoughtlessly rude interest, as if he were a curiosity exhibited for their entertainment. Under their open, inquisitive looks he mastered his temper a little, and turned away before he could betray himself more badly.

Barham’s words were swallowed by the heavy wood, but the inarticulate rumble of his still-raised voice followed Laurence down the corridor. He felt almost drunk with anger, his breath coming in short abrupt spurts and his vision obscured, not by tears, not at all by tears, except of rage. The antechamber of the Admiralty was full of sea-officers, clerks, political officials, even a green-coated aviator rushing through with dispatches. Laurence shouldered his way roughly to the doors, his shaking hands thrust deep into his coat pockets to conceal them from view.

He struck out into the crashing din of late afternoon London, Whitehall full of working men going home for their suppers, and the bawling of the hackney drivers and chairmen over all, crying, ‘Make a lane, there,’ through the crowds. His feelings were as disordered as his surroundings, and he was only navigating the street by instinct; he had to be called three times before he recognized his own name.

He turned only reluctantly: he had no desire to be forced to return a civil word or gesture from a former colleague. But with a measure of relief he saw it was Captain Roland, not an ignorant acquaintance. He was surprised to see her; very surprised, for her dragon, Excidium, was a formation-leader at the Dover covert. She could not easily have been spared from her duties, and in any case she could not come to the Admiralty openly, being a female officer, one of those whose existence was made necessary by the insistence of Longwings on female captains. The secret was but barely known outside the ranks of the aviators, and jealously kept against certain public disapproval; Laurence himself had found it difficult to accept the notion, at first, but he had now grown so used to the idea that now Roland looked very odd to him out of uniform: she had put on skirts and a heavy cloak by way of concealment, neither of which suited her.

‘I have been puffing after you for the last five minutes,’ she said, taking his arm as she reached him. ‘I was wandering about that great cavern of a building, waiting for you to come out, and then you went straight past me in such a ferocious hurry I could scarcely catch you. These clothes are a damned nuisance; I hope you appreciate the trouble I am taking for you, Laurence. But never mind,’ she said, her voice gentling. ‘I can see from your face that it did not go well: let us go and have some dinner, and you shall tell me everything.’

‘Thank you, Jane; I am glad to see you,’ he said, and let her turn him in the direction of her inn, though he did not think he could swallow. ‘How do you come to be here, though? Surely there is nothing wrong with Excidium?’

‘Nothing in the least, unless he has given himself indigestion,’ she said. ‘No; but Lily and Captain Harcourt are coming along splendidly, and so Lenton was able to assign them a double patrol and give me a few days of liberty. Excidium took it as excuse to eat three fat cows at once, the wretched greedy thing; he barely cracked an eyelid when I proposed my leaving him with Sanders – that is my new first lieutenant – and coming to bear you company. So I put together a street-going rig and came up with the courier. Oh hell: wait a minute, will you?’ She stopped and kicked vigorously, shaking her skirts loose: they were too long, and had caught on her heels.

He held her by the elbow so she did not topple over, and afterwards they continued on through the London streets at a slower pace. Roland’s mannish stride and her scarred face drew enough rude stares that Laurence began to glare at the passers-by who looked too long, though she herself paid them no mind; she noticed his behaviour, however, and said, ‘You are ferocious out of temper; do not frighten those poor girls. What did those fellows say to you at the Admiralty?’

‘You have heard, I suppose, that an embassy has come from China; they mean to take Temeraire back with them, and Government does not care to object. But evidently he will have none of it: tells them all to go hang themselves, though they have been at him for weeks now to go,’ Laurence said. As he spoke, a sharp sensation of pain, like a constriction just under his breastbone, made itself felt. He could picture quite clearly Temeraire kept nearly all alone in the old, worn-down London covert, scarcely used in the last hundred years, with neither Laurence nor his crew to keep him company, no one to read to him, and of his own kind, only a few small courier-beasts flying through on dispatch service.

‘Of course he will not go,’ Roland said. ‘I cannot believe they imagined they could persuade him to leave you. Surely they ought to know better; I have always heard the Chinese cried up as the very pinnacle of dragon-handlers.’

‘Their prince has made no secret he thinks very little of me; likely they expected Temeraire to share much the same opinion, and to be pleased to go back,’ Laurence said. ‘In any case, they grow tired of trying to persuade him; so that villain Barham ordered I should lie to him and say we were assigned to Gibraltar, all to get him aboard a transport and out to sea, too far for him to fly back to land, before he knew what they were about.’

‘Oh, infamous.’ Her hand tightened almost painfully on his arm. ‘Did Powys have nothing to say to it? I cannot believe he let them suggest such a thing to you; one cannot expect a naval officer to understand these things, but Powys should have explained matters to him.’

‘I dare say he can do nothing; he is only a serving officer, and Barham is appointed by the Ministry,’ Laurence said. ‘Powys at least saved me from putting my neck in a noose: I was too angry to control myself, and he sent me away.’

They had reached the Strand; the increase in traffic made conversation difficult, and they had to pay attention to avoid being splashed by the questionable grey slush heaped in the gutters, thrown up onto the pavement by the lumbering carts and hackney wheels. His anger ebbing away, Laurence was increasingly low in his spirits.

From the moment of separation, he had consoled himself with the daily expectation that it would soon end: the Chinese would soon see Temeraire did not wish to go, or the Admiralty would give up the attempt to placate them. It had seemed a cruel sentence even so; they had not been parted a full day’s time in the months since Temeraire’s hatching, and Laurence had scarcely known what to do with himself, or how to fill the hours. But even the two long weeks were nothing to this, the dreadful certainty that he had ruined all his chances. The Chinese would not yield, and the Ministry would find some way of getting Temeraire sent off to China in the end: they plainly had no objection to telling him a pack of lies for the purpose. Likely enough Barham would never consent to his seeing Temeraire now even for a last farewell.

Laurence had not even allowed himself to consider what his own life might be with Temeraire gone. Another dragon was of course an impossibility, and the Navy would not have him back now. He supposed he could take on a ship in the merchant fleet, or a privateer; but he did not think he would have the heart for it, and he had done well enough out of prize-money to live on. He could even marry and set up as a country gentleman; but that prospect, once so idyllic in his imagination, now seemed drab and colourless.

Worse yet, he could hardly look for sympathy: all his former acquaintance would call it a lucky escape, his family would rejoice, and the world would think nothing of his loss. By any measure, there was something ridiculous in his being so adrift: he had become an aviator quite unwillingly, only from the strongest sense of duty, and less than a year had passed since his change in station; yet already he could hardly consider the possibility. Only another aviator, perhaps indeed only another captain, would truly be able to understand his sentiments, and with Temeraire gone, he would be as severed from their company as aviators themselves were from the rest of the world.

The front room at the Crown and Anchor was not quiet, though it was still early for dinner by town standards. The place was not a fashionable establishment, nor even genteel, its custom mostly consisting of country-men used to a more reasonable hour for their food and drink. It was not the sort of place a respectable woman would have come, nor indeed the kind of place Laurence himself would have ever voluntarily frequented in earlier days. Roland drew some insolent stares, others only curious, but no one attempted any greater liberty: Laurence made an imposing figure beside her with his broad shoulders and his dress sword slung at his hip.

Roland led Laurence up to her rooms, sat him in an ugly armchair and gave him a glass of wine. He drank deeply, hiding behind the bowl of the glass from her sympathetic look: he was afraid he might easily be unmanned. ‘You must be faint with hunger, Laurence,’ she said. ‘That is half the trouble.’ She rang for the maid; shortly a couple of manservants climbed up with a very good sort of plain single-course dinner: a roasted fowl, with greens and beef gravy sauce; some small cheese-cakes made with jam, calf’s feet pie, a dish of red cabbage stewed, and a small biscuit pudding for relish. She had them place all the food on the table at once, rather than going through removes, and sent them away.

Laurence did not think he would eat, but once the food was before him he found he was hungry after all. He had been eating very indifferently, thanks to irregular hours and the low table of his cheap boarding-house, chosen for its proximity to the covert where Temeraire was kept; now he ate steadily, Roland carrying the conversation nearly alone and distracting him with service gossip and trivialities.

‘I was sorry to lose Lloyd, of course – they mean to put him to the Anglewing egg that is hardening at Kinloch Laggan,’ she said, speaking of her first lieutenant.

‘I think I saw it there,’ Laurence said, rousing a little and lifting his head from his plate. ‘Obversaria’s egg?’

‘Yes, and we have great hopes of the issue,’ she said. ‘Lloyd was over the moon, of course, and I am very happy for him; still, it is no easy thing to break in a new premier after five years, with all the crew and Excidium himself murmuring about how Lloyd used to do things. But Sanders is a good-hearted, dependable fellow; they sent him up from Gibraltar, after Granby refused the post.’

‘What? Refused it?’ Laurence cried, in great dismay: Granby was his own first lieutenant. ‘Not for my sake, I hope.’

‘Oh Lord, you did not know?’ Roland said, in equal dismay. ‘Granby spoke to me very pretty; said he was obliged, but he did not choose to shift his position. I was quite sure he had consulted you about the matter; I thought perhaps you had been given some reason to hope.’

‘No,’ Laurence said, very low. ‘He is more likely to end up with no position at all; I am very sorry to hear he should have passed up so good a place.’ The refusal could have done Granby no good with the Corps; a man who had turned down one offer could not soon expect another, and Laurence would shortly have no power at all to help him along.

‘Well, I am damned sorry to have given you any more cause for concern,’ Roland said, after a moment. ‘Admiral Lenton has not broken up your crew, you know, for the most part: only gave a few fellows to Berkley out of desperation, he being so short-handed now. We were all so sure that Maximus had reached his final growth; shortly after you were called here, he began to prove us wrong, and so far he has put on fifteen feet in length.’ She added this last in an attempt to recover the lighter tone of the conversation, but it was impossible: Laurence found that his stomach had closed, and he set down his knife and fork with the plate still half-full.

Roland drew the curtains; it was already growing dark outside. ‘Do you care for a concert?’

‘I am happy to accompany you,’ he said, mechanically, and she shook her head.

‘No, never mind; I see it will not do. Come to bed then, my dear fellow; there is no sense in sitting about and moping.’

They put out the candles and lay down together. ‘I have not the least notion what to do,’ he said quietly: the cover of dark made the confession a little easier. ‘I called Barham a villain, and I cannot forgive him asking me to lie; very ungentlemanlike. But he is not a scrub; he would not be at such shifts if he had any other choice.’

‘It makes me quite ill to hear about him bowing and scraping to this foreign prince.’ Roland propped herself upon her elbow on the pillows. ‘I was in Canton harbour once, as a mid, on a transport coming back the long way from India; those junks of theirs do not look like they could stand a mild shower, much less a gale. They cannot fly their dragons across the ocean without a pause, even if they cared to go to war with us.’

‘I thought as much myself, when I first heard,’ Laurence said. ‘But they do not need to fly across the ocean to end the China trade, and wreck our shipping to India also, if they liked; besides they share a border with Russia. It would mean the end of the coalition against Bonaparte, if the Tsar were attacked on his eastern borders.’

‘I do not see the Russians have done us very much good so far, in the war, and money is a low pitiful excuse for behaving like a bounder, in a man or a nation,’ Roland said. ‘The State has been short of funds before, and somehow we have scraped by and still blacked Bonaparte’s eye for him. In any case, I cannot forgive them for keeping you from Temeraire. Barham still has not let you see him at all, I suppose?’

‘No, not for two weeks now. There is a decent fellow at the covert who has taken him messages for me, and lets me know that he is eating, but I cannot ask him to let me in: it would be a court-martial for us both. Though for my own part, I hardly know if I would let it stop me now.’

He could scarcely have imagined even saying such a thing, a year ago; he did not like to think it now, but honesty put the words into his mouth. Roland did not cry out against it, but then she was an aviator herself. She reached out to stroke his cheek, and drew him down to such comfort as might be found in her arms.

Laurence started up in the dark room, sleep broken: Roland was already out of bed. A yawning housemaid was standing in the doorway, holding up a candle, the yellow light spilling into the room. She handed Roland a sealed dispatch and stayed there, staring with open prurient interest at Laurence; he felt a guilty flush rise in his cheeks, and glanced down to be sure he was quite covered beneath the bedclothes.

Roland had already cracked the seal; now she reached out and took the candlestick straight out of the girl’s hand. ‘There’s for you; go along now,’ she said, giving the maid a shilling; she shut the door in the girl’s face without further ceremony. ‘Laurence, I must go at once,’ she said, coming to the bed to light the other candles, speaking very low. ‘This is word from Dover: a French convoy is making a run for Le Havre under dragon guard. The Channel fleet is going after them, but there is a Flamme-de-Gloire present, and the fleet cannot engage without aerial support.’

‘How many ships in the French convoy, does it say?’ He was already out of the bed and pulling on his breeches: a fire-breather was nearly the worst danger a ship could face, desperately risky even with a good deal of support from the air.

‘Thirty or more, packed no doubt to the gills with war materiel,’ she said, whipping her hair into a tight braid. ‘Do you see my coat over there?’

Outside the window, the sky was thinning to a paler blue; soon the candles would be unnecessary. Laurence found the coat and helped her into it; some part of his thoughts already occupied in calculating the likely strength of the merchant ships, what proportion of the fleet would be detached to go after them, how many might yet slip through to safe harbour: the guns at Le Havre were nasty. If the wind had not shifted since yesterday, they had favourable conditions for their run. Thirty ships’ worth of iron, copper, quicksilver, gunpowder; Bonaparte might no longer be a danger at sea after Trafalgar, but on land he was still master of Europe, and such a haul might easily meet his supply needs for months.

‘And just give me that cloak, will you?’ Roland asked, breaking into his train of thought. The voluminous folds concealed her male dress, and she pulled the hood up over her head. ‘There, that will do.’

‘Hold a moment; I am coming with you,’ Laurence said, struggling into his own coat. ‘I hope I can be some use. If Berkley is short-handed on Maximus, I can at least pull on a strap or help shove off boarders. Leave the luggage and ring for the maid: we will have them send the rest of your things over to my boarding-house.’

They hurried through the streets, still mostly empty: night-soil men rattling past with their fetid carts, day labourers beginning on their rounds to look for work, maids in their clinking pattens going to market, and the herds of animals with their lowing breath white in the air. A clammy, bitter fog had descended in the night, like a prickling of ice on the skin. At least the absence of crowds meant Roland did not have to pay much mind to her cloak, and they could go at something approaching a run.

The London covert was situated not far from the Admiralty offices, along the western side of the Thames; despite the location, so eminently convenient, the buildings immediately around it were shabby, in disrepair: where those lived who could afford nothing farther away from dragons; some of the houses even abandoned, except for a few skinny children who peered out suspiciously at the sound of strangers passing. A sludge of liquid refuse ran along the gutters of the streets; as Laurence and Roland ran, their boots broke the thin skim of ice on top, letting the stench up to follow them.

Here the streets were truly empty; but even so as they hurried a heavy cart sprang almost as if by malicious intent from the fog: Roland hauled Laurence aside and up onto the pavement just quick enough he was not clipped and dragged under the wheels. The drover never even paused in his careening progress, but vanished around the next corner without apology.

Laurence gazed down at his best dress trousers in dismay: spattered black with filth. ‘Never mind,’ Roland said consolingly. ‘No one will mind in the air, and maybe it will brush off.’ This was more optimism than he could muster, but there was certainly no time to do anything about them now, and so they resumed their hurried progress.

The covert gates stood out shining against the dingy streets and the equally dingy morning: ironwork freshly painted black, with polished brass locks and unexpectedly, a pair of young Marines in their red uniforms were lounging nearby, muskets leaned against the wall. The gatekeeper on duty touched his hat to Roland as he came to let them in, while the Marines squinted at her in some confusion: her cloak was well back off her shoulders for the moment, revealing both her triple gold bars and her by no means shabby endowment.

Laurence stepped into their line of sight to block their view of her, frowning. ‘Thank you, Patson; the Dover courier?’ he said to the gatekeeper, as soon as they had come through.

‘Believe he’s waiting for you, sir,’ Patson said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder as he pulled the gates to again. ‘Just at the first clearing, if you please. Don’t you worry about them none,’ he added, scowling at the Marines, who looked properly abashed: they were barely more than boys, and Patson was a big man, a former armourer, made only more awful by an eyepatch and the seared red skin about it. ‘I’ll learn them properly, never fret.’

‘Thank you, Patson; carry on,’ Roland said, and on they went. ‘Whatever are those lobsters doing here? Not officers, at least, we may be grateful. I still recall twelve years ago, some Army officer found out Captain St. Germain when she got wounded at Toulon; he made a wretched to-do over the whole thing, and it nearly got into the papers: idiotic affair.’

There was only a narrow border of trees and buildings around the perimeter of the covert to shield it from the air and noise of the city; they almost at once reached the first clearing, a small space barely large enough for a middling-sized dragon to spread its wings. The courier was indeed waiting: a young Winchester, her purple wings not yet quite darkened to adult colour, but fully harnessed and fidgeting to be off.

‘Why, Hollin,’ Laurence said, shaking the captain’s hand gladly: it was a great pleasure to see his former ground-crew master again, now in an officer’s coat. ‘Is this your dragon?’

‘Yes, sir, indeed it is; this is Elsie,’ Hollin said, beaming at him. ‘Elsie, this is Captain Laurence: who I have told you about; he helped me to you.’

The Winchester turned her head around and looked at Laurence with bright, interested eyes: not yet three months out of the shell, she was still small, even for her breed, but her hide was almost glossy-clean, and she looked very well-tended indeed. ‘So you are Temeraire’s captain? Thank you; I like my Hollin very much,’ she said, in a light chirping voice, and gave Hollin a nudge with enough affection in it to nearly knock him over.

‘I am happy to have been of service, and to make your acquaintance,’ Laurence said, mustering some enthusiasm, although not without an internal pang at the reminder. Temeraire was here, not five hundred yards distant, and he could not so much as exchange a greeting with him. He did look, but buildings stood in the line of his sight: no glimpse of black hide was to be seen.

Roland asked Hollin, ‘Is everything ready? We must be off at once.’

‘Yes, sir, indeed; we are only waiting for the dispatches,’ Hollin said. ‘Five minutes perhaps, if you should care to stretch your legs before the flight.’

The temptation was very strong; Laurence swallowed hard. But discipline held: openly refusing a dishonourable order was one thing, sneaking about to disobey a merely unpleasant one something else; and to do so now might well reflect badly on Hollin, and Roland herself. ‘I will just step into the barracks here, and speak to Jervis,’ he said instead, and went to find the man who was overseeing Temeraire’s care.

Jervis was an older man, the better part of both his left limbs lost to a wicked raking stroke across the side of the dragon on which he had served as harness-master; on recovering against all reasonable expectations, he had been assigned to the slow duty of the London covert, so rarely used. He had an odd, lopsided appearance with his wooden leg and metal hook on one side, and he had grown a little lazy and contrary with his idleness, but Laurence had provided him with a willing ear often enough to now find a warm welcome.

‘Would you be so kind as to take a word for me?’ Laurence asked, after he had refused a cup of tea. ‘I am going to Dover to see if I can be of use; I should not like Temeraire to fret at my silence.’

‘That I will, and read it to him; he will need it, poor fellow,’ Jervis said, stumping over to fetch his inkwell and pen one-handed; Laurence turned over a scrap of paper to write the note. ‘That fat fellow from the Admiralty came over again not half an hour ago with a full passel of Marines and those fancy Chinamen, and there they are still, prating away at the dear. If they don’t go soon, I shan’t answer for his taking any food today, so I won’t. Ugly sea-going bugger; I don’t know what he is about, thinking he knows aught about dragons; that is, begging your pardon, sir,’ Jervis added hastily.

Laurence found his hand shook over the paper, so he spattered his first few lines and the table. He answered somehow, meaninglessly, and struggled to continue the note; words would not come. He stood there locked in mid-sentence, until suddenly he was nearly thrown off his feet, ink spreading across the floor as the table fell over; outside a terrible shattering noise, like the worst violence of a storm, a full North Sea winter’s gale.

The pen was still ludicrously in his hand; he dropped it and flung open the door, Jervis stumbling out behind him. The echoes still hung in the air, and Elsie was sitting up on her hind legs, wings half-opening and closing in anxiety while Hollin and Roland tried to reassure her; the few other dragons at the covert had their heads up as well, peering over the trees and hissing in alarm.

‘Laurence,’ Roland called, but he ignored her: he was already halfway down the path, running, his hand unconsciously gone to the hilt of his sword. He came to the clearing and found his way barred by the collapsed ruins of a barracks building and several fallen trees.

For a thousand years before the Romans first tamed the Western dragon breeds, the Chinese had already been masters of the art. They prized beauty and intelligence more than martial prowess, and looked with a little superior disdain at the fire-breathers and acid-spitters valued so highly in the West; their aerial legions were so numerous they had no need of what they regarded as so much showy flash. But they did not scorn all such unusual gifts; and in the Celestials they had reached the pinnacle of their achievement: the union of all the other graces with the subtle and deadly power which the Chinese called the divine wind, the roar with a force greater than cannon-fire.

Laurence had seen the devastation the divine wind wrought only once before, at the battle of Dover, where Temeraire had used it against Napoleon’s airborne transports to potent effect. But here the poor trees had suffered the impact at point-blank range: they lay like flung matchsticks, trunks burst into flinders. The whole rough structure of the barracks, too, had smashed to the ground, the coarse mortar crumbled away entirely and the bricks scattered and broken. A hurricane might have caused such wreckage, or an earthquake, and the once-poetic name seemed suddenly far more apt.

The escort of Marines were nearly all of them backed up against the undergrowth surrounding the clearing, faces white and blank with terror; Barham alone of them had stood his ground. The Chinese also had not retreated, but they were one and all prostrated upon the ground in formal genuflection, except for Prince Yongxing himself, who remained unflinching at their head.

The wreck of one tremendous oak lay penning them all against the edge of the clearing, dirt still clinging to its roots, and Temeraire stood behind it, one foreleg resting on the trunk and his sinuous length towering over them.

‘You will not say such things to me,’ he said, his head lowering towards Barham: his teeth were bared, and the spiked ruff around his head was raised up and trembling with anger. ‘I do not believe you for an instant, and I will not hear such lies; Laurence would never take another dragon. If you have sent him away, I will go after him, and if you have hurt him—’

He began to gather his breath for another roar, his chest belling out like a sail in high wind, and this time the hapless men lay directly in his path.

‘Temeraire,’ Laurence called, scrambling ungracefully over the wreckage, sliding down the heap into the clearing in disregard of the splinters that caught at his clothing and skin. ‘Temeraire, I am well, I am here—’

Temeraire’s head had whipped around at the first word, and he at once took the two paces needed to bring him across the clearing. Laurence held still, his heart beating very quickly, not at all with fear: the forelegs with their terrible claws landed to either side of him, and the sleek length of Temeraire’s body coiled protectively about him, the great scaled sides rising up around him like shining black walls and the angled head coming to rest by him.

He rested his hands on Temeraire’s snout and for a moment laid his cheek against the soft muzzle; Temeraire made a low wordless murmur of unhappiness. ‘Laurence, Laurence, do not leave me again.’

Laurence swallowed. ‘My dear,’ he said, and stopped; no answer was possible.

They stood with their heads together in silence, the rest of the world shut out: but only for a moment. ‘Laurence,’ Roland called from beyond the encircling coils: she sounded out of breath, and her voice was urgent. ‘Temeraire, do move aside, there is a good fellow.’ Temeraire lifted up his head and reluctantly uncurled himself a little so they could speak; but all the while he kept himself between Laurence and Barham’s party.

Roland ducked under Temeraire’s foreleg and joined Laurence. ‘You had to go to Temeraire, of course, but it will look very bad to someone who does not understand dragons. For pity’s sake do not let Barham push you into anything further: answer him as meek as mother-may-I, do anything he tells you.’ She shook her head. ‘By God, Laurence; I hate to leave you in such straits, but the dispatches have come, and minutes may make the difference here.’

‘Of course you cannot stay,’ he said. ‘They are likely waiting for you at Dover even now to launch the attack; we will manage, never fear.’

‘An attack? There is to be a battle?’ Temeraire said, overhearing; he flexed his talons and looked away to the east, as if he might see the formations rising into the air even from here.

‘Go at once, and pray take care,’ Laurence said hastily to Roland. ‘Give my apologies to Hollin.’

She nodded. ‘Try and stay easy in your mind. I will speak with Lenton even before we launch. The Corps will not sit still for this; bad enough to separate you, but now this outrageous pressure, stirring up all the dragons like this: it cannot be allowed to continue, and no one can possibly hold you to blame.’

‘Do not worry or wait another instant: the attack is more important,’ he said, very heartily: counterfeit, as much as her assurances; they both knew that the situation was black. Laurence could not for a moment regret having gone to Temeraire’s side, but he had openly disobeyed orders. No court-martial could find him innocent; there was Barham himself to lay the charges, and if questioned Laurence could hardly deny the act. He did not think they would hang him: this was not a battlefield offence, and the circumstances offered some excuse, but he would certainly have been dismissed the service if he had still been in the Navy. There was nothing to be done but face the consequences; he forced a smile, Roland gave his arm a quick squeeze, and she was gone.

The Chinese had risen and collected themselves, making a better show of it than the ragged Marines, who looked ready to bolt at any moment’s notice. They all together were now picking their way over the fallen oak. The younger official, Sun Kai, more deftly scrambled over, and with one of the attendants offered a hand to the prince to help him down. Yongxing was hampered by his heavy embroidered gown, leaving trailers of bright silk like gaily coloured cobwebs upon the broken branches, but if he felt any of the same terror writ large on the faces of the British soldiers, it did not show in his face: he seemed unshaken.

Temeraire kept a savage, brooding eye upon them all. ‘I am not going to sit here while everyone else goes and fights, no matter what those people want.’

Laurence stroked Temeraire’s neck comfortingly. ‘Do not let them upset you. Pray stay quite calm, my dear; losing our tempers will not improve matters.’ Temeraire only snorted, and his eye remained fixed and glittering, the ruff still standing upright with all the points very stiff: in no mood to be soothed.

Himself quite ashen, Barham made no haste to approach any closer to Temeraire, but Yongxing addressed him sharply, repeating demands both urgent and angry, judging by his gestures towards Temeraire; Sun Kai however stood apart, and regarded Laurence and Temeraire more thoughtfully. At last Barham came towards them scowling, evidently taking refuge from fear in anger; Laurence had seen it often enough in men on the eve of battle.

‘This is the discipline of the Corps, I gather,’ Barham began: petty and spiteful, since his life had very likely been saved by the disobedience. He himself seemed to perceive as much; he grew even angrier. ‘Well, it will not stand with me, Laurence, not for an instant; I will see you broken for this. Sergeant, take him under arrest—’

The end of the sentence was inaudible; Barham was sinking, growing small, his shouting red mouth flashing open and shut like a gasping fish, the words becoming indistinct as the ground fell away beneath Laurence’s feet. Temeraire’s talons were carefully cupped around him and the great black wings were beating in broad sweeps, up, up, up through the dingy London air, soot dulling Temeraire’s hide and speckling Laurence’s hands.

Laurence settled himself in the cupped claws and rode in silence; the damage was done, and Laurence knew better than to ask Temeraire to return to the ground at once: there was a sense of true violence in the force behind his wing-strokes, rage barely checked. They were going very fast. He peered downward in some anxiety as they sped over the city walls: Temeraire was flying without harness or signals, and Laurence feared the guns might be turned on them. But the guns stayed silent: Temeraire was distinctive, with his hide and wings of unbroken black, save for the deep blue and pearlescent grey markings along the edges, and he had been recognized.

Or perhaps their passage was simply too swift for a response: they left the city behind them fifteen minutes after leaving the ground, and were soon beyond the range even of the long-barrelled pepper guns. Roads branched away through the countryside beneath them, dusted with snow, and the smell of the air already much cleaner. Temeraire paused and hovered for a moment, shook his head free of dust and sneezed loudly, jouncing Laurence about a little; but afterwards he flew on at a less frantic pace, and after another minute or two he curled his head down to speak. ‘Are you well, Laurence? You are not uncomfortable?’

He sounded more anxious than the subject deserved. Laurence patted his foreleg where he could reach it. ‘No, I am very well.’

‘I am very sorry to have snatched you away so,’ Temeraire said, some tension gone at the warmth in Laurence’s voice. ‘Pray do not be angry; I could not let that man take you.’

‘No, I am not angry,’ Laurence said; indeed, so far as his heart was concerned there was only a great, swelling joy to be once again aloft, to feel the living current of power running through Temeraire’s body, even if his more rational part knew this state could not last. ‘And I do not blame you for going, not in the least, but I am afraid we must turn back now.’

‘No; I am not taking you back to that man,’ Temeraire said obstinately, and Laurence understood with a sinking feeling that he had run up against Temeraire’s protective instincts. ‘He lied to me, and kept you away, and then he wanted to arrest you: he may count himself lucky I did not squash him.’

‘My dear, we cannot just run wild,’ Laurence said. ‘We would be truly beyond the pale if we did such a thing; how do you imagine we would eat, except by theft? And we would be abandoning all our friends.’

‘I am no more use to them in London, sitting in a covert,’ Temeraire said, with perfect truth, and left Laurence at a loss for how to answer him. ‘But I do not mean to run wild; although,’ a little wistfully, ‘to be sure, it would be pleasant to do as we liked, and I do not think anyone would miss a few sheep here and there. But not while there is a battle to be fought.’

‘Oh dear,’ Laurence said, as he squinted towards the sun and realized their course was southeast, directly for their former covert at Dover. ‘Temeraire, they cannot let us fight; Lenton will have to order me back, and if I disobey he will arrest me just as quick as Barham, I assure you.’

‘I do not believe Obversaria’s admiral will arrest you,’ Temeraire said. ‘She is very nice, and has always spoken to me kindly, even though she is so much older, and the flag-dragon. Besides, if he tries, Maximus and Lily are there, and they will help me; and if that man from London tries to come and take you away again, I will kill him,’ he added, with an alarming degree of bloodthirsty eagerness.

Chapter Two

They landed in the Dover covert amid the clamour and bustle of preparation: the harness-masters bellowing orders to the ground crews, the clatter of buckles and the deeper metallic ringing of the bombs being handed up in sacks to the bellmen; riflemen loading their weapons, the sharp high-pitched shriek of whetstones grinding away on sword-edges. A dozen interested dragons had followed their progress, many calling out greetings to Temeraire as he made his descent. He called back, full of excitement, his spirits rising all the while Laurence felt his own sinking.

Temeraire brought them to earth in Obversaria’s clearing; it was one of the largest in the covert, as befitted her standing as flag-dragon, though as an Anglewing she was only slightly more than middling in size, and there was easily room for Temeraire to join her. She was rigged out already, her crew boarding; Admiral Lenton himself was standing beside her in full riding gear, only waiting for his officers to be aboard: minutes away from going aloft.

‘Well, and what have you done?’ Lenton asked, before Laurence had even managed to unfold himself out of Temeraire’s claw. ‘Roland spoke to me, but she said she had told you to stay quiet; there is going to be the devil to pay for this.’

‘Sir, I am very sorry to put you in so untenable a position,’ Laurence said awkwardly, trying to think how he could explain Temeraire’s refusal to return to London without seeming to make excuses for himself.

‘No, it is my fault,’ Temeraire added, ducking his head and trying to look ashamed, without much success; there was too distinct a gleam of satisfaction in his eye. ‘I took Laurence away; that man was going to arrest him.’

He sounded plainly smug, and Obversaria abruptly leaned over and batted him on the side of the head, hard enough to make him wobble even though he was half again her size. He flinched and stared at her, with a surprised and wounded expression; she only snorted at him and said, ‘You are too old to be flying with your eyes closed. Lenton, we are ready, I think.’

‘Yes,’ Lenton said, squinting up against the sun to examine her harness. ‘I have no time to deal with you now, Laurence; this will have to wait.’

‘Of course, sir; I beg your pardon,’ Laurence said quietly. ‘Pray do not let us delay you; with your permission, we will stay in Temeraire’s clearing until you return.’ Even cowed by Obversaria’s reproof, Temeraire made a small noise of protest at this.

‘No, no; don’t speak like a groundling,’ Lenton said impatiently. ‘A young male like that will not stay behind when he sees his formation go, not uninjured. The same bloody mistake this fellow Barham and all the others at the Admiralty make, every time a new one is shuffled in by Government. If we ever manage to get it into their heads that dragons are not brute beasts, they start to imagine that they are just like men, and can be put under regular military discipline.’

Laurence opened his mouth to deny that Temeraire would disobey, then shut it again after glancing round; Temeraire was ploughing the ground restlessly with his great talons, his wings partly fanned out, and he would not meet Laurence’s gaze.

‘Yes, just so,’ Lenton said dryly, when he saw Laurence silenced. He sighed, unbending a little, and brushed his sparse grey hair back off his forehead. ‘If those Chinamen want him back, it can only make matters worse if he gets himself injured fighting without armour or crew,’ he said. ‘Go on and get him ready; we will speak after.’

Laurence could scarcely find words to express his gratitude, but they were unnecessary in any case; Lenton was already turning back to Obversaria. There was indeed no time to waste; Laurence waved Temeraire on and ran for their usual clearing on foot, careless of his dignity. A scattered, intensely excited rush of thoughts, all fragmentary: great relief; of course Temeraire would never have stayed behind; how wretched they would have looked, jumping into a battle against orders; in a moment they would be aloft, yet nothing had truly changed in their circumstances: this might be the last time.

Many of his crewmen were sitting outside in the open, polishing equipment and oiling harness unnecessarily, pretending not to be watching the sky; they were silent and downcast; and at first they only stared when Laurence came running into the clearing. ‘Where is Granby?’ he demanded. ‘Full muster, gentlemen; heavy combat rig, at once.’

By then Temeraire was overhead and descending, and the rest of the crew came spilling out of the barracks, cheering him; a general stampede towards small-arms and gear ensued, that rush that had once looked like chaos to Laurence, used as he was to naval order, but which accomplished the tremendous affair of getting a dragon equipped in a frantic hurry.

Granby came out of the barracks amid the cavalcade: a tall young officer dark-haired and lanky, his fair skin, ordinarily burnt and peeling from daily flying, but for once unmarred thanks to the weeks of being grounded. He was an aviator born and bred, as Laurence was not, and their acquaintance had not been without early friction: like many other aviators, he had resented so prime a dragon as Temeraire being claimed by a naval officer. But that resentment had not survived a shared action, and Laurence had never yet regretted taking him on as first lieutenant, despite the wide divergence in their characters. Granby had made an initial attempt out of respect to imitate the formalities which were to Laurence, raised a gentleman, as natural as breathing; but they had not taken root. Like most aviators, raised from the age of seven far from polite society, he was by nature given to a sort of easy liberty that looked a great deal like licence to a censorious eye.

‘Laurence, it is damned good to see you,’ he said now, coming to seize Laurence’s hand: quite unconscious of any impropriety in addressing his commanding officer so, and making no salute; indeed he was at the same time trying to hook his sword onto his belt one-handed. ‘Have they changed their minds, then? I hadn’t looked for anything like such good sense, but I will be the first to beg their Lordships’ pardon if they have given up this notion of sending him to China.’

For his part, Laurence had long since accepted that no disrespect was intended; at present he scarcely even noticed the informality; he was too bitterly sorry to disappoint Granby, especially now knowing that he had refused a prime position out of loyalty. ‘I am afraid not, John, but there is no time now to explain: we must get Temeraire aloft at once. Half the usual armaments, and leave the bombs; the Navy will not thank us for sinking the ships, and if it becomes really necessary Temeraire can do more damage roaring away at them.’

‘Right you are,’ Granby said, and dashed away at once to the other side of the clearing, calling out orders all around. The great leather harness was already being carried out in double-quick time, and Temeraire was doing his best to help matters along, crouching low to the ground to make it easier for the men to adjust the broad weight-bearing straps across his back.

The panels of chainmail for his breast and belly were heaved out almost as quickly. ‘No ceremony,’ Laurence said, and so the aerial crew scrambled aboard pell-mell as soon as their positions were clear, disregarding the usual order.

‘We are ten short, I am sorry to say,’ Granby said, coming back to his side. ‘I sent six men to Maximus’s crew at the Admiral’s request; the others—’ He hesitated.

‘Yes,’ Laurence said, sparing him; the men had naturally been unhappy at having no part of the action, and the missing four had undoubtedly slipped away to seek better or at least more thorough consolation in a bottle or a woman than could be found in busy work. He was pleased it was so few, and he did not mean to come the tyrant over them afterwards: he felt at present he had no moral ground on which to stand. ‘We will manage; but if there are any fellows on the ground crew who are handy with pistol or sword, and not prone to height-sickness, let us get them hooked on if they choose to volunteer.’

He himself had already shifted his coat for the long heavy one of leather used in combat, and was now strapping his carabiner belt over. A low many-voiced roar began, not very far away; Laurence looked up: the smaller dragons were going aloft, and he recognized Dulcia and the grey-blue Nitidus, the end-wing members of their formation, flying in circles as they waited for the others to rise.

‘Laurence, are you not ready? Do hurry, please, the others are going up,’ Temeraire said, anxiously, craning his head about to look; above them the middle-weight dragons were coming into view also.

Granby swung himself aboard, along with a couple of tall young harness-men, Willoughby and Porter; Laurence waited until he saw them latched onto the rings of the harness and secure, then said, ‘All is ready; try away.’

This was one ritual that could not in safety be set aside: Temeraire rose up onto his hind legs and shook himself, making certain that the harness was secure and all the men properly hooked on. ‘Harder,’ Laurence called sharply: Temeraire was not being particularly vigorous, in his anxiety to be away.

Temeraire snorted but obeyed, and still nothing pulled loose or fell off. ‘All lies well; please come aboard now,’ he said, thumping to the ground and holding out his foreleg at once; Laurence stepped into the claw and was rather quickly tossed up to his usual place at the base of Temeraire’s neck. He did not mind at all: he was pleased, exhilarated by everything: the deeply satisfying sound as his carabiner rings locked into place, the buttery feel of the oiled, double-stitched leather straps of the harness; and beneath him Temeraire’s muscles were already gathering for the leap aloft.

Maximus suddenly erupted out of the trees to the north of them, his great red-and-gold body even larger than before, as Roland had reported. He was still the only Regal Copper stationed at the Channel, and he dwarfed every other creature in sight, blotting out an enormous swath of the sun. Temeraire roared joyfully at the sight and leaped up after him, black wings beating a little too quickly with over-excitement.

‘Gently,’ Laurence called; Temeraire bobbed his head in acknowledgement, but they still overshot the slower dragon.

‘Maximus, Maximus; look, I am back,’ Temeraire called out, circling back down to take his position alongside the big dragon, and they began beating up together to the formation’s flying height. ‘I took Laurence away from London,’ he added triumphantly, in what he likely thought a confidential whisper. ‘They were trying to arrest him.’

‘Did he kill someone?’ Maximus asked with interest in his deep echoing voice, not at all disapproving. ‘I am glad you are back; they have been making me fly in the middle while you were gone, and all the manoeuvres are different,’ he added.

‘No,’ said Temeraire, ‘he only came and talked to me when some fat old man said he should not, which does not seem like any reason to me.’

‘You had better shut up that Jacobin of a dragon of yours,’ Berkley shouted across from Maximus’s back, while Laurence shook his head in despair, trying to ignore the inquisitive looks from his young ensigns.

‘Pray remember we are on business, Temeraire,’ Laurence called, trying to be severe; but after all there was no sense in trying to keep it a secret; the news would surely be all over in a week. They would be forced to confront the gravity of their situation soon enough; little enough harm in letting Temeraire indulge in high spirits so long as he might.

‘Laurence,’ Granby said at his shoulder, ‘in the hurry, the ammunition was all laid in its usual place on the left, though we are not carrying the bombs to balance it out; we ought to restow.’

‘Can you have it done before we engage? Oh, good Lord,’ Laurence said, realizing. ‘I do not even know the position of the convoy; do you?’ Granby shook his head, embarrassed, and Laurence swallowed his pride and shouted, ‘Berkley, where are we going?’

A general explosion of mirth ran among the men on Maximus’s back. Berkley called back, ‘Straight to hell, ha ha!’ More laughter, nearly drowning out the coordinates that he bellowed over.

‘Fifteen minutes’ flight, then.’ Laurence was mentally running the calculation through in his head. ‘And we ought to save at least five of those minutes for grace.’

Granby nodded. ‘We can manage it,’ he said, and clambered down at once to organize the operation, unhooking and rehooking the carabiners with practised skill from the evenly spaced rings leading down Temeraire’s side to the storage nets slung beneath his belly.

The rest of the formation was already in place as Temeraire and Maximus rose to take their defensive positions at the rear. Laurence noticed the formation-leader flag streaming out from Lily’s back; that meant that during their absence, Captain Harcourt had at last been given the command. He was glad to see the change: it was hard on the signal-ensign to have to watch a wing dragon as well as keep an eye forward, and the dragons would always instinctively follow the lead regardless of formal precedence.

Still, he could not help feeling how strange that he should find himself taking orders from a twenty-year-old girl: Harcourt was still a very young officer, promoted over-quick due to Lily’s unexpectedly early hatching. But command in the Corps had to follow the capabilities of the dragons, and a rare acid-spitter like one of the Longwings was too valuable to place anywhere but the centre of a formation, even if they would only accept female handlers.

‘Signal from the Admiral: proceed to meeting,’ called the signal-ensign, Turner; a moment later the signal formation keep together broke out on Lily’s signal-yard, and the dragons were pressing on, shortly reaching their cruising speed of a steady seventeen knots: an easy pace for Temeraire, but all that the Yellow Reapers and the enormous Maximus could manage comfortably for any length of time.

There was time to loosen his sword in the sheath, and load his pistols fresh; below, Granby was shouting orders over the wind: he did not sound frantic, and Laurence had every confidence in his power to get the work completed in time. The dragons of the covert made an impressive spread, even though this was not so large a force in numbers as had been assembled for the battle of Dover in October, which had fended off Napoleon’s invasion attempt.

But in that battle, they had been forced to send up every available dragon, even the little couriers: most of the fighting-dragons had been away south at Trafalgar. Today Excidium and Captain Roland’s formation was back in the lead, ten dragons strong, the smallest of them a middle-weight Yellow Reaper, and all of them flying in perfect formation, not a wingbeat out of place: the skill born of many long years in formation together.

Lily’s formation was nothing so imposing, as yet: only six dragons flying behind her, with her flank and end-wing positions held by smaller and more manoeuvrable beasts with older officers, who could more easily compensate for any errors made from inexperience by Lily herself, or by Maximus and Temeraire in the back line. Even as they drew closer, Laurence saw Sutton, the captain of their mid-wing Messoria, stand up on her back and turn to look over at them, making sure all was well with the younger dragons. Laurence raised a hand in acknowledgement, and saw Berkley doing the same.

The sails of the French convoy and the Channel fleet were visible long before the dragons came into range. There was a stately quality to the scene below: chessboard pieces moving into place, with the British ships advancing in eager haste towards the great crowd of smaller French merchantmen; a glorious spread of white sail to be seen on every ship, and the British colours streaming among them. Granby came clambering back up along the shoulder strap to Laurence’s side. ‘We’ll do nicely now, I think.’

‘Very good,’ Laurence said absently, his attention all on what he could see of the British fleet, peering down over Temeraire’s shoulder through his glass. Mostly fast-sailing frigates, with a motley collection of smaller sloops, and a handful of sixty-four- and seventy-four-gun ships. The Navy would not risk the largest first- and second-rate ships against the fire-breather; too easy for one lucky attack to send a three-decker packed full of powder up like a light, taking half a dozen smaller ships along with her.

‘All hands to their stations, Mr. Harley,’ Laurence said, straightening up, and the young ensign hurried to set the signal-strap embedded in the harness to red. The riflemen stationed along Temeraire’s back let themselves partly down his sides, readying their guns, while the rest of the topmen all crouched low, pistols in their hands.

Excidium and the rest of the larger formation dropped low over the British warships, taking up the more important defensive position and leaving the field to them. As Lily increased their speed, Temeraire gave a low growling rumble, the tremor palpable through his hide. Laurence spared a moment to lean over and put his bare hand on the side of Temeraire’s neck: no words necessary, and he felt a slight easing of the nervous tension before he straightened and pulled his leather riding glove back on.

‘Enemy in sight,’ came faint but audible in the shrill high voice of Lily’s forward lookout, carrying back to them on the wind, echoed a moment later by young Allen, stationed near the joint of Temeraire’s wing. A general murmur went around the men, and Laurence snapped out his glass again for a look.

‘La Crabe Grande, I think,’ he said, handing the telescope over to Granby, hoping privately that he had not mangled the pronunciation too badly. He was quite sure that he had identified the formation style correctly, despite his lack of experience in aerial actions; there were few composed of fourteen dragons, and the shape was highly distinct, with the two pincer-like rows of smaller dragons stretched out to either side of the cluster of big ones in the centre.

The Flamme-de-Gloire was not easy to spot, with several decoy dragons of similar colouring shifting about: a pair of Papillon Noirs with yellow markings painted over their natural blue and green stripes to make them confusingly alike from a distance. ‘Hah, I have made her: it is Accendare. There she is, the wicked thing,’ Granby said, handing back the glass and pointing. ‘She has a talon missing from her left rear leg, and she is blind in the right eye: we gave her a good dose of pepper back in the battle of the Glorious First.’

‘I see her. Mr. Harley, pass the word to all the lookouts. Temeraire,’ he called, bringing up the speaking trumpet, ‘do you see the Flamme-de-Gloire? She is the one low and to the right, with the missing talon; she is weak in the right eye.’

‘I see her,’ Temeraire said eagerly, turning his head just slightly. ‘Are we to attack her?’

‘Our first duty is to keep her fire away from the Navy’s ships; have an eye on her as best you can,’ Laurence said, and Temeraire bobbed his head once in quick answer, straightening out again.

He tucked away the glass in the small pouch hooked onto the harness: no more need for it, very soon. ‘You had better get below, John,’ Laurence said. ‘I expect they will try a boarding with a few of those light fellows on their edges.’

All this while they had been rapidly closing the distance: suddenly there was no more time, and the French were wheeling about in perfect unison, not one dragon falling out of formation, graceful as a flock of birds. A low whistle came behind him; admittedly it was an impressive sight, but Laurence frowned though his own heart was speeding involuntarily. ‘Belay that noise.’

One of the Papillons was directly ahead of them, jaws spreading wide as if to breathe flames it could not produce; Laurence felt an odd, detached amusement to see a dragon play-acting. Temeraire could not roar from his position in the rear, not with Messoria and Lily both in the way, but he did not duck away at all; instead he raised his claws, and as the two formations swept together and intermingled, he and the Papillon pulled up and collided with a force that jarred all of their crews loose.

Laurence grappled for the harness and got his feet back underneath him. ‘Clap on there, Allen,’ he said, reaching; the boy was dangling by his carabiner straps with his arms and legs waving about wildly like an overturned tortoise. Allen managed to get himself braced and clung, his face pale and shading to green; like the other lookouts, he was only a new ensign, barely twelve years old, and he had not quite learned to manage himself aboard during the stops and starts of battle.

Temeraire was clawing and biting, his wings beating madly as he tried to keep hold of the Papillon: the French dragon was lighter-weight, and plainly all he now wanted was to get free and back to his formation. ‘Hold position,’ Laurence shouted: more important to keep the formation together for the moment. Temeraire reluctantly let the Papillon go and levelled out.

Below, distantly, came the first sound of cannon-fire: bow-chasers on the British ships, hoping to knock away some of the French merchantmen’s spars with a lucky shot or two. Not likely, but it would put the men in the right frame of mind. A steady rattle and clang behind him as the riflemen reloaded; all the harness he could see looked still in good order; no sign of dripping blood, and Temeraire was flying well. No time to ask how he was; they were coming about, Lily taking them straight for the enemy formation again.

But this time the French offered no resistance: instead the dragons scattered; wildly, Laurence thought at first, then he perceived how well they had distributed themselves around. Four of the smaller dragons darted upwards; the rest dropped perhaps a hundred feet in height, and Accendare was once again hard to tell from the decoys.

No clear target anymore, and with the dragons above the formation itself was dangerously vulnerable: engage the enemy more closely went up the yard on Lily’s back, signalling that they might disperse and fight separately. Temeraire could read the flags as well as any signal-officer: he instantly dived for the decoy with bleeding scratches, a little too eager to complete his own handiwork. ‘No, Temeraire,’ Laurence called, meaning to direct him after Accendare herself, but too late: two of the smaller dragons, both of the common Pêcheur-Rayé breed, were coming at them from either side.

‘Prepare to repel boarders,’ Lieutenant Ferris, captain of the topmen, shouted from behind him. Two of the sturdiest midwingmen took up stations just behind Laurence’s position; he glanced over his shoulder at them, his mouth tightening: it still rankled him to be so shielded, too much like cowardly hiding behind others; but no dragon would fight with a sword laid at its captain’s throat, and so he had to bear it.

Temeraire contented himself with one more slash across the fleeing decoy’s shoulders and writhed away, almost doubling back on himself. The pursuers overshot and had to turn back: a clear gain of a minute, worth more than gold at present. Laurence cast an eye over the field: the quick light-combat dragons were dashing about to fend off the British dragons, but the larger ones were forming back into a cluster and keeping pace with their convoy.

A powder-flash below caught his eye; an instant later came the thin whistling of a pepper-ball, flying up from the French ships. Another of their formation members, Immortalis, had dived just a hair too low in pursuit of one of the other dragons. Fortunately their aim was off: the ball struck his shoulder instead of his face, and the best part of the pepper scattered down harmlessly into the sea; even the remainder was enough to set the poor fellow sneezing, blowing himself ten lengths back at a time.

‘Digby, cast and mark that height,’ Laurence said; it was the starboard forward lookout’s duty to warn when they entered the range of the guns below.

Digby took the small round-shot, bored through and tied to the height-line, and tossed it over Temeraire’s shoulder, the thin silk cord paying out with the knotted marks for every fifty yards flying through his fingers. ‘Six at the mark, seventeen at the water,’ he said, counting from Immortalis’s height, and cut the cord. ‘Range five hundred fifty yards on the pepper guns, sir.’ He was already whipping the cord through another ball, to be ready when the next measure should be called for.

A shorter range than usual; were they holding back, trying to tempt the more dangerous dragons lower, or was the wind checking their shot? ‘Keep to six hundred yards’ elevation, Temeraire,’ Laurence called; best to be cautious for the moment.

‘Sir, lead signal to us, fall in on left flank Maximus,’ Turner said.

No immediate way to get over to him: the two Pêcheurs were back, trying to flank Temeraire and get men aboard, although they were flying somewhat strangely, not in a straight line. ‘What are they about?’ Martin said, and the question answered itself readily in Laurence’s mind.

‘They fear giving him a target for his roar,’ Laurence said, making it loud for Temeraire’s benefit. Temeraire snorted in disdain, abruptly halted in mid-air and whipped himself about, hovering to face the pair with his ruff standing high: the smaller dragons, clearly alarmed by the presentation, backwinged out of instinct, giving them room.

‘Hah!’ Temeraire stopped and hovered, pleased with himself at seeing the others so afraid of his prowess; Laurence had to tug on the harness to draw his attention around to the signal, which he had not yet seen. ‘Oh, I see!’ he said, and dashed forward to take up position to Maximus’s left; Lily was already on his right.

Harcourt’s intention was clear. ‘All hands low,’ Laurence said, and crouched against Temeraire’s neck even as he gave the order. Instantly they were in place, Berkley sent Maximus ahead at the big dragon’s top speed, right at the clustered French dragons.

Temeraire was swelling with breath, his ruff coming up; they were going so quickly the wind was beating tears from Laurence’s eyes, but he could see Lily’s head drawing back in similar preparation. Maximus put his head down and drove straight into the French dragons, simply bulling through their ranks with his enormous advantage in weight: the dragons fell off to his either side, only to meet Temeraire roaring and Lily spraying her corrosive acid.

Shrieks of pain in their wake, and the first dead crewmen being cut loose from harness and sent falling into the ocean, rag-doll limp. The French dragons’ forward motion had nearly halted, many of them panicking and scattering, this time with no thought to the pattern. Then Maximus and they were through: the cluster had broken apart and now Accendare was shielded from them only by a Petit Chevalier, slightly larger than Temeraire, and another of Accendare’s decoys.

They slowed; Maximus was heaving for breath, fighting to keep elevation. Harcourt waved wildly at Laurence from Lily’s back, shouting hoarsely through her speaking trumpet, ‘Go after her,’ even while the formal signal was going up on Lily’s back. Laurence touched Temeraire’s side and sent him forward; Lily sprayed another burst of acid, and the two defending dragons recoiled, enough for Temeraire to dodge past them and get through.

Granby’s voice came from below, yelling: ‘’Ware boarders!’ So some Frenchmen had made the leap to Temeraire’s back. Laurence had no time to look: directly before his face Accendare was twisting around, scarcely ten yards distant. Her right eye was milky, the left wicked and glaring, a pale yellow pupil in black sclera; she had long thin horns curving down from her forehead and to the very edge of her jaws, her opening jaws: a heat-shimmer distorted the air as flames came bursting out upon them. Very like looking into the mouth of Hell, he thought for that one narrow instant, staring into the red maw; then Temeraire snapped his wings shut and fell out of the way like a stone.

Laurence’s stomach leaped; behind him he heard clatter and cries of surprise, the boarders and defenders alike losing their footing. It seemed only a moment before Temeraire opened his wings again and began to beat up hard, but they had plummeted some distance, and Accendare was flying rapidly away from them, back to the ships below.

The rearmost merchant ships of the French convoy had come within the accurate range of long guns of the British men-of-war: the steady roar of cannon-fire rose, mingled with sulphur and smoke. The quickest frigates had already moved on ahead, passing by the merchantmen under fire and continuing for the richer prizes at the front. In doing so, however, they had left the shelter of Excidium’s formation, and Accendare now stooped towards them, her crew throwing the fist-sized iron incendiaries over her sides, which she bathed with flame as they fell towards the vulnerable British ships.

More than half the shells fell into the sea, much more; mindful of Temeraire’s pursuit, Accendare had not gone very low, and aim could not be accurate from so high up. But Laurence could see a handful blooming into flame below: the thin metal shells broke as they struck the decks of the ships, and the naphtha within ignited against the hot metal, spreading a pool of fire across the deck.

Temeraire gave a low growl of anger as he saw fire catch the sails of one of the frigates, instantly putting on another burst of speed to go after Accendare; he had been hatched on deck, spent the first three weeks of his life at sea: the affection remained. Laurence urged him on with word and touch, full of the same anger. Intent on the pursuit and watching for other dragons who might be close enough to offer her support, Laurence was startled out of his single-minded focus unpleasantly: Croyn, one of the topmen, fell onto him before rolling away and off Temeraire’s back, mouth round and open, hands reaching; his carabiner straps had been severed.

He missed the harness, his hands slipping over Temeraire’s smooth hide; Laurence snatched at him, uselessly: the boy was falling, arms flailing at the empty air, down a quarter of a mile and gone into the water: only a small splash; he did not resurface. Another man went down just after him, one of the boarders, but already dead even as he tumbled slack-limbed through the air. Laurence loosened his own straps and stood, turning around as he drew his pistols. Seven boarders were still aboard, fighting very hard. One with lieutenant’s bars on his shoulders was only a few paces away, engaged closely with Quarle, the second of the midwingmen who had been set to guard Laurence.

Even as Laurence got to his feet, the lieutenant knocked aside Quarle’s arm with his sword and drove a vicious-looking long knife into his side left-handed. Quarle dropped his own sword and put his hands around the hilt, sinking, coughing blood. Laurence had a wide-open shot, but just behind the lieutenant, one of the boarders had driven Martin to his knees: the midwingman’s neck was bare to the man’s cutlass.

Laurence levelled his pistol and fired: the boarder fell backwards with a hole in his chest spurting, and Martin heaved himself back to his feet. Before Laurence could take fresh aim and set off the other, the lieutenant took the risk of slashing his own straps and leaped over Quarle’s body, catching Laurence’s arm both for support and to push the pistol aside. It was an extraordinary manoeuvre, whether for bravery or recklessness; ‘Bravo,’ Laurence said, involuntarily. The Frenchman looked at him startled and then smiled, incongruously boyish in his blood-streaked face, before he brought his sword up.

Laurence had an unfair advantage, of course; he was useless dead, for a dragon whose captain had been killed would turn with utmost savagery on the enemy: uncontrolled but very dangerous nonetheless. The Frenchman needed him prisoner, not killed, and that made him overly cautious, while Laurence could freely aim for a killing blow and strike as best as ever he could.

But that was not very well, currently. It was an odd battle; they were upon the narrow base of Temeraire’s neck, so closely engaged that Laurence was not at a disadvantage from the tall lieutenant’s greater reach, but that same condition let the Frenchman keep his grip on Laurence, without which he would certainly have slipped off. They were more pushing at one another than truly sword-fighting; their blades hardly ever parted more than an inch or two before coming together again, and Laurence began to think the contest would only be ended if one or the other of them fell.

Laurence risked a step; it let him turn them both slightly, so he could see the rest of the struggle over the lieutenant’s shoulder. Martin and Ferris were both still standing, and several of the riflemen, but they were outnumbered, and if even a couple more of the boarders managed to get past, it would be very awkward for Laurence indeed. Several of the bellmen were trying to come up from below, but the boarders had detached a couple of men to fend them off: as Laurence watched, Johnson was stabbed through and fell.

‘Vive l’Empereur,’ the lieutenant shouted to his men encouragingly, looking also; he took heart from the favourable position and struck again, aiming for Laurence’s leg. Laurence deflected the blow: his sword rang oddly with the impact, though, and he realized with an unpleasant shock that he was fighting with his dress sword, worn to the Admiralty the day before: he had never had a chance to exchange it.

He began to fight more narrowly, trying not to meet the Frenchman’s sword anywhere below the midpoint of his sword: he did not want to lose his entire blade if it were going to snap. Another sharp blow, at his right arm: he blocked it as well, but this time five inches of steel did indeed snap off, scoring a thin line across his jaw before it tumbled away, red-gold in the reflected firelight.

The Frenchman had seen the weakness of the blade now, and was trying to batter it into pieces. Another crack and more of the blade went: Laurence was fighting with only six inches of steel now, with the paste brilliants on the silver-plated hilt sparkling at him mockingly, ridiculous. He clenched his jaw; he was not going to surrender and see Temeraire ordered to France: he would be damned first. If he jumped over the side, calling, there was some hope Temeraire might catch him; if not, then at least he would not be responsible for delivering Temeraire into Napoleon’s hands after all.

Then a shout: Granby came swarming up the rear tail strap without benefit of carabiners, locked himself back on and lunged for the man guarding the left side of the belly strap. The man fell dead, and six bellmen almost at once burst into the tops: the remaining boarders drew into a tight knot, but in a moment they would have to surrender or be killed. Martin had turned and was already clambering over Quarle’s body, freed by the relief from below, and his sword was ready.

‘Ah, voici un joli gâchis,’ the lieutenant said in tones of despair, looking also, and he made a last gallant attempt, binding Laurence’s hilt with his own blade, and using the length as a lever: he managed to pry it out of Laurence’s hand with a great heave, but just as he did he staggered, surprised, and blood came out of his nose. He fell forward into Laurence’s arms, senseless: young Digby was standing rather wobblingly behind him, holding the round-shot on the measuring cord; he had crept along from his lookout’s post on Temeraire’s shoulder, and struck the Frenchman on the head.

‘Well done,’ Laurence said, after he had worked out what had happened; the boy flushed up proudly. ‘Mr. Martin, heave this fellow below to the infirmary, will you?’ Laurence handed the Frenchman’s limp form over. ‘He fought quite like a lion.’

‘Very good, sir.’ Martin’s mouth kept moving, he was saying something more, but a roar from above was drowning out his voice: it was the last thing Laurence heard.

The low and dangerous rumble of Temeraire’s growl, just above him, penetrated the smothering unconsciousness. Laurence tried to move, to look around him, but the light stabbed painfully at his eyes, and his leg did not want to answer at all; groping blindly down along his thigh, he found it entangled with the leather straps of his harness, and felt a wet trickle of blood where one of the buckles had torn through his breeches and into his skin.

He thought for a moment perhaps they had been captured; but the voices he heard were English, and then he recognized Barham, shouting, and Granby saying fiercely, ‘No, sir, no farther, not one damned step. Temeraire, if those men make ready, you may knock them down.’

Laurence struggled to sit up, and then suddenly there were anxious hands supporting him. ‘Steady, sir, are you all right?’ It was young Digby, pressing a dripping waterbag into his hands. Laurence wetted his lips, but he did not dare to swallow; his stomach was roiling. ‘Help me stand,’ he said, hoarsely, trying to squint his eyes open a little.

‘No, sir, you mustn’t,’ Digby whispered urgently. ‘You have had a nasty knock on the head, and those fellows, they have come to arrest you. Granby said we had to keep you out of sight and wait for the admiral.’

He was lying behind the protective curl of Temeraire’s foreleg, with the hard-packed dirt of the clearing underneath him; Digby and Allen, the forward lookouts, were crouched down on either side of him. Small rivulets of dark blood were running down Temeraire’s leg to stain the ground black, not far away. ‘He is wounded,’ Laurence said sharply, trying to get up again.

‘Mr. Keynes is gone for bandages, sir; a Pêcheur hit us across the shoulders, but it is only a few scratches,’ Digby said, holding him back; which attempt was successful, because Laurence could not make his wrenched leg even bend, much less carry any weight. ‘You are not to get up, sir, Baylesworth is getting a stretcher.’

‘Enough of this, help me rise,’ Laurence said, sharply; Lenton could not possibly come quickly, so soon after a battle, and he did not mean to lie about letting matters get worse. He made Digby and Allen help him rise and limp out from the concealment, the two ensigns struggling under his weight.

Barham was there with a dozen Marines, these not the inexperienced boys of his escort in London but hard-bitten soldiers, older men, and they had brought with them a pepper gun: only a small, short-barrelled one, but at this range they hardly needed better. Barham was almost purple in the face, quarrelling with Granby at the side of the clearing; when he caught sight of Laurence his eyes went narrow. ‘There you are; did you think you could hide here, like a coward? Stand down that animal, at once; Sergeant, go there and take him.’

‘You are not to come anywhere near Laurence, at all,’ Temeraire snarled at the soldiers, before Laurence could make any reply, and raised one deadly clawed foreleg, ready to strike. The blood streaking his shoulders and neck made him look truly savage, and his great ruff was standing up stiffly around his head.

The men flinched a little, but the sergeant said, stolidly, ‘Run out that gun, Corporal,’ and gestured to the rest of them to raise up their muskets.

In alarm, Laurence called out to him hoarsely, ‘Temeraire, stop; for God’s sake settle,’ but it was useless; Temeraire was in a red-eyed rage, and did not take any notice. Even if the musketry did not cause him serious injury, the pepper gun would surely blind and madden him even further, and he could easily be driven into a truly uncontrolled frenzy, terrible both to himself and to others.

The trees to the west of them shook suddenly, and abruptly Maximus’s enormous head and shoulders came rising up out of the growth; he flung his head back yawning tremendously, exposing rows of serrated teeth, and shook himself all over. ‘Is the battle not over? What is all the noise?’

‘You there!’ Barham shouted at the big Regal Copper, pointing at Temeraire. ‘Hold down that dragon!’

Like all Regal Coppers, Maximus was badly farsighted; to see into the clearing, he was forced to rear up onto his haunches to gain enough distance. He was twice Temeraire’s size by weight and twenty feet more in length now; his wings, half-outspread for balance, threw a long shadow ahead of him, and with the sun behind him they glowed redly, veins standing out in the translucent skin.

Looming over them all, he drew his head back on his neck and peered into the clearing. ‘Why do you need to be held down?’ he asked Temeraire, interestedly.

‘I do not need to be held down!’ Temeraire said, almost spitting in his anger, ruff quivering; the blood was running more freely down his shoulders. ‘Those men want to take Laurence from me, and put him in prison, and execute him, and I will not let them, ever, and I do not care if Laurence tells me not to squash you,’ he added, fiercely, to Lord Barham.

‘Good God,’ Laurence said, low and appalled; it had not occurred to him the real nature of Temeraire’s fear. But the only time Temeraire had ever seen an arrest, the man taken had been a traitor, executed shortly thereafter before the eyes of the man’s own dragon. The experience had left Temeraire and all the young dragons of the covert crushed with sympathetic misery for days; it was no wonder if he was panicked now.

Granby took advantage of the unwitting distraction Maximus had provided, and made a quick, impulsive gesture to the other officers of Temeraire’s crew: Ferris and Evans jumped to follow him, Riggs and his riflemen scrambling after, and in a moment they were all ranged defensively in front of Temeraire, raising pistols and rifles. It was all bravado, their guns spent from the battle, but that did not in any way reduce the significance. Laurence shut his eyes in dismay. Granby and all his men had just flung themselves into the stew-pot with him, by such direct disobedience; indeed there was increasingly every justification to call this a mutiny.

The muskets facing them did not waver, though; the Marines were still hurrying to finish loading the gun, tamping down one of the big round pepper-balls with a small wad. ‘Make ready!’ the corporal said. Laurence could not think what to do; if he ordered Temeraire to knock down the gun, they would be attacking fellow soldiers, men only doing their duty: unforgivable, even to his own mind, and only a little less unthinkable than standing by while they injured Temeraire, or his own men.

‘What the devil do you all mean here?’ Keynes, the dragon-surgeon assigned to Temeraire’s care, had just come back into the clearing, two staggering assistants behind him laden down with fresh white bandages and thin silk thread for stitching. He shoved his way through the startled Marines, his well-salted hair and blood-spattered coat giving him a badge of authority they did not choose to defy, and snatched the slow-match out of the hands of the man standing by the pepper gun.

He flung it to the ground and stamped it out, and glared all around, sparing neither Barham and the Marines nor Granby and his men, impartially furious. ‘He is fresh from the field; have you all taken leave of your senses? You cannot be stirring up dragons like this after a battle; in half a minute we will have the rest of the covert looking in, and not just that great busybody there,’ he added, pointing at Maximus.

Indeed more dragons had already lifted their heads up above the tree cover, trying to crane their heads over to see what was going on, making a great noise of cracking branches; the ground even trembled underfoot when the abashed Maximus dropped lower, back down to his haunches, in an attempt to make his curiosity less obvious. Barham uneasily looked around at the many inquisitive spectators: dragons ordinarily ate directly after a battle, and many of them had gore dripping from their jaws, bones cracking audibly as they chewed.

Keynes did not give him time to recover. ‘Out, out at once, the lot of you; I cannot be operating in the middle of this circus, and as for you,’ he snapped at Laurence, ‘lie down again at once; I gave orders you were to be taken straight to the surgeons. Christ only knows what you are doing to that leg, hopping about on it. Where is Baylesworth with that stretcher?’

Barham, wavering, was caught by this. ‘Laurence is damned well under arrest, and I have a mind to clap the rest of you mutinous dogs into irons also,’ he began, only to have Keynes wheel on him in turn.

‘You can arrest him in the morning, after that leg has been seen to, and his dragon. Of all the blackguardly, unchristian notions; storming in on wounded men and beasts—’ Keynes was literally shaking his fist in Barham’s face; an alarming prospect, thanks to the wickedly-hooked ten-inch tenaculum clenched in his fingers, and the moral force of his argument was very great: Barham stepped back, involuntarily. The Marines gratefully took it as a signal, beginning to drag the gun back out of the clearing with them, and Barham, baffled and deserted, was forced to give way.

The delay thus won lasted only a short while. The surgeons scratched their heads over Laurence’s leg; the bone was not broken, despite the breathtaking pain when they roughly palpated the limb, and there was no visible wound, save the great mottled bruises covering nearly every scrap of skin. His head ached fiercely also, but there was little they could do but offer him laudanum for the pain, which he refused, and order him to keep his weight off the leg: advice as practical as it was unnecessary, since he could not stand for any length of time without suffering a collapse.

Meanwhile, Temeraire’s own wounds, thankfully minor, were sewed up, and with much coaxing Laurence persuaded him to eat a little, despite his agitation. By morning, it was plain Temeraire was healing well, with no sign of wound-fever, and there was no excuse for further delay; a formal summons had come from Admiral Lenton, ordering Laurence to report to the covert headquarters. He had to be carried in an elbow chair, leaving behind him an uneasy and restive Temeraire. ‘If you do not come back by tomorrow morning, I will come and find you,’ he vowed, and would not be dissuaded.

Laurence could do little in honesty to reassure him: there was every likelihood he was to be arrested, if Lenton had not managed some miracle of persuasion, and after these multiple offences a court-martial might very well impose a death sentence. Ordinarily an aviator would not be hanged for anything less than outright treason. But Barham would surely have him up before a board of Navy officers, who would be far more severe, and consideration for preserving the dragon’s service would not enter into their deliberations: Temeraire was already lost to England, as a fighting-dragon, by the demands of the Chinese.

It was by no means an easy or a comfortable situation, and still worse was the knowledge that he had imperilled his men; Granby would have to answer for his defiance, and the other lieutenants also, Evans and Ferris and Riggs; any or all of them might be dismissed the service: a terrible fate for an aviator, raised in the ranks from early childhood. Even those midwingmen who never passed for lieutenant were not usually sent away; some work would be found for them, in the breeding grounds or in the coverts, that they might remain in the society of their fellows.

Though his leg had improved some little way overnight, Laurence was still pale and sweating even from the short walk he risked taking up the front stairs of the building. The pain was increasing sharply, dizzying, and he was forced to stop and catch his breath before he went into the small office.

‘Good Heavens; I thought you had been let go by the surgeons. Sit down, Laurence, before you fall down; take this,’ Lenton said, ignoring Barham’s scowl of impatience, and put a glass of brandy into Laurence’s hand.

‘Thank you, sir; you are not mistaken, I have been released,’ Laurence said, and only sipped once for politeness’s sake; his head was already clouded badly enough.

‘That is enough; he is not here to be coddled,’ Barham said. ‘Never in my life have I seen such outrageous behaviour, and from an officer— By God, Laurence, I have never taken pleasure in a hanging, but on this occasion, I would call it good riddance. But Lenton swears to me your beast will become unmanageable; though how we should tell the difference I can hardly say.’

Lenton’s lips tightened at this disdainful tone; Laurence could only imagine the humiliating lengths to which he had been forced in order to impress this understanding on Barham. Though Lenton was an admiral, and fresh from another great victory, even that meant very little in any larger sphere; Barham could offend him with impunity, where any admiral in the Navy would have had political influence and friends enough to require more respectful handling.

‘You are to be dismissed the service, that is beyond question,’ Barham continued. ‘But the animal must be gotten off to China, and for that, I am sorry to say, we require your cooperation. Find some way to persuade him, and we will leave the matter there; any more of this recalcitrance, and I am damned if I will not hang you after all; yes, and have the animal shot, and be damned to those Chinamen also.’

This last very nearly brought Laurence out of his chair, despite his injury; only Lenton’s hand on his shoulder, pressing down firmly, held him in place. ‘Sir, you go too far,’ Lenton said. ‘We have never shot dragons in England for anything less than man-eating, and we are not going to start now; I would have a real mutiny on my hands.’

Barham scowled, and muttered something not quite intelligible under his breath about lack of discipline; which was a fine thing coming from a man who Laurence well knew had served during the great naval mutinies of ’97, when half the fleet had risen up. ‘Well, let us hope it does not come to any such thing. There is a transport in ordinary in harbour at Spithead, the Allegiance; she can be made ready for sea in a week. How then is the animal to be gotten aboard, since he is choosing to be balky?’

Laurence could not bring himself to answer; a week was a horribly short time, and for a moment he even wildly allowed himself to consider the prospect of flight. Temeraire could easily reach the Continent from Dover, and there were places in the forests of the German states where even now feral dragons lived; though only small breeds.

‘It will require some consideration,’ Lenton said. ‘I will not scruple to say, sir, that the whole affair has been mismanaged from the beginning. The dragon has been badly stirred-up, now, and it is no joke to coax a dragon to do something he does not like to begin with.’

‘Enough excuses, Lenton; quite enough,’ Barham began, and then a tapping came on the door; they all looked in surprise as a rather pale-looking midwingman opened the door and said, ‘Sir, sir—’ only to hastily clear out of the way: the Chinese soldiers looked as though they would have trampled straight over him, clearing a path for Prince Yongxing into the room.

They were all of them so startled they forgot at first to rise, and Laurence was still struggling to get up to his feet when Yongxing had already come into the room. The attendants hurried to pull a chair – Lord Barham’s chair – over for the prince; but Yongxing waved it aside, forcing the rest of them to keep on their feet. Lenton unobtrusively put a hand under Laurence’s arm, giving him a little support, but the room still tilted and spun around him, the blaze of Yongxing’s bright-coloured robes stabbing at his eyes.

‘I see this is the way in which you show your respect for the Son of Heaven,’ Yongxing said, addressing Barham. ‘Once again you have thrown Lung Tien Xiang into battle; now you hold secret councils, and plot how you may yet keep the fruits of your thievery.’

Though Barham had been damning the Chinese five minutes before, now he went pale and stammered, ‘Sir, Your Highness, not in the least—’ but Yongxing was not slowed even a little.

‘I have gone through this covert, as you call these animal pens,’ he said. ‘It is not surprising, when one considers your barbaric methods, that Lung Tien Xiang should have formed this misguided attachment. Naturally he does not wish to be separated from the companion who is responsible for what little comfort he has been given.’ He turned to Laurence, and looked him up and down disdainfully. ‘You have taken advantage of his youth and inexperience; but this will not be tolerated. We will hear no further excuses for these delays. Once he has been restored to his home and his proper place, he will soon learn better than to value company so far beneath him.’

‘Your Highness, you are mistaken; we have every intention to cooperate with you,’ Lenton said bluntly, while Barham was still struggling for more polished phrases. ‘But Temeraire will not leave Laurence, and I am sure you know well that a dragon cannot be sent, but only led.’

Yongxing said icily, ‘Then plainly Captain Laurence must come also; or will you now attempt to convince us that he cannot be sent?’

They all stared, in blank confusion; Laurence hardly dared believe he understood properly, and then Barham blurted, ‘Good God, if you want Laurence, you may damn well have him, and welcome.’

The rest of the meeting passed in a haze for Laurence, the tangle of confusion and immense relief leaving him badly distracted. His head still spun, and he answered to remarks somewhat randomly until Lenton finally intervened once more, sending him up to bed. He kept himself awake only long enough to send a quick note to Temeraire by way of the maid, and fell straightaway into a thick, unrefreshing sleep.

He clawed his way out of it the next morning, having slept fourteen hours. Captain Roland was drowsing by his bedside, head tipped against the chair back, mouth open; as he stirred, she woke and rubbed her face, yawning. ‘Well, Laurence, are you awake? You have been giving us all a fright and no mistake. Emily came to me because poor Temeraire was fretting himself to pieces: whyever did you send him such a note?’

Laurence tried desperately to remember what he had written: impossible; it was wholly gone, and he could remember very little of the previous day at all, though the central, the essential point was quite fixed in his mind. ‘Roland, I have not the faintest idea what I said. Does Temeraire know that I am going with him?’

‘Well, now he does, since Lenton told me after I came looking for you, but he certainly did not find it in here,’ she said, and gave him a piece of paper.

It was in his own hand, and with his signature, but wholly unfamiliar, and nonsensical:

Temeraire—

Never fear; I am going; the Son of Heaven will not tolerate delays, and Barham gives me leave. Allegiance will carry us! Pray eat something.

—L.

Laurence stared at it in some distress, wondering how he had come to write so. ‘I do not remember a word of it; but wait, no; Allegiance is the name of the transport, and Prince Yongxing referred to the Emperor as the Son of Heaven, though why I should have repeated such a blasphemous thing I have no idea.’ He handed her the note. ‘My wits must have been wandering. Pray throw it in the fire; and go tell Temeraire that I am quite well now, and will be with him again soon. Can you ring for someone to valet me? I need to dress.’

‘You look as though you ought to stay just where you are,’ Roland said. ‘No: lie quiet a while. There is no great hurry at present, as far as I understand, and I know this fellow Barham wants to speak with you; also Lenton. I will go tell Temeraire you have not died or grown a second head, and have Emily jog back and forth between you if you have messages.’

Laurence yielded to her persuasions; indeed he did not truly feel up to rising, and if Barham wanted to speak with him again, he thought he would need to conserve what strength he had. However, in the event, he was spared: Lenton came alone instead.

‘Well, Laurence, you are in for a hellishly long trip, I am afraid, and I hope you do not have a bad time of it,’ he said, drawing up a chair. ‘My transport ran into a three-day gale going to India, back in the nineties; rain freezing as it fell, so the dragons could not fly above it for some relief. Poor Obversaria was ill the entire time. Nothing less pleasant than a sea-sick dragon, for them or you.’

Laurence had never commanded a dragon transport, but the image was a vivid one. ‘I am glad to say, sir, that Temeraire has never had the slightest difficulty, and indeed he enjoys sea-travel greatly.’

‘We will see how he likes it if you meet a hurricane,’ Lenton said, shaking his head. ‘Not that I expect either of you have any objections, under the circumstances.’

‘No, not in the least,’ Laurence said, heartfelt. He supposed it was merely a jump from frying-pan to fire, but he was grateful enough even for the slower roasting: the journey would last for many months, and there was room for hope: any number of things might happen before they reached China.

Lenton nodded. ‘Well, you are looking moderately ghastly, so let me be brief. I have managed to persuade Barham that the best thing to do is pack you off bag and baggage, in this case your crew; some of your officers would be in for a good bit of unpleasantness, otherwise, and we had best get you on your way before he thinks better of it.’

Yet another relief, scarcely looked-for. ‘Sir,’ Laurence said, ‘I must tell you how deeply indebted I am—’

‘No, nonsense; do not thank me.’ Lenton brushed his sparse grey hair back from his forehead, and abruptly said, ‘I am damned sorry about all this, Laurence. I would have run mad a good deal sooner, in your place; brutally done, all of it.’

Laurence hardly knew what to say; he had not expected anything like sympathy, and he did not feel he deserved it. After a moment, Lenton went on, more briskly. ‘I am sorry not to give you a longer time to recover, but then you will not have much to do aboard ship but rest. Barham has promised them the Allegiance will sail in a week’s time; though from what I gather, he will be hard put to find a captain for her by then.’

‘I thought Cartwright was to have her?’ Laurence asked, some vague memory stirring; he still read the Naval Chronicle, and followed the assignments of ships; Cartwright’s name stuck in his head: they had served together in Goliath, many years before.

‘Yes, when Allegiance was meant to go to Halifax; there is apparently some other ship being built for him there. But they cannot wait for him to finish a two years’ journey to China and back,’ Lenton said. ‘Be that as it may, someone will be found; you must be ready.’

‘You may be sure of it, sir,’ Laurence said. ‘I will be quite well again by then.’

His optimism was perhaps ill-founded; after Lenton had gone, Laurence tried to write a letter and found he could not quite manage it, his head ached too wretchedly. Fortunately, Granby came by an hour later to see him, full of excitement at the prospect of the journey, and contemptuous of the risks he had taken with his own career.

‘As though I could give a cracked egg for such a thing, when that scoundrel was trying to have you hauled away, and pointing guns at Temeraire,’ he said. ‘Pray don’t think of it, and tell me what you would like me to write.’

Laurence gave up trying to counsel him to caution; Granby’s loyalty was as obstinate as his initial dislike had been, if more gratifying. ‘Only a few lines, if you please – to Captain Thomas Riley; tell him we are bound for China in a week’s time, and if he does not mind a transport, he can likely get Allegiance, if only he goes straightaway to the Admiralty: Barham has no one for the ship; but be sure and tell him not to mention my name.’

‘Very good,’ Granby said, scratching away; he did not write a very elegant hand, the letters sprawling wastefully, but it was serviceable enough to read. ‘Do you know him well? We will have to put up with whoever they give us for a long while.’

‘Yes, very well indeed,’ Laurence said. ‘He was my third lieutenant in Belize, and my second in Reliant; he was at Temeraire’s hatching: a fine officer and seaman. We could not hope for better.’

‘I will run it down to the courier myself, and tell him to be sure it arrives,’ Granby promised. ‘What a relief it would be, not to have one of these wretched stiff-necked fellows—’ and there he stopped, embarrassed; it was not so very long ago he had counted Laurence himself a ‘stiff-necked fellow’, after all.

‘Thank you, John,’ Laurence said hastily, sparing him. ‘Although we ought not get our hopes up yet; the Ministry may prefer a more senior man in the role,’ he added, though privately he thought the chances were excellent. Barham would not have an easy time of it, finding someone willing to accept the post.

Impressive though they might be, to the landsman’s eye, a dragon transport was an awkward sort of vessel to command: often enough they sat in port endlessly, awaiting dragon passengers, while the crew dissipated itself in drinking and whoring. Or they might spend months in the middle of the ocean, trying to maintain a single position to serve as a resting point for dragons crossing long distances; like blockade-duty, only worse for lack of society. Little chance of battle or glory, less of prize-money; they were not desirable to any man who could do better.

But the Reliant, so badly dished in the gale after Trafalgar, would be in dry-dock for a long while. Riley, left on shore with no influence to help him to a new ship, virtually no seniority, would be as glad of the opportunity as Laurence would be to have him, and there was every chance Barham would seize on the first fellow who offered.

Laurence spent the next day labouring, with slightly more success, over other necessary letters. His affairs were not prepared for a long journey, much of it far past the limits of the courier circuit. Then too, over the last dreadful weeks he had entirely neglected his personal correspondence, and by now he owed several replies, particularly to his family. After the battle of Dover, his father had grown more tolerant of his new profession; although they still did not write one another directly, at least Laurence was no longer obliged to conceal his correspondence with his mother, and he had for some time now addressed his letters to her openly. His father might very well choose to suspend that privilege again, after this affair, but Laurence hoped he might not hear the particulars of it: fortunately, Barham had nothing to gain from embarrassing Lord Allendale; particularly not now when Wilberforce, their mutual political ally, meant to make another push for abolition in the next session of Parliament.

Laurence dashed off another dozen hasty notes, in a hand not very much like his usual, to other correspondents; most of them were naval men, who would well understand the exigencies of a hasty departure. Despite much abbreviation, the effort took its toll, and by the time Jane Roland came to see him once again, he had nearly prostrated himself once more, and was lying back against the pillows with eyes shut.

‘Yes, I will post them for you, but you are behaving absurdly, Laurence,’ she said, collecting up the letters. ‘A knock on the head can be very nasty, even if you have not cracked your skull. When I had the yellow fever I did not prance about claiming I was well; I lay in bed and took my gruel and possets, and I was back on my feet quicker than any of the other fellows in the West Indies who took it.’

‘Thank you, Jane,’ he said, and did not argue with her; indeed he felt very ill, and he was grateful when she drew the curtains and cast the room into a comfortable dimness.

He briefly came out of sleep some hours later, hearing some commotion outside the door of his room: Roland saying, ‘You are damned well going to leave now, or I will kick you down the hall. What do you mean, sneaking in here to pester him the instant I have gone out?’

‘But I must speak with Captain Laurence; the situation is of the most urgent—’ the protesting voice was unfamiliar, and rather bewildered. ‘I have ridden straight from London—’

‘If it is so urgent, you may go speak to Admiral Lenton,’ Roland said. ‘No; I do not care if you are from the Ministry; you look young enough to be one of my mids, and I do not for an instant believe you have anything to say that cannot wait until morning.’

With this she pulled the door shut behind her, and the rest of the argument was muffled; Laurence drifted again away. But the next morning there was no one to defend him, and scarcely had the maid brought in his breakfast – the threatened gruel and hot-milk posset, and quite unappetizing – than a fresh attempt at invasion was made, this time with more success.

‘I beg your pardon, sir, for forcing myself upon you in this irregular fashion,’ the stranger said, talking rapidly while he dragged up a chair to Laurence’s bedside, uninvited. ‘Pray allow me to explain; I realize the appearance is quite extraordinary—’ He set down the heavy chair and sat down, or rather perched, at the very edge of the seat. ‘My name is Hammond, Arthur Hammond; I have been deputized by the Ministry to accompany you to the court of China.’

Hammond was a surprisingly young man, perhaps twenty years of age, with untidy dark hair and a great intensity of expression that lent his thin, sallow face an illuminated quality. He spoke at first in half-sentences, torn between the forms of apology and his plain eagerness to come to his subject. ‘The absence of an introduction, I beg you will forgive, we have been taken completely, completely by surprise, and Lord Barham has already committed us to the twenty-third as a sailing date. If you would prefer, we may of course press him for some extension—’

This of all things Laurence was eager to avoid, though he was indeed a little astonished by Hammond’s forwardness; hastily he said, ‘No, sir, I am entirely at your service; we cannot delay sailing to exchange formalities, particularly when Prince Yongxing has already been promised that date.’

‘Ah! I am of a similar mind,’ Hammond said, with a great deal of relief; Laurence suspected, looking at his face and measuring his years, that he had only received the appointment due to the lack of time. But Hammond quickly refuted the notion that a willingness to go to China on a moment’s notice was his only qualification. Having settled himself, he drew out a thick sheaf of papers, which had been distending the front of his coat, and began to discourse in great detail and speed upon the prospects of their mission.

Laurence was almost from the first unable to follow him. Hammond unconsciously slipped into stretches of the Chinese language from time to time, when looking down at those of his papers written in that script, and while speaking in English dwelt largely on the subject of the Macartney embassy to China, which had taken place fourteen years prior. Laurence, who had been newly made lieutenant at the time and wholly occupied with naval matters and his own career, had hardly remembered the existence of the mission at all, much less any details.

He did not immediately stop Hammond, however: there was no convenient pause in the flow of his conversation, for one, and for another there was a reassuring quality to the monologue. Hammond spoke with authority beyond his years, an obvious command of his subject, and, still more importantly, without the least hint of the incivility which Laurence had come to expect from Barham and the Ministry. Laurence was grateful enough for any prospect of an ally to willingly listen, even if all he knew of the expedition himself was that Macartney’s ship, the Lion, had been the first Western vessel to chart the Bay of Zhitao.

‘Oh,’ Hammond said, rather disappointed, when at last he realized how thoroughly he had mistaken his audience. ‘Well, I suppose it does not much signify; to put it plainly, the embassy was a dismal failure. Lord Macartney refused to perform their ritual of obeisance before the Emperor, the kowtow, and they took offence. They would not even consider granting us a permanent mission, and he ended by being escorted out of the China Sea by a dozen dragons.’

‘That I do remember,’ Laurence said; indeed he had a vague recollection of discussing the matter among his friends in the gunroom, with some heat at the insult to Britain’s envoy. ‘But surely the kowtow was quite offensive; did they not wish him to grovel on the floor?’

‘We cannot be turning up our noses at foreign customs when we are coming to their country, hat in hand,’ Hammond said, earnestly, leaning forward. ‘You can see yourself, sir, the evil consequences: I am sure that the bad blood from this incident continues to poison our present relationship.’

Laurence frowned; this argument was indeed persuasive, and made some better explanation why Yongxing had come to England so very ready to be offended. ‘Do you think this same quarrel their reason for having offered Bonaparte a Celestial? After so long a time?’

‘I will be quite honest with you, Captain, we have not the least idea,’ Hammond said. ‘Our only comfort, these last fourteen years – a very cornerstone of foreign policy – has been our certainty, our complete certainty, that the Chinese were no more interested in the affairs of Europe than we are in the affairs of the penguins. Now all our foundations have been shaken.’

Chapter Three

The Allegiance was a wallowing behemoth of a ship: just over four hundred feet in length and oddly narrow in proportion, except for the outsize dragondeck that flared out at the front of the ship, stretching from the foremast forward to the bow. Seen from above, she looked very strange, almost fan-shaped. But below the wide lip of the dragondeck, her hull narrowed quickly; the keel was fashioned out of steel rather than elm, and thickly covered with white paint against rust: the long white stripe running down her middle gave her an almost rakish appearance.

To give her the stability which she required to meet storms, she had a draught of more than twenty feet and was too large to come into the harbour proper, but had to be moored to enormous pillars sunk far out in the deep water and her supplies ferried to and fro by smaller vessels: a great lady surrounded by scurrying attendants. This was not the first transport which Laurence and Temeraire had travelled on, but she would be the first true ocean-going one; a poky three-dragon ship running from Gibraltar to Plymouth with barely a few planks in increased width could offer no comparison.

‘It is very nice; I am more comfortable even than in my clearing.’ Temeraire approved: from his place of solitary glory, he could see all the ship’s activity without being in the way, and the ship’s galley with its ovens was placed directly beneath the dragondeck, which kept the surface warm. ‘You are not cold at all, Laurence?’ he asked, for perhaps the third time, craning his head down to peer closely at him.

‘No, not in the least,’ Laurence said shortly; he was a little annoyed by the continuing oversolicitude. Though the dizziness and headache had subsided together with the lump upon his head, his bruised leg remained stubborn, prone to giving out at odd moments and throbbing with an almost constant ache. He had been hoisted aboard in a bo’sun’s chair, very offensive to his sense of his own capabilities, then put directly into an elbow-chair and carried up to the dragondeck, swathed in blankets like an invalid, and now had Temeraire very carefully coiling himself about to serve as a windbreak.

There were two sets of stairs rising to the dragondeck, one on either side of the foremast, and the area of the forecastle stretching from the foot of these and halfway to the mainmast was by custom allocated to the aviators, while the foremast jacks ruled the remainder of the space up to the mainmast. Already Temeraire’s crew had taken possession of their rightful domain, pointedly pushing several piles of coiled cables across the invisible dividing line; bundles of leather harness and baskets full of rings and buckles had been laid down in their place, all to put the Navy men on notice that the aviators were not to be taken advantage of. Those men not occupied in putting away their gear were ranged along the line in various attitudes of relaxation and affected labour; Roland and the other two cadet runners, Morgan and Dyer, had been set to playing there by the ensigns, who had conveyed their duty to defend the rights of the Corps. Being so small they could walk the ship’s rail with ease and were dashing back and forth with a fine show of recklessness.

Laurence watched them, broodingly; he was still uneasy about bringing Roland. ‘Why would you leave her? Has she been misbehaving?’ was all Jane had asked, when he had consulted her on the matter; impossibly awkward to try and explain his concerns, facing her. And of course, there was some sense in taking the girl along, young as she was: she would have to face every demand made of a male officer, when she came to be Excidium’s captain on her mother’s retirement; it would be no kindness to leave her unprepared by being too soft on her now.

Even so, now that he was aboard he was sorry. This was not a covert, and he had already seen that as with any naval crew there were some ugly, some very ugly fellows among the lot: drunkards, brawlers, gaol-birds. He felt too heavily the responsibility of watching over a young girl among such men; not to mention that he would be best pleased if the secret that women served in the Corps did not come out here and make a noise.

He did not mean to instruct Roland to lie, by no means, and of course he could not give her different duties than otherwise; but he privately and intensely hoped the truth might remain concealed. Roland was only eleven, and no cursory glance would take her for a girl in her trousers and short jacket; he had once mistaken her for a boy himself. But he also desired to see the aviators and the sailors friendly, or at least not hostile, and a close acquaintance could hardly fail to notice Roland’s real gender for long.

At present his hopes looked more likely to be answered in her case than the general. The foremast hands, engaged in the business of loading the ship, were talking none too quietly about fellows who had nothing better to do but sit about and be passengers; a couple of men made loud comments about how the shifted cables had been cast all ahoo, and set to recoiling them, unnecessarily. Laurence shook his head and kept his silence; his own men had been within their rights, and he could not reprove Riley’s men, nor would it do any good.

However, Temeraire had noticed also; he snorted, his ruff coming up a little. ‘That cable looks perfectly well to me,’ he said. ‘My crew were very careful moving it.’

‘It is all right, my dear; can never hurt to recoil a cable,’ Laurence said hurriedly. It was not very surprising that Temeraire had begun to extend his protective and possessive instincts over the crew as well; they had been with him now for several months. But the timing was wretchedly inconvenient: the sailors would likely be nervous to begin with at the presence of a dragon, and if Temeraire involved himself in any dispute, taking the part of his crew, that could only increase the tensions on board.

‘Pray take no offence,’ Laurence added, stroking Temeraire’s flank to draw his attention. ‘The beginning of a journey is so very important; we wish to be good shipmates, and not encourage any sort of rivalry among the men.’

‘Hm, I suppose,’ Temeraire said, subsiding. ‘But we have done nothing wrong; it is disagreeable of them to complain so.’

‘We will be underway soon,’ Laurence said, by way of distraction. ‘The tide has turned, and I think that is the last of the embassy’s luggage coming aboard now.’

Allegiance could carry as many as ten mid-weight dragons, in a pinch; Temeraire alone scarcely weighed her down, and there was a truly astonishing amount of storage space aboard. Yet the sheer quantity of the baggage the embassy carried began to look as though it would strain even her great capacity: shocking to Laurence, used to travelling with little more than a single sea-chest, and seeming quite out of proportion to the size of the entourage, which was itself enormous.

There were some fifteen soldiers, and no less than three physicians: one for the prince himself, one for the other two envoys, and one for the remainder of the embassy, each with assistants. After these and the translator, there were besides a pair of cooks with assistants, perhaps a dozen body servants, and an equal number of other men who seemed to have no clear function at all, including one gentleman who had been introduced as a poet, although Laurence could not believe this had been an accurate translation: more likely the man was a clerk of some sort.

The prince’s wardrobe alone required some twenty chests, each one elaborately carved and with golden locks and hinges: the bo’sun’s whip flew loud and cracking more than once, as the more enterprising sailors tried to pry them off. The innumerable bags of food had also to be slung aboard, and having already come once from China, they were beginning to show wear. One enormous eighty-pound sack of rice split wide open as it was handed across the deck, to the universal joy and delectation of the hovering seagulls, and afterwards the sailors were forced to wave the frenzied clouds of birds away every few minutes as they tried to keep on with their work.

There had already been a great fuss about boarding, earlier. Yongxing’s attendants had demanded, at first, a walkway leading down to the ship – wholly impossible, even if the Allegiance could have been brought close enough to the dock to make a walkway of any sort practical, because of the height of her decks. Poor Hammond had spent the better part of an hour trying to persuade them that there was no dishonour or danger either in being lifted up to the deck, and pointing at frustrated intervals at the ship herself, a mute argument.

Hammond had eventually said to him, quite desperately, ‘Captain, is this a dangerously high sea?’ An absurd question, with a swell less than five feet, though in the brisk wind the waiting barge had occasionally bucked against the ropes holding her to the dock, but even Laurence’s surprised negative had not satisfied the attendants. It had seemed they might never get aboard, but at last Yongxing himself had grown tired of waiting and ended the argument by emerging from his heavily-draped sedan chair, and climbing down into the boat, ignoring both the flurry of his anxious attendants and the hastily offered hands of the barge’s crew.

The Chinese passengers who had waited for the second barge were still coming aboard now, on the starboard side, to the stiff and polished welcome of a dozen Marines and the most respectable-looking of the sailors, interleaved in a row along the inner edge of the gangway, decorative in their bright red coats and the white trousers and short blue jackets of the sailors.

Sun Kai, the younger envoy, leapt easily down from the bo’sun’s chair and stood a moment looking around the busy deck thoughtfully. Laurence wondered if perhaps he did not approve the clamour and disarray of the deck, but no, it seemed he was only trying to get his feet underneath him: he took a few tentative steps back and forth, then stretched his sea-legs a little further and walked the length of the gangway and back more surely, with his hands clasped behind his back, and gazed with frowning concentration up at the rigging, trying evidently to trace the maze of ropes from their source to their conclusion.

This was much to the satisfaction of the men on display, who could at last stare their own fill in return. Prince Yongxing had disappointed them all by vanishing almost at once to the private quarters which had been arranged for him at the stern; Sun Kai, tall and properly impassive with his long black queue and shaved forehead, in splendid blue robes picked out with red and orange embroidery, was very nearly as good, and he showed no inclination to seek out his own quarters.

A moment later they had a still better piece of entertainment; shouts and cries rose from below, and Sun Kai sprang to the side to look over. Laurence sat up, and saw Hammond running to the edge, pale with horror: there had been a noisy splashing. But a few moments later, the older envoy finally appeared over the side, dripping water from the sodden lower half of his robes. Despite his misadventure, the grey-bearded man climbed down with a roar of good-humoured laughter at his own expense, waving off what looked like Hammond’s urgent apologies; he slapped his ample belly with a rueful expression, and then went away in company with Sun Kai.

‘He had a narrow escape,’ Laurence observed, sinking back into his chair. ‘Those robes would have dragged him down in a moment, if he had properly fallen in.’

‘I am sorry they did not all fall in,’ Temeraire muttered, quietly for a twenty-ton dragon; which was to say, not very. There were sniggers on the deck, and Hammond glanced over at them anxiously.

The rest of the retinue were gotten aboard without further incident, and stowed away almost as quickly as their baggage. Hammond looked much relieved when the operation was at last completed, blotting his sweating forehead on the back of his hand, though the wind was knife-cold and bitter, and sat down quite limply on a locker along the gangway, much to the annoyance of the crew. They could not get the barge back aboard with him in the way, and yet he was a passenger and an envoy himself, too important to be bluntly told to move.

Taking pity on them all, Laurence looked for his runners: Roland, Morgan, and Dyer had been told to stay quiet on the dragondeck and out of the way, and so were sitting in a row at the very edge, dangling their heels into space. ‘Morgan,’ Laurence said, and the dark-haired boy scrambled up and towards him, ‘go and invite Mr. Hammond to come and sit with me, if he would like.’

Hammond brightened at the invitation and came up to the dragondeck at once; he did not even notice as behind him the men immediately began rigging the tackles to hoist aboard the barge. ‘Thank you, sir, thank you, it is very good of you,’ he said, taking a seat on a locker which Morgan and Roland together pushed over for him, and accepting with still more gratitude the offer of a glass of brandy. ‘How I should have managed, if Liu Bao had drowned, I have not the least notion.’

‘Is that the gentleman’s name?’ Laurence said; all he remembered of the older envoy from the Admiralty meeting was his rather whistling snore. ‘It would have been an inauspicious start to the journey, but Yongxing could scarcely have blamed you for his taking a misstep.’

‘No, there you are quite wrong,’ Hammond said. ‘He is a prince; he can blame anyone he likes.’

Laurence was disposed to take this as a joke, but Hammond seemed rather glumly serious about it; and after drinking the best part of his glass of brandy in what already seemed to Laurence, despite their brief acquaintance, an uncharacteristic silence, Hammond added abruptly, ‘And pray forgive me – I must mention, how very prejudicial such remarks may be – the consequences of a moment’s thoughtless offence—’

It took Laurence a moment to puzzle out that Hammond referred to Temeraire’s earlier resentful mutterings; Temeraire was quicker and answered for himself. ‘I do not care if they do not like me,’ he said. ‘Maybe then they will let me alone, and I will not have to stay in China.’ This thought visibly struck him, and his head came up with sudden enthusiasm. ‘If I were very offensive, do you suppose they would go away now?’ he asked. ‘Laurence, what would be particularly insulting?’

Hammond looked like Pandora, the box open and horrors loosed upon the world; Laurence was inclined to laugh, but he stifled it out of sympathy. Hammond was young for his work, and surely, however brilliant his talents, felt his own lack of experience; it could not help but make him overcautious.

‘No, my dear, it will not do,’ Laurence said. ‘Likely they would only blame us for teaching you ill-manners, and resolve all the more on keeping you.’

‘Oh.’ Temeraire disconsolately let his head sink back down onto his forelegs. ‘Well, I suppose I do not mind so much going, except that everyone else will be fighting without me,’ he said in resignation. ‘But the journey will be very interesting, and I suppose I would like to see China; only they will try to take Laurence away from me again, I am sure, and I am not going to have any of it.’

Hammond prudently did not engage him on this subject, but hurried instead to say, ‘How long this business of loading has all taken – surely it is not typical? I made sure we would be halfway down the Channel by noon; here we have not yet even made sail.’

‘I think they are nearly done,’ Laurence said; the last immense chest was being swung aboard into the hands of the waiting sailors with the help of a block and line. The men all looked tired and surly, as well they might, having spent the time it would take to load ten dragons, loading only one man and his accoutrements; and their dinner was a good half-hour overdue already.

As the chest vanished below, Captain Riley climbed the stairs from the quarterdeck to join them, taking his hat off long enough to wipe sweat away from his brow. ‘I have no notion how they got themselves and the lot to England. I suppose they did not come by transport?’

‘No, or else we would surely be returning by their ship,’ Laurence said. He had not considered the question before and realized only now that he had no idea how the Chinese embassy had made their voyage. ‘Perhaps they came overland.’ Hammond was silent and frowning, evidently wondering himself.

‘That must be a very interesting journey, with so many different places to visit,’ Temeraire observed. ‘Not that I am sorry to be going by sea: not at all,’ he added, hastily, peering down anxiously at Riley to be sure he had not offended. ‘Will it be much faster, going by sea?’

‘No, not in the least,’ Laurence said. ‘I have heard of a courier going from London to Bombay in two months, and we will be lucky to reach Canton in seven. But there is no secure route by land: France is in the way, unfortunately, and there is a great deal of banditry, not to mention the mountains and the Taklamakan desert to cross.’

‘I would not wager on less than eight months, myself,’ Riley said. ‘If we make six knots with the wind anywhere but dead astern, it will be more than I look for, judging by her log.’ Below and above now there was a great scurry of activity, all hands preparing to unmoor and make sail; the ebbing tide was lapping softly against the windward side. ‘Well, we must get about it. Laurence, tonight I must be on deck, I need to take the measure of her; but I hope you will dine with me tomorrow? And you also, of course, Mr. Hammond.’

‘Captain,’ Hammond said, ‘I am not familiar with the ordinary course of a ship’s life – I beg your indulgence. Would it be suitable to invite the members of the embassy?’

‘Why—’ Riley said, astonished, and Laurence could not blame him; it was a bit much to be inviting people to another man’s table. But Riley caught himself, and then said, more politely, ‘Surely, sir, it is for Prince Yongxing to issue such an invitation first.’

‘We will be in Canton before that happens, in the present state of relations,’ Hammond said. ‘No; we must make shifts to engage them, somehow.’

Riley offered a little more resistance; but Hammond had taken the bit between his teeth and managed, by a skilful combination of coaxing and deafness to hints, to carry his point. Riley might have struggled longer, but the men were all waiting impatiently for the word to weigh anchor, the tide was going every minute, and at last Hammond ended by saying, ‘Thank you, sir, for your indulgence; and now I will beg you gentlemen to excuse me. I am a fair enough hand at their script on land, but I imagine it will take me some more time to draft an acceptable invitation aboard ship.’ With this, he rose and escaped before Riley could retract the surrender he had not quite made.

‘Well,’ Riley said, gloomily, ‘before he manages it, I am going to go and get us as far out to sea as I can; if they are mad as fire at my cheek, at least with this wind I can say in perfect honesty that I cannot get back into port for them to kick me ashore. By the time we reach Madeira they may get over it.’

He jumped down to the forecastle and gave the word; in a moment the men at the great quadruple-height capstans were straining, their grunting and bellowing carrying up from the lower decks as the cable came dragging over the iron catheads: the Allegiance’s smallest kedge anchor as large as the best bower of another ship, its flukes spread wider than the height of a man.

Much to the relief of the men, Riley did not order them to warp her out; a handful of men pushed off from the pilings with iron poles, and even that was scarcely necessary: the wind was from the northwest, full on her starboard beam, and that with the tide carried her now easily away from the harbour. She was only under topsails, but as soon as they had cleared moorings Riley called for topgallants and courses, and despite his pessimistic words they were soon going through the water at a respectable clip: she did not make much leeway, with that long deep keel, but went straight down the Channel in a stately manner.

Temeraire had turned his head forward to enjoy the wind of their progress: he looked rather like the figurehead of some old Viking ship. Laurence smiled at the notion. Temeraire saw his expression and nudged at him affectionately. ‘Will you read to me?’ he asked hopefully. ‘We will have only another couple of hours of light.’

‘With pleasure,’ said Laurence, and sat up to look for one of his runners. ‘Morgan,’ he called, ‘will you be so good as to go below and fetch me the book in the top of my sea-chest, by Gibbon; we are in the second volume.’

The great admiral’s cabin at the stern had been hastily converted into something of a state apartment for Prince Yongxing, and the captain’s cabin beneath the poop deck divided for the other two senior envoys, the smaller quarters nearby given over to the crowd of guards and attendants, displacing not only Riley himself, but the ship’s first lieutenant, Lord Purbeck, the surgeon, the master, and several other of his officers. Fortunately, the quarters at the fore of the ship, ordinarily reserved for the senior aviators aboard, were all but empty with Temeraire the only dragon aboard: even shared out among them all, there was no shortage of room; and for the occasion, the ship’s carpenters had knocked down the bulkheads of their individual cabins and made a grand dining space.

Too grand, at first: Hammond had objected. ‘We cannot seem to have more room than the prince,’ he explained, and so had the bulkheads shifted a good six feet forward: the collected tables were suddenly cramped.

Riley had benefited from the enormous prize-money awarded for the capture of Temeraire’s egg almost as much as Laurence himself had; fortunately he could afford to keep a good table and a large one. The occasion indeed called for every stick of furniture which could be found on board: the instant he had recovered from the appalling shock of having his invitation even partly accepted, Riley had invited all the senior members of the gunroom, Laurence’s own lieutenants, and any other man who might reasonably be expected to make civilized conversation.

‘But Prince Yongxing is not coming,’ Hammond said, ‘and the rest of them have less than a dozen words of English between them. Except for the translator, and he is only one man.’

‘Then at least we can make enough noise amongst ourselves we will not all be sitting in grim silence,’ Riley said.

But this hope was not answered: the moment the guests arrived, a paralysed silence descended, bidding fair to continue throughout the meal. Though the translator had accompanied them, none of the Chinese spoke at first. The older envoy Liu Bao had stayed away also, leaving Sun Kai as the senior representative; but even he made only a spare, formal greeting on their arrival, and afterwards maintained a calm and silent dignity, though he stared intently at the barrel-thick column of the foremast, painted in yellow stripes, which came down through the ceiling and passed directly through the middle of the table, and went so far as to look beneath the table-cloth, to see it continuing down through the deck below.

Riley had left the right side of the table entirely for the Chinese guests, and had them shown to places there, but they did not move to sit when he and the officers did, which left the British in confusion, some men already half-seated and trying to keep themselves suspended in mid-air. Bewildered, Riley pressed them to take their seats; but he had to urge them several times before at last they would sit. It was an inauspicious beginning, and did not encourage conversation.

The officers at first began by taking refuge in their dinners, but even that semblance of good manners did not last very long. The Chinese did not eat with knife and fork, but with lacquered sticks they had brought with them. These they somehow manoeuvred one-handed to bring food to their lips, and shortly the British half of the company were staring in helplessly rude fascination, every new dish presenting a fresh opportunity to observe the technique. The guests were briefly puzzled by the platter of roast mutton, large slices carved from the leg, but after a moment one of the younger attendants carefully proceeded to roll up a slice, still only using the sticks, and picked it up entire to eat in three bites, leading the way for the rest.

By now Tripp, Riley’s youngest midshipman, a plump and unlovely twelve-year-old aboard by virtue of his family’s three votes in Parliament, and invited for his own education rather than his company, was surreptitiously trying to imitate the style, using his fork and knife turned upside-down in place of the sticks, his efforts meeting without notable success, except in doing damage to his formerly-clean breeches. He was too far down the table to be quelled by hard looks, and the men around him were too busy gawking themselves to notice.

Sun Kai had the seat of honour nearest Riley, and desperate to keep his attention from the boy’s antics, Riley tentatively raised a glass to him, watching Hammond out of the corner of his eye for direction, and said, ‘To your health, sir.’ Hammond murmured a hasty translation across the table, and Sun Kai nodded, raised his own glass, and sipped politely, though not very much: it was a heady Madeira well-fortified with brandy, chosen to survive rough seas. For a moment it seemed this might rescue the occasion: the rest of the officers were belatedly recalled to their duty as gentlemen, and began to salute the rest of the guests; the pantomime of raised glasses was perfectly comprehensible without any translation, and led naturally to a thawing of relations. Smiles and nods began to traverse the table, and Laurence heard Hammond, beside him, heave out an almost inaudible sigh through open lips, and finally take some little food.

Laurence knew he was not doing his own part; but his knee was lodged up against a trestle of the table, preventing him from stretching out his now-aching leg, and though he had drunk as sparingly as was polite, his head felt thick and clouded. By now he only hoped he might avoid embarrassment, and resigned himself to making apologies to Riley after the meal for his dullness.

Riley’s third lieutenant, a fellow named Franks, had spent the first three toasts in rude silence, sitting woodenly and raising his glass only with a mute smile, but sufficient flow of wine loosened his tongue at last. He had served on an East Indiaman as a boy, during the peace, and evidently had acquired a few stumbling words of Chinese; now he tried the less-obscene of them on the gentleman sitting across from him: a young, clean-shaven man named Ye Bing, gangly beneath the camouflage of his fine robes, who brightened and proceeded to respond with his own handful of English.

‘A very— A fine—’ he said, and stuck, unable to find the rest of the compliment he wished to make, shaking his head as Franks offered, alternatively, the options which seemed to him most natural: wind, night, and dinner; at last Ye Bing beckoned over the translator, who said on his behalf, ‘Many compliments to your ship: it is most cleverly devised.’

Such praise was an easy way to a sailor’s heart; Riley, overhearing, broke off from his disjointed bilingual conversation with Hammond and Sun Kai, on their likely southward course, and called down to the translator, ‘Pray thank the gentleman for his kind words, sir; and tell him that I hope you will all find yourselves quite comfortable.’

Ye Bing bowed his head and said, through the translator, ‘Thank you, sir, we are already much more so than on our journey here. Four ships were required to carry us here, and one proved unhappily slow.’

‘Captain Riley, I understand you have gone round the Cape of Good Hope before?’ Hammond interrupted rudely, and Laurence glanced at him in surprise.

Riley also looked startled, but politely turned back to answer him, but Franks, who had spent nearly all of the last two days below in the stinking hold, directing the stowage of all the baggage, said in slightly drunken irreverence, ‘Four ships only? I am surprised it did not take six; you must have been packed like sardines.’

Ye Bing nodded and said, ‘The vessels were small for so long a journey, but in the service of the Emperor all discomfort is a joy, and in any case, they were the largest of your ships in Canton at the time.’

‘Oh; so you hired East Indiamen for the passage?’ Macready asked; he was the Marine lieutenant, a rail-thin, wiry stump of a man who wore spectacles incongruous on his much-scarred face. There was no malice but undeniably a slight edge of superiority in the question, and in the smiles exchanged by the naval men. That the French could build ships but not sail them, that the Dons were excitable and undisciplined, that the Chinese had no fleet at all to speak of, these were the oft-repeated bywords of the service, and to have them so confirmed was always pleasant, always heartening.

‘Four ships in Canton harbour, and you filled their holds with baggage instead of silk and porcelain; they must have charged you the earth,’ Franks added.

‘How very strange that you should say so,’ Ye Bing said. ‘Although we were travelling under the Emperor’s seal, it is true, one captain did try to demand payment, and then even tried to sail away without permission. Some evil spirit must have seized hold of him and made him act in such a crazy manner. But I believe your Company officials were able to find a doctor to treat him, and he was allowed to apologize.’

Franks stared, as well he might. ‘But then why did they take you, if you did not pay them?’

Ye Bing stared back, equally surprised to have been asked. ‘The ships were confiscated by Imperial edict. What else could they have done?’ He shrugged his shoulders, as if to dismiss the subject, and turned his attention back to the dishes; he seemed to think the piece of intelligence less significant than the small jam tartlets Riley’s cook had provided with the latest course.

Laurence abruptly put down knife and fork; his appetite had been weak to begin with, and now was wholly gone. That they could speak so casually of the seizure of British ships and property – the forced servitude of British seamen to a foreign throne— For a moment he almost convinced himself he had misunderstood: every newspaper in the country would have been shrieking of such an incident; the Government would surely have made a formal protest. Then he looked at Hammond: the diplomat’s face was pale and alarmed, but unsurprised; and all remaining doubt vanished as Laurence recalled Barham’s sorry behaviour, so nearly grovelling, and Hammond’s attempts to change the course of the conversation.

Comprehension was only a little slower in coming to the rest of the British, running up and down the table on the backs of low whispers, as the officers murmured back and forth to one another. Riley’s reply to Hammond, which had been going forward all this time, slowed and stopped: though Hammond prompted Riley again, urgently, asking, ‘Did you have a rough crossing of it? I hope we do not need to fear bad weather along the way.’ This came too late; a complete silence fell, except for young Tripp chewing noisily.

Garnett, the master, elbowed the boy sharply, and even this sound failed. Sun Kai put down his wine glass and looked frowning up and down along the table; he had noticed the change of atmosphere: the feel of a brewing storm. There had already been a great deal of hard drinking, though they were scarcely halfway through the meal, and many of the officers were young, and flushing now with mortification and anger. Many a Navy man, cast on shore during an intermittent peace or by a lack of influence, had served aboard the ships of the East India Company; the ties between Britain’s Navy and her merchant marine were strong, and the insult all the more keenly felt.

The translator was standing back from the chairs with an anxious expression, but most of the other Chinese attendants had not yet perceived. One laughed aloud at some remark of his neighbour’s: it made a queer solitary noise in the cabin.

‘By God,’ Franks said, suddenly, out loud, ‘I have a mind to—’

His seat-mates caught him by the arms, hurriedly, and kept him in his chair, hushing him with many anxious looks up towards the senior officers, but other whispers grew louder. One man was saying, ‘—sitting at our table!’ to snatches of violent agreement; an explosion might come at any moment, certainly disastrous. Hammond was trying to speak, but no one was attending to him.

‘Captain Riley,’ Laurence said, harshly and over-loud, quelling the furious whispers, ‘will you be so good as to lay out our course for the journey? I believe Mr. Granby was curious as to the route we would follow.’

Granby, sitting a few chairs down, his face pale under his sunburn, started; then after a moment he said, ‘Yes, indeed; I would take it as a great favour, sir,’ nodding to Riley.

‘Of course,’ Riley said, if a little woodenly; he leaned over to the locker behind him, where his maps lay: bringing one onto the table, he traced the course, speaking somewhat more loudly than normal. ‘Once out of the Channel, we must swing a ways out to skirt France and Spain; then we will come in a little closer and keep to the coastline of Africa as best we can. We will put in at the Cape until the summer monsoon begins, perhaps a week or three depending on our speed, and then ride the wind all the way to the South China Sea.’

The worst of the grim silence was broken, and slowly a thin obligatory conversation began again. But no one now said a word to the Chinese guests, except occasionally Hammond speaking to Sun Kai, and under the weight of disapproving stares even he faltered and was silent. Riley resorted to calling for the pudding, and the dinner wandered to a disastrous close, far earlier than usual.

There were Marines and seamen standing behind every sea-officer’s chair to act as servants, already muttering to each other; by the time Laurence regained the deck, pulling himself up the ladderway more by the strength of his arms than by properly climbing, they had gone out, and the news had gone from one end of the deck to the other, the aviators even speaking across the line with the sailors.

Hammond came out onto the deck and stared at the taut, muttering groups of men, biting his lips to bloodlessness; the anxiety made his face look queerly old and drawn. Laurence felt no pity for him, only indignation: there was no question that Hammond had deliberately tried to conceal the shameful matter.

Riley was beside him, not drinking the cup of coffee in his hand, boiled if not burnt, by the smell of it. ‘Mr. Hammond,’ he said, very quiet but with authority, more authority than Laurence, who for most of their acquaintance had known him as a subordinate, had ever heard him use; an authority which quite cleared away all traces of his ordinary easy-going humour, ‘pray convey to the Chinamen that it is essential they stay below; I do not give a damn what excuse you like to give them, but I would not wager tuppence for their lives if they came on this deck now. Captain,’ he added, turning to Laurence, ‘I beg you send your men to sleep at once; I don’t like the mood.’

‘Yes,’ Laurence said, in full understanding: men so stirred could become violent, and from there it was a short step to mutiny; the original cause of their rage would not even necessarily matter by then. He beckoned Granby over. ‘John, send the fellows below, and have a word with the officers to keep them quiet; we want no disturbance.’

Granby nodded. ‘By God, though—’ he said, hard-eyed with his own anger, but he stopped when Laurence shook his head, and went. The aviators broke up and went below quietly; the example might have been of some good, for the sailors did not grow quarrelsome when ordered to do the same. Then, also, they knew very well that their officers were in this case not their enemies: anger was a living thing in every breast, shared sentiment bound them all together, and little more than mutters followed when Lord Purbeck, the first lieutenant, walked out upon the deck among them and ordered them below in his drawling, affected accent. ‘Go along now, Jenkins; go along, Harvey.’

Temeraire was waiting on the dragondeck with head raised high and eyes bright; he had overheard enough to be on fire with curiosity. Having had the rest of the story, he snorted and said, ‘If their own ships could not have carried them, they had much better have stayed home.’ This was less indignation at the offence than simple dislike, however, and he was not inclined to great resentment; like most dragons, he had a very casual view of property, saving, of course, jewels and gold belonging to himself: even as he spoke he was busy polishing the great sapphire pendant which Laurence had given him, and which he never removed save for that purpose.

‘It is an insult to the Crown,’ Laurence said, rubbing his hand over his leg with short, pummelling strokes, resentful of the injury; he wanted badly to pace. Hammond was standing at the quarterdeck rail smoking a cigar, the dim red light of the burning embers flaring with his inhalations, illuminating his pale and sweat-washed face. Laurence glared at him along the length of the near-empty deck, bitterly. ‘I wonder at him; at him and at Barham, to have swallowed such an outrage, with so little noise: it is scarcely to be borne.’

Temeraire blinked at him. ‘But I thought we must at all costs avoid war with China,’ he said, very reasonably, as he had been lectured on the subject without end for weeks, and even by Laurence himself.

‘I should rather settle with Bonaparte, if the lesser evil had to be chosen,’ Laurence said, for the moment too angry to consider the question rationally. ‘At least he had the decency to declare war before seizing our citizens, instead of this cavalier offhand flinging of insults in our face, as if we did not dare to answer them. Not that Government have given them any reason to think otherwise: like a pack of damned curs, rolling over to show their bellies. And to think,’ he added, smouldering, ‘that scoundrel was trying to persuade me to kowtow, knowing it should be coming after this—’

Temeraire gave a snort of surprise at his vehemence, and nudged him gently with his nose. ‘Pray do not be so angry; it cannot be good for you.’

Laurence shook his head, not in disagreement, and fell silent, leaning against Temeraire. It could do no good to vent his fury so, where some of the men left on deck might yet overhear and take it as encouragement to some rash act, and he did not want to distress Temeraire. But much was suddenly made plain to him: after swallowing such an insult, of course the Government would hardly strain at handing over a single dragon; the entire Ministry would likely be glad to rid themselves of so unpleasant a reminder, and to see the whole business hushed up all the more thoroughly.

He stroked Temeraire’s side for comfort. ‘Will you stay above deck with me a while?’ Temeraire asked him, coaxing. ‘You had much better sit down and rest, and not fret yourself so.’

Indeed Laurence did not want to leave him; it was curious how he could feel his lost calm restore itself under the influence of that steady heartbeat beneath his fingers. The wind was not too high, at the moment, and not all of the night watch could be sent below; an extra officer on the deck would not be amiss. ‘Yes, I will stay; in any case I do not like to leave Riley alone with such a mood over the ship,’ he answered, and went limping for his wraps.

Chapter Four

The wind was freshening from the northeast, very cold; Laurence stirred out of his half-sleep and looked up at the stars: only a few hours had passed. He huddled deeper into his blankets by Temeraire’s side and tried to ignore the steady ache in his leg. The deck was strangely quiet; under Riley’s grim and watchful eye there was scarcely any conversation at all among the remaining crew, though occasionally Laurence could hear indistinct murmurs from the rigging above, men whispering to each other. There was no moon, only a handful of lanterns on deck.

‘You are cold,’ Temeraire said unexpectedly, and Laurence turned to see the great deep-blue eyes studying him. ‘Go inside, Laurence; you must get well, and I will not let anyone hurt Riley. Or the Chinese, I suppose, if you would not like it,’ he added, though without much enthusiasm.

Laurence nodded, tiredly, and heaved himself up again; the moment of danger was over, he thought, at least for the moment, and there was no real sense in his staying above. ‘You are comfortable enough?’

‘Yes, with the heat from below I am perfectly warm,’ Temeraire said; indeed Laurence could feel the warmth of the dragondeck even through the soles of his boots.

It was a great deal more pleasant in out of the wind; his leg stabbed unpleasantly twice as he climbed down to the upper berth deck, but his arms were up to his weight and held him until the spasm passed; he managed to reach his cabin without falling.

Laurence had several pleasant small round windows, not draughty, and near the ship’s galley as he was, the cabin was still warm despite the wind; one of the runners had lit the hanging lantern, and Gibbon’s book was lying still open on the lockers. He slept almost at once, despite the pain; the easy sway of his hanging cot was more familiar than any bed, and the low susurration of the water along the sides of the ship a wordless and constant reassurance.

He came awake all at once, breath jolted out of his body before his eyes even quite opened: noise more felt than heard. The deck abruptly slanted, and he flung out a hand to keep from striking the ceiling; a rat went sliding across the floor and fetched up against the fore lockers before scuttling into the dark again, indignant.

The ship righted almost at once: there was no unusual wind, no heavy swell; at once he understood that Temeraire had taken flight. Laurence flung on his boat-cloak and rushed out in nightshirt and bare feet; the drummer was beating to quarters, the crisp flying staccato echoing off the wooden walls, and even as Laurence staggered out of his room the carpenter and his mates were rushing past him to clear away the bulkheads. Another crash came: bombs, he now recognized, and then Granby was suddenly at his side, a little less disordered since he had been sleeping in breeches. Laurence accepted his arm without hesitation and with his help managed to push through the crowd and get back up to the dragondeck through the confusion. Sailors were running with frantic haste to the pumps, flinging buckets out over the sides for water to slop onto the decks and wet down the sails. A bloom of orange-yellow was trying to grow on the edge of the furled mizzen topsail; one of the midshipmen, a spotty boy of thirteen Laurence had seen skylarking that morning, flung himself gallantly out onto the yard with his shirt in his hand, dripping, and smothered it out.

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