Laurence did not try to hold him back; there was no exhilaration or battle-fever, now, which on other occasions might have driven Temeraire to exceed the bounds of his own endurance. Impossible, too, to be sure how quickly they were going; beneath them all was darkness but the occasional faint glow of a chimney, flashing by. They huddled all silent and close against Temeraire’s body, out of the lashing wind.
The eastern edge of the night, behind them, was beginning to shine a paler blue; the stars were going out. No use in urging Temeraire to greater speed; if they could not reach the border before dawn, they would have to hide, somehow, until the following night; there would be no getting across during the day.
“Sir, I make a light there,” Allen said, breaking the silence, his voice stifled and still thick with tears; he pointed away and north. One after another the torchlight glimmers came into view: a thin necklace of lights strung along the border, and the low wrathful roaring of dragons, calling one to the other in frustration. They were flying along the border in small formations, back and forth like wheeling birds, all of them roused and peering into the darkness.
“They haven’t any night-flyers; they are only venturing a shot in the dark,” Granby said softly into Laurence’s ear, cupping his hand around the noise. Laurence nodded.
The agitation of the Turkish dragons had roused the Austrian border as well; on the far bank of the Danube, Laurence could see a fortification not far distant, set on a hill and fully illuminated; he touched Temeraire’s side, and when Temeraire looked around, his great eyes shining and liquid in the dark, Laurence pointed him at it silently.
Temeraire nodded; he did not go straight at the border, but flew parallel to the line of fortifications a while, watching the Turkish dragons in their flights; now and again the crews did even go so far as to fire off a rifle into the dark, likely more for the little satisfaction of making a noise than in real hopes of striking a target. They were sending up flares occasionally, but it was hopeless, with miles of border, to illuminate it all.
Temeraire gave them only the warning of muscles suddenly gathered; Laurence pulled down Allen and the other lookout, Harley, and stayed low to Temeraire’s neck himself, and then Temeraire was driving himself forward with short rapid-fire strokes, building up a great deal of speed; ten dragon-lengths from the border he ceased to beat his wings at all, leaving them wide-extended, and drew in a great heaving breath that distended out his sides; gliding he went straight across at one of the dark places between the outposts, and the torches to either side did not so much as gutter.
He did not beat up again for as long as he could; they drifted so low to the ground that Laurence smelled fresh pine-needles before at last Temeraire risked a fresh stroke and then another, to lift himself clear of the tree-tops. He went to north of the Austrian fort, better than a mile, before he came around again; the Turkish border now was more clearly visible against the sky growing paler, and there was no sign they had been noticed in their crossing: the dragons were continuing their search-flights.
Still they had to get under cover before light; Temeraire was too large to easily hide in the countryside. “Run up the colors and hang out a white flag with them, Mr. Allen,” Laurence said. “Temeraire, get in and land as quick as you can; better to have them make a noise inside the walls than on our approach.”
Temeraire’s head was hanging low; he had flown harder than perhaps ever before in his life, and after earlier exertion and grief; his wingbeats were slow now not from caution but from exhaustion. But he drew himself up without complaint for one last sprint: he flung himself up towards the fort and over its walls in a desperate heave, and came down heavily in the courtyard, swaying upon his haunches, scattering in terror a troop of cavalry-horses on one side, and a company of infantrymen on the other, all of them yelling wildly as they fled.
“Hold your fire!” Laurence bellowed out of his speaking-trumpet, then repeated it in French, standing up to wave the British flag. He won some hesitation from the Austrians, and in the pause Temeraire sighed and settled back upon his haunches, head drooping forward over his breast, and said, “Oh, I am so very tired.”
Colonel Eigher provided them coffee and beds, and for Temeraire one of the horses which had in its frenzy broken a leg; the rest were hurriedly taken outside the walls of the fort and left in a paddock under guard. Laurence slept through until the afternoon, and rose from his cot still half-submerged in the murk of sleep, while outside Temeraire continued to snore in a manner which would certainly have given him away even to the Turks half-a-mile distant across the border, if he had not been curled up securely behind the thick wooden walls of the fort.
“They mean to dance to Bonaparte’s fiddle, do they?” Eigher said, when given a fuller account of their adventure than Laurence had been able to muster up the previous night; his own preoccupation, quite naturally, with the state of relations his nation might expect with her neighbors. “Much joy may they get of him.”
He gave Laurence a good dinner, and some sympathy; but he had little to spare. “I would send you on to Vienna,” he said, pouring yet another glass of wine, “but God in Heaven, I would be serving you an ill turn. It shames me to say, but there are creatures calling themselves men who would serve you to Bonaparte on a platter; and bend both their knees to him while they were at it.”
Laurence said quietly, “I am very grateful for the shelter you have given us, sir, and I would not for all the world embarrass you or your country; I know you are at peace with the French.”
“At peace,” Eigher said, bitterly. “We are cowering at their feet, you may say; and with more truth.”
By the end of the meal he had drunk nearly three bottles; and the slowness with which the wine had any effect upon him betrayed that this was no irregular occurrence. He was a gentleman, but of no high estate, which had limited his advancement and his postings beneath, Laurence suspected, what his competence might have deserved; but it was not resentment drove him to drink but a misery which found voice as the evening drew on, and the combination of brandy and company further unbridled his tongue.
Austerlitz was his demon; he had served under General Langeron in the fatal battle. “The devil gave us the Pratzen Heights,” he said, “and the town itself; took his men out of the best ground deliberately and played at a retreat, and why? So that we would fight him. He had then fifty thousand men, and we ninety, with the Russians; and he was luring us to battle.” Humorlessly he laughed. “And why not give them to us? He took them back easily enough, a few days later.” He waved his hand over the map-table, on which he had laid out a tableau of the battle: a task which had taken him scarcely ten minutes, though he was already thoroughly taken in drink.
Laurence, for his part, had not drunk enough to numb his appalled reaction; he had learned of the great disaster at Austerlitz while already at sea, on his way to China, and only in the vaguest terms; the intervening months had given him no better information, and he had by stages allowed himself to believe the victory exaggerated. Eigher’s tin soldiers and wooden dragons in their stately array made a deeply unpleasant impression as the colonel moved them about.
“He let us entertain ourselves by beating upon his right a little while, until we had emptied our center,” Eigher said, “and then they appeared: fifteen dragons and twenty thousand men. He had brought them up by forced marches, and not a whisper we had of their coming. We limped on another few hours, the Russian Imperial Guard cost them some blood, but that was the end of it.”