Reaching out he tipped over a little mounted figure with a commander’s baton, and lay back in his chair, his eyes shut. Laurence picked up one of the little dragon-figures, turning it over in his hands; he did not know what to say.
“Emperor Francis went and begged him for peace the next morning,” Eigher said after a little while. “The Holy Roman Emperor, bowing to a Corsican who snatched himself a crown.” His voice was thick, and he did not speak again but fell slowly into a stupor.
Laurence left Eigher sleeping and went out to Temeraire, now awake and no less unhappy. “Digby would be bad enough,” Temeraire said, “but we have killed that dragonet, too, and it did not have anything to do with all of this; it did not choose to be sold to us, or to be kept back by the Turks, and it could not get away.”
He had curled himself brooding around the two remaining eggs, keeping them cuddled against his body, perhaps by instinct, and occasionally putting out his long forked tongue to touch the shells. He only with reluctance admitted even Laurence and Keynes to examine them, and kept hovering so close that the dragon-surgeon impatiently said, “Get your bloody head out of the way, will you; I cannot see anything with you blocking all the light.”
Keynes tapped the shells lightly, pressed his ear to the surface and listened, wetted a finger and rubbed them a little and brought it to his mouth. When he was satisfied with his examination, he stepped away again, and Temeraire drew his coils more snugly back around the eggs and looked anxiously to hear his verdict.
“Well, they are in good form, and have taken no harmful chill,” Keynes said. “We had better keep them wrapped up in the silk, and,” he jerked his thumb at Temeraire, “it will do them no harm to have him playing nursemaid. The middle-weight is in no immediate danger at all; by the sound I should say the dragonet is not yet formed; we might have months to wait there. But for the Kazilik, no more than eight weeks, and no less than six; there is not a moment to lose in getting it home.”
“Austria is not safe, nor the German states, with French troops thick on the ground as they are,” Laurence said. “I mean to go northward, through Prussia; a week and a half should see us to the coast, and from there a few days’ flight to Scotland.”
“Whichever way you go, you should go quickly; I will contrive to delay my report to Vienna a little, so you are out of the country before those damned politicians can think of some way they can make use of you to shame Austria a little more,” Eigher said, when Laurence spoke to him again, that evening. “I can give you safe-conduct to the border. But should you not go by sea?”
“It would cost us at least another month, going around by Gibraltar, and we would have to find shelter along the Italian coast a good deal of the way,” Laurence said. “I know the Prussians have accommodated Bonaparte heretofore, but do you think they will go so far as to surrender us to him?”
“Surrender you? No,” Eigher said. “They are going to war.”
“Against Napoleon?” Laurence exclaimed; that was a piece of good news he had not expected to hear. The Prussians had long been the finest fighting force in Europe; if only they had joined the earlier coalition in time, surely the outcome would have been very different, and their entry into the struggle now seemed to him a great victory for Napoleon’s enemies. But it was plain Eigher saw nothing to be pleased with in this intelligence.
“Yes, and when he has trampled them into the dirt, and the Russians with them, there will be no one left at all in Europe to restrain him,” the colonel said.
Laurence kept his opinion of this pessimism to himself. The news made his own heart lift gladly, but an Austrian officer, no matter how passionately he hated Bonaparte, might well not desire to see the Prussian Army succeed where his own had failed. “At least they will have no motive to delay our journey,” he said tactfully.
“Go fast and keep ahead of the fighting, or Bonaparte will delay you himself,” Eigher said.
The next evening they set out again under cover of dark. Laurence had left several letters with Eigher to be sent on to Vienna and thence to London, though he hoped his own road home would be quicker; but in case of any accident, their progress so far should at least be known, and the situation with the Ottoman Empire.
His report to the Admiralty, laboriously encoded in the year-old ciphers which were all he had to hand, had taken on a more wooden tone than usual. It was not guilt precisely; he was perfectly convinced in his own mind of the justice of his actions, but he was conscious how the whole might appear to a hostile judge: a reckless and imprudent adventure, unsanctioned by any authority higher than himself, entered into on the slightest of evidence. Easy enough to make the change in the sentiments of the Turks the consequence rather than the cause of the theft.
And it could not be defended as a question of duty; no one would ever call it a man’s duty to perform so wild and desperate a mission, with profound implications for relations with a foreign power, without orders; it could even be called quite the contrary. Nor was he the sort of sophist who could bald-faced point at Lenton’s orders to bring the eggs home and call that justification. There was none, indeed, but urgency; the more sensible reply, in every possible way, would have been an immediate return home, to place the tangled matter into the hands of the Ministry.
He was not sure whether he would have approved his own actions, hearing of them secondhand; just the sort of wild behavior the world expected of aviators, and indeed, perhaps there was something to it; he did not know whether he would have risked so much, knowing himself subject to serve at the pleasure of the Navy. If deliberate, a paltry sort of caution that would be; but no, he had never consciously chosen the politic course; there was only something quite distinct in being captain to a living dragon who entered wholly into his engagements and who was not to be given or taken away by the will of other men. Laurence was uneasily forced to consider whether he might be in danger of beginning to think himself above authority.
“Myself, I do not see what is so wonderful about authority at all,” Temeraire said, when Laurence ventured to disclose his anxiety that morning as they settled down for a rest; they had encamped in a clearing high upon the leeward side of a mountain slope, untended but for a handful of former sheep now roasting under Gong Su’s careful hand in a fire-pit which did not give off much smoke, the better to avoid notice.
“It seems to me that it is only forcing people to do things which they do not wish to do, and which they cannot be persuaded to do, with threats,” he continued. “I am very glad we are above it. I would not at all be pleased if someone could take you away from me and make me have another captain, like a ship.”
Laurence could hardly quarrel with this, and while he might have argued the description of authority, he could not, feeling too false in so doing; he plainly did like being free of restraint at least so far, and if he were ashamed of it he might at least not lie about it. “Well; I suppose it is true any man would be a tyrant an he could,” he said ruefully. “All the better reason to deny Bonaparte any more power than he already has.”
“Laurence,” Temeraire said thoughtfully, “why do people do as he says, when he is so unpleasant a person? And dragons too.”
“Oh; well, I do not know he is an unpleasant man in his person,” Laurence admitted. “His soldiers love him at least, though that is scarcely to be marveled at, when he keeps winning wars for them; and he must have some charm, to have risen so high.”
“Then why is it so terrible that he should have authority, if someone must have it?” Temeraire asked. “I have not heard that the King has ever won any battles, after all.”