“It does sound so very promising,” Temeraire said. “Surely we shall have him this time. And you need not make that noise, either, O’Dea,” he added. “We will have three hundred dragons with us: I am quite sure even Napoleon and Lien cannot have anything to say to them.”
O’Dea, sitting on a rock and sewing links of mail back onto Temeraire’s armor, had given a lugubrious snort. “Why, it’s true enough we’ve a great many dragons here; I suppose we can hope that most of them will still be with us when we’re there. We must hope for it, sure, seeing how Boney has sent the Russians scampering more than once before now. ’Tis a cold winter in that country, so I’ve heard: a cold winter to be out on the barren plain, haunted by wild beasts, without a fire to sit beside and all the French Army on our heels.”
“I do not think you ought to speak so discouragingly,” Temeraire said disapprovingly. “Why, Maximus and Lily and even Iskierka would not be going away if they thought there were any chance of our being beat: you see how sure they are we will win.”
O’Dea wagged his head. “Ah, indeed; ’tis a pity, all those fellows going away by ship, and like as not to the bottom of the ocean.”
Temeraire flattened his ruff, and maintained a dignified silence until O’Dea had gone back into the house, as the lanterns were dimmed; then he said to Laurence, “Laurence, what will we do, if Napoleon should defeat us?”
“Starve,” Laurence said, dryly.
THE ROOM WAS ABLAZE with candles, many standing before mirrors of gilt and shining on gold and silver; the guests an equal brilliance of jewels and silks and velvet, their voices rising and falling in steady rhythm over the delicate threads of music. There might be a hectic flush on some cheeks, a nervous edge to laughter too quickly suppressed, but no-one surveying the company would have imagined that four hundred miles away, St. Petersburg was occupied by Napoleon’s army; nor from overhearing their conversation.
“They say that one could walk across the Seine on the backs of those foreign dragons, so closely were they crammed in upon one another outside Notre Dame,” Countess Andreyevna said, in tones of solemn horror more appropriate to the discussion of a funeral than a baptism. “We see now where all this dreadful revolution leads, and what a monster has taken hold of France! He will not content himself with regicide and self-aggrandizement, but will tear down the Christian faith with everything else: he is a heathen, that is plain to see.
“And not seven months since the wedding,” she added, with a flavor of spitefulness. “I hope that Bonaparte may be confident of his paternity.”
The new Roi de Cusco, as he had been styled, was by now four months old and reportedly thriving: he had been christened Napoleon Joseph Pachacuti Yupanqui—by Cardinal Fesch, and quite in accordance with Catholic rites, despite the complaints of the countess.
Laurence had not held much hope of some event preventing the marriage. The Incan Empress had shown plainly she had as much quick decision in her nature as ever did Bonaparte, and having made her choice to accept his suit, she had already flung all the resources of her own vast Empire behind that course. Her dragons had driven the British out of the Incan Empire the very same day, and she had taken ship for France with Bonaparte not three months later, from the reports which had reached Laurence in Brazil.
Evidently, Anahuarque had also chosen to anticipate the rites, and thus had Napoleon so quickly gained the heir required to secure the loyalty of the Incan dragons and the future of his dynasty—the only thing which might have been wanting to further spur his relentless ambition. But however much the child’s birth might be deplored, Laurence had not the least desire to engage in gossip about it. Napoleon’s son could as yet do nothing; his army, everything.
Laurence quitted, without much ceremony, the company gathered around the countess in some impatience, and went seeking Hammond. He had been raised amid political dinners, gatherings of men either in power or soon to be, and his sense of such things was finely tuned: this was nothing of the sort—merely society, not politics, nor even the mingling of the two. There were a handful of aristocrats with some influence, each of them courted by a subtle band of hangers-on seeking personal advantage; a few staff officers and adjutants, none as high as a general. The rest of the company were merely the wealthy or titled or connected to the same, and of not the least significance.
“Hammond,” Laurence said, having cut him out of his own conversation with an elderly dandy of a baron with a brusque swiftness of which he would have been ashamed under less dire circumstances, “why the devil are we here?”