He and Temeraire had arrived the previous evening, with Chu and a couple of niru, and joined Shen Shi at the supply depot outside Moscow: enormous granaries piled high with wheat and cured meat, which she had displayed to them with an attitude of deep embarrassment. “I regret that my preparations have been so inadequate,” she said.
They could not in justice be so called; but they were not, however, what one might have wished for a force of three hundred dragons: the Russians had been recalcitrant in providing assistance. “I am trying,” Hammond said now, with some asperity, “to catch someone’s ear: they will not listen to me; not even our own ambassador,” he added bitterly, “the wretched old fool! There are a thousand adventurers all over the city, peddling miracles to anyone that will give them an audience; they have decided I am to be classed with these charlatans.
“My only hope,” Hammond added, “was that your arrival would bring an end to their doubts—that they could scarcely deny the evidence when you had appeared—but I called at the department of state this morning, and a staff-officer told me that if you would fight, you might go westward down the New Smolensk Road and report for duty to whichever colonel you found first; but if I did not leave, he would lay hands on me and kick me all the way to the door. They have not received any report whatsoever, from the east, of any force of dragons approaching. Where are the rest of the beasts?”
“That is not a new question, to be asked of the British,” a man said, approaching their corner, and Laurence looked at him startled: an extraordinary intrusion, and the note of rancor as palpable as the thick Prussian accent.
“I beg your pardon,” Laurence said, grimly, wondering if he was on the point of facing a challenge, a wretched trap between honor and duty; and then there was something familiar about the man, the face. Laurence had a brief, vivid memory of gunpowder smoke in his nose amid a clear and brilliantly blue sky: of a vast army pouring over fields, tricolor flags billowing; a great dragon lapped in heavy scales almost like mail, a bellowing laugh; and he found he did know the man, despite his greying hair and his paunch. “Captain Dyhern, I believe?” he said, slowly.
They had fought together, briefly, in the disastrous campaign of the year six. Dyhern had been taken prisoner at Jena, he and his dragon Eroica, an impressive Prussian heavy-weight, both of them among the many victims of the revolution in aerial tactics which Lien had brought to Bonaparte’s service.
Dyhern’s face was hard and sour and scarred, thinner than last they had met and aged far more than the intervening years could account for; but they had been allies, once, and had done him no injury of which to be ashamed: Laurence and Temeraire had given what aid they could, even in the midst of that overwhelming rout. The anger was not personal, but general, then; Laurence looked steadily into his face, and Dyhern after a moment looked aside, as one who knows himself in the wrong and does not care to admit it.
“I am glad to see you at liberty, sir,” Laurence said; he felt no obligation to press for any more satisfaction. “I hope it is not—I hope the cause is not an unhappy one.” A captain would not ordinarily be paroled or released by the enemy, save if his dragon were slain; although in the legal sense Napoleon and Prussia had made peace, Napoleon had neither withdrawn his occupying troops nor released the dragons, nor his most valuable hostage: the crown prince of Prussia, who lived yet in Paris under his supposed guardianship.
“I escaped prison a year ago,” Dyhern said, briefly for what could only have been a long and a dreadful tale. “As for Eroica—I know not. I have sought him in the breeding grounds. But they did not know of him. They sequestered many of our beasts deep in France—some we hear they have persuaded to turn coat and join their ranks: you may be sure he will never be seen among those,” he added, with a touch of fierce pride. “But of anything else—” His hand moved a little sideways, limply, as though to convey that the sum of his knowledge was insufficient even to be put into words.
So he was an aviator without a beast, grounded and unable to be of any use, and burdened by the wretched knowledge that if Eroica did live, he was yet kept a prisoner by his fear for Dyhern’s own safety: a cause for bitterness Laurence had himself tasted, enough to make him sympathetic. But the twenty dragons that Britain had promised to the Prussian war effort, in the campaign of 1806, had only been held back due to the deadly plague which had descended so mercilessly on Britain’s dragons, and would not even when healthy have made any material difference to the disaster.