The army was in disarray; beneath them, Laurence saw the men marching in long columns, bedraggled, dusty; heads bowed with exhaustion, sullen. Endless numbers of men; Chu himself fell increasingly silent and astonished by the numbers, the further they flew; when they had come to rest upon a hill, near a trickling spring, he shook his head and said, “The ant can devour a mountain,” and then plunged his head deep to drink.
Temeraire continued futilely to search for the high command; there was nothing which might have been called a headquarters visible to the eye. They flew over an artillery company rattling sluggish upon the road; Dyhern caught sight of Prussian soldiers and clambered down from Temeraire’s neck, and went to speak with them. He returned to say, “Barclay de Tolly has been replaced: it is General Kutuzov, now, and they say he is in Elnya, to the south.”
Kutuzov was not in Elnya; but much of the army had concentrated north of the town, and spilled into its limits. Laurence and Dyhern and Tharkay went into the streets together, to try and find some senior officer. A deep smoldering atmosphere emanated from the soldiers and officers alike, somewhere between misery and wrath; the burning of Smolensk was on every tongue, a collective mourning, and Laurence heard Kutuzov’s name repeated every few steps with more desperation than hope. They at last found a ferociously busy colonel engaged in directing the fortification of the northern approach to the town. “General Kutuzov is in Vyazma,” he said: another fifty miles, back the way they had come.
“I begin to see,” Chu said in dry irritation, “why you use such heavy couriers; they must carry enough men to hunt down the one you are looking for, who may be under a table, or in a basket.” The Jade Dragons might have flown the distances trivially, at much less cost to their joint energies, but speaking neither Russian nor French could not themselves communicate, even if Russian officers would have deigned to speak with them; they could serve only as couriers among Chu’s own forces.
Temeraire and Chu reached the town as night was falling, weary. Two of Shen Shi’s supply-dragons had accompanied them, carrying sacks of wheat and a dazed pig, for which they had ample cause to be grateful: the few Russian dragons they saw, their encampments merely crushed fields, were snarling and hissing at one another with belligerence over a scanty supply of dead cavalry-horses. They made their own camp upon a low hill not yet tenanted by any other company, and the supply-dragons dug a cooking-pit. “If you will come with me,” Laurence said to Dyhern, “we will try again: I suppose when we have looked in every town between Smolensk and Moscow, we will find him eventually.”
He scarcely hoped for success, but they made Kutuzov at last, his pavilion planted atop a low rise among three companies of artillery, with two courier-dragons, red, drowsing beside it and a great flag waving brilliant white and red. But the way was still barred. Dyhern attempted to persuade the guards to let them through the perimeter without success; Laurence’s French gained them no better result.
“Well,” Chu said, when they had returned to report their failure, “this general can talk to me, and we can settle upon our ground, and I can summon the three jalan to assemble there in four days. If he does not want to talk to me, I can call together ten niru, here, and let them feed themselves off the countryside for three days. And if he does not talk to me then, we will turn around and go home, and I will apologize to the Emperor. I will not spend my soldiers for fools, nor expose them to those guns for no purpose.”
He said this last very flatly: to have failed his orders so thoroughly would certainly condemn him to disgrace and exile from the Imperial court, even if the fault had been none of his own. But Laurence found he could not argue the decision. He had recalled too clearly, as Chu spoke, the dreadful slaughter of the French dragons at Shoeburyness: the smell of sulfur and fresh loam overturned, the rain of dirt flung high into the air as the British guns brought down the Grand Chevalier. He could scarcely fault Chu for not wishing to hazard his soldiers to such a fate without some assurance of support and the achieving of some desirable end.
“Laurence,” Tharkay said abruptly, “do you have those particularly magnificent robes with you somewhere?”
“Oh! Oh, yes! That is a splendid notion,” Temeraire said, lifting his head with as much eagerness as might be needed to supply the want of Laurence’s own. “Of course they will not turn you away, Laurence, when they see you properly dressed. And I have the robes with me; at least, I ought to: Roland, you have made them quite safe, I suppose?”