Laurence shook his head, privately: he had not yet thought over all the consequence of the amplification of the divine wind, which Temeraire had achieved on Lien’s example. Though she had formerly disdained direct action in battle according to the Chinese tradition, her reluctance had not survived the immediacy of threat to Napoleon’s person; and Laurence had no doubt that Napoleon would bend his every wile towards persuading her to unleash so astonishing a weapon in his service in future. That it might be put to use so devastatingly on land, and not merely at sea, made her even more dreadful a danger.
But now he slid from Temeraire’s back into the courtyard, and helped Hammond to climb down before Temeraire lifted away; he turned to meet the dubious eyes of a sweating Portuguese officer in the uniform of an infantry captain, who brightened as he saw Laurence’s green coat and gold bars. He nodded with enthusiasm, and said in broken French, “Ah, you join us! We are overjoyed, pardon—” and turning waved back the guns, and the soldiers fell with expressions of relief out of their ragged square.
Messengers went running into the main building of the fort, which showed recent signs of repair: fresh masonry and paint unmarked by weather. They were kept standing, and Laurence used the time to study the walls: not much use, he thought, against the Tswana; not up to standing against even a middle-weight.
At last Hammond elbowed him and bowed, as from the fortification issued a party of men, with one corpulent man uniformed and beribboned in the front, and Hammond greeted him in his native tongue and then continued in French to say, “And I beg Your Royal Highness will forgive our delay in arriving, occasioned as it has been by difficulties beyond our control; and permit me to introduce to you Captain William Laurence of His Majesty’s Aerial Corps,” before he whispered urgently and unnecessarily to Laurence, “Pray make your bows, sir: this is the prince regent of Portugal.”
“We will certainly take back Rio, very shortly,” Prince Jo?o said, “when our forces are well-gathered: from Mexico we have already a dozen beasts, whom even now you can see at maneuvers—”
He waved a hand at the window of his office which looked out upon a valley below, meaning by this a handful of small feral-looking dragons. “One generation at most out of the wild, if that, sir,” Ferris said to Laurence in an undertone, as he peered out the window. The beasts were none of them bigger than a Greyling, and certainly to be rolled up by any one of the Tswana dragons, who were the product of dragon-husbandry at least equal to that of the West and raised on a diet of elephants.
“And we await any day the advent of more beasts: it is not Napoleon alone who has transports, after all. Your dragons shall be of great assistance, but as for truce: no! We will never yield—”
“Then, sir, you have not attended to our report,” Laurence said bluntly, while Hammond blanched. “As we speak Napoleon is securing not merely alliance but direct allegiance from the Inca, whose empire now abuts your own realm so nearly as to intrude upon its claimed boundaries; shortly he will be there upon your flank, not with a handful of dragons imported from overseas, but with the vast and organized aerial legions of that nation.”
“Captain Laurence,” Hammond said desperately, “I think you forget yourself—Your Highness, I hope you will forgive—”
“Mr. Hammond, I forget nothing,” Laurence said, “but I will not stand by and serve as audience for a venture so ill-advised as to wreck all hopes of the preservation of this colony: if that, Your Highness,” he added, turning back to the prince, “and not some temporary victory is your desire, you have only one real avenue which I can see: not merely to make peace with the Tswana and send them hence, but to persuade them to settle here among you.”
Laurence chose abruptly to make the proposal, fully expecting the astonished silence which it won him: he could not deny it sounded even more mad when said aloud than when it had first occurred to him, looking upon the French transports in their harbor, the ten thousand refugees and more in the city. The calculation of voyages and time which should be required to send so many back to their home in Africa had struck him with great force. If the Portuguese were persuaded to yield up their remaining slaves, the numbers would swell into impossibility; add to that the hazards of the crossing, and the Tswana could not so easily return home as they had come. Which likely had been Napoleon’s design: he meant Brazil to be besieged a long while.
“Sir,” Laurence added to the staring expressions, “you must recognize you have no other prospects of a defense against the Inca; not in time. If you should acquire a handful of dragons from overseas, those beasts are stolen only for a little while from the war in Europe. Even if victorious here, which can by no means be relied upon, they must return in short order. In the Tswana, you have at hand a small army of dragons already skilled in aerial battle, attached by the bonds of natural sentiment to a portion of your citizenry, and able to remain and at once begin to breed up beasts of battle-weight.”