“If you ask me,” Temeraire said, his tail lashing violently—he had been deeply agitated since Maila’s visit, and Laurence had not yet had any opportunity to pursue the cause—“he is not interested in you and your eggs, after all; he wants only to keep the Empress locked up safe here in the mountains, and not let to do anything: and I am sure he will want to do the same with Granby, too.”
“He is, too, interested in my eggs,” Iskierka said, flaring, while Hammond urged their immediate attendance on the Inca: Maila was prepared to arrange a private audience at once, informally, for them to plead their cause.
“There can be not a moment to lose—the dinner this evening may decide everything, and in any case De Guignes may already be making them proposals by some other channel,” Hammond said, very nearly trying to drag Granby out the door, or push him, all while straightening his cloak and ignoring Granby’s half-attempts to thrust him away. “We must go, at once, at once.”
The conversation was thoroughly one-sided. Granby retired to the background with relief, after the first presentation, while Hammond flung himself into the breach wholeheartedly. But Anahuarque only listened impassive while Hammond tried one avenue and then another. He hinted at the dangers of the ocean crossing—spoke of the revolution in France, and the execution of the King and Queen—listed all the many nations which had lined up to oppose Napoleon’s ambition, never acknowledging that of these, Spain had all but fallen, Prussia had been defeated, Austria had accepted truce, Russia only watched from afar—
He ran down at last, and Anahuarque still said nothing, but only watched them with her dark, thoughtful eyes: her silence a deliberate thing, it seemed to Laurence, designed to invite Hammond’s very torrent of words, and all the intelligence which he might thereby deliver even unintentionally.
Laurence rose and said quietly, “Madam, we cannot know what will sway your decision, so I think we will take our leave of you and give you time to consider. I would only say, if you permit, that the Emperor is a prodigiously gifted man”—he ignored Hammond’s sudden frantic twitch of his sleeve—“prodigiously gifted man, who has turned those gifts to the evil service of ambition. There are no bounds to his appetite for the conquest and subjugation of other men, and whatever aid you choose to give him you may be certain will be turned to those ends, regardless of the misery and privation the pursuit will bring upon the world.”
He bowed, and turned to Temeraire, who was waiting to lift him up. “That was splendidly said, Laurence,” Temeraire said, as they flew back to their courtyard in company with Iskierka. “I am sure it must decide her for us: no-one could like to help Napoleon fight still more wars; not that wars are not exciting, but it is unreasonable.”
Laurence shook his head; he did not know, himself, anything more than that he had at least spoken the truth. He looked at Mrs. Pemberton, who had accompanied them; she said after a moment, “I would be more sanguine, sir, if she had not also seized herself a crown—but on the other hand,” she added, “I think she has not much desire to share it.”
The feast was a deeply peculiar affair: French and British soldiers seated across from one another, mostly unable or unwilling to communicate with one another except by scowling; the Inca’s generals on the upper and lower ends of the square joining in, more universally; the dragons seated behind the men murmuring to one another while they ate their roasted llamas. Even Hammond and De Guignes seemed thrown off their stride by the situation, with its equal shares of high tension and silence, and the only person who gave evidence of being thoroughly comfortable was Napoleon himself.
He had evidently studied Quechua to a little extent, and forged ahead in using his handful of words despite what Temeraire said scornfully to Laurence was a dreadful accent and no grammar whatsoever. He paid a relentless court to the Empress, though seated at several removes from her stool, and took advantage of a rather rude question from one of the warriors seated by her side as an excuse to sweep the cloth before him clear and demonstrate upon it the victory of Austerlitz, with pieces of potato to represent the battalions. Even Laurence could scarcely resist leaning in to hear this narrative; he thought ruefully, in his defense, that with all the just resentment in the world no military man could fail to be enraptured, until one considered the dreadful toll of life, and the consequences to all Europe.
Anahuarque, meanwhile, said very little; she gave Napoleon brief smiles, for encouragement, but as he spoke to the warriors of the battle, Laurence looked to see her eyes intent upon the Emperor, and surprised a look of cold and determined calculation in her face. She glanced back at Maila Yupanqui, who was coiled and brooding with his head laid beside her stool, and laid a hand gently upon his jaw; she bent and murmured to him, some reassurance perhaps for all the foreign men gathered at her table, and his ruffled feathers smoothed after a moment down against his throat.