Feeling pangs of guilt, Laurence hastily fumbled at his purse and threw some gold coins down. “Temeraire, do you have her? For Heaven’s sake let us be gone at once; they will have the whole country after us.”
Temeraire did have her, as was proven once in the air by her muffled but audible yelling from below, “It is my cow! It is mine! I had it first!” which did not greatly improve their chances of hiding. Laurence looked back and saw the whole village shining like a great beacon out of the dark, one house after another illuminating; it would certainly be seen for miles.
“We had better have taken them in broad daylight, blowing a fanfare on trumpets,” Laurence said with a groan, feeling that it was a judgment on him for stealing.
They put down only a little way off out of desperation, hoping to feed Iskierka and make her quiet. At first she refused to let go of her cow, now quite dead, having been pierced through by Temeraire’s claws, though she could not quite get through its hide and begin eating. “It is mine,” she kept muttering, until at last Temeraire said, “Be quiet! They only want to cut it open for you, now let go. Anyway, if I wanted your cow I would take it away.”
“I should like to see you try!” she said, and he whipped his head down and growled at her, which made her squeak and jump straight for Granby, who was knocked sprawling by her landing unexpectedly in his arms. “Oh, that was not nice!” she said indignantly, coiling around Granby’s shoulders. “Only because I am still small!”
Temeraire had the grace to look a little ashamed of himself, and he said a little more placatingly, “Well, I am not going to take your cow anyway, I have one of my own, but you should be polite while you are still so little.”
“I want to be big now,” she said sulkily.
“You shan’t get bigger unless you let us feed you properly,” Granby said, which drew her quick attention. “Come and you shall watch us make it ready for you; how will that do?”
“I suppose,” she said, reluctantly, and he carried her back over to the carcass. Gong Su slit open the belly and cut out first the heart and the liver, which he held out to her with a ceremonial air, saying, “Best first meal, for little dragons to get big,” and she said, “Oh, is it?” and snatched them in both claws to eat with great gusto, blood pouring out the sides of her jaws as she tore and swallowed one bite and another from each one in turn.
One of the leg joints was all the rest which she could manage, despite her best efforts, and then she collapsed into a stupor to their general and profound gratitude; Temeraire devoured the rest of his own cow while Gong Su crudely and quickly butchered the remnants of the second and packed it away in his pots; and they were back aloft in some twenty minutes, with the dragonet now lying heavy and asleep in Granby’s arms, quite dead to all the world.
But there were dragons circling over the illuminated village in the distance now, and as they rose up one of them turned to look at them, its luminous white eyes shining: a Fleur-de-Nuit, one of the few nocturnal breeds. “North,” Laurence said, grimly, “straight north as quick as you can, Temeraire; to the sea.”
They fled all the rest of the night, the queer low voice of the Fleur-de-Nuit sounding always behind them, like a deep brass note, and the answering higher voices of the middle-weights following its lead. Temeraire was burdened more heavily than their pursuers, carrying all his ground crew and supplies and Iskierka to boot; it seemed to Laurence she had already visibly grown. Still Temeraire managed to keep ahead, but only just, and there was no hope of losing them; the night was cold and clear, the moon barely short of full.
The miles spilled away, the Vistula River beneath them unwinding towards the sea, black and glistening occasionally with ripples; they loaded all their guns fresh, readied the flash-powder charge, and Fellowes and his harness-men struggled all the way up Temeraire’s side notch by notch with a square of spare chain-mesh to lay over Iskierka for protection. She murmured without waking and snuggled closer to Granby as they draped it over her body, hooking it to the rings of her little harness.
Laurence thought at first that the enemy had started shooting at them from too far away; then the guns sounded again and he recognized the sound: not rifles but artillery, in the distance. Temeraire turned towards it at once, to the west; out before them was opening the vast unbroken blackness of the Baltic, and the guns were Prussian guns, defending the walls of Danzig.
Chapter 17
“I AM SORRY you should have shut yourself into this box with us,” General Kalkreuth said, passing to him the bottle of truly excellent port, which Laurence could appreciate sufficiently to tell it was being wasted on his palate after the past month of drinking weak tea and watered rum.
It followed on several hours full of sleep and dinner, and the still-better comfort of seeing Temeraire eat as much as he wished. There was no rationing, at least not yet: the city’s warehouses were full, the walls fortified, and the garrison strong and well-trained; they would not easily be starved out or demoralized into surrender. The siege might last a long time; indeed the French seemed in no hurry to begin it properly.
“You see we are a convenient mousetrap,” Kalkreuth said, and took Laurence to the southern-facing windows. In the waning daylight, Laurence could see the French encampments arranged in a loose circle around the city, out of artillery-fire range, astride the river and the roads. “Daily I see our men coming in from the south, the remnants of Lestocq’s division, and falling into their hands as neatly as you please. They must have taken five thousand prisoners already at least. From the men, they only take their muskets and their parole and send them home, so as not to have the feeding of them; the officers they keep.”
“How many men do they have?” Laurence asked, trying to count tents.
“You are thinking of a sortie, and so have I been,” Kalkreuth said. “But they are too far away; they would be able to cut the force off from the city. When they decide to start besieging us in earnest and come a little closer, we may have some action; for what good it will do us, now that the Russians have made peace.
“Oh yes,” he added, seeing Laurence’s surprise, “the Tsar decided he would not throw a good army after bad, in the end, and perhaps that he did not want to spend the rest of his life as a French prisoner; there is an armistice, and they are negotiating a treaty in Warsaw, the two Emperors, as the best of friends.” He gave a bark of laughter. “So you see, they may not bother getting us out; by the end of this month I may be a citoyen myself.”
He had only just escaped the final destruction of Prince Hohenlohe’s corps, having been ordered to Danzig by courier to secure the fortress against just such a siege. “They first appeared on my doorstep less than a week later, without warning,” he said, “but since then I have had all the news I could want: that damned Marshal keeps sending me copies of his own dispatches, of all the impudence, and I cannot even throw them in his face because my own couriers cannot get through.”
Temeraire himself had barely made it over the walls; most of the French dragons enforcing the blockade were presently on the opposite side of the city, barring it from the sea, and surprise had saved them from the artillery below. However, they were now properly in the soup: several more pepper-guns had made their appearance amid the French guns since that morning, and long-range mortars were being dug into place all around.
The walled citadel itself was some five miles distant from the ocean harbor. From Kalkreuth’s windows Laurence could see the last shining curve of the Vistula River, its mouth broadening as it spilled into the sea, and the cold dark blue of the Baltic was dotted over with the white sails of the British Navy. Laurence could even count them through the glass: two sixty-fours, a seventy-four with a broad pennant, a couple of smaller frigates as escort, all of them standing only a little way off the shore; in the harbor itself, protected by the guns of the warships, lay the big lumbering transport hulks which had been waiting to go and fetch Russian reinforcements to the city: reinforcements that now would never come. Five miles distant and as good as a thousand, with the French artillery and aerial corps standing in between.