Blue pins for the small French companies daily marched across his maps, back and forth from their encampments; one by one they were plucked out and laid back into their tin, and Laurence rinsed blood mechanically off his hands at the wash-basin. Very little thought now was required, and he was glad of it, distantly. Their own supply gave them no difficulty; if they landed near a town or a village, meat would somehow be managed for them and the dragons, cows or pigs or mutton, even if the villagers themselves went hungry as a consequence. Occasionally the French tried again a pursuit, orchestrated from farther south, but so much early warning reached them they had merely to draw back a little, and let the dragons sleep, while a flock of little ferals kept watch.
They had been raiding then nearly two months, when Arkady arrived the first week of March in a great flurry of noise, carrying Tharkay and with three of his ferals for escort, and at once began to parade before Temeraire and the others to tell them of his adventures since their last meeting. He had only been patrolling with the others, but by his account he had fought hordes of French dragons, and captured many prizes, and he bragged that they would do well, now he had come to join them; at which news Temeraire laid back his ruff in irritation.
“I have a message for you, from Wellesley,” Tharkay said to Laurence, and came inside with him. The implacable maps were laid out upon a makeshift table, a door laid over two old trestles, inside the small cottage where he had sheltered overnight; Tharkay stood in the doorway looking out while Laurence opened the letter. Their camp was a strange, silent place: no prisoners but the one solitary French officer, the captain, desolately sitting outside a hut with his hands loosely tied and bound to a stake in the ground, under guard by a couple of Granby’s bellmen. The massacred trees, which the dragons used for their sweeping, were in a great heap at the edge of camp and the dark bare branches darker still with dried blood, a forest’s graveyard. Every man went about his work silently, and without either fuss or satisfaction; they had killed fifty men that morning.
Wellesley’s new orders were not very different: he only directed their efforts more particularly towards the eastern coast, and carefully avoided any word to suggest what those efforts should be; all was left unstated, and Wellesley closed by saying, and you are welcome to this jabbering creature and his fellows, if you can make better use of them.
“Very good,” Laurence said, setting it aside. He drew out the map of the North Sea coast, to consider it: there had been some raiding near Stickney, last week, and an outpost near Cromer, one of the places the Fleur-de-Nuits would likely be landing with fresh troops, when they could get across. “They must send out foragers there twice a week,” Laurence said to Tharkay. “I will send you there with Berkley, and free the rest of us to go after them at Stickney; if you begin near the outpost and circle outwards, you are likely to find the foragers soon enough; there ought not be more than fifty men. They have stopped sending out larger bands. Berkley will approach from their forward direction, and you will cut off their avenue of retreat—”
“I beg your pardon,” Tharkay said. “I prefer not.”
Laurence paused, his hand arrested mid-air above the map.
“Arkady, I am sure, will oblige,” Tharkay said, “but someone else must captain him. I regret,” he added, with a lash of irony, “I have not the luxury of setting aside, for a time, the veneer of civilization; I must be a little more careful. A temporary viciousness may be pardonable in a gentleman, even admirable; but it must brand me forever a savage. Laurence, what are you doing?”
The question was simple enough, and ought to have afforded any of a dozen answers; one after another presented themselves for his consideration. “Killing soldiers,” Laurence said, at last, “most of whom are starving; and making them vicious, so they give us still-better excuse.”
It had the poor advantage of being true; giving it voice, Laurence tasted all its ugliness on his tongue. He sat down and put a hand over his mouth, and found his face was wet. He could not speak again for a little while, struggling to master himself and his voice; at last he said to Tharkay, hoarsely, “If you will not, what will you do?”
He did not mean the question in the immediate sense, and Tharkay did not take it so. He shrugged in his restrained way, the movement of a hand only. “There is work enough in the world,” he answered, “and little enough time.”
“And no-one to decide, but yourself,” Laurence said. “No authority but your own conscience.”
“There are authorities to choose from,” Tharkay said, “to suit any action, if you like; I prefer to keep the choice a little closer.”
It seemed to Laurence the most miserably solitary existence imaginable; isolated by more than distance or even disdain. “How do you bear it? The choice, and all the consequences thereof, alone—”
“Perhaps use has reconciled me; or,” Tharkay said dryly, “perhaps I simply have less natural inclination to hold myself responsible for the sins of the world, rather than for my own.”
Laurence covered his face with his hands a moment, and shut his eyes against the filtered reddish light. The hayloft smell of straw and the vanished horses, warm and familiar, and the sulfur bite of the dragons outside; wood-smoke and Arkady’s smug prattle, broken occasionally by Temeraire’s more resonant protests.
“Very well,” he said, and went out, leaving the orders upon the table.
Chapter 15
FORGIVE ME,” LAURENCE SAID. Temeraire had settled himself for the night, curled up comfortably in an old, well-plowed field behind the barn, fallow now and full of soft dry grass underneath the snow. They were alone, or nearly so. Demane and Sipho and Roland and Allen were all tucked into the curve of Temeraire’s haunch, under a little lean-to which Demane and Roland had worked out of a tent and a few sticks, and rigged to Temeraire’s side, as it was warmer to sleep against him so than in the tent alone. But all four were fast asleep. Arkady at last had stopped telling stories, and was now busily making up to Iskierka, to sleep near in the heat she gave off. Temeraire had sniffed a little in disdain, and curled his own tail about the lean-to, just to be sure his crew would sleep warm, and dry besides.
He did not at once understand, what Laurence was apologizing for, until Laurence had explained a little. “Forgive me,” Laurence repeated. “Bad enough that I used myself so; to have used you likewise, is unpardonable—”
“But Laurence,” Temeraire said, at once glad and baffled, “it was my fault, surely: it was my notion we should go to France in the first place. Only, I did not know that they should take your capital, and your rank; and I am sorry—”
“I am not,” Laurence said. “I should give more than that, and count it cheap, to preserve my conscience; I am ashamed to have submitted to despair so far as to ever have thought differently.”
Temeraire did not wish to argue in the least: Laurence sounded like himself again, if still drawn and perhaps unhappy, and that was worth anything; but privately he could not help a certain resentment that a conscience seemed to be so very expensive, and yet had no substantial form which one might admire, and display to one’s company.
“But,” he said, heroically, “I did mean what I said, dear Laurence, about the talon-sheaths, and I do wish you may sell them, and buy some new things for yourself: I would like my conscience to be just as clear.”
Laurence said, with even a touch of amusement, “I am sorry to have neglected my coat, if it has given you so wretched a notion of my finances, but I am not so wholly impoverished.” More gently he added, “There will be no more pavilions, I am afraid, but I hope I need not be an embarrassment to you.”