That the remark gave him no pleasure was evident. “Damned disgrace,” one of the young men in the corner muttered, without looking up.
“Bring me sixty dragons the hour before a battle and I will pardon your treason, and murder, too,” Wellesley said, coming out of the back room. “I don’t know what sort of genius of disaster you are, Laurence, but if you can be aimed at Bonaparte instead of us, you are worth not hanging. Can you make the beasts obey?”
“Sir,” Laurence said, “I have brought you no dragons; you would better say, the dragons brought me. They do not obey me but Temeraire—”
“And the creature obeys you, that is good enough for me,” Wellesley said. “I am not in a mood to have my time wasted with legalities. Do your damned duty, or I will have you hanged, before I go and get myself shot on the field.” He snatched a paper from the table and scribbled upon it a few hurried lines, which could have been interpreted in nearly any fashion one chose, and thrust them out.
Laurence looked at the paper, life, liberty, duty all in one; and was nearly grateful to Wellesley for the bribery and threats, distasteful in themselves, which could only make the command easier to refuse.
“You will forgive me, sir,” he said, “I cannot make you the promise you wish; I have not the power to make it good. If you wish to speak with the leader of the dragon-militia, that is Temeraire himself. And he will not obey, nor the beasts with him, if they are not consulted.”
“For the love of God, and Bonaparte on our doorstep,” Wellesley said. “Do you imagine we have time to go jumping a mile across camp, to coddle dragons now and not just men?”
“He needs no coddling, sir,” Laurence said, “beyond what information you would consider appropriate, for any commander of a substantial militia arrived late, and without any prior knowledge of your plan of attack. He is more than willing to come to you, if there were space cleared for him, and the horses secured against their natural instinct of flight.”
Wellesley snorted. “Plan of attack? He can’t know any less about it than any man alive does. Rowley,” he said, turning abruptly to one of the young men at the side of the tent, who jerked to attention, “go tie up the horses and clear enough room for him to land. How much does he need?”
He waited for no answer, but went back into the general staff meeting. “Temeraire will require some hundred and fifty feet, square, to come down,” Laurence said to Rowley, going outside with him.
“What is he, clumsy as a cow?” the young man said sourly, and shouting gave orders for several tents to be moved, and an entire picket-line of horses. “I won’t answer for your neck if he eats the general’s favorite horse,” he added.
Laurence did not bother to answer these remarks, but went as quickly as he could back to the clearings, and halted: word had traveled at speed, and a handful of his crew had come to the camp, evidently having slipped away from their other assignments. “Sir,” Fellowes said, glancing up from his work, and Blythe beside him with a small forge. Gangly young Allen stood up flushing, two inches taller at a glance than he had been, and touched his hat, and with them Emily Roland.
“Gentlemen,” Laurence said, torn between gratitude and dismay, for they were working not on harness and armor but on Temeraire’s platinum breastplate, and Emily had brought Temeraire’s jeweled talon-sheaths.
These, having been given him in China, were remarkably beautiful, and remarkably gaudy, gold and silver engraved with elaborate Oriental designs and studded with small chips of gemstones. His breastplate, with its great pearl and sapphires, further advanced the service of vanity, with his old smaller string of gold and pearls suspended from its chain, not at all complementary. Besides this Temeraire had arranged to have himself scrubbed until he gleamed, and even, Laurence was sorry to see, his handful of scars painted over, with a pot of the sort of glossy black used upon doors and iron railings. It was most notable upon his chest, where a barbed French ball had taken him in the flesh, during an engagement at sea; the wound had been ugly, and though healed clean had left a puckered knot of scales.
When Laurence came in Temeraire was engaged in examining himself critically as best he could, in a large dressing-room mirror good enough only to show perhaps five feet of him at a time, and considering whether to add a spangled net of chains to be draped over his ruff.
“Iskierka offered me it,” he said, “and while of course ordinarily I would not borrow anyone else’s things, and pretend that they were mine, I am only thinking that, as we have not had time to make medals yet, it might stand in for them.”
“Pray let me advise you against it,” Laurence said, sadly, imagining the generals’ reaction. “Borrowed finery cannot be to anyone’s taste, and if it should be lost, or damaged, you would be indebted—”
“Oh,” Temeraire said, “that is very true; I suppose I had better not,” and he sighed wistfully. “Very well, Roland, take it off,” and he lowered his head reluctantly.
It did not much matter, however, in the end. Temeraire descended to a great spreading silence, even the horses’ frightened cries dying away to overwhelmed stillness. Rowley, still waiting outside, was pale beneath his dark narrow moustache, as Temeraire neatly fitted himself into what was indeed a very cramped space for him, having to coil up his tail as he landed.
“Well, is it here?” Wellesley said, coming out, and pausing looked up and up and up, and said nothing more. A few pieces of jewellery were perhaps not much to notice, Laurence realized, when one had never seen the whole dragon before; and as an Army officer, Wellesley had likely never been close to a beast over courier-weight; a seaman might at least have served on a transport.
“I am Colonel Temeraire, at your service,” Temeraire said, peering down interestedly.
“You are, are you?” Wellesley said after another moment, recovering his voice. “You’ll do to stop a few mouths, anyway. Rowley, go tell those fellows in there to come out, so we can meet with our new colonel.”
A man came hurriedly out of the tent: no military officer, but a gentleman in a neat sober suit of dark brown. “General, if you will forgive me—the Ministry feels there is some danger of a precedent—if I might have a word—” He had not properly, fully, noticed Temeraire yet: while he talked his eyes flicked a few times to the side and up, caught glimpses of black scales, the smooth horn of the talons, impressions which over the course of his sentence accumulated until at last he raised his head to look properly, and fell silent.
“No, you mightn’t,” Wellesley said with satisfaction, watching him choke, and pressed him unresistingly into a folding-chair. “Have a seat, Giles. Rowley, go on and tell the rest of them to come out here.”
“I beg your pardon,” Temeraire said to the poor man, who trembled violently as the dragon’s head lowered near, “but if you are part of the Ministry, I should like a word, myself. We would like to vote, please, and also to be paid.”
The professional soldiers were not quite so easily quelled, and Jane dispelled a great deal of the effect, by coming out and saying to Temeraire, “Did you deck yourself out for Christmas? This is a war, not a Vauxhall burlesque.”
“I have put on my nicest things, to be respectful,” Temeraire said, injured.
“To show away, you mean,” Jane said, and as this mode of conversation did not result in her being eaten, or squashed, the others grew more bold. More bold than Wellesley at least would have liked; he had very evidently hit on the notion of stifling dissent with his own proposals through an intimidation by proxy, more than he had any real interest in consulting Temeraire’s opinion.