Chapter 12
GENERAL FELA WAS YOUNG for his rank, but his hands and his face were those of a man who had spent his life not in drawing rooms but in the field, hardened and sword-callused and leathery with sun; his mustaches and his queue were trimmed to an efficient length. His pistol-belt and swords all of them showed heavy use.
He led the way personally up through the silent ruins of the village: a small creeping terraced place, ancient and clinging to the mountain-side, grey stone mortared to make the walls and steps of the narrow lanes that wound between the houses. The door of the largest house stood thrust open, and blood spattered the floor; the bodies had been removed. Laurence followed Fela and his soldiers inside, grimly, and stood looking in the courtyard: two dozen chests and more, stacked upon one another to the height of a man’s head.
“We followed a British dragon to this place,” Fela said, coldly, “bearing more such chests. The guilty culprits fled before our approaching forces, however, and left their allies to their destruction.”
Laurence looked at Hammond, who did not answer, but only stood in pallid silence.
They went back out through the village. The attack had evidently come in the early hours before dawn, and the town had been brutally punished for its support of the rebels: cattle and goods stripped, citizenry put to the sword. The streets echoed emptily beneath their boot-heels, and the doors stood open, ruined.
A poor mountain village, worth nothing to anyone but its citizens; and now all of those were dead. Laurence could see the marks of talons and jaws, where roofs had been ripped away, walls torn down; and through one gaping hole as he walked along the dusty, smooth-cobblestoned lane he saw a cradle, empty and overturned, blackened with smoke. Laurence was not unused to blood nor to brutality; God knew he had seen more than enough men dead, falling corpses into the ocean or hacked apart with saber and cannon-fire. And yet when he stood looking over the empty and ruined village, his stomach twisted wrenchingly with disgust: a passionate horror.
“Was there more opium there?” Temeraire asked, from where he stood nearly upon the outskirts of the village, leaning anxiously over the roofs.
“Yes,” Laurence said shortly. “Twenty thousand pounds’ worth, or near to it; a monstrous amount.”
“Oh?” Iskierka suddenly raised her head. “Is opium worth so much? I have never heard that, before. What do they mean to do with it, now that they have taken it?”
“Burn it,” Laurence said.
“That seems a great waste,” she said, in disgruntled tones.
“I cannot—I cannot by any means account for it,” Hammond said, in much agitation, when they had returned to the encampment.
The British party had been directed to establish themselves on the western side of the valley, separated pointedly from the rest of the forces by a wide furrowed line of open dirt, with sentries posted along it and a dozen of the red dragons encamped surrounding them. “To do honor to the prince, and to Lung Tien Xiang, and ensure none should trouble them,” Fela had said, coldly, paying lip service to the fiction of Laurence’s command.
“I thank you,” Laurence had said, and did not argue; he was himself savagely angry. Across the camp, Chu was directing that his own pavilion be raised up at the farthest point from theirs, beside Fela’s tent.
Their baggage had been heaped carelessly at the boundary, and the cauldrons of porridge: not a generous allotment of the last, particularly when Maximus and Kulingile dragged at last into the camp; the dragons were snappish and sharp at one another over the pots. Spent from their long and arduous flight, however, they were too weary to quarrel long; the porridge was eaten quickly, and they all collapsed into sleep almost at once.
Hammond’s tent had been put up near the center of their encampment, surrounded for privacy by the tents and pavilions of their own men; Churki slept now half-circled round it, the steady heaving of her side gently swelling the back panel of the tent.
“It will be a wretched mess, if we have to fight our way out of this,” Catherine Harcourt said to Laurence, low, as they ducked inside Hammond’s tent together, with the other captains. “If those twelve can hold us long enough for any reinforcements to come up, which I suppose is what they are thinking, we will be sunk. Our only chance will be to bull out through them as quickly as we can—Lily in the middle, Temeraire and Iskierka on her either flank, one pass to clear out anyone before us, and then they give way to Maximus and Kulingile, and we all fall in behind the two of them and make due west. How we are to contrive to win home, with no supply—”
“Pray keep your voice down!” Hammond said. “There can be no call to begin planning so disastrous a course. I grant you the circumstances are awkward—”
“Awkward!” Harcourt said. “Hammond, we are landed in the middle of the largest aerial army of which I have ever heard tell, and now they are only waiting for word that they may put us to the sword and claw.”
“Word that will not come,” Hammond said. “It is preposterous, the idea that we should have provided opium to these rebels—that we should have somehow delivered it here.” He blotted his forehead with the back of his hand and looked around his tent, anxiously. “Where are—ah.” He dug after his pouch of leaves. “I assure you,” he said, folding over a hunk of crumbling leaves with hands that shook, “there must be a misunderstanding. In the morning, I will consult with Lung Qin Mei—we will draft a reply. There are any number of possible explanations. Perhaps these rebels meant to sell opium in order to fund their efforts; it does not follow that we must have been involved in their crimes.”
“And I suppose,” Laurence said, reaching the end of his temper, “that this ragged band of rebels have somehow contrived in their small and impoverished territory to acquire the funds to purchase so enormous a supply?”
He rose to his feet; Hammond stepped back from him, warily. “What use do you imagine it will be to defend ourselves against other charges, when we have already been proven so demonstrably false?” Laurence said. “Twenty chests of Indian opium, of the same make, packed together and certainly from a single British ship. This is no private, no individual endeavor; this was not concealed from the eyes of our factors. This is no secret winking. This is deliberate, orchestrated defiance of the law, and our guilt there is undeniable.”
Laurence was grimly aware that a courier had already flown for the Imperial City with the news of this latest discovery. He would be obliged to follow it with his own; he would have to make excuses, to scrape and connive at justification. He would have to let Hammond put falsehoods into his mouth, or see his men and fellow-officers condemned, his country-men in Guangzhou chased out, all hope of alliance ruined. And he could scarcely see any hope for averting that fate even if he did all this.
“You have made me a liar, and yourself,” he said, bitterly, and stalked from the tent.
Outside the last of the tents had gone up, and the night had gone quiet: the quiet of a prison camp. The ground crewmen and the junior officers were sitting wearily at their fires, supping on the remnants of the provided food. Several knots of officers stood looking across the boundary line at the rest of the camp and the twelve red dragons drowsing along it: not with more caution than was deserved.
Granby ducked out of the tent and joined him, watching them. “Laurence, I don’t mean to tell you not to be angry: this is a rotten hole for us to have been put into, all because some fellows in Guangzhou want to line their pockets,” he said, after a moment. “But there’s a stink to this all around. Fela hasn’t told all the truth, either.”
Laurence looked at him. Granby said, “Where is this British dragon supposed to have come from, that he says was lugging these chests? It’s the sort of thing he might imagine: I dare say all their merchants ship goods dragon-back, here. We don’t; we haven’t any merchant dragons. Even our courier-beasts don’t come to China: we can scarcely get one to India four times a year.”
“And yet those chests are from Guangzhou, and from a British ship,” Laurence said slowly. “They were conveyed here somehow.”
“I suppose so,” Granby said, “but they weren’t brought by a British dragon, and if Fela says they were, he’s a bare-faced liar.”
“I beg your pardon; I am distracted,” Laurence said, to Mrs. Pemberton: she had spoken to him, and he had not attended, for the lingering turmoil in his mind. “Thank you, tea would be most welcome.”
He had not slept easily or well. The ruined village lingered in his mind, in his dreams; he saw again and again the cracked stone houses, the mill fallen silent, the walls blackened with smoke and the claw-marks standing pale against them. Again and again he had walked through the street, hearing somewhere distantly the roar of dragons, with a strange and dreadful sense of familiarity: perhaps because it might almost have been an English village, a village of Nottinghamshire on his own father’s estates, pillaged so and broken. He had woken unsettled, cloudy.
The day stood before him without direction. He had still the charge, in theory, of finding this rebellion and putting it down, but it was hard to imagine how he ought to carry that out. His command had never been more than a nominal fiction, and if Chu’s sympathies had not been with Lord Bayan and the conservative faction from the beginning, they were surely fixed in that direction now.
He had contemplated crossing the camp to Chu’s pavilion and speaking with him. “I hope you will pardon me, Captain,” Hammond had said, cool and formal with him after the previous day’s reproof, “but I must urge against it. Let us not forget the attempts upon your life. In the present—difficulties—your death would surely be the cap to the efforts to sever relations between our nations. I must ask you to remain within the camp.”
Hammond had spent the rest of the morning in Temeraire’s pavilion, drafting the letter to the Emperor, with Mei offering him advice on the choice of argument and phrase. Mei had regarded the chests of opium with a stony expression as they were brought out of the ruined village, and afterwards had curled herself to sleep without any word to Temeraire, or any of them; but at least she had remained in his pavilion. She had met Hammond’s request for assistance that morning without pleasure, but with a nod of her head.
She had as little choice as he did, Laurence supposed: the conservative faction would surely try to use this to topple the crown prince, if they could, and certainly to undermine his plans for modernization. But to her, the British could be now nothing more than a gang of ruffians, smuggling poison into her nation and conniving at treason; she could scarcely have liked any better than Laurence did, to attempt to defend their acts.
But Hammond had written the letter; she had helped him; Laurence had signed his name to it, and one of the Jade Dragons had borne it away. Then they had all three of them retired, separately: Hammond, with a short bow, to his tent; Mei curled into a corner of the pavilion in pointed silence. Laurence had gone to see Mrs. Pemberton settled: he had ordered that her tent be pitched as near Temeraire’s pavilion and his own as possible, and had begged the most reliable men from the other captains’ crews to stand guard.
She gave him a cup of tea: to his surprise, with milk. “There are some sheep down there below,” she said, with a ghost of a smile, “and Emily has made several acquaintances amongst the young women. They were kind enough to find us a milch one and liberate her. The ewe is picketed down that crevasse, over there, so she needn’t be troubled by seeing the dragons, poor creature. The flavor is not quite right, but at least it is something.”