doorknob rattled and the door opened. Laurence turned and stared at the man on the other side. His lean, travel-leathered face and oriental features were familiar but unexpected. ‘I hope I find you in good health,’ Tharkay said. ‘Will you come with me? I believe there is still a danger of fire.’
The guards had vanished. The house was entirely deserted, but for a couple of men who had wandered in drunk off the street and were sleeping in the front hall. Laurence stepped over their legs and out into the morning. A thin pallid haze of smoke and false dawn lay over the docks, drifting out to sea. Glass, broken slate and charred wood littered the street, with other unspeakable trash. Sweepers lugubriously pushed their brooms down the middle of the lane, doing little to help.
Tharkay led Laurence down a side alley where the dead body of a horse, stripped of saddle and bridle, blocked the way. A young kestrel with long trailing jesses was perched on its side, occasionally tearing at the flesh and uttering satisfied cries. Tharkay held out his hand and whistled, and the kestrel came back to him, to be hooded and secured upon his shoulder.
‘I am three weeks back from the Pamirs,’ Tharkay said. ‘I brought another dozen feral beasts for your ranks. In good time, it seems. Roland sent me to bring you in.’
‘But how came you here?’ Laurence said, while they picked their way onward through the unfashionable back streets. The town already looked as though it had been sacked. Windows and doors still intact, were shut tight, some boarded, giving the house-fronts an unfriendly air. ‘How did you know I was in the town—’
‘The town was not the difficulty. The wreckers off the coast knew which way the Goliath's boats had gone,’ Tharkay said. ‘I was here before you were, I imagine. Finding out where you had been stowed was more difficult. I foolishly went to the trouble of obtaining these, first,’ showing Laurence a folded packet of papers, ‘from the port admiral, in the assumption he would know the whereabouts of the prisoner he was assigning to me. But he left me in the hall for over two hours, and quarrelled with me for another. Only when I had his signature did he at last confess to having not the slightest knowledge where you might be.’
They came to a clearing, a courier-covert, where little Gherni waited for them fidgeting anxiously. She hissed at Tharkay urgently. He answered her in the same tangled dragon-language, which Laurence could not understand, and then clambered up her scanty rigging to her back, pointing out the couple of hand-holds Laurence should use to get himself aboard.
‘We may have some difficulty on our journey,’ Tharkay said. ‘Almost all of Bonaparte's men are stationed on the coast, but his dragons are going deep inland. Fifty thousand men, I believe,’ he answered, when Laurence asked how they faced, ‘and as many as two hundred beasts, if one cares to believe the figure. The Corps has fallen back with the rest of the army, to Rainham. I imagine to await Bonaparte's pleasure, as for why they are being so courteous, you would have to ask the generals.’
‘I thank you for coming,’ Laurence said. Tharkay had risked a great deal, with half of Bonaparte's army between him and the coast. ‘You have taken service, then?’ he asked, looking at Tharkay's coat. He wore gold bars: a captain's rank. In the army it was not uncommon for a man to be commissioned only when he was needed, but it was a rare phenomenon in the Corps, where the type of dragon dictated rank. But with Tharkay was one of the few who could speak with the feral dragons of the Pamirs it was no surprise the Corps had wanted him. It was more of one that he had accepted a commission.
‘For now.’ Tharkay shrugged.
‘No one could accuse you of making a self-interested choice,’ Laurence said grimly, with the smell of the burning city in his nostrils.
‘One of its advantages,’ Tharkay said. ‘Any fool could throw in his lot with a victor.’
Laurence did not ask why he had been sent. Fifty thousand men landed was answer enough. Temeraire must be wanted, and Laurence the only, however undesirable, means to obtain his services. It was a pragmatic and temporary choice, nothing to give him hope of forgiveness either personal or legal. Tharkay volunteered no more, Gherni was already springing aloft, and the wind blew all possible words away.
The sky held the peculiar crispness of late autumn, blue, clear and cloudless, beautiful flying weather. They had scarcely been half an hour aloft when Gherni suddenly plunged beneath them, and trembling went to ground in a wooded clearing of pines. Laurence had seen nothing, but he and Tharkay pushed forward to the edge of the woods and peered out from the shade. Two shapes leapt from the ground, and approached. The two big grey-and-brown dragons, glided with lazy assurance, and well they might. Grand Chevaliers were the largest of the French heavyweights, and only a little smaller than Regal Coppers. Each had what looked close to a dozen stupefied cows dangling in their belly-netting, occasionally uttering groggy and perplexed moans, and pawing ineffectually at the air with their hooves.
The pair went by calling to each other cheerfully in French too colloquial and rapid for Laurence to follow, their crews laughing. Their shadows passed like scudding clouds. Gherni held very still beneath the branches. Her eyes were the only part of her which moved, tracking the great dragons' passage overhead.
She could not be persuaded back aloft, afterwards, but curled up as deeply as she could, and proposed that they should bring her something to eat instead. She would not go up again until it was dark. That the French Fleur de Nuits would be out then, was not an argument Laurence wished to attempt, for fear of her refusing to go on at all. Tharkay only shrugged, examined his pistols, and put himself on a track towards the nearby farmhouses. ‘Perhaps the Chevaliers have not eaten all the cattle.’
There were no cows left visible, nor sheep, nor people. Only a scattering of unhappy chickens, upon which Tharkay methodically loosed the kestrel, taking one after another. They would not make much dinner for Gherni, but they were better than nothing. Then they discovered a small pig in the stable, rooting in the straw, oblivious both to the fate it had earlier escaped and the one now descending upon it.
Gherni was neither picky nor patient enough to demand her pork cooked, and they roasted the chickens for themselves over a small, well-banked fire, feeding the kestrel on the sweetbreads, and waving their hands through the smoke to thin it out. Without salt the meat had little flavour, but did well enough to fill their stomachs. They gnawed down to the bones, rubbed their greasy hands clean with grass, and buried the remnants.
And then they had only to wait for the sun to go down. It was scarcely noon, and the ground cold and hard to sit upon, the wind blowing a steady chill into fingers and feet, despite their stamping. But Laurence could stand when he chose, and go to the edge of the copse and feel the wind blowing into his face, and see the placid well-ruled fields in their orderly brown ranks and tall white birch-trees raising their limbs high against the unbroken sky.
Tharkay came and stood beside him. There was no alteration in his looks or manner. If he was silent, he had been silent before. To be able to stand here for a moment, not as a traitor, but only himself, unchanged, in the company of another, was to Laurence as liberating as the absence of locks and barred doors. He had suffered wide disapproval before without intolerable pain, when he knew himself in the right. He had not known it could be so heavy.
Tharkay said, ‘I might never have found you, of course.’
It was an offer, and Laurence was ashamed to be tempted; tempted so strongly that he could not immediately make his refusal, not with freedom open before him and the stench of smoke and the ship's bilges still thick in the back of his throat.
‘My idea of duty is not yours,’ Tharkay said. ‘But I can think of no reason why you should owe a pointless death to any man.’
‘Honour
