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This Frenchman at least was alive, although he was pale and wretched among the corpses of his friends. But his eyes were tightly closed, when around him the dead men were staring up at Tenzing quite openly, without shame or fear. Tenzing prodded the living man with his foot.
“The danger is past,” he said, in French. “But the villagers will be here shortly to take what they can from your fellows, and you are likely to meet the same mercy you showed to their village. And I have bread."
There was a kind of pity in watching the soldier, young with pads of fat still in his cheeks despite his bones jutting everywhere else, stuffing his mouth with Tenzing's bread with desperate hunger. But it was only the same kind of pity Tenzing had for everyone, everywhere, these days. The soldier was only a boy, but he was a boy with a gun and a uniform, and he and his fellows would have used them to condemn the countryside to the same hunger he felt himself.
But now the boy was quite alone, and Tenzing had questions.
"Who told you to come pillaging here?" he asked, watching him eat. They had moved some distance away from his dead fellows: he evidently did not feel he could flaunt his good fortune before those who would never eat again.
The boy swallowed. "No one, I think. We were only supposed to go north and bring back cattle, and grains and wine, but none of us found anything, for weeks. So we couldn't go back. Every one of us would have been on quarter rations anyway, to feed the dragons."
Tenzing nodded silently, not interrupting. So the French army was starving, men and dragons alike; he knew that already, but here was evidence.
"The last few patrols never came back from the north, so we thought it would be safer in the south. But the corn they gave us in the village was poisoned, all of us retching in the fields all night, sick as dogs. So we came back to teach a lesson."
Tenzing raised his eyebrows. "For what? Disliking having their winter stores taken away?"
"We were hungry," said the boy around another mouthful of bread. He swallowed. "We were hungry and they poisoned our food."
Tenzing couldn't wonder at the indignation, much as he wanted to. He knew well how hunger made demons out of men.
"And then what happened?" he asked instead, calmly.
"Is there more? Bread, I mean."
This second piece he ate more slowly. Tenzing could see him thinking, no longer willing to blindly trust the first person to offer him food. Tenzing had made no attempt to disguise himself; having consented to wear the coat of a British officer, he had not taken it off to question this French soldier.
"You're going to take me prisoner," the boy said suddenly. "You're in league with the devil."
The first was a new accusation for Tenzing, and it took him a moment to realize he was indeed now in a position to imprison an enemy, and that it might be considered his duty to do so. That thought barely formed before he dismissed it entirely.
"You have nothing to fear from me. As soon as my companions return from their own meal, we will part ways, and I am happy not to lay eyes on you again. You may run back to your own army or not, as you prefer. But first, I want to know what happened here to cause this slaughter."
Tenzing gestured up the road where thirty soldiers lay dead. The survivor only glanced behind his shoulder, pale as if he could see them even through the rise of the hill, and shuddered.
"I saw evidence of dragonflight," said Tenzing. "I saw clearly that you were taken by surprise, with no opportunity to fight. You were ambushed. I can imagine why. I do not know the rest."
"What would you do if I told you?" asked the soldier. "Would you inform your superiors?"
Tenzing laughed a little, surprised again to find himself perceived as such an obedient man.
"No," he said, and did not elaborate.
He would certainly not be reporting this to Wellesley; Tenzing had taken service, as it were, but he did not owe the man or the army any loyalty beyond what his own sense of moral direction. He doubted very much that the general would have any censure for the man that had committed this massacre. On the contrary, Tenzing was growing surer by the moment that it was done on his orders. Effective and brutal, starving the French by slaughtering their irregulars. That had Wellesley written all over. It did not surprise Tenzing that he had found an aviator captain just as brutal and just as cold to do his work.
No, he would not be telling Wellesley, not if he wanted a stop put to it. He would tell Laurence, and together they would decide what to do.
"If you are not in league with that devil, then protect me from him," said the soldier urgently. "He will come back for me again, I know it. Him and his master.”
“As I know nothing of the devil, I cannot be of any use against him,” said Tenzing. “Tell me how it happened.”
The boy shuddered violently, throwing down the rest of his bread.
“They are dead, what else is it you need to know! The dragons came down and now they are dead, my brothers are all dead, Guillame is dead, they are dead and will never be hungry again. But I am alive, and I will not forget. Britishman, you ask how it happened, but how could I tell it to you? There was wind and thunder and I thought it was a storm, a sudden storm, until I saw the dragons. And then a terrible claw cut down Guillame, cut him through to the spine, and he fell on top of me and I was spared. I am still wet with his blood, Britishman, look at me! But the devil will not spare me, no, nor his British master; I saw them with my own eyes, and they will not give me mercy.”
He began to weep.
Tenzing sat back and considered. He was not romantic about dragons, but the idea of setting them directly on humans could not help but be distasteful to him. Laurence, he knew, would feel it that much more strongly. Tenzing was putting together the pieces now. Wellesley had sent Laurence and Temeraire on some covert mission to keep him well away from this madness, so that he would not know. The man who had committed treason for the sake of the lives of strangers would never have stood for this slaughter, and Wellesley would have known that well. There was no question in Tenzing’s mind.
“Tell me of the devil,” he said. “Which dragon was he?”
The boy looked at Tenzing dully. His eyes were too dead with fear to be properly called alive. He said,
“The black dragon, of course. A lightless black, like the devil coming out of hell. And his master, with yellow hair.”
Tenzing left the soldier to his fate. He had never pretended to be a kind-hearted man; no, that was Laurence that had pretended those things. It was Laurence that had given him his hand, in Istanbul, promising to be an equal and a friend; it was Laurence who had risked it all to take the soldiers out of Danzig; it was Laurence who had cast himself into ruination for motives that seemed utterly indecipherable to Tenzing now. He couldn’t reconcile the Laurence he knew with what he had done.
If Arkady and the feral dragons that flew with him had sensed his change in mood, they did not ask over it. Tenzing had never so much envied their complete indifference to human affairs. He wanted it for himself, very much. When he landed at villages, a British flag flying from Arkady’s back, he was trying not to notice their hunger, their resentment. He asked, as he always did, about the black dragon.
“Oh yes, sir, we last saw him about five days ago, wasn’t it?” said the headman, glancing at his wife for confirmation. “Him and the big red one, and the fire-serpent, and a few others, there were. We tried to have them all stay for dinner, but the commander wouldn’t hear of it.”
“So polite, he was,” said his wife wistfully. “Wouldn’t take the food from our table, he said, when he was the only reason there was any in the first place. I heard he did properly for the French bully-boys that took our food stores in the first place, too.”
“Yes,” said Tenzing, who had discovered the mass grave that morning. There hadn’t been any survivors. The age of this massacre site alone had told Tenzing that he was moving in the wrong direction, but Laurence was a ghost, impossible to catch, impossible to stop thinking of. He had landed at the nearby village anyway in hopes of learning--something. Anything. “They ambushed the soldiers from above, on dragonback. They are quite dead.”
Their daughter, dark-haired and modestly dressed, had been sewing quietly in the background, all but invisible. She looked up, at this.
“I’m glad,” she said. “I know it’s not the Christian thing to say, but you must know what they did to Luisa, in the next parish over. There’ll be a babe come summer now, and all the milch cows dead or eaten. If God has given a dragon into his hand, then surely it was to seek justice for us that would have starved or worse. So I am glad to hear it, and Luisa’s heart will be peaceful too, I’m sure.”
Later, when the headman had seen Tenzing off to the village green where Arkady and his fellows were waiting, he said to him quietly,
“She’s a good, gentle girl, she is, so don’t judge her by what she says. She and Luisa used to play with dolls together at our country dances, and she’s taken it hard. She has dreams about the French, she says they’re devils. If the black dragon can help guard her dreams, I can only thank him for it.”
But Tenzing, much as he wanted to, could not excuse Laurence so easily. He knew better than to believe him sent from either God or the devil. He was a man, only a man, and try as he might, Tenzing couldn’t want him to be any different.
He still remembered the way he had found Laurence, in that distant attic in London. He remembered seeing him standing in that small space, a prisoner of his own making, unguarded by anything save his own conscience. It was inexplicable, how his heart had ached in that moment, seeing him look out the fog-glazed window at a London filled with smoke. He turned, and Tenzing saw in his face that Laurence had been prepared for anything -- the gallows, the French, an assassin -- anything, except for Tenzing himself. All the words he had thought of saying evaporated into smoke.
But he had offered it, in the end -- “I might never have found you,” he had said, as if it was as easy as all that. As if he did not know exactly what he meant. He had offered to make Laurence disappear. At that moment, Tenzing had wanted very badly to take him away from Britain and into the wild places on the edges of the world. They could have been outcasts together, in the wilderness.
But Laurence had refused him, and Tenzing had let it go at that. And now, staring into his own little campfire at night, he was realizing that he should not have. He should have taken Laurence by force or trickery, somehow, should have forced him away from his spiteful, monstrous country of Britain, should have taken him into the high mountain air where they could be alone and where invasion and war and Wellesley’s orders could not touch him. He should have made Laurence free, as Tenzing was free.
They were wild, incoherent thoughts, and so utterly unlike him that Tenzing was momentarily shocked awake from his half-slumber. What had he been thinking? It was bizarre to him that he had even entertained such thoughts. He did not act like this over any man. Tenzing had trained himself so from a young age, when certain disappointments had made it clear to him that he could not afford to be sentimental. He had learned to practice detachment, and had assured himself that in this practice, he was the equal of any mountaintop monk.
Where was his detachment now? If Laurence was the latest in a long line of men to disappoint him, that could have nothing to do with Tenzing. He would deliver Wellesley’s orders to Laurence. And then he would go. He had made no ties here. He was free to leave, and he would. He would leave this godforsaken country, and Laurence, neither of which had ever been what he had thought them to be.
Tenzing dreamed.
He opened the gaol door, in a distant attic in a London filled with smoke, but when Laurence turned to meet him, his hands were dripping with blood.
“I might never have found you, of course,” said Tenzing, meaning, come away with me, run away, escape .
“To fly would be to make myself truly a traitor,” said Laurence, and Tenzing saw that his mouth, too, was filled with blood. His eyes were unbearably sad. “I cannot fly, I cannot die, I cannot mend what I began, I can be a tool in someone’s hand--”
This wasn’t how the conversation had gone at all. It had a maddening and alien rhythm, like the British nursery songs that the other children at the Company, the white children, had all somehow learned without him. Tenzing turned and tried to make for the door, but Laurence grabbed him with a bloody hand and held onto him. They pulled close, somehow, in the confused logic of dreams. Laurence looked at him.
Tenzing thought he might kiss him. He almost wanted him to kiss him, even with his mouth full of blood. Laurence spoke, full of urgency.
“Tenzing,” he said. “Make me free.”
He woke sweating, despite the chill of the night. The dream had left him confused and sick, and sure only of one thing.
When it came to William Laurence, Tenzing was not free at all.
He still had not decided anything, when he followed Laurence into the cottage.
In the end he had found Laurence not fifty miles from where he had found the surviving French soldier. He and Arkady set down in a neat, silent camp. Tenzing recognized all the officers who passed by him, but none of them acknowledged him beyond a glance. Only Laurence, coming out of his tent, looked glad to see him. But the smile he offered was fleeting. Tenzing felt a strange creeping sense of unreality, as if he was looking at a cracked-mirror version of Laurence. It was the same sense he had gotten when the French soldier had sobbed out the story of le dragon noir .
“I have a message for you, from Wellesley,” said Tenzing, and followed when Laurence led him inside the cottage. The door closed, and they were alone.
Once more Tenzing tried to tell himself that he did not really know Laurence, that they were merely acquaintances that had once believed themselves friends, or more. But light fell on Laurence’s face as he read Wellesley’s letter, light that came in from all the little cracks around the eaves and windows. Whoever had built this shabby little cottage had done their best to make the walls impermeable to the outside world, but time and wind had done their work; the clay had cracked, the wood had rotted, and the straw had blown away. Tenzing could see every line on Laurence’s face illuminated as if he had drawn them there himself. His fingers lifted, then curled inward. He wanted to touch him, even now. Even if his hands came away red with blood. But he stayed still, and studied Laurence, instead.
He had worn thin since Tenzing had last seen him. He was still a powerfully built man, broad-shouldered and tall, but he had dwindled down to a sketch of himself, and what remained was only muscle and bone, a caricature of violence. He was not eating enough; something else was fueling him. His eyes had grown hollow, so shadowed that Tenzing could not immediately tell by looking what color they were; memory alone sufficed to say that they were blue. He had suffered, and was suffering still. Tenzing had known monsters in his time, but he had never known any that would accept monstrousness as a punishment for themselves.
It was Laurence, though, despite all that. The light coming through the cracks gilded the fine hairs on the back of his hands as they smoothed out the paper. The skin on Tenzing’s palms came alive as he remembered the feeling of their hands meeting for the first time. They could feel that way again, if Tenzing could only bring Laurence back to himself, and to Tenzing.
“Very good,” said Laurence, finishing the letter. Tenzing broke from his reverie.
He almost expected an explanation at once, but instead Laurence began to speak of troop movements, of tactics and numbers; Tenzing listened for a moment, impatiently, and then cut him off directly. It didn’t matter, none of this mattered. Laurence was not an avenging devil, or a heaven-sent guardian; he was not a tool, even if he desperately wished to be one. He was a man, and men were made merely of clay. There would be a crack where the light could get in.
"Laurence," he asked. "What are you doing?"