League of Dragons Page 89
“His stragglers are three-quarters of his army,” Hammond said. “Now that Blücher has rejoined us, he does not have enough men to meet us. He has sent half his dragons back to Erfurt, to bring the rest of his infantry along by portage. We will have three days, at least. Come in, you must come in at once,” Hammond continued, and drew Laurence along into the large dining room where the senior staff was assembled, without even noticing the dragon trailing behind them.
Even there, Yu Li at first escaped observation—Marshal Blücher coming forward to greet Laurence with a fervent embrace, and the other officers acclaiming him with all the energy of men who knew very well how closely they had skirted disaster and defeat. “His Majesty will wish to see you,” Blücher said. “You have eaten?”
A stifled yelp interrupted their greetings: Yu Li had inquisitively come up to the table, which was littered with maps tacked together to form a sweeping whole. She put her head out on its long neck to examine their positions, very much startling the young staff-officer next to her, who nearly knocked over his neighbors as he went stumbling back. “I beg your pardon,” Laurence said hastily. “Gentlemen, this is Lung Yu Li, who has been sent from the Chinese legions.”
There was an enormous silence. Yu Li broke it herself, saying in Chinese, “This is a very handsome map, but those men are not over there,” while leaning forward to make several alterations to the disposition of figures with the talons of her foreleg, nudging some here and there in small increments until she was satisfied with their arrangement. She straightened up from the table and blinked around at the company, who wore a general expression of disquiet: a dragon did not generally appear in a dining room, and even Laurence had to admit of a vague sense of something decidedly out of place, as though a caricature from the Gazette had abruptly come to life.
“Sir,” Laurence said to Blücher, “her news does not permit of any delay, further than has already been occasioned. Marshal Kutuzov ought to hear it at once, if he can be disturbed.”
“Ah! He cannot,” Blücher said heavily. “Marshal Kutuzov has died.”
—
The men gathered around the table with the Tsar were divided neatly by dress: the statesmen neat and in good order, the serving-officers unshaven and in clothing stained with sweat and retreat; their faces were equally bleak, however, and Yu Li’s news was not calculated to make them less so.
“By the Dread Lord’s order, the legions departed from Xian directly on receiving the Dread Lord’s order,” Yu Li said, “and proceeded without delay through Yutien and made the crossing of the Taklamakan Desert. Since then we have encountered a steady resistance which has hindered the secure establishment of our supply. As a consequence, we must establish a sufficient presence at each depot to defend it, and our supply-flights must travel in larger groups, which in turn necessitates an increase in supply, and thereby greatly delays our advance.”
“Feral raiding?” a Russian officer asked, when Laurence had translated this far. “I dare say they do not know how to manage wild beasts, when they have none in their own country, but any respectable guards ought to be able to fend them off.”
Laurence was sure Yu Li did not refer to ordinary feral attacks as might be made on any army’s supply, and when he asked her of the arrangements made to avoid these, she said, with a severe eye upon the officer who had spoken, “Naturally, as is necessary to any civilized army, we have a sufficient supply allocated to be able to give appropriate presents to those dragons whose territory we must cross. But our gifts have been refused. These attacks are bent upon destruction, not theft.”
There was a pause, as this sank in. Every man there knew that Kutuzov’s intention had been, as nearly as could be managed, to arrange a trap almost exactly like the one which had nearly closed upon Napoleon’s army in Russia, in the last campaign. He had meant to penetrate as far westward as he could during the winter, and on meeting Napoleon’s advance retire by small piecemeal stages, grudgingly surrendering territory and stretching the French lines of communication, until the arrival of the legions from the East should abruptly shift the balance of aerial power, and allow him to strike a crushing blow—with, they had all confidently expected, the assistance of the Austrians, who would under those circumstances have finally come off the fence. Napoleon had already overset much of this design by leaping forward to seize Dresden and force them so far westward in a single blow. Even a small delay in the legions’ arrival would now have been a cause for concern.
“How long?” Wittgenstein asked finally, breaking the silence.
“General Zhao Lien regrets that it will not be possible to assemble along the Vistula before two months have passed,” Yu Li said.
“We do not have two months,” Blücher said. “We do not have two weeks.”
“If the Austrians came in?” one man said.
“The Austrians will not come in while Napoleon is on their border with five hundred dragons and two hundred thousand men, when we have half those numbers,” Hammond said. “Count Metternich is entirely with us in spirit, gentlemen, but he is not a fool.”
“If I may be so bold,” Laurence said, “we ought first consider how Napoleon has obtained the services of five hundred dragons. Eugene had a strong aerial force at the Elbe, and Davout reportedly has two hundred dragons at Hamburg. The beasts here cannot all have been French. Not after Bonaparte’s losses in Russia, which to our knowledge were immense. There were too many dragons of unusual conformation with them, and Yu Li’s reports must further give rise to the suspicion that he has also established relations with the dragons in the east—that he has anticipated the legions, and arranged these efforts to delay their arrival.”
A conclusion less to the taste of any man present could hardly be imagined: all Kutuzov’s aims shattered. But the rational force of the argument was difficult to avoid, and no-one objected; Laurence paused a moment, saw that no-one would speak, and said forcefully, “This is the work of his Concord, gentlemen. Do any of you doubt it? He has for the cost of pen and ink bought a thousand dragons, who otherwise would have spent this war sleeping idle in remote caverns. Have there been reports of increased raiding, on our own supply?”
A steady rumble of muttering around the table. There had been, everywhere—