He stifled his first reaction, and spoke mildly of the arrangements to Major Seiberling, now the senior Prussian; implying as best he could without outright falsehood that the Admiralty meant to wait until General Kalkreuth was recovered before they gave him an official welcome.
‘Oh; must we fly again?’ Temeraire said. He heaved himself wearily back onto his feet, and approached the drowsing ferals to nudge them awake: they had all crumpled into somnolence after their dinners.
Their flight to Edinburgh was slow and the days were growing short. It was only a week to Christmas, Laurence realized abruptly. The sky was fully dark by the time they reached their destination; but the castle shone out for them like a beacon, its windows and walls bright with torches as it stood on its high rocky hill above the shadowed expanse of the covert. The narrow buildings of the medieval part of the city crammed together close around it.
Temeraire hovered doubtfully above the cramped and winding streets; there were many spires and pointed roofs to contend with, and not very much room between them, giving the city the appearance of a spear-pit. ‘I do not see how I am to land here,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I am sure to break one of those buildings; why have they built these streets so small? It was much more convenient in Peking.’
‘If you cannot do it without hurting yourself, we will go away again, and orders be damned,’ Laurence said; his patience was grown very thin.
But in the end Temeraire managed to let himself down into the old cathedral square without bringing down more than a few lumps of ornamental masonry; the ferals, being all of them considerably smaller, had less difficulty. They were a little anxious at being removed from the fields full of sheep and cattle, however, and suspicious of their new surroundings; Arkady bent low and put his eye to an open window to peer inside at the empty rooms, making sceptical inquires of Temeraire as he did so.
‘That is where people sleep, is it not, Laurence? Like a pavilion,’ Temeraire said, trying cautiously to rearrange his tail into a more comfortable position. ‘And sometimes it is where they sell jewels and other pleasant things. But where are all the people?’
Laurence was quite sure that all the people had fled; the wealthiest tradesman in the city would sleep in a gutter tonight, if it were the only bed he could find in the new part of town, safely away from the pack of dragons who had invaded his streets.
The dragons eventually disposed of themselves in some manner of reasonable comfort; the ferals, used to sleeping in rough-hewn caves, were even pleased with the soft, rounded cobblestones. ‘I do not mind sleeping in the street, Laurence, truly; it is quite dry, and I am sure it will all be very interesting to look at, in the morning,’ Temeraire said, consolingly, before falling asleep with his head lodged in one alleyway and his tail in another.
But Laurence minded for him; it was not the sort of welcome which he felt they might justly have looked for, a long year away from home, having been sent halfway round the world and back. It was one thing to find themselves in rough quarters while on campaign, where no man could expect much better and might be grateful for a cow-byre to lay his head upon. But to be deposited like baggage, on cold unsanitary stones stained dark with years of street refuse, was something other; the dragons might at least have been granted use of the open farmland outside the city.
Laurence knew it was unconscious malice: the common unthinking assumption made by men who treated dragons only as inconvenient, if elevated, livestock, to be managed and herded without consideration for their own sentiments. It was an ingrained assumption. Even Laurence had recognized it as outrageous only when forced to do so by witnessing by contrast the conditions he had observed in China, where dragons were received as full members of society.
‘Well,’ Temeraire said reasonably, while Laurence laid out his own bedroll inside the house beside his head, leaving the windows open so they might continue to speak, ‘we knew how matters were here, and so we cannot be very surprised. Besides, I did not come back to make myself more comfortable, or I would have stayed in China. We must improve the circumstances of our friends. Not,’ he added, ‘that I would object to having my own pavilion; but I would rather have liberty. Dyer, pray will you retrieve that bit of gristle from between my teeth? I cannot reach far enough to put my claw upon it.’
Dyer, startled from his half-doze upon Temeraire’s back, ran to fetch the small pick from their luggage, and then scrambled obediently into Temeraire’s open jaws to scrape away.
‘You would have more luck achieving the latter if there were more men ready to grant you the former,’ Laurence said. ‘I do not mean to counsel you to despair; indeed we must not. But I had hoped to find, upon our arrival, more respect for you than when we departed, not less. It would have brought material advantage to our cause.’
Temeraire waited until Dyer had climbed out again to answer. ‘I am sure they will listen to the merits of such reform,’ he said; a large assumption, which Laurence was not at all sanguine enough to share, ‘and all the more, when I have seen Maximus and Lily and they are ranged with me. And perhaps Excidium also, for he has been in the most battles: no one could help but be impressed by him. I am sure they will see the wisdom of my arguments; they will not be as stupid as Eroica and the others were,’ Temeraire added, with obvious shades of resentment. The Prussian dragons had at first rather disdained his attempts to convince them of the merits of greater liberty and education among dragons. They were as fond of their traditional rigorous military order as their handlers, and preferred to ridicule the habits that Temeraire had acquired in China as effete.
‘I hope you will forgive me for my bluntness; but I am afraid that even if you allied the hearts and minds of every dragon in Britain with your own, it would make very little difference. As a political party you have no influence with Parliament,’ Laurence said.
‘Perhaps we do not, but I imagine if we were to go to this Parliament, we would be attended to,’ Temeraire said, an image most convincing, if not likely to produce the sort of attention Temeraire desired.
He said as much, and added, ‘We must find some better means of drawing sympathy to your cause, from those who have the influence to foster political change. I am only sorry I cannot apply to my father for advice, as relations stand between us.’
‘Well, I am not sorry, at all,’ Temeraire said, putting back his ruff. ‘I am sure he would not have helped us; and we can do perfectly well without him.’ Aside from his loyalty, which would have made him resent coldness towards Laurence on any grounds, Temeraire viewed Lord Allendale’s objections to the Aerial Corps as objections to him personally. Despite them never having met, he felt violently towards anyone whose sentiments would have seen Laurence separated from him.
‘My father has been engaged in politics for half of his life,’ Laurence said. Lord Allendale made special effort towards abolition in particular, it was a movement that had been met with as much scorn at its inception, as Laurence anticipated for Temeraire’s own cause. ‘I assure you his advice would be of the greatest value; and I do mean to effect a repair, if I can, which would allow us to consult him.’
‘I would as soon have kept it, myself,’ Temeraire muttered, meaning the elegant red vase that Laurence had purchased in China as a conciliatory gift. It had since travelled with them five thousand miles and more, and Temeraire had grown as possessive of it. He sighed when it was finally sent away, with a brief and apologetic note.
But Laurence was all too conscious of the difficulties that faced them, and of his own inadequacy to progress so vast and complicated a campaign. He had been a boy when Wilberforce had come to their house. He came as the guest of one of Lord Allendale’s political friends, newly inspired with fervour against the slave trade and just beginning the parliamentary campaign to abolish it. That was twenty years ago, and despite the most heroic efforts by men of ability, wealth and power greater than his own, a million souls or more must have been carried away from their native shores since then.
Temeraire had been hatched for only a few years; for all his