Colonel Eigher provided them coffee and beds, and for Temeraire one of the horses which had in its frenzy broken a leg; the rest were hurriedly taken outside the walls of the fort and left in a paddock under guard. Laurence slept through until the afternoon, and rose from his cot still half-submerged in the murk of sleep, while outside Temeraire continued to snore in a manner which would certainly have given him away even to the Turks half-a-mile distant across the border, if he had not been curled up securely behind the thick wooden walls of the fort.

“They mean to dance to Bonaparte’s fiddle, do they?” Eigher said, when given a fuller account of their adventure than Laurence had been able to muster up the previous night; his own preoccupation, quite naturally, with the state of relations his nation might expect with her neighbors. “Much joy may they get of him.”

He gave Laurence a good dinner, and some sympathy; but he had little to spare. “I would send you on to Vienna,” he said, pouring yet another glass of wine, “but God in Heaven, I would be serving you an ill turn. It shames me to say, but there are creatures calling themselves men who would serve you to Bonaparte on a platter; and bend both their knees to him while they were at it.”

Laurence said quietly, “I am very grateful for the shelter you have given us, sir, and I would not for all the world embarrass you or your country; I know you are at peace with the French.”

“At peace,” Eigher said, bitterly. “We are cowering at their feet, you may say; and with more truth.”

By the end of the meal he had drunk nearly three bottles; and the slowness with which the wine had any effect upon him betrayed that this was no irregular occurrence. He was a gentleman, but of no high estate, which had limited his advancement and his postings beneath, Laurence suspected, what his competence might have deserved; but it was not resentment drove him to drink but a misery which found voice as the evening drew on, and the combination of brandy and company further unbridled his tongue.

Austerlitz was his demon; he had served under General Langeron in the fatal battle. “The devil gave us the Pratzen Heights,” he said, “and the town itself; took his men out of the best ground deliberately and played at a retreat, and why? So that we would fight him. He had then fifty thousand men, and we ninety, with the Russians; and he was luring us to battle.” Humorlessly he laughed. “And why not give them to us? He took them back easily enough, a few days later.” He waved his hand over the map-table, on which he had laid out a tableau of the battle: a task which had taken him scarcely ten minutes, though he was already thoroughly taken in drink.

Laurence, for his part, had not drunk enough to numb his appalled reaction; he had learned of the great disaster at Austerlitz while already at sea, on his way to China, and only in the vaguest terms; the intervening months had given him no better information, and he had by stages allowed himself to believe the victory exaggerated. Eigher’s tin soldiers and wooden dragons in their stately array made a deeply unpleasant impression as the colonel moved them about.

“He let us entertain ourselves by beating upon his right a little while, until we had emptied our center,” Eigher said, “and then they appeared: fifteen dragons and twenty thousand men. He had brought them up by forced marches, and not a whisper we had of their coming. We limped on another few hours, the Russian Imperial Guard cost them some blood, but that was the end of it.”

Reaching out he tipped over a little mounted figure with a commander’s baton, and lay back in his chair, his eyes shut. Laurence picked up one of the little dragon-figures, turning it over in his hands; he did not know what to say.

“Emperor Francis went and begged him for peace the next morning,” Eigher said after a little while. “The Holy Roman Emperor, bowing to a Corsican who snatched himself a crown.” His voice was thick, and he did not speak again but fell slowly into a stupor.

Laurence left Eigher sleeping and went out to Temeraire, now awake and no less unhappy. “Digby would be bad enough,” Temeraire said, “but we have killed that dragonet, too, and it did not have anything to do with all of this; it did not choose to be sold to us, or to be kept back by the Turks, and it could not get away.”

He had curled himself brooding around the two remaining eggs, keeping them cuddled against his body, perhaps by instinct, and occasionally putting out his long forked tongue to touch the shells. He only with reluctance admitted even Laurence and Keynes to examine them, and kept hovering so close that the dragon-surgeon impatiently said, “Get your bloody head out of the way, will you; I cannot see anything with you blocking all the light.”

Keynes tapped the shells lightly, pressed his ear to the surface and listened, wetted a finger and rubbed them a little and brought it to his mouth. When he was satisfied with his examination, he stepped away again, and Temeraire drew his coils more snugly back around the eggs and looked anxiously to hear his verdict.

“Well, they are in good form, and have taken no harmful chill,” Keynes said. “We had better keep them wrapped up in the silk, and,” he jerked his thumb at Temeraire, “it will do them no harm to have him playing nursemaid. The middle-weight is in no immediate danger at all; by the sound I should say the dragonet is not yet formed; we might have months to wait there. But for the Kazilik, no more than eight weeks, and no less than six; there is not a moment to lose in getting it home.”

“Austria is not safe, nor the German states, with French troops thick on the ground as they are,” Laurence said. “I mean to go northward, through Prussia; a week and a half should see us to the coast, and from there a few days’ flight to Scotland.”

“Whichever way you go, you should go quickly; I will contrive to delay my report to Vienna a little, so you are out of the country before those damned politicians can think of some way they can make use of you to shame Austria a little more,” Eigher said, when Laurence spoke to him again, that evening. “I can give you safe-conduct to the border. But should you not go by sea?”

“It would cost us at least another month, going around by Gibraltar, and we would have to find shelter along the Italian coast a good deal of the way,” Laurence said. “I know the Prussians have accommodated Bonaparte heretofore, but do you think they will go so far as to surrender us to him?”

“Surrender you? No,” Eigher said. “They are going to war.”

“Against Napoleon?” Laurence exclaimed; that was a piece of good news he had not expected to hear. The Prussians had long been the finest fighting force in Europe; if only they had joined the earlier coalition in time, surely the outcome would have been very different, and their entry into the struggle now seemed to him a great victory for Napoleon’s enemies. But it was plain Eigher saw nothing to be pleased with in this intelligence.

“Yes, and when he has trampled them into the dirt, and the Russians with them, there will be no one left at all in Europe to restrain him,” the colonel said.

Laurence kept his opinion of this pessimism to himself. The news made his own heart lift gladly, but an Austrian officer, no matter how passionately he hated Bonaparte, might well not desire to see the Prussian Army succeed where his own had failed. “At least they will have no motive to delay our journey,” he said tactfully.

“Go fast and keep ahead of the fighting, or Bonaparte will delay you himself,” Eigher said.

The next evening they set out again under cover of dark. Laurence had left several letters with Eigher to be sent on to Vienna and thence to London, though he hoped his own road home would be quicker; but in case of any accident, their progress so far should at least be known, and the situation with the Ottoman Empire.