Chapter 39 Three Codas
THREE CODAS
Lady Catherine de Bourgh lay on a quiet Surrey hillside amid birdsong and fresh sun.
One side of her gown was dark with blood.
A few feet away, a patch of blight slowly spread.
By her other side, her bronze wyvern lay curled as if sleeping, her scaled chest rising and falling, the motions strangely slow.
Hesitantly—she had never dared before—Lady Catherine touched her fingers to the wyvern’s shoulder. The scales were perfectly fitted, as smooth as porcelain, and as hard as diamond. Warmer than a person, but no warmer than a cat.
The wyvern’s muscled, battered, mud- and blood-stained form did not respond. She lay as if dead other than those slow, soft breaths.
The carnage of battle covered the slope.
This patch of Surrey, on the fringe of the Donwell Abbey grounds, was a very easy distance from Hartfield.
For hundreds of years, it had led an uneventful existence.
Now, the dead littered the ground. The victims were foul crawlers and the men who wielded them, the Overseers in their dark gray coats.
The slavers’ captive wyves had been spared while their masters died. Drugged and confused, the wyves had wandered away.
One crawler, the length of Lady Catherine’s arm, survived as well.
It was exploring the dead a dozen yards away from her.
Dissatisfied, it reared the first third of its body above the ground, pointed legs weaving, the tongue-like organs between its pincers hunting for scents. It flopped down facing her.
Lady Catherine pried another rock from the ground—a sturdy, apricot-sized rock. She threw it. The rock missed, but the crawler retreated a few feet. Lady Catherine was, however, running out of rocks.
“You don’t have to kill them no more,” a young boy’s voice told her.
Wincing, Lady Catherine twisted her head.
The boy was about ten years old. His bottom lip poked out as he considered the lady’s blood-drenched gown and the charred, bedraggled ostrich feather in her turban.
“What else does one do to a crawler, child?” Lady Catherine demanded.
“You just got to make music. Any music. Watch…” He pursed his lips and whistled the tune of “Frère Jacques.” Lady Catherine scowled at the choice, but perhaps a mother or an aunt had sung it to him to teach him a few words of French.
The crawler was unaffected. It rattled closer. The boy finished his recitation and watched it fearlessly.
A small, iridescent, sapphire bird swooped overhead, splaying its forked, swallow-like tail. It landed neatly a few feet from Lady Catherine and inspected the motionless wyvern with curious, flicking attention. Instead of a beak, it had a muzzle covered with shining, pebble-like scales.
The song draca hopped around to face the nearing crawler, then it sang—not birdsong with its pleasant, short recitations, but music incandescent with emotion, romance, and longing. The crawler reared, its pincers clicking as it listened.
The song finished in transcendent joy. The crawler relaxed to the ground and writhed into a curling mass, twining, shell segments clicking.
It looked like a skein of wool winding itself.
The two stingers began extruding a cloudy blue silk, and swiftly it wove a cocoon, arching and rolling its body to cover every part until it was wrapped in fleecy blue, a woolly oval the size of a loaf of bread.
“See?” the boy said proudly.
“I do,” Lady Catherine said. “What happens to it now?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know.” Then his mouth formed a guilty O, and he waved both arms high, shouting in his young, piercing voice, “Found her! Over here!” He whispered to Lady Catherine, “I forgot I was supposed to yell. You won’t tell, will you?”
“Certainly not,” she agreed.
Mr. Knightley ran up the hill. “Lady Catherine. We were concerned…” He slowed when he saw the dead and fell silent when he saw her condition.
“There were rather more of those fools than I expected,” Lady Catherine explained. She sounded tired, and her voice shook a little.
Mrs. Knightley arrived after her husband, puffing from running up the slope in her long skirts.
“You are in a state, woman,” Lady Catherine observed disapprovingly.
Mrs. Knightley’s gown was thoroughly ruined, and she was both ungloved and her head uncovered. She seemed unconcerned about her clothes though, and knelt by Lady Catherine, looking with great worry at the blood. Mr. Knightley stood gravely while his wyfe took Lady Catherine’s hand in both of hers.
“I gather you succeeded,” Lady Catherine said. “You and my nephew and… the great wyves.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Knightley said.
“I saw…” Lady Catherine’s strong blue eyes turned to the azure sky, awed, and she did not say what she had seen.
Urgently, Knightley asked his wyfe, “How bad is she?”
“My ability to sense that has passed,” Mrs. Knightley answered.
As if reminded, she lifted one hand from Lady Catherine’s and, unassumingly but with an irrepressible hint of style, swept her fingers through the encroaching, blighted patch.
The oily, sticky blackness shed where she touched, running like rainwater and vanishing into the earth.
Lady Catherine’s gaze had returned to her bronze wyvern. For the first time, her wrinkled eyes admitted concern. “She was brave and loyal,” she said. “More than I deserve. What is wrong with her?”
Mrs. Knightley gave her a comforting smile. “The world has changed. The draca are sleeping to find their place in the new song. Each must choose how they wish to proceed, and to choose their new name as well. She will wake soon.”
Mrs. Knightley then looked more carefully at the sleeping wyvern, and at Lady Catherine. She smiled and whispered in the old lady’s ear, and a sparkling tear of joy ran from Lady Catherine’s eye.
“Where is the nearest doctor?” Mr. Knightley asked his wyfe.
“Whyever do you keep interrupting?” Lady Catherine demanded crossly before Mrs. Knightley could reply. “Are you ill?”
Mr. Knightley, awkwardly, indicated Lady Catherine’s blood-drenched gown.
“Heaven and earth! That is not my blood.” Lady Catherine frowned, very much offended. “I have twisted my ankle. Be useful and give me a hand up.”
Lord Wellington stood atop a low rise, surveying the victory that would cement his fame.
For this conflict, with the survival of England at stake, he had relied not on battle-hardened troops but the militia, the least renowned of Britain’s soldiers.
The militia trained for a few weeks a year.
They were scorned as grubby farmers and posturing gentlemen by the cavalry and infantry who fought England’s wars overseas.
But those regular troops were trapped in Spain or shattered by the Confederates’ lethal crawlers, so Lord Wellington had sent stealthy agents behind enemy lines to muster the militia in towns and villages.
He committed that ragtag force to a last strike, an unimaginable attack from within the conquered south, a blow intended to penetrate the heart of the enemy by capturing or killing the emperor Napoleon himself.
It would have been a bold plan had it a chance of success.
Lord Wellington, a consummate strategist and pragmatist, considered it a fool’s gamble.
But it was better to gamble than present the keys of London to the invaders, so Lord Wellington grit his teeth and sent orders to twenty-two near-amateur regiments in occupied territory.
Then he dispatched his most trusted aide north to Pemberley to seek a miracle.
The outcome should have been defeat, a brutal and bloody last stand in eternally dull Surrey. Instead, he beheld the career-capping achievement that would ultimately launch him to Prime Minister in a remade Britain.
In most ways, the spent battlefield looked like any other. Confusion, suffering, exhaustion, and celebration. The surrendered French and Confederate soldiers had been herded into demoralized groups. Carts were carrying wounded to surgeons in tents outside the worst of the muck.
The difference from prior battles was the occasional glimpse of women in filthy, tattered skirts, the captives of the slavers.
His expert gaze stopped on three distant, red-coated militia soldiers clustered oddly, their muskets leveled. Lord Wellington mounted his borrowed gelding, rode several hundred yards, and called, “What have you?”
“If you please, m’lord,” one said, and they parted to show a girl dressed in what might charitably be called the worn remnants of a fine white dress.
She looked fourteen years old, a child. “She got one of those monsters,” the soldier pointed out.
He spat nervously and aimed his musket at the huge crawler by her feet.
It was a foot thick and as long as the girl was tall, one of the heavy-shelled creatures that had torn through English lines.
When the soldier pointed his musket, the girl took a quick step to stay between the barrel and the creature.
Lord Wellington dismounted. The girl’s eyes were the muddy brown of the battlefield, the whites bloodshot, the pupils massive, but her gaze met his steadily enough, an achievement not every general could manage.
Beyond her, several Confederate soldiers and an Overseer lay dead, limbs swollen and contorted. The Overseer had a bloody twinned sting on his neck and a pistol in his hand.
“Victory belongs to England,” Lord Wellington told the girl. “You are free and safe. Where are you from?”
She had to think a long time before answering, “Brighton.”
A soldier guffawed. “Nobody’s from Brighton.” He shrank under Lord Wellington’s glance.
“That creature is dangerous,” Lord Wellington said to the girl. “Stand aside so we may dispose of it.”
She shook her head, and her thin hands clenched to fists. The crawler hissed and clacked sword-long pincers.
“I would be dead without it,” she said with a young lady’s diction. “At the end the slavers, they… were shooting the girls.” She swallowed, and her gaze counted the dead men. “I had to do something.”