In Autumn, A White Dragon Looks Over the Wide River

The diplomat, De Guignes, had disappeared somewhere into the palace. Lien remained alone in the courtyard. The pale narrow faces of the foreign servants gawked out at her from the windows of the great house; the soldiers in their blue and white uniforms staring and clutching their long muskets. Other men, more crudely dressed, were stumbling around her; they had come from the stables by their smell, clumsy with sleep and noisy, and they groaned to one another in complaint at the hour as they worked.

The palace, built in square around the courtyard, was not at all of the style she had known at home, and deeply inconvenient. While it possessed in some few places a little pleasing symmetry, it was full of tiny windows arranged on several levels, and the doors were absurdly small—like a peasant’s hut or a merchant’s home. She could never have gone inside. Some of the laborers were putting up a pavilion on a lawn in the court, made of heavy fabric and sure to be hot and stifling in the warm autumnal weather. Others carried out a wooden trough, such as might be used for feeding pigs, and began to fill it with buckets, water slopping over the sides as they staggered back and forth yawning.

Another handful of men dragged over a pair of lowing cattle, big brown-furred creatures with rolling eyes showing white. They tethered the cows before her and stood back expectantly, as though they meant her to eat them live and unbutchered. The animals stank of manure and terror.

Lien flicked her tail and looked away. Well, she had not come to be comfortable.

De Guignes was coming out of a side door of the house again, and another man with him, a stranger: dressed like the soldiers, but with a plain grey coat over all that at least concealed the rudely tight trousers the others all wore. They approached; the man paused a few paces away to look upon her, not out of fear: there was an eager martial light in his face.

“Sire,” De Guignes said, bowing, “permit me to present to you Madame Lien, of China, who has come to make her home with us.”

So this was their emperor? Lien regarded him doubtfully. By necessity, over the course of the long overland journey from China in the company of De Guignes and his fellow countrymen, she had grown accustomed to the lack of proper ceremony in their habits; but to go so far as this was almost embarrassing to observe. The serving-men were all watching him without averting their eyes or their faces; there was no sense of distance or respect. The emperor himself clapped De Guignes on the shoulder, as though they had been common soldiers together.

“Madame,” the emperor said, looking up at her, “you will tell these men how they may please you. I regret we have only a poor welcome to offer you at present, but there is a better in our hearts, which will soon make amends.”

De Guignes murmured something to him, too soft for her to hear, and without waiting for her own answer, the emperor turned away and gestured impatiently, giving orders. The loudly bellowing cows were dragged away again, and a couple of boys came hurrying over to sweep away the stinking pools of urine they had deposited in their fear. In place of the trough, men brought out a great copper basin for her to drink from, bright-polished. The moaning of the cows stopped, somewhere on the other side of the stables, and shortly a roasting scent came: uninteresting, but she was hungry enough, after their long journey, to take her food with no seasoning but appetite.

De Guignes returned to her side after a little more conversation with the emperor. “I hope all meets with your approval?” he said, indicating the pavilion. “His majesty informs me he will give orders that a permanent pavilion be raised for your comfort on the river, and you will be consulted as regards the prospect.”

“These things are of little importance,” she said. “I am eager, however, to hear more of the emperor’s present designs against the nation of Britain.”

De Guignes hesitated and said, “I will inquire in the morning for the intelligence you desire, Madame. His majesty may wish to convey his intentions to you himself.”

She looked at him and flicked her ruff, which ought to have been to him a warning that he was lamentably transparent, and also that she would not be put off in such a manner for long; but he only looked pleased with himself as he bowed again and went away.

She stayed awake the better part of the night in the pleasant cool upon the lawn before the pavilion, nibbling occasionally at the platter of roasted meat as hunger overcame her distaste; at least it was no more unappetizing for being cold. The rising sun, painful in her eyes and against her skin, drove her at last into the shelter of the pavilion; and she drowsed thickly and uncomfortably in the stifling heat, dreaming of her prince’s deep, controlled voice, reciting summer poetry.

In the late afternoon, the sun vanished behind clouds and she could emerge, only to find she had company in the court: three young male dragons of enormous size, all of them dirty, idly gnawing on bloody carcasses, and wearing harnesses like carrying-dragons. They stared at her with rude curiosity; Lien sat back upon her haunches and regarded them icily.

“Good day, madame,” one of them said after a moment, daring to break silence first. Lien flattened back her ruff and ignored him entirely, leaning over the copper basin. Several leaves had blown into the water and not been removed; she lifted them out of the way with the tip of her claw and drank.

The three males looked at one another, their tails and wing-tips twitching visibly with uncertainty like hatchlings fresh from the shell. The first one who had spoken—the largest of them, an undistinguished dark brown in color with a belly of mottled cream and grey—tried again. “I am called Fraternité,” he offered, and when she made no response, he leaned his head in towards her and said very loudly, “I said, good day, I am—”

She blazed her ruff wide and roared at him, a short controlled burst directed at the soft earth before his face, so the dirt sprayed into his face and his nostrils.

He jerked back, coughing and spluttering, making a spectacle of himself and rubbing his face against his side. “What was that for?” he protested, injured; although to her small relief, he and his companions also drew back a little distance, more respectfully.

“If I should desire to make the acquaintance of some person,” Lien said, addressing the small tree a few paces away, so as to preserve at least some semblance of a barrier to this sort of familiarity, “I am perfectly capable of inquiring after their name; and if someone is so lost to right behavior as to intrude themselves undesired upon my attention, that person will receive the treatment he deserves.”

After a brief silence, the smallest of the three, colored in an unpleasant melange of orange and brown and yellow, ventured, “But how we are to be welcoming if we are not to speak to you?”

Lien paused momentarily, without allowing surprise to show; it required an abrupt and unpleasant adjustment to her new circumstances to realize that these were not some idle gawkers who had carelessly intruded: they had been deliberately sent to her as companions.

She looked them over more closely. Fraternité was perhaps two years out of the shell; he did not yet have his full growth, outrageously disproportionate as his mass already was. The orange-brown male was only a little older, and the last, black with yellow markings, was younger again; he was the only one at all graceful in conformity or coloration, and he stank of a markedly unpleasant odor like lamp-oil.

If she had been at home, or in any civilized part of the world, she would at once have called it a deliberate insult, and she wondered even here; but De Guignes had been so anxious to bring her. The rest of her treatment suggested enough incompetence, she decided, to encompass even this. Perhaps the French even thought it a gracious gesture of welcome; and she could not yet afford to disdain it. She had no way of knowing who might be offended by such a rejection, and what power they might have over other decision-making.

So she resigned herself, and said to the tree, rather grimly, “I am certainly not interested in friendship with anyone who cannot eat in a civilized way, or keep himself in respectable order.”

They looked at one another and down at themselves a little doubtfully, and the black and yellow male, who had been eating a raw sheep, turned towards one of the men nearby and said, “Gustav, what does she mean; how am I eating wrong?”

“I don’t know, mon brave,” the man said. “They said she wanted her food cooked; maybe that is what she means?”

“The content of a stranger’s diet, however unhealthful, is scarcely of concern to the disinterested onlooker who may nevertheless object to being approached by one covered in blood and filth and dirty harness, and stinking of carrion,” Lien informed the tree, in some exasperation, and closing her eyes put her head down on her forelegs and curled her tail close to signify the conversation was for the moment at an end.

The three males returned some hours later, washed and with their harnesses polished and armor attached, which gave them the dubious distinction of looking like soldiers instead of the lowest sort of city-laborers, although they looked as pleased with themselves as if they had been wearing the emblems of highest rank. Lien kept her sighs to herself and permitted them to introduce themselves: Sûreté was the orange-brown, and Lumière the black and yellow, who took the opportunity to inform her proudly he was a fire-breather, and then for no reason belched a tremendous and smoky torrent of flame into the air.

She regarded him with steady disapproval. After a moment, he let the flame narrow and trail away, his puffed-out chest curving uncertainly back in, and his wings settling back against his body. “I—I heard you do not have fire-breathers, in China,” he said.

“Such an unbalanced amount of yang makes for unquiet temperament, which is likely why you would do something so peculiar as breathe fire in the middle of a conversation,” Lien said, quellingly.

In forcing her to correct this and a thousand other small indelicacies in their behavior, their company soon made her feel a nursemaid to several slightly dim hatchlings, and it was especially tiring to have to correct their manners over the dinner the servants brought. By the end of the meal, however, she could be grateful for their naïvete, because they were as unguarded in their speech as in their behavior, and so proved founts of useful information.

Some of it thoroughly appalling. Their descriptions of their usual meals were enough to put her off from the barely-adequate dinner laid before her, and they counted themselves fortunate for the privilege of spending the evening sleeping directly on the lawn about her pavilion, as compared to their ordinary quarters of bare dirt. Her prince had told her a little of the conditions in the West when he had returned from across the sea, but she had not wholly believed him; it seemed impossible anyone should tolerate such treatment. But she grimly swallowed that indignation along with the coarse vegetables that had been provided in place of rice; she had not come to make these foreign dragons comfortable, either. She had come to complete her prince’s work.

The prospects for that were not encouraging. Her companions informed her that the French were presently on the verge of war, and when she sketched a rough map in the earth, they were able to point out the enemy lands: all in the east, away from Britain.

“It is the British, though, who give them money to fight us,” Fraternité said, glowering at the small islands; that same money, Lien thought, which they wrung out of the trade which brought the poison of opium into China, in defiance of the Emperor’s law, and took silver out.

“When do you go?” she inquired.

“We do not,” Lumière said, sulkily, and put his head down on his forelegs. “We must stay back; there isn’t enough food.”

Lien could well imagine there was not enough food available to sustain these three enormous creatures, when the French insisted on feeding them nothing but cattle, but she did not see how keeping them behind would correct that difficulty. “Well, the army cannot drive enough cattle to feed us all,” Fraternité said, bafflingly; it took nearly half an hour of further inquiry until Lien finally realized that the French were supplying their forces entirely from the ground.

She tried to envision the process and shuddered; in her imagination long trains of lowing cattle were marched single-file through the countryside, growing thin and diseased most likely, and probably fed to the dragons only as they fell over dead.

“How many of you go, and how many remain?” she asked, and with a few more questions began to understand the nonsensical arrangement: dragons formed scarcely a thirtieth part of their forces, instead of the fifth share prescribed as ideal since the time of Sun Tzu. The aerial forces, as far as she could tell, seemed nearly incidental to their strategies, which centered instead upon infantry and even cavalry, which should have only served for support. It began to explain their obsession with size, when they could only field such tiny numbers in the air.

She was not certain how it was possible this emperor could have won any battles at all in foreign territory, under these conditions; but the dragons were all delighted to recount for her detailed stories of half a dozen glorious battles and campaigns, which made it plain to her that the enemy was no less inept at managing their aerial strength.

Her companions were less delighted to admit they had been present at none of these thrilling occasions; and indeed had done very little in their lives so far but lie about and practice sluggish and awkward maneuvers.

“Then you may as well begin to learn to write,” Lien said, and set them all to scratching lines in the dirt for the first five characters: they were so old they were going to have to practice for a week just to learn those, and it would be years before they could read the simplest text. “And you,” she added to Lumière, “are to eat nothing but fish and watercress, and drink a bowlful of mint tea at every meal.”

De Guignes returned that afternoon, but was more anxious to see how she had received her companions than to bring her any new intelligence. However wise it might have been, she could not quite bring herself to so much complaisance, and she said to him, “How am I to take it when you send to me companions beyond hope of intelligent conversation on almost any subject, and of such immaturity? That among you war-dragons are of the highest rank, I can accept; but at least you might have sent those of proven experience and wisdom.”

De Guignes looked somewhat reluctant, and made some excuse that it had been thought that she might prefer more sprightly company. “These are of the very best stock, I am assured,” he said, “and the chief men of his majesty’s aerial forces put them forward especially for this duty.”

“Heredity alone is no qualification for service, where there is no education,” she said. “So far as I can see, these are fit for no duty but eating and the exertion of brute strength; and perhaps—” she stopped, and a cold roiling of indignation formed in her breast as she understood for what duty they were meant.

De Guignes had the decency to look ashamed, and the sense to look anxious; he said, “They were meant to please you, madame, and if they do not, I am sure others—”

“You may tell your emperor,” she said, interrupting wrathfully, “that I will oblige him in this when he has gotten an heir to his throne upon the coarsest slattern in the meanest town in his dominion; and not before. You may go.”

He retreated before her finality, and she paced a little distance into the courtyard and back, her wings rising and falling from her back to fan her skin against the heat of the sun; it was a little painful, but not more so than the sensation of insult. She scarcely knew how to comport herself properly. She had been used from her hatching to be gawked at sidelong by small and superstitious minds, for her unnatural coloration; and had suffered the pain of knowing that their unease had injured the advancement of her prince. But the stupidest courtier would never have dared to offer her such an offense. Lumière landed before her, returning from a short flight: could he truly think of her in such a way? she wondered, and hissed at him.

“Why are you are bad-tempered again?” he said. “It is a splendid day for flying. Why do we not go see the Seine? There is a nice stretch outside the city, where it is not dirty, and also,” he added, with an air of being very pleased with himself, “I have brought you a present, see,” and held out to her a large branch covered with leaves of many colors.

“I have been the companion of a prince,” Lien said, low and bitterly, “and I have worn rubies and gold; this is your idea of a suitable offering, and yourself a suitable mate?”

Lumière put down the branch, huffily, and snorted. “Well, where are they now, then, if you have all these jewels?” he objected. “And this prince of yours, too—”

She mantled high against the sharp cruelty of the question, her ruff stretched thin and painful to its limits, and her voice trembled with deadly resonance as she said, “You will never speak of him again.”

Lumière mantled back at her in injured surprise, thin trails of smoke issuing from his nostrils, and then one of his companions, clinging to the harness on his back, called loudly, “Mon brave, she has lost him; lost her captain.”

Lumière said, “Oh,” and dropped his wings at once, staring at her with wide-pupiled eyes. She whirled away from the intrusion of his unwanted sympathy and stalked back across the broad courtyard towards the front of the palace, still trembling with anger, and ignoring the yelled protests of the servants seated herself in the broad, cobblestoned drive directly before the doors, where she could not be evaded.

“I am not here to be a broodmare,” she said, when Lumière followed and tried to remonstrate with her, “and if that is all your emperor wants, I will leave at sunset, and find my own way out of this barbaric country. If he desires otherwise, he may so convey to me before then.”

She remained there for several hours with no response; enough time, under the painful sun, to consider with cold, brutal calculation the likelihood that she would elsewhere find the means to overthrow a fortified island nation. It was the same calculation that had driven her to these straits in the first place. With her prince dead and his faction scattered, her own reputation tainted beyond all repair, and Prince Mianning given an open road to his false dreams of modernization—as though there was anything to be learned from these savages—she was powerless in China.

But she would be equally powerless as a solitary wanderer across this small and uncivilized country. She had considered going to England itself, and raising a rebellion there, but she could see already that the dragons of these nations were so beaten down they could not be roused even in their own service. It could almost have made her pity Temeraire; if there were room in her heart for any emotion at even the thought of his name but hatred.

But unlike her poor, stupid young companions, he had chosen his fate even when offered a better one; he had preferred to remain a slave and a slave, furthermore, to poison-merchants and soldiers. His destruction was not only desirable but necessary, and that of the British he served; but for that, she required an external weapon, and this emperor was the only one available. If he would not listen to her—

But in the end, he did come out to her again. In the daylight, she could make out a better picture of his appearance, without satisfaction. He was an ugly man, round-faced with thin unkempt hair of muddy color, and he wore the same unflattering and indecent tight-legged garments as his soldiers. He walked with excessive energy and haste, rather than with dignity, and for companion he had only one small slight man carrying a sheaf of paper, who did not even keep up but halted several paces further back, casting pale looks up at her.

“Now, what is this,” the emperor said impatiently. “What is wrong with these three we have given you? They do not satisfy you properly?”

Lien flattened her ruff, speechless at this coarseness. One would have thought him a peasant. “I did not come here to breed for you,” she said. “Even if I were inclined to so lower myself, which I am not, I have more pressing concerns.”

“And?” the emperor said. “De Guignes has told me of your preoccupation, and I share it, but Britain cannot simply be attacked from one day to the next. Their navy controls the Channel, and we cannot devote the resources required to achieve a crossing while we have an enemy menacing our eastern flank. A fortified island nation is not so easily—”

“Perhaps you are not aware,” Lien said, interrupting him icily, “that I was zhuang-yuan in my year; that is, took the first place among the ten thousand scholars who pursued the examinations. It is of course a very small honor, one which is not worthy of much notice; but if you were to keep it in mind, you might consider it unnecessary to explain to me that which should be perfectly obvious to any right-thinking person.”

The emperor paused, and then said, “Then if you do not complain that we do not at once invade Britain—”

“I complain that you do nothing which will ever yield their overthrow,” Lien said. “De Guignes brings me here with fairy-tales of invasion and an invitation to lend my services to that end, and instead I find you marching uncounted thousands of men away to war in the east, with the best part of what little real strength you have left behind, eating unhealthy and expensive quantities of cattle and lying around in wet weather, so exposed there is no use in even trying to make eggs. What is the sense in this absurd behavior?”

He did not answer her at once, but stood in silence a moment, and then turning to his lagging secretary beckoned and said, “You will have General Beaudroit and General Villiers attend me, at once; Madame,” he turned back, as the message was sent, “you will explain to me how dragons ought to be fed, if you please; Armand, come nearer, you cannot make notes from there.”

The generals arrived an hour later by courier beasts: and at once began to quarrel with her on every point. On the most basic principles of the balance necessary for health, they were completely ignorant and proud to remain so, sneering when she pointed out the utter folly of giving a fire-breather nothing but raw meat. By their lights, dragons could not be fed on anything but animal flesh; and so far as she could tell, they believed the quantity ought to be proportional to a dragon’s volume and nothing else.

They refused to consider any means for inuring cavalry to the presence of dragons, nor even the proper function of dragons in the work of supply, which baffled her into a temporary silence, where General Villiers turned to the emperor and said, “Sire, surely we need not waste further time disputing follies with this Chinese beast.”

Lien was proud of her self-mastery; she had not given voice to an uncontrolled roar since she had been three months out of the shell. She did not do so now, either, but she put back her ruff, and endured temptation such as she had never known. While Villiers did not even notice; instead he went on, “I must beg you to excuse us: there are a thousand tasks to be accomplished before we march.”

She would gladly have torn the creeping vile creature apart with her own bare claws. So far had they lowered her, Lien thought bitterly, in so little time!

And then the emperor looked at Villiers and said, “You have miscounted, monsieur. There are a thousand and two: I must find new generals.”

Lien twitched the very end of her tail, a second self-betrayal in as many moments, although she could be grateful that she did not gape and stammer as did the two officials; and in any case her lapse was not observed. The emperor was already turning to his secretary, saying, “Send for Murat: I must have someone who is not a fool,” and wheeling back to her for a moment said sharply, “He will attend you tomorrow, and you will describe to him how dragons can be fed on grain, and how the cavalry is to be managed. Armand, take a letter to Berthier—” and walked away from them all.

Like all these Frenchmen, Murat had an appearance which veered between unkempt and unseemly, but he was not, to her satisfaction, a fool. She was cautiously pleased. It would take years, of course, to begin to correct the flaws in the division of their army, and the lamentable deficiencies of their husbandry and agriculture would require a generation or more. But she did not need to be quite so patient, she thought. If the emperor obtained the victory of which he was so certain, in the east, and in the meanwhile she persuaded him to adopt a more rational arrangement of his aerial forces, a force sufficient for invasion might be assembled within the decade, she hoped; or two perhaps.

Three days later, Fraternité woke her in the late afternoon roaring; instinct brought her out of the pavilion straightaway, to see what the matter was, but the three of them were only cavorting about like drunkards.

“We are going to war!” Lumière informed her, mad with delight. “We are not to be left behind, after all; only we will have to eat a lot of gruel and carry things, but that is all right.”

She was a little taken aback, and then more when the emperor came to see her that afternoon. “You are coming also,” he said, which she was ashamed to find made her chest wish to expand in an undignified manner, although she controlled the impulse. He wanted her opinions on the new arrangements, he informed her; and she was to tell the officers if there were mistakes.

It had not occurred to her that he would attempt in the span of a week to make changes in the organization of his army, and she kept private her first opinion: that he was a madman. In the morning, escorted by her three young companions, she flew to the place of concentration at Mayence, where the dragons were coming in with their first experimental loads of supply. It was, as anyone could have predicted, perfect chaos. The laborers did not know what they were doing, and were clumsy and slow at unloading the dragons, who had been packed incorrectly to begin with; the soldiers did not know how to manage on the carrying harnesses; the cattle were drugged either too much or too little. One could not simply overturn the habits of centuries, however misguided, by giving orders.

She expressed as much in measured terms to the emperor that evening, when he arrived by courier; he listened to her and then said, “Murat says that applying your methods would provide us with a sixfold increase in weight of metal thrown, and tenfold increase in supply for the dragons.”

“At the very least,” she said, because there was certainly no understating the inefficiency of the present methods. “When done properly.”

“For now, I am prepared to settle for doubling my numbers,” the emperor said dryly, “so we will tolerate some flaws.”

He then dictated a proclamation to his secretary, which was by the hour of the evening meal distributed among the camp and read aloud to the listening soldiers, describing the worst flaws which required correction, and also to her bafflement a lengthy explanation of the reasoning behind the alterations; why he should communicate such information to simple men, likely only to confuse them, she did not understand.

But the next day they did improve a little, and she could not dispute that even fumbling and disorganized, they had bettered the prior state of affairs, although she was still doubtful that it was worth the sacrifice of cohesion and discipline which came when men were following a course in which they had been trained and drilled for years. Of course, the emperor seemed equally willing to sacrifice that discipline in lesser causes. His communications were haphazard at best; while he daily received messages, they came at irregular intervals, and the little couriers cheerfully told her that his army was distributed over hundreds of miles, companies wandering almost independent from one another.

She wondered, and still more at his success, when his couriers were by no means efficient or swift, being bred only for lightness instead of the proper bodily proportions and all far more suitable as skirmishers, and she told him as much that night with even less ceremony. As no one else treated him with the proper degree of awe, she felt it unnecessary to do so herself, and he did not seem to notice any lack of respect. Instead he sent for a chair and sat and asked her questions, endlessly and into the night, while his secretaries and guards drooped around him. His voice at least was pleasant: not so deep as her prince’s nor so well-trained, and with a peculiar accent, but clear and strong and carrying.

In the morning, they left for the front, his small courier in the lead; and in the waning hours of the day Lien crested a bank of hills and paused, hovering and silent, while beneath her a vast ant-army of men crawled like small squares of living carpet over the earth, dotting the countryside in either direction as far as her vision could stretch.

It was of course still not rational to make men rather than dragons the center of any military force; still she could not help a strange and disquieting impression of implacable power in the steady marching, as though they might walk on and on across all the world. And in the dusty tracks behind them came on the rattling caravans of black iron, cannons larger than any she had ever seen.

“These throw only sixteen pounds,” the emperor said that night, while under his brooding eye Fraternité hefted several of the guns. “Can he take more weight than that?”

“Of course I can,” Fraternité said, throwing out his chest.

“No, he cannot,” Lien said. “Do not squawk at me,” she added, with asperity. “You cannot fly straight through the day with your wing-muscles so constrained.”

Fraternité subsided; the emperor however said, “How many hours could he fly with another?”

“No more than two straight,” Lien said, and the emperor nodded. The next day, he summoned her and went to gather men from a town called Coblenz, some sixty miles distant. The cannon were loaded on the heaviest dragons, save Lien herself; they were sent two hours on and unloaded; then, having been rested an hour, sent back for other supplies and to carry forward some companies of the infantry. It was an odd and unintuitive back-and-forth, attended with awkwardness and difficulty, but by nightfall the entire company was all reunited, thirty miles nearer to Mayence and not too wretchedly out of order.

The emperor came to her with a gleam of jubilation in his eye that made him handsomer, although she did not think the progress justified as much satisfaction as he displayed, and said so. He laughed and said, “In three days we will see, madame; I bow to you where dragons are concerned, but not men.”

The next day, they brought the full company into Mayence before noon, and by that evening had set out again on the wing to Cologne for another, with scarcely a pause in between. Before his three days’ time was finished, they had brought in ten thousand men, with their supply, and she had begun to think he was not so much a fool after all: there was that same inevitability in their course which she had felt watching the small marching companies, the momentum of so many men combined; and a spirit of joint effort which animated his countless hordes of tiny soldiers.

“I am satisfied,” the emperor told his officers: he had assembled them by Lien’s pavilion. “Our next campaign, we will do better; but even at this speed, we will reach Warsaw before winter. Now, gentlemen: I want bigger guns, and I do not see any reason we must send back to France for them.”

“There is a fort near Bayreuth,” one of the marshals, a young man named Lannes, offered. “They have thirty-two pounders there.”

“Will you come?” the emperor asked her, almost like an invitation. He did not mean it so, of course, Lien realized; likely he only wanted her to come and fight, like a soldier-beast.

It made her curt. “It is not fitting for a Celestial to enter into lowly combat.”

But he snorted. “I want your opinion on the aerial tactics, not to waste you on the field,” he said.

She watched from beside him upon a low rise overlooking the field, while a dozen of his smaller dragons flung themselves in a pell-mell skirmishing rush at the three enormous beasts guarding the fortress. There was nothing of order to the attack, but that meant it required very little training, and she recognized in it all she had described to him of the principles of maximizing maneuverability. The guns fired only infrequently at the little dragons, too small and too close upon the defenders to make good targets, as they nipped and tore at the larger beasts’ heads and wings.

The sensation of witnessing her own advice transmuted into acts upon the battlefield was a peculiar one; still more so to watch the defending beasts chased away successfully, and then Lumière diving in, flanked by Fraternité and Sûreté, to blast the ramparts clear with flame while the two others tore up the cannons from their moorings on the wall. They returned triumphantly and lay them at the emperor’s feet and hers: great squat wide-mouthed things of pitted iron and scratched wood, ugly and stinking of smoke and oil and blood, and yet also of power, with the enemy’s flag lying broken and like a rag half-draped upon them.

She was disquieted by the feeling, and with the sun as her excuse retreated to the shelter of the woods while behind her the enemy general came out of the fortress and knelt down, and through the trees she heard the soldiers crying Vive la France! Vive l’Empereur! Vive Napoléon! in a thousand ringing voices. The sound chased her into an uneasy sleep where she spread her jaws wide and roaring brought down the walls of some unnamed fortress, and amid the rubble saw Temeraire broken; but when she turned to show her prince what she had done for him, Napoleon stood there in his place.

She woke wretched and cold all at once, with a light pattering rain beginning to fall upon her skin; she felt a sharp longing for home, for a fragrant bowl of tea and the sight of soft mountains, instead of the sharp angry white-edged peaks lifting themselves out of the trees in the distance. But even as she lifted her head, she smelled the smoke of war, bitter and more acrid than ordinary wood-fire; the smell of victory and of vengeance coming. There were men coming into the clearing to put up a sheltering tent over her, and Napoleon striding in behind them saying, “Come, what are you doing, when you have warned me so of leaving dragons exposed to the weather? We will eat together; and you must have something hot.”