Throne of Jade

Chapter 11

THE FOG PERSISTED through the night, lingering as the Allegiance made her final approach to Macao harbor. The long curving stretch of sand, circled by tidy, square buildings in the Portuguese style and a neatly planted row of saplings, had all the comfort of familiarity, and most of the junks having their sails still furled might almost have been small dinghies at anchor in Funchal or Portsmouth roads. Even the softly eroded, green-clad mountains revealed as the grey fog trailed away would not have been out of place in any Mediterranean port.

Temeraire had been perched up on his hindquarters with eager anticipation; now he gave up looking and lowered himself to the deck in dissatisfaction. “Why, it does not look at all different,” he said, cast down. “I do not see any other dragons, either.”

The Allegiance herself, coming in off the ocean, was under heavier cover, and her shape was not initially clear to those on shore, revealed only as the sluggishly creeping sun burnt off the mists and she came farther into the harbor, a breath of wind pushing the fog off her bows. Then a nearly violent notice was taken: Laurence had put in at the colony before, and expected some bustle, perhaps exaggerated by the immense size of the ship, quite unknown in these waters, but was taken aback by the noise which arose almost explosively from the shore.

“Tien-lung, tien-lung!” The cry carried across the water, and many of the smaller junks, more nimble, came bounding across the water to meet them, crowding each other so closely they often bumped each other’s hulls and the Allegiance herself, with all the hooting and shouting the crew could do to try and fend them off.

More boats were being launched from the shore even as they let go the anchor, with much caution necessitated by their unwelcome close company. Laurence was startled to see Chinese women coming down to the shore in their queer, mincing gait, some in elaborate and elegant dress, with small children and even infants in tow; and cramming themselves aboard any junk that had room to spare with no care for their garments. Fortunately the wind was mild and the current gentle, or the wallowing, overloaded vessels would certainly have been overset with a terrible loss of life. As it was they somehow made their way near the Allegiance, and when they drew near, the women seized their children and held them up over their heads, almost waving them in their direction.

“What on earth do they mean by it?” Laurence had never seen such an exhibition: by all his prior experience the Chinese women were exceedingly careful to seclude themselves from Western gaze, and he had not even known so many lived in Macao at all. Their antics were drawing the curious attention of the Westerners of the port also now, both along the shore and upon the decks of the other ships with which they shared the harbor. Laurence saw with sinking feelings that his previous night’s assessment had not been incorrect: indeed rather short of the mark, for there were two French warships in the harbor, both handsome and trim, one a two-decker of some sixty-four guns and the smaller a heavy frigate of forty-eight.

Temeraire had been observing with a great deal of interest, snorting in amusement at some of the infants, who looked very ridiculous in their heavily embroidered gowns, like sausages in silk and gold thread, and mostly wailing unhappily at being dangled in mid-air. “I will ask them,” he said, and bent over the railing to address one of the more energetic women, who had actually knocked over a rival to secure a place at the boat’s edge for herself and her offspring, a fat boy of maybe two who somehow managed to bear a resigned, phlegmatic expression on his round-cheeked face despite being thrust nearly into Temeraire’s teeth.

He blinked at her reply, and settled back on his haunches. “I am not certain, because she does not sound quite the same,” he said, “but I think she says they are here to see me.” Affecting unconcern, he turned his head and with what he evidently thought were covert motions rubbed at his hide with his nose, polishing away imaginary stains, and further indulged his vanity by arranging himself to best advantage, his head poised high and his wings shaken out and folded more loosely against his body. His ruff was standing broadly out in excitement.

“It is good luck to see a Celestial.” Yongxing seemed to think this perfectly obvious, when applied to for some additional explanation. “They would never have a chance to see one otherwise—they are only merchants.”

He turned from the spectacle dismissively. “We with Liu Bao and Sun Kai will be going on to Guangzhou to speak with the superintendant and the viceroy, and to send word of our arrival to the Emperor,” he said, using the Chinese name for Canton, and waited expectantly; so that Laurence had perforce to offer him the use of the ship’s barge for the purpose.

“I beg you will allow me to remind you, Your Highness, we may confidently expect to reach Tien-sing in three weeks’ time, so you may consider whether to hold any communications for the capital.” Laurence meant only to save him some effort; the distance was certainly better than a thousand miles.

But Yongxing very energetically made clear that he viewed this suggestion as nearly scandalous in its neglect of due respect to the throne, and Laurence was forced to apologize for having made it, excusing himself by a lack of knowledge of local custom. Yongxing was not mollified; in the end Laurence was glad to pack him and the other two envoys off at the cost of the services of the barge, though it left him and Hammond only the jolly-boat to convey them to their own rendezvous ashore: the ship’s launch was already engaged in ferrying over fresh supplies of water and livestock.

“Is there anything I can bring you for your relief, Tom?” Laurence asked, putting his head into Riley’s cabin.

Riley lifted his head from the pillows where he lay before the windows and waved a weak, yellow-tinged hand. “I am a good deal better. But I would not say no to a good port, if you can find a decent bottle in the place; I think my mouth has been turned down forever from the godawful quinine.”

Reassured, Laurence went to take his leave of Temeraire, who had managed to coax the ensigns and runners into scrubbing him down, quite unnecessarily. The Chinese visitors were grown more ambitious, and had begun to throw gifts of flowers aboard, and other things also, less innocuous. Running up to Laurence very pale, Lieutenant Franks forgot to stutter in his alarm. “Sir, they are throwing burning incense onto the ship, pray, pray make them stop.”

Laurence climbed up to the dragondeck. “Temeraire, will you please tell them nothing lit can be thrown at the ship. Roland, Dyer, mind what they throw, and if you see anything else that may carry a risk of fire, throw it back over at once. I hope they have better sense than to try setting off crackers,” he added, without much confidence.

“I will stop them if they do,” Temeraire promised. “You will see if there is somewhere I can come ashore?”

“I will, but I cannot hold out much hope; the entire territory is scarcely four miles square, and thoroughly built-up,” Laurence said. “But at least we can fly over it, and perhaps even over Canton, if the mandarins do not object.”

The English Factory was built facing directly onto the main beach, so there was no difficulty in finding it; indeed, their attention drawn by the gathered crowd, the Company commissioners had sent a small welcoming party to await them on shore, led by a tall young man in the uniform of the East India Company’s private service, with aggressive sideburns and a prominent aquiline nose, giving him a predatory look rather increased than diminished by the alert light in his eyes. “Major Heretford, at your service,” he said, bowing. “And may I say, sir, we are damned glad to see you,” he added, with a soldier’s frankness, once they were indoors. “Sixteen months; we had begun to think no notice would be taken of it at all.”

With an unpleasant shock Laurence was recalled to the memory of the seizure of the East India merchant ships by the Chinese, all the long months ago: preoccupied by his own concerns over Temeraire’s status and distracted by the voyage, he had nearly forgotten the incident entirely; but of course it could hardly have been concealed from the men stationed here. They would have spent the intervening months on fire to answer the profound insult.

“No action has been taken, surely?” Hammond asked, with an anxiety that gave Laurence a fresh distaste for him; there was a quality of fear to it. “It would of all things be most prejudicial.”

Heretford eyed him sidelong. “No, the commissioners thought best under the circumstances to conciliate the Chinese, and await some more official word,” in a tone that left very little doubt of where his own inclinations would have led him.

Laurence could not but find him sympathetic, though in the ordinary course he did not think very highly of the Company’s private forces. But Heretford looked intelligent and competent, and the handful of men under his command showed signs of good discipline: their weapons well-kept, and their uniforms crisp despite the nearly sopping heat.

The boardroom was shuttered against the heat of the climbing sun, with fans laid ready at their places to stir the moist, stifling air. Glasses of claret punch, cooled with ice from the cellars, were brought once the introductions had been completed. The commissioners were happy enough to take the post which Laurence had brought, and promised to see it conveyed back to England; this concluding the exchange of pleasantries, they launched a delicate but pointed inquiry after the aims of the mission.

“Naturally we are pleased to hear that Government has compensated Captains Mestis and Holt and Gregg-son, and the Company, but I cannot possibly overstate the damage which the incident has done to our entire operations.” Sir George Staunton spoke quietly, but forcefully for all that; he was the chief of the commissioners despite his relative youth by virtue of his long experience of the nation. As a boy of twelve, he had accompanied the Macartney embassy itself in his father’s train, and was one of the few British men perfectly fluent in the language.

Staunton described for them several more instances of bad treatment, and went on to say, “These are entirely characteristic, I am sorry to say. The insolence and rapacity of the administration has markedly increased, and towards us only; the Dutch and the French meet with no such treatment. Our complaints, which previously they treated with some degree of respect, are now summarily dismissed, and in fact only draw worse down upon us.”

“We have been almost daily fearing to be ordered out entirely,” Mr. Grothing-Pyle added to this; he was a portly man, his white hair somewhat disordered by the vigorous action of his fan. “With no insult to Major Heretford or his men,” he nodded to the officer, “we would be hard-pressed to withstand such a demand, and you can be sure the French would be happy to help the Chinese enforce it.”

“And to take our establishments for their own once we were expelled,” Staunton added, to a circle of nodding heads. “The arrival of the Allegiance certainly puts us in a different position, vis-à-vis the possibility of resistance—”

Here Hammond stopped him. “Sir, I must beg leave to interrupt you. There is no contemplation of taking the Allegiance into action against the Chinese Empire: none; you must put such a thought out of your minds entirely.” He spoke very decidedly, though he was certainly the youngest man at the table, except for Heretford; a palpable coolness resulted. Hammond paid no attention. “Our first and foremost goal is to restore our nation to enough favor with the court to keep the Chinese from entering into an alliance with France. All other designs are insignificant by comparison.”

“Mr. Hammond,” Staunton said, “I cannot believe there is any possibility of such an alliance; nor that it can be so great a threat as you seem to imagine. The Chinese Empire is no Western military power, impressive as their size and their ranks of dragons may be to the inexperienced eye,” Hammond flushed at this small jab, perhaps not unintentional, “and they are militantly uninterested in European affairs. It is a matter of policy with them to affect even if not feel a lack of concern with what passes beyond their borders, ingrained over centuries.”

“Their having gone to the lengths of dispatching Prince Yongxing to Britain must surely weigh with you, sir, as showing that a change in policy may be achieved, if the impetus be sufficient,” Hammond said coolly.

They argued the point and many others with increasing politeness, over the course of several hours. Laurence had a struggle to keep his attention on the conversation, liberally laced as it was with references to names and incidents and concerns of which he knew nothing: some local unrest among the peasants and the state of affairs in Thibet, where apparently some sort of outright rebellion was in progress; the trade deficit and the necessity of opening more Chinese markets; difficulties with the Inca over the South American route.

But little though Laurence felt able to form his own conclusions, the conversation served another purpose for him. He grew convinced that while Hammond was thoroughly informed, his view of the situation was in direct contradiction on virtually all points with the established opinions of the commissioners. In one instance, the question of the kowtow ceremony was raised and treated by Hammond as inconsequential: naturally they would perform the full ritual of genuflection, and by so doing hopefully amend the insult given by Lord Macartney’s refusal to do so in the previous embassy.

Staunton objected forcefully. “Yielding on this point with no concessions in return can only further degrade our standing in their eyes. The refusal was not made without reason. The ceremony is meant for envoys of tributary states, vassals of the Chinese throne, and having objected to it on these grounds before, we cannot now perform it without appearing to give way to the outrageous treatment they have meted out to us. It would of all things be most prejudicial to our cause, as giving them encouragement to continue.”

“I can scarcely admit that anything could be more prejudicial to our cause, than to willfully resist the customs of a powerful and ancient nation in their own territory, because they do not meet our own notions of etiquette,” Hammond said. “Victory on such a point can only be won by the loss of every other, as proved by the complete failure of Lord Macartney’s embassy.”

“I find I must remind you that the Portuguese prostrated themselves not only to the Emperor but to his portrait and letters, at every demand the mandarins made, and their embassy failed quite as thoroughly,” Staunton said.

Laurence did not like the notion of groveling before any man, Emperor of China or no; but he thought it was not merely his own preferences which inclined him to Staunton’s opinion on the matter. Abasement to such a degree could not help but provoke disgust even in a recipient who demanded the gesture, it seemed to him, and only lead to even more contemptuous treatment. He was seated on Staunton’s left for dinner, and through their more casual conversation grew increasingly convinced of the man’s good judgment; and all the more doubtful of Hammond’s.

At length they took their leave and returned to the beach to await the boat. “This news about the French envoy worries me more than all the rest together,” Hammond said, more to himself than to Laurence. “De Guignes is dangerous; how I wish Bonaparte had sent anyone else!”

Laurence made no response; he was unhappily conscious that his own sentiments were much the same towards Hammond himself, and he would gladly have exchanged the man if he could.

Prince Yongxing and his companions returned from their errand late the following day, but when applied to for permission to continue the journey, or even to withdraw from the harbor, he refused point-blank, insisting that the Allegiance should have to wait for further instructions. Whence these were to come, and when, he did not say; and in the meantime the local ships continued their pilgrimages even into the night, carrying great hanging paper lanterns in the bows to light their way.

Laurence struggled out of sleep very early the next morning to the sound of an altercation outside his door: Roland, sounding very fierce despite her clear, high treble, saying something in a mixture of English and Chinese, which she had begun to acquire from Temeraire. “What is that damned noise there?” he called strongly.

She peered in through the door, which she held only a little ajar, wide enough for her eye and mouth; over her shoulder he could see one of the Chinese servants making impatient gestures, and trying to get at the doorknob. “It is Huang, sir, he is making a fuss and says the prince wants you to come up to the deck at once, though I told him you had only gone to sleep after the middle watch.”

He sighed and rubbed his face. “Very good, Roland; tell him I will come.” He was in no humor to be up; late in his evening’s watch, another visiting boat piloted by a young man more entreprenurial than skilled had been caught broadside by a wave. Her anchor, improperly set, had come flying up and struck the Allegiance from beneath, jabbing a substantial hole in her hold and soaking much of the newly purchased grain. At the same time the little boat had overturned herself, and though the harbor was not distant, the passengers in their heavy silk garments could not make their own way to safety, but had to be fished out by lantern-light. It had been a long and tiresome night, and he had been up watch and watch dealing with the mess before finally gaining his bed only in the small hours of the morning. He splashed his face with the tepid water in the basin and put on his coat with reluctance before going up to the deck.

Temeraire was talking with someone; Laurence had to look twice before he even realized that the other was in fact a dragon, like none he had ever seen before. “Laurence, this is Lung Yu Ping,” Temeraire said, when Laurence had climbed up to the dragondeck. “She has brought us the post.”

Facing her, Laurence found their heads were nearly on a level: she was smaller even than a horse, with a broad curving forehead and a long arrow-shaped muzzle, and an enormously deep chest rather along greyhound proportions. She could not have carried anyone on her back except a child, and wore no harness but a delicate collar of yellow silk and gold, from which hung a fine mesh like thin chainmail which covered her chest snugly, fixed to her forearms and talons by golden rings.

The mesh was washed with gold, striking against her pale green hide; her wings were a darker shade of green, and striped with narrow bands of gold. They were also unusual in appearance: narrow and tapered, and longer than she was; even folded upon her back, their long tips dragged along the ground behind her like a train.

When Temeraire had repeated the introductions in Chinese, the little dragon sat up on her haunches and bowed. Laurence bowed in return, amused to greet a dragon thus on an equal plane. The forms satisfied, she poked her head forward to inspect him more closely, leaning over to look him up and down on both sides with great interest; her eyes were very large and liquid, amber in color, and thickly lidded.

Hammond was standing and talking with Sun Kai and Liu Bao, who were inspecting a curious letter, thick and with many seals, the black ink liberally interspersed with vermilion markings. Yongxing stood a little way apart, reading a second missive written in oddly large characters upon a long rolled sheet of paper; he did not share this letter, but rolled it shut again, put it away privately, and rejoined the other three.

Hammond bowed to them and came to translate the news for Laurence. “We are directed to let the ship continue on to Tien-sing, while we come on ahead by air,” he said, “and they insist we must leave at once.”

“Directed?” Laurence asked, in confusion. “But I do not understand; where have these orders come from? We cannot have had word from Peking already; Prince Yongxing sent word only three days ago.”

Temeraire addressed a question to Ping, who tilted her head and replied in deep, unfeminine tones which came echoing from her barrel chest. “She says she brought it from a relay station at Heyuan, which is four hundred of something called li from here, and the flight is a little more than two hours,” he said. “But I do not know what that means in terms of distance.”

“One mile is three li,” Hammond said, frowning as he tried to work it out; Laurence, quicker at figuring in his head, stared at her: if there was no exaggeration, that meant Yu Ping had covered better than 120 miles in her flight. At such a rate, with couriers flying in relays, the message could indeed have come from Peking, nearly two thousand miles distant; the idea was incredible.

Yongxing, overhearing, said impatiently, “Our message is of highest priority, and traveled by Jade Dragons the entire route; of course we have received word back. We cannot delay in this fashion when the Emperor has spoken. How quickly can you be ready to leave?”

Still staggered, Laurence collected himself and protested that he could not leave the Allegiance at present, but would have to wait until Riley was well enough to rise from his bed. In vain: Yongxing did not even have a chance to protest before Hammond was vociferously arguing his point. “We cannot possibly begin by offending the Emperor,” he said. “The Allegiance can certainly remain here in port until Captain Riley is recovered.”

“For God’s sake, that will only worsen the situation,” Laurence said impatiently. “Half the crew is already gone to fever; she cannot lose the other half to desertion.” But the argument was a compelling one, particularly once it had been seconded by Staunton, who had come across to the ship by prior arrangement to take breakfast with Laurence and Hammond.

“Whatever assistance Major Heretford and his men can give Captain Riley, I am happy to promise,” Staunton said. “But I do agree; they stand very much on ceremony here, and neglect of the outward forms is as good as a deliberate insult: I beg you not to delay.”

With this encouragement, and after some consultation with Franks and Beckett, who with more courage than truth pronounced themselves prepared to handle the duty alone, and a visit to Riley belowdecks, Laurence at last yielded. “After all, we are not at the docks anyway because of her draft, and we have enough fresh supplies by now that Franks can haul in the boats and keep all the men aboard,” Riley pointed out. “We will be sadly held up behind you no matter what, but I am much better, and Purbeck also; we will press on as soon as we can, and rendezvous with you at Peking.”

But this only set off a fresh series of problems: the packing was already under way when Hammond’s cautious inquiries determined that the Chinese invitation was by no means a general one. Laurence himself was from necessity accepted as an adjunct to Temeraire, Hammond as the King’s representative only grudgingly permitted to come along, but the suggestion that Temeraire’s crew should come along, riding in harness, was rejected with horror.

“I am not going anywhere without the crew along to guard Laurence,” Temeraire put in, hearing of the difficulty, and conveyed this to Yongxing directly in suspicious tones; for emphasis he settled himself on the deck with finality, his tail drawn about him, looking quite immovable. A compromise was shortly offered that Laurence should choose ten of his crew, to be conveyed by some other Chinese dragons whose dignity would be less outraged by performing the service.

“What use ten men will be in the middle of Peking, I should like to know,” Granby observed tartly, when Hammond brought this offer back to the cabin; he had not forgiven the diplomat for his refusal to investigate the attempt on Laurence’s life.

“What use you imagine a hundred men would be, in the case of any real threat from the Imperial armies, I should like to know,” Hammond answered with equal sharpness. “In any case, it is the best we can do; I had a great deal of work to gain their permission for so many.”

“Then we will have to manage.” Laurence scarcely even looked up; he was at the same time sorting through his clothing, and discarding those garments which had been too badly worn by the journey to be respectable. “The more important point, so far as safety is concerned, is to make certain the Allegiance is brought to anchor within a distance which Temeraire can reach in a single flight, without difficulty. Sir,” he said, turning to Staunton, who had come down to sit with them, at Laurence’s invitation, “may I prevail upon you to accompany Captain Riley, if your duties will allow it? Our departure will at one stroke rob him of all interpreters, and the authority of the envoys; I am concerned for any difficulties which he may encounter on the journey north.”

“I am entirely at his service and yours,” Staunton said, inclining his head; Hammond did not look entirely satisfied, but he could not object under the circumstances, and Laurence was privately glad to have found this politic way of having Staunton’s advice on hand, even if his arrival would be delayed.

Granby would naturally accompany him, and so Ferris had to remain to oversee those men of the crew who could not come; the rest of the selection was a more painful one. Laurence did not like to seem to be showing any kind of favoritism, and indeed he did not want to leave Ferris without all of the best men. He settled finally for Keynes and Willoughby, of the ground crew: he had come to rely on the surgeon’s opinion, and despite having to leave the harness behind, he felt it necessary to have at least one of the harness-men along, to direct the others in getting Temeraire rigged-out in some makeshift way if some emergency required.

Lieutenant Riggs interrupted his and Granby’s deliberations with a passionate claim to come along, and bring his four best shots also. “They don’t need us here; they have the Marines aboard, and if anything should go wrong the rifles will do you best, you must see,” he said. As a point of tactics this was quite true; but equally true, the riflemen were the rowdiest of his young officers as a group, and Laurence was dubious about taking so many of them to court after they had been nearly seven months at sea. Any insult to a Chinese lady would certainly be resented harshly, and his own attention would be too distracted to keep close watch over them.

“Let us have Mr. Dunne and Mr. Hackley,” Laurence said finally. “No; I understand your arguments, Mr. Riggs, but I want steady men for this work, men who will not go astray; I gather you take my meaning. Very good. John, we will have Blythe along also, and Martin from the topmen.”

“That leaves two,” Granby said, adding the names to the tally.

“I cannot take Baylesworth also; Ferris will need a reliable second,” Laurence said, after briefly considering the last of his lieutenants. “Let us have Therrows from the bellmen instead. And Digby for the last: he is a trifle young, but he has handled himself well, and the experience will do him good.”

“I will have them on deck in fifteen minutes, sir,” Granby said, rising.

“Yes; and send Ferris down,” Laurence said, already writing his orders. “Mr. Ferris, I rely on your good judgment,” he continued, when the acting second lieutenant had come. “There is no way to guess one-tenth part of what may arise under the circumstances. I have written you a formal set of orders, in case Mr. Granby and myself should be lost. If that be the case your first concern must be Temeraire’s safety, and following that the crew’s, and their safe return to England.”

“Yes, sir,” Ferris said, downcast, and accepted the sealed packet; he did not try to argue for his inclusion, but left the cabin with unhappily bowed shoulders.

Laurence finished repacking his sea-chest: thankfully he had at the beginning of the voyage set aside his very best coat and hat, wrapped in paper and oilskin at the bottom of his chest, with a view towards preserving them for the embassy. He shifted now into the leather coat and trousers of heavy broadcloth which he wore for flying; these had not been too badly worn, being both more resilient and less called-on during the course of the journey. Only two of his shirts were worth including, and a handful of neckcloths; the rest he laid aside in a small bundle, and left in the cabin locker.

“Boyne,” he called, putting his head out the door and spying a seaman idly splicing some rope. “Light this along to the deck, will you?” The sea-chest dispatched, he penned a few words to his mother and to Jane and took them to Riley, the small ritual only heightening the sensation which had crept upon him, as of being on the eve of battle.

The men were assembled on deck when he came up, their various chests and bags being loaded upon the launch. The envoys’ baggage would mostly be remaining aboard, after Laurence had pointed out nearly a day would be required to unload it; even so, their bare necessities outweighed all the baggage of the crewmen. Yongxing was on the dragondeck handing over a sealed letter to Lung Yu Ping; he seemed to find nothing at all unusual in entrusting it directly to the dragon, riderless as she was, and she herself took it with practiced skill, holding it so delicately between her long taloned claws she might almost have been gripping it. She tucked it carefully into the gold mesh she wore, to rest against her belly.

After this, she bowed to him and then to Temeraire and waddled forward, her wings ungainly for walking. But at the edge of the deck, she snapped them out wide, fluttered them a little, then sprang with a tremendous leap nearly her full length into the air, already beating furiously, and in an instant had diminished into a tiny speck above.

“Oh,” Temeraire said, impressed, watching her go. “She flies very high; I have never gone so far aloft.”

Laurence was not unimpressed, either, and stood watching through his glass for a few minutes more himself; by then she was wholly out of sight, though the day was clear.

Staunton drew Laurence aside. “May I make a suggestion? Take the children along. If I may speak from my own experience as a boy, they may well be useful. There is nothing like having children present to convey peaceful intentions, and the Chinese have an especial respect for filial relations, both by adoption as well as by blood. You can quite naturally be said to be their guardian, and I am certain I can persuade the Chinese they ought not be counted against your tally.”

Roland overheard: instantly she and Dyer stood shining-eyed and hopeful before Laurence, full of silent pleading, and with some hesitation he said, “Well—if the Chinese have no objection to their addition to the party—” This was enough encouragement; they vanished belowdecks for their own bags, and came scrambling back up even before Staunton had finished negotiating for their inclusion.

“It still seems very silly to me,” Temeraire said, in what was meant to be an undertone. “I could easily carry all of you, and everything in that boat besides. If I must fly alongside, it will surely take much longer.”

“I do not disagree with you, but let us not reopen the discussion,” Laurence said tiredly, leaning against Temeraire and stroking his nose. “That will take more time than could possibly be saved by any other means of transport.”

Temeraire nudged him comfortingly, and Laurence closed his eyes a moment; the moment of quiet after the three hours of frantic hurry brought all his fatigue from the missed night of sleep surging back to the fore. “Yes, I am ready,” he said, straightening up; Granby was there. Laurence settled his hat upon his head and nodded to the crew as he went by, the men touching their foreheads; a few even murmured, “Good luck, sir,” and “Godspeed, sir.”

He shook Franks’s hand, and stepped over the side to the yowling accompaniment of pipes and drums, the rest of the crew already aboard the launch. Yongxing and the other envoys had already been lowered down by means of the bosun’s chair, and were ensconced in the stern under a canopy for shelter from the sun. “Very well, Mr. Tripp; let us get under way,” Laurence said to the midshipman, and they were off, the high sloping sides of the Allegiance receding as they raised the gaff mainsail and took the southerly wind past Macao and into the great sprawling delta of the Pearl River.

Chapter 12

THEY DID NOT follow the usual curve of the river to Whampoa and Canton, but instead took an earlier eastern branch towards the city of Dongguan: now drifting with the wind, now rowing against the slow current, past the broad square-bordered rice fields on either side of the river, verdant green with the tops of the shoots beginning to protrude beyond the water’s surface. The stench of manure hung over the river like a cloud.

Laurence drowsed nearly the entire journey, only vaguely conscious of the futile attempts made by the crew to be quiet, their hissing whispers causing instructions to be repeated three times, gradually increasing to the usual volume. Any occasional slip, such as dropping a coil of rope too heavily, or stumbling over one of the thwarts, brought forth a stream of invective and injunctions to be quiet that were considerably louder than the ordinary noise would have been. Nevertheless he slept, or something close to it; every so often he would open his eyes and look up, to be sure of Temeraire’s form still pacing them overhead.

He woke from a deeper sleep only after dark: the sail was being furled, and a few moments later the launch bumped gently against a dock, followed by the quiet ordinary cursing of the sailors tying-up. There was very little light immediately at hand but the boat’s lanterns, only enough to show a broad stairway leading down into the water, the lowest steps disappearing beneath the river’s surface; to either side of these only the dim shadows of native junks drawn up onto the beach.

A parade of lanterns came towards them from further in on the shore, the locals evidently warned to expect their arrival: great glowing spheres of deep orange-red silk, stretched taut over thin bamboo frames, reflecting like flames in the water. The lamp-bearers spread out along the edges of the walls in careful procession, and suddenly a great many Chinese were climbing aboard the ship, seizing on the various parts of the baggage, and transferring these off without so much as a request for permission, calling out to one another cheerfully as they worked.

Laurence was at first disposed to complain, but there was no cause: the entire operation was being carried out with admirable efficiency. A clerk had seated himself at the base of the steps with something like a drawing-table upon his lap, making a tally of the different parcels on a paper scroll as they passed by him, and at the same time marking each one plainly. Instead Laurence stood up and tried to unstiffen his neck surreptitiously by small movements to either side, without any undignified stretching. Yongxing had already stepped off the boat and gone into the small pavilion on the shore; from inside, Liu Bao’s booming voice could be heard calling for what even Laurence had come to recognize as the word for “wine,” and Sun Kai was on the bank speaking with the local mandarin.

“Sir,” Laurence said to Hammond, “will you be so good as to ask the local officials where Temeraire has come to ground?”

Hammond made some inquiries of the men on the bank, frowned, and said to Laurence in an undertone, “They say he has been taken to the Pavilion of Quiet Waters, and that we are to go elsewhere for the night; pray make some objection at once, loudly, so I may have an excuse to argue with them; we ought not set a precedent of allowing ourselves to be separated from him.”

Laurence, who if not prompted would have at once made a great noise, found himself cast into confusion by the request to play-act; he stammered a little, and said in a raised but awkwardly tentative voice, “I must see Temeraire at once, and be sure he is well.”

Hammond turned back at once to the attendants, spreading his hands in apology, and spoke urgently; under their scowls, Laurence did his best to look stern and unyielding, feeling thoroughly ridiculous and angry all at once, and eventually Hammond turned back with satisfaction and said, “Excellent; they have agreed to take us to him.”

Relieved, Laurence nodded and turned back to the ship’s crew. “Mr. Tripp, let these gentlemen show you and the men where to sleep; I will speak with you in the morning before you return to the Allegiance,” he told the midshipman, who touched his hat, and then he climbed up onto the stairs.

Without discussion, Granby arranged the men in a loose formation around him as they walked along the broad, paved roads, following the guide’s bobbing lantern; Laurence had the impression of many small houses on either side, and deep wheel-ruts were cut into the paving-stones, all sharp edges worn soft and curving with the impression of long years. He felt wide-awake after the long day drowsing, and yet there was something curiously dream-like about walking through the foreign dark, the soft black boots of the guide making hushing noises over the stones, the smoke of cooking fires drifting from the nearby houses, muted light filtering from behind screens and out of windows, and once a snatch of unfamiliar song in a woman’s voice.

They came at last to the end of the wide straight road, and the guide led them up the broad stairway of a pavilion and between massive round columns of painted wood, the roof so far overhead that its shape was lost in the darkness. The low rumbled breathing of dragons echoed loudly in the half-enclosed space, close all around them, and the tawny lantern-light gleamed on scales in every direction, like heaped mounds of treasure around the narrow aisle through the center. Hammond drew unconsciously closer to the center of their party, and caught his breath once, as the lantern reflected from a dragon’s half-open eye, turning into a disk of flat, shining gold.

They passed through another set of columns and into an open garden, with water trickling somewhere in the darkness, and the whisper of broad leaves rubbing against one another overhead. A few more dragons lay sleeping here, one sprawled across the path; the guide poked him with the stick of the lantern until he grudgingly moved away, never even opening his eyes. They climbed more stairs up to another pavilion, smaller than the first, and here at last found Temeraire, curled up alone in the echoing vastness.

“Laurence?” Temeraire said, lifting his head as they came in, and nuzzled at him gladly. “Will you stay? It is very strange to be sleeping on land again. I almost feel as though the ground is moving.”

“Of course,” Laurence said, and the crew laid themselves down without complaint: the night was pleasantly warm, and the floor made of inlaid squares of wood, smoothed down by years, and not uncomfortably hard. Laurence took his usual place upon Temeraire’s forearm; after sleeping through the journey, he was wakeful, and told Granby he would take the first watch. “Have you been given something to eat?” he asked Temeraire, once they were settled.

“Oh, yes,” Temeraire said drowsily. “A roast pig, very large, and some stewed mushrooms. I am not at all hungry. It was not a very difficult flight, after all, and nothing very interesting either to see before the sun went down; except those fields were strange, that we came past, full of water.”

“The rice fields,” Laurence said, but Temeraire was already asleep, and shortly began to snore: the noise was decidedly louder in the confines of the pavilion even though it had no walls. The night was very quiet, and the mosquitoes were not too much of a torment, thankfully; they evidently did not care for the dry heat given off by a dragon’s body. There was very little to mark the time, with the sky concealed by the roof, and Laurence lost track of the hours. No interruption in the stillness of the night, except that once a noise in the courtyard drew his attention: a dragon landing, turning a milky pearlescent gaze towards them, reflecting the moonlight very much like a cat’s eyes; but it did not come near the pavilion, and only padded away deeper into the darkness.

Granby woke for his turn at watch; Laurence composed himself to sleep: he, too, felt the old familiar illusion of the earth shifting, his body remembering the movement of the ocean even now that they had left it behind.

He woke startled: the riot of color overhead was strange until he understood he was looking at the decoration upon the ceiling, every scrap of wood painted and enameled in brilliant peacocky colors and shining gilt. He sat up and looked about himself with fresh interest: the round columns were painted a solid red, set upon square bases of white marble, and the roof was at least thirty feet overhead: Temeraire would have had no difficulty coming in underneath it.

The front of the pavilion opened onto a prospect of the courtyard which he found interesting rather than beautiful: paved with grey stones around a winding path of reddish ones, full of queerly shaped rocks and trees, and of course dragons: there were five sprawled over the grounds in various attitudes of repose, except for one already awake and grooming itself fastidiously by the enormous pool which covered the northeast corner of the grounds. The dragon was a shade of greyish blue not very different from the present color of the sky, and curiously the tips of its four claws were painted a bright red; as Laurence watched it finished its morning ablutions and took to the air.

Most of the dragons in the yard seemed of a similar breed, though there was a great deal of variety among them in size, in the precise shade of their color, and in the number and placement of their horns; some were smooth-backed and others had spiked ridges. Shortly a very different kind of dragon came out of the large pavilion to the south: larger and crimson-red, with gold-tinted talons and a bright yellow crest running from its many-horned head and along its spine. It drank from the pool and yawned enormously, displaying a double row of small but wicked teeth, and a set of four larger curving fangs among them. Narrower halls, with walls interspersed with small archways, ran to east and west of the courtyard, joining the two pavilions; the red dragon went over to one of the archways now and yelled something inside.

A few moments later a woman came stumbling out through the archway, rubbing her face and making wordless groaning noises. Laurence stared, then looked away, embarrassed, she was naked to the waist. The dragon nudged her hard and knocked her back entirely into the pond. It certainly had a reviving effect: she rose up spluttering and wide-eyed, and then yammered back at the grinning dragon in a passion before going back inside the hall. She came out again a few minutes later, now fully dressed in what seemed to be a sort of padded jerkin, dark blue cotton edged with broad bands of red, with wide sleeves, and carrying a rig made also of fabric: silk, Laurence thought. This she threw upon the dragon all by herself, still talking loudly and obviously disgruntled all the while; Laurence was irresistibly reminded of Berkley and Maximus, even though Berkley had never spoken so many words together in his life: something in the irreverent quality of their relations.

The rig secured, the Chinese aviator scrambled aboard and the two went aloft with no further ceremony, disappearing from the pavilion to whatever their day’s duties might be. All the dragons were now beginning to stir, another three of the big scarlet ones coming out of the pavilion, and more people to come from the halls: men from the east, and a few more women from the west.

Temeraire himself twitched under Laurence, and then opened his eyes. “Good morning,” he said, yawning, then, “Oh!” his eyes wide as he looked around, taking in the opulent decoration and the bustle going on in the courtyard. “I did not realize there were so many other dragons here, or that it was so grand,” he said, a little nervously. “I hope they are friendly.”

“I am sure they cannot but be gracious, when they realize you have come from so far,” Laurence said, climbing down so Temeraire could stand. The air was close and heavy with moisture, the sky remaining uncertain and grey; it would be hot again, he thought. “You ought to drink as much as you can,” he said. “I have no notion how often they will want to stop and rest along the way today.”

“I suppose,” Temeraire said, reluctantly, and stepped out of the pavilion and into the court. The increasing hubbub came to an abrupt and complete halt; the dragons and their companions alike stared openly, and then there was a general movement back and away from him. Laurence was for a moment shocked and offended; then he saw that they were all, men and dragons, bowing themselves very low to the ground. They had only been opening a clear path to the pond.

There was perfect silence. Temeraire uncertainly walked through the parted ranks of the other dragons to the pond, rather hastily drank his fill, and retreated to the raised pavilion; only when he had gone again did the general activity resume, with much less noise than earlier, and a good deal of peering into the pavilion, while pretending to do nothing of the sort. “They were very nice to let me drink,” Temeraire said, almost whispering, “but I wish they would not stare so.”

The dragons seemed disposed to linger, but one after another they all set off, except for a few plainly older ones, their scales faded at the edges, who returned to basking upon the courtyard stones. Granby and the rest of the crew had woken over the intervening time, sitting up to watch the spectacle with as much interest as the other dragons had taken in Temeraire; now they roused fully, and began to straighten their clothing. “I suppose they will send someone for us,” Hammond was saying, brushing futilely at his wrinkled breeches; he had been dressed formally, rather than in the riding gear which all the aviators had put on. At that very moment, Ye Bing, one of the young Chinese attendants from the ship, came through the courtyard, waving to draw their attention.

Breakfast was not what Laurence was used to, being a sort of thin rice porridge mixed with dried fish and slices of horrifically discolored eggs, served with greasy sticks of crisp, very light bread. The eggs he pushed to the side, and forced himself to eat the rest, on the same advice which he had given to Temeraire; but he would have given a great deal for some properly cooked eggs and bacon. Liu Bao poked Laurence in the arm with his chopsticks and pointed at the eggs with some remark: he was eating his own with very evident relish.

“What do you suppose is the matter with them?” Granby asked in an undertone, prodding his own eggs doubtfully.

Hammond, inquiring of Liu Bao, said just as doubtfully, “He says they are thousand-year eggs.” Braver than the rest of them, he picked one of the slices up and ate it; chewed, swallowed, and looked thoughtful while they waited his verdict. “It tastes almost pickled,” he said. “Not rotten, at any rate.” He tried another piece, and ended by eating the whole serving; for his own part, Laurence left the lurid yellow-and-green things alone.

They had been brought to a sort of guest hall not far from the dragon pavilion for the meal; the sailors were there waiting and joined them for the breakfast, grinning rather maliciously. They were no more pleased at being left out of the adventure than the rest of the aviators had been, and not above making remarks about the quality of food which the party could expect for the rest of their journey. Afterwards, Laurence took his final parting from Tripp. “And be sure you tell Captain Riley that all is ship-shape, in those exact words,” he said; it had been arranged between them that any other message, regardless how reassuring, would mean something had gone badly wrong.

A couple of mule-led carts were waiting for them outside, rather rough-hewn and clearly without springs; their baggage had gone on ahead. Laurence climbed in and held on grimly to the side as they rattled along down the road. The streets at least were not more impressive by daylight: very broad, but paved with old rounded cobblestones, whose mortar had largely worn away. The wheels of the cart ran along in deep sloping ruts between stones, bumping and leaping over the uneven surface.

There was a bustle of people all around, who stared with great curiosity at them, often putting down their work to follow after them for some short distance. “And this is not even a city?” Granby looked around with interest, making some attempt to tally the numbers. “There seem to be a great many people, for only a town.”

“There are some two hundred millions of people in the country, by our latest intelligence,” Hammond said absently, himself busy taking down notes in a journal; Laurence shook his head at the appalling number, more than ten times the size of England’s population.

Laurence was more startled for his part to see a dragon come walking down the road in the opposite direction. Another of the blue-grey ones; it was wearing a queer sort of silk harness with a prominent breast-pad, and when they had passed it by, he saw that three little dragonets, two of the same variety and one of the red color, were tramping along behind, each attached to the harness also as if on leading-strings.

Nor was this dragon the only one in the streets: they shortly passed by a military station, with a small troop of blue-clad infantrymen drilling in its courtyard, and a couple of the big red dragons were sitting outside the gate talking and exclaiming over a dice game which their captains were playing. No one seemed to take any particular notice of them; the hurrying peasants carrying their loads went by without a second glance, occasionally climbing over one of the splayed-out limbs when other routes were blocked.

Temeraire was waiting for them in an open field, with two of the blue-grey dragons also on hand, wearing mesh harnesses which were being loaded up with baggage by attendants. The other dragons were whispering amongst themselves and eyeing Temeraire sidelong. He looked uncomfortable, and greatly relieved to see Laurence.

Having been loaded, the dragons now crouched down onto all fours so the attendants could climb aloft and raise small pavilions on their backs: very much like the tents which were used for long flights among British aviators. One of the attendants spoke to Hammond, and gestured to one of the blue dragons. “We are to ride on that one,” Hammond said to Laurence aside, then asked something else of the attendant, who shook his head, and answered forcefully, pointing again to the second dragon.

Before the reply could even be translated, Temeraire sat up indignantly. “Laurence is not riding any other dragon,” he said, putting out a possessive claw and nearly knocking Laurence off his feet, herding him closer; Hammond scarcely had to repeat the sentiments in Chinese.

Laurence had not quite realized the Chinese did not mean for even him to ride with Temeraire. He did not like the idea of Temeraire having to fly with no company on the long trip, and yet he could not help but think the point a small one; they would be flying in company, in sight of one another, and Temeraire could be in no real danger. “It is only for the one journey,” he said to Temeraire, and was surprised to find himself overruled at once not by Temeraire, but by Hammond.

“No; the suggestion is unacceptable, cannot be entertained,” Hammond said.

“Not at all,” Temeraire said, in perfect agreement, and actually growled when the attendant tried to continue the argument.

“Mr. Hammond,” Laurence said, with happy inspiration, “pray tell them, if it is the notion of harness which is at issue, I can just as easily lock on to the chain of Temeraire’s pendant; as long as I do not need to go climbing about it will be secure enough.”

“They cannot possibly argue with that,” Temeraire said, pleased, and interrupted the argument immediately to make the suggestion, which was grudgingly accepted.

“Captain, may I have a word?” Hammond drew him aside. “This attempt is of a piece with last night’s arrangements. I must urge you, sir, by no means agree to continue on should we somehow come to be parted; and be on your guard if they should make further attempts to separate you from Temeraire.”

“I take your point, sir; and thank you for the advice,” Laurence said, grimly, and looked narrowly at Yongxing; though the prince had never stooped to involve himself directly in any of the discussions, Laurence suspected his hand behind them, and he had hoped that the failure of the shipboard attempts to part them would at least have precluded these efforts.

After these tensions at the journey’s outset, the long day’s flight itself was uneventful, except for the occasional leap in Laurence’s stomach when Temeraire would swoop down for a closer look at the ground: the breastplate did not keep entirely still throughout the flight, and shifted far more than harness. Temeraire was considerably quicker than the other two dragons, with more endurance, and could easily catch them up even if he lingered half-an-hour in sight-seeing at a time. The most striking feature, to Laurence, was the exuberance of the population: they scarcely passed any long stretch of land that was not under cultivation of some form, and every substantial body of water was crammed full of boats going either direction. And of course the real immensity of the country: they traveled from morning to night, with only an hour’s pause for dinner each day at noon, and the days were long.

An almost endless expanse of broad, flat plains, checkered with rice fields and interspersed with many streams, yielded after some two days’ travel to hills, and then to the slow puckering rise of mountains. Towns and villages of varying size punctuated the countryside below, and occasionally people working in the fields would stop and watch them flying overhead, if Temeraire came low enough to be recognized as a Celestial. Laurence at first thought the Yangtze another lake; one of respectable size but not extraordinary, being something less than a mile wide, with its east and west banks shrouded in a fine, grey drizzle; only when they had come properly overhead could he see the mighty river sprawling endlessly away, and the slow procession of junks appearing and vanishing through the mists.

After having passed two nights in smaller towns, Laurence had begun to think their first establishment an unusual case, but their residence that night in the city of Wuchang dwarfed it into insignificance: eight great pavilions arranged in a symmetric octagonal shape, joined by narrower enclosed halls, around a space deserving to be called a park more than a garden. Roland and Dyer made at first a game of trying to count the dragons inhabiting it, but gave up the attempt somewhere after thirty; they lost track of their tally when a group of small purple dragons landed and darted in a flurry of wings and limbs across the pavilion, too many and too quick to count.

Temeraire drowsed; Laurence put aside his bowl: another plain dinner of rice and vegetables. Most of the men were already asleep, huddled in their cloaks, the rest silent; rain still coming down in a steady, steaming curtain beyond the walls of the pavilion, the overrun clattering off the upturned corners of the tiled roof. Along the slopes of the river valley, faintly visible, small yellow beacons burnt beneath open-walled huts to mark the way for dragons flying through the night. Soft grumbling breath echoing from the neighboring pavilions, and far away a more piercing cry, ringing clear despite the muffling weight of the rain.

Yongxing had been spending his nights apart from the rest of the company, in more private quarters, but now he came out of seclusion and stood at the edge of the pavilion looking out into the valley: in another moment the call came again, nearer. Temeraire lifted up his head to listen, the ruff around his neck rising up alertly; then Laurence heard the familiar leathery snapping of wings, mist and steam rolling away from the stones for the descending dragon, a white ghostly shadow coalescing from the silver rain. She folded great white wings and came pacing towards them, her talons clicking on the stones; the attendants going between pavilions shrank away from her, averting their faces, hurrying by, but Yongxing walked down the steps into the rain, and she lowered her great, wide-ruffed head towards him, calling his name in a clear, sweet voice.

“Is that another Celestial?” Temeraire asked him, hushed and uncertain; Laurence only shook his head and could not answer: she was a shockingly pure white, a color he had never before seen in a dragon even in spots or streaks. Her scales had the translucent gleam of fine, much-scraped vellum, perfectly colorless, and the rims of her eyes were a glassy pink mazed with blood vessels so engorged as to be visible even at a distance. Yet she had the same great ruff, and the long narrow tendrils fringing her jaws, just as Temeraire did: the color alone was unnatural. She wore a heavy golden torque set with rubies around the base of her neck, and gold talon-sheaths tipped with rubies upon all of her foreleg claws, the deep color echoing the hue of her eyes.

She nudged Yongxing caressingly back into the shelter of the temple and came in after him, first shivering her wings quickly to let cascades of rain roll away in streams; she alloted them barely a glance, her eyes flickering rapidly over them and away, before she jealously coiled herself around Yongxing, to murmur quietly with him in the far corner of the pavilion. Servants came bringing her some dinner, but dragging their heels, uneasily, though they had shown no such similar reluctance around any of the other dragons, and indeed visible satisfaction in Temeraire’s presence. She did not seem to merit their fear; she ate quickly and daintily, not letting so much as a drop spill out of the dish, and otherwise paid them no mind.

The next morning Yongxing briefly presented her to them as Lung Tien Lien, and then led her away to breakfast in private; Hammond had made quiet inquiries enough to tell them a little more over their own meal: “She is certainly a Celestial,” he said. “I suppose it is a kind of albinism; I have no idea why it should make them all so uneasy.”

“She was born in mourning colors, of course she is unlucky,” Liu Bao said, when he was cautiously applied to for information, as if this were self-evident, and he added, “The Qianlong Emperor was going to give her to a prince out in Mongolia, so her bad luck wouldn’t hurt any of his sons, but Yongxing insisted on having her himself instead of letting a Celestial go outside the Imperial family. He could have been Emperor himself, but of course you couldn’t have an Emperor with a cursed dragon, it would be a disaster for the State. So now his brother is the Jiaqing Emperor. Such is the will of Heaven!” With this philosophical remark, he shrugged and ate another piece of fried bread. Hammond took this news bleakly, and Laurence shared his dismay: pride was one thing; principle implacable enough to sacrifice a throne for, something else entirely.

The two bearer dragons accompanying them had been changed for another one of the blue-grey breed and one of a slightly larger kind, deep green with blue streaks and a sleek hornless head; they still regarded Temeraire with the same staring awe, however, and Lien with nervous respect, and kept well to themselves. Temeraire had by now reconciled himself to the state of majestic solitude; and in any case he was thoroughly occupied in glancing sidelong at Lien with fascinated curiosity, until she turned to stare pointedly at him in return and he ducked his head, abashed.

She wore this morning an odd sort of headdress, made of thin silk draped between gold bars, which stood out over her eyes rather like a canopy and shaded them; Laurence wondered that she should find it necessary, with the sky still unrelieved and grey. But the hot, sullen weather broke almost abruptly during their first few hours of flight, through gorges winding among old mountains: their sloping southern faces lush and green, and the northern almost barren. A cool wind met their faces as they came out into the foothills, and the sun breaking from the clouds was almost painfully bright. The rice fields did not reappear, but long expanses of ripening wheat took their place, and once they saw a great herd of brown oxen creeping slowly across a grassy plain, heads to the ground as they munched away.

A little shed was planted on a hill, overlooking the herd, and beside it several massive spits turned, entire cows roasting upon them, a fragrant smoky smell rising upwards. “Those look tasty,” Temeraire observed, a little wistfully. He was not alone in the sentiment: as they approached, one of their companion dragons put on a sudden burst of speed and swooped down. A man came out of the shed and held a discussion with the dragon, then went inside again; he came out carrying a large plank of wood and laid it down before the dragon, which carved a few Chinese symbols into the plank with its talon.

The man took away the plank, and the dragon took away a cow: plainly it had been making a purchase. It lifted back up into the air at once to rejoin them, crunching its cow happily as it flew: it evidently did not think it necessary to let its passengers off for any of the proceedings. Laurence thought he could see poor Hammond looking faintly green as it slurped the intestines up with obvious pleasure.

“We could try to purchase one, if they will take guineas,” Laurence offered to Temeraire, a little dubiously; he had brought gold rather than paper money with him, but had no idea if the herdsman would accept it.

“Oh, I am not really hungry,” Temeraire said, preoccupied by a wholly different thought. “Laurence, that was writing, was it not? What he did on the plank?”

“I believe so, though I do not set myself up as an expert on Chinese writing,” Laurence said. “You are more likely to recognize it than I.”

“I wonder if all Chinese dragons know how to write,” Temeraire said, dismal at the notion. “They will think me very stupid if I am the only one who cannot. I must learn somehow; I always thought letters had to be made with a pen, but I am sure I could do that sort of carving.”

Perhaps in courtesy to Lien, who seemed to dislike bright sunlight, they now paused during the heat of the day at another wayside pavilion for some dinner and for the dragons to rest, and flew on into the evening instead; beacons upon the ground lit their way at irregular intervals, and in any case Laurence could chart their course by the stars: turning now more sharply to the northeast, with the miles slipping quickly past. The days continued hot, but no longer so extraordinarily humid, and the nights were wonderfully cool and pleasant; signs of the force of the northern winters were apparent, however: the pavilions were walled on three sides, and set up from the ground on stone platforms which held stoves so the floors could be heated.

Peking sprawled out a great distance from beyond the city walls, which were numerous and grand, with many square towers and battlements not unlike the style of European castles. Broad streets of grey stone ran in straight lines to the gates and within, so full of people, of horses, of carts, all of them moving, that from above they seemed like rivers. They saw many dragons also, both on the streets and in the sky, leaping into the air for short flights from one quarter of the city to another, sometimes with a crowd of people hanging off them and evidently traveling in this manner. The city was divided with extraordinary regularity into square sections, except for the curving sprawl of four small lakes actually within the walls. To the east of these lay the great Imperial palace itself, not a single building but formed of many smaller pavilions, walled in and surrounded by a moat of murky water: in the setting sun, all the roofs within the complex shone as if gilded, nestled among trees with their spring growth still fresh and yellow-green, throwing long shadows into the plazas of grey stone.

A smaller dragon met them in mid-air as they drew near: black with canary-yellow stripes and wearing a collar of dark green silk, he had a rider upon his back, but spoke to the other dragons directly. Temeraire followed the other dragons down, to a small round island in the southernmost lake, less than half-a-mile from the palace walls. They landed upon a broad pier of white marble which jutted out into the lake, for the convenience of dragons only, as there were no boats in evidence.

This pier ended in an enormous gateway: a red structure more than a wall and yet too narrow to be considered a building, with three square archways as openings, the two smallest many times higher than Temeraire’s head and wide enough for four of him to walk abreast; the central was even larger. A pair of enormous Imperial dragons stood at attention on either side, very like Temeraire in conformity but without his distinctive ruff, one black and the other a deep blue, and beside them a long file of soldiers: infantrymen in shining steel caps and blue robes, with long spears.

The two companion dragons walked directly through the smaller archways, and Lien paced straightaway through the middle, but the yellow-striped dragon barred Temeraire from following, bowed low, and said something in apologetic tones while gesturing to the center archway. Temeraire answered back shortly, and sat down on his haunches with an air of finality, his ruff stiff and laid back against his neck in obvious displeasure. “Is something wrong?” Laurence asked quietly; through the archway he could see a great many people and dragons assembled in the courtyard beyond, and obviously some ceremony was intended.

“They want you to climb down, and go through one of the small archways, and for me to go through the large one,” Temeraire said. “But I am not putting you down alone. It sounds very silly to me, anyway, to have three doors all going to the same place.”

Laurence wished rather desperately for Hammond’s advice, or anyone’s for that matter; the striped dragon and his rider were equally nonplussed at Temeraire’s recalcitrance, and Laurence found himself looking at the other man and meeting with an almost identical expression of confusion. The dragons and soldiers in the archway remained as motionless and precise as statues, but as the minutes passed those assembled on the other side must have come to realize something was wrong. A man in richly embroidered blue robes came hurrying through the side corridor, and spoke to the striped dragon and his rider; then looked askance at Laurence and Temeraire and hurried back to the other side.

A low murmur of conversation began, echoing down the archway, then was abruptly cut off; the people on the far side parted, and a dragon came through the archway towards them, a deep glossy black very much like Temeraire’s own coloring, with the same deep blue eyes and wing-markings, and a great standing ruff of translucent black stretched among ribbed horns of vermilion, another Celestial. She stopped before them and spoke in deep resonant tones; Laurence felt Temeraire first stiffen and then tremble, his own ruff rising slowly up, and Temeraire said, low and uncertainly, “Laurence, this is my mother.”

Chapter 13

LAURENCE LATER LEARNED from Hammond that passage through the central gate was reserved for the use of the Imperial family, and dragons of that breed and the Celestials only, hence their refusal to let Laurence himself pass through. At the moment, however, Qian simply led Temeraire in a short flight over the gateway and into the central courtyard beyond, thus neatly severing the Gordian knot.

The problem of etiquette resolved, they were all ushered into an enormous banquet, held within the largest of the dragon pavilions, with two tables waiting. Qian was herself seated at the head of the first table, with Temeraire upon her left and Yongxing and Lien upon her right. Laurence was directed to sit some distance down the table, with Hammond across and several more seats down; the rest of the British party was placed at the second table. Laurence did not think it politic to object: the separation was not even the length of the room, and in any case Temeraire’s attention was entirely engaged at present. He was speaking to his mother with an almost timid air, very unlike himself and clearly overawed: she was larger than he, and the faint translucence of her scales indicated a great age, as did her very grand manners. She wore no harness, but her ruff was adorned with enormous yellow topazes affixed to the spines, and a deceptively fragile neckpiece of filigree gold, studded with more topazes and great pearls.

Truly gigantic platters of brass were set before the dragons, each bearing an entire roasted deer, antlers intact: oranges stuck with cloves were impaled upon them, creating a fragrance not at all unpleasant to human senses, and their bellies were stuffed with a mixture of nuts and very bright red berries. The humans were served with a sequence of eight dishes, smaller though equally elaborate. After the dismal food along the course of the journey, even the highly exotic repast was very welcome, however.

Laurence had assumed there should be no one for him to talk to, as he sat down, unless he tried to shout across to Hammond, there being no translator present so far as he could tell. On his left side sat a very old mandarin, wearing a hat with a pearlescent white jewel perched on top and a peacock feather dangling down from the back over a truly impressive queue, still mostly black despite the profusion of wrinkles engraved upon his face. He ate and drank with single-minded intensity, never even trying to address Laurence at all: when the neighbor on his other side leaned over and shouted in the man’s ear, Laurence realized that he was very deaf, as well as being unable to speak English.

But shortly after he had seated himself, he was taken aback to be addressed from his other side in English, heavy with French accents: “I hope you have had a comfortable journey,” said the smiling, cheerful voice. It was the French ambassador, dressed in long robes in the Chinese style rather than in European dress; that and his dark hair accounted for Laurence not having distinguished him at once from the rest of the company.

“You will permit that I make myself known to you, I hope, despite the unhappy state of affairs between our countries,” De Guignes continued. “I can claim an informal acquaintance, you see; my nephew tells me he owes his life to your magnanimity.”

“I beg your pardon, sir, I have not the least notion to what you refer,” Laurence said, puzzled by this address. “Your nephew?”

“Jean-Claude De Guignes; he is a lieutenant in our Armée de l’Air,” the ambassador said, bowing, still smiling. “You encountered him this last November over your Channel, when he made an attempt to board you.”

“Good God,” Laurence said, exclaiming, distantly recalling the young lieutenant who had fought so vigorously in the convoy action, and he willingly shook De Guignes’s hand. “I remember; most extraordinary courage. I am so very happy to hear that he has quite recovered, I hope?”

“Oh yes, in his letter he expected to rise from his hospital any day; to go to prison of course, but that is better than going to a grave,” De Guignes said, with a prosaic shrug. “He wrote me of your interesting journey, knowing I had been dispatched here to your destination; I have been with great pleasure expecting you this last month since his letter arrived, with hopes of expressing my admiration for your generosity.”

From this happy beginning, they exchanged some more conversation on neutral topics: the Chinese climate, the food, and the startling number of dragons. Laurence could not help but feel a certain kinship with him, as a fellow Westerner in the depths of the Oriental enclave, and though De Guignes was himself not a military man, his familiarity with the French aerial corps made him sympathetic company. They walked out together at the close of the meal, following the other guests into the courtyard, where most of these were being carried away by dragon in the same manner they had seen earlier in the city.

“It is a clever mode of transport, is it not?” De Guignes said, and Laurence, watching with interest, agreed wholeheartedly: the dragons, mostly of what he now considered the common blue variety, wore light harnesses of many silk straps draped over their backs, to which were hung numerous loops of broad silk ribbons. The passengers climbed up the loops to the topmost empty one, which they slid down over their arms and underneath the buttocks: they could then sit in comparative stability, clinging to the main strap, so long as the dragon flew level.

Hammond emerged from the pavilion and caught sight of them, eyes widening, and hastened to join them; he and De Guignes smiled and spoke with great friendliness, and as soon as the Frenchman had excused himself and departed in company with a pair of Chinese mandarins, Hammond instantly turned to Laurence and demanded, in a perfectly shameless manner, to have the whole of their conversation recounted.

“Expecting us for a month!” Hammond was appalled by the intelligence, and managed to imply without actually saying anything openly offensive that he thought Laurence had been a simpleton to take De Guignes at face value. “God only knows what mischief he may have worked against us in that time; pray have no more private conversation with him.”

Laurence did not respond to these remarks as he rather wanted to, and instead went away to Temeraire’s side. Qian had been the last to depart, taking a caressing leave of Temeraire, nudging him with her nose before leaping aloft; her sleek black form disappeared into the night quickly, and Temeraire stood watching after her very wistfully.

The island had been prepared for their residence as a compromise measure; the property of the Emperor, it possessed several large and elegant dragon pavilions, with establishments intended for human use conjoined to these. Laurence and his party were allowed to establish themselves in a residence attached to the largest of the pavilions, facing across a broad courtyard. The building was a handsome one, and large, but the upper floor was wholly taken up by a host of servants greatly exceeding their needs; although seeing how these ranged themselves almost underfoot throughout the house, Laurence began to suspect they were intended equally as spies and guards.

His sleep was heavy, but broken before dawn by servants poking their heads in to see if he were awake; after the fourth such attempt in ten minutes, Laurence yielded with no good grace and rose with a head still aching from the previous day’s free flow of wine. He had little success in conveying his desire for a washbasin, and at length resorted to stepping outside into the courtyard to wash in the pond there. This posed no difficulty, as there was an enormous circular window little less than his height set in the wall, the lower sill barely off the ground.

Temeraire was sprawled luxuriously across the far end, lying flattened upon his belly with even his tail stretched out to its full extent, still fast asleep and making occasional small pleased grunts as he dreamed. A system of bamboo pipes emerged from beneath the pavement, evidently used to heat the stones, and these spilled a cloud of hot water into the pond, so Laurence could make more comfortable ablutions than he had expected. The servants hovered in visible impatience all the time, and looked rather scandalized at his stripping to the waist to wash. When at last he came back in, they pressed Chinese dress upon him: soft trousers and the stiff-collared gown which seemed nearly universal among them. He resisted a moment, but a glance over at his own clothes showed them sadly wrinkled from the travel; the native dress was at least neat, if not what he was used to, and not physically uncomfortable, though he felt very nearly indecent without a proper coat or neckcloth.

A functionary of some sort had come to breakfast with them and was already waiting at table, which was evidently the source of the servants’ urgency. Laurence bowed rather shortly to the stranger, named Zhao Wei, and let Hammond carry the conversation while he drank a great deal of the tea: fragrant and strong, but not a dish of milk to be seen, and the servants only looked blank when the request was translated for them.

“His Imperial Majesty has in his benevolence decreed you are to reside here for the length of your visit,” Zhao Wei was saying; his English was by no means polished, but understandable; he had a rather prim and pinched look, and eyed Laurence’s still-unskilled use of the chopsticks with an expression of disdain hovering about his mouth. “You may walk in the courtyard as you desire, but you are not to leave the residence without making a formal request and receiving permission.”

“Sir, we are most grateful, but you must be aware that if we are not to be allowed free movement during the day, the size of this house is by no means adequate to our needs,” Hammond said. “Why, only Captain Laurence and myself had private rooms last night, and those small and ill-befitting our standing, while the rest of our compatriots were housed in shared quarters and very cramped.”

Laurence had noticed no such inadequacy, and found both the attempted restrictions on their movement and Hammond’s negotiations for more space mildly absurd, the more so as it transpired, from their conversation, that the whole of the island had been vacated in deference to Temeraire. The complex could have accommodated a dozen dragons in extreme comfort, and there were sufficient human residences that every man of Laurence’s crew might have had a building to himself. Still, their residence was in perfectly good repair, comfortable, and far more spacious than their shipboard quarters for the last seven months; he could not see the least reason for desiring additional space any more than for denying them the liberty of the island. But Hammond and Zhao Wei continued to negotiate the matter with a measured gravity and politeness.

Zhao Wei at length consented to their being allowed to take walks around the island in the company of the servants, “so long as you do not go to the shores or the docks, and do not interfere in the patrols of the guardsmen.” With this Hammond pronounced himself satisfied. Zhao Wei sipped at his tea, and then added, “Of course, His Majesty wishes Lung Tien Xiang to see something of the city. I will conduct him upon a tour after he has eaten.”

“I am certain Temeraire and Captain Laurence will find it most edifying,” Hammond said immediately, before Laurence could even draw breath. “Indeed, sir, it was very kind of you to arrange for native clothing for Captain Laurence, so he will not suffer from excessive curiosity.”

Zhao Wei only now took notice of Laurence’s clothing, with an expression that made it perfectly plain he was nothing whatsoever involved; but he bore his defeat in reasonably good part. He said only, “I hope you will be ready to leave shortly, Captain,” with a small inclination of the head.

“And we may walk through the city itself?” Temeraire asked, with much excitement, as he was scrubbed and sluiced clean after his breakfast, holding out his forehands one at a time with the talons outspread to be brushed vigorously with soapy water. His teeth even received the same treatment, a young serving-maid ducking inside his mouth to scrub the back ones.

“Of course?” Zhao Wei said, showing some sincere puzzlement at the question.

“Perhaps you may see something of the training grounds of the dragons here, if there are any within the city bounds,” Hammond suggested: he had accompanied them outside. “I am sure you would find it of interest, Temeraire.”

“Oh, yes,” Temeraire said; his ruff was already up and half-quivering.

Hammond gave Laurence a significant glance, but Laurence chose to ignore it entirely: he had little desire to play the spy, or to prolong the tour, however interesting the sights might be. “Are you quite ready, Temeraire?” he asked instead.

They were transported to the shore by an elaborate but awkward barge, which wallowed uncertainly under Temeraire’s weight even in the placidity of the tiny lake; Laurence kept close to the tiller and watched the lubberly pilot with a grim and censorious eye: he would dearly have loved to take her away from the fellow. The scant distance to shore took twice as long to cover as it ought to have. A substantial escort of armed guards had been detached from their patrols on the island to accompany them on the tour. Most of these fanned out ahead to force a clear path through the streets, but some ten kept close on Laurence’s heels, jostling one another out of any kind of formation in what seemed to be an attempt to keep him blocked almost by a human wall from wandering away.

Zhao Wei took them through another of the elaborate red-and-gold gateways, this one set in a fortified wall and yielding onto a very broad avenue. It was manned by several guards in the Imperial livery, as well as by two dragons also under gear: one of the by-now-familiar red ones, and the other a brilliant green with red markings. Their captains were sitting together sipping tea under an awning, their padded jerkins removed against the day’s heat, and both were women.

“I see you have women captains also,” Laurence said to Zhao Wei. “Do they serve with particular breeds, then?”

“Women are companions to those dragons who go into the army,” Zhao Wei said. “Naturally only the lower breeds would choose to do that sort of work. Over there, that green one is one of the Emerald Glass. They are too lazy and slow to do well on the examinations, and the Scarlet Flower breed all like fighting too much, so they are not good for anything else.”

“Do you mean to say that only women serve in your aerial corps?” Laurence asked, sure he had misunderstood; yet Zhao Wei only nodded a confirmation. “But what reason can there be for such a policy; surely you do not ask women to serve in your infantry, or navy?” Laurence protested.

His dismay was evident, and Zhao Wei, perhaps feeling a need to defend his nation’s unusual practice, proceeded to narrate the legend which was its foundation. The details were of course romanticized: a girl had supposedly disguised herself as a man to fight in her father’s stead, had become companion to a military dragon and saved the empire by winning a great battle; as a consequence, the Emperor of the time had pronounced girls acceptable for service with dragons.

But these colorful exaggerations aside, it seemed that the nation’s policy itself was accurately described: in times of conscription, the head of each family had at one time been required to serve or send a child in his stead. Girls being considerably less valued than boys, they had become the preferred choice to fill out the quota when possible. As they could only serve in the aerial corps, they had come to dominate this branch of the service until eventually the force became exclusive.

The telling of the legend, complete with recitation of its traditional poetic version, which Laurence suspected lost a great deal of color in the translation, carried them past the gate and some distance along the avenue towards a broad grey-flagged plaza set back from the road itself, and full of children and hatchlings. The boys sat cross-legged on the floor in front, the hatchlings coiled up neatly behind, and all together in a queer mixture of childish voices and the more resonant draconic tones were parroting a human teacher who stood on a podium in front, reading loudly from a great book and beckoning the students to repeat after every line.

Zhao Wei waved his hand towards them. “You wanted to see our schools. This is a new class, of course; they are only just beginning to study the Analects.”

Laurence was privately baffled at the notion of subjecting dragons to study and written examinations. “They do not seem paired off,” he said, studying the group.

Zhao Wei looked blankly at him, and Laurence clarified, “I mean, the boys are not sitting with their own hatchlings, and the children seem rather young for them, indeed.”

“Oh, those dragonets are much too young to have chosen any companions yet,” Zhao Wei said. “They are only a few weeks old. When they have lived fifteen months, then they will be ready to choose, and the boys will be older.”

Laurence halted in surprise, and turned to stare at the little hatchlings again; he had always heard that dragons had to be tamed directly at hatching, to keep them from becoming feral and escaping into the wild, but this seemed plainly contradicted by the Chinese example. Temeraire said, “It must be very lonely. I would not have liked to be without Laurence when I hatched, at all.” He lowered his head and nudged Laurence with his nose. “And it would also be very tiresome to have to hunt all the time for yourself when you are first hatched; I was always hungry,” he added, more prosaically.

“Of course the hatchlings do not have to hunt for themselves,” Zhao Wei said. “They must study. There are dragons who tend the eggs and feed the young. That is much better than having a person do it. Otherwise a dragonet could not help but become attached, before he was wise enough to properly judge the character and virtues of his proposed companion.”

This was a pointed remark indeed, and Laurence answered it coolly, “I suppose that may be a concern, if you have less regulation of how men are to be chosen for such an opportunity. Among us, of course, a man must ordinarily serve for many years in the Corps before he can be considered worthy even to be presented to a hatchling. In such circumstances, it seems to me that an early attachment such as you decry may be instead the foundation of a lasting deeper affection, more rewarding to both parties.”

They continued on into the city proper, and now with a view of his surroundings from a more ordinary perspective than from the air, Laurence was struck afresh by the great breadth of the streets, which seemed to almost have been designed with dragons in mind. They gave the city a feeling of spaciousness altogether different from London; though the absolute number of people was, he guessed, nearly equal. Temeraire was here more staring than stared-at; the populace of the capital were evidently used to the presence of the more exalted breeds, while he had never been out into a city before, and his head craned nearly in a loop around his own neck as he tried to look in three directions at once.

Guards roughly pushed ordinary travelers out of the way of green sedan-chairs, carrying mandarins on official duties. Along one broad way a wedding procession brilliant with scarlet and gold were winding their shouting, clapping way through the streets, with musicians and spitting fireworks in their train and the bride well-concealed in a draped chair: a wealthy match to judge by the elaborate proceedings. Occasional mules plodded along under cartloads, inured to the presence of the dragons, their hooves clopping along the stones; but Laurence did not see any horses on the main avenues, nor carriages: likely they could not be tamed to bear the presence of so many dragons. The air smelled quite differently: none of the sour grassy stench of manure and horse piss inescapable in London, but instead the faintly sulfurous smell of dragon waste, more pronounced when the wind blew from the northeast; Laurence suspected some larger cesspools lay in that quarter of the city.

And everywhere, everywhere dragons: the blue ones, most common, were engaged in the widest variety of tasks. In addition to those Laurence saw ferrying people about with their carrying harnesses, others bore loads of freight; but a sizable number also seemed to be traveling alone on more important business, wearing collars of varying colors, much like the different colors of the mandarins’ jewels. Zhao Wei confirmed that these were signifiers of rank, and the dragons so adorned members of the civil service. “The Shen-lung are like people, some are clever and some are lazy,” he said, and added, to Laurence’s great interest, “Many superior breeds have risen from the best of them, and the wisest may even be honored with an Imperial mating.” Dozens of other breeds also were to be seen, some with and others without human companions, engaged on many errands. Once two Imperial dragons came by going in the opposite direction, and inclined their heads to Temeraire politely as they passed; they were adorned with scarves of red silk knotted and wrapped in chains of gold and sewn all over with small pearls, very elegant, to which Temeraire gave a sidelong covetous eye.

They came shortly into a market district, the stores lavishly decorated with carving and gilt, and full of goods. Silks of glorious color and texture, some of much finer quality than anything Laurence had ever seen in London; great skeins and wrapped yards of the plain blue cotton as yarn and cloth, in different grades of quality both by thickness and by the intensity of the dye. And porcelain, which in particular caught Laurence’s attention; unlike his father, he was no connoisseur of the art, but the precision in the blue-and-white designs seemed also superior to those dishes which he had seen imported, and the colored dishes particularly lovely.

“Temeraire, will you ask if he would take gold?” he asked; Temeraire was peering into the shop with much interest, while the merchant eyed his looming head in the doorway anxiously; this at least seemed one place even in China where dragons were not quite welcome. The merchant looked doubtful, and addressed some questions to Zhao Wei; after this, he consented at least to take a half-guinea and inspect it. He rapped it on the side of the table and then called in his son from a back room: having few teeth left himself, he gave it to the younger man to bite upon. A woman seated in the back peeped around the corner, interested by the noise, and was admonished loudly and without effect until she stared her fill at Laurence and withdrew again; but her voice came from the back room stridently, so she seemed also to be participating in the debate.

At last the merchant seemed satisfied, but when Laurence picked up the vase which he had been examining, he immediately jumped forward and took it away, with a torrent of words; motioning Laurence to stay, he went into the back room. “He says that is not worth so much,” Temeraire explained.

“But I have only given him half a pound,” Laurence protested; the man came back carrying a much larger vase, in a deep, nearly glowing red, shading delicately to a pure white at the top, and with an almost mirrored gloss. He put it down on the table and they all looked at it with admiration; even Zhao Wei did not withhold a murmur of approval, and Temeraire said, “Oh, that is very pretty.”

Laurence pressed another few guineas on the shopkeeper with some difficulty, and still felt guilty at carrying it away, swathed in many protective layers of cotton rags; he had never seen a piece so lovely before, and he was already anxious for its survival through the long journey. Emboldened by this first success, he embarked on other purchases, of silk and other porcelain, and after that a small pendant of jade, which Zhao Wei, his façade of disdain gradually yielding to enthusiasm for the shopping expedition, pointed out to him, explaining that the symbols upon it were the start of the poem about the legendary woman dragon-soldier. It was apparently a good-luck symbol often bought for a girl about to embark upon such a career. Laurence rather thought Jane Roland would like it, and added it to the growing pile; very soon Zhao Wei had to detail several of his soldiers to carry the various packages: they no longer seemed so concerned about Laurence’s potential escape as about his loading them down like cart-horses.

Prices for many of the goods seemed considerably lower than Laurence was used to, in general; more than could be accounted for by the cost of freight. This alone was not a surprise, after hearing the Company commissioners in Macao talk about the rapacity of the local mandarins and the bribes they demanded, on top of the state duties. But the difference was so high that Laurence had to revise significantly upwards his guesses of the degree of extortion. “It is a great pity,” Laurence said to Temeraire, as they came to the end of the avenue. “If only the trade were allowed to proceed openly, I suppose these merchants could make a much better living, and the craftsmen, too; having to send all their wares through Canton is what allows the mandarins there to be so unreasonable. Probably they do not even want to bother, if they can sell the goods here, so we receive only the dregs of their market.”

“Perhaps they do not want to sell the nicest pieces so far away. That is a very pleasant smell,” Temeraire said, approvingly, as they crossed a small bridge into another district, surrounded by a narrow moat of water and a low stone wall. Open shallow trenches full of smoldering coals lined the street to either side, with animals cooking over them, spitted on metal spears and being basted with great swabs by sweating, half-naked men: oxen, pigs, sheep, deer, horses, and smaller, less-identifiable creatures; Laurence did not look very closely. The sauces dripped and scorched upon the stones, raising thick wafting clouds of aromatic smoke. Only a handful of people were buying here, nimbly dodging among the dragons who made up the better part of the clientele.

Temeraire had eaten heartily that morning: a couple of young venison, with some stuffed ducks as a relish; he did not ask to eat, but looked a little wistfully at a smaller purple dragon eating roast suckling pigs off a skewer. But down a smaller alley Laurence also saw a tired-looking blue dragon, his hide marked with old sores from the silk carrying-harness he wore, turning sadly away from a beautifully roasted cow and pointing instead at a small, rather burnt sheep left off to the side: he took it away to a corner and began eating it very slowly, stretching it out, and he did not disdain the offal or the bones.

It was natural that if dragons were expected to earn their bread, there should be some less fortunate than others; but Laurence felt it somehow criminal to see one going hungry, particularly when there was so much extravagant waste at their residence and elsewhere. Temeraire did not notice, his gaze fixed on the displays. They came out of the district over another small bridge which led them back onto the broad avenue where they had begun. Temeraire sighed deeply with pleasure, releasing the aroma only slowly from his nostrils.

Laurence, for his part, was fallen quiet; the sight had dispelled his natural fascination with all the novelty of their surroundings and the natural interest inherent in a foreign capital of such extents, and without such distraction he was inescapably forced to recognize the stark contrast in the treatment of dragons. The city streets were not wider than in London by some odd coincidence, or a question of taste, or even for the greater grandeur which they offered; but plainly designed that dragons might live in full harmony with men, and that this design was accomplished, to the benefit of all parties, he could not dispute: the case of misery which he had seen served rather to illustrate the general good.

The dinner-hour was hard upon them, and Zhao Wei turned their route back towards the island; Temeraire also grown quieter as they left the market precincts behind, and they walked along in silence until they reached the gateway; there pausing he looked back over his shoulder at the city, its activity undiminished. Zhao Wei caught the look and said something to him in Chinese. “It is very nice,” Temeraire answered him, and added, “but I cannot compare it: I have never walked in London, or even in Dover.”

They took their leave from Zhao Wei briefly, outside the pavilion, and went in again together. Laurence sat heavily down upon a wooden bench, while Temeraire began to pace restlessly back and forth, his tail-tip switching back and forth with agitation. “It is not true, at all,” he burst out at last. “Laurence, we have gone everywhere we liked; I have been in the streets and to shops, and no one has run away or been frightened: not in the south and not here. People are not afraid of dragons, not in the least.”

“I must beg your pardon,” Laurence said quietly. “I confess I was mistaken: plainly men can be accustomed. I expect with so many dragons about, all men here are raised with close experience of them, and lose their fear. But I assure you I have not lied to you deliberately; the same is not true in Britain. It must be a question of use.”

“If use can make men stop being afraid, I do not see why we should be kept penned up so they may continue to be frightened,” Temeraire said.

To this Laurence could make no answer, and did not try; instead he retreated to his own room to take a little dinner; Temeraire lay down for his customary afternoon nap in a brooding, restless coil, while Laurence sat alone, picking unenthusiastically over his plate. Hammond came to inquire after what they had seen; Laurence answered him as briefly as he could, his irritation of spirit ill-concealed, and in short order Hammond went away rather flushed and thin-lipped.

“Has that fellow been pestering you?” Granby said, looking in.

“No,” Laurence said tiredly, getting up to rinse his hands in the basin he had filled from the pond. “Indeed, I am afraid I was plainly rude to him just now, and he did not deserve it in the least: he was only curious how they raise the dragons here, so he could argue with them that Temeraire’s treatment in England has not been so ill.”

“Well, as far as I am concerned he deserved a trimming,” Granby said. “I could have pulled out my hair when I woke up and he told me smug as a deacon that he had packed you off alone with some Chinaman; not that Temeraire would let any harm come to you, but anything could happen in a crowd, after all.”

“No, nothing of the kind was attempted at all; our guide was a little rude to begin, but perfectly civil by the end.” Laurence glanced over at the bundles stacked in the corner, where Zhao Wei’s men had left them. “I begin to think Hammond was right, John; and it was all old-maid flutters and imagination,” he said, unhappily; it seemed to him, after the long day’s tour, that the prince hardly needed to stoop to murder, with the many advantages of his country to serve as gentler and no less persuasive arguments.

“More likely Yongxing gave up trying aboard ship, and has just been waiting to get you settled in under his eyes,” Granby said pessimistically. “This is a nice enough cottage, I suppose, but there are a damned lot of guards skulking about.”

“All the more reason not to fear,” Laurence said. “If they meant to kill me, they could have done so by now, a dozen times over.”

“Temeraire would hardly stay here if the Emperor’s own guards killed you, and him already suspicious,” Granby said. “Most like he would do his best to kill the lot of them, and then I hope find the ship again and go back home; though it takes them very hard, losing a captain, and he might just as easily go and run into the wild.”

“We can argue ourselves in circles this way forever.” Laurence lifted his hands impatiently and let them drop again. “At least today, the only wish which I saw put in action was to make a desirable impression upon Temeraire.” He did not say that this goal had been thoroughly accomplished and with little effort; he did not know how to draw a contrast against the treatment of dragons in the West without sounding at best a complainer and at worst nearly disloyal: he was conscious afresh that he had not been raised an aviator, and he was unwilling to say anything that might wound Granby’s feelings.

“You are a damned sight too quiet,” Granby said, unexpectedly, and Laurence gave a guilty start: he had been sitting and brooding in silence. “I am not surprised he took a liking to the city, he is always on fire for anything new; but is it that bad?”

“It is not only the city,” Laurence said finally. “It is the respect which is given to dragons; and not only to himself: they all of them have a great deal of liberty, as a matter of course. I think I saw a hundred dragons at least today, wandering through the streets, and no one took any notice of them.”

“And God forbid we should take a flight over Regent’s Park but we have shrieks of murder and fire and flood all at once, and ten memoranda sent us from the Admiralty,” Granby agreed, with a quick flash of resentment. “Not that we could set down in London if we wanted to: the streets are too narrow for anything bigger than a Winchester. From what we have seen even just from the air, this place is laid out with a good deal more sense. It is no wonder they have ten beasts to our one, if not more.”

Laurence was deeply relieved to find Granby taking no offense against him, and so willing to discuss the subject. “John, do you know, here they do not assign handlers until the dragon is fifteen months of age; until then they are raised by other dragons.”

“Well, that seems a rotten waste to me, letting dragons sit around nursemaiding,” Granby said. “But I suppose they can afford it. Laurence, when I think what we could do with a round dozen of those big scarlet fellows that they have sitting around getting fat everywhere; it makes you weep.”

“Yes; but what I meant to say was, they seem not to have any ferals at all,” Laurence said. “Is it not one in ten that we lose?”

“Oh, not nearly so many, not in modern times,” Granby said. “We used to lose Longwings by the dozen, until Queen Elizabeth had the bright idea of setting her serving-maid to one and we found they would take to girls like lambs, and then it turned out the Xenicas would, too. And Winchesters often used to nip off like lightning before you could get a stitch of harness on them, but nowadays we hatch them inside and let them flap about for a bit before bringing out the food. Not more than one in thirty, at the most, if you do not count the eggs we lose in the breeding grounds: the ferals already there hide them from us sometimes.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a servant; Laurence tried to wave the man away, but with apologetic bows and a tug on Laurence’s sleeve, he made clear he wished to lead them out to the main dining chamber: Sun Kai, unexpectedly, had come to take tea with them.

Laurence was in no mood for company, and Hammond, who joined them to serve as translator, as yet remained stiff and unfriendly; they made an awkward and mostly silent company. Sun Kai inquired politely about their accommodations, and then about their enjoyment of the country, which Laurence answered very shortly; he could not help some suspicion that this might be some attempt at probing Temeraire’s state of mind, and still more so when Sun Kai at last came however to the purpose for his visit.

“Lung Tien Qian sends you an invitation,” Sun Kai said. “She hopes you and Temeraire will take tea with her tomorrow in the Ten Thousand Lotus palace, in the morning before the flowers open.”

“Thank you, sir, for bearing the message,” Laurence said, polite but flat. “Temeraire is anxious to know her better.” The invitation could hardly be refused, though he was by no means happy to see further lures thrown out to Temeraire.

Sun Kai nodded equably. “She, too, is anxious to know more of her offspring’s condition. Her judgment carries much weight with the Son of Heaven.” He sipped his tea and added, “Perhaps you will wish to tell her of your nation, and the respect which Lung Tien Xiang has won there.”

Hammond translated this, and then added, quickly enough that Sun Kai might think it part of the translation of his own words, “Sir, I trust you see this is a tolerably clear hint. You must make every effort to win her favor.”

“I cannot see why Sun Kai would give me any advice at all in the first place,” Laurence said, after the envoy had left them again. “He has always been polite enough, but not what anyone would call friendly.”

“Well, it’s not much advice, is it?” Granby said. “He only said to tell her that Temeraire is happy: that’s hardly something you couldn’t have thought of alone, and it makes a polite noise.”

“Yes; but we would not have known to value her good opinion quite so highly, or think this meeting of any particular importance,” Hammond said. “No; for a diplomat, he has said a great deal indeed, as much as he could, I imagine, without committing himself quite openly to us. This is most heartening,” he added, with what Laurence felt was excessive optimism, likely born of frustration: Hammond had so far written five times to the Emperor’s ministers, to ask for a meeting where he might present his credentials: every note had been returned unopened, and a flat refusal had met his request to go out from the island to meet the handful of other Westerners in the town.

“She cannot be so very maternal, if she agreed to send him so far away in the first place,” Laurence said to Granby, shortly after dawn the next morning; he was inspecting his best coat and trousers, which he had set out to air overnight, in the early light: his cravat needed pressing, and he thought he had noticed some frayed threads on his best shirt.

“They usually aren’t, you know,” Granby said. “Or at least, not after the hatching, though they get broody over the eggs when they are first laid. Not that they don’t care at all, but after all, a dragonet can take the head off a goat five minutes after it breaks the shell; they don’t need mothering. Here, let me have that; I can’t press without scorching, but I can do up a seam.” He took the shirt and needle from Laurence and set to repairing the tear in the cuff.

“Still, she would not care to see him neglected, I am sure,” Laurence said. “Though I wonder that she is so deeply in the Emperor’s counsel; I would have imagined that if they sent any Celestial egg away, it would only have been of a lesser line. Thank you, Dyer; set it there,” he said, as the young runner came in bearing the hot iron from the stove.

His appearance polished so far as he could manage, Laurence joined Temeraire in the courtyard; the striped dragon had returned to escort them. The flight was only a short one, but curious: they flew so low they could see small clumps of ivy and rootlings that had managed to establish themselves upon the yellow-tiled roofs of the palace buildings, and see the colors of the jewels upon the mandarins’ hats as the ministers went hurrying through the enormous courtyards and walkways below, despite the early hour of the morning.

The particular palace lay within the walls of the immense Forbidden City, easily identifiable from aloft: two huge dragon pavilions on either side of a long pond almost choked with water-lilies, the flowers still closed within their buds. Wide sturdy bridges spanned the pond, arched high for decoration, and a courtyard flagged with black marble lay to the south, just now being touched with first light.

The yellow-striped dragon landed here and bowed them along; as Temeraire padded by, Laurence could see other dragons stirring in the early light under the eaves of the great pavilions. An ancient Celestial was creeping stiffly out from the bay farthest to the southeast, the tendrils about his jaw long and drooping as mustaches. His enormous ruff was leached of color, and his hide gone so translucent the black was now redly tinted with the color of the flesh and blood beneath. Another of the yellow-striped dragons paced him carefully, nudging him occasionally with his nose towards the sun-drenched courtyard; the Celestial’s eyes were a milky blue, the pupils barely visible beneath the cataracts.

A few other dragons emerged also: Imperials rather than Celestials, lacking the ruff and tendrils, and with more variety in their hue: some were as black as Temeraire, but others a deep indigo-washed blue; all very dark, however, except for Lien, who emerged at the same time out of a separate and private pavilion, set back and alone among the trees, and came to the pond to drink. With her white hide, she looked almost unearthly among the rest; Laurence felt it would be difficult to fault anyone for indulging in superstition towards her, and indeed the other dragons consciously gave her a wide berth. She ignored them entirely in return and yawned wide and red, shaking her head vigorously to scatter away the clinging drops of water, and then paced away into the gardens in solitary dignity.

Qian herself was waiting for them at one of the central pavilions, flanked by two Imperial dragons of particularly graceful appearance, all of them adorned with elaborate jewels. She inclined her head courteously and flicked a talon against a standing bell nearby to summon servants; the attending dragons shifted their places to make room for Laurence and Temeraire on her right, and the human servants brought Laurence a comfortable chair. Qian made no immediate conversation, but gestured towards the lake; the line of the morning sun was now traveling swiftly northward over the water as the sun crept higher, and the lotus buds were unfolding in almost balletic progression; they numbered literally in the thousands, and made a spectacle of glowing pink color against the deep green of their leaves.

As the last unfurled flowers came to rest, the dragons all tapped their claws against the flagstones in a clicking noise, a kind of applause. Now a small table was brought for Laurence and great porcelain bowls painted in blue and white for the dragons, and a black, pungent tea poured for them all. To Laurence’s surprise the dragons drank with enjoyment, even going so far as to lick up the leaves in the bottom of their cups. He himself found the tea curious and over-strong in flavor: almost the aroma of smoked meat, though he drained his cup politely as well. Temeraire drank his own enthusiastically and very fast, and then sat back with a peculiar uncertain expression, as though trying to decide whether he had liked it or not.

“You have come a very long way,” Qian said, addressing Laurence; an unobtrusive servant had stepped forward to her side to translate. “I hope you are enjoying your visit with us, but surely you must miss your home?”

“An officer in the King’s service must be used to go where he is required, madam,” Laurence said, wondering if this was meant as a suggestion. “I have not spent more than a sixmonth at my own family’s home since I took ship the first time, and that was as a boy of twelve.”

“That is very young, to go so far away,” Qian said. “Your mother must have had great anxiety for you.”

“She had the acquaintance of Captain Mountjoy, with whom I served, and we knew his family well,” Laurence said, and seized the opening to add, “You yourself had no such advantage, I regret, on being parted from Temeraire; I would be glad to satisfy you on whatever points I might, if only in retrospect.”

She turned her head to the attending dragons. “Perhaps Mei and Shu will take Xiang to see the flowers more closely,” she said, using Temeraire’s Chinese name. The two Imperials inclined their heads and stood up expectantly waiting for Temeraire.

Temeraire looked a little worriedly at Laurence, and said, “They are very nice from here?”

Laurence felt rather anxious himself at the prospect of a solitary interview, with so little sense of what might please Qian, but he mustered a smile for Temeraire and said, “I will wait here with your mother; I am sure you will enjoy them.”

“Be sure not to bother Grandfather or Lien,” Qian added to the Imperial dragons, who nodded as they led Temeraire away.

The servants refilled his cup and Qian’s bowl from a fresh kettle, and she lapped at it in a more leisurely way. Presently she said, “I understand Temeraire has been serving in your army.”

There was unmistakably a note of censure in her voice, which did not need translation. “Among us, all those dragons who can, serve in defense of their home: that is no dishonor, but the fulfillment of our duty,” Laurence said. “I assure you we could not value him more highly. There are very few dragons among us: even the least are greatly prized, and Temeraire is of the highest order.”

She rumbled low and thoughtfully. “Why are there so few dragons, that you must ask your most valued to fight?”

“We are a small nation, nothing like your own,” Laurence said. “Only a handful of smaller wild breeds were native to the British Isles, when the Romans came and began to tame them. Since then, by cross-breeding our lines have multiplied, and thanks to careful tending of our cattle herds, we have been able to increase our numbers, but still we cannot support nearly so many as you here possess.”

She lowered her head and regarded him keenly. “And among the French, how are dragons treated?”

Instinctively Laurence was certain British treatment of dragons was superior and more generous than that of any other Western nation; but he was unhappily aware he would have considered it also superior to China’s, if he had not come and already seen plainly otherwise. A month before, he could easily have spoken with pride of how British dragons were cared for. Like all of them, Temeraire had been fed and housed on raw meat and in bare clearings, with constant training and little entertainment. Laurence thought he might as well brag of raising children in a pigsty to the Queen, as speak of such conditions to this elegant dragon in her flower-decked palace. If the French were no better, they were hardly worse; and he would have thought very little of anyone who covered the faults in his own service by blackening another’s.

“In ordinary course, the practices in France are much the same as ours, I believe,” he said at last. “I do not know what promises were made you, in Temeraire’s particular case, but I can tell you that Emperor Napoleon himself is a military man: even as we left England he was in the field, and any dragon who was his companion would hardly remain behind while he went to war.”

“You are yourself descended from kings, I understand,” Qian said unexpectedly, and turning her head spoke to one of the servants, who hurried forward with a long rice-paper scroll and unrolled it upon the table: with amazement, Laurence saw it was a copy, in a much finer hand and larger, of the familial chart which he had drawn so long ago at the New Year banquet. “This is correct?” she inquired, seeing him so startled.

It had never occurred to him that the information would come to her ears, nor that she would find it of interest. But he at once swallowed any reluctance: he would puff off his consequence to her day and night if it would win her approval. “My family is indeed an old one, and proud; you see I myself have gone into service in the Corps, and count it an honor,” he said, though guilt pricked at him; certainly no one in the circles of his birth would have called it as much.

Qian nodded, apparently satisfied, and sipped again at her tea while the servant carried the chart away again. Laurence cast about for something else to say. “If I may be so bold, I think I may with confidence say on behalf of my Government that we would gladly agree to whatever conditions the French accepted, on your first sending Temeraire’s egg to them.”

“Many considerations besides remain” was all she said in response to this overture, however.

Temeraire and the two Imperials were already coming back from their walk, Temeraire having evidently set a rather hurried pace; at the same time, the white dragon came walking past as she returned to her own quarters with Yongxing now by her side, speaking with her in a low voice, one hand affectionately resting upon her side. She walked slowly, so he could keep pace, and also the several attendants trailing reluctantly after burdened with large scrolls and several books: still the Imperials held well back and waited to let them pass before coming back into the pavilion.

“Qian, why is she that color?” Temeraire asked, peeking back out at Lien after she had gone by. “She looks so very strange.”

“Who can understand the workings of Heaven?” Qian said repressively. “Do not be disrespectful. Lien is a great scholar; she was chuang-yuan, many years ago, though she did not need to submit to the examinations at all, being a Celestial, and also she is your elder cousin. She was sired by Chu, who was hatched of Xian, as was I.”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, abashed. More timidly he asked, “Who was my sire?”

“Lung Qin Gao,” Qian said, and twitched her tail; she looked rather pleased by the recollection. “He is an Imperial dragon, and is at present in the south in Hangzhou: his companion is a prince of the third rank, and they are visiting the West Lake.”

Laurence was startled to learn Celestials could so breed true with Imperials: but on his tentative inquiry Qian confirmed as much. “That is how our line continues. We cannot breed among ourselves,” she said, and added, quite unconscious of how she was staggering him, “There are only myself and Lien now, who are female, and besides Grandfather and Chu, there are only Chuan and Ming and Zhi, and we are all cousins at most.”

“Only eight of them, altogether?” Hammond stared and sat down blankly: as well he might.

“I don’t see how they can possibly continue on like that forever,” Granby said. “Are they so mad to keep them only for the Emperors, that they’ll risk losing the whole line?”

“Evidently from time to time a pair of Imperials will give birth to a Celestial,” Laurence said, between bites; he was sitting down at last to his painfully late dinner, in his bedroom: seven o’clock and full darkness outside, and he had swelled himself near to bursting with tea in an effort to stave off hunger over the visit which had stretched to many hours. “That is how the oldest fellow there now was born; and he is sire to the lot of them, going back four or five generations.”

“I cannot make it out in the least,” Hammond said, paying no attention to the rest of the conversation. “Eight Celestials; why on earth would they ever have given him away? Surely, at least for breeding—I cannot, I cannot credit it; Bonaparte cannot have impressed them so, not secondhand and from a continent away. There must be something else, something which I have not grasped. Gentlemen, you will excuse me,” he added, distractedly, and rose and left them alone. Laurence finished his meal without much appetite and set down his chopsticks.

“She did not say no to our keeping him, at any rate,” Granby said into the silence, but dismally.

Laurence said, after a moment, more to quell his own inner voices, “I could not be so selfish to even try and deny him the pleasure of making the better acquaintance of his own kindred, or learning about his native land.”

“It is all stuff and nonsense in the end, Laurence,” Granby said, trying to comfort him. “A dragon won’t be parted from his captain for all the gems in Araby, and all the calves in Christendom, too, for that matter.”

Laurence rose and went to the window. Temeraire had curled up for the night upon the heated courtyard stones once again. The moon had risen, and he was very beautiful to look at in the silver light, with the blossom-heavy trees on either side hanging low above him and a dappled reflection in the pond, all his scales gleaming.

“That is true; a dragon will endure a great deal sooner than be parted from his captain. It does not follow that a decent man would ask it of him,” Laurence said, very low, and let the curtain fall.

Chapter 14

TEMERAIRE HIMSELF WAS quiet the day after their visit. Laurence went out to sit with him, and gazed at him with anxiety; but he did not know how to broach the subject of what distressed him, nor what to say. If Temeraire was grown discontented with his lot in England, and wished to stay, there was nothing to be done. Hammond would hardly argue, so long as he was able to complete his negotiations; he cared a good deal more for establishing a permanent embassy and winning some sort of treaty than for getting Temeraire home. Laurence was by no means inclined to force the issue early.

Qian had told Temeraire, on their departure, to make himself free of the palace, but the same invitation had not been extended to Laurence. Temeraire did not ask permission to go, but he looked wistfully into the distance, and paced the courtyard in circles, and refused Laurence’s offer to read together. At last growing sick of himself, Laurence said, “Would you wish to go and see Qian again? I am sure she would welcome your visit.”

“She did not ask you,” Temeraire said, but his wings fanned halfway out, irresolute.

“There can be no offense intended in a mother liking to see her offspring privately,” Laurence said, and this excuse was sufficient; Temeraire very nearly glowed with pleasure and set off at once. He returned only late that evening, jubilant and full of plans to return.

“They have started teaching me to write,” he said. “I have already learned twenty-five characters today; shall I show you?”

“By all means,” Laurence answered, and not only to humor him; grimly he set himself to studying the symbols Temeraire laid down, and copying them down as best he could with a quill instead of a brush while Temeraire pronounced them for his benefit, though he looked rather doubtful at Laurence’s attempts to reproduce the sounds. He did not make much progress, but the effort alone made Temeraire so very happy that he could not begrudge it, and concealed the intense strain which he had suffered under the entire seeming endless day.

Infuriatingly, however, Laurence had to contend not only with his own feelings, but with Hammond on the subject as well. “One visit, in your company, could serve as reassurance and give her the opportunity of making your acquaintance,” the diplomat said. “But this continued solitary visiting cannot be allowed. If he comes to prefer China and agrees of his own volition to stay, we will lose any hope of success: they will pack us off at once.”

“That is enough, sir,” Laurence said angrily. “I have no intention of insulting Temeraire by suggesting that his natural wish to become acquainted with his kind in any way represents a lack of fidelity.”

Hammond pressed the point, and the conversation grew heated; at last Laurence concluded by saying, “If I must make this plain, so be it: I do not consider myself as under your command. I have been given no instructions to that effect, and your attempt to assert an authority without official foundation is entirely improper.”

Their relations had already been tolerably cool; now they became frigid, and Hammond did not come to have dinner with Laurence and his officers that night. The next day, however, he came early into the pavilion, before Temeraire had left on his visit, accompanied by Prince Yongxing. “His Highness has been kind enough to come and see how we do; I am sure you will join me in welcoming him,” he said, with rather hard emphasis on the last words, and Laurence rather reluctantly rose to make his most formal leg.

“You are very kind, sir; as you see you find us very comfortable,” he said, with stiff politeness, and wary; he still did not trust Yongxing’s intentions in the least.

Yongxing inclined his head a very little, equally stiff and unsmiling, and then turned and beckoned to a young boy following him: no more than thirteen years of age, wearing wholly nondescript garments of the usual indigo-dyed cotton. Glancing up at him, the boy nodded and walked past Laurence, directly up to Temeraire, and made a formal greeting: he raised his hands up in front of himself, fingers wrapped over one another, and inclined his head, saying something in Chinese at the same time. Temeraire looked a little puzzled, and Hammond interjected hastily, “Tell him yes, for Heaven’s sake.”

“Oh,” said Temeraire, uncertainly, but said something to the boy, evidently affirmative. Laurence was startled to see the boy climb up onto Temeraire’s foreleg, and arrange himself there. Yongxing’s face was as always difficult to read, but there was a suggestion of satisfaction to his mouth; then he said, “We will go inside and take tea,” and turned away.

“Be sure not to let him fall,” Hammond added hastily to Temeraire, with an anxious look at the boy, who was sitting cross-legged, with great poise, and seemed as likely to fall off as a Buddha statue to climb off its pediment.

“Roland,” Laurence called; she and Dyer had been working their trigonometry in the back corner. “Pray see if he would like some refreshment.”

She nodded and went to talk to the boy in her broken Chinese while Laurence followed the other men across the courtyard and into the residence. Already the servants had hastily rearranged the furniture: a single draped chair for Yongxing, with a footstool, and armless chairs placed at right angles to it for Laurence and Hammond. They brought the tea with great ceremony and attention, and throughout the process Yongxing remained perfectly silent. Nor did he speak once the servants had at last withdrawn, but sipped at his tea, very slowly.

Hammond at length broke the silence with polite thanks for the comfort of their residence, and the attentions which they had received. “The tour of the city, in particular, was a great kindness; may I ask, sir, if it was your doing?”

Yongxing said, “It was the Emperor’s wish. Perhaps, Captain,” he added, “you were favorably impressed?”

It was very little a question, and Laurence said, shortly, “I was, sir; your city is remarkable.” Yongxing smiled, a small dry twist of the lips, and did not say anything more, but then he scarcely needed to; Laurence looked away, all the memory of the coverts in England and the bitter contrast fresh in his mind.

They sat in dumb-show a while longer; Hammond ventured again, “May I inquire as to the Emperor’s health? We are most eager, sir, as you can imagine, to pay the King’s respects to His Imperial Majesty, and to convey the letters which I bear.”

“The Emperor is in Chengde,” Yongxing said dismissively. “He will not return to Peking soon; you will have to be patient.”

Laurence was increasingly angry. Yongxing’s attempt to insinuate the boy into Temeraire’s company was as blatant as any of the previous attempts to separate the two of them, and yet now Hammond was making not the least objection, and still trying to make polite conversation in the face of insulting rudeness. Pointedly, Laurence said, “Your Highness’s companion seems a very likely young man; may I inquire if he is your son?”

Yongxing frowned at the question and said only, “No,” coldly.

Hammond, sensing Laurence’s impatience, hastily intervened before Laurence could say anything more. “We are of course only too happy to attend the Emperor’s convenience; but I hope we may be granted some additional liberty, if the wait is likely to be long; at least as much as has been given the French ambassador. I am sure, sir, you have not forgotten their murderous attack upon us, at the outset of our journey, and I hope you will allow me to say, once again, that the interests of our nations march far more closely together than yours with theirs.”

Unchecked by any reply, Hammond went on; he spoke passionately and at length about the dangers of Napoleon’s domination of Europe, the stifling of the trade which should otherwise bring great wealth to China, and the threat of an insatiable conqueror spreading his empire ever wider—perhaps, he added, ending on their very doorstep, “For Napoleon has already made one attempt, sir, to come at us in India, and he makes no secret that his ambition is to exceed Alexander. If he should ever be successful, you must realize his rapacity will not be satisfied there.”

The idea that Napoleon should subdue Europe, conquer the Russian and the Ottoman Empires both, cross the Himalayas, establish himself in India, and still have energy left to wage war on China, was to Laurence a piece of exaggeration that would hardly convince anyone; and as for trade, he knew that argument carried no weight at all with Yongxing, who had so fervently spoken of China’s self-sufficiency. Nevertheless the prince did not interrupt Hammond at all from beginning to end, listened to the entire long speech frowning, and then at the end of it, when Hammond concluded with a renewed plea to be granted the same freedoms as De Guignes, Yongxing received it in silence, sat a long time, and then said only, “You have as much liberty as he does; anything more would be unsuitable.”

“Sir,” Hammond said, “perhaps you are unaware that we have not been permitted to leave the island, nor to communicate with any official even by letter.”

“Neither is he permitted,” Yongxing said. “It is not proper for foreigners to wander through Peking, disrupting the affairs of the magistrates and the ministers: they have much to occupy them.”

Hammond was left baffled by this reply, confusion writ plain on his face, and Laurence, for his part, had sat through enough; plainly Yongxing meant nothing but to waste their time, while the boy flattered and fawned over Temeraire. As the child was not his own son, Yongxing had surely chosen him from his relations especially for great charm of personality and instructed him to be as insinuating as ever he might. Laurence did not truly fear that Temeraire would take a preference to the boy, but he had no intention of sitting here playing the fool for the benefit of Yongxing’s scheming.

“We cannot be leaving the children unattended this way,” he said abruptly. “You will excuse me, sir,” and rose from the table already bowing.

As Laurence had suspected, Yongxing had no desire to sit and make conversation with Hammond except to provide the boy an open field, and he rose also to take his leave of them. They returned all together to the courtyard, where Laurence found, to his private satisfaction, that the boy had climbed down from Temeraire’s arm and was engaged in a game of jacks with Roland and Dyer, all of them munching on ship’s biscuit, and Temeraire had wandered out to the pier, to enjoy the breeze coming off the lake.

Yongxing spoke sharply, and the boy sprang up with a guilty expression; Roland and Dyer looked equally abashed, with glances towards their abandoned books. “We thought it was only polite to be hospitable,” Roland said hurriedly, looking to see how Laurence would take this.

“I hope he has enjoyed the visit,” Laurence said, mildly, to their relief. “Back to your work, now.” They hurried back to their books, and, the boy called to heel, Yongxing swept away with a dissatisfied mien, exchanging a few words with Hammond in Chinese; Laurence gladly watched him go.

“At least we may be grateful that De Guignes is as restricted in his movements as we are,” Hammond said after a moment. “I cannot think Yongxing would bother to lie on the subject, though I cannot understand how—” He stopped in puzzlement and shook his head. “Well, perhaps I may learn a little more tomorrow.”

“I beg your pardon?” Laurence said, and Hammond absently said, “He said he would come again, at the same time; he means to make a regular visit of it.”

“He may mean whatever he likes,” Laurence said, angrily, at finding Hammond had thus meekly accepted further intrusions on his behalf, “but I will not be playing attendance on him; and why you should choose to waste your time cultivating a man you know very well has not the least sympathy for us is beyond me.”

Hammond, answered with some heat, “Of course Yongxing has no natural sympathy for us; why should he or any other man here? Our work is to win them over, and if he is willing to give us the chance to persuade him, it is our duty to try, sir; I am surprised that the effort of remaining civil and drinking a little tea should so try your patience.”

Laurence snapped, “And I am surprised to find you so unconcerned over this attempt at supplanting me, after all your earlier protests.”

“What, with a twelve-year-old boy?” Hammond said, so very incredulous it was nearly offensive. “I, sir, in my turn, am astonished at your taking alarm now; and perhaps if you had not been so quick to dismiss my advice before, you should not have so much need to fear.”

“I do not fear in the least,” Laurence said, “but neither am I disposed to tolerate so blatant an attempt, or to have us submit tamely to a daily invasion whose only purpose is to give offense.”

“I will remind you, Captain, as you did me not so very long ago, that just as you are not under my authority, I am not under yours,” Hammond said. “The conduct of our diplomacy has very clearly been placed in my hands, and thank Heaven: if we were relying upon you, by now I dare say you would be blithely flying back to England, with half our trade in the Pacific sinking to the bottom of the ocean behind you.”

“Very well; you may do as you like, sir,” Laurence said, “but you had best make plain to him that I do not mean to leave this protégé of his alone with Temeraire anymore, and I think you will find him less eager to be persuaded afterwards; and do not imagine,” he added, “that I will tolerate having the boy let in when my back is turned, either.”

“As you are disposed to think me a liar and an unscrupulous schemer, I see very little purpose in denying I should do any such thing,” Hammond said angrily, coloring up.

He departed instantly, leaving Laurence still angry but ashamed and conscious of having been unfair; he would himself have called it grounds for a challenge. By the next morning, when from the pavilion he saw Yongxing going away with the boy, having evidently cut short the visit on being denied access to Temeraire, his guilt was sharp enough that he made some attempt to apologize, with little success: Hammond would have none of it.

“Whether he took offense at your refusing to join us, or whether you were correct about his aims, can make no difference now,” he said, very coldly. “If you will excuse me, I have letters to write,” and so quitted the room.

Laurence gave it up and instead went to say farewell to Temeraire, only to have his guilt and unhappiness both renewed at seeing in Temeraire’s manner an almost furtive excitement, a very great eagerness to be gone. Hammond was hardly wrong: the idle flattery of a child was nothing to the danger of the company of Qian and the Imperial dragons, no matter how devious Yongxing’s motives or how sincere Qian’s; there was only less honest excuse for complaining of her.

Temeraire would be gone for hours, but the house being small and the chambers separated mainly by screens of rice paper, Hammond’s angry presence was nearly palpable inside, so Laurence stayed in the pavilion after he had gone, attending to his correspondence: unnecessarily, as it was now five months since he had received any letters, and little of any interest had occurred since the welcoming dinner party, now two weeks old; he was not disposed to write of the quarrel with Hammond.

He dozed off over the writing, and woke rather abruptly, nearly knocking heads with Sun Kai, who was bending over him and shaking him. “Captain Laurence, you must wake up,” Sun Kai was saying.

Laurence said automatically, “I beg your pardon; what is the matter?” and then stared: Sun Kai had spoken in quite excellent English, with an accent more reminiscent of Italian than Chinese. “Good Lord, have you been able to speak English all this time?” he demanded, his mind leaping to every occasion on which Sun Kai had stood on the dragondeck, privy to all their conversations, and now revealed as having understood every word.

“There is no time at present for explanations,” Sun Kai said. “You must come with me at once: men are coming here to kill you, and all your companions also.”

It was near on five o’clock in the afternoon, and the lake and trees, framed in the pavilion doors, were golden in the setting light; birds were speaking occasionally from up in the rafters where they nested. The remark, delivered in perfectly calm tones, was so ludicrous Laurence did not at first understand it, and then stood up in outrage. “I am not going anywhere in response to such a threat, with so little explanation,” he said, and raised his voice. “Granby!”

“Everything all right, sir?” Blythe had been occupying himself in the neighboring courtyard on some busy-work, and now poked his head in, even as Granby came running.

“Mr. Granby, we are evidently to expect an attack,” Laurence said. “As this house does not admit of much security, we will take the small pavilion to the south, with the interior pond. Establish a lookout, and let us have fresh locks in all the pistols.”

“Very good,” Granby said, and dashed away again; Blythe, in his customary silence, picked up the cutlasses he had been sharpening and offered Laurence one before wrapping up the others and carrying them with his whetstone to the pavilion.

Sun Kai shook his head. “This is great foolishness,” he said, following after Laurence. “The very largest gang of hunhun are coming from the city. I have a boat waiting just here, and there is time yet for you and all your men to get your things and come away.”

Laurence inspected the pavilion entryway; as he had remembered, the pillars were made of stone rather than wood, and nearly two feet in diameter, very sturdy, and the walls of a smooth grey brick under their layer of red paint. The roof was of wood, which was a pity, but he thought the glazed tile would not catch fire easily. “Blythe, will you see if you can arrange some elevation for Lieutenant Riggs and his riflemen out of those stones in the garden? Pray assist him, Willoughby; thank you.”

Turning around, he said to Sun Kai, “Sir, you have not said where you would take me, nor who these assassins are, nor whence they have been sent; still less have you given us any reason to trust you. You have certainly deceived us so far as your knowledge of our language. Why you should so abruptly reverse yourself, I have no idea, and after the treatment which we have received, I am in no humor to put myself into your hands.”

Hammond came with the other men, looking confused, and came to join Laurence, greeting Sun Kai in Chinese. “May I inquire what is happening?” he asked stiffly.

“Sun Kai has told me to expect another attempt at assassination,” Laurence said. “See if you can get anything more clear from him; in the meantime, I must assume we are shortly to come under attack, and make arrangements. He can speak perfect English,” he added. “You need not resort to Chinese.” He left Sun Kai with a visibly startled Hammond, and joined Riggs and Granby at the entryway.

“If we could knock a couple of holes in this front wall, we could shoot down at any of them coming,” Riggs said, tapping the brick. “Otherwise, sir, we’re best off laying down a barricade mid-room, and shooting as they come in; but then we can’t have fellows with swords at the entryway.”

“Lay and man the barricade,” Laurence said. “Mr. Granby, block as much of this entryway as you can, so they cannot come in more than three or four abreast if you can manage it. We will form up the rest of the men to either side of the opening, well clear of the field of fire, and hold the door with pistols and cutlasses between volleys while Mr. Riggs and his fellows reload.”

Granby and Riggs both nodded. “Right you are,” Riggs said. “We have a couple of spare rifles along, sir; we could use you at the barricade.”

This was rather transparent, and Laurence treated it with the contempt which it deserved. “Use them for second shots as you can; we cannot waste the guns in the hands of any man who is not a trained rifleman.”

Keynes came in almost staggering under a basket of sheets, with three of the elaborate porcelain vases from their residence laid on top. “You are not my usual kind of patients,” he said, “but I can bandage and splint you, at any rate. I will be in the back by the pond. And I have brought these to carry water in,” he added, sardonic, jerking his chin at the vases. “I suppose they would bring fifty pounds each in auction, so let that be an encouragement not to drop them.”

“Roland, Dyer; which of you is the better hand at reloading?” Laurence asked. “Very well; you will both help Mr. Riggs for the first three volleys, then Dyer, you are to help Mr. Keynes, and run back and forth with the water jugs as that duty permits.”

“Laurence,” Granby said in an undertone, when the others had gone, “I don’t see any sign of all those guards anywhere, and they have always been used to patrol at this hour; they must have been called away by someone.”

Laurence nodded silently and waved him back to work. “Mr. Hammond, you will pray go behind the barricade,” he said, as the diplomat came to his side, Sun Kai with him.

“Captain Laurence, I beg you to listen to me,” Hammond said urgently. “We had much better go with Sun Kai at once. These attackers he expects are young bannermen, members of the Tartar tribes, who from poverty and lack of occupation have gone into a sort of local brigandage, and there may be a great many of them.”

“Will they have any artillery?” Laurence asked, paying no attention to the attempt at persuasion.

“Cannon? No, of course not; they do not even have muskets,” Sun Kai said, “but what does that matter? There may be one hundred of them or more, and I have heard rumors that some among them have even studied Shaolin Quan, in secret, though it is against the law.”

“And some of them may be, however distantly, kin to the Emperor,” Hammond added. “If we were to kill one, it could easily be used as a pretext for taking offense, and casting us out of the country; you must see we ought to leave at once.”

“Sir, you will give us some privacy,” Laurence said to Sun Kai, flatly, and the envoy did not argue, but silently bowed his head and moved some distance away.

“Mr. Hammond,” Laurence said, turning to him, “you yourself warned me to beware of attempts to separate me from Temeraire, now only consider: if he should return here, to find us gone, with no explanation and all our baggage gone also, how should he ever find us again? Perhaps he might even be convinced that we had been given a treaty and left him deliberately behind, as Yongxing once desired me to do.”

“And how will the case be improved if he returns and finds you dead, and all of us with you?” Hammond said impatiently. “Sun Kai has before now given us cause to trust him.”

“I give less weight to a small piece of inconsequential advice than you do, sir, and more to a long and deliberate lie of omission; he has unquestionably spied on us from the very beginning of our acquaintance,” Laurence said. “No; we are not going with him. It will not be more than a few hours before Temeraire returns, and I am confident in our holding out that long.”

“Unless they have found some means of distracting him, and keeping him longer at his visit,” Hammond said. “If the Chinese government meant to separate us from him, they could have done so by force at any time during his absence. I am sure Sun Kai can arrange to have a message sent to him at his mother’s residence once we have gone to safety.”

“Then let him go and send the message now, if he likes,” Laurence said. “You are welcome to go with him.”

“No, sir,” Hammond said, flushing, and turned on his heel to speak with Sun Kai. The former envoy shook his head and left, and Hammond went to take a cutlass from the ready heap.

They worked for another quarter of an hour, hauling in three of the queer-shaped boulders from outside to make the barricade for the riflemen, and dragging over the enormous dragon-couch to block off most of the entryway. The sun had gone by now, but the usual lanterns did not make their appearance around the island, nor any signs of human life at all.

“Sir!” Digby hissed suddenly, pointing out into the grounds. “Two points to starboard, outside the doors of the house.”

“Away from the entry,” Laurence said; he could not see anything in the twilight, but Digby’s young eyes were better than his. “Willoughby, douse that light.”

The soft click-click of the guns being cocked, the echo of his own breath in his ears, the constant untroubled hum of the flies and mosquitoes outside; these were at first the only noise, until use filtered them out and he could hear the light running footsteps outside: a great many men, he thought. Abruptly there was a crash of wood, several yells. “They’ve broken into the house, sir,” Hackley whispered hoarsely from the barricades.

“Quiet, there,” Laurence said, and they kept a silent vigil while the sound of breaking furniture and shattering glass came from the house. The flare of torches outside cast shadows into the pavilion, weaving and leaping in strange angles as a search commenced. Laurence heard men calling to each other outside, the sound coming down from the eaves of the roof. He glanced back; Riggs nodded, and the three riflemen raised their guns.

The first man appeared in the entrance and saw the wooden slab of the dragon-couch blocking it. “My shot,” Riggs said clearly, and fired: the Chinaman fell dead with his mouth open to shout.

But the report of the gun brought more cries from outside, and men came bursting in with swords and torches in their hands; a full volley fired off, killing another three, then one more shot from the last rifle, and Riggs called, “Prime and reload!”

The quick slaughter of their fellows had checked the advance of the larger body of men, and clustered them in the opening left in the doorway. Yelling “Temeraire!” and “England!” the aviators launched themselves from the shadows, and engaged the attackers close at hand.

The torchlight was painful to Laurence’s eyes after the long wait in the dark, and the smoke of the burning wood mingled with that from the musketry. There was no room for any real swordplay; they were engaged hilt-to-hilt, except when one of the Chinese swords broke—they smelled of rust—and a few men fell over. Otherwise they were all simply heaving back against the pressure of dozens of bodies, trying to come through the narrow opening.

Digby, being too slim to be of much use in the human wall, was stabbing at the attackers between their legs, their arms, through any space left open. “My pistols,” Laurence shouted at him; no chance to pull them free himself: he was holding his cutlass with two hands, one upon the hilt and another laid upon the flat of the blade, keeping off three men. They were packed so close together they could not move either way to strike at him, but could only raise and lower their swords in a straight line, trying to break his blade through sheer weight.

Digby pulled one of the pistols out of its holster, and fired, taking the man directly before Laurence between the eyes. The other two involuntarily pulled back, and Laurence managed to stab one in the belly, then seized the other by the sword-arm and threw him to the ground; Digby put a sword into his back, and he lay still.

“Present arms!” Riggs yelled, from behind, and Laurence bellowed, “Clear the door!” He swung a cut at the head of the man engaged with Granby, making him flinch back, and they scrambled back together, the polished stone floor already slick under their bootheels. Someone pushed the dripping jug into his hand; he swallowed a couple of times and passed it on, wiping his mouth and his forehead against his sleeve. The rifles all fired at once, and another couple of shots after; then they were back into the fray.

The attackers had already learned to fear the rifles, and they had left a little clear space before the door, many milling about a few paces off under the torches; they nearly filled the courtyard before the pavilion: Sun Kai’s estimate had not been exaggerated. Laurence shot a man six paces away, then flipped the pistol in his hand; as they came rushing back on, he clubbed another in the side of the head, and then he was again pushing back against the weight of the swords, until Riggs shouted again.

“Well done, gentlemen,” Laurence said, breathing deeply. The Chinese had retreated at the shout and were not immediately at the door; Riggs had experience enough to hold the volley until they advanced again. “For the moment, the advantage is ours. Mr. Granby, we will divide into two parties. Stay back this next wave, and we shall alternate. Therrows, Willoughby, Digby, with me; Martin, Blythe, and Hammond, with Granby.”

“I can go with both, sir,” Digby said. “I’m not tired at all, truly; it’s less work for me, since I can’t help to hold them.”

“Very well, but be sure to take water between, and stay back on occasion,” Laurence said. “There are a damned lot of them, as I dare say you have all seen,” he said candidly. “But our position is a good one, and I have no doubt we can hold them as long as ever need be, so long as we pace ourselves properly.”

“And see Keynes at once to be tied up if you take a cut or a blow—we cannot afford to lose anyone to slow bleeding,” Granby added to this, while Laurence nodded. “Only sing out, and someone will come to take your place in line.”

A sudden feverish many-voiced yell rose from outside, the men working themselves up to facing the volley, then a pounding of running feet, and Riggs shouted, “Fire!” as the attackers stormed the entryway again.

The fighting at the door was a greater strain now with fewer of them to hand, but the opening was sufficiently narrow that they could hold it even so. The bodies of the dead were forming a grisly addition to their barrier, piled now two and even three deep, and some of the attackers were forced to stretch over them to fight. The reloading time seemed queerly long, an illusion; Laurence was very glad of the rest when at last the next volley was ready. He leaned against the wall, drinking again from the vase; his arms and shoulders were aching from the constant pressure, and his knees.

“Is it empty, sir?” Dyer was there, anxious, and Laurence handed him the vase: he trotted away back towards the pond, through the haze of smoke shrouding the middle of the room; it was drifting slowly upwards, into the cavernous emptiness above.

Again the Chinese did not immediately storm the door, with the volley waiting. Laurence stepped a little way back into the pavilion and tried to look out, to see if he could make anything out beyond the front line of the struggle. But the torches dazzled his eyes too much: nothing but an impenetrable darkness beyond the first row of shining faces staring intently towards the entryway, feverish with the strain of battle. The time seemed long; he missed the ship’s glass, and the steady telling of the bell. Surely it had been an hour or two, by now; Temeraire would come soon.

A sudden clamor from outside, and a new rhythm of clapping hands. His hand went without thought to the cutlass hilt; the volley went off with a roar. “For England and the King!” Granby shouted, and led his group into the fray.

But the men at the entry were drawing back to either side, Granby and his fellows left standing uneasily in the opening. Laurence wondered if maybe they had some artillery after all. But instead abruptly a man came running at them down the open aisle, alone, as if intent on throwing himself onto their swords: they stood set, waiting. Not three paces distant he leapt into the air, landed somehow sideways against the column, and sprang off it literally over their heads, diving, and tucked himself neatly into a rolling somersault along the stone floor.

The maneuver defied gravity more thoroughly than any skylarking Laurence had ever seen done; ten feet into the air and down again with no propulsion but his own legs. The man leapt up at once, unbruised, now at Granby’s back with the main wave of attackers charging the entryway again. “Therrows, Willoughby,” Laurence bellowed to the men in his group, unnecessarily: they were already running to hold him back.

The man had no weapon, but his agility was beyond anything; he jumped away from their swinging swords in a manner that made them seem accomplices in a stage play rather than in deadly earnest, trying to kill him; and from his greater distance, Laurence could see he was drawing them steadily back, towards Granby and the others, where their swords could only become dangers to their comrades.

Laurence clapped on to his pistol and drew it out, his hands following the practiced sequence despite the dark and the furor; in his head he listened to the chant of the great-gun exercise, so nearly parallel. Ramrod down the muzzle with a rag, twice, and then he pulled back the hammer to half-cocked, groping after the paper cartridge in his hip pouch.

Therrows suddenly screamed and fell, clutching his knee. Willoughby’s head turned to look; his sword was held defensively, at the level of his chest, but in that one moment of incaution the Chinese man leapt again impossibly high and struck him full on the jaw with both feet. The sound of his neck snapping was grisly; he was lifted an inch straight up off the ground, arms splaying out wide, and then collapsed into a heap, his head lolling side-to-side upon the ground. The Chinese man tumbled to the ground from his leap, landed on his shoulder, rolling lightly back up, and turned to look at Laurence.

Riggs was yelling from behind him, “Make ready! Faster, damn you, make ready!”

Laurence’s hands were still working. Tearing open the cartridge of black powder with his teeth, a few grains like sand bitter on his tongue. Powder straight down the muzzle, then the round lead ball after, the paper in for wadding, rammed down hard; no time to check the primer, and he raised the gun and blew out the man’s brains, barely more than arm’s reach away.

Laurence and Granby dragged Therrows back over to Keynes while the Chinese backed away from the waiting volley. He was sobbing quietly, his leg dangling useless; “I’m sorry, sir,” he kept saying, choked.

“For Heaven’s sake, enough moan,” Keynes said sharply, when they put him down, and slapped Therrows across the face with a distinct lack of sympathy. The young man gulped, but stopped, and hastily scrubbed an arm across his face. “The kneecap is broken,” Keynes said, after a moment. “A clean enough break, but he won’t be standing again for a month.”

“Get over to Riggs when you have been splinted, and reload for them,” Laurence told Therrows, then he and Granby dashed back to the entryway.

“We’ll take rest by turns,” Laurence said, kneeling down by the others. “Hammond, you first; go and tell Riggs to keep one rifle back, loaded, at all times, if they should try and send another fellow over that way.”

Hammond was visibly heaving for breath, his cheeks marked with spots of bright red; he nodded and said hoarsely, “Leave your pistols, I will reload.”

Blythe, gulping water from the vase, abruptly choked, spat out a fountain, and yelled, “Sweet Christ in Heaven!” and made them all jump. Laurence looked around wildly: a bright orange goldfish two fingers long was wriggling on the stones in the puddled water. “Sorry,” Blythe said, panting. “I felt the bugger squirming in my mouth.”

Laurence stared, then Martin started laughing, and for a moment they were all grinning at one another; then the rifles cracked off, and they were back to the door.

The attackers made no attempt at setting the pavilion on fire, which surprised Laurence; they had torches enough, and wood was plentiful around the island. They did try smoke, building small bonfires to either side of the building under the eaves, but through either some trick of the pavilion’s design, or simply the prevailing wind, a drifting air current carried the smoke up and out through the yellow-tiled roof. It was unpleasant enough, but not deadly, and near the pond the air was fresh. Each round the one man resting would go back there, to drink and clear his lungs, and have the handful of scratches they had all by now accumulated smeared with salve and bound up if still bleeding.

The gang tried a battering ram, a fresh-cut tree with the branches and leaves still attached, but Laurence called, “Stand aside as they come, and cut at their legs.” The bearers ran themselves directly onto the blades with great courage, trying to break through, but even the three steps that led up to the pavilion door were enough to break their momentum. Several at the head fell with gashes showing bone, to be clubbed to death with pistol-butts, and then the tree itself toppled forward and halted their progress. The British had a few frantic minutes of hacking off the branches, to clear the view for the riflemen; by then the next volley was more than ready, and the attackers gave up the attempt.

After this the battle settled into a sort of grisly rhythm; each round of fire won them even more time to rest now, the Chinese evidently disheartened by their failure to break in through the small British line, and by the very great slaughter. Every bullet found its mark; Riggs and his men had been trained to make shots from the back of a dragon, flying sometimes at thirty knots in the heat of battle, and with less than thirty yards to the entryway, they could scarcely miss. It was a slow, grinding way to fight, every minute seeming to consume five times its proper length; Laurence began to count the time by volleys.

“We had better go to three shots only a volley, sir,” Riggs said, coughing, when Laurence knelt to speak with him, his next rest spell. “It’ll hold them all the same, now they’ve had a taste, and though I brought all the cartridges we had, we’re not bloody infantry. I have Therrows making us more, but we have enough powder for another thirty rounds at most, I think.”

“That will have to do,” Laurence said. “We will try and hold them longer between volleys. Start resting one man every other round, also.” He emptied his own cartridge box and Granby’s into the general pile: only another seven, but that meant two rounds more at least, and the rifles were of more value than the pistols.

He splashed his face with water at the pond, smiling a little at the darting fish which he could see more clearly now, his eyes perhaps adjusting to the dark. His neckcloth was soaked quite through with sweat; he took it off and wrung it out over the stones, then could not bring himself to put it back on once he had exposed his grateful skin to the air. He rinsed it clean and left it spread out to dry, then hurried back.

Another measureless stretch of time, the faces of the attackers growing blurry and dim in the doorway. Laurence was struggling to hold off a couple of men, shoulder-to-shoulder with Granby, when he heard Dyer’s high treble cry out, “Captain! Captain!” from behind. He could not turn and look; there was no opportunity for pause.

“I have them,” Granby panted, and kicked the man in front in the balls with his heavy Hessian boot; he engaged the other hilt-to-hilt, and Laurence pulled away and turned hurriedly around.

A couple of men were standing dripping on the edge of the pond, and another pulling himself out: they had somehow found whatever reservoir fed the pond, and swum through it underneath the wall. Keynes was sprawled unmoving on the floor, and Riggs and the other riflemen were running over, still reloading frantically as they went. Hammond had been resting: he was swinging furiously at the two other men, pushing them back towards the water, but he did not have much science: they had short knives, and would get under his guard in a moment.

Little Dyer seized one of the great vases and flung it, still full of water, into the man bending over Keynes’s body with his knife; it shattered against his head and knocked him down to the floor, dazed and slipping in the water. Roland, running over, snatched up Keynes’s tenaculum, and dragged the sharp hooked end across the man’s throat before he could arise, blood spurting in a furious jet from the severed vein, through his grasping fingers.

More men were coming out of the pond. “Fire at will,” Riggs shouted, and three went down, one of them shot with only his head protruding from the water, sinking back down below the surface in a spreading cloud of blood. Laurence was up beside Hammond, and together they forced the two he was struggling against back into the water: while Hammond kept swinging, Laurence stabbed one with the point of his cutlass, and clubbed the other with the hilt; he fell unconscious into the water, open-mouthed, and bubbles rose in a profusion from his lips.

“Push them all into the water,” Laurence said. “We must block up the passage.” He climbed into the pond, pushing the bodies against the current; he could feel a greater pressure coming from the other side, more men trying to come through. “Riggs, get your men back to the front and relieve Granby,” he said. “Hammond and I can hold them here.”

“I can help also,” Therrows said, limping over: he was a tall fellow, and could sit down on the edge of the pond and put his good leg against the mass of bodies.

“Roland, Dyer, see if there is anything to be done for Keynes,” Laurence said over his shoulder, and then looked when he did not hear a response immediately: they were both being sick in the corner, quietly.

Roland wiped her mouth and got up, looking rather like an unsteady-legged foal. “Yes, sir,” she said, and she and Dyer tottered over to Keynes. He groaned as they turned him over: there was a great clot of blood on his head, above the eyebrow, but he opened his eyes dazedly as they bound it up.

The pressure on the other side of the mass of bodies weakened, and slowly ceased; behind them the guns spoke again and again with suddenly quickened pace, Riggs and his men firing almost at the rate of redcoats. Laurence, trying to look over his shoulder, could not see anything through the haze of smoke.

“Therrows and I can manage, go!” Hammond gasped out. Laurence nodded and slogged out of the water, his full boots dragging like stones; he had to stop and pour them out before he could run to the front.

Even as he came, the shooting stopped: the smoke so thick and queerly bright they could not see anyone through it, only the broken heap of bodies around the floor at their feet. They stood waiting, Riggs and his men reloading more slowly, their fingers shaking. Then Laurence stepped forward, using a hand on the column for balance: there was nowhere to stand but on the corpses.

They came out blinking through the haze, into the early-morning sunlight, startling up a flock of crows that lifted from the bodies in the courtyard and fled shrieking hoarsely over the water of the lake. There was no one left moving in sight: the rest of the attackers had fled. Martin abruptly fell over onto his knees, his cutlass clanging un-musically on the stones; Granby went to help him up and ended by falling down also. Laurence groped to a small wooden bench before his own legs gave out; not caring very much that he was sharing it with one of the dead, a smooth-faced young man with a trail of red blood drying on his lips and a purpled stain around the ragged bullet wound in his chest.

There was no sign of Temeraire. He had not come.

Chapter 15

SUN KAI FOUND THEM scarcely more than dead themselves, an hour later; he had come warily into the courtyard from the pier with a small group of armed men: perhaps ten or so and formally dressed in guard uniforms, unlike the scruffy and unkempt members of the gang. The smoldering bonfires had gone out of their own accord, for lack of fuel; the British were dragging the corpses into the deepest shade, so they would putrefy less horribly.

They were all of them half-blind and numb with exhaustion, and could offer no resistance; helpless to account for Temeraire’s absence and with no other idea of what to do, Laurence submitted to being led to the boat, and thence to a stuffy, enclosed palanquin, whose curtains were drawn tight around him. He slept instantly upon the embroidered pillows, despite the jostling and shouts of their progress, and knew nothing more until at last the palanquin was set down, and he was shaken back to wakefulness.

“Come inside,” Sun Kai said, and pulled on him until he rose; Hammond and Granby and the other crewmen were emerging in similarly dazed and battered condition from other sedan-chairs behind him. Laurence followed unthinking up the stairs into the blessedly cool interior of a house, fragrant with traces of incense; along a narrow hallway and to a room which faced onto the garden courtyard. There he at once surged forward and leapt over the low balcony railing: Temeraire was lying curled asleep upon the stones.

“Temeraire,” Laurence called, and went towards him; Sun Kai exclaimed in Chinese and ran after him, catching his arm before he could touch Temeraire’s side; then the dragon raised up his head and looked at them, curiously, and Laurence stared: it was not Temeraire at all.

Sun Kai tried to drag Laurence down to the ground, kneeling down himself; Laurence shook him off, managing with difficulty to keep his balance. He noticed only then a young man of perhaps twenty, dressed in elegant silk robes of dark yellow embroidered with dragons, sitting on a bench.

Hammond had followed Laurence and now caught at his sleeve. “For God’s sake, kneel,” he whispered. “This must be Prince Mianning, the crown prince.” He himself went down to both knees, and pressed his forehead to the ground just as Sun Kai was doing.

Laurence stared a little stupidly down at them both, looked at the young man, and hesitated; then he bowed deeply instead, from the waist: he was mortally certain he could not bend a single knee without falling down to both, or more ignominiously upon his face, and he was not yet willing to perform the kowtow to the Emperor, much less the prince.

The prince did not seem offended, but spoke in Chinese to Sun Kai; he rose, and Hammond also, very slowly. “He says we can rest here safely,” Hammond said to Laurence. “I beg you to believe him, sir; he can have no need to deceive us.”

Laurence said, “Will you ask him about Temeraire?” Hammond looked at the other dragon blankly. “That is not him,” Laurence added. “It is some other Celestial, it is not Temeraire.”

Sun Kai said, “Lung Tien Xiang is in seclusion in the Pavilion of Endless Spring. A messenger is waiting to bring him word, as soon as he emerges.”

“He is well?” Laurence asked, not bothering to try and make sense of this; the most urgent concern was to understand what might have kept Temeraire away.

“There is no reason to think otherwise,” Sun Kai said, which seemed evasive. Laurence did not know how to press him further; he was too thick with fatigue. But Sun Kai took pity on his confusion and added more gently, “He is well. We cannot interrupt his seclusion, but he will come out sometime today, and we will bring him to you then.”

Laurence still did not understand, but he could not think of anything else to do at the moment. “Thank you,” he managed. “Pray thank His Highness for his hospitality, for us; pray convey our very deep thanks. I beg he will excuse any inadequacy in our address.”

The prince nodded and dismissed them with a wave. Sun Kai herded them back over the balcony into their rooms, and stood watching over them until they had collapsed upon the hard wooden bed platforms; perhaps he did not trust them not to leap up and go wandering again. Laurence almost laughed at the improbability of it, and fell asleep mid-thought.

“Laurence, Laurence,” Temeraire said, very anxiously; Laurence opened his eyes and found Temeraire’s head poked in through the balcony doors, and a darkening sky beyond. “Laurence, you are not hurt?”

“Oh!” Hammond had woken, and fallen off his bed in startlement at finding himself cheek-to-jowl with Temeraire’s muzzle. “Good God,” he said, painfully climbing to his feet and sitting back down upon the bed. “I feel like a man of eighty with gout in both legs.”

Laurence sat up with only a little less effort; every muscle had stiffened up during his rest. “No, I am quite well,” he said, reaching out gratefully to put a hand on Temeraire’s muzzle and feel the reassurance of his solid presence. “You have not been ill?”

He did not mean it to sound accusing, but he could hardly imagine any other excuse for Temeraire’s apparent desertion, and perhaps some of his feeling was clear in his tone. Temeraire’s ruff drooped. “No,” he said, miserably. “No, I am not sick at all.”

He volunteered nothing more, and Laurence did not press him, conscious of Hammond’s presence: Temeraire’s shy behavior did not bode a very good explanation for his absence, and as little as Laurence might relish the prospect of confronting him, he liked the notion of doing so in front of Hammond even less. Temeraire withdrew his head to let them come out into the garden. No acrobatic leaping this time: Laurence levered himself out of bed and stepped slowly and carefully over the balcony rail. Hammond, following, was almost unable to lift his foot high enough to clear the rail, though it was scarcely two feet off the ground.

The prince had left, but the dragon, whom Temeraire introduced to them as Lung Tien Chuan, was still there. He nodded to them politely, without much interest, then went straight back to working upon a large tray of wet sand in which he was scratching symbols with a talon: writing poetry, Temeraire explained.

Having made his bow to Chuan, Hammond groaned again as he lowered himself onto a stool, muttering under his breath with a degree of profanity more appropriate to the seamen from whom he had likely first heard the oaths. It was not a very graceful performance, but Laurence was perfectly willing to forgive him that and more after the previous day’s work. He had never expected Hammond to do as much, untrained, untried, and in disagreement with the whole enterprise.

“If I may be so bold, sir, allow me to recommend you take a turn around the garden instead of sitting,” Laurence said. “I have often found it answer well.”

“I suppose I had better,” Hammond said, and after a few deep breaths heaved himself back up to his feet, not disdaining the offer of Laurence’s hand, and walking very slowly at first. But Hammond was a young man: he was already walking more easily after they had gone halfway round. With the worst of his pain relieved, Hammond’s curiosity revived: as they continued walking around the garden he studied the two dragons closely, his steps slowing as he turned first from one to the other and back. The courtyard was longer than it was wide. Stands of tall bamboo and a few smaller pine trees clustered at the ends, leaving the middle mostly open, so the two dragons lay opposite each other, head-to-head, making the comparison easier.

They were indeed as like as mirror images, except for the difference in their jewels: Chuan wore a net of gold draped from his ruff down the length of his neck, studded with pearls: very splendid, but it looked likely to be inconvenient in any sort of violent activity. Temeraire had also battle-scars, of which Chuan had none: the round knot of scales on his breast from the spiked ball, now several months old, and the smaller scratches from other battles. But these were difficult to see, and aside from these the only difference was a certain undefinable quality in their posture and expression, which Laurence could not have adequately described for another’s interpretation.

“Can it be chance?” Hammond said. “All Celestials may be related, but such a degree of similarity? I cannot tell them apart.”

“We are hatched from twin eggs,” Temeraire said, lifting up his head as he overheard this. “Chuan’s egg was first, and then mine.”

“Oh, I have been unutterably slow,” Hammond said, and sat down limply on the bench. “Laurence—Laurence—” His face was almost shining from within, and he reached out groping towards Laurence, and seized his hand and shook it. “Of course, of course: they did not want to set up another prince as a rival for the throne, that is why they sent away the egg. My God, how relieved I am!”

“Sir, I hardly dispute your conclusions, but I cannot see what difference it makes to our present situation,” Laurence said, rather taken aback by this enthusiasm.

“Do you not see?” Hammond said. “Napoleon was only an excuse, because he is an emperor on the other side of the world, as far away as they could manage from their own court. And all this time I have been wondering how the devil De Guignes ever managed to approach them, when they would scarcely let me put my nose out of doors. Ha! The French have no alliance, no real understanding with them at all.”

“That is certainly cause for relief,” Laurence said, “but their lack of success does not seem to me to directly improve our position; plainly the Chinese have now changed their minds, and desire Temeraire’s return.”

“No, do you not see? Prince Mianning still has every reason to want Temeraire gone, if he could render another claimant eligible for the throne,” Hammond said. “Oh, this makes all the difference in the world. I have been groping in the dark; now I have some sense of their motives, a great deal more comes clear. How much longer will it be until the Allegiance arrives?” he asked suddenly, looking up at Laurence.

“I know too little about the likely currents and the prevailing winds in the Bay of Zhitao to make any accurate estimate,” Laurence said, taken aback. “A week at least, I should think.”

“I wish to God Staunton were here already. I have a thousand questions and not enough answers,” Hammond said. “But I can at least try and coax a little more information from Sun Kai: I hope he will be a little more forthright now. I will go and seek him; I beg your pardon.”

At this, he turned and ducked back into the house. Laurence called after him belatedly, “Hammond, your clothes—!” for his breeches were unbuckled at the knee, they and his shirt hideously bloodstained besides, and his stockings thoroughly laddered: he looked a proper spectacle. But it was too late: he had gone.

Laurence supposed no one could blame them for their appearance, as they had been brought over without baggage. “Well, at least he is gone to some purpose; and we cannot but be relieved by this news that there is no alliance with France,” he said to Temeraire.

“Yes,” Temeraire said, but unenthusiastically. He had been quite silent all this time, brooding and coiled about the garden. The tip of his tail continued flicking back and forth restlessly at the edge of the nearer pond and spattering thick black spots onto the sun-heated flagstones, which dried almost as quickly as they appeared.

Laurence did not immediately press him for explanation, even now Hammond had gone, but came and sat by his head. He hoped deeply that Temeraire would speak of his own volition, and not require questioning.

“Are all the rest of my crew all right also?” Temeraire asked after a moment.

Laurence said, “Willoughby has been killed, I am very sorry to tell you. A few injuries besides, but nothing else mortal, thankfully.”

Temeraire trembled and made a low keening sound deep in his throat. “I ought to have come. If I had been there, they could never have done it.”

Laurence was silent, thinking of poor Willoughby: a damned ugly waste. “You did very wrong not to send word,” he said finally. “I cannot hold you culpable in Willoughby’s death. He was killed early, before you would ordinarily have come back, and I do not think I would have done anything differently, had I known you were not returning. But certainly you have violated your leave.”

Temeraire made another small unhappy noise and said, low, “I have failed in my duty; have I not? So it was my fault, then, and there is nothing else to be said about it.”

Laurence said, “No, if you had sent word, I would have thought nothing of agreeing to your extended absence: we had every reason to think our position perfectly secure. And in all justice, you have never been formally instructed in the rules of leave in the Corps, as they have never been necessary for a dragon, and it was my responsibility to be sure you understood.

“I am not trying to comfort you,” he added, seeing that Temeraire shook his head. “But I wish you to feel what you have in fact done wrong, and not to distract yourself improperly with false guilt over what you could not have controlled.”

“Laurence, you do not understand,” Temeraire said. “I have always understood the rules quite well; that is not why I did not send word. I did not mean to stay so long, only I did not notice the time passing.”

Laurence did not know what to say. The idea that Temeraire had not noticed the passage of a full night and day, when he had always been used to come back before dark, was difficult to swallow, if not impossible. If such an excuse had been given him by one of his men, Laurence would have outright called it a lie; as it was, his silence betrayed what he thought of it.

Temeraire hunched his shoulders and scratched a little at the ground, his claws scraping the stones with a noise that made Chuan look up and put his ruff back, with a quick rumble of complaint. Temeraire stopped; then all at once he said abruptly, “I was with Mei.”

“With who?” Laurence said, blankly.

“Lung Qin Mei,” Temeraire said, “—she is an Imperial.”

The shock of understanding was near a physical blow. There was a mixture of embarrassment, guilt, and confused pride in Temeraire’s confession which made everything plain.

“I see,” Laurence said with an effort, as controlled as ever he had been in his life. “Well—” He stopped, and mastered himself. “You are young, and—and have never courted before; you cannot have known how it would take you,” he said. “I am glad to know the reason; that is some excuse.” He tried to believe his own words; he did believe them; only he did not particularly want to forgive Temeraire’s absence on such grounds. Despite his quarrel with Hammond over Yongxing’s attempts to supplant him with the boy, Laurence had never really feared losing Temeraire’s affections; it was bitter, indeed, to find himself so unexpectedly with real cause for jealousy after all.

They buried Willoughby in the grey hours of the morning, in a vast cemetery outside the city walls, to which Sun Kai brought them. It was crowded for a burial place, even considering the extent, with many small groups of people paying respects at the tombs. These visitors’ interest was caught by both Temeraire’s presence and the Western party, and shortly something of a procession had formed behind them, despite the guards who pushed off any too-curious onlookers.

But though the crowd shortly numbered several hundreds of people, they maintained an attitude of respect, and fell to perfect silence while Laurence somberly spoke a few words for the dead and led his men in the Lord’s Prayer. The tomb was above-ground, and built of white stone, with an upturned roof very like the local houses; it looked elaborate even in comparison with the neighboring mausoleums. “Laurence, if it wouldn’t be disrespectful, I think his mother would be glad of a sketch,” Granby said quietly.

“Yes, I ought to have thought of it myself,” Laurence said. “Digby, do you think you could knock something together?”

“Please allow me to have an artist prepare one,” Sun Kai interjected. “I am ashamed not to have offered before. And assure his mother that all the proper sacrifices will be made; a young man of good family has already been selected by Prince Mianning to carry out all the rites.” Laurence assented to these arrangements without investigating further; Mrs. Willoughby was, as he recalled, a rather strict Methodist, and he was sure would be happier not to know more than that her son’s tomb was so elegant and would be well-maintained.

Afterwards Laurence returned to the island with Temeraire and a few of the men to collect their possessions, which had been left behind in the hurry and confusion. All the bodies had been cleared away already, but the smoke-blackened patches remained upon the outer walls of the pavilion where they had sheltered, and dried bloodstains upon the stones; Temeraire looked at them a long time, silently, and then turned his head away. Inside the residence, furniture had been wildly overturned, the rice-paper screens torn through, and most of their chests smashed open, clothing flung onto the floor and trampled upon.

Laurence walked through the rooms as Blythe and Martin began collecting whatever they could find in good enough condition to bother with. His own chamber had been thoroughly pillaged, the bed itself flung up on its side against the wall, as if they had thought him maybe cowering underneath, and his many bundles from the shopping expedition thrown rudely about the room. Powder and bits of shattered porcelain trickled out across the floor behind some of them like a trail, strips of torn and frayed silk hanging almost decoratively about the room. Laurence bent down and lifted up the large shapeless package of the red vase, fallen over in a corner of the room, and slowly took off the wrappings; and then he found himself looking upon it through an unaccountable blurring of his vision: the shining surface wholly undamaged, not even chipped, and in the afternoon sun it poured out over his hands a living richness of deep and scarlet light.

The true heart of the summer had struck the city now: the stones grew hot as worked anvils during the day, and the wind blew an endless stream of fine yellow dust from the enormous deserts of the Gobi to the west. Hammond was engaged in a slow elaborate dance of negotiations, which so far as Laurence could see proceeded only in circles: a sequence of wax-sealed letters coming back and forth from the house, some small trinkety gifts received and sent in return, vague promises and less action. In the meantime, they were all growing short-tempered and impatient, except for Temeraire, who was occupied still with his education and his courting. Mei now came to the residence to teach him daily, elegant in an elaborate collar of silver and pearls; her hide was a deep shade of blue, with dapplings of violet and yellow upon her wings, and she wore many golden rings upon her talons.

“Mei is a very charming dragon,” Laurence said to Temeraire after her first visit, feeling he might as well be properly martyred; it had not escaped his attention that Mei was very lovely, at least as far as he was a judge of draconic beauty.

“I am glad you think so also,” Temeraire said, brightening; the points of his ruff raised and quivered. “She was hatched only three years ago, and has just passed the first examinations with honor. She has been teaching me how to read and write, and has been very kind; she has not at all made fun of me, for not knowing.”

She could not have complained of her pupil’s progress, Laurence was sure. Already Temeraire had mastered the technique of writing in the sand tray-tables with his talons, and Mei praised his calligraphy done in clay; soon she promised to begin teaching him the more rigid strokes used for carving in soft wood. Laurence watched him scribbling industriously late into the afternoon, while the light lasted, and often played audience for him in Mei’s absence: the rich sonorous tones of Temeraire’s voice pleasant though the words of the Chinese poetry were meaningless, except when he stopped in a particularly nice passage to translate.

The rest of them had little to occupy their time: Mianning occasionally gave them a dinner, and once an entertainment consisting of a highly unmusical concert and the tumbling of some remarkable acrobats, nearly all young children and limber as mountain goats. Occasionally they drilled with their small-arms in the courtyard behind the residence, but it was not very pleasant in the heat, and they were glad to return to the cool walks and gardens of the palace after.

Some two weeks following their remove to the palace, Laurence sat reading in the balcony overlooking the courtyard, where Temeraire slept, while Hammond worked on papers at the writing-desk within the room. A servant came bearing them a letter: Hammond broke the seal and scanned the lines, telling Laurence, “It is from Liu Bao, he has invited us to dine at his home.”

“Hammond, do you suppose there is any chance he might be involved?” Laurence asked reluctantly, after a moment. “I do not like to suggest such a thing, but after all, we know he is not in Mianning’s service, like Sun Kai is; could he be in league with Yongxing?”

“It is true we cannot rule out his possible involvement,” Hammond said. “As a Tartar himself, Liu Bao would likely have been able to organize the attack upon us. Still, I have learned he is a relation of the Emperor’s mother, and an official in the Manchu White Banner; his support would be invaluable, and I find it hard to believe he would openly invite us if he meant anything underhanded.”

They went warily, but their plans for caution were thoroughly undermined as they arrived, met unexpectedly at the gates by the rich savory smell of roasted beef. Liu Bao had ordered his now well-traveled cooks to prepare a traditional British dinner for them, and if there was rather more curry than one would expect in the fried potatoes, and the currant-studded pudding inclined to be somewhat liquid, none of them found anything to complain of in the enormous crown roast, the upstanding ribs jeweled with whole onions, and the Yorkshire pudding was improbably successful.

Despite their very best efforts, the last plates were again carried away almost full, and there was some doubt whether a number of the guests would not have to be carted off in the same manner, including Temeraire. He had been served with plain, freshly butchered prey, in the British manner, but the cooks could not restrain themselves entirely and had served him not merely a cow or sheep, but two of each, as well as a pig, a goat, a chicken, and a lobster. Having done his duty by each course, he now crawled out into the garden uninvited with a little moan and collapsed into a stupor.

“That is all right, let him sleep!” Liu Bao said, waving away Laurence’s apology. “We can sit in the moon-viewing terrace and drink wine.”

Laurence girded himself, but for once Liu Bao did not press the wine on them them too enthusiastically. It was quite pleasant to sit, suffused with the steady genial warmth of inebriation, the sun going down behind the smoke-blue mountains and Temeraire drowsing in an aureate glow before them. Laurence had entirely if irrationally given up the idea of Liu Bao’s involvement: it was impossible to be suspicious of a man while sitting in his garden, full of his generous dinner; and even Hammond was half-unwillingly at his ease, blinking with the effort of keeping awake.

Liu Bao expressed some curiosity as to how they had come to take up residence with Prince Mianning. For further proofs of his innocence, he received the news of the gang attack with real surprise, and shook his head sympathetically. “Something has to be done about these hunhun, they are really getting out of hand. One of my nephews got involved with them a few years ago, and his poor mother worried herself almost to death. But then she made a big sacrifice to Guanyin and built her a special altar in the nicest place in their south garden, and now he has married and taken up studying.” He poked Laurence in the side. “You ought to try studying yourself! It will be embarrassing for you if your dragon passes the examinations and you don’t.”

“Good God, could that possibly make a difference in their minds, Hammond?” Laurence asked, sitting up appalled. For all his efforts, Chinese remained to him as impenetrable as if it were enciphered ten times over, and as for sitting examinations next to men who had been studying for them since the age of seven—

But, “I am only teasing you,” Liu Bao said good-humoredly, much to Laurence’s relief. “Don’t be afraid. I suppose if Lung Tien Xiang really wants to stay companion to an unlettered barbarian, no one can argue with him.”

“He is joking about calling you that, of course,” Hammond added to the translation, but a little doubtfully.

“I am an unlettered barbarian, by their standards of learning, and not stupid enough to make pretensions to be anything else,” Laurence said. “I only wish that the negotiators took your view of it, sir,” he added to Liu Bao. “But they are quite fixed that a Celestial may only be companion to the Emperor and his kin.”

“Well, if the dragon will not have anyone else, they will have to live with it,” Liu Bao said, unconcerned. “Why doesn’t the Emperor adopt you? That would save face for everyone.”

Laurence was disposed to think this a joke, but Hammond stared at Liu Bao with quite a different expression. “Sir, would such a suggestion be seriously entertained?”

Liu Bao shrugged and filled their cups again with wine. “Why not? The Emperor has three sons to perform the rites for him, he doesn’t need to adopt anyone; but another doesn’t hurt.”

“Do you mean to pursue the notion?” Laurence asked Hammond, rather incredulous, as they made their staggering way out to the sedan-chairs waiting to bear them back to the palace.

“With your permission, certainly,” Hammond said. “It is an extraordinary idea to be sure, but after all it would be understood on all sides as only a formality. Indeed,” he continued, growing more enthusiastic, “I think it would answer in every possible respect. Surely they would not lightly declare war upon a nation related by such intimate ties, and only consider the advantages to our trade of such a connection.”

Laurence could more easily consider his father’s likely reaction. “If you think it a worthwhile course to pursue, I will not forestall you,” he said reluctantly, but he did not think the red vase, which he had been hoping to use as something of a peace-offering, would be in any way adequate to mend matters if Lord Allendale should learn that Laurence had given himself up for adoption like a foundling, even to the Emperor of China.

Chapter 16

“IT WAS A close-run affair before we arrived, that much I can tell you,” Riley said, accepting a cup of tea across the breakfast table with more eagerness than he had taken the bowl of rice porridge. “I have never seen the like: a fleet of twenty ships, with two dragons for support. Of course they were only junks, and not half the size of a frigate, but the Chinese navy ships were hardly any bigger. I cannot imagine what they were about, to let a lot of pirates get so out of hand.”

“I was impressed by their admiral, however; he seemed a rational sort of man,” Staunton put in. “A lesser man would not have liked being rescued.”

“He would have been a great gaby to prefer being sunk,” Riley said, less generous.

The two of them had arrived only that morning, with a small party from the Allegiance: having been shocked by the story of the murderous gang attack, they were now describing the adventure of their own passage through the China Sea. A week out of Macao, they had encountered a Chinese fleet attempting to subdue an enormous band of pirates, who had established themselves in the Zhoushan Islands to prey upon both domestic shipping and the smaller ships of the Western trade.

“There was not much trouble once we were there, of course,” Riley went on. “The pirate dragons had no armaments—the crews tried to fire arrows at us, if you can credit it—and no sense of range at all; dived so low we could hardly miss them at musket-shot, much less with the pepper-guns. They sheered off pretty quick after a taste of that, and we sank three of the pirates with a single broadside.”

“Did the Admiral say anything about how he would report the incident?” Hammond asked Staunton.

“I can only tell you that he was punctilious in expressing his gratitude. He came aboard our ship, which was I believe a concession on his part.”

“And let him have a good look at our guns,” Riley said. “I fancy he was more interested in those than in being polite. But at any rate, we saw him to port, and then came on; she’s anchored in Tien-sing harbor now. No chance of our leaving soon?”

“I do not like to tempt fate, but I hardly think so,” Hammond said. “The Emperor is still away on his summer hunting trip up to the north, and he will not return to the Summer Palace for several weeks more. At that time I expect we will be given a formal audience.

“I have been putting forward this notion of adoption, which I described to you, sir,” he added to Staunton. “We have already received some small amount of support, not only from Prince Mianning, and I have high hopes that the service which you have just performed for them will sway opinion decisively in our favor.”

“Is there any difficulty in the ship’s remaining where she is?” Laurence asked with concern.

“For the moment, no, but I must say, supplies are dearer than I had looked for,” Riley said. “They have nothing like salt meat for sale, and the prices they ask for cattle are outrageous; we have been feeding the men on fish and chickens.”

“Have we outrun our funds?” Laurence too late began to regret his purchases. “I have been a little extravagant, but I do have some gold left, and they make no bones about taking it once they see it is real.”

“Thank you, Laurence, but I don’t need to rob you; we are not in dun territory yet,” Riley said. “I am mostly thinking about the journey home—with a dragon to feed, I hope?”

Laurence did not know how to answer the question; he made some evasion, and fell silent to let Hammond carry on the conversation.

After their breakfast, Sun Kai came by to inform them that a feast and an entertainment would be held that evening, to welcome the new arrivals: a great theatrical performance. “Laurence, I am going to go and see Qian,” Temeraire said, poking his head into the room while Laurence contemplated his clothing. “You will not go out, will you?”

He had grown singularly more protective since the assault, refusing to leave Laurence unattended; the servants had all suffered his narrow and suspicious inspection for weeks, and he had put forward several thoughtful suggestions for Laurence’s protection, such as devising a schedule which should arrange for Laurence’s being kept under a five-man guard at all hours, or drawing in his sand-table a proposed suit of armor which would not have been unsuited to the battlefields of the Crusades.

“No, you may rest easy; I am afraid I will have enough to do to make myself presentable,” Laurence said. “Pray give her my regards; will you be there long? We cannot be late tonight, this engagement is in our honor.”

“No, I will come back very soon,” Temeraire said, and true to his word returned less than an hour later, ruff quivering with suppressed excitement and clutching a long narrow bundle carefully in his forehand.

Laurence came out into the courtyard at his request, and Temeraire nudged the package over to him rather abashedly. Laurence was so taken aback he only stared at first, then he slowly removed the silk wrappings and opened the lacquered box: an elaborate smooth-hilted saber lay next to its scabbard on a yellow silk cushion. He lifted it from its bed: well-balanced, broad at the base, with the curved tip sharpened along both edges; the surface watered like good Damascus steel, with two blood grooves cut along the back edge to lighten the blade.

The hilt was wrapped in black ray-skin, the fittings of gilded iron adorned with gold beads and small pearls, and a gold dragon-head collar at the base of the blade with two small sapphires for eyes. The scabbard itself of black lacquered wood was also decorated with broad gold bands of gilded iron, and strung with strong silk cords: Laurence took his rather shabby if serviceable cutlass off his belt and buckled the new one on.

“Does it suit you?” Temeraire asked anxiously.

“Very well indeed,” Laurence said, drawing out the blade for practice: the length admirably fitted to his height. “My dear, this is beyond anything; however did you get it?”

“Well, it is not all my doing,” Temeraire said. “Last week, Qian admired my breastplate, and I told her you had given it to me; then I thought I would like to give you a present also. She said it was usual for the sire and dame to give a gift when a dragon takes a companion, so I might choose one for you from her things, and I thought this was the nicest.” He turned his head to one side and another, inspecting Laurence with deep satisfaction.

“You must be quite right; I could not imagine a better,” Laurence said, attempting to master himself; he felt quite absurdly happy and absurdly reassured, and on going back inside to complete his dress could not help but stand and admire the sword in the mirror.

Hammond and Staunton had both adopted the Chinese scholar-robes; the rest of his officers wore their bottle-green coats, trousers, and Hessians polished to a gleam; neckcloths had been washed and pressed, and even Roland and Dyer were perfectly smart, having been set on chairs and admonished not to move the moment they were bathed and dressed. Riley was similarly elegant in Navy blue, knee-breeches and slippers, and the four Marines whom he had brought from the ship in their lobster-red coats brought up the end of their company in style as they left the residence.

A curious stage had been erected in the middle of the plaza where the performance was to be held: small, but marvelously painted and gilded, with three different levels. Qian presided at the center of the northern end of the court, Prince Mianning and Chuan on her left, and a place for Temeraire and the British party reserved upon her right. Besides the Celestials, there were also several Imperials present, including Mei, seated farther down the side and looking very graceful in a rig of gold set with polished jade: she nodded to Laurence and Temeraire from her place as they took their seats. The white dragon, Lien, was there also, seated with Yongxing to one side, a little apart from the rest of the guests; her albino coloration again startling by contrast with the dark-hued Imperials and Celestials on every side, and her proudly raised ruff today adorned with a netting of fine gold mesh, with a great pendant ruby lying upon her forehead.

“Oh, there is Miankai,” Roland said in undertones to Dyer, and waved quickly across the square to a boy sitting by Mianning’s side. The boy wore robes similar to the crown prince’s, of the same dark shade of yellow, and an elaborate hat; he sat very stiff and proper. Seeing Roland’s wave, he lifted his hand partway to respond, then dropped it again hastily, glanced down the table towards Yongxing, as if to see if he had been noticed in the gesture, and sat back relieved when he realized he had not drawn the older man’s attention.

“How on earth do you know Prince Miankai? Has he ever come by the crown prince’s residence?” Hammond asked. Laurence also would have liked to know, as on his orders the runners had not been allowed out of their quarters alone at all, and ought not have had any opportunity of getting to know anyone else, even another child.

Roland looking up at him said, surprised, “Why, you presented him to us, on the island,” and Laurence looked hard again. It might have been the boy who had visited them before, in Yongxing’s company, but it was almost impossible to tell; swathed in the formal clothing, the boy looked entirely different.

“Prince Miankai?” Hammond said. “The boy Yongxing brought was Prince Miankai?” He might have said something more; certainly his lips moved. But nothing at all could be heard over the sudden roll of drums: the instruments evidently hidden somewhere within the stage, but the sound quite unmuffled and about the volume of a moderate broadside, perhaps twenty-four guns, at close range.

The performance was baffling, of course, being entirely transacted in Chinese, but the movement of the scenery and the participants was clever: figures rose and dropped between the three different levels, flowers bloomed, clouds floated by, the sun and moon rose and set; all amid elaborate dances and mock swordplay. Laurence was fascinated by the spectacle, though the noise was scarcely to be imagined, and after some time his head began to ache sadly. He wondered if even the Chinese could understand the words being spoken, what with the din of drums and jangling instruments and the occasional explosion of firecrackers.

He could not apply to Hammond or Staunton for explanation: through the entire proceeding the two of them were attempting to carry on a conversation in pantomime, and paying no attention whatsoever to the stage. Hammond had brought an opera-glass, which they used only to peer across the courtyard at Yongxing, and the gouts of smoke and flame which formed part of the first act’s extraordinary finale only drew their exclamations of annoyance at disrupting the view.

There was a brief gap in the proceedings while the stage was reset for the second act, and the two of them seized the few moments to converse. “Laurence,” Hammond said, “I must beg your pardon; you were perfectly right. Plainly Yongxing did mean to make the boy Temeraire’s companion in your place, and now at last I understand why: he must mean to put the boy on the throne, somehow, and establish himself as regent.”

“Is the Emperor ill, or an old man?” Laurence said, puzzled.

“No,” Staunton said meaningfully. “Not in the least.”

Laurence stared. “Gentlemen, you sound as though you are accusing him of regicide and fratricide both; you cannot be serious.”

“I only wish I were not,” Staunton said. “If he does make such an attempt, we might end in the middle of a civil war, with nothing more likely for us than disaster regardless of the outcome.”

“It will not come to that now,” Hammond said, confidently. “Prince Mianning is no fool, and I expect the Emperor is not, either. Yongxing brought the boy to us incognito for no good reason, and they will not fail to see that, nor that it is of a piece with the rest of his actions, once I lay them all before Prince Mianning. First his attempts to bribe you, with terms that I now wonder if he had the authority to offer, and then his servant attacking you on board the ship; and recall, the hunhun gang came at us directly after you refused to allow him to throw Temeraire and the boy into each other’s company; all of it forms a very neat and damning picture.”

He spoke almost exultantly, not very cautious, and started when Temeraire, who had overheard all, said with dawning anger, “Are you saying that we have evidence, now, then? That Yongxing has been behind all of this—that he is the one who tried to hurt Laurence, and had Willoughby killed?” His great head rose and swiveled at once towards Yongxing, his slit pupils narrowing to thin black lines.

“Not here, Temeraire,” Laurence said hurriedly, laying a hand on his side. “Pray do nothing for the moment.”

“No, no,” Hammond said also, alarmed. “I am not yet certain, of course; it is only hypothetical, and we cannot take any action against him ourselves—we must leave it in their hands—”

The actors moved to take their places upon the stage, putting an end to the immediate conversation; yet beneath his hand Laurence could feel the angry resonance deep within Temeraire’s breast, a slow rolling growl that found no voice but lingered just short of sound. His talons gripped at the edges of the flagstones, his spiked ruff at half-mast and his nostrils red and flaring; he paid no more mind to the spectacle, all his attention given over to watching Yongxing.

Laurence stroked his side again, trying to distract him: the square was crowded full of guests and scenery, and he did not like to imagine the results if Temeraire were to leap to some sort of action, for all he would gladly have liked to indulge his own anger and indignation towards the man. Worse, Laurence could not think how Yongxing was to be dealt with. The man was still the Emperor’s brother, and the plot which Hammond and Staunton imagined too outrageous to be easily believed.

A crash of cymbals and deep-voiced bells came from behind the stage, and two elaborate rice-paper dragons descended, crackling sparks flying from their nostrils; beneath them nearly the entire company of actors came running out around the base of the stage, swords and paste-jeweled knives waving, to enact a great battle. The drums again rolled out their thunder, the noise so vast it was almost like the shock of a blow, driving air out of his lungs. Laurence gasped for breath, then slowly put a groping hand up to his shoulder and found a short dagger’s hilt jutting from below his collarbone.

“Laurence!” Hammond said, reaching for him, and Granby was shouting at the men and thrusting aside the chairs: he and Blythe put themselves in front of Laurence. Temeraire was turning his head to look down at him.

“I am not hurt,” Laurence said, confusedly: there was queerly no pain at first, and he tried to stand up, to lift his arm, and then felt the wound; blood was spreading in a warm stain around the base of the knife.

Temeraire gave a shrill, terrible cry, cutting through all the noise and music; every dragon reared back on its hindquarters to stare, and the drums stopped abruptly: in the sudden silence Roland was crying out, “He threw it, over there, I saw him!” and pointing at one of the actors.

The man was empty-handed, in the midst of all the others still carrying their counterfeit weapons, and dressed in plainer clothing. He saw that his attempt to hide among them had failed and turned to flee too late; the troupe ran screaming in all directions as Temeraire flung himself almost clumsily into the square.

The man shrieked, once, as Temeraire’s claws caught and dragged mortally deep furrows through his body. Temeraire threw the bloody corpse savaged and broken to the ground; for a moment he hung over it low and brooding, to be sure the man was dead, and then raised his head and turned on Yongxing; he bared his teeth and hissed, a murderous sound, and stalked towards him. At once Lien sprang forward, placing herself protectively in front of Yongxing; she struck down Temeraire’s reaching talons with a swipe of her own foreleg and growled.

In answer, Temeraire’s chest swelled out, and his ruff, queerly, stretched: something Laurence had never seen before, the narrow horns which made it up expanding outwards, the webbing drawn along with it. Lien did not flinch at all, but snarled almost contemptuously at him, her own parchment-pale ruff unfolding wide; the blood vessels in her eyes swelled horribly, and she stepped farther into the square to face him.

At once there was a general hasty movement to flee the courtyard. Drums and bells and twanging strings made a terrific noise as the rest of the actors decamped from the stage, dragging their instruments and costumes with them; the audience members picked up the skirts of their robes and hurried away with a little more dignity but no less speed.

“Temeraire, no!” Laurence called, understanding too late. Every legend of dragons dueling in the wild invariably ended in the destruction of one or both: and the white dragon was clearly the elder and larger. “John, get this damned thing out,” he said to Granby, struggling to unwind his neckcloth with his good hand.

“Blythe, Martin, hold his shoulders,” Granby directed them, then laid hold of the knife and pulled it loose, grating against bone; the blood spurted for a single dizzy moment, and then they clapped a pad made of their neckcloths over the wound, and tied it firmly down.

Temeraire and Lien were still facing each other, feinting back and forth in small movements, barely more than a twitch of the head in either direction. They did not have much room to maneuver, the stage occupying so much of the courtyard, and the rows of empty seats still lining the edges. Their eyes never left each other.

“There’s no use,” Granby said quietly, gripping Laurence by the arm, helping him to his feet. “Once they’ve set themselves on to duel like that, you can only get killed, trying to get between them, or distract him from the battle.”

“Yes, very well,” Laurence said harshly, putting off their hands. His legs had steadied, though his stomach was knotted and uncertain; the pain was not worse than he could manage. “Get well clear,” he ordered, turning around to the crew. “Granby, take a party back to the residence and bring back our arms, in case that fellow should try to set any of the guards on him.”

Granby dashed away with Martin and Riggs, while the other men climbed hastily over the seats and got back from the fighting. The square was now nearly deserted, except for a few curiosity-seekers with more bravery than sense, and those most intimately concerned: Qian observing with a look at once anxious and disapproving, and Mei some distance behind her, having retreated in the general rush and then crept partway back.

Prince Mianning also remained, though withdrawn a prudent distance: even so, Chuan was fidgeting and plainly concerned. Mianning laid a quieting hand on Chuan’s side and spoke to his guards: they snatched up young Prince Miankai and carried him off to safety, despite his loud protests. Yongxing watched the boy taken away and nodded to Mianning coolly in approval, himself disdaining to move from his place.

The white dragon abruptly hissed and struck out: Laurence flinched, but Temeraire had reared back in the bare nick of time, the red-tipped talons passing scant inches from his throat. Now up on his powerful back legs, he crouched and sprang, claws outstretched, and Lien was forced to retreat, hopping back awkwardly and off-balance. She spread her wings partway to catch her footing, and sprang aloft when Temeraire pressed her again; he followed her up at once.

Laurence snatched Hammond’s opera-glass away unceremoniously and tried to follow their path. The white dragon was the larger, and her wingspan greater; she quickly outstripped Temeraire and looped about gracefully, her deadly intentions plain: she meant to plummet down on him from above. But the first flush of battle-fury past, Temeraire had recognized her advantage, and put his experience to use; instead of pursuing her, he angled away and flew out of the radiance of the lanterns, melting into the darkness.

“Oh, well done,” Laurence said. Lien was hovering uncertainly mid-air, head darting this way and that, peering into the night with her queer red eyes; abruptly Temeraire came flashing straight down towards her, roaring. But she flung herself aside with unbelievable quickness: unlike most dragons attacked from above, she did not hesitate more than a moment, and as she rolled away she managed to score Temeraire flying past: three bloody gashes opened red against his black hide. Drops of thick blood splashed onto the courtyard, shining black in the lantern-light. Mei crept closer with a small whimpering cry; Qian turned on her, hissing, but Mei only ducked down submissively and offered no target, coiling anxiously against a stand of trees to watch more closely.

Lien was making good use of her greater speed, darting back and away from Temeraire, encouraging him to spend his strength in useless attempts to hit her; but Temeraire grew wily: the speed of his slashes was just a little less than he could manage, a fraction slow. At least so Laurence hoped; rather than the wound giving him so much pain. Lien was successfully tempted closer: Temeraire suddenly flashed out with both foreclaws at once, and caught her in belly and breast; she shrieked out in pain and beat away frantically.

Yongxing’s chair fell over clattering as the prince surged to his feet, all pretense of calm gone; now he stood watching with fists clenched by his sides. The wounds did not look very deep, but the white dragon seemed quite stunned by them, keening in pain and hovering to lick the gashes. Certainly none of the palace dragons had any scars; it occurred to Laurence that very likely they had never been in real battle.

Temeraire hung in the air a moment, talons flexing, but when she did not turn back to close with him again, he seized the opening and dived straight down towards Yongxing, his real target. Lien’s head snapped up; she shrieked again and threw herself after him, beating with all her might, injury forgotten. She caught even with him just shy of the ground and flung herself upon him, wings and bodies tangling, and wrenched him aside from his course.

They struck the ground rolling together, a single hissing, savage, many-limbed beast clawing at itself, neither dragon paying any attention now to scratches or gouges, neither able to draw in the deep breaths that could let them use the divine wind against one another. Their thrashing tails struck everywhere, knocking over potted trees and scalping a mature stand of bamboo with a single stroke; Laurence seized Hammond’s arm and dragged him ahead of the crashing hollow trunks as they collapsed down upon the chairs with an echoing drum-like clatter.

Shaking leaves from his hair and the collar of his coat, Laurence awkwardly raised himself on his one good arm from beneath the branches. In their frenzy, Temeraire and Lien had just knocked askew a column of the stage. The entire grandiose structure began to lean over, sliding by degrees towards the ground, almost stately. Its progress towards destruction was quite plain to see, but Mianning did not take shelter: the prince had stepped over to offer Laurence a hand to rise, and perhaps had not understood his very real danger; his dragon Chuan, too, was distracted, trying to keep himself between Mianning and the duel.

Thrusting himself up with an effort from the ground, Laurence managed to knock Mianning down even as the whole gilt-and-painted structure smashed into the courtyard stones, bursting into foot-long shards of wood. He bent low over the prince to shield them both, covering the back of his neck with his good arm. Splinters jabbed him painfully even through the padded broadcloth of his heavy coat, one sticking him badly in the thigh where he had only his trousers, and another, razor-sharp, sliced his scalp above the temple as it flew.

Then the deadly hail was past, and Laurence straightened wiping blood from the side of his face to see Yongxing, with a deeply astonished expression, fall over: a great jagged splinter protruding from his eye.

Temeraire and Lien managed to disentangle themselves and sprang apart into facing crouches, still growling, their tails waving angrily. Temeraire glanced back over his shoulder towards Yongxing first, meaning to make another try, and halted in surprise: one foreleg poised in the air. Lien snarled and leapt at him, but he dodged instead of meeting her attack, and then she saw.

For a moment she was perfectly still, only the tendrils of her ruff lifting a little in the breeze, and the thin runnels of red-black blood trickling down her legs. She walked very slowly over to Yongxing’s body and bent her head low, nudging him just a little, as if to confirm for herself what she must already have known.

There was no movement, not even a last nerveless twitching of the body, as Laurence had sometimes seen in the suddenly killed. Yongxing lay stretched out his full height; the surprise had faded with the final slackening of the muscles, and his face was now composed and unsmiling, his hands lying one outflung and slightly open, the other fallen across his breast, and his jeweled robes still glittering in the sputtering torchlight. No one else came near; the handful of servants and guards who had not abandoned the clearing huddled back at the edges, staring, and the other dragons all kept silent.

Lien did not scream out, as Laurence had dreaded, or even make any sound at all; she did not turn again on Temeraire, either, but very carefully with her talons brushed away the smaller splinters that had fallen onto Yongxing’s robes, the broken pieces of wood, a few shredded leaves of bamboo; then she gathered the body up in both her foreclaws, and carrying it flew silently away into the dark.

Chapter 17

LAURENCE TWITCHED AWAY from the restless, pinching hands, first in one direction then the other: but there was no escape, either from them or from the dragging weight of the yellow robes, stiff with gold and green thread, and pulled down by the gemstone eyes of the dragons embroidered all over them. His shoulder ached abominably under the burden, even a week after the injury, and they would keep trying to move his arm to adjust the sleeves.

“Are you not ready yet?” Hammond said anxiously, putting his head into the room. He admonished the tailors in rapid-fire Chinese; and Laurence closed his mouth on an exclamation as one managed to poke him with a too-hasty needle.

“Surely we are not late; are we not expected at two o’clock?” Laurence asked, making the mistake of turning around to see a clock, and being shouted at from three directions for his pains.

“One is expected to be many hours early for any meeting with the Emperor, and in this case we must be more punctilious than less,” Hammond said, sweeping his own blue robes out of the way as he pulled over a stool. “You are quite sure you remember the phrases, and their order?”

Laurence submitted to being drilled once more; it was at least good for distraction from his uncomfortable position. At last he was let go, one of the tailors following them halfway down the hall, making a last adjustment to the shoulders while Hammond tried to hurry him.

Young Prince Miankai’s innocent testimony had quite damned Yongxing: the boy had been promised his own Celestial, and had been asked how he would like to be Emperor himself, though with no great details on how this was to be accomplished. Yongxing’s whole party of supporters, men who like him believed all contact with the West ought to be severed, had been cast quite into disgrace, leaving Prince Mianning once more ascendant in the court: and as a result, further opposition to Hammond’s proposal of adoption had collapsed. The Emperor had sent his edict approving the arrangements, and as this was to the Chinese the equivalent of commanding them done instantly, their progress now became as rapid as it had been creeping heretofore. Scarcely had the terms been settled than servants were swarming through their quarters in Mianning’s palace, sweeping away all their possessions into boxes and bundles.

The Emperor had taken up residence now at his Summer Palace in the Yuanmingyuan Garden: half a day’s journey from Peking by dragon, and thence they had been conveyed almost pell-mell. The vast granite courtyards of the Forbidden City had turned anvils under the punishing summer sun, which was muted in the Yuanmingyuan by the lush greenery and the expanses of carefully tended lakes; Laurence had found it little wonder the Emperor preferred this more comfortable estate.

Only Staunton had been granted permission to accompany Laurence and Hammond into the actual ceremony of adoption, but Riley and Granby led the other men as an escort: their numbers fleshed out substantially by guards and mandarins loaned by Prince Mianning to give Laurence what they considered a respectable number. As a party they left the elaborate complex where they had been housed, and began the journey to the audience hall where the Emperor would meet them. After an hour’s walk, crossing some six streams and ponds, their guides pausing at regular intervals to point out to them particularly elegant features of the landscaped grounds, Laurence began to fear they had indeed not left in good time: but at last they came to the hall, and were led to the walled court to await the Emperor’s pleasure.

The wait itself was interminable: slowly soaking the robes through with sweat as they sat in the hot, breathless courtyard. Cups of ices were brought to them, also many dishes of hot food, which Laurence had to force himself to sample; bowls of milk and tea; and presents: a large pearl on a golden chain, quite perfect, and some scrolls of Chinese literature, and for Temeraire a set of gold-and-silver talon-sheaths, such as his mother occasionally wore. Temeraire was alone among them unfazed by the heat; delighted, he put the talon-sheaths on at once and entertained himself by flashing them in the sunlight, while the rest of the party lay in an increasing stupor.

At last the mandarins came out again and with deep bows led Laurence within, followed by Hammond and Staunton, and Temeraire behind them. The audience chamber itself was open to the air, hung with graceful light draperies, the fragrance of peaches rising from a heaped bowl of golden fruit. There were no chairs but the dragon-couch at the back of the room, where a great male Celestial presently sprawled, and the simple but beautifully polished rosewood chair which held the Emperor.

He was a stocky, broad-jawed man, unlike the thin-faced and rather sallow Mianning, and with a small mustache squared off at the corners of his mouth, not yet touched with grey though he was nearing fifty. His clothes were very magnificent, in the brilliant yellow hue which they had seen nowhere else but on the private guard outside the palace, and he wore them entirely unconsciously; Laurence thought not even the King had looked so casually in state robes, on those few occasions when he had attended at court.

The Emperor was frowning, but thoughtful rather than displeased, and nodded expectantly as they came in; Mianning stood among many other dignitaries to either side of the throne, and inclined his head very slightly. Laurence took a deep breath and lowered himself carefully to both knees, listening to the mandarin hissing off the count to time each full genuflection. The floor was of polished wood covered with gorgeously woven rugs, and the act itself was not uncomfortable; he could just glimpse Hammond and Staunton following along behind him as he bowed each time to the floor.

Still it went against the grain, and Laurence was glad to rise at last with the formality met; thankfully the Emperor made no unwelcome gesture of condescension, but only ceased to frown: there was a general air of release from tension in the room. The Emperor now rose from his chair and led Laurence to the small altar on the eastern side of the hall. Laurence lit the stands of incense upon the altar and parroted the phrases which Hammond had so laboriously taught him, relieved to see Hammond’s small nod: he had made no mistakes, then, or at least none unforgivable.

He had to genuflect once more, but this time before the altar, which Laurence was ashamed to acknowledge even to himself was easier by far to bear, though closer to real blasphemy; hurriedly, under his breath, he said a Lord’s Prayer, and hoped that should make quite clear that he did not really mean to be breaking the commandment. Then the worst of the business was over: now Temeraire was called forward for the ceremony which would formally bind them as companions, and Laurence could make the required oaths with a light heart.

The Emperor had seated himself again to oversee the proceedings; now he nodded approvingly, and made a brief gesture to one of his attendants. At once a table was brought into the room, though without any chairs, and more of the cool ices served while the Emperor made inquiries to Laurence about his family, through Hammond’s mediation. The Emperor was taken aback to learn that Laurence was himself unmarried and without children, and Laurence was forced to submit to being lectured on the subject at great length, quite seriously, and to agree that he had been neglecting his family duties. He did not mind very much: he was too happy not to have misspoken, and for the ordeal to be so nearly over.

Hammond himself was nearly pale with relief as they left, and had actually to stop and sit down upon a bench on their way to their quarters. A couple of servants brought him some water and fanned him until the color came back into his face and he could stagger on. “I congratulate you, sir,” Staunton said, shaking Hammond’s hand as they at last left him to lie down in his chamber. “I am not ashamed to say I would not have believed it possible.”

“Thank you; thank you,” Hammond could only repeat, deeply affected; he was nearly toppling over.

Hammond had won for them not only Laurence’s formal entrée into the Imperial family, but the grant of an estate in the Tartar city itself. It was not quite an official embassy, but as a practical matter it was much the same, as Hammond could now reside there indefinitely at Laurence’s invitation. Even the kowtow had been dealt with to everyone’s satisfaction: from the British point of view, Laurence had made the gesture not as a representative of the Crown, but as an adopted son, while the Chinese were content to have their proper forms met.

“We have already had several very friendly messages from the mandarins at Canton through the Imperial post, did Hammond tell you?” Staunton said to Laurence, as they stood together outside their own rooms. “The Emperor’s gesture to remit all duties on British ships for the year will of course be a tremendous benefit to the Company, but in the long run this new mind-set amongst them will by far prove the more valuable. I suppose—” Staunton hesitated; his hand was already on the screen-frame, ready to go inside. “I suppose you could not find it consistent with your duty to stay? I need scarcely say that it would be of tremendous value to have you here, though of course I know how great our need for dragons is, back home.”

Retiring at last, Laurence gladly exchanged his clothes for plain cotton robes, and went outside to join Temeraire in the fragrant shade of a bank of orange trees. Temeraire had a scroll laid out in his frame, but was gazing out across the nearby pond rather than reading. In view, a graceful nine-arched bridge crossed the pond, mirrored in black shadows against the water now dyed yellow-orange with the reflections of the late sunlight, the lotus flowers closing up for the night.

He turned his head and nudged Laurence in greeting. “I have been watching: there is Lien,” he said, pointing with his nose across the water. The white dragon was crossing over the bridge, all alone except for a tall, dark-haired man in blue scholar-robes walking by her side, who looked somehow unusual; after a moment squinting, Laurence realized the man did not have a shaved forehead nor a queue. Midway Lien paused and turned to look at them: Laurence put a hand on Temeraire’s neck, instinctively, in the face of that unblinking red gaze.

Temeraire snorted, and his ruff came up a little way, but she did not stay: her neck proudly straight and haughty, she turned away again and continued past, vanishing shortly among the trees. “I wonder what she will do now,” Temeraire said.

Laurence wondered also; certainly she would not find another willing companion, when she had been held unlucky even before her late misfortunes. He had even heard several courtiers make remarks to the effect that she was responsible for Yongxing’s fate; deeply cruel, if she had heard them, and still-less-forgiving opinion held that she ought to be banished entirely. “Perhaps she will go into some secluded breeding grounds.”

“I do not think they have particular grounds set aside for breeding here,” Temeraire said. “Mei and I did not have to—” Here he stopped, and if it were possible for a dragon to blush, he certainly would have undertaken it. “But perhaps I am wrong,” he said hastily.

Laurence swallowed. “You have a great deal of affection for Mei.”

“Oh, yes,” Temeraire said, wistfully.

Laurence was silent; he picked up one of the hard little yellow fruits that had fallen unripe, and rolled it in his hands. “The Allegiance will sail with the next favorable tide, if the wind permits,” he said finally, very low. “Would you prefer us to stay?” Seeing that he had surprised Temeraire, he added, “Hammond and Staunton tell me we could do a great deal of good for Britain’s interests here. If you wish to remain, I will write to Lenton, and let him know we had better be stationed here.”

“Oh,” Temeraire said, and bent his head over the reading frame: he was not paying attention to the scroll, but only thinking. “You would rather go home, though, would you not?”

“I would be lying if I said otherwise,” Laurence said heavily. “But I would rather see you happy; and I cannot think how I could make you so in England, now you have seen how dragons are treated here.” The disloyalty nearly choked him; he could go no further.

“The dragons here are not all smarter than British dragons,” Temeraire said. “There is no reason Maximus or Lily could not learn to read and write, or carry on some other kind of profession. It is not right that we are kept penned up like animals, and never taught anything but how to fight.”

“No,” Laurence said. “No, it is not.” There was no possible answer to make, all his defense of British custom undone by the examples which he had seen before him in every corner of China. If some dragons went hungry, that was hardly a counter. He himself would gladly have starved sooner than give up his own liberty, and he would not insult Temeraire by mentioning it even as a sop.

They were silent together for a long space of time, while the servants came around to light the lamps; the quarter-moon rising hung mirrored in the pond, luminous silver, and Laurence idly threw pebbles into the water to break the reflection into gilt ripples. It was hard to imagine what he would do in China, himself, other than serve as a figurehead. He would have to learn the language somehow after all, at least spoken if not the script.

“No, Laurence, it will not do. I cannot stay here and enjoy myself, while back home they are still at war, and need me,” Temeraire said finally. “And more than that, the dragons in England do not even know that there is any other way of doing things. I will miss Mei and Qian, but I could not be happy while I knew Maximus and Lily were still being treated so badly. It seems to me my duty to go back and arrange things better there.”

Laurence did not know what to say. He had often chided Temeraire for revolutionary thoughts, a tendency to sedition, but only jokingly; it had never occurred to him Temeraire would ever make any such attempt deliberately, outright. Laurence had no idea what the official reaction would be, but he was certain it would not be taken calmly. “Temeraire, you cannot possibly—” he said, and stopped, the great blue eyes expectantly upon him.

“My dear,” he said quietly, after a moment, “you put me to shame. Certainly we ought not be content to leave things as they are, now we know there is a better way.”

“I thought you would agree,” Temeraire said, in satisfaction. “Besides,” he added, more prosaically, “my mother tells me that Celestials are not supposed to fight, at all, and only studying all the time does not sound very exciting. We had much better go home.” He nodded, and looked back at his poetry. “Laurence,” he said, “the ship’s carpenter could make some more of these reading frames, could he not?”

“My dear, if it will make you happy he shall make you a dozen,” Laurence said, and leaned against him, full of gratitude despite his concerns, to calculate by the moon when the tide should turn again for England and for home.