His Majesty's Dragon t-1

by Naomi Novik

  “Why do you endure it when I ask you to put on a harness, or perform some dangerous maneuver?” Laurence said. “It is his duty, and it is his habit. From the shell he has been raised to obey, and has suffered such treatment. He likely does not contemplate any alternative.”

  “But he sees you, and the other captains; no one else is treated so,” Temeraire said. He flexed his claws; they dug furrows in the ground. “I do not obey you because it is a habit and I cannot think for myself; I do it because I know you are worthy of being obeyed. You would never treat me unkindly, and you would not ask me to do something dangerous or unpleasant without cause.”

  “No, not without cause,” Laurence said. “But we are in a hard service, my dear, and we must sometimes be willing to bear a great deal.” He hesitated, then added gently, “I have been meaning to speak to you about it, Temeraire: you must promise me in future not to place my life above that of so many others. You must surely see that Victoriatus is far more necessary to the Corps than I could ever be, even if there were not his crew to consider also; you should never have contemplated risking their lives to save mine.”

  Temeraire curled more closely around him. “No, Laurence, I cannot promise such a thing,” he said. “I am sorry, but I will not lie to you: I could not have let you fall. You may value their lives above your own; I cannot do so, for to me you are worth far more than all of them. I will not obey you in such a case, and as for duty, I do not care for the notion a great deal, the more I see of it.”

  Laurence was not sure how to answer this; he could not deny that he was touched by the degree to which Temeraire valued him, yet it was also alarming to have the dragon express so plainly that he would follow orders or not as his own judgment decreed. Laurence trusted that judgment a great deal, but he felt again that he had made an inadequate effort to teach Temeraire the value of discipline and duty. “I wish I knew how to explain it to you properly,” he said, a little despairingly. “Perhaps I will try and find you some books on the subject.”

  “I suppose,” Temeraire said, for once dubious about reading something. “I do not think anything would persuade me to behave differently. In any case, I would much rather just avoid it ever happening again. It was very dreadful, and I was afraid I might not be able to catch you.”

  Laurence could smile at this. “On that point at least we are agreed, and I will gladly promise you to do my best to avoid any repetition.”

  Roland came running to fetch him the next morning; he had slept by Temeraire’s side again in the little tent. “Celeritas wants you, sir,” she said, and went back to the castle by his side, once he had put his neckcloth back on and restored his coat. Temeraire gave him a sleepy murmur of farewell, barely opening one eye before going back to sleep. As they walked, she ventured, “Captain, are you still angry at me?”

  “What?” he said, blankly; then he remembered, and said, “No, Roland; I am not angry with you. You do understand why you were wrong to speak so, I hope.”

  “Yes,” she said, and he was able to ignore that it came out a little doubtfully. “I did not speak to Levitas; but I could not help seeing he does not look very well this morning.”

  Laurence glanced at the Winchester as they walked through the courtyard; Levitas was curled in the back corner, far from the other dragons, and despite the early hour, he was not sleeping but staring dully at the ground. Laurence looked away; there was nothing to be done.

  “Run along, Roland,” Celeritas said, when she had brought Laurence to him. “Captain, I am sorry to have called you so early; first, is Temeraire well enough to resume his training, do you think?”

  “I believe so, sir; he is healing very quickly, and yesterday he flew down to the lake and back with no difficulty,” Laurence said.

  “Good, good.” Celeritas fell silent, and then he sighed. “Captain, I am obliged to order you not to interfere with Levitas any further,” he said.

  Laurence felt hot color come to his face. So Rankin had complained of him. And yet it was no more than he deserved; he would never have brooked such officious involvement in the running of his ship, or his management of Temeraire. The thing had been wrong, whatever justifications he had given himself, and anger was quickly subsumed in shame. “Sir, I apologize that you should have been put to the necessity of telling me so; I assure you it will not arise again.”

  Celeritas snorted; having delivered his rebuke, he seemed at no great pains to reinforce it. “Give me no assurances; you would lower yourself in my eyes if you could mean them with real honesty,” he said. “It is a great pity, and I am at fault as much as anyone. When I could not tolerate him myself, Aerial Command thought he might do as a courier, and set him to a Winchester; for his grandfather’s sake I could not bring myself to speak against it, though I knew better.”

  Comforting as it was to have the reprimand softened, Laurence was curious to understand what Celeritas meant by not being able to tolerate him; surely Aerial Command would never have proposed a fellow like Rankin as a handler to a dragon as extraordinary as the training master. “Did you know his grandfather well?” he asked, unable to resist making the tentative inquiry.

  “My first handler; his son also served with me,” Celeritas said briefly, turning his head aside; his head drooped. He recovered after a moment and added, “Well, I had hopes for the boy, but at his mother’s insistence he was not raised here, and his family gave him strange notions; he ought never have been an aviator, much less a captain. But now he is, and while Levitas obeys him, so he remains. I cannot allow you to interfere. You can imagine what it would mean if we allowed officers to meddle with one another’s beasts: lieutenants desperate to be captains could hardly resist the temptation to seduce away any dragon who was not blissfully happy, and we would have chaos.”

  Laurence bowed his head. “I understand perfectly, sir.”

  “In any case, I will be giving you more pressing matters to attend to, for today we will begin your integration into Lily’s formation,” Celeritas said. “Pray go and fetch Temeraire; the others will be here shortly.”

  Walking back out, Laurence was thoughtful. He had known, of course, that the larger breeds would outlive their handlers, when they were not killed in battle together; he had not considered that this would leave the dragons alone and without a partner afterwards, nor how they or Aerial Command would manage the situation. Of course it was in Britain’s best interests to have the dragon continue in service, with a new handler, but he also could not help but think the dragon himself would be happier so, with duties to occupy his thoughts and keep him from the kind of sorrow that Celeritas obviously still felt.

  Arriving once again at the clearing, Laurence looked at the sleeping Temeraire with concern. Of course there were many years before them, and the fortunes of war might easily make all such questions moot, but Temeraire’s future happiness was his responsibility, heavier by far to him than any estate could have been, and some time soon he would have to consider what provisions he could make to ensure it. A well-chosen first lieutenant, perhaps, might step into his place, with Temeraire brought to the notion over the course of several years.

  “Temeraire,” he called, stroking the dragon’s nose; Temeraire opened his eyes and made a small rumble.

  “I am awake; are we flying again today?” he said, yawning enormously up at the sky and twitching his wings a little.

  “Yes, my dear,” Laurence said. “Come, we must get you back into your harness; I am sure Mr. Hollin will have it ready for us.”

  The formation ordinarily flew in a wedge-shaped block that resembled nothing more than a flock of migrating geese, with Lily at the head. The Yellow Reapers Messoria and Immortalis filled the key flanking positions, providing the protective bulk to keep Lily from close-quarters attack, while the ends were held by the smaller but more agile Dulcia, a Grey Copper, and a Pascal’s Blue called Nitidus. All were full-grown, and all but Lily had previous combat experience; they had been especially chosen for this critical fo
rmation to support the young and inexperienced Longwing, and their captains and crews were rightly proud of their skill.

  Laurence had cause to be thankful for the endless labor and repetition of the last month and a half; if the maneuvers they had practiced for so long had not become by now second nature for Temeraire and Maximus, they could never have kept up with the practiced, effortless acrobatics of the others. The two larger dragons had been added into position so as to form a back row behind Lily, closing the formation into a triangle shape. In battle, their place would be to fend off any attempts to break up the formation, to defend it against attack from other heavy-combat-class dragons, and to carry the great loads of bombs that their crews would drop below upon those targets that had already been weakened by Lily’s acid.

  Laurence was very glad to see Temeraire admitted fully to the company of the other dragons of the formation, although none of the older dragons had the energy for much play outside their work. For the most part they lazed about during the scant idle hours, and only observed in tolerant amusement while Temeraire and Lily and Maximus talked and occasionally went aloft for a game of aerial tag. For his own part, Laurence also felt a great deal more welcome among the other aviators now, and discovered that he had without noticing it adjusted to the informality of their relations: the first time he found himself addressing Captain Harcourt as simply “Harcourt,” in a post-training discussion, he did not even realize he had done so until after the words were out of his mouth.

  The captains and first lieutenants generally held such discussions of strategy and tactics at dinnertime, or during the late evenings after the dragons had all fallen asleep. Laurence’s opinion was rarely solicited in these conversations, but he did not take that greatly to heart: though he was quickly coming to grasp the principles of aerial warfare, he still considered himself a newcomer to the art, and he could hardly take offense at the aviators doing the same. Save when he could contribute some information about Temeraire’s particular capabilities, he remained quiet and made no attempt to insinuate himself into the conversations, rather listening for the purpose of educating himself.

  The conversation did turn, from time to time, to the more general subject of the war; out of the way as they were, their information was several weeks out of date, and speculation irresistible. Laurence joined them one evening to find Sutton saying, “The French fleet could be bloody well anywhere.” Sutton was Messoria’s captain and the senior among them, a veteran of four wars, and somewhat given to both pessimism and colorful language. “Now they have slipped out of Toulon, for all we know the bastards are already on their way across the Channel; I wouldn’t be surprised to find the army of invasion on our doorstep tomorrow.”

  Laurence could hardly let this pass. “You are mistaken, I assure you,” he said, taking his seat. “Villeneuve and his fleet have slipped out of Toulon, yes, but he is not engaged in any grand operation, only in flight: Nelson has been in steady pursuit all along.”

  “Why, have you heard something, Laurence?” Chenery, Dulcia’s captain, asked, looking up from the desultory game of vingt-et-un that he and Little, Immortalis’s captain, were playing.

  “I have had some letters, yes; one from Captain Riley, of the Reliant,” Laurence said. “He is with Nelson’s fleet: they have chased Villeneuve across the Atlantic, and he writes that Lord Nelson has hopes of catching the French in the West Indies.”

  “Oh, and here we are without any idea of what is going on!” Chenery said. “For Heaven’s sake, fetch it here and read it to us; you are not very good to be keeping this all to yourself while we are all in the dark.”

  He spoke with too much eagerness for Laurence to take offense; as the sentiments were repeated by the other captains, he sent a servant to his room to bring him the scant handful of letters he had received from former colleagues who knew his new direction. He was obliged to omit several passages commiserating with him on his change in situation, but he managed to elide them gracefully enough, and the others listened with great hunger to his bits and pieces of news.

  “So Villeneuve has seventeen ships, to Nelson’s twelve?” Sutton said. “I don’t think much of the blighter for running, then. What if he turns about? Racing across the Atlantic like this, Nelson cannot have any aerial force; no transport could keep up the pace, and we do not have any dragons stationed in the West Indies.”

  “I dare say the fleet could take him with fewer ships still,” Laurence said, with spirit. “You are to remember the Nile, sir, and before that the battle of Cape St. Vincent: we have often been at some numerical disadvantage and still carried the day; and Lord Nelson himself has never lost a fleet action.” With some difficulty, he restrained himself and stopped here; he did not wish to seem an enthusiast.

  The others smiled, but not in any patronizing manner, and Little said in his quiet way, “We must hope he can bring them to account, then. The sad fact of the matter is, while the French fleet remains in any way intact, we are in deadly danger. The Navy cannot always be catching them, and Napoleon only need hold the Channel for two days, perhaps three, to ferry his army across.”

  This was a lowering thought, and they all felt its weight. Berkley at last broke the resulting silence with a grunt and took up his glass to drain it. “You can all sit about glooming; I am for bed,” he said. “We have enough to do without borrowing trouble.”

  “And I must be up early,” Harcourt said, sitting up. “Celeritas wants Lily to practice spraying upon targets in the morning, before maneuvers.”

  “Yes, we all ought to get to sleep,” Sutton said. “We can hardly do better than to get this formation into order, in any case; if any chance of flattening Bonaparte’s fleet offers, you may be sure that one of the Longwing formations will be wanted, either ours or one of the two at Dover.”

  The party broke up, and Laurence climbed to his tower room thoughtfully. A Longwing could spit with tremendous accuracy; in their first day of training Laurence had seen Lily destroy targets with a single quick spurt from nearly four hundred feet in the air, and no cannon from the ground could ever fire so far straight up. Pepper guns might hamper her, but her only real danger would come from aloft: she would be the target of every enemy dragon in the air, and the formation as a whole was designed to protect her. The group would be a formidable presence upon any battlefield, Laurence could easily see; he would not have liked to be beneath them in a ship, and the prospect of doing so much good for England gave him fresh interest for the work.

  Unfortunately, as the weeks wore on, he saw plainly that Temeraire found it harder going to keep up his own interest. The first requirement of formation flying was precision, and holding one’s position relative to the others. Now that Temeraire was flying with the group, he was limited by the others, and with speed and maneuverability so far beyond the general, he soon began to feel the constraint. One afternoon, Laurence overheard him asking, “Do you ever do more interesting flying?” to Messoria; she was an experienced older dragon of thirty years, with a great many battle-scars to render her an object of admiration.

  She snorted indulgently at him. “Interesting is not very good; it is hard to remember interesting in the middle of a battle,” she said. “You will get used to it, never fear.”

  Temeraire sighed and went back to work without anything more like a complaint; but though he never failed to answer a request or to put forth an effort, he was not enthusiastic, and Laurence could not help worrying. He did his best to console Temeraire and provide him with other subjects to engage his interest; they continued their practice of reading together, and Temeraire listened with great interest to every mathematical or scientific article that Laurence could find. He followed them all without difficulty, and Laurence found himself in the strange position of having Temeraire explain to him the material which he was reading aloud.

  Even more usefully, perhaps a week after they had resumed training a parcel arrived for them in the mail from Sir Edward Howe. It was addressed somewhat whimsic
ally to Temeraire, who was delighted to receive a piece of mail of his very own; Laurence unwrapped it for him and found within a fine volume of dragon stories from the Orient, translated by Sir Edward himself, and just published.

  Temeraire dictated a very graceful note of thanks, to which Laurence added his own, and the Oriental tales became the set conclusion to their days: whatever other reading they did, they would finish with one of the stories. Even after they had read them all, Temeraire was perfectly happy to begin over again, or occasionally request a particular favorite, such as the story of the Yellow Emperor of China, the first Celestial dragon, on whose advice the Han dynasty had been founded; or the Japanese dragon Raiden, who had driven the armada of Kublai Khan away from the island nation. He particularly liked the last because of the parallel with Britain, menaced by Napoleon’s Grande Armée across the Channel.

  He listened also with a wistful air to the story of Xiao Sheng, the emperor’s minister, who swallowed a pearl from a dragon’s treasury and became a dragon himself; Laurence did not understand his attitude, until Temeraire said, “I do not suppose that is real? There is no way that people can become dragons, or the reverse?”

  “No, I am afraid not,” Laurence said slowly; the notion that Temeraire might have liked to make a change was distressing to him, suggesting as it did a very deep unhappiness.

  But Temeraire only sighed and said, “Oh, well; I thought as much. It would have been nice, though, to be able to read and write for myself when I liked, and also then you could fly alongside me.”

  Laurence laughed, reassured. “I am sorry indeed we cannot have such a pleasure; but even if it were possible, it does not sound a very comfortable process from the story, nor one which could be reversed.”

  “No, and I would not like to give up flying at all, not even for reading,” Temeraire said. “Besides, it is very pleasant to have you read to me; may we have another one? Perhaps the story about the dragon who made it rain, during the drought, by carrying water from the ocean?”