Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “When do you go?” she inquired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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