Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  St. Dragon and

  the George

  Gordon R. Dickson

  Gordon R. Dickson was born in 1923 in Edmonton, Canada and moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota as a teenager. Dickson served in the United States Army between 1943 and 1946, and then attended the University of Minnesota, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree and perhaps more importantly met fellow SF writer Poul Anderson. Dickson’s first short story, “Trespass!” (co-written with Anderson), appeared in 1950 and was followed by first novel Alien from Arcturus in 1956.

  Dickson went on to publish more than sixty novels, 150 short stories and twenty-one short story collections. His stories “Soldier Ask Not”, “Lost Dorsai”, and “The Cloak and the Staff” all received the Hugo Award, while “Call Him Lord” was awarded the Nebula Award in 1966. Dickson is undoubtedly most famous for the twelve novels that make up the Dorsai military space opera series, the nine science-fantasy novels in the Dragon Knight series, and the four humorous fantasy books in the Hoka! Series (co-written with Poul Anderson). Dickson died in 2001.

  I

  A trifle diffidently, Jim Eckert rapped with his claw on the blue-painted door.

  Silence.

  He knocked again. There was the sound of a hasty step inside the small, oddly peak-roofed house and the door was snatched open. A thin-faced old man with a tall pointed cap and a long, rather dingy-looking white beard peered out, irritably.

  “Sorry, not my day for dragons!” he snapped. “Come back next Tuesday.” He slammed the door.

  It was too much. It was the final straw. Jim Eckert sat down on his haunches with a dazed thump. The little forest clearing with its impossible little pool tinkling away like Chinese glass wind chimes in the background, its well-kept greensward with the white gravel path leading to the door before him, and the riotous flower beds of asters, tulips, zinnias, roses and lilies-of-the-valley all equally impossibly in bloom at the same time about the white finger-post labeled s. carolinus and pointing at the house—it all whirled about him. It was more than flesh and blood could bear. At any minute now he would go completely insane and imagine he was a peanut or a cocker spaniel. Grottwold Hanson had wrecked them all. Dr. Howells would have to get another teaching assistant for his English Department. Angie…

  Angie!

  Jim pounded on the door again. It was snatched open.

  “Dragon!” cried S. Carolinus, furiously. “How would you like to be a beetle?”

  “But I’m not a dragon,” said Jim, desperately.

  The magician stared at him for a long minute, then threw up his beard with both hands in a gesture of despair, caught some of it in his teeth as it fell down and began to chew on it fiercely.

  “Now where,” he demanded, “did a dragon acquire the brains to develop the imagination to entertain the illusion that he is not a dragon? Answer me, O Ye Powers!”

  “The information is psychically, though not physiologically correct,” replied a deep bass voice out of thin air beside them and some five feet off the ground. Jim, who had taken the question to be rhetorical, started convulsively.

  “Is that so?” S. Carolinus peered at Jim with new interest. “Hmm.” He spat out a hair or two. “Come in, Anomaly—or whatever you call yourself.”

  Jim squeezed in through the door and found himself in a large single room. It was a clutter of mismatched furniture and odd bits of alchemical equipment.

  “Hmm,” said S. Carolinus, closing the door and walking once around Jim, thoughtfully. “If you aren’t a dragon, what are you?”

  “Well, my real name’s Jim Eckert,” said Jim. “But I seem to be in the body of a dragon named Gorbash.”

  “And this disturbs you. So you’ve come to me. How nice,” said the magician, bitterly. He winced, massaged his stomach and closed his eyes. “Do you know anything that’s good for a perpetual stomach-ache? Of course not. Go on.”

  “Well, I want to get back to my real body. And take Angie with me. She’s my fiancée and I can send her back but I can’t send myself back at the same time. You see this Grottwold Hanson—well, maybe I better start from the beginning.”

  “Brilliant suggestion, Gorbash,” said Carolinus. “Or whatever your name is,” he added.

  “Well,” said Jim. Carolinus winced. Jim hurried on. “I teach at a place called Riveroak College in the United States—you’ve never heard of it—”

  “Go on, go on,” said Carolinus.

  “That is, I’m a teaching assistant. Dr. Howells, who heads the English Department, promised me an instructorship over a year ago. But he’s never come through with it; and Angie—Angie Gilman, my fiancée—”

  “You mentioned her.”

  “Yes—well, we were having a little fight. That is, we were arguing about my going to ask Howells whether he was going to give me the instructor’s rating for next year or not. I didn’t think I should; and she didn’t think we could get married—well, anyway, in came Grottwold Hanson.”

  “In where came who?”

  “Into the Campus Bar and Grille. We were having a drink there. Hanson used to go with Angie. He’s a graduate student in psychology. A long, thin geek that’s just as crazy as he looks. He’s always getting wound up in some new odd-ball organization or other—”

  “Dictionary!” interrupted Carolinus, suddenly. He opened his eyes as an enormous volume appeared suddenly poised in the air before him. He massaged his stomach. “Ouch,” he said. The pages of the volume began to flip rapidly back and forth before his eyes. “Don’t mind me,” he said to Jim. “Go on.”

  “—This time it was the Bridey Murphy craze. Hypnotism. Well—”

  “Not so fast,” said Carolinus. “Bridey Murphy… Hypnotism… yes…”

  “Oh, he talked about the ego wandering, planes of reality, on and on like that. He offered to hypnotize one of us and show us how it worked. Angie was mad at me, so she said yes. I went off to the bar. I was mad. When I turned around, Angie was gone. Disappeared.”

  “Vanished?” said Carolinus.

  “Vanished. I blew my top at Hanson. She must have wandered, he said, not merely the ego, but all of her. Bring her back, I said. I can’t, he said. It seemed she wanted to go back to the time of St. George and the Dragon. When men were men and would speak up to their bosses about promotions. Hanson’d have to send someone else back to rehypnotize her and send her back home. Like an idiot I said I’d go. Ha! I might’ve known he’d goof. He couldn’t do anything right if he was paid for it. I landed in the body of this dragon.”

  “And the maiden?”

  “Oh, she landed here, too. Centuries off the mark. A place where there actually were such things as dragons—fantastic.”

  “Why?” said Carolinus.

  “Well, I mean—anyway,” said Jim, hurriedly. “The point is, they’d already got her—the dragons, I mean. A big brute named Anark had found her wandering around and put her in a cage. They were having a meeting in a cave about deciding what to do with her. Anark wanted to stake her out for a decoy, so they could capture a lot of the local people—only the dragons called people georges—”

  “They’re quite stupid, you know,” said Carolinus, severely, looking up from the dictionary. “There’s only room for one name in their head at a time. After the Saint made such an impression on them his name stuck.”

>   “Anyway, they were all yelling at once. They’ve got tremendous voices.”

  “Yes, you have,” said Carolinus, pointedly.

  “Oh, sorry,” said Jim. He lowered his voice. “I tried to argue that we ought to hold Angie for ransom—” He broke off suddenly. “Say,” he said. “I never thought of that. Was I talking dragon, then? What am I talking now? Dragons don’t talk English, do they?”

  “Why not?” demanded Carolinus, grumpily. “If they’re British dragons?”

  “But I’m not a dragon—I mean—”

  “But you are here!” snapped Carolinus. “You and this maiden of yours. Since all the rest of you was translated here, don’t you suppose your ability to speak understandably was translated, too? Continue.”

  “There’s not much more,” said Jim gloomily. “I was losing the argument and then this very big, old dragon spoke up on my side. Hold Angie for ransom, he said. And they listened to him. It seems he swings a lot of weight among them. He’s a great-uncle of me—of this Gorbash who’s body I’m in—and I’m his only surviving relative. They penned Angie up in a cave and he sent me off to the Tinkling Water here, to find you and have you open negotiations for ransom. Actually, on the side he told me to tell you to make the terms easy on the georges—I mean humans; he wants the dragons to work toward good relations with them. He’s afraid the dragons are in danger of being wiped out. I had a chance to double back and talk to Angie alone. We thought you might be able to send us both back.”

  He stopped rather out of breath, and looked hopefully at Carolinus. The magician was chewing thoughtfully on his beard.

  “Smrgol,” he muttered. “Now there’s an exception to the rule. Very bright for a dragon. Also experienced. Hmm.”

  “Can you help us?” demanded Jim. “Look, I can show you—”

  Carolinus sighed, closed his eyes, winced and opened them again.

  “Let me see if I’ve got it straight,” he said. “You had a dispute with this maiden to whom you’re betrothed. To spite you, she turned to this third-rate practitioner, who mistakenly exorcized her from the United States (whenever in the cosmos that is) to here, further compounding his error by sending you back in spirit only to inhabit the body of Gorbash. The maiden is in the hands of the dragons and you have been sent to me by your great-uncle Smrgol.”