by Naomi Novik
“We will have to spend more time hunting,” Tharkay warned, but that was small cost by comparison: Laurence wanted to risk neither challenge nor hospitality from the Persian satraps, which would consume far more time in either case. There was something a little unpleasant and skulking about creeping through the countryside of a foreign nation, without permission, and it would be at the very least embarrassing if they were caught, but he was willing to trust their caution and Temeraire’s speed to guard against the last.
Laurence had meant to stay another day, to let the men worst injured by the avalanche make some recovery on the ground, but there could be no question of that now with Lien on her way to France, where she might wreak merry havoc at the Channel, or upon the Mediterranean Fleet. The Navy and the merchant marine would be wholly unsuspecting and vulnerable; her appearance would not be a warning, for her white coloration would not be found in any of the dragon-books which ships carried, to warn their captains of fire-breathers and the like. She was many years older than Temeraire, and though she had never been trained in battle, she lacked nothing in agility and grace and likely was more practiced in the use of the divine wind; it made him shudder to think of so deadly a weapon placed in Bonaparte’s hands, and aimed nearly at the heart of Britain.
“We will leave in the morning,” he said, and stood up from the floor to find a disgruntled audience of dragons; the ferals had gathered around in curiosity while Tharkay made his diagrams, and, having demanded some explanation from Temeraire, they were now indignant to find their own mountain range little more than a scattering of hatch-marks dividing the vast expanse of China from Persia and the Ottoman Empire.
“I am just telling them that we have been all the way from England to China,” Temeraire informed Laurence, smugly, “and round Africa, too; they have none of them ever been very much outside the mountains.”
Temeraire made some further remarks to them, in a tone of no little condescension. He had indeed some experience to brag of, having been fêted lavishly at the imperial court of China after a journey halfway around the world, not to mention several notable actions to his credit; besides these adventures, his jeweled breastplate and talon-sheaths had already drawn envy from the unadorned ferals, and Laurence even discovered himself the subject of a gallery of appraising slit-pupiled stares after Temeraire had finished telling them he knew not what.
He was not unhappy for Temeraire to have an example before him of dragons in their natural state, without any influence of men: the ferals’ existence offered a happy contrast with the elevated circumstances of the Chinese dragons, by which comparison the lot of British dragons need not look so very ill, and he was glad Temeraire so plainly felt his own position superior to theirs; but Laurence was dubious of the wisdom of thus provoking them into a more active envy and perhaps to belligerence.
The more Temeraire spoke, the more the ferals murmured and looked sideways at their own leader Arkady, with a jaundiced air; jealously aware that he was losing some of his luster in their eyes, he was ruffling up the collar of spikes around his neck and bristling.
“Temeraire,” Laurence said, to interrupt, even though he did not know what else to say, but when Temeraire looked towards him in inquiry Arkady leapt at once into the breach: puffing out his chest, he made an announcement in grandiose tones which sent a quick murmur of excitement around the other ferals.
“Oh,” Temeraire said, tail twitching doubtfully, and regarding the red-patch dragon.
“What is it?” Laurence said, alarmed.
“He says he will come with us to Istanbul, and meet the Sultan,” Temeraire explained.
This amiable project, while less violent than the challenge Laurence had feared, was nearly as inconvenient, and argument was of no use: Arkady would not be dissuaded, and many of the other dragons now began to insist that they too would come along. Tharkay gave up the effort after a short while and turned away, shrugging. “We may as well resign ourselves; there is little we can do to prevent their following, unless you mean to attack them.”
Nearly all the ferals set out with them the next morning, saving a few too indolent or too incurious to be bothered, and the little broken-winged one they had rescued from the avalanche, who stood looking after them at the mouth of the cave and making small unhappy cries as they left. They made difficult company, noisy and excitable, and quick to fall to squabbling in mid-air, two or three of them tumbling head-over-tail in a wild flurry of hissing and claws until Arkady or one of his two larger lieutenants dived at them and knocked them apart with loud remonstrances to sulk in private.
“We will never pass through the countryside unnoticed with this circus following behind us,” Laurence said in exasperation after the third such incident, the echoes of the shrieks still ringing off the peaks.
“Likely they will get tired of it in a few days and turn back,” Granby said. “I have never heard of ferals wanting to go anywhere near people, except to steal food; and I dare say we’ll see them turn shy as soon as we leave their territory.”
The ferals indeed grew nervous towards the afternoon, as the mountains began abruptly to diminish into foothills, and the smooth rolling curve of the horizon came clear, green and dusty and endlessly wide under the great bowl of the sky: a wholly different landscape. They whispered and rustled their wings together uneasily at the edge of the camp, and were very little use at all in hunting. As evening fell, the lights of a nearby village began to gleam faintly orange in the distance, half-a-dozen farmhouses some miles away. By morning several of the ferals had agreed amongst themselves that this must be Istanbul, it was not nearly so nice as they had expected, and they were quite ready to go home.
“But that is not Istanbul at all,” Temeraire said indignantly, and subsided only at Laurence’s hurried gesture.
They were thus rid of the better part of their company, much to their relief. Only the youngest and most adventurous remained, chief among them little Gherni, who had hatched in the lowlands and thus had a little more experience of this foreign landscape, and was quite pleased with this newfound distinction among her peers. She was loud in professing herself not at all afraid, and making mock of those turning back; in the face of her taunting, a couple of the others determined on continuing also, and sadly these were the most chest-puffing quarrelsome of the lot.
And Arkady was unwilling to turn back while any others of his flock remained: Temeraire had told too many stories, and those too vivid, of treasures and feasts and dramatic battles; now the feral leader evidently feared one of his erstwhile subjects might return at some future date covered in glory real or contrived, and challenge his standing; a standing founded less in raw strength—both his lieutenants outstripping him in this arena—than on a certain alchemy of charisma and quickness of thought, rendering his position the less easily defensible.
But he was hardly enthusiastic, for all the strutting bravado with which he concealed his anxiety, and Laurence hoped that he would shortly have persuaded the others to go. His lieutenants, called Molnar and Wringe—as best as Laurence could make out—would certainly have been happier to stay behind even without him, and Wringe, the dark grey, even ventured to suggest as much to her chief, which only succeeded in making Arkady fly into a passion and beat her vigorously about the head, accompanied by a verbal harangue which required no translation.
But that night he huddled close with them for comfort, the mountains having dwindled to distant blue majesty, and the rest of the ferals cuddled about them also, paying only half-hearted attention to Temeraire’s attempts at conversation. “They are not very venturesome,” Temeraire said, disappointed, coming to settle down beside Laurence. “They only ask me all the time about food, and how soon they shall be feasted by the Sultan, and what he will give them, and when they can go home: though they have all the liberty in the world, and could go anywhere they like at all.”
“When you are very hungry, my dear, it is hard for your ambitions to rise above your belly,” Laurence
said. “There is not much to be said for the sort of liberty which they enjoy: the freedom to starve or to be slaughtered is hardly one to which most would aspire, and,” he added, seizing the moment, “both men and dragons may with good sense choose to sacrifice some personal liberty for the sake of the general good, which shall advance their own condition with those of their fellows.”
Temeraire sighed, and did not argue, but prodded at his dinner dissatisfied, at least until Molnar noticed and made a cautious gesture at taking a bit of the half-abandoned meat for himself: which made Temeraire growl him away, and devour all the rest in three tremendous gulps.
They had fine weather the next day, the sky clear and vast, which worked to excellent discouraging effect upon their traveling companions; Laurence was sure that evening would see the last of them turn tail for home. But they made only a poor show of hunting again, and Laurence was forced to send Tharkay with some of the men to try and find a farm nearby, and buy some cattle to make up the difference.
The ferals grew round-eyed at the great, horned brown beasts as they were dragged into the camp lowing in pitiful fear, and even more so when they were given four to divide up amongst themselves, gorging near to ecstasy. The littler ones lay on their backs afterwards, with their wings splayed awkwardly out of the way and their limbs curled over their distended bellies, beatific expressions on their faces, and even Arkady, who had done his best to eat nearly an entire cow alone, sprawled limp-legged on his side. Laurence sinkingly gathered they had never tasted beef before, and certainly not like this farm-raised cattle, fat and sweet-flavored; they would have made very good eating even for the finest table in England, and must have been ambrosial to the ferals, accustomed to subsistence on thin goats and mountain sheep, and the occasional stolen pig.
Temeraire put the seal to the matter by saying blithely, “No, I am sure the Sultan will give us something much nicer,” after which Istanbul took on the roseate glow of Paradise: there was no more hope of shaking them.
“Well, we had better go on by night, as much as we can,” Laurence said, in reluctant surrender. “At least I expect any ordinary peasant who sees us will imagine we are part of their native aerial corps, as much a cavalcade as we are.”
The ferals were at least some use once having gotten over their fright; one of the littler fellows, Hertaz, greenish yellow stripes over dusty brown, proved their best hunter in the summer-yellowed grasslands: he could flatten himself in the tall grass and hide downwind while the other dragons stampeded animals out of forests and hills with their roaring; the hapless beasts would run very nearly straight into his path, and he often brought down as many as half-a-dozen in a single lunge.
The ferals were wary, too, for the scent of men, as Temeraire was not; it was Arkady’s warning that saved them from notice by a Persian cavalry company, all the dragons only barely managing to get behind some hills as the troop came riding over the crest of the road and into sight. Laurence lay concealed a long time, listening to the banners snapping and bridle-bits jingling as the company went gradually by, until the sound had wholly faded into the distance, and twilight advanced far enough they could risk taking to the air once again.
The feral leader was smug and prancing afterwards, and while Temeraire was still eating that afternoon, Arkady seized the opportunity to take back pride of place, regaling his troop with a long and involved performance, half-storytelling, half-dance, which Laurence at first took to be a re-creation of his achievements as a hunter, or some similarly savage activity; the other dragons were all chiming in now and again with their own contributions.
But then Temeraire put down his second deer to listen in with great interest, and shortly began to put in his own remarks. “What is he speaking of?” Laurence asked him, puzzled that Temeraire should have anything to add to the narrative.
“It is very exciting,” Temeraire said, turning to him eagerly, “it is all about a band of dragons, who find a great heap of treasure hidden in a cave, that belonged to an old dragon who died, and they are quarreling over how to divide it, and there are a great many duels between the two strongest dragons, because they are equally strong, and really they want to mate and not fight, but neither of them knows that the other also wants to mate, and so they each think they have to win the treasure, and then they can give it to the other, and then the other one will agree to mate to get the treasure. And one of the other dragons is very small but clever, and he is playing tricks on the others and getting lots of the treasure away for himself bit by bit; and also there is a mated pair who have argued over their own share, because the female was too busy brooding the egg to help him fight the others and get a bigger share, and then he did not want to share equally with her, and then she got angry and took away the egg and hid with it, and now he is sorry but he cannot find her, and there is another male who wants to mate with her, and he has found her and is offering her some of his own share of the treasure—”
Laurence was by now lost in the sea of events, even so summarized; he did not understand how Temeraire was following it at all, or what there was to be interested in about it; but certainly Temeraire and the ferals took passionate enjoyment in the entire tangle. At one stage Gherni and Hertaz even came to blows, evidently over a disagreement on what ought to happen next, batting at each other’s heads until Molnar, annoyed at the interruption of the tale, snapped at them and hissed them into submission.
Arkady flung himself down at last panting and very pleased, and the other dragons all whistled in approval and thumped their tails; Temeraire clicked his talons against a broad rock, in the Chinese mode of approval.
“I must remember it so I can write it down, when we are home, and I can have another writing-box like the one I had in China,” Temeraire said, with a deeply satisfied sigh. “I tried to recite some parts of the Principia Mathematica to Lily and Maximus once, but they did not find it very interesting; I am sure they would like this better. Perhaps we can have it published, Laurence, do you suppose?”
“You will have to teach more dragons to read, first,” Laurence said.
A handful of the crew were making some shifts at picking up the Durzagh language; pantomime ordinarily worked quite well, as the ferals were quite clever enough to make out the meaning, but they were also quite happy to pretend they did not understand anything they did not like, such as being told to move from a comfortable place so tents might be pitched, or being roused up from naps for an evening stretch of flying. As Temeraire and Tharkay were not always handy to translate, learning to speak to them became rather a form of self-defense for the younger officers responsible for setting up the camp. It was rather comical to see them whistling and humming bits of it at the dragons.
“Digby, that will be enough; don’t let me catch you encouraging them to make up to you,” Granby said, sternly.
“Yes, sir; I mean, no, sir, yes,” Digby said, gone crimson and tongue-tied, and scurried away to busy himself with a contrived task on the other side of the camp.
Laurence looked up from his consultation with Tharkay at hearing this, surprised, as the boy was ordinarily the steadiest of the ensigns, for all he was scarcely turned thirteen; he had never needed to be taken-down before, so far as Laurence recalled.
“Oh, no real harm; he has only been saving the choice bits aside for that big fellow Molnar, and some of those other boys too, for their own favorites,” Granby said, joining them. “It’s only natural they should like to pretend themselves captains, but it is no good making pets of the creatures: you don’t make a feral tame by feeding him.”
“Although they do seem to be learning some manners; I had thought ferals would be wholly uncontrollable,” Laurence said.
“So would they be, if Temeraire weren’t at hand,” Granby said. “It is only him making them mind.”
“I wonder; they seem to govern themselves well enough when given sufficient interest in so doing,” Tharkay observed, a little dry, “which seems an eminently rational philosophy; to me i
t is rather more remarkable that any dragon should mind under other circumstances.”
The Golden Horn glittered from a long way off, the city sprawling lavishly over its banks and every hill crowned with the minarets and smooth shining marble domes of the mosques, blue and grey and pink amidst the terra-cotta roofs of the houses and the narrow green blades of the cypress-trees. The sickle-shaped river emptied itself into the mighty Bosphorus, which in its turn snaked away in either direction, black and dazzled with sunlight in Laurence’s glass; but he had little attention for anything but the farther shore, the first glimpse of Europe.
His crew were all of them tired and hungry; as they had drawn closer to the great city, there was a good deal more trouble to avoid settlements, and they had not stopped for more than a cold meal and an uncomfortably broken mid-day sleep in ten days, the dragons hunting on the wing and eating what little meat they caught raw. When they came up over the next rank of hills and saw the great herd of grey cattle grazing upon the wide banks of the Asian side of the strait, Arkady gave an eager bloodthirsty roar and dived at them instantly.
“No, no, you cannot eat those!” Temeraire said, too late: the other ferals were already plunging with cries of delight after the panicked, bellowing herd, and at the southern end of the plain, from behind the ramparts of a squat stone-and-mortar wall, the heads of several dragons, brightly adorned with the plumes of the Turkish service, hove up into view.
“Oh, for all Heaven’s sake,” Laurence said. The Turkish dragons leapt aloft and came on in a furious rush towards the ferals, who were too busy to notice their danger, snatching at first one cow and then another and comparing them in an ecstasy over their sudden riches, too overwhelmed even to settle down and begin eating. That alone saved them: as the Turkish dragons stooped towards them, the ferals jumped and scattered away, leaving almost a dozen cattle crumpled or dead upon the ground, just in time to avoid the reaching claws and teeth.
