Wings of Fire Part 33

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 skin 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 superst.i.tious 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. Lumiere 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?"

Lumiere 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."

Lumiere 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."

Lumiere 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 Lumiere 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 coa.r.s.eness. 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 quant.i.ties 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 quant.i.ty 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 sh.e.l.l. 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 a.s.sembled within the decade, she hoped; or two perhaps.

Three days later, Fraternite 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!" Lumiere 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.

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 Fraternite hefted several of the guns. "Can he take more weight than that?"

"Of course I can," Fraternite 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."

Fraternite 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 a.s.sembled 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 skirmis.h.i.+ng 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 trans.m.u.ted into acts upon the battlefield was a peculiar one; still more so to watch the defending beasts chased away successfully, and then Lumiere diving in, flanked by Fraternite and Surete, 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 Napoleon! 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 place.

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. d.i.c.kson.

Gordon R. d.i.c.kson was born in 1923 in Edmonton, Canada and moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota as a teenager. d.i.c.kson 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. d.i.c.kson's first short story, "Trespa.s.s!" (co-written with Anderson), appeared in 1950 and was followed by first novel Alien from Arcturus in 1956.

d.i.c.kson 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. d.i.c.kson is undoubtedly most famous for the twelve novels that make up the Dorsai military s.p.a.ce 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). d.i.c.kson 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 gla.s.s 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 c.o.c.ker spaniel. Grottwold Hanson had wrecked them all. Dr. Howells would have to get another teaching a.s.sistant for his English Department. Angie...

Angie!

Jim pounded on the door again. It was s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 ba.s.s 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, ma.s.saged 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 fiancee 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 a.s.sistant. Dr. Howells, who heads the English Department, promised me an instructors.h.i.+p over a year ago. But he's never come through with it; and Angie--Angie Gilman, my fiancee--"

"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 ma.s.saged 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."