Victory of Eagles (3 page)

The simple diagramme had perplexed several gentlemen, when Temeraire had put it to them at a party in

the London covert, rather disillusioning Temeraire as to the general understanding of mathematics among

men. The Reverend Salcombe evidently had not paid much attention to that part of his education, either,

for he stared, and colored up to his mostly bare pate, and turned to Lloyd furiously, saying, “You have

put the creature up to this, I suppose! You prepared the remarks—” The unlikelihood of this accusation

striking him, perhaps, as soon as he had made it to Lloyd’s gaping, uncomprehending face, he

immediately amended, “They were given you, by someone, and you fed them to him, to embarrass

me—”

“I never, sir,” Lloyd protested, to no avail, and it annoyed Temeraire so much that he nearly indulged

himself in a small, a very small roar; but in the last moment he exercised great restraint, and only growled.

Salcombe fled hastily all the same, Lloyd running after him, calling anxiously for the loss of his tip: he had

been paid, then, to let Salcombe come and gawk at Temeraire, as though he really were a circus animal;

and Temeraire was only sorry he had
not
roared, or better yet thrown them both in the lake.

And then his temper faded, and he drooped. He thought, too late, that perhaps he ought to have talked

to Salcombe, after all. Lloyd would not read to him, or even tell him anything of the world at all, even if

Temeraire asked slowly and clearly enough to be understood, but only said maddeningly, “Now, let’s not

be worrying ourselves about such things, no sense in getting worked up.” Salcombe, however ignorant,

had wished to have a conversation; and he might yet have been prevailed upon to read him something

from the latest Proceedings, or a newspaper—oh, what Temeraire would have done for a newspaper!

All this time the heavy-weight dragons had been finishing their own dinners; the largest, a big Regal

Copper, spat out a well-chewed grey and bloodstained ball of fleece, belched tremendously, and lifted

away for his cave. His departure cleared a wide space of the field, and now the rest came in a rush,

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middle-weights and light-weights and the smaller courier-weight beasts landing in to take their own share

of the sheep and cattle, calling to one another noisily. Temeraire did not move, but only hunched himself a

little deeper while they squabbled and played around him, and did not look up even when one, a

middle-weight with narrow blue-green legs, set herself directly before him to eat, crunching loudly upon

sheep bones.

“I have been considering the matter,” she informed him, after a little while, around a mouthful, “and in all

cases, where the angle is ninety degrees, as I suppose you meant to draw it, the length of the longest side

must be a number which, multiplied by itself, is equal to the lengths of the two shorter sides, each

multiplied by themselves, added.” She swallowed noisily, and licked her chops clean. “Quite an

interesting little observation; how did you come to make it?”

“I never,” Temeraire muttered. “It is the Pythagorean theorem; everyone knows it who is educated.

Laurence taught it me,” he added, by way of making himself even more miserable.

“Hmh,” the other dragon said, rather haughtily, and flew away.

But she reappeared at Temeraire’s cave the next morning, uninvited, and poked him awake with her

nose, saying, “Perhaps you would be interested to learn that there is a formula which I have invented,

which can invariably calculate the power of any sum; what does Pythagoras have to say to
that.
”

“You never invented it,” Temeraire said, irritable at having been woken up early, with so empty a day to

be faced. “That is the binomial theorem, Yang Hui made it a very long time ago,” and he put his head

under his wing and tried to lose himself again in sleep.

He thought that would be all, but four days later, while he lay by his lake, the strange dragon landed

beside him bristling and announced in a furious rush, her words nearly tumbling over one another in the

attempt to get them out, “There, I have just worked out something quite new: the prime number coming in

a particular position, for instance the tenth prime, is always very near the value of that position, multiplied

by the exponent one must put on the number
p
to get that same value—the number
p,
” she added,

“being a very curious number, which I have also discovered, and named after myself—”

“Certainly not,” Temeraire said, rousing with comfortable contempt, when he had made sense of what

she was talking about. “That is
e,
and you are talking of the natural logarithm, and as for the rest, about

prime numbers, it is all nonsense; only consider the prime fifteen—” and then he paused, working out the

value in his head.

“You see,” she said, triumphantly, and after working out another two dozen examples, Temeraire was

forced to admit the irritating stranger might indeed be correct.

“And you needn’t tell me that this Pythagoras invented it first,” the other dragon added, chest puffed out

hugely, “or Yang Hui, because I have inquired, and no-one has ever heard of either of them; they do not

live in any of the coverts or breeding grounds, so you may keep your tricks. I thought as much; who ever

heard of a dragon named anything like
Yang Hui;
nonsense.”

Temeraire was neither despondent nor tired enough, in the moment, to forget how dreadfully bored he

was, and so he was less inclined to take offense. “He is not a dragon, either of them,” he said, “and they

are both dead anyway, for years and years; Pythagoras was a Greek, and Yang Hui was from China.”

“Then how do you know they invented it?” she demanded, suspiciously.

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“Laurence read it me,” Temeraire said. “Where did you learn any of it, if not out of books?”

“I worked it out myself,” the dragon said. “There is nothing much else to do, here.”

Her name was Perscitia. She was an experimental cross-breed of a Malachite Reaper and a light-weight

Pascal’s Blue, who had come out rather larger, slower, and more nervous than the breeders had hoped;

and her coloring was not ideal for any sort of camouflage: the body and wings mostly bright blue and

streaked with shades of pale green, with widely scattered spines along her back. She was not very old,

either, unlike most of the once-harnessed dragons in the breeding grounds: she had given up her captain.

“Well,” Perscitia said, “I did not mind my captain, he showed me how to do equations, when I was small,

but I do not see any use in going to war, and getting oneself shot at or clawed up, for no reason which

anyone could explain to me. And, when I would not fight, he did not much want me anymore,” a

statement airily delivered, but Perscitia avoided Temeraire’s eyes, making it.

“If you mean formation-fighting, I do not blame you; it is very tiresome,” Temeraire said. “They do not

approve of me in China,” he added, to be sympathetic, “because I
do
fight: Celestials are not supposed

to.”

“China must be a very fine place,” Perscitia said, wistfully, and Temeraire was by no means inclined to

disagree; he thought sadly that if only Laurence had been willing, they might now be together in Peking,

perhaps strolling in the gardens of the Summer Palace again; he had not had the chance to see it in

autumn.

And then he paused, and abruptly raising his head he said, “You say you made inquiries: what do you

mean by that? You cannot have gone out.”

“Of course not,” Perscitia said. “I gave Moncey half my dinner, and he went to Brecon for me and put

the question out on the courier circuit; this morning he went again, and the word was in no-one had ever

heard of anybody by those names.”

“Oh—” Temeraire said, his ruff rising, “oh, pray; who is Moncey? I will give him anything he likes, if only

he can find out where Laurence is; he may have all my dinner, for a week.”

Moncey was a Winchester, who had slipped the leash and eeled right out the door of the barn where he

had hatched, past a candidate he did not care for, and so made his escape from the Corps. He had been

coaxed eventually into the breeding grounds, more by the promise of company than anything else, being a

gregarious creature. Small and dark purplish, he looked like any other Winchester at a distance, and

excited no comment if either seen abroad or absent from the daily feeding; and as long as his missed

meals were properly compensated for, he was very willing to oblige.

“Hm, how about you give me one of those cows, the nice fat sort they save for you special, when you

are mating,” Moncey said. “I would like to give Laculla a proper treat,” he added, exultingly.

“Highway robbery,” Perscitia said indignantly, but Temeraire did not care at all; he was learning in any

case to hate the taste of the cows, when it meant yet another miserably awkward evening session, and

nodded on the bargain.

“But no promises, mind,” Moncey cautioned. “I’ll put it about, no fears, but it’ll be as many as a few

weeks to hear back, if you want it sorted out proper to all the coverts, and to Ireland, and even so

maybe no-one will have heard anything.”

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“There is sure to have been word,” Temeraire said, low, “if he is dead.”

THE BALL CAMEin down through the ship’s bows and crashed recklessly the length of the lower

deck, the drumroll of its passage preceding it with castanets of splinters raining against the walls for

accompaniment. The young Marine guarding the brig had been trembling since the call to go to quarters

had sounded above; a mingling, Laurence thought, of anxiety and the desire to be doing something, and

the frustration at being kept at so useless and miserable a post: a sentiment he shared from his still more

useless place within the cell. The ball seemed only to be rolling at a leisurely pace by the time it

approached the brig, and offered a first opportunity; the Marine had put out his foot to stop it before

Laurence could say a word.

He had seen much the same impulse have much the same result on other battlefields: the ball took off the

better part of the foot and continued unperturbed into and through the metal grating, skewing the door off

its top hinge and finally embedding itself two inches deep into the solid oak wall of the ship, there

remaining. Laurence pushed the crazily swinging door open and climbed out of the brig, taking off his

neckcloth to tie the Marine’s foot; the young man was staring amazed at the bloody stump, and needed a

little coaxing to limp along to the orlop. “A clean shot; I am sure the rest will come off nicely,” Laurence

said for comfort, and left him to the surgeons; the steady roar of cannon-fire was going on overhead.

He went up the stern ladderway and plunged into the confusion of the gundeck: daylight shining in from

her east-pointed bows, through jagged gaping holes, and making a glittering cloud of the smoke and dust

kicked up from the cannon. Roaring Martha had jumped her tackling, and five men were fighting to hold

her wedged against the roll of the ship long enough to get her secure again; at any moment the gun might

go running wild across the deck, crushing men and perhaps smashing through the side. “There girl, hold

fast, hold fast—” The captain of the gun-crew was speaking to her like a skittish horse, his hands wincing

away from the barrel, smoking-hot; one side of his face was bristling with splinters standing out like

hedgehog spines.

In the smoke, in the red light, no one knew Laurence; he was only another pair of hands. He had his

flight gloves still in his coat pocket; he clapped on to the metal with them and pushed her by the mouth of

the barrel, his palms stinging even through the thick leather, and with a final thump she heaved over into

the grooves again. The men tied her down and then stood around her trembling like well-run horses,

panting and sweating.

There was no return firing, no calls passed along from the quarterdeck, no ship in view through the

gunport. The ship was griping furiously where Laurence put his hand on the side, a sort of low moaning

complaint as if she were trying to go too close to the wind, and water was glubbing in a curious way

against her sides: a sound wholly unfamiliar, and he knew this ship. He had served on
Goliath
four years

in her midshipmen’s mess as a boy, as lieutenant for another two and at the Battle of the Nile; he would

have said he could recognize every note of her voice.

He put his head out the porthole and saw the enemy crossing their bows and turning to come about for

another pass: a frigate only, a beautiful trim thirty-six-gun ship which could have thrown not half of

Goliath
’s broadside; an absurd combat on the face of it, and he could not understand why they had not

turned to rake her across the stern. Instead there was only a little grumbling from the bow-chasers above,

not much reply to be making. Looking forward along the ship, he saw that she had been pierced by an

enormous harpoon sticking through her side, as if she were a whale. The end inside the ship had several

ingeniously curved barbs, which had been jerked sharply back to dig into the wood; and the cable at the

harpoon’s other end swung grandly up and up and up, into the air, where two enormous heavy-weight

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