Victory of Eagles. Naomi Novik

upset the dear creature, but to speak nice and slow and gentle, like to a horse,’ which was infuriating enough, even before the gentleman in question was named to him as one Reverend Daniel Salcombe.

      ‘Oh, you,’ Temeraire said, which made Salcombe look taken aback, ‘Yes, I know perfectly well who you are. I have read your very stupid letter to the Royal Society, and I suppose now you have come to see me behave like a parrot, or a dog.’

      Salcombe stammered excuses, but it was plainly the case. He began laboriously to read to Temeraire a prepared list of questions, something quite nonsensical about predestination, but Temeraire would have none of it. ‘Pray be quiet; St. Augustine explained it much better than you, and it did not make any sense even then. Anyway, I am not going to perform for you, like some circus animal. I really cannot be bothered to speak to anyone so uneducated that he has not even read the Analects,’ he added, guiltily omitting Laurence; but then Laurence did not set himself up as a scholar, and write insulting letters about people he did not know, ‘And as for dragons not understanding mathematics, I am sure I know more on the subject than do you.’

      He scratched out a triangle into the dust, and labelled the two shorter sides. ‘There; tell me the length of the third side, and then you may talk. Otherwise, go away, and stop pretending you know anything about dragons.’

      The simple diagram had already perplexed several gentlemen, when he had put it to them during a party in the London covert, rather disillusioning Temeraire as to the general understanding of mathematics among the human populace. Reverend Salcombe evidently had not paid much attention to that part of his education either, for he stared, and coloured to his mostly bare pate. Then he turned to Lloyd furiously, ‘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 met Lloyd's gaping, uncomprehending face. He immediately amended, ‘they must have been given to 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 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. 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 realized 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. If Temeraire asked slowly and clearly enough to be understood, he only said, 'Now, let's not be worrying ourselves about such things, no sense in getting worked up. Salcombe, however ignorant, had at least wished to have a conversation; and he might have been prevailed upon to read something from the latest Proceedings, or a newspaper. Oh, what Temeraire would have done for a newspaper!

      During this time the heavyweight 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. Now the rest came in a rush, middle-weights and light-weights and the smaller courier-weight beasts landing 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 He did not look up even when one, 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 long 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 did,’ Temeraire muttered, ‘it is the Pythagorean theorem; everyone who is educated knows it. Laurence taught it to me,’ he added, 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 did not invent 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 the end of it, but four days later, while he lay by his lake, the strange dragon once again landed beside him. She was bristling furiously and her words tumbled over one another as she rushed, ‘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 smug contempt when he had made sense of what she was talking about. ‘It is not p, it is e; you are talking of the natural logarithm. And as for the rest about prime numbers, it is all nonsense. 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 that the irritating stranger might indeed be correct.

      ‘And you needn't tell me that this Pythagoras invented it first,’ the other dragon added, with her chest puffed out, ‘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 anywhere around breeding grounds, so you may keep your tricks. Who ever heard of a dragon named anything like Yang Hui; such nonsense.’

      Temeraire was neither despondent nor tired enough to forget how dreadfully bored he was, and so he was less inclined to take offence. ‘He is not a dragon, neither of them are,’ 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.

      ‘Laurence read it to 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 crossbreed from a Malachite Reaper and a lightweight Pascal's Blue, who had come out rather larger, slower, and more nervous than the breeders had hoped for. Nor was her colouring ideal for any sort of camouflage. Her body and wings were bright blue and streaked with shades of pale green, with widely scattered spines along her back. Perscitia 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 him. He showed me how to do equations, but I do not see any use in going to war and getting oneself shot at or clawed up, for no good reason. 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.

      ‘Well, 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. Sadly he thought, that if only Laurence had been willing, they might now be together in Peking, strolling in the gardens of the Summer Palace again. He had not had the chance to see it during autumn.

      And then he paused,