Golden Age and Other Stories by Naomi Novik
Golden Age and Other Stories
Copyright © 2017 by Naomi Novik.
All rights reserved.
Dust jacket illustration
Copyright © 2017 by Sandara Tang.
All rights reserved.
Print version interior design
Copyright © 2017 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.
All rights reserved.
Ele ctronic Edition
ISBN
978-1-59606-830-8
See pages 179-180 for individual art credits.
Subterranean Press
PO Box 190106
Burton, MI 48519
subte rrane anpre ss.com
Volly’s Cow
Planting Season
Dawn of Battle
Golden Age
Succession
Dragons and Decorum
Drabbles
Vol y’s Cow
(art by Cary Shien)
TEMERAIRE WAS REALLY quite fond of Volly—no one could help being so, he felt, unless they were
of a particularly unsympathetic nature—but there was no denying that nothing could claim a share of the little dragon’s attention whenever there was a cow in the offing, which he could reasonably have laid claim to, and sometimes unreasonably.
It was rather mortifying on this occasion, because Temeraire was not alone at all—he had brought Gaudion with him. This dragon was an acquaintance of Perscitia’s originally from the eastern breeding grounds—an experimental cross between a Yellow Reaper and a Regal Copper, who had come out with both the wrong size and the wrong color, at least if you asked the British breeders. He was as inclined to be jealous of his consequence as a Regal, and yet wistful for company as a Reaper, an unfortunate conjunction of traits which had seen him given up to the breeding grounds without too much regret by the Corps, and there quite lonely, until Perscitia had discovered him in her efforts to find likely candidates to stand for the next election.
Gaudion was very much inclined to make a part of whatever party would have him, which Temeraire was not certain made much of a recommendation, but which Perscitia considered of the first importance
—“We will never make much headway unless we vote as one,” she always said. “We must make ourselves a reliable set of votes, so that any government that might take power shall want to make itself agreeable to us.” Besides this, he was also reasonably clever, and sensible when anyone was not making him feel smaller than he thought himself, at least according to Perscitia. Temeraire had never yet seen it, himself, as evidently his mere presence was enough to put Gaudion’s back up.
“And if nothing else, he can squeeze his head inside the building through the skylight, which you can’t, and he looks like a Regal Copper, which will certainly have a good effect,” Perscitia said.
“He does not look like a Regal Copper!” Temeraire said. “No one could possibly mistake him.”
“No sensible person could, but I assure you there are any number of members of Parliament who can,” Perscitia said firmly.
So it was desirable to have him elected, and in any case it was certainly more desirable than having no dragon elected for the seat at all. The lines of the borough had been drawn in a very awkward way indeed, carefully skirting the edge of the eastern breeding grounds, avoiding Dover entirely, and Perscitia had been at some pains to find any suitable candidate at all within their bounds. Only because Gaudion had slipped away from the breeding grounds and established himself in a small cave in the South Downs, after too many affronts to his pride, could he qualify, and now they must somehow find at least a few votes for him.
Which had brought them here: Captain James and Volly had only lately been stationed at Bodiam Castle, where they might serve as a longer-distance relay for Winchesters carrying messages from either London or Dover, and were just inside the borders. Volly certainly did not care anything about Parliament or the election, of course, but he had as much right to cast a vote as any other dragon, and Temeraire was sure he would be willing to oblige, if only he could be made to understand what he had to do.
And if only Temeraire could win his attention for long enough to explain it. But there was the cow, just the other side of the tall fence, chewing its cud meditatively. It had been hooded like a cavalry mount, a technique the herd masters had lately adopted which kept the cattle a good deal fatter and more complacent when they had to be raised near dragons. Temeraire had quite approved—it was a Chinese practice, which Laurence had passed along to the Corps through Jane Roland—until this particular moment, where the cow had quite of its own volition wandered right up to the edge of the pen, where sat Volly directly opposite, staring at it in unblinking and total focus.
“I am sure they will give it to you for dinner tonight,” Temeraire tried again, “or at the latest tomorrow; you are sure to have a nice haunch of it very soon,” but there was no use talking to him at all; Volly’s head did not twitch away in the slightest. And the election was this very day—Temeraire had not thought it wise to try and instruct Volly in advance, and rely upon his memory—and the voting should have ended long before feeding time.
Then Gaudion made things worse by saying, stiffly, “That is a handsome cow, and very large for such a small beast; I don’t see why he should have it all to himself, when there are other dragons about, who have a just claim to a share,” and Volly certainly heard that. He flattened his wings against his back and hissed at Gaudion, who drew his head back indignantly. He was nothing like a Regal Copper, but he was much bigger than Volly, of course, who was a courier-beast and closer in size to the very cow he was eyeing.
But of course, Volly was a working-dragon, and the cow was in his own feeding pen, and well within his rights. “My cow,” he said, in tones of clear outrage.
“Certainly it is your cow!” Temeraire interjected hurriedly. “You have been flying a great deal lately, I hear, and you have earned it; I, for one, would never dream of encroaching.” He fired a stern look at Gaudion, who scowled back at him sullenly, not recommending himself in any way whatsoever.
Then inspiration struck, and Temeraire leaned over towards Volly and whispered, “But I am sure that dragon might well try to be quarrelsome about it: shall I get him away again, before the feeders should get round to the butchering? He is a middle-weight, after all, and if he is here when they serve it out, he could certainly make some noise about it. Pray come and cast your vote for him in the election, quickly, and he will have to come away with me at once.”
Planting Season
(art by Hugh Ebdy)
Author’s Note: While Hugh’s gorgeous picture depicts Laurence and a new-
hatched Temeraire, for me it immediately evoked Boston Harbor, and so I’ve
written about a very different character who hails from that region of the
Temeraire universe: the American dragon John Wampanoag, introduced in Blood
of Tyrants . This story takes place a considerable time before that appearance.
THE SMELLS OF Boston harbor were pretty extraordinary to a young dragon’s nose, the tar especially, and John shook his head at the enormous sprawls of fish being heaved onto the docks in their nets, most of which already smelled old. But he marched onward anyway. The sailors who noticed him cleared out of his way all right, and a Narragansett man off one of the whalers called him a greeting and offered him a tasty thick slice of blubber, which you couldn’t call anything but nice, even if it wasn
“Do you know where I can find Mr. Devereux?” John asked him, and was pointed to the right warehouse: it had James & Devereux charmingly painted in gold across the façade in the crisp letters which John had been studying carefully with Father Duquet since his hatching. He couldn’t have got through the front door, but there was a larger one in the back, where a wagon had been drawn up to be loaded, and a cleared spot round the corner where the horses couldn’t see, with the marks of dragon claws on the ground. John settled to wait until the wagon and its big draft horses had cleared out, and then he went inside and spoke to the large man who had been directing the loading.
“I’m from Mashpee: will you please ask Mr. Devereux if he will speak to me? I have a letter for him from my chief.” The men were looking all round him and even peering under his belly, like he was hiding a rider somewhere, so he put out his right foreleg and waved it to show the leather satchel bound securely around it.
“How do you do,” Mr. Devereux said when he came out, very loudly and slowly, as though that would’ve done any good if John hadn’t learned English in the shell.
“I am doing pretty well, thank you,” John said, and introduced himself as John Wampanoag, since the colonists got fussed if you didn’t use a last name, “and I would like a cargo, if you have one looking for transport.”
Devereux soon began speaking in a more ordinary and sensible way, although it was clear he was
perplexed because John did not have a rider with him. John didn’t care to explain, though, so he only said, quite simply, that he did not have one.
“Anyway,” John said, “I can carry more if I don’t have a person weighing me down. I have flown as far as New York, and come back without any trouble,” and handed over the letter from the sachem which expressed her confidence in his reliability, and more importantly an offer to guarantee two hundred dollars’ worth of his cargo. He had proposed that himself: an amount judiciously chosen so its loss would not hurt Mashpee too much, but enough not to be thrown trivially away.
“Hm, I see,” Devereux said, when he had read it.
John added, “I am no heavy-weight, of course, but perhaps you have a smaller cargo which needs to go right away, or can find one.”
Devereux eyed him narrowly, and then said, “Well, let me see what I can do. Will you come back
tomorrow morning?”
John spent the afternoon pleasantly, fishing for his supper in the waters off the harbor—no stale fish for him, thank you—and to make a nice omen of good fortune, in the late afternoon he spotted a whaler in the distance having a fight with a sperm whale a bit too big for them. He flew out and offered to help in exchange for twenty barrels of whale oil out of their hold. The captain bargained him down to ten in a shouted exchange, which was as much as John had really hoped for, so when the whale was secured, they parted with much satisfaction and a sense of a good bargain on all sides.
John took his ten barrels back to the docks and slept across from James & Devereux curled round them—no one troubled him at all—and in the morning, Mr. Devereux offered to buy them for twenty-eight dollars, which was not quite at the top of the market but a fair price.
“Perhaps you could make it a bit more, in shares of my cargo instead of cash: if you have found one for me, and would be willing to take me as an investor,” John said, before Mr. Devereux had even brought out the bills.
“I suppose I can see my way clear to that,” Devereux said, a bit bemusedly. He had four tons of tea to send. By some unlucky chance—for them—five different ships had made it into port from China that same week, and the price of tea in Boston had dropped low enough that Devereux had decided it worth buying some and shipping it on to New York. They agreed that John’s share should be a twentieth of the cargo, along with a hundred dollars for carrier service, which was handsome. John had them bundle the sacks of tea under his belly and wrap it with a thick padding of oilskin to keep them dry.
The journey to New York was all right: it wasn’t too cold anymore, and he found a nice sheltered clearing to pass the night halfway. A couple of Mohawks with riders who didn’t look more than a week past manhood tried to give him some trouble over the Hudson the next morning, but John beat up into a tall damp cloud and hid for half an hour. They shot a few bullets idly in his direction, but they eventually lost interest and went spiraling away, so they hadn’t seen he had cargo. It was all right to say they were one nation now, but there were plenty of folks who didn’t care to remember it when they saw you crossing their hunting grounds of the last five centuries with something worth having.
Probably they had also seen that he hadn’t any rider.
John dived out of the cloud and shook the drops from his wings. He didn’t feel too cold in the chest or the belly, thanks to the oilskin, and looking himself over, it occurred to him that the covering made the cargo hard to see against his dark brown hide. Nobody would’ve guessed he was carrying four thousand dollars’ worth of tea. He might get a cover made to match him even better, and harness straps, too. It would be worth the investment to get back and forth without trouble: having to stop and negotiate a toll, or worse, fight. Personally, he had never understood those dragons who liked a quarrel as much as a good dinner.
Singing Bird had spoken to him and his two hatch-mates about it seriously even while they’d still been in the shell. Fighting wasn’t any use to the tribe these days. Yes, old Green Wing, who was getting on for two hundred, would tell you as long as you’d listen, “Before the yellow fever came, you could not fly ten miles along the coast without seeing a wetu from the sky, and there were a thousand men for every one of us,” lamenting, “and they would dance and race and duel, and show their skills, and only the best were allowed to ride, and we would go on great raids, and bring back the tail-spikes of our enemies.”
Well, that had all been over a long time before John had even broken shell. These days there were less than a hundred dragon riders left among the Wampanoag. Twenty-seven had died in the Revolution.
And there were a lot of colonists with a lot of guns, all of them hungry for land.
The sachem Philip, Singing Bird’s great-grandfather, he’d tried to chase them off, a little more than a hundred years back. He’d made alliance with the Narragansett and with the Mohegan, and together the dragon riders had run the colonists all the way back behind the long guns of Boston, and burned their farms. But the next spring, their King across the sea had sent a big red-speckled egg, and a year after that, Massachusetts Bay colony had a dragon bigger than any of the ships in their harbor. When Dominus went aloft, he took two dozen men with him, loaded down with guns and bombs. He could smash a whole village in fifteen minutes, and twenty dragon riders together couldn’t say much about it. So Philip had to make peace, and they all sat down around a table and drew some new lines on some new maps, and then the colonists went right back to nibble nibble nibbling around the edges, anywhere there weren’t enough Indian folks to catch them, which was everywhere.
When the Revolution came, there’d been a lot of arguing among the Wampanoag. Some folks wanted
to help the British, who promised to keep the colonists out of Indian lands. But Singing Bird had stood up and said those promises weren’t worth any more than the ones they’d got before now, and the colonists weren’t going anywhere. Better to divide them from England with all its busy factories, and long guns, and dragons who could knock you around like a flock of chickadees. She’d already been sachem in Mashpee, since her father had died, but the Wampanoag had named her great sachem, after that, and gave her the name Singing Bird to mark it.
So the Wampanoag—and the Narragansett and the Mohegan, just about all the Iroquois, and eventually the Shawne
So now Pokanoket was a state, and the other Indian nations were too, and most importantly, it had been written into the Constitution that nobody could own land in the borders of an Indian state, only the right to use it, and their descendants had to renew their land-use rights with the sachems whenever they inherited.
That had stopped the worst of the dirty tricks that the colonists had been using to get their lands, getting folks drunk and bribing them to sell land they didn’t have a right to. But it wasn’t going to save them forever. Singing Bird said they had just won some time: time to become the people who made the guns, and the ships, and wrote the laws. Only that would save them, not tooth and claw. That was what she needed them to do, she’d told all the hatchlings. It was hard for an old dragon to learn new ways, so it was up to them, the young ones, to learn English, and as much reading as they could, and put their brains and backs to new work.
John meant to do his best. His hatch-mate Pine Carrier had taken a young man from Cohannet as a companion, and they had gone into timber, where they could together work faster than any crew of twenty; when they had proven themselves, the village would go shares to hire their own crew and equip them, and give them logging rights in the Wampanoag woods. There was talk of a saw-mill of their own. Wave Climber had also taken a companion: a half-Dutch, half-French, half-Mohegan—well, somewhere in there