Golden Age and Other Stories

  The remnants of the kraken’s body sank at once beneath the wave. The tentacles collapsed limply where they lay, or fell overboard. The Reliant tipped so quickly back upright that Céleste was flung down into the water, and still trapped began thrashing, threatened with drowning, and began to scrabble at the ship in his alarm. “Hold still!” Laurence bellowed, himself snatching up a fallen sword as he struggled free. “Céleste, you must hold still, or you will have us all down!”

  “I will try, only this is very unpleasant!” Céleste said, but despite his panic managed to hold fast to the Reliant’s side without thrashing. She tipped heavily under his grip, but he was buoyant enough that when Laurence had directed him to stretch his body out into the water—surrounded already by a truly frenzied crowd of sharks, who made him yelp unhappily when they mistook his talons for parts of the kraken—they were able to right themselves. Round Laurence a dozen eager hands joined in the work of cutting the ropes loose from the ship, and he climbed out onto Céleste’s neck and there managed to cut away the worst of the sailcloth trap.

  The surface beneath his feet lurched as soon as the fabric had slid free, and Laurence had to grab at the few remaining ropes as Céleste launched himself off the ship into the air with a furious beating of his wings. The world spun violently round as Laurence clung to his meager handhold, his body stretched upon the scaled back and his boots skidding over the surface as they lifted away from the poor Reliant, mauled and ragged amidst the wreckage of the kraken with so many fish feeding on its mass that the waters round her were gone silver with their bodies. Wind tore at his hair as the dragon wheeled round, and, breath stolen, Laurence saw beneath him the ocean spread out impossibly vast curved over the surface of the earth, and unsighted islands green in the distance.

  “Oh, is it you?” Céleste said, peering round at him with one cocked eye. “Whatever are you doing there?”

  “My best not to fall,” Laurence shouted back; but the dragon was leveling out, and he managed to lash himself on a little better, with some of the cords he had not cut. It was nothing like a secure perch, but an irrepressible exaltation rose in him as though it wished to lift his breastbone out of his chest.

  He had to shout to Riley, climbed up to the tops, to send a boat for him to the nearest atoll: there was no very reliable way for Céleste to set him down on the deck, nor could he simply dive off and swim to the ship with the infestation of sharks all round. Céleste set him down on a beach not far away, however, and when they had bathed thoroughly—they had both been thoroughly besmirched by the innards of the kraken—they settled together upon the sand to wait for the boat.

  Laurence put his hand on Céleste’s foreleg; the dragonscale was warm and living to the touch, resilient but not hard. Gratitude warmed him through, at unexpected grace: the Reliant would certainly have been pulled down, if not for the dragon’s help, and Laurence would unhesitatingly have sacrificed life and reputation to save his ship and crew. He could not help but feel that he had been offered a test, unknowing, and having chosen to spare the dragon at that cost, had found himself rewarded for it. He knew it irrational, but he could not repress the sensation.

  “I cannot say that I am fond of kraken, even if they are bigger than whales,” Céleste remarked. “They do not taste nearly as nice, and are much more quarrelsome. But that was very exciting,” this on a faintly wistful note. “Of course I do not want to ruin any more ships, and you needn’t think I would ever break my promise, but it is quite boring only sitting round an island all day.” He sighed and put his head down.

  Laurence paused and looked over at the dragon. “Céleste,” he said slowly, “would you ever think of joining the Corps? The Aerial Corps, I mean,” he added, as the dragon looked over at him. “As a fighting-dragon.”

  “Oh!” Céleste said, with dawning excitement. “Like that story you told me, of Vigo Bay!” He had been very enthusiastic about any stories Laurence could tell him of dragons in battle. “I might go to the Corps?”

  “I have never heard that dragons are recruited to the service, being rather hatched into it, but I cannot suppose that they would refuse you, were you willing. It will be a puzzle to get you to Europe,” Laurence said. “But I suppose it might be managed with a pontoon-raft, if a little awkwardly.”

  “I should not like to leave Galant and Mikli and all my friends,” Céleste said, after a moment’s consideration, “but I dare say some of them might care to join the Corps too. And you would be there, of course.”

  Laurence opened his mouth to say he was a naval officer, and not an aviator; but he found he did not wish to make his excuses. “I will certainly see you there,” he said slowly. “I am afraid I do not know how captaincy is managed, in the Corps; there may be a question of seniority. I am in a different service.”

  “Well, I do not care how they have managed it,” Céleste said firmly. “If they do not want to let me have you, I suppose we may always go on somewhere else, mayn’t we? But I must think what to do with my treasure. Of course I will not take all of it away from the others; I do not mean to be greedy, and everyone else did help, but I do not suppose anyone can argue that half of it is mine, at least.”

  Laurence laughed suddenly; he supposed that with a fortune on the scale of Croesus even a dragon might be welcome wherever he liked to go. “Only you will find it difficult to transport,” he said, amused.

  “Oh, no,” Céleste said, serenely. “We have got five of the ships afloat again. I have not thought of anything to do with them, before, but I am sure they will be very useful now.”

  Succession

  (art by Stephanie Mendoza)

  THERE WAS NO shortage of warning. Qian began to feel vaguely unsettled even before the decorations had entirely been cleared from the celebration of the egg’s formation. She had chosen to begin early in the spring, with the approval of the court physicians and astrologers, and by the time the flowers had finished dropping from the plum trees in the palace gardens, she was certain. She watched the petals floating past her pavilion on the drifting current of the water, ephemeral, and said nothing to anyone. There was nothing to say, she told herself. Perhaps she was mistaken. So much could yet go wrong.

  But the days marched onward and no mischance occurred. And she could not regret it. But she knew that others would. So she said nothing. Her companion was gone, her Emperor, her beloved Hongli with his cool wisdom and stern majesty; he was gone. His son was kind and all that was respectful, and she honored him; but she could not open her heart to him, and he had his own companion. She kept the secret like a pearl held in the mouth.

  The first storm of rejoicing had passed. Now a mood of suppressed anxiety surrounded her. Her attendants sang peaceful, calming songs each morning and proffered the very best the palace kitchens could produce, carefully supervised by the physicians: cooling sherbets, heaps of fruit and grain, and light repasts of fish and fowl with all the bones removed.

  The Emperor had not wished to ask it of her, but there was no other choice. Her grandfather Lung Tien Fai had been too old to try even during her own Emperor’s illustrious reign. Her uncle Ming had never sired an egg, and after the disgrace of Prince Yunreng, Zhi had not even been willing to try. He had bought his prince some freedom by agreeing to stand as the Yongzheng Emperor’s companion at his coronation, but it had only ever been a polite fiction, and ever since Yunreng’s death, he had refused flatly to emerge from seclusion, or to have anything more to do with the world. It had required some twelve years of matings on her brother Chu’s part, with twenty-three separate Imperial concubines, only to produce poor, ill-fated Lien. No one could ask him to try again after such a disaster.
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  And Chu’s egg had caused her own mother’s untimely death, hardening in the sac. Xian had clawed herself open to save it being crushed during the laying, after the physicians refused to act. The egg had survived, but infection and fever had taken her not two weeks later. No one had forgotten the dreadful event. No one spoke of Xian in her hearing these days at all, full of worry and superstition.

  But Qian thought of her a great deal. As the weeks crept onward, she spent most of her days in the Pavilion of Ten Thousand Springs, which had been her mother’s favorite retreat, although she knew her attendants were dismayed. She watched the reflections of the willow trees shivering in the water, and remembered her mother gazing just so, after Chu’s egg had first formed.

  Qian had long respected her mother’s courage, but with a faint sensation of doubt. She had of course shared all the natural feeling for a fragile, helpless egg which any person of propriety and honor ought to have, but Xian’s choice had not seemed the course of true wisdom. Surely the better choice would have been to release the egg at once, when it had shown the first signs of untimely hardening, even if its development was not so far forward as it ought to have been. The shell might have been reinforced with clay, and an attentive watch would have been kept upon it day and night. And Xian herself would have been preserved for both the sake of the nation and for the chance of another attempt. The most eminent scholars and physicians had so concluded, in the study that her emperor had ordered during the aftermath of mourning. Qian had seen no reason to question their findings.

  But now she understood, and understood also her mother’s silence.

  When the weather turned towards summer, the Emperor sent the court physician to address any concerns she might have over the development of the egg, with his compliments. She was in the garden again when the attendants came to inform her that the physician was at the gates with his retinue. She should have sent for him before, she knew. Entirely aside from the anxiety over her health, there were many political considerations. She might put those aside now, with her Emperor in his tomb, but others would not. Even in her general retreat, she had heard the whispers moving through the court, with increasing force: no egg had formed, it had all been a sham; the line of Celestials was failing; there would be no companion for Prince Mianning. Many whispered it with malicious glee.

  In resignation, she told her servants she would receive him. She returned to her pavilion and allowed the physician to examine her. He put his hands upon her hide and palpated with exquisite caution, putting his ear horn delicately against her side and closing his eyes to better hear. Her attendants were all waiting anxiously, and his own servants and apprentices also, and relief passed over them like a visible wave when he announced beamingly, “The egg is exceedingly well-formed, and of a charming size,” meaning that it was small, but not dangerously so.

  But he was not the imperial physician for nothing: he continued along her side, feeling for the extremity of the sac, and his smiles abruptly faded. Qian lowered her head and did not look round. He continued to feel over her side carefully, and in a moment he said slowly, “Celestial one, may this humble physician inquire if it is possible that a second egg has formed?” He knew, of course, that she would know.

  “Yes,” Qian said. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to inform the Emperor.”

  He bowed and departed immediately, of course, with all his retinue. Qian said, “How hot it seems to me suddenly. I would be grateful of some cool refreshment,” and her attendants all hurried away at once to prepare and to gossip, where she could not hear them, and left her to her privacy, at least, even if they had taken the secret from her at last.

  The days afterwards seemed to roll away with enormous speed. The diet prepared for her shifted from day to day with the unseen arguments of the physicians; once she even came to her pavilion a little early and found the servants hastily clearing away one breakfast uneaten, and laying out another of entirely different dishes. For a week, they pressed enormous meals of stewed marrowbones and crushed bone upon her; then fear of early hardening reasserted itself, and all meat disappeared for another week.

  Qian nodded when the scholars came to offer her their advice, ate what seemed appetizing, and ignored the rest. She had long since learned the virtue of refusing to argue. If she felt particularly hungry for something, she whispered a quiet word to dear Princess Hexiao, who had come to bear her company; she had been one of Hongli’s favorite daughters. The dish would appear without ceremony, beside the delicate spray of the willow trees. The eggs continued to develop together, in harmony. She could feel the heartbeats like small urgent messenger drums accompanying the thunder of her own, fading gradually away as the shells thickened. Increasingly, she did not fear.

  The laying became nearly an anticlimax. She woke in the early hours. She rose and went outside into the deep, cool water of her bathing pool, let it cradle her, and the eggs slipped easily and quickly forth, floating to the surface. Stars yet lingered in reflections around them. They had remained a little smaller, but she nosed them over with satisfaction, rolling them over in the water: they were both perfect. Then she raised her voice and called to the attendants, who came out rubbing their eyes and stumbling in the dark, and only belatedly fell to their knees and began singing a welcome to the eggs, while the cushioned carts were hastily rolled out so she might lay the eggs one after another onto their waiting beds.

  She spent the next week in a mindless joy, coiled around the precious eggs. Many came to pay their respects, but she could not have said who came and who did not. Of course she noted the occasion when Prince Mianning came. He had expressed his gratitude to her before, when she had first chosen to make the attempt. Now he came and prostrated himself, formally, and asked her permission to see the eggs. He gazed upon them both and said, “They are equally splendid, Celestial One. Indeed, they appear quite identical.”

  “Yes,” Qian said, still too happy to think, and unable to restrain herself from boasting, “I do not think anyone could find anything to criticize in either.”

  He prostrated himself once more before departing, and said nothing else, but by that afternoon, disquiet returned. She looked upon her two eggs, her two magnificent eggs. No one had found anything to criticize. They had been examined thoroughly, with strong lights shined briefly through the shell: two male dragonets, both well developed, mirror images of one another; and their hides were quite plainly dark. No one but herself could even distinguish between the two. That one had been laid some three minutes before the other, and there was a faintly different shade to the speckling developing upon the second egg’s larger curve where it had occasionally rested against the bone of her hip. No one else seemed able to perceive the difference, however.

  She did not choose to have an opinion on the fiercest questions presently dividing the court. Prince Yongxing had on several occasions probed her thoughts, and she had admitted him to her company and allowed the attempt, but she kept those thoughts deliberately unformed. She had met some few of the Europeans who had come to pay their respects to the Emperor, of course; she had many handsome gifts from them displayed in her private collection, in particular one charming toy of a miniature clock which on every hour opened its face to allow a dragon to emerge and sing a peculiar and incomprehensible song, to nearly inexhaustible hilarity. But that did not shape her feelings towards them. She understood quite well the concerns which had made her Emperor deny them the closer intercourse with China which they desired, and those concerns had not been diminished by the passage of the years.

  But Hongli had once said to her, reviewing another lavish tribute, “How many gifts they have sent this yea
r! It seems to me that the ships that come must be larger than when I was young.” He had been an old man then, grey in the garden beside her; he had already formally retired from the throne, although of course he continued to rule. He had never made remarks by accident. She had asked idly for a painter to make her a landscape of Macau harbor, afterwards, and studied the alteration in the ships thoughtfully.

  They were indeed larger than in former days, and they seemed to carry many cannon.

  Mianning, she knew, felt strongly that they must reach out and lay a heavy calming hand upon the waters which those ships were stirring. He was a young man, of course, with a young man’s energy and courage, but it did not follow that he was wrong. Nor was she prepared to dismiss Yongxing’s objections to the outrageous behavior of the barbarian merchants smuggling in opium and ignoring the laws of the monarch they courted so assiduously. These were matters for others to resolve, however, not her.

  Or had been. She gazed at her eggs again. When the Jiaqing Emperor had asked her to make the attempt, she knew it was not an act without weight. It had not been precisely a decision, yet. After all, someone must come to the throne, and that heir would require a Celestial companion. Prince Mianning was the only plausible companion at present, but many years might go forward without a formal commitment, years during which political opponents might continue to hope for a younger prince to rise in competition.

  But it had been very near a decision. The Emperor’s health was growing uncertain, and his only other son was very young. He had wished to give a mark of support to Mianning, and to smooth the course of a likely succession which might otherwise erupt into the horror of familial strife and even civil war. He did not wish to firmly come down upon one side or another in the central argument, but to send a message that the stability of the state outweighed in importance all other considerations. And she had agreed, sharing that opinion wholeheartedly.