In Autumn, A White Dragon Looks Over the Wide River
Naomi Novik
The diplomat, De Guignes, had disappeared somewhere into the palace. Lien remained alone in the courtyard. The pale narrow faces of the foreign servants gawked out at her from the windows of the great house; the soldiers in their blue and white uniforms staring and clutching their long muskets. Other men, more crudely dressed, were stumbling around her; they had come from the stables by their smell, clumsy with sleep and noisy, and they groaned to one another in complaint at the hour as they worked.
The palace, built in square around the courtyard, was not at all of the style she had known at home, and deeply inconvenient. While it possessed in some few places a little pleasing symmetry, it was full of tiny windows arranged on several levels, and the doors were absurdly small—like a peasant’s hut or a merchant’s home. She could never have gone inside. Some of the laborers were putting up a pavilion on a lawn in the court, made of heavy fabric and sure to be hot and stifling in the warm autumnal weather. Others carried out a wooden trough, such as might be used for feeding pigs, and began to fill it with buckets, water slopping over the sides as they staggered back and forth yawning.
Another handful of men dragged over a pair of lowing cattle, big brown-furred creatures with rolling eyes showing white. They tethered the cows before her and stood back expectantly, as though they meant her to eat them live and unbutchered. The animals stank of manure and terror.
Lien flicked her tail and looked away. Well, she had not come to be comfortable.
De Guignes was coming out of a side door of the house again, and another man with him, a stranger: dressed like the soldiers, but with a plain grey coat over all that at least concealed the rudely tight trousers the others all wore. They approached; the man paused a few paces away to look upon her, not out of fear: there was an eager martial light in his face.
“Sire,” De Guignes said, bowing, “permit me to present to you Madame Lien, of China, who has come to make her home with us.”
So this was their emperor? Lien regarded him doubtfully. By necessity, over the course of the long overland journey from China in the company of De Guignes and his fellow countrymen, she had grown accustomed to the lack of proper ceremony in their habits; but to go so far as this was almost embarrassing to observe. The serving-men were all watching him without averting their eyes or their faces; there was no sense of distance or respect. The emperor himself clapped De Guignes on the shoulder, as though they had been common soldiers together.
“Madame,” the emperor said, looking up at her, “you will tell these men how they may please you. I regret we have only a poor welcome to offer you at present, but there is a better in our hearts, which will soon make amends.”
De Guignes murmured something to him, too soft for her to hear, and without waiting for her own answer, the emperor turned away and gestured impatiently, giving orders. The loudly bellowing cows were dragged away again, and a couple of boys came hurrying over to sweep away the stinking pools of urine they had deposited in their fear. In place of the trough, men brought out a great copper basin for her to drink from, bright-polished. The moaning of the cows stopped, somewhere on the other side of the stables, and shortly a roasting scent came: uninteresting, but she was hungry enough, after their long journey, to take her food with no seasoning but appetite.
De Guignes returned to her side after a little more conversation with the emperor. “I hope all meets with your approval?” he said, indicating the pavilion. “His majesty informs me he will give orders that a permanent pavilion be raised for your comfort on the river, and you will be consulted as regards the prospect.”
“These things are of little importance,” she said. “I am eager, however, to hear more of the emperor’s present designs against the nation of Britain.”
De Guignes hesitated and said, “I will inquire in the morning for the intelligence you desire, Madame. His majesty may wish to convey his intentions to you himself.”
She looked at him and flicked her ruff, which ought to have been to him a warning that he was lamentably transparent, and also that she would not be put off in such a manner for long; but he only looked pleased with himself as he bowed again and went away.
She stayed awake the better part of the night in the pleasant cool upon the lawn before the pavilion, nibbling occasionally at the platter of roasted meat as hunger overcame her distaste; at least it was no more unappetizing for being cold. The rising sun, painful in her eyes and against her skin, drove her at last into the shelter of the pavilion; and she drowsed thickly and uncomfortably in the stifling heat, dreaming of her prince’s deep, controlled voice, reciting summer poetry.
In the late afternoon, the sun vanished behind clouds and she could emerge, only to find she had company in the court: three young male dragons of enormous size, all of them dirty, idly gnawing on bloody carcasses, and wearing harnesses like carrying-dragons. They stared at her with rude curiosity; Lien sat back upon her haunches and regarded them icily.
“Good day, madame,” one of them said after a moment, daring to break silence first. Lien flattened back her ruff and ignored him entirely, leaning over the copper basin. Several leaves had blown into the water and not been removed; she lifted them out of the way with the tip of her claw and drank.
The three males looked at one another, their tails and wing-tips twitching visibly with uncertainty like hatchlings fresh from the shell. The first one who had spoken—the largest of them, an undistinguished dark brown in color with a belly of mottled cream and grey—tried again. “I am called Fraternité,” he offered, and when she made no response, he leaned his head in towards her and said very loudly, “I said, good day, I am—”
She blazed her ruff wide and roared at him, a short controlled burst directed at the soft earth before his face, so the dirt sprayed into his face and his nostrils.
He jerked back, coughing and spluttering, making a spectacle of himself and rubbing his face against his side. “What was that for?” he protested, injured; although to her small relief, he and his companions also drew back a little distance, more respectfully.
“If I should desire to make the acquaintance of some person,” Lien said, addressing the small tree a few paces away, so as to preserve at least some semblance of a barrier to this sort of familiarity, “I am perfectly capable of inquiring after their name; and if someone is so lost to right behavior as to intrude themselves undesired upon my attention, that person will receive the treatment he deserves.”
After a brief silence, the smallest of the three, colored in an unpleasant melange of orange and brown and yellow, ventured, “But how we are to be welcoming if we are not to speak to you?”
Lien paused momentarily, without allowing surprise to show; it required an abrupt and unpleasant adjustment to her new circumstances to realize that these were not some idle gawkers who had carelessly intruded: they had been deliberately sent to her as companions.
She looked them over more closely. Fraternité was perhaps two years out of the shell; he did not yet have his full growth, outrageously disproportionate as his mass already was. The orange-brown male was only a little older, and the last, black with yellow markings, was younger again; he was the only one at all graceful in conformity or coloration, and he stank of a markedly unpleasant odor like lamp-oil.
If she had been at home, or in any civilized part of the world, she would at once have called it a deliberate insult, and she wondered even here; but De Guignes had been so anxious to bring her. The rest of her treatment suggested enough incompetence, she decided, to encompass even this. Perhaps the French even thought it a gracious gesture of welcome; and she could not yet afford to disdain it. She had no way of knowing who might be offended by such a rejection, and what power they might have over other decision-making.