Victory of Eagles Page 0,3

questions, something quite nonsensical about predestination, but Temeraire would have none of it. "Pray be quiet; Saint Augustine explained it much better than you, and it still did not make any sense even then. Anyway, I am not going to perform for you, like a circus animal. I really cannot be bothered to speak to anyone so uneducated he has not read the Analects," he added, guiltily excepting Laurence, in the back of his mind; 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 of it than do you."

He scratched out with his claw a triangle, in the dirt, and labeled the two shorter sides. "There; tell me the length of the third, and then you may talk; otherwise, go away, and stop pretending you know anything about dragons."

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, 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