The air came rushing into Laurence’s face, cool and sweet and startlingly fragrant, full of earthy, organic musk: rot and nectar all together, the sulfurous tang of the dragon’s body, all of it somehow magnificently real even if anyone might have called it unpleasant, if it had been offered in a scent bottle. Temeraire beat up in shocking, enormous strokes, purely physical; the wings moved past Laurence on either side like vast black sails, limned with their silvery netting, and then Temeraire turned into the wind and his bracework hummed faintly, coming online, as he launched himself forward.
The air tore from Laurence’s lungs. Temeraire’s body and the bracework’s shielding protected Laurence from the full force of their passage, but that only saved him from being torn off, shredded; he still felt with all his body the ferocity of the wind as they shot forward through the air. He clung to the bracework and stifled an involuntary burst of wholly inappropriate, delighted laughter. He had begun as a fighter pilot, had fought in five actions and a dozen skirmishes—once even manually, during the battle of the Lilienthal Belt, when all their navigation systems had been compromised by the Tricolor virus. He had always loved the sheer intensity of a small starship, the speed and physicality of their flight; but nothing to compare with this: bare to the open sky, exposed, breathing real air, with the green world rolling endlessly below.
“Of course I can go more slowly, if you find you cannot endure it,” Temeraire said, the voice amplified and coming from the neckband.
“No,” Laurence said; he felt himself grinning like a child. “No; I thank you, I am perfectly at ease.”
He could with pleasure have stayed aloft for hours. Temeraire swept with dazzling speed and skill between the massive treetops, the shining trunks like the polished columns of some endless cathedral; Laurence pulled on one of his gauntlets from the kit and reaching out blindly caught one leaf as they tore past a branch: it was wider across than the breadth of his shoulders, the veins gleaming faintly silver, the translucent skin mottled green, with one irritated creature rather like a starfish clinging to the underside, perhaps trying in some slow, slow way to digest a scrap of it. “How long a flight have we?” Laurence asked, letting the wind take the leaf away again, when they passed the next tree.
“Only half an hour more,” Temeraire answered him, more cheerfully. Perhaps the flight was improving his temper; Laurence could scarcely imagine any irritation that could survive this experience, although perhaps it was less remarkable to a dragon. “That is the Green River, over there,” Temeraire added, and Laurence, looking, saw it first merely as a great canyon-like break coming in the treetops, a wide chasm, until they came overhead.
It was astonishingly broad: on another world, in more welcoming soil, it would surely have long since carved itself a deeper passage; here, however, fifty million years had only sufficed to make and slowly widen a gentle indent, that nevertheless gathered runoff to itself. The far side was visible only because they were aloft, and even then only by the upper boughs of the trees that stood there. Masses of green leaves floated upon the surface in great mats, small saplings rooted upon the largest and a few, trapped against the curve of the river, had become veritable islands.
Laurence looked, breathtaken and dazzled; in either direction the river ran through the towering heights of the trees in immense silence, unbroken by birds, by cicada-hum; only a soft endless whispering noise of water running.
He and Temeraire were the only things in sight moving with mortal speed. He knew the youngest of the trees, those the height of yearling oaks, were a century old; the giants were a million years and more. They conquered the unforgiving earth with patience, slow sipping of nutrients by degrees. Those few native living things that were mobile moved only a little, and then carried by the wind; this was not a world that encouraged haste.
“I suppose,” Temeraire said, heavy with scorn, turning his head back to look at Laurence, “that the first thing you will say of the river is you think we ought to dam it up.”
“At the moment,” Laurence said honestly, “I only think it lovely; but I suppose that you would dam it, somewhere, if you could. Can it be done?”
“Oh,” Temeraire said, sounding a little mollified. “Well, no; we did try, but it is just too shallow. We cannot really carve a basin, so the water only runs off, and the trees drink it up so quickly if it gets anywhere near them that it is no use. We have set up some turbines, anyway,” he added, “but they do not do very much good. There are no falls anywhere.”
Laurence felt his great sigh, the dragon’s sides belling out and the hide rising beneath him. He looked and saw a glitter of metal and light, in the distance along the river’s length, and asked, “Are those the turbines there?” Even as he asked, he knew it wrong; those were not turbines.
“No, they are much farther north,” Temeraire said. “That is the capital, where we are going, although what those lights are—” He paused mid-air: his wings described an endless circling wave in the air, while his bracework hummed.
The lights came again: a flickering pattern of green and gold. “Scatter guns,” Laurence said abruptly, cold. The Bonapartists had somehow beaten him here.