Victory of Eagles Read Free

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,
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    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 invariably calculate the power of any sum; what does Pythagoras have to say to that. ”
    “You never invented it,” Temeraire said, irritable at having been woken up early, with so empty a day to
    be faced. “That is the binomial theorem, Yang Hui made it a very long time ago,” and he put his head
    under his wing and tried to lose himself again in sleep.
    He thought that would be all, but four days later, while he lay by his lake, the strange dragon landed
    beside him bristling and announced in a furious rush, her words nearly tumbling over one another in the
    attempt to get them out, “There, I have just worked out something quite new: the prime number coming in
    a particular position, for instance the tenth prime, is always very near the value of that position, multiplied
    by the exponent one must put on the number p to get that same value—the number p, ” she added,
    “being a very curious number, which I have also discovered, and named after myself—”
    “Certainly not,” Temeraire said, rousing with comfortable contempt, when he had made sense of what
    she was talking about. “That is e, and you are talking of the natural logarithm, and as for the rest, about
    prime numbers, it is all nonsense; only consider the prime fifteen—” and then he paused, working out the
    value in his head.
    “You see,” she said, triumphantly, and after working out another two dozen examples, Temeraire was
    forced to admit the irritating stranger might indeed be correct.
    “And you needn’t tell me that this Pythagoras invented it first,” the other dragon added, chest puffed out
    hugely, “or Yang Hui, because I have inquired, and no-one has ever heard of either of them; they do not
    live in any of the coverts or breeding grounds, so you may keep your tricks. I thought as much; who ever
    heard of a dragon named anything like Yang Hui; nonsense.”
    Temeraire was neither despondent nor tired enough, in the moment, to forget how dreadfully bored he
    was, and so he was less inclined to take offense. “He is not a dragon, either of them,” he said, “and they
    are both dead anyway, for years and years;