Ad Luna #3: Birds and Such
Birds are curious creatures. Giant three-headed vultures and birds with grass and lettuce for feathers are somewhat more curious. The True History, of course, features both, and therefore so does Ad Luna – especially the former. The Vulture Dragoons of Lucian’s story are the first people to encounter the wayward Greek adventurers, so I knew it was very important that I work them into the story. As usual, however, this meant both toning down Lucian’s excess and expanding it some other ways.
Let’s start with how Lucian depicts his vultures and their riders, with characteristic brevity and ridiculousness:
These are men riding on large vultures and using the birds for horses. The vultures are large and for the most part have three heads: you can judge of their size from the fact that the mast of a large merchantman is not so long or so thick as the smallest of the quills they have.
In other words, these vultures are bloody massive. They are, in fact, far too large to plausibly have a single rider – if their feathers are like ships’ masts then they’re hundreds of feet long at the smallest! If the vultures were to work in Ad Luna at this size – and I wanted to keep them at this size, because it’s awesome – then they’d need more than one rider. They’d need a whole crew.
I will admit to a hefty dose of inspiration from Naomi Novik’s excellent Temeraire books here. The vultures of Ad Luna are rigged out with harnesses and armour plating, manned by twenty or thirty eager Lunars, in their marvellous glass armour and carrying their impossible weapons. It’s all very naval – a captain with a few officers, marksmen and gunners (in a Flying Fortress-style cupola on the chest), and the like. Lieutenant Dio, Ad Luna‘s main character, is the second officer on his vulture, soaring high above the Moon on patrol against all the world’s many foes.
Being on the Moon was useful to wrap my head around such colossal beasts – lower gravity could let things grow much bigger generally (as is the case with some of the other terrifying monsters of the book…), which is helpful when your vultures are fifty feet long or more. I didn’t make them quite as long as Lucian describes. He was, after all, deliberately exaggerating even the plausible things he described, in the manner of Herodotus and Homer – armies of millions of men, etc.
One important thing to note is that these vultures probably don’t look like the ones you’re picturing. These aren’t the scrawny-necked scavengers of Asia and Africa – these are the kind of vultures Lucian would have seen in the Roman Empire of old, in Europe and maybe Egypt. They’re more like buzzards than stereotypical vultures – at least that’s how I’ve described them; feathered necks and sharp bird-of-prey lines. Three feathered necks, and heads to match – conveniently enough for three saddles; one for the captain and one for his first and second officers.
Three heads, of course, means three brains. I didn’t really have space in the plot to really explore how that might work, as fascinating an idea as it might have been, but three brains makes for at least one very powerful mind. That was handy, because I needed a way for the vulture’s riders to talk to it, to give it orders. Stirrups and reins didn’t seem like enough and I didn’t want talking animals. But a powerful triple mind like that didn’t seem to me to need to talk with words…
Idly he patted Aesara’s leftmost head, stroking the feathers behind her eye, and heard the vulture coo gently. At least the bird had taken to him well enough. He could not speak to her directly – that honour was reserved for the captain, with the arcane crown that was his psionic amplifier. Dio had never used one, seldom ever seen one while not on vulture-back. He had dreamed of what it would be like, though, to converse with one of those alien, tripartite minds. One day, he would. He held onto that thought as he scanned the horizon, seated behind the left-hand head. One day he would hold the centre chair. One day. Though he was thousands of feet above the ground, the only way was up.
Tune in next week for something else Moon-related.
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