"Serves you right for eating our cows!"
The second thousand years
If you wanted to be a dragon, dumb perseverance wasn't enough. You had to have a strategy.
Humans had proliferated, so Byam retreated to the ocean. It was harder to get texts in the sea, but technically you didn't need texts to study the Way, since it was inherent in the order of all things. (Anyway, sometimes you could steal scriptures off a turtle on a pilgrimage, or go onshore to ransack a monastery.)
But you had to get out of the water in order to ascend. It was impossible to exclude the possibility of being seen by humans, even in the middle of the ocean. It didn't seem to bother them that they couldn't breathe underwater; they still launched themselves onto the waves on rickety assemblages of dismembered trees. It was as if they couldn't wait to get on to their next lives.
That was fine. If Byam couldn't depend on the absence of humans, it would use their presence to its advantage.
It was heaven's will that Byam should have failed the last time; if heaven wasn't ready to accept Byam, nothing could change that, no matter how diligently it studied or how much it longed to ascend.
As in all things, however, when it came to ascending, how you were seen mattered just as much as what you did. It hadn't helped back then that the lake humans had named Byam for what it was: no dragon, but an imugi, a degraded being no better than the crawling beasts of the earth.
But if, as Byam flashed across the sky, a witness saw a dragon… that was another matter. Heaven wasn't immune to the pressures of public perception. It would have to recognise Byam then.
The spirits of the wind and water were too hard to bluff; fish were too self-absorbed; and there was no hope of hoodwinking the sea dragons. But humans had bad eyesight, and a tendency to see things that weren't there. Their capacity for self-deception was Byam's best bet.
It chose a good point in the sky, high enough that it would have enough cloud matter to work with, but not so high that the humans wouldn't be able to see it. Then it got to work.
It labored at night, using its head to push together masses of cloud and its tail to work the fine detail. Byam didn't just want the design to look like a dragon. Byam wanted it to be beautiful—as beautiful as the dragon Byam was going to be.
Making the sculpture was harder than Byam expected. Cloud was an intransigent medium. Wisps kept drifting off when Byam wasn't looking. It couldn't get the horns straight, and the whiskers were wonky.
Sometimes Byam felt like giving up. How could it make a dragon when it didn't even know how to be one?
To conquer self-doubt, it chanted the aphorisms of the wise:
Nobody becomes a dragon overnight.
Real dragons keep going.
A dragon is only an imugi that didn't give up.
It took 100 years longer than Byam had anticipated before the cloud was finished.
It looked like a dragon, caught as it sped across the sky to its rightful place in the heavens. In moonlight it shone like mother of pearl. Under the sun it would glitter with all the colors of the rainbow.
As Byam put its final touches on the cloud, it felt both pride and a sense of anti-climax. Even loss. Soon Byam would ascend—and then what would happen to its creation? It would dissipate, or dissolve into rain, like any other cloud.
Byam managed to find a monk who knew about shipping routes and was willing to dish in exchange for not being eaten. And then it was ready. As dawn unfolded across the sky on an auspicious day, Byam took its position behind its dragon-cloud.
All it needed was a single human to look up and exclaim at what they saw. A fleet of merchant vessels was due to come this way. Among all those humans, there had to be one sailor with his eyes on the sky—a witness open to wonder, prepared to see a dragon rising to glory.
§
"Hey, captain," said the lookout. "You see that?"
"What is it? A sail?"
"No." The lookout squinted at the sky. "That cloud up there, look. The one with all the colors."
"Oh wow!" said the captain. "Good spot! That's something special, for sure. It's a good omen!"
He clapped the lookout on the back, turning to the rest of the crew. "Great news, men! Heaven smiles upon us. Today is our day!"
Everyone was busy with preparations, but a dutiful cheer rose from the ship.
The lookout was still staring upwards.
"It's an interesting shape," he said thoughtfully. "Don't you think it looks like a… "
"Like what?" said the captain.
"Like, um… " The look-out frowned, snapping his fingers. "What do you call them? Forget my own head next! It looks like a – it's on the tip of my tongue. I've been at sea for too long. Like a, you know – "
§
Byam couldn't take it anymore.
"Dragon!" it wailed in agony.
An imugi has enormous lungs. Byam's voice rolled across the sky like thunder, its breath scattering the clouds—and blowing its creation to shreds.
"Horse!" said the lookout triumphantly. "It looks like a horse!"
"No no no," said Byam. It scrambled to reassemble its sculpture, but the cloud matter was already melting away upon the winds.
"Thunder from a clear sky!" said the captain. "Is that a good sign or a bad sign?"
The lookout frowned. "You're too superstitious, captain – hey!" He perked up, snatching up a telescope. "Captain, there they are!"
Byam had been so focused on the first ship that it hadn't seen the merchant fleet coming. Then it was too busy trying to salvage its dragon-cloud to pay attention to what was going on below.
It was distantly aware of fighting between the ships, of arrows flying, of the screams of sailors as they were struck down. But
