The very substance of the ambitious
Is merely the shadow of a dream.
A dream itself is but a shadow.
Elizabeth dreamt. She dreamt of a crown, and she dreamt of a city.
Sometimes, the crown was suitably imperial, a great splendid thing of gold and gems, seized by a glorious conqueror. Sometimes, it was a weave of poppies and lupine, red like martyr's blood and purple like the birthing room of an emperor, all plucked in the brilliance of their flowering.
Britain had been imperial long before the shimmering gem of India was placed in Victoria's crown. Henry VIII claimed an imperial crown when he began to divorce himself from Rome legally. He was not subject to the Bishop of Rome because he was an emperor through Brutus. Of Troy.
It wasn't a happy thing, realizing that her regal title didn't mean anything compared to His Britannic Majesty. Playing second fiddle to the actual monarchy had been a hard pill to swallow, even if she did so quickly. (Head of the shipgirl navy wasn't such a bad title, even if it didn't have that regal ring. Maybe, with pluck and luck, she and her sisters could earn titles?)
To some extent, she dreamt of title and power in England, but more often, she drifted back to the crown and title she had been denied. Minor details like her not having a body yet didn't matter to the splendid world of her dreams.
They had been so close. One more day, and they would've reversed Goeben's catastrophe, she was certain of it. No catastrophe at Gallipoli, no butchery of the Anzacs. They would've done more than just distracting the Turks from the Caucuses. The Balkans would have fallen in line, Russia would have gained the supplies she desperately needed,
She dreamt herself like a modern Saint George, the thin shaft of a lance exchanged for the fifteen inches of deathly shell. Goeben came like the dragon, poison spewing from her mouth and some great iron tail thrashing behind her. Saint George's dragon was sated by tribute; it began with sheep but contented itself with men when the pastures emptied. Goeben ate up thousands, her tribute was the blood and treasure of an empire.
(Her triumph over Goeben bled into Jutland nightmares, Goeben going up like Queen Mary and Princess Royal, the shores of Asia and Europe fading away into the fog and mist of the North Sea. Still, Elizabeth would have annihilated her.)
And then she would sail to Constantinople, covering herself in glory. Mehmed took the World's Desire with 25-inch cannons – a copy of one of those guns shot at Britons in 1807 – while Elizabeth's were ten inches smaller… but Elizabeth shot something a bit more powerful than rocks.
Her Constantinople was a dream, splendid and ever-changing. A cross over the Hagia Sophia – although the Russians would insist that it be Orthodox, not Anglican – and candlelight dinner in the Topkapi Palace. They never managed to stay consistent, even when Elizabeth saw photographs of the sites. Those weren't photographs of her Constantinople, the one that hung, swaying, on a branch just barely above her grasp.
A diadem of victory plucked from the abandoned Queen of Cities, a blow that might have cut years off of the war, a modern echo of ancient battle beneath Troy's great walls… how could you not dream about it?
(And maybe Valiant and Malaya wouldn't be so mouthy if Elizabeth had Byzantion under her belt.)
Kaiserin dreamt of her stoker. Well, she had many stokers, but he was hers.
Her Oskar.
Kaiser thought her a fool. He had no status, and his looks were, in her sister's eyes, middling. There was no reason for it, if one viewed marriage as something that could be approached tactically. But that ignored a critical factor.
Other times, she dreamt of Undine. She had read the tale to the younger destroyers, and the story seeped into her dreams. A water spirit without a soul gaining one through marriage to a man…
It struck a chord. She dreamt that she was that Undine, and her comrades were her misguided family. Some of them contented themselves with no romance at all – which was their choice, she supposed – but others made themselves into Lorelei.
She dreamt of murmuring Lorelei, the rock whose echoing whispers brought men to ruin on the Rhine, her comrades crooning like sirens on the rocky outcrops. They seduced their sailors and officers to ruin, paving paths to perdition broad enough for two or many, many more.
Kaiserin would never be able to replicate her namesake perfectly. Certainly, she dreamt of a domestic life like the Empress's: a gaggle of children and a pious, traditional household, but she knew it was a dream. She was tied up in the Navy.
(And, at times, she dreamt of the logical predecessor of children. She'd never be so crass… but her mind generated a quiet nook aboard her ship and coal-stained hands leaving dark smears and stains on her skin.)
Sometimes the dreams became nightmares. Texel again, shells shrieking through the air and sheets of flame dancing above her comrades like some sick Pentecost that divided their fellowship instead of strengthening it.
Sometimes the whole class was picked apart one at a time until Kaiserin was the last survivor being savaged by a whole circling fleet. Sometimes it was sudden, a shell and snapping awake. Speaking of sudden, her mind loved sprinkling mines and torpedoes about in places they had no business being. Those were… unpleasant surprises, and her mind filled in the details very well.
Even then, as the water rushed down hallways and filled her up, she thought of Undine. The scorned Undine who drowned her unfaithful lover in her tears before turning into a stream that curved around his grave, keeping him in an eternal embrace. Kaiserin who dragged her lover out into peril, Kaiserin who hoped and prayed each battle wouldn't end in sinking and buckling, an endless embrace of hard steel around pulped flesh.
If she was Undine, she was a poor one – the water seemed determined not to cooperate with her – but she and Oskar were to be wedded anyway. He didn't give her a soul, he gave her a clumsy wedding band shaped from shattered portions of her hull.
A bit macabre? Perhaps. But like Undine, marriage would make her more than some capricious, destructive force of nature that just so happened to live in human company. She'd be… like him.
(If that meant hard labor and an obscure provincial life, she'd take it. Kaiser could keep her medals, the Kaiser could keep his empire. She had Oskar, and that was contentment enough.)
Oklahoma's dreams tended to be absurd.
You know the sort. Showing up to a fancy meeting in chaps an' fringed leather, wearing a pirate costume during Sunday service, flying through the air, having all her chores done by birds… weird stuff.
Even when her dreams seemed like ones other people had, they were… weird. People had dreams about their teeth falling out or running away from things, Oklahoma spat out mouthfuls of shells and ran away from boats on the surface of the water, hopping over the crests of waves and rolling down into their troughs. Somehow, pulling a Jesus and walking on water made sense in context.
Lots of storms, too. Biguns. Waves looming like skyscrapers over a sea whipped into froth. Blink and she was on the plains, broad and endless, wild winds blowing the grass flat against the ground as a tornado seemed to walk, smaller vortices sprouting off its sides and coming down like the feet of a furious deity. The winds tore up everything – grass, dirt, rocks, anything left lying about – and slammed it all into whatever was still standing, buildings holystone-scoured out of existence when they weren't just torn apart.
Those might not have been absurd dreams for someone who lived in the Great Plains, but for Oklahoma, who still hadn't visited her namesake or spent a night more than a hundred miles from a body of water, she was practically dreaming of another world. From what she had heard and read, they were oddly accurate dreams, but they still felt absurd to a sea-lubber like herself.
For what it was worth, her storm dreams and her flight dreams rarely overlapped. When she flew, it was always clear skies and mirror-smooth water, which felt more absurd than the flying bit sometimes.
She dreamt of bombs falling on the Panama Canal locks as she passed through, a wing of carrier-launched planes leaving her marooned in Gatun or Miraflores Lake, easy pickings for the next go. It felt so much more real than the fleet problems!
(And then mortal peril suddenly shifted into shopping for Panama hats with Nevada. It got really weird when the straw in the hats came back to life and started growing again, making them both look like bushes walking around as it got all tangled in their hair.)
She dreamt of shipgirls she had never heard of attached to equally strange ships, she dreamt they were friends and enemies and everything else. A woman with hair whiter than Oklahoma's own, stretching all the way down to the back, who… went off firefighting, or something? Wasn't as weird as the other white-haired lady, the buff, dark-skinned one who welcomed Oklahoma to her saloon with a tall glass of chicken stock. She drank it straight and then got Oklahoma to help her track down the birds that were supposed to be cleaning the glasses.
Oklahoma figured you'd need a pretty gifted interpreter of dreams to figure out what a horseback chase after intelligent birds meant. Less ambiguous were the ones where she stood in front of an audience. It wasn't like one of those awkward dreams where you ended up without clothes in a public place (which Oklahoma and Nevada never actually had), but even with her dress on she still felt exposed.
They stared and just kept on starin'. Sometimes they'd whisper to each other in words she couldn't understand, but they didn't turn away at all. They watched and they whispered and it was like she was totally exposed, thick all-or-nothing armor hiding nothing.
For the longest time, their talk stayed incomprehensible, but the first word she ever heard from that crowd – foggy and faint everywhere except the eyes – was her name. Oklahoma. Oklahoma, Oklahoma, Oklahoma.
It ramped up, the infrequent audience dream comin' every darn night. They argued, they called for her. They begged for her. She couldn't even get a break in her sleep! Day or night, asleep or awake, somebody was asking somethin' of her, tugging her this way or that. Tenn and Penny and Lexington all bickering, always bickering…
(The audience, she was certain, would judge her for her choice. People would feel hurt. People would get hurt.)
Reading the Gallipoli section in Castles of Steel was genuinely painful. I knew it was coming, and it immediately blew the naval casualties out of the water. Like holy crap. Churchill was right about Goeben causing more slaughter, misery, and ruin than any other ship. And yes Lizzie is supposed to be huffing copium here
The bit in Undine about a water spirit attempting to earn a soul through a relationship with a human inspired a number called 'The Little Mermaid'. I think it could be an interesting idea for a chapter. Hans Andersen was from Denmark, for some proximity bonus.
(Maybe link the martial lifestyle of the Kansen and the little mermaid's sisters pleading with her to kill the prince she was in love with to restore herself to mermaid status in hopes of enjoying all of her mermaid lifespan instead of shooting for full-fledged humanity? There was a bit of a grim note in the original fairy tale about mermaids not having immortal souls and dissolving into seafoam on death. Give us the uncut version Disney!)
The bit at the end of Oklahoma's section is somewhat inspired by some people imagining that the dream of Pilate's wife was her hearing future recitations of the Nicene Creed. The idea of knowing that the future is going to judge you forever, essentially? Eugh.