Novice Dragoneer

4

Her first duty, as it turned out, was gutting fish. And no matter how many fine sentiments you wrapped around the word duty in an oath, her duty was a slippery, smelly business.

She reported, so early in the morning that dawn was just a fringe of light behind the Sisters across the lake, to her new station, taking her first trip across the Long Bridge. She wondered how many heroes she’d heard about in stories and songs had walked that bridge under the eyes of sculpted dragon heads and heroic human figures.

She was told to meet the apprentice Gorgantern at the far end of the long bridge yawningly early, and that he was big, easy to pick out in the murky dawn. He was tall and vastly wide, and something about the way the bottom of his canvas pants hung low about his thighs made Ileth think of a trained bear she’d once seen rearing up on its hind legs.

Gorgantern introduced himself at the other end of the bridge by saying, “I’m in charge here, understand?” as he issued her a thin-bladed, sharp filleting knife and an oilskin apron. The knife’s handle had cracked at some point or other and whoever had used it previously decided to just remove the broken part. There was a whetstone and oil she could use to keep the blade in working condition, but fixing the handle would be up to her. Three other new novices, all boys, started with her. Gorgantern led them to the outer stair down to the Catch Basin.

“Much faster, if you don’t mind walking in weather,” Gorgantern said, taking them down a narrow track that followed a break like a crack in the massive side of the mountainlike Beehive. A hand rope helped them along and gave them confidence. There wasn’t any sort of lip between the stairs and a steep plunge to the rocks and water at the bottom of the Beehive. “The stairs can be slippery, especially if you’ve fish guts smeared all over your feet.”

As they picked their way down the treacherous, uneven stairs, Gorgantern explained that they had the honor of having to travel the farthest to their work of anyone in the Serpentine. The Catch Basin was at the bottom of the Beehive, on the other side where it met the deeper waters of the Skylake. Only the Guard patrols and some of the cargo helpers went out beyond the Catch Basin onto the old point at the end of the Serpentine’s peninsula, the bit with the old half-flooded battlements and defunct lighthouse.

Gorgantern had a meaty face and red arms and hands. He had to cut the sleeves off his shirt to be able to fit in it. He was a fully grown adult, about the age of most of the dragoneers, around his third or fourth decade of life, she suspected.

One of the city-bred boys asked for a pause at a widening of the path. Gorgantern sighed heavily. It gave Ileth a chance to rest her legs from the endless steps and survey the Vyenn waterfront. She wondered about the climb back up at the end of the day.

They started down again. The stairs at this length were steep, irregular, and, worst of all, narrow. Ileth tested the condition of the hand rope. It should be tarred. She hated to think about what would happen in the winter if the stairs were icy and you started to fall. You’d go right out over the edge and into the lake. Or worse, the rocks. There were landings only every hundred steps or so.

They passed through a short tunnel and she caught a sulfurous dragon-smell coming from a passage going deeper into the Beehive, then passed it and went down on the outside again, with the lake just beneath this time, washing up against a pile of great boulders. They came to the bottom of the Beehive and turned left into a tunnel at the base of the peninsula. You could smell water coming in off the lake and fish.

“This is the Catch Basin,” Gorgantern said.

It was a watery cavern carved out of a natural rock overhang that had been improved so barges could be warped in and tied up. There was a yardarm-like device to make lifting loads out of the hatches an easy task, and wheeled carts for moving barrels and other heavy burdens. A pair of draft oxen waited with the patience of their kind in a small pen with feed and water. She later learned they pulled cargo up the ramp and into the Beehive’s warehouse in the lower floors, which connected to the dragon kitchens. For humans, there were also ladders and stairs going up into tunnels leading to storage alcoves and various kinds of workshops.

A few fat lamps lit the ramp and worktables. They reeked of fish.

One of the novice boys also tasked to the Catch Basin had a small tattoo on his hand of a knotted rope. Ileth knew enough of tattoos to know that it meant he’d completed a deep-water voyage, navigating out of sight of land. He just wrinkled his nose at the smell. The other was a farm boy with wind-chafed skin who knew a lot about wheat and barley, and strangely enough had a great head for maps and directions. The farm lad looked pained, as if he were fighting nausea. “This is like pigs, only worse.”

“Just let it fly. Into the water, if you please,” Gorgantern said. “You’ll feel better, after.”

The third, the city-bred boy who’d asked for the rest, wondered aloud how you’d obtain a new work assignment.

Ileth didn’t say anything. You had to start somewhere.

Every morning they had to help unload the fishing boats. They weren’t allowed on the vessels (whether that had something to do with the prohibition on novices leaving the Serpentine unaccompanied, Ileth didn’t know). The catch was mostly a long fish that reminded her a bit of an oar. She didn’t know much about freshwater fish—the only ones she immediately recognized were perch, but she never saw river fish such as trout here. All she knew was that they were big and had mundane, descriptive names like crescent-gills and bluebacks. Some were nearly as big as the saltwater fish the boats of the Freesand used to catch. There were also great cages of things like crayfish that were bigger than any lobster Ileth had ever seen and mollusks that lived in tubelike shells. The fishermen took their catch from the fishing boats and piled them onto big wooden trays that they would weigh and then the novices would carry them to the gutting table. The trays had sides cut and notched so they could be easily stacked.

Gorgantern spent his first days with them watching from the other side of a long wooden table as they gutted the fish and stripped the catch into fillets. Some days they’d leave the fish more or less whole, bones in, as the dragons preferred them that way, once dried and smoked or pickled in brine. White-fleshed fish went outside the sea cave to dry in the sun. Those ended up at the human tables. Fattier red fish, like the long oar-things they were working on in their first morning, generally went to the dragons. The fish’s gutted entrails were either dried for use as chicken feed or put into buckets. The full buckets were hauled down to a skiff for dumping in the slop pools around Vyenn. The slop pools fed the giant crayfish (one sailor called them pigbacks and though the coloring was a little off, they did have spots like older pigs often bore), fish farms, or bait fish, which were used on lines to draw in the larger lake specimens.

She soon learned that Gorgantern disliked having a girl on “his team,” as he styled it. “Every year, I tell them not to give me any girls, and every year, I get one,” he said, shaking his head at the unfairness of it.

“I can’t . . . I can’t help it that I’m—a girl,” Ileth said. “But-But-But maybe . . . but maybe if you tell me how the others gave you—trouble, I can do better.”

She thought it was a “good angle,” as they liked to say on the Serpentine, showing the right attitude, but Gorgantern just snorted.

“Don’t complain about being cold, then. Never met a girl who didn’t complain about the cold in the Catch Basin. It gets blasted cold in winter. If you don’t complain to me about being cold, all will go well, no matter how slow you are at the work.”

Ileth couldn’t fight back openly, but she could still stick a pin in him where he might feel it. “Sir, how long h-have you been apprenticed here?”

“Think my age bothers me? Well, I’m just to turn thirty-three this fall. I’ve been here seventeen years. Never rose above apprentice, true, but I do good work. There’s never a complaint about the Catch Basin. Never. I make sure it stays that way,” he said, hooking his thumb in his belt. The green apprentice’s sash underneath had so many rends it might be mistaken for lace, poorly wound up.

She wondered if the fact that he hooked his thumb so close to his knife sheath was significant.

The fishermen either ignored her or offered their opinions on what she should eat at mealtimes to put some flesh on her hips and breasts. Ileth preferred to be ignored. But there was one, an older red-faced fisherman who acted as sort of a go-between and tallied the catch, who was kindly. His name was Bragg.

“The Catch Basin job’s a terrible one. Were I still a skint your age I’d beg to hose dragon scat. But nothing is forever at the Serpentine. That’s the blessing and the curse all rolled into one bundle. Just do your job well, and you’ll move up. Gorgantern will ride you. If you survive him, you’re tough enough for most anything.” He smiled and brought his fists together, knuckles toward her.

He also told stories of life on the lake. All the dragon waste dumped into the Skylake made the fish grow huge and sometimes strangly misshapen, though Ileth knew from experience to allow for exaggeration in sailor stories. Anyway, he liked to talk, spoke to her as though she were a relation, and didn’t mind that she kept silent.

The work was smelly and tiring and the broken knife handle would grow dangerously slick. Both she and the city boy cut their hands deep enough to call for a bandage almost daily. When she complained about the knife’s handle, Gorgantern called her “Fishbreath” and said that she’d be more careful with a slick knife and less likely to damage the catch or herself. Lake fish were a good deal smellier than the saltwater specimens she’d sometimes had to work with on the coast, especially the ones they brought up from the bottom mud. In her first week she learned that certain kinds of breakfast, anything greasy or oily, didn’t mix well with cleaning fish. She never brought up her meal, but it threatened her a few times. She learned that her stomach passed the mornings a good deal happier if she filled up with yesterday’s rolls and nibbled at a bit of cheese before setting off on the long walk down to the Catch Basin.

Gorgantern sometimes ate her lunch that the Matron, and the girls helping her, had wrapped up in a clean rag, if it appealed to him. He advised her to snack on salted raw fish to build up her muscles and tendons and drink from the brining barrels. The salt would help keep her going.

She thanked him and ate the raw fish and drank the brine. He was big as an ox; maybe there was something to his method.

The afternoon was usually better. With the catch gutted, the novices went to work salting and brining and bringing in the sun-dried fish, laying them in copper carriers to go up to the kitchens. Some of the fish were to be hung in the smokehouse, and Ileth always volunteered to do that, though Gorgantern quit selecting her as soon as he sniffed out that she found the labor a relief. Gorgantern and the boys loaded the heavy and even smellier hoppers that would go in the boats to take the piscine offal back to Vyenn while she scrubbed down the tables. With that done, Gorgantern seated himself on a barrel and took out a tiny clay pipe and had one of the boys fetch him a light, as Ileth couldn’t be trusted not to trip and set fire to the Catch Basin: That would be my fate, some clumsy buttonback sets me afire trying to light my pipe. He’d watch them clean and scrub and, when he was in a particularly good mood, sometimes get them fresh water or spread a little sand on the floor after they washed it so they wouldn’t slip the next day.

She was always exhausted and sore when Gorgantern released them and waved them away as he sat with his pipe, rendered comically small by his huge hands. The long climb up the outside stairs was hard and she usually made it no farther than the Manor, so she missed dinner in the Great Hall most nights. The Matron approved of exhausted young women who stayed safely behind locked doors at night and allowed her a certain amount of freedom in making herself dinner. She was usually dozing over a book when the others returned from dinner, lively from the chance to socialize, even sing and dance, and given the balance between male and female in the Serpentine, no girl who wished to dance sat without a partner.

Ileth was usually too tired to share much in the talk about the after-dinner mingling.

As the days marched on, her roommates in the attic complained about her “reek”—water only washed off bits of fish guts from her skin, and the smell clung to her clothes and hair. She tried changing in the Manor’s cellar laundry as soon as she returned from the long climb, even washing her hair in the laundry vats, but nothing could quite remove the fishy smell. And so she became “Fishbreath” at the Manor as well. Someone must have told the story of Gorgantern’s name for her over dinner.

Santeel Dun Troot wasn’t one of those who used it. She rolled her eyes at juvenile silliness like name-calling. As far as the Name was concerned, Ileth wasn’t worth noticing enough to joke about. The moon-faced girl, Quith, was another one who refrained from either names or complaint about work odor and became the closest thing she had to a friend in the Manor. Quith loved to gossip about the little cliques and coteries that had already formed among the novices in the Manor, and especially which male apprentices were taking an interest in the new arrivals. Ileth, who did not have anything like Quith’s memory for names and social connections and delicate class and geographic strata, just nodded dumbly when Quith spoke with unusual excitement of an apprentice with a Heem or a Vor in their name retrieving a dropped spoon for one of their dormitory mates or refilling their table’s pitcher of water.

Three girls left in those early days. One slipped in dragon waste and ended up facedown in it and got into an altercation with a wingman who ordered her to finish cleaning the dragon before washing herself. “Honor of it!” she exclaimed, packing. “Honor, my grandfather’s wrinkled prong for your honor.” That night the Matron spent the evening lecturing on ladylike language being required no matter one’s emotional state. Another, a sixteen-year-old who’d come in to escape a loveless arranged marriage with a wealthy gentleman, decided a loveless marriage wasn’t such a bad fate after all after scrubbing the floors and washing grease off the stained glass of the Great Hall for a few weeks. A third left in tears, hurrying to her dying mother’s bedside. Ileth was happy to miss that scene.

The city boy who complained of wanting a new job didn’t show up one morning. After three mornings, Gorgantern announced that he’d “quitted” another one, as he phrased it, as though proud of the fact. “And I know who’ll be next,” he said, looking at Ileth with a sly smile.

While her senses revolted at the messy work and her spirit chafed under Gorgantern’s dissatisfaction with all things Ileth, her body made up for it by adapting to the constant, repetitive labor. Her back, shoulders, legs, and feet quit hurting so badly each night and her strength improved, especially in her grip. She found herself able to haul whole loads of wet bedding out of the laundry cauldron with a wooden hook one-handed. The Captain always told the Lodge’s boys that strength started in the fingers and toes and worked its way in.

She even found the energy to do something about her balky knife. After work one night she hunted around in the workshops above the Catch Basin for some good thin line. With no small amount of difficulty she removed the rest of the knife’s handle and, by clamping it in a workshop vise (it was a clever thing; she’d never seen the like but figured it out on her own), tied and wrapped the line tightly around the haft of the blade to make a corded handle. Then she anchored the other end of the line with wire and soaked the hilt in some resin. No one would mistake it for the work of a craftsman, but the knife gave her no more trouble after that.

On her twentieth weary day at the Catch Basin, she learned that service there was a punishment of sorts. They gained a pair of apprentices a year older than she was who’d brawled over an insult. Or two insults, one a word and the other a gesture, as they later told it. They were from provinces at opposite ends of the Vales, and both word and gesture were only known as insults from the context of their use, but it was enough to start a fight. Two weeks’ work in the Catch Basin was their punishment, with the added instruction that they were to work each task shoulder to shoulder.

The exiles almost came to blows again describing their brawl. Each wanted to claim victory.

As the boys spoke of their banishment, Ileth wondered if her being placed under Gorgantern was yet another test. Surely the Masters must know what sort of man he was after all these years. He tortured her relentlessly, criticizing and complaining about her efforts even when she worked as hard as both of the new boys put together. Yes, he kept the place clean and the day’s catch was efficiently divided and dressed, but why hadn’t they thrown him out? His chances of ever being matched up with a dragon or even being a wingman must have been vanishingly small. But what were they looking for in this test? The ability to endure nasty comments? Or did they expect her to stand up to him, get the better of him somehow? Perhaps they just wanted to see how badly Ileth wanted to be a dragoneer.

After seeing how they glared at each other, Ileth quietly suggested to Gorgantern that maybe they be given work that didn’t involve knives.

“If they’re dumb enough to try to stab each other, I want to watch,” Gorgantern replied. “I’ve been yearning for a fight all summer; the heat isn’t doing its job this year. If they start to stabbing, holler right away and for once don’t stutter!”