by E. E. Knight
They retrieved beer, food, and figs. The wingmen had neglected to bring plates, but there was plenty of well-splashed rock about. Ileth set hers down near the pool, glanced around, undressed, and slipped into the water. While it wasn’t the bracing cold of the Freesand or the Skylake, it felt fine on her muscles. She’d heard Santeel speak of her mother taking mineral-water baths.
The other two joined her, keeping their clothes nearby for a quick grab. Ileth decided to eat her bread first as it seemed likely to be wetted by all the mist floating around. It was interesting: salty and chewy on the outside, tender inside.
“So that’s why he’s called ‘the Horse,’” Quith said, lifting the divider and peeping through the gap.
“What?” Finila said.
“Too late, he’s in,” Quith said, lowering the divider again. “So this is the limestone-cut pools. Gossip says more than one Serpentine girl has climbed up into these pools virgin and come down a woman. Tiss from our draft, the one who the Matron used to have read aloud: she had a fine old time up here with that apprentice from the flight cave. The one who’s always logging stuff.”
Ileth, herself the subject of salacious gossip that had thankfully gone stale, didn’t ask for details. Instead she popped a fig in her mouth, leaned back, and shut her eyes, savoring the sweet fruit as she tried to ignore the hooting and splashing from the other side of the tenting. “This would be fine if it were just us.”
“But a lot less fun,” Quith said, peering under the tenting again. One of the boys made a hooting sound and she gave a shocked gasp and giggled.
Singing broke out on the other side of the tent wall. A ribald song started, sputtered, and died off. The beer was taking effect.
They switched to a new tactic. “Come over, come over, won’t Ileth come over . . .” they sang.
“Not on your life,” Ileth called up at the clouds.
“Come over, come over, won’t Finila come over . . .” Finila, who had water all over her glasses, shook her head, looking terrified.
Ileth spoke for her. “Why? Nothing worth seeing over there.”
Quith yelled, “You’ve had too much beer!” They took it as a challenge and Ileth heard a good deal of splashing and clinking.
“Come over, come over, won’t Quith come over . . .”
“Well, I’m going to do it,” Quith said, standing up.
“Quith!” Ileth said. Finila sank even deeper into the water so just her eyes peeped out.
“You have about six scandalous stories around your name. I don’t have any,” Quith said, pushing aside the curtain and jumping in to general male acclaim.
“Ha!” Ileth heard Quith say. “You were right, Ileth. Nothing much worth seeing. No, not even that.”
Quith broke out laughing and Ileth risked a peek. She was in the water, hunkering down so it came up to chin height. She’d herded the boys in her pool to the other side like a particularly wolfish sheepdog.
“No more of this nonsense,” the Horse said. “Quith, jump back to your side of the curtain, before you bring the Committee down on me with half the Assembly behind.”
“Blame it on the beer,” one of his wingmen said. “It’s good beer.”
“The Committee wouldn’t like girls drinking beer any better,” the Horse said. “I’d be sent up before a jury as a corrupter of youth and shipped off to the Azures.”
“It would make a good painting,” one of the boys said. “Bare breasts always sell. Three women enjoying beer in a hot spring.”
“Lukewarm spring,” someone corrected.
“I’ve always wanted to model,” Quith said, getting out of the boys’ pool and returning to her side of the curtain.
“O nymph, be mine—” someone started to recite, but was abruptly cut off when a fig hit him in the face. Quith closed the curtain.
* * *
—
On the way back, Ileth was once again put in line just behind the Horse. She took a few quick steps to get next to him.
“Thank you for this,” Ileth said. “We enjoyed it.”
“Should have known it would get out of hand. I should have sent you and Quith and Finila into Vyenn with a few figs for a respectable tea. I’ll hear about it from the Matron now and be lucky if she doesn’t write the Committee.”
Ileth had never heard of “the Committee.” “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned a committee. Some group of Masters at the Serpentine?”
“You never heard of the Committee of Public Health, Ileth?”
“I . . . I don’t think so.”
“They’re not the terror they once were. Back in the first years of the Republic—no, it goes back further than that. You know the Vales were originally settled by miners.”
“Yes, everyone knows that. Miners and trappers, in the north.”
“It was just men. The only women they ever saw were in trips to brothels or establishments that ran a brothel as a sideline. Even as the Vales grew, in the days of the king and his court, the Vales has had a reputation as a strange area, full of oddities. Like the dragons. Yes, the dragons were here before us, but that’s a history I’m not fit to tell. But the Vales always had a disreputable air, and every town with more than one street having a jade or two didn’t help. The king wasn’t doing anything about it. Some say it was one of the causes of the declaration of the Republic. A roused dragon has nothing on the wealthy shipping line owners who find their only son erupting with pox. Everywhere you looked people were disfigured. Masks and false noses. In the early days of the Republic, the Committee of Public Health was an attempt to fight the disease.”
“Where I grew up, when the lodge-keeper had his friends over, I used to pick up their tankards with a hook and use it to drop them in a boiling pot out of fear of it.”
The Horse chuckled. “When the Republic was declared, the Committee of Public Health cleaned up the brothels, shut them down. That wasn’t their only goal; clean water for everyone was another, functioning sewers. Treated those they could. But the Committee got high-handed, asking for more emergency powers. They started shipping off people deemed incurable to the Azure islands. Penal colonies, you might call them. ‘Pits of despair,’ I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase.”
“It’s from a book, right?”
“Yes. It’s about a young man who falls in love with a prostitute and she gets shipped off and he goes in search of her. Arana Denn, it’s called, named after the girl he’s searching for. It’s a famous novel, because much of it is just the author’s observations of what he saw on these islands.”
“So people who read the book stopped them?”
“There were other reasons. The Committee started going around pressing people for donations. If you donated, you were a good citizen in their eyes, if not, they put you on the next ship out. Eventually they picked on the wrong bunch, the Canalmen’s Syndicate, I think it was, and they had the money and political backing to put together a commission of investigators and lawyers and brought them before a jury. They were financially and socially ruined.”
“Then why are you afraid of it?”
“The Committee still exists. Dragonfire, a few of their pits on the Azure, have people in them even today. They even do good work, here and there, checking that garbage is burned and buried and every province has a physiker-general with the authority to order quarantine. Mostly they’re wielding power through their influence at the Assembly these days. They don’t like the fact that boys and girls are both admitted to the Serpentine. They’re always sniffing for weakness, too.”
Ileth wondered if she should stop bathing in the Skylake. She always thought she’d just been giving the bored sentries a moment or two of harmless diversion while she cooled off after dancing, not risking a moral inquisition.
“If they get evidence that the Serpentine is the den of libertines they believe it to be, it’ll
go into their Record—that’s a journal they print, the Record of the Accounts of the Committee of Public Health—and then we’ll be hearing about it for years.”
Ileth smiled. The Matron had a whole bookshelf of annuals of the Record. She’d sometimes had her girls read aloud from its “Devotion Page” in the quiet after dinner. Interesting to know its history.
* * *
—
After the week-over, the Horse put them to work digging a drainage trench from the dairy. Ileth, Quith, and Finila found themselves keeping track of tools and feeding everyone at mealtimes. Proper work for young ladies.
Ileth watched the Guard on the other side of the Bridge Lane drilling with pikes, knocking hay bales off a swinging wood beam that she supposed represented a horseman. It looked like fun.
Ileth found herself looking forward to her talks with Quith on the way back to the Manor. It took her mind off how tired she felt and the soreness in her feet and legs. It was almost like her first days in the Serpentine, when she and Quith were crammed up together at the top of the attic stairs.
Like the night Ileth was talking about another dragon meeting being called, and the dancers needing to attend. “I sometimes think the girls are here . . . well, to kind of be like you dragon-dancers. Only for the boys. Something to divert them.”
Odd thing for Quith to say. Quith usually dealt in the here and now and what happened to whom.
“That’s interesting. How so?” Ileth asked.
“Sometimes you say you soothe them, and other times you divert them. It makes me think of my mother with my father when he has a hard day.”
“I suppose.”
“I think we do the same thing with the boys. Having a few girls around keeps them all tense and energetic, like a thunderstorm boiling up to release lightning. Life on the boil.”
“Life on the . . . boil?”
“It’s one of Mum’s expressions, you know, boiling water giving off steam. The urge to reproduce. Like beasts in rutting season, there’s all this extra energy to accomplish things and distinguish yourself. Each sex is trying to show off. If it were just boys here, they’d be like a pot of water without any flame under it.”
“None of them even bring me to a simmer,” Ileth said.
Quith narrowed her eyes. “Nobody? Not even Rapoto Vor Claymass?”
“Especially not Rapoto Vor Claymass. That Blacktower trio . . . I wouldn’t mind dancing with that Dun Klaff, if you want me to admit to something, but nobody’s making me swoon. Certainly not enough to-to risk my apprenticeship. Did that once, thanks to a gripe pot and relief that I was still alive. Never again.”
“Oh, so that’s why I saw you taking the air on the Long Bridge this summer out of the top of your overdress in just your sheath. To impress the dragons,” Quith said. “And anyways, ‘never has to go a long way and always falls apart on the trip.’ That’s another expression of my mother’s.”
“I was probably letting the sweat dry off. You have sharp eyes, if you saw that all the way from the Manor.”
“I heard about it at dinner.”
“Who noticed?”
Quith shook her head, smiling mischievously. “Wouldn’t you like to know. He was impressed.”
“I’m not as modest as the Matron would like. Or even Ottavia, I suppose.”
“What’s she like?”
“She’s not the Matron. There are still rules. She’d bring the roof down on one of us if we smuggled a boy into the Quarter, which is impossible because we’re packed in there like fish in a salt tray.”
“Yes, I often feel like the Matron’s beliefs aren’t entirely consistent. We have the finest young men of the Vales here, but if they see an exposed shoulder they’ll throw you down and plow you like a spring field with rain on the way.”
“Quith!”
“Sorry. I’ve been distracted ever since that trip to the pools. It was fun to be looked at for once.”
“There are much better ways to be looked at. Think of a . . . a victory parade in Sammerdam.”
“I don’t think we’ll be winning victories any time we’re apprentices. Caution and retrenchment.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, just something I heard from one of the wingmen who were giving those commissioners a tour. He said they were talking caution and retrenchment ever since the Galantine fiasco.”
Ileth went silent after that.
* * *
—
Ileth followed Santeel’s example in learning how to split her duties between the dancers and Horse Lot. She and Santeel rose early, with Shatha, and put in time in the predawn at drills and fatigues. They’d then eat a quick breakfast in either the dragon kitchens or the Great Hall depending on Santeel’s training and where Horse Lot was expected to assemble, and then spent the day with their fellow apprentices training. Then they’d help with the dancing at night.
The trick was getting enough sleep.
In good weather Horse Lot engaged in outdoor labor of some kind maintaining the Serpentine, labor seemingly designed to drain every last iota of energy out of their young bodies until they barely had strength for dinner. Fixing, washing, mucking out, gardening, pulling creepers off the walls. There were training drills too, putting out mock fires by forming bucket chains and keeping the water flowing for an hour wherever the gutters and sluices most needed a good flushing out. Some of the boys ended up with rat bites from the vermin deluge flushed out, and the girls were sometimes set to work washing out wounds with vinegar before dressing them. Ileth would have liked to prove that she could kill rats with the best of them—she used to be able to pick a rat off a barrel of flour with her sling—but the Horse and his wingmen wouldn’t let her go into the gutters and sluices. Perhaps it was just as well; the odors would have been hard to remove and the dragons might have objected to her aroma.
Fall closed in with rain and wind. Master Traskeer was called away again on some unfinished business at the Assembly and he departed with an unusually large escort of dragoneers. Ileth wondered if it was some attempt to awe the Assembly with a display of the Republic’s aerial power. Her lot didn’t notice his absence. They started working with the horses a little, just going around in circles with them, the Horse correcting their seat, or heels, or elbows each time they passed him.
Ileth began to understand the Horse’s method. You figured out jobs by doing them. The wingmen were always ready to step in to answer questions, but you mostly worked things out with each other, learning who was best at what. Finila, she learned, had excellent hearing, listening like a terrier for rats in the sluices and telling the boys where to look. Quith was the lot’s directory; she always seemed to know who was where and what they were doing. Ileth became the lot’s handywoman, fixing everything from flapping bootheels to dull knives and improvising breathing masks for the rat-killers with rags, camphor, and rosemary. She drew on her years of experience in the Captain’s Lodge, running it on nothing but breeze and spit, as the Freesand expression had it.
With the last gasps of warm weather, the Serpentine opened its gates for the Feast of Follies. She skipped the feast; bad memories wouldn’t allow her to participate, though she did help with such gathering and sewing for the costumes as were within her abilities. Instead she somewhat redeemed herself with Ottavia by being on duty, dancing by music box for bored dragons who weren’t interested in watching their human allies celebrate.
It wasn’t much of a celebration. The food, more like ordinary Serpentine fare with punch and molasses snaps, disappointed. The wind was bad so only protected lights on the Long Bridge could be up, and there weren’t many parties up from Vyenn. The town was in the throes of hard times and there wasn’t money for frivolity. Just a few merchants who did business with the Serpentine and of course the fishermen came with their families. Ottavia said the dragon-dancing exhibition drew a good crowd and there
was some talk of building a theater in town where they could exhibit.
After the Feast, the weather turned cold. The Horse moved his lot to training indoors in what was left of the hippodrome.
Ileth soon learned that whatever her skills as a dancer, she was awful atop a horse, easily the worst in her lot. Most of her lot were experienced pleasure riders, having visited friends and played games on horseback since their youth. Even Quith looked more comfortable up there, riding easily with her hips swaying with the horse while her posture stayed up. Ileth found herself lurching about, elbows out and toes pointed in, hunched over as the trotting horse’s back pounded at her buttocks.
“You have some work to do,” the Horse said. “I thought you dragon-dancers were supposed to be graceful.”
“When I’m on m-my own legs,” Ileth said, looking at the ruin all the riding was making of her wool winter stockings. They looked like a badly constructed ladder.
They heard their first lectures on fighting atop dragons and used quite good clay models someone had made years ago to learn about warlike formations the dragons took on foot and in the air, alone, with a partner, or a trio. Rocks represented dragoneers, straw shafts enemy lines. The Horse surprised them by saying dragons often preferred to fight on foot. They could hug the ground, protecting their vulnerable undersides, and keep their wings tucked tight behind their great muscular shoulders. As part of a battle line or array they could have their sides guarded by allied humans. Their scales were at their toughest when deflecting arrows, crossbow bolts, and meteor shot from directly ahead.
“Dragon on the ground, dragon safe and sound,” the Horse quoted.
They practiced basic military evolutions, using horses from Vyenn and more prosperous farms that had a horse or two exclusively for riding. The visiting horses didn’t care for the dragon-odor and were skittish and hard to control. Ileth felt particularly bad for one mare whose owner said he’d have to send her to be slaughtered as he couldn’t afford her anymore. The Horse tasked her with acclimating the mare to dragons, since she proved such a hopeless horsewoman.
