Daughter of the Serpentine

by E. E. Knight

  Ileth slept soundly in her cozy rope bed after the cold of the lake and awoke refreshed.

  Her Charge informed her that there would be no calls for dancers from the dragons for the next few days. Adding to Ottavia’s troubles, Vii was in the common room crying that she must leave the dancers. Ileth decided she would do laundry and offered to take a load of bedding up to the big washing troughs at the up end. There was always the chance she might find a scrap of something white fit to be turned into a sash.

  Ottavia and the others were happy to fill a washing basket. Ileth told Ottavia that she’d call at the physiker’s too, and have her wound examined. The pins might be ready to come out.

  Taking her basket and eating a bit of smoked fish she’d palmed while passing through the kitchens, she set off through the winding passages out of the Beehive. The preserving salt in the fish restored her. She kept to the narrow, winding human routes. The wider rings where the dragons had their sleeping-shelves were faster, but there was always the chance that a dragon would order you on some errand.

  Like most mornings on the Skylake, an overcast hung low, trapped between the mountain ranges girding the lake. Ileth had lived there long enough to judge that it was thick enough that it had perhaps a fig’s flip of burning off or not in the summer sun. Otherwise they’d get rain that afternoon, probably heavy, as rain at this altitude in the mountains almost always followed a hot day.

  The laundry at the up end was, she understood, an old kitchen built into the thick harborside walls of the Serpentine near the crowded dormitories where most of the boys had their beds. She passed a few of them, yawning and scratching as they carried their little basins, soaps, blades, and combs for their shaving and grooming to the washrooms.

  There were boys already hanging socks and undersheaths to dry when she entered. Quith looked up from a great steaming cauldron she was working with a stick about the size of an oar and smiled. Ileth hoped she wouldn’t bring up her suppositions about her eye. She wasn’t in the mood this morning.

  Quith helped her find lye, and the mention of hunting up a sash led them to the pauper’s bin while the bedding soaked. Nothing even close to white.

  Seeing Ileth’s disappointment, Quith shifted the conversation to lighter subjects and said she remembered Ileth as an early riser from their days together at the Manor.

  “I like to get at it early too,” Quith said. “You can have half your day’s work done before breakfast and then help the novices or sit in with another group of apprentices. Most of the wingmen and dragoneers and such don’t mind an extra person, if you’re quiet. I think the dragoneers like to see someone eager to learn as much as possible, whether it’s their duty or no.”

  Ileth had never thought Quith much of a striver. She might even have been the tailer of their draft if Ileth hadn’t been marooned in the Baronies. Though she did like to be wherever news might be passed about. Maybe she’d matured.

  She took Ileth over to one of the sewing tables and gave her some sensible advice about how best to make a sash, if she ever did find anything white worth turning into uniform.

  Ileth checked over her shoulder. The boys had moved off to talk to another apprentice, just arrived with a full wicker basket. “As you . . . as you’re here, let me ask y-you: Who in our group is from . . . came from Blacktower.”

  “Blacktower. That’s some very exclusive hunting ground. Ileth, didn’t know you set your eye toward mar—”

  “I’m not. I just n-need to know the right words for a . . . for a strategic matter. Someone from our draft.”

  “Well, there’s Dun Treeth, but he’s not at all bright. I don’t think he learned anything there. I’m told Vor Claymass went there for a year when he was ten but his family pulled him back out. Oh, yes, you had that—don’t know why I mentioned him now. There’s that little Apenite Sifler Heem Streeth. Fair warning: his family’s got nothing but the Name these days.”

  So little Sifler had gone to perhaps the most elite school in the Vales. That was interesting.

  Ileth shook her head hard. “Told you, I’m not after a husband. I just need . . . I just need some help with military matters.” She folded over where they’d cut and started on the seam, hoping Quith’s capacious memory for connections could settle on someone else. She didn’t want to mess about with Sifler in exchange for his help.

  “Sifler is who I’d consult. First in everything. I’d say he’s your boy, if you can get him to speak to you. He’s shy, poor thing. I’m sure the others tear him to bits about being poor. You know, I think the boys are worse than us about that.”

  Ileth tried to keep her face neutral. You could learn a lot from Quith if you let her rattle, but she would sometimes realize she was going too far if you looked shocked or skeptical. “Then there’s Vor Rapp, Roben’s wingman, who’s always hanging about with Dun Klaff and I’ve heard he’s smarter than he looks. There’s that other forelock, Heem Beck, but I don’t think he’d tell you the time if he was standing next to a clock. Your best chance is Sifler, I think.”

  Ileth thanked her. Quith helped her with the bedding, and in a few moments they had it cold-rinsed and hung up to dry. If you could get her to stop the gossip, Quith was a good worker.

  Well, the fates had something in store for her with Sifler, it seemed. Perhaps she could find him on duty again after the physiker looked at her wound.

  * * *

  —

  The physiker Threadneedle had practically a whole building to himself at the up end. It had a crazy collection of chimneys and piping, with the patched and whitewashed and sag-roofed look of a place that had at one time or another been meeting hall, dormitory, workshop, and storehouse, perhaps all at once. It probably had once had a nice view of the Serpentine grounds leading down to the Beehive, but the construction of the Great Hall had turned the view into something not much better than an alley. The physiker’s residence was in a set of rooms up a flower-potted stair and the rest of it had been subdivided into examination rooms, sleeping areas for patients, a dispensary, a tool room, and the other necessities of medicine.

  Ileth knocked; his apprentice answered and informed her that the physiker was at his breakfast. “He was out late last night. One of the watch tumbled down the outer Beehive stairs in the dark.”

  Ileth and those slippery stairs were old enemies. A boy had been killed on them her first year. The apprentice invited her to sit in a practice chair. It was a great heavy thing, more like a torture device than furniture, and had leather straps to restrain parts of the body.

  Threadneedle’s office was much like that chair, a strange mix of horror and science and herbology, with several lamps and mirrors with focusing aids to increase the power of both natural and artificial light. Objects and models and sharp shining devices rested in and on cases, bowls of silver and copper piled atop cabinets, and there was a sort of kitchen in back filled with glass jars containing powders and dried things that looked like mushrooms and tree bark and leaves.

  There was a huge, fascinating print on the wall, an anatomy guide of a dragon rendered beautiful by an artist’s ink. The dragon had been stripped of scale and skin so the muscle tissue looked like a butchery shop. Great care had been taken to add beautiful waves of precise lines.

  Ileth asked about the lines, as someone had gone to great trouble over them.

  The apprentice smiled and nodded. “You strike the heart of the matter, sister. Oh, the hours I’ve put into the study of this piece, adding names and direction to those lines.”

  Ileth was content to just nod and let him go on.

  “There are some who hold that the seat of health rests in the brain and nervous system. My Master took me once to a symposium in Sammerdam where I heard a lecture from a very convincing learned man who presented his analysis of the liver as the supreme sovereign of the body, for it energizes the blood and must be supported by moderation in diet and d
rink. Then there are those who concentrate on the relationship between heart and lungs, the exchanges of new air for used that go on with every breath you draw and its distribution through the system.

  “My philosophy is that we are constructs of muscle, for it is through muscle we animals thrive or fail. The bones give it a framework, the brain and nerves direct it, and the blood supplies it in ways known, guessed, and still to be revealed as our science improves. We are a fantastic system for directing and supplying our muscles.”

  This interested Ileth, as she used her muscles constantly dancing, and she would probably have described her body much the same way, except with shorter words.

  “The next time you eat a chicken, observe the meat, the muscle tissue you are eating. Cut it one way, and the fibers separate as easily as you might open an envelope. Cut it across the fibers, and it becomes frayed rope, and equally useless. That is a great deal of the physiker’s art, knowing how to operate upon a muscle, to extract, say, a highpoon from a dragon’s left transverse apogrex, without doing so much damage to the tissue that the dragon will never fly again.”

  It was obviously going to be one of those conversations where Ileth would be looking up words later. She nodded so he might be encouraged to continue.

  “You dancers are good examples; you’re like deer, ready to run and leap and turn at an instant. So you know there is nothing that so instantly changes everything in your body than exertion, especially extreme exertion. The muscles swell with blood as they are fed in accordance with need. The breathing becomes labored to the point it seems you cannot take in enough air, your body releases heat—some say this is due to chemical reactions—and the sweat comes to deal with that heat, and incidentally soothe our dragons. It is a shock to the system. I’ve heard some of the profession say that such shocks must be avoided; they point to sudden, painful deaths as reason for the heart and lungs not to be overtaxed. To never run, and to walk in such a way that you do not tire, to sit rather than stand in conversation. There’s a doctor in Sammerdam who designed and sells this sort of apparatus that allows women to roll about in a little harness on rotating wheels, to take the strain off the legs and limbs, as he puts it, preventing them from being worn out by endless labors in keeping house, which robs them of their beauty. Or so he claims. Bah. Threadneedle swallowed that nonsense whole. He has a sister rolling about in one; she looks like someone tried to make a marionette out of a sack of potatoes. It’s loss, not use, loss of muscle functionality that invites in decrepitude, which sets up housekeeping until it can invite its cousin death.”

  Ileth wondered what such a young man thought of his old fusspot Master Threadneedle. Ileth remembered him stitching up the wound she received in her duel. All the while he worked, he sang little songs to himself like a six-year-old girl getting dressed: socks garter boots and laces, socks garter boots and laces . . .

  “The body saves energy where it can. Muscle that is not being used requires too many resources, food especially. Do you not have a great appetite after dancing?”

  “We’re always eating,” Ileth said, agreeably. She was relaxed now. When she’d first sat in this terrible-looking chair she’d been nervous about all the shining, pointed instruments.

  “Unneeded, unused muscle becomes a repository for extra fats and eventually withers. Same with dragons. Many of our troubles with dragons living together come from underemployment. A dragon alone will roam about, mimicking patrolling and hunting actions it would do in the wild, but when artificially put together like this they will fret and fight. The Academy is very good at keeping you all productively busy. I’ve told them they should have similar duties for the dragons, but I’m in no position to effect change. Yet. It might relieve some of the tension with the Assembly. Society as a whole isn’t that different from anatomy. Our brains, such as they are, are jealous of all the resources that go to the dragons. It was one thing when there was a king and they were a symbol of his throne’s power and glory, and of course in the early days of the Republic we were fighting for our lives, but now with that Galantine defeat it seems unfit, unused muscle to be withered off.”

  Now that he’d turned neatly from anatomy to politics, Ileth lost interest.

  Threadneedle’s apprentice must have sensed it. He began a discourse on a study of the bodies of miners gathered after a tragic accident that killed them by the dozens and how there were many in their seventh decade of life almost indistinguishable from those in their third when the physiker entered. Threadneedle had bits of his breakfast on his shirt and picked at his teeth with a sliver of wood.

  He was much as Ileth remembered him: potbellied, whiskered, and with little lenses such as those with failing eyes (who could afford them) wore on the end of their nose.

  “You’re the girl from that duel a draft or two back. Cut just above the hip in a duel. Bled a lot.”

  “The same,” Ileth said.

  The apprentice looked at her with new interest.

  Threadneedle’s eyebrows came together as he looked at the wound about her eye. “I’m glad I don’t see much of you, errr . . .”

  “Ileth,” she reminded him.

  “Yes. Ileth. I’m glad I don’t see much of you. Most of the young ladies here have been brought up to ask for a physiker at every sniffle and cramp. It’s nice to know some of you get by on your own. I hardly ever see you dancers. Perhaps young Gift here is on to something with all his advice about the tautening of muscle tissues.”

  He looked at his apprentice. “That reminds me. Make up a few Number Four draught packets for Falberrwrath and bring them to the Beehive. Double-check that we have the latest on his estimated weight before you measure. Instruct the dragoneer Roben that he’s to have one a night in with his wine and to be sure that he drinks it. Roben’s the one with gold teeth if you don’t know him. He should sleep and awake refreshed. I think those eggs being about to hatch is making him anxious.”

  “Yes, Physiker,” the apprentice said, and disappeared into the kitchen area with all the jars, drawing a curtain behind him. Ileth heard jars being taken down.

  “When were you injured?” he asked, turning her head to view the wound from different directions.

  “F-four days ago. I was worried, it was so red.”

  “And the wound, it was cleansed?”

  “Soon af-after, with vinegar, s-sir.”

  “Excellent. I’ve often told Joai that had she been born a man she would have made a fine physiker.”

  He tested a pin with his finger. She winced. He wiggled the other one, then looked close at the wound with the aid of a magnifying glass. When he pressed his nose close to her wound and took a deep sniff, she finally protested, as his belly threatened to squash her.

  “Sir!”

  “The nose is a better finder of corruption than the eye, dear. Be happy that your wound has closed without infection, considering it was closed with nothing but pins and sticky plaster. A small scar will probably remain but in someone your age it will fade so that powders applied with sufficient art will render it invisible. Your eyebrow will have a small notch, but the hair will cover it, provided that old Court habit of plucking them down to a thin line such as elegant ladies did in my youth does not return to fashion.”

  Ileth felt a painful pinch at her eye. Something rattled into a metal bowl. “One is out, here’s number two,” Threadneedle sang.

  “Your . . . apprentice is very learned,” Ileth said.

  “You are not the first young lady he’s impressed. Sorry to dash your hopes; he would only be interested in examining the tone of your legs if he were to find himself against them. If he ever marries, it’ll be for her reference library, not a pretty face. I should like to send him on to the Greatyard, even for a year or two, and train another apprentice then retire when he returns, but the Republic’s finances have bottomed and there’s no money, and likely to be none anytime soon. I expect my
pension’s to be shaved next.” He tested and then drew out another pin and Ileth winced.

  Ileth wanted talk to keep her mind off the pain. “Your assistant, G . . .”

  “Gift.” She felt him pinch at the remaining pin.

  “There’s a story behind the name?” Officials in the Vales often reworked foreign names into Montangyan when adding émigrés to the rolls. It wasn’t always laziness, some came to the Vales wishing to leave behind old troubles with a new name.

  “Exactly. Orphan left on a doorstep. Not even of a rich house, a little crossroads farm. It’s one of the things that keeps me believing in the Republic, even when the money dries up. Over in the Baronies, he’d be tilling soil, all that brain wasted. Here, well, we might finally get a worthwhile book on dragon anatomy. The one I have is in Hypatian and it’s terrible. Thank the gods for Gurion the Anatomist from eighty years back. We have copies of his notes and sketches here.” The silver pin clanged into a metal bowl on a little table near the heavy torture chair.

  Ileth asked if he did the wall-spanning study, and the physiker nodded.

  “You’re done, uhh . . .”

  “Ileth.”

  “Yes. Ileth. It’s a beautiful wound. On a man it would give him a bit of dash. You, well, women have their own mind about things.” He took out one of his sun-reflecting mirrors and allowed her to examine herself. The wound was pinkish save for the red spots where he’d just removed the pins and didn’t look anything like beautiful, but then she’d never expected to get through life on her features.

  Ileth rose to leave when the physiker rattled the metal bowl.

  She turned on her heel and he smiled. “I forgot.” She’d been warned of torments if she left the silver pins somewhere; she wanted to give the old physiker a kiss.

  Threadneedle smiled. “I forget names and family connections at the Assembly. My tools, never.”

  As Ileth went out the door, she pulled up to avoid a collision with someone bound for the door. It was a woman swinging along quickly despite a wooden leg, and she stopped herself with a quick brace of the leather-capped limb.