“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.