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.