“Thank you for having me, novices and apprentices of the Manor. It always lifts my spirits, whatever news comes in from outside the walls, good or bad, to see our latest novices. It restores my belief in the durability of our Republic when I see such healthy, spirited young people. I like to come and speak to our newcomers after they’ve had a chance to settle in and the new jobs are no longer quite so new, and you are used to the routine. You’re probably grappling with your first disappointments and difficulties here. Well, that’s the ideal time to meet you, in the hope that now that you’ve found your feet, your heads will be ready to absorb what I was told when I came into the Serpentine . . .”
He did not speak long, or perhaps he did, but it didn’t seem like it. Afterward, Ileth could remember only a specific line or two, one being “your job is not your duty.” He went on some time about duty. To him, your job was just your task, a way to earn your bread and fish. Duty was something you owed both to the past and to the future. In his tradition, the most important duty the novices had was to learn all they could about dragons and how the different parts of the Serpentine kept them healthy, happy, and ready to support and defend the Republic and its citizens. How the Serpentine’s dragoneers and dragons worked as a team, or even better than a team, as a single organism capable of achieving feats neither humans nor dragons alone could accomplish. If they absorbed some idea of what it took to keep the dragons and dragoneers aloft, and took pride in their being part of the Serpentine, however humble, and agreed, one day, to pass on what they learned to a generation not yet born, well, he would know that he’d done his duty to the dragons and dragoneers of the past and the Republic’s future.
Ileth found her eyes full of happy tears. She’d never been so proud to be in a room. She glanced around. Santeel, bright and shining as always, took in every word with a trembling lip as well. Quith looked like she was studying the collar of his uniform.
By the end of his talk, if he’d asked his novices to charge a Galantine pike-and-crossbow line with nothing but fireplace pokers and rotten apples, they would have gone in shrieking the Republic’s barking battle cry. Ileth didn’t know what to make of it. In a less enlightened time, she supposed she would have thought him some kind of sorcerer who put girls under his spell. But she was full of resolve to learn all she could about the Serpentine, up and down, Bayside to Harborside, until every face and stair step and task was known to her.
After his speech, the Charge asked for music. Galia and a few of the other apprentices, less overawed than the others but equally proud to be in his company, started things off with a song and a tune played on a smallhorn and bow-loom.
The Charge delighted in it from his seat in the front row, lightly tapping his palms against his thighs in time to the music and smiling. The apprentices’ example gave the others courage to step forward, and they heard songs from all over the Vales. From time to time he’d lean over and speak to the Matron, asking a question or making a comment. The Matron usually spoke back. Ileth caught a few names and hometowns or districts in the Matron’s answers. It seemed music was a way for their Charge to get a peek at the personality behind the face.
The songs Ileth knew, sung by the Captain and his gang in the Lodge, would not have been well received by the audience at the Manor, at least under the Matron’s eye. Ileth and Quith did find the heart to get up and dance in couple when an informal band struck up, along with some other paired girls. Even the Matron briefly joined in for a reel. In the end, the Charge gave another brief speech, thanking them all for a delightful evening before bowing his way out, his swivel-mounted head turning this way and that.
“That is what I call a man,” Quith said to her after the door shut, panting from the dancing and the heat that had built up in the hall. “I wonder if he’s married?”
Ileth thought it strange that her status-and-connection collector friend didn’t have a complete biography of their Charge.
“Good luck with that, Quith,” Galia said, chuckling as she passed. “He had an unfortunate landing with a wounded dragon years ago. Very unfortunate.”
The novices went to bed that night without a single argument over a rinsing bowl or arrangement of socks and washcloths on the drying line. Perhaps Charge Heem Deklamp was a sorcerer after all.
Newly inspired by Charge Deklamp’s speech, Ileth tried, tried her best, to see Gorgantern with some amount of sympathy and learn from him. See the good side, perhaps hidden because he kept others from getting too close, because they might rise to full dragoneer while he remained in the Catch Basin. He’d hardly been on dragonback at all, and rumor had it the dragons didn’t much like him, perhaps because of his size. He’d failed a key test called a “survival,” whatever that was, so an apprentice he remained and would be until they found some excuse to be rid of him. He was an excellent worker, always taking on extra duties and tasks, helping with the barge and fishing boat lines, keeping up the pace at unloading, and made sure that the barge-men didn’t wander off into the caverns in search of scales. He volunteered for dirty jobs Bragg didn’t care for and was educated enough to keep and help with the tally sheets while Bragg did work more to his liking, like dickering with the barge captains over the price of their fish and celebrating a particularly rich catch by passing around a bottle.
He also frequently stayed late at the Catch Basin. Certain fishermen seemed to like him, and he liked to go on their boats and help with minor repairs or just swap stories. Ileth suspected he might have a souvenir or two from the dragons concealed in his clothing—she’d heard whispers from the girls at night that there was good coin in even a few dragon scales or better yet a claw—but Gorgantern was clever enough to do that sort of thing, if it was happening, out of sight of anyone else.
She also worked late, thinking the harder she worked in the Catch Basin the sooner she’d get away from gutting fish with her wretched old knife with its improvised twine handle. She missed dinner often enough that she sometimes snuck upstairs and begged a little dragon feed from the cooks. It wasn’t cooked fancy at all—most of the dragons wanted nothing but salt on their meat or fish—but it was plentiful if you didn’t mind it frequently being underdone. The dragons liked their meals juicy. When she finally returned and started up the long outer stair, Gorgantern sometimes walked her up and “steadied” her on the trickier steps in a pawing manner that reminded her of the Captain’s drunken friends. She always said, “Thanks, I’ll manage,” and hurried away up the long flights until she was gasping for air and he was far behind.
Gorgantern held his own lessons at night after dinner. He’d picked up a good deal of seamanship and taught his novices about knots, lines, how to splice together a break, and the best way to store ropes and work a block and tackle to advantage. He could light a fire in a blizzard.
Ileth put up with him as best as she could and begged off his seamanship tutorials. She knew her knots from working with both small watercraft and livestock. She would rather hear dragon stories from the cooks or hurry up to the human side of the bridge where there were geography and mapmaking lessons for the students who’d shown aptitude for it as furthers. She crept in and joined one of those circles to better acquaint herself with those subjects and the use of the tools for drawing maps to proper scale. Most of the novices were from moneyed families who had been educated with something better than a shelf of old reference books in Galantine, books of humorous letters that the Captain found amusing on the rare occasions he read, and Hypatian philosophies that had, at one time or another, held up an uneven table.