“See, you can be a dragon dancer. Welcome to the troupe,” Ottavia said.
Then the real work began.
8
Zusya was right. The drills made parts of her body ache that she didn’t know existed.
The movements all had names, and the names were a mix of the movement itself and the body part, or direction, involved. But it was all built around the idea of your earth leg, the one you stood on, and your air leg, the one performing its evolution. In an actual dance, they switched constantly, even rapidly in some of the leaps and turns.
The more senior dancers taught Ileth her own anatomy along with leg raises and arm positions. She wondered if the odd poses and demands on the muscles had a reason other than to make you as sore as possible and sweat out your earlobes. Though you could say this for the relentless discipline of dragon dancing: all of her fellow dancers were sleek and bright-eyed, with seemingly boundless energy and an even, graceful carriage that would be the envy of even someone as mirror-polished as Santeel Dun Troot. Ottavia barked out corrections to the other dancers for what seemed like minutiae, and if you failed to attend to the correction she’d tap you on the offending limb with her cane. Well, you got a tap at first. Later, it seemed like something between the gentle prod of a shepherd on a wayward lamb and the corrective whack of a mother on a disobedient child.
Ileth found the drills calculated to be just hard enough to bring out the sweat but not so hard that you collapsed exhausted after your tune. They kept at it through entire mornings sometimes. Ottavia would sort the dancers into little groups; the more senior ones would exhibit some movement, and the rest of them, including Ileth, would do their best to copy it.
But on the other hand, she did get to hear music every day, even if it was just from one of Ottavia’s many music boxes. There’d been very little music in the Lodge, as the Captain couldn’t stand it. Thinking about the various dances they’d worked through at night in her rope bed, she decided she was hearing more music daily than all but the wealthy families who might have their children constantly at practice with instruments and keyboards.
For all the fresh joy of daily music, the art itself could be intensely frustrating. She mixed up her feet, turning to the right when she should go left, continuing with one evolution while the other dancers, in unison, had switched to the next leg lift or bend. On their breaks she often broke down and cried in the little break room. The most she got out of the other dancers was a gentle pat when they saw her with her face in her hands, sobbing.
“Don’t take it so. You’re new. Catch your breath,” Zusya said, putting a warming blanket about her.
“You have to eat more,” Peak advised her one evening when they were all having tea. “Eat all the time, every chance you get, especially at the beginning. Have pickled eggs and drink the juice. You feel like you’re wasting away. You’re not; you’re rebuilding.”
Ileth took the advice about eating to heart and trotted across the Long Bridge to Joai’s little hole-and-corner kitchen, where she’d bathed and eaten on the day she’d been admitted to the Serpentine. Joai said most of the food in the Beehive wasn’t fit for cat meat (true enough, though the dragons chucked it down) and she was too desperate to wait for the dinner bell. Joai, who seemed to sense that a dragon dancer’s life needed an extra plate here and there, shoveled out soup that she called “Odds and Ends” with fat sausages floating in it like geese on a lake.
“You like being a dancer?” Joai asked.
“It’s b-better than the Catch Basin. I hear music all the time. I like that. I didn’t have much as a child.”
“I thought you wanted to ride dragons someday.”
She paused, a spoonful of soup in one hand and a sausage on a fancy three-tine fork in the other.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Well, being a dancer is nice, if you like dragons. You’re around them all the time. But I never heard of one going on to become a dragoneer. I’d just like to see you use that whistle someday, is all.”
Joai’s comment took some of the glow off her growing strength as a dancer.
“Your technique is not yet there, but you move well,” Ottavia said, at the conclusion of her first ten days. They sat together at her little writing desk, having tea and nuts. Ottavia seemed to exist on nothing but tea and bags of nuts and a single glass of wine every night. “Your joy in this lets one overlook your mistakes. I even forget those arms of yours now and then.”
Dax, their jack-of-all-trades musician, accompanied her first real performance. He was of Vyenn and not the Serpentine, Sammerdam-bred, and he had a quick way of speaking, as though his throat were on fire and the words keen to escape. He couldn’t always work with the dancers, as he was frequently in demand in Vyenn. Even more curiously, he seemed to be able to come and go from the fortress at will, something only the wingmen and dragoneers were allowed. Zusya told her he’d been brought in to help out with the All-Comers Feast a decade or so back and made himself so useful to the Masters that he stayed on as kind of a specialist, like the engineers sometimes brought in to say whether it was safe to take an old wall down or fix the Beehive’s drains.
That first true dragon dance they taught her to perform on her own was a simple one, called the Invocation. It was a tribute to an old priestly rite going back before the Republic, before the Catastrophes, perhaps even before Old Hypatian civilization where a priest called on the spirits of earth, air, fire, and water. You simply did a skip run forward on the balls of your feet, then did a slide into a bow where you folded yourself over your right outstretched leg, the other leg tucked under you, hands reaching ahead and head down against your knee in supplication. Roll over, rise up on both arms as the feet slide out, launch yourself to your feet, go to another compass point, and repeat. The jump-up became progressively harder as you tired, but Ottavia demanded that each be performed identically. Repeat until the music stopped.
They showed Ileth off late one evening in the hall in front of Shrentine, a female dragon who had encouraged Ottavia’s attempts to perfect the art since her early days at the Serpentine and now was something of a patroness to the dancers. Shrentine had a musical ear and swayed about herself when music was playing. Shrentine had a dream of putting together a musical complement of dozens of musicians playing to accompany a stage full of dancers.
“Is art universal, the music and dance, for no words needed,” she said in her heavily accented, almost unintelligible Montangyan.
Ottavia had Dax play her an appropriate tune on his impeller, his preferred instrument—though he seemed able to play anything, whether it was keyed, plucked, bowed, or blown—a fascinating contraption worked by a hand crank that combined a keyboard that worked the strings and the ability to somehow produce a mournful, vibrating bass note. If you turned your back and had him play you a tune on his impeller, you’d swear before a jury that there were three musicians playing (he slapped the curvy wooden case to make a drumming sound with it as well).
She danced through the evolutions, trying to ignore everything but the music.
When the music ended, she bent with legs and waist in the stance she’d been taught, first to Shrentine, then to Ottavia and the troupe, and finally, lingeringly, to Dax. They all applauded. The dragon opened her wings a little and shivered them, making a sound like someone flapping leather curtains with a whip-crack, and folded them up again.
“Ottavia, this one too many times,” the dragon-dame rumbled. Ileth actually only made out Ottavia’s name and the word one; Zusya had to explain to her what she said. It took some time to get an ear for Shrentine’s pronunciation. But at least she tried. Ileth had heard that some of the dragons talked to humans only in Hypatian, figuring they’d learned one human tongue eight hundred years ago and it was too much bother to learn another.
“Your hands still need work,” Shatha said from beneath an elaborate wig. “Your fingers were all over the place when you stepped. Your costume—”
Peak nudged her aside with something that might have been a pinch.
“Four rounds, all prettily done, before you started to give out,” Peak said. “Vii, you could learn something from her. You’re still thinking too much and getting behind the music. Shows in your face. Ileth gets it wrong, but she moves with the beat.”
Ileth nodded through the criticism, bobbing out thank-yous with body language. That was the lovely thing about dance: you didn’t have to speak.
“Delightful! You live through the music!” Dax said, coming forward. He had a funny way of standing when talking informally with “his girls,” as he called the dancers, with his hips askew and facing a different direction than his shoulders, and his head somewhere in between. Ileth still didn’t know quite what to make of him; she’d been taught from an early age to square off your body so it aligned with the person you were addressing. But he meant no insult; he never addressed her, or anyone, in anything but a kindly tone. He kissed her somewhere in the neighborhood of each ear, swinging the impeller on its strap neatly behind him. His beard smelled of sandalwood oil and he had sweat streaking the powder under his traditional musician’s wig, which he’d donned for the occasion. Wigs, especially on men, were old-fashioned and frowned on by the more opinionated of the Republic’s assigns, but Dax, she was learning, did things his own way.
“Promising,” Ottavia said, bringing up the rear of congratulations.
That night Ileth found her bedding wetted. Someone had dumped a bucket of water onto her sleeping pad. It would take days to properly dry. She didn’t say anything, wondering if it was some welcoming ritual. She rolled up the pad and dragged it down to the kitchens and spent an hour toasting the worst of the wetness out of it while the cooks, cleaning up after sending up the dragons’ dinner, invented obvious jokes about her no longer being a virgin dancer until they became bored and left her alone. Once it was dry enough that hanging would do the rest, she upended her crude wooden bed, hung the mattress on it, and slept on the floor.