Duskirk looked through his meal cart and found the most tempting morsel he could: a flat but tasty specimen Ileth now knew was called a spearfish. Stepping forward, he waved the smoked fish under the dragon’s nose. The dragon’s nostrils twitched, then an eyelid flicked, but the Lodger did nothing more. Duskirk shrugged and turned.
“Leave the fish,” Ileth said. “I haven’t had my breakfast.”
“Please yourself. There’s a big barrel over there with shovels and brushes for . . . uh, his waste and such. Those two woodheads out at the join are supposed to attend to it, but if he goes and you’re stuck here alone at night and can’t stand the smell, you should know about it. If you need help with anything, just send Zante or Griff. I’m pretty sure as a dancer in charge of a dragon you can order them about—same goes for me, for what it’s worth, if the beast needs anything. That’s how it works up there. You dancers outrank everyone but physikers, dragoneers, and wingmen, if nobody’s told you.” He gave her a friendly salute and left.
Too bad she didn’t keep a diary. Received my first subordinate-to-superior salute today, from a feeder who empties out his stomach whenever a dragon belches. Maybe she should ask Falth for a notebook in her next letter, even though her news of Santeel had been reduced to Quith’s gossip when she had the energy to walk to the dining hall for dinner.
Alone (if you didn’t count the dragon!) again, Ileth sat and breakfasted on smoked spearfish and considered that she had the (maybe so, maybe not) ability to order some boys about. As she chewed, she tried to remember some of the Captain’s stories about command. According to his roustabout gang, at one time he’d been considered one of the best masters on the North Coast. She finished, having barely begun on the big fish, and cautiously took a walk around the dragon. He slept close to the wall, on an elevation that made brushing waste into the gutter easier. Suppose he shifted in his sleep? He could easily crush her if she was in the wrong spot between him and the wall with no path to back up. Someone on her trip to the Serpentine had told her that he wouldn’t mix with dragons for love or coin: they could take a man’s head clean off with an accidental flick of a wing. She didn’t know if that was true, but their wings must be strong as thunder to get such a body off the ground. Stories of hollow bones filled with magic gases or bladders in their body that created some kind of buoyancy were probably just that, stories. Even the reduced specimen in front of her looked solid enough.
He wasn’t clean at the back end. Did the groomers not even come down to this level? Perhaps without a dragoneer to check their work, he was rarely tended. She left the cavern again and cast about futilely until she gave up and asked the roustabouts at the barrel for grooming tools.
After a couple of boorish jests about what she could do in exchange for the information, Ileth said she was willing to walk all the way up to Ottavia if need be. They told her to calm down and showed her.
The tools were in a case under the Lodger’s neck, as it turned out, and with their help she rolled his head off it, eliciting a soft snort and a grumble that might have been words. The boys retreated, saying something about it being bad luck to wake a dragon. She found a slime-filled cistern and managed to acquire a bucket with soapy water, another for rinsing, and some rags.
She disturbed a vast array of bugs with her activity. They should inspect the Cellars more often. Ileth considered taking notes and building a case to toss that Griff out on his idle ear. What good was bragging about responsibility if you didn’t carry out the most basic of your duties?
She returned to the Lodger’s chamber and went to work on what she could reach. Well, they wanted her to work up a sweat, and this was as good a way as any.
There wasn’t a functional drain as such down here. The end of the gutter was a hole, but it hardly drained. She poked at it with a hand brush and it began to drain a little faster. She went back for a refill of clean water and to try to work up a lather again with the soap that was apparently indifferent to its effects and found that the Lodger had shifted to expose his other side.
The one facing the wall.
This would be trickier. If he rolled back she’d have to climb atop him sharp as a squirrel with a dog after it or she’d be crushed. She’d never watched the grooms at work and had no idea how they handled such situations. She’d seen stout stepladders and such on the upstairs levels; maybe they used them as braces between a wall and body. She stripped off her overdress so she could climb about more easily. Just in case.
“Hello!” she said loudly.
The dragon’s batlike ear flicked toward her, then drooped again.
“Hello!” she said as loudly as she could without shouting.
One eye opened a little more. The nostrils opened and pulled air hard enough to cause her work shirt to flutter.
“Beg pardon: I need to wash your other side. Could you not squash me, please?”
The dragon gave a tired sigh.
Nothing to do but try. She took her short brush and pole brush and tossed them behind the dragon, then clambered over its neck (weren’t dragons chary about men being about their necks?) with Dath Amrits’s whistle clamped between her teeth and went to work. If he threatened to roll on her she’d blow and climb for all she was worth.
This side was much, much worse. A good deal of scale had fallen out and there were sores of some kind, ugly, with some blood. There didn’t seem to be any pus, she was glad to see, if dragons indeed produced such a thing when they were wounded.
She gently cleaned the sores with the hard soap and water and her newer rags. She struck a nerve or sore spot just behind his rear leg, and the leg kicked out. Luckily the leg lashed out toward the opposite direction of the room from her and she threw herself out of the way as the creature rolled back toward the wall, blowing the whistle for all she was worth.
The dragon’s head came up and shook so that its griff rattled loosely. She was reminded of a dog emerging from a pond.
His eyes blinked a few times and he sniffed.
“Hello . . . hello there,” she said.
“You are not known to me,” the Lodger said, slowly, tiredly, but in decent enough Montangyan.
He explored the air above her, close enough so she could feel the heat (and moisture) of his exhalations.
“You smell like pain. Have they been treating you badly, girl?”
“Not at all. I’m with the d-dancers. I think that might be your blood you are smelling on me.” Strange, how easily words came when she was talking to a dragon. Then again, she’d just had a scare; her heart was pounding.
She sensed a presence behind. The dragon shifted his gaze.
Griff peered around the edge of the chamber, Zante behind him. “We heard . . .”
“The pair of you I know,” the dragon said. “Both of you: be off.” The dragon gave his body an experimental stretch. Again, it reminded her of a dog. A great lanky dog rising from a nap. She’d always thought dragons were like cats in their movements. Maybe they grew more doglike when they aged.
“Right,” Griff said, pulling Zante away.
“She’s not wearing a dress! Those legs, man,” Zante said as they went.
“Useless, those two,” the Lodger said, yawning. “The older one trained as a groom, I think, but they know not the brush or file.”
His forming of human sounds was excellent, and his Montangyan good, but he spoke it in a slow, archaic manner. It reminded her of a very old nursery song about cats and mice, or the hoary phrasings of isolated shepherds she’d run into with her sheep and goats on remote mountainsides high above the Freesand.
“They couldn’t even be bothered to . . . that’s just wicked,” Ileth said.