“Be you my new groom?”
“I’m a dancer.”
“That’s a fine thing, the dancers,” the dragon said. “I think they brought me up on the lift, oh, years back. To see them play. Lots of leaping about and I couldn’t even tell how to keep score. But it does hold one’s attention.”
Ileth gathered up her tools. “They told us it was s-something to do with the . . . smell of our sweat.”
“I know the scent of a human female. I’ve enjoyed it. In moderation. You don’t make it to my state of decrepitude sniffing around human females overmuch. The need grows in you. Greater and always greater. Soon, you are living inside the need. Always leads to trouble. Always.”
“I will only dance as much as you ask,” Ileth said, dumping out her water. The flow was stopped again. Something must be blocking it.
“I never intended to wash up here, you know,” the dragon said.
“You didn’t?” She liked the dragon. He was the first, well, conversationalist who didn’t ask her about her stutter.
“I felt my years growing on me and I decided to visit some places where I thought I’d made a difference, see how things were getting on. I saw Hypatia, or what was left of her. They were a great people. If you ever get a chance, go and see the ruins. There’s still some lovely art that’s endured. Some of the old families are still around. Or is it crawling with gargoyles now? Somebody told me that. Too much dragon blood. I came here as well. I helped design these caverns, after all. I thought a touch of the Sadda-Vale would impress, even if they couldn’t build quite on that scale—and even the Sadda-Vale is a poor imitation of an older palace. I’m particularly proud of the Dragon Horn. Got the idea from a blighter fortress ruin over on the other side of the Inland Ocean. Theirs was circular, winding round a tower like a snake. Took five years to build the one in the Rotunda.” His eyes closed and she thought for a moment that he was going back to sleep. Then he opened them again quickly. “I’m sorry, young human, I’m sure none of this interests you. You have a blockage in your drain.”
“Bugger the drain,” she said. “I like stories.”
“You do? Well, I can supply you for the rest of your life, if I’m granted that many more years. I do believe I’m almost the last living link to those times. I did put some of it down. There might be a volume of mine here. Some humans did write it all down in one of your tongues. I think it was yours. You can read? Only accept humans who could read. That was my urge to the first dragoneers.”
Her spotty education had mostly been through curiosity. The Captain and the wretches who tried to pass themselves off as tutors didn’t think any of the girls needed to do more than read, do enough math to buy flour, and mark a calendar.
“Was this the . . . the end of the . . . tour of places you’d lived?” Ileth asked.
The Lodger winked slowly at her. “You think I’ve lost the trail? As I was saying, I meant to visit here one last time, see how things were getting on. Well, a storm blew up, and instead of going to ground right away, I wanted warmth, a bed, and a hot meal. So I fought my way through the storm. But the wind howled at this height and something in my left shoulder gave way. A hard landing. I made the rest of the trip afoot dragging a wing. I’ll never fly again. I meant to die in the Sadda-Vale, but I’ll have to wait for death to see it again, it seems.”
“Dragons travel after death?”
“We all do. I’ll complete my journey when I’ve shrugged off this wreck of a body, if I’m allowed.”
Ileth wasn’t comfortable with these sorts of conversations. She’d had them once or twice with the Captain’s drunken friends who considered themselves learned. “How is that?”
“In the life beyond life. You know this yourself.”
She’d never much cared for the priests and their depictions of existence outside life. She wanted to hear this dragon’s. “How do I know it?”
“Tell me about your first memory of seeing something beautiful.”
Beauty was in short supply in her childhood, but she did what she could to think back. “I remember . . . I remember there was a teapot. Supposedly it belonged to my mother. My real mother. It was white, and there was sort of a raised depiction of flowers on it. The color was part of the workmanship; it wasn’t paint. There was fluting at the top; you removed the lid to pour the water in on the tea leaves. But we hardly ever had tea in the house. I just remember thinking it was beautiful.”
“You were a child then, yes?”
“Yes. I’m not sure how old I was. Not seven. Before seven. It’s when they started making fun of me for my stutter.”
“Your human languages are challenging to imitate. My tongue gives me difficulty. But back to this teapot—when you thought it was beautiful, what made it beautiful?”
“Maybe—maybe how the white was so pure. The brightness of the colored flowers against the white. The delicate fluting on the lid: I remember wondering how they made it so exact.”
“Those certainly sound beautiful. But you were a child. You’d had no training in what made a good teapot or a bad one. You knew nothing of art.”
“No, how could I?” Ileth said.
“Yet you knew.”
“I suppose I did.”
“So how did that knowledge that it was beautiful come to you?”
“Maybe . . . maybe s-someone told me? Or because it was on a shelf where I couldn’t reach it.”
“That might be because it was valuable. Beautiful and valuable don’t always go together.”
“True.”
“You are starting to understand. Valuable is not a fixed constant. Valuable to a dragon, a human, and a dog might be the same, might be different. Certainly in the case of a dog. Beautiful, on the other hand, humans and dragons usually find common ground, which suggests it is a value external to experience. I know these days elves and dwarves have fallen into legend, but they did exist, maybe still do, and they had similar ideas on the subject. So ‘beautiful’ is value we probably have when we come out of the egg, or when you emerge from your mother in that messy mammalian fashion. I’d suggest that a millennium in the past or a millennium in the future that teapot you remembered would probably still be considered beautiful.”
“How does that mean there’s an afterlife?”
“Nothing comes from nothing. Ever heard that expression? A terse dwarf might be the one who first said it, but others have translated and quoted him. There are constants that we, those with the right facilities, humans and dragons and dwarves and so on, know from our earliest years. That means either we learned them in previous lives or certain kinds of knowledge exist outside our organic life and are able to move back and forth between a plane of ideas and truths and into our existence.”
This was a bit thick for Ileth. She had a mental picture of ideas fluttering into the world like birds returning to shore. She wondered if the Lodger was typical of dragons and they all talked this way. Perhaps having such long lives made them philosophers.
“Never underestimate your native powers to reason a matter out,” he continued. “I know humans use writing and tutors and so on to gather and pass on knowledge. That’s useful. I am fond of books myself. Yet learning doesn’t stick until you’ve tried to work things out according to your own lights.”
Ileth had to follow some of this speech from context; the Lodger was using words she wasn’t accustomed to. She wished she had something to write with so she could find out more about the words at another time. “You’re a philosopher, sir,” Ileth said.
The Lodger gave sort of a rumble that struck her like thunder trying to purr like a cat. “When you get to my age, the choice to become a philosopher is made for you. Nothing’s left but your mind and the memories it holds. Places. This rock. I helped design it, you know. Searched all these mountains for the right sort of elements.” He fell silent and she decided not to speak until spoken to. He seemed to be breathing deeply and regularly. She decided to turn back to the drain. She poked about in the hole with the brush handle and didn’t accomplish much except make the handle filthy.