“There!” she shouted. “A dead body.”
The boys handled the worst of it while Ileth held the boat against the reef. Somehow they got the body out of where it and the wreckage were stuck and lashed the “rescue” line about its torso. Avar worked the line in a figure eight around the shoulders and chest of the man—it was a man, Ileth could see now—and from there it was a fairly simple matter to return the boat to shore and pull the corpse through the surf.
The Captain took over from there, hauling it well up onto the beach. It was a horrible, bloated thing. The face was a ruin where scavengers had been feasting on the most tender and accessible flesh. Even now, Ileth could see hopeful crabs looking at the meal from the surf. Trad threw a rock at one.
“Fisherman?” Ileth asked. She found herself looking out of the corner of her eye at the bloated body. It helped, for some reason.
“He’s escaped from the Rari,” the Captain said. “Look, he’s missing all his toes from his left foot. They made a neat job of it. See that, lads. Makes it hard to run. Guess he could still swim for it, though, on those kegs. Wonder if there were others with him?”
“How did he make it all the way to the Freesand? The Rari coast is on the other side of the Headlands,” Avar said, gesturing vaguely at the high hills on the coast east of them, invisible at the moment in the rain.
“Could have died at sea and been carried by current. Could have slipped off a Rari ship. They’re bold these days, they sail all over the bay, and aren’t above going after a fishing boat that ventures too far out.”
Ileth scowled out at the bay. Despicable. Even countries at war didn’t molest each other’s fishermen. But the Rari were mad for slaves.
“Well, now you’ve seen death, lads, raw and gone cold. And Ileth. Not fit for paintings, but it’s just as much a part of life as a mother suckling her babe. Help me get him into canvas so the crabs don’t have him before we can see him turned in and properly buried.”
Ileth wondered what desperate fate drove this man to risk Pine Bay at this time of year, with more ways to die on a couple of kegs than he had fingers and toes. This man hadn’t been following some secret dream. He’d run away from something. Something bad enough to make him brave crossing Pine Bay on a raft, in fall.
There were worse places than the Captain’s Lodge.
PART ONE
A Length of
White Cloth
“In coup, as in life, preparation is sovereign.”
—Iow Heem Jeet, A Monograph on the Game of Coup
1
Ileth, a sixteen-year-old with a list of possessions as short as her not-at-all-famous name, arose quickly her first full morning as an Apprentice to the Dragoneers of the Serpentine. Having a bucket of cold lake water dumped on her head gave her no choice. It left her sputtering in her rope bed.
“Tail-er! Tail-er! Tail-er!” chanted an assortment of her fellow dragon-dancers, apprentices, and wingmen with nothing better to do that predawn than make some noise. They rattled old cowbells, banged tin trays against each other, shook coins in bottles, anything to increase the racket in the tight confines of the Dancers’ Quarter.
A blanket enveloped her head and strong arms lifted her. She squeaked in alarm as they carried her out of the Quarter and into the passages of the Beehive, the cavern-laced mountainous rock that housed the Serpentine dragons and the throng of humans attending their needs.
She’d been warned the previous night that there was some sort of ceremony to endure for being the “tailer”—the last of a year’s novices to cross the threshold into apprenticeship at the Dragoneer Academy. She’d even turned in wearing her day clothes and kept her boots handy, but her boots were presumably still waiting, forlorn.
One of the party amused themselves by tickling her feet. She’d never liked being tickled, even as a child, and lashed out and felt her heel connect with something bony with a satisfying thump.
“That’ll teach you,” a male voice laughed.
“Galba’s Anchor, she’s strong!” one of the wingmen said as Ileth struggled. “What do they build these dancers out of, ship’s cable?”
The racket quieted. She picked up the oily, metallic scent. They were passing through one of the dragon levels—and then she felt the breeze of outside air on her legs.
The blanket came off and a trio of muscular wingmen—she knew they were wingmen by their sword-belts buckled over their sashes—righted her and set her on her feet. The noisemaker racket and jeers broke out anew from the crowd surrounding her. She was at the landward end of the Long Bridge, a wide two-span thoroughfare that itself would be a wonder worth a trip and a painting to remember it by, were it not sandwiched between the towering hump of the Beehive with its famous lighthouse and the Pillar Rocks. The Pillar Rocks loomed overhead, standing like gigantic mushrooms at the end of the peninsula that was crowned by the Serpentine fortress. It was still early enough that the lighthouse’s beacon caused the clouds overhead to glow and the bridge lamps formed little halos in the moist air of the predawn.
A drizzle washed over the party, but no spirits were dampened.
The assembly, such as it was, surrounded her. All the faces watched her, with the anticipation of a crowd expecting entertainment.
Ileth didn’t care to be at the center of attention, particularly a crowd. It brought back memories of the children in the Freesand village circling around her to taunt the stuttering lodge-girl in the thrice-handed-down dress and homemade clogs.
When she’d tried to find out what sort of ceremony she, as the tailer of the draft of ’66, would undergo, she’d just heard a few hints about a “crossing” or a “bridging.” Well, if all they wanted was for her to cross the Long Bridge, she’d comply. She’d done it hundreds of times in worse weather than this.
She looked down the alley of youths. She saw a glint of scale in the mouth of the gaping entrance to the Beehive. At least one dragon was either restless or bored enough to come see what all the noise was about.
Were they going to whistle as she walked back to the Beehive? Turn around and bare their bottoms? Ileth saw the snowcap hair and porcelain complexion of Santeel Dun Troot standing with her sister dragon-dancers in the crowd. It was hard for her to imagine a rich Name like Santeel lewdly waggling her backside like a seven-year-old at a window overlooking a busy street.
Vareen Dun Klaff, the bluffest and apparently the senior of the wingmen, addressed her: “You’re lucky, girl. Privilege of sex, you get chaired across the bridge.” Dun Klaff was an officer in the Guard. She’d sometimes run into him in the Beehive, when he was going about on watch, checking the bored sentries at the entrances to see that they were awake. The two others with him were very much alike in size, manner, and hair, each with a carefully tended forelock curled above the eyebrows.