Robin Hobb - The Complete Liveship Traders Trilogy - Ship of Magic, The Mad Ship, Ship of Destiny

The weather had held fine for them, blustery and cold but with no sign of the drenching rains that could ruin both hides and meat. Then came an afternoon when the clouds suddenly seemed to boil into the sky, beginning at the horizon and rapidly encroaching on the blue. The wind honed itself sharper. Yet the hunters still killed, scarcely sparing a glance at the clouds building up on the horizon, tall and black as mountains. It was only when the first sleet began to arrow down that they gave over their own deadly rain and began shouting angrily for the skinners and packers to make haste, make haste before meat and fat and hides were lost. Althea scarcely saw what anyone could do to defy the storm, but she learned swiftly. The stripped hides were rolled up with a thick layer of salt inside them. All were suddenly pressed into work as skinners, butchers and packers. She abruptly found herself with a skinning knife in her hands, bent over a carcass still warm, drawing the blade from the sea-bear’s gullet to its vent.

She had seen it done often enough now that she had lost most of her squeamishness. Still, a moment’s disgust uncoiled inside her as she peeled the soft hide back from the thick layer of fat. The animal was warm and flaccid beneath her hands, and that first opening of its body released a waft of death and offal. She steeled herself. The wide, flat blade of her skinning knife slipped easily between fat and skin, slicing it free of the body while her free hand kept a steady tug of tension upon the soft fur. She holed the hide twice on her first effort, trying to go too fast. But when she relaxed and did not think about what she was doing so much as how to do it well, the next hide came free as simply as if she were peeling a Jamaillian orange. It was, she realized, simply a matter of thinking how an animal was made, where hide would be thick or thin, fat present or absent.

By her fourth animal, she understood that it was not only easy for her, but that she was good at it. She moved swiftly from carcass to carcass, suddenly uncaring of the blood and smell. The long slice to open the beast, the swift skinning, followed by a quick disembowelling. Heart and liver were freed with two slashes and the rest of the gut-sack rolled free of the body and hide. The tongue, she found, was the most bothersome, prying open the animal’s mouth and reaching within to grasp the still-warm, wet tongue and then hew it off at the base. Had it not been such a valuable delicacy she might have been tempted to skip it entirely.

At some point she lifted her head, to peer around her through the driving sleet. The cold rain pounded her back and dripped into her eyes, but until that moment of respite, she had been almost unaware of it. Behind her, she realized, were no less than three teams of butchers trying to keep up with her. She had left behind her a wide trail of stripped carcasses. In the distance, one of the hunters appeared to be speaking to the mate about something. He made an off-hand gesture towards her and she suddenly knew with certainty that she was the topic of their conversation. She once more bent her head to her work, her hands flying as she blinked away the cold rain that ran into her eyes and dripped from her nose. A small fire of pride began to burn within her. It was dirty, disgusting work, carried out on a scale that was beyond greed. But she was good at it. And it had been so long since she had been able to claim that for herself, her hunger for it shocked her.

There came a time when she looked around her and found no more animals to skin. She stood slowly, rolling the ache from her shoulders. She cleaned her knife on her bloody trousers, and then held her hands out to the rain, letting the icy water flush the blood and gobbets of fat and flesh from them. She wiped them a bit cleaner on her shirt and then pushed the wet hair back from her eyes. Behind her, men bent to work over the flayed carcasses in her wake. A man rolled a cask of salt toward her, while another followed with an empty hogshead. When a man stopped beside her and righted the cask, he lifted his eyes to meet hers. It was Brashen. She grinned at him. ‘Pretty good, eh?’

He wiped rain from his own face and then observed quietly, ‘Were I you, I’d do as little as possible to call attention to myself. Your disguise won’t withstand a close scrutiny.’

His rebuke irritated her. ‘Maybe if I get good enough at this, I won’t need to be disguised any more.’

The look that passed over his face was both incredulous and horrified. He stove in the end of the salt-cask, and then gestured at her as if he were bidding her get to work salting hides. But what he said was, ‘Did these two-legged animals you crew with suspect for one moment that you were a woman, they’d use you, one and all, with less concern than they give to this slaughter. Valuable as you might be to them as a skinner, they’d see no reason why they couldn’t use you as a whore as well. And they would see it that by your being here you had expected and consented to such use.’

Something in his low earnest voice chilled her beyond the rain’s touch. There was such certainty in his tone she could not imagine arguing with it. Instead she hurried off to meet the man with the hogshead, bearing with her the tongue and heart from her final beast. She continued with this task, keeping her head low as if to keep rain from her eyes and trying to think of nothing, nothing. If she had stopped to think of how easy that had become lately, it might have frightened her.

That evening when she returned to camp, she understood for the first time the naming of the rock. A trick of the last light slanting through the overcast illuminated the Dragon in awful detail. She had not seen it before because she had not expected it to be sprawled on its back, forelegs clutching at its black chest, outflung wings submerged in earth. The contortions of its immense body adumbrated an agonized death. Althea halted on the slight rise that offered her this view and stared in horror. Who would carve such a thing, and why on earth did they camp in its lee? The light changed, only slightly, but suddenly the eroded rock upthrust through the thin soil was no more than an oddly shaped boulder, its lines vaguely suggestive of a sprawled animal. Althea let out her pent breath.

‘Bit unnerving the first time you catch it, eh?’ Reller asked at her elbow.

She started at his voice. ‘Bit,’ she admitted, then shrugged her shoulders in boyish bravado. ‘But for all that, it’s just a rock.’

Reller lowered his voice. ‘You so sure of that? You ought to climb up on its chest some time, and take a look. That part there, that looks like forelegs… they clutch at the stump of an arrow shaft, or what’s left of one. No, boy, that’s the real carcass of a live dragon, brought down when the world was younger’n an egg, and rotting slow ever since.’

‘No such things as dragons,’ Althea scoffed at his hazing.

‘No? Don’t be telling me that, nor any other sailor was off the Six Duchies coast a few years back. I saw dragons, and not just one or two. Whole phalanx of ’em, flying like geese, in every bright colour and shape you can name. And not just once, but twice. There’s some as say they brought the serpents, but that ain’t true. I’d seen serpents years before that, way down south. Course, nowadays, we see a lot more of ’em, so folk believe in ’em. But when you’ve sailed as long as I, and been as far as I, you’ll learn that there’s a lot of things that are real but only a few folk have seen ’em.’

Althea gave him a sceptical grin. ‘Yeah, Reller, pull my other leg, it’s got bells on,’ she retorted.

‘Damned pup!’ the man replied in apparently genuine affront. ‘Thinks cause he can slide a skinning knife he can talk back to his betters.’ He stalked off down the rise.