his sword and laying it upon the bed; he did not feel comfortable taking off his coat, but he could at least reduce the formality of his appearance a little by this measure.
‘Shall I show you to the feeding grounds now?’ Granby said, stiffly; it was his first contribution to the conversation since they had left the club.
‘Oh, we ought to show him the baths first, and the dining hall,’ Martin said. ‘The baths are something to see,’ he added to Laurence. ‘They were built by the Romans, you know; and they are why we are all here at all.’
‘Thank you; I would be glad to see them,’ Laurence said; although he would have been happy to let the obviously unwilling lieutenant escape, he could not say otherwise now without being rude; though Granby might be discourteous, Laurence did not intend to stoop to the same behaviour.
They passed the dining hall on the way; Martin, chattering away, told him that the captains and lieutenants dined at the smaller round table, then midwingman and ensigns at the long rectangle. ‘Thankfully, the cadets come in and eat earlier, for the rest of us would starve if we had to hear them squalling throughout our meals, and then the ground crews eat after us,’ he finished.
‘Do you never take your meals separately?’ Laurence asked; the communal dining was rather odd, for officers, and he thought wistfully that he would miss being able to invite friends to his own table; it had been one of his greatest pleasures, ever since he had won enough in prize money to afford it.
‘Of course, if someone is sick, a tray will be sent up,’ Martin said. ‘Oh, are you hungry? I suppose you had no dinner. Hi, Tolly,’ he called, and a servant crossing the room with a stack of linens turned to look at them, an eyebrow raised. ‘This is Captain Laurence; he has just flown in. Can you manage something for him, or must he wait until supper?’
‘No, thank you; I am not hungry. I was speaking only from curiosity,’ Laurence said.
‘Oh, there’s no trouble about it,’ the man Tolly said, answering directly. ‘I dare say one of the cooks can cut you a fair slice or two and dish up some potatoes; I will ask Nan. Tower room on the third floor, yes?’ He nodded and went on his way without even waiting for a reply.
‘There, Tolly will take care of you,’ Martin said, evidently without the least consciousness of any thing out of the ordinary. ‘He is one of the best fellows; Jenkins is never willing to oblige, and Marvell will get it done, but he will moan about it so that you wish you hadn’t asked.’
‘I imagine that you have difficulty finding servants who are not bothered by the dragons,’ Laurence said; he was beginning to adjust to the informality of the aviators’ address among themselves, but to find a similar degree in a servant had bemused him afresh.
‘Oh, they are all born and bred in the villages hereabouts, so they are used to it and us,’ Martin said, as they walked through the long hall. ‘I suppose Tolly has been working here since he was a squeaker; he would not bat an eye at a Regal Copper in a tantrum.’
A metal door closed off the stairway leading down to the baths; when Granby pulled it open, a gust of hot, wet air came out and steamed in the relative cold of the corridor. Laurence followed the other two down the narrow, spiralling stair; it went down for four turns and opened abruptly into a large bare room, with shelves of stone built out of the walls and faded paintings upon the walls, partly chipped away: obvious relics of Roman times. One side held heaps of folded and stacked linens, the other a few piles of discarded clothes.
‘Just leave your things on the shelves,’ Martin said. ‘The baths are in a circuit, so we come back out here again.’ He and Granby were already stripping.
‘Have we time to bathe now?’ Laurence asked, a little dubiously.
Martin paused in taking off his boots. ‘Oh, I thought we would just stroll through; no, Granby? It is not as though there is a need to rush; supper will not be for a few hours yet.’
‘Unless you have something urgent to attend to,’ Granby said to Laurence, so ungraciously that Martin looked between them in surprise, as if only now noticing the tension.
Laurence compressed his lips and held back a sharp word; he could not be checking every aviator who might be hostile to a Navy man, and to some extent he understood the resentment. He would have to win through it, just like a new midwingman fresh on board. ‘Not at all,’ was all he said. Though he was not sure why they had to strip down merely to tour the baths, he followed their example, save that he arranged his clothes with more care into two neat stacks, and lay his coat atop them rather than creasing it by folding.
Then they left the room by a corridor to the left, and passed through another metal door at its end. He saw the sense in undressing as soon as they were through: the room beyond was so full of steam he could barely see past arm’s length, and he was dripping wet instantly. If he had been dressed, his coat and boots would have been ruined, and everything else soaked through; on naked skin the steam was luxurious, just shy of being too hot, and his muscles unwound gratefully from the long flight.
The room was tiled, with benches built out of the walls at regular intervals; a few other fellows were lying about in the steam. Granby and Martin nodded to a couple of them as they led the way through and into a cavernous room beyond; this one was even warmer, but dry, and a long, shallow pool ran very nearly its full length. ‘We are right under the courtyard now, and there is why the Corps has this place,’ Martin said, pointing.
Deep niches were built into the long wall at regular intervals, and a fence of wrought-iron barred them from the rest of the room while leaving them visible. Perhaps half the niches were empty; the other half were padded with fabric, and each held a single massive egg. ‘They must be kept warm, you see, since we cannot spare the dragons to brood over them, or let them bury them near volcanoes or suchlike, as they would in nature.’
‘And there is no space to make a separate chamber for them?’ Laurence said, surprised.
‘Of course there is space,’ Granby said, rudely; Martin glanced at him and leaped in hastily, before Laurence could react.
‘You see, everyone is in and out of here often, so if one of them begins to look a bit hard we are more likely to notice it,’ he said hurriedly.
Still trying to rein in his temper, Laurence let Granby’s remark pass and nodded to Martin; he had read in Sir Edward’s books how unpredictable dragon egg hatching was, until the very end; even knowing the species could only narrow the process down to a span of months or, for the larger breeds, years.
‘We think the Anglewing over there may hatch soon; that would be famous,’ Martin went on, pointing at a golden-brown egg, its sides faintly pearlescent and spotted with flecks of brighter yellow. ‘That is Obversaria’s get; she is the flag-dragon at the Channel. I was signal-ensign aboard her, fresh out of training, and no beast in her class can touch her for manoeuvring.’
Both of the aviators looked at the eggs with wistful expressions, longingly; of course each of those represented a rare chance of promotion, and one even more uncertain than the favour of the Admiralty, which might be courted or won by valour in the field. ‘Have you served with many dragons?’ Laurence asked Martin.
‘Only Obversaria and then Inlacrimas; he was injured in a skirmish over the Channel a month ago, and so here I am on the ground,’ Martin said. ‘But he will be fit for duty again in a month, and I got a promotion out of it, so I shouldn’t complain; I am just made midwingman,’ he added proudly. ‘And Granby here has been with more; four, is that not right? Who before Laetificat?’
‘Excursius, Fluitare, and Actionis,’ Granby answered, very briefly.
But the first name had been enough; Laurence finally understood, and his face hardened. The fellow likely was friend to Lieutenant Dayes; at any rate the two of them had been the equivalent of shipmates until recently, and it was now clear to him that Granby’s offensive behaviour was not simply the general resentment of an aviator for a naval officer shoehorned into his ser vice, but also a personal matter, and thus in some sense an extension of Dayes’s