by Janine Cross
Oh, then.
A slow effervescence on my tongue, tasting like licorice and limes. A subsequent burning, so beautiful and complete it set my mouth and throat aflame, sent pain-dulling heat roaring through my nose, my eyes, my ears.
Dragon venom. Sweet, forbidden dragon venom.
The agony of my flayed back and calves guttered as the analgesic hallucinogen filtered through my blood.
But no, I should not taste venom! I had forsworn the illicit drug in my quest to seek vengeance against Kratt. Yet I could no more prevent myself from swallowing the venom than I had been able to prevent myself from begging for mercy from the whip. Some things are greater than noble aspirations, more powerful than determination. Some would call it instinct. Some, magic.
Others, addiction.
So I did what I had to do to end the overwhelming agony, and as I sucked, my pain-induced dizziness cleared and I recognized the piebald green-and-brown face leering at me: the dragonmaster.
He patted my head as though I were a dog, took the whip from my mouth, and stood.
“Who is she?” Kratt said. He stood above me, a whip’s length away, panting from the exertion of flailing me.
“ ‘Who is she?’ ” the dragonmaster parroted. “You’ve whipped her on the lane during Mombe Taro. She is, therefore, my apprentice—”
“Don’t dissemble, old man.”
“She’s the one I told you about,” the dragonmaster grunted. “The Dirwalan Babu.”
Dirwalan Babu. The Skykeeper’s Daughter, in the ancient Malacarite tongue.
“What proof have you?” Kratt growled.
“Other than the holy will of Re, which directs me?”
“Yes.”
“Other than that which you witnessed just now?”
A momentary silence from Kratt as he glanced up to where the Skykeeper had disappeared.
He looked down at me again. His eyes were cold and penetrating, made of turquoise and quartz. I closed my lids against them.
“She knows venom,” Kratt said slowly. “Knows it well, to have sucked the whip so.”
“You suppose?” the dragonmaster said dryly; then he roared with laughter. Behind my closed lids, I saw the laughter as a rainfall of jewels, sharp and multicolored, tasting of iron and coal. I felt a flicker of fear, quickly soothed by the venom coursing through me. The dragonmaster’s laughter bespoke years of exposure to venom and his inner battle to retain his sanity. Any who’d oft imbibed the dragons’ liquid fire would recognize the sound.
“She’ll die for this travesty, Komikon,” Kratt said, his voice low and dark. “No woman can serve the bull, and no one should know venom as well as she.”
“Not even one of my apprentices?”
“Don’t play me for a fool. Temple will scythe her down before the sun sets on this day.”
“You’ll stay the execution,” the dragonmaster said angrily.
“Will I?”
“By all that is sacred, you must stay her execution; we agreed upon it!”
“You would have me defy Temple over a myth that no one but you knows.”
“It is a prophecy as real as the creature that just flew over us. Few know of it.”
I could smell the tension between the two men, the clash of wills as pungent as the musk male mongooses emit in combat. I lifted my cheek from the ground a little, head numb with venom, and squinted into the sunlight. The two men stood facing each other, inches apart. Waikar Re Kratt still breathed heavily from having whipped me, his flaxen hair a brilliant crown in the sun, his eyes polished beryls, his high cheekbones and chiseled nose the essence of power and calculating might. The dragonmaster stood half-crouched as if to spring at him, was naked save for a stained leather loincloth, every inch of his sinewy, mottle-colored body crisscrossed with white scars.
Kratt turned away from the dragonmaster and walked the few paces to me, his leather boots falling softly upon dusty hardpan. With the languid ease of a jungle cat, he squatted on his haunches and regarded me.
“Her mouth should be blistered from that venom,” he murmured. “She should be choking to death. Frothing. Spewing blood.”
“She knows venom,” the dragonmaster said simply, repeating the very words Kratt had used moments before.
“Who are you, rishi whelp?” Kratt cocked his head to the side. His were the dulcet tones used to sing a child to sleep, but those piercing blue eyes belied the temperate sound. “Who are you, that you know venom so well?”
I tried to summon enough saliva to spit in his face but could not. Neither could I find the courage, not with the wounds on my back so fresh and the memory of pain so immediate.
“I asked you a question, rishi whelp. Answer it.”
“Zarq,” I croaked. “I am Zarq.”
“Is that so? A woman bearing the name of Malacar’s legendary warrior. An unusual piece of refuse, then.” Amusement curled his lips, but his eyes did not join the mirth. “Can you summon that bird at will, hmm? That Skykeeper?”
“Yes,” I lied, my eyes never wavering from his.
“Summon it now.”
“Can’t.” Venom lent me the inspiration to fabricate. “The effort would kill me, in this state.”
“What state?”
He wanted to hear how fiercely he’d wounded me, was poised for such. I would not give him that satisfaction.
From the stable end of the Lashing Lane, where lay the wreckage of overturned carriages, came voices and the answering snorts and bellows from the entrapped dragons. People were beginning to emerge whence they’d hidden in stable and doorway, and I could hear them approaching the smashed carriages, calling out to the wounded.
Kratt’s eyes did not flicker from my face.
“Could you summon that Skykeeper in Arena, rishi whelp, were you to survive the apprenticeship long enough to make it there?”
“I’ll survive long enough,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “And the Skykeeper obeys my will.”
“Does it.” He looked away from me and stared down the lane, as if he might descry the future from its dusty length.
I heard crying. A woman crying, a child wailing. Someone calling for help, over and over. Kratt had chosen to whip me rather than aid them. I wondered whether he had sisters, daughters, claimed women in those crippled carriages.
I licked my lips but could not swallow for the dryness.
He looked back at me, eyes cool, appraising. “Why?”
I didn’t understand the question.
“What motivates you, that you defy Temple by joining the dragonmaster’s apprenticeship? If you are the prophesied get of a Guardian of the Celestial Realm, what need have you to serve me and my bull dragon?”
I borrowed a phrase of the dragonmaster’s. “The will of Re directs me.”
“Does it, now.”
“Yes.”
“The holy will of my bull dragon bids you serve him.”
“Yes.”
“Indeed.”
I forced myself to meet his beryl eyes for all of several heartbeats.
“Well, then,” he murmured, mockery lacing his words. “We must obey the will of Re, mustn’t we?”
He rose, unclasped the cape from his neck, and dropped it over me with a swirl of silk. He became brisk, impatient. “Get her out of here, Komikon. Get her out of here before everyone returns. I’ll deal with Temple.”
TWO
The dragonmaster draped me over his shoulders as if I were a slaughtered young doe and carried me behind the stable domain’s imposing sandstone walls, into the world he ruled. He deposited me belly down upon a hammock, brusquely clasped about my neck the cape Kratt had dropped upon me, and adjusted the cloth as best he could to cover my appalling nakedness from the eyes of his apprentices. I was aware of the apprentices only vaguely; eruptive fevers assailed me, in the manner that only venom, its effects intensified by pain, can.
Belly down and awash in a sea of venom drink, I slept that entire day, right through to the nig
ht. As night descended, as thick and smothering as a slurry of coal dissolved in water, I remained in venom’s grip, alone upon that hammock, which hung from the rafters of but one of the hundreds of stalls in the dragon stables of Roshu-Lupini Re, the warrior-lord of my birth Clutch.
I say I slept, but I use the term loosely, for pain, fear, and hallucinations foster little in the way of sleep.
The night stretched long, impossibly long. It undulated onward with no sign of ending, like an ebony serpent slowly being disgorged from the maw of some vast, timeless sky-beast.
Middle-night came and went, and seemed to come again, and I hated that darkness, so relentlessly present each time I shifted in my sleep, each shifting rousing me with the pain it caused. At some point the dragonmaster appeared, as silent as an apparition at my head, and slid the cold steel of a drinking pipette between my dry lips.
“Drink, drink,” he hissed, his breath tinged by the citric tang of venom.
“What is it?” I asked, though my words came out venom slurred and incomprehensible. I didn’t need an answer, though. I knew full well what liquid floated cold and viscous in the hairy gourd the dragonmaster held cupped in his palms.
So I drank.
Racked by pain, chattering with cold, burning with thirst, I drank his dreadful draft, with each swallow both loathing and craving the venom within.
Loathing it, for how dependent I’d once been upon the poison, for how reckless it could make me, for how it saturated my limbs with bestial lust and my mind with vivid hallucinations.
Craving it, for how the venom created a shield against my mother’s haunt, the Skykeeper, who would have me abandon my current course of action and whittle away my life searching for Waivia, my lost, and most likely dead, half sister.
The consequences would be severe should any find out that the dragonmaster was giving me venom. Its use was strictly governed by Ranon ki Cinai, the Temple of the Dragon, and never was it wasted on a rishi, a Clutch serf such as I. Never. Yet it wasn’t fear of Temple that made me tremble each time I swallowed the dragonmaster’s draft.
When would dawn come?
Never.
I would be locked in that cycle of pain and giddiness, desire and loathing, reality and frost blue hallucinations, forever.
Those hallucinations. Harrowing, accusatory images, they were. Of my sister, Waivia, forced by cruel men to commit acts of sexual degradation. Of emaciated holy women tortured with scalding oil, then decapitated beneath an Auditor’s scimitar. Over and over I heard the melon-fat thunk of blade upon neck; the wet, bubbly exhalation that followed; the grisly thud and sudden stop of blade buried in bone, withdrawn by the Auditor with a twisting wrench from half-hewn neck; his grunt of exertion as he again swung his blade.
A bitter night that was as I lay there, alternately plagued by hallucinations and racked with pain.
But morning did come at last. Pale and watery, the dawn’s light seeped into the stall where I lay facedown on the hammock and stained the flagstones beneath me light gray. Nourished by that light, the muscles in my body eased a little.
Real sleep would come at last.
“Sa Gikiro,” a voice cackled in my ear, and my heart stuttered, then galloped, and at once I was painfully awake again. “Time for me to gather more inductees, hey-o. Fresh fodder for our bull dragon.”
I turned my head and stared into the bloodshot eyes of the dragonmaster. The green bead at the end of his chin braid swung before me as he lifted yet another gourd of venom before my face.
“Drink, Babu. Drink.”
Enough of the poison still burned through my veins from the last draft I’d consumed to lend me sufficient courage to refuse. “No.”
“You’ll rue that decision soon enough! There’s not an inch on your back and rump that isn’t bloody or bruised.”
“I don’t need your poison,” I said, with more conviction and less fear than I felt.
The dragonmaster leaned nearer my face. “So you won’t drink, hey-o?”
He cackled. I closed my eyes against the sour blast of his breath.
“I’ll do so, then.”
My eyes flew open. He tipped the gourd to his lips; the steel drinking pipette fell to the ground and clattered against flagstone. Glug, glug, glug! His larynx punched up and down as he drained the gourd, and fury rushed over me, for that had been my venom.
No sooner did the thought sweep over me than I hated myself for it and the dragonmaster for provoking it.
The dragonmaster drained the gourd, threw it aside, and smirked at me, beads of venom glistening upon his goatee braid. Triumph blazed in his eyes as he saw my clashing emotions.
“I’ll be back this eve, with fresh fodder for Re and more venom for you. I dare you to refuse it then, girl. Ha!”
He turned and loped out of the stall.
Seething with resentment and regret, I watched him cross the courtyard. The dragonmaster moved like a simian, stooped a little, arms hanging low, his lithe, scarred form taut with coiled muscle. I half expected him to spring to the stable’s tetrahedral rooftops and swing himself along the upturned eaves.
But he did not.
He merely entered a long, whitewashed, wattle-and-daub hovel backed against part of the sandstone wall that surrounded the entire stable domain, and disappeared inside the hovel through a doorway of hanging skins.
It was then that I released my breath and the pain that had seemed so manageable moments before swelled, became a fire blazing up my calves, raking across my buttocks and back.
What had I done, refusing venom in that state?
But surely I could overcome the pain without aid of the dragon’s poison. Surely, after all I’d suffered in my life, I was stronger than that.
Eyes clenched shut, I faced away from the courtyard, turning my back, as it were, upon the dragonmaster’s departure, and lay as still as possible, belly down, breathing shallowly, carefully, riding the swell and ebb of pain. Desperately awaiting nightfall and the return of the dragonmaster and his evil, irresistible draft.
The shuffle and lowing of the stable’s hungry dragons heralded the new day. A flock of pigeons landed in the courtyard, cooing, then burst into flight again with a brisk, staccato flutter of wings. Beyond the stable walls, a cur barked, joined by another. From the hovel into which the dragonmaster had disappeared came voices raised in brief argument.
The sun crested the ridge of mountains that surrounded the valley of Clutch Re. I felt the dawn’s light reflecting from the courtyard onto my flayed back. My bladder, distended with all the liquid I’d consumed during the night, gradually became a pulsing thing in desperate need of voiding.
But what to do? Get up? Impossible, in my condition. And pointless, for where to go in the male-exclusive dragonmaster’s domain? There would be no Temple-authorized place where a woman might rid herself of dirty waters without tainting dragon-blessed soil.
But I was no ordinary woman, yes? I had been circumcised years ago, while at Convent Tieron, cleansed by a holy knife. Could I therefore not piss where the male apprentices pissed?
I was near frantic with the need to urinate. I rose onto my elbows; agony flared across my back. I gasped. My eyes leaked tears.
Holding my breath, I slowly sat up and swung my legs over the hammock’s edge. Kratt’s cape hung askew from my neck, covering my torso down to my thighs. My bladder threatened to loose itself as the shift in position heightened the sensation of urgency.
But no, I couldn’t urinate here, on stable floor! For whilst all the soil of a Clutch is dragon blessed and not to be sullied by a woman’s secretions, the ground of the dragon stables, where a Clutch holy bull resides, is by far the most consecrated of earth, and however much I might justify my actions by arguing that my womanhood had been cut from me by a convent holy knife, I would still be violating a fundamental principle of Temple law.
I had to find the dragonmaster, had to have direction on where I might relieve myself.
Ignoring the ra
sp of coarse twine against my raw buttocks, I slid off the hammock, lightheaded from pain and drug and urgency all. Flinching from the dawn’s light, I staggered toward the hovel at the far right of the courtyard, the hovel into which the dragonmaster had disappeared.
Each footfall felt like a whiplash across my back as I crossed the courtyard’s dusty hardpan. Each footstep reverberated across the bruise-heavy tenderness of my buttocks like the aftershock of a cudgel’s blow. The whitewashed hovel swam drunkenly before my eyes, growing closer with agonizing slowness.
The smell of the hovel: a fug of ash from the primitive cooking pit outside, and the stench of old blood that had soaked into the butchering table beside it.
The feel of the gharial hides hanging askew over the hovel’s entrance as I pulled them aside: as hard as bark, furred with dust, speckled with guano.
I ducked into the dark hovel and tripped, clumsy with frantic need. I sprawled full-length across hardpan; my bladder loosed. I shuddered with shameful release.
I lay there several moments, loathing myself for defiling sacred soil, then muttered the Good Woman’s Prayer into the rank earth beneath me.
“Ris shiwenna gindwari, mo Fa Cinai.” Purest Dragon, punish and forgive me.
Something moved near my head.
I rose swiftly to my elbows, looked about. Saw only blackness and shadow; smelled dank earth and rancid tallow.
Then.
Movement. Whispers of air flowing about me, around me. The smell of unwashed bodies.
I was being surrounded.
I launched myself toward the door I’d just staggered through, scramble-crawling through the disgraceful puddle I’d just made. I bumped into hairy shins and reared away from them with a cry, then held myself still, not daring to breathe.
Slowly, my eyes adjusted.
I was ringed by men.
Boys and men, all staring at me, where I knelt, frozen with fear, upon the floor. Their eyes were wet and white and unwavering in the light slinking around the hanging doorway hides.
Outside, a hungry dragon lowed; I started. No one else inside the hovel moved.
A mighty shudder racked me head to toe. My teeth clacked hard together, then again, then again. The noise sounded like a stick running over wooden lathes. I clenched my jaw, but it did no good. Clatter-clack, clatter-clack. Paralyzed by fear, I could not rise to my feet from where I knelt on the ground.