by Janine Cross
I knew that no such restful sleep awaited me, for I feared the animosity of my stable peers and wondered whether they’d dare oust me from the dragonmaster’s domain this very night, even with the Komikon somewhere present within the stable yard walls.
I therefore didn’t lay upon my coarse twine hammock at first, but paced about my stall, bedding chaff shushing round my ankles like wood shavings falling leaflike from a carpenter’s lathe. The slate beneath the bedding was cold and damp on my soles.
Sometime toward dawn, exhaustion wore me down. I found a good-sized stone, and, clutching it to my chest, clambered onto my hammock. The old twine creaked beneath my weight.
I stared at the stars as they faded to the color of rain in the gray murk of the oncoming dawn, vowing not to let my heavy lids close.
I jerked violently awake much later, when the rock I held thudded to the ground. Heart pounding, I blinked and squinted against the brightness of the sun. Muddle-headed, I listened tensely to the very sounds of industry that had, the day previous, lulled me to sleep near the grain silo.
The day was well on its way toward noon. The dragonmaster apprentices of Komikon Re were hard at work. I had slept, ignored and untouched by them, since dawn.
I sat up carefully, conscious of the weals on my back. Of the ribbons of ruined flesh, only a crisscross of ridged skin remained. I ran my fingers cautiously over the snakes of scar tissue. No pain. Slowly, I climbed off my hammock and stretched. Healthy muscle pulled beneath feather-healed skin.
Well.
I stood there, sound in body but not in mind, and stared blankly at the day before me.
What to do now?
Attack the monumental task I’d set before myself, of not only surviving the wrath of Temple for joining the dragonmaster’s apprenticeship but also becoming a dragonmaster, with the aim of using the influence and power a Cinai Komikon commanded to alter the very fabric of an entire nation.
Great Re. Is it any wonder that the prospect exhausted me, that I felt rooted to the spot with defeat?
Once again, I had the brief, sharp realization that, had I followed my original intentions of killing Kratt at Mombe Taro, my head would have long been separated from my neck by an executioner’s blade. I shivered with brief longing for the escape death would have afforded me.
Clutching my elbows to myself, I closed my eyes and took an unsteady breath to clear the dark thought from my mind.
The seductive scent of venom lay as heavy as lead over the stables, and as I inhaled, the fragrance flowed down my nostrils and set my heart glowing like a live coal. The acrid yet honeyed scent danced on my tongue, pimpled the skin on my arms anew, sang through my veins, swelled my heart, soared through my soul.
Yes. Oh, yes. That most desired scent, reminiscent of limes and licorice both: venom. I could not breathe enough of it, ached for it, trembled for it, was dizzy and aroused and consumed by need because of it. I could not help it; I opened my mouth wide and inhaled deeply, repeatedly, savoring the warm, malleable scent as a nebulous substitute for liquid venom.
A feverish flood of memories surged over me: crumbling convent rotunda; ancient, infertile bull dragons. The rasp of scaled hide against my thighs; a dragon tongue leaching black venom upon my belly.
This, then, was a reason to forge into the day: the possibility of imbibing venom. A despicable reason, yes, and a crutch I reached too readily to lean upon. But even as I realized that my fondness for the dragons’ poison provided a stronger impetus to confront the day than the mere desire to live had, I dismissed the dreadful revelation.
I inhaled again and again through an open mouth, drunk on the odor of the dragons’ fire, and when my head reeled from too-quickly sucked-in air, I finally stopped and opened my eyes. Vision unsteady, pulse racing, I took stock of my surroundings.
A massive courtyard sprawled before me, ringed by stalls made of granite blocks quarried from who-knew-where. Half the stalls stood empty save for youths who frantically shoveled manure, and the stalls that were occupied were occupied magnificently by Roshu-Lupini Re’s uncut dragons, yearlings and satons both, females either too young or too hard-worked to lay eggs.
Lean and nervy, trained to spring into the air upon the slightest spur touch and lock talons with other dragons, these were fighting beasts. Unlike the dull hides of the wing-amputated brooders prevalent throughout Clutch Re, or the faded, flaking hides of the dying bulls I had cared for while in Convent Tieron, the scaled hides of the Roshu-Lupini’s destriers fairly shone with vitality and color.
Whereas a brooder’s hide is dappled rust and moss, the hides of the Roshu-Lupini’s dragons shone chestnut and the green of wet jungle foliage. Whereas a brooder stands with head hanging, indifferent to all and sundry, the destriers snorted in their stalls, their long, forked tongues flicking out, black as tar with venom. They rumbled, they tossed their heads, they threw their weight against the heavy iron gates that barred them within their stalls. They rasped their deadly talons against stone.
I loved those dragons, I did.
With my body miraculously healed and the scent of venom effervescing through my blood, I loved those dragons. Exhilaration swelled through me and I felt I could spread my arms and fly.
The courtyard was a-clatter with motion. Pitchforks flashed in the early morning sunlight as apprentices mucked stalls, carted away manure, and wheeled in fresh bedding and fodder. In a shadowy corner, two scrawny boys worked the rusty handle of a pump; water gushed out, splashing into what appeared to be an open aqueduct running through the far side of every stall. Curses rang to and fro; bellows echoed about. Snake poles and muzzle hooks glinted from the cool shadows, the tools wielded by boys either astraddle a dragon or attempting to immobilize one for grooming.
At the far end of the courtyard leaned two dilapidated, narrow structures: the apprentices’ latrines. A pile of lumber and a stack of bricks sat to one side of them. Ah. I understood at once. Those were the materials the dragonmaster wanted me to fashion into a latrine, and the tools I’d require to do so.
I flared my nostrils, piqued by the flagrant challenge he’d set before me. Like any other man, he’d assumed that, as a woman, I’d have no idea how to build a latrine. Such a simple task would not confound me, hey-o! I lifted my chin. I would show him that I was no ordinary woman.
I started across the courtyard, the red, sunbaked earth as warm as fresh blood upon the soles of my bare feet.
At the same far end of the courtyard as the latrines and pile of lumber, an immense sandstone archway led to yet another stable courtyard, and beyond that, another. A line of apprentices was just starting to walk beneath that sandstone archway, each apprentice leading a muzzled, wing-pinioned dragon by means of a hook notched firmly in one of the dragon’s nares. They were taking them somewhere, perhaps for exercise.
I stopped a moment, halfway across the yard, and watched the apprentices and their winged charges disappear through the archway into the courtyard beyond.
How big were the Roshu-Lupini’s stables? There was no way I could tell, standing there, though from my fevered rambling the day previous, I knew the ochre sandstone walls enclosed the entire stable domain, however large. Those walls were twice my height and topped by ceramic shards, necessary to prevent rishi and bayen alike from pestering the dragons and holy Re, our illustrious Clutch bull, with petitions for good luck, fertile wombs, and plentiful food.
Dragons were divine. By mere dint of their intact wings and venom sacs, the Roshu-Lupini’s dragons were regarded as especially divine and most likely to answer the prayers of the devout. There was no real logic in that supposition, but superstition and myth run strong amongst rishi.
I continued across the courtyard, toward the building supplies stacked beside the apprentices’ latrines. The lumber was new and freshly treated with hagi, a Malacarite pitch used to protect wood from the elements, and as I approached the stack of wood, the tar-and-vinegar reek of the hagi combined pleasantly with the stables’ peppe
ry tang of venom.
The planks were straight, the tawny color of heart-wood, and bore few knots. Never before had I worked with such fine wood, for during my years in Convent Tieron, the lumber we’d used to mend our mill wheel had been roughly hewn and weathered, castoffs grudgingly sent our way by the Ranreeb, who, as Temple’s Overseer of the Jungle Crown, was responsible for the Tieron sanctuary.
A wooden crate stained blue and decorated with a rendering of a dragon’s head sat atop the lumber. I crouched on my haunches and cracked the crate open.
“Hey-o,” I murmured in wonder. “What have we here?”
The array of tools within was a treasure. Reverently, I touched one of the sharp teeth of a saw, then picked up a hammer. As a woman, I should have had little knowledge of how to use such tools. But I’d had an unusual life, in Convent Tieron.
I stood, said the customary quendi cinai farkta, the request to the Dragon that the chosen site meet with the bull’s favor, and looked about for a shovel to begin digging the latrine pit.
One of the young apprentices mucking stalls spotted me and hailed another apprentice, a brawny fellow who stood atop a cart loaded with fresh fodder. The brawny fellow lumbered down from the cart and stalked toward me. I recognized him immediately: Egg, the oaf Dono had tried to goad into mounting me.
I fumbled to cover my front with Kratt’s cape, which hung askew from my neck.
With a scowl upon his massive face, Egg lurched toward me. A shadow crossed over him when he was but several feet away. He abruptly stopped and glanced at the sky. I likewise looked up.
A carrion bird glided not far above our heads, swooping toward the great sandstone wall that surrounded the stable domain. Egg shuddered with relief at the buzzard’s deceptively nondescript appearance, then turned his scowl back on me. The bird looked at me from its perch and shook its feathers.
“ ’Bout time you woke up,” Egg grumbled petulantly. “You can’t do that, y’know, sleep late while the rest of us work. You can’t. And you can’t walk around like that, neither.” He gestured at me as color burned up his swarthy neck. “Y’ have to wear somethin’ that covers all of you—”
He cut himself short and his far-spaced eyes widened.
“What happened to your cuts?” he squealed, no longer sounding the bear but a cornered wild pig. “Turn ’round, turn ’round!”
I did so uneasily.
A strangled noise gargled from his throat and he back-stepped several paces. “Where’d they go? How’d they disappear?”
I gauged his reaction and calculated the possibilities. From the corner of my eye, I saw the carrion bird perched on the sandstone wall.
I said, deliberately, “I’m the Dirwalan Babu.”
“The what?”
“The Skykeeper’s Daughter.”
Sure enough, his eyes shot skyward again and he involuntarily flinched, remembering the dreadful appearance of the Skykeeper at the Lashing Lane.
“I heal like this sometimes,” I said with great certainty. “I have that power.”
Egg’s eyes skittered over me like a bead of water dropped upon a hot pan. Slowly, his overlarge face folded in on itself. “Why do inductees have to be assigned to me?” he whined; then he flapped his hands as though shaking out wet laundry. “We got work to do, hey-o. We’ll get no food tonight if our work ain’t done, an’ he’ll flog us after without venom on the whips.”
“I have a latrine to build.”
“You’ve been assigned to me; didn’t you hear what I said?”
“I heard.”
He stared at me, fat lips quivering. I refused to drop my gaze as a woman should before a man.
He grabbed his oily curls and pulled. “You ain’t a veteran, y’know. You can’t do what you like. You ain’t even a servitor. You’re an inductee. So you do what I say, an’ I’m tellin’ you: Muck stalls.”
“No.”
His face suffused with the color of crushed pomegranates, and for a moment I thought he’d tuck his great chin to his chest and charge at me, bearlike. But instead, he shuddered, glanced again at the sky, and gurgled, “We’ll all be whipped.”
He turned and lumbered back to the young boys mucking stalls.
“Faster!” he bellowed at them, snatching a pitchfork from a flaxen stack of clean bedding chaff. “You’re too slow; work faster!”
At his cry, a flock of roosting pigeons burst into flight. The carrion bird, perched upon the wall, shook her feathers at me and cackled angrily.
I picked up the shovel and set to work building my latrine.
I worked hard, familiar with the labor that had oft been my lot during my years in Convent Tieron, for of the two sorry latrines we’d boasted in the convent, either one at any given time had needed extensive structural repairs; as the youngest holy woman, I’d always been assigned the task.
By late noon, I’d dug the latrine hole and clumsily framed up two of the latrine’s four walls. Kratt’s cape was my only piece of clothing, and this I wore knotted shut in several places. The garment, however, offered poor protection against the sun. Heat dizzy, famished, and parched, I staggered toward the courtyard’s rusted pump.
Egg and my fellow inductees—the motley assortment of young boys he’d been screaming at all morn while they mucked out stalls—had long since moved into the adjacent courtyard. I was alone, though even now I could hear Egg in the distance, relentlessly badgering the inductees to work faster.
I was alone, that is, save for the dragons the veterans had returned from exercising some time ago; they now stood quietly in their clean stalls, either chewing maht, regurgitated crop food, or eating the fresh fodder in their mangers. A few preened, one membranous wing spread as best it might be in the stall while a scaly muzzle worked under and over the thin leather, rubbing away insects and the omnipresent red dust of our Clutch.
Other than the dragons, one more presence kept me from being alone: my mother’s haunt.
The wretched bird lofted soundlessly into the air and glided after me as I crossed the courtyard to the pump for a drink. I could feel her baleful eyes boring into my back, could feel her will pulsing behind my temples like a headache. She wanted me out of the stable domain, oh, yes. She wanted me to forget all this apprenticeship nonsense and spend my days searching for Waivia, whom I was certain was dead. Kiyu, sex slaves, didn’t oft live long, and Waivia had been sold into such slavery ten years previous.
I stumbled as I approached the pump, as if a gamy hand were trying to turn my feet in a direction different from the one I desired. I hunched my shoulders and resolutely walked on. As I neared the pump I stumbled again, harder, and I staggered the last few paces forward and caught hold of the pump’s cool iron to stop my fall. Behind me, the haunt perched upon the upswept corner eave above a stall.
Her will continued to throb feverishly behind my eyes. Leave here. Find her.
My knuckles turned pink as I gripped the pump. I squeezed my eyes shut, as if in doing so I could squeeze out her voice.
Leave here and find her. Her will was more insistent now, as sharp and invasive as grit stabbing into an abscessed tooth.
With teeth clenched, I wrenched the pump’s handle up and down, then plunged my head under the cool water that gushed forth.
I kept my head under the water, hoping the cascading splash could shield her off, block out her insidious words. But it couldn’t. Of course it couldn’t. Her presence was an unwanted, unseen visitor trickling into my body, occupying me, threatening to entrap me in limbo and suspend me in nothingness.
“No!” I cried, and I flung my soaked head up from the pump. Water droplets arced into the air and scintillated in the sunlight like the shards of a shattered rainbow, flying higher than gravity should have permitted. They splattered against the perched vulture and sizzled like beads of lard dropped on live coals.
The vulture opened its beak and hissed at me.
“Leave me,” I hissed back as water ran from my drenched hair and soaked the neck of
Kratt’s cape.
Leave here, the haunt countered, and its will fell like a hammer blow against my head. I gripped my ears and staggered away from her and the water pump. I didn’t get far before collapsing against the iron gate of a stall.
“Re help me,” I gasped.
I needed venom to stave off the haunt.
I felt new eyes upon me then, and I raised my head and met the gaze of a dragon in her stall. Her horizontally slitted eyes blazed with a feral sentience; I caught my breath. Suspended in amber irises that seemed back-lit by flame, her pupils widened, then swiftly contracted. The forked tip of her tongue slid out between her firm, ivy green gums. A droplet of venom fell from her tongue to the flaxen bedding chaff. It sat there, at the periphery of my gaze, like a nugget of wet obsidian.
The dragon’s opalescent dewlaps began to inflate. Her sienna wings, folded along her flanks, shuddered. The black claws at the tips of her wings twitched once, twice, thrice, clacking together like wooden needles.
If I stayed much longer draped over the gate to her stall, she’d lash out at me with her venom-coated tongue.
The craving that followed that thought thrilled, then horrified, me.
I hurled myself from her stall and staggered backward, away from the dragon. The buzzard perched on the eaves clacked its beak at me.
With a savage cry, I began scooping up rocks, pebbles, and handfuls of grit from the courtyard ground.
“Get out of here; go!” I shrieked, and I hurled the rocks and pebbles at the haunt. “Go, go; leave me!”