Shadowed By Wings

by Janine Cross

  Gradually, a crowd began to form about the obstacle course. The servitors and veterans had heard of my refusal to attack. Pausing from their training during the worst of the day’s heat, they gathered to watch me parry and dodge.

  The venom was all but gone from me by then, understand, and only my high threshold for hard labor after years at the convent was keeping me upright and moving. Jeers and hoots began peppering the air.

  “Set a servitor against her!” someone called out. “See how long she keeps her vow then!”

  “No, set a veteran against her!”

  Laughter.

  Then someone did step between me and my current opponent, and I came to a swaying stop and blinked through sweat-salted eyes at who it was.

  Dono.

  Relief flooded through me. He was ending this ridiculous show, was coming to my rescue.

  “I’ll spar with her,” he said quietly, his eyes never leaving mine. “Hand me your bludgeon, boy.”

  My young opponent swiftly obeyed and joined the sidelines.

  Dono slowly began circling me, and I, instinctively, mirrored his every move. Then I stopped.

  “Wait,” I said, my voice rasping from my parched throat. “I don’t want to spar you.”

  “You’ll spar me or be beaten.”

  “Fine,” I said softly. “But first I need a drink.”

  Taunts and slurs from the crowd.

  Dono considered, then magnanimously held up a hand for silence. “All right. You need a drink, go.”

  I staggered off in a side-walking manner toward the dust-filmed cistern located in the far corner of the outdoor gym. I’d learned my lesson from the dragonmaster: Turn your back on someone, and you’re likely to get struck. Dono had agreed to allow me to seek water with the confident expectation that I would turn my back on him, and that he could then humiliate me by felling me with his first blow. He stood tensed as I moved away, his bludgeon twitching in readiness for felling me.

  Of course, I gave him no such satisfaction.

  While the gathered apprentices began laying wagers on how long I’d last against Dono, I plunged my head into the cistern’s algae-slick waters to invigorate myself. The water was miserably lukewarm.

  I didn’t want to spar with Dono.

  Not at all.

  I craved his friendship, his support, even his indifference, anything but this hostility. Did he not remember how as children we’d raced crickets at dusk? How we’d napped side by side in the heat of midday during the Fire Season? We’d once shared a concoction of dead hornets, in the childish belief that drinking the mashed insects would furnish us with stingers. I’d had my first sip of maska wine at age seven, when Dono had had the audacity to steal some from his blood-uncle’s domicile and share it with Waivia and me.

  He remembered none of that, apparently. He cared not that I was clan, was his milk-sister. All that mattered to him was that he should remain a cinai komikonpu, a dragonmaster’s apprentice proper, a veteran, and that my deviant presence in the stable domain be removed before it caused Temple to denounce the dragonmaster, end his reign, and oust all his apprentices.

  I cupped water in my palms and did what I’d come to the cistern to do: I drank.

  Have you ever experienced the queer rebound sensation that occurs, the morning after imbibing too much fermented drink, when, upon drinking water on a stomach empty of all food, the alcohol in your blood is temporarily reignited? If so, you can perhaps see the cunning behind my request for water: I had had nothing to eat all day save the dragonmaster’s venom draft, and, as had occurred more than once during my venom-dependent days in Convent Tieron, the moment I drank the water from the cistern, the venom in my blood was slightly reignited.

  But only slightly.

  I returned to face Dono. To a chorus of catcalls and gibes against me, Dono and I began circling one another.

  When he attacked, I didn’t see it coming. He moved and was instantly upon me, and I was stumbling backward under a flurry of blows. Thwack, thwack, thwack! About my head, about my arms, about my waist. I couldn’t see, and I lifted my arms automatically to protect my head. He delivered a short, blunt blow across my stomach, winding me, then grabbed my cape and pulled it tight about my neck. I gagged and clawed at my neck.

  He released me and nimbly leapt back, out of range.

  Stunned, I tried to gather my wits, catch my breath. He came at me again.

  Backward I stumbled, almost tripping in my desperation to avoid his blows. The purpose of his onslaught was clearly to humiliate and overwhelm, not injure me, for no blow was damaging, merely dizzying. My ears rang; I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t catch my breath or gather my wits enough to effectively dodge his rainfall of strikes.

  I tried weaving. I tried ducking. I tried parrying his blows. But I avoided or stopped about only one in eight.

  He grabbed my cape again, briefly strangled me, then let go and leapt back.

  I gaped at him, wheezing, sweat running off me in grimy rivulets. The apprentices jeered and laughed.

  “You can’t do it, Zarq,” Dono said, and I was somewhat pleased to realize that he was breathing hard. “Go home.”

  That hurt far greater than any blow.

  I had no home. My clan had exiled me. Convent Tieron had been purged by Temple Auditors, and all my holy sisters had been executed, save for one named Kiz-dan, who’d fled the convent with me; even she and her child had, to my never-ending sorrow, eventually deserted me.

  The closest thing to a home that I had now was the dragonmaster’s stables.

  I swallowed, shook my woozy head. “I’m not leaving, Dono.”

  He attacked again.

  I fell.

  I lay in the dust, dazed, staring at sun-seared sky. Dono loomed over me.

  “Give in and leave.”

  I licked my lips. “No.”

  “Yield, Zarq, or I’ll hurt you.”

  I closed my eyes, summoned my strength, and staggered to my feet. I braced myself for his next attack.

  When it came, it was swift and angry, and I landed facedown in the dust with the back of my knees smarting from his felling blow.

  Reeling, I slowly clambered upright again. The hoots and catcalls about me began petering to a stop. Dono swam drunkenly before me.

  “If you won’t yield, you’ll have to hit me,” he panted. “I’m leaving myself open, Zarq.”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got to hit me, or you’ll go down.”

  “I won’t strike,” I said.

  “Then you’ll go down.” He swooped in and felled me before I even had time to blink.

  Grit was in my eyes; grit crunched like sand between my teeth. My calves throbbed hot and painfully, taut with swelling bruises. The crowd slewed first one way, then another, as I tried to stand. My vision oscillated and clouded.

  “Stay down, Zarq,” Dono panted. “You don’t have what it takes to be an apprentice.”

  I ignored him and dragged myself upright. I swayed, staggered, and almost fell. Blood from a cut on my cheek dripped into the dust.

  Silence in the gymnasium.

  The silence stretched long and hot.

  Dono finally spat on the ground. “I’m wasting my time. You won’t survive Arena, Zarq. Doesn’t matter how hard you train, doesn’t matter if the dragonmaster keeps Temple away from you. If you can’t play the game by the rules, you won’t make it.”

  He approached me and placed a hand on my forehead.

  It would have been so easy to strike him then. So easy to smash my bludgeon across his face. But I did not. I would not strike an apprentice down, would not turn my back on honor in my quest to obtain that which I desired. I would not become like my mother’s haunt.

  With barely any effort, Dono pushed me over into the dust.

  SIX

  Dusk.

  The hovel courtyard.

  And there lay my latrine, the walls separated, the roof fallen, as if a giant fist had bowled it over. I stared
at it in disbelief as twilight drew a star-shot cape over Re valley.

  “Who did this?” I asked hoarsely. I turned about and faced the shadowy forms of the apprentices, who, like me, had just entered the hovel courtyard. My disbelief flooded into fury.

  “Who did this?” I cried again, and from the adjacent stables, a dragon bugled, challenged by the anger in my cry. The other dragons shifted in their stalls and rasped talons against stone. “By the power of holy Re, I demand that you declare yourself!”

  From the east, a sputtering white star blazed across the sky. A spume of unearthly green scintillated in its wake. It shot high over the adjacent courtyard and scribed a perfect arc above the sandstone archway leading into the stables beyond.

  Through that archway, amongst the stragglers just returning from vebalu training, walked Dono.

  “You!” I stabbed a finger at him. The shooting star exploded into a coruscating nimbus of white and green. The unearthly light showered over Dono and turned him the mottled colors of a corpse.

  Dono had destroyed my latrine, I was sure of it. He’d lost a little self-respect that afternoon, lowering himself to repeatedly attack someone who had refused to fight back. So he’d rashly taken out his pique by dismantling the coarse structure that I’d so carefully crafted the day before.

  A section of the dark detached itself from one corner of the stables and drifted wraithlike toward Dono. It materialized into a form we all simultaneously recognized: the dragonmaster.

  “Did you do this?” the dragonmaster hissed at Dono, and even though I stood some distance away from them both, I heard the dragonmaster clearly, his voice whispering through the courtyard like an invidious wind.

  Dono lifted his chin a little. “Yes, Komikon.”

  I recalled that brash tone from my childhood, from when Dono had first audaciously demanded inclusion in the dragonmaster’s apprenticeship.

  “You will be whipped for it.” The dragonmaster faced us all. “Whomsoever opposes my choice of any apprentice here will be whipped. Do you hear? Twenty lashes, meted out with a venom-free whip! No one opposes my will, regardless of whom I’ve chosen to enter our ranks. Ever!”

  He turned back to Dono. “Now, strip.”

  Dono did so, narrow chin held steady. With his loincloth on the ground, he looked somehow larger than life in the moonlight, his nakedness before us all a powerful statement of his humanity. The Komikon ordered Dono to brace himself against a wall. Dono did so, muscles tense. The Komikon uncoiled his dragon whip from his waist. Dono took a deep, slow breath and visibly forced himself to relax, to unclench tight muscles. So the whip wouldn’t cut so deeply, understand.

  I jumped at the first crack of the whip, tensed for the second, bit my lip at the third.

  After ten lashes, my fury at Dono was gone. Teeth clenched, I listened to the whistle of whip through air, the tight snap of leather against skin, and saw, with eyes unable to look away, the red, raised circles already peppering Dono’s back. Those welts would, with one more forceful strike, split like the peels of rotted plums.

  Dono fell at fifteen lashes, staggered upright again, panting, his sweaty palms leaving visible marks upon the sandstone wall. The moonlight made the blood running down his back and buttocks look like rivulets of dark wine.

  He fell again at eighteen, and again at twenty. He didn’t rise then.

  We all stood motionless as the dragonmaster toyed with his corded bullwhip, which lay stretched long upon the dusty ground. He flicked it, gently; the whip undulated in a slow wave, barely rising from the earth. The muscles in his whip arm were roped with protruding veins, and a smile played upon his face, like that of a mother well pleased with her child.

  “Eidon,” he said, and Dono’s red-haired adversary strode to the Komikon’s side. “I’ll be gone on the morrow again. You’ll act as wai-komikonpu in my absence.”

  “Yes, Komikon.”

  “Any who shirk their duties are to be publicly lashed each dusk, by your hand, on the lane. Eight lashes, meted out with a venom-free whip. And any who oppose my will regarding my choice of the girl receives three times that number. Understand?”

  “As Re wills, Komikon,” Eidon replied. “As Re wills.”

  After the dragonmaster left, the apprentices shuffled toward the hovel and lounged about the ground, untying their leather sacs of destiny wheels and dice from their waists with studied ease. But their poise was contrived as they petitioned Re to favor their dice; the broken skeleton of my latrine was a presence as disturbing as a relentless noise, and Dono’s bloodied form, kneeling still before the sandstone wall, loomed as large as a sepulchral tower behind our backs.

  I staggered over to my broken latrine’s roof, which lay upon the ground like the half shell of an enormous nut, and sank wearily upon it.

  Ringus blew the embers to life beneath the cauldron, then gave orders to this inductee and that to begin preparing the next day’s meal. Servitors bowed before the veterans they had chosen to serve during the day and chanted komikonpu walan kolriks, the dragonmaster apprentice prayers for guardianship, on their behalf. The chants were threnodic. They suited my mood.

  I watched as the servitors sat around the outskirts of the veterans, who began their complex contests of darali abin famoo. I knew virtually nothing about that game of prognostication, though I’d known, as a child, that the pottery clan men had indulged in darali abin famoo during men’s celebrations, when maska ran freely and inebriation ran high. The veteran apprentices, however, played with great intensity and somberness, and the servitors sitting about them watched each veteran’s spin of destiny wheel, each fall of dice, and every forecast those combinations made with equal fervor. No party amusement was this, but a game with serious intent.

  Groans, curses, taunts, grins, and even the occasional scuffle broke out amongst the servitors as alliances swiftly formed and re-formed according to the destiny wheel forecasts. I needed no such forecast for myself: I knew I had no allies.

  Yet.

  For as Eidon spun his wheel and tossed his dice, I saw both him and Ringus glance more than once from their game of prognostication to me.

  I didn’t stand aside to let any queue before me that eve, and no one attempted to make me forfeit my turn, either. I ate what was allotted me by Egg, which looked to be more than on the previous evening, and then I retired to my hammock. I fell asleep instantly.

  I bolted into a sitting position sometime later, heart pounding. Someone had entered my stall, breathing like an angry dragon.

  Darkness all around me, the dense darkness of deep night, lit thinly by weak moonlight. Dono stood hunched and crooked at my side, his features shrouded in shadow. His hands gripped a weapon.

  He raised the weapon. I reared back with a cry.

  “You’ve got a latrine to rebuild,” he said, his words thick with pain.

  I stared at him, mind spinning, and realized that the weapon he held was a shovel.

  “Komikon’s orders,” Dono growled, and he lowered the shovel and leaned on it for support.

  I licked my lips. “I’ll rebuild it tomorrow.” “Tonight. Komikon’s orders. Me and you, together.” I flared my nostrils. “It’s dark, Dono—”

  “Why?” he said, and he abruptly lurched closer, using the shovel as a crutch. “Why’re you doing this, Zarq? What in the name of Re motivates you?”

  I paused, then answered slowly, carefully. “Kratt killed my father. Temple took my brother away just after his birth. Kratt crushed her face beneath his boots.”

  “Whose face?”

  “Mother’s.”

  A pause. Then: “People die. All the time.”

  “Our clan sold Waivia as kiyu, Dono.”

  That penetrated his facade of indifference. Emotion worked over his face, then he turned aside and spat.

  “You think being an apprentice is a safer life?” he growled.

  “I can change things.”

  “What things?”

  “The way things are. Te
mple laws.”

  He stared. “You’re talking revolution.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re cracked. You’re a woman, Zarq, a woman. You can’t start a revolution. Look at you. You can’t even bring yourself to strike down a fellow apprentice. You don’t have what it takes to be an apprentice. Shit, you don’t even have the strength to rebuild a latrine.”

  Anger came then, from somewhere hot and unwanted deep within me, from the hole gouged in my spirit from all I and my family had suffered and lost, a hole I’d filled with the promise of vengeance, a promise I now had turned my back on with the outrageous hope of achieving something greater.

  “Give me the shovel and I’ll build that latrine,” I said, and I snatched the tool from his hand and jumped from my hammock, causing him to step back as my chest struck his.

  “Watch me, Dono,” I said, and I pushed by him, hoisting the shovel up, and strode to the dragon stall adjacent to mine.

  The dragon within was sleeping, standing with snout brushing the ground. At my footsteps, she awoke, slitted pupils dilating, nostrils flaring, head rising. I stood outside her stall’s gate with my hips butted against the stout iron.

  “Hey-o, dragon,” I murmured. “I’d have you know me.”

  The forked tip of her tongue quivered from her gums. Slowly, I set aside my shovel. Slowly, I unknotted my cape.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Dono lurch out of my stall. He stopped at my stall’s threshold, stunned, as I untied the remaining knot in my cape.

  “What’re you doing?!”

  “Obtaining the strength to build a latrine,” I snapped, and I let my garment fall to the ground, snatched up my shovel, and jabbed it lancelike at the destrier.

  She rose up on her hindquarters, and the domed slope of her crown butted against the ceiling as talons the color of newly minted steel shredded the air. Her tongue shot out, thick with venom, straight for me.

  Dono tackled me just as she lashed out. Her tongue glanced off my neck with brutal strength as Dono threw me sideways, and I landed hard on the ground, Dono atop me.

  He launched himself away from the dragon’s reach, knees and feet scrabbling over me; then I, too, scrambled on hands and knees away from the destrier’s stall.