by Jane Yolen
Akki whispered frantically in his ear, “They’re going to kill the hatchlings, Jakkin, I know it.” Her breath was hot. “What kind of people are they?”
Jakkin shook his head. What kind of people? He remembered his own nursery’s culling day, when unsuitable hatchlings had been taken from the screaming hens and sent off to the stews. What kind of people were these men and women of the cave? What kind of people were all the people of Austar?
The women holding the hatchlings turned, walked out of the stall in a line, and with slow, measured steps walked across the cavern to a small holding pen of wood and stone. They placed the baby dragons in it and closed the gate.
Akki let out a relieved sigh that almost deafened Jakkin, then slipped her hand into his, masking her feelings behind a carefully constructed wall he couldn’t penetrate. Silently they continued to watch.
The robeless men crowded into the stall, six on either side of the sleeping dragon and Makk by her tail, holding a plaited net. The men at the dragon’s front rolled her onto her back and Makk slung the net down at their feet, then spread the net where she’d been. When they let her go she rocked back on top of the net.
Then the men in the back did the same and Makk pulled the net through so that it spread across the entire stall floor. When the dragon was settled again each man grabbed a handful of net and, on a mental signal, heaved her toward the cart. It took a lot of grunting and straining, and more than once a man let out a mental curse that struck Jakkin’s mind with the force of a hammer blow. Though he’d heard many curses in the nursery, they’d never made him physically ill before. Jakkin rubbed his temples, trying to ease away the pain.
At last the dragon was positioned on the cart, her tail dragging off the end. Makk and his twelve helpers took up the rope at the front. Six robed men came around the back to push. The five women carrying infants each helped pick up the dragon’s tail so that it wouldn’t scrape along the floor. Then they began to haul the cart and dragon out of the cavern.
Jakkin had no idea of their destination, though he feared it was the pile of white bones at the tunnel’s end. He sent a picture of that pile to Akki, and she squeezed his hand. Puzzled, he looked at her. She was smiling. Turning her head toward him, she whispered, “The bone pile is near the entrance, Jakkin. We could escape.”
He knew she was right, yet something about the ceremony they’d just witnessed kept him from celebrating. The chanting women, the white-robed men all seemed destined for some dark purpose, and he followed them hand in hand with Akki because they knew no other way.
***
IT WAS HARD, sweaty, backbreaking work, but Makk and his men never faltered. Surprisingly, none of the other men offered a hand. It was as if towing the dragon were a singular honor that only certain men were given, though Jakkin couldn’t figure out why. The rest of the people, who trailed behind the cart, seemed enveloped in a carnival atmosphere, smiling and waving their arms, their sendings shot through with unexpected colors, though their silence lent a bizarre note to the whole proceedings. The only noise was the constant rumble of the cartwheels broken by an occasional high, piping cry of one of the infants in its mother’s arms.
Just when Jakkin was beginning to believe there was no end to the journey, only the parade through a maze of tunnels, he saw a pinpoint of bright light ahead, beyond the surging crowd and beyond the cart with its comatose burden. Then the pinpoint became larger, irised open until it filled him com pletely. Only then did he realize he was not just seeing the spot of light but receiving it as a sending as well.
It took him another moment to understand that the light wasn’t torchlight or lanterns or the light from phosphorescent mosses. He threw his hands up over his eyes to help filter out the intense brightness as he continued forward with the crowd. When he finally pulled his hands away he saw they were in a large meadow dotted with copses of trees. The meadow was entirely surrounded by the steep, sloping sides of the mountain, as if they were at the bottom of an enormous bowl.
It was night. What Jakkin had thought was a single bright light was really the pale glow of the sand-colored moons, Akka and Akkhan. He’d been so used to the dim caves that the twin moons seemed uncomfortably bright. Squinting, he stared up at them. A dark figure swept across Akkhan’s face. A wild dragon, he thought.
And then, as if in a dream, came the familiar rainbow pattern, filling him with hope.
“Sssargon waits. Sssargon watches. Sssargon hunts. Sssargon. . .”
Then the sending was gone, blotted out by the closer patterns of the people around him and the dark rumblings of the cart.
The cart moved more easily now, along well-worn ruts, toward a great stone enclosure in the center of the meadow. The ring reminded Jakkin vaguely of some of the country pits, with their stone seats around a center maw.
The men drew the cart through a stone archway and into the center of the ring, where, with a ceremonial heave, they hauled the dragon off the cart. She lay where they dropped her, panting and blinking sleepily up at the light.
Herded into their seats by the crowd, Akki and Jakkin sat next to one another but didn’t touch, afraid that their thoughts would thereby be doubly broadcast to the cave folk. And soon Jakkin’s attention left Akki and was focused on the ring.
He wondered if there was to be a fight. If so, there’d be nothing but a straightforward slaughter, for the hen could barely get her head up. In fact, if she weren’t fed soon, she’d die. He didn’t like the way she was breathing, and everyone knew that a hen right after egg laying and hatching needed extra rations. The irony of it wasn’t lost on him—that he and Akki had worked so hard to save her and were now helplessly going to watch her die. He thought about that a moment. He wouldn’t be helpless. Shaking himself loose of the crowd-induced torpor, he started to stand and protest. But as he stood everyone else stood, too, as if reacting to some signal he’d not even registered.
Once again in their white robes, Makk and his men entered the ring and formed a tight circle around the dragon, as if guarding her. The five garlanded women, infants in arms, stood by the dragon’s tail.
The familiar chant began again. “COME. COME. COME.”
For a long moment no one moved except the hen, whose tail beat a feeble tattoo on the ground.
Then, from the left side, through the stone arch, marched a figure in dark red. Her robe was stiff and fell in peculiar rigid folds from her shoulders. A cowl covered her head, a veil her face. Only her eyes showed, ringed with black paint. She carried a long white stick in her right hand.
Coming to the circle of men, the woman stopped until they moved apart, then walked to the dragon’s head, where she raised her hands above her.
“Great Mother,” she sent, and the people echoed it, a dark black-and-white picture of a towering dragon form that seemed to shimmer in the mind from so many sendings. “Where your children cradled, cradle mine.” She brought her hands slashing down toward the dragon’s exposed neck.
In that instant Jakkin knew what it was she carried: a forefoot bone with the nails still intact. Only a dragon’s nail could slice efficiently through dragon scale, though the un-derneck links were the tenderest part.
Blood gouted from the dragon’s neck and covered the woman’s robe and cowl, staining it a deeper red. The hot, acidic blood spattered on the rocks below and splattered on the woman’s hands. It must have burned her, pocking her wrists and fingers, but she never dropped her weapon. At the very moment of the cut she broadcast a high, piercing sending of triumph and light. The answering image from both the dying dragon and the people around the ring was a tidal wave of red: bright red, blood red, an ocean of it that threatened to drown them all.
Jakkin closed his eyes, hoping to shut out the sight, but the sending went on and on, replaying the scene endlessly in his horrified mind.
***
MINUTES LATER THE woman in red cut open the dragon’s belly and one by one the women laid their infants in the dragon’s birth chamber,
closing the flap of skin over them to ensure the babies’ invulnerability to cold and to open their minds to the linkings of dragons and men.
Akki wept openly through it all, but Jakkin forced himself to remain dry-eyed. He felt hardly anything but guilt, for as soon as the bloody sendings from the crowd had ended, his own bloody memories had begun. He remembered, before the change, the three dragons in his life who had died because of him. The great stud Blood Brother, killed in the nursery, because Jakkin had been careless. He remembered Brother as he last saw him, in a hindfoot rise, pulling his leather halter out of the stall ring and screaming his defiance over Jakkin’s prone body until Likkarn brought him down with a barn stinger. Then there was the pit fighter’S’Blood, that Jakkin had allowed to get badly wounded in a fight. He remembered’S’Blood’s last moments, protesting groggily in the slaughterhouse stews as the steward, in one economical movement, shot him through the ear while Jakkin and Master Sarkkhan watched, helpless, from the walkway above. And then there was Heart’s Blood. Heart’s Blood. That memory was the worst of all. The great red towering majestically above Jakkin and Akki, taking the shots meant for them, death blossoming on her neck like a hideous bloody flower.
No more, he thought. I will allow no more. Not Auricle. Not the new hatchlings. Not even if I have to die to prevent it.
The Fighters
19
JAKKIN DREAMED OF it all that night, the woman in the blood-stiffened cloak so triumphantly slashing the throat of the weakened dragon, then carving open the worm’s belly, and the five infants being cradled in the birth chamber. His dreams were as red as the blood that had covered the babies when they were lifted out of their fleshy nest, changed forever by their contact with the dead dragon’s body. In his dream the dragon was no longer thé unnamed brown that he and Akki had saved for the knife but his much mourned Heart’s Blood. And the infants all wore his own face. He dreamed he was drowning in the blood, and when he woke up he was covered with sweat.
He’d fallen asleep in the bowl of meadow along with Makk and the rest of the people, all of them exhausted by the awful ceremony and its equally bloody aftermath. But, unlike the others, he and Akki hadn’t feasted on the raw dragon meat, hadn’t helped carve away flesh from bone with nail and knife and teeth. Instead they’d watched in horror as the bones, still spotted with the bloody bits of meat, had been piled in a pyramid atop the cart, a pyramid that made mockery of the eggs the dragon had so recently laid. They didn’t even need the wild sendings of the crowd to tell them that soon the cart would transport the bones to the great white pile far off in the caves where scavengers would do the rest.
Akki, eyes swollen from weeping, had turned to run and hide somewhere in the tunnels. Her sending was an agony that flashed through to him despite the blood red frenzies of the crowd.
“We can’t go now,” Jakkin had whispered to her. “Think, Akki, think. If we run now, we leave Auricle. She’ll die the same way. We let Heart’s Blood die. We let the brown. We can’t let Auricle go like this.”
She’d turned toward him, nodding reluctantly.
He’d put his arms around her. “We’ll stay and watch and plan. We’ve got only one chance to get it right.”
Akki had kept her face hidden against his chest, but Jakkin had borne witness to the rest of the ceremony. Then they’d fallen asleep in one another’s arms.
But because they had not taken part in the horrible feast, Jakkin and Akki woke early, Akki first, pulling at Jakkin’s arm until he woke covered with sweat, the sun high overhead. The smell of the carnage was still heavy in the early morning air.
Akki, her eyes like dark bruises, turned toward him. Jakkin concentrated on those eyes, trying to forget his dreams.
“I feel so . . . so dirty,” Akki whispered.
“I think I can get us back to the bath lake,” he said with confidence, though his traitor mind sent uneasiness and confusion. “At least I can try.”
They sneaked away from the sleeping people, careful not to step on outflung arms. It helped that they had fallen asleep on the edge of the crowd. Grabbing a torch that was still spluttering in its metal sconce, they plunged into the inviting darkness of the tunnel. Akki went on ahead, thankful to quit the meadow light, but Jakkin turned back for a moment. For the first time he looked beyond the crowd and the bloody altar and noticed carefully cultivated fields around the meadow’s rim. His mind worked furiously. Could those fields have been worked by the same people who had torn apart a dragon in an hour of bloody worship? The acres of painstaking hoeings did not seem to belong to a folk who savaged a dragon hen just a day after she’d laid her eggs to their silent approval. He turned back onto the dark winding path into the mountain’s heart, remembering his own home, a place where dragon breeders ate dragon steaks and men linked with dying beasts reveled in their cries in the stews. People—people were a puzzle. He guessed he preferred the dragons.
“Akki,” he called, relieved to be able to use his full voice again. “Akki, wait for me!”
***
THEY TOOK SEVERAL wrong turnings and had to back up three times, but it was Akki who noticed it first, at a juncture.
“Look, Jakkin, the phosphorescence isn’t just haphazard. There’s a pattern. Five lines here.” She ran her hand over the nubbly moss and for a moment her finger glowed. A disembodied white finger pointed. “And three over there.”
Jakkin looked. She was right. “That explains how they can run through the tunnels and never get lost.” He laughed, holding an imaginary conversation with himself. “And where do you live, Master Makk? Why on number three, past five, second cave to your right!”
“So if we can remember the number patterns, we can find our way around,” Akki said.
Just as she finished speaking they rounded a turning in the number five tunnel and stumbled into a small cavern with a lake at its center.
“I said I’d find it!”
Akki shook her head. “I don’t think you found it—I think you found another one.” She handed the torch to Jakkin, who set it carefully against the wall. “These caves must be riddled with lakes.”
“You may be right,” Jakkin agreed. “This one doesn’t have the ledge where the guards stood.”
“I’m always right.” She laughed and stripped off her robe. She was wearing her own clothes underneath. Before he could react she’d waded in. When the water was as high as her shoulders, she stopped and turned around. “Come on, Jakkin. Why are you so . . . ?” She took one more step back and disappeared under the water, her mouth still open to speak.
Jakkin thought she was joking and waited for her to resurface, laughing. After a moment he began to get worried. He knew she couldn’t swim. A moment more and he ripped off his own robe and dived in. The water was icy cold and he was afraid it was going to be pitch black underneath. To his surprise, when he opened his eyes the water was dark green and, the farther down he went, a piercing light green shot through with gold. Ahead he could see a dark, slim shadow. It had to be Akki. He swam as fast as he could toward that black spot and at last he could make her out, arms above her head, legs limp, her hair spun out around her head like a web.
He grabbed a handful of her hair and drew her toward him. Her eyes were open and staring, her mouth a black O. Putting his right arm around her waist, he started to kick upward when he realized he wasn’t really sure, in this crystalline world, which way was up and which was down. But trusting to memory, he went away from the light, paddling desperately one-handed toward the black wall.
They shot up and out of the water. He gasped for air, but Akki did not. He dragged her toward the shore and, when he finally got his footing, hauled her up onto the rock. He knew little about healing, less about someone who had almost drowned. All he had was his body’s desperate knowledge.
“Oh, Akki, please. Please!” he cried. “Not now. Not when we’ve escaped.” The echo of his voice was dampened by his water-filled ears. He couldn’t reach her by a sending for there was o
nly that crackle in his mind, the water-induced static. He pulled her close to him in a last mindless embrace and the pressure of his body against hers caused water to spew from her mouth.
Frantically he turned her over onto her stomach and pushed against her back, reason ing that he might be able to pump more water from her that way. Water drained from her mouth and nose, but still she didn’t take a breath. He pushed and pushed until he could coax no more out, until his arms ached, then turned her over and stared.
Her eyes were closed. Her mouth was slack. There was a reddening bruise on her cheek from the stone.
“Oh, Akki, please,” he cried again. “Take my breath. Please!” He put his mouth on hers, as if he could force air into her, and blew. Once. Twice. Three times.
And then, as if rejecting his breath, she coughed, a frothy rough hacking that sent both breath and water back into his mouth. He gagged. She opened her eyes and they were like water-filmed stones. Then life seemed to spark in them again slowly. She coughed once more and Jakkin hugged her, burying his face against her neck. He didn’t want her to see him cry.
“Oh, Akki,” he whispered hoarsely, his lips against her cold skin, “I thought you were dead.”
“Not . . . not dead yet,” she whispered back, her voice unnaturally low. “But awfully wet. And cold.”
Tenderly he wrapped her robe about her shoulders. “Don’t move,” he said. “Just get warm. And get your breath back. There’s something I have to check out. But I’ll be back.”
He turned and dived into the water, an inelegant splashing. Just before his head went under his mind cleared and he could feel her sending, still pale but clear:
“And where would I go without you, Jakkin?”
20
AS HE WENT down, down, down toward the piercing green light, Jakkin concentrated only on his swimming. He was an instinctual but untrained swimmer and had never gone any long distances before. Most of his swimming had been of the splash-and-wade variety, done in the water that threaded through the oasis where he’d raised Heart’s Blood. But he pulled strongly with his arms, kept his feet kicking steadily, and headed into the center of the green light. He counted on that light—it had to be a way out.