by Jane Yolen
“No splat indeed,” Jakkin whispered. He threw his arms around Akki, unashamed of the tears running down his cheeks.
A horrible thought hit them both at the same time, though it was Akki who said it aloud.
“The hatchling!”
Already aware of the danger, the triplets were broadcasting simultaneous signals of distress: flashes of haunch and head as the little dragon tumbled head over heels through the water all the way down the treacherous falls.
***
IT TOOK JAKKIN and Akki nearly an hour to scramble down the cliffside, but when they got to the bottom, where the falls puddled into several rocky pools before fanning out into five small fingerlike rivers, there were the triplets and Sssasha, Sssargon, and Auricle, all standing over the dragonling.
Akki screamed, “You didn’t tell us! You let us think she was dead.” She ran over and grabbed up the hatchling, who wriggled delightedly in her arms.
A splash of chuckles ran through Jakkin’s head. “No splat, no splat, no splat.”
Akki turned to him, her eyes full of laughter. “Jakkin, don’t you see—proof positive that they’re not just animals. Animals couldn’t play a practical joke.” She nuzzled the hatchling.
Jakkin nodded. “But what really happened?” he asked, letting his mind send the question to them.
It took many minutes of patchworked sendings before he and Akki really understood the whole thing. Each dragon added a part or contradicted another. But finally the story came clear. The hatchling, being so small, had tumbled easily and landed in the pooling water at the bottom of the falls without hitting any rocks along the way. She was hardly the worse for her hazardous trip and, in fact, had rather enjoyed it all.
If dragons could smile, they smiled.
Without her medkit Akki couldn’t do much for the scratches and bruises. Sssasha had tom her secundum while carrying Au ricle, and the endpiece of Sssargon’s left wing was ripped. Auricle was missing some scales in both wings and there was blood on her nose. None of it was serious. Only the hatchling seemed unbruised, though its eggskin was peeling off more quickly than was natural.
“We’ll have to be careful with her,” Akki cautioned, “or she’ll get sunburned on her new scales.”
The dragons licked their wounds and Akki reminded Jakkin that that was, after all, the best medicine for them, since there was something in the saliva that promoted healing.
“What really worries me, though,” Akki said later, gesturing to Auricle, “are her eggs. She’s taken quite a beating these last few hours. It may not show on the outside but . . .” She let the sentence dangle.
“Even if she loses this clutch,” Jakkin said, “it won’t be so bad. She’ll be able to have another. And at least she’s alive.”
“Alive—and lost. Just like the rest of us,” Akki said.
Sssasha, who’d been listening in on their thoughts, intruded a sending.
“What pain?”
“No pain,” Jakkin sent back.
“Yes, pain,” Sssasha said, coming over to stick her nose against Jakkin’s chest.
“We’re lost, Sssasha,” Akki sent.
“Not lost. Trust me.”
Jakkin looked at Akki and they burst out laughing at the same time. Sssasha joined in with tiny, popping, rainbow-colored bubbles that seemed to march across a vast sandy plain.
26
EXHAUSTED, THEY SLEPT away the rest of the morning in a tight circle of dragons and humans. Akki woke before Jakkin, then shook him furiously.
“Sssasha and Sssargon are gone,” she said.
Jakkin opened an eye, for a moment stunned by the sun’s glare. He yawned and stretched, surprised at how stiff his body was, and remembered only slowly why his left hand was cramped and aching.
“Jakkin, wake up. Sssasha and Sssargon are gone.”
“They’re probably just off grazing, Akki.” He rubbed his left hand slowly.
“There’s enough grazing right here,” Akki said, her sweeping hand taking in all the land around the fingerlike rivulets.
Jakkin nodded. The grass was rich and thick, and in the drier places burnwort and blisterweed were both growing in abundance, the red stalks a sign of healthy plants. Smoke ghosts swirled over the patches of wort and weed, signaling they were almost ready to leaf out.
“And I can’t hear them,” Akki said.
“You’re worrying too much, Akki.”
“I can’t hear them, but I do hear something else,” she said. “Listen!”
Shrugging, he listened. He could hear the pop-pop of the dragons’ breath as Auricle and the triplets slept easily. He could hear the dull roar of the falls and beyond that a kind of echo that might have been the river. Nearer were the swish-swash sounds of the five streams lazing between banks. He could hear the pee-up-up of some river-edge creature protesting their presence, and the constant chittering of insects.
“I’m listening,” he said as his mind filled with dragon dreams: soft, unfocused points of pulsing light, with darker undertones he suspected belonged to Auricle.
“Then you hear it?”
Shaking his head, Jakkin was puzzled. He tried to listen harder. And then he heard a strange faraway chuffing, deeper than the dragon snores but higher than the roar of the falls. He knew that sound.
“Copter!” he said, jumping up.
Akki grabbed his arm. “What will we do? Where can we hide?”
They’d been sleeping near the smallest of the five rivulets, for the grass was soft and sweet and relatively dry. But there were no rocks or trees to hide behind, and the falls were too far away.
“We could hide under the dragons,” Akki said. “If they were on their feet, we could lie down under Auricle and the others could crowd around.” She ran over to the dragons and started pulling on their earflaps to rouse them.
The copter sounds came closer even as the sleeping dragons began to wake. Auricle lumbered to her feet, sending a jumbled message, gray and questioning, but the triplets, still stretched out on the ground, sent a different thought:
“Man coming. Man coming. Man coming.”
“Akki,” Jakkin said sharply.
She turned at his tone and looked up at him.
“Akki—no.” This time his voice was soft, almost pleading. “No more hiding. No more running. It’s time to face this . . . this man coming. Face him and go home.” He hadn’t known what he was going to say until the words came tumbling out of his mouth, and then he realized he’d known it all along. The escape from the mountain hadn’t been a running-away-from. It had been a running-away-to.
“Think, Jakkin, think.” Her mind sent him arrow points of orange and red, charged with electricity. “We don’t know who’s in that copter, enemy or friend.”
“It could be a stranger,” Jakkin said. “Someone just out for a flight. One chance in three.”
“Remember what you said when we first ran off from the copter, Jakkin. That whoever is in the copter has to be looking for us.” She began to braid the ends of her hair nervously.
He walked over to her and put his arms around her, drinking in the clean grass and river smell in her hair. “Akki, listen to me. With your ears and heart and mind this time.” He sent her a picture of a damned-up river, then slowly opened the floodgates. A wall of green water tumbled through, threatening to overwhelm her.
“It’s time for us to open those gates, Akki.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Time to grow up and time to help Austar grow up, too.”
She pulled away from him and stared at the ground. “Will you be telling them about the egg chamber and how it changes a person, how it lets us live in the cold and see the world through dragons’ ears and eyes? If you do, you know, you’ll be condemning every female dragon on Austar to an early death.”
He shook his head.
“And will you tell them about the metal to be had inside these mountains? Because if they find that metal, they find the cave people.
And then they’ll find the secret of the change. Good-bye, dragons.”
“Them, Akki? Who do you mean?”
“The rebels or the wardens—the bad guys. The ones who’ve been after us.”
“Don’t just worry about the rebels and the wardens, Akki,” Jakkin said. “If it’s a matter of metal and the change, everyone will be a bad guy. Even the good ones like Dr. Henkky and Golden and Likkarn. For all the right reasons, they’ll slaughter the dragons.”
“Then what will you tell them? All of them?”
Jakkin shook his head. “Very little at first.”
She bit her lip. “Listen, Jakkin, I’m a doctor. Or at least I’m almost one. I bet I could help find some other way, other than killing dragons, to give everyone what they want—dragons’ ears and eyes.”
He nodded.
“But if we can’t say anything, how are we going to help Austar grow up?”
He pulled her toward him again. “Slowly,” he said. “From the nursery on. That’s how babies grow.”
“It won’t be easy.”
“Growing up never is,” he said. “I guess I’m just understanding that.”
She kissed him, her hands cool on either side of his face. And the flooding river of his sending turned a blue-green and then they needed no more words.
***
THEY WERE STILL in each other’s arms when the copter came into view around the mountainside. Flanking it were Sssargon and Sssasha, though well out of range of the twirling blades.
Slowly the copter settled between two of the streams. The dragons hovered until the rotors stopped whirling, then they made perfect, graceful landings.
“Show-offs!” Akki whispered, but her arm tensed about Jakkin’s waist.
The copter door opened and a man in a Federation uniform got out. He was a slim man who walked with a movement that was both calculating and loose. As he got closer Jakkin could see the blue of his eyes under beetling brows.
“Hello, Akki. Hello, Jakkin,” he said, his voice full of warmth.
“Golden! It’s Golden,” Akki cried, letting go of Jakkin and running over to the man. “We thought you were dead.”
Golden smiled and the scar on his cheek bunched. Jakkin was sure that this time it was a real scar, not the fake one he’d used so often in the past.
“The same was said about the two of you—in certain quarters. But the reports of our deaths, as an old Earth writer once said of himself, have obviously been grossly exaggerated.” He disentangled himself from Akki’s arms. “Be careful with me, Akki. These bones don’t knit as swiftly as your young ones. Henkky hasn’t been too pleased with my progress these last months. I seem to have several painful reminders of our last—outing—together.”
They all laughed and Akki touched the scar on his cheek.
Jakkin shook his hand, surprised at the strength in the grip, and said, “You don’t seem surprised to see us.”
“I am—and I’m not,” Golden said. “Can you say the same?”
“We’re definitely surprised,” admitted Jakkin.
“We thought you’d be wardens or rebels,” Akki said.
Golden looked at them thoughtfully. “But still you didn’t try to run off.” He paused. “I’d say you’ve done a lot of thinking—”
“And growing up,” Akki said.
“I always thought you two were remarkably grown-up for your age,” Golden said. “Or I wouldn’t have involved you in spying and—”
“Why are you here?” asked Jakkin. “Why now?”
“To find you, obviously. And bring you back.”
Akki smiled but Jakkin’s eyes narrowed. “Bring us back how? As friends? As prisoners? As criminals? As runaways?”
“Not exactly prisoners, otherwise I’d be home and the wardens would be here. But not exactly free either. Let’s say you are wards of the state.”
At their puzzled glances, he added, “An offworld term I learned long ago. You see, I ran the investigation from my hospital bed—when Henkky allowed me!—and cleared you two of the charges of planting the bomb at Rokk Major.”
“How many people were hurt?” Akki asked.
“And how many dragons?” Jakkin added.
“Enough,” Golden said.
“How many?” Jakkin insisted.
“Thirty-seven were killed outright,” Golden said.
“And Sarkkhan?” Jakkin asked.
“And Sarkkhan,” Golden said, nodding.
A small sigh escaped Akki’s lips but nothing more. It was an old wound, and she’d never really believed her father had a chance of escaping. But Jakkin put his hand on her arm and her eyes widened.
“Hundreds of others were injured, some very seriously. At least twenty more died of their wounds over the next few months.”
“And the dragons?” Jakkin asked again.
“Forty maimed.”
“And sent to the stews,” Akki whispered.
Golden nodded. “It was the worst disaster Austar has ever known. The Federation sent men and supplies, but the price was high. They wanted to run the search for you themselves and it took a lot of arguing in the Senate to rule that out. Meanwhile, Captain Khalkkav and his wardens declared you dead. He wasn’t pleased when I proved your innocence from my hospital bed. It took away his hero status and made him little better than a murderer. He forgot how well connected I am. But he forgave me when I found him Akki’s old cell of rebels and he and his men broke it—except for the leader.”
“Number One!” Akki breathed.
“Your Number One got away. His name, by the way, is Swarts.”
“There’s no double K in that name,” said Jakkin. “Is he a master?”
“Oh, yes,” Golden said.
“Then why is he a rebel? I thought only KKs were involved in trying to bring down the system.” Jakkin looked puzzled.
Golden smiled. “Still the innocent, Jakkin? There are as many masters who hate the bond system as bonders.”
Akki whispered, “Golden is a master, Jakkin.”
Golden ignored her and continued, “Wanting freedom to run a world is not a dream limited to the underclasses. Every master is not rich. Every bonder is not poor. And every rebel is not fighting to set his brother free, Jakkin. There are as many reasons as rebels.”
Jakkin looked down at the ground, chafing under Golden’s lecture.
“But freedom is a good and noble goal, Jakkin. I managed to get some of the best of the rebel ideas cleaned up and passed into law from my hospital bed. We set the bonders free. That brought a good many rebels into our camp, I’ll tell you. Except for the ones like Swarts, whose interest is more domination than nation. You’d be surprised how effective and popular a man can become when he’s lying near death and issuing pleas through an attractive lady doctor!”
“I don’t understand,” Akki said. “If you’ve cleared us of the pit bombing and all bonders are free, why aren’t we—exactly?”
“Because, my dear Akki,” said Golden, putting his hands on her shoulders, “I cleared the names of a romantic young dead couple. Once you return alive—well, there are bound to be some difficult questions, which, as my wards and prisoners, you won’t be obliged to answer.”
“What kind of questions?” asked Jakkin, sure he already knew.
“Questions such as why haven’t you frozen to death many times over during Dark-After? How did you escape the night you were left? Where have you been living all this time? Which, by the way, no one will know because I destroyed the pots and garlands in your caves.”
“You found the caves?” Akki asked, her voice rough. “You destroyed everything?”
“Everything,” Golden said. “I hated to do it. It was clear you’d worked hard to make those caves your home.”
“One of them was even named after you,” said Akki in a small voice.
“How did you find them?” Jakkin asked.
Golden shrugged. “Bones,” he said. “The tattletale of bones. We found Heart’s Blood’s
bones—but we didn’t find yours.”
“We?” Jakkin and Akki asked together.
“Don’t worry. We wasn’t Kkalkkav or any of his minions. He really hasn’t the brains to assume you were anything but dead. It was Likkarn.”
“Likkarn!” Jakkin exclaimed.
“Funny old man. Years ago he’d managed to live for a while in the foothills, holed up with dragons in a cave. He knew it could be done, just didn’t know if it had been done by the two of you. What he said was ‘Jakkin and Akki have the luck and lust for it,’ meaning if it could be done, you two could do it. He also said that if you hadn’t made it, then we should bring back your bones and bury them at home. ‘Among friends.’ That’s what he said. He told me that in the hospital. We had a long time there together and I found him a fascinating, complicated man.”
“He was in the hospital, too?”
“He’d had both arms and a leg broken when he fought off the wardens at the nursery to buy us running time, remember?” Golden said. “And he lost the use of one eye as well. Old bones heal slowly. But he says he’s the better for it, for he’d been off the weed all that time. And I don’t think he’s going to backslide, either.”
“So you went up to the caves together?” Akki said. “That must have been difficult for him.”
“We took a copter and set it down in the meadow where your red was killed. I could hardly bring myself to look at the bones. Likkarn did that. He looked—and laughed out loud. Brought me right over. ‘I told you they got luck and lust,’ he said. There wasn’t a human bone among them. Well, you’d know that, of course.
“We went along the pathway on three different days, checking the caves. Found three places with your stamp on them. We tore apart the mattresses and garlands, threw the pots over the cliffside.”
“Oh,” Akki said.
“But how’d you know to find us here?” asked Jakkin.
Golden gestured with his head toward the dragons. “They told us. The big ones.”
Sssargon and Sssasha, squatting on their haunches on either side of the copter, managed to look bored.
“They’d been coming and going almost daily at the nursery these last two weeks, circling and then landing by the incubarn. Likkarn thought he recognized them as Heart’s Blood’s hatchlings. Said that golden slash on the nose of that one was a dead giveaway.”