“I—” he tried to think of something gallant to say, but his heart was racing with elation, and he could only manage a single fumbling sentence. “I’d fight even your father to be with you—except that I’d be afraid that would break your heart, seeing the two of us fighting. I’d throw myself off a cliff rather than break your heart.”
“Then it’s a good thing you don’t have to fight him, because he likes you, and said we can consider it settled between us.” She giggled. “And Mother likes you even better. She told Father that if he dared reject you as a suitor, he’d be sleeping on the floor in the kitchen from now on. Orest doesn’t know about it yet, of course,” she added thoughtfully. “Neither Father nor I told him because he’d be an idiot about it. He’d either decide you weren’t worthy or else he’d go completely the other way and want the whole thing settled immediately, and we can’t have that until everything is—well, normal again. Or at least, until you don’t have to be wingleader and fight. Or until he figures it out for himself, which he might, since he isn’t quite as stupid as he used to be.”
“Or—” Kiron said thoughtfully, feeling a slow smile spreading over his face, “until I make him think it is all his idea. If I do that, he won’t rest until he’s got your father’s consent. Besides, it will give him the chance to act important, as if you couldn’t possibly consider me unless he suggested it.”
“That’s brilliant! And that’s why I love you!” Aket-ten exclaimed, and she rolled over on her side just as he did the same. But they both misjudged how close they were to each other and somehow, as they turned toward each other, they managed to find themselves kissing and—
—and it was like falling into a scalding spring, except that it was good, it was wonderful, and he didn’t want it to stop—
—and Aket-ten broke it off first, but not until they were both hot and breathless.
She said she loves me—
We don’t dare complicate things. His thoughts were all tangled up in possible consequences, even while his body wanted him to go right back to what it had been doing, and reminded him of all the times he’d seen lovers entwined by accident, since no one ever paid any attention to serfs. And that ache in his groin demanded that he do something now, and if he didn’t—
He flushed all over and willed himself not to move.
“Not—” he said, feeling as if it took every ounce of willpower he had to say the word. “—now. Aket-ten I want to, more than anything, but not now.”
“No—” she agreed. “We can’t.” She sounded as breathless as he felt. Well, small wonder. His body wanted one thing and wanted it very badly, and his mind knew it would be a very bad idea. There were already enough complications in their lives. They didn’t need more. “We haven’t the right, we have to think of the things we have to do. We can’t be lovers yet. Not until things are—better. There might be babies, and we need every dragon and rider we have. I can’t take the time for a baby right now.”
“But—” he managed.
“Yes,” she sighed, and brushed his hair off his forehead in a way that made him shiver. Then she pushed him away a little. “But the moment we’re free—you’d better find a quiet place big enough for both of us!”
Somehow, a completely unspoken agreement had passed between them. Maybe that ability of talking to animals did extend to humans sometimes.
Whatever it was—he was content. For now anyway. Maybe not forever—probably not forever—probably not even for too many moons. But for now.
And all he had to do was to convince his body of that. . . .
TWELVE
THE next morning, and for every morning after that, Nofret was waiting to be taken out to Coresan without anyone having to fetch her. Aket-ten told Kiron that Nofret had arranged all of her audiences and meetings for the evening, after she came back. And she was brought back, every evening, if not by Kiron, by one or another of the other Jousters because no one was going to allow her to remain in that deserted city, unprotected, after darkness fell. No one knew what might prowl there, anything from cheetah to other dragons. There would certainly be poisonous snakes and scorpions. There might be ghosts or other evil spirits.
And Ari fretted, though he said nothing, and he was very careful to fetch Nofret home no more often than any of the others. In a way, Kiron couldn’t blame him for being anxious about Nofret’s welfare. If it had been Aket-ten out there alone, he’d have fretted, too—and as far as he or anyone else knew, unlike Aket-ten, Nofret didn’t have any special powers to protect her or help her. He’d have trusted to her good sense, but he couldn’t help but wonder—did anyone who would insist on spending time with a semiwild, nesting dragon in a deserted city crawling with unknown hazards really have good sense?
There were other ways of getting a dragon. She could even wait until next year. . . . What did she have to prove? She was already given all the deference anyone could ask for from the Altans in Sanctuary, and if the Tians didn’t quite understand yet that she was due the respect of a coconsort, they would soon work it out.
All he could guess at this point was that the person she was trying hardest to prove something to was—herself.
Still, she was clever, and if Coresan wasn’t exactly taming, she had come to accept Nofret’s presence and food without a sign of nerves or suspicion. Nofret still couldn’t touch her unless Aket-ten was around, and she still kept her body between Nofret and her eggs, but then, Coresan had watched while Kiron himself stole one of her last clutch, so he couldn’t blame the dragon for being cautious. No matter how many times Aket-ten “talked” to Coresan to reassure her, surely the first thing in her mind when she saw Nofret’s eyes going toward the eggs was that the human was going to take one. It did make him wonder, though, just how much Coresan was able to think—and if she was somehow able to recognize Avatre as her own offspring. And if so, was that making a difference in how she treated the humans who were with Avatre?
The days stretched on, much the same except that they slowly got a little longer every day as the time for the rains arrived and passed. Or what would have been rains, if much rain actually fell out here. There were brief cloudbursts, followed by an explosion of flowers and greenery, but nothing like what was happening in Tia, and to a lesser extent, in Alta.
More refugees arrived, still trickling in by ones and twos, or at most, a family group. The Tians reported that the demonically ferocious storms that had hammered Tia consistently for the last several years had not appeared this season—only the “normal” storms, the ones to be expected, followed by the general rise of Great Mother River for the annual inundation. The Great King’s new advisers were taking credit for this, claiming to have found a way for all Tian priests to work as one. And also claiming that this was why only the lesser priests were still in their temples.
Kiron had wondered how they would explain the absence of so many priests. He’d been hoping that they wouldn’t be able to.
The Altan refugees reported with shudders that fear was the byword. Boys barely into their teens were being conscripted for the army, and the Magi were reputed to be examining and taking select children as young as six. They claimed these children were going to serve in the Palace. But no one ever saw them there, and who would want a child that young serving them?
But no one complained because there were always terrible things happening: murders, poisoned wells, other acts of sabotage, all blamed on Tian agents within the city. You couldn’t even trust your own neighbors, said the refugees. You never knew if they were Tian agents—or if they would denounce you as a Tian agent.
At least, for the moment, the earthshakes had stopped, and the Magi were not lashing the earth with the Eye, burning out nests of so-called traitors and the hidden strongholds of agents within the city (or so they said). So even though rain saturated the city every day, people were trying to rebuild their houses. Some of them were anyway. Some who had nowhere to go in the Altan countryside, like the ones who made their way across the de
sert with the help of the Bedu, had decided that terrible as the Tians must be, it was better to face them than huddle in terror in a wrecked house in Alta.
Kiron knew, or thought he knew, why the Magi weren’t using the Eye at the moment. He thought it rather likely that they simply couldn’t. The burning lance of the Eye used sunlight, somehow concentrating it into a weapon, and with the sky overcast constantly during the rains, there was no sunlight for it to use. And although earthshakes were perfectly normal occurrences in Alta, he had also noticed that every time they used the Eye, there was an earthshake, as if using it somehow disturbed the earth as well—which would be why the shakes had stopped.
And as he watched the faces of Aket-ten, Kaleth, and the Tian priests, he knew that they knew why those young children were being taken. These were the youngsters that would have been Nestlings, had there been anyone in Alta to train them. Those with arcane powers who had not fled were mostly comatose from being repeatedly drained to serve the uses of the Magi. So the Magi needed a new source of power—just as the “advisers” in Tia had needed a source of power.
It made him feel sick; sicker still that there was nothing, realistically speaking, that he could do about it.
Meanwhile, the Tian priests had found a way to call and direct the rare rains kamiseen, to enable it to uncover still more of Sanctuary. It didn’t look as if they would be running out of buildings any time soon. Or—so Kaleth confided to him—treasure. There was enough to pay the Bedu, enough to put some glory into the shrines of the gods and give the priests something in the way of regalia again. The gods were providing still, it seemed.
So the days lengthened, and the nights shortened, and the refugees came in, and what passed for the rains here in the desert ended.
And then, at long last—the hatches started.
The eggs in the hatching pen began cracking first, and that triggered the need to contact the Bedu to start raiding the Tian Sacred Herds. There was no way that Sanctuary could feed the growing population and the hungry dragonets on hunting alone. They needed meat, and a great deal of it.
By this point, the Herds themselves had been moved to make those raids possible without penetrating too far into Tian lands. Those priests that had not fled to Sanctuary were colluding with those who had, and had brought the herds to grazing grounds seldom used, right on the edge of the desert. The excuse was that the herds were looking thin and sickly, a bad omen, and something that could be easily remedied by taking them to fresh pastures. And why should the advisers care what happened to the herds? They played no part in the sacrifices, cared nothing for omens or portents or other priestly matters, and probably thought that they had more important things to worry about. With the few novices that they had managed to get their hands on used up and dead, they were forced to turn their attention to other sources of power. Rumors had come via the priestly caste that one of the advisers himself was making a tour of temples; only now, forewarned, the priests were making very sure he didn’t find the source of power he was looking for—those few priests that had not left their posts who were god-touched. They were moving one step ahead of him, from temple to temple.
And there were too few of those advisers to make a search among the Tian children for those who had not yet fully shown the hand of the gods on them. Kiron had a notion that the Tians, unlike the Altans, would not take tamely to having their children taken—not after those novices were found dead.
Then again, the Tians were not living in the shadow of the Eye either—nor under the baleful gaze of several hundred Magi.
Now that the season of rains and floods were over, the assault on the Altan border, however, had been renewed. Once again, there was a steady flow of casualties on both sides, to feed that unspeakable appetite for the magic and power of lost life.
It was maddening to know that there was nothing those in Sanctuary could do. . . .
The first of the sacred sacrificial animals began arriving in Sanctuary about the time that the little dragonets came into their full and voracious appetites.
These were beasts sacred to the gods, however, and it was Nofret who suggested that the Tian priests actually undertake the full ritual sacrifices they would ordinarily have done, rather than simply butcher the beasts or allow them to be butchered.
“I can’t see any reason why not,” she said, at the evening meeting after the first lot of cattle and goats was driven into the pens waiting for them, a meeting which Kiron was attending in his capacity of wingleader and strongly interested party. “And I can see every reason why you should. We have a much larger temple now—the one the Jousters were going to take and don’t need. It has an inner shrine and a proper sacrificial table. And I think it is a very bad idea to cheat the gods of what is, after all, rightfully theirs.”
“But—” The Thet priest looked at her askance. “They are not your gods, Lady.”
“Pah. Who was worshiped there before? It looked enough like Lord Haras as to make no difference, but it was probably called by a different name. And in a thousand years, the Falcon-headed One will probably have yet a third name. I do not think the gods care what names we use, so long as we do good and not evil. They are the gods of both Altans and Tians at this point, and it doesn’t matter a hair what name you call them by,” she replied instantly. “You have never consulted a woman about this, clearly. We women are pragmatic about such things; we call upon whoever we think might answer us, with no nonsense about whether it is your god or mine. I have even been known to invoke one of Heklatis’ Akkadian goddesses now and again.”
The Thet priest brightened at that. “It could be,” he said, with some deliberation, “that with the number of sacrifices from Tian altars growing fewer, and those from the Sanctuary altars growing more numerous, they might be inclined to actually remove their favor from Tia and bestow it here. The impression we are trying to create may become the actuality.”
“That, too, was my thought,” Nofret said briskly, as Kaleth smiled slightly and Ari looked very thoughtful indeed.
“Even if the Jousters had needed the temple, under the circumstances I would have said to take it,” Ari said gravely, speaking up for the first time this evening. “Let us give all the gods their due, Tian and Altan together. If they look with favor upon us, so much the better for us all.”
And so, the hatching of the dragonets, that had caused so much concern about eroding resources, proved to be the source of a great improvement in the lives of everyone in Sanctuary and of the Bedu as well. The Bedu made their painless raids—the only injuries were to a couple of too eager youngsters who fell from their swift desert-bred horses and broke a bone or two. They moved the herds to secret oases, and for their pains got ten percent of the beasts. Only as many of the sacrificial animals as were needed were brought, moved by night to Sanctuary, to give up their blood on the altar, fulfilling their destinies. And their flesh fed not only the dragonets, but the full-grown dragons and the people of Sanctuary. There was not the overabundance of meat there had been in Mefis—that would have been a criminal waste, since there was, as yet, no way to store it in great quantity; cold rooms, it seemed, took more effort than heating the pens. And unlike in Mefis and in Alta, where there were so many sacrifices in a day that there was always some wastage, every littlest scrap was used. But the overall improvement in diet made people feel less as if they were undergoing great hardship and sacrifice to live in Sanctuary. And another added benefit—so many hides available meant that not only was there an abundance of leather for sandals and belts, blacksmith aprons and other domestic needs, there was plenty for shields and new saddles and harnesses, and even chariot covers. For the first time, a handful of craftsmen from both Tia and Alta began to make the swift-moving chariots used for both war and hunting, to train Bedu horses to pull them, and to allow the charioteers from Lord Ya-tiren’s household to train others.
And not too very long after the last of the eggs in the hatching pen cracked and gave up a handsome little blue
dragonet, Coresan’s clutch began to hatch.
“Should I help?” Nofret asked anxiously, as Coresan prowled around and around the rocking egg.
“No,” Aket-ten said immediately. “Keep away from her. She’s on edge, and while she’s all right with us being within sight, even I can’t tell what she’ll do if you try to get any nearer.”
“Within sight” was something of a misnomer. In fact, they were up on the cliff above the nest. Aket-ten and Re-eth-ke had come in first, realized immediately that the first of the eggs was hatching, and cut off Avatre, Kiron, and Nofret, waving them up to the cliff. Kiron was more than willing to follow her lead in this. He had never seen a dragon with hatching eggs before, and according to Ari, they got positively bloodthirsty until all the hatchlings were safely out and fed. He had said that they should all hatch nearly at once; dragons didn’t start incubation until all the eggs were laid, so that there wasn’t much more than a day or two between the oldest and the youngest.
One of the five eggs Coresan had laid was clearly infertile; she had pushed it off to one side, out of the nest. The others were moving, one violently. And it sounded like there was tapping coming from all of them.
Suddenly Coresan stopped prowling, and practically leaped on the egg that had been moving the most. Trapping it between her foreclaws, she tilted her head to the side, and—
Kiron watched avidly. He knew what must be coming. Dragon egg shells were thicker than the walls of water jars and a great deal less fragile; they had to be, to contain the developing dragon safely. But that meant they were hard. He, Ari, and every other human that had ever helped an egg to hatch had been forced to use hammers to help the baby inside crack the shell. But no one knew how dragons assisted their young. Not even Ari, who had studied dragons nesting in caves to keep the hatching young out of the rains, and had been unable as a consequence to get close enough to see the crucial moment.
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