Alta dj-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Avatre!” he shouted. “Loose!’

  And there was the true measure of her trust for him, for she did just that; she loosened her grip and allowed the ass to break free, leaping back out of reach of its potentially lethal kick. No wild-caught dragon would ever have trusted her rider enough to let go of game she had caught on command.

  But the wounded beast staggered away only a few paces before going to its knees, blood spurting from the gash in its throat, pouring down its leg, and staining the ground crimson.

  A moment more, and it was down again for the last time, kicking out the last of its life as the herd, scenting the blood, turned and fled. And again Avatre showed the depth of her trust, waiting until he gave the signal before pouncing on the quivering carcass. The blood scent filled the kamiseen wind; it would carry for miles. Avatre would need to eat quickly, before the lions and jackals arrived. She might be able to take one or two lionesses or jackals, but not a whole pride or pack.

  Then she hunched over the body, fanning her wings out to either side in an echo of the way a hawk mantled over her prey, as she tore loose great mouthfuls of flesh and gulped them down. The metallic tang of hot blood joined that of dust and baked earth as she feasted.

  This was why he and Avatre were able to take down game like wild ox and ass; beasts that could break a dragon’s leg or wing with a well-placed kick. Now that their hunting skill had matured to this point, she was eating nearly as much as she would have gotten in the Jousters’ compound. Anything bigger than that ass, though, would have needed a different sort of attack. Kiron felt they’d mastered it, but it had been something he’d been loath to use too often—he thought that if they found the right victim, he could drop a rope over its head and neck and Avatre could pull it tight until the wild ox choked. He’d even taught her how to pull something up off the ground with that rope attached to the back of his saddle, and he wasn’t sure even Kashet had been taught that particular trick.

  She gorged herself; he let her feast to repletion. When she finally turned and walked away from the stripped carcass, there was not much left but the head and some bones. This was the way that dragons ate in the wild, and had she been in a compound, she might have eaten even more than this.

  In a compound, she would have followed her feast with a nap; sometimes he had allowed her such a rest on this journey, but he could not today. The sun was past zenith and there were lions coming. It was time to be on their way.

  He approached her, and patted her neck in the signal to kneel. She turned her long neck to look at him mournfully.

  “I know, my love,” he said apologetically. “But we need to be gone.”

  She sighed, a long-suffering sigh; but she knelt and let him take his place in her saddle again.

  Heavy with her meal, however, she did not so much launch herself into the air as lumber skyward, and she made slow going until she found a thermal strong enough to allow her to soar upward with less effort.

  He had not eaten; he was used to that, though his stomach growled sadly and hurt a little. Water from his waterskin would have to do for now.

  From slow spiral up, to long glide down, to slow spiral up again, Avatre lazed her way over the desert, with that green belt growing ever nearer and clearer as the afternoon progressed. Kiron was keeping her working her way in at an angle, for he had decided, now that she’d had a proper meal, that it might not be a bad notion to look for signs of one of those great estates that the Mouth had urged him to seek. The worst that would happen would be that they would have to retreat, or even flee. But the best that would happen would be that they would be able to successfully claim the rights of an Altan Jouster and dragon.

  Finally, he spotted what he was looking for in late afternoon, just as Avatre began to be a bit less lethargic and show more energy.

  He spotted it when Avatre was at the top of one of her thermals: a walled compound far too large to be that of a mere farmer. It was certainly the size of a village, though it was shaped nothing at all like a village; no streets, nothing that looked like individual houses. So it must be the great house and grounds of one of those great estates that the Mouth had described.

  He pointed Avatre’s head toward it with a tug on her guide rein. Obedient as ever, she broke out of the thermal and began her long glide in the direction of the estate.

  Kiron gulped back fear, and straightened his back.

  Now, he thought. Now. Or it will be never.

  And he sent Avatre in.

  TWO

  BENEATH him was a green landscape, so green that after all his time in the desert, it dazzled his senses. Still, he was able to make out what the crops were, even while he adjusted to the change. Date palms. Barley fields. Onions? The closer they got to the compound and the lands around it, the more Kiron recognized, and the more certain he became that this was, indeed, a Great Estate, and not a village. Villagers each had their own little plots and usually grew mixed sets of crops, so that a field was a patchwork of little bits of this and that. The great estates had enormous fields of single crops. And now he could see people working in those fields, none of whom had the look of villagers, for all were men, and they worked in teams. A villager would work his own fields with his wife and those children who were old enough to help. No, these were servants, or, perhaps, slaves. And it gave him a moment of hot satisfaction to think that some of these slaves might be captured Tians, laboring as he had labored to the profit of someone other than themselves, owning nothing, not even the cloth wrapped around their loins. Altans did not have serfs, who were linked to the land they had once owned, for the oft-broken treaty with Tia that created the serf class applied only to those people who had once owned the captured land that they were now tied to. The Altans had been losing land, not taking it, for a very long time now. So there were no serfs inside Alta and any captured Tians became slaves, who could be bought and sold at will.

  The air here smelled different; different from Tia, different from the desert. This was water-rich air, heavy with humidity, and with the scents of lushly growing plants, the scent of mud and the latas that was blooming profusely everywhere. And Kiron felt something strange stirring inside him, a feeling that made him clutch Avatre’s saddle and gulp back a lump in his throat.

  This was the scent of home, of childhood. Except that his home was gone, his family divided.

  No. No matter what that scent promised to his heart, his head knew that he was not coming home.

  He shook off his melancholy; time enough for brooding later, when he wasn’t about to perpetrate a fraud. He clenched his jaw, and concentrated on the fields below. As Avatre’s shadow passed over them, the men looked up, shading their eyes with their hands. He wished he knew what they were thinking.

  Not in the fields. Not near the cattle. Not too near the Great House either. He decided to send Avatre to land in a large yard near a herd of penned goats. Goats were not expensive, and Avatre was no longer spoiled with feeding on tender beef, sent to the altars of the gods. After her feed at their kill, she would need no more than one or two of those goats to satisfy her. He would not be greedy; he would demand animals that were easily replaced.

  As she backwinged to a landing—an exceptionally good and graceful one, and he felt a thrill of pride in her—the goats milled and bleated in panic, and a man in a striped headcloth came out of a nearby building to see what was agitating them.

  The striped headcloth, and the fact that he was wearing a kilt rather than a loincloth, marked him as someone with more authority than a field hand. As he approached, his face already creasing into a frown, Kiron slid down over Avatre’s shoulder and stood with one hand on her foreleg, waiting for him.

  Stand like the new Jousters, he reminded himself. You are Kiron, son of Kiron, rider of Avatre. Raise your chin. Look down your nose. . . .

  “What—” the man began, and Kiron interrupted him, hoping he could keep his voice from shaking or going shrill with nervousness. “Three goats for my beast, date w
ine and food for me,” he snapped. “Quickly! We have far to go.”

  The man reddened at Kiron’s tone, and looked as if he was going to challenge Kiron’s right to anything, but at that moment, Avatre, sensing her rider’s nervousness, stretched out her neck and hissed at him. The man paled and took a step backward.

  “You had better hurry,” Kiron said, narrowing his eyes, feigning annoyance, though what he really felt was a tight fear in his gut that the man would, even now, challenge them. “Or she might choose for herself. She is very hungry.”

  With two goats inside of Avatre, and one slung behind Kiron’s saddle for her breakfast, together with a skin of wine and a bundle that presumably contained food, they launched into the air again, heading north and a little west, angling in toward Alta City. He was filled with elation at his success, almost dizzy with relief that he had actually managed to pull off the scam, and had to restrain himself to keep from shouting his triumph as she surged into the sky. Once in the air, Kiron picked up the river, the Red Daughter of Great Mother River, and they followed it until, just as the sun began to set, he spotted an island.

  It was exactly what he wanted; mostly rock, and covered with the detritus of past floods. There was a lot of dead wood there, and that meant a lot of fuel for a fire to warm the rocks for Avatre’s bed. She was not at all loath to land, and waited with commendable patience while he picked out a hollow among the rocks for her, built the fire, lit it, tended it, let it die, and finally, with the stars bright overhead, tested the rocks to make sure they weren’t too warm for her.

  Here along the river the night didn’t get nearly as cold as it did in the desert, anyway, and these rocks had been baking in the sun all day already. She settled right in and went to sleep, while he investigated his “loot.”

  It wasn’t a princely feast by any means. In fact, it was basic laborer’s food of coarse barley bread, onions and goat cheese, and the wine was just short of becoming vinegar. Nevertheless, the man hadn’t shorted him, and it was entirely possible, given where he’d landed, that this was the best there was to be had without recourse to the Great Lord’s kitchens.

  It was quite a change from the diet of the nomads, however, which was mostly stringy meat and unleavened flatbread, and on that basis alone, he made a good meal out of it. And perhaps, as he got better at demanding what he needed, what he got would also improve. He ate quickly and settled in at Avatre’s side, among her warm rocks. It had been a long, long day, and as he relaxed, he realized how tired he was.

  Excitement, he decided. All the excitement. Making it as far as Alta, coming out of the desert, fooling that overseer. I feel as if I’ve been running all day. He yawned hugely, and felt his muscles going slack as the tension came out of them. He tried to keep his eyes open a little longer, but the warmth of the rocks was so good, and for the first time since he’d left the compound he had a completely full stomach, and before he knew it, his eyes closed of their own accord.

  He was awakened before dawn, not by Avatre, but by a dead duck falling on his head.

  He had always been in the habit of coming awake all at once; a good idea, since Khefti-the-Fat had enjoyed sneaking up and kicking the unwary awake in the morning. The habit had stood him in good stead in the desert; twice during their journey, lions had attempted to steal up on them in the night. Avatre had scented them in her sleep and he had driven them off with a burning brand from his fire. But a dead duck falling on him—that was different.

  He jumped to his feet automatically, shaking the sleep from his eyes, and saw, all in the same moment, the duck at his feet with an arrow through it, a flight of more ducks overhead, and, coming up out of the mist, a small boat with two men in it, one paddling and one holding a bow.

  They seemed surprised to see him; he was no less surprised to see them, and was not particularly happy to note that the one with the bow was sporting a pair of enameled armbands. “You!” the archer called, with the self-assured arrogance of someone of rank. “Have you seen—”

  Avatre’s head came up behind him; she took one look at the men in the boat—she had never seen a boat before, after all, at least not one that was on the same level with her—and snorted in surprise.

  The man with the armbands yelped with a surprise that equaled hers, and fell backward into the boat, and the man with the paddle had all he could do to keep it from capsizing.

  Kiron bent and picked up the duck by the arrow. “I believe,” he said, neutrally, “this must be yours.”

  “Ah. Yes,” the archer stammered.

  Kiron tossed it; it fell at the rower’s feet. Neither man made any move to pick it up, and Avatre snorted again.

  “You had probably better get what sport you can before the sun gets much higher,” Kiron went on, hoping he sounded less nervous than he felt. “When my dragon rises, she’ll probably frighten every duck in the marsh.”

  “Ah. Indeed. Pardon us,” the archer said, and tapped the rower on the shoulder. The rower started, as if being wakened from a trance, and began digging at the water with his oars as if he could not get away from there fast enough. Soon they vanished into the mist again, and Kiron rubbed his head ruefully.

  “Now I wish I hadn’t given back that duck,” he said wistfully. “It would have tasted fine for my breakfast.”

  Then he remembered the fishing line in his gear; unused since it had been given to him (or rather, sent to become part of his grave goods!), it occurred to him that it was going to take Avatre some time to wake up properly, eat, and warm herself up enough to fly, and while she was doing so, he might just as well try his luck. He hadn’t had fish since the last Tian festival.

  His luck, apparently, was in. With a bit of bread left over from his supper, he soon had several fish baking in the ashes of his fire, and both he and Avatre took off with full bellies that morning.

  North and a little west; they followed the river while it meandered in that direction, lost it as he had expected, then picked up the Great Mother River’s second daughter shortly around noon. This was the branch known as the White Daughter, the middle of the three; for there were three, all told: Red, White, and Black, so named for the color of their water, tinted by the mud they carried. This time of year, the White Daughter was more of a pale green; she was shallow, shrunken within her banks, waiting for the rains to make her full again.

  From the Red Daughter to the White, they flew over cultivated lands that were vastly better watered and more fertile looking than the corresponding properties in Tia, and between the fields was a lattice of irrigation ditches, some of them as wide as a cart and deeper than a man was tall. This fertility was no illusion, but Kiron knew it had come at a cost; every hand of farmland had been claimed from the swamp by someone, building the ditches to help drain the land, dredging up baskets of silt from the bottoms of the ditches and building fields, bringing in earth from the edge of the desert to do the same, or extending the reach of the river with a further network of irrigation ditches beyond the land that had been swamp.

  He looked down on these fertile lands and their tenders, and it came to him that he had dared the bluff twice now. Twice he had passed himself off as an Altan Jouster, and twice he had succeeded; dared he try a third time? The nearer he drew to Alta City, the less likely it seemed that his ruse would pass muster, no matter what the Mouth said.

  And there was that saying that his father used to use, “Third time pays for all,” that you might get away with something twice, but when you were caught the third time, the reckoning would be high.

  Safer not to try again, perhaps.

  And it seemed that his caution was appropriate when, as noon approached and he knew Avatre was getting hungry, he spotted the fresh carcass of a cow washed up on another of those rock islands. He knew it was fresh because it wasn’t at all bloated, and when he brought Avatre down on the island to investigate it, the gaping wound in its stomach told what it had died of.

  That was a crocodile bite. Perhaps it had waded in too
deep for a drink; perhaps it had been one of a herd that some farmer had sent across a ford. It could have been carried downstream by the beast that wounded it, and kicked free only to die and wash up here. For whatever reason it had gotten here, he was thankful; he let Avatre have her fill, then doze in the sun while he fished again, this time encasing the gutted fish in mud to bake in a fire until she had finished her nap. He ate one on the spot, and stowed the rest; when Avatre woke, they continued their journey.

  He wished he had a map. He wished that he knew how far it was going to be before he reached Alta City. Going dragonback was infinitely faster than any other way to travel, but Alta was big; Tia was long, but it was narrow, with most of the population confined to either bank of the Great Mother River. Alta was wide; he had heard that if a man tried to walk it from the Eastern Desert to the Western Desert it would take him at least a full moon, depending on the time of year, and there were many flood-swollen streams and ditches he would have to cross.

  And his goal was Alta City, which lay on the coast of the Great Salt Sea that bordered Alta on the north. He knew that he could reach it by following this, the White Daughter of Great Mother River, but how much farther would it be? Dragons flew fast—and far, in a day. Two days? Three?

  His luck was out as sunset neared; there were no more islands, only sandbars, and the Great Estates were more numerous than he liked. But Avatre was hungry again. What was he to do?

  It was the sight of a temple that decided him; it was a large one, and there were bulls penned for sacrifice nearby. Tian dragons were fed from the remains of Tian sacrifices; it was reasonable to think that the Altans might do the same. He signaled Avatre to land; he could hardly escape notice at a temple at sunset, and he was not at all surprised that not one, but several shaven-headed priests in their white linen kilts and enameled pectoral collars hurried up to him as he slid down from Avatre’s back. They looked nervous and apprehensive.