Alta

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Why?” Kiron asked. Pe-atep raised his eyebrows.

  “Well, the shyest rider with the shyest dragon? Think about it! We’d never get them off the ground!” Pe-atep ran his hands down the baby’s sides. “Poor little fellow. This happens in cats, sometimes; lions mostly, but sometimes cheetahs. One is born that just jumps at everything. You just have to coax them, and make sure that they never fail badly enough at anything to frighten them off it.” He chuckled, as the dragonet relaxed and stopped shivering. “There now, you see? It’s all right. Nothing bad happened, little one. I’ll want you lot to start coming into the pen at odd times, and bring a nice little tidbit with you every time you do. He has to start learning that new things can be nice things. It’s the only way to get him through this stage. But once we do, he’ll be as brave as a lioness, won’t you, my handsome fellow?”

  “I’ll pass the word,” Kiron promised, and walked out softly but confidently.

  As he told the others what Pe-atep had requested, he reflected that here, if he wanted it, was another omen. So far, it seemed that the dragonet was matched perfectly to the boy who had gotten it. Menet-ka had the boldest—who was pulling him into the center of attention, which was good for the boy. And Pe-atep, experienced handler of big hunting cats, had the shyest—he who was best equipped to handle such a problem baby out of his own vast experience.

  So Toreth has the quietest but the smartest, I’ve seen that, too, already. And for someone who doesn’t particularly want to draw attention to himself right now, that is the ideal combination. I wonder if that means that Oset-re’s Apetma is going to shred his best tunics and kilts so that he loses some of that vanity? He already knew what Gan’s dragon meant to him—Gan, who had never taken anything seriously before his dragon hatched, was utterly, completely, wholeheartedly besotted. He was just as in love with the gentle Khaleph as Khaleph was with him. And as for Orest—well, Orest’s Wastet was, next to Bethulan, the most demanding of the lot. Everything had to be just so for Wastet—his meat chopped to a certain size, his pen cleaned at once, his water absolutely pure and fresh. There was no longer room in Orest’s world for “close enough.”

  As for Huras—that was a perfect match, too. The huge Tathulen was so good-natured that the perfectionist was learning to slow down and relax a little. Huras was coming to understand that sometimes “close enough” was good enough.

  Wiry little Kalen had brought all of his experience as a falconer to taking care of Se-atmen, who repaid his impeccable care with an outpouring of single-hearted love—which you just did not get from a bird of prey. So even Kalen, who Kiron had thought was probably the perfect candidate for taking care of a tame dragon without having to be taught anything, was learning something. . . .

  And I am learning something from all of them, he thought, as he stood in the doorway of Avatre’s pen, and listened to the little sounds coming from all of the pens. Indeed I am. Now as long as I can keep a little ahead of all of them, we’ll be all right!

  ELEVEN

  THREE days later, Aket-ten made her first appearance in the Jousters’ Compound. She was accompanied by Lord Khumun, who told Kiron’s wing that he wished to see how she would fare in communicating with the dragons for himself.

  The boys had been singularly uninterested in “Orest’s little sister” and had not been enthusiastic about leaving their precious charges to greet her. That all changed the moment they set eyes on her.

  “By the gods!” Gan whispered to Kiron, as all of the boys of Kiron’s wing gathered to greet her. “What happened to Orest’s ‘little’ sister?”

  “She grew up,” Kiron replied shortly, a little dismayed at Gan’s words, and surprised to feel a surge of jealousy. Aket-ten looked—well, wonderful. She had somehow achieved a compromise between the hoyden she had been and that elegant, slightly over-painted “lady” he had first seen in the Temple of All Gods. She looked quite comfortable in her skin, and yet there was no doubt whatsoever that she had, in very fact, grown up. Even Toreth was giving her an interested and intrigued look.

  Yes, every one of the boys was eyeing her with varying degrees of speculation and interest except Orest himself. Orest was apparently oblivious to the change. He still looked bored, and clearly wished himself elsewhere.

  “I have work to do,” he whispered irritably to Kiron. “You’d think they’d leave me out of this welcoming-party!” He shook his head. “She’s bad enough now as a know-it-all; this is just going to swell her pride like a toad in the rain!”

  That his wingmates did not share his impatience didn’t seem to register with him at all.

  Aket-ten didn’t look like someone whose pride was going to swell over all the attention. She looked like someone who knew she had a job to do and was determined to do it well. The encounter with the Magi had changed her profoundly, Kiron decided at last. It had dispelled some cherished illusions, and had forced her to look at the world around her with a high degree of skepticism. He felt sorry for her; the confident child he had rescued back in the swamp was gone.

  On the other hand, the cautious girl who had taken the child’s place would be a bit easier to live with.

  “Do you think you are prepared to attempt a wild-caught dragon?” Lord Khumun asked Aket-ten. “You need not fear them now—I am sure that your brother must have told you that we have been working intensely with them, and that though one must be cautious around them, you need not fear them.”

  Where did that come from? I must have been wool-gathering. Kiron shook his head; he had been so busy staring that he had completely lost track of the conversation.

  Aket-ten hesitated, then answered carefully. “My Lord, the problem is not that I am afraid of the wild-caught dragons, it is the tala. It makes their thoughts so sluggish that I cannot effectively reach them. So while I can easily tell Avatre what it is that Kiron would like her to do, with a wild-caught dragon, I do not believe that I could get past the tala and its own natural resistance to captivity. I fear that the best I could manage would be to read it, to tell you how it is feeling at that moment.”

  “Annoying,” the Lord of the Jousters sighed. “Ah, well, that is better than nothing. You can tell us when they are over-drugged, or under-drugged, and if they are injured, ill, or in season. That is something, at least.”

  She shrugged. “There are many things I can tell you that may help. Animals can suddenly conceive of a dislike for a person or an object, and I can tell you if that happens. I can exert some calming influence on them, provided they have not been provoked into rage. And I can certainly help with the training of the tame ones,” she said firmly. “It will be of no difficulty whatsoever to explain to them what is wanted. If they all grow up like Avatre, they will be eager to please, and need only to be told what to do in order to make a try at it.”

  “Well then, there is a swamp dragon that has been looking a bit seedy of late,” Lord Khumun said briskly. “That would be Pa-alet, ridden by Hotef-ba. Let us see what you can make of him.”

  With Aket-ten at Lord Khumun’s side, and the dragon boys trailing along behind, they all paraded over to the part of the compound where Kiron seldom ventured—the pens of the swamp dragons. He had not had much to do with the swamp dragons since advising Lord Khumun on ways to retrain them—though Menet-ka’s Bethlan had wandered in twice more, looking for her “mother.” As they all moved along the corridor, heads rose on long necks, craning over the walls to peer at the interlopers—slightly smaller heads on slimmer necks than Kiron was used to in an adult dragon. The forehead was broader than that of a desert dragon, though, and the nasal area smaller, and he wondered if they had all been a bit hasty in thinking of the swamp dragons as less intelligent than their desert cousins.

  Their colors were more muted and less metallic than those of the desert dragons, and instead of having colors that shaded on all the extremities to a different color, or something lighter or darker, only the bellies shaded to a lighter version of their base color. But what they lacked
in brightness of color, they made up for in subtle patterning; with few exceptions, virtually all of them sported diamond-in-diamond patterns down their backs in subtle variations of their base colors. He could see how this would be valuable in the swamp; if they were lying in a hot mud pool, they would look much like the surface of the pool. And if they chose to swim in clearer water, that lighter belly would disguise them from below both from the enormous carp that formed part of their diet and from the crocodiles that lurked on the bottom. Even a dragon had reason to fear a really big crocodile.

  They came to the pen of the ailing dragon, who looked up and grunted at their entrance. He was a brown, and he lolled in his pool of hot water with more lethargy than Kiron was used to seeing in a dragon that wasn’t trying to sleep through the rains.

  “Do you need to touch him?” Lord Khumun asked. “If so, I will send for his dragon boy—”

  “No, that will not be necessary, my Lord,” Aket-ten replied, with a faint frown of concentration. She stretched out her right hand as if she meant to touch the dragon, but she remained in the doorway, well out of reach. “Ah. Too much tala, not enough food, my Lord,” she said after a moment, her voice sounding distant and preoccupied. Her eyes stared off into space somewhere, looking distinctly unfocussed. “Something put him off his food at some point recently, a stomach ailment perhaps, but his dragon boy was trying to make sure still he got his full dose. Except that as he lost weight, it was a larger dose than he needed, and the overdose of tala has made him lethargic and put him further off his food. Which of course, will make him lose more weight.”

  She dropped her hand, blinked, and looked up at the Lord of the Jousters, who himself looked impressed. “Can you afford to take him off the fighting roster and put him on a half ration of tala until he returns to fighting weight?” she asked. “That would be the surest way to get him to recover, and the fastest.”

  Lord Khumun visibly weighed the options. “I believe I will have to,” he said at last. “He’s really not effective now. How long do you think it will take?”

  She shrugged. “Half a moon?” she guessed. “For all that I have been studying them, this is the first dragon I have had any contact with besides Avatre.”

  “Half a moon on half rations of tala and all he can eat,” said Lord Khumun to the dragon boy in question, who looked very nervous indeed. Half rations of tala for a dragon meant a great deal less control over him.

  “I think, my Lord,” said Kiron, as an idea occurred to him, “that during this period, if it can be managed, you should let his food walk to him on its own four legs. Or perhaps two—it might be easier to send in chickens, or ducks and geese.”

  “Eh?” Khumun turned to stare at him.

  “I mean, we should force-feed the tala ration to a sheep or several live fowl and then drive them into the pen,” Kiron elaborated. “He’s wild-caught; he’s used to catching and killing his own food. Let him have live food while he’s recovering his strength. It will taste better to him, which will perk his appetite, and having something to kill might help him with aggression.”

  “And the boy will not have to wheel a barrowful of meat close to a testy dragon,” Lord Khumun mused. “I think that is a good compromise. Can you manage it?” he asked the dragon boy.

  “My lord, if it will keep me out of range of his teeth, I can manage nearly anything,” the boy said fervently. Kiron could only reflect how fortunate it was that this was a swamp dragon; the pen was cleaned daily by flushing the pool, which was done from outside. If it had been a desert dragon on half rations—well, he was not sure even leaving it chained short would be protection enough for a boy to clean the pen.

  “I will continue to watch his progress,” Aket-ten added. “And as soon as I think he is ready, we can put him on his full tala ration the same day.”

  “Already you prove your worth,” Khumun said warmly, looking as if he was going to pat her on the head, but stopping before acting on the impulse. “Aket-ten, I am pleased to have your services; our gain is the Winged Ones’ loss. Now, I come to a question—will quarters among the female servants of our compound offend you? Your father specifically asked that you be housed here, but I have no better place to put you. I can arrange for a suite of several rooms with a bathing room to yourself, however. I can simply give you all four of the rooms around a courtyard. The quarters are plain and small, but they are clean and private.”

  She grinned, and for a fleeting moment, Kiron saw the “old” Aket-ten. “Such an arrangement will not displease me at all, my Lord! I can send to my father for things to make such rooms more comfortable, if you could show me now.”

  “So I shall.” Khumun looked at the boys of Kiron’s wing as if he had only just realized they were there. “Well—have you nothing to do?” he growled.

  “Ah—yes, my Lord,” came a ragged chorus of voices, and they scattered before his glare like a covey of quail.

  But not before several of them had cast Aket-ten a final appreciative glance; Kiron might have thought that she was oblivious to these attentions, but he caught her watching them under half-lowered eyelids, and saw the little smile of satisfaction she wore as she turned to follow Lord Khumun to her new quarters.

  He groaned. That was hardly fair! Now he was going to have to compete with all the others—Oset-re with his handsome face, Gan with his glib tongue, Toreth with—with all of his advantages! No, that was not fair at all! How in the name of all the gods was he to compete with all of that?

  Well, he could still do one thing that the others couldn’t, yet. He and Avatre could fly. And the servants’ quarters were just off the practice field. If she was in her courtyard and looked up, she would not be able to avoid seeing the two of them flying.

  Avatre was only just big and heavy enough now to begin practicing that maneuver of Ari’s that had saved Kiron’s life, and of all of the tricks that he planned for his wing, that was the one he wanted them to master first. Yes, they practiced over the net—but so had the Tian Jousters, and an accident had happened anyway that would have ended in a death had Ari and Kashet not been there. If anyone from his wing fell from the back of his dragon, Kiron wanted everyone else to know how to catch him.

  They were in the first stages of the trick at the moment. They were using a bag of barley half the weight of a man. One of the other Jousters carried it over his saddle, and let it slip off at a prearranged signal. Kiron had Avatre stationed at hover immediately below, so that the bag didn’t fall far or build up much momentum before she caught it, ducking her head under and sliding it along her neck to where he grabbed it. Even so, they missed about half the time, which might have been discouraging if Kiron hadn’t known how long it had taken Ari and Kashet to master the exercise. And unlike Ari, who had faced the scorn and amusement of his fellow Jousters right up until the moment when he actually saved someone, the Altan Jousters, who were knocked from their saddles far too often by the Tians with their bigger dragons, were well aware of the value of this “trick.” They only wished that their dragons would be willing to learn it. The fact that eventually there would be at least nine fighting Altan dragons who knew how to pluck a falling man out of the air provided a great deal of comfort to them.

  So Kiron had full cooperation and help from the rest of the Jousters in the compound. It didn’t matter what they were doing at the time; when the one that was currently practicing with him had trouble with his swamp dragon growing restive over the unwelcome proximity of a desert dragon, another rider was willing to take the place of the first.

  He and Avatre also practiced Jousting, of course, but he had more of a mind to take to the sky with a sling rather than a lance. Avatre would have to be full-sized before he could Joust, but he could use a sling now. The greatest limitation was that at the moment, she was not strong or fast enough to fly to the combat zones and return on the same day.

  They practiced until both dragon and rider were tired; Kiron got in a little target practice while on the wing, just to
keep Avatre used to the idea, then brought her in for a much-anticipated grooming and feeding.

  He was not at all unhappy to see Aket-ten waiting for him in the landing courtyard when they came in. Now that Growing season had begun, and with it, warmer weather, she was wearing linen gowns instead of wool. And although it wasn’t the semi-transparent mist linen favored by the Priestess of Tia, her current gown certainly left even less to the imagination than the woolen gowns she’d been wearing during the rains. The wind kicked up by Avatre’s wings as she landed molded the front of the gown as tight to Aket-ten’s form as if it had been wet. He felt his ears grow hot.

  “You two look very good,” Aket-ten said as he dismounted. She held out a hand for Avatre, who was perfectly happy to slide her head under it for a rub. “I would have expected her to be as clumsy as a puppy, trying anything that complicated.”

  “It isn’t the first time,” he admitted, then added awkwardly, “You look very nice.”

  The compliment sounded very flat to him, even as he spoke it, but what else was he to say? You are prettier than any of the women who chased Ari was not better! And You don’t look like a little girl anymore was even worse.

  She dimpled at him. “My Akkadian friend Heklatis had some very good ideas about how I should dress and act, and made sure to help me make these things into habits, as well as rebuilding my wardrobe,” she said, with some amusement. “For a man who does not find women attractive, he has excellent taste and sound notions. I miss my tunics—but I might as well keep my child lock as stick to the things I used to wear.” She sighed. “I wish it was not the case, but he convinced me that how I will dress for the next several years will profoundly affect how people treat me. If I am to be taken seriously, and not dismissed as a hysterical child when I accuse the Magi of wrongdoing, then I must sacrifice some of my freedom and dress the part of a woman. I am quite indebted to him, actually. Even people who knew me in my cradle have been treating me as if they had just realized that I do know what I am doing, and I am not having childish tantrums.”