“Now what’ve you brought back, Ari?” asked a gruff voice from behind Vetch’s back. “This can’t be a prisoner of your arm, and I doubt it’s a spy either.”
Vetch didn’t turn, though he started a little, and pain arced across his back, marking the path of those stripes; the Jouster had claimed him, the Jouster was his master, and a serf never turned his back on his master (except to be whipped), a lesson that Khefti had driven home with a heavy hand. However, the voice sounded mildly irritated, and the underlying tone conveyed that it was someone in authority.
The Jouster pulled off his helmet, revealing a handsome, if melancholy face, square-jawed, with a great beak of a nose and high cheekbones, brown of eye, and black of hair, as all Tians. He spoke to whoever was behind Vetch; at least Vetch now knew his master’s name. Ari. “This is my new dragon boy, Haraket. Serf. I claimed him from his master already, so you’ll have to send to the Palace to handle the accounting; the boy can probably tell you who the fat blob was. Seems a likely child; he was working like a little ant, when I saw him, filling a cistern with a bucket too big for him. He wasn’t afraid of Kashet, anyway, and that’s a head start, so far as I’m concerned.”
“Not some street trash?” the voice replied dubiously. “He’s got fresh stripes—”
“I’m not blind, Haraket, I was there when he got them, for ‘letting’ me take his bucket and quench my thirst,” Ari replied, putting the helmet down, then turning to unbuckle the throat-strap of the saddle. He sounded a trifle irritated, then unexpectedly, the Jouster laughed. “No, he’s a serf, not a thief, not a gutter brat. Now the fat slug that was beating him is going to have to find another in his bloodline if the lazy lout wants to hold the land the boy was tied to.”
Vetch blinked, to hear his own speculation borne out. So that was, indeed, why Khefti had taken him!
Somehow, that only made him feel angrier.
The Jouster’s voice took on an interesting tone, very faintly—malicious?—as he continued unbuckling the dragon’s saddle straps. “You know, if whoever sold the land divided up it up too much, the other land-holders might not have spare serfs in his line to give up to anyone else. He might lose that land when the assessor comes to see about it.”
With a fierce surge of longing, Vetch wished he could be there when the assessor came. He wanted, oh, how he wanted to see Khefti squirm, prevaricate, and sweat! He had sunk all of his savings into that house—or at least, he’d told Vetch that often enough. So if he lost it only because he did not have Vetch anymore, what a supreme bit of revenge that would be!
“But a serf—why not a free boy?” the voice complained. “There must be dozens of free boys you could have from their parents for the asking!”
“Because I’m tired of replacing free boys when they get haughty airs and decide they ought to be something better than ‘just’ a dragon boy!” Ari snapped, and unbuckled the last strap. He pulled the saddle and the pad that Vetch had clung to off the dragon’s back. He turned with it in his hands, and looped all of the straps around it into a compact bundle with a swift and practiced motion.
He dropped the whole thing in Vetch’s arms; Vetch had been expecting this from the moment he’d heard what he was to become. A serf, after all, was for the bearing of burdens. He caught it as it dropped, though one of the strap ends hit the ground and his stripes burned again. He was used to working, and working hard, with more whip cuts on his back than two.
The saddle was heavy, at least for him, and he staggered for a moment beneath its weight. It had an additional scent besides that of leather—a hot, metallic scent, with an overtone of spice. The scent of the dragon?
“There, boy—” the Jouster said, in a tone of dismissal, as he bent to pick up his helmet and tuck it under his arm. “You go with Haraket; he’ll teach you your business. You’ll be living here now.”
Jouster Ari stalked off without a backward look, and Vetch turned, the saddle in his arms, to face the person he had not yet seen.
Haraket. Who must be an Overseer.
The man wore a simple white linen kilt, augmented by one striped, multicolored sash around his waist and a second that ran from his right shoulder, across a chest as muscular as any warrior, to the opposite hip. His square head was shaven, though he did not wear a wig, his skin as browned and weathered as that of any farmer, and he wore a hawk-eye amulet of glazed pottery around his neck. He gazed down on Vetch with resignation from beneath a pair of heavy, black eyebrows. But at least he didn’t look angry. And he wasn’t wearing a whip at his waist either.
“Come on, you,” he said, with a sigh. “Since I’m to teach you your business, the best time to start is now.” Vetch ducked his head obediently, silently telling himself not to look sullen, and followed as the man strode off across the beaten earth of the courtyard. But he stopped dead at the sound of something large and heavy following him.
He turned. The dragon stared down at him, cocking its head quizzically; it had been right on his heels.
“Come on, serf boy!” the man snarled, when he turned to discover that Vetch was not behind him anymore. “Kashet will come along without being led, much less leashed or chained. He follows me and Ari like a dog, and in time, he’ll follow you. Kashet isn’t like other dragons, and that’s something you’d better keep in mind from this moment on. Ari doesn’t need tala to control him. You’re damned lucky to be Ari’s boy; Kashet is a neferek to handle compared with the others.”
He turned abruptly and strode off again, and Vetch hurried to catch up with him, the dragon following along like a hound. For the moment, the ever-present anger that burned in his belly had retreated before his feeling of complete dislocation and bewilderment.
The dragon had landed in a huge courtyard with enormously high limestone walls around it, “paved” with pale beige earth pounded hard and as flat as a smooth mud brick. There were four entrances or gates to this courtyard, square arches each surmounted by a sculpted and painted symbol of a god, each one right in the middle of each wall. All were tall enough to allow a dragon to pass through them, and broad enough for three. The man marched straight through the one nearest them, which had a hawk eye painted in blue, red, and black carved into the top; Vetch followed, and the dragon followed him.
The colors were bright enough to dazzle the eye; there was nothing like these painted walls in Khefti’s village. The painted images leaped out at Vetch, dazzling him. Even Khefti’s apprentices never worked with such wonderful colors!
On the other side of the wall were—more limestone-faced walls, equally dazzling in their whiteness. They formed a sort of alley or corridor stretching in either direction; the area was also open to the sky. These walls were not as tall as the ones around the courtyard, and dragon heads peeked over the tops at intervals, peering at them with some unreadable emotion. They weren’t all the green and gold of Kashet; there were blue ones in all shades from dark to light, red ones, a purple color, and a pale gold and silver. The colors were dazzling, gorgeous, and they filled his eyes the way that a fine meal filled the appetite. Already, Vetch could tell there was a profound difference between these dragons and Kashet. Ari’s dragon had some friendly interest in his eyes when he looked at Vetch—these dragons had the eyes of feral cats, wary and wild.
He expected noise out of them, based on the way the oxen and donkeys of his father’s farm behaved when a stranger came into their yard; to his surprise, there was very little. The dragons hissed and snorted, but there was no bellowing, no growling.
Perhaps they didn’t make any louder sound; perhaps they couldn’t.
They came to an intersection, and the bald man turned the corner to lead him down another corridor, then another—and just as Vetch thought he was totally lost, turned a final corner that brought them inside another courtyard. He stumbled forward on momentum and blundered into a huge pit that formed the center of the courtyard, a pit that was knee-deep in soft, hot sand. He floundered in the stuff, helplessly, and the man reached o
ut a long arm and hauled him back onto the hard verge. Again, the whip cuts on his back reminded him they were there.
“Stay on the walkway around the edge, boy,” the man said, but not unkindly. “That sand will burn you, else, until you’re used to it. You’ll need to toughen your skin to it.”
He’d already found that out; the sand radiated heat upward, as hot as the sun overhead, hotter than the kamiseen. His legs stung a little, though he wouldn’t have called it a burn, exactly. His feet were too callused to feel much, even heat, from so brief an encounter.
“Put the saddle over there,” Haraket continued, pointing to a wooden rack mounted on the wall nearest Vetch. “Untangle the straps and drape them over the rack to dry—dragons don’t sweat, but Jousters do. Kashet doesn’t need to be chained the way the others do, so you leave him free.”
The dragon, ignoring both of them, plunged past them into the center of the room to wallow into the hot sand. Vetch heaved the saddle up onto the rack as he’d been told to do. Under Haraket’s watchful eye, he arranged the saddle straps over the bars of the rack, untangling them as he did so. Something told him that the straps shouldn’t touch the ground, so he took care that they did not do so. The kamiseen did not venture down here, for a wonder, though he could hear it whining above the walls. Not that it was cooler here; not with those hot sands contributing to the fire of the sun overhead.
When he turned to face his instructor, he thought that the man was not displeased. He looked up into Haraket’s face, and waited for more instruction. It was not long in coming.
“The first thing you need to get into your mind is this: Kashet and his Jouster will be your sole concern from morning to night,” Haraket told him, crossing his muscular arms over his chest, and looking down at him, examining, weighing, assessing. “A dragon boy not only tends to his dragon, he tends to the Jouster that rides him. No one can give you orders but your Jouster and me, unless Ari or I tell you otherwise.”
Vetch bobbed his head. “Yes, Overseer,” he replied.
Haraket grunted. “Here is the next thing; your Jouster can probably find plenty of other servants if he needs them, but you are the only one who is to tend to his dragon. If you have to choose between tending the dragon or the Jouster, there is no choice for you: tend the dragon.”
Vetch blinked, but again nodded obediently.
“Now, the first thing you must do, this very moment, is to feed Kashet so that he knows you. Only a dragon boy, or at need, the Overseer or the Jouster will feed a dragon. They are too valuable to let anyone else meddle with them—” Haraket hesitated, then added, “—and other than Kashet, a dragon sharp-set with hunger might—savage—anyone he didn’t know who came to feed him. They’re wild beasts, very large and very powerful. Don’t ever forget that, not for a moment.”
Other than Kashet. . . . Well, that was some comfort. But the thought still made Vetch gulp nervously. And the way that Haraket had hesitated over his choice of words made him wonder if the man had substituted “savage” for “devour.”
Not a comfortable thought at all. What had he fallen into?
“But you’ll never need worry about Kashet.” That was said with a certainty that quelled a little of Vetch’s unease. “Now, come with me. The only way to learn how to feed him is to do so.”
Haraket turned and went out the doorway, and Vetch followed. Shortly the man was leading him at a trot down the corridors; Vetch was hard-put to keep up with the Overseer’s long legs. But those words worried him. Only the Jouster or the Overseer or the dragon boy feeds a dragon. So now, he was probably going to be in competition with another boy—who, from the sound of it, would be freeborn—to take care of Ari and his dragon. That could spell nothing but trouble.
“Sir?” he panted, literally the first question he had asked of anyone since the Jouster arrived at the cistern. He had to cough to clear his dry throat, for he still had gotten nothing to drink. “Sir, who is Kashet’s dragon boy?”
The Overseer looked down at him, his lips tightening; Vetch flinched. He couldn’t imagine how a simple question had made the Overseer so annoyed. “Imbecile,” Haraket muttered, and answered more loudly, “You are Kashet’s boy. Haven’t you been listening to me?”
He almost dared to hope. Was it possible? Did this mean that Kashet’s care was going to depend entirely on him? And if so—
—surely not. Surely, there was someone else, a rival, who would be very angry when he saw that Vetch was a serf. And it could be worse than that, much worse, given what the Jouster had said about “boys getting airs.” Perhaps he had selected Vetch in order to humiliate this other boy—who would, of course, take out his humiliation on Vetch whenever the masters’ backs were turned. When Khefti beat his apprentices, the apprentices pulled evil tricks on Vetch, it followed as surely as the sun rose. And that was without Vetch being a rival!
“Sir—I meant—who is Kashet’s other dragon boy?” In his heart was the dread he would have to face a rival who would share his duties and, without a doubt, attempt to make sure that everything that went right reflected to his credit, and all the blame for whatever went wrong landed on Vetch. Some of that must have shown in his expression, as the Overseer’s face cleared, and he grunted.
“There is no other dragon boy for Kashet. Jouster Ari and I have been caring for him of late.” He grunted again, this time with a distinct tone of disdain. “Jouster Ari’s previous boy elected to accept a position in the King’s army without notice, and left us cursed shorthanded.”
Now all that business about serfs and free boys made sense. . . .
Soldiers had higher status than mere servants . . . and certainly fewer menial duties. So that’s what he meant by “getting airs. . . .” It would make sense that the Jouster would now prefer to find a boy who had no choice, who could not go elsewhere, except, perhaps, back to Khefti. Which of course, was no choice at all.
“Here—down this way is where the servants from all of the temples bring the sacrifices,” Haraket said, making another abrupt turn. This was an alley that looked like a street in the village in a way, though the walls were much taller than any village structures, and the unbroken stretches of wall argued for something the size of a major temple! But the walls along this stretch had doorways and clerestory windows, so it seemed that here the walls were part of huge buildings.
Haraket stopped in front of a real, closed door rather than an open archway or simple gap in the walls. He opened it, and with his hand on Vetch’s shoulders, shoved him through.
On the other side—
Vetch almost broke and ran at the vision of carnage that met his eyes.
The air was full of the metallic scent of blood, so thick he could practically taste it, and everywhere he looked there were dead animals . . . hundreds of dead animals. Working here were butchers, a dozen of them, naked to the waist, smeared in drying blood, dismembering the corpses and throwing the pieces into bins or barrows beside them.
He was no stranger to the slaughter of farm stock but never on a scale like this, and never anything bigger than a goat.
There were carcasses of enormous cattle, goats, sheep, stacked up as casually as mud bricks, being hacked up by the butchers into hand-sized and head-sized chunks, and the sight made him feel sick and dizzy.
And for a moment, all he could think of was the last sight of his father, covered with his own blood—and the anger surged, but the fear and sickness that followed buried it, and he had to clutch the wall and put his burning back up against it to keep from fainting.
But curiously, as the shock wore off, he saw there was no blood, or very little. “This is all fresh from the Temple sacrifices,” Haraket was saying, quite as if he had not noticed Vetch’s reaction, as the nearest of the butchers tossed chunks of meat, bone-in, skin-on, into a barrow parked next to his chopping block. “It’s a nice piece of economy when you think about it. Every day, hundreds of animals are sacrificed to the gods or cut up for divination ceremonies, but there’s
no use for the bodies when the blood and spirit have drained away.”
As Haraket spoke, Vetch began to get control of himself again. It was only meat. No animals were being killed here. It was only meat.
Of course, the Tians believed that the gods required only the blood and the mana of the creatures sacrificed on the altars. There were so many gods, and so many people who needed their favor—he had never actually been to the Avenue of Temples in Mefis, but he had heard tales, heard that there were a hundred gods or more, and almost as many temples, and all of them got sacrifices daily. Not just the bread and beer and honey, the flowers, and the occasional fowl of the little Temple of Hamun, Siris, and Iris in the village, but live beasts, and entire herds of them.
“There aren’t enough priests in the world to consume all that flesh,” Haraket continued, “Even if they were as fat as houses. So it comes to us, who can certainly use it. That’s why they built the Jouster’s Compound on the Temple Road. So—ah, he’s filled that barrow, now you take it.”
The barrow was heavy and hard to push, but Vetch was accustomed to be ordered to do things that were difficult. Haraket watched critically as he grabbed the handles and started shoving, then took the lead. Vetch kept the barrow rolling, following Haraket back to Kashet’s pen at a much slower pace than they had taken to get to the butchers’ place. Haraket kept his strides short, although he did not bother to look at Vetch more than once or twice.
Already, though, things were profoundly different than they had been under Khefti. The Overseer was not chiding him nor punishing him for taking too long with the barrow. Not once had he been cuffed for stupidity, or had his ears boxed for asking a question. Once again, Vetch dared to hope.
Kashet was watching for them; Vetch saw the now-familiar head peering over the walls long before they got to the opening of the pen. Kashet didn’t wait for him to bring the food all the way into the pen either; no sooner had Vetch gotten to the part of the corridor immediately outside the entrance than the dragon snaked his neck out of the doorway and snatched a chunk of meat from the barrow in his powerful jaws, startling Vetch so that he jumped and squeaked involuntarily.
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