In stark contrast to the wild dragonet, Avatre was overjoyed to see him, and it occurred to him that he had better find something for her to do when he wasn’t around. She was old enough now that she could get bored if he wasn’t there to play with. He needed to find dragonet toys. Perhaps she’d enjoy gnawing on a bone, like a dog?
The butchery was deserted, the butchers already at the meeting place, which gave him a free hand there. So when he got her meal of the usual small pieces, he also took possession of a huge leg bone from an ox and brought it with him. It had been stripped clean by the butchers already, which made it ideal for his purposes; there wasn’t any meat on it to putrefy and make her ill. Once she was stuffed, he left the bone beside her, and she was already tentatively biting at it out of curiosity as he left.
He was one of the last to reach the landing court, and as he entered the gate, all he could see were the backs and heads of people in front of him. As short as he was, he hadn’t a prayer of actually seeing anything but the backs of heads. He looked around for something to stand on, and decided that his best bet was to climb up on the base of the pillars carved at either side of the gate itself. The sandstone was smoothed as well as sandstone could be, but he was used to climbing, and swarmed up it like a monkey. It didn’t take long to get himself up there on the top of the pedestal that supported the pillar, and once in place, balancing on the tiny ledge where the square base ended and the round pillar began, he gaped in astonishment at the sheer number of people gathered within those four, high walls. He’d had no idea that there were that many people housed within the compound!
Obviously, the Commander of Dragons knew, though, which was why he had set the meeting here, for there wouldn’t have been any place else able to hold all of them all at once, not even the Jousters’ Hall where Vetch had been freed from Khefti.
The sun shone down on a sea of heads—heads in simple, striped headcloths, shaved heads, heads with the hair cut short and precise, and here and there, the shaggy, long-haired head of a serf. The colors of the wall paintings blazed in the sun, and there was a murmur of voices, a hum that filled the space between the walls.
At the far side of the court, a simple, head-high platform had been set up. Standing up there were the Commander of Dragons and several priests in formal attire—the sort of robes and jewels and regalia they had worn when they had led spell-casting processions around the compound after the first storm. Other than the wall paintings, they supplied the only spots of color in the courtyard, for the garb of nearly everyone from the compound itself was uniformly made of sun-bleached linen. Very few wore ornaments other than the hawk-eye talisman either.
The Commander stood with his hands on his hips with the bright sun shining full down on him, surveying the crowd below him, looking remarkably casual and completely at ease. Once again, he was dressed simply, with none of the showy jewels usually sported by the nobility, and only the Haras pectoral spreading jeweled wings at his bare throat, and the royal vulture at the front of his blue, close-fitting war helmet, marked him as any higher rank than a senior Jouster. Seeing him so very calm evidently was having an effect on the inhabitants of the compound; some of the tension was out of the air, and the murmurous sound of many conversations did not have that frantic edge to it that Vetch had expected.
Finally, the Commander held both hands up peremptorily for silence, and he got it, as the crowd hushed.
“Hear the words of the priests of the gods of Tia,” the Commander said, his words ringing out, strong and deep, into the quiet. “The gods of Tia are stronger than the gods of Alta; her priests are wiser and more powerful, and in no way can the Altan magicians hope to prevail over those of this land. The gods of our land will prevail.”
“Which only means the shave-skulls haven’t figured out what the sea witches are doing, nor how to prevent it,” someone muttered below Vetch, and his neighbors nodded in agreement.
Vetch had to agree with that; if the priests had successfully countered the sea witches’ magic, they’d have boasted about it here and now. If they’d been able to find Seers who could get past the protections that hedged in Altan places of power, they’d have trumpeted their findings. This was all empty air.
But the Commander wasn’t finished. “The priests of our land are wise, learned, and powerful,” he continued, and Vetch thought he heard just a tinge of irony in the man’s voice, “But no man goes hunting with only duck arrows in his quiver, when he does not know what other quarry he might encounter. The Great King, may he live a thousand years, also sent eyes and ears that walk upon two bare feet into the land of the Altans, and this is what he found—”
Vetch found himself leaning forward and holding his breath, and he was not the only one.
“The sea witches have a new magic, but as it is Wind and Water magic, it is subject to the season and the conditions of the season,” the Commander told them, making sure each word was plain and unambiguous. “As the season progresses from Growing to Dry, there will be less water in the air, less-favorable winds. The storms will come farther and farther apart, and lose strength as the days pass and the Dry comes upon us, until at last, they will fade to a memory and we need cope only with the Dry, as ever. Perhaps the Dry holds terror for the enemy of the North, but we know it as an old neighbor. And our priests strive to see that we can learn to turn it against them, as they have sent their sea-born storms against us.”
A collective sigh of relief arose from the crowd; if, like Vetch, some of the other Altan serfs felt disappointment, they were careful not to show it.
Now there were some murmurs beginning, and in a moment, they would probably be in full roar of conversation. Once again, the Commander raised his arms for silence.
“This is not to say that the sea witches may not find ways of raising storms in the Dry,” he cautioned. “I do not need to do more than mention the Midnight kamiseen, I think . . .”
His words had a chilling effect upon the crowd. The Midnight kamiseen was so named, not that it arrived in the dark of the night, but because it threw so much sand in the air, with such terrible winds, that it blotted out the sun. When such a storm blew up, it was as dark as midnight at midday. There was little hope for anyone caught without shelter in such a sandstorm, for it was literally impossible to breathe. One could actually drown in sand.
“Nevertheless, this is a magic of Wind only!” the Commander added. “And the sea witches’ power has ever been that of Water, not Wind alone. Haras of the all-seeing eye is the guardian of the winds of Tia, and of the Jousters, too, and you can rest assured that His hand is over the Jousters and their dragons, and all those who serve them! And since it is a creature of Haras, the priests of Haras intend to learn to turn it northward, and give the witches a taste of true power!”
Small comfort, that, to those gathered below Vetch. Still, it did not do to say so aloud. The priests might hear—and withhold their protection from the grumblers.
It was always a chancy thing, to arouse the enmity of the priests. They might choose to ignore you, or they might not.
Vetch knew, however, as did every other Altan-born serf, that the sea witches’ power was so integrally tied in with water that it was highly unlikely they could call up a Midnight kamiseen. Still—if the storms that had been brought had kept the dragons close to home, perhaps the threat of powerful sandstorms would do the same.
“The Great King,” the Commander continued, “has mighty plans for us, my Jousters. I may not tell you what they are, but I am certain you may guess that as your numbers increase, you become a still more powerful weapon in his quiver. So I will leave you with that. Trust in the gods and their priests, and dream of the Gold of Honor!”
That was enough to evoke a cheer from the assemblage—all but Vetch, who was covering the fact that he was not cheering by climbing down from his perch. He knew, as did everyone else here, what those “plans” were. The truce, which was being eroded at every possible opportunity by both sides, would fill.
And once again, Tia would hammer northward, with the Jousters at the forefront of the challenge.
But if the gods are with me, by then I will be gone . . . .
Eventually, as the storms weakened and took longer and longer to appear, he pulled back the awning over Avatre’s pen. That gave Kashet a good look at her, and she at him, and within a day Kashet got bored with his neighbor and stopped spending so much time peering at her. His one regret was that he didn’t dare ask Ari for advice. If only he could have! But he could take no chance that anyone might learn of Avatre, and of all of the people in the compound, he had the most to fear from Ari. Avatre was in the pen next to Kashet’s, Ari knew very well that he had not been assigned a dragonet to care for, and—Ari was Tian. There was always that. So Vetch had to blunder through on his own, with common sense, what he learned from Baken, and what he overheard from the trainers.
He learned by eavesdropping that the dragons weren’t allowed to carry a grown man until they were three, but that even a male fledgling, smaller than a female, could carry the weight of a small boy. By the time the dragon could fly, its backbone could bear up under that much weight with no problem.
In the old style of training, for the first two years that they were in captivity, the young dragons were given saddles and harnesses, then taken out on long leads and goaded to fly with the dead weight of sandbags in the saddle. This strengthened their flying, and got them used to harness, saddle, and weight on their backs.
Baken, of course, was going for a much more tractable dragon. He had no intention whatsoever of using goads on the new dragonets, and after a lot of convincing (and based on his success so far) the other trainers agreed to follow his lead.
Baken would follow their example, insofar as using the long leads and the sandbags went for early flying practice—but in the safety of the pens and on the four tethers, he would keep putting boys on the dragonets’ backs to get them used to living weight. Furthermore, he was going to use a technique of flight training from falconry, and he planned to teach the dragonets to fly on those long leads from one end of the training field to the other on command. His plan was to teach them to fly between him and another trainer, as a dog was taught to “come” on command; this would be in return for rewards, rather than goading them into the air. This was a training technique he knew well, and the dragon trainers were mightily impressed with the ploys that Baken had used so far.
Vetch was not going to be able to do that; he could hardly take Avatre out of the pen without being discovered. He would have to strengthen her in some other way, so that her first flight would be a strong, high, and fast one. Because, by necessity, it would be with him. . . .
This would be an all-or-nothing cast of the bones. They would either succeed, or fail horribly.
He would not think of failure, or its consequences. So as soon as she was romping around the sands of her pen, he began getting her used to a weight on her back, improvising a harness and a small sandbag at first, then when he discovered where the dragonet harnesses were kept, purloining one and using that. He actually kept a weight on her for about half of the day when he was sure it wouldn’t tire her.
She certainly was anything but quiet; in fact, he had to make her, not one, but several toys to keep her amused. He brought her bones. He made her a big ball of rawhide stuffed with grasses, which she would pursue like a kitten with a ball of thread. Taking a cue from kittens, he rigged a rope with a scrap of silk on the end to a pole he stuck in the sand of her wallow, so she could bat at it with her foreclaws as it moved in the wind. He wrestled with her, teaching her to stop attacking when he commanded her to do so, and enforcing that she must be gentle with him, because he knew that if he did not do this now, while she was small, he could never control her behavior when she was big. The closer it got to the Dry season, the faster she seemed to grow, strong and agile.
The complement of dragonets was now at the fifty that the Great King had stipulated, with as many new boys—at a cost of thirteen Jousters and several dragon hunters that were not themselves Jousters. There was talk, now, of enlarging the compound—because the Great King had gotten wind of the new training techniques, and if they worked, he wanted still more Jousters and dragons . . . .
This did not bode well for Alta. Vetch could only pray that the Altans had spies abroad to hear such things.
At just about the time when the magic-spawned storms stopped altogether, Baken stopped needing Vetch’s help, for now there were two or three of the new boys that weren’t any larger than he was that he could use as “riders” to get the youngsters used to the presence of a human on their backs. Half of the dragonets had learned “up” and “down,” and the blue dragonet was at the stage of learning to fly short distances on a lead. Vetch stole time to watch whenever he could get a moment, trying to make out how he could adapt all of this to training Avatre.
It was just as well that Vetch didn’t need to help Baken anymore because Avatre was taking more and more of his time. He had thought he had been busy when all she did was sleep. Now that she was active, she needed attention.
Fortunately, Ari didn’t know that he wasn’t helping Baken now, and Vetch didn’t intend to tell him. As long as Ari presumed that he was off helping the other dragon boy whenever he was missing, there would be nothing at issue.
He never saw Haraket anymore and Ari only in passing. He was worried about Ari, though; the Jouster was thinner, and looked as if he was not sleeping well. But there wasn’t much that Vetch could do to help him—
—and besides, if Ari learned about Avatre—
Vetch slept entirely too well, but that was hardly surprising, considering how much work he was doing over the course of the day. He was so used to doing things at the run, that he wasn’t sure now if he’d ever be able to do them at a more leisurely pace without feeling that something was wrong.
He sometimes surprised himself by how strong he had gotten, when he found that he had absentmindedly lifted some weight that would have been so far beyond his strength a few moons ago that he would not have considered trying to heft it. He hadn’t gotten all that much taller, and he certainly wasn’t a little barrel of muscle in the way that one or two of the other boys were. He was still wiry and lean, but it seemed that all the good food and hard work had strengthened every single muscle fiber to an amazing degree.
Avatre was also a great deal stronger than he would have guessed; when he loaded her with a sandbag that was nearly his equivalent, she hardly noticed the weight, and there was nothing to tell by looking at her that she hadn’t been wild-caught like the others. He had to wonder, given how lively and big she was, if giving tala to the growing youngsters did more than simply make them easier to handle—if, perhaps, it actually slowed their growth. Certainly Kashet was the biggest male in the compound, nearly as big as any of the females, and he had never gotten tala. Avatre was going to be huge; bigger than her mother Coresan, for certain, and females were always bigger than the males.
She was not as vocal as the other youngsters either; they meeped all the time, their tone rising in shrillness the closer it got to feeding time. Avatre only gurgled happily when he appeared in the doorway, hissed if something alarmed her, and made no other sounds but a soft chuckling when she settled down for a nap with her head in his lap. So the last of Growing season was spent, with Vetch so busy that he could not have told how many days had passed from storm to weakening storm.
At last, one day, he woke to find that all of the tala bushes planted within the compound had blossomed overnight. The air was filled with their peculiar fragrance, sweet, but with a bitter undertone, like myrrh, carried through the corridors by an arid wind that must have begun in the night, coming from off the desert.
The kamiseen—the Dry just begun—he recognized with a start, as he awoke with the scent in his nostrils, out of an uneasy dream of laboring at Khefti’s wells, and heard the wind whining around the corners of the walls of Avatre’s pen. He had been here a year!
>
Although these pampered bushes within the compound always blossomed a day or so before any others, this, and the wind, were the signals that the Dry had officially begun. Unless the sea witches had some new and profoundly powerful magic, there would be no more storms to keep the dragons inside the borders of Tia.
The Commander took the coming of the Dry as his sign as well, and ordered that the Jousters resume their overflights of Altan territory.
He sweetened this order with another: to signal the start of the new patrols, he decreed a two-day festival within the walls of the compound, and provisioned it himself, from his own treasure houses.
Work hardly stopped, of course, but the Jousters were not to go on patrol at all during the festival, and the servants and dragon boys were given leave to partake when their duties were done. Anything in the way of chores that did not immediately pertain to the care of the dragons was suspended for those two days—no leather work, no housekeeping (Palace slaves were brought in to take care of it), even the dragonets were given a reprieve from training (somewhat to Baken’s displeasure). The landing court was laid out for the celebration with a bazaar full of merchants selling trash and treasures, and food and drink tents, jugglers, acrobats, musicians, and dancers, games of chance and games of skill.
The Jousters had their own games, out on the training field, in which they were to compete with each other. They made passes at a ring suspended from a thread which they were to catch on their lances, they swooped down to snatch up bags of straw which they were to drop again on a target painted on the ground, they had races for speed only, and races where speed and agility counted equally.
The landing court was set up the day before, and on dawn of the first festival day, the entertainers were in place, the tents set up, and food of every sort was set out temptingly. The festival began at dawn exactly, with a fanfare of trumpets from the musicians, as those servants who had been freed from duties entirely—and the Jousters, of course—were summoned to the celebrations. Vetch was already awake, of course, but the trumpets startled and frightened Avatre, and he began the day feeling annoyed and irritated.
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