Slowly she got back up to her feet and smoothed out her linen sheath with both hands. “If that is your will, Great K—”
“Not when we are private together,” Ari said firmly. “And, to you, in private, I am nothing more than Ari. Now come to the Lesser Audience Chamber with me. Baket-ke-aput is a good man. If what you need is simple enough, he may be able to help you this very day.”
Aket-ten had not really had very much to do with Ari back when they were all just the refugee Jousters trying to survive at Sanctuary. She was Altan, he was Tian, he was so much older than the rest of the young wing of Jousters created by Kiron, and at any rate, it had not been long before the plan of making him Great King and Nofret Great Queen had resulted in both of them being so embroiled in plans and strategies and negotiations that she had seldom seen him or Nofret. He had been Kiron’s great friend and mentor, not hers. She hadn’t really thought he had paid all that much attention to her, but—
“So I suspect this is about this plan of yours, the Queen’s Wing?” he asked, glancing at her with a hint of a smile. She started a bit, and his smile broadened. “Nofret and I do talk, you know. I was intrigued. I’m not at all clear why you want to do this, but I am intrigued.”
“I’m not sure it is a very good idea now,” she confessed, subdued. “I am having difficulty finding girls who want to be Jousters.”
“You’re having difficulty finding girls like yourself.” Ari nodded. “Not very surprising, really. People in Tia, not just girls, are accustomed to a rigid structure all about them. People expect to do what their fathers, and their grand-fathers, and their many-times-great grandfathers did. If you are a farmer, your son will be a farmer, and your father was a farmer. You might go into the army, or, if you were very clever and very fortunate, you might go to the priesthood or apprentice as a scribe. But you wouldn’t expect to leave your home village unless you went into the army. I expect it is even more rigid for girls, since girls don’t go to the army or become scribes.”
“No, they don’t.” Aket-ten frowned. “But in Alta . . . you might become a skilled craftswoman . . . or . . . or something.” But she couldn’t really think what else a woman might become. She had never been forced to look at things that way. She had always had such freedom as a Nestling, then a Fledgling—one of the special the chosen, the Winged Ones. And before that, well, as the cherished daughter of a great noble.
“Well, I really don’t know what it’s like in Alta. I do know that I was probably the only scribe ever to become a Jouster. And if I had been forced to learn to handle a wild-caught, tala-drugged dragon rather than a hand-tamed one to do so, you would probably find me sharpening my pens in the marketplace at this very moment.” He laughed at her expression.
“I cannot imagine you ever being content to be a scribe,” she finally said.
“Oh, I did not say I would have been content,” he replied. “But here we are.”
They had passed through a number of large, open rooms, most of which had been sparsely populated by people doing things at desks. Light came from ventilation slits up near the ceiling. Now they entered another large room, but this one was empty of everything but a very low dais with two thrones on it, and some stools against the wall.
“Go stand there, if you please,” Ari said, gesturing to the left side of the dais. Aket-ten quickly obeyed. As a former Winged One and the daughter of a noble, she was accustomed to standing about for long periods of time doing nothing.
She adopted the relaxed posture she had learned was best for such situations, while Ari mounted the dais, put on the Lesser Crown that was waiting on the seat of one of the two thrones, and took an equally relaxed pose.
As if that had been some sort of summons, a tall, thin, ascetic man with a faintly harried expression came out of the next room, went to his knees and bowed, then rose again. “Great King, the High Priest Baket-ke-aput craves audience with you.”
Ari looked very much as if he wanted to say, “I know that; he made an appointment.” Instead he inclined his head gracefully and answered, “Then let the High Priest Baket-ke-aput approach.”
The man who entered the room was tall and vigorous—certainly well past middle-age, but vigorous and strong for all of that. He did not abase himself—and why should he; the High Priest of any god was the equal of the Great King, and in fact, the Great King was also a High Priest as his wife would be a High Priestess. But the two greeted each other as friends, and Ari immediately ordered a stool for him.
Baket-ke-aput glanced at her curiously a time or two, but the matters of which they spoke were hardly secret. It seemed that Ari had a plan—
“—build or rebuild temples, with places for the gods of both Tia and Alta, was what I thought,” he was saying. “Two moons of every year for six years, or one year in full to belong to the King to work on these temples. Men from both Tia and Alta would be working side-by-side, sharing the same rations, living in the same barracks, putting up with the same overseers. By the end of two months . . . well, they would go home knowing that the man from the other land is no monster. You cannot share bread and beer with someone for two months and still think of him as unholy.”
Baket-ke-aput pursed his lips. “That fits in neatly with what I had come to ask you for,” the old man replied with a nod. “Some way to enlarge our temples so that the corresponding god of Alta can be set side-by-side with his Tian counterpart. But enlarging the temples would take costly labor, and costlier stone. By your scheme, however . . .”
“You like it, then?” Ari asked eagerly, leaning forward on his throne.
“I think it is a stroke of genius. Let the Great King supply the labor, the temples themselves will supply the raw materials. And now—” the High Priest nodded his head at Aket-ten. “Perhaps you can tell me why this charming young person has been standing here all this time. It is surely not because she is merely a restful place to gaze upon.”
Aket-ten blushed, as Ari gestured her forward. “Jouster Aket-ten, this is the High Priest of Haras whom you asked to see, Lord Baket-ke-aput. Let me make you known to each other.”
“Jouster Aket-ten?” Baket-ke-aput’s brows rose. “Interesting. And what can the Great Queen’s courier wish of me?”
Hurriedly, Aket-ten explained her difficulty in finding young women to join what she, in imitation of Ari, called the “Queen’s Wing.” Baket-ke-aput listened to her with interest until she ran out of things to say.
“And how do you suppose that I may help you in this endeavor?” he said, with a half smile. “I know nothing about dragons, and not a great deal about young women. That is the sign of my wisdom, by the way, Aket-ten. In my age, I have come to understand how little I know of women.”
She flushed. “Well,” she said hesitantly. “I thought . . . I thought maybe . . .” she fumbled, “If there were other girls with my . . . ah . . . the Gift of understanding the minds of animals is not a very useful one . . . and even if they didn’t have that, I thought maybe . . . priestesses would . . .”
Baket-ke-aput laughed gently. “Yes, it is true, the young women who become priestess are very often much more strong-minded and -willed than their sisters. So yes, Aket-ten, I will have the word spread, not only among the young Priestesses of Haras, but of other gods as well. This is serving the gods no less than offering incense and sacrifice and—” He smiled. “The kind of young lady who finds the notion of flinging herself into the sky on the back of a fearsome dragon to be fun is probably not suited to a life of prayer and contemplation!”
SIX
WITHIN two days, there was a rider from the merchant caravan that Kiron had saved, arriving in Aerie with a request for another overflight, and with him, two more traders who had come there themselves. Success in that first trial had caught the attention of King and Queen and merchants alike, more than he had guessed, as it turned out.
Success piled onto success, with every patrol that the wings made that ended in saving a merchant caravan or a traveler. Someti
mes the successes were small ones, setting right a traveler who had lost the road, or dropping a waterskin to someone who had run out. Sometimes they were large, like that first rescue.
The Jousters responded to it as well, with growing cheer and a sense that they were, once again, worth something. Perhaps more so now than when they had been fighters. Then they had been taking lives. Now they were saving them.
And as the Tian and Altan Jousters worked more and more closely together, a grudging respect, and then in some cases, real friendship began to grow.
And so it went, with more and more traders arriving all the time, asking for the same. Send out more dragons, more riders. We need them. We need the help. The merchants and traders were making sure that people knew what the Jousters were doing. It was hard to tell what those who had been complaining about how costly it was to keep dragons were saying now, without being in Mefis or one of the other cities where the complaints had been the loudest—but the merchants who came to ask for escort for their caravans specifically did not turn up empty-handed. Some brought small flocks with them. Some brought more of the goods that were so difficult to bring across the desert, most notably camels laden down with disassembled furniture. Over the next moon or so, Aerie rapidly became a much more livable place.
Then the craftspeople started arriving.
Considering how difficult it had been to get them there initially, Kiron was shocked when the first stonecutters arrived. What was happening all became clear very quickly, though, when a single spice grower turned up with a caravan of carefully nurtured young trees and bags of seed. Aerie was that rare place in the desert, a spot where delicate plants could be protected from kamiseen, where there were no floods and storms, and yet where there was abundant water. Aerie was positioned well to be added to several trade routes, and it had the protection of the Jousters. It could not be a better place to raise incense trees and spices.
He had met with all of them. To all of them he had given the same answer. “We will do our best with the numbers we have.”
But most surprising of all had been the representative from the Bedu, also known as the Blue People, the nomads of the desert.
He was busy, but not so busy that he did not miss Aket-ten. She did not come nearly enough, and he wished he could take the time to go wherever she was but—where was she? She could be anywhere—Mefis, Sanctuary, any of the towns up and down Great Mother River. She was being used as a courier more and more often now, and while he was pleased for her, perhaps it was a good thing that he was so busy, because it was lonely without her.
The request from the Bedu, however, had some urgency. In many, many ways he and his owed them their very lives. This was a chance to pay some of that back.
He sent out all the wings today, including all but four of the youngsters that the Great King had asked specifically to be sent for courier duty. Four young hotheads that had trouble controlling their dragons . . . making boring, routine courier flights should soon steady them down. And perhaps—perhaps this would release Aket-ten to come here to Aerie. Oh, she would probably have to give them some training, but when she was done—surely she would come here.
He sighed, feeling impatience as he waited to go off with his wing until those four were ready to go. He really couldn’t understand why she was so stubborn about this. It wasn’t as if he didn’t want her here after all. . . .
“You know the way,” he reminded them, getting his mind back on the task at hand. They gazed solemnly back at him, so identical they could have been brothers; their height was nearly the same, all of them were of the same stocky build. All Tians, which meant they were darker-skinned than the Altans. All four were former dragon boys. It occurred to him that they might actually like their new assignments; they were going home, after all. They would get the use of the Dragon Courts, the quarters of the former Jousters; there would be no more need to hunt. By the standards of Aerie, those quarters were very luxurious. He found himself en-vying them. “You four must stay together. If one of your dragons decides to hunt, you all hunt. You must arrive together; this is part of wing discipline.”
He looked the dragons over as well, to make sure that all was right with them, as they lifted their heads curiously to sniff the morning wind off the desert. Oddly enough, they were all four of the same color family, variations on blue shading to green. They would look very smart with bronze trappings on their harnesses.
“Hem-serit,” he said, nodding to the most responsible of the lot. “You are temporary wingleader. Any other disposition will have to be confirmed by—” he looked at the dispatch, “—Vizier Nef-kham-het. You will be reporting to him directly when you arrive. Land at the Dragon Court, and there will be a servant waiting for you. After that, what happens and who you report to will be determined by the vizier. If he is displeased with your performance, he will send you back here.”
Hem-serit gave him the fist-to-shoulder salute of the Tians; he nodded. They mounted up—not together, and their dragons seemed inclined toward mischief, since they tossed their heads and pretended not to understand the “Knee” command until he barked it out. Yes, they had a ways to go before they were ready for any sort of responsibility on trail guarding.
He sent them off with a wave and they took off raggedly, diving down into the canyon to pick up speed, then pulling up and out of it and pumping hard for height; for as long as he could see them, they flew in tolerable formation, though blue dragons against a blue sky were a bit difficult to track after a while.
Then, finally, he was able to signal to his wing to mount up. They did much better, although they did not all mount at once with military precision. All their dragons promptly gave a place to climb up on the “Knee” command, and if there was still a little awkwardness getting settled into the saddle, that would pass soon enough. This time the signal to fly was when he sent Avatre diving into the canyon himself; he never got over the thrill, the feel of falling, hurtling toward the ground, bracing himself in the saddle. Then the sudden, hard snap of Avatre’s wings opening, the fall turning abruptly into a climb as he was pushed down into the saddle on her shoulders, the ground being replaced in front of him by sky. His skin tingled, and a laugh of delight rose in his throat.
His wing was not going to be patrolling the trade routes, however. He had another assignment for them all.
The Blue People were being raided, probably by the same lawless deserters and former soldiers that were making up the majority of the bandits. And it was not that the Bedu could not defend themselves; they most certainly could. The problem was that the raids were taking place at night, and animals were being stolen one and two at a time. Clearly the bandits were treating the nomads’ flocks as their private larder.
So Kiron and his wing were doing a different sort of hunting today. They were going to look for the bandits’ camp. It had to be within distance of the latest tribe to be raided, and since the nomads always occupied an oasis, the bandits might be filling their waterskins before helping themselves to a goat or a sheep. Or perhaps not. In the part of the desert where the Bedu tended their flock, water was not as difficult to come by as one might think.
The camp was almost certainly concealed from ground level. It might not be from the air.
After the debacle just before their first successful foray into bandit hunting, all the members of the wing were determined to carry this out with no “incidents.” The dragons were all fed, enough to be full, not so much as to be ready to laze about. Every inch of saddle and harness had been checked and checked again. Their weapons of choice were where they should be.
Kiron nodded with satisfaction, then gave Avatre the signal to fly off into the north.
Well, there they were, all right.
I was right. Hidden from the ground, but not from the air.
This part of the desert was not barren; the Blue People would not have been able to live there if it had been. There was some water here, enough to allow the occasional oasis to dot the lands
cape, and enough that there was vegetation outside an oasis to allow grazing. There were acacia trees and scrubby brush, which the nomads used thriftily, to start fires, but never for the fire itself.
In short, this made a good place for the bandits as well as the nomads.
Kiron kept Avatre circling in the air above the place, studying it, while the rest of his wing made wide circles around them. The encampment, clearly not one of the nomads’ nor of honest traders, was concealed in a narrow, twisting wadi below them, hardly more than a crack in the earth, and just wide enough to pitch a tent. A dangerous place to camp, because if there was an unexpected storm anywhere “upstream,” there would be a flash flood with no warning at all, one that would probably kill most of them and would certainly wash away their gear and drown their animals.
On the other hand, they could dig down below the surface and probably find water there, making a “seep well” for themselves that would ooze a cup or two of water over a reasonable period of time. Several seep wells spaced out over the wadi would produce enough water for men and mounts with patience. That would mean they wouldn’t have to raid the nomads’ oasis for water as well as food. It was a calculated risk, made all the more clever by the fact that no one who knew anything about the desert would expect someone to camp in a wadi.
Now, the question was, what to do about them? The walls were high, the canyon very narrow. In no way would dragons be able to get down there, and so far, all of Kiron’s tactics had relied on spooking the bandits’ mounts as the first attack. The bandits were entrenched there; if they had enough bows, they could do some serious harm to the dragons and the Jousters.
He waved his wing off, and pointed into the distance. They needed to get out of sight of the camp before they landed to confer. He hoped he would have some ideas by then.
He led them off to an eroded, wind-sculpted hill with a flat top. It would make taking off easier for the dragons. He didn’t dismount immediately. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the horizon in the direction of the camp, frowning, trying to think of something clever to force the bandits out. Short of finding one of the Magi to brew up a storm, he couldn’t think of anything.
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