Alta (34 page)

“That it would,” said Toreth smoothly, as Aket-ten gaped at her brother. “So, Aket-ten, tell us more about how you approached this dragon today—”

By the gods,
he thought, listening to the boys question her closely.
Aket-ten isn’t the only one growing up. So is her brother.

Indeed; they were all growing up. And none too soon. Because by the end of the Dry season, if his own calculations were correct, they were all going to face the enemy in the field for the first time. And the advantage, numerically at least, was still with the enemy.

If they weren’t grown up by then, it would be too late.

 

The dragonets were being fitted for their first saddles and harnesses, using Avatre’s outgrown harness as a model. And for once, there were servants here in the dragonet pens who didn’t have to be persuaded that the babies were tame.

The old harness maker and his assistant swarmed all over Wastet like a pair of cleaner birds on a river horse. Wastet regarded them with bright curiosity, while Orest stood by.

“And your colors are blue and scarlet, young lord?” asked the assistant, taking notes on a potsherd. “May I ask why you have colors at all?”

“To differentiate us, not only from our fellow Altan Jousters, but more importantly, from the Tian ones,” Kiron replied for Orest. “We don’t want someone from our own side seeing a desert dragon and thinking it’s ridden by a Tian.”

“And we want to be able to keep track of the others in our wing,” Orest added. “So we can do things that we’ve practiced together.”

“But why different colors for each of you?” the assistant persisted. “I should think you could make out who is who by the colors of your dragons. No one is going to mistake this beetle-colored beauty for any of the others.”

“First of all, we didn’t know they would all hatch out different colors,” Kiron replied. “Second, from a distance they can still be confused—take Avatre, she’s scarlet and gold, which is awfully close to Pe-atep’s Deoth, who’s red and sand colored. Or Kalen’s Se-atmen, brown and gold, who could be taken for Oset-re’s copper-red Apetma. And third, we’re only the first wing of tame desert dragons. There are two female desert dragons that can provide us with more eggs every two years. Eventually there are going to be Jousters with the same color dragons; we need ways to tell them apart in the air, and we might as well start now and get our eyes used to looking for the combination of dragon colors and rider and harness colors.”

“Ah,” the assistant said, contented now. “You see, I like to know why one is asked to do something unusual—”

“And thus, you are too damned curious and prying, you young whelp,” the old man growled. “If you worked as well as you jabbered, we’d have the harnesses done by now.”

“Yes, master,” the assistant said, sounding not at all subservient. He turned back to Kiron. “And you are wanting streamers that can be easily torn away in the same colors as well?”

Kiron nodded. “We’ll be using them in training, to teach the dragons to get in close for harassment, but I don’t want something that is going interfere with flying—”

The assistant dismissed that with a shrug. “Colored grass, loosely woven,” he replied. “Fastened to the back of the saddle. Easily done.”

“As easily as I am going to beat you if we don’t get these dragons measured!” scolded the old man. “Get on with you!”

The two of them moved on to Apetma’s pen. Orest and Kiron exchanged grins.

“What were those extra straps you ordered for?” Orest asked when they had gone. “He didn’t ask about those.”

“Probably because they seem perfectly logical to someone who has never been a Jouster,” Kiron replied, sobering. “I don’t want any accidents. Avatre and I still haven’t mastered the ‘falling-man’ catch. Maybe the senior Jousters will think this is effete, but I want all of you belted down into your saddles when we begin training.”

Orest nodded slowly. “I’ve no objection,” he replied, slowly. “Now that I’ve been up on dragons—it’s a long way down to the ground. I wouldn’t like to fall—”

“Oh, I’m not worried about falling. The Tian Jousters used to say that it isn’t the fall that kills you,” Kiron replied with a straight face.

“Oh? So what is it?” Once again, Orest walked straight into the joke.

“It’s the hitting the ground that kills you,” Kiron replied, and ran out of Wastet’s pen with a brush following him.

He particularly wanted to catch up with the harness makers before they left Oset-re’s Apetma. By now, he half suspected that the boys had forgotten that their dragons were to be harnessed up in the riders’ colors—but Kiron remembered Oset-re’s fuss about having colors that didn’t clash with a dragon’s colors. He’d gotten black and white; was that sufficiently neutral for him to be content? The last thing he wanted was for Oset-re to be unhappy about a little thing like the colors of his harness when it was so easy to fix—

But he found Oset-re perfectly at ease as the harness makers nattered on about what color should be where to avoid soiling the white parts.

“Are you still all right with black and white?” he asked Oset-re cautiously. “It’s not to late to change—”

“Oh, Apetma is going to look amazing,” Oset-re said breezily, holding her head and gazing into her coppery eyes. “Aren’t you, my love? There won’t be another dragon out there as striking as you—” And as he crooned to her, she butted his head gently with her copper-red nose and crooned back at him. And at that moment, Kiron realized that it would not have mattered to the formerly vain Oset-re if Apetma had been dun and his colors green and gray, he would
still
have been sure she was the most beautiful of the lot. He was just as besotted with Apetma as any of them, and nothing was half as important anymore as his dragon.

Kiron left the pen feeling, although he was not sure why, as if he had just won a war.

FROM
below, the view was fascinating, as brilliantly colored dragons soared and dove in the cloudless sky. Watching the dragons practice and train had always been a popular pastime for those who could afford to take the time away from their proper jobs—but now people were snatching a few moments just to come and gape.

The boys were now “safe” to be up on their own during some games, thanks to the many days of going up to warm up other Jousters’ dragons. When they were paired off in noncombat exercises, Kiron liked to leave Avatre in the pen once in a while and just go out to the practice field to watch as if he was one of the spectators. At the moment, the fledglings were ribbon chasing in sets of two, one with the ribbon, one trying to get it. They were over their “clumsy” stage at last, and now he was allowing all eight of them up in the sky at the same time. Since they weren’t very fast at this yet, they were able to avoid collisions that lack of practice and skill would have made inevitable at an adult speed.

The spectators, however, were not aware of the fledglings’ imperfections. They were here to watch and wonder, and marvel. The boys weren’t heroes yet—but the next set of Jousters, waiting their turn to go up and go through the same games, were. And if the swamp dragons weren’t as pretty up in the sky, they were a lot more exciting; they could double back on their own paths in the blink of an eye, and even literally fly rings around each other. None of them could match Avatre, however. She was able to tumble and wingover in a way that none of the others would, because none of the others were as alert and aware as she was, nor were they anywhere near as cooperative. She would try anything he asked her to, which was why he was very, very careful about what he asked her to do.

There were quite a few brand new game exercises, and new forms of combat being practiced up there—and down near ground level as well—these days. At night, Kiron and his wing thrashed out new ideas, and tried to come up with better plans all the time. Some of the things that they had tried worked, some didn’t, and some were useful only as agility training.

Take the ribbon chasing, for instance. One dragon would have a ribbon tied to his harness, and a second dragon would be sent up to take it. It was the job of the first rider to keep the second from snatching that ribbon. It had no application to combat whatsoever, but it certainly trained the dragons and riders in evasive maneuvering.

It was hot and very humid down here on the ground with the green, rank scent of the canals everywhere; in Alta, the dry season wasn’t actually
dry,
not with all of the canals around. Kiron felt sweat tricking down the back of his neck and making his scalp prickle, and wished he was up there. The layer of humid air stopped about halfway to where the dragons were playing now and that was where the dry
kamiseen
wind began. He listened to the spectators with half of his attention; they found the ribbon chasing to be absolutely enthralling. He couldn’t blame them; the game was fun to watch, and even more fun to participate in.

On the other hand, one of the near-ground tactics
was
a combat-trick, and was going to be extremely useful. One of the things that Tian dragons did was to dive down on an Altan army and snatch a commander right out of the midst of his men, rising in the air to drop him to his death. The swamp dragons weren’t big enough to pull that off.

Neither were the fledglings, nor would they be for at least another year. But they would try to do anything that their riders asked them to, once Aket-ten put it into their heads. And one of those things was a new, and potentially deadlier equivalent to what the Tians did. It, too, was intended to serve the purpose of eliminating important enemy commanders.

The fledglings took to it immediately, for it fit in so well with their natural hunting skills that they hardly had anything to learn.

They would rise to the top of a thermal, and their rider would pick a target and signal the general area where it was. Since Tian commanders wore blue war helmets, the fledglings themselves were able to tell exactly who the target was now. They would fix their eyes on the target, then fold their wings and dive. At the last possible moment, they would snap their wings open and turn the dive into a blindingly fast aerial dash at just out of spear reach from the ground. If they had been hunting, that would have ended in them smashing into their prey, knocking it over, and soaring up again to come down a second time on the now-unconscious prey to kill it.

Since this was a combat maneuver, they would aim straight for the target, and at the last possible moment, the rider would launch a javelin at it. What with being thrown from the back of a speeding dragon, when the javelins hit, they usually went all the way through the straw targets, out the other side, and buried themselves a good hand-length into the dirt. How often they
did
hit depended on the skill of the rider. Orest was the most accurate of the boys, hitting his targets well over three quarters of the time, Huras the least, a little better than three out of ten. Kiron himself was somewhere in the middle, and as a consequence, preferred to use the weapon he was most familiar with, the sling. Using a lead pellet instead of a clay one, he was usually able to knock the target’s “head” clean off with an accuracy comparable to Orest with a javelin.

This was very popular with the spectators on the ground, who actually got to see something besides pretty patterns in the sky. It was heartening for them, too; it was one thing to hear about distant victories, it was quite another to see your fighters actually doing something that looked effective and aggressive.

Even the older Jousters had gotten inspired by the successes of the youngsters to try as much of what was being done in fledgling practice as they could command their own dragons to cooperate with. And there, unfortunately, Aket-ten could do only so much. While she could dominate every fighting dragon in the compound now, that only meant that they would obey
her,
not their own riders. And in order to be alert enough to respond the complicated commands, they would have to be on half rations of
tala,
which made them arguably dangerous. Still there were a handful of the older Jousters experimenting with slings, though not one of them had managed to get his mount to tolerate a javelin whizzing past its head. They usually turned and snapped it out of the air, and no one wanted to discourage that behavior, since it meant that the dragons were also catching arrows that had been sent in the Jouster’s direction.

The older Jousters had swiftly worked out for themselves that they needed to learn such things, and quickly, too. Now that the Magi-sent storms had ended with the onset of the Dry season, and the
kamiseen
winds had begun to blow, the Jousters of Tia were back in the air and in support of troops who were angry that they had been lately driven back.

Still, on the ground, the Altans could match them man for man, and for now they were holding the land that they had regained.

And with the help of the new tactics that Kiron was working out, the Altan Jousters were succeeding in avoiding the Tians, forcing them to work much harder to go after them, and keeping them from attacking Altan commanders.