Alta (52 page)

She was not at all averse to this idea; this clear, dry air was much more to her liking than spending the day trying to fly through the pouring rain.

It was cold, and getting colder; he was glad of the extra clothing they were wearing. He and Aket-ten were wearing those woolen garments; Nofret and Marit had to make do with a pair of woolen robes with the skirts cut and bound around their legs. At least they were drying out quickly.

Avatre seemed unhampered by the cold. Up she went, with Kiron consistently giving her the signal that she should go
west.
And she tried, with the strong winds up here carrying them farther south all the time as she tacked against them. And she kept looking, craning her neck around, searching—he had the feeling she knew what he was asking of her.

When they planned this last night, he had wondered if she would understand what she needed to do without Aket-ten being able to give her clear directions. The “up” part was easy, but she had not flown on a long flight since they had arrived in Alta; would she understand that they needed to take one now?

Her bright eyes darted this way and that as she continued to climb, continued to fight the south-flowing winds—and then, just as he had seen her sense the clear air above them, he saw her find something else.

It was nothing that he could see, but she did, and she redoubled her efforts, driving strongly upward toward a place in the sky that seemed no different to him than any other place in the sky—

Until she was in the middle of it.

And then—ah, then she spread her wings wide and suddenly they were
shooting
westward, in the middle of a current that took them at right angles to the flow of the clouds underneath them. This time, with something to compare their speed to, it was clear that they were flying at a dizzying pace, both the highest and the fastest that he had ever flown before.

He glanced around, and caught a glimpse of Aket-ten right behind him. That was all he needed to know; that, and the position of the sun. When it was at its zenith, they would have to go down, no matter where they were, because at that point, this wind would die for a while, and then reverse itself.

They hoped that this would be somewhere that Kaleth was waiting for them, but Kiron did not believe in counting on hope alone, no more than Nofret and Marit did. The boys had together scraped up enough ordinary currency in bronze and silver to get a cart and donkey. He and Aket-ten should have enough time to find a farm, buy a cart and donkey, and send the young women out to the desert’s edge, where they could sell the cart and donkey and have enough money to provision themselves while they took some of their jewels apart and pounded things like rings and delicate ornaments into unrecognizable bits of silver, electrum, and gold. Then, if Kaleth had still not put in an appearance, they could go to one of the places at the desert’s edge where the Bedu came to trade and buy their way into one of the encampments and wait there.

Kiron never counted on anything. Especially not luck.

But before the sun reached the appointed spot, the clouds began to thin in front of them. Soon there were gaps below where Kiron could see the green of the farmlands. And then, when he looked ahead, he realized that it was not the white of more clouds that formed the horizon, but the white sands of the desert—

And the farms beneath turned to scrub, the scrub to dry-scape plants, and then, just as the wind dropped away to nothing and Avatre went into a long, slow glide downward, the sparse desert-edge plants turned to true desert.

This was the moment that he realized just how high they were.

His passenger realized it at the same moment that he did; she shrieked in his ear, startling Avatre into a side-slip, and buried her face in his shoulder.

He didn’t blame her.

Their woolens had kept them warm, but it had been a bit hard to get his breath. Now he knew why.

Suddenly Re-eth-ke folded her wings and went into a dive; taken by complete surprise, he only had the wit to direct Avatre to follow her. And follow she did.

It was not the sort of heart-thumping, near-vertical stoop that he and Aket-ten had endured on their first such flight, but it was steep enough, and he heard his passenger’s muffled wails of pure terror against his shoulder. Re-eth-ke evidently saw something that he couldn’t, for she had her eyes fixed on some point in the blank expanse of desert below. This was not so much a dive as a series of steep spirals; the dragons were somehow steering with their tails, and had just enough wing extended to slow their fall a little.

About the time when he made out that the thing that Re-eth-ke had spotted was a group of four beasts and two men, she tucked her hindquarters under and fanned her wings more, slowing the dive even further; a moment later, Avatre did the same. When he made out that the riders were muffled in Bedu robes and veils, and the beasts were camels, they were moving no faster than they usually were when they made landings, and they were spiraling down in a series of shallow, lazy circles, while the men and beasts watched, the men calmly, the camels nervously. The honks and groans of their complaints drifted up to him, and one of the men laughed at something the other said.

Then the wings of both dragons snapped open to the fullest, simultaneously, and they began backwinging furiously. They touched down within a heartbeat of each other.

Kiron’s passenger might have been still too terrified to move; that was not the case with the other passenger.
She
had unbuckled her restraining strap and was sliding down Re-eth-ke’s back unassisted while the dust they had kicked up was still settling.

One of the men jumped out of his saddle, and began trotting toward them. She hardly seemed to touch the ground as she ran to meet him, cape flying behind her. He caught her up in a tight embrace and held her, while Kiron muttered to the young woman behind him, “You can look up now, Nofret. We’re down, Kaleth’s here, and something a little easier to ride is with him.”

“I’m not a coward. . . .” came the trembling reply.

“You’d be a fool if that ride hadn’t terrified you,” Kiron replied. “And
you
didn’t have anything to take your mind off the end of it. Here, I’ll help you.” He helped her to detach her icy-cold, fear-rigid fingers from his belt, while the second man took something off the back of one of the camels and beckoned to Aket-ten.

By the time he got Nofret down off the back of Avatre, Aket-ten was dragging a woven palm-leaf cloth full of dead goat over to Re-eth-ke, who had her neck stretched out toward it, nostrils flared. The man was dragging a second such burden right behind her; while Re-eth-ke started hungrily on the first installment of her meal, Aket-ten took the second from him. Kiron caught up with the man at the camels, and they brought both halves of Avatre’s meat to her. Kaleth had thought of everything. But then, he should have figured on that. Even before the Wings descended on him, Kaleth tried to think of everything.

Marit and Kaleth were still locked in their embrace, to no one’s surprise. Nofret was sitting on their baggage, which she had managed to get down off Avatre’s back, her head in her hands, now the very image of patient waiting.

“Well, I see you have left Vetch far behind you, Jouster,” said the Bedu, in an amused voice.

“And I see that your clan has prospered enough to afford us four goats this time, Mouth of the Bedu,” Kiron replied, with a lopsided grin.

“Oh, they have been paid for, be assured of that, Kiron of Alta,” said the Bedu. “We have found your city, and have renamed it Sanctuary. As the young Eyes of Alta foresaw, there was treasure there, enough to provision it and make it ready.”

So the Lost City really did exist! He thought longingly of it—it would be so good not to have to go back, to be able to fly on, into the clean desert, and land at the end of the journey in a place where he did not have to fear spying eyes, and the fingers of accusation—

But he still had a great task unfinished. “Let’s hope it is indeed a sanctuary for those who need it,” he said stoically, as Marit and Kaleth at last broke their embrace, and finally came to help Nofret with the bags. Re-eth-ke had finished the last of her meal; Avatre was on the last mouthful. “Right now, if we aren’t to need it prematurely, we need to get back. I want our part in this all to be over with as little shed blood as may be, and that will need all nine of us.”

“Indeed.” The Mouth bowed his head, then raised it again, and looked at Kiron shrewdly. “In the depths of the night we count those whose lives our actions have cost, yet the gods never tell us the numbers of those whose lives were spared because of what we have done. You may choose to think on that, when the night seems long.” He blinked owlishly above his veil. “And that is as it is. Your part is yet to come, and after that, it is in the hands of the gods. Fly fast and safe, Jouster. We will meet in Sanctuary.”

Aket-ten was already in the saddle again, buckling on her restraining strap. She looked back at him, grinned, but gestured upward. He took the hint, and signaled Avatre to kneel, climbing up in the saddle himself.

“Ride swift and safe, Mouth of the Bedu!” he replied, as he buckled on his strap. “We meet in Sanctuary!”

His last sight of them, as the two dragons clawed for height into the clear sky, was of the four camels plodding back into the desert. He hoped that whatever was to come, Sanctuary would live up to its name.

IT
didn’t look like anything at all, really; just a faint, grayish haze on the surface of the three ripe
tala
berries in Kiron’s hand. It could have been dust, except that dust didn’t rub off. It could have been almost anything, or nothing at all, just an odd color on the hard little berries. Kiron handed them back to Heklatis, who took them with a smile and a raised eyebrow. “The harvest looks good this year,” he said.

“Yes,” Heklatis replied blandly. “They’re all like that, plump and well-colored. From here to the southern border of Tia, or so I’m told by the few who venture there. Whatever else, the rains were good for the
tala.
”

Lord Khumun nodded gravely. “So a week to dry, and then we can use them, which is just as well, since I think we have scarcely a week in stockpile.”
He
knew, of course. He had frowned at the odd color of the berries, had looked up at Heklatis who had nodded, then both of them smiled, just a little. Kiron contained his glee with an effort, for he knew that the Tians had no more
tala
stockpiled than the Altans did. The Altan agents had not been able to steal any
tala,
but they had done the next best thing; during the rains, they had made holes in the roofs of the storage rooms where it was kept, to deny it to the enemy. The rain and the rot that followed spoiled it, or most of it. Only the
tala
actually stored at the Jousters’ Compound had been spared.

Lord Khumun’s smile was a weary one; once the rains had ended, his lot had been fraught with difficulty, for the Magus placed in governance over all of them had flexed his muscles and ordered impossible things. A return to traditional Jousting; that had been the first thing, of course—well, he could order all he wanted, but the Magi could not compel obedience on the battlefield, at least, not yet, and the Jousters had bowed their heads and continued with Kiron’s tactics. But besides that, he had ordered all of them into the sky, twice a day, every day, with no rest and little recovery for the injured, and that was taking a toll on them. As tired as they had been during the rains, they were bone-weary now. Lord Khumun’s sad smile told Kiron that he would be glad to see an end to the situation at last, even though it meant there would be no more Jousters and he would have no more command.

Kiron could not imagine what the Magi were thinking of. Were they trying to be rid of the Jousters themselves? It seemed unlikely—

Or were they only trying to get rid of the old Jousters, seeking to replace them with young men of their choosing?

Kiron decided to ask Heklatis about that, this evening. Right now, he had a practice session to run.

They had gone back to using that distant practice field the day that the rains started to taper off, even though the senior Jousters were so much in the air that they didn’t have time, much less the need, to practice. Kiron didn’t want an audience where the Magi could see that they had gathered one. He did not want attention drawn to his wing.

They did have an audience, though, for their new exercises, which were quite exciting, even though there wasn’t a single person out there other than the wing and Heklatis who knew what they were for.

He got back to the pen in time to find his dragon boy cinching the last strap down on Avatre; he checked them all, as he always did, and smiled. “Good job,” he said. “As always.”

The lad grinned, as he gave Avatre the command to kneel. No more vaulting into the saddle from the ground for him anymore; Avatre had gotten too big for that. There was absolutely no doubt in his mind now that
tala
slowed the dragons’ growth as well as dulling their minds and instincts. Avatre was much bigger than her mother had been, and might even be a hair bigger than Kashet when he last saw Ari’s dragon, and she still had another two to four years of growth ahead of her. She was bigger than every other adult desert dragon in the compound.