Dragon's Blood (14 page)

"So I've heard," Sarkkhan replied. "We appreciate your fairness. As to paying her gold..."

Akki stood at the pair-bonders' table and called out loudly, "I do not fill my bag with Sarkkhan gold." Then she walked out of the room.

Jakkin watched her leave. He started to
go after her, but Sarkkhan's hand on his arm stopped him.

"Let her go," the nursery owner said. "She has a head harder than dragon bone, and Fool's Pride to match. Like her mother. Go back to your seat." It was not a suggestion but a command.

Jakkin sat down again between Errikkin and Slakk and replayed the scene in his mind. It was all suggestion; it could be read many ways. Was Sarkkhan jealous? Was he angry? Or was he merely amused? The other boys chattered around him as they finished off extra helpings of the cake. Jakkin seemed to be in two places at once: running through the conversation with Sarkkhan once again and sitting next to the boys. As he heard Sarkkhan's voice saying "Fool's Pride," Trikko was eating a second slice of cake—Trikko, who usually seemed to exist on takk and water.

"Couldn't you have left me some scrapings of icing?" asked Slakk.

"Have a heart," Errikkin said. "You've had three helpings already. Jakkin..."

Jakkin turned slowly and focused on Errikkin. "Yes?"

"Tell us again. How did you manage to kill it?"

Jakkin repeated the tale once again, but his mind was really wandering outside with Akki. He could hardly wait for dinner to be over to find her.

***

A
KKI WAS NOT
in the bondhouse at all. Jakkin finally came upon her by the southwest corner of the building. She was sitting in the sand, her back against the wall. She was fiddling with her bond bag and looking out into the distance, beyond the copse of spikka trees where the first drakk had been killed.

"Akki," he said quietly, and slid down the wall to sit next to her.

She didn't bother looking at him, but let the bag fall against her chest. It didn't make a sound. "Leave me alone."

"But you didn't leave me alone when I needed it."

"He knows I won't take his gold. I've told him so before. There is always a hidden price to pay. No man's gold will go into
my
bag." She placed her hand protectively over the
leather pouch and spoke in a fierce undertone.

"Sarkkhan?" He found himself whispering back.

"That bullheaded, stone-prided ... I hate him." Her voice was loud again, and hard.

Jakkin sat up on his knees and turned to face her. "Now, wait a minute," he said, putting his hands on her face and forcing her to look right at him. "The gold in your bag was my idea, not Master Sarkkhan's."

"
Master!
" She spit the word out.

"Yes,
Master
Sarkkhan. Until I am a master, he is mine. And yours."

"No man is my master," she said.

He was shocked into silence.

"No man's gold will fill my bag," she said, and jangled her bag at him. It was totally empty. He reached over and crumpled it in his hand. Not even a grave coin. He had never known any bonder without that single coin.

"My mother was a baggery girl," she said. "She died at my birth. The other bag girls raised me. But when I was twelve and knew that I wanted to doctor—people and dragons—and not live a bag girl's life, I left. So here I, work. And learn. I am only fifteen.
I have years of learning ahead. But no man's gold will fill
my
bag."

"I see," Jakkin said, though he didn't really.

"Come on. Never mind me. Let's go see your little beauty," Akki said, brushing her hair from her face and giving a swipe at her eyes as well.

Jakkin pretended not to notice. He had a feeling she wouldn't want him to see that she had been crying.

"All right," he said at last, standing up. He was about to reach down and give her a hand when she stood up without his help. "Do you have the broom?"

"Don't I always?" she asked.

He nodded, and they walked down the road, slightly apart, but not so far that Jakkin could not feel the warmth of her by his side.

***

T
HE DRAGON WAS
asleep in the shelter. It did not even wake when they entered. They sat down next to it, listening to its hissing snore and watching the rise and fall, rise and
fall, of its mud brown sides. Its wings twitched slightly, as if it dreamed of flying.

"Look," Akki said, pointing to the tail, "there's red coming through. A berry red, I think."

Jakkin looked. There was a patch of red showing, like a halo around the tail's tip. "Red. But deeper than berry."

Akki moved closer and stared.

"You're right," she said. "It
is
deeper. It's the same color as your blood was on the sand."

"Are you sure?"

"Didn't I see enough of it yesterday?" she asked.

Jakkin nodded and held up his wrist. It was only lightly bandaged and no longer hurt. "Dragon's tongue and heart's blood," he said.

The dragon gave a long, slow yawn and woke, stretching its wings and scrabbling with its claws on the sand.

"Up, thou lazy worm," Jakkin said aloud.

"Do you always speak
thou
to your dragon?"

Jakkin nodded. "At least I try, though I get my
thees
and
thous
mixed up a lot.
My father knew dragons and he said the best trainers always use
thou.
It's supposed to bring me closer to the dragon. It seems to work."

She thought about that a moment. "I expect that's true with people, too," she said.

"Should I call you
thee?
" he asked impulsively.

"I'm not sure either of us wants to be
that
close," she said, laughing. "Yet."

For some reason, her laughter hurt. He answered quickly, "Besides, which of us would be the dragon, and which the trainer?"

"Well, I have the claws for it," she said, holding up her hands. They were large, sturdy hands. "But you have the bonehead."

"Funny, that's what Master Sarkkhan said about you," Jakkin retorted.

"He should know."

Jakkin wondered what she meant.

"Come on, show me what this worm can do. Besides eat, sleep, and cover drakks with sand." She got up and ran out of the shelter, and the dragon followed her, nipping playfully at her heels.

Jakkin stood and went outside. For a minute he watched the two of them playing. As Akki moved, her long, dark, hip-length hair swung around her body. The dragon caught a hank of the hair and pulled. She fell to the ground and the dragon jumped on her, and they rolled over and over to the edge of the spring.

"Look out!" Jakkin warned. But he was too late.

They fell in together and swam apart.

Jakkin kicked off his sandals and took off his shirt and leapt in after them, dousing them both with more water. Akki splashed back with her hands, and the dragon fanned the water with its wings.

"Enough," Akki called at last and climbed up the bank on her hands and knees.

Jakkin reached out, caught her ankle, and dragged her down again. When she resurfaced he said, "I was only able to do that because your feet are so big."

The last part of the sentence was lost in coughing, as he swallowed a wave she pushed toward him. When the coughing fit was over, he saw Akki and the dragon stretched out on the sand, drying in the warmth of the desert
breeze. He climbed up after them and lay down a little ways apart.

Akki turned on her side and leaned on one elbow, facing him. The sand clung to her clothes and bond bag. "Now show me what this dragon can do. After all, you
are
trying to train a fighter, aren't you?"

Jakkin called the dragon to him and showed her its stance. He had to hold the young dragon in place, but once the snatchling got the idea, it stood waiting for his nod of release. Then came the hindfoot. And finally, on command, it blew a few weak, damp straggles of smoke.

"Not much yet," said Jakkin. "But we've got a year. And this mighty worm is already way ahead of its clutchmates. They've just had their first airing. It's already bonded with me, fought a drakk, hovered, and blown smoke. Quite a dragon, don't you think?"

"But you've never trained a dragon before..." she began.

"Of course not."

"Or seen one trained?"

"My father worked with ferals in the sands," Jakkin said. "I think I remember something of that. And I've sneaked about some in the nursery. Last year I watched Likkarn in a session. And I'll try this year as well."

"What about going to a fight?"

"Well, I heard Sarkkhan say once that the dragon itself is the best teacher. And I'll need my gold for food and stuff."

Akki nodded. "I'll get you a book. Can you read? You were born free."

He nodded. "Some."

"Good," she said. "Or else I would have taught you."

"You
can
read," he said, more a statement than a question.

She ignored it. "I've seen several books on training at the hospice and some in Sarkkhan's cottage. I think I can get them for you without anyone suspecting."

Jakkin did not ask her why she had been in Sarkkhan's house. Perhaps she had helped treat him for an illness. She seemed to know him well—and hate him, too. Maybe the nursery rumors were true. After all, she had been brought up in a baggery. And though she had left at twelve ... well, some girls started early. Sarkkhan had no wife, and Akki was beautiful.
Maybe not as beautiful as the girl in Kkarina's portrait, but...

"Let's feed this beastie and go back home," said Akki. "I'm tired. And wet."

"We'll dry," said Jakkin, happy that she had changed the subject. "Long before we reach the nursery and our beds, we'll be dry."

They stripped the leaves from three stalks and pressed out the juices with their nails, for they no longer had the kitchen knife. Then they washed their hands in the warm spring and went back.

A
KKI WAS AS
good as her word, bringing him three books on training over the next few weeks and white trainer suits for them both. Jakkin did not ask her where she got everything, or what she had to do to get it all. He did not want to know—and she did not volunteer the information.

He read the books with painstaking slowness, sounding out some of the harder technical words. And Akki, the few times she came out to the oasis with him, gave him lessons in dragon anatomy.

"Here, in the haunch," she said, pointing to the dragon's upper leg, "the big bone inside is called humerus. And the bending bone is the carpus, like our wrist bone."

He recited all the bones after her; humerus, ulna, radius, carpus, pointing to his own body and then the dragon's body, marveling at all the similarities. He wanted to know everything about dragons, inside and out. He learned the scientific names of the dragon's five claws from one of the books: the large double claws were the lanceae, the back three were called unum, secundum, and tricept, strange otherworldly words that he had to chant in order to remember. Akki tested him on the scientific names, and then he demonstrated the week's lesson with the dragon to her in return.

But Akki was not there as often as Jakkin would have liked. Most evenings she would start off with him, sometimes even holding his hand as they left the bondhouse. Then, at the main road, she would suddenly shake her head and pull her hand away, as if the hand holding had only been a show for the others. She would leave him to go east toward the oasis while she took off on a more northerly path toward the Narrakka River. She warned him not to follow her. He never did.

He never did, because the dragon needed him. Even when it had outgrown the drizzled juice and could graze on the leaves and stalks
of the blisterweed and burnwort that he picked for it—even when it was chest high and then past his shoulder—he could feel it calling to him in his head. It was a siren call he could not resist.

And so the season of the eggs passed.

During the day Jakkin joined Slakk and Errikkin, Trikko and the rest in cleaning the stud barns and mud-bathing the cock dragons. Likkarn was absent more and more from the barns, off to the pits, it was said, his differences with Sarkkhan patched up once again. Jakkin did not miss him.

A new song was going the rounds of the nursery now, called "The Minor Minor Pits" about a dragon who lost all his fights but one, and that one with the greatest champion of the world. Jakkin adopted the song for the mud baths and found its haunting tune with the slow rises and falls of the melody line wonderfully soothing to the excitable males. Even Bloody Flag, who had been unmanageable quite often since his stallmate's death, seemed to calm down and thrumm when the song floated by him.

Dust and fewmets and mud baths filled Jakkin's days, but at night he worked with his
own dragon, teaching it the rudiments of fighting in the pits. All those feints and passes and stands that a dragon does naturally Jakkin gave names to, and he taught the names to his worm. By the end of the egg season, when the days grew shorter and the nights became a pavane of moons across the sky, Jakkin's dragon could respond to his every thought. He put it through its paces two or three times a week: left-claw pass, right, hindfoot rise, stand. And the little dragon obeyed and improved at every lesson.

By the season of training and selling, Jakkin's dragon was far ahead of the dragonlings at the nursery. They were just being separated into fighters and culls. The topmost hatchlings in the pecking order, those who had shown an instinct for blood, were automatically chosen for training. The quieter, frightened dragons were chosen for the stews, though an occasional beauty, one marked with attractive spots or streakings, was set aside. Often baggery girls or the masters' wives enjoyed such as pets. Gelded or spayed, the beauty-dragons never grew more than shoulder high and were gentle creatures of tidy habits.

Culling Day was always a horror. Great
trucks drove onto the nursery grounds, painted with the blood-red logo of the Rokk Stews: a dragon silhouette with crossed knives beneath, and the single word
Quality
outlined in gold paint like an aura above the dragon head. The bonders' foul mood communicated itself to the dragons. The hens stomped back and forth on their great feet, heaving and rocking their weight from side to side. They houghed and groaned. The hatchlings were silent lpeneath their feet; even the top of the order shivered, cowering next to their mothers' tree-trunk legs. In the stud barn came the bellowing of the males as if some memory of their own hatchling days were triggered there.