Joust (18 page)

Once more Vetch had the sense of something very important that was just out of his grasp. But the grief and rage, the terrible emotion that Ari had roused in him—it was too raw, too painful to permit him to think about anything else. Tears cut down his cheeks, hot and bitter, his gut was a mass of knots, and his throat was swollen with grief. But he had learned since that terrible day how to cry without a sound, not even a sniffle, though his eyes burned and ached and his throat closed up completely and his gut was cramped with holding in the sobs he dared not release. Not even in front of this man, who had been absently kind, who spoke as if he might understand.

Ari shook his head, and reached up to pat Kashet’s neck. “And none of that matters to you, I suppose,” he sighed. “It certainly doesn’t matter to the other Jousters. It doesn’t seem to matter to anyone but me that Tians are doing to Altans precisely what we claimed were the most heinous of crimes when the Heyksin inflicted them upon us. It doesn’t seem to concern anyone that we have become what we most despised. Haraket is right. I think too much.”

He patted Kashet again, and the dragon nuzzled him, then pulled away, settling back into the sand. And without another word, Ari turned and left the pen. Vetch was alone in the darkness, with a slumbering dragon, a sorrow too deep and wide to leave room for anything else, and his memories. And an anger that built walls as high as his sorrow was deep.

His throat felt raw, and his gut ached. In a way, it had been easier when he had served Khefti. He’d been too exhausted to be troubled by his memories at night, and his hatred for Khefti had eclipsed all other emotions.

Now—now he lay and watched the moon rise above the pen walls, and when he closed his eyes—

—he watched his father, a quiet, dignified man, face the captain of the soldiers. Kiron Dorian had been a strong, but very lean farmer, bronze skin turned the color of smoothly-tanned leather by the sun; Altans were a trifle paler than Tians, but other than that, there was little difference between the peoples of the two Kingdoms. Like all Altans, he cut his hair short, just above the ears, and he wore the short, unpleated kilt that all Altan farmers sported. In all other ways, he and the soldiers could have been cousins, with the same black hair and dark eyes, the same jutting chins, the same beak-like noses. . . .

There were those who said that the Altans and Tians sprang from the same stock, although both sides would vehemently have denied any such thing. But this had been Vetch’s first sight of a Tian and—and he could not tell the difference between these men and the folk of his own village.

Other than the fact that they were a shade or so darker than his father, and the difference in clothing, of course, and the rest of their dress. And the weapons.

Why,
why
had Kiron reached for his sickle? He had stuck it in his waistband when the captain approached him, but
why
had he drawn it?

Or had he only reacted instinctively, in anger, to protect his land and his family?

Vetch tried to remember what it was that he had heard the captain say—the soldiers had spoken in broken Altan, with a heavy accent. There had been the insults, of course, and the orders—

But surely Kiron had known he could not prevail against an entire band of soldiers.

Maybe he hadn’t cared. Or maybe he had just reacted instinctively, as any man would, when faced with a threat. He had tried to drive out the interlopers, to defend what was his.

And died for it.

Vetch squeezed his eyes shut, and curled himself up to muffle his sobs, and for the first time since his father had died, wept himself to sleep.

 

The days settled into a pattern of meals, work, and sleep. Within a week, the other dragon boys got used to Vetch’s presence, and went from ostentatiously ignoring him to absentmindedly ignoring him, the latter being much easier to bear. At least there was no overt hostility, and the tricks and “pranks” he had dreaded never occurred. He wondered if Haraket or some other Overseer had given them an actual warning about mischief, though that might have been waving a red rag at a bull. After all, the surest way to make a boy do something is to forbid him to do it.

He never asked; he was just grateful to be left in peace. Once in a while, one of them would actually speak directly to him, though it tended to be a command rather than a comment or a pleasantry; Vetch ignored the commands as he had ignored the hostility, for he was not theirs to command.

The attitude that he was, however, rankled, and grew worse, not better, over time. By the time the
kamiseen
died, it was clear even to Te-Velethat that Vetch was a superior worker, and even the sour Overseer of the Household was willing to give him grudging credit for his work. So being told to fetch and carry by someone too lazy to do his own work—with an air of lofty superiority—made his blood boil. Such incidents gave his hatred fresh fuel to feed upon, fuel which was otherwise—lacking.

Haraket was unfailingly just, the Overseer of the Household scarcely ever set eyes on Ari’s quarters anymore, and thus Vetch seldom saw him, and the other servants, slaves, and serfs treated him no differently than any other dragon boy. His fingers no longer itched for clay to make a cursing figure from. In fact, he could go for half a day without being consciously angry.

And as for Ari—well. During the daylight hours, the Jouster was kind, in an austere and distant fashion, courteous and polite. But every so often, the Jouster would come to Kashet’s pen late at night, and the most extraordinary exchanges took place. . . .

Vetch learned very little about Ari’s childhood; only how he had apprenticed as a scribe. He did learn a great deal about dragons, for Ari had studied them extensively. In their behavior, at least according to Ari, they were most like the great cats of the desert, with a great deal of hawklike behavior, especially when young, thrown in.

“Their eyesight is much better than ours, but not as good as a falcon’s,” Ari said one night, as Vetch sat a little apart from him, both of them with their feet and ankles in the hot sand of Kashet’s wallow to keep off the nighttime chill. Kashet’s head was actually in Ari’s lap. “I’ve seen a falcon come down out of the sky from so high up that he wasn’t even a speck, to take a bustard crouched in the desert a few feet in front of me that I couldn’t see. A dragon’s eyesight isn’t nearly that keen. But they are hunters, like the falcons, and when they get prey in sight and they’re hungry, you haven’t a chance of diverting them from it. Not all the
tala
in the world can overcome their instincts when they’re hungry.”

Vetch thought back to his first day, and Haraket berating one of the boys for feeding his dragon too lightly. “What’ll they do?” he asked. “If it’s a Jouster’s dragon that’s very hungry, I mean?”

“Hunt,” Ari said shortly. “Probably not their rider; they haven’t had a chance to learn that we can be food. But they’ll hunt things they’ve seen brought to them as food by their mother and father. Once they’re old enough to feed themselves, their parents bring them whole animals and don’t tear bits off to feed to them. And at the end, just before the youngsters make their first flight, sometimes the parents bring in prey that isn’t quite dead, so the dragonets get the experience of seeing their dinner alive and moving, and make a first kill early on. So they’ll have seen sheep, goats, rabbits, maybe even fowl. A hungry dragon will ignore his training to hunt, and his rider had better hang on or he’ll be thrown. And if that should happen in the middle of a fight or a flight, too bad. I’ve known of a rider to be killed by Altan archers while his dragon was on the ground, feeding, and he was sitting in the saddle, an easy target.”

“And if a dragon ever does learn that humans can be food?” he asked.

“That dragon is destroyed,” Ari replied flatly. “That’s happened, too, in training—stupid Jousters in training who let themselves get slashed or bitten, and their dragon gets the taste of human blood. You can see it in their eyes; they’ve made the connection, and no human is safe. We call them ‘mar dragons,’ and no amount of
tala
can make them forget. We can’t turn them loose because they’ve lost all fear of men, but we can’t keep them, either.”

“Would that happen with Kashet?” he wondered aloud.

Ari started to answer him, then paused. “Huh. I don’t know. Dragons don’t consider each other as prey, and I suppose Kashet thinks that we are dragons. It’s not an experiment I’d care to try.”

Vetch enjoyed listening to Ari talk. He’d been a little worried at first, when Ari turned up after dark, wondering if Ari had something else in mind besides talking, but no more. And if he enjoyed listening, Ari appeared to enjoy having someone who would listen intelligently.

Whatever the reason, at least he felt less alone.

 

Vetch was surprised one noontide to find Haraket
not
overseeing the boys as they collected their meat; he was even more surprised to discover him testing the temperature of Kashet’s sand wallow with his hand and forearm. At least, that was what he
thought
Haraket was doing; he couldn’t imagine any other reason why the Overseer would be kneeling at the verge with his arm plunged into the sand.

Vetch did not stop to question him, however, for Kashet was tossing his head impatiently, wanting his meal.

But Haraket was frowning as he got back to his feet, and he strode over to Vetch, still frowning.

“Get the pen completely cleaned when Kashet’s away,” Haraket ordered. “I mean
completely.
Tidy everything up. This entire row of sand wallows needs the heating spells renewed on them, and the Ghed priests mustn’t be offended by anything that isn’t spotless and utterly neatened.”

He glanced significantly at Vetch’s pallet and his few belongings, and Vetch understood immediately.
Tidy everything up
meant to hide the reminders that this dragon was tended, not by a free-born dragon boy who lived with the others, but a serf. The Ghed priests were notorious sticklers for tradition, and tireless enforcers of custom.

So he hid everything that belonged to him in the storage room, as well as anything else that happened to be lying about in the pen for good measure. Then he cleaned out wallow and “privy”—or at least raked out the top layer of sand in the wallow—and by the time the priests arrived, there was no sign even that Kashet’s pen was in use.

Wild with curiosity by this time, he hid in the storage room with the door curtain held down with a weighted bar across the bottom so that it couldn’t get caught by an ill-timed breeze to reveal where he was. He peeked carefully through a tiny gap between the curtain and the doorpost, as he heard the chiming sound of sistrums and the footsteps of many people.

He waited there while they did—whatever it was that they were doing—in the next pen over. It was hot and very close inside the storeroom, which lacked the roofline windows of a room that was going to be used by people. Sweat prickled his scalp, and a drop slid down his back as he waited. Finally Haraket led four priests and four little priestesses in a kind of solemn procession in through the door to the pen, and they arranged themselves around the wallow, a priest to each corner, the four priestesses in a line across the back wall, Haraket near the door.

They were colorful figures; all four of the priests went shaven-headed, without a wig, but where their heads were bare, their bodies were anything but. Rather than the kilt of most men, they wore long robes of finely pleated white linen; not one robe, but three of them. The first reached to the ground, the second to the calf, and the third to the knee. Their sandals were ornamented with turquoise, and like Haraket they wore a striped sash around their waists and another running from left shoulder to right hip. But their sashes were embroidered and beaded in red, yellow, and green, and were twice as wide as Haraket’s. The four young priestesses dressed in robes of whitest mist linen with wreaths of blue
latas
flowers about their heads, and beads of gold and carnelian at the ends of each of the hundreds of braids in their wigs. They appeared to be not much older than Vetch. Their eyes were lined with kohl and shaded with malachite, and they each wore cones of perfume atop their fine wigs.

All four priests raised their hands together, and began to chant in time to the chiming of the sistrums shaken by the priestesses. They looked so identical at that moment that they might have been paintings on a wall done by the same artist.

The spell was an intricate one, not some simple cursing. Vetch listened avidly as they began with a long, protracted invocation to the gods, Ghed in particular.

Then began the real work of the spell, and that was where Vetch lost track of what they were doing completely. It seemed to involve the sand wallow, but also the Great King’s palace. Both were described in exquisite detail, and the God Ghed was enjoined to take—something—from the palace, and put that same something here in the wallow. But what that was, Vetch could not make out.

Whatever they were doing took a lot of time, though, a great deal of chanting and effort, and the priests’ pleated robes were beginning to wilt a little before they were done.

Inside the stifling storage room, Vetch was feeling a bit wilted himself.

Finally, though, they finished. With a last shake of the sistrums, the priests dropped their arms as one, and filed out the door, as solemnly as they had come. Haraket followed them out, and Vetch heard the chiming and footsteps moving on to the next pen.

Nevertheless, he waited until the chanting on the other side of the walls had started up again before venturing out.

There was no doubt that their magic had worked, and worked well. The sands were hotter than ever, and as Vetch hauled all of the things out of storage that he’d so hastily shoved in, he saw a heat shimmer playing over the top of the wallow. He had to work quickly; he was already a little late to clean Ari’s quarters. Fortunately, that hardly mattered; there just wasn’t that much work to be done there, and he had gotten it down to an art.