Joust (19 page)

Kashet greeted the change in his wallow with a surprised snort, then gleefully plunged in. Ari raised his eyebrow, and paused for a moment instead of heading straight for his quarters.

“Were the Ghed priests here?” he asked.

Vetch nodded. He was still alive with curiosity. “Haraket said the magic needed renewing.”

“I thought things were getting a little cooler than Kashet prefers,” Ari replied, and allowed his eyebrow to drop again. “Good.”

“Ah—” Vetch wasn’t sure he should be asking the question, but he couldn’t bear not to. “What were they doing, anyway? I mean, how do they make things hotter?”

Ari had half-turned away, on his way out the door. Now he turned back and gave Vetch a long, level look. “You were listening, weren’t you.”

It wasn’t a question. Vetch looked at his feet, then at Ari, and swallowed. He was about to be punished. He knew it, he just knew it. “Yes, sir,” he admitted.

“Don’t tell anyone else. The Ghed priests would have a litter of kittens over the idea that an Altan serf was inside their sacred square.” But Ari’s normally solemn, brown eyes were full of amusement, and Vetch took heart again. “As to how they did it—if I knew, I’d be a priest-mage, not a Jouster. But I know what they do, because I’ve copied out the rituals and spells for them before. Have you ever been to the Great King’s palace?”

Before Vetch could shake his head—after all, why would
he
get into a palace!—Ari was going on.

“If you had, the first thing that would strike you is that while everything else is hot enough to bake bread, inside the walls of the palace it’s cool enough for the ladies to wear lambswool mantles. And that is because the Ghed priests, with their magic, are taking the heat from there, and putting it in our sand wallows. That’s what the spell is for; it’s like an irrigation ditch that allows the heat to flow from there to here.”

Vetch stared at him. He’d have doubted Ari’s sanity, except that there was no reason to disbelieve the Jouster. “But,” he said, “what about in winter? You wouldn’t want to make it colder.” It was the only thing he could think of.

“In winter, they take it from somewhere else. My guess would be forges, bakehouses, places where there is a lot of heat it would be good to get rid of, even in winter. In fact, since the winter rains aren’t far off now, they probably did just that this time around, rather than come back a second time to recast the spell.” Ari shrugged. “They might even take it from the fire vents and lava cones out there past the desert; I might have copied some of their spells, but magic is something it’s best not to know too much about. Now—don’t let anyone know you watched the magic, and don’t let anyone know I told you how the spell works.”

And with that, he was gone, leaving Vetch with quite a bit more to think about.

That night, when Ari appeared to tend to Kashet, not a word was spoken about magic. But now Vetch was curious about other things that were not so dangerous to know.

The weather was about to turn; the nights were more than chill, they were cold, and Kashet was very happy with his sand wallow this evening.

“There are hot sands that the wild dragons use?” he said, making it a question, as Ari rubbed under Kashet’s chin.

“Of course there are—though, mind, dragons also use the heat of their own bodies to hatch their eggs. Wild dragons take it turn and turn about, males and females, to brood the eggs. That way they both can eat and drink. At night, when it’s coldest, they brood the eggs together.”

Vetch considered this. “How do you know that?” he asked, finally.

Ari chuckled. “Because, fool that I was, I went out and watched them. And yes, I could very easily have ended up going down one of those long throats. But I was young and immortal, and I was very, very tired of sitting about and writing, endless copies of things no one cared about. Even when I came here, I was the unconsidered copyist. I wanted to do something different, something that would be read for the next hundred years.” He chuckled again. “Actually, although I didn’t really want to be a scribe, my uncle wouldn’t hear of anything else, and after my father died, he was the head of our household when he made my mother his second wife. He was always quoting the sages to me. ‘The metalworker has fingers like crocodile hide, and stinks worse than fish eggs. The fisherman wears little but net, and eats only what he cannot sell. The farmer labors from dawn to dusk, serving only the tax collector, the embalmer is shunned by all, the brick maker is as filthy as a pig, the soldier lives every day never knowing if it will be his last. But the scribe never goes hungry; he can aspire to the halls of the great ones, and his is the only profession wherein he himself is the overseer.’ Except that, of course, that last isn’t true at all, and most scribes spend their lives, not in the halls of the great ones, but sitting in a marketplace, waiting for anyone who wants a letter written, or bent over a desk in his lap, copying copies of copies of things so tedious they send him to sleep.”

Vetch sighed. Whoever had written that hadn’t known anything about farmers. . . .

Then again, whoever had written that was, without a doubt, trained as a scribe originally. He started to ask about Ari’s parents, but Ari continued before he could say anything.

“When I came here to serve the Jousters, I decided to learn as much as I could about the dragons, and I decided that the best way to do so was to study the wild ones. I watched them courting in the sky, and although I never actually caught one laying an egg, I did know within a day when one was laid, because I took to watching particular natural sand wallows. Which wasn’t easy! Dragons only use the wallows that are sheltered to lay their eggs in, usually in caves.”

Vetch shivered, thinking that “wasn’t easy” was assuredly an understatement. What had Ari done? Had he actually been brave enough to slip into the caves to see if eggs had been laid?

Ari had warmed to his subject; it seemed that whenever the subject was “dragons,” Ari could always stir up enthusiasm. “The mother doesn’t start brooding until her clutch is laid, so it wasn’t particularly hard to sneak into her cave to see if she’d left anything.”

Not particularly hard.
Vetch managed not to snort. But he did say, judiciously, “I couldn’t have done that.”

This time Ari laughed aloud, and ruffled Vetch’s hair. It was curious; at first, Vetch had been very wary of Ari, knowing, as he did only too well, that some men . . . well. But Ari had never given him a moment of unease. The physical demonstrations had all been—

—
safe.
That was the word. Brotherly, perhaps. That was close enough to the word he didn’t want to think of—

—
fatherly.

Fortunately, Ari was still merrily talking away. “They usually court and lay just at the start of the dry, and the egg hatches when the rains begin. They feed and grow all during the winter and spring, and fledge when the dry comes again. They’re still small, far too small to joust with, far too small to carry a rider for long, but as you’ll hear Haraket say a thousand times, ‘Neither Jouster nor dragon are made in a season.’ Kashet, of course, began carrying me from the beginning.”

“Is that why he’s so strong?” Vetch ventured.

“It could be,” Ari agreed, and yawned. “Vetch, if you want to hear more about Kashet—”

“Yes!” Vetch interrupted.

Once again, Ari laughed. “Then we’ll have more time after the rains start—which they will within a day or so, or at least, that’s what the Nuth priests are saying. Then our patrols will be cut to one a day, because the dragons will not want to fly. Until then, Kashet and I need to get in as much flying time as we can, so I am going to sleep. And you should, too.”

Ari gently moved Kashet’s head from his lap; the dragon grumbled, but shifted so that all of him was in the wallow. Then Ari stood up.

“Thank you for listening to me babble, Vetch. My fellow Jousters are more than tired of hearing me.”

He heard the faint echo of loneliness in Ari’s voice, and quickly said, “I’m not!”

Ari ruffled his hair again. “I should hope not,” he replied with mock sternness. “Dragons in general, and Kashet in particular, are your business, young dragon boy. Get some sleep, now.”

Ari went off to his own quarters then, and Vetch took his advice. He went to sleep quickly, dreaming of a sky filled with dragons.

I
T was the business of the priests and priestesses of the goddess Nuth—or, more accurately, the Seers among those priests and priestesses—to predict the start of the season of winter rains. This was of vital importance to the Jousters, for once the rains began, their work would be much curtailed. Dragons didn’t like the cold and performed sluggishly when the temperature dropped—and although you could get them to fly in the rain, not even
tala
would keep them in the air for long. So as the end of the dry season neared, the more closely the compound watched the Temple of Nuth for word. Haraket sent messengers daily, asking if a date had been Foreseen. Anxiety mounted, in no small part because the Jousters, and their dragons, were tired. They needed this respite, and needed it badly.

They need not have been concerned. Precisely when the Nuth priests said they would, the rains came.

Three messages arrived from the Avenue of Temples before Haraket could send his daily request; the first gave warning that the rains would certainly begin the next day, the second gave the exact hour (which was the second hour of dawn), and the third, that the first storm would be unusually heavy. Vetch and the rest of the dragon boys had all rehearsed what they were to do, and after the sun set and all the dragons had settled, they had gone down every row of pens and pulled the canvas awnings over every one of the sand wallows. There was no point in allowing even the unused wallows to become pits of hot sand soup, for green muck would grow in it if the water didn’t steam away in time, and that would mean digging out all of the mucky sand and replacing it with clean.

When the rains actually began, Vetch was sound asleep. He woke to the sound of distant thunder and within an hour, rain poured out of the sky and drummed down on the awnings; it was still so dark that he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face, and the first rush of water put out the torches in the corridor outside. It was quite a storm, and he was glad to be under cover when it came, although all of the lightning stayed up in the clouds, and the thunder never was more than a rumble overhead. Still, as hard as the water was pouring down out of the sky, the roar as it hit the canvas and the ground was enough to drown out everything but that thunder. He couldn’t help but contrast his position now with the same time last year, when he had actually climbed up onto the woodpile in Khefti’s back courtyard to shelter under the canvas covering it—for he was not permitted an awning to keep him dry.

These rains would actually do very little for the state of the Great Mother River, for the annual flood that enriched the fields with a thick carpet of rich silt were caused by rain that fell in the lands of the headwaters, much farther south. And the winter rains in Tia were nothing like the ones in Vetch’s home in Alta; storms could last for many days without a pause up there, but were gentle things, as much mist as rain.

The floods had less effect in Alta as well. By the time the Great Mother River reached Alta, she had spread out into the flatlands and swamps, and there was more room for the floodwaters to go.

On the first day of the rains, dawn did not truly arrive; the darkness merely lightened, gradually, to gray. The awnings were cleverly made to dump the rain into channels that carried the water away from the sand wallow; very little got into the hot sand, and most of that quickly steamed away. Kashet showed no signs of wanting to move; in point of fact, it looked to Vetch as if nothing short of an earthquake would budge the dragon from his wallow. Not that Vetch blamed him; he wished he could stay warm and dry—but the rains didn’t stop the chores from needing to be done, so he would have to get up and join the other boys at their daily tasks.

He wrapped his woolen mantle about his shoulders, and left the shelter of the awnings for the corridor—

—where he promptly got soaked. No awnings there; it would have been a shocking waste of canvas, even for so prosperous a place as the Jousters’ compound. The best he could hope for would be that he’d get to spend most of his time inside rooms rather than courtyards. At least the wool of his mantle stayed warm, though wet. The linen kilt went sodden and cold and distinctly unpleasant, it clung to him clammily and only impeded his walking.

He got Kashet’s breakfast; the other boys were straggling in, as reluctant to leave their quarters as he was, and for once, they didn’t pointedly ignore him. Shared misery was making for a semblance of amity, anyway. Haraket was there as usual, and made sure that each of the boys covered the meat in their barrows with much-stained squares of scrap canvas, hide, or some other covering from a pile of such things beside the
tala
-bin. Vetch did the same, although his load did not have
tala
on it; that was the main concern, that the
tala
not wash off. The dragons would be reacting to the onset of the rains according to their natures; some would be surly, some languid, some edgy, and the surly and edgy ones would need that
tala
if their boys were to handle them safely in their enforced confinement. He pulled his mantle over his head, squared his shoulders, and trundled his barrow back to the pen through the downpour.