Joust (26 page)

Vetch wanted to watch. But his time was not his own at the moment. As soon as Kashet came in, he and Ari would need taking care of. Vetch sprinted for the gate nearest Kashet’s pen. When Ari and Kashet landed, they’d need—and deserve—careful attention, and
he
was going to be the one to give it to them.

At the exact moment he began to run, Coresan resigned herself, and with a final hiss, allowed herself to be led away. The third slave freed her tail at Haraket’s signal. Together Haraket and his two helpers led the dragon to her pen, while Ari and Kashet rose again, to hover a little higher for a moment while they picked a good landing spot. Then they landed, nearest to the gate that led to Kashet’s enclosure.

By that time Vetch’s last glimpse of them was as he sprinted through the gate in the wall, going for Kashet’s pen himself. Seftu’s dragon boy was in the corridor, laden with food and drink; Vetch snatched what he wanted from the provender over the other boy’s vehement protests, which he ignored. After all, the novice rider didn’t deserve it; wasn’t he half responsible for the near disaster? Seftu’s Jouster could bloody well wait for his wine. If Vetch were to have a choice, he’d get stale river water, thick with flood-time mud, and be grateful for that much.

When Ari and Kashet stumbled into Kashet’s pen, Vetch was there ahead of them, waiting with a skin flask of palm wine for Ari and a bucket of water for Kashet. But Ari waved off the wine and took the bucket of water instead, drinking as he had that day that Vetch had first seen him, and pouring the rest over his head and shoulders. Kashet went straight to his trough, which, as always, was also full of clean water, and drank as deeply as his Jouster; Vetch was unharnessing him as soon as he reached the trough and stopped moving forward. The dragon not only felt as hot as a furnace, he smelled hot, and Ari smelled like his dragon. Both of them looked utterly spent; the kohl around Ari’s eyes was smeared, making his eyes look like holes burned in his face, and Kashet’s eyes were dull with fatigue.

Ari shook his head like a dog, sending droplets of water flying in the bright sunlight. Vetch cast a glance at him as his own fingers unfastened buckles and pulled away harness; he looked terrible. Weary and ill, and not at all as triumphant as Vetch thought he should be—

“Etat save me from ever having to do
that
again,” he said, and sat down, right on the edge of the sand pit, head and shoulders sagging.

Vetch was torn between going to him and continuing to get the harness off of Kashet; he compromised by unbuckling the last strap and letting the saddle drop to the side, then going to Ari.

“Sir?” he ventured, not daring to touch the Jouster.

“I’ll have that wine now, boy,” came the muffled reply.

Vetch put the skin in his hand; he fully expected Ari to drain it, but the Jouster again surprised him, taking only a single mouthful before handing it back.

“That’s better.” He raised his head. “How is Reaten?”

That was Coresan’s Jouster; Vetch recalled it as soon as Ari spoke the name. And he had news, startled out of Seftu’s dragon boy. “He has a cracked skull, and it would have been very, very bad if he hadn’t been seen to right away, but the priest is certain that he will be all right eventually,” Vetch told him. “The trepanning priest is lifting the bone right now; he should be all right once the incision heals.”

“Teh and Teth be thanked,” Ari sighed, and Vetch had no doubt that the words were more than half prayer. “And Haras, who puts the wind beneath our wings. The gods truly look after the fools of the world.” And he shook his head, slowly, and took another mouthful of wine. “That so little permanent harm has come of this is more than either of those two deserve.”

Vetch couldn’t help himself; he was bursting with curiosity, and with no little awe. “Sir—how did you
do
that? One moment he was falling, the next, he was across your saddle! It looked like magic!”

“It’s all Kashet’s doing,” Ari replied, but he looked up, then, and behind the weariness, seemed very pleased at Vetch’s wide-eyed admiration. “I’ll admit we’ve practiced just that move, in case something like this happened. This was the first time we’ve caught a man, though—it’s always been bags of chaff before this. Have you ever seen a dragon take a goose in flight?”

He waited for Vetch to reply; Vetch shook his head.

“No? Well, it’s something they do in the wild, pulling their head and neck back, then snapping it forward while flying, like a heron catching a fish. I’ve taught Kashet to do that, only to bring his head in
under
what we’re trying to catch rather than snapping at it with his jaws, then to raise his head and fly up a little at the same time. If we’ve got the balance right, what we’re aiming for slides right down his neck onto my saddle where I can steady it.” Ari shook his head, and Vetch gaped as he tried to imagine just how much control and coordination—and cooperation on Kashet’s part!—that would take. “Needless to say, no one else can do it. Another of my little eccentricities that the others put up with in the past; none of them ever had the imagination to see that it could be used to rescue a falling rider. I suspect there won’t be any more sniping remarks about it after this, though.”

Sniping remarks?
Never had it even passed Vetch’s mind that his own Jouster, so highly thought of by Haraket, might be on the receiving end of any criticism. After all, from what he had overheard, Ari was widely thought of to be the most skilled rider and Jouster in the compound. So why would anyone criticize him?

But it appeared that Ari’s unorthodox ways were enough to make him as much of an outsider among the Jousters as Vetch was among the dragon boys.

Vetch snapped his mouth shut, and nodded, and watched as Kashet left his water trough half-emptied, dove into the sand, and rolled wearily in his hot sand wallow. “Reaten won’t be flying for weeks,” he offered. “So the priest says.”

“The Commander of Dragons will have a few choice words with him before he’s able to fly,” Ari said with grim satisfaction. “And I suspect that he’ll consider himself lucky to have that crack over the back of his head; the Commander just might take pity on him because of it.”

“What’s going to happen to him?” Vetch asked.

“At the least, they’ll both be personally reprimanded by the Great King’s Commander of Dragons and might be dismissed as Jousters for their carelessness.” Ari’s lips thinned, and his jaw tightened; Vetch had seldom seen him angry before this, but he was definitely angry now. “As raw as they are, it isn’t as if they can’t be replaced. They both should have known better, but of the two, Seftu’s rider is the most to blame. A male shows the mating urge much more graphically than a female.
I
would have seen it, if they hadn’t only just gotten up into the air. I thought all that jockeying about was Reaten and Horeb trying to impress me with fancy flying, and having no luck at it.”

Ari paused, and Vetch wordlessly handed him the wine for another small, moderate mouthful.

“In fact, anyone who had anything to do with Seftu and Coresan should have seen the signs,” Ari continued. “There’s going to be some sharp words all around before this affair is over, and maybe some dismissals.”

Seftu’s dragon boy probably knew that; he’d been tending Seftu for the last two years at least, and should know all of the protocol and rules that governed not only the Jousters themselves, but everyone connected with them. Certainly he knew more about it than Vetch did. That was probably why he hadn’t done more than protest weakly when Vetch robbed him of his burden; shock, and the fear of being dismissed, had left him so stunned he completely forget Vetch’s lowly status.

Or else, being dragon boy to the hero of the hour had suddenly raised Vetch’s status.

“Seftu’s safe enough; back in his pen,” Vetch was able to report. “His rider—Horeb—I don’t know where he is, but his dragon boy was on the way to the Jousters’ Courts with food and wine.” Dangerous to go further than that, or mention any speculations of his own. He was still just a serf, after all. Anything more, well, that could be taken as gossip about his masters, and even Ari, tolerant as the Jouster was, might feel he had to take some sort of action at that point. So he kept himself quiet.

“Well, it wouldn’t surprise me if Horeb was at least demoted back to the training classes. Reaten just might find himself sent back to the ranks, too, no matter how much the Commander pities him. In any event, he’s going to be bedridden for a while. Which will mean that Coresan won’t be ridden for weeks. Just as well. Coresan will be impossible to handle for that long, or at least until she rids herself of her eggs.” Ari closed his eyes and held out his hand; Vetch put the wineskin into it, and Ari took another mouthful. This time, he kept the wineskin. “It could be worse. Let’s hope the others have learned a lesson about paying attention to their dragons’ behavior, anyway.” Ari had a fourth, very long pull on the wineskin; Vetch thought there was a grim satisfaction in his expression. But he was more interested in what Ari had said than in what his expression might imply.

“Eggs?” Vetch asked, as a wild thought entered into his mind. Dared he think
he
might be able to get hold of one—if there were any at all? But if he could—after all he’d been learning from Ari—“She’ll lay eggs now? How many? Who’s going to mind them?”

“Nobody,” Ari sighed, and his shoulders sagged. “I would, if I could, but no man can tend and fly more than one dragon at a time if it’s to be done raising the dragons from the egg. What a waste! Of course, they’ll probably be sterile—wild dragons mate a dozen times or more for a clutch of two or three and Coresan only mated once today—but you’d think that someone would be interested in trying to duplicate what I did when I was Haraket’s helper! But no. This has happened before, although without the accident, and other than the one egg that hatched Kashet, the eggs
were
just taken away and left on the refuse heap.” His gaze turned scornful. “Of course, warriors can’t be bothered with playing nursemaid to an egg and a dragonet, and they can’t simply assign the task to their dragon boy and expect to come take over from him when the dragon fledges.”

“They can’t?” Vetch breathed, hearing his own wild thoughts confirmed, hearing that the sudden plan that had burst into his mind might be more than a mad dream.

“No, they can’t, not when a dragon’s been raised from the egg by a man,” Ari replied. “Not even if you drugged him with
tala.
A dragon raised wild thinks all humans are the same human; a dragon raised from the egg knows better.” He turned a fond gaze on Kashet, who was now stretched out flat on the top of the sand, spread out like a rug. It was a very peculiar posture, one that said volumes about how tired and cold Kashet was after that flight. Vetch couldn’t imagine how Coresan had had any fight in her at all, after the mating, if Kashet was so exhausted. “The dragon that’s raised from the egg is a dragon that won’t fly for just anyone, will he, Kashet?”

The dragon raised his head, just a little, and sighed.

Ari laughed. “Like a falcon egg-reared, or a cheetah taken before his eyes are open, a dragon hand-reared is loyal only to the one who nurtures him—a hand-reared dragon is not like a dog, who will hunt with any man who knows his commands.”

Kashet rolled over on his back and twisted his long neck around, eying Ari for a moment, then snorted with what sounded like amusement.

At that moment, a number of disparate bits of information came together for Vetch, like broken bits of a wine jar flying back together again and giving him the shape of the thing.

First—Ari had studied to be a scribe, and as a scribe, had been sent here to serve in the compound. A scribe was needed here, certainly, but he must have had a great deal of free time. Many Jousters could read and write on their own, and wouldn’t need his services.

Second—Vetch recalled Ari had said that he had “found” a dragon egg—and after all he had learned, Vetch couldn’t imagine anyone climbing into a nest after a dragon egg! He already knew, of course, that Ari’s education had been cut short before he could be recruited into one of the Temples. He had thought that it was because Ari had hatched Kashet, but what if he had things backward, that Ari had been bound over to work here first, and only after serving as the compound’s junior scribe and learning all he could about dragons, had he hatched Kashet?

Third—Vetch had the key fact that he had not known before this, that a Jousting dragon had escaped to mate and lay eggs at least once before today. That changed the shape of his speculations, entirely.

Ari must have served here and become interested in the dragons for their own sake, then perhaps he rose to become one of Haraket’s helpers, either in his capacity as scribe or because of his interest in the dragons and their ways; that would account for the unspoken bond between the men.

But more times than not, any boy in training to be a scribe ended up attached to a temple, not attached to the Jousters’ Compound. What had led to Ari’s needing to leave his studies? Because he wasn’t that old, yet he had been flying Kashet for years—so he had to have hatched Kashet while he was in his teens. So he couldn’t have truly finished his education as a scribe.

Unless perhaps he had been attending one of the temple schools, when his family fell on hard times and could no longer pay for the schooling. Hadn’t he said once that he was the youngest boy, and it was his uncle who was the head of the household? He had—he’d said his uncle, also a scribe, had made Ari’s mother his second wife after Ari’s father died.

Yes; that must have been it. All the pieces fell neatly into place. Vetch could picture it in his mind’s eye. Ari’s father sending him to school, dying, leaving his widow and son to be supported by his uncle, who eventually married her. Then, the additional strain of a second wife and children on the family finances forced Ari to become a “common” scribe before his education was complete, and he took a position here in the Jousters’ Compound. Ari must have gotten hold of a fertile egg from one of those chance matings, perhaps from the dragon of a Jouster he had served as a scribe, or gotten directly from Haraket as an experiment, or perhaps just because he’d been bold enough to take one before they put it on the midden.