Shadowed By Wings (21 page)

“M
ake sure she keeps breathing,” the Komikon growled as he passed my prone form into Dono’s arms. “You know venom’s tricks.”

Dono didn’t respond. Or perhaps he did. Perhaps I just didn’t hear his response as I swooped in and out of venom’s silken void.

Dono carried me from the training grounds back to my hammock.

I felt like I was floating, suspended somewhere between ground and sky. The stars danced above my face like glass baubles whirled by an invisible juggler. Venom trickled down my thighs, filling the night air with the lusty odor of womanly brine and the citric tang of dragon.

“Keep breathing,” Dono growled at me as he slid me onto my hammock an indeterminable time later, and I saw his voice as a cockroach skittering over a dusty rock.

“Why breathe?” I asked thickly.

A good question, that, or so I thought at the time:
Why
should I keep breathing? Understand, my lungs felt as if they might erupt into molten pools of lava within my chest, then swiftly solidify into porous rock, and this was not at all a terrifying or disagreeable sensation. In fact, I felt certain that if I could only stop breathing long enough, I might comprehend the dragons’ music. Not that I wanted to die. No. I just wanted to hear dragonsong.

“Keep breathing,” Dono growled again, a heartbeat later, a lifetime later, the passage of time incomprehensible to me. But I obeyed. I breathed. Whether from obedience or the body’s natural need for air only, I continued breathing.

So passed the night. Dono stood over me the entire time, and as my desire to stop breathing decreased, it was replaced instead with lust. I reached for Dono; he pushed away my hands and tried to ignore my indecent whispers.

But toward dawn, his resolve broke and he coupled with me. Somehow, we ended on the stable floor.

Fresh chaff had recently been forked into my stall, shin deep and smelling sharp and sweet, like bark stripped from a freshly felled sapling. The light stuff cushioned my back, gave my hips extra thrust. Clinging tight to me, biting my neck, Dono climaxed in my womb while featon chaff drifted down on our heads, much the way kaolin dust had graced us in our infancy, when we’d crawled about my mother’s feet as she’d worked at her potter’s wheel.

Because my vulva was slicked with venom, Dono was soon transported on new wings of lust, venom induced, and he flipped me onto my belly and took me again, from behind. As he did so, he whispered my sister’s name like an incantation, evoking her presence so that no longer were only the two of us on the stable floor, but a third joined us, ethereal yet as tangible as an insatiable need.

“Waivia,” he groaned. “Waivia.”

That was my first time with a man, and I found Dono’s performance somewhat lacking compared to that of a dragon. No dragonsong did our couplings provoke in me, nor any whispers of profound, ancient thoughts. After a while, I begged Dono to desist.

He did.

And as I wept, he held me and began to talk of our childhood and himself. And Waivia.

“She was mine, you know. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here today and she’d be alive.” He stroked my back absently as he talked. “When you stole my whip, you stole her away from me, Zarq.”

With clarity and certainty, I suddenly realized that he despised me—and himself—for his past audacity in demanding inclusion in the dragonmaster’s apprenticeship, which had led to the anger of Temple, the ruination of our clan, and the subsequent sale of Waivia to mitigate a little of that poverty.

I sat up slowly and wiped away my tears.

“It wasn’t my fault, what occurred,” I said quietly. “Nor yours. Temple didn’t observe the Sa Gikiro rite, didn’t give our clan the restitution they should have for losing you to the dragonmaster.”

I hesitated, then placed a hand upon Dono’s closest knee. “It’s Temple’s fault Waivia was lost to us. Neither you nor I are to blame. We were only children.”

The moment I said those words, something dark and heavy lifted away from us both. I saw it lift. Dono sensed it and shuddered. The great black shape rose into the air, grew wings. It flapped ponderously across the courtyard, rising higher into the sky. As it rose, stars shone through its darkness like flecks of quartz at the bottom of a silty river. The wind from the dark shape’s wings feathered Dono’s hair and caressed my cheeks. It smelled like a river bottom, of things long rotted, of muck long out of sunlight. A dense, fertile odor, redolent of birth and death.

We watched it go, Dono and I, though I think he saw it not, only sensed its leaving. But although his anger toward me and his own self-condemnation may have departed, I knew he still yearned for his first love. Waivia.

The dragonmaster gave me many weeks to process the experience of being with his destrier and recover from venom’s giddy sting. At first, my training suffered from the intimate encounter with the old destrier and I shook badly for days. I stumbled often and my balance in the vebalu course was poor. Sunlight hurt my eyes; I was grateful for the approach of the Wet Season and the increasing number of clouds that smothered the sky.

Though my fellow apprentices didn’t know the reason behind my ineptitude, they surmised that I’d suffered from something the dragonmaster had subjected me to and, thankfully, all but a few of them treated me as if I were a fragile egg they had no wish to break. The few apprentices who attempted to treat me elsewise were beaten by Eidon.

As Dono wrestled with his own complex emotions, his treatment of me still vacillated between solicitude and anger. The passion we had shared together that night on my stall floor had not only renewed our childhood bond, but created something else, that feeling one experiences after having shared that vital, vulnerable part of oneself with a lover. And, too, after coupling with me while under the influence of venom, Dono had, in his mind, inextricably linked the memory of his first love to me. To some extent, I had become Waivia to him.

He often found an excuse to place a hand upon my back, waist, or shoulder while instructing me on how to repair that which I already knew how to repair. When he could, he worked alongside me, grooming dragons, mending stone walls, scrubbing mangers. More than once when he brushed by me in close quarters, I felt the press of his erection against my rump.

But, also, he could not forget that I’d chosen to perform bestiality rather than flee the stable domain, and this chafed him sorely. So while one day he might spar easily with me in vebalu and give me advice on how to better my reflexes, the next he would bludgeon me ruthlessly.

Throughout, the dragonmaster watched me closely and questioned me each evening, hoping I’d had an epiphany during the day regarding what I’d heard while joined with his destrier. I could tell him nothing more than what I’d told him in his hidden stable: The dragons’ ancestral memories were a divine, enigmatic song that I could hear but not comprehend. His frustration with my unvarying response increased. I knew I’d soon be asked to lie again before his destrier.

I looked forward to that night.

“Harder!” Egg roared in my ear. It was my third time through the vebalu circuit that day, and I was parched, tired, and vexed by Egg’s boarish voice. And I hated that part of vebalu: scrotum rubbing. Eyes closed, I lightly rubbed my spreadeagled body upon the hide-covered bamboo sac.

“Harder, harder!” Egg roared in my ear. “You have to make the thing move, hey! And don’t spend so long under there; you think Re’s gonna be standin’ still while you’re doin’ that? You have to get in an’ out, in an’ out, else you’ll get trampled!”

With gritted teeth, I increased both the pressure I was exerting on the thing and the speed at which I moved. The whole structure rocked against my torso.

“Better!” Egg bellowed. “Now, move on!”

I lurched back to the balance bar for yet another circuit of the vebalu course.

Ringus stepped in front of me, his cheeks flushed, his eyes bright.

“You’ve got a visitor,” he said in a breathless rush. “Rutkar Re Ghepp.”

I gaped at him, then followed the direction of his thumb with my gaze.

My heart stopped, ran backward several beats, then rushed forward again. He spoke the truth: Rutkar Re Ghepp stood at the entrance of the gymnasium’s courtyard, clothed in a rich emerald waist shirt and slitted, fawn pantaloons. He was flanked by Cafar guards and chancellors.

Rutkar Re Ghepp: Third Son of Roshu-Lupini Re, warrior-lord of our Clutch, and the would-be inheritor of Clutch Re if not for Waikar Re Kratt. Born from the loins of the Roshu-Lupini’s First Claimed Woman, Ghepp had appeared in the world long after the Roshu-Lupini had given up hope that any of his roidan yins, his claimed women, would ever produce a living son.

All infants conceived by the Roshu-Lupini had died during childbirth, understand, regardless of which roidan yin bore the child. The Roshu-Lupini had tried to solve this tragedy by claiming more and more women, but after his fourteenth roidan yin produced yet another stillborn boy, he turned his back upon all his claimed women and took his pleasures only with the best ebanis. Then, unexpectedly, his favorite ebani—a blue-eyed Xxelteker woman exquisitely trained in the arts of pleasuring men—conceived a child by him. Although any child an ebani accidentally bears with her claimer is legitimate, such a child is traditionally regarded as far lower in status than the children begotten from the claimer’s household roidan yins. The Roshu-Lupini made an exception to the cultural norm and declared that should the babe not only survive birth but be born a boy, he would regard the child as his legitimate heir.

Waikar Re Kratt was born several months later.

Overjoyed by his success, the Roshu-Lupini again took himself to the mating closets with his roidan yins, and a second son was born to him nine months later, a child who, tragically, died of snakebite at age two. Undaunted, the Roshu-Lupini continued to vigorously service his women, and seven years after Waikar Re Kratt’s birth, Rutkar Re Ghepp was born from the womb of the Roshu-Lupini’s First Claimed Woman.

And here Ghepp stood, in the dusty coarseness of the vebalu yard, demanding audience with me.

“You stink,” Ringus said, jerking my attention away from the bayen lordling. He pointed a slender finger toward a cistern in the far corner. “I’d wash first.”

“Yes,” I mumbled, addleheaded. “Yes.”

Ringus pursed his slim, sweet lips, then came to a decision. “I’ll fetch the dragonmaster. In case you need him.”

“Thank you,” I said, heart pounding, and turned and walked quickly to the cistern.

What could Ghepp possibly want with me?

Ghepp was rumored to be a thoughtful, predictable man, somewhat staid in habit. Like many Clutch Re rishi, I thought he’d make a far better Clutch lord than Kratt, whose sadism and impatience had already caused misery and death for many in our Clutch.

Seeing Ghepp standing there, in the vebalu courtyard, suddenly made me aware of my vengeance vow to ruin his brother. In the daily swarm of activity as an inductee and the ever-increasing anxiety over the approaching day of Arena, I’d completely forgotten my ulterior motive for joining the dragonmaster’s apprenticeship.

Being abruptly reminded of something so profound as that mad ambition filled me with unease. It had been pleasant to not be preoccupied with ruin and social revolution for awhile, to just enjoy each day’s successes and battle each day’s failures and feel like I belonged and had clan and home once more.

Hastily, I splashed water over myself, then shook off the excess water much as a cur does. Taking a deep breath, I started toward Ghepp, dodging the servitors who grappled each other along the far side of the gymnasium.

I could feel their eyes following me as they wrestled.

Dressed in his ivy and fawn silks, Rutkar Re Ghepp was a startling figure in the vebalu yard’s drab surroundings. He stood flanked by two men garbed in the heavily embroidered blue and red gowns of Cafar chancellors, and on either side of the chancellors stood Cafar guards, resplendent in short skirts and plastrons of steel-studded black leather.

I came to a stop before Ghepp, and, as custom dictates for a woman, stared at his boots. They were made of a soft leather I’d never seen before, a suede from some jungle-caught creature perhaps, or an Archipelagic or Northern beast that I would never lay eyes upon. I could smell the opulence of the chancellors, a perfume-and-pomade scent that was so intrusive that it was a bitter taste upon the tongue. One of the chancellors breathed heavily through his nose, as if he suffered a blockage. A fire ant ran over my bare foot.

“What is your purpose here, in the stables of my father’s Clutch?” Ghepp murmured.

I raised my head, couldn’t help it, and met the steady gaze of his canted chestnut eyes. His dark hair was slightly tousled above his slender brows, and his full lips, centered below high cheekbones the color of fine aged ivory, were slightly parted. His was a beautiful face, one many a woman spun romantic fantasies about, and many a man, too.

“I want to be an apprentice, Bayen Hacros,” I replied.

“Women don’t apprentice. Women don’t serve dragons.”