Alta

by Mercedes Lackey

  Aket-ten tilted her head to the side, and regarded him thoughtfully.

  “This is true,” she admitted. “But there is no other option, short of fielding equal or superior numbers ourselves. Is there?”

  “That, Aket-ten and Kiron, is what I would like you to think on,” he told them. “Because you, both of you, may see something that Kaleth and I have not.”

  Kiron blinked. “I suppose that is possible,” he replied, but dubiously. “Perhaps. In time—”

  “And what have we but time?” the prince retorted, spreading his hands wide. “We have one solution—the tame dragons. One of them is better than four Jousters on tala-drugged beasts. We are not desperate for a solution, I merely want you to see if you can devise more than one. No archer goes into battle with a single bow string.”

  Aket-ten nodded briskly. “That is only reasonable,” she said. “Now, as for my Akkadian, it may be several days before I can speak with him, and more before I can persuade him to speak with you. He is reluctant to admit his training.”

  “And what have I but time?” the prince repeated. “If you can persuade him, well and good. If not, perhaps on the day when my brother and I sit on the Twin Thrones, he will be willing to come forward. Until then, anything he might tell us is nothing we can put into immediate use.”

  “There is that,” Kiron agreed, and stifled a yawn. “Dawn comes early—”

  “Earlier every morning until Midsummer,” Aket-ten agreed cheerfully. “So, I fear, my guests, you must consider yourselves to be invited to leave!”

  “And we will take the invitation in the spirit with which it was given,” said the prince, standing up and giving her a slavish bow that made her laugh. He offered a hand to Kiron, who took it to pull himself to his feet. “Until tomorrow, Aket-ten! I look forward to our match!”

  “Until tomorrow,” she replied, her voice a little muffled as she bent to blow out a lamp.

  “Well fought,” Toreth repeated, slapping Kiron on the back as they left.

  But he said it in a tone that left Kiron wondering. Was he talking about their game of Hounds and Jackals or some other contest altogether?

  Kiron had thought that beautiful Tathulan, Huras’ enormous female dragonet, would probably lose some of her relative size as the others caught up with her. But as the days passed, that didn’t happen. She continued to grow at the same rate as all the others—which meant she was still half again as large as the nearest in size.

  “She’ll be fledging long before Bethlan,” Kiron observed, watching as she tossed her current favorite plaything, a bag loosely stuffed with straw, into the air with a flip of her head. It was a singularly beautiful head; dark blue along the neck ridge and in a blaze down her forehead, fading to a glorious purple, which in turn faded to scarlet on the underside of her jaw and on her muzzle.

  “You think?” Huras asked doubtfully. “She doesn’t act any differently from the others. She’s just bigger. I thought that you told us that the biggest and the strongest were the firstborn.”

  “That’s what Ari told me, but now I wonder. He couldn’t see the wild ones’ nests all that well when he spied on them, and the only dragon he really ever had any experience with was Kashet.” Kiron rubbed the side of his face with the back of his hand. “When it comes right down to it, at this point, we all have eight times the experience with dragonets that he did.”

  “Well, in that case, I think she’ll fledge right in order,” Huras said firmly. “I think it’s more to do with when they’re ready, not how big they are.”

  He might have said more, but a steady bleating had just started from their right and was approaching. They exchanged a look.

  “That doesn’t sound like Bethlan,” said Huras.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Kiron replied, already on his way to the doorway.

  He was just in time to intercept, not Bethlan, but Gan’s Khaleph. “Oh, no, baby!” he said, laughing, barring the way with his arms outstretched. “Not two wanderers! Back you go—”

  But Khaleph wasn’t going to be turned back quite so easily. Instead, he ducked past Kiron and—unexpectedly—into Tathulan’s pen.

  Both dragonets stopped what they were doing with snorts, and stared at one another.

  “Do you think we should chase him out?” Huras asked, in a worried whisper, as Khaleph edged forward a little, neck stretched out so far toward Tathulan that he seemed twice his usual length.

  “No—no, let’s see how they react to each other, first,” Kiron said cautiously. “They’ve never seen another dragon—and Bethlan gets along fine with that swamp dragon she keeps visiting.”

  Now Tathulan had her neck stretched out nearly as far. The two touched noses, snorting in surprise, and jumped back.

  Kiron stifled his laughter. Huras still looked worried—though why he should be worried, when Tathulan was far more likely to injure Khaleph than the other way around, made no sense to Kiron.

  The little emerald-green male stretched out his head again, and this time, when he touched noses with the bigger female, he didn’t snort and jump back. Instead, he carefully eased himself down into the sand pit with Tathulan.

  Now the two of them began a careful circling of each other, rather like two strange dogs—though unlike dogs, neither made any attempt to nip. Then they stopped, and both of them looked at Huras and Kiron.

  “What do they want?” Huras asked urgently.

  “It’s all right,” Kiron told the two dragonets—he was, after all, the one they both knew. “It’s fine, little ones.”

  They looked at each other. And then Khaleph stretched out his neck and head again, one eye on Tathulan, only this time it was toward Tathulan’s stuffed sack.

  She immediately figured out what he was after, and snatched it away from under his nose.

  Clumsily, he gave chase. They romped all over the pen, while Kiron and Huras scrambled out of their way, and the moment he seemed to lose interest in the chase, she stopped, and dropped the sack, pretending to ignore it until he snatched it up and she bumbled joyfully after him.

  “Kiron! They’re playing!” Huras said in astonishment. “I never heard of anything like that!”

  “Nobody’s ever had tame dragons growing up in front of their eyes either,” Kiron pointed out, as Khaleph lost the sack and Tathulan snatched it away again. “For all we know, they play like this in the nest.”

  Just then, Gan came bursting in, hearing their voices and in a panic because Khaleph was not in his pen. He stopped dead at the sight of the two dragonets romping together.

  “Kiron!” he burst out, when he could finally make his mouth work. “They’re playing!”

  “And I think we ought to let them all play together,” Kiron replied. “They’ll have to work together, let’s let them get used to each other early.”

  So the next time little Bethlan went looking for Menet-ka, Kalen steered her into the pen of his female Se-atmen, and soon there was a whirling ball of indigo-blue and brown-gold play-wrestling in Se-atmen’s pen. Toreth deliberately led his Re-eth-katen into Apetma’s pen; clever little Re-eth-katen was soon poking her nose into every pen to find a playmate, much to Avatre’s disgust. Orest’s Wastet and Pe-atep’s Deoth met in the corridor, and in the surprise of the moment, went tumbling into the tenth, empty pen, where they made a fine mess of the oddments that had been stored there. At Kiron’s request, a gate was built across the end of their corridor so that the babies did not get themselves into trouble by assuming that the adult dragons would be as ready to play as their fellow dragonets, and then they were permitted full freedom of the entire set of pens. This had the happy side effect of freeing half the boys while the other half took it in turn to watch over all the babies, and all the babies got used to obeying someone besides “mother.” It had another happy side effect; they grew stronger and much more coordinated with every day spent in play, and as for nights, they were so tired by the time darkness fell that you could not have awakened them with a trumpet.
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br />   However, all the boys soon learned that you either found a way to secure your belongings or you found them being used as playthings. Curtains across the doors stopped some of the dragonets, but not all. Finally, the carpenters were brought in to build actual doors after Lord Khumun tired of replacing bed coverings.

  “What’s next, the furniture?” he grumbled to Kiron. “No, don’t answer that. I can see how fast they’re growing.” And he gave the orders for doors.

  The dragonets found the carpenters to be even more fascinating than the furniture, and followed the poor men from pen to pen, crowding around to watch, tasting the wooden planks, trying to steal the tools. It made for an interesting day for everyone, as the boys tried to keep the dragonets away from the carpenters, and the dragonets tried to get at the carpenters, and the carpenters worked probably a great deal faster than they ever had in their lives, sure that the dragonets would go from tasting the wood to tasting them.

  Avatre had never acted like this—but then, Avatre had been raised in isolation from every other dragon but Kashet. Kashet had been an adult, not at all interested in playing; it gave Kiron a pang to think of how lonely she must have been.

  And yet, he had spent every free moment of time with her. And he had played with her. So perhaps she had been all right.

  The one thing he found himself wishing, though, was impossible.

  He could not help but think how entranced Ari would have been to see all of this, and wish that his mentor could have been there.

  It might even have made him laugh again. And that would have been worth more to Kiron than all the Gold of Honor in Alta.

  TWELVE

  KIRON stood before the single most important man in the compound, and asked for the moon, the sun, and the stars.

  “I want to teach the boys how to fly a dragon now,” said Kiron to Lord Khumun. “I think that putting an inexperienced rider on a fledgling dragon is going to get someone hurt or killed, and there are people who have the ears of the Great Ones who would be pleased if that happened.”

  He did not come out and say that the Magi would be just as glad if the Jousters began having a bout of trouble, but they both knew who he was talking about. For once, the Magi were not getting the credit for victory. Their storms might be keeping the Tian Jousters on the ground, but it was the Altan Jousters, not some storms too far away to be seen, that were being lauded as the force that was turning the tide in this war.

  So Kiron had intercepted Lord Khumun just after his daily inspection of the dragon pens, for Lord Khumun did not leave the running of the compound up to his Overseer—or rather, Lord Khumun was the Overseer, in the sense that he personally inspected everything, every day, and knew the names of every inhabitant of the compound right down to the dragon boys.

  The Lord of the Jousters regarded him steadily, arms crossed over his chest. “All right. I can see where that might be true enough. And it is true that the failure of one of us reflects badly on all of us. What did you have in mind, bearing in mind that all of the dragons we have are out fighting or flying patrols every day?”

  Kiron cleared his throat, and began his carefully prepared argument, reminding himself that the worst that could happen would be that Lord Khumun would say “no.” “Simply flying—taking off, doing simple maneuvers over the compound, and landing—isn’t going to task a dragon at all, especially not if it’s only enough to get their muscles warmed up. I want my boys to start taking the beasts up and warming them up before their assigned rider takes them out, and that is how they will learn to fly before their own dragonets fledge. To start with, I want to use only the two desert dragons that laid our eggs. They’re both Tian dragons, so they were caught in Tia as fledglings rather than adults and they’re tamer. And frankly, they’re lazier. A lazy dragon is what I want for a new rider.”

  Lord Khumun nodded thoughtfully, and pursed his lips. “And I can also see where having your boys warm up a lazy dragon might actually be to our advantage. I’ve noticed that those two lose some of their lethargy once they’ve been moving for a while. Go on.”

  Yes indeed, Lord Khumun knew everything having to do with the Jousters and their beasts. There could be no equivalent to “Vetch and Avatre” here; had anyone hidden an egg or a growing dragonet in an empty pen, Lord Khumun would have known within the day. Not that Kiron could fault Haraket, the Overseer of the Tian Compound—the Altan Compound was less than half the size of the Tian equivalent. It wasn’t that Haraket was careless; no, it was that Lord Khumun was an absolute fanatic about all things having to do with his Jousters.

  On the other hand, there would be no equivalent to the dreadful accident that allowed Avatre to be hatched either.

  “I’ll go up on Avatre at the same time, keeping the height advantage above them, so that if the dragon tries any tricks, we can herd them down again. Two dragons doing two runs each day means that my boys will each get a practice ride every other day.” Now he made a face. “I’d put them up on Avatre, too, but there’d be no one up there with them as a safeguard.”

  “That assumes she could be gotten into the air with you still on the ground,” Lord Khumun pointed out. “I think it unlikely that at this stage she would accept another rider. Perhaps when she is older, but not now.”

  He’s talking as if he is in favor of this already. Actually, I suppose if he wasn’t he would have said no from the beginning. And he’s not going to ask me to put the others on Avatre to teach them either. Thanks be to the gods! Kiron relaxed a little at passing one hurdle—and the truth was, though he could think of other excuses why he didn’t want his friends to train on Avatre’s back, the real reason was that he didn’t want to share her. The mere thought of someone else in her saddle made him acutely unhappy. “With the training I’ve been giving them on the mock dragon, I think they’ll be comfortable in the air pretty quickly.” He waited to see what Lord Khumun would have to say about this, for Lord Khumun had been remarkably silent on the subject of Kiron’s unorthodox training methods. But what was he to do? Traditionally, the Jousters of Alta had been presented with fully-grown, trained, tala-drugged dragons, and taught to fly on them from the beginning. The dragonets were nowhere near big enough to ride.

  The mock dragon had been an idea of his own. He had racked his brain for weeks to come up with a way to simulate flying, and finally, watching a new awning being put up over a pen gave him the idea. Some training was done by putting a saddle at one end of a lever with a weight at the other, but that only gave the rider up-and-down motion. And it wasn’t very far off the ground.

  The training of the Tian dragons, with the dragons tethered within their pens, would be part of the training, but it wouldn’t bring the boys along nearly as fast as Kiron wanted—and what was more, both rider and dragonet would be beginners. As he had said, putting two beginning flyers into the air at once was trouble waiting to happen.

  Look what had happened to him, and he had some experience at flying by then!

  Then, somehow, watching that awning being re-strung, combined with the tethered fledgling, cascaded in his mind into the mock dragon.

  A tightly packed bundle of reeds the size of a dragon’s chest had been put in the center of a courtyard. Ropes had been strung through enormous eye bolts driven into the stone in each corner of the yard at the top of the wall. The ropes were then brought to the center of the yard and tied to the bundle. A dragon saddle was put on it, one of the boys strapped himself into the saddle, and then eight muscular slaves pulled on the ropes to heave the whole contraption into the air until it was suspended above the court, and the boy with it. A thick pile of loose straw with straw-filled mattresses atop that was positioned beneath the bundle.

  And then the games began.

  The object of the boy in the saddle was to remain in the saddle and relatively in control of the situation, which translated as keeping his balance no matter what happened. The object of the slaves was to unseat him. At first, this had been limited to imitating the sor
ts of movements that a dragon would make while flying—the swooping up and down of wing-beat flying, pitches to the right or left. Once those were mastered, though, all bets were off, and the slaves were given leave to make the mock dragon do anything they could manage, whether or not a real dragon would be capable of the motion. And although Kiron had done his best to make sure the mock dragon wouldn’t actually flip upside down, the slaves had managed to find a way to make it do what it wasn’t supposed to.

  The boys came off at first, of course, restraining straps or no restraining straps. They had plenty of bruises to show for it. And they got sick at first. Not anymore.

  As a consequence, he was reasonably certain that the two desert dragons would not be able to do anything to rid themselves of their brand-new riders.

  “I think that’s a reasonable idea,” said Lord Khumun. “It doesn’t tax the dragons, you’ve got safeguards in mind. And then what will you follow this with, once your wing is comfortable with the two desert dragons?”

  “I want them to all take the same sort of warm-up flights on the swamp dragons, so that all of them go up, twice a day, every day.” This wasn’t as dangerous as it might have been before the swamp dragons had been retrained. And there was a big advantage that the swamp dragons had over the desert dragons in this case; they were smaller, so they were less inclined to try violent maneuvers to rid themselves of an unwanted rider.

  Once again, Lord Khumun nodded. “I like that. If anything, the swamp dragons need warming up more than the desert dragons do, especially in the morning.

  Do you think that once your riders have mastered the swamp dragons, their own will be near fledging?”

  “I don’t know, my Lord,” Kiron said honestly. “But if they are not, I propose sending one or two out with a senior Jouster on border-patrol flights, once a day. Not fighting, but simply patrolling. If you choose to replace injured or exhausted Jousters in this way—well, just because the rider is injured or exhausted, that doesn’t mean the dragon is, and there is no reason to let the dragon laze about his pen and get out of condition.”