His throat grew tighter, his stomach ached, and his eyes burned. Vetch didn't want to think about when it all ended; didn't want to remember the day that the strangers came, with their bronze swords and leather shields, their long spears—how they spoke to his father as if he were a slave. He still didn't know exactly what they had said; his mother had all of them sheltered in the house with her, when his father had ordered them there, she'd scolded as she never scolded until they all went into hiding.
But the memories came anyway, and once again, he was there, back in that kitchen, where the bread was burning on the hearth and his mother was paying no attention to it, though it filled the room with the scent of ruin. He was peeking around the edge of a door, and saw how the strangers demanded that his father kneel to them, like a serf. Saw how he cursed them, and picked up a sickle-It wasn't the anger that came, it was the grief. His throat swelled, and he wanted to howl out his loss like the jackals of the desert. But he didn't dare. He stuffed his hand in his mouth, to stifle his sobs, and even his anger was not proof against the sorrow that threatened to overwhelm him.
One moment, and his tall, strong father had been standing, defying the men who—he now knew—had come to steal the land that had been theirs for centuries. In the next instant, he was on the ground, and his mother had burst out of their futile "hiding place"—as if the Tians hadn't known they were there all along!—to fling herself over his body. Vetch saw it before his eyes as if it was playing out all over again; his mother was running toward the twitching body of his father, screaming, and his sisters followed her, adding their wails to hers, while he stood frozen in the doorway for a moment, before following them.
And there was red blood everywhere; it was saturating the front of his father's kilt, pouring into the dust beneath his feet, a single drop on the cheek of his killer, a smear on the blade of the murderous sword.
He didn't remember leaving the house, but he was running, too, not thinking, only screaming at the top of his lungs, screaming at the soldiers. Then, horror on top of horror, the Tian soldiers grabbed her, grabbed him, grabbed his sisters, with the remote indifference of a housewife taking up a chicken for the pot.
Grabbed them, throwing them down beside the road, in the dust, and if any of them tried to rise, they were kicked or clubbed with the butt of a spear until they stayed prostrate. He remembered the taste of dirt and tears, of the blood from his split lip, remembered how his youngest sister wouldn't stop screaming and the soldiers kicked her in the head until they knocked her unconscious.
She was never right after that…
He couldn't get any words past his closed throat, but Ari was just as silent. In a way, he was glad, because if Ari had spoken a single word, he might have flown at him in a rage, and then—
—well, he didn't know what would happen. He certainly wouldn't hurt the Jouster, no more than he had had any chance of hurting the soldier who had killed his father. But in another way, it left him alone in the dark with unbearable memories.
He remembered how, once he was face-down in the dirt, he shook all over; he recalled, viscerally, how he was afraid even to look up, while the sun baked down on his back, and flies buzzed in his father's blood. He remembered that sound, that horrible sound; he was never able to bear the sound of flies after that. He remembered the bruises on his arms where the soldiers had grabbed him, on his ribs where they kicked him, the hundred and one scrapes and cuts where he'd been flung into the ground, the painful bump on his head where one of them had hit him with a spear.
But most of all, he remembered the terrible grief, and the helplessness. Grief that nearly strangled him, and fear, for the bottom had dropped out of the universe and everything he had trusted in was gone.
The soldiers made them lie there in the dirt beside the road as another stranger arrived, this one with a family and a wagonload of furnishings.
Then the soldiers dragged them off their faces, all but Dershela, who lay on her side, her face black and blue. Her, they picked up by her sheath, which tore, leaving one breast exposed, and dropped her behind the rest of them. The soldiers made them all kneel and watch as the strangers invaded their home, and went through the house, pulling out everything they owned.
Had owned.
And before long, it was unrecognizable.
Every article was picked over; the little that the soldiers considered worth taking was pocketed, and the rest destroyed. Every bit of pottery was smashed, every scrap of fabric torn up, every bit of wood splintered and chopped to bits. Every possession was reduced to trash, then tossed onto the dust heap.
But not before his father's body was thrown there first, with less ceremony than if it had been the carcass of a pariah dog, then covered with the trash that had been his possessions and pride. There was no burial ceremony for his father, no offerings, no prayers, no shrine. His ghost would roam the night, unhomed, rootless, unable to find its way to the Summer Country across the Star Bridge.
And then that Tian family took possession of the house that had been home to his father's line, unbroken, for long, long years. As the strange furnishings moved in, the man's wife began berating the servants that they had brought with them—and criticizing the house at the top of her lungs. Her shrill cries filled the air like the calling of a quarrelsome goose as she bullied her servants into emptying the wagon into the house that was rapidly becoming unrecognizable.
Only then was Vetch's family hauled to their collective feet (except for poor Deshara, who was still unconscious) while the officer explained to them what all this meant—that they had been punished for harboring enemies of the Tians, for being enemies of the Tians, for attacking the Tians. That their land was confiscated, and they were graciously being allowed to live, even though their lives were forfeit because the male of the house had attacked an officer of the Tian army.
And that was when they learned what the word "serf" meant.
He could not remember the exact words, only the sense of it, but then again, the sense of it had been beaten into him for so many years that it hardly mattered. That he was bound to the land, and bound to serve the ones who owned it. That he had no rights, except that of being fed and housed. That he was of less import than the kitchen cat, who at least, was of a sacred line going back to the Pashet, the cat goddess.
And last of all, that within the space of a morning, he and his family had been reduced to chattel. They could own nothing, earn nothing, be nothing. They had become possessions, and ones of little value.
Then, after seeing their husband and father murdered for no reason, after lying without food or water in the hot sun for hours, after watching everything they had ever known utterly and wantonly destroyed, they were permitted to rise and start their new lives. They were allowed to make their beds out of whatever they could get from the discards and what they could gather with their own two hands among the weeds and along the riverbank. They were permitted to lodge in what had been the cattleshed, to work their own land without profit or payment.
He choked on his tears now, as he had then, when he had curled into a ball on the malodorous pile of river reeds, and wept himself into exhaustion.
And he remembered how from that day onward, he had eaten what scraps were given to him in bitterness, flavored with tears, seasoned with grief too deep for words.
He didn't want to remember. But he could never forget.
"Five hundred years ago, boy," Ari said softly, breaking the horrible silence, "Five hundred years ago, a people called the Heyksin came to Tia. Did you know that? To us, they are the Cursed People, the Nameless Ones, because of what they did to us. Only scribes, priests, and a few fools who call themselves scholars still know what they called themselves. And they destroyed our army, killed our King and our nobles, and sent their people to take the farms and livelihoods of Tians who had lived in their little mud-brick houses for hundreds of years."
He paused, and breathed into Kashet's nostrils. "So. Does that story sound familiar to yo
u?"
"I— " Vetch couldn't speak.
"Well, perhaps if I continue," Ari replied, as if he had not heard that faltering reply. "Yes, they sent their people to become the owners and masters of homes they themselves had not built, had not tilled. And the Tians who had called those places home now served the newcomers as slaves. When the Tians rebelled, they were beaten and suffered further depredations, when they dared to strike against their overlords, dozens of innocents were slaughtered in retribution. That was what was happening to us, five hundred years ago, when your grandfather's grandfather's grandfather was settling his little farm, winning it from the swamp beside the Great Mother River. Then we Tians learned to ride dragons, to drive chariots, and to make bronze swords and spearheads, and we rose up and drove the Heyksin out. There are those who even say that it was from the Altans that we learned to do these things, though most would deny this, or say that it was the gods themselves who taught us. Oh, we were so proud of ourselves! We were sure that the gods had blessed us, and that we were destined to create a great nation."
"But what happened? If it was Altans who taught— " He stopped; he couldn't go on.
Ari bent his head over Kashet's. "Well, it depends upon who you ask. Some say that your people attacked ours. And that might very well be true—and it may not. I think it more likely that as we pressed northward, the Altans were pressing south, and we met and quarreled over the spoils. And perhaps it was only a matter of your kings hating ours, and ours despising yours. I think—only think, mind, that the Altans probably did attack us when we grew strong enough to threaten them. I believe that they originally hoped to put us, the younger kingdom, in our place. And Vetch, they do continue to attack us, there is no denying that; they do send young warriors into our villages to kill the important men or the Great King's officials there. They set ambushes on the road to murder and rob. And we use this as a reason to muster the army and press northward again, to 'pacify the countryside.' The wrongs are so tangled up now that there is no disentangling them. The problem is, we did—and are doing—to you what the Heyksin did to us. The problem is, because we cannot catch the agents and soldiers, we take out our wrath upon those Altans we can catch."
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."
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