Joust dj-1

by Mercedes Lackey

  "And if a dragon ever does learn that humans can be food?" he asked.

  "That dragon is destroyed," Ari replied flatly. "That's happened, too, in training—stupid Jousters in training who let themselves get slashed or bitten, and their dragon gets the taste of human blood. You can see it in their eyes; they've made the connection, and no human is safe. We call them 'mar dragons,' and no amount of tala can make them forget. We can't turn them loose because they've lost all fear of men, but we can't keep them, either."

  "Would that happen with Kashet?" he wondered aloud.

  Ari started to answer him, then paused. "Huh. I don't know. Dragons don't consider each other as prey, and I suppose Kashet thinks that we are dragons. It's not an experiment I'd care to try."

  Vetch enjoyed listening to Ari talk. He'd been a little worried at first, when Ari turned up after dark, wondering if Ari had something else in mind besides talking, but no more. And if he enjoyed listening, Ari appeared to enjoy having someone who would listen intelligently.

  Whatever the reason, at least he felt less alone.

  Vetch was surprised one noontide to find Haraket not overseeing the boys as they collected their meat; he was even more surprised to discover him testing the temperature of Kashet's sand wallow with his hand and forearm. At least, that was what he thought Haraket was doing; he couldn't imagine any other reason why the Overseer would be kneeling at the verge with his arm plunged into the sand.

  Vetch did not stop to question him, however, for Kashet was tossing his head impatiently, wanting his meal.

  But Haraket was frowning as he got back to his feet, and he strode over to Vetch, still frowning.

  "Get the pen completely cleaned when Kashet's away," Haraket ordered. "I mean completely. Tidy everything up. This entire row of sand wallows needs the heating spells renewed on them, and the Ghed priests mustn't be offended by anything that isn't spotless and utterly neatened."

  He glanced significantly at Vetch's pallet and his few belongings, and Vetch understood immediately. Tidy everything up meant to hide the reminders that this dragon was tended, not by a free-born dragon boy who lived with the others, but a serf. The Ghed priests were notorious sticklers for tradition, and tireless enforcers of custom.

  So he hid everything that belonged to him in the storage room, as well as anything else that happened to be lying about in the pen for good measure. Then he cleaned out wallow and "privy"—or at least raked out the top layer of sand in the wallow—and by the time the priests arrived, there was no sign even that Kashet's pen was in use.

  Wild with curiosity by this time, he hid in the storage room with the door curtain held down with a weighted bar across the bottom so that it couldn't get caught by an ill-timed breeze to reveal where he was. He peeked carefully through a tiny gap between the curtain and the doorpost, as he heard the chiming sound of sistrums and the footsteps of many people.

  He waited there while they did—whatever it was that they were doing—in the next pen over. It was hot and very close inside the storeroom, which lacked the roofline windows of a room that was going to be used by people. Sweat prickled his scalp, and a drop slid down his back as he waited. Finally Haraket led four priests and four little priestesses in a kind of solemn procession in through the door to the pen, and they arranged themselves around the wallow, a priest to each corner, the four priestesses in a line across the back wall, Haraket near the door.

  They were colorful figures; all four of the priests went shaven-headed, without a wig, but where their heads were bare, their bodies were anything but. Rather than the kilt of most men, they wore long robes of finely pleated white linen; not one robe, but three of them. The first reached to the ground, the second to the calf, and the third to the knee. Their sandals were ornamented with turquoise, and like Haraket they wore a striped sash around their waists and another running from left shoulder to right hip. But their sashes were embroidered and beaded in red, yellow, and green, and were twice as wide as Haraket's. The four young priestesses dressed in robes of whitest mist linen with wreaths of blue latas flowers about their heads, and beads of gold and carnelian at the ends of each of the hundreds of braids in their wigs. They appeared to be not much older than Vetch. Their eyes were lined with kohl and shaded with malachite, and they each wore cones of perfume atop their fine wigs.

  All four priests raised their hands together, and began to chant in time to the chiming of the sistrums shaken by the priestesses. They looked so identical at that moment that they might have been paintings on a wall done by the same artist.

  The spell was an intricate one, not some simple cursing. Vetch listened avidly as they began with a long, protracted invocation to the gods, Ghed in particular.

  Then began the real work of the spell, and that was where Vetch lost track of what they were doing completely. It seemed to involve the sand wallow, but also the Great King's palace. Both were described in exquisite detail, and the God Ghed was enjoined to take—something—from the palace, and put that same something here in the wallow. But what that was, Vetch could not make out.

  Whatever they were doing took a lot of time, though, a great deal of chanting and effort, and the priests' pleated robes were beginning to wilt a little before they were done.

  Inside the stifling storage room, Vetch was feeling a bit wilted himself.

  Finally, though, they finished. With a last shake of the sistrums, the priests dropped their arms as one, and filed out the door, as solemnly as they had come. Haraket followed them out, and Vetch heard the chiming and footsteps moving on to the next pen.

  Nevertheless, he waited until the chanting on the other side of the walls had started up again before venturing out.

  There was no doubt that their magic had worked, and worked well. The sands were hotter than ever, and as Vetch hauled all of the things out of storage that he'd so hastily shoved in. he saw a heat shimmer playing over the top of the wallow. He had to work quickly; he was already a little late to clean Ari's quarters. Fortunately, that hardly mattered; there just wasn't that much work to be done there, and he had gotten it down to an art.

  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."

  "1 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 A
ri'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. 1 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.

  Chapter Seven

  IT 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.