Joust dj-1

by Mercedes Lackey

  He learned by eavesdropping that the dragons weren't allowed to carry a grown man until they were three, but that even a male fledgling, smaller than a female, could carry the weight of a small boy. By the time the dragon could fly, its backbone could bear up under that much weight with no problem.

  In the old style of training, for the first two years that they were in captivity, the young dragons were given saddles and harnesses, then taken out on long leads and goaded to fly with the dead weight of sandbags in the saddle. This strengthened their flying, and got them used to harness, saddle, and weight on their backs.

  Baken, of course, was going for a much more tractable dragon. He had no intention whatsoever of using goads on the new dragonets, and after a lot of convincing (and based on his success so far) the other trainers agreed to follow his lead.

  Baken would follow their example, insofar as using the long leads and the sandbags went for early flying practice—but in the safety of the pens and on the four tethers, he would keep putting boys on the dragonets' backs to get them used to living weight. Furthermore, he was going to use a technique of flight training from falconry, and he planned to teach the dragonets to fly on those long leads from one end of the training field to the other on command. His plan was to teach them to fly between him and another trainer, as a dog was taught to "come" on command; this would be in return for rewards, rather than goading them into the air. This was a training technique he knew well, and the dragon trainers were mightily impressed with the ploys that Baken had used so far.

  Vetch was not going to be able to do that; he could hardly take Avatre out of the pen without being discovered. He would have to strengthen her in some other way, so that her first flight would be a strong, high, and fast one. Because, by necessity, it would be with him…

  This would be an all-or-nothing cast of the bones. They would either succeed, or fail horribly.

  He would not think of failure, or its consequences.

  So as soon as she was romping around the sands of her pen, he began getting her used to a weight on her back, improvising a harness and a small sandbag at first, then when he discovered where the dragonet harnesses were kept, purloining one and using that. He actually kept a weight on her for about half of the day when he was sure it wouldn't tire her.

  She certainly was anything but quiet; in fact, he had to make her, not one, but several toys to keep her amused. He brought her bones. He made her a big ball of rawhide stuffed with grasses, which she would pursue like a kitten with a ball of thread. Taking a cue from kittens, he rigged a rope with a scrap of silk on the end to a pole he stuck in the sand of her wallow, so she could bat at it with her foreclaws as it moved in the wind. He wrestled with her, teaching her to stop attacking when he commanded her to do so, and enforcing that she must be gentle with him, because he knew that if he did not do this now, while she was small, he could never control her behavior when she was big. The closer it got to the Dry season, the faster she seemed to grow, strong and agile.

  The complement of dragonets was now at the fifty that the Great King had stipulated, with as many new boys—at a cost of thirteen Jousters and several dragon hunters that were not themselves Jousters. There was talk, now, of enlarging the compound—because the Great King had gotten wind of the new training techniques, and if they worked, he wanted still more Jousters and dragons…

  This did not bode well for Alta. Vetch could only pray that the Altans had spies abroad to hear such things.

  At just about the time when the magic-spawned storms stopped altogether, Baken stopped needing Vetch's help, for now there were two or three of the new boys that weren't any larger than he was that he could use as "riders" to get the youngsters used to the presence of a human on their backs. Half of the dragonets had learned "up" and "down," and the blue dragonet was at the stage of learning to fly short distances on a lead. Vetch stole time to watch whenever he could get a moment, trying to make out how he could adapt all of this to training Avatre.

  It was just as well that Vetch didn't need to help Baken anymore because Avatre was taking more and more of his time. He had thought he had been busy when all she did was sleep. Now that she was active, she needed attention.

  Fortunately, Ari didn't know that he wasn't helping Baken now, and Vetch didn't intend to tell him. As long as Ari presumed that he was off helping the other dragon boy whenever he was missing, there would be nothing at issue.

  He never saw Haraket anymore and Ari only in passing. He was worried about Ari, though; the Jouster was thinner, and looked as if he was not sleeping well. But there wasn't much that Vetch could do to help him—

  —and besides, if Ari learned about Avatre—

  Vetch slept entirely too well, but that was hardly surprising, considering how much work he was doing over the course of the day. He was so used to doing things at the run, that he wasn't sure now if he'd ever be able to do them at a more leisurely pace without feeling that something was wrong.

  He sometimes surprised himself by how strong he had gotten, when he found that he had absentmindedly lifted some weight that would have been so far beyond his strength a few moons ago that he would not have considered trying to heft it. He hadn't gotten all that much taller, and he certainly wasn't a little barrel of muscle in the way that one or two of the other boys were. He was still wiry and lean, but it seemed that all the good food and hard work had strengthened every single muscle fiber to an amazing degree.

  Avatre was also a great deal stronger than he would have guessed; when he loaded her with a sandbag that was nearly his equivalent, she hardly noticed the weight, and there was nothing to tell by looking at her that she hadn't been wild-caught like the others. He had to wonder, given how lively and big she was, if giving tala to the growing youngsters did more than simply make them easier to handle—if, perhaps, it actually slowed their growth. Certainly Kashet was the biggest male in the compound, nearly as big as any of the females, and he had never gotten tala. Avatre was going to be huge; bigger than her mother Coresan, for certain, and females were always bigger than the males.

  She was not as vocal as the other youngsters either; they meeped all the time, their tone rising in shrillness the closer it got to feeding time. Avatre only gurgled happily when he appeared in the doorway, hissed if something alarmed her, and made no other sounds but a soft chuckling when she settled down for a nap with her head in his lap. So the last of Growing season was spent, with Vetch so busy that he could not have told how many days had passed from storm to weakening storm.

  At last, one day, he woke to find that all of the tala bushes planted within the compound had blossomed overnight. The air was filled with their peculiar fragrance, sweet, but with a bitter undertone, like myrrh, carried through the corridors by an arid wind that must have begun in the night, coming from off the desert.

  The kamiseen———the Dry just began—he recognized with a start, as he awoke with the scent in his nostrils, out of an uneasy dream of laboring at Khefti's wells, and heard the wind whining around the corners of the walls of Avatre's pen. He had been here a year!

  Although these pampered bushes within the compound always blossomed a day or so before any others, this, and the wind, were the signals that the Dry had officially begun. Unless the sea witches had some new and profoundly powerful magic, there would be no more storms to keep the dragons inside the borders of Tia.

  The Commander took the coming of the Dry as his sign as well, and ordered that the Jousters resume their overflights of Altan territory.

  He sweetened this order with another: to signal the start of the new patrols, he decreed a two-day festival within the walls of the compound, and provisioned it himself, from his own treasure houses.

  Work hardly stopped, of course, but the Jousters were not to go on patrol at all during the festival, and the servants and dragon boys were given leave to partake when their duties were done. Anything in the way of chores that did not immediately pertain to the care of the dragons was suspen
ded for those two days—no leather work, no housekeeping (Palace slaves were brought in to take care of it), even the dragonets were given a reprieve from training (somewhat to Baken's displeasure). The landing court was laid out for the celebration with a bazaar full of merchants selling trash and treasures, and food and drink tents, jugglers, acrobats, musicians, and dancers, games of chance and games of skill.

  The Jousters had their own games, out on the training field, in which they were to compete with each other. They made passes at a ring suspended from a thread which they were to catch on their lances, they swooped down to snatch up bags of straw which they were to drop again on a target painted on the ground, they had races for speed only, and races where speed and agility counted equally.

  The landing court was set up the day before, and on dawn of the first festival day, the entertainers were in place, the tents set up, and food of every sort was set out temptingly. The festival began at dawn exactly, with a fanfare of trumpets from the musicians, as those servants who had been freed from duties entirely— and the Jousters, of course—were summoned to the celebrations. Vetch was already awake, of course, but the trumpets startled and frightened Avatre, and he began the day feeling annoyed and irritated.

  Then Vetch found himself dodging boys who were suddenly as quick as he to get their feeding and cleaning chores done. Never had the corridors been so congested, so early. And worse was to come—so far as he was concerned, who had no reason to love this festival. The kitchen court was closed, all the servants, serfs, and slaves getting their own holiday, with everyone expected to go to the festival site to get their meals. Once he was out of the area of the pens—which swiftly emptied, as the dragon boys finished their duties and fled to the delights in the landing court—the place was full of strangers.

  Once he sent Ari and Kashet off, he slouched off in a sour mood to get himself breakfast. He didn't even trouble to get a bath—he wasn't going to compete with the little popinjays who were using up all the water in order to try and impress some girl or other! No, he would wait until the afternoon, when there was no one to compete with, and he could get a bath without some stranger poking his nose in the door and staring at him.

  For his privacy was gone along with the quiet; nobles practically swarmed the place, especially the Jousters' quarters. It was a repetition of the usual scene at the training field, only within the compound itself. The glitter of gold, the gleam of jewels, and the sheen of expensive fabrics made him glower with disgust at the amount of show. There were so many women, young and old, draped in flowers, with perfume cones atop their elaborate wigs, that the air was sometimes chokingly sweet with their scent. He was glad that all visitors had been barred from the pens on account of the dragonets, who were easily startled. The fluttering ribbons, the high, shrill voices, and the idiotic babbling would have left the place in an uproar that would take a week to undo.

  The only place where Vetch could get away from the press of the curious and the fawning was in the pens themselves. Not feeling in the least like celebrating when he knew very well that what was being celebrated was the start of more aggression on his own people, he found the pens far more congenial.

  So that was where he took himself, after a brief visit to the landing court where he got fried fish—a delicacy that seldom graced the tables of the dragon boys—and some date-stuffed honey pastries for breakfast. The corridors were, by then, thankfully, echoingly, empty.

  He wasn't surprised to find Kashet still gone. Ari was a senior Jouster, and at this point his skill and Kashet's were near-legendary. He would, no doubt, be competing in the games for most of the day—or perhaps demonstrating that falling-man-catch trick for an admiring audience, but done with a dummy instead of a man. But as Avatre was finally having a nap, worn out from fretting at the unaccustomed noises, and he didn't want to disturb her, he settled down in Kashet's pen for his meal.

  He had just about finished it and was licking the last of the honey from his fingers, when, much to his surprise, a shadow darkened the sun above the pen, and when he looked up, he saw that Ari and Kashet were returning.

  He leaped to his feet—very glad now that Ari had found him here, and not in the other pen. He sent a brief thanks to the gods for sending Avatre that bout of sleepiness as he waited for Kashet to settle, then trotted over to the great dragon's side.

  "Unharness him," Ari said, with shocking brusqueness, as he threw his leg over the saddle and slid down to the ground. "We won't be going back out. The cursed games can go on without us. And I hope they all choke on fish bones."

  Vetch stared at him with an open mouth; Ari's face was white, his mouth pinched, and that last had been said with such savagery that Vetch was sure Ari meant every word. "Why?" he blurted.

  "You don't want to know," Ari replied, and started to stalk off.

  But something inside Vetch made him act without thinking; he grabbed the Jouster by the elbow and wouldn't let him go. "Yes, I do," he said firmly, shocking himself with this insane act of audacity, but unable to stop himself. "Or maybe I don't—but if you don't tell someone, you're going to snap, and then where will Kashet be?"

  Perhaps nothing other than the stark truth that if Ari failed, his dragon would suffer, got through to him. He resisted for just a moment, then his shoulders sagged, and he turned back to Vetch. His eyes were bleak, his mouth twisted, and his skin so pale beneath his tan that it looked as if every bit of blood had been drained from him.

  "You don't want to know. And I want you to know that I didn't have anything to do with what happened. If I'd been ordered to do it, I swear, either I would have stopped it, or I would have flown Kashet into the wilderness instead and never come back—

  That shocked Vetch even more. Ari? Threatening to desert? "Tell me—" he just barely managed.

  Ari took a deep breath. "There's a date orchard, just over the border. The Altans haven't bothered to even try to protect it for seasons and seasons, I don't know why, I suppose it isn't profitable enough. There's a Tian village of settlers right on the edge of the orchard right across the border; when the dates ripen, they harass the Altans and grab the dates for themselves. It's happened every year, like the Flood. But this year—maybe because of the sea-witch-sent storms, the rightful owners got up some courage, they fought back. I mean, really fought; they chased off or wounded most of the Tian settlers who tried to steal their fruit, and even killed two. So yesterday, instead of going out on patrol, one of the senior Jousters decided to teach them a lesson. He led an entire wing of Jousters to the village, where they stooped down on the villagers in their fields, grabbed whoever they could get, carried them up—and dropped them."

  Just like on the battlefield, Vetch thought, his heart growing cold inside him. Only—these weren't enemy commanders being smashed on the rocks. These were simple farmers, who'd done nothing except defend what belonged to them, who had only tried to protect what had been stolen year after year, in defiance of laws and treaties.

  "They didn't stop until there wasn't anyone left in the open. They—weren't even all men—" Ari got out between clenched teeth. "There were women. And some children."

  Dropped, to plummet to the earth and die, smashed like eggs. They hadn't had a chance. Vetch wanted to scream, weep—he couldn't even breathe.

  "I didn't find out about it until today. When the target game started." Ari grated, each word wrung from him, each phrase drenched in pain and anguish. "When they started boasting about it—and saying that the next time they went out—they should stop long enough to paint a target on the ground for more sport!"

  Vetch's anger, so long dormant, erupted within him like a volcano, and filled him with such rage, that if Ari's voice hadn't been flooded with outrage and pain that nearly matched his, he'd have gone for the Jouster's throat, just because he was Tian. As it was, he swayed where he stood, going cold and hot by turns, red mists passing between him and the rest of the world as he tried to hold the anger in check.

  "I will not make
war on children!" Ari shrieked—and broke away from Vetch, and ran.

  Vetch felt his knees giving, and he dropped to the ground like a stunned bird, his pain finding vent in a howl of his own, and a flood of tears that he could not stop, and did not want to.

  He came to his senses only when his eyes were swollen and gummy, his cheeks raw, and he was so dehydrated from weeping and the kamiseen that his lips were cracked and his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. Something snuffled his head—and the back of his neck.

  He looked up through blurring eyes, to see that not only was Kashet whuffing at his hair in concern, but Avatre had managed to make her way out of her own pen and into this one. She whimpered in sympathy and no little fear, though not of Kashet, apparently, who was dividing his attention between Vetch and her.

  "It's—all right—little one," he said thickly, even though it wasn't, but she couldn't know, couldn't understand what had happened, and neither could poor Kashet, who only understood that the center of his universe had screamed and run away, and the other source of his comfort was suffering, too.