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  That one small hope was really all that Vetch had, and it was what he lived for.

  Yesterday, when Khefti had gone to sleep for his afternoon nap without assigning Vetch a task to follow filling the cistern, Vetch had seized the opportunity to run down to the river and dig raw latas roots to hide under his pallet to eat later. Now, in the dry season, the Great Mother River had shrunk from a fruitful matron to the slimmest of dancing girls, and a languid one at that. The latas was easier to reach, the roots now buried in the mud flats rather than waist-deep in the river water, and crocodiles disinclined to pursue potential prey over the mud flats when so many fish were stranded in ever-shallower pools left behind by the receding Great Mother River. While the latas had been in bloom, the glorious blue flowers rising on their waving stems above the surface of the river, Vetch had mentally noted every patch, so he knew where even the smallest and least accessible clumps were. He had to; he was in competition with every other hungry mouth in the village. Perhaps none were as starved as he, but unlike onions and barley, the roots were free for the digging, and all it took was a stick and determination to get them.

  In digging up the roots, he had come across a generous lump of nearly-pure clay, of the sort that Khefti would have been very pleased to see. To Vetch, it had been a treasure as fine as the roots he carried home, for any time that Vetch got his hands on clay, he would make an abshati figure to use to curse Khefti-the-Fat.

  He certainly knew most of what there was to know about molding abshati figures, for he heard the instructions bellowed in the ears of Khefti’s apprentices, day in, day out. The making of such figures was usually for funerary purposes, not cursing—there was a good living in the making of abshatis to represent the deceased or to supply the spirit with servants in the next life. A good half of Khefti’s pottery income came from funerary wares, or replacing such items as went into the tomb from the household stores. Vetch probably could have made abshatis as good as any of those turned out by the apprentices, had Khefti allowed him. But no one would purchase an abshati made by a serf, an Altan, the enemy, lest it carry some sort of subtle curse against Tians that would render the magic the priests would say over it ineffective.

  Ordinary mud would not hold the detail he needed to make a good figure, nor would it shatter the way a well-dried statue of clay would. But although his master was a potter, there was no way for Vetch to purloin his clay, for he guarded it as jealously as his tala. Good clay was valuable, and a careful accounting was made of every weighable scrap of it.

  This time, through some quirk of good fortune, the figure Vetch had modeled was a particularly good one. He had managed to get the limbs all in the right proportions, and Khefti’s bulging belly, ugly frown and perpetually-creased brows just right. Perhaps it was crude, and the face a bit blobby, but anyone who looked at it would surely recognize who it was meant to be. While it was still wet, he had filled the mouth with bits of thistle, and shoved acacia thorns deep into the belly. Then he had set it up on top of the wall in a hidden corner to dry hard in the sun and the kamiseen, and when all of the work was done for the day, because it was such a good likeness, he decided that instead of merely grinding the thing under his heel while chanting his curses, he would try something different.

  He had dug a hole in the path in the moonlight and put the figure in it. That way he could tread on it with every bucket hauled to and from the well, reciting the curses in his head. Maybe if he did that enough, one of them would fly home and strike true. Knowing he would put his foot on his master each time he traveled the path kept him going, even in this heat.

  The dust that flew up in a puff from under his bare foot as he planted it on the burial spot was nearly the same no-color as his foot itself, coated with dried clay and dust as it was. All the better; cursing was earth-magic, and maybe this time the links would be strong enough to make the curse stick. Vetch had tried, and more than once, to get something of his master’s person to put into the figures he made. But Khefti was a coward, always afraid of magic and curses, and was so careful of such things that he never pared his nails without counting all the bits before burning them, and even made his barber burn the hair he’d scraped off the master’s misshapen head before Khefti would leave the shop. Well, Khefti was not well-beloved among his neighbors, so perhaps he was right to be so concerned.

  Vetch reluctantly took his heel from the spot where the figure lay buried, and heaved the bucket forward another step. His arms ached so much, and his legs were so wobbly from exhaustion that it was all he could do to keep from dropping to his knees in the dust, but he dared not set the bucket down for an actual rest. At any moment, Khefti might awaken from his nap and look out to see if Vetch was working.

  Every morning and every afternoon, as long as the kamiseen blew, he filled the drip-cistern that fed the fragile pottery pipes that in turn watered his Tian master’s tala plants. The only source of water for the cistern was the Great Mother River or the master’s well, and neither was easier than the other to get water from.

  If he fetched water from the well, it meant pulling up the water one bucket at a time, bringing up the rope, hand over hand, with the bucket feeling as though it was getting heavier all the time. And the well was (of course) nearly as far from the cistern as the river, though in the opposite direction. The river was marginally farther away, though he would not have to drag the weighty bucket up its rope. But the clear water from the well wouldn’t clog the pottery pipes the way that muddy water from the river would, unless Vetch was very careful when he filled the bucket. Being “very careful” meant wading out into the river, up to his knees—which put him in the way of the crocodiles, who would not turn down prey that came so obligingly within their reach.

  Vetch hated this bucket, too heavy, too big, too awkward, and if he’d dared, he’d have put a hole in the bottom of it. But if he did, Khefti would probably find something worse for him to use—bigger and heavier, or so small as to be nearly useless.

  Tala could only be grown during the dry season, after the Great Mother River had shrunk to a shadow of her wet-season greatness. It only set its berries after the sun-baked fields of wheat and barley were harvested and reduced to bleached stubble and the earth beneath the stubble was riddled with cracks as wide as a man’s hand. But tala fruits were worth their weight in electrum, for tala fruits gave the Jousters their ability to control their great dragons.

  Dragons . . . dragons and tala were inseparable. The only reason to grow the tala was because of the dragons, the creatures that were the greatest weapons that the Tians had. Vetch had only ever seen the dragons at a far distance, overhead, flying out from the city of Mefis a little up the river, gold and scarlet, blue and green against the hard, bright blue of the sky. They would have been beautiful, if they were not so terrible.

  Dragons—well, in part, they were responsible for his being a serf. The war would not have gone so badly for Alta if the Tians hadn’t had so many more dragons and Jousters. He supposed, dully, that he should be cursing them, too—but he could only focus his hate on one target at a time, and at the moment, that target was Khefti.

  Vetch stumbled over a clod and trod down hard on a stone, saving the bucket from going over at the last moment. “Night-demons take you!” he cursed the clod and stone alike, and thought, resentfully, that if Khefti were to allow him the clothing that were allotted to a slave, he would have straw sandals, and he would be saved stone bruises, saved the burning heat that came up through his hardened soles. Khefti’s paths were like Khefti’s heart; hard and uncaring. What could it possibly cost to permit his one serf a simple pair of sandals?

  That was the moment when a revelation, and a sickening one, came to him. And he realized that one of his errors in cursing Khefti might have been in the phrasing of the first part of the curse. He had specifically said my sandal to grind his head into the dust. But Vetch wasn’t wearing sandals, didn’t own sandals (not even the cheapest, woven-straw kind every slave got) and likely nev
er would own sandals. Granted, that was the way that the magician Vetch had spied on had phrased his curse for his customer, but the customer had worn sandals.

  Vetch ground his teeth in frustration, and jerked at the rope handle of the bucket. Well, he would continue the cursing for the entire three days, but how could he have overlooked something so simple?

  Better he should have cursed the tala fields—

  But that would be a dangerous thing to do as well as an audacious one, potentially more dangerous than cursing his master. Granted, the mud-brick wall held little shrines to every god that could be invoked, and plenty of talismans for growth and plenty, which should have prevented any harm whatsoever from coming to the fields, but if Khefti even thought that Vetch was cursing the fields, his stick would be out and drumming a beat on Vetch’s back for days.

  Besides, Vetch wanted to hurt Khefti directly, not indirectly. And anyway, as the son of a farmer, someone who loved and served the land, something within Vetch shrank from wishing harm even on a tiny plot of tala plants.

  Vetch’s master was not a farmer; he was a potter and the master of a brick yard. Nevertheless, he made a great deal of money from his little tala field; his workshops were for his daily bread, but his tala bought him luxuries that his neighbors envied. A harvest like this one would bring more than enough to pay for a rock-carved tomb in the Valley of Artisans, a tomb he could not otherwise have afforded, and for which his apprentices were making a veritable army of abshati servants and pottery funerary wares fit for a man far above Khefti’s station. It also paid for all manner of luxuries: fine linen kilts, many jars of good date wine every day, melons, honey cakes, and roast duck on his table on a regular basis. Khefti even had a melon cooling in his well at this moment, a true luxury in the dry season.

  Oh, melon. . . .

  Just the thought of a melon made Vetch’s stomach cry out with hunger. He hadn’t even tasted a melon rind in an age. Khefti thriftily had his cook pickle the rinds from his melons, in keeping with his parsimonious nature.

  And that thought led down the well-worn path of food. Good bread and beer, melon and dates and pomegranate, honey and fish; all the things that Vetch had not tasted since he became a serf. For that matter, he had not had enough to fill his belly since the last of the great Temple Festivals at the beginning of the growing season, and that was only because it was the Temple of Hamun that provided the bounty. The raw latas roots Vetch had eaten this morning (in addition to his allotted stale loaf end) had helped with the never-ending hunger, but nothing would ever make it stop altogether.

  From the moment Vetch had entered Khefti’s service, he was always hungry; as the savory aromas from Khefti’s kitchen tantalized his nose, he would be making a scanty meal of whatever Khefti allotted him. Breakfast, a palm-sized loaf of yesterday’s dark barley bread (he could have eaten half a dozen of the same size), or supper, a tiny bowl of pottage his family wouldn’t have fed to a pig and another little loaf of stale bread. Sometimes the fare was varied by the addition of an onion beginning to go bad. Lunch was whatever he could find, in the hour when Khefti slept—a handful of wild lettuce, latas roots grubbed out of the riverbank and eaten raw, wild onions so strong they made the eyes water. Sometimes he found wild duck eggs in season; sometimes there were berries or palm fruits, or dates fallen to the ground. Mostly, he got only what Khefti gave him. He hadn’t seen cheese or meat or honey cakes since the farm was taken. He dreamed about food all the time, and there was never a moment when his stomach wasn’t empty. He went to sleep, curled around his hunger, and woke with it gnawing at his spine.

  The only thing that ever really competed with the hunger was anger.

  And anger was as constant a companion as hunger. Not that he could do anything about his anger, but at least when he was angry, sometimes he’d get so worked up that he’d upset his stomach, and then the hunger would go away for a little.

  And when he was angry, he could make the loneliness and the pain and the fear recede for a little. When he was angry, he wasn’t on the verge of the tears that often threatened to overwhelm him. Sometimes, anger was the only defense he had—when the village boys plagued him and threw stones at him, when Khefti beat him. He couldn’t strike back, but at least he could keep from weeping, giving them the satisfaction of knowing that they hurt him. Crying would make him into a greater target for torment than he already was; tears were a sign of weakness he couldn’t afford.

  But he was truly the most miserable of boys, and sometimes he thought that anger was the only possession he had that could not be taken from him.

  And anger was, perhaps, the only thing that kept him alive, in the midst of a life hardly worth living.

  He slept on a pile of reeds he had cut, under the same awning that sheltered the wood for the bread oven from rain, in the outer back court, beyond the kitchen court. His clothing was a loinwrap of whatever rags were deemed unsuitable even for household use, and only when it was little more than a collection of holes held together by dirt and threads like spider’s silk was it ever replaced. Thus Khefti gave lip service to the provision of “food and shelter” for his serf. Under Khefti, Vetch had nothing that was not scant, except for anger and hunger.

  Well, one thing more, perhaps. He had hatred.

  He hated Khefti with a despairing, dull hatred that was as constant as the anger and hunger and was surpassed only by the fear that Khefti inspired.

  His stomach growled again, and grated painfully. Sweat prickled Vetch’s scalp, and a drop of sweat trickled down his temple, down his face, and down his neck, leaving behind a trail of mud in the dust that coated him. But the hot, dry wind swiftly dried it before he could free a hand to wipe it away, adding one more itch to all of the insect bites and healing scratches he was always plagued with. His stomach pressed urgently against his backbone, and he was tired, so tired—even that anger that never left him was not enough to overcome how tired he was.

  What had he done that the gods should treat him so?

  How was it fair, that Khefti claimed him and could work him like a mangy donkey because he had bought the house and a thin strip of the land that had once belonged to Vetch’s father? How was it right, that the Tian thieves had taken the farm that had been Vetch’s home from those who had lived and worked it for generations? What justified what had been done to Vetch’s family, to a man who had not so much as raised a hand in self-defense against the Tians?

  Anger lived in his belly, waking and sleeping, but it was an impotent anger with nowhere to go. And at times like this, it was a weary anger that had worn itself out on the unyielding stone of his life.

  A few steps more, and he made it to the side of the above-ground stone cistern. With a sigh of relief, he eased the bucket to the ground, and went up the two steps that allowed a little fellow like him to reach the cistern lid. He slid the wooden cover aside, pausing for just a second to savor the momentary breath of cool damp that escaped, then groped behind him for the bucket handle, ready to haul it up again.

  It wasn’t there.

  The anger in him roused, and gave him a flare of energy. Vetch whirled, expecting to find that one of the Tian boys who apprenticed with his master had tilted the bucket on its side, allowing it to spill its precious burden into the thirsty, hard-packed earth. Or worse, had stolen the bucket—which would force him to go to Khefti, who would beat him for losing it. Then he would have to fill the cistern with whatever Khefti gave him, crippled by a back aching and raw.

  Someone had taken the bucket, all right, but it wasn’t an apprentice.

  Behind him, a tall, muscular Tian—a warrior, by his build, and one of the elite Jousters, by the heavy linen kilt, the wide brown leather belt, and the empty leather lance socket hanging from it—held the heavy bucket to his lips, gulping down the master’s well water with the fervor of one who was perishing of thirst. Vetch stared at him, the surge of anger he’d felt at having his bucket stolen by yet another Tian overcome with sheer astonishment at seei
ng one of the Jousters here. He had never seen a Jouster so close before, not even an Altan Jouster.

  Where there was a Jouster, could his dragon be far away? Vetch looked wildly about, then a snort made him look up, to the roof of the pottery-drying shed inside Khefti’s walls, and there was the great dragon itself, looking down at him with an aloof gaze remarkably like that of one of the pampered cats that swarmed the Temple of Pashet.

  Vetch gaped; the dragon was a thing of multicolored, jeweled beauty, slim and supple, and quite as large as the shed it perched upon. A narrow, golden, large-eyed head oddly reminiscent of a well-bred horse’s, with the same slim muzzle, dished nose, and broad forehead, was surmounted by a bony crest that shaded from deep gold into a pale electrum, as pale and translucent as the finest alabaster. That elegant golden head rose on a long, flexible neck that shaded from emerald to blue. The wings, of blue shading into purple, rising from muscular shoulders twice the bulk of the hindquarters, were spread to catch the sun. The long, whiplike tail, which reversed the shading of the neck, going from green into gold, was curled around the cruel golden talons of the forefeet, as the dragon lounged comfortably on the flat roof of the shed. The eyes, though, were was what caught you and held you—slit-pupiled and the deep crimson of the finest rubies—

  Not that Vetch had ever seen the finest rubies, or indeed, any rubies. But that was what people said, and certainly the colors sported by this beast had to be every bit as gorgeous as the magnificent wall paintings in even the poorest Tian temples depicting the jewels worn by gods and kings.