Joust Read online

  She began taking him for granted, as a part of her landscape. It was tolerance rather than acceptance, but it was enough. She suffered him to clean her pen while she was in it, which was a mercy; the scheme would swiftly have fallen apart if he’d had to ask Haraket to get someone to clean the pen while he took her out of it. No matter what happened, he couldn’t actually take an egg until after nightfall, which meant that it would have to stay in the pen from the time that she laid it until sundown. If someone else had been required to help him, then farewell secrecy!

  After living the good life for several days, Coresan still snapped at strangers, and that agile tail of hers was guaranteed to deliver painful blows to the unwary. But she seemed to have decided that making life difficult for him was not going to change what she was being asked to do, and would only delay the rewards of food and grooming that she wanted. In fact, there were only two or three more attempts to intimidate him rather than strangers, and even then, the attempts were halfhearted, as if she didn’t care if he didn’t react. He had to wonder, then, what that fool of a Sobek had done with her, that she had gotten so ill-tempered.

  Perhaps all it had taken was simple neglect, after all. Though why Sobek had neglected his charge, when Coresan had not been known for being a particularly difficult dragon, baffled Vetch. Maybe it had been fear; maybe he’d been afraid of her all along, and as a consequence, kept chaining and tying her closer and closer, so that the only time she was truly free to move was when she was under saddle. Maybe that was why she’d learned the trick of snapping her tail at everyone. Sobek hadn’t ever acted as if he feared her until the last, but then, he was a blustering sort of boy, and maybe he couldn’t have admitted his fear even to himself.

  Well, in her position, as he’d thought and said before, he’d have acted the same way Coresan had. If Sobek had been chaining her short, she had certainly been partly cold all the time, since there was no way she could properly wallow on a short chain. He already knew that she’d been hungry, and that she hadn’t been properly cleaned in an age. So, cold, hungry, and itchy—it was a wonder she hadn’t tried to take off Sobek’s head, fulfilling the fears that made him ill-treat her!

  Or maybe it had just been laziness on Sobek’s part, rather than fear. Certainly Haraket seemed to think so. It was a lot easier to bring a barrow full of whatever the butcher happened to put there and leaving it for the dragon to clean out, rather than carefully observing the dragon to see if it was still hungry after the first barrow. And it was easier to skimp on grooming if the dragon was fractious.

  Or, just possibly, Sobek had stupidly thought that by keeping Coresan hungry, he would teach her not to fight him. Now, that was a technique that could work, but only if you made up for the short rations in reward morsels, tidbitting the dragon whenever she did something right, and making sure she got her full feed over the course of the day.

  If the Overseer had thought that Sobek’s fear of his dragon (rather than laziness) was the real reason for what had happened, he still wouldn’t have hesitated to dismiss him, but it wouldn’t have been in such complete disgrace.

  Haraket, so Vetch had heard, had made it known that Sobek was a shirker, a slacker, totally incompetent and the kind of boy who would find any excuse to evade doing his duty. Now the officers of the army wouldn’t have him, even in the lowliest of positions. That didn’t leave much for him but manual labor, or perhaps the scribes or artists, and Sobek had not enough patience for the former, or talent for the latter.

  Just deserts, in Vetch’s mind. No dragon, no beast, could ever be successfully starved into submission.

  Whether it was due to a full belly and a building layer of fat, due to the tala, due to kind treatment, or all three, Coresan confined her displays of temper to the most minor of outbursts with Vetch, snorts, hisses and head-tossing, spending most of her time lounging in the heat. Even those displays of pique were halfhearted, as if she was saying, Yes, you see, I am a princess, and you are beneath me, and will render me my due or feel my wrath. See? I can punish you with my display. Now, you will fetch me some of those lambs or I will make you rue it by hissing at you again. She was, in fact, turning into a creature that reminded him more of a spoiled, wealthy girl chit than a carnivorous monster.

  Yes, tending her was a great deal of work, work he could not have done without a slave assigned to take over his other chores. Actually, his chores had been divided, with a slave cleaning Ari’s quarters, and the chores in leather workshop and armory being taken up by the other dragon boys. It was more work than Kashet caused; Coresan was difficult to move about the compound, and required extra effort when he fed her and especially when he groomed her.

  Nevertheless, she did not cause him as much work as Sobek had been put to, and Vetch was convinced it had all been because of how he had handled her. It was easier to pause at the doorway and throw the impatient dragon chunks of meat until the edge was off her hunger than try and fight past her to put the barrow next to her. It was easier to chain her in the grooming pen and wait out her head-tossing and fidgeting than to fight to chain her even shorter. It was easier in general to work around her than to fight her, and when she didn’t get a fight, she lost interest in fighting. All perfectly logical, really.

  Every morning Haraket asked if there were eggs yet. Every morning, Vetch answered in the negative, truthfully. Then, slightly more than a week after the mating, the first egg appeared; Coresan had laid it some time in the night.

  He hadn’t yet given up hope, but he’d begun to wonder if, perhaps, “everyone” was wrong, and a dragon wouldn’t lay unless she’d mated more than once. But it had become habit to scan the sands of the wallow for any sign of an egg, paying close attention to parts of the pit that Coresan had been digging in the night before.

  The egg, that precious egg, was indeed in a corner of the sand pit she had been paying special attention to last night, and if he had not been looking for it, he might not have seen it, for only the barest top curve showed above the sand. He didn’t go near it, much as he wanted to; he fed her first, wanting to get some tala into her before he made any attempt to investigate it.

  When she was sated, she returned to her wallow. He walked around the pit cautiously, and with one eye always on her, in case she decided to take exception to his interest. But Coresan didn’t seem to notice him, or that he was interested in her egg; she was buried in sand, dozing, when he finally crouched down next to the object of his desire, and brushed the sand away from the top.

  The egg was exactly the same color as the sand, and the shell even had a similar texture to sandstone; it was very hard, like an enormously thick bird’s egg, rather than leathery like a snake egg. He could get his arms around it easily enough, he thought; the question was, how much did it weigh? He uncovered it further, and slid his hand underneath it. He hefted it experimentally, with one hand steadying it and one under the shell, though he didn’t try to lift it completely out of the sand that cradled it. It was as warm as the sand, and weighed about the same as a five-year-old child. Coresan didn’t seem to mind that he handled it, perhaps because she wasn’t yet brooding.

  Or perhaps it was only because this was her very first egg. With barnyard fowl, first-time mothers weren’t always very motherly.

  He covered it back up again, quickly; he didn’t want to chance it getting cold. And now the reality of it came home to him in a rush.

  An egg! Coresan had laid his egg! His hands shook, and his in-sides felt as if he’d eaten live fish. He could hardly contain his excitement. An egg! Here it was, what he’d been waiting for—

  He forced himself to calm down; he tried to look normal, although he felt anything but normal. The first person he had to get past was Haraket, when he arrived to get Coresan’s morning feed. Sure enough, the Overseer was there, making sure the tala got properly measured out, that boys were getting enough meat for their charges. Haraket asked him about eggs when he dipped the scoop into the powdered tala to shake it over Coresan’s
rations, and he just shook his head, trying to keep from looking the Overseer in the eye. Haraket took that as “there is no egg yet” and didn’t ask anything further, much to his relief. He didn’t want to lie to Haraket, not if he could help it. The gods didn’t like falsehood, and he needed the gods on his side in this. He also wasn’t entirely sure that he could lie to Haraket. He wasn’t good at lying, and the Overseer was uncannily good at knowing when someone was lying to him.

  But the egg was on his mind all day as he divided his time between his two charges. He had a choice of several courses of action now, but he would have to decide what he was going to do soon. He had to get his egg before someone else decided to check Coresan’s pen on the theory that Vetch wouldn’t necessarily know what he was looking for, or that Coresan would have buried the eggs and not allowed Vetch to see them.

  When it all came down to it, he was just a dragon boy and not even Haraket knew how much Ari had taught him about the great beasts. It was a logical supposition to presume that he wouldn’t know what to look for; until last dry season, he’d never even seen a dragon that wasn’t high in the sky. It wasn’t likely that Ari would have told anyone how much the Jouster had been teaching Vetch about dragons. Why should he? It would make no difference to anyone, and was no one else’s business.

  They probably figured that the reason that he’d gotten Coresan to behave had more to do with being a farmer’s son and knowing in general how to handle beasts than it had to do with his newly-won knowledge of the great creatures.

  He knew from his experience with geese and Ari’s stories about wild dragons that they didn’t dare let Coresan go broody over her clutch.

  So the very moment that eggs appeared, Haraket would, understandably, feel they had to take them as they appeared. For if she did go broody, they’d be in for nothing but trouble from her.

  She might not even let them get near the eggs once she went broody. Someone might get hurt or even die trying to take the eggs, if her motherly instincts finally awoke. Hens were bad enough; all hens did was to peck the hand that tried to take their eggs from underneath them, and they frequently bruised or even drew blood. He did not even want to think about taking eggs from a broody dragon if their behavior was at all similar. Maybe you could do it at night, but given that he’d already seen Kashet awaken to accept attention from Ari long after he thought that the great beast was torpid, he wouldn’t bet on a female dragon being unaware of what went on at night when she had eggs that she needed to tend.

  Even if she didn’t become protective of her clutch, if they waited to get her eggs away until after she went broody, they would probably have to give her infertile eggs, or dummy eggs to brood, or she would start looking for another mate with twice the energy she had used before. That was what happened in many birds, and if Coresan had been difficult before this—well, with the drive to mate in her at double strength, Vetch didn’t think even he would be able to handle her.

  So he could understand why Haraket would want to get each egg from her as she laid it, or shortly thereafter. He understood it, but that meant he would have to decide within a day or two what he was going to do.

  Should he take this egg, for instance?

  He could take the chance that the first egg would be fertile, and carry it off. He already knew when he could make his theft—at night, when the Jousters were in their quarters, the dragonboys at their recreations, and darkness would cover his actions. Coresan would be torpid, and would not notice him. More importantly, if she missed the egg in the morning, she would not know who had taken it.

  And he knew where he would take it when he had it—one of the empty pens on either side of Kashet’s. There were three times the number of pens than there were dragons, plenty of empty pens where an egg could incubate in the hot sands undisturbed. No one ever went into the empty pens, unless they happened to be storing something there. No one put two adult dragons next to one another, even if they appeared to get along, because of the chance that they would decide one day to fight one another. Or worse, chose one another as mates. Dragons were creatures that flocked together—sort of. They did spend a lot of time in a juvenile flock when they were young and not ready to mate, because clumsy juveniles working together were able to bring down prey that one alone couldn’t manage. And when they weren’t raising young, they also kept to a flock, but that could have been because natural hot places—natural sand wallows, sheltered places where the sun heated the sand, hot springs, and the like—were relatively few compared to the number of dragons. It could have been necessity that had them roosting together at night. But when they were fertile, they were like spotted hunting cats—sharing a territory just long enough to raise the dragonets to fledging, then parting again, and they would fight the dragon that had been a mate if there was a conflict over food, flock rank, or perches. So while there were plenty of extra pens, there was no need to take the risk of conflict by housing the beasts too closely together.

  He would put the egg where it was easy to get to, and when it hatched (if it hatched), Kashet would probably ignore the dragonet as completely as he ignored other adult dragons. Just as he was alone among the other dragons in his affection for humans, he was alone in his indifference to his fellow dragons.

  Now, instead of taking the first egg, he could wait, hope that no one noticed the growing clutch in the corner, and have his choice of eggs. Coresan could lay as many as four; he was giving her plenty of extra bone for the shells, which she would sorely need, to keep her hale and healthy. But the more eggs that appeared, the more likely it was that someone would get impatient and take a look for himself to see what Coresan was up to, and the more likely that she would go broody.

  Take the first, or wait? He wavered between the two actions all day, the egg looming large in his mind the entire time. When Kashet and Ari came in, clearly tired from taking double patrols, he still had not decided. While the rest of the Jousters were still on the lighter duty of practice and patrol, they were on a full schedule; it was a good thing that Kashet was so strong and so willing.

  “If I didn’t know he was flying twice as far as the others every day, I wouldn’t guess it,” Vetch said, as Ari handed him a lance and dismounted, as usual, with a pat on the shoulder for Kashet. “He’s tired, but not as exhausted as he could be. I think you’re more tired than he is.”

  “Well, perhaps it’s because he was first-laid,” Ari said with a proud, if tired, smile. “They hatch in order of being laid, about two days apart. First-born is supposed to be strongest and the smartest, but when the young ones are taken by dragonet hunters out in the wild, firstborn has usually fledged and gone, so they get whatever is left.”

  Then Ari strode off without looking back, which was just as well, for Vetch was still standing there with his mouth open for a long moment after he was gone.

  There it was, the deciding factor. Firstborn is the strongest. If Vetch was going to succeed, his dragon would have to be very big, very strong, and mature very quickly.

  If that had not been enough, all of the conditions that night were perfect for him to move his egg. Most of the other dragon boys all went out that night, for it was a full moon, and the father of one of them, a fisherman, had promised to take them out for night fishing in the moonlight. The Jousters’ quarters were full of music and voices; one of the others was holding festival with many of the Great King’s nobles in attendance, and even Ari, as weary as he was, had consented to attend; the boys who were not out fishing had been pressed into service for the feast. The corridors outside the pens were flooded with light from the moon, and utterly deserted—and Coresan slept like a stone, probably exhausted from laying this, the first of her eggs.

  Vetch dug the egg out of the hot sand with his bare hands. It was very warm, the texture very like that of a common pot, and unwieldy. He lifted it very carefully, transferred it to a sand-lined barrow, and trundled it to its new home without sight or sound of anyone or anything except a few bats flitting about the
corridors in search of insects attracted by the torches. The spirits of the dead were supposed to take the form of bats. Was one of them his father, flitting like a silent guardian over his son? For a moment he paused, looking for a sign—

  He sighed, as the bats went on with their hunting, paying no attention at all to him. They were probably just bats. If his father returned from the Summer Country, how could he possibly know that his Altan son was here, in the compound of the Tian Jousters? No, he would surely be flitting about the farm that had been stolen from him. Hopefully, if he had chosen to return, he was sending the worst possible dreams into the heads of those who had taken it.

  Vetch reburied the egg in the corner of the empty pen least visible from the entrance. The sands were bake-oven hot, but he had gotten used to them by now. He knew, from Ari’s stories of how he had raised Kashet, what he would have to do from this point. He would have to turn the egg at least twice a day to keep the growing dragonet from sticking to the inside of the shell. He would have to make certain that no one spotted him going into the pen. But that was the easy part.

  For if the egg was fertile, if it hatched, he would have to get food to it several times a day, also without being seen—and keep the dragonet amused once it got old enough that it didn’t sleep all the time when it wasn’t eating. Then he would have to somehow train it as Ari had trained Kashet, to carry a burden of a saddle and a rider. He would have to keep anyone from seeing the dragonet—or at least, arrange things such that no one guessed that it wasn’t one newly brought in from the wilds. If he could manage all of that—