Joust Read online

  Vetch blinked. “He got a ceremony? By himself?” was all he could think of to say. If the Great King had held the Gold of Honor ceremony just for Ari— well, it was certain that Ari wouldn’t be a mere Jouster much longer.

  And then what would happen to Vetch and his plans?

  “Well, no,” Haraket admitted. “There were something like forty others. But still! Two armlets and a collar! Everyone else, or nearly, got just bees or armlets, and only one other person got more than Ari did, and he was a Commander of Hundreds. And do you know what he did with them?”

  Vetch shook his head, but he already knew he was going to find out. He could tell from the vehemence that Haraket was showing that the Overseer was only using Vetch’s presence as an excuse to vent his own exasperation. Though why he should be exasperated about Ari getting a great honor, Vetch could not imagine.

  “I’ll tell you what he did! He dropped all three of them in his clothes’ chest, like—like an old kilt! The slave that cleans his rooms found them there, and I had to come and take them away to lock up for him! And what’s more,” Haraket continued in disbelief, “He did the same with the other awards he’s won. They were all in there, packed up as if they were unsuitable presents from an inconvenient relative! Anybody would think he didn’t care!”

  It was perfectly clear to Vetch at this point that Haraket was both partly pleased because Ari was not puffed up by the awards, and exasperated that he seemed to count them of so little worth.

  Vetch made sympathetic noises, but he didn’t understand Ari’s attitude either—

  Yet somehow, it felt right. If Ari had been the type to search after the attention of the mighty, well—

  —he wouldn’t have been Ari.

  The next day, Vetch thought he heard music at sunrise—the distant blare of trumpets and the pounding of drums, the shaking of sistrums. And for a moment, he couldn’t imagine why. . . .

  Then he closed his eyes and tried to reckon up days, and realized what it must be.

  It was the beginning of the Planting Ceremony. The flood was officially over, and the Great King was standing in the stead of the god Siris, with the Chief Lady in the place of Iris, blessing the fields nearest the Palace to prepare them for sowing. All over Tia the priests of Siris and Iris were doing the same, and in Khefti’s village, there would be a great festival with bread and beer distributed at the Temple to all comers. He had lost count of the days, working as hard as he was—

  But then, Planting had never been more to him than the faint hope that he might be able to slip away from Khefti long enough to collect some of that bread and beer for himself. Altans celebrated four seasons, not the five of the Tians. By the time the Great Mother River got to Altan lands, she had spread out so wide in the swamps and delta that Flood was little more than a rise in the waters of an inch or two, and there was no real dry season, just one without rain. But now he remembered how quiet the compound had been last night—and it would be just as quiet tonight, for the Court of the Great King would be holding festival, and all of the Jousters would be invited.

  Haraket appeared as Vetch tended to Kashet shortly after sunrise. He, at least, did not look the worse for wear, so either he had not attended last night’s feast, or else he had been moderate in his appetites.

  “How was Coresan before we took the egg from her?” he asked Vetch, without preamble.

  “Fine, sir,” Vetch said honestly. “No different than usual. If I hadn’t known the egg was there, I wouldn’t have guessed; she even went out for her buffing without any more trouble than usual. And I looked in on her this morning, and she’s still fine. I don’t think she’s missing it, to tell the truth.”

  “Ah, good—” Haraket began, but looked up at a footstep just outside in the corridor.

  Ari appeared in the doorway, also looking no worse for wear than Haraket. But Haraket soon proved who had been attending what last night with his next comment.

  “You were missed at the feast last night,” he said. “I was asked about you.”

  Ari shrugged. “And did you explain that double patrols do not leave a man with much desire to drink date wine, eat until he’s sluggish, pursue pretty little dancers, and stay up far too late?” he replied.

  “It is generally considered an honor to be asked to banquet with the Great King—” Haraket began.

  “—along with a few hundred of his closest friends, indeed.” Ari snorted. “If I was missed, it was only by the Vizier of the feast, who found himself with an empty place to conceal.”

  “I don’t understand you at all,” Haraket growled, as Ari checked Kashet’s harness. “Last night you were invited to the Great King’s own feast, three times you’ve been awarded the Gold of Honor, and no one would even guess it.”

  Ari shrugged. “I’m a practical man. All very well to be heaped with tokens of the Great King’s esteem, but you can’t sell Honor Gold, nor trade it; you can only wear it to show your valor and rank.”

  “And the fact that the Great King favors you, fool!” Haraket retorted with exasperation.

  “And the Great King’s favor gains me—what, precisely?” Ari replied mildly, with no more than a raised eyebrow. “I don’t care to mingle with the nobles of the court, I’m not looking for a promotion, and I value nothing that is as ephemeral as fame.”

  Vetch kept his head down, hoping neither of them noticed him. This was a very interesting conversation, and he didn’t want to be sent away in the middle of it.

  “The Great King’s favor can make you,” Haraket said flatly.

  “And break me.” Now Ari’s voice went as stone-hard as Haraket’s. “Suppose I were to put myself forward. Then I must guard my tongue waking and sleeping, lest someone who wishes to be more favored takes some word of mine and twists it, and whispers it in the Great King’s ear! I could not choose my own friends, my own pastimes, nothing, for fear that someone who does not love to see me raised on high may find a weapon to bring me down! I would be more of a prisoner than a serf, who at least may command his own thoughts. I think not; that sort of life is not for me. Now, if such honors would grant me the freedom to study dragons, rather than use them as weapons, then, they would be of value to me. As it is, they are worth less than sand in the dry season.”

  And with that, he nudged Kashet, who was already impatient to be gone, and they thundered into the sky. Haraket sheltered his eyes with his hand, and peered after him, shaking his head. Vetch didn’t know what to think, but he stowed the words away in his memory to ponder later.

  Coresan laid a total of three more eggs, one every three days, which were duly taken away from her before she had a chance to go broody. She didn’t seem to miss them at all, any more than she’d missed the one that Vetch had taken. Vetch didn’t know what had been done with those eggs, and tried not to think about them. After all, he had more than enough on his hands at the moment, tending to her, Kashet, and his own precious egg which—if he wasn’t mistaken—was showing every sign of being fertile. When all the eggs had been laid, Coresan began to show signs of restlessness.

  Dutifully, Vetch reported that to Haraket as well. The Overseer pulled on his lower lip and thought for a moment. “Reaten is going to be sent down, back to the ranks of the unflighted, until he learns better dragon husbandry,” he said, in an absentminded tone that made Vetch assume he was thinking out loud. “But there’s a likely lad coming up who might do well with Coresan, if she’ll take him . . .”

  Haraket’s voice trailed away, and Vetch wondered what he meant. Could a Jouster be taken from his dragon?

  Maybe not Ari, for Vetch was certain Kashet would never, ever fly for anyone else . . . but would it make any difference to Coresan who flew her?

  Probably not. And that was confirmed a moment later, when Haraket nodded briskly. “I’ll do it,” he said aloud, with satisfaction in his voice. “I’ll switch their dragons. Hah! If he can get into trouble with that beast, I’ll eat his saddle raw, without salt!”

  That
very evening, as Vetch was about to take away a half-barrowload of meat that Coresan suddenly didn’t want—for all on her own, now that she had delivered herself of her clutch, she was cutting back on her food—Haraket appeared at the door to Coresan’s pen with a strange young man in tow. This one could not have been out of his teens, but there was a no-nonsense look about him that made him seem very confident. And when he looked Coresan up and down, he was not at all afraid of her.

  “And this is Coresan. Stand your ground with her,” Haraket was saying. “Remember what I told you.”

  The young man nodded, and approached the dragon, who was peering down at him with great interest. But she didn’t snap; her snappishness all seemed to have been due to her wanting to mate, and being about to go to nest. Now she was back to her old self, agreeable, but with mischief and rebellion in her. Her tail twitched, Vetch noticed, as if she was contemplating a sly and seemingly absentminded thwack across the newcomer’s shins with it.

  “Coresan!” the man shouted, before she had made up her mind about it. “Down!”

  Vetch gritted his teeth on his own resentment as the young man reaped the benefits of Vetch’s work with Coresan; perhaps she hadn’t been flying, but he was the one who calculated that her bad humor was due in part to hunger, he was the one who’d been working with her basic commands, if only to make his own job easier, and he had been teaching her that both obedience and disobedience had consequences. She had been obeying only when she felt like it; now, after all his drilling, she did so automatically.

  She knelt, and the newcomer gestured imperiously at Vetch. He wanted her saddle, of course; Vetch throttled his impulse to follow Coresan’s unruly example before all that drilling and become selectively deaf and blind. Instead, he brought up the saddle and harness.

  At least this fellow was competent enough to do his own saddling. Feeling very much as if he was the expert here, and the Jouster the interloper, Vetch watched the harnessing with a critical eye, and could find nothing to complain about.

  But he felt better when, as the young man finished, he gave Coresan a rewarding slap on the shoulder. At least he didn’t look on the dragon as a sort of flying chariot, insensate and insensible.

  “Up, Coresan,” the Jouster ordered, and then looked back over his shoulder at Haraket as she obeyed without complaint.

  The Overseer nodded, and the new Jouster put one foot on Coresan’s foreleg, and vaulted lightly into her saddle. He signaled to Vetch, who released the chain from around her neck, the chain that had kept her earthbound until this moment.

  Coresan’s training held, though she had not been ridden in nearly a moon; she stayed on the ground rather than going for the sky, although a few weeks ago, she’d have been up like a shot arrow once the chain was off. Instead, she was rock-steady until the new man gave her the nudge to send her up. She responded to his signal eagerly, throwing herself into the air, as Vetch and Haraket shielded their eyes from the storm of sand and wind driven up by the fierce beats of her wings.

  When the buffeting had ceased, Vetch looked up; Coresan was a tiny figure against the hot blue sky, still climbing, and still under control, back to her old self, but with a superior level of obedience as far as Vetch could tell. He glanced over at Haraket, who smiled with satisfaction.

  “I think he’ll do,” the Overseer said aloud, and there was no mistaking the pleasure in it. “We’ll see how Reaten does with Beskela.”

  Vetch’s mouth dropped open at that. Beskela! The male was the oldest dragon in the compound, so old that the blue of his main color had deepened to near-black! If there was a lazier dragon here, Vetch had yet to hear about it. He had gotten rotated back to the new lot of Jousters because his old Jouster had been killed by a lucky arrow from an archer on the ground, and Beskela had elected to return to the compound rather than fly off to freedom as nearly any other dragon would have.

  And that was a measure of how lazy he was. Beskela had learned the most key of lessons, which was where the food came from. He knew that—unlike the case of a dragon in the wild, who, when he failed make a kill, didn’t eat—in the compound, meals arrived on time and in full supply whether a dragon exerted himself to the fullest or not. Beskela liked captivity, so long as no one made him work too hard. And it was rather difficult to force a creature the size of a dragon to do much of anything it didn’t want to.

  Vetch hid his smirk behind his hand. If there was ever a Jouster who deserved being assigned to Beskela, it was Reaten. Patrols would take twice as long to compete as Beskela lounged his way through the sky, and Reaten could pretty much forget about the Gold of Honor, for at the first sight of a fight in the offing, Beskela would do his best to keep as far away as possible from the combat. Failing that, he would hold back, and shy off every time his Jouster tried to close in. That was assuming he didn’t flee altogether, refusing to answer the guide reins.

  Oh, yes, this was certainly a case of the right chickens coming home to roost.

  On the other hand, if a Jouster couldn’t master a dragon like Coresan, at least with Beskela he could get patrolling done and wouldn’t get anyone else in trouble.

  Vetch went back to work, his jealousy fading. Coresan had a good Jouster, it seemed, one of whom Haraket approved. For that, he was grateful. Coresan was no Kashet, but he had been getting rather fond of her.

  Still, it rankled, to be treated as if he was nothing more than a mobile saddle rack, and otherwise ignored.

  When Coresan came back in, it was very clear that her new Jouster was going to continue ignoring Vetch, and it was only because he had gotten to like Coresan that Vetch didn’t go straight to Haraket and demand to be put back on his old duties, serving Ari only. This was like the treatment he had gotten from the other dragon boys, only worse. Why, he didn’t even learn the Jouster’s name for three days, and then only discovered it when he overheard another Jouster asking, “Well, Neftat, and how do you like our prime virago, Coresan? Or do you wish you had Beskela back?”

  Neftat asked him nothing about Coresan—though he did examine every inch of her every time he took her out. He continued to act as if Vetch was a mere convenience, of no import except that he kept the dragon fed, watered, clean, and comfortable.

  Still, he treated Coresan well, and paid as much heed to her moods as an attentive lover would have. She was out of shape, and he was putting her back in shape on a reasonable schedule, being neither too demanding nor too lax. He was a good rider for her.

  But.

  Finally, he couldn’t stand it. He went to Haraket.

  But once he got the Overseer’s attention, he hesitated. How could he, a mere serf, complain about a Jouster?

  He decided that it wouldn’t be a complaint, exactly.

  “Overseer,” he said, choosing his words with the greatest of care, “What is my—my relationship to be to Coresan’s Jouster?”

  “Relationship?” Haraket asked, with a lifted brow. “None, and I told him as much. You aren’t Coresan’s boy—you’re Kashet’s. I don’t want him giving you orders that may conflict with something Ari’s asked you to do, so I told him to leave you alone while I find Coresan a good boy.”

  Suddenly, Vetch was very glad that he hadn’t voiced an actual complaint, for he would have looked very stupid. “Thank you, Overseer,” he said, with utmost politeness. “I—ah—wasn’t sure what I should be doing, with regard to Jouster Neftat.” And he bowed properly, and got out of Haraket’s way as quickly as he could, thanking the gods that he had learned to think before he blurted something out. How much less trouble he would have been in, if only he had kept his mouth shut over the years! He took care to smile at Neftat from then on, even if the latter didn’t appear to take any notice.

  At least with both Coresan and Seftu back on patrol, Ari could stop doing double-duty. Vetch had the idea that he was sleeping a good deal. Certainly Kashet was!

  Haraket was as good as his word, too. By the time the planting season was over, in fact, within a moon, Harak
et found another dragon boy for Coresan, another serf from a stolen farm like Vetch.

  Presumably, having found that Vetch was such a good worker, Haraket was willing to try another of the same type.

  Haraket brought the replacement in one afternoon, without any fanfare, though he had taken the time to get the new boy cleaned up, kilted, and all before he brought him to the pen. With any dragon, that was a good idea; they were used to Jousters and dragon boys in their uniform kilts and kit, and dragons were creatures of habit. Even the few servants like Haraket and the slaves wore pretty much the same uniforms, which varied only in quality of materials. Presumably a dragon couldn’t tell the difference between coarse linen and fine, and the similarity of costume told the dragons who “belonged” here, and who didn’t.

  However, just the previous day Coresan had reacted poorly to the presence of a pretty woman friend of Coresan’s Jouster, Neftat. The bright fluttering gauze of her gown, the high voice, the jangling jewelry—whatever it was had made Coresan rear up and hiss angrily, her tail giving one of those vicious lashes that Vetch had not quite managed to train her out of.

  Neftat had in his turn reacted as Vetch would have wanted, shooing his lady friend outside. This was one of the only times when Neftat actually spoke to Vetch.

  “Keep her company for a moment,” he’d ordered (rather than requested). The tone made Vetch grind his teeth, but he obeyed, though he had no idea how to amuse a lady. He listened to Neftat soothing his dragon with one ear, while he directed the lady’s attention to the carvings on the walls, the construction of the pens, even the dragons peering over the pens with interest at them—babbling foolishly whatever came into his head in an effort to distract her.

  Fortunately, Neftat finally came out and apologized to the lady. Vetch hadn’t even waited to hear what he said.