Joust Page 35

  The easiest, and safest route to revenge would be at the festival, through the medium of poison. If the droppings of dragons burned the skin, what would they do if ground as fine as flour and stirred into food? Put into a stew heavily flavored with pepper, onion, and garlic, it probably wouldn’t even be tasted until too late.

  Ari was far away from the festival—and he could be certain that the only people who ate the poison would be those from within the Jousters’ compound.

  But what if I poisoned Baken by accident? Or Haraket? Or one of the other serfs? That was the problem with such a plan; he knew the people who might be hurt, and there was no way to strike at the perpetrators without knowing who they really were. And if he went after them specifically, he couldn’t act anonymously. It all got very complicated, and he could entirely sympathize with Ari’s anguished cry of I do not make war on children!

  And he couldn’t help remembering another plaint of Ari’s. Haraket says I think too much.

  Maybe that was Vetch’s problem, too. People who didn’t think didn’t seem to have any complicated and inconvenient problems of conscience.

  Kashet had gotten a full holiday out of it, after all; Ari did not return to the dragon pens until after the celebration was over. And when he did, he was close-mouthed and grim. Vetch wondered where he had been all that time; he hadn’t been in his quarters when Vetch went to look, and Kashet had missed him sorely.

  He appeared, as usual, one of the first Jousters to come for his dragon on the morning after the festival. What was not usual was that he was wearing his helmet, rather than carrying it. It was difficult to see his face, impossible to make out his expression, but he didn’t say anything at all as he inspected the harness and lance. Vetch didn’t mind that—how could he? He knew Ari, and knew what it was like to have no recourse to the world’s hurt but to retreat from it, put on a mask, hide anguish within. He couldn’t blame Ari at all for retreating even (or especially?) from him. But what did bother him was that Kashet had so clearly missed those evening visits these past two nights, and Vetch had a good idea that the reason Ari had not come was because of his presence in Kashet’s pen.

  What was more, he would be willing to hazard that Ari was in desperate need of the silent comfort of his dragon, too. As long as Ari thought he had to avoid Vetch, he wouldn’t come to Kashet. And he wouldn’t ask Vetch to absent himself either. It was up to Vetch to give Ari a way around the problem that salvaged his self-esteem.

  So before Ari could mount up and fly off on patrol that first morning after the festival, Vetch caught his Jouster’s arm long enough to make Ari pause for a moment, his foot on Kashet’s shoulder.

  “Sir, Baken wants me to sleep in the pen of one of the dragonets,” he lied. “He doesn’t want just anyone, he wants someone who’s used to it, so that the dragonet isn’t startled by someone who doesn’t know how to act around them in the dark. It’s the one they put in next to Kashet, so I’ll still be here if Kashet needs me. He thinks she’s so young that she’ll tame amazingly if she accepts me as a kind of nest mate.”

  “The little scarlet, over there?” Ari replied, with a tilt of his head, as he considered the request for a moment. “Well, I suppose I’ve no objection. I wanted you sleeping in here initially both to keep Kashet company and to keep you out of the reach of the other boys so they couldn’t easily torment you—but Kashet will be able to scent you over the wall, you will be here if he calls out, and you’ll still be out of reach of the other boys.” He paused a moment. “Yes, I’ve no objection at all. Go ahead and move your gear.”

  “Thank you—” Vetch began, but Ari had already mounted, and before he could say more than that, Kashet was in the air.

  Huh. He thought that, under that veneer of coolness, he’d sensed relief in Ari’s voice. Well, now he had every excuse to be with Avatre between sunset and sunrise, which was a help to him, too. This wasn’t entirely bad; in all of the wretchedness he and Ari were feeling, there was one small grain of good, for at least he wouldn’t have to wake up before first light to be in Kashet’s pen by the time the sun crested the horizon anymore.

  And hopefully, Kashet would get his Jouster’s attentions again. No matter what he felt, or Ari, the poor dragon shouldn’t have to suffer. How could Kashet understand what was wrong? All he knew was that something was the matter, and that he was lonely.

  That night, as he lay along Avatre’s side, waiting for sleep, he thought he heard Ari’s footsteps outside in the corridor—and a few moments later, he definitely heard the Jouster’s voice murmuring on the other side of the wall, though he couldn’t make out the words. He sighed, and felt some tension move out of him. That was it; either Ari was embarrassed at having betrayed his feelings to a mere serf and dragon boy, or he was still so ashamed of what had been done to that Altan village that he found it difficult to face Vetch, another Altan. Or probably it was even more complicated than that, but whatever was wrong, it had been Vetch’s presence that was keeping the Jouster from his nightly visits to the dragon.

  Vetch certainly found it hard to face Ari. No matter what Ari had said, the fact remained that he might well be in the next party ordered to “pacify” an Altan village in the same way. It was possible that, despite his anguished outburst, Ari would countenance such an atrocity if only by passive silence. Vetch didn’t think he would—

  But he couldn’t be sure.

  How much was Ari bound to his duty? How far did loyalty to orders go? What would really happen when he was caught between obedience and conscience?

  And Vetch was caught on the horns of a dilemma, because if that happened, on one hand he didn’t want to know what Ari’s ultimate decision about obeying such an order would be, but on the other—

  Knowing the truth about someone was important.

  But having your illusions smashed was painful.

  He couldn’t pretend that nothing had happened if Ari did simply go along with more horrors.

  But losing what you thought was a friendship—even if it was only an odd sort of friendship—was more painful still.

  But did he want to maintain it when it was based on false perceptions? He didn’t know what decisions Ari had come to, all by himself, over the past two days. Ari was clearly not going to tell him either. Except that he was going out on his usual patrol—

  —a patrol intended to keep innocent Tian farmers and their crops safe—

  —but at what cost?

  He had to concentrate on what he could affect, or he would go mad.

  And maybe that’s how Ari feels.

  At least now Kashet wasn’t being deprived of Ari’s attentions. That was something, anyway. It wasn’t enough for Kashet to “just” get general petting and attention—a certain amount of that petting and attention had to come from his person, the one he had bonded to from the moment of hatching. And if the only way that Kashet could get that attention was for Vetch to absent himself into the next pen—well, that was all right. Curious, though, that Ari had known about Avatre, even identified her by her color. He wouldn’t have thought that Ari’d had time to notice.

  I wonder if Ari guesses about Avatre—he thought, suddenly, alarm making him sit straight up in the darkness. Avatre murmured her objections to his movement, and he lay back down again, mind racing, as he went over every question or comment that Ari had made in the last few days, trying to divine whether there was a clue in what he’d said, some hint that Ari was probing, trying to discover if Vetch had followed in the Jouster’s footsteps and hatched his own dragonet. Ah, don’t be stupid, he thought at last, after he’d been over every detail that he could remember at least twice. As busy as the Jouster had been, how could Ari possibly guess? He just saw Avatre over the wall when he came in at some point. He hasn’t said a word about her, and he hasn’t caught me here with her. How could he guess that she’s my hatchling?

  “Still, it would be a good idea to take extra care from here on in. Ari saw more than most, and was disconcertingly good at
putting facts together into a whole. Vetch filed that in the back of his mind, for caution was now certainly the order of the day.

  But as time went on, the Dry progressed, and the days got hotter and hotter, Ari said nothing. Vetch elected not to return to sleeping in Kashet’s pen, and Ari said nothing about that either. The fact was, Ari wasn’t talking about much of anything, not to him, not to Haraket—but he was doing something. What, Vetch couldn’t guess, but he was spending every waking moment when he was not in the air or with Kashet off somewhere.

  That was all to the good. It was keeping the one person who was likeliest to guess just what the “little scarlet in the next pen” was far away from the scene.

  He was increasingly afraid of leaving Avatre alone, lest she make that first flight in his absence. He rushed through the chores that took him away from the pens. Heart in mouth, he listened all the time for some sign she had been discovered to be something other than one of the “official” dragonets, or worse, that she had made her flight without him.

  And yet, though that would be “worse” for him, it was not necessarily so for her. At least she would be free, even if he were not.

  He was so close to his goal, and yet, at any moment, the prize could be snatched away from him.

  And for the first time since his father had been killed, he prayed, not only to the Altan gods, but to any god that would listen, that she not be discovered and taken from him—or that, if she was discovered, at least let it be that she escaped into the free skies—

  Even if he could not.

  And perhaps the gods, aloof in the Land Beyond the Horizon, actually listened to him.

  Because the moment of discovery—and the moment of first flight—both came at the same moment, and it was when he was with her.

  He was, in fact, sitting on her back—in a purloined saddle. That saddle was one of the small ones in the compound, made precisely for dragonets, and one that he had been eying for days, waiting for the dragonet who was using it to outgrow it. He had his legs braced in the harness, his hand locked into the hand brace at the top of the saddle, the guide straps, which she had learned to obey beautifully, tied to the brace, while she made little bounds up and down the sands of her pen, flapping her wings enthusiastically the whole time. He had come to enjoy these wild rides, even though he’d been terrified at first, for unlike the dragonets that he had ridden for Baken, she was not tethered. He remembered, all too well, his very first ride a-dragonback, face-down over the front of Ari’s saddle. He’d sworn then that he would never, ever ride on a dragon again, but that had been before Avatre. Now—well, he was guiding the dragon, the exhilaration had overcome the terror and now he was able to join in the sense of fun she had in these exercises.

  He thought that she was building up to that burst that would take her truly up into the air, but he wasn’t actually expecting anything other than her first hover. She was right in the middle of her pen, about to make a really big bound; he thought that this might be the moment when she really went airborne with him, rather than just jumping about with wing-assistance, and he was braced for it—

  When a wild shout from the doorway of the pen startled them both.

  “Hoi!” shouted one of the older dragon boys, staring at them. He knew Vetch, he knew very well that Vetch wasn’t assigned to a dragonet, and he knew that Vetch should not have been sitting in the saddle on an untethered dragonet’s back. He didn’t know what Vetch was up to, but one thing he did know. It wasn’t what Vetch was supposed to be doing.

  “Haraket!” he shouted. “Haraket! Come quick!”

  Vetch didn’t even think what to do; he just reacted, by punching Avatre in the shoulders with his heels. She, already startled and alarmed by the shout, and even more so by a strange human in her pen, a thing she had never seen before, also just reacted—by leaping, not jumping; leaping for the sky, eyes focused up, neck outstretched, and wings working purposefully. She was frightened now, truly frightened, and she wanted away before any more people shouted at her and jammed their heels into her! One wing flap. Two.

  She was off the ground, with him still on her back. Not a hover, this; no, it was the first wing beats of real flight.

  “Dragonets are often startled into their first flights,” he heard Ari’s voice in memory. “They get very nervy about the time they’re about to take that big leap. Maybe it’s the gods’ way of making sure they get off the ground that first time, because if nothing startled them into flying, they’d be too afraid to try. . . .”

  She was making good, strong wing beats now, not flaps. And she wasn’t just fleeing, she was climbing, with determination. She wasn’t afraid to fly, not Avatre! She surged upward in that way he recalled from riding Kashet, a jerky, lunging motion, throwing him back each time she made another wing beat, until he bent over the saddle, crouching, to get himself in balance with what she was doing. He was just the rider now; Avatre was the one in control. All he could do was to hold on and try not to hamper her.

  She was above the walls. Then higher than the walls—

  There was more shouting down below; he clutched at the harness in sudden fear—

  He heard Haraket’s voice; he heard the voices of other men, loud, excited, angry, down below and behind him; he looked back and saw a crowd of men in Avatre’s pen, Haraket at their center, gesturing and shouting—but not at him.

  That sent a chill down his back.

  They weren’t calling his name.

  Instead of ordering him back, demanding he return then and there, as they would have been if they thought this flight was purely accidental, they were shouting at each other, issuing confusing and probably contradictory orders. But none of those orders was shouted at him.

  That was when he knew he was in deep trouble.

  They knew what this was about; they knew—knew he’d “stolen” a dragonet, though they didn’t yet know it wasn’t one of the new ones. They knew that this wasn’t just the result of a wager or a boyish prank.

  They understood that he was going to try to escape, that he intended to fly off on Avatre in order to do so.

  And they weren’t going to let him get away. He wasn’t a dragon boy now; he was an Altan enemy, stealing a precious dragonet.

  Avatre craned her neck around and looked down at the waving, yelling humans below her as she beat her wings down in a stroke more powerful than the last had been. Then she glanced back at him, her eyes pinning with alarm; she seemed to understand the fear in him, and redoubled her efforts, which were showing more skill with every passing second. For the first time, Vetch was glad, glad that he was such a skinny weed. He was lighter than the sandbags he’d been training her with, and she was having no trouble carrying him. He felt her deep, easy breathing under his legs; he felt powerful muscles under his hands driving her upward. The compound spun away under him; she caught sight of the hills in the east, and they must have awakened some deep instinct in her, for she drove for them.

  Now she was over the city, wings pumping furiously as she continued to seek for height and the winds above. The kamiseen would aid her in this direction; it drove for those same eastern hills, giving her speed she could never have reached on her own. He clung on to her back more by instinct than skill, crouching down over her neck, trying to move with her. He told himself not to look down.

  He couldn’t help it, though; as she leveled out and stretched her wings in a gliding stroke, he looked down and saw only the broad, flat, gray-green expanse of the Great Mother River below, a boat like a child’s toy being towed against the current, going upriver, pulled by a team of oxen seemingly as small as the ones in his father’s funerary shrine.

  The shrine—

  Too late to think of that, too late to consider all the things that he’d hoped to take with him. If they escaped, he would have to survive and keep them both alive with what he had with him.

  If they escaped.

  They had to.

  Then they were over the fields, once green, n
ow brown in the dry, with here and there a small square of dusty green still being irrigated by hand to provide some special crop. Vegetables, or perhaps even tala.

  Tala—for dragons.

  The only way anyone would be able to catch him would be on a dragon.

  How many Jousters had been in the compound? How many could get their dragons saddled and into the air quickly? How many were just back from a patrol, or about to leave on one? Ari wasn’t back yet, but he’d been due out of the north at any moment. There were others who had surely beaten him back in; Ari was generally the first to leave and the last to return.

  That alone might save him; this was the end of a patrol, not the beginning, and dragons were coming in tired and hungry. It might be hard to get them into the air, and they’d be irritated, sluggish, and reluctant to obey.

  But he had to look back over his shoulder and saw behind him what he’d feared to see—the bright eyes of color against the hard blue of the sky—dragons and Jousters in pursuit. Tiny in the distance, but there were several of them who’d managed to get their mounts airborne; experienced fliers, experienced riders.

  If they caught him—they would never let him keep Avatre. They’d never let him near another dragon again, probably, even if my some miracle he convinced them that this had all been an accident. . . .

  If he claimed that, could he make them believe him? But then, how would he explain purloining the egg and hatching her? That he was raising her for Ari, as a surprise?

  Would anyone believe a tale that tall?

  Even if they did, how could that make any difference? They’d still take Avatre from him!

  Nothing mattered against the enormity of losing Avatre.

  He would rather die than give her up. She was everything to him now; without her, it wouldn’t matter what they did to him.

  He made up his mind at that moment that if they caught him, if they started to force them down, he would jump. Better dead than lose the only thing he loved, the only family he had now. The harness and saddle were not of such tough stuff that she could not eventually get them off; without tending, the leather would quickly dry out and become brittle in the sun. Within weeks, at most, the last pieces would fall off her.