Aerie (5 page)

Or if it did, he probably thought that older children in the family would take the jobs that servants did for the well-off. And to an extent, that was true, but that only meant that common-born girls became accustomed to the burdens of child rearing at a much younger age than their well-born counterparts.

Oset-re pursed his lips. “I can see the problem. There are, well, a
lot
of young men and boys, most of whom have already had at least something to do with dragons, if they weren’t already Jousters, waiting for eggs. And after them, more who were warriors. Giving even one egg to a girl—That is truly asking for trouble from those who have been waiting for a very long time.”

Kiron nodded. “But she is very unhappy that I have not at least considered it.”

Gan’s eyes widened. “
That
kind of ‘unhappy’? I wouldn’t have thought that of her.”

“Not—exactly. But she has been making it—obvious—that she thinks I am being unfair.” He sighed heavily. “She brings it up every time I see her, and she does have some good arguments. And all I can say is that it’s impossible right now. Which doesn’t please her, needless to say.”

“Too bad you didn’t win a girl who only wanted jewels,” Oset-re said with sympathy.

“Have any of you any ideas?” he asked, looking from one to another of them hopefully. “I thought about telling her we would train any girl that managed to find her own egg or nestling, but—”

Pe-atep shuddered. “A very, very bad idea,” he said. “It’s bad enough that some of the ones on the waiting list are going out with the old fledgling hunters trying to find a way to steal hatchlings. People will shrug and think it is sad if it’s a fellow who gets hurt or even killed doing that. ‘He knew the risks,’ they’ll say. If if a girl got hurt or killed doing that, the blame would be on you. And maybe the ghost, too.”

“I wonder . . .” Menet-ka gazed off into the distance. “Now, here is a thought. Obviously, we’re trying to accommodate former Jousters and dragon boys first. They have the experience and something like the expertise, and even Aket-ten at her most stubborn would have to admit that. But when we finally get to people who want eggs but know nothing about dragons . . . I have a notion.” His eyes returned to Kiron’s and he smiled slyly. “And it will solve a problem as well. Make it known that from now on, anyone who wants to be a Jouster that doesn’t have the experience must serve an—apprenticeship, call it—as a dragon boy. Or girl. For at least a year. Six moons serving an adult dragon, and six helping with a hatchling up to fledging.”

“Oh—oho!” said Gan appreciatively. “By the gods, that is a plan!”

Kiron nodded slowly and felt himself beginning to smile as well. “Anyone who does this will find out precisely how much work an adult dragon is, and will see how much
more
work a hatchling and a fledgling is.”

Pe-atep pursed his lips dubiously. “We could have a very high loss of dragon boys. Some will quit within the first moon, I suspect.”

Kiron had to shrug at that. “And this would leave whoever had lost an apprentice at precisely the same point he was before he had an apprentice at all. I think all of us are used to the work now. Besides, it’s better they quit as apprentices than take on a fledgling and abandon it.”

They were all silent on that point. No one had—yet. The closest that anyone had come was when Toreth had been murdered, leaving his dragon bereft. Aket-ten had saved it, comforting it mind-to-mind so that it rebonded with her. But what would happen if a hatchling was abandoned? There were no other Aket-tens about to comfort it. No, this would be much, much better, solving a potential problem and Kiron’s own dilemma at a single blow.

Huras nodded. “Personally, any help at all will be welcome. If it is only for a short time, it will still be welcome.” Kiron smiled at him. That is exactly the sort of thing he would have expected of the easygoing Huras.

“Then that is exactly what I will do,” he said, with a nod. “And if a young woman does not feel easy being an apprentice to one of the existing Jousters, she will just have to wait her turn being apprentice to Nofret or Aket-ten. That seems fair to me.”

And hopefully it would appease Aket-ten at last.

 

Kiron looked up at the sky where the young dragons were soaring in the thermals of late afternoon, then back at the lists Haraket was presenting for his perusal, and sighed.

“You know,” he said unhappily, “no matter what I decide on this, someone is going to object.”

“I know,” the former Overseer said, running a hand over his shaved head. “I know it only too well.”

“Of course you do,” Kiron sighed. There were two lists. The first was of items of construction and furnishings that had just come in from the arduous crossing of the desert. The second, and much longer, was the list of who had requested what items. There were at least two and often a dozen claimants for a single object.

“So what do I do?” he asked forlornly.

“If it were me? Take a walk. Look over what people already have. Some of them have already paid for things out of their own pocket, or brought them in on their own dragons. See what they have, cross things off their list that they’ve gotten for themselves. Then start with the people that haven’t hardly got a stick. Give them each one thing, and work your way down the list. Don’t give anyone more than one thing. That’s what I’d do.”

Kiron nodded thoughtfully. This was the first “official” caravan of goods coming directly from Mefis and the vizier of the Great King and Queen. There would be more; Ari had finally gotten them scheduled. But every new arrival would mean the same clamor for what was on those camels.

He sighed. “Which means another list. Who’s gotten what from the caravan. So it all gets parceled out equally until everyone has what they need.”

“That is what I would do,” Haraket said. “It seems the fairest and wisest course of action.” Again, he ran his hand over his hairless head. “I am glad it is you who is responsible for the decisions,” the former Overseer said ruefully. “I got a belly full of the results when I was in charge of the Dragon Courts, and that was in our days of plenty.”

Kiron rubbed his hands over the heated skin of his biceps. “I appreciate the aid, Haraket,” he said, with a grimace, “But I still would rather it was you.”

“You’re getting all bound up in this nonsense, boy,” Haraket said, then grinned. “Excuse me. Captain of Dragons. Go take Avatre out. Hunt if you want to, but get in some practice, too. Combat practice, even if your targets are nothing but thorn trees. There’s an itching in my bones that says that dragons and Jousters will be fighting again, maybe sooner than we think.”

Kiron looked up alertly at those words. Haraket shook his head. “No, I’ve never been god-touched, but I do get feelings, and they’re more often right than wrong. Get some practice in. If nothing else, you’ll feel better for it.”

Since the alternative was an afternoon listening to people complain about things he could do nothing about, he took Haraket’s advice, left the lists in his quarters, and called Avatre down from her sunning post. She did not look at all loath to quit it, and kept her head up, gazing about alertly as he saddled her and added the combat weapons. He’d always had the feeling that she had enjoyed combat, too, and her reactions seemed to confirm that.

So did the fact that she leaped into the air as soon as he was firmly settled in her saddle.

He gave her no directions, however; since the other dragons of Aerie were not out hunting, it would not matter if she entered someone else’s hunting ground. It was by general agreement that no two dragons, with the exception of Avatre and Re-eth-ke, shared the same hunting ground. They were generally as good and as reliable as the best-trained hunting dogs, but—

But another thing that no one had tested, and no one wanted to risk, was having two dragons come down on the same kill. Dragons in the wild fought over kills. Would the human-raised ones? No one knew. Avatre and Re-eth-ke cooperated because Aket-ten was there to tell them to, speaking in thoughts and images in their minds. Without Aket-ten there—

They might simply posture and circle, like a pair of cats that had not yet made up their minds to fight. But if they fought, if the riders didn’t get off and out of the way quickly enough, death or severe injury was inevitable. And although Kiron had never seen a dragon fight go on to serious hurt in wild dragons, all that meant was
he hadn’t seen it.
That didn’t mean it didn’t happen. There was a lot that wild dragons did that he hadn’t seen, nor had anyone else. No one had known, for instance, that a dragon mother would leave her youngsters in the care of another, if she felt that other was trustworthy enough. That was how Great Queen Nofret had gotten
her
dragon,

It made sense, though, and it explained something that had been reported—one or more of the previous hatching’s females hanging about the nests and not being driven away. It occurred to Kiron, as Avatre spiraled up a thermal, that this was very like what common-born women did, appointing an older child as a tender for the toddlers and infant. The young female got to practice her baby tending under the careful eye of her mother, then just before fledging, which was the moment when the babies really were sturdiest, the mother could fly off, leaving her older daughter in sole command of the nest. In the next few years, this lesson might be repeated, so that when the young female matured enough to mate, she was not relying on instinct alone to guide her in rearing her first hatch—

Such philosophical thoughts were rudely interrupted by the sound of shouting and screaming below him.

Startled, his involuntary movement made Avatre go into a sideslip, and he looked down over her shoulder.

Below him, men on horseback, attacking a laden caravan. With a start, he realized he and Avatre had gone farther afield than he had planned. And that this caravan was taking the more dangerous short route between Sanctuary and Ten-hen-tes, the so-called City of Caravans.

Dangerous, not just because of the lions that roamed this area, but because of the bandits, sadly on the increase. Renegades and lawless men, and some merely desperate, but all deserters from the armies of both Tia and Alta, seeking to make their fortunes by taking the fortunes of others.

The fighter in him instinctively responded, and Avatre in her turn responded instantly to the little signals his muscles gave by going into a steep dive.

His mind was startled, but his body was already reacting, shifting and leaning forward, while his hands reached for his sling and stone bullets. As the defenders of the caravan milled in confusion, and one bandit darted in to cut lead reins of the rearmost camel and lead it off, no one looked up, until the dragon and her rider were literally on top of them.

Kiron slung a stone, but they were already past his target, what he took to be the leader, at the point where bandits and defenders alike suddenly became aware that something incredibly large, bright ruby in color, and possessed of more teeth and claws than anyone sane really wanted to confront, was rushing at them at a high rate of speed just above the ground.

The bandits scattered; so did the defenders. The camels knew this was a predator that could—and would—eat them and tried to bolt. Only the fact that their lead ropes were each tied to the pack saddle of the camel in front of them, and the fact that they all tried to flee in different directions at once, kept them from succeeding in vanishing over the horizon. The men of the caravan all went facedown in the sand, freezing in place like rabbits in hopes the dragon would overlook them.

Not so the bandits.

Some of them tried to rein in their horses to stand and fight, but the horses were having none of that. They also knew what was plunging down out of the sky at them, and were not at all willing to become dinner. Unlike the camels, they were not bound together; they could, and did, bolt in whatever direction seemed the most unobstructed. Not even the strongest bit, not the strongest rider, was going to hold back a horse in a state of panic.

Avatre pulled up, shooting straight up into the sky, as Kiron clung to her saddle and looked for the missing camel. He spotted it just under them. The rider that had tried to steal it was now on the ground, with no sign of his horse—

Unless his horse was the one currently heading north, riderless, at a high rate of speed.

Kiron sent Avatre in a wingover to make a second pass, scattering the riders further. By this point the horses were in full gallop and not likely to stop for miles.

At this point, there really was nothing more he could do to help—and in fact, landing Avatre would be rather counterproductive, given the reaction of the camels, so after that second pass he left the caravan workers to take care of the few remaining bandits themselves. He turned Avatre’s head homeward; she seemed content now to go.

But if he had needed it—there it was. The proof that there still was useful work for the Jousters.

THREE

“SO,”
Kiron announced with glee to his wingleaders. “There’s still useful work for us.”

“Not just useful, I’d say it’s important,” replied Huras after a moment. “Uh—I hadn’t wanted to bring this up before, but . . . without an enemy army to fight, Jousters aren’t exactly a necessary sort of thing to have about.”

Orest snorted. “Neither are pet baboons, but no one complains about them.”

But some of the others looked thoughtful. It was Oset-re who spoke up for all of them. “The thing is,” he said reluctantly, “The pet baboons aren’t eating enough meat every day to feed an entire village. For a moon. It was one thing when we were protecting people from their enemies. Without someone to fight?” He shrugged. “Granted, the Great King and Queen are Jousters and want dragons, but . . .”

“But if we can’t prove ourselves useful, there will be all sorts of pressures brought to bear by nobles and common leaders and maybe even some of the priests,” Gan said bluntly. “We are quite visible, and quite costly and the things that go to support us could go to someplace else at a time when both Tia and Alta are trying to recover from terrible losses.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Granted, it is true that with the weather no longer in the control of the Magi, this year should be a normal one for crops. But there are fewer farmers in the fields as well, at least in what’s left of Alta. I don’t suppose Kaleth has had any revelations from the gods about how the harvest will be, has he?”