Dragon's Heart (18 page)

Jakkin found Arakk's good clothes in the third drawer of the dresser, a shirt of linen and his best leathers. He brought them to Kkarina, pointedly not looking at Arakk's now naked body lying stiffly on the table. Kkarina took the clothes, then waved him away, and he was enormously relieved not to have to stay.

Returning to the bedroom, Jakkin tried to talk to Errikkin about what had happened out in the spikka copse, but once again Errikkin gave Jakkin his back and stared at the wall.

"You can talk to that wall all you like," Jakkin said, "but that doesn't change anything. Things would have been different if you'd been there."

"How?" Errikkin's voice was hollow, even ghostly, with grief. After all, he'd known Arakk much longer than Jakkin had. "How would it have been different?"

How indeed?
Jakkin suddenly realized he'd no idea at all.

***

LATER THAT EVENING, everyone in the nursery gathered in the dining room. They weren't there to eat—that they'd done in Kkarina's kitchen—but to sit by Arakk's body, laid out on one of the tables. They were supposed to say what they best remembered about him, but it took a while for anyone to speak.

Jakkin glanced quickly at the body, and as quickly away.
He looks both like and not-like Arakk,
he thought. Though having known Arakk for only a few days, he couldn't quite put his finger on what he meant by that. Maybe it was that the glow was gone from his moon face. Maybe it was Arakk's utter stillness, a stillness so complete, he might have been carved of stone.

There were copper coins resting on Arakk's closed eyes. "For the Dark Angel," Austarians liked to say, meaning the Angel of Death. Jakkin wondered if Kkarina had supplied the coins. Whether she had a collection of them just waiting for dead nursery folk, for they were not the kind of coins used for money in Austar. He looked again, as if pulled back by an invisible thread.

It—a body. Not Arakk—a person. That's the real difference.
He felt tears prickling behind his eyes but wouldn't let them fall.

Finally, the men began to talk about Arakk. Balakk had the most to say. It was he who'd first come upon Arakk during a trip to The Rokk last year, after the explosion that brought Rokk Major down. Arakk had been living on the streets of the city. A food seller, he'd been orphaned and without work since the bomb blast. He wanted to come to the country and "learn dragons," he said.

"He'd not been good with the big beasts," Balakk told them. "Almost like they was poison to him. Old vet called it an allergy. Broke out in hives when he touched one, he did, though dragon meat and takk never phased him." He wiped an arm across his eyes. "Not scared, mind. He tried his turn with them. 'Twas the hives defeated him. He was happier to be out with me in the fields."

"He always had a smile," said Frankkalin.

Everyone nodded. The word
smile
seemed to run around the room.

"He never failed in the field, whatever the season," Balakk said.

Jakkin thought that a good epitaph.

Then Likkarn stood slowly as if his bones ached. He spoke to the men but he was addressing Arakk, really, staring at the boy's body with an intensity that was palpable. Jakkin felt a cold chill go down his spine as the old man talked.

"We don't always know a hero when we see him," Likkarn said. "And sometimes, too late to tell him, we recognize what splendid things he's done." He paused, wiped a finger under his nose, then continued. "Arakk gave his life for the rest of us. For us and for the dragons he was no good with but still loved. He went eagerly up the tree to meet his doom. That makes him a hero, in every sense of the word."

Not eagerly, but he went quickly. I think that makes him
more
of a hero.
Jakkin didn't say that aloud.

Kkarina brought out a bottle of brew then, and the sweet strong liquor was passed around, with everyone having a small taste. It was too expensive and precious for more than a tiny sip apiece. Jakkin hardly wanted any more, anyway, for it made his head swim. He passed the bottle to Errikkin, who took it without thanks, his sip more like a slurp, which he swirled around in his mouth before swallowing.

Errikkin did an odd thing then. He glared at Jakkin, stood, put a hand on Arakk's cold hand, lifted it to his lips as if kissing it, and then went out of the room.

His head whirling from just a sip of the strong drink, Jakkin left, too, but he went outside, where the twin moons were once again writing their blood-red warning. This time Jakkin understood what they were saying, but the warning had come too late. Arakk was already dead. Slakk was injured. Jakkin was very aware that in both cases it could just as easily have been himself.

He strode swiftly to the incubarn and, once there, headed directly to Auricle's stall. As he walked along he barely listened to any of the hen dragons or their mewling hatchlings. All he could hear was Auricle, who was still shaken over the drakk and the drakk-death smell that sat like a noxious cloud over the back stalls. Besides, she was still grieving over the loss of the hatchling, gone off with Akki.

At last Jakkin got to her stall, opened the door, and went in. Auricle looked up at him, a small orange light flickering in her black eyes. It was the first time he'd seen any sign of a fighting spirit.

He put a hand to her head and sat down suddenly, almost as if his legs had collapsed. She scooted up next to him and he was grateful for the warmth. It occurred to him that he'd felt cold ever since Arakk's death.

"
Thanks, thou beauty
." Jakkin sent, along with a soft, gray river winding endlessly toward a far horizon.

What she sent back to him was equally gray, as if mist had descended on the river, cloaking it on all sides.

They sat that way for a long time, without sound, without further sendings.

"Well," Jakkin said at last, "we certainly aren't going to be much help to one another tonight." The lingering smell from the dead drakk was still potent. He had to leave or be sick.

Patting the dragon's head once, Jakkin stood and left the incubarn quickly. He got back to the bondhouse just as Dark-After began.

***

IN THE MORNING, they put Arakk in a box made of spikka wood. Balakk had carved Arakk's name at the head of the box, with an etched spray of wheat drooping on its stalk.
He must have been up all night working.
Jakkin hadn't known the old plowman had any ability with a carving knife.

In fact, I know nothing about any of them,
he told himself.
Not Balakk or Likkarn or
... Even though he'd lived most of his life among them, they were strangers. He knew the dragons better.

What he did know, however, was that there were always three or four burial boxes kept in a back room of the stud barn. It was an open secret within the nursery, and no one spoke of it for fear of bringing down disaster. "Do not call the Dark Angel, for he will come" was a nursery saying.

But disaster has come, anyway.
Jakkin was beginning to think that
he
was a curse set among them. How could he have considered this place home?

Look at all that had happened because of his presence at the nursery—his mother dead, Sarkkhan dead, Heart's Blood dead, Likkarn partially blinded—old news. And now Arakk dead, Slakk hurt, Errikkin crazy, Akki gone.

All somehow my fault.

Put that bluntly, it sounded stupid. Crazy. Clearly he hadn't killed anybody, but all those things had happened in part or in whole because of him.

All somehow my fault?

He couldn't shake the feeling that there was some truth in that. He tried to sort it out as he walked behind the six men carrying the box to the burial ground. They set the box under the gray-green weeping wilkkin trees.

All somehow my fault?

Jakkin stared down at the deep hole where the box would soon be lowered. He could find no answers there.

He remembered how after his mother had been buried, he'd spent long hours sitting by her grave, calling to her, thinking that if he could just say the right words, she'd return. Kkarina had found him there, a stunned five-year-old. She told him that his parents were in a long, unbroken sleep, and worked with him to make a stone for his mother's grave. It had Mummy on the top, but below it her name, Main. Her free name. She'd been known in the nursery as Makki, because even though she'd been born free, she'd put herself and her young son in bond in order that they might live.

Live.
He snorted like a young dragon. She hadn't lived, but died of a broken heart soon after bringing them both to safety, leaving him at the nursery alone and in bond.

After a time, of course, he'd stopped visiting the grave. Except on feast days, or days he and Kkarina picnicked in the graveyard. Or when, as now, he trailed after a new burial. He'd all but forgotten what his mother looked like, how soft her voice was.

There's still apart of me that thinks I can call the dead back with the right words.
He hadn't known the right words for his father or mother, or for Sarkkhan, or for Heart's Blood.

If I don't have the right words for those I love the most, how can I possibly know the right words for Arakk, who I hardly knew?

Suddenly everyone around him broke into song, a hymn that Jakkin had learned from his mother, or maybe Kkarina. He sang along with them, which made him feel a little better, as if borrowing words from the old song could serve when he had none.

Oh, God, who sends the double moons,
Who spreads the singing sand,
Take pity on your children here
Upon the bonded land.

For we have been but late in jail,
Our lives not ours to give,
Still with your grace we will arise
And learn once more to live.

He looked down at the red earth, thinking how much it looked like blood. How so much of Austar was blood beneath his feet: human blood and dragon's blood and drakk blood combined. His eyes filled with tears and he breathed slowly, deeply. But he was a man now, so of course he didn't cry.

THAT NIGHT, long after everyone was asleep, but well before Dark-After, Jakkin crept back out to the incubarn once more. He had a leather bag filled with sweet wikki fruit, and a drinking pouch tied to his belt. Opening the creaky door, he went in, standing for a moment to drink in the musky smell. Now the sharp, awful drakk odor was gone and it was all dragon stink again, a familiar smell, and one he loved.

Dragons were so simple. He understood them. And now that he could speak to them mind-to-mind, he could know all their secrets as well.

But humans ...
well, they were much too complicated. He hardly understood his own feelings. Of course he didn't really believe he was a curse, the cause of all that had gone wrong at the nursery. But for the moment, watching Arakk's coffin being lowered into its grave, he'd been sure of it.

And then there was Akki. His smile was crooked as he thought of her. Everything came back to Akki. From the first moment he'd really been aware of her, him lying in the hospice bed and she his nurse, till their last quarrel, over ... He couldn't even remember what the quarrel had been about. It didn't matter. Without Akki, he had no reason to stay at the nursery. He would go to The Rokk and try to convince her that they only needed to keep the secret. If Akki was determined to solve the problem of the dragons' gift, then they'd do it together.

After I get some sleep.
He was exhausted from the drakk hunt, the burial, the roil of emotions. The few hours he'd slept in his bed, while Errikkin snored in the bunk above, hadn't helped. A few more hours of sleep, this time surrounded by dragons, and he'd be all right again.

Walking slowly into the incubarn, Jakkin listened in on the dreams of all the dragons. The hens' minds were full of slow, pink clouds; the hatchlings all atwitter with bouncy blobs of color. He dipped in and out of their night thoughts.

Auricle, being neither mother nor hatchling, had a clearer mind: cool and somehow soothing. Jakkin went into her stall and plopped down by her side. He adjusted his back against her great pale flank and was asleep within minutes.

***

WHEN HE AWOKE, it was fully Dark-After. He could sense it, the tendrils of cold finding ways into the barn, through small pores in the stone and wood. But the heating system worked well enough, and the dragons added their own warmth.

Jakkin got up, careful not to wake Auricle or any of the others, and left the barn. Predictably, the door squalled, both opening and closing. He should have oiled it when he'd had the chance.

No lights went on in the bondhouse, and Jakkin moved swiftly around the side of the barn.

Once there, he dashed to the weir, then splashed across and headed to the oasis. There was hardly a sound; not even the insects were awake. Overhead the sky was a deep blue shot through with ribbons of purple. It could be read as dangerous, or exhilarating. Jakkin sighed. The rest of the nursery folk would see only the danger, not the beauty. They didn't have dragon eyes.

"Sssargon!" he called aloud when he was finally close to the oasis. "Sssasha! We're going to find Akki. Now." He hoped they were still there, sending a tentacle of color in red, the color of their shared blood. "
Come. Come
."

For a long moment he heard nothing. Cold crawled across his shoulders. The brilliant sky was still.

And then suddenly he heard the flexing of great wings. A mumble of color crowded into his head. The dragons were beginning to wake: Sssasha first, next her brother, and finally the triplets. They stood, stretched, looked around with eyes that could pierce the dark. They crowded around him, pushing at him with their great keeled chests. Poking into his mind, they sent him rainbows.

"
Akki ... Akki ... Akki,
" they called, picking up his conviction, until his head was a riot of color—first greens and blues like rivers crossing the Austar sands, and then their signature colors of red and rose.