Shadowed By Wings (14 page)

A heat-embittered daronpu with a cheek swollen from a rotting tooth witnessed such.

My greatmother’s navel auntie was arrested on the spot for the dual crime of speaking in public and trying to seduce a man while upon Temple grounds.

Justice was meted out two days later, after enough stones had been gathered by daronpu acolytes and stacked neatly in strategic spots in the market square. Greatmother’s navel auntie, encased alive in a grudrun, the heavy, hempen shroud that encloses a dead woman’s body during transportation to the gharial basins, was herded out of the temple prison shortly after dawn. Beneath the grudrun, she’d been firmly gagged and tightly bound with rope from shoulder to knee. She walked rigidly, blindly.

She was placed upright in a hole in the ground, picked up as though she were a fence post and shoved into place. The hole was thigh deep. Two daronpu acolytes shoveled dirt back into the hole, burying her in place. Their spades moved carelessly in anticipatory haste.

My greatmother, then only seven, was required to watch because she’d witnessed her aunt’s transgression and therefore needed pimala-fuwa, the instructional cleansing of watching justice meted out.

She was required to throw the first stones.

As an old woman, she still remembered the sound those stones made as they struck her aunt’s body. Small, resonant sounds, like rotten plums dropping upon the ground from an untended tree. She remembered her aunt’s silence and the way her aunt’s body shivered with each stonefall. She remembered the seething crush of the crowd, the roar of hysteria emitted from obscenely open mouths. She remembered the spittle gathering like curdled milk in the corners of her cousin’s mouth as he screamed at his aunt in fury and shame, because of what she’d brought on him and herself with her careless footstep, her thoughtless cry, her forbidden touch.

Things had changed somewhat on Clutch Re since then.

Although a woman was still required to wear a bitoo when beyond the walls of her clan compound, she could journey forth unaccompanied by a man. Although forbidden to address or touch a daronpu, she might talk amongst other women while in public. Not that such conversation was encouraged, understand. It was merely overlooked, conveniently unheard by any man within earshot.

Another change that had seeped into acceptance on Clutch Re by the time I was a dragonmaster’s apprentice was that women not only transported clan goods to marketplace for trading; they also carried out the marketplace transactions through inoffensive gestures and brief, modest dialogue. Indeed, it was uncommon to see a man squatted before a mat of wares anymore, and was, in fact, deemed unseemly for a man to be engaged in such subordinate work.

Those changes that had slowly come about since my greatmother’s youth could be attributed to the ever-increasing discord and disorder plaguing the Emperor’s instrument of power in Malacar: Temple. The Temple of the Dragon. In the Emperor’s tongue, Ranon ki Cinai.

The Temple of the Dragon was but a theocratic dictatorship, first imposed upon our nation of Malacar nearly two centuries ago by the foreign autocrat Emperor Wai Fa-sren. Like all inhabitants of the Archipelago, the Emperor believed that dragons were divine. He was, however, a practical man unwilling to destroy the economy of the nation he’d vanquished. He therefore decreed that, although the eating of dragon flesh was forbidden, the consumption of unfertilized eggs laid in Temple-sanctioned Clutches within Malacar would be permitted. He also decreed that dragons could continue to be used as transportation and beasts of burden, but only by those people deemed worthy of such a sacred honor.

Only those people with Archipelagic ancestry, unquestionable loyalty to Temple, and considerable wealth and resource were ever deemed worthy enough.

One hundred and seventy years later, Emperor Wai Fa-sren’s fourth successor, Emperor Mak Fa-sren, still ruled Malacar from his Archipelagic throne, and he still did so through Temple.

Hivelike Temple vaults, each pitted with floor-to-ceiling hexagonal cells, each cell containing an ancient holy scroll, contained all there was to know about dragons and how Emperor Fa’s subjects had to live in regard to them.

But Temple was now rotting from the inside out.

While the Emperor’s Malacar-stationed militia leaders vied for power with his Temple Superiors, the landed gentry acting as overseers upon the Emperor’s Temple-controlled Clutches grumbled about self-governance. Wealthy Malacarite natives in the city muttered louder and more frequently about autonomy, while Clutch rishi and the city populace, aware of the in-house corruption and political squabbles plaguing Temple, chaffed under Temple’s yoke more and more openly.

The deepest thorn embedded in the Emperor’s flesh at the time of my apprenticeship was the sudden increase of Hamlets of Forsaken springing up throughout Malacar. Such nonpartisan agricultural communes, under the protection of no Temple-sanctioned warrior or dragon estate lord, were an unacceptable outrage, a bold, treacherous disregard of Temple Statute and allegiance to the Emperor.

But none of that was my concern as I returned to the Tack Hall where Egg and my fellow inductees polished silver and leather alike. Indeed, it wasn’t until nearly two years later that I even learned of the depth of Temple’s woes. What did concern me at the time, in that relentlessly obsessive way only venom can provoke, was the fact that I was still clothed, ridiculously, in Kratt’s cape, and that should a daronpu visit the stable domain, he could order me stoned on the spot for such indecency.

By the time I stepped onto the Tack Hall’s creaking wooden verandah, I’d determined to fashion myself a man’s short tunic from a couple of the blankets I’d seen stacked against the walls inside. I
could
have made a tunic from Kratt’s cape, I suppose, but I had no desire to wear that man’s cloth against my skin any longer if I could prevent it.

Egg and the inductees were hard at work, the smell of beeswax and polished leather thick in the air. Despite my ardent wish to slip in unnoticed, my arrival was instantly noted by all.

“Where’ve you been?” Egg squealed. “We have work to do!”

Venom hummed in my veins like hornets with raised stingers. I brushed by Egg, went straight to the nearest stack of blankets, and hefted it into my arms.

“These are riddled with holes,” I said in as accusing a tone as I could muster.

“What’re you doin’?” Egg cried.

“Mending these. They’re in a disgraceful state. What are they used for, hey-o?”

“Dryin’ the dragons, after exercisin’ in the Wet.”

“Right. Needles?”

Egg gave a strangled moan, then lurched down the length of the Tack Hall, elbows knocking saddles perched upon wall racks, disturbing the rows of neatly hung reins so that they rustled and hissed like snakes in his wake. At the end of the hall, he rattled through the drawers of a tall, broad cabinet.

He returned with an aggrieved expression, a spool of what looked to be more coarse string than thread, and a bodkin the size and thickness of a woman’s stout hairpin.

“It’s a needle for workin’ leather,” he said defensively. Then, petulantly, “Eidon said nothin’ to me about mendin’ those old blankets.”

I shrugged, took spool and enormous needle from him with muttered thanks, and turned for the door.

Egg’s squeal stopped me in my tracks. “Where’re you goin’
now
?”

“Outside. I can’t see enough in here to sew.” Before he could grant or withhold permission, I walked out of the Tack Hall, my fellow inductees gaping at me.

My insolence toward Egg was unacceptable. No woman should display such behavior toward a man, especially one outside of her clan. But not only did I not quite view Egg as a man, I thought of the stable domain as my new clan, and therefore experienced only the slightest qualms about my audacity, quickly quashed by venom-induced insolence.

Perhaps I possessed more of my mother’s traits than I had hitherto thought; after Waivia had been sold as a sex slave, my mother had shown no compunction whatsoever in such similar displays toward men.

I sat down on the worn verandah and immediately set to fashioning myself a tunic. As long as the garment covered me from neck to knee, I felt it would suffice.

I was never clever with a needle and thread, so my work was clumsy. More than once I stabbed a palm or finger with the bodkin. The flare of pain each time ignited the venom in my veins anew, sending my senses spinning so that my eyesight blurred, my ears were filled with a spiraling whine, and the verandah briefly swooped from my bottom, leaving me suspended in vertigo.

The chaos ended each time within heartbeats, leaving me swelled with a glowing puissance.

The garment, when I was done, hung off me askew but concealed far more of my skin than Kratt’s cape had. Pleased, I fumbled beneath my new tunic, undid Kratt’s cape, and stepped out of it. So I wouldn’t be accused of lying to Egg, I then darned and patched the remaining blankets and folded them neatly back into a stack.

Just as I was about to enter the Tack Hall again with needle and mended blankets, a muted cheer rose up from somewhere in the stables. I looked in the direction of the noise and saw, some ways off, two destriers rising into the sky.

With pellucid, tawny wings beating down the air, and scales the color of wet rust and ivy glimmering in the sunlight, the two beasts riveted me to the spot. The power inherent in those muscle-corded shoulders as wings flexed and stretched filled me with an empathetic tension and exhilaration.

Turning my back on the sight, I entered the Tack Hall and joined my fellow inductees.

There is a joy to be found in polishing fine, sturdy leather, as if by rubbing wax into the grain, one is breathing life into the object, soul back into the empty hide. I worked steadily throughout the early hours of morn alongside my fellow inductees, polishing leather until my fingers were glossy and soft with beeswax, and as the sun shone madly at itself, unable to touch us in the shadowed Hall, a feeling of camaraderie settled upon us all.

Like all women, I knew the art of braiding, and by late morn it had fallen upon me to teach the inductees how to do such, for the parade saddles were heavily garnished with tassels, braiding, and fist-sized flower knots made of looped leather tethers, many of which needed repair. Although Egg knew how to mend them, his brawny fingers worked clumsily, and his attempts to help the inductees learn the skill often ended messily.

At first, the hands I corrected skittered out from under mine and the shoulders I looked over crouched low, to avoid my touch. But as the morning progressed, such recoiling decreased, and although I was never directly addressed during the occasional bouts of chatter and banter that crept into our midst before Egg squelched it with a bellow, I wasn’t excluded from conversation by turned backs, either.

And then came a moment when one of the inductees mentioned that he’d heard a rumor that several Hamlets of Forsaken had joined forces and attacked Clutch Cuhan.

“Can’t be true,” said one sable-eyed boy of about nine. “The Forsaken don’t have dragons, so what’re they gonna use as weapons? Pitchforks?”

Scorn from a clawful of his peers:

“Don’t be yolk-brained; they have scimitars and dirks and things.”

“Axes, too, and crossbows alight with fire.”

“I’ve heard they even use Djimbi blow darts dipped in poison.”

The sable-eyed boy shook his head and said with great conviction, “Doesn’t matter, hey. No one attacks a Clutch. Ever.”

“Not true,” I murmured, tying tight a tassel I’d reshaped upon a saddle. “The Komikon himself mentioned such an uprising to me.”

Silence, and every eye in the place looked at me. A few mouths opened, wanting to ask questions, but then closed again, the would-be speakers uncertain of whether they should acknowledge me or not. Egg solved their dilemma.

“When did he say that?” he demanded.

“Yesterday morning. After flicking his whip at me for turning my back on him,” I added with artful rue.

Fleeting empathy crossed a clawful of faces.

“An’ is it true, then?” Egg asked, a touch of belligerence in his tone. “Clutch Cuhan’s been attacked?”

“Clutch Maht, he said.”

Egg grunted. “That makes more sense. Maht ain’t as big as Cuhan.”

“But why?” asked Sable-eyes. “It’s stupid. The Emperor’ll just crush them.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” I said.

“It’s most likely,” said another boy. “The odds of the Forsaken taking over Maht have to be one in a thousand.”

“But is that a reason for not trying?” I asked. “Don’t we sometimes have to try, despite the odds?”

“Not against those kind of odds.”

“Well, I dunno,” Egg said slowly, a deep frown furrowing his great forehead. “
We
face pretty big odds each time we go into Arena, hey.”

“That’s different,” Sable-eyes stubbornly insisted. “We ain’t Forsaken.”

“No,” Egg growled. “That ain’t what I meant. All I was sayin’ was, we face big odds too.”

“Especially us,” one boy muttered glumly. “The inductees.”

“Exactly,” Egg said, pleased someone had understood him.

“That’s what our apprenticeship is all about,” I added quietly. “Trying against the odds to survive Arena, to attain servitor, then veteran, then one day dragonmaster status. Not a one of us would be here if we didn’t harbor the hope we could attain such.”

A moment of silence as young minds digested that. Expressions changed subtly.

“Maybe it’s that way for the Forsaken,” I continued. “They fight because they believe, because they
have
to believe. Despite the odds.”

“Like us,” Egg grunted. “Yeah. Like us.”

My debate with the sable-eyed boy preyed on my mind for the rest of the morn with as much venom-induced insistence as had my previous fear that the cape I’d been wearing would earn me a stoning by a visiting Holy Warden. See, even though I’d convinced Sable-eyes that the Forsaken’s rebellion
may
have met with success, he’d convinced me that of course it would have ended as an utter failure. The thing that worried me concerning such a failure was the expedient return of the Ranreeb to the Jungle Crown and Daron Re to our Clutch. Once back, their thoughts would naturally return to me, and, their bloodlust whetted by the rebellion of the Forsaken, they’d press for my immediate execution.