"My mother was a baggery girl," she said. "She died at my birth. The other bag girls raised me. But when I was twelve and knew that I wanted to doctor—people and dragons—and not live a bag girl's life, I left. So here I, work. And learn. I am only fifteen. I have years of learning ahead. But no man's gold will fill my bag."
"I see," Jakkin said, though he didn't really.
"Come on. Never mind me. Let's go see your little beauty," Akki said, brushing her hair from her face and giving a swipe at her eyes as well.
Jakkin pretended not to notice. He had a feeling she wouldn't want him to see that she had been crying.
"All right," he said at last, standing up. He was about to reach down and give her a hand when she stood up without his help. "Do you have the broom?"
"Don't I always?" she asked.
He nodded, and they walked down the road, slightly apart, but not so far that Jakkin could not feel the warmth of her by his side.
***
THE DRAGON WAS asleep in the shelter. It did not even wake when they entered. They sat down next to it, listening to its hissing snore and watching the rise and fall, rise and fall, of its mud brown sides. Its wings twitched slightly, as if it dreamed of flying.
"Look," Akki said, pointing to the tail, "there's red coming through. A berry red, I think."
Jakkin looked. There was a patch of red showing, like a halo around the tail's tip. "Red. But deeper than berry."
Akki moved closer and stared.
"You're right," she said. "It is deeper. It's the same color as your blood was on the sand."
"Are you sure?"
"Didn't I see enough of it yesterday?" she asked.
Jakkin nodded and held up his wrist. It was only lightly bandaged and no longer hurt. "Dragon's tongue and heart's blood," he said.
The dragon gave a long, slow yawn and woke, stretching its wings and scrabbling with its claws on the sand.
"Up, thou lazy worm," Jakkin said aloud.
"Do you always speak thou to your dragon?"
Jakkin nodded. "At least I try, though I get my thees and thous mixed up a lot. My father knew dragons and he said the best trainers always use thou. It's supposed to bring me closer to the dragon. It seems to work."
She thought about that a moment. "I expect that's true with people, too," she said.
"Should I call you thee?" he asked impulsively.
"I'm not sure either of us wants to be that close," she said, laughing. "Yet."
For some reason, her laughter hurt. He answered quickly, "Besides, which of us would be the dragon, and which the trainer?"
"Well, I have the claws for it," she said, holding up her hands. They were large, sturdy hands. "But you have the bonehead."
"Funny, that's what Master Sarkkhan said about you," Jakkin retorted.
"He should know."
Jakkin wondered what she meant.
"Come on, show me what this worm can do. Besides eat, sleep, and cover drakks with sand." She got up and ran out of the shelter, and the dragon followed her, nipping playfully at her heels.
Jakkin stood and went outside. For a minute he watched the two of them playing. As Akki moved, her long, dark, hip-length hair swung around her body. The dragon caught a hank of the hair and pulled. She fell to the ground and the dragon jumped on her, and they rolled over and over to the edge of the spring.
"Look out!" Jakkin warned. But he was too late.
They fell in together and swam apart.
Jakkin kicked off his sandals and took off his shirt and leapt in after them, dousing them both with more water. Akki splashed back with her hands, and the dragon fanned the water with its wings.
"Enough," Akki called at last and climbed up the bank on her hands and knees.
Jakkin reached out, caught her ankle, and dragged her down again. When she resurfaced he said, "I was only able to do that because your feet are so big."
The last part of the sentence was lost in coughing, as he swallowed a wave she pushed toward him. When the coughing fit was over, he saw Akki and the dragon stretched out on the sand, drying in the warmth of the desert breeze. He climbed up after them and lay down a little ways apart.
Akki turned on her side and leaned on one elbow, facing him. The sand clung to her clothes and bond bag. "Now show me what this dragon can do. After all, you are trying to train a fighter, aren't you?"
Jakkin called the dragon to him and showed her its stance. He had to hold the young dragon in place, but once the snatchling got the idea, it stood waiting for his nod of release. Then came the hindfoot. And finally, on command, it blew a few weak, damp straggles of smoke.
"Not much yet," said Jakkin. "But we've got a year. And this mighty worm is already way ahead of its clutchmates. They've just had their first airing. It's already bonded with me, fought a drakk, hovered, and blown smoke. Quite a dragon, don't you think?"
"But you've never trained a dragon before..." she began.
"Of course not."
"Or seen one trained?"
"My father worked with ferals in the sands," Jakkin said. "I think I remember something of that. And I've sneaked about some in the nursery. Last year I watched Likkarn in a session. And I'll try this year as well."
"What about going to a fight?"
"Well, I heard Sarkkhan say once that the dragon itself is the best teacher. And I'll need my gold for food and stuff."
Akki nodded. "I'll get you a book. Can you read? You were born free."
He nodded. "Some."
"Good," she said. "Or else I would have taught you."
"You can read," he said, more a statement than a question.
She ignored it. "I've seen several books on training at the hospice and some in Sarkkhan's cottage. I think I can get them for you without anyone suspecting."
Jakkin did not ask her why she had been in Sarkkhan's house. Perhaps she had helped treat him for an illness. She seemed to know him well—and hate him, too. Maybe the nursery rumors were true. After all, she had been brought up in a baggery. And though she had left at twelve ... well, some girls started early. Sarkkhan had no wife, and Akki was beautiful. Maybe not as beautiful as the girl in Kkarina's portrait, but...
"Let's feed this beastie and go back home," said Akki. "I'm tired. And wet."
"We'll dry," said Jakkin, happy that she had changed the subject. "Long before we reach the nursery and our beds, we'll be dry."
They stripped the leaves from three stalks and pressed out the juices with their nails, for they no longer had the kitchen knife. Then they washed their hands in the warm spring and went back.
16
AKKI WAS AS good as her word, bringing him three books on training over the next few weeks and white trainer suits for them both. Jakkin did not ask her where she got everything, or what she had to do to get it all. He did not want to know—and she did not volunteer the information.
He read the books with painstaking slowness, sounding out some of the harder technical words. And Akki, the few times she came out to the oasis with him, gave him lessons in dragon anatomy.
"Here, in the haunch," she said, pointing to the dragon's upper leg, "the big bone inside is called humerus. And the bending bone is the carpus, like our wrist bone."
He recited all the bones after her; humerus, ulna, radius, carpus, pointing to his own body and then the dragon's body, marveling at all the similarities. He wanted to know everything about dragons, inside and out. He learned the scientific names of the dragon's five claws from one of the books: the large double claws were the lanceae, the back three were called unum, secundum, and tricept, strange otherworldly words that he had to chant in order to remember. Akki tested him on the scientific names, and then he demonstrated the week's lesson with the dragon to her in return.
But Akki was not there as often as Jakkin would have liked. Most evenings she would start off with him, sometimes even holding his hand as they left the bondhouse. Then, at the main road, she would suddenly shake her head and pull her
hand away, as if the hand holding had only been a show for the others. She would leave him to go east toward the oasis while she took off on a more northerly path toward the Narrakka River. She warned him not to follow her. He never did.
He never did, because the dragon needed him. Even when it had outgrown the drizzled juice and could graze on the leaves and stalks of the blisterweed and burnwort that he picked for it—even when it was chest high and then past his shoulder—he could feel it calling to him in his head. It was a siren call he could not resist.
And so the season of the eggs passed.
During the day Jakkin joined Slakk and Errikkin, Trikko and the rest in cleaning the stud barns and mud-bathing the cock dragons. Likkarn was absent more and more from the barns, off to the pits, it was said, his differences with Sarkkhan patched up once again. Jakkin did not miss him.
A new song was going the rounds of the nursery now, called "The Minor Minor Pits" about a dragon who lost all his fights but one, and that one with the greatest champion of the world. Jakkin adopted the song for the mud baths and found its haunting tune with the slow rises and falls of the melody line wonderfully soothing to the excitable males. Even Bloody Flag, who had been unmanageable quite often since his stallmate's death, seemed to calm down and thrumm when the song floated by him.
Dust and fewmets and mud baths filled Jakkin's days, but at night he worked with his own dragon, teaching it the rudiments of fighting in the pits. All those feints and passes and stands that a dragon does naturally Jakkin gave names to, and he taught the names to his worm. By the end of the egg season, when the days grew shorter and the nights became a pavane of moons across the sky, Jakkin's dragon could respond to his every thought. He put it through its paces two or three times a week: left-claw pass, right, hindfoot rise, stand. And the little dragon obeyed and improved at every lesson.
By the season of training and selling, Jakkin's dragon was far ahead of the dragonlings at the nursery. They were just being separated into fighters and culls. The topmost hatchlings in the pecking order, those who had shown an instinct for blood, were automatically chosen for training. The quieter, frightened dragons were chosen for the stews, though an occasional beauty, one marked with attractive spots or streakings, was set aside. Often baggery girls or the masters' wives enjoyed such as pets. Gelded or spayed, the beauty-dragons never grew more than shoulder high and were gentle creatures of tidy habits.
Culling Day was always a horror. Great trucks drove onto the nursery grounds, painted with the blood-red logo of the Rokk Stews: a dragon silhouette with crossed knives beneath, and the single word Quality outlined in gold paint like an aura above the dragon head. The bonders' foul mood communicated itself to the dragons. The hens stomped back and forth on their great feet, heaving and rocking their weight from side to side. They houghed and groaned. The hatchlings were silent lpeneath their feet; even the top of the order shivered, cowering next to their mothers' tree-trunk legs. In the stud barn came the bellowing of the males as if some memory of their own hatchling days were triggered there.
The food then was predictably bad, for Kkarina always absented herself on Culling Day, leaving the bonders to sort out her verbal instructions on their own. Something always went terribly wrong in the kitchen without her: the meat would be spoiled or the takk would not boil or the stoves would not function properly.
Only old Likkarn seemed to enjoy the culling. He preceded it every year with a night of blister fury. Jo-Janekk's swollen left eye and a bruise on Balakk's cheek testified to Likkarn's blisterweed strength. It had taken four of them to put him to bed. In the morning they all followed his orders sullenly. He was a weeder—but he knew dragons. His fingers pointed to one hatchling after another, sorting, hesitating only once at a well-spotted orange that was assigned, at last, to the beauty group. Jakkin was secretly pleased that he had guessed all but that last correctly. His eye was as good as Likkarn's.
He also knew that all over Austar IV similar Culling Days were held. It was reasonable to select the best dragons for breeding. Once, so the books told him, the great Austar dragons had been on the edge of extinction and the first settlers had slowly brought them back. The encyclopedia had a whole article on the dragons. They used to fight one another to the death, and it had taken men to train them—retrain them, really—to their old instincts of fighting only until dominance was assured. But that didn't make Culling Day any easier to bear.
Jakkin wondered briefly why the culling had to be so violent, why the hens and hatchlings had to be subjected to such a hard separation. But he knew that the only way to choose the hatchlings properly was to see them all together. And there was no practical way to quiet the culls' terror. Stunning the hatchlings would ruin the tender young meat for the stews and could disorder the beauty-dragons completely. Besides, as Jakkin knew full well, there were very few power cells for the extinguishers to be had. They were used sparingly, and only in life-and-death situations.
That night, out on the oasis, Jakkin sat with his dragon's head in his lap. He sang it all the old songs he knew and tried to think pleasure at it while he scratched behind its ears. But the darker side of Culling Day must have nuzzled through his thoughts, for the dragon pushed his hand aside, stood up, and trotted beyond the weed patch. He heard it snuffling as it went. Leaving it to its own thoughts, he returned to the nursery early.
Two days later, the nursery had settled down again, the hens starting the long process of weaning their remaining hatchlings. In the oasis, Jakkin had to do the same. He made himself stay away, going back every third or fourth night with dread, fearing to find that the dragon had died of starvation without him. Each time he returned, the dragon greeted him joyfully, larger by another handbreadth than the last visit, and the weed and wort patch full of signs of its browsing. Jakkin was torn between pleasure at his dragon's growth—it was now as tall as he was—and a lingering disappointment that the snatchling did not seem to have needed him during his absence. But his pride in the growing strength and ability of his dragon soon overshadowed everything.
It was on the last day of the training season that he taught it a move that was in none of the books. It was an accident, really. They had been playing, though Jakkin now had to play with the dragon much more carefully. It was a little higher than his head, and its legs were the width of half-grown spikka trees. The scales of its back and neck and tail were as hard and shiny as new-minted coins. Only along the belly and where its legs met the firm trunk were the scales still butter soft.
Jakkin had rolled on the ground, propelled by a light tap from the dragon's tail, and had ended up on its left wing. The wing's ribs were encased in the hard grayish skin that contrasted sharply with the dragon's dark red body. Only at the knobby part of the wings, where the rubbery skin stretched taut, was there a hint of red in the gray. Shakily Jakkin stood up on the dragon's wing, careful not to scrape or tear it.
The dragon turned its head slowly to look at him, its eyes black shrouds.
"See, mighty worm, if thou canst free thyself of this encumbrance," said Jakkin, standing very still.
The dragon opened its mouth and yawned, then fluttered its free wing slowly.
Jakkin began to relax. "Nothing? Canst do nothing?" he taunted gently. He watched the fluttering free wing.
Suddenly the tail came around and swept him off the pinioned wing in a single fluid motion. Caught unaware, Jakkin tumbled backward and rolled into the embrace of the dragon's left leg. For a full minute it would not let him go. He could feel its laughter in his head, great churning waves of blue and green.
"And that," said Jakkin when the dragon let him up at last, "that we will call the Great Upset." He dusted his clothes off with his hands. "I let you knock me down. A dragon in the pits will not be so easily fooled." He had started to walk away when the dragon's tail came up behind him and pushed him into the sand once again.
Jakkin laughed and turned over on his back. "You win. You win," he said as the tail came down and n
udged under his arm, where the dragon knew he was especially ticklish.
***
AND THEN IT was the season of stud.
The bonders were kept busy day and night, helping the studs to preen, leading them one at a time into the arena-sized courtyards where the chosen hen waited. As the humans watched, the dragon courtship began.
The female stood, seemingly uninterested, while the male paced around the yard, measuring it with his eye. Every once in a while, he stopped and sprayed the floor with the extended scent glands on the underside of his tail or breathed smoky gusts onto the sand. His hackles rose. The circling continued until the hen either curled into a ball, pretending to sleep—which indicated that she was uninterested in the male—or until she leapt several feet in the air, pumping her great wings and lifting her tail.
If she turned down the courting male's offers, the bonders would jump into the ring and take the deflated dragon away. Deflated was the word, Slakk commented once, as he led Bloody Flag out of the ring. The male dragon's scent gland hung as loose as a coinless bag and his hackles had returned to normal size.
But once a hen accepted the male, showing her preference by her leap above the ring, the male winged into the air after her. Then they both shot into the sky, above the roofless courtyard, the female screaming her challenge to the male, who followed always slightly behind. They rose screaming and spiraling above the nursery, higher and higher, until they were merely black, swirling specks in the sky.
An hour later, the frantic courting flight over, the two returned together, wingtip to wingtip, to the courtyard, where a moss-covered floor pad had been rolled out by the bonders. There, in full view of the watchers, the cock dragon mounted and mated with the hen. Then they lay side by side for the rest of the night. The following morning, separated by mutual consent and the prod-sticks of the bonders, the stud went back to his own stall, the female to the incubarn.
Jakkin only managed to get to the oasis one evening a week during the season of stud, for he was suddenly promoted to helping with the matings, under Likkarn's direct supervision. It was not an easy job. It also meant that he shared Bond-Off with Likkarn. Jakkin's one worry was that the old man would track him over the sands just for spite, to get even with him for every mistake—real and imagined—that Jakkin made in the mating courtyards. But each Bond-Off Likkarn disappeared first. After the third Bond-Off, Jakkin relaxed his guard. He guessed that Likkarn had found someplace away from the nursery to spend the day smoking blisterweed, since each morning after Bond-Off Likkarn's eyes were a furious red.