Jakkin scrambled to his feet. He gazed once at the little dragon curled asleep in the sand. The cold would not bother it, not even as a newborn. He knew that. But just to be sure, he took off his shirt and wrapped it around the sleeping mite, placing the dragonling far back against the rear wall of reeds. Then, hugging his leather jerkin to him, he ran as fast as he could across the sand toward the nursery. If he kept moving, he thought, he could keep warm. If he ran fast enough, he could make it back before the worst of the cold struck. He would not bother about brooming his footsteps, but trust to the wind and pray to whatever god still watched over bond boys. Certainly the masters' god would not recognize him yet.
The sand seemed to slip away from his feet, making running even more difficult. Several times he stumbled and one time went crashing to his knees. It was hard to keep moving in the cold. The metal bond chain around his neck felt as if it were on fire, it was so cold, and the metal eyelets on his jerkin felt as though they were burning small holes wherever they touched his skin.
The cold made him want to stop and snuggle down in the sand, to build himself an earth mound and sleep. Yet he knew such a sleep would be the sleep of death. Dark-After, nothing after, he reminded himself, his feet moving even when his mind willed them to stop.
And then his feet were running on packed earth, and he realized he was on nursery property. But the cold befuddled him, and he was not sure where he was. His breath plumed out before him. He felt he could almost break it off and use it as a pick. Stick it on his forehead and break his way out of the egg of cold that surrounded him. He was sure his skin was becoming as hard and scaled as any lizard's. If blooded, he would roar. He found himself roaring, roaring, roaring, and he fell hard against a stone wall.
A gloved hand pulled at him, and. he was suddenly wrapped in someone's downer.
"Hush. You're found. But the cold has snapped you. Just come along."
He thought he knew that voice. It came from another dream he had had.
A door opened and shut and the warmth made him hurt all over.
"Akki, what are you doing in here?" A sleepy voice.
"Bringing home a body."
"Why, it's Jakkin. Hey, Errikkin, look. It's Jakkin."
"Wonder where he's been all night."
"Look at his chest. Wonder what her name was?"
"Does he look different?"
"Like a man, you mean?" someone snickered.
"Was he coming from town?" A laugh. "You know."
A woman's laugh. "Yes, from the baggeries. Can't you see? His bag is only half-full."
"Or half-empty." More laughs.
"I heard him roaring outside the hospice. I grabbed a blanket, threw on my own thermals, and ran."
"Lucky for him."
"He's all luck. It's a wonder he's a bonder."
Jakkin opened his eyes. His body was too hot now. He threw the blanket off. He stared at Akki, who gave him a wry smile.
"Yes," she said, staring at him. "He's had himself quite a night." She winked.
They led him to his bed and he fell asleep, murmuring, "Beauty. You beauty." He heard them laugh once again before he was totally out.
9
MORNING SEEMED TO come too swiftly. Summoned by the clanging breakfast bell, Jakkin could scarcely rise and had to be dressed by Slakk and Errikkin. They did it good-naturedly and even tried to joke with him. Then they force-marched him down the hall to the common room.
It was the cup of takk flooding through him that gave Jakkin the strength to talk. "Did I—say anything in my sleep?" he asked, deciding that caution was less important than knowledge.
"Not her name," said Slakk, taking his face out of his bowl for the moment. "Nor the sign of her baggery."
"Baggery?" Jakkin was confused.
"Oh, leave him," Errikkin said. "Maybe he doesn't know her name. Maybe it wasn't so important."
"Any time you stay out so late the cold snaps you, and you leave your shirt behind, it's important!" said Slakk. The boys at the table laughed with him. Jakkin blushed, which made them laugh even more.
"I wasn't..." he began, and stopped. Better they guessed wrong than guessed where he really was.
Slakk heard his hesitation and stared at him slyly. "Unless, of course," he said, a grin starting across his face, "unless it was—Akki." As Jakkin made a stuttering protest, Slakk pounced. "It was Akki." He beat his spoon on the table and began chanting "Akki, Akki, Akki."
The rest of the boys at the table joined in, even Errikkin. "Akki. Akki. Akki."
"Stop it!" Jakkin shouted angrily. "It's not Akki. Stop it." But there was no breaking through their noise. He glanced quickly over at the pair-bonders' table, but Akki was not there. Had she heard and left? Or was she not yet at breakfast?
"Akki. Akki. Akki." The boys' chant continued unabated. Now they were all beating their spoons on the table.
Jakkin jumped up and stormed from the room, slamming the door behind him. He knew his dramatic exit would make them surer, but he didn't know what else to do. He needed time to think, time to calm down.
As he pushed through the outer door and into the yard, the bright sun made him squint. The barns seemed to shimmer and glow, heat streams rising from them. The one spikka tree in the courtyard center cast a shadow but no shade. He thought of the shadows of the night before, when he had gone, bent over, toward the incubarn.
And then, suddenly, he remembered the silent-winged eggsucker that had skimmed across the face of the moon. The drakk. He had not yet reported it. It and its family, maybe even a colony, would be somewhere close by. The dragon eggs were hatched, no longer in any danger, but there were still the hatchlings to consider. Soon the hens and hatchlings would be let out into the henyard. A drakk with its sharp, curved talons could maim or kill an unprotected hatchling before the hen was even aware of the drakk's presence. Drakk were silent, and—alive—they had no smell. Dead, they covered anyone close by with a heavy, nauseating odor of decay. Jakkin had heard that a drakk family on the hunt would circle endlessly, taunting a hen until she was drawn away from her helpless brood into a fruitless chase. He thought of his own dragon, his little beauty, out alone in the reeds.
"Stay in the shelter till I come for thee," he murmured, knowing that his thoughts could not reach so far but hoping that the young snatchling's instincts would keep it in the shelter for a while.
He turned and went back toward the bondhouse. As he went in the door, he was relieved to find that the chanting was over.
One of the younger boys, red-haired Trikko, started to call out when he saw Jakkin: "Akk—" He was stopped with an elbow in the stomach by Errikkin, who then turned and, immediately contrite, asked if Trikko had been hurt.
Jakkin nodded at his friends and walked over to the table where the older men sat: Balakk and his two helpers were there, as well as Jo-Janekk, who ran the nursery store, and Frankkalin, who was the main toolsmith and mason. At one corner of the table, surrounded by a self-imposed silence, sat Likkarn. The others ignored him and he glowered into his food bowl. Likkarn looked up only once and stared at Jakkin with such a look of distaste that Jakkin could feel a cold band of sweat start on his neck. He put his hand up to wipe it off and at the same time greeted the other men. He dried his hand on the side of his pants.
"Well, boy?" It was Balakk.
"Last night—" Jakkin began.
"Oh, we heard about your late night," chuckled Jo-Janekk, smoothing his mustache with one hand. "Woke the whole bondhouse, you did."
Jakkin's hand went up to his bag and he squeezed it, letting the tension flow out of his fingers onto the familiar soft bag surface. "Last night," he continued, "a drakk flew overhead. Near the henyard."
Likkarn looked up again. The distaste still showed in his eyes. "A drakk? Are you sure?" he asked quickly.
"Do you know what you're saying? What a drakk hunt will mean to the schedule here on the farm?" added Balakk.
"It was a drakk," Jakkin said, hoping they would not
question him more.
"Describe it," said Likkarn, standing up and coming over to him. His red-rimmed eyes glistened. He was close enough so that Jakkin could see the gray-and-black beard stubble breaking through the scarred surface of his face.
Jakkin took a breath.
"What you saw, bonder," Likkarn added. "Not what you expected to see."
"It was a shadow. A black, silent shadow overhead. Wings stretched so." He spread his arms. "And a long snaky shadow of a head."
"A drakk," Balakk complained.
"Flying which way?" Likkarn asked, as if he did not believe a word.
Jakkin closed his eyes and saw again the great wings of the drakk. "Flying east to west, from beyond the bondhouse toward the incubarn."
"Fewmets!" Balakk's fist slammed against the table. "Those pieces of lizard waste seem to grow out of nothing. Nothing! I've a mind to quit farming and take a job in Rokk. I thought we had wiped them out seven years ago."
Likkarn's lips moved in and out purposefully. "Sometimes a new colony starts when the young are forced out by their elders," he said. "Out to find new territory—and new food. Across the desert sands, closer to civilization." He glared at Jakkin.
"And we were going to take the hatchlings out this very evening for their first airing," said Crikk, Balakk's right hand and his closest friend. He was a young man, just out of childhood, his arms pitted with blood scores. He had helped Sarkkhan several times in the minor pits before asking to be transferred back to the farm. "We don't dare take them out now. They'd just be meat for those monsters."
"So it's a hunt, then," said Balakk wearily. "A regular de-bagged roundup."
"Well, I've got plenty of knives, but they'll need honing," Frankkalin said as he rose. "I'll take some of the boys and get started." He went over to the table and fingered Errikkin, his special favorite, and two of the younger boys. They followed him silently; his one-word explanation was enough.
"I'll start Slakk and the other boys on the dragon food. The baths will have to wait until this is over," Likkarn said. Any sign of weed in his eyes was now gone. "I'll meet you back here in an hour. You take the boy"—he signaled with his chin at Jakkin—"and chart that flight."
Likkarn left, dragging Slakk and the others behind him.
"He acts as if he's still head here," complained Kkittakk, Balakk's second helper, a bonder new to the nursery. "And he's only a lower stallboy now."
"You've not been here long enough to know," Balakk said. "When it comes to fighting drakk, I'll stand behind Likkarn any day. He's got a nose for them, he has. He's as bloody-minded as they are. I remember once he fought a drakk bare handed ... but there's time to tell that later." Balakk stood up. "Come, boy, show me where you saw that piece of worm waste. We'll have to take soundings." He sighed loudly and unfolded his long body from the bench.
They followed Balakk into the hall, where he unlocked a free-standing cupboard full of instruments. He took out a metal and glass object and polished the base of it with his sleeve. Then, finding a package of soft material in the cupboard, he polished the glass lens as well.
"There, that'll do for a first sounding. Now show me exactly where you were when that piece of filth passed over."
In the courtyard, Jakkin stood still for a moment, remembering. "It was night," he said softly.
"We know that," Kkittakk complained.
"Hush, you bonder, or I'll de-bag what little you've got," Balakk said in a fierce whisper. "He means it was dark out and he has to refeel where he stood. Fewmets, man, this thing is going to be hard enough without your interruptions."
Grateful for Balakk's support, Jakkin closed his eyes. He was worried. If he told them exactly where he had been, he might give away the stealing of the dragon, for he had been on the path to the incubarns. But if he lied, the charting of the flight would be off by a kilometer or more, and the drakk might never be found. He thought what that could mean, picturing a hatchling squirming and peeping its fear, hot dragon blood dripping down where the talons gripped, scoring the sand below. He suddenly saw his own dragon with its life spilling out on the sands. He knew then there was no choice.
"Here," he said. "I was walking here. And the drakk flew this way." His hand cut through the air in a steady trajectory. It dipped once, just as the drakk's wings had dipped going by his head, and pointed to a spot well beyond the nursery, out in the sands.
Balakk grunted and turned the wheels of the instrument in his hand. He shouldered Jakkin aside and stood where Jakkin had stood, sighting through the eyepiece.
"There's a copse of spikka trees directly in line. And four or five kilometers farther is the edge of Sukker's Marsh. If we have to go in there to find them, it might take days."
"And back, where it flew from?" Jakkin asked dismally, for that way lay the sands in which his own dragon was hidden.
"I'll get to that. I will." Balakk turned and sighted along the flight line. "No trees on the flight line. It's far and away across the sands before you come to anything in which a family of those baggy horrors could roost. Lucky for us they fly in such straight trajectories. Except when they're on the hunt. But with the dragons all inside right now, they'd just be making their regular straight passes. When they're hunting they can scent a dragon up to five kilometers on either side of their path and straight down as well. They have scent sensors along their bodies, covered by the wings."
Jakkin nodded, the tightness in his chest relaxing only slightly.
"How big were its wings?" Balakk asked again.
Jakkin spread his arms apart a little, then farther.
"A small one. Pray to the gods they're all that size. I heard of a man who tackled a really big drakk, one with a wingspread longer than I'm high. Near dragon size, it was. Ripped him open as easily as a nestling pecks out of its egg." Balakk shuddered. "Let's hope they're all small ones. And that Frankkalin can get his knives honed sharp. We'll take the extinguishers, too. Sarkkhan needs to be told. Jo, you do that. And we'll all have to get into leathers. It's some protection, at least."
"In this heat—" Kkittakk began.
"Ripped him from here," Balakk said easily, pointing to just under his throat, "to here." He finished drawing a line down to his groin.
Kkittakk nodded. "Leathers it is," he said.
They walked back to the bondhouse in silence while Jo-Janekk disappeared toward Sarkkhan's sandbrick house. It was on a small rise overlooking the entire nursery and was surrounded by twenty-year trees. Jakkin had never been inside. Few of the bonders had. Master Sarkkhan was a solitary man who spent time training the pit fighters and running them in the major pits or off on his other farm with the retired studs. He was rarely at the nursery—and never entertained there. He gave orders—and the orders were passed along. Jakkin knew him by sight and by the sound of his voice, a big, booming gong of a voice. He doubted if Sarkkhan knew much about him.
***
THE DRAKK FIGHTERS met outside in less than an hour, dressed in leathers. Jakkin, being the youngest and unfamiliar with the pits, had never owned his own coveralls. He wore a pair of fawn-colored ones that Jo-Janekk had found for him. They were too long and had to be rolled up. There were several strange scarrings on the legs. Jakkin did not ask where the deep scratches came from. He was afraid he knew. He was grateful, though, that they let him be part of the roundup. Some bonders felt that a successful roundup changed a boy into a man. Jakkin was grateful and, though he wouldn't admit it out loud, very frightened. He had heard a lot about drakk, none of it good.
"Master Sarkkhan was not in his house. He's away at the pits—" Jo-Janekk began.
"Fewmets, that's right," Balakk cursed. "I forgot. He's got two fighters. Hoping to have a winner at the minor pits with them. He's hungry, is Master Sarkkhan. Hasn't had a winner in months. Not even at a minor. Well, I hope he has them today, or that we find those pieces of waste. Otherwise, I'd not bet a coin to fill a dead man's bag against a sack of gold but that he'll have us on half rations before n
ightfall."
"Now, Bal," Jo-Janekk began, "you know he's not that kind of master. He came up from bond himself."
"The worst kind are gold masters, they say," Kkittakk put in. "Worse than born masters."
"You haven't been here long enough to know," said Frankkalin.
"Save your fire for the drakk," Likkarn warned them. "We can't wait till Sarkkhan comes back, win or no win." He rubbed his hand over the bib of his coverall, touching the place where his bag lumped. "You can't wait with drakk flying out there." He looked at Jakkin. "Do we have to take this bag of waste?"
"Yes." Balakk gave the answer without hesitation, and as he was now senior, Likkarn could not quarrel with him.
Jakkin could feel the cold sweat begin again, beading his neck and running down the crease of his back. He wondered that he could feel so cold when he should be hot in the confining leathers.
Wordlessly, Frankkalin gave out the knives. Long, straight bladed, they resembled machetes with bone handles. Each man got one. Likkarn, Balakk, and Frankkalin carried extinguishers as well, the three that could be spared from the hallways.
"Stingers for stunning, but finish them with knives," Balakk cautioned. "We can't waste power. There's not another shipment of power packs due into Rokk till next year, and we're already low." He did not have to mention Likkarn's killing of Blood Brother. It was on everyone's mind.
Likkarn grunted and looked away.
Balakk continued as if there had been no interruption. "And once the drakk are down, they can be cut easily enough. Just be sure they are down, though, and always come at them from behind. Even a downed drakk can sometimes make a pass at you with his claws, a reflex like. Knew a man once, had his leg near took off by a drakk he thought was dead." He shivered. "Those ... those..." Even his curse words seemed inadequate. He spit to one side. "I hate them."