A Sending of Dragons

  Sssargon’s anger suddenly forced its way through to them in red hot splashes. “Sssargon fight. Sssargon flames.” And to everyone’s amazement he shot a spearhead of flame out half a meter.

  “Sssargon has lousy timing,” said Akki, but she reached out and scratched him under the chin.

  “Thou brave worm,” Jakkin said, unconsciously falling into the elevated formal language that pit trainers used with their dragons.

  Sssargon preened under their attention, oblivious of the ironic undertones. He even sent a wilder thought to them: “Sssargon kill. Kill all. Sssargon flames once more.”

  “Worm,” warned Jakkin, “we can’t be running off to fight now.”

  “Yes, brave Sssargon,” said Akki, holding up the medkit. “We have little thread left for sewing up thy mighty wings.”

  “And only one small knife and one small spear and . . .”

  Sssargon’s fiery reply shot through them. He did not understand, nor did he want to understand, human reasoning. He wanted blood and earth and air and fire. When Akki tried to send a soothing gray cloud to cover his burning landscape, he shook it off, pumped his wings, and leaped into the air. They could feel the backwind as he flipped to the left and flew out over the valley, his defiance screaming into their minds.

  “Lizard waste,” shouted Jakkin after him. Turning to Akki, he said, “I’ve never had a dragon act like this.”

  “You’re used to nursery dragons, trained and pampered. These hatchlings are wild.”

  “Well, they weren’t born wild,” Jakkin said.

  “His temper will bum off up there in the sky. He’s a bit put out, I think, that Sssasha was the great hero of the fight when he thought he should be,” she said, putting the medkit back in her pack. “Reminds me of a boy I once knew.” She smiled.

  “Not funny,” said Jakkin, but he couldn’t keep from smiling back at her. “However, that’s a dragon long overdue for some hard training.”

  “You’re not exactly the picture of a trainer now.”

  He looked down at his shorts, the dirty remnants of his white trainer’s suit. They were patched and repatched, the earlier, crisper dams done by Akki, the later ones, his own coarse handiwork. “Well,” he admitted, “I guess I don’t look like one. But I still know training. And a certain amount of discipline is necessary, as today proves. If we’re all to survive, we have to find ways of working together.”

  Akki was silent and her thoughts blank.

  “Fewmets, Akki, wasn’t that the first lesson we learned in the nursery? Isn’t that what our grandfathers learned when they were dumped on Austar?”

  Akki’s voice was very quiet. “I thought you said the first and best lesson was I fill my bag myself” She touched his chest where the leather bag used to hang, the bag that signaled to all the world that he was a bonder, the bag he’d filled with gold enough to buy his freedom.

  “We aren’t wearing bond bags anymore.”

  “No, and we haven’t for some time, Jakkin.”

  “Then why are we arguing?” Jakkin asked. “We don’t have time for arguments. We’ve got to get away from this meadow. Now.”

  “Now, now, now. All of a sudden everything is now with you. And besides, we aren’t arguing, Jakkin. We’re discussing things, like sophisticated folk do.”

  “Like city folk?” asked Jakkin. “Is that what you learned the year you lived in the Rokk with the rebels?”

  “I learned to talk about things that matter with Golden and with Dr. Henkky,” Akki said. “I learned to talk out my feelings before they got so big . . . oh, never mind, Jakkin. How can you understand? You’d rather send to dragons.”

  “Akki, that’s not true.” But she had turned away. He picked up his sling and stood there, his mouth empty of words but his mind swirling and confused, and Akki, he was sure, heard it all.

  7

  WITHOUT SPEAKING TO each other, they walked the rim of the gorse meadow looking for a new path down the mountain. Their feet kicked up insects that chittered and flew away. Keeping pace with them were the four hatchlings, who trampled the purple ground cover with their massive feet.

  Sssasha kept checking the skies, though it wasn’t clear whether she was looking for more drakk or trying to find the sulking Sssargon. Unlike humans, dragons sent only what they wanted to send unless they were in the middle of a fight.

  Tri-ssskkette’s sendings kept breaking into jagged little markers of pain and, with the other two echoing her every mental whimper, it made concentration difficult for them all. Jakkin tried sending calming thoughts to the triplet, but nothing seemed to work until Akki began a light show of raucous, bumpy colors that finally took the hatchling’s mind off her wounds.

  Jakkin turned to Akki and drew in a deep breath. “Thanks,” he whispered at last.

  Akki shrugged. “Some patients need a lot of sympathy and some need a lot of distracting.” She stopped for a moment, seemed to calculate, then added, “Dr. Henkky taught me that.”

  “She’s a smart lady,” Jakkin said. It seemed to make peace between them and Jakkin smiled with relief.

  They continued to walk the meadow edge, but it was like looking over the rim of a bowl.

  “I don’t see any paths but the one we came up,” Akki said as they circled a second time. She rubbed the side of her head. The light show was beginning to wear her down.

  “Well, we can’t go back that way,” Jakkin said. “Not after all this.”

  “Without a path, we can’t go anywhere else.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Jakkin asked. “Sit here and wait for the drakk to return? Or the copter?” His voice was over-loud.

  “Jakkin, I’m not the enemy,” Akki said. “Don’t yell at me.”

  He was about to apologize, feeling stupid about losing his temper, when Sssasha sent a picture of a cave into his head. The cave had a long, winding thread of light running end to end.

  Jakkin shook his head to clear it, but Sssasha’s calling came again, steady, insistent. “In?” Jakkin asked. “You want us to find a cave and go in? That’s no real solution. Fine for a night, maybe. Drakk don’t go in caves. And copters won’t find us there. But it won’t last forever. We need a way down this mountain.”

  “Maybe she means a cave like the tunnel,” Akki broke in.

  “Maybe,” Jakkin said. “But I haven’t seen any caves, have you?”

  Akki shook her head. The rock face had been solid.

  Turning in a deliberate, lumbering manner, Sssasha headed toward the rock face beyond them. On a hunch, Jakkin ran after her, and then, with a burst of speed, reached the wall of rock first. The cliff was veined with a dark material and rose straight up, without handholds. At the bottom, where it met the meadow, instead of the ever-present gorse there was a thicket of prickly caught-ums. With his spear Jakkin gingerly parted strand after strand of the tangle. It seemed a hopeless task.

  Sssasha moved slightly to the right and stared at the rock.

  “Here,” said Akki, catching up to them. “Try here, where she’s looking.” jakkin picked at the caught-ums with the spear and on the fifth try he spotted a low, dark hole. Akki carefully held apart the nearer vines, holding her fingers above and below the caught-um thorns while Jakkin used the spear to pull apart the rest of the thicket.

  “How could she know it was there?” Akki asked.

  “Maybe she saw it when she was flying? From above?” His answers seemed more like questions. “Or maybe dragons can, you know, sense caves?”

  “Do you mean this one?” asked Akki, sending the thought simultaneously to Sssasha.

  Sssasha’s answer was another picture, this time of a close, pulsing darkness that reminded both Jakkin and Akki of the egg chamber where they had been sheltered and changed.

  Jakkin looked again at the wall and the low opening, then turned to the dragon. But Sssasha, sensing some kind of signal that the humans could not read, was already pumping her wings in preparation for flight. The three smaller hatchling
s fanned the air in imitation. Even Tri-ssskkette, her wounded wing stuttering in the small eddies, managed to rise up and hover for a moment over the bushes. The wind from the four pair of wings caused the caught-ums to sway, as if great waves were passing through. Then the hatchlings rose higher, banked in formation, and, led by Sssasha, disappeared over the top of the cliff.

  “Stop!” Akki shouted. “Come back.”

  But the dragons were too far off to hear, and they ignored her sendings, even when Jakkin joined her. Soon they were out of sight.

  Dropping to a crouch before the thicket, Akki said, “That’s the first time they’ve all disobeyed.” Then she added softly, “I sure hope those stitches hold.” Hand up over her eyes, she continued to stare at the spot in the sky where the dragons had disappeared.

  Jakkin examined the cave entrance. “I guess that’s our only choice,” he said, pointing.

  Akki turned back and nodded.

  They rounded up their packs, making sure nothing but the trampled gorse gave evidence of their stay there. Then, carefully, so as not to scratch their hands, they pulled apart enough of the intertwining branches of the caught-ums, hooking them on to peripheral strands until they had a clear if narrow path leading into the cave.

  When they reached the rock Jakkin turned and, using his spear, unlocked the knot behind them. The brambles sprang back, once again obscuring the cave.

  “No one could possibly know we’re in here,” Jakkin said, his mind sending its own version of a gate slammed shut.

  ***

  THEY WERE COLD the moment they entered the cave. It was as if the cave were fed by some great belly of wind from below. And there was a strange hollow echo in it that gave them back breath for breath. Jakkin pulled bis gray-white shirt out of the sling and put it on.

  “I don’t like it,” Akki said, shivering. Parts of her voice, terribly distorted, came back to them from the black walls: I . . . ikeit . . . ikeit . . . ikeit. “It’s not—not welcoming, like our other caves. There’s something ugly here. I don’t know what it is, but I feel it.”

  Although Jakkin didn’t answer, his own mistrust linked with hers.

  They reached out and grabbed hands, as if touch alone could warm them, and together began to inch forward into the cave. It was dark inside, and though their gift of dragon sight usually meant they could see colors in the dark, the cave was void of any light. It was a darkness that matched the cold.

  Rounding a bend, they found themselves in a secondary cave with a ceiling high enough so they could stand upright. Ahead was a faint gleaming that cast a grayish light on the shadowy walls. Instinctively they went toward the light, their fingers twined together.

  The glow seemed to come from a pile of sticks stacked up so high, the top reached the cave ceiling.

  Akki reached out with her free hand and touched one of the protruding sticks cautiously. “It’s cold,” she said. “And porous.”

  Jakkin put his hand on another stick. “That’s bone,” he said.

  Akki looked more closely, horrified. “You’re right,” she said. She touched a different bone. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Jakkin, look! Femur, fibula, humerus, another femur, tibia, and these little ones. They’re caudal vertebrae.” She went up and down the stack, touching the bones and naming them, until she added unnecessarily, “Dragon bones.” The echo in the cave mocked her horror, whispering in return: ones . . . ones. . . ones.

  Despite the cold, Jakkin felt a fine film of sweat on his palms as Akki counted out the bones. It took a moment more for him to get out the question that seemed to be echoing inside him. “What . . .” he began, his voice cracking, “what can be big enough to eat this many dragons?” He hesitated, then mused aloud, “Not drakk.”

  “What would be big enough to strip the bones—and then neat enough to stack them?” Akki added. “Stack them in an intricate, interlocking pattern?”

  “We’re leaving,” Jakkin said. “Now.”

  The echo added its own mocking note.

  They backed out of the dark, high chamber and reentered the lower room. The cave mouth, even shuttered with the caught-ums, suddenly seemed to blaze with light, and they started toward the opening.

  A strange chuffing sound leaked through the thorny thicket and into the cave. Jakkin crouched by the cave mouth and listened. Something whirred around the clearing and settled in.

  “Copter!” he sent to Akki, not daring to speak aloud or stir up the cave’s echoes again, even though with the noise the copter was making, he knew he’d never be heard. Carefully he checked that the caught-ums were securely laced over the opening. As far as he could tell, they showed no evidence of entry.

  “We have disappeared,” Akki sent back, forming a picture of a barred door. Jakkin recognized it as the sending he had envisioned earlier when they had first come into the cave. But there was a strange darker color in Akki’s sending that might have been either grim satisfaction—or fear.

  They edged backward till they came again to the bend. Fearfully they rounded it and huddled together against the wall in the chamber of bones. Akki’s hand found Jakkin’s and he was relieved that her hand was as moist as his own.

  Two or three shouting voices reached them, any meaning lost through the filter of brush and stone. The cave echoed their own heavy breathing until it seemed as if the dark itself was filled with fearful respirations.

  “Did we leave anything out there, anything they might recognize as ours?” Jakkin whispered into Akki’s ear.

  She was a long time answering. At last a quiet sending reached into his mind. It was of a landscape that, except for a few sketchy trees, was barren.

  Jakkin wondered suddenly if the dead drakk puzzled the searchers. They could hardly miss it. The smell alone would warn them. He was glad he’d stopped Akki from beating in the drakk’s head with a rock. Surely the searchers—whether they were rebels, wardens, or Fedders—would realize that the drakk had been killed by dragons. And Sssasha’s heavy tread on the gorse should have wiped out any sign of their smaller feet.

  One last shout came to them, then the whir of the copter.

  A weak sending suddenly came through, a picture of a copter with the copse and mountain foreshortened. The copter in the sending rose up from the gorse and headed in a southerly direction.

  “Gone,” came Sssasha’s sending, ending with a quiet, bubbling “Good!”

  “Yes, good,” Jakkin said aloud, and sighed deeply. The sudden echo startled him: ood. . . ood. . . ood. It seemed to go on and on, finally dying off with a hissing, echoed sigh. He crept forward to the cave mouth and turned his head to see Akki in the darkness. “Come on,” he said. “We can get out of here now.”

  “Wait,” Akki said. “I hear something else. Not the copter. Not our own echoes. Something else.”

  When the tickling echo of her words had died away, Jakkin listened, too, straining into the colorless cold. He didn’t know what to expect, perhaps the sound of lizards scrabbling on overhead ledges, perhaps the breath of dragons, perhaps whatever large predator had eaten the dragons and stacked their bones on the floor. What he heard instead was a sending, teasing and gray, as insistent as a trainer’s command.

  “Come. Come. COME. COME.”

  There was something else beneath the sending and around it, a wilder note, like singing.

  Without willing it, he crawled back into the cave of bones, then stood and reached for Akki’s hand once more. They walked around the pile of bones. Behind it was a tunnel.

  “COME. COME. COME. COME.”

  The singing was higher now, like the piping of a flute.

  Will-less, as if in a spell out of Golden’s book of dragon lore, they plunged hand in hand into the tunnel, which closed around them, a narrow, stifling, winding tube.

  8

  AFTER THE FIRST few turns they had to drop hands, needing both to feel along the sides of the tunnel. Though the sides were cold, damp, even slippery to the touch, it was the grayness that amazed Jakkin the
most. Outside, when the moons set and Dark-After was complete, there was always enough light to make colors. In the bone room the bones had lent a strange glow to the cave, and then the phosphorescent fungi on the walls of the tunnel had allowed them some further shades. But this part of the cave seemed just an endless gray shadow land that was more depressing and frightening than black night before the change had ever been.

  Jakkin could not help himself, and his feelings broadcast to Akki. But when her own fear pulsed back at him, he felt only relief, as if her fear excused his. He relaxed into a yawn.

  “I’m sleepy,” Akki said just as he yawned. Her mind babbled at him, suddenly childlike, sending quiet little pictures of gray water and gray waves. “I think I’m going to sit down.” It reminded Jakkin of one of Sssargon’s pronouncements.

  That seemed right—sitting down. They’d been walking hours, with little sleep. Jakkin struggled against another yawn, and when Akki sagged against him, he put his arms around her and let his own knees bend slowly.

  Just then the strange faraway sending began again, steady and insistent, like an alien heartbeat.

  “COME. COME.” Then a pause and a repeat. “COME. COME.” Entwining it, like a dark vine around a bright pillar of light, was another voice that sang to them a wordless, soothing song.

  “Forward,” Jakkin mumbled. “We’ve got to go forward.” He yanked Akki up with him, wondering only slightly why his voice sounded a register higher, childlike.

  They plodded ahead, and when the tunnel’s air got close Akki dropped her pack. Jakkin bent to retrieve it, dragged it after him for a few steps, and then let it fall.

  “COME. COME.”

  The tunnel flared open again and little flecks of light, like the wild fire of a fighting dragon’s eye, seemed to wink at them from the walls.

  “COME. COME.”

  Akki shivered and Jakkin put his arm around her. He could feel the sweat through her shirt. She stumbled, went down on one knee, out of the protection of his arm, and gave a sharp cry. When she stood up she held something white in her hand.