A Sending of Dragons (11 page)

By the time it was his turn on the moss detail, Jakkin was openly yawning, but no one seemed to notice. The bag's straps were made for broader shoulders than his and kept slipping. The cool, flaky mosses were not as easy to set in place as he'd thought. They had to be bent and shaped and tucked into the ore holes, and most of the time they crumbled between his inept fingers.

He was just beginning to get the feel of it, under the gruff tutelage of a one-eyed man he called Brekk (his sign was simply a single staring eye), when there was a loud gonging that echoed and re-echoed off the cave walls. At the sound, so loud in the enforced silence of the tunnels, the men set down their tools and bags and shuffled to the main cavern. Jakkin followed them.

It was only when he was back in the main cave that he realized it was a shift change,
much like Sarkkhan's Nursery, where a few of the bond boys had night-watch duty and others worked in the day. He almost laughed aloud remembering his friends Errikkin, who loved being in bond, and Slakk, who'd try anything to get out of work.

Brekk pushed him toward a small crevice where there was a grassy pallet set upon the stone. He gave Jakkin a brief smile that shut his one good eye and left the empty socket staring.

“
Sleep!
” he commanded, the picture being one of a face with both eyes closed. It was accompanied by a kind of mental hum-song.

Jakkin needed no further urging. He climbed into his sleep crevice and lay down on the grass. He was just wondering that the grass was so fresh and sweet-smelling when sleep overcame him, and with it strange dark dreams.

***

T
HAT SAME PATTERN
of work and sleep, broken by silent meals, continued for a number of rotations. In the half-light of the caves, Jakkin had no idea whether he worked for
hours or days at a time, but simply slogged along until the gong. After a while he almost forgot there
was
anything but the caves, holding only to Makk's promise that they would eventually go to the Place of Women, where Akki was being kept.

As he found himself slipping into the same kind of somnambulant shuffle as the others, he tried to rouse himself with spoken speech. He worked as far from the men as he could manage, whispering little ditties in a voice that carried no farther than his own shadow. He knew if he didn't talk to himself, he would eventually lose the use of ear and tongue. So he recited Fewmets Ferkkin stories, hummed old ballads, even found he'd a gift for verse. He made up seventeen different stanzas of a poem that began “There once was a bond boy named Jakkin . . .” using
lackin', snackin',
and
trackin'
among the rhymes. When he really became bored with his own company and felt himself slipping back into the half-sleep, he invented imaginary dialogues with Akki. She ended every one of these conversations with a hug. He got so he could feel her arms around him, the softness of her cheek on his.

One time he tried to slip away down an empty passage, but Makk caught him before he was around the first turn, and cuffed him soundly. Jakkin returned to the others, his ears ringing and his mind filled with the angry mutterings of the other men. But he noticed he wasn't the only one cuffed. Brekk had his head knocked a few times, and another man, Orkkon, was roughed up for dropping his iron stirring stick. But Orkkon was ill, not lazy, and after a second beating he lay on his pallet three rotations, tossing and sweating. He never moaned aloud, though his sendings were filled with formless dark clouds that Jakkin read as fever.

It was a wonder to Jakkin that the men bore the endless drudgery without complaining. What they did was not any more difficult or arduous than the tasks he'd done at Sarkkhan's Nursery, but there was no variety. And there were no voices. He decided that it was the human voice he missed the most—that and the brightly colored sendings of the dragons. Sound and light. Without those, how could a person survive?

And yet—his traitor mind continued—these men of the mountains survived, and
thrived. Men—and not-men. Survived but at a price. Jakkin guarded his thoughts as he made a list of the things these cavemen lacked: warmth, emotion, laughter, love—all those things that made life worthwhile. The list comforted him.

“I
will
get out of here,” he whispered to himself. “I'll find Akki and go. Anything on the outside will be bearable after this boredom. Anything.” And then he remembered Heart's Blood dying, shook his head, and was silent.

***

I
T WAS THE
ninth or tenth rotation—he'd lost count somewhere along the way—when a runner came to the men as they ate. Jakkin knew him for a stranger even from far away because he was younger than the rest and dressed differently. He was wearing a kind of light-colored woven cloth instead of the loincloths of the ore workers or the darker coveralls of the miners, which were made of the eggskin that hatchlings shed.

The boy's sending was frantic, emotional, full of color, which further marked him.

“
Great Mother trembles,
” he sent, a mael
strom of dark tones. “
She pants. Her birth hole swells. It does not open. All our women fear.
”

Makk and the other men made a tight circle around the boy. Putting his hand on the boy's shoulder, Makk sent, “
I come. Orkkon comes, whose father's father was First Healer.
”

The circle broke apart and re-formed around Orkkon, who still lay sweating on his pallet. Jakkin, on the far edges of the circle, watched as Makk knelt by Orkkon and put a hand on his head.

“
You come,
” Makk sent.

Orkkon managed, with Makk's support, to sit up. Jakkin could see the sweat running down his chest and the flush on his cheeks. He seemed to be having trouble breathing.

“
You come with me,
” Makk sent again.

There was no answering pattern from Orkkon. His mind seemed as flushed and sweaty as his body.

“Wait!” Jakkin cried aloud, wincing as the men turned toward him with another brutal, dark sending. At least he had gotten their attention. “
Wait,
” he sent. “
I am a Dragon Healer in my own place. Let Orkkon stay here. He is too sick anyway. Let me go instead.
”

Makk pushed the sweating man back down on his bed and stood. As he walked toward Jakkin, Jakkin put out his hand. Puzzled, Makk stopped for a moment, then moved forward again. He took Jakkin's hand in his. The instant they touched Jakkin could feel his mind being invaded and he willed it to show pictures of himself and Heart's Blood in the cavernous incubarn. His memory flooded back and he took the memory, shaping it to his own use. There was the dark barn and the great hen towering over him, the fire in her eyes now warm and inviting. Then the great red circling the room in the peculiar halting rhythm of the pregnant female. Next he showed her squatting over the shallow hole dug into the sandy floor. All the while Jakkin soothed her. “Easy, easy, my beauty, easy, easy, my red.” He moved the sending forward, concentrating on the nest itself as the eggs cascaded from the dragon's birth channel into the hole. “
This I have done many times,
” his sending promised. He masked his traitorous afterthought that
many
was a gross exaggeration.

For a moment Makk didn't respond,
though there seemed to be a murmured sending from the other men, approval of some sort. At last Makk sent a black ropelike form shooting into Jakkin's sending, whipping around the arm of the boy pictured there and dragging the dream boy away. Like all of Makk's sendings, it was unambiguous in its meaning.

“
Come,
” said his sending. “
Great Mother needs. Come.
”

T
HE THREE OF THEM
trotted down the tunnels, and though Jakkin tried to mark the way, they made too many turnings and switchbacks for him to remember. Yet, fast as they traveled, Makk and the boy never hesitated; the tunnels seemed to be as familiar to them as the hallways in a nursery bondhouse.

Jakkin wondered what he would find when they reached the Place of Great Mothers. Would the dragon giving birth be Auricle? He doubted that. She hadn't been obviously pregnant and, in fact, had dragged her tail like a dragon in heat. Besides, it took four months for eggs to develop, so there couldn't have been time. But a little fear nagged at him. What did he really know about time inside
the caves? It felt like a week or two, but without access to the sun and moons, he couldn't tell day from night, much less the passage of a week.

Besides, these men were so different—thicker, heftier, duller, speechless—perhaps dragons in the mountains were different as well. Certainly Auricle had seemed odd, almost brain-damaged, or like an infant unused to either light or sound. Of course, now that he'd met and worked with the men of the cave, he understood the dragon better.

Makk and the boy stopped suddenly and Jakkin caught up with them. They had paused just inside the entrance to another large cavern. It seemed lighter and airier than the tunnels, and Jakkin squinted, looking around. High above them was a small opening and, far above that, a wan light like a pale lantern. He stared at it for several moments before he realized it was one of the moons. So—they
could
see outside; they
did
have a way to measure time. He laughed out loud and was cuffed by Makk for the sound.

Clenching his fists, Jakkin turned on Makk, but the man was already walking away, through another arched doorway. That it was
a doorway and not just the beginning of a tunnel became clearer to Jakkin the closer he came to it. The stone on both sides of the arch had been intricately carved with figures of dragons: dragons fighting, dragons flying, dragons mating, dragons giving birth. They were illuminated by torches set on either side of the doorway.

Jakkin raced through the doorway after Makk and the boy and gasped in surprise. Unlike the rough, unadorned caves where the men lived, in this well-lit cavern was a series of stalls chiseled into the stone. In places the stone itself was fluted like curtains, in others there were detailed carvings of men, women, and dragons all entwined.

In the stalls to the left close to twenty dragons were roped, their shadows moving sluggishly against the walls. Silent gray-brown presences, they sent only beige images into Jakkin's mind, so different from the usual raucous colors that challenged him whenever he'd entered the nursery barns. The beige sendings were pale questions that floated slowly across his mind before drifting away, like clouds across a sky.

Jakkin looked carefully at the dragons in
their stalls and sent back his own questions, trying to locate Auricle. But if she was there, he wasn't able to identify her.

“
This is the Place of the Great Mothers?
” Jakkin queried, puzzled because none of the stalled dragons looked old enough to be mated.

“
Place of Little Mothers,
” Makk sent back. “
We go farther.
” He motioned with his head and walked on.

They went through another arched door, this one decorated with a pattern of eggshaped bulges.

“
Who did all this?
” Jakkin's mind buzzed with the question. He hadn't meant to send it, but his curiosity couldn't be contained.

“
The Makker made this.
” Makk stepped through the archway. The boy remained behind, but Jakkin went after Makk.

If the outer cavern had been a surprise, this room was an astonishment. It held only three stalls, but each was as spacious as a room in the nursery incubarn. The first stall was occupied by a greenish gray dragon a little smaller than Sssasha, placidly munching on something Jakkin didn't immediately recog
nize. The second stall contained a pale red dragon who seemed to be sleeping. Both dragons were pregnant, their stomachs bulging, their tails flattened and drooping on the floor.

He heard a panting noise in the third and largest stall. Jakkin peered in. Two broadshouldered women were kneeling over a large brown dragon. The dragon was lying on her side and breathing noisily, tongue lapping the side of her mouth and her earflaps trembling.

“
The Great Mother fails.
” Makk looked over Jakkin's shoulder; his brief judgment brutally apt.

The women looked up simultaneously. Although as thickly built as Makk, their faces as blunt and unattractive, they had more emotion in their expressions. The older one pushed her lank dark hair away from her eyes; the younger one sighed. One of them sent a tired gray thought: “
Yes. She fails.
”

Jakkin went into the stall and moved around the women. He knelt by the dragon's head and touched one earflap. The skin vibrated against his hand in a fast, erratic manner. Not a good sign. He pried open one of the dragon's eyes with his fingers, being
extremely careful not to tear the inner membrane. A dulled eye stared back at him but did not respond to the torchlight. Another bad sign. He noticed the tongue. A healthy dragon's tongue was rough and ridged. This one was smooth and velvety, and that meant fever for sure. A very high fever.

He stood, stepped over the dragon's neck, and walked beside the spine toward the tail.

Gesturing downward, he sent an order to the women: “
Hold the tail away from the Great Mother's body.
”

The younger woman stood and came over to the tail. She picked it up, exposing the birth canal.

Jakkin ducked under and examined the channel. It was clogged with pulpy masses, angry swellings the color of a bruise. When he touched one with a tentative finger, the dragon moaned out loud, a sound so foreign in the cave, it echoed eerily. The woman dropped the tail.

Jakkin stood and turned to Makk. He knew he might not get another opportunity and so he formed his sending with great care.
“
My woman. The one you found. She is a healer. She makes sick ones well. If we are together, she and I, we can save this Great Mother.
” He made the sending as positive as he could, though under his breath he murmured, “I hope.”