A Sending of Dragons (14 page)

She tapped an egg that lay close to her right foot.
Tap. Tap-tap.
She paused.
Tap-tap.

There was a tiny echo from inside the egg.
Tap-tap.

She touched the egg again with a more vigorous stroke.

TAP!

A thin dark line formed on the shell, the barest whisper of a crack.

Jakkin let out a breath.

Suddenly the line became a wider crack, zigzagging like a river around the smaller end of the egg.

The dragon gave the egg a final tap and
it split apart. In the larger half lay a crumpled form, curled tightly around itself. It was the color of scum and was covered with a yellow-green fluid.

The hen dragon overturned the shell and the wrinkled hatchling stumbled blindly onto the cave floor, its eyes still sealed shut with the egg fluids. She gave it a perfunctory lick, then turned her attention to the inside of the shell, which she cleaned with her rough ridged tongue. When all the fluids were gone she went back to the hatchling, licking it clean. Once free of the fluids that had coated its overlarge wings and head, the hatchling flopped down to sleep. The hen ignored it and once again picked through the eggs.

Seven times she tapped an egg, once biting an egg open with her under-tongue growth. In four of the shells were live hatchlings. Two of the eggs contained deformed dragons, one that trembled for a minute in the air before it died, the other long dead and stinking. The third shell held nothing but a bright yellow yolk with a coin-sized spot of blood in its center. She gobbled the yolk down eagerly.

When it was clear the Great Mother was
through picking over the eggs and had fallen back into sleep, the crowd surged forward to clean up the nest and its scattered contents. Each person took an egg or a handful of sand as a souvenir. The dragon was shooed back to her stall with her hatchlings. Then the floor was swept up by the same two women who had been with the dragon from the first. It all happened so quickly, it was as if the hatching had never occurred.

Jakkin was shocked that the cave people had not let the mother dragon crack open and eat the rest of the eggs. There might even be a singleton, an egg that opens late with a slowly forming baby dragon in it. Every nursery bonder knew how important it was for the mother dragon to get those extra rations to replace the fluids and protein she had lost in the hatching. How else could she recover?

Yet even as he worried about the dragon's condition, Jakkin had to smile. The five new hatchlings, wrinkled, ugly, and ungainly, were already nestled by their sleeping mother's side, their butter-soft baby claws pushing against one another in their sleep.

H
OW LONG THEY
sat by the dragon's stall, half dozing in the dim light, Jakkin didn't know. What wakened him was a rumbling noise that began as a low growl and rose steadily into an angry roar. He looked around and couldn't see anything, but an uneasiness invaded his mind, a misty sending that suddenly resolved itself into a tunnel-shaped blackness shot through with familiar gray rainbows.

Jakkin's head jerked up and Akki whispered, “That's Auricle. She's here. Why didn't we notice before?”

Jakkin shook his head. “She never sent anything before.”

“And we were too worried about the egg laying,” Akki added.

They stood and followed the sending to the side stalls, where two dragons were rocking nervously from foot to foot.

“Which one is Auricle?” Akki asked.

Jakkin sent a pattern of blues like lazy rivers meandering across the dark sendings from both dragons. “I'm not sure,” he said to Akki. “We never actually
saw
her. It was too dark in the tunnels.”

“And I was too scared.”

“Me, too.” He laughed aloud. “Me, too.”

“So, which one?”

Jakkin sent Auricle's name, bound about with colorful rainbows, and the larger of the two dragons, the pale red, raised her head to stare back at him.

“
Not-man?
” Her large dark eyes grew larger still.

“Akki, it's the red. She's
got
to be Heart's Blood's cousin.”

“Don't start that again, Jakkin. There's no way to know. Not for sure. And she's not your dragon anyway. She belongs here, in the cave.”

“
Not-man?
” the red dragon sent again.

“What is it?” Jakkin whispered, molding
the question into a sending as well. But no sooner had he sent it than a different sending filled his mind, so loud his head hurt with it.

“
COME. COME. COME.
”

The rumbling noise and the sending seemed to blend together until the command was irresistible, and Akki and Jakkin stumbled toward the tunnel entrance. But the dragons, cuffed as they were by iron bonds at neck and foot, didn't leave their stalls, only started rocking again. The sleeping mother dragon stirred uneasily, lifting her head for a moment in a dazed fashion before sinking back into her stupor.

At the entrance Jakkin could see movement down the tunnel and soon he could make out the figures of Makk and six of his men hauling an enormous wheeled cart. Jakkin put his hand out and dragged Akki back inside the cavern as the men pulled the cart through the arch.

Stripped of their ceremonial robes and wearing only leather shorts, the men's arm muscles bulged and flattened, then bulged again as they tugged the cart over the uneven cavern floor. Behind the cart, pushing, were
another half dozen men similarly stripped down. Beyond them Jakkin could make out the entire company of cave people still dressed in their white robes. The women were now garlanded with strings of dried chikkberries and warden's hearts and some kind of yellow-centered flowers. Five in the front carried naked infants in their arms, babies whose heads were crowned with circlets of leaves.

As the cart rumbled into the cavern Makk directed the men toward the stall where the sleeping dragon once again tried to shake herself out of her stupor, but the lack of extra birth fluids had already taken its toll and she could scarcely move.

The five women came forward, walked in front of the cart, and into the sleeping dragon's stall. The first touched the dragon on the flank. Her sending was restrained but perfectly clear.

“
Great Mother, my child, your child, be one
.”

She bent down and picked up one of the hatchlings with her free hand. It was the same size as her infant, small enough to fit comfortably into the crook of her right arm.

The second woman entered the dragon's stall and touched the hen on the shoulder.

“
Great Mother, my child, your child, be one.
”

“Jakkin, I don't like this.” Akki's mouth was right against his ear. He put his hand up as if to silence her but never took his eyes off the unfolding drama.

The third woman touched the dragon on the head, the fourth over the heart, and the fifth placed her hand on the dragon's belly. Each woman's sending was the same and each, in turn, picked up a hatchling and cradled it against her breasts.

Akki whispered frantically in his ear, “They're going to kill the hatchlings, Jakkin, I know it.” Her breath was hot. “What kind of people are they?”

Jakkin shook his head. What kind of people? He remembered his own nursery's culling day, when unsuitable hatchlings had been taken from the screaming hens and sent off to the stews. What kind of people were these men and women of the cave? What kind of people were
all
the people of Austar?

The women holding the hatchlings turned,
walked out of the stall in a line, and with slow, measured steps walked across the cavern to a small holding pen of wood and stone. They placed the baby dragons in it and closed the gate.

Akki let out a relieved sigh that almost deafened Jakkin, then slipped her hand into his, masking her feelings behind a carefully constructed wall he couldn't penetrate. Silently they continued to watch.

The robeless men crowded into the stall, six on either side of the sleeping dragon and Makk by her tail, holding a plaited net. The men at the dragon's front rolled her onto her back and Makk slung the net down at their feet, then spread the net where she'd been. When they let her go she rocked back on top of the net.

Then the men in the back did the same and Makk pulled the net through so that it spread across the entire stall floor. When the dragon was settled again each man grabbed a handful of net and, on a mental signal, heaved her toward the cart. It took a lot of grunting and straining, and more than once a man let out a mental curse that struck Jakkin's mind
with the force of a hammer blow. Though he'd heard many curses in the nursery, they'd never made him physically ill before. Jakkin rubbed his temples, trying to ease away the pain.

At last the dragon was positioned on the cart, her tail dragging off the end. Makk and his twelve helpers took up the rope at the front. Six robed men came around the back to push. The five women carrying infants each helped pick up the dragon's tail so that it wouldn't scrape along the floor. Then they began to haul the cart and dragon out of the cavern.

Jakkin had no idea of their destination, though he feared it was the pile of white bones at the tunnel's end. He sent a picture of that pile to Akki, and she squeezed his hand. Puzzled, he looked at her. She was smiling. Turning her head toward him, she whispered, “The bone pile is near the entrance, Jakkin. We could escape.”

He knew she was right, yet something about the ceremony they'd just witnessed kept him from celebrating. The chanting women, the white-robed men all seemed destined for
some dark purpose, and he followed them hand in hand with Akki because they knew no other way.

***

I
T WAS HARD,
sweaty, backbreaking work, but Makk and his men never faltered. Surprisingly, none of the other men offered a hand. It was as if towing the dragon were a singular honor that only certain men were given, though Jakkin couldn't figure out why. The rest of the people, who trailed behind the cart, seemed enveloped in a carnival atmosphere, smiling and waving their arms, their sendings shot through with unexpected colors, though their silence lent a bizarre note to the whole proceedings. The only noise was the constant rumble of the cartwheels broken by an occasional high, piping cry of one of the infants in its mother's arms.

Just when Jakkin was beginning to believe there was no end to the journey, only the parade through a maze of tunnels, he saw a pinpoint of bright light ahead, beyond the surging crowd and beyond the cart with its comatose burden. Then the pinpoint became larger, irised open until it filled him com
pletely. Only then did he realize he was not just seeing the spot of light but receiving it as a sending as well.

It took him another moment to understand that the light wasn't torchlight or lanterns or the light from phosphorescent mosses. He threw his hands up over his eyes to help filter out the intense brightness as he continued forward with the crowd. When he finally pulled his hands away he saw they were in a large meadow dotted with copses of trees. The meadow was entirely surrounded by the steep, sloping sides of the mountain, as if they were at the bottom of an enormous bowl.

It was night. What Jakkin had thought was a single bright light was really the pale glow of the sand-colored moons, Akka and Akkhan. He'd been so used to the dim caves that the twin moons seemed uncomfortably bright. Squinting, he stared up at them. A dark figure swept across Akkhan's face.
A wild dragon
, he thought.

And then, as if in a dream, came the familiar rainbow pattern, filling him with hope.

“
Sssargon waits. Sssargon watches. Sssargon hunts. Sssargon
. . .”

Then the sending was gone, blotted out
by the closer patterns of the people around him and the dark rumblings of the cart.

The cart moved more easily now, along well-worn ruts, toward a great stone enclosure in the center of the meadow. The ring reminded Jakkin vaguely of some of the country pits, with their stone seats around a center maw.

The men drew the cart through a stone archway and into the center of the ring, where, with a ceremonial heave, they hauled the dragon off the cart. She lay where they dropped her, panting and blinking sleepily up at the light.

Herded into their seats by the crowd, Akki and Jakkin sat next to one another but didn't touch, afraid that their thoughts would thereby be doubly broadcast to the cave folk. And soon Jakkin's attention left Akki and was focused on the ring.

He wondered if there was to be a fight. If so, there'd be nothing but a straightforward slaughter, for the hen could barely get her head up. In fact, if she weren't fed soon, she'd die. He didn't like the way she was breathing, and
everyone
knew that a hen right after egg laying and hatching needed extra rations. The
irony of it wasn't lost on him—that he and Akki had worked so hard to save her and were now helplessly going to watch her die. He thought about that a moment. He
wouldn't
be helpless. Shaking himself loose of the crowd-induced torpor, he started to stand and protest. But as he stood everyone else stood, too, as if reacting to some signal he'd not even registered.

Once again in their white robes, Makk and his men entered the ring and formed a tight circle around the dragon, as if guarding her. The five garlanded women, infants in arms, stood by the dragon's tail.

The familiar chant began again. “
COME. COME. COME.
”

For a long moment no one moved except the hen, whose tail beat a feeble tattoo on the ground.

Then, from the left side, through the stone arch, marched a figure in dark red. Her robe was stiff and fell in peculiar rigid folds from her shoulders. A cowl covered her head, a veil her face. Only her eyes showed, ringed with black paint. She carried a long white stick in her right hand.

Coming to the circle of men, the woman
stopped until they moved apart, then walked to the dragon's head, where she raised her hands above her.