A Sending of Dragons (3 page)

Jakkin went back into the cave and came out with a handful of wild burnwort, just enough to take the edge off Sssargon's hunger and to quiet his pronouncements. Though Heart's Blood's hatchlings had begun to graze on their own in the various high meadows full of wort and weed, they hated giving up their ritual of sharing. Jakkin had to admit that he also hated to think about giving it up. He smiled tenderly at the dragon.

“Big babies,” Akki whispered.

Jakkin ignored her and focused on Sssargon. “Here, big fellow,” he said aloud, adding a quick green-tinged visualization of the wort.

Sssargon's rough tongue snagged the plant from Jakkin's hand, and his answer was the crisp snip-snap of wort being crunched between his teeth.

Sssasha landed just as Sssargon began to eat, with neither fanfare nor commentary. She
stepped over his outstretched tail but folded her wings a second too soon, which made her cant to one side. She had to flip her outside wing open again in order to right herself.

The red flicker of amusement that Sssargon sent through all their minds made Jakkin sputter. Akki broke into a cascade of giggles, but Sssasha was too even-tempered to mind. She was as sunny as the splash of gold across her nose, a slash of color that—along with her even disposition and placid ways—would have made her unfit either to fight in the pits as had her mother, Heart's Blood, or to be considered for spaying and dwarfing as a
beauty,
a house pet. Jakkin realized, with a kind of dawning horror, that Sssasha would have been one of the early culls in the nurseries, where hatchlings were bred for only one of three destinies. The bonders said,
pit, pet, or stew.
Jakkin swallowed hastily at the thought of Sssasha in one of the stews, a green-suited steward standing over her, placing a stinger to her ear, a knife at her throat. He bit his lip, all laughter gone.

“What pain?”
Sssasha's question poked into his mind.

“No pain,” Jakkin said aloud, but his mind transferred a different thought.

“
Yes, pain,
” insisted Sssasha.

“
Old pain. Gone.
” Jakkin made his mind a careful blank. It was hard work, and he could feel himself starting to perspire.

“
Good,
” said Sssasha.

“
Yesssssss, good,
” Sssargon interrupted suddenly, exploding red bomb bursts in Jakkin's head. “
Sssargon have great hunger.
”

Akki, who had been following this silent exchange thoughtfully, soothed them all with a picture of a cool blue rain, holding it in mind long enough for Jakkin to go back into the cave for two more large handfuls of wort.

Once in the cave, Jakkin was able to let his guard down for a minute, though he reminded himself that even in the cool darkness of the cave, behind walls of stone, he could not be private. His mind was an open invitation to Akki or any dragon who wanted to enter it. Only with the most careful and arduous concentration could he guard its entrance. He had to visualize a wall built up plank by plank or a heavy drapery drawn across it inch by inch. And usually by the time he had carefully constructed these images, the
traitor thoughts had already slipped out. He wondered how dragons kept secrets or even if they had secrets to keep. Everything he thought or felt was now open and public.

“Open to me, anyway,” Akki said as Jakkin emerged from the cave.

He realized with sudden chagrin that she had been listening to his self-pitying thoughts. The more powerful the emotion, the farther it seemed to broadcast. Akki, listening quietly, had sent nothing in return. Flushing with embarrassment, Jakkin looked down at the ground, trying to think of a way to phrase what he had to say out loud. He knew he could control words, because he didn't actually have to
say
anything until he was ready. At last he spoke. “Sometimes,” he began reluctantly, “sometimes a man needs to be alone.” He held out the wort to Sssargon and concentrated totally on that.

“Sometimes,” Akki said to his back, “sometimes a
woman
needs to be alone, too.”

He turned his head to apologize. Words, it seemed, could be slippery, too. But Akki wasn't looking at him. She had her hands up to her eyes, as if shading them from the too-colorful dark.

“Jakkin, this is a strange gift we've been given, being able to sneak into one another's minds. But . . .”

“But at least we're together,” Jakkin said, suddenly afraid of what else Akki might say, suddenly afraid that the words, more than any thoughts, might hurt terribly.

“We may be together more than we ever meant to be,” Akki said. But even as she said it she touched his hand.

He concentrated on that touch and let the rest of it go, making his mind a blank slate like the evening sky. At last little spear points of violet blue pushed across that blank and Jakkin realized Akki was worried.

“Where are the triplets?” she asked. “They should have been here by now. And that's a worry I don't mind sharing.”

“
Sssargon not worry. You not worry.
” Munching contentedly on the last few straws of wort, the dragon gave off waves of mindless serenity. His mood changed only when he noticed that he had finished what was in his mouth, at which point he stretched his neck out to its greatest length and stole a few bites from his sister.

“
That's very reassuring, Sssargon,
” Akki sent.

Jakkin could only guess at the sarcasm behind her thought. There was no color translation for it.

Sssasha let Sssargon take the last of her wort and rose clumsily. She clambered toward Jakkin to see if she could nose out some more food. Bumping against his shoulder, she nearly knocked him to the ground.

“Fewmets!” he cried out. “I may be able to see and hear like a dragon now, but I still can't fly, Sssasha. If you knock me off the mountain, I'll land
splat!”
He tried to send the sound of it with his mind.

“?????”

“Splat!” Jakkin said, then shouted, “SPLAT!”

Akki cupped her hand and slapped it against the dragon's haunch. It made a strange sound.

Sssasha blinked, then sent a barrage of red bubbles into Jakkin's mind. Each one burst with a noise that sounded remarkably like
splat!

“Exactly,” Jakkin said aloud. “And if you
think that sounds funny, you should see how funny I'd look
splattered
all over the landscape.” His laugh was a short barking sound.

But the joke was untranslatable to the dragon and all she received was an unfocused color picture of Jakkin's mood: a net of wistfulness, a slash of anger, and a wisp of lingering self-pity. She turned her head away and gazed out across the mountains that edged into the valley below. If she was amused or worried or upset, no one could tell from her rosy sending and her casual stance.

“Dragons!” Jakkin muttered to himself. Even with his dragon sight he could not pierce the darkness to see what drew her gaze, so he settled down next to her on his haunches, ran his hands through his hair, and waited.

It was five minutes before the triplets began sounding in his mind.

T
HE HIGH-PITCHED
twittering chatter of the three hatchlings began to reach them. The sounds the trio made were unlike any of the full-throated roars Jakkin had ever heard from dragons in the fighting pits. It was as if the three had invented a language all their own, which they occasionally slowed down so that listeners could make some sense of it. Their sendings, too, sputtered with color, which sometimes formed into readable pictures but as often remained unclear.

Moments later they sailed into view, wingtips apart. They flew in formation, their favorite trick. Inseparable, they might as well have emerged from the same egg, though in fact the eggs had been in totally different parts
of the clutch. Still, they looked alike, a rough brown color undistinguished by any markings, and their sending signatures were remarkably alike, too. In honor of their being such close triplets, Akki had named them Tri-sss, Tri-sssha, and Tri-ssskkette. They had accepted those names without a murmur of dissent. But all together they were addressed as Tri, and all three answered to the one name. If they had any others they preferred, it was a secret they shared with no one.

Landing together on the upper edge of the ledge, they waddled in step single file down the trail.

“
Men coming, men coming, men coming,
” they sent, one right after another.

“It's dark and will soon be Dark-After,” said Jakkin.

Rubbing Tri-sssha behind the ears, Akki added, “And you know men can't live in the cold.”

“
You men. You men. You here.
”

Tri-sssha, earflaps vibrating from the special attention, managed a different phrase.

“Yes, but we're different,” Akki explained patiently.

“
Men coming. Men coming. Men coming,
” insisted the little dragons, ignoring both Akki's explanation and the food that Jakkin held out to them.

The minute they turned their heads aside to look up at the darkened sky, Sssargon stretched his long neck, moving his head within inches of Jakkin's. His tongue snaked out and deftly removed the wort from Jakkin's hand. Jakkin slapped at the dragon's nose an instant too late.

And then Jakkin heard a strange mechanical chuffing, the sound of a copter in the distance. It was a noise rarely heard outside the Rokk, the main city, where such devices belonged only to Federation officials or starship crews. No one on Austar was allowed them.

“Akki!” Jakkin cried out loud.

“I hear it,” she said, fear touching her eyes before her mind sent its notice.

“
Men coming, men coming, men coming,
” the trio of hatchlings sent out again in arrow points, and the larger two dragons, from their perch on the mountain, picked up the chorus. They'd been linked to their dragon mother, Heart's Blood, when she had died under the
guns of men, and they harbored a great distrust of humans, except for Jakkin and Akki.

Sssargon lifted his head and swiveled it about like a periscope. A bright light in his black eyes flickered for a moment. Then he addressed Jakkin formally, mind-to-mind.
“Sssargon flies.
”

“No, Sssargon!” Akki cried, stretching her hand out to him.

“No!” commanded Jakkin, deliberately using the tone of voice he normally reserved for the training sessions in which he taught the dragons the fighting moves of the great pits.

But this time Sssargon, usually the most eager at training, ignored Jakkin's demand and stretched his wings. Pumping them twice, he leaped off the cliffside, immediately catching an updraft, and sailed away.

“He's only a baby,” whispered Akki. “A baby.”

Jakkin strained to watch the dragon as he disappeared in the night sky. “Are we so much older?”

“I feel about a hundred years older,” said Akki in a quiet, tired voice. She herded the
hatchlings into the cave before her and looked over her shoulder at Jakkin. “A hundred hundred years.”

He followed them in.

The cave was large, but the four growing hatchlings crowded things considerably and Sssasha, as usual, managed to bump into a shelf, knocking off two of the new bowls.

“Splat?”

Even Jakkin had to laugh at that. He sat down with his back to the cave wall and hoped the cool rock would keep him from sweating too much. Four dragons, even small ones, were like furnaces in the closed-in cave. He could feel the temperature beginning to rise.

Akki sat across from him with Tri-sssha's head in her lap. Her fingers caressed the dragon's earflaps, scratching all around. Humming an old pit ballad about a hen fighter who was matched against one of her own hatchlings, Akki was totally caught up in the sad, haunting melody. So was Tri-sssha. Jakkin could feel the dragon begin to thrum, her initial fears of the men in copters subsumed by the deep sounding of her own body. Tri-sss
and Tri-ssskkette joined her, and soon the cave vibrated with it. When Sssasha finally lent her own deeper thrums to the lot, it was overpowering. Jakkin's head buzzed with the hum and the heat, and he felt it as a great pressure on his temples and chest.

“Stop it!” he cried out angrily, standing up and bumping his forehead on a jutting rock. The pain communicated in a way his anger had not.

Akki lifted her hands as if warding off a blow. The thrumming stopped.

“We have to think,” Jakkin warned. “We have to think and watch and listen. Pay attention.”

As he spoke an image formed in his mind, a sending from Sssargon. The helicopter was making a series of quick spiraling passes over the mountains. Sssargon drifted along lazily, looking like any wild dragon out for a late evening fly. He buzzed the helicopter once, then banked away as if satisfied that the metal bird was not a threat. Jakkin saw the copter through Sssargon's eyes: a heavy, mindless object in the middle of wind eddies, communicating great heat and nothing else. It had
no feathers and no smell and seemed, in Sssargon' s view, pilotless.

“
The men inside,
” Jakkin sent to the dragon, trying to make his images clear. Landscape, emotion, things of the senses passed so easily through a sending, but other things . . . “
Look at the men inside, Sssargon. What do they wear? What do they look, like?
” If Sssargon could send a description, they would know who the men were—Federation rocket pilots or wardens or rebels. “
Look at the men.
”

But the questions didn't seem to interest the dragon and neither did the men in the copter. He sent only a vague impression of a human at the throttle, and then, having tired of this latest game, banked to the right and returned to the ledge. They caught his sending announcing a perfect back-winged landing. “
Sssargon lands.
” A slight thumping outside the cave as his heavy hind legs touched down confirmed this.