A Sending of Dragons (6 page)

Akki nodded. “How can we help them? As long as they're up in the air, what can we do?”

“Lend me your mind. Think as I think. They have a bit of training. Maybe enough. Fewmets, I wish I'd taken more time with them. But Sssasha is pretty big and listens
well. And Sssargon is nearly full grown.” He reached out and Akki put her hand in his, for touching seemed to strengthen a sending.

Concentrating, Jakkin sent a message to the dragons. “
At my signal, breathe out fire.
” He knew that, large as they were, they were still young, and he'd had no supply of burnwort to help stoke the flames. Of the five only Sssasha and Sssargon could even trickle smoke yet. But he also knew that fear and anger sometimes triggered a fiery display. Perhaps a flame or two would be enough of a surprise to move the ring of drakk back.

“Wishes fill no bags,” Akki reminded him. Then she squeezed his hand as if in apology.

The bit of nursery wisdom focused him. He nodded. “
At my signal,
” he reminded the dragons. “
Breathe fire and then at the next, drop down to me. All at once.
”

He repeated the instructions twice. He felt sure that the drakk, with their wordless, dark minds, couldn't understand the plan.

Above them, dipping and rising against the first pale moon, the two circles continued their deadly dance. Thrust, retreat, thrust,
retreat. Below them, at the ridge, the second moon's aura was just beginning to show. The drakk ring tightened like a noose. Guided by the dragon smell and the constant piping of the wounded Tri, the nearsighted monsters closed in.

“When I count to three,” Jakkin said to Akki, “think about the hottest flames you can. It will help them concentrate, and flame is something they know instinctively. The moment the drakk move back, think—
drop!”
He handed Akki his knife and picked up the femur spear, which he'd left lying against the spikka.

Akki held the knife before her and bit her lip.

“One . . .” Jakkin whispered aloud.

Akki nodded.

“Two . . .” He could feel her tension.

“Three. Fire!” Jakkin roared aloud and Akki screamed with him. They sent picture after picture of blazing firebombs and roaring flames, shouting and waving their arms about as an added distraction.

In response, Sssargon trickled some smoke from his nose, enough to make the sky
around them hazy. But it was Sssasha, placid Sssasha, who suddenly flared out with a tongue of flame as long as a mature fighter's. It licked at the face of the nearest drakk, which banked out of the circle, hissing wildly, and crashed onto the rocks below.

Sssargon tried again. His smoke forced the nearest drakk to blink its near-dead white eyes and back away. Sssasha managed another fire flash. It raked the side of a drakk that had not been pushed back by the smoke. The drakk turned and the circle was broken.

“Now drop!”
Akki and Jakkin screamed, their minds linking as one.

The ring of dragons plummeted to the ground, frantically back-winging at the last moment so as not to crash and further injure the wounded Tri.

No sooner had they dropped than Jakkin instructed them, “
Form a ring on the ground. Now—hindfoot rise.
” He sent the kind of controlled messages he'd used when guiding a fighting dragon in the pit. Only this was not for gold, but for life, so there was an added edge of fright in his sending.

Sssargon understood at once and Sssasha
was not far behind. Even little Tri-ssskkette, the wounded one, tried to stand, front claws raised and waiting.

For a moment Jakkin closed his eyes, remembering Heart's Blood. He felt tears beginning in the comers of his eyes. Blinking them back, he forced himself to look, but his grip on the spear tightened.

The lead drakk and the flame-racked second dived.

Jakkin flashed out with the sharpened spear, catching the front drakk in the head above the eye. He did not pierce its hide, but he jarred it enough to disrupt its perfect dive and Sssasha ripped its neck open with her claws. Then she grabbed the drakk in her mouth and flung it with such force, it tumbled to the edge of the cliff.

The second drakk banked sharply and winged away.

The fallen drakk lay on its side, still except for the pulsing sensor organs on the underside of its wings. Its malevolent, blind snake eyes shuttered and unshuttered rapidly. Viscous blood oozed from its neck.

Akki ran over to the cliff's edge and
picked up an enormous rock. Holding it over her head, she walked purposefully to the drakk, ready to drop the stone on the dying beast. She bent over it and Jakkin ran up behind her and yanked her back.

At that moment the drakk's hind claws razored through the air just where Akki's legs had been seconds before.

“It's not dead!” she cried out in horror.

“It's dead,” Jakkin said. “Or near enough. But even dead it'll make a final fatal pass, a kind of reflex, because of those sensors.” He pointed to the fleshy sensors. They were still pulsing. “Didn't you study
that
in your anatomy lessons?” he asked.

“I never studied drakk,” she said softly.

“Someone at the nursery told me he knew a man whose leg was nearly severed in two by a very dead drakk.”

Akki shivered and let the rock fall.

Hot, foul-smelling drakk blood oozed onto the gorse.

“Last time,” mused Jakkin, “the smell of that blood made me sick.”

“Last time you weren't part dragon,” Akki said, but her voice was strange, and
Jakkin suddenly realized it was because she was holding her nose.

Sssargon walked stiff-legged over to the dead drakk and, using only the tip of his tail, poked and prodded it gingerly, waiting for a response. When there was none he pushed the drakk slowly—from the backside only—through the ground cover and over the edge of the cliff. When it landed, after a long fall, Sssasha sent a chuckling thought into Jakkin's head.

“Splat!!!
” Then she turned her attention to helping Tri-ssskkette, slowly licking the tom wing. When the wound was clean she swiveled her great head toward Akki.
“Fix?
”

Akki smiled weakly and went back to the spikka. Her sling pack lay under the tree. In one of the jars were the remains of her medkit. She whispered to Jakkin, “I hope the needles I have are strong enough for dragon skin.” Threading the needle, she went to work. Her small, careful stitches patchworked the flesh and scale feathers that had been tom. “See,” she said to Jakkin, “luckily the
bande dominus,
the big wing bone here, is untouched.
Otherwise she would have been in real trouble.”

Jakkin nodded, muttering under his breath, “
Bande dominus.
”

After a few minutes, except for the strange nobbiness of the thread, the wing looked as good as new.

“No more sleeping under trees,” said Jakkin. “There are still a number of drakk there. And since they usually fly in a straight trajectory”—he hesitated—“they probably nest right here in the meadow. In the top of one of these spikkas.”

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.

W
ITHOUT 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.