Dragon's Blood (15 page)

The food then was predictably bad, for Kkarina always absented herself on Culling Day, leaving the bonders to sort out her verbal instructions on their own. Something always went terribly wrong in the kitchen without her: the meat would be spoiled or the takk would not boil or the stoves would not function properly.

Only old Likkarn seemed to enjoy the culling. He preceded it every year with a night of blister fury. Jo-Janekk's swollen left eye
and a bruise on Balakk's cheek testified to Likkarn's blisterweed strength. It had taken four of them to put him to bed. In the morning they all followed his orders sullenly. He was a weeder—but he knew dragons. His fingers pointed to one hatchling after another, sorting, hesitating only once at a well-spotted orange that was assigned, at last, to the beauty group. Jakkin was secretly pleased that he had guessed all but that last correctly. His eye was as good as Likkarn's.

He also knew that all over Austar IV similar Culling Days were held. It was reasonable to select the best dragons for breeding. Once, so the books told him, the great Austar dragons had been on the edge of extinction and the first settlers had slowly brought them back. The encyclopedia had a whole article on the dragons. They used to fight one another to the death, and it had taken men to train them—retrain them, really—to their old instincts of fighting only until dominance was assured. But that didn't make Culling Day any easier to bear.

Jakkin wondered briefly why the culling had to be so violent, why the hens and hatchlings had to be subjected to such a hard separation. But he knew that the only way to choose the hatchlings properly was to see them all together. And there was no practical way to quiet the culls' terror. Stunning the hatchlings would ruin the tender young meat for the stews and could disorder the beauty-dragons completely. Besides, as Jakkin knew full well, there were very few power cells for the extinguishers to be had. They were used sparingly, and only in life-and-death situations.

That night, out on the oasis, Jakkin sat with his dragon's head in his lap. He sang it all the old songs he knew and tried to think pleasure at it while he scratched behind its ears. But the darker side of Culling Day must have nuzzled through his thoughts, for the dragon pushed his hand aside, stood up, and trotted beyond the weed patch. He heard it snuffling as it went. Leaving it to its own thoughts, he returned to the nursery early.

Two days later, the nursery had settled down again, the hens starting the long process of weaning their remaining hatchlings. In the oasis, Jakkin had to do the same. He made
himself stay away, going back every third or fourth night with dread, fearing to find that the dragon had died of starvation without him. Each time he returned, the dragon greeted him joyfully, larger by another handbreadth than the last visit, and the weed and wort patch full of signs of its browsing. Jakkin was torn between pleasure at his dragon's growth—it was now as tall as he was—and a lingering disappointment that the snatchling did not seem to have needed him during his absence. But his pride in the growing strength and ability of his dragon soon overshadowed everything.

It was on the last day of the training season that he taught it a move that was in none of the books. It was an accident, really. They had been playing, though Jakkin now had to play with the dragon much more carefully. It was a little higher than his head, and its legs were the width of half-grown spikka trees. The scales of its back and neck and tail were as hard and shiny as new-minted coins. Only along the belly and where its legs met the firm trunk were the scales still butter soft.

Jakkin had rolled on the ground, propelled by a light tap from the dragon's tail,
and had ended up on its left wing. The wing's ribs were encased in the hard grayish skin that contrasted sharply with the dragon's dark red body. Only at the knobby part of the wings, where the rubbery skin stretched taut, was there a hint of red in the gray. Shakily Jakkin stood up on the dragon's wing, careful not to scrape or tear it.

The dragon turned its head slowly to look at him, its eyes black shrouds.

"See, mighty worm, if thou canst free thyself of this encumbrance," said Jakkin, standing very still.

The dragon opened its mouth and yawned, then fluttered its free wing slowly.

Jakkin began to relax. "Nothing? Canst do nothing?" he taunted gently. He watched the fluttering free wing.

Suddenly the tail came around and swept him off the pinioned wing in a single fluid motion. Caught unaware, Jakkin tumbled backward and rolled into the embrace of the dragon's left leg. For a full minute it would not let him go. He could feel its laughter in his head, great churning waves of blue and green.

"And that," said Jakkin when the dragon let him up at last, "
that
we will call the Great Upset." He dusted his clothes off with his hands. "I
let
you knock me down. A dragon in the pits will not be so easily fooled." He had started to walk away when the dragon's tail came up behind him and pushed him into the sand once again.

Jakkin laughed and turned over on his back. "You win. You win," he said as the tail came down and nudged under his arm, where the dragon knew he was especially ticklish.

***

A
ND THEN IT
was the season of stud.

The bonders were kept busy day and night, helping the studs to preen, leading them one at a time into the arena-sized courtyards where the chosen hen waited. As the humans watched, the dragon courtship began.

The female stood, seemingly uninterested, while the male paced around the yard, measuring it with his eye. Every once in a while, he stopped and sprayed the floor with the extended scent glands on the underside of his tail or breathed smoky gusts onto the sand.
His hackles rose. The circling continued until the hen either curled into a ball, pretending to sleep—which indicated that she was uninterested in the male—or until she leapt several feet in the air, pumping her great wings and lifting her tail.

If she turned down the courting male's offers, the bonders would jump into the ring and take the deflated dragon away. Deflated was the word, Slakk commented once, as he led Bloody Flag out of the ring. The male dragon's scent gland hung as loose as a coinless bag and his hackles had returned to normal size.

But once a hen accepted the male, showing her preference by her leap above the ring, the male winged into the air after her. Then they both shot into the sky, above the roofless courtyard, the female screaming her challenge to the male, who followed always slightly behind. They rose screaming and spiraling above the nursery, higher and higher, until they were merely black, swirling specks in the sky.

An hour later, the frantic courting flight over, the two returned together, wingtip to
wingtip, to the courtyard, where a moss-covered floor pad had been rolled out by the bonders. There, in full view of the watchers, the cock dragon mounted and mated with the hen. Then they lay side by side for the rest of the night. The following morning, separated by mutual consent and the prod-sticks of the bonders, the stud went back to his own stall, the female to the incubarn.

Jakkin only managed to get to the oasis one evening a week during the season of stud, for he was suddenly promoted to helping with the matings, under Likkarn's direct supervision. It was not an easy job. It also meant that he shared Bond-Off with Likkarn. Jakkin's one worry was that the old man would track him over the sands just for spite, to get even with him for every mistake—real and imagined—that Jakkin made in the mating courtyards. But each Bond-Off Likkarn disappeared first. After the third Bond-Off, Jakkin relaxed his guard. He guessed that Likkarn had found someplace away from the nursery to spend the day smoking blisterweed, since each morning after Bond-Off Likkarn's eyes were a furious red.

It was on that third Bond-Off, as Jakkin and his dragon were lazing in the sand after a hard session of training, that Jakkin thought about the latest mating flight he had seen.

"Canst use thy wings yet?" he asked, picturing the wild mating spiral in his mind. "Canst thou do more than a hover?"

The dragon responded by pumping its wings strongly, stirring the sand and making little frothy eddies in the stream. Then, as Jakkin watched, the dragon began to rise. Its great wings pumped mightily and Jakkin could see the powerful breast muscles moving under the shield of skin. The dragon rose as high as the shelter roof; then two more pumps brought it above the treeline, where it hovered a minute. Suddenly it caught a current of air and rode off into the sea of sky.

Jakkin stood, one hand over his eyes, straining to follow the disappearing dragon. He bit his lip and touched his bag. Now that it knew what its wings were for, the dragon might never return. It might go feral, finding a colony of wild dragons out beyond the mountains. Loosing a feral—that had always been a possibility. And yet he hadn't believed it. Not with his dragon, not really.

In the nursery only the mating dragons were ever allowed to fly. And since they were not ready for mating until the females were two years old, the males three and quite settled into nursery routines, there was rarely a nursery dragon that went feral. Only one that Jakkin could remember had ever gone from Sarkkhan's nursery—a red-gold stud on its first mating flight, a stud named, appropriately, Blood's A Rover. It had happened when Jakkin had first helped in the barns. Likkarn had raged for days, and everyone had felt the back of his hand or the lash of his tongue.

For over an hour the sky was empty and Jakkin was near despair. And then the dragon was back, wheeling and diving and cresting the waves of air with the same buoyant grace with which it had ridden the stream. Finally it settled down, landing on the ground with an earth-shaking thump right next to Jakkin.

He looked at it with a great smile on his face. "There is none like thee," he said, moving to it and circling its neck with his arms. He put his cheek on its scaly jaw. "None."

He was rewarded with a cascade, a waterfall, a sunburst of color, and this time he did not ask it to mute its fiery show.

T
HE YEAR TRAVELED
straight across the season, but Jakkin saw only the wavy lines of progress that his dragon made. By year's end, the dragon towered above him, and it was hard to recall the little hatchling in its yellowish eggskin that had staggered around the oasis under the weight of its oversized wings This yearling dragon was a beautiful dull red. Not the red of holly berry or the red of the wild flowering trillium that grew at the edge of Sukker's Marsh, but the deep red of life's blood spilled upon the sand. The nails on its forepaws, which had been as britde as jingle shells, were now hard—the lanceae were almost indestructible. Its eyes were two black shrouds. It had not roared yet. But Jakkin
knew the roar would come, loud and full and fierce, when it was first blooded in the ring. The quality of that roar would start the betting rippling again through the crowd at the pits, for they judged a fighter partly by the timbre of its voice.

Jakkin dreamed of the pits at night, fretted about them by day. The closest minor pit—for a First Fighter could never start in a major pit; that was only for champions—was past Krakkow, the town that was fifteen kilometers from the nursery. Jakkin had tried to ask seemingly innocent questions of the other bonders about the route to Krakkow and beyond, because Akki had never been to the minor pit there. But Likkarn had overheard one such conversation and had interrupted it as he passed by, asking, "Checking out the fighting dragons for some purpose, boy?" as if he knew something. So Jakkin had stopped asking anything. He had debated going one Bond-Off to the minor pit to check them out himself. But the trip by truck cost a coin, as did the entrance fee to the pit, though Slakk said there were ways to sneak in. And he might have walked there and back in a long
day, but he needed the Bond-Off to train and he had little enough gold left in his bag. Most had gone with Akki to buy more burnwort and blisterweed seeds. He never asked her how she got them, only thanked her when she handed him the precious paper packets of seeds.

He could have stolen what he needed from the nursery stores. Just a handful of seeds seemed an insignificant thing. But he never even considered it, just as he never considered sneaking into the pits. Taking an egg was acceptable thievery, the mark of a possible master. But taking supplies from a nursery might condemn an older dragon to short rations in a bad year. It could even mean death to the nursery worms. And sneaking into the pits meant cutting into the most basic part of Austarian economy. Besides, if he was caught it was punishable by a prison term on another planet. Jakkin simply would not do such a thing.

One evening, while Jakkin was putting the red through its paces, Akki came slipping quietly through the weed and wort patch. The old shoots were mostly all grazed down, but
the new crop, planted with the purchased seed, was sending smoky signals into the still air. Akki's passage moved the gray smoke away from the stalks, and some of the clouds clung to her dark hair, crowning it with fuzzy gray jewels. She tried to brush the stuff off her hair and bond bag with impatient hands.

"Akki," Jakkin cried out when he saw her, unable to disguise the pleasure in his voice. It had been many days since she had visited the oasis.

She grinned lopsidedly. "I've brought you a present."

"A present? For me? What?" He sounded like a child, and willed himself to stop chattering.

She opened her bond bag and reached into it, withdrawing some crumpled pieces of paper.

"Registration papers. For the Krakkow Minor," she said, holding them out to him.

"I don't understand," Jakkin began.

"I didn't think you would. You have to sign these papers in order to fight your dragon at the pit. They don't just let
anyone
in, you know." She shook her head at him.

"But my father never ..."

"Your father was training a feral," she reminded him. "And he never got far enough along with it to register it. Ever since—well, the Constitution at least—there have been rules about this sort of thing."