Always before when Jakkin had been near a layer, he’d been caught up in her sendings, violent maelstroms of color. But this dragon’s sendings were in black, white, and gray, and while they were no less violent, Jakkin found himself outside the waves of her emotions rather than caught up in them. However, the cave people, whose own sendings were as colorless, seemed to be buffeted by the dragon’s wild sendings, and they fled the cavern as soon as she began, leaving Jakkin and Akki alone.
They stayed, partly because they were de lighted to be shed of the guards, but primarily because Akki feared there might still be problems with the newly healed canal.
“It’s too soon,” she whispered, even though there was no one else in the room. “The eggs might tear open the scabs.”
“That’ll be a mess,” Jakkin said.
“And painful,” Akki added.
As they watched, the pressure in the dragon’s birth canal began to send waves rolling up under the sternum and along the heavy stomach muscles. She reared up, her head scraping the rounded ceiling. Fluttering her wings, she pressed them to her sides, the edges touching her belly. Jakkin could see her earflaps vibrating steadily as she slowly settled back down.
“Easy, easy, my beauty,” he murmured, remembering with a sudden shudder the last time he’d spoken these same words to a laying hen. It had been to Heart’s Blood, and the eggs she’d dropped contained Sssargon, Sssasha, and the triplets.
Akki’s head snapped up and she grinned. “The triplets,” she whispered. “Lizard lumps, how I miss them.”
Jakkin didn’t even mind that she’d read his thoughts, but he pointed to his mouth. “Use words,” he said.
“Where do you think they are now?”
“Who?”
“The triplets.”
“Outside.” He sighed.
“I wish we were outside,” Akki said.
He touched her hand, stroking it with his fingers. “We will be soon. I promise.”
And then the dragon’s panting began, in and out, in and out; the ragged breathing filled the cavern and setded over them like a heavy mist. They stopped talking as the rhythm enveloped them.
The dragon heaved herself to her feet and backed out of the stall, pushing Akki to the floor and squashing Jakkin against the wall. Mindlessly the worm stomped around the room, three times, as if searching for something. Her frantic pacing disturbed the two dragons in the outer stalls, and they houghed at her. She responded by whipping her tail back and forth.
At last she found a shallow depression filled with sand at the far end of the cavern. Eyeing it for a moment, she tested it with a claw. Evidently it satisfied her, for she squat ted over it and began to push down. Eggs popped out between her back legs, cascading continuously into the sandy nest for the better part of several hours.
Higher and higher the pile of eggs grew until at last the pile was so high, she had to stand to finish the job. As she did a sticky yellow-white afterbirth tinged slightly with red trickled out of the canal, coating the eggs and binding them together.
“See the blood,” Akki whispered to Jakkin. “Some of the scabs must have come off.”
The dragon shook herself all over, stepped over the pyramid of eggs, and waddled slowly back to the stall, where she began cleaning herself.
Jakkin pulled Akki out of the stall just in time. They were as drained as if they’d done all the hard work of laying themselves. Akki slumped against the cave wall and fell asleep. Jakkin sat down next to her and was soon snoring gently. Their dreams were full of color and light and the smell of the open air.
***
THEY WOKE WELL before the dragon, who was in the comalike sleep that followed egg laying. Jakkin knew that was how the first dragons had been captured, during the vulnerable aftermath of birth.
As they woke they were buffeted by new storms, not from the dragon but from many individual human sendings. Surprised, they looked around the cavern. It was filled with silent men, women, and children jostling one another for a look at the eggs. The most surprising thing of all was that they were all dressed in white robes, a costume oddly unsuited to their heavy bodies.
Makk left the crowd and came over to them, holding out his hands in a gesture of greeting. “Good. Much good.” Then he waved his hands at the white-robed people behind him.
What followed his wave was such a clamor in the mind that Jakkin could think of it only as a cheer. It made him shiver with its intensity, and ended by giving him the worst headache he’d ever had.
As quickly as it had arisen, the silent cheer stopped, but the ache above his eyes continued. Jakkin rubbed at his forehead but it didn’t help.
“Come!” Makk’s sending was both an invitation and a command.
Jakkin stood and pulled Akki up after him, and they joined the crowd surging out of the cavern down a long, straight tunnel and into a small, niched cave, where they were helped into white robes of their own.
Jakkin turned to Akki, mouthing, “What’s going on?”
She shrugged, pointed to her head, and rubbed her left temple with a finger.
Before he could answer, they were rushed away again, moving like part of an underground river racing through the tunnels into yet another cave.
This cave was enormous and vaulted, its ceiling strung with lanterns. Tapestries hung along the walls, the pictures on them, while primitive, clearly showed dragons and children superimposed upon one another. Long unadorned wooden tables sided by benches covered most of the cave’s floor space.
Jakkin was pushed toward a bench and made to sit, strangers on either side of him, Akki across the way. The table was piled high with dishes of steaming stews and salads, boiled mushrooms both gray and white, and cups of a liquid the color of fresh blood.
There was no ceremony. Just as in the bondhouse, everyone reached out for whatever he or she wanted. The clattering of dishes and the banging of hands on the table contrasted strangely with the wordlessness of the people in the room.
After so many days of limited fare, the sight of so much food was overwhelming. Jakkin could feel saliva pooling in his mouth. A strange smell pervaded the room, and it took him a moment to realize it came from the tallow candles set at the table ends. Hungry as he was, Jakkin suddenly felt sick to his stomach. The only thing that could make that much tallow would be dragon fat. Even though his plate was piled high with a variety of inviting foods, he no longer felt like eating. His head ached still, his stomach revolted at the smells. He shook his head.
The man on the right clapped Jakkin on the shoulder before turning back eagerly to his food.
Jakkin sat back and made his mind a blank. Slowly he built up a wall, concentrating on each block until it was as high as his head. He felt rather than heard someone standing in the front of the room and he looked up.
Makk had his hands raised above his head in a kind of benediction, fingers semaphoring to all who watched him. Jakkin raised himself carefully over his mental wall to listen, and Makk’s sending came to him full force:
“Eggs are high. Now we eat. Now we sleep. Not-now we watch hatching. Not-now we count eggs. Time we celebrate. Time we praise. Time we birth again. Blood to blood.”
All around the room people were leaping to their feet, raising their hands overhead.
“Blood to blood,” their sendings repeated. For the first time a river of color, bright red, washed through their black-and-white minds. “Blood to blood.”
In the end only Jakkin and Akki, across the table from him, remained seated. Akki was weeping silently, tears channeling down her cheeks. Jakkin hissed at her and she opened her eyes and stared at him. He sent one word across their bridged minds:
“Why?”
She bit her lip, then whispered, “Oh, Jakkin, I’m afraid. I don’t know why, but I’m so horribly afraid.”
Suddenly Jakkin caught her feelings and they rushed through him, pushing out the bloody sendings, his headache, and everything else except that fear. And he knew he was afraid, t
oo. That he didn’t know why only made it worse.
17
AS MAKK SAID, they ate and slept and then ate again, an enormous display of gluttony that made Jakkin so sick he refused to go back in the dining room.
The watch was set: three men and three women at a time, with a child between them, waited by the nest. Jakkin supposed they were there to guard the eggs from any flikka, though the caverns had seemed curiously without life. And to report when the eggs started hatching.
Jakkin and Akki were dragged along to make up one of the watch teams. They kept their vigil for less than an hour, or so it seemed, squatting on their heels and staring silently at the now-hardened pyramid of eggs. Jakkin’s stomach was still queasy and he wondered if he were clutched, which is how trainers linked to a dragon often felt when the hen was laying. But this wasn’t his dragon and he was hardly linked with her, at least any more than the rest were. He suspected it was just plain fear. And what was that fear? It had something to do with the bloody sendings, that much he knew. And something about the way the cave people greedily devoured their dragon stew. But he’d had friends like that at the nursery and they’d never frightened him. It was just a feeling he had. And Akki, he knew, felt the same.
When his watch was over Jakkin stood with the rest of the white-robed guardians, but instead of filing down the tunnel with them he moved over to the dragon’s stall. She was getting restless in her sleep and he knew she’d be waking before long.
Akki came over to the stall and touched his shoulder. They stood that way as the new watchers entered the cavern to take their turns.
The silence in the cave was unbearable. Jakkin was ready to say something aloud, whatever the consequences, when the dragons in the far stalls began to rock back and forth in place. Jakkin welcomed the creak of bone, the muffled thud of the dragon feet. The rhythm was compelling and he began to sway with them.
And then the dragon sleeping by his feet awoke. Shaking her head from side to side, she stood and backed out of the stall. The watchers at the nest scattered as she moved purposefully toward the pyramid of eggs.
Stopping by the nest, she lowered her head slowly until her nose rested on the topmost egg. For a moment she didn’t move, then houghed a mighty breath out through her nose. The wet, warm breath touched the eggs and a kind of vapor surrounded the top three or four. For a moment the hard shells seemed almost translucent. Jakkin imagined he could see into them and judge the contents. Then the moment passed. The dragon rolled the topmost egg off the pile and onto the floor. It seemed a miracle it did not break, but the hard elastic shell was almost impenetrable from the outside. Only the hatchling within, with the birth bump of horn on its nose, could easily crack open the shell.
Soon the floor by the nest was littered with the cream-colored eggs. There seemed to be nearly a hundred.
A babble of sendings filtered through Jakkin’s concentration and he looked around. The cavern was fast filling with people jostling for position; the children pushed to the front. Unmoved, the dragon continued her work.
Touching each egg in turn, she shoved them around with her lanceae, the twin nails on the front of her foot, almost as if she were counting them, as if she knew already which eggs held live hatchlings and which were just slime-filled decoys for the flikka and drakk.
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.
18
HOW 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 start
ed 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.