“Never mind that, Jakkin,” Akki said. “Don’t think about it. The past is the past. Let it go. Let’s enjoy what we have now. Show me your new pots, and then we can eat.”
They walked into the cave, one of three they’d claimed as their own. Though Jakkin still thought of them as numbers—one, two, and three—Akki had named them. The cave in the Lower Meadows was Golden’s Cave, named after their friend who had fled with them and had most certainly died at the wardens’ hands. Golden’s Cave had caches of berries for flavoring and for drinks. Akki had strung dried flowers on vines that made a rustly curtain between the main cave and the smaller sleeping quarters, which they kept private from the dragons. Higher on the mountain, but not as high as the Upper Meadows, was Likkarn’s Lookout. It was as rough and uncompromising a place as the man it was named after, Jakkin’s old trainer and enemy Likkarn. But Likkarn had proved a surprising ally in the end, and so had the lookout cave, serving them several times in the early days of their exile when they’d spotted bands of searchers down in the valley. But the middle cave, which Akki called the New Nursery, was the one they really considered their home.
What had first drawn them to it had been its size. It had a great hollow vaulted room with a succession of smaller caves behind. There were wonderful ledges at different levels along the walls on which Jakkin’s unfired clay bowls and canisters sat. Ungainly and thick the clay pots certainly were, but Jakkin’s skills were improving with each try, and the bowls, if not pretty, were functional, holding stashes of chikkberries, dried mushrooms like the cave apples Jakkin so disliked, and edible grasses. So far his own favorite bit of work was a large-bellied jar containing boil. It was the one piece he had successfully fired and it was hard and did not leak.
The floor of the cave was covered with dried grasses that lent a sharp sweet odor to the air. There was a mattress of the same grass, which they changed every few days. The bed lay in one of the small inner chambers where, beneath a natural chimney, they could look up at night and see the stars.
“There!” Jakkin said, pointing to the shelf that held his latest, still damp work. “This clay was a lot easier to work.”
There were five new pots, one large bowl, and two slightly lopsided drinking cups.
“What do you think?”
“Oh, Jakkin, they’re the best yet. When they’re dry we must try them in the fire. What do you think?”
“I think . . .” And then he laughed, shaping a picture of an enormous cave apple in his mind. The mushroom had an enormous bitesized chunk out of it.
Akki laughed. “If you are hungry enough to think about eating that,” she said, “we’d better start the dinner right away!”
“We come. Have hunger, too.” The sendings from the three smallest dragons broke into Jakkin’s head. Their signature colors were shades of pink and rose.
“We wait. We ride your shoulder. Our eyes are yours.” That came from the largest two of Heart’s Blood’s hatchlings. They were already able to travel miles with neither hunger nor fatigue, and their sendings had matured to a deeper red. Sssargon and Sssasha, the names they had given themselves with the characteristic dragon hiss at the beginning, spent most of the daylight hours catching currents of air that carried them over the jagged mountain peaks. They were, as they called themselves, Jakkin’s and Akki’s eyes, a mobile warning signal. But they were not needed for scouting at night because there was nothing Jakkin and Akki feared once the true dark set in.
“Come home. Come home.” Jakkin’s sending was a green vine of thought.
“Yes, come home.” Akki’s sending, much weaker than Jakkin’s, was a twining of blue strands around his brighter green. Blue and green, the braiding of the cooler human colors.
“Come home,” called the blue once again. “Come home. I have much food. And I have a new song for you.” The sending was soothing and inviting at the same time. The young dragons loved songs, loved the thrumming, humming sounds, especially if the songs "concerned great flying worms. Baby dragons, Akki’s thought passed along to Jakkin, thought mostly about two things—themselves and what they wanted to eat.
2
“THEY’LL BE HERE SOON,” Akki said in the sensible tone she often used when talking about the hatchlings. “So we’d better eat. You know how much attention they demand once they’re down—rubbing and coaxing and ear scratching.”
“Nursery dragons are worse,” reminded Jakkin. “They can’t do anything for themselves. Except eat. At least these are finding grazing on their own. And they groom themselves. And . . .”
“They’re still babies, though.”
“Some babies!” Jakkin laughed and held his hand above Akki’s head. Sssargon’s broad back already came that high, and with his long ridged neck and enormous head, he was twice Jakkin’s height and still growing.
“Big babies!” Akki amended.
They laughed aloud together and then walked to the pathway, where they sat down on the flat rocks that flanked the cave mouth. Akki shared out the bits of mushroom and then the berries. She had found three kinds: tart chikkberries, black and juicy warden’s heart, and the dry, pebbly wormseye. They washed the meal down with a cup of boil, the thin soup made from cooking the greasy brown skkagg grass of the high meadow. Boil was only drinkable cold—and then just barely. Jakkin made a face.
“I still miss a cup of hot takk with my dinner,” he said. He wiped away a purple smear from his mouth, a trace of warden’s heart, and slowly looked up at the sky. A dark smudge in the west resolved itself into a dragon form. As it came closer, Jakkin stood.
“Sssargon come” Sssargon always announced himself, keeping up a running commentary on his actions. “Sssargon lands.”
His wings stirred the dust at the cave mouth, and for a moment obscured his landing, but Jakkin knew it was a perfect touchdown. For such a large and clumsy-looking beast, Sssargon was often quite dainty.
“Sssargon folds wings.” The great pinions swept back against his sides, the scaly feathers fluttering for just a moment before quieting. Sssargon squatted, then let his large ribbed tongue flick in and out between his jaws. “Sssargon hungers.”
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 h
is 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.
3
THE 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.