Metal! Jakkin gasped aloud. There was so little metal on Austar that what there was had to be carefully husbanded for use in the cities. The cost of metal was far beyond the ordinary bonder. Even most masters could afford little. He remembered the grillwork under the great pots in the fire cavern. And the pots themselves. And the sticks! They were all metal. How could he have been so blind? These strange men had a secret the outside world would love to have—a secret metal cache. If he listened carefully, perhaps he could find out more.
Makk was continuing. “One man, First Makker, knew to take Stone. Knew to turn Stone to Ore. From Ore comes The Fire That Is Water. From The Fire That Is Water come Bands. For we were of Bonds who now are of Bands.”
There was a poetry in Makk’s sending that almost obscured the story he told. Drawing a curtain between Makk’s mind and his own, Jakkin tried to find the real meaning. Could First Makker have been an escaped prisoner back in the days of all their grandfathers? Someone with a working knowledge of metal making who had somehow managed to live through the deadly cold. Jakkin knew that not all the early prisoners were murderers and thieves. A few had been political prisoners sent away from Earth or other planets to the metal-poor desert world of Austar. Some of those prisoners must have had skills beyond the ordinary. What if that First Makker was one? And what if other escapees had joined him and remained hidden within the bowels of the mountains, generation after generation? It made sense. Makk said they were Men of Bonds. And if the secret of the metal making had passed down from father to son over the years . . . He suddenly realized Makk had stopped sending and was staring at him. Jakkin stared back, the wall around his thoughts carefully constructed again.
Makk nodded and the sendings came again. “We Men of Great Mother, Flesh of her flesh. Blood of her blood. One day go to place of Bonds and throw them over.” The sending was dark red, the red of anger and fire and blood, but Makk’s hands were raised as if in ecstasy.
Jakkin didn’t understand what that meant at all. Some ritual of eating, perhaps? What if they insisted he eat with them? Could he do it? Did he dare refuse again? And if these strange men really did plan to go outside and fight, shouldn’t he warn the outsiders? After all, the closest civilized place to these mountains was Sarkkhan’s Nursery, where he had grown up. His friends were there. But if he managed to get out, the last place he should go would be the nursery. Surely any searchers would have spies there.
His mind in a turmoil, he drew in a breath and carefully drew aside the curtain over his thoughts to let a sending out. “The Great Mothers, where are they? And where is the Place of Women?”
Makk lowered his hands and came close to Jakkin, touching him on the shoulder. “What place you? Too high for here. Too thin for here. No Bands. Yet speak without noise. Not like Others.”
“Others? What others?”
“Long ago Others.” He did not elaborate. A man who had been sitting at the far end of the table stood up and came over to Jakkin, placing his hand on top of Makk’s. “What place?”
Jakkin thought a long time before answering, careful to cloak his mind till the last. Sweat beaded his forehead. “I come from another Place, another mountain, another cave.” He knew suddenly that to admit being from the outside was inviting death. “There we wear no Bands but we, too, know the Great Mothers. I am blood of the blood with a great red.” He wouldn’t tell them how he’d shared the dragon’s blood, though her rainbow sign broke across his sending, a memory of that generous spirit he couldn’t keep out.
The colorful sending seemed to startle the men. Makk’s hand dropped from his shoulder and everyone drew away mentally. Jakkin wondered if it was the color or the joy in the sending that had so provoked them. Then he shook his head, continuing:
“I came to your place with my . . . woman.” He bet Akki would be furious if she knew he’d called her that.
Makk nodded, but still kept his distance. “Yes. We know this. She in Place of Women.”
It was Jakkin’s turn to be startled. He walked over to Makk and put his hand on the man’s broad shoulder. At the touch he was able to see right into Makk’s mind. So that was it! He made the sending as strong as he could: “I want my woman. That is how it is done in my place.” When he took his hand away Makk’s mind snapped shut like some kind of trap.
Makk’s fingers moved swiftly, then his sharp sending pierced Jakkin’s mind. “Now you eat.”
“Not that stuff.”
Turning, Makk signed toward one of the men at a table. He rose and brought over another bowl. This one was filled with a dark jellied substance. Jakkin took the bowl and tipped it eagerly into his mouth. He recognized congealed boil and chikkberries, but there was also a greenish, bittersweet taste that lingered after he had finished the food and made his mouth feel clean and good.
Only later did he realize what that meant: chikkberries and boil. The men of the cave didn’t just stay inside. Somewhere there had to be an easy access to outside, to a meadow. He wondered when and how he might dare to ask.
13
MAKK MADE IT clear, though it took many sendings, that if Jakkin didn’t work like the other men, he wouldn’t be fed again. Nor would he be allowed to go to the Place of Women when it was time.
“Time?” Jakkin had sent, hoping for an explanation. He’d already given up on the food. Somehow, somewhere, there was a supply of fresh growing things, but certainly not in the bowels of the cave.
But Makk had only reiterated the same images, of sun and moons, clear notations of time. And since there was no way for Jakkin to find the Place of Women on his own, or to feed himself, for that matter, he worked. He wasn’t happy about it, but he worked, reminding himself to stay alert and learn as much as he could.
Standing on the high shelf of rock and taking his turn at stirring pots of fire, Jakkin felt alternately hot and cold. The flames seared his front, but there was a cold breeze across his shoulders and along the backs of his knees. His arms ached from the unaccustomed labor and his mind was weary from the twin efforts of cloaking and listening. But the more he saw of the metal-making operation, the more he realized its importance. And the more he realized bitterly that he was powerless to let the rest of Austar know.
After hours with the great iron rod, Jakkin was relieved by a silent, hulking worker who signaled him with a hand on the back. When Jakkin turned away from the shelf there was Makk again, ready to lead him to another portion of the cave where men were grubbing around the walls, using metal picks the size of fewmet shovels, mining out the stuff Makk called ore. Following behind these men was a crew of workers with sling bags full of phosphorescent moss, which they placed wherever a vein of the ore had been picked out. Despite Makk’s attempts at an explanation, and the instruction of his own eyes and ears, Jakkin wasn’t sure if the moss was used as tunnel markers for the pickers, for light, for decoration, or a combination of all three.
By the time it was his turn on the moss detail, Jakkin was openly yawning, but no one seemed to notice. The bag’s straps were made for broader shoulders than his and kept slipping. The cool, flaky mosses were not as easy to set in place as he’d thought. They had to be bent and shaped and tucked into the ore holes, and most of the time they crumbled between his inept fingers.
He was just beginning to get the feel of it, under the gruff tutelage of a one-eyed man he called Brekk (his sign was simply a single staring eye), when there was a loud gonging that echoed and re-echoed off the cave walls. At the sound, so loud in the enforced silence of the tunnels, the men set down their tools and bags and shuffled to the main cavern. Jakkin followed them.
It was only when he was back in the main cave that he realized it was a shift change, much like Sarkkhan’s Nursery, where a few of the bond boys had night-watch duty and others worked in the day. He almost laughed aloud remembering his friends Errikkin, who loved being in bond, and Slakk, who’d try anything to get out of work.
Brekk pushed him toward a small crevice where there was a grassy pal
let set upon the stone. He gave Jakkin a brief smile that shut his one good eye and left the empty socket staring.
“Sleep!” he commanded, the picture being one of a face with both eyes closed. It was accompanied by a kind of mental hum-song.
Jakkin needed no further urging. He climbed into his sleep crevice and lay down on the grass. He was just wondering that the grass was so fresh and sweet-smelling when sleep overcame him, and with it strange dark dreams.
***
THAT SAME PATTERN of work and sleep, broken by silent meals, continued for a number of rotations. In the half-light of the caves, Jakkin had no idea whether he worked for hours or days at a time, but simply slogged along until the gong. After a while he almost forgot there was anything but the caves, holding only to Makk’s promise that they would eventually go to the Place of Women, where Akki was being kept.
As he found himself slipping into the same kind of somnambulant shuffle as the others, he tried to rouse himself with spoken speech. He worked as far from the men as he could manage, whispering little ditties in a voice that carried no farther than his own shadow. He knew if he didn’t talk to himself, he would eventually lose the use of ear and tongue. So he recited Fewmets Ferkkin stories, hummed old ballads, even found he’d a gift for verse. He made up seventeen different stanzas of a poem that began “There once was a bond boy named Jakkin . . .” using lackin’, snackin’, and trackin’ among the rhymes. When he really became bored with his own company and felt himself slipping back into the half-sleep, he invented imaginary dialogues with Akki. She ended every one of these conversations with a hug. He got so he could feel her arms around him, the softness of her cheek on his.
One time he tried to slip away down an empty passage, but Makk caught him before he was around the first turn, and cuffed him soundly. Jakkin returned to the others, his ears ringing and his mind filled with the angry mutterings of the other men. But he noticed he wasn’t the only one cuffed. Brekk had his head knocked a few times, and another man, Orkkon, was roughed up for dropping his iron stirring stick. But Orkkon was ill, not lazy, and after a second beating he lay on his pallet three rotations, tossing and sweating. He never moaned aloud, though his sendings were filled with formless dark clouds that Jakkin read as fever.
It was a wonder to Jakkin that the men bore the endless drudgery without complaining. What they did was not any more difficult or arduous than the tasks he’d done at Sarkkhan’s Nursery, but there was no variety. And there were no voices. He decided that it was the human voice he missed the most—that and the brightly colored sendings of the dragons. Sound and light. Without those, how could a person survive?
And yet—his traitor mind continued—these men of the mountains survived, and thrived. Men—and not-men. Survived but at a price. Jakkin guarded his thoughts as he made a list of the things these cavemen lacked: warmth, emotion, laughter, love—all those things that made life worthwhile. The list comforted him.
“I will get out of here,” he whispered to himself. “I’ll find Akki and go. Anything on the outside will be bearable after this boredom. Anything.” And then he remembered Heart’s Blood dying, shook his head, and was silent.
***
IT WAS THE ninth or tenth rotation—he’d lost count somewhere along the way—when a runner came to the men as they ate. Jakkin knew him for a stranger even from far away because he was younger than the rest and dressed differently. He was wearing a kind of light-colored woven cloth instead of the loincloths of the ore workers or the darker coveralls of the miners, which were made of the eggskin that hatchlings shed.
The boy’s sending was frantic, emotional, full of color, which further marked him.
“Great Mother trembles,” he sent, a mael strom of dark tones. “She pants. Her birth hole swells. It does not open. All our women fear.”
Makk and the other men made a tight circle around the boy. Putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder, Makk sent, “I come. Orkkon comes, whose father’s father was First Healer.”
The circle broke apart and re-formed around Orkkon, who still lay sweating on his pallet. Jakkin, on the far edges of the circle, watched as Makk knelt by Orkkon and put a hand on his head.
“You come,” Makk sent.
Orkkon managed, with Makk’s support, to sit up. Jakkin could see the sweat running down his chest and the flush on his cheeks. He seemed to be having trouble breathing.
“You come with me,” Makk sent again.
There was no answering pattern from Orkkon. His mind seemed as flushed and sweaty as his body.
“Wait!” Jakkin cried aloud, wincing as the men turned toward him with another brutal, dark sending. At least he had gotten their attention. “Wait,” he sent. “I am a Dragon Healer in my own place. Let Orkkon stay here. He is too sick anyway. Let me go instead.”
Makk pushed the sweating man back down on his bed and stood. As he walked toward Jakkin, Jakkin put out his hand. Puzzled, Makk stopped for a moment, then moved forward again. He took Jakkin’s hand in his. The instant they touched Jakkin could feel his mind being invaded and he willed it to show pictures of himself and Heart’s Blood in the cavernous incubarn. His memory flooded back and he took the memory, shaping it to his own use. There was the dark barn and the great hen towering over him, the fire in her eyes now warm and inviting. Then the great red circling the room in the peculiar halting rhythm of the pregnant female. Next he showed her squatting over the shallow hole dug into the sandy floor. All the while Jakkin soothed her. “Easy, easy, my beauty, easy, easy, my red.” He moved the sending forward, concentrating on the nest itself as the eggs cascaded from the dragon’s birth channel into the hole. “This I have done many times,” his sending promised. He masked his traitorous afterthought that many was a gross exaggeration.
For a moment Makk didn’t respond, though there seemed to be a murmured sending from the other men, approval of some sort. At last Makk sent a black ropelike form shooting into Jakkin’s sending, whipping around the arm of the boy pictured there and dragging the dream boy away. Like all of Makk’s sendings, it was unambiguous in its meaning.
“Come,” said his sending. “Great Mother needs. Come.”
14
THE THREE OF THEM trotted down the tunnels, and though Jakkin tried to mark the way, they made too many turnings and switchbacks for him to remember. Yet, fast as they traveled, Makk and the boy never hesitated; the tunnels seemed to be as familiar to them as the hallways in a nursery bondhouse.
Jakkin wondered what he would find when they reached the Place of Great Mothers. Would the dragon giving birth be Auricle? He doubted that. She hadn’t been obviously pregnant and, in fact, had dragged her tail like a dragon in heat. Besides, it took four months for eggs to develop, so there couldn’t have been time. But a little fear nagged at him. What did he really know about time inside the caves? It felt like a week or two, but without access to the sun and moons, he couldn’t tell day from night, much less the passage of a week.
Besides, these men were so different—thicker, heftier, duller, speechless—perhaps dragons in the mountains were different as well. Certainly Auricle had seemed odd, almost brain-damaged, or like an infant unused to either light or sound. Of course, now that he’d met and worked with the men of the cave, he understood the dragon better.
Makk and the boy stopped suddenly and Jakkin caught up with them. They had paused just inside the entrance to another large cavern. It seemed lighter and airier than the tunnels, and Jakkin squinted, looking around. High above them was a small opening and, far above that, a wan light like a pale lantern. He stared at it for several moments before he realized it was one of the moons. So—they could see outside; they did have a way to measure time. He laughed out loud and was cuffed by Makk for the sound.
Clenching his fists, Jakkin turned on Makk, but the man was already walking away, through another arched doorway. That it was a doorway and not just the beginning of a tunnel became clearer to Jakkin the closer he came to it. The stone on both sides
of the arch had been intricately carved with figures of dragons: dragons fighting, dragons flying, dragons mating, dragons giving birth. They were illuminated by torches set on either side of the doorway.
Jakkin raced through the doorway after Makk and the boy and gasped in surprise. Unlike the rough, unadorned caves where the men lived, in this well-lit cavern was a series of stalls chiseled into the stone. In places the stone itself was fluted like curtains, in others there were detailed carvings of men, women, and dragons all entwined.
In the stalls to the left close to twenty dragons were roped, their shadows moving sluggishly against the walls. Silent gray-brown presences, they sent only beige images into Jakkin’s mind, so different from the usual raucous colors that challenged him whenever he’d entered the nursery barns. The beige sendings were pale questions that floated slowly across his mind before drifting away, like clouds across a sky.
Jakkin looked carefully at the dragons in their stalls and sent back his own questions, trying to locate Auricle. But if she was there, he wasn’t able to identify her.
“This is the Place of the Great Mothers?” Jakkin queried, puzzled because none of the stalled dragons looked old enough to be mated.
“Place of Little Mothers,” Makk sent back. “We go farther.” He motioned with his head and walked on.
They went through another arched door, this one decorated with a pattern of eggshaped bulges.
“Who did all this?” Jakkin’s mind buzzed with the question. He hadn’t meant to send it, but his curiosity couldn’t be contained.
“The Makker made this.” Makk stepped through the archway. The boy remained behind, but Jakkin went after Makk.
If the outer cavern had been a surprise, this room was an astonishment. It held only three stalls, but each was as spacious as a room in the nursery incubarn. The first stall was occupied by a greenish gray dragon a little smaller than Sssasha, placidly munching on something Jakkin didn’t immediately recog nize. The second stall contained a pale red dragon who seemed to be sleeping. Both dragons were pregnant, their stomachs bulging, their tails flattened and drooping on the floor.