Mercedes Lackey: Joust

"I'm not blind, Haraket, I was there when he got them, for 'letting' me take his bucket and quench my thirst," Ari replied, putting the helmet down, then turning to unbuckle the throat-strap of the saddle. He sounded a trifle irritated, then unexpectedly, the Jouster laughed. "No, he's a serf, not a thief, not a gutter brat. Now the fat slug that was beating him is going to have to find another in his bloodline if the lazy lout wants to hold the land the boy was tied to."

Vetch blinked, to hear his own speculation borne out. So that was, indeed, why Khefti had taken him!

Somehow, that only made him feel angrier.

The Jouster's voice took on an interesting tone, very faintly— malicious?—as he continued unbuckling the dragon's saddle straps. "You know, if whoever sold the land divided up it up too much, the other landholders might not have spare serfs in his line to give up to anyone else. He might lose that land when the assessor comes to see about it."

With a fierce surge of longing, Vetch wished he could be there when the assessor came. He wanted, oh, how he wanted to see Khefti squirm, prevaricate, and sweat! He had sunk all of his savings into that house—or at least, he'd told Vetch that often enough. So if he lost it only because he did not have Vetch anymore, what a supreme bit of revenge that would be!

"But a serf—why not a free boy?" the voice complained. "There must be dozens of free boys you could have from their parents for the asking!"

"Because I'm tired of replacing free boys when they get haughty airs and decide they ought to be something better than 'just' a dragon boy!" Ari snapped, and unbuckled the last strap. He pulled the saddle and the pad that Vetch had clung to off the dragon's back. He turned with it in his hands, and looped all of the straps around it into a compact bundle with a swift and practiced motion.

He dropped the whole thing in Vetch's arms; Vetch had been expecting this from the moment he'd heard what he was to become. A serf, after all, was for the bearing of burdens. He caught it as it dropped, though one of the strap ends hit the ground and his stripes burned again. He was used to working, and working hard, with more whip cuts on his back than two.

The saddle was heavy, at least for him, and he staggered for a moment beneath its weight. It had an additional scent besides that of leather—a hot, metallic scent, with an overtone of spice. The scent of the dragon?

"There, boy—" the Jouster said, in a tone of dismissal, as he bent to pick up his helmet and tuck it under his arm. "You go with Haraket; he'll teach you your business. You'll be living here now."

Jouster Ari stalked off without a backward look, and Vetch turned, the saddle in his arms, to face the person he had not yet seen.

Haraket. Who must be an Overseer.

The man wore a simple white linen kilt, augmented by one striped, multicolored sash around his waist and a second that ran from his right shoulder, across a chest as muscular as any warrior, to the opposite hip. His square head was shaven, though he did not wear a wig, his skin as browned and weathered as that of any farmer, and he wore a hawk-eye amulet of glazed pottery around his neck. He gazed down on Vetch with resignation from beneath a pair of heavy, black eyebrows. But at least he didn't look angry. And he wasn't wearing a whip at his waist either.

"Come on, you," he said, with a sigh. "Since I'm to teach you your business, the best time to start is now." Vetch ducked his head obediently, silently telling himself not to look sullen, and followed as the man strode off across the beaten earth of the courtyard. But he stopped dead at the sound of something large and heavy following him.

He turned. The dragon stared down at him, cocking its head quizzically; it had been right on his heels.

"Come on, serf boy!" the man snarled, when he turned to discover that Vetch was not behind him anymore. "Kashet will come along without being led, much less leashed or chained. He follows me and Ari like a dog, and in time, he'll follow you. Kashet isn't like other dragons, and that's something you'd better keep in mind from this moment on. Ari doesn't need tala to control him. You're damned lucky to be Ari's boy; Kashet is a neferek to handle compared with the others."

He turned abruptly and strode off again, and Vetch hurried to catch up with him, the dragon following along like a hound. For the moment, the ever-present anger that burned in his belly had retreated before his feeling of complete dislocation and bewilderment.

The dragon had landed in a huge courtyard with enormously high limestone walls around it, "paved" with pale beige earth pounded hard and as flat as a smooth mud brick. There were four entrances or gates to this courtyard, square arches each surmounted by a sculpted and painted symbol of a god, each one right in the middle of each wall. All were tall enough to allow a dragon to pass through them, and broad enough for three. The man marched straight through the one nearest them, which had a hawk eye painted in blue, red, and black carved into the top; Vetch followed, and the dragon followed him.

The colors were bright enough to dazzle the eye; there was nothing like these painted walls in Khefti's village. The painted images leaped out at Vetch, dazzling him. Even Khefti's apprentices never worked with such wonderful colors!

On the other side of the wall were—more limestone-faced walls, equally dazzling in their whiteness. They formed a sort of alley or corridor stretching in either direction; the area was also open to the sky. These walls were not as tall as the ones around the courtyard, and dragon heads peeked over the tops at intervals, peering at them with some unreadable emotion. They weren't all the green and gold of Kashet; there were blue ones in all shades from dark to light, red ones, a purple color, and a pale gold and silver. The colors were dazzling, gorgeous, and they filled his eyes the way that a fine meal filled the appetite. Already, Vetch could tell there was a profound difference between these dragons and Kashet. Ari's dragon had some friendly interest in his eyes when he looked at Vetch—these dragons had the eyes of a feral cat, wary and wild.

He expected noise out of them, based on the way the oxen and donkeys of his father's farm behaved when a stranger came into their yard; to his surprise, there was very little. The dragons hissed and snorted, but there was no bellowing, no growling.

Perhaps they didn't make any louder sound; perhaps they couldn't.

They came to an intersection, and the bald man turned the corner to lead him down another corridor, then another—and just as Vetch thought he was totally lost, turned a final corner that brought them inside another courtyard. He stumbled forward on momentum and blundered into a huge pit that formed the center of the courtyard, a pit that was knee-deep in soft, hot sand. He floundered in the stuff, helplessly, and the man reached out a long arm and hauled him back onto the hard verge. Again, the whip cuts on his back reminded him they were there.

"Stay on the walkway around the edge, boy," the man said, but not unkindly. "That sand will burn you, else, until you're used to it. You'll need to toughen your skin to it."

He'd already found that out; the sand radiated heat upward, as hot as the sun overhead, hotter than the kamiseen. His legs stung a little, though he wouldn't have called it a burn, exactly. His feet were too callused to feel much, even heat, from so brief an encounter.

"Put the saddle over there," Haraket continued, pointing to a wooden rack mounted on the wall nearest Vetch. "Untangle the straps and drape them over the rack to dry—dragons don't sweat, but Jousters do. Kashet doesn't need to be chained the way the others do, so you leave him free."