Mercedes Lackey - Joust

His heart leaped in his chest with fear. Voices! Can anyone see down here?

He pressed himself back against overhanging wall of the pocket, and peered up. He couldn't see anything, but some peculiarity of the shape of the pocket brought the voices clearly down to him.

"… saw him fall about there," came Ari's voice.

The terror of discovery held him pinned against the wall.

And his first thought was that Ari had betrayed him, betrayed them both—

He should have lied! He should have told Ari that he was going west, east, south—anything but admitting he was going to try to make it to Altai Now Ari had brought people from the compound, guards or soldiers—

But before he could move a strange voice answered.

"Not a sign of him. Not that the jackals would leave anything, and they probably dragged the body off to a den, anyway," came that other voice. "And the dragonet flew off?"

Ari again. "That way."

"Towards the breeding valleys. Well, she'll be back with her mother by now, and we won't see her again. By now, the other dragons will have chewed the harness and saddle off her, and no captured dragonet ever gets caught twice. You're right, Ari. It had to have been an accident, poor boy, and we jumped to an unwarranted conclusion. If he'd been planning to steal a dragon, he'd have taken one of the older ones, not an unflighted dragonet."

"Of course he would have; of what use is a first-year dragonet to the Altans? They can't carry a man for at least another two years," Ari replied, sounding mournful. "My Kashet would have carried him. I wouldn't be the least surprised to find that Coresan would have, or a half dozen others. What's more, you saw for yourself that there was nothing about his gear that looked as if he was getting ready to run away. There were no provisions, nothing packed, and he didn't even have a firestarter or a waterskin. He didn't even take the funerary shrine."

"No, he didn't—and if nothing else, that's a pretty convincing argument for pure accident. Poor child. He must have underestimated how close that dragonet was to First Flight. Baken is shattered; he thinks it's his fault, showing the youngster how to train the dragonets to carry a man. He thinks Vetch was trying to find a way to prove to Haraket that he deserved the same sort of reward that Baken had been promised."

"It's more like to be mine," Ari said, and if Vetch hadn't known better, he'd have believed in his own demise, Ari was doing so good a job of sounding guilty. "If I'd just followed at a distance instead of chasing him, when the dragonet got tired, I could have retrieved him. Instead, I frightened her into throwing him before 1 was close enough to catch him. Which is why—

A long silence.

"Ah. I'd wondered. Well, the Great King is hardly likely to begrudge you that."

"Indeed. Well, I've brought the shrine, and I got another figure for it. You head on back. I'll see if 1 can find something like remains, and even if I can't, I'll still place the shrine and the offerings for the boy and his father. It's the least I can do."

"And you don't want to find yourself haunted either," the voice said shrewdly. "1 don't blame you. No, get that shrine placed out here so his spirit won't try to come back to the compound. I don't want to see any wandering ghosts in the corridors! See you back at the compound."

Vetch sat there with his mouth falling open, hardly able to believe what he was hearing. Was—Ari had reported him dead? And had he just heard Ari and another Jouster agreeing that he was?

A shadow passed across the opening above, and the familiar sound of dragon wings echoed down where Vetch waited.

And for some time, nothing more happened, as Vetch strained his ears and his nerves went tight as lute string. Then, when he was ready to scream with the tension, he heard something in the passage. It sounded like footfalls. Two light feet, and four very, very heavy ones.

That "something" was indeed Ari and Kashet. The dragon had a large bag strapped across the back of his saddle.

"Ah, awake. I don't suppose you overheard me up there?" Ari said cheerfully. "Down, Kashet."

The dragon stretched himself alongside Avatre, who was still sleeping.

"Uh—most of it. I'm dead?" Vetch hazarded.

"As the god-king Arsani-kat-hamun," Ari agreed. He took the bag from the back of his saddle and tossed it to Vetch; it was a lot heavier than it looked. "Your grave goods. I told everyone you'd been thrown and the dragonet escaped, then suggested that I ought to go set up a funerary shrine to you and your father where I last saw your body. So to avoid having you come back to haunt us, virtually everyone in the compound rushed to put together a rather motley assortment of funerary offerings. I, of course, put together a very select assortment of my own choosing as well, but I saw no reason to refuse their gifts. There might actually be something worth keeping in them."

He felt rather as if he'd been run over by a chariot. Why had he not confided in Ari in the first place? His fears seemed baseless now. Ari had taken a chaotic situation in hand, and had taken care of every possible consideration. "You want me to leave these things for my father?" he hazarded.

"Some of them," Ari said cryptically. "There's another bag back up there—" he jerked his head at the opening, "—where the obliging Dethet-re left it. And yes, I did bring your father's shrine, but I strongly suggest that you set it up here and leave it, or you'll only have to hunt a place to leave it later, and that place will not be nearly as secure. You'll find, I think, that it isn't the sort of item you can afford to take along on a journey the length of the one you have elected to make."

"I can always set up another for him when I get there," Vetch said, after a pause.

"Indeed. Now, I'll go get the other bag, you rummage through that and see what's useful. What isn't—that, you can just leave for your father's spirit."

Ari strode off down the crevice. Kashet remained where he was, since Ari hadn't ordered him to his feet. Vetch knelt down beside the coarse canvas bag and opened it.

On the top of the bag was a roll of his own bedding, with something hard and squarish in it. The shrine? Yes, he discovered as he carefully unrolled the bedding, that the shrine was wrapped in it, so his first act was to deal with it. Ari had been marvelously careful; he quickly set the shrine to rights and looked around the little refuge for somewhere to put it. Finally he climbed up to a kind of shallow niche, high above what he hoped would be the high-water mark in the rainy season. He set the shrine on that ledge, after chasing out sand, a few dead leaves, and the shell of a beetle or two.

He scrambled down from his perch, and returned to unpacking the bag. Under the bedding were the woolen cape he'd been given for cold weather, and the canvas rain cape, both of which he had kept with his bedding. Tied up in a square of cloth were the little treasures he had accumulated while he was at the compound. There weren't many of them, some faience amulets, a carved knife-handle that someone had discarded, a horn spoon he'd made himself, a very small oil lamp he had modeled from clay. A little box proved to be a tinder-box with a firestriker; then came a couple of small knives—a sling and a pouch of stones—a wineskin that sloshed when he shook it. And on the bottom, barley bread and honey cakes, a bit squashed, but he wasn't going to complain.

Ari reappeared with that second bag. "I have no idea what's in this one," he said, bringing it over to where Vetch had spread out his loot. "1 packed the first one; the gods only know what the others thought was suitable as your grave goods." He chuckled. "I'm afraid that your fellow dragon boys recalled that rumor about you being the focus for Altan sea witch magic, and stuffed anything they could think of in there to placate your spirit, because it's cursed heavy!"