Orest raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think that’s the sort of thing that Kaleth hears about.”
“Well, a fellow can ask, can’t he?” Gan was not in the least abashed. “I doubt the gods would be offended by so simple a question.”
“I want to hear about what sort of tactics we should be using,” said Kalen firmly. “Driving off bandits is not the same as fighting trained soldiers. And what do we do with any that we might capture? We won’t have an army underneath us to act as our support in the field. We need to think of these things before we have problems, not after.”
“Should we be getting permission to do this?” Menet-ka worried aloud. “This is nothing we’ve been told to do.”
“But we also haven’t been told not to do it,” Kiron told them all. “And my thought is that if we wait for permission, we might be waiting for moons, but if we just go and
do
it, by the time anyone thinks to order us to stop, the merchants will be so used to the protection that the howls of protest will sound like a pack of wild hounds with prey in sight.”
Gan grinned. “You’re learning,” he said smugly. “You are learning.”
Kiron just shrugged. In so many ways, the old order of things had been uprooted and they were all having to learn new paths. He looked around at them all, his friends, the young fellows he had fought beside and helped to train, and suddenly it was as if he was seeing them for the first time.
“We’ve—all changed,” he said aloud, feeling just a little stunned.
Because they really had changed, all of them, some out of all recognition. When he had first seen them, lining up before him to be told what being a raiser of dragons would be like, they had been an oddly assorted crew. There had been the commoners: quiet Huras, the baker’s son; tall Pe-atep of the booming voice, who had tended the great hunting cats for a noble; small, wiry Kalen, who had done the same with falcons. There they had stood, in their soft commoners’ kilts, no jewels, no eye paint, their hair, like Kiron’s, tied back in a tail. Common as street curs, all of them. Kiron could not boast any great bloodline, for before he had been a serf in the power of the Tians, he had been nothing more than an ordinary farmer’s son.
And the others. Orest, son of the great and wealthy Lord Ya-Tiren; Kiron’s friend, yes but under normal circumstances, they would never have met, much less become friends. So Kiron had met them because he had rescued Orest’s sister Aket-ten from a river horse—so they had become friends because Kiron had done so by flying in on the back of the first tame dragon that the Altans had ever seen. A simple farmer’s son would never have been a Jouster in Altan society; the notion was as outlandish as the reality—that a serf bound to the Tian Jousters had stolen a fertile dragon egg, hatched it, raised the hatchling to adulthood, and escaped with her. Impossible.
Yet there he was, and there they were. And he had been set the task of teaching a new lot of Altan Jousters how to have truly tame dragons, that obeyed out of training and love, instead of drugs and training.
Then there were the others, that he had not until that moment met. Ganek-at-kal-te-ronet, known to his friends as simply Gan, the oldest of the lot, handsome to a fault, with a languid air of laziness and a passion for women, with the highest bloodline of all of them but one. Menet-ka, also nobly born, though of a minor house, shy, but like the others, wearing garments and jewels, eye paint and hairstyle that proclaimed him to be far above the common touch. Oset-re, almost as nobly born as Gan, almost as handsome, with a superficial vanity that had swiftly fallen before his desire to partner a tame dragon.
Kiron preferred not to think about the one who was no longer with them. Prince Toreth, who had stood between the Magi and the power of the Altan throne, and thus, had died at their hands. . . .
Now, though . . . now, there was no telling which of them was common-born and which noble. They all looked alike. There was no eye paint, no one wore his hair in the elaborate braids of nobles. All were clad alike in the wrapped Jouster’s kilt; all were equally tanned and hardened by work. All had the hands of warriors, and some scars, too. Except for some superficial differences of face shape and size, they could have been brothers. Paler than Tians, but like Tians, black of hair and brown of eye, what marked them most was the look they all wore, what Heklatis called “the look of eagles.” Even Aket-ten had that look about her, now that he came to think about it.
They were no longer what they had been. Now they were men.
And one woman . . . no, two.
Because Kaleth had crossed the threshold into adulthood before any of them, and with him, Marit, his lady, and her twin sister Nofret.
It was Menet-ka who understood at once what Kiron meant. He nodded. “We have,” he said gravely. “Now I think it is time we truly showed that.”
Orest made a face. “Alas! We must be
responsible?
” he said in mock mourning. “And here I had hoped that when the wars were over, I could live my life as an idle ne’er-do-well! Ah, well. Fate has other plans for me, I suppose.”
The others laughed. With the Altan capital in ruins, even had Orest been dragonless, he would scarcely have been permitted to be an idler. For that matter, it was vanishingly unlikely that his father would have permitted him to enjoy such a path even if Kiron had never come to Alta. And he, and everyone else, very well knew it.
“So!” Orest continued, with relish. “Tactics! How will a Jouster, or a wing of Jousters, best deal with bandits?”
Kiron smoothed out a patch of sand and laid pebbles in a line on it. “Caravans always travel in single file; this makes them vulnerable to attack from one or both sides. What this means for the bandits is that they must find a place where they can wait concealed.” He heaped up sand on either side of the line of rocks, and placed more rocks behind them. “Since there are only so many places along the caravan routes where they can do this, we need not spread ourselves overly thin, nor play watchdog for the caravans as they traverse their entire routes.”
The others nodded, but it was Huras who said slowly, “For now.”
“For now,” agreed Oset-re. “Without a doubt, once the bandits realize what we are doing, they will change their tactics. But I think we can adapt. Let us concentrate on ‘for now,’ and worry about the change when they make it.”
“Against a small group, the old fighting style against ground fighters worked very well,” Kiron continued. “The horses were frightened into bolting, and none of them had the presence of mind to shoot at me. Of course, this, too, will not hold for long. So what I think we must do is this. We will begin by running patrols in pairs. For now, having two targets will keep the bandits confused enough. We will determine where the places of cover are along the caravan routes and keep them under watch.”
“We will be limited to flying no more than half a day from Aerie,” Kalen pointed out.
Again, Kiron nodded.
“For now,” he repeated. “This will change. Perhaps the merchants will suggest ways in which we can feed our dragons along the routes besides hunting. Perhaps the Great King will establish outposts of Aerie. But, for now, this will do. We will be giving the caravans some protection. And those who are now questioning the need for us will shortly be the ones insisting on such things. So. We have much territory to cover, and not so many of us. I would hear your words, wingleaders. Who shall we set to what patrolling, and still remain able to feed our dragons with hunting?”
Two days later, much as Kiron had expected, Aket-ten swooped down out of the sky on Re-eth-ke, just as he was harnessing Avatre to go out to hunt. Re-eth-ke backwinged smartly, throwing up an enormous cloud of sand, a piece of rudeness on Aket-ten’s part that Kiron found less than appealing. She flung her leg over the saddle and slid down Re-eth-ke’s blue-black flank as he dusted himself off, her face a study in anger and admiration mingled.
“Great King Ari and Great Queen Nofret send their greetings to Kiron, and compliment him on the successes against the bandits that have been raiding caravans,” she said, with an attempt, not very successful, at icy formality. “They command you to continue in these ventures, while their advisers study the results. And I would like to know—” she continued, her eyes flashing, “—why no one told
me
that there was going to be fighting!”
“Because you were with the Great King and Queen,” Kiron replied mildly. “I only just launched the first strike by accident two days ago. We are still working out what pairings are best, and what we will do when two dragons are no longer enough. And do not think to add yourself to the roster. Not until the Great King and Queen release you from messenger duty, at any rate. I cannot countermand their orders, and you will flout them at your peril.”
Aket-ten looked quite ready to bite something. “Any dragon past fledging could run messages!” she protested.
“But not just any Jouster has the full trust of the Great King and Queen,” he pointed out with inexorable logic.
He didn’t expect that to mollify her, and he was right. She actually growled.
But at least this had put all complaints about the lack of female Jousters right out of her head for now.
Aket-ten surveyed her handiwork and smiled.
So Kiron thought he was going to be clever about her plan for more female Jousters, did he? “Allow” it as long as they got their own dragons? He had clearly forgotten who he was dealing with. She loved Kiron, no doubt, but sometimes he drove her mad. He should have known by now that when Aket-ten made up her mind about something, she found a way to get it done.
It didn’t hurt in the least that she was serving duty as a courier between Mefis, Sanctuary, and Aerie. And there in Mefis were all those dragon pens, lying empty. . . .
And in the hills beyond the Great Mother River, all those former Jousting dragons, some of whom, at least, retained some good memories of their service to humans, none of whom were the least bit experienced in hatching eggs and raising youngsters.
It had all been a matter of patience, really. Patience, and having Great Queen Nofret’s ear. Nofret would immediately see the value of having female Jousters as well as male; for one thing, dragon courier service was proving extremely valuable to the Great King and Queen, and they certainly could use more than just Aket-ten to serve as messengers. For another, just because Jousters were very good at fighting, that didn’t mean that fighting was all they could do. Men were so single-minded! Kiron
assumed
that because she’d fought alongside the rest of them, that was what she wanted to do, too! She had never liked the fighting. Never. The acrobatics, the training, all of that, yes, but never the fighting. But girls could scout the borders of the Two Kingdoms without ever engaging an enemy, making the regular patrols that Tian and Altan Jousters always had, and that could free the fighting dragons to be ready to spring into action if a threat did appear! Girls could give Great King Ari regular reports about conditions within the Two Kingdoms, too, if that ever become necessary. In flood season, they could fly rescues as Kiron’s own wing had when the capital of Alta fell. They could ferry a single passenger, say a Healing-Priest, to places where he was needed—much, much faster than the fastest chariot could bring him. From the air, they could learn how to recognize blight in crops and map out the exact area that would have to be burned in order to save the rest of the crops.
And that was only what she could think of without working too hard. She was certain she could think of more things, and all of them would be tasks the men would—face it—scorn to perform. Or, well, at least the hotheaded young men, and the hidebound old ones. Probably Kiron and most of his wing would see the need. But they’d be glad to have girls around to do the jobs, so they wouldn’t have to.
Once she had girl Jousters, anyway. At the moment, she only had one . . . or rather, she had one girl and one egg, shortly to hatch. Still! it was a start!
The Palace still needed its food rooms cooled; that hadn’t changed, and the heat removed had to go somewhere. Sending it to the dragon pens as it had always been sent was the logical choice, even if there were only two dragons here to benefit from it. Or three, if Aket-ten was at the Court. But now there was another occupant here besides Kashet, The-on, and Re-eth-ke.
Secretly, Aket-ten had been very pleased when the only girl to present herself as a candidate for the lone egg she had retrieved had been a fellow Altan and a former serf, as Kiron had been. That had seemed a very good omen. Getting an egg hadn’t been trivial, but it hadn’t been impossible either. The problem had been that so many of the first-time mothers among the former Jousting dragons had laid infertile eggs and had abandoned them for that reason. It had taken a lot of patience and incubation to find one that was fertile and hadn’t sat so long that the egg had died. She must have had drovers haul in over three dozen that she’d had to discard. Only when she was sure she had a fertile one had she felt prepared to look for the right girl to play mother to the incipient dragonette.
But Peri-en-westet was definitely the right girl, someone after Aket-ten’s own heart. Gentle and patient, she nevertheless had a mind of her own and a stubborn streak that had kept captivity from breaking her.
Her history was rather interesting. She had attached herself to a woman with a feeble-minded daughter when the three of them had been acquired by the same master here in Mefis. She was by nature an affectionate person, and since her own family was gone, she had naturally gravitated into helping to care for the daughter until Ari had freed all the serfs and given them paid employment or restored them to their lands again. In this case, the woman Peri had adopted was quite skilled, thanks to her own cleverness in getting into the master’s kitchens. Her talent at baking had blossomed, and now she was one of the bakers for the stoneworkers quarrying limestone across the river. Her daughter was not so impaired that she couldn’t be set to grind flour and pat the loaves into shape. That had freed Peri from having to look after her.