Dragon's Blood (6 page)

"That was done of me when I was younger," Kkarina said. "I keep it around to remind me of the bad times."

Slowly Jakkin turned and looked at Kkarina, trying to find at least a ghost of that unsmiling beauty hidden in her flesh. His imagination was not that good, he decided at last. Only the eyebrows were the same.

"She was never happy, that girl," said Kkarina. "She didn't cry—but she never smiled either. She was never happy then, but she is now. It was Sarkkhan who helped me, bless that man. He's one who has never forgotten his past. Now go on, boy, and get yourself some more food."

Jakkin went over to the locker and took another slab. The cool air from the box was like the beginning of Dark-After. He wrapped
the meat in a napkin and went out, careful to nod at Kkarina as he left.

In the bondhouse, he eased himself onto his bunk and ate the meat quickly. Then he snuggled inside his downer and closed his eyes. He reminded himself that he would have to wake up in the middle of the night, but he was sure that the noise of the others coming to bed would get through to him. And wondering vaguely if he should empty his bag to buy himself a timepiece at the nursery store, he fell into a sleep that was completely without dreams.

E
VEN BEFORE THE
others returned to the bondhouse, Jakkin awoke. He kept his eyes closed and listened while first the men and then the boys straggled in. If they guessed he was awake, they would try to get him to talk. But he wanted to listen and pick up information, not become involved in a long storytelling session.

The first voice he could identify belonged to Balakk, the old plowman, whose main duties were to the acres of weed and wort plants and the large kitchen garden. He was complaining, as usual.

"The river's going to go dry again if we don't get some rain. I've told Master Sarkkhan we'd better drill. There's water down below. I know it."

An answering grunt did not identify Balakk's partner.

"Plenty of water below. Even the worms smell it. I tell you, I fill my bag, and I'm leaving this nursery, unless Master Sarkkhan starts drilling. Got to have more reliable water than this."

Jakkin could hear Balakk's fist striking his hand, but he also knew that Balakk would not leave. The tall gaunt plowman had been making one complaint, one threat after another, for twenty years. It was said of him that he loved complaining and farming in equal measure and that, hidden away somewhere, he had gold enough to fill his bag fifty times over.

Other voices cut across Balakk's complaint, coming closer to Jakkin's bed, finally drowning out the old man's argument. Even seeing Jakkin with his eyes closed did not stop the talkers. After all, a bonder was supposed to be able to sleep through anything.

"Shh. Maybe we should..." That had to be Errikkin. Only Errikkin would try to hush the bonders. Then, as if he had seen something on the faces of the others, Errikkin's
voice changed. "Of course, Jakkin can sleep with dragons fighting over him."

"On him," amended Slakk with a laugh.

There was general laughter then. Jakkin allowed himself to groan and turn over. The laughter increased.

The bantering went on for several minutes more, then the lights flickered. Even through closed eyes, Jakkin could see the lights dim. In five minutes, they would go out altogether.

Jakkin waited for night to claim the room before he opened his eyes. Slowly he became accustomed to the dark, could pick out the shadows of beds, of bodies. Once or twice the door opened as a late-nighter sneaked into the room. There was surprisingly little talk, mostly about old Likkarn's being broken back to stallboy. The story of Sarkkhan and the bag was told again, and a new piece of information added.

"He didn't lose his single room. Even Master Sarkkhan would not dare put that worm waste in here with us," said Balakk. He had proudly refused a single room each year it had been offered. "
We'll
not have a weeder in here." It was the last coherent sentence Jakkin
heard. A few fragments drifted around the room, and then the air pulsed with heavy breathing and the light snores of sleepers.

***

J
AKKIN WAITED ANOTHER
half hour before rising. In the dark, the aching in his shoulders and back seemed multiplied. He suppressed a groan and stood. Carrying his sandals, he tiptoed out the door. If anyone saw him, they would suspect he was meeting a girl. Maybe even Akki. He smiled at the thought. Of all the bond girls at the nursery, she was the best looking by far. And the only one who stayed apart. He went out of the bondhouse into the night.

At first the night seemed quiet, but then Jakkin began to distinguish sounds. The
pick-buzz
of nightwings flittering around the eaves of the barn, the occasional grunting of a stud Settling in his stall. Jakkin drifted toward the incubarn.

Suddenly he sensed rather than heard the silent-winged approach of a drakk, the snake-headed, deadeyed eggsucker so despised and feared by dragon breeders. As he looked up,
it flew across Akkhan, its great wingspread momentarily blotting the moon from sight. He would have to report it in the morning, even though it meant exposing his own night wandering. If there was a colony of drakk nearby, it would have to be wiped out. Hundreds of eggs from one hatching could be lost to a single drakk family. The large adult drakk preyed on hatchlings, too, tearing off wings, legs, huge hunks of flesh from the living young with their razored talons. For good reason, there was a high bounty on drakk. Jakkin waited until the monster was gone from sight. It would not be back until Dark-After was past, since it had just checked the area with its sensors.

In the nursery, a hen dragon stomped her feet at Jakkin's approach, but he did not fear her roaring out. Once the nestlings were hatched, the hens were usually quiet at night, wrapped contentedly around their squirming charges. They chewed burnwort and drizzled the juices into their hatchlings' mouths. For the first month of life, after the hatchlings grew out of their eggskins, they would exist on nothing but the juice. Their little red
toothbuds would grow into sharp white points, and then the hatchlings, too, could chew the leaves of blisterweed and wort, grinding out the juices for themselves and then following the juice with the mashed leaves for bulk.

Jakkin reached the door of the barn and, standing in a shadow, looked around. There was no one in sight. He lifted the latch and went in.

In the half-light supplied by the sulfur lamp, he made his way down the narrow halls. Unlike the stud barn, where wide hallways accommodated the cock dragons, these halls were used only for the human workers. Each compartment for the female and her brood had two doors, one small door opening into the hall and one wide door to the outside. The incubarn was a low, round building built around a central mow, a single column that supported the roof. Around the column was a hollow frame of slats which served as a ventilator to discharge the steam from the packed weed and wort leaves. Jakkin had once heard someone comment that the steam rising up was sometimes so dense you could wash your hands in it. At the top of the roof, the steam
was caught in a series of vents that passed back through the barn to keep the individual compartments warm, even in the cold of Dark-After. It was thought that the warmer the hatchlings were kept, the faster and bigger they grew.

The workers' walkway was in between the central mow and the hens' compartments. Sweat began to trickle under Jakkin's arms, but the heat from the mow felt good on his back. It eased the ache.

Jakkin went first to the eggroom, where all the clutches were kept together for hatching. He knew at once that the hatching was finished, because the room was completely dark, but he went back into the hall and borrowed a lamp anyway, and returned. Little round shadows pitted the walls as the lamp lit the broken shells. Jakkin kicked through the sand floor, smashing pieces of the brittle casings. Jakkin knew, as any nursery bonder knew, about shells. When they were laid, they were elastic, cascading out onto the birth sands in numbers too plentiful to count. They piled up in great slippery pyramids that stuck together with birth fluids during the ice cold
of Dark-After. Only when the temperatures on the planet rose again, and the fluids melted, did the eggs drop from the pyramids into the sand. That was another reason why the barn was kept heated, to hasten the hatching process.

Jakkin knew that, touched then, the eggs would break open, revealing a viscous yellow-green slime. Yet left alone the eggs hardened in a day, sheathed in a covering that even a sharpened pick could hardly open—from the outside. The growing hatchling within could break apart the shell with a horny growth on its nose. So once the egg had hardened, it was considered fair game for any human—thief, trainer, man, or boy—who thought he could sense a living dragon in the shell.

The living dragon. That was the irony. So few of the eggs held living dragons. Most were decoys for the predatory drakk. How often a bonder had had an opportunity to steal an egg, guarding it zealously, only to discover days later that it contained a heavy liquid and nothing else.

The shells were brittle now because the hens had licked the insides clean of the
remaining birth fluids. One by one, the bonders had led the hens in to choose their own hatchlings and suck some sustenance from the sticky fluids. He could see the prints of hen feet in the sand. Angrily, Jakkin kicked at the shells. Then he bent down and picked one up, crunching it in his hand, delighting in the pain as parts of one scratched his palm, drawing blood. "Fewmets," he cursed, and stood.

He knew he should go back to the bondhouse. Stealing an egg was one thing, a kind of acceptable thievery. Stealing a hatchling—that was something else. Eggs were not counted, but hatchlings were, counted and recorded and set down in Likkarn's careful script on the doorway of each hen's nestroom. He had never seen it, but he knew it was so, just as he knew about eggs. It was part of every nursery bonder's knowledge, the rules and lore with which he had grown up.

He knew what he
should
do, but something drew him toward the nestrooms, some thin thread of sound. It was the peeping of a hatchling and the snuffling answer of a hen.
He closed the eggroom door and moved on down the hall.

***

A
T THE FIRST
hen's compartment, he read Likkarn's list out loud. "Heart Worm (4) out of Heart Safe by Blood Bank. M. Blood Brother. 7 hatchlings, 5/27/07."

He lifted the latch and, holding the lamp overhead, stared in. Heart Worm was a yellowish color, not much darker than the eggskin of a newborn. She looked back at him with shrouded eyes and houghed in warning.

Jakkin squatted back on his heels and sang in that low croon, "It's all right, mother worm. It's all right."

She put her head back down and nuzzled the seven dragonlings one by one. Jakkin counted with her, saying the numbers in the same low voice. He watched her tail. The tip twitched back and forth, but he could tell that she was made only slightly anxious by his presence. He stood up slowly and backed out of the door.

The second hen was Heart to Heart, also out of Heart Safe by Blood Bank. She was a
yellow-orange with a deep streak of red from her muzzle to her hindquarters. It spread like a bloodstain over her legs, then spattered like scores (or, Jakkin thought, like Kkarina's freckles) along her tail. She curled around five hatchlings, two of them still fully covered with eggskin. That meant he had missed the last of the hatchlings by only a day. Jakkin bit his lip as disappointment welled up.

Heart to Heart was even calmer than her sister had been. She barely raised her head when he entered. Jakkin took advantage of this and moved to her side, crooning to her the whole while. He put out his hand carefully and stroked the nearest of the hatchlings, a mottled little squirmer who jumped at his touch and struck at his fingers with still-soft claws. "Thou wilt be a fighter," Jakkin whispered. The best trainers, he knew, spoke
thee
and
thou
to their dragons. It was supposed to bring them closer. He had never actually tried it with the big stud dragons. He had never thought of them as
his.
He wondered if it mattered that he did not know how to speak
thee
and
thou
correctly, having only played at it with some of the other boys. Then he laughed
at himself. After all, would the dragon know if he made a mistake? Would it care?

He must have been laughing out loud, because the little dragon stared at him for a long moment. Then it turned its back on him and snuggled against its mother.

Jakkin thought about the hatchling, but he could not bring himself to take it. He got up and left the room.

The next hen was Heart O'Mine, and he could hear her tail beating on the floor, an unmistakable warning. He lifted the latch anyway 'and slipped in. Her card said she was a half-sister to the other two hens, out of Heart Safe by Blood Type. It must have been from Blood Type's very last mating. The old stud was past mating age now, and kept somewhere far away, the other bonders said, on another farm that Sarkkhan owned. Jakkin recalled the stories of Blood Type, the fabled fighter from Sarkkhan's Nursery, his first male dragon. Fifty fights and forty-seven wins, the last a five-hour battle with a champion from the other side of the planet. Heart O'Mine had nine hatchlings this time, her second clutch. There had been a large number 2 next to her
name. Nine hatchlings were a lot, especially for a second clutch. And by the sound of her tail, she was a nervous mother.

Jakkin squatted down on his heels and began the crooning that had worked so well with the first two hens, but Heart O'Mine's tail kept up its loud, irritated thumping. It was then he thought of the silly lullaby that he had sung to Blood Brother.

"Little flame mouths," he began singing, swaying a bit as he did.

The hen's tail seemed to catch his beat.

"Cool your tongues," Jakkin continued.

The tail was definitely moving in time to the song.

"Dreaming starts soon, furnace lungs."