Joust (3 page)

If he fetched water from the well, it meant pulling up the water one bucket at a time, bringing up the rope, hand over hand, with the bucket feeling as though it was getting heavier all the time. And the well was (of course) nearly as far from the cistern as the river, though in the opposite direction. The river was marginally farther away, though he would not have to drag the weighty bucket up its rope. But the clear water from the well wouldn’t clog the pottery pipes the way that muddy water from the river would, unless Vetch was very careful when he filled the bucket. Being “very careful” meant wading out into the river, up to his knees—which put him in the way of the crocodiles, who would not turn down prey that came so obligingly within their reach.

Vetch hated this bucket, too heavy, too big, too awkward, and if he’d dared, he’d have put a hole in the bottom of it. But if he did, Khefti would probably find something worse for him to use—bigger and heavier, or so small as to be nearly useless.

Tala
could only be grown during the dry season, after the Great Mother River had shrunk to a shadow of her wet-season greatness. It only set its berries after the sun-baked fields of wheat and barley were harvested and reduced to bleached stubble and the earth beneath the stubble was riddled with cracks as wide as a man’s hand. But
tala
fruits were worth their weight in electrum, for
tala
fruits gave the Jousters their ability to control their great dragons.

Dragons . . . dragons and
tala
were inseparable. The only reason to grow the
tala
was because of the dragons, the creatures that were the greatest weapons that the Tians had. Vetch had only ever seen the dragons at a far distance, overhead, flying out from the city of Mefis a little up the river, gold and scarlet, blue and green against the hard, bright blue of the sky. They would have been beautiful, if they were not so terrible.

Dragons—well, in part, they were responsible for his being a serf. The war would not have gone so badly for Alta if the Tians hadn’t had so many more dragons and Jousters. He supposed, dully, that he should be cursing them, too—but he could only focus his hate on one target at a time, and at the moment, that target was Khefti.

Vetch stumbled over a clod and trod down hard on a stone, saving the bucket from going over at the last moment. “Night-demons take you!” he cursed the clod and stone alike, and thought, resentfully, that if Khefti were to allow him the clothing that were allotted to a slave, he would have straw sandals, and he would be saved stone bruises, saved the burning heat that came up through his hardened soles. Khefti’s paths were like Khefti’s heart; hard and uncaring. What could it
possibly
cost to permit his one serf a simple pair of sandals?

That was the moment when a revelation, and a sickening one, came to him. And he realized that one of his errors in cursing Khefti might have been in the phrasing of the first part of the curse. He had specifically said
my
sandal
to grind his head into the dust.
But Vetch wasn’t wearing sandals, didn’t own sandals (not even the cheapest, woven-straw kind every slave got) and likely never would own sandals. Granted, that was the way that the magician Vetch had spied on had phrased
his
curse for his customer, but the customer
had
worn sandals.

Vetch ground his teeth in frustration, and jerked at the rope handle of the bucket. Well, he would continue the cursing for the entire three days, but
how
could he have overlooked something so simple?

Better he should have cursed the
tala
fields—

But that would be a dangerous thing to do as well as an audacious one, potentially more dangerous than cursing his master. Granted, the mud-brick wall held little shrines to every god that could be invoked, and plenty of talismans for growth and plenty, which should have prevented any harm whatsoever from coming to the fields, but if Khefti even
thought
that Vetch was cursing the fields, his stick would be out and drumming a beat on Vetch’s back for days.

Besides, Vetch wanted to hurt Khefti directly, not indirectly. And anyway, as the son of a farmer, someone who loved and served the land, something within Vetch shrank from wishing harm even on a tiny plot of
tala
plants.

Vetch’s master was not a farmer; he was a potter and the master of a brick yard. Nevertheless, he made a great deal of money from his little
tala
field; his workshops were for his daily bread, but his
tala
bought him luxuries that his neighbors envied. A harvest like this one would bring more than enough to pay for a rock-carved tomb in the Valley of Artisans, a tomb he could not otherwise have afforded, and for which his apprentices were making a veritable army of
abshati
servants and pottery funerary wares fit for a man far above Khefti’s station. It also paid for all manner of luxuries: fine linen kilts, many jars of good date wine every day, melons, honey cakes, and roast duck on his table on a regular basis. Khefti even had a melon cooling in his well at this moment, a true luxury in the dry season.

Just the thought of a melon made Vetch’s stomach cry out with hunger. He hadn’t even tasted a melon rind in an age. Khefti thriftily had his cook pickle the rinds from his melons, in keeping with his parsimonious nature.

And that thought led down the well-worn path of food. Good bread and beer, melon and dates and pomegranate, honey and fish; all the things that Vetch had not tasted since he became a serf. For that matter, he had not had enough to fill his belly since the last of the great Temple Festivals at the beginning of the growing season, and that was only because it was the Temple of Hamun that provided the bounty. The raw
latas
roots Vetch had eaten this morning (in addition to his allotted stale loaf end) had helped with the never-ending hunger, but nothing would ever make it stop altogether.

From the moment Vetch had entered Khefti’s service, he was always hungry; as the savory aromas from Khefti’s kitchen tantalized his nose, he would be making a scanty meal of whatever Khefti allotted him. Breakfast, a palm-sized loaf of yesterday’s dark barley bread (he could have eaten half a dozen of the same size), or supper, a tiny bowl of pottage his family wouldn’t have fed to a pig and another little loaf of stale bread. Sometimes the fare was varied by the addition of an onion beginning to go bad. Lunch was whatever he could find, in the hour when Khefti slept—a handful of wild lettuce,
latas
roots grubbed out of the riverbank and eaten raw, wild onions so strong they made the eyes water. Sometimes he found wild duck eggs in season; sometimes there were berries or palm fruits, or dates fallen to the ground. Mostly, he got only what Khefti gave him. He hadn’t seen cheese or meat or honey cakes since the farm was taken. He dreamed about food all the time, and there was never a moment when his stomach wasn’t empty. He went to sleep, curled around his hunger, and woke with it gnawing at his spine.

The only thing that ever really competed with the hunger was anger.

And anger was as constant a companion as hunger. Not that he could
do
anything about his anger, but at least when he was angry, sometimes he’d get so worked up that he’d upset his stomach, and then the hunger would go away for a little.

And when he was angry, he could make the loneliness and the pain and the fear recede for a little. When he was angry, he wasn’t on the verge of the tears that often threatened to overwhelm him. Sometimes, anger was the only defense he had—when the village boys plagued him and threw stones at him, when Khefti beat him. He couldn’t strike back, but at least he could keep from weeping, giving them the satisfaction of knowing that they hurt him. Crying would make him into a greater target for torment than he already was; tears were a sign of weakness he couldn’t afford.

But he was truly the most miserable of boys, and sometimes he thought that anger was the only possession he had that could not be taken from him.

And anger was, perhaps, the only thing that kept him alive, in the midst of a life hardly worth living.

He slept on a pile of reeds he had cut, under the same awning that sheltered the wood for the bread oven from rain, in the outer back court, beyond the kitchen court. His clothing was a loinwrap of whatever rags were deemed unsuitable even for household use, and only when it was little more than a collection of holes held together by dirt and threads like spider’s silk was it ever replaced. Thus Khefti gave lip service to the provision of “food and shelter” for his serf. Under Khefti, Vetch had nothing that was not scant, except for anger and hunger.

Well, one thing more, perhaps. He had hatred.

He hated Khefti with a despairing, dull hatred that was as constant as the anger and hunger and was surpassed only by the fear that Khefti inspired.

His stomach growled again, and grated painfully. Sweat prickled Vetch’s scalp, and a drop of sweat trickled down his temple, down his face, and down his neck, leaving behind a trail of mud in the dust that coated him. But the hot, dry wind swiftly dried it before he could free a hand to wipe it away, adding one more itch to all of the insect bites and healing scratches he was always plagued with. His stomach pressed urgently against his backbone, and he was tired, so tired—even that anger that never left him was not enough to overcome how tired he was.

What had
he
done that the gods should treat him so?

How was it fair, that Khefti claimed him and could work him like a mangy donkey because he had bought the house and a thin strip of the land that had once belonged to Vetch’s father? How was it right, that the Tian thieves had taken the farm that had been Vetch’s home from those who had lived and worked it for generations? What justified what had been done to Vetch’s family, to a man who had not so much as raised a hand in self-defense against the Tians?

Anger lived in his belly, waking and sleeping, but it was an impotent anger with nowhere to go. And at times like this, it was a weary anger that had worn itself out on the unyielding stone of his life.

A few steps more, and he made it to the side of the above-ground stone cistern. With a sigh of relief, he eased the bucket to the ground, and went up the two steps that allowed a little fellow like him to reach the cistern lid. He slid the wooden cover aside, pausing for just a second to savor the momentary breath of cool damp that escaped, then groped behind him for the bucket handle, ready to haul it up again.

It wasn’t there.

The anger in him roused, and gave him a flare of energy. Vetch whirled, expecting to find that one of the Tian boys who apprenticed with his master had tilted the bucket on its side, allowing it to spill its precious burden into the thirsty, hard-packed earth. Or worse, had stolen the bucket—which would force him to go to Khefti, who would beat him for losing it. Then he would have to fill the cistern with whatever Khefti gave him, crippled by a back aching and raw.

Someone had taken the bucket, all right, but it wasn’t an apprentice.

Behind him, a tall, muscular Tian—a warrior, by his build, and one of the elite Jousters, by the heavy linen kilt, the wide brown leather belt, and the empty leather lance socket hanging from it—held the heavy bucket to his lips, gulping down the master’s well water with the fervor of one who was perishing of thirst. Vetch stared at him, the surge of anger he’d felt at having his bucket stolen by yet another Tian overcome with sheer astonishment at seeing one of the Jousters
here.
He had never seen a Jouster so close before, not even an Altan Jouster.

Where there was a Jouster, could his dragon be far away? Vetch looked wildly about, then a snort made him look up, to the roof of the pottery-drying shed inside Khefti’s walls, and there was the great dragon itself, looking down at him with an aloof gaze remarkably like that of one of the pampered cats that swarmed the Temple of Pashet.

Vetch gaped; the dragon was a thing of multicolored, jeweled beauty, slim and supple, and quite as large as the shed it perched upon. A narrow, golden, large-eyed head oddly reminiscent of a well-bred horse’s, with the same slim muzzle, dished nose, and broad forehead, was surmounted by a bony crest that shaded from deep gold into a pale electrum, as pale and translucent as the finest alabaster. That elegant golden head rose on a long, flexible neck that shaded from emerald to blue. The wings, of blue shading into purple, rising from muscular shoulders twice the bulk of the hindquarters, were spread to catch the sun. The long, whiplike tail, which reversed the shading of the neck, going from green into gold, was curled around the cruel golden talons of the forefeet, as the dragon lounged comfortably on the flat roof of the shed. The eyes, though, were was what caught you and held you—slit-pupiled and the deep crimson of the finest rubies—

Not that Vetch had ever seen the finest rubies, or indeed, any rubies. But that was what people said, and certainly the colors sported by this beast had to be every bit as gorgeous as the magnificent wall paintings in even the poorest Tian temples depicting the jewels worn by gods and kings.

Such beauty—it was hard to look at the dragon and remember that he should hate it.

The Jouster finished his drink and dumped the rest of the bucket of water over his head without even bothering to take off his helmet, and the anger awoke again, at the wanton wastage of what had taken Vetch so long to haul. Vetch made an involuntary whimper of suppressed rage in the back of his throat as the man tossed the bucket aside, as if it was something of no account, to be discarded.

Which meant, of course, that if Khefti came out at this moment and saw him without the bucket in his hands—

Now anger turned to panic. Vetch scrambled after the bucket just as his master, the
last
creature he wanted to see at this moment, appeared in the door of his courtyard. Khefti was huge and terrifying; his size alone was intimidating, for he must have weighed twice as much as this Jouster. His gut bulged over his dingy, grease-stained linen kilt, his fat hands were quick with a blow, and his doughy face wore a perpetual scowl beneath his striped headdress.