Shadowed By Wings (13 page)

So as much as I had resisted the dragonmaster’s drafts only days before, I now sought the same.

I joined the apprentices for the morn’s repast, the massive bruising across my neck tender and pulsing. I ignored Egg’s gawping mouth and ogle-eyed look as he stood behind the cauldron, ladle hanging loosely from one paw. I reached forward, placed a hand over his, and scooped gruel into my bowl. He barely noticed my touch, just continued to stare.

“I’m waiting for bull wings to bless Clutch Re,” I said. The ritual greeting came out hoarsely, as if I’d just gargled raw, minced chilies.

Egg gathered himself. “May your waiting end, may bull wings hatch.”

I moved away with my bowl of gruel and stood at the edge of the unwashed pack of boys. Nudges and stares followed me.

I slid two fingers into the gruel and scooped some into my mouth. I let it rest there, a clot of broth-swollen grain. With difficulty, I swallowed it.

Overhead, the dawn’s light tainted the pearly sky pink. Dew glistened upon sandstone wall and tiled stable roof, turning as red as fresh blood the rufous dust that coated everything. The citric tang of venom lay so heavy in the chill morning air, it was as though the dragons’ poison, not the sky’s clean dew, slicked roof and ground.

Slowly and steadily, I finished eating my gruel. Morning noises rose and fell about me: The clunk of ladle in cauldron, the slurp and burp of food being ingested; hacks and nose clearings, ritual greetings exchanged. A hungry dragon lowed. A tail thwacked stone in impatience. Snouts snuffled audibly through empty mangers in search of stray nuts.

Soon Egg would herd the inductees to whichever section of the stables demanded our labor. I needed my venom draft.

I scanned the yard for Dono, saw him returning from a visit to the latrines in a stiff, lurching shuffle, still using the shovel as a crutch. The latrine he’d rebuilt during the night, aided by venom-induced energy, was a ramshackle affair, sloppily cobbled together and unlikely to withstand the first monsoon. But it was finished, roof perched askew on top.

I detached from the milling boys and intercepted Dono.

He came to a stop and swayed briefly. A muscle in his jaw twitched.

“Give me the draft,” I murmured. “Give it to me now and I’ll share a little with you.”

He paused. Swallowed.

“What’ll it do to me?” he asked hoarsely.

He’d not swallowed diluted venom before. Yes, as a veteran apprentice he’d been exposed to venom via the Komikon’s poison-saturated whips, and yes, he’d accidentally received venom-slick tongue lashes from the destriers, but no apprentice would have ingested venom before. Of course not. Against Temple Statute, that.

“You’ve tolerance enough; it won’t harm you,” I murmured. “The impact of venom is a clawfold more intense when you swallow it. Your pain will disappear for the day. Well into the night, too.”

The poison had certainly given him the strength to rebuild my latrine last night, for under normal circumstances, he would have been prone on his belly, groaning from the whip welts upon his back.

He tottered briefly upon his crutch. He needed venom as much as I did. “Fine. Come back here after Egg leads you all out.”

He turned and lurched away from me. I averted my eyes from his back.

Shortly after, Egg led us inductees through a side door in the second courtyard. It opened onto yet another courtyard, a small one with but a few stalls, each filled with dragons convalescing from wounds, intestinal trouble, or some such malady. A low wooden building ran two-thirds of the way round this courtyard. The building’s worn wooden verandah squeaked underfoot as the inductees followed Egg along it. Unexpectedly, the lot of them moved slowly, matching my careful pace.

Egg chewed a callus on one palm as he shifted his weight from foot to foot beside me. “Eidon didn’t say nothin’ about you not workin’ today, so you have to work, y’hear? It ain’t often we work in the Tack Hall, so count yourself lucky he gave us such an easy job today.”

He ducked through a creaky door into a dark interior. I and the rest of the inductees followed him.

The smell of brass. Beeswax. Stiff new leather. Oiled wood and dry hemp cloth.

As my eyes gradually adjusted to the gloom, shapes resolved themselves, peculiar shapes perched upon braced racks jutting from the walls. Clawfuls of them, there were, all in orderly lines. Moth-eaten blankets were neatly stacked waist high beneath them.

“This is the Tack Hall, hey,” Egg said, his voice condensed by beam and wall. “This is where all the gear is kept, reins an’ saddles an’ parade stuff. Not the battle gear. That’s kept in the Cafar. Eidon wants us to clean and repair all this. Understand?”

Egg lumbered over to one wall and hoisted a bulky object down from one of the many racks. A saddle, that’s what it was. Great leather riding saddles straddled the racks protruding from the walls, saddles with hand-grips and foot stirrups jutting from them, fore and aft. As Egg lumbered back to us, huffing under the weight of the enormous saddle he carried cradled over his arms, he nodded at a chest-high wooden table, the top of which was peaked like a roof.

“Don’t just stand there! Pair up an’ carry a saddle to this bench.” A pause as he demonstrated with his own saddle, heaving it atop the long table so it sat astraddle the peak, stirrups dangling on either side. “Watch what I do an’ do it yourselves!”

In the ensuing noise and scramble, I slipped out the door and returned to the hovel courtyard.

Dono was waiting at the threshold of my stall, as though he were reluctant to enter without me present.

“Where is it?” I wheezed, looking for the venom gourd.

His eyes darted over me, then darted away, as keen and quick as the beak of a bird that impales its prey upon thorns.

“How do you know it won’t make things worse for you?” he asked.

“Venom?” I was stunned at the very idea. That caught a piercing glance from him and I could see him realizing that, yes, I
had
drunk it before, a great deal.

“It could close your throat over,” he rasped. “You don’t know that it won’t. I bet you’ve never been hit on the neck before, not like that.”

“I’ve drunk it enough to know how it affects me, Dono. It won’t hurt me. It was the force of the tongue lashing that hurt me, not the venom itself.”

“It was the combination of the two.”

“My tolerance of the stuff is higher than that of any apprentice here.”

Dono’s dark eyes studied me from beneath a veil of hair. “Temple’ll kill you for sure. You
are
a deviant.”

“No.”

“Egg says you called yourself a Dirwalan Babu. Those are Djimbi words, Zarq. Djimbi is the language of deviants.”

I frowned, nonplussed. Then I realized what he meant. No term existed for
daughter
in the Emperor’s tongue, and so to describe myself as the Skykeeper’s Daughter to Egg, I’d used the old Malacarite term
babu
. The dragonmaster had likewise called me such.

“It’s not Djimbi; it’s ancient Malacarite.”

“How would you know?”

“I learned the old language as an onai, while learning the hieroglyphic arts.”

“It sounds like Djimbi to me.”

“Just give me the draft, Dono.”

“The Djimbi are deviants. Temple executes all those who aid a deviant.”

“The Komikon is piebald,” I countered. “Djimbi blood flows in his veins. Is
he
a deviant?”

“He shouldn’t be giving the draft to you. It’s against Temple Statute to consume dragon flesh.”

“Venom isn’t flesh.”

“It’s wrong.”

“So you’re going to defy the Komikon’s wishes? Refuse me the draft?”

We stared at each other, both of us tense and unflinching. Finally, Dono shrugged. “You’ll give me half, understand? Half, and say nothing to the Komikon.”

“Half,” I agreed, though it angered me to do so. I’d planned on giving him only a few sips, not half of my potion.

With a nod, Dono limped out of the stall. He returned moments later, lips compressed with the pain of walking. Without speaking a word between us, we moved into the shadows at the very back of my stall.

He held the gourd cupped in his palms. We stood close, facing each other. Our breathing synchronized. His eyes blazed amber, like a dragon’s.

“It’ll lift you high,” I whispered. “It has a fiercer thrust when ingested, and a longer burn.”

He nodded. Outside, the buttery light of dawn was turning into the heat of morn. Beyond the stable domain came the muted sounds of rishi at work.

Dono lifted the gourd to his lips.

I couldn’t help it; I reached out and placed my hands over his. To control how much he drank, understand, so there would be enough left for me. He didn’t shake off my touch.

His lips parted and he tipped the gourd. His larynx bobbed up and down. I heard the liquid slide down his throat. After several swallows, and with the slightest hesitation, he lowered the gourd.

I watched him, waiting for the venom to flare into life within him. I saw the exact moment, too: His eyes widened briefly, then turned bright and brittle, as if sugar glaze had been poured over them and was instantly setting.

He shuddered and closed his eyes. I knew what furious fire raged through his sinus cavities, blazed in his belly, and devoured the pain of his whip welts. I knew what puissance and ecstasy swelled him beyond mere mortality. I knew what lust burned hard and undeniable in his blood.

His erection touched my thigh.

I swiftly downed the remnants of the draft and waited for the effects. They would be nowhere near as instant or intense as what Dono was experiencing during his virgin swallow of dragon’s poison. But I would take what I could get.

I stroked his penis while I waited, emboldened by his inability to control his body, empowered by his weakness, his need, his nearness. I craved some sort of affection from him, any sort.

You don’t know what your lust is for, I felt like whispering against his ear. You don’t realize such lust is intended for a woman, to encourage her to lie with a dragon, that she might hear the dragon’s thoughts.

The theory had only just occurred to me, upon the fiery wings of venom, surmised from what I’d witnessed and experienced at Convent Tieron. It at once made absolute sense.

I continued stroking him, his phallus as smooth and hard as burnished clay in my hand. Want started to pulse within me, too, muted by how paltry the dose of venom had been compared to my tolerance of the poison.

Dono climaxed with a cry, an arched back, a fierce look of elation on his face.

I leaned forward, then, and whispered in his ear, “You don’t want me to leave, Dono. You want me here with you, in the Komikon’s stables. Tell me you want me to stay.”

His eyes cracked open and his lips parted slowly.

“I want …” he croaked. And then he bit his lip and looked away, trembling.

There was a time, nearly a century ago, when a woman could not walk the dusty, narrow alleys of Clutch Re unaccompanied by a man.

She was required to wear a bitoo, an inviolable cloth garment manufactured by a Temple-sanctioned guild clan, at all times. Outside of clan walls she was forbidden to speak or to touch a man, be it her son or aging father or the man accompanying her outside of her ku compound. She was forbidden to gesture in the direction of a temple or a dragon, and forbidden to shed any dirty waters upon the ground as she walked. Quilted handkerchiefs called difees were used just for the purpose of sopping perspiration during an out-of-clan-compound journey; the more damp a woman’s difee upon return, the greater her sweat-sopping vigilance and therefore her piety. With much insincere groaning about laundering, women would compare their difees after journeying outside their clan walls.

Men were embarrassed, impatient, and uneasy when circumstance forced them to accompany a gaggle of women outside clan walls, but such journeys were routinely necessary. Women were needed to cart goods to one of the Clutch markets so that the men could trade the wares for Temple chits or other staples. Women were required to fetch water from the nearest Deep Well during the height of Fire Season. Who else could do such chores? In my youth, my father’s mother, who lived to the extraordinary old age of fifty-two, would recount tales from those times to us girl children each eve, as reproach and reminder for how easy our childhood was compared to hers. Her tales were inevitably gruesome. The heavy pleats around her rheumy eyes would glisten with remembered grief, and her words would haunt our dreams. Although she died before I reached six, her stories remained with me always.

One story she’d been particularly fond of was that of her eldest navel auntie.

It was at the height of an unusually stubborn Fire Season, when muay plants lay limp in clan gardens, wilted leaves curling with brown. Under the sun’s relentless onslaught, the timbers of the women’s barracks creaked like the old bones of a dying beast, and the clan water towers grew thick with stagnant scum and the bloated corpses of thirst-maddened vermin that had fallen into the great vats and drowned.

Trips to the local Deep Well took place frequently, and on one blistering-hot day, my greatmother, then seven, was allocated the chore of fetching water along with her mother, her eldest navel auntie, and two other strong young girls. They waited in the torpid, interminable queue at the Deep Well from dawn until almost high noon. Roasting beneath their bitoos, their skin as feverish wet as the glazed skin of a fire-roasted boar, they lost the ability to think, to move, to breathe almost. They took turns between waiting in the line under that unforgiving sun and seeking refuge in the shade of the nearby temple, but the latter did little to relieve the smothering heat of bitoo and sun.

Finally, their turn at the well. Finally, the dank, metallic water splashing into their enormous urns.

On their return to their clan compound, unwieldy urns filled with precious water balanced upon their heads, my greatmother’s auntie stumbled on a bit of brick fallen from one of the ancient walls that divide clan from clan, guild from guild. Her ankle twisted. She cried out. One hand shot out to steady her balance as a natural reflex. She inadvertently grabbed the arm of her adolescent nephew, assigned the job of viagandri, girl herd, for the day.