Only Aket-ten had no wing of her own. . . .
Not that she didn’t want one. It was only that she wanted one composed only of young female Jousters.
And while he sympathized with her desire, he also knew what a hornet’s nest he would stir up if he gave eggs to young women when there were so many males—dragon boys, former Jousters, and warriors—who wanted to join the ranks of the new Jousters. This, despite the serious load of hard work it took to become one now that the dragons had to be human-raised.
Maybe that was why she would not move in with him. She was still angry at his last refusal.
She had a great many logical arguments. Women were smaller and lighter than men. Women tended to be more nurturing, which was what a young dragon needed. Women had good senses of balance and were good with bow and arrow and sling. And since there was not, and (the gods be willing) never would again be aerial combat between Jousters, other than ribbon chasing, there was no need for great strength.
She was right about all of that. He couldn’t argue with her on those points. But the plain fact remained that until he had satisfied every single male who wanted a dragon, he did not dare distribute a single egg to a young woman. The resulting outcry would be more than he cared to think about.
Aket-ten could only see that there were plenty of young ladies like Nofret who felt the same longing for the companionship and freedom of flight and, yes, love that the bond of human and dragon brought to the human. She couldn’t see that people still thought of the Jousters as warriors. That he was still training the Jousters to be warriors. She thought warfare was over. And so it was—between Alta and Tia.
But what about the lands to the south? And what about those to the east? That was where the Nameless Ones had come from and might come again.
And besides all of that, there were the desert raiders who plagued the Blue People and made the old caravan trails dangerous to use.
When those eight wings were wings of warriors again, well—
It wouldn’t be just incense trees and rare plants that supported them all.
But first he had to get through this.
TWO
THESE people were Jousters, at least. They let him get Avatre unharnessed and turned loose, to go and socialize with other dragons if she wished (which she did but very rarely) or fly alone, or go back to her hot sands and sleep off her breakfast (which was what she usually did). And they let a Jouster whose dragon had not been as good or lucky a hunter as Avatre come and claim the extra meat from him.
But then they descended on him with their problems.
The first to reach him was a trio of the newest Jousters, one older former rider of a swamp dragon from Alta, the other two dragon boys who had gotten themselves fertile eggs. All three of them wanted use of the few workmen they had here. Kiron listened patiently to their arguments before he made a decision.
“Resket-teren gets priority,” he said finally, and held up a hand. “I understand. All three of you have housing problems. But Resket-teren’s can be fixed the fastest. When people have all got about the same level of urgency, that’s how I’m deciding who gets priority.”
The other two grumbled a bit at that but reluctantly admitted that was fair. “You two might help each other,” he suggested to the “losers” in this situation. “You aren’t trained workmen, but there’s a lot that can be done with four hands rather than two.”
They exchanged a wry look, because this had become one of his favorite answers these days. No one could deny the wisdom of what he was saying, even when they didn’t much like it.
With that disposed of, he went the rounds to see how each of the eight wings was faring. Not, of course, that he didn’t already know how they were faring. The names changed within each wing, but each of them had the same triumphs and the same problems. In each wing there were two people who simply did not get along, mostly because of personalities. In each wing there was at least one show-off who would have to take a fall and learn his lesson. In each, there was one dragon slower to learn than the others. There were some riders who were better at cooperating than others—the recalcitrant ones did tend to be the older riders—and these would just have to get over their attitudes, or eventually form a wing of their own, which was certainly a viable proposition, and one he was considering already.
In fact, the more he thought about it today, the better the idea seemed. In the last day or so there had been two incidents of older riders flaring up at their wingleaders, objecting to serving second or third to “some jumped-up dog boy.” The older riders were, by and large, all aristocrats, and the differences in social standing were beginning to rub some of them raw. Finally, after listening to Huras sigh over his particular problem rider, he came to a decision, and as soon as practice was over for the day, he collected the wingleaders in a group while the rest of their Jousters took themselves off to work on their housing.
By now the sun was fully overhead, and it was like a furnace down in the canyons. Kiron squinted against the white-hot glare on the white sand covering the bottom of the canyon, feeling the heat reflecting from the surface as well as hammering down from the sun-disk. Small wonder that the Tians regarded the Solar Disk as a destroyer, rather than the life giver that the Altans called it. It was even hotter up on the cliffs, which was exactly the way the dragons liked it. There were jewel-bright dragons sprawled over every available ledge, wings spread out to absorb the sun, turning the cliff tops of Aerie into an abstract mosaic of color.
Avatre had forsaken the dark and her hot sands to soak up sun just like the others, a sprawl of gilt-edged ruby glistening in the sun. She had her favorite perch atop Kiron’s dwelling, and, on hearing his familiar step, she raised her head a little to look down at him with her great, golden eyes. She made a little crooning sound on spotting him, and put her head back down again. He smiled up at her, and then simply gazed around the canyon for a moment, taking in the peacefully napping dragons. Every one of them was within snapping distance of at least one other. A couple of them were even lolling side-by-side. This was normal behavior for wild dragons; unheard of in the Jousting dragons that had never been raised by humans.
Oh, yes. This was a far cry from the hissing, complaining dragons of the Jousters’ Compound in Tia . . . hissing, complaining, and at times, dangerous. The wild-caught dragons, even when drugged with tala, needed to be chained and regarded other dragons as potential rivals needing to be trounced. Though they had never hunted on their own, wild dragons classed human among the “prey animals,” and there was no telling which of the young dragonets brought in by hunters might have feasted at one point or another on a two-legged meal. Nor how many of them might remember doing just that thing, and try another two-legged morsel.
So far as these dragons were concerned, humans were fellow dragons, nestmates and parents, and the very little naughtiness they got into could readily be dealt with by a fist to the top of the nose. Not that they did very much; most misbehavior occurred before fledging, when they were still small enough to discipline easily, and when they learned that a fist to the top of the nose meant they had been bad.