"There are hot sands that the wild dragons use?" he said, making it a question, as Ari rubbed under Kashet's chin.
"Of course there are—though, mind, dragons also use the heat of their own bodies to hatch their eggs. Wild dragons take it turn and turn about, males and females, to brood the eggs. That way they both can eat and drink. At night, when it's coldest, they brood the eggs together."
Vetch considered this. "How do you know that?" he asked, finally.
Ari chuckled. "Because, fool that I was, I went out and watched them. And yes, I could very easily have ended up going down one of those long throats. But I was young and immortal, and I was very, very tired of sitting about and writing, endless copies of things no one cared about. Even when I came here, I was the unconsidered copyist. I wanted to do something different, something that would be read for the next hundred years." He chuckled again. "Actually, although I didn't really want to be a scribe, my uncle wouldn't hear of anything else, and after my father died, he was the head of our household when he made my mother his second wife. He was always quoting the sages to me. 'The metalworker has fingers like crocodile hide, and stinks worse than fish eggs. The fisherman wears little but net, and eats only what he cannot sell. The farmer labors from dawn to dusk, serving only the tax collector, the embalmer is shunned by all, the brick maker is as filthy as a pig, the soldier lives every day never knowing if it will be his last. But the scribe never goes hungry; he can aspire to the halls of the great ones, and his is the only profession wherein he himself is the overseer.' Except that, of course, that last isn't true at all, and most scribes spend their lives, not in the halls of the great ones, but sitting in a marketplace, waiting for anyone who wants a letter written, or bent over a desk in his lap, copying copies of copies of things so tedious they send him to sleep."
Vetch sighed. Whoever had written that hadn't known anything about farmers…
Then again, whoever had written that was, without a doubt, trained as a scribe originally. He started to ask about Ari's parents, but Ari continued before he could say anything.
"When I came here to serve the Jousters, I decided to learn as much as I could about the dragons, and I decided that the best way to do so was to study the wild ones. 1 watched them courting in the sky, and although I never actually caught one laying an egg, I did know within a day when one was laid, because I took to watching particular natural sand wallows. Which wasn't easy!
Dragons only use the wallows that are sheltered to lay their eggs in, usually in caves."
Vetch shivered, thinking that "wasn't easy" was assuredly an understatement. What had Ari done? Had he actually been brave enough to slip into the caves to see if eggs had been laid?
Ari had warmed to his subject; it seemed that whenever the subject was "dragons," Ari could always stir up enthusiasm. "The mother doesn't start brooding until her clutch is laid, so it wasn't particularly hard to sneak into her cave to see if she'd left anything."
Not particularly hard. Vetch managed not to snort. But he did say, judiciously, "I couldn't have done that."
This time Ari laughed aloud, and ruffled Vetch's hair. It was curious; at first, Vetch had been very wary of Ari, knowing, as he did only too well, that some men… well. But Ari had never given him a moment of unease. The physical demonstrations had all been—
—safe. That was the word. Brotherly, perhaps. That was close enough to the word he didn't want to think of—
—fatherly.
Fortunately, Ari was still merrily talking away. "They usually court and lay just at the start of the dry, and the egg hatches when the rains begin. They feed and grow all during the winter and spring, and fledge when the dry comes again. They're still small, far too small to joust with, far too small to carry a rider for long, but as you'll hear Haraket say a thousand times, 'Neither Jouster nor dragon are made in a season.' Kashet, of course, began carrying me from the beginning."
"Is that why he's so strong?" Vetch ventured.
"It could be," Ari agreed, and yawned. "Vetch, if you want to hear more about Kashet—
"Yes!" Vetch interrupted.
Once again, Ari laughed. "Then we'll have more time after the rains start—which they will within a day or so, or at least, that's what the Nuth priests are saying. Then our patrols will be cut to one a day, because the dragons will not want to fly. Until then, Kashet and I need to get in as much flying time as we can, so I am going to sleep. And you should, too."
Ari gently moved Kashet's head from his lap; the dragon grumbled, but shifted so that all of him was in the wallow. Then Ari stood up.
"Thank you for listening to me babble, Vetch. My fellow Jousters are more than tired of hearing me."
He heard the faint echo of loneliness in Ari's voice, and quickly said, "I'm not!"
Ari ruffled his hair again. "I should hope not," he replied with mock sternness. "Dragons in general, and Kashet in particular, are your business, young dragon boy. Get some sleep, now."
Ari went off to his own quarters then, and Vetch took his advice. He went to sleep quickly, dreaming of a sky filled with dragons.
IT was the business of the priests and priestesses of the goddess Nuth—or, more accurately, the Seers among those priests and priestesses—to predict the start of the season of winter rains. This was of vital importance to the Jousters, for once the rains began, their work would be much curtailed. Dragons didn't like the cold and performed sluggishly when the temperature dropped—and although you could get them to fly in the rain, not even tala would keep them in the air for long. So as the end of the dry season neared, the more closely the compound watched the Temple of Nuth for word. Haraket sent messengers daily, asking if a date had been Foreseen. Anxiety mounted, in no small part because the Jousters, and their dragons, were tired. They needed this respite, and needed it badly.
They need not have been concerned. Precisely when the Nuth priests said they would, the rains came.
Three messages arrived from the Avenue of Temples before Haraket could send his daily request; the first gave warning that the rains would certainly begin the next day, the second gave the exact hour (which was the second hour of dawn), and the third, that the first storm would be unusually heavy. Vetch and the rest of the dragon boys had all rehearsed what they were to do, and after the sun set and all the dragons had settled, they had gone down every row of pens and pulled the canvas awnings over every one of the sand wallows. There was no point in allowing even the unused wallows to become pits of hot sand soup, for green muck would grow in it if the water didn't steam away in time, and that would mean digging out all of the mucky sand and replacing it with clean.
When the rains actually began, Vetch was sound asleep. He woke to the sound of distant thunder and within an hour, rain poured out of the sky and drummed down on the awnings; it was still so dark that he couldn't even see his hand in front of his face, and the first rush of water put out the torches in the corridor outside. It was quite a storm, and he was glad to be under cover when it came, although all of the lightning stayed up in the clouds, and the thunder never was more than a rumble overhead. Still, as hard as the water was pouring down out of the sky, the roar as it hit the canvas and the ground was enough to drown out everything but that thunder. He couldn't help but contrast his position now with the same time last year, when he had actually climbed up onto the woodpile in Khefti's back courtyard to shelter under the canvas covering it—for he was not permitted an awning to keep him dry.