It was the silent, blue time before dawn. The air hung cool and still above the pale sand, not a hint, not a breath of breeze, so still one could hear the tick of grain against grain as a thin trickle at the crest of a dune. The desert stretched out all around Sanctuary, as if beneath the calming hand of a god. Or a goddess, perhaps; Nofret, whom the Altans called Nefer-et, Goddess of the Night, had not yet withdrawn the hem of her robe from the land. Re-Hakat, the sun, still lingered in the Summerland beyond the Star Bridge.
It would not be cool for much longer, nor still.
Kiron stood on the roof of one of the four buildings that surrounded a courtyard that had been given over for use as the dragons’ sand-wallow, and leaned on the parapet to watch the dawn come in over the desert. Not difficult; at this point, although there were still refugees finding their way here all the time with the help of the Bedu (also called the Veiled People), there was no structure in the entire city that was more than three buildings away from the open sand. He was, given a choice, not usually awake at this time. But in a little while, the dragons would, slowly, begin to rouse from their slumber, and they would be hungry. Here in Sanctuary, unlike in Alta and Tia, there was no butchery from which to feed them, no Temple sacrifices to provide the carcasses. If the dragons wished to eat, like their wild brethren, they must hunt. Hunts were always more successful when the Jouster and dragon hunted as a team. So if the dragons wished to eat, their riders must waken and go out with them.
Kiron might be the first one awake and out today, but by now, the others of his wing were stirring at the very least. He generally didn’t beat the rest by very much. Besides, the terrible heat of the desert at midday in the middle of the Dry meant that their schedules were much changed from Alta. Here, they flew at dawn and dusk, and spent the hottest part of the day well away from the burning rays of the sun.
The sun—Altan Re-Haket was not the kindly Solar Disk, the bringer of life here, oh no, not “beautiful with banners.” He was not even the Re-Haket that the Tians knew. Here in the desert, he wore the harsher visage of Se-ahketh, the Tester, the Scourge of Fire, He Who had no mercy, only an unwinking Eye that tested to destruction. Even the dragons sheltered beneath a canopy from His Eye at midday. Sometimes Kiron wondered—was this where the Magi of Alta had gotten the idea for their unwinking Eye, their scourge of fire?
Kiron preferred to greet Avatre with a clear head and unclouded eyes, this morning especially, because it was all the more needful on this day that each dragon of the wing fly to the hunt and return with prey before the sun reached its zenith. Because today, they had another reason besides the sun’s implacable hammer to be well in shelter. There would be a great sandstorm today, so said Kaleth, and Kiron saw no reason to disbelieve him.
And when Kaleth meant a “great” sandstorm, he was not speaking of a quarter-day of wind and blowing sand. Kiron and the others had not yet weathered a “great” sandstorm, but the Veiled People had, and so had Kaleth; the Midnight Khamiseen, the storm without rain that brought the darkness of night at midday. The Bedu spoke feelingly of a sky black at midday, of wind too strong to stand against, of air so thick with dust and grit you could not breathe— —of a storm full of sand like millions of miniscule knives that flayed clothing from the body, and flesh from bone, and packed every open orifice with wind-driven dirt. Get in the shelter of a rock or a dune, and you might survive, if you could get a clear space for your face, breathe through cloth, and managed to keep from being buried alive.
There was no sign of such a storm. The thin, clear light and the cloudless sky held nothing but peace.
Kiron did not trust the promise of such “peace.” He trusted Kaleth.
Kaleth was, without a doubt, god-touched. Had he not led them all here, to the once-buried city of legend they now called Sanctuary? If he said such a storm would blow up, Kiron would believe him. Certainly the Veiled People did. Those within the area of the storm had either taken themselves out of its path, or moved into the city, little though they liked living within walls even for a single day.
Kiron nodded to himself, as he looked out over a city that seemed very strange to the eyes of one accustomed to the straight, clean lines of the buildings of Alta and Tia. Once, Kaleth (then Prince Kaleth) had been nothing more than the quiet, studious twin brother of the more charismatic Prince Toreth. True, he, with Toreth, was one of the four designated heirs to the Thrones of Alta, but until Toreth had been murdered, he had been something of a cipher to most.
Well, he certainly wasn’t a cipher now. A Winged One of Alta, in truth, and a Priest of Haras of Tia, he spoke for the gods of both peoples.
Gods, which were, Kiron was coming to understand, one and the same. Or at least, there was so little difference it mattered not at all.
Kaleth was accepted by the Veiled Ones, the Wanderers of the desert, the Blue People, as a Seer, a Hand of the gods and a Mouth of the people as well. And if Kiron only had an imperfect understanding of what that meant, well, he knew it was a position of great respect, and that was enough for him.
As the city slumbered under the clear, pre-dawn sky, Sanctuary hardly looked like a city at all, more like a collection of squared-off mounds, very like wind-sculpted, sand-polished mastabas, nearly the same color as the sand around them. Hardly surprising no one had found it until Kaleth led the Veiled Ones to it; even if it had not been buried beneath the dunes, when Kiron thought of a city, he thought—well, he thought of nothing at all like this. To his mind, the word “city” called up the image of the tall, angular, sandstone or granite edifices of Mefis, the capital of Tia, carved and painted with images of the gods and Great Kings, reaching five, six, ten times the height of a man. Or the “city” of his slave-days, the mud-brick, two-storied, mathematically-laid out buildings along the narrow streets where ordinary folk dwelled. Or, possibly, the white-columned, long, low buildings of Alta, reflected in the shining surfaces of her seven ring-shaped canals. He did not think of buildings the color of sand, with rounded corners and edges, walls as thick as a man’s arm was long, and scarcely an opening to be seen anywhere.
But that was because the buildings of Sanctuary were armored against the blistering desert heat by the thickness of their stone walls, and against the sandstorm by their curves. Not even the dragons, much as they reveled in heat, spent more time in the sun than they could help, once the great disk had reached past the point of mid-morning. Some of the buildings, in fact, were mere antechambers into a labyrinth of rooms carved out of the rock bed beneath the sand, a network of man-made caves which all connected eventually to that most precious of desert treasures, the water-source that lay at the heart of Sanctuary itself.
Water. Water was the reason for anything made by man in the desert. Men sought for it, fought over it, bartered what was most precious to them for it, killed and died for it and for lack of it. And yet here, through long years gone, and until the gods permitted it to be found again, was a kingdom’s ransom of the precious stuff.
Beneath the sand, beneath the rock that lay beneath the sand, there flowed a river of the purest water, a quiet, steady stream, clear and cool, that widened here into a channel as wide as Great Mother River, and deep enough that it took an effort to touch the bottom before narrowing again and flowing onwards towards the Altan delta. Kiron supposed it must come to the surface at some point, but no one had yet been able to pinpoint that spot, not even the wise desert-dwellers, the Veiled Ones, who themselves had (until now) not even guessed that here was the life-giver that fed a great many of their oases. Here was the reason for Sanctuary existing at all, the reason it had been built in the far past. Here was the reason why Sanctuary was able to prosper now. Even the Veiled People required water, and in this part of the desert that they called the Furnace and the Anvil of the Gods, they deemed it more valuable than the caches of gold that the new owners of Sanctuary were still discovering when wind freed another building from the grip of the sand.
Which might happen today, actually. Kaleth had hinted as much, calling the storm the instrument of the gods, and saying that in the past, it had given what was needed when it was needed. And certainly, Sanctuary was still surrounded on all sides by dunes and hard-packed sand. There was no telling what might lie beneath some of those mounds.
A voice behind him interrupted his thoughts. “What do you think the sandstorm will show us when it passes?”
“Sometimes, I wonder if it isn’t only the dragons’ thoughts you can read, Aket-ten,” Kiron laughed, turning to wrinkle his nose at the only female Jouster—to his knowledge—ever to fly a dragon.
Aket-ten, sister to his good friend Orest, dimpled at him, as awake and alert as if this was midday. Well, she always had been a morning-lover, already up and doing while he and Orest were still shaking the sleep from their eyes. It was a small fault, that. She was in all other ways, to his mind anyway, anything that anyone could ask for in a companion.
Not perfect, but who wanted perfection? It would be far too tiring to have to live up to the perfection of another. A companion who had flaws, now, that meant that you could have an affectionate rivalry without feeling as if there was no chance that you could ever come up to the standards set by your friend.
She was not too tall—but Kiron himself was by no means over-tall. Besides, the best dragon-Jousters were light and lean, for the less of a burden they were to their mounts, the better. Light and lean, Aket-ten certainly was, reed-slim and shorter than he, and he was no giant. Her lively black eyes met yours with a look of acceptance and candor, and her ready smile warmed them further with good humor. If she did not have the finely-chiseled and perfectly regular features of one of the images of the goddesses, she had a face that was full of personality. Since coming to Sanctuary she had chosen to forsake wigs and wear her own blue-black hair cut in the short helmet-style favored by the rest of the wing, which made her look superficially like one of them, but the gentle curves under her simple linen tunic made it clear with only a second glance that this was no boy.
She wasn’t beautiful, but truth to tell, Kiron found himself somewhat intimidated by beauty. The elegance of court ladies made him flush and feel tongue-tied, and that was when they ignored him. When they spoke to him, or glanced at him, or worst of all, smiled, he found himself looking for someone to hide behind. But when Aket-ten smiled, which was far more often here than she had back in Alta, she always made him smile in return. What more could anyone ask?
Once one of the Fledgling-Priestesses of the Altan Temple of the Twins, one of her strongest Gifts was that of Silent Speech with animals. While in the past she had sometimes disparaged herself for having such a “minor” Gift, it had been worth more even than being god-touched on that black day when Kaleth’s twin brother, Toreth, had been murdered by the Magi, and his dragon had nearly thrown herself (and every other dragon in the compound) into suicidal hysterics with grief. Until first Ari, then Kiron, the eight other Altan boys had raised dragons themselves, from the egg, it had been unthinkable that a dragon should actually have a bond of affection with its Jouster. Dragons were, at best, controllable, and only when drugged with the dust made from a dried desert berry called tala. No one had ever thought that a bonded dragon, if it lost its Jouster, would choose to give its loyalty to another.
But that was exactly what had happened when Toreth died, and his midnight blue and shaded-silver dragon Re-eth-katen had nearly died of her grief and loss. When Aket-ten “spoke” to Re-eth-katen and comforted her, that dragon had bonded again to the Fledgling Priestess, and had become her dragon, renamed Re-eth-ke, thus making Aket-ten the first ever female in the Jouster’s Compound as anything other than servant or couch-companion. Just as well, since it had only been possible for her to hide from the increasingly imperious demands of the Magi in that one place in all of Alta. The dragons did not like the Magi, and not all the tala in the world could stop them from making that dislike evident.
The feeling of animosity was mutual, and the Magi had made it their business to remove the Jousters—heroes of the war—by steady attrition.
“Well, if you’re thinking that we’re better off here, no matter how hard life is, than there, well, I agree with you,” Aket-ten said. “I’d rather starve and bathe in sand than stay in Alta one moment longer. Not,” she added with a shiver, “That I think I’d be aware of where I was by now if I had stayed there.”
Kiron nodded, and grimaced. Aket-ten was clever (if, perhaps, sometimes a little too inclined to flaunt that cleverness), brave (if a bit rash and headstrong), loyal (if stubborn), kind (if a little sharp-tongued), and the best sort of friend. And she was right. If she’d stayed—well, if any of them had stayed, they’d probably be half dead from injuries and overwork, or entirely dead. Except for Aket-ten, who would be locked up in the Magi’s “Tower of Knowledge” with the rest of the Winged Ones, somehow being drained to give the Magi the strength for their magic. But—thanks mainly to Kaleth—they’d escaped. They were safe in Sanctuary, and if the future was shrouded in uncertainty, it was at least a future that held freedom. As for Aket-ten, it was Kiron’s hope she was inclining towards becoming more than just a “friend” of late, though he was not pushing too hard. Aket-ten could also be very stubborn if pushed, and hated with a great passion the least hint that she was being pressured into doing anything. He probably had the Magi to thank for that. Still, his position could be much worse. He’d once thought that she harbored a secret passion for Toreth, and that had turned out to be false. The last thing he wanted to do was to give her even the faintest of impressions that he was putting pressure on her. Aket-ten was not a desert-antelope to be swooped down upon, knocked over, and devoured. Rather, she was like her own blue-black dragon Re-eth-ke, to be courted with circumspection, tact, and delicacy, so that when she made up her own mind, it was with the impression that she had been the one who’d had the idea in the first place.
She came up beside him to lean on the parapet and look down into the sand-pit where the dragons were just beginning to stir. All the dragons shared a sand-wallow, rather than each having their own as they had back in Alta. There hadn’t been much of a choice in that; the Jouster’s Compounds had been tended by a small army of servants, builders, and slaves. There were no slaves here in Sanctuary, and precious few servants, and none to spare for building something like the complex of quarters and sand-wallows the dragons were used to. Fortunately, they were all, with the exceptions of Avatre, and Ari’s huge emerald-and-blue dragon Kashet, out of the same batch of eggs. All but Kashet had romped together as nestlings and fledglings, and had trained together from the beginning of their lives. There was no serious quarreling, much less the fighting that happened among unrelated wild-caught Jousting dragons, and though there might be the occasional squabble, it was soon sorted out without much worse than a swat or a nip or two. For her part, although the lovely scarlet Avatre reacted to being forced to share her sand with the “infants” with a pained disdain that was sometimes quite funny to see, but she never bullied them.
As for the sky-blue Kashet, who might have been expected to react poorly to the herd of youngsters, the eldest of the dragons actually took to the half-grown dragonets with great tolerance and even some show of occasional pleasure.
“I wouldn’t even try to get inside your thoughts,” Aket-ten teased. “I’d find myself listening to echoes.”
“Hah,” was all he replied. “You only think that because you’ve spent so much time around your brother, all boys have heads as empty as last-year’s latas-pod.”
“Last year’s latas-pod isn’t empty!” her brother Orest exclaimed, coming up the stairs to flank Kiron on his right. “It is full of the seeds of wisdom, I will have you know! Ah, they’re starting to stir.”
He leaned over and made kissing noises at his own blue and scarlet dragon, who rewarded his attention by slowly raising his bright blue head from his sand-wallow and turning to gaze at Orest with sleep-glazed ruby-colored eyes.
Orest’s face was full of such infatuation that Kiron smiled. Not that he was under any illusions that he didn’t look like that around Avatre. It was quite clear to anyone with eyes that Orest and Aket-ten were brother and sister; in fact, at first glance, they might look like brother and brother. Both were slim, with broad cheekbones but delicate chins, making their faces the same almond shape, and both had the same merry eyes.
“Come on, little prince, it is time to greet the sun with sharp eyes and a clear head,” Orest cooed down at his dragon, coaxingly. “You need to wake up, precious jewel. We need to be in the air quickly this morning.” He turned to his sister. “You did remember to tell them all about the sandstorm, didn’t you?”
“Last night before they went to sleep,” she promised, with a hint of reproach. “You don’t think I’d have forgotten that! They know. I was careful not to confuse them, either. When I told them, I took care to show them images of what they know—a black storm, wicked wind and evil air-currents. That was enough. He’s just sleepy from the heat of the sand; he’ll remember it for himself in a moment and he’ll be more impatient than you to get hunting.”
Without waiting to hear what her brother had to say, she turned and skipped down the staircase on the inside-wall of the pit, to trot along the ledge surrounding the neck-deep sand until she came to where her own dragon was just now waking.
“Don’t tease her, you know how she feels about her responsibilities,” Kiron told his friend. “Look, see! Your little prince has just remembered that if he doesn’t get up in the sky soon, he might not eat today.”
And indeed, the young male had raised his head to look to his rider with sense and a bit of urgency in his gaze. The dragon snorted at Orest with impatience, and began to pull himself up out of his wallow, golden sand cascading from a back that shaded into red on the belly, without another word of coaxing from the young Jouster.
A familiar whine from just beyond Orest’s dragon caught Kiron’s attention, especially when it was paired with an equally familiar snort. He followed Aket-ten down into the pit, to make his way in the opposite direction from the one she’d taken.
Kashet and Avatre had taken to sleeping near to each other; not precisely curled up together, but they did seem to appreciate one another’s company. Perhaps Avatre remembered Kashet from her earliest days in the Tian Jousters’ Compound, before she and Kiron (then called ‘Vetch’) had escaped and fled northward to Alta with Ari’s help, when Kashet had been in the next pen over. Certainly Kashet remembered her.
He remembered Kiron too, and with quite evident affection. The huge dragon snorted again when Kiron came near, and craned his metallic-blue neck over Avatre to blow his hot breath into Kiron’s hair.
Whereupon Avatre bristled with jealousy and shoved his head aside, claiming her rider for herself. Kiron had to laugh as she tried to puff herself up and interpose herself between him and her rival for his affections. Kashet could bowl her over without even taking thought for it, even now. She had a hot temper to match her fiery colors when she was irritated. Fortunately Kashet was a good-natured soul, and—well, it was possible that there was some instinctive behavior involved too. Most male animals would put up with things from females that they would never tolerate in another male. “Peace, little one!” he told her, as she shoved him a little off-balance and tried to look up at him in adoration with one eye while she glared at Kashet out of the other. “You are first in my heart, always—and Ari will be here any moment and Kashet will cease to remember that I live.”
“Ari is here now,” called a voice from above, and Kashet reared up to his full height at the sound of that voice, which put his head well above the level of the roof. Ari looked down over the parapet of the building next to the one that Kiron, Orest, and the other members of Kiron’s wing (except Aket-ten) shared, waved to his protégé, then reached up to scratch the boney eye-ridges of his own dragon as Kashet rested his chin on the parapet and sighed gustily. As Kiron had predicted, Kashet was now quite oblivious to the fact that the younger man even existed, which made Avatre perfectly pleased.
Ari alone stood out from among the Altan inhabitants of Sanctuary as noticeably different. He was much darker, to begin with; here in the desert, he had tanned to the color of old leather, while the Altans had gone the same golden-brown as a properly baked loaf of barley-bread. His face was broader than the Altan “type”, his chin stronger, his eyes a shade of brown that was very near to black.
Kiron would have liked to remain there, giving Avatre the caresses and affection she lived for, but there was no leisure for that this morning. The cramped quarters of the sand-pit made it necessary for almost everyone to leave in order to get saddled, which would mean another delay in taking to the air, and this was a day when no one could afford much in the way of a delay.
Kashet was the first to get out—by virtue of his size and strength, he simply hooked his front talons into the parapet and climbed out over the roof. The first time he’d done that, Kiron hadn’t been the only one who’d gasped and shrunk back, expecting the wall to come down. But either they were all very lucky, or Kashet was a shrewd judge of construction; he hadn’t left more than a scratch or two on the top of the wall. Kiron still didn’t know what the walls of Sanctuary were made up of. It looked like hard-packed sand, or sandstone, but it wasn’t, and it was tougher and stronger than anything Kiron had ever seen before. The walls weren’t made of stone blocks, either; the entire buildings could have been carved from single pieces of stone. There was no sign of seams or block-lines, and although the corners and edges were all rounded as if scoured that way, at a guess Kiron would have said that they had been carved or sculpted that way on purpose from the beginning, given that nothing much seemed to mark it. Whatever material those walls were made of, it was something that stood up to the abuse of dragons climbing all over it.
Nor could Kiron have put an original purpose to this courtyard that now served as the dragon-wallow. When the wing had come to Sanctuary, the space had been filled with sand still, left that way on purpose for the dragons’ use, and the doors and windows that had once looked into the yard had been blocked up at Kaleth’s orders. It was about the size of the landing-court at the Jousters’ Compound in Tia, which made it just about big enough for ten dragons. Now—if somehow, there should be more dragons one day—
I will leave that in the hands of the gods, Kiron told himself. The gods had provided for these ten; he would have faith that they would provide in the future. Or else he and Ari would come up with some clever plan to create more wallows and shelters somehow.
Though the sands were not heated, as were the sands of the pens back in the Compounds, they didn’t yet need to be. The stone of the buildings and the sand itself stored enough heat over the course of the day to keep the dragons comfortable all night. And as for heating the sands in the winter—well, the eccentric Akkadian Healer and magician Heklatis had some ideas on that score, and Kiron was content to leave it at that. Certainly the wild dragons managed; theirs could, too. At least there would be no cold rains to contend with.
“Time to go, my son,” Ari told his dragon. “No one else can move until you do.” With a grunt, Kashet heaved himself up; first getting his forequarters up to the parapet, then carefully planting hind-claws in the blocked-up window-slits and slithering the rest of himself over the edge.
Avatre uttered what sounded like a sigh of relief. She was still small enough that she could use the open staircase as a climbing aid, and that was what she did, leaving the rest of the dragonets the room to shake themselves free of the sand and follow her lead. She and Kashet shared the roof of Ari’s building as their harnessing-stop; six of the eight dragonets made use of the other three roofs, two apiece, leaving the pit to Re-eth-ke and Orest’s striking blue-and-scarlet Wastet.
Harnessing these days was a far cry from the complicated affair it had been back when the dragons were part of Alta’s (and Tia’s) fighting forces. The saddles were the same, but there was no armor, no helmets, and no Jousting-lances. Not that they were unarmed. Especially not when hunting. Aristocratic Gan had trained his dragonet modest brown-and-green Khaleph to tolerate a light hunting-spear flying past his head, so his saddle had a quiver of javelins attached to it. Orest, Ari, Pe-atep and Aket-ten could get their mounts to put up with arrows. The rest of them used slings and stones—not much good at bringing down game of the size a dragon needed, but good enough to distract, irritate, or with luck, stun, and that was all the opening a dragon could ask for.
No making formations for this task; dragons needed a big hunting-territory, and each of them had his (or her) preferred ground. By common consent, Aket-ten and Re-eth-ke got what was nearest Sanctuary, and the rest of them simply let their dragons define the hunting-ranges as they saw fit. They were up and into the air as soon as they were strapped into their saddles, scattering to the four directions. Much as Kiron would have liked to hunt alongside Aket-ten, the plain fact was that it was impossible. Neither dragon would have tolerated another in her hunting-grounds.
So he and Avatre launched into the soft blue eye of the cloudless morning sky, and headed for their allotments without a backward glance at each other. Later, perhaps, if they both got in well ahead of the storm, they could fly together. First things first.
Kiron was minded to chase wild ass this morning; they hadn’t preyed on those herds in a while, and if they were going to have anything left to bring back for Avatre’s evening meal after Avatre ate her fill, it would have to be a substantial kill. That meant flying to the furthest extent of Avatre’s hunting-range, where the sand gave way to scrubby hills and wadis, but she was fresh and strong, and the wind was in their favor. Provided that they made a kill quickly, they would beat the storm back in plenty of time.
So with a quick prayer to Besh, the pot-bellied, bandy-legged luck-god, Kiron began to scan the horizon—and, pragmatically, made sure he had a heavy stone for his sling.