Ari sighed; it sounded weary. 'Because it isn't the tradition, I suppose. Or because it is a great deal less heroic to take an egg than a fighting, hissing nestling that is a few days from flight—or one that is flying and might turn and savage you. Or, most likely, because tending an egg and the nestling that hatches is a great deal of work that must be done by the man who intends to ride the dragon. It can't be done by anyone else, for the dragon bonds with the person who tends him from the egg. I know Kashet would never let Haraket ride him, and I'm not entirely sure he'd ever let anyone other than me in the saddle. And you would have to get an egg freshly-laid and move it in the heat of the day in order to move it without killing the dragonet inside. Why go to all that work when the tala keeps the dragons tame enough to ride?' He made a bit of a scornful noise. 'My fellow Jousters, I suspect, would rather think of themselves as dragon masters or dragon tamers than dragon nursemaids.'
Vetch held his peace; the Jouster didn't seem to expect an answer. He continued to scratch Kashet, who was making burbling sounds in the bottom of his throat. 'I am somewhat out of place among our mighty warriors, I fear,' Ari said after another, much longer interval. 'I was never a soldier, never ambitious to be a warrior. I was trained as a scribe; it is only by virtue of the fact that I ride Kashet that I am a Jouster. The others—well, they are fighters, always intended to be, and never thought of any other life.' He coughed a little. 'In fact, I suspect that they actually think as little as possible.'
'I guess that's good in a warrior,' Vetch said, feeling obscurely troubled. 'A warrior is only supposed to obey orders, not think about them.'
Ari coughed again. 'You could be right. Haraket says that I think too much, and I probably do.'
Vetch sensed something that he couldn't quite put into words; he strained after it, but it eluded him. 'Maybe Haraket is wrong. It's important to think before you say or do something,' he said finally. 'That was what my father always said—
Ari's head came up, like a hound scenting something interesting. 'Your father, the farmer? That is, since you are a serf, I assume your father was a farmer… Did he own his land, before we came and took it away from him? Or was he already a serf to an Altan master, so that our coming made little difference to him?'
Strange questions, certainly not ones that any Tian had ever asked Vetch before. Dangerous questions to answer, if the anger got the better of him. But the darkness made Vetch feel bold, and the calm and curious sadness in Ari's voice cooled his ever-present anger, and he answered, though only after trying to keep his father's advice in mind. 'We—our family—held our land for five hundred years,' he said, with painful pride.
'Five hundred years.' A sigh in the darkness. 'And did your father take arms against us? Or your brother? Or were you tilling the soil in peace, far from any battlefield, and never thought about war until the day someone came and told him that his land was no longer his and made you all servants where you had once been masters?'
Vetch felt his mouth falling open. Never, once, had any Tian ever said anything to indicate that the theft of the family land had been anything other than absolutely justified, the proper desserts for having been on the wrong side in the war. Just who and what was Ari?
He felt impelled to answer. 'My father—my father didn't know anything about fighting,' he said, his throat growing tight. 'We knew there was a war, because so much of our crops went in taxes to feed the King's soldiers, but we never saw any fighting.'
No, one long, slow year rolled into the next, and the time was marked by planting, growing, harvest, dry, winter, and flood, the six seasons of the year. No one but the tax collectors ever came to the village, for they were so far out of the way. Their farm was on the very edge of the swamp where the land became untillable unless you filled it in, one basket of earth at a time. And people did that; in fact, that was how Vetch's forefathers had gained their land, they had won it from the swamp an inch at a time. There was fever there, and the insects were a constant plague, but the land itself was generous and offered abundance to those who cared for it.
The cruel memories came flooding back, and he stared at the darkness of the far wall, feeling his stomach and throat tighten as he spoke. 'It was planting season. Father wouldn't leave the farm at planting season, so I know he didn't go to fight the Tians. And I never had any brothers, only sisters.'
Sisters who were surprisingly tolerant of the small brother who plagued them with tricks, his mother's darling, his father's pride.
Mother, father, sisters, and grandmother; all had lived in relative harmony in the mud-brick house that had been added onto by generations going back decades. Vetch remembered every room of that house, the kitchen at the rear, that was the heart of the house, the little room with his mother's loom, the storerooms, and that luxury of luxuries, separate little sleeping rooms for each of them. He remembered how, in the worst heat, they used to sleep on the roof at night for the sake of the breeze. He remembered how the sun used to pierce the high windows in his bedroom at dawn, and write a bright streak of light across the top of the opposite wall. The room was just big enough for his pallet— raised above the floor by a wood-and-rope frame—and a chest that held his clothing. But it was his, and when he dropped the curtain over the door, he could be quite alone with his dreams. That was when he still had dreams…
Only the freeborn can afford to have dreams.
'I don't think my father ever saw a sword, much less ever held one,' he said, his throat tight. 'The sharpest thing on the farm was his scythe.' He had to stop and swallow. 'The war never even came near us; we just heard that the army was retreating, but we weren't near the big road, so we never saw it going. I don't think my father ever even thought about it; he was too busy worrying about the seeds and the seedlings.'
His throat grew tighter, his stomach ached, and his eyes burned. Vetch didn't want to think about when it all ended; didn't want to remember the day that the strangers came, with their bronze swords and leather shields, their long spears—how they spoke to his father as if he were a slave. He still didn't know exactly what they had
