And this, evidently was only the beginning.
When he'd seen dragons passing overhead, it had never occurred to him how high they were. Now he knew —oh, how he knew!—and the knowledge was enough to scare him witless.
The dragon continued to rise, surging upward and upward, so high that Vetch squeezed his eyes closed again, for he could not bear the sight of villagers reduced to the size of ants, and the mud-brick houses of the nameless hamlet on the outskirts of Mefis to the size of the pebbles that the ants swarmed around. This was bad enough, would have been bad enough had the flight been as smooth as those his spirit took in dreams.
But no. With every wing beat, the dragon lurched skyward, then dropped back a little, convincing Vetch's stomach that they were all about to plummet to the ground. If he'd had anything in his stomach, he would have lost it within the first few moments. As it was, his gorge rose, and there was a musty, sour taste in the back of his throat to accompany the nausea. Vetch kept his eyes squeezed shut.
Finally, they stopped lurching and bounding, and Vetch cracked his right eye open a trifle to see that the dragon was gliding out in level flight. This was only relatively level; it still rose and fell again with each wing beat, except when it was gliding. When the dragon glided, his stomach was a hard, cold knot of agony, certain that they were about to fall out of the sky. When it beat its wings, his stomach turned over again.
In the first moments of the flight, he vowed that if he ever set foot upon the ground again, he would never leave it… and once they reached the height that the Jouster wanted, he vowed that if he lived through this experience, he would dig a hole in the ground and live in it for the rest of his life. Eyes shut, or eyes open? Both states left him in a state of panic.
When his mind unfroze enough for him to notice anything but fear, the first thing that struck him was the extraordinary heat of the dragon's body, hot as the hottest sand at midday during the dry season, hotter than the furnace wind of the kamiseen, heat that came up through the pad he clung to. Which was just as well, as he was shivering in a cold sweat. The other was the feeling of the Jouster's hard, strong hand in the small of his back, once again holding to the belt of his loincloth. Never once did that grip weaken; Khefti-the-Fat might have been strong beneath the blubber, but this man was ten times stronger. And after a few moments of 'level flight,' Vetch began to believe that at least the Jouster wasn't going to let him fall.
Not that he was enjoying the experience. Given his face-down position, he couldn't open his eyes without staring down—a very, very long way down—at the ground that was now so horribly far beneath them. And he couldn't close his eyes without being horribly aware of every little lurch and lean of the dragon that carried him. His heart was pounding so hard with fear that he thought it might burst through his chest; the wind of the dragon's wing beats drowned out every other sound, and now the pain of those two stripes burned all across the stretched skin of his back, adding to the ache of his fingers, arms, and legs as he clung to the pad.
Of the two options, he finally decided that not looking was the lesser of the two evils. So he squeezed his eyes tight anyway and prayed; there wasn't much else he could do. He prayed to Altan and Tian gods both, though the prayers were anything but articulate, and certainly not even close to the proper forms, consisting of all the gods' names jumbled up together with get me down!
But the gods were with him, it seemed; the flight wasn't a long one. Just about the time when Vetch's muscles were starting to cramp and hurt from the strain of holding on, he felt the dragon dropping, and this time, the falling sensation didn't end in an upward lurch. He cracked open one eye, to see the ground rushing up at them, and squeezed both of them as tightly shut again as he could. If anything, seeing that they were hurtling back toward the ground was worse than seeing it so far below them. His heart seemed to stop as the fall went on, and on, and suddenly he couldn't breathe.
Now the great wings thundered all around him, fiercely beating the air, and Vetch redoubled his grip on the pad. He braced for the impact of hitting the ground-But it never came—
Only sudden stillness, and the snap of wings folding, like canvas or leather snapping in a high wind.
And no movement, no movement at all.
Was it over?
Vetch's eyes flew open involuntarily.
Face-down on the pad as he was, the first thing he saw was the dragon's shoulder, the folded wing, and then, the ground, a proper distance away, with a beetle crawling across it that was a real beetle, not an ox reduced to the size of a beetle by distance.
The ground! Never had he been so happy to see a stretch of earth!
The Jouster's hand loosened on Vetch's belt, and without being prompted, Vetch let go of the pad and slid down the dragon's hot, smooth shoulder to the earth. His feet hit the ground together, his legs buckled under him, and he landed on his rump, but he scrambled to his feet quickly, his eyes never leaving his new master, much though he wanted to just lie on the ground and embrace it. The Jouster tossed his leg over the saddle and the dragon's neck, and jumped lightly down, giving his dragon a hearty slap on the shoulder. The dragon snorted, and tossed his head a little.
'Now what've you brought back, Ari?' asked a gruff voice from behind Vetch's back. 'This can't be a prisoner of your arm, and I doubt it's a spy either.'
