Alta

FIVE

OREST was as good as his word. He awoke—or rather, had his servant awaken him—as soon as the meat was delivered to Kiron to feed Avatre. By that time, of course, Kiron was already up and dressed in yesterday’s tunic (for there was no point in putting on a new one that was only going to get blood on it) and Avatre was stretching her wings and making inquisitive noises in the direction of the barrow. Orest made a great deal of noise himself, groaning and grousing about it being so early, though by Kiron’s standards, he’d been sleeping quite late of a morning, and Orest was positively lounging about.
The thing was, in Tia, it had been easy to tell when dawn was coming long before it actually arrived. The air changed, the bitter cold of desert night lost its edge. Here, there was no change of that sort; the night never got all that cold, and so it was the light, and not the change in temperature, that woke him. This place was softer than Tia, with softer air and softer beds.
The scents were softer, too, but heavier; they wafted in and clung. Perhaps that was because of the humidity. And there were more of them. He wondered why it didn’t bother Avatre—but perhaps dragons had a different sort of sense of smell.
By the time Kiron was ready to bathe and change into a clean tunic and loin wrap, the servants had brought breakfast and a sleepy-eyed Orest was eating with one hand while he read his scroll with the other. Kiron hastened to get himself clean while the bread was still warm enough to be at its best, tender and not tough.
At least Tians and Altans both shared proper ideas about bathing. He’d sorely missed his twice-daily baths in the desert, and here, if he’d wanted to, he could have a bath five times a day.
“What’s that about?” Kiron asked, joining him. The servant had even brought a table and stools. How strange to be waited on, rather than being the one doing the serving.
“It’s sacred poetry,” Orest said, making a face. “All about Te-oth, the god of the scribes. Fifteen stanzas, if you please, on the glory of the god and on the superiority of those who master language and writing!”
“Maybe your tutor is trying to tell you something,” Kiron suggested, slathering honey onto some bread and taking a bite.
“He’s telling me that sacred poetry is a dead bore, that’s what he’s telling me,” Orest complained, reaching for more grapes. “But at least he isn’t making me memorize it. All I have to do is tell him in general what it’s about.” He sighed. “I hate memorizing.”
“Maybe now that you’re going to be a Jouster he’ll assign you those scrolls your sister was reading yesterday about dragons, instead of the things you have been reading,” Kiron pointed out. “Where is she, by the way?”
“Up and out before dawn, and hanged if I know how she can stand it,” Orest replied. “The Nestlings don’t have to attend Dawn Rites, but she does, and she’s wretchedly perky about it, too.” He glanced at the sun, then at a series of lines carved into the courtyard paving. It was only at that moment that Kiron realized they were the marks of a sundial that used the shadows of the courtyard walls to mark the time. The whole courtyard was one enormous sundial! No wonder the courtyard was bare! And no wonder Orest had his rooms here, if he required a reminder of the time that was so impossible to ignore. “Well, if you’re done, we might as well go take our punishment. At least you’ll be there to share it with me.”
With a great deal less trepidation than his new friend, Kiron rose and left the servants to clean up after them.
Servants! he marveled, as they left. What wonderful things servants are! No wonder everyone wants them! Oh, he’d had people to bring him food and clean his table back at the Tian Jousters’ Compound, but in everything else, he had been the servant. It was quite a different matter to be the one who was waited on.
He’d taken the precaution of having the servants bring a large kapok-stuffed leather ball, a couple of enormous leg bones, and one of the bells that were often used as wind chimes to leave with Avatre by way of toys. “I’ll be back later, love,” he called to her as he left; she gave no evidence that she was concerned by him leaving her alone, but then, she was used to being left alone by now. In fact, she seemed more interested in the leather ball than in his leaving. He hoped that she would play with it, and not rip it to bits.
They didn’t have to go far. Orest’s tutor Arit-on-senes was waiting for him in a large, airy room with good lighting from a southern-facing window that was just off the next courtyard. There were two small carpets in front of where he sat on a leather-padded stool, with a cushion on each little carpet, a lap-desk in front of it, and a jar of scrolls beside it. His appearance surprised Kiron; he wasn’t Altan or Tian. His hair was yellow and curly, and his eyes were blue. He was astonishingly handsome, and far more athletic-looking than Kiron had expected a scholar to be. His good looks were only slightly marred by the sardonic smile he wore when he saw Orest entering first, and reluctantly.
He was also clean-shaven, and his hair was cut even shorter than a Jouster’s. Kiron wondered if he was a slave—but if he was, he certainly didn’t act like one. He acted like a lord, actually.
“Well, Orest,” he drawled as they entered the room. Kiron noted a faint accent there, different from his own. “I suppose I can count on the fact that you read your assigned scroll?”
He sounded as if he meant the opposite, that he could count on Orest not having read the scroll.
“It is fifteen stanzas in praise of Te-oth, the god of scribes and the bringer of writing to mankind,” Orest replied, taking his seat on the cushion, and settling his desk on his lap. Kiron followed his example, a little awkwardly. “There are two initial stanzas about Te-oth specifically, several on how much a blessing writing and being able to write are, several more in praise of the profession of scribes and contrasting that profession with the misery of all others. I did notice that the author did not mention either Jouster or Councilor to the Great Ones as being inferior to the position of scribe, however.”
“Ah, but a Jouster is a sort of soldier, and a Councilor to the Great Ones has had to learn the craft of the scribe, so they are implied,” Arit retorted.
Orest shrugged. “The final two stanzas praise Te-oth for being the god who most consistently blesses mankind.”
All during this recitation, the tutor’s left eyebrow rose until it had climbed halfway up his forehead. “Well,” he said, when Orest was finished. “I must admit I am pleasantly surprised. If this new diligence is as a result of your association with my new pupil, I am going to revise my initial negative expectations of his influence on you. And as a reward—” Here he bent down, removed the jar of scrolls that had been at Orest’s side, and replaced it with a different one. “—here is literature you will find much more to your liking. Pick any of the three, you’ll be reading all of them and more eventually. I want you to read and then copy each of them, and since you will be needing them in your new career, I suggest you be more careful than you usually are in your copying.”
At that, Orest eagerly plucked a scroll out of the jar, unrolled it, and began scanning it. His face lit up. “Te-karna’s Natural History of Swamp Dragons! Thank you, Master!”
“Don’t thank me, thank your sister,” said the tutor, “and the Lord of Jousters. She’s the one who suggested that you would probably be more attentive if you were to concentrate on this particular subject, and she is the one who ran over after Dawn Rites with these scrolls borrowed from the temple librarian. What is more, by this time she has already spoken to the Lord of the Jousters about getting the loan of more scrolls. I fully expect him to agree. I believe he will be charmed by her audacity, which is just as well, since he is a man whom I would not care to cross.”
“Nor I,” Kiron murmured, earning himself a glance of approval from the tutor.
Orest’s face was a study in shock and chagrin. “I guess I owe her my thanks,” he said slowly.
“And an apology,” Kiron muttered, feeling as if Aket-ten was due more respect from her brother than he had seen. He had been very patronizing last night, even if she had been acting like a know-it-all, and this was how she had responded.
“You owe her more than that. You owe her the courtesy of being diligent from now on. Now, get to your work.” The tutor made an impatient gesture.
“And remember when it comes to your copying, if you mar the original—”
“—you have Father’s permission to beat me,” Orest said, with an air of having heard that before.
“No. I have the temple librarian’s orders to beat you until you will have to stand to eat,” the tutor said grimly. “She said, ‘A boy’s brains are in his buttocks; he learns better when beaten.’ I suggest that it would prove wise to take extra care and not force me to prove that theorem.”
Kiron was very glad that he’d had so much practice in keeping his feelings from showing, or he would probably have destroyed this new friendship by laughing at the expression on Orest’s face until he was sick.
But now it was his turn, as Orest bent over the scroll and the tutor turned to him. “So, boy, what do you know?”
“Nothing, master,” Kiron replied truthfully. “Or practically nothing. The little script I know is Tian.”
“Ah, chicken scratches.” The tutor dismissed Tian writing with an airy wave of his hand. “Just as well, then, you have nothing to unlearn. Well, here is your scroll, and here is a box of potsherds, and this is your pen. Take your scroll, and lay it out before you with the weights.”
It was a very short scroll, and fit perfectly across the top of his lap-desk. The weights were handsome ones, carved pale-brown soapstone images of—such a coincidence—the god Te-oth, in his bird-headed human form, his long, curved ibis bill poking out from beneath his wig.
“That’s right,” the tutor said approvingly. “Now take your pen in your hand as you see Orest doing. Good. Dip it in the ink. Not so much that you will drip, not so little that you will make an unreadable scratch.”
That was a little trickier; the reed pen had to be dipped several times before the tutor was happy.
“Now,” he said, pointing to the first symbol on the scroll with a longer reed. “This is aht.”
Slowly, the tutor took Kiron through the signs and hieratic shapes for the sounds of words. There were a great many of them, but fortunately the signs were all things that were easy to recognize, pictures of things which began with the sound in question, and the hieratic shapes were each a kind of sketch of that picture. Slowly, and with infinite care, he copied the hieratic shapes onto his potsherds. Over and over and over. When he came to the end of the scroll, he was required to go back to the beginning and copy again, forming the sound in his mind as he did so, melding shape, picture, and sound in his head. When he ran out of potsherds, it came as no great surprise to him that the tutor had another box ready for him. Bits of broken pottery were the logical thing to use to practice on; there were always plenty of them, and they served much better than precious papyrus.
It was harder work than it sounded, and by the time the lesson was over, he had a much greater respect for scribes than he had ever had before. Such a lot of shapes! He was certain he would never get them all right. And somehow, he was going to learn how to put those shapes together into words, and words into meaning. . . . Well, if Orest could manage, so could he.
Now he understood why the work of scribes was so important. Words, written words, must be magic, it took so much effort to set them down correctly. And he wondered, did scribes define the world and keep it from spinning off into other shapes with their hedge of words?
He was absolutely so mind-weary by the time the tutor declared that they were finished that he felt as if he had just done a week’s worth of work in a mere morning—
But there were, it seemed, to be a new set of lessons to replace the “mathematica” lessons that Orest had so despised.
As Orest carefully rolled up his scroll, and Kiron capped his pot of ink, the tutor addressed them both. “This will be something new for both of you, I think. You, Kiron, should have no difficulties, even injured as you are, but it is the opinion of the Lord of the Jousters that you, Orest, are in need of conditioning before you undertake to tame a dragon. Therefore, you are both to follow me, now, and I am to deliver you to the kymnasi.”
Now Kiron had not the faintest idea what the tutor was talking about; this was an Altan word that he had never heard before. But Orest looked considerably happier at that moment, so Kiron assumed that whatever it meant, it was not going to involve more scrolls and pens.
The tutor marched them out of the room, through several of the house’s public rooms, and straight out the door.
This was the first time that Kiron had been outside of Lord Ya-tiren’s house, for the ash pit where he took Avatre was well inside the garden walls. This was certainly the first time he had seen Alta City except for fleeting glances as he guided Avatre in that tricky bit of a hop, and he had to stop dead in his tracks and just look for a moment.
Lord Ya-tiren’s home was evidently in one of the outer rings of the city and stood, like its neighbors, on the top of a ridge. The ground sloped away toward the canal from this point. From here, Kiron got a good look at the area surrounding this—well, it was a minor palace, apparently. It stood among other fine homes; to the left was another palace like it, and to the right was a temple surrounded by a walled garden. He suspected that this was the temple to which Aket-ten was attached as a Nestling. These structures all stood along one side of a spacious avenue wide enough for several chariots to pass side by side. Beyond the avenue was one of the seven canals that ringed the city, and on the other side of the canal were more buildings, which seemed to be a bit smaller and crowded more closely together than those on this side of the canal. But beyond that, in the distance, was the heart and core of the city, a hill upon which the Palace of the Great Ones stood, as well as the Great Temple of Khum the Light-Bringer, and several other important buildings and temples. Built of alabaster and limestone, they shone in the sunlight as if they were gilded. And Kiron suddenly understood in that moment that no matter how big Mefis had been, Alta City was ten, a hundred times larger.
“Come along,” the tutor said, a little impatiently, but not without a look of understanding. Kiron followed down the stairs of the villa to the avenue, feeling dwarfed and altogether insignificant in the throng of humanity swirling around him. The thick walls of the villa had kept out the noises of the traffic, and the hum of hundreds and thousands of voices, but now it all surrounded him, and he for just a moment he found it a little hard to breathe.
But it appeared that this segment of the ring was a little city unto itself, for once they got past the next-door villa, there were markets, with shops and craftsmen. So everything that might be needed was here, within reach. And from the way people were acting, they were anything but strangers to one another.
All right, then, he told himself. This is just like a lot of villages all running into one another. It’s not just a giant hive. And some people recognized either the tutor or Orest as they passed, and smiled, or nodded a greeting.
Still, there were a lot of people. It looked as if, where the population of Tia was strung out along the Great Mother River, the population of Alta was mostly concentrated here. He was going to have to think about that, and what it might mean.
Meanwhile, they continued their brisk walk down the avenue, with the occasional cart or chariot passing by, and plenty of people being taken here and there in covered or even enclosed litters. There were a hundred scents in the air, and few of them were unpleasant; the ever-present scent of water, of course, and various cooking odors, and hot stone, and fires, and the scents of flowers that Kiron couldn’t identify. Most people seemed to be wearing perfume as well. There were differences from Tia, but truth to tell, Kiron would have said that there were more similarities than differences. The accent and some of the words differed, of course, enough that he had to think to understand people, though Altan was the tongue of his childhood, and he was falling back into the accent far faster than he would have thought.
They passed a cook shop, with a beer shop beside it; there were a couple of men arguing heatedly over something, while several bystanders listened as if their debate was some sort of entertainment. The tutor turned into what appeared to be another temple building, and they followed.
It turned out to be something quite different. There was a sort of entrance hall that they passed straight through; on the other side of that hall was an enormous courtyard, open to the sky, with a pool in the middle of it. Except for the pool, it looked like one of the Jousters’ landing courtyards, but this one was covered in turf, and there were young men engaged in all manner of sports spread out all over it, and more were swimming back and forth through the water.
Orest looked positively eager as the tutor summoned a white-kilted servant and requested the presence of At-alon. The servant hurried off, and came back with a middle-aged man who was as thoroughly Altan as the tutor was not; black-haired and dark-eyed, with a jutting chin, stocky and incredibly muscular.
“Ya-tiren’s boys, eh?” he said, and looked them up and down. “Thank you, Master Arit. I expect they’ll be able to find their way here from now on, when you’re done with them for the day.”
“I expect they will,” the tutor said dryly. “I’ll leave them here with you, then. Lord Ya-tiren expects them back in time for the noon meal.”
With that, the tutor left them; Kiron shifted his weight from foot to foot, wondering what was to come next.
“You,” the trainer said, pointing at Kiron, “are going to go do very light work until those ribs heal. I’ll have you myself. But you,” he continued, looking at Orest, “need all-around conditioning. See those boys over there?” he pointed to a group of boys of mixed ages, stretching and bending nearby, at the direction of another white-kilted man. “You go join them. They’ll be your work group until I say differently, or the Lord of the Jousters has orders. Hop!”
Orest hopped, without a single word of question or complaint, running off to join the group. He stopped only long enough to explain his presence to the man in charge, then took his place among the other boys. At-alon beckoned, and Kiron followed; they went around the outside of the huge courtyard until At-alon entered one of the doorways into it.
“Now don’t be alarmed; I’m not the sort that’s looking for a pretty boy,” the trainer said gruffly. “But I have to find out just where you’re hurt, and how, which means that I’ll be feeling you all over and pulling on you a bit to see what’s wrong. Hold your arms up, stand still, and if you feel pain—that’s pain, not general aches—say so.”
So Kiron was felt and poked and prodded, and it was soon ascertained that the pain was in his shoulders (still) and the rib cage at his back and left side.
“Good enough,” said At-alon. “Dislocated shoulders that are healing, and cracked ribs that are setting. Healers did a good job on your cuts, from the look of it. You’ve got fine muscle, boy, you’re going to need it, and we don’t want you to lose it while you heal up. So, since there’s nothing wrong with your legs, let’s see you do running rounds of the court until I say stop. Begin at a walk, and when you feel warmed up, increase speed to a run.”
Kiron obeyed, although it felt very, very strange to be running without having a place to be running to, and a duty at the end of the run. Still, in theory at least, he understood what At-alon was doing; since he wasn’t undergoing the strenuous work of a dragon-boy anymore, he knew that he’d better be getting some form of exercise or he’d lose all of the muscle he’d put on. So he ran.
He wasn’t the only runner; there were several boys and men doing the same thing. Some were faster than he, some slower; after a while, he began to feel a sort of pleasure in the exercise. The soft turf kept his ribs from jarring too much, and though he couldn’t run as freely or as fast as he used to because of the pain, it was still good to stretch the muscles of his legs. He could even feel them loosening as he ran.
Finally, the instructor beckoned to him to come into the center area where he was waiting. And then he did some strange arm movements with bags of sand in his hands; he supposed that they must be strengthening exercises, though for someone used to flinging big chunks of meat about and wheeling heavy barrows, they seemed a bit—feeble. After those, he did some bending and stretching, though not too much of those, because it put pressure on his rib cage. Then—carefully—some different things with bags of sand in his hands, only this time, when it began to hurt, he was to stop.
Orest was doing pretty much the same sort of things, only not as long, and not as hard, and he was getting tired much faster than Kiron was. It gave Kiron a feeling of wry satisfaction; at least here he was better than Orest at something. Or he would be until Orest toughened up.
Finally, they were sent to the baths, where they were bathed by yet more servants, massaged with oil with a crisp scent to it, and in Kiron’s case, rebandaged. Their tunics were taken away and brought back freshly cleaned. Then they were sent home, and it was time for the noon meal and a much-needed rest, for Altans, like Tians, took a rest, or even a nap, after the noon meal at the heat of the day. And today, Kiron was very happy to have that privilege that he never enjoyed as a dragon boy except during the rainy season.
They took their noon meal with the rest of the household; Lord Ya-tiren and those of his older sons who were still living at home. Orest came in for a great deal of teasing but some serious congratulation that he had been—tentatively at least—accepted as this new sort of Jouster in training. Kiron kept very quiet, and simply observed, though he caught Lord Ya-tiren watching him with approval now and again. Evidently Orest’s father felt that he, Kiron, was a good influence! Aket-ten was also much in evidence, reporting with triumph that the Lord of the Jousters had promised to lend copies of every scroll of Jousting training and dragon lore that the Jousters possessed. Kiron sighed. This was a little like hearing that the cooks were preparing a feast of every favorite food one had, at a time when toothache kept one from eating any of it!
He resolved to put more effort into learning to read.
Finally, with stomach full and the strong palm wine the lord favored at his table making Kiron a bit drowsy, he returned to the courtyard where Avatre was to discover that someone had cleverly set up a box of sand where she could deposit her leavings.
And before he could clean it out, a servant appeared.
Are they hovering just out of sight? he wondered, startled, Or are they able to know what I’m thinking? Either way, it made him uneasy; Orest might take such things for granted, but he wasn’t used to having people appear out of nowhere to take a task out of his hands before he started it.
“It is by the direction of the Order of Magi, my Lord, that the dragon’s—droppings—be taken to them, as the Jousting dragons’ are,” said the servant, with great politeness, relieving him of the shovel he had picked up. “That is my assignment, and your dragon seems not to mind.”
“Oh, she’s safe enough,” Kiron said blankly. “But I thought that—well, she looks dangerous, and your Jousting dragons are dangerous, so I thought—”
“That we would be afraid?” the servant replied, and smiled. “No, my Lord. The Lady Aket-ten told us that we need not fear the little dragon. This is all the assurance we need.”
“Well—ah—thank you, then,” Kiron replied, and once the servant and his burden were gone, after giving Avatre a great deal of attention and scratching, he went to lie down on his cot in the shade.
His dreams were full of hieroglyphs and hieratic script at first, but then the sign for “wah,” which was a pair of wings, swept under him and carried him off, and the wings turned into Avatre.
And then his dreams were full of flying.

The afternoon was given over, as Orest had said, to listening to philosophers and historians teach. Except that Avatre needed some flying exercise (though not nearly as much as a fully grown Jousting dragon did).
And since Orest was going to have to learn this anyway, Kiron decided to help his friend out by recruiting him to learn how to put the harness on a dragon, using Avatre, who would by far be the easiest he would ever handle until his own dragon got used to the weight and feel of it. The philosophers and historians would still be there when Avatre had been exercised.
“Later I’ll let you fly her, too, if she’ll take you,” he said, “But not until I’m healed, and she’s stronger, and not until I’m sure, really sure, that she’ll always obey me if I’m on the ground.”
Orest looked disappointed, but he didn’t voice it, which Kiron thought was very much to his credit.
Avatre was practically quivering with excitement, and the need to get into the sky. Kiron had to use a stool to get onto her back; his ribs hurt him too much when he tried to climb up the usual way, even with her lying down.
Finally he gave her the signal she was longing for, and she leaped up like an arrow from a fully pulled bow. And she jarred him so that he sucked in his breath in a hiss to keep from yelping and startling her. This wasn’t going to be easy. . . .
And, in fact, until she reached the height that pleased her and found a thermal to soar with, it was damnably painful.
But once she spread her wings to the warm, rising air and stopped jouncing him, and he was able to look down—he found himself thinking that the view was worth some pain.
The hot wind of the kamiseen held them aloft; up here it tasted of the arid desert, a little. Avatre stretched her wings and her neck and he could swear that he saw her smiling. From here he could see the innermost two canals of the seven that ringed Alta City, and a good part of the third. And from here, it was quite clear how the city had grown. The first canal must have been dug around a relatively high spot in the delta marshlands, and everything that was dug up had been deposited in the center, building up what eventually became the hill upon which the Great Ones’ Palace and all the important temples stood, as well as the minor palaces of all of the most important nobles of Alta. Probably everyone in Alta City had once lived there, but eventually, as the city grew, and those of rank and wealth wished more and more land, the common folk were pushed across the canal to the other side.
Where they promptly built themselves another circular canal to protect themselves, depositing what they dug out on the land they intended to occupy, exactly as the Altan farmers were doing out in the marshlands even now. So this second ring of houses, markets, and craftsmen also had its own hill, or rather, ridge, not as tall as the Royal Hill, but certainly enough to give those who lived on top of it a slightly more panoramic view than those who did not.
Then, as the nobles and wealthy grew more numerous, and there began to be divisions of rank even among the notable, the lesser nobility found themselves being pushed off the Royal Hill. They certainly would not have chosen to live among the commoners of the First Ring, and the commoners had no intentions of surrendering what they had a second time, so—a third canal was dug, forming the Second Ring, where those who could not claim divine blood in their veins settled. And again, this ring had a raised ridge of its own running down the center of the ring, which was where Lord Ya-tiren’s villa stood, as well as the temples that could not compete for status on Royal Hill.
By this time, of course, Kiron could guess the next part of the tale. With nobility now living in the outermost ring, there would be a call for protection—
He peered in the direction of the Third Canal; although the air was much hazier here than in Tia, he thought he saw a dragon in the distance. He gave Avatre the signal to send her in that direction—which was, in any case, a safer one than allowing her to head in the one she wanted, which was to try the thermals and updrafts of Royal Hill. He had an idea that overflying the Palace of the Great Ones might get him in a spot of trouble.
How she read the air, he could not guess, but she seemed to be able to see thermals somehow. She spiraled up the one she was in, then began a long glide down over the Third Canal, and caught another on the opposite side. And just as Kiron had guessed, down below were the barracks of the army, the shops and cook shops and drink shops that catered to them, the homes of those who ran and served in those shops, and the whole support structure of armories and stables, forges and supply warehouses, Healers and training grounds and practice fields that an army needed.
And here, too, were the temples of those gods that loved soldiers, and that soldiers loved, and the pens of animals waiting to be sacrificed.
And, as he had expected, the Jousters’ Compound.
It looked very like its Tian counterpart, with some differences. Three fourths of the pens had hot water wallows, not sand pits. And in those pens that had wallows, the dragons were a little smaller than those he was used to, their colors darker. They looked up as soon as they spotted him, of course, their heads weaving back and forth on their long necks. The familiar sounds of slightly irritated dragons drifted up to him from below.
Well, he didn’t want to make any trouble for anyone, especially not the dragon boys who might have to calm their charges if they got any more restless, so he angled Avatre away, curious though she was to look at these odd and unfamiliar relatives.
The Third Ring did not have a hill; whether this was by accident or chance, Kiron could not tell. It might merely have been that the Third Ring covered so much area that the ground that had been dug to make the Fourth Canal was barely enough to raise it all above flood level. Then again, since the Third Ring was devoted entirely to Alta’s military, it could be that no one had felt the need to be physically higher than anyone else.
Beyond the Fourth Canal it was quite clear that the land had been given over to farming, and Kiron had no real interest in seeing what lay there. He knew that three more canals lay beyond the Fourth, probably settled as farmers prospered and their sons desired farms of their own, and continued what had now become habit and custom, of building up farmland by digging out a canal that was as much for drainage as for protection. The canals were all linked by subchannels that cut across the rings like the spokes of a wheel; more spokes were formed by the bridges that linked the roads of the Rings. It was unexpectedly beautiful, and when he thought about all of the labor that had gone into creating the city, his head just swam.
Other than the dragons of the Jousters’ Compound, no one looked up when the shadow of a flying dragon passed over them. Avatre soared from thermal to thermal above the Third Ring to her heart’s content. There were boats out in the canals; little fishing boats, larger barges. Some were hauling cargo from the outer to the inner rings; some were clearly pleasure boats, or the boats carrying officials about on their duties. As he watched, he even saw a species of small boat that seemed to be coming in to land whenever someone on shore hailed it. After a moment, it came to him that these boats must be for hire, to take people wherever in the Rings they wished to go, like hired litters or chariots. That would be much faster than walking, though he doubted that it would be faster than driving a chariot.
The sound of a gong below him startled him, and he looked straight down to discover that he was directly above one of the temples, where a ritual was just beginning, the gong being the signal for the worshipers to gather. And that reminded him that he had an appointment of his own to keep; more lessons. He sent Avatre angling back the way she had come, crossed the Third Canal, and soon spotted Lord Ya-tiren’s manor, with Orest watching anxiously down in one of the minor courtyards. A servant was just arriving with a barrowload of meat, and seeing that, Avatre was not at all loath to land.
Nor, truth to tell, was Kiron; flying required a great deal of the rider, as he shifted his weight and balance to help his dragon. Between that exertion and the exercises of the morning, he was sore.
On the whole, he was going to welcome these lessons, if it meant he might sit at his leisure and merely listen.
Orest hurried to help him take off Avatre’s harness; all of her attention was on that barrow, and when Kiron wheeled it close enough to her that she could reach it, she dove in. He knew that when she was sated, she would want to sleep, so she would not miss him for the rest of the afternoon.
“I was beginning to wonder if you’d decided to fly off again, after seeing all the lessons you were going to have to do,” Orest said, only half teasing, as they made their way out of the manor again, this time going toward the temple next door.
“Why, because you would have?” Kiron teased.
Orest made a face. “Well, yes, actually. We’re going to the temple where my sister is a Nestling; they hold lectures on philosophy and history in the courtyards there. Which do you want first?”
Kiron shrugged as much as he could without further jarring his rib cage. “It’s all one to me; you pick.”
Orest sighed. “History, then. Philosophers go on forever unless it’s close to dinnertime.”
Kiron laughed, and followed his friend in through the gates of the temple, which featured a pair of rainbow-colored wings supporting a slender golden flame. Despite Orest’s glum face, he had a notion that this was going to be interesting. He was beginning to have the impression that Orest was not, and never would be interested in anything that required exercise of his mind, but Kiron felt rather like a sponge that had been dry all of its life and had suddenly been put into water. Let Orest sigh and look gloomy; he was going to enjoy all this “tutoring.”