Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen Read Free Book Online Page B

Likkarn's being broken back to stallboy. The story of Sarkkhan and the bag was told again, and a new piece of information added.
    "He didn't lose his single room. Even Master Sarkkhan would not dare put that worm waste in here with us," said Balakk. He had proudly refused a single room each year it had been offered. "
We'll
not have a weeder in here." It was the last coherent sentence Jakkin
heard. A few fragments drifted around the room, and then the air pulsed with heavy breathing and the light snores of sleepers.
    ***
    J AKKIN WAITED ANOTHER half hour before rising. In the dark, the aching in his shoulders and back seemed multiplied. He suppressed a groan and stood. Carrying his sandals, he tiptoed out the door. If anyone saw him, they would suspect he was meeting a girl. Maybe even Akki. He smiled at the thought. Of all the bond girls at the nursery, she was the best looking by far. And the only one who stayed apart. He went out of the bondhouse into the night.
    At first the night seemed quiet, but then Jakkin began to distinguish sounds. The
pick-buzz
of nightwings flittering around the eaves of the barn, the occasional grunting of a stud Settling in his stall. Jakkin drifted toward the incubarn.
    Suddenly he sensed rather than heard the silent-winged approach of a drakk, the snake-headed, deadeyed eggsucker so despised and feared by dragon breeders. As he looked up,
it flew across Akkhan, its great wingspread momentarily blotting the moon from sight. He would have to report it in the morning, even though it meant exposing his own night wandering. If there was a colony of drakk nearby, it would have to be wiped out. Hundreds of eggs from one hatching could be lost to a single drakk family. The large adult drakk preyed on hatchlings, too, tearing off wings, legs, huge hunks of flesh from the living young with their razored talons. For good reason, there was a high bounty on drakk. Jakkin waited until the monster was gone from sight. It would not be back until Dark-After was past, since it had just checked the area with its sensors.
    In the nursery, a hen dragon stomped her feet at Jakkin's approach, but he did not fear her roaring out. Once the nestlings were hatched, the hens were usually quiet at night, wrapped contentedly around their squirming charges. They chewed burnwort and drizzled the juices into their hatchlings' mouths. For the first month of life, after the hatchlings grew out of their eggskins, they would exist on nothing but the juice. Their little red
toothbuds would grow into sharp white points, and then the hatchlings, too, could chew the leaves of blisterweed and wort, grinding out the juices for themselves and then following the juice with the mashed leaves for bulk.
    Jakkin reached the door of the barn and, standing in a shadow, looked around. There was no one in sight. He lifted the latch and went in.
    In the half-light supplied by the sulfur lamp, he made his way down the narrow halls. Unlike the stud barn, where wide hallways accommodated the cock dragons, these halls were used only for the human workers. Each compartment for the female and her brood had two doors, one small door opening into the hall and one wide door to the outside. The incubarn was a low, round building built around a central mow, a single column that supported the roof. Around the column was a hollow frame of slats which served as a ventilator to discharge the steam from the packed weed and wort leaves. Jakkin had once heard someone comment that the steam rising up was sometimes so dense you could wash your hands in it. At the top of the roof, the steam
was caught in a series of vents that passed back through the barn to keep the individual compartments warm, even in the cold of Dark-After. It was thought that the warmer the hatchlings were kept, the faster and bigger they grew.
    The workers' walkway was in between the central mow and the hens' compartments. Sweat began to trickle under Jakkin's arms, but the heat from the