A Sending of Dragons by Jane Yolen Page A

They had to be bent and shaped and tucked into the ore holes, and most of the time they crumbled between his inept fingers.
    He was just beginning to get the feel of it, under the gruff tutelage of a one-eyed man he called Brekk (his sign was simply a single staring eye), when there was a loud gonging that echoed and re-echoed off the cave walls. At the sound, so loud in the enforced silence of the tunnels, the men set down their tools and bags and shuffled to the main cavern. Jakkin followed them.
    It was only when he was back in the main cave that he realized it was a shift change,
much like Sarkkhan’s Nursery, where a few of the bond boys had night-watch duty and others worked in the day. He almost laughed aloud remembering his friends Errikkin, who loved being in bond, and Slakk, who’d try anything to get out of work.
    Brekk pushed him toward a small crevice where there was a grassy pallet set upon the stone. He gave Jakkin a brief smile that shut his one good eye and left the empty socket staring.
    â€œ
Sleep!
” he commanded, the picture being one of a face with both eyes closed. It was accompanied by a kind of mental hum-song.
    Jakkin needed no further urging. He climbed into his sleep crevice and lay down on the grass. He was just wondering that the grass was so fresh and sweet-smelling when sleep overcame him, and with it strange dark dreams.
    ***
    T HAT SAME PATTERN of work and sleep, broken by silent meals, continued for a number of rotations. In the half-light of the caves, Jakkin had no idea whether he worked for
hours or days at a time, but simply slogged along until the gong. After a while he almost forgot there
was
anything but the caves, holding only to Makk’s promise that they would eventually go to the Place of Women, where Akki was being kept.
    As he found himself slipping into the same kind of somnambulant shuffle as the others, he tried to rouse himself with spoken speech. He worked as far from the men as he could manage, whispering little ditties in a voice that carried no farther than his own shadow. He knew if he didn’t talk to himself, he would eventually lose the use of ear and tongue. So he recited Fewmets Ferkkin stories, hummed old ballads, even found he’d a gift for verse. He made up seventeen different stanzas of a poem that began “There once was a bond boy named Jakkin . . .” using
lackin’, snackin’,
and
trackin’
among the rhymes. When he really became bored with his own company and felt himself slipping back into the half-sleep, he invented imaginary dialogues with Akki. She ended every one of these conversations with a hug. He got so he could feel her arms around him, the softness of her cheek on his.
    One time he tried to slip away down an empty passage, but Makk caught him before he was around the first turn, and cuffed him soundly. Jakkin returned to the others, his ears ringing and his mind filled with the angry mutterings of the other men. But he noticed he wasn’t the only one cuffed. Brekk had his head knocked a few times, and another man, Orkkon, was roughed up for dropping his iron stirring stick. But Orkkon was ill, not lazy, and after a second beating he lay on his pallet three rotations, tossing and sweating. He never moaned aloud, though his sendings were filled with formless dark clouds that Jakkin read as fever.
    It was a wonder to Jakkin that the men bore the endless drudgery without complaining. What they did was not any more difficult or arduous than the tasks he’d done at Sarkkhan’s Nursery, but there was no variety. And there were no voices. He decided that it was the human voice he missed the most—that and the brightly colored sendings of the dragons. Sound and light. Without those, how could a person survive?
    And yet—his traitor mind continued—these men of the mountains survived, and
thrived. Men—and not-men. Survived but at a price. Jakkin guarded his thoughts as he made