A Sending of Dragons by Jane Yolen Page B

a list of the things these cavemen lacked: warmth, emotion, laughter, love—all those things that made life worthwhile. The list comforted him.
    â€œI
will
get out of here,” he whispered to himself. “I’ll find Akki and go. Anything on the outside will be bearable after this boredom. Anything.” And then he remembered Heart’s Blood dying, shook his head, and was silent.
    ***
    I T WAS THE ninth or tenth rotation—he’d lost count somewhere along the way—when a runner came to the men as they ate. Jakkin knew him for a stranger even from far away because he was younger than the rest and dressed differently. He was wearing a kind of light-colored woven cloth instead of the loincloths of the ore workers or the darker coveralls of the miners, which were made of the eggskin that hatchlings shed.
    The boy’s sending was frantic, emotional, full of color, which further marked him.
    â€œ
Great Mother trembles,
” he sent, a mael
strom of dark tones. “
She pants. Her birth hole swells. It does not open. All our women fear.
”
    Makk and the other men made a tight circle around the boy. Putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder, Makk sent, “
I come. Orkkon comes, whose father’s father was First Healer.
”
    The circle broke apart and re-formed around Orkkon, who still lay sweating on his pallet. Jakkin, on the far edges of the circle, watched as Makk knelt by Orkkon and put a hand on his head.
    â€œ
You come,
” Makk sent.
    Orkkon managed, with Makk’s support, to sit up. Jakkin could see the sweat running down his chest and the flush on his cheeks. He seemed to be having trouble breathing.
    â€œ
You come with me,
” Makk sent again.
    There was no answering pattern from Orkkon. His mind seemed as flushed and sweaty as his body.
    â€œWait!” Jakkin cried aloud, wincing as the men turned toward him with another brutal, dark sending. At least he had gotten their attention. “
Wait,
” he sent. “
I am a Dragon Healer in my own place. Let Orkkon stay here. He is too sick anyway. Let me go instead.
”
    Makk pushed the sweating man back down on his bed and stood. As he walked toward Jakkin, Jakkin put out his hand. Puzzled, Makk stopped for a moment, then moved forward again. He took Jakkin’s hand in his. The instant they touched Jakkin could feel his mind being invaded and he willed it to show pictures of himself and Heart’s Blood in the cavernous incubarn. His memory flooded back and he took the memory, shaping it to his own use. There was the dark barn and the great hen towering over him, the fire in her eyes now warm and inviting. Then the great red circling the room in the peculiar halting rhythm of the pregnant female. Next he showed her squatting over the shallow hole dug into the sandy floor. All the while Jakkin soothed her. “Easy, easy, my beauty, easy, easy, my red.” He moved the sending forward, concentrating on the nest itself as the eggs cascaded from the dragon’s birth channel into the hole. “
This I have done many times,
” his sending promised. He masked his traitorous afterthought that
many
was a gross exaggeration.
    For a moment Makk didn’t respond,
though there seemed to be a murmured sending from the other men, approval of some sort. At last Makk sent a black ropelike form shooting into Jakkin’s sending, whipping around the arm of the boy pictured there and dragging the dream boy away. Like all of Makk’s sendings, it was unambiguous in its meaning.
    â€œ
Come,
” said his sending. “
Great Mother needs. Come.
”

14
    T HE THREE OF THEM trotted down the tunnels, and though Jakkin tried to mark the way, they made too many turnings and switchbacks for him to remember. Yet, fast as they traveled, Makk and the boy never hesitated; the tunnels seemed to be as familiar to them as the hallways in a nursery bondhouse.
    Jakkin wondered what he would find when