"Mercedes Lackey - Dragon Jousters 2 - Alta" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

onions and a little meat. He did not have a great deal to pack either. By the time she was finishedтАФ
leaving nothing but the halter rope this morning!тАФso was he.

And so, apparently, was the Mouth. Vetch looked up to see the Mouth waiting in the shelter of the date
palms, the halter of a camel in one hand. Once Vetch was aware of the preparations, the Mouth made the
camel kneel, and mounted, curling one leg over the front of the saddle and locking a foot behind the

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other knee, then giving the beast the command to rise. With a groan of complaint, the camel climbed
back up to his feet and the Mouth started off, tapping the camel's shoulder with a crop to make it trot.

The kamiseen whined, filling the silence that the Mouth left behind; carried on it were the smokes of
cooking fires, and the breath of the deeper desert where even the Bedu did not venture. Vetch took his
time in harnessing Avatre; it wasn't as if they would have any trouble finding their guide once they were
in the air! In fact, they would probably spend a lot of time circling overhead as the camel crossed the
desert beneath them at what would seem to be the pace of a tortoise compared to that of the dragon.

And that was, in fact, exactly what happened. Although the rider was out of sight by the time Avatre
pushed off the ground with Vetch on her back, it was not long before Vetch spotted their guide, and it
took relatively little effort to catch up.

Avatre was a fine flyer now, and Vetch was used to the bounding wingbeats that left the stomach
somewhere behind. In fact, unless he actually thought about it, he never even noticed it; he was so in
tune with her, it sometimes felt to him as if they were part of a single, united creature, conqueror of the
air.

At first, Avatre had to do a great deal of actual flying, doubling back and forth across their guide's path
in that peculiar combination of flying and gliding that the dragons used when there were no thermals to
ride. And the air of early dawn was cold enough to numb the feet and hands and nose; Avatre didn't like
it much, and to tell the truth, neither did Vetch. He shivered in the chill, and was just grateful that the
kamiseen gave Avatre something to ride. If this had been still air, she'd have had to work a lot harder. It
was the gods' own gift that she had made her First Flight at the beginning of the kamiseen, for the wind
had aided them all across the desert. Had it not been the season of the wind, he had the feeling that they
would be making old bones together in the sand, even now.

But as the sun rose and the sand began to heat up, he stopped shivering and Avatre was able to switch
from tacking back and forth on the wind to flying as hawks and falcons of the desert did, spiraling
passively up one thermal, then gliding down until she found another to repeat the process, following
roughly the same course as their guide. For his part, as far as Vetch could tell from above, the Mouth
was singularly unperturbed about whether or not they were keeping up, but kept the camel at a steady,
groundeating lope. Fast enough to make good time and the sort of pace a camel could keep up
indefinitely.

Vetch was keeping an eye on the horizon as well as on their guide, and when, shortly after midday, a
thin line of green appeared along it, he was not at all surprised that their guide chose the shelter of a
thicket of acacia trees to stop at, and dismounted. The Mouth didn't wave to Vetch from below, but then
again, he didn't need to, for the message of the green horizon was clear enough. The Mouth had brought
them to within sight of land claimed only by Alta; peaceful land, where he could not run into either