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“Manora called me to witness the birth of Kylara’s child.”
F’lar maintained an expression of polite interest. He knew perfectly well that Lessa suspected the child was his, and it could have been, he admitted privately, but he doubted it. Kylara had been one of the ten candidates from the same Search three years ago which had discovered Lessa. Like others who survived Impression, Kylara had found certain aspects of Weyr life exactly suited to her temperament. She had gone from one rider’s weyr to another’s. She had even seduced F’lar—not at all against his will, to be sure. Now that he was Weyrleader, he found it wiser to ignore her efforts to continue the relationship. T’bor had taken her in hand and had had his hands full until he retired her to the Lower Caverns, well advanced in pregnancy.
Aside from having the amorous tendencies of a green dragon, Kylara was quick and ambitious. She would make a strong Weyrwoman, so F’lar had charged Manora and Lessa with the job of planting the notion in Kylara’s mind. In the capacity of Weyrwoman . . . of another Weyr . . . her intense drives would be used to Pern’s advantage. She had not learned the severe lessons of restraint and patience that Lessa had, and she didn’t have Lessa’s devious mind. Fortunately she was in considerable awe of Lessa, and F’lar suspected that Lessa was subtly influencing this attitude. In Kylara’s case, F’lar preferred not to object to Lessa’s meddling.
“A fine son,” Lessa was saying.
F’lar sipped his klah. She was not going to get him to admit any responsibility.
After a long pause Lessa added, “She has named him T’kil.”
F’lar suppressed a grin at Lessa’s failure to get a rise from him.
“Discreet of her.”
“Oh?”
“Yes,” F’lar replied blandly. “T’lar might be confusing if she took the second half of her name as is customary. ‘T’kil’ however, still indicates sire as well as dam.”
“While I was waiting for Council to end,” Lessa said after clearing her throat, “Manora and I checked the supply caverns. The tithing trains, which the Holds have been so gracious as to send us”—her voice was sharp—“are due within the week. There will shortly be bread fit to eat,” she added, wrinkling her nose at the crumbling gray pastry she was attempting to spread with cheese.
“A nice change,” F’lar agreed.
She paused.
“The Red Star performed its scheduled antic?”
He nodded.
“And R’gul’s doubts have been wiped away in the enlightening red glow?”
“Not at all.” F’lar grinned back at her, ignoring her sarcasm. “Not at all, but he will not be so vocal in his criticism.”
She swallowed quickly so she could speak. “You’d do well to cut out his criticism,” she said ruthlessly, gesturing with her knife as if plunging it into a man’s heart. “He is never going to accept your authority with good grace.”
“We need every bronze rider . . . there are only seven, you know,” he reminded her pointedly. “R’gul’s a good wingleader. He’ll settle down when the Threads fall. He needs proof to lay his doubts aside.”
“And the Red Star in the Eye Rock is not proof?” Lessa’s expressive eyes were wide.
F’lar was privately of Lessa’s opinion—that it might be wiser to remove R’gul’s stubborn contentiousness. But he could not sacrifice a wingleader, needing every dragon and rider as badly as he did.
“I don’t trust him,” she added darkly. She sipped at her hot drink, her gray eyes dark over the rim of her mug. As if, F’lar mused, she didn’t trust him, either.
And she didn’t, past a certain point. She had made that plain, and, in honesty, he couldn’t blame her. She did recognize that every action F’lar took was toward one end . . . the safety and preservation of dragonkind and weyrfolk and consequently the safety and preservation of Pern. To effect that end, he needed her full cooperation. When Weyr business or dragonlore were discussed, she suspended the antipathy he knew she felt for him. In conferences she supported him wholeheartedly and persuasively, but always he suspected the double edge to her comments and saw a speculative, suspicious look in her eyes. He needed not only her tolerance but her empathy.
“Tell me,” she said after a long silence, “did the sun touch the Finger Rock before the Red Star was bracketed in the Eye Rock or after?”
“Matter of fact, I’m not sure, as I did not see it myself . . . the concurrence lasts only a few moments but the two are supposed to be simultaneous.”
She frowned at him sourly. “Whom did you waste it on? R’gul?” She was provoked, her angry eyes looked everywhere but at him.
“I am Weyrleader,” he informed her curtly. She was unreasonable.
She awarded him one long, hard look before she bent to finish her meal. She ate very little, quickly and neatly. Compared to Jora, she didn’t eat enough in the course of an entire day to nourish a sick child. But then, there was no point in ever comparing Lessa to Jora.
He finished his own breakfast, absently piling the mugs together on the empty tray. She rose silently and removed the dishes.
“As soon as the Weyr is free, we’ll go,” he told her.
“So you said.” She nodded toward the sleeping queen, visible through the open arch. “We still must wait upon Ramoth.”
“Isn’t she rousing? Her tail’s been twitching for an hour.”
“She always does that about this time of day.”
F’lar leaned across the table, his brows drawn together thoughtfully as he watched the golden-forked tip of the queen’s tail jerk spasmodically from side to side.
“Mnementh, too. And always at dawn and early morning. As if somehow they associate that time of day with trouble . . . “
“Or the Red Star’s rising?” Lessa interjected.
Some subtle difference in her tone caused F’lar to glance quickly at her. It wasn’t anger now over having missed the morning’s phenomenon. Her eyes were fixed on nothing; her face, smooth at first, was soon wrinkled with a vaguely anxious frown as tiny lines formed between her arching, well-defined brows.
“Dawn . . . that’s when all warnings come,” she murmured.
“What kind of warnings?” he asked with quiet encouragement.
“There was that morning . . . a few days before . . . before you and Fax descended on Ruath Hold. Something woke me . . . a feeling, like a very heavy pressure . . . the sensation of some terrible danger threatening.” She was silent. “The Red Star was just rising.” The fingers of her left hand opened and closed. She gave a convulsive shudder. Her eyes refocused on him.
“You and Fax did come out of the northeast from Crom,” she said sharply, ignoring the fact, F’lar noticed, that the Red Star also rises north of true east.
“Indeed we did,” he grinned at her, remembering that morning vividly. “Although,” he added, gesturing around the great cavern to emphasize, “I prefer to believe I served you well that day . . . you remember it with displeasure?”
The look she gave him was coldly inscrutable.
“Danger comes in many guises.”
“I agree,” he replied amiably, determined not to rise to her bait. “Had any other rude awakenings?” he inquired conversationally.
The absolute stillness in the room brought his attention back to her. Her face had drained of all color.
“The day Fax invaded Ruath Hold.” Her voice was a barely articulated whisper. Her eyes were wide and staring. Her hands clenched the edge of the table. She said nothing for such a long interval that F’lar became concerned. This was an unexpectedly violent reaction to a casual question.
“Tell me,” he suggested softly.
She spoke in unemotional, impersonal tones, as if she were reciting a Traditional Ballad or something that had happened to an entirely different person.
“I was a child. Just eleven. I woke at dawn . . . “ Her voice trailed off. Her eyes remained focused on nothing, staring at a scene that had happened long ago.
F’lar
was stirred by an irresistible desire to comfort her. It struck him forcibly, even as he was stirred by this unusual compassion, that he had never thought that Lessa, of all people, would be troubled by so old a terror.
Mnementh sharply informed his rider that Lessa was obviously bothered a good deal. Enough so that her mental anguish was rousing Ramoth from sleep. In less accusing tones Mnementh informed F’lar that R’gul had finally taken off with his weyrling pupils. His dragon, Hath, however, was in a fine state of disorientation due to R’gul’s state of mind. Must F’lar unsettle everyone in the Weyr.
“Oh, be quiet,” F’lar retorted under his breath.
“Why?” Lessa demanded in her normal voice.
“I didn’t mean you, my dear Weyrwoman,” he assured her, smiling pleasantly, as if the entranced interlude had never occurred. “Mnementh is full of advice these days.”
“Like rider, like dragon,” she replied tartly.
Ramoth yawned mightily. Lessa was instantly on her feet, running to her dragon’s side, her slight figure dwarfed by the six-foot dragon head.
A tender, adoring expression flooded her face as she gazed into Ramoth’s gleaming opalescent eyes. F’lar clenched his teeth, envious, by the Egg, of a rider’s affection for her dragon.
In his mind he heard Mnementh’s dragon equivalent of laughter.
“She’s hungry,” Lessa informed F’lar, an echo of her love for Ramoth lingering in the soft line of her mouth, in the kindness in her gray eyes.
“She’s always hungry,” he observed and followed them out of the weyr.
Mnementh hovered courteously just beyond the ledge until Lessa and Ramoth had taken off. They glided down the Weyr Bowl, over the misty bathing lake, toward the feeding ground at the opposite end of the long oval that comprised the floor of Benden Weyr. The striated, precipitous walls were pierced with the black mouths of single weyr entrances, deserted at this time of day by the few dragons who might otherwise doze on their ledges in the wintry sun.
As F’lar vaulted to Mnementh’s smooth bronze neck, he hoped that Ramoth’s clutch would be spectacular, erasing the ignominy of the paltry dozen Nemorth had laid in each of her last few clutches.
He had no serious doubts of the improvement after Ramoth’s remarkable mating flight with his Mnementh. The bronze dragon smugly echoed his rider’s certainty, and both looked on the queen possessively as she curved her wings to land. She was twice Nemorth’s size, for one thing; her wings were half-a-wing again longer than Mnementh’s, who was the biggest of the seven male bronzes. F’lar looked to Ramoth to repopulate the five empty Weyrs, even as he looked to himself and Lessa to rejuvenate the pride and faith of dragonriders and of Pern itself. He only hoped time enough remained to him to do what was necessary. The Red Star had been bracketed by the Eye Rock. The Threads would soon be falling. Somewhere, in one of the other Weyrs’ Records, must be the information he needed to ascertain when, exactly, Threads would fall.
Mnementh landed. F’lar jumped down from the curving neck to stand beside Lessa. The three watched as Ramoth, a buck grasped in each of her forefeet, rose to a feeding ledge.
“Will her appetite never taper off?” Lessa asked with affectionate dismay.
As a dragonet, Ramoth had been eating to grow. Her full stature attained, she was, of course, now eating for her young, and she applied herself conscientiously.
F’lar chuckled and squatted, hunter fashion. He picked up shale-flakes, skating them across the flat dry ground, counting the dust puffs boyishly.
“The time will come when she won’t eat everything in sight,” he assured Lessa. “But she’s young . . .”
“. . . and needs her strength,” Lessa interrupted, her voice a fair imitation of R’gul’s pedantic tones.
F’lar looked up at her, squinting against the wintry sun that slanted down at them.
“She’s a finely grown beast, especially compared to Nemorth.” He gave a contemptuous snort. “In fact, there is no comparison. However, look here,” he ordered peremptorily.
He tapped the smoothed sand in front of him, and she saw that his apparently idle gestures had been to a purpose. With a sliver of stone, he drew a design in quick strokes.
“In order to fly a dragon between, he has to know where to go. And so do you.” He grinned at the astonished and infuriated look of comprehension on her face. “Ah, but there are certain consequences to an ill-considered jump. Badly visualized reference points often result in staying between.” His voice dropped ominously. Her face cleared of its resentment. “So there are certain reference or recognition points arbitrarily taught all weyrlings. That,”—he pointed first to his facsimile and then to the actual Star Stone with its Finger and Eye Rock companions, on Benden Peak—“is the first recognition point a weyrling learns. When I take you aloft, you will reach an altitude just above the Star Stone, near enough for you to be able to see the hole in the Eye Rock clearly. Fix that picture sharply in your mind’s eye, relay it to Ramoth. That will always get you home.”
“Understood. But how do I learn recognition points of places I’ve never seen?”
He grinned up at her. “You’re drilled in them. First by your instructor,” and he pointed the sliver at his chest, “and then by going there, having directed your dragon to get the visualization from her instructor,” and he indicated Mnementh. The bronze dragon lowered his wedge-shaped head until one eye was focused on his rider and his mate’s rider. He made a pleased noise deep in his chest.
Lessa laughed up at the gleaming eye and, with unexpected affection, patted the soft nose.
F’lar cleared his throat in surprise. He had been aware that Mnementh showed an unusual affection for the Weyrwoman, but he had had no idea Lessa was fond of the bronze. Perversely, he was irritated.
“However,” he said, and his voice sounded unnatural to himself, “we take the young riders constantly to and from the main reference points all across Pern, to all the Holds so that they have eyewitness impressions on which to rely. As a rider becomes adept in picking out landmarks, he gets additional references from other riders. Therefore, to go between, there is actually only one requirement: a clear picture of where you want to go. And a dragon!” He grinned at her. “Also, you should always plan to arrive above your reference point in clear air.”
Lessa frowned.
“It is better to arrive in open air”—F’lar waved a hand above his head—“rather than underground,” and he slapped his open hand onto the dirt. A puff of dust rose warningly.
“But the wings took off within the Bowl itself the day the Lords of the Hold arrived,” Lessa reminded him.
F’lar chuckled at her uptake. “True, but only the most seasoned riders. Once we came across a dragon and a rider entombed together in solid rock. They . . . were . . . very young.” His eyes were bleak.
“I take the point,” she assured him gravely. “That’s her fifth,” she added, pointing toward Ramoth, who was carrying her latest kill up to the bloody ledge.
“She’ll work them off today, I assure you,” F’lar remarked. He rose, brushing off his knees with sharp slaps of his riding gloves. “Test her temper.”
Lessa did so with a silent, Had enough? She grimaced at Ramoth’s indignant rejection of the thought.
The queen went swooping down for a huge fowl, rising in a flurry of gray, brown and white feathers.
“She’s not as hungry as she’s making you think, the deceitful creature,” F’lar chuckled and saw that Lessa had reached the same conclusion. Her eyes were snapping with vexation.
“When you’ve finished the bird, Ramoth, do let us learn how to fly between,” Lessa said aloud for F’lar’s benefit, “before our good Weyrleader changes his mind.”
Ramoth looked up from her gorging, turned her head toward the two riders at the edge of the feeding ground. Her eyes gleamed. She bent her head again to her kill, but Lessa could sense the dragon would obey.
It was cold aloft. Lessa was glad of the fur lining in
her riding gear, and the warmth of the great golden neck which she bestrode. She decided not to think of the absolute cold of between which she had experienced only once. She glanced below on her right where bronze Mnementh hovered, and she caught his amused thought.
F’lar tells me to tell Ramoth to tell you to fix the alignment of the Star Stone firmly in your mind as a homing. Then, Mnementh went on amiably, we shall fly down to the lake. You will return from between to this exact point. Do you understand?
Lessa found herself grinning foolishly with anticipation and nodded vigorously. How much time was saved because she could speak directly to the dragons! Ramoth made a disgruntled noise deep in her throat. Lessa patted her reassuringly.
“Have you got the picture in your mind, dear one?” she asked, and Ramoth again rumbled, less annoyed, because she was catching Lessa’s excitement.
Mnementh stroked the cold air with his wings, greenish-brown in the sunlight, and curved down gracefully toward the lake on the plateau below Benden Weyr. His flight line took him very low over the rim of the Weyr. From Lessa’s angle, it looked like a collision course. Ramoth followed closely in his wake. Lessa caught her breath at the sight of the jagged boulders just below Ramoth’s wing tips.
It was exhilarating, Lessa crowed to herself, doubly stimulated by the elation that flowed back to her from Ramoth.
Mnementh halted above the farthest shore of the lake, and there, too, Ramoth came to hover.
Mnementh flashed the thought to Lessa that she was to place the picture of where she wished to go firmly in her mind and direct Ramoth to get there.
Lessa complied. The next instant the awesome, bone-penetrating cold of black between enveloped them. Before either she or Ramoth was aware of more than that biting touch of cold and impregnable darkness, they were above the Star Stone.
Lessa let out a cry of pure triumph.
It is extremely simple. Ramoth seemed disappointed.
Mnementh reappeared beside and slightly below them.
