Dragonquest

  “Are you all right, lad? Does your chest hurt?” Manora was bending over him.

  “You found us? Is Felessan all right?”

  “Right as rain, and eating his dinner. Now, does your chest hurt?”

  “My chest?” His heart seemed to stop when he remembered how he got that injury. But Manora was watching him. He felt cautiously. “No, thank-you-for-inquiring.”

  His stomach further embarrassed him with its grinding noises.

  “I think you need some dinner, too.”

  “Then Lytol’s not angry with me? Or the Weyrleader?” he dared to ask.

  Manora gave him a fond smile, smoothing down his tousled hair.

  “Not to worry, Lord Jaxom,” she said kindly. “A stern word or two perhaps. Lord Lytol was beside himself with worry.”

  Jaxom had the most incredible vision of two Lytols side by side, cheeks a-twitch in unison.

  “However, I wouldn’t advise any more unauthorized expeditions anywhere.” She gave a little laugh. “That is now the special pastime of the adults.”

  Jaxom was too busy worrying if she knew about the slit, if she knew the weyrboys had been peeking through. If she knew he had. He endured a little death, waiting to hear her say Felessan had confessed to their crime, then realized she had said they weren’t to be more than scolded. You could always trust Manora. And if she knew and wasn’t angry . . . But if she didn’t know and he asked, she might be angry . . .

  “You found those rooms, Lord Jaxom. I’d rest on my honors, now, were I you.”

  “Rooms?”

  She smiled at him and held out her hand. “I thought you were hungry.”

  Her hand was cool and soft as she led him onto the balcony which circled the sleeping level. It must be late, Jaxom thought, as they passed the tightly drawn curtains of the sleeping rooms. The central fire was banked. A few women were grouped by one of the worktables, sewing. They glanced up as Manora and Jaxom passed, and smiled.

  “You said ‘rooms’?” Jaxom asked with polite insistence.

  “Beyond the room you opened were two others and the ruins of a stairway leading up.”

  Jaxom whistled. “What was in the rooms?”

  Manora laughed softly. “I never saw the Mastersmith so excited. They found some odd-shaped instruments and bits and pieces of glass I can’t make out at all.”

  “An Oldtimer room?” Jaxom was awed at the scope of his discovery. And he’d had only the shortest look.

  “Oldtimers?” Manora’s frown was so slight that Jaxom decided he’d imagined it. Manora never frowned. “Ancient timers, I’d say.”

  As they entered the Main Cavern, Jaxom realized that their passage interrupted the lively conversations of the dragonmen and women seated around the big dining area. Accustomed as he was to such scrutiny, Jaxom straightened his shoulders and walked with measured stride. He turned his head slowly, giving a grave nod and smile to the riders he knew and those of the women he recognized. He ignored a sprinkle of laughter, being used to that, too, but a Lord of the Hold must act with the dignity appropriate to his rank, even if he were not quite Turned twelve and in the presence of his superiors.

  It was full dark, but around the great inner face of the Bowl, he could see the lambent circles of dragon eyes on the weyr ledges. He could hear the muted rush of air as several stirred and stretched their enormous pinions. He looked up toward the Star Rocks, black knobs against the lighter sky, and saw the giant silhouette of the watch dragon. Far down the Bowl, he could even hear the restless tramping of the penned herdbeasts. In the lake in the center, the stars were mirrored.

  Quickening his step now, he urged Manora faster. Dignity could be forgotten in the darkness and he was desperately hungry.

  Mnementh gave a welcoming rumble on the queen’s weyr ledge, and Jaxom, greatly daring, glanced up at the near eye which closed one lid at him slightly in startling imitation of a human wink.

  Do dragons have a sense of humor? he wondered. The watch-wher certainly didn’t and he was the same breed.

  The relationship is very distant.

  “I beg your pardon?” Jaxom said, startled, glancing up at Manora.

  “For what, young Lord?”

  “Didn’t you say something?”

  “No”

  Jaxom glanced back at the bulky shadow of the dragon, but Mnementh’s head was turned. Then he could smell roasted meats and walked faster.

  As they rounded the bend, Jaxom saw the golden body of the recumbent queen and was suddenly guilt-struck and fearful. But she was fast asleep, smiling with an innocent serenity remarkably like his foster mother’s newest babe. He looked away lest his gaze rouse her, and saw the faces of all those adults at the table. It was almost too much for him. F’lar, Lessa, Lytol and Felessan he’d expected, but there was the Mastersmith and the Masterharper, too.

  Only drill helped him respond courteously to the greetings of the celebrities. He wasn’t aware when Manora and Lessa came to his assistance.

  “Not a word until the child has had something to eat, Lytol,” the Weyrwoman said firmly, her hands pressing him gently to the empty seat beside Felessan. The boy paused between spoonfuls to look up with a complex series of facial contortions supposed to convey a message that escaped Jaxom. “Jaxom missed lunch at the Hold and is several hours hungrier in consequence. He is well, Manora?”

  “He took no more harm than Felessan.”

  “He looked a little glassy-eyed as you crossed the weyr.” Lessa bent to peer at Jaxom who politely looked at her, chewing with sudden self-consciousness. “How do you feel?”

  Jaxom emptied his mouth hurriedly, trying to swallow a half-chewed lump of vegetable. Felessan tendered a cup of water and Lessa deftly swatted him between the shoulder blades as he started to choke.

  “I feel fine,” he managed to say. “I feel fine, thank you.” He waited, unable to resist looking at his plate and was relieved when the Weyrleader laughingly reminded Lessa that she was the one who said the boy should eat before anything else.

  The Mastersmith tapped his stained, branchlike finger on the faded Record skin which draped the table, except where the boys were sitting. Fandarel had one arm wrapped possessively around something in his lap, but Jaxom couldn’t see what it was.

  “If I judge this accurately, there should be several levels of rooms in this section, both beyond the one the boys found and above.”

  Jaxom goggled at the map and caught Felessan’s eye. He was excited, too, but he kept on eating. Jaxom spooned up another huge mouthful—it tasted so good—but he did wish that the skin were not upside down to him.

  “I’d swear there were no upper weyr entrances on that side of the Bowl,” F’lar muttered, shaking his head.

  “There was access to the Bowl on the ground level,” Fandarel said, his forefinger covering what he ought to be showing. “We found it, sealed up. Possibly because of that rockfall.”

  Jaxom looked anxiously at Felessan who became engrossed in his plate. When Felessan made those faces, had he meant he hadn’t told them? Or he had? Jaxom wished he knew.

  “That seam was barely discernible,” the Masterharper said. “The sealing substance was more effective than any mortar I’ve ever seen; transparent, smooth and strong.”

  “One could not chip it,” rumbled Fandarel, shaking his head.

  “Why would they seal off an exit to the Bowl?” Lessa asked.

  “Because they weren’t using that section of the Weyr,” F’lar suggested. “Certainly no one has used those corridors for the Egg knows how many Turns. There weren’t even footprints in the dust of most of them we searched.”

  Waiting for the adult wrath that must surely descend on him now, Jaxom kept his eyes on his plate. He couldn’t bear Lessa’s recriminations. He dreaded the look in Lytol’s eyes when he learned of his ward’s blasphemous act. How could he have been so deaf to all Lytol’s patient teachings?

  “We found enough of interest in the dusty, moldy old Records that had been i
gnored as useless,” F’lar’s voice went on.

  Jaxom hazarded a glance and saw the Weyrleader tousle Felessan’s hair; watched as the man actually grinned at him, Jaxom. Jaxom was almost sick with relief. None of the adults knew what he and Felessan had done in the Hatching Grounds.

  “These boys have already led us to exquisite treasures, eh, Fandarel?”

  “Let us hope they are not the only legacies left in forgotten rooms,” the Mastersmith said in his deep rumble of a voice. Absently he stroked the smooth metal of the magnifying device cradled in the crook of his arm.

  CHAPTER VI

  Midmorning at Southern Weyr

  Early Morning at Nabol Hold: Next Day

  HOT, sandy and sticky with sweat and salt, triumph overrode all minor irritations as Kylara stared down at the clutch she had unearthed.

  “They can have their seven,” she muttered, staring in the general direction of northeast and the Weyr. “I’ve got an entire nest. And another gold,”

  Exultations welled out of her in a raucous laugh. Just wait until Meron of Nabol saw these beauties! There was no doubt in her mind that the Holder hated dragonmen because he envied them their beasts. He’d often carped that Impressions ought not to be monopolized by one inbred sodality. Well, let’s see if mighty Meron could Impress a fire lizard. She wasn’t sure which would please her more: if he could or if he couldn’t. Either way’d work for her. But if he could Impress a fire lizard, a bronze, say, and she had a queen on her wrist, and the two mated . . . It might not be as spectacular as with the larger beasts, but then, given Meron’s natural endowment . . . Kylara smiled in sensuous anticipation.

  “You’d better be worth this,” she told the eggs.

  She put the thirty-four hardened eggs into several thicknesses of the firestone bagging she’d brought along. She wrapped that bundle in wherhides and then in her thick wool cloak. She’d been Weyrwoman long enough to realize that a suddenly cooled egg would never hatch. And these were mighty close to cracking shell.

  So much the better.

  Prideth had been tolerant of her rider’s preoccupation with fire-lizard eggs. She had obediently landed in a hundred coves along the western coast, waiting, not unhappily in the hot sun, while Kylara quartered the burning sands, looking for any trace of fire-lizard buryings. But Prideth grumbled anxiously when Kylara gave her the coordinates for Nabol Hold, not Southern Weyr.

  It was just first light, Nabol time, when Kylara’s arrival sent the watch-wher screaming into its lair. The watchguard knew the Southern Weyrwoman too well to protest her entry and some poor wit was dispatched to wake his Lord. Kylara blithely disregarded Meron’s angry frown when he appeared on the stairs of the Inner Hold.

  “I’ve fire-lizard eggs for you, Lord Meron of Nabol,” she cried, gesturing to the lumpy bundle she’d had a man bring in. “I want tubs of warm sand or we’ll lose them.”

  “Tubs of warm sand?” Meron repeated with overt irritation.

  So, he’d someone else in his bed, had he? Kylara thought, of half a mind to take her treasure and disappear.

  “Yes, you fool. I’ve a clutch of fire-lizard eggs about to hatch. The chance of your lifetime. You there,” and Kylara pointed imperiously at Meron’s holdkeeper who’d come shuffling in, half-dressed. “Pour boiling water over all the cleansing sand you’ve got and bring it here instantly.”

  Kylara, born to a high degree in one Hold, knew exactly the tone to take with lesser beings, and was, in fact, so much the female counterpart of her own irascible Lord that the woman scurried to her bidding without waiting for Meron’s consent.

  “Fire-lizard eggs? What on earth are you babbling about, woman?”

  “They’re Impressionable. Catch their minds at their hatching, just like dragons, feed ’em into stupidity and they’re yours, for life.” Kylara was carefully laying the eggs down on the warm stones of the great fireplace. “And I’ve got them here just in time,” she said in triumph. “Assemble your men, quickly. We’ll want to Impress as many as possible.”

  “I’m trying,” Meron said through gritted teeth as he watched her performance with some skepticism and much malice, “to apprehend exactly how this will benefit anyone.”

  “Use your wits, man?” Kylara replied, oblivious to the Lord Holder’s sour reaction to her imperiousness. “Fire lizards are the ancestors of dragons and they have all their abilities.”

  It took only a moment longer for Meron to grasp the significance. Even as he shouted orders for his men to be roused, he was beside Kylara, helping her to lay the eggs out before the fire.

  “They go between? They communicate with their owners?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “That’s a gold egg,” Meron cried, reaching for it, his small eyes glittering with cupidity.

  She slapped his hand away, her eyes flashing. “Gold is for me. Bronze for you. I’m fairly sure that that second one—no, that one—is a bronze.”

  The hot sands were brought and shoveled onto the hearth stones. Meron’s men came clattering down the steps from the Inner Hold, dressed for Threadfall. Peremptorily Kylara ordered them to put aside their paraphernalia and began to lecture them on how to Impress a fire lizard.

  “No one can catch a fire lizard,” someone muttered, well back in the ranks.

  “I have but I doubt you will, whoever you are,” Kylara snapped.

  There was something, she decided, in what the Oldtimers said: Holders were getting far too arrogant and aggressive. No one would have dared speak up in her father’s Hold when he was giving instructions. No one in the Weyrs interrupted a Weyrwoman.

  “You’ll have to be quick,” she said. “They hatch ravenous and eat anything in reach. They turn cannibal if you don’t stop them.”

  “I want to hold mine till it hatches,” Meron told Kylara in an undertone. He’d been stroking the three eggs whose mottled shells he fancied contained bronzes.

  “Hands aren’t warm enough,” Kylara replied in a loud, flat voice. “We’ll need red meat, plenty of it. Fresh-slaughtered is the best.”

  The platter which was subsequently brought in was contemptuously dismissed as inadequate. Two additional loads were prepared, still steamy from the body heat of the slaughtered animals. The smell of the bloody raw meat was another odor to mingle with the sweat of men, the overheated, crowded hall and the general tension.

  “I’m thirsty, Meron. I require bread and fruit and some chilled wine,” Kylara said.

  She ate daintily when the food was brought, eyeing Lord Meron’s sloppy table habits with veiled amusement. Someone passed bread and sourwine to the men, who had to eat standing about the room. Time passed slowly.

  “I thought you said they were about to hatch,” Meron said in an aggrieved voice. He was as restless as his men and beginning to have second thoughts about this ridiculous project of Kylara’s.

  Kylara awarded him a slightly contemptuous smile. “They are, I assure you. You Holders ought to learn patience. It’s needed in dealing with dragonkind. You can’t beat dragons, you know, or fire lizards, as you do a landbeast. But it’ll be worth it.”

  “You’re sure?” Meron’s eyes glittered with unconcealed irritation.

  “Think of the effect on dragonmen when you arrive at Telgar Hold in a few days with a fire lizard clinging to your arm.”

  The slight smile on Meron’s face told Kylara that her suggestion appealed to him. Yes, Meron could be patient if it gave him any advantage over dragonmen.

  “It will be at my beck and call?” Meron asked, his gaze avidly caressing his trio.

  Kylara didn’t hesitate to reassure him, though she wasn’t at all sure a fire lizard would be faithful, or intelligent. Still, Meron didn’t require intelligence, just obedience. Or compliance. And if the fire lizards did not live up to his expectation, she could always say the lack was in him.

  “With such messengers, I’d have the advantage,” Meron said so softly that she barely caught the words.

  “More than mere
advantage, Lord Meron,” she said, her voice an insinuating purr. “Control.”

  “Yes, to have solid, dependable communications would mean I’d have control. I could tell that wherry-blooded High Reaches Weyrleader T’kul to . . .”

  One of the eggs rocked on its long axis and Meron started from his chair. Hoarsely he ordered his men to come closer, swearing as they halted at the normal distance from him.

  “Tell them again, Weyrwoman, tell them exactly how they are to capture these fire lizards.”

  It never troubled Kylara that even after nine Turns in a Weyr and seven Turns as a Weyrwoman herself, she could not have given the criteria by which one candidate was accepted by a dragon and another, discernibly as worthy, was rejected by an entire Hatching. Nor why the queens invariably chose women raised outside the Weyr. (For instance, at the time that boy-thing Brekke had Impressed Wirenth, there had been three other girls, any of whom Kylara would have thought considerably more interesting to a dragonette queen. But Wirenth had made a skyline directly to the craftbred girl. The three rejected candidates had remained at Southern Weyr—any girl in her right mind would—and one of them. Varena, had been presented at the next queen Impression and taken. One simply couldn’t judge.) Generally speaking, weyrbred lads were always acceptable at one Hatching or another, for a weyrboy could attend Hatchings until he was in his twentieth Turn. No one was ever required to leave his Weyr, but those few who did not become riders usually left, finding places in one of the crafts.

  Now, of course, with Benden and Southern Weyrs producing more dragons’ eggs than the weyrwomen bore babies, it was necessary to range Pern to find enough candidates to stand on the Hatching Grounds. Evidently a commoner simply couldn’t realize that the dragons, usually the browns or bronzes, did the choosing, not their riders.

  There seemed to be no accounting for draconic tastes. A well-favored commoner might find himself passed over for the skinny, the unattractive.

  Kylara looked around the hall at the variety of anxious expressions on the rough men assembled. It could be hoped that fire lizards weren’t as discriminating as dragons for there wasn’t much to offer them in this motley group. Then Kylara remembered that that brat of Brekke’s had Impressed three. In that case, anything on two legs in this room would stand a chance. It had been handed them, their one big opportunity to prove that dragonkind did not need special qualities for Impression, that common Pernese of Holds and Crafts need only be exposed to dragons to have the same chance as the elite of the Weyrs.