Dragonquest

CHAPTER VI

Midmorning at Southern Weyr

Early Morning at Nabol Hold:

Next Day

HOT, sandy and sticky with sweat and salt, triumph over-rode 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.”

Exaltations 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 wher-hides 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 sour wine 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.

“You don’t capture them,” Kylara corrected Meron with a malicious smile. Let these Holders see that there is far more to being chosen by a dragon than physical presence at the moment of Hatching. “You lure them to you with thoughts of affection. A dragon cannot be possessed.”

“We have fire lizards here, not dragons.”

“They are the same for our purposes,” Kylara said sharply. “Now heed me or you’ll lose the lot of them.” She wondered why she’d bothered to sweat and toil and bring him a gift, an opportunity which he was obviously unable to accept or appreciate. And yet, if she had a gold and he a bronze, when they mated it ought to be worth her troubles. “Shut out any thought of fear or profit,” she told the listening circle. “The first puts a dragon off, the second he can’t understand. As soon as one will approach you, feed it. Keep feeding it. Get it on your hand, if possible, and move to a quiet corner and keep feeding it. Think how much you love it, want it to stay with you, how happy its presence makes you. Think of nothing else or the fire lizard will go between. There’s just the short time between its hatching and its first big meal in which to make Impression. You succeed or you don’t. It’s up to you.”

“You heard what she said. Now do it. Do it right. The man who fails – ” Meron’s voice trailed off threateningly.

Kylara laughed, breaking the ominous silence that followed. She laughed at the black look on Meron’s face, laughed until the Lord Holder angered beyond caution, shook her arm roughly, pointing to the eggs which were now indulging in wild maneuvers as their occupants tried to break out.

“Stop that cackling, Weyrwoman. It’ll prejudice the hatchlings.”

“Laughter is better than threats, Lord Meron. Even you can’t order the preference of Dragonkind. And tell me, good Lord Meron, will you be subject to the same dire unspeakable punishment if you fail?”

Meron grabbed her arm in a painful grip, his eyes riveted on the cracks now showing in one of his chosen eggs. He snapped his fingers for meat. Blood oozed from the raw handful as he knelt by the eggs, his body bowed tautly in his effort to effect an Impression.

Trying to show no concern, Kylara rose languidly from her chair. She strolled to the table and picked over the meaty gobbets until she had a satisfactory heap on the trencher. She signaled the tense guardsmen to supply themselves as she moved sedately back to the hearth.

She could not suppress her own excitement and heard Prideth warbling from the heights above the Hold. Ever since Kylara had seen the tiny fledglings F’nor and Brekke had Impressed, she had craved one of these dainty creatures. She would never understand that her imperious nature had subconsciously fought against the emotional symbiosis of her dragon queen. Instinctively Kylara had known that only as a Weyrwoman, a queen’s rider, could she achieve the unparalleled power, privilege and unchallenged freedom as a woman on Pern. Skilled at ignoring what she didn’t wish to admit, Kylara never realized that Prideth was the only living creature who could dominate her and whose good opinion she had to have. In the fire lizard, Kylara saw a miniature dragon which she could control – easily control – and physically dominate in a way she could not dominate Prideth.

And in presenting these fire-lizard eggs to a Holder, particularly the most despised Holder of all, Meron of Nabol, Kylara struck back at all the ignominies and imagined slights she had endured at the hands of both dragonmen and Pernese. The most recent insult – that the dishfaced fosterling of Brekke’s had Impressed three, rejecting Kylara – would be completely avenged.

Well, Kylara would not be rejected here. She knew the way of it and, whatever else, she would be a winner.

The golden egg rocked violently, and a massive crack split it lengthwise. A tiny golden beak appeared.

“Feed her. Don’t waste time,” Meron whispered to her hoarsely.

“Don’t tell me how to hatch eggs, you fool. Tend to your own.”

The head had emerged, the body struggled to right itself claws scrabbling against the wet shell. Kylara concentrated on thoughts of welcoming affection, of joy and admiration, ignoring the cries and exhortations around her.

The little queen, no bigger than her hand, staggered free of its casing and instantly looked around for something to eat. Kylara laid a glob of meat in its path and the beast swooped on it. Kylara placed a second a few inches from the first, leading the fire lizard toward her. Squawking ferociously, the fire lizard pounced, her steps less awkward, the wings spread and drying rapidly. Hunger, hunger, hunger was the pulse of the creature’s thoughts and Kylara, reassured by receipt of this broadcast, intensified her thoughts of love and welcome.

She had the fire-lizard queen on her hand by the fifth lure. She rose carefully to her feet, popping food into the wide maw every time it opened, and moved away from the hearth and the chaos there.

For it was chaos, with the over anxious men making every mistake in the Record, despite her advice. Meron’s three eggs cracked almost at once. Two hatchlings immediately set upon each other while Meron was awkwardly trying to imitate Kylara’s actions. In his greed, he’d probably lose all three, she thought with malicious pleasure. Then she saw that there were other bronzes emerging. Well, all was not lost when her queen needed to mate.

Two men had managed to coax fire lizards to their hands and had followed Kylara’s example by removing themselves from the confused cannibalism on the hearth.

“How much do we feed them, Weyrwoman?” one asked her, his eyes shining with incredulous joy and astonishment.

“Let them eat themselves insensible. They’ll sleep and they’ll stay by you. As soon as they wake, feed them again. And if they complain about itchy skin, bathe and rub them with oil. A patchy skin breaks between and the awful cold can kill even a fire lizard or dragon.” How often she’d told that to weyrlings when she’d had to lecture them as Weyrwoman. Well, Brekke did that now, thank the First Egg.

“But what happens if they go between? How do we keep them?”

“You can’t keep a dragon. He stays with you. You don’t chain a dragon like a watch-wher, you know.”

She became bored with her role as instructor and replenished her supply of meat. Then, disgustedly observing the waste of creatures dying on the hearth, she mounted the steps to the Inner Hold. She’d wait in Meron’s chambers – there’d better be no one else there now – to see if he had, after all, managed to Impress a fire lizard.

Prideth told her that she wasn’t happy that she had transported the clutch to death on a cold, alien hearth.

“They lost more than this at Southern, silly one,” Kylara told her dragon. “This time we’ve a pretty darling of our own.”

Prideth grumbled on the fire ridge, but not about the lizard so Kylara paid her no heed.