Dragonsblood

FOUR

As the sound of breaking glass reached her ears over the booming of the message drums, Wind Blossom paused in her slow, steady hunt. She sighed and bid silent farewell to yet more precious glassware. I was never good at this, she thought sadly to herself. The boy was worse than Emorra had ever been.

Wind Blossom took a deep breath and turned toward the noise. Resolutely she overrode the creaks of her joints and the complaints of her muscles. Time-and medicine-on Pern were not what they had been: At seventy-nine, she felt more like a doddering ninety.

The sounds of the drums died as the message was completed-and the noise of breaking glass diminished, but not before Wind Blossom had located its source. It came from her own room. She opened the door but did not enter.

Hunched over the remains of a cabinet at one end of the room, Tieran panted. Tears streamed down his face. Wind Blossom noticed with sadness that his hands were bleeding in several places-again.

“Tieran?” Somehow she managed to modulate her voice to more than a croak. For such small things are we grateful, she thought to herself.

The lad, rangy and awkward in the midst of adolescence, turned away from her, but he did not continue in his destruction. Instead, he started picking his way across the shard-strewn floor toward the door.

Wind Blossom sighed inwardly with relief as she noticed that he at least had his boots on. The damage to his hands looked minor as well, she noted clinically.

As always, almost instinctively, he kept the right side of his face-the “good” side-toward her and tilted his neck in such a way that the lacerations on his nose looked their best.

Of all his injuries, the damage to the nose was the worst-at least for a sixteen-year-old boy who had to endure the pitying stares of his elders and the taunts or the silent shunning of his peers.

Wind Blossom knew that it was possible to repair the damage, once his face had finished growing. If she could learn the necessary skills. If she could find the necessary materials. If she could keep the necessary medicines. If she lived long enough.

They were in a three-legged race: waiting for him to grow up, striving to keep the medical supplies necessary, and hoping that she didn’t grow too feeble to perform the surgery.

And they both knew they were losing.

Latrel could have done it, but that lab accident had cost him the use of his left thumb and, without it, he couldn’t operate. Carelly had never progressed beyond competent nurse. Wind Blossom felt that she could train Tieran to do it-he had the skill-but he could not be both surgeon and patient.

“Where is it?” Tieran demanded in a rough, torn voice. Wind Blossom raised an eyebrow.

“Where is the antibiotic?” He glared at her.

“It is safe,” Wind Blossom said.

“I want it,” Tieran told her. He held out a hand. “Give it to me-now.”

“Why now?”

Tieran’s face crumpled. “He-he-he was under that rock slide for two days! The sepsis had set in long before they found him. The fever took him before I got there.”

Wind Blossom shuddered. “He was a good man.”

Tieran glared at her. “Give it to me! I’m going to find someone-M’hall, someone-and we’ll time it-don’t think I don’t know-and we’ll save him. I need that medicine!”

“You cannot break time, Tieran,” Wind Blossom said softly. “Not even for your father. There is no way.”

Wind Blossom had taught Tieran that dragons could not only go instantaneously between places but also between times. The paradoxes and rules of time travel applied to dragons as much as to anything else that existed in the space-time continuum. It was impossible to go back in time in a manner that could alter events that had already occurred.

“You can’t alter the past,” Wind Blossom said.

Tieran’s face crumpled and he leaned over and onto Wind Blossom. “You said he’d always be there. You said we’d always see each other. You said… And I wasn’t there! I couldn’t help him, I wasn’t there!”

Drawing on her inner strength, Wind Blossom straightened her spine and held the lad while his sorrow and anger poured out.

“I shall miss him, too,” Wind Blossom said after a while. “He was a good man. A good botanist, too. With more training-”

“Training! Is that how you measure a man?” Tieran demanded. “Is that how you see me? No scars, only an apt student? And what am I learning? A lost art, a dying way of doing things-all for your pleasure!”

“Your father wanted you to-”

“My father’s dead,” Tieran cut her off. “And now it’s only you who wants me to learn all this genetic foolery. Splicing genes we can’t see-the last electron microscope failed last year, or don’t you remember?-for ends we don’t know. We could introduce mutations without knowing about it, and for what? For nothing. A might be!”

Brutally he pushed away from her and stormed off down the corridor. Over his shoulder, from his left side, he called back, “You can get Emorra to clean that up. After all, you treat her like your slave.”

Wind Blossom straightened up slowly. With an eye to the glass on the floor she walked over to her cot and sat upon it. With eyes that would admit no tears, she muttered bitterly, “Such a way you have with children, Wind Blossom.”

“Mother! What are you doing?” Emorra demanded as she strode into her mother’s quarters.

“I am cleaning up,” Wind Blossom replied from her position on the floor where she was delicately picking up individual shards of glass and depositing them into a recycling container.

“What happened? Where’s Tieran?” Emorra asked.

“Tieran happened, and I do not know,” Wind Blossom answered. She looked up at her tall daughter, careful not to let any pride show in her expression. “His father was dead before he arrived. He wanted to time it with some antibiotic to save him.”

Emorra gasped, eyes wide. “That can’t be done, can it?”

Wind Blossom sighed, using one of her better sighs. “It cannot, as you should well know.”

“At least not in any literature,” Emorra replied, her face heating as she caught her mother’s implied rebuke. “Mother, what’s the use of learning about temporal paradoxes when they can’t occur? It’s more important to pass on a good fundamental knowledge than to deal with such esoteric issues.” Emorra found herself harping on her favorite issue and discovered, as always, that she couldn’t help it with her mother. “Songs that people will sing and remember-an oral tradition, that’s what we have to rely on.”

“What’s wrong with books?” Wind Blossom quipped.

Emorra frowned. “Mother, you know I love books,” she said with a deep sigh. “But find me someone who’s got the time to make them. Bookmaking is a labor-intensive industry, from the felling of trees to the making of inks and the binding of the pages-things that are impossible to do when Thread is falling.”

“So easy it is to blame Thread,” Wind Blossom said. “Nothing can be done, so we’ll sing about it.”

Emorra stifled a groan and waved her hands in submission. “Let’s not go through this again, please.”

Wind Blossom nodded. She gestured to the recycling container. “This one’s full; get me another.”

Emorra frowned and leaned down to pick up the bucket. After she left, Wind Blossom pursed her lips tightly and held back a heartfelt sigh. Pain, she thought to herself, pain is how we grow. Is this how it was for you, Mother?

“Is there anything else I can get you?” Emorra asked, as she heaved herself up from the floor and grabbed the last bucketful of broken glass. She surveyed the floor carefully, looking for the reflection of any last shards.

“No, thank you,” Wind Blossom said. Emorra’s nostrils flared at her mother’s dismissive tone but she said nothing, nodded curtly, and left, closing the door quietly.

“Well-trained,” Wind Blossom muttered to herself. She kept her gaze on the door for a few moments, assuring herself that Emorra had indeed departed.

Then-a subtle shift, a slight relaxation, and the merest hint of a smile played on her lips. It was short-lived, chased away almost instantly by a frown.

“Your face is like a window,” Kitti Ping’s voice echoed in her mind. “I can see everything you think.”

You see what I want you to see, Wind Blossom thought back to the ancient memory.

She moved to her dresser and opened the drawer with her tunics. Gently she lifted them and found the yellow one. Yes, she thought to herself, Purman would like this.

She pulled the tunic out of the drawer along with the small bag she’d carefully hidden underneath it. She quickly shrugged off her regular tunic and pulled on the yellow one. Then she took the bag and walked over to the laboratory end of her room.

The room was huge and had been a supply room when the Fever Year had hit. Wind Blossom had occupied it in the haste of those deadly days and had never been asked to leave. She lived simply in the room, with only a bed, a dresser, and a bedside table for her comfort. The far side of the room was given up to her laboratory and studies. She liked the room because of the large windows running floor to ceiling on one side.

She opened a locked door in her tall cabinet and pulled out a crucible, ancient ceramic tripod, and grazier. She put these on the workbench along with the bag from her drawer and another bag she had pulled out from the cabinet.

She eyed a stool and shook her head slightly, grabbing her things off the workbench and putting them on the floor beyond it, concealed from the window by the large workbench.

She fished a small lump of charcoal out of the second bag and placed it on the grazier. She lit it quickly, her fingers well-practiced, and slid the tripod stand over it. Into the crucible she placed a selection of herbs from the bag she had taken from her drawer. After a moment, she pulled a number of strands of hair out of her scalp and curled them up into the crucible.

Satisfied, she placed the crucible on the tripod and let the flames of the charcoal lick at it.

I am glad you decided not to join us here at the College, Wind Blossom admitted silently to her memory of Purman. You would have been welcome, but I do not know if you would have accepted the course I’ve chosen for us all.

It will be thousands of years before our descendants will once more be able to bend genes to their will, she mused. It would be a mistake to force our children to cling to our ways. They need to move on, to learn their own ways.

“Make your own mistakes,” Kitti Ping’s voice echoed in Wind Blossom’s mind.

The Eridani Way is not the only way, she thought, partly in response to her mother’s words. Their thinking is deep, but they never thought of war. They never thought of the Nathi. They never thought of a time when no one could twist genes into new shapes.

Wind Blossom’s eyes flicked to the crucible and she brought her thoughts back to Purman. Your way, the way of breeding, will work on Pern for now.

She sighed. It had been difficult to turn Emorra against her. So difficult that she had only half-succeeded: Her daughter had remained at the College and even become its dean. It had taken less effort to drive Tieran away from her, to quench his inbred curiosity about genetics.

In both situations, she had felt all the pain of a mother turning away her child. But Wind Blossom knew that if she taught them the joy she found in genetics, they would be enraptured-and stuck with knowledge they couldn’t use. Committed, as the Eridani had always intended, to the Eridani Way, the way of countless generations husbanding species and planets, they would become incapable of developing solutions of their own.

Wind Blossom’s head shook imperceptibly as she recalled her own internal conflicts, how she had determined that the future of Pern could not rest on the shoulders of a few, select bloodlines-the Eridani Way-but on the actions of all Pernese.

As the last of the smoke rose from the crucible, Wind Blossom wondered again if Ted Tubberman had thought the same thing, and if he had turned his son against him just as Kitti Ping had turned her daughter against her-and as Wind Blossom herself had tried to alienate Emorra.

“Shards!” Tieran groaned as he discovered that he had outgrown his latest hiding place. Hiding was second nature to him. He had always liked the caves and tunnels of his Benden Hold home, particularly when-he suppressed a pang of regret, fear, anger, sorrow-he had been with Bendensk, the watch-wher.

When he had first come to the College, it had been easier: He’d been small for his age and always won at hide-and-seek. Until one day he had realized that no one was looking for him anymore-that they were laughing instead. “Hideaway.” “No-nose.” “Scarface.”

After that he had spent more time with Wind Blossom. Truth be told, he loved to learn all the secrets she had to teach him. He was one of only five people on all of Pern who had looked at human DNA under the electron microscope. And he was one of three-no, two, now-who could trace a mutation back to its genes. Wind Blossom said that soon she would start him on proteomics, the study of proteins.

Tieran snorted. As if that would impress anyone! In fact, there was probably no one on Pern who knew what proteomics was, let alone what it was used for. It was all a waste. He was only here because she wanted him to be here, waiting until he was “ready” for the operations to fix his face.

The sob that threatened to break from his throat was throttled in the harshest of self-control. The boys he could handle; he’d learned enough of hand-fighting from M’hall and-he grimaced-his father. But the girls-lately Tieran had noticed them. Noticed them and noticed how quickly they looked away, walked away, grouped together, speaking in hushed voices.

Admit it, Tieran thought, no matter how great a surgeon you become, no matter what you do, even if Wind Blossom can perform a miracle, no girl is going to look at you.

Except maybe to laugh.

And now his last hiding place was too small. Tieran stifled a curse-not because he was afraid of swearing, but because he was afraid the curse might come out as a sob.

Voices approached in the dark. Tieran pulled himself into a shadowy nook.

“How did the boy take it, then?” Tieran recognized the rich tenor voice as that of Sandell, a student musician. Some Turns back they had played together-hide-and-seek.

“It was hard on him,” Emorra answered. “It must be hard to lose a father.”

“Don’t you remember yours?” Sandell asked.

“No.” Emorra paused. “In fact, it’s been Turns since I last asked mother about him. She never told me anything.”

Sandell laughed. “I’ll bet he was a musician, and that’s why she hates us.”

Emorra snorted. “That would explain where I got my talent.”

“And your looks,” Sandell added softly. From the sound of clothing and the soft noises, Tieran guessed that Sandell had taken Emorra in his arms. He peered around the corner. They were kissing!

Tieran ducked back again as Emorra pushed away from the journeyman.

“Not here,” Emorra said. “Someone might see us.”

Sandell laughed. “So let them!”

“No,” Emorra said firmly.

“Very well, Dean Emorra,” Sandell replied indulgently. “Your quarters or mine?”

Tieran relaxed as he heard them depart.

The loud sound of drums-he guessed it was Jendel up on the big drum-rattled out an attention signal. Tieran heard the response from the four outlying stations and, almost on top of their response, the College drums sounded out their message in deep commanding booms. It was the sign off for the evening; no other message would go out until morning, except in an emergency.

Tieran listened to the details, his throat clenched as he heard the report of his father’s death being passed on down to all the minor holds along the way equipped with either a drummer or a repeater station. The drums fell silent, were echoed by the repeater stations further on and, very faintly, by the stations beyond those, and then the sounds of evening took over the night air.

With a quick breath and a determined spring in his step, Tieran turned to the Drum Tower-his new hiding place.