Harper Hall - Dragonsong

by Anne McCaffrey

  Flame-crewing was cold work, but it was a distinct pleasure for Menolly to be out of the Hold, in the rough air. Her team got as far as the Dragon Stones to the south. Petiron had told her that those stones, standing offshore in the treacherous waters, had once been part of the palisade, probably hollowed with caves like all this stretch of cliff.

  The crowning treat for Menolly was when the Weyrleader, F’lar, himself, on bronze Mnementh, circled in for a chat with Yanus. Of course, Menolly wasn’t near enough to hear what the two men said, but she was close enough to smell the firestone reek of the giant bronze dragon. Close enough to see his beautiful eyes catching all colors in the pale wintry sunlight: to see his muscles knot and smooth under the soft hide. Menolly stood, as was properly respectful, with the other flamethrower crews. But once, when the dragon turned his head in a lazy fashion to peer in her direction, his eyes whirled slowly with their changing colors and she was certain that Mnementh looked at her. She didn’t dare breathe, he was so beautiful!

  Then, suddenly, the magic moment was over. F’lar gave a graceful leap to the dragon’s shoulder, caught the fighting straps and pulled himself into place on the neck ridges. Air whooshed around Menolly and the others as the great bronze opened his fragile-looking wings. The next moment, he seemed to be in the air, catching the updraft, beating steadily higher. Abruptly the dragon winked from view. Menolly was not the only one to sigh deeply. To see a dragonrider in the sky was always an occurrence: to be on the same ground with a dragon and his rider, to witness his graceful takeoff and exit between was a marvel.

  All the songs about dragonriders and dragons seemed inadequate to Menolly. She stole up to the little cubicle in the women’s dormitory that she shared with Sella. She wanted to be alone. She’d a little pipe among her things, a soft, whispery reedpipe, and she began to play it: a little whistle composed of her excitement and her response to the day’s lovely event.

  “So there you are!” Sella flounced into the room, her face reddened, her breath rough. She’d obviously run up the steep stairs. “Told Mavi you’d be here.” Sella grabbed the little pipe from Menolly’s fingers. “And tuning, too.”

  “Oh, Sella. It’s an old tune!” Menolly said mendaciously and grabbed her pipe back.

  Sella’s jaw worked with anger. “Old, my foot! I know your ways, girl. And you’re dodging work. You get back to the kitchen. You’re needed now.”

  “I am not dodging work. I taught this morning during Threadfall and then I had to go with the crews.”

  “Your crew’s been in this past half-day or more and you still in smelly, sandy clothes, mucking up the room I have to sleep in. You get below or I’ll tell Yanus you’ve been tuning.”

  “Ha! You wouldn’t know a tune if you had your nose rubbed in it.”

  But Menolly was shedding her work clothes as fast as she could. Sella was just likely to slip the word to Mavi (her sister was as wary of Yanus as Menolly) about Menolly piping in her room—a suspicious action on its own. Though Menolly hadn’t sworn not to tune at all; only not to do it in front of people.

  However, everyone was in a good mood that night: Yanus, because he’d spoken to F’lar the Weyrleader and because there’d be good fishing on the morrow if the weather held. Fish always rose to feed from drowned Thread, and half the Fall had been over Nerat Bay. The Deep would be thick with schools. With Yanus in a good mood, the rest of the sea holders could also rejoice because there’d been no Thread on the ground at all.

  So it wasn’t any wonder that they called on Menolly to play for them. She sang two of the longer Sagas about dragons; and then did the Name-Song for the current wingleaders of Benden Weyr so her Sea Hold would know their dragonmen. She wondered if there’d been a recent Hatching that Half-Circle mightn’t have heard about, being so isolated. But she was certain that F’lar would have told Yanus if that were so. But would Yanus have told Menolly? She wasn’t the Harper to be told such things as courtesy.

  The sea holders wanted more singing, but her throat was tired. So she played them a song they could sing, bellowing out the words in voices roughened by wind and salt. She saw her father scowling at her, though he was singing along with the rest of them, and she wondered if he didn’t want her—a mere girl—to play men’s songs. It galled her because she’d played them often enough when Petiron was alive. She sighed at this injustice. And then wondered what F’lar would have said if he’d known that Half-Circle Sea Hold was dependent on a mere girl for their harpering. She’d heard everyone say that F’lar was a fair man, a farseeing man, and a fine dragonrider. There were even songs about him and his Weyrwoman, Lessa.

  So she sang them, in honor of the Weyrleader’s visit, and her father’s expression lightened. She sang on until her throat was so tight that not a squeak would come out. She wished that someone else could play to give her a rest but, as she scanned the faces of the holders, there wasn’t any of them who could beat a drum properly, much less finger a gitar or pipe.

  That was why the next day it seemed only logical for her to start one of the children learning the drum rolls. Plenty of songs could be sung just to drumbeat. And one of Soreel’s two children still in Teaching was sensitive enough to learn to pipe.

  Someone, Sella perhaps, Menolly thought bitterly, informed Mavi of Menolly’s activity.

  “You were told no tuning…”

  “Teaching someone drum beats is not tuning…”

  “Teaching anyone to play is Harper business, not yours, m’girl. Just your good fortune Sea Holder is out in the Deep or you’d have the belt across your shoulders, so you would. No more nonsense!”

  “But it’s not nonsense, Mavi. Last night another drummer or piper would have…”

  Her mother raised her hand in warning, and Menolly bit shut her lips.

  “No tuning, Menolly!”

  And that was that.

  “Now girl, see to the glows before the fleet gets back.”

  That job took Menolly inexorably to the Harper’s room: swept clean of everything that had been personal to Petiron. She was also reminded of the sealed message on the Record room mantel. What if the Masterharper were expecting a message from Petiron about the songmaker? Menolly was so very sure that part of that unopened message was about her. Not that thinking about it did Menolly any good. Even knowing it for a fact would be no help, Menolly decided gloomily. But that didn’t stop her from going past Yanus’s Record room and peering in at the tempting package on the mantel.

  She sighed, turning from the room. By now the Masterharper would have heard of Petiron’s death and be sending a new Harper. Maybe the new man would be able to open the message, and maybe, if it was about her, maybe if it said that the songs she’d sent were good ones, Yanus and her mother wouldn’t put such restrictions on her about tuning and whistling and everything.

  As the winter spun itself out, Menolly found that her sense of loss when she thought of Petiron deepened. He had been the only person in the Sea Hold who had ever encouraged her in anything: and most especially in that one thing that she was now forbidden to do. Melodies don’t stop growing in the mind, tapping at fingers, just because they’re forbidden. And Menolly didn’t stop composing them—which, she felt, was not precisely disobeying.

  What seemed to worry Yanus and Mavi most, Menolly reasoned to herself, was the fact that the children, whom she was supposed to teach only the proper Ballads and Sagas, might think Menolly’s tunes were Harper-crafted. (If her tunes were that good in her parents’ ears, what was the harm of them?) Basically they didn’t want her to play her songs aloud where they would be heard and perhaps repeated at awkward times.

  Menolly could, therefore, see no harm in writing down new tunes. She played them softly in the empty Little Hall when the children had left, before she began her afternoon chores, carefully hiding her notations among the Harper records in the rack of the Hall. Safe enough, for no one but herself, ’til the new Harper came, would discover them there.

  This mild deviation
from the absolute obedience to her father’s restriction about tuning did much to ease Menolly’s growing frustration and loneliness. What Menolly didn’t realize was that her mother had been watching her closely, having recognized the signs of rebellion in her. Mavi didn’t want the Hold to be disgraced in any way, and she feared that Menolly, her head turned by Petiron’s marked favor, was not mature enough to discipline herself. Sella had warned her mother that Menolly was getting out of hand. Mavi put some of that tale down to sisterly envy. But, when Sella had told Mavi that Menolly had actually started to teach another how to play an instrument, Mavi had been obliged to intervene. Let Yanus get one whisper of Menolly’s disobedience and there’d be real trouble in the Hold for the girl.

  Spring was coming and with spring, the quieter seas. Perhaps the new Harper would arrive soon.

  And then spring did come, a first glorious day. The sweet scents of seabeachplum and marshberry filled the seaward breezes and came in through the opened shutters of the Little Hall. The children were singing loudly, as if shouting got them through the learning faster. True, they were singing one of the longer Sagas, word perfect, but with far more exuberance than was strictly needed. Perhaps it was that exuberance that infected Menolly and reminded her of a tune she’d tried to set down the day before.

  She did not consciously disobey. She certainly was unaware that the fleet had returned from an early catch. She was equally unaware that the chords she was strumming were not—officially—of the Harper’s craft. And it was doubly unfortunate that this lapse occurred just as the Sea Holder passed the open windows of the Hall.

  He was in the Little Hall almost at once, summarily dismissing the youngsters to help unload the heavy catch. Then he silently, which made the anticipation of the punishment worse, removed his wide belt, signaled to Menolly to raise her tunic over her head and to bend over the high harper’s stool.

  When he had finished, she had fallen to her knees on the hard stone flags, biting her lips to keep back the sobs. He’d never beaten her so hard before. The blood was roaring in her ears so fiercely that she didn’t hear Yanus leave the Little Hall. It was a long while before she could ease the tunic over the painful weals on her back. Only when she’d got slowly to her feet did she realize that he’d taken the gitar, too. She knew then that his judgement was irrevocable and harsh.

  And unjust! She’d only played the first few bars…hummed along…and that only because the last chords of the Teaching Ballad had modified into the new tune in her head. Surely that little snitch wouldn’t have done any lasting harm! And the children knew all the Teaching Ballads they were supposed to know. She hadn’t meant to disobey Yanus.

  “Menolly?” Her mother came to the classhall door, the carrying thong of an empty skin in her hand. “You dismissed them early? Is that wise…” Her mother stopped abruptly and stared at her daughter. An expression of anger and disgust crossed her face. “So you’ve been the fool after all? With so much at stake, and you had to tune…”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose, Mavi. The song…just came into my mind. I’d played no more than a measure…”

  There wasn’t any point in trying to justify the incident to her mother. Not now. The desolation Menolly had felt when she realized her father had taken the gitar intensified in the face of her mother’s cold displeasure.

  “Take the sack. We need fresh greens,” Mavi said in an expressionless voice. “And any of the yellow-veined grass that might be up. There should be some.”

  Resignedly, Menolly took the sack and, without thinking, looped the thong over her shoulder. She caught her breath as the unwieldy sack banged against her scored back.

  Before Menolly could avoid it, her mother had flipped up the loose tunic. She gave an inarticulate exclamation. “You’ll need numbweed on some of those.”

  Menolly pulled away. “What good’s a beating then, if it’s numbed away first chance?” And she dashed out of the Hall.

  Much Mavi cared if she hurt, anyhow, except that a sound body works harder and longer and faster.

  Her thoughts and her misery spurred her out of the Hold, every swinging stride she took jarring her sore back. She didn’t slow down because she’d the whole long track in front of the Hold to go. The faster she went, the better, before some auntie wanted to know why the children were out of lessons so soon, or why Menolly was going green-picking instead of Teaching.

  Fortunately she encountered no one. Everyone was either down at the Dock Cave, unloading, or making themselves scarce to the Sea Holder’s eyes so they wouldn’t have to. Menolly charged past the smaller holds, down aways on the marshroad, then up the righthand track, south of the Half-Circle. She’d put as much distance between herself and Sea Hold as she could: all perfectly legitimate, in search of greenery.

  As she jogged along the sandy footpath, she kept her eyes open for fresh growth, trying to ignore the occasional rough going when she’d jar her whole body. Her back began to smart. She gritted her teeth and paced on.

  Her brother, Alemi, had once said that she could run as well as any boy of the Hold and outdistance the half of them on a long race. If only she had been a boy…Then it wouldn’t have mattered if Petiron had died and left them Harperless. Nor would Yanus have beaten a boy for being brave enough to sing his own songs.

  The first of the low marsh valleys was pink and yellow with blooming seabeachplum and marshberry, slightly blackened here and there: more from the low-flying queens catching the odd Thread that escaped the main wings. Yes, and there was the patch that the flamethrower had charred: the one Thread infestation that had gotten through. One day, Menolly told herself, she’d just throw open a window’s steel shutters and see the dragons charring Thread in the sky. What a sight that must be for certain!

  Fearful, too, she reckoned, having seen her mother treat men for Threadburn. Why, the mark looked as if someone had drawn a point deep groove with a red-hot poker on the man’s arm, leaving the edges black with singed skin. Torly would always bear that straight scar, puckered and red. Threadscore never healed neatly.

  She had to stop running. She’d begun to sweat heavily and her back was stinging. She loosened her tunic belt, flapping the soft runner-beast hide to send cooling draughts up between her shoulder blades.

  Past the first marsh valley, up over the rocky hump hill into the next valley. Cautious going here: this was one of the deep, boggy places. No sign of yellow-veined grasses. There had been a stand last summer two humpy hills over.

  She heard them first, glancing up with a stab of terror at the unexpected sounds above. Dragons? She glanced wildly about for the tell tale gray glitter of sky-borne Thread in the east. The greeny blue sky was clear of that dreaded fogging, but not of dragonwings. She heard dragons? It couldn’t be! They didn’t swarm like that. Dragons always flew in ordered wings, a pattern against the sky. These were darting, dodging, then swooping and climbing. She shaded her eyes. Blue flashes, green, the odd brown and then…Of course, sun glinted golden off the leading, dartlike body. A queen! A queen that tiny?

  She expelled the breath she’d been holding in her amazement. A fire lizard queen? It had to be. Only fire lizards could be that small and look like dragons. Whers certainly didn’t. And whers didn’t mate midair. And that’s what Menolly was seeing: the mating flight of a fire lizard queen, with her bronzes in close pursuit.

  So fire lizards weren’t boy talk! Awed, Menolly watched the swift, graceful flight. The queen had led her swarm so high that the smaller ones, the blues and greens and browns, had been forced down. They circled now at a lower altitude, struggling to keep the same direction as the high fliers. They dipped and dashed in mimicry of the queen and bronzes.

  They had to be fire lizards! thought Menolly, her heart almost stopping at the beauty and thrill of the sight. Fire lizards! And they were like dragons. Only much, much smaller. She didn’t know all the Teachings for nothing. A queen dragon was gold: she mated with the bronze who could outfly her. Which was exactly what was h
appening right now with the fire lizards.