The Dragonriders of Pern

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Seas boil, and mountains move,” she wrote.

  Possibly. If there is a major inner upheaval of the land. One of Fax’s guards at Ruath Hold had once regaled the Watch with a tale from his great-grandsire’s days. A whole coastal village in East Fort had slid into the sea. There had been monumental tides that year and, beyond Ista, a mountain had allegedly emerged at the same time, its top afire. It had subsided years later. That might be to what the line referred. Might be.

  “Sands heat . . .” True, in summer it was said that Igen Plain could be unendurable. No shade, no trees, no caves, just bleak sand desert. Even dragonmen eschewed that region in deep summer. Come to think of it, the sands of the Hatching Ground were always warm underfoot. Did those sands ever get hot enough to burn? And what warmed them, anyway? The same unseen internal fires that heated the water in the bathing pools throughout Benden Weyr?

  “Dragons prove . . .” Ambiguous for half a dozen interpretations, and R’gul won’t even suggest one as official. Does it mean that dragons prove the Red Star passes? How? Coming out with a special keen, similar to the one they utter when one of their own kind passes to die between? Or did the dragons prove themselves in some other way as the Red Star passes? Besides, of course, their traditional function of burning the Threads out of the skies? Oh, all the things these ballads don’t say, and no one ever explains. Yet there must originally have been a reason.

  “Stone pile and fires burn/Green withers, arm Pern.”

  More enigma. Is someone piling the stones on the fires? Do they mean firestone? Or do the stones pile themselves as in an avalanche? The balladeer might at least have suggested the season involved—or did he, with “green wither”? Yet vegetation purportedly attracted Threads, which was the reason, traditionally, that greenery was not permitted around human habitations. But stones couldn’t stop a Thread from burrowing underground and multiplying. Only the phosphine emissions of a firestone-eating dragon stopped a Thread. And nowadays, Lessa smiled thinly, no one not even dragonmen—with the notable exceptions of F’lar and his wingmen—bothered to drill with firestone, much less uproot grass near houses. Lately hilltops, scoured barren for centuries, were allowed to burgeon with green in the spring.

  “Guard all passes.”

  She dug the phrase out with the stylus, thinking to herself: So no dragonrider can leave the Weyr undetected.

  R’gul’s current course of inaction as Weyrleader was based on the idea that if no one, Lord or holder, saw a dragonrider, no one could be offended. Even traditional patrols were flown now over uninhabited areas, to allow the current agitation about the “parasitical” Weyr to die down. Fax, whose open dissension had sparked that movement, had not taken the cause to his grave. Larad, the young Lord of Telgar, was said to be the new leader.

  R’gul as Weyrleader. That rankled Lessa deeply. He was so patently inadequate. But his Hath had taken Nemorth on her last flight. Traditionally (and that word was beginning to nauseate Lessa for the sins of omission ascribable to its name) the Weyrleader was the rider of the queen’s mate. Oh, R’gul looked the part—a big, husky man, physically vigorous and domineering, his heavy face suggesting a sternly disciplined personality. Only, to Lessa’s thinking, the discipline was misdirected.

  Now F’lar . . . he had disciplined himself and his wingriders in what Lessa considered the proper direction. For he, unlike the Weyrleader, not only sincerely believed in the Laws and Traditions he followed, he understood them. Time and again she had managed to make sense of a puzzling lesson from a phrase or two F’lar tossed in her direction. But, traditionally, only the Weyrleader instructed the Weyrwoman.

  Why, in the name of the Egg, hadn’t Mnementh, F’lar’s bronze giant, flown Nemorth? Hath was a noble beast, in full prime, but he could not compare with Mnementh in size, wingspread, or strength. There would have been more than ten eggs in that last clutch of Nemorth’s if Mnementh had flown her.

  Jora, the late and unlamented Weyrwoman, had been obese, stupid, and incompetent. On this everyone agreed. Supposedly the dragon reflected its rider as much as the rider the dragon. Lessa’s thoughts turned critical. Undoubtedly Mnementh had been as repelled by the dragon, as a man like F’lar would be by the rider—unrider, Lessa corrected herself, sardonically glancing at the drowsing S’lel.

  But if F’lar had gone to the trouble of that desperate duel with Fax to save Lessa’s life back in Ruath Hold to bring her to the Weyr as a candidate at the Impression, why had he not taken over the Weyr when she proved successful, and ousted R’gul? What was he waiting for? He had been vehement and persuasive enough in making Lessa relinquish Ruatha and come to Benden Weyr. Why, now, did he adopt such an aloof pose of detachment as the Weyr tumbled further and further into disfavor?

  “To save Pern,” F’lar’s words had been. From what if not R’gul? F’lar had better start salvation procedures. Or was he biding his time until R’gul blundered fatally? R’gul won’t blunder, Lessa thought sourly, because he won’t do anything. Most particularly he wouldn’t explain what she wanted to know.

  “Star Stone watch, scan sky.” From her ledge, Lessa could see the gigantic rectangle of the Star Stone outlined against the sky. A watch-rider always stood by it. One day she’d get up there. It gave a magnificent view of the Benden Range and the high plateau that came right up to the foot of the Weyr. Last Turn there had been quite a ceremony at Star Stone, when the rising sun seemed to settle briefly on Finger Rock, marking the winter solstice. However, that only explained the significance of the Finger Rock, not the Star Stone. Add one more unexplained mystery.

  “Ready the Weyrs,” Lessa wrote morosely. Plural. Not Weyr but Weyrs. R’gul couldn’t deny there were five empty Weyrs around Pern, deserted for who knows how many Turns. She’d had to learn the names, the order of their establishment, too. Fort was the first and mightiest, then Benden, High Reaches, Hot Igen, Ocean Ista and plainland Telgar. Yet no explanation as to why five had been abandoned. Nor why great Benden, capable of housing five hundred beasts in its myriad weyr-caverns, maintained a scant two hundred. Of course, R’gul had fobbed their new Weyrwoman off with the convenient excuse that Jora had been an incompetent and neurotic Weyrwoman, allowing her dragon queen to gorge unrestrained. (No one told Lessa why this was so undesirable, nor why, contradictorily, they were so pleased when Ramoth stuffed herself.) Of course, Ramoth was growing, growing so rapidly that the changes were apparent overnight.

  Lessa smiled, a tender smile that not even the presence of R’gul and S’lel could embarrass. She glanced up from her writing to the passageway that led from the Council Room up to the great cavern that was Ramoth’s weyr. She could sense that Ramoth was still deeply asleep. She longed for the dragon to wake, longed for the reassuring regard of those rainbow eyes, for the comforting companionship that made life in the Weyr endurable. Sometimes Lessa felt she was two people: gay and fulfilled when she was attending Ramoth, gray and frustrated when the dragon slept. Abruptly Lessa cut off this depressing reflection and bent diligently to her lesson. It did pass time.

  “Red Star passes.”

  That benighted, begreened Red Star, and Lessa jammed her stylus into the soft wax with the symbol for a completed score.

  There had been that unforgettable dawn, over two full Turns ago, when she had been roused by an ominous presentiment from the damp straw of the cheeseroom at Ruatha. And the Red Star had gleamed at her.

  Yet here she was. And that bright, active future F’lar had so glowingly painted had not materialized. Instead of using her subtle power to manipulate events and people for Pern’s good, she was forced into a round of inconclusive, uninstructive, tedious days, bored to active nausea by R’gul and S’lel, restricted to the Weyrwoman’s apartments (however much of an improvement that was over her square foot of the cheeseroom floor) and the feeding grounds and the bathing lake. The only time she used her ability was to terminate these sessions with her so-called tutors. Grinding her teeth, Lessa thought that if it weren’t for Ramot
h, she would just leave. Oust Gemma’s son and take Hold at Ruatha as she ought to have done once Fax was dead.

  She caught her lip under her teeth, smiling in self-derision. If it weren’t for Ramoth, she wouldn’t have stayed here a moment past Impression anyway. But, from the second in which her eyes had met those of the young queen on the Hatching Ground, nothing but Ramoth mattered. Lessa was Ramoth’s and Ramoth was hers, mind and heart, irrevocably attuned. Only death could dissolve that incredible bond.

  Occasionally a dragonless man remained living, such as Lytol, Ruatha’s Warder, but he was half shadow and that indistinct self lived in torment. When his rider died, a dragon winked into between, that frozen nothingness through which a dragon somehow moved himself and his rider, instantly, from one geographical position on Pern to another. To enter between held danger to the uniniated, Lessa knew, the danger of being trapped between for longer than it took a man to cough three times.

  Yet Lessa’s one dragonflight on Mnementh’s neck had filled her with an insatiable compulsion to repeat the experience. Naïvely she had thought she would be taught, as the young riders and dragonets were. But she, supposedly the most important inhabitant of the Weyr next to Ramoth, remained earthbound while the youngsters winked in and out of between above the Weyr in endless practice. She chafed at the intolerable restriction.

  Female or not, Ramoth must have the same innate ability to pass between as the males did. This theory was supported—unequivocally in Lessa’s mind—by “The Ballad of Moreta’s Ride.” Were not ballads constructed to inform? To teach those who could not read and write? So that the young Pernese, whether he be dragonman, Lord, or holder, might learn his duty toward Pern and rehearse Pern’s bright history? These two arrant idiots might deny the existence of that Ballad, but how had Lessa learned it if it did not exist? No doubt, Lessa thought acidly, for the same reason queens had wings!

  When R’gul consented—and she would wear him down till he did—to allow her to take up her “traditional” responsibility as Keeper of the Records, she would find that Ballad. One day it was going to have to be R’gul’s much delayed “right time.”

  Right time! she fumed. Right time! I have too much of the wrong time on my hands. When will this particular right time of theirs occur? When the moons turn green? What are they waiting for? And what might the superior F’lar be waiting for? The passing of the Red Star he alone believes in? She paused, for even the most casual reference to that phenomenon evoked a cold, mocking sense of menace within her.

  She shook her head to dispel it. Her movement was injudicious. It caught R’gul’s attention. He looked up from the Records he was laboriously reading. As he drew her slate across the stone Council table, the clatter roused S’lel. He jerked his head up, uncertain of his surroundings.

  “Humph? Eh? Yes?” he mumbled, blinking to focus sleep-blurred eyes.

  It was too much. Lessa quickly made contact with S’lel’s Tuenth, himself just rousing from a nap. Tuenth was quite agreeable.

  “Tuenth is restless, must go,” S’lel promptly muttered. He hastened up the passageway, his relief at leaving no less than Lessa’s at seeing him go. She was startled to hear him greet someone in the corridor and hoped the new arrival would provide an excuse to rid herself of R’gul.

  It was Manora who entered. Lessa greeted the headwoman of the Lower Caverns with thinly disguised relief. R’gul, always nervous in Manora’s presence, immediately departed.

  Manora, a stately woman of middle years, exuded an aura of quiet strength and purpose, having come to a difficult compromise with life which she maintained with serene dignity. Her patience tacitly chided Lessa for her fretfulness and petty grievances. Of all the women she had met in the Weyr, (when she was permitted by the dragonmen to meet any) Lessa admired and respected Manora most. Some instinct in Lessa made her bitterly aware that she would never be on easy or intimate terms with any of the women in the Weyr. Her carefully formal relationship with Manora, however, was both satisfying and satisfactory.

  Manora had brought the tally slates of the Supply Caves. It was her responsibility as headwoman to keep the Weyrwoman informed of the domestic management of the Weyr. (One duty R’gul insisted she perform.)

  “Bitra, Benden, and Lemos have sent in their tithes, but that won’t be enough to see us through the deep cold this Turn.”

  “We had only those three last Turn and seemed to eat well enough.”

  Manor smiled amiably, but it was obvious she did not consider the Weyr generously supplied.

  “True, but that was because we had stores of preserved and dried foods from more bountiful Turns to sustain us. That reserve is now gone. Except for those barrels and barrels of fish from Tillek . . .” Her voice trailed off expressively.

  Lessa shuddered. Dried fish, salted fish, fish, had been served all too frequently of late.

  “Our supplies of grain and flour in the Dry Caves are very low, for Benden, Bitra, and Lemos are not grain producers.”

  “Our biggest needs are grains and meat?”

  “We could use more fruits and root vegetables for variety,” Manora said thoughtfully. “Particularly if we have the long cold season the weather-wise predict. Now we did go to Igen Plain for the spring and fall nuts, berries . . .”

  “We? to Igen Plain?” Lessa interrupted her, stunned.

  “Yes,” Manora answered, surprised at Lessa’s reaction. “We always pick there. And we beat out the water grains from the low swamplands.”

  “How do you get there?” asked Lessa sharply. There could be only one answer.

  “Why, the old ones fly us. They don’t mind, and it gives the beasts something to do that isn’t tiring. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  “That the women in the Lower Caverns fly with dragonriders?” Lessa pursed her lips angrily. “No. I wasn’t told.” Nor did it help Lessa’s mood to see the pity and regret in Manora’s eyes.

  “As Weyrwoman,” she said gently, “your obligations restrict you where . . .”

  “If I should ask to be flown to . . . Ruatha, for instance,” Lessa cut in, ruthlessly pursuing a subject she sensed Manora wanted to drop, “would it be refused me?”

  Manora regarded Lessa closely, her eyes dark with concern. Lessa waited. Deliberately she had put Manora into a position where the woman must either lie outright, which would be distasteful to a person of her integrity, or prevaricate, which could prove more instructive.

  “An absence for any reason these days might be disastrous. Absolutely disastrous,” Manora said firmly and, unaccountably, flushed. “Not with the queen growing so quickly. You must be here.” Her unexpectedly urgent entreaty, delivered with a mounting anxiety, impressed Lessa far more than all R’gul’s pompous exhortations about constant attendance on Ramoth.

  “You must be here,” Manora repeated, her fear naked.

  “Queens do not fly,” Lessa reminded her acidly. She suspected Manora was about to echo S’lel’s reply to that statement, but the older woman suddenly shifted to a safer subject.

  “We cannot, even with half-rations,” Manora blurted out breathlessly, with a nervous shuffling of her slates, “last the full Cold.”

  “Hasn’t there ever been such a shortage before . . . in all Tradition?” Lessa demanded with caustic sweetness.

  Manora raised questioning eyes to Lessa, who flushed, ashamed of herself for venting her frustrations with the dragonmen on the headwoman. She was doubly contrite when Manora gravely accepted her mute apology. In that moment Lessa’s determination to end R’gul’s domination over herself and the Weyr crystallized.

  “No,” Manora went on calmly, “traditionally,” and she accorded Lessa a wry smile, “the Weyr is supplied from the first fruits of the soil and hunt. True, in recent Turns we have been chronically shorted, but it didn’t signify. We had no young dragons to feed. They do eat, as you know.” The glances of the two women locked in a timeless feminine amusement over the vagaries of the young under their care. Then Manora shrugg
ed. “The riders used to hunt their beasts in the High Reaches or on the Keroon plateau. Now, however . . .”

  She made a helpless grimace to indicate that R’gul’s restrictions deprived them of that victual relief.

  “Time was,” she went on, her voice soft with nostalgia, “we would pass the coldest part of the Turn in one of the southern Holds. Or, if we wished and could, return to our birthplaces. Families used to take pride in daughters with dragonfolk sons.” Her face settled into sad lines. “The world turns and times change.”

  “Yes,” Lessa heard herself say in a grating voice, “the world does turn, and times . . . times will change.”

  Manora looked at Lessa, startled.

  “Even R’gul will see we have no alternative,” Manora continued hastily, trying to stick to her problem.

  “To what? Letting the mature dragons hunt?”

  “Oh, no. He’s so adamant about that. No. We’ll have to barter at Fort or Telgar.”

  Righteous indignation flared up in Lessa.

  “The day the Weyr has to buy what should be given . . .” and she halted in midsentence, stunned as much by such a necessity as by the ominous echo of other words. “The day one of my Holds cannot support itself or the visit of its rightful overlord . . .” Fax’s words rang in her head. Did those words again foreshadow disaster? For whom? For what?

  “I know, I know,” Manora was saying worriedly, unaware of Lessa’s shock. “It goes against the grain. But if R’gul will not permit judicious hunting, there is no other choice. He will not like the pinch of hunger in his belly.”

  Lessa was struggling to control her inner terror. She took a deep breath.

  “He’d probably then cut his throat to isolate his stomach,” she snapped, her acid comment restoring her wits. She ignored Manora’s startled look of dismay and went on. “It is traditional for you as headwoman of the Lower Cavern to bring such matters to the attention of the Weyrwoman, correct?”