There are other ways of remembering important matters, Canth replied.
“Just imagine being able to breed tiny fire lizards into a creature the size of you!” He was awed, knowing how long it had taken to breed faster landbeasts.
Canth rumbled restlessly. I am useful. She is not.
“I’d wager she’d improve rapidly with a little help.” The prospect fascinated F’nor. “Would you mind?”
Why?
F’nor leaned against the great wedge-shaped head, looping his arm under the jaw, as far as he could reach, feeling extremely fond and proud of his dragon.
“No, that was a stupid question for me to ask you, Canth, wasn’t it?”
Yes.
“I wonder how long it would take me to train her.”
To do what?
“Nothing you can’t do better, of course. No, now wait a minute. If, by chance, I could train her to take messages . . . You said she went between? I wonder if she could be taught to go between, alone, and come back. Ah, but will she come back here to us now?” At this juncture, F’nor’s enthusiasm for the project was deflated by harsh reality.
She comes, Canth said very softly.
“Where?”
Above your head
Very slowly, F’nor raised one arm, hand outstretched, palm down.
“Little beauty, come where we can admire you. We mean you no harm.” F’nor saturated his mental tone with all the reassuring persuasiveness at his command.
A shimmer of gold flickered at the corner of his eye. Then the little lizard hovered at F’nor’s eye level, just beyond his reach. He ignored Canth’s amusement that the tiny one was susceptible to flattery.
She is hungry, the big dragon said.
Very slowly F’nor reached into his pouch and drew out a meatroll. He broke off a piece, bent slowly to lay it on the rock at his feet, then backed away.
“That is food for you, little one”
The lizard continued to hover, then darted down and, grabbing the meat in her tiny claws, disappeared again.
F’nor squatted down to wait.
In a second, the dragonette returned, ravenous hunger foremost in her delicate thoughts along with a wistful plea. As F’nor broke off another portion, he tried to dampen his elation. If hunger could be the leash . . . Patiently he fed her tiny bits, each time placing the food nearer to him until he got her to take the final morsel from his fingers. As she cocked her head at him, not quite sated, though she had eaten enough to satisfy a grown man, he ventured to stroke an eye ridge with a gentle fingertip.
The inner lids of the tiny opalescent eyes closed one by one as she abandoned herself to the caress.
She is a hatchling. You have Impressed her, Canth told him very softly.
“A hatching?”
She is the little sister of my blood after all and so must come from an egg, Canth replied reasonably.
“There are others?”
Of course. Down on the beach.
F’nor, careful not to disturb the little lizard, turned his head over his shoulder. He had been so engrossed in the one at hand, he hadn’t even heard above the surf sounds the pitiful squawks which were issuing from the litter of shining wings and bodies. There seemed to be hundreds of them on the beach, above the high-tide mark, about twenty dragon lengths from him.
Don’t move, Canth cautioned him. You’ll lose her
“But if they’re hatching . . . they can be Impressed . . . Canth, rouse the Weyr! Speak to Prideth. Speak to Wirenth. Tell them to come. Tell them to bring food. Tell them to hurry. Quickly or it’ll be too late.”
He stared hard at the purple blotch on the horizon that was the Weyr, as if he himself could somehow bridge the gap with his thoughts. But the frenzy on the beach was attracting attention from another source. Wild wherries, the carrion eaters of Pern, instinctively flocked to the shore, their wings making an ominous line of v’s in the southern sky. The vanguard was already beating to a height, preparing to dive at the unprotected weak fledglings. Every nerve in F’nor’s body yearned to go to their rescue, but Canth repeated his warning. F’nor would jeopardize his fragile rapport with the little queen if he moved. Or, F’nor realized, if he communicated his agitation to her. He closed his eyes. He couldn’t watch.
The first shriek of pain vibrated through his body as well as the little lizard’s. She darted into the folds of his arm sling, trembling against his ribs. Despite himself, F’nor opened his eyes. But the wherries had not stooped yet, though they circled lower and lower with rapacious speed. The fledglings were voraciously attacking each other. He shuddered and the little queen rattled her pinions, uttering a delicate fluting sound of distress.
“You’re safe with me. Far safer with me. Nothing can harm you with me,” F’nor told her repeatedly, and Canth crooned reassurance in harmony with that litany.
The strident shriek of the wherries as they plunged suddenly changed to their piercing wail of terror. F’nor glanced up, away from the carnage on the beach, to see a green dragon in the sky, belching flame, scattering the avian hunters. The green hovered, several lengths above the beach, her head extended downward. She was riderless.
Just then, F’nor saw three figures, charging, sliding, slipping down the high sand dune, heading as straight as possible toward the many-winged mass of cannibals. Although they looked as if they’d carom into the middle, they somehow managed to stop.
Brekke said she has alerted as many as she could, Canth told him.
“Brekke? Why’d you call her? She’s got enough to do.”
She is the best one, Canth replied, ignoring F’nor’s reprimand.
“Are they too late?” F’nor glanced anxiously at the sky and at the dune, willing more men to arrive.
Brekke was wading toward the struggling hatchlings now, her hands extended. The other two were following her example. Who had she brought? Why hadn’t she got more riders? They’d know instantly, how to approach the beasts.
Two more dragons appeared in the sky, circled and landed with dizzying speed right on the beach, their riders racing in to help. The skyborne green flamed off the insistent wherries, bugling to her fellows to help her.
Brekke has one. And the girl. So does the boy but the beast is hurt. Brekke says that many are dead.
Why, wondered F’nor suddenly, if he had only just seen the truth of the legend of fire lizards, did he ache for their deaths? Surely the creatures had been hatching on lonely beaches for centuries, been eaten by wherries and their own peers, unseen and unmourned.
The strong survive, said Canth, undismayed.
They saved seven, two badly hurt. The young girl, Mirrim, Brekke’s fosterling, attached three; two greens and a brown, seriously injured by gouges on his soft belly. Brekke had a bronze with no mark on him, the green’s rider had a bronze, and the other two riders had blues, one with a wrenched wing which Brekke feared might never heal properly for flight.
“Seven out of over fifty,” said Brekke sadly after they had disposed of the broken bodies with agenothree. A precaution which Brekke suggested as a frustration for the carrion eaters and to prevent other fire lizards from avoiding the beach as dangerous to their kind. “I wonder how many would have survived if you hadn’t called us.”
“She was already far from the others when she discovered us,” F’nor remarked. “Probably the first to hatch, or on top of the others.”
Brekke’d had the wit to bring a full haunch of buck, though the Weyr might eat light that evening. So they had gorged the hatchlings into such a somnolent state that they could be carried, unresisting, back to the Weyr, or to Brekke’s Infirmary.
“You’re to fly home straight,” Brekke told F’nor, in much the way a woman spoke to a rebellious weyrling.
“Yes, ma’am,” F’nor replied, with mock humility, and then smiled because Brekke took him so seriously.
The little queen nestled in his arm sling as contentedly as if she’d found a weyr of her own. “A weyr is where a drag
on is no matter how it’s constructed,” he murmured to himself as Canth winged steadily eastward.
When F’nor reached Southern, it was obvious the news had raced through the Weyr. There was such an aura of excitement that F’nor began to worry that it might frighten the tiny creatures between.
No dragon can fly when he is belly-bloated Canth said. Even a fire lizard. And took himself off to his sun-warmed wallow, no longer interested.
“You don’t suppose he’s jealous, do you?” F’nor asked Brekke when he found her in her Infirmary, splinting the little blue’s wrenched wing.