CHAPTER VI
Midmorning at Southern Weyr
Early Morning at Nabol Hold: Next Day
HOT, sandy and sticky with sweat and salt, triumph overrode 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,”
Exultations 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 wherhides 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 sourwine 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.