The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (67 page)

The first whine was joined by another and then a low hum throbbed as if carried by the stones of the Weyr itself.

F’lar, his face changing rapidly from surprise to triumphant astonishment, dashed up the passage before Lessa could open her mouth.

“What’s the matter?” she demanded, picking up her skirts to run after him. “What does that mean?”

The hum, resonating everywhere, was deafening in the echo-chamber of the queen’s weyr. Lessa registered the fact that Ramoth was gone. She heard F’lar’s boots pounding down the passage to the ledge, a sharp
ta-ta-tat
over the kettledrum booming hum. The whine was so high-pitched now it was inaudible, but nerve-wracking. Disturbed, frightened, Lessa followed F’lar out.

By the time she reached the ledge, the Bowl was a-whir with dragons on the wing, making for the high entrance to the Hatching Ground. Weyrfolk, riders, women, children, all screaming with excitement, were pouring across the Bowl to the lower entrance to the Ground.

She caught sight of F’lar charging across to the tunnel entrance and she shrieked at him to wait. He couldn’t have heard her across the bedlam.

Fuming because she had the long stairs to descend, then must double back as the stairs faced the feeding grounds at the opposite end of the Bowl from the Hatching Ground, Lessa realized that she, the Weyrwoman, would be the last one there.

Why had Ramoth decided to be secretive about laying? Wasn’t she close enough to her own weyrmate to want her with her?

A dragon knows what to do,
Ramoth calmly informed Lessa.

“You could have told me,” Lessa wailed, feeling much abused.

Why, at the time F’lar had been going on largely about huge clutches and three thousand beasts, that infuriating dragonchild had been doing it!

It didn’t improve Lessa’s temper to have to recall another remark of F’lar’s—on the state of the Hatching Grounds. The moment she stepped into the mountain-high cavern, she felt the heat through the soles of her sandals. Everyone was crowded in a loose circle around the far end of the cavern. And everyone was swaying from foot to foot. As Lessa was short to begin with, this only decreased the likelihood of her ever seeing what Ramoth had done.

“Let me through!” she demanded imperiously, pounding on the wide backs of two tall riders.

An aisle was reluctantly opened for her and she went through, looking neither to her right nor left at the excited weyrfolk. She was furious, confused, hurt and knew she looked ridiculous because the hot sand made her walk a curious, quick-step mince.

She halted, stunned and wide-eyed at the mass of eggs, and forgot such trivial things as hot feet.

R
AMOTH WAS CURLED
around the clutch, looking enormously pleased with herself. She, too, kept shifting, closing and opening a protective wing over her eggs so it was difficult to count them.

“No one will steal them, silly, so stop fluttering,” Lessa exclaimed as she tried to make a tally.

Obediently, Ramoth folded her wings. To relieve her maternal anxiety, however, she snaked her head out across the circle of mottled, glowing eggs, looking all around the cavern, flicking her forked tongue in and out.

An immense sigh, like a gust of wind, swept through the cavern. For there, now Ramoth’s wings were furled, gleamed an egg of glowing gold among the tan, the green and the blue ones. A queen egg!

“A queen egg!” The cry went up simultaneously from half a hundred throats. The Hatching Ground rang with cheers, yells, screams and howls of exultation.

Someone seized Lessa and swung her around in an excess of feeling. A kiss landed in the vicinity of her mouth. No sooner did she recover her footing than she was hugged by someone else, she thought it was Manora, and then pounded and buffeted around in congratulation until she was reeling in a kind of dance between avoiding the celebrants and easing the growing discomfort of her feet.

She broke from the milling revelers and ran across the Ground to Ramoth. She came to a sudden stop before the eggs. They seemed to be pulsing. The shells looked flaccid. She could have sworn they were hard the day she Impressed Ramoth. She wanted to touch one, just to make sure, and dared not.

You may,
Ramoth assured her condescendingly. She touched Lessa’s shoulder gently with her tongue.

The egg was soft to touch and Lessa drew her hand back quickly, afraid of doing injury.

The heat will harden it,
Ramoth said.

“Ramoth, I’m so proud of you,” Lessa sighed, looking adoringly up at the great eyes which shone in rainbows of pride. “You are the most marvelous queen ever. I do believe you will redragon all the Weyrs. I do believe you will.”

Ramoth inclined her head regally, then began to sway it from side to side over the eggs, protectingly. She began to hiss suddenly, raising up from her crouch, beating the air with her wings, before settling back into the sands to lay yet another egg.

The weyrfolk, uncomfortable on the hot sands, were beginning to leave the Hatching Ground, now they had paid tribute to the arrival of the golden egg. A queen took several days to complete her clutch so there was no point to waiting. Seven eggs already lay beside the important golden one and if there were seven already, this augured well for the eventual total. Wagers were being made and taken even as Ramoth produced her ninth mottled egg.

“A queen egg, by the mother of us all,” F’lar’s voice said in Lessa’s ear. “And I’ll wager there’ll be ten bronzes at least.”

She looked up at him, completely in harmony with the Weyrleader at this moment. She was conscious, now, of Mnementh, crouching proudly on a ledge, gazing fondly at his mate. Impulsively, Lessa laid her hand on F’lar’s arm.

“F’lar, I do believe you.”

“Only now?” F’lar teased her, but his smile was wide and his eyes proud.

Weyrman, watch; Weyrman, learn

Something new in every Turn.

Oldest may be coldest, too.

Sense the right; find the true!

If F’lar’s orders over the next months caused no end of discussion and muttering among the weyrfolk, they seemed, to Lessa, to be only the logical outcomes of their discussion after Ramoth had finished laying her gratifying total of forty-one eggs.

F’lar discarded tradition right and left, treading on more than R’gul’s conservative toes.

Out of perverse distaste for outworn doctrines against which she herself had chafed during R’gul’s leadership, and out of respect for F’lar’s intelligence, Lessa backed him completely. She might not have respected her earlier promise to him that she would believe in his ways until spring if she had not seen his predictions come true one after another. These were based, however, not on the premonitions she no longer trusted after her experience
between
time, but on recorded facts.

As soon as the eggshells hardened and Ramoth had rolled her special queen egg to one side of the mottled clutch for attentive brooding, F’lar brought the prospective riders into the Hatching Ground. Traditionally the candidates saw the eggs for the first time on the day of Impression. To this precedent, F’lar added others: Very few of the sixty-odd were weyrbred and most of them were in their late teens. The candidates were to get used to the eggs, touch them, caress them, be comfortable with the notion that out of these eggs, young dragons would hatch, eager and waiting to be Impressed. F’lar felt that such a practice might cut down on casualties during Impression when the boys were simply too scared to move out of the way of the awkward dragonets.

F’lar also had Lessa persuade Ramoth to let Kylara near her precious golden egg. Kylara readily enough weaned her son and spent hours, with Lessa acting as her tutor, beside the golden egg. Despite Kylara’s loose attachment to T’bor, she showed an open preference for F’lar’s company. Therefore, Lessa took great pains to foster F’lar’s plan for Kylara since it meant her removal, with the new-hatched queen, to Fort Weyr.

F’lar’s use of the Hold-born as riders served an additional purpose. Shortly before the actual Hatching and Impression, Lytol, the Warder appointed at Ruath Hold, sent another message.

“The man positively delights in sending bad news,” Lessa remarked as F’lar passed the message skin to her.

“He’s gloomy,” F’nor agreed. He had brought the message. “I feel sorry for that youngster cooped up with such a pessimist.”

Lessa frowned at the brown rider. She still found distasteful any mention of Gemma’s son, now Lord of her ancestral Hold. Yet…she had inadvertently caused his mother’s death. As she could not be Weyrwoman and Lady Holder at the same time, it was fitting that Gemma’s Gaxom be Lord at Ruatha.

“I, however,” F’lar said, “am grateful to his warnings. I suspected Meron would cause trouble again.”

“He’s got shifty eyes, like Fax,” Lessa remarked.

“Shifty-eyed or not, he’s dangerous,” F’lar answered. “And I cannot have him spreading rumors that we are deliberately choosing men of the Blood to weaken Family Lines.”

“There are more craftsmen’s sons than Holders’ boys in any case,” F’nor snorted.

“I don’t like him questioning that the Threads have not appeared,” Lessa said gloomily.

F’lar shrugged. “They’ll appear in due time. Be thankful the weather has continued cold. When the weather warms up and still no Threads, then I will worry.” He grinned at Lessa in an intimate reminder of her promise.

F’nor cleared his throat hastily and looked away.

“However,” the Weyrleader went on briskly, “I can do something about the other accusation.”

So, when it was apparent the eggs were about to hatch, he broke another long-standing tradition and sent riders to fetch the fathers of the young candidates from craft and Hold.

The great Hatching cavern gave the appearance of being almost full as Holder and Weyrfolk watched from the tiers above the heated Ground. This time, Lessa observed, there was no aura of fear. The youthful candidates were tense, yes, but not frightened out of their wits by the rocking, shattering eggs. When the ill-coordinated dragonets awkwardly stumbled—it seemed to Lessa they deliberately looked around at the eager faces as though pre-Impressed—the youths either stepped to one side, or eagerly advanced as a crooning dragonet made his choice. The Impressions were made quickly and with no accidents. All too soon, Lessa thought, the triumphant process of stumbling dragons and proud new riders moved erratically out of the hatching Ground to the barracks.

The young queen burst from her shell and moved unerringly for Kylara, standing confidently on the hot sands. The watching beasts hummed their approval.

“It was over too soon,” Lessa said in a disappointed voice that evening to F’lar.

He laughed indulgently, allowing himself a rare evening of relaxation now that another step had gone as planned. The Holder folk had been ridden home, stunned, dazed and themselves impressed by the Weyr and the Weyrleader.

“That’s because you were watching this time,” he remarked, brushing a lock of her hair back. It obscured his view of her profile. He chuckled again. “You’ll notice Naton…”

“…N’ton…” she corrected him.

“…All right, N’ton…Impressed a bronze.”

“Just as you predicted,” she said with some asperity.

“And Kylara is Weyrwoman for Pridith.”

Lessa did not comment on that and she did her best to ignore his laughter.

“I wonder which bronze will fly her,” he murmured softly.

“It had better be T’bor’s Orth,” Lessa said, bridling.

He answered her the only way a wise man could.

Crack dust, blackdust,

Turn in freezing air,

Waste dust, spacedust,

From Red Star bare.

Lessa woke abruptly, her head aching, her eyes blurred, her mouth dry. She had the immediate memory of a terrible nightmare which, just as quickly, escaped recall. She brushed her hair out of her face and was surprised to find she had been sweating heavily.

“F’lar?” she called in an uncertain voice. He had evidently risen early. “F’lar,” she called again, louder.

He’s coming,
Mnementh informed her. Lessa sensed that the dragon was just landing on the ledge. She touched Ramoth and found that the queen, too, had been bothered by formless, frightening dreams. The dragon roused briefly and then fell back into deeper sleep.

Disturbed by her vague fears, Lessa rose and dressed, forgoing a bath for the first time since she had arrived at the Weyr.

She called down the shaft for breakfast, plaiting her hair with deft fingers as she waited.

The tray appeared on the shaft platform just as F’lar entered. He kept looking back over his shoulder at Ramoth.

“What’s got into her?”

“Echoing my nightmare. I woke in a cold sweat.”

“You were sleeping quietly enough when I left to assign patrols. You know, at the rate those dragonets are growing, they’re already capable of limited flight. All they do is eat and sleep and that is…”

“…What makes a dragon grow…” Lessa finished for him and sipped thoughtfully at her steaming hot
klah
. “You are going to be extra careful about their drill procedures, aren’t you?”

“You mean to prevent an inadvertent flight
between
times? I certainly am,” he assured her. “I don’t want bored dragonriders irresponsibly popping in and out.” He gave her a long, stern look.

“Well, it wasn’t my fault no one taught me to fly early enough,” she replied in the sweet tone she used when she was being especially malicious. “If I’d been drilled from the day of Impression to the day of my first flight, I’d never have discovered that trick.”

“True enough,” he said solemnly.

“You know, F’lar, if I discovered it, someone else must have and someone else may. If they haven’t already.”

F’lar drank, making a face as the
klah
scalded his tongue. “I don’t know how to find out discreetly. We would be foolish to think we were the first. It is, after all, an inherent ability in dragons or you would never have been able to do it.”

She frowned, took a quick breath and then let it go, shrugging.