The Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey [180]
“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