The Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey [283]
A scream was torn from a single throat, a scream like a knife upon raw nerves!
“Don’t leave me alone!” The cry came from cords lacerated by the extreme of anguish; a command, an entreaty that seemed echoed by the black mouths of the weyrs, by dragon minds and human hearts.
Ramoth sprang aloft Mnementh was instantly beside her. Then every dragon in the Weyr was a-wing, the fire lizards, too; the air groaned with the effort to support the migration.
Brekke could not see. Her eyes were filled with blood from vessels burst by the force of her cry. But she knew there was a speck in the sky, tumbling downward with a speed that increased with every length; a plunge as fatal as the one which Canth had tried to stop over the stony heights of the High Reaches range.
And there was no consciousness in that plummeting speck, no echo, however faint, to her despairing inquiry. The arrow of dragons ascended, great wings pumping. The arrow thickened, once, twice, three times as other dragons arrived, making a broad path in the sky, steadily striving for that falling mote.
It was as if the dragons became a ramp that received the unconscious body of their weyrmate, received and braked its fatal momentum with their own bodies, until the last segment of overlapping wings eased the broken-winged ball of the bloody brown dragon to the floor of the Weyr.
Half-blinded as she was, Brekke was the first person to reach Canth’s bleeding body, F’nor still strapped to his burned neck Her hands found F’nor’s throat, her fingers the tendon where his pulse should beat. His flesh was cold and sticky to the touch and ice would be less hard.
“He isn’t breathing,” someone cried. “His lips are blue!”
“He’s alive, he’s alive,” Brekke chanted. There, one faint shallow flutter against her seeking fingers. No, she didn’t imagine it. Another.
“There wasn’t any air on the Red Star. The blueness. He suffocated.”
Some half-forgotten memory prompted Brekke to wrench F’nor’s jaws apart. She covered his mouth with hers and exhaled deeply into his throat. She blew air into his lungs and sucked it out.
“That’s right, Brekke,” someone cried. “That may work. Slow and steady! Breathe for yourself or you’ll pass out.”
Someone grabbed her painfully around the waist. She clung to F’nor’s limp body until she realized that they were both being lifted from the dragon’s neck.
She heard someone talking urgently, encouragingly to Canth.
“Canth! Stay!”
The dragon’s pain was like a cruel knot in Brekke’s skull. She breathed in and out. Out and in. For F’nor, for herself, for Canth. She was conscious as never before of the simple mechanics of breathing; conscious of the muscles of her abdomen expanding and contracting around a column of air which she forced up and out, in and out.
“Brekke! Brekke!”
Hard hands pulled at her. She clutched the wherhide tunic beneath her.
“Brekke! He’s breathing for himself now. Brekke!”
They forced her away from him. She tried to resist but everything was a bloody blur. She staggered, her hand touching dragon hide.
Brekke. The pain-soaked tone was faint, as if from an incalculable distance, but it was Canth. Brekke?
“I am not alone!” And Brekke fainted, mind and body overtaxed by an effort which had saved two lives.
Spun out by ceaseless violence, the spores fell from the turbulent raw atmosphere of the thawing planet toward Pern, pushed and pulled by the gravitic forces of a triple conjunction of the system’s other planets.
The spores dropped through the atmospheric envelope of Pern. Attenuated by the friction of entry, they fell in a rain of hot filaments on the surface of the planet.
Dragons rose, destroying them with flaming breath. What Thread eluded the airborne beasts was efficiently seared into harmless motes by ground crews, or burrowed after by sandworm and fire lizard.
Except on the eastern slope of a northern mountain plantation of hardwood trees. There men had carefully drawn back from the leading Edge of the Fall. They watched, one with intent horror, as the silver