The Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey [40]
“Jora never did fly a dragon at all,” S’lel mumbled, blinking rapidly in his bemusement with the past. His expression was vaguely troubled. “Jora never left these apartments.”
“She took Nemorth to the feeding grounds,” R’gul snapped irritably.
Bile rose in Lessa’s throat. She swallowed. She would simply have to force them to leave. Would they realize that Ramoth woke all too conveniently at times? Maybe she’d better rouse R’gul’s Hath. Inwardly she permitted herself a smug smile as her secret ability to hear and talk to any dragon in the Weyr, green, blue, brown, or bronze, momentarily soothed her.
“When Jora could get Nemorth to stir at all,” S’lel muttered, picking at his underlip worriedly.
R’gut glared at S’lel to silence him and, succeeding, tapped pointedly on Lessa’s slate.
Stifling her sigh, she picked up the stylus. She had already written this ballad out nine times, letter-perfect. Ten was apparently R’gul’s magic number. For she had written every single one of the traditional Teaching Ballads, the Disaster Sagas, and the Laws, letter-perfect, ten times each. True, she had not understood half of them, but she knew them by heart.
“Seas boil, and mountains move,” she wrote.
Possibly. If there is a major inner upheaval of the land. One of Fax’s guards at Ruath Hold had once regaled the Watch with a tale from his great-grandsire’s days. A whole coastal village in East Fort had slid into the sea. There had been monumental tides that year and, beyond Ista, a mountain had allegedly emerged at the same time, its top afire. It had subsided years later. That might be to what the line referred. Might be.
“Sands heat . . .” True, in summer it was said that Igen Plain could be unendurable. No shade, no trees, no caves, just bleak sand desert. Even dragonmen eschewed that region in deep summer. Come to think of it, the sands of the Hatching Ground were always warm underfoot. Did those sands ever get hot enough to burn? And what warmed them, anyway? The same unseen internal fires that heated the water in the bathing pools throughout Benden Weyr?
“Dragons prove . . .” Ambiguous for half a dozen interpretations, and R’gul won’t even suggest one as official. Does it mean that dragons prove the Red Star passes? How? Coming out with a special keen, similar to the one they utter when one of their own kind passes to die between? Or did the dragons prove themselves in some other way as the Red Star passes? Besides, of course, their traditional function of burning the Threads out of the skies? Oh, all the things these ballads don’t say, and no one ever explains. Yet there must originally have been a reason.
“Stone pile and fires burn/Green withers, arm Pern.”
More enigma. Is someone piling the stones on the fires? Do they mean firestone? Or do the stones pile themselves as in an avalanche? The balladeer might at least have suggested the season involved—or did he, with “green wither”? Yet vegetation purportedly attracted Threads, which was the reason, traditionally, that greenery was not permitted around human habitations. But stones couldn’t stop a Thread from burrowing underground and multiplying. Only the phosphine emissions of a firestone-eating dragon stopped a Thread. And nowadays, Lessa smiled thinly, no one not even dragonmen—with the notable exceptions of F’lar and his wingmen—bothered to drill with firestone, much less uproot grass near houses. Lately hilltops, scoured barren for centuries, were allowed to burgeon with green in the spring.
“Guard all passes.”
She dug the phrase out with the stylus, thinking to herself: So no dragonrider can leave the Weyr undetected.
R’gul’s current course of inaction as Weyrleader was based on the idea that if no one, Lord or holder, saw a dragonrider, no one could be offended. Even traditional patrols were flown now over uninhabited areas, to allow the current agitation about the “parasitical” Weyr to die down. Fax, whose open dissension had sparked that movement, had not taken the cause to his grave. Larad, the young Lord of Telgar, was said