The Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey [71]
A tender, adoring expression flooded her face as she gazed into Ramoth’s gleaming opalescent eyes. F’lar clenched his teeth, envious, by the Egg, of a rider’s affection for her dragon.
In his mind he heard Mnementh’s dragon equivalent of laughter.
“She’s hungry,” Lessa informed F’lar, an echo of her love for Ramoth lingering in the soft line of her mouth, in the kindness in her gray eyes.
“She’s always hungry,” he observed and followed them out of the weyr.
Mnementh hovered courteously just beyond the ledge until Lessa and Ramoth had taken off. They glided down the Weyr Bowl, over the misty bathing lake, toward the feeding ground at the opposite end of the long oval that comprised the floor of Benden Weyr. The striated, precipitous walls were pierced with the black mouths of single weyr entrances, deserted at this time of day by the few dragons who might otherwise doze on their ledges in the wintry sun.
As F’lar vaulted to Mnementh’s smooth bronze neck, he hoped that Ramoth’s clutch would be spectacular, erasing the ignominy of the paltry dozen Nemorth had laid in each of her last few clutches.
He had no serious doubts of the improvement after Ramoth’s remarkable mating flight with his Mnementh. The bronze dragon smugly echoed his rider’s certainty, and both looked on the queen possessively as she curved her wings to land. She was twice Nemorth’s size, for one thing; her wings were half-a-wing again longer than Mnementh’s, who was the biggest of the seven male bronzes. F’lar looked to Ramoth to repopulate the five empty Weyrs, even as he looked to himself and Lessa to rejuvenate the pride and faith of dragonriders and of Pern itself. He only hoped time enough remained to him to do what was necessary. The Red Star had been bracketed by the Eye Rock. The Threads would soon be falling. Somewhere, in one of the other Weyrs’ Records, must be the information he needed to ascertain when, exactly, Threads would fall.
Mnementh landed. F’lar jumped down from the curving neck to stand beside Lessa. The three watched as Ramoth, a buck grasped in each of her forefeet, rose to a feeding ledge.
“Will her appetite never taper off?” Lessa asked with affectionate dismay.
As a dragonet, Ramoth had been eating to grow. Her full stature attained, she was, of course, now eating for her young, and she applied herself conscientiously.
F’lar chuckled and squatted, hunter fashion. He picked up shale-flakes, skating them across the flat dry ground, counting the dust puffs boyishly.
“The time will come when she won’t eat everything in sight,” he assured Lessa. “But she’s young . . .”
“. . . and needs her strength,” Lessa interrupted, her voice a fair imitation of R’gul’s pedantic tones.
F’lar looked up at her, squinting against the wintry sun that slanted down at them.
“She’s a finely grown beast, especially compared to Nemorth.” He gave a contemptuous snort. “In fact, there is no comparison. However, look here,” he ordered peremptorily.
He tapped the smoothed sand in front of him, and she saw that his apparently idle gestures had been to a purpose. With a sliver of stone, he drew a design in quick strokes.
“In order to fly a dragon between, he has to know where to go. And so do you.” He grinned at the astonished and infuriated look of comprehension on her face. “Ah, but there are certain consequences to an ill-considered jump. Badly visualized reference points often result in staying between.” His voice dropped ominously. Her face cleared of its resentment. “So there are certain reference or recognition points arbitrarily taught all weyrlings. That,”—he pointed first to his facsimile and then to the actual Star Stone with its Finger and Eye Rock companions, on Benden Peak—“is the first recognition point a weyrling learns. When I take you aloft, you will reach an altitude just above the Star Stone, near enough for you to be able to see the hole in the Eye Rock clearly. Fix that picture sharply in your mind’s eye, relay it to Ramoth. That will always get you home.”
“Understood. But how do I learn recognition points of places