The Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey [77]
Mnementh relayed Ramoth’s message scrupulously, even to imitating Ramoth’s egocentric nuances. F’lar looked sharply at Lessa to see the effect of Ramoth’s astringent observation.
“Just like Ramoth to have the final word,” she said with a hint of her former droll humor.
F’lar felt the muscles along his neck and shoulders begin to relax. She’d be all right, he decided, but it might be wiser to make her talk it all out now, to put the whole experience into proper perspective.
“You said you were there twice?” He leaned back on the couch, watching her closely. “When was the second time?”
“Can’t you guess?” she asked sarcastically.
“No,” he lied.
“When else but the dawn I was awakened, feeling the Red Star was a menace to me? . . . Three days before you and Fax came out of the northeast.”
“It would seem,” he remarked dryly, “that you were your own premonition both times.”
She nodded.
“Have you had any more of these presentiments . . . or should I say reinforced warnings?”
She shuddered but answered him with more of her old spirit.
“No, but if I should, you go. I don’t want to.”
F’lar grinned maliciously.
“I would, however,” she added, “like to know why and how it could happen.”
“I’ve never run across a mention of it anywhere,” he told her candidly. “Of course, if you have done it—and you undeniably have,” he assured her hastily at her indignant protest, “it obviously can be done. You say you thought of Ruatha, but you thought of it as it was on that particular day. Certainly a day to be remembered. You thought of spring, before dawn, no Red Star—yes, I remember your mentioning that—so one would have to remember references peculiar to a significant day to return between times to the past.”
She nodded slowly, thoughtfully.
“You used the same method the second time, to get to the Ruatha of three Turns ago. Again, of course, it was spring.”
He rubbed his palms together, then brought his hands down on his knees with an emphatic slap and rose to his feet.
“I’ll be back,” he said and strode from the room, ignoring her half-articulated cry of warning.
Ramoth was curling up in the Weyr as he passed her. He noticed that her color remained good in spite of the drain on her energies by the morning’s exercises. She glanced at him, her many-faceted eye already covered by the inner, protective lid.
Mnementh awaited his rider on the ledge, and the moment F’lar leaped to his neck, took off. He circled upward, hovering above the Star Stone.
You wish to try Lessa’s trick, Mnementh said, unperturbed by the prospective experiment.
F’lar stroked the great curved neck affectionately. You understand how it worked for Ramoth and Lessa?
As well as anyone can, Mnementh replied with the approximation of a shrug. When did you have in mind?
Before that moment F’lar had had no idea. Now, unerringly, his thoughts drew him backward to the summer day R’gul’s bronze Hath had flown to mate the grotesque Nemorth, and R’gul had become Weyrleader in place of his dead father, F’lon.
Only the cold of between gave them any indication that they had transferred; they were still hovering above the Star Stone. F’lar wondered if they had missed some essential part of the transfer. Then he realized that the sun was in another quarter of the sky and the air was warm and sweet with summer. The Weyr below was empty; there were no dragons sunning themselves on the ledges, no women busy at tasks in the Bowl. Noises impinged on his senses: raucous laughter, yells, shrieks, and a soft crooning noise that dominated the bedlam.
Then, from the direction of the weyrling barracks in the Lower Caverns, two figures emerged—a stripling and a young bronze dragon. The boy’s arm lay limply along the beast’s neck. The impression that reached the hovering observers was one of utter dejection. The two halted by the lake, the boy peering