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 Lessds trick, Mnementh said, unperturbed by the prospective experiment.
F’lar stroked the great curved neck affectionately. You understand how it worked for Ramoth and Lessee?
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 weyriing 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 into the unruffled blue Waters, then glanting upward ‘toward the queen’s weyr. F’lar knew the boy for himself, and compassion for that younger self filled him. If only he could reassure that boy, so torn by grief, so filled with resentment, that he would one day become weyrleader… .
Abruptly, startled by his own thoughts, he ordered Mnementh to transfer back. The utter cold of between was like a slap in his face, replaced almost instantly as they broke out of between into the cold of normal winter.
Slowly, Mnementh flew back down to the queen’s weyr, as sobered as F’lar by what they had seen.
Rise high in glory,
Bronze and gold.
Dive entwined,
Enhance the Hold.
Count three months and more,
And five heated weeks,
A day of glory and In a month,
who seeks?
A strand of silver In the sky …
With heat,
all quickens And all times fly.
“I don’t know why you insisted that F’nor unearth these ridiculous things from Ista Weyr,” Lessa exclaimed in a tone of exasperation. “They consist of nothing but trivial notes on how many measures of grain were used to bake daily bread.”
F’lar glanced up at her from the Records he was studying. He sighed, leaned back in his chair in a bone-popping stretch.
“And I used to think,” Lessa said with a rueful expression on her vivid, narrow face, “that those venerable Records would hold the total sum of all dragonlore and human wisdom. Or so I was led to believe,” she added pointedly.
F’lar chuckled. “They do, but you have to disinter it.”
Lessa wrinkled her nose. “Phew. They smell as if we had … and the only decent thing to do would be to rebury them.”
“Which is another item I’m. hoping to find … the old preservative technique that kept the skins from hardening and smelling.”
“It’s stupid, anyhow, to use skins for recording. There ought to be something better. We have become, dear Weyrleader, entirely too hidebound.”
While F’lar roared with appreciation of her pun, she regarded him impatiently. Suddenly she jumped up, fired by another of her mercurial moods.
“Well, you won’t find it. You won’t find the facts you’re looking for. Because I know what you’re really after, and it isn’t recorded!”
“Explain yourself.”
“It’s time we stopped hiding a rather brutal truth from ourselves.”