Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern
181
“No stock at all?” Moreta asked finally.
“Would young runners have been wintering on the plains? The harper couldn’t check. Didn’t know where and there hasn’t been time to send a sweeprider.”
“No, no. Of course there wouldn’t be time… .” Moreta could quite see that impossibility with the present demands on available riders but she accepted the hopeful suggestion. “Yearlings and gravid runners would be in the winter pasture. Somebody of the Hold will have been tending them and survive.”
The comforting presences in her mind wrapped her with love and reassurances. We are here!
Is Holth with you, Orlith? Moreta asked.
Of course, was the reply from two, now distinct to her, sources.
Oh! How kind! Moreta’s mind drifted, oddly divorced from her body, until she became aware of Leri’s anxious expression. “I’m all right. As Holth will tell you. Did you know she speaks to me?”
“Yes, she’s got rather used to checking in on you,” Leri said with a kind and serene smile.
“What did you put in that wine? I feel … disembodied.”
“That was rather the effect I hoped to achieve. Fellis juice, numbweed, and one of the euphorics. Just to cushion the shock.”
“Are there more?” From the wavering of Leri’s smile, Moreta knew that there were. “You might as well give me the whole round tale now while I’m so remote. My family’s hold … cannot have been unique.” Leri shook her head. “Ruatha Hold?” That would follow the line of catastrophe, Moreta thought.
“They have been badly hit… .”
“Alessan?” She asked about him first because his would be the worst loss there, before he’d even had time to enjoy being a Lord Holder.
“No, he’s recovering, but the decimation among the Gather guests his brothers, almost all the racers”
“Dag?”
“I don’t have many names. Igen Weyr and Hold have been shock-ingly depleted. Lord Fitatric, his Lady, half their children …”
“By the Egg, isn’t there any place spared?”
“Yes, in fact, Bitra, Lemos, Nerat, Benden, and Tiliek have had relatively few cases, and those were isolated promptly to avoid conta—
182 Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern
gion. Those Holds have been magnificent in sending people to the stricken.”
“Why?” Moreta clenched her fists, hunching herself together in a sudden convulsion that was more mental than physical. “Why? When we’re so near the end of the Pass? It’s not fair so c)ose to an Interval. Did you know”Moreta’s voice was hard and intense “that my family started out after the end of the last Pass? My bloodline started then? And nowjust before the next Intervalit’s wiped out!”
That isn’t known for certain, if what you say of wintering stock applies. Do consider that possibility. That probability.” The dragons reinforced Leri’s optimism.
Moreta’s outburst passed almost as swiftly as it had consumed her. She lay back, limp, her eyelids suddenly heavy, her body flaccid. Leri seemed to be retreating from her though she was conscious that the Weyrwoman still sat on the bed.
“That’s right. You sleep now,” Leri said in a gentle croon echoed by two dragon voices.
“I can’t stay awake!” Moreta mumbled and, sighing, relaxed into a potion-induced sleep.
Ruatha Hold, Present Pass, 3.16.43
K’lon was intensely relieved when Journeyman Healer Fallen, his lips pulled down in a sorrowful line, emerged from Lord Alessan’s apartment. The death-stench of the cold corridor bothered K’lon, in-ured though he was to plague-ridden holds.
“I’ve vaccinated the sister and the harper and did that other poor fellow as well. Lord Alessan says that more patients may be found along this corridor, but they did manage to clear the upper levels. I don’t know how the man had managed. I’d no idea it would be so bad or I’d’ve insisted that Master Capiam give us more serum.”
“There isn’t that much to distribute, you know.”
“Don’t I just!”
Fallen gave K’lon a thin smile. The previous evening the bluerider had conveyed the journeyman to South Boll Hold when the drums had reported survivors of the plague. As Capiam’s timely visit to South Boll and his recommendations to its healers had in fact prevented the
Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern
183
plague from spreading as insidiously as it had in midcontinent, it was only just that all the survivors donate blood for serum. Lord Ratoshigan had been a donor though the ever-irascible Lord Holder had been under the distinct impressionadroitly fostered by blue rider and journeymanthat the bloodtaking was part of the prescribed treatment.