Dragonsblood (11 page)

what? For nothing. A might be!”

Brutally he pushed away from her and stormed off down the corridor. Over

his shoulder, from his left side, he called back, “You can get Emorra to

clean that up. After all, you treat her like your slave.”

Wind Blossom straightened up slowly. With an eye to the glass on the floor

she walked over to her cot and sat upon it. With eyes that would admit no

tears, she muttered bitterly, “Such a way you have with children, Wind

Blossom.”

“Mother! What are you doing?” Emorra demanded as she strode into her

mother’s quarters.

“I am cleaning up,” Wind Blossom replied from her position on the floor

where she was delicately picking up individual shards of glass and

depositing them into a recycling container.

“What happened? Where’s Tieran?” Emorra asked.

“Tieran happened, and I do not know,” Wind Blossom answered. She

looked up at her tall daughter, careful not to let any pride show in her

expression. “His father was dead before he arrived. He wanted to
time
it

with some antibiotic to save him.”

Emorra gasped, eyes wide. “That can’t be done, can it?”

Wind Blossom sighed, using one of her better sighs. “It cannot, as you

should well know.”

“At least not in any literature,” Emorra replied, her face heating as she

caught her mother’s implied rebuke. “Mother, what’s the use of learning

about temporal paradoxes when they can’t occur? It’s more important to

pass on a good fundamental knowledge than to deal with such esoteric

issues.” Emorra found herself harping on her favorite issue and

discovered, as always, that she couldn’t help it with her mother. “Songs that

people will sing and remember—an oral tradition, that’s what we have to rely

on.”

“What’s wrong with books?” Wind Blossom quipped.

Emorra frowned. “Mother, you know I love books,” she said with a deep

sigh. “But find me someone who’s got the time to make them. Bookmaking

is a labor-intensive industry, from the felling of trees to the making of inks

and the binding of the pages—things that are impossible to do when

Thread is falling.”

“So easy it is to blame Thread,” Wind Blossom said. “Nothing can be done,

so we’ll sing about it.”

Emorra stifled a groan and waved her hands in submission. “Let’s not go

through this again, please.”

Wind Blossom nodded. She gestured to the recycling container. “This

one’s full; get me another.”

Emorra frowned and leaned down to pick up the bucket. After she left,

Wind Blossom pursed her lips tightly and held back a heartfelt sigh. Pain,

she thought to herself, pain is how we grow. Is this how it was for you,

Mother?

“Is there anything else I can get you?” Emorra asked, as she heaved

herself up from the floor and grabbed the last bucketful of broken glass.

She surveyed the floor carefully, looking for the reflection of any last

shards.

“No, thank you,” Wind Blossom said. Emorra’s nostrils flared at her

mother’s dismissive tone but she said nothing, nodded curtly, and left,

closing the door quietly.

“Well-trained,” Wind Blossom muttered to herself. She kept her gaze on

the door for a few moments, assuring herself that Emorra had indeed

departed.

Then—a subtle shift, a slight relaxation, and the merest hint of a smile

played on her lips. It was short-lived, chased away almost instantly by a

frown.

“Your face is like a window,” Kitti Ping’s voice echoed in her mind. “I can

see everything you think.”

You see what I
want
you to see, Wind Blossom thought back to the ancient

memory.

She moved to her dresser and opened the drawer with her tunics. Gently

she lifted them and found the yellow one. Yes, she thought to herself,

Purman would like this.

She pulled the tunic out of the drawer along with the small bag she’d

carefully hidden underneath it. She quickly shrugged off her regular tunic

and pulled on the yellow one. Then she took the bag and walked over to the

laboratory end of her room.

The room was huge and had been a supply room when the Fever Year had

hit. Wind Blossom had occupied it in the haste of those deadly days and

had never been asked to leave. She lived simply in the room, with only a

bed, a dresser, and a bedside table for her comfort. The far side of the

room was given up to her laboratory and studies. She liked the room

because of the large windows running floor to ceiling on one side.

She opened a locked door in her tall cabinet and pulled out a crucible,

ancient ceramic tripod, and grazier. She put these on the workbench along

with the bag from her drawer and another bag she had pulled out from the

cabinet.

She eyed a stool and shook her head slightly, grabbing her things off the

workbench and putting them on the floor beyond it, concealed from the

window by the large workbench.

She fished a small lump of charcoal out of the second bag and placed it on

the grazier. She lit it quickly, her fingers well-practiced, and slid the tripod

stand over it. Into the crucible she placed a selection of herbs from the bag

she had taken from her drawer. After a moment, she pulled a number of

strands of hair out of her scalp and curled them up into the crucible.

Satisfied, she placed the crucible on the tripod and let the flames of the

charcoal lick at it.

I am glad you decided not to join us here at the College, Wind Blossom

admitted silently to her memory of Purman. You would have been welcome,

but I do not know if you would have accepted the course I’ve chosen for us

all.

It will be thousands of years before our descendants will once more be

able to bend genes to their will, she mused. It would be a mistake to force

our children to cling to our ways. They need to move on, to learn their own

ways.

“Make your own mistakes,” Kitti Ping’s voice echoed in Wind Blossom’s

mind.

The Eridani Way is not the only way, she thought, partly in response to her

mother’s words. Their thinking is deep, but they never thought of war. They

never thought of the Nathi. They never thought of a time when no one could

twist genes into new shapes.

Wind Blossom’s eyes flicked to the crucible and she brought her thoughts

back to Purman. Your way, the way of breeding, will work on Pern for now.

She sighed. It had been difficult to turn Emorra against her. So difficult that

she had only half-succeeded: Her daughter had remained at the College

and even become its dean. It had taken less effort to drive Tieran away

from her, to quench his inbred curiosity about genetics.

In both situations, she had felt all the pain of a mother turning away her

child. But Wind Blossom knew that if she taught them the joy she found in

genetics, they would be enraptured—and stuck with knowledge they

couldn’t use. Committed, as the Eridani had always intended, to the Eridani

Way, the way of countless generations husbanding species and planets,

they would become incapable of developing solutions of their own.

Wind Blossom’s head shook imperceptibly as she recalled her own internal

conflicts, how she had determined that the future of Pern could not rest on

the shoulders of a few, select bloodlines—the Eridani Way—but on the

actions of all Pernese.

As the last of the smoke rose from the crucible, Wind Blossom wondered

again if Ted Tubberman had thought the same thing, and if he had turned

his son against him just as Kitti Ping had turned her daughter against

her—and as Wind Blossom herself had tried to alienate Emorra.

“Shards!” Tieran groaned as he discovered that he had outgrown his latest

hiding place. Hiding was second nature to him. He had always liked the

caves and tunnels of his Benden Hold home, particularly when—he

suppressed a pang of regret, fear, anger, sorrow—he had been with

Bendensk, the watch-wher.

When he had first come to the College, it had been easier: He’d been small

for his age and always won at hide-and-seek. Until one day he had realized

that no one was looking for him anymore—that they were laughing instead.

“Hideaway.” “No-nose.” “Scarface.”

After that he had spent more time with Wind Blossom. Truth be told, he

loved to learn all the secrets she had to teach him. He was one of only five

people on all of Pern who had looked at human DNA under the electron

microscope. And he was one of three—no, two, now—who could trace a

mutation back to its genes. Wind Blossom said that soon she would start

him on proteomics, the study of proteins.

Tieran snorted. As if
that
would impress anyone! In fact, there was

probably no one on Pern who knew what proteomics was, let alone what it

was used for. It was all a waste. He was only here because
she
wanted him

to be here, waiting until he was “ready” for the operations to fix his face.

The sob that threatened to break from his throat was throttled in the

harshest of self-control. The boys he could handle; he’d learned enough of

hand-fighting from M’hall and—he grimaced—his father. But the girls—lately

Tieran had noticed them. Noticed them and noticed how quickly they looked

away, walked away, grouped together, speaking in hushed voices.

Admit it, Tieran thought, no matter how great a surgeon you become, no

matter what you do, even if Wind Blossom can perform a miracle, no girl is

going to look at you.

Except maybe to laugh.

And now his last hiding place was too small. Tieran stifled a curse—not

because he was afraid of swearing, but because he was afraid the curse

might come out as a sob.

Voices approached in the dark. Tieran pulled himself into a shadowy nook.

“How did the boy take it, then?” Tieran recognized the rich tenor voice as

that of Sandell, a student musician. Some Turns back they had played

together—hide-and-seek.

“It was hard on him,” Emorra answered. “It must be hard to lose a father.”

“Don’t you remember yours?” Sandell asked.

“No.” Emorra paused. “In fact, it’s been Turns since I last asked mother

about him. She never told me anything.”

Sandell laughed. “I’ll bet he was a musician, and that’s why she hates us.”

Emorra snorted. “That would explain where I got my talent.”

“And your looks,” Sandell added softly. From the sound of clothing and the

soft noises, Tieran guessed that Sandell had taken Emorra in his arms. He

peered around the corner. They were kissing!

Tieran ducked back again as Emorra pushed away from the journeyman.

“Not here,” Emorra said. “Someone might see us.”

Sandell laughed. “So let them!”

“No,” Emorra said firmly.

“Very well, Dean Emorra,” Sandell replied indulgently. “Your quarters or

mine?”

Tieran relaxed as he heard them depart.

The loud sound of drums—he guessed it was Jendel up on the big

drum—rattled out an attention signal. Tieran heard the response from the

four outlying stations and, almost on top of their response, the College

drums sounded out their message in deep commanding booms. It was the

sign off for the evening; no other message would go out until morning,

except in an emergency.

Tieran listened to the details, his throat clenched as he heard the report of

his father’s death being passed on down to all the minor holds along the

way equipped with either a drummer or a repeater station. The drums fell

silent, were echoed by the repeater stations further on and, very faintly, by

the stations beyond those, and then the sounds of evening took over the

night air.

With a quick breath and a determined spring in his step, Tieran turned to

the Drum Tower—his new hiding place.

FIVE

Fierce winds blow.

Seas roil.

Calm, wind. Settle, sea.

Let my loved return to me.

On the WIND RIDER at sea, Second Interval, AL 507

The wind was gusting as they weighed anchor. When they cleared the

harbor,
Wind Rider
heeled so much that Baror called for them to reduce

sail.

With the sail reset,
Wind Rider
still heeled over at a fierce angle, her bow

breaking through the waves as she sped into the moonlit night.

Within an hour the offshore breeze had been supplanted by gusting winds,

and the moons were lost in a haze of clouds. Five minutes after that the first

of the rain fell upon them.

An hour later the ship was in a full gale, heeling hard over with two men

fighting the helm and four men struggling to furl sail.

Colfet found Baror at the wheel with another man he’d never seen before.

He shouted over the roar of the wind, “Where’s the captain? This sail’s all

wrong for this weather, we’re heeling too hard. We need to alter course,

too—see how she’s digging into the waves? We’ll broach to if we don’t.”

“The captain’s not here,” Baror replied, teeth wide in a grin.

“I can see that,” Colfet responded irritably. “Where is he?” He looked

forward. “Is he forward with the sails?”

“No, you git, he’s not here,” Baror responded, his grin disappearing in a

frown. “Left me in charge, seeing as you’ve got that bum wing.”