Dragonriders of Pern 4 - Dragonsinger

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Now use the regular fingering,” Talmor said, coming over to stand by Menolly, his eyes intent on her hands. Menolly executed the run. He gave a sharp nod of his head, eyed her inscrutably, and then returned to Pona, asking her to try it again, though he outlined a slower time. Pona mastered the run the third time, smiling with relief at her success.

  Talmor gave them another set of scales and then brought out a large copy of a piece of occasional music. Menolly was delighted because the score was completely new to her. Petiron had been, as he phrased it, a teaching Harper, not an entertainer, and though she had learned the one or two occasional pieces of music he had in his possession, he had never acquired more. The Sea Holder, Menolly knew, had preferred to sing, not listen; and most occasional music was instrumental. In the bigger Holds, Petiron had told her, the Lord Holders liked music during the dinner hour and at night when they entertained guests in conversation rather than song.

  This was not a difficult piece, Menolly realized, scanning it and silently fingering the one or two transitional chords that might be troublesome.

  “All right, Audiva, let’s see what you can make of it today,” Talmor said, smiling at the girl with encouragement.

  Audiva gulped, exhibiting a nervousness that puzzled Menolly. As Audiva began to pick out the chords, nodding her head and tapping one foot at a much slower rhythm than the musical notation required, perplexity grew. Well, she thought, charitably, maybe Audiva was a new student. If she was, she was far more competent than Briala, who apparently had trouble just reading the music.

  Talmor dismissed Briala to the table to copy the score for later practice. Pona was no improvement on the other two. The sly-faced, fair-haired girl played with great banging against the gitar belly, at time, but with many inaccuracies. When it was finally her own turn, Menolly’s stomach was roiled by frustrated listening.

  “Menolly,” said Talmor at the end of a sigh that expressed his own frustration and boredom.

  It was such a relief to play the music as it should be that Menolly found herself increasing the time and emphasizing the chords with a variation of her own in the strum.

  Talmor just looked at her. Then he blinked and exhaled heavily, pursing his lips together. “Well, yes. You’ve seen it before?”

  “Oh, no. We had very little occasional music in Half-Circle. This is lovely!”

  “You played that cold?”

  Only then did Menolly realize what she’d done: made the other girls look inadequate. She was aware of their cold, chill silence, their hostile stares. But not to play one’s best seemed a dishonesty that she had never practiced and could not. Belatedly she recognized that she could have hedged: with her scarred hand she could have faltered, missed some of the chording. Yet it had been such a relief, after their limping renditions, to play the music as it was meant to be played.

  “I was the last to go,” she said in a lame effort to retrieve matters, “I’d more time to study it, and see…” She’d started to say, “see where they went wrong.”

  “Yes, well, so you did,” Talmor said, so hastily that Menolly wondered if he’d also realized what a break she’d made. Then he added in a rush of impatience and irritation, “Who told you to join this class? I’d rather thought…” A snigger interrupted his query, and he turned to glare at the girls. ‘Well?” he asked Menolly.

  “A journeyman…”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. I was in the courtyard, and he asked me why wasn’t I in class. Then he told me to come here.”

  Talmor rubbed the side of his jaw. “Too late now, I suppose, but I’ll inquire.” He turned to the other girls.

  “Let’s play it in…” The girls were staring pointedly at the doorway, and he looked about. “Yes, Sebell?”

  Menolly turned, too, to see the man to whom the other coveted fire lizard egg had gone. Sebell was a slender man, a hand or so taller than herself: a brown man, tanned skin, light brown hair and eyes, dressed in brown with a faded Harper apprentice badge half-hidden in the shoulder fold of his tunic.

  “I’ve been looking for Menolly,” he said, gazing steadily at her.

  “I thought someone ought to be. She was misdirected here.” Talmor sounded irritated, and he gestured sharply for Menolly to go to Sebell.

  Menolly slipped from the stool, but she was uncertain what to do about the gitar and glanced questioningly at Sebell.

  “You won’t need it now,” he said so she quietly put it away on the shelf.

  She felt the girls staring at her, knew that Talmor was watching and would not continue the lesson until she had gone, so it was with intense relief that she heard the door close behind her and the quiet brown man.

  “Where was I supposed to be?” she asked, but he motioned her down the steps.

  “You got no message?” His eyes searched her face although his expression gave no hint of his thoughts.

  “No.”

  “You did breakfast at Dunca’s?”

  “Yes…” Menolly couldn’t suppress her distaste for that painful meal. Then she caught her breath and stared at Sebell, comprehension awakening. “Oh, she wouldn’t have…”

  Sebell was nodding, his brown eyes registering an understanding of the matter. “And you wouldn’t have known yet to come to me for instructions…”

  “You…” Hadn’t Piemur said something about Sebell walking the tables, to become a journeyman? “…sir?” she added. A slow smile spread across the man’s round face.

  “I suppose I do rate a ‘sir’ from a mere apprentice, but the Harper is not as strict about such observances as other masters. The tradition here is that the oldest journeyman under the same master is responsible for the newest apprentice. So you are my responsibility. At least while I’m in the Hall and I’m enjoying a respite from my journeyings. I didn’t have the chance to meet you and this morning…you didn’t arrive as planned at Master Domick’s…”

  “Oh, no.” Menolly swallowed the hard knot of dismay. “Not Master Domick!” Even Piemur was careful not to annoy him. “Was Master Domick very…upset?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. But don’t worry, Menolly, I shall use the incident to your advantage. It doesn’t do to antagonize Domick unnecessarily.”

  “Not when he doesn’t like me anyhow.” Menolly closed her eyes against a vision of Master Domick’s cynical face contorted with anger.

  “How do you construe that?” Menolly shrugged. “I had to play for him yesterday. I know he doesn’t like me.”

  “Master Domick doesn’t like anyone,” replied Sebell with a wry laugh, “including himself. So you’re no exception. But, as far as studying with him is concerned…”

  “I'm to study with him?”

  “Don’t panic. As a teacher, he’s top rank. I know. In some ways I think Master Domick is superior, instrumentally, to the Harper. He doesn’t have Master Robinton’s flare and vitality, nor his keen perception in matters outside the Craft.” Although Sebell was speaking in his customary impersonal way, Menolly sensed his complete loyalty and devotion to the Masterharper. “You,” and there was a slight emphasis on the pronoun, “will learn a great deal from Domick. Just don’t let his manner fuss you. He’s agreed to teach you, and that’s quite a concession.”

  “But I didn’t come this morning…”

  The magnitude of that truancy appalled Menolly.

  Sebell gave her a quick reassuring grin. “I said that I can turn that to your advantage. Domick doesn't like people to ignore his instructions. It is not yourworry. Now, come on. Enough of the morning has been lost.”

  He had directed her up the steps into the Hall, and to her surprise opened the door into the Great Hall. It was twice the size of the dining hall, three times the size of the Great Hall at Half-Circle. Across the far end was fitted a raised and curtained platform that jutted into the floor space. Tables and benches were piled haphazardly against the inner walls and under windows. Immediately to her right were a collection of more comfortabl
e chairs arranged in an informal grouping about a small round table. To this area Sebell motioned her and seated himself opposite her.

  “I’ve some questions to put to you, and I can’t explain why I need to have this information. It is Harper business, and if you’re told that, you’ll be wise to ask no further. I need your help…”

  “My help?”

  “Strange as that might seem, yes,” and his brown eyes laughed at her. “I need to know how to sail a boat, how to gut a fish, how to act like a seaman…”

  He was ticking off the points on his fingers, and she stared at his hands.

  “With those, no one would ever believe you had sailed…”

  He examined his hands impersonally. “Why?”

  “Seamen’s hands get gnarled quickly from popping the joints, rough from salt water and fish oil, much browner than yours from weathering…”

  “Would anyone but a seaman know that?”

  “Well, I know it.”

  “Fair enough. Can you teach me to act, from a distance,” and his grin teased her, “like a seaman? Is it hard to learn to sail a boat? Or bait a hook? Or gut a fish?”

  Her left palm itched, and so did her curiosity. Harper business? Why would a journeyman harper need to know such things?

  “Sailing, baiting, gutting…those are a question of practicing…”

  “Could you teach me?”

  “With a boat and a place to sail, yes…with hook and bait, and a few fish.” Then she laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Just that…I thought when I came here, that I’d never need to gut a fish again.”

  Sebell regarded her sardonically for a long moment, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Yes, I can appreciate that, Menolly. I was landbred and thought I’d done with walking about. Just don’t be surprised at anything you’re asked to do here. The Harper requires us to play many tunes for our Craft…not always on gitar or pipe. Now,” and he went on more briskly, “I’ll arrange for the boat, the water and the fish. But when?” At this requisite, he whistled softly through the slight gap between his two front teeth. “Time will be the problem, for you have lessons, and there are the two eggs…” He looked her squarely in the eye then, and grinned. “Speaking of which, have you any idea what color mine might be?”

  She smiled back. “I don’t think you can really be as sure with fire lizard eggs as you can with the dragon's, but I kept the two largest ones for Master Robinton. One ought to be a queen, and the other should turn out to be a bronze at least.”

  “A bronze fire lizard?”

  The rapt expression on Sebell's face alarmed her. What if both eggs produced browns? Or greens? As if he sensed her apprehension, Sebell smiled.

  “I don’t really care so long as I have one. The Harper says they can be trained to carry messages. And sing!” He was a great teaser, this Sebell, thought Menolly, for all his quiet manner and solemn expressions, but she felt completely at ease with him. “The Harper says they can get as attached to their friends as dragons do to their riders.”

  She nodded. “Would you like to meet mine?”

  “I would, but not now,” he replied, shaking his head ruefully. “I must pick your brains about the seaman’s craft. So, tell me how goes a day at a Sea Hold?”

  Amused to find herself explaining such a thing in the Harper Hall, Menolly gave the brown journeyman a dryly factual account of the routine that was all she’d known for so many Turns. He was an attentive listener, occasionally repeating cogent points, or asking her to elaborate others. She was giving him a list of the various types of fish that inhabited the oceans of Pern when the tocsin rang again and her explanation was drowned by shouts as apprentices erupted into the courtyard on their way to the dining hall.

  “We’ll wait until the stampede has settled, Menolly,” Sebell said, raising his voice above the commotion outside, “just give me that rundown on deep water fishes again.”

  When Sebell escorted her to her place, the girls treated her with a stony silence, emphasized by pursed lips, averted eyes and then sniggers to each other. Buoyed by Sebell’s reassurances, Menolly ignored them. She concentrated on eating the roast wherry and the crusty brown tubers, bigger than she’d ever seen and so fluffy inside their crust that she ate more of them than bread.

  Since the girls were so pointedly snubbing her, Menolly looked about the room. She couldn’t spot Piemur, and she wanted him to come help her feed the fire lizards in the evening. She’d better strengthen what friendships she could within the Harper Hall.

  The gong again called their attention to announcements; and to her surprise, Menolly heard her own name called to report to Master Oldive. Immediately the girls fell to whispering among themselves, as if such a summons was untoward, though she couldn’t imagine why, unless they were doing it to frighten her. She continued to ignore them. And then the gong released the diners.

  The girls remained where they were, pointedly not looking in her direction, and she was forced to struggle from the bench.

  “And where in the name of the first shell were you this morning?” asked Master Domick, his face set with anger, his eyes slitted, his voice low but projected so that the girls all cowered away from him.

  “I was told to go to—”

  “So Talmor me,” and he brushed aside her explanation, “but I had left word with Dunca for you to report to me.”

  “Dunca told me nothing, Master Domick,” Menolly flicked a glance beyond him to the girls and saw in their smug expression the knowledge that they, too, had known there’d been a message for her, which Dunca had deliberately neglected to pass on.

  “She said she did,” said Master Domick. Menolly stared back at him, bereft of any response and heartily wishing for Sebell to produce his assistance.

  “I realize,” Domick went on sarcastically, “that you’ve been living holdless and without authority for some time, but while you are an apprentice here, you will obey the masters.” In the face of his wrath, Menolly bowed her head. The next moment, Beauty came diving into the room, with two bronze and two brown shapes right behind her.

  “Beauty! Rocky! Diver! Stop it!”

  Menolly jumped in front of Domick, arms outstretched, protecting him from the onslaught of winged retaliation.

  “What do you mean, disobeying me? Attacking Master Domick? He’s a Harper! Behave yourselves.”

  Menolly had to shout because the girls, seeing the fire lizards swooping down, screamed and tried variously to get under the table or off the benches, overturning them; anywhere away from the fire lizards.

  Domick had sense enough to stand still, incredulous as he was at the attack. Despite the girls’ shriek, Menolly had the lungs to be heard when she wished to.

  Twittering, Beauty circled once and then came to Menolly’s shoulder, glaring balefully at Domick from behind her mistress. The others lined up on the mantel, wings still spread, hissing, their jeweled eyes whirling, looking ready and quite willing to pounce again. As Menolly stroked Beauty to calmness, she struggled with an apology to Domick.

  “Back to work, you! The rest of you, along to your sections,” Domick said, raising his own voice to energize the stragglers in the dining hall who had observed the strange attack, and the boys who were clearing the tables. “I’d forgot about your loyal defenders,” he told Menolly in a tight but controlled voice.

  “Master Domick, will you ever forgive…”