Dragonsblood

by Todd McCaffrey

  “So tell the captain,” Minet said, tired of hearing the same old moaning from Baror that he’d heard since Wind Rider had first set sail.

  “Captain!” Baror snorted. “He’s only the captain until we’re finished our trials.” He took another gulp and slammed down his empty mug. “Then it’s me.”

  “Well, you’ve not that long to wait, then,” Minet said. “And then you’ll decide.” He took a pull from his mug, frowned, and looked into it. His frown deepened when he saw that it was empty. “Still, she’s a pretty one, isn’t she?”

  “She’s a bit plain for my tastes,” Baror grumbled.

  “She’d keep you warm at night,” Minet said suggestively. “Especially if you were the captain. She’d have no choice then.”

  “My missus would skin me,” Baror grumbled. Minet knew that all too well. He was convinced that getting away from his wife was half the reason that Baror had agreed to this voyage.

  “Your missus would skin you only if she found out,” Minet said, his eyes glinting. “As you said, it’s bad luck to have a woman aboard a ship. And accidents can happen.”

  Baror met his eyes with a thoughtful look. Minet nodded at him suggestively. Baror pursed his lips, then grinned.

  “But,” Minet cautioned, “you’d have to wait until you were captain.”

  “I could be captain today,” Baror snapped back.

  “And how do you suppose that?” Minet wondered.

  “Accidents can happen,” Baror replied, rising blearily from his seat.

  “What about that dragonrider? You heard he killed one of the local oafs, didn’t you?”

  “I’ll take care of him, too,” Baror said, stalking off. “He’ll be no trouble if he’s in his cups.”

  The crew of Wind Rider had split up long before J’trel arrived. He found Lorana by herself, pretending not to look at some of the more beautiful fabrics on sale in the weavers’ tent.

  “They’d make great wear for a woman, wouldn’t they?” J’trel asked as he walked up to her.

  “J’trel!” Lorana threw herself into his arms for a hug. “Good to see you!”

  “And you.” Trying not to wince in pain, J’trel grinned at her. “The sea air seems to have done well for you.” He grabbed her hand. “Let’s go somewhere where we can sit—and drink.”

  “I know just the place.” Lorana led him to a tent where they served cool wine and crusty bread. They found a table apart from the others and ordered their drinks.

  “Where are your fire-lizards?” J’trel asked when he was sure they were out of earshot. “I’ve got something for them.”

  Lorana looked around to be sure no one was looking, then summoned the fire-lizards. Garth appeared immediately and chirped happily at the dragonrider. Lorana frowned as she concentrated on summoning Grenn. When the brown fire-lizard finally appeared, he chattered loudly at the two of them before Lorana could shush it.

  “My! He’s in a mood!” J’trel remarked with a grin. He pulled forth two packets from inside his jacket. “Get these on them, and let’s see how they look.”

  The packets turned out to contain beautifully strung bead harnesses. Lorana gasped as she saw the markings. “What’s this?”

  J’trel waved dismissively. “It was the beader’s idea. I told her about Grenn’s wing.”

  Lorana gave him an incredulous look. “Well, all right,” J’trel confessed, “I did make some suggestions.”

  “Animal Healer-in-training?” Lorana asked as she deciphered the patterns in the beadwork. She got Garth’s harness on easily and smoothed it out, but Grenn insisted upon fluttering about her.

  “What’s got him so worked up?”

  Lorana held out a hand to the fire-lizard and coaxed him close to her. She concentrated, focusing to sort through his confused images.

  “There was a fight,” she said at last. Then she looked accusingly at J’trel. “You were in it! Why didn’t you say something?”

  J’trel waved a hand. “A lout learned a lesson in manners. It was nothing.”

  “Nothing! At your age!” Lorana started to say more but snapped her attention back to the fire-lizard. Her eyes grew wide and her face paled as she turned back to the dragonrider. “J’trel, Garth never saw the man get up again. She watched for a long time.”

  The color drained out of J’trel’s face. Before he could say anything, a man approached him, clapping him on the back.

  It was Baror. “Well done, dragonrider! I hear you put a lout in his place!” He leered at the two of them, his eyes glazed with drink, “And I’d say, well in his place!” He slapped his mug in front of the dragonrider. “Have a drink on me!”

  The seaman pulled up a chair close to the table. “I never knew you had it in you, to be honest. Of course, I knew you dragonriders are a tough lot, but I figured at your age—well, drink up!”

  Ashen-faced, J’trel took a deep gulp from the cup Baror proffered. Baror turned quickly away from the dragonrider toward his friend, hiding a smirk. “So, Lorana, I’ll have to watch out for you as well, I’m sure! You keep sharp company, and that’s no lie!

  “Another round here!” he called out to the barman. “Drink up, dragonrider, this one’s on me!”

  Baror continued to ply the dragonrider with wine and offer commiseration—“You wasn’t to know. And he did have it coming, didn’t he, dragonrider?”—until even Lorana, who had been careful with her drink, began to feel bleary.

  J’trel was still upset over the fight and its outcome, but was finding it harder and harder to raise his glass. “I should be going—”

  Baror gave a grunt and stood bolt upright. “I think I see Captain Tanner over there!” He looked at the two of them. “I’ll be right back.”

  Lorana patted the distraught dragronrider on the shoulder, trying to think of something to say.

  Baror came back, bristling with purpose. “We’ve got to go now, Lorana! I spoke with the captain, and we’re to set sail as soon as we can.”

  “I’ll stay here,” Lorana replied, looking at J’trel.

  “No, no, you’ve got to go!” J’trel said, heaving himself to his feet. “I’ve got to get back to the Weyr and—” He staggered, leaning on the table for support.

  “You’ve got to get some rest and see a healer,” Lorana replied.

  J’trel straightened up and pushed himself away from the table. “And I can do that best at the Weyr,” he said. “Go on, get! I’ll be awhile mending. I’ll look for you as soon as I’m done.”

  Baror took in their words with a hidden sneer. “Stay if you want, I’m going.”

  Lorana glanced at him, and back at J’trel. “Wait!” she called to the retreating seaman. She gave the dragonrider a gentle hug and said, “I’ve told Talith to watch out for you.”

  J’trel forced a smile over the grimace of pain that her hug had caused him. “He always does.”

  In the distance, the blue dragon coughed. Lorana frowned, adding, “And keep an eye on that cough!” She pursed her lips. “I swear it’s gotten worse.”

  With one last wave at him, she started after Baror.

  The seaman carefully led her out the far side of the tent to avoid the crowd that was slowly gathering around another seaman spread out on the ground, knocked unconscious by a hard blow with a rock that lay nearby. Baror wondered if he had killed Tanner with the blow, but he didn’t really care.

  “My lord?” a voice whispered nervously into J’trel’s ear. “My lord, it’s very late.”

  J’trel stirred, and raised his head from the table even while wondering how it had got there. Except for the light of the lantern the man carried, it was pitch-dark.

  Emboldened now that the dragonrider had stirred, the man said, “I’ve got to close up now, my lord.”

  Talith? For a terrible instant J’trel feared that something had happened to his dragon and that he’d find himself left all alone, with neither partner nor dragon. The sense of loss for K’nad, which had engulfed him after Lorana had rushed
away, enveloped him like a thick shroud. His sense of dread grew as he waited longer and longer for his dragon to respond.

  J’trel? Talith’s voice came back to him without its usual warmth and strength. I don’t feel right.

  Instantly J’trel heard and felt his dragon’s distress. With a wordless cry, he lurched to his feet, against the pain in his battered ribs, the drink-induced nausea, and the muzziness of an incipient hangover.

  “My lord, are you all right?” the tavern man asked, hands fluttering from gestures of aid to gestures of entreaty.

  “I’ve been better,” J’trel replied with a trace of his usual humor. “But I’m all right.”

  He swiveled blearily toward an exit.

  Talith waited in a nearby clearing. J’trel bit off a gasp of pain as he climbed up the dragon’s side. J’trel could hear his dragon’s breathing and noticed how strained it sounded.

  You’re hurt, Talith noted compassionately.

  And you’re—J’trel was going to say tired but suddenly realized that he meant old—and was shocked into silence. But Talith, from Turns of intimacy, guessed both the original and substitute words J’trel had not thought. The dragon rumbled softly in gentle agreement, and the rumble turned into a sharp cough.

  As the blue launched into the cold night air, J’trel reminisced on the past several months. He had only planned to notify K’nad’s next of kin. The pain of his partner’s loss and age itself had taken too much of a toll on the old dragonrider.

  There was too much pain—and his duties had been discharged. Some dissenting thought crossed his mind, but he couldn’t focus on it. Talith coughed again, painfully.

  I have made you tarry too long, old friend, J’trel said kindly to his life-long mate. You are tired. I am tired. Talith rumbled soft agreement. It is time.

  For a moment longer J’trel reflected on his life. Give Lorana my love, old friend. She will carry on without us, I’m sure.

  After a moment the blue dragon responded, I have told her.

  J’trel nodded. “Good. I am tired and it’s time to rest.”

  Together, dragon and rider flashed one moment in the pale moonlight and were gone.

  FOUR

  It is the duty of an Eridani Adept to preserve their assigned ‘-ome’.

  —Excerpt from the Eridani Edicts

  Fort Hold, First Pass, Year 48, AL 56

  As the sound of breaking glass reached her ears over the booming of the message drums, Wind Blossom paused in her slow, steady hunt. She sighed and bid silent farewell to yet more precious glassware. I was never good at this, she thought sadly to herself. The boy was worse than Emorra had ever been.

  Wind Blossom took a deep breath and turned toward the noise. Resolutely she overrode the creaks of her joints and the complaints of her muscles. Time—and medicine—on Pern were not what they had been: At seventy-nine, she felt more like a doddering ninety.

  The sounds of the drums died as the message was completed—and the noise of breaking glass diminished, but not before Wind Blossom had located its source. It came from her own room. She opened the door but did not enter.

  Hunched over the remains of a cabinet at one end of the room, Tieran panted. Tears streamed down his face. Wind Blossom noticed with sadness that his hands were bleeding in several places—again.

  “Tieran?” Somehow she managed to modulate her voice to more than a croak. For such small things are we grateful, she thought to herself.

  The lad, rangy and awkward in the midst of adolescence, turned away from her, but he did not continue in his destruction. Instead, he started picking his way across the shard-strewn floor toward the door.

  Wind Blossom sighed inwardly with relief as she noticed that he at least had his boots on. The damage to his hands looked minor as well, she noted clinically.

  As always, almost instinctively, he kept the right side of his face—the “good” side—toward her and tilted his neck in such a way that the lacerations on his nose looked their best.

  Of all his injuries, the damage to the nose was the worst—at least for a sixteen-year-old boy who had to endure the pitying stares of his elders and the taunts or the silent shunning of his peers.

  Wind Blossom knew that it was possible to repair the damage, once his face had finished growing. If she could learn the necessary skills. If she could find the necessary materials. If she could keep the necessary medicines. If she lived long enough.

  They were in a three-legged race: waiting for him to grow up, striving to keep the medical supplies necessary, and hoping that she didn’t grow too feeble to perform the surgery.

  And they both knew they were losing.

  Latrel could have done it, but that lab accident had cost him the use of his left thumb and, without it, he couldn’t operate. Carelly had never progressed beyond competent nurse. Wind Blossom felt that she could train Tieran to do it—he had the skill—but he could not be both surgeon and patient.

  “Where is it?” Tieran demanded in a rough, torn voice. Wind Blossom raised an eyebrow.

  “Where is the antibiotic?” He glared at her.

  “It is safe,” Wind Blossom said.

  “I want it,” Tieran told her. He held out a hand. “Give it to me—now.”

  “Why now?”

  Tieran’s face crumpled. “He—he—he was under that rock slide for two days! The sepsis had set in long before they found him. The fever took him before I got there.”

  Wind Blossom shuddered. “He was a good man.”

  Tieran glared at her. “Give it to me! I’m going to find someone—M’hall, someone—and we’ll time it—don’t think I don’t know—and we’ll save him. I need that medicine!”

  “You cannot break time, Tieran,” Wind Blossom said softly. “Not even for your father. There is no way.”

  Wind Blossom had taught Tieran that dragons could not only go instantaneously between places but also between times. The paradoxes and rules of time travel applied to dragons as much as to anything else that existed in the space-time continuum. It was impossible to go back in time in a manner that could alter events that had already occurred.

  “You can’t alter the past,” Wind Blossom said.

  Tieran’s face crumpled and he leaned over and onto Wind Blossom. “You said he’d always be there. You said we’d always see each other. You said . . . And I wasn’t there! I couldn’t help him, I wasn’t there!”

  Drawing on her inner strength, Wind Blossom straightened her spine and held the lad while his sorrow and anger poured out.

  “I shall miss him, too,” Wind Blossom said after a while. “He was a good man. A good botanist, too. With more training—”

  “Training! Is that how you measure a man?” Tieran demanded. “Is that how you see me? No scars, only an apt student? And what am I learning? A lost art, a dying way of doing things—all for your pleasure!”

  “Your father wanted you to—”

  “My father’s dead,” Tieran cut her off. “And now it’s only you who wants me to learn all this genetic foolery. Splicing genes we can’t see—the last electron microscope failed last year, or don’t you remember?—for ends we don’t know. We could introduce mutations without knowing about it, and for 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.