DragonWarrior
By Absinthe
Disclaimers: Ms. McCaffrey's wonderful planet of Pern belongs to her and her alone. No harm is meant by this little romp. Two of the characters are going to look suspiciously like a warrior and her bard, two characters that belong to Universal studios.
Part 2:
Time had flown during her brief visit with her brother and best friend. She missed him sorely, and seeing him again had only driven home that fact. There were things though that she longed to discuss with him, particularly her recent and blossoming attraction to the weyr's new, lissome blonde journeyman harper, that she knew he would never understand. Her return to the weyr was met with the weary solidarity of a close knit group of people that had just had their lives turned over. Khlara was the new Weyr woman, and in a few days, Miriam and T'mal would be officially retiring from leadership. Tara ignored entreaties that she join the remaining celebrants for dinner, and instead ate alone in her quarters.
Miriam had been Weyr woman for a long time, through feast and famine, and Tara knew that she would be missed. Aside from that though, she resented very strongly that Khlara had taken up this new position, and worse yet, Nerath informed her rider that F'deron would be the new Weyrleader. With a little groan, Tara tossed aside her half-eaten redfruit.
"Great, just great," she said, banging her head down onto the tabletop.
Willenth chose well, was the dragon's only reply to her rider's distress.
"That doesn't mean I have to like him now, does it?" Tara replied.
No, Nerath responded, sleepily and ineffably, then she added, Merelan comes.
Tara sat up and made her best effort to pull herself together before the harper got to the top of the steps.
"Hey, I brought you some dinner," Merelan called, her voice echoing a little on the stone walls. Tara listened to the slap of her footfalls as the harper strolled through the weyr and greeted Nerath quite casually before continuing into Tara's rooms. Shaking her head, the Queen rider stood up to greet her friend.
"Good to see you, Merelan," she said, and did not have to feign enthusiasm.
"You all right?" Merelan asked, too perceptive for Tara's comfort.
"Yeah."
"No you're not. You hate F'deron, and Khlara is not exactly your personal confidante," the harper set the plate down and bumped her friend playfully with her shoulder, "You want it so bad you can taste it."
"What? Want what?!"
"Khlara's position."
"Shards, girl! You must be half-witted!" Tara replied in mock outrage.
"No, I really mean it. It's kind of obvious, at least to me. This bothers you, but even so you wouldn't want to be stuck with any of the current bronze riders as a partner anyway, so you're stuck," Merelan prodded.
Tara said nothing, but instead snatched the wineskin that the harper was holding and gulped until the sides of the skin caved in. She lowered it and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, panting.
"I'll take that as a yes," Merelan sighed, flopping down onto a chair. Wordlessly, Tara tossed what was left of the wine to her friend. The harper smiled, bobbed her eyebrows and took a few judicious mouthfuls.
"The man has no manners," Tara started, emboldened by the heat of the wine in her empty belly, "and no sense. He can't take a hint and he has no diplomacy. I don't care what the dragons say."
"So you think that he's a bad choice. But how much of what you're saying is true? How much of it is coming from your pent up animosity? You know I think that there are only three people in this weyr that know how you feel about him."
"Don't forget Khlara," Tara replied, gesturing imperiously for more wine. Merelan handed it back.
"Drink more," the dragon rider demanded, "you're too damn . . . oh shards. Whass the word?"
"Logical?"
"Thassit," as their conversation progressed, Tara fast lost all coherency, and it wasn't long before Merelan followed her. They wound up somehow on the bed in a heap, fighting over the last mouthfuls of wine, and swearing indiscriminately, denouncing everything from the crawlers in the rafters to the holders' half-hearted tithing that forced them to drink this rotten sour wine to get drunk.
It wasn't long before it seemed terribly hot, and the next logical step was to start taking off each others' clothes, and in the manner of many drunken revels, things progressed.
They woke around midmorning, tangled in bedclothes and each other, both nauseous and miserable. Worse yet, they woke to a squeak from the Gemma who had come to say good morning and wake the junior Queen rider for breakfast with Miriam. Tara started up in protest, but the spinning floor prevented her from stopping the interloper. She groaned and cradled her head in her hands. Her hair was stringy and her mouth dry, but the thought of even water made her poor stomach heave.
Merelan somehow had the wherewithal to get up and put her tunic back on. She handed Tara a shirt, shielding her bleary eyes from the light of the morning.
"Oh shards," Tara muttered, adrenaline helping her head to clear a little.
"What happened?" Merelan asked, confused, "I don't . . . remember . . ."
Before they got any farther, Miriam stormed into the room followed by the head woman, who was carrying a jug and a water bucket.
"The first order of business is cleaning the two of you up, this should help with the hangovers," the newly retired weyr woman announced, and set about to pouring two mugs of the malodorous concoction in the jug. She forced both women to swallow their portions and then to sip a cup of water.
"Now," she said, "I trust that you got whatever it was out of your systems last night. This goes no farther than the four of us, understood?"
Three heads nodded, two greenly.
"Tara, come with me," the formidable woman ordered, and stalked off into one of the small antechambers. She pulled the doors closed on either side when they were both inside.
"Tara. You have been like a daughter to me this turn and a half. For the good of the weyr and of Pern, this had better not happen again. You're duty bound to encourage the bronze-riders. This is not done. Do you understand? Never again. I'll let it go just this once because you weren't totally in control," Miriam spoke harshly, but she spoke the truth, "Not many would be as accepting of this as I am, but we're all stuck here, and Nerath is counting on you to be a woman." not a monster hung unspoken in the air. Tara hung her head sadly.
"This will not leave this room," Miriam reminded Merelan and the head woman before she dismissed them, "Come, Tara. You're going to help me move my things."
Merelan stood and watched the two riders leave, her green eyes closed to slits against the knives of light that stabbed mercilessly at her pupils in spite of the significant relief that Miriam's anti-hangover brew was quickly dispersing through her system.
"Get gone, girl," Gemma ordered, flapping her work roughened hands at the harper. Merelan gathered up her clothes, putting herself in order, and stumbled down the stairs. The little blonde made her way across the bowl, her steps growing more steady as she got farther. She held herself together until she was back in her little room. It seemed tiny and bare next to Tara's quarters, but it was comfortingly familiar. She collapsed into tears on the mattress of her little bed.
The emotional backlash of surprised her. At first she didn't know what she was crying about. In fact, it took a few days for her to sort it out. During that time she saw Tara once, from a distance. She happened to look out over the bowl while Nerath was feeding, and caught a glimpse of Tara standing in the grass, tall and self assured, with her hands on her hips. A feeling of . . . adoration overcame the harper. She almost dropped a precious guitar, but Fiemur rescued it from her hands with a disapproving frown.
"Pay attention, girl, you'll get used to the dragons someday," he snapped his fingers and pointed to the sheet of music she was supposed to be studying.
"I'm sorry," Merelan replied, shaking her head at herself. She took the guitar back, and put her fingers to its strings, but her playing that evening only got worse from there. She was distracted, but it was the recognition of her own preoccupation that helped her figure the situation out.
She was in love. Her time at the harper hall had opened her eyes to the possibility of sex between women, but not love. That had been just a game, but she felt such a connection with Tara that the pull was undeniable. They would not have made sloppy drunken love if they hadn't both wanted it, at least subconsciously. Merelan tried to put it out of her mind. The weyr woman's reaction was enough to scare her away for a while, but the lack of contact was fermenting in her stomach and her heart was growing warm with the power of her emotions.
Tara on the other hand, she was eaten up with indignation at Miriam. She understood that what she and Merelan had done was supposed to be wrong, but how could love be wrong? She'd wondered that her whole life. She wanted to scream at Miriam, to make her see, but she knew it wouldn't get her anywhere.
Meanwhile, Khlara and F'deron had made decent Weyr leaders. They were not, perhaps, as popular and well liked as Miriam and her mate had been, but that was to be expected. The egg-heavy Willenth was an irksome reminder of the changes that they weyr infrastructure had undergone. Tara carried on with her duties as junior queen rider as if nothing had happened, or at least she tried very hard to. All she wanted to do was to see Merelan again; just to look into her eyes and see if what she thought would be there was there.
She was helping to get a tithe of wine and fabric into one of the cool storage rooms deep in the bowels of the weyr, but the going was slow as they were having to carry everything down two flights of stairs. They weyrlings were all pitching in. Tara and a blue rider were carrying a cask of red wine between them, moving step by step down the stairs, straining under their burden. At the bottom they set it down with relief, careful not to drop it and break it on the hard stone floor. Tara rolled the barrel the rest of the way, and her friend trudged back up the stairs for another load.
Tara put wedges on either side of the cask and left it in a row with the others. She wiped the sweat off of her face with the back of her hand, and turned to go back up, when she suddenly found herself face to face with Merelan. The blonde harper cocked her head to one side and gestured towards the hallway. Tara nodded, and they left the main storage room for one of the smaller, dustier alcoves off to the side.
"Hey," Tara whispered, smiling sadly.
"Hey," the harper replied, "Look, I know that Miriam probably told you to stay away from me, but I had to talk to you again. I-"
"Merelan," Tara interrupted, stopping the blonde's words with a kiss -- a deep and proper kiss that left them both breathless, "I'm sorry. I just had to do that right."
That one kiss told them both what they needed to know.
"I think I love you," Merelan replied.
"It has to end here," Tara said, huskily, "Miriam knows what she's talking about. We can't do this. I have too many responsibilities. There's only one way we could make this work, and that's for you to impress a bronze."
Tara laughed at the feeble joke she'd made, but Merelan hummed thoughtfully.
"Who says I can't?" the harper defensively retorted. Tara grabbed the smaller woman by the shoulders.
"Call me hidebound, but it's not done. It's never been done, and I don't think that it ever will be!" Tara argued, hearing Miriam's voice echoing in her head even as the words left her lips.
"Why haven't you come to see me?" Merelan suddenly asked, changing the subject.
"I wanted to let Miriam cool down a little. Shards, girl, I missed you. I just didn't think it was a good idea. You saw the look on her face . . ."
"Oh," the blonde looked down at her feet, "I have a class to teach in a few minutes. I had better go."
Merelan grinned suddenly and stole a quick kiss before disappearing. Tara shook her head, joyous and melancholy at the same time. At the sound of her name, she dashed out into the hallway and back up the stairs to retrieve another cask.
Life settled back into its time honored rhythms. Merelan and Tara continued on as the friends they had so notoriously become, but always under the watchful eyes of the former Weyr woman. When Tara heard the news that Willenth had clutched; 58 eggs and one was golden, she joined the celebration with her friends. Her resentment of Khlara was cooling, but coveting Merelan from afar was heating something else up. It was probably hardest for both of them when they joked with each other and rough-housed in public just as they had before. They had to fight to keep the sexual innuendoes out of their banter, and the flush from their faces when they touched accidentally or as they played up to their image as a pair of rambunctious youths.
Khlara interrupted a dozen of the younger riders, Tara, and Merelan all playing a ball game on the beach. The Weyr woman was walking down to the water for a swim, and the game continued as she passed. The leather ball went astray though, and landed at her feet, spraying hot sand up onto her legs. Khlara picked up the ball and tossed to the closest player, but her cool eyes settled on Tara. The junior rider returned the stare as the smile fell from her tanned face.
"Tara!" Khlara admonished, "You could try behaving with the dignity of your rank, for once in your life!"
Tara was so surprised that she didn't even know what to say. Fortunately Merelan came to her rescue with a quick rejoinder.
"Surely you don't begrudge her a little fun?"
Khlara smirked and moved on. Tara grumbled under her breath, but blew off her frustration and threw herself wholeheartedly into the next round. After the game, the two teams went for a swim. The losers had to hike back to the lower caverns and bring the victors lunch. Tara snickered at Merelan as the harper and her team laid out the picnic, but the teasing was all good natured, per usual. All in all, it was a good rest-day.
Late that night, Tara awoke from a strange dream in which she talked to a deformed yellow runner beast that seemed to understand her, and threw a strange flat disk with sharp edges. She couldn't remember anything more articulate than that, but she couldn't seem to get back to sleep. After tossing and turning for a full hour, she got out of bed and padded barefoot out onto the ledge of the weyr to look out over the great bowl. All was silent and dark. She could barely make out the glowing eyes of the watch-dragon on his tower in the distance.
The stone stairs were still warm from the hot sun of the afternoon, and her feet slapped drily on them as she descended to the ground floor. She wandered down to the beach, and settled on the cool sand to listen to the waves. They crashed against the shore with a hypnotic hissing rhythm that made her drowse a little. Tara wasn't sure what roused her a little while later, but she sat up and brushed the sand from her hair and followed her instincts back up into the Weyr bowl. Maybe a half-heard sound, or maybe some kind of subliminal pull led her up towards the hatching grounds were Willenth slept with her body curled slightly around her clutch of enormous eggs. They glowed a little bit in the dark.
What caused Tara's heart to stop still in her chest was the sight of Merelan with her ear pressed to one of the eggs. She ran silently the rest of the way to the clutch, and as she passed the first of the eggs, Merelan stood up and looked like she'd been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
"What do you think you're doing??" Tara hissed, furiously.
Merelan just held her finger to her lips, but it was too late. Willenth opened one of her great eyes and peered at them. A moment later she lifted her huge head. Nerath's sleepy voice rang in Tara's head.
Willenth says it is a good choice.
"Is she going to tell Khlara?" The junior rider asked, anxiously.
Why would she?
A little smile spread across Tara's face, and she scooped the harper up in a tight hug, spinning until the sand underfoot bogged her down and she stumbled, spilling them both to the ground. They choked back laughter as they scrambled to their feet and ran pell mell back down to the beach, Tara leading the way. The two women shucked off their clothes and slipped through the waves, playing like naiads under the crisp white moonlight. Tara floated on her back, and Merelan bobbed beside her, their fingers intertwined. The two moons were reflected in their eyes and they talked of the future with the optimism of blissful youth.
Even as the eggs hardened on the hot hatching ground sands, though, Nerath grew closer to maturity at an alarming rate.
Part 3
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