DragonWarrior
By Absinthe
Hi all! Sorry about the year long delay, I've been . . . shall we say otherwise occupied . . . So anyway, here it is. Mind you I'm not promising resolution yet or anything . . . *EG*
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 8:
Dawn broke with unusual suddenness. There was no slow grey pre-dawn time on the Southern Continent like there was farther north. Tara woke when the sun peeked over the horizon, coloring the sky in spectabular shades of red, orange, and blue. The water reflected it like a warped mirror, and Tara could not resist running down the beach and plunging into waves as red as fire. She lay on her back, awash in the blood colored surface of the sea, and watched the sky above her slowly change colors until all the read dripped away, leaving only crystalline blue.
When she swam back to the beach, riding the thrust of the waves, Merelan was awake. She waited contentedly on Vath's crooked forearm. The bronze's great head rested on the sand, his eyes closed in response to his rider's carresses.
"I could watch you forever," the harper said wistfully.
"You should have seen the sunrise," Tara countered, walking out of the breakers, shouting over the rhythmic roar of the sea.
"It didn't have a thing on you," Merelan smiled lazily.
"You," Tara muttered, standing over her lover and then leaning in to steal a kiss, "are incorrigible."
Merelan grinned shamelessly as she licked the salt from her lips.
"It was a good idea to come here."
"Of course it was. It was my idea," Tara laughed.
"Let's go find breakfast," Merelan suggested.
"I was hoping we could just stay here," Tara replied with a mischievous grin that did not go unanswered. They decided to skip breakfast.
Their sojourn really couldn't have gone better. It made the ensuing busy days easier on them both as their divergent duties kept them apart for longer and longer periods of time. Tara secretly dreamed of separatism -- she wondered what would have happened had she and Merelan met earlier in their lives, at a time when they could have flown in the face of convention and lived together, maybe somewhere alone. They had both become too visible; too important to take the risks they might have in another life.
Merelan was appointed wing-second under J'nor in one of the new wings. F'deron pulled experienced riders form older wings to lead the newly formed groups of young riders. He used M'lan's observations of his up and coming weyrlings as well as assessments he made in conjunction with wingleaders to set up the hierarchy in the wings of new dragons. Tara had more of an adminstrative role. She kept in contact with Miriam and Fayn, who worked together now on the supply stocks and the weyr's pharmacoepia and helped there when needed. She also coordinated with their beholden folk to prepare ground crews, leading training sessions. She tried to cover all the smaller holds, of which there were easily hundreds, as well as the greater ones.
Meanwhile, she and F'deron, privately and increasingly, butted heads over internal matters. She tried to avoid stepping on his toes as best she could, but he resisted her efforts at diplomatic relations with him. It seemed, at times, that he was trying to trip her up; to discredit her. His opinion regarding her right to her position became very clear very quicly. Tara feared that he was letting Khlara influence him. The deposed Weyrwoman still lived in the big Queen's weyr, her bizarre mutterings and shouts sometimes ringing out over the bowl; an echoing reminder of her disregard for the ways of the weyrfolk she had been intended to lead.
Tara was assiduous in her adherence to the weyr honor code, but watched all the while as Khlara's mental condition failed to improve. She became problematic when violent mood swings influenced Willenth, and the other queens had to work together to control her. Tara and Miriam shared their fears and their sense of helplessness. Then one day, after a sevenday of this, Khlara got out of bed, got dressed, brushed out her hair, and walked down to the lower caverns for breakfast. As suddenly as it had begun, she seemed to recover. On closer scrutiny, she was still a little . . . off.
"Khlara?" Jenna, the headwoman said, nervously, "Did you need something dear?"
"No, Jenna, that's quite all right, I can get it myself," she replied, then kept walking into the kitchen, humming some tuneless little ditty at a startling volume. She didn't seem to notice that the staff of the lower caverns avoided her like a plague carrier, and that she ate alone. Afterwards, she went back up her weyr and began to pack up her things.
"Khlara?" she called, passing Willenth on her way inside.
All she heard was the humming. When she stepped through the entryway and saw Khlara neatly folding her clothes and packing them into bags, her mouth fell open.
"Khlara, what are you doing?" she asked, uneasily.
"I'm packing, Tara, I'm moving," Khlara replied, a little dreamily, but as the seconds passed, Tara watched the soft distractedness melt away, "thanks to you."
Tara narrowed her eyes.
"Thanks to me? No, thanks to you. You should have left the weyr when Miriam asked you to."
"And all this for one little mistake?"
"One little mistake? One little mistake that endangered four queens and most of our bronzes . . . and just three months before first fall . . ." she could sense Khlara's building anger, "But that's all done with now. Do you need any help?" she asked, faking magnanimity to change the subject.
"No," Khlara said, and continued on with her task as though Tara wasn't there. The Weyrwoman took the hint and left to return to the board room and prepare for a meeting of the wingleaders, though she was so noticably preoccupied throughout that F'deron publicly asked her what the matter was.
"It's Khlara," she replied, slowly, "She's acting almost like her old self today."
"Then maybe she should be a part of this meeting," F'deron replied, sharply.
"I said almost. And why should she be included? She's not Weyrwoman anymore."
"The only queenrider we need here is the Weyrwoman," T'glan, a middle aged bronze rider spoke up, indignantly.
Several mumbles of agreement were his response and F'deron frowned but held his tongue. Khlara would not be admitted to the meeting. Her demotion had nothing to do with her state of mind, but with her irresponsibility. Things would stand as they were. Even F'deron had to admit that Tara had the majority of the wingleaders behind her. The meeting came to close in the late afternoon, at last. Tara bounded out, and used the rest of the evening to move her things into her rightful place.
The next morning was, at last, the culmination of all of Tara and Merelan's patient waiting. Nerath rose to mate. She took off after blooding several kills with the male dragons of the weyr hot on her tail. Recently, mating flights had become slightly less of an event than they had been the previous turn simply because they happened with greater frequency as the population of the Weyr grew, but this time the results would decide the new Weyrleader. This day most of the Weyrfolk gathered in the bowl, squinting up into the sky until they could no longer see the dragons. The bronze riders were gathered in the Queen's Weyr, and all were less than half conscious of their physical surroundings. Their minds were with their beasts.
Merelan stood among them, a serious contender for the prize for the first time in her life. She'd been nervous, but her fears had dissolved the moment Vath took flight and her mind was jolted by the intensity of their bond and the extent to which she was able to sense what he sensed and feel what he felt. Her own longing to be with Tara seemed paltry next to the intense need Vath transmitted, so his emotions bolstered his rider with hope. Surely they could not fail.
One by one the bronzes fell out of the running, and their riders visibly sagged as they lost the profound immediacy of the temporarily intensified connections with their dragons. Merelan, however, was oblivious to the goings on in the weyr even until F'deron, L'non and she were the last remaining bronze riders with any hope of winning this day. F'deron's Tyolth dropped out when Menth jostled him and pushed him back a dragon-length. Menth and Vath flew almost evenly with each other until Nerath twisted her head and bugled defiantly at them. Menth took advantage of her momentary deceleration just a hair before Vath could, and beat his way laboriously towards the Queen. Every joint in his body strained until momentarily, the bronze managed to entangle Nerath's long neck with his own.
It was over. Merelan blinked, for it took her a moment to register the disaster. She sat down and put her face into her hands. It was over. She walked out, shuffling down to the lower caverns with the rest of the bronzeriders for klah. As she left she could hear the sounds of passion in the bedchamber. L'non's unfamiliar noises, and Tara's well known purling cries, transmogrified by her connection with Nerath into something strange and animalian. She shuddered and kept moving her feet. The farther from the Queen's Weyr she got, the angrier she became. If Tara had really wanted it, Vath would have flown Nerath. The woman was a liar. She had never loved Merelan the way she said she did. She felt used and frustrated. Down in the lower caverns, the riders started to perk up over their mugs of klah. The younger, single bronzeriders were pairing off with some of the younger lower caverns women, but there were far more men than women.
Merelan looked around the room. It would make Tara absolutely furious if she bedded F'deron. She had no idea if he was still sleeping Khlara. Rumor said no, but rumors were sometimes wrong. She got up and sat down next to him, swallowing the bile that rose in her throat to say, "I'm sorry."
The older man shrugged diffidently.
"The dragons didn't want it," he said.
She ran her hand up his thigh under the table.
"Is there somewhere we can go?" she asked, knowing that there was no need for serious pretense.
F'deron stared at her for a moment, shocked, but tossed back the rest of his klah in one gulp, and stood up.
"Of course," he said, and led the way up to his weyr. It was adjacent to the Weyrwoman's chambers. As he fucked her, she listened to the sounds that echoed mercilessly through the stone corridor from Tara's bedchamber. When F'deron came, Merelan pushed him off of her, pulled on her clothes, and stumbled out of the room without a word, furious both with herself and furious with Tara. How dare she?
Merelan studiously avoided both Tara and the new Weyrleader for the next two days, until an argument brought them into contact forcibly. Merelan was drilling with her wing, as usual, when she lost focus and missed her que to start feeding Vath fire stone. The wingleader fell back from point, and glared at her, signalling her to land while the rest of the team continued with the drill.
"For the past two days," he roared, "you've done nothing but day dream. We dont' ahve room for error here. I knew they never should have let a woman into a fighting wing. You're grounded until I speak to L'non."
"I'm sorry, I'll do better I--"
"That's enough. I won't have you risking the lives of the other fighting pairs. Go back to the Weyr immediately."
Tara had seen R'jan separate Merelan and Vath from the wing, and she flew Nerath in closer to listen. They were on their way to Merag hold to speak to Holder Kenith about changing the layout of his fields, but she had time to spare, and wanted desperately to speak to Merelan.
"Merelan!" she shouted, hopping off of Nerath's bakc the moment the dragon landed, "Wait."
Merelan stayed Vath, who was about to take flight to return home.
"R'jan, explain yourself?" she demanded, irrationally angry with her old friend.
R'jan told her more or less what he'd told Merelan.
"Well then she needs more drilling, not less," Tara pointed out, keeping her voice studiously even and calm, "she'll drill with the queens' wing later today, and tomorrow she'll be back with you. And don't you ever say that a woman is not as good as a man within my hearing again, or you'll see just how untrue that is."
R'jan nodded his head nervously.
"Now get back to your wing, your men need you," she barked. R'jan jumped to obey.
"Am I dismissed?" Merelan asked, archly, from Vaths' back.
"Not yet," Tara replied, "please, Merelan, come down here?"
"Why?"
"Because I miss you and I need you."
"Not good enough. Why should I believe you? Nerath clearly doesn't think you need me and I guess she would know."
The dragon lowered her head, her eyes whirling with concern.
"You should believe me because I'm telling the truth."
"So is she," Merelan proudly replied.
"I can't explain it, Merelan. But it's not all Nerath. Vath had a part in the mating flight too. Just because I love you doesn't mean we're garaunteed that Vath will fly Nerath every time she rises. Next time --"
"Next time will be too late."
"Merelan, will you listen to me, at least?" Tara took the blonde's silence for consent, "I never imagined I could feel so much for one person. I never thought that . . . after impressing a dragon I would have the unbelievable good luck to find a person who . . . fits so perfectly. Every moment with you . . . every moment . . . is the best of my life."
Tears started in Merelan's eyes.
"I just wish I could believe her."
You can, Vath replied, matter of factly.
"No, love, what has she done to prove it?"
Does she have to prove that she loves you? Is it not enough that she does?
Merelan bit her lip and asked Vath to take off. With a mighty sweep of his wings, he launched himself, leaving Tara in a shower of dust. The dark woman stood there, unbelieving.
"Did she really just do that?" she demanded of the gigantic golden dragon.
She hurts, Nerath replied, nonchalantly, she will understand.
"When?" Tara asked, in a small voice. Nerath tilted her head ineffably, and did not reply.
To Be Continued . . .
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