Anne McCaffrey: Dragonsong

The three young riders, F’lar, F’nor and Lessa forced the Lord Holders and the Craftsmen to recognize their imminent danger and prepare the almost defenseless planet against Thread. But it was distressingly obvious that the scant two hundred dragons of Benden Weyr could not defend the wide-spread and sprawling settlements. Six full Weyrs had been needed in the olden days when the settled land had been much less extensive. In learning to direct her queen between one place and another, Lessa discovered that dragons could teleport between times as well. Risking her life as well as Pern’s only queen, Lessa and Ramoth went back in time, four hundred Turns, to the days before the mysterious disappearance of the other five Weyrs, just after the last Pass of the Red Star had been completed.

The five Weyrs, seeing only the decline of their prestige and bored with inactivity after a lifetime of exciting combat, agreed to help Lessa, and Pern, and came forward to her time.

Dragonsong begins seven Turns after the Five Weyrs came forward.

Almost as if the elements, too, mourned the death of the gentle old Harper, a southeaster blew for three days, locking even the burial barge in the safety of the Dock Cavern.

The storm gave Sea Holder Yanus too much time to brood over his dilemma. It gave him time to speak to every man who could keep rhythm and pitch, and they all give him the same answer. They couldn’t properly honor the Old Harper with his deathsong, but Menolly could.

To which answer Yanus would grunt and stamp off. It rankled in his mind that he couldn’t give voice to his dissatisfaction with that answer, and his frustration. Menolly was only a girl: too tall and lanky to be a proper girl at that. It galled him to have to admit that, unfortunately, she was the only person in the entire Half-Circle Sea Hold who could play any instrument as well as the old Harper. Her voice was true, her fingers clever on string, stick or pipe, and she knew the Deathsong. For all Yanus could be certain, the aggravating child had been practicing that song ever since old Petiron started burning with his fatal fever.

“She will have to do the honor, Yanus,” his wife, Mavi, told him the evening the storm began to slacken. “The important thing is that Petiron is properly sung to rest. One does not have to record who did the singing.”

“The old man knew he was dying. Why didn’t he instruct one of the men?”

“Because,” replied Mavi with a touch of sharpness in her voice, “you would never spare him a man when there was fishing.”

“There was young Tranilty…”

“Whom you sent fostering to Ista Sea Hold.”

“Couldn’t that young lad of Forolt’s…”

“His voice is changing. Come, Yanus, it’ll have to be Menolly.”

Yanus grumbled bitterly against the inevitable as he climbed into the sleeping furs.

“That’s what everyone else has told you, haven’t they? So why make so much of a necessity?”

Yanus settled himself, resigned.

“The fishing will be good tomorrow,” his wife said, yawning. She preferred him fishing to stomping around the Hold, sullen and critical with enforced inactivity. She knew he was the finest Sea Holder Half-Circle had ever had: the Hold was prospering, with plenty for bartering set by in the storage caves; they hadn’t lost a ship or a man in several Turns either, which said much for his weather-wisdom. But Yanus, at home on a heaving deck in foul weather, was very much adrift when taxed with the unexpected on land.

Mavi was keenly aware that Yanus was displeased with his youngest child. Mavi found the girl exasperating, too. Menolly worked hard and was very clever with her fingers: too clever by half when it came to playing any instrument in the Harper Craft. Perhaps, Mavi thought, she had not been wise to permit the girl to linger in the old Harper’s constant company once she had learned all the proper Teaching Songs. But it had been one less worry to let Menolly nurse the old Harper, and Petiron had wished it. No one begrudged a Harper’s requests. Ah well, thought Mavi, dismissing the past, there’d be a new Harper soon, and Menolly could be put to tasks proper to a young girl.

The next morning, the storm had cleared off: the skies were cloudless, the sea, calm. The burial barge had been outfitted in the Dock Cavern, Petiron’s body wrapped in harper-blue on the tilter board. The entire Fleet and most of the Seahold followed in the wake of the oar-driven barge, out into the faster moving current above Nerat Deep.

Menolly, on the barge prow, sang the elegy: her clear strong voice carrying back to the Half-Circle Fleet; the men chanting the descant as they rowed the barge.

On the final chord, Petiron went to his rest. Menolly bowed her head, and let drum and stick slide from her fingers into the sea. How could she ever use them again when they had beaten Petiron’s last song? She’d held back her tears since the Harper had died because she knew she had to be able to sing his elegy and you couldn’t sing witha throat closed from crying. Now the tears ran down her cheeks, mingled with sea spray: her sobs punctuated by the soft chant of the steersman, setting about.

Petiron had been her friend, her ally and mentor. She had sung from the heart as he’d taught her: from the heart and the gut. Had he heard her song where he had gone?

She raised her eyes to the palisades of the coast: to the white-sanded harbor between the two arms of Half-Circle Hold. The sky had wept itself out in the past three days: a fitting tribute. And the air was cold. She shivered in her thick wherhide jacket. She would have some protection from the wind if she stepped down into the cockpit with the oarsmen. But she couldn’t move. Honor was always accompanied by responsibility, and it was fitting for her to remain where she was until the burial barge touched the stones of Dock Cavern.

Half-Circle Hold would be lonelier than ever for her now. Petiron had tried so hard to live long enough for his replacement to arrive. He’d told Menolly he wouldn’t last the winter. He’d dispatched a message to Masterharper Robinton to send a new Harper as soon as possible. He’d also told Menolly that he’d sent two of her songs to the Masterharper.

“Women can’t be harpers,” she’d said to Petiron, astonished and awed.

“One in ten hundred have perfect pitch,” Petiron had said in one of his evasive replies. “One in ten thousand can build an acceptable melody with meaningful words. Were you only a lad, there’d be no problem at all.”

“Well, we’re stuck with me being a girl.”

“You’d make a fine big strong lad, you would,” Petiron had replied exasperatingly.

“And what’s wrong with being a fine big strong girl?” Menolly had been half-teasing, half-annoyed.

“Nothing, surely. Nothing.” And Petiron had patted her hands, smiling up at her.

She’d been helping him eat his dinner, his hands so crippled even the lightest wooden spoon left terrible ridges in the swollen fingers.

“And Masterharper Robinton’s a fair man. No one on Pern can say he isn’t. And he’ll listen to me. He knows his duty, and I am, after all, a senior member of the Crafthall, being taught up in the Craft before him himself. And I’ll require him to listen to you.”

“Have you really sent him those songs you made me wax down on slates?”

“I have. Sure I have done that much for you, dear child.”

He’d been so emphatic that Menolly had to believe that he’d done what he’d said. Poor old Petiron. In the last months, he’d not remembered the time of Turn much less what he’d done the day before.