Anne McCaffrey - Dragonsinger

As full dark settled over Fort Hold, the crowd began to thin, for those with a distance to travel had to start their journeys home. Stalls were taken down and folded away, the grazing heardbeasts and runners were captured and saddled to bear their owners down the roads from the Hold. The wineman, since he kept a hold in the Fort cliff, continued to serve those unwilling to end a gather.

Pecking Menolly urgently on the cheek, Beauty reminded her that the fire lizards had politely waited for their supper long enough. Abashed at her thoughtlessness, Menolly rushed back to the Harper Hall. On the kitchen steps, Camo sat disconsolately, his thick arms cradling an enormous bowl of scraps, his eyes on the archway. The instant he caught sight of her and the fire lizards wheeling and diving as escort, he rose, calling to her.

“Pretties hungry? Pretties very hungry! Camo waiting. Camo hungry, too.”

From nowhere, Piemur appeared.

“See, Camo, I told you she’d be back. I told you she’d want us to feed her fire lizards!”

Piemur stopped her breathless apologies as he handed out gobs of meat to his usual trio.

“Told you gathers were fun, didn’t I, Menolly? Told you it was about time you had some, too. And you sang just great! You should always sing ‘The Fire Lizard Song’! They loved it! And how come we don’t know that sea song? It’s got a great rhythm.”

“That’s an old song—”

“I never heard it.”

Menolly laughed because Piemur sounded as testy as an old uncle instead of a half-grown boy.

“Hope you know some more new ones like that because I’m so bored with all the stuff I’ve heard since I was a babe… Hey, you had the last piece, Lazy. It’s Mimic’s turn…there! Behave yourself.”

The hungry fire lizards made short work of Camo’s bowl. Then Ranly leaned out of the dining room window, urging them to come and eat before the food was cleared away. There weren’t many in the dining hall: Piemur had been right that they got scanty rations on a gather day, but the cheese, bread and sweetings were all Menolly could eat.

When the Apprentice Master marshaled the younger ones to the dormitory, Menolly quietly ascended the steps to her own room. The lilting strains of still another dance tune drifted on the night air. She’d done her first turn as a harper, and done well. She felt like a harper for the first time, as if she really did belong here in the Hall. Lulled by the music and distant laughter, she fell asleep, the warm bodies of the fire lizards nestling against her.

The next morning, looking from her window to the place where the gather had been held, she saw few traces of litter, only the dew-glistening trampled earth of the dancing square. Holders trudged toward the fields, herdsmen were guiding their beasts to the meadows, and apprentices dashed up and down the holdway on their errands. Down the ramp from Fort Hold paced a troop of leggy runners, fresh after a day’s rest, fretting against the slow pace to which their riders held them until they were past the ambling herdbeasts. They disappeared in a cloud of dust down the long road to the east.

Menolly heard the noise from the apprentices’ dormitory, and a soft, all but inaudible, creeling closer by. She threw on her clothes and dashed down the steps.

“Knew you wouldn’t miss, Menolly,” said Silvina, meeting her on the steps from the kitchen. She carried a tray, which she thrust ahead. “Do take this up to the Harper, like a pet, would you? Camo’s just about finished wielding that chopper of his for your fair.”

Menolly’s polite tap at the Masterharper’s door brought an instant response. He had a fur clutched around him and an insistently creeling fire lizard clawing at his bare arm.

“How’d you know?” he asked, delighted and relieved to see her. “Thank goodness you did. I really can’t appear in the kitchen wrapped in a sleeping fur. There, there! I’m stuffing your face, you bottomless pit. How long does this insatiable appetite continue, Menolly?”

She held the tray for him so he could feed Zair as they crossed the room. She slid the tray onto the middle the sandtable and, anticipating the Harper’s own requirements, offered Zair his next few pieces of meat while Master Robinton gratefully gulped down steaming klah. He grabbed a piece of bread, dipped it into the sweeting, had another sip of klah and then, his mouth full, waved at Menolly to leave.

“You’ve got your own to feed, too. Don’t forget to work on your song. I’ll require a finished copy later this morning.”

She nodded and left him, wondering if she ought to check and see if Sebell was managing with Kimi. He was, seated at one of the journeymen’s tables, with more than enough willing assistants.

Her fire lizards waited patiently at the kitchen steps with Piemur and Camo. Once her friends had been fed, she was enjoying a second cup of klah when Domick came striding across the court toward her.

“Menolly,” and he was frowning with irritation, “I know Robinton wants you to finish that song for him, but will it take all morning? I wanted you to go through that quartet music with Sebell, Talmor and myself. Morshal has the girls for theory on firstday so Talmor’s free. I’ll never get that quartet ready for performance unless we have a few more good rehearsals.”

“I’ll start the copy right now, only…”

“Only what?”

“I don’t have any copying tools.”

“Is that all? Finish your klah quickly. I’ll show you Arnor’s den. Just as well I’m taking you,” Domick said, guiding her toward the door in the opposite corner of the court. “Robinton wants the song done on those sheets of pulped wood, and Arnor won’t hand them out to apprentices.”

Master Arnor, the Hall’s archivist, occupied the large room behind the Main Hall. It was brilliantly lit with glow baskets in each corner, in the center of the room, and smaller ones depending above the tilted worktables where apprentices and journeymen bent to tasks of copying faded record hides and newer songs. Master Arnor was a fusser: he wanted to know why Menolly was to have sheets; apprentices had to learn how to copy properly on old hide before they could be entrusted with the precious sheets; what was all the hurry about? And why hadn’t Master Robinton told him himself if it was all this important? And a girl? Yes, yes, he’d heard of Menolly. He’d seen her in the dining hall, same as he saw all the other nuisancy apprentices and holder girls and, oh, well, all right, here was tool and ink, but she wasn’t to waste it now, or he’d have to make more and that was a lengthy process and apprentices never paid close attention to the simmering and if the solution boiled, it would be ruined and fade too soon and oh, he didn’t know what the world was coming to!

A journeyman had been unobtrusively assembling the various items, and he handed them to Menolly, giving her an amused wink for his master’s querulousness. His smile also conveyed to Menolly the tip that the next time she should come directly to him rather than approach his cranky master.

Domick got her away from the old archivist after the barest of courtesies. As they walked back to the Hall entrance, he again directed her not to be all morning at the copying or he’d never get the new quartet sufficiently rehearsed before the Festival. As he opened the door to the Main Hall, she heard the Masterharper’s voice and sped up the stairs.

As she worked in her room, her concentration was penetrated now and then by voices raised in discussion in the Hall below. Absently she identified the various masters: Domick, Morshal, Jerint, the Masterharper and, to her surprise, Silvina, and others whose voices she couldn’t recognize as readily. As the conversations apparently had to do with posting journeymen to various positions about the country, she paid scant heed.