Dragon's Fire (6 page)

Tenim stood toward the back of the crowd as the next wing of dragons started its first run. He let himself be caught up in the excitement, along with the rest of the Gather, as they looked up in awe at the sight of thirty flaming dragons racing across the afternoon sky, flaming the rope Threads thrown down by the queen riders high above them, displaying their skill as dragon and rider worked to reduce the mock menace to dust.

Tenim’s eye darted from the spectacle above him back to his intended victim, a red-faced, corpulent Trader who bellowed loudly as the Fort riders finished their run and the flags on the Lord Holders’ stands were changed to Benden.

The crowd roared and Tenim seized the moment. He added his own voice, feigned a slip, and fell roughly against the Trader.

“I’m sorry, so sorry!” Tenim said, helping the Trader to his feet and trying to brush the dirt off the man. He pushed a lock of jet black hair off his face, his bright green eyes tinged with concern.

“Not to worry,” the Trader answered genially, backing away. Then he stopped, patting his clothes, and turned back, an angry look on his face.

His purse was in plain sight in Tenim’s hands. With a nervous swallow, Tenim held up the purse and put on his most innocent look. “You dropped your purse. Here it is.”

“Well, thank you, lad,” the Trader said, grabbing the purse.

“You’ll not tell my master on me?” Tenim asked, his eyes wide with fear. “He’d beat me if he found out. I’m always clumsy,” he added with eyes downcast.

“No,” the Trader said kindly. He reached into his purse and pulled out a half-mark. “Not every lad is as honest as you,” he said as he pressed it into Tenim’s hand.

“Thank you!” Tenim said cheerfully, still in character. “Thank you so much.”

He waved at the Trader and started off at a brisk walk, careful not to look back lest the Trader suspect.

Out of sight, Tenim allowed himself one long, explosive curse. His belly rumbled in agreement.

No matter what Moran said, he was too old to beg. It was time to steal.

In the evening there would be gambling; Tenim decided to risk his half-mark on the chance for more.

If he didn’t, there were always those too deep in their cups to notice his light fingers late at night.

“So, Harper, what do you reckon?” the question came from a young impetuous man, part of the crowd Moran had cheerfully insinuated himself into earlier.

“It’s always difficult to know how these things will turn out, Berrin,” Moran replied after a moment’s thought.

Someone in the group shouted, “Ah, no, it’s easy—Telgar for sure!”

“Telgar for first, I’m certain,” Moran said hastily. He couldn’t identify the speaker but he knew better than to cast doubt on the local Weyr’s chances. “It’s which Weyr will come second and third that’s hard to know.”

“Have you a guess?” Berrin asked. When Moran nodded, the Crom holder fingered the bulge in his tunic and asked, “Care to wager?”

“I don’t know if, as a harper, I should bet with you.”

“Why not?”

“Well,” Moran said thoughtfully, “after all, I’ve been around, and I wouldn’t want you to believe that my superior knowledge bested you.”

He caught the holder’s greedy look and knew that his deliberate mistakes in their previous conversations had convinced the holder that Moran was a pompous, overconfident fool. The holder glanced at the bulging purse Moran had carefully hung on his belt in plain sight to all. Of course, the holder had convinced himself that Moran’s purse was bulging with harper marks, a belief that Moran was careful to cultivate by the overprotective way he clutched at it.

Fools and their money are soon parted, Moran reflected silently, remembering his early years at the Harper Hall.

“Well, now, I’m sure you’re a fair man, Harper,” Berrin replied in a tone that told Moran that, in fact, Berrin was sure that Moran was a stupid man. “And I’d trust you to be honest with me if you knew something special.”

Moran nodded affably.

“So how about a wager for second place?” Berrin asked. Moran raised his hands, feigning nervous indecision. “Nothing much, say a mark or two?”

Moran gave the holder a doubtful look.

“Ah, go on, Harper,” one of Berrin’s friends called out from the crowd.

“Well,” Moran began slowly, clutching at his bag, “perhaps a mark that Benden gets second.”

“Benden? I’ll take a mark on that,” another man called from the crowd. Moran smiled to himself as he recognized the man as another of Berrin’s cronies. Privately, the harper was pretty certain that only half of the current crowd was working with Berrin, the rest being innocent but greedy gamblers hoping to exploit Berrin and the harper. Moran was quite certain that in the end he would take money from both groups and come out ahead. He had no qualms with that—there were hungry children at their camp who wouldn’t question how their bellies came to be full.

Halla peered worriedly at her big brother as he slid on the slick ground. Jamal winced and bit off a curse after jarring his broken leg.

“Are you okay?” Halla asked him. She helped him get up and made a face. “What’s that smell? It’s coming from your leg.”

“It’s nothing,” Jamal lied.

“Maybe you should see a healer,” Halla said.

“Healers won’t see us, you know that,” Jamal replied. He waved Halla away. “You go over with the other children, you’re supposed to be watching them.”

Halla sniffed, but dutifully headed off to a forlorn cluster of youngsters mostly younger than her own eight Turns. She turned to look back as Jamal disappeared once more into the Gather crowd and hoped that he would be okay.

“Of course I’ll keep this our secret,” Moran promised the disconsolate wagerers as he collected his winnings.

“That’s very kind of you, Harper,” Berrin told him feelingly, his words echoed by the worried nods of the other losers.

“After all, it was all in good spirits,” the harper said, carefully fishing out a few quarter-marks to each of the losing bettors. After the losers thanked him for his graciousness, Moran returned to the miners.

“Didn’t I say that Telgar would win?” Tarik declared, soundly slapping the harper on the shoulder. He peered down at him, his eyes shining with an avaricious gleam. “You’ve some marks for me, I believe?”

“Indeed I do,” Moran declared jovially, handing over a two-mark piece that he’d just won as part of his other wagers. He leaned closer to Tarik and said in a softer voice, “And I hope you’ll find our other arrangement as advantageous.”

Tarik’s face hardened for just a moment before he responded, “I’m sure I will. Indeed, I’m certain of it.”

CHAPTER 3

N
EAR
C
AMP
N
ATALON,
AL 492.7–493.4

F
ollowing Master Zist’s instructions, Pellar snuck onto one of the trader’s drays and hid behind the barrels of goods intended for Camp Natalon. To increase his chances of avoiding detection, Pellar sent Chitter ahead to Zist.

The trip up to the camp took a sevenday. Zist could only manage to sneak him food twice. Fortunately, Pellar had filled his pack wisely and had planned on surviving on his own for at least two sevendays. He left the trader caravan the night before it was due to arrive at the camp and took off into the mountains.

The weather was chillier than at Fort Hold and the Harper Hall. Pellar was dressed well and kept up a hard pace, knowing that his exertions would keep him warm. He pressed on through the night, only looking for a spot to sleep as the sun crested the horizon.

He found the spot in a clearing on an eastern plateau of the mountains that rose up toward Camp Natalon. The plateau was wide, with a thick canopy of trees and lush undergrowth. Grass grew in wide swathes.

Pellar paused before he entered the plateau, scanning it carefully for any signs of life. A tingling feeling, some strange sense of unease, disturbed him and he shrank back tight against a boulder. He waited, taking the time to pull a piece of jerked beef from his tunic, chewing on the tough strip of meat slowly both from necessity and to force himself to maintain his composure as Mikal had trained him.

He peered around the boulder much later and scanned the plateau again. It took him a moment to spot what had first disturbed him—a darker spot of brown underneath one of the trees. He peered at it suspiciously. A breeze blowing up the side of the mountain, fanned by the warming air of the morning sun, caused something bright on the dark mound to flicker. Pellar shrank back against his boulder and waited again.

Finally, he peered back around, examining the whole plateau until he was certain that it was abandoned. He moved around the boulder that had hidden him and walked briskly onto the plateau. He still suspiciously searched the area, stopping to check the ground and scan the areas beyond the plateau that had been out of his sight, resting himself against a tree or crouching down by a boulder. Satisfied, he made a roundabout circle to the brown spot.

The bright something he’d seen earlier resolved itself to a bundle of yellow flowers. Pellar paused, his throat suddenly tight and dry.

The mound was a grave, newly dug—and it was too small for an adult.

He took a deep breath and worked his way closer to the mound, keeping a careful eye out for any signs of footprints. At first he thought he’d found none, then, as he looked near where the flowers had been left, he made out faint signs of disturbed ground. Curious, he got on his hands and knees, and bent close to the ground. The markings didn’t look like footprints until he got close enough to see the straight thin lines of bindings and realized that the strange markings around them were those of bark being pressed into the ground. The prints were small, another child.

A child wearing sandals made of bark tied on to the feet with twine.

“You can make shoes out of anything,” Mikal had once told him. “Wherhide’s the best, of course. But I once made a pair out of bark.” He’d shaken his head. “They’re brittle, hard to keep on, and don’t last long, but they’re better than going barefoot, particularly in the cold.”

Pellar made a wide circle around the far side of the grave, trying to intersect the bark-sandal tracks as they moved away. He found them. He got down on the ground again, carefully, checking for signs of others. He was about to give up when he noticed some disturbed grass. He smiled to himself.

Someone had very carefully erased his or her tracks. If the small child hadn’t felt compelled to put some flowers on the grave site, Pellar doubted if he would have spotted the tracks at all. Now that he knew what to look for, it would be easy to find—the tracks were less than a day old.

A small child had died and been buried here in an unmarked grave without even flowers to mark the passing. Another child—maybe a sister or a brother—had sneaked back to put flowers on the grave before joining the rest of the troop as they headed north toward Camp Natalon.

If he moved quickly, Pellar thought, he could trail the group right to their camp. Pellar was certain that they were Shunned. Tightening his jaw in determination, Pellar hiked his pack farther up his shoulders. But he had not gone forty paces when he spotted the broken stems of flowers snatched along the pathway. They were taken in ones and twos from a clump, so that only someone looking would have seen them. Pellar wondered for a moment if the child who had picked them had done that deliberately or had merely been picking the nicest flowers he or she could find. He looked down at the clump and stopped, his face clouded.

He unshouldered his pack, pulled out a small shovel, and carefully dug up a small outcropping of the flowers.

Carrying them in his hands, he returned to the grave site and firmly planted them on it, going so far as to pour a bit of his precious water over them. Images of Carissa were mingled in his mind with those of another child, older and faceless but another innocent lost because of the Shunned and those who Shunned them.

Nodding to the dead child’s ghost, Pellar stood back up from his planting, dusted himself off, and turned back resolutely to his tracking. How long, he wondered, could a child who wore bark shoes survive in the northern cold?

He turned back to face the direction of the tracks and peered into the distance, spotting landmarks and guessing at their general destination. Satisfied that he could pick up the trail again, Pellar turned back the way he came. If he went back to the road, he thought, he could make better time and get in front of the slow-moving band.

Pellar arrived at Camp Natalon in the middle of the night, silently moving through the trees on the plain to the west before breaking out into the camp’s clearing and striding boldly, as if he belonged, to the small stone cot that Zist occupied.

The entire camp was sleeping; not even a night shift was working the mine, for that evening there had been a great celebration. Pellar had observed it all from across the lake. When the last of the festivities had died down, he had started his roundabout journey, going west around the far side of the lake, crossing the stream that fed it, and picking his way through the forest.

By the time Pellar reached Master Zist’s doorstep, the evening had turned so cold that Pellar could be seen clearly even in the dim light of the lesser of Pern’s two moons. As he knocked on the door, his stomach grumbled loudly.

The door opened quickly and Zist stood back, blinking away sleep, to let Pellar in to the warmth.

“Your lips are blue,” Zist told him. Pellar could only nod in agreement. Zist grabbed him by the shoulder, turned him, and gave him a gentle shove. “The fire’s over there.”

Pellar scented succulent smells in the air. “I saved you some food from the feast,” Zist said, and Pellar picked up his pace.

He was surprised and grateful when Master Zist thrust a cup of warm
klah
into his frozen hands and pushed him into a chair, making it clear that Pellar was to eat before discussing their business.

As Pellar avidly ate and drank, Zist sat and leaned back in his chair, eyeing the youngster worriedly. Pellar caught the look and interpreted it correctly. He reached under his cloak and pulled out his slate, sliding it over to Master Zist before returning to the excellent food on his plate.

Zist frowned until he saw that the slate was covered with a stiff piece of cloth. He folded the cloth aside and saw that Pellar had written a long missive in carefully precise, tiny letters.

As Zist read, his eyebrows went up.

“You found their camp?” he said in surprise, looking up to Pellar for confirmation. The young harper nodded, grinned, and waved for his Master to continue reading. Zist grunted in assent and bent over the slate once more. He did not read for long before he looked up again. “Mostly children? How are they dressed?”

Pellar pointed to the slate again and once more Zist returned to his reading. The next time he looked up, ready to ask a question, Pellar merely smiled and pointed back down to the slate.

“There’s nothing more there!” Zist protested. Pellar nodded in agreement. “So that’s all you know?”

Pellar nodded again.

“Winter’s coming on,” Zist muttered to himself. “Those children will freeze.”

Pellar made a grimace in agreement and then emphatically rubbed his belly.

“And starve,” Zist agreed. “But I don’t understand why they’re here. Why weren’t they left somewhere else? What use are they up here?”

Pellar stood up, waving his arms to attract the harper’s attention and, when he got it, pointed his thumb at himself, put his hand flat over his head, and then lowered it down to his waist while making big and cute eyes.

“They’re small and cute.”

Pellar nodded and waved a hand, palm up in a general arc, pointed toward the miners’ cottages at the edge of the lake, and then gave Zist the same small-child look.

“Well, of course there are children the same age here, but everyone must know all the children in the camp by now.”

Pellar gestured for his slate and Zist passed it to him, waiting patiently until the young man passed it back with the new message, “Not at night.”

“They’re stealing coal at night?” Zist asked, frowning. After a moment’s thought he declared, “They couldn’t take much, being so small.”

Pellar shook his head and dramatically raised a hand to his forehead, turning back and forth, scanning the room intently.

“They keep watch,” Zist surmised. He nodded in agreement. “And, at night, if one of them saw someone he didn’t recognize, he could shout a warning or act lost and no one would be the wiser.”

Zist leaned back in his chair and gestured for Pellar to sit down. Pellar knew the old harper well: He filled his plate again and nibbled at its contents while occasionally eyeing Master Zist as if hoping to see what the harper was thinking.

“Do you know how much they’re taking?” Zist asked after a long, thoughtful silence. Pellar looked up from his plate and shrugged. Zist gave him a small nod of thanks and resumed his musings.

A long while later, Pellar finished his dinner and reached for his slate again.

“Tell me about the feast,” he wrote.

Master Zist reached for the slate, read it in a quick glance and grunted in assent. “It was quite interesting,” he replied. “Illuminating, really.”

Zist proceeded to describe the wedding between Silstra, the daughter of Danil, one of the miners—in fact, the sole remaining wherhandler at Camp Natalon—and a Smithcrafter named Terregar. He went on at length about the singing ability of one of Danil’s younger sons and the strains he’d noticed between Natalon, the camp’s founder, and Tarik, his uncle.