Chap. 115 Appreciation

Chap. 115  Appreciation 

"One of the things I appreciate about the ability to go between is that, I can escape things like bad weather," K'ndar said.

 He was sitting on the beach, watching his dragon playing with several others in the ocean. Lindea, his friend, was sitting next to him.

 It being a rest day, Lindea was at the Weyr, as were all the palladen skeleton recovery teams. Only the Arrow was still 'on station' at the far southern edge of the Southern Continent.

"I certainly can understand that," she agreed, "It must be amazing to go from one end of the world to the other in the blink of an eye."

"It is. Like today. Look at this beautiful day! It's warm, dry, just enough wind to keep things comfortable. Yet-we're grounded, sort of, because the entire western peninsula of the Northern Continent has gale force winds, meaning dragons stay in their weyr and ships stay in port.  We left Tillek just in time, no one thought to tell us of the storm." 

"Is that where you're staging, Tillek Sea Hold?" she asked.

"You didn't know?"

"No, I've been so tied up feeding the recovery teams that I've not really paid any attention."

"I've heard about your work there. B'rost was telling me you're the star of the show, everyone is happy with the food, and there's apparently a lot of it. Not like at Tillek," he groaned.

She looked at him with a strange expression.

"It's …bad?"

"Lindea, it's horrid. Maybe because their dining hall is so small? Although why they don't build another, I don't know. Maybe it's because the place is so crowded, there's people everywhere. But it still doesn't explain why my food was always cold. And, sorry to say, badly cooked. I've gotten spoiled with Hariko's management and YOUR cooks and bakers, always putting out a good feed."

"So…is that why you and the others left? Because of the food?"

"Not just that, the cavern they lodged us in, supposedly the only one 'big enough' for a bronze and two brown dragons, was wet, cold, dark and the wind just whistled through it. No place to wash up. I don't mind sleeping on a cot, but they were nasty, with sleeping furs so old and worn out they were useless.

Now mind you, I’m used to living outside, I don't demand ultra clean bedding, but, everything about the cavern was bad. We heard a couple kids talking, they didn't know we were dragonriders, and they were saying someone named Arturo hated us and made sure we were stuck in the worst possible place in Tillek. I was cold the entire time," he said.

"I don't think it's the leadership at Tillek, it's the atmosphere of the regular folks there. Dragonriders don't seem to be too welcome there."

Lindea shook her head.

"That's sad, K'ndar, and I don't know what happened. It never used to be like that."

"You've been there?"

"I grew up there. Well, part of my childhood was spent there. When we weren't out fishing or wandering the planet," she said.

He was stunned.

"I didn't know that, for some reason, I thought you were a Southerner, like me."

She shook her head. "No. I was born aboard the Nocket, my father's ship, but fishermen go all over, so it's not like I spent an awful lot of time there. In the summer, we'd turn in our catch at Tillek because we could get a good price for it, we'd get good catches, and the weather was better. But my dad was of the mind that one follows the fish, and fishing is a lot easier in good weather, so we spent most winters down here, staging out of Dorn Island. That's where I was Searched, I was at Dorn Island at the time."

Never been to Dorn, he thought, putting on his mental list of places to see.

"I'm still a bit angry, though, that no one thought to tell us about the bad weather coming," he said, "they were perfectly happy to let us freeze in that cavern."

"It's like that, that far north, K'ndar. I've seen it. A storm can whip up like that," snapping her fingers for emphasis.

Zeta, her golden fire lizard, flew in from the sea and circled above her head. "No," she cried, but it was too late. The queen dropped a dead fish atop her head.

K'ndar laughed despite himself. She glared at him momentarily, and he apologized.

"I'm sorry, but it's kind of funny," he said, as she removed the fish from her hair. The queen danced in the air in front of her. 

"Thank you, Zeta, very much, but I'm not hungry. You can have this back, thank you."

The queen chirped, took the fish from her fingers and whirred away.

"Did you teach her that?"

"Oh, stars, no. She came up with it all on her own. But now I know why she does this."

"?"

"She's feeding a clutch of hatchlings somewhere. When she's got hatchlings, she thinks I need feeding, too."

"Not the Hatching Grounds?" K'ndar said, aghast. 

Zeta's first clutch had been laid in the Weyr's Hatching Grounds. At least two dozen Weyr children had found the clutch and Impressed the fire lizard hatchlings. The hatchlings had caused all sorts of mischief until a fire lizard training school had been formed. 

"No, I don't ever want that to happen again. People were so angry with me when they found out their kids had impressed one of 'my'  fire lizards, even though I had nothing to do with it! No, I told her, please, hide your babies next time, and she remembered. This is her third clutch, now, I think."

He was relieved, and then remembered.

"I need to get with Terilyn. Raventh told me that Siskin mated her Putzu. That was a few weeks ago, I bet she's either laid a clutch or is about to. I have no idea how to bring the subject up, though, and I don't want her angry with me."

"They're fire lizards, K'ndar, they're going to mate. It's what they do. I wish there was a way to control them. Like gelding the males to keep them from breeding."

"I don't know if anyone's ever done that. And you'd have to find all the wild ones, and there's THREE males to worry about and two females."

"It would be easier to keep the females infertile," she said, pondering. Could one spay a dragon? 

She was quiet for a few moments. "I wish…you know, K'ndar, one of the reasons I didn't want to Impress a dragon was because, well, I wasn't sure I wanted the responsibility, nor did I want the sexual part of it. I mean, I'm only now coming to understand who I am, and what I want out of life. I don't want to be a fisherman, I don't want to be a Weyrwoman. I wonder how other girls and women feel about it. Would they have their queen dragons made infertile so that they didn't have to take the job? Or the weyrmate that they might not like, at all?"

He pondered that. "You sound a little like me, Lindea. I didn't want a bronze, because I didn't want to be a Weyrleader. In bronze cases, sometimes they NEVER mate the queen, but the queen almost always mates. I was so relieved when Raventh turned out to be brown."

The BEST brown

He laughed. "Raventh reminds me that he's the BEST brown," he told Lindea.

"That, I think, is what I envy of all dragonriders," she said, "you have this friend in your head."

"He's more than a friend. He's even more than a brother. He's me. And I'm him."

They were both silent for a few moments.

"We're always told, right from Hatching, that when a dragon chooses you, it's because of what type of person you are. Even if you don't know yourself. Like F'mart being chosen by a bronze. None of us liked him, he was a bully,  always challenging the Weyrlingmaster  to demonstrate his 'superiority'. I'm amazed B'rant didn't take him out somewhere and have a little wall to wall counseling. Then, at the driftwood tree lift, it was like a light went on in F'mart's head, he turned into someone who might someday be a 'leader'. He stopped being the arrogant sod. 

Or better yet, Siena. She was in the class ahead of mine, even in school, she was born a leader, with a sharp mind, and always one to look at all sides of an issue before making a decision. The girls in my class, they'd take a problem to Siena before they bothered B'rant or Danelle. The dragons do the choosing. I'm not saying the person is always the right one for the job…remember Jenmay? She was a wretch, but her gold wasn't."

They both shuddered at the memory of Jenmay. No one missed her, but they did miss her dragon. 

"That's what I mean. I would love to have a gold dragon, to be able to go wherever and whenever I like. But it wouldn't be fair, would it, to have her made infertile so that she doesn't mate, or force a partner on me that I might not like, and to not have to do the work a Weyrwoman does. It's like having all the advantages with none of the disadvantages," she said.

"I'm sorry to say this, but it's why I'm happy I'm male and a brown rider. I don't have to worry about any of that. Especially when I know it's the women who do most of the work," he grinned. 

She made a fake frown and pishnucked his head, gently. 

"No, K'ndar, EVERYONE does their part, if it's a good weyr. Or Hold. It's just the weyrleaders are the most visible. None of us non-dragonriding folk envied you when you were out fighting Thread. We did the work here so you didn't have to. It's like working in the kitchen. You can make a bubbly pie, or bread, but someone had to harvest the berries, someone grows the grain, harvests it, someone has to cut the firewood and build the fire.

 Being Weyrleader or Weyrwoman is a big job, you hardly ever saw Danelle, or now, Siena. They're always tied up with work work work. But without them, without us, things would break down."

"Well, it seems as if there's a breakdown in leadership, or teamwork or whatever at Tillek. Now I can see how it fits. And like you, I know that I'm not cut out to be a leader.  I don't think I can rise to the occasion, like F'mart did."

"You should see him at the recovery site, K'ndar. He took hold of the wheel, as we say, right away. 

The first day was utter chaos, he looked around for a while, then suddenly began giving orders. Not bad, I mean, he was "Here, you, do this," and "You there, don't waste your time, go THERE." It was kind of funny to see my brother's crew-some of them twice his age-stop and look hard, then realize the kid had it right, despite his age. But that's what a GOOD ship's crew does-work as a team, don't pay any mind to the age of the leader. You couldn't run a ship otherwise.  It's why we're so close to finishing the recovery."

"You're kidding," K'ndar said, "I thought it was going to take at least a month, maybe more."

"So did everyone else, but it's working because just about everyone put their egos away and let the 'kid dragonrider'-F'mart-run the show. I think many of the folks from Landing were relieved that all they had to do was obey his orders, rather than think. They're not field types, not like dragonriders, or fisherfolk. Or even Holders. They can work a computer like no one's business but when it came to figuring out how to get a bone from the skeleton up the hill, into a crate  and then rigged for dragonlift, they were all adrift. It took one of my brother's crew to show some of them how to tie a knot. Can you believe it?"

He shook his head.

"Only once did we have a problem with one of them. One day this jerk named Shawn came in on dragonback, immediately started to tell people what to do, stop what you're doing, why are you doing it that way?"   

He made the mistake of giving F'mart an order. F'mart-I wish I'd seen it- told him he already had the operation running smoothly, but he could always use another hand lashing crates. 

 Shawn said something about F'mart being 'just' a kid, and that he didn't DO 'drudge work'. 

F'mart said, as far as he was concerned, Shawn WAS a drudge, and he was to do what he was told, or 'this 'kid' would kick his "drudge arse" between without benefit of a dragon." I thought the folks from Landing would split in two from laughing. That Shawn, he went right back to Landing, never did find out what he wanted-or cared."

K'ndar laughed. "That sounds like F'mart! Just begging for an opportunity to skewer someone! I wish I'd seen that, I know that Shawn. He IS a jerk. And I have seen F'mart in action-don't ever tell him I said so, but I am glad I never attempted to take him on in a fight, despite my wanting to punch him in the nose. He would have handed me my head before I knew it had been snapped off."

Lindea nodded.   "So everything is going smoothly. It's why we have today off, one, because the weather report said it would be too windy to dragonlift the crates safely, and two, because we are so far ahead of schedule. Raylan at Landing is complaining because it's '''all coming in too fast!" They had to empty a second storage bay, just to fit all the bones in!"