Chap. 124 Treasure Cave

Chap. 124 Treasure Cave

Secretly, K'ndar was tiring of the exploration of the Western Continent. It didn't have the megafauna of the steppe. It was the same vegetation at every stop. Or perhaps it was that they'd been at it for two weeks and he was ready for a change. From what he'd seen so far…and admittedly, he was no engineer, he hadn't seen a spot that would be useable for a second observatory.

Although, he had to admit, it was an absolute paradise for avians. That cheered his biologists soul. He'd identified as many as thirty species of birds and wherries. 

As they flew southward, he noticed that the vegetation below their wings was thinning out, from the deciduous trees and willows to grassland, then rushes and sedges and now, as they planed down to a landing, it was obviously wetlands.

The avians were everywhere. Their noise was cacophony. K'ndar had never seen so many. Even from this height he could see the mudflats covered with their tracks. The flocks swirled away in great clouds, dismayed by the dragons. A shallow lake was covered with rafts of them.

Greta, being on the smallest and lightest of the dragons, took the lead, to discover if the flats they were to land on would hold their weight.

Earth, her green, lightly touched down with only her hind feet touching.

She sunk into sand and mud up to her hocks.

Panicked, she heaved herself out with a mighty swoosh of her wings and was back in the air, safe.

"No go, boss," Greta called, anxiously. "Too soft, too deep!"

I don't want to land there. It's too risky. It scared Earth, just a little Raventh said.

Me neither.  

D'nis called, "Thank you, ma'am, for the test. D'mitran, let's take our readings from the air. Greta, you and K'ndar fly back to those outcroppings a little ways behind us. We'll join you when we've got these readings in. I don't want to risk our bigger boys in that footing."

Those rocks behind us, they looked solid enough. I think that would be safe to land on Raventh said.

That spot behind us? About a few minutes flight time?

Yes. Corvuth and Careth agree. Earth says the mud stinks.

Without a word, the two turned their dragons and flew to rocky outcroppings from the flats.

Earth, again, tentatively touched down, ready to leap again, but this time the rocks were dependably solid rock. She landed with relief.

Greta dismounted as K'ndar landed a few dragonlengths away.

"Whew, that was scary," she said. "I wouldn't have expected that sort of soil here…but it's there."

She looked over her head. "The avians are EVERYWHERE."

"Yes," K'ndar said, having dismounted, "they probably know it's safe for them."

 He looked through his binoculars and watched D'nis and D'mitran's dragons flying in circles over the mudflats. 

 As if with an invisible force, the avians formed an empty bubble about the two dragons, not allowing them to come close but not fleeing, either. 

Siskin chittered. "If you can find something to hunt, have at it, " he told his pet. Roany wheeped and the two blue fire lizards flew off in tandem. As they did, the flocks of avians split open to allow them to pass.

"Interesting," he said.

"What's that?" Greta asked.

"How the avians avoid the fire lizards, and our dragons, even though they may possibly have never seen anything like them before."

"And yet…they don't seem to be afraid of humans. Look how close you two got to that wherry the other day."

She took out a hand lens and began to examine the rocks they were on. 

"Here," K'ndar said, handing his binoculars to her, "Try these. They magnify, too." 

He showed her how to use the binocular. "This is incredible!" she said, moving here and there, but then she handed them back.

"Thank you, but…I prefer the hand lens. It's just..me, I guess."

He shrugged. 

He clambered down from his perch on the outcropping to test the soil's stability. Here, at least, the soil was hard and solid. Smaller rocks were all over, allowing him to pick up enough for a cairn.

The rocks they were on were full of cavities and crannies. Many of them had dead grasses in them, signs that the avians used the cavities for nesting.

 Maybe, he thought, I might find another den with that animal. Does it NEED a nest? A burrow? Maybe it doesn't need a bird or a wherry.  What WAS it? 

He walked a ways away from the outcroppings. Guano from the avians was everywhere. He found the remains of several that had died and had been scavenged, probably by the little crawlers that were all over Pern, but by insects as well. Here was the track of a tunnel snake.

He turned over several rocks, looking for ones that would stick in one's mind as a benchmark for future visits. 

"Hey!! A cave!" he heard Greta call. 

That was more interesting than turning over rocks!

He joined her at the entrance to a substantial cave.

Roany and Siskin returned, their hunt fruitless.

"I called Roany back, I want him to take a look in this cave," Greta said. 

The two blues flew unhesitatingly into the cave.

Siskin immediately began sending back images.

It went for a long ways, and there was plenty of room, it appeared, for humans to enter.

"Want to do some caving?"

"Sure," K'ndar said, "But let's be careful. And I want to see if there's tracks, scat, whatever in it," he said. 

"It goes pretty far in, Roany reports," she said, as she led the way.  

It took several moments for his eyes to adjust to the reduced light. Still, there was enough light from outside to see where they were going. 

K'ndar scanned the ground. Insects flitted around him. Here and there, empty nests clung to the sides of the cave. The ground was sandy and covered with a thousand tracks of birds and wherries.  

Greta was scanning the sides of the cave. 

"Whoa," she said, stopping so abruptly that K'ndar ran into her.

"Sorry. What do you see?"

"Wish I had better light…shards. But, this rock." she ran her hands over the rock wall at chest height. 

"Look. Look!" 

He looked and saw-rock. But she gave the wall several sharp raps with her ever present hammer, knocking hunks of it off. 

K'ndar remembered a day a long, long time ago, when an ex-miner, Oscoral, now the weyr's night baker, told him about mountains disliking being mined. But this wasn't a mountain, and they weren't miners.

She chortled in glee, then turned to head back out into the sunshine. In her hand was a large hunk of rock that had colors running through it. It was beautiful.

"Look at this! It's glorious!" she said, laughing. 

"What? What is that? Sapphires? Diamonds?" 

Greta laughed. "Oh, no, nothing that fancy, yet to me, this is far more beautiful than gemstones. This is opal." In the bright sun, the colors of the raw stone leaped out. 

She handed it to him. He turned it in the sun, looking at the play of color. The opal was intermixed with hard basalt. Blue, green, black striations in it, hints of red and even gold ran through it. 

"This is beautiful stuff. I've never seen this." He handed it back to her, but she held up her hand.

"No, it's yours. There's a lot more in there, a whole vein of it. Want to get some?"

"Oh, yes. Please. This is lovely stuff." They returned to the spot and Greta easily removed several more large pieces of opalescent rock. He filled up his pockets, understanding, now, what drove some men to risk their lives for "pretty rocks", as Oscoral had called them. 

They heard D'nis calling above them. 

"We're in a cave right underneath you!" K'ndar called, hearing his voice echo from deeper in the cave.

The two men had returned to the rock and were setting up their surveying equipment. 

He and Greta headed back to the opening of the cave and K'ndar 'called' Siskin. Far deeper in the cave, where the fire lizards had no troubles seeing in the gloom, his blue fire lizard sent an image of something white on the floor of the cave.

It was…was it what he imagined?

Ask him to get closer he asked Raventh.

The image came back to him almost immediately. 

It was a skeleton. With a skull.

Siskin, retrieve? he asked in his mind. 

He thinks he can

He heard the fire lizard's wings before he could see Siskin. The blue was carrying a jaw bone.

He emerged from the cave with it in his talons.

Siskin gently deposited the bone into K'ndar's open hands. "Good lad!!" he called, "what a clever one you are!"

It felt cool and dry in his hands. He looked at it in wonder. 

It was that of a carnivore, he could tell immediately from the teeth.

"What..what's it from?" Greta asked, looking at it.

"I don't know. I've never seen a jaw like this before. But…I think it might be from that animal we saw the other day!" he said, hoping in his heart that he was right.

It was only the jaw.  He wanted the entire skeleton. 

Raventh, ask him if there's room for a human to get to the rest of it.

Siskin chirped an affirmative. K'ndar didn't or couldn't expect the lizard to retrieve the entire skeleton, nor did he want Siskin to. He wanted a good look at how it was laid out. He would have to do it, but he had no light!

D'mitran!

He called up to the brown rider, "D'mitran! May I use your datalink? As a light? Siskin found a skeleton and I'd like to recover it, but it's fairly dark back in this cave."

The other grinned, saying "Sure, laddie, here. I'm not using it at the moment. I'll set to 'light' for you."

Siskin led the way into the cave. Greta was behind him, this time, her attention still on the opalescent rock walls.

"The seams get thicker the further in we go," she muttered.  

The ceiling began to lower until he was almost crouching, but Siskin had landed and was now walking. Roany was behind him, intrigued. The datalink's light lit up the cave interior, which glowed in a riot of opalescent color.

"How does that work? Where does the light come from?" she asked.

"It's got a solar powered thing in it that provides power. All you have to do is put it out in the sun for a couple hours, and that stores energy in it that lasts a long time."

He moved the light around the walls. It lit up the cave interior. The walls glowed in a riot of opalescent color. K'ndar was dumbstruck. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the skeleton.

"By the egg," Greta sighed, 'this cave is nothing BUT opal. It's…" she was gawking, twisting her head in circles, astounded.

"Beautiful!" K'ndar exclaimed, but he was saying it at the skeleton in the light.  

She began to collect rock, much of it on the sand floor of the cave. 

He set the datalink down on a rock to illuminate the cave, then knelt by the skeleton.

"It's complete, by the egg, it's complete. The skull is in perfect condition," he said. He picked it up, gingerly,than with growing confidence. It was clean, and relatively new. 

Siskin chipped at him, his eyes whirling what color, K'ndar couldn't tell…the cave was full of color. He reached out to give the proud lizard a head scratch. 

"Good lad. GOOD lad," he murmured, but his mind was on collecting the skeleton. 

Good thing I have this one last collecting bag, he thought, digging it out of his backpack. 

He filled it up with bones.