Chap. 241 Memories of a Mistake

Chap. 241 Memories of a Mistake

 

He had been fascinated at how adroitly the Serengeti's Master had eased the ship from the wharf. How a ship could move like that, with just sails? Now as she cleared the harbor, her yards blossomed with sails and she pulled away swiftly. He saw Harve waving good bye. He waved back, savoring the memory of the boy's expression when he realized he'd been gifted a datalink.

"I'll call you in a few days, just to see how it works," K'ndar had said, "sometimes I have trouble making mine work. Now I have the instruction manual, just like the one I gave you. When you get a chance, read it."

"I will. Thank you, so much!" Harve had said.

A piercing whistle reached them. It was the same tune as he'd heard summon Harve, but this time it had a tone of urgency..or warning.

"I have to go, or I'll be left ashore!" Harve said, and turned and raced back up the gangway. A crew member pulled it inboard right behind him.

K'ndar made his way back to where Raventh had landed, far from a team of horses.

A bronze fire lizard is here. He has a message pouch Raventh said.

Huh! Whose could it be? His brother had a mated pair, as did Lizard, his trader friend. And Francie, too.

The bronze was waiting patiently atop Raventh's head. Siskin spit in fury and flew straight at the bronze, rattling his battle cry. The bronze launched and for a split second the two tangled. The bronze then dropped to Raventh's foreleg, chipping. Siskin triumphantly took his accustomed place atop Raventh's head.

Neither had so much as touched each other, but honor had been satisfied. Still fuming, Siskin preened his wings ostentatiously.

My head is HIS territory Raventh said, laughing.

The bronze did not appear to be too upset by Siskin's attack. He was not wearing any identification.

"Can I take the message, little lad?"

The bronze chipped and thrust his chest out.

They all look alike, he thought. I don't know anyone's fire lizards well enough to say who you are. He pulled the message out of the pouch and closed it securely.

He opened the message.

 

"Well, I won't be sending a response back," he said, immediately. He looked at the bronze.

"Good lad. Thank you. Go home now," he said.

The bronze chipped and launched...and vanished.

There were no words on the paper, just a drawing of a cairn, and an arrow.

Drawing on his memory, he did not recognize the sequence of the cairn. The arrow, of course, indicated North.

The message took him back to the games played in Weyrlingschool, one designed to teach rider to memorize markers to places on Pern. B'rant had called the game "navving", from navigating.

"Navigating to a Weyr or major Hold is easy. I'm sure by now you all have memorized what the volcanic cone of, say, Benden Weyr, looks like. Holds, such as Crom, with it's dragon stone of a pick and a shovel, remind you that Crom hosts the Minecraft Hall.

Halls have carvings that call to mind their specialty, for instance, Harper Hall's dragon stone of a lyre is so beautifully carved you forget it's been carved out of basalt.

Small holds and crafthalls have plainer dragon stones, and some even smaller places have none at all. For instance, those of you who grew up on cotholds can probably recall every foot of it, and can easily visualize it for your dragon."

B'rant had looked over his class. Some of weyrlings were half asleep. Those were the ones, he knew, who'd have trouble later on. Fortunately, no weyrling went out without his or her mentor.

What am I thinking, he said to himself, the girls are never a problem, especially the gold riders. It's always young upstarts like that bloody F'mart. By the egg, I believe that little shit truly asleep.

"When we navigate, then, we use a number of different ways of visualizing where we want our dragons to go. It's vitally important, then, that you commit cairns and dragon stones to memory," he said. "Dragon stones, as you probably are aware, are carved out of stone, usually basalt. I'm certain you all know how much of THAT we have! But cairns are different, being things we make when we're in spots other than a hold, or a hall. Each cairn is different, they have to be! You don't want two cairns to be exactly alike, for you're going to end up somewhere other than where you want to be!

Dragon stones take time to create by a skilled stonemason. But for a cairn, you use what is available at the spot. Stones are the most useful and abundant, but it's okay to make a cairn of other things if you're not in an area with loose rocks. You can use sticks, or stumps. For instance I remember, way back when I was a weyrling, I remember a cairn made using rocks, a stump and part of a wher's skull!

You can use a distinctive tree, for instance, one that has been struck by lighting. In an emergency, you can even scratch a cairn in the sand. But remember, it will wash away, or if it's organic, will rot away, eventually. So try to make a cairn that will withstand weather, and that won't attract some home seeking crawler.

When you make a cairn, you must memorize it. I used to take a slate with me and draw it over and over until I got it set in my memory. And of course, we had hides upon which to permanently record them...but hides rotted, too.

These days, we have 'paper' and 'notebooks', and I would like to see someone in the future, do, um, transferring our memories onto paper and then into the 'database' at Landing."

He resisted the urge to throw something at F’mart. I don’t dare hit him with a rock, I might miss and then look foolish, he thought.

He looked at one of the girls and nodded. Grinning, she got up and passing by F’mart, knocked him in the head.

“Right!” F’mart shouted, then looked around him, as everyone was laughing.

“”I won’t wake you, next time, F’mart,” he snapped. “We’ll see what happens when you come out of between in the middle of a rock,” B’rant said.

F’mart ducked his head.

“As I was saying, F’mart, notebooks should only be used as a secondary source. I’m sure you all know this, but dragons can’t read.”

He’d looked at K’ndar, as he was the only one with a notebook. K’ndar felt the unspoken disapproval.

“But sir, I don’t use it solely for memorizing, I memorize it first, THEN I draw it,” K’ndar had protested.

B’rant said, “Until you graduate, and as long as I’m Weyrlingmaster, my students will use their memory bones rather than a wooden stick that makes marks.”

“Yes, sir,” K’ndar said, feeling the stolid gazes of his classmates on his back. He heard F’mart snickering. He sighed.

"Call me old, but I don't trust paper. If it gets wet it's unreadable and dissolves into a mush. You can't read it in the dark. And I believe it makes dragonriders lazy. Our minds are far more powerful than any piece of paper. So you MUST memorize them. It's fine, I suppose, to use a notebook as a backup, but always, always...commit topographical characteristics, dragon stones and cairns you make or utilize to memory. There will be times when you can't communicate verbally with another dragonrider, but if you 'push' your image of the cairn or stone into your dragon's mind, he will pass it on to the other dragon," B'rant had said.

Then B'rant had sent the weyrlings, with their mentors, at first, on a 'nav'.

Every Weyr's school had a training course on which to learn to navigate. Cairns and dragon stones, sometimes both, were scattered throughout the weyr's open areas. Meadows, shorelines, clearings in a forest, hilltops..at least one, he'd heard, had a dragon stone in the middle of a weyr's dragon bathing pond.

"Navving" was a training exercise where one was shown several cairns, and then had to fly out to each one and take note of what was at the base of the cairn. Sometimes it was a thing out of its normal environment, for instance, a hammer, or a child's toy. Sometimes it was merely a chalk mark on the rock, a number, or a name. But that didn't always work out, as overly competitive weyrlings sometimes cheated by erasing the chalk marks. Once you'd visited each assigned cairn, you flew or went between back to the Weyr and reported what you'd found at each location.

And of course, there were times when someone got lost, or made an error in the configuration of the cairn, and ended up somewhere else. But it was always easy to return home, as the first thing one learned was one's home weyr's dragon stone. Kahrain's stood two meters high and was atop a high ridge overlooking the main bowl. It was visible for kilometers from the air.

K'ndar remembered getting a cairn mixed up, and even getting lost. C'val, his mentor, had been with him.

The blue rider had merely smirked when they popped out of between high above a flat topped butte in what appeared to be the Western Range. It was NOT part of Kahrain Steppe Weyr's training course. They'd landed and found a pile of rocks that had exactly the configuration he'd pushed to Raventh, but it wasn't the one he'd been shown at the Weyr.

He'd felt embarrassed, and foolish, and a little scared. Despite B'rant's admonishment of not depending on a notebook, he'd done exactly that, rather than memorize.

"Where are we?" he'd asked, his heart pounding as he realized they were Lost.

"You tell me! You pushed these coordinates to Raventh, and he pushed them to my Rastabenth. Now what do you do?" C'val had said. He liked K'ndar, but a good mentor allows his student to safely fail in order to learn from it.

Crestfallen, K'ndar had shamefacedly said, "Go home?"

"No."

"No?"

"No. Why?"

K'ndar had always hated guessing games, but this was no game, he knew. C'val was teaching him a very important skill.

"Um...because I might need to come back here, someday? Maybe someone was here long ago, and made this cairn? But no one recorded it? Or it was on a hide, but that hide has rotted away?"

"Correct. All of those can be right, and, K'ndar, this spot, this cairn, might not have been made by human hands. Rocks fall where they fall. It may, also, just have been coincidence, or, as you surmise, someone did make it, what, maybe a thousand years ago? And the wind blew the pile over, or bird landed on it, or we had a small earthquake here, or the rains or snow moved it-there's all sorts of ways rocks move without human intervention. When I make a cairn, I try to avoid piling rocks too high, because they ARE subject to falling over.

So memorize it as it is RIGHT NOW, I will too, and we will record it when we return to the Weyr. But no, we don't go home right away because you didn't push the correct coordinate. Our dragons only go where we tell them, and you told ours to come HERE. Now you need to learn where and how you made this mistake." C'val bit his lip to keep from laughing. "So calm down, take a deep breath, and show show me where you went wrong."

K'ndar thought hard, then moved a ways and built a cairn of rocks that he'd THOUGHT he had memorized.

The two didn't match.

"I...didn't memorize the cairn."

"That's apparent," C'val said. He let K'ndar stew for several moments in his defeat.

Then, he said, "Okay, just this once! Because I know you've been sketching cairns when B'rant's showed you, I saw you draw the cairn your notebook. This is the only time I'll let you use it. Once you've graduated, you can use a notebook, but remember what B'rant said...MEMORIZE."

"Yes, sir," he'd said, crestfallen. He'd dug out his notebook and saw, immediately, the error he'd made. One rock, all it took was one rock, placed in a different position, to make an enormous difference.

"Correct. Now what do you do?" C'val had said.

"Look at the cairn again. And this time MEMORIZE it," K'ndar had said.

"Correct. You memorize one or the other of these two cairns. You might want to come back to this empty, barren spot someday, so destroy the one you made and memorize the other. Then we will go to the cairn you were supposed to go to. You will note what is at the cairn and then we will return to the Weyr," the blue rider had said. "You know, of course, that B'rant will ask you why you went to the wrong location."

"I'll be laughed at, I'm betting. By F'mart, especially," he said.

"Aye, and you'll have it coming, but don't take it personally. Trust me, F'mart has probably already done the same thing. He's just not admitted it. The dragonrider that tells you they've never made a mistake in a coordinate is a liar," C'val had said.

After his initial fright at being lost, and after he grew comfortable with 'navving', his classmates would often play it even after school. It was always fun to get a message like the one in his hand, an invitation to something that only another dragonrider would understand.

I remember that day, Raventh said, dispelling his reverie.

You do? Even though those were the days when you were eating firestone? And you were so young?

I do. You felt...like a stupid.

I did. I was.

But you are not now. So, what shall we do?

Well...I have an idea who sent this, but let's go to this cairn, shall we?

__________________________________________________________________________

They came out of between over a good sized island. It was almost completely covered with rainforest. Even at this height, he could hear a raucous cacophony of bird and wherry calls. From his perch in the sky, he saw great clouds of flutters..winged insects..crowding around the flowers that he could smell even at this height.

There was only one beach, a sandy crescent about 10 to 12 dragonlengths long.

Three fire lizards rose up to greet them, two greens and a bronze.

Below him, he could see the water was so clear that he could two humans swimming in it, with their backs to the sky, and a green dragon chasing fish in the shallows.

Ah. Francie and Raylan.

And Motanith!