“Well, for one thing, firestone inhibits reproduction. If they never chewed stone, a green could lay, but at best they produce small beasts, and we need big ones. And, for another thing”his chuckle rolled out as he went on deliberately, grinning mischievously”if the greens could reproduce, considering their amorousness and the numbers we have of them, we’d be up to our ears in dragons in next to no time.”
The first whine was joined by another, and then a low hum throbbed as if carried by the stones of the Weyr itself. F’lar, his face changing rapidly from surprise to triumphant astonishment, dashed up the passage.
“What’s the matter?” Lessa demanded, picking up her skirts to run after him. “What does that mean?”
The hum, resonating everywhere, was deafening in the echo-chamber of the queen’s weyr. Lessa registered the fact that Ramoth was gone. She heard Flar’s boots pounding down the passage to the ledge, a sharp to-ta-tat over the ket-tiedrum booming hum. The whine was so highpitched now that it was inaudible, but still nerveracking. Disturbed, frightened, Lessa followed F’lar out.
By the time she reached the ledge, the Bowl was a-whir with dragons on the wing, making for the high entrance to the Hatching Ground. Weyrfolk, riders, women, children, all screaming with excitement, were pouring across the Bowl to the lower entrance to the Ground.
She caught sight of F’lar, charging across to the entrance, and she shrieked at him to wait. He couldn’t have heard her across the bedlam.
Fuming because she had the long stairs to descend, then must double back as the stairs faced the feeding grounds at the opposite end of the Bowl from the Hatching Ground, Lessa realized that she, the Weyrwoman, would be the last one there.
Why had Ramoth decided to be secretive about laying? Wasn’t she close enough to her own weyrmate to want her with her?
A dragon knows what to do, Ramoth calmly informed her.
You could have told me, Lessa wailed, feeling much abused.
Why, at the time F’lar had been going on largely about huge clutches and three thousand beasts, that infuriating dragon-child had been doing it! It didn’t improve Lessa’s temper to have to recall another remark of F’lar’s on the state of the Hatching Grounds. The moment she stepped into the mountain-high cavern, she felt the heat through the soles of her sandals. Everyone was crowded in a loose circle around the far end of the cavern. And everyone was swaying from foot to foot. As Lessa was short to begin with, this only decreased the likelihood of her ever seeing what Ramoth had done.
“Let me through!” she demanded imperiously, pounding on the wide backs of two tall riders. An aisle was reluctantly opened for her, and she went through, looking neither to her right or left at the excited weyrfolk. She was furious, confused, hurt, and knew she looked ridiculous because the hot sand made her walk with a curious mincing quickstep.
She halted, stunned and wide-eyed at the mass of eggs, and forgot such trivial things as hot feet.
Ramoth was curled around the clutch, looking enormously pleased with herself. She, too, kept shifting, closing and opening a protective wing over her eggs, so that it was difficult to count them.
No one will steal them, silly, so stop fluttering, Lessa advised as she tried to make a tally.
Obediently Ramoth folded her wings. To relieve her maternal anxiety, however, she snaked her head out across the circle of mottled, glowing eggs, looking all around the cavern, flicking her forked tongue in and out.
An immense sigh, like a gust of wind, swept through the cavern. For there, now that Ramoth’s wings were furled, gleamed an egg of glowing gold among the mottled ones. A queen egg!
“A queen egg!” The cry went up simultaneously from half a hundred throats. The Hatching Ground rang with cheers, yells, screams, and howls of exultation. Someone seized Lessa and swung her around in an excess of feeling. A kiss landed in the vicinity of her mouth. No sooner did she recover her footing than she was bugged by someone else she thought it was Manora, and then pounded and buffeted around in congratulation until she was reeling in a kind of dance between avoiding the celebrants and easing the growing discomfort of her feet. She broke from the milling revelers and ran across the Ground to Ramoth. Lessa came to a sudden stop before the eggs. They seemed to be pulsing. The shells looked flaccid.
She could have sworn they were hard the day she Impressed Ramoth. She wanted to touch one, just to make sure, but dared not.
You may, Ramoth assured her condescendingly. She touched Lessa’s shoulder gently with her tongue.
The egg was soft to touch and Lessa drew her hand back quickly, afraid of doing injury.
The heat will harden it, Ramoth said.
“Ramoth, I’m so proud of you,” Lessa sighed, looking adoringly up at the great eyes that shone in rainbows of pride. “You are the most marvelous queen ever. I do believe you will redragon all the Weyrs. I do believe you will.”
Ramoth inclined her head regally, then began to sway it from side to side over the eggs, protectingly. She began to hiss suddenly, raising from her crouch, beating the air with her wings, before settling back into the sands to lay yet another egg.
The weyrfolk, uncomfortable on the hot sands, were beginning to leave the Hatching Ground now that they had paid tribute to the arrival of the golden egg. A queen took several days to complete her clutch so there was no point to waiting. Seven eggs already lay beside the important golden one, and if there were seven already, this augured well for the eventual total. Wagers were being made and taken even as Ramoth produced her ninth mottled egg.
“Just as I predicted, a queen egg, by the mother of us all,” F’lar’s voice said in Lessa’s ear. “And I’ll wager there’ll be ten bronzes at least.”
She looked up at him, completely in harmony with the Weyrleader at this moment. She was conscious now of Mnementh, crouching proudly on a ledge, gazing fondly at his mate. Impulsively Lessa laid her hand on F’lar’s arm.
“F’lar, I do believe you.”
“Only now?” F’lar teased her, but his smile was wide and his eyes proud.
IF F’LAR’S orders over the next months caused no end of discussion and muttering among the weyrfolk, they seemed to Lessa to be only the logical outcomes of their discussion after Ramoth had finished laying her gratifying total of forty-one eggs.
F’lar discarded tradition right and left, treading on more than R’gul’s conservative toes.
Out of perverse distaste for outworn doctrines against which she herself had chafed during R’gul’s leadership, and out of respect for F’lar’s intelligence, Lessa backed him completely. She might not have respected her earlier promise to him that she would believe him until spring if she had not seen his predictions come true, one after another. These were based, however, not on the premonitions she no longer trusted after her experience between times, but on recorded facts.
As soon as the eggshells hardened and Ramoth had rolled her special queen egg to one side of the mottled clutch for attentive brooding, F’lar brought the prospective riders into the Hatching Ground. Traditionally the candidates saw the eggs for the first time on the day of Impression. To this precedent F’lar added others: very few of the sixty-odd were weyrbred, and most of them were in their late teens. The candidates were to get used to the eggs, touch them, caress them, be comfortable with the notion that out of these eggs young dragons would hatch, eager and waiting to be Impressed. F’lar felt that such a practice might cut down on casualties during Impression when the boys were simply too seared to move out of the way of the awkward dragonets.