Everyone who had a legible script was acceptable, and Lord Paulin had done a bang-up job in making the copyists comfortable. The other Holds had contributed material and work forces.
The exterior buildings of the College were designed to be Threadproof, with high peaked roofs of Telgar slate and gutters which led into underground cisterns where errant Thread would be drowned.
All the Craftsmen involved, including those destined to inhabit the facility, would have preferred to enlarge the cave system, but there had been two serious collapses of caverns and the mining engineers had vetoed interior expansion for fear of undermining the whole cliff-side.
Even the mutant, blunt-winged, flightless photo-sensitive watchwhers had refused to go on further subterranean explorations which, their handlers insisted meant dangers human eyes couldn’t see. So build they did: stout walls more than two and a half meters thick at ground level, tapering to just under two meters under the roof. With the iron mines at Telgar going full blast, the necessary structural beams to support such weight had posed no problem.
The new quarters were to be finished within the month.
Even today there had been a work force, though they had taken a break to watch the aerial display and would finish in time for the evening meal and entertainment.
Charanth landed gracefully, with Ormonth right beside him so that P’tero could remove the tethering safety straps before they could be noticed. As he was doing so, M’leng, green Sith’s rider, came up to him, scolding him for “putting my heart in my mouth like that!” And he proceeded to berate P’tero far more viciously than his Weyrleader would.
K’vin grinned to himself, especially as he saw how penitent P’tero became under such a harangue. K’vin rolled up his riding straps and tied them to the harness ring.
“Enjoy the sun, my friend,” he said, slapping Charanth on the wide shoulder.
I will. Meranath is already there, the bronze dragon said, his tone slightly smug as he executed a powerful upward leap, showering his rider with grit.
Charanth’s attitude towards his mate, Meranath, amused, and pleased, his rider. No-one had expected K’vin to accede to Telgar’s Weyrleadership when it fell open after B’ner’s death nine months before. Who would have expected that the sturdy rider, just into his sixth decade, had had any heart problems? But that is what the medics said killed him. So, when Meranath was ready to mate again, Telgar’s senior Weyrwoman, Zulaya, had called for an open flight, leaving it to the dragons to decide on the next Leader. She’d insisted that she had no personal preference. She had been sincerely attached to B’ner and was probably still grieving for him. There had certainly been no lack of suitors.
K’vin had sent Charanth aloft in the mating flight because all the Telgar Weyr wing leaders were expected to take part, as well as bronze riders from the other Weyrs. He had no real wish to lead a Weyr into a Pass; he considered himself too young for such responsibilities. He had observed from B’ner that the normal duties of an Interval were bad enough, but to know that a high percentage of your fellow-riders would be injured, or killed, that the lives of so many people rested on your expertise and endurance was too much to contemplate. Some nights, now, he was racked by terrifying dreams, and Threadfall hadn’t even started.
On the occasions when he was in Zulaya’s bed, she had been understanding and calmly reassuring.
“B’ner worried, too, if that’s any consolation, Kev,” she said, using his old nickname and soothing back sweat-curled hair as he trembled with reaction. “He had nightmares, too. Comes with the title. As a rule, the morning after a nightmare, B’ner’d go over Sean’s notes. I figure he had to have memorized them.”
“I’ve seen you do the same thing. You’ll do well, Kev, when push comes to shove. I know it.” Zulaya could sound so sure of something, but then she was nearly a decade his senior and had had more experience as a Weyrleader. Sometimes her intuition was downright uncanny: she could accurately predict the size of clutches, the distribution of the colors, the sex of babies born in the Weyr and, occasionally, even the type of weather in the future. But then, she was Fort Weyrbred, a linear descendant of one of the First Riders, Aliana Zuleita, and knew things. It was odd how the golden queens always seemed to prefer women from outside the Weyrs, but sometimes a queen had a mind of her own and chose a Weyrbred woman in spite of what had become custom.
However, just like his predecessor, he constantly reviewed accounts of the individual Falls, how they differed, how you could tell from the Leading Edge of Fall that this would be an odd one. Most often the accounts were dry statements of fact, but the prosaic language did not disguise the presence of great courage: especially as those first riders had to figure out how to cope with Thread, easy or hard.
The fact that he was a several times great-nephew of Sorka Connell, the First Weyrwoman - and Zulaya pointed this out more than once - constituted a secondary and subtle reassurance to the entire Weyr.
“Maybe that’s why Meranath let Charanth catch her,” Zulaya said, her face dead serious but her eyes dancing.
“Had you, I mean… did you think of me… I mean…”, K’vin tried to summon appropriate words two weeks after that momentous flight. He had been overwhelmed by her response to him that night. But afterwards she had seemed very casual in her dealings with him, and she did not always invite him into her quarters, despite the fact that their dragons were inseparable.
“Who thinks at all during a mating flight? But I do believe I’m glad that Charanth was so clever. If there is anything in heredity, having a distant great-nephew of Fort Weyr’s First Weyrwoman - AND from a family that has put many acceptable candidates on the Hatching Grounds - as Telgar’s Weyrleader gives us all a boost.”
“I’m not my many times great-aunt, Zulaya”, She chuckled.
“Fortunately, or you wouldn’t be Weyrleader, but blood will tell!” Zulaya had a disconcerting directness but gave him no real hint how she - the woman, not the Weyrwoman - personally felt towards him. She was kind, helpful, made constructive suggestions when they discussed training programs but so impersonal, that K’vin had to decide that she hadn’t really got over B’ner’s death yet.
He himself was obscurely comforted that his distant great aunt had managed to survive Fall, and he would attempt to do the same. As, he was sure, would his two siblings and four cousins who were also dragonriders, though no others were Weyrleaders. Yet. Still, if his being of the Ruathan Bloodline which had produced Sorka, M’hall, M’dani, Sorana and Mairian offered reassurance to his Weyr, he’d reinforce that at every turn during the Pass.
Now, at probably the last large Gather Pern would enjoy wider Threadfree skies for the next fifty years, he watched his Weyrwoman leave the group of Telgar holders she had been talking to and stride towards him across the open Courtyard.
Zulaya was tall for a woman, long-legged - all the better for bestriding a dragon’s neck. He was a full head taller than she was, which she said she liked in him: B’ner had been just her height. It was her coloring that fascinated K’vin: the inky-black curly hair that, once freed of the flying helmet, tumbled down below her waist.
The hair framed a wide, high cheek-boned face, set off the beige of her smooth skin and large, lustrous eyes that were nearly black; a wide and sensual mouth above a strong chin gave her face strength and purpose which reinforced her authority with anyone. She strode, unlike some of the hold women who minced along, her steel-rimmed boot heels noisy on the flagstones, her arms swinging at her sides. She’d had time to put a long, slitted skirt over her riding gear and it opened as she walked, showing a well-formed leg in the leather pants and high boots.