“M’leng, M’leng, answer me!” P’tero cried, turning his lover’s face towards him, slapping his cheeks. Booted feet stopped by M’leng’s head.
“Oh help us, help us!” he pleaded, clutching at the boots.
“Help me! I’m dying!” The pain in his legs was so awful.
“Who’s got the fellis? Where’s the numb weed?”
As P’tero felt himself slipping into oblivion, he wondered how under the sun Zulaya had got here, and if he was dying.
Cathay, Telgar Weyr, Bitra Hold, Telgar
P’tero didn’t die, although for some days he wished he had.
The shame of being attacked, of endangering M’leng, of being responsible for the injury of nine dragons - when K’vin had particularly warned everyone to be careful - was almost more than he could bear. M’leng might say that P’tero had saved his life - although he had to have his chest wound stitched but P’tero knew that was incidental in the sequence of the attack. Both Sith and Ormonth had suffered from the fangs and claws of the attacking felines, for the creatures had not been easily quelled. Meranath nursed a bite on her left forearm and a slash on her cheek. P’tero hadn’t yet been able to look Zulaya in the eye. V’last’s Collith’s worst injuries were his forearm, gashed to the bone by the powerful hind legs of the female attacking him. The dragon-lion battle had been fierce while it lasted, for the lions had no fear of the dragons and the entire pride of some fourteen adult beasts had joined battle with them.
Meranath had reacted instantly to Ormonth’s shriek - in fact, so quickly that she actually left Zulaya behind. The Weyrwoman had been astonished: dragons simply didn’t do that. Though later, Leopol told P’tero, she had laughed about it - since she’d been swimming and would not have appreciated being hauled dripping wet to companion her dragon.
She’d followed, quickly enough, with V’last, K’vin and others who answered the mayday call.
“She was some put out, too,” Leopol went on, relishing the telling, “because the dragons made a mess of good lion fur well, what they didn’t eat.”
“The dragons ate the lions?” P’tero gasped.
“Sure, why not?” Leopol shrugged, grinning. “The entire pride attacked the dragons. But they let the cubs go, you know, though some folks thought they ought to get rid of all they could find. V’last said Collith said they were quite tasty, if a bit tough to chew. Waste not, want not. But Zulaya really would have liked a lion fur for her bed.”
P’tero shuddered. He never wanted anything to do with lions ever again.
“You should a seen yourself brought in, P’tero,” Leopol added, gesturing to the temporary quarters which had been set up to tend the badly injured riders. “Charanth himself carried you back in his arms.”
“He did?” P’tero’s chagrin reached a new depth.
“And O’ney’s bronze Queth brought M’leng in. Your wing helped Ormonth and Sith back. Actually, they came in sort of piggy-back on Gorianth and Spelth. They were pretty shaken, you know.”
P’tero had heard echoes of that journey from Ormonth who, bless his heart, had never once criticized his rider: another source of infinite distress to P’tero. The blue had been intensely grateful to his weyrmates for their assistance, as he couldn’t leave his rider out of his sight. It had been all the other dragons could do - although Leopol did not relate this - to reassure Ormonth and Sith that neither of their riders would die.
The Weyr had set up a hasty camp to tend the injured for some, like P’tero and Collith, couldn’t risk being taken between until their wounds had scabbed over. K’vin had sent to Fort for Corey to stitch the worst injuries. Maranis, the Weyr medic, was more than competent for the dragons’ wounds, but he needed reassurance on his treatment of the two injured riders. Messengers had gone back to Telgar Weyr to reassure those whose dragons had reported the accident and to bring back more equipment for an extended stay.
In their innocence, the two young riders had chosen a site just above the cave home of a pride of lions. P’tero had never even heard of lions. Evidently he could thank Tubberman for their existence, for they’d broken out of Calusa and bred quite handily in the wild.
“They were,” Leopol told him with great relish, “some of the sport beasts that Tubberman had been experimenting with. They had got loose, after killing Tubberman.”
This was not much consolation to P’tero while he lay on his stomach to let the deep fang and claw-marks heal.
He worried endlessly that M’leng would no longer love him, with such a scarred and imperfect body. M’leng, however, seemed to dwell so on P’tero’s heroism in protecting him with his own body that the blue rider decided not to mention the fact that it had been entirely involuntary. M’leng had been unconscious from the moment of attack, and had a great lump and a cut on the back of his head as well as the chest wound.
Zulaya had arrived to see P’tero trying to remove the claws from M’leng’s back, so there was little the blue rider could say to contradict the Weyrwoman’s version.
Tisha, coming to give him fellis early one morning, found him in tears, positive that he had lost M’leng with such a marred body.
“Nonsense, my lad,” Tisha had said, soothing back his sweaty hair as she held the straw for his fellis juice to his lips. “He will only see what you endured for his sake, to save him.”
“And those scars will heal quite nicely, thanks to Corey’s neat stitching.” The reference to the skill of the Head Medic almost reduced him to tears again. He’d caused so much fuss, he said.
“Indeed you have, but you’ve livened things up considerably, young man, and taught everyone some valuable lessons.”
“I have?” P’tero would just as soon not have done.
“For one, dragons think they’re invulnerable… and they aren’t. A very good lesson to take into Fall with them, I assure you. Cool some of the hot-heads, so certain that it’s just a matter of breathing fire in the right direction.
“For another, the southern continent has developed its own hazards.
“Did the Weyr ever find out about the grubs?” P’tero asked, suddenly recalling the reason for the excursion.
Tisha burst out laughing, then stifled it though P’tero’s tent was a distance from any others. “There, lad, you’ve a good head as well as a brave heart. Yes, they completed the survey faster’n any other’s ever been done.” P’tero learned later that the grubs had infested yet a few more kilometres westward and southward towards the Great Barrier Range in an uneven wave of expansion. Their progress into the sandy scrub lands east of Landing had slowed to a few meters but the agricultural experts were not particularly concerned; they were more eager to have the rich grass and forest lands preserved.
“So the trip hasn’t been a waste?” P’tero asked, relaxing as he felt the fellis spreading out.
Tisha gave him more maternal pats, settling the furs and making sure nothing was binding across his bottom and legs.
“By no means, lovey. Now you go back to sleep…”
As if he could prevent that, P’tero thought as the fellis took over and blotted out conscious thought as well as the pain.
It was three weeks before P’tero’s wounds had healed sufficiently for the trip back. The makeshift infirmary had more patients since there were other hazards besides large, hungry and territorially-minded felines in the southern continent: the heat, unwary exposure to too much sun, and a variety of other minor injuries. Leopol got a thorn in his foot which had festered, so that he joined P’tero in the infirmary shelter until the poison drained.
Tisha and one of the weyrfolk came down with a fever that had Maranis sending back to Fort for a medic more qualified than he in such matters. The woman recovered in a few days but Tisha had a much harder time of it, sweating kilos off her big frame, to leave her so enervated Maranis was desperately worried about her. K’vin sent to Ista to beg a ship to transport her back north, since he could not subject her to trying to climb aboard a dragon.