Выбрать главу

Knowledge of a Gather was very reassuring to the renegade Telgar Blooddaughter. Before she could hope to attract folk to work in her high mountain hold, she would have to supply basic needs, and legitimately. In one trip to a large Gather, she could quite possibly acquire all she needed. She was already making plans as she waited for the men to leave so she could sneak to the greenhouses and help herself to the seedlings.

It had taken her all that first Turn to recover from the shocking frustration of Threadfall. Thella did not cope well with failure. Not only had she lost two of her fine runners to the disgusting stuff—well, the animals had panicked with dragons flying over them and run off a precipice—but all her careful and ambitious plans had had to be abandoned. The disappointment had plunged her into a deep roiling depression. She had planned so carefully: if Thread had only held off until the following Turn, she would have established herself in her own hold.

She had found the place during one of her ramblings in the high country. Someone had once lived—and died—there, for she had removed twelve skulls, the only part of the dead that mountain snakes had been unable to masticate. What had killed the holders would always be a mystery, although Thella had heard of instances where entire hold populations had been wiped out by virulent disease. But they must once have lived well. The hold still held wooden furnishings; the stout slab table and the bedframes, dry and dusty, were usable. The metal fittings and utensils had a thin coat of rust, but that could be sanded off. There were cisterns for water and basins for bathing. Most of the south-facing apertures, protected by deep embrasures, had retained their glass. Four good hearths for warmth and cooking needed only to be cleaned to be used. In her initial investigations as a young and optimistic girl as yet unthwarted by the Threadfall that had destroyed her plans, Thella had even found cloth, brittle with age, in the stone storage chests of the sleeping quarters and grain in the beasthold. There were stone walls around enough highland pastures to support adequate meat animals, and pens were set into one side of the cavern. Thella knew the Masterherdsman had hardy strains that would thrive on mountain fields. She did not like the notion of sharing her living space with beasts, but she had heard that it was one way of generating additional warmth. One would need all the heat one could get in these hills.

But the hold could have been completely reestablished and hers! Hers! If she had just had the Turn or two. The ancient Contract Law of Pern gave her that right. She could have insisted that the Conclave of Lord Holders permit it, once she could prove her competence. Her father had told her, in answer to discreet questions, that anyone could form a hold, so long as it could be proved to be self-sufficient and remained well managed. And a discreet check of the record hides told her that a Benamin Bloodline had once established that mountain hold, but that it had been untenanted since before the last Pass.

Only Thella’s determination to prove her competence—and her pride as eldest daughter of one of the proudest Holds on Pern, direct descendant of its founder, in whom the best qualities of her Bloodline were manifest in her beauty, intelligence, and skill—had kept her alive that first Turn. But she had been reduced to a hand-to-mouth existence which even traveling folk would have scorned. Cursing every step of the way, she had been forced to leave her mountainhold that first winter, before the snows blocked the one trail down, or leave her own skeleton for snake fodder.

Insult was added to injury as once again all of Pern, Hold and Hall, had to rely on those wretched dragonriders who should have been thoroughly redundant. Her father had held that opinion. No dragonrider had minced through Telgar’s Hold since that last Pass had ended. It was all part of a giant concatenation of circumstances ranked against her, Thella of Telgar. But she would prove her durability and resilience. Not even Thread would thwart her in the end.

So by the coming of the second spring of that improbable—but actual—Pass, Thella had finally wintered comfortably, having located three secure, well-concealed caves that were small but adequate for shelter. She had left each of them provisioned for reuse should she require them again. By that time she had become deft at extracting supplies from minor holds in Telgar and Lemos. Except for boots. She had hard-to-fit feet—rather long, wide across the ball, and narrow in the heel—and no matter where she had looked, she had been unable to find suitable footwear. Before she had always had the hold cobbler to supply her boots and shoes; she had left behind a locker full of them, and as hard wear had lacerated worn leather, she regretted her lack of foresight. But then, she had not anticipated living in the rough for nearly two full Turns.

She had acquired all other items of clothing as needed. There were quite a few tall men in Far Cry and one of the other nearby holds, so clothes were plentiful. She took only new trousers and shirts, of course—not even in extremity would Thella of Telgar wear used clothing. She had no trouble getting her hands on an appropriate jacket, a shaggy winter hide, and she had lifted furred sleeping bags, one for each of her three boltholes. Those supplies, along with the food she took, were after all no more than a modest portion of the tithe due a Lord Holder’s family, so she had no compunction about her acquisitions; she merely did not wish to be seen—yet. But boots…boots were another matter, and she might have foregone principle to get decent boots.

A journey to Igen Hold for a Gather would be the best way to end the footwear problem and satisfy one or two other minor needs that would fulfill the rudimentary requirements of her prospective holders. Perhaps she would be able to hire a likely herdsman, preferably one with a family to supply her with drudges. They could camp in the beasthold section and not interfere with her privacy. She had not wanted to take on anyone local, and Gathers were an excellent place to find suitable, and reliable, persons.

Igen’s Gather was slated to begin in ten days. The maps she had taken from Telgar—and had committed to memory—gave the position of camping caverns all the way down the Lemos Valley to Igen, so she did not expect the outward bound journey to pose her any problems. According to what she had overheard, there would be one Threadfall—falling to the north over High Telgar—and she would have to wait out another one hitting Keroon and Igen. She wished, and not for the first time over the past eighteen months, that she knew exactly when Threadfall was due. She had had some very narrow escapes—both from Fall itself and from being seen by ground crews and sweepriders. It did not suit her—yet—for any suspicion of her whereabouts or plans to be known.

She made the trip with both runners, switching from one to the other so that she could set a good pace. She would quickly outdistance the Far Cry travelers whom she did not wish to meet on the trace, although they had a head start. She had been forced to alter her overnight plans when one of her intended campsites proved fully occupied. But her fury over that was diverted when she discovered a hitherto unmarked cave with a small stream making a pool by its inner wall—she had been able to hobble the runners inside and treat herself to the luxury of a bath. She marked the spot unobtrusively so that she could find it again, secure in her infallible memory for places.

From then on, she made a point of finding secondary caverns and thus avoided any unnecessary encounters. An astonishing number of folk were on the move—understandable, since this was evidently the first spring Gather held in the new Pass.

By the night before, she was no more than an hour’s quickstep from Igen. In the dawn darkness, she had watered her runners at the wide river and left them hobbled in a blind ravine, its slopes greening in the swift verdant growth of the desert springtime; her gear she stored behind a boulder. From a careless cotwife she had acquired the voluminous draperies worn by desert holders, contrived a suitable band to secure the headdress and conceal her sun-streaked blond hair, begrimed her face, and used charcoal to thicken her eyebrows, giving her a grimmer cast. Then, with the traditional waterskin of the desert holder slung across her back, she was jogging along the high ground above the river even before she could make out the Gather flag flying from the drum tower of Igen Hold.