The Masterharper of Pern Read online

  A Conclave had been convened when it became all too apparent that five of the six Weyrs were empty. Benden’s two Weyrleaders were mystified as well, truly surprised by the abandonment, and by Benden’s being the only remaining Weyr.

  Many theories had been put forth. A favorite claimed that a mysterious disease had spread through the five Weyrs, killing both dragons and riders. But that didn’t account for the missing weyrfolk or the absence of every stick and stitch belonging to them. Benden Weyr had even sent a wing, with reliable Hold and Hall passengers, to scan the Southern Continent in case all five Weyrs had—for some unknown reason—decided to resettle south, despite the hazards of that country.

  The matter was under discussion, often heated, for Turns afterward and no one the wiser for all the talk.

  Then Creline performed a new work, which he called the Question Song, and which was to be included in the compulsory Teaching Ballads. Gennell had made a mental note to return the song to that category since someone—he wouldn’t like to point a finger—had let it drop out some time before he became MasterHarper. Such things happened: but they shouldn’t, considering the importance with which Creline had treated the work. Odd song. Haunting melody. Yes, worth reviving.

  Another fifty-five Turns remained before Threadfall was due again. That is, Gennell amended to himself, if it was going to Fall again. Many believed Thread was gone forever. A common theory claimed that the Weyrs had been bound by some bizarre suicide pact, leaving only Benden to carry on the draconic traditions. That made no sense whatever to a thinking man. But at least he was unlikely to have to contend with that in his term as MasterHarper. With a sigh of relief, he firmly turned his mind toward sleep.

  Merelan’s cough developed into a chest cold shortly after Turnover. Sniffles and coughs were prevalent during the beginning of any new Turn when the weather remained cold and snowy, and young Robinton and Petiron both suffered from colds, but they threw off the worst of the infection quickly. But Merelan’s cough seemed determined to linger, and she could rarely get through a vocal exercise without having to break off in a spasm. For the first time, Petiron became seriously worried about her health.

  So did Betrice and Ginia, for the singer had quickly lost what weight she had gained after the baby’s birth—and more.

  “You’ve really nothing big coming up in the way of rehearsals, have you?” Ginia asked Petiron privately after delivering another bottle of cough mixture for Merelan. With a certain degree of reluctance, he shook his head; had he not been sick, he most assuredly would have started composing something extravagant for the Spring Gathers.

  “Well, then,” Ginia continued, “I happen to know the MasterHarper is looking for someone to provide basic instruction at a hold in South Boll. Not far from where Merelan was born. So why don’t you ask him to allow you to take the post? I believe the accommodations would be adequate for a small family like yours. The Ritecamp traders just arrived here, and their route takes you close by Pierie Hold.”

  Before Petiron could produce a good reason why he couldn’t leave the Harper Hall at that time, he and his small family were on their way south, their baggage loaded on pack animals that Master Gennell ordered. He sent along two good Ruathan-bred mounts, as well. Master Sev Ritecamp was only too happy to oblige the Harper Hall and had agreed to take them to the very door of Pierie Hold.

  “If Master Petiron wouldn’t mind taking some time of an evening to learn some of our youngsters their Teaching Ballads. They’re in dire need of some educating,” Sev had suggested very politely. “And maybe give us a new song or two in the evening around our fire.”

  “That would be only fair,” Merelan said when Petiron was not as prompt as he could have been in agreeing. Then she winked at her spouse, knowing very well that he hated doing “basics” with beginners, while she enjoyed teaching the very young. So long as the children were taught, it really didn’t matter who did the teaching. As Mastersinger, she knew her Teaching Ballads and Songs as well as Petiron did.

  The young daughter of the Ritecamps’ leader had a toddler the same age as Robie, though not, Merelan privately thought, as sturdy as her lad, but she doubted that Dalma would mind watching two who could amuse each other while Merelan taught.

  MasterHarper Gennell was delighted to have a master to assign for however short a term. Betrice had a word with the Ritecamp healer about Merelan’s condition and waved farewell with the rest of the Hall.

  Although the Ruathan runnerbeasts provided were well trained and easy riding, Merelan at first rode in Dalma’s efficient house-wagon, since she knew herself incapable of managing the antics of a mount right then. Petiron, less familiar with riding beasts, was more often on the lead wagon seat, talking to Sev Ritecamp or his father or his uncle or whoever was the day’s guide. Despite his forebodings and initial dismay, Petiron soon began to relax and enjoy the trip. Having overheard the favorable comments about the Ruathan breed, he offered Sev’s eldest son the chance to ride his mount, and consequently he found all the Ritecamp men more genial toward him. He even enjoyed the nightly music sessions, for almost everyone in the thirty wagons of the train played some instrument and could carry intricate parts. Many had good voices, and he found himself conducting four- and five-part harmonies to some of their favorite ballads and airs, as well as teaching them the newer songs.

  “They’re nearly as good as fourth-year apprentices,” he said with some surprise to Merelan at the end of the third evening’s session.

  “They do it for fun,” she said gently.

  “There’s no reason they cannot do it better and have fun, too,” he said, not at all pleased at her subtle rebuke over his attempt to improve the harmonies.

  “Now, hold still, while I put the salve on your face,” she went on, holding his chin firmly while she pasted his cheeks and nose with the remedy for the windburn he’d acquired.

  With her that close to him, he could see she had more color in her pale cheeks, though she still coughed so hard it made him wince to think what damage she might be doing her vocal cords. But she didn’t seem quite as strained about the eyes and mouth as she had been.

  “Are you all right, Mere?” he asked, holding her by the arms.

  “Of course, I’m all right. Why, it’s an answer to one of my childhood dreams: going adventuring in a trader’s van.”

  She favored him with the wide smile that put dimples in both cheeks, and she was more his Merelan than she had been since before her pregnancy. He folded her into his arms, hugging her—remembering to be gentle, as he felt how thin she still was in his embrace. That reminded him what he might not have, and he was about to put her firmly away from him when she clung tightly.

  “It’s safe enough,” she murmured and he clasped her with a passion that he had been aching to express but had sternly repressed. He didn’t even have to worry about an inopportune interruption from the baby sleeping in the spare crib in Dalma’s wagon. So he loved Merelan with a single-minded urgency that had been denied him far too long. Nor was there any reluctance in her response to him.

  The slow trip south was really a very good idea.

  At some point during that ambling three-week journey to the southern tip of South Boll, Petiron realized that he had been nearly as strung out, emotionally and physically, as Merelan. Being in the Harper Hall, with music, musicians, and instruments constantly heard, caused one to think only of music to write for instruments and voices to perform. On the road, he was not compelled by the tacit competition rampant in the Harper Hall to produce yet more complex and glorious sounds. He had an opportunity for the first time since he had started his apprentice years to realize the richness—as well as the simplicity—of life all around him.

  He’d come from Telgar Hold, one of the largest, so he had never really been short of the necessities of day-to-day existence. Living in the Harper Hall had been a continuation of his childhood’s conditions. He took so many things for granted that it was a lesson to him to be denied easy
access to, say, the well-tanned hides for musical compositions that he was accustomed to covering with quick, large notations. Now he learned to write economically, using small marks that allowed him to fit more than one work on a single hide.

  Eating was another thing he had never given much thought to. Food arrived in the Hall with no indication to those who dined of its acquisition or preparation. Now he learned to hunt and fish with the other men of the caravan, even as the women gathered firewood and nuts and, as they continued to the warmer areas, early greens, fruits, and berries.

  Petiron could stride along with the other traders all day long now, and Merelan, too, put on weight and became weather-tanned, and fit. She walked part of each day with Dalma and the other young mothers, at a pace slow enough for the youngest toddler to keep up. Her cough disappeared and she was once again vivid with the beauty that had stopped Petiron’s heart five Turns earlier. And he began to realize just how restrictive he had been in the Harper Hall; so immersed had he become in composition and practice that he had forgotten that other things existed in life: a normal life.

  The caravan camped for three days by one of the Runner Stations, and, as usual, the Station Master sent his runners out in all directions to alert those who lived far off the southern road.

  “Some of these people are very shy,” the Station Master told his guests. “You might even find them . . . well, a bit . . . odd.”

  “You mean, from living off in the hills?” Merelan asked.

  Sev scratched his head. “They got odd notions, you might say.”

  Merelan knew there was something that he was not saying, and she couldn’t understand his sudden reticence.

  “Ah, d’you have something that isn’t Harper blue?” he blurted.

  “I do,” Merelan said, “but I don’t think Petiron does. You mean, he might aggravate someone?” She smiled to show that she perfectly understood.

  “Ah, yes, that’s about the size of it.”

  “I’ll see what I can do about keeping him occupied,” she said, smiling sympathetically.

  Everything went very well the first two days. The morning of the third, Merelan was entertaining all the children with game songs and teaching them the gestures that went with them, when a very tattered girl, eyes wide with delight, moved with surreptitious stealth closer and closer. When she was near enough, Merelan smiled at her.

  “Do you want to join us?” she asked in a carefully soft voice.

  The girl shook her head, her eyes wide now with a mixture of longing and fear.

  “Oh, please, everyone else is here,” Merelan said, doing her best to reassure the timid child. “Rob, open the circle and let her in, will you, dear?”

  The child took another step and then suddenly squealed when she saw a man charging from the trader’s wagon, right at Merelan’s circle.

  “You there . . . you stop that, you harlot. You evil creature, luring children away from their parents . . .”

  Merelan didn’t realize at first that he meant her. The child raced into the shelter of the heavy plantation just beyond the clearing, but that didn’t seem to cool the man’s fury, for he charged right up to Merelan, his arm raised to strike her.

  Robinton ran to clutch his mother’s skirts, frightened by the wild threats and crazed behavior. Sev, the Station Master, two of the male runners, and three other traders charged to her rescue, Sev just in time to push the attacker off balance and away from Merelan. The children were by then all weeping and running away.

  “Easy, Rochers, she’s a mother, singing baby songs,” Sev said, holding the man away.

  “She’s singing, ent she? Singing comes first, don’t it? Singing to lure kids away! She’s evil. Just like all harperfolk. Teachin’ things no one needs to know to live proper.”

  “Rochers, leave be,” the Station Master said, exercising considerable force to pull the man away, shooting embarrassed and apologetic glances at Merelan.

  “Come, Rochers, we need to finish dealing,” said one of the traders. “Come on, we’d nearly shook hands . . .”

  “Harper harlot!” Rochers shouted, trying to free a fist to wave at Merelan, who was clinging to Robinton as much as he was clinging to her.

  “She’s not a harper, Rochers. She’s a mother, amusing the kids,” the Station Master said, loudly enough to try to drown out what the man was saying.

  “She had ’em dancing!” Spittle was beginning to form in the corners of his mouth as the men pulled him back to the wagons.

  “Get into Dalma’s wagon, Merelan,” Sev said quickly. “We’ll clear him out.”

  Merelan complied, picking Robie up in her arms and trying to calm his frightened sobs. She slipped behind a tree and through the wooded verge until she could duck into Dalma’s wagon, one of the last in the Station clearing. She was shaking when she got inside it, and she nearly shrieked with fear when someone pushed open the little door. But it was only Dalma, her face white with anxiety. She embraced Merelan and tried to soothe Robinton all at the same time.

  “Crazy, woods crazy,” she murmured reassuringly. “Who’d’ve thought he’d even notice you over there, playing so nicely.”

  “What did he mean?” Merelan said, trying to control her sobs. She’d never been so frightened in all her life. Especially since she had joined the Harper Hall, which was held with respect everywhere she’d gone as a Mastersinger. “What could he mean? He called me a harper harlot. And how can singing be bad? Evil?”

  “Now, now.” Dalma held Merelan tightly against her, stroking her hair and patting her shoulder, or patting Robie, though he had recovered within the safety of the wagon and Dalma’s comforting presence. “We run into some real odd folk now and then. Some of ’em have never met a harper, and some don’t hold with singing or dancing or drinking. Sev says it’s because they can’t make wine or beer, so it has to be evil. They don’t want their children to know more than they did or you’d better believe it—” And Dalma gave a sour little laugh. “—they couldn’t keep them from leaving those awful jungles.”

  “But it was the way he said ‘harper’ . . .” Merelan swallowed at the tone of hatred in which the word had been uttered.

  “Now, now, it’s all over with. Sev and the others’ll see those woodsie ones leave.”

  “And that dear little girl . . .”

  “Merelan, forget her. Please.”

  Although she nodded in compliance, Merelan wondered if she would ever forget the wistful hunger in that child’s face: a hunger for music, or maybe just other children playing. But she stayed in the wagon until Sev came to say that the woodsie ones had left and to apologize for exposing her to such a distressing incident.

  There were no further upsets, although she did learn that not every hold the traders stopped at had the benefit of harper education. It was true that there were really not enough harpers to do more than stop in once or twice a year, but Merelan was still shocked at the realization that there was a significant number of cots and small holdings where no one could read or count above twenty.

  She didn’t dare discuss that observation with Petiron, but she knew she would discuss it with Gennell when she got back. Though it was all too likely he was well aware of the lack.

  Usually the trade caravan made a special occasion for those they visited, and Petiron was no longer merely resigned to performing in the evenings; he enjoyed it. So many good voices, so many instrumentalists—not as expert as those he was accustomed to playing with, but good enough, and, more importantly, willing enough to add to the evening’s entertainment. He also acquired variants of ballads and airs that were traditional with the smaller holders but unknown to him. He jotted those down. Some of them were quite sophisticated and he wondered which was original: the Harper Hall’s versions or those that had been passed down through generations in the holds.

  One of the most nostalgic ballads—about the Crossing—could indeed be turned into an instrumental piece, starting with the basic melody, haunting enough, and then e
mbellishments added. To transcribe this, Petiron acquired enough of some of the reed-based writing material that was a local product. It had a tendency to absorb so much ink that his scores were a bit blotchy, but he could amend that when he got back to the Harper Hall. He had always prided himself on his musical memory.

  They reached Pierie Hold halfway through the morning of the twenty-first day of travel, even with a full two-day halt at Merelan’s home hold. She had a chance to see her family, to exchange news and see all the new babies and congratulate the recent pairings—and to show off Robinton.

  Petiron was warmly received by the aunt and uncle who had reared Merelan when her own parents had died in one of the fierce autumnal storms that battered the western coastline. He was truly amazed at the number of really fine, if untrained, voices that her hold had produced.

  “Not one of them but can’t carry a tune,” he told her after the first evening. “Which aunt did you say gave you your first training?”

  “Segoina,” she said, smiling at his astonishment.

  “That contralto?”

  She nodded.

  He whistled appreciatively.

  “She insisted that I be sent to the Harper Hall,” Merelan said with considerable humility. “She ought to have gone, but she’d already espoused Dugall and wouldn’t leave him.”

  “And wasted that glorious voice on a hold . . .” Petiron rather contemptuously indicated the sprawling redstone dwellings that comprised the hold.

  “Segoina has never wasted her talent,” Merelan said a bit stiffly.

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Mere, and you know it,” Petiron replied hastily. He had seen the genuine respect and love that existed between the two women. “But she’d have been a Mastersinger . . .”