The Witching Hour Comes Early [Matsi]

Water surged past his ears with every stroke, more deafening than the rain, but it did not keep Qosis from detecting a nearby scream. After a brief analysis, his brain suggested the sound was somewhere between herdbeast and firelizard, and the Candidate grimaced. A more distant word-sound followed. Qosis shifted his trajectory, moving out from under the bridge on its southern side, where the waterfall pool emptied into the lake. Even without the added shadow of the bridge over his head, he was having trouble seeing. Raindrops pummeled his eyes with irritating frequency.

"'Lo!" he echoed the mystery speaker nonetheless, one arm lofted from the water and waved toward the nearest shoreline rather than any particular silhouette. A few seconds later his vision adjusted to the slightly greater light, and he noticed the seated woman nearby. She was saying something about her "boys." Qosis blinked, eyeing the surrounding waters. He saw at least a couple dark, rounded shapes surface briefly near him, then sink down again. "Children should not be brought out here right now..." he muttered to himself.

He was sure now the woman was no one he knew. Still, if she was intent on summoning him out for purposes unknown, he could not turn back to his work just yet. He advanced to the shoreline, watching as one of the dark heads of the "boys" slithered around in front of him again. A second later his foot kicked the stone bottom, and he realized with some pain that there was no room for a "boy" in that depth of water. Unless the caller really was a fool, and had set a bunch of strangely aquadynamic toddlers on him.

When he saw the shape coming around again he reached out, only to have his fingers bounce off a hard, hairless surface. Qosis jerked his head back in surprise. He made a much quicker ascent up the rest of the shoreline, leaping free of the last misty tongue of water as if it were boiling hot. He whipped back around to face the lake, shoulders hunched and hands closed into fists. He looked aside to Catori a few seconds later, chest rising and falling with a rapidity born from more than fatigue. "Your boys," he rumbled, accusatory. "They appear to be spiderclaws."

Upon noticing his caller's new placement on the ground, Qosis extended an arm to help her rise. He just tried to keep his hand from brushing against the blue mass stuck to her in the process. His brows lifted at her response. Spiderclaws certainly fell under the domain of water creatures. Yet with the blue pillie in such proximity, only stubbornness would continue to insist that the insectoid creature had any similarity to the many-legged crab he had previously assumed. Only a very fat spiderclaw could be related to Bennett.

"Qosis. Dragon Candidate," he answered her trade of name and station, swallowing back any further comments on the pillies for the moment. She was a dragonrider, so she deserved that much courtesy. As usual, his introduction came in fragments, mood dictated by tone rather than word use. Right now, Qosis' voice was warming, slowly. "I thought perhaps you needed me for something." He scanned the wet gloom around them, empty of other dragons and people at the moment. "I am being too wary at late."

Chills twitched his skin and Qosis turned away from Catori. He waved her after him, not thinking clearly enough on his status for anything more appropriate. Eating up the distance from one side of the bridge to the other with his monstrous stride, he quickly returned to his bag of clothing and fished into it for a towel. No good could be done for drying him in this weather, but he draped it over his shoulders to keep him warm. He did run it across his hair first, squeezing out the excess drippings.

Qosis recalled Catori's station. He turned back to face her, disarming any sudden consternation straining his features with a friendly smile. "You have a Green, you said?" he mused, tone already locked to praise. "You can tell her I say hello, if it is any concern of hers."

The dragonrider did not seem to have taken offense to his lack of proper decorum at all. Though vision and hearing were not to be taken for granted in this spoilt evening light, she also looked and sounded young. Younger than him. Almost as impish as some of the female Candidates he was forced to share the Barracks with. Qosis pushed back his revulsion at the thought. He tried to focus on the rider's words, but as they became increasingly bold and childish in their flattery, the corner of his mouth tugged at a grimace.

"Dragons must see better at night than I thought," he said, continuing noncommittally as he processed the flirtation. "Thank you, though. Or thank Koketeth." He shouldered his bag, glancing toward the water, but the rain was cascading in silvery sheets now that precluded any further view of the pillies. Greenrider, he thought to himself. There were many stereotypes available, mostly about the male riders. Perhaps they crossed to the women as well, but Qosis did not like to hold with them in the first place. Catori was making it difficult.

He wiped a glut of rainwater from his hair and eyes, sighing at the inconvenient storm. "I need to go under something," he informed his newest and bubbliest acquaintance, hiking one hand up above his head in illustration. He was not far from the Barracks, but he avoided looking sharply in that direction. He did not care to overemphasize his current position, particularly in light of the imminent question: "And how long have you been a rider at Dalibor, my lady?"

He had thought the caverns would suit for shelter if not the Candidates' barracks, or maybe this plucky Greenrider's weyr, if only for the added warmth...but she was all impulse. He was still trying to decide if he was required to follow when he ducked to look under the bridge. There was a scant patch of dry rock available. He had to squeeze in right next to her, legs extending loosely toward the pillie-infested waters. His heels grazed the surface, pulling back briefly when Catori gave the lake a strange look. Qosis glanced the same way, but when he looked back the rider was beaming at him again.

The Candidate pulled the towel from his shoulders and began running it over his soaked limbs. The rain still misted his side occasionally, but not enough to negate a good drying.

"The start of the season. That is when I landed on this continent, too. It was two days from landing that I was Searched." Catori was sitting very close to his leg, bunched up as she was. ...one kick and she would plummet into the lake.

Qosis had no incentive to do so, and he was not sure why the morbid visual occurred to him.

He stopped rubbing at his leg with the towel as glows lit up at either side of the bridge. The illumination had come late this evening, the drudges-- or Candidates --responsible probably fearing the furious rain. Despite the added light, no one noticed them, but he could see Catori better now. Coalescing drops of water trembled off his bearded chin. "So you have been here for a long time." He looked out at the lake. "You gave that a look though, when I asked. I thought your bugs came from there."

Qosis' wet eyebrow twitched. The way the rider talked was not too different from the average trader, or any other Pernese of middling education. But then, she said she had been here for several Turns. Waiting to ride dragons, then riding dragons. No time to play the harper. And now, with a simple question, she had lost a fair share of her mindless glee. Interesting.

Then came the bug. She was still talking to Qosis, but he was watching the brown pillie creep in under the bridge glow's radius and groom. It was disgusting. It had more than six legs, that could not be natural. Yet attach wings to it and call it a fire-bug, and half the Weyr would want one. When Catori's voice changed from its usual chirp to a croon, the trader's eyes returned to her. They narrowed at the assumption.

"You have a poetic retrospect," he answered in a voice soft, deep and cold. "Do those pillies have any use? Can they..." He considered the clumsy pile of parts constituting Bear, then shook his head. "No betweening. No message-carrying." It crossed him that the pillie could perhaps produce a sound like dolphin speech, but it was not a certainty and there were dolphineers for those purposes anyway. His gaze carried to one side in thought, he finally noticed the hand on his arm. With all the scars webbing it, he had not even felt her.

What a considerate compliment: his company was better than that of a pillie. Qosis watched Catori's inching up to his side, her hand still ineffectually clasped to his arm. She was bold enough in word; part of him wanted to snap at her to match herself with action. But he could also see she was not a young lad tangling with her first brigand, but a woman who had already been granted too much lenience for silly behavior. Snap judgment to be sure-- he still did not know what had clammed her up so quickly about the lake --but accurate enough for the time being. He said nothing of her grope at the old lashings.

"Bother me?" the Candidate echoed with a surprised blink, and the second his eyes opened anew they filled with the electric white flash of the tormented skies. He took to squinting till the spots ran out of his vision. "They do not bother me," he corrected. "What bothers me is keeping animals for the sake of it. Look at it this way: my kin and I have brought tithes to the ancestors of this Weyr for many Turns, all leading up to this time, this place. We do not do this out of the goodness of our hearts. Certainly not. We do it only because without dragons we're all Threaded. And a dragon is a being of great intelligence, charisma, and power. You are a dragonrider. You have already achieved every little boy's dream. You are in every song and every soul."

And Qosis smiled again at last, for Catori did not quite fit how every little boy imagined he would look atop his fighting dragon. "Yet if Thread were to not come, how hard would the harpers have to work? How quickly would those tithes end?" He leaned toward her, as if deposing a secret, but at the last second the glint of reflected glow in his eyes vanished and he paused. He recalled to whom he was speaking.

And he failed to lay out the exact sequence of events that would end the dragonriders of Pern. Thunder drowned even his voice for a few humbling seconds, capped by another silent pulse of lightning. He had seconds to speak yet before nature played the Bowl again. "My lady, I am only trying to illustrate that where there is no practical purpose for something, there is no reason to sustain it. I will not criticize you for your collection." Not aloud, anyway. "It is your decision as to what is useful enough to take on. And I am aware that some creatures on Pern give you no role in that decision. We are human. They are our dreams, and they can come to us at any time."

Qosis had never given much thought to "fate." It was practical as a pillie. And it was a means of absolving him of his life as he had directed it. He wanted to retain ownership of his mistakes as readily as his victories, and fate consumed both. Maybe Impression introduced some watery quality into the brain that eliminated all fervent care for things beyond dragons, Weyrs and harper songs. More likely, he thought as he shifted enough to bring his shoulder out from under Catori's head, he was giving too much credence to a girl that just happened to be a rider as well.

"Do not call them your children unless you gave birth to them," he warned her. "You need to find something better than pets, and different from your dragon, to fill your 'need,' if it troubles you so." He did not get any other words off. Lightning mapped his droplet-studded face, and strobed mingling shadows of rider and Candidate on the stone before peals of thunder took over. Qosis took the moment to consider Catori's less irritating excuse for her pets. He knew that look.

By the time the storm permitted another speaking window, the trader's lips were toying with a smirk instead of a scowl. "I did say every little boy, didn't I?" he chuckled in review of his generalization. "But not me. I did not learn of their existence till I was too old for that." His olive eyes turned to one side in theatrical thought, then returned to her. "Four or five Turns was when I first muddled it out, I suppose. With the assistance of the harpers traveling with us, of course. But there are more important things for a trader's son to know. So over time I gathered bits and pieces of dragons, and tried to fit them together in my head when duty spared me the time. Dalibor was going to be my first real dragon sighting, my first direct dealings with a Weyr...and so it is, isn't it?"

Were he trying to sell the concept of dragonriding-- to himself, so it seemed --he might have swept his gaze pointedly across the Bowl just then, maybe extended his arm if there was a crowd going. Right now he attempted to peer out beyond the bridge, but between the pressing night shadows and the deluge there was nothing to see outside the bridge except Bear. Qosis realized he had not even heard a dragon challenging the thunder's roars for some time. "And now," he said, with a clearing of his throat. "Riding a dragon will be a necessity. But I shall not regret him."

"A wherry?" Qosis suggested as Catori answered his modesty with an outburst. He didn't have the slightest idea what had set her off, and in fact was drawn less to her and more to the pillie that ascended to her head, perching there like an ungainly blue crown. His brow arched to impressive heights as what appeared to be Bennett's singular muzzle abruptly split open into separate parts. The trader's jaw hung; there was nothing on Pern quite like that! Whether it was morbid fascination or horror that stuck his eyes to Bennett, the enchantment broke as Catori got to her feet and stalked off into the rain. Qosis swallowed back the dryness in his throat.

He strained to see after her. Lightning flexed through the wall gap to the south, streaking the lake-top white and allowing him to spot her. She had not gone far. Not even out of hearing range, if he concentrated. But there was nothing worth his ear; she was talking to her bugs again. He leaned back as Bear scuttled out of the gloom toward him, hand subconsciously groping against the ground for a good-sized rock. But the pillie was off again just as rapidly and inconsequentially as his mistress. In fact the similarity alerted Qosis to a point: perhaps these pets Impressed as flits did, and shared their bonded's anger.

Or perhaps they were just ornery. Like Catori. The trader took notice that he was now too late to even volunteer himself for cleaning tables in the dining hall. The scraps he accumulated in that duty usually outdid what he could wrangle during his appointed dinnertime. And it was all thanks to the Greenrider, trying to swoop down and Search him for the Candidacy of her bed. If he offered a pinch of apology and a draught of humor now, he could still have that, and whatever food she had in her weyr. His stomach agreed with the plan, but the rest of him refrained and won it over.

She probably slept with pillies as pillows and he wanted no part of that, among other things. It was unusual though...he had met holder girls just as fickle. It was easier to not treat their emotions with any real gravity. And whatever their moods, he had never turned the holdbrats down. This was a new problem: he was too thoughtful to play the willing piece of meat for her. But not thoughtful enough to meditate on the conundrum while he was still stuck out in this storm.

The trader was up beside her after a few moments. He inclined his head rather than offering a full bow, not that it was bright enough out for his courtesy to be seen in either case. "My lady, I apologize for any offense I may have caused you," he began, never the trader to burn his bridges. "This was an honor that I hope to repeat with many of the Weyrfolk, as it is certainly not an environment I am used to, and I have much to learn." Diplomatic. General. Safe from feminine misinterpretation. "I should see myself to the barracks though, or my minders may worry where I have gone." He grinned, again a pointless expression mimed out in the dark for habit's sake. "Farewell to you and Koketeth. May you both see brighter skies and better hunting tomorrow."