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The heat off the Hatching Grounds was so oppressive that Rodney could feel it sitting on the hewn stairs several levels up. It was a dry heat, absorbed throughout the sunny day, so that even now, closing on sunset with the cavern mostly in shade, the yellow sands still wavered and blurred. The air was dusty to boot, sandy grit kept getting stuck in his throat, and sweat was building on the back of his neck and sliding stickily down his back under his tunic.
He picked at the fabric irritably, wiped his forehead with his sleeve and angled his slate into the slanting sunrays. Here in the corner of the rightmost audience tier, at the edge of the cavern, there was still enough light for him to make out the chalk marks of his equations. The position also, conveniently enough, had almost no view of the Grounds, which meant that no one else wanted to sit here; he had the stairs to himself, enough room to spread out his extra slates and hides.
Plus, it was out of sight of the queen's watchful gaze. She might take his lack of interest as disrespect, and while usually he couldn't care less who he offended, usually he wasn't risking the offense of a gold dragon the length of a mid-sized tree. Oh, sure, they said that dragons never hurt humans, but had anyone who believed that ever taken a good look at those teeth? Or the claws? And Benden Weyr's senior queen—Romath or Rainmanth or whatever it was—was supposedly the biggest on the planet; she could swallow a herdbeast in two and a half bites, so a journeyman smith in about one, by Rodney's calculations.
Behind him, above and below, he could hear the babbling of the crowd, practically the entire population of the Weyr shoved together, close and excited. Like a Gather, but subdued, more murmurs than shouts, every voice hushed in eager expectation. He would appreciate the quiet, except that under the human mumblings was the constant, bone-deep hum of the dragons perched all about the rim of the Grounds, thrumming through the stone benches. Rodney could feel it in his jaw, resonating through his very teeth, and gritted them against it. He'd be lucky if those vibrations didn't knock out his filling. Not to mention it was difficult to write, with the slate tablet on his knees shivering like it was about to crack apart.
With the noise they were making, he supposed it didn't matter that Teyla had dragged him out of the Smith craft-chambers in the comfortably cool Lower Caverns. It'd probably be just as annoying down there, with all the glass rattling. Hopefully they wouldn't hit a frequency to fracture the lenses. No, probably not; it wasn't like this was the first Hatching. Not even the first this Turn. Dragons were horny beasts, apparently. The queens, anyway.
It wasn't even Rodney's first Hatching, technically, but he'd only been five the first time, and didn't remember much except the itchy dress woolens his mother had bundled him up in, fancy gold embroidery, as if they were Lord Holders, not pretenders from a little cothold like Mckay. Now, eleven Turns later, at least he hadn't had to dress up. No one expected a journeyman smith to be anything but a little stained and ragged around the edges.
No one actually expected a journeyman smith to attend a Hatching, for that matter, especially not when he had far more interesting and globally significant things to do, but—"Rodney? Oh, there you are."
A dark auburn head thrust between his nose and the slate he was bent over, and Rodney rocked back, knocking his other tablet off the stair and only just catching it in time. "What?" he snapped.
Teyla gazed at him, all patience. "Are you not going to watch?" she inquired.
"You got me out here," Rodney said, thinking longingly of the craft-chamber, piled high with the latest fascinating finds Benden's dragonriders had brought from the Southern continent. "Isn't that enough?"
"Rodney," the Harper girl rebuked him mildly, "this is too important for you to deny it. The dragons which today hatch here will someday be protecting you and me both, and all we care about."
"Fine, I know, I'm very grateful. The Smith Hall does tithe to the Weyr like everyone else."
"Dragonriding is a greater thing than marks duly paid. There is more happening here than what is owed or offered."
"There's more happening up there, too," Rodney returned, waving a hand at the sky in the general direction of where the Dawn Sisters could be seen, were they far enough South. "That's why I was brought here, not for any Hatching—and I'm close, I know it, I've just about figured out the semi-major axis, and oh, I was so right—"
"The stars are not even in the sky yet, Rodney," Teyla said. "Look, even your fellow Smiths are watching." She pointed, unnecessarily, because his so-called peers stood out already, not only thanks to their Smith-red tunics. They were rowdier than the rest of the crowd; Cavanof must have broken out the strongwine early. They waved back to Teyla when she waved to them, as always ignoring Rodney as thoroughly as he did them. Two Turns and they still hadn't gotten over his early promotion from apprentice.
"The Dawn Sisters aren't stars," Rodney said. He pushed aside one of the hides, checked those underneath. "And my fellow Smiths wouldn't know an artificial geosynchronous satellite if it fell out of the sky onto their heads. You watch, Teyla, and tell me how it goes at the feast later. That's what Harpers are supposed to do anyway, isn't it, telling stories?"
Teyla rolled her eyes. "Very well, Rodney. I hope you do not regret it—it is not something we often get a chance to witness, the Impressions of new dragons."
"Yes, yes, I'm sure you'll put it to music nicely. Have you seen my hide from Fort Hold? It has an inkblot that looks like a crushed bug in the left corner..." But Teyla had left to rejoin the other Harpers, sitting in the top tier along with the Weyr's wingleaders.
She probably hadn't heard him anyway; the dragons' humming had dropped in pitch but upped in volume, until the bases of his ears were aching with the noise. Rodney massaged the throbbing points with one hand, went through his piled hides with the other. Some anonymous scientist had divined the moons' masses, centuries ago; if those numbers were relatively accurate, as supported by the observed eccentricities in the Red Star's approach vector—he had to have it somewhere—
Finally, here it was, the hide he'd copied so meticulously from Fort's faded records. Measurements down to the fourth decimal place, and what instrumentation could gauge the mass of a distant object that precisely? Either that ancient scientist was imaginatively and utterly out of his mind, or these numbers were merely a sadistic practical joke on his successors, or else he had somehow been standing on the moons themselves...a dragon couldn't jump between that far, could it...?
Regardless, Rodney wrote the numbers out on the slate, reached for his abacus and began working through the adjusted equations. This had to be the most frustrating part of anything he did. There was so much room for human error in the math, however painstakingly careful he was, and it wasn't like he could trust it to anyone else. He preferred to do calculations in his head when he could, because scratching them out on slate or manipulating the abacus was so tedious. For all his genius, it was that habit of figuring mentally that had first drawn the attention of the Smiths, as if there were some special meaning to it, beyond his innate impatience with the slowness of the world.
But he could only keep so many numbers in mind at once, and arithmetic this complex he needed to write down. Especially when his head was pounding with heat and the stupid dragon-song, which had climbed to an ear-splitting crescendo and was holding steady. Divide by the planetary mass, and then the square root, where had he put his scale chart—ah, yes, tucked under his second slate.
The sun was setting, the narrow strip of Hatching Ground sand he could see before him dyed orange in the light. The crowd had gone quiet, and the dragons' humming was now constant enough he could tune it out. Rodney closed his eyes, plotting the orbital curves on an imaginary graph, irregular ellipses twisted around and twisting one another, as his fingers worked the abacus, clicking the beads up and down the rods.
A sudden sound threw off his rhythm—not exactly a cheer, more like a sigh, but from a thousand or more voices at once. Rodney cursed, fumbled with the abacus, recounting the beads in the third column. Had one slipped, or two? He was going to have to do the whole thing over again. Hissing with annoyance, he cleared the slate and started from scratch, steadfastly ignoring the rising ruckus of the crowd. His proof needed to be exacting, if he were to have any hope of convincing that idiot Master Smith Lee that the Dawn Sisters were as small as he knew they were—of course their orbits shouldn't be so regular, not with the bi-lunar influence, but if there was another force applied to them, perhaps internal, even...
First equation set, then the second. He carefully copied over the final digits from the tablet onto a spare hide in ink, squinting at the slate—was that a five or a six? He really should have brought a wet cloth to wipe the slate clean, it was hard to read the newest chalk marks through the dusty streaks his sleeve left behind...
And even harder when an unexpected shadow was cast over both hide and slate. Rodney flapped his hand imperatively at the disruption, not looking up, trying to reconstruct the sequence in his mind. "Get out of the way." Two thousand eight-hundred sixty-eight, that sounded right. Right?
What are you doing?
Rodney glared at the numbers. Or was it fifty-eight? And still, the shadow. He flapped again, snapped for good measure, "Move, I said! You're in my light."
Your light?
"Need it to read. And be quiet." Fifty-eight. He was almost positive. Maybe. Wherry-shit, he was going to have to do this again. Again again. Third time's the charm. Stupid Hatching...
And here I thought the sun belonged to everybody. What are you doing?
"I'm trying to calculate the correct orbits of three negligibly massed, apparently geosynchronous objects, which is all but impossible when people keep—"
"Rodney," Teyla said, but oddly enough she sounded quite far away, like she was calling to him across a distance. But if she wasn't the one standing over him, then he wouldn't be able to hear her anyway, over the crowd. Though, also oddly, he wasn't hearing the crowd anymore; maybe that was just because the dragons' humming had gotten that much louder. And the shadow was still in his way—
So you're Rodney?
"Rodney!" Teyla said again, this time urgently, so much so that his head snapped up from the slate automatically.
And then he was gazing into a pair of binary suns, a thousand times more brilliant than the Dawn Sisters, whirling with blue and green, a play of luminance as awesome and breathtaking as the revolution of the stars through the infinite night sky. Only these lights weren't true stars, any more than the Dawn Sisters were, but faceted crystals as big as his fists, shining liquidly. As Rodney stared, they were briefly veiled, a brown-green membrane flicking over and pulling back again, as the dragon hatchling blinked at him.
Rodney blinked back, then dropped his slate and quill and threw up his arms protectively over his face. "Aghh! Um—go away! Get back!"
When he didn't feel any claws or fangs sinking into his flesh, he cautiously put down his arms. The hatchling was still there, though it had rocked back on its haunches, paws or forelegs or talons or what-have-you folded in front of its chest like a spring-hare. It was dark greenish-gold, the setting sunlight glittering over its egg-damp bronze hide, though the pointed ridge running down its neck along the spine was spiky even wet.
Rodney waved at the creature gingerly. "Go on, get back. Shoo."
The hatchling cocked its head. Aquamarine danced with emerald in its gemstone eyes, level with Rodney's own when it arched its neck up.
The beast was, Rodney noticed, quite large, barely small enough to fit on the stone steps leading up the side of the benches. "Uh, the Hatching Ground's that way," Rodney told it, pointing down. "You must've gotten lost."
No, I didn't. The voice was masculine, a little hoarse, a little sardonic: a stranger's voice that he recognized like he had heard it long, long before he was even born. Also a little annoyed, by the tone.
Rodney stared so hard he could feel his eyeballs bulge in their sockets. "No—no nonono no no!" he said succinctly.
The hatchling cocked his head to the other side. Yes, he replied, even more succinctly.
"No!" Rodney argued back. "This is a mistake—I wasn't Searched—you can't—I'm a Smith, not—go—go Impress somebody else!"
The hatchling tipped forward, back onto his front paws, and swiped a damp green-gold wing around fast enough that Rodney didn't have a chance to duck. The cuff to the back of his head was too light to actually hurt, but he winced and yelped anyway.
Nah, I'm cool, the hatchling said. Let's go get something to eat.
"You—that—what?"
You're hungry, right? I know I am.
"Of course I'm hungry, the kitchens wouldn't give me a snack, they said I had to wait for the Hatching feast, even though I told them that if I don't eat regularly I get—"
So let's go get some food, and the hatchling smacked his lips, or what passed for lips, showing off a long maroon tongue and an impressive array of teeth for a newborn.
Rodney noticed that ravenous red swirls were expanding in the hatchling's eyes, drowning out the gentler blues. For some reason this completely failed to frighten him, anymore than the sight of those glistening fangs did. This dragon might be dangerous, but not to him. Never to him.
Nope, the hatchling reassured him cheerfully. Now, food?
"W-wait," Rodney tried. "Not yet, I have to finish—" He knelt down, fumbled for the quill at his feet. "I didn't finish writing—if the slate got erased now—took me the last hour, and I was missing—"
The hatchling took at step forward, pale soft claws scraping on the stone steps, and curved his neck down to peer at the fallen slate. It's sixty-eight, he told Rodney. Two thousand eight-hundred and sixty-eight. You were right the first time. He crouched lower, until his snout was almost touching the tablet. Geeze, how do you read this? You're going to go blind, if you keep writing this tiny.
"I'll have you know, I have perfect vision, when I have light I can see a flea at—"
Food, Rodney!
"Ah, yeah, right." Rodney hastily scribbled the last couple digits on the hide without looking, set it aside on the bench to dry and got up again. "Now, I don't know if they let you in the dining hall, or where dragons usually eat—or what you eat, actually, now, I mean, you're pretty small to devour a herdbeast by yourself—"
"Rodney?"
He blinked as a light hand fell on his shoulder. It took conscious effort to finally tear his eyes away from the newborn dragon's, to look back to Teyla, standing on the benches behind him, leaning over to touch his shoulder. "Hey, Teyla, you've been in Weyrs more than me, where do dragons eat?"
Teyla was giving him a truly weird look. She looked positively rattled, as if anything could rattle Teyla. Even the Thread which had driven her entire Hold from their home inspired more rage than totally understandable terror, but now the journeyman Harper seemed almost afraid. Even though she had always been the one to tell him dragons were nothing to fear.
"Teyla?" Rodney asked again, a tad nervously, as she gaped at him with her mouth open and her brown eyes wide.
It wasn't until after he had said it, and let his voice drop away, that he realized he was speaking into an almost complete silence, broken only by the scritching of the hatchling's claws on the stone. Even the maddening hum of the dragons had finally ceased.
"Uh," Rodney said. "I, uh. Missed the Hatching, I guess? Um. Most of it, anyway." He took an abortive step forward, as if he could block the hatchling from view. This proved impossible, as his wings made him quite a bit wider than Rodney; and also, everyone crowded on all the benches above and below was standing up and looking toward them, Smiths and Harpers and Holders and drudges and many, many dragonriders, the pale and tan cloud of their round faces all turned in their direction, wordlessly gawking at them.
Something clicked in Rodney's head, like a slipped cog in a clockwork mechanism suddenly jostled back into place, and his brain started turning again in a higher gear. Three facts were spit out immediately. One, that Smiths, like most craftsmen, were not generally expected to Impress dragons. Two, that precocious young journeymen Smiths with far better things to do than fly against Threadfall were especially not supposed to Impress bronze dragons, the biggest and strongest and rarest of the fighting colors.
Three, that he was never, ever, not in a thousand lifetimes, going to give this particular bronze dragon up, to anyone, no matter what.
Damn straight, the hatchling agreed with a snort. He nudged Rodney's hip with his muzzle. Now can we eat?
Rodney swallowed, then drew himself up and stared around at their impromptu audience. His mouth was dry, and his fists were closing and unclosing at his sides. As he made an effort to still them, the hatchling shoved his head under Rodney's hand. The spines along his neck, though spiky, were warm and pliant as Rodney drew his hand down them and scratched his blunt fingernails on the damp hide. The dragon purred with feline-like content, for all the scarlet hunger still whirling in his crystal eyes.
Rodney always had liked cats. He cleared his throat. "I know this is irregular," he said, pitching his voice to be heard, as he did when he was trying to talk some sense into a class of Smith apprentices (some of whom were older than him still, and needed to be shouted down quite a bit.) "But it seems like he's picked me, and you, uh, you know what they say about beggars and choosers and wherries of a feather and dragons picking people." There had to be some aphorism about that, he was pretty sure he had once tuned out Teyla telling him a poem along those lines. No one spoke up to argue the point, anyhow, though the way they all were watching him he assumed they were listening.
He stared around the crowd, avoiding looking up at where the Weyrleaders were standing, lest he lose his nerve. "So...I guess we're all going to have to live with it like this. Okay? Okay, great." Rodney nodded, and under his hand felt the dragon nod with him, with far more assurance. "Now, where can we get some dinner? We're both starving here. And the Hatching's done, isn't there supposed to be a feast? I was told—"
Over his head, where he was determinedly not looking, a sharply commanding soprano called down, "Bring meat for the hatchling; after climbing those steps he'll be too tired to make it to the feeding grounds until he's filled his belly. And bring a plate for the boy, too."
"Ah. Thanks," Rodney mumbled, and sat down heavily on the steps. The hatchling sat with him, legs folding in and wings flopped lazily on the stone, like he couldn't be bothered to furl them properly. Rodney's hand was still curled around the hatchling's spikes, and he could feel him breathing, feel the smooth, sinuous muscles of his neck shifting under the amazingly soft hide, bronze worked until it was smoother and suppler than leather. The hatchling's whirling red eyes were on him, gazing back at him like Rodney's own dull blue irises were as fascinating as those incredible crystal orbs.
"—Rodney?" Teyla inquired, , thoughtfully pushing his slates and hides out of the way before sitting down next to him.
He glanced over at her, a little dazed. Probably just hunger. He always was out of it when he went too long without eating. "Sorry, what?"
The anxiety in Teyla's face was fading, leaving a quiet feeling that might have been amusement, or something kinder. "I asked, what is his name, Rodney?"
"His?—whose—oh." Rodney shrugged. "I don't know. Do I have to choose something, or is there a conventional pattern beyond the obvious—"
It's Shepparth, the hatchling said. The food's on its way, right?
"It's coming, it's coming, hold your runnerbeasts, if I can wait then so can you."
You haven't been stuck in an egg for the past four months!
"Point," Rodney allowed, and then to Teyla, "He says his name's Shepparth." He frowned. "That's not really a traditional-sounding dragon name, is it."
"Traditional enough," Teyla said, smiling at him and the hatchling both, fondly.
"I guess. Though you'd think a bronze dragon would have a name that was more, you know. Classic."
Oh, because R'ney is such a classic rider's name.
Rodney winced. "Oh, they wouldn't—they won't. They can't make me. Can they? That's almost as bad as my real first—er, as the name my mother almost gave me—"
Teyla's laughter was a familiar sound, but the low chortle that rippled through his thoughts was new. And yet familiar all the same, like a number he had forgotten and had only just recalled, some key universal constant he should have been born knowing. Rodney, hearing it, couldn't help but laugh himself. He looked down at Shepparth, his dragon, felt himself smiling into those astonishing prismatic eyes, and thought that maybe he'd never stop.