«Dragonsong», Anne McCaffrey

At Half-Circle Sea Hold, in Benden Hold:

Yanus, Sea Holder,

Mavi, Sea Holder’s Lady

Menolly, their youngest child and daughter

Sella, the next oldest daughter

Alemi, the third son of six

Petiron, the old Harper

Elgion, the new Harper

Soreel, wife of First Holder

Old Uncle, Menolly’s great-grandfather

At Benden Weyr:

F’lar, Weyrleader—bronze Mnementh

Lessa, Weyrwoman—queen Ramoth

N’ton, a wingleader—bronze Lioth

T’gellan, wingleader for Half-Circle Sea Hold—bronze Monarth

T’gran, dragonrider—brown Branth

T’sel, dragonrider—green Trenth, bronze fire lizard Rill

F’nor, wing-second—brown Canth, gold fire lizard Grall

Brekke, queenrider—queen Wirenth, killed, bronze fire lizard Berd

Manora, Headwoman of the Weyr’s Lower Caverns

Felena, her second in charge

Oharan, Weyr Harper

Mirrim, fosterling of Brekke, (3 fire lizards)—green: Reppa, Lok; brown: Tolly

Sanra, in charge of children in living cavern

Masterharper Robinton

Masterminer Nicat

Menolly’s fire lizards:

gold: Beauty

bronze: Rocky, Diver

brown: Lazybones, Mimic, Brownie

blue: Uncle

green: Auntie One, Auntie Two

Foreword

Rukbat, in the Sagittarian Sector, was a golden G-type star. It had five planets, two asteroid belts, and a stray planet it had attracted and held in recent millennia. When men first settled on Rukbat’s third world and called it Pern, they had taken little notice of the stranger planet, swinging about its adopted primary in a wildly erratic elliptical orbit. For two generations, the colonists gave the bright red star little thought, until the path of the wanderer brought it close to its stepsister at perihelion.

Then, the spore life, which proliferated at an incredible rate on the Red Star’s wild surface, spun off into space and bridged the gap to Pern. The spores fell as thin threads on the temperate, hospitable planet, and devoured anything organic in their way, seeking to establish burrows in Pern’s warm earth from which to set out more voracious Threads.

The colonists suffered staggering losses in terms of people scored to death, and in crops and vegetation wiped out completely. Only fire killed Thread on land: only stone and metal stopped its progress. Fortunately it drowned in water, but the colonists could scarcely live on the seas.

The resourceful men cannibalized their transport ships and, abandoning the open southern continent where they had touched down, set about making the natural caves in the northern continent habitable. They evolved a two-phase plan to combat Thread. The first phase involved breeding a highly specialized variety of a life-form indigenous to their new world. The “dragons” (named for the mythical Terran beast they resembled) had two extremely useful characteristics: they could get from one place to another instantly by teleportation, and when they had chewed a phosphine bearing rock, they could emit a flaming gas. Thus the flying dragons could char Thread to ash midair and escape its ravages themselves.

Men and women with high empathy ratings or some innate telepathic ability were trained to use and preserve these unusual animals, partnering them in a life long and intimate relationship.

The original cave-Fort, constructed in the eastern face of the great West Mountain range, soon became too small to hold either the colonists or the great “dragons.” Another settlement was started slightly to the north, by a great lake, conveniently nestled near a cave-filled cliff. Ruatha Hold, too, became overcrowded in a few generations.

Since the Red Star rose in the East, it was decided to start a holding in the eastern mountains, provided suitable accommodations could be found. The ancient cave-pocked cones of extinct volcanoes in the Benden mountains proved so suitable to the dragonmen and women that they searched and found several more throughout Pern, and left Fort Hold and Ruatha Hold for the pastoral colonists, the holders.

However, such projects took the last of the fuel for the great stonecutters, originally thought to be used for the most diffident mining since Pern was light on metals, and any subsequent holds and weyrs were hand-hewn.

The dragons and their riders in their weyrs, and the people in the cave holdings, went about their separate tasks and each developed habits that became custom, which solidified into tradition as incontrovertible as law.

By the Third Pass of the Red Star, a complicated social, political and economic structure had developed to deal with the recurrent evil of Thread. There were now six Weyrs, pledged to protect all Pern, each Weyr having a geographical section of the northern continent literally under its wings. The rest of the population, the Holds, agreed to tithe to support the Weyrs, since these fighters, these dragonmen, did not have any arable land in their volcanic homes, nor did they have time for farming while protecting the planet from Passes of the Thread.