Masterharper of Pern by Anne McCaffrey Page B

he missed his small brothers,” she added, glancing at her son with the look that meant he wasn’t to mention that Rulyar had been teaching him gitar fingering for the last few months. Robie would miss Rulyar; he hoped that his mother could find someone else to teach him.
    That night, he dreamed of dragons, sad and tired ones who were trying to tell him something, only he couldn’t hear them. It was as if his ears were clogged with the sands of the courtyard. And they wanted so very much for him to hear what they were saying—something especially for him to know! Then he saw Rulyar, clear as day, on a brown dragon, and Rulyar waved at him, urgently trying to say something, too, but the distance between them was too great for Robinton to hear.
    He was somewhat amazed, a sevenday later, when he heard that Rulyar had Impressed a brown dragon who called himself Garanath. The Fort Hold boy had Impressed a green.
    “That was to be expected,” he heard his father say, but he didn’t dare ask why that was expected.

 
    CHAPTER V
     
     
     
    R OBINTON WAS NINE when his father, looking for some musical score, came across those Merelan kept safely in her work-top drawer.
    “Whose scribblings are these?” he demanded, pausing to read the top one. Without even noticing that his wife was speechless, he looked at two more before tossing the tight roll back in the drawer. She seemed stuck in the doorway, an open message in one hand, a very odd expression on her face.
    “What are you looking for in my desk?” she asked, fighting to keep her voice reasonable. She was furious with him for discarding the—to her—priceless examples of her son’s musical genius, let alone going through her things.
    “Any blank sheets. I’ve run out,” he said, irritably pawing through the variety of objects, rather disgusted by the clutter. “You really ought to clean this out once in a while, Mere.”
    “I keep cleaned pieces there, in plain sight,” she said, enunciating each word with angry clarity and pointing with a stiff finger to the box on the top of her desk.
    “Oh, yes.” Lifting several out, he began to examine each one. “Mind if I borrow these?”
    “Only if you replace what you take.” She was having difficulty remaining calm and had mangled the message into a ball.
    “Well, no need to get huffy,” he said, suddenly noticing her stiff posture and angry glare. “I’ll get more at lunch.” He started out of the room and then turned back. “Who did write those tunes? You?” He smiled in an effort to appease her anger. “Not bad.”
    She was so angry at his condescending smile and tone that she blurted out the truth. “Your son wrote them.”
    Petiron blinked in astonishment. “Robie wrote those?” He started back to her worktop, but she moved swiftly from the door to stand in front of it. “My son is already writing music? You’re helping him, of course,” he added, as if that explained much.
    “He writes them with no help from anyone.”
    “But he must have had some help,” Petiron said, trying to reach around her for access to the drawer. “The scores were well-written, even if the tunes are a trifle childish.” Then his jaw dropped. “How long has he been writing tunes?”
    “If you were any sort of a father to him, paid any attention to what he does, ever asked him a single question about his classes,” Merelan said, letting rip all her long-bottled-up frustration, “you’d know he’s been writing
music
”—she stressed the word—“for several years. You’ve even heard the apprentices singing some of the melodies.”
    “I have?” Petiron frowned, unable to understand either of his mate’s shortcomings: not telling him about his own son’s musicality and not informing him that
apprentices
were learning songs written by his own son. “I have!” he said, thinking back to the tunefulness he’d heard from Washell’s classes. Of course, the songs were suitable to the abilities of the age