The three young riders, F’lar, F’nor and Lessa forced the Lord Holders and the Craftsmen to recognize their imminent danger and prepare the almost defenseless planet against Thread. But it was distressingly obvious that the scant two hundred dragons of Benden Weyr could not defend the wide-spread and sprawling settlements. Six full Weyrs had been needed in the olden days when the settled land had been much less extensive. In learning to direct her queen between one place and another, Lessa discovered that dragons could tele-port between times as well. Risking her life as well as Pern’s only queen, Lessa and Ramoth went back in time, four hundred Turns, to the days before the mysterious disappearance of the other five Weyrs, just after the last Pass of the Red Star had been completed.

The five Weyrs, seeing only the decline of their prestige and bored with inactivity after a lifetime of exciting combat, agreed to help Lessa, and Pern, and came forward to her time.

Dragonsong begins seven Turns after the Five Weyrs came forward.

Chapter 1

Drummer, beat, and piper, blow

Harper, strike, and soldier, go

Free the flame and sear the grasses

Till the dawning Red Star passes.

Almost as if the elements, too, mourned the death of the gentle old Harper, a southeaster blew for three days, locking even the burial barge in the safety of the Dock Cavern.

The storm gave Sea Holder Yanus too much time to brood over his dilemma. It gave him time to speak to every man who could keep rhythm and pitch, and they give him the same answer. They couldn’t properly honor the Old Harper with his deathsong, but Menolly could.

To which answer Yanus would grunt and stamp off. It rankled in his mind that he couldn’t give voice to his dissatisfaction with that answer, and his frustration. Menolly was only a girl: too tall and lanky to be a proper girl at that It galled him to have to admit that; unfortunately, she was the only person in the entire Half-Circle Sea Hold who could play any instrument as well as the old Harper. Her voice was true, her fingers clever on string, stick or pipe, and she knew the Death-song. For all Yanus could be certain, the aggravating child had been practicing that song ever since old Petiron started burning with his fatal fever.

“She will have to do the honor, Yanus,” his wife, Mavi, told him the evening the storm began to slacken. “The important thing is that Petiron is properly sung to rest. One does not have to record who did the singing.”

“The old man knew he was dying. Why didn’t he instruct one of the men?”

“Because,” replied Mavi with a touch of sharpness in her voice, “you would never spare him a man when there was fishing.”

“There was young Tranflty ... ”

“Whom you sent fostering to Ista Sea Hold.”

“Couldn’t that young lad of Forolt’s ... ”