Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #8: Nerilka’s Story (1985)

Lleu: And welcome to Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but the only one by us.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and I, straight up, had never read this one until we did this podcast.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and this is actually the only Pern book that I owned in my own right, that was not my mother’s book, when I was a child.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, today we’re talking about Nerilka’s Story, a companion novel to Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, which, you will recall if you listened to the previous episode, was actually pretty good.

Lleu: Unfortunately, Nerilka’s Story is not very good. So, it’s set at the same time in the Sixth Pass, about 900-some years before the main timeline of the series, and it follows Nerilka, or Rill, who is a side character who shows up near the end of Moreta. She’s the daughter of Tolocamp, the Lord Holder of Fort Hold, who — we will talk about how he is portrayed in this novel, and also in comparison with Moreta. And she essentially, after observing her father’s management, or, as she sees it, mismanagement of the plague that is sweeping the continent and especially the fact that he, after her mother dies of the plague, immediately brings his mistress into the Hold and sets her up in the Lady Holder’s apartments. Nerilka doesn’t like that, and she decides to leave and go help the Healers, who Tolocamp has been presenting some obstacles to as they attempt to treat the plague. She eventually makes her way to Ruatha Hold, which was the main focus of Moreta, and at Ruatha Hold — she spends a few days there, helps Alessan, the Lord Holder, and his team with the runner beast, which is to say, horse, more or less, inoculation program. And then Moreta dies, and Alessan is bereft, and Nerilka’s like, “Well, you should marry me, and I will give you an heir. And then you can die of grief or commit suicide, once you have an heir.” And then the book kind of ends, after a little postscript where Nerilka’s like, “Yes, I love being pregnant, and Alessan is slightly less grief-stricken now. Yay.”

Lleu: This is apparently a happy ending. So the big question here that I think we both had is, what is the point of this book?

Tequila Mockingbird: Why does it need to exist? And I do feel like I can say the answer is, it doesn’t need to exist. It provides really nothing to the story of Moreta. It doesn’t enhance it; it doesn’t complicate it. It sort of answers the question that you might have felt, because we do learn that Nerilka has married Alessan at the very end of Moreta. We see the scene of the hatching of Orlith’s last clutch of eggs, and they’re there and already married at that point, which is, I don’t know, a month or so after Moreta’s died. And so if you, as the reader, finishing that book, having a lot of other complicated emotions, were like, “Wow, Alessan moved on fast, huh. Okay, interesting,” and you wanted a whole book about that, I guess you got what you wanted.

Tequila Mockingbird: But, uh, I don’t know that you would find it satisfying.

Lleu: The thing about this book is that Nerilka is mildly interesting in Moreta.

Lleu: She’s the rebellious daughter of Tolocamp; she lets Masterhealer into Fort Hold’s storage area in order to get medical supplies that Tolocamp has refused them, and then she’s like, “Yeah, I’m going into this internment camp that no one’s allowed in or out of. I’m going to pretend to be a drudge, and I’m going to bring in medicine, and I’m going to work there.” And then, later on, she’s helping Alessan with stuff, and it’s like, okay! That’s great. I don’t think we needed more. I don’t think we needed her whole backstory.

Tequila Mockingbird: Honestly, her backstory is a little bit disappointing, because I feel like when we’re introduced to her in Moreta, she’s a cool character because she’s really unexpected. The scene is from Capiam the Masterhealer’s point of view, and he’s just like, “Oh, a daughter.” He’s clearly dismissed her.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then she kind of pulls him aside, and is like, “Do you want a bunch of complicated medication?” And he’s like, “Huh? What?” And then, you see, this cool spy novel scene, almost, where she’s sneaking them into the back of the storage room and has a cover story in place, and she’s disguising herself. And I at that point was like, “Oh, cool! Does this otherwise dutiful-appearing Lord Holder’s daughter have a secret double life? She does this all the time?” Because she says, like, “Oh, yeah, it’s easy to sneak in and out of Fort Hold. No one pays attention to the servants” kind of thing, and it seemed like, “Oh, this is just who she is!”

Tequila Mockingbird: And this book sort of goes out of its way to say, no, she’s never been that before. The only interesting thing she does is that one paragraph that we saw from her in Moreta. That’s it. She’s never been interesting before or since.

Lleu: Yeah. Unlike some of the other books — some of the other books — where the companion novel, or the interquel, or whatever else you want to call it —

Lleu: — adds some depth to our understanding of a character or an event…this one really doesn’t, because, the thing is, one of the reasons Moreta effective was because Ruatha was really badly affected by the plague. So we get all of these really harrowing scenes of people at Ruatha managing the plague, managing the initial outbreak, managing, especially, the aftermath. But Fort Hold is, like — barely gets it.

Lleu: So Nerilka’s like, “Ugh, Tolocamp is mismanaging this.” I’m like, “There’s nothing to mismanage.”

Tequila Mockingbird: The thread that to me was the most interesting at the beginning, and did provide some of that horror, is that Nerilka understands the drum messages. She’s been taught to interpret drum messages, so she can understand, ’cause Harpers and Healers are both based in Fort Hold, so they’re constantly getting these messages like, “Oh, this many dragonriders have died at Igen. This many dragonriders have died at Telgar. This many Holds aren’t responding to drum messages in Keroon.” And so she’s kind of constantly dealing with a new wave of information, and I was definitely thrown back into that COVID-19, you couldn’t stop refreshing and reading the news, even though all of the news was bad feeling, right —

Tequila Mockingbird: — of being in quarantine and being bombarded with updates that weren’t good and you couldn’t stop. And there’s scenes where she’s trying to sleep, and she’s like, “I wanted to plug my ears, because I couldn’t help but translate the drum messages,” and that was so interesting and compelling, and I, like a fool, thought that there would be a narrative payoff for that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I was anticipating like, “Oh, when Moreta dies, she’s gonna hear that drum message of, like, ‘This terrible tragedy has occurred,’ and she’s gonna have to break the news to Alessan, or she’s gonna have to reckon with it when everyone else in the room won’t know what happened yet,” and that could be really cool and interesting.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then that fully isn’t what happens. Alessan just randomly, psychically knows…?

Tequila Mockingbird: Even though he’s not a dragon rider, and she isn’t a dragonrider yet, although there’s sort of a hint that Oakina is sensitive, and so is Alessan, ’cause he could have Impressed, but no one else that I know of just gets to be fully psychic, other than Lessa, who, as the name — as you pointed out — indicates probably is a descendant of Alessan’s, eventually, a thousand years later.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s just so frustrating, ’cause I agree, that scene with the drums was the one, I think, really effective scene in, frankly, the whole book, as she’s like, “I can’t even plug my ears, because I’ll still like feel the vibrations, and I’ll still know what’s happening.”

Lleu: On the one hand, she’s doing the Pern equivalent of doom scrolling, but, on the other hand, she literally cannot stop doomscrolling, because the messages keep coming. And it was very much, this is an experience that I do not have a directly analogous experience of in my own life. The experience of doomscrolling or of seeing COVID news come in is somewhat similar, but it’s not as visceral, because it’s not embodied in the same way. She cannot stop perceiving these messages, physically.

Lleu: And that’s just not how mass communication works or really has worked at any point.

Lleu: So that scene to me was very much, “Oh, yeah, McCaffrey has successfully conveyed a speculative experience that I don’t have a good direct analog for in a really powerful way.” And then, as you say, it’s not followed up on at all.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I will challenge that mass communication in parts of sub-Saharan Africa has been by drum at various points in history.

Tequila Mockingbird: Another great question about this book: who is the audience for it? Who wants to read this? Who is the person who read Moreta and was like, “Gosh, Nerilka! She’s so cool! I have to have a whole book about her”? Because it sort of feels like this was intended to be a return to the structure of the series as it had previously existed, in that there is this heterosexual, monogamous, romantic relationship — with question marks on some, if not all, of that — enshrined in the ending of the story. We do come back to a younger protagonist; more of that YA before YA existed energy, instead of Moreta as an adult.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. So I think it is, at least superficially, much more similar to Dragonflight, Dragonquest, Dragondrums.

Lleu: Yeah, and I had said. I think, before we both started rereading this, that I think Nerilka’s Story is essentially a teen novel. And as I was rereading it, I was like, “Oh, I guess it’s not,” ’cause she is in her twenties. I think she’s in her early twenties, but she’s fully like an adult.

Lleu: She’s older than Tolocamp’s mistress, who is old enough to have several children and to have been more or less in charge of the smallholding that she was part of. Nerilka’s maybe 25?

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think some of that is that it is a story about striking out on your own and defying your parents, which is very much part and parcel of the teen narrative.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we do get this big sense that Nerilka hasn’t had any opportunities for real independence. The book starts with her not being allowed to go to the Gather at Ruatha, which ends up saving her life. Because she’s made her father angry, or she was rude to her mom, or something.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so she’s grounded right. It’s a very teenage experience. And in a lot of ways she doesn’t have adult agency until she takes it, until she runs away from home.

Tequila Mockingbird: If she had become a healer it would be like, “Wow, yet another woman who’s a healer? And then just gets married and stops being a Healer? This is such a new and different plotline, McCaffrey.” But at least it would be something.

Lleu: The thing is, I think we both said roughly, the first 80% of this book, it still seems like it’s going somewhere.

Lleu: Like, Nerilka starts off, and she tells us, “I have no future in Fort Hold. I want to leave. I want to be able to be my own person. I want to see the world. I want to see Ruatha specifically, because my best friend slash foster-sister slash woman I’m maybe in love with —”

Lleu: “— lived at Ruatha and was married to this man, who she said was super nice.” And then she does that.

Lleu: And it seems like, “Oh, this is great! She’s gonna get to be a person. She’s gonna get to realize her dreams. She’s gonna get to escape. She’s gonna get to see the world.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And we get the plot of Moreta, which, although we’ve already read it, it’s not a bad plot. There’s a plague, it’s stressful, it’s exciting, we’re making a vaccine. And then…it kind of feels like the plot of Moreta ended and McCaffrey just had no ideas about what to do next. ’Cause I feel like this book would have been so much more interesting if it retrod less of the plot of Moreta and picked up more in the, what does happen after? How do you pick up after a plague? How do you deal with the aftermath?

Tequila Mockingbird: And maybe actually show us Nerilka and Alessan’s relationship if you want us to feel like their marriage is a happy ending.

Tequila Mockingbird: Maybe actually give us any real development of what you’re putting as the central component of the finale of your story, instead of montaging it for us.

Lleu: Yeah. The novel is written in first person, and there are some tense issues, because it seems like she hadn’t 100% grasped the relation between present tense and first person narration and the past tense that the bulk of the novel is narrated in. But it ends with this jump forward to a few years after the end of the Pass, which we’re told in Moreta is about eight years away. And so after this tumultuous beginning to their relationship, Nerilka is like, “Yes, now, eight years later, Alessan does love me, for real this time.” And it’s like, well, you could have shown us any of that, and instead we get Nerilka telling us how much she loves being Alessan’s housewife and taking care of the Hold and she’s “happiest when she’s pregnant.” We’re explicitly told that. And she never suffers any bad experiences, and it’s just like — she’s a tradwife influencer! Why is this happening? Why are we supposed to think this is good and engaging and fun? It’s not; it’s horrible!

Tequila Mockingbird: The thing that is the most frustrating about this is, even if, okay, that’s not my personal preference of an interesting narrative, McCaffrey could have written a book where Nerilka was desperate to get married and wanted to be a Holder’s wife and in charge of a Hold and wanted to kind of be in charge of Fort Hold and have that administrative access. Because being the wife of a Lord Holder is also a full-time administrative job, and obviously they weren’t really hiring it for it so much as it was a job you accidentally ended up with, but it is a job that many people could hypothetically find engaging and fulfilling. And so, if this was the happy ending you were building towards, you could set that up and make that part of her character. And instead, it just seems like, that isn’t what she wants for most of the book, and then suddenly she has it, and she’s super happy about it. Frankly, in a way that really reminded me of the end of Dragondrums and the way suddenly Piemur’s like, “Actually, I never wanted to be a regular Harper. I wanted to wander around in Southern Continent with a random baby horse.” And I’m just like, “You did?” I, as a reader, don’t feel like that makes sense. And you can have a twist like that, but then the reader should be looking back and going, “Oh, of course that is what you wanted all along!” or “Oh, that does make sense.” And here I’m just left as reader being like, “Huh. Did I read this book wrong?”

Lleu: I was thinking about Jaxom, too, because so much of this book is — Nerilka’s like, “Yeah,. I’m not really an ideal woman. I’m too like masculine. I’m not very attractive. I’m too interested in a craft, being a Healer.” And then at the end of the novel is her being like, “Actually. I’m just going to be everything that I’m supposed to be as woman. I will be a dutiful wife and a good administrator and bear lots of children and be happy doing that forever.” This is the same as Jaxom being like, “Who am I? There’s all these other things I want to do, all these other things I want to try out being. And now I’ll just be the person that I’ve been expected to be since I was born.” Okay. Great. Really fun.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it makes me question, is this that McCaffrey wants to tell a more subversive story, or a more complicated story, and doesn’t know how to do that, and doesn’t think the publishing market is there for that, and doesn’t trust her reader to enjoy that? Or is it that she doesn’t actually have any interest in telling a story that subverts the status quo, but she wants a twist and doesn’t know how to execute? Where is this coming from?

Lleu: And it’s especially perplexing, because, as we said last time, Moreta is really good!

Lleu: And Moreta is doing something that’s genuinely different and interesting, and then this is the next novel that she wrote.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it does honestly make me wonder, did Moreta not sell well? Was it that McCaffrey went out on a limb and tried something a little different and it wasn’t well received and she was like, “Oh, okay; I guess that’s not what the public wants. I’m gonna go back to telling the story that. will support me as a writer”? Because, in a lot of ways, to me it felt like Moreta was something that McCaffrey wrote when she could take a risk that it wouldn’t sell, because she had achieved some financial stability. But even in the eighties you did have to keep publishing; your books did have to continue to sell —

Tequila Mockingbird: — in order to be a full-time author and a single parent, although at this point I suspect her kids are adults. But I don’t have a sense of what the market looked like at that point.

Lleu: So, I don’t, obviously, have sales figures off the top of my head, but I will say, Moreta was a nominee for the Hugo for best novel.

Lleu: And insofar as the Hugo is voted by people at Worldcon, I think it’s probably fair to take that as a measure of sales.

Lleu: People who are voting are the people who are buying and reading sci-fi books that year. So if enough people read Moreta for it to get a Hugo nomination, I think it probably was doing well, or well enough, anyway. Nerilka was not, I notice.

Tequila Mockingbird: That just proves that the reading public isn’t completely stupid.

Lleu: Yeah. But it was a TIME Magazine bestseller and a New York Times bestseller, although it only reached number 11.

Lleu: But also, buying the book is not necessarily the same as reading the book.

Tequila Mockingbird: Fair, fair. And reading the book is not the same as enjoying the book, as we can both prove. So it feels like, if she genuinely wanted to tell a story that intersected with Moreta but that was also giving us something new, you could have done that, and it seems as if she didn’t want to do that. It leaves me to wonder what she was trying to achieve in writing this book.

Tequila Mockingbird: We do get some interesting stuff, little world-building snippets. For example, Nerilka refers to something as an adjective, so she knows what parts of speech are, which is fascinating, and combined with the fact that Moreta made it clear that Harper’s Hall have an etymological dictionary, I’m fascinated to know what it is that the Harpers have thought was worth preserving for 1,400 years, and whether or not it includes other random tidbits about grammar? Question mark? Linguistics?

Lleu: Yeah. I was joking beforehand, do they have Schoolhouse Rock? Are those the teaching ballads? But now I’m a little more serious. Do they have Schoolhouse Rock? Is the preposition song, “Conjunction Junction,” among the teaching ballads? Surely not, but also, why does Nerilka know what an adjective is?

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s also in contrast — and obviously, ultimately, the extradiegetic answer to all of this is that McCaffrey put in the stuff she wanted to put in and left out the stuff that she wanted to leave out, and we can bend over backwards trying to make it make diegetic sense, and that that won’t necessarily get us anywhere — but, nonetheless, I have to ask, they put all of this time and attention into retaining that, and they don’t have any form of cataloguing on their historical archives? Everyone in Moreta and Nerilka who is trying to figure out if a plague has ever happened before in history and, if so, how you treat one is just like, “Oh, well; I guess the only possible way to find this answer is to read every single record that we have in chronological order, starting with the ones that are almost incomprehensibly deteriorated and working forward from that. There’s no other possible way to find any information out.” And I can, off the top of my head, think of four different low-effort, cataloguing systems that would solve this kind of problem. So we must conclude that — I think I said this earlier — all of the archivists died tragically within the first few years of arrival on Pern. Possibly they were all caught outside in some kind of department picnic when Thread fell for the first time.

Lleu: Yeah, it’s unfortunately only get more infuriating. I know that we’re both also kind of in the middle of Renegades, and I’m also in the middle of Dragonsdawn —

Lleu: — as we’re working our way through things, and I have a lot of questions about information storage decisions. And what kinds of information —

Lleu: — merited longer-term storage and what kinds of information, for some reason, did not.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think there’s something interesting to say about the way that this book — and Moreta — treats vaccination as this long-lost concept which has to be effortfully rediscovered or miraculously remembered. And that seems to suggest that it hasn’t come up before, even though I think we do know that there have been previous plagues on Pern. And I think, unfortunately, some of the answer to why this is so rare is that McCaffrey had a eugenicist slant to her world-building, in that she seemed to believe that illnesses and many disabilities would just be gone in the far distant future, or that they wouldn’t be brought to Pern somehow.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I think it’s fascinating and baffling that she would explicitly have a zoonosis plague — it’s an animal sickness that jumps to humans — and yet she’s like, “Don’t worry, though none of the alien flora or fauna is ever gonna result in this.”

Lleu: None of the local flora or fauna, except for the local flora that we know causes illnesses, because it’s shown up before and will show up in more detail again.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think we also see — she seems very pro-herbal medicine, and what I tend to think of as a very typical American obsession with what they think “Celtic folklore” is, like, “Oh, if you just have the right combinations of herbs, actually, everything’s fine,” and there’s some nonsensical faux-historic “pagan” cultural past that promises this in some way.

Lleu: Yeah. It’s something that we see even in Moreta a little bit, when this first comes up, there’s a comment to the effect of “Homeopathic remedies aren’t working. We need empirical treatment,” and then subsequent uses of “empirical” seem like she didn’t fully understand what that meant, because the instruction is to “treat the symptoms empirically,” which she seems to take to mean, “treat the symptoms on a symptom-by-symptom basis, because there is no current known cure or treatment for the plague as a whole.” But the first time it’s used, it does seem like they’re saying, “Oh, we can’t just do herbal medicine for this; we need to generate an actual, kind of, scientific medical treatment for it.” That then is just not followed through on.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, to be fair, it’s a virus. We’re told that this is a flu virus, so there’s no antibiotic that’s going to work on that; you just have to vaccinate and build up the immune system and treat the symptoms.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, I guess we now have some ways to do this, but it would not be fair to expect her in the ’80s to understand that modern medicine would eventually get there 20 years later.[1]

Tequila Mockingbird: But it does feel like it’s telling us some interesting things, both about the diegetic experience, the world-building of Pern, and about McCaffrey’s choices in building that world.

Lleu: Yeah. Speaking of the eugenics, one of the other things that does come up here is once again, drudges — the servant caste, essentially — are again portrayed as people with some kind of developmental or intellectual disability.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is a great world-building choice that definitely doesn’t need time, attention, or thought into it, McCaffrey; that’s fine. You can just drop that and walk away and not engage with it. And that’s okay.

Lleu: I hate it. But unfortunately it comes up again in the ’90s, I believe, so…

Lleu: So, speaking of things that are bad, let’s get into gender politics!

Lleu: So we talked a little bit about Nerilka specifically, and the conclusion of Nerilka’s Story being essentially Nerilka becoming a tradwife, but there’s also other stuff.

Tequila Mockingbird: There is a very interesting narrative thread focusing on Nerilka’s appearance, the fact that she’s not pretty. And it’s said that none of her sisters are pretty, that they’re not an attractive bunch. It’s interesting because, to me, this doesn’t really seem to achieve anything other than I guess a world-building element, in giving us some information about beauty standards on Pern in the Sixth Pass and providing, again, this very stereotypical teen novel “Oh, I’m just the awkward wallflower girl. I’m not pretty” and then she learns to be confident cliché plotline. Because it doesn’t actually seem to affect any of the plot in any way. She’s unmarried at the start of the book, but that is explicitly not about her appearance.

Tequila Mockingbird: She had an offer of marriage that she wanted to accept, and her dad turned it down because he thought he could do better. And then she clearly has feelings of inferiority about her looks, and since this is a first person narration, we get to hear about it as the reader a lot, but it doesn’t really meaningfully seem to affect how anyone else treats her.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s not like Desdra is like, “Oh, wow! You could train as an apprentice Healer, ’cause, gosh, it’s not like you’ll get married with looks like yours!”

Tequila Mockingbird: She, in fact, is explicitly, like, “Well, I don’t want to take you seriously, and I’m not willing to train you as a Healer because you’re the daughter of a Lord Holder and so you’re gonna get married. This is just a recreation, not a life’s calling.”

Lleu: The one thing the one other thing that it does do is explicitly connect Sixth Pass, at least, but also kind of implicitly Pernese broader beauty standards with racialized traits. In particular, we’re told explicitly and at some length that blond hair is good, blond hair is beautiful, and if you have brown hair, like, euh, that’s not great, and if you have black hair, ugh, you might as well just go home. It’s ugly.

Tequila Mockingbird: And there’s also a very like gendered element to it, ’cause she spends quite a lot of time and energy lamenting the fact that her brothers are more feminine-looking than she and her sisters are, and that it’s kind of like, ugh, a curse of the genetics, that their parents are both attractive, but neither of the sets of children are attractive because they both look a little gender-nonconforming somehow, or not living up to a gendered beauty standard. And, truly, the idea that thousands and thousands of years in the future we’re gonna be worried about how long people’s eyelashes are — that’s not a future I aspire towards, you know?

Lleu: Yeah. It’s so bizarre, except insofar as, as we saw even in Moreta, the most gay-friendly book in the series by a wide margin — well, by a margin, I would say, anyway — she still clearly was attached to this idea of what “real” masculinity and “real” femininity are. And in some ways I feel like “real” femininity, quote-unquote, has a little more flexibility because there is the way that women from Holds are feminine — like, Nerilka’s mother is described as attractive. Presumably she was not attractive in the same way that Moreta, a woman who’s been doing difficult physical labor during Threadfall for her entire working adult life is attractive, and, in fact, Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern explicitly has Moreta reflect on the differences between her appearance, as someone who’s more muscular, because she’s doing physical labor all the time, than Hold women. So there’s a little more flexibility there, but also still you can’t go too far. If you’re too masculine, too something, then you’re maybe not quite a woman in the same way that blue and green riders are not quite men.

Tequila Mockingbird: Moreta’s allowed to have short hair, but she has to be sad about it, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: She has to be like, “Oh, I wish, but, okay, it’s just not practical…” Instead of just being like, “Yeah, I look great with short hair.” And I think in some ways it’s possible that this is a vestige of it reading like a book from the ’80s. And that’s just not as true today to a contemporary reader. I mean, I also don’t know that we are absolutely typical in our opinions and experiences of aesthetic appreciation and gendered appearance. But I think it is interesting in the specter of queer female desire that I do think is present in this book more significantly than in any of the other Pern books.

Tequila Mockingbird: That Nerilka is not a traditionally feminine woman, and we learn about Suriana, who is Alessan’s dead wife and also Nerilka’s teenhood friend and who does seem to exemplify this very commanding and attractive femininity. She was always the pretty one, the funny one, the charming one, the one who made Nerilka prettier and funnier and more charming and she is clearly mourned by Alessan, by Nerilka…

Lleu: Re Suriana, specifically, one of the things that I thought was extremely striking was that Nerilka gets to Ruatha, and once people find out who she is, Oklina, Alessan’s younger sister, tells Nerilka some stories about Suriana that Nerilka hadn’t heard, and Nerilka’s perspective is like, “It’s such a relief to be able to talk about this person who meant so much to me.” Because no one at home was interested. No one at home wanted to hear about this woman they’d never met, this woman they didn’t care about at all. She clearly cared deeply and intensely for Suriana.

Tequila Mockingbird: “I wanted to see, from whatever distance, the man who had captured the love and adoration of Suriana of Misty Hold—Suriana, whose parents had fostered me; Suriana, my dearest friend, who had been effortlessly all that I was not and who had shared the wealth of her friendship unstintingly with me. Alessan could not have grieved more than I for her death, for that event had taken from my life the one life I had valued above my own. To say that part of me had died with Suriana was no exaggeration. We had understood each other as effortlessly as if we had been dragon and rider, and[2] would often laugh as one, uttered the observation the other had been about to make, could instantly fathom each other’s mood, and shared the same cycle to the minute, no matter what distance separated us.

Tequila Mockingbird: “In those happy Turns at Misty Hold, I had even managed to appear prettier in a contentment reflecting Suriana’s vividness. Certainly I was braver in her company.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it goes on to talk about Suriana’s many virtues, but it’s a very interesting comparison to make of, “as between a dragon and a rider,” because we’ve been repeatedly told that that is the purest kind of love, or the most unconditional, overwhelming love that is possible to exist on Pern.

Lleu: Moreta explicitly compares her feelings for Orlith with her feelings for Alessan and is like, “There just is no comparison. I care way more about Orlith than I could ever care about Alessan.”

Lleu: So, first of all, that. The other thing that really jumped out at me there is the “often saying what the other person was thinking” —

Lleu: — because that’s how she describes her relationship with Alessan at the end, as evidence of how in love they are.

Lleu: Is that “We often have the same thoughts. We finish each other’s sentences.” Oh, just like you did with Suriana! Huh!

Lleu: I also, on that on this point, wanted to flag two other passages that are not about Suriana directly, but are about Nerilka interacting with other women. One is the first time that she sees Moreta after the plague slash during the plague. She arrives at Ruatha Hold just as Moreta is preparing to depart with a blue rider, because Orlith is still in the Hatching Ground, and she says,

Lleu: “So, for the first time, I traded places with Moreta. I would have liked to have sustained the contact then, for she had a manner about her that made one get to know her better. She appeared considerably less aloof than she had seemed in the Hold. As Arith began his preparatory little run, Moreta did look back over her shoulder. But it couldn’t have been at me.”

Lleu: And then, similarly, immediately afterwards she meets Oklina for the first time. Oklina asks her about what kinds of medicine she brought:

Lleu: “‘Would you have anything for the racking cough?’ the girl asked, her dark eyes[3] shining. Such a shining could scarcely be for me, or for the provision of cough syrup, but I did not know until much later how these people had spent the unusual hour that had just ended moments before we arrived.”

Lleu: Nerilka clearly desperately wants a woman to look at her the way Moreta looks at Alessan, or the way Oklina looks when she’s thinking about B’lerion. She wants that; she wants to get to know Moreta better. Nerilka’s a lesbian, in a way that I did not remember at all, although I think, when I was looking back at things, I had possibly flagged this last time around, in, like, 2021 when I was last making my way through these books. And in a way that is then immediately abandoned for tradwife!Nerilka —

Lleu: — sort of, anyway — and then also never happens at any other point in the series. The closest thing is something we talked about in Dragonsinger, when Menolly and Audiva exchange their best friend vows.

Tequila Mockingbird: To me, at least, that complicates, but also the text itself complicates, the question of, how much is Nerilka really into Alessan? She clearly likes him, and she clearly respects him. And she repeatedly talks about being impressed by what he has done to support Ruatha, to try and pick himself back up and pick his Hold back up after the plague. She feels sorry for his losses — but I don’t really get a sense that she loves him, because we really don’t get that time. I’m perfectly willing to believe that the text intends us to know that she loves him, and it certainly says the words, but it just doesn’t feel like it. It feels like they hang out and are friends, and then he’s overwhelmed with devastating grief, and she’s like, “Oh, gosh! We have to save his life somehow.” Specifically the line we get is:

Tequila Mockingbird: “My own anguish spoke then, not the sensible, patient, dutiful member of the Fort Hold Horde, but Suriana’s friend, Alessan’s newest holder, and someone who valued him far more than she should. Any sorrow may be borne. Time will heal the deepest hurt of heart—but time must be won.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And she basically tells him he doesn’t have the right to die without an heir, because it’s going to destabilize Ruatha Hold. And then he’s like, “Okay, great. You’re gonna be the one who marries me.” And she seems very surprised. He doesn’t make the offer in a particularly kind way. And it really feels more like she acquiesces because she doesn’t have a great way to say no than because she’s particularly excited to be married to him.

Lleu: Yeah, I would say, it is clear that she is, to some extent, attracted to him.

Lleu: Because we get a couple scenes earlier on where they’re sitting next to each other at dinner, and he keeps accidentally kind of bumping into her, and she’s like, “Ooh, I get a little something every time he touches me. What’s that about? I must just be drunk.” But in a way that the narration is clearly like, “Mm…you’re not just drunk, Nerilka.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s not like this is without precedent, right? We talked about this: this is a romance structure, the “Oh, he’s hot, but I don’t want to marry him. Oops! We just have to get married for reasons.” But even the sloppiest romance, even F’lar and Lessa, then put some narrative work into showing me their interactions and their triumph and their engagement in each other, in a way that this book just doesn’t, because then it ends.

Lleu: Yeah. And the thing that really gets me is that she has been at Ruatha Hold for a whopping three days.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then, less than a month later, she’s like, well —

Tequila Mockingbird: “Now he was vital to my heart and soul in a way I never could have anticipated in the wildest flight of fancy. I treasured every casual touch” —

Tequila Mockingbird: So now we’re just informed, “Wow! She’s in love with him.” But I don’t buy it, because it’s truly been four pages since the last passage that I read. And McCaffrey is normally very good at sweeping me away in the narrative. I don’t like F’lar, but when I’m rereading Dragonflight I want him to love Lessa, because that’s what Lessa deserves.

Tequila Mockingbird: She’s earned that narrative prize of his respect. And here I’m just like, “Uh, Nerilka, hun, you could do better.”

Lleu: Yeah. With, like, literally any woman. You know who Nerilka should be with? Desdra.

Tequila Mockingbird: Very much, yes; I would fully read that. But also just — as somebody with an independent role in Ruatha Hold that she’s proud of, which is what she was going to have before Moreta dies and Alessan proposes to her.

Lleu: Yeah. Truly what Nerilka should be at Ruatha Hold is Alessan’s steward, because that’s what she’s good at, that’s what she enjoys doing, and his steward’s dead!

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. But she can’t possibly just have a job; that can’t be a happy ending.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, that is interesting to contemplate, because, yes, this comes right after Moreta, which challenges it, but Moreta isn’t a happy ending. So she can give women a complicated and interesting sad ending, but it seems like the only happy ending McCaffrey is comfortable with is marriage.

Tequila Mockingbird: Even when women have a prospect of an independent professional life, they have to also be married to a husband who fundamentally is just their professional aspirations embodied in a person in the way that F’lar is just dragonriderness, and Lessa marries him, and Sebell is just Harperness and Menolly marries him. And — you know what I mean?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, yeah. The other thing that I think I’m interested in teasing out of this book is, how much are the social mores of Pern, specifically in regard to marriage, different in the Sixth Pass, as compared to the Ninth Pass? And how much is McCaffrey just being inconsistent in her world-building for narrative effect?

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I thought I knew what was going on, and I thought what was going on was that Lord Holders have one acknowledged legal wife, but they also frequently just have sexual relationships with a large number of women who are their legal dependents. This is very normalized, and it is not shameful for those women to have sexual relationships and bear children for their Lord Holder, because any child of the Lord Holder can inherit. And there’s perhaps a slight preference for a child of a legal marriage, but it’s actually more about who is competent and so you’re not supposed to have recreational sex as a Hold woman, unless it is with your Lord Holder. Cool. That’s pretty consistent across the Ninth Pass. I don’t love that world-building — as you noted, there’s more than a tinge of Orientalism in it, in that she’s co-opting the harem without actually understanding the legal structures of concubinage, but okay.

Lleu: It also sets up legal marriage in an interesting way, in a way that Moreta and Nerilka do elaborate a bit on, where the criterion for a Lord Holder choosing his legal wife is, who’s going to be a good Hold administrator, because the Lady Holder is responsible for a lot of the day-to-day Hold administration and needs to be able to do that, whereas his sexual partners and mothers of any other children don’t necessarily need to have that ability.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. And I think that’s an interesting world-building element.

Tequila Mockingbird: But then, when Nerilka’s mother, the Lady Holder of Fort, dies, there’s this whole plot thread where his mistress is being installed, and it’s like, okay, so what does that mean? Because “mistress” has a very specific historical — definition is may-, connotation is maybe better.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because it’s about the fact that it is a relationship outside of marriage in which a woman is being financially supported, illicitly, in order for that sexual relationship.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so, how is she his mistress and living outside of the Hold in a separate Hold instead of just being, like, “Oh, this is one of the Lord Holder’s many women,” and it talks about like, “Oh, she wouldn’t dare to show her face in the Hold until my mother is dead,” or, “It’s indecent to bring her here so soon after my mother dies…”

Lleu: Well, and, like, Pendra “tolerated” it or, like, “tried to ignore it.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Right, and that is all copied and pasted from a narrative of European historical fiction, talking about, call it the 1500s through to the 1800s, maybe? And it just feels like, was it that you wanted that specific emotional beat —

Tequila Mockingbird: — with Nerilka not liking this woman and feeling condescended to and disrespected and wanting to leave, and so McCaffrey’s just pulling from a trope that people are familiar with and didn’t think about that? Or is it that the alteration of marriage was gradual across Pern’s history and at this point in the Sixth Pass we don’t yet have the openness to Lord Holders just having multiple sexual partners who are their dependents, and it is still illicit or complicated in some way? And that maybe post the plague that is part of what changes, because — I don’t know if it’s actually textual, or if it was in some kind of interview, but McCaffrey does say at some point that after the Sixth Pass there is a noticeable erosion of women’s rights and roles on Pern, because the depopulation meant that women needed to give up Craft careers in order to have bajillions of children.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so I would believe that after this Lord Holder started to be like, “No, I have to have multiple children with multiple different women, because I have to repopulate, or I have to always have an heir; what if you know there’s another plague?” and that that shifts the social mores around marriage.

Lleu: Yeah, there is a third possibility that I also want to discuss. But along this train of thought, the other question mark thing for me was, there’s a reference early on when Nerilka is describing her appearance and how plain she and her sisters are, she does make a reference to the fact that their half-siblings are more attractive than they are, and we know that Tolocamp’s mistress has a few children — some of whom may actually be children of Tolocamp’s son —

Tequila Mockingbird: Not engaging with that right now. I don’t have the bandwidth.

Lleu: But given that Tolocamp’s mistress is younger is younger than Nerilka, it seemed to me like this was implying that they have older half-siblings.

Lleu: Which would, in fact, suggest that there’s other stuff going on, and then, third possibility, when she’s described as mistress that implies some kind of qualitative difference between Tolocamp’s relationship with her and the “normal” quote-unquote kinds of sexual relationships that Lord Holders are —

Lleu: — able or expected to have with their dependents who are not their legal wife.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, because it does seem like Anella some expectation that Tolocamp will marry her.

Tequila Mockingbird: She is clearly eager to be his wife and have that social and political power, and, in fact, so eager to have it that she jeopardizes her ability to exercise it by irritating every single person in Fort Hold, and it’s clear that we’re supposed to think she has poor management skills, and she’s not like suited for the job of being Tolocamp’s wife, completely separately from like Nerilka’s personal antipathy.

Lleu: Yeah, so one of the things that I was turning over in my head as I read this is, is the problem that there was something specific about Tolocamp’s relationship with Annella that was. inappropriate, that maybe he was sort of too demonstrative or too obvious about it —

Lleu: — or was more attentive to her than to his legal wife, and it was violating the terms of propriety? But we don’t get provided with this information. This is just me trying to make sense of the relationship between Sixth Pass social structures and Ninth Pass social structures. And it is entirely possible that it’s just different.

Lleu: — and made me think, “Oh, maybe it is just something specific about Anella and not a change overall?”

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, there’s also just the fact that, if Anella is younger than Nerilka, it does not seem implausible to me that Tolocamp would have had previous extramarital partners. He could have been a serial – not monogamist, but a serial mistress-ist, and that she’s just like the latest mistress.

Tequila Mockingbird: In a way that might suggest one partner at a time outside of marriage pursued recreationally, instead of having a bunch of women that he has children with.

Lleu: But then the question for me is, why doesn’t Nerilka talk about any of the other women, then?

Lleu: If this is an ongoing problem. But it seems like it’s just Anella who is the issue.

Lleu: We’re back to our question that we had when talking about Moreta, which is, how are we supposed to interpret Tolocamp.

Lleu: And I think we can all agree it’s extremely sleazy to bring your mistress into the Hold and “deputize” her, is the word that’s used.

Tequila Mockingbird: Literally he puts her in his dead wife’s bedroom two days after his wife dies.

Lleu: Which is also interesting because it implies that his dead wife’s bedroom is not his bedroom.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, yeah, no, that’s very clear and very normal, I would say, for any kind of pseudomedieval —

Tequila Mockingbird: — European aesthetic. Part of it is just, you have your own separate dressing room, and a room for your maid, and a bathroom, or whatever. And often there would be adjoining doors, but think of it more as a connecting hotel suite than anything else.

Lleu: Okay, fair enough then, yeah. In any case, the question is, in Moreta Tolocamp is criticized for breaking quarantine —

Lleu: — he’s at Ruatha Hold when the plague breaks out, and he calls for a dragonrider to take him back, and K’lon, who has had the plague and recovered from it, conveys him back to Fort Hold, so that he can resume the administration of the Hold in this period of crisis. When he gets back, we’re told that he self-isolates for the incubation period of the disease —

Lleu: — and then continues to administer the Hold, and he seems to have some fundamental misunderstandings of quarantine and disease protocols, insofar as he then refuses to let people in or out of the internment camps where he’s keeping people who might be contaminated or contagious.

Tequila Mockingbird: But he does that far longer than the incubation period would require.

Lleu: Yeah. So there’s definitely some things that he could be criticized for, but also there are plenty of things that it’s like, he didn’t do anything actually wrong here. He’s just really sleazy.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. And Nerilka definitely blames him, or feels like he abandoned her mother and sisters to their deaths, and while I certainly understand why she would feel that way, and if he doesn’t have even a little bit of survivor’s guilt he’s kind of a jerk, but we are told that they are offered the opportunity to return from Ruatha with him and self-isolate similarly, and they turn that down and choose to stay in Ruatha Hold.

Tequila Mockingbird: Right. It seems like maybe they weren’t completely clear on how serious the sickness would become. It’s also implied that maybe Lady Pendra thinks that this is yet another way to convince Alessan to marry one of her daughters.

Tequila Mockingbird: But also they literally die because they’re nursing the people who have been infected at Ruatha.

Lleu: Yeah and we are explicitly told that Nerilka learned her medical training from Pendra. So it seems reasonable to me to think that Pendra as a trained nurse, effectively —

Lleu: — would have said, “Okay. A lot of people are getting sick here. I am equipped to handle this situation. It seems like things are under control at Fort Hold. I trust my son to manage the situation, and then, of course, the Tolocamp is going back.”

Lleu: “That’ll be fine. They don’t need me. I’ll stay here and help here.” And then dies of the plague, because no one knew exactly how bad it was going to get. But people blame Tolocamp for “abandoning” his wife and daughters, and it’s like, well, I don’t think he actually did that.

Tequila Mockingbird: I do think it’s fair that subsequent actions are going to color their interpretation right.

Tequila Mockingbird: If he then comes back and is grief-stricken and eulogizes his wife as so noble, and he wishes that he could have changed her mind, and he’ll remember her forever, I think we’re like, “Oh, poor Tolocamp! How could they have known that this is how the situation would shake out?”

Lleu: Yeah. And instead, the next day he sneaks his mistress into the Hold by a back door.

Lleu: But she’s then also in the Hold and then ultimately installed in his dead wife’s room, which is very weird!

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, again, if you’re gonna be the Holder’s wife, you’re gonna have the rooms of the Holder’s wife, which are both usually connected to the Holder’s, so that’s convenient, but also they’re the big rooms; they’re the rooms that have space for a maid. There’s a prestige attached to that, in the same way that Anella immediately starts wearing Pendra’s clothing.

Tequila Mockingbird: And from a personal or more modern perspective, like, oh, my god! Ick! But in a period context, or in a Pernese context, it’s like, okay, but those are the fancy clothing that only the Lady Holder has access to, so wearing those clothes are a status symbol and a symbol of her assumed now authority over Fort Hold.

Lleu: Yeah, no, I mean more that it’s weird that he does all of this while he is still locked in his room for another several days.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Well, the timeline on this book is very compressed. They were in a hurry.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s very, very romantic of us. And normal. So normal.

Lleu: Yeah. Something else, just very brief, that I thought was striking, speaking of gender politics —

Lleu: — is in the opening section of the book. So, Moreta started with a six-page, very detailed preamble explaining the history of Pern and the social structure.

Lleu: Nerilka’s is a little more compressed, but it includes a really interesting moment that I don’t think is present in Moreta and certainly hasn’t been present in any of the Ninth Pass books thus far, where we’re told that during a Pass, Weyrleaders are more important, because they’re the ones who are in charge during Threadfall.

Lleu: But, during an Interval, Weyrwomen are in charge of everything at the Weyr. The Weyrwomen are the political heads of the Weyr.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is so fascinating, and we don’t really get a chance to see it, because most of the other books are taking place during a Pass, because that’s the exciting part, that’s when there’s Thread; that’s when the dragons get to do things.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I do think there’s an interesting little implication there, because the stated goal of F’lar and of these books is that they’re gonna eradicate Thread once and for all. Okay, so does that suggest that after you’ve eradicated Thread Weyrwomen are just going to be in charge forever?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah! Are we fighting for a matriarchy on Pern? ’Cause I’m down, but I don’t know that you know that that’s what we’re doing here.

Lleu: Yeah, and it’s hard to know, because no one who’s alive at the point that we’re at in the Ninth Pass has experienced this, because either they’re Oldtimers, who’ve lived their entire lives during Threadfall except for three months.

Lleu: Or they’re people who were raised at Benden at the end of the Interval, at which point they only had two queens for a little bit, but mostly they only had one queen, and the last queen rider that they had for ten-ish years was Jora, who wasn’t interested in anything to do with Weyr management.

Lleu: They just don’t know, and so it’s unclear to me to what extent that would actually be reflected after the end of Thread, versus…

Tequila Mockingbird: I guess we’ll just have to keep reading and find out, won’t we?

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause she never gets there. Yes. Yes. So, if, for some ungodly reason, this discussion made you think that you should go out and read Nerilka, please don’t do that to yourself, and if you are in the mood for a traditional romance story, in which two characters fall in love under a slightly thin premise, but you are engaged and emotionally invested in their relationship, and even one in which the female protagonist has a professional aspiration that seems to her somewhat in conflict with the idea of a romance, then I would love to recommend Courtney Milan’s romance novels to you. She has both historical and contemporary romance, although I’m going to be focusing on two specific historical romances. One is The Countess Conspiracy, and one is The Devil Comes Courting, both of which have that professional romantic conflict element as well as some fun history, and they’re even a little bit sexy, which Nerilka really, really isn’t. Got any good lesbian romances?

Lleu: My recommendation is Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. If you have listened to or seen the musical, or seen the movie, and you think you know what it’s about — throw all of that in the garbage, ’cause it’s not. This is a book — in terms of it’s relevance to Nerilka, this is a book that is about close female friendship during a time of crisis, but this time with heavily implied actual lesbian content and not just the weird kind of psychosexual subtext that Nerilka’s got going on with Suriana. It is about the rise of fascism, changes in the ways that people’s lives and bodies are regulated, and has a really sophisticated grasp of history and its relationship to the present, unlike Nerilka. But better.

Lleu: Thanks for listening to this episode of Dragons Made Me Do It. If you enjoyed it and want to hear more, you can follow us on tumblr at dmmdipodcast dot tumblr dot com for updates, or to send us questions or comments, and you can find our archive of episodes along with transcripts, recommendations, funny memes, and more at dmmdipodcast dot neocities — N E O cities — dot org.

[1] In fact the earliest antivirals were apparently developed in the 1960s, but only in the mid-’80s did researchers first begin to sequence virus genomes and make the development of antivirals possible without resorting to just trial and error.

[3] Skipped a word, should be: “her huge, dark eyes.”