Dragonhaven (25 page)

She tried to pick it up with one of her forelegs.

Fourteen-month-old dragons don't have much grasping strength, and they're also still effectively four-legged. According to Old Pete they start using their front legs more like arms when their wings get big enough to provide a different balance, before they can fly. In Lois' case that started happening when she was about three, although that may be early because, of course, she was still trying to be me, in spite of…no, I'm getting ahead of myself: believe me, it's getting harder and harder not to…
she was trying to be me
and I'm two-legged and two-handed. And so she tried to pick up a stick with a front claw, and she couldn't do it.

And the joy
instantly
drained out of her. It was awful. She flopped down on the ground beside the horrible stick and started to cry. No, there weren't any tears, but I didn't have any trouble translating what the noise she was making was, any more than you don't know what a dog's wails mean when you've locked him up and are leaving him behind. And the sound she was making went right through me and aggravated the Headache till I was seeing her through this twinkly red haze and that did
not
help the situation.

I raced up to her, threw myself down beside her—swearing at myself for a fool—and picked the stick up in my mouth. (This was not easy. Human faces are too flat, and your nose gets in the way.) And then began waddling back the way we'd come, on my hands and knees.

She stopped crying and followed me. It was a measure of how demoralized she was that she wasn't instantly thrilled that I was down on her level. But she'd never seen me go any distance on my hands and knees before (ow ow ow ow ow, just by the way: also yuck yuck yuck yuck about the taste of the stick) and she got, I think, so interested, she forgot to be her usual kind of excited. And I
swear
she suddenly got it about how helpless
I
was on all fours. It was like this aspect of my strange reluctance to get down on the ground with her finally made sense to her (so far as I know she never understood about my eczema. For which I am very grateful. Awful sort of thing to know, that you burn your mom every time you touch her). I went
all
the way back on my hands and knees, and very tired and cramped and chafed I was when I got there too. But I wanted to be sure that if she was getting the lesson at all this time she was going to get it RIGHT. Then I threw the stick again.

We both started after it. I didn't hurry and she got there first. She picked it up in her mouth. She carried it back to where I'd thrown it from, and then danced around peeping and burbling (through the stick in her mouth. A sort of
urrrrrglrrrrrr
noise). “Hot stuff, Lois,” I said (there was no way I was going to say, “Good
dragon
, Lois!” and “hot stuff” seemed kind of a relevant praise-phrase for a dragon), and gave her a hard rub between the eyes, which she liked. (Rubbing her between the eyes would actually make her sit still for a few minutes, while you did it, which was useful, till your fingers started getting tired, because you had to do it
hard.
)

Okay. This is pretty cool. Training stage accomplished. She was happy, I was happy, it worked, we're back on track, trauma averted (I hoped). So it's time for rationalization. Dogs aren't trying to be you, they automatically do stuff with their mouths because that's what their instincts tell them to do. (Although I don't think a dog ever brings a stick back first time. They've got it that it's a game, but they have other ideas about the rules.) So dragons imprint on their moms more individually than puppies do. No big deal.

Except that there's one other thing.
She took the last three steps back to me on her hind legs,
or she tried to. She fell over between each step, mind you, but she got up again, half-swayed and half squunched on her butt forward, and fell over, three times.

I could have got round the picking-it-up-in-her-hand, I think, but this was a, ahem, step too far, ha ha. I don't know about yours but my okay-maybe-they-sort-of-have-a-kind-of-language-sometimes-but-animals-are-only-animals-really rationalization faculty goes
screeeeeeeeek
at this point and then breaks down entirely, and like suddenly it's a whole new world and anything is possible.

Maybe it won't seem like that big a deal to you, because you already know what happened later. But it was a big deal to me. The Headache was so bad at that moment that I'd had to sit down, so Lois pranced over and sat on me, complete with victory stick. The red haze began to clear, but my vision was still kind of distorted, and I had a stronger than usual feeling that if I looked really carefully into the trees I'd see some of those big deep shiny dragon eyes that I saw in my dreams looking back at me. It's hard to think clearly when your skull is trying to explode, but this is the idea that I suddenly couldn't get rid of: That the reason why I'd got away with this Scam of Scams, this Swindle of Swindles, this Flimflam of Flimflams, this human raising a dragonlet, was because Lois' mom was hanging around keeping an eye on me. Plus Grace's cooking of course.

But it's way too late for you to send for the small white van with the smiling men holding out the jacket with the sleeves that tie round the back, so you might as well relax.

And Lois did occasionally remind me of Snark. This was one of those times. Possibly because this was a very
special
stick she was compromising her principles and chewing on it, and drooling lovely gooey wood fragments all over my jeans.

Anyway. It wasn't some kind of geometric progression of insanity after that. I don't think. It was like only a small gradual worsening in the mental terrain (with about as many switchbacks as hiking across Smokehill). I still missed having someone who spoke good English to talk to about it, but because of stuff like this, I mostly hadn't told anyone else about it. So once we were alone at Westcamp I didn't feel so much trapped-with-Lois-the-baby-dragon-my-unique-and-dangerous-responsibility as the people back at the Institute might have thought I did. Although I was and she was. And I did have the two-way on all the time I was indoors.

And this was when the Headache changed
again
. It had sort of given warning on the trip out to Westcamp but had then subsided when we arrived and started dragging the trees off the roof and killing deer and so on. Maybe it had been regrouping. I know you're bored with me and my Headache. My fairy tale about Lois' mother keeping an eye on us is
creative
but unconvincing, right? A headache is a headache. No it isn't. Lois headaches had always been different, had always had a slight sense of the Alien Spy Thingy in Your Brain. This latest model was definitely several rungs higher on the ladder of weirdness.

Usually a headache just sits there and throbs, right? It may get bigger or smaller and it may be in one place rather than another and it may spread, but it doesn't feel like it's shouldering aside your gray matter and putting up signposts like for other travelers. (Note:
eeeeek.
) When I'd had them when she was a baby they'd been…smaller, although in a weird way they hurt more, like I wasn't used to them yet, like my brain muscles weren't up to it, like a couch potato trying to get into hiking. Except the ones that came with the dreams about her mom. They had always felt like they were going to crack me open somehow, and maybe as if they'd
been
slowly cracking me open over the last two years, so that other stuff could get in….

I did remember faithfully to check in morning and evening with the Institute (and the two-way continued to cooperate, with a few sniggers and the occasional firecracker noise). And I still talked to Martha every chance I got. The second week we were out at Westcamp by ourselves, when Dad told me they were now fifteen down with the flu and had had to take on some temp help as well as a full-time nurse who was staying in my old bedroom at the Institute, and in spite of everything I've told you about missing everybody and counting to eternity a lot, I found I had to be careful not to sound a little bit
happy
about the fact that they still couldn't send anyone out to keep me company (Crazy Nature Boy: film at eleven).

Of course I was worried about everybody, and I was also missing the human bond to balance the growing dragon bond, like I was getting too
dragony
myself (Lois hammering away at me during the day and the dreams hammering away at me at night and the Headache hammering away all the time). But it was also impossible not to be a little bit pleased—just to let the dragon bond happen without having to second-guess it or you or us all the time because some other human would be coming back soon. Soon I'd have to figure out what to tell (or show) the people who did know about her, because someone would
eventually
come back out here and see what we were up to…but not yet. People had stopped getting the flu and the first ones who'd had it were getting over it and Dad was beginning to say things like “We should be able to think about sending someone out there soon”…but not
yet.

It was the end of the fifth week Lois and I were at Westcamp alone that I almost died.

Lois and I were sitting facing each other in one of the little sandpits in our meadow. I'd been trying to teach her to count. What we were really good at is what I called mirror-dancing, which was using Lois' fantastic mimic ability in three dimensions—and my idea for it had begun with the stick-fetching. But Lois was actually better at it than I was—she could remember a longer series of steps/hops/rolls forward and back and sideways and around trees and so on than I could—which was pretty embarrassing, and I was looking for a way to reestablish my superiority. Parents can be like that with uppity children. So I'd thought of counting—nice low numbers you can handle in pebbles, it's just another little easy three-dimensional sport, no big deal. At least that's how I was explaining it to myself. I have no idea what she thought we were doing, but she was always up for a game.

I had an especially big buzzy headache growing that morning too, but maybe that was just because I was proving to be such a useless teacher. Maybe my basic attitude toward arithmetic (“yecch”) was breaking through. Lois was certainly trying to pay attention, but she kept wanting to rearrange the pebbles. I'm not sure that her heaps were more interesting than mine anyway. When things got discouraging we reverted to stick throwing. Since we'd had that big breakthrough about being-the-same-but-different over fetching sticks, it always seemed to cheer us up—and when I had a useless-teacher headache (this wasn't the first time) sometimes it eased off a little too.

Out here she'd learned to throw sticks for me by dragging one—her special favorite for this activity was one she was barely big enough to drag, but she insisted
I
carry it properly when I fetched it, but then once I wrestled the thing up I could put it over my shoulder, which wasn't an option for sloping, low-slung Lois—but mostly I threw and we both fetched. Usually she took off the moment it left my hand—and she never, ever got fooled by a fake throw the way Snark used to, but then she didn't love running just to run the way Snark did either. And I was a little tired that morning too—she'd kicked in her sleep more than usual the night before—so she was well ahead of me after I threw the first one. But we both noticed the sudden black shadow over the meadow. And the noise. And the smell.

Lois saved my life, although I don't think that was what was in her mind. She was
terrified
, and she spun around and hurtled back toward me, shrieking, and knocked me down, trying to get back into the sling I hadn't worn in more than a year, trying to hide in her mom's pouch from the gigantic greeny-black demon out of nowhere that had landed on the far side of the meadow…

…And shot a long musky-spicy-smelling stream of fire over us, where my head had been two seconds before, before Lois knocked me down. My skull felt like it was bursting, but that was probably just that I was terrified too, and it may have been the terror rather than having had the breath knocked out of me that was why my lungs felt paralyzed. The heat of the fire that had almost killed me seemed to sort of hang around and stick to my skin, like mist drops when you walk in heavy fog. It
dripped
off my hair. I shuddered. More like a convulsion. With that film on me I wasn't quite me; I belonged to the dragon.

You don't always react sensibly in an emergency, especially when it's an emergency there is no sensible reaction
to
. There was a fifty-foot dragon sitting on its haunches on the far side of the meadow and I didn't have a grenade launcher at hand. I yanked my T-shirt up and stretched it down over as much of Lois as it could reach, crossed my legs, tucked her tail into the circle of my legs to the extent that it would go, wrapped my arms around her, and waited for the second blast.

It didn't come. Oh. The dragon probably didn't want to kill Lois too. I tried to peel my T-shirt back up over her again—if I was going to die I wanted it over
soon
, so I didn't have to keep
thinking
about it—but she shrieked again, and started trying to
claw
her way into my stomach, which made me do some shrieking too, and then the dragon raised its head and let out another blast of fire, but straight up this time, and the roar that went with it
really
made my head want to burst, and I could
feel
the dragon's rage and confusion, as well as the throbbing scratches on my stomach.

Lois went strangely still when the dragon roared. Then it stopped, and there was a dreadful pause, and then Lois
jerked
herself out from under my shirt, scrambled over my legs, and set off toward the dragon. I just sat there. Stupidly, I suppose, but intelligently wasn't going to save me either. I'd never seen Lois like this. She stomped along, her tail trailing and her neck stuck stiffly out in front of her, and her spinal plates like
straining
with erectness…for a moment I half saw the dragon she was going to become.

She gave a gag or cough, stopped, opened her mouth, and produced a thin but unmistakable thread of fire. At the
dragon
.

The tumult in my head changed, like changing gear, like putting one book back on the shelf and taking another one down—or more like having one of the muggers stop kicking you and another one start. It's impossible to describe, but it was so definite a sensation that I rocked where I sat, as if I really was being kicked. I put my hands to my head as if literally trying to keep it from exploding. Sometimes if you squeeze in the right place it does help a headache. I squeezed.

The dragon dropped down to all fours. (Good thing it was a big meadow.) It stretched its own neck till its enormous snout was way too close to Lois, but Lois stood her ground. Indeed she danced up and down a few times—and while I'd never seen her have a tantrum, she somehow looked like someone getting ready to have a tantrum—then spread all four legs out like she was bracing herself,
snapped
her neck down and her head out, and…shot out some more fire.

This second go was pretty impressive for something that looked like a short-legged overweight wolfhound with really bizarre mange. The big dragon actually drew its head back a few feet to avoid getting—burned? Maybe the nose is a sensitive area. I somehow hadn't thought to look if the dragon pulled its lips back carefully before it fired. I know there's supposed to be a gland that produces fireproof mucus that lines the throat, blah blah blah, which is why a dragon coughs before the fire comes out. There are stories from what the humans have the nerve to call the “dragon war” in Australia, about guys who survived by throwing themselves down
immediately
or diving to one side or something when they heard that dragon cough. But you need
really
good reflexes. I have to say I hadn't noticed the warning cough when the big dragon tried to kill me.

I didn't piss myself when the dragon raised its head and looked at me again, but I don't know why. Beyond fear, I suppose, but I couldn't have stood up or walked away if that had been what my life depended on, so it's a good thing it didn't. Lois, having made her point, turned her back on the big dragon and flounced back to me. The pressure in my head moved
again
, and this time it seemed to me there were two different pressures sort of emerging from a general background of thumping and whanging—like Nessie and one of her boyfriends rising out of the stormy water of the loch to swallow your boat, oh well at least you can stop bailing—the great big one that was trying to make my head explode, and the little one that was the tiny jerky knot that had been there before. (I hadn't thought of it as
tiny
before though.) The great big one was ANGER ANGER ANGER but it was turning, changing, now more like a prism turning in bright light, but
blinding
bright light, so it hurt to look at it, and becoming SORROW SORROW SORROW. The little one was more like,
oh help eek eek eek oh help
which I understood completely.

Uh-huh. I understood
completely
.

I'd never read anywhere that dragons are telepathic. Maybe anything the size of a dragon that has a good brain can put out big unmissable vibes, if you hang around one long enough, which most people don't. Old Pete's journals never mentioned headaches particularly though—I didn't think? If I got out of this alive I'd have to check. But Old Pete might not have mentioned it even if he had skull busters; mere human foibles didn't interest him…. And I knew Lois awfully well, in my clueless human way, even if it was good scientific practice not to make too many assumptions. Don't we read each other's human emotions all the time? Don't you often know what your dog is thinking? (“I wonder if I could pinch that chicken off the counter in the kitchen before he noticed?”)

So I knew that Lois' flouncing was phony. She was still terrified—as was I—but she was making a much better show of it than I was. I tried to look back at the big dragon as it looked at me, but it wasn't
only
terror that made me prefer to look at Lois. Her last few steps were not flouncy at all, and she dragged herself over the ridge of my crossed legs as if they were a mountain, and collapsed exhausted in their circle. I didn't try to pull my shirt over her again (one of the seams had parted the last time, so it would have been easier), but I did put my arms around her, and then I did look back at the dragon.
Hey, big dragon, yeah, we're a family. You can like it, or you can fry me.
I wasn't sending the message in words. But I was putting out vibes as hard as
I
could.

The dragon looked at us for a while—with big shiny dragon eyes, only from where I was sitting, underneath the surface gleam these eyes were bottomless blackness. It felt like a very long while, but I don't think it was. And then, very slowly and carefully, it settled down, and farther down, butt end first, then front end, till its body was flat on the ground, curling its front legs under it rather like a cat, with its enormous snaky neck arched, and its nose (and fire-spouting mouth) still aimed at us. Finally it stretched its neck out on the ground too, but then at the very last minute it turned its head so the nose (and mouth) was aimed a little to one side of us, and tipped up slightly on the cheek. It rolled its only visible eye back toward us to check that we were paying proper attention (I at least was totally riveted), opened its mouth a crack, and gave a long, long,
long
sigh. There wasn't even any smoke. The vast gentle backdraft of its breath smelled rather like chili powder.

 

I had to name the big dragon too, because she kept coming back. Also because I was sure she was a she too, and you can't go on calling something that isn't an it, it. I had no better excuse for believing that she was a she than I did Lois, mind you. I never saw her pouch, any more than there were any findable slits, sacs, or bulges on Lois' rapidly expanding anatomy, which, since Lois went on liking having her tummy rubbed, I went on getting a good look at. (Every time I did this I thought of Martha.) But she just
was
a she, and the next step was that she had to have a name. So I named her Gulp, because that's how she made me feel, no matter how many times I saw her. Uh-oh. Big dragon's back. Gulp. The fact that I was stiff as a plank for most of a week after Lois knocked me down—I had
not
fallen well—didn't help my attitude any. Neither did the claw marks on my poor much-abused stomach.

A full-grown dragon can't sneak up on you gracefully but I think she was trying to be tactful. She landed at a distance—and no, the earth did not shake; pheasants make almost more of a thump, but the wind her wings made was pretty spectacular—and then sort of
ambled
toward us, and as soon as she got to the edge of our meadow—the more meadowy part of our meadow, I mean, as opposed to the boulder-field end—she went down on her belly, as small as she could make herself, which wasn't nearly small enough if you're asking me, but she gets points for trying. Rattly things, big dragons. Folding up her wings was a sort of loud rustle,
clitterclatterclitter
, even from the far end of the clearing, and folding
her
up made a soft slightly clanky thunking noise, although again she hit the ground with no more noise than a sheep lying down.

And for all I know the apparent attempt to be slow and gentle was as much for her benefit as ours—trying to relate to something like me, whose proportions are all wrong from a dragon perspective, maybe made her feel queasy, aside from what she might think of humans in general, which, at a guess, wasn't too positive either. And it made sense if you're something the size of a young hill hanging out with something the size of a fat wolfhound (skin problems, short bowlegs and peculiar skull development optional) you need to try and find some kind of compromise. Since her
neck
was half as long as the entire meadow (well nearly) she still had a lot of negotiating room.

And she was
hot
. Zowie, was she ever hot. But it's funny though, it wasn't as overwhelming as you might think. You know how the closer you get to a fire the hotter it gets and if you're cold and you're longing for the heat you're like always trying to decide how close you can get before your eyelashes singe and your cheeks flake off? She was more like an electric blanket turned on high. So grown-up dragons develop temperature control maybe—although I wasn't offering to rub her tummy. She was almost
attractively
hot, like a hot water bottle that never cooled off. Except that she was the size of 1,000,000,000,000 electric blankets and had teeth as long as my legs. Not to mention my graphic memory of her flamethrower.