Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits (33 page)

I walked toward them, feeling as if I was in a dream. The weird light and the weird echoy rustling noises that came from everywhere—and the sense of being so far underground—was part of it but it was mostly the dragon. This dragon. Her humming was almost inaudible now but she didn't seem to want to dislodge Dag's tiny hand, so as Sippy and I came closer, rather than turning toward us, there was a sort of half-imaginary tremor through the blackness that was perhaps her acknowledgement or her acceptance of our approach. When I was standing right beside Dag there was a ripple at the top of the head that I thought might be ears.

Dag said sheepishly, ʺI don't know how to do this. I've never introduced anyone to their first dragon. When we do it as cadets, we kneel.ʺ

This seemed perfectly reasonable to me. I knelt. Sippy prostrated himself without any prompting from me. I let go of his topknot and bowed my head so I didn't see her move her head at last, but I heard it—do I mean heard? Underground in the dark next to a dragon your senses do funny things—and felt the surprisingly gentle whisper of her breath through my hair. I don't know if she quite touched me or not, but I felt the heat of her on the top of my head.

Everything was fine. Then Sippy leaped up from his imitation of a hearth-rug, and licked her nose.

The head disappeared instantly, whipping back up and away from us into the darkness, and the rest of the darkness blurred at the edges as it shifted backward. ʺOh,
Sippy,
ʺ I wailed. I didn't suppose an unwanted lick on the nose would be one of the things that made a dragon spit fire, but I didn't want her even a little bit mad at Dag five days before First Flight either.

It took me half a minute to realise that the noise I was hearing was Dag laughing—a normal, easy, proper laugh, like it wasn't costing him anything. And there was another noise too that later on I learnt was the sound of him scratching one of her forelegs. Dragons' claws are very flat, so you can just about reach their ankles when they're standing up. ʺI was going to take her outside anyway. Let's go now before Sippy gangs up on her.ʺ He set off at a brisk trot and I heaved myself along in his wake. I wanted to protest the pace, but when you think about it, you running flat out is still a slow amble to a dragon. And furthermore it was
uphill.
Sippy dashed ahead of us and then dashed back, but he had to make do with jumping straight up in the air since Hereyta was keeping her head well out of reach. It looked a little like his swerving-and-leaping game.

Outside in daylight . . . dragons are
beautiful.
Their skin shines rainbow colours, although a green dragon is green under the rainbows, and a red dragon is red, and so on. As I say, I'd seen a few little ones that did hop-stops to the bigger towns near us, and I thought they were beautiful and proud and just a little bit arrogant—which they were. That's what dragons are like. But Hereyta just about knocked me over, just looking at her. She was a kind of red-gold; when she stretched her wings the iridescence made them look like they were on fire, and when she gave them a flap you would swear you could see the fire running down their edges. I mean, yes, all dragons are beautiful—all the ones I've seen, anyway—but Hereyta was special. Hereyta was amazing. I knew this, even if I had never seen a dragon up close before, and even if she was Dag's dragon so I was going to like her even if she was foogit-sized, dung-coloured, and warty. And even if she had only two eyes.

Dragon eyes vary in colour the way dragon skins do, but all dragon eyes glitter. I know that you talk about eyes glittering—the evil enchanter in a fairy tale always has glittering eyes; so do the things in dark corners when you're little and trying to go to sleep—but dragon-eye glitter is the real thing. I suppose almost everything about a dragon is scary, because they're so huge, and also, of course, because they're the only creature (that we know of) that can fly through the Firespace. But the glitter of their eyes isn't like anything else.

I think that it's the glitter of dragon eyes that's the origin of all those stories about the beds of jewels that wild dragons are supposed to have made for themselves back in the days when dragons were wild, and used to eat children when they couldn't find any sheep. Where all those jewels are supposed to have come from was always beyond me; even if you put all the kings and emperors and enchanters (good and evil) together and stripped them of everything they had, I still don't think you'd get more than about one jewel-bed for one medium-large dragon out of it. But you see the glitter of the eyes and you do think of jewels. Nothing else comes close—not fire, not stars, not anything. Of course I, and most of the other listeners to fairy tales, have never seen more than the mayor's beryl or topaz or whatever the local badge of office is, but we can all dream. When you see a dragon's eyes up close—if you're lucky enough to see a dragon's eyes up close—you don't have to dream.

It was Hereyta's left eye that was gone. Dragons have that great knobbly ridge over their eyes, and some of the breeding lines still throw out horns sometimes, but no really top-class dragon has horns any more. Hereyta didn't. And she had two eyes—which shone so vividly I felt I'd be embarrassed ever staring into a mere bonfire again—and one black crater. It wasn't ugly, any more than a dark hollow in a mountainside is ugly, but it looked all wrong.

She didn't seem to favour that side. As soon as we got outdoors—and this was true every time we came outdoors together for the few days left before First Flight—Sippy went into his full rushing-and-leaping-into-the-air routine. Dag just about killed himself laughing, that first time. In other circumstances I'd've probably got pretty mad at him laughing at Sippy like that, but it didn't actually feel like he was laughing at Sippy. It was like Sippy was doing him this enormous favour by letting all the laughter he hadn't been able to laugh out, where it ought to be, instead of all pent up inside and squashed by worry and misery. Like Sippy licking Hereyta's nose had knocked the bung out of the barrel, and now the laughter came flooding out. And because I wasn't getting mad, I noticed what it really was: love. Dag really loved Hereyta. I understood that. It's so much easier, loving animals. They love you right back, and it doesn't get complicated. Unless it's a two-eyed dragon who you've been partnered with for First Flight at your dragonrider academy.

I don't know if Hereyta just had really nice manners (yes) or if she was amused by Sippy too, but rather than ignoring the tiny lunatic doing his nut around her feet, by the end of that first game she'd developed her own side of it. When Sippy did it to me, the only rule I played by was that I had to move between rushes, so he had to keep adjusting and re-aiming. It was like, if you're going to be this insane, I'm at least not going to make it easy for you. Hereyta used her head. She'd arch her endless neck (I swear the top of the arch had clouds hanging over it) so that her nose was just above ground level—say the top of my head, which is just above ground level to a dragon—and as Sippy rushed at her, she'd twitch it aside. I don't think he started to develop his mid-air twist till he was playing with Hereyta; I was too easy a target. Then she'd move her head along sideways—keeping it amazingly the same distance above the ground—as if she was daring Sippy to try again, which of course he did.

I wasn't laughing like Dag, like that giddy relief when the pain-bane finally kicks in, but I'd almost forgotten all our problems, watching Hereyta and Sippy having such a good time. And then Dag suddenly shut off like he was a door that had been closed. There was a little breeze, and between the sound of that, and Sippy's panting (and thudding back to the ground), and Dag's laughter, I hadn't noticed anything else. But there was another dragon in the field with us. Fancy not having noticed a dragon. But I was fully occupied watching our dragon.

This one was a kind of midnight blue, and it was only about two-thirds the size of Hereyta, which was still plenty big enough. There was a tiny person tearing along beside it with his hand on its ankle, the way Dag had had his hand on Hereyta's. They'd come out of the
hsa
after us. It was half rousing its wings as I turned my head, although I don't know if this was a greeting or an ʺI can take you with one wing tied behind my backʺ show for Hereyta's sake. Hereyta went on playing Sippy's game as if it was all that mattered. I can't believe she didn't know the blue dragon was there, but I still don't know nearly enough about dragon behaviour and I didn't know anything then.

So I made do with the fact that Dag wasn't happy to see whoever it was. He didn't say anything to Hereyta, but I don't know if you call off a dragon like you call off a dog (or grab your foogit by the topknot). I know I keep saying how they've been bred for thousands of years to be amenable to human commands, but I defy you to get anywhere near a dragon and not utterly and profoundly believe that a dragon obeys any human only because it is a
bizarrely
good-natured creature. Or maybe because it has a bizarre sense of humour, in which case maybe dragons have something in common with foogits after all. Anyway, Hereyta went on with her game as Dag stiffened himself to greet the other dragonrider.

ʺMay you fly over a clear horizon,ʺ said the other, with that funny lilt that goes with a formal ritual greeting. I thought I saw his eyebrows go up as he registered that Dag was out of uniform but if they did they came right back down again.

Dag without preamble said to me, ʺThis is Setyep.ʺ I was horribly embarrassed. I was sure there was a proper response to the greeting before you even got to the introductions, and then there is no way that a younger brother should have been introduced first to a dragonrider, even a pre-First-Flight cadet dragonrider. But that was Dag. He'd sit the dragonrider exams to please his parents (and maybe a little to show his cousin we weren't the useless branch of the family) but once he found himself in the Academy, he was going to do it his way. ʺSetyep,ʺ he went on, ʺthis is my brother, Ern.ʺ

If Setyep was offended, he didn't show it. Maybe he was used to Dag. His eyebrows didn't even twitch. ʺThat's a foogit, isn't it?ʺ he said, sounding interested. ʺHow did you train it to do that? I could use a foogit myself, if I'd known.ʺ

I may have made a gargling noise.

ʺAracʺ—this was presumably the dragon, who was now staring off over the trees as if it hadn't seen Hereyta either, and hadn't roused its wings in an attempt that failed to get a response out of her—ʺcan be remarkably lazy about paying attention to which direction I'm trying to send him in, and I live in dread that he'll go some other way entirely, from not paying attention.ʺ

I felt Dag relax a little. I wondered what Setyep had done to annoy him. He'd stiffened for Eled too when we'd first met him but this was a stiffer stiffening. ʺI'm not sure Ern would call it training, would you, Ern?ʺ

I tried to swallow the large boulder in my throat and with a heroic effort made a semi-intelligible answer. ʺHe's always done that. When I—er—when I found him he had a broken leg, and at first when he could use it again, this seemed like a good way to exercise it. But it was his idea. I just didn't, you know, try to stop him.ʺ

Setyep seemed to find this amusing. ʺI'm only a cadet, of course,ʺ he said, ʺbut I guess that's pretty much how dragons get trained too. We don't stop them doing things and then pretend it was our idea. The big question has always been why they happen to do things we might want them to do—and why they let us get away with pretending it had anything to do with us.ʺ

This was so much what I had been thinking I was temporarily distracted. I hadn't seen either dragon move; it wasn't that they were standing like statues, but I hadn't seen them move purposefully. But somehow or other they had squared themselves off so that Sippy was suddenly like the third point of the triangle. I don't know why it looked like that to me. If you have three things plonked down somewhere you can always make a triangle out of them, can't you? And Sippy—it's not like he ever stayed plonked.

But as he ran around making hexagons and dodecagons and things—like a street fair juggler moving his hands fast enough to fool you about where he's hidden the pebble or the ball—it was like when he ran over the correct triangle point something happened. Or something almost happened. I know how dumb this sounds, but for like half a breath where we were was somewhere else. It was hotter there, wherever it was, and the trees had a funny pink halo. If they were trees.

Then Hereyta turned her head, and whatever it was—whatever dragon magic it was—was broken. Arac turned his head too, and looked at Hereyta. Then they both looked at Sippy. Sippy nodded his head and shook himself all over . . . and then flung himself on the ground and rolled around wildly as if it was all too much for him. Whatever it was. Having two dragons to run at, maybe, assuming what I'd just seen was his adaptation of his game, for two dragons. I wondered if either of the other humans present had noticed anything. Anything like hot wind and pink trees.

Dag was in fact looking at the sky. ʺThere aren't any clouds,ʺ he said. ʺAnd the trees are motionless. Am I losing my mind or is there a weird breath of hot air that keeps gusting over us?ʺ

ʺYou're probably losing your mind,ʺ said Setyep. ʺIt's a well-known phenomenon, First Flight nerves. But I've got it too, if it's any comfort—it's more like opening an oven door, rather than a breeze.ʺ

ʺYes,ʺ said Dag. ʺThat's what I thought.ʺ

There was a little silence. ʺEven Dorgin says he lives in a state of perpetual surprise, living around dragons,ʺ said Setyep. ʺIt'll be suppertime by the time we get the dragons back to the
hsa.
You hungry?ʺ