Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits (37 page)

I was watching Dag and didn't really think about what I was doing so I started petting one of Hereyta's ankles. I was reassuring me, not her, but when I stopped Hereyta's nose left the nape of Dag's neck just long enough to point at me. I started petting again. The nose went back to Dag. Sippy, like we were a pair of bad comedians, was licking the side of her other foot. He couldn't reach her ankle.

It was our turn—Hereyta and Dag's turn—finally. I wondered how many times Hereyta had made a First Flight. Maybe never, because I think she hadn't been an Academy training dragon till after she lost her eye. Why had she been waiting for us last night after curfew? I trotted behind Dag and Sippy trotted behind me.

I'd never counted the First Flighters. There were probably about twenty; Academy classes are small. But twenty dragons look like they go on forever. I couldn't even recognise the dragons at the far end of the queue. Unfortunately Fistagh was about halfway along and I could recognise him and his yellow-gold dragon. She was beautiful too; I might as well get used to it that all dragons are beautiful. I couldn't see Eled or Doara. Setyep and Arac were two behind Fistagh, so like only the distance between one end of my village and the other from us. There were only three more dragons and riders after us.

I was just noticing that Fistagh's girl was in the saddle with him when Dag said, ʺUp you go.ʺ He'd unrolled the double belt that the dragonrider uses to tie himself in place in case of unexpected acrobatics or vertigo (also the Firespace is just so strange, Eled had told me, that you can get numb or breathless as well as dizzy: lots of ways to lose it and fall off), which doubles as a mounting ladder, since it has rungs between the two long bands. It's an awkward climb because the rungs are made of the same soft tough cloth that the belts are and you worry about grinding your toes into your dragon's side, but on formal occasions you use the ladder.

I gaped at Dag.

ʺTuck Sippy under your arm; I'll be right behind you and I'll give him or you a shove if he looks like he's slipping.ʺ I'd only been up and down the mounting ladder once—and unhindered by a foogit passenger—most of the time you either climb the dragon as you can, or ask for the head to come down and lift you up somewhere. Dimly I was thinking, Dag let me climb the ladder that once just because he knew I was interested in anything to do with dragons.

ʺCome on,ʺ Dag said impatiently. ʺStad is halfway up already.ʺ Stad was next behind us in the queue. I climbed.

Sippy, who was really not himself this morning, hung like a package over my arm, and while my shoulder was coming out of its socket—and my other arm and side were fiery from strain—by the time I got to Hereyta's saddle, we did both get there. ʺPush up forward,ʺ Dag said, ʺI'm coming in behind you.ʺ Hereyta's saddle was bigger than usual because she was bigger than usual, so there was plenty of space, and I now noticed that Dag must have been doing some secret alterations because the bumps and bulges for both padding and helping keep the rider in place had been rearranged for two. Or three. I had thought Dag had been spending a lot of time ripping out bits of the saddle and sewing them back together, but I'd thought it was general reflex obsessiveness. But Dag had been planning for us to come with him. Why? When had he decided?
Why?
Ralas had only said take us back to the Academy with him.

I settled Sippy in front of me so he could look out over the pommel. Dag dropped a loop of the ladder-belt over me. I stuck my arms through a couple of the rungs and snugged Sippy down with another.

ʺComfy?ʺ said Dag.

I would have liked to say no but I wasn't sure if truth disguised as humour was a good idea right now so I said thanks instead. I was feeling so stunned and flabbergasted and appalled I wasn't feeling anything really. Dag grunted. Maybe he thought that truth disguised as humour wouldn't be a good idea either.

The three dragons after us were all mounted and their riders tied in too. I couldn't see Vorl so I couldn't see if his brother was riding with him. Fistagh's girl was behind him.

My heart was beating so hard I thought I was going to throw up. The Academy officers were making a long queue in front of the dragon queue. Dag had told me they read out a lot of historical stuff that probably nobody ever heard except maybe some of the onlookers. Onlookers. I'd forgotten. Some First Flighters' families, the ones who either lived nearby or were wealthy enough to make journeys that weren't about buying or selling anything, came to watch. I looked around. There was a rope fence that wasn't usually there at the edge of the field. There were probably a hundred people behind it, but they were scattered in little clumps behind the dragon they were interested in. The officers were now bellowing something at us. There was one almost right in front of us and one more near the end of the queue and then five or six stretched out along in the other direction, and they were reading just not in unison enough that it made it impossible to hear what they were saying. I could hear words like
honour
and
heroic
and
stalwart
flying over my head.

I couldn't think of anywhere I belonged less. Sippy was actually shivering. I put my arms around him. We'd heat up in the Firespace, I thought.

Except we weren't going to the Firespace. How could I have forgotten? Hereyta had only two eyes. I still didn't know why Dag wanted us to come with him, but he must have thought it would make it easier somehow, in spite of our extra weight for Hereyta's weak wing. I had a really ignoble moment when I thought that Dag might have brought us because we were foolish and ridiculous and maybe that would make it our fault somehow when Hereyta couldn't Fly with the other dragons. But I realised immediately what a really rotten thing that was to think, and I knew it wasn't true. Maybe it was because Hereyta liked us. She played with Sippy and when I'd stopped petting her ankle she'd noticed. Maybe Dag thought it would be better for her to have three friends with her rather than only one. I wasn't sure he was right. Dragons are very proud.

The officer-heralds had stopped shouting and were leaving the field. It was a blue clear day, cold for the time of year; Sippy's and my excuse for shivering. We seemed to be in the sky already, sitting so high up, in the saddle at the base of Hereyta's neck, with her standing at full attention. And I don't like heights. The heat of her beat through the heavy leather of the saddle and flowed off her neck in front of us like a mane, but it barely touched me; it was like it broke and swept past, like water around a rock. I wished I felt more rocklike, steady and solid and untroubled. I wished I'd never come. I wished Ralas hadn't sent us.

Poor Hereyta.

The neck in front of us quivered. I don't know how I knew that. It wasn't anything I saw. But Hereyta knew what was coming. I leant forward, squashing Sippy into the pommel, but after years of illicit lying between my feet and the wooden foot of my bed he knew how to squash. I let go of him and put both hands on Hereyta's neck.

I was so busy feeling Hereyta through the palms in my hands I didn't notice when the first dragon launched itself into the air.

The backdraft, even from the far front of the queue, was amazing. Not that it disturbed the other dragons one whisker, except that the tension level arced up like a firework on a solstice, but it nearly pulled all my hair out. Sippy rearranged his squashedness a little but he stopped shivering. I was feeling something else, not just heat, beaming up from Hereyta, through my hands, into the rest of me, into Sippy.

Another dragon hurled itself into the air. The ground shook and the trees bent back, their leaves streaming in the wind like a girl's long hair. And another. And another. It was like being in a series of small, violent, curiously self-contained storms, each one closer than the last. . . .

I wasn't anything like ready, and I can't begin to describe it. I wished that it wasn't just my body tied to the saddle but that I had a neck brace as well. I thought my head might just about part from my shoulders. I couldn't breathe. My stomach seemed to have been left behind, which was just as well, because if it had come too I might have been sick. My arms felt like they were being dragged out of my shoulders, my legs from my pelvis, my eyebrows and nose just shoved off my face from the pressure, my eyelids peeled down with them. My eyes were trying to weep from the blast, but the wind snatched the tears away and my eyes felt dry and sore. I couldn't see anything. And it seemed to go on and on and on.

Hereyta went on spiralling up and up and up with great thunderous heaves of her wings. I finally managed to drag my head from crushed backward against my spine to crushed forward against my chest. This way I could kind of see some of what was going on around me, when the vast, country-wide wings on either side of me allowed it. The other dragons were disappearing, and I realised that some of the noise that I thought was Hereyta's wings was actually the rumbly, echoey, huge
whomp
ing noises the disappearing dragons created as they slid into the Firespace.

Whomp
and
whomp
again. There weren't many dragons left. And Hereyta carried on, climbing and climbing and climbing. The last dragon I saw was Arac, Setyep an unrecognisable speck. And then they disappeared too.

There was only us left.

And then the worst thing happened. The thing that was even worse than Hereyta not being able to make the jump. And I don't know how it happened. I'd tied him in myself, and I knew how to tie him, because I knew what a wriggler he was.

Sippy snaked out from between me and the pommel. Out of the harness that kept him safe.

And jumped off Hereyta's back. Into the air. Into nothing.

He might have landed on a wing—he should have landed on a wing; Hereyta's wings are big enough to hug the world—but he didn't. I swear he aimed
.
He aimed for the little triangular gap where the wing met the shoulder. And fell through it. I could see him, a little hairy lump—the wind fanned his hair out till he looked like a greeny-brown dandelion clock—getting smaller and smaller and smaller and farther and farther and farther away. . . .

I heard Dag cry out behind me. I only know because of how sore my throat was later that I must have been screaming. I was busy trying to get out of my own harness—like that was going to do any good—and Dag was busy trying to stop me.

And Hereyta turned in the air like a swallow, neatly, gracefully, impossibly, and plunged after Sippy.

My memory gets pretty confused after that. We'd climbed much higher than where a dragon usually finds its navigation points and goes into the Firespace, I think, so I guess we had some room to manoeuvre. Maybe it makes some kind of sense that Sippy, Hereyta and I—because despite Dag's efforts I had got out of my harness—arrived at the same little piece of air at the same time. I don't actually remember falling. I remember seeing Sippy rolling in the air as if he was perfectly at ease, like he rolled on the ground sometimes when he was so excited he couldn't think what to do with himself.

And I seem to remember Hereyta turning her head toward us, keeping her deadly wings at almost the full distance of her long neck—although even so, with every stroke, Sippy and I bobbed up and down on the air-waves like little boats pitch in the wake of a ship—but we were falling, falling,
falling.
. . .

And then I do remember the roaring and the squashing, which could just be the air, but then the
heat,
and the sharpness of it, almost like being cut with a hot knife. And I have a vague, crazy flash of memory of being still in the middle of the roaring and the squashing but having got my arms around Sippy somehow; and then an even crazier flash of glancing off the rough tip of Hereyta's outthrust nose which was suddenly right there under us to be fallen on, and into the concavity farther back, behind the nostrils, just in front of the steep higher-than-a-man-is-tall crag where the dragon's array of eyes is. We hit and rolled and juddered . . . and thumped against the bottom of the empty left eye socket.

Hereta threw her head up and I managed to think, ʺOh,
no,
we're just going to fall
off
again,ʺ when . . .

. . . the heat really hit me. It wasn't like a knife any more. More like being rolled up too tightly in a blanket that had been lying by the fire too long, and it's high summer. And the
redness.
It was like looking at the sun through your eyelids, except your eyes were open, and there was nothing to see except the redness. And the weightlessness. Or almost weightlessness. That was what made me think we were falling off again, I think, when we weren't. But you didn't feel what you were on properly. Sippy and I weren't quite floating off Hereyta's face but even if we did we wouldn't fall very fast. Not here.

It's pretty weird to think of a dragon floating like a feather in a breeze, but it was pretty much like that, except there was no breeze. Hereyta's wings still went on and on and on and on, stretching away on both sides of us, but they lay almost still now, like landscape. With an occasional un-landscape-like tremor, like a hawk on an updraft.

The Firespace. We'd done it. Somehow. Thanks to Sippy. Thanks to Sippy being totally deranged and stupid and a troublemaker and thinking he could play his game
in mid-air
and if we got out of this alive I'd tie him up
for the rest of his life.

Noise seemed muffled. Or maybe it was just shock. But there was a funny dull quality to what my ears were trying to tell me. I could hear something going on—I thought—pretty close but at the same time I couldn't hear it. And then Arac's head rose over the leading edge of Hereyta's left wing and several leagues of neck passed Sippy and me still lying on Hereyta's nose and then Setyep was hovering right in front of us. You can get quite close to another dragon in the Firespace. Everything moved so slowly, and if two of the floating mountains actually collided, it would happen gently, and they'd just drift away from each other again. But Arac didn't touch us, and there was no backdraft from the soft riffle of his wings.