Buster was the one who came up with a solution. When it was clear I couldn’t climb with him, he simply stopped and lay down on the ground on his belly, and looked up expectantly, until I figured out he was suggesting I get on his back.
It took a really long time to figure this out, because ride a dragon has never been something I’ve considered before. It was about as likely as my someday meeting a friendly demon, basically.
I hopped on. With no saddle apparatus to speak of, I grabbed onto a couple of his scales and held on as well as I could. The surface was a just shy of sandpaper-rough, which made it easier to hang on but also put me at risk for a bad rash if I slid too much.
It wasn’t far, though. About halfway up the climb became literally vertical, at which point I began eyeballing the taller trees underneath in case I had to make a quick trajectory decision during a rapid descent, but it never came to that, because then we arrived at Buster’s “home”.
Buster lived in a cave. This would have made a ton of sense if he were a wild dragon, but since someone went through the trouble to tame him (and, I’m assuming, breed him and perhaps also grow him in a lab or something) I was thinking whoever did that also lived in the cave.
Or at least near the cave, the problem being that there was no near to be found. The cave was on the side of a steep part of the hill. There wasn’t anything man-made beneath us and as far as I could tell it was a pretty big hike to get to anything above. I saw no ladders, ropes, winches, elevators, or anything else suggesting someone visited the cave except by using the route the dragon took.
“Is this home, Buster?” I asked, just to be sure. I mean, it was possible he didn’t know what the word meant, and took me to the cave out of some basic loss in translation. Maybe I was about to be eaten by a cavern full of little baby Busters.
He wagged his tail and bounced up and down a few times and then pointed with his nose toward the mouth of the cave.
I used to like caves, and lived in them quite a lot in the early days: caveman and all that. They were about the only place to get a proper night’s sleep for a very, very long time, because the good ones had no back door so there was no chance of getting snuck up on from behind by something with bigger teeth. There were disadvantages too, like if something sufficiently vicious showed up at the door and couldn’t be fought off, we had nowhere to run. Also, there were a lot of smart predators out there who figured out that humans had to eventually leave the cave if they wanted to get any food, so lying in wait near the entrance became a thing. This made the walk (or run, more frequently) from the cave mouth to the first set of trees a deeply terrifying experience.
My fondest memory of a cave involved one on the Atlantic coastline of South Africa. I don’t remember when I was there or for how long, but I do remember that it was pretty easy, relaxing living. The high tide used bring in all sorts of small sea creatures—crabs, oysters, a bunch of things that may no longer exist—and strand them in pools along the shore at low tide. We would literally just run down to the beach, grab as much as we could carry, and bring it all back to the cave, which was in a hillside just above the high tide water mark. We’d spend the day cracking open shells and eating what was inside, and that was all we had to do for food. There weren’t any predators to speak of, because none of the big ones cared for the ocean.
I heard it said once that it was a “brave man” who tried the first oyster. Whoever said it probably never had to worry about hunting for a protein source, though, because tide pool food was the best food. None of those creatures tried to bite me back.
We never stayed in caves for all that long, just in general, because it was hard to be nomadic while calling a cave home, and it was hard to be hunter-gatherers without being nomadic. Even the oceanfront cave didn’t last too terribly long, because there was no fresh water source nearby. Eventually, we grew to reconsider caves, as something to be threatened by rather than relieved to discover. In the heyday of large land animals, it was pretty hard to find one that wasn’t occupied by something violent, and harder still to evict that violent something.
It was this last part that had me standing near the mouth of this cave and wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake.
But, up and down weren’t fantastic options either, so I let Buster lead me out of the moonlight and into the dark cave mouth.
It took a while for my eyes to adjust, and that wasn’t by a lot, because there was hardly any light to help. I had Buster’s glow-in-the-dark leash, but that was about all.
The ground was cold, smooth rock initially, then turned into dirt and pebbles my feet didn’t entirely appreciate. Nothing truly jagged, though, which was nice. I could lose a whole limb to a sharp enough jutting rock in this darkness.
The sides of the cave never narrowed all that much, and soon I started to pick up the sounds of things ahead that indicated I wasn’t in a cave at all; I was in a cavern.
It was rushing water I was hearing. Hopefully, an underground fresh water source, because I’d run out of water eight hours earlier.
The path opened up into a larger space. I couldn’t see this happen, but I felt it, because the air cooled, and carried the occasional light mist, and the pitch of our own footsteps changed. There was a faint light high above us; my eyes started to pick out details in the room.
“What manner of being are you?” a deep voice asked. More exactly, it was a deep, booming, rumble of a thunderclap that somehow formed words. It was the voice you always hear in movies when a god is talking.
I let out a decidedly non-masculine shriek and jumped a couple of feet at the sound.
“Hello,” I said, in my normal, non-godlike voice.
“What manner of being are you?” he—I was assuming the voice belonged to a male—repeated. The question seemed to come from every direction, like I was standing inside of the questioner. I’m nearly positive sentient islands aren’t a thing, but I’ve been wrong before.
“I’m a man. Human, I’m human.”
Buster wanted to keep going into the room but I had no interest in going any further, so I let go of the leash and watched him run off. It gave me a better idea of the scale of the room, which perhaps was not as large as it seemed.
“A human? No.”
“I’m… pretty sure I am, yeah.”
“Are you special?”
“Special how?” I asked.
“In some way. Humans are ordinary, and we’re all special here. How are you special?”
“There are so few humans on the island, would that alone not make me special?”
He grumbled.
“No, it wouldn’t.”
I was trying to resist the urge to speak to the ceiling as if I were actually addressing a sky god. The echo did sort of make it seem like that was the source of his voice, but I was pretty sure he was about thirty or forty feet in front of me. That was where Buster ran, before disappearing around a corner. If I was correct in assuming I spoke to the dragon’s owner, it made sense Buster would head for him.
“I’m unusually old for a human, is that better?”
“Oh! You’re that human.”
“Um…”
“Leewan Sean.”
That was an interesting thing to say, because although this was certainly a name I’d used in the past, it was in the very, very distant past. I’d never used it on the island or anywhere else in many centuries. It’s popular with some elves, in the same way most vampires recognize me as Apollo.
“Does some one here call me that?” I asked.
“I have heard. There was another… Adam? The first man?”
“Coincident name choice.”
“I am sure.”
“So what kind of name do they have for you?”
“Come closer.”
“I can’t really see anything. How much closer are we talking?”
“Ah yes, human being, human eyes. A human nose will serve you well. Let me get the lights.”
There was an echo of a click
as something mechanical was flipped or pushed or triggered, and then electrical lights hidden in the walls joined the one already lit near the ceiling.
The room was a dirt-floor cavern space with water trickling down a far wall from an unknown source. The half wall on the other side of the room still hid my inquisitor, but only half-hid Buster, whose tail was out. He was lying on the floor beyond the wall.
“The room is artificial,” he said. “Most of the rock on the island is volcanic, which makes proper underground caverns less likely. The natural ones are also not as nice as this. You can come forward, I won’t bite.”
I took a few steps and then started to pick up a somewhat familiar smell. It was body odor, of a specific type.
When I turned the corner I found what had to be the third or fourth impossible thing in the past twenty-four hours. It was a troll, wearing glasses, khakis and a polo shirt, and sitting beside an extremely large custom-job of a computer.
“I’m Grundle,” he said. He stood, which was just utterly terrifying, and extended his hand, which was also terrifying. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. Welcome to the middle of the mountain.”
* * *
Grundle was an adult male troll, which made him about 1/3 larger than Gren, who given the name might have been an ancestor. (Or, they were deeply uncreative when it came to names.) He smelled awful, but not as awful as I remember the last troll smelling, although it helped I was in a high-ceilinged room with decent air flow for a cave. Plus, there were no rotting corpses lying around.
“Can I get you some water?” he asked. “And a chair? You look like you’ve had quite a night. Here, some water, I have some right here.”
“Uh, sure, water.”
His normal speaking voice was only a little higher than the voice-of-God boom he treated me to initially, which I suspect was used specifically to ward off intruders. This was a little funny, because being a troll seemed like a superlative way to scare people off.
I took a seat. He had a normal human-sized chair on the other side of his little room, an indication he sometimes took in guests, and those guests weren’t other trolls. He disappeared down a corridor on the other side of his desk, and returned a moment later with a bottle of water.
It was cold. He had a refrigerator somewhere.
I drank some of the water—which was wonderful—as he sat back down. A few seconds later, I realized I was staring.
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought I reached my limit at non-extinct, tame dragon, but I was wrong.”
He laughed. I never heard a troll laugh before. It was somewhere between Santa and Satan.
“Buster is something else, isn’t he?” he said.
“Buster is impossible,” I said. “I’m pretty sure you are too.”
The singular defining characteristic—and weakness—that every troll before this one had, was abject stupidity.
I guess that’s sort of a cruel descriptive, but “childlike simplicity” isn’t really sufficient. I’d use that to describe a pixie, and pixies can be taught to read. I would have never tried teaching a troll to read, although in fairness most of the ones I knew, I became acquainted with before there was written language. Maybe, then, this is my personal bias and not truly a valid characteristic at all. The problem is, when you take away stupidity, a troll doesn’t have a weakness that I can see, and that makes me uncomfortable.
“We’re both quite rare, you’re correct,” Grundle said. “Dragons more than trolls.”
“How about trolls who can form complete sentences?”
It wasn’t until after I said this that it occurred to me it might be an offensive thing to say. It had been a long day.
He smiled, and took it well.
“You have encountered trolls prior to myself?”
“A few.”
“I’ve only known a couple. I wasn’t raised in a traditional manner, but suffice it to say a troll’s native intellectual capacity is higher than an elderly fellow such as yourself might have learned to expect.”
“Or you’re a savant.”
“A little of both, we’ll say.”
This was like finding a four year old conversant in quantum theory, or a demon working as a professional sommelier. Grundle seemed adequately self-aware to appreciate this, but I didn’t want to press the issue.
“I feel like I may need to come to a new understanding for how this island came to be and what it actually is,” I said. “How long have you been here?”
“Oh, some years. I’m on the committee.”
“You’re on the island committee.”
“Sure. I vote in absentia.”
“Honestly, I think I may be losing my mind.”
He laughed again.
“There are a few places in the world where the special beings gather in groups, and this is one of them. It isn’t all that crazy. I’m sure I am not the only intelligent troll on the planet, any more than Buster is the only living dragon. We had parents, both of us. We’re only rare, not impossible.”
I thought about all I’d come to understand about species propagation, and tried to figure out how that corresponded with the likelihood that there was a coordinated effort to train and keep dragons as pets without my knowing about it. Then I wondered if Grundle was telling me the truth or if he only thought he was.
This wasn’t a special breed of dog we were talking about. This was a dragon.
“So who paid for this place?” I asked.
“I did,” he said, pointing to his computer. “Computer coding for hire can be very lucrative if you know what you’re doing, and nobody on the Internet much cares what I look or smell like. You’re being very kind, by the way.”
“How do you mean?”
“The smell. I know it’s there. I can’t really smell it myself, but I’m sure you can. I’m afraid I can’t do much about it. When I host dinner parties I sit behind glass so as not to ruin everyone’s palates.”
“Parties?”
“I’m quite the chef.”
“All the trolls I knew liked their food raw.”
“Still do! Sashimi, steak tartare… I’ll do some cooking. I have a stove. Oh, are you hungry? Where are my manners?”
* * *
“So what brings you to my home?” Grundle asked, later, after I had a sandwich of rare roast beef washed down with a beer. The latter was a particularly pleasant surprise.
“Buster did,” I said. The dragon was sitting on a large bed in the corner of the dining room, chewing on a bone that looked like it used to belong to a mastodon.
The dining room was quite elegant for a cave. There was a stone table in the center of the room, rough-hewn and only approximately rectangular, polished on top but rough on the bottom. The room itself was only sort-of oval, being as it was a space carved out of the middle of a mountain.
I wanted to ask how many more rooms he had, but that seemed oddly inappropriate. I was only gradually coming to appreciate that despite Grundle being a troll living in a cave on a mountain, this was the equivalent of a visit to a wealthy person’s private estate.
“He likes you,” Grundle said. “He usually takes to strangers only reluctantly.”
“This helped, I think.” I pulled the tin of sulfur powder from my pants and put it on the table. “He likes the smell. And I’m glad, because his attraction to it may have resulted in him saving my life. He chased off… well, something. I don’t know what.”
The troll looked very excited by this.
“Wait, was it one of the howlers?”
“I think probably, yes, if that’s what you call them. Have you seen one?”
“No! No, I almost never leave the cave, but the committee is abuzz about those things. I sent Buster out to gather intel.”
“Is…is Buster going to start talking now?”
“No, no.”
He whistled. Never heard a troll whistle before. Didn’t think their lips could do that.
Buster jumped up and walked over. Grundle rea
ched under one of the scales on the dragon’s head and extracted a tiny metallic box.
“Camera,” he said. “I can usually monitor what he’s seeing from my console, but the island’s wireless network has been down since yesterday.”
“When the wave hit,” I said. I briefly entertained the thought that he knew nothing about the tsunami, as it would have had little direct impact on him in his cave.
“Yes,” he said, nodding slowly. “Awful thing. We’ve called in rescue, but it will be a few days. We all fear the worst. I hope they can hold out until then.”
“They?”
“The survivors.”
“Are you in touch with survivors?”
“Intermittently.”
He shook his head sadly.
“There are so few, though,” he said. “If this were an ordinary tourist destination we would have emergency ships here much sooner, but we have to balance secrecy with humanitarianism. Or, I suppose, in-humanitarianism. In honesty, when Buster brought you here, I just assumed you were one of the tourists from the lower island who managed to wash up mid-jungle.”
“I couldn’t imagine it would be any faster, if large portions of the world are unaware the island even exists. Convincing someone you’re real isn’t the best way to start a rescue operation.”
“Yes. This is very true. The same could be said for most of the species sharing this island, but we—all of us—have favored the privacy of the collective over the safety of the individual for centuries. This I am sure you know better than most anyone.”
“Where are the survivors? How are you reaching them?”
He smiled.
“You’re looking for someone in particular.”
“My girlfriend is missing. She was swept away with the wave. I don’t think she made it to the lower island, though, I think she’s in the jungle.”
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 20
