Eleanor knew there was something I wasn’t telling her too and she was a total brat about it, but at seven, being a brat was almost her job and I didn’t take it too seriously, except that Eleanor’s force of character did kind of mean you had to take it seriously. She took it particularly personally from me because I was another kid, and there were only the three of us. The last family with kids had come and gone while I was still pretty out of it after Mom and then Snark, so I didn’t remember them much (although I remembered their dogs), but Martha and Eleanor had been friendly with them and Eleanor really noticed when they left and kind of realized that what it was about the three of us was that we were the only ones who ever stayed. Eleanor nagged me, all right, but she didn’t get any more out of me than Martha did. The difference was that sometimes I almost told Martha, and I never had to stop myself from telling Eleanor.
The real point was that Lois was, amazingly, still a secret from most of the Institute—usually everybody knows everything about everybody else who lives here. (It’s a joke among the grown-ups that either your partner is faithful or gone.) Somebody was watching over us. Maybe the Arkhola had a song for it. But even if the Arkholas had a lot of songs for it, Lois’ guardian angel was going to need a very, very, very long vacation when all of this was over.
This is hindsight again, but you weren’t there, so I’m trying to tell you the story as it might have looked to a sane person at the time, if there had been any sane people around, which obviously there weren’t. Hindsight tells me that we couldn’t POSSIBLY have kept Lois a secret. So we didn’t. But I’ve told you how ginormously difficult it is to get hired to work at Smokehill, and all that vetting does a pretty good job. I think the Rangers who do the hiring, and the senior ones pretty much all have a lot of Arkhola blood, sort of hum over the candidates, and if the humming goes right, you get hired, and if it doesn’t, you don’t. So what we had at the Institute is a lot of people who were willing to leave a secret alone, because they would guess it must have something dangerous to do with dragons. Maybe Dad suddenly looked twenty years older and Billy stopped making his peculiar bone-dry jokes because of what was going on after the dead dragon and the poacher…but in that case why was Billy’s house suddenly off limits now that the Rangers’ underage apprentice was living there? Not to mention my mysterious semi-disappearance—what was I doing all those hours I was holed up at Billy’s house? Vision on my first solo, huh? It must have been sooome vision.
Even now it’s an effort for me to think about the poacher, even now when that part of it is more or less over and I’m trying just to tell it as a story. I don’t even know his first name—I don’t even really know what he was doing in Smokehill, except ruining everything. He was—and still is—always just “the poacher” to me like you might say “my worst enemy” or “the devil,” if you go for devils, which I don’t much since I stopped playing computer games, but it’s that kind of feeling, that blasting him through seven levels isn’t good enough. He’s “the poacher” because I hated him so much.
Sometimes I stopped even pretending to have any rational view of anything and called him “the villain” or “the bad guy” like what was happening was a Clint Eastwood film or something. He destroyed Smokehill. He did too. Sure, Smokehill is still around, and everyone (maybe even including me) would say that it’s in massively better shape than it was four years ago. But the old Smokehill is gone, and he killed it, when he killed Lois’ mom. This is the new Smokehill, and not everything about it is better (like me writing this story), and making anything better was certainly not in his plan.
Anyway. The whole big thundering emergency that the poacher created was enough to make Dad look (and feel) twenty years older, and Billy stop telling jokes. So some big cheezing camouflage. And that we are here means that anyone who couldn’t keep the secret about Jake’s solo bought it that the only big stressful thing going on was about the poacher. Which is not the sort of thing you want to have to rely on, but sometimes when there’s nothing more you can do and you know it’s not enough it works anyway. As I say, maybe the Arkholas have a song for it.
Which isn’t to say we didn’t sweat trying keeping her a secret. We did. So when carrying a spectacularly illegal and mercilessly increasing in size wiggly baby animal under your shirt is your only real alternative, you stay home a lot. I’d—we’d—started working on convincing her to stay by herself as soon as we got her back to the Institute but it was a struggle. I was really disgusted that the best cover story anybody could think of, the first two or three months, for why I never seemed to leave the house at all, was that I was having nightmares so bad that I wasn’t sleeping, because it made me sound like such a wuss, but it did explain the way I looked if anyone did see me—haggard and haunted. I didn’t know it at the time but the people who’d been involved in removing what remained of the poacher said that it had given them nightmares—and these were outside guys who did stuff like Official Wilderness Cadaver Removal or whatever, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad cover after all—except for the offer of counseling, which Dad helped me to fend off.
But even at four months old an hour without me began to stress Lois—and not too long after that she’d start mewing and scrabbling at the blankets, and once she’d uncovered herself she got panicky, because while being able to hear Grace and Billy was okay for noise, she couldn’t bear being handled by anyone but me. We eventually found out that if they buried her again wearing gloves that I’d also worn and Lois and I had also slept with for a while that worked pretty well, but it was still all really hairy.
Scrubbing up before I went up to the Institute was a colossal bore like I can’t begin to tell you too. Especially all the sore hot-baby-dragon bits. But as I say, baby dragons are smelly little beasts—and the scrubbing-up had to be done fast because my time was ticking away. (I had had some practice for this part of it though, having perfected the ninety-second shower as soon as we moved into Jamie’s old bedroom. I was not going to do the Bath with Friends thing even one day longer than I had to. For ninety seconds once a day she could just lie on the bathroom floor in my old clothes by herself and live with the vile and tragic trauma of separation.)
I don’t think we’d ever have got away with that part—the smelly part—if it weren’t for this sinus-blasting incense Billy started burning, and he used to like soak me in it. All the Rangers started using it, burning it at their doorways, even bedrooms at the barracks, and later on they got enough of it made up to sell in the gift shop; tourists will buy anything, and if it’s true that smell is our most evocative sense, well, any tourist who lit a wand of the stuff once they were home again would be transported back to Smokehill all right. WHAM.
I don’t know how anyone who didn’t have a secret baby dragon around to give them a powerful motive stood the stuff, but the story was that it was to keep off the bad luck/fate/ghosts/spirits/supernatural thingy of choice that were flying around as a result of the death of the dragon and the poacher. Yeah, it was too woo-woo for me too, and then again it kind of wasn’t. After all, I was dreaming about caves full of dragons every night, I no longer knew what woo-woo was.
And, you know, I’d try anything for Lois. Too goofy? Fine, bring it on.
I should explain a little more about the dragon smell. The main thing is that there was so much of it. It wasn’t a proper stink like stink. It was just really thick. It didn’t make you feel sick or grossed out or anything—it wasn’t destroying your life, it was just there. It was kind of almost like another person (well, dragon) in the room. There’s you, your dragonlet, and the way your dragonlet smells. That makes three. It was kind of the second cousin twice removed of the normal Smokehill dragon smell—not only was it a lot more up close and personal but it just wasn’t quite the same thing. Whether this is the difference between baby dragon and grown-up dragon or because Lois was having a seriously nontraditional dragonlethood I don’t know.
Smell is kind of underrated generally. Other than how evocative it i
s and like you don’t taste your food right when you’ve got a head cold, and you open the window if you’ve made a really bad stink stink in the bathroom, we don’t really think about or live with smells much. I mean we try not to live with smells much. Except stuff like perfume and aftershave. Rangers—and anybody who helps out at the zoo and orphanage—are forbidden to wear it, but sometimes the front hall at the Institute is so full of tourist perfume and gunk smells—this in spite of the fact that the roof of the dome is thirty feet overhead—that I want to run away. It used to make Snark sneeze. I’ll take baby-dragon smell, thanks.
But once we both had our first bath after she was born it wasn’t really awful. It was just strong, and it really hung around. It got sort of the edges worn off as she got older, or maybe it was our edges that got worn off instead, because it’s also true that Lois was kind of, uh, smeary, for kind of a long time. Some of it was that I had to keep slapping salve on her because she started to crack at the corners if I didn’t, but some of it she produced her own self. I helped poor Grace hang plastic sheeting over the bottom half of the walls and doors all over her house, as soon as Lois started climbing out of her sling occasionally—and caroming off things, things besides me. That started really early—at about three months—which is also to say I’m so glad because it was not early from my viewpoint, and if I’m going to be honest it’s the dragon dreams that had kept me going even that long, they provided a sort of alternate nonreality since the reality I was living in had got pretty non-in other ways.
I slept a lot, those first three months, partly because getting up four times and then three and then twice a night still left me pretty tired and partly because when I did sleep I got to dream about dragons. You don’t normally know where you’re going to be when you go to sleep, you only know where you’re going to be when you wake up. But those first few months, the stronger the panicky sense of being trapped by this little live thing that was utterly dependent on me and only me got, the stronger the dreams got. And if I slept I dreamed of dragons. In the dreams it was like they were responsible for me, and this was such a relief it even weirdly carried over a little into being awake and being RESPONSIBLE for Lois.
In the in-between bits, falling asleep and coming awake, I thought/ dreamed of Mom, and how much I’d’ve liked to have her there, making me laugh with her stories of diapers and 2 A.M. feedings—I knew she’d’ve even been able to make me laugh about that awful scary imprisoning dependency. I could have really used a laugh. I could’ve asked Grace—and I did later on, about other things—but it didn’t occur to me. It was like I was too far away and holding on by too skinny a thread.
I might have been just holding on myself but only three pouch months has to’ve been way early from dragonlet perspective, it’s just that there was a limit to the size of sling you could hang on me, and it’s not so much that Lois grew out of it but that she gyrated out of it. There was about a week when you kept seeing baby dragon butt or nose or foot sticking out briefly from under my shirt…and then not so briefly, and when it was the nose it was more and more nose till it included eyes and…I remember Snark as a puppy being a perpetual motion machine but he had nothing on Lois. Fortunately she didn’t have the needle puppy teeth and the habit of cruising with her mouth open, looking for things to chomp. She gunked them instead. You know how in someone’s house you can tell the furniture that the dog or cat sits on most—either it’s completely trashed or there’s a blanket or something over it and the blanket’s really trashed. (Snark’s and my TV sofa was about three layers deep in semi-trashed blankets: we moved ’em around so none of the holes went all the way through to the sofa.) Grace kept their bedroom door closed all the time and everything else in the house was wrapped up in old blankets and oilcloth. Even table legs.
For something with no legs to speak of Lois-just-out-of-the-sling sure liked to climb. Maybe it was being short when everything else was so tall (Eleanor liked to stand on chairs). Maybe it was the complicated process of getting in and out of the sling which had kind of a lot of up and down to it. Anyway, Lois climbed. Or tried to climb. At first she was too tottery to do anything but totter and then for a while when she’d come to something in her way she’d just stop, like it was the end of the universe. Then later she tried to climb. Going around appears to be a very late developing concept in dragonlets.
After a while she stopped trying to climb on anything she’d found out wasn’t very dragon-shaped—the kitchen chairs for example—and I sat on the floor a lot to make life easier when she was first starting to explore life outside the sling, since at first she’d go two steps and then run back to Mom and then she’d take three steps and run back, and the house was small enough that when she got up to four steps she started bumping into things. At first this was just The End, as I said. But then it was like…sometimes I imagined she bumped into them almost kind of thoughtfully, because I don’t think she ever tried to climb on anything if she hadn’t bumped it thoroughly first.
I don’t know if her eyes didn’t focus right to begin with (which would be my fault for raising her wrong, guilt guilt guilt) or maybe were built to focus in different light (the light in the dragon caves in my dreams was always weird) or on something very different from human house stuff (duh)—or if baby dragons just do bump into things a lot, like instead of having whiskers, which dragons don’t, telling them about how much space there is or what the shapes of the solid parts in it are. But she was a big bumper, and she did a lot of bumping into things sidelong; she didn’t necessarily lead with her nose, the way something with whiskers does. But it was like she didn’t know what it was till she’d bumped into it a few times. Which was harder (or at least gunkier) on the things than whiskers would have been.
I didn’t mind sitting on the floor, I’m mostly not big on soft squashy furniture and certainly no cold draft had a chance to bother me with Lois nearby, and also I found watching her so interesting. (Proud Mom. Obsessed Mom. Silly with relief for even a few feet and a few minutes of semi-freedom Mom.) For example, not only did she do a lot of her bumping from a funny angle, bumping into things to learn what they were seemed to depend on the thing rather than where it was. She’d bump into some things no matter where they were and some things after the first few times she never bumped into them again, also no matter where they were either. Go figure.
Even when she was no longer using her sling she still didn’t want to be more than a few feet away from me if she could help it, and she preferred some kind of contact. She was hopeless as a lapdog—the wrong shape, and she was too thick-bodied to curl properly—but she’d lie pretty contentedly on my bare feet, or behind my ankles—that’s when she was willing to stop exploring, and lie down at all. She went on wanting skin, and she still spent the nights lying against my stomach.
Fortunately Ranger cottages don’t run to wall-to-wall carpeting—I don’t even want to think about wall-to-wall carpeting with a greasy, low-slung dragonlet in residence. Grace rolled up their few little rugs and stashed them, and I helped her mop the floors, except that Lois usually wanted to play with the mop. And if you held it steady for her, in the developmental stage between Too Small and Too Big, she could climb up onto the top of the broomy part of a broom and sway there for a minute, like a high-wire act.
Grace is a saint. After all, she was there all the time—Billy mostly wasn’t. She’d used to go hiking to find her own plants for her drawings, but once we moved in she stayed home. The Rangers brought her what she asked for, plants and photos, but it wasn’t the same—not that she said so. But I knew she was trapped too—that she’d just let herself be trapped. And nobody had asked her. We just showed up, that first day, after my interesting interview with Dad. I was too shell-shocked to notice much after that so I can’t tell you about the expression on her face when we arrived. I don’t remember what Billy said, or whether he said it in Arkhola or English. I don’t remember anything, except I also don’t ever remember Grace being anything but Grace, which is t
o say kind and unfrazzled, all the time Lois and I were infesting her space. (Her Arkhola name translates as Beautiful Dancer. I think I was raving to Kit about the way Grace put up with us and he’s the one told me. So “Grace” is a pretty good job.)
And I’ve said that everyone at Smokehill would sell their grandmothers to be invited for a meal that Grace cooked—she liked cooking for people, and now she couldn’t do that either, or only for the few of us official secret Lois society members. And she lost her studio because Lois and I took over Jamie’s room—she had to set up her drawing board in the kitchen. But the funny thing is that Lois learned not to whang into the drawing board first, when she was still really little and tottery. She was still crashing into the kitchen table occasionally when she was big enough to make a glass standing on it fall over, just from not paying attention. (Maybe she picked it up from me. I’ve made a few glasses fall over in my time.) But she never did that to the drawing board. And it wasn’t that Grace was ever mean to her about that or about anything. Made you wonder just what she was learning by all that bumping.
But the stuff about the poacher and the dead dragon—Lois’ mom…I mostly didn’t know how bad it was till a lot later. Even at the time I knew that everybody was trying their damnedest to make sure I didn’t know…but I was trying not to know too. I know how much of a jerk this makes me look. But I had really, really, really as much as I could handle with just Lois. And the dreams. And the headaches. And the no-way-out. I don’t want to get all moany and whiny about this but even if it’s a unique scientific opportunity giving up your life to keep someone else alive is kind of hard, and pain is tiring and headaches, you know, hurt, and while the burn marks weren’t too bad, they were tender, so if they got clawed or gouged that hurt too.
And the dreams…sometimes, after a really vivid one, it was like I never quite woke out of it all day, like if I only went a little bit farther into this trance I was trying to hold off (or maybe I was trying to bring it on), I’d see big bus-wheel eyes shining at me from the trees around the house. I wasn’t putting on the Space Cadet thing, I was there. And I’m sorry I was a jerk. But Lois pretty much blotted everything else out.
Dragon Haven Page 11
