I don’t know if running in circles and peeping is a common baby-dragon thing, or whether she was making smells in some of the big dragons’ heads too, but Gulp reached her long neck out, touched her (enormous) nose to Lois’ (tiny) nose—me busy trying to sieve myself through the rock at the back of our niche as Gulp’s more-than-niche-sized nose got closer and closer—and then, well, pointed.
I followed, because I was going to need to make some smells too, pretty soon, and discovered this…brimstone chamber, I don’t know what else to call it. It didn’t smell like what humans did nor like what Lois did—it smelled like burning rock—like what I’d imagine you’d smell if you were standing somewhere near a volcano. It wasn’t disgusting. If anything it was scary—I know, I keep droning on about how everything was so scary, but it’s not as stupid as it sounds, maybe, giant poop is kind of scary—and it did make your eyes water.
I got in and out as fast as I could, although over time and use I noticed that the reason the chamber wasn’t dark wasn’t only that what the dragons left, uh, glowed slightly, but also because there was a very tall rock chimney that opened into the outer world and during the daytime a little light came down it. I wondered what the smell was like at the top—whether there was a blasted patch around the opening from the fumes. Also, the trench we used lay, or had been dug, at an angle, and everything tumbled or was washed down (there’s a lot of inertial force to Giant Poop, and a big dragon takes a long time to have a pee) a big hole at the bottom end. It took me quite a while longer to figure out that the reason the fire that burned in the big central chamber smelled the way it did was because it was burning dried dragon dung. How did they dry it? And where? How did they figure out it burned? That last is probably a no-brainer to a dragon.
You’re probably going off in six directions at once now, wanting to know if this means that dragons are civilized, or maybe you’re busy shouting about how stupid I am for not Addressing This Very Important Subject Immediately. Well, I’m telling the story, like I told you at the beginning I was going to do—try to do—and I’m not going to address the radioactive question of the Civilization of Dragons. There’s a lot of ink spilled elsewhere/space wasted on the internet over this, and the truth is I’m not interested. As far as I’m concerned that’s the story we’re still telling, and I’m not sure we’re out of the foreword yet. It wasn’t so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals weren’t, humans were the solitary unchallenged masters of the globe and probably the universe and the only question was whether we were handling our mastery well. (No. Next question.)
But if you insist on knowing whether a dedicated latrine area is a sign of civilization, the answer is no; most den-living animals have something like it. Old Pete’s caged dragons certainly had a dedicated latrine area, but then so does chinensis, for pity’s sake, and nobody would mistake chinensis for being intelligent. And I couldn’t have told you for sure that the trenches and the slope were dug rather than just found. You could at this point if this is all really getting up your nose (ha ha) also discount the mind stuff—I warn you you won’t be able to for much longer, so enjoy it while you can—by saying it’s merely the way dragons communicate, like dogs growl or whine or raise or flatten their ears and their tails and their hackles.
I could argue for a fire in a hearth, but I admit that dragons being central-Australian in origin and having their own unique relationship with fire including a built-in lighting mechanism confuses the issue—having a fire going at home for a dragon may be no more intellectual than a wild dog making a nest out of grass. I was myself more taken with the fact that Gulp pointed, but there are lemurs that point when they’re making their “watch out” noise, and vervet monkeys have different warning calls—“watch out that’s an eagle” or “watch out that’s a snake,” and everyone looks up and runs down or looks down and runs up. That’s pretty good language, even if they can’t discuss the meaning of life with it.
You know I’m really glad that they’d discovered the lichen on Mars before Lois and I got together. It’s that lichen that really threw the barracuda in the guppy tank. It meant all the hardcore scientists were already off balance when the idea came up that there really was something even a little more special and unusual about dragons than that they were really, really big and vomited fire. After the Martian lichen, some of the scientists came quietly.
But that’s another story. I’m getting ahead of myself again. It gets harder to tell it in order as I get nearer the end. Not the end, nothing like, but the place I am, writing this.
I’m back at the how-do-I-tell-it place again—where I started—and where I am now more or less permanently, ever since Gulp picked Lois and me up and flew away with us. Where there are no he-saids and she-saids—except for that gibbering chucklehead Jake. The where that is the why I didn’t want to start, because I knew this was coming. What will it be like when we get an astronaut to Mars and he or she gets friendly with the lichen and is invited to sit in on one of their group sessions? Which they probably will, since the lichen seems to have been disappointed with the conversations they’ve/it’s tried to have with all the probes. What will that be like? It’ll be STRANGE. And I bet when the astronauts write up their reports they’ll be using lots of phrases like “this is impossible to explain but…”
I don’t know how long we—Lois and I—were in that cavern, except to go to the toilet, before they let us go anywhere else. I think, from the daylight through the latrine chimney, and how often they fed us (and how often we went to the latrine), it must have been about five days. But I kept falling asleep, or maybe I just kept passing out, either because I was very, very tired (which I was: weirdness and terror will do that to you) or because (because of the weirdness and the terror) I needed the escape. When I was asleep I could be somewhere familiar…which is pretty funny when it was so often a cave full of dragons. It’s just it was a different cave: ow, that laughter hurts.
Lois stuck close to me all those first days; I don’t know if she was pretty weirded out her own self or whether she knew I was in trouble—or whether she was picking up “trouble” from me or the dragons—but she seemed even to lose interest in Gulp for a while. I’d wake up out of one of my sudden naps and not immediately see her and think okay, that’s fine, she’s finally gone exploring, that’s a good thing, trying not to feel utterly lonesome and forlorn, and then there’d be a swirly sort of commotion like looking down the top of a blender with the lid off after you’ve dumped something really challenging in, and there would be Lois surfacing from the bottom of the heap of dragon scales.
I also fell asleep a lot—although I think that was more like passing out—in the middle of my attempts-at-talking with the black dragon, who I started out calling Nero because I kept thinking about burning, but in the first place that only scared me worse, and in the second place it was pretty unfair under the circumstances. He never so much as showed me his teeth, let alone shot fire at me the way Gulp had, and he couldn’t help being big. (I don’t know who it was fired at me when Gulp first arrived with her passengers, but I’d stake Smokehill’s ownership deeds that it wasn’t him. He wouldn’t have missed.)
And that sense of waiting he did so well—at first it rattled me too, but then everything rattled me—and never mind what a wuss I am, it would have rattled you too—and then I began to, I don’t know, be kind of grateful, or to rely on it, or something, and then the waitingness seemed to be even a kind of serenity, even, almost, a kind of comfort (at this point I started worrying about what I knew about prisoners identifying with their captors and people in institutions forgetting how to live in the world, but at least worrying, even about very weird new things, made my brain feel sort of like it still belonged to me, that we hadn’t totally parted company as a result of recent events), and by the time they let Lois and me out of the fire-cavern for the first time since we’d come in, I’d started calling him Buddha. Which became Bud, of course.
>
I think it was him who told Gulp to take us outside, although it may have been Gulp’s idea. At first I think I—and probably Lois too because she was attached to me—were strictly Gulp and Bud’s problem. After the initial brief outburst of semi-mayhem the other dragons sort of sat back and said “good luck” or “better you than me” or something (possibly “I hope you get over this dumb idea soon”). It took longer before I started getting any kind of an individual fix on any of the other dragons, although I was often aware of that barely-restrained-avalanche thinking—or “thinking”—from them, like a bunch of journalists being held back by the yellow tape at a crime scene on a TV cop show.
The thing is that as the hours, or the days, passed, I got more and more fixated on sunlight, sky, trees, fresh air, and less able to think, or try to think, about anything else. Some of that was just fear, of course. All there was in the cavern was stone and fire and darkness—and dragons, the smallest of which still made me look like a Yorkshire terrier standing next to a hippopotamus. There were no dragonlets that I ever saw, except Lois.
I don’t think it was dark in there, to the dragons, or maybe they just liked dark. But they moved easily among the shadows, winding their ways among the boulders and stone pillars, and there was this almost-motionless thing they did, where all you could see was the glow of their eyes (dragons don’t blink nearly as often as humans do; mostly their eyes are either open or closed), and then you’d try to follow the rest of them and decide which of the hummocks were stone and which of them were dragon, and then every now and then a boulder would move. Occasionally the firelight fell on someone’s side so you could see him or her breathing, but not very often. I think this probably made it worse, the not knowing, although being a Yorkshire terrier surrounded by hippos, how much detail did you need? You’re alive because nobody’s eaten you. Or sat on you.
But I got so that I couldn’t think as far back as the Institute and other human beings—Dad, Billy, Martha—that was too hard. Even not remembering Eric or f.l.s or cleaning odorata’s cage, which you might think was a good thing, left a hole, made me less me. The dragons weren’t being deliberately cruel—you know, something like, hey, his kind is responsible for all our problems! Let’s make him suffer!—or even thoughtless. I was just too strange for them. (But presumably a lot less scary. At least as just me, all by myself. As the forward scout of the army at your gate, maybe scary enough.) And maybe Bud figured out that what he was increasingly picking up from me was misery.
On the fifth day, if it was the fifth day, Gulp moved forward from whatever shadows she’d been in—although mostly I could see her, like I could see Bud, near to Lois’ and my corner, and the other dragons stayed farther away—anyway she unwound herself from some shadows and then carefully did her invitation-for-transport display, which is that she folded herself up as low as she’d go and then laid her neck and head flat on the ground in front of us…which I might still not have got except that suddenly there were some very queer-looking things in my head that were enough like trees, in my tree-deprived state, that I was willing to jump at anything that looked like a chance.
With us in our small-by-dragon-standards niche, and having her arm’s length—my arm’s length—away, her breath was like the blast from the biggest fan heater you ever imagined although I swear she was trying to breathe shallowly. Lois clambered up her head to the top of her skull at once, making a happy peep this time, but when Gulp didn’t move, I, well, I didn’t jump, couldn’t she just have pointed to the door and I’d walk? But that didn’t seem to be an option. She rolled her ginormous eye at me—and I’ve already told you that being glared at by a dragon is a powerful experience—and I took a deep breath—just taking a deep breath makes you feel extra paltry, by the way, in a cavern full of dragons. And I reluctantly followed Lois, although I went the long way up her shoulder. Even the thought of getting out of the cavern didn’t make me like stepping on a dragon. And I wasn’t even thinking about the throwing-up part of traveling that way.
But I also didn’t really know that she might not be taking us farther in. The trees in my head really weren’t very good trees—not as a human thinks about trees—not as a human who doesn’t yet know how to connect thinks about trees—and I was afraid they were just an echo of my longing. Maybe the caves had sort of greenish geometric rocks farther in (although it was a geometry I didn’t know and I wouldn’t have wanted to say they were rocks either).
I had my eyes closed for a lot of it—rocky walls flashing past that close are not comfortable viewing—and there were a lot of lurches that if they were dragon stair steps were a lot too long for human legs. But I noticed that we were humping our way upward not down and I think it probably would have broken what remained of my sanity if it had turned out she wasn’t going to take us out of the caves after all. But she was. I smelled it first—cool, moving air that didn’t have burning in it—and then I opened my eyes and saw daylight….
It was another sunny day outdoors. Outdoors. I had felt so far away, not just underground, which is intense enough to someone like me whose desk is always as close to the window as I can get it and who can’t sit still more than a few hours without going outside, barring blizzards, and even then I’ll probably go stand on the doorstep and look hopefully for any sign of it stopping till the flakes make my eyelashes stick together and I can’t see any more. But in the whole crazy inexplicable business of trying to talk to Bud, it felt like years had passed in the flickery reddish windowless darkness—I was crazy enough by then to wonder if maybe years had passed, like in old tales of people who visit the fairies.
I slithered down Gulp’s shoulder and fell on the ground—like the stories of the early ocean crossings, when sailors and passengers get out and kiss the ground when there’s finally some ground to kiss after months at sea. But at least they’d had air and sky.
I plastered myself against the bit of ground I landed on, like it was my best friend, which it was. I even bit off some grass—well, it wasn’t grass, but it was some kind of green thing. I suppose I might have poisoned myself, but I didn’t. It had a bitter taste but it tasted good. It tasted of sunlight—of the world aboveground, of the world where humans existed—I don’t know. I almost felt crazier from having got outside again—from having spent five days (or five hundred years) trying to adjust to being a light-deprived lab rat and being scared out of my small lab-rat mind about one of the dragons losing its temper. Bud may have been boss dragon but I knew without being able to talk to any of them about it that not everybody agreed with him about wasting time on me.
Bud had followed us out, and was lying down, trying to look small, I think, like Gulp tried, but he had his head raised—oh, a mere seven or eight feet off the ground—watching me. After I had crawled around on my hands and knees for a few minutes, just reminding myself of dirt and plants—I think I did some whimpering too—I stood up, staggering a little, although I’d been walking in the fire-cavern okay, and turned my face up to the sun, and did a crazy little dance—and Lois did it with me, cavorting and peeping.
One of the weirdest things about the fire-cavern was how quiet it was. Except for Lois and me nobody ever said anything—or growled or barked or whined or peeped or chirped or chortled or shouted. Mostly you heard nothing at all, except the sound of your own breathing—and a sort of low, eerily harmonic background sssssssssh that was presumably the dragons breathing, but you couldn’t identify it. It sounded more like gremlins to me—some kind of cave spook whispering around in the dark. Occasionally you heard these great big creatures moving around, big soft echoey rustles, a few clicks and clatters of talons and wings; and occasionally they made one or another kind of rumble, like maybe a dragon cough or a dragon snort, but they didn’t talk. Or hum. Not to hear anyway. (That came later, when the other dragons started deciding that Bud and Gulp’s idea about me wasn’t so awful after all. Or maybe it’s just that dragons are good losers.) You did hear the fire a bit, but a dried-dragon-dung fire doe
sn’t crackle like a wood fire does, as well as being too purple-blue.
And my human thing about talking had gone away too. You know how I kept talking at Westcamp after Gulp arrived. Not in the dragon cave. I hummed a little bit back at Lois but that was about all. It was almost like my mouth was pressed shut, by the weight of all that darkness and all those dragons.
But I had a little tiny epiphany then, that first time outdoors, with daylight on my skin and in my eyes. You know how deaf people are taught to talk, if they can learn it, because even though they can’t hear, it makes it easier for them to communicate with hearing people, who are used to talking. And then hearing people who want to be able to talk to deaf people learn sign language, and then—sometimes—they talk at the same time as they use the sign language, to help the deaf people, lip-read, I suppose, or get used to the way the mouth is always flapping in hearing people, or something.
While I was still high with being outdoors again—with being reconnected, even if only barely (where the hell was I, in all of five million acres of Smokehill?), with my life—I went over to Bud, stopping when I was still far enough away not to get a crick in my neck by looking up to where he was holding his head (which he probably had as low as he could without getting a crick in his neck), and started talking. Out loud. Like a normal human. Like I hadn’t done for five days in Bud’s cave. I’ve always been a big hand-gestures person, like Mom—Dad only waves his arms around when he’s mad—so I used hand gestures too. I tried to make pictures in my mind while I was telling him the stories—like the hearing person using sign language—but my words led the pictures. Us humans, we lead with words. This is how we do it. And—I think—they got it. Maybe they had a great big dragon epiphany too.
Dragon Haven Page 26
