Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  Dragons make people very, very nervous. You think the panorama of Gulp and me sells so well because it’s cute? It sells so well because it gives people a cold feeling in their throats and a flutter around their hearts. Dragons are, as everyone knows, so big. They make Caspian walruses look small. And they aren’t safely in the ocean like whales, or Nessie in those lochs—you can’t stay on the shore and keep away from them. Dragons belong on land. And they fly. And they breathe fire. And real dragons aren’t beautiful, at least not like the paintings of Saint George. Those dragons may be dying on the point of some dumb hero’s spear, but they’re also gorgeous. The real ones are just BIG. And strange. And pouched, of course. And smelly. All the photo shoots and TV documentaries can’t make them romantic. Just real. Which is a mixed blessing. And why, even though we’re golden right now, we know we have to work at staying golden. Not to mention that the side effect of all this popularity is keeping me out of jail, which is good too.

  I keep away from arguments on dragon intelligence. In the first place I can’t be bothered, and in the second place I have a good line in being young and dumb myself. I didn’t mean to, but you try waking up one morning to discover you’re an overnight sensation—especially when you’ve been tired and scared half out of your remaining half a mind for most of the last two years—and see how well you come across in your first big national interviews. (I should have got Eleanor to write my lines.) The first big national interviews that are, as well, going to make the difference between whether your dad and your friends and your entire world gets prosecuted into oblivion or not, for something you did. Sure I agreed to be interviewed—I was desperate.

  Well, we won. But most of it hasn’t been much fun. Wildly exciting, some of the time, and fascinating, but rarely fun. There’s been a lot of pressure on us from the beginning to go on tour, Lois and me. Gulp’s too big and also too scary and also practically speaking impossible to transport. Just one kid sneaking back to watch Gulp take off from the Wal-Mart parking lot in East Styrofoam and getting a broken head from being caught in the backdraft would destroy all the good we’d done, not to mention the wear and tear on poor Gulp even if nothing went wrong. (It probably bothers me the most that she’d try to do it, if I figured out how to ask her.) And I won’t risk it with Lois either—I wouldn’t even when she was still small enough to squeeze in the back of a big station wagon, and the Searles still looked like they might win, and I was still desperate.

  Dad backs me up, every time, when I say No tours. And he’s still the head of the Institute, as well as my dad. Dad says that I’m the real expert, and he’s right, of course, except that “expert” is not what I am, but it takes a really big person, it seems to me, to sit back and let your barely-eighteen-year-old son take the lead in your life’s work, which is essentially what my dad has done. (Have I mentioned recently that he’s the real hero? The human real hero.) And yet he’s as happy as a puppy in a closet full of shoes, because he can finally study his beloved dragons up close—although he’s still at the early “ow ow ow” stage of the Headache, which gets in the way. Turns out all humans get it—sometimes even some of the TV crews and they’re not even trying to communicate anything except “please do something that will get me a bigger budget.”

  (And just by the way, Dad and I had the worst roaring and thundering argument of my entire life when he found out about my Headache. I know what it was, of course—he’d been feeling like a Bad Father all along, about everything, and especially about the eczema, even though I’d managed never to let him see it, which probably made him even more suspicious, and the truth is there are more bits of me that will never be beautiful because of Lois, and while Dad kept uneasily letting me make that decision, he didn’t like it, and he was pretty sure I wasn’t telling him the whole truth, which I wasn’t. I never told anyone about the Headache. Because I didn’t have to. And that pushed him over the edge. I kept yelling at him, “So, what were you going to do? Make me send her back?” Stupid of me maybe to tell him at all, but it was going to come out anyway as soon as he read about it here.)

  I might as well be writing this as working on my dictionary because my dictionary is getting nowhere fast. Not that in some ways we aren’t getting somewhere—or I hope we are. It’s pretty funny watching Lois—often now with Martha—giving Gulp her talking lessons, for example. I’ve told you that dragons mostly don’t seem to talk out loud—or anyway what we’d call words are only maybe a quarter of dragon language and it’s a support quarter, not a leading quarter. It seems to me there’s a fifth fifth or sixth sixth in there somewhere that I don’t even know what it is, and I think there’s some kind of layers action too…. But meanwhile Gulp is learning to burble. What we’re going to do with the burble—or the cheep, chortle, peep and whatever else—I don’t know yet. But you know, why do dragons have the vocal cords and the larynxes if they don’t use them? Maybe they fell out of the habit of talking out loud as they got good at the head stuff. Or maybe they stopped talking out loud after the Australian “war” with chatty, deadly humans. So we’re going to begin a new habit. I hope.

  But the stuff that is the most translatable into human word facsimiles is surface stuff, like where the food is, and bees go back to the hive and tell each other that, you know? And nobody gets into screaming contests about how intelligent bees are. If you were only using your ears and eyes, a dragon sentence like “There is a valley north of that hill that you can see from here, and then west of the hill beyond that which you can’t see from here, but you could if you flew up a few [tree lengths? Dragon lengths? I still don’t have much grip on dragon measurement and yes this is another problem] which has a good spring at the bottom of it” would come out something like “There is beyond [something] and beyond [something else] [something] of [something] good [something].” And they don’t “speak” in “sentence” shapes anyway. You see why I keep getting mixed up.

  I’m guessing that Bud and Gulp are still the only ones on the dragon side who are working more or less from the same page (of the dictionary, ha ha) that I am—we’re the ones who had our little/big epiphanies, that first day aboveground after Gulp had brought us to Dragon Central. We’re the ones who thought “Right. Here’s the starting line…. Uh, where’s the track?” Gulp is learning to talk out loud. Bud watches over my shoulder a lot when I’m using my laptop, and he’s seen that graphics program. Maybe it’s just as well I don’t know what a dragon laugh is. And speaking of intelligence, I think that the dragons, as we go on yattering and yammering at them (and squeezing our skulls and saying “ow ow ow”), are beginning to feel about us kind of the way we feel about dogs. (And when your dog goes “roooaaaaoooow” at you don’t you sometimes go “roooaaaaoooow” at him back?) And we’ve been living with dogs for forty thousand years and are still arguing about how best to get our point across to them.

  Dad, by the way, doesn’t disagree when—usually I’ve just come away from a particularly frustrating session with some member or members of the white coat brigade, which tends to put me in a ranting sort of mood anyway—when I say that dragons are more intelligent than humans. He says I’m prejudiced, but he doesn’t disagree. He just says we don’t know yet. He likes not knowing. He likes the process of finding out. It makes him happy. It’s the first time since Mom died he’s been happy.

  And we’re actually talking about her for the first time. Or not talking about her so much as just letting her be part of the conversation. Mom said this, Mom said that. (And I wish I had more of her humor when the white coats start sticking me with their specimen-impaling pins, which is what it feels like sometimes. The scientists who can’t stand the headaches but don’t give up easily study me.) But it’s like she’s part of our family again. The door’s been opened. It was like nailed shut for six years but it’s open now. I knew something important had happened when I heard him call her Mad, one evening, at dinner with Billy and Grace. Up till then if he mentioned her at all he called her Madeline, which he’d never u
sed when she was alive.

  It makes both of us miss her more in some ways but…well, it’s the way it is. Somebody you loved dying isn’t something you get over, you know? You get used to it because you have to. You carry it around with you—because you have to. And even after I stopped scratching my cheeks and playing Annihilate all the time and became something more like normal again from the outside, missing Mom was still in there doing stuff to me.

  Since Dad and I started talking about her again I’ve stopped dreaming about her. This is mostly a relief, but I miss it a little bit too. And since Lois has dragons to teach her how to be a dragon I don’t dream about Lois’ mom either. I miss those dreams a little too. I just don’t like people dying, you know? And Snark would have been way jealous of Lois, but he’d’ve got over it. And at least Snark was old, for a dog. It wasn’t exactly okay that he died, but it so wasn’t okay in any way that my mom and Lois’ mom died.

  So the short answer to that question I asked way back at the beginning is…yes. If Mom had still been alive and I’d still been more or less, you know, sane, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the dying dragon’s eye, not the momness of it. I would have been horrified and sorry—and I’d’ve got on the two-way as soon as I got clear of the remains of the poacher, and called Billy, and the story would have been a lot different because there would have been no Lois. Even if I’d noticed that one of Mom dragon’s babies wasn’t quite dead yet, that would have just been one of the horrible things, that it took a little while to die, that I had to watch the last one die while I waited for Billy. It would never have occurred to me to do anything about it—what could I possibly do? Eric’s got incubators, but a fetal squodge wouldn’t anything like make the journey back—and of course an incubator would never have worked on a dragonlet anyway.

  Or back up a little farther yet—if I hadn’t been a jerk about my first overnight alone in the park—if I hadn’t been determined to make that twenty miles—I would never have seen the dying dragon in the first place. But why was I so determined? What was Mom dragon putting out on the airwaves as she lay there dying—about being a mom and dying and leaving her babies behind? And why was it me that picked it up instead of another dragon? And I wouldn’t want to bet against it that it was partly frenzy that helped keep Lois alive—that I COULDN’T BEAR her dying—because of what her and her mom reminded me of.

  So is Lois, and just maybe the entire future of Draco australiensis, worth Mom’s life? I don’t have to answer that. It’s what happened.

  Anyway. I pick up some of the head stuff. Yeah. It’s there, I’m not imagining it, and I’m not going to argue about it any more. But I think the only reason I pick up even as much as I do is because I’m picking up some of the dragonness of it, and I can do that because of Lois—and her mom. Which isn’t something I can pass on to anybody else—yet. But the possibility that there’s some kind of osmosis going on also gives me the best excuse to go on living with dragons, which I do, a lot of the time now, although even I have to take a break sometimes. Also the weather sometimes has something to say about where you are and where you stay in Smokehill.

  There are fancy new premises (built by more Dragon Squadron money) out near where the dragon caves are—the dragon caves I stayed in, that is, since I (and Dad) aren’t making any statements about whether they’re the only dragon-inhabited caves in Smokehill or not—we’re pretty sure not. It’s still hard, counting dragons—and those caves go on and on and they all have spooky gremlin things-moving-around-in-the-dark noises. Now that we’re meeting our dragons face-to-face it should get easier though, shouldn’t it? Well, we still never see more than a few of them at a time, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only human who’s ever seen more than the same half dozen that are the human liaison committee (sorry, little joke here—dragons do not do bureaucrat language).

  I’m pretty sure now that Billy was worried that the caves up by the Institute we were going to open to the public had dragons in them somewhere, or were connected to caves that had dragons in them somewhere, or at least spooky gremlin noises in the dark. Although he’s never said so. And part of that fear would be the suspicion he and Dad both had that we weren’t going to go on stopping australiensis from going extinct for much longer, and what if the tiny little additional pressure of lopping off the tailest tail end of the Smokehill cave network was the tiny little additional pressure too far?

  And somehow once the money started pouring in, the plans for the Institute caves changed. Only the first couple of caverns got opened to the public after all—and all the ways out of them have been very, very, very, very, very, very thoroughly sealed off—although it’s like having won the main issue, there was a kind of hands-washing-of, right okay now go ahead and do your worst declaration and the pointy-head designer from Manhattan or Baltimore did, and those two caves, which are good big ones, are a kind of Madame Tussaud’s of dragons with a little Disneyland thrown in. I can’t bear the place myself but tourists cram in there in their gazillions.

  But it makes me wonder what the Arkholas know that they still aren’t telling us. There were always a lot more of them and only one of Old Pete—and he’s the only one who wrote anything down, and while he couldn’t be bothered most of the time talking about humans, he did often write about how he couldn’t have done what he did without Arkhola help, and how much he admired them. What the Arkholas do instead of keeping journals is make songs. There’s one I think I haven’t told you about, about dragons flying. And the most interesting thing about it is that it’s really old—long before Old Pete brought any dragons here. I’m so horrible at learning languages. But I’m going to have to try to learn Arkhola. Billy says Whiteoak would teach me. Uh-oh.

  Anyway. We’ve got these fancy new premises pretty near Dragon Central—that’s Bud’s caves—which we call Farcamp. We had some trouble deciding where to put it. I didn’t want the dragons to feel that we were harrying them by getting too close to where they lived, but as Dad and Billy pointed out, us feeble little humans can’t actually commute very far in a day, and we need to be somewhere close enough to get there and back, especially in less-than-optimal weather (in bad weather you don’t go anywhere) since except me nobody’s ever been invited to stay, if you want to call what Gulp did inviting. I said that if the dragons wanted to talk to us, they could do the commuting. We finally compromised on a place near a biggish opening aboveground of a series of caves not too far for feeble humans, which are some kind of wing of Dragon Central, but not dead close to where the helicopter found me standing on Bud’s head and screaming.

  There was a lot of grumbling when the plans for Farcamp were presented because of all the tactical problems (see: no more roads and limited helicopter usage and they still haven’t got anywhere with the pack ponies, but we’ve now got college kids and off-season athletes doing two-legged bearer stuff which is a hoot, like something out of an ancient Stewart Granger movie about Darkest Africa) and then when they get there, there still aren’t any dragons??, but Dad and Billy and our eco-loony Friends had worked up some heavy environmental impact stuff that made it necessary not to be any closer to Dragon Central, and since we were now the hottest topic around nobody grumbled too loudly for fear of not getting clearance to visit.

  But the dragons do come, to us, to the Farcamp caves. There’s always at least a couple of members of the human liaison committee waiting for us politely at the cave entrance—which I call Nearcamp, another of my feeble human jokes. Although the whole business of working this out really made me want to go “neener neener and who says dragons aren’t intelligent?” I also saw the caves before the dragons started using them a lot, and I’ve seen them now that they do use them a lot, and I can tell you that they’ve put in a latrine. And I can’t actually swear to this, but I think the rock is getting blacker and redder and shinier and silver-threadier too. And the gremlin noises get more resonant.

  But I’m the only human who’s got in that far—to see the latrine, or listen to the
gremlins in the corridors. This makes more of the white coats nuts, but they can’t do anything about it. In the first place, most of them, the headaches make ’em so sick they have to flee back to Farcamp, in the second place, it’s in the new dragon-contact rules (and guess who helped write them), and in the third place, who is going to get around a dragon lying across the entrance of his or her cave? Even if you had the nerve to tiptoe up to one and maybe pretend you didn’t want to disturb it and would just creep past, the moment it turns that eye on you, and it will….

  The human reception area at Dragon Nearcamp is still pretty minimal. This was my idea first, but not only my dad but also a few of the brighter ethologists and sociologists that the new, expanded Institute was already attracting were saying the same thing. When us humans want human stuff, we’d go back to Farcamp and decompress. But it’s turned out to be totally practical as well as sensible because I’m still the only human so far who can hack the headaches for more than a few hours, although Dad and Martha are beginning to learn. Nobody but me has ever picked up a mental image they can use (although I wonder about Martha, with her empathy, which seems to me almost telepathic, but she says it never comes in anything you could call pictures), but they sure do get the headaches. Real howlers, sometimes, and with visual disturbances, sometimes really graphic hallucinations, and a good bit of vertigo and nausea thrown in.

  I don’t know if I put up with the headaches better because I’m getting something out of them, or because they’re not as bad as what everybody else gets or because I sort of grew into them. If it’s that they’re not as bad, I’m really sorry. Maybe we’ll get over this eventually, or find a way around it. We’ve only just started after all. I figure we have the time. I hope we have the time. I’m worried that some ruthless impatient human is going to decide that the only way—or the fastest way—would be to raise a dragonlet the way I raised Lois, which I can’t believe any dragon mom would agree to. Would any human mom—? Exactly. But there’s still a little problem sometimes convincing the rest of the human world that dragons aren’t still just animals.