Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  Us humans, we still think word = word, mostly. I’m still best with Lois partly I think because we’re kind of on the same level—young and stupid, and, you know, disadvantaged—we didn’t get raised right, in our different ways. I’m second-best with Bud but I think the second-part is because Bud is so far beyond me.

  Here’s another thing you’re not going to want to hear: Okay, so, maybe it’s because they’re so much bigger, maybe their brainwaves are bigger somehow or something, and they can’t fit in our tiny skulls (that’s aside from the three-or-four Tyrannosauruses eeeeek brain-melt aspect). But (you sneer: I can hear you sneering) if dragons are so bright, why are they living in caves instead of out conquering the galaxy and living in penthouses and eating their toasted sheep off jewel-encrusted platinum platters?

  Now you just sit there and think that back at yourself for a minute. Why do dragons live quietly in caves and human beings have invented global warming and strip mining and biological warfare and genocide? Who’s the real winner here in the superior species competition? What dragons do is think. That’s what they’re really good at. Like it or lump it. And that’s why when I get out there in the dragon space, it’s okay…except I’m only a stupid human and I can’t go very far, and even as far as I can go it’s farther than I can bring back with me to all the other humans, who even when they don’t want to kill something or pave something over, still tend to think in terms of x = y and only if x and y both take up normal space in three dimensions and can be measured and checked off a list.

  Yeah. I’m prejudiced. Sue me. Or take this book back to the bookseller and demand your money back because you don’t like my politics. But all right, enough of the woo-woo and the politics. I’m still human, no spinal plates yet, and I guess I kind of need to spend some time at the Institute…and at least that means Martha and I get to sleep in a bed in a house sometimes and the house is ours and we can close the door. So you can relax now. I’m going to tell you the story you want to hear, about Bud. I’m going to tell you about something that everyone knows happened out here in the human-approved three-dimensional world. Well, let’s say something that made the news, which isn’t the same thing, but it’ll do in this case. And I’m finally going to tell you why it happened.

  This was about twenty months ago as I’m writing now. I was back at the Institute, stoically showing myself to hordes of tourists (we’ve got a new amphitheater that’ll seat one thousand and when I’m scheduled to do the Q&A it gets booked out way in advance) and grinding away at my dictionary. I do the dragon side of the dictionary better at Farcamp, and I do the human side of the dictionary better at the Institute. Caught between two worlds and don’t belong to either? You bet.

  I knew Martha wanted kids—although I can’t remember ever especially hearing her say she wanted kids, it’s just always been there, like Paris, since she was seven or so, and yes, when I was trying to explain “marriage” to Bud kids came into it. But she hadn’t started talking about babies like maybe now till she was pretty sure I was mostly out of my bereft-mom phase. It has to be a little bit strange to have to deal with a twenty-two-year-old husband who’s already been through the full pulverizing parental experience, in an all-new Short Intense Variant of the usual scheme, and is kind of off the wall. But Martha took it in her stride. I guess I’d also got over my earlier decision that nothing on Earth or in the outer reaches of the solar system would ever make me have human children if Lois and I lived through our little adventure, although that had something to do with the idea that these human children would be Martha’s babies.

  Besides, there were babies in the atmosphere. Because I was pretty sure Gulp was pregnant. I don’t know how I knew it, other than I’d got it off Bud, Lois and Gulp herself. (Although Gulp’s thoughts/telling/sending/being were significantly different from Lois and Bud’s, that made it kind of more likely to be what I was guessing somehow, sort of like how some languages you speak slightly differently if you’re a man or a woman or a child. You speak pregnancy differently if you’re the one who’s pregnant, if you’re a dragon.)

  I hadn’t told anyone but Martha because I didn’t want to answer any of the 1,000,000 questions that would follow, or waste more time turning down the 1,000,000,000,000 study proposals the news would produce—although to be fair, poor Dad would have to do most of that part. We had a lot more help than we used to (Eric had four assistant keepers, for example, which is how he got to spend time at Farcamp, in spite of the renovated and expanded zoo) and Dad had as many graduate students as he wanted—in fact he had to keep turning them away—but no matter how much he delegated, pushy people were still always trying to go over everybody else’s heads and talk to the big chief boss of the Institute, which was still Dad. Some things don’t change.

  Anyway Martha and I had cleared a little time one day to have a Paris morning, which meant we slept in, which is pretty much an alien concept at Smokehill. And we were talking about babies. Again. There’s another reason I’d come around to the idea of human children (so long as they were Martha’s). Are you with me here? Okay, so you get a gold star and a pat on the head: Maybe the next thing was to try to raise some dragon babies and some human babies together. Maybe the reason my headaches had been so bad from the beginning was because I was already fourteen and three quarters and like my fontanelles had closed years ago. I had no idea how long dragon gestation was, and my experience with Lois wasn’t much to go on about normal dragonlet development, but if there was a human baby around about a year after some dragonlets were born which was maybe when normal dragonlets start spending serious time outside mom’s pouch….

  So not like we knew what our time frame was or anything, including how long it might take for us to provide the human side of our new equation, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to start trying….

  It should have been a lovely warm romantic morning—we’d had a few Paris mornings before and they’d been a huge success—but it wasn’t, this time. It wasn’t, because every time this idea of children touched me it was like being shot or hit by lightning. It got worse till I was literally jerking with the jolt of contact. I was too confused and (increasingly) upset to think about what might be causing it (aside from brain tumor redux of course) and it was Martha who said, “Someone’s trying to get through to you. One of the dragons. Bud. It has to be Bud.”

  And suddenly she was right—or rather as a result of what she’d said I was slowly orienting in the right direction like tuning your aerial, and I could start picking it up. First time, mind you, that anything of the sort had ever happened, long distance messages between us and our dragons, and I was finding it horribly uncomfortable and, you know, deranging. We both got out of bed and Martha made coffee, but I kept spilling it, and when I tried to get dressed she had to help me. It took about another hour of shivering and twitching before I could begin to hear it or read it or have a clue about it besides urg or whatever you say when someone keeps poking you and the poked place is getting sore. And what it said was: Coming for you. Be ready.

  Coming for me at the Institute? Have I mentioned lately that Bud is eighty feet long (plus tail) and his wingspread is easily three times that? And I may not have impressed on you enough that the Institute is pretty much buried among its trees. The only conceivable place for even a medium-sized dragon to touch down is just inside the gate, and even at that he’s going to have to be one hell of a tricky flyer—and Bud isn’t medium-sized. But if anybody was going to be a tricky flyer it would be Bud. Which was okay as far as it goes. Which wasn’t far enough.

  I did think briefly about some of the more open spaces on the far side of the gate, but I didn’t think of them long. In the first place there aren’t any wide open spaces on the other side of the gate for at least a couple of miles—sure there’s a lot of parking lot but it’s full of streetlight stanchions (yes, at our front door—but they’re really dim and the fence blocks the light) and the row of garages runs down kind of the middle of it, and beyond that was the
first (or last) of the motels and the gas stations.

  And “letting the genie out of the bottle” didn’t begin to cover what letting one of our dragons fly out through the gate would do to our lovely user-friendly new reputation, no matter how good the excuse turned out to be. And while I was sure I would see it as the perfect, ultimate, unchallengeable excuse, I couldn’t be sure it would translate that way to all the people who only knew anything about Smokehill from reading about it over their coffee in an apartment building where they have to walk three blocks to see a tree, and their idea of “animals” is the Pekingese next door or the goldfish across the hall. And what had happened once could happen again, which had been the only point worth making about the poacher. So it was going to have to be the little squeezy-by-dragon-standards space inside the front gate.

  The best thing I could think of to do was tell Dad. He was, as I keep saying, still the big boss of the Institute. If he said “we have a dragon flying in and we need the space inside the gates clear” people had to listen. And he did and they did but it was still a messy business—the first thing tourists do when you tell them it’s an emergency is complain. Cooperate is way far down on the tourist-response list. You’d think the idea of seeing a flying dragon up close would appeal to them, but their first reaction was that they’d paid their entrance fee and they were going to stay entered. Then Dad applied me to the problem like a tourniquet to a wound—or maybe more like a gag—anyway having made the announcement and got the Rangers on shepherding duty (a lot of tourists all moaning together doesn’t sound so unlike a bunch of baaing sheep) I played the Pied Piper out through the gate and then hung around answering questions while the Rangers rounded up the stragglers.

  “Answering questions” is a euphemism for saying “I don’t know” a lot punctuated by trying to waffle gracefully. (“Do you really talk to dragons?” for example. You know I am going to chicken out of turning this over to a publisher at the last minute.) But the new post-Lois breed of dragon fanatic calms down immediately when I show up, like a chick under a heat lamp, which is useful. So then after I didn’t answer questions for a while (“Why is there a dragon flying in?” “We’re just clearing space for everyone’s safety”) I signed about a million autographs which always makes me feel like such a jerk.

  It still took an awful lot of time to get everybody out through the gate. As would happen, we had a couple of world-champion whiners that day, as well as an unusually frisky assortment of demon children. It was really tempting to say, “Right, on your buses, you’re out of here.” But we’d let them back in when Bud had done whatever he was doing (I’d been trying not to imagine this) so meanwhile why not let them have the chance of most people’s lifetime and see a real live dragon up close and personal? Although the Rangers were ready to deflect any rebel faction. Also, the grumps were right, they had paid their entrance fees.

  Or you could call it a calculated risk. It’s not uncommon for a busload of tourists to see a flying dragon any more, but it’s nothing you can count on. But it brings ’em back, hoping to see one, or even hoping to see one again. No matter how hard you’re hoping for a puppy for your birthday you don’t know till that morning and the wobbly box with air holes and ribbons around it going “mmph mmph oooooo” that it’s happened. Seeing Bud should be the puppy and the triple-chocolate six-layer birthday cake of longed-for surprises. With any luck every one of the tourists standing around in the parking lot would rush back through the gates after and sign up to be life members of our Friends. Including the grumps. Converts are always welcome. We still need as many people to love us as we can get. Dragons are still fashionable right now, but fashions change.

  This is also a good example of how we think about our dragons. We weren’t worried about how the dragon would behave. Especially not after I told Dad it was Bud.

  When the last of our solar park buses came out through the gates (they were still slow even now we had money to keep them running properly), I went back inside again and waited on the, er, landing pad, and tried not to chew my fingernails. I’ve never been a fingernail chewer but it felt like a moment when a brand new bad habit might be in order. Martha came out to wait with me—tucking her hand under my arm and keeping me from fidgeting myself to pieces—and Dad, and a few of the Rangers, and Eric. The tension level was so high even the premium-class grumblers shut up. Maybe it was sinking in that they were going to see a dragon.

  I’ve told you that our fence does weird things to your eyes (this includes standing outside the gates looking in). One of the things it does is make a low heavy cloud cover even lower and heavier. It was cloudy that day. I began to feel Bud getting close—feel the urgency of him—before anybody could see him. And then when he finally did break through the clouds he seemed already right on top of us. The tourists gasped and one or two of them screamed. Well, think about it: eighty feet is a tennis court plus some extra feet of tail or three tourist buses end to end and now here it is flying at you, and among other things, however much we’re beginning to learn or guess about the way dragon bones are made so that dragons aren’t as heavy as they look, they’re still waaay too big and heavy to fly—any sane person looking at one could tell you that. Okay, planes fly, and they’re even way-er too big, but we all learned about how those stiff wings are built so the air rolls over and under ’em and gives ’em lift. Dragons’ wings flap like birds’ wings flap—like the biggest bird out of your worst nightmare’s wings flap. And the dragon smell comes at you like a spear—I don’t know why a smell is scary, but it is. So when a dragon is directly over you, well, even if you’re me and you’re kind of used to it, your medulla oblongata is still telling you “the sky is falling, you’re about to die, run like hell.”

  Bud looked blacker than ever against the blurry, swirly gray background, and the red eyes and threads of red that flicker over some of his scales I’m afraid make him look a little like some evil dragon out of a fairy tale, the kind that eats princesses—and he is a lot bigger even than Gulp, and while every one of those tourists may have had a copy of that panorama postcard of Gulp and me clutched in their hot little hands, here it is not only enormously live but EVEN BIGGER. I’m impressed there wasn’t more screaming.

  And speaking of eating princesses, as he swooped the last little way toward us, he kept turning his head back and forth like he was choosing which princess-substitute he was going to snatch first. For anyone whose brain was still working it probably looked like he was looking for me—the announcement had been that Bud was coming for me, and there I was; maybe the tourists were expecting me to wave—but I knew better. He knew exactly where I was. I wasn’t the problem. He was trying to figure out where and how to land. I’ve said this was the only possible place for him to land—I didn’t promise it was going to be possible. And when I saw all of him overhead like that (“The sky is falling! You’re dead meat!”) I thought, “He’ll never make it. What do we do now?”—because by now I felt as urgent as he did—I’d sucked up enough of his urgency that I felt all squeaky-stretched like an overinflated balloon, and whatever it was he wanted, I had to do it, even if it meant sprouting (smaller) wings myself and flying after him.

  I’ve never seen anything like the way Bud landed. There was so not enough room for him. It looked for a minute like he was going to fly straight through the open gate after all—fortunately the tourists were all paralyzed for that minute—and then at the last possible instant, or maybe slightly after that, he reared up, not unlike the super humongous, four-legged version of a bird stalling to land on a branch—and the wind from his wings was terrific, and he had all four of those legs thrown out in front of him and you could see the dagger tips of those demolition-grappling-gear claws sparkling in the murky, oppressive light—and as he landed, he threw himself backward, just to stay in place, and it was like a tornado and an earthquake all at once, plus the massive boom of those wings, which he whipped together with a noise like thunder: and even so he was all kind of piled up on himsel
f because there wasn’t ROOM.

  I felt Martha kiss my cheek and her hand briefly in the small of my back as I bolted away from her, into the hurricane and the thunder and the earthquake and the claws, because Bud was saying now now NOW NOW and he hadn’t actually finished landing, or perching, or settling on his tail like an old-fashioned rocketship, and he curled his neck down toward me as I ran as fast as my little short human legs could carry me toward him. He curled his lip at me and I just about got the message so that when he opened his mouth just wide enough I already had a foot on his lip and was groping for purchase with one hand—I’ve said that dragon teeth are wide-spaced. Well, I have to say they’re not quite wide-spaced enough when you’re throwing yourself between them, and it was not at all comfortable as I belly flopped into his mouth—what do you call it when you don’t impale yourself on the points but get stuck between the uprights, like someone falling into a spiked fence? That’s what happened to me. I had aimed toward the front as his mouth opened, simply because that was the end nearest the ground, but since he then promptly closed his jaws over me I was just as glad that I wasn’t back nearer the hinge where he’d have to concentrate more not to squash me.

  It must have looked pretty, uh, peculiar. I knew Dad and Martha and our lot wouldn’t be worried—a little taken aback maybe, but not really worried—Martha told me later there was a lot more screaming at that point (even if I wasn’t a princess or a virgin and furthermore had obviously gone willingly, which your average evil villain dragon type presumably wouldn’t have found nearly so much fun) but that may have been Bud’s takeoff: I couldn’t see it, obviously, but I could feel it. I imagine the laws of physics would tell me that he’d’ve lost all his momentum even by landing long enough to pick me up, which probably took about a minute, but from where I was lying, he sprang back into the air again because he hadn’t lost all that momentum. He flung his head back—so it’s a good thing he had closed his mouth again—gently—although some of his side teeth had little low crags on the inside like vestigial premolars or something, and I could get a grip on these with my hands.