Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  And I felt—facedown in the dark of his hot resiny-organic-fire-smelling mouth—every muscle in his body slamming down against the earth while his wings unfurled and unfurled and unfurled till I imagined them stretching across all of Smokehill to the Bonelands and then clapped forward to scoop the air violently out of the way so we could just dive upward—you know all those stories about all the mega-Gs pressing the fearless astronauts into their padded flight seats on takeoff, speaking of old-fashioned rockets that sit upright on their tails…well, I swear I had all those Gs and I can sure swear I didn’t have a padded flight seat. I felt like all my brains were about to be shoved out through my face, and my heart would punch a hole through my breastbone in a few seconds. The middle of me was pretty well held together by large teeth, but then there were my legs, that were simply going to come off and get left behind.

  And then we were airborne. I felt him level off and he parted his jaws again ever so slightly, and I, trying not to be any more absolutely clumsy than I had to be under the rather awkward circumstances, dragged my heavy, stiff, semi-detached legs the rest of the way into his mouth. This was not a hugely fun process. Bud, big as he is, still had to counterbalance my heavings and floppings and I was way too aware of how far down the ground was as Bud twitched his head and sideslipped. It’s not at all drooly, a dragon’s mouth. A bit damp, but it’s more like what you might call humid, because it’s so hot. A sort of jungle experience, only without the vines and the monkeys (and the poisonous snakes and spiders and whatever). I managed to lay myself down along one side, between teeth and jawbone, like an extra-large plug of chewing tobacco, and I won’t say it was comfortable including for Bud (chewing tobacco doesn’t kick and thrash), but it could have been worse.

  It was a long flight. He set down only once, after only about half an hour or so, near a stream where we could both have a drink; and then I climbed up his shoulder and neck and lay down in that hollow at the base of the skull, and the space there on Bud was a lot more comfortable for me at my runty but inconvenient human size than the space on Gulp was, I don’t know if it was from being bigger or being male, or maybe I was just more used to riding dragons by then (although in fact I don’t ride dragons, barring emergency) but I half curled up and half went to sleep. I didn’t even get cold, although it was cold, and the breath from Bud’s nostrils was steaming like a (very large) teakettle.

  But even though I was dozing I was aware that we just kept going on and on and on—the sky cleared in time to see the sun finish setting and then the moon rose, a blazing big full moon, and then it rose up farther and over us, and the stars wheeled along with it, and still Bud was flying, no racing, over the landscape. Whatever I’ve pretended to understand about the laws of physics, I doubt that they’re all suspended for the flight of dragons, and I imagine something Bud’s size, to keep flying at all, has to fly at some speed. But it was more than that. Bud was pouring it on. The thrust—the bang—forward of each downbeat of those enormous wings had an almost audible THUNK about it, like feet hitting pavement; when I peered ahead the wind clawed at my eyes. We were on our way to whatever we were on our way toward as fast as Bud could take us. Which is why, I imagine, it was Bud himself who came for me. Although I would have had trouble throwing myself into the mouth of almost any other dragon.

  When I raised my head and looked forward (eyes watering in the gale) I could just see Bud’s head, an outline of a craggy red-flecked moving blackness in the surrounding smooth moonlit gray. We were out over the Bonelands by now—pretty well nothing as far as you could see in any direction except rock and shadows. Bud’s blistering urgency, which had settled to a kind of intense dull roar once we’d started, came back again, like spikes of flame surging up out of banked embers. The moon was getting low and dawn wasn’t too far off—and I picked up that we had to get there, wherever there was, before the moon set, and it was like suddenly Bud kicked into some final burst of overdrive and my scalp was getting peeled off, the seams on my clothes were going to part any minute, and I wasn’t just curled up and dozing any more, I was hanging on for dear life.

  At last we slowed and banked and began to come down. I couldn’t see what we were coming to, and for a moment I didn’t care, because I’d been wondering just how much this flight had taken out of Bud, and as he tried to organize himself for landing in a space that had plenty of room even for an eighty-plus-foot dragon, I realized just how exhausted he was. His wings would barely hold him—us—and he juddered and jerked like a plane running out of fuel, and when he landed he landed like a wrecking ball, and the Boneland dust whirlpooled up around us. I’d been pretty well dug in where I was, and I bounced, and my neck was probably going to hurt a lot pretty soon, but I was still clinging on.

  Bud—? I said, frightened.

  Go, he said. Go. There was more to it—I assume it was something about “I’m okay don’t worry about me,” and his voice, or his signal, or his space, still sounded like Bud, and if this urgency to get me here was something he was willing to half kill himself to make happen, the least I could do was whatever he’d brought me here for.

  I climbed down, and a dragon I knew slightly, Opal (Oooooaaaaaaalllllll), was right there, fairly dancing with impatience, and I looked at her, and looked at Bud, and they both pointed their noses in the same direction, so I went thataway. Thataway was a lump of black rock sticking up out of the deserty flatness of the Bonelands; the kind of lump of rock that makes you think “caves,” which the Bonelands are, by reputation, full of, although us humans don’t know much about them, bar the little that a few foolhardy speleologists have mapped. I could feel that I was going toward dragons before I could see them…and then I could feel Gulp…and then Lois…and there were at least three more, dragons I didn’t know so well, like I didn’t know Opal.

  Lois came running out toward me, silvery-coppery in the moonlight, and I was getting off her something I’d never had before, and if I’d been able to make sense out of any dragon it should have been her, but again, all I could pick out of it was URGENT URGENT URGENT NOW NOW NOW. She chased after me like a sheepdog, but I was half walking and half trotting as fast as I could, and all my bones ached. It had been a lot harder on Bud, but I was near the end of my pathetic human strength too, stiff and bruised with it, and half stunned with sleeplessness.

  When Gulp raised her head I could finally make her out from among the weird shadows. Some of my slowness to take it all in was just how tired I was. There was enough moonlight, now that I saw what I was looking at, to see that she was…orange and maroon and crimson. And I at last realized, although they must all have been trying to tell me, that I’d been brought to witness Gulp’s babies being born: and I broke into a shambling run. I didn’t know anything about moonset, I didn’t know anything about anything, but I finally had a clue….

  A whole lot of sad and overwhelming stuff spilled out of me from the last time I’d seen a mom dragon and her babies, and as it went a whole lot of lovely warm live dragon stuff came pouring in…like that what I’d been guessing about the “midwives” wasn’t quite right: Mom knows how many babies she’s got, and chooses an escort for each one—almost like a godparent sort of thing—to help each tiny little dragon droplet from her womb to her pouch. Usually the escorts are all female, although sometimes Dad is invited to be the last one. Dad had been invited. That was Bud. And Bud said, I think it should be Jake. And Gulp said, Great, I thought of that, but it seemed a little way out there, even for us, but it’s the next step, isn’t it? And Bud said yes—or something like that, I don’t know what they said.

  Lois was there because she was an escort.

  Gulp had six dragonlets—and I could feel these tiny soft glowing blobs in my—I have no idea my what—somewhere. Somehow. Faint and fragile but there. They were a kind of orangy maroony themselves. They were…like coming from somewhere and going to somewhere, and I’m not sure I just mean from one piece of Mom to another. But it was almost like someone—Gulp?—had me by the
elbow (the dragonhead-space elbow equivalent) and was saying, Here, look right here. Otherwise it would have been kind of a huge stupendous glittery fireworks display and I’d’ve just kind of stood there going, Uh, wow.

  Five of the dragonlets were already in her pouch.

  The moon, I swear, paused and hovered while for the second time in my life I picked up a smudgy, wet, blobby, just-born dragonlet, and felt its little stumpy legs moving vaguely against my hand…but I knew the difference at once, and grieved all over again for Lois and her mom and her dead siblings, because this one wasn’t confused or bewildered or terrified, it was just waiting for the next thing to happen; it was borne up comfortably by what was supposed to happen, even if it was happening a little slower than it was expecting, and I imagine my hands didn’t feel a whole lot like whatever a dragon dragon escort does. I don’t know if I was being borne up too—like someone helping me “see” the six dragonlets—or whether any fool, having got that far, could see what to do, but the slit in Gulp’s belly that was the opening to her pouch was perfectly obvious, and Gulp had curled herself around and stretched out a foreleg so her last, pygmy dragonlet-escort could scramble up it (cradling a sticky dragonlet against his own permanently-scarred-from-previous-dragonlet-experience belly) and reach far enough.

  The dragonlet—my dragonlet—was a very specific orange and maroon blob in my mind’s eye/somewhere/whatever even though the little thing in my hand was only a bulky shadow—surprisingly heavy for its size the way almost all baby things are—could I just see an edge of that bruise-purple color that poor Lois had been? Or did dragonlets only turn that color if they were living down someone’s shirtfront and eating deer broth?

  It was already hot. So if this was the time when baby fire-stomachs get lit up, at least the escort isn’t expected to do it. Not this escort anyway.

  I put the blob at the lip of the pouch and made sure it got in it, and then stumbled down the foreleg and leaned against Gulp—and watched a lot of shards of memory and grief and fear toppling and tumbling over one another, some of them bursting like sparklers and spinning like Catherine wheels. Lois came and pressed herself against me like she was remembering too.

  And—snicker if you want, I don’t care—I talked to Lois’ mom, talked to her, to Halcyon—and she told me that yes there had been some doubt about the keeping-the-human-up-there part of the Lois-and-Jake high-wire act (let’s try a parasol for balance but I don’t think he’s ever going to be ready for the unicycle): I hadn’t been so far wrong, guessing that being only fourteen when it happened and still a bit squishy myself was part of what made it possible, and even so it was only just maybe possible. Halcyon had like watched my brain shimmy with the headaches—but the, um, markers she’d left (remember “shouldering aside your gray matter and putting up signposts for other travelers, eeeeek”) had given Bud somewhere to start—and some warning about human fragility. She’d worried about the burns too; even young healthy fourteen-year-old human skin is eventually going to get tired of being reburned all the time and refuse to heal. It was maybe true, what I’d said to Eleanor, that you get used to it. But some of it was Halcyon, who was unhappy she hadn’t been able to do it better, that I still had headaches, that the “eczema” had left scars. I could feel her worry and her care, and hey, moms are moms, however many pairs of limbs they have. And she’d been all alone, really alone, much more alone than I’d been.

  All this so that there would be some future for dragons after all, and there was some future, because Lois and I—and Halcyon—and Gulp and Bud and Dad and Martha and the rest of us on both sides—were making it.

  Halcyon was talking to Lois too—I could feel that—but I don’t know what she said. Some of what she said was the same as what she’d said to me, I guess, but she’d’ve been saying it differently. What I could feel was Lois shivering like a frightened puppy—Lois had never shivered in her life that I knew of—and I put my arms around her neck (although I couldn’t reach the whole way around any more), thinking, Halcyon had a choice. It was a horrible choice—she’s the one who died, who knew she was going to die—but she did make it. She was a grown-up, and she decided. I was only fourteen, but I’d had the life I’d had, including that if there was a live baby orphan anything I had to try to keep it alive (and that I was nuts in this case enough to try)—but I was still old enough to make a choice, and I made that choice—that impossible choice—and while I’ve already moaned and whimpered about how the loss of my own mom had kind of removed the “choice” part of my choice—I was still, you know, responsible, and I still made it.

  But poor Lois had never had any choice at all. Or not much of one. She’d chosen to stay alive. She’d fought like anything to stay alive—and her mom and me may have been helping her as much as we could—but she was sure in there herself, struggling like gosh-damn-and-wow to keep breathing. And then again…if you’re going to believe me about Halcyon, then maybe it’s not such an enormous leap of credibility or imagination or hope or what you like, to think that maybe Lois did have a choice. When the souls were all lined up that day in the recycling center, the head angel came in and rapped on the desk to make everybody pay attention and said, Okay, gang, we need a volunteer, and explained what the volunteer was going to have to do. There’d have been dead silence for a minute, maybe, and then the Lois-soul put its hand-equivalent up and said, Yeah, okay, me, I’ll do it….

  I hope Lois’ siblings all got a good go next time round. A real life. An adventure or two. True love. Whatever.

  Whatever else a dragonlet escort is maybe supposed to do, I hope some of it got sucked out of my strangely shaped wrong species (and as you might say nontraditional gender) self because after the sixth blob went to join its brothers and sisters in Gulp’s pouch and Lois and I had our “conversation” with Halcyon I literally fell down where I stood and slept. (And felt ninety years old and arthritic when I woke up.) But Bud and Gulp must’ve been braced for Jake getting most things wrong when they decided to have me there.

  I’ve told you that you pick up dragon stuff when you’re sleeping that you can’t when you’re awake. I probably soaked up more in that one short sleep than I had in all the years before, and while I damned forgot most of it again when I woke up, like you forget most of your dreams, still, something changed. I don’t pick up “words” any better than I ever did—nothing I can revolutionize my dictionary with, unfortunately—but my brain has learned how to handle dragon space!!! It’s like there’s a whole new lobe grown on my brain: the dragon lobe. It CAN be done! Even the headaches are better!!! Wow. I mean, wow. I hadn’t even realized how gruesomely awful the headaches—the Headaches—have been the last seven years—seven years—almost EIGHT—till they lightened up. They’re still there. But they’re easier. Martha says she doesn’t feel like she needs to use a hammer when she tries to rub the tension out of my neck and shoulders any more.

  I think Gulp’s babies were early. Even as unborn pre-blobs they’re already countable individuals to their mom—but neither mom nor blobs, I think, have a reliable sense of when they’re going to be born, any more than human moms do. And so I think that’s why they didn’t have me on tap, so to speak, at Dragon Central, where it would have been a comparatively short hop for a flying dragon to take me to the birth place in the Bonelands. Mind you, I have no idea how they would have convinced me to stick around—I guarantee I would not have understood “Hey, Jake, wanna be escort to one of Gulp’s babies?”—but they’d’ve thought of something. They could always have just got in the way. What would I have done? Forced past them? Playing tag with a dragon just doesn’t appeal much.

  I’d wanted to walk back, that morning in the Bonelands after I woke up, but I was staggering and kind of crazy, and still full of the dreams I was half forgetting and that were half turning into a new part of me, which is maybe why I was staggering and kind of crazy. (Kind of crazy includes that I was two or three hours of a big dragon flying full pelt into the Bonelands and the nearest g
ood water supply was back out of them again, and I wanted to walk.) Anyway the dragons wouldn’t let me walk anywhere. They’d brought Bud like six sheep to help him recuperate, and he’d specially char-grilled a piece for me, and we lay around like we were on holiday for a couple of days—all eight of us (fourteen if you count the tucked-away blobs)—and then he flew me back to Dragon Central. We all went together in little hops, because Lois couldn’t fly very far yet. Let me tell you flying in a troop of dragons (a squadron, just like the game) is even more amazing than anything. Life. The universe. Everything. And Gulp looked…I don’t know how to describe it. Transcendent.

  But I had had a look at the front part of the caves—where we all went as soon as the sun got high—and with my new dragon-sense I got a promise (which is like putting your hand into your empty pocket and finding that someone has slipped you something, money or chocolate or a magic ring) that I’d be brought back to the birth place in the Bonelands from Dragon Central some time. Because I think that is the Birth Place—and you remember what I said about the Dragon Central caves, how it’s like the rock itself had become dragony—it’s like that only way more so at the birth place. At the birth place you know the stones can talk to you. Now if only I could learn the language.

  I’m also no longer sure about mom and dad in dragon terms. I’m not sure but what it’s some kind of marsupial kibbutz, in those pouches, and that while maybe Gulp and Bud contributed some of the eggs and sperm—assuming it’s even an egg-and-sperm deal, which I don’t know either—they may not have contributed all of them. Put it on the list of stuff to try and find out. Including whether the kibbutz thing might have something to do with getting ’em started on how dragon communication works. Maybe the birth place will tell me.