Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  One more thing that I did learn is that having your dragonlets born during a full moon is maybe the best good luck omen there is. Dragon moms start doing whatever the dragon equivalent is of “star light star bright first star I’ve seen tonight” as moons get full toward the ends of their pregnancies. Are dragons superstitious? Beats me. Do dragons actually have an oar in the ethereal what-have-you so that wishing on stars (or whatever) actually has an influence? Beats me too. But it won’t surprise you if I tell you I think dragons are capable of almost anything. And if you want to think that I say “good luck omen” because I’m superstitious and that’s not what the dragons were telling me at all, that’s your privilege. But my version is that it would have been a very bad omen if Gulp’s last baby had missed—had got into the pouch after moonset, when the only thing touching its gummy little hide was darkness and clueless human hands.

  So at least Lois had had something going for her.

  Oh yes, and what did we say when everyone wanted to know why the big black dragon had come booming in for Jake? What was that all about? We waffled. Oh, my, how we waffled. Now that we’ve been kind of winning for a while (and there’s even money in the bank, we’ve NEVER had money in the bank before) Dad’s developed quite a flair for waffling. (I’m still a lousy waffler, so I just disappeared.) Katie’s really good at it too—she’s always been a gift to the business admin side, and she’s done more and more of the Interface with Outsiders stuff since Mom died—and she got him started on waffling as a fine art (as opposed to his natural style of thumping and roaring). Katie’s weakness is being too nice, which has never been one of Dad’s problems.

  So you’re reading it here for the first time, about Gulp’s babies. The publisher who thinks they’re going to get this—although they haven’t actually read it yet, so who knows—have already been sworn to ninety-six jillion kinds of secrecy, with sub clauses about underlings being chained to their desks with no internet access till pub date, etc. And even if it does get out, it doesn’t really matter. I hope. Our security nowadays makes your average bank vault look like a wet paper bag, and a lot of the Dragon Squadron money has gone on the fence—which at this point probably would hold up against a bomb or two. I wish I knew whether I should be glad about that or not.

  It was about two months after this, after Gulp’s babies were born, that Martha told me she was pregnant.

  There should be a very large white space here on the page…because I don’t care how much else has happened to you in your life and how many unique things you’ve been a part of and how many endangered species you’ve rescued and how many laws of science and biology you’ve personally exploded…there’s nothing like the prospect of your own first child for making your life turn over and start becoming something else.

  …And it got worse fast. First Martha said that she was going to spend as much time at Nearcamp and Dragon Central as she could—which is to say as much of the headaches as she could stand—which I understood but didn’t want her torturing herself and who knew if this would mean the baby was busy adapting and wouldn’t have to have dragon headaches or whether it would just start having the headache before it was born, which seemed pretty rough. Martha said no, she’d be able to tell if the baby was unhappy. I’d’ve (nervously) said okay to that one…till she said she wanted to have it at Dragon Central, I mean, born there. She said that if she had a totally free hand she’d have it at the birth place in the Bonelands, if the dragons would allow it—and when I started bouncing up to the ceiling and making holes in it with my head she said, Jake, calm down, Dragon Central was good enough.

  And I said something like GOOD ENOUGH??? And the conversation went on like that for a while. Her point was that birth was a big deal (…duh…), and that Gulp’s dragonlets’ birth that I’d been able to be a part of had changed me profoundly and made my connection to the/my dragons so much stronger and the least we could do was try to return the favor. And I was damned out of my own mouth because I’d told her about this. And I could see her point but I couldn’t stop gobbling about “safety” and “if something went wrong” and so on.

  We were still arguing and in fact we had so not come to any conclusions or even any working hypotheses that we hadn’t told anybody, not even Dad and Katie, yet, when Dad and Katie came to us and said that, uh, well, they’d decided to get married.

  “Oh, that’s great! That’s wonderful!” Martha said, and grabbed her mother and swung her around in an impromptu tango. And I hugged my dad, and he hugged me back, which is absolutely the dragons’ fault, all that sticking my hand (or more) in dragons’ mouths and learning to see/hear/read the atmosphere and all that group-bond stuff with dragons and so on, I’ve got so touchy-feely with my human friends it’s probably pretty repulsive, but they put up with it, probably partly because to the extent that they hang out with dragons it’s happening to them too, which certainly includes my dad. So we actually hugged each other pretty well.

  It’s been this hilariously open secret that Dad and Katie have been together for, I don’t know, years now. Eleanor, before she went off to boarding school last year (she’s got accepted on some kind of Eleanor-invented fast track and is going to be a lawyer by the time she’s seventeen or something: it may not take till she’s fifty to become president), asked them why they didn’t just get married and get it over with? Or at least move in together. Poor Eleanor—if “poor” and “Eleanor” can ever be combined—had the worst of it. She’d got Martha and me out of her hair but here was her mom still hopelessly soppy and silly with my dad—and pretending it didn’t show.

  “They just told me that it was their business and not mine,” she said disgustedly to Martha and me. “You see if you can do anything with them while I’m gone. I don’t get it—all those secrets when Lois was a baby, you’d think they’d be glad not to have a secret that they don’t, you know, have to have.” (I’m hoping Eleanor will keep this attitude. Think of it: a president whose default position is not “whatever we do don’t tell the voters.” Can the country stand it? Stay tuned.)

  So this was terrific news. We were still celebrating, and Martha had got out the cranberry juice to put in the champagne glasses because she wasn’t drinking because of the baby, but since it was the middle of the afternoon we thought maybe no one would think about it being cranberry juice, and it’s not like we had a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator waiting for a major announcement either. But we’d just made the first toast when Martha said, “So, okay, is there a reason you’ve finally decided to get married now and not two or three years ago?”

  And the two of them looked at each other as guiltily and sheepishly as, well, teenagers, and then Dad said, “Well—Katie—”

  And Katie said, “I’m pregnant,” at exactly the same moment as Martha said, “You’re pregnant,” and then Martha and I started laughing and couldn’t stop, and Dad and Katie were obviously relieved, but they were also a bit puzzled till Martha finally gasped out, “So am I!”

  So then the fun really began because Martha told Katie about her idea about the birth at Dragon Central and Katie thought it was a great idea and wanted to do the same, and then Dad started behaving in a way that made the way I’d been behaving look restrained, which isn’t entirely surprising because while Katie was completely healthy and had popped out her two previous daughters with no particular effort and from what she said less drama than most women have to put in, she was now forty-six and so automatically on all the high-risk lists, and Dad wasn’t having any. She’d have that baby in a hospital like a normal twenty-first-century first-world woman, and there was no argument.

  Oh yes there was an argument. Martha and I were so fascinated we almost forgot to keep arguing ourselves. So pretty much within a day or two all of Smokehill knew that (a) Dad and Katie were getting married, (b) Katie was pregnant, (c) Martha was pregnant, (d) Katie and Martha wanted to have their babies at Dragon Central, (e) and the dads concerned were AGAINST this. Soap opera with dragons? You nev
er saw anything like it.

  I don’t know how Dad really felt—we didn’t dare talk about it, we might implode and there’d be a black sucking hole into a parallel universe where two generations of Mendoza men used to be—but he never said This is all YOUR fault although he must have thought it. I thought it. I could almost have done the black hole thing alone. Of course our baby should be born with dragons around. It was the obvious right thing to happen. And it was mean and horrible and two-faced and disloyal and treacherous of me to be trying to make something else happen instead.

  But how could we risk it? (What had Gulp been risking? Was the sixth blob—was my dragonlet dangerously tainted or weakened by its contact with me?) And Katie was part of my family no matter whose sibling her new kid was going to be. But the dragons were a part of my family too, and the ties were…they weren’t even unbreakable. They weren’t even ties. They were a part of ME like my ear or my pancreas was a part of me. Like Martha was a part of me. The way the question kept presenting itself to me was, Who was I going to betray?

  It was nearly getting to the point that the newlyweds and the almost-newlyweds weren’t on speaking terms which would have been funny if it hadn’t been us. And then Grace said softly into one of those dinner conversations that were only not getting loud and nasty through violent self-control of parties concerned, “Jamie married a midwife, you know.”

  Dead silence.

  “Sadie’s a midwife?” I said finally.

  “You could see what she says—ask her advice.”

  What she said, of course, was “You’re all nuts.” But she still agreed to fly out and talk to us in person. Which was amazingly nice of her. Although I had the impression she hadn’t decided whether to laugh or to bring a cattle prod to keep us at a safe distance. Maybe both. She’d only ever met any of us once, four years ago, on their way from Boston where they got married to their honeymoon in Hawaii—and they’d stayed here in Jamie’s old bedroom, which was still a bit redolent of Lois despite a fresh paint job in the bride’s honor. So she had a little idea of what she was getting into, and she came anyway.

  It was my idea to take her straight out to Farcamp and Dragon Central and let her meet, uh, some dragons. Everyone else was still saying “hello.” I was like at the end of my tether and starting to get rope burns.

  She looked from face to face and said hesitantly, “Farcamp?”

  I said, “Farcamp is where the humans stay when we want to spend time with the dragons. Dragon—er—Central is—er—next door.”

  She blinked maybe twice and said, “Okay.”

  But I knew that as soon as we all went to Dragon Central and I actually tried to tell my dragons what was going on, or at least finally let them pick up what I’d been trying to hide, they’d have to know how much I both did and didn’t want…. My stomach hurt. The old scars throbbed, and the inside felt like someone had tried to light me up, mistaking me for a dragonlet with an igniventator.

  Sadie didn’t disintegrate nearly as much as most people and she pulled herself together really fast. Maybe it’s the midwife training. Which isn’t to say she didn’t have a rough time. Everyone does. She shook like a leaf and Martha had to hold her up when she saw her first dragon—lying just outside the cave mouth of Dragon Central. She—Valerie (Vhaaaaaahhhhreeeeee)—recognized Sadie as a new human and raised her head only a very little and very slowly, and didn’t move the rest of herself at all, at first, till Sadie stopped clinging to Martha and at least half stood on her own feet again. And then Valerie unwound that long neck, which is one of the things dragons do, you’re even used to how big they are, and then it’s like that day Bud came to fetch me when his wings seemed to unfurl hundreds of miles: when they stretch their necks out toward you the neck goes on and on and on like the yellow brick road and however many times you’ve seen it you’re briefly not sure if there’s maybe a wicked witch involved this time after all.

  Valerie brought her head about ten feet from us and Sadie gallantly held her ground. I went up to human-arm’s length of her—it’s no wonder I’m always surprised how big I am with other humans because I’m so used to being bug-sized next to a dragon—and she lifted her lip in what was now standard-dragon invitation to known-human-friend for a chat, and I put my hand there and she said something like, Hmmmm? which meant, more or less, A new one, huh? and I said yes, and Valerie said something like, And there’s a purpose to this one, a different purpose, a new purpose? and I rubbed my hand over my face in the basic human “arrrgh” gesture and said something like zlk09&dflj;kgo*&^vx+iueaiiii mmbjdcudpf!!!! because this was so way beyond my powers of communication, and Valerie “laughed” and said, You’d better talk to Bud. (I don’t know how the dragons managed to pick up what I call him, but I knew the dragon “word”—the tiny mind-spasm—they used to name him to me wasn’t his dragon name, and it felt like Bud…but that’s more stuff I can’t explain. They call Gulp Gulp to me too, and Lois I think is Lois, even in Dragonese.)

  The two of us other humans each had a hand under one of poor Sadie’s arms and we were both saying, Look, are you sure you’re okay, you don’t have to do this, you don’t have to stay. It’s hard on us old-timers too, watching a newbie go through the initiation hazing and of course in this case we felt guilty because it wasn’t her idea, we’d asked her to come. But she was saying, No, this is fascinating, this is amazing, don’t you dare take me away, wow, I never imagined….

  We got her down the long first tunnel and into the hearth-room, and she met Bud and Gulp and Lois. She had to sit down—there are a couple of decent human-chair-sized rocks near the hearth, with hollows where your bottom goes, full of shed scales: I had a furniture-moving party with a couple of dragons a while back—but even though she was a little floppy her eyes were obviously focusing as she looked around, and she didn’t throw up or pass out or anything, which, trust me, is very good for a first timer. Martha did the out-loud version of why we were there with the hand gestures, which was as much for Sadie’s benefit (yes we do talk to them, the rumors are true) and then I put my hand inside Bud’s lip and tried not to shriek at him, and he did the dragon equivalent of murmuring “there, there” and the funny thing is I actually did feel a little comforted.

  It sort of seeped in, the “there, there”—like the answer-feeling, like trying to find out the dragon word for “rock.” It was like the misery was a specific quantity, like forty bales of hay, and someone had coolly backed in with a large truck and smuggled thirty of them away. When I looked at Martha she was wearing the same fragile haven’t-smiled-in-a-long-time smile that I could feel on my face.

  Sadie went really quiet when we got back to Farcamp though and I made coffee and offered the aspirin and thought about feeling better, and Martha held Sadie’s hands like you might a lost little girl’s (while the person at the info booth puts out an all-points for Mom and Dad over the loudspeaker). You could see Sadie kind of coming back to herself but the first thing she said was, “Light. We’re going to have to do something about having enough light.” And the second thing she said was, “You’re going to have to give me a job, you know, if this gets out, they’ll have my license off me so fast it’ll leave tread marks.”

  Martha managed not to look at me triumphantly, but I said, or rather squeaked, “What if something goes wrong?” Sadie barely glanced at me—she was deep in thoughts of practical planning—and said, “Have a helicopter standing by, of course. You don’t have to tell it what it’s standing by for, do you?” Which in the new Smokehill was true, we didn’t have to. We hadn’t told the pilot why we were taking Sadie out here, for example. Mostly we still make everybody go the old slow route, including ourselves. But as soon as Martha got too big to make the hike she’d need the helicopter to get out here anyway. Anyone not on the Smokehill grapevine would assume it would whisk her away if she went into labor. Avoiding the question of why she’d want to be joggling around in a chopper going to Farcamp at all.

  “It’s still a long flight to
the Wilsonville hospital—longer to Cheyenne,” I said, failing to be reassured.

  Sadie came back from wherever she was, and paid attention when she looked at me. “Yes. But I can minimize the risks as much as anyone outside a big hospital and all its equipment can. And after that, Jake, I’m sorry, but you have to make the choice.”

  I looked at Martha, but I already knew I’d lost. I didn’t like it but in the end I believed Martha’s vote counted more than mine.

  So that was that. But do I think Bud…yeah, yeah, I would think Bud did something. But…once you’re kind of used to answer-feelings, to getting your answer as a kind of slow leak…once the headaches have softened you up and made you spongy, so you can soak up all kinds of stuff, like pancakes in maple syrup (which is the nicest image I can think of, since spongy doesn’t sound too great), I don’t know…but I don’t know how I let it go, even if I did think Martha’s vote counted more. Justice and fairness don’t mean shit when you’re in love and scared to death. And I knew Martha wasn’t dumb enough not to be worried. But I’ve told you why I named Bud Bud in the first place. He does kind of have that effect. Maybe Martha and I should have gone out there first thing and told him all about it at the beginning.

  And once Martha had won there was no stopping Katie. Bud has to have done something to Dad. Dad never gives up, once he’s made up his mind.

  And then, about five weeks before Martha was due and nine weeks before Katie was, Gulp’s babies made their first public appearances. I’d walked past Zenobia on door duty at Dragon Central and even my stupid thick human radar could pick up the excitement, but I didn’t know what it was about till I rounded the corner into the big hearth-space and there were six small greenish and blackish blobs making slow lurching forays over the more-or-less level floor to one side of the fire—they’re so (comparatively) small still at that age that it takes a lot of dragons staring at them to make you realize they’re not just odd fire shadows, which is your first thought, but in that case why are all the dragons staring—? Oh.…Gulp had made herself into a half-crescent and the open side was toward me. Lois was a rusty-pink gleam beside her, and I realized one of the blobs was sitting between her forefeet. Which is when I figured out what they were.