by Jane Yolen
“Our neat bone stacker is getting sloppy,” Jakkin said, running a finger over the top of the bone. It was a bande dominus, the large knobby bone from a dragon’s wing.
It provoked no laugh from Akki, who began to shiver again.
Jakkin’s foot kicked something that clattered away in the darkness. He got to his knees to try to find it by its gleam, but there were no telltale white patches anywhere on the tunnel floor and he guessed it had fallen into a ditch or ricocheted around a bend. He lifted his head suddenly arid realized that the singing and the command had stopped. It felt as if a headache that had long and mysteriously plagued him had disappeared. He shook his head.
“This is crazy,” he said aloud, his voice back to its normal pitch. “What are we doing here? We have to find our way back and mark our passage or we’ll be lost in here forever.”
Akki grunted her agreement.
They turned, heading back the way they had come. With his head clear of the mental message, Jakkin found he could see a bit more. The gray was not complete, lit as it was by flickering jewels in the wall. He reached out to touch one, and when his hand came close to it, it winked out as if it were an eye, but where the eye had been was only a pinpoint of icy air.
He caught his breath and stumbled on, not mentioning this discovery to Akki, since he wasn’t sure what it meant. Perhaps the mountain was only a shell and these tunnels were close to the outside. Perhaps there was some more sinister meaning. But she was already frightened enough, so he calmed his traitor thoughts and instead sent her a strengthening picture.
They walked along silently for some time, following the twistings of the tunnel. At last Akki spoke, though Jakkin had already guessed what she wanted to say, her absolute fear having snaked into his mind moments before.
“We’re lost, Jakkin. I know it.”
“How can you be sure?”
“We haven’t stumbled over my pack, have we? We should have come on it long ago. And the path seems to be going down instead of up. If we were in the right tunnel, we would have found the cave opening by now.”
He made more soothing sounds, but he knew she was right. He’d figured it out himself scant moments before, and his mind sent out a confirmation before he could stop it.
Akki sat down on the cold stone and, after a moment of hesitation, Jakkin did the same. For a long time they were silent, their bridged minds sending landscapes of gray despair back and forth, pictures compounded of nervous ness and the steady drip-dripping of eroding confidence.
Jakkin forced himself to reach over and pat Akki’s shoulder. That touch comforted them both. She moved over and snuggled against him.
And then they heard a sound, a quick scuttering, as if hundreds of tiny feet were coming toward them.
“The bones,” Akki whispered. “The monsters of the bone pile.”
Into Jakkin’s head exploded the picture of that pile magnified by Akki’s fear into a mountain of dripping blood, red blood, the first color he had been able to conjure in a long while.
The sound got closer.
They scrambled up, determined to face whatever it was on their feet, and they pressed their backs against the wall as if they could disappear into the resisting stone. Akki was holding her breath on and off. Each time she had to let it out to take another breath there was a tiny explosion of sound that echoed mockingly from the walls. Jakkin tried to slow his own breathing but it seemed to roar out instead, bouncing off the stone. He could feel his heart pounding, too, and that noise was so loud he wondered that there was no answering echo.
And still the slithering, skuttering sound came closer, as if the monster bone-stackers had rounded yet another bend in the tunnel.
Jakkin grabbed Akki’s shoulder and she let out a high yip.
“I know that sound,” he said. “The echoes confused me at first, but I recognize it now.”
“What . . . is . . . it?” Akki asked.
“In the nursery,” Jakkin said breathlessly. “When we unstalled the dragons and led them through the halls, the hens in heat dragged their tails behind them on the ground and made that shushing sound. That was when we first knew they were ready to mate.”
“Of course,” Akki said, “the scent glands dragged along the ground and the males would smell it and track a female down.” She stopped. “But all those bones . . . dragons don’t eat dragons. They’re vegetarians. Only people eat dragons. And drakk.”
“No one’s been in these caves before. No one that I know of,” Jakkin said. “Though old Likkarn said—”
And that was when the sending burst upon them full force.
It was a strange, wild, frenzied picture, a riot of grays shot through with angry, jagged blacks and icy silvers, reeking with fear. No common landscape, this one was tunnelshaped and tunnel-twisted, but over and under and burrowing through was an unmistakable rainbow pattern, except that the only gradations of color were grays.
“That’s Heart’s Blood’s pattern!” Jakkin screamed. “The rainbow. It’s her. She’s here!”
“Jakkin, no!” Akki cried, clawing at his arm. “She’s dead. Heart’s Blood is dead. No!” The walls returned her cry over and over.
But Jakkin was already running down the dark tunnel toward the sending.
Akki left the small safety of the wall and followed the sound of his pounding feet. Around a final bend she caught up to him and wrenched at the pack on his back, slowing him for a moment and slamming him against the wall. Just then something large and smelling of the familiar musk of dragon heaved past them, its dragging tail frantically whipping against the walls. The tail caught them both around the ankles and they fell heavily, Akki atop Jakkin’s pack. She felt the jar of boil break and the wetness spread beneath her. She whispered frantically, “That’s not Heart’s Blood, Jakkin. She’s dead. We carved her open. Remember? We sheltered in her. Remember? I saw her bones.”
His sobs began then, the racking sobs of someone unused to tears. At last he got hold of himself and sat up. “Sorry,” he said, snuffling. “I know it’s not her. But who—or what—is it?”
“I don’t know,” Akki said, putting her arms around him with a fierceness that astonished them both. “But I’ve got a feeling we’re going to find out soon.”
Akki took a deep breath, then urged Jakkin to do the same. In and out, in and out, they timed their respirations until they were both calm. And then they felt it, a great trembling presence nearby: breathy, hulking, and frightened.
“Man?” The dark sending was knife sharp, though still within the basic tunnel shape, still gray. Then, tremulously, the sharper image melted away into a river of softer grays. “Not-man?”
Jakkin stood and shed the soaking pack, then he walked slowly toward the creature with the sure step of a dragon trainer. All the while he thought cool and careful landscapes full of meadows and mountains, rivers and trees, gray-green, blue-gray. He put his hand out and rubbed down the dragon’s enormous leg until the creature put its head to his hand and sniffed it carefully. It nudged his hand and he felt along the nose and over the bony ridge of the forehead till he came to its ears. He began to scratch around its earflaps.
Akki edged forward and tickled under the dragon’s chin. She began to sing in a clear sweet voice:
Little flame mouths
Cool your tongues,
Dreaming starts soon
Furnace lungs. . .
And soon the tunnel was filled with a gentle thrumming and the dove gray sendings of the cave dragon.
The Snatchlings
9
THE DRAGON’S THOUGHTS were confusing. They seemed to hop from one splash of gray to the next. Its mouthings were unformed as well, most of the time nothing more than the pipings of a new hatchling, as though it was almost mute.
“Can you get any sense of her?” Akki asked.
“If you’ve found out it is a her, then you’re doing better than I am,” Jakkin said.
“I can feel the difference, idiot!”
Akki sighed. “All this time with dragons and you don’t know a worm-eaten thing. Female dragons have a special ridge under the tongue. You can just barely feel it when they’re not gravid, but it’s there. It grows bigger to help with the egg breaking if a hatchling’s birth bump can’t do the job. Then it gets smaller again, after the hatching.”
“I got all of that but gravid.”
“It means pregnant, Jakkin. Full of eggs. Honestly! I sometimes wonder about you.”
Jakkin grunted. “You have a lot of head knowledge, Akki. But most of what I know comes from here.” He tapped himself on the chest and his sending was a diagram of a human with the pulsing red point in the center of the body.
“That’s the stomach, worm waste. Your heart is higher and on the left side.” She laughed.
“I know that,” Jakkin said quickly. But a moment later he joined in her laughter.
Sensing the lightened mood, the dragon gave a remarkable imitation of a chuckle, deep-throated and near a thrum. For an instant her mind seemed to clear and Jakkin caught a glimpse in her sending of a landscape so alien to him, he wondered if it was real. It was a dark hole in which hot fiery liquids bubbled, and nearly naked creatures, in stooped parody of human beings, bent over the boiling pit. Then the scene was gone, replaced by the same jumble of grays.
“Man? Not-man?” the dragon asked again.
“Of course man,” Akki said.
The dragon leaped up, knocking Jakkin over with its tail as it stood and began to tremble.
“Oh, fewmets,” Akki cried. “Jakkin, do something.”
Jakkin scrambled to his feet and put both hands on the dragon’s back. The only other time he had seen a dragon tremble that much had been in the pit when a defeated dragon had screamed until Heart’s Blood began to shake in the tremors known as Fool’s Pride. Such trembling usually led a dragon to forget all training and fight to the death. But a death wish was not what Jakkin sensed from the cave dragon. He could read only total and overwhelming fear, so he willed himself to send calmly, though he could feel sweat running down his back with the effort. Forcing the image that had always worked for him before, he sent a faded, grayed-out picture of the oasis where he and Heart’s Blood had trained, with its ribbon of blue river threading through the sandy landscape.
But the dragon seemed unable to listen. Her own hot, bubbling fear images kept breaking into Jakkin’s sending, boiling the gray-blue stream and turning the sand dunes into vast gray storms. Her trembling continued unabated.
“Man. Man. Man. Man.” It was a kind of wail that ran through, around, under, and over the sending.
“I can’t reach her,” Jakkin shouted to Akki, his voice bouncing off the walls. “Either that or she can’t hear.”
“Maybe . . .” Akki’s voice was thinned out, “maybe the pictures you’re sending make no sense to her. Try something else.” She’d begun trembling herself with the effort of soothing the dragon.
Jakkin moved toward the dragon’s neck and put his arms around her shaking head. He blew into her ears, trying to get her attention.
“Listen, little flamemouth,” he crooned, “I am not-man. I am part dragon. I had two mothers. Trust me. Trust me. Think of the dark. Think of the quiet. Think of the notmen.” He forced cool, careful thoughts to her, stopping once to blow in her ears again, first the left, then the right. Then he started crooning again.
“I think . . .” Akki began, “I think she’s trembling a little less.”
He nodded, keeping up his croon. He babbled about caves and night and the moons and anything else that he could think of, but all the while he kept the sending as controlled as possible.
“She’s definitely trembling less,” Akki said.
Even Jakkin could feel it now, running his hand down the long neck where the scales, though shifting with small tremors, were moving more slowly. He doubled his effort then, sure of success. “I will tell you a story now,” he said, his voice even, “about Fewmets Ferkkin, a fantastic fellow.” He proceeded to tell the dragon seven jokes in a row without ever changing the tone of his voice. The important thing was to keep the words flowing.
Next to the dragon’s leg, Akki relaxed into a giggle. “Jakkin—you’re terrible,” she said. But her mood, communicating directly with the dragon, helped even more.
As Jakkin began the eighth joke he realized he couldn’t think of any more and finished lamely, “And that’s all we know about Fewmets Ferkkin . . .” but it was all right, for the dragon had stopped shaking.
Jakkin sighed. “Now what is all this,” he said softly, “about not-man?”
But the dragon, too, gave a tremendous sigh, lay down, and put her great head on her front legs and fell asleep.
“When you deal with hysterical babies,” Akki said, “you’ll find a surprising phenomenon—they fall asleep the minute the crisis is over.”
“Some baby,” Jakkin said.
“Big baby,” Akki added.
They laughed, remembering their conversation only a day before.
“So now we have an enormous sleeping dragon on our hands,” Jakkin began.
“And several enormous questions unanswered,” Akki finished for him.
Jakkin was silent.
“One,” Akki said, “is what is the dif ference between man and not-man and why did it scare her so much?”
“Two is—who is she and where did she come from?” Then, as if in afterthought, he added, “She’s certainly too big to have come in through our entrance. And . . .”
“And if she came in elsewhere, where is elsewhere?” asked Akki.
“Three,” Jakkin said, “who is she running from?”
“That’s easy. The thing, whatever it is, that eats dragons and stacks their bones in neat piles.” Akki gave an exaggerated shiver. It translated into wavy lines that streaked through Jakkin’s head.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Jakkin said. “But that leads us right to question four, which is . . .”
“If man frightens her and not-man doesn’t, then is it man who’s doing all the eating?”
“We ate dragon meat before,” Jakkin said.
They were both quiet for a moment, remembering.
“Maybe question five is—what’s down there?” Akki said.
“Down where?” asked Jakkin.
“Question six,” Akki said. “Which direction is down there?”
Jakkin squatted next to the sleeping dragon and put his back against the cave wall. “Question seven is—do we go forward or do we go back?”
Akki knelt next to him. “If we go back, we have to deal with the copter and whoever is in it.”
Jakkin interrupted. “And the fact that there is no other way down the mountain.”
She nodded. “But if we go forward, we have to deal with the dragon’s fear and the man/not-man thing that eats dragons and licks the bones clean and whatever else in her sending we didn’t understand.”
“Hot bubbly somethings. And slopeshouldered creatures. And . . .”
“But that’s all unknown,” Akki said. “And maybe just in her imagination.”
“Dragons don’t have any imagination,” Jakkin said. “They say only what is.”
“But we know what’s back there . . .”
“So the real question is?”
“Numbers eight, nine, and ten,” said Akki. “Which is more frightening—what we know or what we don’t know? The light world filled with copters and possible death or transportation, or this gray world filled with . . .” She stopped.
There was a long moment of silence. Jakkin tried to keep his mind blank, but it boiled with images. Finally he whispered to her, though his mind sent ahead what his mouth had formed reluctantly, “Both. They’re both frightening. You choose. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Hey,” Akki whispered back, “that’s my line!”
“Then we’ll choose together.”
“All right,” Akki said. “We’ll go . . .
” Her mouth shut but her mind spiraled down and down and down into the unknown dark.
10
WITH THEIR MINDS made up, Akki and Jakkin began to plan, and their voices crisscrossed the echoing cave.
“We need to wake up baby here,” said Akki.
“I don’t like calling her baby here”, Jakkin said. “She should have a name.”
“I thought I was the one who named things,” Akki said, smiling. “You’re always teasing me about it.”
“Maybe I’m changing,” Jakkin said.
“Maybe you’re growing up,” Akki retorted.
“Maybe you’re not.”
“Maybe the dragon already has a name,” Akki said.
“Maybe you’ve changed the subject.”
“Maybe she has.”
“Akki, think. If a dragon has a name, it announces it in the first sending.”
“How can she be this old and not have a name?” Akki asked.
“Question number eleven,” Jakkin said.
“Well, she had a gray rainbow in her first sending. How about Rainbow Gray?”
“I hate it.”
“Ssstep-sister.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Then you name her,” Akki said. “It was your idea, after all.”
“All right, I will. What’s the big vein that carries blood to the heart called again?”
“Anatomy lessons, Jakkin?”
“Yes. Sure. What’s it called?”
“You mean the aorta?”
“Aorta? No, that’s awful. You can’t name a dragon Aorta.”
“That’s what it’s called,” Akki said.
“You told me something else.”
“You mean . . .” Akki paused and added, “during one of my anatomy lessons?”
“Enough,” Jakkin said. “I give up. So they weren’t lessons, exactly. Only I did listen. You know a lot and I learned a lot.”
Akki sighed. “You couldn’t have learned much if you can’t remember.”
“Wait, I do remember. It’s not the big vein, it’s part of the heart. It’s called . . .” He stopped, shrugging. “I can’t remember.”