Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  But speaking of training a dragon, it was at this stage, when she was beginning to spend significant amounts of time outside her mom’s pouch equivalent that I began to realize…this is going to sound really stupid…that she was trying to, uh, respond to me, I mean aside from the fact that she still got hysterical if I wasn’t around for more than about two hours.

  I’ve raised, or helped raise, baby birds and baby raccoons and baby woodchucks and baby porcupines, and watched the Rangers raise baby bears and baby wolves and baby eagles, and some of them even survived to grow up and fly or run or trundle away. But when a baby robin gets all excited and sticks its neck out and opens its mouth and goes “ak kak kak kak kak” at you it’s not exactly responding to you. It’s responding to the prospect of getting fed. It never thinks about being a robin, and it doesn’t care what you are, so long as you’re feeding it the right stuff. (Chopped up earthworms rolled in dirt are a favorite. Delicious.) I also know that animals raised by humans tend to grow up funny because they aren’t getting socialized by their own kind and don’t learn how to do it, but even then I’m not sure that what they’re doing is confusing themselves by trying to be human. What they’re doing is failing to learn how to be themselves.

  And I was a little silly about Lois…okay, more than a little. But can you blame me? The point is, when she started spending more time at a little distance, so we could like look at each other—that was another thing, her eyes had suddenly gone all sharp and focused at about five months; I’d begun to think that maybe dragons don’t use sight much (and then I’d remember her mom’s eye, sharp and clear and focused as anything—and dying—and then I’d remember all the impossible stuff I’d seen in that eye about hope and despair—and then I’d take my mind off it like peeling Snark as a puppy off the shoe he was disemboweling)—anyway, when Lois could watch me properly, she started trying to do what I was doing. For a while I could ignore it, put it down to why your cat walks on your keyboard when you’re trying to use your computer, why your dog suddenly wants to play fetch when it’s your turn to get dinner.

  But she wasn’t just trying to get my attention. It took me a while to figure this out—dragons and humans are shaped so much different. It’s not like baby chimps learning to crack coconuts with stones by picking up a stone and banging with it because that’s what Mom’s doing. Or maybe it is. When I was typing, if she didn’t want a nap, Lois used to dance. I should maybe say I’m kind of a dramatic typist. I had had to practice keeping my legs and feet still when Lois first got out of the sling, so she could lie on them while I typed. If they weren’t held down, my feet started tapping all by themselves. (Which wasn’t actually such a bad thing, because if she didn’t want a nap—and she way too often didn’t want a nap—she’d dance with my feet. This was a little distracting I admit, but I usually managed to keep typing.) She made great wheezy inhale noises when I was breathing in something especially wonderful that Grace was taking out of the oven, but that may just have been that she agreed with me. When I’d scratch my head or pull my hair and grunt while I was doing schoolwork I didn’t like (which tended to make the Headache worse too) she’d scratch and shake her head—and grunt.

  Sometimes it was more complicated than that—or maybe what I mean is it was harder to decide it didn’t mean anything. But when I was doing laundry she began to collect whatever small loose stuff she could around the house, shoes, magazines, dropped pencils, wet rain stuff hanging over the radiators, and including snaffling towels off the rails (which in theory were hung too high for her to reach), snurgle them around a while on the kitchen floor (I tried to rescue the towels in time), leave them while the washer ran, and then bring them outdoors and spread them out on the ground (sometimes this was kind of hard on the magazines) when I hung the stuff up to dry.

  This really did catch my attention because it seemed to me to say something about her attention span and her, you know, mental processes generally. It was way too complicated, you know? In fact it started making me think scary Dragons Are Intelligent thoughts so I concentrated on trying to prevent her from “washing” anything that would make more work for me. I told myself that baby critters are always getting into other things—especially things you don’t want them to get into—it’s what they do. It’s part of being a baby critter. It’s part of growing up. Half-grown raccoons are incredibly creative escape artists and nosy and boy can they get into trouble. It’s hardwired. Nothing to get paranoid about. Nope. Nothing at all.

  And I’ve said she was noisy. Well, I talked to her a lot. That went back to that very first day, that awful day when I found her, when we were like both yattering from our different traumas. Well, same trauma, different angle. It’s like we’d just never stopped, it’s just the frenzy level had dropped some, and most of our yattering now was pretty cheerful. A little overwrought sometimes maybe but pretty cheerful.

  I’ve told you she had learned really quickly to “talk” during pauses in a conversation—the one time she consistently broke this rule was while I was in the shower. (She’d gone on not liking to get wet.) I always left the bathroom door half open so she could follow me in if she wanted to (which she always did, but I kept hoping…) and she talked to/with the shower. I could hear her—the water going whoosh whoosh whoosh and Lois going kind of woooosh whooch waaaaaaaash wiiiiiIIIIiiiish, as if she assumed the shower was either one of my noises or a major monologist, and didn’t quite understand why it only made this one sort of splash-and-splatter-punctuated roaring cry.

  So if there was no one else at home sometimes I sang. Now there is a noise to drive the birds from the trees and the dragons into the deepest caverns of the Bonelands. Even Lois’ mimicry boggled at trying to do the dragonlet version of a shower and Jake singing. Although she did do a good hum. In fact her humming was the nearest of all her noises to any of the noises humans make. Sometimes we hummed together.

  But I think I played with her more once Martha and Eleanor were in on it. Things just felt a little less harrowing. That being-on-the-same-side thing even made me feel a little more at ease with the child welfare people, and I swear child welfare people pick up the smell of fear like mean dogs do and have no clue that the fear might be of them. (Mean dogs know perfectly well that it is. We’ve—Smokehill I mean—only ever had maybe two mean dogs since I’ve been old enough to notice, and they don’t last past the first snap. One of the families with kids, one of the kids ran away when Dad banned the dog, and then the rest of the family gave up and left too. More of Dad’s graduate students. He doesn’t have the best luck with his graduate students.)

  Eleanor nearly ruined everything though by deciding to be helpful by adding corroborative testimony like in police shows on TV. She asked the doctor if he couldn’t do anything else for my eczema (his creams hadn’t worked, not surprisingly, but also because I hadn’t bothered to use them) because she was sure it hurt more than I admitted. Thanks, Eleanor. Maybe it worked out okay though since the doctor knew that Eleanor was a busybody. So maybe that Eleanor pretended she knew it was eczema was corroborative testimony. (I taught her to say “corroborative testimony” and she forgave me for being ticked off that she’d opened her big mouth about it at all.)

  Anyway. Lois used to lie on my feet at supper (everybody else carefully and awkwardly keeping their feet out of the way around Billy and Grace’s little kitchen table, especially after she started to generalize about people and wanted to be friends with everybody she saw. Even if you were unsympathetically wearing shoes she’d put her hot scratchy nose up your pantleg to be sociable) which was usually the four of us humans plus one dragon. Except when Dad couldn’t get away or Billy was on duty or aggravating some investigators or checking what the diggers and builders were (still) doing to the caves after they’d closed down for the day (work on this had slowed down a lot since the scandal started). And then sometimes we had Jane or Kit or Whiteoak—or Nate or Jo, who Billy’d added to the dragonsitting/Jake’s Sanity Conservation rota—and people havi
ng a meal together talk (except Whiteoak of course. I learned “thank you” and “please pass the whatever” in Arkhola from having Whiteoak for dinner. Even Whiteoak wasn’t going to risk being rude to Grace I think). Maybe they talk especially when they aren’t completely comfortable with each other, and Dad and I hadn’t been completely comfortable with each other in years, and we also weren’t seeing as much of each other as we used to, so most of the time we talked a lot to cover up the silence.

  (Except of course if there’d just been a big meeting about what to do about the poacher’s parents—which nobody ever did tell me anything about, just by the way, until years later, when I asked Dad. He looked at me blankly for a minute and then gave a sort of hollow nonlaugh. “We didn’t figure anything out, that first meeting,” he said—and Dad doesn’t talk in italics all the time the way I do. “We didn’t figure anything out. We just sat around and moaned and shouted and tore our hair.” He stared into space for a minute, frowning. “It was pretty goddamn awful.”)

  It was a joke for a long time when, if a silence did manage to fall, we’d hear Lois doing her peeping and burbling under the table, which got gruffer and rougher as she got older. But I think I’m the only one of us humans who noticed that it wasn’t just getting gruffer and rougher, but it was starting to rise and fall in a rhythm—kind of a lot like the sound of people talking.

  I thought about this for a while, kind of hoping that someone else would notice too, but if anyone did they didn’t say anything to me. But dragon noises, as I say, are peculiar so probably only my ears could make anything about Lois’ sound effects seem familiar.

  It had been Eleanor’s remark about my goofiness that had really made me think about it. Between Lois and…between Lois and Lois it was really easy not to think about anything but getting through every hour as it came. So up till Martha and Eleanor met Lois I suppose I had kind of been thinking about Lois almost like a funny looking dog with strange habits. Snark imitated all kinds of human things and we all just said oh, what a clown. Eleanor made me realize that while I was just as goofy about Lois as I’d been about Snark, I was goofy about her differently. Not just because she wasn’t a dog. Not just because she was the first addition to my family after fifty percent of it had died. Not just because of the dreams.

  So one afternoon when I’d done more schoolwork than I could stand, and it was sunny outdoors, and we were alone at the cabin, I took her out (she waddled and murmured behind me, her scaly feet and the tip of her now steadily lengthening tail making a funny little scuttling noise on the kitchen linoleum like maybe there were several baby dragons following me instead of only one) and sat down on the ground with her and said, “Hey, Lois.” I said it very carefully and deliberately. “Heeeeeey” on a falling note and “Lois” as two distinct syllables, “Lo” higher and stronger and “is” dropping off and down.

  I didn’t sit on the ground with her so much any more because for some reason this got her all excited and she was too inclined to stick her face in my face and give me more eczema (what a good thing she wasn’t a face-licker), but it was a good way to get her attention. When she rushed over to touch her nose against mine I fended her off with a hand and said “Hey, Lois” again.

  She stopped trying to make face contact and looked at me as if she knew this was important. She didn’t have that squashy look of something that had been stepped on any more, and her head was beginning to look almost a little horsey, narrow at the muzzle and wider between the eyes. Her eyes were a little bulgy like an animal’s who expects to have a lot of peripheral vision, but they were also protected by some nobbly, bumpy ridges, so who knows. Maybe dragons see the world with a nice scalloped frame around it. Baby dragon eyelashes, by the way, are halfway to being spines, which means that when your baby dragon blinks its eyes when it’s falling asleep against your stomach, you feel like you’re being peeled. (Some of the spinal plates, the erectile ones, have slightly serrated edges too, which are in effect more like a cheese-grater.) I must have good resistance to pain or something. I never minded the eczema or the peeling nearly as much as I minded the diapers, and the diapers were over.

  She peeped at me.

  “Hey, Lois.”

  She peeped again, except it was more of a grumble.

  “Hey, Lois.”

  Another rumbly peep. But this one was a three-syllable peep, and the first syllable was longer than the other two.

  “Hey,” I said, more softly. “Lois.”

  And she answered a quieter three-syllable peep, and the long syllable fell down the scale and the first short syllable was higher and stronger and the second short syllable was lower and deeper.

  I looked at her and she looked at me. Sure, mynah birds can do better, but do they do better while you’re both straining with alertness at each other? It takes weeks to teach a parakeet to say its first words. The air was nearly humming around us, and the Headache tried to break out of my skull again, which it didn’t do so much as it used to except when I woke up from dreaming about big dragons and caves with weird lighting effects. I suppose I’d noticed before that the Headache tended to get worse when Lois and I seemed to be getting, you know, intense at each other. But I wasn’t thinking about that either. I did wonder occasionally if maybe it was a brain tumor, but weirdly since I’m so good at worrying about everything I could never really get going worrying about that.

  So I sat there looking at her with her looking at me. I was excited and thrilled and also…frightened and horrified. Frightened because it was like I was finally facing that I had this whole extra responsibility. I’d only been trying to keep her alive, which had been more than enough, but now I’d been reminded, forcefully, that just feeding a wild orphan isn’t enough, and what do you teach a dragon about being a dragon? What was Lois trying to learn from the very funny-looking dragon she thought was her mom by mimicking the noises she (well, he) made?

  I had no idea. And nobody could tell me. And I had read Old Pete’s journals so often I knew them almost by heart and he couldn’t tell me either.

  And I hated the idea that the best Lois had to look forward to was growing up to live in some kind of cage and being dumbly fed by humans for the rest of her life because no one would’ve taught her how to be a dragon. Okay, Lois being alive was a miracle.

  I wanted more miracles. That’s all.

  I also perversely suddenly didn’t want any other humans to notice that Lois was trying to speak human. Add this to the long list of things I can’t really explain. I was afraid of…how their reactions might make me think about it, I guess. Just the fact that they’d have reactions (Dad would get all fascinated and remind me to keep careful notes and Billy would just nod slowly and go on with whatever he was doing) felt like someone putting a hand on your soap bubble: pop. (Although as soap bubbles go, Lois didn’t make the grade.)

  But I was realizing what it really meant that Lois was Lois to me first and a dragon second, however stupid that sounds, like I could forget for half a nanosecond that she was a dragon. But everybody else could afford to see her as a dragon. And this meant I saw her as…?

  I had a lot of sleepless nights after that afternoon, while Lois snuffled and gurgled under the bedclothes. While I worried I also noticed—especially noticeable in an enclosed space like between your sheets—that her burps and farts smelled more and more like singe and char. I was sure Lois would be brokenhearted if she woke up one morning and discovered she’d fried me in her sleep…but what if she did?

  CHAPTER SIX

  I’m still doing a lousy job of giving you any sense of time passing. Well, time passed, and all of us preadult things kept getting bigger, me, Martha, Eleanor…Lois. And the seasons kept changing, the way they do. You don’t not notice things like which season it is in Smokehill. (Well. You get confused sometimes, like when it snows in August, or when the February thaw is longer than usual and every critter in the zoo and the orphanage starts shedding, and everything underfoot that isn’t rock turns to mud, a
nd that year you have to go through this twice.) But weather and seasons are kind of the same even when they’re different: It may be spring now, but winter will come round again soon enough. You know that. So I was lying awake smelling farts like burned toast and scorched hamburger, and thinking about how Lois was getting on for two years old.

  She’d turn two right before I’d turn seventeen. I’d have my high-school equivalency certificate by then easy, and then I could stop pretending to be a fast-track early-acceptance Ranger apprentice and become a real one—out of reach of social workers and bureaucrats at last. And doctors trying to treat me for a unique variety of eczema.

  We’d been so lucky so far. (I keep saying that. But it’s maybe the most important thing of all.) Martha told me there was a big new Friends of Smokehill movement that was holding the Searles off. The Searles were the parents of the villain. Somehow I didn’t manage not to learn their/ his last name. They said that while it was true that their son had been in the park when he shouldn’t, he only wanted to see a dragon and that this one had turned on him for no reason. Like they were there and saw it happen. Like that explained the spare grenades he’d still been wearing when she flamed him and the big-bore lightning rifle heavy enough to penetrate six rhinos standing in a row. Even I’d half-noticed the heavy artillery at the time. Sure he’d only wanted to see a dragon.