Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  Gulp didn’t take Lois away from me though. She took us both.

  This is pretty embarrassing, but the first thing I remember about that journey is throwing up. I guess Gulp didn’t want to hang around for explanations—or maybe she’d seen helicopters before. We do have the occasional dramatic air rescue at Smokehill, and dragons live a long time. Or maybe my panic vibes were impressive. She scooped us up in her front claws, spread her wings, and left. Dragons are not graceful takers-off—or maybe that was just our weight. And my not being used to flying. Mostly a dragon carrying something as big as us would be carrying a kill, and kills don’t care. Also since she didn’t have her front feet she kind of bounced along on her hind ones till her wings took over, and her wings took over by going WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, which meant the dragon and any passengers were going JOLT, JOLT, JOLT, with her entire body doing a massive recoil jerk with every wingbeat. Riding in the backseat of a Smokehill jeep has nothing on flying with a dragon. And by the time we were thirty feet in the air I lost it. Breakfast all over the meadow. I wonder what the guys looking for us made of that, if they were doing the on-your-knees forensic-shuffle-for-evidence thing. They were probably looking for blood.

  Between my head—which was still throbbing, make that THROBBING—and my stomach I was pretty miserable, but I closed my eyes for a while and the cold air began to help. Like her flying style wasn’t ghastly enough, Gulp was corkscrewing around through the landscape—we, I mean us at the Institute, had always assumed that dragons must fly as low as possible sometimes or we’d have had sightings more often. Or more evidence of them walking. But guesses varied about whether this was about energy expenditure or desire to be as inconspicuous as possible for something that runs thirty to eighty feet long, and at the moment it sure felt like she was trying not to be seen. Also her twisting and jinking felt pretty high octane to me and the bigger the predator usually the more energy-conscious it is. (Bleeeeeaaauugh. It was a good thing I didn’t have anything left to throw up after the first time or I’d’ve been leaving a trail.)

  She ducked behind stone pillars and outcroppings and took side-slips down little canyons and valleys (often where her wingspan was I swear unquestionably too wide for clearance) even when they weren’t going in what seemed to be her direction, like she knew there were bad guys following her. And where did she get that idea? There’d never been bad guys at Smokehill, till the poacher. And he didn’t fly, or go whompwhompwhomp.

  She didn’t hold us painfully or anything but I was pretty horribly uncomfortable all the same, and scared that somehow Lois would slip out of either my hands or Gulp’s. This didn’t seem to be bothering Lois at all. Lois was like a kid having her first roller coaster ride. I kept expecting her to say Wheeeeee, although with the wind of Gulp’s wings I couldn’t’ve heard her. I hadn’t trained her what to say for her first roller coaster ride anyway. Joke.

  We stopped once, by a stream at the bottom of one of the little canyons. Gulp came down almost as awkwardly as she’d taken off—holding her, well, her hands stiffly and as if anxiously out in front of her, like someone carrying a birthday cake while walking downstairs in the dark. Phew. I was glad for a drink. We all had a drink. I had a drink and a wash.

  Even that was peculiar—doing something with Gulp for the first time. Like we had something in common. Besides Lois. But Gulp got down on her belly again afterward. Lois knew exactly what was wanted—this was a game they’d played back in the meadow (although I’d never think of the concept of “game” in quite the same way again) and she climbed up to the top of Gulp’s neck and settled down what looked like pretty contentedly, while I watched and reminded myself about how I should want to lose Lois…but not necessarily get stranded who the hell knew where in the middle of Smokehill alone with no survival gear….

  Gulp raised her head just enough to give me a very pointed stare and then laid it down again. So I could step on it, I suppose. That’s how Lois climbed up there. I didn’t want to, but what are you going to do when a dragon stares at you? And I was lost.

  I hope I didn’t hurt her. I was only wearing sneakers, but I’m not a baby dragon and all my weight’s in two feet not four and you don’t step on people. And I didn’t step on her head. I found a way to crawl up her shoulder and then up that infinity of neck. Dragon scales are slippier than you think and the jagged bits aren’t nearly as jagged as they look, nor do they give you much purchase. I settled down pretty gingerly with a leg on either side of the top of her spine, Lois right in front of me, where there’s a little hollow where the skull meets the neck. But maybe it’s the thickness of dragon skin there, she was never more than hot. In fact pleasantly hot, when you’re flying in an open cockpit.

  I didn’t fall off. Neither did Lois. Even without the cage of Gulp’s claws. Among other things the head and neck don’t kick in the wingbeat-recoil the way the body does, so you can afford to kind of relax. Kind of. The dragon still looks around and you may not be looking at/for what the dragon is looking at/for, so you will find yourself very unnervingly looking one way while the head you’re on suddenly swivels around some other way while you’re still flying some other way yet. This is worse when your dragon is actually changing direction, when head and neck become part of the banking and balancing tackle. I also don’t recommend looking down, however good you are about heights.

  Lois was having the most fun she’d ever had in her life, if the blasting-bright-hot little sun in my skull was anything to go by. Maybe it was the comparison with the little sun, plus my own fears, that made the big rock in my head seem even bigger and knobbier and heavier and more headachy than usual and the boulder field squallier. At least up on top here the Headache eased a little but that internal storm-mauled feeling kept me dizzy and nauseated. I spent most of that flight with my cheek pressed against the base of Gulp’s skull, because it was like I didn’t have the strength to hold my head up. (Also that meant more of me stayed warm. And flying was a lot less confusing when my eyes were shut.) Lois had managed to wedge herself between these sort of horny plates a little higher up and farther forward, and every now and then I got hit in the head by her wildly flailing tail—which was now long and heavy enough for some pretty impressive wild flailing. Ow. Not among my best moments however you look at it.

  We stopped several times, but that could have been because Gulp needed a breather, carrying passengers, or a chance to get her normal balance back. And yes, she did stretch and shake her neck every time we got off. I know that horses can carry something like ten percent of their own weight in tack and rider over big jumps, but Gulp was flying. And flying and flying. Very energy intensive, flying, and worse when you’ve got like a very heavy hat tipping you forward all the time. But there wasn’t any place else we could have stayed on, not bareback anyway.

  I’m pretty sure Gulp went the long way around. The angle of the daylight kept changing direction from more than the sun rising and going back down again. (At one point I wondered faintly and queasily if even Billy could keep his sense of direction, flying dragonback.) Was she deliberately confusing our trail, or did dragons always leave a confusing trail? Something as big as a dragon you wouldn’t think they’d’ve learned to bother—that they’d think they needed to. Unless, of course, this was all part of the Smokehill dragons trying not to be watched or studied. Or maybe they never had the faith in our fence that us stupid humans had had, before the poacher.

  We arrived where we were going a little after sunset, although I think that was deliberate too. We’d had kind of a long pause, the last time Gulp came down, and the last flight was more of a hop. The Lois-sun in my head began to fade and it wasn’t round any more. As the bright light died the shape of the thing began to soften like the light did, and by the time it was no more than a faint glow it was also a sort of collapsed blob, like jam let out of its jar. Lois was tired. So was I. The big Gulp-rock had sunk down so it was lower than it was high too, but it hadn’t got softer, it had got harder. Just having it in my head hu
rt. It wasn’t so much a headachy feeling any more though, it was more like by sheer literal weight it was grinding its way down through the bottom of my skull. If I’d had to give it a definition I’d’ve called it stubbornness. I didn’t want to think about what Gulp might have to feel stubborn about but I couldn’t help being pretty sure I could guess.

  After we climbed back up her neck the last time and settled in, she shook herself a couple of times, sharply, and the big rock in my head developed spikes and sank them into my brain. Ow. I felt like a mountainside with pitons being banged into it. Lois gave a little squeak or mew, so I put my arm around her and tried to brace my feet and hands. I was tired and starving, and it wasn’t easy—the waning daylight felt like the waning me and nothing to do with the sun setting like it does every evening—but Gulp was obviously saying “hang on.”

  Because my head was so sore and heavy anyway and the wind made my eyes water—and yeah, I was scared, but try and tell me you wouldn’t be—I put my face down against one of the thick plates on Gulp’s neck again, although I could peer a little. Lois, who’d been pretty much playing Gallant Figurehead Breasting the Airy Ocean all day like something out of a blue-yonder version of Hornblower, was subdued enough now to let me pull her down too. Also as soon as the sun disappeared it started getting cold and plastering myself along Gulp’s hot neck felt good.

  We were at the bottom of another, bigger canyon with a lot of tumbled rock and scree everywhere and a few little patches of dull greenery. The remains of daylight couldn’t show much down here though. The shadows got pretty spooky pretty fast but I was on the scariest shadow of them all…and my sense that she was nerving herself for what happened next was scarier yet. Gulp went round a pillar and between two boulder falls with this amazing snakelike (passenger-cracking) writhe she could do…and suddenly went down and it was suddenly very dark, and then it wasn’t dark any more but the light was red and flickery, like firelight, only not like normal firelight either. The light kind of made me remember something, it was way too familiar….

  …And then there was an incredible roaring in my head and my ears, and Gulp was standing up on her hind legs and roaring back—the vibration felt like sitting on the biggest engine in the world at the moment when the biggest engine in the world is about to fly into smithereens—and twice she turned herself sharply one way or another and the arrow of fire that had no doubt been meant to wipe me off her back went wide, and I only barely stayed on, still hanging on to Lois, who was howling with terror and trying to look for her mom’s pouch again which wasn’t making my life any easier.

  After the first two flame-spears there weren’t any more, maybe because whoever was doing it had noticed that there was a little dragon up there with me (are all dragons this trigger happy?), but the roaring still seemed to go on for a very long time…. I have to be imagining this, but at the time I would have sworn that Gulp’s spinal plates rattled like castanets from the reverb of her roaring…although maybe not as long as it seemed because even after I stopped hearing it in my ears I was still hearing it my head. It felt like an avalanche of boulders and I couldn’t see or hear through it. I wasn’t sure I wasn’t in a real avalanche of boulders, and if I was, presumably I was about to die.

  Gulp may have tried to let us climb down the way we’d been doing all day and I didn’t notice or couldn’t do it. Which is how I found out that she could reach around to the back of her neck with her forelegs when one of her front claws closed—gently—around me. I think I may have yelled—okay, screamed—but then I recognized what she was doing, and tried to let go of the way I had myself wedged in but I was so stiff with terror and confusion that it was pretty impossible, it was like I’d lost track of my own legs and arms, and I couldn’t let go of Lois who was petrified and clinging to me. Mom instinct had kicked in again: I was off my head, but I was holding on to my daughter. Even Gulp had some trouble peeling us out of there and we had a very jerky and stomach-turning ride down to ground level.

  My legs just folded up like wet string, although I was also carrying the hysterical Lois. We collapsed together, and then had the insane-making sensation of Gulp coming down to four legs over us, with us directly under her belly, and her heat poured over us like one of Yellowstone’s boiling geysers. A tiny little portion of my mind, still trying to make rational thoughts against stupendous odds, which was pretty heroic of it in the circumstances, was saying, She’s protecting you! I could hear it, and it made sense and everything, to the extent that anything was making sense, but I was way beyond my deal-with-it boundary. Also the Headache was doing what felt like the cranial version of the John Hurt scene in Alien. I’m afraid I passed out.

  CHAPTER NINE

  When I came to, my head still hurt, but not quite as much, and I had Lois’ head jammed under my chin, humming. It wasn’t a very good hum, it kept breaking up and then starting to rise as if it was going to turn into a shriek, and then she’d catch herself and yank it back down into a hum. But she was trying to hum. And she was only a baby. Time I started dragging myself back together. If I could still find all the pieces.

  So I tried to sit up. The moment I moved, the avalanche in my skull started again and I put my hands to my head and squeezed. The avalanche stopped. It wasn’t the squeezing though, it was another roar from Gulp: I moved, the avalanche started, Gulp roared, the avalanche stopped. Well, it didn’t stop exactly. All the boulders got smaller and they did stop rolling around, as if they’d been flash-frozen by the noise. Or glued. But if the glue wasn’t strong enough they’d fall over and start crashing around again. And I doubted the glue was that good. The ones that had stopped rolling were only the up-close ones anyway. There was still a lot of crashing going on at a little more of a distance. It was very, very weird. Almost weird enough not to be horrible. But not quite. And very, very painful. There was a softish, as rocks go, rather quivery, bristly glowing blob from Lois…and a great big sort of angular looming thing, like she was still standing over us except she wasn’t, from Gulp.

  And outside my skull there were a lot of big looming things. Big looming things. Big looming things.

  Yes. You knew this already, reading it here, but I was having a lot of trouble with reality. We were in a cavern full of dragons.

  I’ll let that sink in for a minute. It takes a lot of sinking in. Think yourself out of your comfy chair and your nice house with the roads and the streetlights outside—and the ceiling overhead low enough that a fifty-foot dragon can’t stand on her hind legs and not bump her head—and think yourself into a cavern full of dragons. Go on. Try.

  There was an actual fire in a big hearth-space (big = Wilsonville would probably fit into it) not too far away from where Lois and I skulked in a little half niche in the uneven stony wall, although I couldn’t see what it was burning, and it didn’t smell like wood, and the red light it cast seemed to me more purple than wood firelight. (It didn’t smell like meat or blood or dead things either, which was just as well. Although I was weak and shaky probably from lack of food too I was not up to the concept of eating from any direction, eater or eatee, and I was particularly not up to thinking reassuring thoughts about how dragons don’t eat humans.) There was a very strong smell of dragon over the strong smell of the smoke, which was almost as overwhelming as the sight of them was—and the echoes, when Gulp roared, must have been making old Earth totter on her axis.

  It was like there was some kind of geometric progression-explosion for every sense I was forced to use: sight, hearing, smell…the smell was strong enough that I was tasting it too, which only left touch, and Lois and the nobbly rock at my back were not much comfort. If you wake up and find yourself chained to a wall in a dungeon and there are a lot of spiky-looking iron things hanging by the fire, you’re relieved there isn’t anyone looking at you thoughtfully while he’s holding the spikiest in the fire, but that you’re alone isn’t much comfort.

  I say the nobbly rock wasn’t much comfort, and you have to remember I was aching in
everything I had to ache in, but we were also in some kind of nest. I was so sore and tired and rattled that it took me a little while—what with the cavern-full-of-dragons thing kind of taking my attention—to realize this. I was lying on the ground, but I was really well padded with—I picked up a handful of the stuff and let it slip through my fingers and patter back into the heap. Dragon scales. They’re a little prickly I admit, but in heaps they’re surprisingly soft. And warm. Even a cavern which is full of dragons and a small-town-sized fireplace going a blast has drafts, particularly when you figure the ceiling is over sixty feet up.

  Gulp sat or crouched near us, with the end of her tail flung out in front of us, so we were barricaded in, by the fire, by the wall, and by Gulp’s tail. Here Gulp was a dark but streaky iridescent green; it was some weird light, because she looked darker by ordinary daylight, and it was like thick red twilight in the cavern. Remember I said that when we’d first come down here last night (if it had been last night) there’d been something almost familiar about the weird light? Yeah. It was just like in my dreams. I couldn’t decide if I recognized the smell from my dreams too. And I was often frightened in my dreams. But the damn crushing terror was new and like complicated in this Toto-I-have-the-feeling-we’re-not-in-Kansas-any-more way, like maybe I had a whole five horrible new senses to experience it with or something, thanks a lot.

  The dragons around us were different sizes and different colors; there were a dozen of them, maybe fifteen—that I could see—that I thought I could see. No, I didn’t recognize any of them—which was a relief: I know, I’m spending a lot of time here redefining “limit” and “edge” (and “crazy” and “impossible”) but recognizing one of these dragons from my dreams of dragons would have been waaay over any definition of any edge you like—even if in my dreams they were, well, friendlier. Or at least they were okay with my being there, which these guys were not.