Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  It was hard to tell dragons from rocks and shadows, and while I was never sure about this either it seemed to me that it wasn’t always the same dozen or fifteen dragons—although I thought Gulp was nearly as big as most of them. The one I could see most clearly, however, was a lot bigger than Gulp, facing us from the other side of the hearth. He was black, with no iridescence at all, although on some of him—eye ridges and nose, spine, elbows—the scales were outlined in red. I had thought Gulp was scary—he was scary. He made Gulp look like a cuddly toy dragon. A fifty-foot cuddly toy dragon. Looking at the size of his head and the one front claw that were reasonably illuminated by the firelight I figured he probably went on forever. His tail probably came out at the caves by the Institute, near where I’d seen Billy that time I’d gone to find him, to tell him Dad had okayed my overnight solo. What a long time ago that was. Sort of the time version of the length of this dragon. And I wondered, suddenly, if dragons were what Billy had been worrying about, down there in the cave. He hadn’t really seen a dragon tail, had he? Sitting in a cavern full of dragons, anything was possible. I might as well just get rid of “impossible” as a concept and stop wasting time trying to redefine it.

  Monster Dragon’s eye slowly blinked. It was like watching an eclipse. I had the feeling I didn’t want to look into that eye, as if it might blind me, like you’re not supposed to look at the sun, even during an eclipse. The leader, maybe? Alpha male and all that? In that case he might be Lois’ dad too, if Old Pete was right and it’s only the alphas that breed. I wondered who had inherited Lois’ mom’s position.

  Cautiously I checked the inside of my skull to see if I could tell which boulder Monster Dragon’s was. I expected him to be the largest and the hurtingest, but he wasn’t. He was large, all right, but he was almost not a boulder at all, more like a…a big lump of clay the potter hasn’t decided what to do with yet. A bit, you know, malleable. Or poised. Balanced. Almost peaceful, which was pretty damned dramatic under the circumstances. How did I know it was him? I don’t know. And to the extent that I could wonder about anything in the old, comparatively-normal-human-Jake way, I wondered just what the last three weeks of hanging out with Gulp had done to me.

  Had she meant to teach me to—talk to her? Or was that an accident of having to spend too much time with me—because of Lois? Having decided not to fry me, that is. Then why hadn’t it happened with Old Pete? Because if he’d started having dragon-shaped, dragon-identified headaches, he’d have mentioned it—because it wouldn’t be just boring human weakness any more, it would be about dragons.

  Was it Lois again—the emergency of Lois? First the extended emergency begun by having stuck her down my shirt front right after she was born. And then…you know those stories of moms lifting the front ends of trucks off their children the trucks have just run over? Maybe it was like that. In the stress of those last moments back at Westcamp, I managed to get through to Gulp. I mean, just having a headache…Eric gives me a headache, and we’ve never gone in for mind-reading. (Automatically the thought followed: Now there’s a really horrible idea.) And then I thought of his voice over the two-way, and I wondered how he was doing. How everyone at the Institute was doing. My father was hostage…?

  And I’m sitting around, trapped and helpless and hallucinating, in a cave full of dragons. I know dragons don’t eat humans…but if we’re playing the Walrus and the Carpenter here, I’m definitely an oyster.

  So there I was—out of time, out of humanity, out of life, certainly life as I knew it, with an aching, echoing head full of…waiting. Oh great. What do I do now?

  I can’t tell you how bad this was, how lost I was, how mind-smithere-eningly alone I was, in this flickery shadowy red-purply nowhere, full of huge breathing shadowy things with huge shining eyes. And there I was, scared silly, scared beyond silly. And one of the things I came out of that experience with is a total inability to use the word “telepathy.” It just doesn’t fit, okay? And also…telepathic dragons. Pleeeease. That is so last century. I’ve got like shelves of Mom’s old story books with telepathic (if pouchless) dragons in them.

  But the problem remains that us mouth-flapping talking-crazy humans don’t have any words for any kind of silent stuff, which is maybe why we overuse “telepathy” so hard. Like a color-blind species making everything red because it’s the only color they’ve heard of, even though they can’t see it either, but it makes them feel clever, like they can imagine color. We can deal with radio waves, that they exist I mean, and even stuff like our dragon fence, but communication that isn’t through our standard five senses is as taboo as the idea that any animals but us have real intelligence. So I’ve called it “telepathy” a few times already because I haven’t got anything else to call it, but I’m stopping now. You can just make up your own word. “Ummgmmgmm” or something, because it occurred to me eventually that the nearest thing us humans do have to some of what dragons do is a kind of inaudible hum. Which is maybe how Lois and I groped toward a common wavelength at the beginning. Mouth talking isn’t completely on a different planet from an audible hum, and once you’ve got to the vocal-cord-jiggling humming part…. That’s still not right, okay? But it’s a piece of some of it. Maybe.

  I’m sitting here now, a long time after I woke up in the cave full of dragons for the first time, thinking, It’s nothing like that. But what is it like? If it’s like anything—and it’s not like anything or I wouldn’t be making such a drooling idiot of myself trying to explain—it’s maybe more like sign language, except that it’s going on in your head, with a little audible harmonic background some of the time. Like you might wave your hands (or you do if you’re me) while you’re talking. Part of where my Headache came from was just trying to grab on to something that almost makes sense, but not really—like the brain strain version of your eyes struggling to see through somebody else’s glasses.

  I remembered that thinking words at Gulp hadn’t done much good, and while I wasn’t sure what Gulp had understood, she’d got us away before the helicopter had arrived, and while she might have had a big avoid thing for helicopters the way all our dragons seemed to about all human stuff…she’d got us away. Maybe only because Lois was too young to leave her mutant freak serial murderer mom, but I couldn’t quite believe that. I may have been her worst nightmare but I just didn’t feel Gulp was defending us both now only for Lois’ sake. Which is also to say that I freaking-mutant well was picking stuff up from the Gulp rock in my head. Emergency may be a hell of a way to make contact, but by golly it works.

  So one way or another here I was in a cavern full of dragons, and still alive to tell about it. Supposing I got out of the cavern full of dragons again, alive, and there was anyone I dared tell…. I was going to tell them what? I squeezed my skull with my hands again, till my wrists ached. Sometimes it’s just your thoughts you can’t deal with, and I couldn’t deal with mine.

  Slowly I tried to organize a picture in my head of Lois and me playing in the meadow where Gulp had first found us. Sort of out in the front of my head, away from my private thoughts.

  This was sucked away—the same dizzy, queasy no-longer-entirely-me-doing-it feeling as I’d had when I’d been trying to “talk” to Gulp—and almost immediately there was a picture in my head of…well, in hindsight, it was a cavern full of dragons, but I didn’t know that at the time. It was way too bizarre. The only reason I even knew I was receiving something was that it was way too bizarre for me to have made it up. I’ve learned a little more now about how dragons see things, or at least how they make their head-picture-communications of what they see, which I guess is also some kind of shorthand like an alphabet is for us. I know the this-group-of-dragons, uh, thingummy. It isn’t even really a picture. But it’s an image, or a symbol of an image, or a gesture of an image.

  But it’s not only an image. This is the really hard part. You have to do something too—like if one person puts out a hand the other person is supposed to put out their hand too and shake i
t. It’s the handshake that makes it—a handshake. Or like the famous stability model of the three-legged stool. If there was a dragon-alphabet version, it would have one of its legs missing: You’d hold it up—you’d make it stable—by thinking about it, or by thinking, “This is a three-legged stool. Never mind one of its legs is missing.” The dragon alphabet mostly doesn’t just lie there like ours does. Mostly you have to connect with it somehow, with what you’re seeing or receiving, you have to hold something up or plug something in, to make it really work. This makes “reading” it a lot harder. If your two-legged stool falls over, you aren’t getting the message “stability.” More likely you’re thinking it’s something about falling over, which it is, kind of, only backwards.

  This was the first time I’d received something sent from a dragon. At least that I knew about. Well, any dragon but Lois. That I’d started maybe picking stuff up from Gulp was new and uncertain—and I hadn’t learned about having to plug in yet either. This time at least I was sort of expecting it—expecting something—probably because I’d “known” that the big lump of peaceful clay in my head was actually Big Goes-on-Forever Dragon. It was a little like—a little tiny microscopic like—looking through one of those cheesy 3D viewer things, that you put a wheel of pictures in and click them around, and what you see is really nothing like what you see in the world—it’s sort of too flat and too jumping-out-at-you simultaneously. (Okay, how retro are we at the Institute? We still sell the glasses, and half a dozen wheels of 3D photos of Smokehill. The funny thing is that people still buy them.) It was a bit like that, only worse. At least when you’re looking through the viewfinder at several rows of mountains that don’t line up in any direction, including with the horizon or with each other, you know what they’re trying to do—what the picture is trying to be. And you can take the viewer away from your eyes and your normal, ordinary life is still there.

  But this—this was—gah, I’ve run out of words again. “Amazing”—boring. “Incredible”—too vague. “Stunning”—my least favorite adjective even before the Headache because it always sounds to me like being hit on the head with a hammer.

  So sending-and-receiving, so, proving that COMMUNICATION was going on, or at least that was what both sides were trying to make happen, didn’t make my poor fractured head hurt any less, but it made having a headache sort of make some sense: my brain was being coerced—like a window being jimmied—into behaving in a way that it was never built for. Cue sound of splintering. Gulp hadn’t done anything like this—although “talking” to her had briefly paralyzed me to the point that I couldn’t flick the switch on the two-way. Maybe this was the next stage. Because I had the strangest feeling that Monster Dragon was actually helping me somehow. That he was really trying to teach me…maybe even trying to be taught by me…poor freaking dragon.

  The mess in my head seemed to be saying, Yes, we know about that. Go on. Although I want to emphasize that there wasn’t any impatience or rudeness about it—even in the state I was in I could feel that. Could feel that gentleness. It just was, like being in the cave of dragons (hungry, shaking, bewildered, and terrified thrown in free) was.

  Okay. Right. Go on with what? And like how?

  I could tell you a lot about those first days I spent in the cavern full of dragons, trying to learn to talk to them, and they to me, but most of it is about not succeeding, which pretty much any scientist will tell you is 99 percent of what you do, finding out what does not work. A scientist, though, puts his notes down and goes away and has a cup of coffee or reads a newspaper or something. Even a field biologist counting scales or scat has a campsite, somewhere that is away from the specimens he thinks he’s studying, something that’s his not theirs (whoever they are). A good field biologist wants to be able to go away, because one of the things you’re always supposed to be worrying about is affecting your object of study’s behavior by your presence. The Institute had been worrying about that ever since Old Pete opened the cage doors, because it’s always been so hard to learn anything about our dragons, beyond that they apparently were still out there somewhere. And if our best attempts at being tactful had already driven them underground, before what happened to Lois’ mother….

  We hadn’t known it was literally underground, although that was always a good guess, in a landscape like this one, with a lot of underground caves. So maybe that was what Billy had been worrying about. But I doubted that if I wandered down one of the tunnels out of the fire-cave I’d find myself coming out beside the Institute, at least not before I starved to death. And besides, I wasn’t going anywhere. I was sitting in a cave surrounded by dragons and far from being a discreet note-taker I was the object of study—the lab rat, in fact. And I didn’t get to go away. Lab rats don’t. I was there and they were all looking at me, with their huge sheeny bottomless eyes. And climbing around inside my head and making my skull sore. When Gulliver got stuck in Brobdingnag, the giants didn’t climb around inside his head.

  I told you way back at the beginning that I’ve always found caves magical. I’m not sure this tendency was helpful under these conditions. If things get too surreal you haven’t got anywhere to, you know, stand any more, to say “okay this is real real,” so you can maybe measure some of the rest of it, so that “up” and “down” and “breathing” are no longer dangerously alien concepts that you have to keep checking up on. And that’s hard. But these caves…even now that I’m used to them, and used to sharing them with a lot of dragons…it’s like the caves themselves are part of the, uh, conversation, part of the something’s-here prickle down your spine, part of the watchingness—the consciousness. Part of the communication process—the connecting, the plugging in. The up and the down and the breathing.

  I still have no idea how far the caves extend, nor in how many directions. But they’re big enough to hold quite a few dragons. And while I never have found anything down there that shares the space the dragons use, except some beetles and spiders and a few tiny flying things to get caught in the webs, all the shadows are populated. Which is what I mean about the consciousness. And the breathing.

  And there are a lot of shadows. The rock itself is beautiful, mostly red and black with some dark green and gold, and there’s silver veining that runs through a lot of it with no pattern I can see, although it also has a sort of wrinkly gleam almost like scales. As if the rock is dragon colored, dragon adapted—almost like it’s part dragon itself.

  In daylight I’ve never seen any silver-veined dragons, but down here in the shifting, shadowy darkness a lot of their scale patterns suddenly seem silver-edged, or seem so for a while, and then they move or stretch or half-turn and it goes away again and you wonder if you imagined it. Except that if you’re imagining it you’re imagining it a lot. I’ve stopped thinking I’m imagining it, because I see it so much, and this place no longer freaks me out the way it did in the beginning. But it does make me wonder about the caves. And how the dragons make somewhere a home. And the stone water-sculptures—stalactites and stalagmites and the other heaps and coils and masses and spines I don’t know the names for—some of them are beyond even what I saw in my dreams. And why do so many of the heaps and coils look like sleeping dragons?

  They kept me well fed, if a steady diet of grilled mutton and venison counts as well fed. There was a pool next to the hearth where we were, which was filled up by a trickle that ran down the wall. It was weirdly greasy and ickily warm and tasted of sulfur, but it was water, and I crept that step or two out of our niche when I needed to, so I wasn’t thirsty, but food…. Lois tucked in at once and it obviously helped her, eating, but it was like, yeah, well, she’s a dragon and it’s not really me they’re trying to feed anyway, I just happen to be here too—and I couldn’t face it. If I could have curled up into a lumpy little ball of self-pity and stayed that way I probably would have.

  But there was always Lois. I started eating finally because it obviously bothered her that I didn’t. After she finished hers she’d come
look at mine and look at me and look at the food again and look at me again…and it wasn’t because she was still hungry. It was so obvious…and I was so stressed out it seemed okay that my baby dragon was doing something so easily translatable in human terms. It seemed sort of restful, in the middle of everything else that was going on. And eventually it was like “well you know if you ate something it might make the nausea go away, think of it as a scientific experiment” and hunger won.

  And it did make me feel better—food—like I was still recognizably (duh) alive in all this totally impossible (no wait, “impossible” has been banished from the vocab) stuff, that it wasn’t just all some really messed-up dream—that it wasn’t just my dragon dreams had taken a really tyrannical (one might even say draconian, ha ha ha) turn for the worse. Which was kind of a mixed blessing really—if it was a messed-up dream eventually I’d wake up. Persephone eating those pomegranate seeds didn’t mean she had to stay, it meant that she was finally waking up to the fact that she already was there and she could either cope or die. I think Alice was trying to wake up, grabbing all those EAT MEs and DRINK MEs. Maybe it was those first days in the dragons’ cavern when I parted company with Alice at last.

  Big dragons don’t eat very often. So I suppose I should be grateful that they fed me as often as they did. A baby dragon my size eats a lot, but then it’s busy growing up to be a dragon. And they must know that humans don’t actually get a lot bigger than what I am. Maybe they just kept offering me food because, once I got started, I kept eating it. Maybe they noticed that Lois worried if I didn’t eat as often as she did.

  I missed carbs and fruit immediately and after about three days—I think it was probably three days—I even found myself thinking a little wistfully about vegetables. After a week I might have eaten a green bean or two with pleasure, which would have been a first. I discovered the sulfur pool outlet, so I managed to have a bit of a wash now and then too without polluting everyone’s drinking water, but it didn’t work awfully well, and there was nothing I could do about my clothes except keep wearing them. Lois saved me from certain embarrassments. After her first meal she did her I-have-to-go-outdoors-now thing of scuttling in little circles making her distressed-peep noise, and the little Lois-rock in my head…well, it’s not true that you can’t imagine a smell. You can if it’s a dragonlet who’s trying to put across her immediate need for latrine space.