Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  “A misfit,” I said, half involuntarily. I didn’t really want to encourage him to keep talking about this, but I couldn’t help myself. “A mutant.”

  “Nothing wrong with your genes,” he said, and I remembered that my father was his staunchest supporter and Mom had actually liked him. “But a misfit, if you like. Just as Lois is. And the mis-fit the two of you have made together is changing the world. And yes, I was jealous, when I got here, watching you. That’s the part Martha’s got right. If a fairy godmother had offered me the chance to be a misfit like you—to grow up in Smokehill, to know it as the only world there is—I’d have been all over her.”

  “I do—I don’t—I read the news—” I started to say, I started to try to say with some kind of dignity.

  “Oh, the news,” Eric said, like you might say, Oh, the cat threw up, or Oh, that’s chewing gum on the bottom of my shoe. He shook his head. “You’ve changed. Or I wouldn’t be bothering to tell you any of this.” He did his laugh-substitute again. “Hell, I admire you now—I wouldn’t want to be Jake Mendoza, hero of the universe—anybody designed the logo for your cape yet? Only time I’ve ever seen anyone with his head that far up his ass just keep on going and come out into the sunlight after all. Wouldn’t have said it was possible. All part of the new physics I guess. I’m just saying…you were a damned annoying little bastard.”

  Only half to change the subject, because I also really wanted to know, I said, “When did you figure it out—about Lois?”

  Eric looked away—up, down, sideways, as if he was looking for an answer like a lost tool that he must have left around here somewhere. “I can’t remember not knowing. But I can’t remember some kind of blazing moment of Eureka! It must be that Jake’s raising a dragonlet! either. It’s such a long time ago. Thank god it’s all a long time ago.” He went silent and broody again, but this time he wasn’t looking at my manuscript, but at me, and worse, he seemed to see what he was looking at. More not-shuffling-feet from Jake. “Do you find it hard to remember, now? To believe that it was as bad as it was?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. And I like finding it hard to remember.”

  “Yeah. Worst for you—for you and for Frank, and maybe Billy. It still sucked for all the rest of us. First the dead dragon and the son of a bitch who’d killed her, and—that was enough. And all those assholes wandering around, with their cheap suits and cheaper attitudes, demanding to know everything, including a lot of stuff they wouldn’t be able to get their heads around anyway, but especially not when they’d already decided we were guilty and couldn’t prove ourselves innocent. You couldn’t turn around without another asshole wanting to know what you were turning around for. And we were guilty of course—just not of what they thought they knew.

  “Slowly we all realized we hadn’t lost the plot, there was something else going on, besides trying to save Smokehill. It wasn’t just we’d made something up because we wanted it so badly. We all knew by the time you went off to Westcamp, I think. But saying it out loud might make it true somehow the assholes could catch us at. We saw it in each other’s faces—and jerked our eyes away.

  “It’s funny now. But the thing—the only clue—that something was going on besides major damage control and the likelihood that we would lose Smokehill—the one thing anyone could actually point to, that didn’t look like desperate wish-fulfillment—was the way you were behaving. You weren’t even on the planet—which in your case, Jake, is saying a lot. There was this crazy wired intensity about you—but what could be more important than the havoc over the dead dragon, the havoc that might cost us Smokehill? And the way you’d always hated the poor damn lizards in the zoo and the poor stupid fools who wanted to believe they were dragons because at least they were there and you could look at them—jeez, chill out—and suddenly all that went away? What else could it be but that you had got yourself a real dragon? And if you could hide it in a Ranger’s cabin, it had to be a very small dragon. Baby dragon. So the one that got killed was a mom dragon. Simple. Simple when we knew you.”

  I took a deep breath and said firmly, “Eric, I always thought you were pretty arrogant.”

  Eric really did smile at that, a long, slow, glinty-eyed smile, like nothing I’d ever seen on his face before. “Takes one to know one, kiddo,” he said. “And I dare you to put that in your story.”

  So I have.

  Eric still cleans odorata’s cage, if nobody volunteers. What head zookeeper cleans his own cages? Eric’s even got staff now. Mind you, I don’t think—Dan or no Dan—Eric’s doing it to spare anyone. He just doesn’t want anyone being mean to odorata. So I suppose I have to say he’s not only not the kind of bully who likes to assign the worst jobs to the people he hates most, that he let me clean odorata means that even if he did think I was a pain in the ass, I was a responsible, conscientious pain in the ass. I suppose this should make me feel better.

  But a tremendous lot has happened in these five years, besides most of us lifers being able to start to forget. And if you’ve got this far in my dragon adventures and have learned to survive (or skip over) my philosophical blather and general rant you might like to hear about some more of it. Help make up for the five years you’ve been waiting. Ha ha. And if you have been waiting, the first thing on your last-five-years list is the story about how Bud almost flew through the front gate—at least according to the mail we, especially me, gets, that’s the first thing on your list. (I get a lot of lists. People seem to think I’m going to find them helpful.) But if this is all really a soap opera with dragons—as it is, according to the mail—you might want to hear some of the rest of it too.

  Like how I asked Martha to marry me. At Dragon Central with Bud watching us. Not that he knew that I was asking her to marry me (although I never know what he knows really). I didn’t know I was going to ask her to marry me. I was doing my famous dragon headache skull squeeze—I’ve got pretty good at this; I can temporarily ease about 75 percent of human dragon headaches in about 75 percent of humans who get them (which is to say all humans who spend any time at Nearcamp). Although unfortunately it seems more to do with my hands than with the squeeze, which means I haven’t been able to teach anybody else to do it, which is bad news for at least two reasons, the first being the obvious one and the second being that this contributes to the Great Jake Myth and while five million acres is plenty to hide in most of the time there’s no escape from the mailbags they bring every day and I’ve begun to wonder if I’d better never go out the gate again myself ever either. Just like the dragons. (I did finally learn to do TV, but only because the public was so weirdly eager to love me that they turned my deer-in-headlights mental and physical paralysis into becoming modesty, and after that it was like, oh, well, okay, if it’s going to be that hard to do anything wrong I suppose I might as well relax and go with the flow.) At least we had our honeymoon in Paris.

  So that evening at Dragon Central, it had kind of been in the back of my mind for a while, I’m a retro kind of guy in a lot of ways and I’d begun to feel I was getting (even) less normal with every arriving mailbag and/or TV interview and I wanted to do this normal thing of marrying my sweetheart, okay? I was kneeling behind her and she was half lying with her legs stretched out in front of her, but she’d leaned back so her forearms and elbows were braced on my thighs and her face tipped up toward me with her eyes closed and even upside down she was so beautiful, so Martha, that I heard my voice say, “If you married me, you could get this on demand.”

  Martha’s eyes opened and she smiled an upside-down smile. “I can get it on demand now.” She closed her eyes again, and probably my grip on her skull faltered a little, because she opened her eyes and said, “That doesn’t mean I won’t marry you.”

  “But does it mean you will marry me,” I said, pathetically, and she pulled herself up and out of my hands and turned around and said, “Yes, of course I’ll marry you, you silly man, and I won’t even tease you about it being for your hands,” and then she kissed my ha
nds, one after the other, and then she kissed me.

  Bud was lying there with us—or some of the end of his nose was (the loooong hot rising and falling gust of his breathing politely angled past us), the rest of him going on and on to Wyoming or so the way the rest of Bud always does—and his eyes were half open, watching us, although it’s interesting, there’s no voyeur thing about it when he watches us, which he does a lot, although I’m pretty sure he has a pretty good idea what kissing is about. So after this kiss had gone on for a while and I started to get it through to myself that I’d just asked Martha to marry me and she’d just said yes, I wanted to jump around and shout and the only person [sic] available was Bud so I said, “Let’s tell Bud.”

  It’s a good example of the Marthaness of Martha that she didn’t say, “What do you mean, tell Bud? We’ve spent five years trying to learn to tell dragons anything, or they us, and even you can’t do it.” She just said, “Sure,” and got up out of my lap and we both went the few steps to Bud’s nose and touched it with our hands. One of the things we have learned is that the getting-something-through—and I’m not going to call it “telling” or “communication” because that’s a lot more grand than it mostly is—usually works better if the human has a hand on the dragon’s nose, slightly depending on what the message is. (There may be other bits of both dragon and human that would work as well, but they’d probably be more embarrassing.) I sort of instinctively guessed that, that day I “told” Gulp that the bad guys were coming for us, and she got Lois and me away—but you tend to grab the other party when you’re really urgent about something, and the reflex remains even if it’s a dragon’s nose rather than a human arm or shoulder. (And for those of us addicted to hand gestures, you still have a hand left over for flapping around.)

  The refinement Bud has come up with is that it works better yet if the dragon curls its lip very slightly so the human can put his or her hand on the softer skin there just inside the tough horny outside. It’s just about not too hot to bear, although I’ve begun to suspect that Bud anyway has pretty good temperature control. The first time Bud curled his lip at me of course I thought I was going to die—but he could have eaten me any time for months by then so why now? And if I was going to do something so offensive to dragon culture that I’d get munched in some kind of involuntary reflex (I’ve told you dragons are amazingly pacific; I doubt they’ve got any execution laws about anything) I’d probably already done it and hadn’t been munched, so this new lip-curling must be something else. I figured it out eventually.

  So now Martha and I both put our hands (delicately) on the hot red lip-margin of Mr. Dragon Chief and tried to tell him our news. I was thinking pair-bond-life-[that’showhumansdoit]-children-starting-just-now-hooray, more or less—pictures are better, but how do you put any of that in pictures? and stuff with high emotional content usually gets across the best even if there aren’t any pictures—and Martha, who knew what I’d been trying to do with my dictionary almost as well as I did, was thinking something similar because I could actually feel her like an echo, “talking” to Bud.

  And Bud, without moving, opened his eyes all the way and gave a huge sort of held-back (don’t want to blow your tiny friends a few hundred yards across the cavern accidentally and bang them into the wall by unrestrained breathing) wooooooaaaaw, I mean with sound in it, and I’ve told you dragons don’t use larynx noises much, and it sure sounded like “congratulations” to me. Furthermore Bud’s wooaaw had roused the other dragons and there were little soft (little and soft as dragons go) rumbly wooaaws from the moving shadows, and one of the moving shadows slipped away—I’d also got pretty good at learning to hear the diminishing huge rustle of a dragon leaving the vicinity: You’d be surprised how confusing dragon noises are; makes most people dizzy (and nervous) till they get used to it, if they get used to it—and while Martha and I were still sort of giggling and saying inane things to each other like “I didn’t think dragons would be such romantics” there was a coming-toward-us gentle gigantic rustle and there was Gulp. And about two minutes later Lois was there too and for the first time in a year or so she forgot that she wasn’t little any more and knocked me down. So Dad and Katie and Eleanor and Billy and Grace and Kit were only the second people to hear that we were getting married. The dragons were first. (Whatever they actually got out of what we told them.)

  Now if you haven’t already, this is probably the point where you talk about how it’s creepy, me and Martha getting married, we’d grown up together, we were the only boy and girl either of us had ever really known (besides Eleanor, and it’s going to take a better man—or woman—than me to tackle her), we should be like brother and sister, and at best we should go out and meet other people first, before we decide on each other, the implication being that then we won’t. Well, in the first place, I don’t ever remember feeling like Martha was my sister, although never having had sisters maybe I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about one. But while you’re sitting there pitying me for being so limited, think about it this way, friend: What if you’d met the girl who was going to be the love of your life when you were four and a half and got to spend the rest of your life with her? Is that the biggest piece of luck you could ever have or not?

  Growing up together had also made us able to communicate or anyway react to each other on levels that people who don’t get to know each other till they’re adults I think probably never can. I’m not using the “t” word again here. But it was like that sometimes—like what I just said about hearing her like an echo when we were trying to tell Bud we were getting married. Martha and I are in this together, and that’s a big help. It makes it realer, saner, less just incredible. Even if it’s more stuff that can’t be taught. We’ll figure out the teaching later. I hope.

  I think both Katie and Dad had had those “they should meet other people first” thoughts but life at Smokehill had got even stranger in the last few years and no one would understand any of it except those of us who’d lived through it. (Eleanor is going to use this to get elected president, of course, so her priorities in a partner are going to be different. If she changes her mind she could always marry a really tough Ranger.) And we’d waited till I was twenty-one and Martha was nineteen which meant they couldn’t really stop us although we wouldn’t have wanted them to try. And they took it really well after all. I could see them both worrying but I could see them both being glad too so that was okay.

  We didn’t tell anybody till it was all over—and we were back from our honeymoon. Dad’s a JP so he could read the words, and Eric somehow got a license to do the blood test. Don’t ask me how. Katie cried. Eleanor didn’t. Eleanor said, “Great. I can have my room back.” To Eleanor’s tremendous credit, she’d let Martha and me drive her out of their cabin kind of a lot, so we could have the room—they shared a bedroom—a couple of hours in the afternoons sometimes, when Katie was on duty somewhere too so the house would be empty. It wasn’t worth trying anywhere else at the Institute—and out at Farcamp and Nearcamp and Dragon Central privacy doesn’t exist.

  We had the wedding at Dragon Central. This was so great a piece of serendipity it made the whole wedding business even more…something. None of the adjectives will do here: great, wonderful, amazing, terrific. Maybe I should just say wooooaaw like a dragon. But about twenty of us Smokehill lifers creeping off to do…something? No way somebody—some wrong body—wouldn’t have noticed and maybe said something to some other wrong body and…but twenty of us lifers going to do some kind of private something at Dragon Central? Sure. Everyone goes all hushed and respectful and admiring and wishing they were a member of the magic circle too. It was…great. Plus having Bud and Gulp and Lois and some of the others there—watching the latest unintelligible human ritual.

  I don’t remember ever talking about a honeymoon in Paris. Martha’s always wanted to go to Paris and I’ve never wanted to go anywhere (no dragons). So we were going to get married…and then we were going to go to Paris. It was
simple. I’d thought fine, I’ll survive Paris because I’m going to be there with Martha, and she really wants to go, and I’ll catch it from her. But I fell for Paris myself—loved it almost as much as Martha did. I kept thinking about being a freak who’s barely been out of Smokehill, who’s never even been on a plane before (two freaks, only Martha’s always known the rest of the world existed, and she’s visited her grandparents in Wisconsin a couple of times), and how Paris might have been Mars to us, and if this is what Mars is going to be like, well, those astronauts are going to have a great time when they get there, and I hope the lichen puts on a good welcome.

  Dad’s wedding present included five nights at this amazing hotel…all he’d said was that he’d “take care of it”…and I mean amazing. Reception was nearly as big as the Institute tourist hall and a lot grander, and our room was nearly big enough for dragons. There was one afternoon I’d actually gone out alone because Martha had admired this ring in a jeweler’s window and—when did I ever go anywhere, right?—I hadn’t bought her a ring although Katie had bought us plain gold wedding rings at a jeweler’s in Cheyenne because she said (mildly outraged) that we had to have wedding rings and we didn’t have to wear them after if we didn’t want to. Rings hadn’t occurred to me so then I thought that I hadn’t done it properly (after all I’m Jake the Clueless Wonder Boy) so I was watching Martha fixedly like a dog watching you palming a dog biscuit, for any sign of wanting anything I could buy her in Paris, although it didn’t have to be a ring. And there was this ring…so I went out to buy it, I can’t remember what I told Martha I was doing.