Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  When I got back she was just getting out of the bath and came out of the bathroom wrapped up to the chin in these huge pink towels so you couldn’t see anything of her but feet and face, and her hair tied up on the top of her head all wet and curly, and she said something like, You know, Jake, you’re doing really well here in Paris pretending not to miss your dragons every minute and only me to keep your attention…and she dropped the towels. I will remember that sight of her—the long golden afternoon light through the window blinds streaming over her like golden ribbons with every curve and hollow highlighted, and the white light from the chandelier in the bathroom haloing her from behind—I’ll remember the picture she made when I’m on my deathbed and die happy. Oh yes, and she liked the ring. She wears it all the time. I’m still wearing the ring Katie bought.

  It’s true I was really glad to see my dragons again. Even after Paris.

  So we got back to Smokehill and then Dad released the news and everybody outside was pissed off that we hadn’t let our wedding be turned into a circus, and we went off to Dragon Central till the uproar quieted down. And then we got a cabin of our own outside the Institute—a new one (and yes, our Rangers came and sang for us, and I sang, well “sang,” a little bit too because Whiteoak has been teaching me some Arkhola), beyond the fortress, which has become office and official dragon-studying visitor space, although everyone calls it The Fortress—which was great, having our own house, although we still spent most of our time at Dragon Central and Nearcamp.

  We pack in some human food and a change of clothing, but that’s all. The dragon caves remain dragon. Which among other things means you have to be fit and strong enough to climb up and down the dragon “stairs.” They’re mostly okay at Nearcamp, but the ones at Dragon Central, while they aren’t as bad as I’d thought when Gulp was transporting Lois and me, are still pretty hairy for us midgets, and at the foot of a few of the cliffs I still had to ask for some tactfully-placed boulders for scrambling. Once you get to the big main fireplace room there are always plenty of shed scales if you don’t feel like sitting—or lying—on rock. And warm water in the sulfur pools.

  And the answer to drafts in caverns full of dragons is to lean against a dragon. Of course you have to choose one who’ll remember not to roll over on you—and you say “please” first. Bud will unfold a wing a little and let you—well, Martha and me—sleep under that, which is pretty amazing. A dragon wingtip is surprisingly light, but you can feel the hot blood whooshing through it. Like sleeping under a waterbed. The first time we got stranded by a blizzard it was maybe a little dark—I will never learn to love windowless underground caves and purple firelight—but we were plenty warm enough. And there was plenty of toasted sheep to go around.

  Sleeping with dragons is useful too—you know your brain waves change when you’re asleep. You pick up dragon stuff when you’re asleep that you can’t when you’re awake—well, I knew that, from that first time I spent with Lois at Dragon Central with probably every dragon there except Bud and Gulp (and Lois) wanting me somewhere else. But the wanting-me-out-of-there, and the mortal terror, made the subtler stuff hard to recognize. Especially through the Headache. And then in the early days of Farcamp when I was spending every minute I could get with the dragons it sometimes got to be a little too much—well, I mentioned it five years ago, about not wanting to wake up some day and discover I’d started growing spinal plates. But with Martha with me it was suddenly okay—it was good. I stopped losing being human, you know? No matter how far into the dragon labyrinth I went.

  And it also makes sense, about brain waves, in a way that a lot of stuff about dragons does not. But this doesn’t mean we’re going to start having a human dormitory at Nearcamp, so don’t bother asking. You’d never sleep through the headaches anyway.

  Martha and I got married two and a half years ago. That’s a really good time to remember. Back a little farther, to when I finished writing this book the last time, that isn’t so good. Five years ago is about the start of the really rough year or so I had learning to let go of Lois—and her to let go of me. There’s some of that starting to happen at the end of what I wrote back then.

  It was sort of easier in a gruesomely traumatic sort of way than it might have been because as soon as the world found out about Lois—as soon as the tape loop with me prancing around on Bud’s head started playing around the world—our lives changed so drastically that we didn’t know which way was up and which way was down (although if I’d fallen off Bud’s head ninety feet up I’m sure it would have hurt, ha ha). So I spent a lot of that first year after the World Found Out feeling torn apart anyway and “losing” Lois was…it was, as I think about it now, not even the most shocking thing, which made it worse, if you follow me, how could anything be more shocking than losing Lois? Even if all that was happening was that she was growing up and that was good?

  But what happened to Smokehill—all that attention and all that money, suddenly, after we’d been this goofy fringy theme-park kind of thing—the theme being our endangered invisible but smelly dragons—counting every penny, and yeah, okay, paranoid from the beginning, but we had cause, didn’t we? Whatever Eric says about what growing up as the center of the Smokehill universe did to me, it did to me what it did to me because that’s how it was. And then Smokehill changed. Smokehill changed. Lois and I were just the detonator for the Big Bang and the new universe. It was not so surprising that we lost each other in the process…even if we were going to have to lose each other anyway. So that Lois could have the life she should have. And I could have a life at all.

  Well, you don’t need to know a lot about that, and if Eric’s right, then I don’t really want to tell you about what even I know isn’t me at my best, but it’s one of those things I feel I should mention, because it’s a big thing.

  So by the time Martha and I got married Lois was spending most of her time at Dragon Central, which meant she was spending at least a major minority of her time without me, and she’d had a growth spurt about a year after we met Gulp so the idea of touring her died the death more easily than it might have if she’d stayed little longer (although a couple times a year we still get some enterprising head case who wants to provide the specially designed airplane to carry a dragon, and take us around to all the football fields in America, but Dad gives ’em short shrift). And then Martha and I did get married and after that it was a whole lot more okay that Lois had her own dragon family and her own life without me.

  We still don’t know where Lois actually fits in the family, by the way. The weird thing is that as the new post-Big-Bang hierarchy settled down, Lois got kind of taken over by Gulp while Bud kind of took me over. Oh, Lois and I saw and see a lot of each other, a lot by anybody’s standards but ours, and when I was with the dragons she turned up pretty fast and stuck pretty close, and sometimes at first she still came back to the human world with me for a little while.

  Grace—and Eleanor—who rarely got out to Farcamp, were always really glad to see her, although “glad” is easier to identify with Grace. Eleanor tended to say things like, “The bigger you get the more you smell.” Or, “Nobody’s going to respect a pink dragon. I hope you’re going to turn green or something soon.” Although I think it wasn’t only that I understood what the words meant that I was the one who got pissed off when Eleanor said stuff like this. Eleanor gets better at aggravating me as she gets older. And Lois isn’t really pink anyway. Not pink pink. Also I tell myself that Eleanor is just developing useful skills by practicing on me and it’ll all be worth it when she hits the campaign trail and makes hash of her opponents during the debates (“and furthermore you smell”).

  But Lois came back to the Institute less and less once she hit her growth spurt. By the end of her third year she wouldn’t fit through ordinary doorways any more—and although she didn’t have keeping-up problems with people on foot, she couldn’t squeeze into the back of a jeep any more either, while her wings weren’t anything like big enough ye
t for flying. She also began to lose interest in strange humans—every new human wasn’t immediately her new best friend, the way she had been. She would still turn it on for a TV crew, but you—well, I—could begin to see that her heart wasn’t in it. It was as if she was being polite. Where did she learn polite?

  She was learning to be a dragon. Who are I swear genetically polite. Which was the thing I’d wanted most of all, Lois becoming a, you know, genuine, 100 percent dragon, and that did take a lot of the edge off the whole mom trauma. What stopped me from getting too comfy about it though was that she was also obviously sweating learning “dragon language” almost as badly as I was. Like maybe there’s a developmental window for learning language in dragons the way there is in humans, and if you miss it, you’ve had it. And that made me feel really, really, really bad.

  But there are a couple more things I think I know now that I didn’t then—three or four years ago. Now pay attention because I’m not going to tell you twice. I’m getting out into woo-woo territory and I don’t much like it out here. Or rather, I like it fine, while I’m out there, with Bud, or occasionally some of the others, it’s coming back to human ground level with what he or they have given me I find kind of bad, looking at it as a human and wondering what the hell I do with it and how to explain it in any way another human—any human but Martha—is going to believe—or be able to make sense of. Yeah, everybody gives me lots of slack—make that lots of slack—because of Lois, but old habits die hard and nobody outside space opera and unicorns likes the “t” word either. Maybe especially when the only stuff I bring back that isn’t bits and pieces is all woo-woo and nothing I can shake down into words and put in my dictionary. So don’t ask me any questions, okay? Just listen.

  One of the big questions has always been what Lois’ mom was doing having her dragonlets so far away from the rest of the dragons—from anywhere dragons ever go in Smokehill—and especially from her midwives. Okay, you think, maybe the dragons did it differently when they were in cages, and maybe what Old Pete saw wasn’t like what they’d be doing on their own. But that’s not it.

  The reason it happened is because she had a…uh, I’m going to call it a vision…that told her to. That told her to go off by herself and have her babies alone. I can still hardly think about it, it’s so awful—her going off like that, and what happened. And it might explain why Gulp was quite so, well, beside herself, when she first found Lois and me. They’d known Lois’ mom died, of course (I think dragons feel it when one of them dies), but somehow they’d missed that one of her babies had survived.

  Or then again maybe they didn’t miss it. I’m pretty sure I got what Bud is telling me about Lois’ mom, but I’m not sure about this. It wasn’t till two years later that we started getting those dragon sightings away from the usual dragon stomping grounds. But maybe a dragonlet has to be two years old before it starts showing up on dragon radar. Or maybe Lois didn’t show up on dragon radar because her radar was crippled by being raised by humans. Or maybe part of the original vision included that the dragons should go looking for some kind of sign two years after Lois’ mom died. (Okay, she did have her own name. It’s something like Hhhhhllllllsssssssn. So I call her Halcyon.) I like that version myself—that they didn’t know what the sign was they were looking for. Which really does explain why Gulp briefly lost her mind.

  It’s obvious that all those dragon headaches I was having before there were any dragons around but Lois, weren’t Lois herself, but Halcyon, or Halcyon’s ghost, if you like, although you probably don’t like. Why did Lois survive? There is NO WAY that poor globby fetus had a prayer of surviving, stuck down some strange species’ shirtfront and fed alien liquids. But she did. She did at least partly because…because Halcyon’s ghost was making me have Mom Dragon Vibes? (Was Halcyon’s vibes coming off a grotesque human dwarf like me what sent Gulp—briefly—mad?) I don’t know. But a big piece of the answer about Lois is there somewhere.

  Here’s the, uh, controversial bit. So far this was just the easy bit, okay? I mean I’ve told you a lot about Halcyon already, but I’m guessing you’ve been finding it a little hard to believe—you weren’t there having the brain version of the hamster running up the inside of your pantleg, and I was, and I still tried really hard to make out that it was just dreams and shock and native goofiness. So I keep trying to make being haunted by a dragon ghost sound more convincing—or maybe I’m just hoping if I mention it often enough you’ll start accepting it just because it’s there all the time like a tree or a house or that tub of yogurt in the back of the fridge that turned green months ago. Familiarity breeds getting to used to the idea. My master plan.

  Okay, here we go. Bud believes that what’s happened to Lois and me is not only the thing that’s going to make it possible for dragons and humans to learn to talk to each other—but that it pretty much wouldn’t have happened any other way. Some poor dragon mom was going to have to die all by herself and all but one of her babies die with her and that one remaining baby get picked up by a human just in time for the dying mom to somehow kind of zap herself into her surrogate. And the human had to have been young enough and/or weird enough—like maybe dragon-as-center-of-universe weird—for the zap to take. I don’t want to even think about thinking about the odds…or what that might mean about how stuff gets, you know, arranged…is it worse to be scared to death by the odds or to consider the possibility that it was what-I’m-calling arranged? Brrrrr. Whatever you do with this idea, it makes me colder than a cavern without a dragon to lean on.

  But if Bud believes it I believe it. Some of the other dragons don’t. But there are probably stick-in-the-mud dragons like there are stickin-the-mud humans, who don’t want to believe anything too new and strange and world-detonating, and personally I’d be happy to entertain a better (i.e., less scary) hypothesis if you’ve got one but I did say better.

  One thing that makes me think Bud is right, besides the fact that he’s Bud, is that while Lois is sweating learning dragon language almost as hard as I am, we talk to each other better than we talk to anydragonbody else, most of the time, Lois and me. Maybe it’s not really all that much better. But there’s a kind of ease or fit to it that I don’t have with any of the other dragons, even Bud. For example we have a, uh, let’s call it a glyph, although it’s maybe more a kind of spasm (maybe helps to explain the headaches, and the wigglyness of the dragon alphabet—or alphabets—or that moods and layers thing, thinking of a, uh, unit or module or something of it as a spasm) for “frustration” which we made up together out of how we felt about trying to learn to talk to (other) dragons. But when I used it on Bud he knew instantly what I was “talking” about, so Lois and I get gold stars and pats on the head for that piece of initiative-taking homework.

  You don’t have the smiling, nodding, pointing to your chest and saying your name option with dragons. Nor can you point to another object and say “rock” and wait to see what they say. They won’t say anything. If you’ve been pointing at a rock and saying “rock” for the last six months, however, if you’ve been working at it really hard, you may have begun to wonder why after you say “rock” you very often get a kind of heavy sensation in the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet (and furthermore it seems a bit diagonal. Right hand, left foot. Left hand, right foot). Although the first elation (supposing you manage to be elated through the confusion) drains away real fast as you start to wonder if they’re talking about a kind of rock, a size of rock, a shape of rock, a color of rock, weight of rock, age of rock, even a hardness of rock, or a kind/size/shape/color/weight/age/hardness of anything, or maybe it’s about something else entirely (Where it came from? How it was created? Or if it’s a big rock, which way its shadow falls as the sun rises up over it and goes down the other side, and no I am not joking) and maybe it’s not “rock” at all, but “thing pointed at” or “humans sure are into rocks, I wonder what that’s about?” “Hello” in dragon is a sort of short, stylized flash of…something like
my first look into Halcyon’s dying eye, and it’ll knock you over if you’re not ready for it.

  And there’s not a lot you can do about the Headache but try to wait it out. See if you’re going to be one of the lucky ones, and that it won’t just go on swamping you (flounder flounder squelch squelch), that you’ll be able to kind of go with the flow after a while. And that’s already supposing that you’re one of the (lucky) ones that don’t just dissolve into a quaking, gibbering mess the first time you get within hailing (so to speak) distance of a dragon, and, more to the point, don’t stay dissolved (and gibbering). Almost everybody gets a little melty around the edges on first introduction. But some people can’t learn to cope. And you can’t blame them—well I can’t, anyway. It’s the size of three or four Tyrannosaurus rexes, and it breathes fire, you know? What’s not to be brain-burstingly afraid of?

  But despite all the up-against-itnesses, see above, I’d much rather be at Farcamp and Dragon Central because when I’m at the Institute I start to lose faith in my dictionary—and the dictionary has to be what I’m for. Maybe I can figure out a way to break the idea of “dictionary” out of words on a page…but even the Son of the Son of the Son of the (okay, Daughter of the) Best Graphics Package in the Human Multiverse—I mean the latest update of the one I was using at the beginning—hasn’t shown me a way to do it yet. Maybe because all the graphics packages are designed by humans. I need some kind of three-(or four-, or five-) dimensional Senssurround thingummy. Any major computer whizzes out there who want a real challenge?