Dragonhaven (30 page)

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 it. 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.

I don't know if running in circles and peeping is a common baby-dragon thing, or whether she was making smells in some of the big dragons' heads too, but Gulp reached her long neck out, touched her (enormous) nose to Lois' (tiny) nose—me busy trying to
sieve
myself through the rock at the back of our niche as Gulp's more-than-niche-sized nose got closer and closer—and then, well, pointed.

I followed, because I was going to need to make some smells too, pretty soon, and discovered this…
brimstone
chamber, I don't know what else to call it. It didn't smell like what humans did nor like what Lois did—it smelled like burning rock—like what I'd imagine you'd smell if you were standing somewhere near a volcano. It wasn't disgusting. If anything it was scary—I know, I keep droning on about how
everything
was so scary, but it's not as stupid as it sounds, maybe, giant poop
is
kind of scary—and it did make your eyes water.

I got in and out as fast as I could, although over time and use I noticed that the reason the chamber wasn't dark wasn't only that what the dragons left, uh, glowed slightly, but also because there was a very tall rock chimney that opened into the outer world and during the daytime a little light came down it. I wondered what the smell was like at the top—whether there was a blasted patch around the opening from the fumes. Also, the trench we used lay, or had been dug, at an angle, and everything tumbled or was washed down (there's a lot of inertial force to Giant Poop, and a big dragon takes a
long
time to have a pee) a big hole at the bottom end. It took me quite a while longer to figure out that the reason the fire that burned in the big central chamber smelled the way it did was because it was burning dried dragon dung. How did they dry it? And where? How did they figure out it burned? That last is probably a no-brainer to a dragon.