Dragonhaven (43 page)

When I raised my head and looked forward (eyes watering in the gale) I could just see Bud's head, an outline of a craggy red-flecked moving blackness in the surrounding smooth moonlit gray. We were out over the Bonelands by now—pretty well nothing as far as you could see in any direction except rock and shadows. Bud's blistering urgency, which had settled to a kind of intense dull roar once we'd started, came back again, like spikes of flame surging up out of banked embers. The moon was getting low and dawn wasn't too far off—and I picked up that we had to get there, wherever there was, before the moon set, and it was like suddenly Bud kicked into some final burst of overdrive and my scalp was getting peeled off, the seams on my clothes were going to part any minute, and I wasn't just curled up and dozing any more, I was hanging on for dear life.

At last we slowed and banked and began to come down. I couldn't see what we were coming to, and for a moment I didn't care, because I'd been wondering just how much this flight had taken out of Bud, and as he tried to organize himself for landing in a space that had plenty of room even for an eighty-plus-foot dragon, I realized just how exhausted he was. His wings would barely hold him—us—and he juddered and jerked like a plane running out of fuel, and when he landed he landed like a wrecking ball, and the Boneland dust whirlpooled up around us. I'd been pretty well dug in where I was, and I bounced, and my neck was probably going to hurt a lot pretty soon, but I was still clinging on.

Bud—
? I said, frightened.

Go,
he said.
Go.
There was more to it—I assume it was something about “I'm okay don't worry about me,” and his voice, or his signal, or his space, still sounded like Bud, and if this urgency to get me here was something he was willing to half kill himself to make happen, the least I could do was whatever he'd brought me here for.

I climbed down, and a dragon I knew slightly, Opal (Ooooo
aaaaaaa
lllllll), was right there, fairly dancing with impatience, and I looked at her, and looked at Bud, and they both pointed their noses in the same direction, so I went thataway. Thataway was a lump of black rock sticking up out of the deserty flatness of the Bonelands; the kind of lump of rock that makes you think “caves,” which the Bonelands are, by reputation, full of, although us humans don't know much about them, bar the little that a few foolhardy speleologists have mapped. I could feel that I was going toward dragons before I could see them…and then I could feel Gulp…and then Lois…and there were at least three more, dragons I didn't know so well, like I didn't know Opal.

Lois came running out toward me, silvery-coppery in the moonlight, and I was getting off her something I'd never had before, and if I'd been able to make sense out of any dragon it should have been her, but again, all I could pick out of it was URGENT URGENT URGENT NOW NOW NOW. She chased after me like a sheepdog, but I was half walking and half trotting as fast as I could, and all my bones ached. It had been a lot harder on Bud, but I was near the end of my pathetic human strength too, stiff and bruised with it, and half stunned with sleeplessness.

When Gulp raised her head I could finally make her out from among the weird shadows. Some of my slowness to take it all in was just how tired I was. There was enough moonlight, now that I
saw
what I was looking at, to see that she was…orange and maroon and crimson. And I at last realized, although they must all have been trying to tell me, that I'd been brought to witness Gulp's babies being born: and I broke into a shambling run. I didn't know anything about moonset, I didn't know anything about anything, but I finally had a clue….

A whole lot of sad and overwhelming stuff spilled out of me from the last time I'd seen a mom dragon and her babies, and as it went a whole lot of lovely warm
live
dragon stuff came pouring in…like that what I'd been guessing about the “midwives” wasn't quite right: Mom knows how many babies she's got, and chooses an escort for each one—almost like a godparent sort of thing—to help each tiny little dragon droplet from her womb to her pouch. Usually the escorts are all female, although sometimes Dad is invited to be the last one. Dad had been invited. That was Bud. And Bud said, I think it should be Jake. And Gulp said, Great, I thought of that, but it seemed a little way out there, even for us, but it's the next step, isn't it? And Bud said yes—or something like that, I don't know what they
said
.

Lois was there because
she
was an escort.

Gulp had six dragonlets—and I could
feel
these tiny soft glowing blobs in my—I have no idea my what—somewhere. Somehow. Faint and fragile but
there.
They were a kind of orangy maroony themselves. They were…like coming from somewhere and going to somewhere, and I'm not sure I just mean from one piece of Mom to another. But it was almost like someone—Gulp?—had me by the elbow (the dragonhead-space elbow equivalent) and was saying, Here, look right
here
. Otherwise it would have been kind of a huge stupendous glittery fireworks display and I'd've just kind of stood there going, Uh, wow.

Five of the dragonlets were already in her pouch.

The moon, I swear, paused and
hovered
while for the second time in my life I picked up a smudgy, wet, blobby, just-born dragonlet, and felt its little stumpy legs moving vaguely against my hand…but I knew the difference at once, and grieved all over again for Lois and her mom and her dead siblings, because this one wasn't confused or bewildered or terrified, it was just waiting for the next thing to happen; it was borne up comfortably by what was supposed to happen, even if it was happening a little slower than it was expecting, and I imagine my hands didn't feel a whole lot like whatever a
dragon
dragon escort does. I don't know if
I
was being borne up too—like someone helping me “see” the six dragonlets—or whether any fool, having got that far, could see what to do, but the slit in Gulp's belly that was the opening to her pouch was perfectly obvious, and Gulp had curled herself around and stretched out a foreleg so her last, pygmy dragonlet-escort could scramble up it (cradling a sticky dragonlet against his own permanently-scarred-from-previous-dragonlet-experience belly) and reach far enough.

The dragonlet—
my
dragonlet—was a very specific orange and maroon blob in my mind's eye/somewhere/whatever even though the little thing in my hand was only a bulky shadow—surprisingly heavy for its size the way almost all baby things are—could I just see an edge of that bruise-purple color that poor Lois had been? Or did dragonlets only turn that color if they were living down someone's shirtfront and eating deer broth?

It was already hot. So if this was the time when baby fire-stomachs get lit up, at least the escort isn't expected to do it. Not this escort anyway.

I put the blob at the lip of the pouch and made sure it got in it, and then stumbled down the foreleg and leaned against Gulp—and watched a lot of shards of memory and grief and fear toppling and tumbling over one another, some of them bursting like sparklers and spinning like Catherine wheels. Lois came and pressed herself against me like she was remembering too.

And—snicker if you want, I don't care—I talked to Lois' mom,
talked
to her, to Halcyon—and she told me that yes there had been some doubt about the keeping-the-human-up-there part of the Lois-and-Jake high-wire act (let's try a parasol for balance but I don't think he's ever going to be ready for the unicycle): I hadn't been so far wrong, guessing that being only fourteen when it happened and still a bit squishy myself was part of what made it possible, and even so it was only
just maybe
possible. Halcyon had like watched my brain
shimmy
with the headaches—but the, um, markers she'd left (remember “shouldering aside your gray matter and putting up signposts for other travelers,
eeeeek
”) had given Bud somewhere to start—and some warning about human fragility. She'd worried about the burns too; even young healthy fourteen-year-old human skin is eventually going to get tired of being reburned all the time and refuse to heal. It was maybe true, what I'd said to Eleanor, that you get used to it. But some of it was Halcyon, who was unhappy she hadn't been able to do it better, that I still had headaches, that the “eczema” had left scars. I could feel her worry and her care, and hey, moms are moms, however many pairs of limbs they have. And she'd been all alone, really alone, much more alone than I'd been.

All this so that there would be some future for dragons after all, and there
was
some future, because Lois and I—and Halcyon—and Gulp and Bud and Dad and Martha and the rest of us on both sides—were
making
it.

Halcyon was talking to Lois too—I could feel
that
—but I don't know what she said. Some of what she said was the same as what she'd said to me, I guess, but she'd've been saying it differently. What I could feel was Lois shivering like a frightened puppy—Lois had never shivered in her life that I knew of—and I put my arms around her neck (although I couldn't reach the whole way around any more), thinking, Halcyon had a choice. It was a horrible choice—she's the one who died, who knew she was going to die—but she did make it. She was a grown-up, and she
decided
. I was only fourteen, but I'd had the life I'd had, including that if there was a live baby orphan anything I
had
to try to keep it alive (and that I was nuts in this case enough
to
try)—but I was still old enough to make a choice, and I made
that
choice—that impossible choice—and while I've already moaned and whimpered about how the loss of my own mom had kind of removed the “choice” part of my choice—I was still, you know,
responsible,
and I still made it.

But poor Lois had never had any choice at all. Or not much of one. She'd chosen to stay alive. She'd fought like anything to stay alive—and her mom and me may have been helping her as much as we could—but she was sure in there herself, struggling like gosh-damn-and-wow to keep breathing. And then again…if you're going to believe me about Halcyon, then maybe it's not such an enormous leap of credibility or imagination or hope or what you like, to think that maybe Lois did have a choice. When the souls were all lined up that day in the recycling center, the head angel came in and rapped on the desk to make everybody pay attention and said, Okay, gang, we need a volunteer, and explained what the volunteer was going to have to do. There'd have been dead silence for a minute, maybe, and then the Lois-soul put its hand-equivalent up and said, Yeah, okay, me, I'll do it….

I hope Lois' siblings all got a good go next time round. A real life. An adventure or two. True love. Whatever.

 

Whatever else a dragonlet escort is maybe supposed to do, I hope some of it got sucked out of my strangely shaped wrong species (and as you might say nontraditional gender) self because after the sixth blob went to join its brothers and sisters in Gulp's pouch and Lois and I had our “conversation” with Halcyon I literally fell down where I stood and slept. (And felt ninety years old and
arthritic
when I woke up.) But Bud and Gulp must've been braced for Jake getting most things wrong when they decided to have me there.

I've told you that you pick up dragon stuff when you're sleeping that you can't when you're awake. I probably soaked up more in that one short sleep than I had in all the years before, and while I damned
forgot
most of it again when I woke up, like you forget most of your dreams, still, something changed. I don't pick up “words” any better than I ever did—nothing I can revolutionize my dictionary with, unfortunately—but my brain has learned how to handle dragon space!!! It's like there's a whole new lobe grown on my brain: the dragon lobe. It CAN be done!
Even the headaches are better!!!
Wow. I mean,
wow.
I hadn't even realized how gruesomely awful the headaches—the Headaches—have been the last seven years—
seven years
—almost EIGHT—till they lightened up. They're still there. But they're easier. Martha says she doesn't feel like she needs to use a hammer when she tries to rub the tension out of my neck and shoulders any more.

I think Gulp's babies were early. Even as unborn pre-blobs they're already countable individuals to their mom—but neither mom nor blobs, I think, have a reliable sense of when they're going to be born, any more than human moms do. And so I think that's why they didn't have me on tap, so to speak, at Dragon Central, where it would have been a comparatively short hop for a flying dragon to take me to the birth place in the Bonelands. Mind you, I have no idea how they would have convinced me to stick around—I guarantee I would
not
have understood “Hey, Jake, wanna be escort to one of Gulp's babies?”—but they'd've thought of something. They could always have just got in the way. What would I have done? Forced past them? Playing tag with a dragon just doesn't appeal much.