Dragonhaven (9 page)

I was still muttering. Now I was saying things like “it's okay, stupid, relax.” I'm not sure if I was talking to myself this time, or the dragonlet. I stuck a finger from my cupping hand in sort of the side of its mouth to give it something to suck on and tipped just a drop or two of broth into its mouth. (This was way more awkward than I'm telling you.) It went
gulp
and went on sucking. Oh hurrah. A lot of your orphans just won't try to eat and that's that. So the dragonlet wasn't going to die of starvation, it was going to die of being poisoned or of not getting enough of some kind of vitamin because deer broth isn't anything like close enough to dragon milk. As I say, no one knows what goes on in those pouches.

I fed it broth till its belly was stretching my sleeve. It was almost beginning to look kind of cute to me. I was in a bad way. But you do get like this with your orphans. If they eat you feel all…mothery. (Mom had been really good with the orphans—maybe almost as good as Eric. I remember getting old enough to ask her, kind of anxiously, if taking care of me had been as bad as the stuff at Eric's orphanage. She'd laughed and said oh no, I was much,
much
worse.) I slid the dragonlet out of my sleeve again and it was either falling asleep because it was full and happy or slipping into its final coma, but it didn't struggle so much this time. I pulled my shirt off and wrapped it up in that because I had a clean shirt in my backpack, and if one of us was going to have the clean shirt I'd rather it was me, and then I put it as near the fire as I thought I could without making dragonlet toast, or anyway setting my shirt on fire.

I looked at the inside of my wrist where it had been lying. The skin there is even thinner than on your stomach, and it was actually burned. Jeez. So I got the wound salve out that is part of the basic kit Billy makes you carry, like waterproof matches and a hatchet to make kindling and a pot to boil water, and put some on, and then I had dinner, which took about three minutes because I was so hungry and tired and shaky.

But by the time I'd finished eating, make that bolting, the wretched dragonlet was mewing again, and trying to get out of the shirt. “Oh, give me a
break,
” I said. I thought maybe I'd put it too close to the fire, so I picked it up, and it went floppy instantly, but then the moment I put it down again it was mewing and thrashing, to the extent that something the size of your hand and with legs an inch and a half long and is maybe three or six hours old can thrash. “You're ugly and you
smell,
” I said.

So fatalistically I put it back inside my clean shirt and it scuffled a little like you might thump your pillow with your fist, and then went to sleep. Which made one of us. It had managed to relieve itself on my old shirt, so
that
was really delightful, and I got my jackknife out and hacked off the dirtiest bits and then sort of tucked the rest of the old shirt around its rear end where it was asleep inside my new shirt and leaving fresh red marks on my stomach. I lay down gingerly on my side clutching it with my other hand so that the old shirt around its rear end wouldn't fall off and wondering if I'd get any sleep at all because what if I rolled
over
on it? Not merely squished dragonlet but squished full-of-deer-broth dragonlet. By then I was probably a little hysterical.

I did sleep but I didn't sleep much. Every time it moved I woke up, and I suppose my brain had been working in my sleep or something because by the first time it woke me up I'd figured that a dragonlet probably had to be fed every ten minutes or something because if it was in its mom's pouch it would probably be permanently stuck on a nipple for the first six months or so, which is what happens with the ordinary true-mammal marsupials we know about and makes sense. And a lot of ordinary orphans you do have to feed round the clock. (Maybe Eric's personality was just the result of chronic sleep shortage, although all of the—human—adults took turns for the middle of the night, and Mom and Katie and Jane never got anything like Eric gets, even on no sleep. Although Dad got a little scratchy.) I was trying to remember how long they think the full-time pouch span is for a dragon, but if I'd ever known I'd forgotten and it didn't really matter at the moment since this was only the first
night
.

Every time it wiggled I woke up, groggily—now I was definitely talking out loud to keep myself awake—and the first time I had to pour the rest of the broth back into the pot and heat it in the embers because it's not a good idea to leave food around even in summer when there's plenty of other stuff to eat for anything wandering by. But after the first time I thought the hell with it and just put the top on the pot and left it in the fire, and I know this completely destroys your respect for me as someone who should be allowed to go on his first solo, and you're right, but you weren't there. And it was still a horrible night (even though nobody tried to eat our broth and then have us for dessert), and I used almost all of the firewood I'd collected after all, keeping the fire going.

And to the extent I did sleep, it was like I was afraid to move at all, so I woke up every time in exactly the same position because it suited trying to hold the damn dragonlet in the position
it
liked, and by morning when I stopped even pretending to sleep my whole right side was like paralyzed and I had a headache like you wouldn't believe, although really I'd had the headache since everything happened yesterday afternoon. And to think a few days ago I'd been feeling that just relearning to sleep on the ground was tough. I may have slept as much as an hour that last spell before dawn. When I tried to sit up I yelped like a dog when you've stepped on its tail. But I felt the dragonlet stir. My stomach felt scalded so I already knew it was still alive. It was probably hungry again too. I hurt too much to be hungry. “You still there, Ugly?” I said.

I got the fire going properly again (nice hot embers, I thought resentfully, regularly blown on and fed sticks—the dragonlet would have been
fine
lying next to the fire all night) and put some more water on to heat and threw another chunk of meat in. At home Dad makes me eat vegetables but when I'm in the park I turn carnivore. Billy never makes me eat vegetables even though most of the year he can usually find green stuff to eat wherever he is. Even I know about waterweed. I just don't eat it. And I bet dragons don't either. I wasn't going to endanger the dragonlet's fragile welfare by threatening it with vegetable matter.

It had done some more on my old shirt, so I cut those bits out. I needed to get back to the Institute soon because I was running out of shirt. Then we did the broth thing again and while in one way it was easier because I was getting in practice it didn't seem to want to open its mouth any wider than it absolutely had to and now in daylight again the corners of its mouth looked sort of, well, chapped, maybe. So I put some wound salve on it and wondered if maybe
that
would poison it, and some more on the inside of my wrist, and then I cruelly let it lie near the fire in a nice warm pile of ashes (I checked) while I cleaned up in the hope that it would do some of its business before I had to wrap it up in what remained of my old shirt again and put it next to my stomach, and it did. So that was something.

But it had also mewed and thrashed while I left it—it had added a sort of high-pitched peep to its repertoire on its second day of life—so by the time I finally did put it back inside my shirt it was exhausted and went to sleep instantly. At least I assume that's what it was doing when it did its pillow-punching trick and didn't move for a while. By now I could feel it breathing—I don't know if it was breathing better or I was learning the mom marsupial drill—and, of course, it was burning holes in the skin of my stomach.

I can't begin to tell you what a long day that was. I was aching all over, particularly my head, and tired into my bones. I don't think I'd ever realized what that phrase meant before. It's a good thing I've been trained since I was a toddler to follow Rangers' marks because I was doing it mindlessly, not thinking because I couldn't think. There was no thinking left in me. And it's ridiculous to say that something the size of a day-and-a-half-old dragonlet
weighed
, but it did. It weighed more than my backpack did somehow. I suppose it was just that I couldn't stop worrying about it. I worried about whether or not it could breathe, because I had to tuck my sweatshirt in over my shirt to make sure it didn't fall out while we were moving, but mostly it wasn't anything so logical. It was just worry worry worry about everything. Worry on legs. Worry walking. Worry staggering and lurching.

I didn't anything like cover twenty miles that day. I think I did about ten, which under the circumstances is amazing. I decided after the first stop to feed my new responsibility that if it could live with human body heat it could probably live with human-body-heat food, so I put the pot of broth under my shirt too. The idea that I had to stop and make a fire every half hour was a whole lot too much. And I was sure I should be feeding it more often than every half hour anyway, I just couldn't. Fortunately the broth pot was small. Mind you my shirt had not been made to hold both a dragonlet and even a small pot of broth so I had to tuck the pot sort of down my pants which made walking harder, and cradle the dragonlet with one hand so it didn't fall down the hole, and the pot leaked. Well, so did the dragonlet. After a while I stopped paying attention. Ordinarily I don't think I'd've been able to ignore getting increasingly covered with runny infant dragon poop but there was nothing ordinary about that day. If I hadn't kept telling myself “Billy will know what to do” I'd never have been able to make myself keep moving at all.

When sunset came I pulled myself together enough to look for the next Ranger mark so I'd know exactly which way to go in the morning. Besides, camping near one was almost like company. Human company. I knew that tomorrow was going to be even worse than today had been. I mopped myself up as well as I could out of the nearby rill while a new pot of water was heating over the fire. I didn't even try to put the dragonlet down this time. Sometimes I think personal hygiene is kind of overdone but I would have
loved
a hot bath. And lots of soap.

I had to clean up carefully, moving the dragonlet around so it didn't get any nasty cold water on it, and it wasn't thrilled with the operation anyway, from the amount of scrabbling and peeping, but when it was broth time again it settled right down and started to suck and swallow. I felt kind of funny about that. I mean, it was already learning the system. It was a
dragon
for pity's sake. But at two days old it was already learning what to do, and I was pretty sure a finger and a camping spoon wasn't the system it was born to expect. I'd tried using a piece of shirt (more shirt gone) as a nipple, but that didn't work so well, or it couldn't suck the broth out of the cloth, or something; the cloth just got soggier and soggier and it kept letting go to try and grab one of my fingers again. So we went back to the old system. My finger was getting almost as sore as my stomach.

But when I thought about how much worse tomorrow was going to be, it never crossed my mind to hope the thing would die and let me off.

I was so tired I fell asleep leaning against a tree with the dragonlet belly up in one sleeve and a potful of broth propped between my legs. A weird sort of distant
whoosh
and a sudden splash of light woke both of us. I opened my eyes slowly, for a moment having no idea where I was or what was going on. The dragonlet was trying to turn itself over so it could dive back into my shirt. Absent-mindedly I helped it while I looked at the big orange streak…in the sky…over the rocks and treetops…the old brain was trying to churn out some kind of recognition….

A flare. A Ranger's flare. And it would be Billy, wondering where I was, if I was in trouble. Knowing that I had to be in trouble, because I wasn't back at Northcamp when I should be. And probably even more worried because I hadn't radioed—I should have radioed in last night—I didn't even have mine turned on so I'd hear him trying to call me. I'd forgotten all about my radio—all about “radio Billy and stay put.” That's how tired and crazy I was.

Everything is harder when you only have one hand and are using the other to keep a dragonlet in your shirt, even if you're busy talking to yourself and telling yourself how to do stuff. (Some of the time I seemed to be talking to Mom. Sometimes I seemed to be talking to the dead dragon, except she was alive. Sometimes they seemed to be there too, and to be talking back. Like I keep saying: tired and crazy.) Eventually I turned the backpack upside down and shook it hard, and everything fell out, including the two-way and my three flares. The two-way bounced and made a nasty
clank
when it hit the second time. Oh well. Flares are less breakable and perhaps easier to use one-handed. I managed to wedge one between two stones. Then I clutched the empty backpack over the dragonlet in case the flare freaked it out through my shirt, and yanked the flare open.

Rangers really are amazing. I guess I was on the right trail so it wasn't like he had to do a big search, and the moonlight was blazing bright again tonight in a clear sky, but even so. Billy was there by midnight.
You
try following an almost invisible path in bad country in the dark for nine or ten miles. I didn't even hear him coming, so I didn't have to worry about what big animal was about to eat me and the dragonlet, although getting eaten would have let me off another six months of every-thirty-minute feedings. Getting eaten was probably the nicer death. Or maybe I didn't hear him coming because I was talking again. I used to talk to my orphans at the zoo—most of us do (“Theeeeere now, isn't that gooooood?” and other inane remarks)—but not like this. I couldn't shut up. I think talking kept the whole gruesome situation at a little distance so I didn't quite finish going crazy. That and keeping myself awake, of course. Also if the dragonlet peeped why shouldn't I answer?

Billy was just suddenly at the edge of the firelight like we'd been together all along and he'd been gone briefly to have a pee or collect firewood or something. Maybe it's just I
was
crazy by then, but I looked up between spoon-tipping and spoon-tipping (and mutter and mutter) and said, “Oh, hello, Billy,” and went back to the dragonlet. It fell asleep between one spoonful and the next, the way it usually did now, and although I woke it up when I turned it over to put it back in my shirt it peeped one burpy peep and instantly crashed again. Then I looked up at Billy who was still standing there like Cinderella's fairy godmother had turned him to stone.

Billy slid out of his backpack very, very carefully and set it down very, very carefully. I don't know if he was trying not to disturb the dragonlet or whether he thought I'd gone off my rocker and had to be treated gently. I noticed distantly that he was acting peculiar but couldn't put it together somehow. I'd also forgotten that I was covered in dried blood, birth slime, dragonlet pee and poop, wound salve, and who knows what else. So he may also have thought I was injured.

He squatted down slowly beside me. “Hey, Jake,” he said. “What's that?”

I actually didn't know what he meant for a moment. “Uh—oh, you mean the dragonlet. It's a baby dragon. Oh!”—because I was beginning to remember that Billy being here was a kind of reentry into the real world. “There's a dead dragon…and a dead, uh, poacher, I guess…just beyond Pine Tor. The dragon had just given birth. All her babies were dead.” I had to stop and swallow. “Except this one.”

I feel a little better about being as crazy as I was, thinking about it now, because Billy didn't really register the poacher or the dead dragon—why I was sitting there with a dragonlet. It's not that he looked surprised or anything—Billy doesn't do surprise—but all he said, slowly and unbelievingly, was, “It's a
dragon.
”

“Yeah,” I said, coming back a little farther into the real world. “It doesn't look like one, does it? I suppose I only knew because they were—” I had to stop and swallow again. “It eats
all the time.
You can get a better look at it when it wakes up again. Which it will. Soon.” I sighed. “I'm sorry I missed getting back tonight. I know I've blown it. But I'm…so tired.”

Billy was silent for a minute. I can imagine, now, what he must have been thinking. Nobody had ever so much as seen a dragon giving birth. It was Old Pete who figured out, working backwards from seeing dog-sized dragonlets for the first time, why the dragon whose pouch they fled for when
they
saw Old Pete for the first time had changed color for a few hours about a year ago. No one—no human, not even Old Pete—had ever seen just-born dragons—let alone kept one alive for thirty hours and counting. I was some kind of eco-naturalist hero. Except that what I'd done would also get me thrown in jail for the rest of my life if anyone found out about it…and get everyone who knew about it thrown in jail for the rest of their lives too. It might even shut down the Institute—or Smokehill itself. There were always a few people rumbling away about dragons being a danger to society, and writing to the money guys in Congress who kept Smokehill alive about child poverty and cures for cancer and other things more important (they think) than dragons.

Smokehill is actually really precarious, although I know that's kind of hard to get your brain around when you're looking at several million acres of rock and dirt—and that fence. The Bonelands—the deserty part—are probably their own best defense, but developers would love to get their hands on the prettier bits of Smokehill, and the government would love to get their hands on the money developers would pay them, if they could find a good excuse to break their promises to us—and there might be gold here after all. And now I might have provided the excuse the government wanted. My not having made it back to Northcamp by nightfall would have been the last thing Billy was thinking about at that moment.

It's no wonder I kept talking to myself. I wasn't keeping myself awake, I was drowning out thoughts like these.

And that's still leaving out the poacher. A dead human
killed
by a dragon.

On the other hand there'd be no way that Billy would ever have told me to let something that had the possibility of living die without a struggle, and he wouldn't care whether it was a dragon or a caterpillar, so that part of it was all right, as far as it went. But I had put everyone in deep
deep
trouble by what I'd done automatically—automatically as a result of having been Billy and the other Rangers' willing slave from the age of two. What I'd done was exactly what every Ranger would have done. And they'd have done it automatically too. Hey, our Rangers bring back orphaned or injured gray squirrels. They'd bring back rats, if we had rats. Well, we do, but our
Rattus
are
Rattus maculatus
and
R. perobscurus,
and endangered.

My point is, we save things. It's what we do.

I was drifting in and out of…semiconsciousness, let's not call it sleep. When the dragonlet woke up again Billy watched very carefully while I fed it, and the next time it—and I—woke up Billy had the broth ready and some piece of something he'd cut off something to make a nipple, and
his
nipple worked, and that made things a
lot
easier. The rest of the night was better. I didn't get a lot more sleep, but I didn't have to think about anything else either—Billy did all that. He didn't offer to touch the dragonlet, but he did everything else. By morning I probably had nearly half my brain available again, which was up on the 10 percent I'd had at midnight when Billy arrived.

We made it back to Northcamp that day, don't ask me how. I think Billy was beaming Strength Waves at me or something. If I could keep a baby dragon alive anything was possible, including Strength Waves. It took us all day, and Billy carried my pack as well as his own, and we stopped a lot, and every time I sat down (which I had to, to feed the dragonlet without worrying about dropping it), I thought I'd never get up again. But I did. Also standing up always made my headache worse (
bang bang bang
), and I kept trying to walk so as not to joggle my head, let alone the dragonlet.

At some feeding or other I noticed that the dragonlet was already bigger than it had been two days ago. If I held it upside down in my hand now, it spilled over onto my wrist. It wasn't going to fit up my sleeve much longer. And it was heavier too obviously. I didn't have to come up with any way to measure that. It was a good thing Billy'd brought food. The dragonlet got through a
lot
of broth.

When I staggered into the little clearing in front of Northcamp I almost couldn't believe it. It was like adopting a baby dragon had sent me into some kind of alternate reality where things like buildings and electricity didn't exist. Billy got the generator going while I was still sitting in a chair and staring at the stove in the big central room. Stoves didn't exist in my alternate reality either. Or chairs. When the teakettle whistled I jumped a mile and the dragonlet woke up and started peeping. I wasn't sure whether it was a frightened peep or a “hello, who are
you
?” peep but it stopped as soon as the teakettle did and went back to sleep. Feeding it sitting in a chair was weird too. Dragons just don't fit in the human world. Duh.

And then there was taking a bath…. In a way that was the first time some of the hairiest implications of what I'd done began to sink in. I'd told Billy, during some night feed or other, that it went nuts any time I tried to lay it down…and then we'd found out the hard way the next day that it hated Billy trying to hold it only slightly less than it hated being laid down. This was a blow. Make that a
BLOW.
Until it happened I hadn't thought about having someone to trade off red welts and disgustingness duty and nooo sleep with—but it occurred to me real fast at that point that I
didn't
have it. That I wasn't
going
to have it. And dragonlets stay in their moms' pouches
how long
??? Also I was used to Billy being able to do anything—including get me out of any trouble I was in. But I was too zonked to follow what this really meant very far. And that's a good thing.

Maybe the teakettle and being in a square place lined with planks (called a “cabin”) and furniture and plumbing and stuff were the thing too many for the dragonlet (see: dragons do not fit in the human world, and don't forget the “duh”) like getting back to human space seemed to be this weird shock to me. My new permanent headache, which I was almost sort of getting used to, was making me feel queasy and dizzy. But the bath was a kind of a watershed (ha ha ha) moment for both of us. The dragonlet had a complete mini Eric-type meltdown. I thought it was going to do itself an injury when we tried to make it a nest with (a) warm ashes, (b) warmed-up blankets, (c) anything else we could think of.

So the way it ended up was, we kept the dragonlet half wrapped in a piece of my by then truly gross shirt and moved it kind of up and down my front while I
got in the bath
that way and tried to wash
around
it, which is to say Billy held it while I tried to wash—this was more embarrassing than I can begin to tell you and it was only being so tired and out of it that made it even possible—and then I got up on my knees and Billy held it against my back while I crouched forward to wash my face and hair. Oh good. New red spots too.

Billy noticed the red spots, both old and new—he'd probably noticed before but maybe he hadn't realized how many of them there were—and did his more-expressionless-than-expressionless wooden-Indian face thing and I noticed, which was interesting, since I wasn't noticing anything, but I suppose it just proves I was fully into my new dragonlet-defending-and-fostering role, because I said, “Oh, they don't
hurt,
they're just
marks
, they're no big deal, they're no
deal
.” And I looked at Billy and Billy looked at me and I could see that Billy knew I was lying but I just kept looking at him and…he looked away. I didn't get into staring contests with Billy because I knew who won and it wasn't me, and furthermore I'd had this one standing there naked and stinking (and red-spotted). The maternal instinct is sure powerful.