Dragonhaven (19 page)

So if there was no one else at home sometimes I sang. Now there is a noise to drive the birds from the trees and the dragons into the deepest caverns of the Bonelands. Even Lois' mimicry boggled at trying to do the dragonlet version of a shower
and
Jake singing. Although she did do a good hum. In fact her humming was the nearest of all her noises to any of the noises humans make. Sometimes we hummed together.

But I think I played with her more once Martha and Eleanor were in on it. Things just felt a little less harrowing. That being-on-the-same-side thing even made me feel a little more at ease with the child welfare people, and I swear child welfare people pick up the smell of fear like mean dogs do and have no clue that the fear might be of
them
. (Mean dogs know perfectly well that it is. We've—Smokehill I mean—only ever had maybe two mean dogs since I've been old enough to notice, and they don't last past the first snap. One of the families with kids, one of the kids ran away when Dad banned the dog, and then the rest of the family gave up and left too. More of Dad's graduate students. He doesn't have the best luck with his graduate students.)

Eleanor nearly ruined everything though by deciding to be helpful by adding corroborative testimony like in police shows on TV. She asked the doctor if he couldn't do anything else for my eczema (his creams hadn't worked, not surprisingly, but also because I hadn't bothered to use them) because she was sure it hurt more than I admitted. Thanks, Eleanor. Maybe it worked out okay though since the doctor knew that Eleanor was a busybody. So maybe that Eleanor pretended she knew it was eczema
was
corroborative testimony. (I taught her to say “corroborative testimony” and she forgave me for being ticked off that she'd opened her big mouth about it at all.)

Anyway. Lois used to lie on my feet at supper (everybody else carefully and awkwardly keeping their feet out of the way around Billy and Grace's little kitchen table, especially after she started to generalize about people and wanted to be friends with everybody she saw. Even if you were unsympathetically wearing shoes she'd put her hot scratchy nose up your pantleg to be sociable) which was usually the four of us humans plus one dragon. Except when Dad couldn't get away or Billy was on duty or aggravating some investigators or checking what the diggers and builders were (still) doing to the caves after they'd closed down for the day (work on this had slowed down a lot since the scandal started). And then sometimes we had Jane or Kit or Whiteoak—or Nate or Jo, who Billy'd added to the dragonsitting/Jake's Sanity Conservation rota—and people having a meal together talk (except Whiteoak of course. I learned “thank you” and “please pass the whatever” in Arkhola from having Whiteoak for dinner. Even Whiteoak wasn't going to risk being rude to Grace I think). Maybe they talk especially when they aren't completely comfortable with each other, and Dad and I hadn't been completely comfortable with each other in years, and we also weren't seeing as much of each other as we used to, so most of the time we talked a lot to cover up the silence.

(Except of course if there'd just been a big meeting about what to do about the poacher's parents—which nobody ever did tell me anything about, just by the way, until years later, when I asked Dad. He looked at me blankly for a minute and then gave a sort of hollow nonlaugh. “We didn't figure
anything
out, that first meeting,” he said—and Dad doesn't talk in italics all the time the way I do. “We didn't figure
anything
out. We just sat around and moaned and shouted and tore our hair.” He stared into space for a minute, frowning. “It was pretty goddamn awful.”)

It was a joke for a long time when, if a silence did manage to fall, we'd hear Lois doing her peeping and burbling under the table, which got gruffer and rougher as she got older. But I think I'm the only one of us humans who noticed that it wasn't just getting gruffer and rougher, but it was starting to rise and fall in a rhythm—kind of a lot like the sound of people talking.

I thought about this for a while, kind of hoping that someone else would notice too, but if anyone did they didn't say anything to me. But dragon noises, as I say, are
peculiar
so probably only my ears could make anything about Lois' sound effects seem familiar.

It had been Eleanor's remark about my goofiness that had really made me think about it. Between Lois and…between Lois and
Lois
it was really easy not to think about anything but getting through every hour as it came. So up till Martha and Eleanor met Lois I suppose I had kind of been thinking about Lois almost like a funny looking dog with strange habits. Snark imitated all kinds of human things and we all just said oh, what a clown. Eleanor made me realize that while I
was
just as goofy about Lois as I'd been about Snark, I was goofy about her
differently
. Not just because she wasn't a dog. Not just because she was the first addition to my family after fifty percent of it had died. Not just because of the dreams.

So one afternoon when I'd done more schoolwork than I could stand, and it was sunny outdoors, and we were alone at the cabin, I took her out (she waddled and murmured behind me, her scaly feet and the tip of her now steadily lengthening tail making a funny little scuttling noise on the kitchen linoleum like maybe there were several baby dragons following me instead of only one) and sat down on the ground with her and said, “Hey, Lois.” I said it very carefully and deliberately. “Heeeeeey” on a falling note and “Lois” as two distinct syllables, “Lo” higher and stronger and “is” dropping off and down.

I didn't sit on the ground with her so much any more because for some reason this got her all excited and she was too inclined to stick her face in my face and give me more eczema (what a good thing she wasn't a face-licker), but it was a good way to get her attention. When she rushed over to touch her nose against mine I fended her off with a hand and said “Hey, Lois” again.

She stopped trying to make face contact and looked at me as if she knew this was important. She didn't have that squashy look of something that had been stepped on any more, and her head was beginning to look almost a little horsey, narrow at the muzzle and wider between the eyes. Her eyes were a little bulgy like an animal's who expects to have a lot of peripheral vision, but they were also protected by some nobbly, bumpy ridges, so who knows. Maybe dragons see the world with a nice scalloped frame around it. Baby dragon eyelashes, by the way, are halfway to being spines, which means that when your baby dragon blinks its eyes when it's falling asleep against your stomach, you feel like you're being peeled. (Some of the spinal plates, the erectile ones, have slightly serrated edges too, which are in effect more like a cheese-grater.) I must have good resistance to pain or something. I never minded the eczema or the peeling nearly as much as I minded the diapers, and the diapers were
over
.

She peeped at me.

“Hey, Lois.”

She peeped again, except it was more of a grumble.

“Hey, Lois.”

Another rumbly peep. But this one was a three-syllable peep, and the first syllable was longer than the other two.

“Hey,” I said, more softly. “Lois.”

And she answered a quieter three-syllable peep, and the long syllable fell down the scale and the first short syllable was higher and stronger and the second short syllable was lower and deeper.

I looked at her and she looked at me. Sure, mynah birds can do better, but do they do better while you're both
straining
with alertness at each other? It takes weeks to teach a parakeet to say its first words. The air was nearly humming around us, and the Headache tried to break out of my skull again, which it didn't do so much as it used to except when I woke up from dreaming about big dragons and caves with weird lighting effects. I suppose I'd noticed before that the Headache tended to get worse when Lois and I seemed to be getting, you know,
intense
at each other. But I wasn't thinking about that either. I did wonder occasionally if maybe it was a brain tumor, but weirdly since I'm so good at worrying about everything I could never really get going worrying about that.

So I sat there looking at her with her looking at me. I was excited and thrilled and also…frightened and horrified. Frightened because it was like I was finally facing that I had this whole
extra
responsibility. I'd only been trying to keep her alive, which had been more than enough, but now I'd been reminded, forcefully, that just feeding a wild orphan isn't enough, and
what do you teach a dragon about being a dragon
? What was Lois trying to learn from the very funny-looking dragon she thought was her mom by mimicking the noises she (well, he) made?

I had no idea. And nobody could tell me. And I had read Old Pete's journals so often I knew them almost by heart and he couldn't tell me either.

And I
hated
the idea that the best Lois had to look forward to was growing up to live in some kind of cage and being dumbly fed by humans for the rest of her life because no one would've taught her how to be a dragon. Okay, Lois being alive was a miracle.

I wanted more miracles. That's all.

I also perversely suddenly
didn't
want any other humans to notice that Lois was trying to speak human. Add this to the long list of things I can't really explain. I was afraid of…how their reactions might make me think about it, I guess. Just the fact that they'd have reactions (Dad would get all fascinated and remind me to keep careful notes and Billy would just nod slowly and go on with whatever he was doing) felt like someone putting a hand on your soap bubble:
pop
. (Although as soap bubbles go, Lois didn't make the grade.)

But I was realizing what it really meant that Lois was Lois to me first and a dragon second, however stupid that sounds, like I could forget for half a nanosecond that she was a dragon. But everybody else could
afford
to see her as a dragon. And this meant I saw her as…?

I had a lot of sleepless nights after that afternoon, while Lois snuffled and gurgled under the bedclothes. While I worried I also noticed—especially noticeable in an enclosed space like between your sheets—that her burps and farts smelled more and more like singe and char. I was sure Lois would be brokenhearted if she woke up one morning and discovered she'd fried me in her sleep…but what if she did?

I'm still doing a lousy job of giving you any sense of time passing. Well, time passed, and all of us preadult things kept getting bigger, me, Martha, Eleanor…Lois. And the seasons kept changing, the way they do. You don't not notice things like which season it is in Smokehill. (Well. You get confused sometimes, like when it snows in August, or when the February thaw is longer than usual and every critter in the zoo and the orphanage starts shedding, and everything underfoot that isn't rock turns to mud, and that year you have to go through this
twice
.) But weather and seasons are kind of the same even when they're different: It may be spring now, but winter will come round again soon enough. You
know
that. So I was lying awake smelling farts like burned toast and scorched hamburger, and thinking about how Lois was getting on for two years old.

She'd turn two right before I'd turn seventeen. I'd have my high-school equivalency certificate by then easy, and then I could stop pretending to be a fast-track early-acceptance Ranger apprentice and become a real one—out of reach of social workers and bureaucrats at last. And doctors trying to treat me for a unique variety of eczema.

We'd been so lucky so far. (I keep saying that. But it's maybe the most important thing of all.) Martha told me there was a big new Friends of Smokehill movement that was holding the Searles off. The Searles were the parents of the villain. Somehow I didn't manage not to learn their/ his last name. They said that while it was true that their son had been in the park when he shouldn't, he only wanted to
see
a dragon and that this one had turned on him for no reason. Like they were there and saw it happen. Like that explained the spare grenades he'd still been wearing when she flamed him and the big-bore lightning rifle heavy enough to penetrate six rhinos standing in a row. Even I'd half-noticed the heavy artillery at the time. Sure he'd only wanted to
see
a dragon.

Our Friends had made a biiiig fuss about the lightning rifle and the grenades, which is why the Searles hadn't closed us down yet, but the Searles said that he would of course have taken gear to protect himself in case of an unprovoked attack…blah blah blah…. The forensic morgue guys had even proved that he'd died instantly when she flamed him, so he had to have shot her first. But…

Several eons ago I'd been hanging around the ticket booth bugging Katie who has always been really good about being bugged (even before Eleanor was born). Snark was with me because he always was with me. I had him lying down. My parents had hammered it into me that if I was going to have a dog I
had
to train him because of all the tourists (and, of course, the park itself). This was fine with me. It's not like I wanted to play football with my pals every afternoon after school. So I trained Snark to do all kinds of stuff. Lying down for a few minutes while I gave Katie a hard time was nothing to Snark.

There were only a few tourists around and I wasn't paying attention. Snark was behind me, and Katie's view was blocked by the corner of the ticket booth. I turned around in time to see some kid only a little younger than me trying to
poke Snark in the eye
—I don't know, to get a reaction or something?—because Snark would have been ignoring anybody who was a stranger. Several things happened at once. I saw Snark jerk his head away from the poking finger, the kid said, “You're a really
stupid
dog, aren't you?” and poked at his other eye, I yelled,
“Hey!”
and Snark jerked his head again…and growled.

And the mother of this kid suddenly appeared from nowhere—where had she been a minute ago?—shrieking that this was a vicious dog and we were to destroy it at once and it was savaging her only child in a
national park
, and she was going to write to her congressman—I was screaming that her kid had been trying to poke my dog in the eye, and Katie was trying to shut us both up. Katie lied and said that she'd seen the kid—she knew Snark, it wasn't really like lying—the mother said she didn't believe it, I was nearly in tears—I now had Snark standing beside me with my hand around his collar—and it might have been a whole lot worse than it was except the kid tried to sneak around and give Snark a kick while everyone else was busy yelling at each other, and not only Katie but a couple of other Rangers who'd been drawn by the commotion saw it. The mother saw it too although she denied it. She didn't deny it convincingly however and when Katie told her she had better take her freaky kid and leave, she actually went.

People are amazing. They'll do stuff you can't believe anyone would do and not believe stuff that is under their noses. You can't trust them and you certainly can't
reason
with them. The laws are schizophrenic because
people
are schizophrenic. So even if the Friends of Smokehill might win against the Searles about their should-have-been-drowned-at-birth son because dragons are rare and endangered and romantic (so long as you forget they have pouches), you still had to assume we wouldn't survive the discovery of Lois. We'd not survive even worse if it came out about the eczema. It wouldn't matter that it wasn't her fault and that I didn't mind (much). It would make her a bad dragon—and it would make all the grown-ups around me bad grown-ups for letting it happen. And she was a bad dragon anyway—look at her homicidal mom—and we were bad (and crazy and dangerous) for having sided with the dragons against our own kind by trying to save her.

Or maybe when Lois grew up crippled or something I'd be the bad human who raised her wrong. You just don't
know
how other humans are going to react. And there were of course so many ways I could be raising her wrong. It was like even in my own head I couldn't answer all the people who would tell me I was, if they knew I was trying to. ALL ways were ways for me to be raising her wrong.

…And at this point my synapses all snap simultaneously and one of the emergency circuits cuts in and diverts me onto a familiar worry loop before I self-destruct.

…For example Lois ate
everything
now, at least she did if I didn't stop her, everything from raw spinach (ewwwww) to cream puffs with ice cream and chocolate sauce. Grace made cream puffs to die for, I admit, but you don't necessarily expect a dragon to get the details. The funny thing about Lois is that unlike a dog she never went around nose to ground vacuum-cleaning the floor or the yard or anything. What she did was watch us and eat whatever we ate. She didn't get many vegetables till she started watching Grace and Billy and not just me. But she'd eaten apples and popcorn almost from the beginning which seem even less dragony than vegetables. (You know the business of carnivores getting their greens from what the herbivore they're eating has in its stomach. And a lot of dogs like
graze.
Snark didn't eat grass so much as moss. He loved moss. Given the landscape around the Institute he had plenty of opportunity.) If she'd ever learned to open the refrigerator door we would have been in big trouble. Fortunately she didn't. (I did keep her away from the cream puffs, after the first time, when I hadn't realized how sneaky she could be: Chocolate is poisonous to dogs, for example, and sugar isn't good for
anybody
, and Lois had enough marks against her already.)

And have I mentioned she
snored
?

But the point was that I was losing my nerve. The emergency-worry shunt was beginning to overload too because it was getting used so often. I began to feel like me turning seventeen was some kind of deadline—and the ads the Searles were paying for were so everywhere on TV now that Martha told me even Eleanor didn't want to watch TV any more. (Billy and Grace didn't have a TV. The farther-out Rangers' cabins mostly couldn't pick up the signal that the Institute's Godzilla-being-attacked-by-a-flying-saucer special unique aerial/dish thingummy somehow squiggled through the fence.)

I was making up the deadline part, of course. Me turning seventeen—so long as the school equivalency went through okay—was going to make the game we were playing a little easier. But it wouldn't change the fact that the game was a deadly one. And you do start going nuts under pressure eventually. Not to mention the increasing difficulty of keeping a perpetually hungry, German-Shepherd-sized, more or less untrained and so far as we knew untrainable, very-high-activity-and-curiosity-level illegal animal, who might start setting fire to things any day now
and
whose wings were finally beginning to sprout, cooped up in a small house.

And it's a lie that Lois was untrainable. It's just that the idea of training usually means that you're supposed to end up where, if you ask someone to do something, they do it. If it's a dog it's like “sit” or “leave it.” If it's a kid it's like “do your homework” or “turn the TV down.” Or training like teaching a kid to get dressed in the morning, till he does it himself. Or a dog to go outside and not on the floor. I didn't housebreak Lois, she did it herself, which Billy and Dad and I sat around agreeing probably means that dragons have dens where they raise their kids, even after the kids climb out of the pouch.

I forgot to tell you, Lois doing it outdoors began the era of
amazing
numbers of outdoor barbecues, to give some disguise—and some excuse—for the latest eye-wateringly peculiar smells that hung around Billy and Grace's cottage. We were such barbecue freaks we were even out there in the winter and, trust me, at Smokehill, that's
wacko
. We did stop as soon as it got cold enough that even hot dragonlet poop froze pretty much instantly…but Billy had to help dig the trench next spring when it all melted—and we dug that trench
fast
.

Lois in the winter was a hoot, by the way. By her first winter she was way active enough that I'd've had to get her outdoors somehow to run some of her energy off anyway, but she was little enough and short-legged enough that without her body temperature acting as a natural snowplow it might have been a problem. As it was I worried about anybody who didn't know about her wondering about the weird snow mazes around the cottage, where Lois had melted some extremely bizarre trails. She didn't run, really, she
cavorted
. And I had to cavort along with her or with my pathetic human heat production I'd've frozen into a Jakecicle.

By her second winter her neck plates gave me enough purchase that I could grab one and be kind of towed along, all bent over of course, and more clumsy than you can imagine. But laughing helps keep you warm too. The only drawback was that she ate even
more
after she'd melted a lot of snow. Just like in Old Pete's diaries about dragons in winter. Also just like Old Pete's diaries she showed
no
inclination to hibernate.

It was also pretty interesting—you do get a little claustrophobic here in the winter. Even being closed to tourists for three months doesn't quite offset this, although, believe me, it helps. And the main Institute building is pretty big, especially when it isn't full of tourists. (Snark and I used to have great games in the empty tourist hall.) But you miss being able to go outdoors easily—or being able to breathe without your nose gluing itself together and your lungs going into shock—or having to
re
shovel the path you just shoveled the
last
time you had to hack your way down to the zoo or whatever—everybody does a lot of shoveling, besides the big plows that fit on the front of some of the jeeps—and although the fence slows some of the wind down, it'll still kill you if it can, and the big winter storms are just
scary. How
much bigger than you are are things like weather? A WHOLE LOT BIGGER. I guess you can ignore this most of the time if you live in a city, but you don't forget it for a minute in a place like Smokehill, and it sort of comes
after
you in winter.

But having an
igniventator-
equipped companion had a really funny effect on me—suddenly I didn't care about winter. If I felt chilly I could just warm myself against Lois for a moment; leaning over her to breathe would even unstick my nose. Except for the eating, and the relative increase of difficulty in cavorting due to whatever quantity of snow had to be melted first, the cold didn't seem to faze Lois at all. Although I admit that
not
having up to several thousand visitors a day the way it was in peak season, any one of whom might manage to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, might have had something to do with my suddenly more liberal attitude toward deep winter.

But even Billy's incense and me burying everything I found wasn't enough, we needed to add charcoal briquettes to the bouquet. But while Lois getting it that the entire cottage was a no-go area might mean that she was preprogrammed by thousands of years of dragons raising their dragonlets in dens, I wondered if that was all it was. Because Lois
was
so amazing a mimic. When we were out in the park we all went outdoors so there was a precedent. I'm just grateful I didn't have to teach her to use the toilet. But the mimic stuff gave me an idea about training. Which is how I trained her to fetch sticks—by fetching them myself first. Getting her to pay attention to me and what I was doing was never a problem. (Pity I couldn't teach her to do French, or Latin.) I thought of fetching sticks because it was something I thought would translate—I wasn't sure I could get “sit” across to something shaped like Lois, and while I tried to train her to lie down, she didn't seem to think she had to do this unless I stayed lying down too. That's the thing—I never felt like Lois' owner, or boss. Mom, maybe. But how many little kids actually do what their moms tell them?