Dragonhaven (39 page)

Like how I asked Martha to marry me. At Dragon Central with Bud watching us. Not that he knew that I was asking her to marry me (although I never know what he knows really).
I
didn't know I was going to ask her to marry me. I was doing my famous dragon headache skull squeeze—I've got pretty good at this; I can temporarily ease about 75 percent of human dragon headaches in about 75 percent of humans who get them (which is to say
all
humans who spend any time at Nearcamp). Although unfortunately it seems more to do with my hands than with the squeeze, which means I haven't been able to teach anybody else to do it, which is bad news for at least two reasons, the first being the obvious one and the second being that this contributes to the Great Jake Myth and while five million acres is plenty to hide in most of the time there's no escape from the mailbags they bring every day
and
I've begun to wonder if I'd better never go out the gate again myself ever either. Just like the dragons. (I did finally learn to do TV, but only because the public was so weirdly eager to love me that they turned my deer-in-headlights mental and physical paralysis into becoming modesty, and after that it was like, oh, well, okay, if it's going to be that hard to do anything wrong I suppose I might as well relax and go with the flow.) At least we had our honeymoon in Paris.

So that evening at Dragon Central, it had kind of been in the back of my mind for a while, I'm a retro kind of guy in a lot of ways and I'd begun to feel I was getting (even) less normal with every arriving mailbag and/or TV interview and I wanted to do this
normal thing
of marrying my sweetheart, okay? I was kneeling behind her and she was half lying with her legs stretched out in front of her, but she'd leaned back so her forearms and elbows were braced on my thighs and her face tipped up toward me with her eyes closed and even upside down she was so beautiful, so
Martha
, that I heard my voice say, “If you married me, you could get this on demand.”

Martha's eyes opened and she smiled an upside-down smile. “I can get it on demand now.” She closed her eyes again, and probably my grip on her skull faltered a little, because she opened her eyes and said, “That doesn't mean I won't marry you.”

“But does it mean you
will
marry me,” I said, pathetically, and she pulled herself up and out of my hands and turned around and said, “Yes, of
course
I'll marry you, you silly man, and I won't even tease you about it being for your hands,” and then she kissed my hands, one after the other, and then she kissed
me.

Bud was lying there with us—or some of the end of his nose was (the loooong hot rising and falling gust of his breathing politely angled past us), the rest of him going on and on to Wyoming or so the way the rest of Bud always does—and his eyes were half open, watching us, although it's interesting, there's no voyeur thing about it when he watches us, which he does a lot, although I'm pretty sure he has a pretty good idea what kissing is about. So after this kiss had gone on for a while and I started to get it through to myself that I'd just asked Martha to marry me and she'd just said yes, I wanted to jump around and shout and the only person [sic] available was Bud so I said, “Let's tell Bud.”

It's a good example of the Marthaness of Martha that she didn't say, “What do you mean, tell Bud? We've spent five years trying to learn to tell dragons
anything,
or they us, and even
you
can't do it.” She just said, “Sure,” and got up out of my lap and we both went the few steps to Bud's nose and touched it with our hands. One of the things we have learned is that the getting-something-through—and I'm not going to call it “telling” or “communication” because that's a lot more grand than it mostly is—usually works better if the human has a hand on the dragon's nose, slightly depending on what the message is. (There may be other bits of both dragon and human that would work as well, but they'd probably be more embarrassing.) I sort of instinctively guessed that, that day I “told” Gulp that the bad guys were coming for us, and she got Lois and me away—but you tend to grab the other party when you're really urgent about something, and the reflex remains even if it's a dragon's nose rather than a human arm or shoulder. (And for those of us addicted to hand gestures, you still have a hand left over for flapping around.)

The refinement Bud has come up with is that it works better yet if the dragon curls its lip very slightly so the human can put his or her hand on the softer skin there just inside the tough horny outside. It's just about not too hot to bear, although I've begun to suspect that Bud anyway has pretty good temperature control. The first time Bud curled his lip at me of course I thought I was going to die—but he could have eaten me any time for months by then so why now? And if I was going to do something so offensive to dragon culture that I'd get munched in some kind of involuntary reflex (I've told you dragons are amazingly pacific; I doubt they've got any execution laws about anything) I'd probably already done it and
hadn't
been munched, so this new lip-curling must be something else. I figured it out eventually.

So now Martha and I both put our hands (delicately) on the hot red lip-margin of Mr. Dragon Chief and tried to tell him our news. I was thinking pair-bond-life-[that'showhumansdoit]-children-starting-just-now-hooray, more or less—pictures are better, but how do you put any of
that
in pictures? and stuff with high emotional content usually gets across the best even if there aren't any pictures—and Martha, who knew what I'd been trying to do with my dictionary almost as well as I did, was thinking something similar because I could actually feel her like an echo, “talking” to Bud.

And Bud, without moving, opened his eyes all the way and gave a huge sort of held-back (don't want to blow your tiny friends a few hundred yards across the cavern accidentally and bang them into the wall by unrestrained breathing)
wooooooaaaaw
, I mean with sound in it, and I've told you dragons don't use larynx noises much, and it sure sounded like “congratulations” to me. Furthermore Bud's
wooaaw
had roused the other dragons and there were little soft (little and soft as dragons go) rumbly
wooaaw
s from the moving shadows, and one of the moving shadows slipped away—I'd also got pretty good at learning to hear the diminishing huge rustle of a dragon leaving the vicinity: You'd be surprised how confusing dragon noises are; makes most people dizzy (and nervous) till they get used to it,
if
they get used to it—and while Martha and I were still sort of giggling and saying inane things to each other like “I didn't think dragons would be such romantics” there was a coming-toward-us gentle gigantic rustle and there was Gulp. And about two minutes later Lois was there too and for the first time in a year or so she forgot that she wasn't little any more and knocked me down. So Dad and Katie and Eleanor and Billy and Grace and Kit were only the second people to hear that we were getting married. The dragons were first. (Whatever they actually
got
out of what we told them.)

Now if you haven't already, this is probably the point where you talk about how it's creepy, me and Martha getting married, we'd grown up together, we were the only boy and girl either of us had ever really known (besides Eleanor, and it's going to take a better man—or woman—than me to tackle her), we should be like brother and sister, and at best we should go out and
meet other people
first, before we decide on each other, the implication being that then we won't. Well, in the first place, I don't ever remember feeling like Martha was my sister, although never having had sisters maybe I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about one. But while you're sitting there pitying me for being so limited, think about it this way, friend: What if you'd met the girl who was going to be the love of your life when you were four and a half and got to spend the rest of your life with her? Is that the biggest piece of luck you could ever have or not?

Growing up together had also made us able to communicate or anyway react to each other on levels that people who don't get to know each other till they're adults I think probably never can. I'm not using the “t” word again here. But it was like that sometimes—like what I just said about hearing her like an echo when we were trying to tell Bud we were getting married. Martha and I are in this together, and that's a big help. It makes it realer, saner, less just
incredible.
Even if it's more stuff that can't be taught. We'll figure out the teaching later. I hope.

I think both Katie and Dad had had those “they should meet other people first” thoughts but life at Smokehill had got even stranger in the last few years and
no one
would understand any of it except those of us who'd lived through it. (Eleanor is going to use this to get elected president, of course, so her priorities in a partner are going to be different. If she changes her mind she could always marry a really tough Ranger.) And we'd waited till I was twenty-one and Martha was nineteen which meant they couldn't really stop us although we wouldn't have wanted them to try. And they took it really well after all. I could see them both worrying but I could see them both being glad too so that was okay.

We didn't tell anybody till it was all over—
and
we were back from our honeymoon. Dad's a JP so he could read the words, and
Eric
somehow got a license to do the blood test. Don't ask me how. Katie cried. Eleanor didn't. Eleanor said, “
Great.
I can have my room back.” To Eleanor's tremendous credit, she'd let Martha and me drive her out of their cabin kind of a lot, so we could have the room—they shared a bedroom—a couple of hours in the afternoons sometimes, when Katie was on duty somewhere too so the house would be empty. It wasn't worth trying anywhere else at the Institute—and out at Farcamp and Nearcamp and Dragon Central privacy doesn't exist.

We had the wedding at Dragon Central. This was so great a piece of serendipity it made the whole wedding business even more…something. None of the adjectives will do here: great, wonderful, amazing, terrific. Maybe I should just say
wooooaaw
like a dragon. But about twenty of us Smokehill lifers creeping off to do…
something
? No way somebody—some wrong body—wouldn't have noticed and maybe said something to some other wrong body and…but twenty of us lifers going to do some kind of private something at Dragon Central? Sure. Everyone goes all hushed and respectful and admiring and wishing they were a member of the magic circle too. It was…
great
. Plus having Bud and Gulp and Lois and some of the others there—watching the latest unintelligible human ritual.

I don't remember ever talking about a honeymoon in Paris. Martha's always wanted to go to Paris and I've never wanted to go anywhere (no dragons). So we were going to get married…and then we were going to go to Paris. It was simple. I'd thought fine, I'll survive Paris because I'm going to be there with Martha, and she really wants to go, and I'll catch it from her. But I fell for Paris myself—loved it almost as much as Martha did. I kept thinking about being a freak who's barely been out of Smokehill, who's never even been on a plane before (two freaks, only Martha's always known the rest of the world existed, and she's visited her grandparents in Wisconsin a couple of times), and how Paris might have been Mars to us, and if this is what Mars is going to be like, well, those astronauts are going to have a great time when they get there, and I hope the lichen puts on a good welcome.

Dad's wedding present included five nights at this amazing hotel…all he'd said was that he'd “take care of it”…and I mean
amazing
. Reception was nearly as big as the Institute tourist hall and a lot grander, and our room was nearly big enough for dragons. There was one afternoon I'd actually gone out alone because Martha had admired this ring in a jeweler's window and—when did I ever go anywhere, right?—I hadn't bought her a ring although Katie had bought us plain gold wedding rings at a jeweler's in Cheyenne because she said (mildly outraged) that we had to have wedding rings and we didn't have to wear them after if we didn't want to. Rings hadn't occurred to me so then I thought that I hadn't done it properly (after all I'm Jake the Clueless Wonder Boy) so I was watching Martha
fixedly
like a dog watching you palming a dog biscuit, for any sign of wanting anything I could buy her in Paris, although it didn't have to be a ring. And there
was
this ring…so I went out to buy it, I can't remember what I told Martha I was doing.

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.