Dragonhaven (42 page)

The best thing I could think of to do was tell Dad. He was, as I keep saying, still the big boss of the Institute. If he said “we have a dragon flying in and we need the space inside the gates
clear
” people had to listen. And he did and they did but it was still a messy business—the first thing tourists do when you tell them it's an emergency is
complain
. Cooperate is way far down on the tourist-response list. You'd think the idea of seeing a flying dragon up close would appeal to them, but their first reaction was that they'd paid their entrance fee and they were going to stay
entered.
Then Dad applied me to the problem like a tourniquet to a wound—or maybe more like a gag—anyway having made the announcement and got the Rangers on shepherding duty (a lot of tourists all moaning together doesn't sound so
un
like a bunch of baaing sheep) I played the Pied Piper out through the gate and then hung around answering questions while the Rangers rounded up the stragglers.

“Answering questions” is a euphemism for saying “I don't know” a lot punctuated by trying to waffle gracefully. (“Do you really talk to dragons?” for example. You know I
am
going to chicken out of turning this over to a publisher at the last minute.) But the new post-Lois breed of dragon fanatic calms down immediately when I show up, like a chick under a heat lamp, which is useful. So then after I
didn't
answer questions for a while (“
Why
is there a dragon flying in?” “We're just clearing space for everyone's safety”) I signed about a million autographs which always makes me feel like such a jerk.

It still took an awful lot of time to get everybody out through the gate. As
would
happen, we had a couple of world-champion whiners that day, as well as an unusually frisky assortment of demon children. It was really tempting to say, “Right, on your buses, you're out of here.” But we'd let them back in when Bud had done whatever he was doing (I'd been trying
not
to imagine this) so meanwhile why not let them have the chance of most people's lifetime and see a real live dragon up close and personal? Although the Rangers were ready to deflect any rebel faction. Also, the grumps were right, they
had
paid their entrance fees.

Or you could call it a calculated risk. It's not uncommon for a busload of tourists to see a flying dragon any more, but it's nothing you can count on. But it brings 'em back, hoping to see one, or even hoping to see one again. No matter how hard you're hoping for a puppy for your birthday you don't
know
till that morning and the wobbly box with air holes and ribbons around it going “mmph mmph oooooo” that it's happened. Seeing Bud should be the puppy
and
the triple-chocolate six-layer birthday cake of longed-for surprises. With any luck every one of the tourists standing around in the parking lot would rush back through the gates after and sign up to be life members of our Friends. Including the grumps. Converts are always welcome. We still need as many people to love us as we can get. Dragons are still fashionable right now, but fashions change.

This is also a good example of how we think about our dragons. We weren't worried about how the
dragon
would behave. Especially not after I told Dad it was Bud.

When the last of our solar park buses came out through the gates (they were still slow even now we had money to keep them running properly), I went back inside again and waited on the, er, landing pad, and tried not to chew my fingernails. I've never been a fingernail chewer but it felt like a moment when a brand new bad habit might be in order. Martha came out to wait with me—tucking her hand under my arm and keeping me from fidgeting myself to pieces—and Dad, and a few of the Rangers, and Eric. The tension level was so high even the premium-class grumblers shut up. Maybe it was sinking in that they were going to
see a dragon.

I've told you that our fence does weird things to your eyes (this includes standing outside the gates looking in). One of the things it does is make a low heavy cloud cover even lower and heavier. It was cloudy that day. I began to
feel
Bud getting close—feel the
urgency
of him—before anybody could see him. And then when he finally did break through the clouds he seemed already right on top of us. The tourists gasped and one or two of them screamed. Well, think about it: eighty feet is a tennis court plus some extra feet of tail or three tourist buses end to end and now here it is
flying
at you, and among other things, however much we're beginning to learn or guess about the way dragon bones are made so that dragons aren't as heavy as they look, they're still
waaay
too big and heavy to fly—any sane person looking at one could tell you that. Okay, planes fly, and they're even way-er too big, but we all learned about how those stiff wings are built so the air rolls over and under 'em and gives 'em lift. Dragons' wings flap like birds' wings flap—like the biggest bird out of your worst nightmare's wings flap. And the dragon smell comes at you like a spear—I don't know why a
smell
is scary, but it is. So when a dragon is directly over you, well, even if you're me and you're kind of used to it, your medulla oblongata is still telling you “the sky is falling, you're about to die, run like hell.”

Bud looked blacker than ever against the blurry, swirly gray background, and the red eyes and threads of red that flicker over some of his scales I'm afraid make him look a little like some evil dragon out of a fairy tale, the kind that eats princesses—and he is a
lot
bigger even than Gulp, and while every one of those tourists may have had a copy of that panorama postcard of Gulp and me clutched in their hot little hands, here it is not only enormously live but EVEN BIGGER. I'm impressed there wasn't more screaming.

And speaking of eating princesses, as he swooped the last little way toward us, he kept turning his head back and forth like he was choosing which princess-substitute he was going to snatch first. For anyone whose brain was still working it probably looked like he was looking for me—the announcement had been that Bud was coming for me, and there I was; maybe the tourists were expecting me to wave—but I knew better. He knew exactly where I was. I wasn't the problem. He was trying to figure out where and how to land. I've said this was the only possible place for him to land—I didn't promise it was
going
to be possible. And when I saw all of him overhead like that (“The sky is falling! You're dead meat!”) I thought, “He'll never make it. What do we do now?”—because by now I felt as urgent as he did—I'd sucked up enough of his urgency that I felt all squeaky-stretched like an overinflated balloon, and whatever it was he wanted, I
had
to do it, even if it meant sprouting (smaller) wings myself and flying after him.

I've never seen anything like the way Bud landed. There was
so
not enough room for him. It looked for a minute like he was going to fly straight through the open gate after all—fortunately the tourists were all paralyzed for that minute—and then at the last possible instant, or maybe slightly after that, he reared up, not unlike the super humongous, four-legged version of a bird stalling to land on a branch—and the wind from his wings was
terrific
, and he had all four of those legs thrown out in front of him and you could see the dagger tips of those demolition-grappling-gear claws sparkling in the murky, oppressive light—and as he landed, he
threw
himself backward, just to stay in place, and it was like a tornado and an earthquake all at once, plus the massive
boom
of those wings, which he
whipped
together with a noise like thunder: and even so he was all kind of piled up on himself because there wasn't ROOM.

I felt Martha kiss my cheek and her hand briefly in the small of my back as I bolted away from her, into the hurricane and the thunder and the earthquake and the claws, because Bud was saying
now now NOW
NOW
and he hadn't actually finished landing, or perching, or settling on his tail like an old-fashioned rocketship, and he curled his neck down toward me as I ran as fast as my little short human legs could carry me toward him. He curled his lip at me and I just about got the message so that when he opened his mouth just wide enough I already had a foot on his lip and was groping for purchase with one hand—I've said that dragon teeth are wide-spaced. Well, I have to say they're not quite wide-spaced
enough
when you're throwing yourself between them, and it was
not
at all comfortable as I belly flopped into his mouth—what do you call it when you don't impale yourself on the points but get stuck
between
the uprights, like someone falling into a spiked fence? That's what happened to me. I had aimed toward the front as his mouth opened, simply because that was the end nearest the ground, but since he then promptly closed his jaws
over
me I was just as glad that I wasn't back nearer the hinge where he'd have to concentrate more not to squash me.

It must have looked pretty, uh, peculiar. I knew Dad and Martha and our lot wouldn't be worried—a little taken aback maybe, but not really worried—Martha told me later there was a lot more screaming at that point (even if I wasn't a princess or a virgin and furthermore had obviously gone willingly, which your average evil villain dragon type presumably wouldn't have found nearly so much fun) but that may have been Bud's takeoff: I couldn't see it, obviously, but I could
feel
it. I imagine the laws of physics would tell me that he'd've lost all his momentum even by landing long enough to pick me up, which probably took about a minute, but from where I was lying, he sprang back into the air again because he
hadn't
lost all that momentum. He flung his head back—so it's a good thing he had closed his mouth again—gently—although some of his side teeth had little low crags on the inside like vestigial premolars or something, and I could get a grip on these with my hands.

And I felt—facedown in the dark of his hot resiny-organic-fire-smelling mouth—every muscle in his body slamming down against the earth while his wings unfurled and unfurled and
unfurled
till I imagined them stretching across all of Smokehill to the Bonelands and then clapped forward to scoop the air violently out of the way so we could just
dive
upward—you know all those stories about all the mega-Gs pressing the fearless astronauts into their padded flight seats on takeoff, speaking of old-fashioned rockets that sit upright on their tails…well, I swear I had all those Gs and I can sure swear I didn't have a padded flight seat. I felt like all my brains were about to be shoved out through my face, and my heart would punch a hole through my breastbone in a few seconds. The middle of me was pretty well held together by large teeth, but then there were my legs, that were simply going to come off and get left behind.

And then we were airborne. I felt him level off and he parted his jaws again ever so slightly, and I, trying not to be any more absolutely clumsy than I had to be under the rather awkward circumstances, dragged my heavy, stiff, semi-detached legs the rest of the way into his mouth. This was not a hugely fun process. Bud, big as he is, still had to counterbalance my heavings and floppings and I was way too aware of how far down the ground was as Bud twitched his head and sideslipped. It's not at all drooly, a dragon's mouth. A bit damp, but it's more like what you might call humid, because it's so hot. A sort of jungle experience, only without the vines and the monkeys (and the poisonous snakes and spiders and whatever). I managed to lay myself down along one side, between teeth and jawbone, like an extra-large plug of chewing tobacco, and I won't say it was comfortable including for Bud (chewing tobacco doesn't kick and thrash), but it could have been worse.

 

It was a long flight. He set down only once, after only about half an hour or so, near a stream where we could both have a drink; and then I climbed up his shoulder and neck and lay down in that hollow at the base of the skull, and the space there on Bud was a lot more comfortable for me at my runty but inconvenient human size than the space on Gulp was, I don't know if it was from being bigger or being male, or maybe I was just more used to riding dragons by then (although in fact I
don't
ride dragons, barring emergency) but I half curled up and half went to sleep. I didn't even get cold, although it was cold, and the breath from Bud's nostrils was steaming like a (very large) teakettle.

But even though I was dozing I was aware that we just kept going on and on and on—the sky cleared in time to see the sun finish setting and then the moon rose, a blazing big full moon, and then it rose up farther and over us, and the stars wheeled along with it, and still Bud was flying, no
racing
, over the landscape. Whatever I've pretended to understand about the laws of physics, I doubt that they're all suspended for the flight of dragons, and I imagine something Bud's size, to keep flying at all, has to fly at some speed. But it was more than that. Bud was pouring it on. The thrust—the
bang
—forward of each downbeat of those enormous wings had an almost audible
THUNK
about it, like feet hitting pavement; when I peered ahead the wind clawed at my eyes. We were on our way to whatever we were on our way toward as fast as Bud could take us. Which is why, I imagine, it was Bud himself who came for me. Although I would have had trouble throwing myself into the mouth of almost any other dragon.