Dragonhaven (44 page)

I'd wanted to walk back, that morning in the Bonelands after I woke up, but I was staggering and kind of crazy, and still full of the dreams I was half forgetting and that were half turning into a new part of me, which is maybe why I was staggering and kind of crazy. (Kind of crazy includes that I was two or three hours of a big dragon flying full pelt
into
the Bonelands and the nearest good water supply was back
out
of them again, and I wanted to
walk
.) Anyway the dragons wouldn't let me walk anywhere. They'd brought Bud like six sheep to help him recuperate, and he'd specially char-grilled a piece for me, and we lay around like we were on holiday for a couple of days—all eight of us (fourteen if you count the tucked-away blobs)—and then he flew me back to Dragon Central. We all went together in little hops, because Lois couldn't fly very far yet. Let me tell you flying in a
troop
of dragons (a squadron, just like the game) is even more amazing than
anything
. Life. The universe. Everything. And Gulp looked…I don't know how to describe it. Transcendent.

But I had had a look at the front part of the caves—where we all went as soon as the sun got high—and with my new dragon-sense I got a promise (which is like putting your hand into your empty pocket and finding that someone has slipped you something, money or chocolate or a magic ring) that I'd be brought back to the birth place in the Bonelands from Dragon Central some time. Because I think that is
the
Birth Place—and you remember what I said about the Dragon Central caves, how it's like the rock itself had become
dragony
—it's like that only way more so at the birth place. At the birth place you
know
the stones can talk to you. Now if only I could learn the language.

I'm also no longer sure about
mom
and
dad
in dragon terms. I'm not sure but what it's some kind of marsupial kibbutz, in those pouches, and that while maybe Gulp and Bud contributed some of the eggs and sperm—assuming it's even an egg-and-sperm deal, which I don't know either—they may not have contributed all of them. Put it on the list of stuff to try and find out. Including whether the kibbutz thing might have something to do with getting 'em started on how dragon communication works. Maybe the birth place will tell me.

One more thing that I did learn is that having your dragonlets born during a full moon is maybe the best good luck omen there is. Dragon moms start doing whatever the dragon equivalent is of “star light star bright first star I've seen tonight” as moons get full toward the ends of their pregnancies. Are dragons superstitious? Beats me. Do dragons actually have an oar in the ethereal what-have-you so that wishing on stars (or whatever) actually has an influence? Beats me too. But it won't surprise you if I tell you I think dragons are capable of almost
anything.
And if you want to think that I say “good luck omen” because
I'm
superstitious and that's not what the dragons were telling me at all, that's your privilege. But my version is that it would have been a very bad omen if Gulp's last baby had missed—had got into the pouch after moonset, when the only thing touching its gummy little hide was darkness and clueless human hands.

So at least Lois had had something going for her.

 

Oh yes, and what did we say when everyone wanted to know why the big black dragon had come booming in for Jake? What was that all about? We
waffled
. Oh, my, how we waffled. Now that we've been kind of winning for a while (and there's even money in the bank, we've NEVER had money in the bank before) Dad's developed quite a flair for waffling. (I'm still a lousy waffler, so I just disappeared.) Katie's really good at it too—she's always been a gift to the business admin side, and she's done more and more of the Interface with Outsiders stuff since Mom died—and she got him started on waffling as a fine art (as opposed to his natural style of thumping and roaring). Katie's weakness is being too nice, which has never been one of Dad's problems.

So you're reading it here for the first time, about Gulp's babies. The publisher who thinks they're going to get this—although they haven't actually read it yet, so who knows—have already been sworn to ninety-six jillion kinds of secrecy, with sub clauses about underlings being chained to their desks with no internet access till pub date, etc. And even if it does get out, it doesn't really matter. I hope. Our security nowadays makes your average bank vault look like a wet paper bag, and a lot of the Dragon Squadron money has gone on the fence—which at this point probably would hold up against a bomb or two. I wish I knew whether I should be glad about that or not.

 

It was about two months after this, after Gulp's babies were born, that Martha told me
she
was pregnant.

There should be a very large white space here on the page…because I don't care how much else has happened to you in your life and how many unique things you've been a part of and how many endangered species you've rescued and how many laws of science and biology you've personally exploded…there's
nothing like
the prospect of your own first child for making your life turn over and start becoming something else.

…And it got worse fast. First Martha said that she was going to spend as much time at Nearcamp and Dragon Central as she could—which is to say as much of the headaches as she could stand—which I understood but didn't want her torturing herself
and
who knew if this would mean the baby was busy adapting and wouldn't have to have dragon headaches or whether it would just start having the headache before it was born, which seemed pretty rough. Martha said no, she'd be able to tell if the baby was unhappy. I'd've (nervously) said okay to that one…till she said she wanted to
have
it at Dragon Central, I mean,
born
there. She said that if she had a totally free hand she'd have it at the birth place in the Bonelands, if the dragons would allow it—and when I started bouncing up to the ceiling and making holes in it with my head she said, Jake, calm
down
, Dragon Central was good enough.

And I said something like GOOD ENOUGH??? And the conversation went on like that for a while. Her point was that birth
was
a big deal (…duh…), and that Gulp's dragonlets' birth that I'd been able to be a part of had changed me profoundly and made my connection to the/my dragons so much stronger and the least we could do was try to return the favor. And I was damned out of my own mouth because I'd told her about this. And I could see her point but I couldn't stop gobbling about “safety” and “if something went wrong” and so on.

We were still arguing and in fact we had
so
not come to any conclusions or even any working hypotheses that we hadn't told anybody, not even Dad and Katie, yet, when Dad and Katie came to
us
and said that, uh, well, they'd decided to get married.

“Oh, that's
great
! That's
wonderful
!” Martha said, and grabbed her mother and swung her around in an impromptu tango. And I hugged my dad, and he hugged me back, which is absolutely the dragons' fault, all that sticking my hand (or more) in dragons' mouths and learning to see/hear/read the atmosphere and all that group-bond stuff with dragons and so on, I've got so touchy-feely with my human friends it's probably pretty repulsive, but they put up with it, probably partly because to the extent that they hang out with dragons it's happening to them too, which certainly includes my dad. So we actually hugged each other pretty well.

It's been this hilariously open secret that Dad and Katie have been together for, I don't know,
years
now. Eleanor, before she went off to boarding school last year (she's got accepted on some kind of Eleanor-invented fast track and is going to be a lawyer by the time she's seventeen or something: it may not take till she's fifty to become president), asked them why they didn't just get married and get it over with? Or at least move in together. Poor Eleanor—if “poor” and “Eleanor” can ever be combined—had the worst of it. She'd got Martha and me out of her hair but here was her mom still hopelessly soppy and silly with my dad—and pretending it didn't
show.

“They just told me that it was their business and not mine,” she said disgustedly to Martha and me. “
You
see if you can do anything with them while I'm gone. I don't get it—all those secrets when Lois was a baby, you'd think they'd be glad
not
to have a secret that they don't, you know,
have
to have.” (I'm hoping Eleanor will keep this attitude. Think of it: a president whose default position is
not
“whatever we do don't tell the voters.” Can the country stand it? Stay tuned.)

So this was terrific news. We were still celebrating, and Martha had got out the cranberry juice to put in the champagne glasses because she wasn't drinking because of the baby, but since it was the middle of the afternoon we thought maybe no one would think about it being cranberry juice, and it's not like we had a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator waiting for a major announcement either. But we'd just made the first toast when Martha said, “So, okay, is there a reason you've finally decided to get married now and not two or three years ago?”

And the two of them looked at each other as guiltily and sheepishly as, well, teenagers, and then Dad said, “Well—Katie—”

And Katie said, “I'm pregnant,” at exactly the same moment as Martha said,
“You're pregnant,”
and then Martha and I started laughing and couldn't stop, and Dad and Katie were obviously relieved, but they were also a bit puzzled till Martha finally gasped out, “So am I!”

So then the fun really began because Martha told Katie about her idea about the birth at Dragon Central and Katie thought it was a
great
idea and wanted to do the same, and then Dad started behaving in a way that made the way I'd been behaving look
restrained
, which isn't entirely surprising because while Katie was completely healthy and had popped out her two previous daughters with no particular effort and from what she said less drama than most women have to put in, she was now forty-six and so automatically on all the high-risk lists, and Dad
wasn't having any.
She'd have that baby in a hospital like a normal twenty-first-century first-world woman, and
there was no argument.

Oh yes there was an argument. Martha and I were so fascinated we almost forgot to keep arguing ourselves. So pretty much within a day or two all of Smokehill knew that (a) Dad and Katie were getting married, (b) Katie was pregnant, (c) Martha was pregnant, (d) Katie and Martha wanted to have their babies at Dragon Central, (e) and the dads concerned were AGAINST this. Soap opera with dragons? You never saw anything like it.

I don't know how Dad really felt—we didn't dare talk about it, we might implode and there'd be a black sucking hole into a parallel universe where two generations of Mendoza men used to be—but he never said
This is all YOUR fault
although he must have thought it.
I
thought it. I could almost have done the black hole thing alone.
Of course
our baby should be born with dragons around. It was the obvious
right
thing to happen. And it was mean and horrible and two-faced and disloyal and
treacherous
of me to be trying to make something else happen instead.

But how could we risk it? (What had Gulp been risking? Was the sixth blob—was
my
dragonlet dangerously tainted or weakened by its contact with me?) And Katie was part of my family no matter whose sibling her new kid was going to be. But the dragons were a part of my family too, and the ties were…they weren't even unbreakable. They weren't even
ties.
They were a part of ME like my ear or my pancreas was a part of me. Like Martha was a part of me. The way the question kept presenting itself to me was,
Who was I going to betray?

It was nearly getting to the point that the newlyweds and the almost-newlyweds weren't on speaking terms which would have been funny if it hadn't been us. And then Grace said softly into one of those dinner conversations that were only not getting loud and nasty through
violent
self-control of parties concerned, “Jamie married a midwife, you know.”

Dead silence.

“Sadie's a midwife?” I said finally.

“You could see what she says—ask her advice.”

What she said, of course, was “You're all
nuts
.” But she still agreed to fly out and talk to us in person. Which was amazingly nice of her. Although I had the impression she hadn't decided whether to laugh or to bring a cattle prod to keep us at a safe distance. Maybe both. She'd only ever met any of us once, four years ago, on their way from Boston where they got married to their honeymoon in Hawaii—and they'd stayed here in Jamie's old bedroom, which was still a bit redolent of Lois despite a fresh paint job in the bride's honor. So she had a
little
idea of what she was getting into, and she came anyway.