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We were at the bottom of another, bigger canyon with a lot of tumbled rock and scree everywhere and a few little patches of dull greenery. The remains of daylight couldn't show much down here though. The shadows got pretty spooky pretty fast but I was on the scariest shadow of them all . . . and my sense that she was nerving herself for what happened next was scarier yet. Gulp went round a pillar and between two boulder falls with this amazing snakelike (passenger-cracking) writhe she could do . . . and suddenly went down and it was suddenly very dark, and then it wasn't dark any more but the light was red and flickery, like firelight, only not like normal firelight either. The light kind of made me remember something, it was way too familiar. . . .

. . . And then there was an incredible roaring in my head and my ears, and Gulp was standing up on her hind legs and roaring back – the vibration felt like sitting on the biggest engine in the world at the moment when the biggest engine in the world is about to fly into smithereens — and twice she turned herself sharply one way or another and the arrow of fire that had no doubt been meant to wipe me off her back went wide, and I only barely stayed on, still hanging on to Lois, who was howling with terror and trying to look for her mom's pouch again which wasn't making my life any easier.

After the first two flame-spears there weren't any more, maybe because whoever was doing it had noticed that there was a little dragon up there with me. (are all dragons this trigger happy?), but the roaring still seemed to go on for a very long time. . . . I have to be imagining this, but at the time I would have sworn that Gulp's spinal plates rattled like castanets from the reverb of her roaring . . . although maybe not as long as it seemed because even after I stopped hearing it in my ears I was still hearing it my head. It felt like an avalanche of boulders and I couldn't see or hear through it. I wasn't sure I wasn't in a real avalanche of boulders, and if I was, presumably I was about to die.

Gulp may have tried to let us climb down the way we'd been doing all day and I didn't notice or couldn't do it. Which is how I found out that she could reach around to the back of her neck with her forelegs when one of her front claws closed — gently — around me. I think I may have yelled — okay, screamed — but then I recognized what she was doing, and tried to let go of the way I had myself wedged in but I was so stiff with terror and confusion that it was pretty impossible, it was like I'd lost track of my own legs and arms, and I couldn't let go of Lois who was petrified and clinging to me. Mom instinct had kicked in again: I was off my head, but I was holding on to my daughter. Even Gulp had some trouble peeling us out of there and we had a very jerky and stomach-turning ride down to ground level.

My legs just folded up like wet string, although I was also carrying the hysterical Lois. We collapsed together, and then had the insane-making sensation of Gulp coming down to four legs over us, with us directly under her belly, and her heat poured over us like one of Yellowstone's boiling geysers. A tiny little portion of my mind, still trying to make rational thoughts against stupendous odds, which was pretty heroic of it in the circumstances, was saying, She's protecting you! I could hear it, and it made sense and everything, to the extent that anything was making sense, but I was way beyond my deal-with-it boundary. Also the Headache was doing what felt like the cranial version of the John Hurt scene in Alien. I'm afraid I passed out.

CHAPTER NINE

When I came to, my head still hurt, but not quite as much, and I had Lois' head jammed under my chin, humming. It wasn't a very good hum, it kept breaking up and then starting to rise as if it was going to turn into a shriek, and then she'd catch herself and yank it back down into a hum. But she was trying to hum. And she was only a baby. Time I started dragging myself back together. If I could still find all the pieces.

So I tried to sit up. The moment I moved, the avalanche in my skull started again and I put my hands to my head and squeezed. The avalanche stopped. It wasn't the squeezing though, it was another roar from Gulp: I moved, the avalanche started, Gulp roared, the avalanche stopped. Well, it didn't stop exactly. All the boulders got smaller and they did stop rolling around, as if they'd been flash-frozen by the noise. Or glued. But if the glue wasn't strong enough they'd fall over and start crashing around again. And I doubted the glue was that good. The ones that had stopped rolling were only the up-close ones anyway. There was still a lot of crashing going on at a little more of a distance. It was very, very weird. Almost weird enough not to be horrible. But not quite. And very, very painful. There was a softish, as rocks go, rather quivery, bristly glowing blob from Lois . . . and a great big sort of angular looming thing, like she was still standing over us except she wasn't, from Gulp.

And outside my skull there were a lot of big looming things. Big looming things. Big looming things.

Yes. You knew this already, reading it here, but I was having a lot. of trouble with reality. We were in a cavern full of dragons.

I'll let that sink in for a minute. It takes a lot of sinking in. Think yourself out of your comfy chair and your nice house with the roads and the streetlights outside — and the ceiling overhead low enough that a fifty-foot dragon can't stand on her hind legs and not bump her head — and think yourself into a cavern full of dragons. Go on. Try.

There was an actual fire in a big hearth-space (big — Wilsonville would probably fit into it) not too far away from where Lois and I skulked in a little half niche in the uneven stony wall, although I couldn't see what it was burning, and it didn't smell like wood, and the red light it cast seemed to me more purple than wood firelight. (It didn't smell like meat or blood or dead things either, which was just as well. Although I was weak and shaky probably from lack of food too I was not up to the concept of eating from any direction, eater or eatee, and I was particularly not up to thinking reassuring thoughts about how dragons don't eat humans.) There was a very strong smell of dragon over the strong smell of the smoke, which was almost as overwhelming as the sight of them was — and the echoes, when Gulp roared, must have been making old Earth totter on her axis.

It was like there was some kind of geometric progression-explosion for every sense I was forced to use: sight, hearing, smell . . . the smell was strong enough that I was tasting it too, which only left touch, and Lois and the nobbly rock at my back were not much comfort. If you wake up and find yourself chained to a wall in a dungeon and there are a lot of spiky-looking iron things hanging by the fire, you're relieved there isn't anyone looking at you thoughtfully while he's holding the spikiest in the fire, but that you're alone isn't much comfort.

I say the nobbly rock wasn't much comfort, and You have to remember I was aching in everything I had to ache in, but we were also in some kind of nest. I was so sore and tired and rattled that it took me a little while — what with the cavern-full-of-dragons thing kind of taking my attention — to realize this. I was lying on the ground, but I was really well padded with — I picked up a handful of the stuff and let it slip through my fingers and patter back into the heap. Dragon scales. They're a little prickly I admit, but in heaps they're surprisingly soft. And warm. Even a cavern which is full of dragons and a small-town-sized fireplace going a blast has drafts, particularly when you figure the ceiling is over sixty feet up.