And Hereyta turned in the air like a swallow, neatly, gracefully, impossibly, and plunged after Sippy.
My memory gets pretty confused after that. We’d climbed much higher than where a dragon usually finds its navigation points and goes into the Firespace, I think, so I guess we had some room to manoeuvre. Maybe it makes some kind of sense that Sippy, Hereyta and I—because despite Dag’s efforts I had got out of my harness—arrived at the same little piece of air at the same time. I don’t actually remember falling. I remember seeing Sippy rolling in the air as if he was perfectly at ease, like he rolled on the ground sometimes when he was so excited he couldn’t think what to do with himself.
And I seem to remember Hereyta turning her head toward us, keeping her deadly wings at almost the full distance of her long neck—although even so, with every stroke, Sippy and I bobbed up and down on the air-waves like little boats pitch in the wake of a ship—but we were falling, falling, falling. . . .
And then I do remember the roaring and the squashing, which could just be the air, but then the heat, and the sharpness of it, almost like being cut with a hot knife. And I have a vague, crazy flash of memory of being still in the middle of the roaring and the squashing but having got my arms around Sippy somehow; and then an even crazier flash of glancing off the rough tip of Hereyta’s outthrust nose which was suddenly right there under us to be fallen on, and into the concavity farther back, behind the nostrils, just in front of the steep higher-than-a-man-is-tall crag where the dragon’s array of eyes is. We hit and rolled and juddered . . . and thumped against the bottom of the empty left eye socket.
Hereta threw her head up and I managed to think, ʺOh, no, we’re just going to fall off again,ʺ when . . .
. . . the heat really hit me. It wasn’t like a knife any more. More like being rolled up too tightly in a blanket that had been lying by the fire too long, and it’s high summer. And the redness. It was like looking at the sun through your eyelids, except your eyes were open, and there was nothing to see except the redness. And the weightlessness. Or almost weightlessness. That was what made me think we were falling off again, I think, when we weren’t. But you didn’t feel what you were on properly. Sippy and I weren’t quite floating off Hereyta’s face but even if we did we wouldn’t fall very fast. Not here.
It’s pretty weird to think of a dragon floating like a feather in a breeze, but it was pretty much like that, except there was no breeze. Hereyta’s wings still went on and on and on and on, stretching away on both sides of us, but they lay almost still now, like landscape. With an occasional un-landscape-like tremor, like a hawk on an updraft.
The Firespace. We’d done it. Somehow. Thanks to Sippy. Thanks to Sippy being totally deranged and stupid and a troublemaker and thinking he could play his game in mid-air and if we got out of this alive I’d tie him up for the rest of his life.
Noise seemed muffled. Or maybe it was just shock. But there was a funny dull quality to what my ears were trying to tell me. I could hear something going on—I thought—pretty close but at the same time I couldn’t hear it. And then Arac’s head rose over the leading edge of Hereyta’s left wing and several leagues of neck passed Sippy and me still lying on Hereyta’s nose and then Setyep was hovering right in front of us. You can get quite close to another dragon in the Firespace. Everything moved so slowly, and if two of the floating mountains actually collided, it would happen gently, and they’d just drift away from each other again. But Arac didn’t touch us, and there was no backdraft from the soft riffle of his wings.
ʺI think your brother wants to kill you,ʺ Setyep said in close to his usual laconic manner, although he was having trouble with it. He looked alarmed, amazed, delighted and completely bewildered all together, which made laconic hard to hang on to. It was probably the effect of the Firespace again but even his words seemed rubbed and soft somehow. ʺBut you’re probably safe enough for now.ʺ He shook his head—slowly; it’s hard to do anything quickly when you don’t weigh anything, it seems to turn your muscles to jelly, that and the heat, which makes you not want to try to move anyway. Arac managed to give me quite a sharp look, however, full of all the questions Setyep wasn’t asking, including ʺwhat are you doing on Hereyta’s nose anyway?ʺ
But I thought about his ʺfor now.ʺ We’ve got here. Hurrah and all that.
But how do we get out again? Presumably a dragon needs three eyes to get out too. And I wasn’t looking forward to trying to duplicate what we’d just done. Especially the coming out into the ordinary world again and falling off Hereyta’s face. And falling and falling. Although I supposed staying where we were and frying or starving to death wasn’t a great choice either.
Sippy was puffing away like a bellows; I was panting too, my mouth open, gasping. The hot air tasted funny and felt funny in your throat and lungs; it didn’t feel like air, and you weren’t sure you could breathe it, whatever it was. You felt it pressing against your eyes too. In the murky reddish light Sippy looked sort of maroon, and the usual bright glint of his eyes was dull. When I turned my head I could see that Hereyta had her third eyelids closed; Dag had told me the third eyelids seemed to be some kind of Firespace protection or focus since they were never closed in our world and always closed in the Firespace. Hereyta’s eyes were also half closed. I couldn’t see Arac’s so I don’t know if she was squinting because of the Firespace—how well could she see in the Firespace with only two eyes?—or because of the little things on her nose. She was obviously aware of us though; I could tell by how carefully she was moving her head, keeping it perfectly level as she twisted it around and down, and then down some more. Dragons can scratch the napes of their own necks with their teeth. Or, in this case, they can lower their heads to within reach of someone sitting in a saddle there.
I saw Dag looking grimly determined, standing on the saddle. He still had his harness on, but he’d untied it from the saddle and it hung in loops around his shoulders; his tapping stick was still in his boot. He made one of his peculiar chirruping dragon-calls and Hereyta stopped her nose where it was and angled it very slightly downwards, not enough to tip Sippy and me out of our convenient hollow, and Dag pulled himself gingerly up over her chin and lips, walked gently up the length of her nose and sat down beside us with a heavy sigh.
I waited for the lecture. For the shouting and raving.
It didn’t come.
For something to do while I waited I looked around. Arac had taken a long slow circle off to one side and now, wings slightly tilted, came sweeping back. His upper wing sailed over me and then some-impossible-how he and Hereyta were floating right next to each other again with their enormous wings as if in layers, and I don’t know, pleated. So Setyep was actually comparatively near us. Hereyta had her neck sort of folded up too, like a scarf, so Arac was only a little bit (in dragon terms) below us. I could see Setyep’s face—a congested-looking bricky red, like Dag’s and I’m sure like mine—and see the expression on it although I wouldn’t have wanted to say what that expression was. The alarm and amazement and so on had kind of all blurred together and become something else.
I looked at Sippy then. There weren’t even any dark green glints in the maroon; it was like green just didn’t exist here. He was flat out on his side—or as flat as you can get on the wavy scales of dragon skin—and in spite of how hard he was panting the fine fur on his belly was matted with sweat (foogits only sweat on their underparts). He looked exhausted, but maybe it was just the heat. I’d never seen him exhausted before, even in the heat of high summer when everyone else is.