Voices of Dragons

7

On clear days in January, Kay continued hiking out to see Artegal. It didn’t occur to her not to. Snow and cold were tiny obstacles, when she could bundle up. Because of the cold, she couldn’t stay long, but the dragon would have lingered all day, nestled in the snow, his tail sweeping back and forth through drifts.

The creek was frozen now. Kay could walk across it if she was careful. Instead of sitting while she waited for him, she paced to keep warm. This day was one of the sunny ones, and the light gleamed, sparkling like crystals off snow-covered ground, and snow-dusted branches.

The distant peaks in the interior of Dragon never had snow on them. Warmed from the fires of dragon lairs within, the snow melted.

She hadn’t been waiting long when he arrived. She recognized the sound of trees creaking, as if in a wind. Especially today, when no breeze blew. He came into view, gunmetal gray against the snowy world, and settled on his forelimbs, bringing himself closer to her. The light in his onyx eyes blazed.

“Hi,” she said.

His lip curled. “Wanted to show you this,” he said, and opened a foreclaw, offering her an object. She hadn’t noticed that he’d held his claws tightly shut. “Belonged to my mentor. It’s human.” He sounded excited.

It was a book, and for a moment she was horrified. It looked ancient, bound in brown leather, worn and stained, with tarnished metal fixtures on the spine and corners, and here it was in the outdoors, in cold and snow. It was maybe the size of one of her schoolbooks, and she wondered how a large dragon could handle something so small. Artegal’s claws worked like pincers, setting it in her hands. Once she had it, he tucked his arm back to his side. She hardly noticed how comfortable she’d become around him; she hardly noticed his size and no longer thought of his claws and teeth as weapons that could tear into her. He was just Artegal, who liked to talk about books.

The book was heavy and seemed fragile. Somehow, it had survived time and being carried in the claws of a dragon.

“How old is it?” she said.

“Centuries.”

That didn’t sound ridiculous spoken in the growling voice of a dragon.

“It should be in a museum,” she murmured, running skittering fingers over the cover. Tiny dimples from the animal’s hair were still visible in the leather. She’d seen pictures of books like this in history class.

“Has been safe, dry, and cool, in dragon caves,” he said. “I brought it when I was sure you would understand. Look inside.”

His trust in her made her pause a moment, overcome. This was an honor, and she was flattered. After the lump in her throat faded, she opened the book to the middle.

Dense, black writing covered thick parchment pages. Vivid drawings looped around the borders of each page. Vines, multicolored flowers, large letters touched with gold. Figures stood here and there among the foliage: dragons—silver, red, mottled green and brown, black—their tails looping and tangling around themselves and other tails in knots, long necks stretching over letters, around corners, fire twining from pointed mouths. And with them, people. Women in tight-fitting gowns, men in brightly colored tunics. Sheltered by the bodies of those huge beasts, resting their hands on lowered snouts, touching the tip of a raised wing. Perched on their backs, even. People, riding dragons.

She couldn’t read the text. The writing was strange; so was the language. But she could make out the first word on the first page, an obvious title written large: Dracopolis.

She looked at Artegal and would have sworn he was smiling.

“People and dragons used to be friends,” she said. “Is that what this is saying?”

“Seems so,” he said smugly.

“Is this real?” she said. “This isn’t just made up?”

Artegal nodded. “My mentor told me stories, told to him by his mentor. He kept the book. Not many have seen it, he said. Not many want to believe it. Most have forgotten.”

“But I’ve never heard of any stories—the human side doesn’t tell stories.” Except for stories of Chinese luck…

“The tales faded in the time of hiding. Except for this.”

This showed a secret history that no one knew anything about. How could people have forgotten this? Why did only the stories of war get passed down?

“I can’t read it.”

“Latin,” he said. “I can read, a little. Dracopolis: City of dragons.”

“We can show this to people,” she said. “Then maybe we won’t have to sneak around. People won’t be afraid of dragons anymore.” She thought about the dragon-raid drills, and how wonderful it would be never to have another one.

He snorted. “Not so simple. The conflict is older than we are. Not as easily forgotten.”

“But we can try,” she said.

“Will they listen?”

Silent, she turned the pages, studying the haunting images. The drawings were stylized, flat, the poses awkward. But she could almost see emotion, the expressions on their faces, faint smiles, as the people and dragons looked at each other. It would be easy for someone to say it was all made up, to call it fiction. She had only Artegal’s word for it, that this was history. And the example of the two of them, talking together week after week. That made the book feel true. But it also felt a little like fighting a war of their own, against all the more familiar stories of people and dragons as enemies. Artegal was right—would anyone listen to a couple of kids?

She frowned. “Is this worth it?”

“This what?”

Hugging the book to her, she paced, wondering if he would even understand her explanation. “I’m keeping these meetings secret from everyone I know. My parents, my best friends—though there are actually a lot of reasons I can’t talk to Tam and Jon right now.” She sat on the rock and sighed.

“Tam and Jon—friends?”

“Yeah. It’s complicated. Ever since Tam started going out with Carson she’s been obsessed with him, and now Jon and I are sort of going out, and it doesn’t matter how much we say that it won’t change anything, it does change things. Half the time I don’t even know what to say to him. Never mind keeping this secret from him.”

“Confusing,” Artegal said, tilting his head. “Don’t understand.”

“Neither do I.” She smiled weakly.

“Can I help?”

“I don’t know. I guess just talking about it helps.”

“Then you should talk. That’s why I came—talking is always good.”

“Even if I am breaking who knows how many laws—”

“Me as well,” he said, huffing through his nostrils. “Breaking dragon law.”

“What’ll they do to you if they find out?”

“Grounded.”

She almost said, Hey, me too, then realized he was talking about something different. “They’ll keep you from flying?”

“Yes,” he said.

Pursing her lips, she turned back to the illuminated page. Across the top of a page, a dragon soared, its wings spread over the upper third of the parchment. Straps looped across its chest, around its wings, over its back. They formed a kind of harness, and clinging to the dragon’s back, hands gripping the harness, was another of the tiny medieval people, a man with wide eyes and curling hair.

“Did you see this?” She held the book up over her head, tilting it so he could peer at it with his shining eye. He snorted an assent. In the cold air, the breath from his nostrils billowed.

“Did this really happen?” she asked. “Did people really fly with dragons? Or is this just a story? Imaginary.” She tried to remember the terms from English class. “Like some kind of symbolism?”

“My mentor had a harness,” he said, nodding at the book. “Broken, though. Very old. Like the straps there, see?” His predator eyes hadn’t missed a detail. Of course they’d have harnesses, so the riders wouldn’t fall. If this had been fiction or symbolism, would the artists have bothered showing that detail?

“So people really did this. Dragons carried them. They flew.” She was starting to get a really bad idea.

Artegal must have had the same really bad idea. He had that lilt to his brow, the same one he’d had the first time they met, when he’d said, “Because—not supposed to.”

She shook her head, even though she could feel the smile creeping on her own lips. “Maybe we could make one like it, if you wanted to.”

She climbed smooth rock faces with ropes and harness and didn’t fall. Already she was thinking of how to loop the ropes, how to knot them together to secure them and hook herself to his back.

“Am curious,” he said, his lips curving in a wry dragon smile.

This was like free-climbing a forbidden slope of granite. She wanted to see if she could. She just wanted to see.

“I think I have an idea,” she said.

Artegal gave her the book to take home and study. Opening it on her bed, she crouched over it and turned the pages, from beginning to end. Each page seemed fragile, like if she turned it too quickly it would disintegrate. Yet the parchment was soft. Pettable, almost, like a very fine leather. She resisted an urge to stroke the edges, because that kind of treatment couldn’t be good for it. Toward the end of the book, the images changed. They no longer showed the two species smiling at each other, working to move boulders from a field or build city walls. Instead, there was fire. Dragons sailed across the sky, raining down fire, and lines of human warriors carrying spears and swords approached dragons whose necks twisted back in anger. Something had happened, and a war had started.

Tucked between the last couple of pages of the book was a piece of paper—actual paper, not the thin parchment that made up the rest of the book. It was old, yellow, brittle—but not as old as the rest of the book. She was afraid to unfold it; it felt like it would crumble in her hands. She partially unfolded it, just enough to see. It was a map. It looked like an ocean, with large islands around the edges. A black dot on one of the spots of land was labeled Dracopolis, with numbers after it—latitude and longitude, maybe? The handwriting was different from the writing in the book, flowing and precise. The ink had turned to a pale brown. After copying the numbers—she was sure they were coordinates—she folded the page and returned it to the book.

She checked the coordinates on the map in her atlas, tracing latitude and longitude to a place near the northern edge of Greenland. But that couldn’t have been right, because there was nothing there, just the Arctic Ocean and a bunch of ice. She drew a circle around the general area and put an X roughly at the intersection of the coordinates. Not exactly a point on the map to chase down, but she was still curious. She’d ask Artegal about it.

Kay took a spiral notebook from her pile of schoolwork and turned to a blank page. Back at the beginning of the medieval book, she started copying letters, trying to make out the words. Artegal had said this was Latin. She ought to be able to find some kind of translation site online to tell her what this all meant, if she could just make out the letters. Unfortunately, whoever had written this had decided to leave out all the spaces between words. She could put the letters down, but didn’t know where anything started or ended. When she put the lines of gibberish into the translator, she got back…gibberish. Despairing, she wondered if she was going to have to learn a whole new language.

When she finished, she carefully wrapped the book in a clean towel and hid it in a drawer.

Looking at local topographical maps, she found a valley—barely a valley, more like a forgotten space between a set of hills close to the dragon side of the border. It was too close to the border to be frequented by dragons, but hidden from surveillance on the human side. It may give them enough space to experiment.

She told Artegal about the place, describing it in terms of compass readings based on the map, so many degrees from north. He better understood when she marked it in relation to the setting sun.

“I know this place,” he said. “It is good.”

“I found something else in the book,” she said, after they’d agreed on their plan. “It’s newer, I think. Someone wrote down coordinates on a piece of paper and slipped it between the pages. It’s for a place way north and east—near Greenland, do you know where that is?”

“The Arctic islands?” he questioned.

“I think so.”

He purred thoughtfully. “East, where my mentor vanished.”

Someone had copied down latitude and longitude, believed they were important enough to write down. But they didn’t label the coordinates—to keep them secret? “You think he went there?” Kay said. “Who wrote the note?”

“I do not know,” Artegal said.

A week later, they met somewhere other than their secret glade by the creek. Knowing her parents, knowing the patrol schedules and where she could go and have it be unlikely she’d be found helped her hide. It also helped that she’d grown up in these woods and knew the landmarks. She could leave the trails and not get lost.

She parked her Jeep at a trailhead where it wouldn’t be out of place. This required a couple of extra miles of hiking to reach their meeting spot, which meant starting out stupidly early. She brought along with her yards of rope and her rock-climbing harness. She kept thinking, This is crazy. Completely insane.

“You’ve been doing a lot of hiking. Especially for this time of year,” her mother had observed when Kay left the house.

“It’s been helping with all the stress at school,” Kay had explained. Her mother seemed pleased with the explanation, as if proud that Kay was handling the stress on her own.

She wore her warmest layers of clothing and brought along chemical warmers for her boots and gloves. She didn’t need them at first, hiking hard with her climbing gear in a backpack. She was sweating.

Artegal had already arrived and was waiting. He tilted his head to study the equipment slung over her shoulders. “Make harness. With this?”

“I’m not sure it’ll even work. It may not work.” She kept saying that, and yet she wanted to try it. How different could it be? You secured your line. You clipped in. You didn’t fall. End of story.

“We’ll try,” he said, and that was that.

First, she arranged the line on the ground in front of Artegal, eyeing the dragon and trying to estimate how much it would take to circle that giant frame. A figure eight would work best, she decided, looped over his chest in front of and behind his wings and meeting in the back. “Will this hurt you if it goes over your wings?”

He snorted a puff of steam out his nose. “As you say, I’m not sure.”

Leaning forward, he lowered himself to the ground, on top of where Kay had spread the lines out. Taking one end of the line, she touched Artegal’s shoulder. The scales were smooth, cool. She imagined that if she knocked her knuckles on them, they’d ring out. She lay her hand flat. A jump and a couple of steps would carry her up to his back. They’d been meeting each other for weeks, but they’d only talked. This was the first time she’d touched him since the day he fished her out of the river. It seemed awkward.

Artegal, his head turned to watch her, nodded once.

Pulling with her hands, pushing with her feet, she scrambled up the slope of his shoulder and found herself kneeling on his back. She had to think to keep her balance. She could feel his body shift as he breathed, the rhythmic movement of lungs, in and out.

He seemed huge from this angle. She could stand on his back, and it would be like standing on a smooth, flat floor.

She did this three more times, to bring the other ends of the rope up. She looped them together and knotted them securely as if she were tying a rope to someone else’s harness. She left herself a loop and a carabiner—a steel oval with a hinged closure—to secure her harness to.

He didn’t seem to mind her clambering all over him. She thought she would have felt it if he flinched or winced. Leaning on his back, she called to him, “Tell me if I’m hurting you.”

His lip curled. “Would take much more to hurt me.”

She checked every line, knot, and carabiner three times. Finally, she put on her climbing harness, secured around her waist and legs. She’d left her helmet at home—if she fell from the air, a helmet wouldn’t do much good. She thought she was ready. Standing on the ground by his shoulder, she looked at Artegal, into his shining eye.

“Are we sure about this?” she said.

“We can prove the book is not false,” he said. “And—is exciting. An adventure.”

That, she understood. “It sure is.”

“If something goes wrong, call to me,” he said.

Once again she climbed up his shoulder, to the middle of his back, between his forelimbs. She snapped the carabiner on her harness onto the loop on Artegal’s harness. She stretched out, lying facedown, bracing with her legs.

“Ready?” he said. Even with his head turned, she could just see the corner of his eye at the end of his long stretch of silvery neck.

Not really. But she never would be until she did it. She held onto the ropes as tightly as she could. “Yeah.”

He walked, carrying her on foot for a quarter of a mile, to the line of forest that marked the valley. The motion felt lurching, shoulders bunching and lifting as he moved his arms and wings, his hind legs causing his whole body to roll like a boat as he pushed himself forward. If she were prone to motion sickness, she would be sick from this. But she crouched, sitting up slightly on her hands and knees, letting her body shift and rock with the motion. She could even start to look around her and marvel at the world from fifteen feet off the ground. High branches passed by at eye level; birds flew below her.

The path he took crested, then started downhill. He didn’t warn her when he launched straight up, fast as a rocket.

She fell and slammed against his scaly back, grunting as the harness took all of her weight. The breath was knocked out of her. Dangling, she rolled over until she was looking up at bright blue sky. She grabbed the rope and pulled herself back to stability, digging her toes in, bracing. Artegal flinched a little—no more than the shiver of muscle she’d have when shrugging off a fly. If he was going to do things like that without telling her, then he’d just have to put up with her scrambling on his back.

The muscles under her bunched as he stretched his forelimbs and raised his wings. They became gleaming sails on either side of her. At the same time, he tipped up, almost vertical, and she gasped as her legs swung free. But her knots held, her harness gripped her comfortably just as it was supposed to. She’d secured the lines well enough that they slipped only a few inches, shifting along his back. They didn’t seem to interfere with his wings. It was just like climbing. She wasn’t going to fall.

Almost immediately he flattened, skimming along the treetops where he was less likely to be seen. Lying on her stomach, she mostly saw him, his neck stretched forward, the wedge of his head cutting a path through the air, the thick muscles of his back bunching, relaxing, bunching again as his wings dipped like oars. When the wings swept back, she could see past his shoulder to a carpet of treetops, the tips of conifers speeding past in a blur. In the distance, mountains surrounded them. Above her, nothing but sky. It was a big world.

The scales were slippery, and when he made a sudden banking movement, she lost her grip again, letting out a yelp as she fell. Scrabbling for purchase, she rammed an elbow into the base of a wing. He grunted, and the rhythm of his wing strokes faltered. He swerved and flapped harder to keep upright.

“Sorry,” she called, wondering if he could hear her over the wind.

He leveled off again, and she regained her balance in the center of his back. Her muscles were already stiff from bracing, but she thought she’d found the best position: lying flat, propped on her elbows, holding the rope across his shoulders, using her feet to keep her steady, shifting with his movements instead of against them. Struggling against his rapid turns had caused her to fall.

Wind howled around her. Gripping the ropes tightly, she huddled as if in a storm. But she was flying with a dragon. Flying. She grinned, laughter bubbling up, but the wind kept her gasping for air, and the sound never quite burst forth.

He sailed around the valley, dipping his wings to turn one way or another, soaring just above the treetops. No fancy tricks—they were both getting used to this. But she grew comfortable enough with the harness, the movement, the view, and the feeling of being at the mercy of a large, living creature. No, not at the mercy of—they were partners in this. She started to enjoy herself enough that she was disappointed when the dragon tipped his nose down and dipped into an open space among the trees.

He tucked himself, pulling up his neck and body, stretching his hind legs forward to take the landing, and sweeping his wings back like a hawk to control his descent. She was practically dangling off his nearly vertical back as they passed by the top of the trees.

She’d have expected them to crash into the trees, ripping through branches. A total mess. But for all his size, Artegal was agile. He hit the ground without a stumble, while inertia slammed her into his back, causing her to lose her breath again. Just as carefully as he’d unfurled them, he tucked his wings in and settled, leaning forward on the tips of his fingers and shifting on his hind legs.

Her hands were cramped from holding a death grip on the ropes. She almost couldn’t open them. She shivered because even her coat and winter clothes hadn’t been enough to protect her from the blast of wind. If they did this again, she’d have to wear warmer clothes. And learn to trust the harness and rigging. If she could learn to use it to balance, she wouldn’t have to hold on so tightly, and she might be able to look around more.

If they did this again—she couldn’t wait to do this again, even though they weren’t supposed to be doing this at all.

She hung there, unable to move for a moment, trying to catch her breath and unclench her body. Artegal curled his neck around, trying to see her. Over his shoulder, she caught the corner of his gaze.

Then she laughed. “Oh my God!”

“Well?” he rumbled.

“That was amazing!” Fumbling, she unclipped her harness and fell, sliding down his shoulder to sprawl on the ground. “What about you? Are you okay?”

“Your weight is little. Easy to carry. But we could adjust the ropes.”

With his clawed forelimbs, he showed her where the ropes had slipped and pinched under his wings, where they could be tighter across his back and looser across his chest to allow easier movement while remaining secure. She did the best she could with cold, stiff fingers. As she stepped back, Artegal rolled his shoulders and stretched his wings, flexing against the harness. He seemed to nod in satisfaction.

“Better,” he said. “It will need testing to be sure.”

Half hopefully, half fearfully, she asked, “So this means you want to do this again?”

Instead of speaking down to her, he lowered his head, almost to the ground, so they were on a level. “Don’t you?”

She nodded as enthusiastically as she could, hoping he’d understand. “Of course! I mean, I’ve flown before, in airplanes, but this—this was so different, so amazing. I could see everything, everywhere. I felt like I could touch clouds—I mean, the air even smelled better.”

He purred, as if in agreement, and seemed pleased.

“Is it always like that?” she said. “Do you ever get tired of it?”

“No,” he said. “Never. We are made for flight.”

He’d made her a part of that. It was better than conquering a rock face. And they would fly again.