Dragonhaven

Dragonhaven

by Robin McKinley
Dragonhaven

Dragonhaven

by Robin McKinley

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Overview

Think of 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.

Jake lives with his scientist father at the Makepeace Institute of Integrated Dragon Studies in Smokehill National Park. Smokehill is home to about two hundred of the few remaining Draco australiensis, which is extinct in the wild.

There are five million acres of the Smokehill wilderness and the dragons rarely show themselves. Jack’s never seen one except deep in the park and at a distance. They stay away from the Institute—and the tourists. But dragon conservation is controversial. Detractors say dragons are much too dangerous and much too expensive, and should be destroyed. Supporters say there is no record of their doing anything more threatening than eating sheep, there are only a few hundred of them left at best and they must be protected.

But they are up to eighty feet long (plus tail) and breathe fire.

On Jake’s first overnight solo in the park, he meets a dragon—the thing that he would have said he wanted above everything else in the world. But this dragon is dying—dying next to the human she has killed. Jake knowns this news could destroy Smokehill. The dead man is clearly a poacher who attacked first, but that will be lost in the outcry against dragons. But then Jake notices something even more urgent: the dragon has just given birth, and one of the babies is still alive…

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781440696008
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 09/20/2007
Sold by: Penguin Group
Format: eBook
Pages: 352
Sales rank: 98,731
File size: 852 KB
Age Range: 12 - 17 Years

About the Author

Robin McKinley has won various awards and citations for her writing, including the Newbery Medal for The Hero and the Crown and a Newbery Honor for The Blue Sword. Her other books include Sunshine; the New York Times bestseller Spindle's End; two novel-length retellings of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Beauty and Rose Daughter; and a retelling of the Robin Hood legend, The Outlaws of Sherwood. She lives with her husband, the English writer Peter Dickinson.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 2

I didn't see anything that day but ordinary eastern Smokehill landscape, and little stuff like squirrels, and a few deer and wild sheep. But the weirdest thing is that by the time I got to Pine Tor I had this huge harrowing sense of urgency, instead of feeling good and tired and pleased with myself-and maybe deciding to go a last leisurely quarter-mile farther to make it twenty miles and then find a nice place to camp didn't register with me at all. I was so wired I couldn't stand still, despite how tired I was. I had to keep going. Where? What? Huh?

I have to say I'd made unbelievable time. That sounds like bragging but it's important for what happened. I got to Pine Tor and it was still afternoon. I stood there, panting, looking around, like I was looking for a Rangers' mark, except I'd already found the one that was there. I wasn't even very interested in the fact that Pine Tor itself looked just like Grace's-Billy's wife-drawing of it and so it was like I had seen it before. It was like I was waiting. . . .

Waiting. . . .

I knew what the smell was immediately, even though I'd never smelled it before. The wind was blowing away from me or I'd've smelled it a lot sooner. My head snapped around like a dog's and I set off toward it, like it was pulling me, like it was a rope around my neck being yanked. No, first I stopped and took a very close look at where I was. Pine Tor is big, and I needed to be able to find not just it again, but the right side of it. I was about to set off cross country, away from the Rangers' trail and the Rangers' marks-the thing I was above all expressly forbidden to do-and I had to be able to findmy way back. Which proves that at least some of my brain cells were working.

It wasn't very far, and when I got there I was glad the wind was blowing away from me. The smell was overwhelming. But then everything about it was overwhelming. I can't tell you . . . and I'm not going to try. It'll be hard enough, even now, just telling a little.

It was a dead-or rather a dying-dragon. She lay there, bleeding, dying, nearly as big as Pine Tor. Stinking. And pathetic. And horrible. She wasn't dying for any good reason. She was dying because somebody-some poacher-some poacher in Smokehill-had killed her. If everything else hadn't been so overpowering that alone would have stopped me cold.

I was seeing my first dragon up close. And she was mutilated and dying.

She'd got him too, although it was too late for her. When I saw him-what was left of him-I threw up. It was completely automatic, like blinking or sneezing. He was way beyond horrible but he wasn't pathetic. I was glad he was dead. I was just sorry I'd seen him. It.

There were a couple of thoughts trying to go through my head as I stood there, gasping and shaking. (I was shaking so hard I could barely stand up, and suddenly my knapsack weighed so much and hung on my back so clumsily it was going to make me fall down.) We don't have poachers at Smokehill. The fence keeps most of them out; even little half-hearted attempts to breach it make a lot of alarms go off back at the Rangers' headquarters and we're allowed to call out a couple of National Guard helicopters if enough of those alarms go off in the same place. (Some other time I'll tell you about getting helicopters through the gate.) It's happened twice in my lifetime. No one has ever made it through or over the fence before a helicopter has got there-no one ever had. Occasionally someone manages to get through the gate, but the Rangers always find them before they do any damage-sometimes they're glad to be found. Even big-game-hunter-type major assho-idiots sometimes find Smokehill a little too much. I'd never heard of anyone killing a dragon in Smokehill-ever-and this wasn't the sort of thing Dad wouldn't have told me, and it was the sort of thing I'd asked. Nor, of course, would he have let me do my solo if there was any even vague rumor of poachers or big-game idiots planning to have a try.

The other thing that was in my head was how I knew she was female: because of her color. One of the few things we know about dragon births is that Mom turns an all-over red-vermilion-maroon-with-orange-bits during the process, and dragons are green-gold-brown-black mostly, with sometimes a little red or blue or orange but not much. Even the zoos had noticed the color change. Old Pete had taken very careful notes about his mom dragons, and he thought it was something to do with getting the fire lit in the babies' stomachs. It's as good a guess as any.

But that was why the poacher'd been able to get close to her, maybe. Dragons-even dragons-are probably a little more vulnerable when they're giving birth. Apparently this one hadn't had anyone else around to help her. I didn't know why. Old Pete thought a birthing mom always had a few midwives around.

You don't go near a dying dragon. They can fry you after they're dead. The reflex that makes chickens run around after their heads are cut off makes dragons cough fire. Quite a few people have died this way, including one zookeeper. I suppose I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about the fact that she was dying, and that her babies were going to die because they had no mother, and that she'd know that. I boomeranged into thinking about my own mother again. They wanted to tell us, when they found her, that she must have died instantly. Seems to me, if she really did fall down that cliff, she'd've had time to think about it that Dad and I were going to be really miserable without her.

How do I know what a mother dragon thinks or doesn't think? But it was just so sad. I couldn't bear it. I went up to her. Went up to her head, which was like nearly as big as a Ranger's cabin. She watched me coming. She watched me. I had to walk up most of the length of her body, so I had to walk past her babies, these little blobs that were baby dragons. They were born and everything. But they were already dead. So she was dying knowing her babies were already dead. I'd started to cry and I didn't even know it.

When I was standing next to her head I didn't know what to do. It was all way too unreal to want to like pet her-pet a dragon, what a not-good idea-and even though I'd sort of forgotten that she could still do to me what she'd done to the poacher, I didn't try to touch her. I just stood there like a moron. I nearly touched her after all though because I was still shaking so hard I could hardly stay on my feet. Balance yourself by leaning against a dragon, right. I crossed my arms over my front and reached under the opposite elbows so I could grab my knapsack straps with my hands like I was holding myself together. Maybe I was.

The eye I could see had moved slowly, following me, and now it stared straight at me. Never mind the fire risk, being stared at by a dragon-by an eye the size of a wheel on a tour bus-is scary. The pupil goes on and on to the end of the universe and then around to the beginning too, and there are landscapes in the iris. Or cavescapes. Wild, dreamy, magical caves, full of curlicue mazes where you could get lost and never come out and not mind. And it's hot. I was sweating. Maybe with fear (and with being sick), but with the heat of her staring too.

So there I was, finally seeing a dragon up close-really really up close-the thing I would have said that I wanted above every other thing in the world or even out of the world that I could even imagine wanting. And it was maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to me. You're saying, wait a minute, you dummy, it's not worse than your mom dying. Or even your dog. It kind of was though, because it was somehow all three of them, all together, all at once.

I stared back. What else could I do-for her? I held her gaze. I took a few steps into that labyrinth in her eye. It was sort of reddish and smoky, and shadowy and twinkling. And it was like I really was standing there, with Smokehill behind me, not Smokehill all around us both as I stood and stared (and shuddered). The heat seemed to sort of all pull together into the center of my skull, and it hung there and throbbed. Now I was sweating from having a headache that felt like it would split my head open. So that's my excuse for my next stupid idea: that I saw what she was thinking. Like I can read a dragon's expression when I mostly can't tell what Dad or Billy is thinking. Well, it felt like I could read her huge dying eye, although maybe that was just the headache, and what I saw was anger-rage-despair. Easy enough to guess, you say, that she'd be feeling rage and despair, and it didn't take any creepy mind-reading. But I also saw . . . hope.

Hope?

Looking at me, as she was looking at me (bang bang bang went my skull), a little hope had crept into the despair. I saw this happen. Looking at me, the same sort of critter, it should have seemed to her, as had killed her.

And then she died.

And I was back in Smokehill again, standing next to a dead dragon, and the beautiful, dangerous light in her eye was gone.

And then I did touch her. I forgot about the dead-dragon fire-reflex, and I crouched down on the stinking, bloody ground, and rested my forehead against a tiny little sticky-out knob of her poor ruined head, and cried like a baby. Cried more than I ever had for Mom-because, you know, we'd waited so long, and expected-but not really expected-the worst for so long, that when the worst finally arrived we couldn't react at all.

Twenty rough miles in a day and crying my head off-when I staggered to my feet again, feeling like a fool, I was so exhausted I barely could stand. And while none of this had taken a lot of time, still, it was late afternoon, and the sun was sinking, and I needed to get back to Pine Tor tonight if at all possible. I began drearily to drag myself back the way I had come. I had to walk past all the little dead dragonlets again. I looked at them not because I wanted to but to stop myself from looking at the poacher's body. Which is how I noticed that one of them was still breathing.

A just-born dragon is ridiculously small, not much bigger than the palm of your hand. Old Pete had guessed they were little but even he didn't guess how little. I'm not even sure why I recognized them, except that I was already half nuts and they seemed to be kind of smoky and shadowy and twinkling. The color Mom goes to have them and get their tummies lit up lasts a few hours or as much as half a day, but no one-not even Old Pete-had ever seen the babies or the fire-lighting actually happening and maybe that's not really when they're born or lit at all, and it's just Mom's color that makes humans think "fire."

But I did recognize them. And I could see that the smokiest, twinklingest of the five of them was breathing: that its tiny sides were moving in and out. And because no one knows enough about dragons one of the things I'd read a lot about, so I could make educated guesses just like real scientists, was marsupials. If I hadn't known that dragons were marsupial-ish I think I probably still wouldn't have recognized them, nuts or not.

They look kind of lizardy, to the extent they look anything, because mostly what they look is soft and squidgy-just-born things often look like that, one way or another, but dragons look a lot worse than puppies or kittens or even Boneland ground squirrels or just-hatched birds. New dragonlets are pretty well still fetuses after all; once they get into their mom's pouch they won't come out again for yonks.

This baby was still wet from being born. It was breathing, and making occasional feeble, hopeless little swimming gestures with its tiny stumpy legs, like it was still blindly trying to crawl up its mom's belly to her pouch, like a kangaroo's joey. I couldn't bear that either, watching it trying, and without thinking about it, I picked it up and stuffed it down my shirt. I felt its little legs scrabble faintly a minute or two longer, and then sort of brace themselves, and then it collapsed, or curled up, and didn't move any more, although there was a sort of gummy feeling as I moved and its skin rubbed against mine. And I thought, Oh, great, it's dead now too, I've got a sticky, gross, dead dragonlet down my shirt, and then I couldn't think about it any more because I had to watch for the way to Pine Tor. The moon was already rising as the day grayed to sunset, and it was a big round bright one that shed a lot of light. I could use all the breaks I could get.

I made it back to Pine Tor and unloaded my pack but I didn't dare sit down because I knew once I did I wouldn't get up again till morning at least. I was lucky; Pine Tor is called that for a reason and in a countryside where there isn't exactly a lot of heavy forest (pity you can't burn rock) I was really grateful that I didn't have to go far to collect enough firewood. The moonlight helped too. I hauled a lot of wood back to my campsite, being careful not to knock my stomach, because even if the dragonlet was dead I didn't want squished dead dragonlet in my shirt. I hauled and hauled partly because I was so tired by then I couldn't remember to stop, and partly because if the dragonlet was still alive I had a dim idea that I needed to be able to keep it warmer than my own body temperature, and partly because if it was dead I didn't want to know and hauling wood put off finding out. There'd been too much death today already.

Interviews

The ending to Dragonhaven leaves open the possibility for a sequel. Is that an upcoming project?

The short answer is: no. I admit that I have a few thoughts about Jake's daughter, but that story, if it wants to be a story, will have to join the queue. And I'm not holding my breath, because I seem to be incapable of writing sequels. I've never written one yet. The closest I've come is the two Damar books, The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown, but even there I couldn't get it right. Aside from the fact that the books take place several hundred years apart, and therefore don't have a lot of (ordinary human) characters in common, Hero, which I (intentionally) wrote second, is a prequel. I also regularly receive begging letters for a sequel to Sunshine and I'd love to write a sequel but I have to write what comes. Sequels don't come, or they haven't yet. I admit I'm still hoping. Who knows? Maybe the new order will begin with Jake's daughter.

I feel that most of my books have a slightly sequelly resonance about the ending. This isn't deliberate but it does seem to me a quality of a story's liveness. Real life does sometimes seem to kind of come in chapters but it rarely has tidy endings. And if you write fantasy the usually reliable ending of death becomes negotiable too. I also think my knowing something about what happens to characters after the end of the last chapter is part of what makes the written-down portion sturdy. Like tent-pegs. Once you're in the tent you don't see them, but they're holding it up for you.

Some of the dragon's behavior is comparable to that of a dog; did you have a pet in mindwhile writing?

Again, no. But I've had animals either graphically underfoot or at least near at hand most of my life, and baby things do tend to have certain qualities in common (peskiness being the first and foremost) so connecting with Jake's experience wasn't too much of a stretch, even though I've never raised a dragonlet. For which I'm grateful. Puppies are enough of a handful. I brought my new canine generation home last October, just when I was plunging into the final mad race to get rewrites on Dragonhaven done in time to shove it through for publication this autumn, which is to say I was already several months late. Two puppies energetically wreaking their will on their surroundings-and me trying to prevent them from chewing up anything that would either give them a nasty stomach-ache or that I'd miss if it disappeared, like most of the furniture-did perhaps add something to the texture of the last tweaks I gave to Jake's story.

Which of Jake's characteristics would you most like to have?

Talking to and being friends with dragons, of course!

What inspired you to write this book?

You're trying to disguise the dreaded question 'where do you get your ideas?' The answer is the same. I have no clue. These things zap in from the something-or-other-osphere and say HI. I'M A STORY. I'M YOUR STORY. WRITE ME. I don't know why they come, I just hope they go on doing it. I can tell you that Dragonhaven started life as another Fire Elementals short story-my husband Peter Dickinson and I are theoretically supposed to produce Air, Earth and Fire to go with the Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits that we've already produced. Years ago. I'm just not very good at short stories. My last novel before Dragonhaven, Sunshine, started as a Fire story too. The one I'm working on now also started life as a Fire story. . . .

What do you enjoy best about writing fantasy?

I'm afraid this is another unanswerable one, like 'where do you get your ideas' or 'what inspired you'. Fantasy is what comes to me to be written down. Before I wrote (my first published novel) Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast I'd written probably about half and half fantasy and non-fantasy fiction. The Really Really Really Awful Novel I wrote when I was eighteen was straight fiction. For quite a few years after Beauty, which was followed by The Door in the Hedge, Sword, and Hero,fantasy all, I kept waiting for the straight story to blast in from wherever and tell me to write it down. It didn't. Outlaws of Sherwood, my retelling of Robin Hood, is still the nearest I've come to straight fiction, and while it's roughly (very roughly) historical and magic-free, to me it's still pretty much all the same thing as the others: ballads about Robin Hood turn up in the same anthologies as ballads about ghosts and shape changers and pact-offering devils and so on. Come to that, Dragonhaven is magic-free, but I don't suppose anyone's going to call it straight fiction and shelve it next to Mary McCarthy and Carson McCullers.

If you weren't writing novels, what would you be doing?

Riding horses, walking dogs for miles and miles over the countryside, ringing bells (big church tower bells and little singing handbells, in English change-ringing patterns), playing the piano, floundering in a garden I keep forgetting to leave places to put my feet when I squash another plant in, baking bread, studying homeopathy, writing my blog, reading, reading, reading. . . . Oh, you don't mean earning a living, do you? Hmmm. That's harder to answer. Give me a minute . . . .

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