They kept me well fed, if a steady diet of grilled mutton and venison counts as well fed. There was a pool next to the hearth where we were, which was filled up by a trickle that ran down the wall. It was weirdly greasy and ickily warm and tasted of sulfur, but it was water, and I crept that step or two out of our niche when I needed to, so I wasn't thirsty, but food. . .. Lois tucked in at once and it obviously helped her, eating, but it was like, yeah, well, she's a dragon and it's not really me they're trying to feed anyway, I just happen to be here too — and I couldn't face it. If I could have curled up into a lumpy little ball of self-pity and stayed that way I probably would have.
But there was always Lois. I started eating finally because it obviously bothered her that I didn't. After she finished hers she'd come look at mine and look at me and look at the food again and look at me again . . . and it wasn't because she was still hungry. It was so obvious . . . and I was so stressed out it seemed okay that my baby dragon was doing something so easily translatable in human terms. It seemed sort of restful, in the middle of everything else that was going on. And eventually it was like "well you know if you ate something it might make the nausea go away, think of it as a scientific experiment" and hunger won.
And it did make me feel better — food — like I was still recognizably (duh) alive in all this totally impossible (no wait, "impossible" has been banished from the vocab) stuff, that it wasn't just all some really messed-up dream — that it wasn't just my dragon dreams had taken a really tyrannical (one might even say draconian, ha ha ha) turn for the worse. Which was kind of a mixed blessing really — if it was a messed-up dream eventually I'd wake up. Persephone eating those pomegranate seeds didn't mean she had to stay, it meant that she was finally waking up to the fact that she already was there and she could either cope or die. I think Alice was trying to wake up, grabbing all those EAT MEs and DRINK MEs. Maybe it was those first days in the dragons' cavern when I parted company with Alice at last.
Big dragons don't eat very often. So I suppose I should be grateful that they fed me as often as they did. A baby dragon my size eats a lot, but then it's busy growing up to be a dragon. And they must know that humans don't actually get a lot bigger than what I am. Maybe they just kept offering me food because, once I got started, I kept eating it. Maybe they noticed that Lois worried if I didn't eat as often as she did.
I missed carbs and fruit immediately and after about three days — I think it was probably three days. — I even found myself thinking a little wistfully about vegetables. After a week I might have eaten a green bean or two with pleasure, which would have been a first. I discovered the sulfur pool outlet, so I managed to have a bit of a wash now and then too without polluting everyone's drinking water, but it didn't work awfully well, and there was nothing I could do about my clothes except keep wearing them. Lois saved me from certain embarrassments. After her first meal she did her I-have-to-go-outdoors-now thing of scuttling in little circles making her distressed-peep noise, and the little Lois-rock in my head . . . well, it's not true that you can't imagine a smell. You can if it's a dragonlet who's trying to put across her immediate need for latrine space.
I don't know if running in circles and peeping is a common baby-dragon thing, or whether she was making smells in some of the big dragons' heads too, but Gulp reached her long neck out, touched her (enormous) nose to Lois' (tiny) nose — me busy trying to sieve myself through the rock at the back of our niche as Gulp's more-than-niche-sized nose got closer and closer — and then, well, pointed.
I followed, because I was going to need to make some smells too, pretty soon, and discovered this . . . brimstone chamber, I don't know what else to call it. It didn't smell like what humans did nor like what Lois did — it smelled like burning rock — like what I'd imagine you'd smell if you were standing somewhere near a volcano. It wasn't disgusting. If anything it was scary — I know, I keep droning on about how everything was so scary, but it's not as stupid as it sounds, maybe, giant poop is kind of scary — and it did make your eyes water.
I got in and out as fast as I could, although over time and use I noticed that the reason the chamber wasn't dark wasn't only that what the dragons left, uh, glowed slightly, but also because there was a very tall rock chimney that opened into the outer world and during the daytime a little light came down it. I wondered what the smell was like at the top — whether there was a blasted patch around the opening from the fumes. Also, the trench we used lay, or had been dug, at an angle, and everything tumbled or was washed down (there's a lot of inertial force to Giant Poop, and a big dragon takes a long time to have a pee) a big hole at the bottom end. It took me quite a while longer to figure out that the reason the fire that burned in the big central chamber smelled the way it did was because it was burning dried dragon dung. How did they dry it? And where? How did they figure out it burned? That last is probably a no-brainer to a dragon.
You're probably going off in six directions at once now, wanting to know if this means that dragons are civilized, or maybe you're busy shouting about how stupid I am for not Addressing This Very Important Subject Immediately. Well, I'm telling the story, like I told you at the beginning I was going to do — try to do — and I'm not going to address the radioactive question of the Civilization of Dragons. There's a lot of ink spilled elsewhere/space wasted on the internet over this, and the truth is I'm not interested. As far as I'm concerned that's the story we're still telling, and I'm not sure we're out of the foreword yet. It wasn't so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals weren't, humans were the solitary unchallenged masters of the globe and probably the universe and the only question was whether we were handling our mastery well. (No. Next question.)
But if you insist on knowing whether a dedicated latrine area is a sign of civilization, the answer is no; most den-living animals have something like it. Old Pete's caged dragons certainly had a dedicated latrine area, but then so does chinensis, for pity's sake, and nobody would mistake chinensis for being intelligent. And I couldn't have told you for sure that the trenches and the slope were dug rather than just found. You could at this point if this is all really getting up your nose (ha ha) also discount the mind stuff — I warn you, you won't be able to for much longer, so enjoy it while you can — by saying it's merely the way dragons communicate, like dogs growl or whine or raise or flatten their ears and their tails and their hackles.
I could argue for a fire in a hearth, but I admit that dragons being central-Australian in origin and having their own unique relationship with fire including a built-in lighting mechanism confuses the issue having a fire going at home for a dragon may be no more intellectual than a wild dog making a nest out of grass. I was myself more taken with the fact that Gulp pointed, but there are lemurs that point when they're making their "watch out" noise, and vervet monkeys have different warning calls — "watch out that's an eagle" or "watch out that's a snake," and everyone looks up and runs down or looks down and runs up. That's pretty good language, even if they can't discuss the meaning of life with it.
You know I'm really glad that they'd discovered the lichen on Mars before Lois and I got together. It's that lichen that really threw the barracuda in the guppy tank. It meant all the hardcore scientists were already off balance when the idea came up that there really was something even a little more special and unusual about dragons than that they were really, really big and vomited fire. After the Martian lichen, some of the scientists came quietly.