But I also didn't really know that she might not be taking us farther in. The trees in my head really weren't very good trees — not as a human thinks about trees — not as a human who doesn't yet know how to connect thinks about trees — and I was afraid they were just an echo of my longing. Maybe the caves had sort of greenish geometric rocks farther in (although it was a geometry I didn't know and I wouldn't have wanted to say they were rocks either).
I had my eyes closed for a lot of it — rocky walls flashing past that close are not comfortable viewing — and there were a lot of lurches that if they were dragon stair steps were a lot too long for human legs. But I noticed that we were humping our way upward not down and I think it probably would have broken what remained of my sanity if it had turned out she wasn't going to take us out of the caves after all. But she was. I smelled it first — cool, moving air that didn't have burning in it — and then I opened my eyes and saw daylight. . ..
It was another sunny day outdoors. Outdoors. I had felt so far away, not just underground, which is intense enough to someone like me whose desk is always as close to the window as I can get it and who can't sit still more than a few hours without going outside, barring blizzards, and even then I'll probably go stand on the doorstep and look hopefully for any sign of it stopping till the flakes make my eyelashes stick together and I can't see any more. But in the whole crazy inexplicable business of trying to talk to Bud, it felt like years had passed in the flickery reddish windowless darkness — I was crazy enough by then to wonder if maybe years had passed, like in old tales of people who visit the fairies.
I slithered down Gulp's shoulder and fell on the ground — the stories of the early ocean crossings, when sailors and passengers get out and kiss the ground when there's finally some ground to kiss after months at sea. But at least they'd had air and sky.
I plastered myself against the bit of ground I landed on, like it was my best friend, which it was. I even bit off some grass — well, it wasn't grass, but it was some kind of green thing. I suppose I might have poisoned myself, but I didn't. It had a bitter taste but it tasted good. It tasted of sunlight — of the world aboveground, of the world where humans existed — I don't know. I almost felt crazier from having got outside again — from having spent five days (or five hundred years) trying to adjust to being a light-deprived lab rat and being scared out of my small lab-rat mind about one of the dragons losing its temper. Bud may have been boss dragon but I knew without being able to talk to any of them about it that not everybody agreed with him about wasting time on me.
Bud had followed us out, and was lying down, trying to look small, I think, like Gulp tried, but he had his head raised — oh, a mere seven or eight feet off the ground-watching me. After I had crawled around on my hands and knees for a few minutes, just reminding myself of dirt and plants — I think I did some whimpering too — I stood up, staggering a little, although I'd been walking in the fire-cavern okay, and turned my face up to the sun, and did a crazy little dance — and Lois did it with me, cavorting and peeping.
One of the weirdest things about the fire-cavern was how quiet it was. Except for Lois and me nobody ever said anything — or growled or harked or whined or peeped or chirped or chortled or shouted. Most ly you heard nothing at all, except the sound of your own breathing and a sort of low, eerily harmonic background sssssssssh that was presumably the dragons breathing, but you couldn't identify it. It sounded more like gremlins to me — some kind of cave spook whispering around in the dark. Occasionally you heard these great big creatures moving around, big soft echoey rustles, a few clicks and clatters of talons and wings; and occasionally they made one or another kind of rumble, like maybe a dragon cough or a dragon snort, but they didn't talk. Or hum. Not to hear anyway. (That came later, when the other dragons started deciding that Bud and Gulp's idea about me wasn't so awful after all. Or maybe it's just that dragons are good losers.) You did hear the fire a bit, but a dried-dragon-dung fire doesn't crackle like a wood fire does, as well as being too purple-blue.
And my human thing about talking had gone away too. You know how I kept talking at Westcamp after Gulp arrived. Not in the dragon rave. I hummed a little bit back at Lois but that was about all. It was almost like my mouth was pressed shut, by the weight of all that darkness and all those dragons.
But I had a little tiny epiphany then, that first time outdoors, with daylight on my skin and in my eyes. You know how deaf people are taught to talk, if they can learn it, because even though they can't hear, it makes it easier for them to communicate with hearing people, who are used to talking. And then hearing people who want to be able to talk to deaf people learn sign language, and then — sometimes — they talk at the same time as they use the sign language, to help the deaf people, lip-read, I suppose, or get used to the way the mouth is always flapping in hearing people, or something.
While I was still high with being outdoors again — with being reconnected, even if only barely (where the hell was I, in all of five million acres of Smokehill?), with my life — I went over to Bud, stopping when I was still far enough away not to get a crick in my neck by looking up to where he was holding his head (which he probably had as low as he could without getting a crick in his neck), and started talking. Out loud. Like a normal human. Like I hadn't done for five days in Bud's cave. I've always been a big hand-gesture person, like Mom – Dad only waves his arms around when he's mad — so I used hand gestures too. I tried to make pictures in my mind while I was telling him the stories – like the hearing person using sign language — but my words led the pictures. Us humans, we lead with words. This is how we do it. And — I think — they got it. Maybe they had a great big dragon epiphany too.
It's been and still is all totally hard sweating dia-freaking-bolical work after that — in fact in a way it's been worse because that's when I started to believe in what we were doing, Bud and me, talking to each other here we go again, like when I first began to realize what raising Lois was really going to be like. But this time — this time I was going to let myself know how hard it was going to be, and do it anyway. I know how dumb this sounds, but I wanted to be a grown-up for Bud. This was different from what had happened with Lois. Duh.
But if you've hung on this long because you think I'm going to Explain Everything — stop now. Put this down, go away, wash the car, look up the horoscope for your goldfish, and I'm sorry I've wasted so much of your time. Give this book to your library (if they want it). But it was a big thing, that day, for me anyway. Back there in the dark Bud had been patiently holding the dragon space for me — while I mostly cowered in my niche. (Of course I couldn't cope, any more than I could have coped with a dragonlet, which was clearly impossible.) But out here in the light I could see that that is what he had been doing — that it wasn't all just being in the dark surrounded by dragons and making stuff up to make myself feel better. It was happening in daylight too. Bud was listening. Bud wanted to listen. To me.
I think the last few days had been pretty intense for the dragons too. I may be unbelievably weeny in dragon terms but that I was there was epoch making. And look what trouble one really weeny new germ can do somewhere it's never been before.