Iron Rookery

The stars weren’t out yet. She passed the time with hope. Hope is a thing of the future, where she was from, and it felt surreal to travel back only to sit around and wait. Her name was Saire (sigh-EAR) and she nestled atop the Arrol Gantry, 228ft in the air.

Dragons were beings of landscape, on the edge of the unknown, and she could not have helped but be drawn to the way the humans were adding the ocean itself to their territories. How very draconic!

Though proud of her scales, this dragon had grown gunmetal grey after living among industrialised humans for so long. With some clever arrangement or posturing, she could hide in plain sight. Even if someone were to take a good look at the gantry right now, they’d have perceived Saire as a bundle of chains or a secured set of fall-arrest gear. A necklace of corroded copper was just enough of an accent to help with this blending of shapes and shades.

Despite how this human society was moving so much in the direction of haste, it was patched like a worn-out jacket with pockets of waiting. Even if one of the rivet crews were available, though, she couldn’t have visited them. Not that day. She had no way of counting the throng who’d come to watch the launch of the Ship of Dreams. She couldn’t stay unnoticed by flying in daylight!

Technically, RMS Titanic would launch on the morrow. Not for the transatlantic voyage, but for the next stage of construction. Saire wanted to spend as much time as she could with the construction crews she’d come to love. Installing the boilers would take months, anyway.

She hadn’t anticipated the paperwork, the inspections, the reporters, the pomp and circumstance. Her studies had focused upon the deaths at sea under the light of the constellation Aries. Her fellow scholars had been helpful in narrowing that down. Not until she’d really dug into the construction project had she realised the oversight: they’d been all about starlight and ocean mana.

Saire hadn’t prepared to love the humans. Hadn’t known their world.

She did not appreciate at the time how safe she’d felt. With industrial humanity taking on more and more of the landscape, it was getting harder for dragons to forge lairs or raise their clutches. Now she watched a human clutch of egg-like ships, tens of thousands of humans milling about beneath her, and feared naught.

***

A few months ago:

“Look, I get you, but you can’t fly. Even if you could be quiet as an owl, a big flyin’ lizard stands out,” William said. He had a massive moustache and liked to wear cowboy hats the moment he was allowed to take off his hard hat. That he’d never set foot in America was irrelevant.

“Oh, put saddles on your chairs, codger,” Saire replied.

It was after dark. The dragon was restlessly standing next to a supply ramp on Slipway 3, the keel of the Titanic looming opposite with a dull incandescent shine. She was surprisingly well hidden from outside eyes, for all that she stood boldly in the path of a work area.

“No call to be rude, now,” William said with an affected drawl, “but what would George say?”

“Why do you do that?” Saire asked. Her shuffling ceased as she swerved her three-foot-long neck to face him directly. “All of you.” She circled the air with a claw. “Asking what people would say. Your clutches, mates, tutors, and what have you. What if George should speak as he wishes?”

“Aren’t you worried he wouldn’t be proud of you?” William asked. Then he laughed at the uncomprehending gleam in her serpentine eyes.

Her lips still covered her teeth, but they'd shifted to be thinner in front. A grin, as much as she could manage such a thing. She held William's eye as she lifted and unfolded her wings. She fanned them and stiff-pushed so that they snapped like the cracking of knuckles.

Her torso spanned about the size of a good mule, so she easily had an eight-foot wingspan. In the quiet evening the snaps could have been a splintering mast or the splitting of a steel cable, but with a bony quality.

It was worth the look on William's face. Someone shouted, "What was that!?"

Saire was already fluttering like a grey tarp, slipping around the edge of the dock and clinging to its underside. Any clicks, slides, or slithering sounds she made while moving on the underside of the dock could have been mistaken for the lapping of water or the knocking-about of flotsam.

William, meanwhile, had to make himself scarce. Explaining that sound to an overnight anybody would mean extra time. Off the clock.

He didn’t talk to the dragon for a week after that.

***

The eve of Launch Day:

Saire lounged on the gantry, mingling reveries of the future with her memories in order to pass the time discreetly. There was an army of laughter – what the humans called a "parade" – a few blocks over. Meanwhile, she watched the crews with their inspections and last-minute touches. She spotted one of the riveters, Stephen Gengrich, limping carefully along the edge of Yard 401. There were some officials from Harland and Wolff, a person with a notebook, a photographer, several injured workers, and a widow dressed in mourning.

Clearly, someone was covering – or trying to cover – a story about the deaths and injuries of the project. Obviously, no one talked about Saire’s involvement in limiting Gengrich’s injury. The rivet crews kept her presence hush-hush because otherwise, they’d either be declared mad or reveal the reality of dragons. At best, that would lose them Saire forever.

***

A few weeks ago:

Stephen Gengrich was more monkey than man. He often flipped or swung with ropes or crossbars in ways that “get me there faster.” It was no lie; he was the fastest man in the crews. He moved with a slight forward hunch and a determined alternation of the shoulders, and he liked to swing his arms just a little as he walked with their backs facing forward.

“Y’know, the bigwigs have a rule of thumb: a death for every £100 000,” Stephen remarked one day as he worked.

“For all that, you seem carefree with this iron rookery of yours,” Saire said. On this particular day, they had been installing the final girders and crossbeams for the last deck of the Titanic.

The dragon was standing on a lower crossbeam, holding to the edge of Stephen's girder by her forelimbs. They stood on the bones of the Ship of Dreams, fleshed with shadow and hidden from view. Other than her head and neck, Stephen wouldn’t have perceived Saire without her efforts to hold his attention while he worked.

“Are you secretly a cat?” Stephen asked as he moved to heat another rivet. Instead of the usual flame tools, he held it up for Saire, who obliged with a strictly controlled breath of fire. Shouting was common throughout the construction of the ship; chatting happened at the tops of lungs. “You’re standing like one.”

When she finished breathing upon it and Stephen began setting the rivet, the dragon replied: “These rivets you use are a curious thing. Like stitching metal. No wings, no fins; you humans sew your way across the great blue yonder!”

“Only William calls it that,” Stephen said. Then, louder: “Why do you keep calling the ship an iron rookery?”

“I don’t,” she answered. “I’m talking about the whole yard.” She gestured about with a claw. “You sew up strange metal eggs!” Her jaw skittered a bark; laughter.

"You know that's slang 'round these parts? Rookery? Means a slum," Stephen shouted over his work.

"Maybe I'm slumming it," the dragon said. Her teeth glimmered with a playful fire in her gut.

Saire had been sliding the slits of her eyes this way and that while the pair chatted. What she could make out in the darkness no one knew. Stephen was out of his fall-arrest before she registered that he was finished with the riveting. “Race you to the cabin!” he declared with a grin as he made his way to the network of ladders and scaffolds.

“I got it!” Stephen shouted while Saire was focused on getting airborne without banging something with her wings or tail. She looked up, where she expected to see him, wondering why his tone sounded both urgent and assuring.

He wasn’t there.

He banged his leg off of something metal as he fell in the dark. She caught him swiftly and he cursed. It was embarrassment, not anger. She wasn’t large enough to sustain flight with a human in her arms for long, however.

“Sorry!” Saire called as she thundered her wings with wild abandon to reach the deck. Stephen opened his mouth, but his teeth clacked together with the jolt of impact as he rolled along the deck. Like sinuous, molten gunmetal, she was over the edge and into the black of the Titanic well before anyone arrived.

It was his own fault, but she couldn’t help a hard-to-place burden: that could have been £100 000 of shame. She enjoyed working with the humans. Installing the steam boilers would be particularly fun. But she couldn’t outpace those numbers: dragon population, injuries, fleeing animals, human population, deaths. Her kind were acutely aware of the value of money, but a ship was not a hoard.

Or was it?

***

After the launch:

George always made it a point to either bring copper or let Saire know when his work would involve the metal. She said it was lucky. He thought that was odd, but unusual stories seemed to be the way of things for them.

He’d found her egg at the site of a derailed train six years ago. He’d been part of a search party looking for Alan Dorling’s sister and nephew. Alan had loved that boy like his own son.

They found the sister hiding from brigands and salvagers in a damaged car. The egg, which the others mistook for a rock, had been in the car as well. George had kept it and now he had a sort of niece of his own. Saire told George her name when she hatched. He never spoke of the nephew.

She never spoke of the future, or how a dragon travels in time: she had to regress into an egg to make the journey. Which meant growing up in order to be useful here. The scholars labored hard and long to work out the details. She had to be small enough to infiltrate the operation, but large enough to do something once inside.

The longer she spent in the past, and the more she grew, the more likely it was that her presence would be discovered. The humans might attack her. Stopping the RMS Titanic from “hatching” (so to speak) wouldn’t be enough. Humans being what they were.

“Ahoy, George!” Saire declared jubilantly as he entered the boiler room. “What have you got for me?”

“Your mother was a train!” George teased her.

Alan, ruddy-cheeked and shiny-nosed, laughed and spat to the side. Everything would be cleaned after the installation, anyway. “Don’t be ‘couraging ‘er,” Alan slurred. Then he cleared his throat and stood straighter, taking a steadying breath. “That is, I mean, this ‘ere ain’t no playground.”

“Aw, Alan, I’m touched!” Saire said. “But I’m perfectly safe. Can’t wait to see those boilers in action.”

“You got a golden fleece I oughta know ‘bout?” Alan asked as he set up the arc lights in the corners of the room.

George set down most of the rivet gear. “Golden fleas?”

“Fleece,” Saire said. She climbed atop one of the boilers that had been delivered an hour ago. In the dim light, surrounded by unpainted metal walls, she was all eyes of ember and a sense of looming. Well, and exuberant youth. “I was reading to Alan last week, ain’t that right?”

Alan shrugged as he worked. He was back-on to them as he set up a light in one corner and snuck in a swig from one of his flasks when he was sure the pair were too busy looking at each other to notice.

George offered an awkward half-smile, unsure if his conciliation was intended for the six-year-old dragon or the alcoholic of six years. Or perhaps the boilers. He shook it off. “Someone bribing you with books?”

“William likes dusty old things. He had a copy of something on mythology. Thought the boys would get a kick out of learning to read.” Saire winked.

“We were gonna teach you!” Alan corrected as he finished with the light and turned around.

“She taught herself back in oh-nine,” George said with a chuckle. “Or so she says.”

“So I do say! And you best not question the word of a dragon!” She actually huffed.

“I made you this,” George said, glad that he had something to pry his foot out of his mouth. He produced, from amid the gear he’d been carrying, a twined length of copper cable. “They said it was the wrong make. Doesn’t happen that often anymore, but they know I have an eye out for this sort of thing. They let me have it in exchange for a little work off the clock. I made it into a friendship bracelet. Well, something like it. Give me your head.”

Saire, so delighted that she forgot she’d been offended, slid with a predator’s gait from her perch to the floor next to George. The riveter had to work around the dragon’s eager tremors as he slipped the copper knot onto her like a necklace. Saire’s neck curled like a question mark so she could level her gaze on herself, one claw held up for dainty poses and adjustments. “Thank you!” she said with glee.

George scratched the bridge of her snout and responded with a slow nod of acknowledgment.

Alan grunted. “The crew’ll show up to work those steam boilers. You wanna get on with this or what?”

***

Tuesday 9 April 1912:

George climbed to the top of the gantry and took a seat beside the dragon. Stars arrived in the darkening sky as the last stragglers took their leave below. “They’re only giving me tomorrow off,” George said. “Then it’s on to the Britannic.”

A dragon wing slid over him like a cloak. Saire's head swiveled to gaze at him as she spoke. “You’ve been part of something impressive. A ship wrapped in a fleece of a different metal. Tougher than copper, maybe luckier than gold.”

“I wish I could join you for the maiden voyage.”

“That would make the farewell harder, I think,” Saire said. She bumped him affectionately with her snout.

“Surely you’re not going forever?” George glanced up at the filling in of the constellations. “If you can go to the Ram, or Aries, or whatever you call it, can’t you come back?”

“My kind need to be on the edge of the unknown,” Saire said sadly. “Yours need to make everything known to you, useful and free of unformed shadows. I can’t promise anything until five days from now.”

“What happens then?”

“Either the stars will align or they won’t.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“It does, my dear George, but not in a way you can understand. Keep up on your papers of news.”

“Newspapers.”

“Whatever.”

George rested a hand upon the friendship necklace wrapping Saire’s neck. “Have you practised for your plans with the boilers?”

“You know I did. My dedication to fire lets me hide in any flame, but your steam machines won’t keep much human company. I like it that way. Just a few at a time and those, the ones with toughened hands.”

“Now that you’re so much made of fire, or connected to it…aren’t you afraid? I’ve seen how you’ve had to work to avoid too much water. You’ll be out on the wide ocean.”

Saire pressed her head to George’s. “Not to worry. You’ve all said it: the Titanic is unsinkable.”

Her plan was to keep it that way.