Pearl and the Human Hatchling

The human was sitting in a charred, devastated clearing.

When Pearl approached it, she felt something was amiss. This human didn’t look like the ones her dragon kin had shown in their memories, to deter her from wanting to escape to the mainland. Those humans had been taller, bulkier. More active, at least in the memories. Usually brandishing some kind of weapon. Her kin had made them seem terrifying.

This one was small, and seemed to be attempting to consume its own fist.

Pearl crept a few steps closer, curious. Surely a creature of this size couldn’t be any threat to her. Why, it was hardly the size of her head, and that was without including the sweep of her magnificent silvery horns. Her kin must have been exaggerating, twisting their own memories to try to scare her.

But even a race of humans exactly the same size as dragons, bristling with weapons, wouldn’t have frightened her enough to want to stay, not when she was so useless, such an embarrassment to them. Better here among the terrifying humans than on an island with her kin when she couldn’t cast flame.

Eye to eye with the small creature now, her head dipped to take in its scent – smoke and fire and ash, oddly – Pearl realised what the difference was. This human wasn’t fully formed yet. A hatchling – a child, they called it, she remembered. Barely out of the egg. Do humans hatch from eggs? Regardless, it was young.

Then there ought to be larger humans with it. Where were the child’s kin? A dragon hatchling would never be left by itself like this. But the clearing was deserted. The child was alone. It detached its fist, now dripping, from its mouth, and stared up at Pearl.

And exploded into flame.

The blaze lasted only a few seconds, and Pearl, being dragon, wasn’t harmed. Maybe she was useless when it came to casting flame, but at least her hide was as strong as anyone else’s. There was nothing else left in the clearing to burn, either. Anyway, that explained the blackness all around the human child, and the scent of smoke.

But she’d never heard of humans casting flame. Humans were supposed to be petrified of flame. It was the dragons’ best advantage against them – the reason Pearl had been so firmly forbidden to leave the island and go anywhere near them.

Fascinated, Pearl reached out to the tiny human, seeking to share its memories.

They were a chaotic bundle: fire, of course, and shouting – was that human language? One of them was making high-pitched, staccato noises. Distress, she understood. Then, abruptly, loss and fear and aloneness. The human child didn’t seem to understand any more than Pearl did why it was sitting by itself out here. But she was beginning to.

It cast more flame, and when it again failed to damage her in any way, it stretched up its hand, trying to touch her. Pearl lowered her head further, allowing the contact. The child’s hand was pleasantly hot, like the heated stones of the island where her dragon kin would rest in the sun, basking in the heat. It rubbed back and forth along her scales, and Pearl’s eyes half-closed in bliss. The child giggled.

Well, this wasn’t so bad, Pearl thought. Her dragon kin had surely been exaggerating the danger posed by these creatures. At any rate, the hatchlings were definitely not a threat.

She wondered if she ought to leave the human where it was, or not. Having no idea as to the development of humans, she didn’t know if it could survive by itself. Perhaps the other humans had intended it not to.

***

Pearl heard the voices before the child did – a hushed conversation through the trees. Humans. Tense, she dug her claws into the earth, but held herself back from flight. She’d made the decision to leave the island, so she was going to have to get used to the presence of humans. She wasn’t going to flee at the first sign of them. And she wasn’t going to leave the human hatchling alone, not until she understood what was going on.

The quiet speech was no more than sounds, though, and it was annoying, not having the humans’ language. Pearl reached out to one of the humans, not to share memories, but to seize his, raking through the thoughts and absorbing the language. In moments, the grating sounds resolved themselves into words that Pearl could understand.

“…can’t go along with this, Abi is only a child…”

“A child who just burned down a house because she couldn’t find her favourite toy – would you risk it? Sandor was within his rights. He has the baby to think of.”

“What’s he going to do if the baby turns out the same?”

The humans fell silent for a moment at that, then one of them said, “Anyway, there’s no point arguing about it now. She won’t have survived the night.”

Their steps were closer now – close enough for the child to hear them. Pearl caught the scent of sudden terror from it – from her, she amended, understanding who the men were discussing.

There was fear coming from the men too. They stopped moving, stopped talking, as they arrived at the edge of the blackness.

Pearl took a tiny step forward, looming over the human hatchling.

When had she decided to protect the child – to ally herself with a human, however tiny? But glancing down, she found herself thinking more of their similarities. Both of them set apart from their kin, Pearl because she had no flame, and this child because she had it in abundance. Maybe she and Abi were more kin to each other than either was to their own kind.

One of the men started, “Look at all this. Do you still think we were wrong to-?”

Another cut him off with a sharp cry of “Dragon!”

The clearing erupted; suddenly the men were running, and Pearl was shielding the child with her wings, a snarl ripping its way out of her flameless throat, making the ground shudder. Arrows flew. The child flamed again, and every one fell as ash to the ground.

The next time, the child’s flame was weaker. She was tiring, Pearl thought. The same thing happened with young dragons. They didn’t know how to measure the flame, how to hold some of the power back.

Abandoning arrows, the men went for swords and knives, and when one threw a knife at her, grazing her wing, Pearl knew that they couldn’t hold their ground here. The child couldn’t destroy these weapons with fire, and while Pearl still had horns and claws to fight with, there were too many of them. So she made darting motions at them, threatening them with the sharp points of her horns to make them retreat.

Then she picked up the child, very gently, in her jaws, took a couple of bounding steps through the blackened clearing, and took off.

Another knife, hurled by whoever had managed to gather the courage first, missed her by a hair. She heard it clatter to earth as she beat her wings, gaining height and leaving the human men behind.

***

At first, Pearl thought she must have gone mad. She’d never had a hatchling – what dragon would want to mate with a defective, flameless one like her? She hadn’t even helped to take care of the hatchlings on the island. The elders had kept her away from them, as if they thought flamelessness was contagious, as if it could spread to the younger dragons.

What was she even going to do with a human hatchling? She didn’t know how to care for one, how to keep it alive.

They’d settled in a cave, and Abi was sleeping now, murmuring to herself and occasionally kicking her legs. The rocky floor was perfectly comfortable for Pearl, but humans preferred softness, and warmth. Their hides were delicate, and the rock would hurt it. Had it been a fool’s errand taking her here?

That first night, Pearl hunted for herself and for the child, plagued with anxiety – what would Abi eat? Could she stomach a raw animal? Humans cooked their food. Abi could do that too, but Pearl didn’t think she had that much control over her flame. She hadn’t been taught the ways. Maybe she was still too young to learn them.

So, daring, she flew over the village and stole from their gardens. A random item of clothing, hung out to dry, food that they’d discarded, an odd piece of pottery, all caught up in her claws and transported to the cave, where she was going to do her best to care for this human.

None of it was perfect. None of it satisfied the child, who screamed and flamed and wouldn’t eat a bite. Pearl despaired. How could she keep Abi alive if she wouldn’t even try the food she found?

She didn’t know she was being watched. But the following night, when she flew over the village again, desperate to find something better, she found a small stack of items left at its boundary – a blanket, a pail half-filled with milk, a metal cup hanging from it. Then there were clothes, human food, and a soft replica of a human on top of the pile.

They smelled of human, but not of Abi. They weren’t her things… but then, her things would have burned in that last fire, the one that had made the humans expel her. Carefully, flying as evenly as she could so as not to spill the precious milk, Pearl flew them back to the cave.

The watcher was more attentive that night, apparently – for in the nights that followed, the gifts were left closer, along Pearl’s flight path, until they were piled just outside the mouth of the cave, the giver always vanishing before Pearl could see them.

It helped a lot, but Abi wasn’t easy. She didn’t want to eat when Pearl thought she ought to. She certainly didn’t want to be taught how to control her flame. Pearl, frustrated, wondered if she could be taught how to control it. Whenever she was upset, whenever she didn’t want to do as Pearl asked, whenever her tiny human legs failed her – sometimes for no apparent reason at all – her flame shot out, reaching up to the roof of the cave. If Pearl was fast enough, she would cover the child with her wings, protecting the human gifts as much as she could. When she wasn’t quite fast enough, she discovered that she could also channel the flame, directing it by opening her wings slightly in the direction she wanted it to go.

That was interesting. It was almost like having flame herself.

In spite of everything, Abi survived. So did Pearl. As the days passed, she’d even go so far as to say they were happy. Abi learned to climb up Pearl’s neck and hold onto her horns, first to walk around, and later for short flights along the moonlit beach; Pearl would stay as low as she safely could, ready to catch the child in her claws if she should fall, but she never did.

The little gifts, keeping Abi fed and clothed, continued to arrive; Pearl left the pail outside the cave before she went to hunt for herself, and when she returned it would be full. She never saw their mysterious benefactor…

…until she did.

***

The human woman slunk into the cave, moving slowly. Pearl snarled and moved forward, in front of Abi – but Abi wouldn’t stay put. She tottered out from behind the dragon.

“Mama!”

Oh. The mystery of the gifts had been solved. But still… Pearl growled again, more softly this time, a warning, and the woman stayed where she was, at the mouth of the cave. She lifted her head in defiance and glared up at Pearl.

“Do you think I’ll hurt her?” the woman demanded.

If Pearl had had flame, she’d have snorted smoke. You abandoned her. You didn’t expect her to survive. She extended one wing, preventing Abi from running to her mother.

The woman paled, but held her ground. “Not me. Never me. I fought it.”

Pearl stared at her, taking her in. It was hard to tell with humans, of course, but she supposed the woman was somewhat smaller than the men she’d encountered before.

Then they did this against your will?

The woman nodded. Pearl scented salt water – a tear running from the woman’s eye.

“When I saw what you were taking – when I knew you were taking care of her…” She stopped, breathed, started again. “Thank you.”

Pearl dropped her wing. Abi had been smacking it with an ineffective fist. She’d even tried throwing flame against it, which was nothing more than pleasant warmth to Pearl. Now she lurched out and ran to the woman, who fell to her knees and held her arms out.

No flame, Pearl cautioned. It hurts humans.

Abi ignored her as she hurtled into her mother’s arms, but there was no flame. All the same, Pearl stood ready to thrust her wing between the humans if Abi lost control.

Eventually she said, Why did you wait so long to come inside, when you’ve been here every day?

There was a loud sniffing noise, and the woman peeled herself away enough to look up at Pearl. “I wasn’t going to. It was better for her to be here, with you – I knew that seeing me again would upset her.”

But Abi didn’t seem upset. She was giggling now, reaching for her smattering of toys to hold up for her mother’s approval. The woman’s hands touched each one, caressed Abi, even as she continued talking to Pearl.

“But I needed to be sure she was safe, because… the monster is coming.”

A wordless question passed from Pearl to the human.

In response, the woman sent an image of the thing she called monster.

She’d seen it before, Pearl realised, and rather than waiting for the woman to explain, she plucked the memories directly from her mind, images flitting before her: a human male, attached to a certain amount of respect and fear, riding on the back of a sea-dragon in the way Abi did with Pearl, but where Abi was having fun, experiencing flight, this man was controlling the creature. Pearl delved deeper and saw that he came regularly to the village, taking its wealth, the sea-dragon wreaking destruction on both people and buildings if he wasn’t appeased quickly enough.

“Tomorrow is the day,” the woman confirmed. “If you’re here, the monster might smell you and come after you – so you need to take Abi and go somewhere else until it’s over.”

Pearl didn’t answer immediately. She was still watching the image of the sea-dragon, controlled by the human as if it was no more than a common pet. It made her angry.

She knew little of her sea-cousins. They were from far across the world. Some elder dragons had met them, but long ago, and now they were only memories, passed around under the heat of the sun.

This creature, does it cast flame? she asked.

The woman took a moment to understand the question. “Oh – like Abi? No, but it does enough damage without that. The faster we get it over with, so that it leaves, the better.”

Pearl dipped her head, as humans did to show assent. It meant nothing to her, but the human woman clearly took it as agreement; she gave Abi a final hug, and left. Pearl sensed the relief wafting from her as she hurried away from the cave.

She believed Abi would be safe here with Pearl – and so she would be safe, but Pearl wouldn’t be with her.

***

As the sun rose, Pearl could sense the fear coming from the village, even from here. She’d spent so long monitoring their minds, ensuring they weren’t near enough to see her when she hunted, that she was now almost too familiar with them.

She prepared to leave the cave, checking the nook where Abi slept in her remaining blankets – only to find the nook empty and her careful plans futile.

“Abi come,” the child announced, not in her blankets at all but standing next to Pearl, head tilted right back to glare at her.

No. You stay here. It’s not safe.

“Abi come,” Abi repeated stubbornly.

Pearl lowered her head, looking the child in the eye. You will stay here, she repeated in her turn, but Abi reached up and took one of Pearl’s sweeping horns in her grasp. Before Pearl could shake her off, she was sitting up there, gripping with the heat of dragons in her hands and her legs.

She was about to object again, when the child projected a series of images, and Pearl blinked in surprise. It seemed she was getting too familiar with Abi’s mind as well, and Abi had learned how to communicate in the way dragons did.

She saw Abi sitting atop her neck, a landscape from Abi’s perspective, from between her own horns. She saw a sketch-like approximation of the sea-dragon, something Abi could never have seen for herself, but she’d obviously caught the worry around it, and had built up her own mental picture. Finally, she saw a burst of flame.

“Abi fire,” the child concluded, as if it was obvious.

Pearl hesitated. It was certainly true that flame would be an advantage in what she planned to do. On the other hand, Abi was a hatchling. She had no place in a battle, even one Pearl was certain she could win.

Still, Abi showed no signs of giving in, and if she spent too long trying to persuade her to get down, or remove her bodily, she’d miss her chance.

Very well. But you must stay there, and do as you’re told.

“Promise,” Abi said complacently. “Abi good.”

With an internal sigh, Pearl left the cave, leaping into the air, and flew for the village.

At the boundary, where Abi’s mother had visualised the human and his pet arriving, they waited. The sun climbed higher, and the fear from behind them intensified. And from the direction of the sea, man and beast approached.

People came from the village, probably hoping to appease him quickly. Seeing two dragons instead of one upset them, and there was shrieking, yelling, the sound of humans running about, drawing weapons. Pearl refused to look around. Her attention was on the human coming towards them, and on the great blue sea-dragon he rode.

The sea-dragon was chained, metal links wrapped around its neck and held by the human. Its eyes were dull, utterly devoid of hope. Pearl snarled, and felt the humans retreat behind her.

She projected directly to the sea-dragon. Why do you permit this?

The sea-dragon lifted its defeated gaze to hers, and showed her sensations and images: of the chains, of pain repeated over years, and bone-deep longing for the sea. Its hopelessness made Pearl growl again. No dragon should be treated like this. No human should have this power.

One chance, she projected to the human. Release the sea-dragon. Leave this village. Never return.

His only answer was to laugh, and spur the sea-dragon on to attack.

I’m sorry, the sea-dragon said as it launched into the air. Pearl had no choice but to do likewise, to meet it, to stop it from passing her and attacking the village. When she struck, it didn’t even cry out. She couldn’t bear it.

Atop her neck, Abi was growing hotter, ready to cast flame.

Do it, Pearl ordered, but it was still a few moments before Abi erupted, still uncontrolled.

Pearl brought her wings in close, channelling the flame, but not towards the sea-dragon.

She aimed it at the heavy chain. Every ounce of Abi’s flame went into the same concentrated area. The human panicked and kicked at the sea-dragon, trying to evade the flame, but for once, the sea-dragon wouldn’t obey – it was frozen, staring at Pearl. The chain distorted, weakened, and Pearl tore through it with her claws, dislodging the human. She caught him as he fell, seizing him in her jaws, not bothering to be gentle. He smelled of fire. The fire had scorched him, and she had no compassion. He shouldn’t have kept hold of the end of the chain. He should have taken the chance she’d offered him.

A sense of shock, disbelief, and profound gratitude came from the sea-dragon as it backed away from her.

Go to the cave, Pearl said, showing the sea-dragon where it was. I’ll follow.

Turning to the village, and the villagers cowering below, she deposited the human on the ground in their midst.

Do what you please with him, she said, and prepared to leave.

“Wait!”

She paused, as one human detached itself from the rest, shouting up at her. A woman, an air of authority around her, used to being listened to.

“Why?” the human asked. “Why would you help us?”

If you won’t keep your hatchling safe, Pearl replied tiredly, it falls to me.

The other humans had all heard that, and she watched them look to each other, and then to Abi on her neck. She was already aware of Abi’s tiredness, and just wanted to get back to the cave, where Abi could climb down, and both of them could rest – and then there was the sea-dragon to think of.

At the edge of the crowd, Abi’s mother was silently sobbing, but smiling as well.

“What do you ask in return?” the human woman asked then.

Nothing, said Pearl, and then rethought it. Peace.

The woman glanced back to the others. “We will not attack you.” Resolve and honesty shone through the speech. “We will not attack the child. We thank you.”

Pearl dipped her head once, and took off.