Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Long Drop (Part 14)
Dex had never once doubted his own courage. He had, on occasion, doubted the ground's willingness to wait for him.
Dex had eaten unusually well that afternoon, four dubia roaches of exceptional size followed by a wedge of butternut squash Mike had warmed slightly under the lamp before offering it, a small kindness Dex accepted with his customary air of a monarch receiving nothing less than his due, and he had then done what any monarch does after a state banquet, which was to inspect the new construction. The new construction was a branch. Mike had installed it that morning, a tall, pale, twisting length of grapevine that ran from the sand up into the warmest corner beneath the lamp, and Dex had climbed it with great confidence and considerable speed, all the way to the top, where he now sat, full and warm and entirely unable to see how a creature of his standing was supposed to get back down.
It was a long way down. It was, from the top of that branch, a very long way down indeed, the sand gone small and far and faintly granular beneath him, the water dish a coin, the basking rock a pebble, and Dex, who had never once in his life admitted to being unsure of anything, stared at the drop with the fixed, unblinking attention he normally reserved for crickets and rivals, until the drop began to stare back, and the branch beneath his claws began to feel a great deal less like wood.
Then there was wind. Not the mild, obedient breeze of the mesh pen in the yard, but a real, insistent, world sized wind, cold at the edges and thin in a way that made his lungs work for it, and when he opened his eyes there was no glass anywhere in sight, only a vast pale sweep of cloud stretched out below him like a second, softer ground, and a narrow steel platform beneath his feet that had no business existing at whatever impossible height this was. He was, he understood with the swift, unquestioning logic of a lizard who has been staring at one spot for far too long, standing at the open door of the sky itself, and he was not standing there alone.
A dozen other dragons flanked him along the platform in matching harnesses, goggled and solemn, and pacing the line with her claws hooked behind her back in an attitude of profound unbothered authority was, of all people, Nettie, the same blue tongued skink who had spent four days the previous winter making it clear exactly how little his royal theatrics impressed her, now apparently promoted, in the specific and generous way imagination promotes people, to Wing Commander of an outfit stenciled along the platform railing as the High Sky Corps. She looked exactly as unimpressed by altitude as she had been by rank. "Bearded dragon," she said, not quite a question, giving him the same flat, evaluating look she'd once given his opinion of the guest tank's water dish placement. "You've done a lot of dramatic staring at things from a rock. Let's see how you do staring at things from twelve thousand feet."
The briefing, such as it was, involved a great deal of pointing at a harness buckle Dex did not remember agreeing to wear, a rapid and largely un-followable explanation of when precisely to pull the small cord looped over his left shoulder, and a closing piece of guidance from Nettie that amounted to trust the fall, which struck Dex, even in his current overheated state, as advice better suited to a fortune cookie than an actual airborne emergency. The dragon beside him, a lanky younger fellow with a nervous, flickering throat, whispered that the trick was not to look down until you had already jumped, and Dex privately filed this away as the single most useless piece of advice he had received from anyone, real or imagined, and then, because the line was moving and dignity demanded he not be the one holding it up, looked down.
Cloud, and beneath the cloud, impossibly far beneath it, the vague dark green suggestion of a whole world, hills and rivers and what might have been a lake catching the light like a dropped coin, all of it so far away and so entirely indifferent to whether one specific bearded dragon made it down in one piece that something in Dex's chest, some old cold-blooded instinct several evolutionary eras older than his opinions about himself, delivered a single unambiguous message: this is not a basking rock, and there is no glass here to stop you falling. He had never, in his entire dignified life, admitted to being afraid of anything, on the grounds that fear was the sort of vulgar public display he left to lesser reptiles, and he was not about to start admitting it now, in front of a promoted skink and eleven strangers in goggles, so what he said aloud, in a voice he was reasonably satisfied came out steady, was simply, "After you, Commander."
Nettie's opinion of that particular delaying tactic arrived in the form of a short, businesslike shove between his shoulder blades, and then there was no platform at all, only air, tremendous quantities of it, roaring past his frills and tail and the four small legs he was pinwheeling with a total absence of the dignity he'd promised himself only seconds earlier. The cloud came up to meet him in a cold, wet, momentary nothing, and on the far side of it the world reassembled itself at terrifying speed, green and brown and rushing upward with the specific, focused urgency of a surface that had never once, in the history of surfaces, changed its mind about being hit.
Somewhere above and beside him, other dragons were pulling their cords in neat, practiced arcs, blooming into wide, sail-like membranes that caught the air and slowed them into lazy, showy spirals, and Dex, scrabbling at his own shoulder with a foreclaw that suddenly felt three sizes too large for the job, found the cord, pulled it, and produced, for his considerable trouble, nothing whatsoever. The ground did not care. The ground, if anything, seemed to be taking his continued descent rather personally.
What happened next happened the way his best displays of temper had always happened, which is to say entirely without his permission: the loose fold of skin beneath his chin, the one Mike called his beard and Dex privately considered the single most eloquent part of himself, snapped open in a sudden defensive flare, wide and dark and trembling at the edges, an old, honest reflex meant for staring down rival lizards through glass and never once, in the whole design of him, intended for catching wind at speed. It caught wind at speed anyway. The fall didn't stop so much as it changed its mind about him, his plummet folding sideways into a long, shuddering glide, and Dex, understanding perhaps one word in five of what his own body had just done on his behalf, decided this was an excellent time to stop questioning it.
He rode it out low over the tops of the clouds, beard fanned wide and catching every current the sky offered him, and for one long, suspended stretch of borrowed time the whole imagined world opened up beneath him exactly the way the real one never had, hills folding into forest folding into a silver thread of river, a landscape with no glass anywhere between him and it, close enough now that he could pick out the shapes of rooftops and the pale ribbon of a road, and it occurred to him, with the particular clarity available only to a creature currently being held aloft by his own chin, that falling and flying turned out to be nearly the same act, told from two different distances.
The rest of the squadron caught up to him in a loose, admiring formation, the nervous young dragon from the platform whooping in a way that suggested he had forgotten every piece of advice he'd given anyone, and Nettie herself dropped alongside Dex with the same unbothered economy of motion she brought to everything, glancing sideways at his fully deployed beard with an expression that might, on a face less committed to unimpressedness, have been respect. "Didn't peg you as a natural," she said. "Didn't peg myself as one either," Dex answered, which was, for him, practically a confession, and Nettie's only reply was a short, satisfied huff before she peeled off to bark landing instructions at somebody's cousin.
The ground, when it finally arrived, did so far more gently than its earlier attitude had promised, a long skidding touchdown across grass that smelled improbably of Mike's actual backyard, and the squadron gathered around him in the loose, backslapping way of people who had all just done something they weren't entirely sure they could survive. Someone produced a length of ribbon from nowhere in particular and looped it with great ceremony around Dex's neck, and Nettie, arms crossed, delivered what he understood to be the highest praise available in her vocabulary: "Not bad, for a lizard who mostly just glares at things."
Dex stood there in the settling dust with his ribbon and his aching, gloriously overworked beard, and allowed himself, just once, the small private admission that he had been afraid up on that platform, properly afraid, and that the fear had turned out to be a good deal more survivable than the not knowing had been, a piece of information he suspected might prove useful again someday, on some future ledge he could not yet picture, real or otherwise.
The squadron did not stay. The wind went first, then the grass, then the ribbon, and what was left was the lamp's steady gold and the top of the grapevine branch and the sand, still a long way down, though not, Dex now noticed, quite as long as it had been. Mike was at the glass, wearing the look of a man who has just watched his lizard's beard inflate and deflate several times in rapid succession for no visible reason, and who has been standing there for a while deciding whether to help. He reached for the lid.
Dex did not wait for him. He tucked his front legs, spread his toes wide, flared his beard dark for no reason he could have defended to anyone, and dropped. It was about the length of a hand. He landed on the sand in a soft, graceless skid, beard still out, and sat there in the settling grit with his heart going and his chin held very high, and found that the thing he had admitted to himself on the platform held every bit as true down here: the fear had been survivable, and the not knowing had been the worse of the two.
"Well," Mike said, lowering the lid again. "Nice landing." Dex closed his beard, walked to the foot of the grapevine, looked up it with a long, measuring look, and began to climb.
Dex is a bearded dragon. If you keep one, our bearded dragon care guide covers the lighting, heat and diet the real ones need.