Prairie Fire (5 page)

GAGETOWN BLUES

They don't send everyone to New Brunswick for Basic Training, but they do send all the Oil Watch recruits there. Officially, this is both because New Brunswick is coastal (though the base itself is not), allowing for exposure to saltwater dragons, and because it is well-forested. Unofficially, it's because after what happened in the Battle of the Somme, the government of Newfoundland had it written into the British North America Act that only Newfie dragon slayers could be trained on the island, and New Brunswick was the next best option.

We arrived at CFB Gagetown early in the morning via train, along with approximately five hundred other recruits, less than one in ten of whom were dragon slayers. The Oil Watch employed a large support regiment, which would include engineers (both combat and smith), firefighters, medics, and for the first time in decades, one bard. I was not looking forward to being the novelty. The dragon slayers would be outnumbered, but at least they would have comrades in their work. Even if Owen ended up assigned to a small base, I could be outnumbered one to hundreds. Notoriety was all well and good in high school or a small town. In the military, I suspected it could be drastically uncomfortable.

Our train was one of the first to arrive, straight from CFB Downsview in Toronto, but the westerners had all arrived before us, their trains taking days longer than ours had. Flying was reserved for people more important than we were, and trains were cheaper and safer, in any case. Still, after twenty-four hours, I was ready to be on solid ground again.

The arrival area was disturbingly well-organized, considering how many people were there. We found our luggage and were marshalled into lines for our lodging assignments. The Oil Watch had a marginally higher ratio of females to males than the regular forces did, but there were still few enough of us that while the male dragon slayers were billeted separately from the support crews, the female ones were all put together.

You could spot the dragon slayers easily enough. Most of them were tall and broad across the shoulders. And they often sported burn scars. My hands were clenched around the handles of my bag, and I was wearing long sleeves, which hid the burns on my arms. Soon that wouldn't be an option. It was summer, and the training uniform required a T-shirt. I wasn't worried about it, though. The T-shirt would be the least of my worries, compared with the buttons on the dress uniform.

We were sorted and shown to the barracks, where we left our things and were then hustled off to the mess hall. I followed Sadie through the line, and we took our trays to the appointed table. I couldn't see Owen, who usually stood out in a crowd due to his height, so I turned my attention to my food instead. Lottie had warned us that meals were short, and to eat as quickly as we could. I struggled with speed, but at least I could cut my own food now, not that this stuff really required it. The boy across the table from us made a face when he saw my hands, and soon after that the whispering started. I kept my eyes on my plate, but I could feel Sadie bristling beside me. Before anyone said something that might have caused trouble, though, there was the sound of a microphone coming on, and our attention was called to the front of the room.

“Welcome to CFB Gagetown,” said a man I might have described as tall, had I not known Aodhan Thorskard. He was every inch cornet: compact but lacking the hard edge of a trumpet. “This is your last day of relative freedom. Finish your breakfasts and return to your barracks for tours and kit assignments. You will meet your instructors and get a taste of what the next fourteen weeks will be like. Dragon slayers, if you require an additional weapons locker, inform your sergeant.”

We all stared at him, reasonably sure of what we were supposed to do next, but no one seemed to be willing to be first to do it.

“Move!” he bellowed, and move we did.

By the end of the first week, my hands ached almost constantly, except during my time in the pool. By the end of the second, I'd torn the skin between my thumb and index finger on both hands and had to forgo swimming entirely in favour of a trip to the infirmary.

“I'd say take it easy, but we both know that's not an option,” said the medic as he finished winding gauze around my hands, thin, so I could still move them as well as possible. “But no swimming.”

“I passed that test, sir,” I said. Actually, it had been the easiest one. We'd practiced in Lake Huron starting in April, diving off the end of the pier in Saltrock while there was still ice on the beaches.

“I'm glad to hear it,” he said. “I'm one of the few who had you lasting the first week.”

I wasn't surprised to hear there was a betting pool on whether or not I'd make it. I didn't want to know the odds, or who had taken which dates, but I couldn't avoid the way everyone watched me. I scored very low on things like our practical weapons proficiencies. Theoretically, I knew the firearms inside and out, but I couldn't take them apart and put them back together with any speed at all. I had surprised myself to learn I was a good shot, if I wasn't moving. Apparently music had given me steady hands. I could keep up during physical drills, but I couldn't pack my own kit or make my own bed fast enough to suit the sergeants. And Quick Change was an unmitigated disaster. I was getting much better at push-ups, though.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, hoping he would think I was talking about my hands and not his somewhat better-than-average expectation of me.

“That's what we're here for,” he replied. “Come back if you bleed through the gauze.”

He got me a note to explain that I was exempt from swimming, and I headed back out to join my training group. The sergeant read the note with a glare, his natural expression, and then suggested I use my extra time to practice in the gun range. Well, it wasn't exactly a suggestion.

By the end of third week, I had calluses on top of my scars, and I'd gotten used to the extra pain. We started our wilderness training after that, out in all weather in the base's carefully terraformed forests. Part of this training was endurance, and included all the recruits, but mostly this was training for the dragon slayers, and since I was still attached to Owen, I went with them. Even though it was much rougher than camping with Aodhan, I still found it better than the on-base training, much to the dismay of the remaining bettors.

“I really wish you'd told me about the betting pools earlier,” Sadie said one night when we were back in the barracks with almost enough time to get dry before the next drill had us at the mercy of the elements again. “I mean, I know you're not going to quit. I could have made a killing.”

“They might force me out,” I said. Every day the chance decreased, but it was still a possibility.

“There's a different pool for that,” said the girl in the bed past Sadie's. She was a dragon slayer from Chilliwack, which put her at odds with almost everyone else on the base. British Columbia didn't send many people to the Forces, and the fact that its dragon slayers were conscripted was a sore point.

“Then I'd definitely have made a lot of money,” Sadie said. “But don't worry, I won't hold it against you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Can you sing the Manitoulin song before lights-out?” the Chilliwack girl asked.

The request was echoed from all around me. It wasn't the first time they'd asked me to sing, but it was the first time they'd been so specific. That was the first song I'd written with words, on the grounds that I didn't think I'd ever be able to play it. Emily had helped, and I'd started taking voice lessons. My voice still wasn't spectacular, but since I was writing the music, my songs were always perfectly in my range. It was almost like it had been, but not quite.

Emily had also been the one to insist on a YouTube channel, claiming that it was the easiest way to go public without it costing us anything. We'd used the soundproof rooms at Trondheim Secondary to record it, and it'd gotten almost a hundred thousand hits within days of uploading. We'd also recorded my earlier works, played by the band or by Mrs. Heskie, with the appropriate footage of Owen where possible. Apparently we had a very large following, though I mostly left it to Emily to manage, because it made me nervous.

The Manitoulin song was probably the best piece of music I'd ever written at that point. After it went up on the Internet, for all the world to criticize, I had Emily go through the comments (something she had made Owen and me promise never to do), and pick out all the useful critiques of the work. Most people said it was moving, if a bit saccharine. They focused on the words, but the comments I appreciated the most were the ones that focused on the melody and the construction of the song. Emily knew that and sent them my way.

“My favourite part is when they're in the car, with the dragons overhead,” Paul Anka had commented in some random interview on the CBC. “That must have been terrifying, to be so close, and you can really feel it in the notes and the pacing. Give her time to grow up a bit more, and she'll make you a dragon slayer you'll never forget.”

Paul Anka knew from making people.

I looked at Sadie, who was sitting cross-legged on her bed. She smiled. Our beds lined the walls of the barracks, heads against the wall and toes pointing into the narrow aisle down the middle. There weren't any windows, for dragon safety, or decoration, beyond a Canadian flag in the corner and the articles of the Oil Watch framed in a dented brass holder beside it. I was tucked in, mercifully ready for once, but the others were still folding things to stow in their gear boxes or sitting cross-legged on their faded blue bedspreads to chat.

We didn't usually have any free time between our last assignments of the day and lights-out, but it was five minutes to eleven, and somehow there was nothing else to do. All of these girls would have heard the song on the Internet, and most of them didn't talk to me during the day unless we were working on the same project, but right now, it felt like we were a team. Like the Guard, or the soccer team. Hell, like that first Friday in history when I'd lit myself on fire.

I took a drink of water from the glass near my bed. I'd been out in the rain for two days, and I hadn't had a singing lesson in months. But this was as much part of my job as anything else I'd done since I got here. I breathed in and out, remembering the car, the sky, the water, and the eggs. The fire. I called a C to mind and found it in the same place it always was. I went up to the G where the song began, and then I opened my eyes and sang.

I had them all as soon as I started, I could tell. They could feel it, see it. Even though they knew how the story ended, they wanted me to tell it to them. They didn't get this from the Internet. In that video, you never see my hands.

SOCIAL DYNAMICS

The most dangerous place at CFB Gagetown is also the farthest hike from the barracks where the recruits in Basic Training stay. This is done on purpose, of course, as almost everything on the base is, because the danger is dragon-related, and not everyone who comes to the Canadian Forces comes from a town like Trondheim, which has trained itself to be ready for anything.

By the end of week twelve, almost everyone had lost the money they'd bet on me. There were some hard feelings about that in the barracks, but the officers seemed better equipped to move on with their lives. We started training with mixed groups, putting the engineers, medics, and firefighters together with the dragon slayers so that they would all learn to work with a team. The medics and engineers were all older than the dragon slayers, having completed their degrees before enlisting. Since Owen would theoretically be in charge of his unit, I was worried that they might balk at taking orders from him, but I had forgotten to take the training we were all receiving into account. Basic made you very good at being ten feet in the air when someone said “jump” before you thought to ask “which way?”

It turned out that both Sadie and Owen were good at teamwork, having had a lot of practice, but the dragon slayer from Chilliwack was close behind them. I heard whispers that the female dragon slayers always did better, because they were better at adapting to social dynamics than the boys were.