“Oh—I’m sorry.” He began to blush. The redness crept up his throat to his cheeks. “I should have known—”
“Never mind, it’s not important. I think I’d better see your father as soon as possible.”
“Of course.”
They climbed a wide, curving staircase of stone blocks rounded at the corners by time and wear.
Snake had never met an extremely beautiful person who was as sensitive to criticism as Gabriel, especially unintended criticism. Compellingly attractive people often exuded an aura of self-confidence and assurance, sometimes to the point of arrogance. Gabriel, on the other hand, seemed exceedingly vulnerable. Snake wondered what had happened to make him so.
The thick-walled stone buildings of mountain towns kept their rooms at a nearly constant temperature. After so long in the desert Snake was glad of the coolness. She knew she was sweaty and dusty from the day’s ride, but she did not feel tired now. The leather satchel made a satisfying weight in her hand. She would welcome a simple case of infection. Unless it was so bad she could do nothing but amputate, there would be small chance of complication, almost no chance of death. She was glad she would probably not have to face losing another patient so soon.
She followed Gabriel up a flight of spiral stairs. Gabriel did not even slow at the top, but Snake paused to glance around the enormous overpowering room. Its tall, smoke-colored window, the curved pane at the top of the tower, gave a spectacular view of the entire twilit valley. The scene dominated the whole room, and someone had realized that, for there was no furniture to detract from it except big wide pillows in neutral colors. The floor had two levels, an upper semicircle set against the back wall, to which the stairs led, and a lower, wider ring bordering the window.
Snake heard angry yelling, and a moment later an old man ran from the next room, bumping into Gabriel and knocking him off balance. The younger man, recovering, grabbed the older’s elbows to steady him just as the old man clutched at him for the same reason. They looked at each other gravely, oblivious to the humor of the situation.
“How is he?” Gabriel asked.
“Worse,” the old man said. He glanced beyond to Snake. “Is she—?”
“Yes, I’ve brought the healer.” He turned to introduce her to the old man. “Brian is my father’s assistant. No one else can get near him.”
“Not even me, now,” Brian said. He pushed his thick white hair from his forehead. “He won’t let me see his leg. It hurts him so much he’s put a pillow under the blankets to hold them off his foot. Your father’s a stubborn man, sir.”
“No one knows better than me.”
“Stop the noise out there!” Gabriel’s father shouted. “Haven’t you any respect? Get out of my rooms.”
Gabriel straightened his shoulders and looked at Brian. “We’d better go in.”
“Not me, sir,” Brian said. “Me he ordered out. He said not to come back until he calls, if he calls.” The old man looked downcast.
“Never mind. He doesn’t mean it. He wouldn’t hurt you.”
“You believe that, sir, do you? That he doesn’t mean to hurt?”
“He doesn’t mean to hurt you. You’re indispensable. I’m not.”
“Gabriel—” the old man said, breaking his pose of servility.
“Don’t go far,” Gabriel said lightly. “I expect he’ll want you soon.” He entered his father’s bedroom.
Snake followed him inside, her eyes slowly accustoming themselves to the darkness, for curtains hid this large room’s windows and the lamps were not lit.
“Hello, father,” Gabriel said.
“Get out. I told you not to bother me.”
“I’ve brought a healer.”
Like everyone else in Mountainside, Gabriel’s father was handsome. Snake could see that, even beyond the lines of anxiety crossing his strong face. He had a pale complexion, black eyes, and black hair tousled by his stay in bed. In health he would be an imposing person, someone who would expect to control any group he joined. He was handsome in a completely different way from Gabriel, one that Snake could recognize but feel no attraction for.
“I don’t need a healer,” he said. “Go away. I want Brian.”
“You frightened him and you hurt him, father.”
“Call him.”
“He’d come if I did. But he can’t help you. The healer can. Please—” Gabriel’s voice crept toward desperation.
“Gabriel, please light the lamps,” Snake said. She stepped forward and stood beside the mayor’s bed.
As Gabriel obeyed, his father turned away from the light. His eyelids were puffy and his eyes bloodshot. He moved only his head.
“It will get worse,” Snake said gently. “Until you won’t dare move at all. Finally you won’t be able to, because the poison from your wound will weaken you too much. Then you’ll die.”
“You’re a fine one to talk about poisons!”
“My name is Snake. I’m a healer. I don’t deal in poisons.”
He did not react to her name’s significance, but Gabriel did, turning to look at her with renewed respect and even awe.
“Snakes!” the mayor snarled.
Snake was not inclined to waste her energy in argument or persuasion. She went to the foot of the bed and pulled loose the blankets so she could look at the mayor’s wounded leg. He started to sit up, protesting, but abruptly lay back, breathing heavily, his face pallid and shiny with sweat.
Gabriel came toward Snake.
“You’d better stay up there with him,” she said. She could smell the cloying odor of infection.
The leg was an ugly sight. Gangrene had set in. The flesh was swollen, and angry red streaks reached all the way up the mayor’s thigh. In a few more days the tissue would die and turn black, and then there would be nothing left to do but amputate.
The smell had grown strong and nauseating. Gabriel looked paler than his father.
“You don’t have to stay,” Snake said.
“I—” He swallowed and began again. “I’m all right.”
Snake replaced the blankets, taking care not to put any pressure on the swollen foot. Curing the mayor would not be the problem. What she would have to deal with was his defensive belligerence.
“Can you help him?” Gabriel asked.
“I can speak for myself!” the mayor said.
Gabriel looked down with an unreadable expression, which his father ignored, but which to Snake seemed resigned and sorrowful and completely lacking in anger. Gabriel turned away and busied himself with the gas lamps.
Snake sat on the edge of the bed and felt the mayor’s forehead. As she had expected, he had a high fever.
He turned away. “Don’t look at me.”
“You can ignore me,” Snake said. “You can even order me to leave. But you can’t ignore the infection, and it won’t stop because you tell it to.”
“You will not cut off my leg,” the mayor said, speaking each word separately, expressionlessly.
“I don’t intend to. It isn’t necessary.”
“I just need Brian to wash it.”
“He can’t wash away gangrene!” Snake was growing angry at the mayor’s childishness. If he had been irrational with fever she would have offered him infinite patience; if he were going to die she would understand his unwillingness to admit what was wrong. He was neither. He seemed to be so used to having his own way that he could not deal with bad fortune.
“Father, listen to her, please.”
“Don’t pretend to care about me,” Gabriel’s father said. “You’d be quite happy if I died.”
Ivory-white, Gabriel stood motionless for a few seconds, then slowly turned and walked from the room.
Snake stood up. “That was a dreadful thing to say. How could you? Anyone can see he wants you to live. He loves you.”
“I want neither his love nor your medicines. Neither can help me.”
Her fists clenched, Snake followed Gabriel.
The young man was sitting
in the tower room, facing the window, leaning against the step formed by upper and lower levels. Snake sat beside him.
“He doesn’t mean the things he says.” Gabriel’s voice was strained and humiliated. “He really—” He leaned forward with his face in his hands, sobbing. Snake put her arms around him and tried to comfort him, holding him, patting his strong shoulders and stroking his soft hair. Whatever the source of the animosity the mayor felt, Snake was certain it did not arise from hatred or jealousy in Gabriel.
He wiped his face on his sleeve. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m sorry. When he gets like that…”
“Gabriel, does your father have a history of instability?”
For a moment Gabriel looked mystified. Abruptly he laughed, but with bitterness.
“In his mind, you mean? No, he’s quite sane. It’s a personal matter between us. I suppose…” Gabriel hesitated. “Sometimes he must wish I had died, so he could adopt a more suitable eldest child, or father one himself. But he won’t even partner again. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I do sometimes wish he were dead too.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t want to.”
“I don’t believe it at all.”
He looked at her, with the faint and tentative beginnings of what Snake thought would be an absolutely radiant smile, but sobered again. “What will happen if nothing is done?”
“He’ll be unconscious in a day or so. Then—by then the choice will be to cut off his leg against his will, or let him die.”
“Can’t you treat him now? Without his consent?”
She wished she could give him an answer he would like better. “Gabriel, this isn’t an easy thing to say, but if he lost consciousness still telling me to do nothing, I’d have to let him die. You say yourself he’s rational. I have no right to go against his desires. No matter how stupid and wasteful they are.”
“But you could save his life.”
“Yes. But it’s his life.”
Gabriel rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, an exhausted gesture. “I’ll talk to him again.”
Snake followed him to his father’s rooms, but agreed to stay outside when Gabriel went in. The young man had courage. Whatever his failings in his father’s eyes—and apparently in his own—he did have courage. Yet perhaps on another level cowardice was not altogether absent, or why did he stay here and allow himself to be abused? Snake could not imagine herself remaining in this situation. She had thought her ties with other healers, her family, were as strong as relationships could be, but perhaps blood ties were even more compelling.
Snake felt not at all guilty about listening to the conversation.
“I want you to let her help you, father.”
“No one can help me. Not any more.”
“You’re only forty-nine. Someone might come along you could feel about the way you felt about mother.”
“You hold your tongue about your mother.”
“No, not any more. I never knew her but half of me is her. I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you. I’ve made up my mind to leave here. After a few months you can say—no—in a few months a messenger will come and tell you I’m dead, and you’ll never have to know if it isn’t true.”
The mayor did not answer.
“What do you want me to say? That I’m sorry I didn’t leave sooner? All right—I am.”
“That’s one thing you’ve never done to me,” Gabriel’s father said. “You’re stubborn and you’re insolent, but you’ve never lied to me before.”
Silence stretched on. Snake was about to go in when Gabriel spoke again.
“I hoped I might redeem myself. I thought if I could make myself useful enough—”
“I have to think of the family,” the mayor said. “And the town. Whatever happened you’d always be my firstborn, even if you weren’t my only child. I couldn’t disavow you without humiliating you in public.”
Snake was surprised to hear compassion in the harsh voice.
“I know. I understand that now. But it won’t do any good if you die.”
“Will you keep to your plan?”
“I swear it,” Gabriel said.
“All right. Let the healer in.”
If Snake had not taken an oath to help the injured and the sick, she might have left the castle right then. She had never heard such calm and reasoned rejection, and this was between a parent and a child—
Gabriel came to the doorway, and Snake entered the bedroom in silence.
“I’ve changed my mind,” the mayor said. And then, as if he realized how arrogant he sounded, “If you would still consent to treat me.”
“I will,” Snake said shortly, and left the room.
Gabriel followed her, worried. “Is something wrong? You haven’t changed your mind?”
Gabriel seemed calm and unhurt. Snake stopped. “I promised to help him. I will help him. I need a room and a few hours before I can treat his leg.”
“We’ll give you anything you ask.”
He led her along the width of the top floor until they reached the south tower. Rather than containing a single imposing room, it was divided into several smaller chambers, less overwhelming and more comfortable than the mayor’s quarters. Snake’s room was a segment of the circumference of the tower. The curved hall behind the guest rooms surrounded a central common bath.
“It’s nearly suppertime,” Gabriel said as he showed her her room. “Would you join me?”
“No thank you. Not this time.”
“Shall I bring something up?”
“No. Just come back in three hours.” She paid him little attention, for she could not wonder about his problems while she was planning the operation on his father. Absently she gave him a few instructions on what to have ready in the mayor’s room. Because the infection was so bad it would be a dirty, smelly job.
After she had finished he still did not leave.
“He’s in a great deal of pain,” Gabriel said. “Don’t you have anything that would soothe it?”
“No,” Snake said. “But it wouldn’t hurt to get him drunk.”
“Drunk? All right, I’ll try. But I don’t think it will help. I’ve never seen him unconscious from drink.”
“The anesthetic value is secondary. Alcohol helps the circulation.”
“Oh.”
After Gabriel had left, Snake drugged Sand to make an antitoxin for gangrene. The new venom would have its own mild local anesthetic, but that would not be much help until after Snake had drained the mayor’s wound and his circulation was not so seriously impeded. She was not glad she would have to hurt him, but she did not regret it as much as with other patients she had been forced to hurt in the course of a cure.
She took off the dusty desert clothes and her boots, which badly needed an airing. She had strapped her new pants and shirt to the bedroll. Whoever had brought it upstairs had laid them out. Getting back into the kind of clothes she was used to would be pleasant, but it would be a long time before they were worn as comfortable as what the crazy had destroyed.
The bathroom was softly lit with gas lamps. Most buildings as large as this one had their own methane generators. Whether private or communal, the generators used trash and garbage and human waste as a substrate for bacterial production of fuel. With a generator and the solar panels on the roof, the castle was probably at the very least self-sufficient in power. It might even have enough of a surplus to run a heat pump. If a summer came along that was hot enough to overwhelm the natural insulation of stone, the building could be cooled. The healers’ station had similar amenities, and Snake was not sorry to come upon them again. She ran the deep tub full of hot water and bathed luxuriously. Even perfumed soap was an improvement over black sand, but when she reached for a towel and discovered it smelled of peppermint, she simply laughed.
Three hours passed slowly while the drug worked on Sand. Snake was lying fully clothed but barefoot, wide-awake, on the bed when Gabriel tapped on the door. Snake sat up, hel
d Sand gently behind the head and let him wrap himself around her wrist and arm, and let Gabriel in.
The young man looked at Sand warily, fascinated enough to overcome an obvious trepidation.
“I won’t let him strike,” Snake said.
“I just wondered what they feel like.”
Snake extended her arm toward him, and he reached out to stroke Sand’s smooth patterned scales. He drew back his hand without comment.
Back in the mayor’s bedchamber, Brian, looking not so downcast, was content to have his master under his care once more. The mayor was a lachrymose drunk. Moaning almost tunefully, he wept as Snake approached him, fat tears sliding down his cheeks. The moans ceased when the mayor saw Snake. She stopped at the foot of his bed. He watched her fearfully.
“How much has he drunk?”
“As much as he will,” Gabriel said.
“It would be better if he were unconscious,” Snake said, taking pity on him.
“I’ve seen him drink till dawn with the council members but I’ve never seen him unconscious.”
The mayor squinted at them blearily. “No more brandy,” he said. “No more.” The words were forceful despite a slight slurring. “If I’m awake you can’t cut off my leg.”
“That’s quite true,” Snake said. “Stay awake, then.”
His gaze fastened on Sand, the rattler’s unblinking stare and flicking tongue, and he began to tremble. “Some other way,” he said. “There must be another way—”
“You are trying my patience,” Snake said. She knew she would lose her temper in another moment, or, worse, she would begin to cry for Jesse again. She could only remember how much she had wished to help her, while she could heal this man so easily.
The mayor lay back in his bed. Snake could feel him still trembling, but at least he was silent. Gabriel and Brian stood one on either side of him. Snake pulled the blankets loose from the foot of the bed and let them lie in a visual barricade across the mayor’s knees.
“I want to see,” he whispered.
His leg was purple and swollen. “You do not,” Snake said. “Brian, please open the windows.” The old servant hurried to obey, pulling aside the curtains, swinging glass panels open to the darkness outside. Cool fresh air drifted across the room.
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