Dreamsnake

by Vonda McIntyre

  “When Sand strikes you,” Snake said, “you’ll feel a sharp pain. Then the area around the bite will go numb. That will be just above the wound. The numbness will spread slowly, because your circulation is almost cut off. But when it spreads far enough I’ll drain the wound. After that the antitoxin will work more effectively.”

  The mayor’s flushed cheeks paled. He did not say anything, but Brian put a glass to his lips and the mayor drank deeply. The flush returned.

  Well, Snake thought, some people you should tell, some people you shouldn’t.

  Snake tossed Brian a clean cloth. “Pour some of the brandy on this and lay it across his nose and mouth. You and Gabriel can do the same thing for yourselves if you want. This won’t be pleasant. And both of you drink—one good gulp each. Then hold his shoulders easily. Don’t let him sit up abruptly; he’ll frighten the rattler.”

  “Yes, healer,” Brian said.

  Snake cleaned the skin above the deep wound in the mayor’s calf.

  Lucky not to have tetanus as well, she thought, remembering Ao and the other collectors. Healers came through Mountainside occasionally, though they had come more frequently in the past. Perhaps the mayor had been vaccinated, once he knew he would not have to see a serpent.

  Snake unwrapped Sand from her arm and held him behind the bulge of his jaw, letting him flick his tongue against the discolored skin. He arranged himself into a thick coil on the bed. When Snake was satisfied with his position, she released his head.

  He struck.

  The mayor cried out.

  Sand bit only once, and quickly, so fast he was back in his coil before an observer could be sure he had moved. But the mayor was sure. He had begun trembling violently again. Dark blood and pus oozed from the two small puncture wounds.

  The rest of Snake’s work was smelly and messy but routine. She opened the wound and let it drain. Snake hoped Gabriel had not eaten much dinner, for he looked ready to lose it, even with the brandy-soaked cloth over his face. Brian stood stoically by his master’s shoulder, soothing him, keeping him still.

  By the time Snake had finished, the swelling in the mayor’s leg was already considerably reduced. He would be well in a few weeks.

  “Brian, come here, would you?”

  The old man obeyed her hesitantly, but he relaxed when he saw what she had done. “It looks better,” he said. “Already better than when he last let me look at it.”

  “Good. It will keep draining, so it’s got to be kept clean.” She showed him how to dress the wound and bandage it. He called a young servant to take away the soiled cloths, and soon the stench of infection and dying flesh had dissipated. Gabriel was sitting on the bed, sponging his father’s forehead. Sometime earlier the brandy-soaked cloth had slipped from his face to the floor, and he had not bothered to replace it. He no longer looked so pale.

  Snake gathered Sand up and let him slide across her shoulders.

  “If the wound hurts him badly, or his temperature rises again—if there’s any change that isn’t an improvement—come get me. Otherwise I’ll see him in the morning.”

  “Thank you, healer,” Brian said.

  Snake hesitated as she passed Gabriel, but he did not look up. His father lay very still, breathing heavily, asleep or nearly so.

  Snake shrugged and left the mayor’s tower, returned to her room and put Sand in his compartment, then wandered downstairs until she found the kitchen. Another of the mayor’s ubiquitous and innumerable servants made her some supper, and she went to bed.

  6

  The mayor felt better in the morning. Brian had clearly been up all night beside him, yet he accepted his orders—not exactly cheerfully, for that was not Brian’s style, but without reservation or resentment.

  “Will it leave a scar?” the mayor asked.

  “Yes,” Snake said, surprised. “Of course. Several. I took out quite a lot of dead muscle, and it will never all fill back in. You probably won’t limp, though.”

  “Brian, where’s my tea?” The tone of the mayor’s voice revealed his annoyance at Snake’s reply.

  “It’s coming, sir.” The fragrance of spices drifted into the room. The mayor drank his tea alone, ignoring Snake while she rebandaged his leg.

  When she left, scowling, Brian followed her to the hall outside.

  “Healer, forgive him. He’s not used to illness. He expects things to go his way.”

  “So I noticed.”

  “I mean…he thinks of himself scarred… He feels betrayed by himself…” Brian spread his hands, unable to find the right words.

  It was not that uncommon to find people who did not believe they could get sick; Snake was used to difficult patients who wanted to get back to normal too soon, despite the need for recuperation, and who became querulous when they could not.

  “That doesn’t give him the right to treat people the way he does,” Snake said.

  Brian looked at the floor. “He’s a good man, healer.”

  Sorry she had let her anger—no, her annoyance and hurt pride—touch him, Snake spoke again, more gently.

  “Are you bound here?”

  “No! Oh, no, healer, I’m free. The mayor doesn’t allow bonding in Mountainside. Drivers who come with bondservants are sent out of the city, and their people can choose to go with them or give the city a year’s service. If they stay the mayor buys their papers from the driver.”

  “Is that what happened with you?”

  He hesitated but finally answered. “Not many know I used to be bound. I was one of the first to be freed. After one year he tore up my bonding papers. They were still valid for twenty years, and I’d already served five. Until then I wasn’t sure I could trust him—or anyone. But I could.” He shrugged. “I stayed on afterward.”

  “I understand why you feel grateful toward him,” Snake said. “But it still doesn’t give him the right to order you around twenty-four hours a day.”

  “I slept last night.”

  “In a chair?”

  Brian smiled.

  “Get someone else to watch him for a while,” Snake said. “You come with me.”

  “Do you need help, healer?”

  “No, I’m going down to the stables. But you can nap while I’m gone, at least.”

  “Thank you, healer. I’d rather stay here.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  She left the residence and crossed the courtyard. It felt good to walk in the cool morning, even down the steep hairpin turns of the cliff trail. The mayor’s pastures spread out below her. The gray mare was alone in a green field, galloping back and forth with her head and tail high, bouncing stiff-legged to a halt at the fence, snorting, then wheeling to run in the opposite direction. If she had decided to keep on running, she could have cleared the chest-high fence and hardly noticed it, but she was running for no other reason than play.

  Snake walked along the path to the barn. As she neared it she heard a slap and a cry, then a loud and furious voice.

  “Get on with your work!”

  Snake ran the last few steps to the stable and pulled open its doors. The inside was nearly dark. She blinked. She heard the rustling of straw and smelled the pleasant heavy odor of a clean horsebarn. After a moment her eyes became more accustomed to the dimness and she could see the wide straw-carpeted passageway, the two rows of box stalls, and the stablemaster turning toward her.

  “Good morning, healer.” The stablemaster was a tremendous man, at least two meters tall, and heavily built. His curly hair was bright red and his beard was blond.

  Snake looked up at him. “What was that noise?”

  “Noise? I don’t—Oh, I was just countering the pleasures of laziness.”

  His remedy must have been effective, for whoever had been lazy had disappeared very quickly.

  “At this hour of the morning laziness sounds like a good idea,” Snake said.

  “Well, we get started early.” The stablemaster led her farther into the barn. “I stabled your mounts
down here. The mare’s out for a run, but I’ve kept the pony in.”

  “Good,” Snake said. “He needs to be shod as soon as possible.”

  “I’ve sent for the blacksmith to come this afternoon.”

  “That’s fine.” She went inside Squirrel’s stall. He nuzzled her and ate the piece of bread she had brought him. His coat shone, his mane and tail were combed, and his hooves were even oiled. “Someone’s taken very good care of him.”

  “We try to please the mayor and his guest,” the big man said. He stayed nearby, solicitously, until she left the stable to bring the mare inside. Swift and Squirrel had to be reintroduced to pasture slowly, after so long in the desert, or the rich grass would make them sick.

  When she returned, riding Swift bareback and guiding her with her knees, the stablemaster was busy in another part of the building. Snake slid off the mare’s back and led her into her stall.

  “It was me, mistress, not him.”

  Startled, Snake turned, but whoever had whispered to her was not in the stall, nor in the passageway outside.

  “Who’s that?” Snake said. “Where are you?” Back in the stall she looked up and saw the hole in the ceiling where fodder was thrown down. She jumped on the manger, grabbed the edge of the hole, and chinned herself up so she could see into the loft. A small figure jumped back in fright and hid behind a bale of hay.

  “Come out,” Snake said. “I won’t hurt you.” She was in a ridiculous position, hanging down in the middle of the stall with Swift nibbling her boot, without the proper leverage to climb the rest of the way into the loft. “Come on down,” she said, and let herself drop back to the ground.

  She could see the form of the person in the hayloft, but not the features.

  It’s a child, she thought. Just a little kid.

  “It’s nothing, mistress,” the child said. “It’s just he always pretends he does all the work and there’s others do too, is all. Never mind.”

  “Please come down,” Snake said again. “You did a very nice job on Swift and Squirrel and I’d like to thank you.”

  “That’s thanks enough, mistress.”

  “Don’t call me that. My name’s Snake. What’s yours?”

  But the child was gone.

  People from town, both patients and messengers, already waited to see her when she reached the top of the cliff, leading Swift. She would get no leisurely breakfast today.

  She saw a good deal of Mountainside before evening. For a few hours at a stretch she worked hard, busy and hurried but content, and then as she finished with one patient and went to hear about the next, apprehension swept over her and she thought that this time she might be asked to help someone who was dying, someone like Jesse whom she could not help at all.

  Today, that did not happen.

  In the evening she rode Swift north along the river, passing the town on her left, as the glow of the sun sank past the clouds and touched the west mountain peaks. The long shadows crept toward her as she reached the mayor’s pasture and stables. Seeing no one around, she took Swift into the barn herself, unsaddled her, and began to brush her smooth dappled coat. She was not particularly anxious to return to the mayor’s residence and its atmosphere of dogged loyalty and pain.

  “Mistress, that’s not for you to do. Let me. You go on up the hill.”

  “No, you come on down,” Snake said to the disembodied whispery voice. “You can help. And don’t call me mistress.”

  “Go on, now, mistress, please.”

  Snake brushed Swift’s shoulder and did not answer. When nothing happened she thought the child had gone; then she heard a rustling in the hay above her. On impulse she stroked the brush backwards across Swift’s flank. An instant later the child was beside her, taking the brush gently from her hand.

  “You see, mistress—”

  “‘Snake.’”

  “—This is no job for you. You know healing, I know horse-brushing.”

  Snake smiled.

  The little girl was only nine or ten, small and spare. She had not looked up at Snake; now she brushed Swift’s ruffled hair straight again, her face turned down and close to the mare’s side. She had bright red hair, and dirty, chewed fingernails.

  “You’re right,” Snake said. “You are better at that than I am.”

  The child was silent for a moment. “You fooled me,” she said sullenly, without turning around.

  “A little,” Snake admitted. “But I had to or you wouldn’t let me thank you face to face.”

  The child spun around, glaring up. “Then thank me!” she cried.

  The left side of her face was twisted with a terrible scar.

  Third-degree burns, Snake thought. The poor child—! And then she thought: If a healer had been near, the scar would not have been so bad.

  But at the same time she noticed the bruise along the right side of the little girl’s face. Snake knelt and the child shrank back from any contact, turning so the scar would be less visible. Snake touched the bruise gently.

  “I heard the stablemaster yelling at someone this morning,” Snake said. “It was you, wasn’t it? He hit you.”

  The child turned back and stared at her, her right eye wide, the left held partly closed by scar tissue.

  “I’m all right,” she said. Then she slid out of Snake’s hands and ran up a ladder into the darkness.

  “Please come back,” Snake called. But the child had disappeared, and even when Snake followed her into the loft she could not find her.

  Snake hiked up the trail to the residence, her shadow pushed back and forth by the swaying of the lantern she carried. She thought about the nameless little girl ashamed to come into the light. The bruise was in a bad spot, just at the temple. But she had not flinched from Snake’s touch—at least not the touch to the bruise—and she had none of the symptoms of a concussion. Snake did not have to worry about the child’s immediate health. But in the future?

  Snake wanted to help somehow, but she knew that if she had the stablemaster reprimanded, the little girl would be left with the consequences when Snake went away.

  Snake climbed the stairs to the mayor’s room.

  Brian looked exhausted, but the mayor was fresh. Most of the swelling had left his leg. The punctures had scabbed over but Brian was doing a good job of keeping the main wound open and clean.

  “When can I get up?” the mayor asked. “I have work to do. People to see. Disputes to settle.”

  “You can get up any time,” Snake said. “If you don’t mind having to stay in bed three times as long afterwards.”

  “I insist—”

  “Just stay in bed,” Snake said tiredly.

  She knew he would disobey. Brian, as usual, followed her to the hall.

  “If the wound bleeds in the night, come get me,” she said. She knew it would, if the mayor got up, and she did not want the old servant to have to deal with the injury alone.

  “He is all right? He will be?”

  “Yes, if he doesn’t push himself too hard. He’s mending fairly well.”

  “Thank you, healer.”

  “Where’s Gabriel?”

  “He does not come up here any more.”

  “Brian, what’s the matter between him and his father?”

  “I’m sorry, healer, I cannot say.”

  You won’t, you mean, Snake thought.

  Snake stood looking out over the dark valley. She did not feel like going to sleep yet. That was one of the things she did not much like about her proving year: most of the time, she went to bed alone. Too many people in the places she had gone knew about healers by reputation only, and were afraid of her. Even Arevin feared her at the beginning, and by the time his fear ebbed, and their mutual respect changed to attraction, Snake had to leave. They had no chance together.

  She leaned her forehead against the cool glass.

  When Snake first crossed the desert, it was to explore, to see the places healers had not visited in decades or that they had never vi
sited before. She had been presumptuous, perhaps, or even foolish, to do what her teachers no longer did and no longer considered doing. There were not even enough healers for the people on this side of the desert. If Snake succeeded on her visit to the city, all that might change. But Jesse’s name was the only difference between Snake and any other healer to ask Center for knowledge. If she failed—Her teachers were good people, tolerant of differences and eccentricities, but how they would react to the errors Snake had made, she did not know.

  The knock at her door came as a relief, for it interrupted her thoughts.

  “Come in.”

  Gabriel entered, and she was struck once more by his beauty.

  “Brian tells me my father’s doing well.”

  “Well enough.”

  “Thank you for helping him. I know he can be difficult.” He hesitated, glanced around, shrugged. “Well… I just came in to see if there’s anything I can do for you.”

  Despite his preoccupation, he seemed gentle and pleasant, qualities that attracted Snake as much as his physical beauty. And she was lonely. She decided to accept his well-mannered offer.

  “Yes,” she said. “Thanks.” She stopped before him, touched his cheek, took his hand and led him toward a couch. A flask of wine and some glasses stood on a low table near the window.

  Snake realized that Gabriel was blushing scarlet.

  If she did not know all the desert customs, she knew those of the mountains: she had not overstepped her privileges as a guest, and he had made the offer. She faced Gabriel and took his arms just above the elbows. Now he was quite pale.

  “Gabriel, what’s the matter?”

  “I… I misspoke. I didn’t mean—If you like I can send someone to you—”

  She frowned. “If ‘someone’ was all I wanted I could have hired them from town. I wanted someone I like.”

  He gazed at her, with a quick faint grateful smile. Perhaps he had decided to stop repressing his beard and grow it out at the same time he decided to leave his father’s house, for his cheeks showed a trace of fine red-gold hair.

  “Thank you for that,” he said.

  She guided him to the couch, made him sit down, and sat beside him. “What’s wrong?”