All in an instant, she froze and the horses screamed and Snake heard the furious echoing snarl of a big cat. Swift rushed past the healer and knocked her down. As Snake struggled back to her feet to grab the bridle she glimpsed the black panther, lashing its tail at the entrance of the cave. It snarled again and Swift reared, pulling Snake off her feet. Melissa tried to hold Squirrel as pony and child backed quivering into a corner. The panther sprang toward them. Snake caught her breath as it brushed by like the wind itself, and its sleek coat touched her hand. The panther leaped four meters up the back wall and disappeared through a narrow fissure.
Melissa laughed shakily with relief and release of terror. Swift blew out her breath in a high, loud, frightened snort.
“Good gods,” Snake said.
“I heard—I heard somebody say wild animals are as scared of you as you are of them,” Melissa said. “But I don’t think I believe it any more.”
Snake unfastened the lantern from Swift’s saddle and held it high, toward the fissure, wondering if human beings could follow where a big cat led. She mounted the skittish mare and balanced herself standing on the saddle. Melissa took Swift’s reins and calmed her.
“What are you doing?”
Snake leaned against the cave wall, stretching to cast the lantern’s light into the passageway.
“We can’t stay here,” she said. “We’ll die of thirst or starve. Maybe there’s a way to the city through here.” She could not see very far into the opening; she was too far below it. But the panther had vanished. Snake heard her own voice echo and return as if there were many chambers beyond the narrow crack. “Or a way to something.” She turned and slid down into the saddle, dismounted, and untacked the gray mare.
“Snake,” Melissa said softly.
“Yes?”
“Look—cover the lantern—” Melissa pointed to the rock over the entrance of the cave. Snake shielded the lantern, and the indistinct luminous shape brightened and reached toward her. She felt a quick chill up her spine. She held out the lantern and moved closer to the form.
“It’s a drawing,” she said. It had only appeared to move; it was a spidery shape crawling against the wall, merely paint. A clever optical illusion that now, though Snake knew better, looked as if it were creeping toward her.
“I wonder what it’s for.” Melissa’s voice, too, whispered against the rock.
“Maybe it’s to lead people out—that would mean there is something farther inside.”
“But what about Swift and Squirrel? We can’t leave them here.”
“If we don’t find something for them to eat,” Snake said gently, “they’ll starve too.”
Melissa looked up toward the panther’s ledge, the blue light ghostly on her scarred face.
“Melissa,” Snake said suddenly, “do you hear something?” It was a change, but she could not figure out what it was. The black panther, screaming in the distance? Whoever had painted the spider symbol on the wall? Her fingers curled around the handle of the knife on her belt.
“The wind stopped!” Melissa said. She ran toward the cave entrance.
Snake followed close behind, at every instant ready to pull Melissa back from the storm’s violence. But her daughter was right: what she had heard was not a sound but the abrupt end of a sound she had become accustomed to.
Nothing happened. Outside, the air was absolutely still. The low dust clouds had swept across the desert and disappeared, leaving puffy, towering thunderheads arrayed around with rich blue sky. Snake stepped out into the strange luminosity of the morning, and a cold breeze fluttered the robe at her ankles.
All at once, the rain began.
Snake ran out into the drops, lifting her arms to them like a child. Squirrel trotted past her and broke into a gallop. Swift sped by him, and they cavorted and bucked like foals. Melissa stood still, gazing upward, letting the rain wash her face.
The clouds, a long, wide bank of them, passed slowly overhead, now shedding rain, now breaking for an instant of hummingbird-bright sun. Snake and Melissa finally retreated to the shelter of the rocks, soaked and chilly and happy. A triple rainbow arched across the sky. Snake sighed and sank down on her heels to watch it. She was so wrapped in awe of the colors, as they alternated back and forth through the spectrum, that she did not notice exactly when Melissa sat close beside her. First she was not there, then she was, and Snake slipped her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. This time Melissa relaxed against her, not quite so poised to tear herself away from any human contact.
The clouds passed, the rainbow faded, and Squirrel trotted back to Snake, so wet that the texture of his stripes, as well as their color, was visible. Snake scratched him behind the ears and under the jaw; then for the first time in perhaps half an hour looked out across the desert.
In the direction from which the clouds had come, a pale, delicate green already softened the low black hills. The desert plants grew so quickly that Snake imagined she could almost see the boundary slipping nearer like a gentle tide, following the progress of the rain.
10
Snake realized reluctantly that she could not stay at Center. It was simply too dangerous to spend any time exploring the mountain caves, though they drew her strongly. They might lead eventually to the city, but they might as easily trap her, and Melissa, in a mesh of sterile stone tunnels. The rain offered a single reprieve: if Snake did not accept it, she and her daughter, the horses and the serpents, would have no second chance.
Somehow it did not seem fair or right to Snake that her return to the mountains was as easy as a pleasure trip through meadowlands. For that was what the desert metamorphosed into after a rain. All day the horses snatched mouthfuls of tender leaves as they walked, while their riders picked great bouquets of honeycups and sucked the flowers’ ends for their nectar. Pollen hung heavy in the air. Leading the horses, Snake and Melissa walked far into the night, while the aurora borealis danced; the desert became luminous and neither horses nor riders seemed tired. Snake and Melissa ate at random intervals, chewing on dry fruit or jerky as they traveled; near dawn, they flung themselves on soft, lush grass where only sand had been a few hours before. They slept a short while and woke at sunrise, refreshed.
The plants on which they rested had already budded. By afternoon flowers covered the dunes in drifts of color, one hill white, the next bright purple, a third multicolored in streamers of species that led from crest to valley. The flowers moderated the heat, and the sky was clearer than Snake had ever seen it. Even the contours of the dunes were altered by the rain, from soft rolling billows to sharp-edged eroded ridges, marked by the narrow canyons of short-lived streams.
The third morning the dust clouds began to gather again. The rain had all seeped away or evaporated; the plants had captured all they could. Now dryness mottled the leaves with brown as the plants shriveled and died. Their seeds drifted across Snake’s path in eddies of the wind.
The vast desert’s peace wrapped itself around her shoulders, but the eastern foothills of the central mountain range rose before her, reminding her again of failure. She did not want to go home.
Swift, responding to some unconscious movement of Snake’s body, her reluctance to go on, stopped abruptly. Snake did not urge her forward. A few paces farther along, Melissa reined in and looked back.
“Snake?”
“Oh, Melissa, what am I taking you to?”
“We’re going home,” Melissa said, trying to soothe her.
“I might not even have a home anymore.”
“They won’t send you away. They couldn’t.”
Snake wiped tears fiercely away on her sleeve, the fabric silky against her cheek. Hopelessness and frustration would give her no comfort and no relief. She leaned down against Swift’s neck, clenching her fists in the mare’s long black mane.
“You said it was your home, you said they were all your family. So how could they send you away?”
“They wouldn’t,” Snake whispered. “But i
f they said I couldn’t be a healer, how could I stay?”
Melissa reached up and patted her awkwardly. “It’ll be all right. I know it will. How can I make you not be so sad?”
Snake let out her breath in a long sigh. She looked up. Melissa gazed at her steadily, never flinching. Snake turned and kissed Melissa’s hand; she enfolded it in her own.
“You trust me,” she said. “And maybe that’s what I need most right now.”
Melissa half smiled in embarrassment and encouragement and they started onward, but after a few paces Snake reined Swift in again. Melissa stopped too, looking up at her with worry.
“Whatever happens,” Snake said, “whatever my teachers decide about me, you’re still their daughter as much as mine. You can still be a healer. If I have to go away—”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Melissa—”
“I don’t care. I never wanted to be a healer anyway,” Melissa said belligerently. “I want to be a jockey. I wouldn’t want to stay with people who made you leave.”
The intensity of Melissa’s loyalty troubled Snake. She had never known anyone who was so completely oblivious to self-interest. Perhaps Melissa could not yet think of herself as someone with a right to her own dreams; perhaps so many of her dreams had been taken from her that she no longer dared to have them. Snake hoped that somehow she could give them back to her daughter.
“Never mind,” she said. “We aren’t home yet. We can worry about it then.”
Melissa’s set mask of decision relaxed slightly, and they rode on.
By the end of the third day the tiny plants had fallen to dust beneath the horses’ hooves. A fine brown haze covered the desert. Now and then a cloud of feathery seeds drifted by, cast to the air. When the wind was stronger, heavier seeds skittered along the sand like tides. When night fell Snake and Melissa had already entered the foothills, and the desert had turned bare and black behind them.
They had returned to the mountains traveling straight west, the quickest way to safety. Here, the foothills rose more gently than the steep cliffs at Mountainside, far to the north; the climb was easier but much longer than at the northern pass. At the first crest, before they started toward the next, higher, hills, Melissa reined Squirrel in and turned around, gazing back at the darkening desert. After a moment she grinned at Snake. “We made it,” she said.
Snake smiled slowly in return. “You’re right,” she said. “We did.” Her most immediate fear, of the storms, dissolved slowly in the clearer, colder air of the hills. The clouds hung oppressively low, disfiguring the sky. No one, caravannaire or mountain dweller, would see even a patch of blue, or a star, or the moon, until next spring, and the sun’s disc would fade duller and duller. Now, sinking beneath the mountain peaks, it cast Snake’s shadow back toward the darkening stark sand plain. Beyond the reach of the most violent wind, beyond the heat and waterless sand, Snake urged Swift on, toward the mountains where they all belonged.
Snake kept a lookout for a place to camp. Before the horses descended very far she heard the welcome trickle of running water. The trail led past a small hollow, the source of a spring, a spot that looked as if it had been used as a campsite, but long ago. The water sustained a few scrubby forever trees and some grass for the horses. In the center of a bare-beaten patch of ground the earth was smudged with charcoal, but Snake had no firewood. She knew better than to try chopping down the forever trees, unlike some travelers who had left futile ax marks, now grown half together, in the rough bark. The wood beneath was as hard and resilient as steel.
Night travel in the mountains was as difficult as day travel in the desert, and the easy return from the city had not wiped out the strain of the complete journey. Snake dismounted. They would stop for the night, and at sunrise—
At sunrise, what? She had been in a hurry for so many days, rushing against sickness or death or the implacable sands, that she had to stop and make herself realize that she had no reason for hurrying any more, no overwhelming need to get from here to anywhere else, nor to sleep a few hours and rise yawning at sunrise or sunset. Her home awaited her, and she was not at all sure it would still be her home once she reached it. She had nothing to take back but failure and bad news and one violent-tempered sand viper that might or might not be useful. She untied the serpent case and laid it gently on the ground.
When the horses were rubbed down, Melissa knelt by the packs and started getting out food and the paraffin stove. This was the first time since they started out that they had made a proper camp. Snake sat on her heels by her daughter to help with dinner.
“I’ll do it,” Melissa said. “Why don’t you rest?”
“That doesn’t seem quite fair,” Snake said.
“I don’t mind.”
“That isn’t the point.”
“I like to do things for you,” Melissa said.
Snake put her hands on Melissa’s shoulders, not forcing or even urging her to turn. “I know you do. But I like to do things for you, too.”
Melissa’s fingers fumbled with buckles and straps. “That isn’t right,” she said finally. “You’re a healer, and I—I work in a stable. It’s right for me to do things for you.”
“Where does it say that a healer has more rights than someone who used to work in a stable? You’re my daughter, and we’re a partnership.”
Melissa flung herself around and hugged Snake tightly, hiding her face against her shirt. Snake embraced her and held her, rocking back and forth on the hard ground, comforting Melissa as if she were the much younger child she had never had the chance to be.
After a few minutes Melissa’s arms loosened and she pulled back, self-contained again, glancing away in embarrassment.
“I don’t like not doing anything.”
“When did you ever have the chance to try?”
Melissa shrugged.
“We can take turns,” Snake said, “or split the chores every day. Which would you rather do?”
Melissa met her gaze with a quick, relieved smile. “Split the chores every day.” She glanced around as if seeing the camp for the first time. “Maybe there’s dead wood farther on,” she said. “And we need some water.” She reached for the woodstrap and the waterskin.
Snake took the waterskin from her. “I’ll meet you back here in a few minutes. If you don’t find anything don’t spend a lot of time looking. Whatever falls during the winter probably gets used up by the first traveler every spring. If there is a first traveler every spring.” The place not only looked as though no one had been here for many years, it had an undefinable aura of abandonment.
The spring flowed swiftly past the camp and there was no sign now of mud where Swift and Squirrel had drunk, but Snake walked a short distance upstream anyway. Near the source of the spring she put the waterskin down and climbed to the top of a tremendous boulder that provided a view of most of the surrounding area. No one else was in sight, no horses, no camps, no smoke. Snake was finally almost willing to let herself believe the crazy was gone, or never really there at all, a coincidence of her meeting one real crazy and a misguided and incompetent thief. Even if they were the same person, she had seen no sign of him since the street fight. That was not as long ago as it seemed, but perhaps it was long enough.
Snake climbed back down to the spring and held the waterskin just beneath the silvery surface. Water gurgled and bubbled into the opening and slipped over her hands and through her fingers, cold and quick. Water was a different being in the mountains. The leather bag bulged up full. Snake looped a couple of half hitches around its neck and slung the strap over her shoulder.
Melissa had not yet returned to camp. Snake puttered around for a few minutes, getting together a meal of dried provisions that looked the same even after they had been soaked. They tasted the same, too, but they were a little bit easier to eat. She unrolled the blankets. She opened the serpent case but Mist remained inside. The cobra often stayed in her dark compartment after a long trip, and grew b
ad-tempered if disturbed. Snake felt uneasy with Melissa out of sight. She could not dispel her discomfort by reminding herself that Melissa was tough and independent. Instead of opening Sand’s compartment so the rattler could come out, or even checking on the sand viper, a task she did not much enjoy, she refastened the case and stood up to call her daughter. Suddenly Swift and Squirrel shied violently, snorting in fear, Melissa cried “Snake! Look out!” in a voice of warning and terror, and rocks and dirt clattered down the side of the hill.
Snake ran toward the sound of scuffling, the knife on her belt half-drawn. She rounded a boulder and slid to a stop.
Melissa struggled violently in the grasp of a tall, cadaverous figure in desert robes. He had one hand over her mouth and the other around her, pinning her arms. She fought and kicked, but the man did not react in either pain or anger.
“Tell her to stop,” he said. “I won’t hurt her.” His words were thick and slurred, as if he were intoxicated. His robes were torn and soiled and his hair stood out wildly. The irises of his eyes seemed paler than the bloodshot whites, giving him a blank, inhuman look. Snake knew immediately that this was the crazy, even before she saw the ring that had cut her forehead when he attacked her on the streets of Mountainside.
“Let her go.”
“I’ll trade you,” he said. “Even trade.”
“We don’t have much, but it’s yours. What do you want?”
“The dreamsnake,” he said. “No more than that.” Melissa struggled again and the man moved, gripping her more tightly and more cruelly.
“All right,” Snake said. “I haven’t any choice, have I? He’s in my case.”
He followed her back to camp. The old mystery was solved, a new one created.
Snake pointed to the case. “The top compartment,” she said.
The crazy sidled toward it, pulling Melissa awkwardly along. He reached toward the clasp, then jerked back his hand. He was trembling.
“You do it,” he said to Melissa. “For you it’s safe.”
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