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.
“Let her go,” she said.
“I’ll trade you. 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 gripped her 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.”
The crazy sidled toward it, pulling Melissa along. He reached toward the clasp, then jerked back. He was trembling.
“You do it,” he said to Melissa. “For you it’s safe.”
Without looking at Snake, Melissa reached for the clasp. She was very pale, for unlike Snake she was not immune to venoms.
“Stop it,” Snake said. “There’s nothing in there.”
Melissa let her hand fall to her side, looking at Snake with mixed relief and fear.
“Let her go,” Snake said again. “If the dreamsnake is what you want, I can’t help. He was killed before you even found my camp.”
Narrowing his eyes, he stared at her, then turned and reached for the serpent case. He flicked the catch open and kicked the whole thing over.
The grotesque sand viper lurched out in a tangle, writhing and hissing. It raised its head as if to strike, but both the crazy and Melissa stood frozen. The viper slid away. Snake sprang forward and pulled Melissa to safety, but the crazy did not even notice.
“Trick me!” Suddenly he laughed hysterically and raised his hands to the sky. “That would give me what I need!” Laughing and crying, with tears streaming down his face, he sank to the ground.
Snake moved quickly toward the rocks, but the sand viper had disappeared. Scowling, resting her hand on her knife, she stood over the crazy. The vipers were rare enough on the desert: they were nonexistent in the foothills. Now she had nothing at all to take back to her teachers.
“Get up,” she said. Her voice was harsh.
The crazy remained in his crumpled heap, crying quietly.
“What’s wrong with him?” Melissa asked.
“I don’t know.” Snake toed him in the side. “You. Stop it. Get up.”
He did not reply or react.
“He jumped out of a big pile of rocks. I didn’t even think to watch for anybody there, it would have been so hot.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Melissa said. “But he let that viper go.”
The man moved weakly at their feet. His wrists protruded from ragged sleeves; his arms and hands were like bare branches.
“I should have been able to get away from him,” Melissa said in disgust.
“He’s stronger than he looks,” Snake said. “For gods’ sake, man, stop all that howling. We’re not going to do anything to you.”
“I’m already dead,” he whispered. “You were my last chance so I’m dead.”
“Your last chance for what?”
“For happiness.”
“That’s a lousy kind of happiness,” Melissa said, “that makes you wreck things and jump out on people.”
He glared up at them, tears streaking his skeletal face. “Why did you come back? I couldn’t follow you any more. I wanted to go home to die, if they’d let me. But you came back. Right back to me.” He buried his face in his tattered sleeves, and his shoulders trembled and shook.
Snake knelt down and urged him to his feet. She had to support most of his weight herself. Melissa stood warily by, then shrugged and came to help. At their half-settled camp they lowered him to the ground and pillowed his head on a saddle, where he lay staring blankly at the sky.
“He isn’t going to do anything, is he?” Melissa asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“He made me drop the firewood.” Clearly disgusted, Melissa strode toward the rocks.
“Melissa—”
She glanced back.
“I hope that sand viper just kept on going, but he might still be over there. We don’t really need a fire.”
Melissa hesitated so long that Snake wondered if she preferred the company of the sand viper to that of the crazy, but in the end she shrugged and went the other way.
Snake held the water flask to the crazy’s lips.
“What’s your name?”
She waited, but he did not answer. She had begun to wonder if he had gone catatonic when he shrugged, deeply and elaborately.
“You must have a name.”
“I suppose,” he said. “I suppose I must have had one once.”
“Why did you want my dreamsnake? Are you dying?”
“I told you that I was.”
“Of what?”
“Need…”
Snake frowned. “Need for what?”
“For a dreamsnake.”
Snake sighed. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.”
He jerked himself upright, scrabbling at the neck of his robe until it ripped, baring his throat. “That’s all you need to know!”
Snaked looked closer. Among the rough dark hairs of the crazy’s growing beard she could see numerous tiny scars, all in pairs, clustered over the carotid artery. She rocked back, startled. A dreamsnake’s fangs had left those marks, she had no doubt of that. But she could not even imagine, much less recall, a disease so severe and agonizing that it would require that much venom to ease the pain yet in the end leave its victim alive. Those scars had been made over a considerable time, for some were old and white, some so fresh and pink and shiny that they must still have been scabbed over when he first rifled her camp.
“Now do you understand?”
“No,” Snake said. “I don’t.”
She waited again, impatient but unwilling to take the chance of sidetracking him.
The crazy licked his lips. “Water…please?”
Snake held the flask to his lips and he drank greedily. He tried to sit up but his elbow slipped beneath him and he lay still, without even trying to speak. Snake’s patience ended.
“Why have you been bitten so often by a dreamsnake?”
He looked at her, his pale, bloodshot eyes quite steady. “Because I was a good and useful supplicant and I took much treasure to the broken dome. I was rewarded often.”
“Rewarded!”
His expression softened. “Oh, yes.” He was no longer looking at but through her. “With happiness and the forgetfulness of dreams.”
He closed his eyes and would not speak again, even when Snake prodded him roughly.
She joined Melissa, who had found a few dry branches on the other side of camp and now sat by a tiny fire.
“Someone has a dreamsnake,” Snake said. “They’re using the venom as a pleasure drug.”
Melissa looked up at her, her twisted frown showing that she understood all that meant to Snake. “That’s stupid,” she said. “It’s selfish. Why don’t they use something that grows around here? There’s lots of stuff.”
“I don’t know,” Snake said. “I don’t know for myself what the venom feels like. Where they got the dreamsnake is what I’d like to know. They didn’t get it from a healer, not voluntarily.” Melissa stirred the soup. The firelight turned her red h
air golden.
“Snake,” she finally said, “when you came back to the stable that night—after you fought with him…he would have killed you if you’d let him. Tonight he would’ve killed me if he’d had a chance. If he has some friends and they decided to take something from a healer…”
“I know.” Snake scratched intersecting lines on the ground with a sharp pebble, a meaningless design. “That’s almost the only explanation that makes any sense.”
It must have been midnight when Snake awoke. The fire had gone out, leaving the camp pitch dark. Snake lay without moving, expecting the sound of the crazy trying to free himself from the loose ropes with which she had bound him.
Melissa cried out in her sleep. Snake slid toward her, groping in the dark, and touched her shoulder.
“It’s all right, Melissa,” Snake whispered. “Wake up, you’re just having a bad dream.”
After a moment Melissa sat bolt upright.
“What—?”
Snake touched her again and she flinched violently.
“Melissa, it’s me, it’s Snake. You were having a nightmare.”
Her voice shook. “I thought I was back in Mountainside. I thought Ras—”
Snake held her, stroking her soft curly hair. “I know. But he can’t hurt you any more.”
She felt Melissa nod.
“Do you want me to stay here with you?” Snake asked. “Or would that bring the nightmares back?”
Melissa hesitated. “Please stay,” she whispered.
Snake lay down and pulled both blankets over them, for the night had turned cold. Melissa huddled against her, and a few moments later Snake knew by her breathing that she was asleep.
The crazy’s voice was loud and whiny, but much stronger than it had been the night before.
“Let me up. Untie me. You going to torture me to death? I need to piss. I’m thirsty.”
Snake threw off the blankets and sat up. She was tempted to offer him the drink of water first, but decided that was the unworthy fantasy of being awakened at dawn. She got up and stretched, yawning.
The crazy pulled at the ropes. “Well? You going to let me up?”
“In a minute.” She used the privy they had dug behind some bushes, then returned to camp and untied the crazy. He sat up, rubbing his hands together and grumbling, then rose and started away.
“I don’t want to invade your privacy,” Snake said, “but don’t go out of my sight.”
He snarled something unintelligible but did not let the natural screen hide him completely. Scuffing back to Snake, he squatted down and grabbed for the water flask, drank thirstily, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and looked hungrily around.
“Is there breakfast?”
“I thought you were planning to die.”
He snorted.
“You can talk for your breakfast,” Snake said.
The man looked at the ground and sighed. “All right,” he said. He rested his forearms on his knees, letting his hands droop. His fingers trembled.
Snake waited, but he did not speak.
Two healers had vanished in the past few years. Snake still thought of them by their child-names, the names by which she had known them until they left on their proving years. She had not been extremely close to Philippe, but Jenneth had been her favorite older sister, one of the three people she had been closest to. She could still feel the shock of the winter and spring of Jenneth’s testing year, as the days passed and the community slowly realized she would not return. They never found out what happened to her. Sometimes when a healer died a messenger would bring the bad news to the station, and sometimes even the serpents were returned. But the healers never had any message from Jenneth. Perhaps the crazy slumping before Snake had leapt on her in a dark alley somewhere, and killed her for her dreamsnake.
“Well?” Snake asked sharply.
The crazy started. “What?” He squinted at her, struggling to focus his eyes.
Snake kept her temper. “Where are you from?”
“South.”
“What town?”
He shrugged. “No town. No town left, there. Just the broken dome.”
“Where did you get the dreamsnake?”
He shrugged.
Snake leaped to her feet and grabbed his dirty robe. The cloth at his throat bunched in her fist as she pulled him upright. “Answer me!”
A tear trickled down his face. “How can I? I don’t understand you. Where did I get it? I never had one. They were always there, but not mine. They were there when I went there and they were there when I left. Why would I need yours if I had some of my own?”
The crazy sank to the ground as Snake slowly unclenched her fingers.
“‘Some’ of your own?”
He held out his hands, raising them to let the sleeves fall back to his elbows. His forearms, too, at the inside of the elbow, at the wrists, everywhere the veins were prominent, showed the scars of bites.
“It’s best if they strike you all over at once,” he said dreamily. “In the throat, that’s quick and sure, that’s for emergencies, for sustenance. That’s all North will give you, usually. But all over, if you do something special for him, that’s what he gives you.” The crazy hugged himself and rubbed his arms as if he were cold. He flushed with excitement, rubbing harder and faster. “Then you feel, you feel—everything lights up, you’re on fire—everything—it goes on and on.”
“Stop it!”
He let his hands drop to the ground and looked at her, blank-eyed again. “What?”
“This North—he has dreamsnakes.”
The crazy nodded eagerly, letting memory excite him again.
“A lot of them?”
“A whole pitful. Sometimes he lets someone down in the pit, he rewards them—but never me, not since the first time.”
Snake sat down, gazing at the crazy yet at nothing.
“Where does he get them?” she asked. “Do the city people trade with him? Does he deal with the offworlders?”
“Get them? They’re there. North has them.”
Snake was shaking as hard as the crazy. She clasped her hands around her knees, tensing all her muscles then slowly making herself relax. Her hands steadied.
“Why did you come right back to me when you don’t have any?” the crazy said plaintively. “Why didn’t you let me die?”
“You aren’t about to die,” Snake said. “You’re going to live until you take me to North and the dreamsnakes. After that whether you live or die is your own business.”
The crazy stared at her. “But North sent me away.”
“You don’t have to obey him anymore,” Snake said. “He has no more power over you, if he won’t give you what you want.”
The crazy stared at her for a long time, blinking, frowning in deep thought. Suddenly his face grew serene and joyful. He started toward her, stumbled, and crawled. On his knees beside her he caught her hands.
“I’ll help you get some of the dreamsnakes, and then you’ll give me one of my own.” He smiled. “To use any time.”
Snake pulled her hands back as the crazy bent to kiss them. “Yes,” she said, through clenched teeth.
Now she had promised him, and though she knew it was the only way she could get his cooperation, she felt as if she had committed a terrible sin.
Snake was glad to be back in the mountains where they could travel by day. The morning was cool and eerie, the trails narrow and fog-laden. The horses waded through the mist like aquatic creatures, tendrils swirling around their legs. Snake inhaled deeply until the cold air hurt her lungs. She could smell the fog, and the rich humus, and the faint spicy tang of pitch. The world lay green and gray around her, for the leaves on the overhanging trees had not yet begun to turn. Higher on the mountain, the darker evergreens looked almost black.
It was a relief not to have to ride double with the crazy. Mounted on a lop-eared old nag, he ambled along behind. Just after breaking camp they had met two youngsters, herders hunting
strays, and Snake had bought one of their pack horses. She had had to press payment on them. Their reluctance to let her have the animal had not been an attempt to raise the price. Rather, they were embarrassed. Well, no less was Snake. But the crazy had refused any other horse; only this one was calm enough.
Now, even farther behind than usual, audible but not visible, the crazy talked to himself and sang softly and off key. His voice grew fainter and fainter. Impatiently, Snake reined Slate in to let him catch up. Melissa stopped even more unwillingly. She would not ride any closer to him than she had to.
After several minutes, the old horse shambled through the mist, eyes half-closed and ears flopping. The crazy hummed tunelessly.
“Does the trail look familiar yet?”
The crazy gazed smiling at her. “It’s all the same to me,” he said, and laughed.
Snake sighed. She had no idea if the broken dome was half a day’s ride or half a year’s away, from what the crazy had told her. Because of the freshness of his scars she knew it could not be too far, but she wished she was at least sure they were on the right trail. She let the crazy’s horse pass them so he could lead.
“I don’t think he’s taking us anyplace, Snake,” Melissa said. “I think he’s just leading us around so we have to take care of him. We ought to leave him here and go somewhere else.”
The crazy stiffened. Slowly, he turned around. The old horse stopped. Snake was surprised to see a tear spill from the crazy’s eye and drip down his cheek.
“Don’t leave me,” he said. His expression and his tone were simply pitiful. Before this he had not seemed capable of caring so much about anything at all, even the dreamsnakes. He gazed at Melissa, blinking his lashless eyelids. “You’re right not to trust me, little one,” he said. “But please don’t abandon me.” His eyes unfocused and his words came from very far away. “Stay with me to the broken dome, and we’ll both have our own dreamsnakes. Surely your mistress will give you one.” He leaned toward her, reaching out, his fingers curved like claws. “You forget pains and troubles, you’ll forget your scars—”
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