Dreamsnake

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  I look like a bandit, she thought. Or a clown.

  But the laughter she deserved was of contempt, not joy. Tear tracks streaked the dirt on her face. She touched them, still staring down at her reflection.

  Snake wished she could forget the past few days, but they would never leave her. She could still feel the dry fragility of Jesse’s skin, and her light, questioning touch; she could still hear her voice. And she could feel the pain of Jesse’s death, which she could do nothing to prevent, and nothing to ease. She did not want to see that pain or feel it again.

  Plunging her hands into the cold water, Snake splashed it across her face, washing away the black dust, the sweat, and even the tracks of her tears.

  She led Swift quietly along the shore, passing tents and silent campsites where the caravannaires still slept. When she reached Grum’s camp she stopped, but the tent flaps were closed. Snake did not want to awaken the old woman or her grandchildren. Farther back from the shore Snake could see the horse corral. Squirrel, her tiger-pony, stood dozing with Grum’s horses. His black and gold coat showed the effects of a week of energetic brushing, he was fat and content, and he no longer favored his shoeless foot. Snake decided to leave him with Grum another day, and disturb neither the tiger-pony nor the old caravannaire this morning.

  Swift followed Snake along the shore, nibbling occasionally at her hip. Snake scratched the mare behind the ears, where sweat had dried underneath the bridle. Arevin’s people had given her a sack of hay-cubes for Squirrel, but Grum had been feeding the pony, so the fodder should still be in camp.

  “Food and a good brushing and sleep, that’s what we both need,” she said to the horse.

  She had made her camp away from the others, beyond an outcropping of rock, in an area not much favored by the traders. It was safer for people and for her serpents if they were kept apart. Snake rounded the sloping stone ridge.

  Everything was changed. She had left her bedroll rumpled and slept-in, but everything else had still been packed. Now someone had folded her blankets and piled them up, stacked her extra clothes nearby, and laid her cooking utensils in a row in the sand. She frowned and went closer. Healers were regarded with deference and even awe; she had not even thought of asking Grum to watch her belongings as well as her pony. That someone might bother her equipment while she was gone had never even occurred to her.

  Then she saw that the utensils were dented, the metal plate bent in half, the cup crushed, the spoon twisted. She dropped Swift’s reins and hurried to the neat array of her belongings. The folded blankets were slashed and torn. She picked up her clean shirt from the pile of clothing, but it was no longer clean. It had been trampled in the mud at the water’s edge. It was old and soft and well worn, frayed and weak in spots, her comfortable, favorite shirt. Now it was ripped up the back and the sleeves were shredded; it was ruined.

  The fodder bag lay in line with the rest of her things, but the scattered hay-cubes were crushed in the sand. Swift nibbled, at the fragments, while Snake stood looking at the wreck around her. She could not understand why anyone would rifle her camp, then leave the ruined gear tidily folded. She could not understand why anyone would rifle her camp at all, for she had little of value. She shook her head. Perhaps someone believed she collected large fees of gold and jewels. Some healers were rewarded richly for their services. Still, there was much honor in the desert and even people who were unprotected by awe, by their professions, thought nothing of leaving valuables unguarded.

  Her torn shirt still in her hand, Snake wandered around what had been her camp, feeling too tired and empty and confused to think about what had happened. Squirrel’s packsaddle leaned against a rock; Snake picked it up for no particular reason except perhaps that it looked undamaged.

  Then she saw that all its side pockets had been slashed open and torn away, though the flaps were secured only by buckles.

  The side pockets had contained all her maps and records, and the journal of her unfinished proving year. She thrust her hands into corners, hoping for even a scrap of paper, but nothing at all remained. Snake flung the saddle to the ground. She hurried around the edges of her camp, looking behind rocks and kicking up the sand, hoping to see white discarded pages or to hear the crackle of paper beneath her feet, but she found nothing, there was nothing left.

  She felt physically assaulted. Anything else she had, her blankets, her clothes, certainly the maps, could be useful to a thief, but the journal was worthless to anyone but her.

  “Damn you!” she cried in a fury, at no one. The mare snorted and shied away, splashing into the pool. Shaking, Snake calmed herself, then turned and held out her hand and walked slowly toward Swift, speaking softly, until the horse let her take the reins. Snake stroked her.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’ll be all right, never mind.” She was speaking as much to herself as to the horse. They were both up to their knees in the clear, cool water. Snake patted the mare’s shoulder, combing the black mane with her fingers. Her vision suddenly blurred and she leaned against Swift’s neck, shaking.

  Listening to the strong steady heartbeat and the mare’s quiet breathing, Snake managed to calm herself. She straightened and waded out of the water. On the bank, she unstrapped the serpent case, then unsaddled the horse and began to rub her down with a piece of the torn blanket. She worked with the grimness of exhaustion. The fancy saddle and bridle, now stained with dust and sweat, could wait, but Snake would not leave Swift dirty and sweaty while she herself rested. “Snake-child, healer-child, dear girl—” Snake turned. Grum hobbled toward her, helping herself along with a gnarled walking stick. One of her grandchildren, a tall ebony young woman, accompanied her, but all Grum’s grandchildren knew better than to try to support the tiny, arthritis-bent old woman.

  Grum’s white headcloth lay askew on her sparse hair. “Dear child, how could I let you pass me? I’ll hear her come in, I thought. Or her pony will smell her and neigh.” Grum’s dark-tanned age-wrinkled face showed extra lines of concern. “Snake-child, we never wanted you to see this alone.”

  “What happened, Grum?”

  “Pauli,” Grum said to her granddaughter, “take care of the healer’s horse.”

  “Yes, Grum.” When Pauli took the reins, she touched Snake’s arm in a gesture of comfort. She picked up the saddle and led Swift back toward Grum’s camp. Holding Snake’s elbow — not for support, but to support her — Grum guided her to a chunk of rock. They sat down and Snake glanced again around her camp, disbelief overcoming exhaustion. She looked at Grum.

  Grum sighed. “It was yesterday, just before dawn. We heard noises and a voice, not yours, and when we came to look we could see a single figure, in desert robes. We thought he was dancing. But when we went closer, he ran away. He broke his lantern in the sand and we couldn’t find him. We found your camp…” Grum shrugged. “We picked up all we could find, but nothing whole was left.”

  Snake looked around in silence, no closer to understanding why anyone would ransack her camp.

  “By morning the wind had blown away the tracks,” Grum said. “The creature must have gone out in the desert, but it was no desert person. We don’t steal. We don’t destroy.”

  “I know, Grum.”

  “You come with me. Breakfast. Sleep. Forget the crazy. We all have to watch for crazies.” She took Snake’s scarred hand in her small, work-hardened one. “But you shouldn’t have come to this alone. No. I should have seen you, Snake-child.”

  “It’s all right, Grum.”

  “Let me help you move to my tents. You don’t want to stay over here anymore.”

  “There’s nothing left to move.” Beside Grum, Snake stood staring at the mess. The old woman patted her hand gently.

  “He wrecked everything, Grum. If he’d taken it all I could understand.”

  “Dear one, nobody understands crazies. They have no reasons.”

  That was exactly why Snake could not believe a real crazy would destroy so much so com
pletely. The damage had been inflicted in a manner so deliberate and, in a strange way, rational, that the madness seemed less the result of insanity than of rage. She shivered again.

  “Come with me,” Grum said. “Crazies appear, they disappear. They’re like sand flies, one summer you hear about them every time you turn around, the next year nothing.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I am,” Grum said. “I know about these things. He won’t come back here, he’ll go somewhere else, but soon we’ll all know to look for him. When we find him we’ll take him to the menders and maybe they can make him well.”

  Snake nodded tiredly. “I hope sp.”

  She slung Squirrel’s saddle over her shoulder and picked up the serpent case. The handle vibrated faintly as Sand slid across himself in his compartment.

  She walked with Grum toward the old woman’s camp, too tired to think anymore about what had happened, listening gratefully to Grum’s soothing words of comfort and sympathy. The loss of Grass, and Jesse’s death, and now this: Snake almost wished she were superstitious, so she could believe she had been cursed. People who believed in curses believed in ways of lifting them. Right now Snake did not know what to think or what to believe in, or how to change the course of misfortune her life had taken.

  “Why did he only steal my journal?” she said abruptly. “Why my maps and my journal?”

  “Maps!” Grum said. “The crazy stole maps? I thought you’d taken them with you. It was a crazy, then.”

  “I guess it was. It must have been.” Still, she did not convince herself.

  “Maps!” Grum said again.

  Grum’s anger and outrage seemed, for the moment, to take over for Snake’s own. But the surprise in the old woman’s voice disturbed her.

  Snake started violently at the sharp tug on her robe. Equally startled, the collector jumped back. Snake relaxed when she saw who it was: one of the gleaners who picked up any bit of metal, wood, cloth, leather, the discards of other camps, and somehow made use of it all. The collectors dressed in multicolored robes of cloth scraps ingeniously sewn together in geometric patterns.

  “Healer, you let us take all that? No good to you—”

  “Ao, go away!” Grum snapped. “Don’t bother the healer now. You should know better.”

  The collector stared at the ground but did not retreat. “She can’t do with it. We can. Let us have it. Clean it up.”

  “This is a bad time to ask.”

  “Never mind, Grum.” Snake started to tell the collector to take everything. Perhaps they could make use of torn blankets and broken spoons; she could not. She did not even want to see any of it again; she did not want to be reminded of what had happened. But the collector’s request drew Snake from her questions and her confusion and back toward reality; she recalled something Grum had said about Ao’s people when Snake first talked to her.

  “Ao, when I vaccinate the others, will you all let me vaccinate you, too?”

  The collector looked doubtful. “Creepty-crawlies, poisons, magics, witches — no, not for us.”

  “It’s none of that. You won’t even see the serpents.”

  “No, not for us.”

  “Then I’ll have to take all that trash out to the middle of the oasis and sink it.”

  “Waste!” the collector cried. “No! Dirty the water? You shame my profession. You shame yourself.”

  “I feel the same way when you won’t let me protect you against disease. Waste. Waste of people’s lives. Unnecessary deaths.”

  The collector peered at her from beneath shaggy eyebrows. “No poisons? No magics?”

  “None.”

  “Go last if you like,” Grum said. “You’ll see it doesn’t kill me.”

  “No creepty-crawlies?”

  Snake could not help laughing. “No.”

  “And then you give us that?” The collector gestured in the direction of Snake’s battered camp.

  “Yes, afterward.”

  “No disease afterward?”

  “Fewer. I can’t stop all. No measles. No scarlet fever. No lockjaw—”

  “Lockjaw! You stop that?”

  “Yes. Not forever but for a long time.”

  “We will come,” the collector said, turned, and walked away.

  In Grum’s camp, Pauli was giving Swift a brisk rub-down while the mare pulled wisps of hay from a bundle. Pauli had the most beautiful hands Snake had ever seen, large yet delicate, long-fingered and strong, uncoarsened by the hard work she did. Even though she was tall, her hands still should have looked too big for her size, but they did not. They were graceful and expressive. She and Grum were as different as two people could be, except for the air of gentleness shared by grandmother and granddaughter, and by all Pauli’s cousins that Snake had met. Snake had not spent enough time in Grum’s camp to know how many of her grandchildren she had with her, or even to know the name of the little girl who sat nearby polishing Swift’s saddle.

  “How’s Squirrel?” Snake asked.

  “Fine and happy, child. You can see him there, under the tree, too lazy to run. But he’s sound again. You, now, you need a bed and rest.”

  Snake watched her tiger-pony, who stood among the summertrees, switching his tail. He looked so comfortable and content that she did not call him.

  Snake was weary but she could feel all her muscles tight across her neck and shoulders. Sleep would be impossible until some of the tension had drained away. She wanted to think about her camp. Perhaps she would decide that it had, as Grum said, simply been vandalized by a crazy. If so, she must understand it and accept it. She was not used to so much happening by chance.

  “I’m going to take a bath, Grum,” she said, “and then you can put me someplace where I won’t be in your way. It won’t be for long.”

  “As long as you are here and we are here. You’re welcome with us, healer-child.”

  Snake hugged her. Grum patted her shoulder.

  Near Grum’s camp one of the springs that fed the oasis sprang from stone and trickled down the rocks. Snake climbed to where sun-warmed water pooled in smooth basins. She could see the whole oasis: five camps on the shore, people, animals. The faint voices of children and the high yap of a dog drifted toward her through the heavy, dusty air. In a ring around the lake the summertrees stood like feathers, like a wreath of pale green silk.

  At her feet, moss softened the rock around a bathing-basin. Snake pulled off her boots and stepped onto the cool living carpet.

  She stripped and waded into the water. It was just below body temperature, pleasant but not shocking in the morning heat. There was a brisker pool higher in the rocks, a warmer one below. Snake lifted a stone from an outlet that allowed overflow water to spill down upon the sand. She knew better than to allow dirty water to continue flowing to the oasis. If she did, several angry caravannaires would come up to tell her to stop. They would do that as quietly and firmly as they would move animals corralled too close to the shore, or ask someone to leave who had the bad manners to relieve himself at water’s edge. Diseases transmitted in fouled water did not exist in the desert.

  Snake slid farther into the tepid water, feeling it rise around her, a pleasurable line crossing her thighs, her hips, her breasts. She lay back against the warm black stone and let tension flow slowly away. The water tickled the back of her neck.

  She thought back over the last few days: somehow the incidents seemed spread over a long span of time. They were embedded in a fog of exhaustion. She looked at her right hand. The ugly bruise was gone, and nothing was left of the sand viper’s bite but two shiny pink puncture scars. She clenched her fist and held it: no stiffness, no weakness.

  Such a short time for so many changes. Snake had never before encountered adversity. Her work and training had not been made easy, but they were possible, and no suspicions or uncertainties or crazies had marred the calm passage of days. She had never failed at anything. Everything had been crystal-clear, right and wrong well d
efined. Snake smiled faintly: if anyone had tried to tell her or the other students that reality was different, fragmentary and contradictory and surprising, she would not have believed. Now she understood the changes she had seen in students older than she, after they came back from their proving years. And, more, she understood why a few had never returned. Not all had died, perhaps not even most. Accidents and crazies were the only dangers that would have no respect for a healer. No, some had realized they were not meant for the healer’s life, and had abandoned it for something else.

  Snake, though, had discovered that no matter what, with all her serpents or none of them, she would always be a healer. The few worst days of self-pity over losing Grass were gone; the bad times of grief over Jesse had passed. Snake would never forget Jesse’s death, but she could not excoriate herself for the manner of it forever. Instead she intended to carry out Jesse’s wishes.

  She sat up and scrubbed herself all over with sand. The stream flowed around her and spilled through the outlet onto the sand. Snake’s hands lingered on her body. The pleasure of cool water, relaxation, and touch reminded her with an almost physical shock how long it was since anyone had touched her, since she had acted on desire. Lying back in the pool, she fantasied about Arevin.

  Barefoot and bare-breasted, her robe slung over her shoulder, Snake descended from the bathing-pool. Halfway back to Grum’s camp, she stopped short, listening again for a sound that had touched the edge of her hearing. It came again: the smooth slide of scales on rock, the sound of a moving serpent. Snake turned carefully toward the noise. At first she saw nothing, but then, finally, a sand viper slid from a crack in the stone. It raised its grotesque head, flicking its tongue out and in.

  With a faint mental twinge, recalling the other viper’s bite, Snake waited patiently until the creature crawled farther from its hiding place. It had none of the ethereal beauty of Mist, no striking patterns like Sand. It was simply ugly, with a head of lumpy protuberances and scales of a muddy dark brown. But it was a species unfamiliar to the healers, and, more, it was a threat to Arevin’s people. She should have caught one near his camp, but she had not thought to. That she had regretted ever since.