Dreamsnake

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “It’s more proof you’ve adopted her,” Brian said. “I think it will satisfy the mayor.”

  Snake slipped the coin bag into a pocket and let Mist and Sand slide back into their compartments. She shrugged. “All right. It doesn’t matter. As long as Melissa can leave.” Suddenly she felt depressed, and she wondered if she had held so firmly and arrogantly to her own will that she had disarranged the lives of others to no benefit for them. She did not doubt she had done the right thing for Melissa, at least in freeing her from Ras. Whether Gabriel was better off, or the mayor, or even Ras…

  Mountainside was a rich town, and most of the people seemed happy; certainly they were more content and safer now than they had been before the mayor took office twenty years before. But what good had that done the children of his own household? Snake was glad to be leaving, and she was glad, for good or ill, that Gabriel was going too. “Healer?”

  “Yes, Brian?”

  From behind, he touched her shoulder quickly and withdrew. “Thank you.” When Snake turned a moment later, he had already, silently, disappeared.

  As the door to her room swung softly shut, Snake heard the hollow thud of the big front door closing in the courtyard. She looked out the window again. Below, Gabriel mounted his big pinto horse. He looked down into the valley, then slowly turned until he faced the window of his father’s room. He gazed at it for a long time. Snake did not look across at the other tower, for she could tell from watching the young man that his father did not appear. Gabriel’s shoulders slumped, then straightened, and when he glanced toward Snake’s tower his expression was calm. He saw her and smiled a sad, self-deprecating smile. She waved to him. He waved back.

  A few minutes later Snake still watched as the pinto horse switched his long black and white tail and disappeared around the last visible turn in the northbound trail. Other hooves clattered in the courtyard below.

  Snake returned her thoughts to her own journey. Melissa, riding Squirrel and leading Swift, looked up and beckoned to her. Snake smiled and nodded, threw her saddlebags over her shoulder, picked up the serpent case, and went to join her daughter.

  Chapter 9

  The wind in Arevin’s face felt cool and clean. He was grateful for the mountain climate, free of dust and heat and the ever present sand. At the crest of a pass he stood beside his horse and looked out over the countryside Snake had been raised in. The land was bright and very green, and he could both see and hear great quantities of free-flowing water. A river meandered through the center of the valley below, and a stone’s throw from the trail a spring gushed across mossy rock, His respect for Snake increased. Her people did not migrate; they lived here all year around. She would have had little experience with extreme climates when she entered the desert. This was no preparation for the black sand waste. Arevin himself had not been prepared for the central desert’s severity. His maps were old; no member of the clan still living had ever used them. But they had led him safely to the other side of the desert, following a line of trustworthy oases. It was so late in the season that he had met no one at all: no one to ask advice about the best route, no one to ask about Snake.

  He mounted his horse and rode down the trail into the healers’ valley.

  Before he encountered any dwellings he reached a small orchard. It was unusual: the trees farthest from the road were full-grown, gnarled, while the nearest ones were merely saplings, as if a few trees had been planted every year for many years. A youth of fourteen or fifteen lounged in the shade, eating a piece of fruit. When Arevin stopped, the young man glanced up, rose, and started toward him. Arevin urged his horse across the grassy edge of the meadow. They met in a row of trees that seemed perhaps five or six years old.

  “Hi,” the young man said. He picked another piece of fruit and held it out toward Arevin. “Have a pear? The peaches and the cherries are all gone and the oranges aren’t quite ripe yet.”

  Arevin saw that, in fact, each tree bore fruit of several different shapes, but leaves of only a single shape. He reached uncertainly for the pear, wondering if the ground the trees grew on was poisoned.

  “Don’t worry,” the young man said. “It isn’t radioactive. There aren’t any craters around here.”

  At this Arevin drew back his hand. He had not said a word, yet the youth seemed to know what he was thinking.

  “I made the tree myself, and I never work with hot mutagens.”

  Arevin had no idea what the boy was talking about except that he seemed to be assuring him that the fruit was safe. He wished he understood the boy as well as the boy understood him. Not wishing to be impolite, he took the pear.

  “Thank you.” Since the youth was watching him both hopefully and expectantly, Arevin bit into the fruit. It was sweet and tart at the same time, and very juicy. He took another bite. “It’s very good,” he said. “I’ve never seen a plant that would produce four different things.”

  “First project,” the boy said. He gestured back toward the older trees. “We all do one. It’s pretty simple-minded but it’s traditional.”

  “I see,” Arevin said.

  “My name’s Thad.”

  “I am honored to meet you,” Arevin said. “I am looking for Snake.”

  “Snake!” Thad frowned. “I’m afraid you’ve had a long ride for nothing. She isn’t here. She isn’t even due back for months.”

  “But I could not have passed her.”

  Thad’s pleasant and helpful expression changed to one of worry. “You mean she’s coming home already? What happened? Is she all right?”

  “She was well when I saw her last,” Arevin said. Surely she should have reached her home well ahead of him, if nothing had happened. Thoughts of accidents, unlike viper bites, to which she would be vulnerable, assailed him.

  “Hey, are you all right?”

  Thad was beside him, holding his elbow to steady him.

  “Yes,” Arevin said, but his voice was shaky.

  “Are you sick? I’m not done with my training yet but one of the other healers can help you.”

  “No, no, I’m not ill. But I can’t understand how I reached this place before she did.”

  “But why’s she coming home so early?”

  Arevin gazed down at the intent young man, now as concerned as Arevin himself.

  “I do not think I should tell her story for her,” he said. “Perhaps I should speak to her parents. Will you show me where they live?”

  “I would if I could,” Thad said. “Only she doesn’t have any. Won’t I do? I’m her brother.”

  “I’m sorry to cause you distress. I did not know your parents were dead.”

  “They aren’t. Or they might be. I don’t know. I mean I don’t know who they are. Or who Snake’s are.”

  Arevin felt thoroughly confused. He had never had any trouble understanding what Snake said to him. But he did not think he had comprehended half of what this youth had told him in only a few minutes.

  “If you do not know who your parents are, or whose Snake’s are, how can you be her brother?”

  Thad looked at him quizzically. “You really don’t know much about healers, do you?”

  “No,” Arevin said, feeling that the conversation had taken still another unexplained turn. “I do not. We have heard of you, of course, but Snake is the only one to visit my clan.“

  “The reason I asked,” Thad said, “is because most people know we’re all adopted. We don’t have families, exactly. We’re all one family.”

  “Yet you said you are her brother, as if she did not have another.” Except for his blue eyes, and they were not the same shade at all, Thad did not look anything like Snake.

  “That’s how we think of each other. I used to get in trouble a lot when I was a kid and she’d always stick up for me.”

  “I see.” Arevin dismounted and adjusted his horse’s bridle, considering what the boy had told him. “You are not blood kin with Snake,” he said, “but you feel a special relationship to her. Is thi
s correct?”

  “Yes.” Thad’s easygoing attitude had vanished.

  “If I tell you why I have come, will you advise me, thinking first of Snake, even if you should have to go against your own customs?”

  Arevin was glad the youth hesitated, for he would not have been able to depend on an impulsive and emotional answer.

  “Something really bad has happened, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Arevin said. “And she blames herself.”

  “You feel a special relationship for her, too, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she for you?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’m on her side,” Thad said. “Always.”

  Arevin unbuckled the horse’s bridle and slipped it off so his mount could graze. He sat down beneath Thad’s fruit tree and the boy sat nearby.

  “I come from the other side of the western desert,” Arevin said. “There we have no good serpents, only sand vipers whose bite means death…”

  Arevin told his story and waited for Thad to respond, but the young healer stared at his scarred hands for a long time.

  “Her dreamsnake was killed,” he said finally.

  Thad’s voice held shock and hopelessness; the tone chilled Arevin all the way to his almost impervious, controlled center.

  “It was not her fault,” Arevin said again, though he had continually stressed that fact. Thad now knew about the clan’s fear of serpents and even about Arevin’s sister’s horrible death. But Arevin could see quite clearly that Thad did not understand.

  The boy looked up at him. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “This is really awful.” He paused and looked around and rubbed the heel of his hand across his forehead. “I guess we better talk to Silver. She was one of Snake’s teachers and she’s the eldest now.”

  Arevin hesitated. “Is that wise? Pardon me, but if you, Snake’s friend, cannot comprehend how all this happened, will any of the other healers be able to?”

  “I understand what happened!”

  “You know what happened,” Arevin said. “But you do not understand it. I do not want to offend you, but I fear what I say is true.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Thad said. “I still want to help her. Silver will think of something to do.”

  The exquisite valley in which the healers lived combined areas of total wilderness with places of complete civilization. What appeared to Arevin to be virgin climax forest, ancient and unchanging, spread as far as he could see, beginning on the north slope of the valley. Yet immediately downhill from the tremendous dark old trees, an array of windmills spun gaily. The forest of trees and the forest of windmills harmonized.

  The station was a serene place, a small town of well-built wood and stone houses. People greeted Thad or waved to him, and nodded to Arevin. The faint shouts of a children’s game drifted down the breeze.

  Thad left Arevin’s horse loose in a pasture, then led Arevin to a building somewhat larger than the others, and somewhat removed from the main group. Inside, Arevin was surprised to observe, the walls were not of wood but of smooth white glazed ceramic tile. Even where there were no windows, the illumination was as bright as day, neither the eerie blue glow of bioluminescence nor the soft yellow light of gas flames. The place possessed a feeling of activity quite different from the placid atmosphere of the town itself. Through a half-open door Arevin saw several young people, younger even than Thad, bending over complicated instruments, completely absorbed in their work.

  Thad gestured toward the students. “These are the labs. We grind the lenses for the microscopes right here at the station. Make our own glassware too.”

  Almost all the people Arevin saw here — and, now that he thought of it, most of the people in the village — were either very young or elderly. The young ones in training, he thought, and the old ones teaching. Snake and the others out practicing their profession.

  Thad climbed a flight of stairs, went down a carpeted hall, and knocked softly on a door. They waited for several minutes, and Thad seemed to think this quite ordinary, for he did not become impatient. Finally a pleasant, rather high-pitched voice said, “Come in.”

  The room beyond was not so stark and severe as the labs. It was wood-paneled, with a large window overlooking the windmills. Arevin had heard of books, but he had never actually seen one. Here, two walls lined with shelves were full of them. The old healer sitting in a rocking chair held a book in her lap.

  “Thad,” she said, nodding, with a welcoming yet questioning tone.

  “Silver.” He brought Arevin in. “This is a friend of Snake’s. He’s come a long way to talk to us.”

  “Sit down.” Her voice and her hands shook slightly. She was very old, her joints swollen and twisted. Her skin was smooth and soft and translucent, deeply lined on the cheeks and forehead. Her eyes were blue.

  Following Thad’s lead, Arevin sat on a chair. He felt uncomfortable; he was accustomed to sitting cross-legged on the ground. . “What do you wish to say?”

  “Are you Snake’s friend?” Arevin asked. “Or only her teacher?”

  He thought she might laugh, but she gazed at him somberly. “Her friend.”

  “Silver nominated her for her name,” Thad said. “Did you think I wanted you to talk to just anybody?”

  Still, Arevin wondered if he should tell his story to this kindly old woman, for he remembered Snake’s words all too clearly: “My teachers seldom give the name I bear, and they’ll be disappointed.” Perhaps Silver’s disappointment would be great enough to exile Snake from her people.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” Silver said. “Snake is my friend, and I love her. You need not fear me.”

  Arevin told his story for the second time that day, watching Silver’s face intently. Her expression did not change. Surely, after all the experiences she must have had, she could understand what had happened better than young Thad could.

  “Ah,” she said. “Snake went across the desert.” She shook her head. “My brave and impulsive child.”

  “Silver,” Thad said, “what can we do?”

  “I don’t know, my dear.” She sighed. “I wish Snake had come home.”

  “Surely the small serpents die,” Arevin said. “Surely others have been lost in accidents. What is done?”

  “They live a long time,” Thad said. “Longer than their healers, sometimes. They don’t breed well.”

  “Every year we train fewer people because we have too few dreamsnakes,” Silver said in her feathery voice.

  “Snake’s excellence must entitle her to another serpent,” Arevin said.

  “One cannot give what one does not have,‘” Silver said.

  “She thought some might have been born.”

  “Only a few ever hatched,” the old woman said sadly.

  Thad glanced away. “One of us might decide not to finish their training…”

  “Thad,” Silver said, “we haven’t enough for all of you now. Do you think Snake would ask you to return the dreamsnake she gave you?”

  Thad shrugged, still not meeting Silver’s gaze or Arevin’s. “She shouldn’t have to ask. I should give it to her.”

  “We cannot decide without Snake,” Silver said. “She must come home.”

  Arevin looked down at his hands, realizing that there would be no easy solution to this dilemma, no simple explanation of what had happened, then forgiveness for Snake.

  “You mustn’t punish her for my clan’s error,” he said again.

  Silver shook her head. “It is not a question of punishment. But she cannot be a healer without a dreamsnake. I have none to give her.”

  They sat together in silence. After a few minutes Arevin wondered if Silver had fallen asleep. He started when she spoke to him without glancing away from the view out her window.

  “Will you keep looking for her?”

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation.

  “When you find her, please tell her to come home. The counci
l will meet with her.”

  Thad rose, and with a deep sense of failure and depression Arevin understood that they had been dismissed.

  They went back outside, leaving the workrooms and their strange machines, their strange light, their strange smells. The sun was setting, joining the long shadows together into darkness.

  “Where shall I look?” Arevin said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “I came here because I believed Snake was coming home. Now I don’t know where she might be. It’s nearly winter. If the storms have started…”

  “She knows better than to get stuck out on the desert in winter,” Thad said. “No, what must have happened is somebody needed help and she had to go off the route home. Maybe her patient was even in the central mountains. She’ll be somewhere south of here, in Middlepass or New Tibet or Mountainside.”

  “All right,” Arevin said, grateful for any possibility. “I will go south.” But he wondered if Thad were speaking with the unquestioning self-confidence of extreme youth.

  Thad opened the front door of a long low house. Inside, rooms opened off a central living-space. Thad threw himself down on a deep couch. Putting aside careful manners, Arevin sat on the floor.

  “Dinner’s in a while,” Thad said. “The room next to mine is free right now, you can use it.”

  “Perhaps I should go on,” Arevin said.

  “Tonight? It’s crazy to ride at night around here. We’d find you at the bottom of a cliff in the morning. At least stay till tomorrow.”

  “If that is your advice.” In fact, he felt a great heavy lethargy. He followed Thad into the spare room.

  “I’ll get your pack,” Thad said. “You take a rest. You look like you need it.”

  Arevin sat down slowly on the edge of the bed.

  At the door, Thad turned back. “Listen, I’d like to help. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “No,” Arevin said. “Thank you. I am very comfortable.”

  Thad shrugged. “Okay.”

  The black-sand desert stretched to the horizon, flat and empty, unmarred by any sign that it had ever been crossed. Heat waves rose like smoke. There was no steady wind yet, but all the marks and detritus of the traders’ route had already been obliterated: erased or covered by the shifting breezes that preceded winter. At the crest of the central mountains’ eastern range, Snake and Melissa looked out toward their invisible destination. They dismounted to rest the horses. Melissa adjusted a strap on Squirrel’s new riding saddle, then glanced back the way they had come, down into the high valley that had been her home. The town clung to the steep mountain slope, above the fertile valley floor. Windows and black glass panels glittered in the noon sun.