“I’ve never been this far from there before,” Melissa said with wonder. “Not in my whole life.” She turned away from the valley, toward Snake. “Thank you, Snake,” she said.
“You’re welcome, Melissa.”
Melissa dropped her gaze. Her right cheek, the unscarred one, flushed scarlet beneath her tan. “I should tell you something about that.”
“About what?”
“My name. It’s true, what Ras said, that it isn’t really—”
“Never mind. Melissa is your name as far as I’m concerned. I had a different child-name, too.”
“But they gave you your name. It’s an honor. You didn’t just take it like I did mine.”
They remounted and started down the well-used switchback trail.
“But I could have turned down the name they offered me,” Snake said. “If I’d done that, I would have picked my own adult name like the rest of the healers do.”
“You could have turned it down?”
“Yes.”
“But they hardly ever give it! That’s what I heard.”
“That’s true.”
“Has anybody ever said they didn’t want it?”
“Not as far as I know. I’m only the fourth one, though, so not very many people have had the chance. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t accepted it.”
“But why?”
“Because of the responsibility.” Her hand rested on the corner of the serpent case. Since the crazy’s attack she had begun to touch it more often. She drew her hand away from the smooth leather. Healers tended to die fairly young or live to a very old age. The Snake immediately preceding her had been only forty-three when he died, but the other two had each outlasted a century. Snake had a tremendous body of achievement to live up to, and so far she had failed.
The trail led downward through forever trees, among the gnarled brown trunks and dark needles of the trees legend said never bore seeds and never died. Their resin sharpened the air with a piny tang.
“Snake…” Melissa said.
“Yes?”
“Are you… are you my mother?”
Taken aback, Snake hesitated a moment. Her people did not form family groups quite the way others did. She herself had never called anyone “mother” or “father,” though all the older healers bore exactly that relationship to her. And Melissa’s tone was so wistful…
“All healers are your family now,” Snake said, “but I adopted you, and I think that makes me your mother.”
“I’m glad.”
“So am I.”
Below the narrow band of scraggly forest, almost nothing grew on the mountain’s flanks but lichen, and though the altitude was still high and the path steep, Snake and Melissa might as well have been on the desert floor already. Below the trees, the heat and the dryness of the air increased steadily. When they finally did reach the sand, they stopped for a moment to change, Snake into the robes Arevin’s people had given her, Melissa into desert clothes they had bought for her in Mountainside.
They saw no one all day. Snake glanced over her shoulder from time to time, and kept on guard whenever the horses passed through dunefields where someone could hide and ambush unsuspecting passersby. But there was no trace of the crazy. Snake began to wonder if the two attacks might have been coincidence, and her memories of other noises around her camp a dream. And if the crazy was a crazy, perhaps his vendetta against her had by now been diverted by some other irresistible concern.
She did not convince herself.
By evening the mountains lay far behind them, forming an abrupt wall. The horses’ hooves crunched in the sand, but the underlying silence was complete and unearthly. Snake and Melissa rode and talked as darkness fell. The heavy clouds obscured the moon; the constant glow of the lightcells in Snake’s lantern, relatively brighter now, provided just enough illumination for the travelers to continue. Hanging from the saddle, the lantern swung with Swift’s walk. The black sand reflected light like water. Squirrel and Swift moved closer together. Gradually, Snake and Melissa talked more and more softly, and finally they did not speak at all.
Snake’s compass, the nearly invisible moon, the direction of the wind, the shapes of sand dunes all helped them proceed in the right direction, but Snake could not put aside the pervasive wilderness fear that she was traveling in circles. Turning in the saddle, Snake watched the invisible trail behind them for several minutes, but no other light followed. They were alone; there was nothing but the darkness. Snake settled back.
“It’s spooky,” Melissa whispered.
“I know. I wish we could travel by day.”
“Maybe it’ll rain.”
“That would be nice.”
The desert received rain only once every year or two, but when it came, it usually arrived just before winter. Then the dormant seeds exploded into growth and reproduction and the sharp-grained desert softened with green and bits of color. In three days the delicate plants shriveled to brown lace and died, leaving hard-cased seeds to endure another year, or two, or three, until the rain roused them again. But tonight the air was dry and quiet and gave no hint of any change.
A light shimmered in the distance. Snake, dozing, woke abruptly from a dream in which the crazy was following and she saw his lantern moving closer and closer. Up until now she had not realized how sure she was that somehow he was still following her, still somewhere near, fired by incomprehensible motives.
But the light was not a carried lantern, it was steady and stationary and ahead of her. The sound of dry leaves drifted toward her on faint wind: they were nearing the first oasis on the route to Center.
It was not even dawn. Snake reached forward and patted Swift’s neck. “Not much farther now,” she said.
“What?” Melissa, too, started awake. “Where — ?”
“It’s all right,” Snake said. “We can stop soon.”
“Oh.” Melissa looked around, blinking. “I forgot where I was.”
They reached the summertrees ringing the oasis. Snake’s lantern illuminated leaves already split and frayed by windblown sand. Snake did not see any tents and she could not hear any sounds of people or animals. All the caravannaires, by now, had retreated to the safety of the mountains.
“Where’s that light?”
“I don’t know,” Snake said. She glanced at Melissa, for her voice sounded strange: it was muffled by the end of her headcloth, pulled across her face. When no one appeared, she let it drop as if unaware that she had been hiding herself.
Snake turned Swift around, worried about the light.
“Look,” Melissa said.
Swift’s body cut off the lantern’s light in one direction, and there against the darkness rose a streak of luminescence. Closer, Snake could see that it was a dead summertree, close enough to the water to rot instead of drying. Lightcells had invaded its fragile trunk, transforming it into a glowing signal. Snake breathed softly with relief.
They rode farther, circling the still, black pool until they found a site with trees thick enough to give some shelter. As soon as Snake reined in, Melissa jumped down and began unsaddling Squirrel. Snake climbed down more slowly, for despite the constant desert climate, her knee had stiffened again during the long ride. Melissa rubbed Squirrel with a twist of leaves, talking to him in a barely audible voice. Soon they were all, horses and people, bedded down to wait through the day.
Snake padded barefoot toward the water, stretching and yawning. She had slept well all day, and now she wanted a swim before starting out again. It was still too early to leave the shelter of the thick summertrees. Hoping to find a few pieces of ripe fruit still on the branches, she glanced up and around, but the desert dwellers’ harvest had been thorough.
Only a few days before, on the other side of the mountains, the foliage at the oases had been lush and soft; here, now, the leaves were dry and dying. They rustled as she brushed past. The brittle fronds crumbled in her hand.
She stopped where the beach began. The bla
ck strip was only a few meters wide, a semicircle of sand around a minuscule lagoon that reflected the overhanging latticework of branches. In the secluded spot, Melissa was kneeling half-naked on the sand. She leaned out over the water, staring silently downward. The marks of Ras’s beating had faded, and the fire had left her back unscarred. Her skin was fairer than Snake would have guessed from her deep-tanned hands and face. As Snake watched, Melissa reached out slowly and touched the surface of the dark water. Ripples spread from her fingertips.
Melissa watched, fascinated, as Snake let Mist and Sand out of the case. Mist glided around Snake’s feet, tasting the scents of the oasis. Snake picked her up gently. The smooth white scales were cool against her hands.
“I want her to smell you,” Snake said. “Her instinctive reaction is to strike at anything that startles her. If she recognizes your scent, it’s safer. All right?”
Melissa nodded, slowly, clearly frightened. “She’s very poisonous, isn’t she? More than the other?”
“Yes. As soon as we get home I can immunize you, but I don’t want to start that here. I have to test you first and I don’t have the right things with me.”
“You mean you can fix it so she’d bite me and nothing would happen?”
“Not quite nothing. But she’s bitten me by mistake a few times and I’m still here.”
“I guess I better let her smell me,” Melissa said.
Snake sat down next to her. “I know it’s hard not to be afraid of her. But breathe deeply and try to relax. Close your eyes and just listen to my voice.”
“Horses know it, too, when you’re afraid,” Melissa said, and did as Snake told her.
The cobra’s forked tongue flickered over Melissa’s hands, and the child remained still and silent. Snake remembered the first time she had seen the albino cobras: a terrifying, exhilarating moment when a mass of them, coiled together in infinite knots, felt her footsteps and lifted their heads in unison, hissing, like a many-headed beast or an alien plant in violent and abrupt full bloom.
Snake kept her hand on Mist as the cobra glided over Melissa’s arms.
“She feels nice,” Melissa said. Her voice was shaky, and a little scared, but the tone was sincere.
Melissa had seen rattlers before; their danger was a known one and not so frightening. Sand crawled across her hands and she stroked him gently. Snake was pleased; her daughter’s abilities were not limited to horses.
“I hoped you’d get along with Mist and Sand,” she said. “It’s important for a healer.”
Melissa looked up, startled. “But you didn’t mean—” She stopped.
“What?”
Melissa drew in a deep breath. “What you told the mayor,” she said hesitantly. “About what I could do. You didn’t really mean it. You had to say it so he’d let me go.”
“I meant everything I said.”
“But I couldn’t be a healer.”
“Why not?” Melissa did not answer, so Snake continued. “I told you healers adopt their children, because we can’t have any of our own. Let me tell you some more about us. A lot of healers have partners who have different professions. And not all our children become healers. We aren’t a closed community. But when we choose someone to adopt, we usually pick someone we think could be one of us.”
“Me?”
“Yes. If you want to. That’s the important thing. For you to do what you want to do. Not what you think anyone else wants or expects you to do.”
“A healer…” Melissa said.
The quality of wonder in her daughter’s voice gave Snake another compelling reason to make the city people help her find more dreamsnakes.
The second night Snake and Melissa rode hard. There was no oasis, and in the morning Snake did not stop at dawn, though it was really too hot to travel. Sweat drenched her. The sticky beads rolled down her back and sides. They slid halfway down her face and dried into salty grit. Swift’s coat darkened as sweat streamed down her legs. Every step flung droplets from her fetlocks.
“Mistress…”
The formality startled Snake and she glanced over at Melissa with concern. “Melissa, what’s wrong?”
“How much farther before we stop?”
“I don’t know. We have to go on as long as we can.” She gestured toward the sky, where the clouds hung low and threatening. “That’s what they look like before a storm.”
“I know. But we can’t go much longer. Squirrel and Swift have to rest. You said the city is in the middle of the desert. Well, once we get in we have to get back out, and the horses have to take us.”
Snake slumped back in her saddle. “We have to go on. It’s too dangerous to stop.”
“Snake… Snake, you know about people and storms and healing and deserts and cities, and I don’t. But I know about horses. If we let them stop and rest for a few hours, they’ll take us a far way tonight. If they have to keep going, by dark we’ll have to leave them behind.”
“All right,” Snake said finally. “We’ll stop when we get to those rocks. At least there’ll be some shade.”
At home in the healers’ station, Snake did not think of the city from one month to the next. But in the desert, and in the mountains where the caravannaires wintered, life revolved around it. Snake had begun to feel that her life too depended on it when at last, at dawn after the third night, the high, truncated mountain that protected Center appeared before her. The sun rose directly behind it, illuminating it in scarlet like an idol. Scenting water, sensing an end to their long trek, the horses raised their heads and quickened their tired pace. As the sun rose higher the low, thickening clouds spread the light into a red wash that covered the horizon. Snake’s knee ached with every step Swift took, but she did not need the signal of swollen joints to tell her a storm approached. Snake clenched her fists around the reins until the leather dug painfully into her palms, then slowly she relaxed her hands and stroked her horse’s damp neck. She had no doubt that Swift ached as much as she did.
They approached the mountain. The summertrees were brown and withered, rustling stalks surrounding a dark pond and deserted firepits. The wind whispered between the dry leaves and over the sand, coming first from one direction, then another, in the manner of winds near a solitary mountain. The city’s sunrise shadow enveloped them.
“It’s a lot bigger than I thought,” Melissa said quietly. “I used to have a place where I could hide and listen to people talk, but I always thought they were making up stories.”
“I think I did too,” Snake said. Her own voice sounded very lost and far away. As she approached the great rock cliffs, cold sweat broke out on her forehead, and her hands grew clammy despite the heat. The tired mare carried her forward.
The times the city had dominated the healers’ station were the year Snake was seven, and again when she was seventeen. In each of those years a senior healer undertook the long hard journey to Center. Each of those years was the beginning of a new decade, when the healers offered the city dwellers an exchange of knowledge and of help. They were always turned away. Perhaps this time, too, despite the message Snake had to give them.
“Snake?”
Snake started and glanced over at Melissa. “What?”
“Are you okay? You looked so far away, and, I don’t know—”
“ ‘Scared’ would be a good word, I think,” Snake said.
“They’ll let us in.”
The dark clouds seemed to grow thicker and heavier every minute.
“I hope so,” Snake said.
At the base of Center’s mountain, the wide dark pool had neither inlets nor outlets. The water oozed up into it from below, then flowed invisibly away into the sand. The summertrees were dead, but the ground cover of grass and low bushes grew lushly. Fresh grass already sprouted in the trampled areas of abandoned camps and the paths between, but not on the wide road to the city’s gate.
Snake did not have the heart to ride Swift past the water. She handed her reins to Melissa at th
e edge of the pool.
“Follow me when they’re finished drinking. I won’t go in without you, so don’t worry. If the wind rises, though, come running. Okay?”
Melissa nodded. “A storm couldn’t come that quick, could it?”
“I’m afraid it could,” Snake said.
She drank quickly and splashed water on her face. Wiping the drops on the corner of her headcloth she strode along the bare road. Somewhere close beneath the black sand lay a smooth, unyielding surface. An ancient road? She had seen remains in other places, disintegrating concrete flesh and even the rusting steel bones in places the collectors had not yet worked.
Snake stopped before Center’s gate. It was five times her height. Generations of sandstorms had brushed the metal to a lustrous finish. But it had no handle, no bell-pull, no door knocker, no way Snake could see of summoning someone to let her in.
She stepped forward, raised her fist, and banged it against the metal. The solid thud sounded not at all hollow. She pounded on the door, thinking it must be very thick. As her eyes grew more accustomed to the dim light in the recessed doorway, she saw that the front of the door was actually concave, perceptibly worn down by the fury of the storms.
Her hand aching, she stepped back for a moment.
“About time you stopped that noise.”
Snake jumped at the voice and turned toward it, but no one was there. Instead, in the side of the alcove, a panel clicked away into the rock and a window appeared. A pale man with bushy red hair glared out at her.
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