Dreamsnake

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  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 for an instant as if to strike in retaliation for its captivity, but both the crazy and Melissa stood frozen. The viper slithered around and slid toward the rocks. Snake sprang forward and pulled Melissa away from the crazy, but he 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, gripping the handle of her knife, she stood over the crazy. The vipers were rare enough on the desert: they were nonexistent in the foothills. Now she could not make the vaccine for Arevin’s people, and she had nothing at all to take back to her teachers.

  “Get up,” she said. Her voice was harsh. She glanced at Melissa. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Melissa said. “But he let that viper go.”

  The crazy remained in his crumpled heap, crying quietly.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Melissa stood at Snake’s elbow, peering down at the sobbing man.

  “I don’t know.” Snake toed him in the side. “You. Stop it. Get up.”

  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’ sakes, 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, that makes you wreck things and jump out on people,” Melissa said.

  He glared up at them, tears streaking his skeletal face. Deep lines creased his skin. “Why did you come back? I couldn’t follow you anymore. 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 the tattered sleeves of his desert robe. He had lost his headcloth. His hair was brown and dry. He sobbed no longer, but his shoulders trembled.

  Snake knelt down and urged him to his feet. She had to support most of his weight herself. Melissa stood warily by for a moment, then shrugged and came to help. As they started forward, Snake felt a hard, square-edged shape beneath the crazy’s clothes. Dragging him around, she pulled open his robe, fumbling through layers of grimy material.

  “What are you doing? Stop it!” He struggled with her, flailing about with his bony arms, trying to pull his clothing back across his scrawny body.

  Snake found the inside pocket. As soon as she touched the hidden shape she knew it was her journal. She snatched it and let the crazy go. He backed up a step or two and stood shivering, frantically rearranging the folds of his garments. Snake ignored him, her hands clenched tight around the book.

  “What is it?” Melissa asked.

  “The journal of my proving year. He stole it from my camp.”

  “I meant to throw it away,” the crazy said. “I forgot I had it.”

  Snake glared at him.

  “I thought it would help me, but it didn’t. It was no help at all.”

  Snake sighed.

  Back in their camp, Snake and Melissa lowered the crazy to the ground and pillowed his head on a saddle, where he lay staring blankly at the sky. Every time he blinked, a fresh tear rolled down his face and washed the dirt and dust away in streaks. Snake gave him some water and sat on her heels watching him, wondering what, if anything, his strange remarks meant. He was a crazy, after all, but not a spontaneous one. He was driven by desperation.

  “He isn’t going to do anything, is he?” Melissa asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He made me drop the wood,” Melissa said. Clearly disgusted, she strode toward the rocks.

  “Melissa—”

  She glanced back.

  “I hope that sand viper just kept on going, but he might still be over there someplace. We better do without a fire tonight.”

  Melissa hesitated so long that Snake wondered if she might say she preferred the company of the sand viper to that of the crazy, but in the end she shrugged and went over to the horses.

  Snake held the water flask to the crazy’s lips again. He swallowed once, then let the water drip from the corners of his mouth through several days’ growth of beard. It pooled on the hard ground beneath him and dribbled away in tiny rivulets.

  “What’s your name?” Snake 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; he licked his lips, his hands twitched, he blinked and two more tears cut through the dust on his face, “I suppose I must have had one once.”

  “What did you mean, all that about happiness? 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. Her knees hurt. She shifted her position and sat cross-legged near the crazy’s shoulder. “I can’t help you if you don’t help me know what’s wrong.”

  He jerked himself upright, scrabbling at the robe he had arranged so carefully, pulling at the worn material until it ripped. He flung it open and bared his throat, lifting his chin. “That’s all you need to know!”

  Snake 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 arteries. 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 so 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. What was the matter—” She stopped, frowning. “Were you a healer?” But that was impossible. She would have known him, or at least known about him. Besides, dreamsnake venom would have no more effect on a healer than the poison of any serpent.

  She could not think of any reason for one person to use so much dreamsnake venom over so long a time. People must have died in agony because of this man, whoever or whatever he was.

  Shaking his head, the crazy sank back to the ground. “No, never a healer… not me. We don’t need healers in the broken dome.”

  Snake waited, impatient but unwilling to take the chance of sidetracking him. The crazy licked his lips and spoke again.

  “Water… please?”

  Snake held the flask to his lips and he drank greedily, not spilling and slobbering as before. He tried to sit up again 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.” His eyes lost their focus; he seemed to be looking through her. “With happiness and forgetfulness and the reality 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 the tiny fire, waiting to find out what was going on.

  “Someone has a dreamsnake,” Snake said. “They’re using the venom as a pleasure-drug.”

  “That’s stupid,” Melissa said. “Why don’t they just use something that grows around here? There’s lots of different 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, at least not voluntarily.”

  Melissa stirred the soup. The firelight turned her red hair 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 a dreamsnake from a healer…”

  “I know.” Healers killed for their dreamsnakes? It was a difficult idea to accept. Snake scratched intersecting lines on the ground with a sharp pebble, a meaningless design. “That’s almost the only explanation that makes any sense.”

  They ate dinner. The crazy was too deeply asleep to be fed, though he was far from being in danger of dying, as he claimed. He was, in fact, surprisingly healthy under the dirt and rags: he was thin but his muscle tone was good, and his skin bore none of the signs of malnutrition. He was, without question, very strong.

  But all that, Snake thought, was why healers carried dreamsnakes to begin with. The venom did not kill, and it did not make death inevitable. Rather, it eased the transition between life and death and helped the dying person accept finality.

  Given time, the crazy could no doubt will himself to die. But Snake had no intention of letting him carry out his will before she found out where he came from and what was going on there. She also had no intention of staying up half the night trading watches over him with Melissa. They both needed a good night’s sleep.

  The crazy’s arms were as limp as the ragged robes covering them. Snake drew his hands above his head and tied his wrists to her saddle with two sets of its packstraps. She did not tie him tightly or cruelly, just firmly enough so she would hear him if he tried to get away. The evening had turned chilly, so she threw a spare blanket over him, then she and Melissa spread their own blankets on the hard ground and went to sleep.

  It must have been midnight when Snake woke again. The fire had gone out, leaving the camp pitch-dark. Snake lay without moving, expecting the sound of the crazy trying to escape.

  Melissa cried out in her sleep. Snake slid toward her, groping in the dark, and touched her shoulder. She sat beside her, stroking her hair and her face.

  “It’s all right, Melissa,” Snake whispered. “Wake up, you’re just having a bad dream.”

  After a moment Melissa sat bolt upright. “What—”

  “It’s me, it’s Snake. You were having a nightmare.”

  Melissa’s voice shook. “I thought I was back in Mountainside,” she said. “I thought Ras…”

  Snake held her, still stroking her soft curly hair. “Never mind. You never have to go back there.”

  She felt Melissa nod.

  “Do you want me to stay here next to 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. The night had turned cold, but Snake was glad to be out of the desert, back in a place where the ground did not tenaciously hold the day’s heat. Melissa huddled against her.

  The darkness was complete, but Snake could tell from Melissa’s breathing that she was already asleep again. Perhaps she had never completely awakened. Snake did not go back to sleep for some time. She could hear the crazy’s rough breath, nearly a snore, above the trickle of water from the spring, and she could feel the vibrations of Swift and Squirrel’s hooves on the hard-packed earth as the horses shifted in the night. Beneath her shoulder and hip the ground yielded not at all, and above her not a star or a sliver of moon broke through into the sky.

  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, then waved at Melissa, who was standing between Swift and Squirrel as they nudged her for their breakfast. Melissa laughed and waved back.

  The crazy pulled at the straps. “Well? You going to let me up?”

  “In a minute.” She used the privy they had dug behind some bushes, and walked over to the spring to splash water on her face. She wanted a bath, but the spring did not provide that much water, nor did she intend to make the crazy wait quite so long. She returned to camp and untied the thongs around his wrists. 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. He drank thirstily and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, looking around hungrily.

  “Is there breakfast?”

  “I thought you were planning to die.”

  He snorted.

  “Everyone in my camp works for their food,” Snake said. “You can talk for yours.”

  The man looked at the ground and sighed. He had dark bushy eyebrows that shadowed his pale eyes.

  “All right,” he said. He sat cross-legged and 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?” Her maps showed this pass, but nothing beyond it. In the mountains as well as in the desert, people had good reason to avoid the extreme southern lands.

  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 an
d 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, imagining the delicate creatures trapped in a pit, exposed to the elements.

  “Where does he get them? 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 hard around her knees, tensing all her muscles, then slowly making herself relax. Her hands steadied.

  “He got angry at me, and he sent me away,” the crazy said. “I was so sick… and then I heard about a healer and I went to find you, but you weren’t there and you took the dreamsnake with you—” His voice rose as the words came quicker. “And the people chased me away but I followed you, and followed you and followed you until you went back into the desert again, I couldn’t follow you there anymore, I just couldn’t, I tried to go home but I couldn’t, so I lay down to die but I couldn’t do that either. Why did you come right back to me when you don’t have the dreamsnake? Why don’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 any more,” Snake said. “He has no more power over you, if he won’t give you what you want. Your only chance is to help me get some of the dreamsnakes.”