Vonda McIntyre - Dreamsnake

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 the 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?”