Vonda McIntyre - Dreamsnake

“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.