Dreamsnake

She still could not remember where she had left her belt, nor, now that she thought about it, why she had been looking for it during the night—Snake sat up abruptly, remembering Melissa, and almost cried out. But guilt was as strong as the protests of her body. She had to do something. Yet confronting Ras would not help her young friend. Snake had seen that already. She did not know what she could do. For the moment she did not even know if she could get herself into the bathroom.

That much, at least, she managed. And her belt pouch was there as well, neatly hung on a hook with her belt and knife. As far as she recalled she had left all her things where they fell. She was slightly embarrassed, for she was not ordinarily quite so untidy.

Her forehead was bruised and the long shallow cut thickly scabbed: nothing to be done about that. Snake got her aspirin from the belt pouch, took a heavy dose, and limped back to bed. Waiting for sleep she wondered how much more frequent the arthritis attacks would get as she grew older. They were inevitable, but it was not inevitable that she would have such a comfortable place in which to recover.

The sun was high and scarlet beyond thin gray clouds when she woke again. Her ears rang faintly from the aspirin. She bent her right knee tentatively and felt relief when she found it more limber and less sore. The hesitant knock that had awakened her came again.

“Come in.”

Gabriel opened the door and leaned inside.

“Snake, are you all right?”

“Yes, come on in.”

Gabriel entered as she sat up.

“I’m sorry if I woke you but I looked in a couple of times and you never even moved.”

Snake pulled aside the bedclothes and showed him her knee. Much of the swelling had gone down, but it was clearly not normal, and the bruises had turned black and purple.

“Good lords,” Gabriel said.

“It’ll be better by morning,” Snake said. She moved over so he could sit beside her. “Could be worse, I guess.”

“I sprained my knee once and it looked like a melon for a week. Tomorrow, you say? Healers must heal fast.”

“I didn’t sprain it last night, I only bruised it. The swelling’s mostly arthritis.”

“Arthritis! I thought you never get sick.”

“I never catch contagious diseases. Healers always get arthritis, unless we get something worse.” She shrugged. “It’s because of the immunities I told you about. Sometimes they go a little wrong and attack the same body that formed them.” She saw no reason to describe the really serious diseases healers were prone to. Gabriel offered to get her some breakfast and she found to her surprise that she was hungry.

Snake spent the day taking hot baths and lying in bed, asleep from so much aspirin. That was the effect it had on her, at least. Every so often Gabriel came in and sat with her for a while, or Larril brought a tray, or Brian reported on how the mayor was getting along. Gabriel’s father had not needed Snake’s care since the night he had tried to get up; Brian was a much better nurse than she.

She was anxious to leave, anxious to cross the valley and the next ridge of mountains, anxious to get started on her trip to the city. Its potentialities fascinated her. And she was anxious to leave the mayor’s castle. She was as comfortable as she had ever been, even back home in the healers’ station. Yet the residence was an unpleasant place in which to live: familiarity with it brought a clearer perception of the emotional strains between the people. There was too much building and not enough family; too much power and no protection against it. The mayor kept his strengths to himself, without passing them on, and Ras’s strength was misused. As much as Snake wanted to leave, she did not know how she could without doing something for Melissa. Melissa…

The mayor had a library, and Larril had brought Snake some of its books. She tried to read. Ordinarily she would have absorbed several in a day, reading much too fast, she knew, for proper appreciation. But this time she was bored and restless and distracted and disturbed.

Midafternoon. Snake got up and limped to a chair by the window where she could look out over the valley. Gabriel was not even here to talk to, for he had gone to Mountainside to give out the description of the crazy. She hoped someone would find the madman, and she hoped he could be helped. A long trip lay ahead of her and she did not relish the thought of having to worry about her pursuer the whole time. This season of the year she would find no caravans heading toward the city; she would travel alone or not at all.

Grum’s invitation to stay the winter at her village was even more attractive now. But the idea of spending half a year crippled in her profession, without knowing whether she would ever be able to redeem herself, was unendurable. She would go to the city, or she would return to the healers’ station and receive her teachers’ judgment.