Dreamsnake

Swift, responding to some unconscious movement of Snake’s body, her reluctance to go on, stopped abruptly. Snake did not urge her forward. A few paces farther along, Melissa reined in and looked back.

“Snake?”

“Oh, Melissa, what am I taking you to?”

“We’re going home,” Melissa said, trying to soothe her.

“I might not even have a home anymore.”

“They won’t send you away. They couldn’t.”

Snake wiped tears fiercely away on her sleeve, the fabric silky against her cheek, Hopelessness and frustration would give her no comfort and no relief. She leaned down against Swift’s neck, clenching her fists in the mare’s long black mane.

“You said it was your home, you said they were all your family. So how could they send you away?”

“They wouldn’t,” Snake whispered. “But if they said I couldn’t be a healer, how could I stay?”

Melissa reached up and patted her awkwardly. “It’ll be all right. I know it will. How can I make you not be so sad?”

Snake let out her breath in a long sigh. She looked up. Melissa gazed at her steadily, never flinching. Snake turned and kissed Melissa’s hand; she enfolded it in her own.

“You trust me,” she said. “And maybe that’s what I need most right now.”

Melissa half smiled in embarrassment and encouragement and they started onward, but after a few paces Snake reined Swift in again. Melissa stopped too, looking up at her with worry.

“Whatever happens,” Snake said, “whatever my teachers decide about me, you’re still their daughter as much as mine. You can still be a healer. If I have to go away—”

“I’ll go with you.”

“Melissa—”

“I don’t care. I never wanted to be a healer anyway,” Melissa said belligerently. “I want to be a jockey. I wouldn’t want to stay with people who made you leave.”

The intensity of Melissa’s loyalty troubled Snake. She had never known anyone who was so completely oblivious to self-interest. Perhaps Melissa could not yet think of herself as someone with a right to her own dreams; perhaps so many of her dreams had been taken from her that she no longer dared to have them. Snake hoped that somehow she could give them back to her daughter.

“Never mind,” she said. “We aren’t home yet. We can worry about it then.”

Melissa’s set mask of decision relaxed slightly, and they rode on.

By the end of the third day the tiny plants had fallen to dust beneath the horses’ hooves. A fine brown haze covered the desert. Now and then a cloud of feathery seeds drifted by, cast to the air. When the wind was stronger, heavier seeds skittered along the sand like tides. When night fell Snake and Melissa had already entered the foothills, and the desert had turned bare and black behind them.

They had returned to the mountains traveling straight west, the quickest way to safety. Here, the foothills rose more gently than the steep cliffs at Mountainside, far to the north; the climb was easier but much longer than at the northern pass. At the first crest, before they started toward the next, higher, hills, Melissa reined Squirrel in and turned around, gazing back at the darkening desert. After a moment she grinned at Snake. “We made it,” she said.

Snake smiled slowly in return. “You’re right,” she said. “We did.” Her most immediate fear, of the storms, dissolved slowly in the clearer, colder air of the hills. The clouds hung oppressively low, disfiguring the sky. No one, caravannaire or mountain dweller, would see even a patch of blue, or a star, or the moon, until next spring, and the sun’s disc would fade duller and duller. Now, sinking beneath the mountain peaks, it cast Snake’s shadow back toward the darkening stark sand plain. Beyond the reach of the most violent wind, beyond the heat and waterless sand, Snake urged Swift on, toward the mountains where they all belonged.

Snake kept a lookout for a place to camp. Before the horses descended very far she heard the welcome trickle of running water. The trail led past a small hollow, the source of a spring, a spot that looked as if it had been used as a campsite, but long ago. The water sustained a few scrubby forever trees and some grass for the horses. In the center of a bare-beaten patch of ground the earth was smudged with charcoal, but Snake had no firewood. She knew better than to try chopping down the forever trees, unlike some travelers who had left futile ax marks, now grown half together, in the rough bark. The wood beneath was as hard and resilient as steel.

Night travel in the mountains was as difficult as day travel in the desert, and the easy return from the city had not wiped out the strain of the complete journey. Snake dismounted. They would stop for the night, and at sunrise—