Dreamsnake

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 and 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.”

The crazy stared at her for a long time, blinking, frowning in deep thought. Suddenly his expression cleared. His face grew serene and joyful. He started toward her, stumbled, and crawled. On his knees beside her, he caught her hands. His own were dirty and callused. The ring that had cut Snake’s forehead was a setting that had lost its stone.

“You mean you’ll help me get a dreamsnake of my own?” He smiled. “To use any time?”