Dreamsnake

They let the tiger-pony and the gray mare loose in a clearing near the trail. Instead of galloping toward the meadow and rolling in the grass, they stood close together, watchful and nervous, their ears swiveling, nostrils wide. The crazy’s old horse stood in the shade alone, his head down. Melissa watched them, her lips tight.

The crazy stood where he had dismounted, staring at Snake, tears in his eyes.

“Melissa,” Snake said, “if you do go home alone, tell them I adopted you. Then—then they’ll know you’re their daughter too.”

“I don’t want to be their daughter. I want to be yours.”

“You are. No matter what.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Is there a trail?” she asked the crazy. “What’s the quickest way up?”

“No trail… it opens before me and closes behind me.”

Snake could feel Melissa restraining a sarcastic remark. “Let’s go, then,” she said, “and see if your magic will work for more than one.”

She hugged Melissa one last time. Melissa held tight, reluctant to let her go.

“It’ll be all right,” Snake said. “Don’t worry.”

The crazy climbed surprisingly quickly, almost as if a path really did open up for him, and for him alone. Snake had to work hard to keep up with him, and sweat stung her eyes. She scrambled up a few meters of harsh black stone and grabbed his robe. “Not so fast.”

His breath came quickly, from excitement, not effort. “The dreamsnakes are near,” he said. He jerked his robe from her hand and scuttled up sheer rock. Snake wiped her forehead on her sleeve, and climbed.

The next time she caught him she grabbed him by the shoulder and did not let go until he sank down on a ledge.

“We’ll rest here,” she said, “and then we’ll go on, more slowly and more quietly. Otherwise your friends will know we’re coming before we’re ready to have them know.”

“The dreamsnakes—”

“North is between us and the dreamsnakes. If he sees you first will he let you go on?”

“You’ll give me a dreamsnake? One of my own? Not like North?”

“Not like North,” Snake said. She sat in a narrow wedge of shade, leaning her head back against the volcanic rock. In the valley below, an edge of the meadow showed between dark evergreen branches, but neither Swift nor Squirrel was in that part of the clearing. It looked like a small scrap of velvet from this distance. Suddenly Snake felt both isolated and lonely.

Nearby, the rock was not so barren as it appeared from below. Lichen lay in green-gray patches here and there, and small fat-leaved succulents nestled in shady niches. Snake leaned forward to see one more closely. Against black rock, in shadow, its color was indistinct.

She sat back abruptly.

Picking up a shard of rock, Snake leaned forward again and knelt over the squat blue-green plant. She poked at its leaves. They closed down tight.

It’s escaped, Snake thought. It’s from the broken dome.

She should have expected something like this; she should have known she would find things that did not belong on the earth. She prodded it again, from the same side. It was, indeed, moving. It would crawl all the way down the mountain if she let it. She slipped the rock’s point beneath it and lifted the plant out of the crevice, rolling it upside down. Except for the bristle of rootlets in its center, it looked just the same, its brilliant turquoise leaves rotating on their bases, seeking a hold. Snake had never seen this species before, but she had seen similar creatures, plants—they did not fit into the normal classifications—take over a field in a night, poisoning the ground so nothing else would grow. One summer several years before she and the other healers had helped burn off a swarm of them from nearby farms. They had not swarmed again, but little colonies of them still turned up from time to time, and the fields they had taken over were barren.

She wanted to burn this one but could not risk a fire now. She pushed it out of the shadows into sunlight and it closed up tight. Now Snake noticed that here and there lay the shriveled hulls of other crawlies, dead and sun-dried, defeated by the barren cliff.

“Let’s go,” Snake said, more to herself than to the crazy.