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.
But all that, Snake thought, was why healers carried dreamsnakes to begin with. The venom did not kill, and it did not make death inevitable. Rather, it eased the transition between life and death and helped the dying person accept finality.
Given time, the crazy could no doubt will himself to die. But Snake had no intention of letting him carry out his will before she found out where he came from and what was going on there. She also had no intention of staying up half the night trading watches over him with Melissa. They both needed a good night’s sleep.
The crazy’s arms were as limp as the ragged robes covering them. Snake drew his hands above his head and tied his wrists to her saddle with two sets of its packstraps. She did not tie him tightly or cruelly, just firmly enough so she would hear him if he tried to get away. The evening had turned chilly, so she threw a spare blanket over him, then she and Melissa spread their own blankets on the hard ground and went to sleep.
It must have been midnight when Snake woke again. The fire had gone out, leaving the camp pitch-dark. Snake lay without moving, expecting the sound of the crazy trying to escape.
Melissa cried out in her sleep. Snake slid toward her, groping in the dark, and touched her shoulder. She sat beside her, stroking her hair and her face.
“It’s all right, Melissa,” Snake whispered. “Wake up, you’re just having a bad dream.”
After a moment Melissa sat bolt upright. “What—”
“It’s me, it’s Snake. You were having a nightmare.”
Melissa’s voice shook. “I thought I was back in Mountainside,” she said. “I thought Ras…”
Snake held her, still stroking her soft curly hair. “Never mind. You never have to go back there.”
She felt Melissa nod.
“Do you want me to stay here next to you?” Snake asked. “Or would that bring the nightmares back?”
Melissa hesitated. “Please stay,” she whispered.
Snake lay down and pulled both blankets over them. The night had turned cold, but Snake was glad to be out of the desert, back in a place where the ground did not tenaciously hold the day’s heat. Melissa huddled against her.
The darkness was complete, but Snake could tell from Melissa’s breathing that she was already asleep again. Perhaps she had never completely awakened. Snake did not go back to sleep for some time. She could hear the crazy’s rough breath, nearly a snore, above the trickle of water from the spring, and she could feel the vibrations of Swift and Squirrel’s hooves on the hard-packed earth as the horses shifted in the night. Beneath her shoulder and hip the ground yielded not at all, and above her not a star or a sliver of moon broke through into the sky.
The crazy’s voice was loud and whiny, but much stronger than it had been the night before.
“Let me up. Untie me. You going to torture me to death? I need to piss. I’m thirsty.”
Snake threw off the blankets and sat up. She was tempted to offer him the drink of water first, but decided that was the unworthy fantasy of being awakened at dawn. She got up and stretched, yawning, then waved at Melissa, who was standing between Swift and Squirrel as they nudged her for their breakfast. Melissa laughed and waved back.
The crazy pulled at the straps. “Well? You going to let me up?”
“In a minute.” She used the privy they had dug behind some bushes, and walked over to the spring to splash water on her face. She wanted a bath, but the spring did not provide that much water, nor did she intend to make the crazy wait quite so long. She returned to camp and untied the thongs around his wrists. He sat up, rubbing his hands together and grumbling, then rose and started away.
“I don’t want to invade your privacy,” Snake said, “but don’t go out of my sight.”
He snarled something unintelligible but did not let the natural screen hide him completely. Scuffing back to Snake, he squatted down and grabbed for the water flask. He drank thirstily and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, looking around hungrily.
“Is there breakfast?”
“I thought you were planning to die.”
He snorted.
“Everyone in my camp works for their food,” Snake said. “You can talk for yours.”
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
