“It’s all right,” Snake said. “We can stop soon.”
“Oh.” Melissa looked around, blinking. “I forgot where I was.”
They reached the summertrees ringing the oasis. Snake’s lantern illuminated leaves already split and frayed by windblown sand. Snake did not see any tents and she could not hear any sounds of people or animals. All the caravannaires, by now, had retreated to the safety of the mountains.
“Where’s that light?”
“I don’t know,” Snake said. She glanced at Melissa, for her voice sounded strange: it was muffled by the end of her headcloth, pulled across her face. When no one appeared, she let it drop as if unaware that she had been hiding herself.
Snake turned Swift around, worried about the light.
“Look,” Melissa said.
Swift’s body cut off the lantern’s light in one direction, and there against the darkness rose a streak of luminescence. Closer, Snake could see that it was a dead summertree, close enough to the water to rot instead of drying. Lightcells had invaded its fragile trunk, transforming it into a glowing signal. Snake breathed softly with relief.
They rode farther, circling the still, black pool until they found a site with trees thick enough to give some shelter. As soon as Snake reined in, Melissa jumped down and began unsaddling Squirrel. Snake climbed down more slowly, for despite the constant desert climate, her knee had stiffened again during the long ride. Melissa rubbed Squirrel with a twist of leaves, talking to him in a barely audible voice. Soon they were all, horses and people, bedded down to wait through the day.
Snake padded barefoot toward the water, stretching and yawning. She had slept well all day, and now she wanted a swim before starting out again. It was still too early to leave the shelter of the thick summertrees. Hoping to find a few pieces of ripe fruit still on the branches, she glanced up and around, but the desert dwellers’ harvest had been thorough.
Only a few days before, on the other side of the mountains, the foliage at the oases had been lush and soft; here, now, the leaves were dry and dying. They rustled as she brushed past. The brittle fronds crumbled in her hand.
She stopped where the beach began. The black strip was only a few meters wide, a semicircle of sand around a minuscule lagoon that reflected the overhanging latticework of branches. In the secluded spot, Melissa was kneeling half-naked on the sand. She leaned out over the water, staring silently downward. The marks of Ras’s beating had faded, and the fire had left her back unscarred. Her skin was fairer than Snake would have guessed from her deep-tanned hands and face. As Snake watched, Melissa reached out slowly and touched the surface of the dark water. Ripples spread from her fingertips.
Melissa watched, fascinated, as Snake let Mist and Sand out of the case. Mist glided around Snake’s feet, tasting the scents of the oasis. Snake picked her up gently. The smooth white scales were cool against her hands.
“I want her to smell you,” Snake said. “Her instinctive reaction is to strike at anything that startles her. If she recognizes your scent, it’s safer. All right?”
Melissa nodded, slowly, clearly frightened. “She’s very poisonous, isn’t she? More than the other?”
“Yes. As soon as we get home I can immunize you, but I don’t want to start that here. I have to test you first and I don’t have the right things with me.”
“You mean you can fix it so she’d bite me and nothing would happen?”
“Not quite nothing. But she’s bitten me by mistake a few times and I’m still here.”
“I guess I better let her smell me,” Melissa said.
Snake sat down next to her. “I know it’s hard not to be afraid of her. But breathe deeply and try to relax. Close your eyes and just listen to my voice.”
“Horses know it, too, when you’re afraid,” Melissa said, and did as Snake told her.
The cobra’s forked tongue flickered over Melissa’s hands, and the child remained still and silent. Snake remembered the first time she had seen the albino cobras: a terrifying, exhilarating moment when a mass of them, coiled together in infinite knots, felt her footsteps and lifted their heads in unison, hissing, like a many-headed beast or an alien plant in violent and abrupt full bloom.
Snake kept her hand on Mist as the cobra glided over Melissa’s arms.
“She feels nice,” Melissa said. Her voice was shaky, and a little scared, but the tone was sincere.
Melissa had seen rattlers before; their danger was a known one and not so frightening. Sand crawled across her hands and she stroked him gently. Snake was pleased; her daughter’s abilities were not limited to horses.
“I hoped you’d get along with Mist and Sand,” she said. “It’s important for a healer.”
Melissa looked up, startled. “But you didn’t mean—” She stopped.
“What?”
Melissa drew in a deep breath. “What you told the mayor,” she said hesitantly. “About what I could do. You didn’t really mean it. You had to say it so he’d let me go.”
“I meant everything I said.”
“But I couldn’t be a healer.”
“Why not?” Melissa did not answer, so Snake continued. “I told you healers adopt their children, because we can’t have any of our own. Let me tell you some more about us. A lot of healers have partners who have different professions. And not all our children become healers. We aren’t a closed community. But when we choose someone to adopt, we usually pick someone we think could be one of us.”
“Me?”
“Yes. If you want to. That’s the important thing. For you to do what you want to do. Not what you think anyone else wants or expects you to do.”
“A healer…” Melissa said.
The quality of wonder in her daughter’s voice gave Snake another compelling reason to make the city people help her find more dreamsnakes.
The second night Snake and Melissa rode hard. There was no oasis, and in the morning Snake did not stop at dawn, though it was really too hot to travel. Sweat drenched her. The sticky beads rolled down her back and sides. They slid halfway down her face and dried into salty grit. Swift’s coat darkened as sweat streamed down her legs. Every step flung droplets from her fetlocks.
“Mistress…”
The formality startled Snake and she glanced over at Melissa with concern. “Melissa, what’s wrong?”
“How much farther before we stop?”
“I don’t know. We have to go on as long as we can.” She gestured toward the sky, where the clouds hung low and threatening. “That’s what they look like before a storm.”
“I know. But we can’t go much longer. Squirrel and Swift have to rest. You said the city is in the middle of the desert. Well, once we get in we have to get back out, and the horses have to take us.”
Snake slumped back in her saddle. “We have to go on. It’s too dangerous to stop.”
“Snake… Snake, you know about people and storms and healing and deserts and cities, and I don’t. But I know about horses. If we let them stop and rest for a few hours, they’ll take us a far way tonight. If they have to keep going, by dark we’ll have to leave them behind.”
“All right,” Snake said finally. “We’ll stop when we get to those rocks. At least there’ll be some shade.”
At home in the healers’ station, Snake did not think of the city from one month to the next. But in the desert, and in the mountains where the caravannaires wintered, life revolved around it. Snake had begun to feel that her life too depended on it when at last, at dawn after the third night, the high, truncated mountain that protected Center appeared before her. The sun rose directly behind it, illuminating it in scarlet like an idol. Scenting water, sensing an end to their long trek, the horses raised their heads and quickened their tired pace. As the sun rose higher the low, thickening clouds spread the light into a red wash that covered the horizon. Snake’s knee ached with every step Swift took, but she did not need the signal of swollen joints to tell her a storm approached. Snake clenched her fists around the reins until the leather dug painfully into her palms, then slowly she relaxed her hands and stroked her horse’s damp neck. She had no doubt that Swift ached as much as she did.