“Snake,” Melissa said softly.
“Yes?”
“Look — cover the lantern—” Melissa pointed to the rock over the entrance of the cave. Snake shielded the lantern, and the indistinct luminous shape brightened and reached toward her. She felt a quick chill up her spine. She held out the lantern and moved closer to the form.
“It’s a drawing,” she said. It had only appeared to move; it was a spidery shape crawling against the wall, merely paint. A clever optical illusion that now, though Snake knew better, looked as if it were creeping toward her.
“I wonder what it’s for.” Melissa’s voice, too, whispered against the rock.
“Maybe it’s to lead people out — that would mean there is something farther inside.”
“But what about Swift and Squirrel? We can’t leave them here.”
“If we don’t find something for them to eat,” Snake said gently, “they’ll starve too.”
Melissa looked up toward the panther’s ledge, the blue light ghostly on her scarred face.
“Melissa,” Snake said suddenly, “do you hear something?” It was a change, but she could not figure out what it was. The black panther, screaming in the distance? Whoever had painted the spider symbol on the wall? Her fingers curled around the handle of the knife on her belt.
“The wind stopped!” Melissa said. She ran toward the cave entrance.
Snake followed close behind, at every instant ready to pull Melissa back from the storm’s violence. But her daughter was right: what she had heard was not a sound but the abrupt end of a sound she had become accustomed to.
Nothing happened. Outside, the air was absolutely still. The low dust clouds had swept across the desert and disappeared, leaving puffy, towering thunderheads arrayed around with rich blue sky. Snake stepped out into the strange luminosity of the morning, and a cold breeze fluttered the robe at her ankles.
All at once, the rain began.
Snake ran out into the drops, lifting her arms to them like a child. Squirrel trotted past her and broke into a gallop. Swift sped by him, and they cavorted and bucked like foals. Melissa stood still, gazing upward, letting the rain wash her face.
The clouds, a long, wide bank of them, passed slowly overhead, now shedding rain, now breaking for an instant of hummingbird-bright sun. Snake and Melissa finally retreated to the shelter of the rocks, soaked and chilly and happy. A triple rainbow arched across the sky. Snake sighed and sank down on her heels to watch it. She was so wrapped in awe of the colors, as they alternated back and forth through the spectrum, that she did not notice exactly when Melissa sat close beside her. First she was not there, then she was, and Snake slipped her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. This time Melissa relaxed against her, not quite so poised to tear herself away from any human contact.
The clouds passed, the rainbow faded, and Squirrel trotted back to Snake, so wet that the texture of his stripes, as well as their color, was visible. Snake scratched him behind the ears and under the jaw; then for the first time in perhaps half an hour looked out across the desert.
In the direction from which the clouds had come, a pale, delicate green already softened the low black hills. The desert plants grew so quickly that Snake imagined she could almost see the boundary slipping nearer like a gentle tide, following the progress of the rain.
Chapter 10
Snake realized reluctantly that she could not stay at Center. It was simply too dangerous to spend any time exploring the mountain caves, though they drew her strongly. They might lead eventually to the city, but they might as easily trap her, and Melissa, in a mesh of sterile stone tunnels. The rain offered a single reprieve: if Snake did not accept it, she and her daughter, the horses and the serpents, would have no second chance.
Somehow it did not seem fair or right to Snake that her return to the mountains was as easy as a pleasure trip through meadowlands. For that was what the desert metamorphosed into after a rain. All day the horses snatched mouthfuls of tender leaves as they walked, while their riders picked great bouquets of honeycups and sucked the flowers’ ends for their nectar. Pollen hung heavy in the air. Leading the horses, Snake and Melissa walked far into the night, while the aurora borealis danced; the desert became luminous and neither horses nor riders seemed tired. Snake and Melissa ate at random intervals, chewing on dry fruit or jerky as they traveled; near dawn, they flung themselves on soft, lush grass where only sand had been a few hours before. They slept a short while and woke at sunrise, refreshed.
The plants on which they rested had already budded. By afternoon flowers covered the dunes in drifts of color, one hill white, the next bright purple, a third multicolored in streamers of species that led from crest to valley. The flowers moderated the heat, and the sky was clearer than Snake had ever seen it. Even the contours of the dunes were altered by the rain, from soft rolling billows to sharp-edged eroded ridges, marked by the narrow canyons of short-lived streams.
The third morning the dust clouds began to gather again. The rain had all seeped away or evaporated; the plants had captured all they could. Now dryness mottled the leaves with brown as the plants shriveled and died. Their seeds drifted across Snake’s path in eddies of the wind.
The vast desert’s peace wrapped itself around her shoulders, but the eastern foothills of the central mountain range rose before her, reminding her again of failure. She did not want to go home.
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.