Dreamsnake (33 page)

She wondered if she had imagined or dreamt the mating scene. It
had seemed so real
…

Whether she had dreamt it or not, there had been many more
dreamsnakes in the crevasse. Either their holes were too well
concealed for her to find without a more careful search, or North
had taken all the rest of the serpents away.

A green motion at the edge of her vision drew her around. She
reached for the dreamsnake and it struck at her. She pulled her hand
back, glad to see that even after all that had happened her reflexes
were quick enough to avoid the fangs. She was not afraid of the bite
of one of the serpents: her immunity to the venom would be extremely
high right now. Each time she was exposed to it, it would take even
more to affect her the next time. But she did not want to experience
a next time.

She captured the last big dreamsnake and put it in her bag, tied
the cloth shut with one strip of material, and tied the whole thing
to her belt with the other, leaving a long tether.

Snake could see only one way to escape. Well, there
was
another way, but she doubted she had enough time to build herself a
ramp of fragmented stone and stroll out. She returned to the far end
of the crevasse, to the narrow space where the walls came together,
where she had held Melissa.

Something tickled her bare foot. She looked down and saw the
eggling dreamsnake gliding away. She bent down and picked it up,
gently so as not to startle it. The horny tissue had fallen away,
and the scales beneath were pale pink all around its mouth. In time
they would turn scarlet. The tiny serpent tasted the air with its
three-pronged tongue, butted its nose against her palm, and flowed
around her thumb. She slipped it into the breast pocket of her torn
shirt, where she could feel it moving only a layer of material away.
It was young enough to tame. The warmth of her body lulled it.

Snake braced herself in the narrow space. Leaning back, she
pressed her shoulders and her spine against the rock. The wound had
not yet begun to hurt again, but she did not know how much stress
she could stand. She set herself not to feel the injury, but
exhaustion and hunger made concentration difficult. Snake put her
right foot against the opposite wall and pushed, bracing herself.
Carefully, she placed her other foot on the wall and hung suspended
between the two faces of the crevasse. She pushed with both feet,
sliding her shoulders upward, pushing back and down with her hands.
She slipped her feet a little higher and pushed again, creeping
upward.

A pebble came free beneath her foot and she slid, falling
sideways. She scratched at the wall, scrabbling to keep herself in
position. Rock tore at her elbows and back. She slammed down,
landing hard and badly. Struggling for breath, Snake tried to rise
and then lay still. Down and up reversed and shimmered. When they
finally steadied, she drew in a long breath and pushed herself to
her feet again. Her bad knee trembled slightly with the strain.

She had not, at least, fallen on the dreamsnakes. She put her
hand to her pocket and felt the little one moving easily.

Gritting her teeth, Snake leaned back against the wall. She
pushed herself upward again, moving more carefully, feeling for
broken stone before she put any pressure on a new spot. Rock scraped
her back and her hands grew slippery with sweat. She kept herself
going; she imagined being able to look over the edge of her prison
and she imagined hard ground and horizons.

She heard a noise and froze.

It’s nothing, she thought. One piece of stone hitting another.
Volcanic rock always sounds alive when it clashes against itself.

The muscles in her thighs trembled with strain. Her eyes stung
and her vision sparkled with sweat.

The sound came again. It was no clattering rock but two voices,
and one of them was North’s.

Nearly sobbing with frustration, Snake slid back into the
crevasse. Going down was just as hard, and it seemed to take an
interminable length of time before she was far enough to jump the
rest of the way. Her back and her hands and feet scraped against
stone. The noise was so loud in the enclosed space that she was sure
North would hear it. As a rock clattered down the side of the
crevasse, Snake flung herself to the ground, curling her body around
the sack of dreamsnakes. She froze there, by sheer will concealing
the tremors of fatigue. Needing desperately to pant for breath, she
forced herself to breath slowly, as if she were still asleep. She
kept her eyes nearly closed, but she saw the shadow that fell over
her.

“Healer!”

Snake did not move.

“Healer, wake up!”

She heard the scuff of a boot against stones. A shower of rock
fragments rained down on her.

“She’s still sleeping, North,” Snake’s crazy said. “Like
everybody else, everybody but you and me. Let’s go to sleep, North.
Please let me sleep.”

“Shut up. There isn’t any venom left. The serpents are
exhausted.”

“They could give just one more bite. Or let me go down and get
another, North. A nice big one. Then I can make sure the healer’s
really sleeping.”

“What do I care if she’s really sleeping or not?”

“You can’t trust her, North. She’s sneaky. She tricked me into
bringing her to you
…
”

The crazy’s voice faded away with his and North’s footsteps. As
far as Snake could hear, North did not bother to reply again.

As they left, Snake moved only enough to put her hand over the
pocket of her shirt. The eggling was, somehow, still all right; she
could feel it moving slowly and calmly beneath her fingers. She
began to believe that if she ever got out of the crevasse alive, the
tiny dreamsnake would too. Or perhaps she had the order reversed.
Her hand was shaking; she drew it away so it would not frighten her
serpent. Turning slowly over on her back, she looked at the sky. The
top of the crevasse seemed an immense distance from her, as if each
time she had tried to scale the walls they had risen higher. A hot
tear trickled from the corner of her eye back into her hair.

Snake sat up all at once. Getting to her feet was slower and
clumsier, but finally she stood in the narrow space between the
walls and stared straight ahead at the face of the rock. The scraped
places on her back rubbed against the stone, and the wound in her
shoulder was perilously close to tearing open. Without looking
upward, Snake put one foot against the wall, braced herself, wedged
herself in with her other foot, and started up again.

As she crept higher and higher, she could feel the cloth of her
shirt shredding beneath her shoulders. The knotted headcloth rose
from the ground and scraped up the wall beneath her. It started to
swing; it was just heavy enough to disturb her balance. She stopped,
suspended like a bridge from nowhere leading nowhere, until the
pendulum below shortened its oscillation. The tension in her leg
muscles increased until she could hardly feel the rock against her
feet. She did not know how near the top she was and she would not
look.

She was higher than she had got before; here the walls of the
crevasse gaped wider and it was harder for her to brace herself.
With every tiny step she took up the wall she had to stretch her
legs a little farther. Now she was held only by her shoulders, by
her hands pushing hard against the rock, and by the balls of her
feet. She could not keep going much longer. Beneath her right hand,
the stone was wet with blood. She forced herself upward one last
time. Abruptly the back of her head slipped over the rim of the
crevasse and she could see the ground and the hills and the sky. The
sharp change nearly destroyed her balance. She flailed out with her
left arm, catching the edge of the crevasse with her elbow and then
with her hand. Her body spun around and she snatched at the ground
with her right hand. The wound in her shoulder stabbed her from
spine to fingertips. Her nails dug into the ground, slipped, held.
She scrabbled for a toehold and somehow found one. She hung against
the wall for a moment, gasping for breath and feeling the bruises
over her hipbones where she had slammed into the stone. Just above
her breast, in her pocket, squeezed but not quite crushed, the
eggling dreamsnake squirmed unhappily.

With the last bit of strength in her arms, Snake heaved herself
over the edge and lay panting on the horizontal surface, her feet
and legs still dangling. She crawled the rest of the way out. The
torn headcloth scraped over stone, the fabric stretching and
fraying. Snake pulled it gently until the makeshift sack lay beside
her. Only then, with one hand on the serpents and the other almost
caressing the solid ground, could Snake look around and be sure that
she had climbed out unobserved. For the moment, at least, she was
free.

She unbuttoned her pocket and looked at the eggling, hardly
believing that it was unharmed. Rebuttoning her pocket, she took one
of the baskets from the pile beside the crevasse and put the mature
serpents in it. She slung it across her back, rose shakily to her
feet, and started toward the tunnels circling the crater.

But the tunnels surrounded her like infinite reflections, and she
could not remember which one had let her in. It was opposite the
single large refrigeration duct, but the crater was so large that
any one of three exits might have been the one she wanted.

Maybe it’s better, Snake thought. Maybe they always go in through
the same one and I’ll get another that’s deserted.

Or maybe no matter which one I take I’ll meet someone, or maybe
all the others lead to dead ends.

At random, Snake entered the left-hand tunnel. Inside it looked
different, but that was because the frost had melted. This tunnel,
too, held torches, so North’s people must use it for something. But
most of them had burned to stubs, and Snake crept through darkness
from one vague, flickering point to another, trailing her hand
against the wall so she could return if this did not lead her
outside. Each new light had to be the tunnel’s mouth, but each time
she found another fading torch. The corridor stretched onward.
However harried she had been before, however exhausted she was now,
she knew the first tunnel had not been this long.

One more light, she thought. And then—?

The sooty smoke drifted around her, not even revealing an air
current to show her the way. She stopped at the torch and turned
around. Only blackness lay behind her. The other flames had gone
out, or she had rounded a curve that blotted them from her view. She
could not bring herself to backtrack.

She walked through a great deal of darkness before she saw the
next light. She wanted it to be daylight, made bargains and bets
with herself that it would be daylight, but knew it was merely
another torch before she reached it. It had nearly died; it
flickered to an ember. She could smell the acrid smoke of an ebbing
flame.

Snake wondered if she were being herded to another crevasse, one
lying in wait in the dark. From then on she walked more carefully,
sliding one foot forward without shifting her weight until she was
sure of solid ground.

When the next torch appeared she hardly noticed it. It did not
cast enough light to help her make her way. The basket grew heavier
and a reaction to all that had happened set in. Her knee ached
fiercely and her shoulder hurt so much that she had to slide her
hand beneath her belt and hug her arm in close against her body. As
she scuffed along the untrustworthy path, she did not think she
could have lifted her feet higher even if caution had allowed it.

Suddenly she was standing on a hillside in daylight beneath the
strange twisted trees. She looked around blankly, then stretched out
her left hand and stroked rough tree bark. She touched a fragile
leaf with an abraded, broken-nailed fingertip.

Snake wanted to sit down, laugh, rest, sleep. Instead, she turned
right and followed the hillside around, hoping the long tunnel had
not led her half the hill or half the dome away from North’s camp.
She wished North or the crazy had said something about where they
had put Melissa.

The trees ended abruptly. Snake almost walked into the clearing
before she stopped herself and pulled back into the shadows. Thick
low round-leafed bushes carpeted the meadow with a solid layer of
scarlet vegetation. On the natural mattress lay all the people she
had seen with North, and more. They were all asleep, dreaming, Snake
supposed. Most lay face up with their heads thrown back, their
throats exposed, revealing puncture wounds and thin trickles of
blood among many sets of scars. Snake looked from person to person,
recognizing no one, until her search reached the other side of the
clearing. There, touched by the shade of an alien tree, the crazy
lay sleeping. His position differed from that of everyone else: he
was face down, stripped to the waist, and he had stretched out his
arms before him as if in supplication. His legs and feet were bare.
As Snake skirted the clearing, moving closer to the crazy, she saw
the many fang marks on his inner arms and behind his knees. So North
had found an unexhausted serpent, and the crazy had finally got what
he wanted.

But North was not in the clearing, and Melissa was not there
either.

A well-used trail led back into the forest. Snake followed it
cautiously, ready to slip between the trees at any warning. But
nothing happened. She could even hear the rustling of small animals
or birds or indescribably alien beasts as she padded barefoot over
the hard ground.

The trail ended just above the entrance to the first tunnel.
There, next to a large basket, alone with a dreamsnake in his hands,
sat North.

Snake watched him curiously. He held the serpent in the safe way,
behind the head so it could not strike. With the other hand he
stroked its smooth green scales. Snake had noticed that North had no
throat scars, and she had assumed that for himself he used the
slower and more pleasurable method of taking the venom. But now the
sleeves of his robe had fallen back and she could see quite clearly
that his pale arms were unscarred too.