Dreamsnake

Snake frowned. Melissa was nowhere in sight. If North had put her back in the caves Snake might search futilely for days and still not find her. She had no strength left for a long search. She stepped out into the clearing.

“Why don’t you let it bite you?” she said.

North started violently, but did not lose control of the serpent. He stared at Snake with an expression of pure confusion. He glanced quickly around the clearing as if noticing for the first time that his people were not near him.

“They’re all asleep, North,” Snake said. “Dreaming. Even the one who brought me here.”

“Come to me!” North shouted, but Snake did not obey his commanding voice, and no one at all answered.

“How did you get out?” North whispered. “I’ve killed healers — they were never magic. They were as easy to kill as any creature.”

“Where’s Melissa?”

“How did you get out?” he screamed.

Snake approached him without any idea what she would do. It was true that North was not strong, but sitting down he was still nearly as tall as she was standing, and right now she was not strong either. She stopped in front of him.

North thrust the dreamsnake toward her, as if it would frighten her or bind her with desire to his will. Snake was so close that she reached out and stroked the serpent with the tip of her finger.

“Where’s Melissa?”

“She’s mine,” he said. “She doesn’t belong in the world outside. She belongs here.”

But his pale eyes, flicking sideways, betrayed him. Snake followed his gaze: to the huge basket, nearly as long as she was tall and half that deep. Snake went to it and carefully lifted its lid. She took one involuntary backward step, drawing in a long angry breath. The basket was nearly filled with a solid mass of dreamsnakes. She swung toward North, furious.

“How could you?”

“It was what she needed.”

Snake turned her back on him and slowly, carefully began lifting dreamsnakes from the basket. There were so many of them she could not see Melissa, even as a vague shape. She took dreamsnakes out of the basket by pairs, and, once they could no longer reach her daughter, dropped them on the ground. The first one slid over her foot and coiled itself around her ankle, but the second one glided rapidly away toward the trees.

North scrambled up. “What are you doing? You can’t—” He started after the freed serpents, but one of them raised itself to strike and North flinched back. Snake dropped two more serpents on the ground. North tried once again to capture a dreamsnake, but it struck at him and he nearly fell avoiding it. North abandoned the serpent and flung himself toward Snake, using his height to threaten her, but she held a dreamsnake out toward him and he stopped.

“You’re afraid of them, aren’t you, North?” She took one step toward him. He tried to stand firm but when Snake took a second step he backed abruptly away.

“Don’t you accept your own advice?” She was angrier than she had ever been before: the sane part of her mind, driven deep, watched with shock how glad she was to be able to frighten him.

“Stay away—”

As Snake approached him he fell backward. Scrabbling at the ground he pulled himself away, and stumbled again when he tried to rise. Snake was near enough to smell the odor of him, musty and dry, nothing like human scent. Panting, like an animal at bay, he stopped and faced her, his fists clenched to strike as she brought the dreamsnake closer.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t do it—”

Thinking of Melissa, Snake did not reply.

North stared at the dreamsnake, mesmerized. “No—” His voice broke. “Please—”

“Is it pity you want from me?” Snake cried with joy, knowing she would give him no more mercy than he had offered her daughter.

Suddenly North’s fists unclenched and he leaned toward her, stretching out his hands to her, exposing the fine blue veins of his wrists.

“No,” he said. “I want peace.” He trembled visibly as he waited for the dreamsnake’s strike.

Astonished, Snake drew back her hands.

“Please!” North cried again. “Gods, don’t play with me!”

Snake looked at the serpent, then at North. Her pleasure in his capitulation turned to revulsion. Was she so much like him, that she needed power over other human beings? Perhaps his accusations had been true. Honor and deference pleased her as much as they pleased him. And she had certainly been guilty of arrogance, she had always been guilty of arrogance. Perhaps the difference between her and North was not of kind, but only of degree. Snake was not sure, but she knew that if she forced this serpent on him now, while he was helpless, whatever differences there might be would have even less meaning. She stepped back, dropping the dreamsnake on the ground.

“Stay away from me.” Her voice, too, trembled. “I’m going to take my daughter and go home.”

“Help me,” he whispered. “I discovered this place, I used its creatures to help others, don’t I deserve help now?” He looked pitiably at Snake but she did not move.

Suddenly he moaned and lunged for the dreamsnake, grasping it in one hand and forcing it to bite his other wrist. He whimpered as the fangs sank in, once, again.

Snake backed away from him, but he no longer paid any attention to her. She turned toward the huge wicker basket.

The dreamsnakes had begun to escape of their own accord now. One slithered over the basket’s side and fell to the earth with a soft thud. Several more peered over, and gradually the weight of the whole mass of them bulged out the wicker and tilted the basket. It tipped over, and the serpents squirmed out in a writhing pile.

But Melissa was not there.

North swept past Snake, oblivious to her, and plunged his pale blood-spotted hands into the mass of dreamsnakes.

Snake grabbed him and pulled him around. “Where is she?”

“What — ?” He strained feebly toward the serpents, his translucent eyes glassy.

“Melissa — where is she?”

“She was dreaming…” He gazed at the dreamsnakes. “With them.”

Somehow, Melissa had got away. Somehow, her will had defeated North, the venom, the lure of forgetfulness. Snake looked around the camp, searching again, seeing everything but what she wished to see.

North moaned in frustration and Snake let him go. He grabbed at escaping serpents as they slid away into the forest. His arms were a mass of bloody pinpricks, and each time he recaptured another of his creatures he forced it to strike at him.

“Melissa!” Snake called, but there was no answer.

Suddenly North grunted; then, after a moment, he made a strange moaning sound. Snake looked over her shoulder. North rose slowly, a serpent in his bloody hands, thin trickles of blood flowing from a bite in his throat. He stiffened, and the dreamsnake writhed. North fell to his knees and balanced there. He toppled forward and lay still, and his power drained away from him as the alien dreamsnakes escaped back into their alien forest.

By reflex, Snake went to him. He breathed evenly. He was not hurt, not by such a gentle fall. Snake wondered if the venom would affect him as it affected his followers. But even if it did not, even if his dread of it caused him to react badly, she could do nothing for him.

The dreamsnake he still held squirmed and flailed itself from his grasp. Snake caught her breath in memory and sorrow. Its spine was broken. Snake knelt beside it and ended its pain, killing it as she had killed Grass.

With the taste of its blood chill and salty on her lips, she fumbled for the strap of her small wicker basket and hoisted it across her shoulders. It did not occur to her to look for Melissa anywhere but on the trail leading down the hill, toward the break in the dome.

The tangle-trees cast a deeper, darker shade here than in the first place Snake had passed among them, and the opening through them was narrower and lower. With chills on her back, Snake pushed herself as fast as she could go. The alien forest that surrounded her could harbor any sort of creature, from dreamsnakes to silent carnivores. Melissa was completely unprotected; she did not even have her knife anymore.