With a faint mental twinge, recalling the other viper’s bite, Snake waited patiently until the creature crawled farther from its hiding place. It had none of the ethereal beauty of Mist, no striking patterns like Sand. It was simply ugly, with a head of lumpy protuberances and scales of a muddy dark brown. But it was a species unfamiliar to the healers, and, more, it was a threat to Arevin’s people. She should have caught one near his camp, but she had not thought to. That she had regretted ever since.
She had not been able to vaccinate his clan because, not yet knowing what diseases were endemic, she could not prepare the right catalyst for Sand. When she returned, if she were ever permitted to return, she would do that. But if she could capture the viper sliding softly toward her, she could make a vaccine against its venom as well, as a gift.
The slight breeze blew from the viper to her; it could not scent her. If it had heat-receptors, the warm black rocks confused it. It did not notice Snake. Its vision, she supposed, was no better than any other serpent’s. It crawled right in front of her, almost over her bare foot. She leaned down slowly, extending one hand toward its head and the other out in front of it. When the motion startled it, it drew back to strike and put itself right in her grasp. Snake held it firmly, giving it no chance to bite. It lashed itself around her forearm, hissed and struggled, showing its startlingly long fangs.
Snake shivered.
“You’d like a taste of me, wouldn’t you, creature?” Awkwardly, one-handed, she folded her headcloth up and tied the serpent into the makeshift bag so it would frighten no one when she returned to camp.
She padded on down the smooth stone trail.
Grum had readied a tent for her. It was pitched in shade, its side flaps open to catch the faint cool early-morning breeze. Grum had left her a bowl of fresh fruit, the first ripe berries of the summertrees. They were blue-black, round, smaller than a hen’s egg. Snake bit into one slowly, cautiously, for she had never eaten one fresh before. The tart thin juice spurted from the berry’s broken skin. She ate it slowly, savoring it. The seed inside was large, almost half the volume of the fruit. It had a thick casing to protect it through the storms of winter and long months or years of drought. When she had finished the berry, Snake put the seed aside, for it would be planted near the oasis, where it would have a chance to grow. Lying down, Snake told herself to remember to take a few summertree seeds with her. If they could be made to live in the mountains, they would be a good addition to the orchard. A moment later she fell asleep.
She slept soundly, dreamlessly, and when she awoke that evening, she felt better than she had for days; she felt good. The camp was quiet. For Grum and her grandchildren, this was a planned rest-stop for their pack animals and themselves. They were traders, returning home after a summer of bartering and buying and selling. Grum’s family, like the other families camped here, held hereditary rights to a portion of the summertree berries. When the harvest was over and the fruit dried, Grum’s caravan would leave the desert and travel the last few days to winter quarters. The harvest would begin soon: the air was bright with the fruit’s sharp scent.
Grum stood near the corral, her hands folded across the top of her walking stick. Hearing Snake, she glanced around and smiled. “Sleep well, healer-child?”
“Yes, Grum, thanks.”
Squirrel looked almost ordinary among Grum’s horses; the old trader fancied appaloosas, piebalds, paints. She thought they made her caravan more noticeable, and probably she was right. Snake whistled and Squirrel tossed his head and cantered toward her, kicking his heels, completely sound.
“He’s been lonely for you.”
Snake scratched Squirrel’s ears as he pushed her with his soft muzzle. “Yes, I can see he’s been pining away.”
Grum chuckled. “We do feed them well. No one ever accused me and mine of mistreating an animal.”
“I’ll have to coax him to leave.”
“Then stay — come to our village with us and stay the winter. We’re no healthier than any other people.”
“Thank you, Grum. But I have something I have to do first.” For a moment she had almost put Jesse’s death out of her mind, but she knew it would never be far away. Snake ducked under the rope fence. Standing at the tiger-pony’s shoulder, she lifted his foot.
“We tried to replace the shoe,” Grum said. “But all ours are too big and there’s no smith to reforge his or make him a new one. Not here, not this late.”
Snake took the pieces of the broken shoe. It was nearly new, for she had had Squirrel reshod before ever entering the desert. Even the edges at the toe were still sharp and square. The metal itself must have been flawed. She handed the pieces back to Grum. “Maybe Ao can use the metal. If I take Squirrel carefully, can he get to Mountainside?”
“Oh, yes, since you can ride the pretty gray.”
Snake regretted having ridden Squirrel at all. Usually she did not. Walking was fast enough for her, and Squirrel carried the serpents and her gear. But after leaving Arevin’s camp she had felt the effects of the sand viper’s bite again, when she thought she had overcome them. Intending to ride Squirrel only until she stopped feeling faint, Snake had got on him, and then actually fainted. He carried her patiently, slumped as she was over his withers, on across the desert. Only when he began to limp did she come to, hearing the clank of the broken iron.
Snake scratched her pony’s forehead. “We’ll go tomorrow, then, as soon as the heat fades. That leaves all day to vaccinate people, if they’ll come to me.”
“We’ll come, my dear, many of us. But why leave us so soon? Come home with us. It’s the same distance as to Mountainside.”
“I’m going on to the city.”
“Now? It’s too late in the year. You’ll be caught in the storms.”
“Not if I don’t waste any time.”
“Healer-child, dear one, you don’t know what they’re like.”
“Yes, I do. I grew up in the mountains. I watched them down below every winter.”
“Watching from a mountaintop’s nothing like trying to live through them,” Grum said.
Squirrel wheeled away and galloped across the corral toward a group of horses dozing in the shade. Snake suddenly laughed.
“Tell me the joke, little one.”
Snake looked down at the hunched old woman, whose eyes were as bright and clever as those of a fox.
“I just noticed which of your horses you put him in with.”
Grum’s deep tan flushed pink. “Healer, dear girl, I planned not to let you pay for his keep — I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Grum, it’s all right. I don’t mind. I’m sure Squirrel doesn’t. But I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed come foaling time.”
Grum shook her head wisely. “No, I won’t, he’s well behaved for a little stallion, but he knows what he’s about. The spotty horses are what I like, especially the leopard ones.” Grum had a leopard-spot appaloosa, her prize: white with coin-sized black spots all over. “And now I’ll have stripy ones to go with them.”
“I’m glad you like his color.” Inducing a virus to encapsulate the proper genes had taken Snake a good bit of work. “But I don’t think he can get you many foals.”
“Why not? As I said—”
“He may surprise us — I hope he does, for you. But I think he’s probably sterile.”
“Ah,” Grum said. “Ah, too bad. But I understand. He’s from a horse and one of those stripy donkeys I heard about once.”
Snake let it pass. Grum’s explanation was quite wrong; Squirrel was no more a hybrid than any of Grum’s horses, except at a single short gene complex. But Squirrel was resistant to the venom of Mist and Sand, and though the cause was different, the result was the same as if he were a mule. His immunities were so efficient that his system quite likely did not recognize haploid cells, the sperm, as “self,” and so destroyed them.