Dreamsnake

Chapter 6

The mayor felt better in the morning. Brian had clearly been up all night beside him, yet he accepted his orders — not exactly cheerfully, for that was not Brian’s style, but without reservation or resentment.

“Will it leave a scar?” the mayor asked.

“Yes,” Snake said, surprised. “Of course. Several. I took out quite a lot of dead muscle, and it will never all fill back in. You probably won’t limp, though.”

“Brian, where’s my tea?” The tone of the mayor’s voice revealed his annoyance at Snake’s reply.

“It’s coming, sir.” The fragrance of spices drifted into the room. The mayor drank his tea alone, ignoring Snake while she rebandaged his leg.

When she left, scowling, Brian followed her to the hall outside.

“Healer, forgive him. He’s not used to illness. He expects things to go his way.”

“So I noticed.”

“I mean… he thinks of himself scarred… He feels betrayed by himself…” Brian spread his hands, unable to find the right words.

It was not that uncommon to find people who did not believe they could get sick; Snake was used to difficult patients who wanted to get back to normal too soon, despite the need for recuperation, and who became querulous when they could not.

“That doesn’t give him the right to treat people the way he does,” Snake said.

Brian looked at the floor. “He’s a good man, healer.”

Sorry she had let her anger — no, her annoyance and hurt pride — touch him, Snake spoke again, more gently.

“Are you bound here?”

“No! Oh, no, healer, I’m free. The mayor doesn’t allow bonding in Mountainside. Drivers who come with bondservants are sent out of the city, and their people can choose to go with them or give the city a year’s service. If they stay the mayor buys their papers from the driver.”

“Is that what happened with you?”

He hesitated but finally answered. “Not many know I used to be bound. I was one of the first to be freed. After one year he tore up my bonding papers. They were still valid for twenty years, and I’d already served five. Until then I wasn’t sure I could trust him — or anyone. But I could.” He shrugged. “I stayed on afterward.”

“I understand why you feel grateful toward him,” Snake said. “But it still doesn’t give him the right to order you around twenty-four hours a day.”

“I slept last night.”

“In a chair?”

Brian smiled.

“Get someone else to watch him for a while,” Snake said. “You come with me.”

“Do you need help, healer?”

“No, I’m going down to the stables. But you can nap while I’m gone, at least.”

“Thank you, healer. I’d rather stay here.”

“Whatever you say.”

She left the residence and crossed the courtyard. It felt good to walk in the cool morning, even down the steep hairpin turns of the cliff trail. The mayor’s pastures spread out below her. The gray mare was alone in a green field, galloping back and forth with her head and tail high, bouncing stiff-legged to a halt at the fence, snorting, then wheeling to run in the opposite direction. If she had decided to keep on running, she could have cleared the chest-high fence and hardly noticed it, but she was running for no other reason then play.

Snake walked along the path to the barn. As she neared it she heard a slap and a cry, then a loud and furious voice.

“Get on with your work!”

Snake ran the last few steps to the stable and pulled open its doors. The inside was nearly dark. She blinked. She heard the rustling of straw and smelled the pleasant heavy odor of a clean horsebarn. After a moment her eyes became more accustomed to the dimness and she could see the wide straw-carpeted passageway, the two rows of box stalls, and the stablemaster turning toward her.

“Good morning, healer.” The stablemaster was a tremendous man, at least two meters tall, and heavily built. His curly hair was bright red and his beard was blond.

Snake looked up at him. “What was that noise?”

“Noise? I don’t — Oh, I was just countering the pleasures of laziness.”

His remedy must have been effective, for whoever had been lazy had disappeared very quickly.

“At this hour of the morning laziness sounds like a good idea,” Snake said.

“Well, we get started early.” The stablemaster led her farther into the barn. “I stabled your mounts down here. The mare’s out for a run, but I’ve kept the pony in.”

“Good,” Snake said. “He needs to be shod as soon as possible.”

“I’ve sent for the blacksmith to come this afternoon.”

“That’s fine.” She went inside Squirrel’s stall. He nuzzled her and ate the piece of bread she had brought him. His coat shone, his mane and tail were combed, and his hooves were even oiled. “Someone’s taken very good care of him.”

“We try to please the mayor and his guest,” the big man said. He stayed nearby, solicitously, until she left the stable to bring the mare inside. Swift and Squirrel had to be reintroduced to pasture slowly, after so long in the desert, or the rich grass would make them sick.

When she returned, riding Swift bareback and guiding her with her knees, the stablemaster was busy in another part of the building. Snake slid off the mare’s back and led her into her stall.

“It was me, mistress, not him.”

Startled, Snake turned, but whoever had whispered to her was not in the stall, nor in the passageway outside.

“Who’s that?” Snake said. “Where are you?” Back in the stall she looked up and saw the hole in the ceiling where fodder was thrown down. She jumped on the manger, grabbed the edge of the hole, and chinned herself up so she could see into the loft. A small figure jumped back in fright and hid behind a bale of hay.

“Come out,” Snake said. “I won’t hurt you.” She was in a ridiculous position, hanging down in the middle of the stall with Swift nibbling her boot, without the proper leverage to climb the rest of the way into the loft. “Come on down,” she said, and let herself drop back to the ground.

She could see the form of the person in the hayloft, but not the features.

It’s a child, she thought. Just a little kid.

“It’s nothing, mistress,” the child said. “It’s just he always pretends he does all the work and there’s others do too, is all. Never mind.”

“Please come down,” Snake said again. “You did a very nice job on Swift and Squirrel and I’d like to thank you.”

“That’s thanks enough, mistress.”

“Don’t call me that. My name’s Snake. What’s yours?”

But the child was gone.

People from town, both patients and messengers, already waited to see her when she reached the top of the cliff, leading Swift. She would get no leisurely breakfast today.

She saw a good deal of Mountainside before evening. For a few hours at a stretch she worked hard, busy and hurried but content, and then as she finished with one patient and went to hear about the next, apprehension swept over her and she thought that this time she might be asked to help someone who was dying, someone like Jesse whom she could not help at all.

Today, that did not happen.

In the evening she rode Swift north along the river, passing the town on her left, as the glow of the sun sank past the clouds and touched the west mountain peaks. The long shadows crept toward her as she reached the mayor’s pasture and stables. Seeing no one around, she took Swift into the barn herself, unsaddled her, and began to brush her smooth dappled coat. She was not particularly anxious to return to the mayor’s residence and its atmosphere of dogged loyalty and pain.

“Mistress, that’s not for you to do. Let me. You go on up the hill.”

“No, you come on down,” Snake said to the disembodied whispery voice. “You can help. And don’t call me mistress.”

“Go on, now, mistress, please.”

Snake brushed Swift’s shoulder and did not answer. When nothing happened she thought the child had gone; then she heard a rustling in the hay above her. On impulse she stroked the brush backwards across Swift’s flank. An instant later the child was beside her, taking the brush gently from her hand.

“You see, mistress—”

“ ‘Snake.’”

“ — This is no job for you. You know healing, I know horse-brushing.”

Snake smiled.

The little girl was only nine or ten, small and spare. She had not looked up at Snake; now she brushed Swift’s ruffled hair straight again, her face turned down and close to the mare’s side. She had bright red hair, and dirty, chewed fingernails.

“You’re right,” Snake said. “You are better at that than I am.”

The child was silent for a moment. “You fooled me,” she said sullenly, without turning around.

“A little,” Snake admitted. “But I had to or you wouldn’t let me thank you face to face.”

The child spun around, glaring up. “Then thank me!” she cried.

The left side of her face was twisted with a terrible scar.

Third-degree burns, Snake thought. The poor child — ! And then she thought: If a healer had been near, the scar would not have been so bad.

But at the same time she noticed the bruise along the right side of the little girl’s face. Snake knelt and the child shrank back from any contact, turning so the scar would be less visible. Snake touched the bruise gently.

“I heard the stablemaster yelling at someone this morning,” Snake said. “It was you, wasn’t it? He hit you.”

The child turned back and stared at her, her right eye wide, the left held partly closed by scar tissue.

“I’m all right,” she said. Then she slid out of Snake’s hands and ran up a ladder into the darkness.

“Please come back,” Snake called. But the child had disappeared, and even when Snake followed her into the loft she could not find her.

Snake hiked up the trail to the residence, her shadow pushed back and forth by the swaying of the lantern she carried. She thought about the nameless little girl ashamed to come into the light. The bruise was in a bad spot, just at the temple. But she had not flinched from Snake’s touch — at least not the touch to the bruise — and she had none of the symptoms of a concussion. Snake did not have to worry about the child’s immediate health. But in the future?

Snake wanted to help somehow, but she knew that if she had the stablemaster reprimanded, the little girl would be left with the consequences when Snake went away.

Snake climbed the stairs to the mayor’s room.

Brian looked exhausted, but the mayor was fresh. Most of the swelling had left his leg. The punctures had scabbed over but Brian was doing a good job of keeping the main wound open and clean.

“When can I get up?” the mayor asked. “I have work to do. People to see. Disputes to settle.”

“You can get up any time,” Snake said. “If you don’t mind having to stay in bed three times as long afterwards.”

“I insist—”

“Just stay in bed,” Snake said tiredly.

She knew he would disobey. Brian, as usual, followed her to the hall.

“If the wound bleeds in the night, come get me,” she said. She knew it would, if the mayor got up, and she did not want the old servant to have to deal with the injury alone.

“He is all right? He will be?”

“Yes, if he doesn’t push himself too hard. He’s mending fairly well.”

“Thank you, healer.”

“Where’s Gabriel?”

“He does not come up here any more.”

“Brian, what’s the matter between him and his father?”

“I’m sorry, healer, I cannot say.”

You won’t, you mean, Snake thought.

Snake stood looking out over the dark valley. She did not feel like going to sleep yet. That was one of the things she did not much like about her proving year: most of the time, she went to bed alone. Too many people in the places she had gone knew about healers by reputation only, and were afraid of her. Even Arevin feared her at the beginning, and by the time his fear ebbed, and their mutual respect changed to attraction, Snake had to leave. They had no chance together.

She leaned her forehead against the cool glass.

When Snake first crossed the desert, it was to explore, to see the places healers had not visited in decades or that they had never visited before. She had been presumptuous, perhaps, or even foolish, to do what her teachers no longer did and no longer considered doing. There were not even enough healers for the people on this side of the desert. If Snake succeeded on her visit to the city, all that might change. But Jesse’s name was the only difference between Snake and any other healer to ask Center for knowledge. If she failed — Her teachers were good people, tolerant of differences and eccentricities, but how they would react to the errors Snake had made, she did not know.

The knock at her door came as a relief, for it interrupted her thoughts.

“Come in.”

Gabriel entered, and she was struck once more by his beauty.

“Brian tells me my father’s doing well.”

“Well enough.”

“Thank you for helping him. I know he can be difficult.‘’ He hesitated, glanced around, shrugged. ”Well… I just came in to see if there’s anything I can do for you.“

Despite his preoccupation, he seemed gentle and pleasant, qualities that attracted Snake as much as his physical beauty. And she was lonely. She decided to accept his well-mannered offer.

“Yes,” she said. “Thanks.” She stopped before him, touched his cheek, took his hand and led him toward a couch. A flask of wine and some glasses stood on a low table near the window.

Snake realized that Gabriel was blushing scarlet.

If she did not know all the desert customs, she knew those of the mountains: she had not overstepped her privileges as a guest, and he had made the offer. She faced Gabriel and took his arms just above the elbows. Now he was quite pale.

“Gabriel, what’s the matter?”

“I… I misspoke myself. I didn’t mean — If you like I can send someone to you—”

She frowned. “If ‘someone’ was all I wanted I could have hired them from town. I wanted someone I like.”

He gazed at her, with a quick faint grateful smile. Perhaps he had decided to stop repressing his beard and grow it out at the same time he decided to leave his father’s house, for his cheeks showed a trace of fine red-gold hair.

“Thank you for that,” he said.

She guided him to the couch, made him sit down, and sat beside him. “What’s wrong?”

He shook his head. His hair fell across his forehead, half hiding his eyes.

“Gabriel, have you somehow not noticed that you are beautiful?”

“No.” He managed a rueful grin. “I know that.”

“Do I have to pry this out of you? Is it me? Gods know I can’t match the looks of Mountainside people. Or if you prefer men, I understand.” She had not hit on what made him draw away from her yet; he had not reacted to anything she had suggested. “Are you ill? I’m the first person you should tell!”

“I’m not ill,” he said softly, not meeting her gaze. “And it isn’t you. I mean, if I had my choice of anyone… I’m honored you think this much of me.”

Snake waited for him to continue.

“It wouldn’t be fair to you, if I stayed. I might—”

When he stopped again, Snake said, “This is the trouble between you and your father. This is why you’re going away.”

Gabriel nodded. “And he’s right to want me to go.”

“Because you haven’t lived up to his expectations?” Snake shook her head. “Punishment is no help. It’s stupid and self-gratifying. Come to bed with me, Gabriel. I won’t make any demands on you.”

“You don’t understand,” Gabriel said miserably. He took her hand and lifted it to his face, rubbing her fingertips across the fine soft stubble. “I can’t keep my side of the agreement lovers make between them. I don’t know why. I had a good teacher. But biocontrol is all beyond my reach. I’ve tried. Gods, I’ve tried.” His blue eyes were bright. He let his hand fall away from hers, to his side. Snake caressed his cheek once more and put her arm around his shoulders, hiding her surprise. Impotence she could comprehend, but lack of control — ! She did not know what to say to him, and he had more to tell her, something he desperately wanted to talk about: she could feel that from the stark tension of his whole body. His fists were clenched. She did not want to push him; he had been hurt enough that way already. She found herself searching for gentle and roundabout ways of saying things she would ordinarily deal with straightforwardly.

“It’s all right,” Snake said. “I understand what you’re saying. Be easy. With me it doesn’t matter.”

He looked up at her, as wide-eyed and surprised as the little girl in the stable had been when Snake looked at the new bruise instead of the old, ugly scar.

“You can’t mean that. I can’t talk to anyone. They’d be disgusted, like my father. I don’t blame them.”

“You can talk to me. I won’t judge you.”

He hesitated a moment more, then the words, pent up for years, rushed out. “I had a friend named Leah,” Gabriel said. “That was three years ago, when I was fifteen. She was twelve. The first time she decided to make love with anyone, more than just playing, you know, she chose me. She hadn’t finished her training yet, of course, but it shouldn’t have mattered because I’d finished mine. I thought.”

He was leaning against Snake, now, with his head on her shoulder, gazing with unfocused eyes at the black windows.

“Maybe I should have taken other precautions,” he said. “But I never even thought I might be fertile. I never heard of anybody who couldn’t handle biocontrol. Well, maybe not deep trance, but fertility.“ He laughed bitterly. ”And whiskers, but I hadn’t started growing any then.“ Snake felt him shrug as the smooth material of his shirt slid across the rough new fabric of her own. ”A few months later we had a party for her, because we thought she’d learned her biocontrol faster than usual. No one was surprised. Everything comes quickly to Leah. She’s brilliant.“ He stopped for a moment and simply lay against Snake, breathing slowly and deeply. He glanced up at her. ”But it wasn’t her biocontrol that stopped her menstruation, it was that I had made her pregnant. She was twelve and my friend and she chose me, and I almost ruined her life.“

Now Snake understood everything, Gabriel’s shyness, his uncertainty, his shame, even why he cloaked his beauty when he went outside: he did not want to be recognized; even more, he did not want anyone to offer him their bed.

“You poor children,” Snake said.

“I think we always assumed we’d partner, eventually, when we both knew what we were going to do. When we were settled. But who’d want an uncontrolled partner? They’d always know that if their control lapsed just a little, the other would have none. A partnering couldn’t last that way.” He shifted his weight. “Even so, she didn’t want to humiliate me. She didn’t tell anyone. She aborted it, but she was all alone. And her training wasn’t far enough along for that. She almost bled to death.”

“You shouldn’t treat yourself as if you’d hurt her out of spite,” Snake said, knowing that nothing as simple as words would be sufficient to make Gabriel stop despising himself, or to make up for the way his father treated him. He could not have known he was fertile, if he had not just been tested, and once one learned the technique it was not usually necessary to worry. Snake had heard of people incapable of biocontrol, but not very often. Only a person unable to care for anyone would have come unmarked through what Gabriel had undergone. And Gabriel quite obviously cared.

“She got well,” Gabriel said. “But I turned what should have been pleasure into nightmare for her. Leah… I think she wanted to see me again, but couldn’t make herself. If that makes sense.”

“Yes,” Snake said. Twelve years old: perhaps that had been Leah’s first realization that other people could influence her life without her control or even knowledge; it was not a lesson children learned willingly or easily.

“She wants to be a glass-former, and she had an appointment to assist Ashley.”

Snake whistled softly in admiration. Glass-forming was a demanding and respected profession. Only the best of its people could build solar mirrors; it took a long time just to learn to make decent tubed panels, or curved panes like the ones in the towers. Ashley was not one of the best. She was the best.

“Did Leah have to give it up?”

“Yes. It could have been permanently. She went the next year. But that was a year out of her life.” He spoke slowly and carefully but without emotion, as if he had been through this so many times in his mind that he had forced some distance between himself and the memory. “Of course I went back to the teacher, but when they tracked my reactions longer they realized I could only keep the temperature differential a few hours at a time. Not enough.”

“No,” Snake said thoughtfully, wondering just how good Gabriel’s teacher really could have been.

Gabriel drew back so he could look into her face. “So, you see, I can’t stay with you tonight.”

“You can. Please do. We’re both lonely, and we can help each other.”

He caught his breath and stood abruptly. “Don’t you understand—” he cried.

“Gabriel.”

He sat down slowly, but did not touch her.

“I am not twelve years old. You don’t need to be afraid of giving me a child I don’t want. Healers never have children. We take the responsibility for that ourselves, because we cannot afford to share it with our partners.”

“You never have children?”

“Never. Women do not bear them and men do not father them.”

He stared at her.

“Do you believe me?”

“You really still want me, even knowing — ?”

In answer, Snake stood up and began unbuttoning her shirt. The newness made the buttonholes stiff, so she stripped the shirt off over her head and dropped it on the floor. Gabriel stood up slowly, looking at her shyly. Snake unbuttoned his shirt and his pants as he reached out to hold her. When his pants slid off his narrow hips he began to blush.

“What’s wrong?”

“I haven’t been naked in front of anyone since I was fifteen.”

“Well,” Snake said, grinning, “high time.” Gabriel’s body was as beautiful as his face. Snake unfastened her pants and left them in a heap on the floor.

Taking Gabriel to her bed, Snake slipped under the sheet beside him. The soft glow of the lamp highlighted his blond hair and his fair skin. He was trembling.

“Relax,” Snake whispered. “There’s no hurry, and this is all for fun.” As she massaged his shoulders the tightness slowly left them. She realized she too was tense, tense with desire and excitement and need. She wondered what Arevin was doing.

Gabriel turned on his side and reached for her. They caressed each other and Snake smiled to herself, thinking that though no single experience could compensate Gabriel for the last three years, she would do her best to make a start.

Soon, though, she realized he was not prolonging the foreplay by intent. He was working to please her, still thinking and worrying much too much, as if she were Leah, a twelve year old whose first sexual pleasure was his responsibility. Snake got no joy out of being worked on, out of being someone’s duty. And, as well, he was trying hard to respond to her, failing, and growing more embarrassed by the second. Snake touched him gently, brushing his face with her lips.

Gabriel flung himself away from her with a curse and hunched over on his side with his back to her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was so rough Snake knew he was crying. She sat up beside him and stroked his shoulder.

“I told you I’d make no demands.”

“I keep thinking…”

She kissed the point of his shoulder, letting her breath tickle him. “Thinking isn’t the idea.”

“I can’t help it. All I can offer anyone is trouble and pain. And now without even giving them any pleasure first. Maybe it’s just as well.”

“Gabriel, an impotent man can satisfy another person. You must know that. What we’re talking about now is your pleasure.”

He did not answer, did not look at her: he had flinched when she said “impotent,” for that was one difficulty Gabriel had not talked himself into until now.

“You don’t believe you’re safe with me, do you?”

He rolled over and looked up. “Leah wasn’t safe with me.”

Snake drew her knees up against her breasts and rested her chin on her fists. She gazed at Gabriel for a long time, sighed, and held out her hand so he could see the scars and slashes of snakebites.

“Any of those bites would have killed anyone but a healer. Quickly and unpleasantly or slowly and unpleasantly.”

She paused to let what she had said sink in.

“I spent a lot of time developing immunities to those venoms,” she said. “And a good deal of discomfort. I never get sick. I never have infections. I can’t get cancer. My teeth don’t decay. Healers’ immunities are so active they respond to anything unusual. Most of us are sterile because we even form antibodies to our own sex cells. Let alone anyone else’s.“

Gabriel pushed himself up on one elbow. “Then… if you can’t have children, why did you say healers can’t afford to have them? I thought you meant you didn’t have time. So if I—”

“We raise children!” Snake said. “We adopt them. But the first healers tried to bear them. Most of them couldn’t. A few could, but the infants were deformed, and they had no minds.”

Gabriel turned on his back and gazed at the ceiling. He sighed deeply. “Gods.”

“We learn fertility control very well,” Snake said.

Gabriel did not answer.

“You’re still worried.” Snake leaned on her elbow beside him, but she did not reach out to touch him yet.

He glanced at her with an ironic and humorless smile, his face strained with self-doubt. “I’m scared, I guess.”

“I know.”

“Have you ever been afraid? Really frightened?”

“Oh, yes,” Snake said.

She rested her hand on his belly, brushing her fingers across his smooth skin and the delicate dark-gold hairs. He was not visibly shaking but Snake could feel his deep, steady, frightened trembling.

“Lie still,” she said. “Don’t move until I tell you.” She began stroking his belly and thighs, his hips and the sides of his buttocks, ending each stroke closer to his genitals but not actually touching them.

“What are you doing?”

“Sh-h. Lie still.” She kept stroking him; and she talked to him, letting her voice slip into a hypnotic, soothing monotone. She could feel him fighting not to move as she teased him: he fought himself, and the trembling stopped without his noticing.

“Snake!”

“What?” she asked innocently. “Is something wrong?”

“I can’t—”

“Sh-h.”

He groaned. This time he was not shaking with fear. Snake smiled, eased herself down beside him, and drew him around to face her.

“Now you can move,” she said.

For whatever reason — because of her teasing, or because Snake had made herself as vulnerable to him as he was to her, and he could trust her, or more probably simply because he was young and healthy and eighteen and at the end of three years’ guilty self-deprivation, he was all right after that.

Snake felt like an observer, not a salacious eavesdropper but an imperturbable watcher, almost disinterested. And that was strange. Gabriel was innately gentle, and Snake drew him on to abandonment as well. Though her own climax was satisfying, a welcome release of emotional tensions that had been building as long as she had been alone, she was concerned mostly for Gabriel. Though she returned his passion eagerly, she could not keep from wondering how sex would be with Arevin.

Snake and Gabriel lay close together, both sweaty and breathing heavily, their arms around each other. For Snake, the companionship was as important as the sex itself. More important, for sexual tensions were easily enough dealt with. Aloneness, and loneliness, were something else altogether. She leaned over Gabriel and kissed his throat and the edge of his jaw.

“Thank you,” he whispered. Snake could feel the vibration of his words against her lips.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “But I didn’t ask you for selfless reasons.”

He lay silent for a while, his fingers spread along the curve of her waist. Snake patted his hand. He was a sweet boy. She knew the thought was condescending, but she could not help it, nor could she help wishing, with the detached observer part of herself, that Arevin was with her instead. She wanted someone she could share with, not someone who would be grateful to her.

Gabriel suddenly held her tight and hid his face against her shoulder. She stroked the short curls at the back of his neck.

“What am I going to do?” His voice was muffled, his breath warm on her skin. “Where will I go?”

Snake held him and rocked him. Suddenly she wondered if it might have been kinder to let him leave her when he had offered to send someone else, to allow him to continue his life of abstinence unbroken. Yet she could not believe he was really one of the unfocused pitiful human beings who could never learn any biocontrol at all.

“Gabriel, what kind of training did you have? When they tested you, how long could you hold the temperature differential? Didn’t they give you a token?”

“What kind of token?”

“A little disc with a chemical inside that changes color with temperature. Most of the ones I’ve seen turn red when a man raises his genital temperature high enough.” She grinned, remembering an acquaintance who was rather vain about the intensity of his disc’s color, and had to be talked into removing it when he went to bed.

But Gabriel was frowning at her. “High enough?”

“Yes, of course, high enough. Isn’t that how you do it?”

His fair eyebrows drew together, distress and surprise mixing in his expression. “Our teacher instructs us on keeping the temperature low.”

The memory of her vain friend and any number of bawdy jokes came together in Snake’s mind. She wanted to laugh out loud. Somehow she managed to reply to Gabriel with a perfectly straight face.

“Gabriel, dear friend, how old was your teacher? A hundred?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said. “At least. A very wise old man. He still is.”

“Wise, I’m sure, but out of touch,” Snake said. “Out of date by eighty years. Lowering the temperature of your scrotum will make you infertile. But raising the temperature is much more effective. And it’s supposed to be a good deal easier to learn.”

“But he said I could never control myself properly—”

Snake frowned but did not say what she thought: that no teacher should ever say that to a student about anything. “Well, often one person doesn’t get along well with another and all that’s needed is a different teacher.”

“Do you think I could learn?”

“Yes.” She restrained another sharp comment about the wisdom and ability of Gabriel’s first teacher. It would be better if the young man realized the teacher’s faults himself. Clearly, he still felt too much admiration and respect; Snake did not want to push him into a defense of the old man, the person who perhaps had done most to hurt him,

Gabriel grasped Snake’s hand. “What do I do? Where do I go?” This time he spoke with hope and excitement.

“Anywhere the men’s teacher knows techniques less than a century old. Which direction are you going when you leave?”

“I… I haven’t decided.” He looked away.

“It’s hard to go,” Snake said. “I know it is. But it’s best. Spend some time exploring. Decide what will be good for you.”

“Find a new place,” Gabriel said sadly.

“You could go to Middlepath,” Snake said. “The best teachers I’ve heard of live there. And then when you’ve finished you can come back. There’ll be no reason not to.”

“I think there will. I think I’ll never be able to come home again, because even if I do learn what I need, people here will always wonder about me. The rumors will still be there.“ He shrugged. ”But I have to go anyway. I promised. I’ll go to Middlepath.“

“Good.” Snake reached back and turned down the lamp to a tiny spark. “The new technique has other benefits, I’m told.”

“What do you mean?”

She touched him. “It requires you to increase the circulation in the genital area. That’s supposed to increase endurance. And sensitivity.”

“I wonder if I have any endurance now?”

Snake began to answer him seriously, then realized Gabriel had made his first, tentative, joke about sex.

“Let’s see,” she said.

A hurried knock on the door woke Snake well before dawn. The room was gray and ghostly, highlighted in shades of pink and orange from the lamp’s low flame. Gabriel slept soundly, smiling faintly, his long blond eyelashes gently brushing his cheeks. He had pushed away the bedclothes and his long beautiful body lay uncovered to mid-thigh. Snake turned reluctantly toward the door.

“Come in.”

A stunningly lovely young servant entered hesitantly, and light from the corridor spilled over the bed.

“Healer, the mayor—” She gasped and stood staring at Gabriel, the blood on her hands forgotten. “The mayor…”

“I’ll be right there.” Snake got up, slipped into her new pants and the stiff new shirt, and followed the young woman to the mayor’s suite.

Blood from the opened wound soaked the bedding, but Brian had done the proper emergency things: the bleeding had nearly stopped. The mayor was ghastly pale, and his hands trembled.

“If you didn’t look so sick,” Snake said, “I’d give you the tongue-lashing you deserve.” She busied herself with the bandages. “You’re blessed with a superb nurse,” she said when Brian returned with fresh sheets and was easily within hearing. “I hope you pay him what he’s worth.”

“I thought…”

“Think all you like,” Snake said. “An admirable occupation. But don’t try to stand up again.”

“All right,” he muttered, and Snake took it as a promise.

She decided she did not need to help change the sheets. When it was necessary, or when it was for people she liked, she did not mind giving menial services. But sometimes she could be inordinately prideful. She knew she had been unforgivably short with the mayor, but she could not help it.

The young servant was taller than Snake, easily stronger than Brian; Snake expected she could handle her share of lifting the mayor and most of Brian’s as well. But she watched with a distressed expression as Snake left the room to go back to bed and padded barefoot down the hallway.

“Mistress — ?”

Snake turned. The young servant glanced around as if afraid someone might see them together.

“What’s your name?”

“Larril.”

“Larril, my name is Snake, and I hate being called ‘mistress.’ All right?”

Larril nodded but did not use Snake’s name.

Snake sighed to herself. “What’s the matter?”

“Healer… in your room I saw… a servant should not see some things. I don’t want to shame any member of this family.” Her voice was shrill and strained. “But… but Gabriel — he is—” Her words caught in confusion and shame. “If I asked Brian what to do he would have to tell his master. That would be… unpleasant. But you mustn’t be hurt. I never thought the mayor’s son would—”

“Larril,” Snake said, “Larril, it’s all right. He told me everything. The responsibility is mine.”

“You know the — the danger?”

“He told me everything,” she said again. “There’s no danger to me.”

“You’ve done a kind thing,” Larril said abruptly.

“Nonsense. I wanted him. And I have a good deal more experience at control than a twelve year old. Or an eighteen year old, for that matter.”

Larril avoided her gaze. “So do I,” she said. “And I’ve felt so sorry for him. But I — I was afraid. He is so beautiful, one might think of… one might lapse, without meaning to. I couldn’t take the chance. I still have another six months before my life is mine again.”

“You were bonded?”

Larril nodded, “I was born in Mountainside. My parents sold me. Before the mayor’s new laws, they were allowed to do that.” The tension in her voice belied her matter-of-fact words. “It was a long time before I heard the rumors that bonding had been forbidden here, but when I did, I escaped and came back.” She looked up, almost crying. “I didn’t break my word—” She straightened and spoke more confidently. “I was a child, and I had no choice in the bonding. I owed no driver my loyalty. But the city bought my papers. I do owe loyalty to the mayor.”

Snake realized how much courage it had taken Larril to speak as she had. “Thank you,” Snake said. “For telling me about Gabriel. None of this will go any farther. I’m in your debt.”

“Oh, no, healer, I did not mean—”

There was something in Larril’s voice, a sudden shame, that Snake found disturbing. She wondered if Larril thought her own motives in speaking to Snake were suspect.

“I did mean it,” Snake said again. “Is there some way I can help you?”

Larril shook her head, once, quickly, a gesture of denial that said no to her more than to Snake. “No one can help me, I think.”

“Tell me.”

Larril hesitated, then sat on the floor and angrily jerked up the cuff of her pants.

Snake sat on her heels beside her.

“Oh, my gods,” Snake said.

Larril’s heel had been pierced, between the bone and the Achilles tendon. It looked to Snake as if someone had used a hot iron on her. The scar accommodated a small ring of a gray, crystalline material. Snake took Larril’s foot in one hand and touched the ring. It showed no visible joining.

Snake frowned. “This was nothing but cruelty.”

“If you disobey them they have the right to mark you,” Larril said. “I’d tried to escape before and they said they had to make me remember my place.” Anger overcame the quietness of her voice. Snake shivered.

“Those will always bind me,” Larril said. “If it was just the scars I wouldn’t mind so much.” She withdrew her foot from Snake’s hands. “You’ve seen the domes in the mountains? That’s what the rings are made of.”

Snake glanced at her other heel, also scarred, also ringed. Now she recognized the gray, translucent substance. But she had never before seen it made into anything except the domes, which lay mysterious and inviolable in unexpected places.

“The smith tried to cut that one,” Larril said. “When he didn’t even mark it he was so embarrassed he broke an iron rod with one blow, just to prove he could.” She touched the fine tough strand of her tendon, trapped within the delicate ring. “Once the crystal hardens it’s there forever. Like the domes. Unless you cut the tendon, and then you’re lame. Sometimes I think I could almost stand that.” She jerked the cuff of her pants down to cover the ring. “As you see, no one can help. It’s vanity, I know it. Soon I will be free no matter what those things say.”

“I can’t help you here,” Snake said. “And it would be dangerous.”

“You mean you could do it?”

“It could be done, it could be tried, at the healers’ station.”

“Oh, healer—”

“Larril, there would be a risk.” On her own ankle she showed what would have to be done. “We wouldn’t cut the tendon, we’d detach it. Then the ring could come off. But you’d be in a cast for quite a while. And there’s no certainty that the tendons would heal properly, your legs might never be as strong as they are now. The tendons might not even re-attach at all.”

“I see…” Larril said, with hope and joy in her voice, perhaps not really hearing Snake at all.

“Will you promise me one thing?”

“Yes, healer, of course.”

“Don’t decide what to do yet. Don’t decide right after your service to Mountainside is over. Wait a few months. Be certain. Once you’re free you might decide it doesn’t matter to you any more.”

Larril glanced up quizzically and Snake knew she would have asked how the healer would feel in her position, but thought the question insolent.

“Will you promise?”

“Yes, healer., I promise.”

They stood up.

“Well, good night,” Snake said.

“Good night, healer.”

Snake started down the corridor.

“Healer?”

“Yes?”

Larril flung her arms around Snake and hugged her. “Thank you!” Embarrassed, she withdrew. They both turned to go their ways, but Snake glanced back.

“Larril, where do the drivers get the rings? I never heard of anyone who could work the dome material.”

“The city people give it to them,” Larril said. “Not enough to make anything useful. Just the rings.”

“Thank you.”

Snake went back to bed, musing about Center, which gave chains to slavers but refused to talk to healers.