Dancing in Dreamtime (28 page)

That night, a purring sound woke her, a soft drumming on the roof of the dome, and after a moment of unease she smiled. Her first rain.

Gradually, Marn began to trust the wind and rain, the dirt and sky, and the expressions on bare faces. Sometimes as she worked outdoors she would find herself in a drowse, saturated with sun, her mind gone out.

One afternoon, she helped Jurgen search the nearby hills for a spring to supply earth-filtered water for the fish tanks. Eventually they traced a brook to its source at the head of a ravine, where someone long ago had walled in a pool with stones. The walls had slumped, and from the jumble of stones, velvety with moss, water
seeped downhill in glistening threads. The pool was fringed by blue flowers, their clusters of trumpet-shaped blossoms bobbing from tall stems. Jurgen had a way of stooping over any new plant, screwing up his black eyes in an effort of memory, and then declaring its name.

“Virginia bluebells,” he announced. “Just like the pictures, only they're alive. Amazing.”

Marn felt her own face mirroring his pleasure. She had not gone without a mask long enough to gain control of her features, so emotions swirled across her face as wind stirred the surface of the lake. “It seems a shame to disturb the stones,” she said. “The flowers are so pretty.”

“Call them bluebells,” Jurgen insisted. “We need to recover the old names.”

“Yes, bluebells.”

A grin cracked his black beard. Turning to her, his arms spreading as if to enwrap her, he bellowed, “And look at that!”

She flinched back, but he lumbered past her, arms swung wide, and scrambled up the slope to the base of an immense tree. The gray bark of the trunk had flaked away in fist-size chips to reveal a creamy bark underneath, as if the tree were shedding. Higher up, where the branches canopied against the sky, the smooth under-bark showed through like the skin of something newborn.

“It's a sycamore,” Jurgen cried, almost singing the word. He slammed his chest against the rough trunk and hugged the tree.

“You look silly,” Marn said.

“Silly?” he roared. “How could anybody come across a great tree like this and not wrap arms around it? A sycamore! I never thought I'd see one.” He leaned back and gazed up the trunk. “The
old-timers used the wood for water troughs and wagon wheels and butcher blocks.”

Marn turned away in disgust, thinking of knives, meat, blood. Her stomach churned. That was the way with Jurgen. One minute he made her feel easy in the wilds, the next minute he shocked her.

Noting her disgust, he growled, “City girl.”

“I'm trying. It's a lot to get used to.”

His mouth quirked into what she took as a smile, although she could not be sure. Only his teeth showed through the bristling fur. “Sorry. I get impatient. Let's work.”

They leaned their packs against the scabby trunk of the sycamore. Scrabbling down the bank, avoiding the frail blue flowers, Jurgen was the first to reach the spring. He grabbed a stone, then another and another, heaving them to the side. Marn slid after him, wary of his flailing elbows. As he hefted the next rock, there was a blur of movement, like a rope snapping and recoiling, and he cried out.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I'll be damned. A snake.” He stared at his arm. “I've just been snakebit.”

“A snake? But they're extinct.”

He gave a harsh bark of laughter. “This one didn't get the message.”

He loosened his cuff and folded back the sleeve. Marn forced herself to look at his bare forearm, which bristled with the same coarse black hair that covered his jaw and skull. The muscles were thick and netted with veins. Near the elbow were twin rows of puncture-marks, like pin-pricks, leading up to a pair of larger purplish holes, oozing blood.

She pressed a hand over her mouth. Words dried on her tongue.

“I'm glad to learn we didn't kill off all the snakes,” Jurgen said, “but I'd be happier if this one wasn't poisonous.”

“How do you know it's poisonous?”

“See those two big holes? Those are fang marks, where the venom is injected. Question is, what species?” He rehearsed the possibilities as he labored up the slope. “Too far north for cottonmouths. A rattler would have made a ruckus. Likely a copperhead.” He suddenly turned, and Marn, hurrying after, bumped into him, then immediately pulled back. “Could you tell,” he asked, “was it brownish, with darker bands, or creamy with copper bands?”

Marn trembled. “All I saw was like a rope lashing out. I didn't notice color.”

“Well, open your eyes.” His gaze, dark and rough as the stones he had been heaving, glared at her, then swung away. He continued on up to the sycamore, where he slumped against the piebald trunk. His outstretched legs in their muddy coveralls looked like two more knotty tree roots. He tilted the arm for inspection.

Marn approached cautiously, afraid of Jurgen, of the snake, of the repulsive wound. “Shouldn't we go back?”

Again he laughed harshly, his chin thrust up by pain. “If that bastard could survive our poisons, I can survive his.”

“We need the medicine kit.”

“I'll be okay as soon as I rest a minute.” He tilted his head back against the trunk and loosed a full-throated bellow.

Was this how the poison worked? Marn wondered. She hovered uncertainly before him, feeling too small to budge him unless he cooperated. “Come on, Jurgen. We've got to go back.”

“If there's snakes, what else might have survived?” His eyes, already squinting from pain, squeezed tighter in his effort to recall names. “Fox. Deer. Turtles. Eagles. Salamanders. What else? Bears. Beavers. Owls. Why not coyotes? Maybe even cougars.”

The terror Marn had felt when she first peered out through the hole in the pipeline now swept back over her. It was madness to have left Indiana City. Stifling or not, life back there was at least safe. Nothing could lash out at you, leap on you, bite you. Her skin crawled. “Jurgen,” she said as calmly as she could, “get up. We're going back to camp.”

“Right,” he grunted. But instead of moving, he gazed at his wounded arm. The flesh was turning purple, the skin from elbow to wrist was swelling. “Imagine—snakebite!”

“Jurgen,” she pleaded.

“Just get my pins under me.” His legs jerked, but failed to lift him. “Dizzy.”

His weakness frightened her now, as his strength had frightened her before. “Should I go for help?”

Jurgen shook his head. “No. I can walk. Give me a hand.” He raised his good arm.

Without letting herself think, Marn grabbed his thick hand with both of hers, braced her feet against a root, and tugged with all her might. Slowly he rose to his feet. Once upright, he staggered a few steps. “Can't see. Fool legs won't work.”

Again without thinking, Marn slipped an arm around his waist and eased her shoulder against his side, bracing him. They lurched ahead. He was massive and his weight seemed to grow with every step. But she would not let go, not even when he reeled and his beard rasped her forehead. She could feel his panting against her ribs, and she found herself panting in sympathy.

By the time they stumbled into the dome she was too weary to fret about their twined bodies. But the startled expressions with which Hinta and Sol greeted them brought back her confusion.

“A snake bit him,” Marn explained, short of breath.

“A what?” demanded Sol, shrinking back. Even Hinta raised her gloves, palms out, as if to shove them away.

“Help me lay him down.”

“Are we there?” Jurgen's voice rose brokenly. The good fist rubbed his eyes. “Can't see a thing.”

That snapped Hinta and Sol out of their daze. Together with Marn they lowered him to his cushion. The swollen arm, mottled scarlet and purple, made Marn nauseous. She pushed her feelings aside and bent over him, covering him with his sleeping bag. Sol ran to call the others, while Hinta powered up the medicine console.

Marn was trying to cut Jurgen's sleeve with scissors, to ease the swelling, but the arm kept jerking. “Jurgen,” she spoke close to his ear, “you're going to be all right. But we've got to touch you. You'll forgive that?”

His answer was mumbled. “Sure, sure. Go ahead.”

A point of fear glinted from his black eyes. His shivering made the cushion tremble. Marn finished cutting the sleeve, then drew the cover to his chin, leaving only the puffy arm exposed. “Hurry,” she whispered to Hinta. “He's in shock.”

“Snakebite?” Hinta called. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I'm sure. Copperhead. Code it in, see if there's an antidote.”

Hinta slipped off her gloves and typed the implausible message on the console. As Marn watched the lithe fingers dance on
the keys, desire uncoiled in her. She yearned to make her first contact with this brisk woman, so easy in her body. But instead here was Jurgen stretched out beside her, his body cumbersome and rough.

“It says lower the arm,” Hinta read from the screen, “bind it above the elbow, slit the skin at the fang marks, suck the venom out, administer antivenin.”

“Can we make that?” Marn asked.

Hinta tapped the keys, paused, shook her head, the milky hair swirling. “Idiot machine synthesizes antidotes for every toxin we ever invented. But for natural poisons—nothing.”

Jurgen broke into delirious babbling. “Snake, by God. Thought they were all dead. Wolves. Bears. Ghost bite.”

“Easy,” Marn whispered. It seemed callous to touch him through clumsy gloves, so she drew them off and pressed her bare hand to his cheek. The shudder of that contact ran through her body. But she had no time to savor it.

Hinta passed her the antiseptic swab and scalpel. Worry swept aside all of Marn's inhibitions, made her scrub and then slice the skin, exposing red flesh. Meat, the same as any animal. “Now the syringe.”

“I'm looking for it.”

Marn waited. Jurgen trembled under her hands. “Hurry.”

Hinta rummaged in the medical chest with angry clacking noises. “It's not here. Maybe somebody took it for collecting samples.”

Marn let her body think for her. “Quick, check if the venom is a stomach poison.”

“Why do you—”

“Just do it.”

Clicking of keys. “No,” said Hinta, “it's a blood poison.”

Marn looked down at Jurgen. Only the whites of his eyes were visible. His mouth was a wheezing hole in the beard. The skin around the wound seemed ready to split. The fang marks oozed.

“You're not going—” said Hinta in a panic.

Marn waved her away. It was like bending steel to force her mouth down to the festering wound. Her lips met his hot skin. She sucked, and the first trickle of fluid on her tongue made her gag. She reared back and spat violently into a bowl. Then she bent once more to the wound.

By then the others were crowding into the dome, simmering with questions, carrying with them the smells of wood and dirt. Marn heard the word
snake
hissed repeatedly, as if it were an incantation. She kept sucking, gagging and spitting, until they were shocked into silence, kept sucking until nothing more would come, then she leaned back, mouth sticky, an acrid taste on her tongue. She glared at the ring of faces. “What are you staring at? You'd rather he die?”

They drew back from her, as from a sparking wire. Marn stayed by Jurgen, her hand on the black spittle-soaked fur of his jaw. She felt a connection with this man, as if in pressing her lips to him a circuit had been closed and power had surged between them.

“We don't have the antidote,” Hinta explained to the others.

Their whispers took up again the hiss of
snake, snake
. It was as though, in felling Jurgen, a legendary beast had struck at them all. What did any of them know about the wilds? School had taught them little, merely filled them with dread of the outside. Videos and holos showed only deserts, sulphurous volcanos, blank
oceans, and miles of blighted emptiness. You could learn about this forested and rivered world only by hearsay, through the old folks, or through tedious hours in the archives.

Marn stroked Jurgen's hair, which felt as springy and resilient as the soil in the forest. His mouth sagged open, breathing hoarsely. His naked arm, bloated and discolored, lay at his side.

“The question is,” Hinta was saying, “do we take him back inside or not?”

“And give it all up?” The acid-scars on Jolon's cheeks reddened with indignation.

“No, absolutely not,” said Coyt.

Voices jumbled together too quickly for Marn to sort them out. The sensations from her hands commanded all her attention—the wiry mat of his beard, so strange, and the stuttering pulse in the bend of his elbow. Could a heart pump so fast, through so huge a body? He bulked on his cushion like a fallen tree.

When Marn could separate voices again, Rand was saying, “It would take a pair of us to haul him back through the pipe. Or we might locate a health patroller.”