Grum’s white headcloth lay askew on her sparse hair. “Dear child, how could I let you pass me? I’ll hear her come in, I thought. Or her pony will smell her and neigh.” Grum’s dark-tanned age-wrinkled face showed extra lines of concern. “Snake-child, we never wanted you to see this alone.”
“What happened, Grum?”
“Pauli,” Grum said to her granddaughter, “take care of the healer’s horse.”
“Yes, Grum.” When Pauli took the reins, she touched Snake’s arm in a gesture of comfort. She picked up the saddle and led Swift back toward Grum’s camp. Holding Snake’s elbow — not for support, but to support her — Grum guided her to a chunk of rock. They sat down and Snake glanced again around her camp, disbelief overcoming exhaustion. She looked at Grum.
Grum sighed. “It was yesterday, just before dawn. We heard noises and a voice, not yours, and when we came to look we could see a single figure, in desert robes. We thought he was dancing. But when we went closer, he ran away. He broke his lantern in the sand and we couldn’t find him. We found your camp…” Grum shrugged. “We picked up all we could find, but nothing whole was left.”
Snake looked around in silence, no closer to understanding why anyone would ransack her camp.
“By morning the wind had blown away the tracks,” Grum said. “The creature must have gone out in the desert, but it was no desert person. We don’t steal. We don’t destroy.”
“I know, Grum.”
“You come with me. Breakfast. Sleep. Forget the crazy. We all have to watch for crazies.” She took Snake’s scarred hand in her small, work-hardened one. “But you shouldn’t have come to this alone. No. I should have seen you, Snake-child.”
“It’s all right, Grum.”
“Let me help you move to my tents. You don’t want to stay over here anymore.”
“There’s nothing left to move.” Beside Grum, Snake stood staring at the mess. The old woman patted her hand gently.
“He wrecked everything, Grum. If he’d taken it all I could understand.”
“Dear one, nobody understands crazies. They have no reasons.”
That was exactly why Snake could not believe a real crazy would destroy so much so completely. The damage had been inflicted in a manner so deliberate and, in a strange way, rational, that the madness seemed less the result of insanity than of rage. She shivered again.
“Come with me,” Grum said. “Crazies appear, they disappear. They’re like sand flies, one summer you hear about them every time you turn around, the next year nothing.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“I am,” Grum said. “I know about these things. He won’t come back here, he’ll go somewhere else, but soon we’ll all know to look for him. When we find him we’ll take him to the menders and maybe they can make him well.”
Snake nodded tiredly. “I hope sp.”
She slung Squirrel’s saddle over her shoulder and picked up the serpent case. The handle vibrated faintly as Sand slid across himself in his compartment.
She walked with Grum toward the old woman’s camp, too tired to think anymore about what had happened, listening gratefully to Grum’s soothing words of comfort and sympathy. The loss of Grass, and Jesse’s death, and now this: Snake almost wished she were superstitious, so she could believe she had been cursed. People who believed in curses believed in ways of lifting them. Right now Snake did not know what to think or what to believe in, or how to change the course of misfortune her life had taken.
“Why did he only steal my journal?” she said abruptly. “Why my maps and my journal?”
“Maps!” Grum said. “The crazy stole maps? I thought you’d taken them with you. It was a crazy, then.”
“I guess it was. It must have been.” Still, she did not convince herself.
“Maps!” Grum said again.
Grum’s anger and outrage seemed, for the moment, to take over for Snake’s own. But the surprise in the old woman’s voice disturbed her.
Snake started violently at the sharp tug on her robe. Equally startled, the collector jumped back. Snake relaxed when she saw who it was: one of the gleaners who picked up any bit of metal, wood, cloth, leather, the discards of other camps, and somehow made use of it all. The collectors dressed in multicolored robes of cloth scraps ingeniously sewn together in geometric patterns.
“Healer, you let us take all that? No good to you—”
“Ao, go away!” Grum snapped. “Don’t bother the healer now. You should know better.”
The collector stared at the ground but did not retreat. “She can’t do with it. We can. Let us have it. Clean it up.”
“This is a bad time to ask.”
“Never mind, Grum.” Snake started to tell the collector to take everything. Perhaps they could make use of torn blankets and broken spoons; she could not. She did not even want to see any of it again; she did not want to be reminded of what had happened. But the collector’s request drew Snake from her questions and her confusion and back toward reality; she recalled something Grum had said about Ao’s people when Snake first talked to her.
“Ao, when I vaccinate the others, will you all let me vaccinate you, too?”
The collector looked doubtful. “Creepty-crawlies, poisons, magics, witches — no, not for us.”
“It’s none of that. You won’t even see the serpents.”
“No, not for us.”
“Then I’ll have to take all that trash out to the middle of the oasis and sink it.”
“Waste!” the collector cried. “No! Dirty the water? You shame my profession. You shame yourself.”
“I feel the same way when you won’t let me protect you against disease. Waste. Waste of people’s lives. Unnecessary deaths.”
The collector peered at her from beneath shaggy eyebrows. “No poisons? No magics?”
“None.”
“Go last if you like,” Grum said. “You’ll see it doesn’t kill me.”
“No creepty-crawlies?”
Snake could not help laughing. “No.”
“And then you give us that?” The collector gestured in the direction of Snake’s battered camp.
“Yes, afterward.”
“No disease afterward?”
“Fewer. I can’t stop all. No measles. No scarlet fever. No lockjaw—”
“Lockjaw! You stop that?”
“Yes. Not forever but for a long time.”
“We will come,” the collector said, turned, and walked away.
In Grum’s camp, Pauli was giving Swift a brisk rub-down while the mare pulled wisps of hay from a bundle. Pauli had the most beautiful hands Snake had ever seen, large yet delicate, long-fingered and strong, uncoarsened by the hard work she did. Even though she was tall, her hands still should have looked too big for her size, but they did not. They were graceful and expressive. She and Grum were as different as two people could be, except for the air of gentleness shared by grandmother and granddaughter, and by all Pauli’s cousins that Snake had met. Snake had not spent enough time in Grum’s camp to know how many of her grandchildren she had with her, or even to know the name of the little girl who sat nearby polishing Swift’s saddle.
“How’s Squirrel?” Snake asked.
“Fine and happy, child. You can see him there, under the tree, too lazy to run. But he’s sound again. You, now, you need a bed and rest.”
Snake watched her tiger-pony, who stood among the summertrees, switching his tail. He looked so comfortable and content that she did not call him.
Snake was weary but she could feel all her muscles tight across her neck and shoulders. Sleep would be impossible until some of the tension had drained away. She wanted to think about her camp. Perhaps she would decide that it had, as Grum said, simply been vandalized by a crazy. If so, she must understand it and accept it. She was not used to so much happening by chance.