The branches are beginning to bud.

Clouds coast by, moving from one shape to another. Sometimes meaningful shapes--one looks like a jumping fish until the tail splits away, and one suggests a woman's head with a wide-open mouth for a while. Most of the time they just move through a fluid progression of cloud shapes.

Dreyu watches them all with equal attention. They move slowly or more quickly, some shifting rapidly, some changing little; there is no pattern in the picture. The branches sway fitfully, a loose ensemble with no scheme apart from the will of the fluttering breeze.

Insect chatter rasps on all sides without ceasing; occasionally a monkey cackles in the distance. There are always birds, some caroling by day and some lamenting by night. Their calls repeat endlessly but not steadily; there are always staggered pauses, as though the birds listen for replies, though they resume each time with the same song as before.

Every so often a bird settles on the near branches overhead, during the day, when the little ones move about; it usually stops to examine him and meet his eyes, cocking its head this way and that before moving on. Some bigger animals pass along the arroyo, most ignoring him entirely, a few dismissing him after a cursory inspection. By night once a jaguar surprises him, padding softly above his head and snuffling loudly at his ear. He does nothing, so the cat moves on.

He was walking, until he fell, the boy knows. Presently he will stand and walk again. He has an errand.

In the meantime he is a little distracted; the dull knot in his chest is always at the forefront of his attention, and maintaining a focus on anything else is difficult. Since his heart stopped he feels little hunger; he is not much aware of the cold. He cannot remember really sleeping.

He wonders to himself whether he will ever grow older. Or is he stagnant now, a boy that never quite becomes a man? Never to change, never even to die, he thinks to himself, just to sit softly hurting in the ravine until I am covered over in moss. One day the wind will topple me like a stone and my face will be in the soil. Then when I am blinded the world will stop moving altogether.

Twice the boy hears voices, men's voices that he recognizes. A group of men from the village are on the path above him, the path he remembers slipping from, sometime before. Ana-te, the hunter, is there, speaking from time to time as they pass. Dreyu hears their feet as they walk the path above him. They are gone again before he gives much thought to them, and then after a time they pass once more, returning the way they came.

He thinks of speaking, but the idea cannot hold his attention.

Momentarily Dreyu will rise and set about his search again. The clouds above him are edged with light; the sun is falling over the plainland, out of sight, and after that it will be dark. The branches will be harder to watch at first, as always, but the moon is still bright and the clouds will be easy to see.

And this at least is of some comfort in his listless and ageless world; day gives way to night, and night turns back to day, over and over, steadily. This alone has a rhythm.

The third night is falling when the last search party returns. They look like the others, unless they walk a little more slowly and hang their heads a little lower. Dalei knows when she first notices their approach that they have found nothing. Dreyu would be with them had they found him unhurt; but they do not walk like bearers of news, with urgency or dread. They expect to learn of his discovery by another band.

She nudges Loka and points before she turns back toward town. Behind her he rises with his friend Mide to meet the searchers and learn what they have to tell.

Dalei watches her feet measure the road back to her door, their skin just darker than the dust they shape, the dust that trails them in little clouds, pace after pace. She is not surprised that Dreyu was not to be found downriver. But none of the groups found any trace at all, even though on her insistence several moved east into the foothills.

All the world around her is losing color to the dusk. As her padding footfalls draw her home the puffs of dust are barely visible, and her feet are grey and dim like the shadow of her house ahead. The fires of the village draw the eye, now, darkening the night around them by their brightness.

Dalei pauses by the door of the house, but she does not enter. She is restless. After a moment she paces on.

Her shadowy feet beat forward steadily, but their direction wavers. She thinks sometimes of visiting Ten-kaoa, and sometimes of the house of her friend Adan the painter; the feet will not allow it, determined as they are to go on walking. All colors have drained into the earth until there is only one grey; the feet dip into darkness with each step, as though they wade in the river. Gradually they describe a loose knot tied around the village, crossing their own wandering prints with each loop.

Dalei is sure, despite her recurrent moments of panic, that Dreyu is not sitting in neglect somewhere in the village. The people have looked too thoroughly. For the same reason she feels certain he was not abducted; he could not be hidden in the village and anyone from outside would surely have left some trace.

She frowns. He has gone east, by himself. She has no doubt. Nothing else makes sense. But he cannot have outdistanced the warrior parties. The boy has barely been able to keep walking. And he has never known the mountains, not since he was a tiny boy she could carry in one arm. He really doesn't know even what to look for.

But there is no other way he would have gone. She knows it.

The footfalls are rapid and jarring, now, and she lets them lead her; she no longer watches the path ahead. She is picturing her son in the mountains by himself, out of her reach, with the storms ready to break any day. He is not old enough for that, even in his full health. But she cannot see any way to help, and her feet carry her back and forth without design. In due time they set her at her doorstep, no closer to a solution.

I cannot move, the boy thinks idly. Just now I have commanded my body to stand, but it sits as it was. Did I not try to stand?

A little while ago a cloud passed through the shape of a flower as it rolled by, a shape that reminded the boy of a river-lily. He thought of the thunderlily when he saw it, tried to imagine or remember what the mountain flower looks like.

Now there is a wide blue space above him and the clouds that are visible are just clouds; grey and fleeting, drawn into windblown forms like hair, like a ripped seedpod, and moving quickly. But the boy still sees the lily-cloud, and he wonders how long it will take him to make the climb. The height and the distance seem terrible and desolate to him.

But the thunderlily is there, somewhere, and his errand is to find her.

His mind weaves in doubt; only his eyes ever move, tracking the clouds as they skate overhead, always faster. He has tried to stand a hundred times, or thought about trying. He decided to stand the first time the sun rose. He decided when the clouds first turned grey and all the scents grew strong.

He decides again now, when he notices how the wind has taken on a chill--how it has been building for some time now into a certain violence, snapping the branches one way and the other.

Beneath the anxious complaints of the birds and the monkeys seeking cover he hears the wind: the wind itself has taken up a voice to mutter with, a distracted and foreboding whisper that fades and grows, and Dreyu tells himself it is time to go. But he does not rise.

The sky has grown much darker now, and the clouds are spreading to cover the world entirely. The quick dark clouds still dart by ever faster but higher, far above them, there is another tier of darkness, a fitful blanket of grey wool roiling and bulging with only scattered gaps that show blue.

It is distressing, this darkness. The boy feels restless. The darkening of the sky only resembles nightfall; he knows it is the coming of a storm front. And though he has little memory of mountain storms, he knows they are more violent than those of the valley; he has always felt just a touch of disappointment with the lowland storms.

But he feels only a distant concern for the danger of the storm itself. It is the darkening of the light that bothers him--because it does resemble twilight, but it comes too soon. This false half-daylight is breaking the rhythm. He feels a twinge of fear, as he has forgotten to for a great while; the wind is growling a little louder all the time and the clouds gather ever darker but none of these things have a pattern.

He should go. The cure is at the top; Ten-kaoa said so. But what if he cannot move?

His heart becomes aware of the sound before he does; at first all he knows is a stabbing resurgence of the pain, and he draws breath coarsely. But underlying that convulsive tightening he hears a sound that is not the wind, a noise like the tumble of a heavy stone, emanating from a distance but from no particular direction. It dominates his awareness.

There is a sort of thrill in this, amid the shock of sudden pressure, a thrill in feeling something happen inside himself. The thunder rolls louder, and after a protracted moment subsides, reluctantly, echoing.

It is a second longer before the ache relaxes. Dreyu feels it fading almost with disappointment, feels himself drifting out of time again. A part of him wishes the thunder would come again.

The cure is at the top, he tells himself.

For a brief uncertain time the boy remains as he has been, sitting and watching. Where the impulse comes from he cannot say, but his head rocks forward to look down at his own hands and feet; the small trees erupt with little birds scattering in dismay, and the cobbles grind against one another beneath him as he rises.

At once the world widens. Standing, Dreyu can see over the nearby slopes to the looming peaks beyond, some cliffs rearing so high the advancing stormclouds must break and creep around them. He has not seen them so close by before, not in the daylight, not since his distant childhood. Now, wreathed in storm and towering, they look insurmountable.

As his eyes scan the range he feels the first point of moisture, sharp and sudden like a beesting, on the back of his hand. Here and there behind the eastern peaks there comes a sharp flash, a flickering vision of false peaks in the shadowed clouds, and before long dim echoes of thunder begin to roll without ceasing. The sound hurts, but those twinges stir him.

There is no stiffness; his legs carry him as strongly as ever up to the lip of the ravine and further up the long cool slope of the ridge. He needs only to remember not to stop, and the storm spurs him inexorably upward. As he progresses he must take care not to let his feet slip; the churning patchwork of stormclouds has smoothed into a soft film of light grey and the rain falls now in earnest, soaking his clothing and dripping from his long black hair. The lightning shows itself now in momentary streaks, jagged as bats' flight, and the thunder comes now and again in splitting crashes that knock the boy breathless.

It is only a little while before the storm passes over. It is not so long after that before another comes; and so day and night become indistinct. Now, though, when the boy falls, he hauls himself numbly upright again and moves on; he falls often, but he never stops walking.

There is no path to follow; the trees are thick, sometimes, and they bend his path in every direction as he trudges uphill, the only way he knows to go. The mountains are growing huge and strange as he penetrates more deeply into the chain; he cannot recognize any of the monstrous white-caps as crowns visible from the valley when, after a while, he finds himself on a steep face overlooking an unfamiliar gap. Staring over his shoulder, between the treetops, at a world where all the earth shoots upward and the river-valley is nowhere to be seen, he stops moving, at last, to think.

It will do no good to crest every mountaintop, he says to himself--we didn't live so high as that, in houses set on a pinnacle with only the sun and the eagles for neighbors. We were nestled into the face of the mountain and--

Dreyu tries, but he cannot remember which way the sunset showed in his childhood home.

There was snow, and there is no snow yet, so I must climb higher. That much I know. But which way? Along this west side of the mountains, surely--we couldn't have forced our way across this boundless forest of walls. How could I not realize? Did I think all the mountains were one? It could take a lifetime just to wander in search. I may not have a lifetime.

Beyond the slope on the other side of the rift, over the shoulder of the mountain, a mass of cloud is rising; no little tantrum of a storm but a stern, proud onslaught running high over the range; its shadow crawls over the green hills beneath it. The leading edge stretches away to the south; the tower of cloud he can see will pass by him to the east but it cannot be long before the rain will reach him also.

A little time passes while he watches the front moving; as it progresses it billows higher, and there--above the dark and flashing rains, where the top of the cloud is still nearly white--the pillar is abruptly cut off, or planed off, the high wind shoving the raincloud aside, shaving it into the form of a thunderhead. It is as though the cloud itself, slowly, stretches out a finger to point toward the north.

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