The council wore on well after dark, last night. Dalei spoke often and at length, and though many joined her in calling for a renewed search she spoke at last alone. There will be no search. Her eyes are hard, fixed on the picture forming in the sand, and her left hand strikes her thigh.

Uye-te-reyos.

Her hand thumps again.

By you I am most grievously wronged, and he is. It was never you who fought to place blame; you did not insist that my son must be dead in the mountains already. You did not shrug and tell me he must find his own way home. But if you agreed to lead the search it would have begun this morning, and you did not.

You said we should not.

She stares at her representation of Uye-te-reyos in the sand, marked by a long braid and the conventional figure of a heart, drawn too large. She began the painting soon after the council dispersed; now a great space of Adan's working area is covered with human figures in colored sand. Her face set, Dalei adds another: the woman who repeated all night that Dreyu could not possibly be alive. She cradles the darkest sand in her right palm, curling the hand just so; the sand runs like water along the crease of her skin and falls to the damp ground in a short thin stream. Her left hand never stops its steady pounding.

She began painting last night by the light of a fire, four torches and the waxing moon, when she made a representation of her son; the figure is at the center of the painting, unmistakable with its eyes painted blue. Then, absently, she depicted Uye-te-reyos, and then a chain of other people between the two. My son, she thinks, and me; my father, his sister, her husband, and his brother, who is you: that is the distance between a thoughtless old warrior and a sick young boy who needs his help.

They would have gone, we would all have gone, if you had, had you not spoken against it. But I cannot go by myself. I would if I thought I could make the trip at all. I know Loka is thinking about it, though he would be no safer than I alone in the spring rains. But Dreyu is alone.

She made the painting as a rebuke against the warrior, and while she worked she cried; there are tears in the dust and in the pigment. In the indeterminate stretch of last night she went on painting; she made chains of relation between her son and the townspeople who spoke most strongly against a search, so that now the painting radiates outward from Dreyu like lines from a tentpole, and half the townspeople are represented. At this point she is just adding people wherever she knows to add them.

None of you, she thinks. My boy is a stranger to none of you and none of you will stir to help him.

Adan has stood nearby watching for some time; he has been standing nearby and watching his friend since her son first fell ill. Now he watches Dalei's painting. This is the first time she has come here since Dreyu's disappearance, and she has rarely come alone; the painter has been teaching her. She is a grown woman, older than he--not a likely apprentice, but they are close and she loves his art.

Still soundless, the sandpainter walks closer and kneels behind her; she becomes aware of him then, and without speaking he wraps her in a loose embrace, his chin draped over her shoulder. She relaxes, leans back slightly, and stops moving.

After a long moment her left hand begins to tap again, and the sandpainter frowns.

"How is it?"

Dalei shakes her head and hunches forward again to resume painting. Adan watches silently a little while.

"Lower." Dalei starts and lowers her hand over the ground. "Even lower, for a fine line. Close enough almost to scrape the painting--" the painter pantomimes a graceful, sweeping curve without sand, and she nods. When she resumes, adding the figure of a baby girl born recently to a woman drawn on the fringe, the painter's eyes flicker between her hard-set face and her pounding hand.

"You're making your right hand shake."

Both hands are still as she scowls; she exhales all in a rush, and when she begins to paint again it is only a moment before the hand begins its rhythm again.

"You've been tapping like that for days."

"I just can't believe they won't go."

"I know."

"My son is not dead." Today, her voice is quietly insistent rather than pleading. She looks helplessly at her left hand. "I feel so restless, knowing he's out there, and they will not go to him."

"I know. But this tapping, Dalei--you were doing that before the council. Many days now."

She stops thumping again, and scowls at the painting; her hand begins again almost as soon as she speaks. "I know. I've noticed it too, Adan. I don't know what to think about it. I know nothing more than that it helps me relax a little. Every time I stop I remember again that I'm not doing anything, nothing at all to help him."

Adan considers this. "I will beat hands, then, and you will paint."

The first woodblock snap of his hands together startles them both after her dull thudding rhythm; he takes the same tempo as he claps, sitting back to watch. His friend paints again with steady hand, moving all around the painting to add more figures to the fringe.

Before long he leaves briefly to fetch a small drum; and it is hours later, when he sits drumming on the edge of the sandlot in the afternoon, that Loka finds them.

The wiry little farmer looks flushed, his summer-shaven head beaded with sweat beneath the glowering white sky; his eyes barely pass over the scene before his news falls from him.

"He's gone. Uye-te-reyos is gone." Dalei straightens immediately and turns to face her husband, her face unreadable. Adan keeps drumming softly while the man continues. "Twice I went to his house to talk about the council, but he was gone, and his daughter told me in the end that he wouldn't be back today--"

"Did he go? Where is he?"

"He went up. She told me after I kept asking for a while; she says he left not long after the council. He's gone up to look for Dreyu."

"Alone?"

"Alone. She says he really meant it, what he said last night about keeping the village safe; and also he believes you--that there's really only one place Dreyu could be going."

"Oh, Loka--" Dalei raises her face and arms, spinning slowly in place, speechless, as her knowledge of the people of the world is proven not wholly wrong. And before their eyes she begins dancing, fiercely dancing around the edge of her own design, as though her leaping feet will teach the earth the rhythm that the painter drums.

The spider is not a vision. The boy was not sure for some time, standing open-mouthed as he stared intently at her, perched as she is at the center of her web, slender legs radiating in an echo of the pattern she has stretched across the boy's path. But she has not spoken and she stays in his line of sight as long as he looks, so he is sure now that she is a real spider.

All the world around him grows higher and colder; patches of snow lie like spent leaves on the slopes, turned to gritty crystal now that the rains have come. The melt has begun in earnest and the steep ground is awash with rivulets of water, shocking cold streams without streambeds that know only to race downward and seek the river. The mountains forbid straight roads; again and again the boy has been turned around so far he lost his certainty of direction, and in this thaw the ground is not only steep but treacherously slick. It has been slow going.

But he has come a way; he thinks he must have traveled far. He has traveled far enough to learn grave doubts about his search; all the cliffs and towering faces look the same, here and there, and the uneasy plain of cloud above looks more or less the same all the time--formless, indeterminate, scattering its seed everywhere at once, inundating the earth with droplets like the ones strung all along the spiderweb, masterpiece of the spider who must be a real spider.

It was not so difficult a road, coming down into the valley; there was a trail, not this tangled and overgrown mountainside to force a path through. He can remember the long body of his people pacing always downward, family after family, working their way into the foothills like a caterpillar climbing down a treetrunk headfirst. They walked, they didn't have to scramble and stumble this way. Maybe he can find the road to lead him home. He has been following the thunder north for days, and surely his old home is not much further.

This time he is careful not to let himself be too deeply engrossed, fascinating though the spiderweb is; it stretches over a space almost as far across as his arms can reach, and he almost walked through it before he saw the pattern of leftover raindrops. It is soothing just to see it. The threads of other webs hang here and there on his clothing, certainly, though most will have washed away in the rains.

Let me be as wise as you are, spider, he thinks. Your lines are not such sturdy stuff, to weather these rains and winds when the trees themselves are breaking. But you, you know how to bind them just so, like a painting of ripples on water, and so they are strong, unbreakable, in the pattern you appoint for them. If you could speak I would beg you to bind my heart. But you cannot, and it is better that you are real. Thank you, spider. Thank you for not being another vision.

Lowering his head, he backs away from the web, and forcing a path just uphill to avoid it he presses on, feeling a little better than he was.

The visions began a day ago, or two days ago, when the monkey spoke. He remembers it vividly, or perhaps he is still dreaming it, in echo: it was a white monkey with a bright crimson face, who sat in a hanging branch above him and stared without retreating. He has seen monkeys as long as he has been walking, so he paid it little mind, but he was bewildered when the monkey spoke.

Tell me your name.

The boy kept walking, waiting for something he could believe, his mouth open.

Tell me your name.

"My name is Iniei-dreyu." His long-disused voice cracked.

The monkey sat silent a moment, and said again: tell me your name.

Dreyu frowned and did not answer.

As he labored on the monkey turned and sprang ahead of him, always turning back to stare again. He cannot remember how long this continued. What he recalls is the moment when the monkey, hanging right in front of him, raised its voice: Ko-natat!--and leaped over his head to vanish in the forest behind him, leaving him stunned, with the ache inside him swelling for a long cruel moment.

Now the boy walks among visions, unsure even of his name. The voices began to call soon after the appearance of the monkey; the wind carries human voices that speak, but dimly, so that he cannot quite understand them.

He has seen the thunderlily growing on a cloud, and he tried to reach for it before it faded; he has seen a vision of slick stones dripping water, so vivid it drowned the sight of the world around him entirely for a while; briefly he even saw his mother, dancing far ahead of him, just for a moment before she also was lost--and this is the dream that first stirred in him a seed of bitterness.

But it is the voices that never leave him. The thunder growls and now and again calls him by the name the monkey gave him, Ko-natat, which is Dry-Heart; and ever when it rains the voices of snakes whisper through the falling water: dying, dying, dying. Beneath all of this, though, he has slowly become aware of the deep, strange singing of the mountains, without rhythm but joyful in their fierce and solemn way, oblivious to his struggle, to the unbroken silence inside him, and to the storms that rage above them all.

Through the tumult of his senses he continues as best he can doggedly to the north. His eyes unceasingly scan the range before him in hopes of spotting his old village, which he fears more and more he may pass by altogether. Certainly he cannot have far to go.

The higher peaks alone are struck by yellowing sunlight when he sees another thing that is surely not a vision: a new storm, a dark monstrous storm that bears heavily toward him, from the east, moving swiftly, and its leading edge is visibly reaching down, stretching lower as it approaches. The boy sees, without emotion, that if this vague fringe keeps moving as it is it will surely strike the earth right where he walks.

The old road is overgrown; Uye-te-reyos moves swiftly through the new growth, to make the best of clear skies and waning daylight while they last. For the moment the road is obvious again; many times before now he has been forced to make long and occasionally dangerous detours when a rockfall or a mudslide obstructed the old path. He feels certain the boy has not come this way; any sign of his passage would be clearly visible despite the warrior's hurry.

Since his people have settled in the valley he has never walked this road. Altogether he has traveled much less than before. He feels responsible for their safety, and he alone knows enough of the world to see how weak they still are. They feel more powerful than they are, and he is aware that this stems largely from his own presence. He has tried to temper his martial reputation by cultivating notoriety as a calm speaker in peace, but the legend will not go from him; they know his ferocity and courage have been mentioned, in his day, among many peoples--all along the river and down the very coast of the sea. And so he, alone in the village, is thought of as a professional warrior.

But he is the hero of a fragile, liminal people. He knows this, and he loves them; they are his native people and his oldest friends. In his love for them he has won them a new and fruitful home, and he has sworn in solitary meditation that he will leave them safer and stronger when he dies.

Age has come calling. The long braid of his hair is threaded through with white, now, and the face around the dark and somber eyes is roughened by so many years walking roads like this one. But he is some years yet from losing the better part of his strength. Each stride drives him forward with renewed energy, easily, as though he tumbles downhill; it is a great heart that drives him.

Above the new growth there is a broad band of clearly visible sky; he is always aware of it, and every hour or two he scuttles up a little way into a taller tree to look further out. Before him he can make out a higher loop of the muddy path under his feet; at his own unrelenting pace he is only an hour or two from the old village. Above the slope the hunter can see another front approaching; after a moment it draws his attention more sharply. It is a great cloud, high but moving quickly, and it has taken the form of a cresting wave, just like a wave on the sea, but monstrous in proportion. It approaches with an ethereal slowness, like the dream of a wave, but with alarming rapidity for a cloudbank. The warrior can see the rain reaching down from the vanguard of the storm; a deluge of rain has already broken in the sky, and he is watching it fall even as it continues to drive forward.

Uye-te-reyos sighs inaudibly and strides on with a little more energy. If the cloud were a wave it would curl down upon this very mountain, and crash on his head. And it looks like it will do just that as a storm; already it has all but swallowed the light of the lowering sun. He cannot remember any very good shelter between this spot and the village; perhaps he should try to make it to the leaning rock wall that ought to be by the roadside before long, or maybe he would do best to leave the road for a thicker cover of trees until the storm blows over.

He shrugs one shoulder under the gather of his light bag. He carries little; a few meals' worth of dried food, a pair of knives, a coil of light rope, a tough cudgel. Around his neck is the blessing of a downriver chieftain, the celebrated collar of beads; lower on his chest hangs the featherstone given him by his wife in her final years. If the boy is up here--if Dalei is right, and the warrior believes she is--he has nothing to carry.

He frowns thinking about it. It is hard for him to believe her son could have survived so long in the mountains, young, unequipped, weak the way he is. But he may have, and if he lives Uye-te-reyos must find him.

The warrior's thought is interrupted when he realizes that he will not make it to the shelter of the leaning wall before the storm strikes. He begins to move even faster, loping forward on the slick road, but even as he does his eyes are tracking the rain: the dangling fingers of the storm are reaching swiftly down, growing wide and distinct, spreading visibly into spray above the sprinter.

All at once the storm bursts upon him in darkness, and in truth he feels battered like stones under the surf of the sea. He feels the heavy stroke of the water on his back as though he had dived down into it, and his eyes squint in the furious downpour. The world around is white with spray and the trees thrash their heads under the onslaught; the ground itself melts beneath him in an instant, slithering away under his foot like sand. He falls and is at once back on his feet, half covered in mud; his own braided hair whips madly about his head as he drives his feet down into the mud for purchase. The world for him is a scrambling confusion of water and earth; he can barely make out the road to follow as he hurls himself uphill, sending the mud flying behind him, and saplings shudder in the churning wake of his passage.

Dust flies and the people are singing. The fire and the torches have been lit again by the people who have passed by this place in greater numbers all day and into the night.

When Dalei's eyes remember the world around her she sees a ring of her neighbors, her people, singing in the firelight as she dances. The painting is scattering and mixing into the dust underfoot; the beat of the drumming is masked by the complexity of other drums that have come to join in.

The twin daughters of Mide were among the earliest to arrive, and they are dancing with her still; many others have come and gone. Once in a while Dalei can see her husband's shorn head bent over his own drum, shining red in the firelight.

In the east the sky flashes unceasingly over the mountains, and there is an endless, jagged stream of thunderclaps; no one knows whether the mountains are drumming or complaining, and the faces of the people are turned eastward in alarm as often as to the dance.

Whenever there is a marriage among this people there is such a dance; Adan paints a dance-floor, one more symbolic and legendary, and the people dance--and when the sand is scattered and the painting unmade entirely, the wedding is complete.

So, let this be a wedding, Dalei thinks, as she whips her throbbing feet into the air again. Let this be the marriage of all our people together, so let us dance until the dust is only dust--and let us never stop drumming until my son comes home.

It is both light and dark above, high on the slopes, where a boy clings to a small tree, on his knees, his eyes shut. His long hair is plastered over his face and the pounding water sluices over him, fountaining off onto the ground in all directions; he is drenched entirely. Through his eyelids he can still see the frantic flicker of light; from moment to eyeblink moment it is starless black or freakishly white, and when he does open his eyes all vision loses its smoothness; everything flashes jerkily between disparate still instants in the light of the shivering ribbons. The thunder is loud enough to be felt and strikes instantly with every flash. It is like being caught inside a roaring throat, and it never ceases.

The boy's name is Ko-natat. His heart is clenched inside him, a harsh knot that has no chance to ease amid this assault. He must labor to breathe--the pain is intolerable; it suffuses Ko-natat's consciousness and loosens the grip of his hands on the slick bark. Surrounded as he is by hoarse visions, his heart is the only thing the boy can perceive that has never yet spoken to him; around him the world is a riot of phantasm. Here and now he cannot see outside the moment. To be is to cling and endure, and nothing can mark the time. So the boy kneels and clings and watches the world's flickering.

The rain falls like thunder. The thunder falls like rain.

Patience, the warrior says to himself. Rivulets trace the lines on his impassive face as he crouches under the scant shelter of the rock wall. He fingers the featherstone in its pouch and tightens his eyes to slits, looking up to try and gauge the storm's passage. Some years have passed since last he saw such a violent storm rage so long.

No good. The downpour could last all night. Pushing on through it is no use; sleeping through it might be impossible. Still, he reasons, trying to rest is probably the most useful thing to do. And so there under the leaning wall the old hunter lays himself down in the dripping brush, the leaves flickering around him in this mockery of daylight.

She would laugh, he thinks, squeezing his wife's stone one more time. Will I never tire of finding new ways to sleep badly?

Iniei-dreyu, if you are out here, I do not envy you this night.

They are his mother's hands, the tight and straining hands he sees squeezing the very last drop of water from a drying cloth; this is the last fleeting vision the boy sees even as he lurches upright, before he really knows he is moving, opening his eyes and his mouth in a sudden shout: "Let me be!"

He is answered by a blinding ribbon and a splitting crash. It is laughter; the lightning is taunting him. Little thing, it seems to say, little feeble thing, we do not wish to.

"Let me go on!" His voice tears at him. Some part of his mind is trying to quiet him. The world still chatters in a loose progression of frozen moments, but the visions are continuous; he sees guttering flames and dancers, the shadowed, half-remembered grace of the thunderlily, his mother's hands. "Let me go on," he tells the lighting, "I must reach the village on the mountain."

Trespass. Such is the lightning's accusation. You are gone from your valley, you are in the high land where you should not be. Why have you come, little thing? We do not like you.

"Look at me!" the boy bellows; he is lost and angry and he cannot be sure his eyes are open. "I was born on the mountain! The sky is in my eyes! Look at me!" He is standing, now, and beneath his feet he feels the tuneless singing of the mountains.

Go away, little thing. You left the mountain long ago. You have no place here.

"I am dying," the boy shouts into the air. "Look at me! My name is Ko-natat and I am dying. I am dying! I must go up to the mountain."

No.

"Let me go!" he rages. "I need to reach the mountain flower. I need to find the thunderlily! The thunderlily!"

There is no answer for a time, though the rain continues its blinding assault, forever whispering. The boy waits, swaying; he has little strength to go on arguing.

Go away. You may not pass.

"I--" he chokes, helpless. He shakes his head slowly for a moment.

"I will pass," he says at last slowly, "because I must. Will you stop me? Will you strike me dead like On-wes? Stop me."

There is no answer.

"Strike me!" the boy commands. "Stop my heart." And he lifts his hands from the treetrunk, stretching them toward the sky in invitation, wavering slightly.

The sky is quiet and uncertain. The white rain still hisses and whispers.

"Stop my heart!" he roars.

He waits a long moment before he lets his arms fall to his sides and stands breathless with his eyes closed. The lightning has lessened, and it no longer seems to speak. Quickly, it seems, the rainfall eases on his shoulders and the wind slackens. Only the mountains go on singing.

Eyes open, the boy shifts his foot to begin walking again, and at once slips and falls on the sodden earth.

It is still night when Ko-natat breaks from the trees onto a road. The significance is lost on him in his amazement, because there above him in the band of visible sky is a rift, a rent in the clouds. And there, high above in peace, he sees the stars. He stands a while just staring. There is no pattern to them, but they shine, as little has done in his eyes for far too long. There are two corners of the same wedge he has known in the valley; the third must be above them, behind the cloud.

But so many more have joined them. The sky of the mountains is clear, he is reminded, far more clear than in the lowlands. In this tiny path are more stars than he can count, each remaining fixed in place with the assurance of the undying.

"Even the dead have some luck left," he whispers out loud.

He casts his eyes to either side; there is thick growth in this swath cut through the forest, but it is certainly a road. To his left it seems to slope uphill. He turns without questioning and trudges on.

It is the barest beginning of dawn. The sky whitens over the valley, under the light that warms to gold in the clouded mountains; the misted ground of the valley begins to stretch before the eye, though the torches are black and cold and the fire was long since allowed to sink to ember and ash. A few birds have querulously begun their songs.

Around the flat and denuded area some few people remain, fewer still awake; they sit huddled and quiet, staring here or there and listening. The drums lie unattended on the earth. The dust where the dance has been is a riddle of footprints, the colors mixed to a bland and speckled darkness. No trace of the painting remains.

There, near the center of the circle, lies the woman who was first and last to dance, the mother of the son. Her mouth is slightly open in her exhausted sleep and dust creeps into the sable sheen of her hair, flung tangled out around her. Near her head her husband sits watching, contemplative. Waking eyes glance to her every so often; it is her day to lead, and they have followed her vision out of awe and bemused loyalty. They do not understand the purpose of their dance--none have spoken of it--but it seemed fitting to them and they do not question, so they have kept the rhythm.

Only one drum beats now. It is in the hands of Ten-kaoa, and it speaks only the bare rhythm that began the dance. She stands on the west of the circle, standing erect and singing over the heads of her people to the mountains. The people listen unspeaking and watch the dawn. No one in living memory has seen Ten-kaoa sleep; she has sung for hours. Her hand beats steady and untiring on the drum and her voice is the tenuous warble of an old woman. The clouds in the east have hushed themselves to listen.

See, it is dawn and the sky is white:
The sky is white over the mountain.
All day the sky is blue over the valley and the people remember.
In evening the sky is yellow over the river
And the sun will leave and the sky will be black:
But the sun goes back to the mountain,
And all the people remember.

See, the rain falls high on the mountain, and the sky is angry.
All down the mountain the little streams run cold;
Always they run down to the sweet wide river.
At the end of the valley the river runs out into the ocean,
And the ocean is wide and its sky is angry.
But the rain goes back to the mountain,
And all the people remember.

See now, it is spring and there is rain from the east:
Winter has gone away south
And summer is coming from the north, and we remember.
Soon the autumn will come drifting ahead of winter.
But spring will come back to the mountain,
And the people remember.

See, the man goes into the woman,
And out from the woman comes a boy:
The boy is a man and will go back to woman,
And they will have children, and all the people remember.
Those children too will grow old and die,
And their people will grow old and die on the mountain.
See now, the boy is young, of a young people, and dying:
See, the boy goes back to the mountain,
And the mountain will remember.

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