“Green,” he called, thinking that there might be others, that his son might hear, or someone hear, and tell Green that he was called. But no answer came; and what the mound had taken in, it kept. He moved closer, climbed the slope with all his nerves taut‑strung. He went as far as the hole and put his head inside. There was the smell of earth and damp; and far away, down some narrow tunnel, he heard something move. “Green,” he shouted. The earth swallowed up his voice.
He crouched there a moment, arms flung across his knees, despair thicker about him than before. His children had all gone amiss, every one; and Green, the different one was stranger than all the strange children he had sired. Green’s eyes were distant and his mind was unknowable, as if all the unpleasantness of the world had seeped into Pia while she carried him, and infected his soul. Green was misnamed. He was that other face of spring, the mistbound nights when calibans prowled and broke the fences; he was secret things and dark. He had lost himself, over and over again; had shocked himself on the fences, sunk himself in bogs–had lost himself into the hills, and played with ariels and stones, forgetting other children.
Jin wept. That was his answer now that he was like born‑men and on his own. He mourned without confidence that there would be comfort–no tapes, now; nothing to relieve the pain. He had to face Pia, alone; and that he was not ready to do. He pictured himself coming home with daylight left, giving up, when Pia would not. When he failed her, she would come out into the hills herself: she was like that, even frail as she grew in these years. Pia, to lose a son, after all the pain–
He got up, abandoning hope of this place, kept walking, brushing the weeds aside in the trough between the mounds, going deeper and deeper into the heart of the place. All the way to the river–that was how far he must go, however afraid he was, all along this most direct track from the village to the river, as close as he could hew to it.
Brush stirred above him on a ridge: he looked up, expecting Calibans, hoping for his son–
And found two, Jin and Mark, standing on the wooded ridge above him, mirrors of each other, leaning on either side of a smallish tree.
“Father,” Jin Younger said–all smug, as if he were amused. And hostile: there was that edge always in his voice. Jin 458 faced his son in confused pain, never knowing why his children took this pose with him. “A little far afield for you, isn’t it, father?”
“Green is lost. Did your sister find you?”
“She found us. We’re all out looking.”
Jin elder let the breath go out of him, felt his knees weak, the burden of the loss at least spread wider than before. “What chance that we can find him out here?”
“What chance that he wants to be found?” Mark asked, second‑born, his brother’s shadow. “That’s the real matter, isn’t it?”
“Pia–” He gestured vaguely back toward the camp. “I told her I could go faster, look further–that you’d help; but she’ll try to come–and she can’t. She can’t do that anymore.”
“Tell me,” Jin Younger said, “would you have come for any of us? Or is it just Green?”
“When you were four and five–I did, for you.”
Jin Younger straightened back as if he had not expected that. He scowled. “Sister’s gone on down by the river,” he said. “If we don’t take Green between us, there’s no catching him.”
“Where’s Zed and Tam?”
“Oh, off hereabouts. We’ll find them on the way.”
“But Pia’s on the river alone?”
“No. She’s got help. Anyhow, Green won’t hurt her. Whatever else, not her.” Jin Younger slid down the slope, Mark behind him, and they caught their balance and stopped at the bottom in front of him. “Or didn’t that occur to you when you sent her into the hills by herself?”
“She said she knew where you were.”
His sons looked at him in that way his sons had, of making him feel slow and small. They were born‑men, after all, and quick about things, and full of tempers. “Come on,” Jin Younger said; and they went, himself and these sons of his. They shamed him, infected him with tempers that left him nothing–his sons who ran off to the wild, who took no share of the work in the fields, but cut stone when the mood took them, and dealt with born‑men for it in trade, their own discovery. Well enough–it was not calibans that drew them; but laziness. He tried to guide them, but they had never heard a tape, his sons, his daughter…who ran after her elder brothers.
Who left her youngest brother to himself; while Green–started down a path all his own.
Jin thought that he might have done better by all of them. In the end he felt guilt–that he could not tell them what he knew, and how: that once there had been ships, that ships still might come, that there was a purpose for the world and patterns they were supposed to follow.
It was the first time, this walk with his eldest sons, that they had ever walked in step at all–young men and a man twice their age, the first time he had ever come with them on their terms. He felt himself the child.
iii
The way was strange along the bank, the reeds long since left behind, where the river undercut the limestone banks and made grottoes and caves. The calibans had taken great slabs of stone and heaved them up in walls–no caprice of the river had done such things. It was a shadowed place and a hazardous place, and Pia refused to go into it. She perched herself on a rock above the water, arms about her knees, in the shadows of the trees that arched out from rootholds in the crevices of the stone. Moss grew here, in the pools; fish swam, black shapes in the ripples, and a serpent moved, a ripple through the shallow backwaters of the river. Ariels and flitters left tracks on the delicate sand, washed up on the downstream side of the stones, and at several points were the grooves calibans made in their coming up from the river, deep muddy slides.
She looked up and up, where the cliffs shadowed them, scrub trees clinging even to that purchase. There were caves up there. Possibly ariels found them accessible, but no human could climb that face. Bats might nest there. There might possibly be bats, though they came infrequently to the river.
And very much she wished for her brothers…the more when something splashed and moved.
She turned; caught her breath at the sight of the coveralled figure which had come up behind her among the rocks.
“Green,” she said softly, ever so quietly. Her youngest brother looked back at her, out of breath, with that strange, sober stare he used habitually. “Green, our father’s looking for you.”
A dip of the head, one of Green’s staring nods, his eyes hardly leaving her. He knew, Green meant; she knew how to read him.
“You know,” she said, “how upset they’ll be.”
A second nod. There was no hint of distress on Green’s face. No feeling at all. She remembered why she hated this brother, this feelingless nothing of a brother who had changed everything when he came.
“You don’t care.”
Green blinked, solemn as one of his leathery pets.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked. “Doing what? You want to starve?”
A shake of the head.
“Speak to me. Once, speakto me.”
Green sank down on his haunches on the bank and gathered up a stone, laid it flat on another one. He no longer listened.
“That’s nice,” she said. For one desperate moment she thought of warning him off, telling him the others were coming, so that he would run off, would escape, so that they would never again have to worry about him. But the words stuck in her throat, an ultimate dishonesty–not for themselves, but because it would be hard to look at her father and claim Green had run away.
She sidled closer while her brother made patterns with the stones…sidled closer, snatched suddenly at his arm and spoiled his pattern. He came up flailing and splashing into the margin of the water, twisted in her grip, and of a sudden her foot skidded on wet moss, spilling them both.