“They’ve smoothed the mounds, levelled the way to the river,” the old woman said. “But you don’t remember how it was.”
“They made the mounds flat.”
“And they go on building. See how the fields go, right across the plain; see where the fences go.”
“Mustn’t touch them fences, the power’ll hurt you.”
She whipped out her arm straight toward him, snapped her fingers. It had as well been a blow; might have been if she had had her stick in her hand. He clenched his arms in shock. “Them fences.”
“Those fences, ma Pia.” He was trembling, from the hour, the cold, the old woman’s eyes.
“Who taught you to talk? Stupid Nine’s lot?”
“No, ma Pia.”
“You talk, hear? Not like Nine’s breed. Not like my brother Jin’s either. You know why, boy?”
“To go and come,” he recited. “To be like born‑men, like them–” He stammered on the word and the cold. The old woman’s eyes bore down on him and he swallowed and picked his word. “Like them down there in the camp.–To be born‑man.”
A moment more the old woman stared at him shivering in front of her; and then she opened her blanket, inviting him into the warmth of her arms. He came, because she frightened him and she had never done this since he was small; and because his teeth were chattering from the morning chill. He was ten. He was old enough to be afraid of her body, which had stopped being woman or man, so old she was, so thin and hard and frail at once that she had stopped being anything he understood. She smelled of smoke and herbs when her arm and the blanket enfolded him; she felt like one of the ariels, all dry and strange. Her hair was white and coarse when he looked up at her. Her arm hugged him with an unsuspected tenderness, waking memories of earliest years, of being a child, and she rocked him–ma Pia, whose face did not know how to laugh.
“I had a brother,” she said. “His name was Green. He went away into the mounds. Before that he forgot how to talk. You never do that. You never do that, young Cloud.”
“I can write my name,” he said.
The arm tightened about him. “Every year more buildings down there. They want us to come. They make their fences and they want us inside. Sometimes I think I’d like to go down and see–but they’ve changed it all. And our kind doesn’t get into the center of it, just the town. There were domes. There were born‑men that lived there. I remember. I remember the day the ships came back and there was a forest where the center of the buildings is now; and mounds; and the calibans weren’t all upriver. Nothing could move them, until the ships came, and the fences, and then the calibans left, and all the Weirds with them, right up the Styx, and to Otherside. So Green went. I think he must be dead now. It was a long time ago.”
He was silent, victim of this outpouring of old things, frightening things, because he saw the buildings growing too, constantly changing.
“Your father was my oldest boy. You look like him, those eyes.”
“Where’d you get my grandfather?” He went brave of a sudden, and twisted about and looked into her eyes.
“Don’t know,” she said. “I found that boy.” That was always the answer. And then: “I think I got him off a born‑man’s son.” She ruffled his hair. “Maybe off a Weird, what would you say?”
His face went hot.
“No,” she said. “I don’t remember. That’s the way it is. It’s cold. I’m walking back.”
“Tell me.”
The old lips pursed. “I think I got him off this born‑man. I do think I did. He was a pretty boy. Such pretty hair, like yours. Name was Mayes. He came into the hills but he never stood the first winter. So fine he was–but he just faded out. My boy had none of that. He was strong. But your mother–”
“She died birthing a baby. I know.”
“Birthing’s hard.”
“Lots do it.”
“Lots die.” She gripped his face in a hard, thin hand, turned his eyes toward her, and the blanket fell away, so that he was cold. “She was Elly Flanahan‑Gutierrez; and she had hair like yours. She was a born‑man’s daughter. Her mother went down in the mounds and came out pregnant.”
He shook his head, teeth chattering. She would not let him go. “My father was Jin, my mother Pia; they had numbers. Born‑men made them. They had me, and Jin; Mark–he’s dead, long time, and Zed–you never knew him: he hunted, and one day he didn’t come back; and Tam Oldest; and me; and Green who went into the mounds. And Old Jin, the second Jin, he had Jin Younger; and Pia Younger; and Tam Younger; and Cloud Eldest; and Sunny and others he didn’t know and no one did. Maybe Elly Flanahan. Maybe. Zed had nobody. But he could have had Elly. If he did it was his only that anyone knows. Tam Oldest had Tam Youngest and Jin Youngest and Red Pia and Cloud Oneeye. Or maybe he had Elly Flanahan. And Green–he was thirteen when he went into the mounds and Jane Flanahan did, and you know, Cloud Youngest, you look most like Green. Hehad hair like that and eyes like that, and you’re small like he was small. Maybe it was Green. Or maybe it was a hundred more, eh? who live in the dark in the mounds. You talk, Cloud, you read and you write your name, and maybe someday you go down to the new camp and plow the fields.”
“I’m a Hiller.” It was protest. His shivers were convulsive. “My ma she wasn’t what you say.”
“Call your oldest Elly,” the old woman said, making him believe she was crazy as they said. “Or Green. And you teach them to talk, hear me, Cloud?” She drew with her finger on the ground, among the dead grass, as if she had forgotten him. “This is the sun rising.” A backwards spiral. “This is setting. Or change. Pebbles one on the other, that’s building. There’s the big browns and the stupid grays and the little greens. And there’s those have seen the seafolk beach in the river in the dark before the ships came back. There’s a thing I saw–it was like caliban but not. Only one. It was big, Cloud. In the river near the sea. I never saw the like again. Lots of things I could never tell the olders. And now there’s lots of things I can’t tell the youngers. Is that fair?”
“I’m cold, ma Pia. I’m cold. Please let’s go. My father told me come.”
“Here.” She took off the blanket from about her shoulders–she wore leather with fringes, all the clothes she ever wore–she wrapped it about his shoulders and stood up with the staff she had had by her in the grass. She moved slowly, grimacing lines deeper into her wrinkled face. And when he got to his feet she tousled his hair again, touched his face in a gentle way ma Pia had never used. And then she walked away toward the north.
“Ma Pia!” Cloud cried, exasperated. He clutched her blanket about him and ran after, the edges fluttering as he hurried. “Ma Pia, that’s the wrong way. That’s the river that way.” The old were like that, forgetting where they were. He was embarrassed for her, for fierce old Pia, and angry for all she had said, and grateful for the blanket. “It’s this way.”
She stopped and stood. “Thought I might go down to the camp today. But there’s no one there to see. Thought I might like a hot meal and maybe look at the machines, like old days. But they make fences down there, and you have to ask to come in and ask to come out and they might think I was old and sick, eh? I’d die if they shut me in. And that’s no way to go. Our village stinks, you know that, Cloud, it smells like the town down there smells, like it smelled the day the first Jin died. I’m tired of stink. I think I’ll take a walk upriver, see where the calibans have gone.”
“Ma Pia, that’s a long walk. I don’t think you ought to do that.”
She smiled, a face that was set with years of scowls. It shook his world, that smile, so that he knew he had never known her. “I think I might about make it,” she said. “Mind you talk, Cloud. Mind you read and write.”
And she walked away. He was guilty, coward, standing there, but she never called him after her. She’s an older, he thought, she’s oldest of the old, like the hills themselves, she is. She knows whether she wants a boy at her heels. She knows how to find her way to home. She knows where she’s going and how far she means to walk. And: She’s beautiful, he thought, which he had never thought in his life about Pia Oldest, but she was, tall and straight and thin, with the wind dancing in the fringes of her clothes and the gray ropes of her hair–going away from him because she wanted to.