The trees spread away from the road in a purpling-green flood of treetops. Beyond them the valley fell away where countryfolk lived, a pale haze of land beyond that, flat as flat: and vast sky, delirious blued violet, and streamers of cloud like pond-ice, high, high above the plain, going off into milky white.
Terror afflicted Thorn. The sky was all too large beyond the mountain. To fly, Duun said. There were machines; Duun had mentioned them. Now and again when the meds came he had seen one far away, before it went out of sight behind the mountain. Sometimes there were white trails in the sky: planes, Duun said. People fly in them.
(Where, Duun? Where do they go? Why do they go? Can they see us?” Thorn-the-child had waved at such planes, standing dizzily atop the tallest rock he could climb: “Here I am, here, here!”)
(Notice me. Give me a sign you see. Here I am, are you like me? Do you see other children where you go? Have they skins like mine? And eyes like mine? And have they five fingers too?)
(Thousands and thousands of shonun in the city. Will there be some like me?)
The road wound down and down, among the trees and out of them. Far away was a sound the wind never made, that grew: machine-sound, thumping in ominous accents that always spoke of meds.
“They’re coming in,” Duun said. “They’ll be early. Waiting for us.”
The strangers came up the road to meet them. Not the meds, but others, dressed from neck to foot in blue and gray. Wearing weapons. Thorn hesitated when he saw them, but Duun kept walking, so he knew they were acceptable. “You didn’t need to,” Duun told them when they met. “We have orders,” one of them said; that was all. Thorn stood still in the encounter at a turning of the road. They looked at him, these strangers, and they looked away, as if he had no importance, being only an appendage, Duun’s. And the blue-clad folk led off, walking down again, with one of them behind them, another by Duun’s side.
The mountain stopped being theirs then. Strangers owned it. Strangers came to get in the way of their last moments with it, his and Duun’s. He knew why Duun wanted them away. But Duun would not tell them no, and walked without looking at things like trees and stones, as Duun had looked about him before they came. Without talking to him. Duun was bitter. Duun hurt. Thorn knew it. (My fault. My doing. All of it. They should take me and go away and Duun would still have his mountain.) But no one offered Thorn that choice. Perhaps it did not exist.
Down and down, the last little distance to the flat, around the last turning of the road.
A machine sat in the meadow; it had huge blades. It had flattened a circle all around itself in the milky green grass. There were broad dusty roads that met there, and people stood there at that crossing, far removed.
“We’ve kept them off,” said a man who had not spoken before. Only not a man like the Duun, like Ellud, like the meds. This one was broader-hipped, walked differently, had a quiet, smaller voice. Woman, Thorn thought, hearing that, and his heart picked up its beats.
(“Women are,” Duun had told him, when he was small, “us and different.”)
(“How different?” Thorn asked.)
(“Inside. Outside, in some things. They have a place inside they make babies. Men put them there; women make them.”)
(“How? child-Thorn asked. “That does it,” Duun said, and showed him what this was. “I haven’t got that,” Thorn had said, looking at himself. “Duun, I haven’t got that. Mine’s all outside.”)
(“You’re different,” Duun had said.)
(“Am I a woman?”)
(“No,” Duun said. “You’re a child. You’re going to be a man.”)
(“How do women make babies?”)
Duun had not answered then. Or he had forgotten. Thorn knew the answer later. (“See this,” Duun had said. Showed him the young inside a deiggen Thorn had killed. “They’re babies. You ought not to kill the does. See the eartips. Don’t hunt that kind.”)