Each time, the exile followed that silent summons, the better to spy the faces of the sufferers, searching and hoping not to find a familiar one among them. And amid all this, or perhaps because of it, the dreams came and came again, children invading all the old places, children stepping from the whispering orchard into the day, climbing the wood and descending into the valley.
Children found and lost again; children welcomed, then discarded.
Late that afternoon, the sky darkened and lightning flickered behind the clouds. Soon, fat raindrops slapped the tops of the leaves and churned the brown earth to mud. Max walked through it, getting chilled and wet as the five of them scrabbled up the muddy rise. The mountain changed here into a series of craggy steps, yawning with caves. They crawled into the first one that had enough space for all of them and turned to watch the storm, shivering with the sudden cold and flinching at the crack of thunder.
Max set the peaches down and sucked at his wet clothing, glad for the water, even if he was shivering. Outside, he could see the lower half of the mountain spread below him. Clouds foamed so thick over the wood a new mountain seemed to have risen from the roof of trees.
A fork of lightning split the sky.
“It can’t get us, right?” Kate asked.
Max peered from beneath the stone rim and counted three before the thunder smashed above the trees.
“No, the cave’s protecting us,” he said.
“That’s good.”
Still, at the next burst she gripped his hand.
“I don’t like it.”
The trees bent and flailed in the wind, and Jean moved close, too.
“What if it hits a tree?” she asked. “Will it catch fire? Will it burn us?”
“We’ll be fine,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
But he could feel them jump beside him, and Jean dug her fingernails into his arm with each new clap overhead.
“Tell us a story,” Kate said after a while. “Like Dad does when there’s a storm.”
The wind threw rain into the cave, and Max blinked it from his eyes. Despite the food and the rest, he was still tired, and his bones ached. “Ask Susan,” he said. “Susan knows lots of stories.”
But Susan had stretched out by the curve of the wall, and she only shook her head.
“You tell one,” she said. “I’m too tired.”
The sky flashed and the trees shivered and the rain drove into the earth.
“Okay,” Max said. “I’ve got a story.”
It was a story of thunder and lightning, and all the things people used to believe, before they knew anything.
“They knew things,” Susan said. “Just not science.”
“Right, before they knew any science,” he amended. “And so they were afraid of things like storms. Some thought whole families of gods lived over the clouds, and thunder was the sound of one of their giant chariots rolling over the sky.”
Jean leaned her head against his arm. “That’s funny,” she said.
He rubbed the rain out of his hair, and then out of hers, listening to the drops clatter in the dirt like small stones.
“Well, they didn’t think so. Other people said thunder was a giant bird whose wings made the wind blow and the thunder come. There were lots more, but I don’t know them all.”
Nell had stretched out so that she lay parallel to the mouth of the cave, behind the three of them. “You’re forgetting the one who threw thunderbolts,” she said.
“Yes, there was that, too,” he agreed. “And there’s even a story about thunder being the sound of people bowling in the sky. But I’m not sure anyone ever believed that one.”
There was a long pause when he’d finished, filled by the sound of the drumming rain and the rush of wind through leaves. After a while, Kate said, “So what’s the end?”
Max looked down at her. In the gray-gold light of the storm, her curls seemed charged with electricity.
“What do you mean the end?”
“Well, a story’s got to have an end, doesn’t it?”
The trees bowed and hissed, and wet leaves slapped the stone above them as Max thought about it.
“I guess the end is that people learned to understand things. You know, lightning’s just electricity in the air, looking for a place to go. And thunder’s just the sound it makes. You hear it later because light travels faster than sound.”
The little girls were quiet a minute.
“So people weren’t scared anymore? Is that the end?” Kate asked him.
He gave her a half-hearted yes. There were plenty of things to be afraid of at home, even in a world framed by solid walls and rules he knew. Storms just hadn’t been one of them. Here, even that certainty was gone. He wasn’t sure he could say there was nothing to fear.
“Well, that’s a good story, then,” Kate said. “Thanks.”
The storm did not calm until long after dark. As he watched it, Max thought about huge birds that brought the wind, and flashing thunderbolt weapons, and the truth of static electricity and polarization. Lightning and thunder made a lot of noise, he told himself, but it was all just physics. Explosions came from chemical reactions, and there was a reason for them, one plus one equaled two, no matter how big and loud two happened to be.
Emotions, they were chemical reactions, too, in a way. He thought about that awhile and wondered if the rules in Ganbihar meant that simple things like fear and excitement and anger could turn on the lightning.
The storm had long gone and the sky had turned from gold to black when Kate began to scream into the dark. Max had been waiting for it, and now he sprang up and grabbed her by the shoulders before the others could find her.
Strong emotion, he
