We saw nothing strange about the children conceived after the fire that destroyed our village. Women worked and waited through their nine months as usual. Huts and yards were rebuilt as winter swallowed autumn. The charcoal-scarred ground beneath our new huts was rubbed clean by bare feet and mud. As summer burned through the green of spring, the women gave birth. Only the midwife murmured her surprise; seven births in two days. Four girls, three boys.

      They grew into a gaggle of half-naked screaming children. Seven wild eyed creatures who ran through the village for the first four years of their life with no responsibilities and no cares. We watched them grow and saw nothing strange. We remembered being that young, before age and work shook out the wide-eyed wonder and joy of life.

      When they turned five, and the memories of the bright flames that had roared down the mountains had faded, it was time for the children to grow up. At five years old they were ready to become a useful part of the village. Their mothers cursed and slapped the children for always being underfoot. The fathers beat them for taking tools and dogs away and losing both in play.

      So the children born after the fire were given food and taken to the edge of the village. We called the goats and older children from their winter pastures below the village and separated the milking does from their kids, bucks and the barren does. We told the children, as every five year old had heard before, to take the goats to the mountains and stay there for the summer. When the first autumn rains reached the mountains, they should bring the herds home.

      The children’s eyes were bright, and their skinny legs danced with impatience as we loaded their bags with coarse bread and water jugs. They squirmed as mothers said their quick, diffident goodbyes. No child cried or begged not to go, but turned with great eagerness to the mountains. We saw with surprised pride how eager they seemed to want to help. With little ceremony and great relief we drove goats and children up into the mountains.

      At the edge of the village we watched them run for the high green slopes. We wondered who ran faster. Not even as we watched the herd vanish into the mountainous gorges did we feel there was anything strange about the children's eagerness to be gone. When they were high up the mountain we turned back to our own lives, tending crops and keeping the year filled with the mundane daily routine. The older children lingered at the mountain path to watch with wistful eyes until the herds were no more than tiny white specks on the green-grey slopes.

      That summer was a long hot stretch of dry sun-glare. Our crops withered. The stream baked into a thirsty bed of cracked earth. We went about our work with skin burnt brown and hauled water from the river a mile away. We thought nothing of the children in the mountains. In the mountains, water ran all year in cold, thin trickles over slippery rocks. Five times we sent an older child up to the pastures to see how children and herds alike were faring on the rich red soil and vivid green grass tucked deep into mountain crevasses. They always came back with uneventful reports of fat goats and filthy, happy children.

      One day toward the end of the summer, a mother sent her twelve-year-old daughter to see how their three goats were growing, and to take food to her little brother. Two days later the girl came tearing back into the village. Her legs were torn by brambles and rocks and her hair was singed. The smell of smoke clung to her clothes, her skin. Her screams, so much more urgent than the usual childish yells, brought us all running. She fell to the ground, hugged her blood-scraped knees and cried out, “They burn, they burn!”

      Her mother tried to sooth her with clumsy, unfamiliar caresses – but the girl pushed her away and swung around to stare up at the mountains. We crowded around, worried that something had happened to our precious goats. The girl coughed and shuddered. “They ate –” She stopped and turned to look wide-eyed at her mother. Horror or awe crossed the girl’s face. In a moment she scrambled up, evaded our restraining hands and bolted away toward the river. We never saw her again.

      Three of the fathers, hulking men confident of their power to face anything as long as it wasn’t a dry spell in the distillery, marched up to the mountains. We waited and fidgeted over our work. The girl’s screams still rang in our ears.
The men came back the next morning. They had seen the children, seen some of the herds far up in the red crevasses where the brightest grass grew. Nothing was strange. The flocks were healthy. The children had come running to meet them, including the girl’s little brother. They would stay in the mountains forever, they said – silly childish talk soon quelled by one cold, wet week at the end of summer. So the fathers said. The girl who had run from the village must have been mad. We nodded, and chuckled uneasily at our own grim fears, and went on with our work. Only the midwife comforted the girl’s mother.

      Summer at last showed weariness and gave up its ever-present threat to eat our village a second time in fire. The autumn storms flew over the mountains and anchored themselves to the earth with a steady rush of thick, heavy rain. A cold wind brought each sunrise under the scudding clouds and blew away each sunset. Mud spread to our knees. The stream ran free with a torrent of red-soaked water that rushed down the mountains to join the river. Autumn took the last of our failed harvest. The milking does, tethered outside each of our squat huts, bleated and looked to the mountains. We picked over our thin crops and stared into the coming weather. A hungry winter was longer than a burning summer.

      We began to wonder why the children had not brought the herds down to the lower, warmer pastures. Often we found ourselves standing beside our milking goats, tethered to the door of our huts. Together we would watch the grey mountains. Some said they saw brief flickers of bright red light illuminate the dull grey rain and rock, high on the cracked peaks. Some said the mountains had at last woken from their fifty-year sleep. We chewed our sodden bread and said nothing. Most remembered, without knowing why, the girl who had gone up the mountain and fled the village on her return. Her mother was often seen at the edge of village, gaunt face turned up to the mountains with a sad twist in her wide mouth. Rain trickled down her cheeks and she sang to the son she still had, somewhere in the mountains.

      The cold set in. We lived in wet and wind and waited dourly for spring.

      Starved of our normal crops and hungry for goat meat and fresh milk – for strangely all the milking goats had dried up as autumn ended – we decided that the children had to be brought down. Perhaps some hurt had come to them. Perhaps they were lost. The herds would be too cold, too hungry if we waited any longer. All the goodness of the long summer would be shivered out of their bony hides.

      Six of us went this time. We took dogs and sticks to drive the reluctant goats – and children – home. The mother who had lost her daughter insisted with tears and fury that she should go with us to find her son. We grumbled as we climbed, certain that young generations were all irresponsible, unfit for any trust these days. The rain eased the morning we left. A dove-grey haze still hid the blue sky and hung over us in silence as we began the climb.

      We found no flocks. All that day we climbed further and further into the mountains, past the usual goat pastures. The skies opened again and spat forth an unwelcome greeting the higher we went.

      Evening came. We found the children. Above us, on the very highest slope, we saw them move. Wind whistled around us, biting cold as the rain eased to a trickle. We passed a pile of bones; freshly cracked, goat hide flayed off. We saw no flocks, but we had found the children. A final slip of dark gold sunlight forced its way through the seam between sky and earth below us. The children watched us come.

      They sat on great lichen-painted boulders at the top of a low cliff. Behind them reared the final peak of the highest mountain. Their clothes were ragged and there were no shoes on their stained, battered feet. Somehow they looked older than they should. None seemed to care that we were there. They leapt from rock to rock, tossing bones and stones to each other in careless play. One, the brother of the girl who had run away, hailed us as we closed the gap. His mother drew a deep shivering breath. The boy sat closest to us, skinny legs dangling over the edge of his wide flat boulder. The last sunlight that had broken the storm glinted on his face.

      “Why are you here?” he called out. His voice was high and childish. Each word was spoken as if he barely knew how to form them. One of the men, a tanner who kept our bodies warm with his cured goat-skins, told him it was time to come home. Time to bring the herds in and prepare for the spring, when the children would learn to milk and cook and feed the village.

      “But we have no flocks. They are gone.” The boy laughed. Behind him the other children broke into loud cackles of unrestrained glee. We stared at them, mute with tiredness and confusion. The boy leaned forward. “The flocks are gone.” He kicked his heels against the rock and sprang up, his small toes curled over the lip of the rock. “Would you like to see us fly?”

      His mother turned and walked away down the mountain with her head bowed. Impatient and eager to get the herds home by daybreak, we told the boy to stop, told the children to learn their place and fetch the herds.

      The boy stared down at us for a moment. His child-soft skin glowed copper in the final sunlight strands. “I told you,” he said softly, and we shuddered without knowing why, “They are gone.”

      He tilted his head and gazed thoughtfully at us. We said nothing. We had no words left. The boy smiled again, and turned toward the mountain peak. As he turned, something red and sinister flared in the center of his eyes for a brief moment. Then the last of the sunlight had gone. We looked up at the smiling children and felt as if we were the infants, not them. We were in the wrong.

      The boy jumped off his rock and ran past the other children, up the last steep slope of the mountain into the dark evening. A girl who sat close by us, playing alone, spoke up. Her voice, too, was high and issued strangely from her small mouth. Her matted red curls hung in ringlets around her long, delicate face that seemed too clearly formed for such a young child. “Our parents thank you for giving us life and food, and for sending us into the mountains. We would not have known our truth if you had kept us forever down where the air is heavy with soil and water. You saw our parent’s fire when they took your village. They are sorry for destroying your homes, but the fire was necessary to give us life like yours until we were ready to join our family.”

      The red-haired girl smiled. She dropped the broken goat-skull she had been playing with and left her rocky seat. The other children joined her. Together they ran up the mountain to stand with the boy on the mountain’s peak. We watched, bluster and anger sucked out of us by a fear that lingered long after the children had vanished.

      Silenced by a knowledge higher than the turn of crops or the strength of wind, we turned and walked back into the dark rain-drenched night. As tired as we were, we did not stop to rest. At the base of a tall cliff we found the woman who had lost both her children. We paused to offer a prayer and cover her face. We took her clothes for the use another would glean from them, but did not stop to bury her. The mountains would care for their own dead. We walked on with our heads down and our mouths shut.

      When dawn negotiated freedom from the sullen clouds, we reached the village outskirts. Only once we were safely amongst the damp sleeping huts and crowing roosters did we turn and face the mountains. Around us the rest of the village stirred to the beginning of a day that was, for them, exactly like yesterday.

      The storm lifted. The first ribbons of defiant sunlight touched the far side of the highest mountain. We saw the children, still on the mountain’s peak.

      The children stretched out their great wings, so fine they caught and filtered the strengthening sun. Even from where we stood, we could see long black heads uncoil and rise up between the outstretched wings to greet the dawn. A faint cry soared down to us on the morning wind, a deep ululating roar that held fire and music and the childish excitement in being alive. A moment later we heard a joyous reply from high above the lingering clouds; stronger and clearer, older. We covered our ears in shame.

      Five years they had lived amongst us. We had been so blind. The village woke to the new day and went about the daily tasks. We five who had climbed the mountain watched as seven launched from the high dawn-touched mountain. With a few beats of their transparent wings, the children vanished into the rain-washed sky.