The Fifth Head of Cerberus

“A STORY,” by John V. Marsch

A girl named Cedar Branches Waving lived in the country of sliding stones where the years are longer, and it came to her as it comes to women. Her body grew thick and clumsy, and her breasts grew stiff and leaked milk at the teats. When her thighs were drenched her mother took her to the place where men are born, where two outcrops of rock join. There there is a narrow space smooth with sand, and a new-dropped stone lying at the joining in a few bushes; and there, where all the unseen is kind to mothers, she bore two boys.

The first came just at dawn, and because a wind rose as he fled the womb, a cold wind out of the eye of the first light across the mountains, his mother called him John (which only signifies “a man”, all boy children being named John) Eastwind.

The second came not as they are ordinarily born—that is, head foremost as a man climbs from a lower place into a high—but feet foremost as a man lets himself down into a lower place. His grandmother was holding his brother, not knowing that two were to be born, and for that reason his feet beat the ground for a time with no one to draw him forth. Because of this his mother called him John Sandwalker.

She would have stood as soon as her sons were born, but her own mother would not permit it. “You’ll kill yourself,” she said. “Here, let them suck at once so you won’t dry.”

Cedar Branches Waving took one in each arm, one to each breast, and lay back again on the cold sand. Her black hair, as fine as floss, made a dark halo behind her head. There were tear streaks from the pain. Her mother began to scoop the sand with her hands, and when she reached that which still held the strength of the dead day’s sun, she heaped it over her daughter’s legs.

“Thank you, Mother,” said Cedar Branches Waving. She was looking at the two little faces, still smeared with her blood, that drank of her.

“So my own mother did for me when you were born. So will you do for your daughters.”

“They are boys.”

“You’ll have girls too. The first birth kills—or none.”

“We must wash these in the river,” Cedar Branches Waving said, and sat up, and after a moment stood. She was a pretty girl, but because it was newly emptied her body hung shapeless. She staggered but her mother caught her, and she would not lie down again.

The sun was high by the time they reached the river, and there Cedar Branches Waving’s mother was drowned in the shallows and Eastwind taken from her.

By the time Sandwalker was thirteen he was nearly as tall as a man. The years of his world, where the ships turned back, were long years; and his bones stretched, and his hands—large and strong. There was no fat on him (but there was no fat on anyone in the country of sliding stones) and he was a foodbringer, though he dreamed strange dreams. When his thirteenth year was almost done his mother and old Bloodyfinger and Flying Feet decided to send him to the priest, and so he went out alone into the wide, high country, where the cliffs rise like banks of dark cloud, and all living things are unimportant beside the wind, the sun, the dust, the sand, and the stones. He traveled by day, alone, always south, and at night caught rock-mice to leave with twisted necks before his sleeping place. In the morning these were sometimes gone.

About noon on the fifth day he reached the gorge of Thunder Always, where the priest was. By great good luck he had been able to kill a feign-pheasant to bring as a gift, and he carried this by its hairy legs, with the long naked head and neck trailing behind him as he walked; and he, knowing that he was that day a man, and that he would reach the gorge before the sun set (Flying Feet had told him landmarks and he had passed them) walked proudly, but with some fear.

He heard Thunder Always before he saw it. The ground was nearly level, dotted with rock and bush, and held no hint that there was less than stone forever beneath his feet. There was a faint grumbling, a muttering of the air. As he walked on he saw a faint mist rising. This could not indicate the gorge of Thunder Always because he could see plainly farther ground, not far off, through it; and the sound was not loud.

He took three steps more. The sound was a roaring. The earth shook. At his feet a narrow crevice opened down and down to white water far below. He was wet with the spray, and the dust ran from his body. He had been warm and he was chill. The stones were smooth and wet and shook. Carefully he sat, his legs over the darkness and white water far below, and then, feet foremost as a man lets himself down into a lower place, climbed into Thunder Always. Not until he searched just where the water foamed, where the sky was a slot of purple no wider than a finger and sprinkled with day stars, did he find the priest’s cave.

The mouth was running with spray, and loud with the rushing waters—but the cave sloped up and up on broken stones fallen from the roof. In the dark Sandwalker climbed, climbed on hands and feet like a beast, holding the feign-pheasant in his teeth until his fingers found the priest’s feet and his hands the withered legs. Then he laid (he feign-pheasant there, feeling like cobweb the hair and feathers and the small, dry bones dropped from earlier offerings, and retreated to the cave mouth.

Night had come, and at the appointed spot he lay down and after a long time slept despite the roaring water; but the ghost of the priest did not come into his dreams. His bed was a raft of rushes floating in a few inches of water. Around him in a circle stood immense trees, each rising from a ring of its own serpentine roots. Their bark was white like the bark of sycamores, and their trunks rose to great heights before vanishing in dark masses of their own leaves. But in his dream he was not looking at these. The circle in which he floated was of such extent that the trees formed only a horizon to it, cutting off the immeasurable concavity of the sky just where it would otherwise have touched earth.

He was, in some way he could not define, changed. His limbs were longer, yet softer; but he did not move them. He stared at the sky, and felt that he fell into it. The raft rocked, with a motion hardly detectable, to the beating of his heart.

It was his fourteenth birthday, and the constellations, therefore, occupied just those positions they had held on the night of his birth. When morning came the sun would rise in Fever; but sisterworld, whose great blue disk now showed a thin paring above the encompassing trees, obscured the two bright stars, the eyes, that were all that could be seen of The Shadow Child. None of the planets were the same. He wiped from his mind the knowledge that The Snow Woman now stood in Five Flowers, and imagined her in the place of Seeing Seed, as he knew she had been on his birthnight. And Swift in the Valley of Milk, Dead Man in the place of Lost Wishes… The Waterfall roared silently across the sky.

Feet splashed close to his head. Eastwind sat up, by long practice imparting only the slightest motion to the tiny raft.

“What have you learned?” It was Lastvoice, the greatest of starwalkers, his teacher.

“Not as much as I wished,” Eastwind said ruefully. “I fear I slept. I deserve to be beaten.”

“You are honest at least,” Lastvoice said.

“You have told me often that one who would advance must own to every fault.”

“I’ve told you as well that it is not the offender who passes sentence.”

“Which will be?” asked Eastwind. He strove to keep apprehension from his voice.

“Suspended, for my best acolyte. You slept.”

“Only a moment, I’m sure. I had a curious dream, but I’ve had these before.”

“Yes.” Serene and commanding, Lastvoice leaned over his pupil. He was very tall, and the blue light of rising sisterworld showed a bloodless face from which the few wisps of beard, as ritual required, were plucked daily. The sides of his head had been seared with brands kindled in the flows of the Mountains of Manhood, so that his hair, thicker than any woman’s, grew only in a stiffened crest.

“I dreamed again that I was a hill-man, and I had gone to the source of the river, where I was to receive an oracle in a sacred cave. I lay down, that I might be given it, near rushing water.”

Lastvoice said nothing, and Eastwind continued, “You hoped I had been walking among the stars; but as you see, it was a dream of no spirit.”

“Perhaps. But what do the stars tell you of the enterprise tomorrow? Will you wind the conch?”

“As my master says.”

When Sandwalker woke he was stiff and cold. He had had such dreams before, but they faded quickly and if there was any message in this one he did not understand it, and he knew that Lastvoice was certainly not the priest whose ghost he had invited. For a few minutes he toyed with the idea of staying in the gorge until he was ready to sleep again, but the thought of the clear morning sky above and the warmth of the sun on the plateau decided him against it. It was almost noon when, ravenously hungry, he made the last climb and flung himself down to rest on the warm, dusty ground.

In an hour he was ready to rise again and hunt. He was a good hunter, young and strong, and more patient than the long-toothed bitch cat that waits flattened on a ledge all day, two days, remembering her cubs that weaken as they mew for her and sigh, and sleep, and cry again until she kills. There had been others when Sandwalker was only a year or two younger; not, perhaps, quite so strong as he; others who, after running and stalking and hunting again until the sun was almost down had come back to the sleeping place with hands empty and slack bellies, hoping for leavings and begging their mothers for breasts now belonging to a younger child. These were dead. They had learned the truth that the sleeping place is easily found by a food-bringer, not hard for a full belly to find; but shifts and turns before hungry mouths until it is lost in the stones, and on the third empty day is gone forever.

And so for two days Sandwalker hunted as only hill-men hunt, seeing everything, gleaning everything, sniffing out the nest of the owl-mouse to swallow her children like shrimp and chew the hoarded seeds to sweet pulp; creeping, his skin the cold stone color of the dust, his wild hair breaking the telltale silhouette of his head; silent as the fog that reaches into the high country and is not seen until it touches the cheek (when it blinds).

An hour before full dark of the second day he crossed the trail of a tick-deer, the hornless little ungulate that lives by licking up the brown blood drinkers its hoofs’ click calls from their hiding places near water holes. He followed it while sisterworld rose and ruled, and was still following when she had sunk half her blue wealth of continents behind the farthest of the smoking mountains of the west. Then he heard spring up before him the feasting song the Shadow children sing when they have killed enough for every mouth, and he knew that he had lost.

In the great old days of long dreaming, when God was king of men, men had walked unafraid among the Shadow children by night, and the Shadow children, unafraid, had sought the company of men by day. But the long dreaming had given its years to the river long ago, floating down to the clammy meadowmeres and death. Yet a great hunter, thought Sandwalker, (and then because he had held since least boyhood that milk-gift that allows a man to look from eyes outside his own and laugh he added, a great hunter who was very hungry) might attempt the old ways again. God, surely, orders all things. The Shadow children might slay by the right hands and the left while the sun slept, but what fools they’d look if they tried to kill him if God did not wish it, by night or day.

Silently, but proud and straight, he strode on until sisterworld’s blue light showed the place where, like bats around spilled blood, the Shadow children ringed the tick-deer. Long before he reached them their heads turned, on sterns unhindered as the necks of owls. “Morning met where much food is,” Sandwalker said politely.

While he walked five paces there was no sound, then a mouth not human answered, “Much food indeed.”

Women at the sleeping place, wishing to frighten children still playing when their shadows were longer than themselves, said the Shadow children’s teeth dripped poison. Sandwalker did not believe it, but he remembered this when the other spoke. He knew “much food” did not mean the tick-deer, but he said: “That is well. I heard your song—you sang of many mouths and all full. It was I who drove your meat to you, and I ask a share—or I kill the largest of you to eat myself, and the rest may dine upon the bones when I have finished. It is all one to me.”

“Men are not as you. Men do not eat the flesh of their kind.”

“You mean yourselves? Only when you are hungry, but you are hungry all the time.”

Several voices said softly, “No,” drawing out the word. “A man I know—Flying Feet, a tall man and not afraid of the sun—killed one of you and left the head for night-offering. When he woke, the skull was stripped.”

“Foxes,” said a voice that had not spoken before, “or it was a native boy of his own get he killed, which is more likely. Mice you left us while you came here, and now you would be repaid in deer’s flesh. Dear mice indeed. We should have strangled you while you slept.”

“You would have lost many in the attempt.” “I could kill you now. I alone. So we butcher your brats that come whimpering to.us—quiet them and dine well.” One of the dark figures rose.

“I am no suckling—I have fourteen summers. And I do not come starving. I have eaten today and I will eat again.”

The Shadow Child who had risen took a step forward. Several of the others reached toward him as though to stop him, but did not. “Come!” Sandwalker said. “Do you think to call me from the sleeping place to kill among the rocks? Baby killer!” He flexed his knees and hands and felt the strength that lived in his arms. Before making his bold approach he had resolved that if the Shadow children tried to kill him he would flee at once without trying to fight—he was certain that he could quickly outdistance theii short legs. But he was equally sure now that whether the poisoned bite was real or not, he could deal with the diminutive figure facing him.

The voice which had spoken to him first said urgently, but so softly it was almost a whisper, “You must not harm him. He is sacred.”

“I did not come to fight you,” Sandwalker said. T only want a fair portion of the tick-deer I drove into your hands. You sing that you have much.”

The Shadow Child who had risen to face him said, “With my smallest finger, little native animal, I will break your bones until the ends burst through your skin.”

Sandwalker edged away from the talons the other thrust toward him and announced contemptuously, “If you are his blood, make him squat again—or he is mine.”

“Sacred,” their voices replied. The sound of the word was like the night wind that looks for the sleeping place and never finds it.

His left hand would bat the shrunken claws aside; his right take the small, too-supple throat in the grip that killed. Sandwalker set his feet and waited, crouching, the slight farther advance that would bring the shuffling figure within sure reach. And then, perhaps because at the edge of sight a mile-wide plume of smoke from the Mountains of Manhood had blown aside to reveal her, sisterworld’s light fell, in the instant before setting and as quickly as lightning-glare, on The Shadow Child’s face. It was dark and weak, huge eyes above sagging flesh, the cheeks sunken, the nose and mouth, from which a thick liquid ran, no larger than an infant’s.

But though Sandwalker remembered these things later he did not notice them in the brief flash of blue light. Instead he saw the face of all men, and the strength they think theirs when they are full of meat, and that they are fools to be destroyed with a breath; and because Sandwalker was young he had never seen that thing before. When the talons touched his throat he tore himself away, and, gasping and choking for a reason he could not understand, dodged back toward the knot of dark bodies about the tick-deer.

“Look,” said the voice which had spoken to him first. “He weeps. Boy, here, quickly, sit with us. Eat.”

Sandwalker squatted, drawn down by their small, dark hands, beside the tick-deer with the others. Someone said to The Shadow Child whose fingers had stretched for his throat a moment before, “You mustn’t hurt him; he’s our guest.”

“Ah.”

“It’s all right to play with them, of course; it keeps them in their place. But let him eat now.”

Another put a gobbet of the tick-deer’s flesh into Sandwalker’s hands, and as he always had, he gorged it before it could be snatched away. The Shadow Child who had threatened him laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry I frightened you.”

“It’s all right.”

Sisterworld had set and, no longer robbed of their brilliance, the constellations blazed across the autumn sky: Burning Hair Woman, bearded Five Legs, Rose of Amethyst that the people of the meadowmeres, the marshmen, called Thousand Feelers and the Fish. The tick-deer was sweet in Sandwalker’s mouth and sweeter in his belly, and he felt a sudden content. The shrunken figures around him were his friends. They had given him to eat. It was good to be sitting thus, with friends and food, while Burning Hair Woman stood on her head in the night sky.

The voice that had addressed him first (he could not, for a time, make out from whose mouth it came) said: “You are our friend now. It has been a long time since we’ve taken a shadow-friend from among the native population.”

Sandwalker did not know what was meant, but it seemed polite, and safe, to nod; he did so.

“You say we sing. When you came you said we sang The Song of Many Mouths and All Full. There is a singing in you now, a happy song, though without counterpoint.”

“Who are you?” Sandwalker asked. “I can’t tell which of you is talking.”

“Here.” Two of the Shadow children edged (apparently) aside, and a dark area which Sandwalker had thought was only the star-shadow of a stone straightened and showed a shrunken face and bright eyes.

“Well met,” said Sandwalker, and gave his name.

“I am called the Old Wise One,” said the oldest of the Shadow children. “Well met truly.” Sandwalker noticed that the stars could be seen faintly through the Old Wise One’s back, so he was a ghost; but this did not greatly bother Sandwalker—ghosts (though they most frequently stayed in the dreamworld as who would not if he might) were a fact of life, and a helpful ghost could be a strong ally.

“You think me a shadow of the dead,” said the Old Wise One, “but it is not so.”

“We are all,” Sandwalker pronounced diplomatically, “but shadows cast ahead of them.”

“No,” said the Old Wise One, “I am not that. Since you are a shadowfriend, now I will tell you what I am. You see all these others—your friends as truly as I—gathered about this carcass?”

“Yes.” (Sandwalker had been counting them lest another appear. There were seven.)

“You would say that these sing. There is The Song of Many Mouths and All Full, The Bending Sky-Paths Song that none may corne, The Hunting Song, The Song of Ancient Sorrows we sing when the Fighting Lizard is high in the summer sky and we see our old home as a little yellow gem in his tail. And so on. Your people say these songs sometimes disturb your dreams.”

Sandwalker nodded, his mouth full.

“Now when you speak to me, or your own people sing at your sleeping places, that singing is a shaking in the air. When you speak, or one of these others speaks to you, that, too, is a shaking in the air.”

“When the thunder speaks,” said Sandwalker, “that is a shaking. And now I feel a small shaking in my throat when I talk to you.”

“Yes, your throat shakes itself and thus the air, as a man shakes a bush by first shaking his arm which holds it. But when we sing it is not the air that shakes. We shake extension; and I am the song all the Shadow children sing, their thought when they think as one. Hold your hands before you thus, not touching. Now think of your hands gone. That is what we shake.”

Sandwalker said, “That is nothing.”

“That which you call nothing is what holds all things apart. When it is gone, all the worlds will come together in a fiery death from which new worlds will be born. But now listen to me. As you are named shadowfriend you must learn before this night is over to call our help when you require it. It is easily done, and it is done this way: when you hear our singing—and you will find now that if you listen well, lying or sitting without motion and bending your thought to us, you may hear us very far off—you, in your mind, must sing the same song. Sing with us, and we will hear the echo of our song in your thought and know you require us. Try it now.”

All about Sandwalker, the Shadow children began singing The Daysleep Song, which tells of the sun’s rising; and of the first light; the long, long shadows and the dances the dust-devils do on the hilltops. “Sing with us,” the Old Wise One urged.

Sandwalker sang. At first he tried to add something of his own to the song, as men do at the sleeping place; but the Shadow children pinched him and frowned. After that lie only sang The Daysleep Song as he heard them singing, and soon all of them were dancing around the bones of the tick-deer, showing how the dust-devils would.

He now saw that the Shadow children were not all old men as he had imagined. Two indeed were wrinkled and stiff. One seemed a woman though like the rest she had only wisps of hair; two neither old nor young; and two, little more than boys. Sandwalker watched their faces as he danced, marveling that they seemed at once both young and old—and the faces of the others that seemed old yet young. He could see much better than he had been able to while they were squatting about the tick-deer, and it came to him—both understandings at once, so that surprise pushed surprise—that in the east the black of the sky was giving way to purple, and that there were but seven Shadow children. The Old Wise One was gone. He turned to face the rising sun—half from instinct, half because he thought the Old Wise One might have gone that way. When he turned again the Shadow children had scattered behind him, darting among the rocks. Only two were visible, then none. His first thought was to pursue them, but he felt certain they would not wish it. He called loudly, “Go with God!” and waved his arms.

The first beams of the new sun sent shapes of black and gold leaping toward him. He looked at the tick-deer; some shreds of flesh remained, and bones that would yield marrow if he could break them. Half-humorously he said to these leavings, “Morning met where much food is,” then ate again before the ants came.

An hour later, as he picked his teeth with a fingernail, he thought about his dream of the night before. The Old Wise One, he felt, might have interpreted it for him. He wished that he had asked. If he slept now, by daylight, there was little chance that any good dream would come, but he was tired and cold. He stretched himself in the warm sunshine—and noticed that the back of the woman walking before him looked familiar. He was walking faster than she and soon could see that it was his mother, but when he tried to greet her he found he was unable to do so. Then he, who had always been so sure of foot, tripped on a stone. He threw out his hands to save himself, a shock went through his whole body, and he found himself sitting up, alone, and sweating from the sun’s heat.

He stood, still trembling, brushing at the grit that clung to his damp limbs and his back. It was only foolishness. There was no use in sleeping by day—his spirit only left the body at once and went wandering, and then if the priest did come to him in sleep there would be no one to receive him. The priest might even become angry with him and not come back. No, he must either return to the cave and try again there, or acknowledge failure and go away—which would be intolerable. He would return, then, to the gorge.

But not with empty hands. The feign-pheasant he had brought before had proved an inadequate gift. This might be because the priest was in some way displeased with him; but, as he reflected with some satisfaction, it might also be because the priest intended some revelation of great moment, for which the feign-pheasant was insufficient. Another tick-deer, if he could find one, might be satisfactory. He had come from the north and had seen few signs of game; to go east would mean crossing the river gorge before he traveled far, and westward, toward the burning moun-tains, stretched a waterless wilderness of stone. He went south.

The land rose slowly as he went. There had been little vegetation, but it became less. The gray rock gave way to red. About noon, as his tireless stride brought him to the summit of a ridge, he saw something he had seen only twice before in his life: a tiny, watered valley, an oasis of the high desert which had managed to hold soil enough for real grass, a few wild flowers, and a tree.

Such a place was of great significance, but it was possible to drink there, and even to stay for a few hours if one dared. And it was less offensive to the tree, as Sandwalker knew, if one came alone—an advantage for him. Approaching, as custom dictated, neither swiftly nor slowly, but with an expression of studied courtesy, he was about to greet it when he saw a girl sitting, holding an infant, among the roots.

For a moment, impolitely, his eyes left the tree. The girl’s face was heart-shaped, timorous, scarcely a woman’s yet. Her long hair (and this was something to which Sandwalker was unaccustomed) was clean—she had washed it in the pool at the foot of the tree, and untied the tangles with her fingers so that it now spread a dark caul upon her brown shoulders. She sat cross-legged and unmoving, with the baby, a flower thrust in its hair, asleep on her thighs.

Sandwalker greeted the tree ceremoniously, asking permission to drink and promising not to stay long. A murmuring of leaves answered him, and though he could not understand the words they did not sound angry. He smiled to show his appreciation, then went to the pool and drank.

He drank long and deep, as desert animals do; and when he had had his fill and lifted his head from the wind-rippled water he saw the girl’s reflection dancing beside his own. She was watching him with large, fearful eyes; but she was quite close. “Morning met,” he said.

“Morning met.”

“I am Sandwalker.” He thought of his journey to the cave, of the tick-deer and the feign-pheasant and the Old Wise One. “Sandwalker the far-traveled, the great hunter, the shadow-friend.”

“I am Seven Girls Waiting,” the girl said. “And this,” she smiled tenderly down at the baby she carried, “is Mary Pink Butterflies. I called her that because of her little hands, you know. She waves them at me when she’s awake.”

Sandwalker, who in his own short life had seen how many children come and how few live, smiled and nodded.

The girl looked down into the pool at the foot of the tree, at the tree, at the flowers and grass, everywhere but at Sandwalker’s face. He saw her small, white teeth creep out like snowmice to touch her lips, then flee again. The wind made patterns on the grass, and the tree said something he could not understand—though Seven Girls Waiting, perhaps, did. “Will you,” she asked hesitantly, “make this your sleeping place tonight?”

He knew what she meant and answered as gently as he could, “I have no food to share. I’m sorry. I hunt, but what I find I must keep for a gift for the priest in Thunder Always. Doesn’t anyone sleep where you sleep?”

“There was nothing anywhere. Pink Butterflies was new, and I could not walk far… We slept up there, beyond the bent rock.” She made a wretched little gesture with her shoulders.

“I have never known that,” Sandwalker said, laying a hand on her arm, “but I know how it must feel, sitting alone, waiting for them to come when no one comes. It must be a terrible thing.”

“You are a man. It will not come to you until you are old.”

“I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

“I’m not angry. I’m’not alone either—Pink Butterflies is with me all the time, and I have milk for her. Now we sleep here.”

“Every night?”

The girl nodded, half-defiantly.

“It isn’t good to sleep where a tree is for more than one night.”

“Pink Butterflies is his daughter. I know because he told me in a dream a long time before she was born. He likes having her here.”

Sandwalker said carefully, “We were all engendered in women by trees. But they seldom want us to stay by them for more than a single night.”

“He’s good to us! I thought…” the girl’s voice dropped until it was barely audible above the rustling of the wind in the grass, when you came he might have sent you to bring us something to :at.”

Sandwalker looked at the little pool. “Are there fish here?”

The girl said humbly, as though confessing some misdemeanor, I haven’t been able to find any for… for…”

“How long?”

“For the last three days. That’s how we were living. I ate the fish from the pool, and I had milk for Pink Butterflies. I still have milk.” She looked down at the baby, then up again at Sandwalker, her wide eyes begging him to believe her. “She just drank. There was enough milk.”

Sandwalker was looking at the sky. “It’s going to be cold,” he said. “See how clear it is.”

“You will make this your sleeping place tonight?”

“Any food I find must go toward my gift.” He told her about the priest, and his dream.

“But you will come back?”

Sandwalker nodded, and she described the best places to hunt—the places where her people had found game, when they had found game.

The long, rocky slope above the tree and pool and little circle of living grass took the better part of an hour to climb. At the bent rock—a crooked finger of stone left pointing skyward after some calamity of erosion—he found the sleeping place her people had used: the rocks that had sheltered the sleepers from wind, a few scuffed tracks the weather had not yet erased, the gleaming bones of small animals. But the sleeping place was of no use or interest to him.

He hunted until sisterworld rose, and found nothing, and would have liked to sleep where he was; but he had promised the girl he would come back, and there was already an icy spirit in the air. He found her, as he had expected, lying with her arms around the baby among the tangled roots of the tree.

Exhausted, he flung himself down beside her. The sound of his breathing and the warmth of his body woke her; she started, then looked at him and smiled, and he was suddenly glad he had come back. “Did you catch anything?” she said.

He shook his head.

“I did. Look. I thought you might like to have it for your gift.” She held up a small fish, now stiff and cold.

Sandwalker took it, then shook his head. If the feign-pheasant had been inadequate, this would certainly not be acceptable. “A fish would spoil before I got it there,” he said. He started a hole in the belly with his teeth, then widened it with his fingers until he could scrape out the intestines and lift away most of the bones, leaving two little strips of flesh. He gave one to the girl.

“Good,” she said, swallowing. Then, “Where are you going?”

Sandwalker had risen, still chewing the fish, and stood stretching his tired, cold muscles in sisterworld’s blue light. “Hunting,” he answered. “Before, I was looking for something large, something I could take for a gift. Now I’m going to look for something small, just something for us to eat tonight. Rock-mice, maybe.”

Then he was gone, and the girl lay hugging her child, looking through the leaves at the bright band of The Waterfall and the broad seas and scattered storms of sisterworld. Then her eyes closed, and she could pull sisterworld from the tree. She put the blue rind to her lips and tasted sweetness. Then she woke again, the sweet juice still in her mouth. Someone was bending over her, and for a moment she was afraid.

“Come on.” It was he, Sandwalker. “Wake up. I’ve got something.” He touched her lips again with his fingers; they were sticky, and fragrant with a piercing perfume of fruit, flowers, and earth.

She stood, holding Pink Butterflies pressed against her, her jutting breasts warming Pink Butterflies’s stomach and legs (that was what they were for, besides milk), her arms wrapped about the little body, shivering.

Sandwalker pulled her. “Come on.”

“Is it far?”

“No, not very far.” (It was far, and he wanted to offer to carry Pink Butterflies, but he knew Seven Girls Waiting would fear he might harm her.)

The way lay north by, east, almost on the margin of the earliest beginning of the river. Seven Girls Waiting was stumbling by the time they reached it: a small dark hole where Sandwalker had kicked in the ground with his heel. “Here,” he said. “I stopped to rest here, and with my ears close I could hear them talking.” He ripped up the seemingly solid ground with strong fingers, tossing away the clods; then a clod, dark as the others in sisterwor’d’s blue light, came up dripping. There was a soft murmuring. He broke the clotted stuff in two, thrusting half into his own mouth, half into hers. She knew, suddenly, that she was starving and chewed and swallowed frantically, spitting out the wax.

“Help me,” he said. “They won’t sting you. It’s too cold. You can just brush them off.”

He was digging again and she joined him, laying Pink Butterflies in a safe place and smearing her little mouth with honey to lick, and her hands so that she could lick her fingers. They ate not only the honey but the fat, white larva, digging and eating until their arms and faces, their entire bodies, were sticky and powdered with the bee-rotten soil; Sandwalker, thrusting his choice finds into the girl’s mouth and she, her best discoveries into his, brushing aside the stupefied bees and digging and eating again until they fell back happy and surfeited in one another’s arms. She pressed against him, feeling her stomach hard and round as a melon beneath her ribs and against his skin. Her lips were on his face, and it was dirty and sweet.

He moved her shoulders gently. “No,” she said, “not on top of me. I’d split. I’d be sick. Like this.” His tree had grown large, and she wrapped it with her hands. Afterward they put Pink Butterflies between their perspiring bodies to keep her warm and slept the remainder of the night, the three of them, pressed in a tangle of legs and sighs.

The roaring of Thunder Always came to Sandwalker’s ears. He rose and went into the priest’s cave, but this time, though it was as dark as before, he could see everything. He had found the power, he did not know where, to see without eyes and without light; the cave stretched to either side of him and ahead of him—a jumble of fallen slabs.

He went forward and upward. It was drier. The floor became gritty clay. Icicles of stone hung from the coldly sweating rocks overhead and lifted from the floor at his feet until he walked as if in the mouth of a beast. Drier still, and there were no more stone teeth, only the rough tongue of clay and the vaulted throat growing smaller and smaller. Then he saw the bed of the priest with the bones of gifts all around it, and the priest rose on his bed to look at him.

“I am sorry,” Sandwalker told him, “you are hungry and I’ve brought you nothing.” Then he held out his hands and saw he held a dripping comb in one and a mass of fat larva cemented with honey in the other. The priest took them, smiling, and bending down chose from among the litter of bones an animal’s skull, which he held out to Sandwalker.

Sandwalker took it; it was dry and old, but the priest’s hand had stained it with fresh blood, and as he watched, the blood brought life to it: the bone becoming new and wet, then marble with dark veins, then wrapped in skin and fur. It was the head of an otter. The eyes, liquid and living, looked into Sandwalker’s face.

In them he saw the river, where the otter had been born; the river trickling past the despoiled hive; saw the water dive through the high hills seeking the true surface of the world; saw it rush in torrents through Thunder Always and slow from plunging rapids to a swift stream and at last to a broad halfmile, winding almost without current through the meadowmeres. He saw the stiff flight of hair-herons and aigrettes, yellow frogs wrestling for the possession of the wind; and through the slow, green water, as though he were swimming in it himself twenty feet down among the stones and gravel and mountain-born sand of the bottom, the figure of the otter. With brown fur that was nearly black it threaded the waters like a snake until, close to him, it turned broad side on and he could see its short strong legs paddling—clear of the sandy bottom by a finger-width, but seeming to walk along it.

“What?” he said. “What?” Pink Butterflies was squirming against him. Sleepily he helped her until she reached one of her mother’s breasts, then cupped his hand about the other. He was cold and thought of his dream, but it seemed hardly to have ended.

He stood beside the broad river, his feet in mud. It was not yet quite sunrise, but the stars were dimming. Rushes rippled in the dawn wind, the waves running to the edge of the world. Calf-deep in the river, with slow eddies circling their legs, stood Flying Feet, old Bloodyfinger, Leaves-you-can-eat, the girl Sweetmouth, and Cedar Branches Waving.

From behind him stepped two men. The people of the meadowmeres, he knew, drove their young men from women until fire from the mountains proved their manhood and left their thigh and shoulders puckered with scars. These men had such scars, and their hair had been knotted in locks, and they wore grass about their wrists and waxy blossoms at their necks. A man with a scarred head chanted, then ended. He saw Flying Feet see that the man’s eyes were on him and step backward—and so doing, into a place where the river was suddenly deeper. Flying Feet sank, floundering. The scarred man seized him. The water churned with his stragglings, but the scarred men, themselves now waist-deep, bent over him, thrusting him down. The stragglings grew less, and Sandwalker, knowing he dreamed—Sandwalker asleep beside Seven Girls Waiting—thought as he dreamed that were he Flying Feet he would feign death until they brought him to the air again. Meantime Flying Feet’s churning of the river had ceased. The silt his kicking had raised floated away, leaving the water clear. In it his arms and legs lay lifeless, and his long hair trailed behind him like weed. The dream Sandwalker strode to him, feet lifting high, scarcely splashing when they came down. He looked at the blank white face under the water, and as he looked, the eyes opened, and the mouth opened, and there was an agony in them which faded and became slack, the eyes no longer seeing.

Sandwalker could not breathe. He sat up trembling, gulping air, a pressure on his chest. He stood, feeling he must thrust his head higher than water he could not see. Seven Girls Waiting stirred, and Pink Butterflies waked and whimpered.

He left them and walked to the top of a small knoll. As in his dream the sun was corning, and the east was rose and purple with the reflection of his face.

When Seven Girls Waiting had drunk from the river and was feeding Pink Butterflies he explained his dream to her: “Flying Feet thought as I. He would pretend death. But the marshmen had seen that trick, and…” Sandwalker shrugged.

“You said he couldn’t get up,” she said practically, “so he would have died anyway.”

“Yes.”

“Will you hunt today? You still need a gift, and since we didn’t stay at the tree last night you could sleep there tonight.”

“I don’t think the priest requires another gift of me,” Sandwalker said slowly. “I thought he was not helping me, but now I see that the dream I dreamed in his cave of floating and watching the stars was by his help, and the dream I dreamed by daylight of walking with my mother and the others was by his help, and the dream I dreamed last night. Truly, the men of the marsh have taken my people.”

Seven Girls Waiting sat down, holding Pink Butterflies on her lap and not looking at his face. “It is a long way to the marshes,” she said.

“Yes, but my dream has shown me how I may travel swiftly.” Sandwalker walked to the edge of the little stream which would become the great river and looked down into it. The water was very clear, and hip-deep. The bottom was sand and stones. He plunged in.

The current, fast even here, took him. For a moment he raised his head from the water. Seven Girls Waiting was already far away, a small figure shining in the new sun; she waved and held up Pink Butterflies so that she could see, and he knew that she was calling, “Go with God.”

The water took him again and he spun on to his belly and thought of the otter, imagining that he too had nostrils close to the top of his head and short, powerful swimming legs in place of his long limbs. He stroked and shot ahead, stroked and shot ahead, occasionally pausing to listen for the roar of a falls.

He passed many, leaving the river and circling them on foot. The lesser rapids he swam, growing more skillful at each. Through half the gorge of Thunder Always he carried a large fish to leave as an offering in the priest’s cave. In deep pools the currents sent him swirling toward the bottom until, with their force spent, he hung suspended in the green light, his hair a cloud about his face — then streaming straight out behind it as he followed the waters to the surface again among crystal spheres of air.

Late that day, though he could only guess it, he passed through the country most familiar to him, the rocky hills where his own people roved, having come farther north since morning than he had traveled southward on the way to Thunder Always in five days. Evening came, and, from a stretch of the river quieter than most, he crawled onto a sandy bank, finding himself almost too tired to drag his body from the water. He slept on the sand in the shelter of high grass, and did not look at the stars at all.

The next morning he walked for half an hour along the little beach before slipping, hungry, into the water again. Everything was easier now. Fish were more plentiful and he caught a fine one, then a dabduck by swimming under water, eyes open and limbs scarcely moving, until he could grasp the unlucky bird’s feet.

The river, too, was quieter; and if he did not rush along as swiftly, his progress,,.was less exhausting. It flowed smoothly among wooded hills; then, much broader, slipped through lowlands where great trees sank roots in the water and arched branches fifty feet toward mid-channel from either side. At last it seemed to stagnate in a flatland where reeds, dotted with trees and brush, spread without limit; and the cold, unliving water acquired, by means Sandwalker did not comprehend, faintly, the taste of sweat.

Now night came again, but there was no friendly bank. Cautiously he picked his way half a mile over the reeking mud to reach a tree. Waterfowl circled overhead, calling to each other and sometimes crying—as though the death of the sun meant terror and death for them as well, a night of fear.

He spoke to the tree when he reached it, but it did not reply and he felt that whatever power dwelt in the lonely oasis trees of his own land was absent here; that this tree spoke to the unseen no more than to him, engineering no babes in women. After begging permission (he might, after all, be wrong) he climbed into a high fork to sleep. A few insects found him, but they were torpid in the cold. The sky was streaked with clouds through which sisterworld’s bloodless lightshoneonlyfitfully. Heslept, then woke; and first smelled, then heard, then in the wanton beams saw, a ghoul-bear lope by—huge, thick-limbed, and stinking.

Almost he slept again. Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.

Not sorrow, he thought, though when he remembered Seven Girls Waiting and Pink Butterflies and the living, thinking tree ruling kindly its little lake and flowered lawn in the country of sliding stones, something hurt.

Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, sang the night wind, throbbing.

Not sorrow, Sandwalker thought to himself, hate. The marshmen had killed Flying Feet, who had sometimes out of his plenty given him to eat when he was small. They would kill Bloody-finger and Leaves-you-can-eat, Sweetmouth and his mother.

Sorrow, sing sorrow.

Not sorrow, he thought, the wind, the tree. He sat up, listening to convince himself that it was only the sighing of the wind he heard, or perhaps the tree murmuring of better places. Whatever it was—perhaps, indeed, he had been wrong about this lonely, reed-hemmed tree—it was not an angry sound. It was… nothing.

The lost wind sighed, but not in words. The leaves around him scarcely trembled. Far overhead and far away thunder boomed. Sorrow, sang many voices. Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow. Loneliness, and the night coming that will never go.

Not the wind; not the tree. Shadow children. Somewhere. Forming the words softly, Sandwalker said, “Morning met. I am not lonely or sad, but I will sing with you.” Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow. He remembered that the Old Wise One had said, “As you are named shadowfriend, you must learn before this night is over to call for our help when you require it.” He had hoped, with a boy’s optimism, to free his people by his own strength, but if the Shadow children would help him he was very willing that they should. “Loneliness,” he sang with them, and then, closing his lips and unfolding his mind to the clouds and the empty miles of water and reeds, and the night coming that will never go.

Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, sang again the Shadow children (somewhere), but the mind-song seemed now something less an expression of feeling and something more a ritual, a song traditional to their circumstances. They had heard him. Come to us, shadowfriend. Aid us in our sorrow.

He tried to ask questions, and discovered he could not. As soon as his thought was no longer the thought of the song, as long as it no longer swayed and pleaded with the others, the touching was broken and he was alone.

Aid us, aid us, sang the Shadow children. Help us.

Sandwalker climbed down from the tree, shuddering at the thought of the ghoul-bear. Far off in the night a bird chuckled fiendishly. Not only was it difficult to tell from whence the song came, but activity submerged the impression of it in his own mind’s motions. He stopped, first standing, then leaning against the bole of the tree, finally closing his eyes and throwing back his head. Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow. A direction—perhaps—north by west; diagonally away from the main channel of the river. He looked at the sky, hoping to take a bearing from the Eye of Cold—but the clouds, rank upon serried rank, allowed no star more than an instant.

He walked and splashed, then halted, embarrassed by his own noise. Around him the marsh seemed to listen. He tried again, and in a few hundred steps developed a method of walking which was reasonably silent. Knees high, he moved his feet quickly across the water and put them down with the whole foot arched like a diver. Like a wading bird, he thought. He remembered the times he had seen the long-limbed, plumed frog-spearers stalking the margins of the river. I am Sandwalker truly.

But there was mud underfoot now. Several times he was afraid he would be mired, and small animals he recognized as somehow akin to the rockrats scuttled away at his approach or dove into ponds. Something he could never see whistled at him from thickets of reeds and the black mouths of burrows.

Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, sang the Shadow children, closer now. The ground, though still soft, was no longer covered with standing water. Sandwalker moved from shadow to shadow, immobile when the clouds leaked sisterworld’s light. A voice—a Shadow child’s thin voice, but a real voice that came to the ears—said (at some distance, but distinctly), “They are waiting to take him.”

“They will not take him,” answered a second, much less clearly. “He’s our friend. He… we… will kill them all.”

Sandwalker crouched among rushes. For five minutes, ten minutes, he did not move. Overhead the clouds flew east and were replaced by more. The wind swayed the reeds and whispered. After a long time a voice, not a Shadow child’s said: “They’ve gone. If there ever were any. They heard them.”

A second voice grunted. Ahead of him a hundred paces or more something moved; he heard rather than saw it. After another five minutes he began to circle to his left.

An hour later he knew that there were four men waiting in a rough square, and suspected that the Shadow children were in the center. To be hunted was no new experience—twice as a child he had been hunted by starving men—and it would be simple now to melt away and find a new sleeping place or return to his old one. He crept forward instead, at once frightened and excited.

“Light soon,” one of the men said, and another answered him, “More might still come; be quiet.” Sandwalker had almost reached the center of the square.

Slowly he crept forward. His hand touched air. The earth was no longer level in front of him. He groped. It fell away. Not straight down, but down at a steep slope, very soft. He peered into the darkness, and a reedy Shadow voice whispered: “We see you. A little further, if you can, and hold out your hands.”

They were taken by diminutive, skeletal fingers, tugged, and there was a small, dark shape beside him; tugged again and there was another. Three, but already the first had faded into the rushes. Four, but only the newcomer beside him. Five, and he and the fifth were alone. Holding his body close to the ground, he turned and began to creep away the way he had come. There were stealthy noises around him, and one of the hunters said, almost (it seemed) in his ear, “Go look.” Then there was a crash as a hundred reeds snapped, and a confusion of thrashing sound. To his right a man stood up and began to run. The Shadow child beside him threw himself at the marshman’s ankles as he passed and he came crashing down.

Sandwalker was upon him almost before he hit, his thumbs merciless as stones as they drove into the neck. Lightning flashed, and he saw the contorted face, and two small hands that reached down to pluck out the marshman’s eyes.

Then he was up; it was blind dark, and the marshmen were yelling and a thin voice screaming. A man loomed in front of him and Sandwalker kicked him expertly, then drove the head down with his hands to meet his knees; he took a step backward and a Shadow child was on the man’s shoulders, his fleshless legs locked around the throat and his fingers plunged into the hair. “Come,” Sandwalker said urgently, “we have to get away.”

“Why?” The Shadow child sounded calm and happy. “We’re winning.” The man he rode, who had been doubled over in agony, straightened up and tried to free himself; the Shadow child’s legs tightened, and as Sandwalker watched, the marshman fell to his knees. It was suddenly quiet—much quieter, in fact, than it had been before they had been discovered, because the insects and night birds were mute. The wind no longer stirred the reeds. A Shadow child’s voice said: “That’s over. They’re a fine lot, aren’t they?”

Sandwalker, who was not equally sure that there would be no more fighting, answered, “I’m certain your people are brave, but it was I who overcame two of these wetlanders.”

The marshman who had dropped to his knees a moment before rose shakily, and guided by the Shadow child on his shoulders staggered away. “I didn’t mean us,” the voice talking to Sandwalker said. “I meant them. We have enough here for a number of feasts. Now everyone’s meeting by the hole where they kept us. Go over there and you can see.”

“Aren’t you coming?” Sandwalker had been looking for the speaker, and could not locate him.

There was no answer. He turned, and guided by a well-developed sense of direction went back to the pit. The four men were there, three of them with riders on their shoulders, the fourth moaning and swaying, scrubbing with bloodied hands at the bleeding sockets of his eyes. Two more Shadow children crouched in the trampled marsh grass.

A voice from behind Sandwalker said, “We should eat the blind one tonight. The rest we can drive into the hills to share with friends.” The blind man moaned.

“I wish I could see you,” Sandwalker said. “Are you the same Old Wise One I talked to three nights ago?”

“No.” A sixth Shadow child stepped from somewhere. In the faint light (even Sandwalker’s eyes had difficulty seeing more than half-shapes and outlines; the ridden men were bulks more felt than seen) he seemed completely solid, but older than any of the others.

The starlight, when the clouds permitted starlight, glittered on his head as on frost. “We knew you as a shadow friend only by your singing. You are very young. Was it only three nights ago that you became one of us?”

“I am your friend,” Sandwalker said carefully, “but I do not think I am one of you.”

“In the mind. Only the mind is significant.”

“The stars.” It was the blind man, and his voice might have been the voice of a wound, speaking through livid lips with a tongue of running blood. “If Lastvoice our starwalker were here he would explain to you. Leaving the body behind to rove the stars and straddle the back of the Fighting Lizard. Seeing what God sees to know what he knows and what he must do.”

“There are those in my country who speak thus,” said Sandwalker, “and we drive them to the edges of the cliffs—and beyond.”

“The stars tell God,” the blind prisoner mumbled stubbornly, “and the river tells the stars. Those who look into the nightwaters may see, in the ripples, the shifting stars coming. We give them the lives of you ignorant hillsmen, and if a star leaves its place we darken the water with the starwalker’s blood.”

The Old Wise One seemed to have gone away—Sandwalker could no longer see him among the silently waiting Shadow children—but his voice said, “Enough talk. We hunger.”

“A few moments more. I want to ask about my mother and my friends. They are prisoners of these people.”

The blind man said, “Make the not-men go, first.”

Sandwalker said, “Go away,” and the two Shadow children who were not riding men moved their feet to make a trampling in the grass, but remained where they were. “They are gone,” Sandwalker said. “Now what of the prisoners?”

“Was it you who blinded me?”

“No, a Shadow child; mine were the hands at your throat.”

“Their singing brought you.”

“Yes.”

“Thus we keep them where no other men are, near the hills. And often their singing brings more of the kind—until sometimes we have as many as twenty, for they do not care if their friends may be eaten if they themselves may escape. But sometimes instead, as now, we lose what we have—though I never thought this should come to me. But I have never known of the singing to bring a boy.”

“I am a man. I have known woman, and dreamed great dreams. You drowned Flying Foot, defiling God’s purity with death. What of the others?”

“You will try to save them, Fingers at My Throat?”

“My name is Sandwalker. Yes, if I can.”

“They are far north of here,” said the terrible voice of the blind man. “Near the great observatory of The Eye. In the pit called The Other Eye. But my own eye is gone, and my other eye also; tell me, how stand the stars now? I must know when it is time to die.”

Sandwalker glanced up, though the racing clouds covered everything; and as he did, the blind man lunged. In an instant the Shadow children were on him like ants on carrion, and Sandwalker kicked him in the face. The other prisoners bolted.

“Will you eat this meat with us?” the Old Wise One asked when the blind man had been subdued. “As a shadowfriend you are one of us, and may eat this meat without disgrace.” He had reappeared, though he took no part in the struggle with the blind man—at least, one of the dim figures seemed to be he.

“No,” Sandwalker said. “I ate well yesterday. But will you not pursue those who fled?”

“Later. Burdened with this one, we would never retrieve them, and he would flee too—blind or not—if we were to leave him alone. It would be possible to break his legs, but there is a ghoul-bear near; we winded him before you came.”

Sandwalker nodded. “I too.”

“Would you see this one’s death?”

“I might start the trail of the others,” Sandwalker said. To himself he reflected that they would run north, downstream. Toward the pit call The Other Eye.

“That is a good thought.”

Sandwalker turned away. He had not taken ten steps before the rain came; through its drumming he heard the blind man’s death rattle.

Day came, clear and cold. By the time the sun stood a hand’s width above the horizon the last clouds were gone, leaving the sky a blue touched with black and dotted with faint stars. In the meadowmeres the reeds bent and creaked in the wind, and an occasional bird, riding the turbulent air as Sandwalker had ridden the river’s thundering waters, crossed heaven from end to end while he watched.

The trail of the three who had fled had not been difficult. The marshmen were fishers, fighters, finders of small game—but not hunters, as hunting was understood in the mountains. He had not yet seen them, but a hundred clues told him they were not far ahead: a broken herb still struggling to rise as he passed, footprints in mud still filling with water. And the signs of other men were there as well. The hunted ran now on paths that were more than game trails, and there was a presence in the land as there had not been in the empty miles at the highland’s feet, a presence cruel and detached, thinking deep thoughts, contemptuous of everything below the clouds.

At the same time he was conscious of the Shadow children behind him. In the last hours of the night he had heard their song of Many Mouths and All Full, and then The Daysleep Song; now they were quiet, but their quiet was a presence.

The three who had fled were tired—their steps, as the mud showed, stumbled and dragged. But there was nothing to be gained by overtaking them without the Shadow children, and indeed they were of no use to him at all except as a lure to bring the Shadow children deep into the wetlands where they might help him. He was exhausted himself, and finding a spot dry enough to grow a few shrubs he slept.

“Where is he?” said Lastvoice, and Eastwind, who had seen everything, told him. “Ah!” said Lastvoice.

They took Sandwalker at twilight, a great ring of them. They had come behind him and closed from all sides, big, scarred men with ugly eyes. He ran from one part of their circle to another, from end to end, finding no escape, the marshmen always closer until they were shoulder to shoulder, he hoping for dark but caught (at last) in the dark. He fought hard and they hurt him.

For five days they held him, then all night drove him before them, and at first light, cast him into that pit which is called The Other Eye. There were four there already. They were his mother, Cedar Branches Waving; Leaves-you-can-eat; old Bloodyfinger; and the girl Sweetmouth.

“My son!” said Cedar Branches Waving, and she wept. She was very thin.

For half a day Sandwalker tried to climb the walls of The Other Eye. He made Leaves-you-can-eat and the girl Sweetmouth push him, and he persuaded old Bloodyfinger to lean against the slopingxsand while Leaves-you-can-eat climbed upon his shoulders so that he, Sandwalker, might climb upon both and so escape; but the walls of the pit called The Other Eye are of so soft a sand that they fade under the feet and hands, and the more they are pulled down, the less they can be climbed. Bloodyfinger floundered and Sandwalker fell, and they were the same as before.

At about an hour after the noon, another Sandwalker appeared at the rim of the pit, and stood a long time looking down. Sandwalker, in the pit, stared up at himself. Then men, the big men of the meadowmeres with their scars, brought a long liana, and holding one end of this woody vine flung the other down. “That one,” said the Sandwalker who stood in the high place, and he pointed to the real Sandwalker.

Sandwalker shook his head. No.

“You are not to be sacrificed—not yet. Climb up.”

“Am I to be freed?”

The other laughed.

Then if you would speak to me, Brother, you must come down.”

Eastwind looked at the men holding the liana, shrugged in a way that was half a joke, and with his hands on the vine slid down. “I wish to see you better,” he said to Sandwalker. “You have my face.”

“You are my brother,” Sandwalker said. “I have dreamed of you, and my mother told me of you. Two of us were born, and at the washing she held me and her own mother you. The marshmen came and forced your name from her mother’s mouth that they might have power over you, then killed her.”

“I know all that,” Eastwind said. “Lastvoice, my teacher, has told me.”

Sandwalker hoped for some advantage by drawing their mother into the talk, so he said, “What was her name, mother? Your mother, whom they drowned? I have forgotten.” But Cedar Branches Waving was weeping and would not answer.

“You are to be killed,” said Eastwind, “that you may carry our messages to the river, who tells the stars, who tell God. Lastvoice has warned me that there may be some danger to me in your death. We are, perhaps, but one person.”

Sandwalker shook his head and spat.

“It is an honor for you. You are a hill-boy like ten others—but in the stars you will be greater than I, who learn to read the instructions the river writes God.”

“You are really not so much like me,” Sandwalker said, “and you have no beard.” He touched his lip where the bristles were beginning to sprout. Unexpectedly the girl Sweetmouth, who had been (with Leaves-you-can-eat and old Bloodyfinger) watching them silently, began to giggle. Sandwalker looked at her angrily and she pointed at Eastwind, unable to contain her laughter.

“When I was an infant,” Eastwind said. “We bind those things tightly with a woman’s hair, and they putrefy. It is not painful, and only a few of those who will be starwalkers die. I had wished to say that Lastvoice has warned me that we are one. You will die before I, and go to the river and the stars. I am not afraid of that. In my dreams I shall float with you in places of power; I came to tell you that in your dreams you may yet walk as a living man.”

A voice from the rim of the pit hailed Eastwind. “Scholar of the Sky, there are more. Do you wish to come up?”

Sandwalker looked up and saw the small forms of Shadow children, hemmed on three sides by the marshmen.

“No,” said Eastwind. “If I am not afraid of these—these are at least men—should I fear those?”

“Perhaps,” Sandwalker said.

The Shadow children came tumbling down the soft slope. In the bright sunlight they looked far smaller than they had by night, bloodless and crook-legged. Sandwalker thought real children looking so would soon die.

“We will soon die,” one of the Shadow children (Sandwalker was not certain which) said. “And be eaten by these. You too.”

Eastwind said: “The ritual eating of gifts given the river is very different from feasting, little mock-men. We shall feast on you.”

The marshman who had called to Eastwind, apparently a man of some importance among them, announced from his place at the rim, “Five, Scholar of the Sky.” He rubbed his hands. “And there’s no sweeter meat than Shadow child’s.”

“Six,” Eastwind corrected him.

“This pit was not dug by hands,” said one of the Shadow children. Several of them were by now poking about, sifting the fine sand through their fingers.

“These are your followers,” Eastwind said to Sandwalker. “Would you care to explain their new home to them?”

“I would if I could, but no one knows why the world is as it is, save that it conforms to the will of God.”

“Learn, then, where you stand. Here—a few hundred paces east—the river widens forever. It is as a stem widens to the flower, save that the flower of the river, which is called Ocean, widens without limit.”

“I don’t believe it,” Sandwalker said.

“Don’t you understand yet? Don’t you know why the river exceeds in holiness both God and the stars? Why children at the beginning of their lives must be washed by it, and its waters muddied with the blood of the very starwalkers should a star fall? The river is Time, and it ends at this sacred place in Ocean, which is the past and extends forever. On the east bank, where the ground is low and the water sometimes sweet and sometimes salt, is the Eye, the great circle from which the starwalkers go forth. On this west bank it has pleased Ocean to build this Other Eye to contain the gifts that will in time be his. Lastvoice, who has thought much on all things, says that the hands of Ocean, which strike the beaches forever, draw forth the sand on which we stand even as more slips down to replace it—having been returned by him to the beaches. Thus it is that The Other Eye is never empty and can never be filled.”

“We wash our children in the river,” Sandwalker said, “because it signifies the purity of God. The root-earth of the trees, their fathers is still upon them and should be washed away. As for the rest of your nonsense, I think it no better than that about our being the same person.”

“Lastvoice has opened the bodies of women…” Eastwind began, then seeing the disgust on Sandwaiker’s face he turned on his heel, grasped the liana, and signaled the men waiting to pull him up. At the rim he waved briefly and called, “Good-by, Mother. Good-by, Brother,” then was gone.

Old Bloodyfinger said in his snarling voice, “You might have got something from him—but he won’t be back.”

Sandwalker shrugged and said: “Do they let us go up to drink? I’m thirsty and there are no pools in this place.”

There was no shade either, but the Shadow children were lying down on the side of the pit which would be shaded first, curling into small, dark balls. Bloodyfinger said, “About sundown they’ll throw down stalks that don’t have much flavor but a lot of iuice. That’s all the drink you’ll get. All the food too.” He jerked a thumb at the Shadow children. “But butchering those vermin would give us food and juicy drink. Three of us, five of them, that’s not bad, and they won’t fight well while the sun is high.”

“Two of you, six of us. And Leaves-you-can-eat won’t fight if I fight him.”

For a moment Bloodyfingers looked angry, and Sandwalker remembering those big fists, readied himself to dodge and kick. Then Bloodyfinger grinned his gap-toothed grin—“Just you and I, huh, boy? Bruising each other while the rest watch and yell. If you win, your friends eat, and if I do—why they come for me after dark. No. In a few days you’ll be hungry—if any of us are alive. I’ll talk to you again then.”

Sandwalker shook his head, but smiled. He had been driven all night by his captors and had spent the morning struggling with the slipping walls, so when Bloodyfinger turned away he scooped a place in the sand near the Shadow children and lay down. After a time the girl Sweetmouth came and lay beside him.

At sunset, as Bloodyfinger had said, the stems of plants were thrown down to them. The Shadow children were beginning to stir, and brought two for Sweetmouth and Sandwalker, Sweetmouth took hers, but she was frightened by the Shadow children’s gleaming eyes. She went to the other side of the pit to sit with Cedar Branches Waving.

The Old Wise One came to sit beside Sandwalker, who noticed that he had no water stalk. Sandwalker said, “Well, what do we do now?”

Talk,” said the Old Wise One.

“Why?”

“Because there is no opportunity to act. It is always wise to talk a great deal, discussjng what has been done and what may be done, when nothing can be done. All the great political movements of history were born in prisons.”

“What are political movements, and history?”

“Your forehead is high and your eyes are far apart,” the Old Wise One said. “Unfortunately like all your species you have your brain in your thorax—” (he tapped Sandwalker’s hard, flat belly, or at least made the gesture of doing so, though his finger had no substance) ’so neither of those indications of mental capacity is valid.”

Sandwalker said tactfully, “All of us have our brains in our stomachs when we are hungry.”

“You mean minds,” the Old Wise One told him, “It is possible for the mind to float fourteen thousand feet or more above the head.”

“The starwalkers of these wetlanders say their minds—perhaps they mean their souls—leave the ground, tumble through space, kick off from sisterworld, and, drawn by the tractive universe, glide, soar, sweep, and whirl among the constellations until dawn, reading everything and tending the whole. So they told me in my captivity.”

The Old Wise One made a spitting sound and asked Sandwalker, “Do you know what a starcrosser is?”

Sandwalker shook his head.

“Have you ever seen a log floating in the river? I mean high in the hills, where the water rushes between stones and the log with it.”

“I rode the river myself that way. That’s how I came to the meadowmeres so quickly.”

“Better yet.” The Old Wise One lifted his head to stare at the night sky. “There,” he said, pointing. “There. What do you call that?”

Sandwalker was trying to follow the direction of his shadowy finger. “Where?” he said. Burning Hair Woman watched with calm, unseeing eyes through the Old Wise One’s hand.

“There, spread across all the heavens from end to end.”

“Oh, that,” Sandwalker said. “That’s the Waterfall.”

“Exactly. Now think of a hollow log big enough for men to get into. That would be a starcrosser.”

“I see.”

“Now humans—my race—actually traveled in those, cruising among the stars before the long dreaming days. We came here that way.”

“I thought you were always here,” Sandwalker said.

The Old Wise One shook his head. “We either came recently or a long, long time ago. I’m not sure which.”

“Don’t your songs tell?”

“We had no songs when we came here—that was one of the reasons we stayed, and why we lost the starcrosser.”

“You couldn’t have gone back in it anyway,” Sandwalker said. He was thinking of going upstream on a river.

“We know. We’ve changed too much. Do you think we look like you, Sandwalker?”

“Not very much. You’re too small and you don’t look healthy, and your ears are too round and you don’t have enough hair.”

“True,” said the Old Wise One, and fell silent. In the quiet that followed, Sandwalker could hear softly a sound he had never heard before, a sound rising and falling: it was Ocean smoothing the beach a quarter-mile away with his wet hands, but Sandwalker did not know this.

“I didn’t mean to be insulting,” Sandwalker said at last. “I was just pointing these things out.”

“It is thought,” the Old Wise One said, “that makes things so. We do not conceive of ourselves as you have described us, and so we are not actually that way. However, it’s sobering to hear how another thinks of us.”

“I’m sorry.”

“In any event, we once looked just as you do now.”

“Ah,” said Sandwalker. When he was younger, Cedar Branches Waving had often told him stories with names like “How the Mule-Cat Got His Tail” (stole it from the lack-lizard, who had it for a tongue) and “Why the Neagle Never Flies’ (doesn’t want the other animals to see his ugly feet, so he hides them in the grass unless he’s using them to kill something). He thought the Old Wise One’s story was going to be something like these, and since he hadn’t heard it before he was quite willing to listen.

“We came either recently or a long, long time ago, as I said. Sometimes we try to recall the name of our home as we sit staring at each other’s faces in the dawn, before we raise the Day-sleep Song. But we hear also the mind-singing of our brothers—who do not sing—as they pass up and down between the stars; we bend their thinking then, making them go back, but these thoughts come into our songs. It is possible that our home was named Atlantis or Mu—Gondwanaland, Africa, Poictesme, or The Country Of Friends. I, for five, remember all these names.”

“Yes,” said Sandwalker. He had enjoyed the names, but the Old Wise One’s referring to himself as five had reminded him of the other Shadow children. They all seemed to be awake and listening, but sitting far off in various places around the pit. Two, so it appeared, had attempted to climb the shifting walls, and now waited where they had abandoned the effort—one a quarter way, one almost halfway up. All the humans except himself slept. The blue radiance of sisterworld was sifting over the rim.

“When we came we looked as you do now—” began the Old Wise One.

“But you took off your appearance to bathe,” Sandwalker continued for him, thinking of the feathers and flowers his own people sometimes thrust into their hair, “and we stole it from you and have worn it ever since.” Cedar Branches Waving had once told him some similar story.

“No. It was not necessary for us to lose our appearance for you to gain it. You come of a race of shape-changers—like those we called werewolves in our old home. When we came some of you looked like every beast, and some were of fantastic forms inspired by the clouds—or by lava flows, or water. But we walked among you in power and majesty and might, hissing like a thousand serpents as we splashed down in your sea, stepping like conquerors when we strode ashore with burning lights in our fists, and flame.”

“Ah!” said Sandwalker, who was enjoying the story.

“Of flame and light,” repeated the Old Wise One, rocking back and forth. His eyes were half-shut, and his jaws moved vigorously as though he were eating.

“Then what happened?” asked Sandwalker.

“That is the end. We so impressed your kind that you became like us, and have so remained ever since. That is, as we were.”

“That can’t be the end,” said Sandwalker. “You told how we becam›e the same, but you haven’t told yet how we became different. I am taller already than any of you, and my legs are straight.”

“We are taller than you, and stronger,” said the Old Wise One. “And wrapped in terrible glory. It is true that we no longer have the things of flame and light, but our glance withers, and we sing death to our enemies. Yes, and the bushes drop fruit into our hands, and the earth yields the sons of flying mothers do we but turn a stone.”

“Ah,” said Sandwalker again. He wanted to say, Your bones are bent and weak and your faces ill; you run from men and the light, but he did not. He had called himself a shadowfriend—besides, there was no point in quarreling now. So he said, “But we’re still not the same, since my own people do not have those powers; neither do our songs come on the night wind to disturb sleep.”

The Old Wise One nodded and said, “I will show you.” Then looking down he coughed into his hands and held them out to Sandwalker.

Sandwalker tried to see what it was he held, but sisterworld was shining brightly now and the Old Wise One’s hands were cobweb. There was something—a dark mass—but though he bent close Sandwalker could see nothing more, and when he tried to touch what the Old Wise One held, his fingers passed through the hands as well as what they contained, making him feel suddenly foolish and alone, a boy who sat muttering to empty air when he might have slept.

“Here,” the Old Wise One said, and motioned. A second Shadow child came and squatted beside him, solid and real. “Is it you I’m talking to, really?” Sandwalker asked, but the other did not answer or meet his eyes. After a moment he coughed into his hands as the Old Wise One had done and held them out.

“You talk to all of us when you talk to me,” the Old Wise One said. “Mostly to us five here; but also to all Shadow children. Though weak, their songs come from far away to help shape what I am. But look at what this one is showing you.”

For a moment Sandwalker looked instead at the Shadow child. He might have been young, but the dark face was silent and closed. The eyes were nearly shut, yet through the lids Sandwalker sensed his stare, friendly, embarrassed, and afraid.

“Take some,” invited the Old Wise One. Sandwalker prodded the chewed stuff with a finger and sniffed—vile.

“For this we have given up everything, because this is more than anything, though it is only a herb of this world. The leaves are wide, warty, and gray; the flowers yellow, the seed pink prickled eggs.”

“I have seen it,” Sandwalker said. “Leaves-you-can-eat warned me of it when I was young. It is poisoned.”

“So your kind believes, and so it is if swallowed—though to die in that way might be better than lifd But once, between the full face of sisterworld and her next, a man may take the fresh leaves, and folding them tightly carry them in his cheek. Then there is no woman for him, nor any meat; he is sacred then, for God walks in him.”

“I met such a one,” Sandwalker said softly. “I would have killed him save that I pitied him.”

He had not meant to speak aloud and he expected the Old Wise One to be angry, but he only nodded. “We too pity such a one,” he said, “and envy him. He is God. Understand that he pitied you as well.”

“He would have killed me.”

“Because he saw you for what you are, and seeing felt your shame. But only once, until sisterworld appears again as she did, may a man search out the plant and pluck new leaves, spitting away then that which he has carried and chewed until it comforts him no longer. If he takes the fresh leaves more often, he will die.”

“But the plant is harmless as you use it?”

“All of us have been warmed by it since we were very young, and we are healthy as you see us. Didn’t we fight well? We live to a great age.”

“How long?” Sandwalker was curious.

“What does it matter? It is great in terms of experience—we feel many things. When we die at last we have been greater than God and less than the beasts. But when we are not great, that which we carry in our mouths comforts us. It is flesh when we hunger and there is no fish, milk when we thirst and there is no water. A young man seeks a woman and finds her and is great and dies to the world. Afterward he is never as great again, but the woman is a comfort to him, reminding him of the time that was, and he is a little again with her what once he was wholly. Just so with us until our wives that were are white when we spit them into our palms, and without comfort. Then we watch sister-world’s face to see how great the time has been, and when the phase comes again we find new wives, and are young, and God.”

Sandwalker said, “But you no longer look as we look now.”

“We were that, and have exchanged for this. Long ago in our home, before a fool struck fire, we were so—roaming without whatever may be named save the sun, the night, and each other. Now we are so again, for are gods, and things made by hands do not concern us. And as we are, so are you—because you walk only as you see us walk, doing as we do.”

The thought of his own people imitating the Shadow children whom they by day despised amused Sandwalker; but he only said, “Now it is late, and I must rest. I thank you for all your kindness.”

“You will not taste?”

“Not now.”

The silent Shadow child, who seemed less real than the gossamer figure he crouched beside, returned the chewed fiber to his mouth and wandered away. Sandwalker stretched himself and wished Sweetmouth would come again to lie with him. The Old Wise One, without having left, was gone; and there were evil dreams: every part of him had vanished, so that he saw without eyes and felt without sJtin, hanging, a naked worm of consciousness amid blazing glories. Someone screamed.

They screamed again, and he came up fighting nothing, his arms flailing but his legs bound, his mouth full of grit. Cedar Branches Waving was screaming, and Leaves-you-can-eat and old Bloodyfinger seized his arms and pulled until he thought he must break. Around him in a circle the Shadow children watched, and Sweetmouth was crying.

“This dirt at the bottom goes down,” Bloodyfinger said when they had pulled him free, “and sometimes it goes down fast.”

Cedar Branches Waving said, “When you were still small but thought you were grown, you wouldn’t sleep beside me any longer, and I used to get up in the night and go over and see if you were all right. I woke and thought of that tonight.”

“Thank you.” He was still gagging and spitting sand.

From the shadows a voice told him, “We did not know. In the future, unsleeping eyes will watch you.”

“Thank you all,” Sandwalker said. “I have many friends.”

There was more talk until, one by one, the humans returned to their resting places and lay down again. Sandwalker moved for a time around the floor of the pit, testing the footing and listening for the crawling of the sand. He heard only Ocean, and at last tried to sleep again. “This cannot be true, Lastvoice was saying. “Look again!” “I cannot… a cloud—” Ahead the oily surface of the river stretched away beneath the night sky; black, glistening, broadening, it showed no stars, nothing but its own water and bits of floating weed. “Look again!” Long hands, soft yet bony, gripped his shoulders.

Someone shook him, and it was not yet light. For a moment he felt that he was sinking into the sand once more, but it was not so. Bloodyfinger and Sweetmouth were beside him, and behind them other, unfamiliar, figures. He sat up and saw that these were marshmen with scarred shoulders and knotted hair. Sweetmouth said, “We have to go.” Her large, foolish eyes looked everywhere at no one.

There was a liana to help them climb, and with the marshmen behind they floundered up, Sandwalker and Bloodyfinger first, then Leaves-you-can-eat, then the two women and the Shadow children. “Who?” Sandwalker asked Bloodyfinger, but the older man only shrugged.

At the river Lastvoice stood with his feet in the shallows and the dawnlight behind him. There was a chaplet of white flowers on his head, hiding the scars where his hair had been burned away; and another garland, of red blossoms that looked black in the pale light, upon his shoulders. Eastwind stood near him, watching, and on the bank several hundred people waited—silent figures light-stained early morning colors of yellow and red, their features growing clearer, individuals, a man here, a child there, standing suddenly contrasted from the mass with mask-like, immobile faces. Sandwalker ignored them and stared at Lastvoice; it was the first time he had seen the starwalker beyond the dreamworld.

Their guards drove them into the water until it reached their knees. Then Lastvoice lifted his arms and, facing the fading stars, began to chant. The chant was blasphemy, and after a few moments Sandwalker closed his ears to it, begging God that he might dive, swim deep, and so escape; but then the others would be left behind, and there were so many marshmen on the bank, and he had always heard that they were good swimmers. He asked the priest to help him, but the priest was not there. Then Lastvoice had finished, long before he expected it.

There was a silence, and Lastvoice stabbed the air with both hands. A sound, a moan that might have been of pleasure, came from the watchers. Men surged forward and seized old Bloody-finger and Leaves-you-can-eat, forcing them into deeper water. Sandwalker sprang to help them, but was at once struck down from behind; he floundered, fighting, expecting that they would try to hold him under, but no one molested him further. He got his feet beneath him and stood, coughing and wiping his long hair from his eyes. Men were still clustered around Leaves-you-can-eat and old Bloodyfinger, but the water was still, the ripples gold-tipped by the rising sun.

“Two today,” someone said behind Sandwalker. “The people are delighted.” He turned and saw Eastwind, who pushed past him and stalked away with the high-kneed hair-heron gait. “Back to the pit,” one of the guards announced, and with Cedar Branches Waving and Sweetmouth, Sandwalker turned and splashed back toward shore, the Shadow children following. He had just left the water when he heard the snap of breaking bone, and turning saw that two of the Shadow children were dead, their heads lolling as marshmen carried them away. He stopped, angry in a way he had not been at the other deaths. A guard pushed him.

“Why did you kill them?” Sandwalker said. “They weren’t even part of the ceremony.”

Two grabbed him and bent his arms behind him. One said: “They’re not people. We can eat them anytime.” The other added, “Big feast tonight.”

“Let him go.” It was Eastwind, who took his elbow. “No use fighting, Brother. They’ll just break your arms.”

“All right.” Sandwalker’s shoulders had been close to breaking already. He swung his arms back and forth.

Eastwind was saying: “We usually sacrifice only one at a time—that’s why the people are excited now. With the two men and the two others there will be enough for a large piece for everyone, so they’re happy.”

“The stars were kind, then,” said Sandwalker.

“When the stars are kind,” Eastwind answered in a flat voice that was yet like an echo of his own, “we don’t send the river any messengers at all.”

They had reached the pit before Sandwalker realized it was near. He strode to the edge determined to climb down rather than be pushed. Someone, a small figure that seemed to hold a smaller one, was already there; he stopped in surprise, was straight-armed from behind, and tumbled ignominiously down.

The newcomer was Seven Girls Waiting. That night the Old Wise One and the other remaining Shadow children sang the Tear Song for their dead friends. Sandwalker lay on his back and tried to read the stars to see if the message old Bloodyfinger and Leaves-you-can-eat had carried had had any effect, but he was not learned and they seemed only the familiar constellations. Seven Girls Waiting had spent the day telling all of them how she had followed him down the river and been caught, and the sorrow he had felt at first in seeing her had turned, as he listened, to a kind of weak anger at her foolishness. Seven Girls Waiting herself seemed more happy than frightened, having found in the pit substitutes for the companions who had deserted her. Sandwalker reminded himself that she had not seen the drownings.

Who could read the stars? The night was clear, and sisterworld, now much waned, had not yet risen; they shone in glory. Perhaps old Bloodyfinger could have, but he had never asked. He reminded himself that this was why the pit was called The Other Eye. Somewhere across the river Eastwind and Lastvoice would be studying the stars as well. Fretfully he rolled from side to side: the next time he would dive into the river and try to escape. Free, he might be able to help the others. If there remained others after the next time. He thought of Cedar Branches Waving being pushed beneath the surface (her face seen in agony through the ripples), then tried to put the thought aside. He wished that Seven Girls Waiting or Sweetmouth would come and lie with him and distract him, but they lay side by side, hands outstretched and touching, both asleep. The Tear Song rose and fell, then faded and died; Sandwalker sat up. “Old Wise One! Can you read the stars?”

The Old Wise One came acrass the sand to him. He seemed fainter than ever, but taller, as if his illusion had been stretched. “Yes,” he said. “Although I do not always read there what your kind do.”

“Can you walk among them?”

“I can do whatever I choose.”

“Then what do they say? Will more die?”

“Tomorrow? The answer is both no and yes.”

“What does that mean? Who?”

“Someone dies every day,” the Old Wise One answered. And then, “I am what you call a Shadow child, remember. If the stars speak to me it is of our own affairs they speak. But it is all foolish divination—the truth is what one believes.”

“Will it be Cedar Branches Waving?”

The Old Wise One shook his head. “Not she. Not tomorrow.”

Sandwalker lay back, sighing with relief. “I won’t ask about the others. I don’t want to know.”

“That is wise.”

“Then why walk among stars?”

“Why indeed? We have just sung the Tear Song for our dead. You were full of thoughts of the others who died, so we are not angry that you did not join—but the Tear Song is better than such thoughts.”

“It won’t bring them back.”

“Would we wish it?”

“Wish what?” Sandwalker found, with a certain wrench of surprise, that he was angry, and angry at himself for being so. When the Old Wise One did not answer immediately he added, “What are you talking about?” The constellations flashed with icy contempt, ignoring them both.

“I only meant,” the Old Wise One said slowly, “if our song could call back Hatcher and Hunter, would we sing? Returned from death, would we not kill them?” Sandwalker noticed that the Old Wise One seemed younger than he had previously. Ghosts were strange.

And easily offended he remembered. “I’m sorry if I sounded discourteous,” he said as politely as he could. “Hatcher and Hunter were your friends’ names? They were my friends too if I am a shadowfriend, and Bloodyfinger, and Leaves-you-can-eat. We should do something for them too—sit around and tell stories about them until late—but this doesn’t seem like a place where you can do it. I don’t feel good.”

“I understand. You yourself resemble the man you called Bloodyfinger to a marked degree.”

“His mother’s mother and my mother’s were probably sisters or something.”

“You are looking at my comrades, the other Shadow children. Why?”

“Because I never thought of Shadow children having names. I only thought of them as the Shadow children.”

“I know.” The Old Wise One was staring at the sky again, reminding Sandwalker that he had said he could walk there. After what seemed a long time (Sandwalker lay down again, turning on his belly and resting his head on his arms, where he could smell, faintly, the salt tang of his own flesh), he said, “Their names are Foxfire, Swan, and Whistler.”

“Just like people.”

“We had no names before men came out of the sky,” the Old Wise One said dreamily. “We were mostly long, and lived in holes between the roots of trees.”

Sandwalker said, “I thought we were the ones.”

“I am confused,” the Old Wise One admitted. “There are so many of you now and so few of us.”

“You hear our songs?”

“I am made of your songs. Once there was a people using their hands—when they had hands—only to take food; there came among them another who crossed from star to star. Then it was found that the first heard the songs of the second and sent them out again—greater, greater, greater than before. Then the second felt their songs more strongly in all their bones—but touched, perhaps, by the first. Once I was sure I knew who the first were, and the second; now I am no longer sure.”

“And I am no longer sure of what it is you’re saying,” Sandwalker told him.

“Like a spark from the echoless vault of emptiness,” the Old Wise One continued, “the shining shape slipped steaming into the sea…” But Sandwalker was no longer listening. He had gone to lie between Sweetmouth and Seven Girls Waiting, reaching out a hand to each.

The next morning, before dawn, the liana was flung down the side of the pit again. This time there was no need for the marsh men to come down into The Other Eye to drive the hill-people up. Someone shouted from the rim and they came, though slowly and unwillingly. At the top Eastwind stood waiting, and Sandwalker, who had climbed with the three remaining Shadow children, asked him, “How were the stars last night?”

“Evil. Very evil. Lastvoice is disturbed.”

Sandwalker said: “I thought they looked bad myself—Swift right in the hair of Burning Hair Woman. I don’t think Leaves you-can-eat and old Bloodyfinger delivered the message you gave them. Leaves-you-can-eat would always do about what anybody asked him, but old Bloodyfinger’s probably been telling everyone you deserve worse than you’ve been getting. That’s what I’m going to do myself if you send me.”

Eastwind exclaimed, “Fool!” and tried to knock him down. When he could not, two of the marshmen did.

It was misty, and because of the mist dark. Sandwalker (when he got up) thought that the darkness and cold fog, which he knew would be thickest a few feet above the water of the river, would be excellent for escape; but apparently the marshmen thought so as well. One walked on either side of him, holding his arms. Today it seemed a long way to the river. He stumbled, and his guards hurried him along to catch up with the others. Ahead the small, dark backs of the Shadow children and the broad, pale ones of marshmen appeared and vanished again.

“A good eating last night,” one of the marshmen said. “You weren’t invited, but you’ll be there tonight.”

Sandwalker said bitterly, “But your stars are evil.”

Fear and fury rushed into the man’s eyes, and he wrenched Sandwalker’s arm. Ahead, in the mist, there were not quite human screams, then silence.

“Our stars may be evil,” the other marshman said, “but our bellies will be full tonight.” Two more came walking back the way they had come, each carrying the limp body of a Shadow child. Sandwalker could smell the river—and hear, in the uncanny silence of the fog, the sound its ripples made against the bank.

Lastvoice stood as he had before, tendrils of white vapor twining about his tall figure. The marshmen wore necklaces and anklets and bracelets and coronets of bright green grass today, and danced a slow dance on the bank; women, children, and men all winding like a serpent, mumbling as they danced. Eastwind relieved one of the guards and muttered in Sandwalker’s ear, “This may! be the last muster of the marsh. The stars are very evil.” Sandwalker answered contemptuously, “Are you so afraid of them?” Then Eastwind was gone, and the guards were thrusting him, with the last Shadow child, his mother, and the two girls into a shivering group. Pink Butterflies was crying, and Seven Girls Waiting rocked her back and forth, comforting her with some nonsense and asking things of God. Sandwalker put his arm around her and she buried her face in his shoulder.

The last Shadow child stood next to Sandwalker, and Sandwalker, looking down, saw that he trembled. The Old Wise One stood beside him, so thin in the mist that it seemed no one except Sandwalker could possible see him. Unexpectedly the last Shadow child touched Sandwalker’s arm and said, “We will die together. We loved you.”

“Chew harder,” Sandwalker told him, “and you won’t believe that.” And then, because he was sorry to have hurt a friend at such a time he added more kindly, “Which one are you—aren’t you the one who showed me what it is you chew?”

“Wolf.”

Lastvoice had begun his chant. Sandwalker said, “Your Old Wise One told me last night your names were Foxfire, Whistler, and something else I forget—but there was none of that name.”

“We have names for seven,” the Shadow child said, “and names for five. The names for three you have heard. My name now is the name for one. Only his name, the Old Wise One’s name, never changes.”

“Except,” the Old Wise One whispered, “when I am called—as occasionally I once was—the Group Norm.” The Old Wise One was only a sort of emptiness in the mist now, a man-shaped hole.

Sandwalker had been watching the guards, and he saw, as he thought, an opening—a moment of relaxation of vigilance as they listened to Lastvoice. The mist hung everywhere and the river was wide and hidden. If God so willed, he might reach the deep water…

God, dear God, good Master…

He bolted, feet splashing, then slipping as he tried to dive his supple body between two marshmen. They caught him by the hair and smashed his face with fists and knees before pushing him back among the others. Seven Girls Waiting, Sweetmouth, and his mother tried to help him, but he cursed them and drove them away, bathing his face in the bitter river water.

“Why did you do that?” the last Shadow child asked.

“Because I want to live. Don’t you know that in a few minutes they’re going to drown us all?”

“I hear your song,” the Shadow child said, “and I wish to live too. I am not, perhaps, of your blood, but I wish to live.”

“But we must die,” the voice of the Old Wise One whispered.

“We must die,” Sandwalker said harshly, “not you. They won’t pick your bones.”

“When this one dies, I die,” the Old Wise One said, indicating the last Shadow child. “Half I am of your making and half of his, but without him to echo, your mind will not shape me.”

Softly the last Shadow child said again, “I, too, wish to live. It may be that there is a way.”

“What?” Sandwalker looked at him.

“Men cross the stars, bending the sky to make the way short. Since first we came here—”

“Since first they came here,” the Old Wise One corrected him gently. “Now I am half a man, and know that we were always here listening to thought that did not come; listening without thought of our own to be men. Or it may be that all are one stock, half-remembering and dwindling, half-forgetting and flourishing.”

“The song of the girl with the little child is in my mind,” said the last Shadow child, “and the one they call Lastvoice is chanting. And I do not care if we are two or one. We have sung to hold the starcrossers back. We desired to live as we wished, unreminded of what was and is; and though they have bent the sky, we have bent their thought. Suppose I now sing them in, and they come? The marshmen will take them, and there will be many to choose from. Perhaps we will not be chosen.”

“Can one do so much?” Sandwalker asked.

“We are so few that among us even one is no mean number. And the others sing so the starcrossers will not see what they wish to see. For a heartbeat my song will clear their sight, and the bent sky is near here at many points. They will be swift.”

“It is evil,” the Old Wise One said. “For very long we have walked carefree in the only paradise. It would be better if all here were to die.”

The last Shadow child said firmly, “Nothing is worse than that I should die,” and something that had wrapped the world was gone. It went in an instant and left the river and the mist, the shaking, dancing marshmen and chanting Lastvoice and themselves all unchanged, but it had been bigger than everything and Sandwalker had never seen it because it had been there always, but now he could not remember what it had been. The sky was open now, with nothing at all between the birds and the sun; the mist swirling around Lastvoice might reach to Burning Hair Woman. Sandwalker looked at the last Shadow child and saw that he was weeping and that his eyes held nothing at all. He felt that way himself, and turning to Cedar Branches Waving asked, “Mother, what color are my eyes now?”

“Green,” Cedar Branches Waving answered. “They look gray in this light, but they are green. That is the color of eyes.” Behind her Seven Girls Waiting and Sweetmouth murmured, “Green.” And Seven Girls Waiting added, “Pink Butterflies’s eyes are green too.”

Then, glowing red as old blood through the fog, a spark appeared—high overhead to the north, where Ocean moved like an eel under the grayness. Sandwalker saw it before anyone else. It grew larger, more angry, and a whistling and humming came over the water; on the bank one of the dancing women screamed and pointed as the gout of red fire came hissing down. It made the noise heard when lightning kills a tree. There were two more red stars falling with it already, and the shrieking of all the people followed them down, and when they struck, the marshmen fled. Sweetmouth and Seven Girls Waiting threw their arms around Sandwalker and buried their faces in his chest. The marshmen who had guarded them were running, tearing away their grass bracelets and crowns.

Only Lastvoice stood. His chant had stopped, but he did not flee. Sandwalker thought he saw in his eyes a despair like that of the exhausted beast that at last turns and bares its throat to the jaws of the tire-tiger. “Come,” Sandwalker said, pushing aside the girls and taking his mother’s arm; but in his ear the Old Wise One said, “No.”

Behind them feet were splashing in the river water. It was Eastwind, and when Lastvoice saw him said, “You ran.”

Eastwind answered: “Only for a moment. Then I remembered.” He sounded shamed. Lastvoice said, “I shall speak no more,” and turned his back on them all, looking out to Ocean.

Sandwalker said: “We’re going. Don’t try to stop us.”

“Wait.” Eastwind looked at Cedar Branches Waving. “Tell him to wait.”

She said to Sandwalker, “He, too, is my son. Wait.”

Sandwalker shrugged and asked bitterly, “Brother, what do you want of us?”

“It is a matter for men, not women; and not,” Eastwind looked at the last Shadow child, “for such as he. Tell them to go to the bank and upriver. No marshman, I swear, will hinder them.”

The women went, but the last Shadow child only said, “I will wait on the bank,” and Eastwind, defeated, nodded.

“Now, Brother,” said Sandwalker, “what walks here?”

“While the stars remain in their places,” Eastwind answered slowly, “the starwalker judges the people; but when a star falls the river must be clouded with his blood, that it may forget. His disciple does this, aided by all nearby.”

Sandwalker looked a question.

“I can strike,” Eastwind said, “and I will strike. But I love him, and I may not strike hard enough. You must help me. Come.”

Together they swam the river, and on the farther bank found a tree of that white-barked kind Sandwalker had once dreamed grew in a great circle about Eastwind. The roots trailed in the bitter water, and selecting a branching one less thick than a finger, Eastwind bit it through, pulled it up dripping to give to Sandwalker. It was as long as his arm, the lower part heavy with small shellfish and smelling of ooze. While Sandwalker examined it, Eastwind took another for himself, and with them they flogged Lastvoice until no further blood ran as he floated, though the sharp little shells sliced the white flesh of his back. “He was a hill-man,” Eastwind said. “All starwalkers must be born in the high country.”

Sandwalker dropped his bloody flail into the water. “Now what?”

“It is over.” Eastwind’s eyes were wet with tears. “His body is not eaten, but allowed to drift to Ocean, a total sacrifice.”

“And you rule the marsh now?”

“My head must be burned as his was. Then—yes.”

“And why should I let you live? You would have drowned our mother. You are no man, and I can kill you.” Before Eastwind could answer Sandwalker had seized him, bending him backward by the hair.

“If he dies,” the Old Wise One’s voice whispered to Sandwalker, “something of you dies with him.”

“Let him die. It is u part of me I wish to kill.”

“Would he slay you thus?”

“He would have drowned us all.”

“For what was in his mind. You slay him now for hate. Would he have slain you so?”

“He is like me,” Sandwalker said, and he bent Eastwind back until the water was on his forehead and lapping at his eyes.

“There is a way to know,” the Old Wise One said, and Sandwalker saw that the last Shadow child had come out into the river again. When he saw Sandwalker looking at him, he repeated, There is a way.”

“Very well, how?”

“Let him up,” the Shadow child said, and to Eastwind, “You eat us but you know we are a magic people.”

Gasping, Eastwind answered, “We know.”

“By our power I made the stars to fall; but I now do a greater magic. I make you Sandwalker and Sandwalker you,” said the Shadow child, and as quickly as a striking snake darted forward and plunged his teeth into Eastwind’s arm. While Sandwalker watched, his twin’s face went slack and his eyes looked at things unseen.

That which swam in my mouth swims in his veins now,” the Shadow child said, wiping Eastwind’s blood from his lips. “And because I spoke to him and he believed me, in his thought he is you.”

Sandwalker’s arm was sore from flogging Lastvoice, and he rubbed it. “But how will we know what he does?”

“He will speak soon.”

“This is a game for children. He should die.” Sandwalker kicked Eastwind’s feet so that he fell into the water, and held him there until he felt the body go limp. When he straightened up he said to the last Shadow child, “I spoke.”

“Yes.”

“But now I don’t know if I am Sandwalker or Eastwind in his dream.”

“And neither do I,” said the Shadow child. “But there is something happening down there on the beach. Shall we go and see?”

The mist was burning away. Sandwalker looked where the Shadow child pointed and saw that where the river joined moaning Ocean a green thing was bobbing in the water. Three men with their limbs wrapped in leaves stood on the sand near it, pointing at the stranded body of Lastvoice and talking a speech Sandwalker did not understand. When he came close to them they extended their hands, open, and smiled; but he did not understand that open hands meant (or had meant, once) that they held no weapons. His people had never known weapons. That night Sandwalker dreamed that he was dead, but the long dreaming days were over.