“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,
