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.
“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?”
