We followed the twisty canyon so far as it would lake us, then climbed up a crumbly path to a low saddle of the mountain which I thought might give us some sense of direction. If nothing else, we could wait there until dark and get some sense from the stars. As it was, however, we had no sooner come upon the saddle than we were set upon by a tribe of half-naked, leather-lean creatures I did not at first take for human, so hairy they were, and so given to showing their teeth. They took us off, Grommy by a rope, Misquick by her bridle, and me over the shoulder of one of them to the very city I had seen from the air. There were crumbling walls and domes with great holes fallen through, a line of street half-obscured beneath fallen stone, and other buildings reduced to fang-sharp protrusions of metal. The doors that went through the ancient walls were a strange shape, narrow at the bottom and wide at the top, and the walls themselves were great, thick things. Inside a few of the most ancient buildings were statues; idols, I suppose could be said, though it was hard to tell what the stones might have been carved to represent, so worn with weather they were and polished by the hands of the hairy people. There was one all lumpy that looked rather like a mole, and one with wings, and one that looked like a tangled pile of rope. A d’bor, probably. Several were star-shaped, like my star-eye, and I made the star sign reverently. One never knew what might be looking.
I guessed they might have something to do with the old gods. In our part of the world, Murzy said, the evidence of them was often found, here and there, though mostly among ruins. Then I realized that “roones’ were “ruins”, and that this was the ancient city I had often heard of but never seen before, Old South Road City.
If this were Old South Road City, then the people in it were the blind runners, and this brought a new kind of fear. The blind runners were said to eat children. That virtue was claimed for them by every nursemaid who ever was, and every harassed mother as well. “Be still, now, or I’ll have the blind runners come eat you up!” I’d heard it over and over until I was old enough to leave the nursery. I think children hear it still, all over the world, whether their minders have ever seen a blind runner or not. As I was only about nine years old, it occurred to me that I might still be of an appetizing age.
They did not immediately offer to eat me, however, and by the time I thought of it again, it was obvious they ate mostly fungus and roots and giant wheat. They did not even gesture a sharp stone toward Misquick, and she was fat and juicy as any animal ever was.
They sat me down among them, Misquick beside me and Grommy at my feet, while they garbled and howled as though they had been wranglebats. It was some time before I perceived the howling to be melodic and the garbling intelligible, but once it came to me that they were singing, I recognized the intent well enough. They were singing “On the Road, The Old Road,” which is a children’s jumprope song, or a song to go with playing jax, or even a much-tag song. One of the younger ones fingered the amulet I had been given by Murzy’s oldsters, crying out some “looky here” or other, and then they were all staring at my front, where the little star hung, its green-and-black eye peering back at them.
“Footseer?” one asked of another, and the next thing I knew they were blindfolding me and taking off my shoes. Then I was whirled and whirled, as in a game of blind man’s grab, and set down in a sudden silence. I felt a tingle in one toe and reached tentatively toward it, setting my foot down on something hard that tingled more—not in pain, you understand, but a tickly, pleasurable feeling.
I went toward it, until both feet were on it, and found that by continuing to move, the tingling would go on, though if I simply stood still, it stopped after a moment. So I wandered myself, quite happily, humming as I went, until a great cry went up from the assembled crowd, “Footseer!” and they took the blind-fold away. I had been following a line of half-buried stones, part of an ancient roadway, and had done it without seeing it at all.
After that we had some food and drink with much garbling and good cheer, and one of them took me back to a road I knew. I went to find Murzy to ask her about them, and she said they were the blind runners—blindfolded runners—indeed, those who looped through all the lands of the True Game on the Old Road. Old South Road City was the place they began from, and while not all the runners lived there year round, it was there they gathered to begin the journey.
“Chile,” she said in the comfortable nursery dialect she always used with me then, “it’s as well tha came on them when tha did, for they are more or less sane this time of year. When the time of storms comes, then looky out. They begin to foam and fulminate on the road, blind as gobblemoles, stopping for no man nor his master.”
“Why do they do that, Murzy?” I asked her. The ones I had seen had been sane enough, certainly, and not bad hosts, either. They had
