“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.”