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.”