“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?”
“My name is Sandwalker. Yes, if I can.”
“They are far north of here,” said the terrible voice of the blind man. “Near the great observatory of The Eye. In the pit called The Other Eye. But my own eye is gone, and my other eye also; tell me, how stand the stars now? I must know when it is time to die.”
Sandwalker glanced up, though the racing clouds covered everything; and as he did, the blind man lunged. In an instant the Shadow children were on him like ants on carrion, and Sandwalker kicked him in the face. The other prisoners bolted.
“Will you eat this meat with us?” the Old Wise One asked when the blind man had been subdued. “As a shadowfriend you are one of us, and may eat this meat without disgrace.” He had reappeared, though he took no part in the struggle with the blind man—at least, one of the dim figures seemed to be he.
“No,” Sandwalker said. “I ate well yesterday. But will you not pursue those who fled?”
“Later. Burdened with this one, we would never retrieve them, and he would flee too—blind or not—if we were to leave him alone. It would be possible to break his legs, but there is a ghoul-bear near; we winded him before you came.”
Sandwalker nodded. “I too.”
“Would you see this one’s death?”
“I might start the trail of the others,” Sandwalker said. To himself he reflected that they would run north, downstream. Toward the pit call The Other Eye.
“That is a good thought.”
Sandwalker turned away. He had not taken ten steps before the rain came; through its drumming he heard the blind man’s death rattle.
Day came, clear and cold. By the time the sun stood a hand’s width above the horizon the last clouds were gone, leaving the sky a blue touched with black and dotted with faint stars. In the meadowmeres the reeds bent and creaked in the wind, and an occasional bird, riding the turbulent air as Sandwalker had ridden the river’s thundering waters, crossed heaven from end to end while he watched.
The trail of the three who had fled had not been difficult. The marshmen were fishers, fighters, finders of small game—but not hunters, as hunting was understood in the mountains. He had not yet seen them, but a hundred clues told him they were not far ahead: a broken herb still struggling to rise as he passed, footprints in mud still filling with water. And the signs of other men were there as well. The hunted ran now on paths that were more than game trails, and there was a presence in the land as there had not been in the empty miles at the highland’s feet, a presence cruel and detached, thinking deep thoughts, contemptuous of everything below the clouds.
At the same time he was conscious of the Shadow children behind him. In the last hours of the night he had heard their song of Many Mouths and All Full, and then The Daysleep Song; now they were quiet, but their quiet was a presence.
The three who had fled were tired—their steps, as the mud showed, stumbled and dragged. But there was nothing to be gained by overtaking them without the Shadow children, and indeed they were of no use to him at all except as a lure to bring the Shadow children deep into the wetlands where they might help him. He was exhausted himself, and finding a spot dry enough to grow a few shrubs he slept.
“Where is he?” said Lastvoice, and Eastwind, who had seen everything, told him. “Ah!” said Lastvoice.
They took Sandwalker at twilight, a great ring of them. They had come behind him and closed from all sides, big, scarred men with ugly eyes. He ran from one part of their circle to another, from end to end, finding no escape, the marshmen always closer until they were shoulder to shoulder, he hoping for dark but caught (at last) in the dark. He fought hard and they hurt him.
For five days they held him, then all night drove him before them, and at first light, cast him into that pit which is called The Other Eye. There were four there already. They were his mother, Cedar Branches Waving; Leaves-you-can-eat; old Bloodyfinger; and the girl Sweetmouth.
“My son!” said Cedar Branches Waving, and she wept. She was very thin.
For half a day Sandwalker tried to climb the walls of The Other Eye. He made Leaves-you-can-eat and the girl Sweetmouth push him, and he persuaded old Bloodyfinger to lean against the slopingxsand while Leaves-you-can-eat climbed upon his shoulders so that he, Sandwalker, might climb upon both and so escape; but the walls of the pit called The Other Eye are of so soft a sand that they fade under the feet and hands, and the more they are pulled down, the less they can be climbed. Bloodyfinger floundered and Sandwalker fell, and they were the same as before.