At sunset, as Bloodyfinger had said, the stems of plants were thrown down to them. The Shadow children were beginning to stir, and brought two for Sweetmouth and Sandwalker, Sweetmouth took hers, but she was frightened by the Shadow children’s gleaming eyes. She went to the other side of the pit to sit with Cedar Branches Waving.
The Old Wise One came to sit beside Sandwalker, who noticed that he had no water stalk. Sandwalker said, “Well, what do we do now?”
Talk,” said the Old Wise One.
“Why?”
“Because there is no opportunity to act. It is always wise to talk a great deal, discussjng what has been done and what may be done, when nothing can be done. All the great political movements of history were born in prisons.”
“What are political movements, and history?”
“Your forehead is high and your eyes are far apart,” the Old Wise One said. “Unfortunately like all your species you have your brain in your thorax—” (he tapped Sandwalker’s hard, flat belly, or at least made the gesture of doing so, though his finger had no substance) ’so neither of those indications of mental capacity is valid.”
Sandwalker said tactfully, “All of us have our brains in our stomachs when we are hungry.”
“You mean minds,” the Old Wise One told him, “It is possible for the mind to float fourteen thousand feet or more above the head.”
“The starwalkers of these wetlanders say their minds—perhaps they mean their souls—leave the ground, tumble through space, kick off from sisterworld, and, drawn by the tractive universe, glide, soar, sweep, and whirl among the constellations until dawn, reading everything and tending the whole. So they told me in my captivity.”
The Old Wise One made a spitting sound and asked Sandwalker, “Do you know what a starcrosser is?”
Sandwalker shook his head.
“Have you ever seen a log floating in the river? I mean high in the hills, where the water rushes between stones and the log with it.”
“I rode the river myself that way. That’s how I came to the meadowmeres so quickly.”
“Better yet.” The Old Wise One lifted his head to stare at the night sky. “There,” he said, pointing. “There. What do you call that?”
Sandwalker was trying to follow the direction of his shadowy finger. “Where?” he said. Burning Hair Woman watched with calm, unseeing eyes through the Old Wise One’s hand.
“There, spread across all the heavens from end to end.”
“Oh, that,” Sandwalker said. “That’s the Waterfall.”
“Exactly. Now think of a hollow log big enough for men to get into. That would be a starcrosser.”
“I see.”
“Now humans—my race—actually traveled in those, cruising among the stars before the long dreaming days. We came here that way.”
“I thought you were always here,” Sandwalker said.
The Old Wise One shook his head. “We either came recently or a long, long time ago. I’m not sure which.”
“Don’t your songs tell?”
“We had no songs when we came here—that was one of the reasons we stayed, and why we lost the starcrosser.”
“You couldn’t have gone back in it anyway,” Sandwalker said. He was thinking of going upstream on a river.
“We know. We’ve changed too much. Do you think we look like you, Sandwalker?”
“Not very much. You’re too small and you don’t look healthy, and your ears are too round and you don’t have enough hair.”
“True,” said the Old Wise One, and fell silent. In the quiet that followed, Sandwalker could hear softly a sound he had never heard before, a sound rising and falling: it was Ocean smoothing the beach a quarter-mile away with his wet hands, but Sandwalker did not know this.
“I didn’t mean to be insulting,” Sandwalker said at last. “I was just pointing these things out.”
“It is thought,” the Old Wise One said, “that makes things so. We do not conceive of ourselves as you have described us, and so we are not actually that way. However, it’s sobering to hear how another thinks of us.”
“I’m sorry.”
“In any event, we once looked just as you do now.”
“Ah,” said Sandwalker. When he was younger, Cedar Branches Waving had often told him stories with names like “How the Mule-Cat Got His Tail” (stole it from the lack-lizard, who had it for a tongue) and “Why the Neagle Never Flies’ (doesn’t want the other animals to see his ugly feet, so he hides them in the grass unless he’s using them to kill something). He thought the Old Wise One’s story was going to be something like these, and since he hadn’t heard it before he was quite willing to listen.
“We came either recently or a long, long time ago, as I said. Sometimes we try to recall the name of our home as we sit staring at each other’s faces in the dawn, before we raise the Day-sleep Song. But we hear also the mind-singing of our brothers—who do not sing—as they pass up and down between the stars; we bend their thinking then, making them go back, but these thoughts come into our songs. It is possible that our home was named Atlantis or Mu—Gondwanaland, Africa, Poictesme, or The Country Of Friends. I, for five, remember all these names.”
“Yes,” said Sandwalker. He had enjoyed the names, but the Old Wise One’s referring to himself as five had reminded him of the other Shadow children. They all seemed to be awake and listening, but sitting far off in various places around the pit. Two, so it appeared, had attempted to climb the shifting walls, and now waited where they had abandoned the effort—one a quarter way, one almost halfway up. All the humans except himself slept. The blue radiance of sisterworld was sifting over the rim.
“When we came we looked as you do now—” began the Old Wise One.
“But you took off your appearance to bathe,” Sandwalker continued for him, thinking of the feathers and flowers his own people sometimes thrust into their hair, “and we stole it from you and have worn it ever since.” Cedar Branches Waving had once told him some similar story.
“No. It was not necessary for us to lose our appearance for you to gain it. You come of a race of shape-changers—like those we called werewolves in our old home. When we came some of you looked like every beast, and some were of fantastic forms inspired by the clouds—or by lava flows, or water. But we walked among you in power and majesty and might, hissing like a thousand serpents as we splashed down in your sea, stepping like conquerors when we strode ashore with burning lights in our fists, and flame.”
“Ah!” said Sandwalker, who was enjoying the story.
“Of flame and light,” repeated the Old Wise One, rocking back and forth. His eyes were half-shut, and his jaws moved vigorously as though he were eating.
“Then what happened?” asked Sandwalker.
“That is the end. We so impressed your kind that you became like us, and have so remained ever since. That is, as we were.”
“That can’t be the end,” said Sandwalker. “You told how we becam›e the same, but you haven’t told yet how we became different. I am taller already than any of you, and my legs are straight.”
“We are taller than you, and stronger,” said the Old Wise One. “And wrapped in terrible glory. It is true that we no longer have the things of flame and light, but our glance withers, and we sing death to our enemies. Yes, and the bushes drop fruit into our hands, and the earth yields the sons of flying mothers do we but turn a stone.”
“Ah,” said Sandwalker again. He wanted to say, Your bones are bent and weak and your faces ill; you run from men and the light, but he did not. He had called himself a shadowfriend—besides, there was no point in quarreling now. So he said, “But we’re still not the same, since my own people do not have those powers; neither do our songs come on the night wind to disturb sleep.”