by Gene Wolfe
Sandwalker was looking at the sky. “It’s going to be cold,” he said. “See how clear it is.”
“You will make this your sleeping place tonight?”
“Any food I find must go toward my gift.” He told her about the priest, and his dream.
“But you will come back?”
Sandwalker nodded, and she described the best places to hunt—the places where her people had found game, when they had found game.
The long, rocky slope above the tree and pool and little circle of living grass took the better part of an hour to climb. At the bent rock—a crooked finger of stone left pointing skyward after some calamity of erosion—he found the sleeping place her people had used: the rocks that had sheltered the sleepers from wind, a few scuffed tracks the weather had not yet erased, the gleaming bones of small animals. But the sleeping place was of no use or interest to him.
He hunted until sisterworld rose, and found nothing, and would have liked to sleep where he was; but he had promised the girl he would come back, and there was already an icy spirit in the air. He found her, as he had expected, lying with her arms around the baby among the tangled roots of the tree.
Exhausted, he flung himself down beside her. The sound of his breathing and the warmth of his body woke her; she started, then looked at him and smiled, and he was suddenly glad he had come back. “Did you catch anything?” she said.
He shook his head.
“I did. Look. I thought you might like to have it for your gift.” She held up a small fish, now stiff and cold.
Sandwalker took it, then shook his head. If the feign-pheasant had been inadequate, this would certainly not be acceptable. “A fish would spoil before I got it there,” he said. He started a hole in the belly with his teeth, then widened it with his fingers until he could scrape out the intestines and lift away most of the bones, leaving two little strips of flesh. He gave one to the girl.
“Good,” she said, swallowing. Then, “Where are you going?”
Sandwalker had risen, still chewing the fish, and stood stretching his tired, cold muscles in sisterworld’s blue light. “Hunting,” he answered. “Before, I was looking for something large, something I could take for a gift. Now I’m going to look for something small, just something for us to eat tonight. Rock-mice, maybe.”
Then he was gone, and the girl lay hugging her child, looking through the leaves at the bright band of The Waterfall and the broad seas and scattered storms of sisterworld. Then her eyes closed, and she could pull sisterworld from the tree. She put the blue rind to her lips and tasted sweetness. Then she woke again, the sweet juice still in her mouth. Someone was bending over her, and for a moment she was afraid.
“Come on.” It was he, Sandwalker. “Wake up. I’ve got something.” He touched her lips again with his fingers; they were sticky, and fragrant with a piercing perfume of fruit, flowers, and earth.
She stood, holding Pink Butterflies pressed against her, her jutting breasts warming Pink Butterflies’s stomach and legs (that was what they were for, besides milk), her arms wrapped about the little body, shivering.
Sandwalker pulled her. “Come on.”
“Is it far?”
“No, not very far.” (It was far, and he wanted to offer to carry Pink Butterflies, but he knew Seven Girls Waiting would fear he might harm her.)
The way lay north by, east, almost on the margin of the earliest beginning of the river. Seven Girls Waiting was stumbling by the time they reached it: a small dark hole where Sandwalker had kicked in the ground with his heel. “Here,” he said. “I stopped to rest here, and with my ears close I could hear them talking.” He ripped up the seemingly solid ground with strong fingers, tossing away the clods; then a clod, dark as the others in sisterwor’d’s blue light, came up dripping. There was a soft murmuring. He broke the clotted stuff in two, thrusting half into his own mouth, half into hers. She knew, suddenly, that she was starving and chewed and swallowed frantically, spitting out the wax.
“Help me,” he said. “They won’t sting you. It’s too cold. You can just brush them off.”
He was digging again and she joined him, laying Pink Butterflies in a safe place and smearing her little mouth with honey to lick, and her hands so that she could lick her fingers. They ate not only the honey but the fat, white larva, digging and eating until their arms and faces, their entire bodies, were sticky and powdered with the bee-rotten soil; Sandwalker, thrusting his choice finds into the girl’s mouth and she, her best discoveries into his, brushing aside the stupefied bees and digging and eating again until they fell back happy and surfeited in one another’s arms. She pressed against him, feeling her stomach hard and round as a melon beneath her ribs and against his skin. Her lips were on his face, and it was dirty and sweet.
He moved her shoulders gently. “No,” she said, “not on top of me. I’d split. I’d be sick. Like this.” His tree had grown large, and she wrapped it with her hands. Afterward they put Pink Butterflies between their perspiring bodies to keep her warm and slept the remainder of the night, the three of them, pressed in a tangle of legs and sighs.
The roaring of Thunder Always came to Sandwalker’s ears. He rose and went into the priest’s cave, but this time, though it was as dark as before, he could see everything. He had found the power, he did not know where, to see without eyes and without light; the cave stretched to either side of him and ahead of him—a jumble of fallen slabs.
He went forward and upward. It was drier. The floor became gritty clay. Icicles of stone hung from the coldly sweating rocks overhead and lifted from the floor at his feet until he walked as if in the mouth of a beast. Drier still, and there were no more stone teeth, only the rough tongue of clay and the vaulted throat growing smaller and smaller. Then he saw the bed of the priest with the bones of gifts all around it, and the priest rose on his bed to look at him.
“I am sorry,” Sandwalker told him, “you are hungry and I’ve brought you nothing.” Then he held out his hands and saw he held a dripping comb in one and a mass of fat larva cemented with honey in the other. The priest took them, smiling, and bending down chose from among the litter of bones an animal’s skull, which he held out to Sandwalker.
Sandwalker took it; it was dry and old, but the priest’s hand had stained it with fresh blood, and as he watched, the blood brought life to it: the bone becoming new and wet, then marble with dark veins, then wrapped in skin and fur. It was the head of an otter. The eyes, liquid and living, looked into Sandwalker’s face.
In them he saw the river, where the otter had been born; the river trickling past the despoiled hive; saw the water dive through the high hills seeking the true surface of the world; saw it rush in torrents through Thunder Always and slow from plunging rapids to a swift stream and at last to a broad halfmile, winding almost without current through the meadowmeres. He saw the stiff flight of hair-herons and aigrettes, yellow frogs wrestling for the possession of the wind; and through the slow, green water, as though he were swimming in it himself twenty feet down among the stones and gravel and mountain-born sand of the bottom, the figure of the otter. With brown fur that was nearly black it threaded the waters like a snake until, close to him, it turned broad side on and he could see its short strong legs paddling—clear of the sandy bottom by a finger-width, but seeming to walk along it.
“What?” he said. “What?” Pink Butterflies was squirming against him. Sleepily he helped her until she reached one of her mother’s breasts, then cupped his hand about the other. He was cold and thought of his dream, but it seemed hardly to have ended.
He stood beside the broad river, his feet in mud. It was not yet quite sunrise, but the stars were dimming. Rushes rippled in the dawn wind, the waves running to the edge of the world. Calf-deep in the river, with slow eddies circling their legs, stood Flying Feet, old Bloodyfinger, Leaves-you-can-eat, the girl Sweetmouth, and Cedar Branches Waving.
From behind him stepped two men. The people of the meadowmeres, he knew, drove t
heir young men from women until fire from the mountains proved their manhood and left their thigh and shoulders puckered with scars. These men had such scars, and their hair had been knotted in locks, and they wore grass about their wrists and waxy blossoms at their necks. A man with a scarred head chanted, then ended. He saw Flying Feet see that the man’s eyes were on him and step backward—and so doing, into a place where the river was suddenly deeper. Flying Feet sank, floundering. The scarred man seized him. The water churned with his stragglings, but the scarred men, themselves now waist-deep, bent over him, thrusting him down. The stragglings grew less, and Sandwalker, knowing he dreamed—Sandwalker asleep beside Seven Girls Waiting—thought as he dreamed that were he Flying Feet he would feign death until they brought him to the air again. Meantime Flying Feet’s churning of the river had ceased. The silt his kicking had raised floated away, leaving the water clear. In it his arms and legs lay lifeless, and his long hair trailed behind him like weed. The dream Sandwalker strode to him, feet lifting high, scarcely splashing when they came down. He looked at the blank white face under the water, and as he looked, the eyes opened, and the mouth opened, and there was an agony in them which faded and became slack, the eyes no longer seeing.
Sandwalker could not breathe. He sat up trembling, gulping air, a pressure on his chest. He stood, feeling he must thrust his head higher than water he could not see. Seven Girls Waiting stirred, and Pink Butterflies waked and whimpered.
He left them and walked to the top of a small knoll. As in his dream the sun was corning, and the east was rose and purple with the reflection of his face.
When Seven Girls Waiting had drunk from the river and was feeding Pink Butterflies he explained his dream to her: “Flying Feet thought as I. He would pretend death. But the marshmen had seen that trick, and…” Sandwalker shrugged.
“You said he couldn’t get up,” she said practically, “so he would have died anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Will you hunt today? You still need a gift, and since we didn’t stay at the tree last night you could sleep there tonight.”
“I don’t think the priest requires another gift of me,” Sandwalker said slowly. “I thought he was not helping me, but now I see that the dream I dreamed in his cave of floating and watching the stars was by his help, and the dream I dreamed by daylight of walking with my mother and the others was by his help, and the dream I dreamed last night. Truly, the men of the marsh have taken my people.”
Seven Girls Waiting sat down, holding Pink Butterflies on her lap and not looking at his face. “It is a long way to the marshes,” she said.
“Yes, but my dream has shown me how I may travel swiftly.” Sandwalker walked to the edge of the little stream which would become the great river and looked down into it. The water was very clear, and hip-deep. The bottom was sand and stones. He plunged in.
The current, fast even here, took him. For a moment he raised his head from the water. Seven Girls Waiting was already far away, a small figure shining in the new sun; she waved and held up Pink Butterflies so that she could see, and he knew that she was calling, “Go with God.”
The water took him again and he spun on to his belly and thought of the otter, imagining that he too had nostrils close to the top of his head and short, powerful swimming legs in place of his long limbs. He stroked and shot ahead, stroked and shot ahead, occasionally pausing to listen for the roar of a falls.
* * *
He passed many, leaving the river and circling them on foot. The lesser rapids he swam, growing more skillful at each. Through half the gorge of Thunder Always he carried a large fish to leave as an offering in the priest’s cave. In deep pools the currents sent him swirling toward the bottom until, with their force spent, he hung suspended in the green light, his hair a cloud about his face — then streaming straight out behind it as he followed the waters to the surface again among crystal spheres of air.
Late that day, though he could only guess it, he passed through the country most familiar to him, the rocky hills where his own people roved, having come farther north since morning than he had traveled southward on the way to Thunder Always in five days. Evening came, and, from a stretch of the river quieter than most, he crawled onto a sandy bank, finding himself almost too tired to drag his body from the water. He slept on the sand in the shelter of high grass, and did not look at the stars at all.
The next morning he walked for half an hour along the little beach before slipping, hungry, into the water again. Everything was easier now. Fish were more plentiful and he caught a fine one, then a dabduck by swimming under water, eyes open and limbs scarcely moving, until he could grasp the unlucky bird’s feet.
The river, too, was quieter; and if he did not rush along as swiftly, his progress,,.was less exhausting. It flowed smoothly among wooded hills; then, much broader, slipped through lowlands where great trees sank roots in the water and arched branches fifty feet toward mid-channel from either side. At last it seemed to stagnate in a flatland where reeds, dotted with trees and brush, spread without limit; and the cold, unliving water acquired, by means Sandwalker did not comprehend, faintly, the taste of sweat.
Now night came again, but there was no friendly bank. Cautiously he picked his way half a mile over the reeking mud to reach a tree. Waterfowl circled overhead, calling to each other and sometimes crying—as though the death of the sun meant terror and death for them as well, a night of fear.
He spoke to the tree when he reached it, but it did not reply and he felt that whatever power dwelt in the lonely oasis trees of his own land was absent here; that this tree spoke to the unseen no more than to him, engineering no babes in women. After begging permission (he might, after all, be wrong) he climbed into a high fork to sleep. A few insects found him, but they were torpid in the cold. The sky was streaked with clouds through which sisterworld’s bloodless lightshoneonlyfitfully. Heslept, then woke; and first smelled, then heard, then in the wanton beams saw, a ghoul-bear lope by—huge, thick-limbed, and stinking.
Almost he slept again. Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.
Not sorrow, he thought, though when he remembered Seven Girls Waiting and Pink Butterflies and the living, thinking tree ruling kindly its little lake and flowered lawn in the country of sliding stones, something hurt.
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 hear
d 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.”