The Fifth Head of Cerberus

by Gene Wolfe

  In the great old days of long dreaming, when God was king of men, men had walked unafraid among the Shadow children by night, and the Shadow children, unafraid, had sought the company of men by day. But the long dreaming had given its years to the river long ago, floating down to the clammy meadowmeres and death. Yet a great hunter, thought Sandwalker, (and then because he had held since least boyhood that milk-gift that allows a man to look from eyes outside his own and laugh he added, a great hunter who was very hungry) might attempt the old ways again. God, surely, orders all things. The Shadow children might slay by the right hands and the left while the sun slept, but what fools they’d look if they tried to kill him if God did not wish it, by night or day.

  Silently, but proud and straight, he strode on until sisterworld’s blue light showed the place where, like bats around spilled blood, the Shadow children ringed the tick-deer. Long before he reached them their heads turned, on sterns unhindered as the necks of owls. “Morning met where much food is,” Sandwalker said politely.

  While he walked five paces there was no sound, then a mouth not human answered, “Much food indeed.”

  Women at the sleeping place, wishing to frighten children still playing when their shadows were longer than themselves, said the Shadow children’s teeth dripped poison. Sandwalker did not believe it, but he remembered this when the other spoke. He knew “much food” did not mean the tick-deer, but he said: “That is well. I heard your song—you sang of many mouths and all full. It was I who drove your meat to you, and I ask a share—or I kill the largest of you to eat myself, and the rest may dine upon the bones when I have finished. It is all one to me.”

  “Men are not as you. Men do not eat the flesh of their kind.”

  “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 anothe
r 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.”

  All about Sandwalker, the Shadow children began singing The Daysleep Song, which tells of the sun’s rising; and of the first light; the long, long shadows and the dances the dust-devils do on the hilltops. “Sing with us,” the Old Wise One urged.

  Sandwalker sang. At first he tried to add something of his own to the song, as men do at the sleeping place; but the Shadow children pinched him and frowned. After that lie only sang The Daysleep Song as he heard them singing, and soon all of them were dancing around the bones of the tick-deer, showing how the dust-devils would.

  He now saw that the Shadow children were not all old men as he had imagined. Two indeed were wrinkled and stiff. One seemed a woman though like the rest she had only wisps of hair; two neither old nor young; and two, little more than boys. Sandwalker watched their faces as he danced, marveling that they seemed at once both young and old—and the faces of the others that seemed old yet young. He could see much better than he had been able to while they were squatting about the tick-deer, and it came to him—both understandings at once, so that surprise pushed surprise—that in the east the black of the sky was giving way to purple, and that there were but seven Shadow children. The Old Wise One was gone. He turned to face the rising sun—half from instinct, half because he thought the Old Wise One might have gone that way. When he turned again the Shadow children had scattered behind him, darting among the rocks. Only two were visible, then none. His first thought was to pursue them, but he felt certain they would not wish it. He called loudly, “Go with God!” and waved his arms.

  The first beams of the new sun sent shapes of black and gold leaping toward him. He looked at the tick-deer; some shreds of flesh remained, and bones that would yield marrow if he could break them. Half-humorously he said to these leavings, “Morning met where much food is,” then ate again before the ants came.

  An hour later, as he picked his teeth with a fingernail, he thought about his dream of the night before. The Old Wise One, he felt, might have interpreted it for him. He wished that he had asked. If he slept now, by daylight, there was little chance that any good dream would come, but he was tired and cold. He stretched himself in the warm sunshine—and noticed that the back of the woman walking before him looked familiar. He was walking faster than she and soon could see that it was his mother, but when he tried to greet her he found he was unable to do so. Then he, who had always been so sure of foot, tripped on a stone. He threw out his hands to save himself, a shock went through his whole body, and he found himself sitting up, alone, and sweating from the sun’s heat.

  He stood, still trembling, brushing at the grit that clung to his damp limbs and his back. It was only foolishness. There was no use in sleeping by day—his spirit only left the body at once and went wandering, and then if the priest did come to him in sleep there would be no one to receive him. The priest might even become angry with him and not come back. No, he must either return to the cave and try again there, or acknowledge failure and go away—which would be intolerable. He would return, then, to the gorge.

  But not with empty hands. The feign-pheasant he had brought before had proved an inadequate gift. This might be because the priest was in some way displeased with him; but, as he reflected with some satisfaction, it might also be because the priest intended some revelation of great moment, for which the feign-pheasant was insufficient. Another tick-deer, if he could find one, might be satisfactory. He had come from the north and had seen few signs of game; to go east would mean crossing the river gorge before he traveled far, and westward, toward the burning moun-tains, stretched a waterless wilderness of stone. He went south.

  The land rose slowly as he went. There had been little vegetation, but it became less. The gray rock gave way to red. About noon, as his tireless stride brought him to the summit of a ridge, he saw something he had seen only twice before in his life: a tiny, watered valley, an oasis of the high desert which had managed to hold soil enough for real grass, a few wild flowers, and a tree.

  Such a place was of great significance, but it was possible to drink there, and even to stay for a few hours if one dared. And it was less offensive to the tree, as Sandwalker knew, if one came alone—an advantage for him. Approaching, as custom dictated, neither swiftly nor slowly, but with an expression of studied courtesy, he was about to greet it when he saw a girl sitting, holding an infant, among the roots.

  For a moment, impolitely, his eyes left the tree. The girl’s face was heart-shaped, timorous, scarcely a woman’s yet. Her long hair (and this was something to which Sandwalker was unaccustomed) was clean—she had washed it in the pool at the foot of the tree, and untied the tangles with her fingers so that it now spread a dark caul upon her brown shoulders. She sat cross-legged and unmoving, with the baby, a flower thrust in its hair, asleep on her thighs.

  Sandwalker greeted the tree ceremoniously, asking permission to drink and promising not to stay long. A murmuring of leaves answered him, and though he could not understand the words they did not sound angry. He smiled to show his appreciation, then went to the pool and drank.

  He drank long and deep, as desert animals do; and when he had had his fill and lifted his head from the wind-rippled water he saw the girl’s reflection dancing beside his own. She was watching him with large, fearful eyes; but she was quite close. “Morning met,” he said.

  “Morning met.”

  “I am Sandwalker.” He thought of his journey to the cave, of the tick-deer and the feign-pheasant and the Old Wise One. “Sandwalker the far-traveled, the great hunter, the shadow-friend.”

  “I am Seven Girls Waiting,” the girl said. “And this,” she smiled tenderly down at the baby she carried, “is Mary Pink Butterflies. I called her that because of her little hands, you know. She waves them at me when she’s awake.”

  Sandwalker, who in his own short life had seen how many children come and how few live, smiled and nodded.

  The girl looked down into the pool at the foot of the tree, at the tree, at the flowers and grass, everywhere but at Sandwalker’s face. He saw her small, white teeth creep out like snowmice to touch her lips, then flee again. The wind made patterns on the grass, and the tree said something he could not understand—though Seven Girls Waiting, perha
ps, did. “Will you,” she asked hesitantly, “make this your sleeping place tonight?”

  He knew what she meant and answered as gently as he could, “I have no food to share. I’m sorry. I hunt, but what I find I must keep for a gift for the priest in Thunder Always. Doesn’t anyone sleep where you sleep?”

  “There was nothing anywhere. Pink Butterflies was new, and I could not walk far… We slept up there, beyond the bent rock.” She made a wretched little gesture with her shoulders.

  “I have never known that,” Sandwalker said, laying a hand on her arm, “but I know how it must feel, sitting alone, waiting for them to come when no one comes. It must be a terrible thing.”

  “You are a man. It will not come to you until you are old.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

  “I’m not angry. I’m’not alone either—Pink Butterflies is with me all the time, and I have milk for her. Now we sleep here.”

  “Every night?”

  The girl nodded, half-defiantly.

  “It isn’t good to sleep where a tree is for more than one night.”

  “Pink Butterflies is his daughter. I know because he told me in a dream a long time before she was born. He likes having her here.”

  Sandwalker said carefully, “We were all engendered in women by trees. But they seldom want us to stay by them for more than a single night.”

  “He’s good to us! I thought…” the girl’s voice dropped until it was barely audible above the rustling of the wind in the grass, when you came he might have sent you to bring us something to :at.”

  Sandwalker looked at the little pool. “Are there fish here?”

  The girl said humbly, as though confessing some misdemeanor, I haven’t been able to find any for… for…”

  “How long?”

  “For the last three days. That’s how we were living. I ate the fish from the pool, and I had milk for Pink Butterflies. I still have milk.” She looked down at the baby, then up again at Sandwalker, her wide eyes begging him to believe her. “She just drank. There was enough milk.”