If he did die, he thought, if he died right now, here on the tree, it would be worth it to have had this one, perfect, mad moment.
“Hey!” he shouted at the storm. “Hey! It’s me! I’m here!”
He trapped some water between his bare shoulder and the trunk of the tree, and he twisted his head over and drank the trapped rainwater, sucking and slurping at it, and he drank more and he laughed, laughed with joy and delight, not madness, until he could laugh no more, until he hung there too exhausted to move.
At the foot of the tree, on the ground, the rain had made the sheet partly transparent, and had lifted it and pushed it forward so that Shadow could see Wednesday’s dead hand, waxy and pale, and the shape of his head, and he thought of the shroud of Turin and he remembered the open girl on Jacquel’s table in Cairo, and then, as if to spite the cold, he observed that he was feeling warm and comfortable, and the bark of the tree felt soft, and he slept once more, and if he dreamed any dreams this time he could not remember them.
By the following morning the pain was no longer local, not confined to the places where the ropes cut into his flesh, or where the bark scraped his skin. Now the pain was everywhere.
And he was hungry, with empty pangs down in the pit of him. His head was pounding. Sometimes he imagined that he had stopped breathing, that his heart had ceased to beat. Then he would hold his breath until he could hear his heart pounding an ocean in his ears and he was forced to suck air like a diver surfacing from the depths.
It seemed to him that the tree reached from—hell to heaven, and that he had been hanging there forever. A brown hawk circled the tree, landed on a broken branch near to him, and then took to the wing, flying west.
The storm, which had abated at dawn, began to return as the day passed. Gray, roiling clouds stretched from horizon to horizon; a slow drizzle began to fall. The body at the base of the tree seemed to have become less, in its stained motel winding sheet, crumbling into itself like a sugar cake left in the rain.
Sometimes Shadow burned, sometimes he froze.
When the thunder started once more he imagined that he heard drums beating, kettledrums in the thunder and the thump of his heart, inside his head or outside, it did not matter. He perceived the pain in colors: the red of a neon bar sign, the green of a traffic light on a wet night, the blue of an empty video screen.
The squirrel dropped from the bark of the trunk onto Shadow’s shoulder, sharp claws digging into his skin. “Ratatosk!” it chattered. The tip of its nose touched his lips. “Ratatosk.” It sprang back onto the tree.
His skin was on fire with pins and needles, a pricking covering his whole body. The sensation was intolerable.
His life was laid out below him, on the motel-sheet shroud: literally laid out, like the items at some Dada picnic, a surrealist tableau: he could see his mother’s puzzled stare, the American embassy in Norway, Laura’s eyes on their wedding day ...
He chuckled through dry lips.
“What’s so funny, puppy?” asked Laura.
“Our wedding day,” he said. “You bribed the organist to change from playing the Wedding March to the theme song from Scooby-Doo as you walked toward me down the aisle. Do you remember?”
“Of course I remember, darling. ‘I would have made it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.’ “
“I loved you so much,” said Shadow.
He could feel her lips on his, and they were warm and wet and living, not cold and dead, so he knew that this was another hallucination. “You aren’t here, are you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But you are calling me, for the last time. And I am coming.”
Breathing was harder now. The ropes cutting his flesh were an abstract concept, like free will or eternity.
“Sleep, puppy,” she said, although he thought it might have been his own voice he heard, and he slept.
The sun was a pewter coin in a leaden sky. Shadow was, he realized slowly, awake, and he was cold. But the part of him that understood that seemed very far away from the rest of him. Somewhere in the distance he was aware that his mouth and throat were burning, painful, and cracked. Sometimes, in the daylight, he would see stars fall; other times he saw huge birds, the size of delivery trucks, flying toward him. Nothing reached him; nothing touched him.
“Ratatosk. Ratatosk.” The chattering had become a scolding.
The squirrel landed, heavily, with sharp claws, on his shoulder and stared into his face. He wondered if he were hallucinating: the animal was holding a walnut shell, like a doll’s-house cup, in its front paws. The animal pressed the shell to Shadow’s lips. Shadow felt the water, and, involuntarily, he sucked it into his mouth, drinking from the tiny cup. He ran the water around his cracked lips, his dry tongue. He wet his mouth with it, and swallowed what was left, which was not much.
The squirrel leapt back to the tree, and ran down it, toward the roots, and then, in seconds, or minutes, or hours, Shadow could not tell which (all the clocks in his mind were broken, he thought, and their gears and cogs and springs were simply a jumble down there in the writhing grass), the squirrel returned with its walnut-shell cup, climbing carefully, and Shadow drank the water it brought to him.
The muddy-iron taste of the water filled his mouth, cooled his parched throat. It eased his fatigue and his madness.
By the third walnut shell, he was no longer thirsty.
He began to struggle, then, pulling at the ropes, flailing his body, trying to get down, to get free, to get away. He moaned.
The knots were good. The ropes were strong, and they held, and soon he exhausted himself once more.
In his delirium, Shadow became the tree. Its roots went deep into the loam of the earth, deep down into time, into the hidden springs. He felt the spring of the woman called Urd, which is to say, Past. She was huge, a giantess, an underground mountain of a woman, and the waters she guarded were the waters of time. Other roots went to other places. Some of them were secret. Now, when he was thirsty, he pulled water from his roots, pulled them up into the body of his being.
He had a hundred arms that broke into a hundred thousand fingers, and all of his fingers reached up into the sky. The weight of the sky was heavy on his shoulders.
It was not that the discomfort was lessened, but the pain belonged to the figure hanging from the tree, rather than to the tree itself. Shadow in his madness was now so much more than the man on the tree. He was the tree, and he was the wind rattling the bare branches of the world tree; he was the gray sky and the tumbling clouds; he was Ratatosk the squirrel running from the deepest roots to the highest branches; he was the mad-eyed hawk who sat on a broken branch at the top of the tree surveying the world; he was the worm in the heart of the tree.
The stars wheeled, and he passed his hundred hands over the glittering stars, palming them, switching them, vanishing them ...
A moment of clarity, in the pain and the madness: Shadow felt himself surfacing. He knew it would not be for long. The morning sun was dazzling him. He closed his eyes, wishing he could shade them.
There was not long to go. He knew that, too.
When he opened his eyes, Shadow saw that there was a young man in the tree with him.
His skin was dark brown. His forehead was high and his dark hair was tightly curled. He was sitting on a branch high above Shadow’s head. Shadow could see him clearly by craning his head. And the man was mad. Shadow could see that at a glance.
“You’re naked,” confided the madman, in a cracked voice. “I’m naked too.”
“I see that,” croaked Shadow.
The madman looked at him, then he nodded and twisted his head down and around, as if he were trying to remove a crick from his neck. Eventually he said, “Do you know me?”
“No,” said Shadow.
“I know you. I watched you in Cairo. I watched you after. My sister likes you.”
“You are ....” the name escaped him. Eats roadkill. Yes. “You are Horus.”
The madman nodded. “Horus,” he said. “I am the falcon of the morning, the hawk of the afternoon. I am the sun, as you are. And I know the true name of Ra. My mother told me.”
“That’s great,” said Shadow, politely.
The madman stared at the ground below them intently, saying nothing. Then he dropped from the tree.
A hawk fell like a stone to the ground, pulled out of its plummet into a swoop, beat its wings heavily and flew back to the tree, a baby rabbit in its talons. It landed on a branch closer to Shadow.
“Are you hungry?” asked the madman.
“No,” said Shadow. “I guess I should be, but I’m not.”
“I’m hungry,” said the madman. He ate the rabbit rapidly, pulling it apart, sucking, tearing, rending. At he finished with them, he dropped the gnawed bones and the fur to the ground. He walked farther down the branch until he was only an arm’s length from Shadow. Then he peered at Shadow unselfconsciously, inspecting him with care and caution, from his feet to his head. There was rabbit blood on his chin and his chest, and he wiped it off with the back of his hand.
Shadow felt he had to say something. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” said the madman. He stood up on the branch, turned away from Shadow and let a stream of dark urine arc out into the meadow below. It went on for a long time. When he had finished he crouched down again on the branch.
“What do they call you?” asked Horus.
“Shadow,” said Shadow.
The madman nodded. “You are the shadow. I am the light,” he said. “Everything that is, casts a shadow.” Then he said, “They will fight soon. I was watching them as they started to arrive.”
And then the madman said, “You are dying. Aren’t you?’
But Shadow could no longer speak. A hawk took wing, and circled slowly upward, riding the updrafts into the morning.
Moonlight.
A cough shook Shadow’s frame, a racking painful cough that stabbed his chest and his throat. He gagged for bream.
“Hey, puppy,” called a voice that he knew.
He looked down.
The moonlight burned whitely through the branches of the tree, bright as day, and there was a woman standing in the moonlight on the ground below him, her face a pale oval. The wind rattled in the branches of the tree.
“Hi, puppy,” she said.
He tried to speak, but he coughed instead, deep in his chest, for a long time.
“You know,” she said, helpfully, “that doesn’t sound good.”
He croaked, “Hello, Laura.”
She looked up at him with dead eyes, and she smiled.
“How did you find me?” he asked.
She was silent, for a while, in the moonlight. Then she said, “You are the nearest thing I have to life. You are the only thing I have left, the only thing that isn’t bleak and flat and gray. I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.”
He looked down at the woman in the moonlight, and his eyes stung with tears.
‘Til cut you down,” she said, after a while. “I spend too much time rescuing you, don’t I?”
He coughed again. Then, “No, leave me. I have to do this.”
She looked up at him, and shook her head. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You’re dying up there. Or you’ll be crippled, if you aren’t already.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I’m alive.”
“Yes,” she said, after a moment. “I guess you are.”
“You told me,” he said. “In the graveyard.”
“It seems like such a long time ago, puppy,” she said. Then she said, “I feel better, here. It doesn’t hurt as much. You know what I mean? But I’m so dry.”
The wind let up, and he could smell her now: a stink of rotten meat and sickness and decay, pervasive and unpleasant.
“I lost my job,” she said. “It was a night job, but they said people had complained. I told them I was sick, and they said they didn’t care. I’m so thirsty.”
“The women,” he told her. “They have water; The house.”
“Puppy ...” she sounded scared.
“Tell them ... tell them I said to give you water ...”
The white face stared up at him. “I should go,” she told him. Then she hacked, and made a face, and spat a mass of something white onto the grass. It broke up when it hit the ground, and wriggled away.
It was almost impossible to breathe. His chest felt heavy, and his head was swaying.
“Stay” he said, in a breath that was almost a whisper, unsure whether or not she could hear him. “Please don’t go.” He started to cough. “Stay the night.”
“I’ll stop awhile,” she said. And then, like a mother to a child, she said, “Nothing’s gonna hurt you when I’m here. You know that?”
Shadow coughed once more. He closed his eyes—only for a moment, he thought, but when he opened them again the moon had set and he was alone.
A crashing and a pounding in his head, beyond the pain of migraine, beyond all pain. Everything dissolved info tiny butterflies which circled him like a multicolored dust storm and then evaporated into the night.
The white sheet wrapped about the body at the base of the tree flapped noisily in the morning wind.
The pounding eased. Everything slowed. There was nothing left to make him keep breathing. His heart ceased to beat in his chest.
The darkness that he entered this time was deep, and lit by a single star, and it was final.
Chapter Sixteen
I know it’s crooked. But it’s the only game in town.
—Canada Bill Jones.
The tree was gone, and the world was gone, and the morning-gray sky above him was gone. The sky was now the color of midnight. There was a single cold star shining high above him, a blazing, twinkling light, and nothing else. He took a single step and almost tripped.
Shadow looked down. There were steps cut into the rock, going down, steps so huge that he could only imagine that giants had cut them and descended them a long time ago.
He clambered downward, half jumping, half vaulting from step to step. His body ached, but it was the ache of lack of use, not the tortured ache of a body that has hung on a tree until it was dead.
He observed, without surprise, that he was now fully dressed, in jeans and a white T-shirt. He was barefoot. He experienced a profound moment of deja vu: this was what he had been wearing when he stood in Czernobog’s apartment the night when Zorya Polunochnaya had come to him and told him about the constellation called Odin’s Wain. She had taken the moon down from the sky for him.
;He knew, suddenly, what would happen next. Zorya Polunochnaya would be there. She was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps. There /as no moon in the sky, but she was bathed in moonlight nonetheless: her white hair was moon-pale, and she wore the same lace-and-cotton nightdress she had worn that night in Chicago.
She smiled when she saw him, and looked down, as if momentarily embarrassed. “Hello,” she said.
“Hi,” said Shadow.
“How are you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think this is maybe another strange dream on the tree. I’ve been having crazy dreams since I got out of prison.”
