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American Gods (American Gods #1) Page 71
Author: Neil Gaiman

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 nak*d," confided the madman, in a cracked voice. "I'm nak*d 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 breath.

"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.

"I'll 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 into 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 déjà 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 was 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."

Her face was silvered by the moonlight (but no moon hung in that plum-black sky, and now, at the foot of the steps, even the single star was lost to view) and she looked both solemn and vulnerable. She said, "All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them."

Beyond her, the path forked. He would have to decide which path to take, he knew that. But there was one thing he had to do first. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and was relieved when he felt the familiar weight of the coin at the bottom of the pocket. He eased it out, held it between finger and thumb: a 1922 Liberty dollar. "This is yours," he said.

He remembered then that his clothes were really at the foot of the tree. The women had placed his clothes in the canvas sack from which they had taken the ropes, and tied the end of the sack, and the biggest of the women had placed a heavy rock on it to stop it from blowing away. And so he knew that, in reality, the Liberty dollar was in a pocket in that sack, beneath the rock. But still, it was heavy in his hand, at the entrance to the underworld.

She took it from his palm with her slim fingers.

"Thank you. It bought you your liberty twice," she said. "And now it will light your way into dark places."

She closed her hand around the dollar, then she reached up and placed it in the air, as high as she could reach. Then she let go of it. Instead of falling, the coin floated upward until it was a foot or so above Shadow's head. It was no longer a silver coin, though. Lady Liberty and her crown of spikes were gone. The face he saw on the coin was the indeterminate face of the moon in the summer sky.

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