They climbed their own ladders now, and they began to knot the ropes, intricate and elegant knots, and they wrapped the ropes first about the tree, and then about Shadow. Unembarrassed, like midwives or nurses or those who lay out corpses, they removed his T-shirt and briefs, then they bound him, never tightly, but firmly and finally. He was amazed at how comfortably the ropes and the knots bore his weight. The ropes went under his arms, between his legs, around his waist, his ankles, his chest, binding him to the tree.
The final rope was tied, loosely, about his neck. It was initially uncomfortable, but his weight was well distributed and none of the ropes cut his flesh.
His feet were five feet above the ground. The tree was leafless and huge, its branches black against the gray sky, its bark a smooth silvery gray.
They took the ladders away. There was a moment of panic as he dropped a few inches, as all his weight was taken by the ropes. He made no sound.
He was entirely naked by that point.
The women placed the body, wrapped in its motel-sheet shroud, at the foot of the tree, and they left him there.
They left him there alone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Hang me, O hang me, and I’ll be dead and gone,
Hang me, O hang me, and I’ll be dead and gone,
I wouldn’t mind the hangin’, it’s bein’ gone so long,
It’s lyin’ in the grave so long.
—OLD SONG
The first day that Shadow hung from the tree he experienced only discomfort, that edged slowly into pain and fear and, occasionally, an emotion that was somewhere between boredom and apathy: a gray acceptance, a waiting.
He hung.
The wind was still.
After several hours fleeting bursts of color started to explode across his vision in blossoms of crimson and gold, throbbing and pulsing with a life of their own.
The pain in his arms and legs became, by degrees, intolerable. If he relaxed them, let his body go slack and dangle, if he flopped forward, then the rope around his neck would take up the slack and the world would shimmer and swim. So he pushed himself back against the trunk of the tree. He could feel his heart laboring in his chest, a pounding arrhythmic tattoo as it pumped the blood through his body…
Emeralds and sapphires and rubies crystallized and burst in front of his eyes. His breath came in shallow gulps. The bark of the tree was rough against his back. The chill of the afternoon on his naked skin made him shiver, made his flesh prickle and goose.
It’s easy, said someone in the back of his head. There’s a trick to it. Either you do it, or you die.
It was a wise thing to have thought, he decided. He was pleased with it, and repeated it over and over in the back of his head, part mantra, part nursery rhyme, rattling along to the drumbeat of his heart.
It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.
It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.
It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.
It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.
Time passed. The chanting continued. He could hear it. Someone was repeating the words, only stopping when Shadow’s mouth began to dry out, when his tongue turned dry and skin-like in his mouth. He pushed himself up and away from the tree with his feet, trying to support his weight in a way that would still allow him to fill his lungs.
He breathed until he could hold himself up no more, and then he fell back into the bonds, and hung from the tree.
When the chattering started—an angry, laughing chattering noise—he closed his mouth, concerned that it was he himself making it; but the noise continued. It’s the world laughing at me, then, thought Shadow. His head lolled to one side. Something ran down the tree-trunk beside him, stopping beside his head. It chittered loudly in his ear, one word, which sounded a lot like “ratatosk.” Shadow tried to repeat it, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He turned, slowly, and stared into the gray-brown face and pointed ears of a squirrel.
In close-up, he learned, a squirrel looks a lot less cute than it does from a distance. The creature was rat-like, and dangerous, not sweet or charming. And its teeth looked sharp. He hoped that it would not perceive him as a threat, or as a food source. He did not think that squirrels were carnivorous…but then, so many things he had not thought had turned out to be so…
He slept.
The pain woke him several times in the next few hours. It pulled him from a dark dream in which dead children rose and came to him, their eyes peeling, swollen pearls, and they reproached him for failing them and it pulled him from another dream, in which he was staring up at a mammoth, hairy and dark, as it lumbered toward him from the mist, but—awake for a moment, a spider edging across his face, and he shook his head, dislodging or frightening it—now the mammoth was an elephant-headed man, pot-bellied, one tusk broken, and he was riding toward Shadow on the back of a huge mouse. The elephant-headed man curled his trunk towards Shadow and said, “If you had invoked me before you began this journey, perhaps some of your troubles might have been avoided.” Then the elephant took the mouse, which had, by some means that Shadow could not perceive, become tiny while not changing in size at all, and passed it from hand to hand to hand, fingers curling about it as the little brown creature scampered from palm to palm, and Shadow was not at all surprised when the elephant-headed god finally opened all four of his hands to reveal them perfectly empty. He shrugged arm after arm after arm in a peculiar fluid motion, and looked at Shadow, his face unreadable.
“It’s in the trunk,” Shadow told the elephant man, who had seen the flickering tail vanish.
The elephant man nodded his huge head, and said, “Yes. In the trunk. You will forget many things. You will give many things away. You will lose many things. But do not lose this.” And then the rains began, and Shadow was awake once more. He tumbled, shivering and wet, from deep sleep to wakefulness in moments. The shivering intensified, until it scared Shadow: he was shivering more violently than he had ever imagined possible, a series of convulsive shudders which built upon each other. He willed himself to stop shaking, but still he shivered, his teeth banging together, his limbs twitching and jerking beyond his control. There was real pain there, too, a deep, knife-like pain that covered his body with tiny, invisible wounds, intimate and unbearable.
He opened his mouth to catch the rain as it fell, moistening his cracked lips and his dry tongue, wetting the ropes that bound him to the trunk of the tree. There was a flash of lightning so bright it felt like a blow to his eyes, transforming the world into an intense panorama of image and after-image. Then the thunder, a crack and a boom and a rumble, and, as the thunder echoed, the rain redoubled. In the rain and the night the shivering abated; the knife-blades were put away. Shadow no longer felt the cold, or rather, he felt only the cold, but the cold had now become part of himself, it belonged to him and he belonged to it.
Shadow hung from the tree while the lightning flickered and forked across the sky, and the thunder subsided into an omnipresent rumbling, with occasional bangs and roars like distant bombs exploding in the night, and the wind tugged at Shadow, trying to pull him from the tree, flaying his skin, cutting to the bone; and at the height of the storm—and Shadow knew in his soul that the real storm had truly begun, the true storm, and that now it was here there was nothing any of them could do but ride it out: none of them, old gods or new, spirits, powers, women or men…