There was not long to go. He knew that, too.
When he opened his eyes, Shadow noticed 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 the sun. 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. As he finished with them, he dropped the gnawed bones and the fur to the ground. He walked further 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 the man’s 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. I was high in the sky, and none of them saw me, although some of them have keen eyes.”
And then the madman said, “You are dying. Aren’t you?”
But Shadow could no longer speak. Everything was very far away. 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 a while,” 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.