His mother’s eyes were closed in a morphine peace: what she had thought was just another sickle-cell crisis, another bout of pain to be endured, had turned out, they had discovered, too late, to be lymphoma. There was a lemonish-gray tinge to her skin. She was in her early thirties, but she looked much older.
Shadow wanted to shake himself, the awkward boy that he once was, get him to hold her hand, talk to her, do something before she slipped away, as he knew that she would. But he could not touch himself, and he continued to read; and so his mother died while he sat in the chair next to her, reading a fat book.
After that he had more or less stopped reading. You could not trust fiction. What good were books, if they couldn’t protect you from something like that?
Shadow walked away from the hospital room, down the winding corridor, deep into the bowels of the earth.
He sees his mother first and he cannot believe how young she is, not yet twenty-five he guesses, before her medical discharge and they’re in their apartment, another embassy rental somewhere in Northern Europe, he looks around for something to give him a clue, and he’s just a shrimp of a kid now, big pale-gray eyes and straight dark hair. They are arguing. Shadow knows without hearing the words what they’re arguing about: it was the only thing they quarreled about, after all.
—Tell me about my father.
—He’s dead. Don’t ask about him.
—But who was he?
—Forget him. Dead and gone and you ain’t missed nothing.
—I want to see a picture of him.
—I ain’t got a picture, she’d say, and her voice would get quiet and fierce, and he knew that if he kept asking her questions she would shout, or even hit him, and he knew that he could not stop asking questions, so he turned away and walked on down the tunnel.
The path he followed twisted and wound and curled back on itself, and it put him in mind of snakeskins and intestines and of deep, deep tree roots. There was a pool to his left; he heard the drip, drip of water into it somewhere at the back of the tunnel, the falling water barely ruffling the mirrored surface of the pool. He dropped to his knees and drank, using his hand to bring the water to his lips. Then he walked on until he was standing in the floating disco-glitter patterns of a mirror-ball. It was like being in the exact center of the universe with all the stars and planets circling him, and he could not hear anything, not the music, nor the shouted conversations over the music, and now Shadow was staring at a woman who looked just like his mother never looked in all the years he knew her, she’s little more than a child, after all…
And she is dancing.
Shadow found that he was completely unsurprised when he recognized the man who dances with her. He had not changed that much in thirty-three years.
She is drunk: Shadow could see that at a glance. She is not very drunk, but she is unused to drink, and in a week or so she will take a ship to Norway. They have been drinking margaritas, and she has salt on her lips and salt clinging to the back of her hand.
Wednesday is not wearing a suit and tie, but the pin in the shape of a silver tree he wears over the pocket of his shirt glitters and glints when the mirror-ball light catches it. He does not dance badly; they make a fine-looking couple, considering the difference in their ages. There is a lupine grace to his movements.
A slow dance. He pulls her close to him, and his paw-like hand curves around the seat of her skirt possessively, moving her closer to him. His other hand takes her chin, pushes it upward into his face, and the two of them kiss, there on the floor, as the glitter-ball lights circle them into the center of the universe.
Soon after, they leave. She sways against him, and he leads her from the dance hall. Shadow buries his head in his hands, and does not follow them, unable or unwilling to witness his own conception.
The mirror lights were gone, and now the only illumination came from the tiny moon that burned high above his head.
He walked on. At a bend in the path he stopped for a moment, to catch his breath.
He felt a hand run gently up his back, and gentle fingers ruffle the hair on the back of his head.
“Hello, hon,” whispered a smoky female voice, over his shoulder.
“Hello,” he said, turning to face her.
She had brown hair and brown skin and her eyes were the deep golden-amber of good honey. Her pupils were vertical slits. “Do I know you?” he asked, puzzled.
“Intimately,” she said, and she smiled. “I used to sleep on your bed. And my people have been keeping their eyes on you, for me.” She turned to the path ahead of him, pointed to the three ways he could go. “Okay,” she said. “One way will make you wise. One way will make you whole. And one way will kill you.”
“I’m already dead, I think,” said Shadow. “I died on the tree.”
She made a moue. “There’s dead,” she said, “and there’s dead, and there’s dead. It’s a relative thing.” Then she smiled again. “I could make a joke about that, you know. Something about dead relatives.”
“No,” said Shadow. “It’s okay.”
“So,” she said. “Which way do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
She tipped her head on one side, a perfectly feline gesture. Suddenly, Shadow knew exactly who she was, and where he knew her from. He felt himself beginning to blush. “If you trust me,” said Bast, “I can choose for you.”
“I trust you,” he said, without hesitation.
“Do you want to know what it’s going to cost you?”
“I’ve already lost my name,” he told her.
“Names come and names go. Was it worth it?”
“Yes. Maybe. It wasn’t easy. As revelations go, it was kind of personal.”
“All revelations are personal,” she said. “That’s why all revelations are suspect.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No,” she said, “you don’t. I’ll take your heart. We’ll need it later,” and she reached her hand deep inside his chest, and she pulled it out with something ruby and pulsing held between her sharp fingernails. It was the color of pigeon’s blood, and it was made of pure light. Rhythmically it expanded and contracted.
She closed her hand, and it was gone.
“Take the middle way,” she said.
Shadow hesitated. “Are you really here?” he asked.
She tipped her head on one side, regarded him gravely, said nothing at all.
“What are you?” he asked. “What are you people?”
She yawned, showing a perfect, dark-pink tongue. “Think of us as symbols—we’re the dream that humanity creates to make sense of the shadows on the cave wall. Now go on, keep moving. Your body is already growing cold. The fools are gathering on the mountain. The clock is ticking.”
Shadow nodded, and walked on.
The path was becoming slippery now. There was ice on the rock. Shadow stumbled and skidded as he walked down the rock path, toward the place where it divided, scraping his knuckles on a jut of rock at chest height. He edged forward as slowly as he could. The moon above him glittered through the ice-crystals in the air: there was a ring about the moon, a moonbow, diffusing the light. It was beautiful, but it made walking harder. The path was unreliable.