They walked back to Whiskey Jack’s shack. He opened the door. Shadow hesitated. “I wish I could stay here with you,” he said. “This seems like a good place.”
“There are a lot of good places,” said Whiskey Jack. “That’s kind of the point. Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land’s still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn’t going anywhere. And neither am I.”
Shadow closed the door. Something was pulling at him. He was alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter until it was burning like the sun.
And then the pain began.
There was a woman who walked through a meadow, and spring flowers blossomed where she had passed. In this place and at this time, she called herself Easter.
She passed a place where, long ago, a farmhouse had stood. Even today several walls were still standing, jutting out of the weeds and the meadow-grass like rotten teeth. A thin rain was falling. The clouds were dark and low, and it was cold.
A little way beyond the place where the farmhouse had been there was a tree, a huge silver-gray tree, winter-dead to all appearances, and leafless, and in front of the tree, on the grass, were frayed clumps of colorless fabric. The woman stopped at the fabric, and bent down, and picked up something brownish-white: it was a much-gnawed fragment of bone which might, once, have been a part of a human skull. She tossed it back down onto the grass.
Then she looked at the man on the tree and she smiled wryly. “They just aren’t as interesting naked,” she said. “It’s the unwrapping that’s half the fun. Like with gifts, and eggs.”
The hawk-headed man who walked beside her looked down at his penis and seemed, for the first time, to become aware of his own nakedness. He said, “I can look at the sun without even blinking.”
“That’s very clever of you,” Easter told him, reassuringly. “Now, let’s get him down from there.”
The wet ropes that held Shadow to the tree had long ago weathered and rotted, and they parted easily as the two people pulled on them. The body on the tree slipped and slid down toward the roots. They caught him as he fell, and they took him up, carrying him easily, although he was a very big man, and they put him down in the gray meadow.
The body on the grass was cold, and it did not breathe. There was a patch of dried black blood on its side, as if it had been stabbed with a spear.
“What now?”
“Now,” she said, “we warm him. You know what you have to do.”
“I know. I cannot.”
“If you are not willing to help, then you should not have called me here.”
“But it has been too long.”
“It has been too long for all of us.”
“And I am quite mad.”
“I know.” She reached out a white hand to Horus, and she touched his black hair. He blinked at her, intently. Then he shimmered, as if in a heat haze.
The hawk eye that faced her glinted orange, as if a flame had just been kindled inside it; a flame that had been long extinguished.
The hawk took to the air, and it swung upward, circling and ascending in a rising gyre, circling the place in the gray clouds where the sun might conceivably be, and as the hawk rose it became first a dot and then a speck, and then, to the naked eye, nothing at all, something that could only be imagined. The clouds began to thin and to evaporate, creating a patch of blue sky through which the sun glared. The single bright sunbeam penetrating the clouds and bathing the meadow was beautiful, but the image faded as more clouds vanished. Soon the morning sun was blazing down on that meadow like a summer sun at noon, burning the water vapor from the morning’s rain into mists and burning the mist off into nothing at all.
The golden sun bathed the body on the floor of the meadow with its radiance and its heat. Shades of pink and of warm brown touched the dead thing.
The woman dragged the fingers of her right hand lightly across the body’s chest. She imagined she could feel a shiver in his breast—something that was not a heartbeat, but still…She let her hand remain there, on his chest, just above his heart.
She lowered her lips to Shadow’s lips, and she breathed into his lungs, a gentle in and out, and then the breath became a kiss. Her kiss was gentle, and it tasted of spring rains and meadow flowers.
The wound in his side began to flow with liquid blood once more—a scarlet blood, which oozed like liquid rubies in the sunlight, and then the bleeding stopped.
She kissed his cheek and his forehead. “Come on,” she said. “Time to get up. It’s all happening. You don’t want to miss it.”
His eyes fluttered, and then they opened, two eyes of a gray so deep it was colorless, the gray of evening, and he looked at her.
She smiled, and then she removed her hand from his chest.
He said, “You called me back.” He said it slowly, as if he had forgotten how to speak English. There was hurt in his voice, and puzzlement.
“Yes.”
“I was done. I was judged. It was over. You called me back. You dared.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes.”
He sat up, slowly. He winced, and touched his side. Then he looked puzzled: there was a beading of wet blood there, but there was no wound beneath it.
He reached out a hand, and she put her arm around him and helped him to his feet. He looked across the meadow as if he was trying to remember the names of the things he was looking at: the flowers in the long grass, the ruins of the farmhouse, the haze of green buds that fogged the branches of the huge silver tree.
“Do you remember?” she asked. “Do you remember what you learned?”
“Yes. It will fade though. Like a dream. I know that. I lost my name, and I lost my heart. And you brought me back.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, for the second time. “They are going to fight, soon. The old gods and the new ones.”
“You want me to fight for you? You wasted your time.”
“I brought you back because that was what I had to do,” she said. “It’s what I can do. It’s what I’m best at. What you do now is whatever you have to do. Your call. I did my part.” Suddenly, she became aware of his nakedness, and she blushed a burning scarlet flush, and she looked down and away.
In the rain and the cloud, shadows moved up the side of the mountain, up to the rock pathways.
White foxes padded up the hill in company with red-haired men in green jackets. There was a bull-headed minotaur walking beside an iron-fingered dactyl. A pig, a monkey, and a sharp-toothed ghoul clambered up the hillside, in company with a blue-skinned man holding a flaming bow, a bear with flowers twined into its fur, and a man in golden chain mail holding his sword of eyes.
Beautiful Antinous, who was the lover of Hadrian, walked up the hillside at the head of a company of leather queens, their arms and chests steroid-swollen and sculpted into perfect shapes.
A gray-skinned man, his one cyclopean eye a huge cabochon emerald, walked stiffly up the hill, ahead of several squat and swarthy men, their impassive faces as regular as Aztec carvings: they knew the secrets that the jungles had swallowed.
A sniper at the top of the hill took careful aim at a white fox, and fired. There was an explosion, and a puff of cordite, gunpowder scent on the wet air. The corpse was a young Japanese woman with her stomach blown away, and her face all bloody. Slowly, the corpse began to fade.