American Gods

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.”

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 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?”

“I lost my name, and I lost my heart. And you brought me back.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “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. “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-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.