She did not dare to talk to him. At that moment, it would have been sacrilegious. She watched him, exhausted as she was, and she wondered.
About twenty feet out from the base of the tree, half-overgrown with long meadow grass and dead creepers, he found a canvas bag. Shadow picked it up, untied the knots at the top of the bag, loosened the drawstring.
The clothes he pulled out were his own. They were old, but still serviceable. He turned the shoes over in his hands. He stroked the fabric of the shirt, the wool of the sweater, stared at them as if he were looking at them across a million years.
One by one, he put them on.
He put his hands into his pockets, and looked puzzled as he pulled one hand out, holding what looked to Easter like a white-and-gray marble.
He said, “No coins.” It was the first thing he had said in several hours.
“No coins?” echoed Easter.
He shook his head. “They gave me something to do with my hands.” He bent down to pull on his shoes.
Once he was dressed, he looked more normal. Grave, though. She wondered how far he had traveled, and what it had cost him to return. He was not the first whose return she had initiated; and she knew that, soon enough, the million-year stare would fade, and the memories and the dreams that he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you could touch. That was the way it always went.
She led their way to the rear of the meadow. Her mount waited in the trees.
“It can’t carry both of us,” she told him. “I’ll make my own way home.”
Shadow nodded. He seemed to be trying to remember something. Then he opened his mouth, and he screeched a cry of welcome and of joy.
The thunderbird opened its cruel beak, and it screeched a welcome back at him.
Superficially, at least, it resembled a condor. Its feathers were black, with a purplish sheen, and its neck was banded with white. Its beak was black and cruel: a raptor’s beak, made for tearing. At rest, on the ground, with its wings folded away, it was the size of a black bear, and its head was on a level with Shadow’s own.
Horus said, proudly, “I brought him. They live in the mountains.”
Shadow nodded. “I had a dream of thunderbirds once,” he said. “Damndest dream I ever had.”
The thunderbird opened its beak and made a surprisingly gentle noise, crawroo? “You heard my dream too?” asked Shadow.
He reached out a hand and rubbed it gently against the bird’s head. The thunderbird pushed up against him like an affectionate pony. He scratched it from the nape of its neck up to the crown.
Shadow turned to Easter. “You rode him here?”
“Yes,” she said. “You can ride him back, if he lets you.”
“How do you ride him?”
“It’s easy,” she said. “If you don’t fall. Like riding the lightning.”
“Will I see you back there?”
She shook her head. “I’m done, honey,” she told him. “You go do what you need to do. I’m tired. Good luck.”
Shadow nodded. “Whiskey Jack. I saw him. After I passed on. He came and found me. We drank beer together.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure you did.”
“Will I ever see you again?” asked Shadow.
She looked at him with eyes the green of ripening corn. She said nothing. Then, abruptly, she shook her head. “I doubt it,” she said.
Shadow clambered awkwardly onto the thunderbird’s back. He felt like a mouse on the back of a hawk. There was an ozone taste in his mouth, metallic and blue. Something crackled. The thunderbird extended its wings, and began to flap them, hard.
As the ground fell away beneath them, Shadow clung on, his heart pounding in his chest like a wild thing.