sharpen a stick of mistletoe and go down to the ash tree, and ram it through his eye. That’s what those morons fighting out there have never been able to grasp. It’s never a matter of old and new. It’s only about patterns. Now. My stick, please.”
“Why do you want it?”
“It’s a souvenir of this whole sorry mess,” said Mr. World. “Don’t worry, it’s not mistletoe.” He flashed a grin. “It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world, the symbol is the thing.”
The noises from outside grew louder.
“Which side are you on?” she asked.
“It’s not about sides,” he told her. “But since you asked, I’m on the winning side. Always. That’s what I do best.”
She nodded, and she did not let go of the stick. “I can see that,” she said.
She turned away from him, and looked out of the cavern door. Far below her, in the rocks, she could see something that glowed and pulsed. It wrapped itself around a thin, mauve-faced bearded man, who was beating at it with a squeegee stick, the kind of squeegee that people like him use to smear across car windshields at traffic lights. There was a scream, and they both disappeared from view.
“Okay. I’ll give you the stick,” she said.
Mr. World’s voice came from behind her. “Good girl,” he said reassuringly, in a way that struck her as being both patronizing and indefinably male. It made her skin crawl.
She waited in the rock doorway until she could hear his breath in her ear. She had to wait until he got close enough. She had that much figured out.
The ride was more than exhilarating; it was electric.
They swept through the storm like jagged bolts of lightning, flashing from cloud to cloud; they moved like the thunder’s roar, like the swell and rip of the hurricane. It was a crackling, impossible journey, and Shadow forgot to be scared almost immediately. You cannot be afraid when you ride the thunderbird. There is no fear: only the power of the storm, unstoppable and all-consuming, and the joy of the flight.
Shadow dug his fingers into the thunderbird’s feathers, feeling the static prickle on his skin. Blue sparks writhed across his hands like tiny snakes. Rain washed his face.
“This is the best,” he shouted, over the roar of the storm.
As if it understood him, the bird began to rise higher, every wing-beat a clap of thunder, and it swooped and dove and tumbled through the dark clouds.
“In my dream, I was hunting you,” said Shadow, his words ripped away by the wind. “In my dream. I had to bring back a feather.”
Yes. The word was a static crackle in the radio of his mind. They came to us for feathers, to prove that they were men; and they came to us to cut the stones from our heads, to give their dead our lives.
An image filled his mind then: of a thunderbird—a female, he assumed, for her plumage was brown, not black—lying freshly dead on the side of a mountain. Beside it was a woman. She was breaking open its skull with a knob of flint. She picked through the wet shards of bone and the brains until she found a smooth clear stone the tawny color of garnet, opalescent fires flickering in its depths. Eagle stones, thought Shadow. She was going to take it to her infant son, dead these last three nights, and she would lay it on his cold breast. By the next sunrise the boy would be alive and laughing, and the jewel would be gray and clouded and, like the bird it had been stolen from, quite dead.
“I understand,” he said to the bird.
The bird threw back its head and crowed, and its cry was the thunder.
The world beneath them flashed past in one strange dream.
Laura adjusted her grip on the stick, and she waited for the man she knew as Mr. World to come to her. She was facing away from him, looking out at the storm, and the dark green hills below.
In this sorry world, she thought, the symbol is the thing. Yes.
She felt his hand close softly onto her right shoulder.
Good, she thought. He does not want to alarm me. He is scared that I will throw his stick out into the storm, that it will tumble down the mountainside, and he will lose it.
She leaned back, just a little, until she was touching his chest with her back. His left arm curved around her. It was an intimate