They tried to stand off the soldiers, but the men fired and killed them both. So the song's wrong about the jail, but that's put in for poetry. You can't always have things like they are in poetry. Poetry ain't what you'd call truth. There ain't room enough in the verses.

-a singer's commentary on "The Ballad of Sam Bass," in A Treasury of American Folklore.

None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you-even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.

So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Never a word of it is literally true. Even so, the next thing that happened, happened like this:

At the foot of Lookout Mountain men and women were gathered around a small bonfire in the rain. They were standing beneath the trees, which provided poor cover, and they were arguing.

The lady Kali, with her ink-black skin and her white, sharp teeth, said, "It is time."

Anansi, with lemon-yellow gloves and silvering hair, shook his head. "We can wait," he said. "While we can wait, we should wait."

There was a murmur of disagreement from the crowd.

"No, listen. He's right," said an old man with iron-gray hair: Czernobog. He was holding a small sledgehammer, resting the head of it on his shoulder. "They have the high ground. The weather is against us. This is madness, to begin this now."

Something that looked a little like a wolf and a little more like a man grunted and spat on the forest floor. "When better to attack them, dedushka? Shall we wait until the weather clears, when they expect it? I say we go now, I say we move."

"There are clouds between us and them," pointed out Isten of the Hungarians. He had a fine black mustache, a large, dusty black hat, and the grin of a man who makes his living selling aluminum siding and new roofs and gutters to senior citizens but who always leaves town the day after the checks clear whether the work is done or not.

A man in an elegant suit, who had until now said nothing, put his hands together, stepped into the firelight, and made his point succinctly and clearly. There were nods and mutters of agreement.

A voice came from one of three warrior-women who comprised the Morrigan, standing so close together in the shadows that they had become an arrangement of blue-tattooed limbs and dangling crow's wings. She said, "It doesn't matter whether this is a good time or a bad time. This is the time. They have been killing us. Better to die together, on the attack, like gods, than to die fleeing and singly, like rats in a cellar."

Another murmur, this time one of deep agreement. She had said it for all of them. Now was the time.

"The first head is mine," said a very tall Chinese man, with a rope of tiny skulls around his neck. He began to walk, slowly and intently, up the mountain, shouldering a staff with a curved blade at the end of it, like a silver moon.

***

Even Nothing cannot last forever.

He might have been there, been Nowhere, for ten minutes or for ten thousand years. It made no difference: time was an idea for which he no longer had any need.

He could no longer remember his real name. He felt empty and cleansed, in that place that was not a place.

He was without form, and void.

He was nothing.

And into that nothing a voice said, "Ho-hoka, cousin. We got to talk."

And something that might once have been Shadow said, "Whiskey Jack?"

"Yeah," said Whiskey Jack, in the darkness. "You are a hard man to hunt down, when you're dead. You didn't go to any of the places I figured. I had to look all over before I thought of checking here. Say, you ever find your tribe?"

Shadow remembered the man and the girl in the disco beneath the spinning mirror-ball. "I guess I found my family. But no, I never found my tribe."

"Sorry to have to disturb you."

"Let me be. I got what I wanted. I'm done."

"They are coming for you," said Whiskey Jack. "They are going to revive you."

"But I'm done," said Shadow. "It was all over and done."

"No such thing," said Whiskey Jack. "Never any such thing. We'll go to my place. You want a beer?"

He guessed he would like a beer, at that. "Sure."

"Get me one too. There's a cooler outside the door," said Whiskey Jack, and he pointed. They were in his shack.

Shadow opened the door to the shack with hands he had not possessed moments before. There was a plastic cooler filled with chunks of river ice out there, and, in the ice, a dozen cans of Budweiser. He pulled out a couple of cans of beer and then sat in the doorway and looked out over the valley.

They were at the top of a hill, near a waterfall, swollen with melting snow and runoff. It fell in stages, maybe seventy feet below them, maybe a hundred. The sun reflected from the ice that sheathed the trees that overhung the waterfall basin.

"Where are we?" asked Shadow.

"Where you were last time," said Whiskey Jack. "My place. You planning on holding on to my Bud till it warms up?"

Shadow stood up and passed him the can of beer. "You didn't have a waterfall outside your place last time I was here," he said.

Whiskey Jack said nothing. He popped the top of the Bud, and drank half the can in one long slow swallow. Then he said, "You remember my nephew? Henry Bluejay? The poet? He traded his Buick for your Winnebago. Remember?"

"Sure. I didn't know he was a poet."

Whiskey Jack raised his chin and looked proud. "Best damn poet in America," he said.

He drained the rest of his can of beer, belched, and got another can, while Shadow popped open his own can of beer, and the two men sat outside on a rock, by the pale green ferns, in the morning sun, and they watched the falling water and they drank their beer. There was still snow on the ground, in the places where the shadows never lifted.

The earth was muddy and wet.

"Henry was diabetic," continued Whiskey Jack. "It happens. Too much. You people came to America, you take our sugar cane, potatoes, and corn, then you sell us potato chips and caramel popcorn, and we're the ones who get sick." He sipped his beer, reflecting. "He'd won a couple of prizes for his poetry. There were people in Minnesota who wanted to put his poems into a book. He was driving to Minnesota in a sports car to talk to them. He had traded your 'Bago for a yellow Miata. The doctors said they think he went into a coma while he was driving, went off the road, ran the car into one of your road signs. Too lazy to look at where you are, to read the mountains and the clouds, you people need road signs everywhere. And so Henry Bluejay went away forever, went to live with brother Wolf. So I said, nothing keeping me there any longer. I came north. Good fishing up here."

"I'm sorry about your nephew."

"Me too. So now I'm living here in the north. Long way from white man's diseases. White man's roads. White man's road signs. White man's yellow Miatas. White man's caramel popcorn."

"White man's beer?"

Whiskey Jack looked at the can. "When you people finally give up and go home, you can leave us the Budweiser breweries," he said.

"Where are we?" asked Shadow. "Am I on the tree? Am I dead? Am I here? I thought everything was finished. What's real?"

"Yes," said Whiskey Jack.

" 'Yes'? What kind of an answer is 'Yes'?"

"It's a good answer. True answer, too."

Shadow said, "Are you a god as well?"

Whiskey Jack shook his head. "I'm a culture hero," he said. "We do the same shit gods do, we just screw up more and nobody worships us. They tell stories about us, but they tell the ones that make us look bad along with the ones where we came out fairly okay."

"I see," said Shadow. And he did see, more or less.

"Look," said Whiskey Jack. "This is not a good country for gods. My people figured that out early on. There are creator spirits who found the earth or made it or shit it out, but you think about it: who's going to worship Coyote? He made love to Porcupine Woman and got his dick shot through with more needles than a pincushion. He'd argue with rocks and the rocks would win.

"So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there's something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it's always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn't need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it. It gave us salmon and corn and buffalo and passenger pigeons. It gave us wild rice and walleye. It gave us melon and squash and turkey. And we were the children of the land, just like the porcupine and the skunk and the blue jay."

He finished his second beer and gestured toward the river at the bottom of the waterfall. "You follow that river for a way, you'll get to the lakes where the wild rice grows. In wild rice time, you go out in your canoe with a friend, and you knock the wild rice into your canoe, and cook it, and store it, and it will keep you for a long time. Different places grow different foods. Go far enough south there are orange trees, lemon trees, and those squashy green guys, look like pears-"

"Avocados."

"Avocados," agreed Whiskey Jack. "That's them. They don't grow up this way. This is wild rice country. Moose country. What I'm trying to say is that America is like that. It's not good growing country for gods. They don't grow well here. They're like avocados trying to grow in wild rice country."

"They may not grow well," said Shadow, remembering, "but they're going to war."

That was the only time he ever saw Whiskey Jack laugh. It was almost a bark, and it had little humor in it. "Hey Shadow," said Whiskey Jack. "If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?"

"Maybe." Shadow felt good. He didn't think it was just the beer. He couldn't remember the last time he had felt so alive, and so together.

"It's not going to be a war."

"Then what is it?"

Whiskey Jack crushed the beer can between his hands, pressing it until it was flat. "Look," he said, and pointed to the waterfall. The sun was high enough that it caught the waterfall spray: a rainbow nimbus hung in the air. Shadow thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

"It's going to be a bloodbath," said Whiskey Jack, flatly.

Shadow saw it then. He saw it all, stark in its simplicity. He shook his head, then he began to chuckle, and he shook his head some more, and the chuckle became a full-throated laugh.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine," said Shadow. "I just saw the hidden Indians. Not all of them. But I saw them anyhow."

"Probably Ho Chunk, then. Those guys never could hide worth a damn." He looked up at the sun. "Time to go back," he said. He stood up.

"It's a two-man con," said Shadow. "It's not a war at all, is it?"

Whiskey Jack patted Shadow's arm. "You're not so dumb," he said.

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.

***

Easter walked through the meadow, and spring flowers blossomed where she had passed.

She walked by 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."

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.

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.

The people continued up the hill, on two legs, on four legs, on no legs at all.

***

The drive through the Tennessee mountain country had been startlingly beautiful whenever the storm had eased, and nerve-wracking whenever the rain had pelted down. Town and Laura had talked and talked and talked the whole way. He was so glad he had met her. It was like meeting an old friend, a really good old friend you'd simply never met before. They talked history and movies and music, and she turned out to be the only person, the only other person he had ever met who had seen a foreign film (Mr. Town was sure it was Spanish, while Laura was just as certain it was Polish) from the sixties called The Manuscript Found in Saragassa, a film he had been starting to believe he had hallucinated.

When Laura pointed out the first SEE ROCK CITY barn to him he chuckled and admitted that that was where he was headed. She said that was so cool. She always wanted to visit those kinds of places, but she never made the time, and always regretted it later. That was why she was on the road right now. She was having an adventure.

She was a travel agent, she told him. Separated from her husband. She admitted that she didn't think they could ever get back together, and said it was her fault.

"I can't believe that."

She sighed. "It's true, Mack. I'm just not the woman he married anymore."

Well, he told her, people change, and before he could think he was telling her everything he could tell her about his life, he was even telling her about Woody and Stoner, how the three of them were the three musketeers, and the two of them were killed, you think you'd get hardened to that kind of thing in government work, but you never did.

And she reached out one hand-it was cold enough that he turned up the car's heating-and squeezed his hand tightly in hers.

Lunchtime, they ate bad Japanese food while a thunderstorm lowered on Knoxville, and Town didn't care that the food was late, that the miso soup was cold, or that the sushi was warm.

He loved the fact that she was out, with him, having an adventure.

"Well," confided Laura, "I hated the idea of getting stale. I was just rotting away where I was. So I set off without my car and without my credit cards. I'm just relying on the kindness of strangers."

"Aren't you scared?" he asked. "I mean, you could be stranded, you could be mugged, you could starve."

She shook her head. Then she said, with a hesitant smile, "I met you, didn't I?" and he couldn't find anything to say.

When the meal was over they ran through the storm to his car holding Japanese-language newspapers to cover their heads, and they laughed as they ran, like schoolchildren in the rain.

"How far can I take you?" he asked, when they made it back into the car.

"I'll go as far as you're going, Mack," she told him, shyly.

He was glad he hadn't used the Big Mack line. This woman wasn't a barroom one-nighter, Mr. Town knew that in his soul. It might have taken him fifty years to find her, but this was finally it, this was the one, this wild, magical woman with the long dark hair.

This was love.

"Look," he said, as they approached Chattanooga. The wipers slooshed the rain across the windshield, blurring the gray of the city. "How about I find a motel for you tonight? I'll pay for it. And once I make my delivery, we can. Well, we can take a hot bath together, for a start. Warm you up."

"That sounds wonderful," said Laura. "What are you delivering?"

"That stick," he told her, and chuckled. "The one on the backseat."

"Okay," she said, humoring him. "Then don't tell me, Mister Mysterious."

He told her it would be best if she waited in the car in the Rock City parking lot while he made his delivery. He drove up the side of Lookout Mountain in the driving rain, never breaking thirty miles per hour, with his headlights burning. They parked at the back of the parking lot. He turned off the engine.

"Hey, Mack. Before you get out of the car, don't I get a hug?" asked Laura with a smile.

"You surely do," said Mr. Town, and he put his arms around her, and she snuggled close to him while the rain pattered a tattoo on the roof of the Ford Explorer. He could smell her hair. There was a faintly unpleasant scent beneath the smell of the perfume. Travel would do it, every time. That bath, he decided, was a real must for both of them. He wondered if there was anyplace in Chattanooga where he could get those lavender bath-bombs his first wife had loved so much. Laura raised her head against his, and her hand stroked the line of his neck, absently.

"Mack...I keep thinking. You must really want to know what happened to those friends of yours?" she asked. "Woody and Stone. Do you?"

"Yeah," he said, moving his lips down to hers, for their first kiss. "Sure I do."

So she showed him.

***

Shadow walked the meadow, making his own slew circles around the trunk of the tree, gradually widening his circle. Sometimes he would stop and pick something up: a flower, or a leaf, or a pebble, or a twig, or a blade of grass. He would examine it minutely, as if concentrating entirely on the twigness of the twig, the leafness of the leaf.

Easter found herself reminded of the gaze of a baby, at the point where it learns to focus.

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. "Damnest 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.

It was exactly like riding the lightning.

***

Laura took the stick from the backseat of the car. She left Mr. Town in the front seat of the Ford Explorer, climbed out of the car, and walked through the rain to Rock City. The ticket office was closed. The door to the gift shop was not locked and she walked through it, past the rock candy and the display of SEE ROCK CITY birdhouses, into the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Nobody challenged her, although she passed several men and women on the path, in the rain. Many of them looked faintly artificial; several of them were translucent. She walked across a swinging rope bridge. She passed the white deer gardens, and pushed herself through the Fat Man's Squeeze, where the path ran between two rock walls.

And, in the end, she stepped over a chain, with a sign on it telling her that this part of the attraction was closed, she went into a cavern, and she saw a man sitting on a plastic chair, in front of a diorama of drunken gnomes. He was reading the Washington Post by the light of a small electric lantern. When he saw her he folded the paper and placed it beneath his chair. He stood up, a tall man with close-cropped orange hair in an expensive raincoat, and he gave her a small bow.

"I shall assume that Mister Town is dead," he said. "Welcome, spear-carrier."

"Thank you. I'm sorry about Mack," she said. "Were you friends?"

"Not at all. He should have kept himself alive, if he wanted to keep his job. But you brought his stick." He looked her up and down with eyes that glimmered like the orange embers of a dying fire. "I am afraid you have the advantage of me. They call me Mister World, here at the top of the hill."

"I'm Shadow's wife."

"Of course. The lovely Laura," he said. "I should have recognized you. He had several photographs of you up above his bed, in the cell that once we shared. And, if you don't mind my saying so, you are looking lovelier than you have any right to look. Shouldn't you be further along on the whole road-to-rot-and-ruin business by now?"

"I was," she said simply. "But those women, in the farm, they gave me water from their well."

An eyebrow raised. "Urd's Well? Surely not."

She pointed to herself. Her skin was pale, and her eye sockets were dark, but she was manifestly whole: if she was indeed a walking corpse, she was freshly dead.

"It won't last," said Mr. World. "The Norns gave you a little taste of the past. It will dissolve into the present soon enough, and then those pretty blue eyes will roll out of their sockets and ooze down those pretty cheeks, which will, by then, of course, no longer be so pretty. By the way, you have my stick. Can I have it, please?"

He pulle............