One by one they turned their backs on him, and as he lost their faces they were gone, one with the landscape. But the last of them, her hair streaked white on dark gray, pointed before she turned away, pointed into the wine-colored sky.
“Ask them yourself,” she said. Summer lightning flickered, momentarily illuminating the landscape from horizon to horizon.
There were high rocks near him, peaks and spires of sandstone, and Shadow began to climb the nearest. The spire was the color of old ivory. He grabbed at a handhold and felt it slice into his hand. It’s bone, thought Shadow. Not stone. It’s old dry bone.
It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began. Shadow continued to climb. His hands hurt. Bone popped and crushed and fragmented under his bare feet. The wind tugged at him, and he pressed himself to the spire, and he continued to climb the tower.
It was made of only one kind of bone, he realized, repeated over and over. Each of the bones was dry and ball-like. He imagined that they might be the egg shells of some huge bird. But another flare of lightning told him differently: they had holes for eyes, and they had teeth, which grinned without humor.
Somewhere birds were calling. Rain spattered his face.
He was hundreds of feet above the ground, clinging to the side of the tower of skulls, while flashes of lightning burned in the wings of the shadowy birds who circled the spire—enormous, black, condorlike birds, each with a ruff of white at its neck. They were huge, graceful, awful birds, and the beats of their wings crashed like thunder on the night air.
They were circling the spire.
They must be fifteen, twenty feet from wingtip to wingtip, thought Shadow.
Then the first bird swung out of its glide toward him, blue lightning crackling in its wings. He pushed himself into a crevice of skulls, hollow eye-holes stared at him, a clutter of ivory teeth smiled at him, but he kept climbing, pulling himself up the mountain of skulls, every sharp edge cutting into his skin, feeling revulsion and terror and awe.
Another bird came at him, and one hand-sized talon sank into his arm.
He reached out and tried to grasp a feather from its wing—for if he returned to his tribe without a thunderbird’s feather he would be disgraced, he would never be a man—but the bird pulled up, so that he could not grasp a feather. The thunderbird loosened its grip and swung back onto the wind. Shadow continued to climb.
There must be a thousand skulls, thought Shadow. A thousand thousand. And not all of them are human. He stood at last on the top of the spire, the great birds, the thunderbirds, circling him slowly, navigating the gusts of the storm with tiny flicks of their wings.
He heard a voice, the voice of the buffalo man, calling to him on the wind, telling him who the skulls belonged to . . .
The tower began to tumble, and the biggest bird, its eyes the blinding blue-white of forked lightning, plummeted down toward him in a rush of thunder, and Shadow was falling, tumbling down the tower of skulls . . .
The telephone shrilled. Shadow had not even known that it was connected. Groggy, shaken, he picked it up.
“What the fuck,” shouted Wednesday, angrier than Shadow had ever heard him, “what the almighty flying fuck do you think you are playing at?”
“I was asleep,” said Shadow into the receiver, stupidly.
“What do you think is the fucking point of stashing you in a hiding place like Lakeside, if you’re going to raise such a ruckus that not even a dead man could miss it?”
“I dreamed of thunderbirds . . .” said Shadow. “And a tower. Skulls . . .” It seemed to him very important to recount his dream.
“I know what you were dreaming. Everybody damn well knows what you were dreaming. Christ almighty. What’s the point in hiding you, if you’re going to start to fucking advertise?”
Shadow said nothing.
There was a pause at the other end of the telephone. “I’ll be there in the morning,” said Wednesday. It sounded like the anger had died down. “We’re going to San Francisco. The flowers in your hair are optional.” And the line went dead.
Shadow put the telephone down on the carpet, and sat up, stiffly. It was 6:00 A.M. and still night-dark outside. He got up from the sofa, shivering. He could hear the wind as it screamed across the frozen lake. And he could hear somebody nearby crying, only the thickness of a wall away. He was certain it was Marguerite Olsen, and her sobbing was insistent and low and heartbreaking.
Shadow walked into the bathroom and pissed, then went into his bedroom and closed the door, blocking off the sound of the crying woman. Outside the wind howled and wailed as if it, too, was seeking a lost child.
San Francisco in January was unseasonably warm, warm enough that the sweat prickled on the back of Shadow’s neck. Wednesday was wearing a deep blue suit, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles that made him look like an entertainment lawyer.
They were walking along Haight Street. The street people and the hustlers and the moochers watched them go by, and no one shook a paper cup of change at them, no one asked them for anything at all.
Wednesday’s jaw was set. Shadow had seen immediately that the man was still angry, and had asked no questions when the black Lincoln Town Car had pulled up outside the apartment that morning. They had not talked on the way to the airport. He had been relieved that Wednesday was in first class and he was back in coach.
Now it was late in the afternoon. Shadow, who had not been in San Francisco since he was a boy, who had only seen it since then as a background to movies, was astonished at how familiar it was, how colorful and unique the wooden houses, how steep the hills, how very much it didn’t feel like anywhere else.
“It’s almost hard to believe that this is in the same country as Lakeside,” he said.