The fat kid began to giggle, a low, snuffling laugh in the back of his throat and in his nose. “Okay,” he said. “Hee. Hee. Okay. Hee. Got it. Message received on Planet Technical. Loud and clear. Ixnay on the estionsquay.”
Mr. World shook his head. He rested a hand on the fat kid’s shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “You really want to know?”
“Sure.”
“Well,” said Mr. World, “seeing that we’re friends, here’s the answer: I’m going to take the stick, and I’m going to throw it over the armies as they come together. As I throw it, it will become a spear. And then, as the spear arcs over the battle, I’m going to shout, ‘I dedicate this battle to Odin.’”
“Huh?” said the fat kid. “Why?”
“Power,” said Mr. World. He scratched his chin. “And food. A combination of the two. You see, the outcome of the battle is unimportant. What matters is the chaos, and the slaughter.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Let me show you. It’ll be just like this,” said Mr. World. “Watch!” He took the wooden-bladed hunter’s knife from the pocket of his Burberry and, in one fluid movement, he slipped the blade of it into the soft flesh beneath the fat kid’s chin, and pushed hard upward, toward the brain. “I dedicate this death to Odin,” he said, as the knife sank in.
There was a leakage onto his hand of something that was not actually blood, and a sputtering sparking noise behind the fat kid’s eyes. The smell on the air was that of burning insulation wire, as if somewhere a plug was overloading.
The fat kid’s hand twitched spastically, and then he fell. The expression on his face was one of puzzlement, and misery. “Look at him,” said Mr. World, conversationally, to the air. “He looks as if he just saw a sequence of zeroes and ones turn into a cluster of brightly colored birds, and then just fly away.”
There was no reply from the empty rock corridor.
Mr. World shouldered the body as if it weighed very little, and he opened the pixie diorama and dropped the body beside the still, covering it with its long black raincoat. He would dispose of it that evening, he decided, and he grinned his scarred grin: hiding a body on a battlefield would almost be too easy. Nobody would ever notice. Nobody would care.
For a little while there was silence in that place. And then a gruff voice which was not Mr. World’s cleared its throat in the shadows, and said, “Good start.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
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 allus 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,” 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 in this day and age. Never a word of it is literally true, although it all happened, and the next thing that happened, happened like this:
At the foot of Lookout Mountain, which is scarcely more than a very high hill, men and women were gathered around a small bonfire in the rain. They stood beneath the trees, which provided poor cover, and they were arguing.
The lady Kali, with her ink-black skin and 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 moustache, 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. They will continue to kill us, whether we fight or not. Perhaps we will triumph. Perhaps we will die. 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.”
“No. You aren’t sorry. 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.”