“I did what I had to do.”
“Perhaps.”
Czernobog walked to the old wooden sideboard, and, bending down, pulled an attaché case from underneath it. He flipped the catches on the case. Each one sprang back with a satisfying thump. He opened the case. He took a hammer out, and hefted it, experimentally. The hammer looked like a scaled-down sledgehammer; its wooden haft was stained.
Then he stood up. He said, “I owe you much. More than you know. Because of you, things are changing. This is spring time. The true spring.”
“I know what I did,” said Shadow. “I didn’t have a lot of choice.”
Czernobog nodded. There was a look in his eyes that Shadow did not remember seeing before. “Did I ever tell you about my brother?”
“Bielebog?” Shadow walked to the center of the ash-stained carpet. He went down on his knees. “You said you hadn’t seen him in a long time.”
“Yes,” said the old man, raising the hammer. “It has been a long winter, boy. A very long winter. But the winter is ending, now.” And he shook his head, slowly, as if he were remembering something. And he said, “Close your eyes.”
Shadow closed his eyes and raised his head, and he waited.
The head of the sledgehammer was cold, icy cold, and it touched his forehead as gently as a kiss.
“Pock! There,” said Czernobog. “Is done.” There was a smile on his face that Shadow had never seen before, an easy, comfortable smile, like sunshine on a summer’s day. The old man walked over to the case, and he put the hammer away, and closed the bag, and pushed it back under the sideboard.
“Czernobog?” asked Shadow. Then, “Are you Czernobog?”
“Yes. For today,” said the old man. “By tomorrow, it will all be Bielebog. But today, is still Czernobog.”
“Then why? Why didn’t you kill me when you could?”
The old man took out an unfiltered cigarette from a pack in his pocket. He took a large box of matches from the mantelpiece and lit the cigarette with a match. He seemed deep in thought. “Because,” said the old man, after some time, “there is blood. But there is also gratitude. And it has been a long, long winter.”
Shadow got to his feet. There were dusty patches on the knees of his jeans, where he had knelt, and he brushed the dust away.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” said the old man. “Next time you want to play checkers, you know where to find me. This time, I play white.”
“Thanks. Maybe I will,” said Shadow. “But not for a while.” He looked into the old man’s twinkling eyes, and he wondered if they had always been that cornflower shade of blue. They shook hands, and neither of them said goodbye.
Shadow kissed Zorya Utrennyaya on the cheek on his way out, and he kissed Zorya Vechernyaya on the back of her hand, and he took the stairs out of that place two at a time.
Postscript
Reykjavík in Iceland is a strange city, even for those who have seen many strange cities. It is a volcanic city—the heat for the city comes from deep underground.
There are tourists, but not as many of them as you might expect, not even in early July. The sun was shining, as it had shone for weeks now: it ceased shining for an hour or so in the small hours. There would be a dusky dawn of sorts between two and three in the morning, and then the day would begin once more.
The big tourist had walked most of Reykjavík that morning, listening to people talk in a language that had changed little in a thousand years. The natives here could read the ancient sagas as easily as they could read a newspaper. There was a sense of continuity on this island that scared him, and that he found desperately reassuring. He was very tired: the unending daylight had made sleep almost impossible, and he had sat in his hotel room through the whole long nightless night alternately reading a guidebook and Bleak House, a novel he had bought in an airport in the last few weeks, but which airport he could no longer remember. Sometimes, he had stared out of the window.
Finally the clock as well as the sun proclaimed it morning.
He bought a bar of chocolate at one of the many candy stores, walked the sidewalk, occasionally finding himself reminded of the volcanic nature of Iceland: he would turn a corner and notice, for a moment, a sulphurous quality to the air. It put him in mind not of Hades but of rotten eggs.
Many of the women he passed were very beautiful: slender and pale. The kind of women that Wednesday had liked. Shadow wondered what could have attracted Wednesday to Shadow’s mother, who had been beautiful but had been neither of those things.
Shadow smiled at the pretty women, because they made him feel pleasantly male, and he smiled at the other women too, because he was having a good time.
He was not sure when he became aware that he was being observed. Somewhere on his walk through Reykjavík he became certain that someone was watching him. He would turn, from time to time, trying to get a glimpse of who it was, and he would stare into store windows and out at the reflected street behind him, but he saw no one out of the ordinary, no one who seemed to be observing him.
He went into a small restaurant, where he ate smoked puffin and cloudberries and arctic char and boiled potatoes, and he drank Coca-Cola, which tasted sweeter, more sugary than he remembered it tasting back in the States.
The waiter brought his bill—the meal was more expensive than Shadow had expected, but that seemed to be true of meals in every place on Shadow’s wandering. As the waiter put the bill down on the table, he said, “Excuse me. You are American?”
“Yes.”
“Then, happy Fourth of July,” said the waiter. He looked pleased with himself.
Shadow had not realized that it was the Fourth. Independence Day. Yes. He liked the idea of independence. He left the money and a tip on the table, and walked outside. There was a cool breeze coming in off the Atlantic, and he buttoned up his coat.
He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.
He pulled out his book.
An old man came striding across the hillside toward him: he wore a dark gray cloak, ragged at the bottom, as if he had done a lot of traveling, and he wore a broad-brimmed blue hat, with a seagull feather tucked into the band, at a jaunty angle. He looked like an aging hippie, thought Shadow. Or a long-retired gunfighter. The old man was ridiculously tall.
The man squatted beside Shadow on the hillside. He nodded, curtly, to Shadow. He had a piratical black eye patch over one eye, and a jutting white chin-beard. Shadow wondered if the man was going to hit him up for a cigarette.
“Hvernig gengur? Manst Þú eftir mér?” said the old man.
“I’m sorry,” said Shadow. “I don’t speak Icelandic.” Then he said, awkwardly, the phrase he had learned from his phrase book in the daylight of the small hours of that morning: “Ég tala bara ensku.” I speak only English. “American.”
The old man nodded slowly. He said, “My people went from here to America a long time ago. They went there, and then they returned to Iceland. They said it was a good place for men, but a bad place for gods. And without their gods they felt too…alone.” His English was fluent, but the pauses and the beats of the sentence were strange. Shadow looked at him: close-up, the man seemed older than Shadow had imagined possible. His skin was lined with tiny wrinkles and cracks, like the cracks in granite.