American Gods (17 page)

“I sent the message out to everyone I could find,” said
Wednesday. “Obviously not everyone is going to be able to come. And some of
them,” with a pointed look at Czer-nbbog, “might not want to. But I think we
can confidently expect several dozen of us. And the word will travel.”

They made their way past a display of suits of armor (“Victorian
fake,” pronounced Wednesday as they passed the glassed-in display, “modern
fake, twelfth-century helm on a seventeenth-century reproduction,
fifteenth-century left gauntlet ...”) and then Wednesday pushed through an exit
door, circled them around the outside of the building (“I can’t be doin’ with
all these ins and outs,” said Nancy, “I’m not as young as I used to be, and I
come from warmer climes”) along a covered walkway, in through another exit
door, and they were in the carousel room.

Calliope music played: a Strauss waltz, stirring and occasionally
discordant. The wall as they entered was hung with antique carousel horses,
hundreds of them, some in need of a lick of paint, others in need of a good
dusting; above them hung dozens of winged angels constructed rather obviously
from female store-window mannequins; some of them bared their sexless breasts;
some had lost their wigs and stared baldly and blindly down from the darkness.

And then there was the carousel.

A sign proclaimed it was the largest in the world, said how
much it weighed, how many thousand lightbulbs were to be found in the
chandeliers that hung from it in Gothic profusion, and forbade anyone from
climbing on it or from riding on the animals.

And such animals! Shadow stared, impressed in spite of himself,
at the hundreds of full-sized creatures who circled on the platform of the
carousel. Real creatures, imaginary creatures, and transformations of the two:
each creature was different. He saw mermaid and merman, ijentaur and unicorn,
elephants (one huge, one tiny), bulldog, frog and phoenix, zebra, tiger,
manticore and basilisk, swans pulling a carriage, a white ox, a fox, twin
walruses, even a sea serpent, all of them brightly colored and more than real:
each rode the platform as the waltz came to an end and a new waltz began. The
carousel did not even slow down.

“What’s it for?” asked Shadow. “I mean, okay, world’s biggest,
hundreds of animals, thousands of lightbulbs, and it goes around all the time,
and no one ever rides it.”

“It’s not there to be ridden, not by people,” said
Wednesday. “It’s there to be admired. It’s there to be.”

“Like a prayer wheel goin’ around and round,” said Mr.
Nancy. “Accumulating power.”

“So where are we meeting everyone?” asked Shadow. “I thought
you said that we were meeting them here. But the place is empty.”

Wednesday grinned his scary grin. “Shadow,” he said. “You’re
asking too many questions. You are not paid to ask questions.”

“Sorry.”

“Now, stand over here and help us up,” said Wednesday, and
he walked over to the platform on one side, with a description of the carousel
on it, and a warning that the carousel was not to be ridden.

Shadow thought of saying something, but instead he helped
them, one by one, up onto the ledge. Wednesday seemed profoundly heavy,
Czernobog climbed up himself, only using Shadow’s shoulder to steady himself,
Nancy seemed to weigh nothing at all. Each of the old men climbed out onto the
ledge, and then, with a step and a hop, they walked out onto the circling carousel
platform.

“Well?” barked Wednesday. “Aren’t you coming?”

Shadow, not without a certain amount of hesitation, and a
hasty look around for any House on the Rock personnel who might be watching,
swung himself up onto the ledge beside the World’s Largest Carousel. Shadow was
amused, and a little puzzled, to realize that he was far more concerned about
breaking the rules by climbing onto the carousel than he had been aiding and
abetting this afternoon’s bank robbery.

Each of the old men selected a mount. Wednesday climbed onto
a golden wolf. Czernobog climbed onto an armored centaur, its face hidden by a
metal helmet. Nancy, chuckling, slithered up onto the back of an enormous,
leaping lion, captured by the sculptor mid-roar. He patted the side of the
lion. The Strauss waltz carried them around, majestically.

Wednesday was smiling, and Nancy was laughing delightedly,
an old man’s cackle, and even the dour Czernobog seemed to be enjoying himself.
Shadow felt as if a weight were suddenly lifted from his back: three old men
were enjoying themselves, riding the World’s Largest Carousel. So what if they
all did get thrown out of the place? Wasn’t it worth it, worth anything, to say
that you had ridden on the World’s Largest Carousel? Wasn’t it worth it to have
traveled on one of those glorious monsters?

Shadow inspected a bulldog, and a mer-creature, and an elephant
with a golden howdah, and then he climbed on the back of a creature with an
eagle’s head and the body of a tiger, and held on tight.

The rhythm of the “Blue Danube” waltz rippled and rang and
sang in his head, the lights of a thousand chandeliers glinted and prismed, and
for a heartbeat Shadow was a child again, and all it took to make him happy was
to ride the carousel: he stayed perfectly still, riding his eagle-tiger at the
center of everything, and the world revolved around him.

Shadow heard himself laugh, over the souBd of the music. He
was happy. It was as if the last thirtysix hours had never happened, as if the
last three years had not happened, as if his life had evaporated into the
daydream of a small child, riding the carousel in Golden Gate Park in San
Francisco, on his first trip back to the States, a marathon journey by ship and
by car, his mother standing there, watching him proudly, and himself sucking
his melting Popsicle, holding on tightly, hoping that the music would never
stop, the carousel would never slow, the ride would never end. He was going
around and around and around again ...

Then the lights went out, and Shadow saw the gods.

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,

And through them passes a wild motley throng.

Men from Volga and Tartar steppes.

Featureless figures from the Hoang-ho,

Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt and Slav,

Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn;

These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,

Those tiger passions here to stretch their claws,

In street and alley what strange tongues are these,

Accents of menace in our ear,

Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew.

—Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “The Unguarded Gates,” 1882

One moment Shadow was riding the World’s Largest Carousel,
holding on to his eagle-headed tiger, and then the red and white lights of the
carousel stretched and shivered and went out, and he was falling through an
ocean of stars, while the mechanical waltz was replaced by a pounding rhythmic
roll and crash, as of cymbals or the breakers on the shores of a far ocean.

The only light was starlight, but it illuminated everything
with a cold clarity. Beneath him his mount stretched and padded, its warm fur
under his left hand, its feathers beneath his right.

“It’s a good ride, isn’t it?” The voice came from behind
him, in his ears and in his mind.

Shadow turned, slowly, streaming images of himself as he
moved, frozen moments, each him captured in a fraction of a second, every tiny
movement lasting for an infinite period. The images that reached his mind made
no sense: it was like seeing the world through the multifaceted jeweled eyes of
a dragonfly, but each facet saw something completely different, and he was
unable to combine the things he was seeing, or thought he was seeing, into a
whole that made any sense.

He was looking at Mr. Nancy, an old black man with a pencil
mustache, in his check sports jacket and his lemon-yellow gloves, riding a
carousel lion as it rose and lowered, high in the air; and, at the same time,
in the same place, he saw a jeweled spider as high as a horse, its eyes an
emerald nebula, strutting, staring down at him; and simultaneously he was looking
at an extraordinarily tall man with teak-colored skin and three sets of arms,
wearing a flowing ostrich-feather headdress, his face painted with red stripes,
riding an irritated golden lion, two of his six hands holding on tightly to the
beast’s mane; and he was also-seeing a young black boy, dressed in rags, his
left foot all swollen and crawling with blackflies; and last of all, and behind
all these things, Shadow was looking at a tiny brojlvn spider, hiding under a
withered ocher leaf.

Shadow saw all these things, and he knew they were the same
thing.

“If you don’t close your mouth,” said the many things that
were Mr. Nancy, “somethin’s goin’ to fly in there.”

Shadow closed his mouth and swallowed, hard.

There was a wooden hall on a bill, a mile or so from them.
They were trotting toward the hall, their mounts’ hooves and feet padding
noiselessly on the dry sand at the sea’s edge.

Czernobog trotted up on his centaur. He tapped the human arm
of his mount. “None of this is truly happening,” he said to Shadow. He sounded
miserable. “Is all in your head. Best not to think of it.”

Shadow saw a gray-haired old Eastern-European immigrant,
with a shabby raincoat and one iron-colored tooth, true. But he also saw a
squat black thing, darker than the darkness that surrounded them, its eyes two
burning coals; and he saw a prince, with long flowing black hair and a long
black mustache, blood on his hands and his face, riding, naked but for a bear
skin over his shoulder, on a creature half-man, half-beast, his face and torso
blue-tattooed with swirls and spirals.

“Who are you?” asked Shadow. “What are you?”

Their mounts padded along the shore. Waves broke and crashed
implacably on the night beach.

Wednesday guided his wolf—now a huge and charcoal-gray beast
with green eyes—over to Shadow. Shadow’s mount caracoled away from it, and
Shadow stroked its neck and told it not to be afraid. Its tiger tail swished,
aggressively. It occurred to Shadow that there was another wolf, a twin to the
one that Wednesday was riding, keeping pace with them in the sand dunes, just a
moment out of sight.

“Do you know me, Shadow?” said Wednesday. He rode his wolf
with his head high. His right eye glittered and flashed, his left eye was dull.
He wore a cloak with a deep, monklike cowl, and his face stared out from the
shadows. “I told you I would tell you my names. This is what they call me. I am
called Glad-of-War, Grim, Raider, and Third. I am One-Eyed. I am called
Highest, and True-Guesser. I am Grimnir, and I am the Hooded One. I am All-Father,
and I am Gondlir Wand-Bearer. I have as many names as there are winds, as many
titles as there are ways to die. My ravens are Huginn and Muninn, Thought and
Memory; my wolves are Freki and Geri; my horse is the gallows.” Two
ghostly-gray ravens, like transparent skins of birds, landed on Wednesday’s
shoulders, pushed their beaks into the side of Wednesday’s head as if tasting
his mind, and flapped out into the world once more.

What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came
back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe
everything.

“Odin?” said Shadow, and the wind whipped the word from his
lips.

“Odin,” whispered Wednesday, and the crash of the breakers
on the beach of skulls was not loud enough to drown that whisper. “Odin,” said
Wednesday, tasting the sound of the words in his mouth. “Odin,” said Wednesday,
his voice a triumphant shout that echoed from horizon to horizon. His name
swelled and grew and filled the world like the pounding of blood in Shadow’s ears.

And then, as in a dream, they were no longer riding toward a
distant hall. They were already there, and their mounts were tied in the
shelter beside the hall.

The hall was huge but primitive. The roof was thatched, the
walls were wooden. There was a fire/tburning in the center of the hall, and the
smoke stung Shadows-eyes.

“We should have done this in my mind, not in his,” muttered
Mr. Nancy to Shadow. “It would have been warmer there.”

“We’re in his mind?”

“More or less. This is Valaskjalf. It’s hi old hall.”

Shadow was relieved to see that Nancy was now once more an
old man wearing yellow gloves, although his shadow shook and shivered and
changed in the flames of the fire, and what it changed into was not always
entirely human.

There were wooden benches against the walls, and, sitting on
them or standing beside them, perhaps ten people. They kept their distance from
each other: a mixed lot, who included a dark-skinned, matronly woman in a red
sari, several shabby-looking businessmen, and others, too close to the fire for
Shadow to be able to make them out.

“Where are they?” whispered Wednesday fiercely, to Nancy. “Well?
Where are they? There should be dozens of us here. Scores!”

“You did all the inviting,” said Nancy. “I think it’s a
wonder you got as many here as you did. You think I should tell a story, to
start things off?”

Wednesday shook his head. “Out of the question.”

“They don’t look very friendly,” said Nancy. “A story’s a
good way of gettin’ someone on your side. And you don’t have a bard to sing to
them.”

“No stories,” said Wednesday. “Not now. Later, there will be
time for stories. Not now.”

“No stories. Right. I’ll just be the warm-up man.” And Mr.
Nancy strode out into the firelight with an easy smile.

“I know what you are all thinkin’,” he said, “You are
thinking, What is Compe Anansi doin’, comin’ out to talk to you all, when the
All-Father called you all here, just like he called me here? Well, you know,
sometimes people need re-mindin’ of things. I look around when I come in, and I
thought, where’s the rest of us? But then I thought, just because we are few
and they are many, we are weak, and they are powerful, it does not mean that we
are lost.