American Gods (53 page)

Chad looked at Shadow, then at the deputy. He said to the deputy,
quietly, but loudly enough for Shadow to hear, “Look. I just want to say, I’m
not comfortable with the way this is happening.”

The deputy nodded. “You’ll have to take it up with the appropriate
authorities, sir. Our job is simply to bring him in.”

Chad made a sour face. He turned to Shadow. “Okay,” said
Chad. “Through that door and into the sally port.”

“What?”

“Out there. Where the car is.”

Liz unlocked the doors. “You make sure that orange uniform
comes right back here,” she said to the deputy. “The last felon we sent down to
Lafayette, we never saw the uniform again. They cost the county money.” They
walked Shadow out to the sally port, where a car sat idling. It wasn’t a
sheriff’s department car. It was a black town car. Another deputy, a grizzled
white guy with a mustache, stood by the car, smoking a cigarette. He crushed it
out underfoot as they came close, and opened the back door for Shadow.

Shadow sat down, awkwardly, his movements hampered by the
cuffs and the hobble. There was no grille between the back and the front of the
car.

The two deputies climbed into the front of the car. The
black deputy started the motor. They waited for the sally port door to open.

“Come on, come on,” said the black deputy, his fingers drumming
against the steering wheel.

Chad Mulligan tapped on the side windqw. The white deputy
glanced at the driver, then he Iqwergd-the window. “This is wrong,” said Chad. “I
just wanted to say that.”

“Your comments have been noted, and will be conveyed to the
appropriate authorities,” said the driver.

The doors to the outside world openeo. The snow was still falling,
dizzying into the car’s headlights. The driver put his foot on the gas, and
they were heading back down the street and on to Main Street.

“You heard about Wednesday?” said the driver. His voice
sounded different, now, older, and familiar. “He’s dead.”

“Yeah. I know,” said Shadow. “I saw it on TV.”

“Those fuckers,” said the white officer. It was the first
thing he had said, and his voice was rough and accented and, like the driver’s,
it was a voice that Shadow knew. “I tell you, they are fuckers, those fuckers.”

“Thanks for coming to get me,” said Shadow.

“Don’t mention it,” said the driver. In the light of an
oncoming car his face already seemed to look older. He looked smaller, too. The
last time Shadow had seen him he had been wearing lemon-yellow gloves and a
check jacket. “We were in Milwaukee. Had to drive like demons when Ibis called.”

“You think we let them lock you up and send you to the
chair, when I’m still waiting to break your head with my hammer?” asked the
white deputy gloomily, fumbling in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. His
accent was Eastern European.

“The real shit will hit the fan in an hour or less,” said
Mr. Nancy, looking more like himself with each moment, “when they really turn
up to collect you. We’ll pull over before we get to Highway 53 and get you out
of those shackles and back into your own clothes.” Czernobog held up a handcuff
key and smiled.

“I like the mustache,” said Shadow. “Suits you.”

Czernobog stroked it with a yellowed finger. “Thank you.”

“Wednesday,” said Shadow. “Is he really dead? This isn’t
some kind of trick, is it?”

He realized that he had been holding on to some kind of
hope, foolish though it was. But the expression on Nancy’s face told him all he
needed to know, and the hope was gone.

Cold it was, and dark, when the vision came to her, for in
the far north daylight was a gray dim time in the middle of the day that came,
and went, and came again: an interlude between darknesses.

They were not a large tribe as these things were counted
then: nomads of the Northern Plains. They had a god, who was the skull of a
mammoth, and the hide of a mammoth fashioned into a rough cloak. Nunyunnini, they
called him. When they were not traveling, he rested on a wooden frame, at man
height.

She was the holy woman of the tribe, the keeper of its
secrets, and her name was Atsula, the fox. Atsula walked before the two
tribesmen who carried their god on long poles, draped with bearskins, that it
should not be seen by profane eyes, nor at times when it was not holy.

They roamed the tundra, with their tents. The finest of the
tents was made of caribou hide, and it was the holy tent, and there were four
of them inside it: Atsula, the priestess, Gugwei, the tribal elder, Yanu, the
war leader, and Kalanu, the scout. She called them there, the day after she had
her vision.

Atsula scraped some lichen into the fire, then she threw in
dried leaves with her withered left hand: they smoked, with an eye-stinging
gray smoke, and gave off an odor that was sharp and strange. Then she took a
wooden cup from the wooden platform, and she passed it to Gugwei. The cup was
half filled with a dark yellow liquid.

Atsula had found the pungh mushrooms, each with seven spots,
only a true holy woman could find a seven-spotted mushroom—and had picked them
at the dark of the moon, and dried them on a string of deer cartilage.

Yesterday, before she slept, she had eaten the three dried
mushroom caps. Her dreams had been confused and fearful things, of bright
lights moving fast, of rock mountains filled with lights spearing upward like
icicles. In the night she had woken, sweating, and needing to make water. She
squatted over the wooden cup and filled it with her urine. Then she placed the
cup outside the tent, in the snow, and returned to sleep.

When she woke, she picked the lumps of ice out from the
wooden cup, leaving a darker, more concentrated liquid behind. It was this
liquid she passed around, first to Gugwei, then to Yanu and to Kalanu. Each of
them took a large gulp of the liquid, then Atsula took the final draft. She
swallowed it, and poured what was left on the ground in front of their god, a
libation to Nunyunnini.

They sat in the smoky tent, waiting for their god to speak.
Outside, in the darkness, the wind wailed and breathed.

Kalanu, the scout, was a woman who dressed and walked as a
man: she had even taken Dalani, a fourteen-year-old maiden, to be her wife.
Kalanu blinked her eyes tightly, then she got up and walked over to the mammoth
skull. She pulled the mammoth-hide cloak over herself, and stood so her head
was inside the mammoth skull.

“There is evil in the land,” said Nunyunnini in Kalanu’s
voice. “Evil, such that if you stay here, in the land of your mothers and your
mother’s mothers, you shall all perish.”

The three listeners grunted.

“Is it the slavers? Or the great wolves?” asked Gugwei,
whose hair was long and white, and whose face was as wrinkled as the gray skin
of a thorn tree.

“It is not the slavers,” said Nunyunnini, old stone-hide. “It
is not the great wolves.”

“Is it a famine? Is a famine coming?” asked Gugwei.

Nunyunnini was silent. Kalanu came out of the skull and
waited with the rest of them.

Gugwei put on the mammoth-hide cloak and put his head inside
the skull.

“It is not a famine as you know it,” said Nunyunnini,
through Gugwei’s mouth, “although a famine will follow.”

“Then what is it?” asked Yanu. “I am not afraid. I will
stand against it. We have spears, and we have throwing rocks. Let a hundred
mighty warriors come against us, still we shall prevail. We shall lead them
into the marshes, and split their skulls with our flints.”

“It is not a man thing,” said Nunyunnini, in Gugwei’s old voice.
“It will come from the skies, and none of your spears or your rocks will
protect you.”

“How can we protect ourselves?” asked Atsula. “I have seen
flames in the skies. I have heard a noise louder than ten thunderbolts. I have
seen forests flattened and rivers boil.”

“Ai ...” said Nunyunnini, but he said no more. Gugwei came
out of the skull, bending stiffly, for he was an old man, and his knuckles were
swollen and knotted.

There was silence. Atsula threw more leaves on the fire, and
the smoke made their eyes tear.

Then Yanu strode to the mammoth head, put the cloak about
his broad shoulders, put his head inside the skull. His voice boomed. “You must
journey,” said Nunyunnini. “You must travel to sunward. Where the sun rises,
there you will find a new land, where you will be safe. It will be a long
journey: the moon will swell and empty, die and live, twice, and there will be
slavers and beasts, but I shall guide you and keep you safe, if you travel toward
the sunrise.”

Atsula spat on the mud of the floor, and said, “No.” She could
feel the god staring at her. “No,” she said,, “You are a bad god to tell us
this. We will die. We will all dje, and then who will be left to carry you from
high place to high place, to raise your tent, to oil your great tusks with fat?”

The god said nothing. Atsula and Yanu exchanged places.
Atsula’s face stared out through the yellowed mammoth bone.

“Atsula has no faith,” said Nunyunnini in Atsula’s voice. “Atsula
shall die before the rest of you enter the new land, but the rest of you shall
live. Trust me: there is a land to the east that is manless. This land shall be
your land and the land of your children and your children’s children, for seven
generations, and seven sevens. But for Atsula’s faithlessness, you would have
kept it forever. In the morning, pack your tents and your possessions, and walk
toward the sunrise.”

And Gugwei and Yanu and Kalanu bowed their heads and exclaimed
at the power and wisdom of Nunyunnini.

The moon swelled and waned and swelled and waned once more.
The people of the tribe walked east, toward the sunrise, struggling through the
icy winds, which numbed their exposed skin. Nunyunnini had promised them truly:
they lost no one from the tribe on the journey, save for a woman in childbirth,
and women in childbirth belong to the moon, not to Nunyunnini.

They crossed the land bridge.

Kalanu had left them at first light to scout the way. Now
the sky was dark, and Kalanu had not returned, but the night sky was alive with
lights, knotting and flickering and winding, flux and pulse, white and green
and violet and red. At-sula and her people had seen the northern lights before,
but they were still frightened by them, and this was a display like they had
never seen before.

Kalanu returned to them, as the lights in the sky formed and
flowed.

“Sometimes,” she said to Atsula, “I feel that I could simply
spread my arms and fall into the sky.”

‘That is because you are a scout,” said Atsula, the
priestess. “When you die, you shall fall into the sky and become a star, to
guide us as you guide us in life.”

“There are cliffs of ice to the east, high cliffs,” said
Kalanu, her raven-black hair worn long, as a man would wear it. “We can climb
them, but it will take many days.”

“You shall lead us safely,” said Atsula. “I shall die at the
foot of the cliff, and that shall be the sacrifice that takes you into the new
lands.”

To the west of them, back in the lands from which they had
come, where the sun had set hours before, there was a flash of sickly yellow
light, brighter than lightning, brighter than daylight. It was a burst of pure
brilliance that forced the folk on the land bridge to cover their eyes and spit
and exclaim. Children began to wail.

“That is the doom that Nunyunnini warned us of,” said Gugwei
the old. “Surely he is a wise god and a mighty one.”

“He is the best of all gods,” said Kalanu. “In our new land
we shall raise him up on high, and we shall polish his tusks and skull with
fish oil and animal fat, and we shall tell our children, and our children’s
children and our seventh children’s children, that Nunyunnini is the mightiest
of all gods, and shall never be forgotten.”

“Gods are great,” said Atsula, slowly, as if she were
imparting a great secret. “But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts
they come, and to our hearts they shall return ...”

And there is no telling how long she might have continued in
this blasphemy, had it not been interrupted in a manner that brooked no
argument.

The roar that erupted from the west was so loud that ears
bled, that the people could hear nothing for some time, temporarily blinded and
deafened but alive, knowing that they were luckier than the tribes to the west
of them.

“It is good,” said Atsula, but she could not hear the words
inside her head.

Atsula died at the foot of the cliffs when the spring sun
was at its zenith. She did not live to see the New World, and the tribe walked
into those lands with no holy woman.

They scaled the cliffs, and they went south and west, until
they found a valley with fresh water, and rivers that teemed with silver fish,
and deer that hail never seen man before and were so tame it was necessary to
spit and to apologize to their spirits before killing them.

Dalani gave birth to three boys, and some said that Kalanu
had performed the final magic and could do the man-thing with her bride; while
others said that old Gugwei was not too old to keep a young bride company when
her husband was away; and certainly once Gugwei died, Dalani had no more
children.

And the ice times came and the ice times went, and the
people spread out across the land, and formed new tribes and chose new totems:
ravens and foxes and ground sloths and great cats and buffalo, each a beast
that marked a tribe’s identity, each beast a god.

The mammoths of the new lands were bigger, and slower, and
more foolish than the mammoth of the Siberian plains, and the pungh mushrooms,
with their seven spots, were not to be found in the new lands, and Nunyunnini
did not speak to the tribe any longer.

And in the days of the grandchildren of Dalani and Kalanu’s
grandchildren, a band of warriors, members of a big and prosperous tribe,
returning from a slaving expedition in the north to their home in the south,
found the valley of the first people: they killed most of the men, and they
took the women and many of the children captive.