by Neil Gaiman
There were two dots in the sky, immediately below the clouds: a small one and a larger one. A spatter of rain brushed her face in the morning wind.
A barefoot girl came out from the encampment, walking toward her. She stopped beside a tree, hitched up her skirts, and squatted. When she had finished, Easter hailed her. The girl walked over.
“Good morning, lady,” she said. “The battle will start soon now.” The tip of her pink tongue touched her scarlet lips. She had a black crow’s wing tied with leather onto her shoulder, a crow’s foot on a chain around her neck. Her arms were blue-tattooed with lines and patterns and intricate knots.
“How do you know?”
The girl grinned. “I am Macha, of the Morrigan. When war comes, I can smell it in the air. I am a war goddess, and I say, blood shall be spilled this day.”
“Oh,” said Easter. “Well. There you go.” She was watching the smaller dot in the sky as it tumbled down toward them, dropping like a rock.
“And we shall fight them, and we shall kill them, every one,” said the girl. “And we shall take their heads as trophies, and the crows shall have their eyes and their corpses.” The dot had become a bird, its wings outstretched, riding the gusty morning winds above them.
Easter cocked her head on one side. “Is that some hidden war goddess knowledge?” she asked. “The whole who’s-going-to-win thing? Who gets whose head?”
“No,” said the girl. “I can smell the battle, but that’s all. But we’ll win. Won’t we? We have to. I saw what they did to the All-Father. It’s them or us.”
“Yeah,” said Easter. “I suppose it is.”
The girl smiled again, in the half-light, and made her way back to the camp. Easter put her hand down and touched a green shoot that stabbed up from the earth like a knife blade. As she touched it it grew, and opened, and twisted, and changed, until she was resting her hand on a green tulip head. When the sun was high the flower would open.
Easter looked up at the hawk. “Can I help you?” she said.
The hawk circled about fifteen feet above Easter’s head, slowly, then it glided down to her, and landed on the ground nearby. It looked up at her with mad eyes.
“Hello, cutie,” she said. “Now, what do you really look like, eh?”
The hawk hopped toward her, uncertainly, and then it was no longer a hawk, but a young man. He looked at her, and then looked down at the grass. “You?” he said. His glance went everywhere, to the grass, to the sky, to the bushes. Not to her.
“Me,” she said. “What about me?”
“You.” He stopped. He seemed to be trying to muster his thoughts; strange expressions flitted and swam across his face. He spent too long a bird, she thought. He has forgotten how to be a man. She waited patiently. Eventually, he said, “Will you come with me?”
“Maybe. Where do you want me to go?”
“The man on the tree. He needs you. A ghost hurt, in his side. The blood came, then it stopped. I think he is dead.”
“There’s a war on. I can’t just go running away.”
The naked man said nothing, just moved from one foot to another as if he were uncertain of his weight, as if he were used to resting on the air or on a swaying branch, not on the solid earth. Then he said, “If he is gone forever, it is all over.”
“But the battle—“
“If he is lost, it will not matter who wins.” He looked like he needed a blanket, and a cup of sweet coffee, and someone to take him somewhere he could just shiver and babble until he got his mind back. He held his arms stiffly against his sides.
“Where is this? Nearby?”
He stared at the tulip plant, and shook his head. “Way away.”
“Well,” she said, “I’m needed here. And I can’t just leave. How do you expect me to get there? I can’t fly, like you, you know.”
“No,” said Horus. “You can’t.” Then he looked up, gravely, and pointed to the other dot that circled them, as it dropped from the darkening clouds, growing in size. “He can.”
Another several hours’ pointless driving, and by now Town hated the global positioning system almost as much as he hated Shadow. There was no passion in the hate, though. He had thought finding his way to the farm, to the great silver ash tree, had been hard; finding his way away from the farm was much harder. It did not seem to matter which road he took, which direction he drove down the narrow country lanes—the twisting Virginia back roads that must have begun, he was sure, as deer trails and cowpaths—eventually he would find himself passing the farm once more, and the hand-painted sign, ASH.
This was crazy, wasn’t it? He simply had to retrace his way, take a left turn for every right he had taken on his way here, a right turn for every left.
Only that was what he had done last time, and now here he was, back at the farm once more. There were heavy storm clouds coming in, it was getting dark fast, it felt like night, not morning, and he had a long drive ahead of him: he would never get to Chattanooga before afternoon at this rate.
His cell phone gave him only a No Service message. The fold-out map in the car’s glove compartments showed the main roads, all the interstates and the real highways, but as far as it was concerned nothing else existed.
Nor was there anyone around that he could ask. The houses were set back from the roads; there were no welcoming lights. Now the fuel gauge was nudging Empty. He heard a rumble of distant thunder, and a single drop of rain splashed heavily onto his windshield.
So when Town saw the woman, walking along the side of the road, he found himself smiling, involuntarily. “Thank God,” he said, aloud, and he drew up beside her. He thumbed down her window. “Ma’am? I’m sorry. I’m kind of lost. Can you tell me how to get to Highway Eighty-one from here?”
She looked at him through the open passenger-side window and said, “You know. I don’t think I can explain it. But I can show you, if you like.” She was pale, and her wet hair was long and dark.
“Climb in,” said Town. He didn’t even hesitate. “First thing, we need to buy some gas.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I needed a ride.” She got in. Her eyes were astonishingly blue. “There’s a stick here, on the seat,” she said, puzzled.
“Just throw it in the back. Where are you heading?” he asked. “Lady, if you can get me to a gas station, and back to a freeway, I’ll take you all the way to your own front door.”
She said, “Thank you. But I think I’m going farther than you are. If you can get me to the freeway, that will be fine. Maybe a trucker will give me a ride.” And she smiled, a crooked, determined smile. It was the smile that did it.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I can give you a finer ride than any trucker.” He could smell her perfume. It was heady and heavy, a cloying scent, like magnolias or lilacs, but he did not mind.
“I’m going to Georgia,” she said. “It’s a long way.”
“I’m going to Chattanooga. I’ll take you as far as I can.”
“Mm,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“They call me Mack,” said Mr. Town. When he was talking to women in bars, he would sometimes follow that up with “And the ones that know me really well call me Big Mack.” That could wait. With a long drive ahead of them, they would have many hours in each other’s company to get to know each other. “What’s yours?”
“Laura,” she told him.
“Well, Laura,” he said, “I’m sure we’re going to be great friends.”
The fat kid found Mr. World in the Rainbow Room—a walled section of the path, its window glass covered in clear plastic sheets of green and red and yellow film. He was walking impatiently from window to window, staring out, in turn, at a golden world, a red world, a green world. His hair was reddish-orange and close-cropped to his skull. He wore a Burberry raincoat.
The fat kid coughed. Mr. World looked up.
“Excuse me? Mister World?”
“Yes? Is everything on schedule?”
The fat kid’s mouth was
dry. He licked his lips, and said, “I’ve set up everything. I don’t have confirmation on the choppers.”
“The helicopters will be here when we need them.”
“Good,” said the fat kid. “Good.” He stood there, not saying anything, not going away. There was a bruise on his forehead.
After a while Mr. World said, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
A pause. The boy swallowed and nodded. “Something else,” he said. “Yes.”
“Would you feel more comfortable discussing it in private?”
The boy nodded again.
Mr. World walked with the kid back to his operations center: a damp cave containing a diorama of drunken pixies making moonshine with a still. A sign outside warned tourists away during renovations. The two men sat down on plastic chairs.
“How can I help you?” asked Mr. World.
“Yes. Okay. Right, two things, Okay. One. What are we waiting for? And two. Two is harder. Look. We have the guns. Right. We have the firepower. They have. They have fucking swords and knives and fucking hammers and stone axes. And like, tire irons. We have fucking smart bombs.”
“Which we will not be using,” pointed out the other man.
“I know that. You said that already. I know that. And that’s doable. But. Look, ever since I did the job on that bitch in L.A., I’ve been . . .” He stopped, made a face, seemed unwilling to go on.
“You’ve been troubled?”
“Yes. Good word. Troubled. Yes. Like a home for troubled teens. Funny. Yes.”
“And what exactly is troubling you?”
“Well, we fight, we win.”
“And that is a source of trouble? I find it a matter of triumph and delight, myself.”
“But. They’ll die out anyway. They are passenger pigeons and thylacines. Yes? Who cares? This way, it’s going to be a bloodbath.”
“Ah.” Mr. World nodded.
He was following. That was good. The fat kid said, “Look, I’m not the only one who feels this way. I’ve checked with the crew at Radio Modern, and they’re all for settling this peacefully; and the intangibles are pretty much in favor of letting market forces take care of it. I’m being. You know. The voice of reason here.”
“You are indeed. Unfortunately, there is information you do not have.” The smile that followed was twisted and scarred.
The boy blinked. He said, “Mister World? What happened to your lips?”
World sighed. “The truth of the matter,” he said, “is that somebody once sewed them together. A long time ago.”
“Whoa,” said the fat kid. “Serious omertà shit.”
“Yes. You want to know what we’re waiting for? Why we didn’t strike last night?”
The fat kid nodded. He was sweating, but it was a cold sweat.
“We didn’t strike yet, because I’m waiting for a stick.”
“A stick?”
“That’s right. A stick. And do you know what I’m going to do with the stick?”
A head shake. “Okay. I’ll bite. What?”
“I could tell you,” said Mr. World, soberly. “But then I’d have to kill you.” He winked, and the tension in the room evaporated.
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.
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 flock of brightly colored birds and 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 always 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,” in 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. Never a word of it is literally true. Even so, the next thing that happened, happened like this:
At the foot of Lookout Mountain men and women were gathered around a small bonfire in the rain. They were standing beneath the trees, which provided poor cover, and they were arguing.
The lady Kali, with her ink-black skin and her 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 mustache, 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 s
uit, 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. 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.”
“Let me be. I got what I wanted. I’m done.”
