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  Royce was tried as an adult, and by his eighteenth birthday had moved to Huntsville. He shared a cell with an enormous Samoan, and the two didn't exactly become the best of friends. Those first weeks were the roughest on him, I think, all alone and mixed in with every enemy of the white man he could imagine, and all of them coming after him. Then he met another skinhead in the yard and was invited to join the Church of Odin. It was all downhill from there.

  As near as I've been able to tell from reading between the lines of Royce's story, groups like the Church of Odin are not all that uncommon. Some enterprising convict at some point in the recent past realized that religious groups are afforded rights and privileges not given the mass of prisoners. The simplest thing in the world, then, would be to start a religion. Soon it was all the rage. There was the Church of Wicca, the Moorish Science Temple, the Sons of Aztlan and New Nation of Islam. And there was the Church of Odin.

  All these jokers would do, as Royce tells it, was to "conduct gang activity". What that means I don't know, unless it is to tattoo each other and plan how to beat other gangs senseless. Nevertheless, I guess the color television wasn't enough to hold the skinheads' interest, so it was church time and pagan prayer meetings instead.

  Royce was approached like every other inmate of suitable ethnic makeup. A member of the Church came up to him in the exercise yard and told him that his white brothers had formed a church, and that if he alerted the guards he would be escorted from his cell and to meetings at designated times. The word "Odin" was mentioned, Royce remembered, and that was about it. Young, bruised and impressionable, Royce agreed.

  What happened next is, I believe, the thing that slowly turned Royce from a rather dull-minded thug to an intellectually eager lunatic. When next his cell block was taken to the library to select reading material, while the others all gravitated to lawbooks to help them bolster up their flagging appeals, Royce hit the card catalogue and looked up "ODIN". He came up with a children's book, The Children of Odin by Padraic Colum, which he took back to his cell and read straight through, cover to cover, over the next three days. Then he read it again. And again. And when it came time to go back to the library the following week, he checked it out again, along with a copy of Myths of the Norsemen, one of The Lives of the Norse Kings, a large picture book called D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths, and a collection of Norse Eddas. Slowly his reading speed increased, as did his comprehension, and as they did he would go back and read the books again and again.

  Meanwhile the Church of Odin continued their meetings. While the guards were in ear shot, they called upon their Viking god to grant them strength, to protect them in times of torment, and to strike down their enemies, but when the guards wandered away it was back to how to smash the Mexican Mafia, or stick it to the Crips, all in hoarse, whispered tones. Royce sat quietly in the back, the Colum book in his lap, and became increasingly confused. He was starting to understand something, was stepping up to a precipice of belief, and he was beginning to feel like he was all alone.

  Finally, he couldn't take it any more. When one of the more experienced Church members was instructing a newbie on the proper manufacture and care of a shiv, Royce leapt from his folding chair and held his book high in the air.

  "Blasphemy," he shouted, his voice breaking. "This is blasphemy."

  Slowly, as one, the others turned to look at him.

  "What the fuck?" the shiv coach muttered, his eyes narrowing.

  "You call yourselves sons of Odin, but you don't understand anything about him! Odin didn't just come for us, for the Aryan." Royce took a deep breath, and plowed on. "Odin hung himself from the World Ash for the sake of all mankind, and the runes he won were given to all the children of man. If this is really Odin's church, we should let anyone in…. We should invite them in: Mexican, black, Chinese…"

  The air in the room seemed to drop ten degrees as he spoke, and the others started to climb slowly out of their chairs.

  "What the fuck?" the skinhead at the front repeated.

  "Odin is the All Father of All," Royce went on. "You… you're just a bunch of bigots."

  There was a long pause, as Royce tells it, when they all just looked at him, over a dozen of them, their eyes wide, their mouths hanging open. Then, without a signal or sign, they all rushed forward and proceeded to beat the living shit out of him.

  His remaining years in prison, Royce kept apart from the other skinheads as much as possible. Everyone else, for the most part, kept pretty much apart from him, too. They learned early on that the chance to knock his face in wasn't nearly worth having to listen to him talk about the glory of Odin while they did it. Through it all, Royce's strength in his new-found religion grew stronger and stronger, and became in the end unbreakable.

  Finally, the parole board agreed that Royce had met the terms set for his early release. They glossed over his occasional outburst on the Norse gods, choosing instead to note simply that he had "undergone a religious conversion" while incarcerated. Royce Crayton was released back into society, his only possessions a battered bomber jacket, a key to a house that had burned to the ground years before, and a battered copy of The Children of Odin that had been given to him by the prison librarian when the cover had finally fallen off.

  Older, wiser, and without a doubt nuttier than a fruitcake, Royce began his mission: to bring to the world the Good News of Odin.

  The evening wore on, and all but the most committed drinkers filtered out in ones and twos, leaving in the end only a half-dozen of us in the place. After seeing that everyone's beverage needs had been seen to, Royce came around to the front of the bar and found a seat next to me. Resting his elbows on the counter-top, he fingered a little necklace he wore, a four-armed cross banded by a circle that seemed somehow familiar.

  "So, Brother Spencer," he began in that loud, everywhere-at-once voice of his, "do you really want to know about the All Father, or are you just making fun of me?"

  I put on my best wounded look and tried to seem offended.

  "What? Me?" I gasped. "Make fun of you? You must have me confused with someone else."

  Royce looked at me from under his thick eyebrows and set his mouth in a line.

  "Someday," he said, "you're going to find yourself running headlong into something you'll have no choice but to believe in."

  "Sure," I said. "Like a brick wall." I lit a cigarette and blew out a cloud of gray smoke that hung about his head like a halo. "No, seriously. I'm working on a story and the 'northern mysteries' came up, and I was hoping you could answer a few questions about them."

  "Such as?" Royce pulled his tall beer over close, and took a long draw.

  "What are they?"

  He laughed, a thick, deep in the chest laugh, and clapped a hand on my shoulder.

  "As many times as I've tried to make you listen to the truth, and now you come looking for it."

  "Something like that."

  "Well, you've come just in time. On Friday I leave for Graceland. My annual pilgrimage." Somehow Royce had managed to work Elvis into his whole cosmology, something about how he was the ideal Nordic man or some such. I tried briefly to imagine the King all done up with a spear and magic helmet, but the image just didn't take.

  "You realize," Royce continued, "that you're not asking a simple question here. Suppose I were to ask you to sum up Christianity for me? How easily could you do that?"

  "Old Southern guys talking too slow, and uncomfortable pews. Oh, and collection plates. How's that?"

  Royce shook his head at me and took another drink of his beer.

  "Okay, okay," I said. "There was also something about a one-eyed god. What's that all about?"

  "I'm sorry, do I know you?" Royce said. "Have we met before? You can't be the Spencer Finch I know, because I'm sure I've told him all about this a thousand times before."

  "Right, I know all about it. I've been listening. You're a self-ordained minister of Odin–"

  "Gothi," Royce interrupted.


  "Pardon?"

  "I prefer the term Gothi. It means priest, more or less. The correct term of address is Gothi Royce."

  "O-kay," I answered slowly. "You're a… Gothi… for Odin, which as near as I can divine means a One Man Watchtower of Norse Mythology."

  "Not mythology," Royce corrected. "That's insulting. It implies a dead faith, a matter only of interest to historians and psychologists. It's a religion, pure and simple."

  "Sorry."

  "No offense taken," he answered, and then drew himself up straight on his stool. "The oneeyed god is Odin himself, the All Father, the Truth-Finder, the Changeable One. He plucked out his own eye to trade to the dwarf Mimir for wisdom, and then hung himself on the World Ash to gain knowledge of the runes. He created the heaven and the earth, and peopled it with man and the animals. He built the shining city of gold for the gods of the Aesir, and waits in patience for the final battle with the Giants to come. He–"

  "Whoa, whoa," I interrupted, taking a note pad from my jacket pocket and uncapping my pen. "Slow down. I didn't get anything after he pulled out his own eyeball."

  "Sorry," Royce answered, a bit sheepishly. "I tend to get over-enthused. Let me try it again, more slowly this time."

  And he did.

  It took close to an hour and two pitchers of beer, but by the time Royce was done I had a pretty good idea what this Odin character was all about. He seemed at first the standard mythological Big Man in the Sky, close cousin to Zeus, and Jehovah, and Santa Claus, but the more Royce got into it the stranger it became. Whereas the other old guys with beards tended to just sit up on their porcelain thrones and make with the thunderbolts, Odin had to work and sweat for his position. At least, that's the way Royce told it.

  The gods, or the "Aesir" as Royce called them, seemed pretty much just regular folks. They had kids, held jobs, got feeble and eventually died. In between, though, came the magic swords and the flying chariots and the horses with eight legs. Other than that, old Asgard sounded like your average everyday trailer park, with silver shields everywhere instead of aluminum siding.

  The head guy, the oldest of the gods, was Odin. In the beginning, it seems like he had the job purely on the basis of seniority. He'd been at the plant longer than anybody else, and the divine union appeared to take care of their own. That just wasn't enough for Odin, though, so he started looking for something else. Putting on some grungy clothes and a floppy hat, he went down to the mortal world and commenced to rambling. More than anything else, it seems, he wanted to be wise.

  The first thing he did, the thing that had caught me in my tracks earlier in Royce's spiel, was trade his right eye for supernatural wisdom to some twisted old fart who lived under a big tree. Never mind why the twisted old fart didn't just use all that wisdom to make himself the head man; maybe he just wanted the eyes. Odin walked away a little worse for wear, never able to enjoy a 3D movie again, but he had the wisdom of the ages.

  But it just wasn't enough to our boy Odin. He always needed more, like a junkie hooked on forbidden lore. By this point, normal folks walking around on the earth had started stringing each other up to the greater glory of Odin, in hopes that he would grant special knowledge to them. Odin, seeing this as a good enough plan, decided to take it one step further. He decided to sacrifice himself to Odin.

  Royce seemed to ignore the practical problems of sacrificing yourself to yourself, so I decided to ignore it too. Either way, when he was done, there wasn't just a whole lot Odin didn't know.

  Odin, though, being a generous sort of sky god, didn't hold anything back. Once he had the mysteries of the ages in his sweaty little palm, he did the last thing you'd expect management to do. He just handed it over to mankind. All these little magic tablets he found, each with funky little letters on them… he just passed them out to people, and when they saw them they could learn everything Odin knew. How this was taken by the other Big Men In The Sky, Royce didn't mention, but I can well imagine.

  In the end, which according to Royce hasn't happened yet, all the surviving gods in Asgard will get off their shiny butts and go stomp mudholes in the asses of the black hats, the Giants. Or the Giants will stomp mudholes into them; it's not clear. Either way, just about everybody ends up dying, except for one of Odin's sons and two regular folks, and the world starts over. There was all kinds of nonsense about giant snakes and swords of flame, but that was the general idea.

  What this had to do with that yellowed piece of paper, or with a dead Greek writer, or with that guy chained to the mountain as an hors d'oeuvre for an eagle, I wasn't sure. What I was sure about was that it was one long story, and that Royce believed every word of it. But he was buying the beers, grateful for an audience, so I couldn't complain.

  By the time Royce was all done, it was nearing on closing time, and the place had just about emptied out. I was started to feel a bit ragged, and so peeled myself off the stool and got ready to go.

  I thanked Royce for his input, glancing over the pages of notes I'd got. He just beamed, throwing an arm around my shoulders, sure in his heart I'd taken my first step to full conversion. I hadn't, but I didn't have the heart to tell him.

  On my way to the door, I snapped my fingers and spun around.

  "I've got a package coming to me here," I called back to him, then across the bar stacking up chairs on the tables. "I couldn't give my own address, and figured I could swing by here to pick it up."

  "Sure," Royce answered. "What is it?"

  "Just a package," I said. "Won't take up any space."

  "No sweat. I'll be here early tomorrow, since I'm leaving the next day. Have to get my stuff ready for the trip."

  "Right." I gave a little wave, and then listed off towards the door.

  Back home, only the second time in a month, I dragged the boxes out of the trunk and up the steps to the house. It was just a few minutes after 2 a.m., and I knew I was too awake to sleep any time soon. As tired as I was I wanted nothing more than to drop right there on the hardwood floor; but I'd spent hours staving off a drunk, and now all that nervous energy was just pouring out of my eyes.

  Figuring I'd see what else dear old granddad had in his box of tricks, I fished around inside and came up with a stack of papers held together with a rusty paper clip. The type was smudged, but legible. Collapsing onto the couch and switching on a lamp, I started to read.

  "An Encounter at Dusk"

  (The following account is excerpted from Gallants All, an early collection of rogues' tales by William Harrison Ainsworth, first

  published by Riley & Sons Ltd., 1833)

  In the surviving accounts of the activities of Reginald Taylor, the notorious highwayman known as La Main Noire to the French and the Black Hand in his native England, there is one episode which seems to stand apart from the work-a-day parry and thrust of his customary encounters. It was an occasion on which, one might hazard to say, La Main Noire met his match.

  Late of Yorkshire, at that time living in France as a successful merchant, Reginald Taylor as his wont would take often to the open road in the hooded guise of the highwayman, thus to deprive wealthy aristos of their overburdened purses, and to convey these moneys into more deserving hands. Clad all in midnight sable, a pair of Dragoon pistols crossed in his belt, the gallant brigand continued in Louis the Well-Beloved's kingdom the work he had begun in George Augustus's. The king's infantry and musketeers pursued him in vain, and La Main Noire continued his activities unchecked.

  One late summer afternoon, during that second year of the Austro-Prussian War, a well-appointed carriage was making its way along the wide road from Calais to the City of Lights. Its furnishings were of intricately worked brass, the curtains hanging in the well-fitted windows of a russet gold. The driver was a sturdy enough fellow, the dust of two decades in the seat still clinging to his hair. Of his passengers, he knew only that they numbered two men and one woman, dressed in the height of fashion and giving the distinct impression that they would not gladly answer any unnece
ssary questions.

  Near dusk, the carriage was quick approaching the township of Amiens, where they would stop for the night. The driver, mindless of the road in front of him, thinking only of a soft bed, a warm mug of beer, and the company of an attractive jeune fillette, almost drove right over the man standing in the middle of the wide road, a pistol cocked and ready in each hand.

  The driver pulled his team to a halt, and then gripped the reins tight, his gaze trained on the black clad man in the road.

  "Throw down the reins, monsieur," boomed the voice of the brigand. "No harm will come to you."

  The driver took little comfort at the man's words, still eyeing the cocked pistols. Relenting, he let slip the reins, and awkwardly raised his hands over his head.

  "Good," the brigand commented. "Now, off the carriage." He gestured to the ground with one of the pistols, and stepped forward menacingly.

  The driver nodded dumbly, and when his feet hit the dusty road he knew who the villain must be. It was none other than that scourge of the king's roads, La Main Noire.

  "Now, open the door," instructed the highwayman. "And be quick about it."

  The driver complied, stumbling around to the side of the carriage and, with a guilty look, opening wide the side door. Then he stepped quickly back, his eyes averted.

  "You, in the coach," La Main Noire boomed. "Out into the open."

  For a long moment, there was no movement, no sound, only the slowly dimming light from the setting sun, and the quiet rustling of the leaves. Then, with a quiet grace, a man stepped out, first to the running board, then to the ground. He was followed by the other man, and then the woman.