by Neil Gaiman
“We played checkers,” said Czernobog, hacking himself another lump of pot roast. “The young man and me. He won a game, I won a game. Because he won a game, I have agreed to go with him and Wednesday, and help them in their madness. And because I won a game, when this is all done, I get to kill the young man, with a blow of a hammer.”
The two Zoryas nodded gravely. “Such a pity,” Zorya Vechernyaya told Shadow. “In my fortune for you, I should have said you would have a long life and a happy one, with many children.”
“That is why you are a good fortune-teller,” said Zorya Utrennyaya. She looked sleepy, as if it were an effort for her to be up so late. “You tell the best lies.”
At the end of the meal, Shadow was still hungry. Prison food had been pretty bad, and prison food was better than this.
“Good food,” said Wednesday, who had cleaned his plate with every evidence of enjoyment. “I thank you ladies. And now, I am afraid that it is incumbent upon us to ask you to recommend to us a fine hotel in the neighborhood.”
Zorya Vechernyaya looked offended at this. “Why should you go to a hotel?” she said. “We are not your friends?”
“I couldn’t put you to any trouble . . .” said Wednesday.
“Is no trouble,” said Zorya Utrennyaya, one hand playing with her incongruously golden hair, and she yawned.
“You can sleep in Bielebog’s room,” said Zorya Vechernyaya, pointing to Wednesday. “Is empty. And for you, young man, I make up a bed on sofa. You will be more comfortable than in feather bed. I swear.”
“That would be really kind of you,” said Wednesday. “We accept.”
“And you pay me only no more than what you pay for hotel,” said Zorya Vechernyaya, with a triumphant toss of her head. “A hundred dollars.”
“Thirty,” said Wednesday.
“Fifty.”
“Thirty-five.”
“Forty-five.”
“Forty.”
“Is good. Forty-five dollar.” Zorya Vechernyaya reached across the table and shook Wednesday’s hand. Then she began to clean the pots off the table. Zorya Utrennyaya yawned so hugely Shadow worried that she might dislocate her jaw, and announced that she was going to bed before she fell asleep with her head in the pie, and she said good night to them all.
Shadow helped Zorya Vechernyaya to take the plates and dishes into the little kitchen. To his surprise there was an elderly dishwashing machine beneath the sink, and he filled it. Zorya Vechernyaya looked over his shoulder, tutted, and removed the wooden borscht bowls. “Those, in the sink,” she told him.
“Sorry.”
“Is not to worry. Now, back in there, we have pie,” she said.
The pie—it was an apple pie—had been bought in a store and oven-warmed, and was very, very good. The four of them ate it with ice cream, and then Zorya Vechernyaya made everyone go out of the sitting room, and made up a very fine-looking bed on the sofa for Shadow.
Wednesday spoke to Shadow as they stood in the corridor.
“What you did in there, with the checkers game,” he said.
“Yes?”
“That was good. Very, very stupid of you. But good. Sleep safe.”
Shadow brushed his teeth and washed his face in the cold water of the little bathroom, and then walked back down the hall to the sitting room, turned out the light, and was asleep before his head touched the pillow.
There were explosions in Shadow’s dream: he was driving a truck through a minefield, and bombs were going off on each side of him. The windshield shattered and he felt warm blood running down his face.
Someone was shooting at him.
A bullet punctured his lung, a bullet shattered his spine, another hit his shoulder. He felt each bullet strike. He collapsed across the steering wheel.
The last explosion ended in darkness.
I must be dreaming, thought Shadow, alone in the darkness. I think I just died. He remembered hearing and believing, as a child, that if you died in your dreams, you would die in real life. He did not feel dead. He opened his eyes, experimentally.
There was a woman in the little sitting room, standing against the window, with her back to him. His heart missed a half-beat, and he said, “Laura?”
She turned, framed by the moonlight. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I did not mean to wake you.” She had a soft, Eastern European accent. “I will go.”
“No, it’s okay,” said Shadow. “You didn’t wake me. I had a dream.”
“Yes,” she said. “You were crying out, and moaning. Part of me wanted to wake you, but I thought, no, I should leave him.”
Her hair was pale and colorless in the moon’s thin light. She wore a white cotton nightgown, with a high lace neck and a hem that swept the ground. Shadow sat up, entirely awake. “You are Zorya Polu . . . ,” he hesitated. “The sister who was asleep.”
“I am Zorya Polunochnaya, yes. And you are called Shadow, yes? That was what Zorya Vechernyaya told me, when I woke.”
“Yes. What were you looking at, out there?”
She looked at him, then she beckoned him to join her by the window. She turned her back while he pulled on his jeans. He walked over to her. It seemed a long walk, for such a small room.
He could not tell her age. Her skin was unlined, her eyes were dark, her lashes were long, her hair was to her waist and white. The moonlight drained colors into ghosts of themselves. She was taller than either of her sisters.
She pointed up into the night sky. “I was looking at that,” she said, pointing to the Big Dipper. “See?”
“Ursa Major,” he said. “The Great Bear.”
“That is one way of looking at it,” she said. “But it is not the way from where I come from. I am going to sit on the roof. Would you like to come with me?”
She lifted the window and clambered, barefoot, out onto the fire escape. A freezing wind blew through the window. Something was bothering Shadow, but he did not know what it was; he hesitated, then pulled on his sweater, socks, and shoes and followed her out onto the rusting fire escape. She was waiting for him. His breath steamed in the chilly air. He watched her bare feet pad up the icy metal steps, and followed her up to the roof.
The wind gusted cold, flattening her nightgown against her body, and Shadow became uncomfortably aware that Zorya Polunochnaya was wearing nothing at all underneath.
“You don’t mind the cold?” he said, as they reached the top of the fire escape, and the wind whipped his words away.
“Sorry?”
She bent her face close to his. Her breath was sweet.
“I said, doesn’t the cold bother you?”
In reply, she held up a finger: wait. She stepped, lightly, over the side of the building and onto the flat roof. Shadow stepped over a little more clumsily, and followed her across the roof, to the shadow of the water tower. There was a wooden bench waiting for them there, and she sat down on it, and he sat down beside her. The water tower acted as a windbreak, for which Shadow was grateful.
“No,” she said. “The cold does not bother me. This time is my time: I could no more feel uncomfortable in the night than a fish could feel uncomfortable in the deep water.”
“You must like the night,” said Shadow, wishing that he had said something wiser, more profound.
“My sisters are of their times. Zorya Utrennyaya is of the dawn. In the old country she would wake to open the gates, and let our father drive his—uhm, I forget the word, like a car but with horses?”
“Chariot?”
“His chariot. Our father would ride it out. And Zorya Vechernyaya, she would open the gates for him at dusk, when he returned to us.”
“And you?”
She paused. Her lips were full, but very pale. “I never saw our father. I was asleep.”
“Is it a medical condition?”
She did not answer. The shrug, if she shrugged, was imperceptible. “So. You wanted to know what I was looking at.”
“The Big Dipper.”
&nb
sp; She raised an arm to point to it, and the wind flattened her nightgown against her body. Her nipples, every goose-bump on the areolae, were visible momentarily, dark against the white cotton. Shadow shivered.
“Odin’s Wain, they call it. And the Great Bear. Where we come from, we believe that is a, a thing, a, not a god, but like a god, a bad thing, chained up in those stars. If it escapes, it will eat the whole of everything. And there are three sisters who must watch the sky, all the day, all the night. If he escapes, the thing in the stars, the world is over. Pf!, like that.”
“And people believe that?”
“They did. A long time ago.”
“And you were looking to see if you could see the monster in the stars?”
“Something like that. Yes.”
He smiled. If it were not for the cold, he decided, he would have thought he was dreaming. Everything felt so much like a dream.
“Can I ask how old you are? Your sisters seem so much older.”
She nodded her head. “I am the youngest. Zorya Utrennyaya was born in the morning, and Zorya Vechernyaya was born in the evening, and I was born at midnight. I am the midnight sister: Zorya Polunochnaya. Are you married?”
“My wife is dead. She died last week in a car accident. It was her funeral yesterday.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“She came to see me last night.” It was not hard to say, in the darkness and the moonlight; it was not as unthinkable as it was by daylight.
“Did you ask her what she wanted?”
“No. Not really.”
“Perhaps you should. It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you. Zorya Vechernyaya tells me that you played checkers with Czernobog.”
“Yes. He won the right to knock in my skull with a sledge.”
“In the old days, they would take people up to the top of the mountains. To the high places. They would smash the back of their skulls with a rock. For Czernobog.”
Shadow glanced about. No, they were alone on the roof.
Zorya Polunochnaya laughed. “Silly, he is not here. And you won a game also. He may not strike his blow until this is all over. He said he would not. And you will know. Like the cows he killed. They always know, first. Otherwise, what is the point?”
“I feel,” Shadow told her, “like I’m in a world with its own sense of logic. Its own rules. Like when you’re in a dream, and you know there are rules you mustn’t break. Even if you don’t know what they mean. I’m just going along with it, you know?”
“I know,” she said. She held his hand, with a hand that was icy cold. “You were given protection once. You were given the sun itself. But you lost it already. You gave it away. All I can give you is much weaker protection. The daughter, not the father. But all helps. Yes?” Her white hair blew about her face in the chilly wind.
“Do I have to fight you? Or play checkers?” he asked.
“You do not even have to kiss me,” she told him. “Just take the moon from me.”
“How?”
“Take the moon.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Watch,” said Zorya Polunochnaya. She raised her left hand and held it in front of the moon, so that her forefinger and thumb seemed to be grasping it. Then, in one smooth movement, she plucked at it. For a moment, it looked like she had taken the moon from the sky, but then Shadow saw that the moon shone still, and Zorya Polunochnaya opened her hand to display a silver Liberty-head dollar resting between finger and thumb.
“That was beautifully done,” said Shadow. “I didn’t see you palm it. And I don’t know how you did that last bit.”
“I did not palm it,” she said. “I took it. And now I give it you, to keep safe. Here. Don’t give this one away.”
She placed it in his right hand and closed his fingers around it. The coin was cold in his hand. Zorya Polunochnaya leaned forward, and closed his eyes with her fingers, and kissed him, lightly, once upon each eyelid.
Shadow awoke on the sofa, fully dressed. A narrow shaft of sunlight streamed in through the window, making the dust motes dance.
He got out of bed, and walked over to the window. The room seemed much smaller in the daylight.
The thing that had been troubling him since last night came into focus as he looked out and down and across the street. There was no fire escape outside this window: no balcony, no rusting metal steps.
Still, held tight in the palm of his hand, bright and shiny as the day it had been minted, was a 1922 Liberty-head silver dollar.
“Oh. You’re up,” said Wednesday, putting his head around the door. “That’s good. You want coffee? We’re going to rob a bank.”
COMING TO AMERICA
1721
The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored. For the most part it is uninspected, unimagined, unthought, a representation of the thing, and not the thing itself. It is a fine fiction, he continued, pausing for a moment to dip his pen in the inkwell and collect his thoughts, that America was founded by pilgrims, seeking the freedom to believe as they wished, that they came to the Americas, spread and bred and filled the empty land.
In truth, the American colonies were as much a dumping ground as an escape, a forgetting place. In the days where you could be hanged in London from Tyburn’s triple-crowned tree for the theft of twelve pennies, the Americas became a symbol of clemency, of a second chance. But the conditions of transportation were such that, for some, it was easier to take the leap from the leafless and dance on nothing until the dancing was done. Transportation, it was called: for five years, for ten years, for life. That was the sentence.
You were sold to a captain, and would ride in his ship, crowded tight as a slaver’s, to the colonies or to the West Indies; off the boat the captain would sell you on as an indentured servant to one who would take the cost of your skin out in your labor until the years of your indenture were done. But at least you were not waiting to hang in an English prison (for in those days prisons were places where you stayed until you were freed, transported, or hanged: you were not sentenced there for a term), and you were free to make the best of your new world. You were also free to bribe a sea captain to return you to England before the terms of your transportation were over and done. People did. And if the authorities caught you returning from transportation—if an old enemy, or an old friend with a score to settle, saw you and peached on you—then you were hanged without a blink.
I am reminded, he continued, after a short pause, during which he refilled the inkwell on his desk from the bottle of umber ink from the closet and dipped his pen once more, of the life of Essie Tregowan, who came from a chilly little cliff-top village in Cornwall, in the southwest of England, where her family had lived from time out of mind. Her father was a fisherman, and it was rumored that he was one of the wreckers—those who would hang their lamps high on the dangerous cliffs when the storm winds raged, luring ships onto the rocks, for the goods on shipboard. Essie’s mother was in service as a cook at the squire’s house, and at the age of twelve Essie began to work there, in the scullery. She was a thin little thing, with wide brown eyes and dark brown hair; and she was not a hard worker but was forever slipping off and away to listen to stories and tales, if there was anyone who would tell them: tales of the piskies and the spriggans, of the black dogs of the moors and the seal-women of the Channel. And, though the squire laughed at such things, the kitchen-folk always put out a china saucer of the creamiest milk at night, put it outside the kitchen door, for the piskies.
Several years passed, and Essie was no longer a thin little thing: now she curved and billowed like the swell of the green sea, and her brown eyes laughed, and her chestnut hair tossed and curled. Essie’s eyes lighted on Bartholomew, the squire’s eighteen-year-old son, home from Rugby, and she went at night to the standing stone on the edge of the woodland, an
d she put some bread that Bartholomew had been eating but had left unfinished on the stone, wrapped in a cut strand of her own hair. And on the very next day Bartholomew came and talked to her, and looked on her approvingly with his own eyes, the dangerous blue of a sky when a storm is coming, while she was cleaning out the grate in his bedroom.
He had such dangerous eyes, said Essie Tregowan.
Soon enough Bartholomew went up to Oxford, and, when Essie’s condition became apparent, she was dismissed. But the babe was stillborn, and as a favor to Essie’s mother, who was a very fine cook, the squire’s wife prevailed upon her husband to return the former maiden to her former position in the scullery.
But Essie’s love for Bartholomew had turned to hatred for his family, and within the year she took for her new beau a man from a neighboring village, with a bad reputation, who went by the name of Josiah Horner. And one night, when the family slept, Essie arose in the night and unbolted the side door, to let her lover in. He rifled the house while the family slept on.
Suspicion immediately fell upon someone in the house, for it was apparent that someone must have opened the door (which the squire’s wife distinctly remembered having bolted herself), and someone must have known where the squire kept his silver plate, and the drawer in which he kept his coins and his promissory notes. Still, Essie, by resolutely denying everything, was convicted of nothing until Master Josiah Horner was caught, in a chandler’s in Exeter, passing one of the squire’s notes. The squire identified it as his, and Horner and Essie went to trial.
Horner was convicted at the local assizes, and was, as the slang of the time so cruelly and so casually had it, turned off, but the judge took pity on Essie, because of her age or her chestnut hair, and he sentenced her to seven years’ transportation. She was to be transported on a ship called the Neptune, under the command of one Captain Clarke. So Essie went to the Carolinas; and on the way she conceived an alliance with the selfsame captain, and prevailed upon him to return her to England with him, as his wife, and to take her to his mother’s house in London, where no man knew her. The journey back, when the human cargo had been exchanged for cotton and tobacco, was a peaceful time and a happy one for the captain and his new bride, who were as two lovebirds or courting butterflies, unable to cease from touching each other or giving each other little gifts and endearments.