American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  “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 die, 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 Nunyununni 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. Atsula 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 had 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.

  One of the children, hoping for clemency, took them to a cave in the hills in which they found a mammoth skull, the tattered remnants of a mammoth-skin cloak, a wooden cup, and the preserved head of Atsula the oracle.

  While some of the warriors of the new tribe were for taking the sacred objects away with them, stealing the gods of the first people and owning their power, others counseled against it, saying that they would bring nothing but ill luck and the malice of their own god (for these were the people of a raven tribe, and ravens are jealous gods).

  So they threw the objects down the side of the hill, into a deep ravine, and took the survivors of the first people with them on their long journey south. And the raven tribes, and the fox tribes, grew more powerful in the land, and soon Nunyunnini was entirely forgot.

  Part Three

  THE MOMENT OF THE STORM

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  People are in the dark, they don’t know what to do

  I had a little lantern, oh but it got blown out too.

  I’m reaching out my hand. I hope you are too.

  I just want to be in the dark with you.

  —Greg Brown, “In the Dark with You”

  They changed cars at five in the morning, in Minneapolis, in the airport’s long-term parking lot. They drove to the top floor, where the parking building was open to the sky.

  Shadow took the orange uniform and the handcuffs and leg hobbles, put them in the brown paper bag that had briefly held his possessions, folded the whole thing up, and dropped it into a garbage can. They had been waiting for ten minutes when a barrel-chested
young man came out of an airport door and walked over to them. He was eating a packet of Burger King french fries. Shadow recognized him immediately: he had sat in the back of the car, when they had left the House on the Rock, and hummed so deeply the car had vibrated. He now sported a white-streaked winter beard he had not had before. It made him look older.

  The man wiped the grease from his hands onto his jeans, extended one huge hand to Shadow. “I heard of the All-Father’s death,” he said. “They will pay, and they will pay dearly.”

  “Wednesday was your father?” asked Shadow.

  “He was the All-Father,” said the man. His deep voice caught in his throat. “You tell them, tell them all, that when we are needed, my people will be there.”

  Czernobog picked at a flake of tobacco from between his teeth and spat it out onto the frozen slush. “And how many of you is that? Ten? Twenty?”

  The barrel-chested man’s beard bristled. “And aren’t ten of us worth a hundred of them? Who would stand against even one of my folk, in a battle? But there are more of us than that, at the edge of the cities. There are a few in the mountains. Some in the Catskills, a few living in the carny towns in Florida. They keep their axes sharp. They will come if I call them.”

  “You do that, Elvis,” said Mr. Nancy. Shadow thought he said Elvis, anyway. Nancy had exchanged the deputy’s uniform for a thick brown cardigan, corduroy trousers, and brown loafers. “You call them. It’s what the old bastard would have wanted.”

  “They betrayed him. They killed him. I laughed at Wednesday, but I was wrong. None of us are safe any longer,” said the man whose name sounded like Elvis. “But you can rely on us.” He gently patted Shadow on the back and almost sent him sprawling. It was like being gently patted on the back by a wrecking ball.

  Czernobog had been looking around the parking lot. Now he said, “You will pardon me asking, but our new vehicle is which?”

  The barrel-chested man pointed. “There she is,” he said.

  Czernobog snorted. “That?”

  It was a 1970 VW bus. There was a rainbow decal in the rear window.

  “It’s a fine vehicle. And it’s the last thing that they’ll be expecting you to be driving.”

  Czernobog walked around the vehicle. Then he started to cough, a lung-rumbling, old-man, five-in-the-morning smoker’s cough. He hawked, and spat, and put his hand to his chest, massaging away the pain. “Yes. The last car they will suspect. So what happens when the police pull us over, looking for the hippies and the dope? Eh? We are not here to ride the magic bus. We are to blend in.”

  The bearded man unlocked the door of the bus. “So they take a look at you, they see you aren’t hippies, they wave you goodbye. It’s the perfect disguise. And it’s all I could find at no notice.”

  Czernobog seemed to be ready to argue it further, but Mr. Nancy intervened smoothly. “Elvis, you come through for us. We are very grateful. Now, that car needs to get back to Chicago.”

  “We’ll leave it in Bloomington,” said the bearded man. “The wolves will take care of it. Don’t give it another thought.” He turned back to Shadow. “Again, you have my sympathy and I share your pain. Good luck. And if the vigil falls to you, my admiration, and my sympathy.” He squeezed Shadow’s hand with his own catcher’s-mitt fist. It hurt. “You tell his corpse when you see it. Tell him that Alviss son of Vindalf will keep the faith.”

  The VW bus smelled of patchouli, of old incense and rolling tobacco. There was a faded pink carpet glued to the floor and to the walls.

  “Who was that?” asked Shadow, as he drove them down the ramp, grinding the gears.

  “Just like he said, Alviss son of Vindalf. He’s the king of the dwarfs. The biggest, mightiest, greatest of all the dwarf folk.”

  “But he’s not a dwarf,” pointed out Shadow. “He’s what, five-eight? Five-nine?”

  “Which makes him a giant among dwarfs,” said Czernobog from behind him. “Tallest dwarf in America.”

  “What was that about the vigil?” asked Shadow.

  The two old men said nothing. Shadow glanced at Mr. Nancy, who was staring out of the window.

  “Well? He was talking about a vigil. You heard him.”

  Czernobog spoke up from the backseat. “You will not have to do it,” he said.

  “Do what?”

  “The vigil. He talks too much. All the dwarfs talk and talk. Is nothing to think of. Better you put it out of your mind.”

  Driving south was like driving forward in time. The snows erased, slowly, and were completely gone by the following morning when the bus reached Kentucky. Winter was already over in Kentucky, and spring was on its way. Shadow began to wonder if there were some kind of equation to explain it—perhaps every fifty miles he drove south he was driving a day into the future.

  He would have mentioned his idea to somebody, but Mr. Nancy was asleep in the passenger seat in the front, while Czernobog snored unceasingly in the back.

  Time seemed a flexible construct at that moment, an illusion he was imagining as he drove. He found himself becoming painfully aware of birds and animals: he saw the crows on the side of the road, or in the bus’s path, picking at roadkill; flights of birds wheeled across the skies in patterns that almost made sense; cats stared at them from front lawns and fence posts.

  Czernobog snorted and woke, sitting up slowly. “I dreamed a strange dream,” he said. “I dreamed that I am truly Bielebog. That forever the world imagines that there are two of us, the light god and the dark, but that now we are both old, I find it was only me all the time, giving them gifts, taking my gifts away.” He broke the filter from a Lucky Strike, put the cigarette between his lips and lit it.

  Shadow wound down his window.

  “Aren’t you worried about lung cancer?” he said.

  “I am cancer,” said Czernobog. “I do not frighten myself.”

  Nancy spoke. “Folk like us don’t get cancer. We don’t get arteriosclerosis or Parkinson’s disease or syphilis. We’re kind of hard to kill.”

  “They killed Wednesday,” said Shadow.

  He pulled over for gas, and then parked next door at a restaurant for an early breakfast. As they entered, the pay phone in the entrance began to jangle.

  They gave their orders to an elderly woman with a worried smile, who had been sitting reading a paperback copy of What My Heart Meant by Jenny Kerton. The woman sighed, then walked back and over to the phone, picked it up, said “Yes.” Then she looked back at the room, said, “Yep. Looks like they are. You just hold the line now,” and walked over to Mr. Nancy.

  “It’s for you,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Mr. Nancy. “Now, ma’am, you make sure those fries are real crisp now. Think burnt.” He walked over to the pay phone. “This is he.”

  “And what makes you think I’m dumb enough to trust you?” he said.

  “I can find it,” he said. “I know where it is.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course we want it. You know we want it. And I know you want to get rid of it. So don’t give me any shit.”

  He hung up the telephone, came back to the table.

  “Who was it?” asked Shadow.

  “Didn’t say.”

  “What did they want?”

  “They were offerin’ us a truce, while they hand over the body.”

  “They lie,” said Czernobog. “They want to lure us in, and then they will kill us. What they did to Wednesday. Is what I always used to do,” he added, with gloomy pride.

  “It’s on neutral territory,” said Nancy. “Truly neutral.”

  Czernobog chuckled. It sounded like a metal ball rattling in a dry skull. “I used to say that also. Come to a neutral place, I would say, and then in the night we would rise up and kill them all. Those were the good days.”

  Mr. Nancy shrugged. He crunched down on his dark brown french fries, grinned his approval. “Mm-mm. These are fine fries,” he said.

  “We can’t trust those people,” said Shadow.


  “Listen, I’m older than you and I’m smarter than you and I’m better lookin’ than you,” said Mr. Nancy, thumping the bottom of the ketchup bottle, blobbing ketchup over his burnt fries. “I can get more pussy in an afternoon than you’ll get in a year. I can dance like an angel, fight like a cornered bear, plan better than a fox, sing like a nightingale . . .”

  “And your point here is . . . ?”

  Nancy’s brown eyes gazed into Shadow’s. “And they need to get rid of the body as much as we need to take it.”

  Czernobog said, “There is no such neutral place.”

  “There’s one,” said Mr. Nancy. “It’s the center.”

  Determining the exact center of anything can be problematic at best. With living things—people, for example, or continents—the problem becomes one of intangibles: What is the center of a man? What is the center of a dream? And in the case of the continental United States, should one count Alaska when one attempts to find the center? Or Hawaii?

  As the Twentieth Century began, they made a huge model of the USA, the lower forty-eight states, out of cardboard, and to find the center they balanced it on a pin, until they found the single place it balanced.

  As near as anyone could figure it out, the exact center of the continental United States was several miles from Lebanon, Kansas, on Johnny Grib’s hog farm. By the 1930s the people of Lebanon were all ready to put a monument up in the middle of the hog farm, but Johnny Grib said that he didn’t want millions of tourists coming in and tramping all over and upsetting the hogs, so they put the monument to the geographical center of the United States two miles north of the town. They built a park, and a stone monument to go in the park, and a brass plaque on the monument. They blacktopped the road from the town, and, certain of the influx of tourists waiting to arrive, they even built a motel by the monument. Then they waited.

  The tourists did not come. Nobody came.