Reykjavík in Iceland is a strange city, even for those who have seen many strange cities. It is a volcanic city—the heat for the city comes from deep underground.
There are tourists, but not as many of them as you might expect, not even in early July. The sun was shining, as it had shone for weeks now: it ceased shining for an hour or so in the small hours. There would be a dusky dawn of sorts between two and three in the morning, and then the day would begin once more.
The big tourist had walked most of Reykjavík that morning, listening to people talk in a language that had changed little in a thousand years. The natives here could read the ancient sagas as easily as they could read a newspaper. There was a sense of continuity on this island that scared him, and that he found desperately reassuring. He was very tired: the unending daylight had made sleep almost impossible, and he had sat in his hotel room through the whole long nightless night alternately reading a guidebook and Bleak House, a novel he had bought in an airport in the last few weeks, but which airport he could no longer remember. Sometimes, he had stared out of the window.
Finally the clock as well as the sun proclaimed it morning.
He bought a bar of chocolate at one of the many candy stores, walked the sidewalk, occasionally finding himself reminded of the volcanic nature of Iceland: he would turn a corner and notice, for a moment, a sulphurous quality to the air. It put him in mind not of Hades but of rotten eggs.
Many of the women he passed were very beautiful: slender and pale. The kind of women that Wednesday had liked. Shadow wondered what could have attracted Wednesday to Shadow’s mother, who had been beautiful but had been neither of those things.
Shadow smiled at the pretty women, because they made him feel pleasantly male, and he smiled at the other women too, because he was having a good time.
He was not sure when he became aware that he was being observed. Somewhere on his walk through Reykjavík he became certain that someone was watching him. He would turn, from time to time, trying to get a glimpse of who it was, and he would stare into store windows and out at the reflected street behind him, but he saw no one out of the ordinary, no one who seemed to be observing him.
He went into a small restaurant, where he ate smoked puffin and cloudberries and arctic char and boiled potatoes, and he drank Coca-Cola, which tasted sweeter, more sugary than he remembered it tasting back in the States.
The waiter brought his bill—the meal was more expensive than Shadow had expected, but that seemed to be true of meals in every place on Shadow’s wandering. As the waiter put the bill down on the table, he said, “Excuse me. You are American?”
“Yes.”
“Then, happy Fourth of July,” said the waiter. He looked pleased with himself.
Shadow had not realized that it was the Fourth. Independence Day. Yes. He liked the idea of independence. He left the money and a tip on the table, and walked outside. There was a cool breeze coming in off the Atlantic, and he buttoned up his coat.
He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.
He pulled out his book.
An old man came striding across the hillside toward him: he wore a dark gray cloak, ragged at the bottom, as if he had done a lot of traveling, and he wore a broad-brimmed blue hat, with a seagull feather tucked into the band, at a jaunty angle. He looked like an aging hippie, thought Shadow. Or a long-retired gunfighter. The old man was ridiculously tall.
The man squatted beside Shadow on the hillside. He nodded, curtly, to Shadow. He had a piratical black eye patch over one eye, and a jutting white chin-beard. Shadow wondered if the man was going to hit him up for a cigarette.
“Hvernig gengur? Manst Þú eftir mér?” said the old man.
“I’m sorry,” said Shadow. “I don’t speak Icelandic.” Then he said, awkwardly, the phrase he had learned from his phrase book in the daylight of the small hours of that morning: “Ég tala bara ensku.” I speak only English. “American.”
The old man nodded slowly. He said, “My people went from here to America a long time ago. They went there, and then they returned to Iceland. They said it was a good place for men, but a bad place for gods. And without their gods they felt too…alone.” His English was fluent, but the pauses and the beats of the sentence were strange. Shadow looked at him: close-up, the man seemed older than Shadow had imagined possible. His skin was lined with tiny wrinkles and cracks, like the cracks in granite.
The old man said, “I do know you, boy.”
“You do?”
“You and I, we have walked the same path. I also hung on the tree for nine days, a sacrifice of myself to myself. I am the lord of the Aes. I am the god of the gallows.”
“You are Odin,” said Shadow.
The man nodded thoughtfully, as if weighing up the name. “They call me many things, but, yes, I am Odin, Bor’s son,” he said.
“I saw you die,” said Shadow. “I stood vigil for your body. You tried to destroy so much, for power. You would have sacrificed so much for yourself. You did that.”
“I did not do that.”
“Wednesday did. He was you.”
“He was me, yes. But I am not him.” The man scratched the side of his nose. His gull-feather bobbed.
“Will you go back?” asked the Lord of the Gallows. “To America?”
“Nothing to go back for,” said Shadow, and as he said it he knew it was a lie.
“Things wait for you there,” said the old man. “But they will wait until you return.”
A white butterfly flew crookedly past them. Shadow said nothing. He had had enough of gods and their ways to last him several lifetimes. He would take the bus to the airport, he decided, and change his ticket. Get a plane to somewhere he had never been. He would keep moving.
“Hey,” said Shadow. “I have something for you.” His hand dipped into his pocket, and palmed the object he needed. “Hold your hand out,” he said.
Odin looked at him strangely and seriously. Then he shrugged, and extended his right hand, palm down. Shadow reached over and turned it so the palm was upward.
He opened his own hands, showed them, one after the other, to be completely empty. Then he pushed the glass eye into the leathery palm of the old man’s hand and left it there.
“How did you do that?”
“Magic,” said Shadow, without smiling.
The old man grinned and laughed and clapped his hands together. He looked at the eye, holding it between finger and thumb, and nodded, as if he knew exactly what it was, and then he slipped it into a leather bag that hung by his waist. “Takk kærlega. I shall take care of this.”
“You’re welcome,” said Shadow. He stood up, brushed the grass from his jeans. He closed the book, put it back into the side-pocket of his backpack.
“Again,” said the Lord of Asgard, with an imperious motion of his head, his voice deep and commanding. “More. Do again.”
“You people,” said Shadow. “You’re never satisfied. Okay. This is one I learned from a guy who’s dead now.”
He reached into nowhere, and took a gold coin from the air. It was a normal sort of gold coin. It couldn’t bring back the dead or heal the sick, but it was a gold coin sure enough. “And that’s all there is,” he said, displaying it between finger and thumb. “That’s all she wrote.”
He tossed the coin into the air with a flick of his thumb. It spun golden at the top of its arc, in the sunlight, and it glittered and glinted and hung there in the mid-summer sky as if it was never going to come down. Maybe it never would. Shadow didn’t wait to see. He walked away and he kept on walking.