ccepting the applause and laughter like a pro, and then he turned and walked back to where Shadow and Czernobog were standing.
“I thought I said no stories,” said Wednesday.
“You call that a story?” said Nancy. “I barely cleared my throat. Just warmed them up for you. Go knock them dead.”
Wednesday walked out into the firelight, a big old man with a glass eye in a brown suit and an old Armani coat. He stood there, looking at the people on the wooden benches, saying nothing for longer than Shadow could believe someone could comfortably say nothing. And, finally, he spoke.
“You know me,” he said. “You all know me. Some of you have no cause to love me, but love me or not, you know me.”
There was a rustling, a stir among the people on the benches.
“I’ve been here longer than most of you. Like the rest of you, I figured we could get by on what we got. Not enough to make us happy, but enough to keep going.
“That may not be the case anymore. There’s a storm coming, and it’s not a storm of our making.”
He paused. Now he stepped forward, and folded his arms across his chest.
“When the people came to America they brought us with them. They brought me, and Loki and Thor, Anansi and the Lion-God, Leprechauns and Kobolds and Banshees, Kubera and Frau Holle and Ashtaroth, and they brought you. We rode here in their minds, and we took root. We traveled with the settlers to the new lands across the ocean.
“The land is vast. Soon enough, our people abandoned us, remembered us only as creatures of the old land, as things that had not come with them to the new. Our true believers passed on, or stopped believing, and we were left, lost and scared and dispossessed, only what little smidgens of worship or belief we could find. And to get by as best we could.
“So that’s what we’ve done, gotten by, out on the edges of things, where no one was watching us too closely.
“We have, let us face it and admit it, little influence. We prey on them, and we take from them, and we get by; we strip and we whore and we drink too much; we pump gas and we steal and we cheat and we exist in the cracks at the edges of society. Old gods, here in this new land without gods.”
Wednesday paused. He looked from one to another of his listeners, grave and statesmanlike. They stared back at him impassively, their faces masklike and unreadable. Wednesday cleared his throat, and he spat, hard into the fire. It flared and flamed, illuminating the inside of the hall.
“Now, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover for yourselves, there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance.
“They are aware of us, and they fear us, and they hate us,” said Odin. “You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise. They will destroy us, if they can. It is time for us to band together. It is time for us to act.”
The old woman in the red sari stepped into the firelight. On her forehead was a small dark blue jewel. She said, “You called us here for this nonsense?” And then she snorted, a snort of mingled amusement and irritation.
Wednesday’s brows lowered. “I called you here, yes. But this is sense, Mama-ji, not nonsense. Even a child could see that.”
“So I am a child, am I?” She wagged a finger at him. “I was old in Kalighat before you were dreamed of, you foolish man. I am a child? Then I am a child, for there is nothing in your foolish talk to see.”
Again, a moment of double vision: Shadow saw the old woman, her dark face pinched with age and disapproval, but behind her he saw something huge, a naked woman with skin as black as a new leather jacket, and lips and tongue the bright red of arterial blood. Around her neck were skulls, and her many hands held knives, and swords, and severed heads.
“I did not call you a child, Mama-ji,” said Wednesday, peaceably. “But it seems self-evident—“
“The only thing that seems self-evident,” said the old woman, pointing (as behind her, through her, above her, a black finger, sharp-taloned, pointed in echo), “is your own desire for glory. We’ve lived in peace in this country for a long time. Some of us do better than others, I agree. I do well. Back in India, there is an incarnation of me who does much better, but so be it. I am not envious. I’ve watched the new ones rise, and I’ve watched them fall again.” Her hand fell to her side. Shadow saw that the others were looking at her: a mixture of expressions—respect, amusement, embarrassment—in their eyes. “They worshiped the railroads here, only a blink of an eye ago. And now the iron gods are as forgotten as the emerald hunters . . .”
“Make your point, Mama-ji,” said Wednesday.
“My point?” Her nostrils flared. The corners of her mouth turned down. “I—and I am obviously only a child—say that we wait. We do nothing. We don’t know that they mean us harm.”
“And will you still counsel waiting when they come in the night and they kill you, or they take you away?”
Her expression was disdainful and amused: it was all in the lips and the eyebrows and the set of the nose. “If they try such a thing,” she said, “they will find me hard to catch, and harder still to kill.”
A squat young man sitting on the bench behind her hrrumphed for attention, then said, with a booming voice, “All-Father, my people are comfortable. We make the best of what we have. If this war of yours goes against us, we could lose everything.”
Wednesday said, “You have already lost everything. I am offering you the chance to take something back.”
The fire blazed high as he spoke, illuminating the faces of the audience.
I don’t really believe, Shadow thought. I don’t believe any of this. Maybe I’m still fifteen. Mom’s still alive and I haven’t even met Laura yet. Everything that’s happened so far has been some kind of especially vivid dream. And yet he could not believe that either. All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.