Czernobog nodded. His brow creased. The sunlight glinted on his gray hair and mustache, making them appear almost golden. “Is . . .” he frowned. “Is not . . .” He broke off. “Maybe you should go. Is not a good time.”
“Take as long as you need,” said Shadow. “I’m ready.”
Czernobog sighed. “You are a very stupid boy. You know that?”
“I guess.”
“You are a stupid boy. And on the mountaintop, you did a very good thing.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“Perhaps.”
Czernobog walked to the old wooden sideboard and, bending down, pulled an attaché case from underneath it. He flipped the catches on the case. Each one sprang back with a satisfying thump. He opened the case. He took a hammer out and hefted it experimentally. The hammer looked like a scaled-down sledgehammer; its wooden haft was stained.
Then he stood up. He said, “I owe you much. More than you know. Because of you, things are changing. This is springtime. The true spring.”
“I know what I did,” said Shadow. “I didn’t have a lot of choice.”
Czernobog nodded. There was a look in his eyes that Shadow did not remember seeing before. “Did I ever tell you about my brother?”
“Bielebog?” Shadow walked to the center of the ash-stained carpet. He went down on his knees. “You said you hadn’t seen him in a long time.”
“Yes,” said the old man, raising the hammer. “It has been a long winter, boy. A very long winter. But the winter is ending, now.” And he shook his head, slowly, as if he were remembering something. And he said, “Close your eyes.”
Shadow closed his eyes and raised his head, and he waited.
The head of the sledgehammer was cold, icy cold, and it touched his forehead as gently as a kiss.
“Pock! There,” said Czernobog. “Is done.” There was a smile on his face that Shadow had never seen before, an easy, comfortable smile, like sunshine on a summer’s day. The old man walked over to the case, and he put the hammer away, and closed the bag, and pushed it back under the sideboard.
“Czernobog?” asked Shadow. Then, “Are you Czernobog?”
“Yes. For today,” said the old man. “By tomorrow, it will all be Bielebog. But today, is still Czernobog.”
“Then why? Why didn’t you kill me when you could?”
The old man took out an unfiltered cigarette from a packet in his pocket. He took a large box of matches from the mantelpiece and lit the cigarette with a match. He seemed deep in thought. “Because,” said the old man, after some time, “there is blood. But there is also gratitude. And it has been a long, long winter.”
Shadow got to his feet. There were dusty patches on the knees of his jeans, where he had knelt, and he brushed the dust away.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” said the old man. “Next time you want to play checkers, you know where to find me. This time, I play white.”
“Thanks. Maybe I will,” said Shadow. “But not for a while.” He looked into the old man’s twinkling eyes, and he wondered if they had always been that cornflower shade of blue. They shook hands, and neither of them said goodbye.
Shadow kissed Zorya Utrennyaya on the cheek on his way out, and he kissed Zorya Vechernyaya on the back of her hand, and he took the stairs out of that place two at a time.
POSTSCRIPT
Reykjavik, 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 fro
m 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 two in the small hours of the morning. 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 Reykjavik 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.