It’s one thing, he thought, singing for your life, in a room filled with diners, on the spur of the moment, with a gun barrel in the ribs of the girl you…
That you…
Oh.
Well, thought Charlie, I can worry about that later.
Right now he badly wanted either to breathe into a brown paper bag or to vanish.
“There must be hundreds of them,” said Spider, and there was awe in his voice.
There was a flurry in the air, on a nearby rock, which resolved itself into the Bird Woman. She folded her arms and stared at them.
“Whatever it is you’re going to do,” Spider said, “you better do it soon. They aren’t going to wait around forever.”
Charlie’s mouth was dry. “Right.”
Spider said, “So. Um. What exactly do we do now?”
“We sing to them,” said Charlie, simply.
“What?”
“It’s how we fix things. I figured it out. We just sing it all, you and I.”
“I don’t understand. Sing what?”
Charlie said, “The song. You sing the song, you fix things.” Now he sounded desperate. “The song.”
Spider’s eyes were like puddles after the rain, and Charlie saw things in them he had not seen before: affection, perhaps, and confusion and, mostly, apology. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lion watched them from the side of a boulder. Monkey looked at them from the top of a tree. And Tiger…
Charlie saw Tiger. It was walking gingerly on four feet. Its face was swollen and bruised, but there was a glint in its eyes, and it looked as if it would be more than happy to even the score.
Charlie opened his mouth. A small croaking noise came out, as if Charlie had recently swallowed a particularly nervous frog. “It’s no use,” he whispered to Spider. “This was a stupid idea, wasn’t it?”
“Yup.”
“Do you think we can just go away again?” Charlie’s nervous glance swept the mountainside and the caves, took in each of the hundreds of totem creatures from before the dawn of time. There was one he had not seen the last time he had looked: a small man, with lemon yellow gloves and a pencil-thin moustache and no fedora hat to cover his thinning hair.
The old man winked when he caught Charlie’s gaze.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
Charlie filled his lungs, and he began to sing. “I am Charlie,” he sang. “I am Anansi’s son. Listen as I sing my song. Listen to my life.”
He sang them the song of a boy who was half a god, and who was broken into two by an old woman with a grudge. He sang of his father, and he sang of his mother.
He sang of names and words, of the building blocks beneath
the real, the worlds that make worlds, the truths beneath the way things are; he sang of appropriate ends and just conclusions for those who would have hurt him and his.
He sang the world.
It was a good song, and it was his song. Sometimes it had words, and sometimes it didn’t have any words at all.
As he sang, all the creatures listening began to clap and to stamp and to hum along; Charlie felt like he was the conduit for a great song that took in all of them. He sang of birds, of the magic of looking up and seeing them in flight, of the sheen of the sun on a wing feather in the morning.