American Gods by Neil Gaiman Page A

now, in painful, lurching sobs, and for the first time since he was a small boy, Shadow cried himself to sleep.
COMING TO AMERICA
A.D. 813
    They navigated the green sea by the stars and by the shore, and when the shore was only a memory and the night sky was overcast and dark they navigated by faith, and they called on the All-Father to bring them safely to land once more.
    A bad journey they had of it, their fingers numb and with a shiver in their bones that not even wine could burn off. They would wake in the morning to see that the hoarfrost had touched their beards, and, until the sun warmed them, they looked like old men, white-bearded before their time.
    Teeth were loosening and eyes were deep-sunken in their sockets when they made landfall on the green land to the west. The men said, “We are far, far from our homes and our hearths, far from the seas we know and the lands we love. Here on the edge of the world we will be forgotten by our gods.”
    Their leader clambered to the top of a great rock, and he mocked them for their lack of faith. “The All-Father made the world,” he shouted. “He built it with his hands from the shattered bones and the flesh of Ymir, his grandfather. He placed Ymir’s brains in the sky as clouds, and his salt blood became the seas we crossed. If he made the world, do you not realize that he created this land as well? And if we die here as men, shall we not be received into his hall?”
    And the men cheered and laughed. They set to, with a will, to build a hall out of split trees and mud, inside a small stockade of sharpened logs, although as far as they knew they were the only men in the new land.
    On the day that the hall was finished there was a storm: the sky at midday became as dark as night, and the sky was rent with forks of white flame, and the thunder-crashes were so loud that the men were almost deafened by them, and the ship’s cat they had brought with them for good fortune hid beneath their beached longboat. The storm was hard enough and vicious enough that the men laughed and clapped each other on the back, and they said, “The thunderer is here with us, in this distant land,” and they gave thanks, and rejoiced, and they drank until they were reeling.
    In the smoky darkness of their hall, that night, the bard sang them the old songs. He sang of Odin, the All-Father, who was sacrificed to himself as bravely and as nobly as others were sacrificed to him. He sang of the nine days that the All-Father hung from the world-tree, his side pierced and dripping from the spear-point’s wound, and he sang them all the things the All-Father had learned in his agony: nine names, and nine runes, and twice-nine charms. When he told them of the spear piercing Odin’s side, the bard shrieked in pain as the All-Father himself had called out in his agony, and all the men shivered, imagining his pain.
    They found the scraeling the following day, which was the all-father’s own day. He was a small man, his long hair black as a crow’s wing, his skin the color of rich red clay. He spoke in words none of them could understand, not even their bard, who had been on a ship that had sailed through the pillars of Hercules and who could speak the trader’s pidgin men spoke all across the Mediterranean. The stranger was dressed in feathers and in furs, and there were small bones braided into his long hair.
    They led him into their encampment, and they gave him roasted meat to eat, and strong drink to quench his thirst. They laughed riotously at the man as he stumbled and sang, at the way his head rolled and lolled, and this on less than a drinking-horn of mead. They gave him more drink, and soon enough he lay beneath the table with his head curled under his arm.
    Then they picked him up, a man at each shoulder, a man at each leg, carried him at shoulder height, the four men making him an eight-legged horse, and they carried him at the head of a