The man squatted beside Shadow on the hillside. He nodded, curtly, to Shadow. He had a piratical black eyepatch 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. And then, "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 sentences 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 kaerlega. I shall take care of this."
"You're welcome," said Shadow. He stood up, brushed the grass from his jeans.
"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 midsummer 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.
The End