Chapter 4 (p.6)
“Can I ask how old you are? Your sisters seem so much older.”
She nodded her head. “I am the youngest. Zorya Utrennyaya was born in the morning, and Zorya Vechernyaya was born in the evening, and I was born at midnight. I am the midnight sister: Zorya Polunochnaya. Are you married?”
“My wife is dead. She died last week in a car accident. It was her funeral yesterday.”
“I'm so sorry.”
“She came to see me last night.” It was not hard to say, in the darkness and the moonlight; it was not as unthinkable as it was by daylight.
“Did you ask her what she wanted?”
“No. Not really.”
“Perhaps you should. It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you. Zorya Vechernyaya tells me that you played checkers with Czernobog.”
“Yes. He won the right to knock in my skull with a sledge.”
“In the old days, they would take people up to the top of the mountains. To the high places. They would smash the back of their skulls with a rock. For Czernobog.”
Shadow glanced about. No, they were alone on the roof.
Zorya Polunochnaya laughed. “Silly, he is not here. And you won a game also. He may not strike his blow until this is all over. He said he would not. And you will know. Like the cows he killed. They always know, first. Otherwise, what is the point?”
“I feel,” Shadow told her, “like I'm in a world with its own sense of logic. Its own rules. Like when you're in a dream, and you know there are rules you mustn't break, but you don't know what they are or what they mean. I have no idea what we're talking about, or what happened today, or pretty much anything since I got out of jail. I'm just going along with it, you know?”
“I know,” she said. She held his hand, with a hand that was icy cold. “You were given protection once, but you lost it already. You gave it away. You had the sun in your hand. And that is life itself. All I can give you is much weaker protection. The daughter, not the father. But all helps. Yes?” Her white hair blew about her face in the chilly wind, and Shadow knew that it was time to go back inside.
“Do I have to fight you? Or play checkers?” he asked.
“You do not even have to kiss me,” she told him. “Just take the moon.”
“How?”
“Take the moon.”
“I don't understand.”
“Watch,” said Zorya Polunochnaya. She raised her left hand and held it in front of the moon, so that her forefinger and thumb seemed to be grasping it. Then, in one smooth movement, she plucked at it. For a moment, it looked like she had taken the moon from the sky, but then Shadow saw that the moon shone still, and Zorya Polunochnaya opened her hand to display a silver Liberty-head dollar resting between finger and thumb.
“That was beautifully done,” said Shadow. “I didn't see you palm it. And I don't know how you did that last bit.”
“I did not palm it,” she said. “I took it. And now I give it to you, to keep safe. Here. Don't give this one away.”
She placed it in his right hand and closed his fingers around it. The coin was cold in his hand. Zorya Polunochnaya leaned forward, and closed his eyes with her fingers, and kissed him, lightly, once upon each eyelid.
Shadow awoke on the sofa, fully dressed. A narrow shaft of sunlight streamed in through the window, making the dust motes dance.
He got out of bed, and walked over to the window. The room seemed much smaller in the daylight.
The thing that had been troubling him since last night came into focus as he looked out and down and across the street. There was no fire escape outside this window: no balcony, no rusting metal steps.
Still, held tight in the palm of his hand, bright and shiny as the day it had been minted, was a 1922 Liberty-head silver dollar.
“Oh. You're up,” said Wednesday, putting his head around the door. “That's good. You want coffee? We're going to rob a bank.”
Coming to America 1721
The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored. For the most part it is uninspected, unimagined, unthought, a representation of the thing, and not the thing itself. It is a fine fiction, he continued, pausing for a moment to dip his pen in the inkwell and collect his thoughts, that America was founded by pilgrims, seeking the freedom to believe as they wished, that they came to the Americas, spread and bred and filled the empty land.
In truth, the American colonies were as much a dumping ground as an escape, a forgetting place. In the days where you could be hanged in London from Tyburn's triple-crowned tree for the theft of twelve pennies, the Americas became a symbol of clemency, of a second chance. But the conditions of transportation were such that, for some, it was easier to take the leap from the leafless and dance on nothing until the dancing was done. Transportation it was called: for five years, for ten years, for life. That was the sentence.
You were sold to a captain, and would ride in his ship, crowded tight as a slaver's, to the colonies or to the West Indies; off the boat the captain would sell you on as an indentured servant to one who would take the cost of your skin out in your labor until the years of your indenture were done. But at least you were not waiting to hang in an English prison (for in those days prisons were places where you stayed until you were freed, transported, or hanged: you were not sentenced there for a term), and you were free to make the best of your new world. You were also free to bribe a sea captain to return you to England before the terms of your transportation were over and done. People did. And if the authorities caught you returning from transportation—if an old enemy, or an old friend with a score to settle, saw you and peached on you—then you were hanged without a blink.
I am reminded, he continued, after a short pause, during which he refilled the inkwell on his desk from the bottle of umber ink from the closet, and dipped his pen once more, of the life of Essie Tregowan, who came from a chilly little cliff-top village in Cornwall, in the Southwest of England, where her family had lived from time out of mind. Her father was a fisherman, and it was rumored that he was one of the wreckers—those who would hang their lamps high on the dangerous coast when the storm winds raged, luring ships onto the rocks, for the goods on shipboard. Essie's mother was in service as a cook at the squire's house, and, at the age of twelve, Essie began to work there, in the scullery. She was a thin little thing, with wide brown eyes and dark brown hair; and she was not a hard worker but was forever slipping off and away to listen to stories and tales, if there was anyone who would tell them: tales of the piskies and the spriggans, of the black dogs of the moors and the seal-women of the Channel. And, though the squire laughed at such things, the kitchen-folk always put out a china saucer of the creamiest milk at night, put it outside the kitchen door, for the piskies.
