American Gods by Neil Gaiman

days became shorter, some of the men took to searching for the scraeling village, hoping to find food, and women. They found nothing, save for the places where fires had been, where small encampments had been abandoned.
    One midwinter’s day, when the sun was as distant and cold as a dull silver coin, they saw that the remains of the scraeling’s body had been removed from the ash tree. That afternoon it began to snow, in huge, slow flakes.
    The men from the northlands closed the gates of their encampment, retreated behind their wooden wall.
    The scraeling war party fell upon them that night: five hundred men to thirty. They climbed the wall, and, over the following seven days, they killed each of the thirty men, in thirty different ways. And the sailors were forgotten, by history and their people.
    The wall they tore down, and the village they burned. The longboat, upside-down and pulled high on the shingle, they also burned, hoping that the pale strangers had but one boat, and that by burning it they were ensuring that no other Northmen would come to their shores.
    It was more than a hundred years before Leif the Fortunate, son of Erik the Red, rediscovered that land, which he would call Vineland. His gods were already waiting for him when he arrived: Tyr, one-handed, and gray Odin gallows-god, and Thor of the thunders.
    They were there.
    They were waiting.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Let the Midnight Special
    Shine its light on me
    Let the Midnight Special
    Shine its ever-lovin’ light on me
    —“T HE M IDNIGHT S PECIAL ,” TRADITIONAL SONG
    S hadow and Wednesday ate breakfast at a Country Kitchen across the street from their motel. It was eight in the morning, and the world was misty and chill.
    “You still ready to leave Eagle Point?” asked Wednesday, at the breakfast bar. “I have some calls to make, if you are. Friday today. Friday’s a free day. A woman’s day. Saturday tomorrow. Much to do on Saturday.”
    “I’m ready,” said Shadow. “Nothing keeping me here.”
    Wednesday heaped his plate high with several kinds of breakfast meats. Shadow took some melon, a bagel, and a packet of cream cheese. They went and sat down in a booth.
    “That was some dream you had last night,” said Wednesday.
    “Yes,” said Shadow. “It was.” Laura’s muddy footprints had been visible on the motel carpet when he got up that morning, leading from his bedroom to the lobby and out the door.
    “So,” said Wednesday. “Why’d they call you Shadow?”
    Shadow shrugged. “It’s a name,” he said. Outside the plate glass the world in the mist had become a pencil drawing executed in a dozen different grays with, here and there, a smudge of electric red or pure white. “How’d you lose your eye?”
    Wednesday shoveled half a dozen pieces of bacon into his mouth, chewed, wiped the fat from his lips with the back of his hand. “Didn’t lose it,” he said. “I still know exactly where it is.”
    “So what’s the plan?”
    Wednesday looked thoughtful. He ate several vivid pink slices of ham, picked a fragment of meat from his beard, dropped it onto his plate. “Plan is as follows. On Saturday night, which, as I have already remarked, is tomorrow, we shall be meeting with a number of persons preeminent in their respective fields—do not let their demeanor intimidate you. We shall meet at one of the most important places in the entire country. Afterward we shall wine and dine them. There will be, at a guess, thirty or forty of them. Perhaps more. I need to enlist them in my current enterprise.”
    “And where is the most important place in the country?”
    “One of them, m’boy. I said one of them. Opinions are justifiably divided. I have sent word to my colleagues. We’ll stop off in Chicago on the way, as I need to pick up some money. Entertaining, in the manner we shall need to entertain, will take more ready cash than I happen to have available. Then on to Madison.”
    “I see.”
    “No, you don’t. But all will