“He is the problem!” shouted Czernobog. “He is! You tell him that there is nothing will make me help him! I want him to go! I want him out of here! Both of you go!”
“Please,” said Zorya Utrennyaya. “Please be quiet, you wake up Zorya Polunochnaya.”
“You are like him, you want me to join his madness!” shouted Czernobog. He looked as if he was on the verge of tears. A pillar of ash tumbled from his cigarette onto the threadbare hall carpet.
Wednesday stood up, walked over to Czernobog. He rested his hand on Czernobog’s shoulder. “Listen,” he said, peaceably. “Firstly, it’s not madness. It’s the only way. Secondly, everyone will be there. You would not want to be left out, would you?”
“You know who I am,” said Czernobog. “You know what these hands have done. You want my brother, not me. And he’s gone.”
A door in the hallway opened, and a sleepy female voice said, “Is something wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong, my sister,” said Zorya Utrennyaya. “Go back to sleep.” Then she turned to Czernobog. “See? See what you do with all your shouting? You go back in there and sit down. Sit!” Czernobog looked as if he were about to protest; and then the fight went out of him. He looked frail, suddenly: frail, and lonely.
The three men went back into the shabby sitting room. There was a brown nicotine ring around that room that ended about a foot from the ceiling, like the tide line in an old bathtub.
“It doesn’t have to be for you,” said Wednesday to Czernobog, unfazed. “If it is for your brother, it’s for you as well. That’s one place you dualistic types have it over the rest of us, eh?”
Czernobog said nothing.
“Speaking of Bielebog, have you heard anything from him?”
Czernobog shook his head. He looked up at Shadow. “Do you have a brother?”
“No,” said Shadow. “Not that I know of.”
“I have a brother. They say, you put us together, we are like one person, you know? When we are young, his hair, it is very blond, very light, his eyes are blue, and people say, he is the good one. And my hair it is very dark, darker than yours even, and people say I am the rogue, you know? I am the bad one. And now time passes, and my hair is gray. His hair, too, I think, is gray. And you look at us, you would not know who was light, who was dark.”
“Were you close?” asked Shadow.
“Close?” asked Czernobog. “No. How could we be? We cared about such different things.”
There was a clatter from the end of the hall, and Zorya Vechemyaya came in. “Supper in one hour” she said. Then she went out.
Czernobog sighed. “She thinks she is a gpod cook,” he said. “She was brought up, there were servants to cook. Now, there are no servants. There is nothing.”
“Not nothing,” said Wednesday. “Never nothing.”
“You,” said Czernobog. “I shall not listen to you.” He turned to Shadow. “Do you play checkers?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Shadow.
“Good. You shall play checkers with me,” he said, taking a wooden box of pieces from the mantelpiece and shaking them out onto the table. “I shall play black.”
Wednesday touched Shadow’s arm. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” he said.
“Not a problem. I want to,” said Shadow. Wednesday shrugged, and picked up an old copy of Reader’s Digest from a small pile of yellowing magazines on the windowsill.
Czernobog’s brown fingers finished arranging the pieces on the squares, and the game began.
In the days that were to come, Shadow often found himself remembering that game. Some nights he dreamed of it. His flat, round pieces were the color of old, dirty wood, nominally white. Czernobog’s were a dull, faded black. Shadow was the first to move. In his dreams, there was no conversation as they played, just the loud click as the pieces were put down, or the hiss of wood against wood as they were slid from square to adjoining square.
For the first half dozen moves each of the men slipped pieces out onto the board, into the center, leaving the back rows untouched. There were pauses between the moves, long, chesslike pauses, while each man watched, and thought.
Shadow had played checkers in prison: it passed the time. He had played chess, too, but he was not temperamentally suited to planning ahead. He preferred picking the perfect move for the moment. You could win in checkers like that, sometimes.
There was a click as Czernobog picked up a black piece and jumped it over one of Shadow’s white pieces. The old man picked up Shadow’s white piece and put it on the table at the side of the board.
“First blood. You have lost,” said Czernobog. “The game is done.”
“No,” said Shadow. “Game’s got a long way to go yet.”
“Then would you care for a wager? A little side bet, to make it more interesting?”
“No,” said Wednesday, without looking up from a “Humor in Uniform” column. “He wouldn’t.”
“I am not playing with you, old man. I play with him. So, you want to bet on the game, Mister Shadow?”