"They do that," admitted Zebediah. "You've got to get used to the heat, though, before you eat it. Otherwise you can just burn away."

"Why did I not remember this?" said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy, through the bright flames that surrounded him. "Why did I not remember that this was how my father went, and his father before him, that each of them went to Heliopolis to eat the Phoenix? And why do I only remember it now?"

"Because the years are burning off you," said Professor Mandalay. He had closed the leather book as soon as the page he had been writing on caught fire. The edges of the book were charred, but the rest of the book would be fine. "When the years burn, the memories of those years come back." He looked more solid now, through the wavering burning air, and he was smiling. None of them had ever seen Professor Mandalay smile before.

"Shall we burn away to nothing?" asked Virginia, now incandescent. "Or shall we burn back to childhood and burn back to ghosts and angels and then come forward again? It does not matter. Oh Crusty, this is all such fun! fun!"

"Perhaps," said Jackie Newhouse, through the fire, "there might have been a little more vinegar in the sauce. I feel a meat like this could have dealt with something more robust." And then he was gone, leaving only an after-image.

"Chacun a son gout," said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle, which is French for "each to his own taste," and he licked his fingers and he shook his head. "Best it's ever been," he said, with enormous satisfaction. said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle, which is French for "each to his own taste," and he licked his fingers and he shook his head. "Best it's ever been," he said, with enormous satisfaction.

"Good-bye, Crusty," said Virginia. She put her flame-white hand out, and held his dark hand tightly, for one moment, or perhaps for two.

And then there was nothing in the courtyard back of Mustapha Stroheim's Kahwa Kahwa (or coffeehouse) in Heliopolis (which was once the city of the Sun, and is now a suburb of Cairo) but white ash, which blew up in the momentary breeze, and settled like powdered sugar or like snow; and nobody there but a young man with dark, dark hair and even, ivory-colored teeth, wearing an apron that said (or coffeehouse) in Heliopolis (which was once the city of the Sun, and is now a suburb of Cairo) but white ash, which blew up in the momentary breeze, and settled like powdered sugar or like snow; and nobody there but a young man with dark, dark hair and even, ivory-colored teeth, wearing an apron that said KISS THE COOK KISS THE COOK.

A tiny golden-purple bird stirred in the thick bed of ashes on top of the clay bricks, as if it were waking for the first time. It made a high-pitched "peep!" and it looked directly into the sun, as an infant looks at a parent. It stretched its wings as if to dry them, and, eventually, when it was quite ready, it flew upward, toward the sun, and nobody watched it leave but the young man in the courtyard.

There were two long golden feathers at the young man's feet, beneath the ash that had once been a wooden table, and he gathered them up, and brushed the white ash from them and placed them, reverently, inside his jacket. Then he removed his apron, and he went upon his way.

Hollyberry TwoFeathers McCoy is a grown woman, with children of her own. There are silver hairs on her head, in there with the black, beneath the golden feathers in the bun at the back. You can see that once the feathers must have looked pretty special, but that would have been a long time ago. She is the president of the Epicurean Club-a rich and rowdy bunch-having inherited the position, many long years ago, from her father.

I hear that the Epicureans are beginning to grumble once again. They are saying that they have eaten everything.

(FOR HMG- HMG-A BELATED BIRTHDAY PRESENT)

INVENTING ALADDIN

In bed with him that night, like every night, her sister at their feet, she ends her tale, then waits. Her sister quickly takes her cue, and says, "I cannot sleep. Another, please?"

Scheherazade takes one small nervous breath and she begins, "In faraway Peking there lived a lazy youth with his mama.

His name? Aladdin. His papa was dead...."

She tells them how a dark magician came, claiming to be his uncle, with a plan: He took the boy out to a lonely place, gave him a ring he said would keep him safe, dropped in a cavern filled with precious stones, "Bring me the lamp!" and when Aladdin won't, in darkness he's abandoned and entombed....

There now.

Aladdin locked beneath the earth, she stops, her husband hooked for one more night.

Next day she cooks she feeds her kids she dreams....

Knowing Aladdin's trapped, and that her tale has bought her just one day.

What happens now?

She wishes that she knew.

It's only when that evening comes around and husband says, just as he always says, "Tomorrow morning, I shall have your head,"

when Dunyazade, her sister, asks, "But please, what of Aladdin?" only then, she knows....

And in a cavern hung about with jewels Aladdin rubs his lamp. The Genie comes.

The story tumbles on. Aladdin gets the princess and a palace made of pearls.

Watch now, the dark magician's coming back: "New lamps for old," he's singing in the street.

Just when Aladdin has lost everything, she stops.

He'll let her live another night.

Her sister and her husband fall asleep.

She lies awake and stares up in the dark Playing the variations in her mind: the ways to give Aladdin back his world, his palace, his princess, his everything.

And then she sleeps. The tale will need an end, but now it melts to dreams inside her head.

She wakes, She feeds the kids She combs her hair She goes down to the market Buys some oil The oil-seller pours it out for her, decanting it from an enormous jar.

She thinks, What if you hid a man in there?

She buys some sesame as well, that day.

Her sister says, "He hasn't killed you yet."

"Not yet." Unspoken waits the phrase, "He will."

In bed she tells them of the magic ring Aladdin rubs. Slave of the Ring appears....

Magician dead, Aladdin saved, she stops.

But once the story's done, the teller's dead, her only hope's to start another tale.

Scheherazade inspects her store of words, half-built, half-baked ideas and dreams combine with jars just big enough to hide a man, and she thinks, Open Sesame, Open Sesame, and smiles. and smiles.

"Now, Ali Baba was a righteous man, but he was poor..." she starts, and she's away, and so her life is safe for one more night, until she bores him, or invention fails.

She does not know where any tale waits before it's told. (No more do I.) But forty thieves sounds good, so forty thieves it is. She prays she's bought another clutch of days.

We save our lives in such unlikely ways.

THE MONARCH OF THE GLEN

An American Gods Novella

"She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening."

ANGELA C CARTER, "The Lady of the House of Love"

I

"If you ask me," said the little man to Shadow, "you're something of a monster. Am I right?"

They were the only two people, apart from the barmaid, in the bar of a hotel in a town on the north coast of Scotland. Shadow had been sitting there on his own, drinking a lager, when the man came over and sat at his table. It was late summer, and it seemed to Shadow that everything was cold and small and damp. He had a small book of Pleasant Local Walks in front of him, and was studying the walk he planned to do tomorrow, along the coast, toward Cape Wrath.

He closed the book.

"I'm American," said Shadow, "if that's what you mean."

The little man cocked his head to one side, and he winked, theatrically. He had steel gray hair, and a gray face, and a gray coat, and he looked like a small-town lawyer. "Well, perhaps that is what I mean, at that," he said. Shadow had had problems understanding Scottish accents in his short time in the country, all rich burrs and strange words and trills, but he had no trouble understanding this man. Everything the little man said was small and crisp, each word so perfectly enunciated that it made Shadow feel like he himself was talking with a mouthful of oatmeal.

The little man sipped his drink and said, "So you're American. Oversexed, overpaid, and over here. Eh? D'you work on the rigs?"

"Sorry?"

"An oilman? Out on the big metal platforms. We get oil people up here, from time to time."

"No. I'm not from the rigs."

The little man took out a pipe from his pocket, and a small penknife, and began to remove the dottle from the bowl. Then he tapped it out into the ashtray. "They have oil in Texas, you know," he said, after a while, as if he were confiding a great secret. "That's in America."

"Yes," said Shadow.

He thought about saying something about Texans believing that Texas was actually in Texas, but he suspected that he'd have to start explaining what he meant, so he said nothing.

Shadow had been away from America for the better part of two years. He had been away when the towers fell. He told himself sometimes that he did not care if he ever went back, and sometimes he almost came close to believing himself. He had reached the Scottish mainland two days ago, landed in Thurso on the ferry from the Orkneys, and had traveled to the town he was staying in by bus.

The little man was talking. "So there's a Texas oilman, down in Aberdeen, he's talking to an old fellow he meets in a pub, much like you and me meeting actually, and they get talking, and the Texan, he says, Back in Texas I get up in the morning, I get into my car-I won't try to do the accent, if you don't mind-I'll turn the key in the ignition, and put my foot down on the accelerator, what you call the, the-"

"Gas pedal," said Shadow, helpfully.

"Right. Put my foot down on the gas pedal at breakfast, and by lunchtime I still won't have reached the edge of my property. And the canny old Scot, he just nods and says, Aye, well, I used to have a car like that myself."

The little man laughed raucously, to show that the joke was done. Shadow smiled and nodded to show that he knew it was a joke.

"What are you drinking? Lager? Same again over here, Jennie love. Mine's a Lagavulin." The little man tamped tobacco from a pouch into his pipe. "Did you know that Scotland's bigger than America?"

There had been no one in the hotel bar when Shadow came downstairs that evening, just the thin barmaid, reading a newspaper and smoking her cigarette. He'd come down to sit by the open fire, as his bedroom was cold, and the metal radiators on the bedroom wall were colder than the room. He hadn't expected company.

"No," said Shadow, always willing to play straight man. "I didn't. How'd you reckon that?"

"It's all fractal," said the little man. "The smaller you look, the more things unpack. It could take you as long to drive across America as it would to drive across Scotland, if you did it the right way. It's like, you look on a map, and the coastlines are solid lines. But when you walk them, they're all over the place. I saw a whole program on it on the telly the other night. Great stuff."

"Okay," said Shadow.