Gods of Jade and Shadow(29)

Hun-Kamé opened his hand, sprinkling gray-and-black dust upon the ground.

He said several words that Casiopea could not understand. It was a strange tongue, very old. Where the dust had fallen, smoke began to rise, as if a charcoal brazier had been lit. The smoke had a shape, that of a dog, but then it shifted and it was a man, and then a bird, until one could not precisely define the nature of the apparition. The more she tried to pin it down, the more jumbled it became, threatening to give her a headache.

“I greet you and thank you for obeying my call,” Hun-Kamé said. “Do you know me?”

“Prince of the Starless Night, Firstborn Son of Xibalba. You are a god without a throne. I know you,” the smoke said. Its voice was low; it resembled a smoldering fire.

“Then you realize you must obey my command,” Hun-Kamé said with the hauteur of a king, a hand pressed against his chest. “I wish to know where my essence is hidden.”

“To you I owe three answers, and three I will give.”

The smoke rose, the dog, the bird, the shape, towering above them. It had two black eyes, two black pinpoints, which shone despite its blackness. Casiopea, standing next to Hun-Kamé, felt it looking at her. It was a fabulous thing, this creature, which brought with it the scent of incense and dead flowers. It made her wonder what other impossible beasts the Lords of Xibalba commanded.

The smoke opened its jaws and spoke.

“The city on the lake, the impossible city, Tenochtitlán. Deep in the arid wastelands, El Paso,” it said.

Then the apparition shook its head and stared at the ground, evasive. It was clear it did not wish to say any more.

“Where else?” Hun-Kamé demanded.

The apparition curled out its tongue. “In Baja California, by the sea, find Tierra Blanca. Find your destiny, Lord of Xibalba, but find your doom, for your brother is more cunning and more powerful than you ever imagined,” the smoke-creature said, and its voice was now the crackling of burning wood.

“Do not lecture me, messenger,” the god replied.

“I speak the truth.”

“Who has what belongs to me? Where do they reside?”

“You must ask the ghosts, or sorcerers, or some other who can aid you, oh Lord, for I have given you three answers and a warning, which is the most even a god such as you may command of me.”

“Then I dismiss you and will take your answers with me.”

The smoke creature grew larger, then it bowed, its body folding upon itself, its forehead touching the ground. The smoke seeped into the earth, like the rain sinks into the soil, and was gone. Around them the night trembled, bidding the apparition goodbye.

“You have heard where we will journey,” Hun-Kamé told her. “Tomorrow we depart for Mexico City.”

He could have said they’d depart for Antarctica and it wouldn’t have mattered much; she couldn’t muster the energy for a reply and her forehead ached.

They walked back to the guesthouse. It was very late and the front door was closed, but Hun-Kamé opened the door with ease. They went to their rooms and Casiopea, exhausted by the excursion, fell upon the bed without bothering to change out of her clothes, dressed in silver and white. The wonders of the night did not keep her up, and she slept soundly.



* * *



—

The next day, they caught the evening train to Mexico City. Had they taken an earlier train, Casiopea might have been able to gaze out the window and observe the landscape, the marshes and the scrub growth and the rows of palm trees. Huts with walls of bamboo, old men sitting in worn chairs, children chasing stray dogs. She might have been able to see the train climb up from the low hills of Veracruz and approach the mountains, their tops dusted with snow. But the night was like spilled ink upon the page, blotting out all vegetation and natural features.

Casiopea did feel the train, though. It lumbered onward, away from the humid heat of the coast. She had never been on such a contraption. She felt as if she rested in the belly of a metal beast, like Jonah who was swallowed by the whale. This image in her family’s Bible had often disconcerted her, the man sitting inside a fish, his face surprised. Now she sympathized with him. She could not see where they were headed, nor the place where they’d come from, and thus felt as though time and the world around her transmogrified, became unknowable; it was as if she were traveling in a dream.

She listened to the metallic click of the wheels along the steel rails while Hun-Kamé leaned back in his chair. They were sharing a sleeping car and it was small, so when he sat like that, his legs stretched out, he seemed to take up all the space. She did not mind, though, curled up against the window, the stars and the sky absorbing her thoughts. She associated her father with the smell of musty books or ink, the rustle of paper—he’d been a clerk, those had been the tools of his trade. But most of all she associated him with the stars, which he loved.

“You can speak with ghosts?” she asked, breaking the silence in their compartment.

“And other things that roam the night, as you may have noticed,” Hun-Kamé replied.

“Would you be able to speak with my father? He passed away when I was small.”

He turned his head, looked at her with disinterest. “Ghosts generally attach themselves to the stones, to a single place; rarely they may be shackled to a single person. I could not, from here, summon your father. Besides, he may not be a ghost. Not everyone who dies binds himself to the land. If your father perished quietly, then quietly he will have left this mortal realm.”