Gods of Jade and Shadow(41)

“Of course,” Martín said, although he frankly thought it might be better to slap some sense into his cousin. “What if she refuses?”

“Then we will determine another way to proceed. Do nothing else without the Supreme Lord’s consent,” the owl said, before it batted its wings and flew off into the night.

Martín was left alone on the roof of a building he did not know, in a city he had never visited before. It was the middle of the night, and he was afraid of being robbed by ruffians. He was also dreadfully cold; the trip on the owl’s back had left him sniffling and tired. Martín checked himself into a hotel near Casiopea’s lodgings and went to sleep because there was little he could do until the morning and he needed a pillow under his head and a hot bath.

He hoped for good dreams. Instead, he dreamed of Uukumil, his childhood, and his hateful cousin.



* * *



—

In dreams, she hit him with the stick and Grandfather laughed.

Martín Leyva was indolent, proud, and cruel. His faults were not solely the result of an inherent nature. They had been honed and coaxed by his family, through explicit action and through lapses in judgment.

As a man he already saw himself as worthy of praise. As a Leyva, child of the wealthiest family in town, his ego grew inflated. There was little he could not do, from berating the servants to lording over his female cousins and his sisters as if he were the ruler of a principality. His grandfather was a bitter tyrant, and Martín copied his mannerisms, feeling disappointed with his father, who was a much more placid fellow, meek, gray, and subdued by the patriarch. Rather than imitate the father, then, he took after the grandfather. He considered himself the future Man of the House, the undisputed macho of the Leyva clan.

Nevertheless, sometimes cracks showed in his narcissistic fa?ade. Martín was sent off to a good school but expelled. He’d had a hard time fitting in at the institution. Not only were the intellectual demands too much for his limited, closed brain, but he could discern scorn in the faces of the other pupils. The Leyvas were kings of Uukumil, but not kings of Mérida. He felt like an outsider, diminished. Unable to be the center of attention, he managed to get himself packed back to his hometown and refused to return to the school.

But home did not offer the respite he might have expected, mainly because Casiopea was living with the family.

At first, Martín had not quite known how to react to the girl, who was two years his junior. He was aloof, but his cool indifference turned to outright anger the more he observed her. First of all, there was Casiopea’s personality, which irritated him.

The day he returned from school, the letter narrating his expulsions clasped between his hands, she’d been with Grandfather to observe his humiliation…

His sisters and his other girl cousins were mild, quiet creatures who knew better than to defy him. But Casiopea was made of sterner stuff. She did as she was told, but sometimes she’d protest. She’d rebel. And even if she said nothing, he read mutiny in her eyes.

Then there was the matter of her intelligence. Martín thought books were for fools. If a man could do long division and read the headlines of the newspapers, that was all that was required. For a while he had read the paper for his grandfather, stumbling over big words, until the man, exasperated, assigned the task to the younger girl. Lo and behold, she could read well, could write in a neat hand, and did her sums with surprising quickness. Her mother had taught the child, and then the child continued to teach herself more. Martín believed this was suspicious, unfeminine.

“Why couldn’t you be a boy?” Grandfather said, eyes on Casiopea, and Martín almost broke into tears…

Hostile, he circled around the girl, issuing orders, seeking to dominate her, finding pleasure in this power. Yet he held back an inch. There was the slim veneer of civility to his actions. He spoke unpleasantries, but in the tone of a gentleman.

This changed when she hit him. He had been goading her for a while and did not think she’d break. But then Martín told her that she was almost a bastard: her mother had been pregnant when she married, round with child. Casiopea grabbed a stick and swung it against the boy’s head.

She almost took out his eye. In pain, hollering, thinking he had been dramatically injured, Martín had wept until his mother and the other members of the family ran out to see what was wrong.

Casiopea pretended she hadn’t heard the words, ducking her head, but she’d heard and Martín had heard…Why couldn’t you be a boy?

The beating Casiopea received from Grandfather did not satisfy Martín. Nothing could satisfy him. He quivered in his bed as the doctor examined him and rubbed an ointment on his face. A man, overcome by a girl. Because at fifteen he had considered himself a man already, and suddenly he was reduced back to infancy. He saw the disgust in his grandfather’s face, the veiled smiles of the servants, the scorn there, hidden and quiet and real, and he felt such utter shame.

He hated her from then on. It was not animosity or the scuffles of youth; he could not stand her.

Although, if he admitted it to himself, the trouble had started before, that day when he returned from school. But he did not like to think of it. Somehow the physical beating was a better start to the animosity. It justified it more neatly. She’d started it.

In dreams, she hit him with the stick and Grandfather laughed. Martín twisted and turned and muttered in his bed, her name on his lips.