Gods of Jade and Shadow(83)

Hun-Kamé danced, she thought, to distract her. Or else, to show them all—Vucub-Kamé, Zavala, Martín—his disdain, his aloofness.

But when she chanced to look aside, catching a glimpse of their reflection splayed across a mirror, she did not observe any disdain or aloofness.

In Uukumil, when she’d gone to fetch a few items from the general store, on an occasion when she forgot to bring her shawl and conceal her hair with it, she’d caught the eye of one of the boys who worked there. He was the shopkeeper’s assistant, and on that summer day he was carrying a heavy sack of flour in his arms. When she walked in and began reading out the list of supplies, he lost his hold on the sack and dropped it, the flour spilling over the floor. Casiopea remembered three children, who were also in the store, giggling at the mishap, and she’d blushed because the boy had stared at her. Not a normal stare, if there was such a thing, but a startling look of eagerness.

Casiopea recognized the look on Hun-Kamé’s face: it was that same look, more engrossed if anything, heavier than the brief flicker of a look she caught in Uukumil before she mumbled an apology and stepped outside the store.

This look went to her head. It was stronger than the champagne and she gripped his hand tight and she would have stumbled if he hadn’t held her against him.

“I wish we could keep dancing too,” he said.





They walked up the stairs of the hotel, avoiding a group of drunk patrons who, between giggles and shoves, were making their way down the wide staircase. It was a somber march for Casiopea and Hun-Kamé, almost funerary. When Hun-Kamé placed the key in the door’s lock, she thought to turn around.

But they’d danced, and now they were here, and they needed to keep going.

He turned the key.

Shadows had invaded the vestibule. Hun-Kamé and Casiopea walked into one of the bedrooms, and there were pools of darkness so vivid they looked liquid, as if someone had left a window open and the night had dripped against the wallpaper and elegant furniture, making the bulbs of the lamps dim.

A lazy plume of darkness rose in the middle of the room and a man stepped out from it, clad in a white cape. He resembled Hun-Kamé, his skin dark, the face proud. His hair was very pale, the color of the fragile crust of salt that forms upon the seawater when it evaporates. The eyes were devoid of color, not dark like Hun-Kamé’s, but a silken gray. Therefore the brothers mirrored and did not mirror each other.

“How long, our parting,” Vucub-Kamé said, his voice also silken, the curve of his lips not quite forming a smile.

Hun-Kamé did not say anything, but Casiopea felt his anger like a hot coal. If she reached out and touched his hand she feared he might scorch her.

“Long enough for you to construct this monstrosity,” Hun-Kamé replied, at last.

“Monstrosity? Hun-Kamé, you are caught in the past.” Vucub-Kamé smiled fully. But the smile did not reach his eyes. “Do you think I could build a temple in the middle of Baja California? They have outlawed the Christian churches—not that I mind—and now they pray to idols of aluminum and Bakelite. We need new trappings, new acolytes. And blood, of course.”

“So, not everything is new.”

“Blood is the oldest coin. Blood remains.”

Hun-Kamé took several steps until he was standing in front of his brother. They were of the same height and stared each other in the eye.

“I told you not to defy the wisdom of eternity. Your scheme is ignoble. If ever Xibalba should rise anew, it shall rise by the will of fate and not by cheap sorcery,” Hun-Kamé said. “You will pay for your treason.”

“I paid long ago, swallowing each one of your offenses.”

“We all play our roles,” Hun-Kamé said. “My role was to rule over Xibalba.”

“Over Xibalba, not over me. I was not born to be your slave.”

“Enough with your nonsense.”

“You expected me to gnaw at scraps, to drink spoiled wine. One time we were gods, not shadows. Until they, the twins—”

“The Hero Twins defeated us and we were humbled, as we had to be humbled for our pride was great,” Hun-Kamé declared.

“Then I shall build great temples and paint them with blood until our defeat is washed away! Until we are humbled no longer!”

“Enough, I said.”

Hun-Kamé’s voice was imperious and well rehearsed. She imagined they’d had similar conversations before. She imagined, by the tone Hun-Kamé employed, that the conversations ended with Vucub-Kamé’s acid silence. Not on this occasion.

“Has he told you what it was like?” Vucub-Kamé asked, turning toward Casiopea and moving in her direction. She saw Hun-Kamé shift uncomfortably, but Vucub-Kamé blocked her line of sight with his body.

“The burning of the most precious incense, the sweet blood of priests, the sacrifices in the cenotes littered with jewels, the ball game concluding in glorious decapitation,” he said.

Casiopea almost thought she could see it, could taste it. The night skies like velvet darkness, pierced by the stars, the murals in the palaces, waterholes so blue you’d think them inked with the leaves of the a?il, and the devotion of men, like a wave, a sound, this force that made the land quiver. The adoration of mortals filling one’s lungs. Then that same adoration receding, the emptiness it left, the way the azure remained on the walls of temples, weathering the assault of time, but everything else faded until it felt as if you’d fade too.