Gods of Jade and Shadow(86)

“I told you we all have different names. You are Lady Tun, you are Casiopea, you are the Stone Maiden, and deep inside your heart you have a secret name. Grant me a name and it will be yours and mine alone.”

“I don’t—”

He was standing close to her, but he moved closer, and she stared at him.

“I could be a different person. If you gave me a name, who is to say it is not mine? If I had an ordinary name, I could have an ordinary story,” he said. “I could swear I first saw you in Mérida, standing in the middle of the street.”

It was too cold out there, and she without a jacket, the tips of her fingers tingling. Casiopea wanted to rub her hands against her arms, but did not move.

“It’s all symbols, the stories we tell; if you give me a name I could die and I could open my eyes again, and I’d remember that name.”

He was determined and grim, and something else entirely, which she did not recognize, and then his face softened. “I wouldn’t be a god. I…I told you already, I hardly remember myself sometimes. I could forget it all.”

But we’ve come this far, her mind protested. Her tongue, however, was unwilling to voice the thought. Her mouth caged the words.

“Gods don’t die and yet, at times, when I’ve sat next to you I thought I’d die, this pain in my chest that I can hardly understand except it’s you, caught there,” he told her, more than a little bewildered, very quietly, the waves almost drowning out his voice. “Have you ever felt anything like that?”

Casiopea’s breath was a burning coal. She did not reply, tentatively raising her left hand, where the splinter lay, where he’d marked her, brushing away a lock of hair from his forehead.

“Yes,” she said finally.

He leaned down, pressing his lips against her neck, before grasping her face and kissing her on the mouth.

He was untested, raw, worse than Casiopea. She’d at least found kisses on the printed page. But it was nice, the kiss, and he was the handsomest man she’d ever seen. He wanted her. She hadn’t thought…had not allowed herself to think she might be wanted like this.

But this plan! To become mortal!

Madness. He’d gone mad.

But who was to say she had not met him in Mérida? That the story Martín had told her family had not been the truth? Who would look at Hun-Kamé, devoid of his supernatural sheen, and think There goes a man who was a god? They’d simply say, “Look now, look at this pretty couple, look how he holds her hand and she kisses him. Like they are the air each other breathes.”

His mouth against her own, the imprint of his smile against her cheek, and she knew she wanted nothing other than this man. Not the god, but the man, with the dark brows, his long nose, the slender hands that rested against her back. She had already picked a name for him—Francisco, like that poet who wrote about life and death and loving—and might have said it, sealed the bargain this way, but a nagging detail tugged at her, made her open her eyes and look at him. The eye patch, the missing eye, the bit of him that wasn’t there hitting her like the waves hit the shore.

Casiopea understood the strength of narrative and the strict rules that govern a sonnet. The rhyme scheme constant, like the tide. There is a way to things. And, long ago, so very long ago, she recalled a word: patan. It was this that stalled her.

“You told me we must not let him win,” she reminded him. “What happens in Middleworld, with your brother now all powerful?” she asked. “Blood and sacrifice, and—”

He shook his head. “The glory he desires. The rest, does it matter?” he told her. “It doesn’t matter, if there’s you and me.”

She wished she could repeat his words, like the parrot in its cage back in Uukumil. But she remembered what he’d told her: the cenotes would be piled with corpses, men riddled with arrows. She’d seen it, it was no illusion, and she couldn’t quite make up her mind, she couldn’t be heedless, even if her resolve was crumbling.

“Vucub-Kamé would do wickedness upon the land, and there might be pain, but we’d be together and we’d go far away. The world is wide. What matters what happens to a fraction of it?”

“But—”

“My brother can have the halls of Xibalba and the black throne,” he said. “We can have each other.”

He kissed her again, and it lasted forever. Casiopea thought there’d be nothing left of her when he moved away, it wouldn’t be he who was erased and granted a new identity. And when she pressed a hand to his hair she was sure nothing but love mattered, there was only the two of them in this place by the sea.

“You’ll lose me otherwise,” he said, in a whisper.

“I want you to stay with me.”

“Then make me stay.”

She was dazed and breathless, leaning forward into the touch of his fingers, and it would be the easiest thing in the world to simply whisper a new name for him. It lingered heavy on her tongue, the name.

Francisco.

He was there; he raced through her bloodstream, and she saw no way to deny him.

“I want to dance with you, to the fastest music possible. I want to learn the names of stars. I want to swim in the ocean at night. I want to ride next to you in one of those automobiles and see where the roads go,” he said, laughing, as he held her face between his hands.