Gods of Jade and Shadow(94)

“For you and him, maybe.”

“Trust me. You don’t want this. And I’ll talk to Vucub-Kamé,” he promised. “He’s not going to kill you; you are a Leyva, after all.”

“Don’t try that again. I’ve never been a Leyva. You made sure I knew that.”

“I’m sorry! All right? I’m sorry! But for God’s sake don’t take it out on me, on us, now. Casiopea, tell me you won’t go on.”

She thought he’d keep his word, he’d do as he’d promised when they spoke in Mexico City: call her “cousin,” let her walk beside him. Even buy her dresses and trinkets, take her to dances in Mérida like he did with his sisters on occasion. He was desperate, after all.

Although she would have liked this, once upon a time, she would not relent.

“I’m headed to the palace,” she said, as much to him as to herself.

“God. You never quit, do you?” he yelled, and there was a dangerous anger in him.

Casiopea attempted to run, but he was very quick and rushed at her. She did not know how to fight and could barely gasp as he cleaved her against the ground. She raised her arms, trying to push him back, and their limbs thrashed as they struggled.

He meant to beat her, she thought. Teach her a lesson, like their grandfather with the cane; like Martín himself had done before. A slap or two. But then he raised his knife and she raised her hands, trying to shield her face; she kept the knife at bay, trapping his wrists with her fingers and holding him in place. And she couldn’t even yell at him: he was heavy, he crushed her. It was as if she’d forgotten how to breathe. She thought she’d die in this strange place, by the shrunken trees, their white branches whispering to the wind.

With his hair in his eyes and with his fury, her cousin was unrecognizable. He was a monster from the myth, more terrifying than Kamazotz because she’d feared Martín for a long time, because she’d dreamed it might end like this somehow, that he’d commit himself to violence, long before she ever initiated this quest.

“Martín, please,” she managed to croak, and she thought he would never budge.

But then he stood up, and he scrambled away from her, trembling, as if it had been he who had been pinned down against the dirt, a knife in front of his eyes. Casiopea blinked and pushed herself up.

“I can’t,” Martín said. “You stupid, stupid girl, I can’t!”

He was crying. She’d seen him cry when they were younger, when she’d hit him in the head. Blood had welled, so much blood, and he’d wept. Now he cried again, even though he had been attempting to hurt her. Noticing her gaze on him, he turned abruptly toward Casiopea, and Casiopea raised her arms. She thought he might attempt to finish what he had started.

Instead of the bite of the knife she felt his hands on her. He shoved her away with such force she rolled down the hill. She landed on a clump of weeds, no damage done. The ground was soft clay and the hill small. A trickle of a stream ran nearby.

“Stay there!” he warned her, and then he disappeared from sight.

Casiopea stood up and waited for a few minutes before climbing back up, but when she reached the top of the hill she found the road had vanished and she was standing upon a long, muddy flat. She turned around, trying to spot the road. It was nowhere to be seen.

Another stream flowed near her. Or perhaps it was the same one she’d seen before, even though that would have been impossible. But Xibalba did not respect the topography of Middleworld; distances here were extended and compressed.

Trees, yellow and rotting with age, poked out from the mud. Mud cones served as nests for strange birds that resembled flamingos but did not have their colors. They were gray. Not the gray of the flamingos when they are young, before they have eaten enough of the shrimp that give them their vivid pink hue. A darker sort of gray, like soot.

Not knowing what else to do, Casiopea began to walk. The birds, when she went by, raised their heads and stared at her and flapped their wings, making sounds that resembled a hiss, but they did not attempt to get close. She kept a hand on her knife.

She decided to follow the stream, even if any direction would have been the same now that she’d lost the road. When she grew thirsty, she knelt down and drank from it.

The souls of the dead, when they made their way to Xibalba, forgot themselves and were lost if they journeyed beyond the Black Road, and she began to lose herself too. She thought she had been walking for weeks, blisters on her feet, shoes caked with mud, her clothes askew, her hair in disarray.

When she looked over her shoulder, back to the place where she’d come from, she saw nothing but the mud cones and the trickle of water rolling through the land. She blinked, realizing the oddity of water rushing in the open: she’d never walked by a river before, they were all underground, back in northern Yucatán.

It was hard for her to remember Yucatán, though she’d spent her entire life there.

It was equally difficult to remember her bedroom, the books she used to read, the poetry she’d learned, the names of stars, her mother’s face, her father’s stories. Had it been hours in Xibalba? Could it have been years? She looked at her hands, and they were the hands of a young woman, but the more she stared at them, the older they became. Brown spots appeared upon the back of them, and she moved slowly, her spine weighed down by age.