“This heads in one direction, back and forth in a line. But can you picture an automobile? Cutting in whatever direction you will, winding down roads. Did you see them in the city? You could do as you pleased in one of those,” she said, thinking of the vehicles that had rolled before their eyes, providing an exciting chaos to the streets in downtown Mexico City. Along with the night swimming and the dancing, this was one of her secret, deepest wishes.
“You want to go back home,” she said. “I don’t want to go back. Not for a thousand years, and yet…I don’t know what I’ll do if I’m not taking care of Grandfather and fetching the groceries. I’ve never seriously thought of it, and now it seems I should. Or maybe not, maybe it’s too soon. Maybe there’s no point in talking about automobiles when I don’t know if I’ll live to be nineteen. But it would be fun, wouldn’t it? To ride one. Maybe to ride it with you.”
He tossed her a strange look she’d never seen before. She catalogued all his looks and thought she knew them by now. This look she did not recognize. It reminded her of the movement of a match as it strikes the box.
“With me?”
She felt abashed, tried to shrug it off. “It’s only daydreams.”
“Casiopea,” he said. His voice had a deep, pleasant rumble to it. He let his hand fall upon hers.
Again she had the sensation that she was in the belly of a whale, swaying gently, as she had had during the ride from Mexico City to El Paso. She recalled that Jonah was thrown into the sea to appease God, and he lay nestled inside the creature, but she could not remember, for the life of her, what had happened to him.
His thumb stroked over her knuckles. and Hun-Kamé leaned down in what she took to be a motion to kiss her. He had been afraid and uncertain, and now he was composed, and it was she who felt a shiver go down her spine.
She remembered a story she’d read or heard—she could not much remember where—about men who took advantage of women on trains, using the privacy of the compartment as a means for mischief. It might have been the priest who issued the warning during a sermon, it was the kind of thing he might lecture them about. Ride a train and find yourself with a bold, strange man. Kiss a man and soon enough he’ll be taking liberties with you. Wait a little and you’ll be carrying a bastard baby to be baptized at the church, with a single surname to his name.
Yes, men could be brazen on a train.
And so could women,she mused. She was, after all, here, with him. Chasing adventure, a fancy. Chasingsomething.
There was tightness in her throat, and the sun shone harshly through the window, making his dark eye even darker, as if he objected to its light and conjured more shadows. Since she’d cast away seven layers of decency already, she decided one more would not matter, and if he attempted a kiss she’d allow it.
“I like your daydreams, dear girl,” he said quietly.
“I’ve never said them aloud before,” she told him.
It was true. She’d pressed all her fantasies like dried flowers in books, carefully hidden where neither Martín nor Cirilo would see them. Rarely, late at night, had she allowed herself to contemplate them. If she’d declared them in a loud voice Casiopea would have let them take root inside her, and she could not have that. Instead, she polished them in secret, precious bits that they were, but bits and not wholes.
She understood now, his paucity with words.
He did not kiss her. He hovered next to her, pressed his forehead against her own instead, which was worse than any liberty he might have taken, more raw.
“Words are seeds, Casiopea. With words you embroider narratives, and the narratives breed myths, and there’s power in the myth. Yes, the things you name have power,” he said.
Casiopea clenched her hands together, and her heart clenched too, and she nodded solemnly, though she also sighed when he drew away from her.
They were quiet and they were foolish, both of them, thinking they were treading with any delicacy, and that if they somehow moderated their voices they’d stop the tide of emotion. The things you name do grow in power, but others that are not ever whispered claw at one’s heart anyway, rip it to shreds even if a syllable does not escape the lips. The silence was hopeless in any case, since something escaped the god, anyway: a sigh to match the girl’s own.
Vucub-Kamé walked in the gardens of his palace, past ponds filled with minuscule glowing fish, until he reached a lake of considerable size. He set a hand upon one of the ceiba trees growing next to the lake, bigger than any of the other trees, its massive roots dipping into the water. The ceiba trees in Xibalba had a silver cast, but this particular one was brighter than the rest, its leaves more luminous, almost iridescent.
The lake was special too, its waters never reflected anything. Not a leaf nor a branch, nor the figure of the Death Lord circling it. Though curiously clear, the waters seemed bottomless and no fish swam there: only the Great Caiman, in its depths, which had traveled the seas when the world was young and teemed with the fury of chaos. Shards of chaos remained in the water, which was why it rejected reflections and why Vucub-Kamé could not read portents in its depths. Curiously, auguries function following the principles of order.
Or not so curiously. After all, prophecy traces clean paths. Vucub-Kamé’s ability lay in witnessing the arrow of what might be, of following the thread of order among what others thought was simple chance. Men also had this gift, but being a god, his power was unparalleled. Yet the more time passed, the more disorganized his visions of his own future became.
Vucub-Kamé had not tried to divine the future since leaving Xtabay’s home, but he had been considering the facts as he knew them, considering them very carefully. And pacing, pacing beside the lake and wondering about the strength of chaos upon his finely laid plans.
Vucub-Kamé was alone, the attendants of the god having been dismissed for the time being. Yet now two men approached the Death Lord, bowing low when they reached him. Aníbal and Martín. He’d sent for them. After they had abased themselves sufficiently, Vucub-Kamé bid them rise.
“How do you find my kingdom?” Vucub-Kamé asked Martín. The heavy obsidian necklace around his neck accentuated the harshness of his face, giving his words an added weight.
“It’s interesting,” Martín mumbled. He was prosaic and, lacking any desire for the fantastic, he would have rather kept his eyes shut the whole journey. Best ask a slug what it thinks of the architecture of a city.
“Do you think you can walk its road alone?” the god asked, aware now that there was no need for formalities and polite inquiries with the Leyva boy, and somewhat irritated by this since the vanity of gods extends to their constructions, and surely he desired to hear a long exultation of the beauty of the Black City.
“Martín progresses,” Aníbal said.
“Quickly, I hope.”
