“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 thoughhehad been attempting to hurther.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.
Had she been young? Once upon a time. Stories began like that, but she’d never had the chance to imagine fairy tales, busy on her knees scrubbing the floors. Was that the way she’d lived? Every day, cleaning the house, helping carry fruits and vegetables to the kitchen, shining her grandfather’s shoes.
It had been like this. She’d grown up, grown into a woman. Still the same routine. Still in Uukumil. Fetch this, fetch that. The brush and the soap and her hands cracked from all the housework. Her mother had died, and she’d stayed in Uukumil. Martín married, had children. But Casiopea did not, since she was a poor relation, there by force of charity. Her hair had hints of silver, then it went all white. She’d died an old woman, her breath sour, her eyes cloudy with cataracts.
She never set a foot outside the town. In her youth she’d dreamed of fast dances, the lure of the automobile. But she never saved enough money, never had the courage to move to Mérida. She’d grown resentful, then bitter, until she knew nothing but the taste of spite.
She’d died and somehow she’d ended here. In this place where birds that lacked flesh and feathers followed her journey with their empty eye sockets and she sank into the mud, her skirt crusted with the wet earth.
But then, there had been…
Hadn’t there been something else? The memory scratched against her skull, stubborn. Casiopea scratched her head in turn, felt stray wisps of hair against her fingers, the dryness of the scalp. She squinted and could not focus her eyes well. She was an old woman, after all.
And there had been…
There had been a poem that described exactly what she was feeling. This poem, read long ago, in a musty book, pages missing from it.
And it had said…
“ ‘He indicates life’s essential brevity, unexpected and with suffering, assaulted by death,’ ” Casiopea whispered.
She remembered. She’d told Hun-Kamé about this poem when they were in Tijuana. But that had not been years ago, it had been a few days ago. She was not old. She was a young woman, and when she raised her hand and looked at it she saw the skin she knew, unblemished by the passage of time.
She remembered her quest too.
She was headed to the palace, to find the World Tree.
Casiopea blinked. All around her the land was a blinding white, which made her shield her eyes for a moment. The mud flat and the birds were gone. She stood upon a salt flat instead, dotted with phosphorescent plants that swayed gently to a soft breeze.
Xibalba had attempted its tricks again.
