Their route cut through many states, the train lurching across mountains and ravines, snaking around colonial mining centers and pine forests, before finally reaching the desert. For a while she had pressed her hands against the glass, trying to document the sights and commit them to memory—the types of trees, the colors of the houses, and the shapes of clouds—but in the end it was too much.
The passengers were as varied as the landscape. A man with chickens in a cage, a group of schoolgirls in identical dresses, three rakish looking young men in a state of inebriation, all headed to different sections of the train. At each stop vendors walked by the windows, hawking their wares, even though they had taken the evening train and Casiopea had not expected this much activity.
At least it would be a comfortable voyage. The ads for the train company promised the finest accommodations possible, and Casiopea realized they were not kidding. Their compartment was one of the largest, with enough space for a bed—not berths, a bona fide double bed—and two plush lounge chairs, a folding washstand, a drop table, a dresser with an oval mirror, and a window with dark orange curtains that matched the bed’s covers.
There was much to admire in the compartment, from the varnished wood paneling to the finely woven brown-and-tan rug, but Casiopea decided her focus would be the bed. She was tired and took off her shoes, falling back over the covers, not bothering to change.
Hun-Kamé also kicked his shoes off and lay next to her. Ordinarily this should have alarmed her modesty because, well, it was a bed. It was one thing to share a compartment, as they’d done, and another to be sleeping literally next to a man, no division between them.
“There’s a bit of the devil in every man, even if he may act the part of the saint,” her mother had warned her. And of course, the follow-up: don’t give a fellow any ideas.
Recalling her mother’s admonishments, Casiopea thought of constructing a border between their bodies, a wall of sheets and pillows to demarcate the territory. Then again, he wasn’t her fellow, and she was too exhausted by their encounter with Xtabay to care what ideas were circling his head. Instead of building a wall, she pressed her head against the pillow and promptly went to sleep.
When Casiopea woke up, a light rain was splattering the windows of the car. It was dark outside. She sat up and glanced at Hun-Kamé, who was asleep, his body turned in her direction.
He wasn’t merely lying there. He was sleeping, his chest calmly rising and falling. After he had said he didn’t sleep.
Alarmed, Casiopea tapped his shoulder, and he groaned and shifted and opened his eye, his face tangled with dreams. But only for a few seconds, because he sat up quickly enough, frowning, alert.
“Sorry,” Casiopea said. “You were…I thought you didn’t sleep.”
“I don’t,” Hun-Kamé replied in a clipped voice.
He frowned even more now and looked so upset Casiopea wished she hadn’t said a thing, hadn’t woken him. There was a certain darkness upon Hun-Kamé at all times and it was not the blackness of his hair, the ravenlike eye, it was all about him, as if aside of being clothed in a suit and tie he was also dressed in shadows. Now the darkness intensified, the night without stars settling on the covers, in the space between them, even if the light fixtures shone as brightly as when they’d walked into the compartment.
“It’s the mortal element you provide me with. It has been turning me more and more human. And then the distance between us and Yucatán does not help; I grow weaker with each kilometer. My brother knows this, no doubt expecting such a change will help his plans come to fruition. I don’t know how much time we have left,” he said.
Time. Yes. She remembered the bone shard. She spread out her fingers and held her palms up, looking at her hands. She had forgotten she was dying, he was a disease, a parasite. How easy it was to forget! He made her forget not through arcane sorcery but with his mere presence.
“It’s making you human and it’s killing me,” she said.
“Yes, but it hadn’t been quite like this before. It’s getting worse.”
“Oh,” Casiopea whispered, placing her hands on her lap. Oh, for she couldn’t think of anything better to say. It wasn’t even that she was frightened, she was more…dismayed. It didn’t seem fair. No, it wasn’t fair at all. She’d glimpsed the world outside with no chance to sample it.
Well, I won’t die yet, she promised herself. I have plenty of things to do. Swim in the sea, dance at a nightclub, drive an automobile, to name a few. Casiopea was pragmatic, yes, but now that these things were possible, although not probable, she was not going to dismiss them and pretend she did not want them.
She clutched her hands together, and as the train stuttered, slowing down, she raised her head, looking at him, he who might condemn her to an early grave.
“Why did your brother do this to you anyway?” she asked.
Somehow, they had not discussed it. Hun-Kamé did not venture his thoughts often unless she asked, and she had not thought to go down this painful avenue, but at this point she thought it her right to inquire.
“Have you never heard of family quarrels? You don’t get along with your cousin, Martín. If you had the chance, wouldn’t you be rid of him?” Hun-Kamé asked with a shrug.
“If you mean I’d harm him greatly…I don’t know. I’ve never wanted to be rid of Martín…I wished to be away from him; that is different.”
“Come, girl, if you could have your revenge on him, you would,” he insisted. “You’d strike him and cut him with thorns.”
“I’m not a girl,” she countered, offended. “And no. I’m not…I don’t need to cause Martín pain to be happy.”
Casiopea considered her cousin. The cruelties he’d inflicted on her, the punishments she’d endured because of him. If the tables were turned, would she not seize the chance to torment him? Hadn’t she wished he would fall down a well? But those had been the half-formed ideas of a child. Her mother had been right: it was not as if her cousin’s misfortune could bring her joy.
“It did no good that time I hurt him,” she said, shaking her head. “I won’t be hitting him or cutting him, or anything of that sort. I’d be like him if I derived joy from the misery of others. I’m not like Martín”
Hun-Kamé was frankly confused by her words, as if it had never occurred to him one could be this magnanimous. Not that she hadn’t bickered with Martín, not that she hadn’t hit him hard that one time, but none of this had ever pleased her. She’d wanted Martín to let her be.
“My brother does derive pleasure from the misery of others, we all do. We are lords of Xibalba, kindness is not in our nature. But of course, that wasn’t all that drove him to cut my head off and toss me in that chest. My brother wants a new empire.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Hun-Kamé rested his back against the headboard and spread his hands, the gesture expansive.
“The chu’lel births gods, but the prayers of men are like a fan that makes the flames rise higher. It increases our power. Picture it, if you will, as a feast. Without the prayers and the beliefs of men, the food is bland and tasteless, but add a pinch of it and it is like the spices that flavor a delicious meal.
“Men ceased to worship Xibalba a long time ago, but Xibalba remains because the well of power from which we were born is deep. I believe the oceans may lick the land and devour it, and the Black Road of Xibalba would exist. Yet our sturdy kingdom of shadows was not enough for my brother.”
“What else could he want?”
“He wanted a return to the old ways. The prayers of men to flow anew. Salt in our dishes. He was not content with ancient glories. I kept away from Middleworld. It is not our kingdom, and although I was aware of some of the changes in our peninsula, it did not interest me to see what new palaces and trinkets mortals fashioned.”
The god had not been surprised by any of the things they’d witnessed in the city. Neither the trams nor the automobiles, nor the dresses women wore and the hats men sported, caught his eye. She had assumed he had experienced this before. Not the automobiles, but the trains certainly, and the buildings and some of the tastes of people. But perhaps he had not; it might have mostly been vicarious knowledge.
“But Vucub-Kamé, he became fascinated with the world of men and he became interested in a spot in Baja California, a place where the chu’lel also converged. This convergence was not quite as powerful as in Yucatán, but interesting nevertheless. He had been speaking to a mortal man, Aníbal Zavala, and Zavala had a theory both points could be stitched together.”
“Stitched?”
“Connected somehow. Xibalba could draw on the power in Baja California. That was the general idea. But I refused to listen,” Hun-Kamé said, shaking his head.
“Why?”
“Vucub-Kamé’s idea violated the natural order of things. It was fueled by greed and fear.”
“What would a god fear?”
“Irrelevance. Eventually, the eternal sleep our godhood grants us,” Hun-Kamé said. “Since I would not partake in his mad action, Vucub-Kamé decided to dispose of me, and he managed it, for a while. But after I regain my throne, he shall pay dearly for this affront. I spent a few decades in that box. He will spend centuries, no, millennia in the prison I will fashion for him after I hack off his head and limbs.”
The darkness Hun-Kamé carried grew in intensity and it brought with it a chill, like touching ice. It made Casiopea feel as if she were tasting frost, and from her half-parted lips there escaped a soft plume of her breath, dissolving almost instantly. She closed her mouth, frowning, and crossed her arms.
“You wouldn’t do such a thing, not truly, would you?” Casiopea asked.
“Do you think me kind?” Hun-Kamé replied. “He cast me into an unbearable torment. I wished to cry in the dark but had no voice. I wished to move but was a pile of timeworn bones. I was and was not, like an insect dashing against a glass dome. He will taste the same misery.”
“If you know such a thing is unbearable, then why would you subject anyone to it? Even him.”
Hun-Kamé gave her an amused look. “Virtuous child who has not known the true measure of unhappiness, how could you ever imagine the breadth of my enmity? What games do you think gods play?”
Casiopea thought Hun-Kamé was mocking her and yet, when she looked carefully at him, she realized there was a wild earnestness about him. “Did your brother obtain everything he wanted, then?” she asked. “The connection he dreamed of?”
“Had he done it I’d know and you’d know it too. The world would not be the same at all,” Hun-Kamé said. “But I suspect trickery awaits us in Baja California. I am not stupid. He has seeded the road and wants us to find him, and therefore I suspect his dream may not be forgotten.”
“How would the world be different?”
“It would run with the blood of sacrifices and the adulation of mortals. The cenotes would be piled with gold and corpses. Men would be painted blue and their bodies riddled with arrows, although, certainly, the supreme offering is the severing of the head.”
She had seen this imagery in books, had read about the wooden rods displaying hundreds of human skulls at the entrance of the temples, the bloodletting rituals involving shells and obsidian blades, but these were practices long forgotten.
“Surely that wouldn’t happen now?” she said. “You wouldn’t have a…a man riddled with arrows in the middle of Mérida?”
“That is precisely what my brother would have, and not simply Mérida. He would engulf many cities north and south of our peninsula. He desires power, more power than he’s ever tasted, more than we were ever meant to have. Incense is not enough for him. He’ll burn the land, the forests, swallow the smoke that rises from it.”
In that moment Hun-Kamé was again cold, boundless. And, of course, dark. The chill of Hun-Kamé was the chill of the grave. Her grave, perhaps. Why worry about the sacrifices of others when she was scheduled for her own death? And yet, she worried, for the picture he painted in her mind was vivid and for a moment even more real than their compartment. It was crimson and black, and an obsidian throne upon a pile of bones, and the stench of rotting flesh in her nose. She felt like gnawing at her nails or covering her eyes, like a girl.
She shook her head. “You ought to have said all this before.”
“I assumed you realized this was greater than you and me.”
“Liar,” she muttered.
He bristled at that, and she guessed he’d give her some grand speech about how this is what gods do, they keep their mouth shut and don’t go spilling all their secrets to lowly mortals.
“I thought you’d be afraid,” he said instead, after a minute.
“I am!”
“Hence why I didn’t say it. If you were a hero you’d know this is the way things go. It is patan. When Hunahpu and Xbalanque descended to Xibalba they realized—”
“There were also two Hero Twins and they were divine,” she said, interrupting him. “So maybe that helped them know the rules and…and kill monsters. Did you think I’d run off if you told me? Is that it? I would not.”
“I know you won’t run away, but I didn’t want to burden you with all of this. To sour your days more than I have already,” he said most politely.
She felt this politeness masked his true feelings. That he did see her as a coward, as unworthy. She knew about patan. Not just tribute, but duty and beyond duty, the obligation that carves your place in the world, and she wasn’t about to disregard it. But her hands were trembling.
Maybe she was a coward. Cuch chimal, dragging her shield on her back and retreating from battle. She bit her lip.
“I’m not useless,” she assured herself more than him. “I can be brave.”
“I am not implying you aren’t brave,” he said. There was something heavy and dark in his gaze as he looked at her, something quiet too, that muffled his voice.
He leaned forward, inclining his head. He didn’t seem like a powerful lord then, and she couldn’t explain the change, only that in the past few minutes, as they spoke, he’d become more tangible. He was very handsome, with that wonderful voice of his. But he was distant, like the face in an old painting staring at her across the ages. It was beauty you couldn’t hold. Then he looked to her, for a moment, very much a man, which startled her.
He drew back, leaned back and away from her, eyebrows furrowed.
“You need not consider my brother and his schemes. I will prevail and you will be rewarded for your assistance as was promised,” he said dismissively. Now he was not looking at her and he was a great lord.
He changed. He was always changing, a thousand tiny ripples, tiny tessellations and dark reflections. It threw her out of balance, and her breath burned in her mouth.
“With the finest jewels and treasures of the earth, which your servants will fetch at your command,” she said, not meaning to sound bitter; she merely remembered what he’d told her when he’d given her the silver bracelet. She gazed down at her wrist, running her hand along the piece of jewelry.
“With your heart’s greatest desire,” he said simply.
Ah, the ocean lit by the moon, night swimming in its depths; the automobile she wished to drive, curious about that beast of metal that roared upon the roads; the pretty dress reaching her thighs, made for dancing at clubs where they played all the music they mentioned in the papers, and which she’d never heard.
But when she looked at him to say may I have all that? the joy she felt, like a child who opens her Epiphany presents, was scattered.
It was nothing he did or nothing he said, since he was doing and saying nothing, just sitting at her side.
There was silence, a quiet that stretched out forever and was no more than a few minutes long. An emptiness that made Casiopea rub her arms, which filled the heart he’d spoken about. She waited for him to talk because she had no words and did not want to find them now lest she say the wrong thing, but he was prone to silences. She realized he would feel no need to talk.
So, yes, perhaps she was bitter, and beneath her bluster she was scared, and in turn perhaps he kept secrets, which only made it worse.
She sighed, raised her head, admired his profile for a second. She spoke, her voice as light as she could make it.
“Do you think they’ll have opened the dining car yet?” she asked.
“We can find out,” he said and they rose.
He brushed a few wrinkles from his suit, and she fixed her hair. He offered her his arm.
The dining car was empty but the tables were all set, with spotless white linens and gleaming glasses. Casiopea rested her chin against her hand and looked out the window, at the stars, which were fading. She longed. Not for one specific thing but for everything; she had longed for a long time. He’d made this longing worse: it followed her quietly, this awkward feeling under her skin.
“What do you dream about?” he asked.
“Sorry?” she replied, turning her head away from the window.
“When you dream, what do you dream about?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Lots of different things, I suppose,” Casiopea said with a shrug, tracing the rim of a glass with a hand.
“Do you dream about the things you see on the streets during the daytime and the people you know?”
“Sometimes.”
She wondered what he was going on about. He looked rather serious, and he rubbed his chin. She noticed the trace of stubble on his cheeks. Had he needed to shave before? He’d seemed very pristine to her, a statue in his perfection.
“I think I dreamed tonight. It’s difficult for me to understand it since I am unused to the activity.”
“My father had a book and it claimed that dreams can have secret messages. If you dream you are flying it means one thing and if you dream your teeth are falling out it means another. I do hate it when my teeth fall out in dreams,” she said.
“I dreamed about you,” he said, the voice deliberate, cool.
Casiopea coughed so loudly she thought the entire train had heard her, every single person in every berth and the conductor to boot. And then she blushed so brightly she seriously considered slipping under the table. She grabbed her napkin, tossed it on her lap, and fidgeted with it instead, unwilling to look at him.
“What is the matter?” Hun-Kamé said. “You are very strange sometimes.”
“Nothing is the matter with me. You dream about me and nothing is the matter,” she said, lifting her head and almost shouting at him. Couldn’t he see how mortified she was?
Now he looked irritated, as if she’d been mean to him. But she was not trying to be mean; it wasn’t the sort of thing she’d expected to hear.
“I shouldn’t have dreamed, not about you or teeth or whatever men dream. I feel like I’m standing on quicksand and I’m sinking fast. I’m forgetting who I am,” he admitted.
He looked utterly lost. She patted his hand, which rested against the mahogany table, in sympathy, not knowing what else to do.
“You’ll be yourself again soon,” she promised.
He looked down at her fingers resting on top of his. He seemed surprised, and she felt abashed, thinking she’d done something wrong. But when she attempted to pull away her hand, he gave it a squeeze and he nodded.
“I dreamed you walked the Black Road of Xibalba,” he said. “I did not like this. It is a dangerous path. And I was glad when you woke me. It is not that I think you a coward, Lady Tun, it is that I wish you no harm.”
He slid his hand away, and she stared at the empty plate before her. “I suppose there’s nothing to do but hope for the best.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Hun-Kamé said thoughtfully, grabbing his napkin and unfolding it. A server had walked by and filled their glasses with water. Casiopea guessed they would begin the breakfast service soon.
“Have I told you,” he said suddenly, “how beautiful are the mountains in the east of my kingdom? They are made of different layers, first a layer of sturdy jadeite, then a layer of vibrant malachite, and finally a layer of pale pink coral. Even your stars would envy their beauty.”
It was a strange comment. Was he attempting to distract her? A light danced in his dour eye. It was muted. The light of a half moon instead of the sun, but it made her lean forward, quick and eager.
“You say that because you have not seen them streaking the sky,” she replied.
“Are they made of malachite and coral?”
“Well, no.”
“Then they do not compare.”
She smiled at Hun-Kamé. He smiled at her too. What was this? A simple act of mimicry? No. The smile, like his laughter, like the errant dream, came from his heart. Did he realize it? No. Does everyone who has been young and foolish realize the extent and depth of their emotions? Of course not.
What about Casiopea? Surely the sonnets, the turns of phrases in poems, had schooled her somewhat. But then, like him, she had lived vicariously, had seen the world from a distance. The yearning inside her was impossible, like when as a child she’d wished to pluck a shooting star from the sky; it was wildly familiar and new at the same time. And she didn’t want it; she could recognize a fool’s errand even if she could not name it.
The train pressed forward and the glasses tinkled and he looked at her as if he’d not truly seen her before. And maybe, he had not.