“Thank you for letting me come through,” I said.
“I like your gift. To reach the Lords, just continue through the Snow Fields.”
“Thank you.”
“Watch your step. There are beings that can see you when you walk through the Snow Fields.”
I turned around, and the opening in the city was gone, and the cylinder resumed its rotation on top of the lake.
I walked on the snow, and I was grateful that I had worn so many layers for the trip.
During my walk, I didn’t encounter a single animal, insect, or plant. I walked for a long time, and time dissolved. But my mind didn’t fret over the loss of time, because I knew the Lords were the ones eating it. The snow under my boots chilled my feet, and I walked into a silence that was deeper than a dead galaxy.
I heard the throb of the Lords, and I knew that they could hear me, too.
MICTECACÍHUATL AND MICTLANTECUHTLI
“Empty cities are scary cities.” – Ron Amadeo, exclusive WTTW interview regarding his memoir I Continue to Be the King, 2017.
“Everything you need to know is in Frida Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas.” – Clara Montes, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, Aleph Digital Press, Paris/Mexico, 2034.
“There are cities made of gold, and there are cities drenched in dew. There’s a city in a coil; it eats me, and it eats you.” Arkangel, “Rhapsody,” The Violet Album, 2008, Reckless Records.
The Snow Fields spanned thousands of miles, and I walked them. The air kissed my forehead, and at this depth in the Coil, the scents of flowers became very faint. Instead, I tasted something like sea water in the air.
I only heard the sound of my breathing and the crunch under my boots.
I don’t know how I didn’t notice someone had been walking next to me. I felt his body radiate heat, and I heard the deep bell sounds that rang from his body.
“Just a few more steps, Wanderer,” the Xolotl said.
Suddenly, he looked comical to me. Skinny legs, a caved-in chest, and the head of a hairless dog.
“Am I going to have give you a tip after this little tour?” I said.
“What is a ‘tip’, Wanderer?”
“I could explain, but the joke’s already gone. Had to be there.”
“Tell me about your ‘jokes,’ then.”
“You know, when things don’t go as you expected, sometimes, you laugh. That’s humor.”
“I don’t understand your meaning, Wanderer.”
“Haven’t you ever laughed?” I said. Down in the distance, I felt the ground slope upward. We were coming up on a shallow hill.
“Wanderer, how often will you be returning to the Coil?”
“I have no intention on coming back. I’ve come for my tonal and to retrieve my brother.”
“Is this when I should laugh?” he said.
I bit my lip and shook my head.
The slits in the Xolotl’s chest emitted tiny clicks, and he dug his claws into my shoulder. It was a gesture that felt friendly but also territorial, like an eagle digging its talons into a mouse before devouring it. I would never understand the feral nature of this being.
“I enjoyed our adventure, Wanderer. You can always call for the hummingbirds in your city of towers. And they will fly to you.”
“Thank you.”
“And your brother? Where is he?” I said.
“You have seen his traces, the essence of his feathered-serpent form wrapped inside my body, but there are things that I don’t know. But if he returns, I will know. He blazes.”
I took the Xolotl’s right hand in mine, and I did my best to shake it. The sharp edges of his claws grazed the palm of my hand, and I had to put my left hand over his to let him know I was saying goodbye.
I heard the Xolotl turn back, and his bells rang off in the distance. Now I stood on the lip of a shallow crater, and beneath it, a hard drumming began, thick as a heartbeat. I had heard it many times before.
The pit beneath my feet was covered by a thin membrane, swirling in shades of blue ranging from cobalt to cornflower blue.
This is the third time you’ve seen color down here. If you’re this deep in the canyon, how can color exist?
The first time had been next to the waterfall inside the temple of flowers. The second time happened when I had walked through the city of Mictlán, the Heart of the City had showed me its faint purple light.
So there is color down here after all.
The membrane beneath me was split down the middle by a thick vein, and from where I stood, the structure that throbbed inside this pit in a snow field looked like a giant beating heart bathed in cobalt.
“ENTER,” a voice roared. It shook my body, and as the drums pounded, I felt the snow stir beneath me.
The snow slid forward and backward toward the crater, shifting as a massive being stirred under it.I noticed a soft edge in my field of vision. Nothing solid, just a hint of gray.
But then I saw another edge of grey on my left.
The snow was turning gray. Not black. An actual gray.
And further below the surface of the snow, I saw tiny threads, like gossamer. They glowed.
There were pink and purple threads, and green ones, too. Some were ruby-colored, and some sparkled in colors that I had no name for.
More light radiated from the tiny rivulets, and the snow changed color again from gray to white.
The threads ran like veins on the flat ground, up the tiny hill, and down into the blue membrane.
“ENTER,” said the voice.
“But how?” I said.
“ENTER.”
The membrane grew transparent, and beneath the pit, I saw them.
The Lords were a marvel. They gave off black light just as bright as the sun’s, and it was only if I squinted that I could see their shapes in the pit. Two beings, colossal in size, flowed into each other like the roots of a tree. They were the size of a planet, faceless, smooth as glass. Inside their thousands of limbs, I saw stars thick and bright — whole constellations that knitted together to form flesh. The Lords had teeth and beaks, snouts and antennae, and I could feel how one was distinctly male, and the other female. I stared down at them from the edge of the crater.
“You look nothing like what I saw in José María’s books,” I said. I had expected human shapes, skinned skulls and feathers. Instead, there was glass, light, nebulae and spirals of light.
They spoke back to me in a music that was full of knowledge, but which contained no words.
The edges of the pit dripped with the luminous streams of shining streams of particles, and they dripped onto the Lord’s bodies, shimmering.
Each of the Lords had a pair of human lips, and they shifted their numerous limbs to find a more comfortable position. Then they kissed. The kiss was sensuous, and I could see spiral galaxies beneath the transparent skin. Stars went supernova and shrank back upon themselves behind that transparent skin, and the kiss made a melancholy music, too.
The Lords unlocked from their kiss, and as they took a break, they turned their human mouths upward, to take a moment to drink the multicolored particles.
Their drinking swallowed all light, and it released endless music out from the snow pit.
After satiating their thirst, the Lords returned to their lovers’ kiss.
“I want my tonal,” I said. The blue membrane grew so transparent that it virtually disappeared.
“You already have it,” they spoke. “Our daughter handed it to you.”
“Your daughter?”
“Tonalpohualli, the Heart of the Mictlán City. She rotates over the lake.”
“Yes, I do know her.”
“She says you gave her a gift. You are kind.”
“And what is my tonal, then?”
“Your tonal is the symbol of the house, just like our daughter. You are like her in so many ways.”
“When I came to visit Mictlán in dream at the age of thirteen, I came back without a tonal, even if the cal
endar said it was supposed to be the house.”
“We remember,” they said. I shuddered at the thought of what memories these beings might have. “But your will was too strong. So strong you left your tonal down here, in the Coil.”
“And how can I prove I have it now?”
“You don’t have to prove anything, Wanderer. Not to us, and not to anybody. As long as you have language, you don’t have to prove anything.”
The rivulets of sparkling liquid thickened. The Lords were beginning to consume the rainbow streams of liquid faster and faster, and I felt my feet slipping on the snow.
I fell on my ass, and the snow slid beneath me. Tiny colored particles clung to my coat and my boots.
They’re pulling you in.
If I didn’t find a foothold, I would fall into the limitless bodies of the Lords.
They will eat me. I know they will eat me.
“One more thing,” I said, and the pit echoed back my words. “I want to talk to my brother José María. I didn’t leave things okay with him.”
The gravitational pull on my flesh eased up for a moment, and I felt the Lords’ gaze—a gaze made of a million eyes—focus on me. They stared and stared.
The Lords pulsed with music, but without anything even close to eyes, I had no real signs of their having heard my request.
“I want to see my brother. I need to see my brother.”
The Lords emitted a long musical note, forlorn and alien.
The galaxies inside their translucent skin exploded, bloomed, and then faded into an inky darkness. Were they ignoring me?
Is this all there is?
“It can’t be,” I said. “It can’t.”
The beings beneath me flooded my eyes and ears with fright and beauty, but I had come here for a reason, and I wanted answers.
I felt an anger rise in me. I had wanted to see José María in corporeal form, right inside the Coil, just like he had been there with me the other two times before.
“I came here to take my brother back to my world,” I said.
But my brother was nowhere to be seen.
The glow of the snow intensified, and for a moment, it lit up the field around me. It burned so bright, in fact, that for a few moments, I could see up into the vastness of the canyon of Mictlán, as if a flash had gone off from a camera. From my spot at the heart of the canyon, I could see the top of the city of Mictlán, and the temple of flowers, and much farther up, a series of blue eyes on the head of Blue Hummingbird as she nestled in the upper levels of the Coil.
“This is the mouth of the river, Wanderer,” the Lords said. “The nine rivers lead here. Your sibling has swum in their waters, and he flows toward us.”
José María had been a particle of colored light in the snow beneath my feet, flowing into the pit, but how would I know which one?
I got down on my knees and plunged my hands into my snow, hoping to recognize something, anything in the flecks of snow.
Which one is he, dammit? Which one?
I shoveled snow in big handfuls, and its rainbow light turned my clothes red, green, and violet. But in these tiny specks I found nothing that could help me find the one speck I was looking for.
“Give him to me,” I screamed, raking my hands through the snow. I lowered my face so I could see the flakes up close, but I didn’t see him. I didn’t hear him.
But the sense of peace in this place continued, and the Lords ignored me. Their gravitational pull was still making me slide toward the edge of the pit. I stood up and took a few steps back. My eyes were not made to see these colored pinpoint at this scale, and I knew I could spend an eternity looking for the right speck.
“So, you will agree to your task?” the Lords said.
“What task?”
“To widen the gates between worlds.”
Even though time had come to a standstill in this pit, my heartbeat quickened in fear.
“I thought you didn’t want that to happen.”
“It is the flowers that would deny the gates, but my wife agrees,” the Lord said.
“And my husband feels the same,” the Lady continued, “that we can’t stop the gates from opening. The time is now. And we love you too much to deny you that journey.”
“But opening gates and all this death—does this mean you will kill everyone on Earth if I do this?”
“We do not kill. We only transfer souls into the other side. Once we take them in, they emerge on the other side of our consciousness.”
“And who does the killing, then?”
“Well, it’s the creatures in your world that do. The plants, the insects, the cats, and the men. You all kill. You all die.”
“Why don’t you open the gates, then?” I said. I was very angry with these two beings.
“Because we are too old, too far inside the wheels. That is not our role.”
I considered everything I learned inside the Coil, and I wished for a moment that I too could be dead and turned into a particle of colored light in one of these rivers.
And then a word froze my thoughts: Reina.
Reina.
José María would never have walked away from such a challenge from the Lords of Death. I knew this. He would have thought it was cool as shit, and easy to do. And he never would have wished he was dead. He was too brave.
I took a deep breath.
“Sure, I’ll accept.”
“It is decided. And thus, you will need to defeat the Ocullín, Wanderer. Because opening the gates allows his passage, too.”
“My knife—” I said, unsheathing my grandmother’s blade.
“You can keep your object, Wanderer, but in time you will understand that you do not need such things,” the Lords said.
“And what will opening the gates do?” I said.
“It will spill knowledge over your kin,” the Lords said. “And for this, you’ll have to answer to the the flowers and their ancestors one day.”
“And how should I do this? I mean, my world is a whole planet—“
“Nothing is as expected, Wanderer. Stop struggling, and you will find your way.”
The membrane grew thick and blue again, and the incomprehensible bodies of Mictecacíhuatl and Mictlántecuhtli disappeared beneath the shield. And the snow returned to its still state as darkness crept back over me.
Time was frozen down here, yet I could still understand for a moment — for a fraction of a second — how beautiful the Lords really were. If newborns, thirteen-year-olds and twenty-six-year-olds glimpsed these two lovers in dream, what other dreams were possible?
I now understood what my parents had meant about rites of passage. Despite the travels I had made inside this crib of darkness, I still only felt like I was just a nineteen-year-old girl, and deep down inside I feared I was not ready for the Lords’ task.
But I had no choice. I gave the things in the pit my word, and their music had only shown me kindness, and peace. And I had seen that rainbow-colored snow that melted in their mouths. Snow made of trillions of souls of living things, like the trees and the moss, babies and adults, birds and insects. I would never want to destroy that.
The silence that swelled from the pit made me uneasy.
I walked back toward the northern road and the city of Mictlán.
I did some quick math as my footsteps echoed along the Northern Road, and I realized that if I emerged from Mictlán again, I would be twenty years old on Earth, but I would be closer to twenty-eight years old from the two journeys I had already made here. The numerals looked beautiful in my mind as I saw them lined up next to each other, and as I moved in the darkness toward the city, I stopped paying attention to my surroundings.
I could see the cylinder of the city about three miles in the distance when I felt a stir in the waters of the lake.
“I will be happy to see you when your teeth fall out, girl,” said a gnarled voice beneath the water. “Weathered, old, ready to die.”
The water’s surface remain
ed smooth, but I knew what lay down there, inside the surface. Whatever magic the Ocullín used made reflections possible on this lake, despite the lack of any light.
This time, instead of letting him chase me like an animal, I sharpened myself to greet him. Now that I was out of the Snow Fields, I removed my coat and wrapped my mother’s shawl around my hips like a sarong. In my right hand I held the tiny knife I had brought with me.
I dragged the knife along the surface of the lake and it sliced open, letting out sharp notes of music and the smell of fresh blood.
“I see you in there,” I said. “Show me how you travel.”
“Stupid girl,” roared the Ocullín. “It’s as simple as mirrors. The doorways made of mirrors belong to my father, Black Tezcatlipoca. You used one of his doors when you prayed to Rhinoceros at the music temple in your world. Maybe you’d like to meet my father and tell him about your silly concert someday?”
I turned my blade in front of my eyes, and I stood next to the water as the sound of thousands of legs scuttled toward me.
If the sound was accurate, the Ocullín would tear my back within seconds.
But I called his bluff. No attack came. He only wanted me to fear such a thing.
I knelt on the ground and stabbed the water again, and with my free hand, I reached in.
I emerged with something resembling a wet caterpillar, and it spat in my face. It cut my skin, and it burned. Its body rose from the water, thick, bulbous, like a cancer cell that would never stop dividing.
I wrestled the creature on that road, and I lost my breath as I clawed at it. I slashed it as hard as I could.
I screamed the names of the hummingbirds, and two of them flew down to my location. One distracted the Ocullín, slashing him with its beak. It distracted the Ocullin enough for me to hop on the back of the second bird. We rose in the air. The Ocullín sprouted moth wings and flew upward, chasing after us.
It screamed in a thousand unique voices:
“BITCH”
“CUNT”
“PUTA”
The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) Page 29