Gods of Jade and Shadow

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  She kept going. But then she heard it: a loud scraping noise and a rumble that almost made her lose her footing. The bones were moving. The gaps between them were disappearing.

  Casiopea scrambled forward, hurrying to escape this trap. The bones clacked against each other, and she pushed at one protrusion, which resembled a gigantic rib, managing to make it rock a little to the left, allowing her to squeeze through. The bones clacked louder, closing in like a mouth. There was a gap, small enough that she might scrabble out if she got on her knees, and this she did. The ground was harsh against her knees, scratching them, but Casiopea hurried. The bones descended, ready to crush her whole, and she rolled out of the maw. Her shawl tangled with the bones, but she tore it off her shoulders and left it behind, landing on her back and peering up at the sky.

  The wall of bones showed no gaps anymore. It stood white and silent, the clacking having ceased. Her shawl, trapped between two bones, moved with the wind, like a flag, before the bones seemed to pull it in, swallowing the cloth whole.

  Better it than me, she thought.

  Casiopea stood up, rubbing her palms against her skirt, and walked away from the wall of bones. She had lost her bracelet, her gourd, and her shawl, retaining only her knife. She thought this did not bode well, but she was no soothsayer, and had neither a divining stone nor eighteen kernels of corn to peer into the future.

  A black vulture flew down to land on the road next to her and stared at Casiopea curiously.

  “I’m headed to the Jade Palace,” she told the bird and knew she must move on. There was nothing more to do. One foot before another, and the Black Road like fresh tar.

  * * *

  —

  The gods sat each in his chair. On the floor the ashes kept changing and reshaping the scene the twins observed, showing both travelers. Martín, aided by his previous experiences on the Black Road, was moving in an efficient fashion through the shadows, increasing his speed.

  The ashes on the floor rose and traced the image of Casiopea. She’d had a harder time at it, but she’d evaded the monstrous Kamazotz and the maw of bones. If Vucub-Kamé had been a betting man, he would have bet against this outcome.

  Vucub-Kamé sank his nails into the wood of his chair, making it groan. Quickly he turned his head and stared at his dark-haired brother, who in turn was utterly concerned with the movement of the ash-girl across the land.

  “Who is she?” Vucub-Kamé demanded, standing up, furious, but with the cold fury of a Lord of Death, the words ice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How is she doing it?”

  “There is no trick, if that is what you are implying. I have not cheated,” Hun-Kamé said.

  Of course he had not. He could not have. The girl had moved slowly, clumsily, at the beginning, but she had now gained speed and might soon be overtaking Martín. It was her own doing, the firmness of her resolve, and Vucub-Kamé again thought about the meaning of symbols. The maiden, a bracketed promise.

  “You must be cheating in some way,” Vucub-Kamé said, offended. “She is a weak thing to manage on her own.”

  “You are a poor judge of others,” Hun-Kamé replied and looked at his brother, his one eye inky black.

  Bah! And yet, had they not all failed Vucub-Kamé? Old Cirilo, the cunning Xtabay, the Zavala twins with their midnight sorceries. It came down to Martín now. The young man was not the fine blade a god might have wanted to wield, but a coarser weapon, a heavy mace. Who cared?

  “I’ll see her dead,” Vucub-Kamé told the ash, and his cold anger froze into an invisible arrow of ice, and when he breathed out, the arrow slid from his lips and into the mind of Martín, who sat on the stump of a tree, which had fallen by the road.

  The man was wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, exhausted by the trip, feeling rather depressed by the landscape of Xibalba. He wet the piece of cloth and dabbed his cheek with it, feeling the sting of a bruise. Around him there were black trees without any leaves, their naked branches stretching up to the heavens, and logs ripe with rot, like the one that served as a seat for him.

  Martín pressed his hand against his head, and the ring he wore stung, biting into his flesh.

  Vucub-Kamé’s thought reached him as if it had been his own. It echoed in his skull.

  Kill her, Vucub-Kamé said.

  “Kill her,” Martín repeated. His voice had no color; it was bleak and brisk and old.

  The echo died away, and Martín twisted the handkerchief between his hands.

  “Lord, please,” he said, but the presence had abandoned him. He sat alone, with the dead trees as his only company. The instructions had been clear.

  He could already feel his cousin approaching, even if he did not understand how he could sense her. Somehow Vucub-Kamé must have engineered her arrival, steered her from her course. Or it might not have been the Lord of Xibalba; the Black Road did have a mind of its own.

  No matter. He felt her.

  It was as if she were an insect, making the silk of a spider web vibrate.

  This, in turn, made him the spider.

  Martín clutched the handkerchief.

  Trees, so close together at times they formed a lattice, bordered Casiopea’s path. Yet the trees were invariably shrunken, dead, and their branches stood ghostly white against the gray sky.

  The road was steep; it led up a hill, and she had trouble managing it. At last she reached a clearing. A clump of trees lay to her right, but she could see below, far away, the Black City.

  A monumental causeway cut through a ring of thorns that rose around the city, like a defensive stone wall might have shielded mortal towns, though this metropolis need not shield itself from any foes. All the buildings were made of black stone, honoring the city’s name, but of a glossy black that shifted and shimmered. Pillars and stelae rose in the plazas, long staircases decorated with pale glyphs led to multiple platforms. Serene, sober, monochromatic, that was the city. Except for the Jade Palace at its center, aflame with color and unlike any of the structures Casiopea knew back home.

  The palace had four levels, each level receding slightly from the previous one, their façades decorated with elaborate geometrical patterns that created a palpable rhythm, like the beating of a drum. These terraces were connected by an imposing central staircase. Impossibly, the whole structure was made of a pale green jade, like a giant jewel, as Hun-Kamé had said. It looked like the palace she had imagined when they stood by the sea.

  She looked at this strange city, sculpted from the stray dreams of restless mortals, and took a deep breath.

  A rustle came from the clump of dead trees, and Casiopea turned her head, expecting to find a snake or another animal, and instead stared at her cousin. Martín was grim and tired as he stopped and also looked in the direction of the city. He took a sip from the gourd dangling from his neck and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He offered her a sip. She took it, cautiously.

  “God. I feel like I’ve been walking forever,” he said. “Do you feel the same way?”

  “A little,” she replied, handing him the gourd back.

  Martín drank more, but there was no more to be had. Irritated, he took off the gourd from around his neck and tossed it away. It rolled down the side of the hill.

  “Casiopea, you shouldn’t go any farther,” he told her.

  “It’s a competition. We are competing to see who gets there first. I can’t stay here,” she replied, guessing he meant to fill her with doubt.

  “Yes, you can, if you know what’s good for you. Vucub-Kamé does not want you moving any closer to the city.”

  “I don’t care what he wants. We have a deal, and I am not going to give up now.”

  Martín had not looked at her this whole time. Now he turned his eyes toward her. His face was parched, not a physical thirst but a spiritual one.
He looked haunted.

  “Casiopea, I can’t let you go on. So…sit down here and wait,” he said, running a hand through his hair. It was slick with sweat. He had a scratch on his cheek, he was dirty, and his hair was a mess, as if he’d been walking for days on end. The journey must have taxed him. She was tired, too, and would have loved to sit down and rest.

  “And what? Let you win?” she asked.

  “Vucub-Kamé needs to retain the throne, the whole family depends…God, they depend on that. Your loss…it would be the best for everyone.”

  “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.

  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.

  The river had disappeared, and Casiopea began to follow the odd phosphorescent plants. They were placed in a row, each one chained to the next. There were also anemones and plants that looked like curious orchids, but were made of travertine. In the distance she spotted mountains of corals. She looked up, and a school of sightless fish flew above her head, as if they were birds, as if they had forgotten they were supposed to dwell in the deepest of waterholes, beneath the calcareous soil.

  Her body ached, but the hand ached worst of all, and she pressed it against her chest. She could almost feel the time running out, like a gigantic beating heart that palpitated quietly across the land.

  The salt was cool and inviting. She pressed on, and when her shoes were lodged full with salt, she took them off and continued barefoot. She was headed nowhere, and nowhere she went, hoping to find the Black Road even if she knew, within her, she could not.

  She walked past towering pillars of seashells, pressed together like bricks, and reached a lake. It glowed a soft blue, like in her dreams.

  * * *

  —

  The wind had dried Martín’s tears, which hurt more than the bruises on his body, more than his parched throat. He raced down the causeway that led into the Black City, raced past graceful buildings carved from onyx. In the windows of some of those homes stood people with white masks who regarded him curiously, and he encountered and ignored soldiers, priests, and commoners who also walked down the same road, who turned their heads to glance in derision at a mortal man who dared to navigate their knotted city.