bones that lay beside her. She sat with her shoulders hunched forward, staring at her folded hands. For a moment, I felt sympathy for this poor mad ghost, exiled by her own doing, lost and alone. Without thinking, I reached out toward her. She looked up and I stopped.
"How did your daughter die?" I asked.
Zuhuy-kak met my gaze. Her hands were folded in her lap. For a moment, she said nothing. "I gave her to the goddess," she said at last.
"You sacrificed your daughter," I said, staring at the woman's face.
Zuhuy-kak did not speak for a moment. "The ah-nunob were coming and the battle was not going well,"
she said. "We had captured their warriors. I killed them at the altar and we heaped their skulls in the courtyards, but that was not enough."
Her hands were grasping each other tightly. She turned her gaze toward the darkness at the back of the cave and swayed forward and back almost as if she rocked a child in her arms. She spoke in a singsong tone. "There had been much killing, so much killing on the battlefield and in the temple. My husband, a man of power and nobility, a good man, had died that week on the field. The scent of blood hung thick and heavy in the air, overflowing the temple, filling the courtyard, spilling out of the sacred places and flowing down the sacbe, a river of rich red scent laced with the smoke of burning incense. The sound of the drum and the rattle followed me everywhere, beating like my own heart, steady and strong. Like my own heart."
She had drawn her folded hands up to her breast, and she was rocking back and forth, back and forth to a drumbeat that I could not hear. Her words came quickly now. "The smoke, the smell of blood, the cries of the wounded tended by the healers-—these seemed natural things." She had closed her eyes. "I gave my child to the gods to stop the coming of the ah-nunob. I meant it to be a willing sacrifice, a gift. I prepared her, dressed her, and perfumed her, gave her balche mixed with herbs to drink. I took her to the place of sacrifice, filled with the power of the goddess. She did not struggle. She smiled at me, because I had told her that Ixtab would come and take her to paradise. She was afraid, but she smiled up at me. And at the moment that I was bringing the blade down, when the power of the goddess should have been greatest, I doubted. My daughter looked up at me, and I doubted the power of the goddess." She opened her eyes and the strange light that filled them reminded me of the madwoman who claimed to be Jesus Christ. "I doubted and the ah-nunob took the city. The cycle turned and the goddess lost her power."
My stomach ached, a solid steady pain that reminded me of the aching in my gut that plagued me throughout my pregnancy. A sad and heavy feeling, as if I canned a burden that was too great. The doctor who attended me during pregnancy said it was nothing, it was psychosomatic. Many pregnant women felt unhappy, he said; it wasn't abnormal. He said that they felt unhappy—I remember that. It did not seem to cross his mind that maybe they had good reason to feel unhappy, maybe they were in pain, maybe they carried a weight that was too great to bear. I wondered what the doctor would say now.
"Now it is time for the cycle to turn again. You can bring the goddess back to power. Your daughter—''
"No," I said.
"You can," she said. I noticed then that she was holding the obsidian blade. "It will be easy. And then, once it is done, you can rest."
"No."
"You are like me," she said. "I know you. I knew you when I saw you by the well. You too made a sacrifice that was not good. You began falling just as I began falling when my daughter died and the power of the goddess died with her. I began falling long before the priests threw me in the well," she said.
"You can rest now," I said. "You can stop."
"I tried to stop. When the people were leaving and the city was in confusion. I asked two masons to wall me in, and they did it for me. They walled me in and I stopped here. I