Gods of Jade and Shadow - Silvia Moreno-Garcia Page 0,122

In it sat his missing eye, like a jewel against velvet. He must reintegrate it into his body, complete the process that had begun in Yucatán. Before this, though, he spoke to Casiopea.

“I owe my kingdom to you and my gratitude,” he told her. “I promised you your heart’s desire, and you may have anything you wish. If you ask for the jewels of the earth, I will grant them. Should you wish to avenge yourself against your treacherous cousin, his blood will be spilled.”

She glanced at Martín, who was on his knees, his forehead pressed against the dirt. Same as Zavala. She shook her head.

“I never wanted jewels,” she said. “And I’d like that Martín be allowed to return home.”

“Very well,” Hun-Kamé said. “As for you, my brother—”

“I submit to you,” Vucub-Kamé replied, scarred palms up, toward the sky. “Take your vengeance. You’ve earned it.”

Vucub-Kamé sank to his knees, his head bowed, like a war captive, under the shadow of the World Tree. He offered no resistance, the defiance had been drained from him, and the color had vanished from his eyes. They were as pale as pearls, and his clothes, mimicking his debased state, withered, becoming moth-eaten tatters fit for a beggar.

Hun-Kamé looked at Vucub-Kamé with a hard face, the face of the blade against the jugular, but when he leaned down it was to clasp his brother’s shoulder.

“I’ve desired nothing except your death,” he said, “and yet now I do not find the need for it. I was unkind to you and you returned the unkindness, but I cannot perpetuate a cycle of sorrows.”

At this, Vucub-Kamé did raise his head. He tried to read deceit in his brother’s voice, but could not find it.

“It is the remaining mortality in your veins that renders you like this,” he said, wary.

“Perhaps. Or the wisdom to understand the order of duality should not be challenged,” Hun-Kamé said, and then, quietly, “Or the fact that despite my bitterness you are my brother.”

Hun-Kamé looked down at his brother’s scarred hands, and Vucub-Kamé beheld Hun-Kamé’s face, the empty eye socket.

The nature of hate is mysterious. It can gnaw at the heart for an eon, then depart when one expected it to remain as immobile as a mountain. But even mountains erode. Hun-Kamé’s hate had been as high as ten mountains and Vucub-Kamé’s spite as deep as ten oceans. Confronted with each other, at this final moment when Hun-Kamé ought to have let hate swallow him, he had decided to thrust it away, and Vucub-Kamé slid off his mantle of spite in response.

Casiopea had given herself, after all, and Hun-Kamé ought to give too.

Hun-Kamé handed Vucub-Kamé back the box, and Vucub-Kamé hesitated for a moment before carefully grabbing the missing eye and placing it in his brother’s eye socket. Then Vucub-Kamé lifted his hands, and a crown knit itself between his hands, the royal diadem of onyx and jade, which he placed on Hun-Kamé’s head. Around Hun-Kamé’s waist there was now a leather belt decorated with large incrustations of matching onyx and jade.

The brothers were both exactly the same height, and when they looked at each other, their eyes were level, dark and light. They were eternal, never changing, and yet they had changed.

“Welcome to your abode, Supreme Lord of Xibalba,” Vucub-Kamé said.

The wind, whispering in the branches of the World Tree, repeated these words.

Crowned anew, Hun-Kamé might have been expected to make his triumphant entrance into the palace, to bask again in the glory of his kingship. Courtiers filled cups brimming with liquor, the incense burners perfumed the air of the throne room. A hundred exaltations waited to be spoken.

Await they must a little longer.

He returned to the girl.

“Come,” he told Casiopea and took her by the hand. His power restored, he did not need the Black Road to walk between shadows, as she’d done, and he simply slipped into that space between spaces and out into a distant corner of his kingdom.

This was the desert of gray. Nothing grew here. It was the outer edge of Xibalba, where the Black Road begins, even if the borders of Xibalba are ever-changing and no cartographer could ever draw an accurate picture of it. Nevertheless, it was the border of his realm.

“Soon you must return to Middleworld,” Hun-Kamé told her. “And I must become a god.”

“Are you not a god yet?” she asked.

He shook his head. “One last thing remains,” he said, taking her hand between his, and she knew he meant