Gods of Jade and Shadow - Silvia Moreno-Garcia Page 0,35

was trying to be friendly, but instead I’ll be off, then. There is no point in offending Death and his handmaiden any further. My apologies, miss. Be well, cousin.”

The weather god took out a cigarette and he lit it, chuckling as he walked down the alley and disappeared from sight, heading back toward the music and the raucous crowds. The night grew warmer, again the ordinary tropical night of the port, and Hun-Kamé lifted his hand from her shoulder.

“Thank you,” she told him.

“You should not thank me for such small things,” he replied.

Casiopea supposed he was correct, since he needed her and if he had stood up for her, it was because she was valuable to him. Nevertheless she considered it a nice gesture. No one had ever defended her when Martín bothered her, and she could not help but to feel grateful and to look kindly at him. Thus, minutes after she thought she might want to fear him, be wary of him, she was again forgetting his true nature and seeing a man.

“Lady Tun, if you’ll come with me, we have work to do,” Hun-Kamé said, heading in the opposite direction from the one the Mam had taken.

“What kind of work?”

“Now that I have my ear back I can listen to the voices of the psychopomp and the dead. Let us find a proper crossroad.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You shall see,” he said.

They walked away from the downtown area, the crowds growing thinner until there were only a few people around them, then none. They walked for a long time. The white houses on each side of the street were silent as tombs. The silver in their costumes caught a ray of light here and there, like a stray spark.

They reached a crossroad. There were no more houses, not a single lonely shack on the side of the road, only the narrow path they’d been following. Casiopea glanced up at the stars, looking for Xaman Ek, which the Europeans called Polaris. This star was the symbol of the god with the monkey head, to whom the resin of the copal tree is offered at the side of the road. She wondered if he was as real as Hun-Kamé, and whether he truly had the head of an animal.

A moth flew by, and Hun-Kamé stretched out his hand, as if calling for it. The moth obeyed him, gently settling upon his palm, and he closed his fingers, crushing it. Had Hun-Kamé been mortal, he would have needed a more substantial sacrifice—a dog would have been suitable—to engage in this sorcery of the night. But since he was a god, and a god who had regained his lost ear and with it a smidgen of his magic, the moth sufficed.

Hun-Kamé opened his hand, sprinkling gray-and-black dust upon the ground.

He said several words that Casiopea could not understand. It was a strange tongue, very old. Where the dust had fallen, smoke began to rise, as if a charcoal brazier had been lit. The smoke had a shape, that of a dog, but then it shifted and it was a man, and then a bird, until one could not precisely define the nature of the apparition. The more she tried to pin it down, the more jumbled it became, threatening to give her a headache.

“I greet you and thank you for obeying my call,” Hun-Kamé said. “Do you know me?”

“Prince of the Starless Night, Firstborn Son of Xibalba. You are a god without a throne. I know you,” the smoke said. Its voice was low; it resembled a smoldering fire.

“Then you realize you must obey my command,” Hun-Kamé said with the hauteur of a king, a hand pressed against his chest. “I wish to know where my essence is hidden.”

“To you I owe three answers, and three I will give.”

The smoke rose, the dog, the bird, the shape, towering above them. It had two black eyes, two black pinpoints, which shone despite its blackness. Casiopea, standing next to Hun-Kamé, felt it looking at her. It was a fabulous thing, this creature, which brought with it the scent of incense and dead flowers. It made her wonder what other impossible beasts the Lords of Xibalba commanded.

The smoke opened its jaws and spoke.

“The city on the lake, the impossible city, Tenochtitlán. Deep in the arid wastelands, El Paso,” it said.

Then the apparition shook its head and stared at the ground, evasive. It was clear it did not wish to say any