Gods of Jade and Shadow

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The soil in Yucatán is black and red, and rests upon a limestone bed. No rivers slice the surface in the north of the peninsula. Caves and sinkholes pucker the ground, and the rainwater forms cenotes and gathers in haltunes. What rivers there are run underground, secretive in their courses.

Brackish waters are common, giving a habitat to curious, blind fish in the depths of the cave systems, and where limestone meets the ocean, the shore turns jagged.

Casiopea did not argue. She was bone-tired and Mother was constantly serving her a meal of platitudes instead of any significant answers or action.

Despite the revolution, the “divine caste” endured. Perhaps no more Yaquis were being deported from Sonora, forced to work the sisal fields; perhaps no more Korean workers were lured with promises of fast profits and ended as indentured servants; perhaps the price of henequen had fallen, and perhaps the machinery had gone silent at many plantations, but money never leaves the grasp of the rich easily.

Mérida was changing, but Mérida was still a city where the moneyed, pale, upper-crust citizens dined on delicacies, and the poor went hungry. At the same time, a country in flux is a country padded with opportunities.

Dreamers and romantics like her father did not fare well, and though she had dreamed in Uukumil, she’d done so quietly, in secret. If someone chanced by, she closed the book she was looking at. She hid desires inside an old tin can. She never told anyone what she hoped for.

“Besides, you have an unfortunately brave and kind heart.” “How do you know what heart I have?” “You’d make a poor card player, dear. Can’t hide yourself.”

“You did not rescue me,” Casiopea replied. “I opened that chest. Besides, I wasn’t a princess in a tower. I knew I’d get away one way or another, and I was not waiting for a god to liberate me. That would have been both silly and unlikely.”

“Feel here, hmm? My own magic rests in your veins,” he said, as if seeking her pulse. He was right. It was the tugging of a string on a loom, delicate, but it ran through her, and when he touched her it struck a crystalline note. Upon that note, another one, this one much more mundane, the effect of a handsome man clutching a girl’s hand.

“Why would I need to dream? It means nothing. Those are but the tapestries of mortals, woven and unwoven each night on a rickety loom.” “They can be beautiful.” “As if there’s no other beauty to be had,” he said dismissively. “There’s little of it, for some,” she replied.

Before its iron skeleton was erected a more modest three-story building had stood there, made of red tezontle, best suited for the soft Mexico City soil that had been, after all, a city of canals before the Spaniards filled up its waterways.

Casiopea, meanwhile, looked at a heavy silver bracelet with black enamel triangles, of the “Aztec” style, which was much in vogue and meant to attract the eye of tourists with its faux pre-Hispanic motifs. It was a new concoction, of the kind that abound in a Mexico happy to invent traditions for mass consumption, eager to forge an identity after the fires of the revolution—but it was pretty.

Gods cannot rudely move mortals like one moves a piece across a game board. To obtain what they wish gods may utilize messengers, they may threaten, they may flatter, and they may reward.

A god may cause storms to wreck the seaside and mortals, in return, may raise their hands and place offerings at the god’s temple in an effort to stop the hurricane that whips the land. They may pray and bleed themselves with maguey thorns. However, they could also feel free to ignore the god’s weather magic, they could blame the rain or lack of it on chance or bad luck, without forging the connection between the deity and the event.

Ah, there is none more fearful of thieves than the one who has stolen something, and a kingdom is no small something.

“I understood what he said,” she told Hun-Kamé. “How is that possible?” “Death speaks all languages,” he replied. “But I am not death.” “You wear me like a jewel upon your finger,

“Xibalba is made of nine levels. Through these levels descends the Black Road, which reaches a wall made from the thorns of the ceiba tree. Beyond this wall begins a causeway that leads to the gates of the Black City and allows access to the Jade Palace. By the palace is a lake where the World Tree quenches some of its thirst, and at the bottom of the lake dwells the First Caiman, which swam in the primordial seas and whose head was severed when the world was newly born.”

“Few living mortals have made the journey down the Black Road. It is a dangerous and long path. It may take years to reach the gates of the Black City.

now came a drawing that resembled the labyrinth Vucub-Kamé had shown him, an arrangement of black lines branching wildly, turning back and forward.

“Certain sorcerers and priests, and sometimes certain ordinary mortals—though these only in their dreams—have found their way to the Black City with more haste. They’ve done so by slipping through the shadows.”

“If you look at the road, carefully, there are spots where you can sense gaps. You can jump from gap to gap, walking the road with more ease. But you must be careful. The Black Road is treacherous. It is changing, rearranging itself. It does not lie still. It hungers.”

Keep your thoughts and your feet on the road, do not go astray. The Land of the Dead is vast. It’s easy to get lost.”

“Gods move pieces across boards, young man. That is what you are now.

He was afraid, like when he’d been a small child and thought monsters lurked under his bed; only now they did, and he assisted them.

“My younger brother is a usurper, gaining his throne with deceit. You do the will of a liar,” Hun-Kamé said. “Does it matter? Power is power.”

“Words are seeds, Casiopea. With words you embroider narratives, and the narratives breed myths, and there’s power in the myth. Yes, the things you name have power,” he said.

The things you name do grow in power, but others that are not ever whispered claw at one’s heart anyway, rip it to shreds even if a syllable does not escape the lips.

Or not so curiously. After all, prophecy traces clean paths. Vucub-Kamé’s ability lay in witnessing the arrow of what might be, of following the thread of order among what others thought was simple chance.

there was a smidgen of truth to the myth. But what mattered was not the veracity of the story, but its power. The symbol. The hidden meaning.

But what did the tourists know? The Americans streamed into Mexico, ready to construct a new playground for themselves, to drink the booze that was forbidden in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco, but flowed abundantly across the border.

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.