Gods of Jade and Shadow

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

“As if you had anything to be proud of,” her cousin continued. “Your mother was the old man’s favorite, but then she had to run off with your father and ruin her life. Yet you walk around the house as if you were a princess. Why? Because he told you a story about how you secretly are Mayan royalty, descended from kings? Because he named you after a stupid star?”

With a furious clacking the bones jumped in the air and began assembling themselves into a human skeleton. Casiopea did not move. The pain in her hand and the wave of fear that struck her held the girl tight to her spot. In the blink of an eye all the bones clicked into place, like pieces in a puzzle. In another instant the bones became muscle, grew sinews. In a third blink of the eye they were covered in smooth skin. Faster than Casiopea could take a breath or a step back, there stood a tall, naked man before her. His hair was the blue-black of a sleek bird, reaching his shoulders, his skin bronzed, the nose prominent, the face proud. He seemed a warrior-king, the sort of man who could exist only in myth. Unnaturally beautiful the stranger was—this was beauty sketched from smoke and dreams, translated into fallible flesh—but his dark gaze was made of flint.

The god shook his head majestically. You’d have thought he was decked in malachite and gold, not naked in the middle of the room. “I cannot, for I am not whole. My left eye, ear, and index finger, and the jade necklace. These I must have in order to be myself again. Until then, this shard remains in you, and you must remain at my side, or perish.”

“Power, embedded in the peninsula, radiating from it. There is much magic here. In other parts of the world the ancient gods have gone to sleep, for although gods do not die, they must slumber when their devoted cease in their prayers and offerings.

blade could not. Wielding such a weapon, made of noxious iron and tattooed with powerful magic, had burnt Vucub-Kamé’s palms, left him with scars, but it was a small price to pay for a kingdom.

“Chu’lel,” he said. “It is the sacred life force that resides around you. In the streams, in the resins of trees, in the stones. It births gods and those gods are shaped by the thoughts of men. Gods belong to the place where the chu’lel emanated and birthed them; they may not travel too far. The god of your church, if he is awake, does not live in these lands.”

The imagination of mortals shaped the gods, carving their faces and their myriad forms, just as the water molds the stones in its path, wearing them down through the centuries. Imagination had also fashioned the dwellings of the gods. Xibalba, splendid and frightful, was a land of stifling gloom, lit by a cheerless night-sun and lacking a moon. The hour of twilight did not cease here. In Xibalba’s rivers there lurked jade caimans, alabaster fish swam in ink-black ponds, and glass insects buzzed about, creating a peculiar melody with the tinkling of their transparent wings. There were bizarre plants and lush trees, though no flowers bloomed in the soils of the Underworld—perhaps some had, at one point, but they’d long withered.

“That means you don’t dream,” she said. “Dreams are for mortals.” “Why?” “Because they must die.” Somehow this made a perfect sort of sense. The volume of Aztec poetry she had read was full of lines about dreams and flowers, the futility of existence. “That’s sad,” she said, finally. “Death? It is unavoidable, not sad.”

But the eye had now changed. The pupil, like a black mirror, caught reflections. The street, the cars going down the boulevards, and his young companion. She was rendered in most vivid colors.

When she’d spoken and he’d turned his head, his pupil reflected her and washed away the rest of the room. Such incidents are not uncommon between young mortals who believe they exist on a deserted island where no one else may step foot. Hun-Kamé? He was not young, born centuries and centuries before.

Before, he had not been able to observe his triumph, even if he could see Hun-Kamé’s arrival in Tierra Blanca. But now even this arrival was missing. A hundred branching futures wove before him, and the more he pushed and tried to see through the chaos, the more they tangled, they knotted, they broke before his eyes.

“How would the world be different?” “It would run with the blood of sacrifices and the adulation of mortals. The cenotes would be piled with gold and corpses. Men would be painted blue and their bodies riddled with arrows, although, certainly, the supreme offering is the severing of the head.” She had seen this imagery in books, had read about the wooden rods displaying hundreds of human skulls at the entrance of the temples, the bloodletting rituals involving shells and obsidian blades, but these were practices long forgotten.

He said nothing, and she slapped his chest, furious at his dour expression. At this he did react, by catching her wrists, although he did not seem upset. He held her hands. “I know I ask many things of—” “You ask everything!” “You will be repaid,” he said, touching the silver bracelet, as if reminding her of his generosity, the possible avenues of wealth offered to her.

“I’d like to count stars with you. I don’t know where I even got this idea, but it’s there,” he said. The dust speaks louder when the wind stirs it, but she heard him anyway and knew not what to say, and everything she’d said so far had been stupid, so why would a few words help at this point?

They were quiet and they were foolish, both of them, thinking they were treading with any delicacy, and that if they somehow moderated their voices they’d stop the tide of emotion. 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. The silence was hopeless in any case, since something escaped the god, anyway: a sigh to match the girl’s own.

Tucked neatly inside a black snail shell lay Casiopea’s sigh. It was a delicate thing, like a nocturnal butterfly. Pretty too. In strokes of crimson and blue it painted a picture of the most exquisite heartache.

“It’s all symbols, the stories we tell; if you give me a name I could die and I could open my eyes again, and I’d remember that name.” He was determined and grim, and something else entirely, which she did not recognize, and then his face softened. “I wouldn’t be a god. I…I told you already, I hardly remember myself sometimes. I could forget it all.”

“My brother can have the halls of Xibalba and the black throne,” he said. “We can have each other.” He kissed her again, and it lasted forever. Casiopea thought there’d be nothing left of her when he moved away, it wouldn’t be he who was erased and granted a new identity. And when she pressed a hand to his hair she was sure nothing but love mattered, there was only the two of them in this place by the sea. “You’ll lose me otherwise,” he said, in a whisper. “I want you to stay with me.” “Then make me stay.”

She clung to him, felt his hammering heart under her palm. It was real, he was real, this was real, and the rest was just…stories. Children’s stories. There was no magic, no gods, no quests. She could convince herself she had imagined it all and then it would be that way. A wisp of a nightmare and the reality of them.

It was so quiet that she began to hear the beating of her heart, the movement of the blood through her veins; each step was like the trampling of the elephant. But this was the only noise: it all came from within her and had a disorienting effect. She paused a couple of times to sip from the gourd, and the sloshing of the water was as loud as the rapids of a river in this desert of silence.

Then she remembered the long road she’d traveled, the obstacles she’d overcome, and what Hun-Kamé had told her when they stood by the sea. It rang in her ears so clearly: And yet you are. She also recalled the ways his eyes had deepened, the velvet blackness, that third kiss he did not share. He didn’t need to. He loved her, she knew it. She loved him back. She could not betray him. She could not betray herself. She could not betray the story. Mythmaking. It’s greater than you or I, this tale.

Proper or no, the pain was raw; it roared through her body and she opened her eyes wide. The blood welled. It soaked her shirt and she trembled. She let go of the knife, she did not attempt to press her hands against her throat, did not attempt to stop the flow of blood. Instead, she remembered what she’d told Hun-Kamé at the hotel: that she wanted everything to live. And her lips, they repeated this request, not life for herself but for all others. Casiopea sank to her knees, slid into the water, the lake swallowing her whole.

A grain of dust may contain a universe inside, and it was the same for him. Within that gray speck there lived his love and he gave it to Casiopea, for her to see. He’d fallen in love slowly and quietly, and it was a quiet sort of love, full of phrases left unsaid, laced with dreams. He had imagined himself a man for her, and he allowed her to see the extent of this man, and he gave her this speck of heart, which was a man, to hold for a moment before taking it back the second before it faded.