“How long did you spend in that chest?” she asked.
“Fifty years. Your grandfather was a young man then.”
“Were you aware of what was going on?”
“I slept, but it’s not the sleep of mortals.”
She remembered what Loray had told her, how gods could not die. Instead they slept. Casiopea frowned.
“How many gods are there?”
“I have eleven brothers.”
“And beyond that? I go to church every week, and well…the priest says if you are good you’ll head straight to Heaven, but is Heaven real, then? Is there one God up there or many?”
It was another sin to ask this. Four, five, how many was that? Oh, did it matter? She wanted to know.
Although he had carefully peeled his orange, Hun-Kamé was not eating it. He held it in the palm of his hand. “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.”
She spit out the seeds from her orange, cupping them in her hand. There was a wastebasket next to the washstand. She tossed them in there.
“Why wouldn’t he be awake?” she asked, frowning.
“The prayers and offerings of mortals feed gods, they give them power, just as they give them shape. But when the prayers cease, the chu’lel that bubbled to the surface may sink back into the earth, and the gods must sleep. But they remain and may flower again.”
Finally Hun-Kamé took a section of the fruit and placed it in his mouth. If he enjoyed the taste of the food, his face did not show it. Whatever foods the gods sampled in their abode would be much more enticing than an orange.
She thought back to the tale of the Hero Twins, when they defeat the Lords of Xibalba and decree that no sacrificial blood will ever be offered again to them, and she wondered if that was the moment when the gods had lost their worshippers, or whether it happened later. Perhaps she might ask about them at some point, but now a more urgent question assailed her.
“How can you be here, then, when mortals do not pray to you?”
“There are wells of power, secret places unlike others, where the land is fertile and strong, and gods may remain. My dominion is vaster than others because a stone weaved through the heavens and cleaved the oceans, the earth itself. Kak noh ek. A boiling kiss upon this world.”
“You mean an asteroid,” she said, finally understanding. “You were born from an asteroid.”
How silly that she had not caught Loray’s meaning before! Yes, an asteroid. She had not paid them too much heed when perusing astronomy books, being more interested in distant stars.
“But then, the moon would be filled with gods, would it not?” she asked.
“Have you not heard a word I said? Mortals gave us our form,” he told her.
Like a furnace? she wondered. Did mortals sculpt the forms of gods? And if so, did those forms change? Or were gods inviolable, their visage, once imagined, forever remaining in its original shape?
Then her mind turned to the chunk of rock that had delivered the gods onto her continent. How could that have been the raw material from which the dark-haired god arose?
“Is that why my ancestors built observatories and looked at the night sky? Did you want them to look at the place you came from?”
“What funny thoughts you have,” he said. “What would I care about the heavens when I reside in the Underworld?”
“I would care. All I could do sometimes was stare at the sky,” she admitted.
“Whatever for?”
“Because it made me think one day I’d be free,” she told him.
She had looked up at the night sky far too often, trying to divine her future in the face of the pockmarked moon. Casiopea was a realist, but her youth also made it impossible to remain rooted to the earth every second of the day. Once in a while she sneaked a line of poetry into her heart, or memorized the name of a star.
“Free of what?”
“My grandfather was terrible. I do not miss him or his house,” she admitted. Her mother she did not miss yet, either. She knew that would come. For now, the excitement and newness obliterated those feelings, though she realized she must pen Mother a letter. At least a postcard. She would send one from Veracruz.
“Then it is a good thing I rescued you,” Hun-Kamé said.
“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.”
“You appear very certain of yourself for a girl without a penny in the world who had not even seen what lay a kilometer away from her home until a couple of days ago.”
“Well, now I have a god by my side.”
“Just watch how you speak to me, stone maiden,” he said, pointing at her.
He did not sound angry, but she disliked the words all the same. After having been ordered by her family to mind her tongue and her manners, she was loath to allow a man to so quickly dictate her speech patterns.
“My grandfather and my cousin slapped me when I was impertinent. Will you do that too?” she asked, and she couldn’t help but to cut her words with a tad of defiance.
He gave her an odd look, which wasn’t quite disapproval. And he didn’t quite smile even if his lips curved, teeth showing.
“No. I would not. I also can’t imagine it would do any good, since their blows did not curb your spirit. That is worthy. My brother did not break me, either.”
She chided herself for not considering the cruel imprisonment he’d suffered. He was at turns quiet and a tad rude, but then he had not spoken to anyone in many years, locked in a place of blackness, left alone.
As much sorrow as Casiopea had known, she had still an understanding of kindness.
“I’m sorry about that. What my grandfather and your brother did to you,” she said, her voice soft.
“Why would you be sorry?” he asked in surprise. “It had nothing to do with you.”
“Yes, but if I had known, I’d have let you out long ago.”
His gaze fixed upon her. She thought he had not looked at her yet, and only in that instant did she materialize before him. It was an uncomfortable sensation, because his gaze was cool, and yet it burned, made her look down at the folds of her skirt and feel like she might blush, an uncommon occurrence.