“I apologize thoroughly. This was taxing for you,” he said, and now he didn’t seem grim, just sober and measured.
“I…I’m not even sure…what were those things?” she asked.
“Ghosts.”
“I didn’t imagine ghosts were like that.”
Not that she had pictured ghosts as people wearing sheets, with two holes cut out for their eyes, or as wispy, floating apparitions. She hadn’t thought they’d be as frightening as they’d been. Nor that they might try to eat her.
“Certain ghosts. There are others, like those who haunt the roads and devour children, for one,” Hun-Kamé said with a shrug. “You should rest.”
“I’m not sure I want to nap,” she said, suddenly afraid of all the creatures that lurk in the dark and the shadows that might invade the room if she drew the curtains.
“And I assure you, you should. I do not say this idly. When I cast magic, I draw from your strength.”
She stared at him. “Like…”
“I feed off you. You know this.”
“Not like this, not—”
“Every minute of every hour, and when I use my magic, even more. Come, lie down,” he said, clasping her hand and drawing her toward the bed, then gesturing for her to sit.
Casiopea sat at the head of it, clutching a decorative pillow between her hands. She had wanted to see Mexico City, and when she did she had not expected she would be frightened by ghosts. Nor did she think she’d spend her first evening there asleep because a god had used her hair and her energy to conjure said ghosts. She’d imagined a nebulous sort of fun. But there was little fun to be had; even Carnival had not been enjoyed, merely observed from afar.
“It’s not right,” she said, frowning and toying with the pillow’s tassels. “It isn’t fair. I’m food for them or…or for you.”
“And who ever told you life was fair?”
“Maybe I thought it would be fairer with a god at my side.”
“That is rather naïve,” he said. “I’ll have to dissuade you about this. Who said this to you?”
He seemed so utterly serious—not cruel, just serious and concerned, as if he’d just discovered she didn’t know how to count to ten—about this matter that it made her chuckle.
“What amuses you?”
“Nothing. I suppose I might nap for a bit,” she told him, rather than explaining herself. She didn’t think he’d understand. “I guess you’ll want to sleep too.”
“I do not sleep.”
They had shared their quarters on the boat and the train, but she had not checked to see if he slept. He certainly lay on his berth. She had assumed he must rest too.
“But you said you slept in the chest, and Loray, he told me some gods sleep,” she said, remembering that detail.
“I also said it was not like your sleep, and as you can imagine, it was under extraordinary circumstances that I engaged in this activity.”
She considered this, nodding and placing the pillow back on the bed, behind her. “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.”
“No, not death,” she said, shaking her head. “That you don’t dream.”
“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.
She thought of the daily drudgery at Uukumil. Rise, get grandfather’s breakfast to his room, take the dishes back to the kitchen, sweep a floor or scrub it clean. Each evening a meal with her mother, each night a prayer to her guardian angel. Sundays at church, the clothes clinging to her skin, the day too hot. The secret time to peruse the pages of her father’s book. Her mother, brushing her hair and smoothing her worries. And again, this cycle.
“Is that why you stare at the stars?” he asked. “Are you searching for beauty or dreaming with your eyes wide open?”
“My father was an astronomy enthusiast. He knew the names of the stars and he’d point them out. I try not to forget them.”
She also tried to retain the sound of his voice when he told her legends before bedtime, but truth be told she’d forgotten. This made her sad, but she attempted to clutch the other remains of his memory even more tightly, holding with special reverence a book of poems by Francisco de Quevedo with pages falling out, like a withered daisy, which had rested by her father’s bedside when he passed away.
“My grandfather was so angry when he heard they’d called me Casiopea. Grandfather wanted a good Christian name, not some Mayan nonsense, and threatened to cut off contact with my mother if they went with that. Then they named me Casiopea. ‘It’s Greek nonsense, now,’ my father said.”
She remembered the priest’s face when he’d heard she had no proper Christian name. He insisted on calling her María, and when that didn’t work, “the Leyva girl,” eliminating Tun. Now that she thought about it, that’s what most people called her, even though she had girl cousins, and any of them might have been “the Leyva girl.” There had been talk that some of those cousins ought to go to a boarding school, but Grandfather was old-fashioned and believed a woman’s place was at home, where she could focus on learning to be a proper wife. Martín had gone to a school when he’d been younger, but fed up with the rules and lessons there, he’d got himself expelled. Grandfather did not bother sending him back again.
“My grandfather didn’t appreciate the wittiness of the statement. He cut her off anyway. Then my father died and we had to go live in Uukumil,” she said. “Had I known you were trapped in that chest, I would have released you years ago, to spite him.”
“I would have been very grateful,” he replied. “As for those stars of yours and your dreams, I suppose they’ve kept you company, and there is no folly in them.”
She pressed a cheek against the bed’s padded headboard and glanced up at him. Her eyelids felt heavy but she didn’t want him to go yet, she wanted him to stay by the bed, looking down at her, his hands in his pockets, an eyebrow quirked.