“What offer?” Casiopea asked.
“I don’t know the terms, they wouldn’t say, but Vucub-Kamé will be generous to you. He…it would be best if you take Vucub-Kamé’s offer, because the other option, that first one, is no good.”
“Why not?”
“There’s a road, all right? The Black Road, it runs through Xibalba. They’ll have us walk it.”
“You and I?”
“Yes. A contest.”
They stood by a stone fountain, water spilling from the mouth of a stone frog resting at its top. It made him think of home, their courtyard there, the parrot in its cage. All he wanted was to go to Uukumil. He’d never desired the world; it was Casiopea who had wanted that.
“Look, Casiopea, I don’t…whatever shit competition they have planned, it scares the hell out of me. So if for once in your life you’d do as you’re told and…I mean, that asshole you’re hanging out with, it’s not like he—”
“What are you talking about? I always do what I’m told,” she interrupted him.
“No, you don’t. Not without a fight,” he said.
It was true. She was willful, daggers hidden beneath her muttered yeses, her eyes fixing on him, slick as oil. Like now, the way her mouth curved, a painting of defiance without uttering a single sound.
“Is that why you hate me?” she asked.
“Why does it matter?” he replied.
He thought of the dark little girl who had arrived in Uukumil one afternoon, stepping down from the railcar with her hair in a pigtail and her pretty mother at her side. He had been curious, then, instead of hostile. She was a poor relation and therefore Martín did not know how to talk to her, whether it was proper to play together, so he kept a cautious distance. That mild courtesy became ice one spring.
“Do you remember the day after I came back from school, when they expelled me?” he told her, the memory loosening his tongue. “I went to talk to Grandfather, and he was in his room, of course, and you were there, reading the newspaper for him.”
Sitting with her simple navy dress and the pigtail that reached her waist. Martín had felt wretched as he walked into the room and realized he’d have to explain himself in front of her, which increased the humiliation, but his grandfather had ordered him to speak up and did not bother to dismiss the girl.
“I was scared, but I had to tell him what had happened. I thought he’d hit me with the cane, but instead he sighed and he turned to you and he said, ‘Why couldn’t you be a boy?’ And I knew then exactly what he thought of me.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Casiopea said.
“It was. It doesn’t matter if you intended it or not, we were meant to be enemies from then on.”
Casiopea now, with her hair cropped so short and a sharp yellow dress, seemed ages away from the big-eyed girl in the chair, but something of the child remained, hurt at one of his taunts.
“I wanted you to be my friend,” she admitted.
“I’m sorry about that,” he told her, and it was the most honest thing he’d ever said to her, likely the kindest too. Although…if he had stretched his mind far back, there had been an afternoon, shortly after her arrival in Uukumil, when they had gone hunting for bugs behind the house. Digging with sticks and getting dirt under their nails. Until his mother came out and pulled him inside with a few sharp words.
Poor relations. Didn’t make sense to mix with them, especially when that relation bore a resemblance to the maids. Look at her, his mother said, might be a full Indian girl if one did not know any better. Shameful. Martín could only nod at his mother.
“So now…now I’m supposed to do what? Bend the knee before Vucub-Kamé because you are sorry?” Casiopea asked, her voice sharp, making him raise his head.
“Because it’s the smart thing to do, all right?” he shot back.
“You won’t even tell me what Vucub-Kamé has planned.”
“They won’t tell me. They are evasive. It’s not surprising. Grandfather told me nothing growing up, not a single word about Xibalba or the Black Road.”
“But you do know there will be a contest.”
“Something of the sort. Casiopea, neither one of us should be in the Land of the Dead. Take whatever he offers, all right? What’s the matter, don’t you want to go home? Think of your mother if you’ll think of nothing else.”
Martín patted his jacket and lit his cigarette. Gestures like this helped him feel more secure; they reminded him he was alive, which was a great worry to him lately, having seen Xibalba. No man can remain quite the same after observing the Place of Fright.
“I want to get out of this without any more trouble,” he told her. “I want to go home.”
It was he who slipped back this time, becoming the child in Grandfather’s room, sniveling and afraid of the wrath of his elders, twisting the cuffs of his shirt. As he twisted his cuffs, his fingers slid upon the ring of the Death Lord and a change came upon him. He dropped the cigarette.
He felt a voice course through his body without warning. He did not hear it, it was merely there, inside him, as though he were an instrument and someone else was playing him. Ice rushed through his veins, made his eyes shine as bright as polished stones.
“When he no longer needs you, Hun-Kamé will abandon you on the side of the road,” Martín said, and this voice was not his own. It was much too intense, much too bitter. It was not Martín at all, even if it sounded like him. Somehow, it was Vucub-Kamé. “He will give you ashes and vinegar, for he is not generous. You’ll have faced foes and trials, and be left with nothing.”
“I’m not helping him in order to obtain a reward,” she replied.
“But it isn’t fair, is it? Your family will lose everything they have, and you will return home empty-handed. If you can even find the way back. If you even live through it. All he does is take. Take and take some more, doesn’t he?”
He raised a finger, pressed it against his lips, and smirked. “Don’t deny it. He takes your life, your blood. Why can’t you take something for a change?”
She must have noticed the change in him, the glimmer in his eyes.
“Vucub-Kamé…he’s here, isn’t he?” she whispered.
“Yes, he’s here,” Martín muttered.
Casiopea spun around, as if trying to find the Death Lord, but of course Vucub-Kamé wasn’t standing anywhere in sight. Martín bowed his head and placed his hands on Casiopea’s temples.