“Over Xibalba, not over me. I was not born to be your slave.”
“Enough with your nonsense.”
“You expected me to gnaw at scraps, to drink spoiled wine. One time we were gods, not shadows. Until they, the twins—”
“The Hero Twins defeated us and we were humbled, as we had to be humbled for our pride was great,” Hun-Kamé declared.
“Then I shall build great temples and paint them with blood until our defeat is washed away! Until we are humbled no longer!”
“Enough, I said.”
Hun-Kamé’s voice was imperious and well rehearsed. She imagined they’d had similar conversations before. She imagined, by the tone Hun-Kamé employed, that the conversations ended with Vucub-Kamé’s acid silence. Not on this occasion.
“Has he told you what it was like?” Vucub-Kamé asked, turning toward Casiopea and moving in her direction. She saw Hun-Kamé shift uncomfortably, but Vucub-Kamé blocked her line of sight with his body.
“The burning of the most precious incense, the sweet blood of priests, the sacrifices in the cenotes littered with jewels, the ball game concluding in glorious decapitation,” he said.
Casiopea almost thought she could see it, could taste it. The night skies like velvet darkness, pierced by the stars, the murals in the palaces, waterholes so blue you’d think them inked with the leaves of the añil, and the devotion of men, like a wave, a sound, this force that made the land quiver. The adoration of mortals filling one’s lungs. Then that same adoration receding, the emptiness it left, the way the azure remained on the walls of temples, weathering the assault of time, but everything else faded until it felt as if you’d fade too.
“The world was young then, it smelled of copper and brine,” Vucub-Kamé told her, almost wistfully, and she thought even though he stood before her, he wasn’t there, his eyes far off, gazing into the land of his memories.
Slowly he looked down at her, tilting her head up as if to better examine goods at the market, and it reminded her, oddly enough, of the town’s butcher, his eyes on her as he tried to tip the scale. Now this god weighed her flesh on a scale of a different sort. “Young, as you are young. Look at you, like the dawn,” he said. “You can’t understand, of course, but one day you’ll want to be new again,” he continued. “You’ll wish to return to this moment of perfection when you were the embodiment of all promises.”
Vucub-Kamé took a strand of her hair between his fingers. He was so close to her she thought his eyes were not gray, but lighter, the shade of bones that have been pecked clean by wild animals.
“You’ve refused me twice. Will you do it a third time and risk my wrath, I wonder? Three is a special number, for it is the number that represents women and I ask what shall you represent? Shall you perhaps be the fruit, plucked too soon and left to rot upon the ground? You are, as I’ve said, so young.”
There was Xibalba deep in his gaze, and the promise of her death. And deeper yet she saw the bones of men that would litter Middleworld if his schemes came to fruition; she saw the splash of blood on stones; she felt the fright and the pain of mortal beings.
She looked away.
“Stop your nonsense,” Hun-Kamé said, moving to stand by Casiopea’s side, his arm brushing against hers, his fingers pressing against her knuckles.
“My nonsense? You’ll pit her against the Black Road, brother,” Vucub-Kamé said.
“I did not conceive the challenge,” Hun-Kamé replied, his voice unpleasant, his body tense.
“It does not matter. One way or another, you are killing her before her time. Such cruelty.”
Vucub-Kamé spoke with the most delicious mockery, Hun-Kamé replied with a haughty silence.
“It does not have to be this way. The lot of us, we could be friends,” Vucub-Kamé said, looking at her again with the same care he’d granted her all through their meeting. She felt she was being weighed anew.
“What do you mean?” she asked cautiously.
“I’d like to offer you life instead of death,” Vucub-Kamé said, sliding past them, and picking an apple from the bowl of fruit that had been set by the window. “It’s a simple trick. You cut your left hand off.”
“I know how that goes,” Casiopea said. “I cut it off and sever the link between Hun-Kamé and me, and then he’ll be so weak he won’t be able to fight you, and you win.”
“I must admit that did cross my mind. I’m thinking something more complicated, but beneficial for all parties. Don’t just cut the hand. You kill yourself.”
He paused, as if to allow her to perfectly understand the meaning of his words. She scoffed. Did he imagine she was mad? Or so exhausted she’d simply admit defeat? She was tired, her body pained her, her hand ached, and there was a weariness of her spirit, as if it was being ground down bit by bit, and yet she was not so tired she’d stop at this point.
“Kill yourself, and as you die offer yourself to me in sacrifice,” he continued, tossing the apple in the air and catching it. “Those who pledge themselves to the Lord of Xibalba are invited to dwell in the shadow of the World Tree.”
“I don’t see how that is any better for me,” Casiopea said. “I’d be dead, and then you could harm Hun-Kamé.”
“Oh, Hun-Kamé offers himself afterward, too; he pledges his allegiance. He kneels down and I cut his head with my axe. Then his blood spills upon the floor and I collect it, using it as the mortar to complete my spells. But as weakened as he will be after you die, and as changed as my brother is, the Hun-Kamé who will walk into Xibalba will be very much a mortal man.”
Vucub-Kamé squeezed the fruit and it shrank, blackening and rotting in the blink of an eye, until he was holding nothing but ashes, which he displayed on his palm for her to see.
“I have the power to restore mortals who worship me,” Vucub-Kamé said.
As he spoke, the ashes in his hand formed themselves back into an apple, as crisp and red as it had been seconds before. Not a scratch on it.
“Gods don’t…they don’t become mortal,” Casiopea said. “They don’t die.”
“There are two warring essences in my brother’s body in this instant. Separate his immortal elixir from the mortal substance coursing from his body, and why not? I lop off his head, he resurrects. He’d open his eyes and be a man,” Vucub-Kamé said. “Free to walk Middleworld, to dream the dreams men dream. And you, too, Casiopea, alive again. I am offering you what no one else can offer. Give up your quest. And you, my brother, give up your claim. Give yourself to me, and in giving, grant me all you are.”