Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (61 page)

“Cover your head,” she says to me without looking, “the Sun likes to follow him.”

We’re halfway to the river before he speaks. “Is it difficult?” he says. “Always being tormented by the Sun?”

“Yes,” I say. “But the Moon loves me better. I glow like a beacon in her light.”

He stops, pulls a pouch out from beneath the ceremonial covering of his breechclout. “I want to show you something. I had one of my father’s most skillful artisans make these for you,” he says.

They are two rounds of obsidian – so thin they are a translucent grey instead of opaque black – rimmed and held by fine woven fiber, which also attaches them to each other. Long fibers on the sides are meant to be tied around the head.

It’s hard to know what to do or say to him. “They are strange,” is what I finally manage.

He nods. “But this way no one will think you are crying when you are not.” He ties them to my face, then fiddles with their positioning a bit when I complain they make my eyelashes hurt.

When he’s done I whip off my head covering and look toward the Sun. There are wavy lines on the air where there shouldn’t be, but the Sun’s face is clouded enough by the volcanic glass that I don’t immediately start tearing. And when I look down and around, nothing radiates enough light to bother me.

I drop to my knees, then touch my forehead to the ground in front of Umám’s feet.

“I prefer the friend to the subject,” he says after a moment. “And be careful. They break easily. The artisan was left with shard and powder in his hands when he tried to chip the shape in attempts that came before.”

When I get back to my feet, he studies me. “They make your face look like a mask.”

“A white demon.”

He nods. “You’re quite monstrous.”

I pull my features to what I’ve seen on the masks. “Enough to scare off the foreigners?”

“And the people too,” he says, but with a smile.

It is the last we say about it, but I think on the unexpected gift during the hours it takes us to fulfill the old woman’s demand. “Have you no siblings?” I say finally.

He looks at me. “No. Nor real friends either. Just those who would curry favor by proximity.”

Later, standing before the old woman, both of us muddy and abraded from the rough harvesting, Umám reaches for my hand as he had that first day. I think I love him for this brotherly touch. The way of witches is lonely. The way of the only ghost witch born in a generation, more so.

“I have seen that eight thousand men will not be enough to secure victory,” the old woman says to Umám. “And you will not find help from the Kakchiquel by promising them riches. You will only send them to the invaders’ side in hopes of ruining us.”

Umám hangs his head. “You are telling me I cannot win.”

“No,” she says. “I am telling you the ways of men are not enough. Send couriers to every village, to every woman like us who walk between worlds. We will make men of corn to swell your ranks.”

“You are not gods to make men.”

“Chssst,” she says, but Umám doesn’t know to go quiet and hear what she’ll say next.

“I will consult with the priest-advisors,” he rushes to say, then disappears even faster than the first time.

“The priests will say no,” the old woman says to me as she gathers her ritual things and ducks back into the house to return them to her chest.

“That is ever the way between men of power and women of power,” she adds when I follow her inside. “So they become priests to kings and we stay witches hidden among the people. But we will do what we will anyway.”

She closes the lid of her chest and turns to look at me. She motions at the obsidian rounds. “What are those?”

“He had them made. They let me see the Sun without hurting my eyes.”

She smiles, a tiny little sliver of smile.

“I will be teaching you the ways of making life, K’antel,” she says. “And the ways of taking it. This you will learn because I have seen your future.”

I feel a shiver climb my spine. “Will I be a part of Umám’s victory?” I ask.

“You’ll help him live forever,” she says. Then, before I can say anything else, she points at the open door. “There is corn to shuck.”

Black, red, yellow and white. The kernels of corn look like multicolor teeth pulled from their gums and set out to dry.

We grind and grind and grind. When the trough is filled with meal, we mix it with the slurry and shape our warriors out of corn and clay. They line up in our compound, rank upon rank, hardening under charge of the Sun.

Umám’s and my first haul of corn and clay is not enough, of course, and the old woman and I carry more raw ingredients up to the compound. The villagers mark the corn we take from the terraces and are respectful of our need even when they don’t know the why of it. But they don’t help us, or follow us up to the compound. Witches are part of them, but always apart.

The obsidian rounds make the Sun friendlier, but I still love the Moon best, and the white doe and I go out under her gaze to dance to the music I hear in the earth. One night, the old woman catches us at our dance – around and through the rows of waiting men – and watches us wordlessly.

“I have confused you for a child when in reality you are a white demon,” she says later that night, as we’re both laying on our mats.

“Can white demons love?” I say. “Because I love you.”

I hear her get up and come to the edge my mat. She strokes my hair, as she did when I was four or five and crying from the work, or the Sun, or some remark I’d overheard on market day. “Not everything that seems human is human,” she says.

“But I am,” I say as I fall asleep.

The next day she grabs a blade and cuts my braids off. She wraps them carefully in a cloth and stores them in her chest. What’s left on my head is so short it is soft and prickly at once, and I can’t stop myself from running my hands over it.

“Promise me one thing,” she says. “Promise you will come back to me.”

“Am I going somewhere?”

She nods, but doesn’t say anything, and moments later she leaves.

That night I see Umám, standing with his back to our frozen army as if he’s already leading them. His skin is painted red and his hair is half pulled away to stream down his back. His headdress is every shade of green – pale jade cabochons and strands of mixed dark nephrite and turquoise beads, topped with the three-foot tail feathers of a male quetzal. They arc high over his head and down his back.

“It is time,” he says. “Two days from now I will meet the invaders on the plain of Olintepeque.”

“We will send our battalion to meet you,” I say, motioning behind him.

He turns around, looks at the strange, still figures. “Do you dream?”

“Yes. A color, mostly. What about you?”

He turns back to me. “I’ve been dreaming the same dream every night for the past three months. Corn kernels pouring out of men like blood.”

“That’s good,” I say. “We created them from corn so they would bleed instead of you.”

“But the gods created us from corn as well,” he says.

As Umám steps forward, into the light the Moon streams down, I see for the first time his nahual perched on his shoulder. Not even the majestic tail feathers on the headdress have prepared me for the bird. Neither too small nor too large, it is uniformly green. But it is a green not of this world; a green made by the gods for the gods; a green that burns my eyes worse than the Sun ever has.

The bird raises its wings, lifts and coasts over to me for a moment. Then, instead of returning to its perch, it flies straight to the center of Umám’s chest and dives through his hardened cotton armor – and behind that his muscle and bone – as if all were as tender as a barely unfurled leaf. The nahual disappears into the boy warrior. For a few instants the eyes that look into mine are hard and inhuman, as they were once before, and now I know why.

Then, they are just Umám’s eyes again.

“Promise me something,” he says.

Unease rises in me and seals my lips, but I manage to nod.

“Promise you’ll remember me as Umám, not the Tekún or whatever I become.”

“I will,” I say.

He fades out slowly this time, as if he is reluctant to go.

I don’t know how long I stand there until I feel the old woman’s hand on my arm. She leads me up the mountainside, past a rock covered with wax drippings from the blessings we’ve asked there. Past the slender, silvery tree to which the Moon ties her loom when she takes to her daytime weaving. Past the cave where the Sun goes to change into a jaguar and stalk the night.

We’re almost to the top of the mountain when we come upon a space formed by the roots of a tree so enormous no more than its trunk can be seen. Its branches are hidden in a garment of clouds.

This is her cavern. The first grandmother. The eternal grandmother. The grandmother who has loved me from the day she held me, and shaped the tool that I am to be to her hand.

It starts with one drop, and then another. Soon it is a steady drizzle. The ranks of mud and corn men take in the wet. Their pallid yellowish-grey cheeks flush. Their fingers flex around the figured handle of slingshot, the long hollow of blowgun. Their sandaled feet lift as one, stamp as one. It is the tún, tún, tún of the hollowed log instrument with the same name as sound; and the bom, bom, bom of drums calling to war.

All at once the statues open their mouths, and the rain falls on their outstretched tongues – this red rain, blood rain, rain of the living and of the dead. The cry that issues from each throat at the same time has the quality of song. A song meant for a road that opens only once and for a short while. The song of a body brought to life.

I run faster than I have ever run. At my side, the white doe matches my stride. Behind us are the grandmother’s corn men, in formation three abreast, silently keeping pace.

I cannot say what the people think as we pass their villages on our way to Olintepeque. I imagine they think it is a white demon – boyish, naked and absolutely colorless except for the black rounds where eyes should be – leading an army of ghosts. But as each night of our run turns to dawn, the people come to the edge of the trade road to throw flower petals under our feet. The children sprint alongside us for a stretch, and the women walk behind them, stoic and thoughtful. We start with five thousand corn men and march thirty thousand onto the battlefield.

Arrows, darts, and stones pierce the sky. Black powder flares. The foreigners shoot charges as the animals below them rise on enormous hind legs and tear at the people with hooves tipped in metal.

I see one of our men catch a foreigner’s shot mid-torso and then the mud and corn pours out until it is no longer a man standing but a mound of dirt and husk and kernel on the field. The foreigner stops to push another shot into his gun, controlling his animal with the pressure of his knees.

I drop to my haunches, place my palms flat on the earth. I’ve always known the way of what roots beneath the ground, but this is no ordinary harvest. I sing as the grandmother has taught me and the earth itself becomes a weapon. Blades of obsidian push out of the ground where the foreigner’s animal is set to step. I hear a bellow as volcanic glass points bury themselves in the soft under its hooves.

I pull two long blades from the ground for myself. Even after he slides off the tremendous beast, the foreigner is much taller than me, and encased in metal armor. But every plate weighs, and I jump where he can’t follow. I stab up between seams. He twists, then goes down on a knee.

The people prefer prisoners to corpses, but the foreigner brings his musket up and I know I cannot afford to keep to custom.

I make another obsidian blade rise and drive itself through skin and bone where the jointed knee of armor opens the foreigner to earth. The sudden pain makes his shot go wide. The blades in my hands slash one way, then another, across his throat. He gurgles, then flops forward and the ground takes his blood.

The next foreigner – only half-armored – looks confused when I step up to face him. His eyes slide over my skin, even paler than his own. He hesitates, I do not. The next one does much the same.

As I step over their bleeding, dying bodies, I put it together in my head. The foreigners know nothing of the white demons, so they do not fear me for my semblance. They fear me because I look like one of their young, turned against them and repudiating the savagery of this invasion.

Rightly is the grandmother known for her foresight.

I keep dancing with my blades and beside me the white doe distracts and bewilders, buying me time to slash wider, pierce deeper. We will never be taken.

When the silence falls, my body is as red as if I had been smeared with achiotl.

At the heart of the plain of Olintepeque, a red-haired foreigner with a dark red animal beneath him meets a lone standing warrior. They are like statues, the light caresses them with love.

Then blowgun and musket rise to sight at the same time.

Umám blows his feathered dart with enough force that it slices half through the animal’s eye and lodges its long thorn in what rests behind. As the beast topples, the foreigner still caught on its back buries his shot in Umám’s thigh.

Umám leaps forward anyway. He reaches for the animal – down and snorting and sneezing as if it could rid itself of the pain in its head that way – pulls a blade and slits its throat. It brays its death, and the foreigner scrambles to get out from beneath it.

I turn back to my own fight. I have a foreigner to unseat, and following him, one of his allies – who looks like one of the people and probably has ancestors in common with us. I’m humming and singing with power, as the grandmother knew I would be when she sent me into battle.

The soles of my feet are hard, but not so much that I can’t discern what I step on as I make my way from one end of the battlefield to the next: kernels of corn; dirt slicked to mud by blood; gobbets of flesh, some squishy, some firm.

Then, my toes curl around something smooth, cold, unyielding. I look down. It is a large nephrite bead – dark green and glossy like the leaves of certain trees. Not too far from it is another bead, this one the paler blue-green of turquoise. And then another.