I’ll do no such thing, Rook wanted to say — meant to, anyhow. Call me “husband” all you want, don’t make it so. Don’t remember gettin’ fitted for any ring with you, either, just ’cause we once had carnal knowledge of each other in a dream —
Far too late for such equivocations, though.
She pressed him down with both palms on his chest, punch-hard, like she aimed to leave bruises with her fingers — rode him the way he’d seen Chess break horses which truly were three times his size, with a sneer at the very idea of being trampled. He was glued fast to her, every point of entry a brand-new orifice, ripped wide and gasping. Behind them, the tree was already folding itself back to the ground, dissolving into her unseen dragonfly-wing train — used once and then discarded, with not even a shred of regret. Her hair was in his mouth, waterfalling over his eyes in a septic blindfold — arousing and dreadful, a charnel aphrodisiac.
Her cheek pressed to his, a strange little pit starting to open at its very centre, twisting so sharp he could feel it form, without even having to watch: a black spiral raw as a new tattoo, the colour of decay. Her breath already in his lungs, incense-laden, hotter than a furnace. To try not to breathe it would be to suffocate.
Horror and desire, too mixed by far to separate. She yanked his own palm up to span her neck, collarbone to collarbone, arrogant against possible treachery; he could’ve strangled her one-handed, and she knew it. The same way she knew he never would.
“Call me Ixchel, husband,” she commanded. And ground his sensitized skin against where the rope’s puffy burn bulged, flaking — where what had once been poor Adaluz’s pulse fluttered and skirled, flushing the damage brightly. Saying, “See, here: I have let blood too, to show you my good faith. We match now, you and I.”
Not your blood to let, Rook thought, eyes rolling back. But his scar was tightening in sympathy — a vascular choir singing, red and salt, washing him away, where no one but she could follow.
Oh, Chess is really gonna kill me, once he finds out. Though that’s only if he does, and she don’t kill me first.
Fuck it, though.
Reverend Rook growled at his own hypocrisy, hard enough to hurt, like every damn thing else about these supernatural shenanigans. Then flipped them both, to at least give himself the impression of being on top — and let her have her way.
Later, clothes re-ordered, they stepped out together beneath the salt-encrusted lintel of Love’s church, back into the moon’s harsh purview. It shone down on Bewelcome, illimitable and pure, the same way it once had on the dark-stained marble steps of Tenochtitlan, and both of them cast stunted black shadows beneath its too-bright light — though Rook’s did stretch far longer than Ixchel’s, to be sure. And seemed far less divided.
“Thought that was just s’posed to be a way for us to talk,” he said. She took a moment’s pause, before answering — stretched luxuriantly, every joint cracking, and yawned wide, trying to taste everything at once. “Aaaah, the air,” she murmured. Then: “We have held congress a long time, one way or another, you and I. So I ask — do you know what I want yet, little king?”
“I got some small notion. But I’d really rather hear you say it.”
She — Ixchel — nodded Adaluz’s head, black hair disordered and enticing. “What I want is what I had. What you want is for what you already have to last forever. You fear Hell, and rightly. I live there. So you have seen.”
“Yes.”
“You know I speak truth, then. As all gods must.”
“Uh huh. If that’s even true — ’cause not havin’ met as many as you, I can’t really tell. You ain’t my God, lady. I don’t know you from a hole in the ground.”
A shrug. “Then I will enlighten you. It costs me nothing.” Stepping lightly into the circle again, she sat, cross-legged, and patted the wet dirt next to her. He lowered himself down across from her, by aching degrees, assumed a similar posture — like she was ’bout to spin some schoolyard tall tale, and with probably just as much weight to it. But then again, why would she lie?
Hell, why wouldn’t she? To get her way, fool. Same as everybody else. “Once there was a girl of the Mexica — that great empire which once lay to the south, where those lands you call Mexico are now. Her name I no longer recall. She was born without flaw, and raised to pay her family’s debt to the gods until — one day — her mother took her to the temple. She was to be cihuatlamacazque, a god’s wife. The girl lived her days in endless prayer, letting blood each morning into the sacred brazier, so that the perfume of it rose up to please her husband-to-be — He By Whom We Live, Enemy of Both Sides, who the Maya called God K. He who the Mexica called . . . Smoking Mirror.
“But one night the moon was eaten, and the people cried out in horror. Such a thing was too dreadful to let stand; the star-devils and small female gods might burn back onto the earth without the moon to prevent them, snatching up children and eating them. In their despair, however, a god — perhaps even the Enemy himself — whispered in the temple cluazvacuilli’s ear that she should select the girl who shone brightest and persuade her to allow herself to be sacrificed. Then the moon would return. And this was done.
“That girl Became me, little king, and then I Became myself — again and again, I Becam
e. She was not the first, though she brought me forth at last from the Maya gallery of gods to the Mexica one . . . re-embodied, alive once more to receive my due, to eat the precious blood spilled in my name from then on. To choose my ixtiptla for beauty and strength, accept their willing deaths and clothe myself in their bodies, over and over — as you see.” She ran both careless hands down Adaluz’s curves at once, proprietary, shivering slightly at the feel. “Neither the first . . . nor the last.”
Rook nodded, for lack of anything better to offer. Keep talkin’, he thought.
“I do not know why Smoking Mirror did what he did for me, even now. Perhaps, since he loves to fight, all he wanted was a worthy opponent. Yet I cannot complain, for certainly I profited from it. Because I was one of the oldest of the gods, one of the smallest — because my cult was eaten away by time and forgetfulness — I endured even after the Steel Hats came with their One-God babble, when the greatest of the new began to fade away. They thought me no threat at all, until they were too weakened to offer me resistance. And then, after we had sunk back down into the Ball-Court once more to wait for renewal, there in the dark when all other gods forgot even their own names — ”
“You hunted them down, and ate them. Took their juice, like Grandma tried to do with me. Didn’t you.”
“I did. And why are you so sure?”
“’Cause . . . that’s what I’d’ve done.”
She smiled. “See, then: we do understand each other.”
Darkness above, yet far greyer, the moon starting to fade. Darkness below, all but infinite.
“My blood was shed by those who wanted gods,” Ixchel told Rook, “and so I became one. I fed the engine, as it fed me. But as you are now, so once was I.”