A Book Of Tongues

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Up from Mictlan-Xibalba, a crack came extending by slow degrees, like the first small tear in a rolled snake’s egg — splitting, resplitting, fine and flexible as dead woman’s hair. Meeting on its way with the same artesian wellspring Rook had teased forth once before, it washed the earth beneath their feet free of salt to form a mucky circle ’round himself and the woman, roughly twelve feet in diameter, like it’d been measured out with a pair of coffins for compasses.

Then the crack’s furthest finger opened up a smallish hole right in the off-centre of this depression, through which — while they both watched, with similar fascination — a dark tendril poked and furled, coiling the way kudzu does, pumping with evil juice. A quarterbreath, and it had swelled cock-thick. A half-, and it bloomed big as a big man’s wrist. Three breaths later, a young sapling.

Bark like unclean fur, leaves quill-sharp, pine-needles from a giant’s Christmas wreath. The tree spread itself out above them, its low-slung limbs hung with vines so heavy they reminded Rook of nothing so much as serpents. But its fruit did shine: satin-silvery, casting light down on the woman’s face as she stared upwards, mouth open, wondering — a thin rain of glitter, spores heavy with sleep, and dreams.

Open your mouth, little king; she teeters on the brink. We must be careful how we steer her, if the right outcome is to be obtained. Speak only the words I send you.

No help for it, then. At all.

“This tree — ” Rook began.

“Beautiful,” the woman agreed. “What do they call it?” “Yaxche. Tree of Heaven. It’s a . . . calabash, I think. But that ain’t the point.”

“No.”

“Point is — you want to die. That’s why you came here, right?”

She looked down again, as if shamed — at her weeping dress-front, the mess between her thighs turning her hem to rust. Whispered, mouth barely moving: “Yes.”

“Well, then . . . there you go.”

He pointed to the tree, which was already letting down a helpful extra length of vine — close-plaited, easy to tie, hard to break. A hangman’s rope.

“That’s a sin, though,” she said; more of a question than a statement, going strictly by intonation. Like she was hoping he’d try and talk her out of it.

Wasn’t as though that was a strict impossibility, either, it suddenly struck Rook. Sure, the woman’d come out to Bewelcome on her own, who knew how far. No food or water with her that he could see, which meant — if he was to give in to a foolish impulse of mercy — he’d have to waste most of the latest jolt he’d sucked from Chess on healing her alone. But then he’d be so weak, even if he did get her back to a place half-civilized, the citizens there’d simply shoot him where he stood once the first of them put a name to his notorious face. Scatter his brains, burn his body, atomize him beyond even Lady Rainbow’s recall . . . if she didn’t kill him herself, long before, for breaking faith with their subterranean compact.

You cannot save her, little king. As you know, in your bones.

No. And . . . yes.

We are complicit in this, husband, as in all things else. Is that not the meaning of marriage?

Not really, not for everybody. But then — I ain’t everybody.

“What’s your name?” he asked the woman, on further impulse.

“Adaluz,” she replied, the terminal “zee” a faint “th” lisp — but didn’t ask him his in return, as one might’ve thought only polite. Then again, it probably wasn’t anything she particularly cared to know, right at this very instant.

“Mexican, huh?” No reply. “Well, leave that by. You cleave still to the Holy Roman Catholic faith, Adaluz?”

“. . . I did . . .”

“Yeah, ’course. But that was before God killed your child, right? Or — let you kill it.”

She took the implication straight to the jaw, slap-hard, with barely a flinch. Just kept her gaze locked fast to that half-born noose, its tail already curling in on itself, forming an unslippable knot for her convenience. Her mouth gave a twist, skewing a drawn purse-string way that rendered her entire pretty face a badly sewn mask.

Matthew, 2:18, Rook couldn’t stop himself from thinking. In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.

“I can’t reach it,” was all sad Miss Ada said, at length, hopelessly. “It’s . . . too high for me.”

“Well, I can help you with that, ma’am. I mean — I’m surely tall enough to spot you a lift. Ain’t I?”

A long, wet sniff. Then, with her tear-blurred voice even softer than her words’ slight Spanish tinge could make it — “You’re very kind, señor.”

“Oh, no such thing, darlin’. No such thing.”

He went down on one knee in the salt, like he meant to propose, and cupped his hands in a makeshift stirrup. Step up, now, honey, ’fore you change your mind. Best to strike while the iron’s hot.

She did.

And then . . . stood there a second more with one foot up, one foot down, like she couldn’t decide whether she wanted on or off this dirt-bound ride, after all. Listened quiet, while Rook mouthed the “hey, rube!” spiel his Lady dictated, from her sodden, death-stink home. How there was nothin’ to any fine degree wrong with stretching your own neck, if the circumstances warranted. How this tree was a gallows grown for Adaluz alone, to end her pain and see her set up on high for all to gawk at, a new constellation of loss fixed at the very apex of an empty black sky. No need to think it over, since in Rainbow’s suicide paradise her child would be returned to her, whole and grown, to live by her side forever —

“You’ll never want for anything again, either of you,” he told her, throat dust-dry. “No hunger . . . no fear. Woman who dies of childbirth, God smiles on her, something fierce. Her baby too. You’re a pair of soldiers who went down fightin’, and there’s not much more honourable than that.”

“No,” she said, eyes tight-shut, head shaking like palsy, like fever. Like the only way she could keep herself from stopping was to turn eyelids and brain inside-out, and slip into voluntary blindness like a hangman’s all-too-welcome hood. “There isn’t, is there?”

Rook shook his head right back at her, even knowing full well she couldn’t see him do it. It was that, or scream.

Adaluz reached up, face abruptly slick with tears, La Llorona herself; the tree reached down to meet her halfway, wrapping itself helpfully tight ’neath her chops. And when Rook let his clasp part at last, she didn’t even struggle — just hung there, slack yet straining, ’til her own weight broke that throat-bone Rook knew so well, long after midnight but longer still before dawn.

’Til her lips crept back, bruising blue, and her tongue ground bloody between two uneven rows of small white teeth. ’Til a weak little spurt of piss ran down her legs to splatter on the ground, washing the profane circle even wider.

Oh, this better all be worth it, in the end, Rook thought. ’Cause if it’s not — by God, all gods, I deserve every damn thing I get.

Rook watched her sway to and fro a span, continent-slow — her skin warm enough, yet, to mist just a bit, against the cold night air — before laying the Smoking Mirror carefully on the wet ground beneath her, so that her shadow crossed over it on the very next swing, crossed and then locked to it, impossibly fast. With only the key-in-lock click of an opening door as accompaniment, along with a rumble that might be thunder, if thunder normally came from down rather than up.

That Hell-deep crack, opening wider. Yawning to send a fresh new wad of darkness sprout forth, lolling, a wet black tongue.

Say my name now, husband, while her heart’s precious blood stays hot. Say it, out loud.

“I don’t know your name,” Rook snarled. But his mouth opened yet one more time, and he heard the alien syllables spill out, burning his throat the way bile does, when you vomit — a mouthful of foulness. Bones boiled to burnt stock.

She of the Rope

She of the Traps

She of the Snares

Lady Rainbow

Suicide Moon

Psychopomp Mother

Eclipse’s Bride

Ix

Tab

IxChel

YxTabayTlazTleOtlCoYoTlaxQhuiChalChiuhTlicue

All of them, and none of them — or just the first. Or — maybe not. Or —

The baroque chorale echo of it took Rook from inside, a tin hornet’s nest shook hard and set ringing, hammering, buzzing, poisonous-sweet and painful, shit, so fucking painful. . . .

He fell to his knees, which was probably where she liked him best. Pawed and beat at his own head like it was a nut he was trying to crack, as the mirror winked open — a staring eye, a hole. As it stretched itself to let a veritable snake-bag of new tresses burst forth, geyser up the tree’s trunk and swarm down the rope, cocooning Adaluz’s corpse in black: a silk-drop seed-pod, heavy and full and ripe.

Only to tear itself open, thread by thread, and let her fall free once more, hitting the ground beneath in a feral crouch — with such impact, the eclipse itself shattered, leaving the moon unscathed and coldly shining once more above. Shining, the way her eyes — and teeth — did, as she caught Rook by the chin and grinned, before crushing his mouth to hers. Like brightly polished bone.

“Oh, little king,” she said, tearing at his buttons, pinning him wide with her hard-muscled legs and screwing herself right down on top of him, regardless of wounds or muck — not even pausing to wipe the filth from her loins as she hiked her vehicle’s dress high, naked and unafraid. “I’m cold, cold so long . . . so long. Warm me, now. Warm me.”

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 Became. 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.”

“The engine?”

She laid one hand over his eyes, death-cool enough to make him shudder. “This world, with all its pleasures, its wellspring of misery — light and heat expressed through blood, the only fuel strong enough to keep everything going. Look.”

See:

A green, steaming jungle or an arid plain. Both. Maybe. Or neither. White cities rearing up huge as Egypt’s pyramids, their sides gingerbread chalet-stepped, plastered with gleaming lime — all but their central staircases, each one the shining metaphorical fulcrums of this alien word, atop which sat kings so hung with jade and gold they could barely move, surrounded by priests in huge, nodding masks and feather-cloaks, dancing, drumming, speaking in tongues. And wooden-armoured warriors carrying swords fringed with black glass, dragging endless coffles of prisoners tied at the neck and wrists: grist for the mill, meat for the altar-stone.

The same four moves, over and over, done until no part of the whole seems real as the whole itself, the object of all this sanguine worship. The dance which does not — cannot — stop, or the whole universe dies with it.

Cut the victim free, press him (or her) down. Let them rave with prophecy, the gods’ favour. Feed them pulque, that they may die drunk and happy, giving themselves over wholly.

With your stone knife, slice across the front of the chest starting between the second and third rib, cutting across the breastbone to the opposite side. After, break the bone transversely, with a sharp blow and a chisel. A gaping hole opens, exposing the lungs, which deflate like moonflowers at dawn.

While the heart continues to beat, reach into the chest and sever the arteries and veins. Grasp the organ, and lift it from its bloody cradle to the sky.

The blood is then deposited in a green bowl with a feathered rim, into which a hollow cane — also feathered — is placed. Through this reed, the gods suck their nourishment.

Again, and again, and yet again. Without cessation. Until those once-white stairs run red and slick and steaming, a gigantic gutter of constantly shed grue.

A machine, Rook thought, forced to consider it through her eyes, but still able to retain his modern perspective. Men as parts, blood as oil. Cogs and wheels.

To which she replied, equally silent: Show me this . . . machine. Then added, once he had — Ah. Yes. Very like that, yes.

So that was the world she wanted to bring about again, in a nutshell — the Mayan-Aztec Death Factory, a cotton gin of severed heads and heart-smoke, built on whitewashed bones. And he was going to help her do it, he supposed. Not so much in order to get what he wanted as . . . not lose what he had.

“Look you, little king — our reign was long. Four worlds came and went, cracked to pieces beneath us. We were well-fed indeed. A thousand thousand fellow magicians died unborn, their powers unrealized, to help keep us alive. But instead we grew fat, we quarrelled, we squabbled — like children, but with less reason. We could never bridle ourselves to work together, even at the very end . . . which is the only way your Steel Hats and desert-prophet howlers ever overcame us. We fell down to the Sunken Ball-Court, a dreamy morass, all blended together, and now we do not even recall who we once were, let alone how we might Become again. But the one great truth which watching four worlds come and go has taught me, is how that which is dead need not be dead forever, if the right sacrifices can only be made.”

Here she drew a long breath, oddly ragged. Almost sad.

“Yet of a hundred gods, only I — as yet — remain awake, alive,” she said, as though to herself. “Only I.”

“Not even that Smoking Mirror of yours, huh?”

Remote: “Not even he.”

Rook snorted, not overmuch inclined to sympathy. “So you are just a ghost, then,” he said. “A jumped-up Goddamn ghost, nothin’ more. You’re me, savin’ the meat.”

“Oh, but I am far more than that, husband. Now that I have fed on my betters, if not my elders, I am six gods at once — two more than Smoking Mirror himself — and the very least of them is far beyond your comprehension. You have heard their names already, remember?

“Ixtab, Mother of all Hanged Men . . . she was the one who first made contact with you, who reeled you up and hooked you in. Ixchel, Suicide Moon, Lady Rainbow — she of the Ropes and Snares — bound you fast, spun her web around you, anchored you in time and space. Yxtabay, She of the Long Hair, drew you into the wilderness, to tie you tight in desire’s meshes, with Tlazteotl Filth-eater ready at her left hand to redeem you of all the sins you’ve committed in love’s name — to eat them up, then shit them back out. Then comes Coyotlaxqhui, the Broken Moon, who opened the door to bring me up into your world. And Chalchiuhtlicue herself, with her spinning serpent skirt, is the womb that birthed me into flesh once more, the way she births and re-births the whole world. The way she drowned the last sun in order to make way for this one, which will shiver itself apart in earthquake and calamity.”

Rook looked at her askance. “The fuck you . . . look, shit. Look, now . . .” His words ran out. Then, weakly: “. . . I never asked for any of this.”

Another laugh. “Did you not? Well, it does not matter. You were to hand — the perfect instrument. Your utility will yet exalt us both.”

She laid her cool palm on him again, this time at temple, and let her silver voice’s tone drop accordingly, slow and soothing, murmuring, plausibly, “You want to keep your own power, as is understandable. Yet you want to save your lover, too — from himself. From you. The old woman lied to you, little king, perhaps without knowing it. Nothing must be given up. These things are not incompatible, so long as one of the magicians involved is — something more.”

“And how would that happen, exactly?”

“A man who beds with a goddess becomes a god, or dies. Or both.”

“Oh, is that so? Well, I don’t think I’m much cut out to be a god, really. Hell, I wasn’t even barely fit to serve one, by the end.”

“Perhaps. Things might differ, however, were the god you served one . . . you already loved.”

And at last, all at once, he saw what it was she’d had — always, from the very beginning — in mind.

Not him at all, not ever.

Oh, you cheatin’ bitch.

Rook schooled himself hard, and drawled: “Hate to tell you, Moon-lady, but — if you’re lookin’ in Chess’s direction, you may not have exactly struck pay-dirt. ’Cause he just ain’t much of a one for beddin’ women, full stop.”

“Oh, all men burn to return to their mother’s womb, little king — even your wild boy. Desire has nothing to do with it. The universe’s very spark will pull us together; I will mark him as my bridegroom and he will come, raving. Like you, he will be unable to help himself.”

“I don’t want him hurt,” Rook repeated, stubborn. “Or — to hurt him.”

“But if you had to, Reverend, to reap the greatest gain? For both of you?”

He didn’t answer — couldn’t.

“Aaaah,” she breathed once more, hungry as ever. “And that is the god-seed buried in you, husband — the deep-laid root of the calabash, poking its way between the rocks and blossoming with succulent fruit. Hun Hunaphu’s severed head, crying out amongst the bark and leaves to be born again, at any cost.”

Rook closed his eyes. And thought, helpless: The gods are chosen for their youth, their beauty. They live on blood and worship.

Chess could do that. He’d be happy with people fearing him, as always, and even happier with people having to love him, or the sun goes out.

(In the machine, one cog is as good as another.)

She whispered: “The king is priest, too — always. Did I not mention? And as his high priest, you would lose nothing. Nothing but blood, in its season.”

“I’d give him that anyways, gladly.”

“As you say.”

His heart beat on, a hammer on flint, drawing sparks.

“What’ll I have to do?” Asher Rook asked, at last — eyes kept firmly closed, so he wouldn’t have to see the pleasure in Dread Lady Ixchel-Adaluz’s awful, answering smile.

That tripping giggle, ringing out — icy, abyssal bells.

“You won’t enjoy it, little king,” she told him, softly — like that was any sort of news.

Rook sighed. And said: “Tell me anyway.”