‘The year grows old and things happen,’ she said. ‘Perhaps not the same things that happened in my time. Nevertheless, things happen.’
‘Leave me alone,’ I said to her.
‘It will do you no good to ignore me,’ she said.
‘It did me no good to speak to you,’ I said. I turned away from her. I climbed down into the pit without looking back.
It was cool and quiet in the inner chamber. I flashed the light on the skeleton. That lay quiet at least. Her daughter’s skull peered out of the nest of bones.
‘I used that blade,’ Zuhuy-kak said, jerking her head toward the obsidian knife that lay on the stone platform. ‘It is very sharp. Her pain will be brief.’
I picked up the blade and tested the edge. Still sharp: a bright bead of blood formed on my thumb. I inspected the old scars on my wrists. The skin was thin and vulnerable. But Tony would not approve if I bled on a valuable artifact. I could use my pocketknife instead.
‘Not yet,’ Zuhuy-kak said. ‘First your daughter, then yourself.’
‘I sent my daughter away.’
The woman was not listening to me. She lifted her head as if she heard something outside the tomb, and she smiled.
‘Liz?’ My daughter’s voice came from the dark gap that led to the outside world. ‘Are you there? Are you all right?’
What do you do when you are falling? Do you reach out and try to grab for support? If you aren’t careful, you will pull others down with you. Unless you are very careful.
A flashlight beam found the gap in the wall, filling it with yellow light. Diane’s head followed the beam.
‘You don’t belong here,’ I said. ‘Go back.’
The hand that held the flashlight was trembling. ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’ She climbed through the opening into the tomb.
‘No.’ I took a step back, away from her. Shadows nestled in her eyes, making them into dark hollows, like the eyes of a skull.
She stepped toward me, holding out a hand in supplication or threat – I could not tell which. I backed away, the blade in my hand, retreating into the cave. I was not afraid of these shadows. I wasn’t afraid of death; dying was an easy way out. I could not name the thing I feared, but I saw it in the reaching hand of my daughter.
I broke and ran, scurrying away like a bewildered rat in an unfamiliar warren. Some dark instinct had overtaken me, driving me to escape, to dart down any tunnel that led away from the light, to crawl where I could not run, to squeeze through narrow passages, rushing just ahead of the pursuing flashlight beam, a nocturnal animal seeking the safety of darkness.
She was just behind me, always just behind me. ‘Liz?’ I dropped my light and did not linger to retrieve it. I could hear her behind me as I blundered forward, hands out like a blind man, touching the cool walls and the rounded stalactites.
‘Mother?’ she said, and the voice was so near that I leapt forward. I did not land for a long time. I fell in the warm velvet darkness, knowing that this was what had to happen, this was the destiny of the katun that was to come.
I woke with a sharp pain in my leg and the chill of water around me. For a moment, I thought 1 floated in the Sacred Well, but I opened my eyes to darkness. I was resting in a puddle of chill water, cupped in a low basin of limestone. My hips were in the water; my shoulders, on the rock. My leg was twisted beneath me, stabbing with a pain that distracted me from the aching of my head. I drew a deep breath and lifted myself on my arms, trying to straighten the leg, an effort that made me cry out in pain.
In response to the cry, like an answer from the gods, a beam of light flashed down from above, blinding me and making me cry out again. I could not see the source of the light – it was a bright spot high above me – but I recognized my daughter’s voice. Her voice was ragged. ‘Why did you run? You shouldn’t have run.’
I squinted up into the beam. ‘That’s so.’ My voice was as rough as the limestone beneath me. I was calmer now. The instinct that had made me run was contained. I looked down at myself, and by the light of Diane’s flashlight I could see the twisted leg. Broken, I thought. When I tried to shift my weight and support it on my hands, I felt the bones grind. For a moment the flashlight seemed to fade and my head filled with a dull red thundering darkness.
When I could hear again, my daughter’s panicky voice stabbed me from above. ‘Are you all right? Say something. Are you all right?’
‘My leg is broken,’ I told her, my voice rasping. ‘You’ve got to go back and get help.’
‘I can’t.’ The light did not waver from my face. Her voice was thin and strained, on the edge of tears. ‘I don’t know the way. I lost track. You were going too fast.’
There was a moment of quiet in which I could hear water dripping, a sweet, high sound. I looked around me. Beside the pool, a stalagmite rose from the limestone floor to meet a stalactite that reached down from the ceiling. Beside this pillar was a rounded stone, an altar of sorts. Pots and clay figurines clustered around the base of the pillar. On the distant walls, I could see paintings: Ix Chebel Yax watched me from the wall, and the serpent coiled on her headdress grinned. In one hand, she held a thunderbolt; in her other hand, a scrap of the rainbow. Women danced before her, and a child, painted bright blue, lay across the altar, her chest arched back to receive the knife.
‘Why did you run?’ she asked. ‘Why did you run from me?’
The water dripped, a steady liquid music. My leg throbbed, but as long as I did not move, I was spared the shooting pains that made me cry out. I did not answer my daughter because I had no answers. What would satisfy her? I had been dreaming of blood. I held an obsidian blade in my hands and I feared that I was capable of much. I knew that soon I would die, and that death would spare me the necessity of providing answers.
‘I’m crazy too,’ my daughter was saying softly. I shivered in the darkness. ‘Shadows follow me. The old woman follows me.’
‘Not crazy,’ I said, but the words were an effort. The chill of the water had filled my bones and my voice was stiff with the cold. I could not stop shivering.
‘Call it what you like.’ The light moved, as if she had shifted position. ‘What difference does it make? I’m lost up here and you’re lost down there. I can’t get down. We’re not going anywhere. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Salvador will find you.’
‘I doubt that.’
I closed my eyes against the light. Surely it would not be so hard to pull myself out of the water. The limestone sloped at a gentle angle. Not so hard. I would die, but I did not want to die in the water. I opened my eyes and planted my hands against the bottom of the pool. The first shove moved me two inches higher on the slope and made me cry out like a beaten dog. I took a breath and pushed again, gaining another inch. Again. I knew that if I stopped, I would not begin again, and so I did not stop. I lost count after the tenth time I pushed. By that time, the cries had given way to a constant whimpering that rose and fell with the pain.
I stopped when I was stretched out on dry land. My leg was more or less straight. It was easier to bear the pain when I was still than when I was moving. I rested, then realized that my daughter had been talking to me for some time now. Coming back from the faraway place that I had been visiting, I opened my eyes. ‘What?’
‘Do you remember the Christmas that you gave me a quetzal shirt from Guatemala?’
I lay on my back, listening to the dripping water. ‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you let me come with you when you left?’
There are questions that have no right answers. ‘I couldn’t.’
‘That’s not a good enough answer.’
I closed my eyes and remembered that Christmas. Diane had followed me to the car and asked me if she could come. Her face had been open, vulnerable, filled with raw need. ‘I couldn’t take care of you. I could barely take care of myself. I wanted you to be safe. I knew Robert would protect you.’