I See Fire | Wattys 2021/22 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Eighteen

I woke up before Emma the next morning, but still well after sunrise. I was certain I'd missed breakfast and every other morning activity, until I actually ventured out of the room. The house was deserted. Even the cooking and dining rooms were cold and devoid of fresh aromas. I was, against all odds, the first one up.

Well, except for Huitz, but he was the sun god and woke at an ungodly hour regardless. That hardly counted.

I had asked about my personal Fuego problem the night before. Chal had told me she'd speak with me the next day. I was pretty sure she was just too tired to deal with my problems right then, but my mind had spent the rest of the evening listing off every other scenario that could have punted the conversation to a better time. Maybe she had to break it to me that there was no way to fix this.

I gripped my wrists. They were gods. If a god made this disease, other gods must have the power to get rid of it again.

After that answer, Jem had then shocked me by asking how long the gods would let us stay. The answer had been indefinite. Not that I planned to hang around here longer than I could possibly help.

I wandered to the cooking room. Emma had frozen the leftovers of yesterday's soup, so I warmed up a bowl and parked myself in the couch room where I could watch things out the odd windows. Not that there was much to see. The easternmost windows, I had learned, all looked out onto different parts of Tlalocan. What had once been lush gardens and forest was now a lifeless mat of dead plants sprinkled with snow.

The rest of the windows looked down onto various parts of the world below. Like the windows onto Tlalocan, they shifted views periodically. I set my bowl aside and hopped up. It took a few laps to get the speed right, but I soon found I could move around the room to catch a new landscape at each window each time. I forced myself to keep pace as my heart rate quickened. Was this room made with this very purpose? To look for villages in the world below?

Even if it wasn't, this was perfect. If the gods always woke this late, I could come here in the mornings and catch a hundred views before anyone else stirred in their beds. With Fuego still clinging to me like a smoke smell, I couldn't exactly visit a human village, but once I found a cure...

I walked until a door clicked somewhere else in the house. Unwilling to risk getting caught just yet, I finished my breakfast and washed my bowl in the bathroom washbasin, having no powers to clean it nor to summon water to the cooking room. I was putting it away when a shuffle of footsteps approached. Xipe startled when he saw me, then nodded and smiled a hello. I didn't seem unwelcome, so I lingered as he lit both fires and pulled pots and ingredients from thin air and corners of the counter. I didn't recognize half of them.

"Can I help?" I said before my brain reminded me how sick any heat on my palms made me feel. If they thought I liked it here, I'd be less likely to get questions if I was found while pacing.

Sure.

His voice sounded the same in my head as if he'd just spoken. I wondered just how much the gods talked like this. It would certainly be convenient, living together in such close quarters.

Xipe set me to work grinding maize for porridge, then produced a bunch of unfamiliar vegetables and showed me how to dice them. There were green stems, greener fruits, pale orange tubers, and an ambiguous blue-grey fungus. Chilies at least I recognized, though they came in different shapes, sizes, and colour shades than the ones Grillo Negro found growing on the desert in summertime.

Careful, that one's hot, said the god.

I pride myself in my tolerance, I replied. I'd hardly made a slice, though, before the orange chili began to scorch my fingers. After that, I prided myself in my creative knife skills to keep the pepper off my hands.

Xipe was much more relaxed here, and I was getting genuinely curious about the things in this cooking room. This was still part of my ancestry, after all. I soon felt comfortable pestering the golden god about his recipes and every single other thing he was doing. He was more than happy to talk. The foods all had stories, some dating back millennia. He showed me unique colours and kinds of maize, the dark beans that had made the frothy drink from the day before, and how to handle the giant, leathery leaves he used to wrap anything he put straight on the coals. He shared Xolotl's appreciation for non-conjured foods, which I learned he often went out of his way to search for when spring rolled around. He stored what he could through the winter.

The gods drifted in one by one. Xolotl put himself to work again. Tezcat rolled his eyes and made his own lunch. He didn't eat much.

Chal was one of the last up. She poked her head in the door as we were washing up—Xipe also liked to do dishes by hand—and her eyes landed on me. I'll catch you after, she said when I put down my washcloth. She bid the others good morning and withdrew.

"Ad, why didn't you wake me?" Jem had replaced Chal in the doorway. "You were cooking? Can I join next time?"

Tezcat muttered something about not knowing what the fuss was about. He tossed his clean bowl on a stack on the counter and went back to his room. He was limping.

"Tezcat, take it off," called Chal. "You'll hurt yourself."

Her answer was the slam of a door.

Don't mind him, said Xipe. This time I sensed that Jem was in on the message. This is Tezcat when he is upset.

Was it about the village yesterday? Or had he been forced to revisit his mother's house to show us that vision sequence? I didn't know how visions worked.

Or maybe it was that and more. I'd gotten the sense that Tezcat had been more attached to the people of La Cueva than he pretended to be. He hadn't looked at Jem, Emma or I when Chal described how the underground village had been massacred. Maybe we looked like the villagers.

My thoughts from yesterday evening echoed over me again. How safe was Grillo Negro? How far had we and the village already been dragged into this? We couldn't start getting comfortable.  

The cooking room felt too cheerful now. Xipe's eyes twinkled at Jem. And yes, you can join next time.

A different voice snuck in, to Jem and I only. Hope you know what you're getting into, said Xolotl, hiding a smile. He can talk about cooking for hours.

I'm not complaining, said Jem. He already looked excited.