Chapter 14 #3
Surprised to have gotten a straight answer out of him, I decided to push. “What actually caused the toppling of the Mayan culture then? I’ve read a few theories, but they all seemed oversimplified.”
He gazed off into space, thinking for long enough that I feared he wouldn’t tell me.
“It had a lot to do with drought, which caused famines that either wiped out whole cities or sent people northward. After struggling for centuries, the Spanish invaders only finished off what nature had started. While our culture was sophisticated in many ways, they had come to conquer. I suppose my kind could have done more to stop it, but we were fascinated by the new worlds they came from. Most of us set out to see what we had been missing while we had lived in our isolated kingdoms. I spent a lot of time in Europe and North Africa.”
“So how did you end up here?”
He smiled, making him look almost human. “I looked for the most isolated spot I could find with a mild climate. These mountains were hard to access for people back then.”
“And yet you managed to build all this,” I motioned to the walls of the room, “by yourself?”
“I convinced a group of strong men looking for greater meaning in their lives that we could start a retreat for them and others. A meditation through work sort of religion that never caught on.”
His eyes danced with mischief. While I was certain he had been worshipped at some point in his life, this struck me as false. “Were you the head monk in this particular religion?”
“I was the god.”
Pfft. “I don’t believe you.” I looked back down at the page I had already read three times.
“I built it for the love of my life,” he said quietly.
A jolt of energy rushed through my heart and stomach, but I willed my body not to react.
The love of his life, what a thing to say, whether it was true or not.
Jealousy spiked in my chest and spread through my body like poison.
Did she appreciate it? This act of love.
Even if he had misread her and she never wanted to be isolated from the world, eventually leaving him for things he could not offer her.
Did she like it? This house he had built for them to retreat to together.
My eyes tracked the rows of words I read without absorbing their meaning.
I took a few deep breaths to slow my heart rate.
What had I been reading before he revealed himself to me?
Oh yes, the gods and goddesses of the Mayan culture, mostly recorded by the people in undecipherable pictographs, largely lost to the ravages of time and weather.
But they were real people after all, and I knew next to nothing about them.
“What do you think of the house, Corvus?” he asked, disrupting my reading.
Surprised, because what did it matter what I thought, I looked up at him.
He gazed at me with unusual intensity. I glanced out the windows facing the courtyard, shrouded in evening darkness, reflecting only our silhouettes and the fire.
I loved this house. Not only did I feel safe here, but accepted and truly free in a way I had never known before.
I loved the thick stone walls, the vistas from the back rooms, the simplistic kitchen that worked beautifully for our needs, even my room, despite belonging to that other woman, whom I could not stand to think about.
The gothic style, the bell tower I always looked for when flying back, the hot springs both under the house and in his courtyard—I loved it all.
He was probably listening to my redux, so I said, “It’s a wonderful house, Camazotz. ”
Despite my intentions, I glanced up in time to see a satisfied look on his face before he looked back down at his book.
“Don’t worry so much about the others like me.
I have no intention of you meeting any of them.
” The brief flare of happiness that had sparked from his look withered.
We were more or less back to where we had been before this conversation, with me in the dark and wondering how I fit into his life, if at all.
Other than that one conversation, he gave me no other useful information.
Each night we pored over our books, and I did my best to soak in knowledge he never intended for me to use.
Why he wanted me with him was still a mystery.
He never once revealed the real reason his enemies wanted to hurt him, and I was too invested now to push for answers.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I half-convinced myself that the only reason he had me do all my research was so I could be an asset once we got there.
Because the thought of being left behind was intolerable.
Other than a couple of trips to town to buy some essentials for our journey, our days and nights passed much the same.
No one came asking after Darryl. I even saw the sheriff's deputy in town once.
He simply wished me a good day and went on with his business.
With each passing day, I was coming to terms with my crime, what horrible things I was capable of doing, and the possibility that I could be expected to commit similar ones.
The one thing that didn’t happen the entire time in the remaining weeks was a repeat of that kiss. I tried to pretend it didn’t matter. I had blown my one chance.