Chapter 20
Ygnacio
I don’t sleep, not unless a lack of chispa has robbed me of consciousness. But I dream.
I tumble through years, through decades, to a night when I am wrenched from sleep by my sisters’ screams. Walls of orange surrounded our house; smoke rolled over me like a blanket, stifling me, choking me.
We grasped for each other through the blistering darkness, our hands slipping, our cracked voices calling out the first syllables of names before breaking into coughs.
Embers seared our bare feet. Smoke stung our eyes.
When cold air washed over us, I fell to my knees. I let my sisters’ hands go.
That was when the ropes caught me.
My sisters called after me when I was yanked away like livestock.
Their smoke-wretched voices cracked and pleaded.
I heard them in the valley. I heard them for days, their voices echoing against the inside of my skull.
I heard them as I was forced to climb, higher and higher into the mist, toward some unknowable end.
Some way up the mountain, their voices faded.
I never heard them again.
Legend has it that the first Viceroy chose this mountaintop because from here he could see the sea. He could watch his ships come and go, leaving laden with chispa, returning filled with silver.
My father said that this mountaintop was supposed to be a channel.
A sacred place where the penitents came to pray to their departed loved ones on sacred days, their shoulders draped in holy flowers that swung as they pressed their foreheads to the earth.
For centuries before the Viceroy, it was said that this was a place between living and death.
A place where the dead could hear you and be heard in return.
To think that I once doubted my father when he said prayers to the dead. The dead can hear just fine. The dead of this mountain, in fact, would prefer it if the living talked less.
Living voices are all I’ve heard since stones crashed down on me, crushing my skull, breaking the bones of my hands, shattering my back.
I watched from high above as my mangled body was dragged and thrown and covered by dirt. As I was dumped with as little ceremony as the others into the ground at the edge of the property. Covered with stones and dirt. Left without a prayer, silent or spoken, to rot.
I felt every minute of it.
The separation of chispa from body was not a clean cut; the wound festered and writhed.
The sinews that bound me to the body in the dirt snapped, agonizingly slow, as time weakened and blackened them.
I never lost the body; I know where it lies to this day.
My spirit, however, I was certain I would lose.
I was so sure that, in due course, nature would sever the bond between it and the world, and I would pass into whatever lay beyond.
Instead, I met them.
When I was still alive, we exhumed sarcophagi as we were forced to dig the foundation of la Casa de las Gardenias.
Metal shone through rocks and dirt, catching the light and gleaming rich and bold as a sunrise.
Shouts; scrabbling hands brushed away mud and roots.
Groans and creaking, straining wood as the sarcophagi were lifted out of the earth. First one, then two, then three.
Then, as the sun set, they were presented to the Viceroy.
The sarcophagi were lustrous, thick stone inlaid with gold and shining stones.
Lapis. Ruby. These winked and flirted with the Viceroy as he walked slowly around the artifacts, running a ringed hand and a covetous eye over carved glyphs so old that I was sure not even my father, priest though he was, had ever studied them.
At the Viceroy’s barked orders, metal was chipped and peeled away. The lids were forced open. I and other builders watched in horror as gem-heavy collars were snatched from mummified necks, and bodies turned to dust in the twilight.
As the sarcophagi were desecrated, a dread hung so thick and dark on the air that I swore I could almost see it. We did not know who they were. Perhaps they were once gods. It made me wonder if it was their burial that gave this mountaintop its power.
Later, when I had died and rotted—the last, shredded thread of my spirit broke free of decay and bones—they were the first things I saw.
Billowing clouds of blackness. Claws and fangs, muscular limbs, and hunger.
My kin.
They swept me into the eaves of the house, and here I have stayed.
Whether by act of them or man or mountain, I am trapped here. Forever. Dead, but never resting. Forced to witness the living and to salivate over how they move, breathe, dance, and eat.
For years, I tried everything I could to be sprung from this in-between. This prison where I am neither at rest nor living. I raged. I wept. I lay in silence, brooding, plotting, trying again—only to be disappointed.
Then, when an old man died in the house, I learned what it was like to devour chispa.
And I discovered that I could live again.