The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (28 page)

“She showed me the Ocullín,” I said. “From a long time ago, when he tried to eat his way through Mictlán.”

“That’s not the story she showed me. She showed me things that I don’t have words for.” José María said. “But she spoke to us individually. Again.”

“Again?” I said.

“Yes, she was back there, in Chicago. She was talking to us through the tunnel of butterflies. She was manifesting through the tunnel.”

“Holy shit,” I said. He was right. That’s why I had thought it so strange that the tunnel could have thought she was a snake.

“Don’t you see, Clara?” José María said. “The creatures—the gods—inside Mictlán,
 
we catch glimpses of them in our world sometimes, just tiny little glimpses. They can inhabit buildings, and maybe living things, too. They manifest there, and well, we got lucky when the snake spoke to us through the wizard’s tunnel.”

“And you’re sure Blue Hummingbird didn’t make that tunnel?” I said.

“One hundred percent,” my brother said. “She showed me. The wizard named Black Wings was Guillermo. He tried so hard for so many years to get into Mictlán, and he never could. All that time, he begged Blue Hummingbird, begging her to let him into the Coil. Until he tricked her into building that tunnel. And then he disappeared. He left that tunnel down at the bottom of the lake, like a haunted house.”

“If we heard the snake speak to us through the tunnel—” I said.

“Then maybe you really did see the Ocullín through the bookcase in Minerva’s attic, too,” José María said.

I ate more flowers, hoping my belly would get full. Food was a comfort right now, the only thing that could quell my fear from having been seen by something as horrible as the Ocullín back in Chicago.

I walked to the edge of the ground we stood on to get a glimpse of the canyon around us. In this lower part of the spiral canyon, flowers invaded every wall and even the roads. Even the wasp nests were covered in flowers of every shape and kind. They dripped down like lazy diamonds and thick trumpets.

The intoxicating shapes and scents of so many flowers was something I had never expected to see in this place without light. Part of me wanted to keep those flowers with me forever.

A forest of marigolds pulsed with music and their scent just about a quarter mile from us. We walked through their trumpet-like howls, and I brushed their tops the way I might pet a dog. Afterward, we reached a clearing. I unpacked the shawl from my pack, and I placed several dozen roses in it to save for eating later.

“Let’s see if we can find a place to rest up there,” I said. “Where we won’t be so exposed.”

The taste of the flowers haunted my mouth. Mictlán had nothing that resembled weather. There was only wind and breezes. As we cut through the forest, their subtle music took on a brighter note. With each step of our approach, the flowers sang, and they released more perfume. Their song startled me.

I know this song.

I had heard Abuela Blanca sing this to us when I was a toddler, and its sweet melody filled my chest with warmth.

“That’s just like the song we’re supposed to learn for the journey to Mictlán,” I said to José María. He nodded, listening to every note.

The carpets of marigolds formed several peaks and folds, and I could see there were openings in some of its surfaces, as if someone had constructed a new architecture out of living flowers. We walked through a canopy of trees and arrived in a plaza. In its midst, an impossibly tall structure, constructed of marigolds, roses, orchids and corpse flowers, stabbed the open air of the canyon.

It was a castle, a temple of flowers.

It rose about a mile into the air, with twin stairways that led up to small conical rooms at the top. The flowers hissed and bellowed in their song, and though the building looked like it could eat us alive, I knew I should not be afraid. Even in this place without any colors, I could feel the vibrant, soft textures of all those petals, and the firm, smooth surfaces of the stalks and the stamens.

The architecture of the temple looked very familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

I tried speaking to the flowers of the building, but they only responded in song. I couldn’t understand what they were singing.

“If we get to the top, we can get a handle on how far down we’ve made it,” José María said. “Maybe we can see how much farther we have to go down the canyon, too.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

We climbed slowly, because the steps were steep and the scent of the flowers made us sleepy, but we took swigs of the water in our water bottles. José María helped me up the risers when I became afraid of the heights, and we did our best to not disturb the smoke owls that swooped above our heads. They did not attack us. Rather, I felt that the smoke owls were keeping us safe.

For now.

“Are you really going to go to that protest on Michigan Avenue when we get back?” José María said.

“If we get out, yes. This time, we’re going to make a big difference,” I said.

Nothing delighted me more than my brother’s innocence. This trip down here was just a game to him. Nothing but a romp. He was already planning on our return. I wanted to be as hopeful as him, but I knew I could not. If I found my tonal in the bottom of the Coil, I had no idea how we would ever get back.

We may be dead already for all we know, making the trip that everyone makes when their time is up.

“Do you hear that?” José María said as he put his arm on my elbow. We had almost reached the top of the temple.

I listened. Floating like a whisper, beneath the bell tones of the rocks and the ringing screech of the owls, I heard something. I also
felt
something.

It was viscous liquid. Heavy and with intention. Rushing, crashing, sparkling in waves. It was water.

“Sounds like a river,” my brother said.

“It’s coming from
inside
the temple,” I said.

We took a few more steps up the temple, and I swooned with nausea. We were so high up in the air, I was reminded of the times my father took us to the Willis Tower to the observation deck. I felt afraid but alive.

And alive was good.

José María let out a few hard noises, like a human beat box, and the sounds he emitted permitted us to see down below us. There, just over the edge of the temple, I could see thick, rubbery grasses flanking a wide river. The force of the water crashed and swelled. Inside the current of the river, tiny objects like sparkles emitted their sound signature through the liquid. Without light, I shouldn’t have been able to see anything sparkle in the river, but I could see billions of the tiny metal particles flow through the water.

“We must be moving in the right direction,” José María said.

“Which of the rivers do you think this is?”

There were nine rivers in Mictlán, all of them interconnected like a braid. They flowed in a spiral downward along the walls of the canyon. There was something about the sheen of the water, the twinkle inside the river that felt familiar, and good, something that felt like the safety of home.

“Clara, get your ass up here,” José María said. My brother was standing at the top of the temple with his hands on his hips. The flowers provided him a firm surface to stand on, despite the petals’ delicate appearance. “You’re never going to believe what’s up here.”

I clambered up the last riser and walked onto the flat landing. It spread before me in an area of about 300 feet by 300 feet. At its center, two shrines stood like twins. They had triangular openings but no doors. Though I could sense many of the details around me, I couldn’t feel anything that was inside those conical towers.

“No, fool, not inside the rooms; turn around!” José María said, and he yanked me by the shoulders so I could see the landscape below the temples.

I could see very far with ears instead of eyes, and there, maybe two thousand miles in the distance, I could feel
all
of it. I gasped.

A lake spread out below me for miles, almost as big as an ocean. Its waters were as still as a stone. I could see the way in which the river we had just seen fed into the lake, and the opening on the other side, where the river continued on, as it dove under a mountain and continued its underground journey.

Situated on top of the lake, in a perfect cross shape, stood a small city made of thorns, flowers and the bones of animals. Four roads connected the shore to the center, and at the center, a flat circular stone rotated, emitting multiple symphonies of music. The structures of the bridges and the island throbbed with life. The thorns swelled, and poison rose to their tips. The bones bent their shape as the flowers bloomed and swelled in the darkness.

It’s a city floating on top of the water.

Blue Hummingbird had promised that there were no objects down here, and she was right. Even the city below me was made of things that seemed to be alive.

Beyond the lake, snow fields spread out for thousands more miles, and somewhere in the distance, they fell off into a thicker darkness.

But the city floating on top of the lake before me made so much music, it was as if it wanted to be noticed.
 

“Is that—” I said.

“It’s the place we showed you and your ancestors many wheels ago, Wanderer,” a familiar voice said behind us, and its music pounced in our ears while its stench of maggots and pus grew in our nostrils. I turned over my shoulder, and in doorway of the right-hand shrine, I heard him.

I felt his lean but ferocious presence. I felt the textures of his dog head, his erect ears, the milky eyes, and the ragged body. His sharp claws.

“It’s what you came here for, Wanderer. The city of Mictlán,” the Xolotl growled, and he lunged at me. He struck me hard in the gut, and we flew off the ledge of the temple as his jaws snapped at me through the air.

The temple of flowers grew distant, and the Xolotl clamped his jaws over my right arm. The pain was fiery hot, but my skin maintained its integrity. I screamed, and as I saw the walls of the temple rise past me, I cried.

I told myself I wouldn’t do this. But I want to be home now. I want to be back as soon as I can, however I can.

I have a mother, a father. I have a bed that I sleep in.

I was an ingrate.

Just as soon as I let out a sob, a skittering music blasted my left ear, and a fast-moving object approached us. I could hear it moving, so fast that I couldn’t understand its shape, just its force.

And then it was under me, cradling me, and the Xolotl was screaming lines of a song, lines that called forth the name of this creature beneath us.

We were no longer falling, but instead, we were rising again, even though this spiral canyon had no sky.

The Xolotl released my arm from his jaws, and I realized that he was playing with me again.

But he also held on to you for safety. For your safety.

The Xolotl grabbed me by the shoulders, and he turned me around, so I could face forward and ride the creature like a horse. Below me, I could see three sets of slanted eyes, feathers so slick they looked like fish scales, and a beak that elongated into the shape of a very long and sharp needle. The wings at its sides beat so fast that I lost the texture of their music.

“To ride her, you must speak her name,” he said. “It goes like this.”

The song he sang spoke her name. It was a song filled with honey, cactus quills and shards of amethyst. I did my best to speak it with my tongue and throat.

I had never felt an animal so powerful and graceful respond to its name in the way the hummingbird did. Her feathers grew slicker and she emitted wider cones of sound. Suddenly, I could get my bearings on where we were going.

We were circling the temple of flowers, and each time we passed its walls, the temple’s song groaned an aching song.

“The flowers in that building don’t want you here,” the Xolotl said. “That dissent is not a surprise. They have never wanted visitors here.”

The stench of the Xolotl made me gag, but he was no longer trying to bite me, and he had taught me how to ride the hummingbird. And I was grateful.

“Why wouldn’t they want visitors?” I said.

“That’s the way the flowers in the canyon think. They have long been the strongest political force in the lower levels of Mictlán, and it’s because of a simple fact: they don’t want knowledge to escape the canyon. They want it to stay hidden here.”

“Knowledge of what, exactly?” I said.

“That’s my very point,” the Xolotl said. “They have gathered so much of it, they no longer know what knowledge is sacred and what isn’t. They just have too much of it. They hoard, Wanderer.”

“Can they tell me how to find my tonal?” I said.

“Yes,” the Xolotl howled, and his voice echoed through the walls of the canyon. It was a lonely, horrible sound.

“My parents said if I find my tonal, the shadows of death will leave me alone,” I said.

The Xolotl grunted, and then he snorted. “That’s what they said?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should return home now. You will never be free of those shadows.”

He laughed, while I wanted to cry. I bit my lip instead.