Yaguara by Nicola Griffith

Author:Nicola Griffith [Griffith, Nicola]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-10-09T17:52:11+00:00

Cleis’s fever lasted three days. She was up and about before then. “Don’t tell me I should rest. I’m fine. Never better. I don’t need two good arms to study the glyphs. And the rains won’t wait.”

The first couple of days at the site, Jane kept a surreptitious eye on Cleis, but gave up when Cleis caught her at it and glared. They worked in silence, Jane moving crabwise with camera and tripod along walls, changing filters, checking light levels; Cleis making notes, taking measurements, staring blankly at the trees and muttering to herself.

On the fourth day, Jane got back to the shack to find Cleis sitting on the bed with her notes, and the remains of the splint piled in a heap on the table. “I took it off,” Cleis said. “My arm feels fine. It was probably just a sprain.”

There was nothing Jane could say. She cleared away the mess.

Something had changed since Cleis’s accident: children now ran past their shack, playing games, and more than once Jane had seen villagers walking through the trees to their milpas, mattocks on their shoulders. They had greeted her with a smile and a wave.

Sometimes, too, she would look up from her camera to see Cleis and Ixbalum together, out of earshot, talking. Jane wondered why Ixbalum was now willing to speak to Cleis; wondered what she was saying, what craziness she was spilling into Cleis’s eager ears. But she did not ask. Instead, she tried to push Cleis from her mind by working from first light until last. At night she would lie down, exhausted, and fall into a troubled sleep. Her dreams were vivid and fractured. More than once she woke to find Cleis gone from her bed. Where do you go? Jane wanted to ask, and how? But she never did. She imagined Cleis and Ixbalum gliding through the jungle, looking into the dark with their golden eyes…

One night her dreams were jumbled images: time running backward while she watched the ruins re-form into a city; vast storms overhead; Cleis talking to her earnestly, explaining. “Ixbalum doesn’t care what I know anymore. It doesn’t matter what the children tell me. I’m hers now.” Jane woke drenched in sweat. She looked over at Cleis’s bed: she was sleeping like a baby.

Am I going mad?

She needed to get away. She got out of bed, pulled on her clothes.

She waited until just after dawn to wake Cleis. “The photography is ahead of schedule, and we need supplies. I’m driving to Benque Viejo. I’ll be gone two or three days.”

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