The valley lies at their backs now, Ana sees. They havecrossed. She is so stricken by her relief that she forgets herself andwhispers, “Is it real?”
“Because it doesn’t hurt you, it can’t be real?” says thecoyote.
“Not here,” Ana says.
“No,” says the coyote. “Not here.” He licks the mud from hislips and beckons for them to climb astride his back. Ana mounts gracelessly,buries her fists in his coat, and yanks with such force that clumps of fur comeout in her hands. The coyote says nothing, but he is still licking his lipshungrily. She can feel his ribs beneath her thighs.
◊
The natives of the dead land, the coyote says, have abandonedthe rhythms of birthing and feeding and getting deathly sick. Only the importeddead feign life, and they do so clumsily.
“Not even you?” Ana says to the coyote. “Were you notmothered and brought up?”
“I am unliving and undying,” says the coyote out of swollenlips. He is attacking a beehive and so the hive is attacking him, covering hiscanyon-colored snout with white wings and tiny, sprawling black legs. When hetears the mass of honeycombs open, the bees collapse dead in a heap at hisfeet. “Feed the child,” says the coyote, nudging the hive towards her.
Ana obliges, though her daughter does not seem to be muchhungrier than the natives of the land of the dead. She hasn’t tried to nursesince they arrived. While Sylvie licks honey from her fingertips, she persists:“Tell me the truth. Not even the gods can be unborn.”
“We are all unborn here,” says the coyote. “All forged. Allmade. I asked to be made a nagual because I, like you, was alive when Ifollowed someone else into death. Five hundred or five thousand years ago, Icannot remember. Either way, I have been unchanged ever since. Time is not thesame here, you’ll find. I’ve been starving for a few eternities and getting nothinner.”
“You look,” Ana says, “very thin to me.” And she reachesout, her fingers covered in honey, to nourish one sickly creature as shenourished the other. The coyote regards her suspiciously as he lowers his mouthto her hand. His cactus tongue raises welts on her skin, but she does not feelthem.
“Don’t imagine,” says the coyote, “that you can ever fleedeath.”
“I would never try.”
He aims a caustic look at her and then at Sylvie, who haslost interest in the honey and is blithely tearing the wings off the dead bees.“Everything is an exchange here, you’ll see. I had to kill a nagual tobecome one. You or her. It’ll come to you or her.”
“It already has,” Ana says. She wrestles the wingless beesfrom Sylvie’s fists and sets out across the desert. Moving in insubstantialincrements towards another river, another dead cactus-studded land. If shedidn’t have a daughter, she might have a pistol and a will to live instead.
◊
In labor with Sylvie, Ana swallowed a sour-tasting draught ofmorphine and sobbed inconsolably over an old superstition that had been buriedmany years ago beneath a Spanish baptismal font.
“I won’t belong with you anymore,” she said over and overagain, clutching at the tails of her husband’s shirt. “Please, don’t let thechild come.”
He was an unsturdy and beautiful man, Arturo, and he didn’tknow how to comfort her. “Stop thinking on those other worlds,” he said,speaking under his breath so the midwife across the room wouldn’t hear him.“It’s just heaven and hell and purgatory.”
“Heaven for the warriors, the mothers, and the drownedones,” she managed, though her tongue felt thick from the morphine and the painof labor was deafening. “Purgatory for the rest. Didn’t they preach it thatway, once?” It was true, they had. The camp chapel was prone to sacrilege,inducing velvet-clad Catholicism to shake hands with those ancientdust-streaked truths which everyone with even a speck of Aztec heritage knew.
“I’d drown before I’d leave you,” said Arturo, and she kneweven then that he was lying but she let him say it, let him tangle his fingersin her sweat-soaked hair and prop her head up on the adobe wall that served asthe headboard for their frameless mattress. “And they dabbed a bit of holywater on my forehead, didn’t they?”
“You know that’s not what it means,” she sobbed.“Please—”
She bit down on an iron crucifix while the midwife drewSylvie from her womb, pushing her screams to the back of her throat andwatching Arturo through a rose-colored morphine haze. How heavenly he looked.How impossible. She hoped her child was nothing like him, that Sylvie wouldinstead be branded with the inexorable mark of that savage, ancient heavenwhere mothers and warriors and the drowned feast upon their enemies.
◊
The land of the dead does not frighten Ana now that she haslearned all its rules. Small gods with stars for faces sometimes try to makegood on their reputations as tricksters, but they come away disappointed by herinvulnerability to cuts and bruises. Other trespassers attack—longtimewanderers who have lost their guides and resent that she should persist whenthey have lost all hope—but the coyote kills them and buries their bodies inthe sand. “When they rise, they will be aspen trees and their branches willanchor the wind,” he says.
There are many meanings of the word dead, Ana hasrealized. Many intermediate stages between being and not being alive. She findsshe can no longer name the stage where she subsists, nor the one where Sylviehas landed.
The second river in the land of the dead is nothing like thefirst. The shore is not exposed to the wilds of the desert, but hidden in acave where stalactites protrude from the slick rock and armored starfish writhein pools. Poised elegantly at the lips of the water, enormous cats with goldenskin look out over the horizon. They are the guardians, the coyote says, of thethreshold to the other world.
“We’ve crossed the land of
