A low chant (from where? all mouths are closed) summons him to unconsciousness. Domingo lets his eyelids droop and is dazzled by a landscape of hills guarded by trees, clearings licked by mist, puddles that mirror the stag’s bewilderment.

Passively carried along by the movement of the throng, Marcela and Lorenzo have arrived at its center, which is the Cross. What disproportion there is between the two sizes! Yet, on the scales of justice, the soul weighs more than wood. A blade of grass is enough to make the emptiness of the universe overflow.

These mysteries no longer shock Catalina, who has been spinning them out from the time of her earliest youth. How often the skein unravelled into countless threads! How often she found the strands, tied the knots, and wove a sturdy fabric whose design was simple and clear!

But she did not understand how a sacrifice could be consummated without pain. Her own flesh, emaciated by its familiarity with the divine, rebelled against the idea.

Domingo appeared to be sleeping. What did the mayordomos add to the posh that had tranquilized the will, enfeebled the limbs and crushed the resistance of “the one who was born at the eclipse.”

No. Such a death, like a vegetable or a stone, would be worthless in the eyes of the dark powers. And they would demand another hostage. Catalina seized the basin from Xaw Ramírez Paciencia. Before the terrified faces, she poured the water that was left in it onto the victim’s temples to revive him.

Domingo came to himself with a shiver of alarm. The image that filled his horizon calmed him. He knew well the anguished tension, the alarm that had always appeared on Catalina’s face at the least threat to his health or happiness. Now, as always, she was bending over him to protect him. But why, instead of the warm softness of her lap, was he given the geometric rigidity of the Cross?

Domingo wanted to move, to change position, and realized that he could not. His arms had been fully extended and around his wrists a tightly knotted cord held them in place. He struggled to free himself but only succeeded in deepening the furrow the cord was making in his flesh.

Domingo stayed still, as an animal caught in a trap does, so as not to hasten its end. Only his eyes, more than astonished, stunned, stared insistently at Catalina’s as if to implore her not for help but for an explanation.

Spellbound, Catalina followed these movements, this prudent and useless paralysis. Now death would take possession of this body as the gods always took possession of her, making a show of their power over an enemy subjugated in an unequal battle, an enemy brought down by force, whose every nerve—and there are so many!—has been shredded.