Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “Yeah,” Marena said. “Break a leg, babe.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re going to kill ’em.”

  “Thanks.” I realized she was holding my hand. Yikes. Tenderness. Watch out for that shit.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s move on. What was your first nudibranch?”

  “It was a pair of Hermissenda crassicornis.” Dawn was coming up outside, and maybe because of the red lamp the sky looked greenish. Ixchel was still visible. It seemed almost orange, and larger. I coughed.

  “Who was your first real girlfriend?”

  “That would be Jessica Gunnison.”

  “Who was the voice of Mickey Mouse?”

  “Hang on a second,” I said. My tongue hurt. I kept looking at Ixchel. Now it was almost red, and for some reason Vega, which is above it and to the left, also looked red, and then a third red star became visible just below it, and then there were five and nine and then thirteen, and the dots grew and merged together, and I realized they were drops of blood, dripping out of my tongue onto our folded petition to One Ocelot, at the womb of the sky. The growls of giant mahogany-trunk rasps pulsed through the stone.

  “Jed?” Marena’s voice asked.

  I’m okay, I tried to say, but my mouth was all full of pain and blood. There was something I’d forgotten. Don’t worry, I tried to say, I actually feel pretty great. My body had that running-on-fumes quality of having been awake for a long time, but there was a compensating lightness to it. I inhaled a flood of resinous air. It was sticky with the full spectrum of the offering smoke, wild tobacco, geranium buds, burning skin, cilantro, rubber, bubbling crystals of copal amber, and something else underlying everything, something from before, something happy, oh, that’s it, that’s what it is, it’s chocolate—

  Wait.

  There was something I’d forgotten, not—

  TWO

  The Opposite of Cinnamon

  IX IN AD 664

  [27]

  We pulled the rope of thorns through our tongue, burned it, crawled out the door, took five steps, and stood at the lip of the great killing stairs. The Laughing People, the Ixians, strained up toward us and started the countdown, or rather count-up, pulsing to the numbers, spinning their featherwork parade shields from front to back so that the whole human field flashed from cold red to blue-green and back again and again.

  Damn, I thought. We really had no clue.

  I’d had a pretty clear idea of what the place would have looked like—and then the actual thing was so different that for a second I actually thought I was somehow in the wrong place, that the wave had missed Ix and I was in ancient Khmer, say, or Atlantis, or in the future, or on some other planet. Come on, Jed, orient yourself. That’s the cleft peak, San Enero. Except it’s all built and—damn. Things wobbled in and out of visibility through the gold whorls of offertory feathers. A domehead captive screamed somewhere below and trailed off into a kind of cackling gasp.

  Holy shit, I thought. It had actually worked.

  I tilted my head back and swallowed a mouthful of my own blood. Es delicioso, I thought, so many layered tastes, sweet-corn oil, copper, umami, seawater … it really is the best thing in the world, the way it shoots out of a dark-purple vein and then flashes instantly into scarlet, and then the way it slowly mellows to sienna and then skins over into black amethysts and finally puckers into those chewy nuggets that are just packed with tangy goodness …

  M’AX ECHE? Who are you?

  Are you one of the four four-hundreds?

  What?

  Huh.

  What was that?

  Are you one of the thirteen? Or one of the nine?

  Was that me?

  Get out of my skin.

  Oh, hell. I wasn’t in charge. The target had not been erased. I was trapped.

  “Uuk ahau k’alomte’ yaxoc …”

  “Overlord, greatfather,

  Grandfather-grandmother—

  Zeroth sun, firstborn sun …”

  Oh, hell.

  Bad break, Jedface. Wrong place, wrong time. No, right time, roughly right place, definitely wrong body. Cońo cońo cońocońo fuckedy fuckedy fuck fark fook.

  “Ahau’s niche” indeed. Sure, it’s called the ahau’s niche, so naturally the ahau would be in it, right? Malo. Wrong.

  This Chacal character is 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s replacement. Royal autosacrifice by proxy. They’re going to toss me to the human sharks, and then in a few days, 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s going to come back from the grave, or rather the kitchen, and step right back into the saddle. Damn, we were dumb. Good going, guys. You too, Jed. Serves you right for trusting them. ĄCutre! Jerk, fool, moron—

  Hold it.

  Bad luck. Do something. Assess the damage. Regroup.

  Oh, shit, Dios te salve, María, ni modos, no way, no way.

  Phalange, eyelid, sphincter, whatever. Move. Move. Move.

  Oh, chíngalo, oh fuck, oh God, oh fuck God.

  Trapped. Frozen. Helido. Cast in epoxy. Lucite souvenir paperweight.

  Focus, I thought. Move. Concentrate. Move. Open mouth. Say it!

  Nada.

  Claustropanic. Holyshitholyshit.

  Está chupado, no sweat, so, let’s all just shout it out, shall we? Stand and deliver.

  Everybody does it, everybody’s doin’ it, birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, let’s do it, let’s cease to exist, oh God oh God.

  And give these bastards a lethal dose of R-E-S-P-, et cetera. They’ll be lining up to kiss our culo. Right?

  No answer.

  Jesu-bloodyfucking-cristo.

  Last chance. Come on. Chacal? We’re pals, right? żCompadre? Don’t do this. Listen. At least give it a hearing. Think about it. How often does this happen to someone? It’s not an event to just shrug off. No matter what these hustlers tell you, if you just give this a try they’ll all just fall into line. We can take over this whole place. Together. You and me. Chang and Eng. No sweat. Give me ten days and we’ll have those Ocelot wankers wiping our calabazo. Nobody’s going to think less of us. Come on. Say it. Say it.

  Nothing.

  Listen, I thought hard, if you can stop just enjoying the damn moment for a second I think I can get you out of this, but you’ve got to listen to me listen listen please listen a second listen listen please—

  Silence. He wasn’t buying it. It was like his concentric certainties were hugging me to death.

  HEY, I thought at him. Think. Try to understand what I’m telling you. This is not the center of the universe, por el amor de Dios, it’s just plain Central America, and if you could just let me set you straight on a couple basic things you won’t want to die anymore, I can get us out of this out we can get out get out, get, get …

  “Four suns, then five suns …”

  Chacal’s hearing was better than mine. It was like he could zero in on each individual voice and tell whether its owner was sick or healthy or young or old or had filed or unfiled teeth. And we could tell that each voice believed, that each one knew its presence was essential for the collective to conjure One Ocelot down from his sky cave.

  “Eight suns …”

  We were looking down. Deathward. Ropes of black rubber smoke scrolled up to us from twin-giant incensarios at the base of the stairs, at the eye of the vortex … God dog, those stairs. They were stairs that didn’t go up. Just down. According to Michael’s calculations, when someone the weight of an average Maya gent of the period—say, Chacal—took the big leap, he’d be at the bottom in about 2.9 seconds, that is, roughly the time it takes a bowling ball to roll down the alley and hit the pins, and in most cases he’d be in at least two main pieces. Yep, about a minute from now we’ll be tamale filling, our head will be a ball in the cosmic soccer game, and not only will I be fuqueteado but everybody in 2013, and I really mean everybody, they, too, will be fuqueteados—

  Come on, Joaquín, just grab the wheel. Just move his mouth, just find that synapse, push that button, LIF’ DAT BALE. Come on. Wait. Did my left leg just quiver? I think so, I think so. Again.r />
  Again.

  Nothing.

  A flake of skin ash scuttled across our forehead and I thought I could see Chacal’s uay, that is, his animal self, fly out ahead of us, a gray owl. There was an instant of perfect balance. All 620 ą muscles of my body were at full tension. I thought I could see where I was heading, into a rush of egoless motion, a feeling like I was a chrome flying fish leaping over a green guilloché-enamel sea, and then that I wasn’t just one fish but the whole school, and then a seawide army of them, all leaping in unison, swimming on the wind. We took a last breath.

  Hell. Marena’s going to wonder what happened. She’ll think I screwed up.

  Try. Again. MOVE!

  Nothing.

  “Wuklahun tun …”

  “Nineteen suns …”

  Last chance gone. Chances all used up.

  Well, at least I got to see it, I thought. That’s still a lot.

  Ready.

  Please. One more second. Please.

  My feet shifted for purchase on the stone launching pad. They found the exact spot. I lowered my bejeweled body into a feline crouch, eager to spring out over the stairs. I’d make it, I thought. I’d never be enslaved by the Night Chewers. I wouldn’t have to fight my way through the underwaterworld. The smokers would treat me as well as if I really were 9 Fanged Hummingbird himself. They’d convey me straight to the womb of the sky’s thirteenth shell, right into the fire. Finally I’d be able to rest. I would achieve oblivion.

  “… Twenty-score twenty-score sheaves of suns,

  This is the number we ask you to give to us,

  One Ocelot, over us, come to us, grace us.”

  Silence. Somewhere, a rock dove cooed.

  This is it, I thought. Really better think of something, something clev—

  A single voice spoke, somewhere behind and above me. It wasn’t a human voice. It’s a macaw, I thought. No, it’s a trained spider monkey. Or maybe it’s some kind of scraper instrument, a stone guira, a bone ratchet, anything but a person—but then somewhere in the sea of my new memories I knew it was human, that it was a dwarf ’s voice, magnified by a giant megaphone and distorted by splintering off the city’s thousand angled planes. It was a male, but it was above a countertenor, like the voice of Alessandro Moreschi, the Last Castrato. There was an odd blankness to it. Or maybe I should say there was a lack of doubt. It was as though the voice had never, ever been questioned. It wasn’t that it was used to commanding, but rather that it had never said anything that wasn’t an order by definition and that there had never been even a possibility in the mind of the voice’s owner that it would ever be disobeyed. And in some fold of my new brain I could feel that Chacal knew whose voice it was, and then a moment later I also knew. It was the voice of the real 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the ahau and k’alomte’ of Ix.

  It said:

  “Pitzom b’axb’äl!”

  Which, roughly translated, meant:

  “Play ball!”

  That was it. Time to dive.

  [28]

  “Ch’oopkintikeen k’in ox utak!”

  It was me. I’d shouted it out. I DID IT! I thought, I CAN OVERRIDE C CHACAL! YyyaaaAAAAYYYJED!!

  Silence. A green jay cackled somewhere.

  Okay. Get out the rest. Verb difference. Remember the consonant shift. Ch’opchin, not ch’oopkin. Sub in that thing they call themselves, ajche’ej winik. Laughing People. Breathe from the diaphragm. Go.

  “Ch’oopchintikeen k’in ox utak!” I said, trying to project without shrieking,

  “I am the blinder

  of the third sun hence:

  Fourteenth k’atun,

  on 12 Wind,

  on 1 Toad,

  The Northern Belcheress

  will burst with ulcers

  she’ll rain her blackness

  on the hills, the valleys,

  And only I know how to lead you through it,

  You laughing people, you need—”

  WA’TAL WA’TAL WA’TALWA’TALWA’TALWA’TAL!!! STOP STOP STOP STOPSTOPSTOP!!! his mind shrieked around me. I choked up, sixty-one words before the end. Come on, damn it. Get it all out. Through the darkness, through the—

  Nothing. Mierda. I was just barking airlessly like a lung-shot dog. A feeling, a very terrible feeling, like shame but deeper than shame, rose up around me like a tide of acid vomit. It soaked into my mind and filled me up with a single word:

  AJSAT!

  Like all important words it didn’t quite translate. But there is an English word that’s very close, especially if you imagine it used in a setting of high social pressure, say in an important kickball match in, say, fourth grade:

  LOSER!

  You’ve made me LOSE, you made me LOSE, LOSE, LOSE, I AM A LOSER BECAUSE OF YOU, LOSER, LLLLOOOOOOSSSZERRRR—

  Chíngate, I thought, fuck you, I fucked you up. I tried to step back from the edge but my body had seized up again. Something rose out of the city, a collective intake of breath. What were they thinking? Somehow we seemed to tip forward without quite falling and I saw the frozen crowd rotating up over me and the chopper-steps rising to meet me, and as my eyes focused on the flint teeth of the third stair from the top, the one that was going to cleave into my face, time really did stand still.

  I’m dead, I thought. That was the last thing I saw, and it’s etched on what’s left of my brain. Going to fade out slowly. Na’ na. Mommy. Please. Hmm. Odd things were happening in the hinterlands of my vision. A sort of wicker beach ball floated past me on the left and bounced down the stairs. On its fourth bounce it shattered and iridescent green and magenta things exploded out of it. Feathers? No, too fast. One darted by us. Hummingbirds. Huh.

  No, it’s not subjective, I thought. We’re not falling. We’re really suspended somehow, or rather, somebody’s holding us from behind. Hmm. A huge unfired-clay pot—it was at least as big as one of those man-size olive-oil jars (pithoi?) in the palace at Knossos—arced over my head, slowly settled on the seventh step, and smashed into a house-size puff of yellow and black. The puff grew and spread around us. They were bees. Other things fell around me, orchids, marigolds, bits of jade, stiff white tortillas Frisbeeing over the stairs, but now we’d already turned around, or rather we’d been turned around, our back was to the sun and we were facing the door of the sanctuary, a black lamprey’s mouth in a giant cat-toad’s face crowned with vegetable glory. Don’t let me fall backward, that would be just too undignified. Did I think that? Or was it Chacal?

  I also realized we weren’t breathing.

  We die, we burst.

  Well, that was Chacal. Hey, sorry I blew your big—

  Zero, zero. Gak. Claustrophopanicaphobiofear. Don’t choke us, please, just breathe, just breathe in, breathin. Got. To. Suck. In. This. Sucks. Breathe. In.

  Gkk.

  Hands held me on either side and a giant live thing reared up in front of the doorway. At first, what they’d call the purely associational or prediagnostic or whatever part of my perception read it as a bird, and not just any bird, but a phororacoid, an eight-plus-foot flightless flesh-eating Miocene hell-butcher with nine-inch talons and an eyespotted cockscomb the size of yearling pigs. But the Chacal side of me—and it was a side of me, by this time—knew who it was. It was a greathouse, that is, an aristocrat, in his full ceremonial headdress. Although headdress isn’t a strong enough word. It was a swollen prosthesis, a vegeto-mechanico Synthetic-Cubistic construct avant la lettre. One of the long plumes of its crest brushed my forehead and I saw that it was artificial, a composite of hundreds of red macaw feathers sewn onto a bamboo stalk. It extended a claw and held me by the chin. Under its bone-inlaid papier-mâché beak, deep down in its gizzard, I saw it had just swallowed someone else, there was a tiny head down there, as bald as a turtle’s and wrinkled like brain coral, glistening red, glaring at me with burnt-orange vulturine eyes. I could feel that Chacal had known him personally, that in fact to Chacal he was both close and revered, and then I realized I knew he was the red bacab, the bacab of the east. It was 2 Jeweled Skull.

  Kill me,
Chacal thought. Absolve me. I have ruined us, I have ruined myself, kill me, renounce me.

  Shame. God damn it, I tried to think, this is not about me. But Chacal and I shared emotions the way conjoined twins share a blood supply, and I thrashed along with him in that quicksand of cosmic embarrassment. It was an emotion I knew but hadn’t felt since—well, I don’t even know when. But I suppose anyone can bring back a whiff of it by remembering something from kidhood, like, maybe in the recess period following that kickball game the other kids ganged up on you and started pelting you with those big red shards of processed cedar bark, and if you could relive what it felt like to have everyone you knew laughing at you, how desperately you tried to will yourself to melt down into the ground, and how there was no contradiction between hating the teasers and still needing their acceptance … but then you’d have to add that for Chacal there wasn’t even the hope of eventual refuge that you might have seen dimly on the horizon of the playground. There’d never be any parents to run home to, no sympathetic school nurse, no eventual growing up, nothing. There’d only ever been one exit for him and I’d just welded it shut. My vision tunneled in on 2 Jeweled Skull’s arm, on the jade scutes around his wrist, on the exposed upper arm with a crust of cinnabar cracking into scales on his loosening skin, on a lone shoot of black hair sprouting out of the scales like an Aporocactus in the Mojave, I mean, epiphytic cacti, grow, usually … whoa. Dizzying out. By now we hadn’t taken a breath in over a minute and I was getting that gray fuzz like the times when I was little, when I’d cut myself and nearly bled out. A vulturine voice I thought was 2 Jeweled Skull’s pierced the carbon-dioxide buzz in our skull and I thought I caught the word luk’kintik, “defilement.” There was something in the tone, something maybe even—apologetic? Pleading? Hot fingers wriggled into my mouth and even though I’d lost proprioception, there was still a sense of falling into the soft red dark. Am I finally rolling down? I wondered. Please let me fall, don’t catch me, let me roll, it’s what I want, it’s what I want.