Kuti bin oc, a different voice said, in a different language from Ixian that I still seemed to understand. Turn him over. There was a recoil in Chacals nerves, as though Id just tasted something his tongue didnt like. Something about the voice seemed small and low-rent, like a Maya version of Timothy the Circus Mouse. I guessed it pegged its owner as a member of some sort of untouchable caste.
They flipped me over and stretched me out. Wait, I need my piece of gravel. That was my special piece of gravel. Two more sluices of the stuff came down, and then for a few beats they let me just lie there writhing and dripping on the flagstones. Someone pulled the gag wad out of my mouth and poured in some cool drinking water. Wow. An indescribable blessing. I lapped at it like a dog at a lawn sprinkler. I noticed I was being messed with, but still not by hands. Theyre wearing deerskin mittens. Got to protect themselves from my uncleanness. They scraped me with what I supposed were shell strigils. They cleaned all the hard-to-reach areas, if you know what I mean. They dug what I guessed were the last flakes of sacrificial blue pigment from under my seven remaining fingernails. They rubbed, or rather Rolfed, me with some kind of oil. It had a slight fishy quality under essences of vanilla and geranium. Maybe it was from a porpoise. They oiled and brushed my hair, or what was left of it, and when their mittens touched the stump of what, before the not-quite-sacrifice, had been my queue or pigtail or whatever, another of those instinctive shame-gorges rose up in my throat. Bastards. Eventually I got dusted with something, evidently the blue-white ashes hed talked about. I just lay there and let it happen, like a Linzer torte under a shower of powdered sugar. I tried to pretend I was getting a full-body treatment at Georgette Klinger at 980 Madison Avenue, but it didnt quite take in my mind.
They tied my hands in front of me with soft rope, leaving a lot of slack on each end, and tied another rope in two loops around my chest and neck, like a dog harness. Finally they hooked me under the arms and lifted me up. As I said, Chacals body was used to abuse. I could feel it was strong in a different way from a modern athletes body, not muscle-built or stretched out by aerobics, but thickened and somehow solidified, like you couldnt knock me over with a bus. At any rate, even after the fairly high blood loss and the days of fasting that had preceded the botched sacrifice, I, or it, didnt quite faint. They tried to march me along, and I actually tried to help, but my leg was still out of commission and they ended up carrying me vertically, with my feet dragging on the pavement.
From the shadows I felt crossing over me, I got the impression that wed gone through a gap in the wall of the courtyard, and then from the way we moved we went up an inclined path. There was a breeze and a sense of space that might mean we were on the west face of a hill. After sixty steps we turned right and went into shadow and up eighteen stairs into a dark corridor. We twisted through a narrow switchbacked passage. There was a strong scent of high-quality tobacco, like we were inside a giant humidor, and maybe an underscent of vanilla. We paused. There was the sound of someone holding aside something like a bead curtain and we moved forward again into a stone-cool room.
Cerise light seeped into my buried eyes. They set me down on a stone floor with something thin and soft over it. Someone tucked my legs under me and sculpted me into a proper captives squatting position. Everything stopped.
He over us addresses you beneath him, the tenor voice chanted on my left. The room had a muffled echoless quality, like a recording studio.
There was another long pregnant-with-monster-quintuplets pause. At some point maybe someone gave an order, because two hands grabbed and held my head and two more did somethingoh, shit, blinding me, oh, Christ, no, wait … no, they were cutting through the stitches in my eyes with a tiny blade. I would have struggled, of course, but Chacals body didnt move. Finally I noticed I wasnt being held anymore and I creaked one eye open. The first thing I saw was my own hairless and unfamiliarly foreskinned genitalia hanging between my thighs.
Hmm, I thought, thats a new one. Most twenty-first-century Maya arent circumcised, but Id been born in a real hospital, where they had their own ideas. Next I noticed the big skanky cauliflowery ballplayers calluses on my knees and then the bloody tears dripping onto my green thighsgreen?and then an old impact scar on my iliac arch where some ball must have smashed it, and then a dark violet glyph the size of a Zippo lighter tattooed on my chest. From somewhere in Chacal I recognized the tattoo as giving my nine-skull hipball-game rank. There was something reddish all over the floor, petals of something. Geraniums. But they werent really red. They were something else. And my skin really did look green, and it wasnt the oil theyd rubbed into it. The color really was different. And it wasnt any sort of drug or the film of blood from the stitches. Id suspected it up on the mul, but at the time Id been pretty busy, and I guess I just shrugged it off.
Chacals eyes were different. The colors were not the ones Id known as Jed. My skin wasnt even exactly green. It was more like the false green you get by mixing yellow and black paint. But it wasnt even quite that. The color of the carpet of wild geranium petals over the floor, which ought to have been about a deep orange, was more like a fluorescent magenta. But that isnt quite it, either, the color I was seeing was north of that somehow … maybe Chacals colorblind, in some weird way? Except I think Im seeing more colors. Maybe hes a tetrachromat, that is, someone who can see four primary colors instead of just three. Yeah. Except supposedly the few documented cases of human tetrachromacy were all women. Huh
Wait. Get back on track. Think about this some other time.
2 Jeweled Skull
Addresses you
Beneath him captive.
Face him, hear him.
It was the tenor voice. I hoisted my head and focused into the red murk.
I was in the center of a high, square room about fifteen arms on a side. The walls seemed to be glowing crimson, or rather the color that Jed would have seen as crimson. Now it was a creepy underwater-flesh blue-red-whatever. The left and right walls sloped inward at about thirty degrees, so that the wall I was facing was a high isosceles triangle with its peak about thirty arms off the floor. There didnt seem to be any doors besides the one wed come through, which was directly behind me. As things got clearer I could see the walls only looked lit from behind. Actually they were covered with tapestries or panels woven out of what might be the throat feathers of ruby trogons, knotted onto reed latticework, and they were reflecting indirect light that ricocheted down from a tiny oculus, burning with sunlight at the peak of the trapezoidal wall behind me.
There were six people in the room. Three of them were the guards whod brought me in. Two crouched on either side of me, and I could feel the warmth of a third at my back. Each of them held a sort of club or mace, I guess so they could control me at more than arms length, and as one of the mace heads floated near my face I could see it wasnt stone but some kind of pincushiony spiky thing. Then there was someone three arms in front of me and a bit to the left. He was a hunchback, nearly normal-sized but with a big wide head and all balled up, with a lopsided blue-striped face and a tufted conical hat that made him look like a blue macaw. I guess it sounds a little silly, but around here, or maybe in my new, preconditioned mind, it looked the opposite of silly, in fact it looked so deadly serious you could plotz.
And then, four arms directly in front of me but just now coming into visibility out of the gloom, 2 Jeweled Skull sat cross-legged on a wide double-headed jaguar bench, smoking a long green cigar through his left nostril.
His body was turned forty-five degrees away from me, and instead of looking at me he looked down at a couple of breadbox-sized dark gourds or wooden pots on the floor in front of him, each studded with green-white stones that spelled out the glyph awal, that is, enemy. He wore a sort of skirt or kilt with a wide sash that nearly reached to his sternum, and I could just see the profil perdu of a shrunken head, sewn by the hair to the back
of the sash so that it faced away from him, watching his back, as it were, with a petulant expression. Besides jade wristlets and anklets and rawhide sandals, his only other clothing was a complicated crownless turban with an artificial vanilla orchidmade, I thought, of bleached eagle feathersat the peak of his forehead. A green-throated hummingbirda real, well-taxidermized one with lifelike polished-jet eyeshovered in front of the orchid on a nearly invisible stalk, as though time had stopped just as it was about to plunge its beak into the nectary. It confused me for a second, because during training wed been so fixated on getting my head into 9 Fanged Hummingbird, who, as you may remember, was the ahau of the ruling family, the Ocelots, and the kalomte. But things around here were a little more involved than that. 9 Fanged Hummingbird was just a name, one of the kalomtes many revealed and unrevealed names, and it didnt have anything to do with his totem or uay or whatever, any more than someone named April Fish would have to be born in April or be a fish. So the hummingbird on 2 Jeweled Skulls headgear didnt mean he had anything to do with hummingbirdsalthough it might mean, metaphorically speaking, that people liked vanilla. And in fact, I was half remembering that vanilla beans were somehow important to the Harpy House, maybe one of the main sources of their nouveau richesse.
Below the orchid his forehead swept down at a low angle and connected to a small wooden bridge that eliminated the indentation of his brow and brought it into line with the vulturine wedge of his nose. Spirals of blue tattooed dots scrolled up from the corners of his mouth to his blackened eyelids. In spite of his creased and sun-cured skin he didnt seem old … but he was old, I knew from Chacals brain, at least hed certainly had his second birth, that is, he was over fifty-two, and I thought I knew he was quite a bit older than that.
His eyes turned and looked at mine. People like to say that theres a certain blankness to the eyes of someone whos killed a lot of people. I dont think its true. Some of the worlds most bloodthirsty cats have the most convincingly expressive eyes around. But there was a certain chill factor in there, a habitual disdain like what pigs probably see in the eyes of slaughterhouse workers, and I did get that caught-in-the-police/NewsChannel-helicopter-floodlight feeling. Automatically my eyes teared up and I blinked and looked down at the gourds on the floor. They were moving, shuffling around on little hands, and it took me a few seconds to realize that they were armadillos, each with its shell studded with azurite plugs and tethered to the floor by a ribbon through one of its ears.
Who is Mickey Mouse? 2 Jeweled Skull asked.
My heart didnt quite skip a beat, but it did seem to contract into a tight little ball. He was speaking in English.
[31]
He hadnt gotten all the vowels right, so it sounded more like Meh-kay Mah-ohs. But I hadnt misheard it. Had I? No, no way. My head got weightless and then leadenly heavy.
I underneath you answer you above me, I said automatically. Had I said it in Cholan or English? Cholan, I think … damn, Im going crazy. Okay. Im going to speak in English. Here goes.
Mickey Mouse is not a living creature, I said in English. He is a cartoon character. A drawing.
Silence.
Who is the ahau pop Ditz ni?
What? I wondered. Oh. Okay.
The ahau Disney died two katunob before my time, I said. He was the voice of Mickey Mouse. It wasnt easy talking to him without an honorific, so I added an I below you say.
Is Mickey Mouse his uay?
No, Mickey is just an effigy. Hes a … hes a puppet. A baxäl.
Is Jed-kas your uay? 2 Jeweled Skull asked. You wouldnt think a voice so high, almost squeaky, could be so commanding. But commanding was really too weak a word. Or is it Mickey?
This isnt going well, I thought. -kas, the suffix hed attached to my name, meant something along the lines of you thirteen steps beneath me. That is, as far down the social pyramid as possible. It was the declension an ahau would use to address a domehead, that is, a barbarian, someone who wasnt even a proper Maya enemy but just a nonperson.
No, I answered. Neither of those things.
There was a pause. How the holy bloody hell had this happened? I wondered. He cant have just learned
Oh, wait a second, I thought. I know how.
He must have been in there.
2 Jeweled Skull had been inside the Kings Niche with me, up there on the mul. At least for part of the time, that is, part of the eight minutes or so of the download window. And when my consciousness got zapped into Chacals, it must have gotten into 2 Jeweled Skulls head too. Holy shitzus.
What did you come to steal? he asked.
We dont want to steal anything, I said.
There was a pause. He wants me to look at him, I realized. I lifted up my head, but my new body shied away again from making eye contactyou werent supposed to eyeball your superiors around hereand instead I focused on the glyphs tattooed on his chest. They werent any Id seen before. Some kind of secret language. He had his cigar between his thumb and forefinger, and he set it down on a little stand with a sort of backhanded grace that reminded me of something, what the hell was it … oh, okay, it was a Japanese waiter serving teaI think it was at Naoe, when I was there with Sylvanaand this old guy there had done the whole thing with the whisk for us, and hed set down the wooden ladle on the mouth of the water jar in that special way. But 2 Jeweled Skull did it with a sort of heavy, brooding, haughty quality that wasnt at all Japanese, or Asian, or Navajo, or anything, but just totally Maya. I felt his eyes like a pair of stone blades sliding down my chest and along the veins of my arms to my quivering fingers and back up to my face, looking for tells or microexpressions that might give me away. Except if hes got my memories inside him, why doesnt he know everything Im thinking? I wondered. Maybe his brain had gotten a smaller dose of me than Chacals had. Or maybe he was tougher than Chacal, and hed willed it away. Come on. Think. What the fizzizuck had happened up there? Well, 2 Jeweled Skull had donated Chacal to serve as 9 Fanged Hummingbirds proxy. Right? So at some point in the ceremony, probably as a kind of last farewell, 2 Jeweled Skull must have gone inside the Kings Niche with Chacal. So he got at least a decent-size dose of my mind. But he seems to have retained his own mind in good condition. At least hes in control of his own body. Apparently.
Christ, what a bunch of fuckups we are. Although come to think of it, Taro had mentioned that there might be scatter, as he put it. Of course, Id pretty much shrugged it off. In fact, he said theyd even thought about coding my consciousness on a wider beam and maybe hitting a lot of people. But the sanctuary on the mul was the only structure in the area they had a solid date for, and the stone walls would help contain any scatter from the EPR beam, and anyway if theyd blasted me all over the place who knew what would happen. Having a lot of Jeds and semi-Jeds running around would probably be a recipe for trouble even in the twenty-first century.
You came to learn how to play against the smokers, he said. From somewhere in Chacal I knew that by the smokers he meant what a so-called modern Westerner might misleadingly call the gods. Is he talking about the Game? Got to be. Could he possibly even know how to play it? Maybe he was a sun adder. Maybe all the greathouse ajawob were adders to some extent. At least Id come to the right place. Should I ask him for a Game? How about best nine out of seventeen?
And will there be
More like you coming?
he asked in Ixian Cholan.
No. Probably no more ever. Dont elaborate, I thought.
You think you can
Entomb yourself
Alive,
And pickle flesh
Against thirteen
Times thirteen hundred rains.
No, not exactly, I said
You plan to hold
Your body skyward
In your baktun,
In your katun,
Again in your
Abandoned skin.
Body skyward basically meant alive. Around here the dead folks walked upside down, like reflections in water.
You over me
Are in the light,
I managed to say.
And when we kill you,
2 Jeweled Skull asked,
Will your foul twin in me
Die in me too?
What? I thought. Oh, shit. Maybe Id better not answer that one directly.
Pause.
Suddenly, I had an idea.
Brian D'Amato Page 38