Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  The three preparators and I were in the center of a circle, or rather a nonagon, about twenty arms wide, marked by nine short torches stuck into recently burned-over turf. We were on the bare crest of a wide hill, and not in a residential area. So we were at least a few miles away from the ceremonial district of Ix. There was a wider circle, marked by about fifty torches. But there was no moon and I couldn’t see anything beyond it.

  Bloods crowded around the circumference. I counted thirty-one of them—my new head couldn’t count as fast as my Jed-head had, but I guess I could still count pretty fast—and then guessed there were forty, since they liked to do things by twenties around here. Each blood held a javelin a little taller than he was. Like most spears the javelins were in two parts, a long shaft and a two-foot ferrule that fit into it loosely enough to detach on impact, but instead of a flint blade they were tipped with blunt wooden plugs. The javelins were wrapped with fur around the shaft, jaguar for the Ocelots and monkey for the other clans. The bloods wore deerhide kilts and wide cotton sashes with two extra ferrules stuck in the back. They wore rubber-soled sandals, like mine, and their skins were oiled for night hunting with red-pigmented dog grease. Their hair was pulled into tight tails that sprouted from the whorl and curled back up over the head toward the face. More than half of them were on the fashionably portly side. As in India, if you could afford food, you wore it. Chacal’s memories must have been kicking in pretty well by now, because even with the bewildering patterns of their kilts and body paint I could tell there were bloods from all five Ixian greathouses. The bloods from the ruling Ocelot House wore turquoise spots on their calves, and the bloods from the Vampire Bat House, who were closely related to the Ocelots but whose patron direction was the northwest, wore black and orange vertical stripes all the way up their legs. Then the Itz’un House, that is, the Snuffler House, from the northwest, wore white stripes all over, and the Macaw House, who represented the southwest and were the Harpies’ biggest supporters, wore yellow spots. There were also bloods there from the Harpy House, in red and black stripes, and they seemed to be stretching their legs and swishing their javelins and getting ready along with everyone else. Great, I thought, even my own family’s competing to waste me. I couldn’t bring myself to look them in the eyes, but just from their voices I could tell that Chacal had known a few of them. There was a sort of formal jokey strutting going on, and while they swaggered and vogued they were sizing me up with an exaggeratedly professional air, like I was a racehorse in the paddock. “Ymiltik ub’aj b’ak ij koh’ob, impek’ ya’ la’,” I heard somebody say. “I’ll keep the antlers and the teeth, but my dogs get the rest.” There was a lot of laughing. These are happy folk, I thought. Salt of the earth.

  “No, I get the antlers, you can have the penis, and my dogs get the rest,” somebody else said. Great, I thought, I’m back in junior high. Despite myself I looked up at the line of faces, trying to think of some searing riposte. The blood who’d come up with the remark, one of the younger Snufflers, bent down to my level, puffed out his cheeks, and crossed his eyes, making a face a lot like the Harpo Marx Gookie. Somehow I started laughing along with everybody else. It all seemed like the funniest thing in the world. Of course it was a bummer to be on the receiving end, but in another way it didn’t matter. It all just meant you were alive. I made a mock-pouting face back and I got an even bigger laugh. Who cares what side you’re on, the world can use a little more laughter, can’t it? I turned around, scanning the circle. A few of the faces felt like old friends. Some of them smiled at me, genuinely approving. I smiled back. There was empathy there. But it was an empathy that didn’t preclude what they were going to do to me, because they wouldn’t ask for different treatment themselves.

  The preparators stood me up, steadying me by the antlers. The head guy took up a shell blade and knelt down next to me. There was a moment of premature terror—I thought he was skinning me already—but he just scraped me lightly with the sawtoothed edge, etching faint parallel stripes down my legs. As I looked around, I saw that some of the hunters were doing the same thing to themselves. Next he sunk his mitt into a dish of powder that looked like pollen and slapped it into the cuts. Ouch. Little curls of heat crawled up my legs. My feet twitched, practically jumping on their own. The stuff was some kind of powdered nettle. Making me feisty and insensitive. Whatever. Outside the circle the bloods were slapping their legs with the same stuff, pumping themselves up and razzing each other. Finally the preparators let go of my appendages and backed out of the circle into the ring of bloods. I staggered but caught myself and managed to stay on my feet, my heavy head wobbling. A hail of hissing—the Mesoamerican equivalent of applause—blasted in at me on ale-soaked air.

  The hunters settled down, exactly like third-graders when the teacher walks into the room, and drew apart, letting a tall elder-statesmanish character enter the circle. He came up to me with a bundle of something in his hand. Automatically I assumed the do-what-thou-wilt-with-me crouch. He squatted two arms in front of me and unrolled a strip of white deerskin. Inside there were four small but perfect jade celts, that is, smooth-ground ceremonial ax-heads, or “currency blades” as anthropologists call them. He rolled them back up and tied the skin on each end. Next he poured a little hill of sienna-brown cacao beans out of a conical basket and, with the efficiency of an old-time croupier sorting chips, counted out eighty of them into a deer-scrotum pouch and tied it shut. Just out of habit I couldn’t keep myself from ransacking Chacal’s memories to try to estimate what the roll was worth. Of course, the economy was so different that you couldn’t really exchange it into 2012 money anyway. I mean, around here a good quetzal tailfeather was worth two decent male slaves. But as a rough figure I’d say I was getting about eight thousand dollars U.S. Just enough to get started in a new town. Forty acres and a mul. Cheapskates. He rolled the roll and the pouch in a larger strip of cotton and gave it to the preparators to tie onto the back of my sash. When that was done he backed away from me and waved his goad at the line of bloods. They parted, making a gap for me on the northwest edge of the nonagon.

  “Ch’een b’o’ol,” he said in a trilling, singsong voice like an old country auctioneer’s. “Throw in your stakes.” It was like saying, “Faites vos jeux.” Place your bets.

  Beyond the gap the hilltop looked like a midnight garage sale at the Museum of Natural History. There were at least four hundred other people up here, all straining to get a look at me over the ring of hunters. There were bundles and packs and travois carts and dozens of green rush trading mats piled with all sorts of stuff, bolts of white cotton, bales of some kind of aromatic bark, bags of what I supposed were cacao beans, bouquets of spoonbill feathers, green-obsidian cores and currency blades, leashed bunches of live kutzob’—that is, neotropical ocellated turkeys—and piles of wooden and clay personal counters, which I guessed were like casino chips, representing gods know what. Offficials of some kind in black-and-white capes and monkey headdresses, evidently managers or bookies, walked between the groups in pairs, keeping track of the bets with baskets of little paper chits. At the edge of the crowd I could just make out what looked suspiciously like two shiny skinned bodies hanging together from a tall tripod like a teepee frame. Warm-up victims, maybe. Don’t think about it. I listened to the crowd, trying to sort out the betting. From what I could hear at first, it seemed like all the bets were on which hunter would catch me. Finally I heard a few people offering bets that I’d make it. It made me feel pretty good until it turned out they got odds of eight to one against me. There was a disagreement starting somewhere, on my left side, and it grew. For a minute I thought everybody might start fighting each other and I’d get away like in some Keystone Kops movie, but they resolved it by letting another person come into the circle and take a look at me. He was a short, scruffy-looking guy, and definitely an untouchable, but he must have been a popular oddsmaker because he put on a pair of those mittens and lifted up my arms and guided my legs apart, feeling for muscle tone. It was pretty degrading, but I went along wi
th it. He announced something to the effect of how I was in pretty good shape and the odds against me shot down to a whoppingly optimistic five to one.

  Looks bad, Jeddio, I thought. Pretty damn hopeless. Not fair. I mean, sure, there’s a chance I’ll make it. But, really, nobody gives odds like that except for a stunt. You’re a point spread, babe.

  “Tz’o’kal, tz’o’ka,” the adder said. “Final offerings.” It was like saying, “Les jeux sont faits.”

  The crowd quieted down. Some of the bloods took off bits of jewelry and handed them to their squires or whatever. Behind me someone blew a horn like a shofar. Everyone turned, looking to the northwest. I looked too. Out in the darkness, where the stars disappeared, bonfires lit up one after the other, tracing the undulating spine of the next ridge like a string of Christmas LEDs draped over a ragged hedge. How far away was it? About half a mile, looks like. I couldn’t see what was in the valley I had to cross. Damn.

  I knew through Chacal—although, of course, at this point anybody would have been able to figure it out—that if I made it safely across that line I’d be off the menu, free to go anywhere I wanted. Of course, I’d still be on the lam to some extent, and I was too tainted to be a blood again, just another homeless or, as we’d say in Ixian, hearthless nonentity skulking from one no-name town to another. I tried to conjure some sort of plan out of Chacal’s foggy notion of local geography, but all I could come up with was that I’d have to get on the northern sacbe, that is, the sacred highway, and stay on it until I was in the ever-shifting borderlands between the zones controlled by Yaxchilán and its ancient enemy, Ti ak’al, whose empire was currently in a state of near collapse. I’d probably get robbed and eaten the first night. And even if I didn’t, what good would it do? I had less than a year here anyway. Maybe I’ll just sit here. Maybe I just don’t feel like playing this game right now. Did they ever think of that? Reindeer games are a drag anyway. Although if you do stay here they’ll just practice some more of their nefarious torture arts on you. Maybe the best thing is to just grab one of those spearheads and swallow it. Let the world go to hell thirteen hundred years from now. That’s too far away to care about. Screw it.

  There were four beats of silent waiting and then 2 Jeweled Skull’s voice:

  “Tz’on-keej b’axb’äl !”

  I stepped out of the circle and, with as much dignity as possible, walked through the crowd of bloods and other Ixob’ to the outer circle. I didn’t look at any of them. They all drew back and gave me plenty of room, but the moment I crossed the line of firelight the bloods slid into a chorus:

  “Nine boys run down a big fat deer and say:

  ‘Your head is light, your ass is heavy, Deer.’

  The deer’s two ears become the ninth boy’s spoons …”

  It was a counting song, like eeny-meeny-mynie-moe, and Chacal and every other Ixian child had grown up with it. Nobody had to explain the rules to me for me to know that the instant they got to the last word—ts’ipit, that is, “ring”—the bloods could leave the outer circle, and I was fair game.

  “The deer’s two antlers are the eighth boy’s rakes …”

  I dashed down down the terraced slope.

  “The deer’s hooves are the seventh boy’s four hammers,

  The deer’s one back becomes the sixth boy’s purse …”

  Step. Step. Stepstep. Stepstep. Ditch. Over. Tree. Around. Chacal wasn’t a hunter, but his feet still found safe steps in the undergrowth. The drilling whines of cicadas whipped past me and I smelled pine and horsemint. So what if I’m in a passel of trouble, I thought, I actually feel kind of great. I think I’ll just jump over the next tree instead of going around it.

  “The deer’s intestines are the fifth boy’s necklace …”

  No problem. They haven’t even started yet. I bounded over the edge of the first terrace and for an instant of dislocation I thought I was somehow upside down, falling up into outer space. There were more stars below me than above—but they were flickering and drifting in amorphous constellations and for the next two seconds I thought I was running down into a lake, and then as I passed over the first few stars I realized the shoals of lights rippling below me were glowworms, armies of green-white elaterids raving and orgying over the ferns and jacarandas. We have to be east of Ix, I thought. On Harpy land, probably, somewhere in the folds of east-to-west limestone ridges that strung out of the Sierra de Chamá and slowly diminished toward the Lago de Izabal. Okay. Try to guess the distance. From hilltop to fireline was about half a mile as the laser flies. So how far will I have to actually run? Two miles? Maybe more like three. One uphill. So what, I’ll handle it. Whoops. Shrub. Ground not burned over so recently here. I half slid down to the base of the hill and rolled over onto clover and marigolds. Up. Up. Hup. Can’t see the Fire Ridge anymore. Forward. Zoom. Okay, we’re back on track. The rhythm section was still jamming back at Home Base and I noticed my steps were syncing to it. The slope here was tufted with eucalyptus and ceiba trees, some were like gigantic umbrellas and others just saplings, some trunks leafless, some fallen, and some that were just decaying stumps. But they were all too regular and too widely spaced to be a natural forest. They’d either been planted or systematically thinned. In fact, if you ignored the way the trees were festooned with bundles of tobacco leaves tied with multicolored ribbons—offerings to the clan mate whose uay was lodged within each tree—and also the fact that there were fewer live trees than dead ones, you could almost imagine you were in some Capability Brown-style English park. Behind me the bloods’ voices were rising as they neared the end of the chant:

  “The deer’s one jawbone makes the fourth boy’s fork …”

  Fast, fast. Moving well. Chacal’s instincts were kicking in, the old adrenaline autopilot. You only have to operate the top cortex of your brain. Left.

  Stepstep. Stepstep. Over. Tree, tree. Around. Over. More uneven ground here. Barriers. Steeplechase. I felt strangely light. It couldn’t be just because Chacal’s body was so young, or because it was so much stronger than mine had ever been, even after being wasted by presacrifice fasting. It had to be just that I was smaller now. It’s why little kids have so much energy, it’s not just because they don’t know what a pit the world is, it’s just that they don’t have much to lift. How tall am I now? If I hadn’t been a little preoccupied up there, I could have compared myself with what I knew was the four-foot-two-inch height of the lintel of the King’s Niche. But the average height of an upper-class Maya male of the period was about five feet two, and I was only a bit above average. So say I’m five four. Jed was five nine. So if strength increases with the square of your height but weight increases with your height cubed, let’s assume my G-drag is about—

  Ouch. Pointy. Careful. Right. Stepstep. Stepstep. Don’t get distracted. You’re not home free yet—

  “The deer’s one nose becomes the third blood’s pipe …

  Deer’s thirty teeth become the second’s dice …”

  I think I can I think I can I think I can I think I can. Wobbling. I got my hands up around my cagado antler-rack, maybe I can get this sucker off, no, glued on, I was just wrenching my scalp off like the thing really grew out of my skull. Forget it. Focus.

  “The deer’s one sphincter is the first boy’s ring,

  The deer’s one sphincter is the first boy’s ring!”

  The word b’aac, “ring,” stretched out into a long hissing cheer and the patter of evil little feet. And they’re off and runninggg. Don’t look back. Ahead. Ahead.

  Trees. Slalom between the trunks. Left. Right. No, left. Now right. Left again. Nearly halfway. Doing good.

  Footsteps came down after me like a wall of light rain.

  Fuck ’em. Left. Into the thicket. Don’t get your antlers caught. Look down. Left hand shields eyes. Right arm front and over. Anticipate branches. Think, then run.

  Still way ahead of them. No sweat. As I came into the valley between the two hills the ground leveled off, but it was full of twigs and crud. Watch it. Twigs and crud equal sound. Sound equals death. Silence = Life. I tip-ran forw
ard. Still another mile, maybe. Largely uphill.

  Ouch. Step. Ouch. Nettles. Pain twanged up through my legs. Forks in the road. Well, if it slows me down, it’ll slow them down.

  Stop. Listen.

  Group getting closer. How many? Four? Maybe they split again. They’re good trackers. Don’t leave a trail. Run backward on footprints and then veer off? No, too difficult. Doesn’t really work. Only foxes.

  Forward. Quiet. Step. Step. This is actually a pretty good game. After all, game just means a victim you can eat—

  “Unf.”

  Chacal’s body knew what it was, the grunt of someone throwing a javelin, and we dodged-and-ducked automatically. The spear whistled three feet or so overhead. And it really whistled, with a high-A fifth chord. There were tiny reed flutes attached to its shaft.

  —eeeeeeethdgdgdgt.

  Dag. Landed pretty close. Stuck in a tree or something. Ought to find it. No, no time. I skidded the rest of the way down into a dry gully between the two hills. Behind and above me the bloods whistled to each other in house hunting-codes. You could tell they were fanning out and advancing down the hill in pairs, covering the whole slope. Timeless classic hunting technique.

  I paused. Go straight up? Yeah. Just go. Up the hill. Come on. I crouched up the slope.