There were only two other people I could see from here. 3 Blue Snail, the hunchback with the throaty tenor, stood off by himself at the far right. He wore a blue feather cape and a short spiral headdress that made him look all head and mouth, like one of those deep-sea fish with the elastic stomachs. And then across the stream, about fifty arms away, a tall Harpy blood was standing in a little grove of spiny guava trees.
Then there were the three dressers behind us, I thoughtcounting everyone the way I doand there was someone else, sitting close by on our right, who I wasnt supposed to look at. If there were any guards or porters around, they were out of our line of sight.
Teex!
3 Blue Snail shouted almost in my ear in his buzzy voice: You!
Chacal snapped to attention. To him it was like Id felt once when I was fifteen and some cop just bullhorned me out of nowhere: Hey, YOU! Pancho! You with the faggy hat! Freeze!
Teex ma ka te!! You after-the-end shit-skin child!
Who were your mothers, and who were your fathers?
You dont know? Offalfetus doesnt know.
2 Jeweled Skull held his hand out to us and turned his palm upward. It meant that if Ior rather Chacal, since he was pretty solidly in charge of our time-share body right nowhad anything to say, wed better say it now.
I screamed:
Cal tumen hum pic hun, pic ti ku ti bin oc!
that is,
Fathermother, make me holy,
Give me death!
Or rather, Chacal screamed it. Or maybe I should say he made us scream it. He couldnt move, of course, not because the voice was magic, but just because if you were a Harpy it was a voice you obeyed. But he knew what they were about to do, and he didnt want it. He wanted them to kill him, or us, in this body, his old body. He was fine with dying, of course, but he wanted to take me and his body with him.
2JS turned his hand palm down. Request declined. 3 Blue Snail took the cue and started coaxing us in his educated-baby singsong voice:
You, One Chacal,
Great hipball striker, bone breaker,
You red one, you strong one,
Victor at Ix over 22 Sidewinder,
Over the Ocelots,
Victor at 20 Courts
Over Lord 18 Dead Rain
Of the Jaguars,
Why are you sitting there
Wearing that ugly skin?
Here is your real one.
All your three selves are here,
Here is your tree,
Heres your skin,
Heres your hawk-uay,
All to receive you.
Theyre all here,
Your fathers,
Your elder brothers,
Your younger brothers,
Your teammates …
At the word tree our eyes focused across the stream, on the guava grove. Each of the trees had a few old offerings hanging from it, but one of them was absolutely festooned with new cotton streamers and strings of orange spondylus shells and wads of blood-spattered offering letters. Even if I hadnt had his memories to draw on, I would have guessed it was Chacals motz, his root, that is, a tree that had been planted or at least dedicated when Chacal was born.
And 2JS had the hawk, of course. What about the skin?
Breaking form, Chacal strained our eyes to the right. Four arms away from us a naked teenage boy crouched on the flowers in a supplicants position, smiling a slightly stupid beatific grin that I figured was the effect of presacrificial drugs. He was younger than Chacal, although since his hair said hed passed his last initiation, he was officially at the same life-stage. Probably he had a similar birthday and name day, which were more important than his actual age. His face was only a bit like mine, that is, what I remembered through osmosis to be Chacals. And I didnt even have a good idea of that, since around here mirrors were rare and water was underworldly and considered dangerous to stare at, and so Chacal had only seen his own reflection a few times. Still, his facial tattoos were the same as ours, double spirals of tiny dots emerging from the corner of his lips and spreading up onto the cheeks, and he had a fresh brand in the same spot above his hip where Chacal had the big hipball-impact scar.
Just what I need, I thought, another brain transplant. So I guess the other proxy, the one in the deer hunt, that was the fake proxy. This was the real proxy. Whatever.
This is your garden,
Your dooryard, your hearthstones,
Your hammock. Here!
Over here! Leave that sack or
Well all disrespect you, renounce you …
Well, hey, Chacal? I thought. This seems like a pretty clear choice to me. Come on, theyve even got your stuff all packed. Take a hint, Clint.
He didnt respond, but he seemed to swell, like a clogged sinus on a depressurizing airplane. 3 Blue Snail halt-stepped over and crouched at my left side, like a hundred-pound newborn baby. He held a cylinder pot of something up to our mouth, and either because we were still parched or because Chacal couldnt help being at least physically obedient, we drank it down. Uk. Id had some skanky cocktails around here already, but this one was a real puzzle. At first it seemed totally bland, just some kind of broth with a rusty undertone and a brainy texture like ground sweetbreads, but after it was down I started to get this gross chalky aftertaste. It reminded me of somethingoh, yeah, I know. It was like this joke drink we used to make at school called a Phillips Screwdriver, that is, vodka and milk of magnesia. Now I felt like Id had a dry sponge in my stomach that was puffing up to football, no, basketball, no, beach ball size. I noticed the residue in the cup was a periwinkle blue. Blue-corn syrup, maybe? Next 3BS took a stingray spine in one hand and two little clay cups in the other. He leaned forward and I felt his swollen fingers pinch my earlobe. He pushed the spine in and pulled it out with a little tearing sound.
Ears bleed a lot, and in less than a minute the cups were full. My two dressers kneed forward, took the cups, and, using sponges, started painting, or rather daubing, the proxy with my blood. When he was covered with red and already drying to brown, they moved back to me and my ball yoke. Inside me Chacal said something like No, no, no, but not in words. Youre over, I thought. Youre history. Take a hike, Ike. Meanwhile the dressers kept working on me. They plastered my earlobe and cleaned the extra blood off my chest. They cut off the wrist cuffs theyd just tied on. They unfastened my headdress. They took my loincloth, my stone toe rings, everything. When I was naked, they strapped all my regalia onto the poor teenager. He tottered under the weight. They came back and sharkskinned the blood-scroll tattoos off my cheeks. They rasped the huge hipball players cauliflower calluses off my knees and elbows. I bet if my eyes had been different colors or anything else that would have identified me as Chacal, they would have dug those out too. It all hurt. I went through some changes.
By now 3BS was addressing the proxy, taking on the voices of Chacals parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and presumed founding ancestors, all of whom he named, and all of whom, it seemed, were presumed to be still living somewhere inside the grove of guava trees or the hills behind them. Each of the personae he took on begged Chacal to join them.
Sounds like a good deal, I thought at Chacal. If I were me Id get out of this old body and into that kid right away. Out of the corner of our eye I watched the dressers cut a patch of skin out of the proxys chest, like the one theyd stitched up on mine. Without interrupting his harangue, 3BS handed them something. It was the strip of glyphs theyd peeled off my chest on the deer course. It had been tanned, and now it was all supple and translucent. It was a little confusing, because Id thought theyd used it on the skin of the other proxy, the one from the deer hunt. Maybe theyd forged a substitute in the meantime and switched it again. Or maybe the skin of the deer-hunt proxy wasnt still hanging up on display. Maybe theyd gotten to take it home. Whatever. Anyway, they started to sew it onto the proxy�
�s chest with gut thread tied to an eyeless thorn needle.
Kaanic teech chaban, 3BS said. Roughly, This is your last chance. He set a wide-flared bowl on the mat between my knees and picked up an ornate jade vomiting spatula, or rather vomicus, to use the scholarly word. Great, I thought. Will the real Chacal please throw up? He pulled down my lower jawfor a second I got a stab of fear that he was going to tear it offand then with the other hand he inserted the stick in my throat.
Ek
The sinus burst, the pressure released, and I erupted. Three waves of sour yellow liquid vomit crashed through my throat and spattered into the bowl. I thought Id turned inside out. I collapsed on the mat. Im dead, I thought, they got me too. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the proxy take the bowl and drink it in one draft. When he was finished they poured a cup of balche into the bowl, swished that around, and made him drink that too. Across the stream the tall blood at the edge of the woods raised a big black steatite ax in a long handle, threatening to chop down Chacals birth tree.
I, Chacal beneath you, am happy in this vessel, the boy choked out as soon as he could talk. Hed been rehearsed, of course, but you could tell he believed it all. It was a big honor for him. Actually, thats putting it mildly. For him it was like a royal wedding. He was a regular little Lady Diana Spencer. Yeah, youre a lucky kid, all right
Wait.
Chacal was gone.
It was true. Id only just realized it, but he was gone.
The blood put down the ax.
I felt empty and stupid, like, along with whatever else, Id just vomited out about twenty feet of intestines and two-thirds of my brain cells. But at least it was me doing the feeling. One of the dressersa different one now, not an untouchablereached into a bag and sifted a handful of white feathers, or actually I think it was eagle down, over my wet body.
Each of the nine guests of honor walked to the new Chacal, greeted him, and returned to his place. 2 Jeweled Skull was the last. He extended his foot and the new Chacal touched its underside. It was an unusual honor. When he got back to his mat, 2JS picked up a conch shell engraved with red blood-scroll clouds and blew it, like Triton. It had a feeble, apprehensive sound. We all waited.
There was a chunking sound of little clay bells, like a St. Lazarus rattle, behind us, to the northwest. I didnt look around, but soon enough the Harpys nacom, that is, 2 Jeweled Skulls house sacrificer, walked slowly into view, like he owned all the time in the universe. His skin was blackened with carbon and he had a black turban bristling with black catbird feathers and a giant black bill-mask that made him look like Daffy Ducks evil twin. The neurons in Chacals brain didnt want to look at him or think about him, but my mind found his name anyway: 18 Salamander. Two little boys followed him, twins about eight or nine years old and with carbonized skin like his.
Fathermothers, make me holy, grant me death, the proxyor maybe I should call him the new Chacalwhispered. The nacoms two assistants helped the poor kid stretch out on the mat and held his arms and legs as the sacrificer made a transverse incision across his abdomen. He reached into the cut and up under the rib cage, still holding the knife, using it to part the diaphragm and detach the heart from the aorta and vena cavae. It took him nearly twenty seconds or so, but finally he pulled the heart out, leaving the knife in its place, and set it on a dish of corn porridge. I wasnt supposed to be watching, but everyone seemed to have pretty much forgotten me, and I kept one eye cracked as I lay on the mat. It turns out that a heart can go on beating for a while after its removed, and in fact this one even kept squirting pink mist for about fifteen beats until it started just pumping air, making little squeaks, and ran down. I watched sideways as the nacoms assistants lifted the new Chacal into a big basket, curled him up like a sleeping dog, and tied the wicker lid over him with four complicated hitch knots that spelled the glyphs for four hundred times four hundred, an idiom for eternity. Evidently they didnt want him to come creeping back. Even before they were done, 3 Blue Snail was standing over me, squinting at the sun in his eyes, his blue-clay body paint running in the heat, asking me to promise not to tell anyone my new inner name, that is, the name of my new uay. I promised. If anyone ever found out your real name, they could use it in a curse, and youd be an easy target for whatever demonish critter they got to go after you. He bent down, whispered it in my bleeding ear, and told me to repeat it. I tried but it was hard to talk around a mouthful of what seemed to be either blood or vomit, so I swallowed what I could of it and the new dresser wiped the rest off my chin. 3 Blue Snail must have thought I was stalling, because he rapped me on the side of the head with his knuckle and made the dresser back off. I whispered the name. He made me repeat it twice before he stood back up and announced my new outer, or revealed, name. Like most names involving animals it had nothing to do with my uay :
10 Skink, he said. Finished.
Bummer, I thought. I always get the uncoolest names. Damn.
Behind me someone had lit the hut on fire. I guess it was just a one-use disposable item. I lifted my head and saw the nacamobs assistants hoist the big basket onto their shoulders and start off, followed by a line of porters with all the other tchotchkes. Chacals father and the burden bearer followed them down the trail to the village, shaking maracas to keep away the Xibalbans. I felt lonely. 2 Jeweled Skull untethered the hawk. It didnt move at first, so he shooed at it until it flapped grumpily up into the trees.
[37]
They hustled me a long way both uphill and downhill. I was still pretty weak fromwell, from everything. When I fell asleep they carried me. They gave me hot water. Hun Xoc, who was running the operation, took a cone of salt out of his own traveling bag and let me lick it. At one point I noticed I was moving in a funny way. Im swinging, I thought, Im on the end of a rope. I mean, not figuratively. They were lowering me down horizontally, like a girder, out of the light, into a space full of echoing clicks and whispers and the smells of chocolate, urine, pine pitch, and wet stone. It was dark. Other hands took the bundle, unfastened it from the ropes, and carried it about forty paces, set it down, and unrolled me onto a drift of corn husks. When my eyes adapted, it turned out I was in a wide cavern that, after all my cooping up, seemed as large as the Hyperbowl. The pile of husks was near a storage niche braced with cedar logs and stacked with hills of unhusked cacao pods and tanned deerhides reeking of natural ammonia, as far as possible from a zone of green sunlight that sifted down from a ragged oculus thirty arms across and fifty arms overhead, fringed with what I first thought were exposed roots and then saw were stalactites. The space was filled with scaffolding, struts, and ropes and buttresses and drying racks, but the main feature was what had to be the worlds largest rope ladder, a strip of about sixty twenty-to-ten-arm logs looped into thick braided cables and strung at a steep angle from our side of the floor to the far edge of the oculus. Five nearly naked workmen clambered around on the ladder like sailors on the shrouds of a square-rigged ship, guiding down a bundle of board-hard untanned deerskins. There were at least thirty other workers in the cave, and some of them must have been looking at us with too much curiosity because Hun Xoc, whod already climbed down, barked at them to get back to what they were doing. They stood me up, but I still needed two people to help me walk, not because I was shaky from all the abusealthough it didnt helpbut because with Chacals consciousness gone, I was having to relearn how to control my new body. The worst thing was trying to turn left and turning right instead. We steered around a big natural impluvium in the floor and passed a male cook in womens clothing who was slapping the morning tortillas over three small hearthstones. I guessed he was what anthropologists would call a berdache, a sex straddler who could do womens work in a male space. A sort of woven-clay chimney rose over the hearth, almost like a stovepipe, and twisted up the side of the ladder to the outdoors. We had to duck under a rack with a brace of just-killed jabiru storks tied together by t
he necks and bunches of plucked Muscovy duckswhich, despite the name, do not come from Muscovy. I noticed how hungry I still was. Past the kitchen zone there was a raised wooden platform where a couple of old Harpy accountants in monkey headbands were counting out measures of seed corn and passing them to assistants, who poured the kernels into corn-husk packets and tied them up with colored thread. Rolls of rubberized canvas and banana bunches of fifty-gauge torpedo cigars were stacked on wicker sort-of pallets, away from the walls but out of the reach of the rain. No wonder the Harpies have been in charge of this town for three hundred years, I thought. Theyre survivalists.
Brian D'Amato Page 45