Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  Scab casters were people who could give you skin diseases by breathing on you from a distance. By extension the term meant any makers of esoteric mischief, that is, like witches or sorcerers. A scab caster might be human or not entirely human, and he or she might be alive or dead or not entirely either. But in any event, if you were one of the pillars of the community like 2JS, you didn’t deal with them.

  Maybe, I said, we—I mentally italicized the we—could just chef up a few longbows at first and train a squad of bloods to use them. Bows might be a novelty around here—which in itself was pretty odd, come to think of it, I thought—but nobody would think they were supernatural.

  “I know what bows are,” he said. “Forest domeheads shoot birds with them. They are not to be touched by fineheads.” By fineheads he meant us Maya elite, who, as I think I mentioned, had acutely sloped foreheads. They were made by swaddling newborns in a sort of frame with a slanted board pressing on their face, and they were considered elegant and de rigueur. Domeheads could mean anybody who couldn’t afford such things, either domestic thralls, foreigners, or, in this case, uncivilized tribes.

  “But even without new weapons I can still help our house exalt itself,” I said. “What I can do”—I tried to think of a word for technology—“the crafts I know are not just for building things. They are a different way of strategizing.”

  “You mean a better way,” 2 Jeweled Skull said.

  Not necessarily, I said. They might be worse. Tetchy bastard, I thought. Well, at least I’ve got him talking. Okay. What I’ve got to do here, is, I’ve got to make him think I can be the best consigliere since Karl Rove.

  “Suppose some of our bloods were caught by a raider,” I said. “If they shot to kill, in formation, instead of trying to take prisoners. They—”

  He cut me off with a “Zzzzz!” sound, the equivalent of “Shhh.”

  “The Choppers are nearby,” he half whispered, “in our household, around our hearthstones.”

  Choppers? I wondered. I didn’t know what they were, except I had an automatic sense from Chacal’s neurons that they were living people who were more powerful than we were.

  “When you above me say Choppers,” I asked, “do you mean the Ocel—”

  “ZZZZZZ!!”

  I shut up. I kept my eyes on the ground. There was silence, except for the sound of the monkey remembrancer’s brush on the dry leaves. I snuck a look at him out of the corner of my left eye. He made a few more strokes and stopped. I realized he was taking notes on our conversation in some kind of shorthand. Hmm.

  I counted another ten beats. I looked up at 2JS. His face was like wood behind the tobacco haze. His eyes had hardened. Stupid, Jed, I thought. Stupid, stupid.

  “The Overlord of the Choppers has been seen prowling here, in his hunting skin,” 2JS said. He must mean 9 Fanged Hummingbird, I thought. And they think that 9 Fanged Hummingbird can morph himself into an ocelot, and slink around his subordinates’ towns at night, and listen to them through stone walls with his feline superhearing. And if I ever forget it, and I say anybody’s actual name, it might alert his wandering uay. And I’ll be in trouble. Right. Got it.

  Still …

  “You can’t still believe that,” I said. “Look in my memories, you know that can’t be done.”

  2JS didn’t answer. Instead, he took a long nose-puff and blew a chestful of smoke at me. At first I felt a zap of offendedness, and then I realized that he hadn’t meant it as an insult. He was trying to purify the area against any lingering Jed-pollution. Even after going through every purging ritual in the book I was still Typhoid Marty. The smoke was a lot stronger than the twenty-first-century product. Wild tobacco, I thought. Yuck. Like I said, I chewed but I didn’t smoke, except when I was making an offering, like to Maximón or whoever. But now … hmm. Oddly enough, I realized I wanted a cigar. I guess it was another of Chacal’s hardwired habits. Yuck. Yum. Yuck and yum at the same time.

  I sat. Okay, I thought, this time let him speak first. And don’t try to convince him about stuff he’s not going to get. Don’t try to turn him on to the scientific worldview. If he still believes in warlocks and were-jaguars, let him.

  And also, I was starting to understand that in this society, no one was ever alone. Even just the way 2JS had these other people here right now—the monkey, the guard, and the other character with the veil—while we were having a conversation that he wanted to keep secret—well, for him, this was like being alone. Around here, even if you didn’t happen to have someone else’s consciousness in your head, you were almost never alone physically. Nobody here slept alone, or even with one other person, but rather in the same small room with the whole family and, for the upper classes, servants and guards. No one ate alone. Nobody traveled alone, nobody worked a field alone, and nobody lived alone. When people did happen to get separated for a minute from the rest of the pack, they tended to get very nervous. So even in ordinary life, even if you were just an ordinary person, there was no opportunity for secrecy.

  “So what shall I above you do with you?” he asked.

  I decided to show a scrap of backbone.

  “You over me must already have a purpose for me,” I said, “or else why go to all this expense?”

  After three beats I thought he might be smiling, not from his mouth but from a bunching of his cheeks. At least there’s a grain of humor to this guy.

  “What makes you under me think I have saved you for something pleasant?” he asked.

  Uh-oh. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I still want you in the dark,” he said. It was like saying, “I’m still furious at you.”

  I looked up, and despite myself, I looked into his eyes. There was a click-and-whir of unorthodox contact. Eyeballing was seldom if ever done around here. Still, I couldn’t look away.

  His eyes weren’t friendly.

  “Now, you underneath me,” he said, “I owe you a dark debt.” He paused. “I am going to do many things to you.”

  Oh, chingalo, I thought. Think of something.

  I looked around frantically. I looked at the guard. He was still crouching, unmoving, two arms to 2JS’s right, facing away from him and staring down at an empty spot on the red cotton groundcloth. I looked at the monkey remembrancer. He’d stopped writing and was cleaning his brush in a leather water cup. I looked at the stacks of baskets and bales. I looked at the old dude in the veil.

  Huh. I realized what was odd about his arms. They were hairy.

  As you probably know, Native Americans don’t have a lot of body hair. I have exactly—I mean, my Jed body, which was probably relaxing with a pińa colada about now—has exactly five chest hairs. And that body’s more than a third Spanish. Around here, in these old days—well, I hadn’t seen any body or facial hair at all yet. But I’d known it wasn’t unheard of, since in the twenty-first century I’d seen more than a couple of old Maya figurines with beards. Maybe you had to be from some special family to grow them, or you had to be over seventy years old, or something. I looked at him more closely. He had a pebble in his hand. And from the way he held it—

  He’s a sun adder, I thought.

  No wonder he’d been allowed to be here this whole time, to hear all this stuff … the more your adder knew about your business, the better. That is, the farther ahead he’d be able to read for you. Of course he has to be trusted, a total confidant. Like a confessor. This guy was probably only in-house. Maybe he was even a bit of a captive, since he’d know secrets.

  I turned to the adder.

  “I next to you request a Game,” I said.

  [38]

  The adder’s head tilted slightly under the veil.

  “I don’t own anything right now,” I went on, “but what I can find to give, in this light or the next or the next, I will offer, to you and to Lady Turd, who is the Cradler of Tonight, 9 Darkness, 11 Rainfrog”—it was Monday, March 28, AD 664—“and to Mam and the Waiting Woman, the smokers of the Game.”

  Silence.

  The veil twitched. I interpreted the motion to mean the head under it was turning to look at 2
JS. I looked at 2JS. He looked back. There was that shock of eye contact again, and before I turned down again I thought I could see a sort of weary wisdom behind his yellowing lenses, not anything passive or placid but an amused awareness of what was possible and what wasn’t.

  2JS said

  “My adder underneath me, 7 Prong,

  Reads only for his chiefs,

  But he can play a bone-count duel against you.”

  Oh, hell, I thought. Duel. Great. 7 Prong, huh? Charming. I wondered whether they’d kill me if I lost. Probably, I thought—

  Suddenly the guard whirled silently around and faced us, ready to lunge forward and strangle me. 2JS must have signaled him somehow. He signed to the guard in a language Chacal didn’t know. I realized the guard was deaf. Probably he’d been deafened intentionally. And he’d been looking away, so he couldn’t read our lips. I thought 2JS might be telling him to take me away and feed me to the armadillos or whatever they normally fed people to, but instead the guard crouched to the back of the room and, with a symphony of creaks and crackles, climbed up onto a stack of baskets. I looked back at 2JS and then at 7 Prong. He’d unwrapped his veil and taken off his hat. He was older than 2JS, and there were streaks of gray in his long pigtail, and his face would have been nondescript if he hadn’t had a beard. But he did, and here, it was shocking. It wasn’t thick, and it was four inches long or so, but it was respectable, and tied into a cylinder like those Egyptian pharaohs’ beards, and I couldn’t help staring at it. His body was thin and old, and without any tattoos, except a row of four penny-sized blue dots on his left shoulder. But it was hairy. His eyes were bleary and friendly. He touched his right hand to his left elbow, which was the closest thing to shaking hands or nodding or whatever that seemed to get done in these sorts of sit-downs. I did the same, except, since he was senior to me, I touched the arm just above my elbow. Hi, guy, I thought. Hi from one adder to another. Brotherhood of Gamers. No problem.

  Without getting up 7 Prong turned so that he was facing me. I turned so that we were facing each other. He got out a pouch of tobacco, poured out a few leaves, and popped about half of them into his mouth. I took the rest. We chewed. Damn, this stuff is strong, I thought. He put a bowl of sand between us. I rubbed some of the tobacco juice into my thigh—there was no stain there on Chacal’s thigh, I noticed, this was his first time—and spat the rest out into the sand bowl. A minute later he did the same and pushed the bowl away. Meanwhile the guard had come back with a two-arms-long roll of thick cloth. He set it down between us and unrolled it. It felt as though the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree had just sprung into being, fully lit, in the small, gloomy room.

  It was a woven-feather game board. The time quadrants glowed carmine and buttery amber, and even the black quadrant was so glossy and Ethiopic that you felt you could fall into it. This was one of those freaks of artifice that you can’t believe was made by human fingers, like Gobelin tapestries, say, or Rajshahi silk brocades, or that crystal-beaded Romeo Gigli snood that Kristin McMenamy wore on the cover of Italian Vogue in October of 1993. It was octagonal, instead of square, and instead of circular bins, like the boards we’d made from Taro’s design, this one just had a tuft of quetzal-throat emerald at each of the 260 points. But I was still disappointed. I’d been hoping there’d be something new to me in the design, something that would help answer the questions I’d brought with me … but instead, no matter how gorgeous it was, it was pretty much like the layout Taro had worked out from the picture in the Codex.

  Damn.

  2JS slid off his cushion, kneed over to us, and turned the mat a few degrees counterclockwise so that the directions of the colors were correct. As it turned out—or, I suppose, intentionally—7 Prong was in the southeast, the Harpies’ direction, and I was playing for the black northwest.

  Like a good referee, 2JS ran through the rules. This version was a bit like the one-on-one Game I’d played a few rounds of with Tony Sic, but it was more similar to something my mother and I used to play. Although we hadn’t had the big board, of course. Anyway, it’s bit like Battleship, because you each have five points on the board corresponding to your throws, and you have to guess your opponent’s points and keep him from guessing yours. But to “guess” you have to move your stone onto that point, so you can also block the other guy with your seeds, to some extent. But then you try to fake him out by blocking decoy points and whatever. Anyway, you couldn’t lie—especially since 2JS knew what the points were anyway—but you could conceal and misdirect. I guess you could say it was also a little like Stratego—which is one of my favorite games—because there’s almost no chance, but it’s not perfect information either. Of course, it’s different from the real Sacrifice Game that you’d use for reading out someone’s days, but not entirely different. Maybe it’s about as different as gin rummy is from poker.

  The guard brought out a pot with a hole in the side. 7 Prong—who still hadn’t spoken except in sign language—looked away. I put my hand in the hole. 2JS looked down into the pot. I had to choose any five numbers between 0 and 260. I tried to make my choices as random as possible—which isn’t easy—and signed them to 2JS. I took my hand out of the pot. 2JS put his hand in, held the pot so I could see, and repeated my choices. He got them all right. Next I turned away and he did the same thing with 7 Prong. When they were done I turned back to the board. 2JS loaned me a quartz pebble and nine tz’ite-tree seeds. 7 Prong took out his own stone and seeds. We each touched our right hand to the ground at the side of the board. It was like the way you nod before you start a game of Go. Since he was senior to me, 7 Prong moved first. He scattered the seeds and moved his quartz pebble out to 11 Ahau.

  De todos modos. I scattered the seeds. I moved. He moved.

  Hmm. Okay. I think it’s going to go this way, no, wait, it’d go this way. Okay, first this happens, then they react to it by this, okay—

  Damn it. I couldn’t think the way I would have in my Jed body. I moved anyway. 7 Prong moved.

  Okay. Come on, Jed. Come on, Chacal’s brain. Focus.

  I thought. I was starting to sweat. Since we didn’t have a clock, I figured 2JS would interrupt and demand a move if I took too long.

  Okay. Come on. This way. That way. Here. There. At least Chacal had a high IQ, I thought. Imagine how bad it could have been. I might’ve gotten zapped into some idiot. Also, the Game’s really just a way of opening logic up to insight. You don’t have to be the greatest number-cruncher. Although it doesn’t hurt. I moved. He moved. I moved. He moved.

  Hmm.

  I moved.

  Correct, 7 Prong signed. Ha! I’d gotten one of his numbers.

  Okay. I was starting to get the hang of using Chacal’s head. At least my old skilz hadn’t all been in the lower levels of my brain. Wherever they were, they’d made the trip along with my Jedditude. Taro had been right, as usual.

  7 Prong got one of my numbers. I got another of his, and then another. On the hundred-ninety-second move, 7 Prong put both of his hands flat down on the mat, signaling that he resigned.

  Damn, I thought. That’s it?

  I’d been disappointed before, but now—even though I supposed I should have been happy that I’d passed a test—I was crushed. Mierda, I thought, this guy doesn’t know anything. Was he just a no-talent 2JS had brought in to discombobulate me? Or maybe they weren’t any better at the Game back here than we were back there. Maybe this whole thing was a waste. Or maybe I’d just ended up in the wrong place. Great, I’m way out here in the boonies with a bunch of bush-league losers. Hell, hell, hell and prostration.

  7 Prong signed something. 2JS signed back. I didn’t catch what they were saying. 7 Prong signed, “Agreed.” He took a fingerful of tobacco out of his pouch and popped it in his mouth.

  “T’aac a’an,” 2JS said. “Rematch.”

  “Agreed,” I clicked.

  The guard handed 2JS a big clay bowl. It was full of salt. 2JS reached down into the salt, rummaged around, and pulled out two tiny clay bottles, each sealed with wax. He put the first bottle down on
a small cotton cloth on the mat in front of him and folded the cloth over the bottle. The guard handed him a hammerstone. Delicately, 2JS crushed the bottle under the stone. He unfolded the cloth. An odd blue smell, something neither I nor Chacal had smelled before, grew in the room. 2JS stirred the bits of the bottle with his long black-lacquered and garnet-inlaid index fingernail. He picked out a tiny shriveled glob of what looked like brown wax—it was about the size of an Advil tablet—and laid it on the red quadrant of the board in front of 7 Prong. The adder took the tobacco mud out of his mouth, kneaded it together with the little bead, and put the bolus back into his mouth between his teeth and his upper lip. He didn’t chew it. 2JS broke open the second bottle. There was a pinch of coarse yellow powder inside. It looked like stale shredded Parmesan cheese. 2JS scooped up a tiny bit of the powder with the nail of his little finger and carefully held the finger out over the board. Slowly, 7 Prong leaned forward, got his nose into position, and snorted it up. He sat back. 2JS covered the remaining drugs with a pair of gourd bowls.