Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  I asked about the three other Ixian greathouses. 2JS said that two of them, the Macaws and the Snufflers, disliked the Ocelots as much as the Harpies did. But just like the Harpies, they were related to the Ocelots through webs of marriage and adoption. 2JS’s grandfather was 9FH’s grand-uncle’s brother-in-law. 9FH’s sister was the aunt of the patriarch of Macaw House. The patriarch of the Snuffler House had adopted two of 9FH’s nieces’ sons. And on and on. And a lot of these different families’ rights derived from their relationship to the ruling house. Attacking the Ocelots would be out of societal character, the way killing a family member still seems more evil to people than killing a stranger. And it would shake up the system so badly that the other houses would immediately start feuding with each other. And, of course, you’d have to give up on whichever of your relatives were currently “visiting” in the Ocelots’ compound.

  And even if all these problems somehow vanished, 9 Fanged Hummingbird was still a living god. Being the greatfathermother of a feline clan was like being the pope in Renaissance Italy. No matter what kind of a jerk the pope was, people believed he had God’s ear. Even mercenaries who’d stick at nothing else wouldn’t attack him. And if you took him down, you’d better be sure to become pope yourself, and in a hurry. For 2JS to come to power and hang on to it, the Ocelots would have to be forced to seat him in their mountain, that is, to acknowledge him as their rightful heir. They’d concoct some genealogical history “proving” that 2JS was a direct descendant of One Ocelot, and then, in a sham election at the popol na, the council house, they would “choose” him as their ahau. But, 2JS said, there was no chance this would happen.

  Of course, even in a premonetary society wealth does make power, and maybe, if things were allowed to run their course for another few k’atuns, the Harpies would become so rich they could hire mercenaries to help take on the Ocelots, or they’d marry into them, or they’d get all the other clans on their side, or something. But the Ocelots wouldn’t allow things to run their course. They wanted to clean the slate now, before the Harpies got any stronger, and they were on the lookout for any sort of insult from the Harpies that could start a conflict. They’d almost found it in the way I’d ruined 9FH’s reseating ceremony on the mul. And since then, they’d come up with something even more menacing.

  “The Ocelots have challenged us,” he said, “to a great hipball game, and I’ve named this sun: 1 Sweeping, 0 Gathering.”

  That was a hundred and six days from today. According to 2JS, great hipball games could only happen when a new yearbearer came in, which was once every four years. It had been eight years since the Ocelots’ team last played against the Harpies. In the old days, k’atuns ago, the most important hipball games were contests between the great ahaus and captured royal bloods from other cities. They’d given the ahau a chance to show he was still fit to rule. Other hipball games had functioned as duels between brothers, sons, or in-laws of the kings, resolving conflicts that might otherwise have led to civil war. “But in our own degenerate b’ak’tun,” as 2 Jeweled Skull put it, the overlords were usually represented by professional in-house hipball players, like me, Chacal. Sometimes a challenged house would even put together a sort of all-star team of loaned or freelance players from other cities. But the Harpies couldn’t do that this time without losing all the face in the world. The Ocelots’ team would be all in-house, so the defending team would have to be all Harpy bloods.

  And in most situations that would have been all right. The Harpy House’s team had done well for the last three war seasons. The team had been a good source of revenue for 2 Jeweled Skull, both from shares of winnings and from the trading contracts it had promoted. But this season the Ocelots’ team would be as good or better. And, 2JS said, Chacal’s being out of the lineup wasn’t going to help.

  Sorry, I thought.

  2JS told me—not in so many words, but more between the lines, if conversation has lines—that theoretically it was an honor to be invited to play against the ruling family, but actually it was usually a disaster. As per tradition, most members of each clan would want to stake a large part of their worth on the game. 2JS would be pressured into putting up more than half of his estate on their team. And their allies and dependents and other supporters would, collectively, stake even more. If the Harpies lost the game, they’d lose a huge amount of their property but stay alive and unenslaved, at least for a while. If the Harpies were winning in the last period, the Ocelots would probably pull a fake foul. The Harpies would have to contest it, and there’d be an instant civil war. Or, possibly, the Ocelots would manage to rig the game from the beginning, either by co-opting the umpires or by some other trick. Then they’d either take the property or, if the Harpies objected, start attacking. One way or another the Harpies were screwed. It was a transparent swindle, but it didn’t matter. You couldn’t refuse a challenge. Around here, if you lost face you lost everything.

  La gran puta, I thought. Well, at least I was starting to understand what I hadn’t before, that the Harpy House was under a huge amount of pressure. Maybe at some other time I would have been able to pull off the potter’s wheel project or whatever. But wherever you went, mafia bosses like 2JS and 9FH were always inches away from a turf war. And now, after my mul fiasco, 9FH was looking for an excuse to force the issue. And he was going to win.

  This is hopeless, I thought. I’m on the wrong side. I should just sneak out of here and defect to the Ocelots. Except that, A) I wouldn’t get out the door here, let alone in the door there, and B) they wouldn’t understand me the way he did. I’d be lucky if they just ate me without torturing me first—

  Uh-oh.

  I’d gotten a horrible feeling that 2JS was guessing what I was thinking. I mean, about trying to go over to the other side.

  I looked at 2 Jeweled Skull. He looked at me. I didn’t look away.

  At first, I thought I was waiting for him to order me killed. But as the stare-down wore on, second by second, I realized I was feeling almost close to him. Maybe it was just Stockholm Syndrome.

  Or just that when you’re in a weird spot you latch on to the person who’s most like you, even if that person’s totally out to get you. Maybe he’s actually not such a bad guy. Maybe he has so much of me in him that he feels close to me—

  Hang on. Don’t get cozy. He did just treat you to the worst hours of your life. Remember?

  “Tie your uay to its post at night,” he said. It was like saying, “Don’t get any ideas.” But he said it with a slight undertone of humor.

  Whew, I thought. Okay. Change the subject.

  “I want to play another Game,” I said. I said I wanted to try the Old Salter’s dust again, and I wanted to work out whether 11 Whirling was really closing in on me, and what the Harpies should do next, and what to do about the hipball game. I didn’t say I was better than 7 Prong, but it was obvious that I thought so.

  He said I shouldn’t have another dose for a few days. You had to “polish yourself ” against it, he said. That is, you had to increase dosages over years. But even if I did develop a tolerance, I wouldn’t know so much as 11 Whirling. There were secrets about the Game that the lower-skulled adders weren’t supposed to know and that the higher-skulled adders usually wouldn’t teach them. Kings didn’t want their house adders training too many apprentices, because an enemy might get hold of one of them. Most adders, even the ones who came from Maya cities, were trained in Tamoan, and only a few left the city in each k’atun.

  Tamoan? I wondered. I didn’t know the name, but it triggered an association in Chacal, a triad of huge pyramids.

  2JS said that of the thirty-two living nine-skulls that he knew of, eighteen of them were in Tamoan. The other fourteen were spread through different royal seats in Mesoamerica, with one or at most two per city. And unless I could study with one of them, I wouldn’t become a nine-skull myself. And I wouldn’t anyway, because I was too old.

  I understand, I signed. Damn it.

  “And even if you could make one of them teach you, you might not really learn anything,” he
said. For every nine-skull adder there were four hundred who never got that far.

  Bullshit, I thought, I’ll do fine. But I didn’t say it.

  And even if I did turn out to be a good student, he went on, I still wouldn’t be able to play the nine-stone Game without years of practice. Of the thirty-one nine-skulls, very few were under forty years old. Although, he added, some of the female ones were younger.

  I asked why.

  “Old Salter is friendlier to women,” he said. “So they say.” Yeah, I thought, either that or they’re just better at it.

  Also, he said, he only had a little left, and it was getting stale. It wasn’t so much about the dosage but about how fresh it was. The stuff did not improve with age. And the Ocelots weren’t going to let him have any more. Supposedly they were getting low on it themselves.

  “And besides all that,” he said, “11 Whirling will find you first. You have to be a nine-skull to fool a nine-skull.”

  It was frustrating, but I had to admit it made some sense. It was like how ratings in chess or Go are so solid that you don’t get too many upsets. Like in the Go world, say you were a 1-dan professional. Your odds of beating a 9-dan, in an even game, would be around one in thirty. And even though I’d felt amazing during that one-on-one Game, I was still only playing with one skull. I couldn’t imagine playing with more than four, let alone nine.

  Hmm. Speaking of that, there was something I’d been meaning to ask about … oh, right.

  “Is 11 Whirling really the only nine-skull in Ix?” I asked. “What about the woman in the Codex, the ahau-na Koh?”

  “I saw her in the book in your worm,” 2 Jeweled Skull said. “The lady Koh’s k’aana’obol ”—that is, her eldest maternal uncle—“is my e’ta’ taxoco’ obo l’ta’taxoco.” That is, he was the half-brother of 2JS’s second cousin’s maternal grandfather. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up, I thought.

  He said Lady Koh was born twenty-eight solar years ago in a village about two jornadas north of Ix. Her family was a branch of the royal house of Lakamha, that is, Palenque, and they were related to both the Ocelot and Harpy Houses of Ix. She’d shown physical signs of being a sun adder. One of the signs was that she had eleven children of her hands, that is, eleven fingers. When she was seven, the Ocelots arranged for her, and a few other children from upper-caste Maya families, to be sent to the Star Rattler compound in Tamoan. And the same number of children from the families of high-ranking Star Rattler tu’nikob’, that is, sacrificers or offering priests, or, literally, “sucklers”—got sent south from Tamoan to the Maya cities. I guess it was more of the guest/hostage system, but in this case it sounded like a bit of a student exchange program. Most of the Mayan apprentices couldn’t cut the mustard and had come back from Tamoan in a few years, but Koh had become one of the forty sun adderesses in the Star Rattler Society. In the meantime her home village had been absorbed by the Ti’kalob, and her family had been captured. 2JS didn’t know whether they’d been executed or whether they were still hostages.

  “The Codex said she was in Ix,” I said.

  2JS said that wasn’t true. He’d read the Codex in my memories, he said, and all it said was that she was from Ix.

  God damn it, I thought. Well, come to think of it, that glyph was a little ambiguous. Hell. Just one more in a grand parade of crushing setbacks. So Michael Weiner just assumed she’d be around here. Moron.

  “What about the Game in the Codex?” I asked.

  “I have a copy of that game,” 2JS said. Even though she played it for the Ocelots.

  Great, I thought. It’s a fucking best-seller. Although I guess that makes sense. I mean, if you were walking around the ruins of Orlando someday in the future and you pulled an ancient, crumbling book out of a junk heap, what would it most likely be, some incredibly apropos special significant secret thing? Or just Orlando for Dummies, or The Good News Bible, or Caddyshack: The Novelization?

  I asked him where the Game had been played. He said she’d staged it in Tamoan, as a gift to her relatives in the southeast.

  “You over me,” I asked, “is Tamoan a name for Teotihuacan?”

  “I don’t know that name,” he said.

  I told him I meant a huge city, with three great mulob’ and hundreds of lesser ones. I said it was about thirty-five k’inob—that is, jornadas, days’ journeys, if you figured a day of brisk hiking as about thirty miles—to the west by northwest.

  2JS clicked in a plosive way that was like saying, “Correct.”

  Hmm, I thought.

  Teotihuacan was an Aztec name. But the Aztecs, who first saw the city in the fourteenth century, knew it only as a gigantic ruin, and neither they nor anyone else knew what its real name had been. They said it was the place where the Fourth Sun and the Third Moon had been born. And as I think I may have said, it was the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, with at least two hundred thousand people, the size of London in 1750.

  2 Jeweled Skull said Teotihuacan—as we might as well call it, just for consistency—was just one jornada from the place where time had started, on 4 Overlord, 8 Darkness, 0.0.0.0.0, that is, August 13, 3113 BC. On that date the greatest greatfathermothers, the Green Hag and Hurricane, had built a city called Tola, with captive waterfalls in red coral towers and plazas tessellated with amethyst and jade. The first fleshly people lived there until 4 Overlord, 18 Forest, 7.0.0.1.0—that is, June 25, 353 BC. On that day Prank the Sun Chewer destroyed the city with a cyclone of hot knives. Nine-score survivors hid in a cave and later followed a vulture to the site of a secret spring about thirty miles east. After twenty sunless days, on 11 Overlord, 18 Cowering, they founded a new city, Teotihuacan. The survivors all bled themselves—that is, they swore—that in the new city, no one would ever do anything boastful, that is, anything that could possibly irritate Prank or any of the other smokers. No single ahau would exalt himself. Instead the city would be administered by a council of patriarchs from each of two moieties. Everyone in the city would belong to one or the other of these populations, either the red side, which owned the acts of war, or the white side, which owned the acts of peace. None of the patriarchs would exalt themselves by name, either in orations or in written inscriptions, and in fact writing was still a disreputable art. At dawn and at noon every person in the valley would be present under the sky and offer smoke to the smokers. There would be no deviation from the routine, not because of war, weather, disease, or any other reason. And for one thousand and seventeen years there hadn’t been.

  Teotihuacan’s empire had spread over the world. They had the closest thing to a regular military in the Western Hemisphere, with drilled infantry that marched in formation and fired volleys of darts from atlatls. Warlords from Teotihuacan had taken over Maya cities like Ti’kal and Kaminaljuyú and founded their own dynasties there. Hundreds of cities and thousands of towns sent preagreed “gifts” to the city every year. Teotihuacan controlled the trade in obsidian, which came from nearby mines, which was why in some dialects the empire was called K’Kaalom K’sic, the Domain of Razors. But it also exported hematite, rock salt, north-country slaves, and a dozen other things. And it had the monopoly on Old Salter’s and Old Steersman’s respective dusts.

  Still, over the last two centuries, the empire had weakened at the seams. Every year there were more and more people—or I guess we could call them barbarians—outside its borders, trying to get a piece of the action. Despite the infantry, some frontier outpost got raided almost every day. And worse than that, upstart towns within the empire were defaulting on tribute and ignoring the collectors, and undercutting the syndicate. For instance, the empire was supposedly in charge of the entire salt trade, but lately the Ixians and others were buying sea salt directly from villages on the coast. And the city of Teotihuacan itself was beset by what twenty-first-centuryites would call the troubles of urbanity: overcrowding, tuberculosis, economic decay, rural resentment, and, recently, what a twenty-first-century person would call religious issues, or, as he put it, “shouting and stoning around Star Rattler’s House.”

  It wouldn
’t last much longer. As I think I mentioned somewhere, archaeologists had dated the end of the city’s main phase to between AD 650 and 700. But despite all the advances in pollen DNA dating, radioisotope dating, and a dozen other dating technologies, as of 2012 they hadn’t yet narrowed it down more than that.

  Not that the place would exactly fall into a memory hole. By around AD 1000 the Toltecs would be the dominant civilization in the Mexican Highlands, and although it’s not clear whether they were closely related to the Teotihuacanos, it’s probably fair to say that most of their culture ultimately derived from Teotihuacan. And three hundred years after that, the so-called Aztecs would take over what was left of the Toltec cultural system and parlay it into an empire that in 1518 would be nearly as large as Teotihuacan’s empire was now.

  Anyway, the main thing was that the empire certainly hadn’t collapsed yet. 2JS said he thought it was mainly because the Two Popolob’ of Teotihuacan—hmm, maybe in this case we should translate Popolob’ as “Synods,” because they were religious councils as much as secular ones—could cut off supplies of the Salter’s and Steersman’s dust to any client regime that stopped supporting them. The network of sun adders, which was like a loose international guild, might pick up some of the slack, but at some point they ran out of the stuff and needed more from the source. He suspected, he said, that the synods had cut down on the supply lately because they wanted to set off minor wars between different Maya cities, in order to keep them weak. More than anything else the Game was a peacekeeper. When governments can’t predict what’s going to happen, that’s when they get paranoid, and that’s when the situation devolves.