All the caravans had stopped. Everyone faced forward, to the northeast. The birds resettled. We got out our candelarias. Now the bulk of the booming came from over the ridge ahead of us, from the holy city. Drums answered from far across the lakes, coming in a half-beat late to sync with the echoes. Go for it, I thought. Rock the Casbah. The rumble filled up the valleys and the world seemed to shrink. Smaller household drums took up the beat until it broke into hundreds and then thousands of smaller, less disciplined voices and dissolved into an unparsable global rattling, like all the snare drums Ludwig ever made. Lighter-men were passing through the caravans with fatwood brands and one of them lit my incense burner. He whispered something about how it was fresh fire from the Hurricane mul. Do I tip this guy? I wondered automatically, but he was gone. Ah, that clean resin scent. Thats the smell of freshness. Ouch. Id burned my thumb. Damn. I turned the thing around and held it level with my forehead so the unbreathed smoke could float up. On either side of us women and babies and wobbling oldsters crowded the warehouse rooftops and held up their censers. Nobody within the citys orbit could get out of presenting her-or himself to the sun at dawn and noon. Even if you were a hundred years old, even if you were quadriplegic, even if it was pouring rain, in fact especially in the rain, to say thanks for the damn rain, you had to be there. And if somehow they couldnt drag you outdoors, they hanged you. So a little fresh air was pretty much compulsory.
The drums faded into an all-over chanting, a deep-throat ululation in a language that seemed to have fewer consonants than Hawaiian. I just mumbled along under my mouth comb. Later I heard that supposedly no one remembered what the words meant. Maybe everyone was just mumbling along. I plejuh legion … to the flag … Dont notice me, Im just one of the sheep.
The chant faded. Like everyone around me I got some sand out of the path and snuffed out my incense. We walked up the last flight of wide white stairs, into the cooler air of the pass, through a big Karamon-like ceremonial gateway, and over the crest of the ring
Baax ka mulac teen? 2 Hand asked. But where is the city?
THREE
Razortown
THE SEAS OF WINGS
[45]
A lake of fog filled the valley below us, with only the wide cone of Cerro Gordo, the citys White Mountain, outlined against the gray sky. We stood on a pass at the south end of the basin, and the stepped road descended in front of us between big, blocky stuccoed villas, down the long grade to what I knew was a smooth alluvial plain. Its not fog, I thought, its blue. Its smoke, copal offerings from a few hundred thousand of those little censers. And just in the last second a layer of the smoke had sheared off from the top of the bowl of still air, so that now you could see one and then three orange lights in the mist, almost level with us, one far away framed by Cerro Gordo and then two closer and to the right, and then you could just see shapes swelling beneath them and see that the lights were the watchfires at the apices of the three great mulob, the Jade Hags mul at the north end, farthest from us, and then the gigantic Hurricane mul on the right, and then, closer on the right and smaller than the other two, the indigo-blue mul of the Star Rattlers Children. Other fires gleamed out of the gray, each at the peak of one of the hundreds of other mulob, not so high as the three biggies but no dwarfs, either, and then, as the smoke rose and dissipated, more and more things solidified Brigadoonishly out of the haze, very very very solid things, growing by slow accretion like crystals of alexandrite in a laboratory vat, a molecular-scale skeleton morphing into a jewelscape for giants.
When I first saw it in ruins thirteen hundred and fifty-one years later, I was a late-twentieth-century urbanite, more than a little blasé about jet travel and skyscrapers, and I was still overwhelmed. For an eighth-century Mesoamerican there could be no conceivable doubt that this was the earthly paradise, the greatest city that ever had been or ever would be, that it had been built by gods before men existed, and that its rulers today were descendants of those gods, sitting unassailably in the center of the twenty-three shells of the universe. There are no words in English, Spanish, Cholan, Klingon, or any other language that could convey the otherworldly awe of this place at the height of its power. Before you could see the crowds you could hear or feel them, like if you put your hand on the outside of a beehive, and then you could just see that the surfaces, all the horizontal surfaces, were crawling with orange and black and gray specks, that the place was packed. Theres no way all those people can get indoors, I thought. This cant be the usual population. They must be sleeping outside, on top of each other. Swollen, swollen …
As at Ix, only a tiny proportion of the construction had survived into the twentieth century. But unlike at Ix, those fragments had been excavated and restored in the early twentieth century. Id spent a few weeks here in 1999 and knew the archaeological map well. Now I could see how botched and misleading the INAH restoration had been. But even if it had been perfect, there was still so much here that wouldnt last, so much that was new, that I barely recognized the place Id studied. What the tourists would see was just the center of the teocalli zone, brown and stony in the middle of nowhere. Now that center was just one more elaborate part of a packed metropolis that spread out and out, a formation of interlocking hives that seemed more like one single building than many and that sprawled over the entire valley and all the hills, right up and over Cerro Gordo, a landscape of aggressive artificiality like you associate with places like Hong Kong or Las Vegas and not with the premodern world. There were no streets visible, since the streets were just narrow alleys between wide houses or rather kin-based apartment compounds, so that from here the residential areas looked more like a Middle Eastern city than any other Old World type, except for little things like the colors and the style. Like Manhattan the city was oriented a bit east of north, in this case 15.25 degrees, to align with Kochab, and the long, straight chain of sunken courts and wide spectator walls that the Aztecs would much later call the Street of the Dead stretched straight away from us. Actually, it wasnt a street at all, and from the look of things today it was barely even a processional route but a series of linked plazas, and it bristled with towers that hadnt been even thought of in the reconstructions. I guess for clarity Ill just call it the main axis. Now you could see that the Hurricanes mul was black and red, and the Jade Hags mul was black and white, and the Rattlers mul was black and cerulean blue. The Hurricanes mul loomed like a heart attack against the hills, like, whoa, thats bigger than big, its on a completely different scale, its not built for humans. You could feel the mass, the sheer gravity, of the core, like if you put a steel ball down on a level surface it would roll toward it. The same fire had been burning continuously for over forty-four years, since the last gap in the cycle, but theyd extinguish it eleven lights from now so that it wouldnt defy the Prank, the Black Chewer. Then, when the eclipse lifted, theyd light it again from the sun itself. The thing had a numbing certainty that simply didnt allow for the possibility of dissent. Who could even think of revolt against that?
Now you could clearly see the Jade Hags mulmuch later the so-called Pyramid of the Moonstaring down the end of the titanic street. It was too far to see clearly through the smoke and steam, but it seemed to have flecks of something swarming around it. Birds? Something in my eyes? The third great mul, the blue one, the only blue building in town, the House of the Star Rattler Society, was where it should be, aggressively chunked down at the southeast end of the main axis like a rook sliding over onto the king file. It was smaller than either of the others but infinitely more ornate and still huge enough not to mess with, in fact quite a bit bigger than it would be in the reconstructed version centuries later, which would uncover an earlier façade. There was more than a touch of the Maya South about it, with its surface of interwrithing snakes, but even so the design had been geometricized or Mexicanized or Cubisticized or whatever, so that it both fitfat?fit in and didnt fit in with the re
st of the city, another bit of asymmetry, in this case, maybe, more destabilizing.
In the center of the main axis, in the big plaza in front of the Hurricane mul, there was a fourth element that wasnt on my mental map. 2JS hadnt mentioned it, and it hadnt been reconstructed by archaeologists. How could they have missed it? Damn, it was big, a huge steep cone sticking up like a green thumb, almost as tall as the mul. As I focused on it, it resolved into a sort of open pagoda with thirteen floors or platforms, each about five arms above the other. The ant people crawling around on it were naked and painted with streaks of gray, which meant they were slaves. I decided that it must be woven out of reeds and green wood and that it was probably the xcanacatl, the sort of bonfire-of-the-vanities thing that 12 Cayman had talked about. That would mean it would be finished and packed with offerings in time for the darkness, and that after the sucklers drove off the Chewer, theyd light it with the fresh fire of the second dawn.
The Jade Hags mul faces down the main axis like a general at a review, but the Hurricane mul faces off against emptiness. Theres only a medium-sized plaza on the other side of the main axis to balance it, and it doesnt balance it, and the swollen hulk stares out alone into the west, and theres a sense of loneliness or loss. There was that feeling of a question, like say you see a Classical marble athlete with a raised arm, and that arms broken off at the shoulder and you wonder, is he saluting? Is he throwing a javelin? Is he raising a sword? Or maybe if you hear the first part of a musical phrase without a resolution, and its so disturbing you try to come up with a resolution yourself and hum it. There was an odd sense of expectation … a sense not exactly of something incomplete but simply of waiting, a Miss Havisham feeling of a world-size table set for an important guest, some great visitor outside, arriving soon.
[46]
Our porters hesitated. Mine mumbled a little protective prayer in a village languageGrandfathers, look out for me, or something like thatbut 12 Cayman got them going again and we moved forward and down. My mouth comb was dripping wet and ouchy on my septum. Because the road had stairs, it didnt have to zigzag like Old World roads, and a few times I thought Id pitch forward. Waves of drying chilies, boiling corn, burning feces, and the clayish tang of freshly chipped flint and obsidian passed through us. Constant clicking and grinding sounds rose up to us from the flint-and polished-tool quarters, like thousands of click beetles and hieroglyphic cicadas. A white-faced registrar from the Aura House came through and took names, titles, and amounts, and knotted them into a tangle of cords like an Inca quipu.
We regrouped. There were only twenty people left in our core party. This didnt seem like a good sign. We moved down again. As the Hurricane mul rose level with us, its angles shifted in an inexplicable rhythm, layers coming into view and fading out again, steep and less steep and then steeper, in some kind of logical progression.
When we were nearly level with the valley floor, about a half-mile from the teocalli district, we turned west off the trade route into what I guess you could call a pedestrian alleyway. It was packed with people, and 14s men got into the front of our line, swinging these sort of flails to beat the riffraff out of the way. Place, place, pour le Reverend Pčre Coronel. We moved slowly past a row of doors that had recently been boarded up, or rather filled with stones and tied over with vine ropes. Hmm. Expecting trouble? Too many sailors in town?
Citizens edged sideways around us on either side. They stared at us, not with any hostility, I thought, but in a blankly curious way that was still disturbing. Maybe it was just the paint. Maya faces only got painted on a few special occasions. The Teotihuacanos painted their faces whenever they went out. But also the face paint here was aggressively abstract, with dark bands across the eyes that camouflaged the features and made everyone look the same, except for clan-marking dots that I couldnt read anyway. Some of them had ulcers or pustules under the paint, and really a lot of them didnt look that healthy. There was a lot of coughing and hawking. Theres tuberculosis around here, I thought. Its a population sink. Probably a lot of parasitic infections, maybe some unclassified plagues … well, great, thats all we need.
We edged forward. The crowds got thicker. I was getting a creepy feeling about this place. I mean, on top of the ten thousand other creepy feelings. Whats bugging me? I wondered. It wasnt that it was messy, in fact there was a certain Shinto cleanliness to the town. And it wasnt filled with shady characters. If anything, there was almost a middle-class air about the people wed passed. You sure wouldnt get that in a Maya city. In Ix you were either a hot-shot or not. Maybe it was just that the walls here were all rubbed with carbon and looked like fresh charcoal, mute matte black with sparkles. Its just a strange feeling to be in a black city. On the other hand, it wasnt so uniformly black as it had looked from the pass. The pavement, where there was any, was red stone, there were colored fabrics in the upper windows, there were the bands of shell, and the foliage drooping down from the roof arbors gave the place a lush sort of Hanging Gardens of Babylon feeling … still … maybe it was just that there were no written inscriptions. Nope, no signs, no glyphic monuments, no bills posted, nothing. In fact, 12 Cayman had said there was no written version of the language. Maybe writing was frowned upon as sumptuary excess. At any rate, except for a few accountants whod learned writing from imported Maya scribes, the Teotihuacanos were illiterate. Still, they kept a pretty tight ship, administratively. We turned north, into an even darker alley.
Whyd we have to be in the white district, that is, the black side? I wondered. I bet the red side of town is nicer. And why the hell is the black side called the white side? Its like how in the U.S. what they call the red states arent red. And in fact theyre the more anticommunist states. Its just to be confusing.
Every family in the city belonged to one of two moieties. The Aura, or white, or peace moiety lived, in general, on the westernblackside of the main axis. There were hundreds of major white lineages, but the most important one was the Morning Glory lineage. The patriarch of the Morning Glories was someone named 40 Agouti, who 2JS said was also Lady Kohs local foster father and the archon of the White synod. Supposedly another name for him was the Peacelord. The other, red moiety, the Swallowtails, was traditionally led by the Puma lineage. The Warlord, the head of the Puma lineage, was someone by the odd-to-me-sounding name of Turd Curl. Auras traditionally dealt with agriculture, water allocation, what wed call religion, trading, and most crafts. The Swallowtails dealt with war, as well as with weapons crafts and foreign trade. Youd think having a division like that would be a recipe for trouble, but because there was no intramarriage within the moietiesthat is, an Aura woman has to marry a Swallowtail man and vice versathe two groups were heavily interrelated and mutually dependent. For centuries the balance between them had held up. This may also have been because of an almost socialist ethic. Clan leaders werent supposed to be honored outside their own families, and the city wasnt ruled by any single person but by two councils composed of the heads of the hundred or so main lineages in each moiety.
We took another turn into a narrower alley. It was filled with people who had to basically back up to get out of the way. A little farther on, finally, we stopped. 14s herald climbed up the steep staircase. We all followed, up about two stories into the white sunlight.
Wed gotten to about the same height as the Hurricane mul and had a good view of the white quarter. Flat terraced rooftops stretched away on all sides, broken with flower and fruit gardens growing in shallow beds of lava silt and night soil. Plumes of sweatbath steam rose out of hidden vents and vanished quickly in the dry air. A few of the compounds went up to roughly three stories, but most were at the same height so that you could walk across catwalks from one compound to the next, like you do in the pueblos or in the old quarters of cities in Muslim Africa. Behind us the porters handed up the bundles. I passed the ready signal forward and we padded generally nor
thward on rattley plank bridges. Hun Xoc pointed out rows of big covered pots at the edges of the roofs and said they were full of water in case there was a fire. Finally we teetered onto the roof of the Harpy trading house. It was part of a larger compound of buildings housing avian-clan Maya families from a few different lowland cities. Something was going on down in the street in front of us, but I couldnt see it. It sounded like somebody was getting beaten up. 14s fellator had to call down to the street to ask what was going on, and there was another slowdown while somebody shouted up and explained it all to him, and then somebody elses voice came in and explained it differently. Damn it, we dont have all day, I thought. I pushed through to 12 Cayman.
Lets send a courier to Lady Koh now, I said in the Harpy House language.
We should wait until we are covered, he said, meaning indoors. He said it wasnt a good idea to flash our merchandise where random people could see it.
Brian D'Amato Page 56