Its true, I thought. People were crowding around on other rooftops to see what was up. I clicked, Okay.
I went back to my spot in the line. I rocked up and down on my feet.
14 came back and explained what we were hearing. Apparently a woman was getting killed by the acolytes of the Morning Glory Synod, who I guess were like Taliban religious enforcers, for having a sneezing fit during the noon vigil.
12 Cayman ordered us not to go down to the street. He said we might not be able to get in through the formal door. Instead we climbed down a half-ladder, half-staircase into a small courtyard. It was about thirty arms square, empty except for a table altar in the center and a big wooden ancestor in each corner, with a single door in each wall. Automatically, we formed up on the east side of the courtyard, the direction wed come from. 14s group stood on the west. Basically the whole household, which was at least fifty people, had come out to gawk at us. There was a minute of awkwardness. One was supposed to ask permission to come into a house before you were in the house. Now here we were already in the house. Still, 12 Cayman gave a foot sign and we got out the cigars and went into our greeting routine. It seemed to me that 14 Wounded and his men kept checking me out, out of the corners of their eyes. I knew some of them had seen Chacal play. Still, I looked totally different, didnt I? Its probably just that I was a striking-looking character. Id been coming to realize that I had a certain personal charisma or physical presence, a lot more than I had as Jed. Chacal had been a major athlete, and even though I tried to subdue my movement, his body still carried itself like one. Its like when you meet some top baseball player, you can tell in a second hes someone special. I got a twinge of stage fright. 2 Jeweled Skull had drilled me on the right salutations to use with 14s household, the different way Id have to walk in Teotihuacan, how to crouch below someone or stand tall over someone else, where I should sit in relation to 12 Cayman, to the hearth, to my own attendants, on what words was it all right to look up and when I should just look down, and on, and on, and on. But even so, my rank in the group was still a little unclear, and that made it difficult for everybody. And around here you could offend somebody just by, say, facing in the wrong direction. Be careful, I thought. Not nervous, but careful. Hun Xoc sidled a little closer, either to make my face a little harder to see or to show support. Thanks, I thought. Youre a good guy.
14 led us over to one of the big wood figures, the one in the southeast corner. It was an ugly, chunky, nearly naked seated female, a little under life-size, not an ancestor like Id thought, but maybe the Jade Hag. 14 and an assistant held the thing by knobs on the shoulders and knees and lifted it up. Only the front half came up. That is, the whole statue opened up like a clam, and the entire anterior section of the body came off, with half of each arm and half of each of the crossed legs, down to the calves. The feet, and the posterior half, stayed on the stone base. The whole thing was filled with little painted clay dolls, about sixty of them. They were all over, not just in the torso section but fastened onto the back of the arms, the inside of the legs, just crawling all over. I guessed that each one represented somebody in 14s household. Maybe matryoshka dolls are kind of the same idea. An attendant came over with a tray of twenty dolls, one for each of us, and we stood around while a painter marked each one with colors to individualize them.
I snuck a look at Hun Xoc. What fresh insanity is this? his expression said. I looked away so that I wouldnt smile. The painter handed me my doll. It was a squat, cheap, moldmade clunky thing with a big Teotihuacan-style headdress, not like me at all except for the red stripes on the sash. But I guess now that Id held it, it was me. I waited my turn and gave the doll to the acolyte. He tied it onto a spur that projected from the shell under the statues left buttock. Does the spot mean anything? I wondered. Or is that just where they had some room left? 12 Cayman hesitated a moment before he put in his figurine. This was a Mexican affectation. Not Maya. I got the sense that 12 Cayman felt that 14 Wounded was going a little too native. When everyone was in they closed the thing up again. In spite of myself I got a feeling like the body wall was closing over me and I was all safe and cozy in the big civic organism, with zero individual freedom. Maybe it was the same with everything in Teotihuacan, it was all little mulob huddled around big mulob, small plazas enclosed in bigger plazas, and everything dependent on something else.
Now that we were family, we finally got invited into the sweathouse. As we trooped into the north archway, 12 Cayman made some excuse and he, Hun Xoc, 3 Returning Mothour remembrancer/reciter/accountantand I managed to split off and duck into a side door. It wasnt polite, but 12 Cayman had been in the house before and he outranked everyone here.
We needed a little privacy, but the first room we tried had a horrible smell that turned out to come from a clutch of five slaves. They were about eight years old and squatted patiently in the corner of a wall, tied together with ceremonial light rope. One flinched at the flies crawling over his shoulders but didnt swat at them. Too passive. We went through another courtyard. There were cisterns, avocado trees in baskets, yellow cotton mantas drying on racks, and women in yellow quechquemitlsthat is, the triangular things gals wore here instead of huipilsdying strips of something in a barrel. All very normal, I thought. Relax. We found a darker, deserted room. It had a provisional bandits-cave look, with bolts of cloth stacked against the walls and big jars whose shape meant they contained pure salt. One of 14s attendants followed us in, but 12 Cayman glared at him in that dark way and he backed out. Hun Xoc undid his bundle and dug out the gift wed brought for Lady Koh. It was a head-sized box of four hundred score tiny gorgetsthat is, throat skinsof male violaceous trogons. When he opened it up to check them out, they seemed to glow in the gloom like a nuclear pile. It was an incredible gift, representing hundreds of man-days, worth who knew what.
[47]
One peculiarity of ours was that despite all the books, we didnt really have a culture of letters. I mean, like, memos or epistles. You didnt really send people written material, and the few times you did, it was always just ceremonial writing bundled together with something, like a card accompanying a gift. No one would ever just dash off a note to someone. For that we used remembrancers, people like 3 Returning Moth, who could speak ten languages, who were certified runners, who were practiced at standing up to torture, and who could listen to a long speech once and recite it back anytime in the future without losses or misprisions. I guess I was like that, back when I had my old brain. Except for the running and torture part. So what I was doing was already a bit of an innovation. Well, at this point, maybe we had to scrap the low-profile thing. Anything to get this womans attention. Even if it raises a few eyebrows.
12 Cayman asked if Hun Xoc or I had anything to add to the message 2JS had worked out. We said no. He recited the message. 3 Returning Moth repeated it back. It was both a request for the gift of an audience and a warning that we, as emissaries of part of Kohs family, had an obligation to tell her about a threat. But we didnt know how shed receive it. Her loyalties might be divided.
12 Cayman said that on the way here hed found out exactly where Lady Koh was. I wondered whether hed been discreet enough with the inquiry. Well, hes pretty cagey, I thought. Its fine. Im sure its fine. He told us shed be in the east building of her convent. Then, surprising me, he said that we had to wait for two ninths and that he was sending two of 14 Woundeds people along.
Local escort, I thought. Hell. So much for secrecy.
We waited in the antechamber of the sweat lodge with 14 Wounded and his fellator, a son of 14s named Left Yucca. We got our hair done. You always had to look your best around here. I guess its like being a celebrity, a female celebrity anyway, with something to promote, youre just going to one ghastly gala event after another, spending hours every day on hair and makeup when you could be learning Greek. Hun Xoc and I were having our hair redressed in the Teotihuacanob styl
e, with thinner local oil and without beads or knots. Most Ixian would be too proud, or you might even say too patriotic, to do anything of the kind, but we wanted to be able to blend in if we had to. Blissfully, wed taken out our nose bars.
The Teotihuacano were famously laconic, not chatty like the Ixob, and 14 Wounded and his little court had picked up the mannerism. But 12 Cayman had kind of cleverly drawn him out, and now 14 was telling us how at the moment there were at least a thousand native Maya living herenot that we had a concept like Maya, though, just the names of different city-statesand out of those, only about thirty were Ixob. Eighteen of those were from Harpy-dependant clans and lived in this house, and the others were from lineages allied with the Ocelots. Compared to the hundred or so Tikalan here it was a small community. And since lately 14 Wounded had had to avoid the Ocelots, I figured he probably felt pretty isolated.
12 Cayman asked where the Ocelots were centered. Of everyone in Teotihuacan they were the people we most had to avoid. Luckily for us they have to live with the Pumas, 14 said. And the Pumas are becoming impossible.
According to 14 the current situation in Teotihuacan couldnt last much longer. Chalco, Zumpanco, and five other city-states in the huge Valley of Mexico economic zonewhich had all been uncomplaining subordinates of Teotihuacan for centurieswere now defaulting on tribute. Most seriously, they werent sending more fuel wood to the metropolis Teotihuacans limekilns. 14 didnt say any more about this, but my guess was that over the years the deforestation had caused the flooding, erosion, and mudslides wed seen on the trek through the valley.
Even so, he said, more immigrants than ever, especially Too-Talls, were pouring into town. He said the Too-Talls were the biggest problem in Teotihuacan. There were four hundred times four hundred times four hundred families of them, which was an idiom for a whole lot. If all of them got together, he said they could overrun this whole place. They were descended from coyotes, which was why they were so smelly. They had to be wiped out.
The problem was that the city was obligated to host anyone who showed up. Now, just based on what Id heard of their language, my guess about the Too-Talls was that they were the same people whose descendants, or close relatives, anyway, would be known as the Toltecs. So I was a little curious about them. But 14 said that the Too-Talls were low-clan fog gravelersI didnt know what that meant and didnt get a chance to askwhod been kicked out of their own city and were overrunning the valley looking for things to steal. From what I could tell, their city was about a hundred miles due north of here. I couldnt identify it as any site I knew about. 14 claimed that hed been there and said it was a low, sprawling, stinking barbaric place where the children ate feces and packs of coyotes ran through the courtyards.
The Pumas go out hunting for them in the hills, he said. But they cant do that inside the valley. There had been street fights and riots, and the Puma sentries had become insupportably overbearing. Over the last few peace seasons there had already been food shortages and brown scabssome kind of plaguein the poorer sections of the city. Now, with the irregular rain, the coming harvest was expected to be the worst in seventy-one years.
And finally, he said, there was the growing tension between the Star Rattler Society and the synods of the two great moieties. The way he explained it, it sounded to me like there were parallels to Rome in the second century AD. The Star Rattler Cult was enjoying a resurgence, especially among the hearthless tribes and roundhousers, that is, the lower-caste clans who were constantly gravitating to the city. The Rattler Society was pledging more and more followers or converts every day, people affiliated with both the white and red moieties who were disgruntled with what you might call the stultification of Teotihuacano society. It sounded as though the Rattler Society offered a less hierarchical, less ancestor-based religion, with an overarching protector whose body wasnt localized in any specific shrine on earth but was the Milky Way itself. 14 said many of these new converts had also blooded themselves in particular to the charismatic Lady Koh.
The Rattler Cult was something like a Protestant movement, like Akhenatons long before or Luthers long after. Wherever you have a syndicate of priests operating for a long time, they accrue a huge amount of wealth and people start getting resentful. And right now the Rattlers were riding a trend of burgeoning popularity among the dispossessed. The Silence would start six days from today, which would be five days before the eclipse. During that time the city would be under blackout and all fires would be put out, even the great fires at the peaks of the mulob. Athough there was a regular Silence every fifty-two years, this was a specially decreed off-schedule one, which was even more frightening. Those five days wouldnt be protected by any friendly smokers, or ancestors, or anyone, because they werent real, name-able days at all, just cosmic mistakes. The people would feel adrift in a nightmare flextime at the mercy of hearthless, malevolent uayob. A lot of people evidently hoped to make it through by walking on the white back of the Rattler, that is, asking it for protection when everyone else had abandoned them. At any rate, it was going to get harder each day to see Lady Koh. Wed have to move soon.
Still, with all this, 14 didnt seem very worried. In fact, if anything he seemed blasé. Maybe hed soaked up some of the myth of Teotihuacans eternality. Of course, it was true that the place had been more stable than the Maya cities. If a Maya ahau screwed up a couple years in a row, the whole administration would be apt to change, by abdication or by coup. Or the place could be seen as tainted and abandoned. Teotihuacan was different. But that didnt mean it would last forever.
14 Wounded paused. 12 Cayman was silent. Neither he nor Hun Xoc nor I had mentioned Lady Koh. And wed told 3 Returning Moth, the remembrancer, not to tell his escort where he was going.
Lately, 14 went on, the Puma sentries had been harassing Rattler converts on their way from the market to the Rattlers Forumthe Ciudadelaand two days ago a family of converts had been killed. Relatives were demanding restitution from the Pumas, and people said the Swallowtails had broken their bargain with the rains.
So, with all this going on, the chewingthe solar eclipse coming up eight days from nowwould be a dangerous moment.
Pause. 12 Cayman looked at Hun Xoc and then at me. He had that scary look of a commanding officer, but he didnt say anything. We didnt either.
You next to me, have you offered to our greatfathers together with Lady Koh? 12 Cayman asked. For all we knew, she might not just be under house arrest. 12 Cayman was trying to make sure she was still alive.
14 Wounded didnt answer directly. Instead he said that he and the other Harpies in Teotihuacan used to see Lady Koh in Rattler processions, but lately shed been missing from them. But he said that, like a few of the other Rattlers sucklers, she was also said to be a top orator and that there was a rumor that lately she had been receiving pledges of personal service from many of the hundreds of people who were, every day, joining the Rattler Society.
They say that four war seasons ago someone denounced her at the Puma Synod, he said. And that night a scorpion came into his house and stung him, and his eyeballs popped and he went blind. He said shed predicted the flood of three peace seasons ago, that she only saw the heads of a few of the top Rattler-pledged greathousers and wouldnt take any more clients, that she had two wives, and that she could read the unborn katun, that is, that she could see twenty years into the future. And she can talk to spiders and make them spin colored webs or weave ropes and banners.
I looked at Hun Xoc. He looked downa Maya shrugmeaning, Well, its possible. Stranger things happen.
The Two Synods dont trust her, 14 said.
Apparently Lady Koh was near the top, but not at the top, of a society or order called the Children of the Orb Weaver. They were women who, for ritual reasons, could act and speak as men and wear mens clothes. I guess we could call them cross-dressers
, only that sounds like its just an act. Epicines? No, that sounds femmy. Hmm. They use the word berdaches in a lot of textbooks, but really thats more specific to males from the Plains cultures. Maybe we should just call them androgynes. Although that sounds a little biological, but whatevs. Anyway, over the last two tunob, he said, Koh and the rest of the Orb Weavers, and also their corresponding order of biologically male Rattler sucklers, had practically become hostages. He didnt put it this way, but to me it sounded as though the Puma sentries had put them under a kind of house arrest. It reminded me of this guy at the poker room in Commerce who used to wear sunglasses at the one-two table, like, Ooh, I dont want anyone to get a tell on me while I go for that big twenty-two-dollar pot.
A messenger whistled. 12 Cayman whistled back, meaning, You have permission to come in. He crouched over and whispered to 12 Cayman. 12 Cayman made his excuses and left. I followed him into the little passage. 12 Cayman turned and whispered to me that 3 Returning Moth had come back and said the cedar stick had been brokenthat is, that Lady Koh wouldnt see us.
[48]
12 Cayman, Hun Xoc, and I found 3 Returning Moth and took him and his guard into the storeroom, the one with the jars of salt, to clean him up. Given all the ups and downs of traveling in the city, hed probably run about three miles each way and was sweating and trying not to pant. Sunlight slanted through the oculus at a low angle. It was already the equivalent of four p.M. Late. 3 Returning Moth said he was as sure as he could be that Lady Koh had personally gotten the message. Shed sent the feathers back with another nearly-as-large gift from her to us, so it wouldnt be an insult. Her thresholdersthat is, doormensaid all the Orb Weavers children had already pledged this time to suckle the Chewer, meaning they were fasting before the eclipse.
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