Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  Koh gestured with her tiny light hand. The Penguin Woman came up behind me again and slid between us. She held a big basket in her little talons. She kneed over to the brazier, sat, and took out two hexalobed terra-cotta bowls and two cylindrical drinking pots. Like almost all the dishes and vessels and whatever in Teotihuacan, they were well-made but unornamented—like Pyrex, as Esther Pasztory said. Supposedly some of the top smokers here were poor, and anything too luxurious was a hazard because it might make them jealous. The dwarf mixed powdered cacao beans, honey, and hot water, in that order, and, as per routine, poured the liquid from pot to pot to work up a foam. She put the empty pot down and passed the full one to Koh. Koh took a sip and gave the pot to the dwarf. She passed it to me. I did the little cup-accepted gesture, drank half of it, gestured that it was great, and drank the rest. It was hot, that is, spicy hot, and cardamomy. I put the pot down, and the Penguin Woman took it away.

  And that was about as far as they went with serving drinks around here. I realized I was also hungry. You’d think they’d bring in a tray of fried goliath roaches or something. But they didn’t do things that way around here. Serving beverages in a host-guest situation was more for ritual than thirst. You didn’t often just sit and drink with someone. It wasn’t like tea in the East or cocktails in the West or anything. You just took your beverage, drank it standing up in as few drafts as possible, and passed it on. And snacking was something you did on your own time. It was one of the things that would have totally fruk me out if Chacal’s body hadn’t already been used to it. Even people who could afford as much as they wanted hardly ever ate even two meals a day. And every third day or so, they didn’t eat at all. Most of the time you could offer a strip of deer jerky to, say, Hun Xoc, and he’d say, “Oh, no thanks, I had something yesterday.” And he was a hipball player who needed the weight. And then when they did eat, it was a Lucullan binge. At the average royal feast three-fourths of the food would go to waste. Well, whatever. Where was I?

  Time to say something.

  “We underneath you have brought you a bundle,” I said. Bundle was a politer way of saying gift or offering, since it meant you didn’t have to decline the noun any further and give away what was inside. “I under you have tried to read the skulls for us, for my family, and I have failed. We beg you, take the bundle and read our skulls.”

  “ You next to me give too much,” she said.

  She treated us to another insufferable pause. I asked again. Damn it, I thought. If she says no, I’m going to start smashing things. Although really, one adder couldn’t or shouldn’t refuse to do a reading for another. At least not once you were face-to-face. Or maybe I was relying too much on professional courtesy.

  The Penguin Woman lit something in a little dish. It was an incense ball, the kind they used as clocks around Palenque. From its size it looked like it would have about a quarter of a ninth-light on it, that is, about forty-two minutes. Better hurry, I thought. But the pause stretched on. Finally, she clicked her tongue twice, meaning she’d take the job. She untied two ribbons on her staff. It turned out to be a rolled-up wicker game board. She spread it out on the west side of the brazier. It was the same design 2JS had used, with the same number of bins and everything, but larger. She opened a jar, took out a pinch of powdered tobacco, and, rather demurely, rubbed it on the inside of her thigh.

  Okay, I thought. Give her a lowball.

  I asked her to tell me the date of my death.

  She took out a grandeza of tz’ite-tree seeds and scattered them over the board.

  There was something perfunctory about her style, and I got the feeling she didn’t plan to give me anything but the briefest possible session. Four runners chased my alter-ego stone into a near dead end. After a little calculation she gave the next Wak Ahau, Waxac Muan, or 6 Overlord, 8 Jeweled Owl—that is, a hundred and thirty-two lights from today—as the most likely date. It sounded reasonable, for the death of this body, anyway. Given the expected progression of my brain tumors, I only had about a hundred and ten days of mental clarity left in me. There were also other possible death days for me before that, in this current tun, especially Kan Muluk, Wuklahun Xul, that is, 4 Raining, 17 Ending, and Hun Eb, Mih Mol, that is, 1 Sweeping, 0 Gathering. Whatever, I thought. I clicked, meaning I accepted the diagnosis.

  So far, I was disappointed. This wasn’t anything that out of the ordinary. I asked a second question: Where would my descendants—and the word didn’t especially mean my personal descendants, which I didn’t have any of, but descendants of my family, that is, of 2JS—be on 9 Night, 1 Dark Water, in the first tun of the fifteenth k’atun of the eleventh b’ak’tun? And how many of them would there be?

  It was a pretty common query, except for the time span. The date was in AD 1522, 313,285 days from today. It was one of the catastrophe dates in the Codex.

  She didn’t seem to react. She took five runners and scattered her corn kernels over the board, counted them quickly, and told me that on that day about fifteen-score descendants of the Harpies would reinter their founders’ bone bundles in the “riverless north.” That would be the Yucatán, I thought. The others, about a hundred score, would be “scattered in the jungles, in the forests that will cover the jewel cities.”

  Well, that’s at least a bit impressive, I thought. Okay. Time for the big question.

  “What sun will be the Razor City’s last?” I asked.

  She paused, as often. I sat. Finally, she spoke.

  “Children”—she meant clients—“have asked me this four hundred times.” She said that over the last k’atun, a few enterprising adders had, in fact, set various dates for the end of the city. Those dates had passed, and those adders had fled or been killed. Still, she said, there was a general tacit feeling that the end would be soon, at least among the top sun adders and their elite clients. Supposedly even some of the ruling houses had privately accepted the fact and were preparing their clans for an eventual migration.

  Now, as I’m pretty sure I mentioned somewhere, I didn’t know how long the city would last. And maybe no one did. And the archaeological data was vague. And the collapse of Teotihuacan wasn’t mentioned in the Codex Nurnberg, or at least not in the pages we had. Now, according to Koh, it hadn’t turned up in any known Game.

  “But you have not found a date?” I asked.

  “That writing is too close to our eyes,” Koh said.

  What she meant—well, it’s what Taro called event-cone trouble. That is, it’s not really possible to predict something you have the power to influence. So you can be blinded by proximity. They also call it the problem of the observer participant. And La Rochefoucauld called it “l’aveuglerie de l’oeil qui ne voit pas lui-meme,” that is, “the blindness of an eye that cannot see itself,” and Stephen King called it the Dead Zone. You’d think it would be easier to predict something nearer in time, and harder to predict something further off. And that’s usually true, up to a point. But past that point, it never is. It’s kind of like how it’s always tougher to take your own advice.

  “But can you over me play forward to that sun?” I asked.

  “That sun lives in smoke,” Koh said.

  Oh, hell, I thought. She’s thinking of blowing me off. Damn, you’d think she’d be a bit more curious. She’s got to be wondering what kind of adder I was, how I’d been able to see all the stuff in the letter—well, whatever. Okay. Try to give her something.

  “I know the Razor City only owns a few handfuls of sunlight,” I said.

  “This light, the last, and the next,” she said. “Just as it has since I came here.”

  It was like saying, “As usual. What else is new?” It wasn’t really the polite correct response. But maybe she thought she was above manners—

  “Ch’ak sac la hun Kawak, ka Wo,” she said. It meant “Don’t start anything on 10 Hurricane, 2 Toad.” But the sense was stronger, like “Don’t even make any decisions on that day. Just stay indoors and out of trouble.”

  I clicked yes.

  “Good,” she gestured.

  She stood up.


  She teetered a little, hobbled back around me to the entrance flap. I heard it rustle.

  I was alone. I sat for four hundred beats, and then another four hundred. She didn’t come back.

  What the fuck? I wondered. Was that it? She’s just flat-out leaving? Nobody ever does that around here. What the flying fuck? WTFFF?

  I sat. I counted four hundred beats. I listened. I couldn’t hear a damn thing. How do they get it so silent in here? Somehow the compound had been constructed to deflect the hubbub of the city. There weren’t any air currents that I could feel. The smoke from the torch went up toward the oculus in a nearly straight line. I sat some more.

  Well, hell, I thought. This is a washout. Maybe we made this whole trip for nothing. Maybe 2JS was just trying to get rid of me. Maybe somebody’s going to come in behind me and strangle me. Maybe Lady Koh’s not all that super anyway. Damn it, why do I always get stuck with the second-stringers? All I needed was just to meet one hot shot. Just one person around here who could take some initiative.

  I counted another eight hundred beats. I was feeling a little gravity-challenged. Something in that chocolate was putting me in some kind of a state. I wasn’t sure what state it was, but it was a state.

  Maybe I should’ve told her more. The stuff in the letter wasn’t really enough to get her attention. And come to think of it, why had 2JS wanted me to be so cagey, really? Maybe he didn’t want me to give her anything too impressive just because he wanted her to think the information came from him. He didn’t want Koh to get any more impressed than necessary because he didn’t want me getting too cocky. Or too autonomous.

  Well, too late.

  Maybe I’ll just slink back whence I came. If I can even find my way out of here. Maybe I’ll just sit here for another couple of hours and see what happens. Maybe—

  Fuck it.

  I don’t usually think of myself as terribly insightful, at least not outside the boundaries of something I can control, like the Game. But for whatever reason—either because for a while now I’d had that feeling you get sometimes when you’re alone at night in a brightly lit house, a house that doesn’t have the psychohygienic provision of blinds on every window, and suddenly a certainty comes over you that you’re being watched, and not by a friend, or maybe just because I was getting pretty frustrated, I reached out, picked the torch out of its holder, and thwacked it down on the floor. There was a little Vesuvius of sparks. Like I think I said it was made of a sheaf of wax myrtles dipped in dog tallow, and the flaming seeds scattered over the mats—which I guess had been dampened slightly, like tatami—and sizzled out.

  I sat in the blackness. Already there wasn’t even a trace of blue left in the oculus. There’s not enough twilight around here, I thought. No twilight in the courts of the sun. I sat in the dark. Face it, Jedster. You’ve struck out big time. I watched the scattered myrtle embers fade out one after another like a dying galaxy.

  I listened. Nothing. I sat. I thought I saw something.

  There was still some light in the room. It was right in front of me. Or rather it wasn’t in the room but from outside the room. I kneed forward across the hearth cover to where Koh had been and peered into the dark. It was the light from a brazier of fresher coals glowing through the screen of I guess feathers. There was another room on the other side of the wall. Although it wasn’t really a wall but a metallic fabric screen, like a scrim in a theater. Whatever the metallic scales on it were made of, they worked like a two-way mirror. And there was someone sitting there, only three arms away from me. I started to make out the contours and then the major shapes. It was a young woman, in the same outfit and the same pose as the old lady.

  She knows, I thought. You know I can see you.

  Relax, I thought. I inhaled, resettled my spine, and exhaled. The woman hadn’t moved. Now I could see detail. Her right hand seemed to be painted black, and I couldn’t get a good look at it, but her left hand was unpainted and I focused on it. It had seven fingers. The smallest one was pointed and jointless like the tentacle of a sea anemone and barely the size of a .22 long rifle bullet. I looked back at her face. It was pale on most of the top half and black on the bottom, with the border running under her left eye, over her upper lip, and across her right cheek to the mandibular angle.

  [50]

  “What other names do you next to me use?” the woman asked. Her voice was the same as the old woman’s.

  Better give her something, I thought.

  “My hipball name was Chacal,” I said.

  “And who are your other fathers, other mothers, other elder brothers, younger brothers?” At first her voice was still a presenile croak, but by the time she got to the word “na’ob,” “mothers,” it had started sliding lower and smoothing out, as though she were aging in reverse.

  I gave her the name of Chacal’s biological father.

  “And where are you from?” Now her voice was what seemed to be her natural tone, a clear contralto, lower than the average Maya woman’s. What the hell? I wondered. So when the old lady was speaking, the real lady Koh had been ventriloquizing behind her. Why? And how had the impostor known when to move her lips? I wondered. Some signal. A string, a rod in the floor, maybe. Well, whatever.

  “From Ix,”

  “But before that?”

  “From Bolocac,” I said. It was the name of Chacal’s village.

  “And where were you from before Bolocac?” Koh asked. She was talking in this singsongy way and it was maybe trancing me out a bit.

  “From Yananekan,” I said, without thinking. That was the current name of the area around Alta Verapaz where much later I’d grown up as Jed. Hell.

  “And after that, but before Bolocac?”

  “I am dark,” I said a little spacily. It was like saying “I don’t understand.” Damn it, Jed, I thought. You’re letting this marimacha clock you. Cool it.

  “ You must have left Yananekan before you were a blood,” she said.

  I clicked yes. I could feel her eyeballing me. Maybe I shouldn’t even try to bullshit this woman. Like any good sun adder, she could spot a tell through a lead wall.

  “And what sun lighted your departure?”

  I made up a plausible date.

  “And what did people call you then?”

  “They called me Chacal.”

  “But that was not your first name?”

  I started to say it was and then I realized I’d hesitated. Too late, I thought. That was as good as a yes.

  She paused. I snuck another look at her. When I’d seen 2 Jeweled Skull’s portrait head of her I’d thought the pattern on her skin was just her signature face paint. Now it looked like it was under her skin, tattooed on. Actually, I thought, even with all that shitterie going on, she wasn’t exactly bad-looking. She had great skin, achromatically speaking, and an otherwise symmetrical face, and a feminine affect. That is, it was feminine in the sense of maybe compassionate, or motherly, or rather pre-motherly, like someday she’d be nice to her kids, but not today. I looked down again quickly and focused on a single dim geranium petal on the mat in front of me.

  “And you next to me, why do you travel?” she asked.

  “Because 2 Jeweled Skull wants to protect his family.”

  “2 Jeweled Skull wants the things he wants. But you next to me, what do you want?” There was something a little different in her tone, something—well, I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret it. A tinge of being a little miffed, a sense of “why won’t you trust me?”

  “I underneath you want simply what he wants,” I answered.

  “Still, you seem to want more than that.”

  “It is as you above me say.”

  Pause.

  I counted forty beats.

  “And do you belong here?” she asked, finally.

  No, I thought, definitely not—but then I realized that I hadn’t just thought it, I’d said it. Damn. Breaking protocol, I looked up. She was looking at me.

  She sees it, I thought. She sees loneliness. It’s all over you like blue on Smurf. I looked down again and made another
“whatever you over me say” gesture.

  “And then where were you from before Bolocac?”