Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “Two suns before the sorcerer would cast his fire out of obsidian.”

  “Yes.”

  “And this was the day that the Ix-ahau asked you to come here?” Koh asked.

  “No, it was days after that,” I said. And, I told her, even then I had to practically beg Marena to send me.

  “But she showed you the book just in time.”

  I said it wasn’t just in time because it was too late to do anything, and thousands of people died.

  “But it was just in time for you to know the bad sun was coming.”

  “Yes.”

  “And so maybe the Ix-ahau Maran Ah Pok was planning to send you here before she showed you the book.”

  “I had to beg her,” I said again.

  “And how long did it take to convince her?” Koh asked.

  I thought back. “Not long,” I said. Actually, come to think of it, I guess it was about a minute and a half.

  “Then maybe that is your answer,” Koh said.

  I sat and thought about it. You know, Jed, I thought, she could be right. You’re stupid. You try to be all cool and sophisticated but inside you’re a trusting sort of simpleton. Maybe Marena and Lindsay Warren and Michael Dick-face and Taro and everybody were all taking advantage of you from day one. Maybe Sic never even wanted to come back here. That was just a ploy to get you jealous. No wonder his Ch’olan sucked, he knew he didn’t need it.

  I really didn’t want to believe it, though. I shook my head a bit, discreetly, I hoped, trying to sober up.

  “And you wanted to meet the adder who played the Game,” she said.

  I said that we didn’t entirely understand what would happen on the last date.

  “On that sun the four hundred babies will tell us what they want,” Koh said.

  Pause. Don’t say anything, I thought. Wait.

  Koh didn’t say anything, though. Unlike the average interrogee. Finally, I couldn’t stand it.

  “In the book it says there will be more than before, but still none,” I said.

  “Correct,” Koh clicked.

  “And they will ask for something,” I said. “Won’t they?”

  “They will ask for something we can’t give them.”

  Pause.

  Okay, I thought. Maybe I’d better just ask.

  “And what is the Flesh Dropper?”

  I don’t know, she gestured.

  “What about the total of the suns of their tortures and the suns of their festivals?”

  “Every living being has more tortures than festivals.”

  “That sounds correct,” I gestured. “What about the place of betrayal?”

  “That is in the nameless suns,” she said. Literally the expression meant the five nameless intercalary days at the end of the Maya solar year. But in this context it was more like when you say “in the middle of nowhere,” except it’s the middle of notime. That is, it doesn’t happen in the same time flow—or temporal arrow or temporal dimension or whatever—as the rest of life. It’s a kind of limbo, like a time out in a ball game.

  Pause.

  “And taking two from twelve makes One Ocelot?” I asked.

  “No, that is something One Ocelot did,” Koh said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “One Ocelot did not make it clear.”

  “What did you see on that sun?”

  “I didn’t see anything,” she said. “I heard it all from One Ocelot.”

  “You were playing against One Ocelot?” I asked. As I think I mentioned, One Ocelot was the ancestor of the Ocelot Clan, who opened the sweetwater vein of Ix and who stripped the wooden flesh off the drowned mute men in the last days of the third sun.

  Koh clicked yes.

  “Was he in the sanctuary of the Ocelots’ mul?” I asked.

  “They brought him to a secret court,” she said.

  She meant that they’d brought his mummy down from the pyramid, and she’d played the Game against him. Of course, he must have spoken and made his moves through an interpreter.

  Well, it serves me right for not guessing that, I thought. Come to think of it, that character in the Codex had looked a little odd. As I think I mentioned, or maybe I didn’t, mummies were a big deal in these parts. They weren’t like Egyptian mummies, though. They were usually wood-and-corn-paste effigies, built around a skull and some, but not all, of the other bones in the skeleton. Often they wore a mask made from the tanned skin of the deceased, and sometimes they wore other masks over that one. They were bundled in all sorts of robes and regalia. And unlike Egyptian mummies, they didn’t just lie around in tombs. They sat in at feasts and conferences and got carried through festivals and even battle. They got around. And of course they talked a lot, through intermediaries.

  “And could you over me condescend to tell me more?” I asked.

  “There is no more to tell from that Game. Your book was complete.”

  “But sometimes one could drive that prey again down that same path,” I said. It was an idiom, but I meant “Maybe you could pick up that same Game again near the end and play out a different endgame.” It was like how in chess you might go back to the move just before the winning move just to see if the losing side had a chance.

  “That won’t be done,” Koh said. “One Ocelot still plays with living balls.” As I think I mentioned, “balls” could also mean “runners.” “Maybe no one will play a Game that large again. Finished.”

  Hell, I thought. Apparently, she meant that the art was dying out. And when somebody around here said “finished,” it meant you weren’t going to get any more information out of them, even if you tortured them. Although you might torture them anyway, just as a point of etiquette.

  Koh looked at the incense clock. It had gone out. The session was supposed to be over. Damn it. I’d expected the ancient past to be leisurely. Now I was trying to squeeze another few minutes out of her, like some B-list journalist interviewing Madonna. Koh turned back toward me, with her eyes looking over mine, as was proper. Hell. Hellhellhellhellhell. Really, you’d think this might be at least a little interesting. That is, you don’t meet Buck Rogers every day of the k’atun, but still, I guess she just couldn’t do this right now, the Silence was starting soon, there were lines of other, richer supplicants outside, the Synods were getting ready to close down the Rattler’s House, time was seriously a-wastin’—

  Okay. Regroup. Try another tack.

  “I know the exact moment that the Chewer will attack the sun nine days from now,” I said. “It will be eight hundred score and nine score and one beat after the first shard of dawn,” I said. As I think I mentioned, every sun adder in Mesoamerica knew that there would be a solar eclipse early in the day. But not even the most learned ones, the heads of the astronomer clans at Teotihuacan, Ix, or Palenque could predict the exact time. They weren’t even sure if it would be total or partial. For that stuff, you need telescopes and calculus.

  “He who knows, knows,” she said. It was kind of an untranslatable idiom, but basically it was like saying “we’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?” Like, tell me something I can use this minute. She had a point.

  “Then the sun will be blocked out for nineteen score and eight beats,” I said, “and then, forty-one score and eighteen beats later, it will be whole again.”

  Pause. She didn’t throw me out, so I went on.

  “Except nothing really chews on the sun,” I said. “Blood Rabbitess comes between the earth and the sun”—Koh clicked unimpressedly, meaning she already knew that—“and blood Rabbitess is a ball, with the same side always turned toward us, and the sun is a flaming ball, like a night-game hipball, and Sun Vanquisher and Sun Trumpeter are the same being”—she clicked at that too—“and that being is also a ball, and the zeroth level”—that is, the earth—“is also a ball, and it holds us to itself the way a large lodestone holds on to smaller ones. And the cigar fires of Iztamna and Ixchel, and 7 Hunaphu, they’re also just balls, all lobbing high around the sun.”

  “But they don’t fall,” she said.

  Hah, I thought. The mask slips. The Ice Empress really is interested in som
ething.

  “They are falling,” I said, “but they have a long way still to fall before they hit the sun. They’ll be falling for another four hundred times four hundred times four hundred times four hundred times four hundred times four hundred times four hundred b’ak’tuns.” This had better be blowing her mind, I thought. It’s my A material. I leaned forward—ill-manneredly—and picked a shallow round bowl out of the array of clayware next to the brazier. I pulled the neck-slit of my manta up to my mouth, popped off one of the round gray-stone beads with my teeth, yanked the dangling thread out of the bead, dropped the bead in the bowl, picked up the bowl, and rolled the bead around. It was pretty wobbly but I launched into my spiel anyway:

  “The center of this bowl is like the sun,” I said. “And we stand on one side of the bead. And as we spin it appears to us that the sun is moving. But really we’re the beings who are moving.”

  “So you next to me say the sun is at the bottom of the turquoise bowl,” she said.

  “No, there is no bowl. There is no sky shell. The sky is just wind all the way up. And actually, we don’t move around it quite in a circle. We move in a shape like a goose’s egg.”

  I leaned forward—unconscionably rudely, again, but I hoped we were past that—and swept away a drift of petals with my powerful forearm, exposing a truncated crescent of pale, fine-woven reed matting. I poked my index finger into the least hot-looking zone of the brazier, rubbed it around in the soot, and drew a circle on the mat.

  “This little round is the Fourth Sun,” I said. “The ball that is both Sun Vanquisher and Sun Herald rolls around it on this larger round.” I had to go back for more soot six times before I finished the drawing:

  Of course, my sketch looked a lot rougher, but it was still readable. “This is the zeroth level here,” I said, writing an eye/oyster glyph at the extreme left. “And this is where Sun Vanquisher rises furthest whiteward.” I wrote a Venusas-Evening Star glyph at 11:00 on the large circle and put a single dot next to it.

  I thought Koh was about to say something, but she didn’t.

  “This is Sun Vanquisher’s last night,” I said. I wrote the glyph below and to the left of the first. I poked two dots next to it.

  Koh stared at the drawing. She didn’t say anything. As I think I mentioned somewhere, it’s true that the Maya calendar was indeed famously accurate, better on the solar count than the uncorrected Gregorian one. But they didn’t have heliocentrism yet, although from the way Koh was taking it I guessed that she and the very best Maya astronomers might have an inkling of it.

  “And this third spot is the ball’s first morning, when it’s named Sun Herald,” I said, moving it around counterclockwise. “Then this is yellowmost morning. This is its last morning. Then it’s behind the sun for fifty days, and then it appears again as Sun Vanquisher, here. Twelve score and four days and ninety-one score and five beats in all.” I wrote the number 6 next to the last glyph. I didn’t mention the superior and inferior conjunctions. Why belabor the point?

  I paused.

  The pause stretched on.

  Gotcha, I thought. If there’s one thing you could always count on with these folks, it’s a solid foundation in naked-eye astronomy. She was a sun adder, after all. And every adder was always looking for an edge over the others. Even if progress got frowned upon—that is, what we dead white males would call progress—there was still the haphazard sort of progress that comes naturally and irrepressibly out of plain one-upmanship. Adders are hustlers, and they’re always looking for a new angle. And not even just to, say, predict the first rain a little more accurately than the adder in the next town, but to trade with other adders. In Koh’s case, for instance, she’d be expected to share stuff like this with the other Orb Weavers, so that the whole group could use the extra accuracy as a bargaining chip in their squabble with the Synods.

  Finally, Koh spoke: “And so you say that when 2 Peccary steps out of the procession and turns back caveward down the white road, that is the same.” She meant Mars.

  “He doesn’t turn at all,” I said. “It only looks that way to us because the ground underneath us is moving. It’s the same as with Sun Herald. But it takes longer because 2 Peccary is farther away from the sun than we are.”

  “And Sun Herald is closer.”

  “Sun Herald is closer.”

  “And you say the sun is bigger than the zeroth level,” she said.

  “More than four hundred times four hundred times bigger,” I said. “And if you started walking to the sun now, although you couldn’t, but let’s say you were flying as fast as you can walk, you wouldn’t get there for nine hundred times four hundred b’ak’tunob.”

  Koh stared at the diagram, calculating. She’s making some leaps, I thought. She’s Copernicus at Warmia. She’s Tycho Brahe, freezing his nose off from poking it into space. She’s Johannes Kepler. She’s Gallifreakingleo. Wait’ll I turn you on to some general relativity, I thought. You’ll cream on your abacus. e = babes2.

  “And so your hometimers know everything,” Koh said finally. I had to stifle a jump, she’d been quiet for so long.

  “Not quite everything,” I gestured. “They are—they will be working to know everything eventually.”

  “And are they all powerful greathousers?” That is, were they all rich and in charge?

  “No, many of them are still roundhousers. But still, most of them are much richer than roundhousers now. There’s so much food even the hearthless get fat. Most people will live for more than three k’atuns. We’ll ride through the sky inside giant copper bird canoes. We’ll have cold torches that burn for hundred-scores of nights and weapons that kill hundred-scores of people a hundred-score jornadas away. We’ll speak to each other and see each other’s faces over any distance, through lines of invisible light. Even before I was born, twelve men had canoed to the ball of the moon. There will be four-hundred-score-four-hundred-score-four-hundred-score-four-hundred-score- four-hundred-score-four-hundred-score of us. We’ll see inside ourselves without cutting ourselves open. We’ll make devices that are cleverer than we are. We’ll dive to the bottom of the salt sea, and stay there for days, and come back alive.”

  “But you have forgotten the most important things,” she said. “And so you came here. Correct?”

  I paused. Well, whatever. “Correct,” I clicked.

  “Because you in your time have forgotten your grandfathermothers,” she said.

  I made a “not entirely” gesture.

  “But you do know how many suns the Razor City will keep up its offerings,” she said. That is, how long would Teotihuacan last?

  Damn. “We do not know that,” I said.

  She asked why, if I came from the thirteenth b’ak’tun and knew so much, I didn’t know the exact sun.

  I told her how, by the time I was born, almost all her world’s books had been destroyed, and how the few that had survived didn’t give the date. I tried to explain what archaeologists were, and how they dated things, and told her that they’d calculated the abandonment of the city to some time in the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth k’atun of this b’ak’tun, that is, roughly between AD 650 and 710, but couldn’t get any more accurate than that. “The damage will be too extensive for better archaeological dating,” I tried to say.

  Pause again. She stared at the drawings.

  I didn’t say anything. At least it was easier not to talk than it had been. The mental Ex-Lax was wearing off.

  Koh took one of the fly whisks off the rack and held it against her thigh. It meant the reading was over.

  “Perhaps you next to me and I will consult the skulls again in a basket of suns, after the Chewer has been driven off,” she said.

  God DAMN it, I thought. No, let’s make that “I inwardly shrieked.” Bitch. Maybe I should just take off, maybe I can just score the shit on the street, better than schlumping around here all—

  No. Be persistent. Who knows, maybe she’s just haggling you up for more goodies. Take it up a level.

  “The Orb Weavers’ House will not survive much longer,” I said, desperately breaking protocol. “We
don’t know how long it will last but it won’t be long.”

  “I next to you have known that for a long time.”

  “2 Jeweled Skull offers asylum in Ix, for you and for your order.”

  Koh shifted. I thought she cocked her head a bit, as though she heard something, but I might have just imagined it. She didn’t answer.

  Hell, I thought. Well, that’s the end of my A material. 2JS had said I should wait to make the offer until she asked for it, and then to make it seem like a concession, and that otherwise she’d think it was some sort of con.