Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  I trailed off. Jesus, I thought. This is getting a little intense for me. A billion years of evolution and five million years of human evolution and it’s all come down to the two of us.

  “There is a jar in the blackmost mountain,” Koh said. “All the yaj”—that is, all the pain, or pain smoke, or in this case, tears—“of all beings everywhere drips into the jar.”

  “I under you have heard of this,” I said.

  She said,

  “Lai can h’tulnaac,” she said,

  “Lail x nuc homoaa Cu tz’o, cu tz’a.”

  “And when the great jar

  Is filled to the brim

  It will end, it will shatter.”

  “X’tan boc ch’ana k’awal nab,” I said. “This is making solidified corn gruel with peccary urine.” In Ixian, it was the closest thing you could say to “bullshit.” Although I guess it sounds funnier if you’ve spent the whole day dragging two-hundred-pound limestone blocks up a ninety-foot pyramid in 110-degree heat.

  “As you next to me say,” Koh gestured.

  And for some reason—and I don’t think it was one of Koh’s witchy-poo tricks—after that, I had a feeling almost like passing out for a second or two, or like having been thinking of something important and then forgetting it, and when I remembered what I’d been up to we weren’t staring at each other anymore. I looked down. Koh shifted under her manta. We were in some other timespace.

  “Old Steersman isn’t coming here,” Koh said. She meant that she didn’t have Old Steersman’s dust, the topolytic component of the Game drugs.

  “Would you next to me play without it?” I asked.

  She signed there wasn’t any point.

  “But you do follow the Steersman sometimes, correct?” I asked.

  She clicked yes.

  I heard the Penguin Woman behind me. She came into view and lit a second incense ball. Well, that’s a good sign. Does that mean it’s a yes? She waddled up to Koh and stood on tiptalons. Koh tilted her head, whispered about fifty words into her ear, and handed her something. The dwarfess scuttled out.

  It’s happening, I thought. She’s going to get hold of some of that Steersman shit and go for it. Maybe we can just catch that bastard right now. If we get a name, I could just leave that in the lodestone cross box and not even worry about the drugs for the time being. I’m gonna get you, Doomster Man. Yeah. No sweat.

  Koh took a fresh myrtle torch and held it in the brazier. It flared up yellow-green. She set it in the holder. The light glinted on the dark side of her face.

  If there’d been a single moment when Koh had a change of heart, I hadn’t seen it. And now that we were going ahead I didn’t even feel that I’d convinced her myself. There was a sense that it wasn’t about me, that at most I’d been able to deliver some new information and she’d been strong enough to change her mind based on it. I felt weakened. She opened one of the baskets, took out a long, thin, green cigar, bit a quarter-inch off the mouth end, lit it on the myrtle torch, took a deep drag, puffed smoke to the five directions, and said

  “Now my heart’s breath is white,

  Now my heart’s breath is black,

  Now my heart’s breath is gold,

  Now my heart’s breath is red,

  Lord Old Salter, we two here far under you

  Ask you to loan us your quick eyes, your wary eyes,

  Sovereign knowing lord, watching lord. Finished.”

  She bent down and puffed a chestful of smoke through the mesh of the basket. She waited a moment, lifted off the cover, reached in, and pulled out a slightly smaller basket that had been nested inside it. Its mesh was looser and I could see movement and a white heart-shaped thing hanging in the center. Koh set it down and half-lifted the lid with her right hand. The white thing was the paper nest of a small colony of polybiine wasps. More quickly than I could follow Koh had reached in with her left hand and had grabbed a fat golden-green female wasp with the long black nails of her thumb and sixth finger. She set her down in the center of a little dish. The wasp was at least two inches long, with a gravid abdomen and an extended ovipositor. Her wings had been amputated. She peered around with her big eyes. Koh’s left forefinger came down out of the sky and pressed the wasp down on the dish at the junction of her thorax and abdomen. Even though she was tranquilized by the smoke, the wasp scrambled to get away, her feet slipping on the smooth glaze of the plate. Koh used the first two fingernails of her right hand as scissors and snipped off the wasp’s head. It bounced on the dish, its mandibles opening and closing. Next she grabbed the stinger and ovipositor and yanked them out of the poor thing’s abdomen. A fat little toxin sac, a couple of clear beady eggs, and some yellow hairs and shreds of chitin came along with them. Koh set the cluster of gunk down on the side of the dish. Finally, still holding down the abdomen with her left hand, she tore off one of the six thrashing legs—the right front, I think—and dropped it on a second tiny dish. She pushed the dish over to me.

  Koh lifted up the struggling, five-legged, headless insect, popped it into her mouth, chewed twice, and swallowed.

  I hesitated.

  Come on, Jed, I thought. Don’t be such a wuss. I picked up the leg and rolled it stupidly around in my hand as though it might leap up and pinch my eye. Okay. I popped it into my mouth. It was still twitching on my tongue. I crunched it up and swallowed as fast as I could. Koh handed me the stogie, I guess to wash it down. I took a good-size drag. It was a little dry and oddly spiced but not bad. I didn’t know what to do with it so I held on to it. The dwarfess came back in and laid out a little array of baskets, jars, and tiny dishes on each side of the hearth cover as though we were about to have afternoon tea. Already my mouth felt as though it was larger than my head.

  Koh said,

  “Now we’ll suppose that I play a great-Game here,

  In front of you next to me,

  Would you betray me to hostile greathouses?

  Or name me to strangers?

  Would you recount in the open what now happens

  Inside our citadel,

  Here on our jade mountain, here underneath the sky,

  Over the heartland?

  Would you then chatter about it outside, in the hundred zocalos?

  Would you slice open my vein-knotted book

  In the sun, in the daylight?”

  I choked out a response around a tongue that felt as fat and slow as a woodchuck:

  “How would I still be a blood

  If I ever repeated a secret?

  Then from that time they would no longer call me

  A son of the Harpy House,

  Grackles would jeer at me, hornets would sting

  My two lips, my two eyeballs,

  Then armadillos would lick at my skull

  In the dunes, in the wastenesses,

  Far from this mountain cave over the sea crater,

  Under the sky shell.”

  How was that? I wondered. Correct enough for you? Or do you also want to hear it in Latin?

  Slowly, Koh gestured, “Acknowledged.” I watched her dark hand drop toward her thigh. It seemed to be falling and falling and not getting there, and then it seemed as though it wasn’t falling anymore, that she was just holding it out in midair. Weird, I thought. I looked over at the clock, or rather I started to, but it took my eyes a while to get there. It’s that time-smashing Old Salter dust stuff again, I thought. Chronolytic. Except this is a lot more chronolytic than the last—oh, there it is. My eyes had gotten to the incense ball, finally; it looked like it was about half-gone, but I couldn’t see it well because the dwarfess must have hung a strip of cheesecloth or something over it—oh, sorry, no, it was just a wisp of smoke, not moving, or appearing not to move because of the drug. I heard the Penguiness whispering something. I turned my eyes back to Koh. They felt like big granite spheres rolling in oiled sockets. Koh gave me a “strong wait” hand gesture, the same gesture the Harpy clan used in hunts or raids when everyone was supposed to freeze.

  Someone outside the room whistled. The dwarf scuttled out the door. It
seemed that minutes went by between each little footfall. Koh stood up. It was like watching a mountain being slowly thrust up by the subduction of the tectonic plate underneath it. She turned toward me and shook her manta into a better attitude. Whoa, I thought. Surprisingly, she was a lot taller than the average Maya woman, maybe even a hair taller than I was, that is, than I was now, and Chacal was a big guy. Rudely, I twisted my head around, watching. She seemed thin under her quechquemitl. Most sun adders were thin, but she was maybe a little too thin. She took four steps toward the center of the half-room and lowered herself to her knees facing the door behind me. I’m not generally a ballet queen, but a long time ago I saw Rudolf Nureyev in L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune, and there was a kind of haughtiness in his movements, where every finger was just, like, I’m the hottest and you’re the nottest, and Lady Koh had something a lot like that. Except around here it wasn’t so off-putting.

  I twisted around. A head and shoulders appeared in the little doorway and bobbed up and down as their owner stood up. My irises had to strain but gradually, like a nebula in a big telescope, he came into focus. He was a tall man. He wore a dark thin manta. He had loose hair like a nacom’s and skin rubbed with gray ash. I couldn’t make out his markings, but he smelled like cat musk, or rather he was wearing a kind of artificial musk, made from Mimulus inoschalus, that the low-level Ixian Ocelots also wore. So he was from the other side, the Puma House, but he wasn’t a feline being himself. Probably he was from some foster clan that served the Pumas as monks. He recited something incomprehensible in a whispery voice and Koh answered in the same language. I don’t understand, I thought. Say it in Bumfuckistani. He walked toward Koh, taking five slow, tiny steps. Koh didn’t move.

  There was something about the scene I didn’t like. In fact it gave me a bit of the creeps. The Puma fumbled with something near his waist. No way, I thought. He pulled out a little pouch, held it up near his face, untied what were probably some more of those impossible secret fisherman’s knots, thumbed it open, and took something out. I didn’t see what the something was.

  Koh leaned forward and opened her mouth. The Puma put the something on her tongue. She closed her mouth, leaned back, and chewed it up.

  I got a little shock, a relic from my days as a preconfirmed Catholic. Was that how communion rituals got started? I wondered. Take and freak, this is my blotter. I felt like I nearly choked staying silent.

  There was something poignant about watching her do this very common, human thing, that is, eat. It had a kind of affectionate drudgery to it, like you could see she’d done this thousands of times. Suddenly she seemed like a human being, like a fun girl to be around. A little wacky, maybe.

  The Puma messenger leaned forward, listening to Koh swallow. The dwarf handed him a cup of I guess hot water and he held it out to Koh. She took it with the hem of her manta between her hand and the cup, drank down whatever was in it, and gave it back to him. He looked into it and then down at her. She opened her mouth wide. He examined it for a moment and then spread his arms to show he was satisfied. To me it seemed kind of degrading to Koh, like she was getting tranqs in prison. The Puma took another little thing out of a different waist pouch. The Penguin Woman held out a trading tray and he set it in the center. It was a little figurine of Koh, with her face painted in that distinctive way. Maybe it was what Koh had given the dwarfess before. The Penguin Woman chanted a little thank-you-guest speech in that same old language.

  The Puma whispered a thank-you-host reply, squatted, and withdrew backward into the tunnel. The Penguin Woman followed him out.

  So that’s how they do it, I thought. Koh and the other Orb Weavers didn’t even have direct access to all the components of the Game drugs. Instead, it was basically a double-key system. You could only get the full effect by taking two different compounds. And the head adders of the Morning Glory House knew how to make one of them and the Swallowtail House adders knew how to make the other, and neither one had gotten the secret out of the other, not in the hundreds of years since whatever genius it was set up the system.

  Well, Jed, you should have guessed it. No wonder this town’s been so stable for such a long time. Damn, why didn’t I think of that?

  Hell. This is going to be tough.

  Frustration. Deep in my clenched fists I could feel my long nails breaking the skin of my palms. Relax, I thought. Keep it together. True strength is seeing every finish line as the next starting point. Breathe.

  Koh was still. I sat still. I blinked. My eyelid rolled down like dusk and, after a long night, like dawn. There was silence except for the rustlings in the tunnel beyond the door. Then there was a low whistle like a mourning dove’s. Koh stood up, walked over to the screen, slipped through it, bent down over me—I hadn’t quite had a chance to get back to my spot—and grabbed me by my hair, not by my pigtail, which was still false, but the forelock, and kissed me, violently, thrusting her smooth tongue into my mouth, twisting it around mine, rubbing it into my cheeks, over my palate, between my sharpened teeth and the fresh laceration and old scars on my inner lips, down to my tonsils, everywhere—

  [52]

  She tasted like nothing I’d ever tasted, not in the ninth b’ak’tun or in the twelfth, maybe a little like that wistful taste like uni, raw sea urchin, but darker and older and more metallic. Wow, major kiss, I thought, just about the last thing I expected in this context; Native Americans don’t really have a kissing culture.

  I almost thought she was she expecting me to rip her damn raiment off and go at it, and I was considering trying to fondle her somewhere—if I could get it together enough to find a fondlable spot—when she let go of my hair, broke away from me with a wet pop, and sat back in her spot on the far side of the hearth cover. The dwarf, who evidently had come back, set down a basketful of pots and jars and gave Koh a cup of something. She drank it as though she wanted to wash my taste from her mouth. I settled down again on my mat, trying to quiet my breathing. She looked as though nothing noteworthy had happened. Weirdly enough I felt unfaithful to Marena, even though she and I weren’t really an item, probably. Settle down, Goofus, I thought, you’re dreaming. All these broads are out for marlin. They’re not interested in some grungy little … whatever …

  Whoa. A numby fugu-ish aftertaste was growing in my mouth. I wobbled a little and sat up straight again.

  Well, so that’s the deal, I thought. She was just giving me a taste of the dope. Purely a professional maneuver. Chill.

  So the colony of wasps produced X chemical—maybe they fed on something specific and they refined it in their bodies—and that was the Old Salter’s dust. And that process was owned by the Orb Weavers. And then if you combined it with the Steersman’s dust—that is, the topolytic drug, the Y chemical that the Puma messenger had given Lady Koh—it gave you the full nine-stone enabling effect.

  Well, damn. That’s a disappointment. 2JS had thought she’d have a stash of the stuff on hand. Instead she had to fill a prescription and use it all in one shot under feline supervision. And from the way she was talking before, it sounds like even that was out of the ordinary, that they weren’t giving any of it out on demand, except that she was able to get a tiny dose of it by calling in a favor. Fuck and fuck.

  Hmm.

  Ready? Koh gestured.

  I sat up straighter. Ready, I signed. Koh took a deep drag on her cigar.

  “My breath is red, my breath is white,” she said.

  When you root yourself you make yourself believe you’re at the heart of the universe. But this time I didn’t have to make myself believe it. I was already sure of it. The bite of gravity felt stronger than it ever had, but at the same time it seemed like I was feeding off it, building up a mountain-full of energy. I thought I could feel each of the different layers of material beneath me, cotton, rush matting, clay, soil, stone, molten stone, all the way down to earth’s white-hot crystal core. The underwaterworlds and overworlds rotated around us. I was home.

  The dwarf slid a claw through a loop of string on the hearth cov
er, lifted up the wooden square, and slid it aside. It looked heavy but she didn’t seem to strain. In the space underneath, instead of a fire pit, there was a nearly perfect square depression, about fifteen inches deep and forty inches on a side. On its flat bottom I could just make out the incised outlines of a game board, a thirteen-by-thirteen square. Koh was sitting on the southwest and I was on the northeast: The dwarf set rushlights on the northwest and southeast sides of the stone well, filling it with light. The stone was some kind of dark, fine-grained gneiss, and it had that patina that you can only get from skin, from generations of hands tapping and rubbing, sweeping and polishing, and when Koh tapped the southwest wall five times with the butt of her fly whisk, you could tell from the resonance, or the lack of resonance, or something, that the pit had been chipped out of living rock, and that we were sitting on the peak of a buried mountain that went down through the alluvium of the valley and into the roots of the Sierra Madre Oriental.

  “Ya’nal Wak Kimi,” Koh said,

  “Now on 6 Dying, on 14 Stag, in the eleventh tun, counting,

  Nearing the end of eleven k’atuns in the tenth b’ak’tun, counting,