Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  Now I am borrowing this sun’s breath, now I will borrow tomorrow’s,

  Now I will borrow the wind of the suns that will follow tomorrow.”

  She took a finger-scoop of damp tobacco out of one of the little baskets and drew her hand inside her quechquemitl so that she could rub the stuff into her thigh. I couldn’t get much of an idea of what was going on under all the drapery, but it was still a pretty sexy gesture.

  I sat back a bit. I felt extremely wrong. I was sure that I was going to vomit, and not just the contents of my stomach, but my entire digestive tract. Everything from the esophagus to the colon was going to spray out of my mouth and pile up on the board. I choked it all back and sat a few degrees straighter. Keep it together, Joaquinito. You wanted to play with the big kids. So play.

  “Now my own breath is a yellow wind,”

  She said. “Now my own breath is a red wind,

  Now my own breath is a white wind,

  A black wind, an emerald-green wind.

  You of my uncle’s house,

  You far away and now close to me,

  Here we are sitting together

  Between the four heights, four volcanoes,

  Here on the blue-green volcano,

  Five suns from the northeast white mountain,

  Five suns away from your southeastern heights,

  From your family’s red mountain,

  Five suns away from the yellow southwestern volcano,

  And five suns

  Away from the darkness,

  Away from the scab-black northwestern volcano.”

  The dwarf handed Koh something. It was a black stone, a rounded cone, about two inches wide at the base and seven inches high, polished to a licked gloss. Koh set it down in the red quadrant—although there were only traces of pigment left on the board’s surface, but of course one knew what the colors were—in the bin, or rather the faint depression, that corresponded to today. Its bottom fitted into the concavity so that it stood upright and stable. The Penguin Woman handed Koh another and another, until there were nine pillars rising up from the board, making a star map of this particular day at this location, with the Pleiades, the moon, and then Venus just rising at the eastern edge. Next she added five stones, which, I guessed, stood for the five mountains of Teotihuacan, that is, they established our exact place on earth.

  Koh held out her dark hand and opened it slowly, meaning “Now, what is your question?”

  Okay, I thought. Better phrase this right.

  I’m still not sure just how on board she is. I have to get her to commit. If it isn’t enough to just identify the Doomster now, then she should show me how to play with nine stones. And if you need to get together the Game drugs to do that, then she should tell me how to do that too. Right.

  “You next to me please tell me,” I said, “how can I preserve my hometimers’ lineages through the last sun of the thirteenth b’ak’tun, and for the thirteen b’ak’tuns following that sun.”

  Koh didn’t react. But the pause stretched on in a way that made me pretty sure she was displeased. Well, she’s not throwing me out, I thought. Pause. Pause. Pause.

  Finally, the Penguin Woman—who seemed to get cues from Koh telepathically like some kind of homunculus—crawled into view with another set of wicker boxes. She took a jar and a paintbrush out of one of them and painted the walls of the sunken board with some kind of fat or oil. It had an odd smell. Next she painted the stuff on the sides of the standing rocks—

  Whoa. Dizzy.

  By now the taste from that kiss had filled my whole body. It was crab-meaty and sour—not so sour as an ant, though—and then under that there was a cocaine-like buzz, and still farther down and later in the aftertaste there was some unnatural flavor that maybe reminded me of some kind of soft drink they used to make when I was a kid, some really debased pre-natural-food-era chemically futuristic drugstore novelty, except I’d forgotten the name, what was it, some …

  Where was I?

  The dwarf handed Koh a basket. She took a little wiggling pinkish-brown thing out of it and set it down on the game board’s blue-green center point. It crouched there, and turned its head, and blinked around in the light. It was a baby monkey, smaller than a lab mouse—maybe about two inches high if it stood up, which it didn’t—and nearly naked. Its groin was painted or dyed black, to look like a loincloth, and there was a black sort of cap painted on its head, I guess to make it look more human. It didn’t look like a miniature human baby. It had the proportions of an adult. I couldn’t tell what species it was but from its malnourished, elongated look, and from its spiraling tail, I guessed that it might be a spider monkey, an Ateles, one of those dark tiny things that eats a lot of fruit and almost never comes down to the forest floor. They grow fast, so it had to be almost a newborn, but already it had a dusting of dark down, and as it dashed twice around the perimeter of the board, it seemed as mobile as an adult. It tried to climb up the corner of the polished wall and then tried to push itself up between two standing stones that were close to each other, but it kept slipping down, scrabbling against the greased stone. Then it tried leaping, and I almost thought it would clear the edge, but it didn’t have the muscles or coordination an adult would have and couldn’t leap above twice its own height. Finally it paused and urinated in the center of the red quadrant. I couldn’t see much—you’d need a jeweler’s loupe—but I got the impression it was a male. He looked up at us, although of course he couldn’t see us with those tiny eyes that hadn’t yet learned to focus. It crept into the red-and-black corner and cowered there, shivering. Koh brought one of the dry chocolate cups down over the monkey and slid it over the shallow bins to the square in the white quadrant that corresponded to today, four lines from the Eclipse Day on the border of the black quadrant.

  There was a pause. I noticed I was listing slightly to port. By now whatever she’d slipped me in that kiss had brought me beyond the point of sharpening my wits and into a stage where I couldn’t have told you who I was—although come to think of it, that was actually an issue. And I’d only gotten a trace of what she’d taken, I thought. She must have enough of this stuff in her system to kill a blue whale. And she was also a lot smaller than I was. No wonder the nine-stone adders had to start getting habituated to the drugs when they were five years old. I probably had this dopey high-guy grin. Lady Cool would think I was a total fruitcake. Well, that’s what happens your first time.

  The Penguin Woman handed Koh a second box. It was shaped like a little square hut with a tuft of strings on top. This time she set it down in the center of the black quadrant, untied the little knot, and pulled up one of the strings. A wall of the box slid up like the door of a Chinese cricket cage.

  Koh laid her open hand in front of the open door.

  We waited. Now what? I wondered.

  A pair of segmented longhorn antennae unfolded out of the shadow, paused, rotated in opposition, and paused again, and then a white ribbon of fangs flowed up into Lady Koh’s hand. It was a centipede, but not one I could classify, and it was a cavernicole morph, an eyeless albino species that for all anyone knew might have been living in the same light-tight sinkhole since the latest thing in vertebrates was the coelacanth. It was unpigmented, almost transparent in the soft places, but with brown at the edges of its chitin plates like the singeing at the peaks of a meringue pastry. It was around twelve inches long, which is enough to get your attention. It held still for long enough for me to see that it had twenty-one pairs of legs and that it had no eyes, just four stubs where the eyes would have been. The fangs, or rather poison claws, were long and gently curved, like cavalry sabers. And the setae—that is, the bristles that pick up motion—on its antennae were hugely enlarged, like spikes on an ocotillo cactus. It was like a zipper with the universe caught in it, painfully.

  More quickly than I could follow Koh had reached in with her left hand—the heptadigital one—and had grabbed the thing by its second tergite, the one right behind its head. She set it down in the center of a little dish and held i
t down with her thumb. It—or let’s call it she, because Koh did—she tried to get free, rearing her hind length up and scratching at Koh’s wrist with her flailing tarsae.

  “She is one k’atun and tunob old,” Koh said. “She is very wise.”

  Koh took her thumb away.

  I shifted on my crossed legs. I hadn’t seen or heard of this before. Really, I’d expected Koh to just bring out her stones and seeds and start playing away. Well, uno nunca sabe.

  Koh tapped her fingernails next to the ’pede, apparently communicating with her in her own vibratory language. The thing seemed to cock a slit sensillum to listen. Finally, she unstiffened a little and looked sightlessly up at me. I got a shivery impression she could taste us. She slid twice around Koh’s palm and curled into a loose spiral. Koh spoke to her in a new, smaller voice, and in a different language, all close vowels and sibilants. I leaned in too closely and the critter turned and snapped its labial palps at the warmth of my face with a pair of double clicks.

  “Your spine must move northwest,” Koh said. She meant to sit back a bit. I did. I almost thought she was smiling a bit at my little drug problem. I probably had eyes like a twelve-year-old’s after his first toke. Very funny.

  Koh set her hand down near the board’s extreme southeast. The ’pede slid off her palm like a trickle of mercury and took possession of the corner. She reoriented herself. She settled. She seemed used to the board.

  “Forgive me, lead me, shining guest,” Koh said. With a shell-game-quick movement she covered the centipede with a second chocolate cup. I was unpleasantly reminded of little entertainments that my stepbrothers in Utah set up, gladiatorial combats in TV crates involving whiptail lizards and lab rats. Koh laid her light hand on the cup over the centipede and her dark hand on the cup over the monkey.

  “My breath is black, my breath is yellow,

  My breath is red, my breath is white, my breath

  Is now blue-green … ,”

  Koh said.

  She lifted both cups.

  Nothing moved. I watched the centipede through weeks, and months, and years. Finally her antennae stirred, raised, and swung slowly through a 150-degree arc, tapping like a marimba player’s mallets as they spot-tasted the surface. She paused. She’s feeling something, I thought. Was the board like a kind of seismograph? Was the ’pede sensing the ebbs and floods of lava tides two miles below us? Was it gauging the pull of the moon?

  The two creatures were as far apart on the board as possible, and because of the cluster of standing stones in the middle, they couldn’t see each other. But, slowly, the centipede rustled, orienting herself, and then moved three wary steps east, perpendicular to the monkey, palpating the surface of the red quadrant. From the way she found her footing in the shallow bins, it seemed that she was accustomed to the terrain. The monkey stiffened. Something was up.

  In terms of size, the centipede had the advantage. But I’d seen howler monkeys kill snakes bigger than they were. And even if the monkey decided he didn’t want to fight the centipede, he could always just bounce away. And the ’pede was blind. So my guess was that, once again, things looked bad for the invertebrates.

  The monkey turned his head left, ever so slightly, and the centipede cocked her own cephalothorax in the same direction. It was hard to believe that he’d made a sound. But the ’pede’s ancestors had lived underground for a long time, and they’d learned to sense the tiniest vibrations. There was another long pause and then the monkey edged slightly left, checking out a possible route to the south. The ’pede reacted immediately. The monkey paused and crept forward. I counted four beats and then the centipede began to move, first only stroking the board in place and then creeping au pas de loup southward, perpendicular to the monkey, her claws contacting the surface in waves. I thought I could almost hear the taps of chitin on the stone and the differences between the taps. The Scolopendra came to the edge of the standing stone at today. Her antennae probed past the edge, thinking around the corner. I thought of Marena in that photograph, climbing that rock face, feeling for cracks above her head. The monkey crept nearer. The ’pede started to slide forward, moving in a way that looked like she was chewing her way through space, and then froze in position, tasting the air with her antennae. She looked like an open mouth with the teeth on the outside, a Cheshire jaguar’s bloody grin. The monkey took a tiny hop left, out from the shelter of the standing stone.

  The ’pede stiffened.

  The monkey saw her. He froze.

  Did he know what she was? All mammals instinctively fear segmented things. On the other hand, monkeys, even frugivores like this guy, eat a lot of bugs. And this monkey didn’t just look hungry. He was truly underfed. His eyes narrowed, and you could see by the greed in them that he’d been on a starvation diet, that he’d attack anything with meat on it. Was he going to grab her by the tail and whip her head against the stone? Or would he paw at her over and over until he’d smooshed her, like a fox does with a scorpion?

  He studied her. The centipede crept forward again, warily, into the yellow and clockwise toward the red. The monkey’s tensed body didn’t move, but his eyes followed her. She crossed into the red zone. The monkey shifted his weight. Suddenly, too fast for the eye to follow, the centipede darted forward. The monkey jumped and leapt sideways, almost backward, and crouched behind one of the obstacle stones. The centipede slowed and turned.

  There was a standoff. I counted five beats, and then ten. The monkey crept backward, keeping the standing stone between them. At fourteen beats, the tableau dissolved into motion. The combatants ricocheted across the surface too fast to follow, like a pinball between bumpers or a video of subatomic particles bouncing around in a cloud chamber. I had an impression that it was the monkey chasing the centipede. All around the vinegar bush, I thought. Then it seemed that the centipede was chasing the monkey, roughly counterclockwise through the henge of stones, which made something like an obstacle course. On each circuit the centipede came closer to the monkey than it had before. Now the monkey was into the red, and then the centipede was into the red and up into the white and the monkey had leapt across the board, into the black, with the centipede following and then not following but turning and heading backward, as though she were figuring out where the monkey was going to go, and before I could see what had happened the centipede had headed him off against one of the standing stones. Then the monkey had looped around behind her. He faked her out, I thought. The centipede froze. The monkey seemed to gather his courage. He jumped, grabbed the ’pede’s last segment, and raised it to whip her down to the stone, but before he could get her off the ground the centipede’s head had curled up behind the monkey’s back. I got a disturbing feeling that the ’pede had planned this, had seen it all ahead of time. She clenched around his torso and dug her bladed arms into the flesh at the nape of his neck.

  The monkey tore away, leapt backward, and stumbled. It was clear that he’d been envenomated. He struggled westward, creeping on all fours, but by 8 Reed his hands were slipping on the stone. He stumbled around Venus and back northward. He made it as far as 13 Wind. After decades of playing the Game I could feel, without knowing how, that his terror keyed into something basic about the layout of the board.

  I looked up at Koh. She was concentrating on the scene with what I’d have to call a burning focus, reading the monkey’s panic.

  The centipede sat, waiting. I noticed she was in the very center of the board, on the green zero date, which also represented Teotihuacan in the board’s world-map aspect. After thirty seconds the monkey was moving more stiffly, dragging himself forward, away from the centipede. He wouldn’t be so much in pain now, I thought, just feeling terribly cold. Two minutes later he was at the far side of the black quadrant. He toppled forward, like a little figurine, resting on his face. He could still flex and unflex his hands. Otherwise, he seemed to be paralyzed below the neck. The centipede approached him, more insouciant this time, legs rippling unhurriedly like oars on a galleon. When she reached him she palpated him with
her furred antennae in long, delicate strokes. She folded herself around him. He tipped over stiffly but his hands still curled around two of the ’pede’s spiked legs, trying to push away. They were small animals, but the scene felt gigantic, like we were seeing the true, unedited story of Saint George and the dragon. The monkey began to scream.

  The sound was almost too high to hear, as shrill as a diamond cutter across a sheet of Pyrex. It was a tiny sound. But it was so penetrating that I was sure that Hun Xoc and the rest of them could hear it out in the courtyard, that 14 Wounded could hear it all the way across town, that they could hear it way out in the wastelands, in Ix, at the North Pole, and on Mars. After a hundred and four beats the glass seemed to shatter, and the scream stopped, and started again, and broke again, and finally the monkey was screaming silently, with his mouth frozen open and his lips drawn back from his tiny teeth. After three thousand beats he was swelling with digestive juices but still twitching. The centipede began to feed, her little jaws and palps moving over the monkey, back and forth, like a child eating corn on the cob, tonguelessly licking him, basting him with gelatinous saliva. ’Pedes are messy eaters, and soon the monkey was glistening with the stuff and there was a clear pool of it underneath him. After sixty thousand beats, the centipede’s enzymes had largely dissolved the monkey’s muscles and internal organs, and it looked more like a skin filled with water than a recently living creature. The ’pede gnawed at the base of his neck, and then up through the soft skull into the brain, and then back down into the torso. We watched in the suffocating silence. Koh’s pupil was so dilated that the brown of her iris was like an aureole around an eclipsed sun. The centipede turned the monkey’s torso over with her quick delicate fussy harp-plucking movements and began coating his stomach. I estimated that it only took about an hour and forty minutes for the monkey to be reduced to a smudge of fur and teeth.