Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “Can you over me tell me where he is?” I asked, but she’d already moved on, tapping her runner beyond the last day, into no-name time. Damn it. I snuck a look at her. Gamers learn to hide mental fatigue. But they also learn to sniff it out. So even though Koh didn’t show more than a hint of that pinched dryness you get in too-long-focused eyes, and maybe a slight swelling in one or two thin veins visible through the melanin-free side of her face, I still got an impression that she might collapse. A single bead of sweat crawled out of her oiled hairline. On the board and, it seemed, around us, multitudes of inchoate shapes tumbled and howled with a sound like some tribe of giant nonhuman mammals in some huge stone hall. Ahead of us there was something like an edge, and beyond that, a zone that wasn’t fog or darkness, but something like the area outside your field of vision, the 80 percent of the sphere around your head where not only can’t you see, but you can’t even really visualize what it would be like to see there. You strain to look up, say, past the widow’s peak above your nose, and there’s something like a bank of brown fog, but then, beyond that, there isn’t even blackness but just a sort of nothing that your brain isn’t wired to imagine.

  “And this is the cliffside,” she said. It meant there was nothing else.

  Pause.

  Well, that’s a drag, I thought. I stifled a monohiccup. I felt queasy. The dwarf waddled over and took out the standing stones and cleared away the pebbles. There was a last long pause while Koh looked down at the empty board. My eyes were so tired that my vision was getting bluish. When Koh turned away the dwarf washed the board down with b’alche’, salt, and water, tapped it five times to let its uayob know we were leaving, replaced the cover, and scattered fresh geranium petals over it. She got a wet cloth out of one of her jars and snuffed out the stumps of the rushlights.

  I blinked. There was light in the room. It was the blue light that I’d thought was in my eyes. It was still weak but it was strong enough for me to see that the waxy stuff that covered the walls and screens and ceiling, and that had looked black in the firelight, wasn’t paper or leaves or feathers. It was a mosaic of the wings of blue morpho butterflies. They were little circular sections, laboriously trimmed out of the center of the wings and sewn onto the canvas backing, tens of thousands of iridescent lapis-lazuli-blue disks rippling in otherwise undetectable air currents. Supposedly, here in the northwest, morphos were the uayob of slain warriors, and they could only be collected after they’d died naturally. Sometimes the collectors followed dying ones for days. How long had it taken? I wondered. How many lives’ worth of man-hours had been spent on this room? The light swelled. It seemed to be falling down from the oculus like snow, so slowly that I thought I could see individual photons. The blue deepened to that unimaginable liquid morpho ultramarine, that structural blue that isn’t a pigment, that comes from the interference of their billions of angled scales and vanishes under a drop of water, and it deepened beyond that, as though we were sinking in the tropical ocean, becoming so saturated it was as though I’d never seen the color blue before.

  The dwarf stopped what she was doing and scurried out, as though she’d gotten one of her telepathic signals.

  I guess that’s it, I thought. I took in a breath to start the usual thank-you speech but Koh interrupted me with a “wait where you are” gesture.

  She closed her eyes. It felt like the most intimate thing she’d done since I got here.

  We sat.

  So, I wondered, do we count that as a failure? She did get us there, I guess … still, that wasn’t enough to really go after anyone … was it? I don’t—

  “I need to play that through again,” Koh said. “With a full measure of Salter’s and Steerman’s dusts.”

  I didn’t know what to say so, as I do too rarely, I shut up.

  Hmm, well, she seems to consider that a failure. Still, at least she has confidence. It was kind of like how Taro’d said that we’d need another 1020 ply to be sure we’d bring the Doomster into range. We couldn’t do it, of course, because there wasn’t that much computing power on the planet, but at least he knew it wasn’t impossible.

  Well, maybe we can do it this way. She thinks—

  I heard something faint and looked up. The Penguin woman was back, whispering something in Koh’s light ear.

  I sat.

  The whispering went on and on. My sense of time wasn’t back to normal yet, but I was sure it was more than ten minutes. Koh asked a few things in single-hand signs that I didn’t understand. She looked at me in a way that made me a little nervous. Finally, the dwarf left. Koh settled back into a formal position and looked at me again in a way that made me look down at the place where the board had been.

  Do you know how—well, I’m sure you know—how in Greek tragedies, all the action happens offstage? And the only things that happen onstage are like, say, a messenger comes in and says something like, “My queen! The Thessalonians are defeated!” Well, the first time I read those plays I thought it was all pretty stagey and unrealistic. But the more I saw of the world and things, especially things here, that is, here in the Olden Times, the more I realized that stuff actually is kind of realistic. Queens and dukes and ahauob and whoever really did spend most of their time sitting in their offices and getting third-hand reports and sending out couriers and generally staying out of the action.

  “I’m told that the Harpy 14 Wounded’s compound has been raided,” Koh said. She didn’t exactly glare at me but there was a flatness in her tone that I thought was more than just exhaustion from the Game. She was mad.

  “B’aach?” I asked. “What?” It was an unforgivably rude way to speak to her, but I guess I was regressing to our twenty-first-century lack of manners.

  “14 Wounded is outside in the courtyard with your men.”’

  “What happened to the rest of the Ixian bloods?” I asked.

  “For all we know they are also on their way here,” she said.

  I started to uncross my legs. “I under you should—”

  She turned her hand over, meaning “Shut up,” before I could say “go out and see them.”

  “I am told it was the Swallowtail Clan who entered the house,” she said.

  It’s those Oxwitzan Jaguar fuckwads, I thought. Those boats that had been following us in the gulf. They’d probably gotten here right after us, pleaded their case in front of their foster cousins in the Puma Synod, and gotten them to shut 14 down. And there was about a 100 percent chance that the Ixian Ocelots had put them up to it. Hell.

  “I am told there are more of them on their way here,” she said. Apparently, the Harpies who’d gotten away were trying to claim temporary asylum here, in the Rattler’s quarter.

  Damn, she’s angry, I thought. And it wasn’t just because the Rattler’s children weren’t eager to take in any more refugees, although they weren’t, despite the fact that the universal hospitality rule—of which this whole vigil festival thing was kind of an overblown extension—basically obligated them to. The problem was that this incident was likely to scotch any chance of repairing relations between the Rattlers and the two synods.

  Well, okay, I thought. Change of plans. Don’t get discouraged. It’s not important how far away your goal is—just that you’re moving toward it.

  We still have a little time. 14’s small potatoes. Right? The synods might go after some minor foreign trader right before High Holy Week, but they wouldn’t stir up anything with the Rattlers until after the vigil. Would they?

  Okay. Think.

  There was no way to get out on the sly. We’d have to stay in the Rattler’s quarter until after the eclipse and then come up with some way to force our way out.

  And Koh had just better bite on the asylum offer. She’ll take it, I thought. She has to.

  “I beg you over me to come to Ix,” I said. “My father 2 Jeweled Skull now offers you—

  [54]

  Eight days later, at the start of the second ninth of the day—10:32 A.M.—every human inhabitant of the holy valley of Teotihuacan was outdoors, looking upward, waiting for the Chewer to ambus
h the sun. The only unoccupied surfaces were the taluds and tableros of the mulob. Bloods, slaves, traders, crafters, pilgrims, porters, captives, children, old women, young women, babies—and even people who couldn’t see or stand, and even the dying, in fact even the recently dead—were assembled in their ranks and orders and packed into plazas and rooftop gardens. Old men sat on their sons’ shoulders and young men wore stiltlike sandals or teetered on tall stools. Every initiated male held whatever noisemaker was traditional to his clan and allowed to his seniority—drums, horns, maracas, ocarinas, clay bells, stone bells, castanets, sticks, clappers, bullroarers, rasps, whistles, flutes, and a hundred other gadgets, every one of them brand-spanking-new.

  There were no fires in the valley. In fact, there were no fires in the entire altiplano. And even beyond the empire’s farthest reach, hearthstones had been doused and scattered. In most of the Western Hemisphere, and probably in all of Mesoamerica, every torch, rushlight, coal, cigar, and miscellaneous flame had been extinguished. Last night it was overcast, and there was no moon, and as we made our final preparations in one of the Rattler’s courtyards, it felt like—well, despite the fact that we were in the center of what was at the moment the densest concentration of people in the world, we could just as easily have been deep underground in a vast phosphorless cavern. Between the Sonoran Desert and the Andes, the continent was as dark as it had been before hominids infected it, thirty thousand years ago.

  All but a few vessels and pots had been drilled or smashed. Blankets and clothing had been stained, slashed, or unwoven. Pictographic inscriptions had been canceled with streaks of blue ink. Livestock and slaves had been killed, and thousands of old, sick, or just pious people had killed themselves. Everyone, or at least everyone except me and maybe a handful of other skep-tics, was terrified that this might be the final death of their sun. And I was terrified too, of course, just not about that.

  From our perch up here on the snout of the Rattler’s mul—that is, about halfway up the front of the pyramid, facing east toward the fetish market across the southern end of the main axis—we could feel the heat rising off the bodies, the mélange of their breaths, sour air from the ulcerated throats of the captives in their wicker standing-cages, the black air from the elders’ tobacco, cancerated lungs. The sky was clear, and luckily for us there was only a little breeze. It was a perfect day for the end of time. I shifted from foot to foot. A loose end of gut cord from my combat sandal was hooking into the skin of my shin, but I didn’t want to bend down to deal with it. That sort of thing wasn’t done. I wobbled forward. Hun Xoc held out an arm and eased me back upright.

  We were facing west, in the center of our core group of Harpy bloods. Hun Xoc was on my left, and Armadillo Shit was behind me. His job was literally to watch my back. We were in the center of a group of eleven other Harpy bloods and twenty-two Harpy nonbloods. 12 Cayman was in the vanguard, ready to move to the rear in case of attack.

  We all wore blue outer mantas that identified us as aspirants to the Rattler Society. Under them we had on as much armor as we could get away with without looking suspicious. That is, we each wore wicker shin and arm guards and a vest made of two layers of thick canvas quilting, each filled with wood chips, which could stop most blades. Each of us had a short mace or a club strapped to the inside of one thigh and a rolled-up wicker shield strapped to the other. We also had a three-part spear, hanging from weak, easily breakable threads in the center of our backs, under our mantas. Next to it we each had a rolled-up wicker shield, which we’d had made specially for this action. Each one had three cross-pieces that folded down and a pair of strong hide straps that let you hold it with both arms. Still, I wished the shields were bigger. They might be our weak link.

  The Puma bloods on the opposite mul were in full dress armor and carried tall parade javelins that, despite their ornamental eccentric-flint spearpoints, could still do a lot of damage. As I think I mentioned, the Pumas hated the Rattler’s Children, and at the first sign of a fight they’d take the opportunity to cleanse as many of the Rattler’s Children as possible. And the Pumas were still hosting some Ixian Ocelots. And who knew whether they’d heard anything? Word traveled a lot faster than people. Somebody back home might have realized that 2JS was up to something and sent a message here, and put the Pumas on the lookout for any Ixian Harpies. On top of everything else we might have bounties on our skins.

  “Look,” Hun Xoc signed by tapping on my left arm.

  I followed his eyes forward and down. Three vingtaines of Swallowtail javelinmen in red quilted armor had just pushed through the crowd and stationed themselves between the plaza and the fetish market, blocking most of the entrance to the main axis.

  Damn it, I thought. Well, that’ll put a crimp in our schedule.

  Koh must see them. Doesn’t she?

  I snuck a look over my shoulder. Behind us the top third of the Star Rattler’s ornate mul wedged into the thin sky. Its staircase was packed with converts and aspirants. Sixty arms above us, at the lip of the sanctuary, the fifty-two senior sucklers and adders to Star Rattler stood in an immobile row. They were all dressed, almost identically, as men, with blue Chaakish eye masks, like fat glassless goggles, to help them see through the Black Chewer’s breath, and big scaled helmets and platform sandals. Above them, at the apex of the mul, framed by the mouth of the sanctuary, there was a glimpse of a tall headdress that belonged to Lady Yellow, the senior sun adderess of the Orb Weaver Synod. I guess she was kind of the mother superior. Supposedly she was a hundred and eight years old.

  I counted five figures in from the north corner and picked out Lady Koh. Stupidly, I got a flash of pride spotting her in the lineup. Her face, or what I could see of it, was impassive.

  It was hard to believe we were really going forward. How did Koh know the whole thing wasn’t some kind of trap? Well, at least she knew from her cross-examination of me that I wasn’t lying. In fact, I’d bet she considered me as under her control. Well, maybe I was. Still, she can’t know what’s going to happen when she gets to Ix.

  Or can she? Maybe she’s worked out more of her own future than she’s letting on.

  Maybe she wants to take over the Game drugs operation so she can start her own empire.

  Hmm. Well, maybe that would be okay. Why not? Go ahead, set your sights a little higher. Still, don’t worry about that right now. Okay. One thing at a time. A, B, C. And A, right now, is the Swallowtail squad.

  She must see them, I thought. Should we just try to go past them anyway? Or should we change the route? And if we do, will we be able to signal it to her?

  No, don’t do it, I thought. Better just follow the plan. Get to the first rendezvous at the pharmacopoeia and then change if you have to.

  Hun Xoc touched my arm again. I snapped my head around. Face front, soldier.

  You know, I thought, really the creepiest thing about this—or the most singular thing, anyway—was that despite the temptation, not a single member of the crowd made a premature sound. Well, they’d been practicing for five days, I thought. I’d been whispering for so long that I wondered if my vocal cords would still work. For the last five days it had seemed that the only living thing you heard was the birds.

  You could feel the crowds shivering. You could smell the anticipation in their sweat. The mass of life rustled and creaked, like a jungle in that quiet phase of the night just before the predawn chorus. Their hands hovered over their instruments. But nobody whistled, or tapped, or even dropped a rattle. I wondered whether any other city this size in the history of the world had, or would, ever create this kind of unity in its population. Even animals seemed impressed by the silence, so that the occasional scrawk of a gull or a blackbird or the bark of a dog in a pen seemed halfhearted, just a little dust in the groove. Every so often a baby would squeal, and, immediately, it would be muffled. And probably suffocated, I thought.

  Bastards. Despite the colors and the freshness and the collective goodwill, it was still a dire, horrible day. Even if you didn’t know anyth
ing about the place—say you’d just stepped out of a teleporter—you’d instinctively feel that the city was at a tipping point. It felt like a doctor’s waiting room, with all of us waiting for the receptionist to call our names and say, in as neutral a tone as possible, that they had the results of our test.

  Of course, from a twenty-first-century perspective I suppose it was all actually pretty silly. After all, it was just another eclipse. But on another level—and even when I tried to cultivate some emotional distance—I kept feeling there was a certain sanity behind the whole thing. In the twenty-first century people just went barreling ahead, and then when something bad happened they couldn’t believe it. Here, at least, everyone wasn’t pretending that everything was always A-OK.

  I snuck a look to the right, toward the center of the city. The great main axis stretched off to the north. The city seethed with newly woven streamers and long strips of spoonbill feathers raised on a hundred thousand bamboo poles, all orange to attract the sun, curling in the weak breeze like the polyps of octocorals. Underneath the banners, each of the thousands of bloods standing in the choice real estate of the teocalli district had a small circular shield over his left shoulder, and each shield had a featherwork design, bright, simple, geometric, and slightly different from all the others, all facing the same direction—west—like a field of sunflowers. The effect was so heraldic that you could imagine we were medieval knights, meeting for a tournament on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. There wasn’t a single person with an uncovered head or a bare face. Even the slaves wore rags wrapped around their upper lips. Higher-ups were so encrusted with jade and spondylus shells, and with such long-feathered headdresses, that they seemed to have exoskeletons and antennae. It was like the people in this town might as well have been pinned in place, in drawers labeled by greathouse lineage, dependent clan, subclan, sub-subclan, serving clan, and slave clan, and every individual in that slave clan. I’d say it was regimented except that, unlike uniforms in a modern military review, no two people’s markings were exactly alike.