I let my focus crawl north along the axis until it found two plazas that reflected the flat blue of the sky. The sunken courts near the Ocelots mul had been filled with water, like swimming pools. One was stocked with axolotl, water lilies, and jabiru storks, which were sacred to the Jade Hag. The water in the other pool was bare. Supposedly it was laced with ololiuqui, so that the captives whod be thrown into it later on would drown without struggling. There was a row of squat offering platforms along its western bank, and on one of them you could just make out a dash of turquoise that might have been the five Ixian Ocelots who were 9 Fanged Hummingbirds delegation to the festival. At least wed managed to avoid them this far, I thought.
At the midpoint of the main axis the swollen haw of the Hurricane mul dwarfed everything else. Its peak was about twice the height above us that we were above the plaza, high enough so that on a hazy day, or in the offering smoke, you could really believe the sucklers on it were being swallowed by hungry clouds. But today Chacals sharp eyes could pick out the whole scene, the lesser synod members on the second-from-top level, with the row of giant megaphones, like alphorns, twenty arms long, resting on their shoulders, and now, on the highest level, the tall red-orange headdresses of the Puma Synod, just emerging from the four mouths of the teocalli.
The crowds rustled. The distorting perspective of the receding levels of the pyramid made the Synod seem like inaccessible giants farther away than the shell of the sky. Teotihuacan didnt have kings, and the archonic offices passed between different members of the two councils. When they appeared in public, they were heavily masked, and no one outside the council was supposed to know who they were. But Koh had it from good sources that the current archon of the Swallowtails was an elderly Puma named Turd Curl. Shed also said to watch for the person who was likely to be Turd Curls successor, a Puma blood named Severed Right Hand. Supposedly he was only thirteen years oldbut already he was considered the up-and-comer. They said hed been born with fur and fangs, and that he always knew, without being taught, how to transform into his feline self. They said he only ate humans, captives younger than he was. But that was probably just propaganda. Koh had said his colors were yellow and lilac.
I followed the angle of the great muls stairs down to where it met a freshly built wooden mul. Fifty-two sacrifices, each exactly nine years and twenty-nine days old, had been keeping a vigil inside it for five days. When it was set on fire theyd help carry all the other offerings and present them to the newborn sun. About two hundred arms southeast of the pagoda there was a tiny minor mul in a sort of orange-and-black checkerboard pattern. The Pumas pharmacopoeia, the monastery garden where the Pumas grew and distilled their components of the Game drug. Our target.
According to Koh, the Swallowtail sucklers knew exactly how long the totality of the eclipse would lastabout eighteen and a half minutesand theyd try to increase the illusion of their power by cutting it as close as possible. Theyd wait until only one or two hundred beats before the sun would reemerge, and then, Turd Curl would signal. On the level below him fifty-two of his sucklers would start swinging bullroarers made from the femurs of their predecessors. On the level below that two hundred and sixty of their acolytes would blow their giant horns, and on the levels below, and spreading through the known world, the men would strike up their instruments and the women and children would shout or chant, Marhóani, marhóani, Go away, go away, and babies would get chili powder blown in their eyes to make them cry, and even dogs would get kicked in the ribs, and everyone would make as much noise as possible until the Chewer was driven off. Then the head sucklers would light the new fire from the sun itself, using a huge and reportedly magnificent concave mirror ground and polished from hćmatite. Theyd send the fire down the mul to the pavilion of the new sun, that is, the bonfire. All through the rest of the day and night the charge holders of the four thousand towns would troop past the bonfire, light their torches, and take the fresh fire and tales of the capitals grandeur back to their homelands. And the vast majority would believe it was thanks to the Puma Synods leadership that they were able to rescue the sun.
Or that was the Swallowtails plan. Koh and I had other ideas.
Two days ago, Koh had made her move. Just after noon, without notifying her fellow adderesses, shed called forty-eight of her closest followers together and issued a warning about the eclipse. The Sky Eel, she said, had told her that this time, the Black Chewer would not be persuaded to regurgitate this sun, but would steal the ball, that is, swallow the sun for good. The Eel, that is, Star Rattler, would give birth to a new sun, she said, and since that sun would be unrelated to the cat lineages, over the next katun the Sky Eels children would be privileged above all others. But before that, in order to cleanse the dying world, the Rattler was planning to open a cloud gourd and release an army of what they called dadacanob, long beesthat is, yellowjackets, Vespula squamosa, a major nuisance and minor killer in these partsto sting the eyes of everyone in Teotihuacan who hadnt followed the Rattler. Everyone but the Rattlers Children would be condemned to darkness. After that the Sky Eel would tell Koh where to lead its followers and would extend its protection to a new Rattler city in the Red Land, that is, the southeast. Meanwhile, messengers visited the leaders of twenty-four Koh-affiliated households and gave them the location of the rendezvous point: Flayed Hill. As soon as they heard the voice of the yellowjackets, they should gather their families and their most valuable possessions and start marching east.
That last part made me a little uneasy. Somehow wed gone from talking about her own household and a few followers to close to five thousand people. Would there be enough food for them in the Harpy towns? For that matter, would there be enough food and water along the way? How many of them would die on the trek?
Dont worry about it, I told myself. Just keep a low profile, score the drugs, ship them back to Ix, and get the fizook out of here.
Koh had immediately been called into the presence of Lady Yellow, who was something like the orders mother superior. It meant that at least one of her forty-eight confidants was informing on her. Lady Yellow told Koh that the society was planning to vote on her membership. If Koh were blackballed, shed be expected to drown herself. Later, an informant in the Aura Glory Synod got word to her that the Synods considering inviting her to present herself to themthat is, forcing her to turn herself in for what would inevitably be torture and execution.
By noon on the day of the silence ordinary people were repeating what shed said in whispers, in the well courts and markets of Teotihuacan. It was a rumor, an order, and a rallying cry : The next sun is Star Rattlers. Everyone in the city and probably everyone in the Valley of Mexico had heard about it, from Turd Curl to the lowliest night-soil collector. And, as is usual with such things, it was already getting exaggerated. The world was dissolving. The sky was falling. The city was going to ooze into a hole in the zero earth. And on, and on, and on.
Still, nobody wanted to do anything to stir up trouble before the eclipse. It was partly because it would look like a sign of weakness, but also because everybody, from top to bottom, took the silence period very seriously. Besides, when the sun did reappear, Koh would be discredited and easy to attack.
Of course, the Synods knew the sun was going to come out again. They knew almost everything about solar eclipses, not just the saros intervals of eighteen years and eleven and one-third days but whether theyd be partial or total and how long they would last. And they tried to make sure the masses knew as little as possible. Like psychiatrists the ruling class had to keep you feeling that they were making you better but that the situation was still dire enough for you to have to keep coming back.
When the eclipse ended, the Pumas would come for ustheyd kill Koh and most of us, if they could. Before they got to us, I had to steal their component of the Game drugs and everyone had to get to the rendevous point. Oh, and then if we all survived, I would
learn the nine-stone game and get my notes on everything entombed back in Ix. I still didnt know how the trumpet vine had destroyed Disney World, but that was a problem for another day. Lets call it a long shot.
[55]
Something was wrong with the space. It was like the whole outdoors was getting smaller, shrinking to the size of a single stuffy room. No, I thought, its not the space, its the light. Everything looked just a little more solid, a little closer. The shadows were sharper. The hills, the crowds, and a loose strand of my oiled hair were all in too-high relief. There was a sense of muffling, like all the dampers had come down on a thousand-pipe cathedral organ. I snuck a look up at the sun. There was a nibble out of it at two oclock.
Ive never seen anything to make me think theres anything like ESP. But even so, I cant imagine that you could have been anywhere in the cityeven blindfolded, earplugged, and double-boxed in some soundproofed basementwithout feeling the fear at that moment. It oozed through stone walls. It rang in the soil.
As clear as a heart attack Turd Curls voice cracked the silence:
Charhápiti sini, chá jucha phumuári …
You with red teeth, will you now skin and scatter us
Over your darkness?
Now will you never return to the heart of the lake,
Of the sky shell? You …
The Teotihuacan Valley has echoic properties, like a whisper gallery. When plastered construction covered the hills, the echoes were much stronger. There was no doubt that every being in the valley had heard him. But there was no answer. And there wasnt supposed to be. This was the only thing Turd Curl would say and the last words we would hear until he gave the order for noise.
I focused on Hun Xocs harpy-feather headdress, about twelve inches away. Something was odd about the latticework of fibers. They were morphing, sharpening. The Black Chewer, who was much more powerful than the sun himself, had jagged the edges of every object everywhere. I looked away, toward the crowds on the steps below us. Everything had the same curling, frizzing, wrinkling disease around the edges, as though every loose fiber, every projection, was gnarling and sharpening into a hook, a sort of twisted fingernail. I shuddered.
I listened. The calls of the birds had stopped. I didnt hear even the buzz of a fly.
Lets get going, guys.
I shut my left eye and snuck another look at the sun. It had already shriveled to a thin sliver like a tungsten filament. On its right edge, Bailys beads spiked out between the mountains rimming Humboldts Crater on the horizon of the invisible moon. Viel besser wäre, wenn sie auf der Erde so wenig, wie auf dem Monde, hätte das Phänomen des Lebens hervorrufen können, as Jupiter Tonans said. The sanest person ever to live, I thought. Well, dont dwell on it. Out in the plazas, and up on the hills, the serried crowds looked spiky and menacing. Now the sun was circled with the spiracle of light, what they call the diamond ring. The edges between the lights and shadows on Hun Xocs scarified cheeks were as sharp as if the light were coming through a pinhole. His red-oiled skin looked brown, and his blue headbands looked gray, almost like we were under sodium light in some future dystopolis. The corona bloomed and spread around the hole in the sky like the cardiotoxic tentacles of a Chironex jellyfish. Houston, we have totality, I thought.
An unsteadiness or quivering rippled through the crowd. You could feel the breath held in a million lungs, and you could smell the hysterical tension, the terror that the source of all warmth might never escape from the Black Chewers stomach. I, or lets say even I, since I think its fair to say I was the least superstitious person there, had to remind myself that it was just a phase. Things would go back to the way they were.
Wouldnt they?
I listened. There was just that same thick woolly silence. I looked up at the blinded twin again. Still total. Less than two minutes left. Okay, come on, homes, anytime you feel like it.
Anytime.
Hell.
I closed my right eye to refreshen it and focused the left one on the line of the western hills. Nothing.
I listened.
Nothing.
Come on. Do it
Something floated over the valley from the east, a thin sound like a long Mylar ribbon. It was a sound with no name. I think that at first the people in the valley werent even sure that it was a sound. Then, as it went on and grew a little louder, I suppose most of them thought it was a cicada, which was the closest thing in nature. The sound spread, or else the same sound rose up in other places. Even with all the human bodies buffering the sound the chords ricocheted off the planes of the hundred mulob. First it seemed to be coming from the east, and then maybe from the south, and next maybe from somewhere nearby, and as more invisible sources joined in it got louder and louder, louder than Id expected, and more reverberant, with a feedback drone like God was fooling with a stack of old Fender Twin amps.
My trainees, down in the dusty cellar with the rat droppings and the walls muffled with corn husks, had been more than startled when they first heard the sound. First they were creeped out, and then they were fascinated, and then they had to master it. Imagine that youd never heard a violin before, that in fact youd never heard a stringed instrument of any kind, not even a plucked string. What would it sound like? It would be a little bit like a cicada, a little bit like a pumice-string saw, a little like a cat, and a little like a swarm of bees.
The voice of strings is just a major technological marvel. Theres nothing else thats so shocking and so hypnotic, that combines so much sharpness with so much breadth. Theres nothing else like the shape of its sound wave sawing into your ear. Even dogs are spooked by strings until they get used to them. It was transfixing.
Of course, my traineesthe Fifteen Fiddlers, as I thought of themdidnt get it quite right. What we were hearing was a long way from Fritz Kreisler and the Berlin Philharmonic. In fact it was a mess. And of course the instruments didnt quite sound like cellos or violins or dilrubas or violas. Still, they were decent, full-voiced, uncracked, well-rosined strings, played with a bow. And my guys had it down close enough to give you the same shiver youd get hearing it for the first time:
[56]
By the fifth time they repeated the phrase, I smelled urine and feces rising off the crowd, and that stale-and-sour species of sweat people excrete when theyre terrified. Guess some folks just cant take the pressure, I thought. Ahh, that sweet smell of fear. Smells like … apocalypse. You could feel the strings hooking their fear and drawing it out like taffy into threads that just stretched thinner and thinner, up and up and up, until they finally crystallized and broke into plain inchoate invertebrate panic.
I was proud of my team. Theyd all worked hard over the last six days. Id had twenty craftsmen going almost nonstop, in the inner courts of a big householdful of carpenters in the north Aura quarter. They were dependents of the Gila House and loyal to Koh. They were really good folks. Still, it wasnt easy. Even though thered been a muted, fireless, but urgent bustle through the valleypreparation for the festival that would follow the eclipsewe still had to sneak around. We only moved after dark, since you werent supposed to do any business during the silence. Every time, we had to bribe our way past different troops of low-level Swallowtail guards. They thought we were smuggling copal, since they could smell it on our hands. What with trying out different types of dried bottle gourds, waiting for wildcat gut, getting the cedar necks carved, getting the horn pegs made, finding that human hair breaks after a few strokes and figuring out how it could be corded into tiny strands and still work in a bow, trying out fifty kinds of gum to find a decent substitute for rosin, and getting everything glued together only two days ahead of D-day, it was definitely the hardest project Id worked on in a long time, tougher than setting up my Chromidorus marislae tank.
Some of the men were pretty handy flute musicians already, in their pentatonic way. They were all eager beavers, were excited about the proj
ect, thrilled to help the Rattler reclaim the sun, and ready to do anything for Lady Koh. And they learned pretty fast, sawing away in the dark. Still, just like when Id tried to hum some show tunes for Hun Xoc, they didnt get Western music right away. It was like they couldnt really hear a tune with a phrase and repetitions and a resolution. I guess if you havent been acculturated, if youve never heard an octaval chord before, its just not a natural thing. Still, once they got harmonic they wouldnt stop playing it. And when we tried out the passage in question, the pyramidal scales from the Violin Sonata no. 1 that Prokofiev said ought to sound like a wind in a graveyard, it affected everybody. Evidently the Game gods had been right.
Brian D'Amato Page 68