Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  By the time they’d run through the passage ten times, children were crying and their high voices blended into the strings. The crowds packed into the plazas were moving but not yet on the move. They were just jiggling against each other like molecules of compressed gas, feeling for exits. Any minute now, I thought.

  Come on. Time for phase II.

  I heard a couple people on the stairs below us sniffling. I turned and looked north into the plazas. Children and old women were rubbing their eyes. Men were squirming. Good.

  Around me the bloods squirmed and sniffed.

  I felt what I thought was the first sting in my own eyes. Ouch. Good.

  I smelled something sharp. Something hurt back near my tonsils. Good.

  I looked around. The bloods behind me were squinching up their faces. It meant our second team of confederates had lit their hidden fires.

  There were thirty-six of them, spread out in a rough half-circle on the east side of the city, in the kitchen yards and courtyards of fourteen different compounds. The top layers of the fires were dried heaps of a kind of tropical poison ivy, fatwood, and dried poison sumac, which is a strong lachrymogen, like CS. At first the smoke was nearly invisible. It wasn’t scentless, but it had no distinctive smell. I saw people squirming down in the courts of the main axis, which meant it was hugging the ground. Good.

  Koh knew everything about the local weather. Two nights ago she’d decided that the breeze would be weak, and from the east as usual, and that the smoke would hang in the valley. The conspirators had moved as much of the fuel as they could from the sites on the west side to ones in the east. And here it was working out like she’d said. They’d done a good job. They’d had to buy up hearth wood, low-grade rubber, and, more suspiciously, sumac, ivy, and loads of cecropia leaves, and smuggle it across the pilgrimage ring in small batches. They’d had to hide the coals they’d use to light the fires from the Morning Glory bloods, who were like the religious police.

  The blood in front of me dropped his manta. It was the signal to get ready. I disengaged and dropped my own and pulled the javelin off my back. I unwrapped the obsidian spearhead and fitted the three parts of the shaft together. Even without metal fittings the shafts clicked into each other in that efficient way that gives you a (false in this case) feeling of slick power, like a marine assembling an M16 in whatever point whatever seconds. With as little bending over as possible I got the wicker shield off my leg, unrolled it, and tied the two crosspieces to the uprights. It was a little like making a kite. The end product was light but pretty rigid. I fastened the deerskin strap, got the spear tied onto my right hand and the shield onto my left, and straightened up. I found my green headband under my testicles and tied it around my forehead one-handed. It was a move I would never have been able to execute as Jed. Everybody on the Rattler’s side was supposed to have a green headband for IFF. That is, Identification, Friend or Foe.

  My eyes were watering. I closed the left one.

  So, how much attention had we just attracted? I wondered. I looked out over the plazas. The crowds were stirring and squirming in a sort of Brownian motion, feeling for exits.

  Ouch. My eye was twitching. Now there was definitely dark smoke overhead. The second layer of the fires was supposed to make as much smoke as possible, to block or at least obscure the reemerging sun.

  I closed my right eye and opened the left one again. I dug my left hand down past my belts and loincloth and into a little bag. Everybody who was in on the plot had one. It was filled with a kind of salve made from copal amber, royal jelly, ageratina, and hummingbird eggs. I scooped out a dab with my designated clean finger, the pinky, and smeared it into my right eyelid. According to Koh’s surgeon, if you kept switching eyes and salving the closed one, you could walk through smoke for a long time and still see. Somewhere I’d heard that old-time firemen used to do something similar. Still, just offhand it didn’t seem too effective. Note to self: Remember to take some back and pitch it to the Body Shop.

  I took a quick look at the top of the Hurricane mul.

  Something was going on up there.

  Turd Curl’s archimage couldn’t properly light the fire with the light of the sun blocked by smoke, but they were pretending to do it anyway, by sleight of hand. Someone lit the giant torch at the apex of the Hurricane mul, and the fire runner, a trained athlete in a puffy and cumbersome suit of feathers soaked in tallow, held his arm in the fire pretty much as planned, and turned and bounded down the steps, as planned, and when the fire overwhelmed him his flaming body rolled forward between the ranks of Puma bloods. The bloods knocked and guided his body down, out onto the snout of the great mul, which was on a level with Hun Xoc and me but separated by a gulf of humans, and down the lower stairs and out into the plaza into the bonfire pagoda, almost as though nothing was wrong.

  But the pagoda had already started burning. Somebody, maybe one of Koh’s men, must have thrown or shot a hidden coal into it. It had already flared up before the fire runner even reached the snout. By this time the general public wasn’t watching the mul ritual anyway. People were looking in the sky for the Rattler and trying to run, or fight, or hide. I heard the cantors of the Puma Synod up at the sanctuary, calling through their alphorns, “Hac ma’al, hac ma’al,” “The new sun, the new sun,” but the chant had that tone that creeps into people’s voices when they know they’re being ignored. It was too late.

  The crowd’s motion was brisker now, like people in a busy street just before a storm, when everyone steps lively for cover even though there are no raindrops yet. A wave of yellow-gray smoke swept over us. The fiddling had degenerated, less and less Prokofiev and more and more random sawing, but it seemed louder than ever. You don’t think of strings as loud instruments, but now they were a global whine. Somewhere I heard one of Koh’s confederates shouting a phrase they’d rehearsed: “A’ch dadacanob, a’ch dadacanob,” “The yellowjackets are here, the yellowjackets are here!” Another voice picked it up, an old lady’s. I didn’t think she was a planted agitator. But you know how people shout what their bosses shout. A few more of the Rattler Society converts shouted it, and then more, and then people were shouting it who couldn’t possibly be Rattlers. The voices were hoarse, maybe from days of disuse during the Silence, and the chant spread through the crowd with a sound like a hailstorm rasping over a cornfield. Koh’s people accentuated it, like cheerleaders, and inserted other phrases welled up and spread alongside it, “The sun is dead, we’re dying, we have died,” and “Ak a’an, ak a’an,” “This is the end, this is the end.” Laughter mixed in with the chanting—hysterical laughter, I suppose. A few musicians had started drumming and piping; it sounded halfhearted and their effort trailed off as the cries of fright rose up from the zócalos. The cacophony of noisemakers and shouting, which I was still half expecting, never came. The crowds in the courts and rooftops stirred and bristled. Below us the packed market plaza began to roil.

  The majority had no doubt that this was the army of yellowjackets—invisible or not—that Koh had predicted, and that they would sting everyone into blindness. I saw old women, bloods, undercastes, and little boys looking up at the sky, pointing and shouting, “Ha k’in, ha k’in,” “The Rattler, the Rattler,” and involuntarily I looked up myself. The ropes of smoke wreathed and undulated, and I bet if I’d looked a little longer I could have caught the wave of the consensual hallucination myself and watched Star Rattler in all its detail coil down out of heaven, tongue probing, feathers rippling, fangs spurting holy ichor.

  “Ha k’in, ha k’in, ha k’in, ak a’an, ak a’an, ak a’an …”

  Terror crackled through the crowd. It seemed like some kind of pheromonal imperative: GET AWAY! YOU ARE GOING TO DIE ! ! !

  As the multitudes stampeded, I felt the stone under my sandals quiver. I teetered a bit and caught myself. Shared, multiplicitous terror can sweep you into a wave of weightlessness. If you were there on 9/11, or on the Indian Ocean during the tsunami, or in Florida during the Domino Star, or at any of the other big ones, you know that the
re’s a moment in these things when everyone around you is utterly unsure. You all look at each other and you can see that no one knows anything, that everyone else is thinking the same things you are, that we could all be dying, that the rest of the world might already be destroyed. Society generates a kind of gravity that you feel even when you’re in a personal crisis. But in a global crisis that gravity’s gone. There’s a feeling of the absurd. Of course, the absurd is pretty mainstream now, so one tends to discount it. But when the real absurd really comes out, it has teeth.

  By now the mobs were on the move. I turned my head way around to the left and took a last look up at Koh. She was floating down to us. No, wait, she was being carried. It looked like she was on a sort of human funicular. I’d heard a nasal barking and now that I saw the scene I could tell it was Lady Yellow, the mother superior, screaming at Koh. It sounded like more than a capital offense.

  Hun Xoc tapped three times on my forearm.

  It was a few seconds before I could even get myself together to realize what he’d signed: We’re going. I reached back and tapped the same signal on Armadillo Shit’s arm.

  The bloods below me moved forward. Let’s get the hell off this fancy rock.

  I jumped down the fourteen-inch step. Another step. Another.

  Fourteen more steps to go. A few women down in the Sidewinder’s Court had started singing the Rattler song, and now more and more people were joining in, and the singing and laughing combined with the shrieks and the violins to create a sound that I really think, despite the fact that nothing shocks anybody anymore, could still drive anybody insane.

  Step. Step.

  I saw from the blue-plastered flagstones under my feet that we were at the level of the plaza. The bloods in front of me paused. They moved. I marched, or rather shuffled, forward.

  The “stop” signal came back. Okay.

  I stopped. We waited.

  A slap on the chest. It meant “Form up.” I slapped Armadillo Shit’s chest.

  I raised my shield. The bloods packed in tighter around me.

  12 Cayman had turned out to be an open-minded guy, especially for a career military type. I’d told him about the classical testudo, that is, the turtle, the infantry formation invented by Alexander the Great and used by the early Caesars against less well-organized armies from Scotland to Pakistan. He’d liked the idea and implemented it. It was designed for pushing through a crowd with minimum losses. Basically you all clumped together and held up your shields to make a shell. The soldiers at the edges of the formation held their shields with both hands, and the ones in the second rank stuck their spears out between them to jab at anybody who came close. Unfortunately, we couldn’t use the big wooden pavis shields the Romans had. You can’t do everything.

  I raised my shield over my head and fitted it in between everyone else’s.

  I had the most protected position in the testudo. Like if you were playing nine ball, I’d be the five ball in the center of the diamond. So I couldn’t see much of anything, and the main sounds were scuffing feet, heavy breathing, and the creaking of the wicker armor.

  We crawled forward, plowing through the throng. The pavement here was covered with scarlet poinsettia leaves, and as we shuffled through them we kicked up a red blizzard. I couldn’t see anything ahead of us, and behind us all I could see was smoke rising from about where Koh’s house would be.

  Hell. If a fire really gets going, we’ll be in trouble.

  We made it to the west side of the Sidewinder Court and down the northernmost steps into the main axis.

  Our hope had been that even if the Puma bloods found their commanders and got into their squads, they still wouldn’t be prepared for a small, focused charge into an offbeat part of their compound. Maybe they’d even leave the pharmacopoeia relatively unguarded. Well, we’ll see about that when we get there.

  Ouch. Ouch.

  Two slaps on my right shoulder. It meant that we were about to turn right.

  I wriggled my arm back and slapped the shoulder of the blood behind me.

  We turned right.

  The testudo reformed, lengthening along the north-south main axis and narrowing on the east-west one. Now 12 Cayman, who’d been four ranks to my right, was three ranks ahead of me, commanding from near the head of the formation. The sign to march forward seemed to carry through our squad as quickly as cracks in glass.

  I was swept up in the charge, pressed between human stalks so I could barely breathe. I could’ve rested just by raising my feet and getting carried along in the center of the turtle. I got a flow of—well, I guess you could call it courage, or group courage. I suppose it’s what the legionnaires felt.

  Damn, I thought. We’re unstoppable.

  We headed up the main axis. We’d go a quarter-mile farther north and then, just before we reached the southwest corner of the Hurricane mul, we’d turn sharply right and east and force our way into the Pumas’ pharmacopoeia. We’d planned the routes over a model of the city and made the bloods memorize the route backward and forward.

  Besides the turtle, I’d introduced one other innovation to the squad: an injunction not to try to take prisoners. It had turned out to be one of the most difficult things for them to accept. Around here prisoners, and not territory, were the final object of war. Loot was secondary. But we’d told them that on this raid, if any of our bloods broke formation to take a captive, that blood, and his dependent family, would be derated and banished. Their only goal was to get us through as fast as possible. 12 Cayman was a gifted drillmaster and so far they seemed to have understood.

  We got the stop signal. We waited.

  Another more complicated signal came back in the Harpy’s hunting sign language: The Gilas are here.

  I felt the squad shifting around me, and I got a glimpse of blue Gila regalia through the press of bodies. We’d just met up with six vingtaines, that is, a hundred-and-twenty-man contingent, of Gila bloods. They absorbed us like an amoeba swallowing a paramecium, and the enlarged creature moved forward. In a panicked crowd it can actually be easy to go upstream, since they’re so eager to get around you. So far, so good.

  Soon we were on the Street of the Dead. With the crowds streaming around us, we had to feed our collective body through these narrow gaps, up and down through flights of stairs, up, down, and do it again. Each time we crossed over the top of the wall that separated one plaza from another, at that moment, going over the hump, I could get at least a glimpse of what was going on. When we trooped over the next wall, I held back for a second and took a better look around.

  Whoa. Bad.

  [57]

  Swarms of humans flooded down the Hurricane mul toward bonfires lit from flaming leaves and banners and offering paper. People staggered to the fire with loads of thatch and cloth and hearth wood, pushed through the circle, and dumped the stuff into the flames. I watched one white-banded Morning Glory blood, a bit older than me, holding up a little kid, away from the flames, as he tried to pick and push his way to the steps in the wall of the court. It was kind of heroic, I thought. At least somebody was saving somebody. People aren’t all bad. He stepped over a circle of ancient women. They were sitting on singed bodies, munching on flowers and peppers from the festival garlands while right next to them their grandchildren were strangling each other and hacking trophies off the corpses.

  They were laughing.

  And not only were they laughing, they were helping themselves get killed. For instance, I saw this one character hold his arm out and dare this other guy, who I thought was his brother, to chop it off. And his brother hacked at it with a battle saw. It took three chops to get the forearm off the humerus and sever the extensor tendon. Then his brother handed him the saw and he tried to chop off his brother’s arm, except he was too weak already to do it. It was like some creepy slapstick comedy act, like that bit with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, except you could tell that these people really were in pain after getting maimed, even if they were still laughing. I saw a bunch of ac
olytes taking turns diving off the wall onto the stairs. They weren’t getting up. A kid was running through the circle of musicians and toward the bonfire. I thought he was going to try to jump over it. He’ll never make it, I thought, it’s impossible. But instead he took a running leap and dove into the heart of the fire, in a puff of sparks. His friends cheered. It was like they were playing at doing these things.

  It certainly wasn’t a popular revolt in the twenty-first-century sense. Nobody was planning to set up a people’s state. For that matter, I don’t think anyone from any of the lower clans ever expected or hoped to take charge of anything. It was pretty easy to tell if people were related, from their clothing and markings, and now we could see brothers, fathers and uncles and children killing and maiming each other, clustering in these little groups and practically beating their heads together, picking up the grandmother, say, and throwing her into the air, or biting each other in the back of the neck. And then people who would never have even touched were messing with each other. Social distinctions were dissolving. Women were dancing with men from rival clans. Porters in paper loincloths were were slap-fighting with Puma javelinmen in their outrageous finery, A line of twenty nearly naked slaves, who had sawed through their anchor rope but were still tied together at the waist, slithered like a centipede between us and the bonfire, grabbing bits of food from fallen offering bundles and stuffing it into their mouths. An hour ago it would have been a capital offense. The city had been held together by a brittle pyramid of hierarchies, and when you pulled out a few, they all tumbled down.