Now all to the southeast, northwest, northeast, southeast, attend, she chanted in her throaty whine. All above, below, and in the center attend. Now all before us, all after us, and all now, attend, attend.
There was silence on the platform and then a significant sound. It was almost imperceptible against the noises from the panic below us. But the bloods next to me heard it with their professional ears, and I heard it, and Koh heard it.
One of the Pumas on the far left of the line hadnt given up his atlatl, his spearthrowerhe must have been hiding it in his mantaand he nocked a short poison dart into it, as though he was going to launch it at her. Or maybe he was trying to get one of us to launch a spear at him so that a fight would start. That was always a problem with these people. Theyd prefer to be killed than be taken captive. At any rate, with a quick shift of position, the bloods on both sides of me were suddenly aiming their javelins at him and about to launch them. But Koh shruggedit was our equivalent of holding up a wait fingerand they didnt fire.
And neither did the Puma blood. Koh stood for a moment, not looking at him and not speaking, daring him to throw the dart.
I dont know whether she felt any fear, but she knew that if you showed any fear you were done for. Anyway, she didnt budge.
Five beats went by, and then ten. Finally the Puma bloodwell, he didnt quite lower the dart, but he relaxed, or shifted his body in a way that you could tell he wasnt about to throw it.
Koh spoke. Her voice was low, cold, and heraldic. You could just tell it was her, but it was different from any of the voices shed used before. She used an ancient sacerdotal form of Teotihuacano, and I only picked up about every third word. But of course, I got a translation later:
You on a level with us, but divested
Of maces, of javelins,
Pumas, all cowed on your citadel,
Now overmastered, surrounded,
You within range of our javelins,
Holding your suicide razors,
Now our ahau, our sun-swallowing eel,
Our jade-feathered Star Rattler
Speaks through the Ahau-na Koh of the Orb Weavers,
Koh of the Auras.
She on a level with him comes to speak with the Puma,
The Warlord.
There was a pause. The Pumas shuffled a bit.
One of the elder Pumas stepped forward, agonizingly slowly. He walked in halt-steps, that is, with the left foot never stepping forward of the right one, which meant that he wasnt yet her bound captive and so he wasnt in a hurry. He wore an orange full-face mask and a gigantically swollen full-length red feather cape. So this would be the symposiarch of the synod, I guessed.
I on a level with Ahau-na Koh, I may call him, or not, he said.
Koh didnt answer. The Puppy Woman, who was maybe a bit hyperactive, shifted from foot to foot. After ten more beats he made a hand sign behind his back and the crowd of elder Pumas parted in the middle and edged away from the doors of the teocalli.
The four doors led straight back to four long temple cellae, a tripartite sky cave that supposedly mirrored the underground one directly below it. I couldnt see much of them from where I was cowering, but I could see that the left-hand chamber, the northernmost, was mosaicked or paneled with mother-of-pearl. The right chamber was lined with light-green jade, and the middle one was all polished pyrite. The rooms seemed to be filled with people, but a little later it turned out that most of the figures inside were mummies. Four attendants carried the living god out of the central chamber. Turd Curl sat, cross-legged but leaning back against puma-skin cushions, in a small covered palanquin. He was covered with red-orange feathers and an orange feather mask. The only visible parts of his body were skeletal hands painted with red cinnabar and a section of shriveled leg above his right ankle. He looked … well, he looked like a dying god, one who was even more powerful for being close to death. And he didnt look like a benign one either. If theyd sent me to deal with him Id already be banging my forehead on the flagstones and mumbling, I beg you to make my execution mercifully swift, O Great One.
They stopped just ten arms from her. They didnt set him down, although that would have brought his eye level closer to hers, which should have been the protocol. Koh simply ignored the insult.
You on a level with me, will you accept a yellow rope? Koh asked.
I next to you speak for Hurricane, he said. His voice was like the sound of some engine down in a mine. When he returns from hunting, soon, what then?
On that sun all of you next to me will reseat your line, Koh said. On that sun Star Rattlers brood will nest far away.
Basically, what Turd Curl was saying was that Hurricane, the Old Man of the Storm, was just taking a little vacation, and that was why Star Rattler had taken over the day. In other words, he was spinning it like his own god had planned this all along. What Koh had said, basically, was that at a date in the near futureto be negotiated shortlyshe would release Turd Curl and the rest of the captives, and she and her followers would be on their way to somewhere else.
There was another pause. As usual, my twenty-first-century side scoffed a bit. What a load of gilded hooey. All these poor people were fighting and screaming and getting incinerated below us, and we still had the time to go through this whole elaborate protocol. On the other hand, my gone-native side realized that people dont just do their stupid rituals. They are their stupid rituals. If we didnt go through the correct motions, nothing would really have happened.
And I have to say, Koh was keeping her head in a tense situation. We were still vastly outnumbered, in the middle of a bunch of people who really hated us. If they got their act together, they could take us apart. If the fire didnt get us all first.
Finally there was something like a silent vote, and the Puma elders threw down their obsidian suicide knives. As they broke on the shell floor they made humble little shattering sounds, like Christmas ornaments falling off a tree. Maybe it was just fatalism. Maybe even most of the Pumas believed that this was all supposed to happen, that everything the greathousers did was inevitable, and that they had a new master.
Two of the top Gila bloods tied a yellow rope around Turd Curls chest, the symbol of a hostage that may either be killed or might still be exchanged. They carried him to the lip of the stairs and exhibited him to the Pumas down below.
Two of Kohs men dragged a discarded megaphone to the lip of the platform. They held the Penguin Woman up to the mouthpiece. When she spoke through it, her little singsong voice came out huge and inhuman:
You underneath us, you Swallowtails, Pumas,
In range of our javelins …
She ordered the Puma bloods to stop where they were. If they advanced even one step farther up the mul, she said, we would begin killing the hostages and tossing the bones of their ancestors off the sanctuary.
The sounds of combat below faded. A few battered-looking Rattler bloods clambered up onto the platform. Evidently the Puma attackers were taking the whole thing seriously. A little crowd of invalids had grown around me, Gila and Rattler bloods whod been too badly injured to do any work. Hun Xoc bustled through it and crouched down on my right.
He asked if I was all right. I said I was good but about to collapse. He said I had blood under my nose and helped me wipe it off. I asked him how strong we were. He said wed lost eight Harpy bloods. The Gilas had lost forty-one bloods, and Koh had lost sixty. Altogether, our numbers were down by almost a third. Hell. Given what we still had to go through, that was enough to sink the whole campaign. Even aside from the human tragedy, of course. As they say.
We also now had two hundred and eighty-six hostages, including Turd Curl himself, two of his wives, six other members of the imperial family, forty-eight members of the Puma Synod, and fifty-nine generally elder Swallowtails. That wasnt so bad. The main thing was that Severed Right Hand, the likely heir, wasnt anywhere on th
e mul.
Also, 4 Sunshower was dying, Hun Xoc said. Just five steps from the top hed been gored by a spear from the defenders. Id missed it.
I got to my feet with a little help and staggered twenty paces east to where theyd put him. I sat down next to him. Hed gotten pale underneath his red body oil, and it gave him an odd pink shade, like dry, uncooked liver. A flint point had been driven deep into his small intestine. It would only come out in pieces, I thought. Sour-smelling gastric juice and two-thirds-processed feces were leaking out. Around here you didnt recover from a dirty wound like that. Hell, I thought. He was a good guy. He was breathing, a little, and I put my head down and called his name in his ear, but he was already unconscious from blood loss.
I started to stand up again but couldnt.
Koh took up a position on an upended altar stone in front of the central cella. One by one the Puma elders trooped by, and each one put somethingan ear spool, a mouth comb, a hair bracelet, or whateverdown on the ground in front of her, offering her allegiance. At each gift she tapped her right hand on her left shoulder, lightly acknowledging the giver. She was still masked, but Im sure if I could have seen her face it would have had a queenly serenity to it, as though shed always known, since even before her birth, that this would happen.
Great, I thought, Ive created a monster. A regular Elsa Lanchester. Take it easy with those Tesla coils, babe.
Id never been a big believer in the Great Man school of history, but now that I was seeing history closer up, I have to say charisma does count for something. Sometimes all you have to do is just take charge. And I guess it was just as well somebody did too.
Well, so, let her have her day, I thought. Let her do her victory thing. Theyre into victory around here.
Forget it, Jed, I thought. Its not entirely our fault.
[61]
A wave of ashes rippled over my face, and for a minute we couldnt see a thing, and then the wind revolved and the burning city was clear again. We didnt want this, I thought. This sort of thing happens sometimes. It had happenedwould happen?to the Xhosa, in 1856, when they burned their crops and killed their cattle and forty thousand of them starved to death. It happened in the 1890s, with the Ghost Dancers. It used to happen every year at the Rath Yatra festival at Puri in Orissa, when people would dive under the wheels of the Jagannath. It happened at Jonestown. It happened in Orlando. It happens.
But of course, it was entirely our fault. My fault. Todo por mi culpa. My fault, my fault.
I looked west. Down in the four hundred plazas the heat currents twisted the smoke and spark-showers into fat cables, like the gold-thread ropes on old theater curtains but the length and width of freight trains. They coiled around and up the sides of the pyramids and whipped upward at the top. One of those giant round kites floated underneath us, rolling slowly like a flaming tumbleweed. I looked south. Way out beyond the ruins of Star Rattlers mul, you could see that the cyclones of fire were processing counterclockwise around the city, as though we were in the eye of a hurricane on the sun.
[62]
I walked, or rather staggered, over to Koh. Shed taken off her mask, holding it in her dark hand while she stroked the Penguin Woman with the light one, fondling the scalp under the dwarf s thin hair and then running her hand down her cheek and then down her body, scrabbling her fingers as though she was scratching a cat. The dwarf snuggled and stretched and finally slid out of Kohs arms and toddled back to her keeper. Koh stood up and took four steps to the edge of the terrace. She looked down at the smoke and corpses in the zócalos. She looked up and this way, north, and caught my eye. But wed agreed that she wouldnt single me out in front of the Pumas, and she turned south, toward the Rattlers compound. It was already in the last phase of its burning, dribbling black smoke up into the brown sky. I thought I could see an odd expression through her blankness, even in profile. Something near the corners of her mouth was conveying something close to doubt. Whirlwinds of sparks that looked more like flakes of gold leaf and droplets of molten steel flew upward behind her. Kohs turquoise mask dangled from her dark hand, facing me dead on, and I had the odd feeling that she could see me through its empty eyes. But she didnt move her real head. It just stayed there, the curve of its jaw underlit by the flames, facing out over the courts of the sun like a giant basalt head in some Ozymandian desert, polished by eons of sandstorms. Somewhere below us the fire hit a reservoir and a thunderhead of steam sizzled up into the vortex. Kohs eyes followed it up and then, unhurriedly, settled back down again on the smoldering symmetry that was no longer the axle of the world. I thought at first that she reminded me of some painting of Helen on the deck of Menelauss ship, looking back at Troy as it burned, and then I thought maybe I was thinking of Garbo at the end of Queen Christina. Or maybe it was Marena standing on the causeway staring out at the oil-glazed gulf. Or maybe it was that nephila spider at the center of its orb. Suddenly I saw something under her dark eye, and I realized it was tears, but then I decided it was probably just from the smoke. She reset her mask, tied it behind her head with a blood knot, and turned away.
FOUR
The Aftercomers
[63]
Who was the voice of Mickey Mouse? Marena asked.
Hang on a second, I said. I had to cough. I coughed.
Jed? You want some more Squirt?
No, thanks, I said, Im fine, uh, Walt himself was the original voice of the Mouse.
Right. Okay. Whats the square root of five?
I told her.
Whats the name of your lasthang on. She paused. Anas on the line, she wants us to wrap it up, she said.
It should be enough by now, Dr. Lisuartes voice said, close behind me in the tiny room. She paused. Hang on. No, I need to talk to the lab first, she said, evidently talking to Ana through her communicator. Okay, out. CTP? This is Akagi, we have a three-nine-eight from Keelorenz. It took me what seemed like a while to remember that when she said CTP she was addressing the Consciousness Transfer Protocol lab at the Stake, that Akagi was Lisuartes code name, and that Keelorenz was Ana Vergaras code name. I didnt know what a three-nine-eight was. Okay, check, she went on. Pause. They say theyve got enough, she said. I figured the last sentence was directed to Marena and me, and that it meant the lab had enough scans of my thought processes to stop transmission.
So were going to unplug me now? I asked groggily.
They said yes. Lisuarte powered down the toilet, that is, the big white PET/MRI ring around my head. I could hear the magnets dragging against their tracks as they decelerated. Predawn light was coming up in the doorway. Marena started pulling off my trodes, not in a sexy way. Well, thats it. Whatever version of me had shown up under the questioning was on its way. In fact, it had gone on its way, arrived, done what it was going to do, and died, a long time ago.
They hustled me out of the ahaus niche. The sky was dark gray and the stars were gone. Michael and Hitch, the cameraman, were still on the landing and they and Marena half carried me down the crumbling stairs, passing me down over the twenty-six-inch risers. It seemed to take about a month.
I can walk, I said.
Yeah, but not with any accuracy, Marena said.
There was a cleared area at the base of the mul, with a path leading downhill past the palace to the river. I stumbled along. Ana and Grgur were waiting on the beachlet where Marena and I had had our little thingy fourteen hours ago. Ana was talking into the air with her hand over her ear.
Whats going on? Marena asked Michael after hed caught his breath. According to the briefings wed had, this was where the Hippogriff swivelcraft would pick us up if we had to make an impromptu exit.
Ana thinks we may have to pull out now, Michael said. Unlike Marena and Lisuarte and me hed been listening to all the radio talk.
Why? she asked.
Theres a pat
rol coming in. They think it may go through here.
Fuck, Marena said. If they dont come through the site, well go back later.
We waited. Ana kept talking. She didnt explain anything.
Wheres No Way? I asked. Michael said he didnt know. Boy Commando didnt seem to be around either. I found my ear thing, got it in, and turned it on.
… sixteen clicks, Anas voice was saying. Hey, where are you going? she asked, louder.
I need to go back to the palace and get my stuff, Marena said.
Negative, Asuka, Ana said. Nobody goes anywhere.
Brian D'Amato Page 73