The crowd gave a single sharp gasp. The ball soared up, making a rainbow arch down the ball court, hanging in the air for what seemed long breaths of time, and fell.
It disappeared; far beyond Qikab’s stone, beyond even the end of the court, the ball vanished into the grass. There was a stunned silence among the Itzen, and Qikab sprang forward, his face dark with rage.
“You cheat! You cheat, you little monster!” With clubbed fists he leapt at Corban.
Corban bounded away, dropping the sling; Qikab struck him a broad-swinging blow on the shoulder and knocked him sprawling. He rolled up onto his feet; Qikab was stalking toward him, furious, his huge fists clenched up before him. Corban remembered another big man he had fought, long ago, and launched himself headfirst, staying low, to drive his shoulder into Qikab’s knees.
The Itzen swayed, his legs buckling; sprawling on his belly on the ground, Corban gripped him by both ankles and yanked him down. With a thud and a howl the big man fell flat on his back. All around them the other Itzen were screaming in their own language. Corban scrambled up; Qikab pushed himself onto his hands and knees and Corban jumped with both feet on his back and slammed him flat again. With both hands he gripped Qikab’s left wrist and twisted his arm up, and planted his foot in the small of Qikab’s back.
The screaming of the onlookers abruptly cut off. Corban swung his gaze around them, at the wall of shocked Itzen faces. and brought his eyes to Tok Pakal, standing stone-faced in the front of the great palanquin.
“Give me what I have won! Three times now I’ve beaten you. give me what you promised me!”
With one last wrench on Qikab’s arm, he let go and stepped back, leaving the Itzen groaning in the dirt. The other men were goggling at him. Then Kan Chak strode forward, his face set rigid with anger, but not to challenge Corban.
He went at Tok Pakal, shouting in his own language. In the back of the great palanquin the old man Sak Nik stood up, his gaze on the chieftain. The other Itzen pressed forward. They ignored Corban; they were all shouting at Tok Pakal in their own language, and they were getting steadily more angry.
Corban moved back, out of their way. Qikab’s servants had come to bring the prince water and to help him up. Corban turned and went off, toward the drum line, his mind churning.
He had done nothing. He had been an idiot to think he could hold Tok Pakal to the wager. His belly knotted in a raw fury, at himself, at the Itzen, at the perverse and unjust world. Behind him the shouting suddenly died into an ominous silence. In a moment they would come to kill him.
He had reached the drum line. Beyond, the camp stretched out into the distance, open under the sky. The afternoon’s thunderstorm was building on the horizon, towers of clouds, like another world floating above this one.
He had not saved a single slave. He turned, edgy, looking for something else to do. The drum line was the voice of their power; he could at least cut their throats. He drew his knife and plunged the blade into the stretched-skin head of the first drum.
It sang, when the blade hit, and then ripped from edge to edge. Pleased with this, he went down the line, slashing the drum heads. Behind him, at the great palanquin, the Itzen gave one single many-throated yell.
He could yell, too. He stopped at the next drum he came to; the mallets that played it were lying on the ground, and he took them up and began to beat on it. At first he could make only a little sound, until he remembered how the drummers swung their arms, and raised the sticks high and banged them down.
Boom, the drum said. Boom boom.
He knew nothing of the language. He wanted only to confuse people. He played with the sticks, going fast and then slow; there were places along the edge, also, that sounded different. After a while his arms started to ache. He put the sticks down, slashed this drum also and went on down the line, cutting with his knife.
Epashti thought at first it was only thunder, the faint little boom at the edge of her hearing, but she lifted her head, and listened, and realized it was one of the drums.
A thrill ran along her nerves. Only one drum. Something about this was odd. She stood up, to see what the leather men were doing.
The camp stretched out around her in the midday heat, the air thick and moist with the coming storm. Most of the people lay flat on the ground as if blown there by a great wind. Here and there a leather man stood, and they were all facing the distant sound of the single drum.
They were doing nothing. Two rows from her one soldier leaned on his spear, listening to the drum; when she rose his eyes followed her, but he did not move. Then he turned away from her, and called out, “What does that mean?”
Down the line, another of the leather men lifted his shoulders in a shrug. All around the camp, they stood, caught in some spell, enchanted by the distant, solitary drum.
Epashti’s heart began to gallop. She thought, I can go now. They won’t know what to do. She stooped, and shook Leilee.
“Come,” she said. “We are escaping.” Leilee sat up, dazed; beyond her, Pila suddenly lifted her head.
“What? What is it?”
Epashti reached for Leilee’s hand. “Follow me.”
Pila sat up where she was, throwing a sleepy child off her lap. “Where are you going?” She reached out and caught hold of Epashti’s dress.
Epashti said, “Let go of me, woman, now.”
Pila clung to her dress, turned her head, and screamed, “Help me! She’s trying to escape.”
Epashti reached down and gripped Pila’s wrist and twisted, and her dress came free of the woman’s fingers. Nearby one of the leather men had swiveled his head around toward Pila, frowning, but the drum called him back, turned him forward again, telling him something he had to obey but did not understand. Epashti glared down at Pila.
“Stay here, you fool, if you want. We are leaving.” She turned toward the river, and began to walk.
She did not look back, and she kept her steps slow, lest anything disturb the spell on the leather men. She kept her eyes on the river. Her heart was banging in her chest. She passed a leather man who stood, gaping, his brow furrowed, staring up at the drums; he paid no heed to her. Through the corners of her eyes, she saw other people walking, like her, streams of them, moving away. The faint little drum beat on. She matched her footsteps to it.
Miska squatted, and put his hand to the pounded dirt before him. They had come this way, the longnoses, run up here across the plain to the foot of this hill, to this particular tree, and then run back again. They had broken branches off the tree. He straightened, puzzled.
The hill rose behind him, sun-blasted. Before him, the Wolves had drifted out toward the plain, looking toward the camp. Over to his left, under the trees, the Bears were standing in a clump, looking ready to run at the first danger. Ekkatsay, in their midst, said, “What’s going on?”
Miska shrugged. “I don’t know. I—” His head turned. “What’s that?”
The Wolves were stirring, uneasy, pacing back and forth; Hasei shifted his bow from his back to his left hand. Miska went up toward the camp a few steps. In among the Bears, Ekkatsay put his hand to his ear, turning his head, trying to hear something, and Hasei said, “A drum. From the camp, there.”
Miska straightened. “Is it talking about us?” His ears strained, listening for more drums, yet only this one sounded, a thump at the edge of his hearing.
Ahanton came up through the midst of the men, small in the red and blue cloak, her gaze fastened on Miska. She said, “It’s Corban.”
Hasei said, “It’s stopped.”
Ekkatsay said, “It doesn’t sound like anything to me,” and Miska reached out and silenced him with a wave, stretching one hand out to Ahanton. “What?”
“It’s Corban,” she said. Her eyes shone, enormous, gray as frost. “I know it. I can hear his voice in it. It’s Corban.”
“The signal.” Miska flung his arms up, drawing all eyes to him. They gawked at him, startled. He shouted, “It’s the signal. Now
we will surely beat them—Follow me! Run!” Without waiting to see if any of them actually did, he waved his war club up over his head and let out a howl, and raced out onto the plain, headed for the longnose camp.
Corban slashed the drums all down the line. This took him around behind the end of the Itzen tents, well away from the ball court. They had stopped shouting down there, but he could still hear single voices, ringing out. He wondered if they had heard his drumming. If anybody had heard his drumming. At the last drum in the line, he picked up the sticks, and turned to look over the camp of the little people.
His heart jumped. The camp was moving, not orderly as it had before, but seething with people going in all directions—all except one. No one came this way. They were walking away from him. They all were leaving.
He gripped the sticks, joyous, and began to bang on the drum again, swinging his arms hard. In the west the thunderstorm was building, packed layers of cloud, and the muttering of the thunder lay over the drum, but still he pounded. Out on the plain, as the sun slid behind the edges of the advancing clouds, and the light began to fail, he saw now, even some of the leather men were moving away. Far out there a walking figure suddenly peeled off its chest armor and cast it down, and went on walking.
A hoarse yell behind him brought him whirling around. Qikab was striding toward him, a spear in his hand.
“So that is you, doing this. You think it will make any difference, monster—”
Corban flung the mallets aside, and drew his knife. The thin blade looked like a sliver of grass against the ribbon edge of the spear. Qakib thrust at him, and he dodged back, his knee not answering right; he nearly fell.
The Itzen crowed at him, and lunged at him again with the spear. “I’m telling you now, monster, you’re lost! Tok Pakal is thrown down. Soon there will be a new man in the great palanquin, and I promise you it will be me!”
At that, he strode forward, the spear in both hands, the black needle head stabbing and jabbing, driving Corban back one staggering step at a time, never within reach of Corban’s knife. Corban could not take his eyes from the tip of the spear, which poked at him like a snake, glass-tongued. He thought of the sling on his belt—if he could get away—find a stone—
He wrenched out of the path of the thrusting spear, and his knee collapsed. He went down hard. Qikab bounded at him, and the spear struck down. Corban rolled, but not fast enough; he felt the spear hit him in the side, slice through his skin and into the ground, and then he was pinned there, facedown.
He writhed around, trying to reach the shaft behind him with his hand, and the pain knifed through his side, freezing him with a gasp. He braced himself up on one arm, groaning. Qikab stood over him, a broad smile on his face, and kicked him in the hip.
“Now,” he said. “This time, you lose.” He reached to his belt to draw his knife.
Corban could not move; awkward, helpless, he gaped up at the Itzen prince, and Qikab smiled down at him. Cocked his arm with the knife. Corban stiffened, ready to lunge out when he struck, to fight somehow.
A strange look came over Qikab’s face, and he straightened. He lifted the knife, almost lazily, like an afterthought, and then slowly he pitched down flat to the ground. Out of his back a skinny little arrow stuck.
Corban twisted, trying to reach the spear. Over his head, against the slate-gray sky, arrows in flights passed like geese. People were rushing toward him, up the plain. Then, under the patter of thunder, he heard the howling of the Wolves.
His hair prickled up. He gathered himself against the pain, and curled his arm carefully behind him and got hold of the spear. He wrenched on it. A wash of pain nearly sent him under, but when he got his head to stop whirling, he was lying flat, and the spear lay flat beside him.
He had sense enough not to stand. He could hear them running by him, all around, feel the pounding of their feet in the ground under him; they would kill anything in their path. Their arrows laced the sky again above him. Their howls rose even above the thunder. They swooped by like the wild hunt, like the al of the storm, and fell on the Itzen camp.
In the little silence they left behind them, Corban pushed himself to his knees. His whole side was slick with blood. When he moved everything hurt. He picked his knife off the ground and put it into its sheath on his belt, and forced himself up onto his feet.
He was facing the Itzen camp. Screams and yells erupted from it, half-drowned in the thunder. Through the spaces between the tents, he could see people rushing back and forth in the square, arms raised with weapons; he saw people stagger and fall. He couldn’t tell who was winning.
The rain hadn’t started, but the wind was picking up, plucking at the peaks of the tents, and now abruptly through the cloth patching of the nearest tent he saw the glow of a fire.
He staggered off along the drum line, his hand pressed to his bleeding side. As he came near the tent, the flames caught on the wall and roared up, and the wind lifted the flames into the darkening sky like a giant torch, spraying embers and bits of burning cloth. In the baleful light Corban saw into the square in the middle of the tents, into the wild thrash of the men there fighting.
He could see the Itzen, taller than the others, with their topknots. He stood rooted where he was, watching through the flames like a sheet of wrinkling red-gold water, as one by one these tall men vanished down into the dark thrashing mass of their enemies.
He turned away, toward the dark, the camp below him; he had to find Epashti. He laid his hand to his side, throbbing with steady pain, the blood leaking through his fingers.
The great black ledge of the storm cloud was stretching out over the plain, its blurry ragged margin creeping over the sun. Corban walked through the line of the slashed drums; the plain before him was disappearing into the huge deep shadow of the storm. The wind like a hand against his back pushed him into that whirling center. The camp was almost empty. He went by a row of dead fires, the earth pounded to dust under. his feet, and another row, bed on bed of cold coals, where nobody sat. The wind lifted the dust up into the air and swirled it off into the storm like a flag.
The air was turning coppery, and new shadows flowed on ahead of him, rippling, watery, bloody red. He looked back, and saw the Itzen tents going up, one by one, in towering flames.
He looked around. In the camp he saw no leather men at all anymore, but here and there, some people still sat on the ground, staring dazedly up at the Itzen camp. He went on, passed by a chunk of something like a big shell, a beetle shell, and realized it was a piece of leather armor.
“Epashti!”
He screamed into the wind, and the wind carried it off into nothing. The first huge raindrops struck his head. He turned around, looking back again toward the lurid flickering light from the blaze of the Itzen. The books, he thought. The pictures. The scraps of cloth and feathers, brought all the way from Mutul. Then he saw, through the rolling smoke and the sheets of falling rain, two of the palanquins, rushing toward him.
A dozen of the Itzen carried them, running at a good lope, the long poles on their shoulders. Nobody rode in them. Swaying and creaking they went by Corban as he stood there; the second was the great palanquin, three men on each pole. After it, crying, his little arms out reaching, ran the dwarf Erkan.
“Wait—Wait—”
Just beyond Corban, one of the Itzen let go of the carrying pole and whirled around to catch the little man by the arms, and running a few steps with him tossed him up into the chair. Corban, squinting, thought it was Kan Chak who did this. Then the palanquin was rocking and swaying away, hurrying off through the rain, fleeing back to Cibala.
Corban thought, Let Kan Chak tell them not to come this way again.
His gaze sharpened. Something small and lumpy had fallen out of the palanquin and lay on the ground in the steady driving rain. He went over and picked it up, and it was the leather pouch Tok Pakal had shown him, that would make more and better maz.
He held it, wondering if he should even kee
p it, and behind him, someone called his name.
He spun around. At first all he saw was the red and blue flutter of his cloak rushing toward him through the gray of the rain. Then he saw it was Ahanton.
He gave a hoarse cry, and stooped, and she ran into his arms. He wrapped himself around her. She burrowed her face against his neck. “I thought you were gone.” She was crying. “Then I heard the drum.”
He laughed, stroked her hair, her weight light in his arms. “It’s good. It’s good.” He wrapped the cloak around her against the rain, pulled the edge up over her head. He laid his face against her as she curled against his shoulder. His side throbbed but that would mend. “We have to find Epashti.”
“There,” she said, and lifted herself up, and pointed.
He looked where she was looking. Up across the deserted camp, through the driving rain and the wind and the crash of the thunder, a woman walked calmly toward them, walked as if on her home earth, in the sunshine, her head up, and her smile wide. She came up to them, and said, “So you are Ixewe, after all.”
“Wife,” he said, “I greet you more gladly than I can say.” He reached out to her, and she embraced him and Ahanton, warm and sweet, and they all stood together in the rain, happy.
Ekkatsay laughed, unsteady, exhuberant. The fight was over but the excitement still coursed through him, the thrill of being still alive. The crashing rain was swiftly soaking down the fires all around him, and already some of the other men were poking into the smoldering ruins, looking for things to take home. There were bodies burning in the rubble, giving up a stink of charred flesh.
The Serpent Dreamer Page 21