The Sacrifice Game jd-2

by Brian D'Amato

  But 20 Blue Snail-Shit makes 2JS sound confident, too, she said.

  I said maybe it was 6’s job to put a good spin on things.

  Koh said she thought 2JS was pretty smart. He’d have to have something worked out, some unpleasant surprise for the Ocelots that wouldn’t depend on what we did.

  I looked at her. I mean, into her eyes, which you just didn’t do. Normally her eyes-even the one surrounded by her light skin-were as cowled and tragic as if they’d been been painted by Pontormo. But now they were transparent. And they weren’t tragic. They were wary. I could tell she was thinking that 2 Jeweled Skull-in exchange for the safety of his own house-might sell her out to the Ocelots.

  “2 Jeweled Skull set this up,” I said. “Your guilt is his.”

  “He might deny that,” Koh said. “Now that more

  Feline-clan bloods hate my house than hate his.”

  If he turned you in they’d get him later anyway, I said. She didn’t answer, but from her face it seemed that she realized that was true. The Ocelots would renege. They knew he was bound up in this from the beginning and they’d never forgive him.

  “And once he’s won will he need me around?” she asked.

  “He’ll need the tsam lic, and a nine-skull adder,” I said.

  “I’m not so sure,” she said, “he’ll get those from

  9 Fanged Hummingbird, as soon as he captures him,

  If he even thinks he needs the Game at all.”

  Koh added two uncertainty stones to 2JS’s stack. I could feel my loyalties dividing. She must have seen it in me, because suddenly she started backtracking:

  “I trust my father 2 Jeweled Skull,” she said,

  “I wouldn’t plot against him, and I’m not

  Positioned to; I only want to shield

  Our followers, and leave them an escape

  In case another city crumbles on them.”

  I said I guessed that sounded like the right thing to do. Sometimes Koh’s forties-Picassoid face would seem all limpid and transparent and I’d feel all cuddly with her-not that I’d ever touched her myself or anything, but just kind of homey and peaceful-and then her face would go opaque again like that glass in Marena’s office and it was like I was alone in an observation room.

  Koh unrolled what I thought was a smaller Game-mat, but it turned out to be a detailed and relatively naturalistic map of Ix. “The ball court’s isolated here,” she said, running her little finger down its trench. She was right. The whole temple district had originally been built on a hill surrounded on three sides by a shallow irregular lake, kind of like a miniature San Francisco. Since then the lake level had been raised and palace plots had been extended out into the water, so the temple district was surrounded by wide canals, like the Rialto in Venice. The temple district included the five largest of Ix’s hundred and ten muls, six hipball courts, the Ocelots’ emerald-green greathouse, the council house, and the original sacred well of the Ocelots, which was now fed by aqueducts from the surrounding mountains but was still surrounded by a garden that included a few of the original celestial poison trees. There weren’t any solid bridges on the east, north, and west, just floating pedestrian barges that could easily be moved. Even if we were armed and ready when we took our places in the stands, we’d still be in the center of the Ocelots’ ward, separated from the mainland by the mountains behind the Ocelots’ emerald-and-scarlet mul. Two hundred of us could be trapped and picked off without much trouble. I figured the odds of something unpleasant happening to us on the court, either during or right after the ball game, were at least ten to one.

  So what can we do about it? I asked. Not go? Set up shop somewhere else?

  No, there are other things we can do, she said. We may not be able to pull another Teotihuacan, but we can do something like it. You might have to be the one to carry some of it out, though.?Yo? I thought. Little moi? Why me again, because I’m the odd man out anyway?

  Always me, me, me.

  Because you’re such a genius with the ball, she said, answering my thought.

  Chacal was the genius, I said, and he’s gone. She just sat there and looked at me, like she knew I could still play as well as before. I kind of felt she was right too. Despite everything I was feeling great these days. Finally I said fine, sure, run it by me. I can deal.

  She said as an antepenultimate plan she thought we might disguise me as one of the lesser-known ballplayers on the Harpy team and try to get me into the halach pitzom, the great-hipball game, for a couple of rounds.

  “Then you could score a ring or two and win,” she said.

  “The Ocelots would have to really cheat,

  And might not even get away with it.”

  Whoa, I thought. Hang on a beat.

  I said it sounded like fun for me-my cocktail of Chacal neurotransmitters was already perking up just at the thought of my getting onto a court.

  She said imagine the reaction. The fans would go wild, although she didn’t put it that way. Maybe they’d all give you some big hero thing and you’d be able to take over.

  I said that sounded a little too good to be true.

  Well, anyway, she said, whatever happens it would at least distract them. They’d be off their stride.

  I asked for how long and she said she didn’t know.

  So then what? I asked.

  Then we go to the antepenultimate plan, she said. Great, I thought. The ultimate plan, as always, was just to kill ourselves as quickly as possible. All right, I thought, what’s the pen ultimate plan? I asked her, as whateverly as I could.

  She held out her dark hand out and, slowly, turned it palm-downward. “I’ll show you,” it meant.

  (24)

  Just in sight of the Cloud People’s main citadel, which would be the site of Oaxaca City, there was a place I knew well, with a tree, eventually a rather famous tree, that-which? Who? — that would still be alive at the end of the last b’aktun. I led Koh’s caravan a half-jornada off the route to camp there, and she and I fasted and prepared for a session of the nine-stone Sacrifice Game. We’d agreed that I’d be the only querent, and only her dwarf and Armadillo Shit would be attending.

  The big cypress wasn’t big yet. In fact, it looked less than a hundred years old, and it divided into three trunks near the base. So it wasn’t one that you’d ordinarily think of as a major branch of the Tree of Four Hundred Times Four Hundred Branches, the tree at the axis mundi that penetrated down through the hells and soared up through the holes in the centers of the thirteen skies, the tree the Teotihuacanians called the Tree of Razors and that the Motulob-the citizens of Tikal-called the Tree with the Mirror Leaves, and that, in the twenty-first century, generally gets called something like the “Maya World Tree” or even “the Mayan Yggdrasil.” But I convinced Koh that I knew what I was talking about. We started at the naming time of Lord Heat, that is, noon. Twenty arms west of the Tree there was an ancient well surrounded by a five low stone cisterns, each about two arms across. The westernmost cistern had been filled to the brim with fresh water, and Koh sat on its west side, facing east. I sat on its eastern side and, instead of presuming to make eye contact, focused on her hands. Twenty bloods, under Hun Xoc’s command, sat around us in a loose circle with about a fifty-arm radius. The sun went under a rainless cloud shelf. Her dwarf handed her a jade offering basin, with coals still smoldering in it under the ashes of offering paper, and held it up in front of her forehead to stand in for the sky.

  I looked down, into the still water. Koh looked down. We nodded to our reflected souls. They nodded back, almost immediately. Koh brought the basin sharply down onto the rim of the cistern, cracking it into pieces and scattering sparks out of the cinders. Without flinching from the embers that burned her palms, she pushed everything into the water. The shards sank and the coals and ashes floated, sizzling.

  “

  …” she said. That is, in the ancient language,

  “Teech Aj Chak-’Ik’al la’ ulehmb’altaj �
�uyax ahal-kaab Ajaw K’iinal…”

  “You, Hurricane, who sparked Lord Heat’s first dawning…”

  I took over:

  “,” I said, “Teech kiwohk’olech la abobat-t’aantaj uxul kiimlal,”

  “You over us who foreknows his final dying,”

  “Teech Aj k’inich-paatom ya’ax lak…”

  “You, sun-eyed coiler of the blue-green basin…”

  Hmm. I paused for a second. What’s the next part again? Oh, right. I started to go on, but Koh broke in and finished the sentence herself:

  “Teech uyAj ya’ax-’ot’el-pool ya’ax-tuun ch’e’e…”

  “You, jade-skinned carver of the turquoise cistern…”

  I snuck a glance up at the tree. Mayan languages tend to classify things more by similarity of shape or function than by differences, so that, for instance, insects, bats, and birds are all the same class-and the Maya skeleton of my borrowed brain did the same, so that the tree, which was and is, as I’ve said, a cypress, became in my sight, also, a latex tree, a calabash tree, and especially a ceiba tree, the ceiba tree, ya’ax che, Ceiba pentandra, the kapok tree, the cotton-silk tree, the Generous Tree. It was thorny and umbrelliform, pustuled with phantom orchids sucking its red muculent sap and clouded with Cynopterus sphinx bats harvesting its scoriac nectar, and its branches spread at a curve as steep as the cissoid of Diocles. And then, without seeming to change, it was also a stone tree like a titanic stalagtite, and then it was a stratovolcano, higher than Orizaba, but, of course, upside down, with its buttress roots worming up through the thirteen shells of the sky.

  “Teech te’ij acho’oh jul-che’o’ob,” Koh went on, “uchepiko’ob’ noj k’ahk’o’ob,”

  “You, there, whose hissing javelins strike wildfires,”

  “Meent utz anuhko’on wa’ye’ ti’ amosoon.”

  “Deign to respond to us, here, from your whirlwind.”

  She sunk her dark ring finger in the water and stirred up a cloud of asphaltic steam.

  “I can smell him,” she said.

  She meant 2 Jeweled Skull.

  She paused. “He’s more you than you know.”

  I almost broke protocol and asked her what she meant, but she’d moved on, up the trunk of our now-internalized tree, zagging and zigging through the forking branches, setting stones down so fast that sometimes she just let me guide her hand without even looking at the board. Naturally, we had a hell of an edge, since I could use my-well, let’s not be modest, I could use my encyclopedic-ass knowledge of Mesoamerican, world, and economic history to guide her. But even so, as I think I’ve touched on a few times without having the stamina to really go into, we had to deal with the cosmic frustration of not being able to see within our own event cones. That is, what would happen to me, or to Koh, or to people we could influence directly, and so on, those events were still in flux. But as we got farther into the future, paradoxically, things became clearer. So, for instance, we knew the ceremonial district of Ix would be abandoned within the next k’atun — the next twenty years-but we couldn’t pin the date down more closely than that. But the abandonment of Motul-Tikal-was more certain, around 949, and then we both knew and saw how Chichen would be overthrown by treachery in 1199, how the next may capital, Mayapan, would be destroyed by the Xiu in 1441, and then the whole world would-nearly-disappear in the plague, in 1515, nine years before Tonatiuh, that is, Sun Hair, Pedro de Alvarado, would finish it off-nearly-in 1524. The b’aktuns of slavery and pain after that were, of course, well documented, and we crawled together farther and farther out onto the thin green twig of the last possibilities, past the Disney World Horror, past Marena finding-thank God-the Lodestone Cross, and toward a very likely End of Everything, a doomster named M something, in the north, somewhere-Canada! — and then, they-yes, they, we, we stop him! and then Wait.

  “The one from the north is not the last,” she said. Her voice was starting to quaver from the strain.

  “Not the last doomster?” I asked.

  “No.” She ran out of seeds. She scattered again, and, again, climbed up past M. Again, she couldn’t see any details of the last one, the one we had to worry about. Oh, God, I thought, oh, Jesus, oh, oh, hell hell. “I can’t see him,” she said. “He’s too close to you.”

  “Is it someone I know?” I asked. “Someone I may be going to know?”

  “ Erer k’ani,” she said. Maybe. A pearl of sweat rolled down her light cheek, over the border into the dark side of her chin, and dropped onto the white margin of the board, where it touched the rim of the cistern.

  She scattered again. She shivered. She winced, brought up her dark hand, and screwed its heel into one eye and then the other, as though she’d been staring at the sun.

  “ Erer k’ani,” she said again.

  Pause. Ten beats. Twenty beats.

  “The Celestial Rattler has shed seven skins,” she said. “But it”-incidentally I’m using “it” as the pronoun because Mayan is ungendered-“won’t shed another until another until the birth of 4 Ahau. And with that skin, you’ll know that its two heads have parted destinies.”

  Foolishly, I looked up. It was only a few four-hundred-beats after noon, and, to boot, the sky was still overcast with smoke from the wildfire, but even so I thought I could see the Rattler’s body, the Ecliptic, sidewinding across the sky’s ninth shell.

  Everybody’s probably heard the folk unwisdom about how you can tell how many years old a rattlesnake is by counting its rattles. And most folks now probably know that of course this isn’t true, because although they do gain, roughly, one rattle each time they slough their skin, the little suckers don’t necessarily shed only once a year. Anyway, the tzab, that is, the Rattler’s rattles, were the seven stars of the Pleiades cluster. Koh meant it would gain a new rattle, a new star, just before the end date.

  It sounded unlikely. From what I could recall, there were a few possible protostars in the nebulae surrounding the formation, but nothing that made astronomers think there’d be an eighth Pleiade any time soon. Or, rather, that one would have been born around, say, AD 1500, when the light that would strike the Earth in 2012 left the cluster. As to the two heads parting destines, I had no idea what she meant by that. Sometimes Star Rattler was depicted with two heads, not like that poor two-headed fer-de-lance they’d had at the Hogle Zoo, but with at one on each end. That’s the way it was on the double-headed serpent scepter, the one 9 Fanged Hummingbird carried on state occasions. Maybe she just meant there’d be a big saddle point on that day, something to make a decision about. But we knew that already. There had to be more to it than that. I started to ask her to clarify, but she waved me off. “That’s all,” she said. She stretched out her bare light arm and swept the stones off the board. Game over.

  “Thanks to you over me,” I said. “And-”

  “One more thing,” she said. “It’s someone you know of, but whose face you’ve never seen.”

  (25)

  That was all.

  Well, fine. Now, what the bleeding hell did she mean?

  We tried again and again, of course, and then, when the tsam lic had worn off, we went over and over the game. Night fell, or maybe just happened. Koh’s shall-we-say praetorian guard prowled around us with increasing impatience and eventually with real alarm, begging us to rejoin the army. Finally she got me to admit that I accepted it, that is, that I accepted the fact that everything I’d done up until now had been useless, that the notes and the jars of tsam lic and the Lodestone Cross burial and all that I’d been so pathetically proud of wouldn’t stop the real doomster, and that if we wanted to work out who the doomster was, or how to stop him, or anything more specific than what we’d just seen, we’d have to play the Sacrifice Game on a vastly larger scale. A human game, specifically. And if that didn’t work I’d have to get my brain back to the twenty-first century in relatively good condition. Either way, we’d have to get back to Ix.

  Sometimes-at times like this, I’d say, especially-one might
as well just go with the cliche: I was crushed. Yes, it’d be nice to come up with a more clever word than crushed, but really, why bother? Crushed pretty well does the job.

  What surprised even me, though, was how much I wasn’t crushed just because I was a lazy slob and I’d thought I could relax. It was that I-even I-was rather annoyed, in fact more than annoyed, in fact, let’s say again, crushed-that the world was still doomed. And I even realized that I cared about it in the general sense, not just personally, that even if I died back here from my neuroblastomas or in a ball game or by the flint dagger or the wooden sword or whatever, even if I didn’t get back to the thirteenth b’aktun to see Marena and the gang and catch the next season of Game of Thrones, I still wanted the good old crazy ratty loathsome ridiculous old world to keep rolling on.

  Okay. Look. We can do this, I thought. We’re young, we still have a lot of our health left, we’re capable, we know more stuff than anybody else in the whole world. Just go with the best bet. Get to Ix and help 2JS get put in charge of the place. And in return he’ll help us get together a human game. No sweat. Right?

  Wrong. Oh, God are we fucked. We are so very fucked. Royally fucked we fucking very are Cancel that. Buck up. Man up. Gird your loins into the sticking place. Forward, crawl.

  At the Isthmus of Tehuantepec we turned yelloward off the commercial track and onto a single-file path through what they called the Protectorship of the Brown Ants. It was the floor of a Devonian sea, coarse calcium sand made of diatoms and crinoid stems and the scales of ancient armored fish. The dunes gave evidence of nocturnal use, musky ropes of fox scat and the parallel-gash tracks of sidewinders, but daylight was dead. Sometimes we’d pass a lump of armadillos, poking around like big sow bugs and licking ants off crumbled lobes of brain coral. Supposedly some of the convert-bloods behind us complained that we were leading them into Kikilbaj, what the Aztecs would later call Miclantechutli, the desert graveyard at the zeroth world’s ragged edge. They kept flipping out about the celestial Puma and Jaguars who were supposedly spying on us, and they were constantly doing all sorts of pathetic little rituals, combinations of bribes, apologies, foster adoptions, and threats. In the unfashionable rear of the now seemingly endless procession, families were offering their younger children to the lords of their hearth fires, making them swallow ashes or ramming hot stones into their eyes.