The Sacrifice Game jd-2

by Brian D'Amato

  The runners said that 1 Gila’s Four Hundred had lost nearly a fifth of their men and more of the women, but they’d also picked up a few villages, even without Koh, and they were on schedule. Hun Xoc sent a different pair of runners back with a message for them to head through the Macaws’ Pass into the Harpy House’s hunting preserves, on the east side of Ix. From there 2 Jeweled Skull’s men would get them as close to the city as possible, less than a hundred-score beats’ march away from the red eastern gate. We also decided to send the three Scorpion-adders and the sensitive cargo-sleds with them instead of taking a chance that the Ocelot inspectors would ask to go through them, even though the really major stuff was in false bottoms under boxes of Koh’s rattlesnakes.

  And when we get the word to them, they move in, Koh added. The runners went off and we moved out again, marching in daylight. We were late. In the next sun’s middle age, near what they later called Santa Cruz, we got onto the great western sacbe, a laser-straight causeway with a whitewashed macadam under blue mirage puddles and spews of heat distortion. I hoped we looked fearsome and dragonish, sliding down the immense walkway like a spiny caterpillar on the edge of a porcelain cleaver. If it weren’t for the curvature of the earth we could have seen Ix at its vanishing point far to the east, surrounded by yellow corn plots and orchards. Seeing my ancestral country in its prime-even all withering in the drought, it still looked a lot more prosperous than it would in the bad old twenty-first-made me feel kind of homesick, I kept wondering what Marena would say about all this. She’d have all sorts of isn’t-this-fun apercus.

  At dusk runners from 1 Gila came in and said the Four Hundred Newborn Clans were at Two Kinds of Jade, near Palenque, which meant they were behind schedule. Hun Xoc sent them back with a message to double their pace again even if they had to split off a temporary camp for the stragglers and leave them behind. It wouldn’t do for us to get into Ix if they weren’t around to back us up. On our end he forced an extra march overnight and we managed to sight the glow of festival smoke from Ix before dawn on the day of the big ball game. Monkey accountants scampered up and down the line doing the final count-we were down to only about eleven thousand bloods and forty thousand porters-and telling everyone to look peaceable. Even though the road was a free zone we were over Black Macaw territory and had to be cool and act like we weren’t an army, just acquaintances of 2JS’s. A quarter after the zenith, outside Ix’s fourth and outermost circle of palisades, the signal for “weapons ready but not visible” came down through the file, like a wave of motion through our collective centipede. 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s runners had come up. I pushed forward to the back of the van and watched the little conference. One of Koh’s palanquins was there, but for all I knew it wasn’t the one with her in it. The Ocelot ambassadors were all decked out in their signature emerald-green under their tetrahedral parasols and speaking in this really haughty lilt, dandies from the capital slumming it out in the hinterlands. They recited a formal invitation to the great-hipball game, which would start after dawn at the Second Twin Setting, which meant about three-hundred-score beats from now. They made it sound like a huge favor and a big deal, like getting tickets for the Super Bowl. Then, before Hun Xoc could respond, they said they only had room for two hundred of the Rattler’s guests-it was understood that they meant only blooded clan members-and couldn’t properly receive the rest in the city.

  So what, it wasn’t supposed to be up to them, I thought, if one of the competing clans had room for a lot of guests, that was their business. Fine, fine, I thought, we’ll crash the afterparty.

  Hun Xoc stood facing them in the direct sunlight. He took his time about answering, not even flinching at the deerflies biting him. I wondered if their biting meant rain was coming. If it did, Koh’s idea with the earthstar compound was screwed from go.

  It was a bit of a tense moment. If we didn’t accept, it would be an insult and an excuse to start a fight right now. We were in the weakest possible position, uncamped and tired. Since we were on settled hostile ground, our scouts hadn’t been able to check out our flanks. If the Ocelots hit us now they’d be dug in with an easy retreat and we’d be way out in the breeze.

  Hun Xoc had signaled that he was ready to answer.

  “We all accept with thanks,” he said, “but how

  Can we desert our children on the road?” he asked.

  The Ocelots drew back and conferred. Evidently they didn’t want to wait here while the runners got the answer to 9 Fanged Hummingbird and brought back his response. Eventually they worked out that we’d all go into Ix, but that a hundred and twenty of our bloods would have to stay as “guests,” that is, really, hostages, in the Ocelots’ grounds on the mainland, far from the temple district. Hun Xoc agreed and made the division, taking the best fighters with us in our two hundred and leaving the others in the lurch. We said greatfathers-protect-yous and did a few little extreme-unction-ish rituals. We’ll never see them again, I thought.

  While that was going on covert runners from 1 Gila came in at the back of our line and we had to wait for the damn Ocelots to leave before we could talk to them. 1 Gila’s news wasn’t good. He’d been slowed down by a bad raid and had had trouble making the split. When the runners had left they were still only at Ch’uuk sal-“Sweetwater”-which was still over a full normal day away. We sent back a message asking how much of the force could he get to Ix for the ball game, assuming the first ball dropped on schedule, exactly at the death of Grandfather Heat. I kept asking stupid questions. How long would the hipball truce protect us? Would the Ocelots come after 2JS after the festival, or during it, or even during the ball game? Finally even Hun Xoc told me to quiet down. By full sunlight we’d hired four hundred local porters to carry us into Ix and got the hell going. We wanted all our bloods to be fresh and feisty and ready to kick some head.

  (28)

  It was hard to see much of the actual city through all the kites, banners, and offering smoke, but I remember thinking, “Wow, Ix is huge!” I realized I hadn’t gotten much of a look at the city before, since my first visit had been a little rushed. Not that it was endless like Teotihuacan, but it certainly wasn’t a couple of pyramids in the middle of a jungle. It was more like the central cluster of the nine main mulob were there to focus the hundreds of acres of comfortable houses and the thousands of acres of shantytown sprawl. The Harpy Clan’s own mul-which was named One Harpy, the seat and personification of the founder of the line-was the closest from this angle and just spiked up overhead like superheated smoke from an old-fashioned space rocket. I’d never gotten a good look at it before. It was steeper than the others, almost a sixty-degree angle, and red on each side with the directional colors banded through on the north, west, and south. The sacbe branched southwest and we descended four levels into the plain of the valley. The terraced slopes on either side were studded with rows of hundreds of nearly identical compounds, and at least in this district the different sides of most of the houses were painted in the colors of the directions they faced, and the whole thing had a sort of cubist bop to the staggered blocks, like they were all lit with yellow light from the south and black light from the west and so on, no matter what time of day it was. But it wasn’t like Teotihuacan’s brutal crystals, it was all organic, smoothed over at the corners, and the closer you got to the center of town the more everything sprouted a luxuriance of grotesque vegetal ornamentation that I really can’t describe the effect of, it was just so much, forests of multicolored grandfather-poles, tree-people, cornstalk-people, their heads bursting Daphne-like into ceiba-branches that trailed off into long, thin streamer-kites fulgerating against the pewter clouds. I guess you might get something of the volume of the overload by walking around inside a Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka, but the style was different, all shadowy and obsessive, and outlined, every little thing darkly haloed like it was sealed in an infinitely flexible membrane. I got a shiver without knowing why and then realized we were passing a mural of myself, as Chacal, winning th
e tun’ s halach pitzom against 6 Hurricane at Snapping-Turtle Lake, with a big “in memoriam to the greatest” inscription with all my dates and scores, and I felt this huge flood of vicarious pride or something and had to force myself to cool it. As we crossed the first bridge we could see the canals and the big oxbow around the temple precinct were choked with ceremonial canoes, all draped in cotton banners and red-and-pink geranium chains and flying giant sun-disk kites. A contingent of Harpy bloods had met us and were walking alongside Hun Xoc, code-whispering about arranging for the converts. They’d be able to get inside the valley but they wouldn’t come closer than the second circle of palisades without starting a fight. Bloods and dependents from all different clans, even some Ocelots in their distinctive emerald trogon-feather half-capes, crowded the low walls of the causeway and pushed against the flanking bloods trying to get a peek at Lady Koh. They shouted the same questions over and over, mainly asking for predictions on the big hipball game. Somebody begged her to curse the people who’d raped and “sealed” his four daughters, but he got shouted down. A rumor had gotten around that Koh was powerful enough to call the Rolling Head without harming herself. In general, a curse involving the Head was so powerful it would kill the curser as well as the cursee. But if you were really major, you could do it and survive. Anyway, she ignored the issue. We turned off the sacbe down the steps toward the courts. The city was dressed in its beyond-festive great-hipball game atmosphere. Every surface had been redyed with fugitive overlays, cerulians, violets, and magentas, and oiled and buffed and reoiled, and it all sparkled in the peach light. I kept wanting to look over my shoulder and had to remind myself that was stupid, if they attacked us now we couldn’t do anything about it.

  We crossed the Second Bridge and passed under the Black Gate and into an alley between the rows of low stone dressing-room buildings that bordered the court precinct. It was male territory, but I guess since Koh was a liminal being it was okay for her to be here. Anyway, she had her two male epicene-attendants holding translucent blue-green feather-fans on either side of her head so that symbolically she’d never stepped outside her holy space. I could hear the players gearing up inside the screened-and-guarded rooms, and beyond that the crowd in the stands, that nervous pre-bloodsporty rustling growl. We passed a couple of vendors selling drinks of hot water at drought prices. Good, I thought, people’s home cisterns are probably pretty much empty. If there was a battle the soldiers and fires would eat up the rest of the stored drinking water in a few thousand beats.

  The Harpy bloods ushered us-I mean Koh and her dwarf and two of her handmaids, and then 2 Hand, 14 Wounded, and me, and our attendants-to the back of what you might call the Visitors’ Field House and through a little anus-door into one of the few tiny hipball-game changing rooms that wasn’t in use. I wished Hun Xoc were with us, but he’d had to go through a special purification. When my eyes got used to the interior dark I saw there was a one-fifth-scale statue of me in a niche-that is, myself as Chacal, the ballplayer. It wasn’t a good one, just a mold-made workshop multiple, but it was still disconcerting. There were figurines of 3 Balls and 1 Big Peccary and these other legendary players alongside. Two more Harpy heralds were flanking the draped mouth-door on the far side of the room, which led out to the Ocelots’ ball court. There were nine of them, but the great-hipball court was by far the biggest. It smelled like sweat and analgesic ball-oil. There needs to be a stronger word than nostalgia for the effect of smells like that. It just shot this jump-through-the-roof rush through my Chacal side, all buzzed up with pride and confidence and determination, but on my Jed side it coughed up all this bad stuff from high school in Nephi, the locker room and the sports doctor’s office with the rolls of adhesive and the Pam Anderson poster on the wall and all these loutish athletes coming in to get taped up before they went out on the field, and me sitting there blue-icing a bruise I’d gotten from a free weight in my Remedial Physical Education program, and just having to sit and plot my revenge while I took all this shit about being an aboriginal faggot freak. And now I was a big shot in this environment. The biggest. I mean, really, you have no idea how huge I was. It was like it was 1999 and I was Michael Jordan and everyone thought I’d died in a space-shuttle accident, but really I was walking around looking at displays of myself in the video stores at O’Hare Airport. In two minutes there’d be so many people there that the floor would collapse. Just wait, I thought. It’s comeback time.

  2 Jeweled Skull’s heralds crouched in and flanked the door.

  (29)

  “And here my sons are,” 2 Jeweled Skull said, “and Lady Koh of the Rattlers, and her backrests and flutes.”

  He meant her supporters. He went on a bit, doling out bits of praise. Hmm. 2 Jeweled Skull was saying all the right things, but there was something different and older about him. Maybe he just didn’t look so scary as he had when I was the new kid in town and he was towering over me with torture implements.

  He teetered over to me, embraced me in that stiff dancey way, and gave me a ceremonial battle-saw. It was a three-arm-lengths shaft with a handle beaded in the pattern of my names and captures, with its last two feet widening into a flat wood blade inlaid with circular pink spondylus shells and edged with double rows of perfectly matched triangular blades of iridescent-yellow obsidian, like the nose of a golden sawfish.

  Whoa, I thought. Usually I was just frustrated by the whole hyperflattering flowery speech thing but for once it didn’t seem like just empty form, it really meant something. It was corny but I was getting all misty and glowy inside.

  “You tilt your basin of blood my way,” I said, correctly. “Perhaps

  You’ve just mistaken me for someone else,

  I who am unreliable, I of vice, of shit,

  May I not think myself a worthy receiver.”

  Yeah, I really did good, didn’t I, I thought. I felt, just, like, warm. Even the long aftertaste of the time he’d tortured me just made him seem more fatherly, in a sick way, I guess, but I couldn’t get distance from the feeling. Anyway, I could understand how he’d felt. After all, he’s old, I thought. He was carrying over sixty solar years, which was old for a Maya, or a preindustrial person from anywhere. Maybe it was up to me to take care of him now. He acknowledged everyone else in correct order but cut the exchange of speeches short. Judging from the tone of the beaters out on the court, the first ball would drop in eight more measures of four thousand beats each, that is, about two hours, which would seem like a while, but 2 Jeweled Skull had so much meeting-and-greeting to do that there was barely enough time to get him into position. Between the beats you could hear the crowd making urgent crackly sounds, like kids opening presents.

  Please take asylum here, 2 Jeweled Skull said to Lady Koh. He touched a bowl of chocolate. His herald handed it to her.

  “Star-Rattler’s Brood would accept your too-bright offer,”

  Koh said, before touching the bowl,

  “But our children have a gift as well for you.”

  She meant the tsam lic and the three captured adders.

  “But they aren’t here yet, and we come with unbent backs.”

  At the risk of being obvious, “with unbent backs” was like saying “empty-handed.”

  2JS couldn’t just say “Oh, yeah? Then when the hell are they showing up?” As host it was his position to say “Oh, that’s all right, anything’s fine, come anytime.” The mode we were speaking in made it all about whatever you weren’t saying as opposed to what you were. It was like Strange Interlude, you pictured everyone speaking out loud through a mask and then whispering what they really meant on the inner side.

  “Our messengers say your children only entered

  Our fields this morning,” he said, “but we all hope

  They’ll join us for our moonrise victory feast.”

  It was Koh’s turn to make a quick decision. She took the bowl of chocolate, held it in the “accepted” gesture, drank, and sent it back.

  “And please
take this as our pledge to serve our host

  With all our numbers, genius, blood, and sight,” she said.

  She handed Coati four long blue military-macaw tailfeathers, which he handed to the herald. 2JS accepted them. Everyone didn’t quite sigh with relief, but there was an okay-let’s-get down-to-brass-shit feeling. We sent out the peripheral people so that counterclockwise it was just 2 Jeweled Skull, Hun Xoc, 2 Hand, me, 14 Wounded, Lady Koh, Coati, and Hun Xoc.

  We all squatted in the tiny dark hot room, not wanting to sit on the stone floor or to take the time to set our mats. Coati set a Gila figurine in front of him to acknowledge that he was also speaking for them.

  It was 2 Jeweled Skull’s position to start.

  There was a pause.

  Our backup troops, the Rattler’s Newborn, were just fucking not here.

  You couldn’t blame 1 Gila or anyone for the delay, but it was still a crisis that could sink the whole thing. The mood was shifting from an if-we-keep-our-heads-we’re-going-to-rock feeling to a maybe-we’re-in-trouble-no-matter-what-we-do feeling. 2JS and I looked at each other. We both wanted to get away and just catch up, but this was one time work really did have to come first.