On the Ocelot side, Emerald Feral Dog-the coach-was going to start Emerald Immanent-a giant, who must have been at least five six-and Emerald Howler-the one we called “Fat Monkey-Bitch”-as strikers. Their starting zonekeeper was going to be Emerald Snapper-“Fatter Monkey-Bitch”-and Emerald Screecher and Emerald Jog were the bench. Emerald Immanent was making not-quite obscene gestures up at the Harpy stands. I’m going to pop you, you fat fuck, I thought. Up in the stands the drivers were chasing away a vendor hung with gourds of hot honeyed and salted pine-tea and sweet cacao. A couple of independent bookies hopped acrobatically through the stands taking last-minute side bets on individual players. I checked my personal inventory, the same little pre-ball-game ritual I always did. I felt the weasel-gut cords holding my knee- and elbow-padding. I untied my main torso harness, loosened it slightly, and retied it. If it was too tight it could cut you. An insei came by with a charger full of rosin and ashes and I dipped my hands in it and spread it over my arms while he rosined my feet. From here I could see most of the Ocelots’ emerald mul past their end zone, and beyond that a bit of the eastward curve to the mainland, and above that and to the right a glimpse of the wall-and-platform complex that surrounded the Ocelots’ sacred Great Cistern.
Maybe it really could be done, I thought. Stranger things had happened. It’d be totally unexpected. Surprise. Surprise, like that Ana Vergara said. Surprise is your copilot I noticed everything had gone completely silent.
9 Fanged Hummingbird’s music started, a single giant flute, getting nearer and nearer. The crowd in the Ocelot stands parted and a tetrahedral box floated into the center of the stands on the shoulders of dwarf bearers. The box was covered with iridescent emerald-green hummingbird feathers, like something that had dropped from a Platonic heaven onto the shoulders of 9FH’s two attendants. He could see clearly through the screen, but to us on the sunlit side it looked as opaque as enameled metal. As they set the box on the mat-throne at the highest riser the shrill cheer-chord rose again, each side repeating its chorus over and over, off-rhythm with the other side, trying to drown them out: the Harpies chanting, “ Ch’ uchu’ b’aj, jab k’eseic k’uul, ch’ uchu’ b’aj, jab k’eseic k’uul, ” We shine up high, we tear off your jaws, we shine up high, we tear off your jaws, we shine up high, we tear off your jaws, and the Ocelots chanting, Chupa’yal bak, chuyu’baj tox, We flash bright-dark, we chew on your hearts. Down on the court we saluted him:
“You far over us,
Lord of the Razor,
You far over us,
Lord of the Javelin,
You far over us,
Closest to One Hurricane,
You far over us,
Dearest to Iztam Na,
You far over us,
Ruby-browed Captor of Eleven Wind of Motul,
You far over us,
Sun-eyed Captor of Sideways Coatimundi of Caracol,
You far over us,
Avenger of the capture of Sixteen Ocelot,
You far over us,
Retriever of the skull of Four Ocelot,
You far over us,
Captor of eighteen times four hundred bloods and sixty-one bloods,
You far over us,
Subjugator of twenty times twenty cities,
You far over us,
Lord of the Twice Four Hundred Cities,
You far over us,
Overlord of four hundred times four hundred towns,
You far over us,
Nine-Fold King of Sacrifices,
You far over us,
You out of range of our offerings,
You far over us,
You over the four hundred times four hundred times four hundred thralls under us,
You far over us,
You far over all those over us,
You far over us,
Earthquake-born, whose real name no one can guess,
You far over us,
Whose manifest name is 9 Fanged Hummingbird,
Deign you to look down over us,
Grant us your clear sight extending far, far over us, protecting us,
You, far over us,
Overlord,
9 Fanged Hummingbird.”
Then, as slowly as sufi dervishes, we spun around and around to salute the four directions, the two competing ahauob, the five great houses of Ix, all these visiting indignitaries, Lady Koh, the lords of the dawns and the lords of the dusks, and other notable guests from as far away as what’s now the southern shore of Lake Nicaragua. As Hun Xoc used to say, we practically saluted our own asses.
There was a blast from a tree-horn. The temple precinct sank into silence like debris settling after an explosion. The cantor launched into his megaphoned spiel,
“Now twenty, fifty-two, two-hundred sixty,” running through the litany of great exploits his generation of the greathouses of Ix had endured on this court, and encouraging the young players of today to try to match the skill and stony resolve of the players of old even though they’d be bound to fail and everything, on and on. I was only smoggily aware of it. The referees entered in their long feather robes, one from each corner of the court, censing the trench with their big twisted cigars. Their decisions were final and could be capricious, but they were all over seventy years old, without children, and serious about the hipball game as a sacrament. And they were all from a single presumably nonaffiliated monastic clan, and it would be almost but not quite unheard of for them to slant the calls toward one side, since their order’s survival had traditionally been dependent on its impartiality. Still, a corrupted individual could always have been planted a long time ago The cantor had finished his recitation. While you could still hear the outlying criers had finished repeating it the Master of Hipball-or Magister Ludi as we Glasperlenspiel fans might translate his title-announced the stakes.
“Four hundred score dependents each,” he said.
The main bet was always supposed to be chunchumuk, even money, but it was bartered out in a complicated and, I think, kind of artificial way. While he talked, punters and bookies in the audience were already holding up fingers asking for nine-to-two odds against the Harpies, which even I thought was on the long side. I remembered I’d forgotten to get my own bet in and then decided it wasn’t important. The Magister Ludi was about to finish when 2 Jeweled Skull’s herald’s drum sounded. The chanter let the herald take the floor.
The herald said that the Harpies asked to raise the stakes by wagering One Harpy. He meant our first mul and the temple-including the support or family membership or loyalty or service or whatever you’d call it-of One Harpy himself, the founder who’d brought such wealth to our clan over the last nine hundred and fifty-eight solar years. Basically everything we had, including our name.
The side betting stopped. There were a few murmurs in the silence. A crow cawed an alarm far off to the east. Bad sign.
The Ocelots took a few score beats to respond. When they did, their crier said they’d see the bet, but he didn’t stake the Ocelots’ mul and founder. Instead he put up what you could roughly call the equivalent, in loyalty, real estate, hunting and fishing rights, salt works, and slaves. It took forever to list everything, but it didn’t sound fair to me. Still, we accepted it.
There were another eighty beats of expectant silence. I couldn’t see 2 Jeweled Skull but he was probably conferring with his in-house bookies. Finally, he accepted.
The side odds went to seven to four and there was a whole new spate of what they called “hero bets,” durations and spreads on individual players. I figured that about half of the city’s entire year’s economy was going to redistribute based on this one match.
Two pairs of untouchables entered the trench. Each lifted a round-bottomed cylindrical jar of powdered pigment on long tongs and balanced it on the top head-plate of each of the square target pegs.
There were some very complicated rules to hipball, kind of like international ice hockey rules, with a lot of checks and balances in the scoring,
but basically a hit on the other side’s target peg was worth a point, and a ball that came up over the top of the peg and either broke the pot or knocked pigment out of the pot scored four points. There weren’t any ring goals on this court, or for that matter on any other that I ever saw in the old days, although they eventually became famous because of the much later court at Chichen Itza, which of course became a tourist attraction in the twentieth century. Which supposedly they gave James Naismith the idea for basketball. Sometimes players practiced by knocking the ball through a big wooden hoop that they rolled on the ground. But using rings in the ball game itself must have started later. Anyway, the first side to score nineteen points won. But-weirdly, but maybe not coincidentally, almost like in modern Ping-Pong or tennis-you had to win by three points. And just like in those games you could go back to “deuce” indefinitely. If you faulted the ball over your own rear goal line, a point went to the other side. You didn’t switch sides. Each team had two substitute players, but that was it, and if more players got knocked out of the ball game it came down to last-man-standing.
DOOOONG.
A brace of bearers brought in the doeskin-wrapped ball Hun Xoc had brought back from 31 Courts, holding the too-potent bundle with wooden hands, and tied it to the service cord. An umpire inspected the knot, signaled, and the ball was hoisted up, hanging above the central marker stone.
“Now, One, Two, Four, Five, Seven, Nine, Thirteen,” the Magister Ludi chanted, switching from the second-person plural imperative to the apostrophic tense you used only when speaking to gods,
“Now Twenty, Fifty-Two, Two Hundred Sixty,
O Night, O Wind, O Day, O Rain, O Zero,
Now, guests, inspect 2 Creeper’s blood-boiled head.”
2 Creeper had been the greatest Ixian ballplayer in living memory, but he’d sacrificed himself thirty-nine solar years ago after an ankle sprain. The Ball had been wound out of white latex around 2 Creeper’s cranium as a hollow center-to increase the bounce-and then baked black and studded with painted thorns, like little nails. Finally the ball had been purified in two kinds of blood and then washed in original water boiled over the offering fires of both houses’ grandfathers-nests. It was bound on a little below its equator by thirteen turns of a multicolor-stranded rope, and as the last of the ribbons dropped off, the service cord began to unwind. I smelled that old fight-or-flight charge building up in the players around me, joints quivering ever so slightly, weight shifting, glands shooting that rich watch out cortisol mixture into spinal cords no matter what kind of kamikaze ethic their upper brains had been washed in.
“Li’skuba hun,” the chanter called. “Ready for Ball One.”
The sunlight clicked behind the mul, but guava light reflected into the court off the eastern roof-combs like they were vertical lakes. They wouldn’t set torches for over thirty-score beats. The bookies called last bets and then hushed up. The right strikers tensed their muscles for their springs, front feet ready to disengage from their lines at the sound of the ball striking the central marker. There were four beats of global motionlessness as the spotter watched the dying sun.
There were thirty-nine beats of silence.
He held up his hand, and, delicately, brought it down in a cutting motion.
There was a stirring and an intake of breath in the crowd. The Magister cut the end of a taut cord attached to the railing of his chair. The end of the cord seemed to dart away from him like a blue racer, and it whistled down to the court and up through three different loops to the ball-sac and the ribbons around the ball uncoiled and fell to the side, exposing the dark sphere. In proportion to our body size it was about as big as a basketball. Knocking it around with your bare flesh was like playing hackysack with a cannonball, and if you got off balance the ball could maim or kill you.
The untouchables scurried out of the court. The referees stepped behind the end-zone line. The rope unraveled faster and faster and just as the ball began to free itself the Magister Ludi called out “PIIITTZOOOHHM PAAYYEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” which I guess the closest thing to in English would be “PLLL- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY BALL!!!!!
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The knot unraveled, but the ball seemed not to fall but to hover for more than a moment and then to sink reluctantly into the thick air, slowly accelerating down into the round central marker, building up to real speed in the last arm of its fall, and then there was a hollow CHUHN!!! the sound marking the exact demarcation between yesterday and today for all Ixian historical time.
“Chun,” the cantor called almost simultaneously with the sound. In ball language chun was the word for base or “trunk” or “root,” since the markers were sections of branches of the tree path to Xibalba. So the cantor’s play-by-play was kind of like Yoruba talking pressure-drums, it both imitated the sounds of the ball game and gave out names and moves and positions, and the whole rap radiated out from the court in a widening circle. Listening to the city was like hearing hundreds of big antique radios picking up a broadcast through some thick medium that slowed it down to much less than the speed of sound.
Before you could see the black sphere rise off the marker the right-hand strikers had already closed in, Hun Xoc from our side and Emerald Immanent from the west. The ball drooped down again into their double blur and you heard flesh slapping on flesh and then the crisp hollow sound of the ball on a hollow yoke. The head cantor shouted, “ Bok!” the ball word for “yoke,” or “bone” or “horn.” The word was so close to the actual sound that it seemed like one of the echoes off the sloping banks, as the batteries of criers relayed the call out into the suburbs and hamlets and out the roads far through the hinterlands. Village adders memorized it at the first hearing. Troupes of hipball-adders interpreted it based on where the hit came from, by whom, on what beat, and a hundred other considerations, and the human reverberations rippled through signal- and runner-relays out through IX and Ix’s four hundred towns and beyond, out to the corners of the four quarters and up and down to the buds and roots of the Big Tree, the Tree of Four Hundred Times Four Hundred Branches. But of course here the ball-time was moving on ahead, and before the echo had gotten to the second relay circle, beyond the court district, the ball had angled up and hit the Harpies’ goal peg, and there was a wide liquid clap on the huge clay-cylinder scoring drum. The cantor shouted, “ T’un!” which imitated the sound of the ball on the hollow peg but was also the word for “point.”
The referees signed that it was legal. A big whooshing spitty whistley hiss rose out of the Ocelots and their partisans, the equivalent of applause, all breaking against a tide of stamping feet on the Harpy side, the more satisfying Maya equivalent of boos.
“T’un Bolom, kam-chen Bolomob,” the first chanter sang, that is,
“Goal, Ocelot, one-zero, Ocelots.”
The circles criers repeated the call, “T’un Bolom, kam-chen Bolomob.”
At the goal the players retreated behind their end-zone lines. A pair of untouchables ran in and caught the ball together with their gloved hands. One of them stood on the central marker, holding the ball, while the other purified it with a dusting of blood ashes out of a pouch. If the invisibles were like stagehands, the untouchables were a bit more like ballboys. But since they touched the court surface and the blood and the dead and most of all the ball, they were irrevocably polluted.
“Li’skuba ka.” Ready for Ball Two. I was getting that racehorse-at-the-gate feeling that I’d burst if I didn’t get out on the court. The first invisible faced west and threw the ball underhanded up into the air, expertly dropping it down on the Ocelots’ emerald-green rear marker.
“Chun,” the chanter called again. Emerald Immanent got the tip again and yoke-bounced the ball upward, controlling it-“ Bok” — and passed it gently off his shoulder arm.
“P’uchik,” the chanter called. The word both meant a hit on the body and imitated the sound of a ball hitting flesh and then snap-disengaging from oiled skin. Emerald Howler, the other Ocelot striker, cau
ght the pass on the side of his yoke, “bok,” and knocked it ahead and right, angling it off the sloped masonry wall like in old-fashioned court tennis.
“Pak,” the cantor called, imitating the crisp solid sound. It was also the word for “wall.” Emerald Immanent had already run downcourt and positioned himself under the dropping ball for a shot at the target. The crowd noise fell to near silence and all you could hear was the warbling play-by-play chants and the players’ grunts and the squeaks and cracks of their sandals. It wasn’t that spectators weren’t allowed to talk, but that the game absorbed your total attention, even if you couldn’t see it happening. The crowd was so fascinated they actually shut up and let the intensity build until it was released in the paroxysm of applause at the end of a tense play, or a goal, or a death.
5-5 came up fast and blocked Emerald Immanent’s shot, but Immanent shifted, faded back, shoulder-passed back off the wall to Emerald Howler-“ P’uchik pak ”-who yoked it up perfectly up into the underside of the Harpy goal: “ Bok… t’un!”
“T’un Bolom,” the score-adder called, “wasak-chen Bolomob.”
“Goal, Ocelot, two-zero, Ocelots.”
Whistling blasted out of the crowd. It was two hundred beats later before the players settled into their positions and the head invisible served out the third ball. Emerald Immanent got it again and tried the same run-and-feint and back-pass to Emerald Howler, but this time Hun Xoc was there and he intercepted it, pulling the ball out of the air with his wrist-guard and sending it south to Red Beak. It was a signature move of the Harpy School. In most courts around here hipball was more like soccer, because you couldn’t touch the ball with your feet or your hands. But Ixian rules were a bit different, and we each wore a lizard-skin-wrapped wooden extension on the underside of our wrists, extending up into the palms, and you could bat or deflect the ball with those. Even so, the ball was so heavy you couldn’t get much force on it with your arms. And of course you weren’t allowed to catch it, not that you’d want to. Really, it was too heavy to launch seriously with anything but the braced weight of most of your body, and if it had any major momentum behind it you’d have to add some of your own as well. In your big yoke, which came nearly to the nipple level, and the roll of cotton padding peeking up over it, you felt gravity siphoning up through you, and as you received and launched the ball it felt like you were negotiating between a good-sized satellite and the pulling power of the earth. Sometimes you’d have to use your shoulder or calf or even upper arm, but you wouldn’t want to and no matter how hard you were you flinched against the weight. So the idea was to shoot with your hip-yoke whenever possible-which let you get your full weight behind the impact-and then to use your calf, shoulder, thigh, upper arm, and finally the palm guard, in that order of preference. Using your head would be a bad idea.
The Sacrifice Game jd-2 Page 21