“The water,” 2 Jeweled Skull’s voice said.
I contracted like a poked sea cucumber. I’d thought we were all alone in here. Guess the old guy hasn’t lost his New World ninja sneak-up skills. Oh, hi, I thought, sorry, I thought we had the flat all to ourselves.
“It sounds like you’re in trouble,” I whispered. I didn’t have any vocal cords working.
“What is it in the water?” he asked. I felt one of those sharp fingernails gouge through my cheek, but I was getting passive about that stuff.
“I told you she was coming after you,” I said. He poked his nail farther into the back of my tongue. I guessed he was trying to say I should answer the question.
“I don’t know,” I gagged around his finger. “Is there some kind of witchcraft afoot?”
“I’m going to execute your bitch, Hun Xoc, now,” he said in Chol.
That sounds good, I said. Is that all right with you? I asked, switching to the “equals” tense Hun Xoc and I used. I heard him grunt yes. But instead 2 Jeweled Skull and someone else started untying me, probably getting me together for another visit to the dentist. I held my breath and pushed it up into my head, straining against myself, what I guess they call red-turning or “doing a raspberry” on the playground, but it was really an old torture-victim’s trick. Because it was dark I got away with it and passed satisfyingly out.
(47)
My head got half-going again as they carried me through the open alleys of the Ocelot House and out into the upper zocalo. It was already past noon. Dry-wood-and-lime-smoke hung in the still air. Burning buildings. Somehow there was a sense that the bottom had dropped out of the city. My eye was weird where the teaser had sprayed water on it, it was all jumping around and unfocused, but one of the first things I noticed was a Harpy guard crawling around on the floor, spitting and repeating the same thing over and over, “Kot wuk, Kot wuk, Kot wuk,” that is, “Here’s my favorite auntie, here’s my favorite auntie.” Well, that’s a good sign, I thought. The earthstar compound was having its desired effect, at least on one person. They passed me down steep steps. There were shouts and the noise of multiple ball impacts that, from the flavor of the echoes, I could tell were coming from the Great-Hipball Court. It was nearby, but I couldn’t tell in which direction. Finally I got my eye working and I could see we were on the raised platform in front of the Council Mat House. I didn’t have a great sense of depth, and I had to keep swinging my head around to get a wider field of view, so it took me a minute to see that some kind of combat was still going on out in the yellow and red quarters. There were a few lackluster one-on-one fights nearer to us, more like street fights than warfare. We descended to the level of the temple district, down through an almost visible boundary layer into an inversion filled with the miasma of decaying bodies, a beyond-belief stench like opening up a month-dead walrus on a sunny beach and rubbing your face in its fermented gastric juices and self-digested tissues. It wasn’t just human, it was also fish decomposing in the canals, with a faint anise scent over everything else. Outside my little escort there were all kinds of people eddying around, castes and clans who would never normally be mixed together, everyone flopping and bumping, saying things that didn’t make any sense. Some of them prancing around in luxury clothing and headdresses that weren’t theirs, something you’d absolutely never do. One group of Bat House bloods was sitting in a circle, throwing thorn-spiked balls back and forth at each other and crying like little kids with temper tantrums. Maybe Koh’s buying me out, I thought. On the other hand maybe the Ocelots are buying me out.
The guards carried me past collapsed wood stands, around little fires and puddles of alcohol and vomit and through the Ocelots’ emerald-green end-zone into the main trench of the ball court. Its floor had been neutralized with a layer of thousands of pink geranium blossoms, but otherwise it was a mess, with bits of clothing and weapons and blood all over the stands and platforms. They carried me out over a lake of petals to a big Harpy trading mat that had been laid out in the center of the face-off zone. I didn’t see 2JS anywhere but from the way the attendants acted I got the sense he was behind me, watching. There were Harpy guards standing at the banks and on each end zone, but I noticed one of them was unconscious at his post and another two were nibbling on his bare feet, tearing off strips of skin and swallowing them. Looks good, I thought. Some kind of fight erupted behind me and I looked around, but it was just another Harpy blood sitting on the ground and shouting. He was all wild-eyed and foamy at the nose. He started kicking out at his brothers, who stood back and urinated all over him. The far end-zone was mainly pyramidal stacks of bodies, ready to be dealt with but not getting processed. A few were squirming but at least there were more dead ones than live ones. It was a perfect day for the horde of the flies. Some of the corpses hadn’t even been stripped of their elaborate-ass festival regalia. It was like those photos of British officers frozen in the Crimea, where they’re wearing all this fancy stuff but they’re still really messed up. Through the eastern V of the court I could see a bit of the wide steps up to the council house. It all looked like the ratty tail end of a late party, people stagger-dancing and flapping their arms. Harpies with victors’ blossoms and untended captives, bloods who had fought against each other a little while ago, were sitting motionless next to each other, staring into nearby infinity. A little Ocelot boy sat on a soldier’s dead body, pricking himself over and over on the chest with a spearhead.
Psyche, I thought. Fabulous. I’d been worried that the shit would be too diluted. Not that I was out of the frying pot yet. Trade me out, I thought, they’d better be trading me out. Come on, Koh, babe. Trade me out. A ten-man treaty party was advancing from the other side of the court, but I couldn’t make out who they were since they were all in neutral clothes. The Harpy negotiators set me in the center of the trading mat. Again. I wondered whether my stock had gone up or down and tried to check out what was on the other side, but it was just a stack of tied screenfold tribute books and another damn dish of clay tokens I couldn’t read through my one messed-up eye. I held myself up for a beat, saw that under their mantos the other traders were Rattlers’ Children, which meant they’d come from Lady Koh.
I rolled back on the down-soft fabric. A big fly, her abdomen filled with eggs, lighted on the outside corner of my sighted eye. I blinked but she wouldn’t go away. It was too likely a spot. I was too relieved to care much, though. They turned me over to a team of dressers, because I remember being in a neutral-color tent with a couple of people working on my leg while a surgeon rubbed yellow cocaine syrup into my empty eye socket. I whined a little and he gave me a ball of corn silk soaked in cocaine and morning-glory paste to chew on. I couldn’t move. Maybe it was for my own good. They really took charge of you around here. It wasn’t just that I’d been tied up half the time. It was like ninety percent of the time I was treated like a week-old baby. Or like a cow going through a packing plant. I thought about asking him to cut a chunk out of the bridge of my nose, like the Duke di Montefeltro’s, so that I could see a bit farther to the right. But I decided maybe I’d had enough folk-medical abuse for one day.
At another point, which I guess must have been later, I could tell I was lying prone on a fur pallet in a stone room. It was all blue and glowy and I wasn’t alone. There was this incredible itching in the ball of my right foot. I tried to scratch it, and my arm actually seemed to work, but I couldn’t find the foot anywhere. Eventually I felt for my penis-great, it was still around, I thought-and then followed my leg down from there with my hand. The leg ended in a crusty cauterized stump just below the knee, but as I viciously scratched the stump it felt like I was scratching my old foot again with penetrating electric fingers. Absolute bliss. I felt for the bone at the core but it had been plugged with wax.
Where’s what’s left of me? I giggled. At this rate all that’s going to come back to Marena will be a brain in a vat. If that. Vat. Bat. Vein in a brat.
I exploded into a sneezing
-fit-someone must have stuck some fish-tincture up my nose, kind of like smelling salts. I rubbed my eye. Warm oily hands turned me over and held my head up toward the light. The far walls were covered with the wings of blue morpho butterflies. Lady Koh was sitting at its center, looking at me out of the heart of the cerulean bloom. She had a wooden dish on the table in front of her, and inside the dish I recognized my leg, dry-cured and dusted with cinnabar.
(48)
The thirty Grandfathers of Heat between July 16, the day Koh traded me out of captivity, and today-13 Motion, that is, January 22, 664 AD, the first day of my combined wedding-and-seating festival-isn’t quite a total dropout. I remember stuff. But I was in such a flaky mental state that either I don’t remember what came before what, or I think I must be remembering the explanation of what had happened to me that someone gave me later instead of the actual occurrence. And trying to sort it out seems like a labor of Penelope.
In fact, having my coiffure done in the once-in-a-lifetime Hero Twins Senegalese-twistesque style-which took them over five hours, mainly because my natural hair was still only two inches long and they insisted on hitch-knotting each strand of the extensions on separately-is almost the first thing I can remember as a definitely time-marked event. I remember thinking how I’d come a long way-how Koh was in charge of Ix, and how pretty soon she’d put me nominally in charge by marrying me-and how much I still had to do. I had to organize a human Sacrifice Game with Lady Koh, and play it until we got to the 4 Ahau date of the last b’aktun. And even if we didn’t come up with anything-well, since I’d buried the Lodestone Cross cache, I’d learned what felt like ten times as much about the Game. Maybe even if I didn’t get my brain back, it would still be enough to make Taro’s version of the game sufficiently powerful, powerful enough to neutralize the 2012 dooomster. So I had to write that all down in a form that, if I didn’t make it back, Jed 1 would still understand. I had to take over 2 Jeweled Skull’s ROC gel operation and make sure we had enough of all the different compounds. I had to get the tomb in order. I had to figure out how to bury myself in a way that would ensure that my tomb would be undisturbed. And those were only the main things. Each of them needed hundreds of other things to get done first, even to have a chance of working. And I was already getting double images and microblackouts and spike headaches and other brain-tumor symptoms. And before I could do anything else, I had to heal my leg and my eye and get at least half-functional. I lay still for days on end in a tiny pinkwashed room that adjoined a different, smaller sweat-bath, kind of a celebrity hospital and detox center, just feeling my wounds itchily stitch themselves together. I’d lie there doing yoga eye-exercises with my one eye, moving my focus as slowly as possible from upper left to lower right, repeating the process hundreds of times, getting comfortable with the most interesting pocks and cracks on the stucco ceiling. I wasn’t exactly depressed in that way where the whole world seems like it’s made out of Homasote, but I was definitely fuged out and totally exhausted, with a flavoring of that resignation you get to when you know you’re really broken beyond repair. Sometimes when I’d fall asleep a tattoo scribe would sneak in, rub anesthetic into, say, my upper arm, and when I’d wake up there’d be a sore patch with another row of twenty head-glyphs and the name of each captive I’d supposedly taken. Of course I hadn’t actually captured anyone, but Lady Koh had dedicated their blood to me because I’d made it all possible. Becoming a capturer was like being a “made” man in the Mafia, where you’re sort of certified by performing a killing.
Koh had thoughtfully traded Hun Xoc out of captivity too. He hung out with me a lot. His arms had healed, although you could see the crescent cross-sections of bone in the center of the cauterized crust at the stumps, and exposed bone is painful, especially in cold weather. He’d had fake arms made of human skin stretched over wicker, with stylized hands like flowers, that fastened onto studs in his stumps. But when he was hanging out with me he’d have them taken off and let one of my male nurses massage him with oil. Of course I kept asking him and everyone about the battle. He said that before we’d even gotten to Ix, Koh had told 1 Gila and her main body of troops to stall for another two days after first being sighted by 2 Jeweled Skull. Koh had made sure that the Ocelots and Harpies would fight each other as long as possible, so that when her own troops came in, the Ixob would be exhausted as well as drugged.
I’d gotten the earthstar compound into the well a bit before midnight, and it wasn’t until the evening of the next day that the first Harpy bloods who’d drunk from the water system started to feel unusually happy. Of course most people attributed the elation to their great victory, and what with the fog of the aftermath of the battle and all the balche drinking and premature feasting and raping and pillaging and whatever that went on after the Ocelots’ military structure fell apart, the drugged water had spread through most of the city and especially most of the Harpy clan before more than a couple non-judgment-impaired people had realized what was going on. Best of all, it had taken out five of 2 Jeweled Skull’s eight commanders along with their troops. It hadn’t gotten 2 Jeweled Skull or 9 Fanged Hummingbird. They probably drank only rainwater. Certainly their food was tasted, stored, cooked, retasted, and then selected at random. Anyway, it had been plenty.
From what the dressers said I gathered that Koh had let 2 Jeweled Skull think she’d retreated northeast, and then kept moving her band of converts around the perimeter of the Harpy Clan’s scouting range. Supposedly she’d even let a couple of her doubles get captured just to throw the Harpies off. And then, when the earthstar drug hit, she’d moved in her big old ragtag horde in the confusion. Supposedly the short siege had been more like a bunch of parades converging on a riot. She’d pushed through to the lake in less than half a day and then used her numbers to block the bridges and cut off the peninsula and the temple district. By late that evening the holdout Harpy bloods had collapsed most of the Ocelot compound around themselves. And by now-I mean by 13 Motion-there wasn’t any real fighting still going on, just a few fires still burning in the north and west where Ocelot-allied clans had torched their granaries.
I still didn’t really know what the hell was going on, though. Had Koh really won? Was she really in charge? Had 2 Jeweled Skull really lost? What had happened to 9 Fanged Hummingbird? How had Koh gotten away to begin with? Hadn’t she been sitting in the middle of all these Ocelot bloods at the hipball game? All of whom had been primed to capture her?
I closed my eye. Don’t even try to understand right now, I thought. The answers to these questions and more…
The Sacrifice Game jd-2 Page 29