The Sacrifice Game jd-2

by Brian D'Amato

  I could tell the polyrhythms were speeding up. 9 Fanged Hummingbird started chasing the Chacal actor around the square. Chacal popped himself off his umbilical cord and hid behind an ember pot. The actor playing 2 Jeweled Skull of the Harpy House crept in, reacted to 4 Orange Skull’s headless body, grabbed Chacal, and pulled him away into the red zone of the Sacrifice Game grid. 9 Fanged Hummingbird mimed looking around, but couldn’t find them.

  “2 Jeweled Skull took 9 Wax into his ball-school

  In Blue Stone Mountain, far, far East, in safety,” On The Left said.

  We were totally rewriting history, of course. Especially my-or Chacal’s-undistinguished genealogy. Chacal wasn’t blood-related to the Ocelots at all, he was just a dependent-clan provincial kid who’d shown early talent and gotten himself into the league.

  Still, the same old story gets ’em every time. I hoped.

  9 Wax-now called Chacal-became the greatest ballplayer ever, of course. The actor did a couple nice stunt versions of my spectacular saves. Then pretty soon the 9 Fanged Hummingbird character suspected who he was and tried to sacrifice him. But then there was the eruption, well-suggested by batteries of tree-drums and long ratchets. Our hero fled to Teotihuacan, destroyed it apparently single-handedly, brought the Star Rattler-in this scene, a long-jointed wooden snake-back to Ix, and challenged 9 Fanged Hummingbird to a big hipball match. The square filled with acrobats wearing huge full-head masks like toy bobble-heads, one for each of the famous ballplayers. The tumbler who was playing the ball knocked the Ocelot champions’ heads off one after another. And invisibles scurried in and cleaned up the stage for the war. It had all taken less than a half an hour so far but I was getting impatient. I knew how it came out. Warrior-mimes faced each other across the square, advanced one by one, and paired off into slow-motion duels. Up on the four cedar poles the twelve acrobat kids spread their Harpy-ancestor wings and let themselves drop. Their gut cords unwound from the pole, spinning them counterclockwise in widening gyres down toward the eastern crowd. The Ocelot ancestors crept out on the western side, not just giant cats but Ocelot-catfishes with bulbous bulging-stomached popcorn-stuffed suits so big each outfit took four jaguars’ skins to make and jutting jawless faces waving long flagella and feelers and trailing hairy barbels. They didn’t look ridiculous, though, they stalked forward with that wary catty deliberation behind each silent pad-placement and it was really kind of disturbing. They grouped on the raised border of the zocalo, two rope-lengths in front of where we were standing, and watched. Down on the battlefield the Harpies were winning. 9 Fanged Hummingbird turned and ran to his ancestors for help, but they rejected him and pushed him back into the ring.

  “You’re weak and treacherous,” the cantor said, imitating the voice and language of the Ocelot Ancestors.

  “Bring us our heir, the son of our greatfathers,

  And seat him on the mat, or you’ll be slaughtered.”

  The 9 Fanged Hummingbird character spun around frightenedly and ran off. I guess On The Left’s going to do all the voices himself, I thought. Is that supposed to make it more arty? Down on the battlefield the Ocelot bloods seemed to be getting the upper hand again. The 2 Jeweled Skull character ran back and forth, trying to show as clearly as possible that his side was in big trouble. Finally he ran up to the Chacal character, who was dispatching another Ocelot blood at the extreme southeastern corner of the court, just below the Star Rattler’s blue-green mul.

  “My son, 9 Wax, help us kill the Ocelots,” the cantor said in an imitation of the voice of 2 Jeweled Skull.

  “I can’t kill my own family,” “Chacal” said.

  “Then stop the battle,” “2 Jeweled Skull” said. “Take

  The Ocelot’s mat, and also take my mat,

  The Harpy’s mat, and sew the two together,

  Unite both great-greatfathers in one blood.”

  Wow, this really is bullshit, I thought. That wasn’t at all the way things happened. Would the guests really believe it? Except don’t even think that way, I thought. Believing it doesn’t matter. It’s about whether the ones who know what actually happened can deny the truth. And of course they can. That’s what people are good at. It’s media, for God’s sake. Right? And everybody’ll go home and tell two friends about what they saw, and they’ll tell two friends, and by tomorrow afternoon it’ll be like it all really happened.

  The Chacal character pointed his saw at the sun. The clashing warriors in the battle separated and froze into listening attitudes. There was a long, long hiss from orchestras of maracas, like shipyardsful of woodworkers running sharkskin over lignum vitae. Everyone-including guards and watchmen who were supposed to face their posts-turned and looked toward the Star Rattler’s mul. The low sun hit its facade flat-on and saturated it with light filtered to a pure spectrum-band of cadmium-orange deep through the still-omnipresent ash roof. I smelled that smell again, the one that followed Koh, more insistent now, and as smoke curled up like fangs out of the mouth of the high sanctuary something emerged and flowed down the stairs with the deceptive nonmotion of a lava flow and rolled coiling into the zocalo, sidewound forward, tasting the space, and then reversed itself and slithered up to the peak of the mul again, its head passing its tail at the top, and then as its tail thrashed it slid down again with horrible purposefulness and coiled in the zocalo’s blue-green central zone, scattering the warriors, and oriented itself to the invisible milky way. It paused, licking the air with jointed tongues-they were made like those novelty wooden snakes that bend sideways but not up and down-and then wriggled warily toward us across the court, its movement so perfectly snakelike or rather centipedal that it was hard to shake the sense that it was alive. It had that angular movement that isn’t really movement, where the thing just shifts mysteriously from one spot to another without seeming to be in between, without crawling or even sliding, more just sucking itself obliquely forward by torsion building and releasing and building, surfing on the liquid sine wave of the universe, and for a beat I realized it was lining its side-stars up with the earthstars of the mulob, remaking or mirroring the astronomical moment, Antares setting and Saturn in the Crab. It drew itself up at the apron of the Ocelots’ mul-which had been emerald and scarlet but was now black, scarlet, and Lady Koh’s signature blue-green-and reared back, flaring its ruff like a horned lizard and inflated its chest like a mating quail’s. It seemed to be about to speak and then it puffed its cheeks to bursting, like a frog’s, and extended its eyes on long stalks like a slug’s, feline-slitted pupils rolling round and around, inspecting us. It opened its mouth, and first nothing and then a sound came out, a gurgling of petrified glyptodonts bubbling up out of tar pits, a wheeze and release like sneezing out broken glass. A dark-green flood of writhing globules vomited out of its mouth, separated into lumps with legs and hands, and rolled blindly over the stones squealing in mock pain, dwarves dressed as toads covered with glistening thick oil that mimicked digestive juice. The dragon coughed, shook its head, unfolded and spread its thirteen pairs of wings, opened its jaws again, and spoke:

  “Star Rattler calls One Ocelot: Show yourself.”

  (56)

  Everyone on the dais drew back from me so that I was exposed to the crowd. I teetered up four low steps to the next, smaller platform, the foot of the stairs of the pyramid, a half-rope-length above everyone else. I was alone except for a tall wrapped stele lying in the center of the landing, ready to be lifted and slid into the big hole under its base.

  The crowd reacted, although it wasn’t anything you could hear. This was already the first stage in climbing the mul. It meant I was committed to respond to the oracle’s challenge. The whole thing was considered a test. Which I guess is obvious, except it wasn’t just testing me personally. If Ocelot accepted me and infused me with his uay I’d supposedly be strong enough to establish Ix as the seat of another thirteen-k’atun cycle, the way Teotihuacan had been the seat of the previous one, and then Ix would get a whole lot of goodies. Of co
urse, now that the Teotihuacanob coalition had fallen apart, other cities would immediately contest the claim. But everyone was still taking it kind of seriously. Too many snafus from the ruling family and people would start losing confidence. Motivation, I thought. Human resources. Give ’em a leader. Ein Volk, ein Fuhrer. The Ocelot interpreter took out a half-calabash basin. It passed hand to hand like a collection plate, first through the great-bloods on the level below me and then through part of the crowd below them. Each person who got it unwrapped a single small green chili pepper, Capsicum frutescens, a variety so hot that it was used only for torture and poisoning fish-and dropped it into the gourd. The full basin came back to the interpreter. He mashed the chilis with a pestle- the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true- I thought added a shot of balche, and stirred it up. An ordinand handed him a blue sacrificial cord with ocotillo thorns woven into it. He showed the rope to the crowd and coiled it into the basin, tamping it down with the pestle. He let it sit for a minute and then pulled it out to show how it was soaked with chili water and covered with little yellow seeds. There wasn’t going to be any possible question about it. Nothing up my sleeve.

  I turned to the mul and gave it the son-to-father salute. Except for its staircase its entire bulk was draped with the twenty-seven original halach popob, cotton-and-feather weavings rippling over its nine blue-green courses in waves of gold, black, and scarcely believable unfaded Gobelin reds.

  Thirteen of them hadn’t been unfolded since the seating of 4 Rabbit, in the first sun in the first tun of the eighth red hotun, 493 AD, at the last quadruple conjunction of Saturn, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, two hundred and fifty-six years ago. The interpreter handed me the cord.

  Okay. Right. No point waiting, I thought. Not everyone in the crowd could see everything, but the great-bloods on my left and right could see plenty.

  Can’t fake this one. Nope. Come on, get it over with.

  I unwrapped a fresh stingray spine, handling it gingerly like a communion wafer, and tied it to one end of the cord, like I was threading a needle.

  Go for it. Goferit. Gfrt.

  I untied my little loin-package and took out my penis. It was a little embarrassing, not because I was showing it off or anything but because it was looking kind of puny, pulling its turtle-head into its long foreskin. Shrinking violet. Shying away from the coming inevitable.

  Hard up, little dude.

  Now, now, NOW NOW NOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOW. I held up the shaft, slid the spine into the underside right above the bulb, and slipped the point forward in the space between the loose skin and the deep fascia and poked it out again just under the corona, pulling the thorn-thread after it. The first mental state I was aware of was disbelief, amazement that I could be feeling like this and still be alive. The interpreter set the chili-coil basin down on my left, placed a larger terra-cotta trencher in front of me, and dropped thirteen triangles of blue sacrificial paper into it. He seemed to check the menstrual flow out of my glans and then stood back. I was too aware of the scores of great-bloods leaning in closer, watching for even a grimace or twitch of pain that might show I wasn’t the one. I dangled the cord down over the mound of paper, scattering red dots, and kept pulling it through. I watched the blood flow out of my groin, out over the ribbons on my legs, down into the trencher, spilling over its rim and off down the stairs and into the world, the inside becoming the outside, the most-private written out for the universe. It made sense. I pulled it through, hand over hand, as slowly as possible. It was the longest rope in the universe. And the thickest. It made the VSNL transpacific cable seem like a piece of dental floss. Come on. Too late to whiff out now. Go. Go. Go. Go. The heat of the capsaicin had already spread through my body, buzzing my eardrums and activating tear ducts I tried to choke off, but I did manage to just stand there, not jumping a rope-length into the air and screaming like I really had to do but just pulling and pulling, hand over hand, until it sank into its own groove. It was only while these things were happening that you could ever explain to yourself why we did it. I mean, pain has its own world and its own allure, but it’s not describable after the fact. When you get down to it we did it only for the only good reason to do anything, that is, just for the hell of it. It was just suffering for its own sake, or for its own clarity. When you become a connoisseur of agony it gets like anything else, like any acquired taste, you get into controlling it, you learn how to distribute it through your body and through time, how to teeter on the very edge of your expanding personal limit without falling off into insanity. It teaches you to separate yourself from your body and swim out into the ether. You learn how to distinguish four hundred different shades of pain. A ton of stuff. And as far as I know it’s a lost art, like knapping a statue out of obsidian.

  I pulled the last thorn-knot through and out with an explosion of droplets and coiled the end of the bloody cord into the offering-trencher, and now the aftermath was already setting in, quarts of endorphins sloshing through my capillaries. Pain releases you from yourself and returns you to yourself. The interpreter took the trencher, raised it and showed it to the sky caves of the four directions, and set it down on a brazier. Curls of blood-smoke slithered up and out, my essence sent into the farthest reaches of the great gas-cloud. It made sense.

  I stood there wobbling a bit in the warped gravity. It might have been just a figment of my lack of imagination, but I thought I could hear sniffing, the big cat checking out my scent. I teetered backward and caught myself. Watch it. I was feeling dangerously good. One thing I can guarantee is that that moment of recovering from intense pain is the truest peace anyone can ever experience. Especially if it’s self-inflicted pain. If you can dive into what you’re most afraid of and drift there and not swim up until you’re good and ready, everything gets different, the world looks all washed and every vertex of reality’s ten billion polygons a second is shard-keen against your Malpighian skin, like you’re a sphere of holographic film picking up every photon reflected by every facet of the world.

  An acolyte knelt in front of me, squeezed tiny globs of anesthetic honey-lime into the two wounds on my penis, and wrapped it up again in its bloody bands. The sniffing sound segued into something like a purr. My mask came down over my head and my backrack attached itself to my torso, tying itself on with four hundred biting laces in eight hundred invisible hands.

  He says to come a little closer, the interpreter said. How did he hear him from this distance? I wondered. Was there somebody else relaying sign language? Well, ask about that later. You can’t be an expert on all their little secrets. Remember, they’ve been staging these things for a long time. They know what they’re doing.

  I positioned myself at the first step, sideways to the incline. The stairs had fantastically high risers, twenty-two inches according to the BYU map, and we were small people, so as I stood flat on what was effectively the first step, the one above it was above my knee, between it and the level of my groin. To raise myself up it I had to balance on my peg, lift my intact leg with its stilt-shoe as high as possible, like an eleve in ballet, position it on the upper step, shift my weight to it, and pull the peg up after me. I’d had them drill a shallow hole at the edge of each step, kind of like on Captain Ahab’s deck path, so I could fasten my hidden sole-spike into it between steps. But as I took the first one and wobbled on the pull-up I had trouble getting it in, and when it did slip in I tipped over to that side and panicked until I teetered back upright and found my center of balance. Whoa, I thought. Watch it.

  Cripes. Two hundred and fifty-four steps to go. If I pulled this off, it really would be because of divine intervention.

  The beaters signaled the next step. Okay. Next. Go. I had to move up one step every five beats. We hadn’t made any allowance for the fact that I’d been maimed. If we changed the requirements or faked it at all, I’d lose too much of my already leaky credibility.

  I’d rehearsed this, of course, on a forty-step mock-up. But I hadn’t been brilliant and I’d been
too sick to risk the drinking and blood loss. And it was getting breezy, and dark. And mainly I just wasn’t feeling too good. It wouldn’t have been so bad without the damn towering beaky Eagle headdress, I thought. And without the claw-foot Elton John platforms, of course. But I was starting to feel like with them I didn’t have much of a shot. I raised my foot but somehow I flicked my vision upward, toward the sanctuary, and my Cyclops eye somehow let an awareness of depth into my head.

  Uh-oh. I’m in trouble.

  The stairs just went up and uppity up, but it wasn’t even the horribly steep fifty-one-degree angle that had really hit me, it was the unbrokenness of the span, the subtle strangeness of the absence of railings, absence of landings, absence of turns between flights, the lack of all those little-noticed amenities that all stairs in the rest of the world always have. The stairs projected utter antihumanism, architecture as weapon, not just a complete disregard for comfort and safety but a will to grind you down, to trick you into climbing and then to make you slip and saw you into pulp. There’d never been and wouldn’t ever be anything like these stairs in the architecture of the entire rest of the world. You’re nothing against them, I thought. Call it off.

  Nope. Don’t even think about it.

  They’ll tear you to bits. Even now. They don’t love you that much. As far as I knew, all the kings and adders who had fallen had been posthumously disowned and wiped out of the records. It was one thing you just couldn’t wuss out on, the risk of being on the stairs was an essential bit of realness in the trial by ordeal.

  I pushed up to the second step. I felt synovial fluid squirt out of my knee. I cracked and wrenched and got my peg into the hole almost on cue. Really, I could handle these stairs in a jiff, I thought. I mean if I weren’t also crippled, drunk, blood-poor, and in stilts Stop whining, I thought. Just shut up and deal. Third step. I blasted myself up faster than I was supposed to. My sweat-drenched foot slid forward on the plaster. Christ, watch it, watch the hell out. Slow down. Save it. You aren’t the athlete Chacal used to be. You were able to play that one ball game okay but it’s pretty much spoiled you for anything else. Not even counting injuries sustained since then. Chill. Beat. Fourth step. I could feel eyes pressing on my back, my clansmen and their clansmen, adders and bloods and dependents, all looking up at me, or rather to me. I could feel their need to trust, feel all the responsibility, all that stuff that sounds so dopey. Something was clicking into position beyond fear and resignation. I guess I’d have to call it a comprehension of the particularity of the moment, or of the brittleness of existence, but it was more abstract… anyway, only two hundred and fifty-two steps to go, I thought. No big whoop. Fifth step.