The Sacrifice Game (16 page)

The next big group we passed was a clanlet of well-to-do Swallowtail-affiliated traders, about fifteen blood family members and two veintenas of thralls hauling them on eight extralong sleds. On the last sled, three eight-year-old girls, who looked like triplets, fanned the patriarch with huge chocho palm leaves that had recently been blanched and then dyed blue-green. Which, I guess, is getting into more detail than necessary, but I wanted to mention it while I’m thinking of since it became an issue later: all of Koh’s followers who could afford it wore or carried something in her signature turquoise-blue shade—there were vats of the indigofera dye on special sleds—so that from a distance the procession looked like it had been sprinkled with periwinkle blossoms. Something old, something new, I thought. Something borrowed, something askew. And something too nauseating even to name. Still, they all thought they were part of a larger being. And despite everything, there was an element of fun to it, or if not quite fun at least adventure. For most of them this was the first time they’d been away from their home ground. For that matter, some of the women probably hadn’t ever been two rope-lengths outside their hamlets. This was the primary event in their lives, and in their family’s lives, all the way back to their first ancestor at the first birth of this sun on 4 Lord, 8 Seed Maize, 0.0.0.0.0., that is, August 11, 3113 BC, and ahead to their last descendant, who, of course, would die on the last 4 Ahau of the last b’aktun, in AD 2012.

There were about three hundred big palanquins in the high-rent district of the line. They varied in size and opulence but they all had arrays of cushions and big round wicker roofs covered with embroidered cloth, so that they looked incogruously like psychedelicized Conestoga wagons. Lady Koh held court on the largest of the palanquins. It was only about eight arms wide—still wider than any of the others—but about forty long. Right now there were sixteen people sitting on it and forty carrying it. There was a breeze, but another gang of thralls carried a portable windbreak, and the feathers on the mat barely stirred. A squad of guards ran alongside on each hand. There was a strong smell of monarda—a kind of horsemint that upscale valets crushed and strewed around their masters—which didn’t much cover up the hellish odors, and under that a hint of what people said was the breath of Koh’s most secret uay, and what a modern person would call her signature scent. When I’d first smelled it I’d described it to myself as the opposite of the smell of cinnamon, and now, after what seemed like years, I still didn’t have a better description. But I did know, now, that its main component was enfleuraged from what I was pretty sure was a species of
Brassia,
the genus of orchids that mimics spiders, and that as far as anyone seemed to know, it was unique to her and her close followers.

Koh’s guards all knew Hun Xoc, but it still took a while to pass through their circles. I was already doing rage-abatement breathing by the time my bearer finally set me down on the edge of the platform. It rocked just a bit as it moved along, pleasantly boatlike. Koh sat in the turquoise center of a feather-cloth Sacrifice Game board two arm-lengths square. Her eyes were closed and she was mumbling to one of her uays in some animal language. There were eight members of the
popol na
—the mat house, that is, the council, up here, and they greeted me and went back to talking among themselves. They were all in expensive gear, but it was still a pretty motley crew. Crüe. Whatever. The youngest of them, 14 Wounded, was eight
tuns,
that is, a little less than eight solar years, older than I was. He’d been the trade representative in Teotihuacán for my adoptive clan, the Harpies, who were the richest family in Ix besides the ruling clan, the Ocelots. Or they might now be even richer, because of the Ocelots’ gigantic debts, except it was harder to put a value on things here than it was back in the twenty-first. Anyway—oh, except there was one who was younger, Koh’s Steward of Invisible Things. His title meant he was something like a legal counsellor. His name was Coati, that is, kind of a raccoon. I’d barely met him back in Teotihuacán, but now he was with her every minute.

The group had started as a temporary meeting of the major greathouse ahaus, but now it had hardened into a government. Well, whatevs. The other seven people on the platform were attendants, fanning us and whisking away the screwflies. None of them looked at Koh. Ordinary folks who saw her face might get scorched by her captive lightning.

Hun Xoc manuevered next to me and squatted. I kneed to the edge of the Game cloth. It was strewn with jade and quartzite pebbles, and after a minute I could see that she was using it as a battle map. A long line of turquoise pebbles, stretching diagonally from the center of the white quadrant to the upper corner of the black one, represented our caravan. The clusters of pink quartz that approached it on its north side were Severed Right Hand’s army, and it looked to me like they were color-coded like in an old Kriegspiel layout, darkening as they became increasingly hypothetical. But beyond that I couldn’t read what she was up to. There was at least an equal number of other stones, mainly black and yellow, distributed in other zones of the board, and aside from the fact that they had more to do with time than space I couldn’t tell what they represented. For all I knew, some of them were just there to confuse the other members of the council.

Well, if so, it was working. They were all stone-cold killers and word-is-law patriarchs, and now they were sitting patiently, waiting, speaking in hushed mutters, and casting apprehensive looks at her as we jogged along. Either they all believed she was getting her orders from a higher authority, or they figured enough of the others believed that none of them wanted to question her.

When I—

—Ow. Damn. One of the scareflies had gotten a hair into my eye. I glared at him. He quaked in terror, almost literally. And I almost felt guilty, but I got over it. I watched Koh. She moved two of the black stones. She was as unhurried as though no one else was there.

Hmm.
When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery,
I was going to say. Well, our own nunnery novice had certainly convinced these cats that she knew something. Just two tuns ago—I would have said “short tuns” if they hadn’t seemed longer than python turds—Koh had been just one of the more promising young members of the Orb Weaver Sorority. It was an elite group of epicene veneratoresses to Star Rattler, high-stone sun-adderesses who usually wore men’s clothing so that they could operate in male spaces. Although now she was wearing bits of both male and female clothing. And as far as I knew, this was her own idea. She was becoming all things to all people.

Geez Belize, I thought, I’ve created a monsteress. I gave this girl her start. I mean, I was the one who’d contacted her in the first place, because there was a picture of her in the Codex Nuremberg. But the Codex wouldn’t be written until long after this, sometime in the 1100s. And it wasn’t clear from the Codex whether she’d still be alive or not
after
she became a big deal. She could end up like Jesus and be dead for a hundred years before the franchise really got going. And if she turned into a martyr, most likely she’d take me down with her. Well, don’t worry about it. I was still pretty useful to her. Wasn’t I? I mean, I knew stuff nobody around here knew, not even her. I could even still mix up some gunpowder if she wanted me to, although of course I didn’t want to call that much attention to myself. Somebody’d say I was a dangerous scab-caster—like a warlock—and every other ambitious blood would be looking to off me.

The mumbling stopped. Lady Koh raised her eyes, and they met mine, and, without actually moving a single muscle of her face, somehow she conveyed a smile.

( 19 )

A
fter that, Lady Koh made eye contact with each member of the council in turn and then, instead of speaking, took her hands out of the folds of her manto and signed in Ixian hunting language. Every once in a while, when there was a name that didn’t translate, she spoke a syllable or two to fill in. “He’ll march ahead of us, at least to the oxbow,” she signed. “Then he’ll retrace his route and wait for a west wind dawn.” She moved the largest and brightest of the pink quartz pebbles southeast of our position and then back alongside us, illustrating the maneuver. The idea was that Severed Right Hand would want to come at us with the sun rising behind his men and the wind in front so we wouldn’t smell him. It sounded reasonable. “So we need to have
iik
and coals ready.” That is, when they attacked, we’d be ready to run baskets full of burning chili peppers upwind, to try and blind them.

“Smoke is for first-time-menstruating nongreathouse second-born girl daughters,” 14 Wounded said. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, the expression sounded better in Mayan. Anyway, it meant that smoke screens were a cowardly tactic.

There was a pause. Cowardly is good, I thought, but I didn’t want to start definding myself on the point, so I just kept walking. Set a good example, I thought. Quiet, uncomplaining, impervious to pain, stoic—
ow
. Sticklet in my left sandal. Damn. Ow, ow, ow. Why me?
Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow
. I shook it out. Okay. The trail went over a dry gulch and the platform swayed like a jet in a pocket of low pressure. You could hear thousands of callused and/or sandaled feet padding on gravel.

Finally Coati held up a hand with the thumb and first two fingers touching, which meant basically, “Insignificant as I am, may I yet please speak?” The members of the popol clicked their tongues for “yes.”

They looked at Koh. She signed “yes.”

“All great-alliances collapse from stomach parasites, not predators,” Coati said. It was a well-known line from some old masque, but 14 Wounded didn’t say anything more.

Koh and her privy council spent some time working on the new set of signals they’d give for advances and retreats. She stipulated that after the battle—which, I guess, they all figured couldn’t be avoided—her followers would regather in a village called Place of the Ticks, on a defensible bluff two jornadas to the southwest. From there the migration would bear due south for two days, and then turn east along the Atoyac River to a site on the coast just south of what would later be called Veracruz. She’d resettle them there, she said, and reseat the Star Rattler’s
mul
—that is, very generally, “pyramid.” And after that, Koh and I would go on to Ix by the inland water route, with a small escort of two hundred and forty Orb Weaver bloods and a hundred and ten nonblood supporting families, meaning about another two thousand people.

The council lasted for two-thirteenths of the day, that is, about three hours. No one could leave until everyone agreed it was over. And in fact, unless one of us drastically changed rank, whenever any combination of us sat together again, it would be in the same relative positions and oriented toward the same directions. There were also twelve people who were allowed in the room but had to sit outside the circle: four servers, two of Koh’s monkey-masked clerks, a silent guy in a striped outfit who was named 0 Porcupine Clown, and who seemed to be kind of Koh’s court jester, 1 Gila’s accountant and two guards, and our own two calligraphers. And, because tonight would belong to Serpigo, who was the most dangerous of the lords of the dusks, there were four censers pacing counterclockwise around the perimeter of the circle, trailing clouds of geranium incense out of their hand burners.

Finally one of the this-meeting-has-to-end votes carried. The bigwigs crouched backward away from the circle and went back to their own families. Hun Xoc stayed. Coati rolled up the Game board, the attendents folded the wicker covering over the four of us, and Koh and I got to speak almost in private.

She said that while I was away on my burial excursion she’d sent four runners forward to 2 Jeweled Skull, my adopted father and the ahau of the Harpy Clan. They were going to—wait, maybe I should mention a few other things about old 2JS. When I’d received Jed
₁
’s mind up on the Ocelots’ mul, 2JS had unexpectedly been in the same tiny room with me, and he’d gotten a bit of scatter, enough of my memories to speak English and Spanish and understand quite a bit of what I was up to. But he hadn’t gotten enough of me to, say, understand that the images he had of airplanes weren’t a species of friendly condor, or that the computers he remembered me using weren’t silent marimbas with captive souls inside. And he was still very much himself. There wasn’t enough of me in there to confuse him about who he was, the way I’d been confused at first about whether I was me or Chacal, the ballplayer whose brain I was, shall we say, staying in as a guest. Luckily for me, Chacal’s sense of self had faded away pretty quickly. But 2 Jeweled Skull had never become me. And knowing so much about me hadn’t exactly seemed to help him empathize with me or my plight. He’d been angry. And I guess he’d had a legitimate beef. But he’d tortured me pretty badly to get me to pull myself out of his mind, and then, when I’d finally convinced him I couldn’t do that, he’d gradually figured out a way to turn the situation to his advantage. He’d sent me to Teotihuacán to break the Teotihuacanian monopoly on tsam lic, the Sacrifice Game enabling drugs, and now here I was.

Anyway, Koh’s runners were going to repeat to 2 Jeweled Skull—in a Harpy House code language that they themselves didn’t understand—the message that I and the other Harpy bloods who’d survived from the team he’d sent, along with Lady Koh and a small Rattler-blood escort, would be sempiternally honored to attend the great-hipball game in Ix on Ixlahun Chuwen, Bolonlahun Yaxk’in, that is 13 Howler, 19 Redness, or July 14, forty-nine days from now. But they weren’t going to mention the great migration. He will have heard about it anyway by now, she said. Calling attention to it would just raise the issue of what we intended to do with them. What if Koh didn’t manage to found her shining-city-on-a-hill and we turned up in Ix leading a hungry multitude?

I moved back to one of the long, narrow Ball Brethren sleeping toboggans—for some reason they had a team of four watchdogs pulling it today, instead of the usual pairs of thralls—and crashed between two of my teammates. It was male-on-male cozy in a way that would have weirded me out as fagophobic old Jed. We trudged on through the night. What I thought were low stars behind the smoke turned out to be bonfires up in the hills that loomed invisibly on both sides of the trail. Just before the next dawn an alarm went down the line. There were always hairless dogs barking, arfing, and yipping, but some of us could distinguish the voices of the actual watchdogs, and when their pitch went up, it meant we were under attack. The Teotihuacanians were ahead of us, just like Lady Koh had said, but somehow they’d managed to ambush two veintenas of our forerunnners and they were closer than we’d allowed for. Ahead of me Koh gave the first of her coded commands. Armadillo Shit stripped off my wristlets and anklets and other rank signifiers and wrapped me up like I was a low-clan elder. My manto looked normal, but it was made of quilted cotton filled with sand, which pretty effectively stopped most thrown darts. Naturally, Koh had prohibited me from fighting. But for some reason—maybe it was emotion carrying over from Chacal—I realized that, irrationally, I really, really wanted to get my hands bloody.

Well, resist that impulse. It didn’t matter. Right? Why should it? I shouldn’t care about these people.
Those I fight I do not hate,
I thought.
Those I guard I do not love
. Except maybe I did. Already I could hear the moan of long bull-roarers and the grunts and occasional screams from up ahead. Then there was another hoarse sound, children screaming through megaphones. It’s a pretty hard sound to describe, like cats in traps, maybe, but more sort of bagpipish, so much so that I wondered whether bagpipes had first been invented to imitate it. Severed Right Hand was torturing some of his youngest captives. Then there were the ringing sparks of flint points in the last dark, like little stone bells, and the barely audible click of darts leaving the spear-throwers, and the hisses and sizzles as the first of the flaming spears came in. The line started to smell like a giant pit latrine, as all battles do, plus vomit, and with the addition of chili smoke. Jaguar-Scorpion battle-cries welled up and the Rattler bloods started screeching coded instructions to each other—we did have war cries, by the way, but I never heard any that were like that whoo-whoo-whoo thing the Plains tribes do in old movies—and at the same time one of the Harpy bloods who was shielding me put his hand up to his face and picked a thin blowgun-dart out of one eye, like a long flowered thorn stretching out forever. Even in the firelight reflected off the smog-roof I could see the point was wrapped in the black-and-yellow-striped skin of a harlequin creeper. I suppressed a flinch. You couldn’t let anything faze you in front of these people. But if you could just suck it up, you were almost home.

We crouched with our shields up and backed into the crowd of Rattler bloods behind us. The blood who’d been hit broke from the group, turned around with his bloody wink, and saluted us—our salute was generally more of a casual “Hey, bro,” than a military deal—and ran wobblingly off to charge the Jaguars while he was still alive. While that was happening and before it was over a runner came through from Hun Xoc and led us farther back into a narrow pass. Koh’s entourage was already in the center. They set guards at each end so that if it looked like we might get cut off on one side we’d get ready to break on the other. I listened, trying to separate the code-calls from the screeches and the whirs of whistle-spears, but couldn’t get anything. It was still too dim to see detail. Someone was pushing through to us. It was Hun Xoc. He said the outrunners didn’t think Koh had been singled out yet, so neither had I. We should just dig in. In the meantime 1 Gila had taken a division south and was going to come back in from the east with noise like there were a whole lot more of us.

Well, the plan sounds—oh, wait. Who the hell is 1 Gila? Okay. The largest Teotihuacanian war clan that was solidly bonded to Koh and her Star Rattler Cult—and so were declared enemies of Severed Right Hand—were the Lineage of the
Acaltetepón
, that is,
Heloderma horridum,
the Mexican beaded lizard. 1 Gila wasn’t the patriarch of the clan—that was his much older uncle—but he was their war leader, and he was probably Lady Koh’s most powerful supporter.

Okay.

Well, the plan sounds great, I thought. Yup. You’ve got my blessing. I asked about our second-largest battle-ready group, 3 Talon’s contingent and the rest of his Mexican Eagle Clan. Or let’s be correcter and say “Caracara Clan.” Hun Xoc said they were fighting other feline clans themselves, but that as far as he could tell they’d already split off. Just before we needed them. The spies said they were going to consolidate in a fortified Caracara town about four jornadas west of the Valley. We didn’t know what they’d do after that. Probably they’d try to start another Teotihuacán-like city nearby with themselves in charge, although we knew from history that it wouldn’t be such a big deal. Anyway, they didn’t want to tell us much or make commitments, but since they were in shit with the cat clans they wanted peace, if not necessarily union, with the Rattlers. Nobody wants to fight on two fronts, except for crazies like late-period Hitler.

For a while things didn’t look good. 1 Gila’s people, who knew the area, could tell which different vendetta squads had taken advantage of the collapse of government in the region and come through ahead of us just from the number of headless bodies tied up in trees. The number of white buzzards overhead seemed to double every fifty-score beats and it started to really bug me, I couldn’t stop thinking about how hot and sour they must feel even way up in the air, all these fat suckers with their little heads like barbed penises, just slacking around in these high, agonizingly slow interlocking spirals, the most patient birds in the world. But by the end of the day—the day that was already being called the first Grandfather Heat of the fifth family of suns, “the Grandfathers of Heat to be born after the end of the earthly paradise”—it became clear that in this case bad for others was good for us. At noon we met the main body of Koh’s Rattler Newborn, or converts, which was listed at fourteen thousand but was obviously triple that if you counted women and children and thralls. About a third of Koh’s followers from the zocalo, that is, the plaza, had been killed by the Jaguars or by the fires, but the ones who had gotten away credited her with saving them. Most of them had picked up their extended families in the suburbs—who knew her prophecy already—and packed up whatever they had left to follow Koh to the Promised Land. Of course, they didn’t know she hadn’t yet decided where that would be.