In the Courts of the Sun (40 page)

“How will you take it out?”
“I have to show you,” I said.
“Take out your twin worm now.”
Okay, I thought, or rationalized. Fine. Let’s say we can’t bullshit this guy. Come clean. Be a mensch. “I can’t do that,” I gasped out. “Look through Jed’s memories, look for Taro Mora. You’ll see I just don’t have the ability to do that, I don’t, I don’t—”
“Take it out,”
2 Jeweled Skull said again.
“I beneath you don’t have the ability to do that,” I said, trying not to scream. “I can’t get me out of your head, because, for the same reason I can’t get me out of my head.”
Pause.
“But you above me and I can operate together,” I said, “the Jeds in you and me could take care of the Ocelots in almost no time, and I think we will win, beat ’em, beat ’em . . .”
You’re babbling, I realized. Shut up. But I couldn’t. I heard myself trying to talk about fireworks and crop rotation, but it came out as near gibberish. Well, this is great, isn’t it? I thought. “Mickey Mouse is gonna come get you for this,” my voice was saying somewhere. “He’s a very powerful demigod and he’s a pal of mine besides,
eeeeyyh
, he’s a friend who’s made for you and meeeyeeeehYYY
AAAHHH
. . .”
He must have signaled again, because the teaser chanted,
“Hun tzunumtub tz-ik-een yaj”
again and my orbital muscles automatically squeezed so tight I thought my eyeball would pop and I realized it was a Pavlovian thing, a little formula they say before each stroke of the lash, as it were. He gave me another shot of smoke. My eyeball sizzled like a frying egg. This is your eye on toast. Don’t ask them to stop, I thought, then you’re really in for it. It’ll just make it worse. How could it be worse? Hmm, fair question. Still, they’re pretty professional with this stuff. Let’s figure they actually could make it worse. They could put on an Alicia Keys album, for instance—
“Then tell me how to force your twin to leave.”
“I forced Chacal to leave me,” I managed to say. “You can force Jed to leave you. I can’t tell you how to do it. Just do it.”
I almost added the word
Nike,
but we were speaking in Ixian so it didn’t follow. There was a long pause. I guess you could say it was an uncomfortable pause, only at this point that probably sounds a little weak. Suddenly the teaser took his fingers away. My eye clamped shut. Tears actually squirted out of the lachrymal glands and I could hear them hitting the teaser on the chest. Something soft settled into my eye and the burning descended on a long arc, until it was almost just a pleasurable buzzing, like someone had stuffed a magic finger in the empty socket. Although of course it wasn’t empty, it was still filled with an eyeball the size of a croquet ball. The teaser was still chanting to One Harpy in that soft maternal voice. A finger was buttering my eye, coating it with some kind of salve that smelled like oil of cloves, although there weren’t any cloves in the New World. Were there? I guess you don’t want the eye to burn out permanently, you want it to be all right in a while so you can do it again, and again, and again. Saltwater sprayed into my eye out of someone’s mouth. The hands let go of my head and let me dog-shake it automatically, and then wiped it down with wet cloth mittens. It felt so great I got that stupid rush of pathetic gratitude.
“So you have killed me,” 2 Jeweled Skull said.
I started to explain that he’d have gotten a lower dosage of luons.
“B’aax ka?”
he asked. “How long?”
“More than two and fewer than seven rounds of the tz’olk’in.”
“How long exactly?” he asked.
“That’s as close as I know,” I said. “Look in my head, it’s not—”
“Hun tzunumtub tz-ik-een yaj,”
the teaser said. It felt like a timpani roll that you know is building up to a crash of cyclopean cymbals, like in “The Crusaders in Pskov,” and you’ll do anything to stop it. My body strained against the ropes, struggling to get a hand or a toe or something up to my eye, but everything was held down, and I passed into that absolutely insupportable pain of the frustrated imperative, the itching that demands to be scratched more than your body demands even, say, air. I’d thought I’d felt big pain before, as Jed, getting skewered by ten-thumbed nurses for arterial blood tests, for instance. And I’d always felt I’d still prefer it to, say, eternal nothingness. But that was just ignorance. Death is a million times preferable to real pain. After an indeterminate while my eye—or rather the liner cells in the fatty tissue surrounding my eye—was feeling fine again, feeling kind of great, in fact, and there was my hand, there were the cool red petals on the floor—yeah, I was even seeing out of it. I looked up.
2JS crouched in front of me. Beads of sweat covered his face like the scales of a Gila monster. His hands were in big long sharkskin mittens that looked absurdly like something that Williams Sonoma would sell to suburban barbecue chefs. The thumbs were covered with chili paste. He took me by the head and shook me, like a dog killing a squirrel.
“TAKE OUT YOUR PARASITE ! ! !”
he said.
“FINISHED !”
I didn’t even have a chance to answer before his thumbs dug into my eyes. This time I really screamed. I screamed for a long time, and then, as I gulped in air, I found I was breathing in chili fumes, that they were holding the censer under my mouth, I felt like—or in fact I somehow believed that—my body had been turned inside out and dipped in sulfuric acid.
At some point I realized, again, that I wasn’t in pain anymore. A happy nectared breeze caressed my face. I noticed I was prone on the floor, and my head was on its side. I opened my good eye and saw something odd: a long, snouty, spiky-haired giant rat thing’s blank black bead-eye staring into mine. It was one of the armadillos, and it was licking my eye. I recoiled with that absolute prehuman revulsion, but my body was still being held down, and all I really managed was to quiver.
“Hun tzunumtub tz-ik-een yaj,”
the teaser said.
Big pain stretches time, so I don’t know how many times 2 Jeweled Skull said, “Take back your uay
.”
Maybe ten, or a hundred. Finally his voice tapered off, and the teaser’s voice took over, yelling things into my ear, using casting-out language, and I realized they weren’t simply torturing me out of anger but trying to exorcise Jed from Chacal, I guess on the theory that if I left I might take my twin, the one in 2 Jeweled Skull, along with me. Once in a while the teaser would start the Salve Chant,
“Ukumil can . . . ,”
and I’d get this cooling blast of hope and longing, as though the waiter at the restaurant where you’d eaten the habañero was coming toward you with a big old mango milkshake, waving it under your nose . . . and then the teaser would stop without giving me anything, and it became not even so much about the pain, but about wanting the salve, and then they’d bring the chili out again. Three billion years later there was barely any me left, just a big ball of reptile panic, but at some point I had an unlocated feeling that they were giving up, and a little later I heard 2JS’s voice say,
“Ch’an,”
“Enough.”
“Xa’ nänb’äl-een ek chäk’an,”
3 Blue Snail’s voice said. “We’ll see him to the course.” Maybe it was just my messed-up perceptions, but I thought their voices had even more of a vibe of urgency than they’d had before, a looking-over-the-shoulder tension. Hmm.
The guards gathered me up and marched me outside, into vegetal humidity. I didn’t need a blindfold this time, of course, but I could tell that night had fallen while I was away. They took me down a flight of forty rough stairs into a big wooden roundhouse and tied me down on a wood pallet in a pool of heat from two sputtering torches. I tried to relax my muscles to accept whatever pain they were going to dish out. A cold, purposeful tickling came up over my legs and arms and onto my chest.
What the shit’s going on now? I wondered, not for the first time. They were tying thin-soled running sandals onto my feet, and a tight sash around my waist, and now there was a tightening around my head. It was some kind of leather cap with wooden inserts that they were fixing onto my skull with gum and wound gut cords, like they were hafting a spearhead. For a while I guess I kind of pretended to myself that it was still just Dr. Lisuarte gluing the ’trodes onto my head and that none of this had happened, but then one of the cold tickling things worked its way up to my neck, and as I involuntarily giggled and squirmed and got my good eye open I saw for a half-second that it was a long-bristled paintbrush, like a Chinese calligraphy brush. They were painting white glyphic dots on the tan field of my skin. I found myself looking at the pattern of tattooed zigzag stripes on the arm that was holding the paintbrush and instantly knowing from it, the way you’d know that a person in a black-and-white-striped shirt was a football referee, that its owner was an
ajjo’omsaj
. That is, he was a getting-readyer, or a dresser or valet, or maybe the best word would be “preparator.” And then the fact that the zigzags were brown and not blue meant he was an
emsa’ajjo’omsa
, a “lower” preparator, a kind of untouchable who could handle dangerously unclean things. I tried to roll my head to either side to see what the others were doing but I couldn’t turn it, there was some kind of big thing on it stopping its movement, a wide headdress with two pairs of branching stalks . . . maybe they were horns, I thought . . . no, not horns, I realized, they were antlers. They were dressing me up as a deer.

[32]

T
here was a sense of jostling motion and the air was hot and stale. I strained to get a hand to my face, but my arms were tight to my sides. I was rolled up in a grass blanket. Two people were carrying me, I thought. And it seemed like we were going uphill. I listened.
The motion stopped. They laid me down on turfy ground. I picked up a few words; it was 2JS saying something about how he’d invited all these people here as part of his penance and that he was offering a deer to the fastest among them, with more profuse apologies and plans for a more elaborate festival in the near future. Stupidly, I felt embarrassed for 2JS and the whole Harpy House, even though they were going to kill me. I flipped over four times as the blankets unrolled. Air. It was like diving into cool alcohol. I was on my back, on a canvas ground-cloth under bright torchlight. A wave of jeer/cheers rose up on all sides and cut off as though someone had given a sign. There were four beats of silence and then a chorus of “We far below you thank you over us,” in the high aristocratic voices of thirty or forty young
k’iik’ob’
—literally, “bloods.” A blood was any male who had been initiated into one of the warrior societies. So in practice the term had connotations of both “high-born” and “able-bodied,” someone born or adopted into one of the greathouses, and usually under eighteen years old. Someone else held my mouth open and spat in a hot thick syrupy mixture of b’alche, honey, some kind of blood, and something else—one of their superduper secret ingredients, I guessed—that gave the stuff an epoxy undertaste. But my throat was so withered that I was like, yum, a delicious beverage, and I gurgled it down. A third pair of hands—also wearing those damn mittens—helped me get my eyes open. The left one was still too swollen to see much, but the right one was almost fine. Huh.
The three preparators and I were in the center of a circle, or rather a nonagon, about twenty arms wide, marked by nine short torches stuck into recently burned-over turf. We were on the bare crest of a wide hill, and not in a residential area. So we were at least a few miles away from the ceremonial district of Ix. There was a wider circle, marked by about fifty torches. But there was no moon and I couldn’t see anything beyond it.
Bloods crowded around the circumference. I counted thirty-one of them—my new head couldn’t count as fast as my Jed-head had, but I guess I could still count pretty fast—and then guessed there were forty, since they liked to do things by twenties around here. Each blood held a javelin a little taller than he was. Like most spears the javelins were in two parts, a long shaft and a two-foot ferrule that fit into it loosely enough to detach on impact, but instead of a flint blade they were tipped with blunt wooden plugs. The javelins were wrapped with fur around the shaft, jaguar for the Ocelots and monkey for the other clans. The bloods wore deerhide kilts and wide cotton sashes with two extra ferrules stuck in the back. They wore rubber-soled sandals, like mine, and their skins were oiled for night hunting with red-pigmented dog grease. Their hair was pulled into tight tails that sprouted from the whorl and curled back up over the head toward the face. More than half of them were on the fashionably portly side. As in India, if you could afford food, you wore it. Chacal’s memories must have been kicking in pretty well by now, because even with the bewildering patterns of their kilts and body paint I could tell there were bloods from all five Ixian greathouses. The bloods from the ruling Ocelot House wore turquoise spots on their calves, and the bloods from the Vampire Bat House, who were closely related to the Ocelots but whose patron direction was the northwest, wore black and orange vertical stripes all the way up their legs. Then the Itz’un House, that is, the Snuffler House, from the northwest, wore white stripes all over, and the Macaw House, who represented the southwest and were the Harpies’ biggest supporters, wore yellow spots. There were also bloods there from the Harpy House, in red and black stripes, and they seemed to be stretching their legs and swishing their javelins and getting ready along with everyone else. Great, I thought, even my own family’s competing to waste me. I couldn’t bring myself to look them in the eyes, but just from their voices I could tell that Chacal had known a few of them. There was a sort of formal jokey strutting going on, and while they swaggered and vogued they were sizing me up with an exaggeratedly professional air, like I was a racehorse in the paddock.
“Ymiltik ub’aj b’ak ij koh’ob, impek’ ya’ la’,”
I heard somebody say. “I’ll keep the antlers and the teeth, but my dogs get the rest.” There was a lot of laughing. These are happy folk, I thought. Salt of the earth.
“No,
I
get the antlers, you can have the penis, and my dogs get the rest,” somebody else said. Great, I thought, I’m back in junior high. Despite myself I looked up at the line of faces, trying to think of some searing riposte. The blood who’d come up with the remark, one of the younger Snufflers, bent down to my level, puffed out his cheeks, and crossed his eyes, making a face a lot like the Harpo Marx Gookie. Somehow I started laughing along with everybody else. It all seemed like the funniest thing in the world. Of course it was a bummer to be on the receiving end, but in another way it didn’t matter. It all just meant you were alive. I made a mock-pouting face back and I got an even bigger laugh. Who cares what side you’re on, the world can use a little more laughter, can’t it? I turned around, scanning the circle. A few of the faces felt like old friends. Some of them smiled at me, genuinely approving. I smiled back. There was empathy there. But it was an empathy that didn’t preclude what they were going to do to me, because they wouldn’t ask for different treatment themselves.
The preparators stood me up, steadying me by the antlers. The head guy took up a shell blade and knelt down next to me. There was a moment of premature terror—I thought he was skinning me already—but he just scraped me lightly with the sawtoothed edge, etching faint parallel stripes down my legs. As I looked around, I saw that some of the hunters were doing the same thing to themselves. Next he sunk his mitt into a dish of powder that looked like pollen and slapped it into the cuts. Ouch. Little curls of heat crawled up my legs. My feet twitched, practically jumping on their own. The stuff was some kind of powdered nettle. Making me feisty and insensitive. Whatever. Outside the circle the bloods were slapping their legs with the same stuff, pumping themselves up and razzing each other. Finally the preparators let go of my appendages and backed out of the circle into the ring of bloods. I staggered but caught myself and managed to stay on my feet, my heavy head wobbling. A hail of hissing—the Mesoamerican equivalent of applause—blasted in at me on ale-soaked air.
The hunters settled down, exactly like third-graders when the teacher walks into the room, and drew apart, letting a tall elder-statesmanish character enter the circle. He came up to me with a bundle of something in his hand. Automatically I assumed the do-what-thou-wilt-with-me crouch. He squatted two arms in front of me and unrolled a strip of white deerskin. Inside there were four small but perfect jade celts, that is, smooth-ground ceremonial ax-heads, or “currency blades” as anthropologists call them. He rolled them back up and tied the skin on each end. Next he poured a little hill of sienna-brown cacao beans out of a conical basket and, with the efficiency of an old-time croupier sorting chips, counted out eighty of them into a deer-scrotum pouch and tied it shut. Just out of habit I couldn’t keep myself from ransacking Chacal’s memories to try to estimate what the roll was worth. Of course, the economy was so different that you couldn’t really exchange it into 2012 money anyway. I mean, around here a good quetzal tailfeather was worth two decent male slaves. But as a rough figure I’d say I was getting about eight thousand dollars U.S. Just enough to get started in a new town. Forty acres and a mul. Cheapskates. He rolled the roll and the pouch in a larger strip of cotton and gave it to the preparators to tie onto the back of my sash. When that was done he backed away from me and waved his goad at the line of bloods. They parted, making a gap for me on the northwest edge of the nonagon.
“Ch’een b’o’ol,”
he said in a trilling, singsong voice like an old country auctioneer’s. “Throw in your stakes.” It was like saying,
“Faites vos jeux.”
Place your bets.
Beyond the gap the hilltop looked like a midnight garage sale at the Museum of Natural History. There were at least four hundred other people up here, all straining to get a look at me over the ring of hunters. There were bundles and packs and travois carts and dozens of green rush trading mats piled with all sorts of stuff, bolts of white cotton, bales of some kind of aromatic bark, bags of what I supposed were cacao beans, bouquets of spoonbill feathers, green-obsidian cores and currency blades, leashed bunches of live
kutzob’
—that is, neotropical ocellated turkeys—and piles of wooden and clay personal counters, which I guessed were like casino chips, representing gods know what. Offficials of some kind in black-and-white capes and monkey headdresses, evidently managers or bookies, walked between the groups in pairs, keeping track of the bets with baskets of little paper chits. At the edge of the crowd I could just make out what looked suspiciously like two shiny skinned bodies hanging together from a tall tripod like a teepee frame. Warm-up victims, maybe. Don’t think about it. I listened to the crowd, trying to sort out the betting. From what I could hear at first, it seemed like all the bets were on which hunter would catch me. Finally I heard a few people offering bets that I’d make it. It made me feel pretty good until it turned out they got odds of eight to one against me. There was a disagreement starting somewhere, on my left side, and it grew. For a minute I thought everybody might start fighting each other and I’d get away like in some Keystone Kops movie, but they resolved it by letting another person come into the circle and take a look at me. He was a short, scruffy-looking guy, and definitely an untouchable, but he must have been a popular oddsmaker because he put on a pair of those mittens and lifted up my arms and guided my legs apart, feeling for muscle tone. It was pretty degrading, but I went along with it. He announced something to the effect of how I was in pretty good shape and the odds against me shot down to a whoppingly optimistic five to one.
Looks bad, Jeddio, I thought. Pretty damn hopeless. Not fair. I mean, sure, there’s a
chance
I’ll make it. But, really, nobody gives odds like that except for a stunt. You’re a point spread, babe.
“Tz’o’kal, tz’o’ka,”
the adder said. “Final offerings.” It was like saying,
“Les jeux sont faits.”
The crowd quieted down. Some of the bloods took off bits of jewelry and handed them to their squires or whatever. Behind me someone blew a horn like a shofar. Everyone turned, looking to the northwest. I looked too. Out in the darkness, where the stars disappeared, bonfires lit up one after the other, tracing the undulating spine of the next ridge like a string of Christmas LEDs draped over a ragged hedge. How far away was it? About half a mile, looks like. I couldn’t see what was in the valley I had to cross. Damn.
I knew through Chacal—although, of course, at this point anybody would have been able to figure it out—that if I made it safely across that line I’d be off the menu, free to go anywhere I wanted. Of course, I’d still be on the lam to some extent, and I was too tainted to be a blood again, just another homeless or, as we’d say in Ixian, hearthless nonentity skulking from one no-name town to another. I tried to conjure some sort of plan out of Chacal’s foggy notion of local geography, but all I could come up with was that I’d have to get on the northern
sacbe
, that is, the sacred highway, and stay on it until I was in the ever-shifting borderlands between the zones controlled by Yaxchilán and its ancient enemy, Ti ak’al, whose empire was currently in a state of near collapse. I’d probably get robbed and eaten the first night. And even if I didn’t, what good would it do? I had less than a year here anyway. Maybe I’ll just sit here. Maybe I just don’t feel like playing this game right now. Did they ever think of that? Reindeer games are a drag anyway. Although if you do stay here they’ll just practice some more of their nefarious torture arts on you. Maybe the best thing is to just grab one of those spearheads and swallow it. Let the world go to hell thirteen hundred years from now. That’s too far away to care about. Screw it.
There were four beats of silent waiting and then 2 Jeweled Skull’s voice:
“Tz’on-keej b’axb’äl !”
I stepped out of the circle and, with as much dignity as possible, walked through the crowd of bloods and other Ixob’ to the outer circle. I didn’t look at any of them. They all drew back and gave me plenty of room, but the moment I crossed the line of firelight the bloods slid into a chorus:
“Nine boys run down a big fat deer and say:
‘Your head is light, your ass is heavy, Deer.’
The deer’s two ears become the ninth boy’s spoons . . .”
It was a counting song, like eeny-meeny-mynie-moe, and Chacal and every other Ixian child had grown up with it. Nobody had to explain the rules to me for me to know that the instant they got to the last word—
ts’ipit
, that is, “ring”—the bloods could leave the outer circle, and I was fair game.
“The deer’s two antlers are the eighth boy’s rakes . . .”
I dashed down down the terraced slope.
“The deer’s hooves are the seventh boy’s four hammers,
The deer’s one back becomes the sixth boy’s purse . . .”
Step. Step. Stepstep. Stepstep. Ditch. Over. Tree. Around. Chacal wasn’t a hunter, but his feet still found safe steps in the undergrowth. The drilling whines of cicadas whipped past me and I smelled pine and horsemint. So what if I’m in a passel of trouble, I thought, I actually feel kind of great. I think I’ll just jump over the next tree instead of going around it.
“The deer’s intestines are the fifth boy’s necklace . . .”
No problem. They haven’t even started yet. I bounded over the edge of the first terrace and for an instant of dislocation I thought I was somehow upside down, falling up into outer space. There were more stars below me than above—but they were flickering and drifting in amorphous constellations and for the next two seconds I thought I was running down into a lake, and then as I passed over the first few stars I realized the shoals of lights rippling below me were glowworms, armies of green-white elaterids raving and orgying over the ferns and jacarandas. We have to be east of Ix, I thought. On Harpy land, probably, somewhere in the folds of east-to-west limestone ridges that strung out of the Sierra de Chamá and slowly diminished toward the Lago de Izabal. Okay. Try to guess the distance. From hilltop to fireline was about half a mile as the laser flies. So how far will I have to actually run? Two miles? Maybe more like three. One uphill. So what, I’ll handle it. Whoops. Shrub. Ground not burned over so recently here. I half slid down to the base of the hill and rolled over onto clover and marigolds. Up. Up. Hup. Can’t see the Fire Ridge anymore. Forward. Zoom. Okay, we’re back on track. The rhythm section was still jamming back at Home Base and I noticed my steps were syncing to it. The slope here was tufted with eucalyptus and ceiba trees, some were like gigantic umbrellas and others just saplings, some trunks leafless, some fallen, and some that were just decaying stumps. But they were all too regular and too widely spaced to be a natural forest. They’d either been planted or systematically thinned. In fact, if you ignored the way the trees were festooned with bundles of tobacco leaves tied with multicolored ribbons—offerings to the clan mate whose uay was lodged within each tree—and also the fact that there were fewer live trees than dead ones, you could almost imagine you were in some Capability Brown-style English park. Behind me the bloods’ voices were rising as they neared the end of the chant: