In the Courts of the Sun (41 page)

“The deer’s one jawbone makes the fourth boy’s fork . . .”
Fast, fast. Moving well. Chacal’s instincts were kicking in, the old adrenaline autopilot. You only have to operate the top cortex of your brain. Left.
Stepstep. Stepstep. Over. Tree, tree. Around. Over. More uneven ground here. Barriers. Steeplechase. I felt strangely light. It couldn’t be just because Chacal’s body was so young, or because it was so much stronger than mine had ever been, even after being wasted by presacrifice fasting. It had to be just that I was smaller now. It’s why little kids have so much energy, it’s not just because they don’t know what a pit the world is, it’s just that they don’t have much to lift. How tall am I now? If I hadn’t been a little preoccupied up there, I could have compared myself with what I knew was the four-foot-two-inch height of the lintel of the King’s Niche. But the average height of an upper-class Maya male of the period was about five feet two, and I was only a bit above average. So say I’m five four. Jed was five nine. So if strength increases with the square of your height but weight increases with your height cubed, let’s assume my G-drag is about—
Ouch. Pointy. Careful. Right. Stepstep. Stepstep. Don’t get distracted. You’re not home free yet—
“The deer’s one nose becomes the third blood’s pipe . . .
Deer’s thirty teeth become the second’s dice . . .”
I think I can I think I can I think I can I think I can. Wobbling. I got my hands up around my
cagado
antler-rack, maybe I can get this sucker off, no, glued on, I was just wrenching my scalp off like the thing really grew out of my skull. Forget it. Focus.
“The deer’s one sphincter is the first boy’s ring,
The deer’s one sphincter is the first boy’s
ring
!”
The word
b’aac
, “ring,” stretched out into a long hissing cheer and the patter of evil little feet.
And
they’re off and
run
ninggg. Don’t look back. Ahead. Ahead.
Trees. Slalom between the trunks. Left. Right. No, left. Now right. Left again. Nearly halfway. Doing good.
Footsteps came down after me like a wall of light rain.
Fuck ’em. Left. Into the thicket. Don’t get your antlers caught. Look down. Left hand shields eyes. Right arm front and over. Anticipate branches. Think, then run.
Still way ahead of them. No sweat. As I came into the valley between the two hills the ground leveled off, but it was full of twigs and crud. Watch it. Twigs and crud equal sound. Sound equals death. Silence = Life. I tip-ran forward. Still another mile, maybe. Largely uphill.
Ouch. Step. Ouch. Nettles. Pain twanged up through my legs. Forks in the road. Well, if it slows me down, it’ll slow them down.
Stop. Listen.
Group getting closer. How many? Four? Maybe they split again. They’re good trackers. Don’t leave a trail. Run backward on footprints and then veer off? No, too difficult. Doesn’t really work. Only foxes.
Forward. Quiet. Step. Step. This is actually a pretty good game. After all,
game
just means a victim you can eat—
“Unf.”
Chacal’s body knew what it was, the grunt of someone throwing a javelin, and we dodged-and-ducked automatically. The spear whistled three feet or so overhead. And it really whistled, with a high-A fifth chord. There were tiny reed flutes attached to its shaft.
—eeeeeeethdgdgdgt.
Dag. Landed pretty close. Stuck in a tree or something. Ought to find it. No, no time. I skidded the rest of the way down into a dry gully between the two hills. Behind and above me the bloods whistled to each other in house hunting-codes. You could tell they were fanning out and advancing down the hill in pairs, covering the whole slope. Timeless classic hunting technique.
I paused. Go straight up? Yeah. Just go. Up the hill. Come on. I crouched up the slope.
Zhhhweeeee—
Another.
Duck!
Thhgdg.
Damn. They couldn’t see me through the trees, could they? They’re throwing by sound. Just chipping. Don’t worry. Stay out of kill range and you’ll be fine. I veered right. Shit. Antlers caught. I could hear a couple of the fastest hunters panting up the hill after me. Potential puncture wounds tingled over my back. Pull. Branches. Pull them
out
. Pull. Vines. Ouch. Neck. Dammit.
Whzhhweee. Bkt!
There. Got my antlers free. Left. I hightailed it uphill and left. Up. Left. Left. Shit—
Whzeeeeeeeeeee . . .
Overhead. Down. Crouch. Down. Don’t let them get a clear shot. Keep the trees between us, then get up to the torch line somewhere, find a hole. Damn. The place didn’t offer cover like a natural forest. It was more like hiding behind pillars of a colonnade. You had to keep moving from trunk to trunk. Okay. Up. Antlers unbalancing me. Head heavy. Damn. I got an image of myself as one of those prehistoric Irish elks with the racks as wide and heavy as two Yamaha Road Stars. No wonder they didn’t last. Gotta get these fuckers
off.
I dug my fingertips in under the leather straps around my head, but there was some sort of gum or resin under there, bonding to my skin. Never mind.
Quiet. Run silent, run deep. They’re fast too. Just keep going.
Got to vomit. The thing is, if you really run faster than you can, you throw up. Gotta go. Gork. Uchg. Whew. I think I managed to do it quietly. Anyway, there wasn’t much there. Keep going. Come on. Don’t worry about where you’re getting your strength from, just where it will take you. Hup. Hup.
I veered uphill and south. Can’t take this abuse much longer. Such a knot of pain in my heart. Lung. Whatever.
It was quiet again. No more shouting. They were still coming after me, though. Listening. Slow down. You’re too noisy.
Stealthy. Healthy and wise.
Hmm. The line’s right up there. Just a little farther. Just go for it. No, wait.
I paused.
Oh, shit. Close behind me on the left. Damn. Twigs snapping. Better—
Wait. No. Making too much noise. Too showy. He wants to drive me forward into the others.
Think. What are they doing?
They’re above you. Waiting for you. And the rest are spreading out. A few trackers were going to stay on my trail as I went up the slope, and the rest would fan out in front of me. And then they’d close in.
The hunters above me were settling in. Listening.
Stay put. You run for it, yousa goin’ die.
You’re going to have to go for the line from a different spot. From the left.
Okay. Back down. Retrace.
I padded backward as silently as my feet knew how, back toward the valley. The ground here was clear, but some of the eucalyptus branches drooped down to chest height. Watch it. I turned around and stumbled downhill. Now that I was facing southwest for the first time I saw a vague larger glow beyond the next ridge of the sierra, a glow that Chacal’s brain knew very well, the temple watch fires of Ix.
De todos modos.
Just curve west and try again. They probably expect you to go counterclockwise. Everything around here goes counterclockwise. Go clockwise.
I couldn’t see the ridge, but the stars were like having a GPS. Judging by 9 Death’s Head, that is, Regulus, it was right over there.
I figured it was about seventy difficult steps up the burnt turf from here to the torch line.
Bueno.
Go.
I headed up the hill in a wide curve, aiming to come out of the line of trees as far to the west as possible—
Close. Something. I threw myself on the ground without knowing why.
Cht-tzii—thkgk.
Shit. I jumped up, whoa, falling back, no, g
rabbed
, damn, my neck,
coño Dios,
holy shit, a hand on my goddamn antlers. I wrenched my head forward but he had me by the main shaft of the right fork. I pulled left, no, too late, he had me, but then without thinking I arched my back and slammed my points back against him. There was a moment of resistance and a sharp exhalation of breath, and as I twisted forward again the hunter’s hand released and I spun around facing him. His legs said he was from the Ocelot House, and he was twelve or fourteen at the most, but with tauntingly long hair, like, Hey, go ahead, grab it. He was holding his left hand over his right collarbone where a point of my antler had gone in. I repositioned myself and jumped frog-style at his face. The shock wave went from his skull to mine like we were a couple of pool balls. Eat horn, fathermotherfucker. Ty spikes the baseman. Fuck y’all. He grabbed my horns and twisted them, Theseus-and-the-Minotaur style. I let myself turn and fall, got a hand around the big knot at the front of his sash, and pulled my points up into his neck again. This time he stumbled back and when I arched my back again his hands let me go.
Ouch. Was my neck broken? No, then I wouldn’t be moving. I stepped back and looked sideways up at the Ocelot. The right side of his head was shiny black in the starlight, blood from a gouge below his eye. He staggered toward me.
Don’t worry, he’s too messed up. I backed away from him.
He’s losing blood, he’s getting weaker. Just hold him off until he collapses and then pop him. On the other hand, maybe I should just run.
Or should I take the time to kill him so he won’t give an alarm? That’s ridiculous, just run. They can already hear where the hell I am. Speed. I ran. Just make it up there and you’ll be free to leave. Free as a bee, free to bee, you and meeee—
Whoa. Who’ hoppen?
I was prone on the ground again. I rolled over and sat up. My right leg was hot. Hmm. A javelin had hit it on the back of my thigh, two inches above the knee. Oh, hell, I’m hit. Shit doggy dog. Blunt or not, those things still do some damage. Not deep, but still. Bloody. Bloody hell. As I was checking out the cut I noticed the javelin was still in one piece and lying on the ground, and as I was looking at that, it slid away from me, backward through the grass like the tail of a snake. I grabbed it by the fur covering, just below the joint where the replaceable ferrule attached to the main shaft. Somebody tried to yank it away. I yanked back and looked up. It was the same Ocelot blood. Oh, Christ. Face it, dude, you’re beat. We glared at each other but there wasn’t any real communication there. Fine, I thought, just don’t yell for backup. Save me all for yourself. I twisted the javelin against his thumbs, but he wouldn’t let go. I lowered my antlers between us and got into a squat and managed to climb back onto my feet, still holding the spear shaft. Okay, Jed, just don’t let go. I twisted behind the tree, still hanging on to the spearshaft, and I circled counterclockwise, keeping the roughly eight-inch-diameter trunk between us, using it as a fulcrum, going faster and faster. I took my right hand off the spear, swung it around the trunk, and got my hand onto a leather-and-jade band around his upper left arm, and I had him by both arms, with the tree between us. He seemed to recoil as my skin touched his and for a moment he was off-balance, his feet still on the ground while mine were already walking up the trunk. I tightened my grip on the leather band, leaned back, and straightened myself. There was a beautiful
thwotch
sound as his chest slammed into the trunk. The muscles of his wrists went slack for an instant, but he didn’t let go of the spear shaft and I choked my left hand farther up on it, finally getting to his wrist cuff, and then grabbed that and pulled again. This time, even through the wood of the trunk, my feet could feel his mandible mashing into his upper jaw. Chew tree, scuzzface! Power to the dirty fighters! He shouted something, slurring badly, and then just went into a series of yelps to help everyone locate the direction of the sound. Fucker. He must have decided that he’d had it and he might as well turn me in. Shut up shutup shutupshutup, I thought, you are bumming me out and you are buttfucking dead. I twisted around the trunk to the right, got enough arm slack to move my right hand off the shoulder strap and up onto the back of his head, got a good grip on his beaded topknot, and pulled him into the trunk again, feeling the skull split somewhere, and from the way it shifted you could tell it had lost its rigidity, like an egg with a cracked shell that hasn’t yet popped its membrane. The yelping stopped. You are
over,
I thought. Got that? I am the hottest shit known to man, I thought. Hah. Sure, I’m a little woozy, but none the worse for wear. I can handle this. Anyway, I’m armed now, right?
I’ve
got a
ja
velin, my mind singsonged,
I’ve
got a
ja
velin. I have the technology. Up. Firelight right up there. Not far at all. Come on.
There were weird sounds behind me. Oh, cripes.
Snuffling.
They’re sniffing for my sweat. And blood. Damn. Damn.
Quiet.
Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Softer. Inhale. I synchronized my panting with the trills of a nearby cricket. Blend in. Think like a bush.
Still, they’ll smell me. Better move out soon.
Now. No, wait.
Either the fear or just the whole situation or something was triggering flashes from Chacal’s memories, a snippet of his early training, a sort of character test when the pilomancers, that is, the hipball augurers, had led him down into the Hipball Brethren’s soul cave. They’d walked through the caverns without torches, feeling their way by grooves in the floor, and laid him naked in a stone sarcophagus. And then they’d gone away, supposedly. At the time he’d believed he’d been there for days before the voices started. They started as faraway whispers,
Who is this, I smell someone who shouldn’t be here, let’s eat him, let’s jawbone him.
They were the uayob of ancient disgraced hipball players coming to take him to Xib’alb’a, drawing closer and closer, demanding secret names that he’d sworn never to divulge, ordering him to leave the casket and come with them, and when the voices nestled right in next to him, so loud and close they seemed to be burrowing into him, he didn’t know whether he’d ended up shouting along with them in the hurricane of screams, but he knew that he hadn’t run away, that he hadn’t told the name, that he hadn’t even moved. When they’d lifted him out the next day, the eight-year-old who was going to be Chacal had passed the point of utter insane terror into something else. And by the time he’d realized that it was only the pilomancers calling through tubes that fed into the vents of the casket, it didn’t make any difference. The boys who’d survived that and the other tests had either been born with a flint core or had grown one. They were opaque to suffering. Twenty-first-century people would have said that the trauma of the tests deadened their day-to-day emotions and seeded a rage that could blast out with almost no provocation. Here it just meant they could become bloods.