In the Courts of the Sun (43 page)

[34]

F
or about twenty-five seconds, and for the only time in my life, I believed there was life after death.
I tried to shout, but the heavy blunt head of the blood’s mace had hit me in the abdomen and knocked out the air. I tried to grab his legs, but now a second person had gotten around me from behind and was holding my arms. I tried to kick but the first blood was sitting on my legs. I spat. He didn’t react. I writhed. It didn’t help. Panic. They’re skinning me anyway, I thought, the eruption doesn’t matter. They don’t care, it doesn’t matter, they’re skinning me anyway, ohgodohgod. The blood—it was the Harpy blood, Hun Xoc—set down his mace and pushed my forehead down into the turf. Oddly, though, I didn’t feel it. This can’t be it, there’s got to be more just give me a little more please this can’t be totally it this can’t be it. He pried my mouth open and gripped my lower jaw, his thumb over the central teeth and under the tongue. I still didn’t feel anything. He wrenched it left and right, first out of one socket and then out of the other. The mandible tore off with sprays of blood and saliva. The tongue came off with the rest and lapped comically at the air. This is weird, I thought, that really ought to be pretty painful. I must be beyond pain . . . but also, it was as though I was watching it from outside, lying next to myself. There were four bloods standing around me now, all from the Harpy House. One of them, the squat one with a wide face, held a tiny torch, like a birthday candle, cupping the light in his hand. Another sliced down the undersides of my arms and disjointed the wrists, careful not to tear the skin so that the full hands would stay attached to the cured pelt. It was the most hopeful moment I’d ever experienced and probably ever would experience. I thought I was my freshly released astral body, just hanging out for a little while to observe the treatment of my husk before setting off for parts unknown.
Soon I realized that was just too silly to believe. For one thing, I was still in immense pain. I still felt my various injuries, the weight of the two bloods holding me, and even an ant or something crawling on one of the thistle stalks gouging into my back. And more importantly, even though the body they were dressing out had a truncated pigtail like mine, and a face, or what was left of one, that seemed about like mine, he wasn’t quite the same. His forearm was hipball-impact toughened, but not so much as mine, and the calluses on his knees weren’t nearly so big and impressive. Besides, the way I was watching the scene didn’t seem right either. I wasn’t floating in the air above it, the way ectoplasm is supposed to. I was still pinned to the ground, still blinking dust and blood out of my eyelids.
It isn’t you, I thought. Face it. It’s some other guy. Even though he’s roughly the same size, age, and body type, and even though he has roughly the same deer-spots, he just isn’t you—
Ouch. Damn it. What’s wrong with my chest? I got my eyes down far enough to see. One of the bloods holding me had a tiny obsidian razor between two fingers, and he inserted it into my chest at the base of the sternum. He drew it up in a convex arc to the U of my clavicle and symmetrically back down again, making a mandorla shape. And this time he was really doing it to
me
, by the way, not the substitute me. He pinched the point of the patch of skin and peeled it upward. Ouch. Ouch. That really hurts. The beatings, the chilies, the enema, all that hurt a lot, but this, ow, yow, this really hurrrruuuiiiieeeeEEEEE—
A strip of integument about a half-inch wide and four inches long released with a little pop. For an instant he held it up with the suede side toward me, glistening with tiny globular fat cells, and the weak light shone through it just right, and I could make out the familiar column of blue glyphs running down the center, my nine-skull hipball-rank tattoo.
Did I blank out? I don’t know. After all, blanking out is something you can only infer from its effects, like dark energy. At some point cotton felt blankets wrapped around me and contracted. Four hands flipped me over and I felt smothering again as they rolled me up. There were javelin shafts in the roll with me, I guess as camouflage. And by now, and despite Chacal’s training, I was actually crying, whimpering an existential Nancy Kerrigan “Why, why,
WHYYYYY?!?!?
” crushed that I wasn’t dead, that I wasn’t a ghost, that I was still trapped here, that it wasn’t me.

[35]

A
taste, or the memory of a taste, that I somehow recognized as mother’s milk rose up first, and then other previsual memories that it took a while to realize weren’t mine but Chacal’s. I knew I had a body, because every square millimeter of its surface itched, it itched like I had Parsee-cake crumbs under my skin, and I couldn’t scratch, I could barely wriggle against my fat-soaked wrappings. Got to scratch, got to scratch . . . and then the external itches would concentrate into my chest, where I’d lost what felt like about a square foot of skin, and then that would fade and for a long time my whole self would be in my throat, a vast furrowed Nazca salt desert, thirsty, thirsty, until finally, after centuries of zero precipitation, someone unwrapped my face into bright sunlight, squirted in a spray of salty corn gruel, and covered me back up. During the long descending curve of relief I became aware that I still had a tongue, swollen like a big dried-out dill pickle but still all there, and that my face was covered only by a thin layer of something like cheesecloth, and I could breathe almost normally. It seemed that it was afternoon, and that a team of porters was carrying the long, narrow bundle with me in it up zigzag hillside paths, eastward and upward, into the highlands, over rope bridges and alongside rushing streams.
Why’d they bother to save me?
The Harpies wanted to fool the other greathousers. That had to be it. They wanted everyone else in Ix to think I was dead. Well, so that’s great, right? 2 Jeweled Skull’s had a change of heart. He’s decided you might be good for something. He wants to keep you alive.
Hmm. Maybe 2 Jeweled Skull had timed the hunt to wind down right around the time I’d predicted for the eruption.
Yeah. You know, now that I had a chance to think about it, really, it wouldn’t have made sense for all those guys to be out playing protopaintball if they’d thought the sky was about to fall right then. They would have been back at home, crouched over their household icons, muttering pleas to their misbegotten gods.
So, what must have happened was that old 2JS figured my estimate of the time of the eruption would be more accurate than whatever their local geomancers had predicted. If they’d even predicted anything. Maybe he was just bullshitting me about that. Huh. Anyway, he’d figured the big bang was going to come ahead of schedule—and maybe the general population wasn’t expecting it to be such a big deal anyway, maybe they thought it would just be a couple of pops and sparkles on the horizon—and so he timed the deer hunt to be winding down right around then. So that would have been around four A.M. on the twenty-seventh. So maybe when it happened all the bloods in the hunting party got flipped out. Except the Harpies knew about it, and in the middle of the confusion the Harpies subbed in a proxy to get skinned instead of me. And that’s why they took the strip of skin off my chest, the hipball tattoos . . . that was something they couldn’t fake. They’d sew it onto his skin and try to hide the seam.
Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. So I guess that Harpy blood, the one with the smooth sweet face, Hun Xoc, he really did miss me on purpose when he threw that javelin at me from like four steps away. And that’s why those Harpies were always so close on my tail without nailing me. They were following me all through the hunt, watching out for me . . . although what if somebody from one of the other clans had caught me anyway? Maybe they had some plan to switch me later on somehow . . . except probably not. Probably if that had happened they’d just have given me up.
Bastards. Well, anyway, they didn’t.
So, I did get it right, didn’t I? I called the eruption a hell of a lot better than their people did. Did that mean I’d gained any status around here?
The road was filled with traffic, long foot caravans with their dogs yapping ahead and behind and messengers dashing past us, rattling their warning maracas. Chacal’s senses picked up something grim about the sound, like they were all rushing to get home. Refugees, almost. The jacanas and swifts were calling again, a bit warily, maybe confused by the eruption, but Chacal’s mind could still tell from the calls that it was toward dusk. The going was slower here. A couple of times my bundle got passed from hand to hand to hand, like they were portaging a canoe. At some point they started carrying me upright, tied to a board, through a lot of shadow and little sunshine. It seemed more remote here, and the porters sang a sort of rosary song, listing their ancestors’ unassuming names. But it wasn’t a carefree little workday song. It had an apprehensive quality, like a charm against goblins. Every so often they’d squeeze me and listen to my breath to make sure I was respirating. Occasionally we’d stop and one of the dressers would unwrap the cheesecloth from my head, pry open my mouth, and pop out the wad of cotton. Then before I could even grunt, he’d spit in a spray of whatever knockout stuff they were giving me—it tasted like strong b’alche, but the effect was like Dilaudid—and then swab out my nose, restuff the cotton in my mouth, and replace the veil. Finally the bundle must have become too awkward for the terrain—or else we’d come to a private enough spot—because they put me down and unrolled me into the cool air. They peeled off my blindfold and I panted up at the sky.
It was a blue twilight. There were no clouds, no obvious effects from the eruptions out in the gulf, except for that hint of anxiety in the birdsongs. Hun Xoc’s face looked down on me and before I could react, two pairs of arms hoisted me upright and helped me balance. None of them said anything. I didn’t feel like I could say anything. I just panted. There was a big piece of ashy cotton wool stuck over the wound on my chest. Someone, maybe one of the untouchables, spat honey water into my mouth and I managed to swallow a few drops. I blinked around. We were on the south side of a ridge, on a narrow traverse near the top of a broad curved slope. On our left the incline rose at about forty-four degrees, dark serpentine boulders held in a natural net of yellow lianas. On our right the slope descended three or four hundred feet to a line of Montezuma pines. Behind them there were glimpses of a village, linked clusters of small houses, granaries, and half-open workshops, all built up from uncut mountain stones, sealed with dull red plaster and thatched with
xit
-palm fronds. The red and black stripes on the walls meant it was a Harpy town, but there were black-and-turquoise-dotted awnings stretched on the ramadas of some of the central buildings, which Chacal’s brain understood to mean that members of the Ocelot House were also in residence. There weren’t any mulob’ or ritual structures that I could see. Maybe this was the profane town, and its sacred twin was somewhere else. There was a big, elaborate cistern, though, on a stepped platform in the center of town, and slaves with their short hair and strips of gray cloth through their earlobes and skin streaked with gray body paint, trudged to it and from it it with white rubberized baskets of water on their backs, like nurse ants carrying their pupae. Beyond the village there was a ridge that matched this one, and then, just slightly visible, another ridge beyond that. There wasn’t any smoke haze over the valleys, meaning the burning season hadn’t started yet. Maybe it had been postponed by the eruption. In front of us a hewn staircase, or rather more of a ladder, angled steeply down for at least seventy feet into a wide crevasse in the gray rock. They were probably going to tie a safety line onto me and see if I’d help them pass me down.
Hmm.
There were twenty people in the party. Four were Harpy bloods. Six were
liksajob
, or guards. That is to say, they were warriors from one of the Harpies’ subordinate clans, who could never become full-scale bloods no matter how tough they were. The rest seemed to be untouchables and porters. I looked from face to face. They all stared back as though I were a Word Search puzzle. No one said anything. My focus skidded to a rest on Hun Xoc. He looked back with as much curiosity as the others but a little more sympathy. It was coming back to me. Hun Xoc. Right. Chacal had helped train him at what you might call the Little League division of the Hipball Society. He was dark and unusually wiry for a greathouse blood. Oddly enough, his name sounded almost the same translated into English: “1 Shark.” A pair of chocolate-brown hairless hunting dogs swaggered up to sniff me. They were like Mexican Xolos, but larger, about the size of Dalmatians. A vic of lesser Canada geese honked by overhead, heading southeast at the wrong time of year. Away from the volcano.
Hun Xoc turned back to the rest of the group and started reordering them for the climb down the stairs. I realized I was being held only by a single mittened hand around each of my wrists.
Just the one lookout man ahead of me. One untouchable behind me. Then the dogs. Then the stairs.
The geese banked right, to the south. No better time. Now.
I twisted against the untouchable’s thumbs, got free, butted my way past the surprised lookout, dove at the top step, and somersaulted out over the edge. Even before the rush in my ears and the release of weightlessness, the shame sloughed off me like a radiation-soaked lead suit. I giggled in midair and it was my Jed side giggling, too, feeling absolutely free for once, almost for the first time, and even though I’d realized it wasn’t me, that Chacal had reasserted himself, all I could feel was the cocainesque exhilaration of—
My right shoulder exploded at the impact of a stone stair. I bounced once and turned over slowly in space. My left hip cracked down next, but the impact was mushy, somehow, not enough pain, not quite there. I should have been picking up speed but instead I was slowing down, there were hands all over me, they’d jumped down after me and they were clinging to my body, shielding me, digging their knees and elbows into the rocks. A few of them grunted, but no one screamed. I rolled over four more times, the center of a giant warm Loony Tunes snowball of shredding flesh, and then we ground to a stop with a swirl of gurgling sounds. Damn. I pushed the remaining air out of my lungs. Got to suffocate myself. No. Not me. Chacal. Chacal holding our breath. Shit. Can you really hold your breath until you die?
Chacal seemed to answer that he could do anything.
Things started to get all soft the way they do when you’re blacking out, and then the limbs around me shifted. Someone yanked my head back by the hair and I thought, Finally, I
am
being beheaded, I under you thank you, fathermothers, take my head, it’s what—