In the Courts of the Sun (52 page)

Word came down the line that our paddlers should stick to their pace and that everyone should pretend not to see the Oxhuitzob’ unless they saluted us first.
So far we’d exchanged some sort of greeting with everyone we’d passed. Our boatmen hailed people they knew, sometimes effusively and sometimes with just a slight raise of the right shoulder, the equivalent of a nod. Evidently our trade party was a regular occurrence, just a little off-season and unusually hurried.
But the Jaguar boats did signal to us, and we slowed and edged over to them like we’d been planning to acknowledge them all along. In the shallows our boatmen turned their extra-long paddles around and used them as poles. I could feel the bloods in our canoe stiffen, and Hun Xoc’s hand drifted an inch toward the roll of blowguns and maces he had tied under the gunwale. It’s nothing, I thought. They had peace perfume out and so did we. That is, each boat had a little animal figurehead, a prow godling, lashed to a short bowsprit, with threads of incense streaming from its nostrils. Burning cakes of acacia gum and powdered tobacco told everyone you were coming without any violent agenda. As we got closer I could pick out their leader in the last boat. He had a high cat headdress, a blackened body, and a whitened face, and he scanned us with deep eyes. I and the five bloods who were duplicating me were wearing wide conical straw hats like Vietnamese
nonlas
, and I tried to angle my head down without breaking posture. Chacal had played against the Agouti Hipball Society of Oxwitzá, and won. Some of these cats must have seen the game.
It’s going to be fine, I thought. Nobody’s going to make you out of context. Like most hipball players Chacal had both played and accepted awards wearing an animal helmet that more than half masked his face. Even the best figurines of him were vague, likenesswise. And what with the hair extensions, the lack of ball calluses, the new tats and body mods, and the fact that I’d lost so much weight nobody’d think I’d ever been a hipball player at all, no outsider, we hoped, would connect me with Chacal. 2JS’s idea was that I should try to come off as sick and maybe a bit retarded, so that people wouldn’t talk to me so much. And of course I wouldn’t look anyone in the eye.
12 Cayman’s cantor sang a greeting song. A herald jumped out into the water and handed the whitefaced guy’s attendant a red bundle of tobacco, jade, and our signature powdered chocolate.
There was a pause. Ix had lost hundreds of bloods to these people over the years, in a war that was just one strand of the eternal web of revenge that made the world stay put. At least it was limited, individualized warfare, not a total mobilization. It was more like you had to worry if someone had vowed that they were out to get you, specifically, or if you got onto the wrong turf, which you just wouldn’t do. It was like gangs walking around downtown in daylight, crossing the street to avoid each other. Or you could say it was like the Middle East, where there can be, or rather, usually is, a war going on and there are still commercial flights taking off and landing all the time, strings of tour buses at the borders, and civilians all over the combat zone.
But the waterways were also sort of churches, as well as markets and stock exchanges. They’d been the only real commons for a thousand years. When you were on water you were under the protection of Jade Hag, who had dug the river in the days of the third sun, before Seven Macaw came. An attack on the river was as rare and despicable as the Pazzis attacking Giuliano de’ Medici in the Duomo. Anyone who did anything violent was in danger of getting torn apart, not just by watchful locals but by his own party. Also, the cliché about how walking into a traditional village is like walking into someone’s living room is absolutely true. Around here, wherever you were, you were somebody’s guest, and you and they were woven into a web of reciprocal hospitality. Instead of handing over passports and bribes and ticket money, you gave gifts and got cheaper gifts back. And if your gifts weren’t good enough, or if you made any trouble, people would remember, and it would come back to you later, and worse, somehow.
Finally, someone in one of the other Jaguar boats sang back the antistrophe of the greeting song, and someone else gave us a bundle of whatever their kind of shit was, and we were off.
“He looked at you,” Hun Xoc told me through unmoving lips like a ventriloquist. When we were out of sight he made me put on a light mask, and my five doubles did the same. I guess wearing a mask around seems odd. But the fact is that in Europe people wore masks well into the nineteenth century. Men and women wore traveling masks partly because of the dust from the roads, and partly because, like respirators today, they were supposed to protect you from some diseases, but mostly just not to get hassled. Even in the U.S., even into the 1950s, lots of ordinary women still wore hats with veils. Right? It’s not all that outré. And besides, the concept of disguise wasn’t a common one around here. If you put on a mask, it didn’t mean you were concealing something but rather that you were honoring or in fact embodying the being whose mask it was. Masks made you more the thing you really were.
A bigger danger than getting spotted was that part of our caravan could get separated, or ambushed, or turned, or all three, and someone would give something away to an enemy that would, eventually, get back to the Ocelots. Of course, all of the bloods in the caravan, and a few of their attendants, knew that Chacal hadn’t really been killed at the end of the deer hunt. But they’d been given to understand that two of what you could call Chacal’s souls, his uay and his inner name, had left his body at the exorcism. Now only Chacal’s breath was still here, and his other souls had been replaced by mine.
Characteristically, 2JS had spun the situation as a positive development: 10 Red Skink, he said, had come from the Harpy House’s mountain before his time to be born in order to warn the lineage that they were in danger and to help them persevere.
The head of our rear guard was waiting at the next portage. 12 Cayman, 18 Dead Rain, and Hun Xoc stood aside and met with him. They didn’t ask me to be a part of it and they whispered in a hunting language I didn’t know. But when we got back on the water Hun Xoc told me that the rear guards said there was a crew of twenty or so people following us, both in boats and, maybe, by porters on the towpaths. The guards couldn’t tell where they were from, and from the little they’d been able to hear, they were speaking in market Ixian. The head guard had said he thought their headdresses meant they were from the Catfish House of Xalancab, near Kaminaljuyu, which was a neutral house in respect to both the Harpies and the Ocelots, but on the other hand no one had recognized any of them so they could just be in disguise. The Catfish were an obscure house that didn’t get out much, so it would have been an easy deception.
Hun Xoc said 12 Cayman had asked whether they moved or signed like monkey shooters. The word could mean “manhunters” or “assassins.” The head of the scouts said he couldn’t tell. But they definitely weren’t trying to catch up with us. 12 Cayman asked whether it seemed like they knew where we were going or only following. But the guard didn’t know.
“If I had to bet on it I would say two to one they are Choppers,” Hun Xoc said. As I think I mentioned,
Choppers
was a nickname for “Ocelots.” They’d gotten it because they had the right to use a special kind of large ax in combat.
Maybe 9 Fanged Hummingbird had spotted us when he was prowling around as his nocturnal uay, Hun Xoc said. Maybe he’d come to suspect that Chacal was still alive. If the Ocelots captured me it would prove that the Harpies had perpetrated a blasphemous deception, and 9FH would be able to seize everything owned by the Harpy House, including goods, water and land rights, and people, without much protest from the other clans.
I didn’t know what to say. Just don’t dump me over the side until you’re sure, I thought. Next I thought about asking whether our pursuers could have been sent by 2JS himself, but I caught myself in time. If they had been, either Hun Xoc didn’t know about it or he was trying to fool me.
Besides, it was good for these guys to think I was closer to 2JS than I maybe really was. They were letting me in on a few things, letting me sit with the big kids in the lunchroom, but I had a feeling—well, let’s call it a certainty—that they’d also gotten orders to keep an eye on me at all times. I never woke up from sleeping without finding one of them watching me. I never left the file of bloods without 2 Hand or Armadillo Shit running farther out than I had, outflanking me. And I noticed they never let me near the extra sandals, or the food, or the water.
And really, 2JS was right to be worried. Of course, I had to trust him. One takes the deal because it’s the only deal. But there was still the little fact that he’d tortured me that kept popping up in the back of my mind. And even with all the pomp and bling-itude about adopting me, and all the bonding, and even with how much a stranger in a strange land wants to have a family, still, in my most
selbst ehrlich
moments, I had to admit that I didn’t have any reason to think he had my interests at heart. And his objectives weren’t the same as mine. He really just wanted the secret special sauce recipe. If he could break the Teotihuacano monopoly on the drugs, he’d be able to write his own ticket. But as far as my own lookout went—well, if I thought I could get away from the bloods, find some secluded village, do some tricks to get the locals on my side, put a raiding troop together, grab some sun adder out of one of the smaller cities—and supposedly there were at least forty-five nine-stone adders in Mesoamerica, outside of the seventy or so in Teotihuacan—and get samples of the
drogas
and bury them for the Chocula team to find (and really, they didn’t need more than a mg or two of each one to be able to analyze them) then maybe I would have . . . well, come to think of it, now it was all sounding kind of daunting. But the point is, it was possible, at least, and 2JS had to be worried that I might try it.
So, my guess was that if I made a break for it, or if I even started planning to make a break, I’d find myself trussed up like a Christmas goose in about one second.
Still, I thought, maybe this is the right thing to do. Let’s not forget that Lady Koh was the authoress of the Game in the Codex. Right? Even if she wasn’t the best-known adder out there—and according to 2JS, that would either be 11 Whirling, who belonged to the Ixian Ocelots, or Boiled Tapir, who worked for Pacal the Great at Palenque—she might still be the best person to get on our side. Maybe she was something really special, one of the great adders, the kind who, as 2JS had said at some point, only come along once in a b’akt’un. Maybe if I got in to see her, everything after that would be smooth sailing. She might know everything and clear it all up for us. Maybe she’d scope out the Doomster right away. Just get that name back to the Chocula team and the twenty-first-century world’ll be just fine. Maybe she’d even throw in a few stock picks. When/if I got back, I’d be richer than Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz.
So go with it, Jed. For now. Don’t overthink.
I asked whether the people who were following us could be from Teotihuacan. Hun Xoc said they could have been hired by someone from there, but why would anyone want to? And Lady Koh—or the Twenty-second Daughter of the Orb Weavers, as he called her in order not to alert her uay by pronouncing her name—wouldn’t have hired them because she’s a nine-skull adder. She would already have seen that we were coming in one of her Games.
Right, I said. I don’t think so, I thought. No matter how great she is, the Game still isn’t a crystal ball—
The sea.
It was that Precambrian smell of salt, or more accurately of salt-loving things. I looked around at the others. You could tell they smelled it, too, from the way their movements were quickening. We were nearly at the edge of the dry world. Tomorrow we’d be out on the gulf, on the trade lanes to the Empire of Razors and the Lakes of Wings.

[42]

T
wo sea canoes and their crews were waiting with the advance men at a rendezvous point on the coast, a hidden beach three miles north of the outlet. It can’t have been much of a secret, because there were about three hundred scruffy-looking people standing around on a strip of buttery sand broken by jags of black lava and the corpse of a lemon shark pulsating in the wash. There was a delay when the canoe’s owners said that because of the eruption, the paddlers were afraid of being boiled and eaten by the Earthtoadess and we’d have to go farther off land than was usually considered safe. So naturally they hit us up for a higher rate even than what they’d agreed on a few hours before. Also we had to hire a highly thought-of local
k’al maac
. He was like what in South Africa they call an
inyanga,
a water doctor, someone who keeps you afloat by constant chanting and pouring baby oil on troubled waters and whatever. I figured he was just another faker, but later I saw him using an odd and, to my eye, simplistic version of the Game to suss out the sea weather. 18 Dead Rain did the haggling and finally we got loaded. Our rear guard stayed on shore. They’d look around to see if we were still being followed and catch up to us later. We offered blood to the Cradlers of the Northwest and launched.
I guess it might not seem like you could get over two hundred people into two canoes, but these weren’t Old Towns. I figured each was about ninety-five feet long and eight feet across at the widest point. They were dugouts, or rather burnedouts, made from from mahoganies the size of Luna, Queen of the Redwoods. The lead canoe had a long neck on the prow with a little head like an elasmosaurus’s, and the second, the one we’d be riding in, had a kind of lobsteresque thing with antennae. Their black hulls were scaled with orange and white glyphs and glistening with manatee oil. They also had canopies on them that made them look like Cleopatra’s barge, but 12 Cayman made the crew take them off for speed. There were no sails anywhere. Maybe I should show them how to chef one up, I thought. Except better not. Don’t attract attention.
As we got safely out past the breakers, the bloods seemed to loosen up. Finally, for the first time since we’d left Cocoa Town, they could chat.
“Ac than a puch tun y an I pa oc’ in cabal payee tz’oc t pitzom?”
a voice asked. “Remember when we played here and you knocked out the forward’s eye?”
It took me a beat to realize he was talking to me.
“B’aax?”
he asked. It was like saying “Hello, Earth to 10 Skink.”
It was 2 Hand, Hun Xoc’s brother. He was sitting behind me. Hun Xoc was sitting in front of me, and the other major people in the canoe were 3 Returning Moth—the remembrancer—and 4 Saw-Tongue, one of my sort-of doubles. Our acolytes sat on our left. I turned around.
“Ma’ax ca’an,”
I said. “That wasn’t me.”
“Well, he fell down and you hipped the ball at him and hit him on the back of the head, and his scarves kept his head from cracking, but his eye fell out.” 2 Hand was big and squat with a kind of bug-eyed face, and he pulled back the lids of his right eye and bulged it out as much as possible. “And he could still see with the other eye, so he tried to stuff the loose one back into the socket and couldn’t, and then didn’t know what to do with it, and he knew he was about to pass out and didn’t want us to get it. So he ate it.”
“I don’t remember that,” I said.
“You need to eat a big bowl of tapioca,” Hun Xoc said to 2 Hand. It was an idiom for “cool it.” Chacal was under a sort of
damnatio memoriae
, and even asking about something that had happened to me before the Change was getting too close to breaking the rule that my previous name wasn’t to be spoken. But 2 Hand didn’t pay much attention to stuff like that.
I could hear 4 Saw-Tongue trying to stifle a giggle.
“Did that really happen?” I asked.
“It wasn’t quite like that,” Hun Xoc said.
“It was exactly like that,” 2 Hand said.
“Do you remember 22 Scab?” 2 Hand asked me.
I clicked no.
“He was one of 3 Balls’s gardeners,” Hun Xoc cut in. “He was all warty and awful-looking, and he used to always go to the sweatbath alone, and then finally one time 22 Sidewinder came in and saw that he had the tip of his penis cut off. And he wouldn’t tell any of us how it had happened.”
“Do you remember when we found out how it happened, with Shit Hair?” 2 Hand asked.
“Are you asking me?” I asked. He clicked yes.
I clicked no. I looked at 2 Hand through my mask. How much was he buying it? I wondered. That is, my amnesia routine? He didn’t strike me as all that swift, but there was still some reservation there. Anyway, how much were the other people in the canoe buying it, or the other people in the expedition, who’d hear about everything I said later on? Did they believe everything 2JS said or were they just going along with it? They weren’t idiots. On the other hand, there wasn’t any great tradition of skeptical secularism around here. Probably it varied. Some of them believed everything and other people thought their religiopolitical leaders tended to overstate things.
And of course even if they did believe it, they’d be mad at me for messing up Chacal. Apparently that had been part of 2JS’s speech to them, he’d told them I’d come to rescue Chacal too . . . but still, there had to be some resentment here. And fear, too, probably. They’re not sure I’m human.
Anyway, don’t get paranoid. It’s not all about you.
2 Hand went on. “Well,” he said, “on the way back from the game here, we stayed in this mudman village and there was a
k’aak
”—that is, a domehead girl—“who wanted to fuck everyone. Every hipball player. She had long hair with brown streaks. And she was always hanging around and they called her Shit Hair. You remember?”
“No,” I said. Actually it was ringing a cracked bell somewhere, but I’d have needed more context to bring it up.
“Then you don’t remember when you were asleep and 1 Black Morpho rubbed
c’an aak’ot
on your penis?”
I clicked no again.
“What happened?” 4 Saw-Tongue asked.
“Well, Ch—this one here woke up,” 2 Hand said, “and he started jumping up and down holding his penis, and he was yelling, ‘My penis is too big!
MY PENIS IS TOO BIG!!!’
Apparently
c’an aak’ot
was some kind of topical priapic hallucinogen. And he was running all around the yard and he saw Shit Hair, and he said, Aha! And he grabbed her and started fucking her in the ass. So after a while he is feeling better, and he is wiping off his penis, but now Shit Hair starts to bounce around. She is going, ‘Ayyy, ayyyeee, yee, yee, yee!’ ”
As you may have guessed, 2 Hand was now imitating voices and performing a vigorous pantomime, almost rocking the boat, so to speak.
“So she squats down and starts shitting. And all this shit comes out, and the rest of us are standing there staring. And then she starts shitting out her intestine. And more and more intestine just comes out of her ass, and it curls up under her, and then one of the dogs comes over and runs away with the end of it, and that just pulls out more and more. So he starts eating it, and more and more comes out, and then Shit Hair makes this wincing face and this part of her intestine comes out with a lump in it. And so this one”—he meant me—“grabs the intestine away from the dog, and pushes the lump out of the chewed end, and it falls on the ground. It is this little scrawny thing, and it is all wrinkled and warty. It was the tip of 22 Scab’s penis! So this one is saying, ‘I would know this penis anywhere! It is 22 Scab’s! Somebody run and get him! We found it! We found it!’ ”
The acolytes were biting their lips to keep themselves from giggling. 3 Returning Moth and 4 Saw-Tongue were laughing. The paddlers, luckily, didn’t understand our house language.
“This is all new to me,” I said. Then I started laughing too. Maybe it was the way he did it. I guess you had to be there.
“That is enough,” Hun Xoc said. “Finished. The Choppers will smell your hard-on.”
I may have forgotten to mention this, but we weren’t supposed to do much of anything sexual on this trip. Long-distance travel was the same as a sacred hunt. You shouldn’t even ever have a secret erection, if you could avoid it, because, as Hun Xoc said, the same way it was supposed to spook game animals, it might let enemies smell us coming. But, of course, the bloods were mainly teenagers and of course males.
“We have to be
sac kanob,
” Hun Xoc went on. That is, fer-de-lances. The expression meant that, more than any other snake, the fer-de-lance was fast, hard to spot, and, especially, mute.
2 Hand settled down.
“Besides,” Hun Xoc said, “you are saying more than really happened. Only a very tiny little bit of her intestines came out.” He leaned back and put a plug of chewing tobacco in his mouth. It was dark already. No twilight in the Courts of the Sun. As we passed the bonfire at Comalcalco we turned northwest— deathward—steering perpendicular to the stars of Teotihuacan, the Vulturess and Vulturess’s Wound, that is to say to Thuban, which was the pole star back in 3113 BC, at the beginning of the Long Count, and its red shadow, ι Draconis. I could see the red in it more clearly than I’d ever seen it before, even with a telescope. Hun Xoc said that we were getting close enough to the stars to hear them hissing as they touched the water. I could hear what he meant, a sound like the sizzle of cigar butts dropping in a puddle, but of course it was just the waves. Phytobacteria flashed at each dip of their paddles, like sparks between flints. Just before dawn, which is the best time for collecting, I’d lean over the side—making an effort not to look at my new reflection, since it always freaked me out—and I’d try to list the inverts. There were peppermint shrimp, of course, and long red lines of krill, but there were also these huge cnidarian medusas and some kind of giant lavender ctenophore like a Venus’s girdle that I didn’t recognize. One time I spotted a ’branch I was sure was undescribed, but when I reached in to try to grab it the water was so full of venomous jellyfish that it stung my hand and I missed it.
Our rear guard caught up with us at noon. They were in a narrow canoe like a racing scull with ten active and ten resting paddlers. Hun Xoc and the other bloods had their hands on their spear throwers, but the boat was draped in strings of Harpy-colored paper flowers and when they got close the bloods recognized them. Our boats pulled closer to shore and into the lee of a sandbar.
The head rear guard climbed into our canoe and moved to the back. The steersman left his post and he and everyone else moved forward so the five of us, including me this time, could talk.
There was a big squad following us, the guard said, ten or fifteen people at least, the same people who had been shadowing us on the river.
We couldn’t resist looking east. There were a lot of boats on the water, but he said they were too far away for us to pick them out of the pack.
12 Cayman told the scouts to make port, hire two smaller boats, and follow the people who were following us. Meanwhile we’d outdistance them. If they knew where we were going, he said, they’d stay on the water. Otherwise they’d stop at every port to find out whether we’d been through.
“And do not catch up with us again until you are sure which it is,” he said.
The upshot was that instead of making landfall today, we reset our course north by northwest, farther out into the gulf, and paid the paddlers our first bonus for speed. Later tonight we’d reset again, to the west, and try to lose the tail. The lookouts kept watching the horizon behind us, shielding their eyes with rolled-up skins like telescopes, but the air was getting foggier, or rather smoggier, and they couldn’t pick out anything suspicious.
By morning the water was swirling with iridescent slicks from dead whales and speckled with bloated carp. We couldn’t see or feel the dust falling on us, but we looked gray around the gills, and if you scrubbed wet cotton lint over your face it came up blackened. The die-off had attracted all the seagulls in the world. I’m not exaggerating. I’m sure of it. Some were only the size of crows and others were as big as pteranadons. When we passed the ragged white carcass of, I think, a porpoise, so many gulls took off from it that some of the paddlers thought they were hatching out of its body. The flies, too, had had a major population spike and there wasn’t enough wind to keep them off, but Armadillo Shit did a good job, constantly dusting me with a human-hair whisk, switching from one arm to the other every few hours. Poor old hardworking Armadillo Shit.
On our ninth night out of Ix the gulf got choppy and they lashed the canoes together with long boards to make a sort of catamaran. We had to get even farther out from the shore in case the wind got stronger and pushed us toward the rocks. It’s a hurricane, I thought. We’re grouper bait. So much for the Water Quack. He’ll be the first one we toss over. But the shit passed over us and at what I figured was three A.M. the big orange moon slid out from under the clouds like a half a 5 mg Valium and dropped into the water.
So auch auf jener Oberfläche sich noch im krystallinischen Zustand befände.
The next day we almost surfed into port on the dead rollers. The town was a Teotihuacano outpost called Where They Were Blinded, on the north side of what would be the Laguna de Alvarado. It was mainly a complex of ghatlike mud terraces leading down into a shallow estuary clogged with canoes and barges and crews speaking fifty different languages. There was a big encampment of salters curing swamp rat and croakers, and even with the wind there was a fermenting-fish stench and a general sense of bad vibe.
While the big guys haggled, 2 Hand and Armadillo Shit set me up in a sort of portable wicker hut, like a bathing machine. I got out my writing stuff and a blank screenfold book with plain covers. I was going to use charcoal, but then 3 got me some splinters of hematite that made good clear marks on the gesso, like silverpoint, and I was all set.
I wrote and coded up my most recent note home:
[deciphered]
NEW KEY WORD: AWHNNBAGHSDDLPFSETQHYTAHBDSZ
Jed DeLanda
Tacoanacal Pana’ Tonat (Alvarado)
Chocula Team
Ix Ruinas, Alta Verapaz, RG
Wednesday, March 31, 664 AD, about 11:00 A.M.
Dear Marena, Taro, Michael, Jed, et al.
You’ll have noticed that in my first letter I tried to describe some of the local color, as it were, and soon gave up. In this installment I’ll stick to business. As I mentioned, my first priority in Teotihuacan will be to get an audience with the woman from the Codex N, Ahau-na Koh. Here’s what I know so far about her: