In the Courts of the Sun (54 page)

[44]

Y
ou know how a city like, say, Marrakesh or Benares or wherever looks all charming on the Travel Channel but then when you’re actually there the smell and the squalor make you wish you were right now back in, say, Tenafly, or wherever you came from, no matter how wherever? Tamoanatawacanac was like Benares without the filmi music. There must have been eight thousand people that I could see from here just milling around on the shore trying to get somewhere else. I had my porters lift me up so I could see over the crowd. We were in a sort of open circuit or pomerium, about a thousand arms wide, between the shore wall behind us and, to the east, a high stockade ribbed with ramshackle watchtowers. There was an ad hoc quality to the whole place, that sense of a once-proper park turning into a Reaganville, raggedy people setting up camp, in tents, in yurts, under blankets, under nothing, under each other. Vingtaines of Swallowtail javelinmen turtled their way through the mob, threatening too-aggressive pilgrims with palm-fiber flails. One blood at the back of each troop held a thirty-foot pole with a big round feather shield on it about five arms from the top. Each shield had a different pattern, which, I guess, was the troop’s crest. Then, at the tip of each pole, there was the tanned skin of someone who’d gone somewhere or done something he shouldn’t, flapping weakly like a wet museum banner.
In this world your clothes were your passport, and a gang of javelinmen helped steer us through the plebes. Members only, I thought. We edged past knots of people. By now I could pick out clans and nationalities by their clothes and body mods, and, as a bonus, Chacal’s set of mainly disdainful status associations kicked in automatically: For instance, the orange sort of saris those short, dusty people were wearing meant they were Cacaxtlans, and over there, those tall wiry domeheads with—damn, I’m using derogatories, which was good manners here but bad, bad bad in Century 21—those wiry individuals with the precancerous sun-cracked skin were Chanacu, proto-Mixtecs, from the mountains around Zempoaltépetl. The roped-together gang of tall ectomorphs with the fresh scabs and penitential sandbags tied to their ankles weren’t slaves but Yaxacans, people from the far northwest of the valley, expiating a black debt. That line of tiny, pale, furtive, nearly naked characters with the big lip plugs and clay-caked bowl cuts had come from the far, far south, maybe even from Costa Rica, and sold little frogs and insects made of hammered gold, which was still a huge novelty in these parts. A minor Zapotec king, covered with rattling yellow shell scales, passed us riding on the shoulders of a hyperteloric giant nearly seven feet tall. There were two kinds of people with a western look: Taxcanob’ from the Pacific coast and another tribe I didn’t place, some kind of fishermen in eelskin and shark teeth. Four of them were squatting over a pricked cross in the pavement, playing the simple gambling version of the Game. The rest were standing around kibitzing loudly. That’s a dumb game, I thought. The difference between the full Sacrifice Game and what they were playing was like the difference between tournament bridge and Go Fish. Times a hundred. Hun Xoc pointed out a crew of tall, hickish-looking northerners in deerskins who’d supposedly traveled for years across the northern deserts and might have come—it was hard to believe, but possible—all the way from one of the incipient corn empires along the Ohio Mississippi. They traded a kind of blue stone that was just coming in, tremendously expensive and still unknown in the Maya states: turquoise. Ahead of us there was the sound of someone getting beaten up and on our left a wandering mat-man, that is, a sort of independent auctioneer who had set up to sell off pilgrims’ children so their parents could get in. He lifted a naked four-year-old boy up above his head to show him off, holding him by the cord that tied his feet to his wrists, so that the kid drooped forward, squealing. A troop of Maya bloods next to us, in low-grade homespun and overambitious hair, were Yucatecans, and the dudes with pyrographed whorls on the left side of their bodies were Colimans, here to hawk pottery to replace the stuff that would be smashed during the Silence. Apparently—and I wasn’t quite clear on it yet—the idea was that anything with a soul, which basically meant anything with a function like a weapon or a tool or even a bowl, could easily get possessed during the vigil and start attacking its owners. I pictured a stocky housewife thrashing her arms around in the dark, fending off an angry swarm of terra-cotta kitchenware. Anyway, you were supposed to break all of that stuff and start fresh. Maybe it was just a marketing ploy so they could all sell more stuff to each other. Instead of planned obsolescence, which would mean you had to come out with a new model every so often, they’d simplified it to planned obliteration.
We pushed toward the stockade. Move aside, VIP comin’ thru. Getting in didn’t look easy. A chain of Swallowtail bloods, three deep and in the fullest possible peacetime drag, blocked the only gap in the wall. Behind them, through the steam from hundreds of sweatbaths, you could see a terraced slope chockablock with freshly thatched warehouses and piles of stripped and sharpened tree trunks. I was thinking how we’d probably come all this way for nothing when I noticed we were getting into a receiving-hospitality formation and that 12 Cayman was being saluted by quincunx of Maya bloods who’d come up out of nowhere. Hun Xoc pointed out one of them to me: the famous 14 Wounded, 2JS’s adopted nephew.
He wore what seemed like more jewelry than he needed for the occasion, but he was a little shorter than Maya-nobility average and he had a nondescript look under his nose mask. He was the head of what you could call the Harpy House trading mission in Teotihuacan. Actually, it was a little more complicated than that because the Harpies were part of an international sort-of-federation of eagle-related lineages, and he did business with a lot of them. But the basic point is that he handled a lot of Lowland business and even though he wasn’t a citizen of Teotihuacan—which was itself a pretty fluid definition—he supposedly had a lot of friends in highish places here.
14 Wounded stood in the center of four adopted bloods. They were displaced rural Ixob, probably refugees, who’d been blooded one way or another to his clan. Despite the Maya faces they had a sense of foreignness, with angularly draped mantas and skin shining with red dog fat. They wore
tanasacob
, which were a sort of comblike pendant that fastened through a piercing in your septum and hung down over your mouth. They reminded me of Victorian handlebar mustaches, demure, in a way, but also menacing. They made it surprisingly hard to read a face. The reason for them, supposedly, was that in the presumably violence-free city, teeth were considered too aggressive to show. They said bad, scab-carrying winds came out of people’s mouths. Which isn’t far from the truth, come to think of it. It was like an evil-eye charm, except it was against the evil mouth. If your tanasac fell out, you were supposed to cover your mouth with your hand like a giggling Japanese woman.
It wasn’t easy, but our group brain took over and we managed to clear a little space in the throng.
“Please let us feast you, don’t refuse our cakes,”
14 said in a still-mellifluous old smoker’s voice. You couldn’t see much of his face, but his eyes had a jokey feeling.
“Thanks to your lords for sheltering our bloods,”
12 Cayman said in the honorific. Hun Xoc unrolled a gift mat and 12 Cayman laid a bundle of our best highland cigars on it.
We did the whole little greeting dance. 14 Wounded touched his shoulder, saluting me respectfully but not as an equal, kind of a condescending “Hi, little brother” salute. He’d hosted 12 Cayman and two of the other bloods before. But he hadn’t been to Ix for over twenty years, and thankfully neither he nor any of his household had ever seen Chacal. I saluted him back as my superior. It wasn’t the time to get huffy about the pecking order. Meanwhile, the porters who’d been trailing behind caught up with us, oozing in around the circle like a rope coiling into a bucket. 14 said he was anxious to share chilies with us and that the Swallowtails had decided to close the roads early, so we had to move. Right, I thought, what have we been doing all this time? Lounging around eating bonbons? Jerk.
Like a drill team we formed into our meeting-relatively-important-strangers pattern. It was basically a half-circle of bloods, with 12 Cayman in the center and three layers of attendants, of decreasing rank, crouching behind us. They’d put me on the side, in the second-to-most-junior position, so I wouldn’t have to do any talking.
Around here, everything was like getting backstage. You had to know somebody. 14 already had an arrangement with the Swallowtails. The wall of bloods opened slowly, oozed around us, and closed behind the last man of the caravan, like an amoeba eating a rotifer. If it had been any kind of regular gate instead of a human one, some of the riffraff would have pushed through. Now we were in an awkward space between the stockade and the pass about a thousand arms uphill. There were high cairns of fuel wood and cotton mantas drying on lines, like we were in the collective backyard of some cracker trailer park. There was more elbow room here and we found a clear area. The porters, who’d been carrying the sleds over their heads, finally unpacked them and took them apart. They seemed upset about dismantling old pals.
My very chains and I grew friends.
A crew of odd-looking characters from a Teotihuacan house called the Cranes, who seemed to be like tax inspectors, picked through the contents. 12 Cayman and the Cranes’ head dude sorted out the gift to the hill, which was like an entry tariff. An accountant paced around tying butterfly knots into a big shaggy string tally. We separated our weapons and a few prohibited classes of objects, like any green fabric, anything made from snakeskin, or any hipball equipment. The games with large balls were considered a type of warfare, or I guess you could say a martial art, and so they were prohibited here. In fact the only legal ball sport was the lacrossish affair we’d just seen, which didn’t have any official betting. I noticed Hun Xoc and the other players wrapping beaded bands over the hipball calluses on their knees and arms. Around here professional players were considered disreputable characters.
“Am I allowed to bring in the shit in my stomach?” 2 Hand asked the accountant in our house language. “Or do I have to leave it here?”
The accountant said he didn’t understand.
“Because I will want it back when we leave,” 2 Hand said.
We all had to wear dark gray mantas, and we put in our tanasacs, those mouth comb things. Mine had been made for me—you couldn’t ever wear another person’s—and it still didn’t fit. Damn thing. Supposedly you couldn’t be barefaced anywhere in the sacred valley. Even the menials had to tie a rag across their mouths, like Old West bandits. Anyway, you couldn’t imagine a more annoying piece of masculine jewelry. I’ve seen four-inch clit rings that were more comfortable. Probably.
The mask steward ran back and forth getting us ready, like a hairstylist before a fashion show. Meanwhile the acolytes put us through our paces. They were deferent but we still had to do what they said. I guess it was like the lord chamberlain, or whoever tells the Prince of Wales to walk this way or whatever. Each one of us—even the slaves—had to repeat a little peace oath, both in our own language and in Teotihuacano, which had endlessly agglutinated words and weird creaky vowels and was incomprehensible to most of us. The oath was all about how we’d never raise a weapon to anyone, always cover our mouths, and be present to suckle the noon and the dawn. Next we each had to throw an article of clothing into a bonfire. It turned out that the dressers had tied a single ribbon around each of our ankles just for that. You guys just earned your bonus, I thought. I’d been about to toss in my loincloth. Then we all also had to step across a line of morning-glory vines that made a uay boundary, that is, something the wrong kind of invisible characters couldn’t cross. Finally the thurifers rebaptized each of us with smoke out of a giant pipe and gave each of us a little clay thing.
I looked at mine with that “Thanks, what the hell do I do with this?” feeling, like when they hand out that clay pipe and tobacco at the Yale graduation. It was an oblong lump of plain unglazed clay, fresh out of the kiln, with two holes or cups or depressions. Oh, okay. The cups were packed with powdered charcoal ground with copal and perfumed with scarlet beebalm. It was an incense burner.
We did our leave-taking gestures, turned east, and climbed the wide road with the lake at our back. I noticed that at some point four tall men dressed as Swallowtail acolytes had joined us. They’re minders, I thought. Spies. 12 Cayman had said there’d be
tsazcalamanob
, “guides” or “hosts,” and not to acknowledge them unless they said anything. Fine. Just pretend they’re bell-boys. It’s for your own good.
Even more than most Mesoamerican cities Teotihuacan only had a few fortifications, just some low stone walls in a few key places. I got the feeling that for a long time the city had felt it was invulnerable out of sheer fabulous-ness. Lately they’d been building movable wooden barricades, cheveaux-de-frises, as they would have said in the old cavalry days, that is, stripped tree trunks with shorter pointed trunks lashed perpendicularly onto them in groups of three every few arms, making an array of spiked tripods. We passed four gangs of slaves dragging the things to the spots where, starting tomorrow, they’d lay them across the road. There were also three freshly dug dry moats, with punji stakes at the bottom, that we crossed on woven bridges. One was so shaky-looking I got off my porter and walked across myself. 12 Cayman glared at me with his sunken eyes, but enough pomp is enough. I got back on my human steed.
Birds scattered. The lacrosse game behind us dampened and hushed. Thunder rose around us, or rather it wasn’t thunder—it’s drums, I thought, big stone water drums, as full and inexplicably satisfying as D-bass timpani, rolling in bursts with long rests between them,
bombombombombom, bom . . . bombombombombom, bombombom . . . bombombombombombom,
and I realized that the rhythm was the numbers of the day,
Wak Kimi, Kanlahun Sip,
6 Dying, 14 Stag, over and over in a unique pattern that would never be repeated, 6 . . . 14 . . . 9 . . . 11 . . . 11 . . . 12 . . . 6 . . . ,