In the Courts of the Sun (66 page)

[54]

E
ight days later, at the start of the second ninth of the day—10:32 A.M.—every human inhabitant of the holy valley of Teotihuacan was outdoors, looking upward, waiting for the Chewer to ambush the sun. The only unoccupied surfaces were the
taluds
and
tableros
of the mulob. Bloods, slaves, traders, crafters, pilgrims, porters, captives, children, old women, young women, babies—and even people who couldn’t see or stand, and even the dying, in fact even the recently dead—were assembled in their ranks and orders and packed into plazas and rooftop gardens. Old men sat on their sons’ shoulders and young men wore stiltlike sandals or teetered on tall stools. Every initiated male held whatever noisemaker was traditional to his clan and allowed to his seniority—drums, horns, maracas, ocarinas, clay bells, stone bells, castanets, sticks, clappers, bullroarers, rasps, whistles, flutes, and a hundred other gadgets, every one of them brand-spanking-new.
There were no fires in the valley. In fact, there were no fires in the entire altiplano. And even beyond the empire’s farthest reach, hearthstones had been doused and scattered. In most of the Western Hemisphere, and probably in all of Mesoamerica, every torch, rushlight, coal, cigar, and miscellaneous flame had been extinguished. Last night it was overcast, and there was no moon, and as we made our final preparations in one of the Rattler’s courtyards, it felt like—well, despite the fact that we were in the center of what was at the moment the densest concentration of people in the world, we could just as easily have been deep underground in a vast phosphorless cavern. Between the Sonoran Desert and the Andes, the continent was as dark as it had been before hominids infected it, thirty thousand years ago.
All but a few vessels and pots had been drilled or smashed. Blankets and clothing had been stained, slashed, or unwoven. Pictographic inscriptions had been canceled with streaks of blue ink. Livestock and slaves had been killed, and thousands of old, sick, or just pious people had killed themselves. Everyone, or at least everyone except me and maybe a handful of other skep-tics, was terrified that this might be the final death of their sun. And I was terrified too, of course, just not about that.
From our perch up here on the snout of the Rattler’s mul—that is, about halfway up the front of the pyramid, facing east toward the fetish market across the southern end of the main axis—we could feel the heat rising off the bodies, the mélange of their breaths, sour air from the ulcerated throats of the captives in their wicker standing-cages, the black air from the elders’ tobacco, cancerated lungs. The sky was clear, and luckily for us there was only a little breeze. It was a perfect day for the end of time. I shifted from foot to foot. A loose end of gut cord from my combat sandal was hooking into the skin of my shin, but I didn’t want to bend down to deal with it. That sort of thing wasn’t done. I wobbled forward. Hun Xoc held out an arm and eased me back upright.
We were facing west, in the center of our core group of Harpy bloods. Hun Xoc was on my left, and Armadillo Shit was behind me. His job was literally to watch my back. We were in the center of a group of eleven other Harpy bloods and twenty-two Harpy nonbloods. 12 Cayman was in the vanguard, ready to move to the rear in case of attack.
We all wore blue outer mantas that identified us as aspirants to the Rattler Society. Under them we had on as much armor as we could get away with without looking suspicious. That is, we each wore wicker shin and arm guards and a vest made of two layers of thick canvas quilting, each filled with wood chips, which could stop most blades. Each of us had a short mace or a club strapped to the inside of one thigh and a rolled-up wicker shield strapped to the other. We also had a three-part spear, hanging from weak, easily breakable threads in the center of our backs, under our mantas. Next to it we each had a rolled-up wicker shield, which we’d had made specially for this action. Each one had three cross-pieces that folded down and a pair of strong hide straps that let you hold it with both arms. Still, I wished the shields were bigger. They might be our weak link.
The Puma bloods on the opposite mul were in full dress armor and carried tall parade javelins that, despite their ornamental eccentric-flint spearpoints, could still do a lot of damage. As I think I mentioned, the Pumas hated the Rattler’s Children, and at the first sign of a fight they’d take the opportunity to cleanse as many of the Rattler’s Children as possible. And the Pumas were still hosting some Ixian Ocelots. And who knew whether they’d heard anything? Word traveled a lot faster than people. Somebody back home might have realized that 2JS was up to something and sent a message here, and put the Pumas on the lookout for any Ixian Harpies. On top of everything else we might have bounties on our skins.
“Look,” Hun Xoc signed by tapping on my left arm.
I followed his eyes forward and down. Three vingtaines of Swallowtail javelinmen in red quilted armor had just pushed through the crowd and stationed themselves between the plaza and the fetish market, blocking most of the entrance to the main axis.
Damn it, I thought. Well, that’ll put a crimp in our schedule.
Koh must see them. Doesn’t she?
I snuck a look over my shoulder. Behind us the top third of the Star Rattler’s ornate mul wedged into the thin sky. Its staircase was packed with converts and aspirants. Sixty arms above us, at the lip of the sanctuary, the fifty-two senior sucklers and adders to Star Rattler stood in an immobile row. They were all dressed, almost identically, as men, with blue Chaakish eye masks, like fat glassless goggles, to help them see through the Black Chewer’s breath, and big scaled helmets and platform sandals. Above them, at the apex of the mul, framed by the mouth of the sanctuary, there was a glimpse of a tall headdress that belonged to Lady Yellow, the senior sun adderess of the Orb Weaver Synod. I guess she was kind of the mother superior. Supposedly she was a hundred and eight years old.
I counted five figures in from the north corner and picked out Lady Koh. Stupidly, I got a flash of pride spotting her in the lineup. Her face, or what I could see of it, was impassive.
It was hard to believe we were really going forward. How did Koh know the whole thing wasn’t some kind of trap? Well, at least she knew from her cross-examination of me that I wasn’t lying. In fact, I’d bet she considered me as under her control. Well, maybe I was. Still, she can’t know what’s going to happen when she gets to Ix.
Or can she? Maybe she’s worked out more of her own future than she’s letting on.
Maybe she wants to take over the Game drugs operation so she can start her own empire.
Hmm. Well, maybe that would be okay. Why not? Go ahead, set your sights a little higher. Still, don’t worry about that right now. Okay. One thing at a time. A, B, C. And A, right now, is the Swallowtail squad.
She must see them, I thought. Should we just try to go past them anyway? Or should we change the route? And if we do, will we be able to signal it to her?
No, don’t do it, I thought. Better just follow the plan. Get to the first rendezvous at the pharmacopoeia and then change if you have to.
Hun Xoc touched my arm again. I snapped my head around. Face front, soldier.
You know, I thought, really the creepiest thing about this—or the most singular thing, anyway—was that despite the temptation, not a single member of the crowd made a premature sound. Well, they’d been practicing for five days, I thought. I’d been whispering for so long that I wondered if my vocal cords would still work. For the last five days it had seemed that the only living thing you heard was the birds.
You could feel the crowds shivering. You could smell the anticipation in their sweat. The mass of life rustled and creaked, like a jungle in that quiet phase of the night just before the predawn chorus. Their hands hovered over their instruments. But nobody whistled, or tapped, or even dropped a rattle. I wondered whether any other city this size in the history of the world had, or would, ever create this kind of unity in its population. Even animals seemed impressed by the silence, so that the occasional scrawk of a gull or a blackbird or the bark of a dog in a pen seemed halfhearted, just a little dust in the groove. Every so often a baby would squeal, and, immediately, it would be muffled. And probably suffocated, I thought.
Bastards. Despite the colors and the freshness and the collective goodwill, it was still a dire, horrible day. Even if you didn’t know anything about the place—say you’d just stepped out of a teleporter—you’d instinctively feel that the city was at a tipping point. It felt like a doctor’s waiting room, with all of us waiting for the receptionist to call our names and say, in as neutral a tone as possible, that they had the results of our test.
Of course, from a twenty-first-century perspective I suppose it was all actually pretty silly. After all, it was just another eclipse. But on another level—and even when I tried to cultivate some emotional distance—I kept feeling there was a certain sanity behind the whole thing. In the twenty-first century people just went barreling ahead, and then when something bad happened they couldn’t believe it. Here, at least, everyone wasn’t pretending that everything was always A-OK.
I snuck a look to the right, toward the center of the city. The great main axis stretched off to the north. The city seethed with newly woven streamers and long strips of spoonbill feathers raised on a hundred thousand bamboo poles, all orange to attract the sun, curling in the weak breeze like the polyps of octocorals. Underneath the banners, each of the thousands of bloods standing in the choice real estate of the teocalli district had a small circular shield over his left shoulder, and each shield had a featherwork design, bright, simple, geometric, and slightly different from all the others, all facing the same direction—west—like a field of sunflowers. The effect was so heraldic that you could imagine we were medieval knights, meeting for a tournament on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. There wasn’t a single person with an uncovered head or a bare face. Even the slaves wore rags wrapped around their upper lips. Higher-ups were so encrusted with jade and spondylus shells, and with such long-feathered headdresses, that they seemed to have exoskeletons and antennae. It was like the people in this town might as well have been pinned in place, in drawers labeled by greathouse lineage, dependent clan, subclan, sub-subclan, serving clan, and slave clan, and every individual in that slave clan. I’d say it was regimented except that, unlike uniforms in a modern military review, no two people’s markings were exactly alike.
I let my focus crawl north along the axis until it found two plazas that reflected the flat blue of the sky. The sunken courts near the Ocelot’s mul had been filled with water, like swimming pools. One was stocked with axolotl, water lilies, and jabiru storks, which were sacred to the Jade Hag. The water in the other pool was bare. Supposedly it was laced with ololiuqui, so that the captives who’d be thrown into it later on would drown without struggling. There was a row of squat offering platforms along its western bank, and on one of them you could just make out a dash of turquoise that might have been the five Ixian Ocelots who were 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s delegation to the festival. At least we’d managed to avoid them this far, I thought.
At the midpoint of the main axis the swollen haw of the Hurricane mul dwarfed everything else. Its peak was about twice the height above us that we were above the plaza, high enough so that on a hazy day, or in the offering smoke, you could really believe the sucklers on it were being swallowed by hungry clouds. But today Chacal’s sharp eyes could pick out the whole scene, the lesser synod members on the second-from-top level, with the row of giant megaphones, like alphorns, twenty arms long, resting on their shoulders, and now, on the highest level, the tall red-orange headdresses of the Puma Synod, just emerging from the four mouths of the teocalli.
The crowds rustled. The distorting perspective of the receding levels of the pyramid made the Synod seem like inaccessible giants farther away than the shell of the sky. Teotihuacan didn’t have kings, and the archonic offices passed between different members of the two councils. When they appeared in public, they were heavily masked, and no one outside the council was supposed to know who they were. But Koh had it from good sources that the current archon of the Swallowtails was an elderly Puma named Turd Curl. She’d also said to watch for the person who was likely to be Turd Curl’s successor, a Puma blood named Severed Right Hand. Supposedly he was only thirteen years old—but already he was considered the up-and-comer. They said he’d been born with fur and fangs, and that he always knew, without being taught, how to transform into his feline self. They said he only ate humans, captives younger than he was. But that was probably just propaganda. Koh had said his colors were yellow and lilac.
I followed the angle of the great mul’s stairs down to where it met a freshly built wooden mul. Fifty-two sacrifices, each exactly nine years and twenty-nine days old, had been keeping a vigil inside it for five days. When it was set on fire they’d help carry all the other offerings and present them to the newborn sun. About two hundred arms southeast of the pagoda there was a tiny minor mul in a sort of orange-and-black checkerboard pattern. The Puma’s pharmacopoeia, the monastery garden where the Pumas grew and distilled their components of the Game drug. Our target.
According to Koh, the Swallowtail sucklers knew exactly how long the totality of the eclipse would last—about eighteen and a half minutes—and they’d try to increase the illusion of their power by cutting it as close as possible. They’d wait until only one or two hundred beats before the sun would reemerge, and then, Turd Curl would signal. On the level below him fifty-two of his sucklers would start swinging bullroarers made from the femurs of their predecessors. On the level below that two hundred and sixty of their acolytes would blow their giant horns, and on the levels below, and spreading through the known world, the men would strike up their instruments and the women and children would shout or chant,
“Marhóani, marhóani,”
“Go away, go away,” and babies would get chili powder blown in their eyes to make them cry, and even dogs would get kicked in the ribs, and everyone would make as much noise as possible until the Chewer was driven off. Then the head sucklers would light the new fire from the sun itself, using a huge and reportedly magnificent concave mirror ground and polished from hæmatite. They’d send the fire down the mul to the pavilion of the new sun, that is, the bonfire. All through the rest of the day and night the charge holders of the four thousand towns would troop past the bonfire, light their torches, and take the fresh fire and tales of the capital’s grandeur back to their homelands. And the vast majority would believe it was thanks to the Puma Synod’s leadership that they were able to rescue the sun.