In the Courts of the Sun (71 page)

Whoa. There she is.

[60]

K
oh climbed the last stair and stepped onto the temple porch. Her guards lowered the shielding quilts and backed away from her. She was still in her green mask, but her arms were bare, one pale and the other the solid blue-black of her vitiligo. Her dresser had tied on her feather headdress—I was impressed that she’d found time to rethink her coiffure in the middle of a battle, although I guess that’s what girls are like—and the light of the fires behind her projected a nimbus of light into the golden-green plumes. The crowd of Harpy/Gila/Rattler bloods on the platform parted. She walked between them, unhesitatingly, like Joan of Arc through the north portal at Reims. The Puma elders who were still clinging to the top of the mul turned their heads to look at her. She took nine steps. She was walking the way a lizard walks, deliberate, alert, and seemingly emotionless. Two extra-long quetzal feathers trailed through the air above her head in a delayed duplication of her movements, like antennae that sniffed the past. Her dwarf, the Penguin Woman—who, just by the way, supposedly had a seagull uay, and because of a lightning storm she’d been stopped midway through the process of casting off her human skin and becoming her animal self—positioned herself just in front of her, held up her little claws for a moment, put them down, looked left and right, and spoke.
“Now all to the southeast, northwest, northeast, southeast, attend,” she chanted in her throaty whine. “All above, below, and in the center attend. Now all before us, all after us, and all now, attend, attend.”
There was silence on the platform and then a significant sound. It was almost imperceptible against the noises from the panic below us. But the bloods next to me heard it with their professional ears, and I heard it, and Koh heard it.
One of the Pumas on the far left of the line hadn’t given up his atlatl, his spearthrower—he must have been hiding it in his manta—and he nocked a short poison dart into it, as though he was going to launch it at her. Or maybe he was trying to get one of us to launch a spear at him so that a fight would start. That was always a problem with these people. They’d prefer to be killed than be taken captive. At any rate, with a quick shift of position, the bloods on both sides of me were suddenly aiming their javelins at him and about to launch them. But Koh shrugged—it was our equivalent of holding up a “wait” finger—and they didn’t fire.
And neither did the Puma blood. Koh stood for a moment, not looking at him and not speaking, daring him to throw the dart.
I don’t know whether she felt any fear, but she knew that if you showed any fear you were done for. Anyway, she didn’t budge.
Five beats went by, and then ten. Finally the Puma blood—well, he didn’t quite lower the dart, but he relaxed, or shifted his body in a way that you could tell he wasn’t about to throw it.
Koh spoke. Her voice was low, cold, and heraldic. You could just tell it was her, but it was different from any of the voices she’d used before. She used an ancient sacerdotal form of Teotihuacano, and I only picked up about every third word. But of course, I got a translation later:
“You on a level with us, but divested
Of maces, of javelins,
Pumas, all cowed on your citadel,
Now overmastered, surrounded,
You within range of our javelins,
Holding your suicide razors,
Now our ahau, our sun-swallowing eel,
Our jade-feathered Star Rattler
Speaks through the Ahau-na Koh of the Orb Weavers,
Koh of the Auras.
She on a level with him comes to speak with the Puma,
The Warlord.”
There was a pause. The Pumas shuffled a bit.
One of the elder Pumas stepped forward, agonizingly slowly. He walked in halt-steps, that is, with the left foot never stepping forward of the right one, which meant that he wasn’t yet her bound captive and so he wasn’t in a hurry. He wore an orange full-face mask and a gigantically swollen full-length red feather cape. So this would be the symposiarch of the synod, I guessed.
“I on a level with Ahau-na Koh, I may call him, or not,” he said.
Koh didn’t answer. The Puppy Woman, who was maybe a bit hyperactive, shifted from foot to foot. After ten more beats he made a hand sign behind his back and the crowd of elder Pumas parted in the middle and edged away from the doors of the teocalli.
The four doors led straight back to four long temple cellae, a tripartite sky cave that supposedly mirrored the underground one directly below it. I couldn’t see much of them from where I was cowering, but I could see that the left-hand chamber, the northernmost, was mosaicked or paneled with mother-of-pearl. The right chamber was lined with light-green jade, and the middle one was all polished pyrite. The rooms seemed to be filled with people, but a little later it turned out that most of the figures inside were mummies. Four attendants carried the living god out of the central chamber. Turd Curl sat, cross-legged but leaning back against puma-skin cushions, in a small covered palanquin. He was covered with red-orange feathers and an orange feather mask. The only visible parts of his body were skeletal hands painted with red cinnabar and a section of shriveled leg above his right ankle. He looked . . . well, he looked like a dying god, one who was even more powerful for being close to death. And he didn’t look like a benign one either. If they’d sent me to deal with him I’d already be banging my forehead on the flagstones and mumbling, “I beg you to make my execution mercifully swift, O Great One.”
They stopped just ten arms from her. They didn’t set him down, although that would have brought his eye level closer to hers, which should have been the protocol. Koh simply ignored the insult.
“You on a level with me, will you accept a yellow rope?” Koh asked.
“I next to you speak for Hurricane,” he said. His voice was like the sound of some engine down in a mine. “When he returns from hunting, soon, what then?”
“On that sun all of you next to me will reseat your line,” Koh said. “On that sun Star Rattler’s brood will nest far away.”
Basically, what Turd Curl was saying was that Hurricane, the Old Man of the Storm, was just taking a little vacation, and that was why Star Rattler had taken over the day. In other words, he was spinning it like his own god had planned this all along. What Koh had said, basically, was that at a date in the near future—to be negotiated shortly—she would release Turd Curl and the rest of the captives, and she and her followers would be on their way to somewhere else.
There was another pause. As usual, my twenty-first-century side scoffed a bit. What a load of gilded hooey. All these poor people were fighting and screaming and getting incinerated below us, and we still had the time to go through this whole elaborate protocol. On the other hand, my gone-native side realized that people don’t just
do
their stupid rituals. They
are
their stupid rituals. If we didn’t go through the correct motions, nothing would really have happened.
And I have to say, Koh was keeping her head in a tense situation. We were still vastly outnumbered, in the middle of a bunch of people who really hated us. If they got their act together, they could take us apart. If the fire didn’t get us all first.
Finally there was something like a silent vote, and the Puma elders threw down their obsidian suicide knives. As they broke on the shell floor they made humble little shattering sounds, like Christmas ornaments falling off a tree. Maybe it was just fatalism. Maybe even most of the Pumas believed that this was all supposed to happen, that everything the greathousers did was inevitable, and that they had a new master.
Two of the top Gila bloods tied a yellow rope around Turd Curl’s chest, the symbol of a hostage that may either be killed or might still be exchanged. They carried him to the lip of the stairs and exhibited him to the Pumas down below.
Two of Koh’s men dragged a discarded megaphone to the lip of the platform. They held the Penguin Woman up to the mouthpiece. When she spoke through it, her little singsong voice came out huge and inhuman:
“You underneath us, you Swallowtails, Pumas,
In range of our javelins . . .”
She ordered the Puma bloods to stop where they were. If they advanced even one step farther up the mul, she said, we would begin killing the hostages and tossing the bones of their ancestors off the sanctuary.
The sounds of combat below faded. A few battered-looking Rattler bloods clambered up onto the platform. Evidently the Puma attackers were taking the whole thing seriously. A little crowd of invalids had grown around me, Gila and Rattler bloods who’d been too badly injured to do any work. Hun Xoc bustled through it and crouched down on my right.
He asked if I was all right. I said I was good but about to collapse. He said I had blood under my nose and helped me wipe it off. I asked him how strong we were. He said we’d lost eight Harpy bloods. The Gilas had lost forty-one bloods, and Koh had lost sixty. Altogether, our numbers were down by almost a third. Hell. Given what we still had to go through, that was enough to sink the whole campaign. Even aside from the human tragedy, of course. As they say.
We also now had two hundred and eighty-six hostages, including Turd Curl himself, two of his wives, six other members of the imperial family, forty-eight members of the Puma Synod, and fifty-nine generally elder Swallowtails. That wasn’t so bad. The main thing was that Severed Right Hand, the likely heir, wasn’t anywhere on the mul.
Also, 4 Sunshower was dying, Hun Xoc said. Just five steps from the top he’d been gored by a spear from the defenders. I’d missed it.
I got to my feet with a little help and staggered twenty paces east to where they’d put him. I sat down next to him. He’d gotten pale underneath his red body oil, and it gave him an odd pink shade, like dry, uncooked liver. A flint point had been driven deep into his small intestine. It would only come out in pieces, I thought. Sour-smelling gastric juice and two-thirds-processed feces were leaking out. Around here you didn’t recover from a dirty wound like that. Hell, I thought. He was a good guy. He was breathing, a little, and I put my head down and called his name in his ear, but he was already unconscious from blood loss.
I started to stand up again but couldn’t.
Koh took up a position on an upended altar stone in front of the central cella. One by one the Puma elders trooped by, and each one put something—an ear spool, a mouth comb, a hair bracelet, or whatever—down on the ground in front of her, offering her allegiance. At each gift she tapped her right hand on her left shoulder, lightly acknowledging the giver. She was still masked, but I’m sure if I could have seen her face it would have had a queenly serenity to it, as though she’d always known, since even before her birth, that this would happen.
Great, I thought, I’ve created a monster. A regular Elsa Lanchester. Take it easy with those Tesla coils, babe.
I’d never been a big believer in the Great Man school of history, but now that I was seeing history closer up, I have to say charisma does count for something. Sometimes all you have to do is just take charge. And I guess it was just as well somebody did too.
Well, so, let her have her day, I thought. Let her do her victory thing. They’re into victory around here.
Forget it, Jed, I thought. It’s not entirely our fault.

[61]

A
wave of ashes rippled over my face, and for a minute we couldn’t see a thing, and then the wind revolved and the burning city was clear again. We didn’t want this, I thought. This sort of thing happens sometimes. It had happened—would happen?—to the Xhosa, in 1856, when they burned their crops and killed their cattle and forty thousand of them starved to death. It happened in the 1890s, with the Ghost Dancers. It used to happen every year at the Rath Yatra festival at Puri in Orissa, when people would dive under the wheels of the Jagannath. It happened at Jonestown. It happened in Orlando. It happens.
But of course, it was entirely our fault. My fault.
Todo por mi culpa.
My fault, my fault.
I looked west. Down in the four hundred plazas the heat currents twisted the smoke and spark-showers into fat cables, like the gold-thread ropes on old theater curtains but the length and width of freight trains. They coiled around and up the sides of the pyramids and whipped upward at the top. One of those giant round kites floated underneath us, rolling slowly like a flaming tumbleweed. I looked south. Way out beyond the ruins of Star Rattler’s mul, you could see that the cyclones of fire were processing counterclockwise around the city, as though we were in the eye of a hurricane on the sun.