The Sacrifice Game (15 page)

“Of course, it’s really his advisers playing.”

“Oh?” I asked. “Who are they?”

He said they were five nine-stone players who’d worked for years for the capital’s twin synods, and who were so permanently
in camera
that nobody, not even the synodsmen themselves, knew their names. Supposedly they didn’t have tongues, and they spoke only in a house sign language, and they had white skin, like vestal virgins, and two of them were over a hundred and twenty years old.

“Well, that’s good to know,” I said. It sounded like it was just hocus-pocus.

“And they also say he’s a great
hun sujri,
” he said. Now he’s really got to be jiving me, I thought. The word literally meant “skin slougher,” or, to save syllables, let’s say “molter,” that is, a skin changer or a metamorphoser, someone whose animal uay was so unusually strong that it could transform his physical body. It especially applied to people with big-cat uays, Jaguars and Pumas. They were known for metamorphosing into cats, of course, but they also supposedly sometimes appeared as boys, as capturing-age bloods, or as old men, depending on the occasion. And the most powerful of them were always adding to their stock of new uays, human and animal.

“Which of his uays would you over me guess that he’d favor?” I asked, trying for a nonconfrontive reply. That is, what would he likely metamorphose into?

“I’d keep an eye out for snatch-bats,” Maximón said. He meant the big
camazotz
vampire bats,
Desmodus draculae,
which had a longer wingspan than any of their related species that would survive into later centuries. They were fearsome-looking suckers.

“You wouldn’t happen to know whether Severed Right Hand is planning to attack us right now, would you?” I asked.

“He has his own problems,” Maximón said, or his glyphs said. “He’ll wait to cut you off at the Río Capalapa.” His outlines seemed less distinct than ever.

Wow, I thought. How did he know that? Or, what I mean is, how did I know that? I mean, you only get out of these things what you already have in there somewhere.

Hmm. We were still four solid jornadas from the Capalapa. Send a runner back to Lady Koh? Except I don’t have any evidence. We could reroute the march west, and then go south along the Mixteco instead. But that’s a pretty big deal. Anyway, he could be wrong. That is, I could be wrong. Severed Right Hand could attack us tomorrow. Better wait and get back to her and then send out some recons and try to confirm.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’ll be all right if you hurry.” He said something else, but I couldn’t read the last four glyphs. Damn. Ashes. I rubbed my eyes but the glyphs, and Maximón, looked blurrier than before.

“Thanks.”

“
Dominos Nabisco
,”
he said, orally. Did I hear that right? I wondered. “And also with you,” I said. I started to back away from him Maya-underling style, but after only ten steps all I could see was the tip of his cigar floating in the infrareddening haze.

( 17 )

“W
e’re turning whiteward,” I signed to Hun Xoc, shielding my hands with the drape of my manto so the men wouldn’t see that I was actually the one in charge. He didn’t ask why, he just gave the order, signing over his turbaned head so that everyone could see. We marched to the crossroads and turned onto the left path.

The redirect took up about fifteen hundred beats—around twelve minutes—because we had to signal the front-runners, and then they signaled that they were coming back to show us what they insisted was a path in the right direction, although when we got to it I couldn’t see it. We marched—well, let’s say “slogged”—toward the nearest mesa of the low northern sierra. If I remembered right we were about eight thousand feet above sea level now, so up there it would be nearly nine thousand.

This had better be the right decision, I thought. What if I’m really losing it? Maybe the fact that the Maximón thing had been so realistic was something I ought to worry about. Maybe I’d gotten a whiff of psychoactives back when we were raiding the Puma’s pharmacopoeia, and they’d taken until now to kick in. Or maybe it was the neoplasm. I mean, the brain tumors that would have been seeded by the downloading. They had to be getting big enough now to start causing problems. I’d picked up roughly two sieverts of gamma radiation that had zwapped an image of my memories into Chacal’s brain fifty-one days ago. The Consciousness Transfer Protocol and the downloading routine and everything were all amazing technology, but the downsides were that there was damage to the host brain, the host spinal cord, and a few other vital areas. I figured the body I was in was good for another seven months or so, tops. Sometime around the thirteenth k’in of this uinal—in the Gregorian calendar, say, before January of 665—I’d be too unhealthy to function at all normally. Well before that time, I’d need to be signed, sealed, and entombed. And we’d just have to see whether I’d get delivered.

Well, don’t stress on it. Except should I really be taking Maximón’s advice? I mean, it was really my own advice, but if I was getting screwy . . .

Well, even so, if I’d learned one thing from these Olde Mayaland folks, it was that—well, actually, I’d learned a few things, but one of them was—it was that your brain isn’t one thing. The way they put it, you had sort of a stable of different souls. Some were human, some were animals, and some, like your
ik’ar,
your “wind,” or let’s say your breath, were practically mineral. And if you were clever, you let them talk to each other, and you made sure they all listened.

The crew and I struggled up the slope of crumbled sandstone. Finally we gave up on dignity and climbed on all fours, with our feet turned outward for extra grip. Still, I slid more than once, ripping cuts in my forearms. I kept looking around and seeing, with a reliable little chill, how small our troop looked against the cyclopean landscape. Like I said, I’d only brought twenty-two porters, four Harpy Clan bloods counting my adopting brother Hun Xoc, Six Ixian Rattler bloods, 7 Iguana—the Harpy sacrificer—and our head outrunner, 4 Screaming, with his own crew of nine, and a few other miscellaneous functionaries. It wasn’t enough to fight off even a single veintena of actual soldiers. If they found us.

The slope leveled out into a wide oval tableland that floated over the ash shroud around us, so that it felt like we were in a crater on some C-class asteroid. We posted lookouts at the rim and I marked three hundred and fifty paces to the nearer center of the oval and signed to Hun Xoc. He relayed the command to the porters and they set down their packs, put together their wooden shovels, and started digging. Hun Xoc and his two porters and I got out a forty-arm’s-length right-triangle surveyor’s cord and marked out the four smaller holes where we’d drop in the lodestones. In the twenty-first century, they’d be brazenly visible from any of Warren Communication’s microwave-sounder satellites. Before that was done, the crew hit rock, four arm-lengths down, but they changed their wood shovels for picks and kept at it. Hun Xoc, the other bloods, 7 Iguana, and I all sat on the piles of rubberized bags and watched. Greathouse bloods didn’t do dirt.

We waited. Maximón had been right about the wind. Lord Papagayo had been walking strong on the plain, but up here when you dropped dust out of your hand it fell straight down. Weird.

We’d brought six nearly identical terra-cotta round ovens, each about twenty finger-widths across. Each one was wrapped in rubberized deerskin so that it looked like a half-deflated yellow beach ball. Inside each of the vessels were two more nested terra-cotta bowls with a layer of wax between them. So each round oven had only about forty cubic inches of interior space. Still, one of these interior spaces held four duplicate screenfold books with my notes on the Game, copied, two tiny jadeite bottles of the refined tsam lic compounds, toads and other critters mummified six different ways, and two folded miniature feather-cloth Game boards, all packed in expensive Cholulan rock salt. I hoped it would give Marena and company enough information to stave off Armageddon. Still, I couldn’t just slack off. Even if they got the package—well, I was pretty sure they’d get it, but let’s say even after they got it—there’d be a chance that without the sort of specialized knowledge and skills I was picking up from Koh, they wouldn’t be able to use the Game effectively enough to stop all potential doomsters. If we wanted to be closer to certain, I’d have to get my working brain back, with all its precious cargo. Or most of it.

The other five round ovens held various counterfeit versions of the stuff, convincing enough, I hoped, to satisfy any treasure hunters who might get the gossip.

After four hundred times four hundred beats I strolled over and looked in. They’d gotten down another two arm-lengths. Good enough. We started them on the second hole, one rope-length—about twenty-one feet—west of this one. Again, we sat and watched. Armadillo Shit picked fleas out of my hair. The flint pick heads struck showerlets of sparks on the bedrock. Hun Xoc told them to speed it up.

He’s right, I thought. They’re working hard, but they don’t seem eager to finish.

They know.

Well, it can’t be helped.

After another hundred-score beats they’d finished fifteen holes. Enough to fill the Albert Hall, I thought. All right already. I signed to 7 Iguana to get ready, and he opened his pack and took out a short muffled mace, like a ball-peen hammer with its head wrapped in rubber tape.

( 18 )

W
e buried the rest of them, raked over the scars, and spread gravel and cinders over them as realistically as we could in the half-light. I didn’t even tell Hun Xoc which of the vessels was the important one, although he might have been able to guess from the pattern of the other nine holes. Each of these—the smaller holes—received a heavy rubberized deer-hide sack the size of a bowling-ball bag. Five of the bags were full of very ordinary rocks in a big wad of wax. The other four, the ones forming a perfect two-rope-length cross with the primary vessel at the center, were full of chunks of meteoric magnetite, which I’d bought thirty-one days ago at the fetish market in Teotihuacán, at a cost equal to about fifty good adolescent male slaves. The magnetite was also, of course, in a big wad of wax. I figured it was probably overkill, but why cut corners on your signature project? As the men filled in the holes I rotated them around a bit, hoping they’d get confused. Not that it would matter unless we got stopped unexpectedly—

Bdrdrdrdroododoodoot.
We all froze.

A pygmy-owl hoot. Also just detectably artificial. It was the outrunners. Seventy beats later a silhouette materialized on the north ridge and held his hands over his head, palms down, signing “No danger, but wait.” A hundred and thirty beats later—a Maya beat was a little shorter than a second, so say about two minutes—4 Screaming, our chief outrunner, was standing next to us. His rubber-soled-sandaled feet hadn’t made even a slight crunch on the cinders and packed gravel. His name was 4 Screaming, but despite his name, he was silent and permanently furtive, and like all the outrunners—actually they were called
k’antatalob,
“sniffers,” because around here you usually smelled your enemies before you could see them—he was long-legged and wiry, with pocked skin smeared with deer feces.

“No Pumas,” he signed, “but there are tracks half a day north, and in Coixtlahuaca we counted about twice four hundred skinless bodies.” The Pumas—who’d been the leading war lineage of Teotihuacán, and whose remnants were following Severed Right Hand—routinely flayed their kills, animal and human. He started to go through the list of the towns and paths and milpas where they’d seen the biggest concentrations of corpses, but after a minute I just looked at Hun Xoc—who was senior to me and nominally the ranking captain but who was easygoing enough to be basically acting as my second-in-command—and flicked my eyes northeast. Hun Xoc signed for 4 Screaming to take his squad that way as far as possible for two-ninths of a night—about four hours—and then report back again.

4 Screaming took thirty beats to sign to his squad, and they all took off again without even asking for drinking water. God, I thought, these guys are tough as jackboots. Gluttons for punishment.

Well, good for our side. We could keep digging.

By eighty-score beats before dawn, or what would have been dawn under normal conditions, the top of the mesa looked exactly like it had when we’d gotten here. To me, anyway. To an experienced tracker, it—well, you can’t cover everything, I thought. Better to get the hell out of here even if it’s not perfect. Anyway, there was still wood ash falling. That would even it out a bit. I gave the signal for the crew to reassemble at the southeastern rim of the basin. Without being asked, thirty-eight of the men squatted in two rows of nineteen, facing northwest, toward their birthplaces. 2 Hand—another adopted son of 2 Jeweled Skull’s, who was also officially senior to me but who was increasingly acting as my third lieutenant—went down the rows, taking their offering letters. We’d burn them to Star Rattler at the next celestial date. The first one signed that he was ready and our
nacom—
our untouchable executioner—squatted behind him and hammered, or almost just tapped, once, on the back of his head, driving the occiput into the brain stem. The sound was as soft as if he was hitting balsa wood, not bone.

The porters loaded the bodies onto the empty sleds and started to pull them down the mesa. They’d be defleshed and, presumably, brought all the way with us to—well, to wherever we were going, which was a bit of a vexed issue—and then stored in the Star Rattler’s ossuary. It wouldn’t do to have any of their cranky uays hanging around here, leading some warlock or fortune-hunting wraith or whatever back up here to the basins. On either side of the trail, every so often, you could just make out one of the outrunners lurking along, making sure that none of the much-reduced crew ran off. But it didn’t look like they would. The thing was, these days, you really could get good help. Or, to be less flip, these guys counted themselves among the lucky ones. Around here, the rodent-uayed—that is, ordinary people—didn’t do much better in the afterlife than they did here on the zeroth level. Most of their multiplicitous souls would just wander around and eventually starve. After all, nobody among the living would bother to feed them, or at least not for long. These guys had guaranteed, if not lavish, support in the next levels. They wouldn’t have to be slaves to one of the Nine, or even to the Thirteen. They could relax a bit, finally, and work their way toward what everyone aspired to: oblivion. And it would take them only twenty years or so. Only the feline-uayed stuck around for any length of time—not because immortality would be fun, since it wouldn’t, especially when people on the zero level started to forget to send you blood and tobacco—offerings—but because they had a responsibility to keep an eye on the other members of the clan, living, dead, and unborn.

And besides, I thought, Koh had insisted. Right? It couldn’t be helped. Except, no. Don’t try to shift the responsibility, Jed-head. You had the witnesses iced and that’s all there is to it. And, not even very indirectly, you’ve accounted for a lot of other poor bastards over the last few few
tunob
. And, frankly, it’s started not even to bother you very much. You’re just another realpolitiker. You evil fuck.

We humped back southwest down the long grade. The porters kept begging for the honor of carrying me, or at least pulling me on a sled, but Chacal’s body had been feeling like it was getting soft—he’d been a top athlete, after all, before all the excitement started—and I insisted on marching. I wore out another pair of rubberized sandals on the scurf. That’s five so far, I thought. 4 Screaming rematerialized and he and 2 Hand and I had a quick, silent confab. He said Lady Koh and her entourage had moved six-score rope-lengths up the line already, so we adjusted our course to intersect hers, branching off our previous track onto a new route that zigzagged down out of the high ground into charred scrub and then into damper air and what you could charitably call rolling meadows. Each of the recently abandoned milpas—that is, corn-and-squash fields—had a scarecrow of sorts in the center, usually a dog skull with a ragged cape on a tall stick, with strings of bird femurs and clamshells clicking and clopping in the occasional breeze. It was as though somebody’d mandated that everyone go out of their way to make things as creepy and depressing as possible. It looked like some of the corn had been harvested, too young, but most of the pinkie-sized ears were burnt and withered on the stalks, with a few popped kernels standing out like big whiteheads. Even this far south the drought had lasted fifty-six days so far—since the eruption of San Martín—and everything had burned as fast as Chinese dead money. It seemed like even the rocks burned. We’d seen villagers spreading the fires around their houses, torching their own granaries and huts with their wives and children screaming inside them.

It wasn’t logical, but the average Mesoamerican still seemed to think that the world needed some help ending itself, and there’d been a thousand orgies of self-immolation all the way from the Sonoran Desert to what would be Costa Rica. We’d seen whole families staked out alive on the ground for the insects and vampire bats, kids peeling strips of loose arm skin off exhausted but conscious oldsters and eating it like it was Fruit Roll-Ups, mothers killing their toddlers by forcing pink-hot pebbles down their throats, a thousand things you wish you could unsee. And by now, except for the animals on the run, there was basically nothing left. Fuck Severed Right Hand, I thought. He won’t be able to feed his troops around here. Ten more days and he’ll lose interest. Why was he so determined? It can’t be because of the tsam lic. According to Koh’s informers he had his own sun-adders and they were rebuilding the pharmacopeia in Choula.

There’s got to be something else going on that I don’t know about. Maybe I should confront Koh about it? Except, in general around here you didn’t get very far with direct questions. Just watch her, I thought. Watch and deduce. Then when she gets the people to wherever they’re going—hmm. Well, I needed to get back to Ix for my last act. That is, the entombment. But the refugees—well, even if the Maya lowland zones hadn’t been agriculturally exhausted yet, the way they would be in two hundred years, there still wouldn’t be enough unclaimed farmland in Ix’s orbit. If they could even learn how to do that kind of bog-reclamation planting, which I doubted they would. People don’t learn. Lately, Lady Koh had been saying that the Rattler had shown her the site of a new city, in the coastal flats on the farthest marches of the Harpy Clan’s red territory—that is, somewhere on the Quintana Roo coast. The current deal was that 2 Jeweled Skull would provide an escort for safe conduct to the site and give her lineage the area in perpetuity. But it sounded vague to me. And most of these people wouldn’t get nearly that far anyway. We had food for another forty days or so, but once we were into the dry season, it was . . . hell. It was depressing.

Don’t think about it. Anyway, you did the main thing, right? Maybe the Lodestone Cross bit was going to be enough. Maybe I’d already just become the biggest hero since Hercules. Since Jesus, for that matter. Maybe I was done here. Maybe I can just relax. Except not. Still ought to go through with the backup plan. Get back to Ix. Get the ol’ memories back to Marena. Do the full meal deal.

The light faded to a more delicate shade of scab. 4 Screaming’s second-in-command came up and signed that they’d sniffed a large crowd of strangers to the northeast. They couldn’t tell yet if they were the Teotihuacanian soldiers, but we picked up speed. They asked to carry me again and I said no. Oddly, despite everything, I felt pretty good.

At the end of this Grandfather Heat’s youth—about ten
A.M.
—the breeze shifted up and we smelled our caravan. It was basically that same aroma as when a really hard-core homeless person shuffles onto the subway and everybody risks a ticket to cross between the moving cars rather than stay even fifteen beats in the presence of the indescribable hell stench. But what was odd about it now was that to me, coming in from the cold as it were, it smelled reassuring, or even pleasant, like home. I guess it really is all context. Hun Xoc touched my arm and pointed ahead at ten o’clock. At first I couldn’t see anything and then I made out a human figure against the brown sky, levitating two rope-lengths over the scrub. As we got closer I could see it was a lookout, or as I’ve said, a sniff-out, one of our shortest, scrawniest, and sharpest-eyed bloods, wobbling in a sort of a crow’s-nest on the top of a tower woven of weeping bamboo. It looked so flimsy you wouldn’t think it could support a squirrel. He signed down to us that things were clear. Another came into view behind him, and then another and another, so that as we got close to our line of march there was a whole troop of them, like a thin reflection of the dust-wreathed caravan below. You could squint and just imagine that it was a camel train on the Silk Road, headed toward Samarkand. Nights in the Garden of Allah. Song of the Sheikh. Midnight at the Oasis. Ah, zee Englishwoman is a thoroughbred which no man has yet dared to ride. Bring her to my tents, Hasan. Have zee serving girls anoint her with essences of oud and Ubar and drape her in the finest Murshidabadian silks and suchlike. I will school her in the ways of the Rif.
Blue heaven, and you, and I, and sand, kissing the moonlit sky . . . the desert breeze, whisp’ring a lullaby . . .

I was used to it by now, but I suppose to the twenty-first-century eye one of the odder things about this place—I mean Mesoamerica, or for that matter the entire New World—was that everything was single file. Even if you had a hundred thousand people on the move, there were never even two of them abreast. The thin human snake just slid on forever, curving over both horizons. 2 Hand—Hun Xoc’s younger brother and, unofficially, something like my second mate—came out with a veintena of men to meet us and said that the number of Koh’s followers had gone up by a fifth—again—just while we were away, so despite our adjustments we’d still come in about four thousand marchers behind the great woman and her entourage. 2 Hand called her “the Elderess,” which made me wonder whether he was starting to believe some of her hype. Bad sign. We cut through the line and jogged ahead on its southern side, with what they called the Iguana River, a sad yellow trickle at the low point of the long Nochixtlán Valley, on our right hand. It was light enough to see faces now, although today’s sun wouldn’t show itself. I passed—or to be socially correct I should say “my bearer, my scarefly, my weapons valet, my faithful fellator Armadillo Shit,” and I passed—a delicate-looking fourteen-year-oldish girl who was pulling her family’s big ratty old travois single-handedly, or I guess I should say single-headedly, since it was drawn by a tumpline that cut deep into her forehead. There was a mole a half inch below the right of her hornet-stung lips, just like the one on, hmm, some actress, who was it—oh, yeah, Claudine Auger, the girl who played Domino in
Thunderball
. Her mother and sisters were walking in front of her, and her father, a brother, and four other male relatives sat in the sled, taking it easy. Patriarchal fucks, I thought, although I should mention that the four male relatives were deceased, just masked mummy bundles sitting as stiffly upright as Quaker ministers, so they were probably pretty light. But then there were also three big hearthstones on the sled, and one of those big wooden Teotihuacanian host statues, the kind that have all the little statues inside them, and a bunch of other bundles that I guessed were just more garbage, and I was on the verge of going up and shaking the paterfamilias and screaming, “You
fuck,
first, you get out and pull the sled, and second, you toss those dead guys and the other crap right
now
and fill up every waterskin you’ve got, and beg, borrow, or steal as much rock salt as you can
possibly
drag, and then
maybe
you all have a chance of lasting another twenty days, you FUCKHEAD,” but of course you’d have to tell everybody the same thing and the important thing was to keep a low profile and get yourself and the tsam lic critters back to Ix, and anyway you couldn’t argue with these people. Or any people. Then there were three loners, each dragging a fresh or—let’s say “still unprepared”—corpse. There just weren’t enough defleshers to go around, even though they were working day and night, stuffed with extra rations and sitting in unaccustomed luxury on special sleds as they picked over the bodies with their inch-long fingernails. And they were hurrying. It was lousy mojo—obviously—if the dogs got any of you, but even so a big scurfy pack of them seemed to be making its whole living following the catafalques. When the bones finally dried out, an engraver would carve their owners new names—that is, their postholocaust, Koh-given names—into the ulnas and tibias. Although you’d think there wouldn’t be time for such niceties. But even with fire, starvation, bandits, disease, and troops of more novel apocalyptic horsemen, everybody found the leisure to give themselves new names, brands, tattoos, tooth decor, and whatever else. Craziness.