The Sacrifice Game (19 page)

( 23 )

Y
ou could have individual conversations in the “smoke,” the after part of the mat circle, when you were all just hanging around, not necessarily at your own position, and it was even considered polite to doze off. Sleeping’s a big part of bonding. It’s hard to describe the cozy factor of the huge foster family and my growing place in it. The clan definined who and what you were so strongly and so completely that, as naturally as F = ma, you’d be willing to die for it in a beat. It, and not you, was you. Anyway, at the southwest end of the round room, Hun Xoc, 1 Gila, and 2 Hand were getting their knee calluses massaged and drinking out of the balche pot through long bullrush straws. On the white side, I mean, the northeast side, near the little door, the two Rattler greatmothers were still sitting bolt up on their backrests and chatting together, smoking and weaving elaborate shrouds on little hip-strap looms. Coati was stirring the fire. The emissaries had already done their big leave-taking, so they wouldn’t have to go through it again, and Zero Porcupine Clown had taken them off to their own over-storm house with a bunch of the Rattler Clan’s sex workers and gamblers, a few of whom were also trained listeners and mnemonists, just in case they said anything. Koh had told the gamblers to let them win. Most of them would escort us to Ix, but a couple of runners were going to rush back to 2JS as soon as the storm let up. I was reclining on top of my two dressers and pets, and the younger brother was rubbing oil into my feet and ankles, which were still scabby from volcanic ash. I guess maybe that sounds a little odd. But it wasn’t in a sexual way. In fact, none of us were supposed to do any sex on the trip, even though the local chicks and dicks all wanted to service us godlings, because the adders said our semen trail would make it easier for Severed Right Hand’s hit squads to track us. I was just leaning on them because they were used to it and it was cold and I was entitled to the service. There was more touching in general around here, although if you touched someone you weren’t supposed to that was it for you. Supposedly Shang emperors used to sleep on
mounds
of people. Anyway I was just calming down enough to close my eyes when Koh kneed over to me. Her big quilted turquoise-blue manto was tied a little like a giant stiff bathrobe. My dressers propped me up into a more formal attitude. Koh settled into her position on the mat and unrolled another world-map version of the Sacrifice Game board, a less elaborate traveling model. On this one the central circle represented our own army or migration or whatever, and she piled stones in it representing how many different types of people we had, 62-score full bloods, 9-score sick or wounded bloods, 410-score scouts, dressers, and calligraphers, about 700-score converted men and roughly 1,202 score converted women and children, 812-score porters, 2,108-score thralls and captives, and over 3,500-score stragglers who really didn’t have any reason to be with us. Of course, the Star Rattler societies in other cities were revitalized by Koh’s success, and they were pledging tens of thousands of new converts, but until her chickens got here she wasn’t counting them.

She subtracted stones for how many of each grade of person we were likely to lose to raids and how many to attrition and starvation. A lot of people don’t have a head for logistics, how many bowls of gruel each soldier ate per week or whatever. They want to hear how a lone hero won a whole war single-handed. Koh was the opposite. She wanted to reduce the uncertainty as much as possible before she even started to do her really serious calculations.

Koh set out carved disks representing the major cities, with a saucery green one standing in for Ix, and then started laying out glyphic stones into them. I recognized the stones that represented 2 Jeweled Skull, 9 Fanged Hummingbird, Severed Hand, 3 Talon—who was the patriarch of the shall-we-say “international” alliance of aerial clans—and our troops and followers, and a lot of the other clans, and us. But in general I could still understand only about ten percent of her visualization. Pretty soon she was using little brown seeds that represented hypotheticals, often in doubles and triples. She positioned the hit squads that were chasing us in four different possible spots. She guessed at food sources and weather along the route into Ix. And when she’d come to the end of her own knowledge she started asking me things. What did I think the other Caracara Greathouses were up to? How much has 2 Jeweled Skull asked them for help? What was his real relationship with the small Rattler Society of Ix? Why hadn’t the Ixian Rattler Feeder responded to her messages?

Why do you think the Ocelots are so confident? she whispered.

I said I guessed that actually a lot of them were terrified by the end of Teotihuacán, but that some of them were thinking they might be able to fill the gap and carry on the business of the empire with a bigger cut for themselves. They’d have to get rid of the Harpies first, though, and so they’d spent quite a bit in bribes to the supposedly neutral hipball officials, probably much more than 2JS could afford.

But 20 Blue Snail-Shit makes 2JS sound confident, too, she said.

I said maybe it was 6’s job to put a good spin on things.

Koh said she thought 2JS was pretty smart. He’d have to have something worked out, some unpleasant surprise for the Ocelots that wouldn’t depend on what we did.

I looked at her. I mean, into her eyes, which you just didn’t do. Normally her eyes—even the one surrounded by her light skin—were as cowled and tragic as if they’d been been painted by Pontormo. But now they were transparent. And they weren’t tragic. They were wary. I could tell she was thinking that 2 Jeweled Skull—in exchange for the safety of his own house—might sell her out to the Ocelots.

“2 Jeweled Skull set this up,” I said. “Your guilt is his.”

“He might deny that,” Koh said. “Now that more

Feline-clan bloods hate my house than hate his.”

If he turned you in they’d get him later anyway, I said. She didn’t answer, but from her face it seemed that she realized that was true. The Ocelots would renege. They knew he was bound up in this from the beginning and they’d never forgive him.

“And once he’s won will he need me around?” she asked.

“He’ll need the tsam lic, and a nine-skull adder,” I said.

“I’m not so sure,” she said, “he’ll get those from

9 Fanged Hummingbird, as soon as he captures him,

If he even thinks he needs the Game at all.”

Koh added two uncertainty stones to 2JS’s stack. I could feel my loyalties dividing. She must have seen it in me, because suddenly she started backtracking:

“I trust my father 2 Jeweled Skull,” she said,

“I wouldn’t plot against him, and I’m not

Positioned to; I only want to shield

Our followers, and leave them an escape

In case another city crumbles on them.”

I said I guessed that sounded like the right thing to do. Sometimes Koh’s forties-Picassoid face would seem all limpid and transparent and I’d feel all cuddly with her—not that I’d ever touched her myself or anything, but just kind of homey and peaceful—and then her face would go opaque again like that glass in Marena’s office and it was like I was alone in an observation room.

Koh unrolled what I thought was a smaller Game-mat, but it turned out to be a detailed and relatively naturalistic map of Ix. “The ball court’s isolated here,” she said, running her little finger down its trench. She was right. The whole temple district had originally been built on a hill surrounded on three sides by a shallow irregular lake, kind of like a miniature San Francisco. Since then the lake level had been raised and palace plots had been extended out into the water, so the temple district was surrounded by wide canals, like the Rialto in Venice. The temple district included the five largest of Ix’s hundred and ten muls, six hipball courts, the Ocelots’ emerald-green greathouse, the council house, and the original sacred well of the Ocelots, which was now fed by aqueducts from the surrounding mountains but was still surrounded by a garden that included a few of the original celestial poison trees. There weren’t any solid bridges on the east, north, and west, just floating pedestrian barges that could easily be moved. Even if we were armed and ready when we took our places in the stands, we’d still be in the center of the Ocelots’ ward, separated from the mainland by the mountains behind the Ocelots’ emerald-and-scarlet mul. Two hundred of us could be trapped and picked off without much trouble. I figured the odds of something unpleasant happening to us on the court, either during or right after the ball game, were at least ten to one.

So what can we do about it? I asked. Not go? Set up shop somewhere else?

No, there are other things we can do, she said. We may not be able to pull another Teotihuacán, but we can do something like it. You might have to be the one to carry some of it out, though.

¿Yo?
I thought. Little
moi
? Why me again, because I’m the odd man out anyway?

Always me, me, me.

Because you’re such a genius with the ball, she said, answering my thought.

Chacal was the genius, I said, and he’s gone. She just sat there and looked at me, like she knew I could still play as well as before. I kind of felt she was right too. Despite everything I was feeling great these days. Finally I said fine, sure, run it by me. I can deal.

She said as an antepenultimate plan she thought we might disguise me as one of the lesser-known ballplayers on the Harpy team and try to get me into the
halach pitzom,
the great-hipball game, for a couple of rounds.

“Then you could score a ring or two and win,” she said.

“The Ocelots would have to really cheat,

And might not even get away with it.”

Whoa, I thought. Hang on a beat.

I said it sounded like fun for me—my cocktail of Chacal neurotransmitters was already perking up just at the thought of my getting onto a court.

She said imagine the reaction. The fans would go wild, although she didn’t put it that way. Maybe they’d all give you some big hero thing and you’d be able to take over.

I said that sounded a little too good to be true.

Well, anyway, she said, whatever happens it would at least distract them. They’d be off their stride.

I asked for how long and she said she didn’t know.

So then what? I asked.

Then we go to the antepenultimate plan, she said. Great, I thought. The ultimate plan, as always, was just to kill ourselves as quickly as possible. All right, I thought, what’s the
pen
ultimate plan? I asked her, as whateverly as I could.

She held out her dark hand out and, slowly, turned it palm-downward. “I’ll show you,” it meant.

( 24 )

J
ust in sight of the Cloud People’s main citadel, which would be the site of Oaxaca City, there was a place I knew well, with a tree, eventually a rather famous tree, that—which? Who?—that would still be alive at the end of the last b’aktun. I led Koh’s caravan a half-jornada off the route to camp there, and she and I fasted and prepared for a session of the nine-stone Sacrifice Game. We’d agreed that I’d be the only querent, and only her dwarf and Armadillo Shit would be attending.

The big cypress wasn’t big yet. In fact, it looked less than a hundred years old, and it divided into three trunks near the base. So it wasn’t one that you’d ordinarily think of as a major branch of the Tree of Four Hundred Times Four Hundred Branches, the tree at the axis mundi that penetrated down through the hells and soared up through the holes in the centers of the thirteen skies, the tree the Teotihuacanians called the Tree of Razors and that the Motulob—the citizens of Tikal—called the Tree with the Mirror Leaves, and that, in the twenty-first century, generally gets called something like the “Maya World Tree” or even “the Mayan Yggdrasil.” But I convinced Koh that I knew what I was talking about. We started at the naming time of Lord Heat, that is, noon. Twenty arms west of the Tree there was an ancient well surrounded by a five low stone cisterns, each about two arms across. The westernmost cistern had been filled to the brim with fresh water, and Koh sat on its west side, facing east. I sat on its eastern side and, instead of presuming to make eye contact, focused on her hands. Twenty bloods, under Hun Xoc’s command, sat around us in a loose circle with about a fifty-arm radius. The sun went under a rainless cloud shelf. Her dwarf handed her a jade offering basin, with coals still smoldering in it under the ashes of offering paper, and held it up in front of her forehead to stand in for the sky.

I looked down, into the still water. Koh looked down. We nodded to our reflected souls. They nodded back, almost immediately. Koh brought the basin sharply down onto the rim of the cistern, cracking it into pieces and scattering sparks out of the cinders. Without flinching from the embers that burned her palms, she pushed everything into the water. The shards sank and the coals and ashes floated, sizzling.

“
 .
 . .” she said. That is, in the ancient language,

“Teech Aj Chak-’Ik’al la’ ulehmb’altaj ‘uyax ahal-kaab Ajaw K’iinal . . .”

“You, Hurricane, who sparked Lord Heat’s first dawning . . .”

I took over:

“
,”
I said,
“Teech kiwohk’olech la abobat-t’aantaj uxul kiimlal,”

“You over us who foreknows his final dying,”

“Teech Aj k’inich-paatom ya’ax lak . . .”

“You, sun-eyed coiler of the blue-green basin . . .”

Hmm. I paused for a second. What’s the next part again? Oh, right. I started to go on, but Koh broke in and finished the sentence herself:

“Teech uyAj ya’ax-’ot’el-pool ya’ax-tuun ch’e’e . . .”

“You, jade-skinned carver of the turquoise cistern . . .”

I snuck a glance up at the tree. Mayan languages tend to classify things more by similarity of shape or function than by differences, so that, for instance, insects, bats, and birds are all the same class—and the Maya skeleton of my borrowed brain did the same, so that the tree, which was and is, as I’ve said, a cypress, became in my sight, also, a latex tree, a calabash tree, and especially a ceiba tree,
the
ceiba tree,
ya’ax che,
Ceiba pentandra,
the kapok tree, the cotton-silk tree, the Generous Tree. It was thorny and umbrelliform, pustuled with phantom orchids sucking its red muculent sap and clouded with Cynopterus sphinx bats harvesting its scoriac nectar, and its branches spread at a curve as steep as the cissoid of Diocles. And then, without seeming to change, it was also a stone tree like a titanic stalagtite, and then it was a stratovolcano, higher than Orizaba, but, of course, upside down, with its buttress roots worming up through the thirteen shells of the sky.

“Teech te’ij acho’oh jul-che’o’ob,”
Koh went on,
“uchepiko’ob’ noj k’ahk’o’ob,”

“You, there, whose hissing javelins strike wildfires,”

“Meent utz anuhko’on wa’ye’ ti’ amosoon.”

“Deign to respond to us, here, from your whirlwind.”

She sunk her dark ring finger in the water and stirred up a cloud of asphaltic steam.

“I can smell him,” she said.

She meant 2 Jeweled Skull.

She paused. “He’s more you than you know.”

I almost broke protocol and asked her what she meant, but she’d moved on, up the trunk of our now-internalized tree, zagging and zigging through the forking branches, setting stones down so fast that sometimes she just let me guide her hand without even looking at the board. Naturally, we had a hell of an edge, since I could use my—well, let’s not be modest, I could use my encyclopedic-ass knowledge of Mesoamerican, world, and economic history to guide her. But even so, as I think I’ve touched on a few times without having the stamina to really go into, we had to deal with the cosmic frustration of not being able to see within our own event cones. That is, what would happen to me, or to Koh, or to people we could influence directly, and so on, those events were still in flux. But as we got farther into the future, paradoxically, things became clearer. So, for instance, we knew the ceremonial district of Ix would be abandoned within the next
k’atun
—the next twenty years—but we couldn’t pin the date down more closely than that. But the abandonment of Motul—Tikal—was more certain, around 949, and then we both knew and saw how Chichen would be overthrown by treachery in 1199, how the next
may
capital, Mayapán, would be destroyed by the Xiu in 1441, and then the whole world would—nearly—disappear in the plague, in 1515, nine years before Tonatiuh, that is, Sun Hair, Pedro de Alvarado, would finish it off—nearly—in 1524. The b’aktuns of slavery and pain after that were, of course, well documented, and we crawled together farther and farther out onto the thin green twig of the last possibilities, past the Disney World Horror, past Marena finding—thank God—the Lodestone Cross, and toward a very likely End of Everything, a doomster named M something, in the north, somewhere—Canada!—and then, they—yes, they, we, we stop him!, and then—

Wait.

“The one from the north is not the last,” she said. Her voice was starting to quaver from the strain.

“Not the last doomster?” I asked.

“No.” She ran out of seeds. She scattered again, and, again, climbed up past M. Again, she couldn’t see any details of the last one, the one we had to worry about. Oh, God, I thought, oh, Jesus, oh, oh, hell hell. “I can’t see him,” she said. “He’s too close to you.”

“Is it someone I know?” I asked. “Someone I may be going to know?”

“
Erer k’ani
,” she said.
Maybe
. A pearl of sweat rolled down her light cheek, over the border into the dark side of her chin, and dropped onto the white margin of the board, where it touched the rim of the cistern.

She scattered again. She shivered. She winced, brought up her dark hand, and screwed its heel into one eye and then the other, as though she’d been staring at the sun.

“
Erer k’ani
,” she said again.

Pause. Ten beats. Twenty beats.

“The Celestial Rattler has shed seven skins,” she said. “But it”—incidentally I’m using “it” as the pronoun because Mayan is ungendered—“won’t shed another until another until the birth of 4 Ahau. And with that skin, you’ll know that its two heads have parted destinies.”

Foolishly, I looked up. It was only a few four-hundred-beats after noon, and, to boot, the sky was still overcast with smoke from the wildfire, but even so I thought I could see the Rattler’s body, the Ecliptic, sidewinding across the sky’s ninth shell.

Everybody’s probably heard the folk unwisdom about how you can tell how many years old a rattlesnake is by counting its rattles. And most folks now probably know that of course this isn’t true, because although they do gain, roughly, one rattle each time they slough their skin, the little suckers don’t necessarily shed only once a year. Anyway, the
tzab
, that is, the Rattler’s rattles, were the seven stars of the Pleiades cluster. Koh meant it would gain a new rattle, a new star, just before the end date.

It sounded unlikely. From what I could recall, there were a few possible protostars in the nebulae surrounding the formation, but nothing that made astronomers think there’d be an eighth Pleiade any time soon. Or, rather, that one would have been born around, say, AD 1500, when the light that would strike the Earth in 2012 left the cluster. As to the two heads parting destines, I had no idea what she meant by that. Sometimes Star Rattler was depicted with two heads, not like that poor two-headed fer-de-lance they’d had at the Hogle Zoo, but with at one on each end. That’s the way it was on the double-headed serpent scepter, the one 9 Fanged Hummingbird carried on state occasions. Maybe she just meant there’d be a big saddle point on that day, something to make a decision about. But we knew that already. There had to be more to it than that. I started to ask her to clarify, but she waved me off. “That’s all,” she said. She stretched out her bare light arm and swept the stones off the board. Game over.

“Thanks to you over me,” I said. “And—”

“One more thing,” she said. “It’s someone you know of, but whose face you’ve never seen.”