The Sacrifice Game (33 page)

( 46 )

I
realized I was awake again, but there was a minute or so before I could remember where I really was, and instead I thought I was back in the hospital in K’oben, where I’d been when my parents were killed. It was all soaked with gallons of urine and just this solid despair when you don’t even know what despair is. I’ll remember that smell forever, I mean, at least once per minute between now and forever. Anyway, at some point I figured out that I wasn’t a fantasizing sick little kid anymore, I was in this really unusual situation, and I wasn’t in a cinder-block building or underground or anything, I was just bandaged over my eyes, and I was in one of an array of captive baskets set in rows like livestock pens. It was stuffy but there was a ventilating shaft overhead. At some point I realized Hun Xoc was nearby. But we just identified ourselves with the usual apologies and it’s-all-rights, and didn’t say anything else. They were hoping we’d start talking. Idiots, I thought, of course I wasn’t going to say anything. I wouldn’t say anything if we were tied up outside in the middle of a desert for a year and I was
sure
no one was listening. We worked out an alternating “beater” job position so we could keep track of time. My roughly eight-hour shifts were from what we figured was dawn to noon and then from dusk to midnight. Sometimes I got tired of counting time by Maya beats and started to do it by running through the B side of the Beatles’
Abbey Road
album over and over. It’s 19.2 minutes long and it’s so easy to hum it’s like “Happy Birthday,” you can keep time with it and still think about whatever else you want. Maybe we’d be here for years, I thought. Maybe 2JS had worked his thing out and we were just being stored until we cracked. Or didn’t. Twenty years is 547,500
Abbey Road
B sides. When it wasn’t my turn to be the clock I just drifted in and out. When you’re a bound prisoner you get to a stage where you can’t sleep, it’s just too uncomfortable, so you sleep in patches, conking out and starting awake again. At about twenty-six hours into our confinement torchlight came in from one side under my bandages and someone pulled our heads up and poured water back into our mouths. Probably the giggle water, I thought. Who cares. Anyway, we’ll get to check it out. The guard didn’t change or even loosen the bonds. Although I already felt I was sensing where the spy was, about one rope-length behind us. No matter how quiet he was being you could learn to distinguish it from the breezes outside. At thirty hours, the flies started biting. At least they stuck to my left side for some reason. Maybe it was wetter. A better spot for their eggs. At thirty-one hours in I started to smell a black tinge of
Clostridium
, the herald of gangrene, from my poisoned right foot. Great, I thought, on top of everything else. I just lay there, straining my right wrist-rope in a circular motion against its wicker cleat that, in a couple of years, might even wear it through, feeling my scabs crinkling, skin rotting, my body just turning into bits of dirt. My okay leg could feel the heat from my bad leg’s decay. I’m just a compost bin, I thought. Postconsumer. Consumed. There weren’t a lot of events. Sounds rose and fell outside, all too confused to read. They could have been a battle, a party, a herd of moose, anything. Once in a while a pair of red rats ran under the baskets. I made friends with the columns of flies and
Pediculidae
lice surveying me for development. The thing is, pure despair isn’t really that interesting to talk about. After a while, even pain gets boring. Forty-one hours into our confinement, right after my morning clock shift, the wind died down and the rot wafted up again.

“The water,”
2 Jeweled Skull’s voice said.

I contracted like a poked sea cucumber. I’d thought we were all alone in here. Guess the old guy hasn’t lost his New World ninja sneak-up skills. Oh, hi, I thought, sorry, I thought we had the flat all to ourselves.

“It sounds like you’re in trouble,” I whispered. I didn’t have any vocal cords working.

“What is it in the water?”
he asked. I felt one of those sharp fingernails gouge through my cheek, but I was getting passive about that stuff.

“I told you she was coming after you,” I said. He poked his nail farther into the back of my tongue. I guessed he was trying to say I should answer the question.

“I don’t know,” I gagged around his finger. “Is there some kind of witchcraft afoot?”

“I’m going to execute your bitch, Hun Xoc, now,” he said in Chol.

That sounds good, I said. Is that all right with you? I asked, switching to the “equals” tense Hun Xoc and I used. I heard him grunt yes. But instead 2 Jeweled Skull and someone else started untying me, probably getting me together for another visit to the dentist. I held my breath and pushed it up into my head, straining against myself, what I guess they call red-turning or “doing a raspberry” on the playground, but it was really an old torture-victim’s trick. Because it was dark I got away with it and passed satisfyingly out.

( 47 )

M
y head got half-going again as they carried me through the open alleys of the Ocelot House and out into the upper zocalo. It was already past noon. Dry-wood-and-lime-smoke hung in the still air. Burning buildings. Somehow there was a sense that the bottom had dropped out of the city. My eye was weird where the teaser had sprayed water on it, it was all jumping around and unfocused, but one of the first things I noticed was a Harpy guard crawling around on the floor, spitting and repeating the same thing over and over,
“Kot wuk, Kot wuk, Kot wuk,”
that is, “Here’s my favorite auntie, here’s my favorite auntie.”
Well, that’s a good sign, I thought. The earthstar compound was having its desired effect, at least on one person. They passed me down steep steps. There were shouts and the noise of multiple ball impacts that, from the flavor of the echoes, I could tell were coming from the Great-Hipball Court. It was nearby, but I couldn’t tell in which direction. Finally I got my eye working and I could see we were on the raised platform in front of the Council Mat House. I didn’t have a great sense of depth, and I had to keep swinging my head around to get a wider field of view, so it took me a minute to see that some kind of combat was still going on out in the yellow and red quarters. There were a few lackluster one-on-one fights nearer to us, more like street fights than warfare. We descended to the level of the temple district, down through an almost visible boundary layer into an inversion filled with the miasma of decaying bodies, a beyond-belief stench like opening up a month-dead walrus on a sunny beach and rubbing your face in its fermented gastric juices and self-digested tissues. It wasn’t just human, it was also fish decomposing in the canals, with a faint anise scent over everything else. Outside my little escort there were all kinds of people eddying around, castes and clans who would never normally be mixed together, everyone flopping and bumping, saying things that didn’t make any sense. Some of them prancing around in luxury clothing and headdresses that weren’t theirs, something you’d absolutely never do. One group of Bat House bloods was sitting in a circle, throwing thorn-spiked balls back and forth at each other and crying like little kids with temper tantrums. Maybe Koh’s buying me out, I thought. On the other hand maybe the Ocelots are buying me out.

The guards carried me past collapsed wood stands, around little fires and puddles of alcohol and vomit and through the Ocelots’ emerald-green end-zone into the main trench of the ball court. Its floor had been neutralized with a layer of thousands of pink geranium blossoms, but otherwise it was a mess, with bits of clothing and weapons and blood all over the stands and platforms. They carried me out over a lake of petals to a big Harpy trading mat that had been laid out in the center of the face-off zone. I didn’t see 2JS anywhere but from the way the attendants acted I got the sense he was behind me, watching. There were Harpy guards standing at the banks and on each end zone, but I noticed one of them was unconscious at his post and another two were nibbling on his bare feet, tearing off strips of skin and swallowing them. Looks good, I thought. Some kind of fight erupted behind me and I looked around, but it was just another Harpy blood sitting on the ground and shouting. He was all wild-eyed and foamy at the nose. He started kicking out at his brothers, who stood back and urinated all over him. The far end-zone was mainly pyramidal stacks of bodies, ready to be dealt with but not getting processed. A few were squirming but at least there were more dead ones than live ones. It was a perfect day for the horde of the flies. Some of the corpses hadn’t even been stripped of their elaborate-ass festival regalia. It was like those photos of British officers frozen in the Crimea, where they’re wearing all this fancy stuff but they’re still really messed up. Through the eastern V of the court I could see a bit of the wide steps up to the council house. It all looked like the ratty tail end of a late party, people stagger-dancing and flapping their arms. Harpies with victors’ blossoms and untended captives, bloods who had fought against each other a little while ago, were sitting motionless next to each other, staring into nearby infinity. A little Ocelot boy sat on a soldier’s dead body, pricking himself over and over on the chest with a spearhead.

Psyche, I thought. Fabulous. I’d been worried that the shit would be too diluted. Not that I was out of the frying pot yet. Trade me out, I thought, they’d better be trading me out. Come on, Koh, babe. Trade me out. A ten-man treaty party was advancing from the other side of the court, but I couldn’t make out who they were since they were all in neutral clothes. The Harpy negotiators set me in the center of the trading mat. Again. I wondered whether my stock had gone up or down and tried to check out what was on the other side, but it was just a stack of tied screenfold tribute books and another damn dish of clay tokens I couldn’t read through my one messed-up eye. I held myself up for a beat, saw that under their mantos the other traders were Rattlers’ Children, which meant they’d come from Lady Koh.

I rolled back on the down-soft fabric. A big fly, her abdomen filled with eggs, lighted on the outside corner of my sighted eye. I blinked but she wouldn’t go away. It was too likely a spot. I was too relieved to care much, though. They turned me over to a team of dressers, because I remember being in a neutral-color tent with a couple of people working on my leg while a surgeon rubbed yellow cocaine syrup into my empty eye socket. I whined a little and he gave me a ball of corn silk soaked in cocaine and morning-glory paste to chew on. I couldn’t move. Maybe it was for my own good. They really took charge of you around here. It wasn’t just that I’d been tied up half the time. It was like ninety percent of the time I was treated like a week-old baby. Or like a cow going through a packing plant. I thought about asking him to cut a chunk out of the bridge of my nose, like the Duke di Montefeltro’s, so that I could see a bit farther to the right. But I decided maybe I’d had enough folk-medical abuse for one day.

At another point, which I guess must have been later, I could tell I was lying prone on a fur pallet in a stone room. It was all blue and glowy and I wasn’t alone. There was this incredible itching in the ball of my right foot. I tried to scratch it, and my arm actually seemed to work, but I couldn’t find the foot anywhere. Eventually I felt for my penis—great, it was still around, I thought—and then followed my leg down from there with my hand. The leg ended in a crusty cauterized stump just below the knee, but as I viciously scratched the stump it felt like I was scratching my old foot again with penetrating electric fingers. Absolute bliss. I felt for the bone at the core but it had been plugged with wax.

Where’s what’s left of me? I giggled. At this rate all that’s going to come back to Marena will be a brain in a vat. If that. Vat. Bat. Vein in a brat.

I exploded into a sneezing-fit—someone must have stuck some fish-tincture up my nose, kind of like smelling salts. I rubbed my eye. Warm oily hands turned me over and held my head up toward the light. The far walls were covered with the wings of blue morpho butterflies. Lady Koh was sitting at its center, looking at me out of the heart of the cerulean bloom. She had a wooden dish on the table in front of her, and inside the dish I recognized my leg, dry-cured and dusted with cinnabar.