The Sacrifice Game (37 page)

We could hear sounds of a crowd outside, families from our dependent clans who’d heard about the procession over the bridge and had followed and been allowed onto the peninsula. It sounded like it was mainly kids asking for handouts. The guards had orders to keep them quiet but to hand out honey tamales to everyone, and then to everyone again and again. So the throng would probably triple by the end of the meal. Some of the cantor’s apprentices were addressing the crowd, repeating his version of what was happening in the forbidden court.

Each set of parents sat and saluted the Toastmaster again, one by one and in order. 14 Black Gila ordered his servitors
to bring in the marriage table. It was large and low, like a Japanese tea table, newly built for this occasion and scheduled to be destroyed immediately afterward. Waiters brought out miniature canoes full of fresh water and poured them into tripedal basins.

“Now take the basin, wash each other’s mouth,

Each other’s hands,”
the cantor said,
“and taste,

But not too greedily, not to excess.”

Oh, please, I thought. Enough with Big Nanny. But of course I did exactly as he said.

( 52 )

T
hat was basically what I did here now, go along with things. Uncomplainingly. The head brewer set a huge tub of balche
in the center, bristling with long drinking reeds, and all of us—I mean all the men—crowded around and sucked the pot down to the bottom, like the visual cliché of a nineteen-fifties teenage couple drinking out of the same milkshake with two straws. A pourer refilled the pot with a weaker dilution and the women did the same. Next they handed me a pot of smoking tubes, thin reeds filled with ground tobacco and orchid aromatics, and a stack of tube-rest dishes, like ashtrays. I wobbled up, put the pot under my right arm, and passed them out to the men in order, starting with 1 Gila, handing the tube from my left hand to the recipient’s right hand, like it was a spear. Next I handed out the ashtrays, from my right hand to their left ones this time, like they were shields. I sat down and we puffed as the food came in. It had all been transported here from the Harpy House, right behind the gifts, in big braziers.

The first dish was a roast giant peccary ornamented with arching bay branches, a gift from my father to Koh’s father. They went through the whole presentation and acceptance thing. 1 Gila sent it back to his storehouse, presumably for later consumption. The next dish was a roast stag, with the same garnish, a gift from my father to the toastmaster. Nobody ate any of that either. On The Left gave it a puff of blessing smoke and sent it off to his house. Finally they brought in the real dinner, all in individual casseroles, one of each item for each guest serving the flesh foods clockwise. There was kind of a choked disturbance at the far end of the room, near the screen, and for a beat I thought the Snuffler Clan really had gotten someone in here to bust up the party, but as I stood up I could see the head bearer had whopped one of his underlings. The servers had to carry the dishes in the palms of their hands, never by the rims, no matter how hot they were, and the guy who was on the floor and crawling out of the room had evidently gotten his thumb in the gravy. I reminded myself to tell Hun Xoc—who was acting as my first lieutenant—not to let them kill him.

Everyone ate pretty discreetly, almost furtively, in a way. Like On The Left said, it wasn’t good to make noise or seem to be eating too greedily. Certainly we all had better table manners than most people in, say, the U.S. in the early twenty-first century, although that’s not saying a lot. We also had to keep quiet while Koh’s mother and so-called father asked the toastmaster to explain our marital duties to us, and then we all had to listen to his speech. It went on forever in spite of Koh’s instructions to cut it short. Come on, come on, I thought, it was nearly noon and there was much more serious stuff to take care of, even before the end of the sun. And then we still had to get everybody ready and announce the human-piece version of the Sacrifice Game. It was going to be a long day’s journey into night.

Back on Meet Your Ex-Leg day, Koh’d said that the hundred and twenty days I would spend recovering from my poison-illness and various “sacred wounds” was just enough time for her to make me into a nine-stone adder. She’d asked me about the visions I’d had, that is, the dreams, and she’d interpreted them and said I was on the right track. And she’d taught me the necessary things about the basic Sacrifice Game, all the things my mother never taught me, things that had taken six hundred years to forget, how to count without looking at the pieces, how to read ahead without looking at the board, how to count yourself down into a divination state without using any drugs, how to listen to your blood and feel its lightning striking different parts of your body, how to lay your body out over the board and the world so that the lightning would really mean something, a location, a time, an event. She said I’d been good when she played the first Game with me and now I was getting great, that I was a natural even though I was learning so late, all that stuff. But she also said she didn’t think I’d ever get more than a few k’atunob
ahead. “You have to have it pressed into your skull when it’s still forming, like your forehead-board,” she said. She’d had Lady Creosote Bush sit with me and teach me when Koh was away. CB was her superior in the Orb Weaver Sorority and a higher nine-skull adder than Koh, although I suspected not so naturally talented. She was eighty-four solar years old, certainly the oldest person I’d run into around here, and she’d witnessed the great city-wide version of the Sacrifice Game they played at Teotihuacán in 604, sixty years ago.

We were going to try to duplicate it here in Ix. The human game would need at least two hundred trained adders. We’d requisitioned two hundred and forty from the towns in Ix’s orbit, and another fifty-one had come, as gifts, from other city-states as far away as Motul. Most of them would be only at the one- or two-stone level but a few would be more advanced. Most of them wouldn’t survive.

I was relieved, of course—well,
relieved
seems like a weak word—that Koh was alive and in charge. But I was still totally dependent on her for the success of my ultimate goal, and I didn’t want to blow it. It seemed that she’d been working on the Game, learning how to dose the scorpion drugs and everything, but she certainly hadn’t shown me anything about that level of it and hadn’t even hinted at what sort of move would get us past the next cycle. I was still pretty nervous about the whole thing. It was getting late in the trip and I still hadn’t learned anything about what was going to happen in 2012. And what made my position even more touchy was that before he was recaptured, 2 Jeweled Skull had supposedly killed the remaining Scorpion-Puma adders, the ones Koh had traded for me. So Koh—and possibly Lady Creosote Bush—were the only people in Ix who could still play the nine-stone version of the Sacrifice Game. Any other players of her level anywhere in the area would be with the old Ocelots, allied with Severed Right Hand, and totally out to get us. Koh said she was going to support my project and make sure I was entombed correctly. But she wasn’t going to tell me anything about the highest level of the Game until after we were married. And I hadn’t been in a position to object. So despite things seemingly going my way at the moment, I was still feeling some random perturbation. Calmate, Jedderina, I thought. Prenez une gélule de chill.

The toastmaster finished and we heard the rataplan of five kinds of popcorn in the courtyard outside, meaning we were getting to the wind-up phase, which wasn’t exactly dessert but was more like snack foods. Koh and I didn’t eat anything anyway, we spent the whole time serving each other’s families, which in our exalted case didn’t mean running around replacing cups but redundantly badgering the servants to do it. There were nine kinds of starchy-liquid drinks to keep track of, thick manioc beer, goo drinks made of tiny mucilaginous salvia seeds like thin Jell-O, soured
posolli
dough like sickroom gruel, corn mush like Cream of Wheat flavored with cacao butter and colored with cinnamony
Tagetes lucida
marigold pollen, all these things that I guess sound gross but actually you get into them after a little while. It’s reassuring stuff. Soul food. For the last course the mixers I’d just given them formed up around the table and poured the achiote-dyed chocolate back and forth, over and over, raising high blood-red froth heads, sprinkling a few drops each time to each of the four directions. The women couldn’t drink the chocolate either. Not fair, I thought—

A little death-scream came from behind the blue featherwork screen at the far end. I jumped up. There was a shout from a guard:

“Ch’aatol!”

Assassin.

( 53 )

T
he feather screen had canted over but the Rattler guards had already converged on the sound, closing off the view. The toastmaster stopped his spiel. Hun Xoc got to me and he made me sit down, his mock hand pressing dryly on my shoulder. I sat. I caught Koh’s eyes. Ignore them, they said. She gestured to the toastmaster to go on and he started again. She looked back down at her dish in that demure bridal way. I listened. One of the girls was still making noise but it seemed like the guards were already calming down after the first shock. Someone had made his way in and nearly gotten to the main wedding party, which wasn’t good. They probably weren’t assassins, though. More likely just outcasts who’d been liquored up and sent in to slow us down.

I looked around the table. Some of the celebrants looked uncomfortable, but they did the right thing, which was the cool thing, which was to go on with what they were doing like nothing was out of the ordinary. I could hear more screaming outside. One of Koh’s men was already whispering to her, telling her what had happened. I made what-the-hell-is-going-on? gestures behind my back until one of the guards got into whispering position behind my shoulder.

“Yellows,” he said, meaning the Snuffler Clan. I clicked “Understood” and asked if anyone had been hurt in here. He said he didn’t know, but that the intruder had been taken. I looked back at Koh, but she wouldn’t look at me. It’s getting too late in the day to deal with this, I thought. Had she left enough time for everything? It’s frustrating when there’s just no way you can ask.

Finally, by the time the speech ended, everything had quieted down, inside and outside. Well, that was efficient, I thought. Shrugged that one off pretty fast. Part of the job. No sweat. I could still hear my heart beating, but I hoped nobody else could. I knew Koh and Hun Xoc could see my nostrils flaring, but they wouldn’t hold it against me. They knew I’d brought twenty-first-century cowardice along with me, and by now they thought of it as one of my charming flaws. I caught Koh’s eyes again. She didn’t look worried. The servers cleared the dishes and table and took them out to the bonfire. We all drank and smoked again, and washed our hands again, and Koh and I stood up. On The Left signed for us to stand together and we walked tentatively toward each other like two red-footed boobies gearing up for a mating dance. He stood behind us and tied the long corner of Koh’s embroidered half-cape to the tail of my huipil. He held up a plate of tiny milk-white honey tamales. Koh picked one up. I picked one up. She fed hers to me. I fed mine to her. That was it. The guests stood up and we all trooped out, still in order, out the little throat-door. The courtyard and walls were crawling with Rattler guards. Someone had definitely tried something, but this wasn’t the time to ask about it. We all paraded sunward around the serving room under an arch and into another larger courtyard, covering what had been a whole section of the second council zocalo. Its new walls were festooned with orchid-strings and the floor was invisible under drifts of pink geranium petals. At the far end the freshly built windowless bridal house looked like a pink sugar cube with a door in it. The sky overhead was settling into that too-blue afternoon color. We led the procession as slowly as possible to the door, kicking up little pink dust-devils. Koh stooped through the entrance cloths first. I followed. My valet, dresser, hairdresser, and flautist followed me in. Koh’s maid, dresser, hairdresser, and head vocalist followed her in. Finally On The Left stooped through the door, stood in front of it with his legs apart and his arms on his staff, and watched.

The house had two rooms. The first was just a cubical chamber with a tiny oculus and a brazier in each corner casting mottled red ember-light over walls encrusted with stars of red conch shells. There was a high raised sleeping shelf in the back with four big bat-skin cushions and four hammocks. In the center there was a low stone altar table and a small hearth with a little white-jade corn-grinding stone and cylindrical
metate
. The second room was a sweathouse, opening off to the right. It didn’t have any furniture, just mats and jars and a hearth in the center. I was feeling a little twitchy and getting an exuberant erection. The musicians had come into the courtyard outside. They slowed the downbeat to one out of four and took the drone chord up a third. Koh led her three attendants into the sweathouse and strewed geranium and bay-tree leaves over the floor while the girls poured resined water over the hot stones. My attendants unplugged my jewelry, unwound all my stuff, and untied my leg, storing it all on a wicker mannequin. The four women crouched out of the steaming door, their clothes dripping, and I crouched in. My valet undressed and followed me. I sat and sweated for four hundred beats. My hairdresser undid the big football of female hair from the top of my head. It was hard to sit still. I looked down at my tattooed glans poking out of the foreskin like the head of a killer whale through an ice floe. Whoa, that’s really something, I thought. I guess it sounds like I’m bragging. But it was Chacal’s body. My valet scraped me down. Since this morning I’d already developed another coat of sweat-goo. But it was cleaner goo. Finally they moved me back out into the main room and stood me up, balancing me on my meat leg. Cool air whisked over me. Koh was standing next to the sleeping shelf, facing me and Flipper the Self-Willed Dick. My dresser rubbed male-manatee oil into me and dusted me with metallic-green beetle-shell flakes. I watched the maids peel off Koh’s last layer of fabric. Her body was proportioned differently from the western canon, maybe something like one of Maillol’s young nudes. Or of course you can see a bit of the feeling of it in Classic Maya statues, like there’s a figurine of a weaving woman from Jaina Island—which was a sort of Isle of the Dead off the Yucatán, like the San Michele in Venice—in the Griffin collection at the Princeton Art Museum that has that same boneless strength. Koh was a bit taller and more willowy than the average Maya, and it made me feel a little runtish. I’d thought it was because she had Teotihuacanob ancestors but now I guessed it might be related to her polydactylity thing, chromosomal trisomy 13 or whatever it was. She had two smaller vestigial nipples, each about four finger-widths below her regular ones, and two more little moles each three finger-widths below those, each set of three strung on a subtle hint of a seam like the lateral lines on a fish. The dark patch on the right side of her face continued down her neck and over her right clavicle, slanting left over her left breast, leaving her stomach and hips light, and then looped back around over her right thigh and slanted left again, leaving her right leg light to just above her knee and throwing her entire left leg into darkness. On her right side the three dark nipples popped out of the light ground. It was like she was a spiral-extruded soft ice cream cone imperfectly dipped in chocolate coating. I guess it sounds maybe grotesque but it was incredibly beautiful, with her perfect wide face and perfectly rounded limbs. Her genitals appeared to be normal, although of course they were hairless like most Maya’s, with chocolate-dark labia peering out of her light pubis. Her dressers started oiling her with a mixture presumably from a female manatee.

The servants weren’t eyeballing us in the face, of course, but they were watching our every move to see whether we needed anything. Still, we were both so used to them and so dismissive of them as people that there was still a certain sense of privacy in the small room even though there were eleven people in it. Actually, On The Left was the only one here who made me feel a little uncomfortable. But he hadn’t moved from his post in front of the doorway and wasn’t going to. My flute player eased into a little rambling Lester Youngish solo theme I’d sort of written to go along with the sort of sad march they were playing outside, nothing that would make it sound like jazz or anything, but still a super novelty. I could see a little bit of surprise and maybe interest behind Koh’s blankness. Probably more about the music than about me.

Koh let them dust her. She moved to the sleeping shelf. She had a sort of geisha grace, but the style was less twitchy, without that white-silk stiffness. There was more flow, more gravity, I guess less yang and more yin. I’d only rarely seen any twenty-first-century Indians moving that way, like my mother, a little bit, when she was sewing. Maybe it was a little like Javanese ballet movement, but without the sort of apologetic gestures. But really, it’s silly to compare it to anything else, it was its own thing. Come here, my little Frigid Queen, I thought. Koh’s singer started improvising a listlike erotic prayer to my Mayaland swing theme. On The Left shifted as though he was about to say something, but didn’t. His deal was just to sit here and witness for both families that we didn’t pull any last-minute substitutions or anything. With royal marriages everyone really wanted to make sure of what they were getting.

They lifted me onto the shelf. Koh’s dresser fanned her. My dresser fanned me. Koh kneed over to me. I balanced myself while my valet held my knee stump. Her maid took my bursting penis and guided it clinico-choreographically into Koh. The instant I was enveloped by that ridged cylindrical tongue, what self-control I had over whatever aphrodisiac had been in that damn tamale just evaporated. My hips jerked back and forth involuntarily and I was basically just fucking away, which I guess is at least a good way to break the ice. Koh reciprocated. There was a lot of pressure and speed down there but I was still surprised that Koh had an orgasm almost immediately. She stifled it a bit but there wasn’t any doubt. It was like a teenager’s orgasm. First sex all over again. Koh had had plenty of sexy fun with her maids and women-in-waiting or whatever in the Star Rattler Society, but not with any men. So I guess maybe it was the novelty. Although it wasn’t a whole Buster Hymen thing. Virginity wasn’t such a big deal at this level, somebody as major as she was didn’t have to prove anything.

There was definitely something drive-in-movieish about it for me, though. Like I guess if you’re a guy, especially, and if you grew up dealing with primitive, superstitious peoples, like say the middle class in the U.S. in the 1970s, you might have been making out with someone and for whatever reason this person didn’t want to slide for home. So you staggered back home or out to the car or whatever and started masturbating and your testicles were so swollen like two Jiffy Pop bags, pebbles of cum overflowing and backing all the way up into your ductus deferens, so that it actually took minutes of near-pain to get into org-mode, and then when you got over the hump you just exploded in a total agony that submerged any more delicate pleasure sensations you might have gotten but which knocked you into such a long slide of incredible release—as you lay aching and groaning in this rain of semen—that you still might give quite a bit to reexperience that intensity. So, yeah, anyway, this was like that. When I could hear again, On The Left was giving the scene his little “well done” blessing. He left. The servants poured balche over the four pots of embers in the corners of the room and left, too, tying the door behind them. We had about nineteen minutes, which we had to spend together to keep our putative child from being polluted by Koh’s looking at any other person. I wondered whether I really would get her pregnant. It was an odd idea for me. Except if I had a kid with Koh it wouldn’t take after me anyway. It would be like Chacal. And of course, even if Koh and I didn’t conceive, she’d either have a kid with someone else or just commission one secretly and pretend it was hers.

Koh sort of slid out from under me and I sank prone on the olingo-skin cushions and looked at her. We were more or less in bed together and more or less alone in the twilight steam.

She started giggling and tied my hair back out of my face. As a rule, I can’t say the Maya were very cuddly, but there was definitely affection there. Although she didn’t seem into oral stuff. We messed around a little more and I was trying to get her to come again when she said she appreciated how I had a lot of different ideas but she thought she still basically preferred sex with women. She lay back and played with my penis, pulling the foreskin over it and then pushing it back. She said it reminded her of the ovipositor of one of her wasps because of the way it was striped. I bent down and tried kissing her again but it just wasn’t one of her tropes of demonstrating affection. Mouths around here were more for biting and chewing and getting yours near someone was like an attack. I said it was like when she’d put the drugs into my mouth seventy-four suns ago, but she still wasn’t into it. Cuddling was different too. I’d see something as a sexual preliminary and she would see it as juvenilizing. Like the way some people like baby talk and some people can’t stand it. I stroked her, though, from one nipple down to the next and back up the other side, over and over and as lightly as possible so that I was really just gliding over her almost nonexistent body hair, and she did like that. She sat up and started checking out my stump. I blew air over her to cool her.