The Sacrifice Game (41 page)

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W
hen the nacom reached the lower apron of the adoratory, I stepped back into the shelter of its mouth, just behind a wide brazier. The attendants laid the kid down on the plain stone table. The nacom bent over him, purified the boy and then his long-handled flint knife with his cigar, slit the kid’s stomach horizontally with a single motion, palmed a smaller knife, reached in and up, worked for a moment inside the abdominal cavity, severing the heart from the aorta and vena cavae—and then pulled out the little red muscle. An attendant held up a dish. The nacom
set the heart in the dish, slit it longitudinally, opened it up like a book, and studied it. He turned upstage to me, let an attendant wipe the blood off his arms, and then signaled that the signs were good. I signed the go-ahead, and the attendant ran up past me and tipped the heart into the brazier. I listened to it sizzle and breathed in the sausagey smoke. The different sections of the crowd-orchestras reacted, hitting high notes of relief on a long, slow melody that overlaid the bass line, while the kid’s body rolled down the stairs to the holy chefs. One down, I thought.

The kid had behaved really well and didn’t even seem drugged. It reflected well on the Snufflers. And on me, too, I supposed. Sometimes you’d be happier if you could get your captive to scream, because you just wanted to humiliate him, but a lot of the time you’d be happy if the victim took it like a mensch, since you wanted to show how hard you were by capturing somebody that tough in the first place. This was more in the second category. Also, there were some occasions when you wanted your adders to divine from their screams, but at a time like this if they freaked out it would just help spoil the invocation.

The Macaw Clan’s oblationers unwrapped their gift. It was a little boy on his first public-name-date anniversary, which meant he was nearly four years old. They led him to the base and the invisibles mimed hoisting him up to me on his flowery-strung blue ribbon, actually lifting him up, placing him on each step, and lifting him onto the next. The Macaw boy wasn’t too heavily drugged, either, and by the third step you could see that he really was terrified, he’d realized in some way what was actually going on, and he slid into something between a whimper and a screech.

I guess all this is going to make me completely unsympathetic. Right? I’d made my peace with what was going to happen earlier, when I was going through the wedding rehearsals with Koh’s stand-ins—but I suppose I was still just a fuck to go along with it. Of course, I didn’t see any other way. I was just following orders.

And remember, this was a big ceremony and we still only did nine or ten people, which isn’t exactly a holocaust, right? I mean, it’s not great, but at least we didn’t do those big wholesale blowout sacrifices like the Aztecs supposedly did later. They’d go through ten times that many people on just a regular day, probably before breakfast. Although on the other hand, I’d recommend getting captured by the Aztecs, instead of the Maya. Since we—I mean the Maya—were a lot more creative torture-wise. At least the Aztecs just killed you.

And anyway, consider the context, right? We—I mean we like us Ixob dudes again—we were emulating God by being as mean as possible. God obviously enjoys killing little kids, right? At least we didn’t pretend that God
doesn’t
enjoy torturing innocent people, or pretend not to notice.

And anyway, I did feel queasy, I did feel sorry. But where do I get off mentioning it anyway? Sorry doesn’t muck the custard.

Down in the zocalo my own Harpy clan was unswaddling their gift. It was a former foster brother of all of theirs, now disinherited: 18 Jog, 2 Jeweled Skull’s favorite nephew. He’d been sewn into the 2 Jeweled Skull costume from the masque, but he wasn’t the one who’d actually danced 2 Jeweled Skull. We hadn’t trusted him to go through the motions. I focused across the plaza at the central room of the Council House, where 2 Jeweled Skull was being forced to watch from his cage, but it was too dark in there to see him.

The invisibles stripped off 18 Jog’s regalia and unwrapped his team of five dwarves. They were so fattened they looked table-ready, like kids in turkey costumes in a school Thanksgiving play. But they weren’t official sacrifices, either, and weren’t going into the communion pot. They were just there because 18 Jog was still a greathouse, captive or not, and still deserved attendants to keep him amused on the road out of this level. Dwarves always work. The invisibles led them up, 18 Jog walking stiffly—he was twenty-three solar years old and, from what I could tell, not so quick or forceful as his famous uncle—and the dwarves followed, struggling up the high steps, trailing veils of tinkling laughter from the crowds. To me they didn’t look very aesthetic, more like Grock, Loopy, Scuzzy, Sullen, and Retarded, only without the beards, but really they were matched and trained and must have cost a lot. Anyway the audience had been waiting for a finale.

They came to the threshold. 18 Jog just stood there like Jesus until they stretched him over the table. I could hear a couple of his joints popping. Maybe Koh’s people wanted to make him scream. But really it wasn’t a good idea. Anyway since he was a full-blood captive there wasn’t much chance of it. At most you’d get a little unconscious vocalization at the instant of death.

The nacom purified 18 Jog’s face and chest. I walked forward, let the nacom blow smoke over my halberd, and set its central hooked blade on 18 Jog’s neck.

Now, as you probably noticed, so far I hadn’t done any of the actual killing myself. In general you didn’t want to get that close to the death-breath. So you let the professional sacred outcastes take care of it. You really just wanted the recipient—Ocelot, in this instance—to give you the credit. It’s like you want to throw the party, but you don’t want to have to cook everything yourself and hand-feed it to your guests. But in this one case I was expected to do a few little things, although I’d still let the nacom
give the coup de grâce. It was okay partly because 18 Jog wasn’t a captive I’d taken with my own hands. It was like how when you were hunting it wasn’t cool to eat anything you’d bagged yourself.

I held 18 Jog’s forehead with my left hand, turned his head toward me, made an incision under the earlobe, found the condyle of the mandible, and severed it from the temporomandibular ligament. I turned to the other cheek, did the same thing, handed my long-handled knife to one of the ordinands, pushed 18 Jog’s forehead back so he couldn’t bite me, hooked my right thumb around his lower incisors, and pulled off his jaw. A little sun-shower of blood spattered down around me and saliva sprayed up out of the ducts. I held the jaw up and whirled it around four times. The tongue was still flapping and trailing pink drool. I tossed it down the stairs. The ordinands stood up 18 Jog to show him to the crowd, teasingly tilting him back and forth on the lip of the precipice. He tried to launch himself over but they kept catching him. The crowd went wild and a few sections lost control of the chant. I wasn’t feeling good about the whole thing, but I’ve got to admit—just to get rid of any vestige of sympathy you may have for me—that at the same time I couldn’t help not quite laughing but at least being aware of how ridiculous 18 Jog looked at that moment, with his front teeth sticking down into nothing and his big head wagging around on its little neck. A jawless person is just really, really funny-looking. They handed me my knife, turned him back upstage to me, and I cut into his abdomen longitudinally above the navel. He had abs, not a six-pack or anything, but still abs, so it wasn’t an easy cut, but I got through it in one motion. I got a little dizzy for a beat, maybe from stage fright or conflicting motives or something but maybe more just from the feeling of parting that thickness. Cutting into living flesh is like that feeling of spooning into something soft that keeps its shape, like pudding or cheesecake, and taking out a smooth half-oval. There’s some basic fascination in creating that hollow area. Maybe surgeons feel that all the time. Still, I got it back together, handed off my knife, reached in and up with both arms, and tore through the diaphragm with my nails.
This little curtain of flesh,
I thought. I found the heart, and held it for a beat. I guess it’s obvious that it must be an odd feeling to hold a still-beating heart in your hands, but it’s hard for me to say exactly why. I guess you could get a sense of it by holding a bird and thinking about crushing it to death. It’s got that same incredible power at the vanishing point of the lines of repulsion and fascination.

For some reason I looked at 18 Jog’s face and his eyes contacted mine. He didn’t seem angry or panicked or anything, he just had that swooning relaxed look you get when pain goes over the edge.

The heart wasn’t what we were after in this particular procedure. It would go into a special giant batch of
atole
later on. I let go of it kind of reluctantly, twisted my hands down and behind it, and found the liver.

It’s a heavy, fragile, floppy organ, but I found and cut the vena cava and the portal vein, got both big lobes out—along with the gallbladder—and plopped them into the dish. An acolyte wiped my hands with palm oil. I took the dish, turned, and walked up into the sanctuary. It was darker inside now but there were still flares burning and a single feline acolyte crouching in the back next to the heirophant’s casket. I set the basin down on the old great-mat. The acolyte lifted the old man’s torso. He looked at me and then bent down over the liver to inspect it. I came forward and watched. He turned it over. It seemed like a big, healthy, blood-rich sucker, but then he reached into the fissure between the left and quadrate lobes, and pointed to a smelly little abscessed necrosis, like a popped tube of anchovy paste. He looked at me.

“All right for now, but not for later,” he rasped. Or, well, his voice was a little thinner and finer than a rasp. “He sanded”? “He emeryboarded?” “He nailfiled?” Anyway, I knew I wouldn’t get any more out of him. He was set on being difficult. I thanked him, did my little obeisance, and walked out back to the threshold.

“Kimak-kimak,”
I said.
“All’s good to swim,

Forward, four times four hundred solar years.”

The crowd answered with a din like a giant cave full of sea lions. Just to show off, the ordinands released 18 Jog and let him stand on his own for a beat. He just stood there for five beats. His chest and legs were solid red but he was still alive. Finally he tried to take a step toward me but tilted forward, and just as he was about to fall into my arms the acolytes caught him and held him while the nacom expertly sawed the rest of his head off his body and handed it to a preparator-acolyte for wrapping. There was almost no blood from the neck. The ordinands released the body again and the nacom nudged it downstage, over the lip of the saw-stairs. It tumbled over and down almost noiselessly. The crowds went silent for a beat and then slid back into a softer, more awed-sounding cycle of the chant. I felt this wave of protectiveness of them, and I could feel how grateful they all were, love and relief rising off them like heat waves. Sacrifice can create this incredible bond, maybe the strongest bond you can have with more than one other person at a time. And especially with throngs of people you haven’t met. There’s this community epiphany, you get a rush of shared exaltation of surviving on together. You know so clearly you’ve all felt the same thing and lived through the same little terror, it’s like you’ve just had sex with everyone there.

They rolled the next batch of sacrifices down the stairs alive, just to get the party mood going again, first Loopy, then Retarded, and then Jock, Sullen, and Scuzzy all at once. Since the atole was finished it was all right to pollute the stairs with inferior blood. They bounced over and down and around and around, glortching and squealing, their movements defining five separate arcs from living to dead. To the audience—I almost said “to my family”—it was pretty much the funniest thing in the world. Great sense of humor, guys, I thought. I shoulda brung some tapes of
The Benny Hill Show.

An acolyte tapped the platform next to my foot. I turned. He was offering me a regulation-size ball, freshly wrapped out of white rubber ribbon. Its glyphs said 18 Jog’s head was inside, just in case there was any doubt. I took the ball and held it over my head. I could feel the inrush of breath underneath me. I threw it down the steps. It bounced higher and higher as it fell lower, finally arcing high into the crowd, and then bobbing from one lucky person to another as they hipped it back and forth across the square.

Pitzom pay-ee,
I thought. Let the Game Begin. I signed for Koh’s escort to bring her out. The hissing rose up again from Star Rattler’s mul. The snake poured down her steps again. The crowd below scattered aside. The mul’s temple doorway, recently resculpted as Star Rattler’s giant mouth, vomit-birthed a big blue egg-box and flicked its rattle against it. The egg exploded and Koh emerged headfirst, like a baby, in a cowl of metallic green beetle shells sewn in a celestial map onto a manto pieced from the skins of four hundred black iguanas.