The Sacrifice Game (48 page)

( 71 )

M
ask handed me a greenstone hipball. I bounced it off my hip and it struck the pillar. The sparks lit everything with outer-space relief, for less time than an electronic camera flash but still long enough to see a piece of almost everything, the edge of the big white phallic stalagmite boss, like a natural stele, Hun Xoc’s wet, startled face, strings and nodes of desiccated offerings draping over bulbous rocks like the single endless skeleton of a legged snake that trailed off into drifts of tortoises and barracudas. The bones got older and crustier, until I realized they weren’t all just offerings, that we were on a bed of petrified sea creatures, and that the gravel under my feet was bits of sea-lilies and anemones and crinoid stems and shark teeth cast in lost-stone thousands of millennia ago. I could see down the long slope in front of us, to where the fossils smoothed into fine lunar sand, and then the waveless shore and the black still lake, and then out and beyond that, just nothing, no cave walls that I could see, no horizon, just what looked like veils of dark matter, graphite dust shrouding an old helium star. The sound lagged behind the light and when it welled up it wasn’t sharp like glass on stone, it was a low D-note that drifted up through our feet and into our heads and then broke into the hollow voices of fused quartz clusters,
brool tuun tob, broo toon lob,
reverbing away like vibraphone tubes the size of blue whales.

I swung again, much harder, and I nearly jumped or rather hopped, it was like I’d dropped a shipping container of lead ore into a water drum the size of a grain elevator, but I got it together and finished the phrase with two more cracks lower down. Like Mask had said, the melody came out, that interrogatory theme without a reply. So far. It was like the stone organ was naturally tuned to a five-note scale. I was shivering a little at the end, no matter what I told myself I couldn’t help feeling I was stirring up larger sounds somewhere else, it was all just that impending Doric strapping-on-the-armor feeling. We waited but the sound didn’t end, multivalent echoes came back upside down and self-amplifying cobalt-purple waves reverberated through the Toad’s sinuses and it was just really bumming me out, actually, and then I realized Mask was chanting again:

“We are the white snake wriggling in the swampfire,

We are the red snake throbbing in the fart place . . .”

It was like a whisper gallery down here, all he had to do was speak normally and it came back like Paul Robeson singing Odin.

“He dives into our fathermother’s womb,

Accept him into your own hall, your court,

Your root, your time, your garden, your own skin—”

I walked forward with my hand on Hun Xoc’s shoulder. My meat toe felt glacial water and recoiled. I could sense it was flowing west. They laid my mat and I sat down, my bags of offerings at my sides. Behind me the Adders had gotten the doped-up jaguar and the fourteen-year-old blood out of their swaddles and were trying to revive them. I just sat and looked out over the water. My mental color-wheel had shifted again, past the normal spectrum into other wavelengths where I could see an extra band of heat past infrared and two of ultra-ultra-ultraviolets, which is the definition of something indescribable, I guess, since each different color is something more irreducibly different from any other than any other two things are different from each other. I could see new veins in the rocks and clouds of fear rising off the attendants. I could see infection smoldering in Hun Xoc’s pruned arms and EEG fields rippling around his brain. I could see the pressure of the air on the stone like electric potentials, with the zero lines running between them like cell membranes. The water in the lake glowed bee-purple with radioactive alum. I forgot who I was for a while and then remembered—not that the knowledge of who I was turned out to be very comforting—and wondered if they’d overdone it, maybe there was a plot to assassinate me and they’d given me too much on purpose. No, no no, I thought. Forget it. Paranoia’s normal. You always go through this stage when the shit starts really kicking in. I couldn’t get my head totally around the notion, though. Still, nowhere else to go but stay. You can do it. Wait it out.
Oh, when the shit—

Starts kicking in—

Oh-when-the-shit

Starts

Kiiiiiii—cking in . . .

On one level I was aware that behind me they were purifying the two offerings, killing them, and laying them out, but it all seemed like it was happening in some other time, on video, maybe. I felt a sear of pain in my groin. Alligator Root had gotten a bone spike and bladder and was injecting me with a solution of Lady Koh’s blood so that I’d be able to find her. Mask of Jaguar Night and Alligator Root touched me silently on the chest. Hun Xoc’s hands opened my offering-box of fifty-two of my best mountain cigars and lit one for me. Pineapple light flooded the shore and vanished. Hun Xoc touched me on the breast with his forehead and the entire team hurried off, crimson footsteps skritching away on the tactile trail, leaving the dead boy and the cat behind me. I blew a puff of smoke out over the lake.

Of course, I couldn’t see anything but the little dying sun at the end of my cigar, but I felt I could feel everything, the thousands of tons of pressure through the stone above me, the temperature of the water (six degrees Celsius), the magma oozing through the veins of the old volcano behind us, the layers of lithospheres and asthenospheres and mantles of silicates and molten iron and nickel down 3,180 miles to the crystal toad-stone at the earth’s core.

I waited and waited and shifted my half-leg and waited some more. 2 Jeweled Skull’s skin tightened over me, merging with mine. I could still hear the ringing of the stone bells, maybe just in my mind but I thought also in my ears. I finished the cigar and fanned the last wisp out across the water. I took a jade ball out of my offering bag and put it in my mouth. It was like I was hatching this egg, and then the earth’s mouth was incubating us, and the other layers were brooding over the earth. Eventually even the warmth from the bodies behind me and from the coals in my fire bag died away and I was sitting utterly alone in the scaleless phosphor-blue void. I felt tectonic plates drifting over Earthtoad’s back like barnacled scabs on a humpback whale and listened to her swallowing her own shed rot, grinding up pustules of fungus into oil and alkalines and bases and reeking clouds of methane and husbanding four billion different food-chain cycles of birth and decay just to vary its diet. And again I caught myself thinking I was a toad myself. There really was something in this stuff, I don’t know whether it was a genetic memory but it was sure some basic understanding of toadishness. I remembered how we each carried our own colony of tzam lic inside our bodies, how we knew that a dragonfly was about to swoop toward us long before it left the waterlily it was perching on, rope-lengths away, how we could know the weather months in advance so we could change the thickness of our skin and the placement of our eggs, how we knew where our mates would be, where the orgies would be scores of jornadas away, all tomorrow’s parties, the meaning of the toads’ own religion of transformation and cannibalism, how we knew where the water would be, when it would dry away, when the water would come again, when to slip into suspended animation and wait for what would be, would be, would be.
Que sera, sero
. I waited until my impatience turned into its opposite, like the waiting itself was making it happen, through suns and nights and in and out of weeks and hotunob
and eons until I knew I really was nothing, I was just delusions floating in space, and then just when I was thinking I might just about understand the meaning of eternity I smelled something, first just something and then something unpleasant. It grew into a sensation I couldn’t have imagined my little nose was strong enough to register and transmit, a primal black-and-orange STAY AWAY warning-stink of putrefaction beyond gangrene, something only a giant-beaked carrion-eating flightless diatryma bird might have breathed in through arm-long convoluted nostrils as it came over a ridge of hills and looked down at a creosote bog filled with the carcasses of giant dugong sea cows that had drowned years ago and hadn’t surfaced until today. I winced my eyes more tightly shut but I was already tasting its full spectrum through the dancing ring-bursts of my retina, bubbles in a dark sea of iridescent oil, and as I started to try to suffocate myself I sensed the tick of paddles and a long narrow shape far out on the hematite lake, approaching under the layer of mist.

( 72 )

T
here were nine Scullers in the black shell. I recognized Spine in the prow, just like his portrait glyph with his one-eyed silver vulture face and the lancet through his beak. Next there were Serpigo—a hunchback with badger claws sprouting spine-grass like a Chia Pet—and Scald, a bloated corpse with big black-steaming egg-eyes, and then Scab, with ribbons of flesh flapping over his carbuncles. Snatchbat sat on the thwart, squinting and sniffing around with his gnarly flat-nosed-face, and then there was Yaw, known in Mesoamerica as, particularly, the scourge of the lowland forests, all spider-sucked and shriveled. Sarcoma sat in the rear, covered with clusters of tumerous masslets, and then there was Scurf, not just a disembodied head now the way he was represented in codices and on monuments, but a tall full figure with the tentacled face of a star-nosed mole, and last there was the old steersman, Skitters, the fanged rabbit, so much clearer than his profile on the moon, holding the tiller. It was the whole notorious gang,
the netherworld’s bosomfoes working tooth and nail overtime in earthveins, toadcavities, chessganglions, saltklesters, underfed, nagging firenibblers knocking . . .

The boat glided up onto the beach and Spine hopped out onto the sand. I didn’t move. Behind them two canoes-full of white-faced attendants hove to on either side. Spine jumped up on me like a mongoose, grabbed the cigars with both hands, lit one with his eye, and puffed it into life through his other empty eye-socket. Scald and Serpigo had followed him out and grabbed for the cigars but he twisted around and poked them in the eyes with his toe-talons, stuffing the smokes into a sort of marsupial pouch in his distended stomach. A claw grabbed my stump and yanked me off-balance down into the lake. I’m afraid I really did scream, that time, or at least yelp. The water felt like lightbulb-glass shards suspended in boiling aspic. Someone held my head down. I hadn’t gotten a breath and swallowed all this crushed-ice sand before he pulled it out again. I started to get in a last swig of air but he stuffed me under again. I could hear them cackling at me through the water. Eventually somebody hauled me up into the boat by my goddamn breechclout and wrang it from behind, crushing one of my testicles until I could feel whatever was inside it squirting into my scrotum like caviar. Don’t worry, it’s all in your head, I thought. Monsters from the Id. No, wait, don’t think about that or they might fade. Go with it.

They tied me onto the spiked thrall-thwart and handed me a long war paddle with a sharpened blade. By the time I’d gotten it turned around and into the water they’d handed me the other seven barbed war-paddles, and I was dropping paddles in the water and trying to pick them up and they all lounged back and laughed, thwacking the paddles on my head—which struck sparks, for some reason—and pulling on 2JS’s skin, which I have to admit probably looked pretty lumpy and awful. Yaw grabbed 2JS’s penis, stretched it out like a bungee cord, and snapped it back. I yelped again. General laughter all around.

Scab climbed in with my other personal offerings and the corpse of the jaguar and the boy all burritoed up in my mat. Snatchbat poked a spiked goad into my neck and I took one long paddle and started stroking away from the shore.

No problem, I thought, I’m in.

Skitters made a quick fake-out motion and ripped into Spine’s pouch, digging the cigars out through the wound. Spine whirled and grabbed for them but Fang threw them up in the air and they all grabbed them and started frantically lighting them. The boat rocked and then capsized underneath us, but then it rolled up like a kayak and they all came up dripping, laughing until they were just collapsing with breathy piping wheezes. Snatchbat poked me again and again and faster and faster and we shot out over the frictionless clarity, out toward the center of the vast basin, leaving a stinking-yellow trail glowing in the black water.

I lost count after four hundred and ten strokes. The rest of the crew wouldn’t help at all, they were just grabbing at the boy’s body and tearing it apart while they smoked the cigars down as fast as they could. I couldn’t see anything but I could tell the current was veering to port and we were going with it.

Snatchbat jabbed me on the left side of my neck. I paddled harder but we kept drifting left. He lashed me across my eye. I started feathering and then backpaddling on the right but we just kept getting drawn counterclockwise. I looked back. Skitter wasn’t even touching the tiller now, he was just munching on one of the kid’s thumbs and peeling the skin off the jaguar I’d brought. I was about to say something like “hey, help me out here” but we were already past that moment when you realize you’re too far gone to get back in control, and it’s like you’re slipping down a toboggan run, clawing at the ice even though you know there’s just no way. We were just sliding over and around and around into the suction at the heart of the lake, and the circle narrowed and closed in and the surface of the water turned inside out and poured down into the whirlpool, and the canoe rolled over and the water poured in. The paddlers screamed as though it was a total surprise. My lungs filled up and that mind-snapping certainty that you’re dying just clicked on in me and my drowning-panic exploded into something else. It’s hard to describe but it was like the panic itself was the baseline and I was building the rest of my mind back on top of it.

The canoe righted itself and I was relieved for about a beat before I realized it was the wrong way round, we were paddling upside-down, under the water, on the thin bubble-surface of the air. Snatchbat prodded me again and I paddled automatically, wondering when I’d be dead. And then everything started to seem normal, the way anything will after a while. The deal was that Xibalba was the flip side of the world; your Xibalba-self walked upside down underneath you, sharing your shadow, your two pairs of feet meeting when you touched the surface of the earth. You can get a sense of it when you see your reflection in a pool or even in an ordinary mirror, you might be looking into your reflection’s eyes and realize that the person there isn’t quite you, not just that it’s slightly distorted but that it’s got something else on its mind, something a bit hostile or a little crazy, and when it smiles back at you, you can see it really doesn’t like you.

So I just kept stroking. It was thicker going, of course, and it was harder paddling air than water. I kept noticing how the bubbles I stirred up were different from water drops. But otherwise everything actually seemed to be going all right. Scarlatina handed me a feathered fan-paddle that worked better on air, and I took us forward and out in a widening curve. I spat up a few last air bubbles and sucked the cold water in through my alveoli. 2 Jeweled Skull’s skin acted like a wetsuit, keeping me warm. The current drew us fast forward into rapids and down a fjord between white thorny anthodites, clusters of knifelike stalagmites lit with flickering tourmaline. Everything was utterly clear, like my eye was a scanning tunneling electron binocular microscope. I guess I still knew it was in my mind, but I also knew—or at least I was certain at the time—that I was perceiving another less transient space than the world I’d come from. Not that it was anything wooshy or mystical, if anything it was less mysterious than my lives before, like I’d been staying in a dark haunted old hotel room and suddenly one of the staff just came in and turned on a ceilingful of arc lights and I could see all the electric wires powering the hologram ghosts.

We coasted down into level minus four, past shores cluttered with impaled bodies of humans and animals, white sea-maggots pouring out of their mouths like extruding blobs of mayonnaise and the staccato reports of gas-swollen stomachs popping around us, and then the dendritic copper channel narrowed, roaring through a canyon into Blood River, and spat us through an intersecting gorge into Pus River. Lymph bubbled over the gunwales but Skitters steered us down staggered cataracts into Lancet River, a wide reach of churning spines, and finally into a sluggish river of black bile, with drifting clumps of necrotic liver and gangrene slicks. For a minute I wondered whether it was something I was making up because of 2JS’s liver problem, but then I remembered, no, the hierophant had mentioned it.

Spine and Scarlatina had given up on me and taken out their paddles again, and they steered us through linked lagoons of molten ruby and gold and mercury mixing and separating in marbleized swirls and into a long, straight waterway, and we just coasted forward under crystal epidote vines arching overhead, past milpas of kidney-ore corn growing on neatly heaped bodies. Ahead of us the Halls of the Lords of the Night loomed up at the dead end of the canal like a range of karst towers over the Huang Ho Valley, but no matter how much I paddled they didn’t seem to get any larger, until after monotonous dark suns of stroking, when I was just collapsed over the thwart gasping the molasses-thick atmosphere, the temples finally rose up over us in fungally excrescent magnificence, cultivated porphyry-basalt columns and buttes of black jade erupting with boil-clusters of opal-dripping carnalite on terraces of tiled yellow crocolite in matrices of banded ironstone.

We pulled up onto a sort of ridge of ghats and the Scullers inhumanhandled me out of the canoe onto the granite, thwacking me with their paddles like multiple Charons. Crowds of Sickeners, or I guess we should more respectfully call them Xibalbans, clattered out and pressed in around us, lifting the canoe over me and shaking it. Wet gristly bones and ornate reliquaries fell around me, the boxes bursting open, spilling clouds of dyes and feather embroidery and expensive smokes. The Xibalbans grabbed them but I managed to grab the smallest box, the one for Jaguar Night, and tucked it under the skin of my groin while they were frantically lighting the cigars and smoking them down in single gigantic drags. I watched Serpigo do a fancy exhalation but then Scald closed her mouth over his snot-stringed nose, and she sucked the fumes back into his mouth and down her own throat. Flesh-stained smoke jetted out of carbonized holes in her chest. Scab and Bloody Teeth were fighting over a tied
culebra
-twist of seven lit cigars, poking for each other’s eyes with their sharp-forked tongues. Finally Bloody Teeth got possession of the bunch but Scab got hold of his arm, ground Bloody Teeth’s stub-holding hand into a pile of tumbled coals, put the smoldering hand in his mouth, took a huge drag, and farted a gigantic brown-green cloud of tar, nicotine, and burning fat. I tried not to breathe.

Ulcer grafted a big floppy skeletal of my bamboo leg and poked at me until I staggered up the ghats through the eastern gate. There was a low screech from a giant cracked flute and the Xibalbans all parted and scattered, and I walked alone into the trench of a ball court the size of all outdoors, with sloped banks cloven out of solid mesas of wave-green jade threaded with veins of cyanotrichite and olivine. As I walked toward the reviewing stand at level seven I focused on the ground, trying not to look up at the Magister Ludi, and so I couldn’t see the thousands of ghouls in the stands, but I could hear their cackling and feel their bulbous eyes on distended optic-nerve stalks, like slugs’ eyes. I stood on my marker.