The Sacrifice Game (49 page)

( 73 )

J
aguar Night, ahau and k’alomte of the nine underwaterworlds, lounged in a high referee’s chair woven from the ribs of whale sharks. He was all gooey with baby oil and laden with bracelets and anklets of glistening human eyeballs and a belt of severed hands endlessly clasping each other. His cape was sewn of thousands of woven eyelids, their lashes rippling over the surface like a thin layer of scalloped fur, and he had barbels on his mucous-slick face, like a catfish. White chunks of raw porous bone protruded from his wrists and his brow ridge and his knees and his back, and fat round ticks and white leeches crawled over his irregularly sited pseudopods, leaving interlocking slime-trails. Blue fungi bloomed in the crevices of his groin. He was sick and decayed and in obvious pain, but in his case his condition just increased his strength, he lived on the power of his own diseases, like a sea urchin digesting the mites on its skin. Beautiful little girls and boys climbed over him, oiling him, scraping and licking his pustules. They weren’t Xibalbans. As far as I could tell, they were living humans from the middle-world. Maybe the Xibalbans snatched them every so often. Or they’d captured some a long time ago and kept them here to breed. A few of the boys and girls lay in gnawed pieces on big plates. A giant fat hairless food dog with a peg-toothy grin rolled on the amber floor, chewing a child’s ear. Four-hundred-scores of husks of lunar fanged rabbits imploded overhead and rained bloody fur like rose petals into the Domus Auria, and orange twilight filtered flickering through a lattice in the floor, the captive sun struggling in the dark below. “My greatest greatfather-greatmother,” I said.

“I know you from somewhere,” he mewed. “Somewhere later on.”

I repeated the salutation.

You don’t fool me, he said, you’re not 2 Jeweled Skull. His voice was a nonvoice, like something on an old Moog synthesizer. He peeled a dark-red strip off this little Scab Boy he had next to him—it was a kid who’d evidently been sanded down a few days ago and allowed to crust over until now—and chewed it up like a tortilla chip.

No, I said, I’m not, I thought you might want his skin so I kept it fresh for you. I didn’t think my voice sounded too convincing. Jaguar Night gestured and two of his preparators came out, carefully cut the skin’s stitches, and shucked it off me. I hung on to my last gift box. The preparators sewed 2JS’s skin onto a big howler monkey, like it was a mannequin, and let it hop around. The crowd went wild. I was naked and getting a serious case of that Maidenform-dream vulnerable feeling.

Why haven’t you brought me anything? Jaguar Night asked.

I brought you a cat and a boy, I said, and—

Where are they? he asked.

Your ambassadors ate them on the way here, I said.

I don’t believe you, he said.

I cracked open my last box, unrolled the bundle in front of me, and fanned out four hundred of the largest and most perfect whole quetzal skins. I made him an offertory gesture. It’s hard to explain how valuable those things were, but they were like Leonardo drawings. If you worked it out in terms of man-hours or whatever, what I’d brought would be worth the Ixian equivalent of between thirty and forty million 2012 dollars. Still, their main attraction wasn’t the cost. We’d chosen them because we figured they were hard to get down here, even more than fresh chewing tobacco.

One of the boys slid a plate under the green fan and climbed up to the Lord’s mangler-hand. He took one of the skins and raised it to stroke his pustulated cheek, enjoying the soft pressure of the feathers against his boils. I guessed it was okay to assume they were accepted. Meanwhile, I’d noticed the largely defleshed name-soul of 2JS seated in the row of ghouls on the reviewing stand, smirking at me. Like everyone who died and went to Xibalba, he was aging in reverse, and despite his skeletality he already looked a little younger than when I’d seen him last.

“Hmm, look who seems to be seated below the salt,” I said.

“2JS has been given the position of Chief Convivitor,” Jaguar Night said. He meant that 2JS mixed up the blood and burning turpentine they drank as toasts to each other.

“Ooh, I’m impressed,” I said. “They really gave you a platinum parachute, didn’t they? You’ve done really well for yourself. That’s like being head urinal attendant at the Wilshire Grand.”

“Laugh while you still have a trachea,” 2JS said.

“Hey, I’m going back and you’re staying here in Tabascoenemastan.”

Enough, I thought. I was being rude to my primary host. I turned back to Jaguar Night.

A question, please, I said.

He made a “whatever” gesture.

We thought you might know where Lady Koh’s uay has gotten to, I said as casually as possible.

We ate it, he said.

Nonsense, I said.

You’re right, we didn’t, he said. She stopped by, but she left two nights ago.

I need to ask her something, I said.

You should have had plenty of suns already, he said.

That’s true, I said.

All right, he said, just give us your own skin, and we’ll see you get to her.

I can’t do that, I said. I didn’t even bother to say that I needed to get back. He knew that anyway, he was just giving me a hard time.

Too late, he said.

I know you can, I said, I know how strong you next to me are.

I won’t, he said.

Then I challenge your champion to a hipball match, I said. It was my last-resort prepared sentence.

He looked at me with an eye a like plucked-out rabbit’s eye floating in a Petri dish of upscale shampoo. He sighed through his pleuroceles and, pensively, scratched his tentacles with a testic—that is, rather, he stenched his tensicles with—I mean, he tested his scratchsicles with a tenticrotch—never mind.

All right, he screaked. Then field five balls. And if you win we’ll show you the way to Lady Koh.

( 74 )

I
should have expected it, but I hadn’t negotiated the rules, and they sent four players out against me: Three Balls, a little rotten but looking tougher than ever, and my old mashed-and-charred friends from my last ball game, 15 Immanent, 20 Silence, and 9 Dog. I can’t deal with this, I thought, it’s too
Dawn of the Dead
around here, but it didn’t help. What was I thinking? I wondered. I still only had one leg and one eye, for Chrissake, I could barely play five rounds of Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots.

“Good luck. Ball One, play ball,” Jaguar Night said.

I got the face-off and hipped the ball west, but as it bounced and 3 Balls gingerly headed it off I realized I’d already screwed up, my hip was spraying blood. They’d let me get to the ball first because the ball was really a spherical knife. It was like this thing that happened to this friend of No Way’s named Cobi, he was in a fight in a school cafeteria and got hit with what they called a
ballestero,
a hard orange with a whole bunch of single-edged razor blades stuck deep in it with just their corners sticking out. It really messed him up and he had to have about a hundred stitches. Except this thing the Xibalbans had didn’t exactly have blades, it was more like a Möbius strip or a Klein bottle, where even though the surface was round it was still also a big razor-sharp knot that whirled like a Cuisinart blade. Anyway, before I’d gotten it together 3 Balls yoked the thing onto my goal-peg.

I limped back to my marker. Spine ambled out to tidy me up. “Really,” he said, “of all of us, you under me are the most nauseating.” Yeah, yeah, I signed. He dusted me off with a long-haired scalp.

The second ball came down. 9 Dog blasted it into my chest and it stuck. All four of them ran to my side, picked me up, and threw me up against the peg. My ear knocked over the dish of mica flakes and I bounced down the bank like a Gumby doll.

I won the next six balls, though, and won the match.

A cacophony of jeers all rose around me, it was just horrible, like you’d never think people could laugh that way at something so stupid except of course you can see it every day on TV on talk shows. They were gibbering so hard they were gnawing on their own arms, rolling over and down onto the court, lying on their backs and juggling me in the air and kicking me back and forth until I was ricocheting off the stone bank with steel-on-steel impact. I just took it. It certainly didn’t hurt any less than it would have in the real world. They closed around me into a spanking line and thwacked me through it with bone saw-paddles, like I was that chicken the Nephi Knights used to kick around. But I was off in the right direction.

“Hey,” I called to 2 Jeweled Skull. “Toss me another towel, will ya? I’ll schmear you a fiver next time.” I screwed a fist into my working eye and walked forward against the obsidian wind.

( 75 )

I
came to the citadel at the crossroads, in the center of the center. The northern path led down into a scabrous clotted horror-desert, past fractal fungal rock-bones impacted and twisted with projecting nodes in serried rows like sharks’ teeth. I felt my scalp peeling back and the flesh shredding off my bones. I turned left at the first new moon, 4 Motion, 7 Thought. Days flickered by underneath me like railroad ties. Whilrlwinds of razors sanded my skeleton. Five layers of fabric parted one after the other, white porcupine quills, yellow leather, mulberry cotton, black snakeskin, and gold-green feathers, and I was through, and I thought I saw someone up ahead, and I saw that what was going to happen on the last day wasn’t going to be a natural disaster, or any known type of man-made disaster, that it meant something but something totally new . . . but then it was gone, and then the floor, or what I was visualizing as the floor, must have just rotted underneath me, because I was lying covered with dirt. I was dirt myself. I must have been decomposing for years, I thought, but when it’s years of pain you lose track fast. I felt leaf-cutter ants growing fungus farms in my adipocere. I oozed through level nine, and ten and eleven and twelve, and the Tree of Mirrors forked out into a white road, the back of the double-headed star-feathered diamondback Rattler, the Milky Way, and I slid down one arc and up another following Sun-Carrier toward the Heart of Sky. The sun crawled out of the ragged cave-mouth, exhausted and bloodless and thirsty after his escape from the dark lords, and stumbled blindly up onto the rim of the blue-green basin, blinking, looking around for prey. I backed up, scrambling down the serpent’s dry, slippery body, but I was stuck, and as I pulled I saw that the serpent was my own foot, or rather the stump under my knee, which had scaled over, and extended, and grown into a rattlesnake. The snake’s neck twisted away from me and reared up like a whip stopped in midcrack, and its vibrating head sighted on me, sensing my body heat through the pits in its cheeks, licking my sweat spray out of the air. I could see my reflection in its opaque lidless eyes. Could I really swallow myself? The snake built up the torsion to strike, its snare-drum-roll-thunder peaking to the snapping point, and with the speed of a crack traveling through a sheet of glass it lunged at my lips, hemotoxin welling out of the grooves in its fangs.

But instead of striking, it held itself still, mouth gaping. There was a wet black ball down in its salmon-pale throat. It just swallowed something, I thought, it hasn’t finished digesting its last gift. But it regurgitated the black bolus up toward me, and I saw the ball was covered with hair, it was the top of a head, and I recognized the whorl. The head turned backward and a bicolored forehead rotated toward me, and I was looking upside-down into Lady Koh’s eyes as she extruded onto the wide scale-path, naked and glistening with cosmic universal solvent and studded with diamond-patterned traceries of jade stars. Wow, I thought. I guess this really is kind of neat. Koh lowered herself up to me along her own death-umbilicus. I know she was more beautiful than ever but I can’t remember what she looked like. Just not the same.

“I wanted a separate time with you,” I said. She gave a Maya click-shrug, but it wasn’t so dismissive as it sounds, there was regret there. I think I was kind of crying, or not really of course, since it probably wasn’t even possible in my not-quite physical state, but I at least felt like crying. I’d thought I was past being too emotional but I really did get just this flood of love or whatever and it kind of freaked me out.

Koh said something like “You didn’t follow me here just to see me again.” Only, it wasn’t exactly in words that had any sound or exact shape to them, so I can’t quote it exactly.

I said I would have anyway, but that of course I wanted to ask her about the Sacrifice Game.

She either gestured or said that I could ask her.

What did you see at the hotun-end? I asked.

I couldn’t see a thing, she said.

No, I don’t understand, I said. I watched you.

It’s just too far, she said. The chance builds up.

I guess I already said the word
frustration
doesn’t have enough size on it. This was like frustration supersized, with fries, with a bullet. I kept thinking I was getting closer to it, whatever it was, and then it kept shifting shape and backing away.

I’ve got to do something, I said.

You’d have to play in your own time, she said.

I said I wouldn’t know how.

You know enough to do it, she said, just play it there, closer to the edge.

I don’t know a thing, I said, the position’s no good. Remember? The runner was trapped in the wasteland, there wasn’t any way to keep playing.

So if I show you how to win from that position, she asked, will you give me your bond that if you play in the afterworld, if what you see is wrong, and shouldn’t happen, you’ll stop?

I said of course I would.

You’ll just resign the Game and let your world run out? she asked.

“Wife-sister-father-mother-daughter,”
I said,

“Ahau-na Koh, accept your blood-twin. Please.”

Koh hesitated a moment, scooped a handful of stars up out of the road, let some slip out of her fist like corn, and cast them out over the world, the real world, which was now her board. It wasn’t like a globe, it was a flat square, but somehow it also mapped the whole world correctly, and I could see other continents, southern Africa and Australia, under the swirling cloud-steam. The star-crystals bounced and landed into the final position from the City Game, and she set the Sun-Carrier as the runner, trapped in the far northwest.

“And if you see what’s going to happen,”
she said,

“And if it’s right, you’ll play it out. If not,

You’ll take the runner to the edge, and jump.”

The word she used for “right,” or rather the silent word I understood, was maybe a bit more like the English words
appropriate
or
inevitable,
but stronger than either. It wasn’t just like “Do the right thing,” it was like “Don’t mess up the program.”

I asked how I’d be able to tell what was right. She said I’d have to be the umpire on that one, and anyway, it ought to be easy. I promised again that I’d do what she said. Koh looked at me and took the four far corners of the square board, two in each hand, like the world was a map on a square of stiff cloth, and folded them up over the center. They met in the middle, making a pyramid.

“The farthest points are all the same,”
Koh said.

I felt like Immanuel Kant must have felt when he suspected how the Milky Way could be the foreshortened section of a galaxy, and suddenly the universe was bigger for him than it had ever been for anyone. Although of course that was his own idea.

So the board was a mat, a pop, and it was flexible. The mulob were the same map folded convexly into pyramids—a mountain fold, as they say in origami—and the ball courts were the same map folded concave, in a valley fold. And even the globe of the earth had something to do with the same map, twist-folded back on itself somehow, a torus mapping the inside of a sphere. I almost had a glimpse of insight into how the colors and directions and tendencies and cycles all meshed, how the Sacrifice Game wasn’t absolute but just a visualization of a subtle tendency in the universe, put in a form a human being could almost, but not quite, comprehend, like a three-dimensional model of a four-dimensional solid. It was easy to see how the Runner could escape by jumping from the corner where he was trapped. But then after that he could move off anywhere. Although I thought I saw something, not an idea but just a notion—

And then it just slipped away, like the eighth move in a chess game, it was just too much for my pea brain. I didn’t have the organizing principle, it was like I was looking at a disk sliced out of the body of a snake and trying to guess what its head looked like.

I’m not taking much back, I thought. Just one trick. One idea, as we say in chess.

“Even from here I see it only dimly,” she said. “But I see you alongside him.” Or, I should mention again at this point, Mayan is ungendered so it might have meant either him or her. “It’s someone you know, but whose face you’ve never seen.”

“I’ll try it as soon as I get back to the zeroth level,” I said.

“Don’t bother, you won’t see anything from there,” she said, “you’ll only drown yourself. Wait until you’re all the way there.” By
all the way there
she meant “then,” that is, in the last b’aktun. “A lot of things can happen from the same position,” she said, although those weren’t her exact words, which I don’t remember. Or maybe she didn’t exactly speak in words. “When you’re closer you’ll see the move you need to make. If we played now we’d be hunting in the dark.”

I said all right. It wasn’t the time to argue. I was dubious, though. Even knowing about the strategy for the move, I was a long way from feeling like I’d be able to play through and get it right. Even assuming I got back.

I’ll just have to take really good notes, I thought. Leave it to Marena. She’ll figure it out. She’ll give it to LEON.

Below us the sun bubbled up in ecstasy at the horizon apex of the mul board, bloated with offerings, glowing a bloodier-than-blood oxygenated red that was simultaneously blue-green,
yax,
the double-faced color of life, and for a p’ip’il I thought I saw Waterlily Jaguar at its center.

I asked her if she could just stay for a beat.

I can’t, she said, I have to go. If you see your Marena, would you give her a message?

What? I thought. Of course, I said.

“Just tell her not to wait until the sun’s

Last beat,”

she said.
“And ask her to calculate the remainder

of twenty minus thirteen.”

What do you mean? I thought. Seven? It can’t be that simple. “Do you—” I started to say, but she’d already slid away above me and I slipped backward down along the hard shell of the sky, rolling around it like a marble in a bowl. The sick sun slid into the black land, crashing and bleeding out as the mouth of the Earthtoad closed over it, and it was night again, and the skeleton-joint jewelscape of Xibalba rotated over me, the layers of heaven swinging underneath like giant multiple eyelids, and I clawed and scrambled at the sky shell but there was nothing to hold, it was like a water slide at one of Lindsay Warren’s old AquaParks, and as I vortexed down into the galactic sewer I know I saw something past the rim, up in the thirteenth level, some kind of a structure I recognized, but I was already in that waking-up state where you feel the dream’s sharp-carved details deliquescing into foam but you can’t do anything about it, and when they hauled me up out of the ice water I’d already forgotten. They dragged me out of the wet cave to an ember basket in the antechamber and said it was only two suns since I’d begun the vigil. I guess I must have been on dreamtime. Even so, Hun Xoc said I was pretty sick from dehydration. Eventually I looked up at him. He was in his capturing face.