In the Courts of the Sun (35 page)

TWO

The Opposite of Cinnamon

IX IN AD 664

[27]

W
e pulled the rope of thorns through our tongue, burned it, crawled out the door, took five steps, and stood at the lip of the great killing stairs. The Laughing People, the Ixians, strained up toward us and started the countdown, or rather count-up, pulsing to the numbers, spinning their featherwork parade shields from front to back so that the whole human field flashed from cold red to blue-green and back again and again.
Damn, I thought. We really had no clue.
I’d had a pretty clear idea of what the place would have looked like—and then the actual thing was so different that for a second I actually thought I was somehow in the wrong place, that the wave had missed Ix and I was in ancient Khmer, say, or Atlantis, or in the future, or on some other planet. Come on, Jed, orient yourself. That’s the cleft peak, San Enero. Except it’s all built and—damn. Things wobbled in and out of visibility through the gold whorls of offertory feathers. A domehead captive screamed somewhere below and trailed off into a kind of cackling gasp.
Holy shit, I thought. It had actually worked.
I tilted my head back and swallowed a mouthful of my own blood.
Es delicioso,
I thought, so many layered tastes, sweet-corn oil, copper, umami, seawater . . . it really is the best thing in the world, the way it shoots out of a dark-purple vein and then flashes instantly into scarlet, and then the way it slowly mellows to sienna and then skins over into black amethysts and finally puckers into those chewy nuggets that are just
packed
with tangy goodness . . .
M’AX ECHE?
Who are you?
Are you one of the four four-hundreds?
What?
Huh.
What was that?
Are you one of the thirteen? Or one of the nine?
Was that me?
Get out of my skin.
Oh, hell. I wasn’t in charge. The target had not been erased. I was trapped.
“Uuk ahau k’alomte’ yaxoc . . .”
“Overlord, greatfather,
Grandfather-grandmother—
Zeroth sun, firstborn sun . . .”
Oh, hell.
Bad break, Jedface. Wrong place, wrong time. No, right time, roughly right place, definitely wrong body.
Coño coño coñocoño
fuckedy fuckedy fuck fark fook.
“Ahau’s niche” indeed. Sure, it’s called the ahau’s niche, so naturally the ahau would be in it, right?
Malo.
Wrong.
This Chacal character is 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s replacement. Royal autosacrifice by proxy. They’re going to toss me to the human sharks, and then in a few days, 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s going to come back from the grave, or rather the kitchen, and step right back into the saddle. Damn, we were dumb. Good going, guys. You too, Jed. Serves you right for trusting them.
¡Cutre!
Jerk, fool, moron—
Hold it.
Bad luck. Do something. Assess the damage. Regroup.
Oh, shit,
Dios te salve, María, ni modos
, no way, no way.
Phalange, eyelid, sphincter, whatever. Move. Move. Move.
Oh,
chíngalo,
oh fuck, oh God, oh fuck God.
Trapped. Frozen.
Helido.
Cast in epoxy. Lucite souvenir paperweight.
Focus, I thought. Move. Concentrate. Move. Open mouth. Say it!
Nada.
Claustropanic. Holyshitholyshit.
Está chupado,
no sweat, so, let’s all just shout it out, shall we? Stand and deliver.
Everybody does it, everybody’s doin’ it, birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, let’s do it, let’s cease to exist, oh God oh God.
And give these bastards a lethal dose of R-E-S-P-, et cetera. They’ll be lining up to kiss our
culo
. Right?
No answer.
Jesu
-bloodyfucking-
cristo.
Last chance. Come on. Chacal? We’re pals, right?
¿Compadre?
Don’t do this. Listen. At least give it a hearing. Think about it. How often does this happen to someone? It’s not an event to just shrug off. No matter what these hustlers tell you, if you just give this a try they’ll all just fall into line. We can take over this whole place. Together. You and me. Chang and Eng. No sweat. Give me ten days and we’ll have those Ocelot wankers wiping our
calabazo
. Nobody’s going to think less of us. Come on. Say it. Say it.
Nothing.
Listen,
I thought hard, if you can stop just enjoying the damn moment for a second I think I can get you out of this, but you’ve got to listen to me listen listen please listen a second listen listen please—
Silence. He wasn’t buying it. It was like his concentric certainties were hugging me to death.
HEY,
I thought at him. Think. Try to understand what I’m telling you. This is
not
the center of the universe,
por el amor de Dios,
it’s just plain Central America, and if you could just let me set you straight on a couple basic things you won’t want to die anymore, I can get us out of this out we can get out get out, get, get . . .
“Four suns, then five suns . . .”
Chacal’s hearing was better than mine. It was like he could zero in on each individual voice and tell whether its owner was sick or healthy or young or old or had filed or unfiled teeth. And we could tell that each voice believed, that each one knew its presence was essential for the collective to conjure One Ocelot down from his sky cave.
“Eight suns . . .”
We were looking down. Deathward. Ropes of black rubber smoke scrolled up to us from twin-giant
incensarios
at the base of the stairs, at the eye of the vortex . . . God dog, those stairs. They were stairs that didn’t go up. Just down. According to Michael’s calculations, when someone the weight of an average Maya gent of the period—say, Chacal—took the big leap, he’d be at the bottom in about 2.9 seconds, that is, roughly the time it takes a bowling ball to roll down the alley and hit the pins, and in most cases he’d be in at least two main pieces. Yep, about a minute from now we’ll be tamale filling, our head will be a ball in the cosmic soccer game, and not only will I be
fuqueteado
but everybody in 2013, and I really mean everybody, they, too, will be
fuqueteados
—
Come on, Joaquín, just grab the wheel. Just move his mouth, just find that synapse,
push
that button,
LIF’ DAT BALE.
Come on. Wait. Did my left leg just quiver? I think so, I think so. Again.
Again.
Nothing.
A flake of skin ash scuttled across our forehead and I thought I could see Chacal’s uay, that is, his animal self, fly out ahead of us, a gray owl. There was an instant of perfect balance. All 620 ± muscles of my body were at full tension. I thought I could see where I was heading, into a rush of egoless motion, a feeling like I was a chrome flying fish leaping over a green guilloché-enamel sea, and then that I wasn’t just one fish but the whole school, and then a seawide army of them, all leaping in unison, swimming on the wind. We took a last breath.
Hell. Marena’s going to wonder what happened. She’ll think I screwed up.
Try. Again. MOVE!
Nothing.
“Wuklahun tun . . .”
“Nineteen suns . . .”
Last chance gone. Chances all used up.
Well, at least I got to see it, I thought. That’s still a lot.
Ready.
Please. One more second. Please.
My feet shifted for purchase on the stone launching pad. They found the exact spot. I lowered my bejeweled body into a feline crouch, eager to spring out over the stairs. I’d make it, I thought. I’d never be enslaved by the Night Chewers. I wouldn’t have to fight my way through the underwaterworld. The smokers would treat me as well as if I really were 9 Fanged Hummingbird himself. They’d convey me straight to the womb of the sky’s thirteenth shell, right into the fire. Finally I’d be able to rest. I would achieve oblivion.
“. . . Twenty-score twenty-score sheaves of suns,
This is the number we ask you to give to us,
One Ocelot, over us, come to us, grace us.”
Silence. Somewhere, a rock dove cooed.
This is it, I thought. Really better think of something, something clev—
A single voice spoke, somewhere behind and above me. It wasn’t a human voice. It’s a macaw, I thought. No, it’s a trained spider monkey. Or maybe it’s some kind of scraper instrument, a stone
guira
, a bone ratchet, anything but a person—but then somewhere in the sea of my new memories I knew it was human, that it was a dwarf ’s voice, magnified by a giant megaphone and distorted by splintering off the city’s thousand angled planes. It was a male, but it was above a countertenor, like the voice of Alessandro Moreschi, the Last Castrato. There was an odd blankness to it. Or maybe I should say there was a lack of doubt. It was as though the voice had never, ever been questioned. It wasn’t that it was used to commanding, but rather that it had never said anything that wasn’t an order by definition and that there had never been even a possibility in the mind of the voice’s owner that it would ever be disobeyed. And in some fold of my new brain I could feel that Chacal knew whose voice it was, and then a moment later I also knew. It was the voice of the real 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the ahau and k’alomte’ of Ix.
It said:
“Pitzom b’axb’äl!”
Which, roughly translated, meant:
“Play ball!”
That was it. Time to dive.

[28]

“
C
h’oopkintikeen k’in ox utak!”
It was me. I’d shouted it out.
I DID IT!
I thought,
I CAN OVERRIDE
C
CHACAL! YyyaaaAAAAYYYJED!!
Silence. A green jay cackled somewhere.
Okay. Get out the rest
.
Verb difference. Remember the consonant shift.
Ch’opchin
, not
ch’oopkin
. Sub in that thing they call themselves,
ajche’ej winik
. Laughing People. Breathe from the diaphragm. Go.
“Ch’oopchintikeen k’in ox utak!”
I said, trying to project without shrieking,
“I am the blinder
of the third sun hence:
Fourteenth k’atun,
on 12 Wind,
on 1 Toad,
The Northern Belcheress
will burst with ulcers
she’ll rain her blackness
on the hills, the valleys,
And only I know how to lead you through it,
You laughing people, you need—”
WA’TAL WA’TAL WA’TALWA’TALWA’TALWA’TAL!!!
STOP STOP STOP STOPSTOPSTOP!!! his mind shrieked around me. I choked up, sixty-one words before the end. Come on, damn it. Get it all out. Through the darkness, through the—
Nothing.
Mierda.
I was just barking airlessly like a lung-shot dog. A feeling, a very terrible feeling, like shame but deeper than shame, rose up around me like a tide of acid vomit. It soaked into my mind and filled me up with a single word: