In the Courts of the Sun (37 page)

[30]

T
he side of the box slapped me and flipped me over. Someone held me, but not with hands. Maybe they were mittens. I felt cords being cut, but I didn’t have a chance to pick up much detail. They were too professional about it, like policemen who can have you searched, cuffed, and into the cage seat in less than ten seconds. The box coughed me out into sunlight that felt like hot oil on my skin. The air tasted weirdly sweet. I was lying prone on the flagstones. Fresh blood crackled into my cold leg and smoldered around the bedsores on my back. A pair of ducks quacked overhead. This is definitely not the eruption, I thought. My hand, or rather, that is, my right hand, found a little elongated spur on the powdery stone and I got it under my forefinger, sort of holding on to it mentally, the way I guess you do sometimes when things aren’t going right. You fasten on a random object as though it can help prove you exist. Or I do, anyway.
I’d been right that it was late afternoon, and without seeing the sun, just by feeling the low angle of the light on my side, Chacal’s sense of direction oriented itself. I was facing south. But it was a different sort of south from Jed’s south. That is, the whole sense of orientation was different. Like almost everybody in the twenty-first century I’d tended to think of north as up and south as down, and east as right and west as left, just because that’s the way they have it on most maps. But for Chacal southeast was up and northwest was down. And the whole place, that is, the world, seemed to be on a sort of incline, tilting down to the west, with—
A throaty tenor voice half sang and half snarled at me:
“Into’on ho tuulo
Ta’änik-eech . . .”
“We five address you
One below us: who
Was it who shat you out,
Who bore you, pus-man?”
The voice’s owner was about ten arms away. From the words he used I knew he was a Harpy sun adder, sort of like a family priest, and from the voice itself . . . yes, a fuzzy image of the person it came from flickered in Chacal’s memories. Somehow he was messed up, physically, although he wasn’t a dwarf . . . in fact I almost knew his revealed name, it was . . . hmm, what was it? I know I know his name—
“Offer him yellow water,
Red oil, red ale,
White water, shielding oil,
And blue-white ashes—”
It started raining. Hot rain, from all different directions. Oh, fuck, it’s urine. I instinctively contracted into a ball, with my still numb leg just a big void tingling at the edges.
There were at least four people around me, and each one was relieving himself of a prodigious amount of waste liquid. Fuck this, I thought. Damn. Water sports. They don’t mean it personally. It’s purifying. Right? Maybe.
Somebody steered his stream into my face. I thought I heard a snicker but maybe I just imagined it. Don’t get humiliated, I told myself. Anyway, what do you care? They don’t know you. Still, it’s hard to keep your equanimity when you’re . . . Jesus, how do they hold this much? Put ’em away, guys, you’ve made your point. Bastards, bastards. Wait’ll I’m in charge around here. I’ll put you on lifetime latrine duty, and that means you’ll
be
the latrine.
As is the way of things, the stuff petered out. A wave of something else hit me, cool slippery stinging stuff, some mixture of sour b’alche’—that is, lilac-tree beer, oil, and lye, with an evil-lemon smell of formic acid that, in these days before Janitor in a Drum, had to have been made out of crushed ants. The patches of raw skin on my back seemed to have caught on fire. As Jed I would have screamed like a stuck banshee, but Chacal had trained himself never to scream or squeal or even squirm. One of his earliest memories, and one of the most recurring, since it had already come up in my head more than once, was of lying naked and unoiled in high grass, letting a menagerie of insects nibble food mines in his skin, and seeing how long he could go without a twitch. I squinted harder and tried to clench my mouth around the gag but the cleanser wormed into my nostrils, and as I started to sneeze it sizzled into my throat.
“Ku’ti bin oc,”
a different voice said, in a different language from Ixian that I still seemed to understand. “Turn him over.” There was a recoil in Chacal’s nerves, as though I’d just tasted something his tongue didn’t like. Something about the voice seemed small and low-rent, like a Maya version of Timothy the Circus Mouse. I guessed it pegged its owner as a member of some sort of untouchable caste.
They flipped me over and stretched me out. Wait, I need my piece of gravel. That was my special piece of gravel. Two more sluices of the stuff came down, and then for a few beats they let me just lie there writhing and dripping on the flagstones. Someone pulled the gag wad out of my mouth and poured in some cool drinking water. Wow. An indescribable blessing. I lapped at it like a dog at a lawn sprinkler. I noticed I was being messed with, but still not by hands. They’re wearing deerskin mittens. Got to protect themselves from my uncleanness. They scraped me with what I supposed were shell strigils. They cleaned all the hard-to-reach areas, if you know what I mean. They dug what I guessed were the last flakes of sacrificial blue pigment from under my seven remaining fingernails. They rubbed, or rather Rolfed, me with some kind of oil. It had a slight fishy quality under essences of vanilla and geranium. Maybe it was from a porpoise. They oiled and brushed my hair, or what was left of it, and when their mittens touched the stump of what, before the not-quite-sacrifice, had been my queue or pigtail or whatever, another of those instinctive shame-gorges rose up in my throat. Bastards. Eventually I got dusted with something, evidently the “blue-white ashes” he’d talked about. I just lay there and let it happen, like a Linzer torte under a shower of powdered sugar. I tried to pretend I was getting a full-body treatment at Georgette Klinger at 980 Madison Avenue, but it didn’t quite take in my mind.
They tied my hands in front of me with soft rope, leaving a lot of slack on each end, and tied another rope in two loops around my chest and neck, like a dog harness. Finally they hooked me under the arms and lifted me up. As I said, Chacal’s body was used to abuse. I could feel it was strong in a different way from a modern athlete’s body, not muscle-built or stretched out by aerobics, but thickened and somehow solidified, like you couldn’t knock me over with a bus. At any rate, even after the fairly high blood loss and the days of fasting that had preceded the botched sacrifice, I, or it, didn’t quite faint. They tried to march me along, and I actually tried to help, but my leg was still out of commission and they ended up carrying me vertically, with my feet dragging on the pavement.
From the shadows I felt crossing over me, I got the impression that we’d gone through a gap in the wall of the courtyard, and then from the way we moved we went up an inclined path. There was a breeze and a sense of space that might mean we were on the west face of a hill. After sixty steps we turned right and went into shadow and up eighteen stairs into a dark corridor. We twisted through a narrow switchbacked passage. There was a strong scent of high-quality tobacco, like we were inside a giant humidor, and maybe an underscent of vanilla. We paused. There was the sound of someone holding aside something like a bead curtain and we moved forward again into a stone-cool room.
Cerise light seeped into my buried eyes. They set me down on a stone floor with something thin and soft over it. Someone tucked my legs under me and sculpted me into a proper captive’s squatting position. Everything stopped.
“He over us addresses you beneath him,” the tenor voice chanted on my left. The room had a muffled echoless quality, like a recording studio.
There was another long pregnant-with-monster-quintuplets pause. At some point maybe someone gave an order, because two hands grabbed and held my head and two more did something—oh, shit, blinding me, oh, Christ, no, wait . . . no, they were cutting through the stitches in my eyes with a tiny blade. I would have struggled, of course, but Chacal’s body didn’t move. Finally I noticed I wasn’t being held anymore and I creaked one eye open. The first thing I saw was my own hairless and unfamiliarly foreskinned genitalia hanging between my thighs.
Hmm, I thought, that’s a new one. Most twenty-first-century Maya aren’t circumcised, but I’d been born in a real hospital, where they had their own ideas. Next I noticed the big skanky cauliflowery ballplayer’s calluses on my knees and then the bloody tears dripping onto my green thighs—green?—and then an old impact scar on my iliac arch where some ball must have smashed it, and then a dark violet glyph the size of a Zippo lighter tattooed on my chest. From somewhere in Chacal I recognized the tattoo as giving my nine-skull hipball-game rank. There was something reddish all over the floor, petals of something. Geraniums. But they weren’t really red. They were something else. And my skin really did look green, and it wasn’t the oil they’d rubbed into it. The color really was different. And it wasn’t any sort of drug or the film of blood from the stitches. I’d suspected it up on the mul, but at the time I’d been pretty busy, and I guess I just shrugged it off.
Chacal’s eyes were different. The colors were not the ones I’d known as Jed. My skin wasn’t even exactly green. It was more like the false green you get by mixing yellow and black paint. But it wasn’t even quite that. The color of the carpet of wild geranium petals over the floor, which ought to have been about a deep orange, was more like a fluorescent magenta. But that isn’t quite it, either, the color I was seeing was north of that somehow . . . maybe Chacal’s colorblind, in some weird way? Except I think I’m seeing
more
colors. Maybe he’s a tetrachromat, that is, someone who can see four primary colors instead of just three. Yeah. Except supposedly the few documented cases of human tetrachromacy were all women. Huh—
Wait. Get back on track. Think about this some other time.
“2 Jeweled Skull
Addresses you
Beneath him captive.
Face him, hear him.”
It was the tenor voice. I hoisted my head and focused into the red murk.
I was in the center of a high, square room about fifteen arms on a side. The walls seemed to be glowing crimson, or rather the color that Jed would have seen as crimson. Now it was a creepy underwater-flesh blue-red-whatever. The left and right walls sloped inward at about thirty degrees, so that the wall I was facing was a high isosceles triangle with its peak about thirty arms off the floor. There didn’t seem to be any doors besides the one we’d come through, which was directly behind me. As things got clearer I could see the walls only looked lit from behind. Actually they were covered with tapestries or panels woven out of what might be the throat feathers of ruby trogons, knotted onto reed latticework, and they were reflecting indirect light that ricocheted down from a tiny oculus, burning with sunlight at the peak of the trapezoidal wall behind me.
There were six people in the room. Three of them were the guards who’d brought me in. Two crouched on either side of me, and I could feel the warmth of a third at my back. Each of them held a sort of club or mace, I guess so they could control me at more than arm’s length, and as one of the mace heads floated near my face I could see it wasn’t stone but some kind of pincushiony spiky thing. Then there was someone three arms in front of me and a bit to the left. He was a hunchback, nearly normal-sized but with a big wide head and all balled up, with a lopsided blue-striped face and a tufted conical hat that made him look like a blue macaw. I guess it sounds a little silly, but around here, or maybe in my new, preconditioned mind, it looked the opposite of silly, in fact it looked so deadly serious you could plotz.
And then, four arms directly in front of me but just now coming into visibility out of the gloom, 2 Jeweled Skull sat cross-legged on a wide double-headed jaguar bench, smoking a long green cigar through his left nostril.
His body was turned forty-five degrees away from me, and instead of looking at me he looked down at a couple of breadbox-sized dark gourds or wooden pots on the floor in front of him, each studded with green-white stones that spelled out the glyph
awal
, that is, “enemy.” He wore a sort of skirt or kilt with a wide sash that nearly reached to his sternum, and I could just see the
profil perdu
of a shrunken head, sewn by the hair to the back of the sash so that it faced away from him, watching his back, as it were, with a petulant expression. Besides jade wristlets and anklets and rawhide sandals, his only other clothing was a complicated crownless turban with an artificial vanilla orchid—made, I thought, of bleached eagle feathers—at the peak of his forehead. A green-throated hummingbird—a real, well-taxidermized one with lifelike polished-jet eyes—hovered in front of the orchid on a nearly invisible stalk, as though time had stopped just as it was about to plunge its beak into the nectary. It confused me for a second, because during training we’d been so fixated on getting my head into 9 Fanged Hummingbird, who, as you may remember, was the ahau of the ruling family, the Ocelots, and the k’alomte’. But things around here were a little more involved than that.
9 Fanged Hummingbird
was just a name, one of the k’alom’te’s many revealed and unrevealed names, and it didn’t have anything to do with his totem or uay or whatever, any more than someone named “April Fish” would have to be born in April or be a fish. So the hummingbird on 2 Jeweled Skull’s headgear didn’t mean he had anything to do with hummingbirds—although it might mean, metaphorically speaking, that people liked vanilla. And in fact, I was half remembering that vanilla beans were somehow important to the Harpy House, maybe one of the main sources of their
nouveau richesse.
Below the orchid his forehead swept down at a low angle and connected to a small wooden bridge that eliminated the indentation of his brow and brought it into line with the vulturine wedge of his nose. Spirals of blue tattooed dots scrolled up from the corners of his mouth to his blackened eyelids. In spite of his creased and sun-cured skin he didn’t seem old . . . but he was old, I knew from Chacal’s brain, at least he’d certainly had his second birth, that is, he was over fifty-two, and I thought I knew he was quite a bit older than that.
His eyes turned and looked at mine. People like to say that there’s a certain blankness to the eyes of someone who’s killed a lot of people. I don’t think it’s true. Some of the world’s most bloodthirsty cats have the most convincingly expressive eyes around. But there was a certain chill factor in there, a habitual disdain like what pigs probably see in the eyes of slaughterhouse workers, and I did get that caught-in-the-police/NewsChannel-helicopter-floodlight feeling. Automatically my eyes teared up and I blinked and looked down at the gourds on the floor. They were moving, shuffling around on little hands, and it took me a few seconds to realize that they were armadillos, each with its shell studded with azurite plugs and tethered to the floor by a ribbon through one of its ears.