In the Courts of the Sun (38 page)

“Who is Mickey Mouse?” 2 Jeweled Skull asked.
My heart didn’t quite skip a beat, but it did seem to contract into a tight little ball. He was speaking in English.

[31]

H
e hadn’t gotten all the vowels right, so it sounded more like “Meh-
kay
Mah-
ohs
.” But I hadn’t misheard it. Had I? No, no way. My head got weightless and then leadenly heavy.
“I underneath you answer you above me,” I said automatically. Had I said it in Ch’olan or English? Ch’olan, I think . . . damn, I’m going crazy. Okay. I’m going to speak in English. Here goes.
“Mickey Mouse is not a living creature,” I said in English. “He is a cartoon character. A drawing.”
Silence.
“Who is the ahau pop Ditz’ ni?”
What? I wondered. Oh. Okay.
“The ahau Disney died two k’atunob’ before my time,” I said. “He was the voice of Mickey Mouse.” It wasn’t easy talking to him without an honorific, so I added an “I below you say.”
“Is Mickey Mouse his uay?”
“No, Mickey is just an effigy. He’s a . . . he’s a puppet. A
b’axäl.
”
“Is Jed-
kas
your uay?” 2 Jeweled Skull asked. You wouldn’t think a voice so high, almost squeaky, could be so commanding. But
commanding
was really too weak a word. “Or is it Mickey?”
This isn’t going well, I thought.
-kas,
the suffix he’d attached to my name, meant something along the lines of “you thirteen steps beneath me.” That is, as far down the social pyramid as possible. It was the declension an ahau would use to address a domehead, that is, a barbarian, someone who wasn’t even a proper Maya enemy but just a nonperson.
“No,” I answered. “Neither of those things.”
There was a pause. How the holy bloody hell had this happened? I wondered. He can’t have just learned—
Oh, wait a second, I thought. I know how.
He must have been in there.
2 Jeweled Skull had been inside the King’s Niche with me, up there on the mul. At least for part of the time, that is, part of the eight minutes or so of the download window. And when my consciousness got zapped into Chacal’s, it must have gotten into 2 Jeweled Skull’s head too. Holy shitzus.
“What did you come to steal?” he asked.
“We don’t want to steal anything,” I said.
There was a pause. He wants me to look at him, I realized. I lifted up my head, but my new body shied away again from making eye contact—you weren’t supposed to eyeball your superiors around here—and instead I focused on the glyphs tattooed on his chest. They weren’t any I’d seen before. Some kind of secret language. He had his cigar between his thumb and forefinger, and he set it down on a little stand with a sort of backhanded grace that reminded me of something, what the hell was it . . . oh, okay, it was a Japanese waiter serving tea—I think it was at Naoe, when I was there with Sylvana—and this old guy there had done the whole thing with the whisk for us, and he’d set down the wooden ladle on the mouth of the water jar in that special way. But 2 Jeweled Skull did it with a sort of heavy, brooding, haughty quality that wasn’t at all Japanese, or Asian, or Navajo, or anything, but just totally Maya. I felt his eyes like a pair of stone blades sliding down my chest and along the veins of my arms to my quivering fingers and back up to my face, looking for tells or microexpressions that might give me away. Except if he’s got my memories inside him, why doesn’t he know everything I’m thinking? I wondered. Maybe his brain had gotten a smaller dose of me than Chacal’s had. Or maybe he was tougher than Chacal, and he’d willed it away. Come on. Think. What the fizzizuck had happened up there? Well, 2 Jeweled Skull had donated Chacal to serve as 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s proxy. Right? So at some point in the ceremony, probably as a kind of last farewell, 2 Jeweled Skull must have gone inside the King’s Niche with Chacal. So he got at least a decent-size dose of my mind. But he seems to have retained his own mind in good condition. At least he’s in control of his own body. Apparently.
Christ, what a bunch of fuckups we are. Although come to think of it, Taro had mentioned that there might be “scatter,” as he put it. Of course, I’d pretty much shrugged it off. In fact, he said they’d even thought about coding my consciousness on a wider beam and maybe hitting a lot of people. But the sanctuary on the mul was the only structure in the area they had a solid date for, and the stone walls would help contain any scatter from the EPR beam, and anyway if they’d blasted me all over the place who knew what would happen. Having a lot of Jeds and semi-Jeds running around would probably be a recipe for trouble even in the twenty-first century.
“ You came to learn how to play against the smokers,” he said. From somewhere in Chacal I knew that by the “smokers” he meant what a so-called modern Westerner might misleadingly call “the gods.” Is he talking about the Game? Got to be. Could he possibly even know how to play it? Maybe he was a sun adder. Maybe all the greathouse ajawob’ were adders to some extent. At least I’d come to the right place. Should I ask him for a Game? How about best nine out of seventeen?
“And will there be
More like you coming?”
he asked in Ixian Ch’olan.
“No. Probably no more ever.” Don’t elaborate, I thought.
You think you can
Entomb yourself
Alive,
And pickle flesh
Against thirteen
Times thirteen hundred rains.”
No, not exactly, I said—
“You plan to hold
Your body skyward
In your b’ak’tun,
In your k’atun,
Again in your
Abandoned skin.”
“Body skyward” basically meant “alive.” Around here the dead folks walked upside down, like reflections in water.
“You over me
Are in the light,”
I managed to say.
“And when we kill you,”
2 Jeweled Skull asked,
“Will your foul twin in me
Die in me too?”
What? I thought. Oh, shit. Maybe I’d better not answer that one directly.
Pause.
Suddenly, I had an idea.
“Jed?” I asked. “I’m Jed DeLanda, too, you know. You and I are like twins.”
“I am not Jed.”
Uh-oh, I thought.
“As you above—,” I started to say, but 2 Jeweled Skull’s right hand opened and rotated slightly to the left, and from Chacal I knew it was a sign for “silence,” and my mouth snapped shut with Pavlovian speed. 2 Jeweled Skull looked past me, toward the hunchback.
The guards on either side of me eased back a bit on their haunches. The hunchback waddled toward me and stopped about three arms away. He studied me. I tried not to flinch. Somewhere in Chacal I was sure I knew his name. He had little stunted talonish arms like a T. rex’s, with syndactyl fingers on his right hand, and a permanently grinning mouth with jutting upper teeth spaced nearly a tooth’s width apart from each other. It’s got to be some kind of Morquio syndrome, I thought. How old is he? He looked old, but people don’t live past forty with a case like that. Do they? Cripes, what the hell was his name? It was 10 Smoking Caterpillar, or ½ Mock Turtle, or something. Oh, okay. Got it. It’s 3 Blue Snail. He was an
ajway,
that is, sort of like a family priest, only
priest
sounds like he’s part of a big organization, and this guy was a private contractor. Maybe
shaman
’s a little closer, except that it sounds like some Siberian dude with antlers. How about
theurgist
? Or is that too fancy? No, let’s go with it. Okay. Anyway, I was pretty sure he—3 Blue Snail, the Harpy theurgist—was the owner of the tenor voice. Yeah. Definitely. I even pulled some images of him dancing around at a first-burning ceremony. At least I was starting to learn how to access Chacal’s memories. The trick seemed to be to think in Ch’olan, not the twenty-first-century variety but the current Ixian dialect, and then not to try too hard, just to let word association do the work—
3 Blue Snail set his fan of tobacco leaves down in a dish, picked up something else, stood up to his full height, and was still for a minute. No one seemed to breathe, least of all me, and I could hear the blood in my ears. I realized he was sniffing the air.
Something else is going on here, I thought. Not that I knew how these people behaved normally. But there was a definite sense that they were being cautious about something, and it was something other than me. It was like we were in someone else’s house and didn’t want to be overheard. But still, this is 2 Jeweled Skull’s
audiencia
or throne room or whatever, isn’t it? Or maybe not, maybe we’re in some sort of temporary place . . . and anyway, my showing up when I did must have thrown everybody off their game a little.
From what I could get out of Chacal’s head . . . well, it was tricky. But to oversimplify, if Ix were England in the 1450s, the Ocelots would be like the House of Lancaster. They were still in charge of everything, but they were unpopular and hemorrhaging wealth. 2JS’s Harpies would be like the House of York, who had been subordinate for a long time but were gaining strength and making noises about taking over. Then there were also three other royal houses in Ix. Two of them favored the Harpies, but the other, the Vampire Bat House, was inseparably allied with the Ocelots.
So the Ocelots are probably using the botch-up on the mul as an excuse to come after the Harpies. Okay. Use that.
3 Blue Snail turned around in place, and turned around again, whirling, I guess, but very slowly, slower than a Sufi dervish, which is pretty slow. Each time he passed one of the four directional points—that is, AITISB, northeast, southwest, and so on—he tapped once on a sort of clay drum in his left hand, using a sort of thimble on his index finger. He was listening for echoes, I guess, or rather for hostile uayob who might be spying on us, animal doppelgängers or disembodied eyes or homunculi or whatever. His eyes searched the twelve corners of the room, moving independently from each other, which was pretty disconcerting. And it didn’t seem like one was a wandering eye either. Instead it looked like he could actually control it and focus on two widely separated objects at once, like a chameleon. Finally he stopped, bent down, picked up a fresh tobacco leaf, and used it as a spoon to scoop up some kind of powder or ashes out of the dish. He threw one leaf full over his right shoulder, one over his head, behind, one over his left shoulder, and one in front. There was another pause, and then he tapped the side of his drum with a sharp wakeuppy sound. Either from Chacal, or just because it was obvious, I knew it meant we were all clear and that I was expected to look back at 2 Jeweled Skull. I managed to do it. Focus on the thing on the bridge of his nose, I thought. Not on his eyes—
“Why did you choose me and not the sky-born k’alomte’?” 2 Jeweled Skull asked, in Ixian. He meant 9 Fanged Hummingbird. 2 Jeweled Skull and his peers were ahau popob, “lords of the mat,” but, like I think I said, the k’alomte’ was more like “emperor” or “warlord.”
“We didn’t,” I said in Ixian. “We wanted—we were looking for 9 Fanged Hummingbird. It was—it was an
accident
.” I said the last word in English because there wasn’t any Ixian word for “accident,” or “chance,” or any of those things.
“Why did you choose this sun?” he asked, meaning this date.
“We chose this time because we found it in a codex . . . that is, a Game record in a screenfold book.”
Pause. He didn’t say he didn’t understand, but I had the feeling his English wasn’t quite up to code. He had to have less of me inside him than I did. If that makes any sense. Maybe he just hadn’t gotten the brain-wipe section of the program, the way Chacal had. He’s still more himself. Not that even Chacal got wiped enough, of course. And maybe he’d only gotten a tiny bit of me after that. Although even that would probably be more than enough for most people. I said the sentence over again in Ixian.
“And have you crouched beneath ahau-na Koh?” he asked.
“What? Like, have I met her?” I asked. “No, no, we just read about her in the Codex.”
Pause. I thought that next he was going to ask why we had chosen this particular city, instead of some other, but he didn’t. Maybe as far as he was concerned, Ix was the center of the universe, and no one could want to be anywhere else. What’s weird, I thought, is that he doesn’t seem too surprised by all this. Or rather he seems violated and upset, natch . . . but it felt like the idea that I came from what we’d call the future wasn’t a big deal to him. I guess around here the future was more like a place. In fact, I suppose uayob, or souls or whatever, from the future and the past turn up around here all the time—
“What will you recompense me for my ranking son?” he asked.
What? I wondered. I’m responsible for his son’s death?
Hell. That didn’t sound good.
Had they substituted 2 Jeweled Skull’s son for me on the mul? That’s got to be it. Damn. Good job, Jedediah. You’re really getting these folks to like you. Rulers do tend to be touchy about their firstborn. Do I apologize? How? “I under you don’t understand,” I said.
“You disrespect me over you,” he said.
“No, I great-respect you,” I gurgled. “I apologize, but I don’t understand.” And I really, really don’t, I thought. Fuck.
“I know things that can help us,” I said. “Two lights from now there’s going to be a firestorm in the northwest.” I switched to English. “A volcanic eruption—”
“We above you all know this already,” he said. “The Ocelots’ adders warned against it twenty lights ago. You underneath me offer nothing.”
Oh, I thought. Okay. Great. There goes my big prophet routine. So much for the Connecticut Yankee. Well, fine,
me caigo en la mar.
What else have we got to put on the table? Okay. Let’s try another prepared Contingency Speech. I said:
“I underneath you
Will pay this debt somehow,
I can build you
A puppet that throws
Giant javelins,
Hipballs that
Burst into fire,
Or perfectly
Rounded pot—”
“We over you
Do not need help
From a reeking thing,”
2 Jeweled Skull said.
Evidently I was too polluted even to deal with.
I switched to English. “I can help us defend ourselves against the Ocelots,” I said. “You can become the k’alomte’. Look in my memories. Look for ‘gunpowder. ’ We can whip some up in a few days, just dig some guano out of those caves on the north side and leach out the nitrates—”
He tilted his head in a way that shut me up before I even knew it meant “You have our permission to be silent.”
“You are talking with sand in your mouth,” he said. “The overlords of this b’ak’tun will not allow those things.”
What? I thought. Luddite alert. Wait, I started to say—
“X’imaleech t’ul k’ooch mix-b’a’al,”
he said. “ You are walking as though there is nothing in your back-rack.” It was one of those idioms you understand right away. Basically, it meant, “It seems you don’t have anything to offer.”