In the Courts of the Sun (45 page)

cofradios
from T’ozal, the village where I grew up. Things hadn’t really changed that much, I thought, or wouldn’t. Next to him—sitting on the ground, since he didn’t rate a mat—was my, that is Chacal’s, biological father. He was a coarse-looking and surprisingly young milpero, with bad teeth and a creased brow from carrying loads with a tumpline. His wide straw hat looked beachy and almost 1960s-moderne. His name was Wak Ch’o, that is, 6 Rat, a typical peasanty roundhouser name. Somewhere I knew that Chacal’s mother was dead, not that she would have been allowed near here anyway, and not that it seemed to have made much of an impression on Chacal. But he had brothers, and they weren’t around. Hmm. Anyway, you’d think seeing his father again would have brought up emotions like love and sadness and whatever in Chacal. Right? But if they did, I didn’t feel it. All I felt from Chacal right now was shame. Or maybe his emotion was a little more specific than that, more like . . . hmm. Oh, I know. It was more like stage fright.
There were only two other people I could see from here. 3 Blue Snail, the hunchback with the throaty tenor, stood off by himself at the far right. He wore a blue feather cape and a short spiral headdress that made him look all head and mouth, like one of those deep-sea fish with the elastic stomachs. And then across the stream, about fifty arms away, a tall Harpy blood was standing in a little grove of spiny guava trees.
Then there were the three dressers behind us, I thought—counting everyone the way I do—and there was someone else, sitting close by on our right, who I wasn’t supposed to look at. If there were any guards or porters around, they were out of our line of sight.
“Te’ex!”
3 Blue Snail shouted almost in my ear in his buzzy voice: “You!”
Chacal snapped to attention. To him it was like I’d felt once when I was fifteen and some cop just bullhorned me out of nowhere: “Hey, YOU! Pancho! You with the faggy hat! Freeze!”
“Te’ex m’a’ ka’ te!!”
“You after-the-end shit-skin child!”
“Who were your mothers, and who were your fathers?
You don’t know? Offal—fetus doesn’t know.”
2 Jeweled Skull held his hand out to us and turned his palm upward. It meant that if I—or rather Chacal, since he was pretty solidly in charge of our time-share body right now—had anything to say, we’d better say it now.
I screamed:

“Cal tumen hum pic hun, pic ti ku ti bin oc!”
that is,
“Fathermother, make me holy,
Give me death!”
Or rather, Chacal screamed it. Or maybe I should say he made us scream it. He couldn’t move, of course, not because the voice was magic, but just because if you were a Harpy it was a voice you obeyed. But he knew what they were about to do, and he didn’t want it. He wanted them to kill him, or us, in this body, his old body. He was fine with dying, of course, but he wanted to take me and his body with him.
2JS turned his hand palm down. Request declined. 3 Blue Snail took the cue and started coaxing us in his educated-baby singsong voice:
“You, One Chacal,
Great hipball striker, bone breaker,
You red one, you strong one,
Victor at Ix over 22 Sidewinder,
Over the Ocelots,
Victor at 20 Courts
Over Lord 18 Dead Rain
Of the Jaguars,
Why are you sitting there
Wearing that ugly skin?
Here is your real one.
All your three selves are here,
Here is your tree,
Here’s your skin,
Here’s your hawk-uay,
All to receive you.
They’re all here,
Your fathers,
Your elder brothers,
Your younger brothers,
Your teammates . . .”
At the word
tree
our eyes focused across the stream, on the guava grove. Each of the trees had a few old offerings hanging from it, but one of them was absolutely festooned with new cotton streamers and strings of orange spondylus shells and wads of blood-spattered offering letters. Even if I hadn’t had his memories to draw on, I would have guessed it was Chacal’s
motz
, his root, that is, a tree that had been planted or at least dedicated when Chacal was born.
And 2JS had the hawk, of course. What about the skin?
Breaking form, Chacal strained our eyes to the right. Four arms away from us a naked teenage boy crouched on the flowers in a supplicant’s position, smiling a slightly stupid beatific grin that I figured was the effect of presacrificial drugs. He was younger than Chacal, although since his hair said he’d passed his last initiation, he was officially at the same life-stage. Probably he had a similar birthday and name day, which were more important than his actual age. His face was only a bit like mine, that is, what I remembered through osmosis to be Chacal’s. And I didn’t even have a good idea of that, since around here mirrors were rare and water was underworldly and considered dangerous to stare at, and so Chacal had only seen his own reflection a few times. Still, his facial tattoos were the same as ours, double spirals of tiny dots emerging from the corner of his lips and spreading up onto the cheeks, and he had a fresh brand in the same spot above his hip where Chacal had the big hipball-impact scar.
Just what I need, I thought, another brain transplant. So I guess the other proxy, the one in the deer hunt, that was the fake proxy. This was the real proxy. Whatever.
“This is your garden,
Your dooryard, your hearthstones,
Your hammock. Here!
Over
here
! Leave that sack or
We’ll all disrespect you, renounce you . . .”
Well, hey, Chacal? I thought. This seems like a pretty clear choice to me. Come on, they’ve even got your stuff all packed. Take a hint, Clint.
He didn’t respond, but he seemed to swell, like a clogged sinus on a depressurizing airplane. 3 Blue Snail halt-stepped over and crouched at my left side, like a hundred-pound newborn baby. He held a cylinder pot of something up to our mouth, and either because we were still parched or because Chacal couldn’t help being at least physically obedient, we drank it down. Uk. I’d had some skanky cocktails around here already, but this one was a real puzzle. At first it seemed totally bland, just some kind of broth with a rusty undertone and a brainy texture like ground sweetbreads, but after it was down I started to get this gross chalky aftertaste. It reminded me of something—oh, yeah, I know. It was like this joke drink we used to make at school called a Phillips Screwdriver, that is, vodka and milk of magnesia. Now I felt like I’d had a dry sponge in my stomach that was puffing up to football, no, basketball, no, beach ball size. I noticed the residue in the cup was a periwinkle blue. Blue-corn syrup, maybe? Next 3BS took a stingray spine in one hand and two little clay cups in the other. He leaned forward and I felt his swollen fingers pinch my earlobe. He pushed the spine in and pulled it out with a little tearing sound.
Ears bleed a lot, and in less than a minute the cups were full. My two dressers kneed forward, took the cups, and, using sponges, started painting, or rather daubing, the proxy with my blood. When he was covered with red and already drying to brown, they moved back to me and my ball yoke. Inside me Chacal said something like No, no, no, but not in words. You’re
over
, I thought. You’re history. Take a hike, Ike. Meanwhile the dressers kept working on me. They plastered my earlobe and cleaned the extra blood off my chest. They cut off the wrist cuffs they’d just tied on. They unfastened my headdress. They took my loincloth, my stone toe rings, everything. When I was naked, they strapped all my regalia onto the poor teenager. He tottered under the weight. They came back and sharkskinned the blood-scroll tattoos off my cheeks. They rasped the huge hipball player’s cauliflower calluses off my knees and elbows. I bet if my eyes had been different colors or anything else that would have identified me as Chacal, they would have dug those out too. It all hurt. I went through some changes.
By now 3BS was addressing the proxy, taking on the voices of Chacal’s parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and presumed founding ancestors, all of whom he named, and all of whom, it seemed, were presumed to be still living somewhere inside the grove of guava trees or the hills behind them. Each of the personae he took on begged Chacal to join them.
Sounds like a good deal, I thought at Chacal. If I were me I’d get out of this old body and into that kid right away. Out of the corner of our eye I watched the dressers cut a patch of skin out of the proxy’s chest, like the one they’d stitched up on mine. Without interrupting his harangue, 3BS handed them something. It was the strip of glyphs they’d peeled off my chest on the deer course. It had been tanned, and now it was all supple and translucent. It was a little confusing, because I’d thought they’d used it on the skin of the other proxy, the one from the deer hunt. Maybe they’d forged a substitute in the meantime and switched it again. Or maybe the skin of the deer-hunt proxy wasn’t still hanging up on display. Maybe they’d gotten to take it home. Whatever. Anyway, they started to sew it onto the proxy’s chest with gut thread tied to an eyeless thorn needle.
“K’aanic teech chaban,”
3BS said. Roughly, “This is your last chance.” He set a wide-flared bowl on the mat between my knees and picked up an ornate jade vomiting spatula, or rather vomicus, to use the scholarly word. Great, I thought. Will the real Chacal please throw up? He pulled down my lower jaw—for a second I got a stab of fear that he was going to tear it off—and then with the other hand he inserted the stick in my throat.
Ek—
The sinus burst, the pressure released, and I erupted. Three waves of sour yellow liquid vomit crashed through my throat and spattered into the bowl. I thought I’d turned inside out. I collapsed on the mat. I’m dead, I thought, they got me too. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the proxy take the bowl and drink it in one draft. When he was finished they poured a cup of balche into the bowl, swished that around, and made him drink that too. Across the stream the tall blood at the edge of the woods raised a big black steatite ax in a long handle, threatening to chop down Chacal’s birth tree.
“I, Chacal beneath you, am happy in this vessel,” the boy choked out as soon as he could talk. He’d been rehearsed, of course, but you could tell he believed it all. It was a big honor for him. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. For him it was like a royal wedding. He was a regular little Lady Diana Spencer. Yeah, you’re a lucky kid, all right—
Wait.
Chacal was gone.
It was true. I’d only just realized it, but he was gone.
The blood put down the ax.
I felt empty and stupid, like, along with whatever else, I’d just vomited out about twenty feet of intestines and two-thirds of my brain cells. But at least it was me doing the feeling. One of the dressers—a different one now, not an untouchable—reached into a bag and sifted a handful of white feathers, or actually I think it was eagle down, over my wet body.
Each of the nine guests of honor walked to the new Chacal, greeted him, and returned to his place. 2 Jeweled Skull was the last. He extended his foot and the new Chacal touched its underside. It was an unusual honor. When he got back to his mat, 2JS picked up a conch shell engraved with red blood-scroll clouds and blew it, like Triton. It had a feeble, apprehensive sound. We all waited.
There was a chunking sound of little clay bells, like a St. Lazarus rattle, behind us, to the northwest. I didn’t look around, but soon enough the Harpy’s
nacom,
that is, 2 Jeweled Skull’s house sacrificer, walked slowly into view, like he owned all the time in the universe. His skin was blackened with carbon and he had a black turban bristling with black catbird feathers and a giant black bill-mask that made him look like Daffy Duck’s evil twin. The neurons in Chacal’s brain didn’t want to look at him or think about him, but my mind found his name anyway: 18 Salamander. Two little boys followed him, twins about eight or nine years old and with carbonized skin like his.
“Fathermothers, make me holy, grant me death,” the proxy—or maybe I should call him the new Chacal—whispered. The nacom’s two assistants helped the poor kid stretch out on the mat and held his arms and legs as the sacrificer made a transverse incision across his abdomen. He reached into the cut and up under the rib cage, still holding the knife, using it to part the diaphragm and detach the heart from the aorta and vena cavae. It took him nearly twenty seconds or so, but finally he pulled the heart out, leaving the knife in its place, and set it on a dish of corn porridge. I wasn’t supposed to be watching, but everyone seemed to have pretty much forgotten me, and I kept one eye cracked as I lay on the mat. It turns out that a heart can go on beating for a while after it’s removed, and in fact this one even kept squirting pink mist for about fifteen beats until it started just pumping air, making little squeaks, and ran down. I watched sideways as the nacom’s assistants lifted the new Chacal into a big basket, curled him up like a sleeping dog, and tied the wicker lid over him with four complicated hitch knots that spelled the glyphs for four hundred times four hundred, an idiom for eternity. Evidently they didn’t want him to come creeping back. Even before they were done, 3 Blue Snail was standing over me, squinting at the sun in his eyes, his blue-clay body paint running in the heat, asking me to promise not to tell anyone my new inner name, that is, the name of my new uay. I promised. If anyone ever found out your real name, they could use it in a curse, and you’d be an easy target for whatever demonish critter they got to go after you. He bent down, whispered it in my bleeding ear, and told me to repeat it. I tried but it was hard to talk around a mouthful of what seemed to be either blood or vomit, so I swallowed what I could of it and the new dresser wiped the rest off my chin. 3 Blue Snail must have thought I was stalling, because he rapped me on the side of the head with his knuckle and made the dresser back off. I whispered the name. He made me repeat it twice before he stood back up and announced my new outer, or revealed, name. Like most names involving animals it had nothing to do with my uay :
“10 Skink,” he said. “Finished.”
Bummer, I thought. I always get the uncoolest names. Damn.
Behind me someone had lit the hut on fire. I guess it was just a one-use disposable item. I lifted my head and saw the nacamob’s assistants hoist the big basket onto their shoulders and start off, followed by a line of porters with all the other tchotchkes. Chacal’s father and the burden bearer followed them down the trail to the village, shaking maracas to keep away the Xib’alb’ans. I felt lonely. 2 Jeweled Skull untethered the hawk. It didn’t move at first, so he shooed at it until it flapped grumpily up into the trees.