In the Courts of the Sun (48 page)

Huh.
Normally when you’re playing a game, your own time slows down, so that you don’t realize how long you’ve been there until, say, you notice it’s dark outside. But now the time around me had slowed down. Or, rather, the Old Salter’s dust was a chronolytic drug, something that sped up the synapses in the brain without giving you a seizure or making you confused or frantic or whatever. I blinked, and the brown darkness of my eyelids rolled down as slowly as a thick cloud front passing overhead. On the other hand, my thinking wasn’t at all slower, in fact it seemed clearer. I did a few in-head calculations to check. Pretty soon I was sure about it, and not only that, but I was sure I had a huge amount of working memory available, more than I’d had as Jed, which was a lot. When I looked at the board and thought about all the dates and contingencies stretching into the future, it felt as though I was standing under a waterfall of dice, and there was plenty of time to look around and pick one out and read it, and in fact to focus on any and all of them, and to memorize the positions of all of them as they fell past you, and to calculate how each of them would finally land.
Maybe this is it, I thought. Got to get this stuff back to the team. Although when Taro finds out, he’ll be disappointed. He’d wanted a mathematical answer, something he could teach LEON. Now it looks like it’s more of an intuition thing. Well, score one for wetware.
Eventually, I completed my move, and 7 Prong moved—I watched one of his fingernails and it was like watching the moon fall across the sky—and I managed to move again, and he started to move again, although by now I already knew what he was going to do, and I was getting a little bored and looking around the room, rolling my eyeballs slowly around in their sockets. I watched a puff of smoke extrude out of 2JS’s nose like a starfish painstakingly inching its way out of a coral crevice. I watched the hair curling out of 7 Prong’s face like spring leaves budding on a tree-covered mountain. I watched the flame of a rushlight swaying back and forth as slowly as a Rasta woman at a grounation. On the nineteenth move I plunked my pebble down onto 7 Prong’s last number. He didn’t even have time to resign.
Hot damn. Just give me a few dime bags of this stuff and I’ll cruise back to Century 21 and I won’t just track down that doomster, I’ll solve the Hodge Conjecture, discover a perfect cuboid, and figure out how to retain formatting between different editions of Microsoft Word. No sweat. 7 Prong made a sign of submission—sort of like saying “Congratulations, good game”—and stood up slowly. His knees cracked like two hazelnuts. He teetered past me and out of the cave room. The flap of deerskin swished behind me. I was already feeling that sort of winner’s remorse that always comes over you when you really crush somebody. I noticed there was no feeling in my legs, and I started to stand up myself, but there was a rushing in my ears like two fire-hoses spraying blood against the inside of my skull and a flux of nausea like a bile-filled balloon inflating in my small intestine, and I tipped over into softness. Someone was sprinkling water on my face, and when I got my eyes open I saw it was a guard. A different guard, not the deaf guard. I rolled my head to look around but there was a crack of pain in my neck and I had to give up. I moved a hand. Ouch. I was utterly stiff, the way you get if you take a lot of codeine and sleep for hours without moving. I realized three things: that I’d blacked out, that a lot of time had passed, and that maybe, maybe, if I got that Old Salter’s dust stuff back to the folks in the last b’ak’tun, we really might have a chance.

[39]

T
he guard got me to drink some water. He massaged me in a rough way—something Chacal’s body was used to—and got me to the point where I could sit upright. Finally he gave me a sort of paste of unsweetened chocolate that you were supposed to lick out of a little cup. I did. I’d guess it had about the same amount of caffeine as five espressos. 2 Jeweled Skull crouched into the room and sat on the other side of the game board, where 7 Prong had sat. He wore the same basic outfit as before, with the same chains of jade and spondylus shells, but he looked cleaned up. Maybe he’d been in a sweatbath. I heard someone, another guard, probably, come in and sit behind me, but my manners were improving and I didn’t look around.
“So Old Salt came to you the first time,” he said.
Yes, I clicked.
“That’s a good sign.” He said that most people didn’t get much out of him the first time they met him. Like with most drugs, I thought. Except if that wasn’t much, what’s it like when you get used to it? I bet if I played LEON on that stuff I’d be able to spot that doomster in no time. And I’d only had a quarter dose, at most. Not that it hadn’t nearly killed me anyway, but still.
2JS took a fresh cigar, lit it on a coal, and puffed on it. I watched. Suddenly, and astonishingly, he offered me one. I said the little ritual thanks. He said the little ritual don’t-mention-its. He lit it on the coals and handed it to me.
I had trouble lifting my hand to take it. Evidently part of the Old Salter’s dust’s distinctive back end was a feeling like you were a victim of selective gravity, or like sixty pounds of miniature lead shot had been injected into your blood. Still, I did manage to grab the thing and get it into my mouth—I know when in Rome, I thought, but I still wasn’t into nasal—and sucked in the smoke. It had a strong vegetal taste, with an overtone of chocolate and hints of mint, flint, and lint on the finish. Damn, that’s good. Chacal’s body was hopelessly addicted.
Well, so maybe old 2JS was at least a bit impressed, I thought. I did pretty much blow away that 7 Prong character, didn’t I? Except don’t mention it, I thought. Don’t insult his adder. Incompetent though the guy might be.
“We had an eight-skull adder but he died,” 2JS said, apparently reading my mind.
I didn’t know what that was or what to say. Maybe it meant that his old adder could play with eight running stones. If that was true, he must have been pretty brilliant. Even though I didn’t understand, I clicked, “Understood.”
“7 Prong is a three-skull adder,” 2JS said. “We’re working on getting a seven-skull, from Broken Sky. But supposedly the Macaw House has also made him an offer.”
I clicked. So there was a competition between houses to attach the best adders. It was the same way when I grew up in Alta Verapaz; different villages tried to attract the best curanderos.
An inferior wasn’t supposed to question a superior, but maybe I could risk it. He’s opening up to me, I thought. We have a special bond. Right?
“And who do you above me believe is the best sun adder?” I asked.
“11 Whirling is the only nine-skull adder in Ix,” he said. “There are only thirty-one nine-skulls.” From the declension it was clear that he meant that was all there were in the entire world. He said that 11 Whirling had been attached to the Ocelot House when he was a little boy, over sixty years ago, and that he was now legendarily powerful. In fact, 2JS said, he might be homing in on me as we speak. Sometime soon he’d figure out that deer hunt had been a sham. And he’d locate me in one of his Games, and the Ocelots would send a squad to capture me.
I asked why the Ocelots were still angry at us—and I mentally stressed the
us
—if we’d made things up to them with the deer hunt. Right after I asked I regretted it. That’s either a stupid question or an annoying one, I thought. Watch it.
But if it bothered him, 2JS didn’t show it. He said that for one thing, most of the Ocelots probably assumed that we had ruined the sacrifice on the mul on purpose. But the roots of the disagreement went way back. The Ocelots had been the leading family in Ix ever since it was founded on, supposedly, 9 Ahau, 3 Sip, 8.0.0.0.0.0. On that day, One Ocelot had claimed the water caves in his mountain and had divided the land around the mountain between his family and the ahaus of the other four high houses, including, supposedly, One Harpy.
Of course, even if that One Ocelot had really existed, 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the current ahau of ahauob, probably wasn’t so directly descended from him as he’d have everyone believe. Still, nobody was about to challenge his hereditary control of the sweet waters—that is, irrigation, and therefore pretty much all Ixian agriculture—or his monopoly on slaves, which came from the fact that he was the only Ixian who could initiate warfare. The Ocelots also controlled the duties of the Ix collective, that is, the rituals and what you could call the priesthood. And they had monopolistic hunting rights in most places and on certain animals, the right to ask travelers for gifts—that is, to tax the roads—and the right to distribute the spoils of war, the sole right to deal in jade, and on and on. They owned one day out of every uinal—a month of twenty days—and five extra days out of every tun, the 360-day solar year. Most important of all, they had a monopoly on the Game drugs, which were indispensible and which armed Swallowtail Lineage couriers brought in once every four years from Mexico.
Great, I thought. So basically it’s still all about the narco trade.
2JS said there was also a second Game drug, one 7 Prong had never tried, called Old Steersman’s dust. “If you ever meet the Steersman, you’ll see that he’s even older than Old Salter,” he said. “He’s so old that his skin is dark gray. He stands with a long paddle in the stern of the canoe.” It sounded to me as though Old Salter was the personification of the chronolytic drug and Old Steersman was the god of some kind of presumably topolytic one—that is, not in the cellular-chemistry sense, but as in something that collapses one’s sense of space. And, supposedly, the two drugs together had a synergistic effect. “The adders say that when you have the two old men together, they throw so much lightning in your blood that it’s like in the days of our great-grandfathermothers, when they could see the entrails of stones.”
Still, 2JS said, even with the monopoly on the Game drugs, the Ocelot house wasn’t unassailable. It had become top-heavy over the last few k’atunob. There were too many Ocelot bloods with expensive lifestyles and not much to do. And they’d gotten poorer and poorer. “Their new uayob’ are runts,” 2JS said. It meant something like how, in the old days in Europe, they would have said their blood was thinning. For some reason the latest generations of royal-line Ocelots had tended to be subnormal, or stillborn, or something. 9 Fanged Hummingbird was a dwarf, and no one outside his immediate family had ever seen him unmasked. It can’t have been because they were eating off lead plates, like the ancient Romans, but they were doing something wrong. And lately they’d mismanaged their estates and squandered resources on festivals and overblown building projects. At their last feast, for their “victory” in the rigged hipball game, they’d used, and then burned, the feathers of 40,800 green violet-eared hummingbirds, each of which was worth more than a month of slave labor. And that was only one type of feather out of twenty.
Meanwhile the Harpy House and the Macaw House, and to a lesser degree the Snuffler House, had gotten richer. They’d organized increasingly long-distance trade routes, from Sonora to as far south as Panama. 2JS ran the country’s chocolate trade like a vertical trust. The
milperos
who grew the cacao trees and harvested the beans were roundhouse thralls or dependents of his. The dozens of villages that husked, fermented, dried, and roasted them—chocolate needs a lot of processing—were all headed by members of his extended family. The long-distance traders were blooded to him somehow. And even the goods that came back from abroad, like salt and obsidian-ware, got warehoused in one of 2JS’s towns while he decided on the right market and the right time to sell.
Lately the Harpy House had become the Ocelots’ major creditor, and like other royals around the world, the Ocelots were perennially defaulting. Although he didn’t put it that way, of course. The closest thing you could say in Ixian was that the Ocelots were becoming “unwelcoming.” That is, they weren’t reciprocating gifts. Instead of giving away any of their core wealth, like some of the water rights, they’d simply dug in. 9 Fanged Hummingbird had started demanding “greeting gifts,” that is, extra tariffs, from goods that barely even crossed over the Ocelots’ roads.
I asked about the three other Ixian greathouses. 2JS said that two of them, the Macaws and the Snufflers, disliked the Ocelots as much as the Harpies did. But just like the Harpies, they were related to the Ocelots through webs of marriage and adoption. 2JS’s grandfather was 9FH’s grand-uncle’s brother-in-law. 9FH’s sister was the aunt of the patriarch of Macaw House. The patriarch of the Snuffler House had adopted two of 9FH’s nieces’ sons. And on and on. And a lot of these different families’ rights derived from their relationship to the ruling house. Attacking the Ocelots would be out of societal character, the way killing a family member still seems more evil to people than killing a stranger. And it would shake up the system so badly that the other houses would immediately start feuding with each other. And, of course, you’d have to give up on whichever of your relatives were currently “visiting” in the Ocelots’ compound.
And even if all these problems somehow vanished, 9 Fanged Hummingbird was still a living god. Being the greatfathermother of a feline clan was like being the pope in Renaissance Italy. No matter what kind of a jerk the pope was, people believed he had God’s ear. Even mercenaries who’d stick at nothing else wouldn’t attack him. And if you took him down, you’d better be sure to become pope yourself, and in a hurry. For 2JS to come to power and hang on to it, the Ocelots would have to be forced to seat him in their mountain, that is, to acknowledge him as their rightful heir. They’d concoct some genealogical history “proving” that 2JS was a direct descendant of One Ocelot, and then, in a sham election at the
popol na
, the council house, they would “choose” him as their ahau. But, 2JS said, there was no chance this would happen.
Of course, even in a premonetary society wealth does make power, and maybe, if things were allowed to run their course for another few k’atuns, the Harpies would become so rich they could hire mercenaries to help take on the Ocelots, or they’d marry into them, or they’d get all the other clans on their side, or something. But the Ocelots wouldn’t allow things to run their course. They wanted to clean the slate now, before the Harpies got any stronger, and they were on the lookout for any sort of insult from the Harpies that could start a conflict. They’d almost found it in the way I’d ruined 9FH’s reseating ceremony on the mul. And since then, they’d come up with something even more menacing.
“The Ocelots have challenged us,” he said, “to a great hipball game, and I’ve named this sun: 1 Sweeping, 0 Gathering.”
That was a hundred and six days from today. According to 2JS, great hipball games could only happen when a new yearbearer came in, which was once every four years. It had been eight years since the Ocelots’ team last played against the Harpies. In the old days, k’atuns ago, the most important hipball games were contests between the great ahaus and captured royal bloods from other cities. They’d given the ahau a chance to show he was still fit to rule. Other hipball games had functioned as duels between brothers, sons, or in-laws of the kings, resolving conflicts that might otherwise have led to civil war. “But in our own degenerate b’ak’tun,” as 2 Jeweled Skull put it, the overlords were usually represented by professional in-house hipball players, like me, Chacal. Sometimes a challenged house would even put together a sort of all-star team of loaned or freelance players from other cities. But the Harpies couldn’t do that this time without losing all the face in the world. The Ocelots’ team would be all in-house, so the defending team would have to be all Harpy bloods.
And in most situations that would have been all right. The Harpy House’s team had done well for the last three war seasons. The team had been a good source of revenue for 2 Jeweled Skull, both from shares of winnings and from the trading contracts it had promoted. But this season the Ocelots’ team would be as good or better. And, 2JS said, Chacal’s being out of the lineup wasn’t going to help.
Sorry, I thought.
2JS told me—not in so many words, but more between the lines, if conversation has lines—that theoretically it was an honor to be invited to play against the ruling family, but actually it was usually a disaster. As per tradition, most members of each clan would want to stake a large part of their worth on the game. 2JS would be pressured into putting up more than half of his estate on their team. And their allies and dependents and other supporters would, collectively, stake even more. If the Harpies lost the game, they’d lose a huge amount of their property but stay alive and unenslaved, at least for a while. If the Harpies were winning in the last period, the Ocelots would probably pull a fake foul. The Harpies would have to contest it, and there’d be an instant civil war. Or, possibly, the Ocelots would manage to rig the game from the beginning, either by co-opting the umpires or by some other trick. Then they’d either take the property or, if the Harpies objected, start attacking. One way or another the Harpies were screwed. It was a transparent swindle, but it didn’t matter. You couldn’t refuse a challenge. Around here, if you lost face you lost everything.
La gran puta,
I thought. Well, at least I was starting to understand what I hadn’t before, that the Harpy House was under a huge amount of pressure. Maybe at some other time I would have been able to pull off the potter’s wheel project or whatever. But wherever you went, mafia bosses like 2JS and 9FH were always inches away from a turf war. And now, after my mul fiasco, 9FH was looking for an excuse to force the issue. And he was going to win.
This is hopeless, I thought. I’m on the wrong side. I should just sneak out of here and defect to the Ocelots. Except that, A) I wouldn’t get out the door here, let alone in the door there, and B) they wouldn’t understand me the way he did. I’d be lucky if they just ate me without torturing me first—