In the Courts of the Sun (55 page)

bombombombom, bombombombom . . . bombombombom . . . bombombombombombom . . .
It was the angelus, the noon offering. Our troop slowed and stopped. I got a signal to dismount. Damn. From here on we’d walk. Litters weren’t allowed in the holy city, and you weren’t even supposed to ride on someone’s back unless you were incapacitated.
All the caravans had stopped. Everyone faced forward, to the northeast. The birds resettled. We got out our candelarias. Now the bulk of the booming came from over the ridge ahead of us, from the holy city. Drums answered from far across the lakes, coming in a half-beat late to sync with the echoes. Go for it, I thought. Rock the Casbah. The rumble filled up the valleys and the world seemed to shrink. Smaller household drums took up the beat until it broke into hundreds and then thousands of smaller, less disciplined voices and dissolved into an unparsable global rattling, like all the snare drums Ludwig ever made. Lighter-men were passing through the caravans with fatwood brands and one of them lit my incense burner. He whispered something about how it was fresh fire from the Hurricane mul. Do I tip this guy? I wondered automatically, but he was gone. Ah, that clean resin scent. That’s the smell of freshness. Ouch. I’d burned my thumb. Damn. I turned the thing around and held it level with my forehead so the unbreathed smoke could float up. On either side of us women and babies and wobbling oldsters crowded the warehouse rooftops and held up their censers. Nobody within the city’s orbit could get out of presenting her- or himself to the sun at dawn and noon. Even if you were a hundred years old, even if you were quadriplegic, even if it was pouring rain, in fact especially in the rain, to say thanks for the damn rain, you had to be there. And if somehow they couldn’t drag you outdoors, they hanged you. So a little fresh air was pretty much compulsory.
The drums faded into an all-over chanting, a deep-throat ululation in a language that seemed to have fewer consonants than Hawaiian. I just mumbled along under my mouth comb. Later I heard that supposedly no one remembered what the words meant. Maybe everyone was just mumbling along. I plejuh legion . . .
to
the flag . . . Don’t notice me, I’m just one of the sheep.
The chant faded. Like everyone around me I got some sand out of the path and snuffed out my incense. We walked up the last flight of wide white stairs, into the cooler air of the pass, through a big
Karamon
-like ceremonial gateway, and over the crest of the ring—
“B’aax ka mulac t’een?”
2 Hand asked. “But where is the city?”

THREE

Razortown

THE SEAS OF WINGS

[45]

A
lake of fog filled the valley below us, with only the wide cone of Cerro Gordo, the city’s White Mountain, outlined against the gray sky. We stood on a pass at the south end of the basin, and the stepped road descended in front of us between big, blocky stuccoed villas, down the long grade to what I knew was a smooth alluvial plain. It’s not fog, I thought, it’s blue. It’s smoke, copal offerings from a few hundred thousand of those little censers. And just in the last second a layer of the smoke had sheared off from the top of the bowl of still air, so that now you could see one and then three orange lights in the mist, almost level with us, one far away framed by Cerro Gordo and then two closer and to the right, and then you could just see shapes swelling beneath them and see that the lights were the watchfires at the apices of the three great mulob, the Jade Hag’s mul at the north end, farthest from us, and then the gigantic Hurricane mul on the right, and then, closer on the right and smaller than the other two, the indigo-blue mul of the Star Rattler’s Children. Other fires gleamed out of the gray, each at the peak of one of the hundreds of other mulob, not so high as the three biggies but no dwarfs, either, and then, as the smoke rose and dissipated, more and more things solidified Brigadoonishly out of the haze, very very very solid things, growing by slow accretion like crystals of alexandrite in a laboratory vat, a molecular-scale skeleton morphing into a jewelscape for giants.
When I first saw it in ruins thirteen hundred and fifty-one years later, I was a late-twentieth-century urbanite, more than a little blasé about jet travel and skyscrapers, and I was still overwhelmed. For an eighth-century Mesoamerican there could be no conceivable doubt that this was the earthly paradise, the greatest city that ever had been or ever would be, that it had been built by gods before men existed, and that its rulers today were descendants of those gods, sitting unassailably in the center of the twenty-three shells of the universe. There are no words in English, Spanish, Ch’olan, Klingon, or any other language that could convey the otherworldly awe of this place at the height of its power. Before you could see the crowds you could hear or feel them, like if you put your hand on the outside of a beehive, and then you could just see that the surfaces, all the horizontal surfaces, were crawling with orange and black and gray specks, that the place was packed. There’s no way all those people can get indoors, I thought. This can’t be the usual population. They must be sleeping outside, on top of each other. Swollen, swollen . . .
As at Ix, only a tiny proportion of the construction had survived into the twentieth century. But unlike at Ix, those fragments had been excavated and restored in the early twentieth century. I’d spent a few weeks here in 1999 and knew the archaeological map well. Now I could see how botched and misleading the INAH restoration had been. But even if it had been perfect, there was still so much here that wouldn’t last, so much that was new, that I barely recognized the place I’d studied. What the tourists would see was just the center of the teocalli zone, brown and stony in the middle of nowhere. Now that center was just one more elaborate part of a packed metropolis that spread out and out, a formation of interlocking hives that seemed more like one single building than many and that sprawled over the entire valley and all the hills, right up and over Cerro Gordo, a landscape of aggressive artificiality like you associate with places like Hong Kong or Las Vegas and not with the premodern world. There were no streets visible, since the streets were just narrow alleys between wide houses or rather kin-based apartment compounds, so that from here the residential areas looked more like a Middle Eastern city than any other Old World type, except for little things like the colors and the style. Like Manhattan the city was oriented a bit east of north, in this case 15.25 degrees, to align with Kochab, and the long, straight chain of sunken courts and wide spectator walls that the Aztecs would much later call the Street of the Dead stretched straight away from us. Actually, it wasn’t a street at all, and from the look of things today it was barely even a processional route but a series of linked plazas, and it bristled with towers that hadn’t been even thought of in the reconstructions. I guess for clarity I’ll just call it the main axis. Now you could see that the Hurricane’s mul was black and red, and the Jade Hag’s mul was black and white, and the Rattler’s mul was black and cerulean blue. The Hurricane’s mul loomed like a heart attack against the hills, like, whoa, that’s bigger than big, it’s on a completely different scale, it’s not built for humans. You could feel the mass, the sheer gravity, of the core, like if you put a steel ball down on a level surface it would roll toward it. The same fire had been burning continuously for over forty-four years, since the last gap in the cycle, but they’d extinguish it eleven lights from now so that it wouldn’t defy the Prank, the Black Chewer. Then, when the eclipse lifted, they’d light it again from the sun itself. The thing had a numbing certainty that simply didn’t allow for the possibility of dissent. Who could even think of revolt against
that
?
Now you could clearly see the Jade Hag’s mul—much later the so-called Pyramid of the Moon—staring down the end of the titanic street. It was too far to see clearly through the smoke and steam, but it seemed to have flecks of something swarming around it. Birds? Something in my eyes? The third great mul, the blue one, the only blue building in town, the House of the Star Rattler Society, was where it should be, aggressively chunked down at the southeast end of the main axis like a rook sliding over onto the king file. It was smaller than either of the others but infinitely more ornate and still huge enough not to mess with, in fact quite a bit bigger than it would be in the reconstructed version centuries later, which would uncover an earlier façade. There was more than a touch of the Maya South about it, with its surface of interwrithing snakes, but even so the design had been geometricized or Mexicanized or Cubisticized or whatever, so that it both fit—fat?—fit in and didn’t fit in with the rest of the city, another bit of asymmetry, in this case, maybe, more destabilizing.
In the center of the main axis, in the big plaza in front of the Hurricane mul, there was a fourth element that wasn’t on my mental map. 2JS hadn’t mentioned it, and it hadn’t been reconstructed by archaeologists. How could they have missed it? Damn, it was big, a huge steep cone sticking up like a green thumb, almost as tall as the mul. As I focused on it, it resolved into a sort of open pagoda with thirteen floors or platforms, each about five arms above the other. The ant people crawling around on it were naked and painted with streaks of gray, which meant they were slaves. I decided that it must be woven out of reeds and green wood and that it was probably the
xcanacatl,
the sort of bonfire-of-the-vanities thing that 12 Cayman had talked about. That would mean it would be finished and packed with offerings in time for the darkness, and that after the sucklers drove off the Chewer, they’d light it with the fresh fire of the second dawn.
The Jade Hag’s mul faces down the main axis like a general at a review, but the Hurricane mul faces off against emptiness. There’s only a medium-sized plaza on the other side of the main axis to balance it, and it doesn’t balance it, and the swollen hulk stares out alone into the west, and there’s a sense of loneliness or loss. There was that feeling of a question, like say you see a Classical marble athlete with a raised arm, and that arm’s broken off at the shoulder and you wonder, is he saluting? Is he throwing a javelin? Is he raising a sword? Or maybe if you hear the first part of a musical phrase without a resolution, and it’s so disturbing you try to come up with a resolution yourself and hum it. There was an odd sense of expectation . . . a sense not exactly of something incomplete but simply of
waiting
, a Miss Havisham feeling of a world-size table set for an important guest, some great visitor outside, arriving soon.