In the Courts of the Sun (56 page)

[46]

O
ur porters hesitated. Mine mumbled a little protective prayer in a village language—“Grandfathers, look out for me,” or something like that—but 12 Cayman got them going again and we moved forward and down. My mouth comb was dripping wet and ouchy on my septum. Because the road had stairs, it didn’t have to zigzag like Old World roads, and a few times I thought I’d pitch forward. Waves of drying chilies, boiling corn, burning feces, and the clayish tang of freshly chipped flint and obsidian passed through us. Constant clicking and grinding sounds rose up to us from the flint- and polished-tool quarters, like thousands of click beetles and hieroglyphic cicadas. A white-faced registrar from the Aura House came through and took names, titles, and amounts, and knotted them into a tangle of cords like an Inca quipu.
We regrouped. There were only twenty people left in our core party. This didn’t seem like a good sign. We moved down again. As the Hurricane mul rose level with us, its angles shifted in an inexplicable rhythm, layers coming into view and fading out again, steep and less steep and then steeper, in some kind of logical progression.
When we were nearly level with the valley floor, about a half-mile from the teocalli district, we turned west off the trade route into what I guess you could call a pedestrian alleyway. It was packed with people, and 14’s men got into the front of our line, swinging these sort of flails to beat the riffraff out of the way.
Place, place, pour le Reverend Père Coronel.
We moved slowly past a row of doors that had recently been boarded up, or rather filled with stones and tied over with vine ropes. Hmm. Expecting trouble? Too many sailors in town?
Citizens edged sideways around us on either side. They stared at us, not with any hostility, I thought, but in a blankly curious way that was still disturbing. Maybe it was just the paint. Maya faces only got painted on a few special occasions. The Teotihuacanos painted their faces whenever they went out. But also the face paint here was aggressively abstract, with dark bands across the eyes that camouflaged the features and made everyone look the same, except for clan-marking dots that I couldn’t read anyway. Some of them had ulcers or pustules under the paint, and really a lot of them didn’t look that healthy. There was a lot of coughing and hawking. There’s tuberculosis around here, I thought. It’s a population sink. Probably a lot of parasitic infections, maybe some unclassified plagues . . . well, great, that’s all we need.
We edged forward. The crowds got thicker. I was getting a creepy feeling about this place. I mean, on top of the ten thousand other creepy feelings. What’s bugging me? I wondered. It wasn’t that it was messy, in fact there was a certain Shinto cleanliness to the town. And it wasn’t filled with shady characters. If anything, there was almost a middle-class air about the people we’d passed. You sure wouldn’t get that in a Maya city. In Ix you were either a hot-shot or not. Maybe it was just that the walls here were all rubbed with carbon and looked like fresh charcoal, mute matte black with sparkles. It’s just a strange feeling to be in a black city. On the other hand, it wasn’t so uniformly black as it had looked from the pass. The pavement, where there was any, was red stone, there were colored fabrics in the upper windows, there were the bands of shell, and the foliage drooping down from the roof arbors gave the place a lush sort of Hanging Gardens of Babylon feeling . . . still . . . maybe it was just that there were no written inscriptions. Nope, no signs, no glyphic monuments, no bills posted, nothing. In fact, 12 Cayman had said there was no written version of the language. Maybe writing was frowned upon as sumptuary excess. At any rate, except for a few accountants who’d learned writing from imported Maya scribes, the Teotihuacanos were illiterate. Still, they kept a pretty tight ship, administratively. We turned north, into an even darker alley.
Why’d we have to be in the white district, that is, the black side? I wondered. I bet the red side of town is nicer. And why the hell is the black side called the white side? It’s like how in the U.S. what they call the “red states” aren’t red. And in fact they’re the more
anti
communist states. It’s just to be confusing.
Every family in the city belonged to one of two moieties. The Aura, or white, or “peace” moiety lived, in general, on the western—black—side of the main axis. There were hundreds of major white lineages, but the most important one was the Morning Glory lineage. The patriarch of the Morning Glories was someone named 40 Agouti, who 2JS said was also Lady Koh’s local foster father and the archon of the White synod. Supposedly another name for him was the “Peacelord.” The other, red moiety, the Swallowtails, was traditionally led by the Puma lineage. The “Warlord,” the head of the Puma lineage, was someone by the odd-to-me-sounding name of Turd Curl. Auras traditionally dealt with agriculture, water allocation, what we’d call “religion,” trading, and most crafts. The Swallowtails dealt with war, as well as with weapons crafts and foreign trade. You’d think having a division like that would be a recipe for trouble, but because there was no intramarriage within the moieties—that is, an Aura woman has to marry a Swallowtail man and vice versa—the two groups were heavily interrelated and mutually dependent. For centuries the balance between them had held up. This may also have been because of an almost socialist ethic. Clan leaders weren’t supposed to be honored outside their own families, and the city wasn’t ruled by any single person but by two councils composed of the heads of the hundred or so main lineages in each moiety.
We took another turn into a narrower alley. It was filled with people who had to basically back up to get out of the way. A little farther on, finally, we stopped. 14’s herald climbed up the steep staircase. We all followed, up about two stories into the white sunlight.
We’d gotten to about the same height as the Hurricane mul and had a good view of the white quarter. Flat terraced rooftops stretched away on all sides, broken with flower and fruit gardens growing in shallow beds of lava silt and night soil. Plumes of sweatbath steam rose out of hidden vents and vanished quickly in the dry air. A few of the compounds went up to roughly three stories, but most were at the same height so that you could walk across catwalks from one compound to the next, like you do in the pueblos or in the old quarters of cities in Muslim Africa. Behind us the porters handed up the bundles. I passed the “ready” signal forward and we padded generally northward on rattley plank bridges. Hun Xoc pointed out rows of big covered pots at the edges of the roofs and said they were full of water in case there was a fire. Finally we teetered onto the roof of the Harpy trading house. It was part of a larger compound of buildings housing avian-clan Maya families from a few different lowland cities. Something was going on down in the street in front of us, but I couldn’t see it. It sounded like somebody was getting beaten up. 14’s fellator had to call down to the street to ask what was going on, and there was another slowdown while somebody shouted up and explained it all to him, and then somebody else’s voice came in and explained it differently. Damn it, we don’t have all day, I thought. I pushed through to 12 Cayman.
“Let’s send a courier to Lady Koh now,” I said in the Harpy House language.
“We should wait until we are covered,” he said, meaning indoors. He said it wasn’t a good idea to flash our merchandise where random people could see it.
It’s true, I thought. People were crowding around on other rooftops to see what was up. I clicked, “Okay.”
I went back to my spot in the line. I rocked up and down on my feet.
14 came back and explained what we were hearing. Apparently a woman was getting killed by the acolytes of the Morning Glory Synod, who I guess were like Taliban religious enforcers, for having a sneezing fit during the noon vigil.
12 Cayman ordered us not to go down to the street. He said we might not be able to get in through the formal door. Instead we climbed down a half-ladder, half-staircase into a small courtyard. It was about thirty arms square, empty except for a table altar in the center and a big wooden ancestor in each corner, with a single door in each wall. Automatically, we formed up on the east side of the courtyard, the direction we’d come from. 14’s group stood on the west. Basically the whole household, which was at least fifty people, had come out to gawk at us. There was a minute of awkwardness. One was supposed to ask permission to come into a house before you were in the house. Now here we were already in the house. Still, 12 Cayman gave a foot sign and we got out the cigars and went into our greeting routine. It seemed to me that 14 Wounded and his men kept checking me out, out of the corners of their eyes. I knew some of them had seen Chacal play. Still, I looked totally different, didn’t I? It’s probably just that I was a striking-looking character. I’d been coming to realize that I had a certain personal charisma or physical presence, a lot more than I had as Jed. Chacal had been a major athlete, and even though I tried to subdue my movement, his body still carried itself like one. It’s like when you meet some top baseball player, you can tell in a second he’s someone special. I got a twinge of stage fright. 2 Jeweled Skull had drilled me on the right salutations to use with 14’s household, the different way I’d have to walk in Teotihuacan, how to crouch below someone or stand tall over someone else, where I should sit in relation to 12 Cayman, to the hearth, to my own attendants, on what words was it all right to look up and when I should just look down, and on, and on, and on. But even so, my rank in the group was still a little unclear, and that made it difficult for everybody. And around here you could offend somebody just by, say, facing in the wrong direction. Be careful, I thought. Not nervous, but careful. Hun Xoc sidled a little closer, either to make my face a little harder to see or to show support. Thanks, I thought. You’re a good guy.
14 led us over to one of the big wood figures, the one in the southeast corner. It was an ugly, chunky, nearly naked seated female, a little under life-size, not an ancestor like I’d thought, but maybe the Jade Hag. 14 and an assistant held the thing by knobs on the shoulders and knees and lifted it up. Only the front half came up. That is, the whole statue opened up like a clam, and the entire anterior section of the body came off, with half of each arm and half of each of the crossed legs, down to the calves. The feet, and the posterior half, stayed on the stone base. The whole thing was filled with little painted clay dolls, about sixty of them. They were all over, not just in the torso section but fastened onto the back of the arms, the inside of the legs, just crawling all over. I guessed that each one represented somebody in 14’s household. Maybe matryoshka dolls are kind of the same idea. An attendant came over with a tray of twenty dolls, one for each of us, and we stood around while a painter marked each one with colors to individualize them.
I snuck a look at Hun Xoc. What fresh insanity is this? his expression said. I looked away so that I wouldn’t smile. The painter handed me my doll. It was a squat, cheap, moldmade clunky thing with a big Teotihuacan-style headdress, not like me at all except for the red stripes on the sash. But I guess now that I’d held it, it was me. I waited my turn and gave the doll to the acolyte. He tied it onto a spur that projected from the shell under the statue’s left buttock. Does the spot mean anything? I wondered. Or is that just where they had some room left? 12 Cayman hesitated a moment before he put in his figurine. This was a Mexican affectation. Not Maya. I got the sense that 12 Cayman felt that 14 Wounded was going a little too native. When everyone was in they closed the thing up again. In spite of myself I got a feeling like the body wall was closing over me and I was all safe and cozy in the big civic organism, with zero individual freedom. Maybe it was the same with everything in Teotihuacan, it was all little mulob huddled around big mulob, small plazas enclosed in bigger plazas, and everything dependent on something else.
Now that we were family, we finally got invited into the sweathouse. As we trooped into the north archway, 12 Cayman made some excuse and he, Hun Xoc, 3 Returning Moth—our remembrancer/reciter/accountant—and I managed to split off and duck into a side door. It wasn’t polite, but 12 Cayman had been in the house before and he outranked everyone here.
We needed a little privacy, but the first room we tried had a horrible smell that turned out to come from a clutch of five slaves. They were about eight years old and squatted patiently in the corner of a wall, tied together with ceremonial light rope. One flinched at the flies crawling over his shoulders but didn’t swat at them. Too passive. We went through another courtyard. There were cisterns, avocado trees in baskets, yellow cotton mantas drying on racks, and women in yellow
quechquemitls
—that is, the triangular things gals wore here instead of huipils—dying strips of something in a barrel. All very normal, I thought. Relax. We found a darker, deserted room. It had a provisional bandits’-cave look, with bolts of cloth stacked against the walls and big jars whose shape meant they contained pure salt. One of 14’s attendants followed us in, but 12 Cayman glared at him in that dark way and he backed out. Hun Xoc undid his bundle and dug out the gift we’d brought for Lady Koh. It was a head-sized box of four hundred score tiny gorgets—that is, throat skins—of male violaceous trogons. When he opened it up to check them out, they seemed to glow in the gloom like a nuclear pile. It was an incredible gift, representing hundreds of man-days, worth who knew what.