In the Courts of the Sun (58 page)

taxac
, which was a complicated sort of verbal game, and
kak
, which you played with your hands. I noticed the pavement under my feet was black, and then, as we passed the big central altar, it turned briefly yellow and then red. It was laid out in Game quadrants, in very bright colors, some kind of dye, I guess, soaked into the limestone. We passed a pair of blue-hatted Rattler oracles who seemed to be just drifting through the crowd, answering questions. Missionary spirit, I thought. We stepped around knots of people bending over fire bowls, making offerings either to the Rattler or, through the Rattler, to absent relatives, ancestors whose names or remains had been lost. Most of the out-of-towners looked to me like village charge-holders. Each one probably represented a few hundred panicked farmers from God knows where. Left Yucca said the drought had driven more people than ever to the Sky Eel, that is, Star Rattler. He said that the Swallowtail and Aura Synods owned their own families of sun adders, but the Rattler Society adders were still considered the best. 14 had said it was because they could write and had preserved a library of refinements too large for any one person, or even a college of griots, to remember. Some of them were Maya immigrants, like Lady Koh, so maybe they’d been keeping up an island of literacy. Supposedly, Koh catered to out-of-towners like the Too-Talls by using several different languages in her offerings. The Rattler didn’t mind, Left Yucca said. And the Rattler didn’t ask for expensive gifts, just music, mint and tobacco smoke, and a few strands of your hair.
Drumbeats rose around us. The crowd’s motion slowed and stopped.
The drumming echoed from all over the city, and you could hear it expanding out into the hills and beyond. It was a beat we hadn’t heard before, kind of an ominous five-stroke roll.
“They say they are closing the city borders now,” Left Yucca said. “Two days early.” They were shutting up the city for the vigil, and no one is getting in or out.
Damn it, I thought. I looked at Hun Xoc. Well, we’re trapped here now, his return look said. We just have to make the best of it.
As the drumming stopped, the crowd went back to its business, but more hurriedly and more quietly. Hell and suckstration, I thought. I’d been thinking about trying to scam a few hits of the Game drugs from somewhere and then getting the hell out of this turkey town now, before the vigil. Well, so much for that idea.
We edged our way down the packed staircase. There were Puma guards eyeballing us on either side, so I kept my head down and only got a quick look at the Rattler’s mul. It was designed to look as though it had been woven out of two species of giant snakes, or rather two aspects of the Rattler: the Sea Rattler, who was sinuous and naturalistic, and the Sky Rattler, who was stylized and geometric, with goo-goo-googly blue-goggled Chaak eyes and equilateral teeth. Koh’s all-female society lived in one of two compounds on the south side of the Rattler’s Court, and its male counterpart lived in the other. From the buildings you couldn’t tell which was which. They were built of smooth-plastered wood in an older style, with next to no windows, just the occasional slit. Their façades were washed with blue instead of the orange that was usual on this side. The doors were all tiny, carved with scare faces but still not showy. Most of the main doors had a guard or two sitting outside. Were they a permanent fixture or was it just because things had been bad lately? Families of supplicants, Teotihuacanos, Too-Talls, and others, crowded the alley. They didn’t have sleeping bags and there weren’t any fires. They were just sitting, or huddling, and shivering. It’s no wonder Koh didn’t want to talk to us. She was turning them away in droves.
We stepped over them and, a few times, on them. One or two people complained a bit, but the caste system let us get away with anything. We were bloods and they were nonentities and that was it. Left Yucca led us to one of the buildings, not to the door, but to the side of the door. Knocking wasn’t done around here. It would be too aggressive. You either whistled as softly as possible or just waited until someone came out. But there were three
dvorniks
squatting in front of the court entrance, playing the gambling version of patolli on a stained cloth board. They all stood up. We presented ourselves. They didn’t want to go in and they said it wouldn’t be any use, but Left Yucca seemed to have ingratiated himself with them on his last visit, because he got them into an argument about how, even though we were only related to Lady Koh at about five removes, that still couldn’t mean she’d want people to say she’d “kicked over her hearthstones,” that is, that she’d violated the hospitality rule. Could she?
They told us to wait. One of them went in. I felt like it was late 1989 and we were talking to Armando, the doorman at Nell’s.
We waited. This is lame, I thought. Maybe Koh was just a patzer anyway. Sometimes I wondered about it myself. That is, I wondered about the obvious question: How come, if the nine-stone game was so powerful, the top sun adders hadn’t taken over the world?
Of course, one answer was that they had taken over their world. They’re solidly in charge of this place, I thought, and the rest of Mesoamerica, even if they let the feline clans take the political heat. I guess the real question I was asking was, why hasn’t, or wouldn’t, the Game spread to the so-called Old World?
Fernand Braudel used to ask his students to figure out why fourteenth-century China, which had a big navy and paper money and everything, hadn’t discovered America. His own best answer was that they didn’t need it. Everyone in power in China was already doing great, and the only thing left for them to do was get more entrenched. So maybe the sun adders didn’t need to take over anywhere else. There’s always a lot of inertia around. It can be more powerful than innovation, or ambition, or anything. If things were going well, why rock the boat? Good inventions don’t always take over. Sometimes they die out despite or because of being so good. Babbage’s Difference Engine didn’t get built for a hundred years. They had pottery in Polynesia at first and then forgot how to make it. The Romans had concrete, and then after they lost the recipe nobody worked it out again until 1824.
I looked around. It was already pretty cold. It reminded me of the first time I lived in Mexico City. I was surprised at how cold it could get at night here. I smelled some kind of bitter incense. A family of Too-Talls who’d been picking their way across the other side of the alley stood still, looking down.
Something was wrong. Now what?

[49]

H
mm.
The Teotihuacanos weren’t noisy people, but you always could sense that there were zillions of them around. All day we’d been hearing voices, scrapings, hammerings, the click of tortillas and flint, the hum of the grumbling hive. Now it felt like everyone was gone. All human sounds had stopped.
There were no dusk rituals here like we had in the Maya states. There was just an uneasy silence. Here, even in regular conversation, you avoided mentioning “sundown.” You just said “later on” or “early tonight.”
I looked at Hun Xoc. He exhaled, the Maya equivalent of rolling his eyes. People looked up at him, like, Hush! Echoland!
I listened. There was still a sea of sound out there, the yawps of gulls and dogs and the drumming of turkeys and the ultraviolet scrape of the bats, but the human world was holding its breath.
Damn, I thought. It’s getting a little tense around here. I looked around at the supplicants. They were staring down at the ground or at spots on their mantas, anywhere but at the sky. The woman sitting next to my right leg was shivering, and I don’t think it was from cold or from illness but from fear. After eight hundred years the city was still afraid of the dark.
Finally, as the sun sank somewhere, Koh’s men came and led us through a bare blue courtyard and across into a sweatbath. We got undressed, reoiled, and wrapped into new outfits, purple cotton kilts and sashes with big mantas over that. Purple was a neutral color, that is, not neutral in the design sense but in that it wasn’t owned by any particular clan. The guards led us through a tangle of dark passages, maybe just to confuse us, and through another little yard into a small square room. Seven figures sat on the bench looking up at us out of the gloom as though we’d interrupted something, which I guess we had. Five of them were dressed as males and wore blue diamond-pattern mantas. They had hats like big loose turbans that hid most of their faces. Even so, I could tell from the piercings that most of them were native Teotihuacanos, maybe high-status converts to the Orb Weavers. One of them was a stocky guy with a broken nose. The black and orange beading on his manta identified him as a personage 14 had told us might be here: 1 Gila, the leader of the Gila House, a big mercantile Aura moiety that had converted to the Rattler. He had a son of his with him. They both looked pretty tough. We didn’t meet them, though, or even really acknowledge them. Unless you were going to go through a formal introduction, which could take a long time, you sort of all pretended not to see each other. Then there were two people in the room who were dressed as women and who I thought maybe really were women. Maybe they were Koh’s wives. Then there was a dude who I figured was maybe a clown or jester, because he wore a sort of funny porcupine suit. As my pupils dilated I could see there was a dog squatting in the corner behind us and that there were lots of little jars and bowls and a wide tray, luxuriously heaped with melting snow, arranged on the floor over layers of blue-and-white eyedazzler rugs. There was a mural on the wall behind them with shoals of kiddoid gnomides cavorting around an underwater volcano.
According to 14, this was a communal house shared by five or six families. And the families were all women. They weren’t thought of as lesbian marriages, though. As far as I could tell from what he’d said—which wasn’t totally coherent—the Orb Weaver’s daughters weren’t all androgynes. Instead, vingtaines of them were socially presented as regular, hetero-normal families, with some of the women taking male roles and others taking female ones. Lady Koh was one of the “bloods,” which, in anthropological terms, allowed her to enter male-gendered ritual spaces, for instance the teocalli on the Rattler’s mul. I guess the point—
Whoa. What the hell?
The dog stood up on its hind legs. I got a little shiver. It was a human.
She was a dwarf, with an elongated anatine face, and she was almost naked. Her skin was dyed green, but in this light it looked black. As she waddled around the hearth I thought of a penguin. I didn’t have the urge to laugh, though. She’s not achondroplastic like 3 Blue Snail, I thought. She was what they used to call a primordial dwarf, or a bird-headed dwarf. Seckel syndrome. I remembered they didn’t live long. Probably she was still a teenager. I’d also thought they were usually retarded, but she seemed functional. She made a “listen” gesture. I squatted down a little lower.
“ You over us . . . the Lady Koh speaks only . . . to one inquirer at a time,” she said. Her voice was a creepy catlike monotone, and she spoke in male Teotihuacano, which had a scraggy sound.
“I underneath you carry the petition,” I said. I looked at Hun Xoc.
He looked back, hesitating. This was against his directive to keep his eyes on me every minute. Still, they couldn’t do anything about it. My audience with Lady Koh was the whole point of the mission. He shrugged his eyes, like, “All right, whatever.”
Thanks for your trust, I looked back.
The dwarf had peeled up one of the rugs. There was a square hole under it. Like at the French court under Louis XIV, they were crazy around here for trapdoors and passages and peepholes. The dwarf crawled down into the hole face-first, like the White Rabbit. I put a leg in to feel how deep it was, found a sloped bottom, squatted into the thing, and crawled after her. My knees kept pulling on my skirts and fetching me up. The tunnel slanted down at about thirty degrees. I crept through the dark for about fifteen arms and came out a mousehole door into the middle of a passageway that was open to the sky. The dwarf led me around a corner, through another small door covered with hide flaps, and into a dark room about eight arms square. It was lower down than the previous room, but the roof was at the same level, so the stucco ceiling was nearly twenty arms overhead and made it feel like you were at the bottom of a well. There was a trace of blue from a high oculus covered with oiled skin that I guessed faced onto an overhung courtyard. The walls were covered with what looked like metal scales. There was a plain terra-cotta brazier with a few dying coals, two Go-bowl-size baskets, a pair of fly whisks in a little rack, and a bone stand with a single myrtle torch that burned with a greenish flame. The green feather cape we’d sent and the jar of poison skins were curled up in a corner like a couple of sleeping cats. And there was a peculiar scent in the air I can’t get it together to describe.
It wasn’t the bitter smoke from outside, and it wasn’t the wax-myrtle berries from the torch, which have an odor somewhere between wintergreen and linseed oil. It smelled—well, it seemed to me like the opposite of cinnamon, if there were such a thing. Although smells aren’t like colors. There are no primaries on the odaphone. Although I guess that’s what makes a new smell possible in a way that a new color isn’t. I swung my feet under me and tried to adjust the drape of my manta with one suave, easy motion. Instead I flopped down like a three-flippered walrus. God, I’m a klutz, I thought. Got to rehearse this stuff. The dwarf scampered around me and left the way we’d come in.
I settled myself into a half-supplicant position, dutifully facing the brazier. The floor under my calves was covered with some kind of spongy matting and strewn with geranium petals to ward off my pollution.
I sat. I felt weird. After a minute I realized why: It was the first time I’d been alone in a room since I woke up stuffed in that basket back in 2JS’s prisoner compound. Too bad this wasn’t a good juncture to run away from the babysitters.
The flap rustled. Child-gauge steps came up behind me. It wasn’t good form to turn so I just sat. A short, slight figure—not more than an arm and a half—teetered around me, leaning on a staff tied with blue ribbons. Unsteadily, she sat on the other side of the brazier and laid the staff in front of her. She was an ancient woman in a man’s manta and hair.
I shivered a little, just internally, I hoped. Her face was so wizened and puckered that it looked like it was glued together out of pebbles. But I could still see that it was black on the right side and a pale but normal skin color on the left, with the border in an S-curve, just like on 2JS’s model head. Her gnarled hands were crossed in her lap. Her black hair had to be a wig. Her eyes were sunk so deep I couldn’t even see a gleam.
2JS had been wrong about her age. But how was that possible? Or had she been somehow aged by poison, like Viktor Yushchenko?
She settled herself and held her hands over the brazier, warming them, although the room temperature was still at least eighty degrees. I was pretty sure that no other people had come in, which was odd. No guards. Maybe the great lady just wasn’t afraid of being attacked.
Lady Koh opened her crinkled dark hand palm-upward. Say something, I thought. I spoke in the male high-equals dialect of Ixian:
“Tzitic uy oc caba ten lahun achit,”
I said. That is, under you, my name is 10 Skink. “Our family under you calls me your brother [that is, relative], of the Harpy House of Ix, the eighteenth [ foster] son of the twenty-capturing 2 Jeweled Skull.”
“And who is your father?” she asked. “And what other names do you have besides 10 Skink?”
“2 Jeweled Skull is my father,” I said.
“And who lighted your awakenings?” she asked. I hadn’t answered the other names thing, but like all good interrogators, Koh didn’t repeat an unsuccessful question, at least not right away.
I told her. That is, I told her 2 Jeweled Skull’s ceremonial grandmothers’ name days.
“And who lighted your grandfathers’?”
I told her. That is, I ran through the right names from the Harpy lineage 2JS had adopted me into.
“And when did you become a brother of the Harpy bloods?”
“Thirty-three lights ago.”
“And who gave you your grandeza?” That is, what sun adder was my mentor? Her toothless voice sounded older than her skin, like a burnt log getting dragged down a damp gravel path.
“7 Prong,” I said. “Of the Harpies of Ix.” In my ears it didn’t sound convincing. You’re just nervous, I thought. You’re doing fine. Chill out.
“And why don’t you next to me trust 14 Wounded’s son, Left Yucca?” she asked. “Or does he talk too much?”
“I do trust him.” Hmm, I wondered, had she been watching us through a peephole when we were out in the courtyard? And if she had, was what I was thinking about Left Yucca really that obvious from my body language? Or what?
“And is the Harpy House still tight, still green?” she asked. The idiom meant “are the slats tightly bound to the posts, and is the thatched roof fresh?” That is, were they okay?
I said the House was fine.
“But they do have a great-hipball game scheduled against the Ocelots,” she said.
Damn it, I thought. All the way up here, she’d gotten the gossip that we were in trouble. No matter how hard you traveled, news always traveled faster. At this rate, you might as well just give everybody a cell phone. Had she heard of the fiasco on the mul? Did she guess that my visit had something to do with it?
I clicked that yes, the great-hipball game was going to happen. I didn’t elaborate.
“And you used to play hipball,” Koh said. “But you don’t now. Is that right?”
Hell. Had she just guessed that from Chacal’s big build and broken nose? Or maybe she’d picked up on some bit of body language. Or she or some spy of hers had gotten a peek at the spots on my knees or elbows where the calluses had been removed. Anyway, one didn’t want to lie more than necessary. I clicked yes.
Koh paused.
2JS and I had spent hours going over and over how I was going to present our case. And the idea was to make the approach as soft as possible. I’d ask her to play toward the end of Teotihuacan. If necessary I’d lay a little of my special information on her to convince her that the place was doomed. Then, I’d try to make this lead into a discussion of the Rattler Society’s problems. Ideally, I’d hook her in, inspire her to want to get the hell out of town, and then see if I could manipulate her into asking us to help her. And then I’d offer her asylum in Ix.
Of course, to do that I’d have to convince her that we could protect her. But 2JS had been leery of telling her too much. We thought I might do a few little tricks to impress her—make a barometer or a floating compass, say, or draw an ellipse with a trammel, or just clue her in to, say, fractions. Assuming she was enough of a nerdette to be impressed by such things, which, since she was a sun adder, she certainly would be. And we thought I could even trade a few of those tricks, or a few bits of information, for the drugs and recipes. But I shouldn’t ask her about the Game in the Codex, because that could lead into a discussion of the 4 Ahau date, in 2012, and if I seemed especially worried about that she’d wonder why. After all, the thirteenth b’ak’tun was a long way away. And we’d decided that I shouldn’t tell her anything about Jed, or where I really came from or whatever. For one thing Lady Koh probably wouldn’t believe it. And even a credulous type who’d believe anything wouldn’t be able to visualize it. Only people who’d experienced it, the way 2JS and I had, would know what I was talking about. Otherwise it would be like I was babbling in Martian, about Martian stuff.
And if I showed her too many tricks, or clued her in to too much science or whatever, I’d start to seem too powerful. She might think I was some kind of scab-caster, or even a smoker, a deity, in a human skin. Or was I a representative of some great adder, working through 2 Jeweled Skull to disguise my real master? Or was I actually some great nine-skull adder myself, one she’d somehow never heard of, who was disguising his abilities? Or what if she thought I was a spy from one of the two Teotihuacano Synods—who, according to folklore, knew everything—trying to lure her into an obvious act of treason? There was no telling what she’d do. What if she told her order about me? After all, she was blooded to them. They’d likely have the usual knee-jerk reaction, that I was too much of a threat to the status quo, and have me killed.
At best, Koh would figure she was getting hustled. She’d assume—and with some reason—that as soon as I got what I wanted, I’d leave her in the lurch. I should just present myself as a novice adder who nevertheless had some very special insights, and leave it at that. She shouldn’t know too much about why I was here in Teotihuacan, or rather she should think I was here on a routine trade run. She shouldn’t know that 2JS was having problems in Ix. Although it was too late for that. I had to make her think that 2JS was large and in charge, and that he was the only greathouse in her home territory who was going to offer her a safe harbor. We needed her to feel like bringing the goods back to Ix was her own idea. And of course, most of all, I shouldn’t ask her about the two dusts. In fact I shouldn’t even mention them. If she suspected they were the main thing we wanted, that would set off every alarm in the place, and she’d toss me out.