In the Courts of the Sun (59 page)

Koh gestured with her tiny light hand. The Penguin Woman came up behind me again and slid between us. She held a big basket in her little talons. She kneed over to the brazier, sat, and took out two hexalobed terra-cotta bowls and two cylindrical drinking pots. Like almost all the dishes and vessels and whatever in Teotihuacan, they were well-made but unornamented—like Pyrex, as Esther Pasztory said. Supposedly some of the top smokers here were poor, and anything too luxurious was a hazard because it might make them jealous. The dwarf mixed powdered cacao beans, honey, and hot water, in that order, and, as per routine, poured the liquid from pot to pot to work up a foam. She put the empty pot down and passed the full one to Koh. Koh took a sip and gave the pot to the dwarf. She passed it to me. I did the little cup-accepted gesture, drank half of it, gestured that it was great, and drank the rest. It was hot, that is, spicy hot, and cardamomy. I put the pot down, and the Penguin Woman took it away.
And that was about as far as they went with serving drinks around here. I realized I was also hungry. You’d think they’d bring in a tray of fried goliath roaches or something. But they didn’t do things that way around here. Serving beverages in a host-guest situation was more for ritual than thirst. You didn’t often just sit and drink with someone. It wasn’t like tea in the East or cocktails in the West or anything. You just took your beverage, drank it standing up in as few drafts as possible, and passed it on. And snacking was something you did on your own time. It was one of the things that would have totally fruk me out if Chacal’s body hadn’t already been used to it. Even people who could afford as much as they wanted hardly ever ate even two meals a day. And every third day or so, they didn’t eat at all. Most of the time you could offer a strip of deer jerky to, say, Hun Xoc, and he’d say, “Oh, no thanks, I had something yesterday.” And he was a hipball player who needed the weight. And then when they did eat, it was a Lucullan binge. At the average royal feast three-fourths of the food would go to waste. Well, whatever. Where was I?
Time to say something.
“We underneath you have brought you a bundle,” I said.
Bundle
was a politer way of saying gift or offering, since it meant you didn’t have to decline the noun any further and give away what was inside. “I under you have tried to read the skulls for us, for my family, and I have failed. We beg you, take the bundle and read our skulls.”
“ You next to me give too much,” she said.
She treated us to another insufferable pause. I asked again. Damn it, I thought. If she says no, I’m going to start smashing things. Although really, one adder couldn’t or shouldn’t refuse to do a reading for another. At least not once you were face-to-face. Or maybe I was relying too much on professional courtesy.
The Penguin Woman lit something in a little dish. It was an incense ball, the kind they used as clocks around Palenque. From its size it looked like it would have about a quarter of a ninth-light on it, that is, about forty-two minutes. Better hurry, I thought. But the pause stretched on. Finally, she clicked her tongue twice, meaning she’d take the job. She untied two ribbons on her staff. It turned out to be a rolled-up wicker game board. She spread it out on the west side of the brazier. It was the same design 2JS had used, with the same number of bins and everything, but larger. She opened a jar, took out a pinch of powdered tobacco, and, rather demurely, rubbed it on the inside of her thigh.
Okay, I thought. Give her a lowball.
I asked her to tell me the date of my death.
She took out a grandeza of tz’ite-tree seeds and scattered them over the board.
There was something perfunctory about her style, and I got the feeling she didn’t plan to give me anything but the briefest possible session. Four runners chased my alter-ego stone into a near dead end. After a little calculation she gave the next
Wak Ahau, Waxac Muan,
or 6 Overlord, 8 Jeweled Owl—that is, a hundred and thirty-two lights from today—as the most likely date. It sounded reasonable, for the death of this body, anyway. Given the expected progression of my brain tumors, I only had about a hundred and ten days of mental clarity left in me. There were also other possible death days for me before that, in this current tun, especially
Kan Muluk, Wuklahun Xul,
that is, 4 Raining, 17 Ending, and
Hun Eb, Mih Mol,
that is, 1 Sweeping, 0 Gathering. Whatever, I thought. I clicked, meaning I accepted the diagnosis.
So far, I was disappointed. This wasn’t anything that out of the ordinary. I asked a second question: Where would my descendants—and the word didn’t especially mean my personal descendants, which I didn’t have any of, but descendants of my family, that is, of 2JS—be on 9 Night, 1 Dark Water, in the first tun of the fifteenth k’atun of the eleventh b’ak’tun? And how many of them would there be?
It was a pretty common query, except for the time span. The date was in AD 1522, 313,285 days from today. It was one of the catastrophe dates in the Codex.
She didn’t seem to react. She took five runners and scattered her corn kernels over the board, counted them quickly, and told me that on that day about fifteen-score descendants of the Harpies would reinter their founders’ bone bundles in the “riverless north.” That would be the Yucatán, I thought. The others, about a hundred score, would be “scattered in the jungles, in the forests that will cover the jewel cities.”
Well, that’s at least a bit impressive, I thought. Okay. Time for the big question.
“What sun will be the Razor City’s last?” I asked.
She paused, as often. I sat. Finally, she spoke.
“Children”—she meant clients—“have asked me this four hundred times.” She said that over the last k’atun, a few enterprising adders had, in fact, set various dates for the end of the city. Those dates had passed, and those adders had fled or been killed. Still, she said, there was a general tacit feeling that the end would be soon, at least among the top sun adders and their elite clients. Supposedly even some of the ruling houses had privately accepted the fact and were preparing their clans for an eventual migration.
Now, as I’m pretty sure I mentioned somewhere, I didn’t know how long the city would last. And maybe no one did. And the archaeological data was vague. And the collapse of Teotihuacan wasn’t mentioned in the Codex Nurnberg, or at least not in the pages we had. Now, according to Koh, it hadn’t turned up in any known Game.
“But you have not found a date?” I asked.
“That writing is too close to our eyes,” Koh said.
What she meant—well, it’s what Taro called event-cone trouble. That is, it’s not really possible to predict something you have the power to influence. So you can be blinded by proximity. They also call it the problem of the observer participant. And La Rochefoucauld called it
“l’aveuglerie de l’oeil qui ne voit pas lui-meme,”
that is, “the blindness of an eye that cannot see itself,” and Stephen King called it the Dead Zone. You’d think it would be easier to predict something nearer in time, and harder to predict something further off. And that’s usually true, up to a point. But past that point, it never is. It’s kind of like how it’s always tougher to take your own advice.
“But can you over me play forward to that sun?” I asked.
“That sun lives in smoke,” Koh said.
Oh, hell, I thought. She’s thinking of blowing me off. Damn, you’d think she’d be a bit more curious. She’s got to be wondering what kind of adder I was, how I’d been able to see all the stuff in the letter—well, whatever. Okay. Try to give her something.
“I know the Razor City only owns a few handfuls of sunlight,” I said.
“This light, the last, and the next,” she said. “Just as it has since I came here.”
It was like saying, “As usual. What else is new?” It wasn’t really the polite correct response. But maybe she thought she was above manners—
“Ch’ak sac la hun Kawak, ka Wo,”
she said. It meant “Don’t start anything on 10 Hurricane, 2 Toad.” But the sense was stronger, like “Don’t even make any decisions on that day. Just stay indoors and out of trouble.”
I clicked yes.
“Good,” she gestured.
She stood up.
She teetered a little, hobbled back around me to the entrance flap. I heard it rustle.
I was alone. I sat for four hundred beats, and then another four hundred. She didn’t come back.
What the fuck? I wondered. Was that it? She’s just flat-out leaving? Nobody ever does that around here. What the flying fuck? WTFFF?
I sat. I counted four hundred beats. I listened. I couldn’t hear a damn thing. How do they get it so silent in here? Somehow the compound had been constructed to deflect the hubbub of the city. There weren’t any air currents that I could feel. The smoke from the torch went up toward the oculus in a nearly straight line. I sat some more.
Well, hell, I thought. This is a washout. Maybe we made this whole trip for nothing. Maybe 2JS was just trying to get rid of me. Maybe somebody’s going to come in behind me and strangle me. Maybe Lady Koh’s not all that super anyway. Damn it, why do I always get stuck with the second-stringers? All I needed was just to meet one hot shot. Just one person around here who could take some initiative.
I counted another eight hundred beats. I was feeling a little gravity-challenged. Something in that chocolate was putting me in some kind of a state. I wasn’t sure what state it was, but it was a state.
Maybe I should’ve told her more. The stuff in the letter wasn’t really enough to get her attention. And come to think of it, why had 2JS wanted me to be so cagey, really? Maybe he didn’t want me to give her anything too impressive just because he wanted her to think the information came from him. He didn’t want Koh to get any more impressed than necessary because he didn’t want me getting too cocky. Or too autonomous.
Well, too late.
Maybe I’ll just slink back whence I came. If I can even find my way out of here. Maybe I’ll just sit here for another couple of hours and see what happens. Maybe—
Fuck it.
I don’t usually think of myself as terribly insightful, at least not outside the boundaries of something I can control, like the Game. But for whatever reason—either because for a while now I’d had that feeling you get sometimes when you’re alone at night in a brightly lit house, a house that doesn’t have the psychohygienic provision of blinds on every window, and suddenly a certainty comes over you that you’re being watched, and not by a friend, or maybe just because I was getting pretty frustrated, I reached out, picked the torch out of its holder, and thwacked it down on the floor. There was a little Vesuvius of sparks. Like I think I said it was made of a sheaf of wax myrtles dipped in dog tallow, and the flaming seeds scattered over the mats—which I guess had been dampened slightly, like tatami—and sizzled out.
I sat in the blackness. Already there wasn’t even a trace of blue left in the oculus. There’s not enough twilight around here, I thought. No twilight in the courts of the sun. I sat in the dark. Face it, Jedster. You’ve struck out big time. I watched the scattered myrtle embers fade out one after another like a dying galaxy.
I listened. Nothing. I sat. I thought I saw something.
There was still some light in the room. It was right in front of me. Or rather it wasn’t in the room but from outside the room. I kneed forward across the hearth cover to where Koh had been and peered into the dark. It was the light from a brazier of fresher coals glowing through the screen of I guess feathers. There was another room on the other side of the wall. Although it wasn’t really a wall but a metallic fabric screen, like a scrim in a theater. Whatever the metallic scales on it were made of, they worked like a two-way mirror. And there was someone sitting there, only three arms away from me. I started to make out the contours and then the major shapes. It was a young woman, in the same outfit and the same pose as the old lady.
She knows, I thought. You know I can see you.
Relax, I thought. I inhaled, resettled my spine, and exhaled. The woman hadn’t moved. Now I could see detail. Her right hand seemed to be painted black, and I couldn’t get a good look at it, but her left hand was unpainted and I focused on it. It had seven fingers. The smallest one was pointed and jointless like the tentacle of a sea anemone and barely the size of a .22 long rifle bullet. I looked back at her face. It was pale on most of the top half and black on the bottom, with the border running under her left eye, over her upper lip, and across her right cheek to the mandibular angle.

[50]

“W
hat other names do you next to me use?” the woman asked. Her voice was the same as the old woman’s.
Better give her something, I thought.
“My hipball name was Chacal,” I said.
“And who are your other fathers, other mothers, other elder brothers, younger brothers?” At first her voice was still a presenile croak, but by the time she got to the word
“na’ob,”
“mothers,” it had started sliding lower and smoothing out, as though she were aging in reverse.
I gave her the name of Chacal’s biological father.
“And where are you from?” Now her voice was what seemed to be her natural tone, a clear contralto, lower than the average Maya woman’s. What the hell? I wondered. So when the old lady was speaking, the real lady Koh had been ventriloquizing behind her. Why? And how had the impostor known when to move her lips? I wondered. Some signal. A string, a rod in the floor, maybe. Well, whatever.
“From Ix,”
“But before that?”
“From Bolocac,” I said. It was the name of Chacal’s village.
“And where were you from before Bolocac?” Koh asked. She was talking in this singsongy way and it was maybe trancing me out a bit.
“From Yananekan,” I said, without thinking. That was the current name of the area around Alta Verapaz where much later I’d grown up as Jed. Hell.
“And after that, but before Bolocac?”
“I am dark,” I said a little spacily. It was like saying “I don’t understand.” Damn it, Jed, I thought. You’re letting this
marimacha
clock you. Cool it.
“ You must have left Yananekan before you were a blood,” she said.
I clicked yes. I could feel her eyeballing me. Maybe I shouldn’t even try to bullshit this woman. Like any good sun adder, she could spot a tell through a lead wall.
“And what sun lighted your departure?”
I made up a plausible date.
“And what did people call you then?”
“They called me Chacal.”
“But that was not your first name?”
I started to say it was and then I realized I’d hesitated. Too late, I thought. That was as good as a yes.
She paused. I snuck another look at her. When I’d seen 2 Jeweled Skull’s portrait head of her I’d thought the pattern on her skin was just her signature face paint. Now it looked like it was under her skin, tattooed on. Actually, I thought, even with all that shitterie going on, she wasn’t exactly bad-looking. She had great skin, achromatically speaking, and an otherwise symmetrical face, and a feminine affect. That is, it was feminine in the sense of maybe compassionate, or motherly, or rather pre-motherly, like someday she’d be nice to her kids, but not today. I looked down again quickly and focused on a single dim geranium petal on the mat in front of me.
“And you next to me, why do you travel?” she asked.
“Because 2 Jeweled Skull wants to protect his family.”
“2 Jeweled Skull wants the things he wants. But you next to me, what do you want?” There was something a little different in her tone, something—well, I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret it. A tinge of being a little miffed, a sense of “why won’t you trust me?”
“I underneath you want simply what he wants,” I answered.
“Still, you seem to want more than that.”
“It is as you above me say.”
Pause.
I counted forty beats.
“And do you belong here?” she asked, finally.
No, I thought, definitely not—but then I realized that I hadn’t just thought it, I’d said it. Damn. Breaking protocol, I looked up. She was looking at me.
She sees it, I thought. She sees loneliness. It’s all over you like blue on Smurf. I looked down again and made another “whatever you over me say” gesture.
“And then where were you from before Bolocac?”
“I was in the north,” I said. I don’t have to answer all this, I thought. I’m going to get peeved in a minute—
“How far north?”
“Farther than from here to Ix,” I said. Oops, I thought. That wasn’t what I meant to say.
“ You went farther than the Bone Ocean?” She meant the deserts north of the lake country.
I was about to gesture “whatever” again and then thought I was just coming off as a sniveling, evasive little twerp. So I clicked “ Yes.”
“What was it like there?”
“It was different from here or Ix,” I said.
“How different?”
“ Very different.” I sounded far away from myself.
“But it was more different than very different.”
I paused. What the hell, I thought. “You are correct,” I said. “It was different in ways that are unpaintable.” That is, they were impossible to imagine.
That seemed to hold her for a second.
“And who was your first father?” she asked.
Pause. Damn, I thought. She’s getting too close. And no wonder. You’re chatting away like some giggly girl after two drags on a
banano
. God
damn
it, Jed head,
shut up.
I managed not to answer.
The pause stretched on. A hundred and twenty beats. Two hundred. Finally, against my better judgment, I looked up.
Uh-oh. I looked down.
I thought I’d seen a flash of something dangerous in her face. Not angry, but dangerous.
Damn it. She knows you’re hiding something. Something serious. Maybe she’d caught some microexpression. Watch out. You could disappear in here. The Harpy trading clan was rich, but it didn’t have much influence in Teotihuacan. Even if the Orb Weavers might have political problems, they could still crush us like a chigger.
“Who was the smoker who first lit the face of your mother?” she asked.
I told her Chacal’s mother’s naming day. I had the urge to say more but I used my tongue to stuff a bit of my inside upper lip into a spot between two projecting tooth inlays and pulled on it until it hurt, and I stayed quiet. It was a trick of Chacal’s. God damn it, what the hell was in that shit? It had to be a dissociative, some salvia divinorum derivative, or tetrodotoxin, even, or— well, whatever it is, you can beat it. Easily. Remember, the main thing about truth serum is, it doesn’t really work. At best it’s just logorrhea serum. Just screw your courage to the sticky spot. And just don’t have any more of that hot chocolate. I bit my lip thing again.
Ouch.
The Penguin Woman waddled into my field of vision. She slid one of her stubby digits through a string loop in the screen that divided me from Koh and edged to one side. The screen went with her, folding up like an accordion. Now Lady Koh and I were really in the same space, and the change was startling, as though instead of just collapsing the screen the Penguin Woman had ripped my clothes off. Now I could see that the dark side of Lady Koh’s face wasn’t a tattoo but her natural color. That is, she was piebald. The right side was the color of the concentrated melatonin, like in a mole, that is, almost black. The upper part of her face wasn’t blue, like 2JS’s model. It was just normal Maya skin color, although like all upper-caste women’s it was pale from being kept out of the sun. Maybe there had been some tattooing, but just to improve the border between the two zones. The line was a little too smooth and sinuous to be natural. She’d shown signs, 2JS had said. No kidding. And he’d mentioned that she was related to Janaab’ Pacal, the ahau of Lakamha, that is, Palenque. And he has eleven fingers, right? Maybe the vitiligo or whatever was somehow related to the polydactyly. It’s not all that far out. Anyway, it’s better than having a Hapsburg lip. Or Hanoverian hæmophilia. She breathed in and I got a glimpse of two front teeth inlaid with what looked like emeralds.
The dwarfess tied the folded screen to the wall and then, it seemed, melted away, probably into one of her rabbit holes. Chacal’s eyes did the polite thing and looked down again at the matting.
Koh asked,
“ When did you last touch your father? And when
Did you last touch your mother?
Who was the smoker who blew ashes over her?
When was her darkness?
Why did you wander away and not stay
At their feet, at the hearthstones?”
There was a strange feeling in my throat. No, more in my chest. Damn it, I thought. She’s reading me. Empath bitch. And I’d thought I had my game face on. I’d been off-guard and now she was on the scent.
Okay. Slow down. First think, then think again, then speak.
“There were, you above me, there were scores of reasons,” I said.
“ Where is your mother? And where is your father?
And where is your garden?”
Hadn’t she asked me that before? I wondered. I was getting a gentle sort of buzz. You’re slipping, Jedster, I thought. Keep it together. I pulled harder on my shred of lip. The bland taste of blood spread over my tongue. I didn’t answer.
“ When did you last see your own younger sisters,
Your own older sisters?
Where did you last see your own little brothers,
Your own older brothers?
When was your milpa last burned? Is it cleared?
Is it seeded and weeded?
Who sweeps your granary there? Is it thatched?
Is it clean for the harvest?
Who watches out for the grackles? Who bundles
Your stack of tortillas?
Who sings your names in the square when the grandchildren
Circle the bonfire?
When you come home with a sore on your back,
Who will rub it with mint oil?
When you walk home in the night, in the chill,
Who will wait in the dooryard?”
I couldn’t answer.
I’d never cried as Chacal, and in fact I couldn’t remember any moment in Chacal’s life when
he’d
cried, not since the first hipball initiations, anyway. Where he grew up, you cry, you die. For all I knew he couldn’t even force his eyes to cry anymore. He’d beaten it out of them. But his eyes still had that feeling of being about to cry, when the fluid around your eyeballs sours and heats and pressure builds up. Damn it, I thought. Get it together. I stared at the geranium petal. It was longer than the others, standing upright on a twisted tail, like a seahorse.
“You want to tell me something,” Koh’s voice said. Or had I just thought she said it? Get it together.
I sat up straighter and snuck a look at her on the way up. If I could have taken a photograph of her face, I’d bet it would have looked as blank as before. But in person, somehow she seemed to be looking at me with indulgence, with sympathy, almost with a smile. Maybe it was all in her eyes. Or maybe it was a slight inclination of the head. Or maybe she was intentionally emitting some kind of pheromone—
“There is something else inside you,” she said.
I pulled harder on my lip flap. “As you above me say,” I gestured. I glanced up. She was staring right at me. As I think I said, eye contact was a big deal around here. It was like in
An Officer and a Gentleman,
when Louis Gossett Jr. is all like, “Don’t you eyeball me, recruit! Use your peripheral vision!” I looked down again.
“Answers are also great-grandchildren of questions,” Koh said. I think she meant, basically, that if I didn’t want to tell her anything, how could I expect her to count my suns?
“I under you am unpracticed at speaking, but I do want to see them counted,” I said. That is, I don’t want to chat, I want you to start playing the Game right the hell now.
“I under you am too poor to reciprocate your bundle,” she said. Basically, “Take back your goddamn feathers and everything else and get out of my shop.” She looked away and to her left, to the west, signifying the past. That is, This interview is in the past. We’re done.
“The suns I want to count are very few,” I said. “And they light you too.” That is, “ You’re doomed, witch bitch. Your days are numbered in single digits, and if you don’t get on with the show we all might as well—”
There was a sound like someone snapping a pencil in the desk behind you in second grade. I looked up. She was looking back, but differently this time.
Animal trainers say that the difference between wolves and dogs is that dogs look at you and wolves look through you. A dog looks into your eyes and empathizes. She wasn’t looking into my eyes. She was looking through me.
She means me harm, I thought. Need to get out of here. Automatically, I shifted my weight, getting ready to stand up. But instead of just shifting like it ought to, my weight—my point of balance, I guess you’d say—sloshed heavily forward and back, like an inflatable kiddie pool full of green slime. My legs had fallen asleep and buzzed, painfully. Cripes, I’ve had it, I thought. She’s going to—hell, maybe I’d better just lunge forward, grab her throat, try to—no. There are probably guards watching. Just get it together and leave in a dignified hurry. I uncrossed my sleeping legs as slowly as if I were trying not to set off a motion alarm. I shifted my weight forward and moved my hands down to push off the floor. Okay. On three.
A la uno, á la
—
Koh screamed.
My eyes locked onto her face. It was stretched back into a gaping terrified grin. Sclera showed all around her irises and her emerald tooth inlays glinted like a row of compound eyes. The shriek ran up and down the scale, an eardrumscraping Fay Wray spew of absolute terror and agony, the sound you’d make as you felt a jaguar’s fangs slide into the back of your neck. I recoiled, or thought I did, but nothing moved. I realized I was sitting in exactly the same position. I was paralyzed.
Policemen learn to shout “Freeze!” with enough authority that people really do freeze. But the problem is they don’t always stay frozen for long. This was different. Something about the combination of the dope in the chocolate and the scream had triggered some kind of tonic immobility, a primeval reaction like marsupials can get if they hear the sound of a predator and don’t see an escape route.
“Hain chama,”
Koh said. “Take this.”
She leaned forward and reached out with her light arm. She held a single tz’ite-tree seed between her first and second fingers, like a Go stone.
My right fist entered my field of vision. I watched it glide slowly under her hand and open, palm up. The seed dropped into it. It closed and returned to its perch on my thigh. I looked up. Somewhere, two of my cervical vertebrae crackled, loudly.
I resettled into position. I was dizzy. I looked down and back up at her. Her face was back to its placid default state. Oddly, I didn’t feel angry. I just felt deflated.
“When you are asleep, they can do many things to you,” she said. She meant that she could freeze me again if she wanted, and could torture me, and get me to tell her whatever she wanted to know. Vee haff ways, et cetera.
I’d never thought of myself as an especially brave person. Still—and maybe it was Chacal’s ball nerves coming through, or maybe I was just tired, but I just said two words:
“Bin el.”
That is, “Proceed.” And I think I managed to say it with a convincing measure of insouciance. I felt that old toughness, or heart, or courage or whatever, flowing back into my system. Go for it,