In the Courts of the Sun (60 page)

cabrona
. Like the granola bar says, bring it on.
She didn’t blink. Her face had the monstrous inexpressiveness of, say, Kenny Tran’s, the time he cleaned me out with air in the final table of the 2010 Commerce Casino No Limit Hold ’Em Tournament.
“Actan cha ui alal,”
she said, finally. That is, roughly, “Beat it.”
Well, maybe I will, I thought, and then almost before I’d thought it, everything seemed to turn around in my head and I felt this flood of cosmic frustration. Great, I thought. I’d been working this room for hours already and—hell. I mean, where could I go, anyway? You can’t hide from a global holocaust. And I couldn’t hide from my brain tumors, either. What was I going to do, sneak around Teotihuacan and try to scrounge up the drugs some other way? Walk into the red temple precinct and try to bribe it out of them? Not bloody likely. I’d get picked up by the Swallowtail Stasi and processed into
carne molida
. Hell, hell, hell. Something told me—and I hate to appeal to that old intuition chestnut, but at least this time something really, really told me—that this was the closest shot I was going to get.
“You are doomed here,” I said. “And I did come here to help you. I know things you would never be able to find out yourself. And I know that Razor City has very few suns left.”
“And what is your name?” she asked.
I got a little shiver, for some reason, maybe just from her tone, and I think she saw the waves of gooseflesh over my arms. All the time I’d been here, I’d been dealing with people who used what they thought was magic all the time. And still I’d never run into anything—unless you count the Game, which doesn’t count—that you could really call magic, or ESP, or even a hard-to-explain level of coincidence or intuition. And I’m sure that however Koh had paralyzed me, it wouldn’t count as supernatural. But it was enough to keep me in a state of creeped-outedness.
Chill, Jed, I thought for the googleth time. She’s not a witch. I snuck a look at her. If she was surprised, she wasn’t showing it. Her eyes raked over me. I looked down at the floor again.
Hell, I thought. Just roll the damn dice.
“
Caba ten
Joachim Carlos Xul Mixoc DeLanda,” I said. The Spanish sounded weird here. I thought I saw a tiny flicker deep in her eyes, like maybe I’d caught her attention.
“And what sun lighted your naming?” she asked.
“The sun 11 Howler, 4 Whiteness, in the fifth uinal of the first tun of the eighteenth k’atun of the thirteenth b’ak’tun.”
There was a pause, but not such a long one as you’d think.
“Who was your mother?” she asked. “And who was your father?”
“My mother was Flor Tizac Maria Mixoc DeLanda, of the Ch’olan, and my father was Bernardo Koyi Xul Simon DeLanda, of the T’ozil.”
“And who are your smokers, your protectors?”
I told her the names of Jed’s gods, Santa Teresa and Maximón. I gave him his Mayan name, Mam.
“And when did you leave your dooryard?” she asked.
“13 Imix, 4 Mol, in the fifth uinal of the eleventh tun of the eighteenth k’atun of the eleventh b’ak’tun.” That is, September 2, 1984, the day my parents sent me to the hospital in Xacan.
Pause.
Well, good for you, Jed, I thought. That’s the second time you’ve spilled your guts to somebody on this trip. Mix a dollop of loneliness and a pinch of tongue-loosening narcotics and it gets tough to be cagey—
“And how did you come here?” Koh asked.
“I rode here on a waterfall of light,” I said. “Or rather, I was the waterfall.” What the hell am I babbling about? I wondered. That’s not a good metaphor. Oh, well, let it go.
“So,” she said,
“Then, in your time, have our kin gone unfed?
Have our smokers gone hungry?”
There was a quality in her voice of—well, I hesitate to mention it, because it makes her sound like a downer, and so far, at least, she was the opposite, in fact being in the same room with her felt oddly energizing, like holding a sharp machete or a high-caliber handgun—but her voice had this undertone of incredible sadness, as though she’d seen more of the world than any single person could have, let alone someone her age, as though she’d watched millions of beings pass from childhood enthusiasm into ever-greater disappointments and finally into antemorbid terror.
“Do your hometimers still sing their names?
Do they still perfume their skeletons?
“Do our home smokers still suckle on slaves’ blood?
And do they protect you?”
“It’s true that my contemporaries have forgotten some of their obligations,” I said. It sounded lame when it came out. In fact it sounded even lamer than it sounds in English. “Still, some of your descendants do still suckle your smokers on the altars, on the hilltops. Even if they do not remember their names, they try to suckle them all.”
“And what do they suckle them on?”
Well . . . I thought. Not humans, anyway. “Most of them are impoverished,” I said.
“It sounds as though they let their ancestors go hungry.”
“They do what they can.”
“And so your world is rotting underneath you.”
Yes, I thought, in the twenty-first century, things really are falling apart. Ignoring the falconer, shuffling off to Bethlehem, it’s so bad even the worst lack all conviction.
“It may be,” I said. “But it does not have to be that way.”
“Then why are you here? Whose path do you scout?”
She meant who was I working for. I was about to say 2 Jeweled Skull, but then I thought why go through all that again and just said “Marena Park.”
“And then why did the Ix-ahau Maran Ah Pok decide to send you here?” Koh asked.
“We saw you in a book,” I said. “One of the books recording the Game you played on 9 Overlord, 13 Gathering survived to our k’atun. I saw the book on 2 Were-Jaguar, 2 Yellowribs, in the nineteenth k’atun of the thirteenth b’ak’tun.”
“Two suns before the sorcerer would cast his fire out of obsidian.”
“Yes.”
“And this was the day that the Ix-ahau asked you to come here?” Koh asked.
“No, it was days after that,” I said. And, I told her, even then I had to practically beg Marena to send me.
“But she showed you the book just in time.”
I said it wasn’t just in time because it was too late to do anything, and thousands of people died.
“But it was just in time for you to know the bad sun was coming.”
“Yes.”
“And so maybe the Ix-ahau Maran Ah Pok was planning to send you here before she showed you the book.”
“I had to beg her,” I said again.
“And how long did it take to convince her?” Koh asked.
I thought back. “Not long,” I said. Actually, come to think of it, I guess it was about a minute and a half.
“Then maybe that is your answer,” Koh said.
I sat and thought about it. You know, Jed, I thought, she could be right. You’re stupid. You try to be all cool and sophisticated but inside you’re a trusting sort of simpleton. Maybe Marena and Lindsay Warren and Michael Dick-face and Taro and everybody were all taking advantage of you from day one. Maybe Sic never even wanted to come back here. That was just a ploy to get you jealous. No wonder his Ch’olan sucked, he knew he didn’t need it.
I really didn’t want to believe it, though. I shook my head a bit, discreetly, I hoped, trying to sober up.
“And you wanted to meet the adder who played the Game,” she said.
I said that we didn’t entirely understand what would happen on the last date.
“On that sun the four hundred babies will tell us what they want,” Koh said.
Pause. Don’t say anything, I thought. Wait.
Koh didn’t say anything, though. Unlike the average interrogee. Finally, I couldn’t stand it.
“In the book it says there will be more than before, but still none,” I said.
“Correct,” Koh clicked.
“And they will ask for something,” I said. “Won’t they?”
“They will ask for something we can’t give them.”
Pause.
Okay, I thought. Maybe I’d better just ask.
“And what is the Flesh Dropper?”
I don’t know, she gestured.
“What about the total of the suns of their tortures and the suns of their festivals?”
“Every living being has more tortures than festivals.”
“That sounds correct,” I gestured. “What about the place of betrayal?”
“That is in the nameless suns,” she said. Literally the expression meant the five nameless intercalary days at the end of the Maya solar year. But in this context it was more like when you say “in the middle of nowhere,” except it’s the middle of notime. That is, it doesn’t happen in the same time flow—or temporal arrow or temporal dimension or whatever—as the rest of life. It’s a kind of limbo, like a time out in a ball game.
Pause.
“And taking two from twelve makes One Ocelot?” I asked.
“No, that is something One Ocelot did,” Koh said.
“I don’t understand.”
“One Ocelot did not make it clear.”
“What did you see on that sun?”
“I didn’t see anything,” she said. “I heard it all from One Ocelot.”
“You were playing against One Ocelot?” I asked. As I think I mentioned, One Ocelot was the ancestor of the Ocelot Clan, who opened the sweetwater vein of Ix and who stripped the wooden flesh off the drowned mute men in the last days of the third sun.
Koh clicked yes.
“Was he in the sanctuary of the Ocelots’ mul?” I asked.
“They brought him to a secret court,” she said.
She meant that they’d brought his mummy down from the pyramid, and she’d played the Game against him. Of course, he must have spoken and made his moves through an interpreter.
Well, it serves me right for not guessing that, I thought. Come to think of it, that character in the Codex had looked a little odd. As I think I mentioned, or maybe I didn’t, mummies were a big deal in these parts. They weren’t like Egyptian mummies, though. They were usually wood-and-corn-paste effigies, built around a skull and some, but not all, of the other bones in the skeleton. Often they wore a mask made from the tanned skin of the deceased, and sometimes they wore other masks over that one. They were bundled in all sorts of robes and regalia. And unlike Egyptian mummies, they didn’t just lie around in tombs. They sat in at feasts and conferences and got carried through festivals and even battle. They got around. And of course they talked a lot, through intermediaries.
“And could you over me condescend to tell me more?” I asked.
“There is no more to tell from that Game. Your book was complete.”
“But sometimes one could drive that prey again down that same path,” I said. It was an idiom, but I meant “Maybe you could pick up that same Game again near the end and play out a different endgame.” It was like how in chess you might go back to the move just before the winning move just to see if the losing side had a chance.
“That won’t be done,” Koh said. “One Ocelot still plays with living balls.” As I think I mentioned, “balls” could also mean “runners.” “Maybe no one will play a Game that large again. Finished.”
Hell, I thought. Apparently, she meant that the art was dying out. And when somebody around here said “finished,” it meant you weren’t going to get any more information out of them, even if you tortured them. Although you might torture them anyway, just as a point of etiquette.
Koh looked at the incense clock. It had gone out. The session was supposed to be over. Damn it. I’d expected the ancient past to be leisurely. Now I was trying to squeeze another few minutes out of her, like some B-list journalist interviewing Madonna. Koh turned back toward me, with her eyes looking over mine, as was proper. Hell. Hellhellhellhellhell. Really, you’d think this might be at least a little interesting. That is, you don’t meet Buck Rogers every day of the k’atun, but still, I guess she just couldn’t do this right now, the Silence was starting soon, there were lines of other, richer supplicants outside, the Synods were getting ready to close down the Rattler’s House, time was seriously a-wastin’—
Okay. Regroup. Try another tack.
“I know the exact moment that the Chewer will attack the sun nine days from now,” I said. “It will be eight hundred score and nine score and one beat after the first shard of dawn,” I said. As I think I mentioned, every sun adder in Mesoamerica knew that there would be a solar eclipse early in the day. But not even the most learned ones, the heads of the astronomer clans at Teotihuacan, Ix, or Palenque could predict the exact time. They weren’t even sure if it would be total or partial. For that stuff, you need telescopes and calculus.
“He who knows, knows,” she said. It was kind of an untranslatable idiom, but basically it was like saying “we’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?” Like, tell me something I can use this minute. She had a point.
“Then the sun will be blocked out for nineteen score and eight beats,” I said, “and then, forty-one score and eighteen beats later, it will be whole again.”
Pause. She didn’t throw me out, so I went on.
“Except nothing really chews on the sun,” I said. “Blood Rabbitess comes between the earth and the sun”—Koh clicked unimpressedly, meaning she already knew that—“and blood Rabbitess is a ball, with the same side always turned toward us, and the sun is a flaming ball, like a night-game hipball, and Sun Vanquisher and Sun Trumpeter are the same being”—she clicked at that too—“and that being is also a ball, and the zeroth level”—that is, the earth—“is also a ball, and it holds us to itself the way a large lodestone holds on to smaller ones. And the cigar fires of Iztamna and Ixchel, and 7 Hunaphu, they’re also just balls, all lobbing high around the sun.”
“But they don’t fall,” she said.
Hah, I thought. The mask slips. The Ice Empress really is interested in something.
“They are falling,” I said, “but they have a long way still to fall before they hit the sun. They’ll be falling for another four hundred times four hundred times four hundred times four hundred times four hundred times four hundred times four hundred b’ak’tuns.” This had better be blowing her mind, I thought. It’s my A material. I leaned forward—ill-manneredly—and picked a shallow round bowl out of the array of clayware next to the brazier. I pulled the neck-slit of my manta up to my mouth, popped off one of the round gray-stone beads with my teeth, yanked the dangling thread out of the bead, dropped the bead in the bowl, picked up the bowl, and rolled the bead around. It was pretty wobbly but I launched into my spiel anyway:
“The center of this bowl is like the sun,” I said. “And we stand on one side of the bead. And as we spin it appears to us that the sun is moving. But really we’re the beings who are moving.”
“So you next to me say the sun is at the bottom of the turquoise bowl,” she said.
“No, there is no bowl. There is no sky shell. The sky is just wind all the way up. And actually, we don’t move around it quite in a circle. We move in a shape like a goose’s egg.”