In the Courts of the Sun (63 page)

Mimulus inoschalus,
that the low-level Ixian Ocelots also wore. So he was from the other side, the Puma House, but he wasn’t a feline being himself. Probably he was from some foster clan that served the Pumas as monks. He recited something incomprehensible in a whispery voice and Koh answered in the same language. I don’t understand, I thought. Say it in Bumfuckistani. He walked toward Koh, taking five slow, tiny steps. Koh didn’t move.
There was something about the scene I didn’t like. In fact it gave me a bit of the creeps. The Puma fumbled with something near his waist. No way, I thought. He pulled out a little pouch, held it up near his face, untied what were probably some more of those impossible secret fisherman’s knots, thumbed it open, and took something out. I didn’t see what the something was.
Koh leaned forward and opened her mouth. The Puma put the something on her tongue. She closed her mouth, leaned back, and chewed it up.
I got a little shock, a relic from my days as a preconfirmed Catholic. Was that how communion rituals got started? I wondered. Take and freak, this is my blotter. I felt like I nearly choked staying silent.
There was something poignant about watching her do this very common, human thing, that is, eat. It had a kind of affectionate drudgery to it, like you could see she’d done this thousands of times. Suddenly she seemed like a human being, like a fun girl to be around. A little wacky, maybe.
The Puma messenger leaned forward, listening to Koh swallow. The dwarf handed him a cup of I guess hot water and he held it out to Koh. She took it with the hem of her manta between her hand and the cup, drank down whatever was in it, and gave it back to him. He looked into it and then down at her. She opened her mouth wide. He examined it for a moment and then spread his arms to show he was satisfied. To me it seemed kind of degrading to Koh, like she was getting tranqs in prison. The Puma took another little thing out of a different waist pouch. The Penguin Woman held out a trading tray and he set it in the center. It was a little figurine of Koh, with her face painted in that distinctive way. Maybe it was what Koh had given the dwarfess before. The Penguin Woman chanted a little thank-you-guest speech in that same old language.
The Puma whispered a thank-you-host reply, squatted, and withdrew backward into the tunnel. The Penguin Woman followed him out.
So that’s how they do it, I thought. Koh and the other Orb Weavers didn’t even have direct access to all the components of the Game drugs. Instead, it was basically a double-key system. You could only get the full effect by taking two different compounds. And the head adders of the Morning Glory House knew how to make one of them and the Swallowtail House adders knew how to make the other, and neither one had gotten the secret out of the other, not in the hundreds of years since whatever genius it was set up the system.
Well, Jed, you should have guessed it. No wonder this town’s been so stable for such a long time. Damn, why didn’t I think of that?
Hell. This is going to be tough.
Frustration. Deep in my clenched fists I could feel my long nails breaking the skin of my palms. Relax, I thought. Keep it together. True strength is seeing every finish line as the next starting point. Breathe.
Koh was still. I sat still. I blinked. My eyelid rolled down like dusk and, after a long night, like dawn. There was silence except for the rustlings in the tunnel beyond the door. Then there was a low whistle like a mourning dove’s. Koh stood up, walked over to the screen, slipped through it, bent down over me—I hadn’t quite had a chance to get back to my spot—and grabbed me by my hair, not by my pigtail, which was still false, but the forelock, and kissed me, violently, thrusting her smooth tongue into my mouth, twisting it around mine, rubbing it into my cheeks, over my palate, between my sharpened teeth and the fresh laceration and old scars on my inner lips, down to my tonsils, everywhere—

[52]

S
he tasted like nothing I’d ever tasted, not in the ninth b’ak’tun or in the twelfth, maybe a little like that wistful taste like
uni,
raw sea urchin, but darker and older and more metallic. Wow, major kiss, I thought, just about the last thing I expected in this context; Native Americans don’t really have a kissing culture.
I almost thought she was she expecting me to rip her damn raiment off and go at it, and I was considering trying to fondle her somewhere—if I could get it together enough to find a fondlable spot—when she let go of my hair, broke away from me with a wet pop, and sat back in her spot on the far side of the hearth cover. The dwarf, who evidently had come back, set down a basketful of pots and jars and gave Koh a cup of something. She drank it as though she wanted to wash my taste from her mouth. I settled down again on my mat, trying to quiet my breathing. She looked as though nothing noteworthy had happened. Weirdly enough I felt unfaithful to Marena, even though she and I weren’t really an item, probably. Settle down, Goofus, I thought, you’re dreaming. All these broads are out for marlin. They’re not interested in some grungy little . . . whatever . . .
Whoa. A numby fugu-ish aftertaste was growing in my mouth. I wobbled a little and sat up straight again.
Well, so that’s the deal, I thought. She was just giving me a taste of the dope. Purely a professional maneuver. Chill.
So the colony of wasps produced X chemical—maybe they fed on something specific and they refined it in their bodies—and that was the Old Salter’s dust. And that process was owned by the Orb Weavers. And then if you combined it with the Steersman’s dust—that is, the topolytic drug, the Y chemical that the Puma messenger had given Lady Koh—it gave you the full nine-stone enabling effect.
Well, damn. That’s a disappointment. 2JS had thought she’d have a stash of the stuff on hand. Instead she had to fill a prescription and use it all in one shot under feline supervision. And from the way she was talking before, it sounds like even that was out of the ordinary, that they weren’t giving any of it out on demand, except that she was able to get a tiny dose of it by calling in a favor. Fuck and fuck.
Hmm.
Ready? Koh gestured.
I sat up straighter. Ready, I signed. Koh took a deep drag on her cigar.
“My breath is red, my breath is white,” she said.
When you root yourself you make yourself believe you’re at the heart of the universe. But this time I didn’t have to make myself believe it. I was already sure of it. The bite of gravity felt stronger than it ever had, but at the same time it seemed like I was feeding off it, building up a mountain-full of energy. I thought I could feel each of the different layers of material beneath me, cotton, rush matting, clay, soil, stone, molten stone, all the way down to earth’s white-hot crystal core. The underwaterworlds and overworlds rotated around us. I was home.
The dwarf slid a claw through a loop of string on the hearth cover, lifted up the wooden square, and slid it aside. It looked heavy but she didn’t seem to strain. In the space underneath, instead of a fire pit, there was a nearly perfect square depression, about fifteen inches deep and forty inches on a side. On its flat bottom I could just make out the incised outlines of a game board, a thirteen-by-thirteen square. Koh was sitting on the southwest and I was on the northeast: The dwarf set rushlights on the northwest and southeast sides of the stone well, filling it with light. The stone was some kind of dark, fine-grained gneiss, and it had that patina that you can only get from skin, from generations of hands tapping and rubbing, sweeping and polishing, and when Koh tapped the southwest wall five times with the butt of her fly whisk, you could tell from the resonance, or the lack of resonance, or something, that the pit had been chipped out of living rock, and that we were sitting on the peak of a buried mountain that went down through the alluvium of the valley and into the roots of the Sierra Madre Oriental.
“Ya’nal Wak Kimi,”
Koh said,
“Now on 6 Dying, on 14 Stag, in the eleventh tun, counting,
Nearing the end of eleven k’atuns in the tenth b’ak’tun, counting,
Now I am borrowing this sun’s breath, now I will borrow tomorrow’s,
Now I will borrow the wind of the suns that will follow tomorrow.”
She took a finger-scoop of damp tobacco out of one of the little baskets and drew her hand inside her quechquemitl so that she could rub the stuff into her thigh. I couldn’t get much of an idea of what was going on under all the drapery, but it was still a pretty sexy gesture.
I sat back a bit. I felt extremely wrong. I was sure that I was going to vomit, and not just the contents of my stomach, but my entire digestive tract. Everything from the esophagus to the colon was going to spray out of my mouth and pile up on the board. I choked it all back and sat a few degrees straighter. Keep it together, Joaquinito. You wanted to play with the big kids. So play.
“Now my own breath is a yellow wind,”
She said. “Now my own breath is a red wind,
Now my own breath is a white wind,
A black wind, an emerald-green wind.
You of my uncle’s house,
You far away and now close to me,
Here we are sitting together
Between the four heights, four volcanoes,
Here on the blue-green volcano,
Five suns from the northeast white mountain,
Five suns away from your southeastern heights,
From your family’s red mountain,
Five suns away from the yellow southwestern volcano,
And five suns
Away from the darkness,
Away from the scab-black northwestern volcano.”
The dwarf handed Koh something. It was a black stone, a rounded cone, about two inches wide at the base and seven inches high, polished to a licked gloss. Koh set it down in the red quadrant—although there were only traces of pigment left on the board’s surface, but of course one knew what the colors were—in the bin, or rather the faint depression, that corresponded to today. Its bottom fitted into the concavity so that it stood upright and stable. The Penguin Woman handed Koh another and another, until there were nine pillars rising up from the board, making a star map of this particular day at this location, with the Pleiades, the moon, and then Venus just rising at the eastern edge. Next she added five stones, which, I guessed, stood for the five mountains of Teotihuacan, that is, they established our exact place on earth.
Koh held out her dark hand and opened it slowly, meaning “Now, what is your question?”
Okay, I thought. Better phrase this right.
I’m still not sure just how on board she is. I have to get her to commit. If it isn’t enough to just identify the Doomster now, then she should show me how to play with nine stones. And if you need to get together the Game drugs to do that, then she should tell me how to do that too. Right.
“You next to me please tell me,” I said, “how can I preserve my hometimers’ lineages through the last sun of the thirteenth b’ak’tun, and for the thirteen b’ak’tuns following that sun.”
Koh didn’t react. But the pause stretched on in a way that made me pretty sure she was displeased. Well, she’s not throwing me out, I thought. Pause. Pause. Pause.
Finally, the Penguin Woman—who seemed to get cues from Koh telepathically like some kind of homunculus—crawled into view with another set of wicker boxes. She took a jar and a paintbrush out of one of them and painted the walls of the sunken board with some kind of fat or oil. It had an odd smell. Next she painted the stuff on the sides of the standing rocks—
Whoa. Dizzy.
By now the taste from that kiss had filled my whole body. It was crab-meaty and sour—not so sour as an ant, though—and then under that there was a cocaine-like buzz, and still farther down and later in the aftertaste there was some unnatural flavor that maybe reminded me of some kind of soft drink they used to make when I was a kid, some really debased pre-natural-food-era chemically futuristic drugstore novelty, except I’d forgotten the name, what was it, some . . .
Where was I?
The dwarf handed Koh a basket. She took a little wiggling pinkish-brown thing out of it and set it down on the game board’s blue-green center point. It crouched there, and turned its head, and blinked around in the light. It was a baby monkey, smaller than a lab mouse—maybe about two inches high if it stood up, which it didn’t—and nearly naked. Its groin was painted or dyed black, to look like a loincloth, and there was a black sort of cap painted on its head, I guess to make it look more human. It didn’t look like a miniature human baby. It had the proportions of an adult. I couldn’t tell what species it was but from its malnourished, elongated look, and from its spiraling tail, I guessed that it might be a spider monkey, an
Ateles,
one of those dark tiny things that eats a lot of fruit and almost never comes down to the forest floor. They grow fast, so it had to be almost a newborn, but already it had a dusting of dark down, and as it dashed twice around the perimeter of the board, it seemed as mobile as an adult. It tried to climb up the corner of the polished wall and then tried to push itself up between two standing stones that were close to each other, but it kept slipping down, scrabbling against the greased stone. Then it tried leaping, and I almost thought it would clear the edge, but it didn’t have the muscles or coordination an adult would have and couldn’t leap above twice its own height. Finally it paused and urinated in the center of the red quadrant. I couldn’t see much—you’d need a jeweler’s loupe—but I got the impression it was a male. He looked up at us, although of course he couldn’t see us with those tiny eyes that hadn’t yet learned to focus. It crept into the red-and-black corner and cowered there, shivering. Koh brought one of the dry chocolate cups down over the monkey and slid it over the shallow bins to the square in the white quadrant that corresponded to today, four lines from the Eclipse Day on the border of the black quadrant.
There was a pause. I noticed I was listing slightly to port. By now whatever she’d slipped me in that kiss had brought me beyond the point of sharpening my wits and into a stage where I couldn’t have told you who I was—although come to think of it, that was actually an issue. And I’d only gotten a trace of what she’d taken, I thought. She must have enough of this stuff in her system to kill a blue whale. And she was also a lot smaller than I was. No wonder the nine-stone adders had to start getting habituated to the drugs when they were five years old. I probably had this dopey high-guy grin. Lady Cool would think I was a total fruitcake. Well, that’s what happens your first time.
The Penguin Woman handed Koh a second box. It was shaped like a little square hut with a tuft of strings on top. This time she set it down in the center of the black quadrant, untied the little knot, and pulled up one of the strings. A wall of the box slid up like the door of a Chinese cricket cage.
Koh laid her open hand in front of the open door.
We waited. Now what? I wondered.
A pair of segmented longhorn antennae unfolded out of the shadow, paused, rotated in opposition, and paused again, and then a white ribbon of fangs flowed up into Lady Koh’s hand. It was a centipede, but not one I could classify, and it was a cavernicole morph, an eyeless albino species that for all anyone knew might have been living in the same light-tight sinkhole since the latest thing in vertebrates was the coelacanth. It was unpigmented, almost transparent in the soft places, but with brown at the edges of its chitin plates like the singeing at the peaks of a meringue pastry. It was around twelve inches long, which is enough to get your attention. It held still for long enough for me to see that it had twenty-one pairs of legs and that it had no eyes, just four stubs where the eyes would have been. The fangs, or rather poison claws, were long and gently curved, like cavalry sabers. And the setae—that is, the bristles that pick up motion—on its antennae were hugely enlarged, like spikes on an ocotillo cactus. It was like a zipper with the universe caught in it, painfully.
More quickly than I could follow Koh had reached in with her left hand—the heptadigital one—and had grabbed the thing by its second tergite, the one right behind its head. She set it down in the center of a little dish and held it down with her thumb. It—or let’s call it she, because Koh did—she tried to get free, rearing her hind length up and scratching at Koh’s wrist with her flailing tarsae.
“She is one k’atun and tunob old,” Koh said. “She is very wise.”
Koh took her thumb away.
I shifted on my crossed legs. I hadn’t seen or heard of this before. Really, I’d expected Koh to just bring out her stones and seeds and start playing away. Well,
uno nunca sabe.
Koh tapped her fingernails next to the ’pede, apparently communicating with her in her own vibratory language. The thing seemed to cock a slit sensillum to listen. Finally, she unstiffened a little and looked sightlessly up at me. I got a shivery impression she could taste us. She slid twice around Koh’s palm and curled into a loose spiral. Koh spoke to her in a new, smaller voice, and in a different language, all close vowels and sibilants. I leaned in too closely and the critter turned and snapped its labial palps at the warmth of my face with a pair of double clicks.
“Your spine must move northwest,” Koh said. She meant to sit back a bit. I did. I almost thought she was smiling a bit at my little drug problem. I probably had eyes like a twelve-year-old’s after his first toke. Very funny.
Koh set her hand down near the board’s extreme southeast. The ’pede slid off her palm like a trickle of mercury and took possession of the corner. She reoriented herself. She settled. She seemed used to the board.
“Forgive me, lead me, shining guest,” Koh said. With a shell-game-quick movement she covered the centipede with a second chocolate cup. I was unpleasantly reminded of little entertainments that my stepbrothers in Utah set up, gladiatorial combats in TV crates involving whiptail lizards and lab rats. Koh laid her light hand on the cup over the centipede and her dark hand on the cup over the monkey.
“My breath is black, my breath is yellow,
My breath is red, my breath is white, my breath
Is now blue-green . . . ,”
Koh said.
She lifted both cups.
Nothing moved. I watched the centipede through weeks, and months, and years. Finally her antennae stirred, raised, and swung slowly through a 150-degree arc, tapping like a marimba player’s mallets as they spot-tasted the surface. She paused. She’s feeling something, I thought. Was the board like a kind of seismograph? Was the ’pede sensing the ebbs and floods of lava tides two miles below us? Was it gauging the pull of the moon?