In the Courts of the Sun (64 page)

The two creatures were as far apart on the board as possible, and because of the cluster of standing stones in the middle, they couldn’t see each other. But, slowly, the centipede rustled, orienting herself, and then moved three wary steps east, perpendicular to the monkey, palpating the surface of the red quadrant. From the way she found her footing in the shallow bins, it seemed that she was accustomed to the terrain. The monkey stiffened. Something was up.
In terms of size, the centipede had the advantage. But I’d seen howler monkeys kill snakes bigger than they were. And even if the monkey decided he didn’t want to fight the centipede, he could always just bounce away. And the ’pede was blind. So my guess was that, once again, things looked bad for the invertebrates.
The monkey turned his head left, ever so slightly, and the centipede cocked her own cephalothorax in the same direction. It was hard to believe that he’d made a sound. But the ’pede’s ancestors had lived underground for a long time, and they’d learned to sense the tiniest vibrations. There was another long pause and then the monkey edged slightly left, checking out a possible route to the south. The ’pede reacted immediately. The monkey paused and crept forward. I counted four beats and then the centipede began to move, first only stroking the board in place and then creeping
au pas de loup
southward, perpendicular to the monkey, her claws contacting the surface in waves. I thought I could almost hear the taps of chitin on the stone and the differences between the taps. The
Scolopendra
came to the edge of the standing stone at today. Her antennae probed past the edge, thinking around the corner. I thought of Marena in that photograph, climbing that rock face, feeling for cracks above her head. The monkey crept nearer. The ’pede started to slide forward, moving in a way that looked like she was chewing her way through space, and then froze in position, tasting the air with her antennae. She looked like an open mouth with the teeth on the outside, a Cheshire jaguar’s bloody grin. The monkey took a tiny hop left, out from the shelter of the standing stone.
The ’pede stiffened.
The monkey saw her. He froze.
Did he know what she was? All mammals instinctively fear segmented things. On the other hand, monkeys, even frugivores like this guy, eat a lot of bugs. And this monkey didn’t just look hungry. He was truly underfed. His eyes narrowed, and you could see by the greed in them that he’d been on a starvation diet, that he’d attack anything with meat on it. Was he going to grab her by the tail and whip her head against the stone? Or would he paw at her over and over until he’d smooshed her, like a fox does with a scorpion?
He studied her. The centipede crept forward again, warily, into the yellow and clockwise toward the red. The monkey’s tensed body didn’t move, but his eyes followed her. She crossed into the red zone. The monkey shifted his weight. Suddenly, too fast for the eye to follow, the centipede darted forward. The monkey jumped and leapt sideways, almost backward, and crouched behind one of the obstacle stones. The centipede slowed and turned.
There was a standoff. I counted five beats, and then ten. The monkey crept backward, keeping the standing stone between them. At fourteen beats, the tableau dissolved into motion. The combatants ricocheted across the surface too fast to follow, like a pinball between bumpers or a video of subatomic particles bouncing around in a cloud chamber. I had an impression that it was the monkey chasing the centipede.
All around the vinegar bush,
I thought. Then it seemed that the centipede was chasing the monkey, roughly counterclockwise through the henge of stones, which made something like an obstacle course. On each circuit the centipede came closer to the monkey than it had before. Now the monkey was into the red, and then the centipede was into the red and up into the white and the monkey had leapt across the board, into the black, with the centipede following and then not following but turning and heading backward, as though she were figuring out where the monkey was going to go, and before I could see what had happened the centipede had headed him off against one of the standing stones. Then the monkey had looped around behind her. He faked her out, I thought. The centipede froze. The monkey seemed to gather his courage. He jumped, grabbed the ’pede’s last segment, and raised it to whip her down to the stone, but before he could get her off the ground the centipede’s head had curled up behind the monkey’s back. I got a disturbing feeling that the ’pede had planned this, had seen it all ahead of time. She clenched around his torso and dug her bladed arms into the flesh at the nape of his neck.
The monkey tore away, leapt backward, and stumbled. It was clear that he’d been envenomated. He struggled westward, creeping on all fours, but by 8 Reed his hands were slipping on the stone. He stumbled around Venus and back northward. He made it as far as 13 Wind. After decades of playing the Game I could feel, without knowing how, that his terror keyed into something basic about the layout of the board.
I looked up at Koh. She was concentrating on the scene with what I’d have to call a burning focus, reading the monkey’s panic.
The centipede sat, waiting. I noticed she was in the very center of the board, on the green zero date, which also represented Teotihuacan in the board’s world-map aspect. After thirty seconds the monkey was moving more stiffly, dragging himself forward, away from the centipede. He wouldn’t be so much in pain now, I thought, just feeling terribly cold. Two minutes later he was at the far side of the black quadrant. He toppled forward, like a little figurine, resting on his face. He could still flex and unflex his hands. Otherwise, he seemed to be paralyzed below the neck. The centipede approached him, more insouciant this time, legs rippling unhurriedly like oars on a galleon. When she reached him she palpated him with her furred antennae in long, delicate strokes. She folded herself around him. He tipped over stiffly but his hands still curled around two of the ’pede’s spiked legs, trying to push away. They were small animals, but the scene felt gigantic, like we were seeing the true, unedited story of Saint George and the dragon. The monkey began to scream.
The sound was almost too high to hear, as shrill as a diamond cutter across a sheet of Pyrex. It was a tiny sound. But it was so penetrating that I was sure that Hun Xoc and the rest of them could hear it out in the courtyard, that 14 Wounded could hear it all the way across town, that they could hear it way out in the wastelands, in Ix, at the North Pole, and on Mars. After a hundred and four beats the glass seemed to shatter, and the scream stopped, and started again, and broke again, and finally the monkey was screaming silently, with his mouth frozen open and his lips drawn back from his tiny teeth. After three thousand beats he was swelling with digestive juices but still twitching. The centipede began to feed, her little jaws and palps moving over the monkey, back and forth, like a child eating corn on the cob, tonguelessly licking him, basting him with gelatinous saliva. ’Pedes are messy eaters, and soon the monkey was glistening with the stuff and there was a clear pool of it underneath him. After sixty thousand beats, the centipede’s enzymes had largely dissolved the monkey’s muscles and internal organs, and it looked more like a skin filled with water than a recently living creature. The ’pede gnawed at the base of his neck, and then up through the soft skull into the brain, and then back down into the torso. We watched in the suffocating silence. Koh’s pupil was so dilated that the brown of her iris was like an aureole around an eclipsed sun. The centipede turned the monkey’s torso over with her quick delicate fussy harp-plucking movements and began coating his stomach. I estimated that it only took about an hour and forty minutes for the monkey to be reduced to a smudge of fur and teeth.
I snuck a look at Koh. She was looking at me with one eye and keeping her other on the ’pede. Whoa, I thought. It can be disconcerting to talk to people who have a wandering eye. But unlike someone with the medical condition Koh could apparently control her eyes independently. I looked back at the board. Nothing happened for another eternity or two. Just when I felt like everything had ended and we were all mummified in our spots, Koh seemed to move. I looked up at her. Nothing. I looked back at the centipede. Something was wrong.
The centipede tensed, as though she sensed enemies. She whipped her head to the left and then to the right, snapped her maxillae twice, and then seemed to panic. She ran clockwise, and then counterclockwise, over the red land, over the yellow land, out to the eighth b’ak’tun, and then turned right and dashed into the black land, and then ran back again over the white land and the yellow land, way, way out this time, into the thirteenth b’ak’tun, and back and forth, pastward, futureward, crossing the present over and over until finally, in the center of the north quadrant, on 14 Night, she dug in and spun around and around counterclockwise. For some reason a word scrolled across my mind:
INSANE
. On the twenty-eighth spin she seemed to come to a decision and froze, her tail raised. Her antennae quivered. Her legs drummed preternaturally fast. There’s an Ixian expression that says you’ll never move faster than when you shiver at your death.
The centipede took four halting steps north, then six slow steps southeast, and shuddered to a stop on a bin that, with the numerical stones, signified 12 Motion, 5 Turquoise, in the seventh k’atun of the twelfth b’ak’tun, or December 3, 1773. It was the year of the earthquake that destroyed Antigua when it was the capital of Guatemala. Should I mention it? Or did Koh already know? I decided not to volunteer anything. The centipede moved forward again, staggering, if you can stagger with forty-two legs, until she came to on 2 Etz’nab, 1 K’ank’in, 2 Razor, 1 Yellowribs, two days from the end date.
Evidently she’d been poisoned by the monkey, or by whatever the monkey had been raised on. She writhed, curled, uncurled, flipped over onto her back, curled and uncurled, and flopped onto her stomach. She bit at the base of her left 18th leg. Bits of white flesh swelled out through cracks in her exoskeleton. Mist sprayed from her fangs as she pumped neurotoxins into the air. She flipped onto her back again, clawing at herself. A seam opened in the center of her back and widened, the cuticle unzipping segment by segment. She was molting.
Arthropods molt using peristaltic waves. A molting spider looks like a lone hand pushing its way out of a glove. Insects tend to tear off one piece at a time. A centipede flexes and extends, like a foot shrugging off a slipper. Usually the molt reveals a complete fresh exterior, and it’s as though the creature has been reborn. I remembered that someone—maybe my mother, or maybe Chacal’s mother—had said that if we could shed our skins we’d be able to live forever.
Now, though, this centipede was trying to molt when she wasn’t ready. There was no new exoskeleton under the one she was shedding, just raw liner cells oozing bubbles of hemolymph. Basically, she was skinning herself alive. She twisted and flopped against the stone, obviously in agony. Curls of chitinous shell separated and dropped to the stone with shreds of white flesh stuck to their undersides. The ventral sides of her last two segments seemed to be moving, or kneading, maybe, and then they fell apart—but the pieces were moving, no, they were little things moving, maggots, maybe? No, they were hundreds of tiny translucenty-white centipedes, each only about the size of a bit of shaved dried coconut from some old-fashioned ice-cream snowball dessert. I thought I remembered that
Scolopendra
laid eggs, but evidently this type was different. The little guys crawled and spread and wriggled and clustered around the gobbets of their mother’s flesh, lapping up ichor. Finally the mother curled into a ring, gnawing at herself until she was just a soggy tangle on 9 Skull, 11 Wind, in the white quadrant of the board. Eventually only her antennae were still moving, drawing slow figure eights in the air. Within another thousand beats, the kids had stopped too. Koh’s fingers came down out of the sky. Her nails closed on the tattered centipede. She picked her up—the ’pede was as stiff as a burnt strip of bacon—and put the opal runner down in her place. She swept up the bits of the monkey and the loose bits of the ’pede with a new cotton cloth. The dwarf held out a clay box. Koh wrapped the remains of both animals in the cloth, laid the bundle in the box, and spoke briefly to it in two languages. The dwarf took the box away, presumably for dignified entombment. Before I knew what she was doing Koh had already taken away the large standing stones and started laying out the skulls, that is, pebbles, on the bins where the creatures had been, counting again in that old language. It seemed that she paused for several minutes between each stone and the next, and I had to keep reminding myself that she was moving at normal speed and I was just thinking faster.
Even so, the actual combat between the creatures had still happened so fast I barely saw it. But not only had Koh seen it all, she remembered the entire tangle of paths that the centipede and monkey had taken, and remembered it perfectly. She traced it with a chain of markers, using different shapes of pebbles on the spots of different events, a flat oval on the bin where the centipede first struck, a wedge where the monkey died, and a near-perfect sphere on the site of the centipede’s death. It was one of the most singular mental feats I’d ever seen, and I’d seen a few. To me the whole thing had been 80 percent blur. I bet she could have watched a ten-minute video of balls bouncing around on a billiard table and then sketched every frame.
Finally, Koh tapped the board five times and emptied out a bag of little stones. They were all different. Some were flattened on one side like gum-drops. Each represented a planet or a major star. She selected the cast of characters that would currently be overhead and put back the rest. She laid out tonight’s skyscape on the board, slightly differently this time, with the Last Lord of the Night bowing down to the west and the birth of Sun Vanquisher, that is, Venus, in the east. The stone she used to represent the moon was a smooth spheroid hydrophane, a water opal. In Europe, in the Middle Ages, they called it the Eye of the World.
Koh said:
“Now blackward I salute the cave of the dead,