In the Courts of the Sun (65 page)

Now yellowward I salute the cave of the breathing,
Now redward I salute the cave of the unborn,
Now whiteward I salute the cave of never at all.
Now I am scattering yellow seeds, black seeds,
And now I am scattering
White skulls and red skulls,
And this is your own blue-green skull,
Your own namesake,
And now we are moving.”
She brought down a green stone and tapped it forward, walking down into the west, up into the east, and back to the crossroads, up the side of the Crocodile Tree, past the Four Hundred Boys, that is, the Pleiades, and along the long white road of the snake’s stomach, past the hearthstones, that is, the belt of Orion, and then south toward Sirius and Mirzam, what we called the Second Lord of the Night, leaving a trail of stones behind her through the convolutions of time. She moved fast, but I followed it with no problem. In fact, even though Chacal’s brain didn’t have the Game connections my Jed one had had, I was coming up with solutions to stuff I’d screwed up in my old games. And it didn’t even exactly feel like I was thinking more clearly. It was something different, a feeling specific to the topolytic drug. It wasn’t like flying through space, but like having all space conflated, or with the whole world balled up in your hand, so that if you just turned it slightly you’d be wherever . . . or maybe it was more as though the world were a deck of cards, so that you could bring distant spaces together just by reshuffling, you could plop Ceylon into the middle of Oklahoma or pour the Trifid Nebula into this room.
Koh set down nine white pebbles and started them hunting the runner. It came to the sun eight days from now, the day of the eclipse. She said there was a faint gray smell there, and that there was also a
k’ii
for me on that day. The word meant a ploy or a strategy, a way to turn things my way. The kii had a two-part name:
“chaat ha’ anachan.”
The first word,
chaat,
meant the Northwest Wind, which was dry, hot, and coded black. Or it could mean just wind in general. The second word,
anachan,
meant a mortuary town, that is, a Mexican-style miniature city of the dead. We’d passed hundreds of them on the long trudge inland from San Martín. Other than that, the dust was too thick, as she put it, for her to see anything more clearly.
Wind in a cemetery, I thought. Hmm.
“Five suns, fourteen suns, and thirty suns,
“Fifty-five suns, ninety-one suns, one hundred suns . . .”
When she’d made twenty placements, Koh took up the first one and continued, like the way a solo mountain climber sets a safety line, climbs up past it, sets another, and then climbs down to remove the first. I’d thought she might use tongs to move a piece on the far side of the board, but instead she leaned way out over it. I got a half eyeful of décolletage. Mmmm. Some things never change. I was feeling like I wouldn’t mind another Kiss of the Spider Woman. Maybe the light-and-dark thing was kind of cute, in a way. What was wrong with her? Was it just hyperpigmentation? You could get extra melanin from hormonal imbalances. Or was it really vitiligo? Melasma? Addison’s disease? Hæmochromatosis? Angina? Xeroderma pigmentosum? Zero-sum game—
“Zero suns,” Koh said. She’d come to the date that corresponded to the spot where the monkey was killed. But she didn’t stop. Instead, and without hesitation, she kept on placing stones, as though the centipede was still chasing the monkey through in some Kaluza-Kleinian collapsed dimension. Some of the bins nearly filled up with pebbles. If there had been only one or two runners I could have followed it. But as I think I’ve said, each new runner increased the difficulty many times over. A nine-stone game isn’t just one stone harder than an eight-stone game. It wasn’t even nine times harder. It was 9!, that is, 9 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2, or 362,880 times harder.
“14, 51, 124, 245,” Koh whispered. She read ahead and then reversed. She backtracked all the way to 5 Kaban, 15 Chen, 8.14.17.7.17, the date identified in the Codex as the collapse of A’ K’aakan, that is, El Mirador, and then turned around and continued along the path into the future, moving ahead 394 days, to the edge of the red quadrant and the founding date of Ix. There was something about the pattern of the hooked path she took, the way it wove back and forth and from point to point like a Maurer rose, and the way it kept repeating itself at different scales as it expanded to wider and wider angles . . . but it always had the same curve to it, a sort of hook, and there was something about that hooking curve that seemed to slice through the mushroom cloud of effects and strike, like a knife on a peach pit, on causes.
“When we come to a place and a sun that are strange to me,” Koh said, “I will tell you the things I read there, and you will tell me their names.”
I clicked that I would. The system she was talking about wasn’t unusual. In fact there were already precedents in the protocol of the Game. For instance a client might ask the adder what’s likely to happen on a trip he’s taking. If he’s talking about a place that he’s visited but the adder hasn’t, the adder will try to intuit the outlines but ask the client to clarify particulars along the way.
“Three hundred ninety-five, five hundred six,” she said. She moved ahead one bundle of fifty-two solar years and then another and another and another. Tzam lic crackled under my skin like static voltage around a Van de Graaff globe. Koh described the Jewel Cities imploding into the jungle, and I imagined them like a backward film of silent red Chinese skyrockets against a green sky. Ix, Axcalamac, Yaxchilán, Bonampak, Palenque, Kaminaljuyú, Ti ak’al, Uaxactun, and Tonil all dissolved in the wave of dissolution that spread from the ruins of the Teotihuacano empire. Her fingers jumped ahead, setting a skull-kernel on the next square at each silent beat, leaving a widening wake, but a wake
ahead
of the line of seeds, the feather-hairs of the board weaving into crystals of history. New cities sprouted in the north, Kan Ec, Pink Mountain, Tula, Flint Lake, Chichén, Kabah, Narrow-Never-Empty-Well, Uxmal, and Mayapán. Later, after the beginning of the tenth b’ak’tun, new clusters of pyramids crystallized in the lake again, near the center of the board but south and west of the ruins of Teotihuacan: Tlaxcala, Tenochtitlán, and a hundred other towns of the Triple Alliance. Files of soldiers streamed like conqueror ants out of the capitals and over Mesoamerica. I snuck a look at Koh. She was straining, carrying me through history like she was surfing a lava flow with me riding on her back. If you play competitive chess or Go, or probably even if you compete at Neo-Teo or whatever’s the latest nontrivial computer game, you know the feeling, the mental agony of keeping that many balls in the air. Even if you’re an athlete, it’s the same. You make that final effort and you think you can’t do it and then you do, you go through that wall and get it up there, but then there’s no way to bring it down, and you panic and yell for a spotter. Koh held thousands of eventualities in her mind and watched them spread out from her alter-ego-stone, and on each move, she chose one of them. Canoes the size of towns slid up out of the sea into the red bottom of the board. She saw the tarpon men again and saw blackberry boils erupting out of square miles of tan skin, lungs throbbing with pustules, bodies dying and spoiling too fast to bury. She moved up to 1518, the year Hernán Cortés reached Mexico City, only a few miles from the ruins of Teotihuacan. The white cities in the center of the lake shriveled in a burst of flame. She moved again.
“Nine Wind, ten thought, sixteenth k’atun,” she said. That was February 4, AD 1525. The lake dried into mud and blew away in storms of dust.
“He almost destroys us,” she said.
“Who?” I asked.
She described a tarpon-scaled giant with an orange beard.
I said I knew who it was.
“Who is it?” she gestured.
“Pedro de Alvarado.”

[53]

K
oh repeated the name. There was something chilling about hearing it here, now, in her voice.
“Now we are slaves,” she said. I focused back on the board. Now it was as big as the entire Western Hemisphere, and populations rolled over the continents like loose beads in a platter. She described cities that doubled in size every few peace seasons, like ground fungi, and dark double roots with wet, giant worms slithering over them. I told her what I guessed she was imagining and she repeated the word: “Railroads.” She moved from December 24, 1917, into 1918, on the dates of the earthquakes that had destroyed Ciudad Guatemala. She described the roots multiplying, and gnarling and sprouting and oozing bitumen. Dark running ticks would crawl over them, sucking the Earthtoadess’s blood, and the trees would shrivel in their breath. After the ninth k’atun of the last b’ak’tun the stinking ticks multiplied into vast enameled herds, red and blue and yellow, and some of them sprouted wings. I told her I thought she was imagining roads and cars and airplanes. She described clusters of quartz crystals that “grew overnight, and vomited white flies over the cracked blue-green bowl.” I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. She set her sapphire down on 11 Howler, 4 Whiteness, in the fifth uinal of the first tun of the eighteenth k’atun of the thirteenth and last b’ak’tun.
“Your name-day,” she said. I clicked “Correct.”
She moved it to February 4, 1976—the day of the last big Guate city earthquake—and then farther out into the last b’ak’tun. “Eleven Motion,” Koh said. “A blowgun-snake with mouth and anus joined vomits a dust-mote into the God of Zero’s fire, and the sands fuse to crystal knives.” The Maya date corresponded to June 2, 2009, the day of the collider blast in Huajapan de Léon. I started to tell her a little bit about it, but she moved on, tapping her lead opal outward, to 6 Razor, 6 Yellowribs.
“They fight themselves here,” she said, “in the game-city in the northern coral flats.”
“Disney World,” I said.
“And what exactly will happen on that sun?”
I described the day as well as possible.
She moved on. We came to the edge of the world at the extreme west rim of the board and the bin named 4 Overlord, 3 Yellowribs, that is, December 21, 2012, at the limit of time.
“A hidden ahau turns his men against his own,” she said. “He has a crooked skull.”
I clicked yes. Still, that didn’t seem like a lot of information.
“No, wait,” she said. “He is not an ahau. He is only using an ahau’s voice. His name is Trumpet Vine.”
Whoa, I thought. Well, that’s pretty specific in its way. The only problem was that I’d never heard of anything named Trumpet Vine.
Hmm.
The Ixian term she’d used,
t’aal chaconib,
meant something like “hummingbird chocolate flower.” And it definitely meant “trumpet vine,”
Campsis radicans
. But the thing was, the word was more common as an adjective, as an idiom for a salmon-pink color. That is, one thinks of trumpet vines as red, but the wild species we had was pink, or salmon pink. So maybe she just meant “light red.”
“Can you over me tell me where he is?” I asked, but she’d already moved on, tapping her runner beyond the last day, into no-name time. Damn it. I snuck a look at her. Gamers learn to hide mental fatigue. But they also learn to sniff it out. So even though Koh didn’t show more than a hint of that pinched dryness you get in too-long-focused eyes, and maybe a slight swelling in one or two thin veins visible through the melanin-free side of her face, I still got an impression that she might collapse. A single bead of sweat crawled out of her oiled hairline. On the board and, it seemed, around us, multitudes of inchoate shapes tumbled and howled with a sound like some tribe of giant nonhuman mammals in some huge stone hall. Ahead of us there was something like an edge, and beyond that, a zone that wasn’t fog or darkness, but something like the area outside your field of vision, the 80 percent of the sphere around your head where not only can’t you see, but you can’t even really visualize what it would be like to see there. You strain to look up, say, past the widow’s peak above your nose, and there’s something like a bank of brown fog, but then, beyond that, there isn’t even blackness but just a sort of nothing that your brain isn’t wired to imagine.
“And this is the cliffside,” she said. It meant there was nothing else.
Pause.
Well, that’s a drag, I thought. I stifled a monohiccup. I felt queasy. The dwarf waddled over and took out the standing stones and cleared away the pebbles. There was a last long pause while Koh looked down at the empty board. My eyes were so tired that my vision was getting bluish. When Koh turned away the dwarf washed the board down with b’alche’, salt, and water, tapped it five times to let its uayob know we were leaving, replaced the cover, and scattered fresh geranium petals over it. She got a wet cloth out of one of her jars and snuffed out the stumps of the rushlights.
I blinked. There was light in the room. It was the blue light that I’d thought was in my eyes. It was still weak but it was strong enough for me to see that the waxy stuff that covered the walls and screens and ceiling, and that had looked black in the firelight, wasn’t paper or leaves or feathers. It was a mosaic of the wings of blue morpho butterflies. They were little circular sections, laboriously trimmed out of the center of the wings and sewn onto the canvas backing, tens of thousands of iridescent lapis-lazuli-blue disks rippling in otherwise undetectable air currents. Supposedly, here in the northwest, morphos were the uayob of slain warriors, and they could only be collected after they’d died naturally. Sometimes the collectors followed dying ones for days. How long had it taken? I wondered. How many lives’ worth of man-hours had been spent on this room? The light swelled. It seemed to be falling down from the oculus like snow, so slowly that I thought I could see individual photons. The blue deepened to that unimaginable liquid morpho ultramarine, that structural blue that isn’t a pigment, that comes from the interference of their billions of angled scales and vanishes under a drop of water, and it deepened beyond that, as though we were sinking in the tropical ocean, becoming so saturated it was as though I’d never seen the color blue before.
The dwarf stopped what she was doing and scurried out, as though she’d gotten one of her telepathic signals.
I guess that’s it, I thought. I took in a breath to start the usual thank-you speech but Koh interrupted me with a “wait where you are” gesture.
She closed her eyes. It felt like the most intimate thing she’d done since I got here.
We sat.
So, I wondered, do we count that as a failure? She did get us there, I guess . . . still, that wasn’t enough to really go after anyone . . . was it? I don’t—
“I need to play that through again,” Koh said. “With a full measure of Salter’s and Steerman’s dusts.”
I didn’t know what to say so, as I do too rarely, I shut up.
Hmm, well,
she
seems to consider that a failure. Still, at least she has confidence. It was kind of like how Taro’d said that we’d need another 10
²⁰
ply to be sure we’d bring the Doomster into range. We couldn’t do it, of course, because there wasn’t that much computing power on the planet, but at least he knew it wasn’t impossible.
Well, maybe we can do it this way. She thinks—
I heard something faint and looked up. The Penguin woman was back, whispering something in Koh’s light ear.
I sat.
The whispering went on and on. My sense of time wasn’t back to normal yet, but I was sure it was more than ten minutes. Koh asked a few things in single-hand signs that I didn’t understand. She looked at me in a way that made me a little nervous. Finally, the dwarf left. Koh settled back into a formal position and looked at me again in a way that made me look down at the place where the board had been.
Do you know how—well, I’m sure you know—how in Greek tragedies, all the action happens offstage? And the only things that happen onstage are like, say, a messenger comes in and says something like, “My queen! The Thessalonians are defeated!” Well, the first time I read those plays I thought it was all pretty stagey and unrealistic. But the more I saw of the world and things, especially things here, that is, here in the Olden Times, the more I realized that stuff actually is kind of realistic. Queens and dukes and ahauob and whoever really did spend most of their time sitting in their offices and getting third-hand reports and sending out couriers and generally staying out of the action.
“I’m told that the Harpy 14 Wounded’s compound has been raided,” Koh said. She didn’t exactly glare at me but there was a flatness in her tone that I thought was more than just exhaustion from the Game. She was mad.
“B’aach?”
I asked.
“What?”
It was an unforgivably rude way to speak to her, but I guess I was regressing to our twenty-first-century lack of manners.
“14 Wounded is outside in the courtyard with your men.”’
“What happened to the rest of the Ixian bloods?” I asked.
“For all we know they are also on their way here,” she said.
I started to uncross my legs. “I under you should—”
She turned her hand over, meaning “Shut up,” before I could say “go out and see them.”
“I am told it was the Swallowtail Clan who entered the house,” she said.
It’s those Oxwitzan Jaguar fuckwads, I thought. Those boats that had been following us in the gulf. They’d probably gotten here right after us, pleaded their case in front of their foster cousins in the Puma Synod, and gotten them to shut 14 down. And there was about a 100 percent chance that the Ixian Ocelots had put them up to it. Hell.
“I am told there are more of them on their way here,” she said. Apparently, the Harpies who’d gotten away were trying to claim temporary asylum here, in the Rattler’s quarter.
Damn, she’s angry, I thought. And it wasn’t just because the Rattler’s children weren’t eager to take in any more refugees, although they weren’t, despite the fact that the universal hospitality rule—of which this whole vigil festival thing was kind of an overblown extension—basically obligated them to. The problem was that this incident was likely to scotch any chance of repairing relations between the Rattlers and the two synods.
Well, okay, I thought. Change of plans. Don’t get discouraged. It’s not important how far away your goal is—just that you’re moving toward it.
We still have a little time. 14’s small potatoes. Right? The synods might go after some minor foreign trader right before High Holy Week, but they wouldn’t stir up anything with the Rattlers until after the vigil. Would they?
Okay. Think.
There was no way to get out on the sly. We’d have to stay in the Rattler’s quarter until after the eclipse and then come up with some way to force our way out.
And Koh had just better bite on the asylum offer. She’ll take it, I thought. She has to.
“I beg you over me to come to Ix,” I said. “My father 2 Jeweled Skull now offers you—