In the Courts of the Sun (67 page)

Or that was the Swallowtails’ plan. Koh and I had other ideas.
Two days ago, Koh had made her move. Just after noon, without notifying her fellow adderesses, she’d called forty-eight of her closest followers together and issued a warning about the eclipse. The Sky Eel, she said, had told her that this time, the Black Chewer would not be persuaded to regurgitate this sun, but would “steal the ball,” that is, swallow the sun for good. The Eel, that is, Star Rattler, would give birth to a new sun, she said, and since that sun would be unrelated to the cat lineages, over the next k’atun the Sky Eel’s children would be privileged above all others. But before that, in order to cleanse the dying world, the Rattler was planning to open a cloud gourd and release an army of what they called
dadacanob,
“long bees”—that is, yellowjackets,
Vespula squamosa,
a major nuisance and minor killer in these parts—to sting the eyes of everyone in Teotihuacan who hadn’t followed the Rattler. Everyone but the Rattler’s Children would be condemned to darkness. After that the Sky Eel would tell Koh where to lead its followers and would extend its protection to a new Rattler city in the Red Land, that is, the southeast. Meanwhile, messengers visited the leaders of twenty-four Koh-affiliated households and gave them the location of the rendezvous point: Flayed Hill. As soon as they heard the voice of the yellowjackets, they should gather their families and their most valuable possessions and start marching east.
That last part made me a little uneasy. Somehow we’d gone from talking about her own household and a few followers to close to five thousand people. Would there be enough food for them in the Harpy towns? For that matter, would there be enough food and water along the way? How many of them would die on the trek?
Don’t worry about it, I told myself. Just keep a low profile, score the drugs, ship them back to Ix, and get the fizook out of here.
Koh had immediately been called into the presence of Lady Yellow, who was something like the order’s mother superior. It meant that at least one of her forty-eight confidants was informing on her. Lady Yellow told Koh that the society was planning to vote on her membership. If Koh were blackballed, she’d be expected to drown herself. Later, an informant in the Aura Glory Synod got word to her that the Synods considering inviting her to present herself to them—that is, forcing her to turn herself in for what would inevitably be torture and execution.
By noon on the day of the silence ordinary people were repeating what she’d said in whispers, in the well courts and markets of Teotihuacan. It was a rumor, an order, and a rallying cry :
The next sun is Star Rattler’s.
Everyone in the city and probably everyone in the Valley of Mexico had heard about it, from Turd Curl to the lowliest night-soil collector. And, as is usual with such things, it was already getting exaggerated. The world was dissolving. The sky was falling. The city was going to ooze into a hole in the zero earth. And on, and on, and on.
Still, nobody wanted to do anything to stir up trouble before the eclipse. It was partly because it would look like a sign of weakness, but also because everybody, from top to bottom, took the silence period very seriously. Besides, when the sun did reappear, Koh would be discredited and easy to attack.
Of course, the Synods knew the sun was going to come out again. They knew almost everything about solar eclipses, not just the saros intervals of eighteen years and eleven and one-third days but whether they’d be partial or total and how long they would last. And they tried to make sure the masses knew as little as possible. Like psychiatrists the ruling class had to keep you feeling that they were making you better but that the situation was still dire enough for you to have to keep coming back.
When the eclipse ended, the Pumas would come for us—they’d kill Koh and most of us, if they could. Before they got to us, I had to steal their component of the Game drugs and everyone had to get to the rendevous point. Oh, and then if we all survived, I would learn the nine-stone game and get my notes on everything entombed back in Ix. I still didn’t know how the “trumpet vine” had destroyed Disney World, but that was a problem for another day. Let’s call it a long shot.

[55]

S
omething was wrong with the space. It was like the whole outdoors was getting smaller, shrinking to the size of a single stuffy room. No, I thought, it’s not the space, it’s the light. Everything looked just a little more solid, a little closer. The shadows were sharper. The hills, the crowds, and a loose strand of my oiled hair were all in too-high relief. There was a sense of muffling, like all the dampers had come down on a thousand-pipe cathedral organ. I snuck a look up at the sun. There was a nibble out of it at two o’clock.
I’ve never seen anything to make me think there’s anything like ESP. But even so, I can’t imagine that you could have been anywhere in the city—even blindfolded, earplugged, and double-boxed in some soundproofed basement—without feeling the fear at that moment. It oozed through stone walls. It rang in the soil.
As clear as a heart attack Turd Curl’s voice cracked the silence:
“Charhápiti sini
,
chá jucha phumuári . . .”
“You with red teeth, will you now skin and scatter us
Over your darkness?
Now will you never return to the heart of the lake,
Of the sky shell? You . . .”
The Teotihuacan Valley has echoic properties, like a whisper gallery. When plastered construction covered the hills, the echoes were much stronger. There was no doubt that every being in the valley had heard him. But there was no answer. And there wasn’t supposed to be. This was the only thing Turd Curl would say and the last words we would hear until he gave the order for noise.
I focused on Hun Xoc’s harpy-feather headdress, about twelve inches away. Something was odd about the latticework of fibers. They were morphing, sharpening. The Black Chewer, who was much more powerful than the sun himself, had jagged the edges of every object everywhere. I looked away, toward the crowds on the steps below us. Everything had the same curling, frizzing, wrinkling disease around the edges, as though every loose fiber, every projection, was gnarling and sharpening into a hook, a sort of twisted fingernail. I shuddered.
I listened. The calls of the birds had stopped. I didn’t hear even the buzz of a fly.
Let’s get going, guys.
I shut my left eye and snuck another look at the sun. It had already shriveled to a thin sliver like a tungsten filament. On its right edge, Baily’s beads spiked out between the mountains rimming Humboldt’s Crater on the horizon of the invisible moon.
Viel besser wäre, wenn sie auf der Erde so wenig, wie auf dem Monde, hätte das Phänomen des Lebens hervorrufen können,
as Jupiter Tonans said. The sanest person ever to live, I thought. Well, don’t dwell on it. Out in the plazas, and up on the hills, the serried crowds looked spiky and menacing. Now the sun was circled with the spiracle of light, what they call the diamond ring. The edges between the lights and shadows on Hun Xoc’s scarified cheeks were as sharp as if the light were coming through a pinhole. His red-oiled skin looked brown, and his blue headbands looked gray, almost like we were under sodium light in some future dystopolis. The corona bloomed and spread around the hole in the sky like the cardiotoxic tentacles of a
Chironex
jellyfish. Houston, we have totality, I thought.
An unsteadiness or quivering rippled through the crowd. You could feel the breath held in a million lungs, and you could smell the hysterical tension, the terror that the source of all warmth might never escape from the Black Chewer’s stomach. I, or let’s say “even I,” since I think it’s fair to say I was the least superstitious person there, had to remind myself that it was just a phase. Things would go back to the way they were.
Wouldn’t they?
I listened. There was just that same thick woolly silence. I looked up at the blinded twin again. Still total. Less than two minutes left. Okay, come on, homes, anytime you feel like it.
Anytime.
Hell.
I closed my right eye to refreshen it and focused the left one on the line of the western hills. Nothing.
I listened.
Nothing.
Come on. Do it—
Something floated over the valley from the east, a thin sound like a long Mylar ribbon. It was a sound with no name. I think that at first the people in the valley weren’t even sure that it was a sound. Then, as it went on and grew a little louder, I suppose most of them thought it was a cicada, which was the closest thing in nature. The sound spread, or else the same sound rose up in other places. Even with all the human bodies buffering the sound the chords ricocheted off the planes of the hundred mulob. First it seemed to be coming from the east, and then maybe from the south, and next maybe from somewhere nearby, and as more invisible sources joined in it got louder and louder, louder than I’d expected, and more reverberant, with a feedback drone like God was fooling with a stack of old Fender Twin amps.
My trainees, down in the dusty cellar with the rat droppings and the walls muffled with corn husks, had been more than startled when they first heard the sound. First they were creeped out, and then they were fascinated, and then they had to master it. Imagine that you’d never heard a violin before, that in fact you’d never heard a stringed instrument of any kind, not even a plucked string. What would it sound like? It would be a little bit like a cicada, a little bit like a pumice-string saw, a little like a cat, and a little like a swarm of bees.
The voice of strings is just a major technological marvel. There’s nothing else that’s so shocking and so hypnotic, that combines so much sharpness with so much breadth. There’s nothing else like the shape of its sound wave sawing into your ear. Even dogs are spooked by strings until they get used to them. It was transfixing.
Of course, my trainees—the Fifteen Fiddlers, as I thought of them—didn’t get it quite right. What we were hearing was a long way from Fritz Kreisler and the Berlin Philharmonic. In fact it was a mess. And of course the instruments didn’t quite sound like cellos or violins or dilrubas or violas. Still, they were decent, full-voiced, uncracked, well-rosined strings, played with a bow. And my guys had it down close enough to give you the same shiver you’d get hearing it for the first time:

[56]

B
y the fifth time they repeated the phrase, I smelled urine and feces rising off the crowd, and that stale-and-sour species of sweat people excrete when they’re terrified. Guess some folks just can’t take the pressure, I thought. Ahh, that sweet smell of fear. Smells like . . . apocalypse. You could feel the strings hooking their fear and drawing it out like taffy into threads that just stretched thinner and thinner, up and up and up, until they finally crystallized and broke into plain inchoate invertebrate panic.
I was proud of my team. They’d all worked hard over the last six days. I’d had twenty craftsmen going almost nonstop, in the inner courts of a big householdful of carpenters in the north Aura quarter. They were dependents of the Gila House and loyal to Koh. They were really good folks. Still, it wasn’t easy. Even though there’d been a muted, fireless, but urgent bustle through the valley—preparation for the festival that would follow the eclipse—we still had to sneak around. We only moved after dark, since you weren’t supposed to do any business during the silence. Every time, we had to bribe our way past different troops of low-level Swallowtail guards. They thought we were smuggling copal, since they could smell it on our hands. What with trying out different types of dried bottle gourds, waiting for wildcat gut, getting the cedar necks carved, getting the horn pegs made, finding that human hair breaks after a few strokes and figuring out how it could be corded into tiny strands and still work in a bow, trying out fifty kinds of gum to find a decent substitute for rosin, and getting everything glued together only two days ahead of D-day, it was definitely the hardest project I’d worked on in a long time, tougher than setting up my
Chromidorus marislae
tank.
Some of the men were pretty handy flute musicians already, in their pentatonic way. They were all eager beavers, were excited about the project, thrilled to help the Rattler reclaim the sun, and ready to do anything for Lady Koh. And they learned pretty fast, sawing away in the dark. Still, just like when I’d tried to hum some show tunes for Hun Xoc, they didn’t get Western music right away. It was like they couldn’t really hear a tune with a phrase and repetitions and a resolution. I guess if you haven’t been acculturated, if you’ve never heard an octaval chord before, it’s just not a natural thing. Still, once they got harmonic they wouldn’t stop playing it. And when we tried out the passage in question, the pyramidal scales from the Violin Sonata no. 1 that Prokofiev said ought to sound like a wind in a graveyard, it affected everybody. Evidently the Game gods had been right.
By the time they’d run through the passage ten times, children were crying and their high voices blended into the strings. The crowds packed into the plazas were moving but not yet on the move. They were just jiggling against each other like molecules of compressed gas, feeling for exits. Any minute now, I thought.
Come on. Time for phase II.
I heard a couple people on the stairs below us sniffling. I turned and looked north into the plazas. Children and old women were rubbing their eyes. Men were squirming. Good.
Around me the bloods squirmed and sniffed.
I felt what I thought was the first sting in my own eyes. Ouch. Good.
I smelled something sharp. Something hurt back near my tonsils. Good.
I looked around. The bloods behind me were squinching up their faces. It meant our second team of confederates had lit their hidden fires.
There were thirty-six of them, spread out in a rough half-circle on the east side of the city, in the kitchen yards and courtyards of fourteen different compounds. The top layers of the fires were dried heaps of a kind of tropical poison ivy, fatwood, and dried poison sumac, which is a strong lachrymogen, like CS. At first the smoke was nearly invisible. It wasn’t scentless, but it had no distinctive smell. I saw people squirming down in the courts of the main axis, which meant it was hugging the ground. Good.
Koh knew everything about the local weather. Two nights ago she’d decided that the breeze would be weak, and from the east as usual, and that the smoke would hang in the valley. The conspirators had moved as much of the fuel as they could from the sites on the west side to ones in the east. And here it was working out like she’d said. They’d done a good job. They’d had to buy up hearth wood, low-grade rubber, and, more suspiciously, sumac, ivy, and loads of cecropia leaves, and smuggle it across the pilgrimage ring in small batches. They’d had to hide the coals they’d use to light the fires from the Morning Glory bloods, who were like the religious police.
The blood in front of me dropped his manta. It was the signal to get ready. I disengaged and dropped my own and pulled the javelin off my back. I unwrapped the obsidian spearhead and fitted the three parts of the shaft together. Even without metal fittings the shafts clicked into each other in that efficient way that gives you a (false in this case) feeling of slick power, like a marine assembling an M16 in whatever point whatever seconds. With as little bending over as possible I got the wicker shield off my leg, unrolled it, and tied the two crosspieces to the uprights. It was a little like making a kite. The end product was light but pretty rigid. I fastened the deerskin strap, got the spear tied onto my right hand and the shield onto my left, and straightened up. I found my green headband under my testicles and tied it around my forehead one-handed. It was a move I would never have been able to execute as Jed. Everybody on the Rattler’s side was supposed to have a green headband for IFF. That is, Identification, Friend or Foe.
My eyes were watering. I closed the left one.
So, how much attention had we just attracted? I wondered. I looked out over the plazas. The crowds were stirring and squirming in a sort of Brownian motion, feeling for exits.
Ouch. My eye was twitching. Now there was definitely dark smoke overhead. The second layer of the fires was supposed to make as much smoke as possible, to block or at least obscure the reemerging sun.
I closed my right eye and opened the left one again. I dug my left hand down past my belts and loincloth and into a little bag. Everybody who was in on the plot had one. It was filled with a kind of salve made from copal amber, royal jelly, ageratina, and hummingbird eggs. I scooped out a dab with my designated clean finger, the pinky, and smeared it into my right eyelid. According to Koh’s surgeon, if you kept switching eyes and salving the closed one, you could walk through smoke for a long time and still see. Somewhere I’d heard that old-time firemen used to do something similar. Still, just offhand it didn’t seem too effective. Note to self: Remember to take some back and pitch it to the Body Shop.
I took a quick look at the top of the Hurricane mul.
Something was going on up there.
Turd Curl’s archimage couldn’t properly light the fire with the light of the sun blocked by smoke, but they were pretending to do it anyway, by sleight of hand. Someone lit the giant torch at the apex of the Hurricane mul, and the fire runner, a trained athlete in a puffy and cumbersome suit of feathers soaked in tallow, held his arm in the fire pretty much as planned, and turned and bounded down the steps, as planned, and when the fire overwhelmed him his flaming body rolled forward between the ranks of Puma bloods. The bloods knocked and guided his body down, out onto the snout of the great mul, which was on a level with Hun Xoc and me but separated by a gulf of humans, and down the lower stairs and out into the plaza into the bonfire pagoda, almost as though nothing was wrong.
But the pagoda had already started burning. Somebody, maybe one of Koh’s men, must have thrown or shot a hidden coal into it. It had already flared up before the fire runner even reached the snout. By this time the general public wasn’t watching the mul ritual anyway. People were looking in the sky for the Rattler and trying to run, or fight, or hide. I heard the cantors of the Puma Synod up at the sanctuary, calling through their alphorns,
“Hac ma’al, hac ma’al,”
“The new sun, the new sun,” but the chant had that tone that creeps into people’s voices when they know they’re being ignored. It was too late.
The crowd’s motion was brisker now, like people in a busy street just before a storm, when everyone steps lively for cover even though there are no raindrops yet. A wave of yellow-gray smoke swept over us. The fiddling had degenerated, less and less Prokofiev and more and more random sawing, but it seemed louder than ever. You don’t think of strings as loud instruments, but now they were a global whine. Somewhere I heard one of Koh’s confederates shouting a phrase they’d rehearsed:
“A’ch dadacanob, a’ch dadacanob,”
“The yellowjackets are here, the yellowjackets are here!” Another voice picked it up, an old lady’s. I didn’t think she was a planted agitator. But you know how people shout what their bosses shout. A few more of the Rattler Society converts shouted it, and then more, and then people were shouting it who couldn’t possibly be Rattlers. The voices were hoarse, maybe from days of disuse during the Silence, and the chant spread through the crowd with a sound like a hailstorm rasping over a cornfield. Koh’s people accentuated it, like cheerleaders, and inserted other phrases welled up and spread alongside it, “The sun is dead, we’re dying, we have died,” and
“Ak a’an, ak a’an,”
“This is the end, this is the end.” Laughter mixed in with the chanting—hysterical laughter, I suppose. A few musicians had started drumming and piping; it sounded halfhearted and their effort trailed off as the cries of fright rose up from the zócalos. The cacophony of noisemakers and shouting, which I was still half expecting, never came. The crowds in the courts and rooftops stirred and bristled. Below us the packed market plaza began to roil.
The majority had no doubt that this was the army of yellowjackets—invisible or not—that Koh had predicted, and that they would sting everyone into blindness. I saw old women, bloods, undercastes, and little boys looking up at the sky, pointing and shouting,
“Ha k’in, ha k’in,”
“The Rattler, the Rattler,” and involuntarily I looked up myself. The ropes of smoke wreathed and undulated, and I bet if I’d looked a little longer I could have caught the wave of the consensual hallucination myself and watched Star Rattler in all its detail coil down out of heaven, tongue probing, feathers rippling, fangs spurting holy ichor.
“Ha k’in, ha k’in, ha k’in, ak a’an, ak a’an, ak a’an . . .”
Terror crackled through the crowd. It seemed like some kind of pheromonal imperative: GET
AWAY
!
YOU ARE GOING TO DIE ! ! !
As the multitudes stampeded, I felt the stone under my sandals quiver. I teetered a bit and caught myself. Shared, multiplicitous terror can sweep you into a wave of weightlessness. If you were there on 9/11, or on the Indian Ocean during the tsunami, or in Florida during the Domino Star, or at any of the other big ones, you know that there’s a moment in these things when everyone around you is utterly unsure. You all look at each other and you can see that no one knows anything, that everyone else is thinking the same things you are, that we could all be dying, that the rest of the world might already be destroyed. Society generates a kind of gravity that you feel even when you’re in a personal crisis. But in a global crisis that gravity’s gone. There’s a feeling of the absurd. Of course, the absurd is pretty mainstream now, so one tends to discount it. But when the real absurd really comes out, it has teeth.
By now the mobs were on the move. I turned my head way around to the left and took a last look up at Koh. She was floating down to us. No, wait, she was being carried. It looked like she was on a sort of human funicular. I’d heard a nasal barking and now that I saw the scene I could tell it was Lady Yellow, the mother superior, screaming at Koh. It sounded like more than a capital offense.
Hun Xoc tapped three times on my forearm.
It was a few seconds before I could even get myself together to realize what he’d signed:
We’re going.
I reached back and tapped the same signal on Armadillo Shit’s arm.
The bloods below me moved forward. Let’s get the hell off this fancy rock.
I jumped down the fourteen-inch step. Another step. Another.
Fourteen more steps to go. A few women down in the Sidewinder’s Court had started singing the Rattler song, and now more and more people were joining in, and the singing and laughing combined with the shrieks and the violins to create a sound that I really think, despite the fact that nothing shocks anybody anymore, could still drive anybody insane.
Step. Step.
I saw from the blue-plastered flagstones under my feet that we were at the level of the plaza. The bloods in front of me paused. They moved. I marched, or rather shuffled, forward.
The “stop” signal came back. Okay.
I stopped. We waited.
A slap on the chest. It meant “Form up.” I slapped Armadillo Shit’s chest.
I raised my shield. The bloods packed in tighter around me.
12 Cayman had turned out to be an open-minded guy, especially for a career military type. I’d told him about the classical testudo, that is, the turtle, the infantry formation invented by Alexander the Great and used by the early Caesars against less well-organized armies from Scotland to Pakistan. He’d liked the idea and implemented it. It was designed for pushing through a crowd with minimum losses. Basically you all clumped together and held up your shields to make a shell. The soldiers at the edges of the formation held their shields with both hands, and the ones in the second rank stuck their spears out between them to jab at anybody who came close. Unfortunately, we couldn’t use the big wooden pavis shields the Romans had. You can’t do everything.
I raised my shield over my head and fitted it in between everyone else’s.
I had the most protected position in the testudo. Like if you were playing nine ball, I’d be the five ball in the center of the diamond. So I couldn’t see much of anything, and the main sounds were scuffing feet, heavy breathing, and the creaking of the wicker armor.
We crawled forward, plowing through the throng. The pavement here was covered with scarlet poinsettia leaves, and as we shuffled through them we kicked up a red blizzard. I couldn’t see anything ahead of us, and behind us all I could see was smoke rising from about where Koh’s house would be.
Hell. If a fire really gets going, we’ll be in trouble.